Best of The Program | 7/7/21

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Welcome to the podcast today, hosted by Pat Gray, Stu Bergeer, a host of Pat Gray Unleashed, and Stu Does America.

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Today on the podcast, Glenn is back, by the way, back on Monday.

We get into Biden's continuing issues with his cognitive decline and how the media basically has made him a non-entity

in the news, which is very strange.

Andrew Cuomo's daughter has come out as demisexual.

And if you don't know what that means, you're a hate monger.

We hate you.

Everyone hates you, but you're the hate monger somehow.

I can't remember.

I don't know exactly how that works, but we will tell you what a demisexual is if you don't happen to know and we look at the war in afghanistan what's the right way to think about it and did we do the right thing sort of just in the cover of night leaving and leaving a giant airbase empty

questionable pat would you say questionable okay okay good we did say good luck to him on the way out though good luck They didn't hear us because they were nowhere in the area because we didn't tell them where we were leaving.

But that's probably okay.

That's fine.

Maybe we left a note, a sticky note.

Maybe?

Hey, good luck, guys.

Even though the Taliban now has already a third of the country, what could possibly go wrong?

Here's the bucket.

You're listening to the best of the Blandbeck program.

One quick point here on the vaccines and the fact that the media obviously doesn't care about getting people vaccinated.

They just do it.

Yeah, this door-to-door thing is ridiculous.

It's ridiculous.

That's going to push people from away from the vaccine.

You show up at the door with a needle.

Sorry.

I don't know where that's been.

I don't want anything to do with it.

See you later.

Yeah.

Bubba now.

One thing you could do is I think, and they're not doing this so far, but like you could just get the vaccines to people's doctors.

Right.

One of the issues, like I had a friend who was thinking about getting the vaccine.

They hadn't gotten it yet.

And they went to a doctor's appointment.

And the doctor was like, look, you should get it.

Like, get the vaccine, get it done.

I know it's annoying.

Just get it done.

And they were like, all right, what do I need to do?

And what they needed to do was leave the doctor's office and go on their phone and set up an appointment for four days later and then drive home.

Just do it right there.

Right.

Like, just get it, get it in the hands of the freaking doctors who people trust, right?

Like, you know, their local doctor who's giving them the information.

That's one thing.

Another thing you could do, and this is more applicable to what we're talking about here,

which is

if you actually cared, let's just say, let's just come up with a mythical world where the priorities of the media and the government was to say, we want this pandemic to be over and we want people to be vaccinated.

And the vaccines are great.

And we think this is the best thing that we can do.

Yeah.

We're going to put that above everything.

We're not going to, obviously, it's bigger than politics, right?

What you could do is

have

a concentrated effort to put a guy named Donald Trump on television and all over the media to get the vaccine about how much the vaccines are a success story.

Can you imagine what that would do?

Yes, it probably would make a big difference.

It would influence millions of people who are supporters of his and remind them that, hey, he's the one that got this going.

Right.

It went through his, it's his administration, it's his accomplishment.

Yes.

By the way,

Donald Trump got the vaccine.

Yep.

I listened to Donald Trump Trump on the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton show.

They're in the Rush Limbaugh time slot.

And they had the President of the United States on the air.

Former.

Former.

Sorry, I should say.

Former.

You're right.

Former President of the United States.

And Jeffy, by the way,

from Chewing the Fat Podcast, joins us here.

He's just a believer.

I mean, Joe Biden got more votes than anyone.

Thank you, my friend.

He's the president of the United States of America.

But, like, you take the former president, and I was listening to him talk about the vaccines.

He sounds exactly the same way he did during the campaign.

A huge part of his

re-election campaign was, hey, we're getting these vaccines done.

And a huge part of his legacy is having gotten the vaccine done.

Yeah.

In the timeframe he said this would get done.

Yeah.

Which is incredible.

And as he pointed out again, the entire media said it was impossible and he was lying about it.

Right.

Okay.

So let's just say, like, I know you have this ban on the president.

I know you can't bring him on when asking him about denouncing white supremacy or whatever weird thing you feel like you have to do every time he comes on.

How about don't do any of that?

How about have a nice softball interview where you say to Donald Trump, hey, guess what, Don?

It would work.

Yes, it would.

