One American - Chase Geiser - The United States, Afghanistan, Betrayal & America's Enemies Domestic & Abroad With Lara Logan & Chase Geiser

Dec. 26, 2021 - One American - Chase Geiser

01:21:32

The United States, Afghanistan, Betrayal & America's Enemies Domestic & Abroad With Lara Logan & Chase Geiser | OAP #62

Award-winning journalist Lara Logan turns her fearless investigative eye to America’s political, social and economic war zones to reveal the truth behind the mainstream narrative of today’s most divisive issues.

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	It's One American Podcast Live with Laura Logan.
	How are you?
	Hey, I'm good.
	I like your titles.
	I feel inspired.
	Good.
	I hope so.
	You should uh put me as a muse on on your next book or something in the acknowledgments, inspired by Chase Geyser.
	In my next book.
	I still haven't done the first one.
	I know.
	I was reading your Wikipedia page and I was surprised that I didn't find a book because I was going to try to read one before before we spoke.
	And I was like, oh, she hasn't written one yet.
	Don't read Wikipedia.
	Half the stuff on there is nonsense.
	Well, I know that when I read it.
	Yeah, but they're mean to you.
	You know why I haven't uh I haven't written a book yet because honestly, I I like talking about other people.
	Like I really enjoy telling other people's stories.
	And uh the thought of doing a book about my life.
	I'm trying to think of like, you know, I'd want to tell all my secrets, and then everyone would know them, and that wouldn't be fun.
	Yeah.
	I the the whole autobiography uh autobiography exercise is interesting to me because on the one hand, the type of person that would write an autobiography is typically someone that you know you'd be interested in reading about, but on the other hand, it's a very narcissistic thing to do.
	And so I'm just a big fan of the I love the Walter Isaacson biographies.
	I think they're the best.
	I tell you what, I'm gonna do.
	I'm gonna do my first book is gonna be on Afghanistan.
	Yes.
	So I was uh when I was looking into you a little bit, and I was born in 1990.
	So I was 11 years old in 2001 when September 11th happened.
	I was sort of a teenager during all the Middle Eastern Wars.
	I'm not intimately familiar with what that was like as a journalist and as an adult, uh, because I was interested in video games during that period of time.
	And so, so what was that like for you?
	Can you just kind of tell the audience a little bit about how you got involved and what your experience was?
	Well, I think you know, there may be a lot of people in the audience who remember that moment of seeing the uh first plane hit the World Trade Center, and um this uh I mean, utterly devastating um few days, weeks, months that followed, you know.
	There was nothing uh quite like listening to the recordings that people left on the answering machines and on the phones of um of the of their loved ones, those who could make calls from the plane.
	It haunted me, you know, and it haunted people, I think, all over the world.
	Strange enough, people in California sort of seemed to move on long before the rest of the world did.
	And I immediately um, you know, I mean, with every force in my body, I was heading for Afghanistan at that point.
	I was living in London, working as a journalist.
	My bosses were like, oh no, no, no, no.
	You know, um, that's way too dangerous.
	And um, of course, it was just inevitable though that that's where we would all go because we knew those of us who had been following al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, we all knew instantly that it was um an al-Qaeda attack, and we knew he was in Afghanistan, and we knew that's where the US would end up.
	So it didn't take brain surgery, honestly.
	Sometimes, you know, you look back at how these things are are treated um as if like how could anyone have known that the attack was coming?
	Oh, well, yeah, because bin Laden issued the first fatwa, which was the declaration of war, where he gave the American people a chance to respond, which of course is not, it's just politics.
	And then the second fatwa declaring war on the US and there'd been a series of a terrorist attacks before that.
	So it really um wasn't difficult to know exactly where this came from and inevitably Al Qaeda claimed responsibility.
	But Afghanistan had been at war for so long, and it had been a dangerous war for such a long time that um I was very familiar with it, and it was incredibly difficult to get in and out of Afghanistan.
	So just my journey to get there, you know, involved.
	Uh I think I was on the border of France and England with Afghan refugees.
	I'd just been arrested by the French police for um following these uh um asylum seekers as they broke into a French railway station and they magically disappeared when the police found us.
	Just me and my cameraman, the two idiots, right?
	Ended up in the line of uh those arrested that night.
	And uh managed to talk my way with my French, because I had studied French out of the um out of jail into my morning live shots, and then my bosses said go.
	And it was a whirlwind from that, you know, having to get my husband in the north of England to pack a bag for me, get to the Moscow embassy, try to get a visa for uh Russia, uh which was normally a two, three-week, four-week process, and persuading the guy in the embassy to meet me after work at a coffee shop in Knightsbridge,
	giving him the wrong telephone number in exchange for a quick visa, then uh getting to Moscow um in the middle of the night and in between that actually, incredibly having to pop over from London to England, I mean to Germany to get a visa from the Afghan government in exile, so that you weren't completely illegal in every part of the country, and then to Moscow, and then from Moscow to Tajikistan in the north.
	That was a challenge because there were thousands of people trying to get on those flights, and uh uh forcing my way into the office of the owner of Tajik Airlines or the guy running it in Moscow and hiring his nephew as a translator, getting to Dushan Bay,
	then persuading the um foreign minister of Afghanistan in in exile at the time to let me hop a ride on his helicopter, getting across the border, persuading him when he got off to let me keep flying with the the pilots, going uh deep into the Panchea Valley, and then spending my first nights next to a river with about I don't know, 20, 30, 40 maybe Afghan men sleeping on the floor of a mud house in the Pancha Valley.
	Panche Valley where the Afghans are still fighting, by the way, still resisting, and uh where we really the deepest cuts of this betrayal, you know, are still running with blood in that valley today, makes me so sad.
	Yeah.
	So you arrived in Afghanistan before the United States did, right?
	Well, yes, technically, although, you know, you shouldn't underestimate uh, of course, the intelligence agencies and the clandestine operatives.
	There were no doubt um a number of them on the ground.
	You know, you know, people really don't understand.
	This is one historical fact that has to be corrected for the record.
	The United States never invaded Afghanistan.
	You don't invade a country with a few hundred Greenberries and clandestine operators and uh planes in the sky.
	It was the Afghan forces on the ground who really did the fighting and who uh took Kabul and took that ground, you know, piece by piece, and who lost uh the most casualties um in the offensive to drive the Taliban out of Kabul.
	So there were a small number of clandestine operators, and then obviously more and more, you know, by the time you are in the United States and you're seeing planes in the sky dropping bombs, make no mistake, there are brave Americans on the ground with uh your Afghan allies who are already deep, deep, deep into the fight.
	Yeah, that's one thing I admire um about you and journalists of a different era, not that you're a journalist from of a different era, you're not certainly a contemporary, but it seems to me.
	I don't know.
	How old are you changing?
	I'm I'm 31.
	So I'm 50.
	I got I got almost 20 years on you.
	And I feel every bit of it.
	No, you look great, and you're you're I think you have yet to peak in your um uh professional accomplishments.
	I know that you're uh an award-winning journalist, and uh I think that the future is bright for you, and I'm really excited to see your work.
	I you know, we met when you spoke at Fredericksburg, and um I really enjoyed what you had to say.
	I think I learned a lot from you uh that evening.
	And I just knew that this was a conversation that I wanted to have.
	But the the point that I was trying to make is you know, we have a lot of problems in the corporate media today with bias and basically propaganda narrative type material.
	And one thing I admire about you, and like I said, journalists of a former era, is that you go right in the middle of a war zone to cover what's actually going on when I don't think any of these talking heads would have remotely close to the courage to go go into danger to get the story because they can just make up the story.
