"Second Strike" Narrative Falls Apart, Kash Patel Responds, and How To Be a Man, with Rich Lowry, Charles Cooke, Elliot Ackerman, and Bryan Cox | Ep. 1204

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Quite a turn of events regarding the Washington Post's big story on Friday that Secretary of War Pete Hexeth allegedly ordered military leaders to, quote, kill everybody after two people aboard an alleged drug boat survived the initial attack.

Okay, this is the Washington Post. It broke on Friday.
That was its reporting.

It set the country on fire for the past five days with people repeating that story, accusing Pete Heckseth of war crimes, and it has dominated print media, digital media, and

everything online. everything on cable.
The New York Times late last night reporting, citing five U.S. officials, that basically the Washington Post story was all wrong.

That Secretary Hegseth's initial order did not, in fact, specify what should happen if survivors remained.

And as White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt laid out yesterday, the second attack

was ordered independently by Admiral Frank Bradley. goes by Mitch, I guess, in order to render the vessel destroyed and complete the mission.

We pointed this out in an AM update this morning, and our first guest is going to walk us through it.

There is a difference between a mission that is meant to destroy a boat that winds up simply damaging it on the first strike, and one that destroys it on the first strike, but nonetheless has two people floating in the water.

If the boat has not been destroyed and it's merely damaged, that's an incomplete mission, whether there are survivors floating or not.

The Times also dropping the bombshell that per one of the officials they interviewed, the U.S.

military actually intercepted radio communications from one of the survivors in the water to narco traffickers.

Yet another reason why it might make sense for the mainstream media to just pump the brakes before they

climb all over the terms, war crimes, and start talking about prosecuting people for murder.

My first guest today already knows that lesson because he was one of the few online who was saying, hold on, over the past couple of days, that he did not see the evidence of any war crime.

And after he read the Washington Post report, even though now we believed it was erroneous, but even

as flawed as it was, he said there's reason in here to doubt what they're reporting, even from what they've said. And his name is Dr.
Brian L. Cox.
He spent 22 years in the U.S. Army.

He's now an adjunct professor at Cornell Law School. His work focuses on international criminal law law involving armed conflict.

Brian has gone viral on X for his analysis on what happened in this strike, taking on the misleading reporting by The Washington Post and what he says are biased takes from anonymous military groups that are now getting re-cited by places like the Washington Post to shore up their initial reporting.

But these are anonymous people who are saying, you know, here's what the law is. How do we rely on them for anything?

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Brian, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. It's really great to join you.
Okay, so you teach law and you have a background in the military. Did you practice law?

I did. So my first 15 years in the military was as a combat soldier.
So airborne infantry soldier and then combat camera and then as an airborne infantry officer.

So that was 15 years on the line, as we call it in the military. And then the last three of that 15 years, I was in law school while I was in the National Guard.

And then once I graduated, I came back from law school, came back on active duty as a judge advocate.

And I spent the last seven years as a military lawyer, so an Army judge advocate, including a deployment to Afghanistan where I advised on international operational law.

Okay, so quite a bit. So you read this Washington Post report that hit on Friday,

the headline of which is:

hold on:

Hexeth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say, colon, kill them all.

The subhead, as two men clung to a stricken, burning ship targeted by SEAL Team 6, the Joint Special Operations Commander followed the Defense Secretary's order to leave no survivors.

Now we have the New York Times weighing in, saying

basically that this was wrong. That there was one order by Pete Hegseth.
It was before the mission and said, take out these boats.

And there was no issue order saying,

kill them all.

But he wanted these boats destroyed.

And that there was no subsequent communication between Pete Hexeth and the Admiral, who was on scene making the calls, saying, kill those survivors who were clinging for life to this partially destroyed boat.

That is not what happened, according to five sources in the New York Times. We'll see what the Washington Post does.

But you, before you even knew about the New York Times reporting, were saying, there are enough holes in that WAPO report to drive a truck through.

I do not trust this, and I actually don't think any war crime has been stated. Why?

So there's just so much speculation that's going on. So we don't know.
It was two anonymous sources who were reporting the quote from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. And we don't know for sure.

Well, first of all, they're anonymous reports, anonymous sources. So there is that.

But even the quote from the story, it's not clear whether this was a direct quote from Pete Hegseth saying, kill everybody, the way that it's worded in the Washington Post story, or whether the anonymous sources are basically paraphrasing what Secretary of War told to whoever the audience was.

And so that was the first element that

I'm concerned about. And then Even if, let's say, it was directly before the mission and the Secretary of War directs directs whatever the commanders involved to kill everybody.

That still isn't necessarily an order to take no prisoners, right?

And so we are trained that if somebody is out of the fight due to sickness, illness, injury, or detention, in this case, shipwreck, that we don't continue the attack. And so if

troops are given an order to kill everybody,

you can reasonably interpret that to be kill all the enemy, so attack the enemy.

But at the same time, if you do end up encountering someone who is out of the fight, in this case, due to shipwreck, then you don't attack them.

Exactly. So what the New York Times is reporting today, it hit last night, is that, again, five U.S.
officials who spoke separately on the condition of anonymity said Mr.

Hegset, the head of the September 2nd attack, ordered a strike that would kill the people on board the boat and destroy the vessel and its purported cargo of drugs, which would be a standard order.

I mean, you don't order these boats destroyed and not expect the people on board are going to die. You just take them out, take out the boat, take out the drug cargo on board.
And that was it.

Not what the Washington Post reported, which was as these two survivors are clinging there, Pete Hegseth called up and said, take them out. That's what the Washington Post went with.

It's what NPR is going with still today, even in the wake of late night's New York Times drop.

Yeah, and it's just completely speculative. And

I understand the need to rely on anonymous sources at times when we're reporting stories, especially when we're dealing with the government.

But we still need to assess, we need to engage in a bit of media literacy and say, okay, well, these anonymous sources are saying that Pete Hegset said this.

And there's just so much

ambiguity there, which ambiguity is fine. We're going to have that in reporting.

But then to take that and run with it and essentially accuse the sitting Secretary of War of being a war criminal based on

this basically double hearsay that's being reported from anonymous sources is just,

it doesn't make any rational sense.

Well, and on top of everything, so now you tell me, let's deal with what we believe is the reality here.

Because Wapo suggested that Hegseth gave a spoken order, a spoken order saying, kill them all, like kill everyone who is still in that water.

Now we believe that's not true, that the Washington Post had that wrong.

So let's deal with what we believe actually happened. Pete gave the

okay for the mission: take out the boat, strike it, you know, everybody on board's gonna die, and

take out the cargo. Then they dropped their first strike, and the boat was, according to the

administration's critics, they say it was destroyed.

Excuse me, it was destroyed. And you have these two clinging to life, and the rules of law prohibit you from striking them.
Now, let's talk about the admiral, because the admiral, this guy Mitch,

forgive me, can't find his last name in front of me,

he did

say, Bradley, let's have a second strike. He is the one who said, we need a second strike.

But that, too, is not a war crime, because you point out in your piece the difference between destroying a boat and damaging a boat. Can you explain that? Right.

Absolutely. So assuming that the boat itself originally is a military objective.

So by definition, in the law of armed conflict, this is something that's by its nature, location, purpose, or use, in this case, purpose, makes an effective contribution to military action such that capturing it or destroying it gives a definite military advantage, concrete and direct military advantage under the circumstances ruling ruling at the time.

So that's the standard. That's what we apply in practice.
That's what we're trained on.

And so the boats to begin with, assuming that law of armed conflict applies, and there's a lot of discussion about whether it should or shouldn't, and that's something we could get into.

But for purposes of the operators who are involved in this strike, they are applying the law of armed conflict because they're told that they're in an

armed conflict. So this boat originally qualifies then as a military objective by definition that I just suggested.
And it will no longer be a military objective if it is completely destroyed, right?

So if under the circumstances, no longer by its use makes an effective contribution. And

even with the facts that the Washington Post

reports in that initial story, there's an indication to me, at least when I read this, that

the commander involved must have assessed that it still qualified, to use the legal term, still qualified as a military objective because he suggested that it could still radio for assistance and another boat could come and capture, retain, regain control of the cargo and then

continue mission, almost said Charlie Mike, because that's what we call it in the military, continue mission.

And so if that's the case, then it's my impression from reading that is that the commander must have assessed that this boat still qualifies as a military objective such that it can still be attacked

which would also mean incidentally that the the personnel that are on board are not shipwrecked because and if they were shipwrecked let's call them or to combat so out of the fight due to shipwreck so we should not attack them in that case but if the vessel that they're on still qualifies as a military objective then they're not but they're by definition they're not shipwrecked and you know the the commander could order subsequent strikes to finish the you know the mission to complete the mission to ensure that the boat is no longer serviceable, that no longer is a military objective.

So if the boat is not destroyed and the mission is to destroy it, and you have two survivors who are floating on the boat or holding onto the boat in the water, it's fair game.

They're going to go if the mission is take out that boat. That's right.
So, and this is a difference between whether the boat was disabled or destroyed.

And so if, I mean, if it's destroyed, we can think of

pieces of boat floating around in the water.

You know, and, you know, maybe a survivor's with a a life vest on are clinging to it or whatever. Like that's a destroyed boat.
And if that's the case, then there would be no reason to reattack it.