Mr.

President, you came up,

you were able to shepherd these.

Think about this approach.

If CNN was on the air,

if all the news networks and the president of the United States went and said, you know what, Mr.

President, we have a lot of disagreements.

But look, you did an incredible thing here where you pushed these things through.

You were able to

create an environment where things occurred that have never occurred in human history.

That you have wiped out

with these vaccines, we could wipe this pandemic off the planet, and you're the guy who shepherded that process through.

Instead, what they've done is say, there was no plan.

There was no plan at all.

We had no idea.

We came in here.

There's boxes of vaccines.

They were even going to be mailed.

They just completely lied because they wanted to win politics more than they cared about whether people lived or died.

And they could.

That is the truth.

Ignore everything that happened before and just say, here's Donald Trump.

Donald Trump helped get this thing done.

And Donald Trump, what do you think about the vaccines?

And he could just do it.

And they don't have to say anything about it.

They don't have to go backwards.

They don't have to talk about January 6th.

Go forward.

They don't have to talk about that.

That's what you just said.

That would never happen.

Biden could never say that.

Not in a million years.

That would not happen.

Neither could one single soul on CNN.

They couldn't even bring themselves.

Like, let Donald Trump come in there and and say, you know what, you guys lied about me the entire time, and these vaccines were a success, and you guys were wrong.

And let him say every terrible thing because obviously you care about people getting the vaccine.

You're not getting it, right?

You care about the vaccine.

So you know they don't.

You're going to put the pandemic above your personal pride, right, guys?

Except they were not

even considerate of it.

And you played his, you know, we continue to play clips of Joseph Robinette Biden struggling

to say anything.

And I see where there's a new study done, a new survey of a thousand likely voters from the Convention of States and the Trafalgar Group.

56.5% of American voters do not believe that President Biden is fully executing his duties in office.

Wow.

That's amazing.

Okay.

56.5%

of American voters.

You can't get to 56.5 with just Democrats, guys.

No, you can't.

You can't do that.

No, you cannot.

Or just Republicans.

So that's not just Republicans saying, yeah, he's not fully executing.

That's Democrats, Republicans, Independents.

I'd like to know, because I'll bet, you know, there's a huge

portion of,

I don't know.

You know, there's a lot of Jeffies out there who.

I don't know.

I don't know.

So what is it, like 56.5 to 20?

to 19 who think he's fully executing his job, his responsibility?

Does it say?

36.4% believe he is directing all policy.

36.

That's higher than I would have guessed.

31.7% Democrat voters do not believe.

That's incredible.

I know.

Wow.

I know.

And, you know, you got 83.6% of Republican voters that don't believe he's doing it.

I would say that's a little low.

Yeah.

I mean, that seems a little low.

And 58,

a little over 58% of independent voters do not believe he's fully executing his job.

That's remarkable.

I mean, and I don't see how you come to another conclusion other than you just, you know, you're hoping.

You're a Democrat.

You voted for him.

You're hoping.

Or you just watch CNN, which doesn't cover any of it.

You know, you only

in your little sphere, all you see is what reinforces your point of view.

And if that's what you do, then you don't understand that the guy is in serious cognitive decline.

Yeah, no question.

I mean, he does not wear in his pants backwards

like the previous president, Donald Trump, Trump, but he's barely been disproven, by the way.

I mean, he just struggles every day.

And I would say that, you know, you talked about the notes

in his jacket pocket being the same.

I don't know.

Doesn't he carry the names of all the

names of dead soldiers and the

deaths of the coronavirus in the one pocket?

He didn't seem to have that in either pocket, though.

I don't know.

It seemed like the other notes.

He didn't mention,

he didn't pull the first one out and go, oh, these are the numbers that I carry with me every day.

No, no, he did not mention that.

So it's probably the

exact same

note.

I'm sure it is.

Sad.

Also, dreams do come true.

Here, as long as we're doing a little chewing the fat segment, I want you to know dreams do come true.

Michaela Kennedy Cuomo, 23, came out on Instagram.

And, you know, the daughter of your man, you know him, you love him, Andrew Cuomo.

Andrew Cuomo is awful.com.

Yes.

Is his last name dot com?

I think it is.

It must be.

Every time I hear Andrew Cuomo is awful.