	You know, um the one thing I will say is like I'm proud to be part of uh a significant number of journalists like myself, right?
	I mean, I'm not the only one.
	And that's um that's a great thing because it means uh that this is not going this form, you know, this kind of real journalism and going to the story and seeing it firsthand, it's not going to die with me.
	It didn't begin with me, it's not going to end with me.
	It is far bigger than me.
	And you are absolutely right.
	I mean, sometimes when I see these, you know, um, I mean, real beep beep, right?
	That's what I want to say.
	You can say whatever you want.
	Yeah, sitting behind their desks, um, you know, um, and criticizing you and judging you and and all the rest of it, and really um working hard to destroy your reputation, your career, your ability to make money, you know, to work at all.
	I mean, I used to, I used to be more um offended by them than I am now.
	I gotta be honest.
	Now I literally don't even read what they write.
	I couldn't care less.
	I mean, some bald guy at CNN who's got four and a half viewers and you know, they're paid political operatives anyway, um, who are not even real journalists, um, they really don't.
	I just don't care about these people anymore.
	They are on the wrong side of history.
	The heartbreak for me has been um, you know, that obviously I have a lot of colleagues who I love and respect.
	And I know that all across the media there are uh great journalists.
	They unfortunately don't get a chance to breathe.
	And it's um it's an uncomfortable thing, and it's on all of us, um, you know, that we all have to address that.
	And we have to fight for what we're supposed to be when we're at our best.
	And we can't give up that ground.
	But I also what I worry about, Chase is, you know, I'm so encouraged by the fact that there are people like yourself and others out there who see what um the media has become in many ways, and they don't want to be a part of that.
	And um, and in spite of all the bullying and intimidation and cancel culture and you know, and propaganda and everything else, people still see the truth.
	So that's the thing that gives me strength.
	And it also gives me a real roadmap to what I'm supposed to do with uh the time that I have left, right?
	Because I I don't want um any of the the standards and the principles and the experience um that I learned along the way from other great journalists.
	I don't want that to die with all of us.
	I don't want that to be a lost art.
	I want to hold on to that and be the living, breathing example of that, and also provide a home, you know, and um and guide and mentor and advise and work alongside, right?
	Um, other people.
	So that's what I'm really working on is creating a platform that isn't defined by politics, um, that is completely independent, that takes, I'm gonna take, you know, I'm gonna take support and backing from absolutely everywhere and be available absolutely everywhere.
	I don't care what people say, I'm gonna um I'm just gonna continue to do what I have always done.
	Nobody owns me, and nobody owns any good journalists.
	We work to find uh the truth.
	We do the best that we can to find the truth.
	And um, and this whole idea, you know, of what the media has become now, where I mean, I'm just I I literally am shocked.
	You do years and years and years of dishonest, inaccurate reporting on uh Russia collusion.
	And you think that if you do like one column by your media guy, that somehow that changes uh the whole narrative, and you are now absolved and you can still continue to report and argue, you know, that aspects of your reporting were correct, uh, but you like, and you're still gonna put all the people who lied to you, you're gonna put them on television or you know, in print, and you're gonna continue to report on them as if none of the other stuff ever happened.
	I mean, I I don't even know it's garbage.
	That's what that is, it's just garbage.
	You know, and I will say for me, it's never been about Democrat and Republican.
	I am neither Democrat nor Republican, you know, I I hate those um terms, right?
	I didn't grow up here.
	I don't have, I'm not tied to parties like that.
	I just really believe um that there are things that make sense and things that don't.
	And um, And something insane has taken over, you know, people, some people in this country.
	And I don't care.
	There's a lot, there's a lot of people in the Republican Party who are not really in the Republican Party, right?
	Or not really conservative or whatever.
	I mean, and they're um equally as bad.
	Believe me, the reason we don't know the truth about the last election is that there are people on both sides of the aisle who don't want you to look closely at vote fraud.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Um I totally agree.
	And that's actually the basis for how I named this podcast, the one American podcast, because uh when people would ask me if I was a Republican or a Democrat, I just wanted to respond and say I'm just one American.
	And that's that's sort of the whole vision is is that we we have to get away from people identify themselves and their sense of self these days in our culture based on what groups they're a part of.
	And I really think that we have to get away from this identity politics, and it's not just the identity politics that we see with like critical race theory, but on an individual level, it is so important, in my opinion, that your sense of self isn't denoted by what race you are, right?
	Like I'm not a white guy, I'm just chase.
	I'm not a Catholic, I'm just chase.
	I'm not a Republican, I'm just chase, right?
	And I sometimes I affiliate with these groups or whatever, but that's not how I get my sense of self.
	I get my sense of self by the things that I do in my life and the the attempts that I make to live according to my own values.
	And sometimes I have integrity and sometimes I don't.
	Sometimes I fall short.
	But I think the person that you are is defined by what your values are and how well you live according to them, uh, in a sense.
	And I just wish we would get back to that.
	I didn't know you were white, and I didn't assume that you were a guy.
	So this is news to me, right?
	Because I couldn't possibly understand either of those things by looking at you, because that would be assuming too much.
	Right.
	And I wouldn't want to insult you and send you to your safe space, Chase.
	Appreciate that.
	Yeah, I just assumed that you were, you know, black and a white supremacist and also transgender.
	Maybe at the same time.
	Maybe I should change the podcast to critical chase theory.
	Yeah, that's nice.
	So we were talking about uh we were talking a bit about journalism, and I wanted to ask you um uh I wanted to go back to the Afghanistan story with you and ask you as a professional journalist who jumped through all these hoops to get into Afghanistan.
	When you get there, how the hell do you like know what to do?
	Well, you go to like the chamber of commerce meeting to network.
	You know, it's really not as difficult as you might think in a strange way.
	So Afghanistan was not my first rodeo.
	Um, and that really helps a lot.
	I had been a journalist since I was 17 years old.
	I had been a journalist in South Africa in the townships during, you know, an extremely violent difficult time.
	And I learned uh from really great uh cameramen and journalists and producers.
	I gotta tell you, some of the best ever that you could imagine.
	And I um I learned, you know, to listen, I learned to pay attention, I learned to find the right local people.
	I learned to be smart um about the decisions that I made.
	Um I learned not to be reckless.
	It's funny because you know, the the favorite smears of me are well, before um, you know, I left 60 minutes in CBS when they were still attacking me there, it was, oh, she's reckless, you know, um, she's a loose canon, she can't be controlled, she just relies on her looks.
	And it was really, it's really kind of funny because um I you know, I don't know if if this makes any sense to anyone, but I I think you can imagine that when you're in the middle of uh a truly brutal situation, um, and uh, you know, a city is burning down around you and people are being shot.
	No one cares what you look like.
	Right.
	Nobody cares one bit what you look like.
	I mean, um, and when you are um there to do your job, you know, and you have to stay alive, your number one task is get out of the way, right?
	get out of the way.
	And of course, equally as important, survive.
	And then third, do your job, right?
	Because you're not there to be a tourist.
	So like, I didn't even begin, my brain doesn't even go anywhere beyond that.
	Because to me, those three tasks are all consuming.
	And then, you know, the level of difficulty just in performing the most simple basic things, making sure that, you know, you know that you have enough food, that you know that you have enough water, that you know that you have a place that you can sleep, that you know that you have enough money, that when you travel, you're not going the wrong route, that when you rely on someone, you've done your due diligence, and you really feel that you can trust this person.
	I mean, these are, these are very, in a way, simple and obvious things.
	And those are the things that consumed my mind.
	Not only that, but I'm really trying to understand, right?
	I'm trying to understand understand exactly what's happening, put what I know into context.
	There's, you can read as many books as you like.