But if the boat is disabled, and again, by the initial report from the Washington Post, it's what it sounds to me like the commander involved assessed that the boat was disabled rather than destroyed.

Then there's no, it still qualifies then by legal definition, by law of armed conflict, as a military objective such that it can be,

you know, it can be

the mission is destroy it.

you've only disabled it so you need a second strike to destroy it that's what this Admiral Bradley saw and did and those two guys who survived the initial blast were taken down in the second strike and now

not only do we have the suggestion that it's possible the two survivors might have been able to coordinate with other narco-terrorists we actually in the New York Times report have this is on the record now.

One of the officials that spoke to the Times is quoted as saying the the U.S. military intercepted radio communications from one of the survivors to what the official said were narco-traffickers.

I mean, now that's as clear-cut as it comes. Any, any military commander would order those guys taken out.

Absolutely, because at that point, if that's the intelligence that they have, at that point, it absolutely still does qualify.

Because again, by definition, something, an object by its use makes an effective contribution to military action.

And so, you know, if the there's, and so it was, it was kind of implied by the way that the Washington Post reported it that, you know, the commander believed that they could radio for assistance and have someone come and get the cargo and continue with the mission.

But with the, you know, going on record now, establishing on the record that, yes, there was in fact a radio transmission that was intercepted, then, you know, that basically supports the conclusion that that's exactly what the commander believed at the time.

And the commander ordered subsequent strikes to destroy the boat because it wasn't destroyed to begin with.

This is so amazing to me. This all makes perfect sense.

It's a left-wing Trump-hating narrative that we have these military commanders who are just these rogue agents who have thrown caution to the wind, who are just out there for bloodlust, trying to take down anybody that they see in the seas, as opposed to rational, thoughtful, considered leaders who understand the rules of military combat a lot better than the Washington Post or some armchair pundits who want to jump all the way all over them.

And it also seemed clear in the way the military was very careful in its wording about this.

You had Trump saying, Hegseth told me he did not give that second order, that he did not give a verbal command to kill all the people. And they're still denying that.

And then Hegseth sent out a tweet saying, I stand behind Admiral Bradley. He's done nothing wrong, which seemed to be a way of saying, here's the guy who gave the order, but he did nothing wrong.

It was a way of sort of clarifying it wasn't me, and now we know it wasn't him. But we also want to find out whether Admiral Bradley did anything wrong.
And the answer is no.

He had a partially destroyed ship from which, according to this one official to the Times, The radio comms were still possible. And one of the survivors was using them to call in backup.

Exactly. Yeah.
And so

this is the danger with running with completely speculative reporting is, you know, and initial reports are almost always, and this is something we know in the military, you know, for operationally, we just take it as a given.

Initial reports are almost always,

if not wrong, they're at least

incomplete enough that you don't have enough information to make kind of

really meaningful conclusions. We still need to gather information.
We need to still need to figure out exactly what happened.

And so the responsible thing, if the Washington Post wanted to report based on the sources that they have, I mean, that's a journalistic decision in-house.

And I know that there are checks in place to decide whether we're going to run a story based on completely anonymous sources. So that's one thing to run this story.

There is news value and public interest in it. I get it.

But we need to exercise caution when all we're dealing with is speculative reports from anonymous sources that we're not really sure, like they're filling in, they're providing some evidence of what happened, but they're not really filling in the gaps.

And before we can make conclusions and denounce everybody involved as a war criminal, I mean, this is, if they're wrong about this, if they're wrong about the allegations, this is defamation, right?

So

right.

So before we jump to conclusions like this, it's, I mean, it's just, it makes logical sense to gather the information and figure out, you know, now now if it came to light that the commander involved or the secretary of war for this case, you know, saw that the boat was completely destroyed and there was no military utility in attacking the boat anyways, and there's just two survivors clinging around to, you know, wreckage floating around in the Caribbean Ocean, and they said killed them anyways.

I mean, if that's the evidence that we're getting, then, I mean, that sounds to me like a war crime, right? But we're not getting that evidence from the initial Washington Post report.

And so it's irresponsible to take, to make conclusions, you know, really assertive conclusions that this was a war crime and that Pete Hegseth needs to resign or be fired or prosecuted or whatever based on

Congressman Seth Moulton of Massachusetts out there saying, you mark my words, someone's going to jail for murder.

I mean, that's like so irresponsible, ginning up hatred and acrimony toward our serving military members who are under enough stress as it is.

You made a point in your tweet storm that was so powerful.

Responding to those who say, oh, you know, in defense of the so-called seditious six, the six lawmakers who went out there and started this whole thing by saying, hey, soldiers, don't obey illegal orders.

People say, you know what? It's just a reminder, just a reminder to these soldiers in these tumultuous times. Like

you don't have the obligation to follow an illegal order and they just needed that.

You had a response to that. Tell us what it is.
Yeah, we don't need to be, we, so, you know, having spent 22 years in the military, I'm still kind of part of my identity.

And so I still identify in that, even though I'm no longer in. But,

you know, service members, me included when I was in, we don't need reminders that we, you know, have to,

we have an obligation not to obey. manifestly unlawful orders, right? So not just unlawful orders, but manifestly.
We don't need anyone from Congress.

We don't need anyone from the outside to remind us of this because, I mean, it's part of the ethos that we live every day. It's drilled into us, you know, starting in basic training.

And it's part of our, following orders is it's part of the military life. I mean, it's part of good order and discipline.

But we're also, we already understand that we have no obligation to follow patent, you know, manifestly unlawful orders.

And so the, and the people who are who are reminding us or reminding the members of the DOD of of this, they know that.

They know that service members don't need to be reminded that we have no obligation to follow manifestly unlawful orders. They're doing this to create doubt, to second guess

the current political leadership of the military, civilian and senior military leadership, to create the appearance that the orders that are being given are manifestly unlawful.

And so there is an obligation not to follow them.

and it's just that is also uh irresponsible uh because again it's not something we need to be reminded of and the obligation is not just to you know uh

not follow or not obey unlawful orders but it's manifestly unlawful and if we don't special and so the context of the people you know the the members of congress who are being referred to as the seditious six they are make they're making their case that this is not an armed conflict, that it should actually be human rights law that's applying, and we should not be engaged in you know military strikes against these boats and that's a fine that's you know an opinion and that's you know it's interesting academically but the troops who are involved in this this conflict are not specialists in you know international law involving the resort to force and so you know that's that's at the political leadership level and so you know we are given orders you are in it we have determined the political leadership has determined that you are in an armed conflict so apply law of armed conflict to this rather than you know human rights law and And that is a,

we're not in a position to understand whether that is unlawful or not.

We are going to comply with law of armed conflict. This is pretty sophisticated stuff that had to be run up and down the chain of command and lawyers, DOJ and elsewhere.

Like to expect Admiral Bradley to have full, complete knowledge of this, whereas people have gone to law school, who have practiced law at the elite levels, who understand military law, maritime law, all the things,

they had to study this. They had teams who studied it.
To expect one one admiral to have it all down as opposed to understanding that I have a boss who has to deal with that.

He talks to lawyers who had to deal with that. And when my boss tells me what to do, I do it.
Like that's how the chain of command works. But the notion that Senator Mark Kelly

can somehow empower, you know, the guy who actually has to press the button on the kinetic strike

to say, no, Admiral, I'm not doing that, sir. Mark Kelly told me I have the authority to say no to you is really dangerous.
It is. So it's dangerous at the individual level because if that

troop, whoever it is, that service member refuses to obey the order and it doesn't turn out that it's reasonably manifestly unlawful, then that whoever it is, that service member is going to be court-martialed.

And that service member, you know, it's not going to be a defense that, well, I read on, you know, social media that Senator Mark Kelly said that I have an obligation not to do this.

and so I didn't do it. So that's not a defense.
And so that service member is now at legal risk for

having the impression that he or she does not need to follow this order when it actually is a lawful order.

And so these external commentators are essentially trying to substitute their own understanding of what is or is not lawful for the actual current chain of command from the Secretary of War all the way down to the tactical level.

So that's one one issue for the individual

concerned is that's not going to be a defense when they get court-martialed for this. But then there's a more

kind of systemic concern with this, and that is it's sowing the seeds of doubt among those who are actually involved with carrying out orders.

And if there is hesitation in carrying out lawful orders, that's the whole reason why we train on this, how we train on

the disciplined use of overwhelming force.

If we're not doing that because we're second guessing orders that are actually lawful, we're going to end up having hesitation on the battlefield.

And that's going to end up creating missed opportunities that could end up costing us our lives when the missed opportunity of the adversary that we didn't attack ends up attacking us.

And that could end up creating a risk of mission failure. Wow.
It's just so irresponsible. Brian Cox, thank you so much for your analysis.
Love talking to you. Absolutely.

Thank you very much for having me. All right, take care.
Thank you for your service.

Okay, coming up next, Rich and Charlie have been watching this. They're with National Review.
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Let's get to the rest of the news with our next guest. It's an NR Day here at the MK Show.
Rich Lowry, editor-in-chief of National Review and Charles C.W.

Cook, senior writer for National Review and host of the Charles C.W. Cook podcast.
Find all their work by becoming an NR Plus subscriber. Highly recommend.
Guys, great to see you. Good to see you.