What is his middle name and then dot comes?

Andrew CuomoIsAwful.com is the way it works out.

She came out last month as queer, but now

has declared herself demisexual.

Wait, hold on, because I thought also she had come out previously.

Do you have the whole transition?

I do.

Okay, walk us through this because this is pretty interesting.

Okay, Okay, so in elementary school,

she feared that she was lesbian.

And that's the way she phrased it.

That's the way she feared.

I don't know why she feared it.

What kind of hate monger is this person?

Yeah.

That is the way she phrased it.

She feared.

So you have to assume that I guess before that, she was either straight or nothing, right?

She's a little kid, elementary school.

So she hits elementary school and she's like, oh my gosh, I'm terrified I might be

lesbian.

Okay.

Right.

Wow.

And I've got a lot of kids in elementary school think in those terms.

A lot of kids are like, I think I I might be a lesbian.

Habits all the time, very common.

Then in middle school,

she came out to family and close friends as bisexual.

Okay, so there's the third thing that she is.

She's bisexual in elementary school.

Then when she was in high school,

she discovered pansexuality.

Okay, pansexuality.

So she saw sex with everybody.

That's the flag for me.

No, I think pansexual, if I understand it correctly, And Jeffy, I know you'd probably be the expert on this, but let me attempt it.

Pansexual means that basically you don't care about whether it's a guy or a girl.

Like, you're just going to, like, whatever, whatever, if you meet someone, you like them, you go for it, you don't think about it, you're not attracted to either one.

But that's almost anything, right?

And now she recently-it's not limited to just men or women, I think.

Right.

Right, right.

But

where bisexual is you're, you're, you are attracted to both.

Yeah.

Where pansexual is you're not necessarily attracted to either.

It's just, you're just attracted to the individual.

And you're not necessarily not attracted to everything either.

Right.

I mean, so you might be attracted to absolutely everything or nothing or nothing or nothing or nothing right you can't be pinned we should point out

as queer yeah okay queer okay now what is

that she's demisexual demise demisexual yeah demisexual which is

what is demisexual that is uh people

only feel sexually attracted to someone when they have an emotional bond i think this is interesting because i'm demisexual right i think i think demisexual is the way we're supposed to be right yes now i think like when you talk about sexual attraction

i can look at uh you know some movie star and say wow she's hot right without having an emotional bond with her yes right or he in my i'm saying in my particular case okay i might say but like i i so you she's saying you can't be attracted visually

You can only be attracted via emotional bonds.

Right.

So it's not exactly the way that I think everybody is, but it's a good element of a relationship.

I think it's.

This is where her dreams have actually come true because she said in this interview that she has always dreamed of a world in which nobody will have to come out.

Me too.

Oh, my gosh.

You guys.

I don't think the dream is coming out.

It's true.

You're there.

You've arrived.

You've arrived.

You don't have to worry about it anymore.

She claims that nobody has to come out because everybody's sexuality will be assumed fluid.

That's a different

formulation.

In the world that we live in now, it force feeds cisgender heterosexuality.

I hate it.

Coming out of the closet is a lifelong process of unpacking, internalized social constructions and stigma.

How many times have I said exactly the same thing?

How many times?

I can't.

If I've said it once.

You've said you've said well, that's the time you said it, but I haven't.

But if I had said it once.

This is why I keep hearing this mainly from the

very warm videos produced by giant corporations like Procter and Gamble

who say like, love is love.

Let us give you a two-minute pride video about that.

And at the end of one of these I watched last week, it said like, we just want to get to this point where we don't need to talk about this anymore.

We're just, you know,

you've arrived.

Congratulations.

You know, because they say like, oh, well, we wanted to come out.

And then we realized people were going to be judging us.

And obviously that means evil conservatives like us, right?

That would be judging us.

Here's the thing: we're not judging you.

We don't want to hear about it.

We don't need to hear about it.

You can do whatever you want to do on your own.

I don't want to hear word one about it.

And you've arrived at this incredible world you desire, this oasis that you've been trying to get to this entire time, where you just don't have to tell anybody about it.

We don't have to hear about it.

I feel like you have to tell us.

We don't need to know.

I'm sorry if we conveyed to you that we wanted to hear about this stuff.

