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Aug. 18, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:00:05
WHAT WENT WRONG? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep156
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What went so badly wrong in Afghanistan?
We can criticize the botched, ridiculous Biden plan of withdrawal, but what would a better withdrawal plan look like?
I'll tell you. Also, I want to look at what went wrong with the war in a deeper sense.
Was this an unwinnable war from the start and why?
Also, Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Lohmeyer, formerly of the Air Force and the U.S. Space Force, joins me to talk about the woke military and how it's taking its revenge on him for exposing it.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
In Afghanistan, the United States has not only left behind thousands, possibly over 10,000 Americans.
But we have created in the Taliban the most dangerous terrorist force in the world.
Why? Because we have essentially left behind all this American equipment that is now Taliban controlled.
A Pentagon spokesman was asked, does the United States have any plans to get any of that back?
And the answer is, well, not really.
So let's begin with the Americans left behind.
These are people who are now in desperate conditions.
The U.S. Embassy has very little it can do to help them.
It's telling them things like, you have to watch out for your own safety.
We will try to get you out, but there's a limit to what we can do.
And then we have our Afghan allies, people who have worked with the United States for a long time, And these are people who are being just targeted, shot bodies in the street, not just in Kabul, but in other regional towns.
The media is actually not showing enough of this, in part because they're trying to hide and protect Biden by covering up the magnitude of the debacle.
Let me talk a little bit about what's fallen into Taliban's hands, because we've essentially weaponized this terrorist operation.
And I'm quoting now political commentator Adam Schwartz.
He goes,"...the Taliban is set to become the best-armed Islamic fundamentalist group in the world when they inherit all the advanced U.S. military equipment from the Afghan army." You see pictures on social media of Taliban guys walking around.
And by the way, they used to have these good kind of old AK-47s, but now they have M16 rifles, our rifles, M4 rifles, M249, M240 machine guns.
You'll see the Scar-H. You'll see military vehicles, Taliban guys sitting in Humvees.
Now, who knows if they can drive the Humvees?
They probably can. But you see MAXPRO trucks, MRAP MAXPRO trucks.
Taliban guys are kind of jubilantly waving their rifles over them.
They've got M117 tank-like armored vehicles, which, by the way, can survive an RPG blast, and are also armed with a grenade launcher.
This is all in the hands of the Taliban, believe it or not.
The Taliban now have more Black Hawk helicopters than about 150 countries around the world.
They've got drones. They've got U.S. helicopters.
So essentially, in this ignominious end to the war on terror, a war that we've apparently lost after two decades, Biden has lost.
At the end of this war, we have...
We have created this menace and almost given over the weaponry to the other side, making them stronger than they were before.
Before they were sort of 11th century primitives, you know, working on the monkey bars.
They had to plan the 9-11, you know, come over here, use our own planes against us.
But now they've got real weaponry.
And you've got to say the Biden administration is to blame.
Now, I realize that, you know, when Biden gave his speech, Biden's point was, well, you know, you can't really blame me.
Come on, man, because I'm just doing what Trump was going to do anyway.
This is Biden's logic, that Trump is going to withdraw.
He's going to withdraw. Therefore, no criticism is possible of the way in which Biden withdrew.
I see a tweet here from Tom Cotton.
He goes, no one in their right mind would have closed the Bagram Air Force Base and left behind thousands of U.S. civilians and thousands of Afghan allies.
Why would you do that?
And having done that, the U.S. is basically saying, now we're trying to get 40,000 to 60,000 Afghans out.
How? We don't really have a base.
We sort of have a very limited embassy with staff.
And here's the State Department's response when asked about this.
How are you going to get these 40,000 to 60,000 people out?
Quote, we are doing as much as we can for as long as we can.
I mean, the sheer helplessness and pathos of that.
So under Biden, the United States has become, I would call it, the world's biggest idol talker.
We're going to hold the Taliban accountable for returning U.S. citizens.
Really? How? How are you going to hold them accountable?
We demand, and the international community demands that they respect women's rights and human rights.
Who cares about what you demand?
What power do you have on the ground to enforce this demand?
We deplore their actions in murdering our Afghan allies.
Blah, blah, blah.
This is really pathetic, and I think it signals it's a very bad sign for U.S. power in the world in the future.
Now, what should we have done?
What would Trump have done?
I'm pretty sure I know what Trump would have done.
I know what I would have done, and it's actually very simple.
I guess it does take a brain that is not like Biden's flickering light to figure this out, but presumably Biden has advisors who could have thought this up.