	And it's never the same as being on the ground, looking people in the eye, sleeping in the dirt with them, running for your life with them, you know, being with the Palestinians, and running from the Israelis, you know, having people next to you shot.
	I mean, when you experience and live with those things, when you're digging through the rubble, and you're pulling out, helping people pull out their children, or their neighbors, or just, you know, running into hospitals with wounded, with people screaming, and seeing the struggle of the doctors, or you're putting wounded people in the back of your car, and you're, you know, racing to the hospital, and you're watching every street, this street's on fire, here there are barricades, okay, here they're killing people, which is the safest way to go.
	Does someone have a radio?
	Is someone listening?
	I mean, like, it's just amazing to me that you could have anybody uh I mean there are people who go to these places make no mistake right and they go to the hotel and they're hotel warriors and they do most of what they do from a rooftop or they have very controlled circumstances and that's the way they do it and there's value in that it's not the way I ever did it.
	And so, of course, you know, I got a lot of criticism for that because if you have security, they want you to be the hotel warrior because then they don't have a challenge in keeping you safe.
	They don't want you to be the person that jumps in the back of a truck with a bunch of militia guys to go across town to meet with one of the leaders, right, who you have a relationship with.
	They don't want you to go into the areas that nobody else wants to go in.
	But the whole point of being a journalist, the whole point of being in that place, I didn't, if I wanted to, safe.
	If safety, you know, was my kind of number one concern, why am I in Kabul in the middle of a war?
	Why am I in Baghdad as it's falling and Saddam Hussein is being dislodged from power, you know?
	So I would say, though, that the most critical thing that you can do going into any situation is to have a good local person who, you know, if you're smart and you're lucky, you know, other journalists, I've relied many times in my life on my colleagues to help and to advise when I didn't have any backing and I didn't have a network and I didn't have any
	money, you know, and somebody else has you and they've been brought in, then, you know, you rely on them to help you with that.
	And you just figure it out.
	And there's always a pack of journalists, you know, you can find them.
	The stills photographers are great because they normally are the worst paid, you know, so many of them are freelance and they always have to be there firsthand to get that amazing photograph.
	And so they really have their nose to the ground.
	So I loved hanging out, you know, with those guys when I could.
	I always enjoyed the agency people.
	I was, you know, I'm an old agency person.
	I was with Voyage News Agency for many, many years.
	And in agency news, you are the eyes and ears, right?
	You're the really, you're the key ingredient.
	I mean, other people, you know, the networks can come in and they can use agency material.
	So they don't have to be there all the time.
	Really, even some people do.
	But it's that's why it's a really good place to learn but you know I was a very um seasoned experienced journalist I'd been in Angola during the war in Mozambique during the war in the South African townships I've been in Malawi and Zambia in Burundi in uh Uganda uh in Kenya, in uh Lesotho, in uh Zambia.
	I mean, I had been all over by the time I got to Afghanistan.
	I'd been in the Palestinian territories.
	I had uh I'd been in other places too.
	It's just that um when I became really well known for my coverage from Afghanistan because I was one of only two journalists on the front lines, Steve Harrigan uh from Fox News was the other one.
	Um, people were like, oh, Barbie goes to war.
	How did she get there?
	Uh who is she?
	And you know, fortunately, um, it was nothing for me in in many respects, living without you know, hot food and without um a shower or a toilet or surviving on you know very little um basic stuff, one you know, a couple t-shirts.
	I grew up in Africa.
	Okay, I grew up in Africa.
	When I was a kid, we would go on vacation to uh our favorite place down the coast, six hour drive on dirt roads with no electricity.
	I spent my birthdays and Easter in the graveyard with my, you know, with my um siblings and our uh childhood friends reading the inscriptions on gravestones and swimming on beaches with no shark nets and no lifeguards and uh gas, you know, gas lights, right?
	And giant roaches running around.
	I mean, and that was paradise to me, absolute paradise.
	So I was never worried about the the physical comforts and the loss of those things.
	I used to go into the bush with Ranger friend of mine, and we wouldn't even stay in the camp.
	We'd throw packs on our backs and we'd just go into the reserve.
	And you'd stay up all night doing two hour shifts, you know, looking for if you were by the river, it would be hippos and crocodiles and obviously all the animals that come to drink um in the river, the lions and all that.
	And it's like uh it's like Laura Logan, tomb raider instead of Laura Croft, tomb raider.
	I have I have had the luckiest life.
	I have had the luckiest life I had.
	I I couldn't uh be more grateful than I am uh to have been born in Africa and raised there.
	I have such a love um for the people and for the place every day of my life that I am away, a little piece of me dies, just a little bit.
	So one thing that you you mentioned um uh really struck with me.
	Uh you said, you know, you can read as many books as you want about something, but unless you're there experiencing it, you're not really getting the full sense of it.
	And it reminds me of that famous scene from the movie Goodwall Hunting.
	I'm not sure if you've seen it with Robin Williams and Matt Damon.
	Oh, come on.
	Yeah, that's a great film.
	You know the scene at the when they're on the park bench in Afghanistan.
	Yeah, they're on the park bench and um uh Robin Williams is like, I bet you could tell me everything about Michelangelo, but have you ever been in the Sistine Chapel?
	Do you know what it's like to smell the Sistine Chapel, right?
	And it reminds me of what you said.
	I think it's the same thing.
	And so I want to ask you um of all the time that you spent, particularly in Afghanistan, and I know you've been everywhere in dangerous situations, but what what if you had to say what the one thing is that you learned from that experience, what what would that takeaway be?
	It prepared me to understand the depth of the betrayal of abandoning uh our allies in Afghanistan.
	You know, I was not one of those people who romanticized Afghanistan from the beginning.
	You know, I was one of those people who were like, I mean, this place, you know, there's parts of Afghanistan that are just brown and harsh and horrid, right?
	And um Afghans are really different people.
	They've grown up in a very different environment.
	And you know, you'll often hear people say, oh, people are the same all over the world.
	And and I used to always joke, yeah, except for Afghanistan.
	And over the years, um, because I was there year after year after year, sometimes I lived there for a year.
	Um, I lived with Afghan soldiers in the first war with the Taliban On their front line, right?
	Three and a half months of living with Afghan soldiers when the Taliban had 90% of the country.
	Um and what I learned about them over time, uh really formed like the deepest love in my heart because it wasn't obvious.
	It wasn't self-evident, it wasn't like landing at some tropical island and everything is beautiful and people are friendly and saying, Oh, I love this place.
	It was a really uh deep-rooted kind of loyalty um and love.
	I mean, when I go back to Afghanistan, well, this was before we burned the entire country to the ground, right?
	Set torch to nation.
	Um, I would see the same people from 20 years before.
	Many of them would travel from all parts of the country.
	They would move heaven and earth, you know, even the people who didn't speak English.
	Imagine somebody consistently staying in touch for 20 years, for 20 years, when the only conversation that you can have, you know, language-wise is very limited, and yet they never forget and they never give up on you, and they never stop trying, and they never that commitment just never fades.
	So I think when you understand like the depth of that bond and the significance of it, um, and then you now you see what we have done, where the people that stood by us, not just through this uh war,
	not just through the one before, but for decades before that, when you understand that you have torn these people to shreds, you ripped their lives apart, you've taken from them the valleys that they love, the homes that they built,
	the neighborhoods that are familiar, the the history that is theirs, the, you know, even the Afghans who have fled, many of them, um, many of those still trying to leave, they didn't have paperwork, they didn't have visas, they don't have passports still, because they never wanted to leave.
	It may not be the perfect uh country still, certainly as an American or as a European um, you know, foreigner, you could look at it and say, why would anybody want to live here?