That's our mistake.

We don't.

We don't.

We never did.

Dreams do come true, Sue.

By the way, they do come true every day on Chewing the Fat with Jeffy.

Listen to the podcast.

You're listening to the best of the Glendeck program.

Raytheon, another

gigantic American...

corporation that is involved in critical race theory or CRT, as we call it for short.

And apparently they're taking their white employees to school.

So

that's great.

That's great.

You could tell that the left is not enjoying the way this is playing out because they're doing all the typical things that people on the left do in these situations, which is deny it's not really what we mean.

You're using the term incorrectly.

It's not really happening.

These things that you say are so bad.

When their former position was these things are not bad.

These are good.

Yeah.

Right.

Now they're realizing the pushback, I think, from the American people.

They've run up against that wall a little bit with this stuff.

And so they're saying things like, well, it's not really critical race theory.

It's just intersectionality.

They're very closely related, as we, as we all know, intersectionality essentially would be an element that is required to discuss critical race theory.

Well, for instance, have you confronted your privilege yet?

Have you confronted it?

I have.

You have?

Yep.

Okay.

Yeah.

And confronting it,

it ran the other way.

It did.

Yeah.

It would.

So you don't have your privilege.

I just scared it away.

You scared it away.

Yeah.

That's how you do it.

When you confront it, you just got to confront it, come out from behind a door or something when it's walking.

It's like maybe it's on its phone.

Yeah.

And then you jump out and you make a really loud noise and it runs away.

Oh, okay.

And then you don't have any more privilege.

All right.

That's the way it works.

Okay.

So you identified and scared away your privilege.

Have you stepped aside for for minority voices yet?

You need to step aside.

No.

No, you haven't done that.

I'm not going to step aside really for anybody.

I'm going to.

Well, these minority voices, though, Stu, are more important than your own.

So.

So you kind of need to step aside for them.

Understanding what we're doing is encouraging people to listen to others based on their skin color.

Yes.

Now, has there ever been an an example of this being utilized and turned out poorly?

Has there ever

been real?

There's many examples of that, but we're ignoring those now?

Oh, we're going to ignore them.

Yeah, we're ignoring them.

Okay, good.

Yeah.

Because I have this idea, and it's been sort of foundational to me for quite a long time, which is never, ever in your entire life, make any decision.

Based on skin color.

Really?

Never.

Not once.

Not even one time in your life.

That's what you're saying.

Should you make any decision based on skin color.

Old think is what that is.

That's old think.

Yeah.

Not the appropriate way to go.

Not appropriate anymore.

Got him.

No.

And by the way, we should point out: Raytheon is our second largest defense contractor.

Yes.

They should be thinking about building giant missiles

and planes, but things that blow other things up.

Focus on that.

That's really important.

Intersectionality should not be the focus of Raytheon.

And why is it?

It's just so bizarre.

And we're supposed to reject, according to Raytheon in their program, they're telling employees to reject the notion of equality and instead strive for equity.

Yeah, Nathan.

Can you walk us through the difference between equality and equity, Stu?

Sure, I can.

As Chris Ruffo, who initially reported this, as he seems to be doing all the time,

Raytheon explicitly instructs employees to oppose equality, defined as, quote, quote,

treating each person the same, regardless of their differences.

Right.

Reject that.

Yeah, that's old, again, old think.

And instead, strive for equity, which, quote, focuses on the equality of the outcome.

End quote.

Love that.

Do you remember when, like, the conservative attack against the left-wing philosophy was to say, hey,

we all want equality.

We just want equality of opportunity.

They want equality of outcome.

And the left would be like, what?

How dare you say that?

That's not true.

That's not what we want.

Now they admit it.

Now they admit it.

It's exactly what they want.

Of course it's what they want.

And that's what equity is.

This word, which sounds like the other word, but is not the other word.

Equality and equity are different things.

Big time.

And so this is essentially Marxism they're talking about because they want to guarantee the outcome.

Or at least theoretical Marxism.

Of course, Marxism in reality has no such thing as equality of outcome.

Except that

everybody comes out poorly.

Everyone comes out poorly except for the ruling class, which has a pretty sweet life.

Certainly different groups.

Ask the Uyghurs if communism provides equality of outcome.