Number one. Make a plan in which you find out, identify all the people you want to get out.
Identify all the U.S. civilians, all the NGOs, all the U.S. workers, the U.S. teachers in Afghanistan.
Have them identified.
Move them to the Bagram Air Force Base.
Get them out. Number two, identify all your Afghan allies, the people who have really helped you, that you can count on.
Yes, I agree. Those people cannot be left to rot, cannot be left to be killed.
Bring them to the Bagram Air Force Base, get them out.
And then the third and very critical point, and this is to notify the Taliban and say, listen guys, you know, you had a big advantage for the past 20 years.
You were hiding in the mountains and it was pretty hard to find you.
And therefore we had to fight against this guerrilla force.
But here's the bad news.
If we get out and you come in and occupy Kabul and take over the government, you're going to be using courthouses and parliament and government buildings and mosques and To carry out your normal administrative activities.
Well, guess what? You have now given us 300 excellent targets full of Taliban guys!
And so, at any time, starting now, we can come back and pulverize you in such a way that you're going to go back to the Stone Age, kind of the way that you were right after 9-11.
So, the bottom line of it is the United States now has actual military targets in Kabul Now, I don't think the Biden administration has the stomach for any of this.
They're such wimps. They're such pathetic individuals.
They wouldn't even dream of launching strikes now against the Taliban.
But that would certainly tame their hubris.
That would certainly show that, yeah, the United States may be out of there, but you know what?
We've actually got a long reach.
Check this out. Bam!
And so this is the way that a powerful country behaves in the world.
Think of what China would do in our place or Russia.
So in a sense, what we're telegraphing through Biden is we don't deserve to be the world's superpower.
We don't want to be the world's superpower.
We can't even run our own affairs very well.
We're just a laughingstock in the world.
And all the people who voted for Biden, in a sense, I guess, have signed up for this.
Knowingly or unknowingly, they have put in charge a team, and we've seen with Democrats before, this is what they do, this is what they're doing now, they're taking us down, and they even seem, in their own pathetic way, a little proud of it.
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How does the world's most powerful military lose a war, even a protracted war, against a relatively small group of poorly armed peasant Afghan tribesmen?
How does that happen?
It happens in two ways.
I want to probe here the deeper roots of America's loss in Afghanistan.
And here, while I will fault the Biden administration, this is a bipartisan disaster.
Let me start by talking about The war itself, which had two phases.
The first phase, which lasted only a few weeks.
Remember, right after 9-11, the Taliban, which had been responsible for providing safe haven, training ground, here are the monkey bars, to the 9-11 hijackers, they were a part of 9-11.
So it was completely right and proper that the United States say, okay, guys, you know what?
You're going to pay for it in a very big way.
And that big way was to essentially obliterate the Taliban from the seats of power.
Kill a lot of them, drive the rest into the mountains, oust them from power in their own country.
And that was done.
And that was done successfully.
It was done quickly.
And this was under Don Rumsfeld.
Dick Cheney was involved.
And it was a boom, boom, boom.
And the Taliban was essentially on the canvas.
Now... This is really when things began to take a confused turn.
Because right after that, the question is, and now what?
What? Now, at this point, a bunch of theories began to arise.
There's the Colin Powell theory.
I'm going to call it, if you break it, you own it.
The idea here is that if you smash a country or smash a government, you somehow own the country.
To me, a complete non-sequitur, kind of a buffoonish statement.
But nevertheless, this was one way of thinking about it.
We have a responsibility to rebuild Afghanistan.
Why? Why?
But nevertheless, the Bush people were like, I guess we have a responsibility.
We're the United States. We fixed the world.
This was part of that arrogant, United States is going to sort of make the world more like it model.
And the other view was I'd call it the Condoleezza Rice view because I actually heard it come right out of her mouth.
And she goes, well, we're not going to play whack-a-mole.
Now, what she means by this is that we're not going to bomb the Taliban and leave and then let the Taliban come back and take over Afghanistan and start planning another 9-11.
We got to go whack them again.
And then we'll leave again.
So Condoleezza Rice's point is we sort of need an institutional fix.
We need a systematic fix.
But what fix? How do you fix another country?
Now, the United States did do this, by the way, at the end of World War II with Japan and with Germany.
But those were special cases.
We're talking about modern industrialized countries that had educated populations.
In many ways, they had, if not the infrastructure, which had been destroyed, they had the know-how to make this kind of infrastructure.
To be part of, you might say, a global economy of innovation and trade and perhaps even embrace democracy and human rights.