	You know, I mean, this place is a dump.
	But um, but when it lives in your soul and it's in your blood and it's in your DNA, and this is where you belong.
	This is the place that makes the most sense to you in the whole world.
	Um many Afghans never wanted to give that up.
	Many of them still don't want to give it up.
	Many of them right now are literally withering away in misery in refugee camps or not even in refugee camps in limbo, in what is known as lily pads, right?
	Places where they're just temporarily being housed until they can figure out some country that will take them while we systematically work as the United States and the State Department to make sure that they're not welcome anywhere.
	And um, thousands now of being deported back into the hands of the Taliban, some of them being murdered on arrival, and um and more.
	I mean, um I live with daily guilt because of all the people I can't help.
	You mentioned betrayal, and you know, there's there are a lot of people that have there's there's a lot of different perspectives to have on the whole Afghanistan war.
	And particularly its association with what happened in Iraq, and people say, you know, there were never weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, why did we go in?
	And with Afghanistan, it's like we we ended up finding Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.
	So why were we in Afghanistan?
	There's all sorts of different perspectives and confusion around that war, how we handled it, how long we should have been there.
	And I I can safely say that I I'm very ignorant on the nuance and the and um the complexity of that that political power dynamic and and all the different variables involved.
	So it's not so complex.
	Okay.
	I can simplify it for you.
	So so, and it's uh this is how I would say it.
	You know, one of the most interesting things you mentioned there was why are we in Afghanistan when Osama bin Laden is in Pakistan?
	And that question actually goes to the heart of the whole Afghanistan war.
	It was true from day one that uh America's enemies were in Pakistan.
	They will use Afghanistan, they may be Afghan, right?
	But that they were in uh that they were always in Pakistan.
	The leadership of the Taliban was in Pakistan.
	It wasn't just Osama bin Laden.
	There were more Islamic terrorist groups inside Pakistan in the Northwest Frontier province than on any other piece of ground anywhere in the world.
	And so what we really needed to address, that we never ever addressed, was our relationship with Pakistan and Pakistan's relationship with our enemies.
	And we could have stayed in Afghanistan for another 150 years.
	And it would not have changed the fact that Pakistan support for our enemies was the real problem.
	And we have known that from day one.
	Both Democrat and Republican administrations are responsible for that policy.
	And that has never ever been addressed.
	This was Pakistan's invasion of Afghanistan.
	This is just an extension of that policy.
	And for all those people who who are, you know, I want to say, I want to be mean and say stupid enough to believe that we didn't know what was going on in Afghanistan.
	But it's not fair, you know, of me to say that.
	Because people don't know that when you're at war, when you're the United States and you're at war somewhere for 20 years, there is nothing that happens on that battlefield that you are not tracking.
	There is nothing.
	The NSA is the crown jewel of intelligence collection for the entire world.
	Every intelligence agency in existence is beating a path to the NSA's door if they can, trying to get in on the systems that we have.
	And so this whole idea that we were taken by surprise and we didn't know, and so on and so on, the depth of the lies is just staggering when you actually understand how these things function.
	Plus, this is a nuclear region.
	Okay, I mean, uh by law, we have to be connected to and listening and surveilling and monitoring absolutely everything happening with nuclear countries.
	I mean, that's that's just standard for what we do all over the world, even when we're not at war.
	Then on top of that, you know, I have actually spoken to and know intelligence um operatives who were tracking the movement of Al Qaeda and other foreign fighters into Afghanistan for months and months and months, going into Pakistan first, staging in Pakistan, and then going from Pakistan into Afghanistan.
	And then on top of that, even you know, the most junior soldier knows that when you when you are um have military operations of that scale in any country, that it requires logistics and it requires weapons and it requires vehicles and it requires movement of troops and it requires massing of troops.
	And do you really think that with our satellites and our surveillance capabilities that we were not watching all of this happen every minute of the day in real time?
	I mean, it's just, and that's the tip of the iceberg, right?
	So what I would say to you is this for the people who don't remember 9-11, who are too young, don't fall for the false narrative that there was no relationship between Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and that somehow there's a new version of the Taliban, Taliban 2.0, and they, you know, they're just upset because we invaded their country.
	There's not one single ounce of truth in any of those statements.
	They are 100% false.
	You know, what happened in Afghanistan was about a war of ideas.
	It is about the American idea, the idea of living free and the right of every man, woman, and child to live free and to live freely.
	That is what is Afghanistan has always been about.
	So you're of the position that the reason we were attacked is because of antagonism toward Western culture.
	No, we were attacked because the terrorists who carried out 9-11 want to rule the world.
	That's what they want.
	Their ideology is about global power, world domination.
	It's the oldest reason in the book.
	It's why everyone tries to rule the world.
	It's people who want power.
	What do they say?
	What does the ideology actually say?
	It says that they want to restore the time of the Islamic caliphate when what?
	When Islam, their version of Islam, ruled the world, right?
	And so this is not just a war on Western culture and Western civilization.
	This is a war on anyone, including and actually first and foremost on other Muslims who don't interpret Islam the way they do, who don't want to live the way they do, who oppose what they believe in, or who believe in something else.
	So if you think about it on a daily basis, Islamic terrorists, where are they fighting?
	In Syria, in Iraq, in Afghanistan.
	Who are they killing on a daily basis?
	The Muslims.
	It's not Christians, except if you go to Nigeria, where by the way, they're not just killing Christians, right?
	They're killing more Christians there than any other country on earth.
	But they're also killing other Muslims.
	And so it's a mistake.
	Of course, there's an element of this.
	When you're going to conquer the world and you're going to rule the world, you have to get rid of all other powerful civilizations.
	So, yes, Judeo-Christian civilization is on the target list.
	But guess who else is on the target list?
	Gay people, right?
	And other Muslims who don't comply and don't see the world the way you do.
	And in fact, you have to kill more of them, and then you have to kill Christians.
	And so it's that's why I say these things are very simple.
	This was an attack that was uh that was really about the American idea.
	And that is what is on trial in Afghanistan.
	And what we just did is we said to the world, you know what?
	The American idea isn't actually worth fighting for, and it's morally bankrupt.
	We don't believe in it enough to fight for it with everything that we've got.
	And I'm not saying, I'm not saying, believe me, it's so it's pathetic that the only counter to that is people will say, Well, what do you want to be there for another hundred years?
	Like, are you a warmonger?
	Are you advocating for war?
	Don't be ridiculous.
	Like, I mean, if you really want my my personal opinion after all of this time is that we should never have stayed in Afghanistan.
	That the United States um absolutely had to respond to 9-11 and um had uh a very effective strategy of an air campaign and a small number of clandestine operatives working with Afghan forces and allies who did the majority of the fighting.
	And what we should have done after that, once Kabul had fallen and the Taliban were in shreds and ran for their lives into Pakistan, by the way, into Pakistan, sound familiar.
	Um, at that was the point at which we should have given Afghanistan, uh, left it to the Afghans and said, what support do you need?
	How can we help you?
	And offered intelligence support and everything else.
	And by the way, uh those guys that want to kill our people and that are killing your people, yeah, they don't come back, right?
	They don't come back into office because if they do, we're gonna have to take care of it ourselves, and you don't want that.
	And then at the same time, we we had to address what was happening in Pakistan and with Pakistan.
	And that has never ever ever been addressed.
	In fact, the only national security uh strategy that ever went after Pakistan was the very first one under Michael Flynn when he was the national security advisor in uh the very beginning of the Trump administration.
	And that is the only national security strategy that ever put Pakistan where it needed to be, and it was never implemented because what did they do?