Not too great to hear you. As I texted you earlier, you sound worse than yesterday.
I know. I saved up all my Reutrage for you, Rich Lowry.

All right, so

I understand you heard at least part of Brian Cox, who's a very thoughtful guy.

And what his initial reaction to that Washington Post report is already already being borne out by the subsequent reporting by the New York Times.

He saw the Washington Post talking about a disabled boat as opposed to a destroyed boat and understood as a guy who served for 22 years, wait, wait, wait, that makes a difference.

If the mission is to destroy a boat and after strike one, it's only been disabled, you can pretty much bet your dollars to donuts. There's going to be a strike two.
That's a mission not accomplished.

And so the second strike would have been perfectly within the laws of war with or without two survivors clinging to some portion of the boat.

But on top of all that, we get the New York Post, or sorry, New York Times now reporting that at least one of the officials they spoke to reports that one of these alleged survivors or whatever you want to call them had radioed back.

It was actually radioing back to another narco-terrorist saying, like, help,

the boat has been disabled, and giving, you know, the people in command, like Admiral Bradley, even more reason to take the second strike.

And we also now learn, contrary to the Washington Post report, that Pete Hexeth did not

issue a second order. There was no verbal command to kill everybody, as WAPO reported.
So, Rich, I mean,

there was a litany of things wrong as it looks today from that Washington Post report, which is diametrically opposed to the New York Times and to what the White House and the Pentagon are saying.

Yeah, so just as someone who's spent a a lot of time consuming news last my adult life, just the Washington Post story has the classic aspect of something that's too perfect, that's too cinematic.

It feels like the movie where you have the handsome, slightly nefarious defense secretary with all the screens on the wall.

And there's the moment where you can see whether you can take out the wounded guys and he orders it.

So I just inherently, we need to learn more, but the New York Times story seems more credible to me. Where I depart from our guest, I guess, is that

what he says makes total sense to me. If this is a destroyer or some sort of military vessel, of course you take it out even if there are wounded people on the vessel.

But I just don't think these drug runners are combatants. I don't think they represent a threat to our military.

I don't see any reason why you wouldn't take the guys off the boat and then sink the boat or whatever you want to do. So I have a problem over and beyond the double tap.

I don't think we should be tapping these boats to begin with because they're not combatants.

Okay, but

they've gotten a legal blessing for doing that. And so now the question is tactics and whether they're within the rules of war.

And it looks like the Washington Post got way ahead of its skis on this one, Charles. And I'll tell you something else that's interesting here.
This morning you had NPR.

And I believe the, I don't know what NPR tapes,

excuse me, it's up first podcast. But I think it's either very, very late at night or first thing in the morning because I'm always comparing my own AM update to theirs just to see if

they have what we have because we always go very, very late on our taping. Anyway,

they completely ignore the New York Times reporting, which is not like NPR.

So I think they either missed it or worse, they just didn't account for it in doubling down on the what appears to be faulty Washington Post reporting from Friday.

Take a listen to what I heard on NPR this morning.

So on Friday, the Washington Post reported that on September 2nd, U.S. forces struck one of those boats, leaving survivors afterwards.
And so Hagseth gave an order to kill those survivors.

Now, NPR later confirmed that Hagseth had ordered both strikes. All of that matters because, as Congress members from both parties have said, that second strike may have constituted a war crime.

Meanwhile, the Department of Defense in that Washington Post story said that, quote, this entire narrative is completely false. Now, what did we we learn from the White House yesterday?

Well, the administration then confirmed some parts of this story.

At yesterday's press briefing, Press Secretary Caroline Levitt acknowledged a second strike, but as for Hagseth ordering it, she didn't deny it, but said Hagseth authorized U.S. Navy Admiral Frank M.

Bradley to take these actions. But our NPR colleague Tom Bowman has new reporting on this.
Yesterday, a U.S.

official who was not authorized to speak publicly pushed back on the White House, saying Hagseth gave the command for two strikes to kill, in addition to two strikes to sink the boat.

Okay, so it's like the New York Times report doesn't exist. She doesn't acknowledge Caroline Levitt did say yesterday that Hegseth did not say kill everyone.
She did not acknowledge,

she just went with that he gave the order to kill

and that NPR confirmed that he gave this order to kill, like a second order.

And she did not acknowledge the Hegseth tweet tweet yesterday saying Admiral Bradley is the one who did it and we stand behind him. He basically said Admiral Bradley commanded the operation.

He did nothing wrong. We stand behind him 100%.
So like none of this is in NPR, which I will confess is shocking to me. Your thoughts?

Well, that part's not shocking to me. I was skeptical of the Washington Post story.

That doesn't mean it's untrue, but I have been and remain skeptical of it, having lived through now 10 years of stories relating to Donald Trump. The way in which the anonymous sources were

used as scaffolding to build what, as Rich said, looks a bit like a movie scene made me sceptical.

And then when the New York Times story came out, which is against the interests of the New York Times' editorial bent, I became even more skeptical.

So I'm absolutely open to the idea the Washington Post got this wrong or went too far with what information it had. And I think your guest made a compelling case to that effect.

But I am with Rich on the underlying problem, which is that there's no authorization here for war in the first place. Now, that is a separate issue.

It certainly would not mean that Pete Hegseth or others were engaged in war crimes or any of that.

But I do think that that matters as a backdrop just as much as the details of this particular struggle. It does matter.
I agree with you that it matters.

Before I move off of this and to that, I want to point this out. John Pedoritz,

he's not a fan of Pete Hegseth, so I think it's fair to say, of Commentary Magazine.

He tweeted out, if this New York Times story is true, the Washington Post story is a genuinely vile slander of both Hegseth and Bradley. And he's seeing it too.
So this is a major conflict between

the New York Times on the one hand, NPR and Washington Post on the other hand, and we'll see how it gets resolved.

But resolve, it should, because you've got military service personnel twisting in the wind. And the whole thing is so wrong.
This is all started by Mark Kelly.

He has this aweshux: like, gee, I'm just being neighborly here, letting the soldiers know that they shouldn't obey these terrible orders, which inevitably, you know, the evil Donald Trump or Pete Hexeth are giving.

So, like, I'm just Joe friendly trying to remind you of this. But, like, that's what set this whole thing off.
Here, that is. This is actually from Meet the Press on Sunday, SAT Zero.

You can certainly go to the judge, advocate, generals, the lawyers, and have a discussion about it. If you don't have time, you just say simply, I'm not going to do that.
That's against the law.

It puts a lot of burden on the troops to make a decision in real time. It puts a tremendous amount of burden on officers in the military, but that is their responsibility.
And they can figure out.

You know, a reasonable person can tell something that is legal and something that is illegal. So would you refuse these specific orders to strike drug boats if you were still in uniform?

Well, the difference between the initial strike and what is being reported as a second strike, and those things are different.

I think this administration has tied themselves in knots, the explanations that we have received on how

this is all legal. And I was saying weeks ago, my concern is with the service members that we're going to put these individuals in a really, really tough decision, in a tough place.

And you know, they may find out down the road that they did something that is illegal. It is not fair to them.

Wait, I thought he just said that you know. He said in the middle of that soundbite, you know what's a legal order and what's an illegal order.

Then he ends it with, I'm really concerned about the service members who might not know. And then down the line are going to get prosecuted.
The whole argument is circular. It falls apart upon just

easy scrutiny, Rich Lowry. And that's because he's not doing protect the troops.
He's doing

Well, I thought it was notable in that interview. He was pressed a couple times on that point.
Would you have defied the second order? And he was very hesitant.

He never said, yeah, I would have defied it. Instead, he went to those generalities.
Look on this video, it was clearly base maintenance.

The audience for that is the left-wing base of the Democratic Party. Everyone who's in the military, all this stuff is drilled into them constantly.

They don't need Mark Kelly's permission to defy illegal orders.

And I just, I'm highly skeptical on the other side of the ledger that any Marine, a 19-year-old Marine, is going to defy a lawful order because of something Mark Kelly said.

So I find this aspect of it to be just entirely theater.

Here's the other thing, Rich, to your point about the Washington Post theatrical reporting. It was co-authored by Ellen Nakashima.
Does that ring a bell at Wapo?

She's been square in the crosshairs of our friend Glenn Greenwald for many years, who has kept the receipts on the RussiaGate fake reporting.

And she was almost as bad as Natasha Berstrand, who's also all over this story. Two of the chief antagonists of Trump 1.0 are back in Trump 2.0.

And now here's Ellen Nakashima, who won a Pulitzer in 2018 for her fake Russagate reporting that said that Russia was trying to help Trump win the White House.

Again, now we're looking at all these CIA documents and understanding that they were manipulated by John Brennan and so on.

She had no skepticism at all because it made Trump look bad the first time around. And I would argue exactly the same thing is haunting her reporting.

She's now been humiliated, not by Fox News, not by me, not by NR, but by the New York Times. And they need to update that reporting stat.

Okay, let's keep going.

Now, today,

I want to tell you that we have our own exclusive reporting

in response to the hit that came out yesterday, this report, attacking Cash Patel and to a lesser extent, Dan Bongino. We broke some of this news on our AM update, but I have more to tell you today.

That is direct from Cash Patel himself with his authorization that it be on the record.

Just by way of background, what happened was a group called the National Alliance of Retired and Active Duty FBI Special Agents and Analysts issued a report.