All of that. But Afghanistan had none of that.
And so the idea here was to somehow fix Afghanistan, to own it, in Colin Powell's words.
But if you ask people, well, what is the standard now?
How long are we going to stay in Afghanistan?
What are we trying to do?
And the answer was always sort of different.
Number one. We're trying to create some stability, Dinesh.
We're trying to make sure that Afghanistan isn't unstable.
But how do you make a country stable?
How do you know when you've achieved stability and it's time to get out?
The answer is you don't.
Second, we're trying to have democracy in Afghanistan.
Now, democracy, not quite in the American sense, but we're going to take the tribal system.
We're going to play around with it.
We're going to have some elections. We're going to see if the democratic seed takes in Afghanistan.
And so we had some elections, but there were always elections that seemed kind of questionable, polluted by corruption and fraud.
And so this democracy was, you may say, a fragile plant at best in Afghanistan.
How do you know when democracy has been fully established?
You never do.
Number three, we're going to promote women's rights.
Well, okay, you don't allow women to, you don't let them be forced to wear the burqa.
They have a choice of whether to wear the hijab.
But the Afghan women are by and large traditional.
They're still wearing the hijab.
You can't look on the street and count hijabs and go, well, you know what?
I think we've advanced women's rights enough.
It's time to leave. Or four, we want education and development in Afghanistan.
So you set up some schools and you start teaching a few kids and they learn a little bit.
And then you go, well, how much is enough?
Obviously, we haven't educated all the Afghans.
They don't all have high school degrees, let alone advanced degrees.
So at what point? The point I'm getting at here is the United States dispatched a massive infrastructure of NGOs and educators and democracy promoters and human rights promoters and blah, blah, blah, all to sort of fix this country.
And At no point was it clear when we could get out of there.
Meanwhile, contrast the confused, bungling, pompous strategy of the United States with the concentrated, focused Taliban strategy.
Taliban strategy is really simple.
Let's hide out in the mountains.
Let's make constant guerrilla attacks.
Let us take one town after another.
Let's try actually to use our local advantage.
We know the terrain. Also the fact that we are Muslims like everybody else here.
Let's present the U.S. as a foreign imperialist invader, an occupier, and try to mobilize Afghan sentiment against us.
Let's kill the warlords one after the other.
After all, those guys are thoroughly corrupt.
They're being paid by the United States.
Let's see if we can, like the Viet Cong did, Launch a successful guerrilla operation, and they have.
So, when you have two sides, and one side knows exactly what it's doing, it's purposeful, it's ruthless, it never gives up, and the other side is pompous, bloviating, has no sense of purpose, has no end point, has no real even definition of victory, it's kind of obvious which side, in the end, is going to win.
In their recent budget proposal, the White House Budget Office forecast inflation for 2021, 2.1%.
In June, the actual inflation rate, 5.4%.
So inflation is here.
It's coming faster than our government is prepared for.
Their solution is, well, what?
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account. Again, text to Nesht to 484848 and protect your savings today. The United States under Biden is facing multiple crises on many fronts.
And it's almost as if we, you know, lurch from one crisis to the next.
So it's the crisis of the border.
People are just flooding in.
We could take well over a million illegals.
But it's...
We're using the term illegal.
Biden is inviting them.
He's letting them in. He's giving them notices to appear.
Ha ha ha ha ha! That's the border crisis.
And then you have the energy crisis and the inflation crisis and, of course, the Afghan crisis, which I've been focused on.
And then Biden, once he creates the crisis, blocks the Keystone Pipeline, prints all this money, creating an inflationary impact.
Prices start to rise.
Obviously, part of that is going to be gas prices start to rise as gas prices start to rise and fuel prices start to rise.
That makes the prices of lots of other things that are dependent on fuel start to rise.
The price of lumber starts to rise.
The price of food, which is transported by fuel, starts to rise.
So Biden's realizing this is actually starting to pinch people in the wall in a serious way.
So let me try to do something about it.
And in typical form, just as in Afghanistan, it's one sort of rhetorical cloud after another.
Biden's now, the latest, this is coming from Jake Sullivan, is I'm calling on OPEC to increase its production of oil.
Thus, obviously, with more supply, this would drive the price down.
The demand is constant. The supply is more.
But think about it. The United States doesn't belong to OPEC. OPEC is a cartel.
This is, by the way, a cartel that was started in the 1970s.
It's 13 countries, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates.
And, of course, there are a bunch of other countries that also belong.