	They made sure they got rid of Michael Flynn as soon as they possibly could, because Democrats and Republicans and corrupt people on both sides of the aisle, and all of the Never Trumpers and all of the people who were subverting the uh duly elected, legally elected government, and they were going to make sure that we um continued the corrupt policies of the past and didn't actually address those things the way they needed to be addressed.
	And the last thing that I would say is, you know, we really did need to leave uh the counter-terrorism force that was supposed to Be left behind in Afghanistan.
	I don't want people to get confused here.
	You know, we still have forces in Japan and Germany and other places that have been there since the end of the second world war.
	What people really need to know and understand about Afghanistan and what just happened in the withdrawal is the greatest lie of all, the most egregious thing that we did in a long list of terrible things that we did to the Afghans was to lie about their will to fight for their country and to pretend to the world that the Afghans just surrendered and they gave up and that you know, as Lloyd Austin and Biden and the others said, you can't buy the will to fight.
	You know, how can you?
	It's bad enough that you betrayed them.
	It's bad enough that you didn't keep the small force of 2,500 counterterrorism um assets that you had promised to keep.
	It's bad enough that you created a highly mobile special operations um force of commandos who who are built on your model and need mobility, right?
	So they needed the air support, they needed uh the air support that we supplied, and you took that.
	Then you took all the contractors that kept the Afghan Air Force in the skies, right?
	You took all of these things.
	You empowered their enemies, you gave your withdrawal plans to the enemy and not to your allies.
	You made deals behind their back that allowed them to keep killing your allies, but not kill your forces, right?
	I mean, the the list of things that we did, not to mention actually giving their biometrics, their names, their fingerprints, their addresses, their phone numbers, their retinas, right?
	You gave everything to their enemies.
	You gave them lists, you told them where to find them, how to find them.
	Then you locked down the country.
	You locked down the country by pressuring the neighbors not to allow Afghans in, pressuring the neighbors not to allow American veterans in who were trying uh to help Afghans get out.
	You turned the entire country into a prison.
	And then on top of all of that, the worst thing that you did was go out in public and call them a bunch of cowards and lie and pretend that, for example, the democratically elected leader of Afghanistan, the uh the vice president Amrullah Salah, who is now the acting, the interim president, that those people uh were cowards who ran when they're in fact, I mean, are still fighting today and still resisting today.
	I mean, I it's just it's unimaginable that you would slip the throats of the people that helped you and that that gave uh their sons and daughters uh to fight with you, and then on top of that, you would lie about it and make it their fault and call them a bunch of cowards.
	I mean, that is like the degree to which that is morally depraved, is to me beyond description.
	Why did we do it the way we did?
	Well, you know, that that is um first of all, it's a great question because it's one of the most basic fundamental questions of journalism, right?
	That every journalist should ask.
	It's also the obvious question.
	Um, but it's not a question for me.
	I mean, I can tell you my analysis.
	I could be like one of the many jackasses all over television and pretend that I have all the answers, right?
	And tell you things that are unknowable.
	Um, I can be a seasoned journalist and I can point to things that that are, I think are indicators that are very revealing.
	And I will do that.
	But the truth is, the real point here is that that's a question for them to answer.
	They are the ones who did it, right?
	They're the ones who are responsible for it.
	So they are the ones who need to answer that question.
	If you go back to the Obama administration, there's another lie that's being pushed here by the Atlantic, um, by you know, Steve Cole from The Atlantic and the New York magazine and Slate and all these others.
	So they want to say, look, you know, this was really Trump's fault, right?
	Because Trump is the one who wanted to pull out of Afghanistan.
	Trump is the one who did this.
	This was all set in stone before Biden got into office and and and he was just following what Trump did.
	Well, I mean, apart from the fact that Biden didn't follow anything else Trump did and had the power to do whatever he wanted, um, so that's just a ridiculous lie.
	Um, The other part of this that is being buried is that Obama is the one who ran for the exits in Afghanistan.
	He is the one who began negotiating behind the Afghan government's back.
	He's the one who had the embarrassment of negotiating with someone who wasn't even a Taliban member, right?
	And and they had egg all over the face of the administration because the guy was just an imposter who was stringing them along.
	I mean, um, and so uh for me the history is really revealing because if you go back to what Obama said, he at the time made it very clear, said repeatedly that he did not believe the world needed a superpower, that he did not believe that America should be the superpower.
	He encouraged the head of NASA, Charlie Baldwin, who I actually spoke to and verified this with in person because I didn't believe the news reporting.
	It seemed ridiculous to me.
	But he did say to Charlie Baldon, don't you know, don't talk about America's accomplishments in space.
	We want you to push the achievements of the Islamic world in space, which were almost non-existent.
	And uh Charlie Bolden said that to me.
	He didn't understand it.
	Um, and if you go back, you know, what did Obama do?
	He went to Cairo.
	I covered that for CBS News.
	He went to Cairo and apologized to the world for America's behavior.
	So what you start to see is a lot of action from the Obama administration, which points to the fact that they um were systematically weakening America's power on the world stage.
	And the very same people, Susan Rice and Jake Sullivan and others who were in Ben Rhodes, right, who were in the Obama administration, they're in the Biden administration again.
	They're the very same people carrying out this policy.
	The and um, and then you have you know, just pathetic corrupt people like uh Major General Donahue and McKenzie and Milley and Austin, General Lloyd Austin, these um absolutely reprehensible um cowards,
	right, who have lied uh to the American people and lied to the world and lied to the men under their command who know better and who have uh no integrity whatsoever, and um who uh literally had American citizens at the gates in Kabul and denied them access and denied them entry, and have since lied about that, by the way.
	And you know, who every time I say this feed to their stooges and the Pentagon press corps, you know, a counter narrative, that is just false.
	I have text messages, okay, General Donahue.
	I have your copies of your text messages where you actually were being told there were American citizens there and said you would let them in and didn't.
	All right.
	So, and I and I was on the phone on FaceTime with people who were at those gates for hours, hour after hour after hour.
	I know I lived in real time.
	You will never ever escape that history.
	And you will never escape the truth on that.
	You know, and we are not even close to accountability for what has been done in Afghanistan.
	So why they did it, I think it's very obvious.
	They know that when you leave behind 84 billion dollars worth of advanced military equipment, that um terrorists, knoco-terrorists, the you know, they're going to give who are working closely with your enemies, such as China and Russia and Iran, that they're going to share that technology.
	You know that technology is being shared.
	So if you don't do anything about it, um, and you have the ability to change that like that, right, in a heartbeat, you can use thermal stealth drones.
	You don't have to put any boots on the ground.
	Well, if you're if you don't take any action, you're choosing to allow that outcome.
	And if you're choosing to allow that outcome, it somehow serves your interests.
	It certainly weakens the United States.
	There's no doubt about that.
	Everybody agrees on that, that when your enemies have your technology and your equipment and your weapons, right, you're not safer.
	You're not stronger.
	You're weaker and you're more at risk.
	And if your government, your leaders don't care about that, then uh the logical conclusion is that it suits this is the outcome they wanted.
	They've done nothing to change it.
	Therefore, they have the outcome that they want.
	Why they want that outcome?
	Well, you could you look to their statements, you look to their actions.
	To me, the answers are obvious.
	I mean, they uh they're burning this country to the ground.
	They don't want the United States as we have always known it as the republic that has existed since 1776.
	They don't want it to exist.
	They don't believe it should.
	They have a different vision for the future.
	So it's so counterintuitive because it just if you look at the if you look at the laws of human nature and if you look at historical behavior among leaders, no leader ever intentionally weakens their own power position unless they're bought.
	That's and I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist in this because this is all just speculative for me.
	But it seems to me that if you're the president of the United States and you're sys you're systematically weakening the United States, it's because you're working for someone else other than the United States, right?