This report, we're told, is going to be presented to Congress later this week. It's called a pulse check of the first six months of the Patel leadership,

February through August. And it calls the FBI a chronically underperforming agency, in part because of Cash's political partisanship.

It reveals a troubling picture, they say, this is after their interviews with rank-and-file current and former agents, of a chronically underperforming agency debilitated by low confidence in FBI leadership based on a lack of prior experience, a historically toxic culture of fear and operational paralysis, and deep-seated internal partisanship.

They go on, and I'll go through some of the allegations. But the biggest thing that they want that they point to that's been used to embarrass or try to cash Patel is a story that

when Cash went out to the

Charlie Kirk assassination guys, that he showed up there

via his airplane.

And he didn't have an FBI jacket and that he, you know, like a high school girl wanting to be in the right outfit at the big football game, refused to leave the vehicle, the plane, until he got the proper threads on him.

He wouldn't leave until he got an FBI jacket and that on top of that, he demanded a patch to make him look like badass.

Like so, so that one of the local guys had to take off a patch and give him the patch so that he looked tougher. That's the implication.

Well, I've spoken with Cash Patel, and he said none of that is true. His initial denials and the real facts about where the FBI is, they call it rudderless.

The FBI is actually truly setting records on its arrest rates. on violent crimes, gangs, and so on, but it's all an AM update.

But on this particular incident, which was meant to personally humiliate him, obviously, he says it's not true. He says he flew from New York directly out to Utah.
He had no proper clothing.

He was out to dinner when he learned about Charlie. So he did borrow an FBI jacket.

He said the patches piece of the story is also not true. He said a guy who worked

one of the special divisions out in Utah actually gave him a patch as like a solidarity, the way a lot of law enforcement will give you like a coin or whatever.

He gave it to him because he wanted the FBI director to feel like part of the crew.

And Patch, to respect this guy and say thanks for, you know, giving this to me, put it on his arm and got off the plane. He said there was no waiting on the plane to get a jacket.

There was no waiting on the plane to get a patch. He said, we ran off the plane.
We understood Charlie had been murdered. It was a tumultuous time.

And that just none of this is true. And I got to tell you guys something.
When I went through yesterday, because Miranda Devine had an explosive report yesterday, she is always a great reporter.

But then later, the actual 110 or some odd page report dropped. And as I actually went through it, the complaints in here, boys, I mean, okay, I'll give you an example.

The deep-seated internal partisanship is there because

of, they say, because of the FBI director who previously campaigned for the president as a vocal critic of the FBI.

Too fucking bad.

Also left-leaning factions embedded who have TDS. I accept that.
There is increasing dislike for Trump in the FBI, they say.

The number of FBI employees exhibiting TDS is much more widespread than, is much more widespread than it was within the FBI. Then they go on to say, agents are upset about the January 6th pardons.

A sub-source who's an FBI employee reported he or she is demoralized that the president pardoned those rightfully convicted for their role in January 6th. Well, take it up with Oprah.
Why is that?

Why does Cash Patel have to run around talking to some, like an individual? This is a one-person complaint from the sound of it. They go on to say,

Patel is allegedly paralyzed. FBI personnel, predominantly those members of FBI management, are afraid of losing their jobs.
They are making operational decisions based on that fear.

Some FBI managers are waiting for the FBI director to tell them specifically what to do. And they're not doing anything because they're waiting on those directions.

This reads like a struggle session that you would have it like a self-help self-help weekend away. And the conclusion of these guys in this report is you better listen to Cash Patel.

Every opinion matters. You have to reprogram the mindset from hyper defensive to full receive mode and commit to embracing feedback.
And then you must execute on the recommendations.

This sounds like a BLM session, like the Wall Street Journal kids who tried to pull this shit onto the WSJ during the George Floyd Apalooza. And WSJ said, yeah, we hear you.

We understand your feelings. Get out if you don't want to work here.
It's a news organization. Rich, I'm sorry, but this is like, I'm not persuaded.
And this is not just because I like Cash and Dan.

I was perfectly ready to criticize them. This sounds like bullshit.

Yeah, so the Jacket story, classic kind of BS story, it goes back to the HexF Washington Post story.

I learned long ago in the Trump era, you don't believe anything that allegedly happened in private or said, but that was said in private.

I I mean, they lied about things Trump said on camera in the Lester Hold interview about why he fired James Comey, what he said about the Charlottesville protests.

So I don't believe anything that's reported about something that happened in private unless there's some written record of it. And this is a classic story that feels like the jacket thing.

It's just made up. It's hearsay, repeated two or three times by people who hate the guy and want to embarrass him.
So I

put no credibility in that whatsoever. And his denial sounds totally credible.
Now, look, this is a huge institutional and organizational lift for him. He's never had a job like this.

I'm sure things have been shaky because he's inexperienced.

We saw some of that in public and how he handled the Charlie Kirk assassination, you know, saying whether we had a suspect in custody or not, and having to change a couple times on that.

But on the other hand, there's an entrenched bureaucracy that's going to be hostile to his priorities and hostile to his politics. So, this is not,

I don't take any of this very seriously, but it comes with the job for Cash. Yeah.
Well, exactly.

And Miranda's a straight reporter, but the question is what's in the ingredients of the report that she was basing her report on. And here's the thing he raised with me,

Charlie Cash did.

The FBI is doing a good job. They allege it's rudderless, directionless.
People are paralyzed. These are some of the stats we listed in AM update today.

Under Cash's leadership, the Bureau has made almost 30,000 arrests this year. That's a 100% increase from 2024, 25,000 of those for violent crimes.

Over 100 MS-13 gang members, over 200 plus trend or Aragua members. 6,000 missing children have been found.
That's a 22% increase over last year.

1,700 child predators have been arrested, up 10% over last year. Human trafficking arrests, up 15% from last year.
Domestic terrorism arrests, up 30, 30%.

1,900 kilos of fentanyl have been seized.

Four of the top 10 most wanted criminals have been nabbed. That's the same number President Biden's FBI nabbed in four years sitting in office.
So to me, this just smacks of they don't like him.

They don't like Dan. The FBI, I'm talking about the FBI rank and file.
And

that hasn't changed just because they got rid of DEI, et cetera.

So I'm very far from being an expert in the internal workings of the FBI. I'm also not a great fan of the FBI.
What I do know, though, is how the U.S. Constitution works.

And all of the criticisms that you read are irrelevant under our system of government.

I am also a critic of the January 6th pardons, but Donald Trump is the duly elected president of the United States. He's the head of the executive branch.

And if you cannot, as an FBI agent or any other agent of the federal government, work for the president, then you have to resign. Likewise, Donald Trump chose Cash Patel

to be in that role as the head of that agency. If you don't like him, then you have to leave.

If you look back to the beginning of this republic, the idea that people would stay on between presidencies was absurd. Now, over time, we've developed this professional bureaucracy.

There are good sides to that, there are bad sides to that. But the deal is that as a government employee, you work for the president until you can't.

So if you've been in the FBI or any other agency in the last 15 years, you've worked under Barack Obama and Donald Trump and Joe Biden and now Donald Trump again, those are very different people.

They've done very different things. Half the country likes one of those guys, the other half does not.
So I think unless there is a lot more to the report,

I think the answer to that is nobody cares. The notion that the military in particular, but police forces, ought to be subordinate to the civil power is one of the core elements in America.

So, you know, I don't know if you need to go see Oprah, but if you're upset with your leadership, then suck it up because that is how our democracy works and you wouldn't want it any other way.

It's very strange, Rich, to read this from FBI agents. Like,

you have to receive the information. You have to do something about it.
Make them feel seen and heard. Oh, my God.

I mean, like, if I heard this from my staff, I'd be like, you need to go work for somebody else. I'm not the make you feel seen and heard kind of person.

Yeah, you want the FBI guys to be guys with crew cuts that take orders and go take down bad guys. Don't spend their time backbiting and whining, which is what this report sounds like.
Well, exactly.

So in any event, I think what I'm seeing with cash and with Dan is a trend to try to diminish and embarrass them.

And I know their critics will say that's because they've done diminishing and embarrassing things. And I would just urge people to understand.
I've been in this business a long time.

I'm seeing a pattern on them, same pattern as we've seen on Hegseth, where the people who didn't like them to begin with continue not to like them, and then more and more and more hit pieces wind up in the news.

In fact, we just saw this.

This is a good, before we go to break, I'm just going to read this. I know.

This is from,

here it is. Eric Schmidt, who's now

a U.S. senator from Missouri.
He says, a quick note on Hegseth. He was and is a threat to permanent Washington status quo.
They didn't defeat the nomination. They tried hard.

I saw all the behind-the-scenes craziness. He was their top target.
Since then, there have been countless anonymous leaks meant to undermine him and thwart Trump and others.

Bogus story after bogus story. It's the same tired playbook.
Same for him, same for cash, same for Dan. We'll be right back.

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Rich Lowry and Charlie Cook of National Review are back with me now. And guys, this just in as Trump is holding a cabinet meeting,

some good news. It's not, we don't know how good, but it's definitely good.
News about the

remaining survivor National Guard member who was shot by that Afghani

asylum. He'd been granted asylum in April.

You remember there was a

young woman, she passed, and then there was a young man who's 24 and Trump just said this. Listen.