Now, Russia, Malaysia, and Mexico have part of the sort of extended so-called OPEC+. So OPEC takes this request under consideration, and they go, well, no.
We don't think there's any need to produce any more oil.
It's not our job to basically fix the U.S. economy.
If you're having problems, you're on your own, pal.
So you can see the ineffectiveness, the kind of sheer fecklessness, the pathetic nature of this Biden pleading, plead with the Taliban, plead with OPEC. Now, what makes all of this so disgraceful and disgusting is the United States has oil.
The United States has huge deposits of natural gas.
Governor Greg Abbott Tweet it back at Biden.
And he basically says, hey, listen, Texas can do this.
That's a quote. He goes, quote, our producers can easily produce that oil if your administration will just stay out of the way.
So here's the Biden administration actively blocking oil leases, actively blocking oil production in the United States, awarding a pipeline, by the way, while approving at the same time the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is a pipeline from Russia to Germany.
Strengthening our adversary, Russia.
We're not strengthening our ally, Germany.
We're making our ally, Germany, more dependent on Russia and consequently less dependent on us.
We're doing all these bad things together and then when they have consequences, oil prices go up.
We plead unsuccessfully, as it turns out, with OPEC, hey guys, we want you to make some more oil.
And OPEC basically goes, nah, we don't think we're going to do it.
So this is what we have at the helm of the U.S. government.
In a way, the feebleness of Biden, this stumbling man who doesn't know where he is, his wife has to point, there's the microphone, the secret, there's the road, don't walk among the plants, he might trip.
This is now America.
Biden's bungling, fumbling incoherence is now a model for U.S.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast Matthew Lohmeyer.
Now, you might recognize Matthew Lohmeyer's name.
He's a 2006 graduate of the US Air Force Academy, spent more than a decade in the Air Force.
He then joined the United States Space Force.
And we're going to get into this, but he's also the author of a really fascinating book.
It's called Irresistible Revolution.
We're going to talk about the book and about his experiences once the book came out.
Matthew, welcome to the show.
Great to have you.
Let me just start by having you share a little bit about your story.
What did you grow up?
Why did you join the military?
Talk a little bit about how you got into it.
Thanks for having me, Dinesh.
First, I'll say up front that these are my own views and not those of the Defense Department.
I grew up in Tucson, Arizona.
And really, growing up, I didn't care much about the military or anything else but basketball.
I didn't even care about my studies, in fact.
And so I understand that you ended up going to Tucson, Arizona as well early on when you came here, as well as just this last couple of weeks to go speak down there.
So that was fun. Yep. Yeah, no, I was in a little town, well, I don't know if you know Little Patagonia in Sonoyta, which is right down on the way to Nogales in Mexico.
And I spent a year between those two small towns living with four different families.
Yeah, in high school, my dad would load up a Jeep with some dirt bikes and we'd go down to Patagonia and there were a few caves down there and so we'd go spelunking down in Patagonia.
Fascinating. Okay, so keep going.
You're in Tucson. You want to play basketball.
And then what happens? That's all I did.
I wanted to play basketball. As it turns out, the best basketball games of my high school career were when the Air Force Academy recruiters had come to watch.
And the worst games of my life were when other universities came to watch that I perhaps would have rather gone to attend their school.
So I ended up going on a recruiting visit to the Air Force Academy and saw B1 fly over at a football game and got a little bit better sense about what was happening there for the first time in my life.
And because of, frankly, the support of my parents, I chose to go to the Air Force Academy.
And it was while I was there that I started to appreciate the importance of military service, the defense of our nation and our allies.
And diverted my aims from going to medical school and being a doctor to then going and flying jets because I got an incentive flight in a T-38 out at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California.
And so I ended up graduating, as you said, in 2006.
Shortly thereafter, went to pilot training.
And I stayed in Oklahoma for four years as a T-38 instructor pilot and taught young men and women, both our own citizens, as well as allies from various countries in the globe, to teach them how to fly jets.
And they went back to their various air forces and flew jets for their air forces.
And then eventually emerged and flew F-15Cs, a single-seat air-to-air fighter for our Air Force, and did that in Japan.
And it was after that that I ended up coming into what was then Air Force Space Command.
As you're aware, the Air Force was responsible for Largely speaking, everything the military was doing in space, and there are some exceptions, but did that for a number of years and gained some expertise in space-based missile warning, and that brings us up to the present moment where, up until just several months ago, I was in command of a space-based missile warning unit.