Well, you can't because they're in concentration camps.

Oh, yeah, it's difficult to get to them at this point.

They're in thousands of concentration camps spread throughout the

But yeah, it does not actually provide such things, but it is theoretically providing those things.

Chris Ruffo writes, finally, in a collection of recommended resources, the company encourages white employees to, quote, defund the police, end quote,

quote, this is a defense contractor.

We should defund the police.

I love this.

Also, quote, participate in reparations,

decolonize your bookshelf, and something that I will personally guarantee that I will never, ever in my life, ever do, quote, join a local white space.

Now, what is a white space?

Yeah.

It seems to be a collection of white people who talk about their whiteness.

Their white space.

Why do I want to say that?

For example, let me just give you a theoretical.

Do you want to talk about how bad you are as white people?

Well, talk about your whiteness and understand and think about your race all the time.

Something like, like, they used to have these groups.

People wore hoods to the meetings,

And they were great, I'm sure.

Robert Bird was a big member, big proponent of local white spaces.

Yeah, that was something that

used to happen among Democrats all the time, and now they want to bring it back.

Isn't that wonderful?

You know, the Democrats brought us the KKK, and now we have local white spaces, which are totally different than the KKK in that they're also white people getting together to talk about their race all the time.

I guess the fact that they're saying they're the bad race instead instead of another race being bad is some sort of improvement, but I would say not a concept worth revisiting.

Not a fixable one, you know, Pat?

Sometimes you get to the point where you're just like, you know what?

Let's not try to, let's say, fascism.

Let's not remix it and see what we can come up with and try it again.

Let's just skip it.

Let's just rule it out.

KKK?

Let's just rule it out.

Let's just take it out.

Let's not try to fix it.

Let's not try to come up with a different way of doing a local white space.

Let's get rid of them entirely.

Sounds like the right approach to me.

It does.

Yeah, it does.

Unbelievable.

And this is so constant right now.

Raytheon, again, this is not, I don't know, to use some example, like Starbucks, right?

Like

some left-wing organization, some left-wing company.

I don't know.

Some like organic,

you know,

bi-local hemp salesman, you know, coming up with an org with a, with a, with a seminar like this.

This is a freaking defense contractor.

Yeah, second largest in the country after Lockheed Martin.

That's pretty amazing.

Now, one thing you should stay away from, first of all, one thing you need to do, Pat.

I want to make sure we understand what you need to do, what you need to stay away from.

You need to, according to the Raytheon internal documents, you need to think about telling your...

Think about telling your employees to do this.

You have to, quote, identify everyone's race.

Now, your employees, if they spend a minute

trying to identify every other employee's race, what you should do with that employee is fire them immediately.

Get them the hell out of your company.

If you have employees that are taking time out of your workday to figure out and, like, what, document everyone's race.

Pat, has there ever been a historical example

where a group of people documenting others' race has turned out poorly?

Has that ever gone the wrong way?

Like, if you want to make a giant list of people and try to figure out, like, I don't know, what percentage black they are, what percentage Jewish they are, but let's just say, in a theoretical world, could that turn out poorly?

Oh,

wow.

In the last

15 minutes, I can't think of a situation like that.

If I was to go back, maybe,

I don't know, into the sort of early to mid last century, I could possibly think of a place or two where

maybe that occurred.

Okay, okay.

So there is maybe one, but we shouldn't probably think about it and learn anything from it, right?

No.

Okay.

No.

How about

you must listen to the experience of marginalized identities and give those with such identities the floor on meetings or on calls, even if it means silencing yourself.

So let's say you have a really good idea for a missile.

Okay.

But, you know, a

Mongolian person is in the room, a Mongolian American, and they say, you know what?

I, as a Mongolian American, am oppressed.

I believe the missiles should be shot with slingshots.

Let me have the floor for, let's say, an hour.

What you should do is silence yourself and your rocket

propulsion technology and say, you know, we got to go slingshots.

Because, look, they are a marginalized group, and that's your job.

And that would be part of deconstructing my privilege, wouldn't it?

It would really.

And understanding how white male behavior is devastating to racial minorities.

Right.

And in that situation where you're, you know, you're, you're suppressing your own idea for theirs, why,

uh, you've done a good thing there.

Yeah.

There you go.