Then I want to pay my deepest respects to those two incredible

people from the National Guard in West Virginia. They came from.
I spoke to their parents.

Sarah is gone.

She passed away. She's looking down on us now and she loves her parents and they loved her.

They were, somebody said, how are they doing? I said, the word is devastated.

Doing. How are they going to do? They're devastated.
The rest of their lives they're going to be devastated. She was an incredible person, highly respected, top of her class, everything.

She was like a perfect human being.

20 years old, just started. She was like a baby.
She was so proud. They were giving her a promotion.
And she told the parents that she was getting a promotion. And they were so proud of her.

Then they get a call that this happened.

And we have one young man who's fighting for his life. He's fighting very hard.
I think he's probably doing better than anybody.

They said he didn't have a chance. I'll tell you, the one who said he's going to live is his mother.
Spoke to his mother. Sir, he's going to live.

I pray to God that's true. His name is Andrew Wolfe.
Sarah Beckstrom is the National Guard member who died on Thanksgiving, age 20.

And what's been so disgusting in the wake of this murder, an attempted murder in the case of Andrew Charles, is

the left wing running around trying to pretend that the issue is really that they were there in the first place, like Jane Mayer of the New Yorker out there saying that this is all so unnecessary.

They didn't need to be there as if that's really the problem. Like,

not that there's some lunatic who drove from Washington State to Washington, D.C.

to shoot down two innocents in the prime of their lives, but that Trump gave the order to fortify the crime preventions in Washington, D.C.

Yeah, it's absolutely outrageous. They make it sound as if the United States staged an unprovoked invasion of, say, Australia, and then these two young people were shot.

At which point you would say, well, why were they there? But that's not what happened. The District of Columbia is a federal district.
It is under federal control. It's not a state.

It's not a foreign country. The federal government is allowed to deploy federal agents in the federal district.

So once you get past that, then what Jane Mayer and others effectively are saying is the equivalent of saying, well, if you don't like the police, you can just shoot them. Which is crazy.

Of course you can't. This is the fundamental presumption beneath our civilization that we do not kill people

just because we have a problem with them. Now we don't know precisely what the person who shot them was trying to achieve, but it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter whether he was upset that they were there. It doesn't matter whether he was trying to commit some secondary crime.
It doesn't matter whether he had political or religious objections.

It doesn't matter whether he equated them in some way with ICE or other federal agents. Perhaps he was upset about taxes.
That doesn't give him the right to kill IRS agents. You cannot do this.

It is not just stupid to say, well, of course, if they hadn't been there, they wouldn't have been shot because someone else would have been, the police. is evil.

That is not how it works in the United States.

But I think, unfortunately, it is representative of a particular sort of progressive thinking, which holds that if, for whatever reason, you, being the progressive elite, don't like someone, whether that be the deployment of the National Guard in DC or ICE performing and enforcing immigration law or, say, Charlie Kirk saying things they didn't like, then it's sort of understandable.

They wouldn't go so far as to say it's justified, but it's sort of understandable. And you have to take that into consideration when looking at the story.

And Ken Delanian on MS Now, which is formerly MSNBC, he said... Well, you want to play it? Because he essentially said this.

Let me play it. Here it is.
Sat 11.

But of course, you know, there's so much controversy happening in the United States right now with ICE, who are also wearing uniforms and wearing masks. And

so there's, you don't know

people walking around with uniforms

in an American city, there are some Americans that might object to that.

And so apparently this shooting has happened.

There are some Americans who might object to that. And so apparently this shooting has happened.
Because people walking around with uniforms,

people might object to it, Charlie.

Well, so how dare he say that? How dare he say that? As I say, he's not going to come out and say it was justified or they came close. He's going to hint at it.

There are all manner of things that I object object to megan i don't like the federal income tax i don't like obamacare i don't like some of our gun control laws there's no way ken delanian would go on tv and say well of course the president just signed an increase in the tax rate so that an irs agent was killed you know so that happened there's no way you would say uh that uh

what about a hhs department

Right, that's another one for 50 years. Now, of course, there were a few people, a handful on the fringes during the Roe v.
Wade era, who did target abortion doctors.

But do you know what people at National Review said? They said, don't do that. That's murder.
Don't do that. That is a fundamental break in the social contract.

And Kendallinian wasn't out there saying, well, yeah, abortions make a lot of people upset. You know, he wasn't saying that.
It only works one way, Rich, and it's obvious.

And it's like, to me, the difference is between as a lawyer, cause in fact and proximate cause.

You know, if you, if I get into a car accident, God forbid, and hurt somebody, am I the proximate cause of that accident? Maybe, maybe I am. Is my mom the cause in fact of that accident?

In a way, if you want to go back that far, she gave birth to me. Like every, so yeah, President Trump, like also the parents of those two poor National Guardsmen, yeah, they're to blame.

They must, they didn't stop them from joining the National Guard. Trump is to blame.
He deployed the National Guard.

Maybe their coffee maker was to blame because had it not worked that morning, they would have been five minutes late.

It's like you don't spend time in the cause and fact place when you're a news person. You talk about the proximate cause of what led to this terrible thing.

And by anyone's measure, there is one person and one person alone to blame for this. And it's this Afghani guy we brought back here after we pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021.

Yeah, and the idea that wearing uniforms is a provocation. All All sorts of people wear uniforms, right? You know who else

wears uniforms? Cops. Cops are ambushed.
Several years ago under de Belasio, there's a cop sitting in his car in Queens and was shot in the head.

Are we supposed to say, oh, he shouldn't have parked there?

He shouldn't have been in the car? Or those Dallas officers in that awful ambush that

15, 12 something shot, a number of them killed? Was it their fault? Should they have not been there? Some people don't like police. Maybe it was their fault.
So this is hideous stuff.

And maybe one effect from this will be that it actually humanizes the National Guard members. They aren't going to these cities cracking heads.
They're not some alien force.

They're, by and large, young people, upstanding, patriotic, want to do their duty. And what they're doing largely in Washington, D.C.

is providing a symbol of public order that in no way justifies any act of violence against them, any harassment against them. And of course, in no way justifies murdering them.

So, what do we make of this guy? Because

I realize a lot of people went to the fact that he was unvetted. There are too many who were let in after the withdrawal who were unvetted, and there were, that's true.

But it does not appear that this guy was necessarily one of them because

he went through a lot of vetting. And my next guest coming on after you guys is going to walk us through some of that.

But

even the administration is suggesting they think the guy was radicalized here,

here,

which is like, oh, geez,

like, great, great, Rich. What do we do with that?

So he got here

and life was so miserable for him, or he had some sort of a break. I don't know.
Now we're getting all the articles about how sad he was. I don't really care.
Who gives a shit how sad he was?

He was a sad terrorist who yelled Allahu Akbar as he took Sarah Bextrom's life.

Boo fucking who.

But it is interesting if he got radicalized here because he was a few years earlier helping us and then was yelling Allahu Akbar as he shot two of our service personnel. Yeah.

So it's very hard to see how you filter out for this, right? If he either had a mental break or he was radicalized once he was here or a combination.

of those two it's very hard to vet for that now my take we've talked about this before is we just need fewer numbers you make fewer mistakes if you're letting fewer people in in the first place.

And we should be very cautious about people from alien cultures. I think there should always be a humanitarian element to our immigration policy.

But refugees from, maybe we'll talk a little bit about Minnesota too, you know, from Somalia are going to have a hard time assimilating. It's a totally different culture.

Somalia doesn't have anything to do with us.

There's no reason we should be giving asylum to those people or that if they're refugees, they shouldn't be going someplace nearby Somalia where they might speak the language where the culture is familiar.

And it would be easier for them to go back. That's supposed to be part of the process.
You hope refugees eventually return to their native country.

And it'd be much easier for Minneapolis to assimilate the Somali immigrants if, say, there are 10,000 rather than 80,000. So I don't think there's an easy answer to this guy's case.

At least it doesn't look like there was.

You'd hope when we're granting asylum, by the way, that it's not just, do you have a fear of persecution back home, which he certainly did but whether you're sane or not and an upstanding member of the community or not and with the Trump administration kicking the tires now and the asylum process you hope that's something they're looking at well there was this group that was monitoring him Charlie this like immigration

I don't know what it's called it's got some long official sounding name but it wasn't really a governmental organization it was a left-leaning organization that realized he was suicidal and as far as I can tell told no one did not you know it's problematic because to the points that Rich was just making, you bring these people who have a totally different background, totally different upbringing, who, let's face it, grow up in a place where the jihad is very frequent, common, familiar, and not nearly as frowned upon as it is here.

And then you unleash them in the United States, even when they were so-called good guys, with only a left-leaning, bleeding heart, like checking in on them every once in a while.

And are we totally shocked that this is what happened?

Well, also,

although, of course it is not the case that most people who come here from Islamic countries are radicalized, they are more likely to be radicalized than, say, me

because they come from a background in which the messages they're receiving are normal. If somebody came up to me and started talking about radical Islam, I think I would look at them.
Funny.

Also, you're radicalized on some things, Charlie. Just in the dead.
That's true. I'm radicalized on the American experiment.

The government repayment is due to debt. That's right.
Kamala Harris. That's right.

But I managed to avoid killing anyone in the process. I just wrote very furiously at my keyboard in the grand sedition of American Rebels.