Now, did the Air Force transfer you to the sort of space division or is it something that you became, you were fascinated by astronauts and the moon landing and you always wanted to do that so it was a natural move for you or did it happen that sort of Air Force direction?
Yeah, just like I hadn't taken any notice of the Air Force or the Air Force Academy before I showed up to go to school there.
Likewise, I had never taken much notice of what we were doing in space.
In fact, I was medically separated from the flying community in 2013.
And I had a really sharp commander at the time who said, hey, if I couldn't be flying jets, I'd go to the other pointy end of the spear, which was what we were doing in space.
And I said, Like, you mean go to the moon?
I don't know what we're doing in space.
NASA, what are you talking about?
And that's what I learned about Air Force Space Command.
And so I ended up choosing that career field out of the flying career field.
I could have chosen a number of other career fields and decided to choose space.
I did, like I said, space-based missile warning for several years, but maybe it's worth mentioning here as well, that I had a very unique opportunity after doing that job to travel around the globe and visit many of our space operating locations with the four-star general, General John Raymond, goes by Jay Raymond, who's now the commander of the U.S. Space Force.
And so we traveled the globe together, helped plan his travel, and...
Got to participate.
No, I won't put it that way. I'll put it more accurately.
Listen in on some of the discussions, incident to the creation of a Space Force while I was his aide-de-camp traveling the world.
So that was a unique opportunity to glean different perspectives on the pros and cons of the creation of the new service.
We're going to take a pause.
When we come back, I'm going to ask Matthew about some troubling discoveries that he made while in the military that inspired and motivated him to write a book documenting and exposing them.
We'll be right back. Welcome to my show!
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I'm talking to Matthew Lohmeyer of the U.S. military, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Space Force, and also the author of Irresistible Revolution, a book that was published just a few months ago this year.
Matthew, we talked in the first segment about your really impressive background, the fact that you have this experience in the Thank you.
I've not exactly perfected the science of trying in several minutes to describe this, and so I'm going to do my best to get right to the point today.
When I came into command of a space-based missile warning unit last summer, in the summer of 2020, it was right on the heels of George Floyd's death.
And all service members, at least in the Air and Space Forces, will remember that even some of our senior leaders ended up producing Air Force produced videos where they were in uniform.
It was subtle, but essentially displaying a form of political activism.
The Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force, who's now retired, who is a black airman, who had a tremendous amount of respect from all of the service members, got on video in uniform and said, I am George Floyd.
And then talked about how he's a black airman, he's a black man first, and he wears the uniform second, essentially.
And that was off-putting to many service members to hear identity politics beginning to be injected from the senior leaders into the service.
And of course, our young service members aren't going to stand up and say, hey, I don't like what you're doing, because they're taught to, one, follow their leaders, respect authority, and to remain apolitical.
The chief of staff of the Air Force did something similar where he said every time he sees the lights of a police car in his rearview mirror, he wonders if he's next.
He's also a black airman. And so when senior leaders start to do that kind of thing, and by the way, they didn't say they were speaking their own views and not the views of the Defense Department, which I've been in trouble for, outside of uniform.
Then these young, impressionable airmen and guardians of our Air and Space Forces and other services as well, they begin to take up the mantle of activism and do so unapologetically because they understand that their leadership will now support their, what I will characterize as left-wing social justice activism.
And so you begin to see in social media criticism of the current administration, the Trump administration, We're good to go.
Was, I would say, activism from base leadership at my base that I tried to address using the internal mechanisms available to me, like my chain of command and the formal Inspector General Complaint Process System, but to no avail.
When base leadership was sending out videos like 13th, a Netflix video and The Uncomfortable Truth, that were pushing a New York Times 1619 project sort of narrative that our founding was evil, The founders were evil and our founding documents are unworthy.
And they're the very documents our young service members swear an oath to support and defend with their life.
And so for me, a line was crossed.
It wasn't just, hey, I believe differently than you, politically speaking.
It was, there's a certain ideologically driven narrative about the evils of this country that we will perpetuate even within the military.
And for me to point out that that was occurring was to be charged with political activism.
And so that's why I was actually relieved of command on May 14th of this year.
It was alleged that That I was politically partisan while acting in an official capacity for writing a book and speaking about these things.
And all along I said, hey, it's not politically partisan to, one, call out Marxist revolutionary impulse where it exists, and we can get into that, and I've been into it elsewhere.
But two, I did it out of uniform on my own private time as a private citizen, essentially, and pointed out the partisanship that was creeping into the military.
And for that, I'm the politically partisan hack.