Done a good thing.

And I think we could look at this at three different levels here, Pat, right?

The level of like higher education, university teaching, should critical race theory be discussed.

Like, I don't want my kid necessarily, I don't want to pay to send my kid to a place where they're going to learn about that, but you know what?

Academic discussion, whatever.

You can do whatever you want.

Shouldn't be banned, certainly, although I wouldn't want to send my kid to a school that was doing it.

Secondarily, you have this level, right?

Raytheon, companies.

Would I want to work at a company?

What do I want to invest in a company?

Would I want to,

if I was running a company, do this sort of nonsense and teach critical race theory or something similar to it to my employees, I would say absolutely not.

Should it be banned?

No.

I mean, I think if Raytheon wants to freaking waste their people's time with this nonsense, I don't think you can ban it.

You know, we live in a country where people should be able to do these things if they want to.

However, horrible idea.

The next level, though, is the one we're talking about more frequently, which is should these be taught in public schools to K to 12?

Right.

And that, should that be banned?

Sure, it should.

Absolutely should not be taught to kids K to 12.

And so defense there from the left has been what this is what Vox's framing of it was last week.

Many Republican lawmakers cite critical race theory as a reason to ban discussions about racism in schools.

First of all, I've never heard that before.

I've never heard a Republican say anything like that.

No one says that they don't want to discuss racism in schools.

No one says they want to say, you know what, let's present slavery positively.

I've never, I went through the whole school system in public schools.

Never did I hear word one that racism was good.

Never did I hear word one that

slavery was kind of a positive.

Never taught.

But they say the way they frame it is Republicans are trying to ban discussion of racism in schools, which is not at all what's going on.

And then they say, though, there's little evidence that the framework of critical race theory is even being taught in K-12 schools.

So

it's not a bad thing, but even if it were being taught, even if it were a bad thing, it's not actually being taught in K-12 schools.

Here are two stories from just the past week.

The nation's largest teachers union has approved a plan to promote critical race theory in all 50 states and 14,000 local school districts.

Does that sound like a K-12 problem?

Does it to me?

Ibram X.

Kendi, the guy who wrote anti-racist,

How to Become an Anti-Racist and Anti-Racist Baby.

He is scheduled to speak Wednesday at the American Federation of Teachers Teach Conference.

This is absolutely a massive issue here, and it should be thought about, and it should be out of our schools.

If we're going you want to have a you want to start your own private school where you teach kids a critical race theory and kids pay their own money to go to it and blah, blah, blah.

That is allowed in the United States of America, even if we don't like it.

However, public schools, absolutely not.

And states absolutely have the right to put standards on what is taught in the curriculum of their schools.

Of course they do.

Of they do.

The federal government doesn't have much of a role in it, but the state government does.

And the local governments do even more.

And the idea that this is just a non-issue because Democrats find it to be unpopular and they realize they're on the wrong side of the polls on it does not mean it goes away.

Yeah, 61% of Americans don't want critical race theory taught in their schools.

61%.

You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.

So, it's finally happened.

The pullout of Afghanistan after a mere

20 years.

I mean, is it too soon?

I don't think so.

I don't think so either.

I don't think so.

Are we, and are we the last of the coalition to still be there?

The British aren't there anymore right now.

No, yeah, they're gone.

They've been gone for a while.

So it's just us.

It is just us.

Well, it was just us.

I mean, it's basically dot now.

Now it's the Afghans.

I heard a report this morning, they're going to keep a few hundred troops in the country mainly to protect the embassy, which is sensible, right?

Like if you're going to have an embassy there

in a country that's going to be.

If you're not going to keep them there, then you move the embassy.

You move the people out of the embassy.

Yeah, you just abandon the country entirely.

But if you're going to have an embassy there, you should have troops there to protect the people in it.

So we left the other day.

Our troops left Bagram Air Base basically in the middle of the night and didn't tell the Afghans that we were leaving.

So a group of people went in and looted the place

before the Afghans got in there.

Which is great.

Which is great.

A 14-square-mile

Air Force base.

Yes.

Gigantic area.

And, you know, so they, I guess, what, I guess what happened was there were some rumors that we were going to be leaving.

I mean, we all,

they presented this in the media.

They're like, well ahead of schedule.