But look, it's more difficult to vet people from Afghanistan than it is people from England or Japan or Australia. And that's another thing we have to bear in mind.

He may have been vetted, but the information that the federal government was able to look at when I applied to become a permanent resident and then a citizen was comprehensive because I came from a stable country in which the bureaucracy and the government have long been fairly competent.

And that is true of people from France or from Germany or from Australia or Japan or what you will. It's just not the case for people from the third world.

There aren't many records in failed Islamic states such as Afghanistan. And that is, you know, when we hear the word vetted, that's something we ought to bear in mind.

Now, that doesn't mean, of course, you don't let anyone in from anywhere that isn't a Western country. But it does mean you have to have a different approach because you just can't know

that the paper trail in an Afghanistan, as opposed to, say, a Germany, is worthwhile.

By the way, the name of the group that was supposed to be keeping an eye on him is the U.S.

Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, which sounds so nice and official, but really it's just some left-leaning group that's supposed to, I guess, ease their way into the country and keep one eye on them.

And the person did accurately deduce that he was feeling suicidal,

did not accurately deduce that he was feeling homicidal. And if they did, did nothing about it.
So what's the point of the group?

Not just that, but the guy drove cross-country to commit this murder. It was cold-blooded.
And now I'm really kind of sick of the how sad he was stories, but they continue to pop up.

He was sad, really sad. You know who else is sad? The family of Andrew Wolfe and Sarah Bextrom.
That's who I have ink and patience for, not this guy's family.

All right, I want to keep going now.

Trump issued a tweet in response to all this saying he's basically shutting down these asylum claims.

He's going to try to denaturalize people who are naturalized citizens here under Joe Biden's auto pen.

He's cutting off immigration from third world countries. And then you had Christy Noam

get on the air. Do we have that sound about you guys? She got on the air last night, was it? I said last night, this morning.

And she said, no, it's the New York Post reporting, said she wants a, quote, full

travel ban on unnamed countries who are flooding the U.S. with dangerous migrants.

She wrote on X, I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that's been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.

This was after she, quote, just met with the president. So a DHS spokesperson told the post a list of nations would be announced soon.

So a full travel ban,

unlike the loser countries, like

I don't know exactly.

It'd probably be the 19 countries they've already listed as countries of concern.

A country that goes to Kelly's point, if you don't have a functional country or a liable country government on the other end, you can't vet someone and you're going to have huge visa overstay problems.

So I think this kind of pause is appropriate, but of course it's going to be depicted as racist.

Mark Kelly, our friend Mark Kelly, in that same Meet the Press interview that you played a clip from earlier, said said that Trump wants to shut down third world immigration because he hates brown people, right?

And this is an argument we're going to hear when actually you could stop all immigration from those 19 countries forevermore.

And still the immigration flow into the United States would be overwhelmingly, to use his term, brown, because most people are coming from Latin America and from Asia, but they always play the race guard.

Exactly right. And here, this aired actually,

is this SOT5, the one from Sky News, guys?

This is

This is something different.

Okay, but this is the a guy This is veteran action founder Mark Lucas and he's talking about how Afghanis for example treat their children and their women just just to give you one example of how different their culture is from ours.

Take a listen here SAT 5 In Afghanistan, there was a saying that we as Americans have the watches, but the Afghans own the time. They are very patient.

And over the weekend, I was sharing stories of what I witnessed as a platoon leader in Afghanistan in 2010.

You know, the Afghan elders that I had to conduct key lead engagements with, they had small little boys that were called chai boys, maybe eight or nine years old, who were at every single one of our meetings giving us tea.

And my Afghan interpreter told me that those young boys were sold into sexual slavery and their parents were willing to sell their children in hopes that they would be able to be sent to Kabul to get a higher education from these elders.

But my interpreter proudly told me that many of these young boys would grow up to become men and they'd come back and they would kill those elders. But also the Afghans would beat their women.

They have no respect for women. And I had three

strong, brave women attached to my unit. They were members of my female engagement team.
And they all just so happened to be blonde-haired.

And we had to constantly protect them from our Afghan allies in the Afghan border patrol. But when we'd go out on a foot patrol, you'd have these sick Afghan men just hover around them.

So I'm trying to warn people that these aren't folks that you want in your neighborhood.

I mean,

Charlie, I think that's true. I don't think it's necessarily true of everyone in Afghanistan or these third world countries, but enough that, like, why would we be wanting more immigrants from there?

Look, they're all loser countries.

There are loser countries. And we know that because we live in a non-loser country.
This is one of the strangest things that I hear. We're hot now.
Trump says we're hot. We're a hot country.

Well, but we are. And we are the greatest country in the world.
And we're almost certainly the greatest country that there has ever been.

And there are people here from all different places and all different races. And that's great.
And I'm an advocate of this.

But one of the things that I'm increasingly frustrated by from people who agree with me on this and who do think that immigration can be good and who do believe that America is a propositional nation that doesn't exclude anyone because of the country they were born in is that if you believe that America is good you also have to believe that other places aren't.

Now that doesn't mean you think everywhere is terrible and America is the only good country in the world. I'm not asking people to become Sam the Eagle, but culture obviously matters.

And it doesn't grow up from the soil. It's not the case that the moment you arrive in the United States, you're suddenly imbued with all of the presuppositions that make America what it is.

You can't have one without the other. You can't believe America is good, uniquely good even, that it has this great creed, and that everywhere else is identical.

So we need to be careful about where we bring people in from. And more to the point, we need to be careful about what we expect from them when we get here.

Because if you suddenly replace the population of the United States with the population of other places, then the United States will become more like those other places unless you very assiduously demand, and that is the word, demand, that they conform to America.

And the irony, of course, here is that the vast majority of people who live in those other places want to become Americans because of what America is. But that takes a bit of work.

It doesn't happen instantly you pass border control. And we seem unwilling now to do the work.
So we say America is a great place, which it is. We say America is a creedal nation, which it is.

And then we're not willing to do the work, whether that's at the educational level in schools and universities, whether that's at the immigration level.

I mean, you mentioned this organization that went to visit this guy as being a left-wing NGO or what you will. There's far too many of those that don't actually like the United States.

There was an example three or four years ago of Beto O'Rourke when he was running in Texas. I forget whether it was for Senate or governor.

Basically telling a bunch of immigrants as part of a campaign stop that America's history was terrible. Don't do that.
Don't do that. That's how you prevent people from assimilating.

So I think that we have to accept there are loser countries, there are bad places.

And if you want to bring people in from them, which I'm not opposed to completely, although I think the numbers should be quite small, then you have to have enough social and national self-confidence to say, and if you're coming in, this is how we do it.

And you have to get with the program because we're right and you're wrong. There's nothing wrong with that.
So instead, we've gotten lectured by the left on multiculturalism, Rich.

Yeah, in terms of culture and how enduring it was, I took a couple couple trips during the war to Afghanistan, Megan. And I remember once they were showing us,

I think it was at an air base, and the Afghans, when they're eating meat, would come and chop it up on the floor. And our guys, of course, thought that wasn't sanitary.

So they built this beautiful facility with all these wonderful countertops. It looked like a kitchen in a cooking show you see on TV.
And then someone,

so how do the Afghans use this? Oh, well, they put the meat on the floor and chop it up still, right? So that's just their culture. And it's very hard to change.

Now, that doesn't mean that all Afghans are bad.

And very likely, Afghans will eventually assimilate to the United States in the second or third generation.

But if it's our choice who comes here, why would we choose that if you can actually have people who can assimilate almost instantly, which make much more sense for our national interest?

And just a final point on the one that Charlie made about numbers.

Comic Dave Smith, I don't have much use for his foreign policy views, as you might have gathered by things I've written about him, but he was in a debate with libertarians about whether open borders make sense.

And he was the anti-position.

And he had this hypothetical that I think is really telling, what if there's a nuclear exchange on the subcontinent and we had open borders and everyone in Bangladesh came to the United States just instantly?

Would we still be the United States or would we kind of be Bangladesh? And it is at least to some extent the latter. So that's not what you want in your immigration.
Yeah, exactly right.

It's well said by Dave, and I totally agree with you. I've got to get to this just because it's too fun not to with you guys.

President Trump had an MRI this week or last week, and on Monday the White House released information about it. They said he's fine.
He's in, quote, excellent overall health.

Presidential physician, Dr. Sean

Barbabella, released a memo describing the October exam, okay, so it was a while ago, as standard. and its findings as perfectly normal.

It was basically just a routine, comprehensive, executive, physical. And they took a hard look at him because he's had some of those like circulatory issues causing his ankles to swell.

In any event, he's fine. But not according to Megan Hayes, who is the former special assistant to President Joe Biden and Director of Message Planning, who on ex-Sunday posted the following.

It is an undeniable fact. Donald Trump is aging rapidly.
It should concern us all.

Megan Hayes, you don't know her maybe necessarily by name. I'm sure the audience doesn't.

Maybe this will help

as they see what Megan Hayes is known for. Here's our first video, V1.

There's Joe Biden working the rope line. Someone is in an Easter Bunny costume trying to distract him from talking to people.

Sending him on his merry way so that he will stop saying inane things. Let's play Sat SOT 17 here.
This is, what's this? Each your buddy scares Biden? Let's see. Let's, oh, it's the SOT version.

Okay, let's see.

This is her interfering.