	Because if if you were really on team USA, why would you weaken team USA, right?
	And so that's what's alarming to me.
	And I don't have an answer as to who it is.
	Some people say, oh, it's the CCP, they've infiltrated, they've bought everybody, and um it's it's it's Marxism, CPN, and maybe I don't know, maybe there's some of that, but it seems to me that there's there's money personally involved in very obscure non-public ways,
	and that I don't know who or what, but why would you weaken the US position as the president of the United States or as any leader in the United States, whether you're a general, um a contractor or whatever, why would you ever allow that to happen unless there was financial gain for you personally?
	So some people allow these things to happen because they're weak and they're cowards and they're corrupt, right?
	So some people just go along with it for all of those reasons.
	Some people uh have personally to gain.
	So they go along with it for those reasons.
	Um other people go along with it because they're ideologically bought in to whatever outcome it is.
	Like say you're one of those people that doesn't believe the world needs a superpower, right?
	That it should be um a collective of nations, as Obama said, and um uh and that we're better off in a world without a superpower, then you're you know, you're an ideological warrior for your vision of what the world should look like, right?
	So there are uh and then there are all the people who just go along with it because um the price of standing up is too high.
	You're not gonna pay that price.
	And then there are the people who are deceived, who um it is it is counterintuitive, right?
	Um, I'm the crazy one.
	Lara Logan must be the crazy one because it makes no sense that our own leaders would uh install a not go terrorist super state voluntarily that threatens the United States, and unforced give up a billions of dollars worth of advanced military equipment to our enemies,
	burn our relationships with our allies, embarrass the United States on the global stage, uh betray uh everyone that we've ever needed, send a message to our allies everywhere.
	Don't stand with the United States because we don't have your back, and so on.
	I mean, you just keep going, right?
	Like, why on earth would anybody do that?
	It Lara must be wrong.
	It cannot be true because it makes no sense, and I just don't believe it.
	And you know, in a way, it's kind of the beauty of who we are and where we are as a country, that we have such faith in our institutions and our leaders.
	It's taken a very long time for people to accept the degree to which the media has been deceptive.
	There's a latency because they've they've built that brand credibility 50 years ago.
	And you know why?
	Because we created something that was noble in intent, and that is important to fight for.
	Don't give up on the FBI because you've got a bunch of corrupt people at the top, and um, and they're, you know, they've got their uh stooges in the ranks who are destroying the reputation and um of the FBI and doing politically motivated persecutions and false investigations and targeting their political enemies.
	Don't give up on the Institutions of government or the institutions of media or the office of the president itself, right?
	These are noble institutions.
	They are the pillars of the republic.
	And every American who's out there working to sustain this country and to innovate and to create or you know, or to build or to maintain, these people rely on their leaders and their journalists, their media, to be honest with them and to tell them about the important things that they need to know about.
	They don't have time to go digging across the internet and ferreting out which journalists to trust and which publication and staying across who's been bought by who and who changes and you know, over time developing a you know breadth of knowledge on some.
	I mean, come on.
	You know, it's like uh if you work in oil and gas, sure, that's your brain butt, you're gonna follow it.
	If you're in finance, you're gonna follow it.
	And you know, you get a lot of people in the big cities that are very scathing and um and patronizing and and quite honestly, uh just you know, uh offensive in the way that they speak about uh people who are not uh up to you know the minute following current events and plugged into you know the whole world.
	Whereas um, but there's a big difference between being ignorant of something because you just don't have the time and the capacity to to uh to devote your life to that, and it's outside you know what you're what you're doing, or the people who are too stupid to understand.
	And the knee-jerk thing is oh, they're too stupid to understand, or they're too, you know, oh, they're they're less than us somehow, those people in flyover country who are keeping this country afloat, right?
	Those farmers who are working day and night, seven days a week um to feed us and to feed people across the world.
	They're just too uh redneck and racist and introvert, uh, you know, introspective uh to have a real understanding of the world.
	They're less than me.
	That's just all of that is uh is the most arrogant, um deceitful nonsense that um people have been fed and have come to believe, and many journalists believe.
	And um, and what I would say to you is is this all around us, what we are seeing is an assault on the things that we know to be real and to be true.
	Um and things don't add up.
	You know, it made sense in the beginning of the pandemic when we didn't know anything about COVID to say, okay, we're going to temporarily suspend our civil liberties so that we can address this urgent, urgent public health crisis.
	Well, now guess what?
	Now we know that it can be treated.
	Now we know that it's pretty much like the flu.
	Now we know that um early treatment is very effective.
	Now we know that there are cheap drugs available all over the world.
	Now we know that there is herd immunity.
	Now we know that for those who believe in the vaccines, that there are vaccines.
	Now we know, you know, and so on and so on and so on.
	So what you have now, when you have forced mandates, you're like, but wait a minute.
	The CDC says I've got as much chance of surviving this as I have flu.
	So why are we losing 12,000 pilots?
	Because they don't want to be vaccinated, and you know, there are issues with the vaccines.
	Go and look at the CDC's um own data on that, right?
	And many other countries in uh around the world, the rise in myocarditis, you know, heart issues and uh the issues with spike proteins and and other um problems that have arisen in some people from uh after having the vaccines.
	So once you start to see that, you're like, well, okay, so now you've got we know lockdowns are not effective.
	Look at Sweden, right?
	Um, we know that masks are not effective, and yet even the EPA did a study.
	The EPA did a study that shows that the that the masks at best block 35% of viral transmission, only 35% at best.
	Right.
	And don't forget, that's when you're using a mask in a surgical situation, right?
	In a hospital, in a dentist's office, you put it on, you use it temporarily for a specific period of time, and you toss it.
	It's gone.
	It's not, you know, that's that's that's not what masks were not designed to be worn 24-7, you know, by someone who's who's running um a marathon or something like that, right?
	Masks were not designed to be worn by babies and uh toddlers and people going about their daily lives.
	They're effective when they're used in a in a very specific uh context for a short period of time for with a very specific purpose.
	And and um, and there are there's many studies actually that show that.
	And what we're seeing now is we see selective uh focus on certain studies, right?
	So they'll tell you hydroxychloroquine didn't work.
	All these people took it and died.
	Oh, except they when you look at the study level.
	And they were going to die anyway.
	And by the way, the ventilation is the wrong protocol, and um and you know, the actual studies that show the effectiveness hydroxychloroquine show it being used early on and together with isothromycin as a ZPAC, that combination treatment as being what's needed and what's effective.
	Sure, and regardless of whether you believe in these controversial drugs, there is no controversy about the efficacy of monoclonal antibodies.
	So why aren't we just talking about getting monoclonal antibodies everywhere?
	Everyone agrees that those work.
	Or early treatment.
	Why aren't we talking about the fact that you have a much better chance, a much better outcome with COVID if you're treated early and you're aggressive than if you leave it?
	You know, there's lots of things.
	So then when you start to look at, okay, well, um, we're under siege by white supremacists.
	Um, except now, over time, as uh many Americans from all different backgrounds are speaking up and resisting uh many of these policies.
	You see, oh, wait a minute, Larry Elder and Dave Chappelle, they're white supremacists too.
	No, that doesn't know.
	So, and you know, and the assault on 1776, this idea that everyone who wasn't a perfect person, that George Washington, you know, the whole civil war was was um only fought to enforce slavery and had nothing to do with liberating America, or that there's never been a white slave in history that, oh yeah, the first slaves weren't the Irish enslaved by the who?
	Yeah, the British.
	I mean, it's you know, you can only keep, these are all lies, right?
	They're just lies.
	The one of the greatest lies of all that we're so divided.