Well, Trump had it scheduled for May.

So July would not be ahead of schedule.

Biden just said he just changed the schedule to September and then left in July after the initial scheduling.

So like he, this is how the how the left gets away with this crap with the media.

I, uh, I'll never, I'll never understand.

But I guess when you have someone who you're rooting for, it's a lot easier to justify such things.

Uh, but basically, there was a rumor that they were going to be leaving.

They just turned the lights out, and everyone was like, Wait, why did all the lights go off over there?

We should just go over there and see what's going on.

Realize nobody was there.

And there's like photos of people like carrying off cases of like Red Bull full.

Like, it's like energy drinks and stuff, right?

Bizarre, bizarre circumstance.

And it's hard to imagine that this turns out well.

Yeah,

the problem is the Taliban will probably now

just retake Afghanistan, right?

That's what I expect to happen, is that terrorists will just get back together and

reclaim the country.

But

what would you do?

Just stay there forever?

What's the alternative?

If you don't pull out and we don't ever come home

and we leave troops there forever.

We probably could keep the Taliban at bay.

But when you leave, what can you do?

There's all sorts of reporting where Afghan troops are handing over weapons to the Taliban.

The Taliban now supposedly,

but the best estimates are they control one-third of the country already as we're leaving.

I mean, we've basically just given up on this.

And look, you can make the argument that our mission should have been more narrow, and that mission was accomplished, right?

I mean, you know,

Osama bin Laden is dead.

Al-Qaeda is not really the force that it once was.

But, you know, our mission was

larger than that.

We could have left in 2011.

Yeah.

Or a lot, you know,

I mean,

Osama bin Laden specifically as an individual was 2011.

But I mean, there was massive damage to al-Qaeda generally, well before

that.

Yes.

I do hesitate at times with this idea that we should judge a war by

how long it goes on for.

You know, like, first of all, this has not been a war in the way that we think of warfare for a long time.

That's true.

You mentioned earlier,

Pat, late last hour, that 13 people per year die from getting hit by

vending machines that fall over.

Yeah.

Well, in 2020, 11 people died in Afghanistan.

11?

11.

Less than the amount of people who die from vending machines falling over them in the United States.

Not to minimize, of course, the loss of our.

Totally.

I mean, like, but I mean, when you look at the deaths that occurred, several of them were motor vehicle accidents.

Oh, wow.

Right.

There were some that were attacks.

Some of them were attacks by Afghan troops.

Yeah, that's the toughest to take.

That's the toughest to take for sure.

I'm not saying any of these don't

aren't crucial, but I mean, like, here we go.

Non-hostile vehicle accident, non-hostile incident, non-hostile vehicle accident rollover, non-hostile, non-hostile.

Yep.

There, here's a hostile.

Hostile fire, small arms file,

green on blue attack.

So that was by an Afghan Afghan troop.

Yep.

Same thing for the next one.

Then a non-hostile aircraft crash.

Six.

Non-hostile aircraft

crash.

And then hostile fire IED attack.

So when you think about the

traditional warfare attack, I'd say you would say one.

Right?

I mean, you wouldn't necessarily think off the top of your head of a green on blue type of attack.

Right.

But you have to count.

All of these count, obviously.

You know, if you have a kid over there who died in an aircraft crash, you're not going to feel any better about it.

But that stuff happens in the United States.

Yeah.

And we have aircraft crashes from military test pilots in the United States that happen.

That's not to to say that it's nothing.

It's something, and look, we have to at some point,

even if it's just for spending, right, reasons, like you can't just spend money maintaining another country forever.

But like to think of this as everyone's like, this is America's forever war.

Can you look at a year like 2020 and say, okay, that's a war year?

Remember,

what's the alternative of war?

What we used to do in war was, yes, the wars would end in three to five years because hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people were dead.

Yeah,

you fought them full bore, full on.

It was

just warfare all the time.

It wasn't like, okay,

we're going to take this country and we're going to maintain it.

And

we're going to get attacked every once in a while.

That's not what's, I mean, that's what's been happening in Afghanistan

for,

what,

10 years at least?

Maybe more than that.

I mean, if you look at the fatalities, U.S.

fatalities in Afghanistan,

really

you had a peak, the highest number was 2010 at 498.