He listens and moves right along. And this person, Charlie, Megan Hayes, who's best known for that, would like to lecture us on presidential fitness for office.

Yeah, so I think it's worth saying at the outset that President Trump is old, and I personally would quite like it if we stopped electing people who are so old.

But President Trump is showing no signs of being anything close to what Joe Biden had become,

well, by the end of, maybe even the middle of, and some of the start of his only term in office. And what's happening here is this:

the left got caught covering up Joe Biden's infirmity and now has decided that it's their turn. And because Donald Trump is also quite old, they want people to say, yeah, Trump is exactly the same.

They think they will get to play the same card. But that card was not dealt on the basis of the number

of Joe Biden's birth certificate. That card was dealt because it was very obvious that Joe Biden was senile.

If Joe Biden had been in the same sort of form that Donald Trump is in, and Donald Trump, it's worth saying, had two parents who lived a long time and did pretty well, then we would never have had that scandal in 2024.

But I think what's happened is the Democratic Party and the left has just decided that because Biden had to go through that, then Trump does too.

And so they're going to try and speak it, will it into existence when it's just not there.

And say that the right wing is ignoring it and therefore therefore has dirty hands and can't call them out on their, it's so obvious and it's a failure. Guys, you are not a failure.

You are a delight as always. Great to see you both.
Thanks for being here. I can feel better.

Thank you very much. All right, when we come back, a first-time guest on this show who's been writing recently about what it means to be a good man.

And let me just tell you, he would know.

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Hey everyone, it's me, Megan Kelly. I've got some exciting news.
I now have my very own channel on SiriusXM.

It's called the Megan Kelly Channel, and it is where you will hear the truth unfiltered with no agenda and no apologies.

Along with the Megan Kelly show, you're going to hear from people like Mark Halperin, Lake Lauren, Maureen Callahan, Emily Drushinsky, Jesse Kelly, Real Clear Politics, and many more.

It's bold no BS news only on the Megan Kelly channel, SiriusXM 111 and on the Sirius XM app.

My next guest is a former Marine who became well known for his books and essays about war politics and life after combat. Elliot Ackerman served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan during the war on terror.

He also took part in the CIA's Zero Unit, which was created to hunt senior members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

The program is in the headlines this week because the Afghani national accused of shooting two National Guardsmen in Washington, D.C., killing one of them, was also a member of Zero Unit.

But more recently, Elliot has been writing some beautiful columns. over at the Free Press about how to be a good man, something I can attest personally, he is because he is a friend of mine.

Elliot, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me on, Megan.
It's great to see you. Great to see you too.

So it's funny because even though we're friends and I adore you and your beautiful wife Lee, I actually had never, I heard you on Doug's show, my husband Doug Brunt, and his show dedicated, but I had never read

the actual commendation when you were awarded the Silver Star. And I'm so impressed by people who have won, have been awarded like the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart, all that.

It's like it just really speaks to an extraordinary character.

But you not only did five combat tours, five in Iraq and Afghanistan, but were awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart, the Silver Star being the third highest military combat decoration.

I'm going to read some of this, but let me just say, this is always kind of an interesting experiment. How do you describe the reason you were awarded the Silver Star?

Oh, I mean, you know,

one of the things that's sort of tricky about these awards is you get awarded for something that is probably, you know, the worst day of your life.

They don't hand out those medals when everything goes right on a mission.

And oftentimes

it is the, you know, the leader of the unit who is awarded for what everyone else in the unit does.

So, you know, I was a platoon commander, a young platoon commander in Fallujah when the events occurred in my Silver Star citation.

And a lot of it involved a moment when my platoon was, we were all surrounded in a house together and how we got out of that house. And then another moment included

some wounded Marines who we got out of the line of fire.

So

those are the events mentioned in this citation. But, you know, those awards are tricky.

You wouldn't, you read Medal of Honor citations, and, you know, those are not happy days that you're reading about.

Well, you are, of course, as I knew you would be too humble to actually talk talk about what you did, but I am going to tell the audience some of it.

Excuse me.

Quote: During a ferocious enemy counterattack in the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, with complete disregard for his own safety, 2nd Lieutenant Ackerman twice exposed himself to vicious enemy fire as he pulled wounded Marines out of the open into shelter.

When the amphibious tractors sent to evacuate his wounded men could not locate his position, he once again left the safety of his covered position and rushed through a gauntlet of deadly enemy fire to personally direct the amphibious tractors toward his wounded Marines.

On 11 November, as the battle continued, 2nd Lieutenant Ackerman recognized the exposed position of his Marines on the rooftops and ordered them to seek cover in the buildings below.

Shortly afterward, he personally assumed the uncovered rooftop position, prompting a hail of deadly fire from the enemy.

With rounds impacting all around him, he coolly employed an M240G machine gun to mark targets for supporting tanks with devastating effects on the enemy.

Throughout the battle, and despite his own painful shrapnel wounds, he simultaneously directed tank fires, coordinated four separate medical evacuations, and continually attacked with his platoon directly into the heart of the enemy with extreme tenacity.

I love this. I love that I'm actually just first hearing this in-depth

description of you after having known you for a couple of years. God bless you.
Thank you right off the bat for your service. And then you went on to become a writer.

So you've been writing books both about the military. So you did five combat tours.
You were in Iraq. You were in Afghanistan.
You were in the CIA.

And yet, somehow, through all of this, you maintained a sense of fashion, which is a fun thing about you.

Straight man, married to a gorgeous, brilliant writer who's also extremely talented, Lee Carpenter. But how do you, how does like a CIA, Marine, Fallujah, Silver Star earning

guy like you, not to mention CIA, wind up so fashionable and straight?

Well,

you know, I don't really consider myself some grand fashionista, Megan. I guess I do believe in,

you know, being intentional about everything that you do in life. And I actually think that's something that I learned in the Marines.
Like you wake up every day and you make decisions, right?

You make decisions if you're going to like put on a pair of sweatpants or maybe like, you know, put on some khakis or some nice jeans or something to that effect. Um,

so I believe in living with intention. And I think if you know, you have intention that gives you a direction as how you achieve goals.

So, you know, I'm coming on your show, I could wear a t-shirt, or I could have wore my blazer. You know what I mean? Might as well wear my blazer.

So,

I don't consider myself a fashionist. I definitely consider myself someone who tries to pay attention to the small things and live life with intention.

And the follow-up is naturally: when are you taking Doug Brunt shopping? Where does that happen?

Anytime, anytime.

This needs to happen. ASAP, you know, Christmas is coming.
I'm always very generous. I really, really would love Doug to get some Elliott Ackerman-approved lunch.

We can back channels for Doug. Okay.
So let me ask you about some of the stuff in the news, and then we'll talk about your columns because I really love what you're doing at the Free Press.

This guy who was part of the same force that you were part of, the Zero Unit, you didn't know him, but he was part of the same unit, who now shot these two National Guard members, killing one of them.

Good news on the

surviving National Guard member who we're here today has wiggled his toes and may have wiggled his hand or may have given a thumbs up. So that's encouraging.

You wrote an interesting piece about this guy, too, suggesting, look, this was not a good one.

He was vetted, but we don't throw away all of the Afghani nationals we took after 2021 just because this guy was bad. And right now, I think most people are in the mindset of, yes, we do.

Like, we're not taking any chances. They don't share our culture.
You know, one false start. They're all out of here.
You make a compelling case that, you know, not so fast. Explain.

Well, you know, when I worked in the Zero units,

you know, our mission was we went after very high-level Taliban and al-Qaeda leadership.

I mean, I remember the first day I showed up on the Zero unit, literally the first night working with that unit, I went after a top 10 al-Qaeda target, a very bad guy in the Corongol Valley.

And standing next to me on that mission, it was basically there were like three Americans and 250 Afghans. And we got that guy that night.

You know, and we worked, you know, longtime members of SEAL Team 6, the U.S. Army Rangers.

And, you know, what happened in DC is like, is inexcusable.

completely unacceptable.

But, and I understand for most Americans, it's sort of an abstraction. They have no idea what the zero units are.
are, and suddenly they're in the headlines, and

that can be scary. So, but from someone who spent time in those units, I'll tell you, you know, my war buddies, many of them are Afghans.

And we did everything that I did with the Marines you mentioned in that citation. I mean, we fought together.
We bled beside one another, you know, and many of those Afghans died.

And they died not because they wanted to live in a backward-facing Afghanistan that included practices like Bachabazi and the the Chai boys, which I listened to your previous segment, but they wanted to live in an Afghanistan that's forward-looking and different.

And that didn't work. So does that mean we should open the floodgates to every single person in Afghanistan who wants to come here? No, I wouldn't argue that.

But I think when you look at a number of these members of the zero units, and some of whom are already U.S. citizens and

in this country, contributing to this country,

let's not make the mistake of being completely categorical in our thinking

because that's not what we've done historically as a nation. I mean, listen, my people came here more than 100 years ago from Ukraine, and we were basically shuttle Jews.

And when we came off the boat, and I have the photos in my family, like we did not look very American by 1900 standards.

So I just think, you know, there's a real conversation going on in this country about immigration. I think that

it's a worthy conversation.

You know, administration is administration. It does not seem like this is an issue that we've gotten right.

But I'll tell you right now, there are a bunch of Afghans who fought long and hard against our enemies that I know personally, you know, who are afraid right now to be in America.