	What unites people in this country is so much stronger than what divides any of us.
	That doesn't deny that there are things that divide us.
	That doesn't deny that there are racial issues and racial injustices that need to be addressed.
	It just is we have leaders and we have political factions who are very well funded who want us to focus only on what divides us, and they don't want us to remember what unites us because divided, we fall.
	Divided, we fall.
	And so what you see are the patterns, right?
	That bring you back to this recurring theme that the people who want to enforce lockdowns, they are not in favor of restoring the economy.
	The people who want to um cripple small businesses with um with testing mandates and vaccine mandates that they know are going to finish off small business, they are not in favor of restoring the economy.
	The people who are um, you know, in favor of a digital passport and a digital currency, they have a vested interest in ensuring that the current financial system doesn't survive, right?
	The people that want that believe in a universal basic income for all of us, where you get paid to stay at home and you don't work.
	Now, those people, they have a vested interest in uh in all in making sure that we like that idea, right?
	Because if we have AI that's gonna render all of us unemployed, and uh we're not gonna be able to get jobs, um, they're gonna want us to be happy to stay at home and just get uh money to stay at home.
	They want to demonize work.
	And what is work?
	Work is the basis of the American dream.
	What is the American dream based on?
	If you were not born rich and you weren't born connected to anyone, and you weren't born in the right circumstances in any way, you don't, you know, you don't have any of the advantages in life, but you work hard.
	That's the American dream that anyone can rise.
	You can improve your situation, you can Go from you know the lower classes to the middle class or lower middle class to upper middle class or from the middle class into the upper class.
	You know, you have this upward mobility.
	What is that?
	That's hope.
	You have hope that you can improve your situation.
	And all it really takes is uh is integrity and honesty and hard work.
	Well, hard work has now been demonized, right?
	Oh no, no, no, no, don't work hard.
	We want people to go to college and study things that don't actually make them employable, and they become activists.
	And where do they get the money?
	Well, they get donations, fundraises, right?
	They don't actually earn the money, they just get given money to go and implement an ideology.
	And by the way, look then at all those NGOs, how they learned a money through the NGOs and and how that money goes round and round and round, and how it's hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, right?
	And the partnership with big tech where we've allowed these monopolies to exist.
	Monopolies don't help America.
	They never did.
	That's why we have antitrust legislation.
	Monopolies don't help the current economic system.
	And I can't think of a single monopoly in the history of the United States that wasn't sponsored by the government.
	I mean, if you look at all the famous monopolies, say the eminent domain for the railroads, it was all government sponsored.
	I I don't necessarily believe that monopolies are possible.
	I don't believe that capitalism, laissez faire capitalism catalyzes monopolies.
	I think you have to have mixed economy in order for monopolies to exist because they have to be sponsored by a government with a monopoly on force.
	Without Section 230 protection, you would never have Twitter and Facebook of today.
	They wouldn't exist and they wouldn't have as much power.
	And now, and the Googles, by the way.
	Look at Google, they can decide who wins an election anywhere in the world.
	And the line between big tech and big government today is gone, right?
	There's a an extraordinarily brilliant um young man by the name of Jacob Appelbaum, who I was fortunate enough to get to know and to interview for my uh season, uh, the season of my show, Laura Logan has no agenda.
	Um, that was about big tech big brother.
	And Jacob Applebaum was one of the pillars of WikiLeaks.
	He was one of the developers of Thor, the privacy software that allowed WikiLeaks to move information securely, and one of the most brilliant people I have ever, ever, ever met.
	And uh, like other people in WikiLeaks, from Julian Assange to Trevor Fitzgibbon, his PR person, they were all attacked and falsely accused of uh sexual crimes that don't uh that never happened.
	And Jacob unfortunately is in self-imposed exile in Berlin because he's been threatened that if he comes back, they're gonna arrest him and pin something on him, right?
	But Jacob was the one of the ones who who first opened my eyes to the degree to which there has never been a line actually between big tech and big government.
	And um that is one of the most disturbing things because you know, I'm guilty.
	I did a piece on Jack Dorsey and Twitter on 60 Minutes.
	I believed that he created Twitter.
	I know Jack believes he created Twitter, but um actually none of these technologies uh were created uh by Dorsey or Zuckerberg or anything, right?
	They were developed by DARPA and the intelligence agencies, they were developed um by the CIA, and then they were ceded into um you know society and funded and uh and then given protections that they should never have been given and allowed then to take over our society and dominate the conversation and censor um Americans, deny us our constitutional rights.
	I mean, it's outrageous where we are now.
	So why would we allow that?
	You know, why would why would the Biden administration torture an entire nation and weaken the United States?
	Ask them why would you allow uh monopolies to exist that obliterate the First Amendment?
	Ask, ask them, ask our leaders why they don't do anything about it.
	Yeah.
	Well the question then becomes we've gotten to this point where the truth is illegal and you can be banned for well, not it's not literally illegal, but it practically is.
	So if you speak truth, oh no, it's a crime, it's a crime, right?
	It's uh it's a crime of domestic Terror, right?
	Right.
	And so we're at this place, and there doesn't there isn't an there is not an obvious path to recourse.
	And you know, I I am I'm an optimistic person.
	I believe in the future.
	And I and if you look at the history of the United States, we've been through trying times that are every bit as difficult as the times that we're in right now, and we've overcome those.
	So I'm optimistic that there's something that we can do to win this fight for liberty.
	Um, but I but I don't know what the path is.
	It's not obvious to me what we need to do.
	The answer is that the path is both obvious and not obvious.
	In principle, it's obvious, right?
	It's very, very, very simple.
	The only way out of this is the truth.
	That's what we need.
	We need the whole truth.
	Whether we like the truth or don't like the truth, it really doesn't matter.
	Does it serve this party?
	Does it serve that party, this politician, that politician?
	It doesn't matter.
	Okay.
	I feel the same way about my Benghazi story I did for 60 minutes.
	That was I was savaged and attacked for, you know, I just want the truth.
	We never got the truth.
	Um, and even if it doesn't serve me, I don't care.
	I just want to know the truth.
	Did this guy lie to me?
	Did he not lie to me?
	Right.
	But he disappeared.
	And guess what?
	Two unnamed State Department officials were briefed by two unnamed FBI officials and blah, blah, blah, right?
	It's the same old song and dance that by now is very familiar.
	So you never get to the truth.
	It's the same thing here.
	We now know that the Clinton campaign worked with the Russian, uh, with Russian government spies and others, paid for disinformation to subvert an American um election and administration, a legally elected president, and so on.
	That was literally an insurrection attempt.
	That that's what baffles me some that was literally an extra an insurrection attempt.
	It was it was a lie.
	And they tried to totally unseat one of the three branches of government with that lie.
	How is that not an insurrection?
	No, it's treason and sedition, is what it actually is.
	That's the law.
	And um, and so you know, if that was Trump who did that, or some other Republican, I would want the truth just as much as I want it now.
	It's not personal.
	And I kind of, you know, the example I often use for people is if you were if you had stage four cancer and you went to the doctor and he diagnosed you, you want him to tell you the truth, or you want him to lie to you.
	You know, we don't always like the truth, but I do believe in my heart and soul with every part of me that most of us, most of us as human beings want the truth.
	And it's very interesting because the truth really is bathed in light, right?
	That's how we get to the truth.
	It comes to us in the light, it doesn't come in the dark.
	We talk about shining a light.
	The Washington Post, um, you know, talks about democracy dies in darkness.
	I mean, that's a joke at this point, right?
	I mean, they're in a tunnel of darkness at this point, but um, but nevertheless, if you think about that, the truth rarely is bathed in light.
	And what what is deception?