Now, again, 498 was 10 minutes of a battle of previous wars.

As sad as all of this is, and every loss of life is incredibly, I mean, you don't have to, I don't have to sell this audience on the fact that

we all care about our military members, but war has changed in a way that I think is positive,

even though

there's no longer necessarily these days where you walk away with the parades and everything else.

I mean, 498 was the peak in 2010.

Then it went to 415, 310, 128, and it's been under 100 since 2015, or 14.

It was 55, 22, then 13, 15, 14, 24, 11.

Then that was 2020 was 11.

Now, again, I went through those 11.

Only one of them is what you would think traditionally of a war death.

A couple of others from friendly,

allies that should have been helping us and turned on us.

A couple of those, it was three.

And the rest were non-hostile events where, you know, car crashes, airplane crashes, things that were terrible, but also not what you would think of as a traditional war death.

Did you happen to read the

latest Malcolm Gladwell book, The Bomber Mafia?

By any chance?

It's really good.

I mean, it's really, really well done.

And I like Malcolm's stuff.

I mean, it's always interesting to me.

But this is about basically the idea of the early Air Force where they decided

their vision of what war could become

where they would drop guided bombs, not just bombs that plastered an entire, you know, just denigrated an entire civilian population without thinking about it.

Their vision of trying to create the technology that would allow us to target the military installations we wanted to hit and not just carpet bomb societies.

And

one of the main proponents of this was in World War II and got to the point where he was leading the operations against Japan

from the air and eventually lost his gig because the technology wasn't really ready.

They didn't really have it ready.

And they wound up changing to carpet bombing, basically.

But you realize that, like, you know,

When we think of Japan, obviously in World War II, we think of the atomic bomb.

So much was done with essentially napalm-type devices, firebombing these places, because the way their homes were built were very vulnerable to fire, and they were very close to each other.

And we were just, you know, dropping.

And there was a lot of that during Vietnam to clear away the jungle.

Yeah, exactly.

But they were doing it to clear away, you know, communities and cities.

And I'm not questioning these tactics in that, like, this war needed to end.

And I'm glad that we dropped the atomic bomb.

I'm not like anybody who thinks the opposite of that.

But like,

that was the choice at the time.

It was like, do you essentially kill 100,000 people tonight in their homes?

Essentially, the equivalent of what we saw in Miami, right?

Where the entire building just catches on fire or collapses and everyone in it dies.

And do you do this over multiple square miles every night for a year?

That was warfare.

Yeah.

Look, Afghanistan

is a different situation.

And to sit here and say, like, you look at these years, years.

Do you have the total from the whole war?

It's something like 4,000 or 5,000, right?

2,452.

2,000 years.

That does not include this year, by the way.

I have only up till 2020 here, but 2,452.

Now, I think the number you're thinking of is 3,596, which was total coalition deaths.

So that includes the UK and other...

455 from the UK, 689 total in all the other countries combined.

Iraq was 4,910 total coalition, 4,586 U.S.

But again, even Iraq, you you look at Iraq, this is since 2012.

2012, there were two deaths

for the U.S.

2004,

I'm missing 2013 on my chart here, but 2014, 4, then 8, 20, 22, 17, 12, 11.

And again, you look at the details to them, and many of them are the same sad situations, vehicle accidents, rollovers, non-hostile.

There are some that are hostile.

I mean, these are still dangerous areas for sure.

But I think judging a war,

what we should look at when we judge a war should be, of course, the outcome.

Did we stop people attacking us if that's why we went to war?

Which in Afghanistan, I would argue, that was the reason we went.

And we stopped that.

And when we've

seemed to accomplish interrupted a lot of it.

And also, the main thing is how many...

The most important thing to me is how many of our service people do we lose, not how long the war goes on.

Look, it's uncomfortable to say, and this is true, that people who fought in, who went to Afghanistan after 9-11 have children who are now serving in Afghanistan or until very recently.

It's hard to think in those terms.

But the fact if we could return both of those people back here, that's much more important than the timeline.

Oh, yeah.

And we have changed warfare.

I mean, people are dying a lot less in wars, and that is good.

It is much, it's no longer the

drain on human life that it once was, at least not at the moment.

We can take a little solace out of that, I think.