And, you know, I just think as a people, we are typically a generous and a welcoming people.

We are also, you know, a reasonable people. So I don't, again, I'm not making an argument for some categorical reception of everyone who wants to to leave Afghanistan.

For a lot of these people, folks who fought in the zero units, folks who fought in other units, who bled for American principles, I'd encourage all of us to just take a beat before we make big sweeping statements about entire groups.

Fair enough. Fair enough.
It's good to get the other side because when something like this happens, I think many of us feel like just get them out. You know, we got enough problems of our own.

We don't have to inherit others. But you and other service members I know have pointed out, no, some of these guys actually really were critical to the fight and to saving American lives.

And it's not that simple to just say, now get out. Like, we owe them more than that.
And it's not all of them, but it's, it's a fair amount of them. So we got to be careful.

If we didn't do the screening on the way in, we definitely need to need to do the screening before we send them out.

Okay.

Now you've been writing about how to be a man. And this is an important subject.

You are a man. You have children who will be men.

And you've been thinking about it, I'm sure the same way we've all been thinking about it, because we're having a crisis with young men in this country. The left calls it toxic masculinity.

That's a lie. That's not what's happening here.
What I see on the right is sort of a generation of lost boys who have been blamed for everything, for everything by the left.

And that seeps into their K-12 education. They hear similar when they go off to college.

They don't get into the best colleges anymore because, especially if they're white, they're the last people that college administrators want to see on their campuses.

They don't get the jobs that they used to, but they still have the same financial pressures as being head of household and so on.

And this can all lead to a depressive cycle, not to mention the influence of the iPhone, gaming, social media, and all the rest of it. So why did you begin this series over at the Free Press?

You know,

well, sort of, you know, I don't really consider myself, I'm not really a creature necessarily of the right or the left.

I kind of roam around in my opinions, but I'm going to use some of the language that I consider is kind of the language of the left.

And so much as the left for a long time has talked about, you know, that, you know, how marginalized groups, they need, they need to be seen, they need representation.

And I actually, I really believe that across categories.

I think like children in particular, no matter who you are, like you need to have an adult in your life who you can look at and say, I want to be like that person, or you need teachers in your lives to speak with you with intention about your identity.

I think that is all really important for young people. But guess what? That's also important for just sort of, you know, straight young boys

who maybe are pretty vanilla in their interests. Like they like, maybe they like just sports and, you know, and action movies.

And I think for a while,

you know,

young people who've been just sort of more traditionally masculine, the only word that is attached to that word masculine is toxic.

And we don't talk about all the great things that come with being masculine and how to be a good man. And oh, by the way, if you're, you know, if you're

a feminist, like there's nothing better for the feminist movement than creating good men.

You don't want to inherit a bunch of lost boys who become lost men because that's bad across categories, not just for

those men.

So I have an interest in this just as

the father of three boys.

Is that, okay, how do I speak to my boys about the adults they're going to be And the adults they're going to be are going to be, they're going to be men.

And for me, it's this idea of just intention and oftentimes just starting with the small things, like, you know, how do you tie a tie? You know, how do you introduce yourself to someone?

How do you, you know, you ask me why, you know, why do I dress nicely? It's that same thing. It's like.
making little decisions about how you're going to be in this world.

And those little decisions are cumulative. But we haven't been having much of a deliberate conversation with that and speaking or, you know, seeing, to use that word, our young boys for a while.

So I think the spirit of

this is just to like see those young men by offering them

little bits of advice. And the series is titled, you know, A Man Should Know.
Because in my life, I had so many people teach me things.

At the end of giving me my lesson, they'd just be like, No, you know, a man should know how to do that. And that's all I'm saying.

It's hey, if you're a man, you should know how to do some of these things. Yeah, like, um, tell a story about your watch.

Oh, sure. So, um, so this is my this watch of mine.
I've had this watch for 20 years. Um,

I was

on deployment in 2006 with the Marines, and we were in the Mediterranean Sea, and Israel had invaded Lebanon. And we were in charge of evacuating all of the American citizens out of Beirut.

And that sounds a lot more exciting than it was. It basically meant we were just sitting on the ships doing circles for a couple of months.
And one of my friends on that ship was a fighter pilot.

And if you or any of your listeners have met fighter pilots, they're usually pretty reliably watch guys. And he kind of got me into watches and looking at watches.

And I was, you know, I was making some money. I was a young single guy and my pay was tax-free.

And I had just come from Iraq, actually.

And I started thinking, you know, I really wish I'd had a better watch than something that I could kind of pass down and would be a little bit of an heirloom to my kids.

So I took my pay from that deployment while we were at sea. And when we pulled into port, we pulled into Dubai.

And I went to a mall and, you know, and i bought this watch it's a nice watch it's a role x explorer 2 uh and i've worn this watch on my wrist every day for 20 years

and what does it what does it do for you

you know it to me it's about it's less about the watch it's just about having something that you carry with you every day and you imbue it with value and it's something that can be passed down.

So

I wore this watch in Afghanistan. I work as a journalist.
I've covered the wars in Syria and Ukraine. This watch was on my wrist then.
It was on my wrist the day my children were born.

It was on my wrist the day that I met my beautiful wife, Lee, and the day we got married. And, you know, in the future, I'll probably, you know, pass this watch down to

my son

and then, you know, buy myself another watch. But I think it's about creating meaning in some of the things that we have and creating traditions.

And that's something I think anyone should know how to do, but a man should know how to

do certainly.

Also, there was a piece about, was it, I'm trying to remember whether it was the specific letter writing or thank you writing, one or both,

or the combination.

I just wrote a piece last week. Yeah, it was about how it was really about how to say thank you to someone

and sort of little gestures that we can engage in. So

my wife and I had.

some friends over for dinner. This was a couple of years ago.
And one of our guests just afterwards sent along a

thank you note that he had printed out on a piece of stationery, just talking about the evening and how lovely it was. And I was sort of struck by,

you know, what a decent gesture that was. And so I started following that practice.

And just, you know, instead of sending someone a text after seeing them or an email, and I'm just writing a follow-up thank you note.

And I've just, you know, really been impressed by how meaningful it is and how meaningful it's been for me when I receive those notes because there's something that you can hold on to.

You know, I save letters.

So I think little gestures like that make quite the difference. I mean, and you know, you know, my wife, she's the queen of the thank you note slash gift.

She's the queen of the thank you gift. That's why, that's why you're never coming over again because these gifts are so amazing that say thank you.
I'm like, I can never live up to this.

All I ever do is send a text. She not only does she send you a gift, she sends you like a really clever gift that she put a lot of thought behind.
I'm totally wowed by her.

Yeah. You know, and she's good.
And these, and these lessons that I write about, I mean, you know, the column is a man should know, but they're not things that are, you know, just taught by men.

Some of them are, but some of they aren't. And the piece on thank you notes is one I largely attribute to things my wife has taught me.

So what else should a man know? I mean, you

have a challenge in today's day and age of imbuing the toughness of a Marine,

but the,

I don't know, I don't want to say softness, but let's say tenderness of a man that a woman would want to be with and who can navigate the tricky society that we're in in 2020, nearly 2026 America.

So, I mean, is that taught by example or is that a lesson? Is that a chat at the dinner table balancing those two pulls of a man's personality?

Well, again, I think they're about intention and control. You know, when I served in the Marines, my division commander in Iraq was, you know, General Mad Dog Mattis.

And, you know, he famously told the 1st Marine Division that our motto was no better friend, no worse enemy.

And I think a man should understand how to be gentle, how to be kind, how to be open-minded, but should also know

how to be strong and how to be tough and single-minded when the moment calls for it and be able to toggle between those two with utter control. So

this series doesn't necessarily go into the deeper philosophy, but it really kind of focuses on just sort of specifics, little ways to be intentional as a man with how you

exist in the world and present yourself in the world. So some of the columns we have coming up are, you know, just

how to wear a tuxedo.

You know, who's going to teach you? A lot of dudes don't know how to do that.

And if the first time you get invited to a black tie event, it's the first time you have to figure out how to put on a tuxedo, maybe that's going to be a little bit awkward for you.

So these are just little things, stuff that people taught me

that I hope to pass on, not only to my sons, but to just pass on in general to anyone who wants this knowledge because I think it's worth holding on.

There's a great one in there on how to be a friend, especially as a guy and

how to make it easier to have meaningful conversations with your friends. I'm sure you're going to be having one of those this week with Doug Brunt, and I'll be with your lovely wife.

Thank you so much, Elliot. It's great to see you.
Great to be on. Thanks, Megan.

Check out the series, you guys. It's A Gentleman Should Know and it's A Man Should Know and it's over at the Free Press.
And Elliot, as you can see, knows of what he speaks. He's a very smart writer.

His books have been bestsellers. He's got a very impressive history, and he's just genuinely a good person.
So I think you will enjoy it. And I thought you'd enjoy him.

We are back tomorrow with Chamoth of the All-In Podcast and more. We got a couple surprises in tomorrow's show for you.
Tune in then and see them. And while I have you, is it shopmegankelly.com?

You can go to shopmegankelly.com. You can get holiday merch with the MK Show logos on it.
That could be fun for the man or woman in your life. Check it out, and we'll see you all tomorrow.

Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

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