	It is bathed um and cloaked really in darkness and deceit, right?
	And lies.
	And lies don't have any legs, they need other lies.
	You gotta keep telling more lies to prop it up, right?
	Oh, the unvaccinated, they're the problem.
	I'm sorry.
	How many of them have natural immunity?
	Uh you as vaccinated, you can still transmit COVID.
	So what you know, it's a lie, right?
	I mean, people just see it as a lie.
	And uh, you know, my children were vaccinated.
	I've always been vaccinated my whole life.
	Um, it's not like I'm coming to this from an ideological position of being an anti-vaxxer.
	Um, but I'm not an idiot, right?
	And I think there are a lot of people, I know there are millions of people like myself.
	You know, one of my heroes, and I don't know her name, I gotta look it up.
	One of my heroes is the mother in California who went to the school board with her daughter behind her and was a big part of the reason, probably the main reason that teacher put up the Antifa flag In the classroom was fired.
	I love that woman.
	I am gonna look up her name and I'm gonna do something with her because that woman spoke for every mother and every parent when she just said, you know what?
	This is not right and it is not happening.
	And she didn't have connections, she didn't appear to be, you know, super like wealthy or she wasn't anyone famous.
	She uh she was just a regular mom.
	And she said, my daughter is standing behind me because that's my job as a parent to protect my child.
	And now parents are under attack.
	The whole idea of parenting, you know, there's a whole ideology online that says every form of parental power is a form of abuse.
	The Atlantic magazine, you know, they had a whole article about how the nuclear family was a mistake, right?
	Um, and so you you look at all of these things, and what you see is that people who stand up for the truth, no matter who they are, that they are the path.
	They are our way out of this because the truth is our way out of this.
	I know that good is stronger than evil.
	I know that good exists because we have it in in every one of us.
	I have it in me, and I'm not alone, right?
	And I have lived by this all of my life, and I'm 50 years old now.
	So, in terms of the principles, it's very, it's very, very simple and it's very, very obvious.
	The truth is what matters, and we have to fight for that.
	And the principles are very clear.
	They've never changed, right?
	And uh, and that's why you have sayings like that's why the Spartans fought for freedom, just like we're fighting for our freedom today to hold on to our freedom, because the principles um that have governed us, those endure over time.
	They just don't change.
	So, in that sense, it's not hard to figure out and to see the way ahead.
	In the other sense of what do you do and and what does it mean practically, and what are the actions that you're supposed to take, and what are you not supposed to do?
	Well, those um those are up to every one of us.
	There isn't a blueprint, there's not a manual that says you've got to do this or you've got to do that, or this is what you should care about.
	I had um some students, one student actually asked me at a college, you know, can you tell us what to care about?
	What should we be paying attention to in the world?
	And I said, absolutely not.
	You have to decide what to care about.
	You know what your strengths are today, you know what you're good at.
	If you're a small business owner or you're you know good at running businesses, you should be creating opportunities for people who are fired for the wrong reasons, like because they don't want to take the they don't want to be vaccinated.
	There should be no one in this country, no national guardsman, no soldier, no sailor, no marine, no border patrol agent who is unemployed and struggling this Christmas because they didn't want to be vaccinated, or you know, um no air hostess, right?
	Air steward, there should be nobody.
	So if you are the kind of person, if you have jobs that you can provide, then provide jobs for those people.
	If you are, there's a new wine called We the People Wine, right?
	For people who are sick and tired of having you know progressive morality and politics shoved down their throats.
	Um, if you feel passionate about the church, then you should really take a look at what the Lutheran church is doing with revolutionary theology.
	They just had a drag queen read the Bible on the altar in a church.
	If that is something that um you feel strongly about, then that is your path.
	Must not have been levitatous.
	Figure out what you care about, what your strengths are, and play to your strengths.
	And the only thing that I would say to people is that there's a price for everything.
	So if you choose the easy path, and you choose not to risk everything, and you choose to keep your head down and hope that they don't come for you, and somehow you're going to you're going to escape, right?
	You're not going to be one of the ones that's going down in this fight.
	You have to know that there's a price for that too.
	It may be a price that you don't want to pay.
	You may think that the price of standing up for your principles and for your family or for your country or for whatever it is that you believe in, you may think that that price is too heavy, but you don't know the price of not standing up.
	Well, and not to bring up um Nazism and the Holocaust given the recent controversy.
	But it what you said reminds me of bring it up.
	I don't care.
	Well, what um what you said reminds me of that famous poem.
	First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist, then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist, and they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew, then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me, right?
	So that's the whole idea that you you have to you have to you can't put your head down even early because that cat that that enable that's that's enable that's enabling tyranny or authoritarianism to commit uh greater and greater injustice.
	That's exactly right, is that you're enabling it.
	If you like you may not care about a particular issue um or a particular person who's been canceled, but if you don't speak up, um, you know, yeah, then uh you're enabling the whole culture of cancel culture, right?
	You're enabling those tactics, and that's what why you're seeing more and more and more people in Hollywood who are standing up to these tactics, because they're saying, Wake up, people.
	You know, you think this is just um in the time of Trump, it was easy to say that this is just about Trump and Trump supporters.
	But with Trump out of office, it's much more obvious now that this was never about Trump, actually.
	And it was always about a target list of demonizing um certain people in our society in order to um go after them and get rid of your political opposition and redesign this country uh the way you want.
	Well, Laura, thank you for being a light in the darkness and for coming on my show today.
	I appreciate it.
	It was an honor to have you as a guest.
	Um it was a really great episode.
	I really enjoyed this conversation.
	And um uh where can people follow you and keep up with your work?
	So that's a good question.
	Um I am uh I am I'm gonna be launching my own show and I'm figuring that out.
	There is a Laura Logan.com, I think, website that um I'm just in the process of setting up.
	I'm on Twitter and and Facebook, but I'm gonna be on Getter and um a bunch of other places as well.
	What I want to do, Chase, is I want to be um I wanna be a vehicle for independent voices and young journalists, new journalists, whatever it is, and and uh and an easy place for people to go to get, you know, to hear Tom Johnson from the Long War Journal,
	for example, you know, and and uh Christopher Rufo um for your interesting critical race theory and Alex Baronson if you want to look at COVID, where people own their own brands, their own their own work, and um and nobody owns any of us,
	and nobody um has the ability to censor you or silence you or intimidate you or take away everything, take everything from you, your ability to feed your children or keep a roof over your head, you know, and and it's a place that's not defined by politics.
	It's one America, right?
	Is um it's what you talked about, it's what your show's about, where you can hear different views, agree with some, not agree with others, whatever.
	And you don't have to work too hard to find it.
	Um, that it's everywhere.
	I want it to be everywhere.
	Absolutely.
	Well, thank you so much for coming on.
	Yeah, that baby crying in the background, you better go.
	That's that's my little girl.
	So I better get going, but thank you so much.
	It was a great episode.
	I know she's great.
	She's gonna be one next month.
	Um she's been uh she's been a real joy.
	So um thank you so much again for coming on.
	Please let me know if there's anything I can do for you to help you.
	Uh I'm very grateful to you and all your work.
	Stay in the fight.
	I will.
	I will fight.
	You're doing great.
	I love your started this podcast because it occurred to me that there was a concerted effort to shame America and what it means to be American.
	When I asked myself, what can I do about this?
	It's really hard because I'm not a political action committee.
	I don't have tremendous amount of followers.
	I certainly didn't when I started.
	I am one American.
	One American podcast reinforces the values and ideals of America.
	It reinforces Americanism by having conversations with key influencers of all sorts of different backgrounds, beliefs, but with one thing in common.
	The belief in America and that America is inherently good.

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