You mentioned that when you were getting these senior officers, in a sense, taking a knee or identifying with political activism, that it emboldened, let's say, young black airmen or maybe Latino airmen to go, okay, well, I can speak up.
I can attack Trump. It's going to be fine.
Did this also intimidate conservatives who were in the armed forces, who felt like outlaws or pariahs because they would not be supported?
Yes, and I will clarify one thing.
So, whereas it did embolden protected demographic identity groups, let's say, there were plenty of white activists that jumped into the fray as well, wanting to apologize for the privilege and get others to join the anti-racism bandwagon that Ibram Kendi's been all about.
And it affects every airman And every service member, regardless of their race and their politics, when they show up into a politicized work environment and are confronted with, in the case of my base,
weekly and monthly emails and invitations to watch videos and to do down days, down days for your viewer, Is where all of your service members stop doing their operational mission or their training function, and they take a knee so that they can discuss something of great importance.
Like, usually, historically in my career, it's been, hey, one of our fellow pilots crashed and died, and we're going to take a knee to have a safety day, and we're going to not fly that day.
Well, in two months, we had several down days to discuss diversity, equity, and inclusion.
And as you're aware, the diversity, equity, and inclusion industry is steeped in critical race theory jargon, which is rooted in Marxist ideology.
And that has a very sinister and subversive impact on a culture, if you give it a few months, where people, because of a climate of fear, are afraid to say, hey, something feels off about this to me.
I don't like the divisive impact of some of these talking points that we're either told to participate in or keep quiet.
And so I began to see people of all races and potentially both sides of the political spectrum start to feel alienated at work and start to not feel included.
We pride ourselves on an inclusive environment, and it's having exactly the opposite effect in our forces.
When we come back, I'm going to ask Matthew to talk about his book and why he decided to tell the story and what happened next.
We'll be right back.
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I'm talking to Matthew Lohmeyer, formerly of the US Air Force, then of the US Space Force, author of Irresistible Revolution.
Matthew, you published this book in May of this year, and it appears that when your superiors found out, they went berserk.
In fact, you were fired over this book.
They claimed that you were politicizing, I guess, The military.
And it must be a heck of a book, is all I can say, because there must be very damaging information in it that is going to put these guys in a very bad light.
So let me start by asking you, what's in the book that makes all these guys run for cover?
But also in a more broad way, why did you decide to write the book and what is its main theme?
So, I think it's a good book if I say so myself.
I don't know that people should have ran in fear and tried to punish me for writing it.
In fact, I'm fairly certain that at the time that I was fired on May 14th, none of the people in my chain of command could have ever had an opportunity to even have the book in their hands by that time, let alone have heard rumors from others in their circles about what was in it.
And so it seems to me that because I had published a book and the subtitle is provocative, and it's Marxism's goal of conquest and the unmaking of the American military.
So first off, and it was deliberately so provocative.
So I'm sure that that was quite off-putting and perhaps still is, and maybe embarrassing.
But I did a podcast for 30 Minutes with CD Media with Todd Wood, and I spoke about the And the three-star general who had relieved me of my command referenced that podcast, which I did in my free time, not in my official capacity.
And I have attempted to be nonpartisan and simply address Marxist-rooted critical race theory as a divisive force within the armed forces at the moment.
And that's what the book's overarching theme is about.
It's about the divisive impulse of Marxist revolutionary ideology.
And it was for, I think, again, the climate of fear that we talked about in the previous segment that has been generated in the past calendar year especially, that senior leaders felt like we better hold this guy accountable right away before we're held accountable for allowing such a political activist to be on the loose as a commander in the Space Force.
Now, they, of course, didn't know what was in the book.
And I'll say this.
I try to be very careful not to out particular people.
I've removed identities from the book.
I've been vague in some of my language.
But all of the personal vignettes that I've shared in there are 100% true to my experiences, as I have reported to me from various service members about Matthew,
you know, I remember now, just from a couple of weeks ago, when General Milley was testifying on the January 6th subject, he made the offhand comment, well, you know, I can read Marx without becoming a Marxist.
I assume that part of what the military would say in response to what you're saying is that, no, we're not a bunch of Marxists.
How can you use that ridiculously broad phrase?
We are merely familiarizing ourselves with the kind of literature that makes us more liberally learned, more broadly educated, and thus better military men at the end.
But it seems to me that what you're saying is that this is not a matter of reading Marx kind of the way that you or I might read Shakespeare or Homer.
Rather, they're reading it as an instruction manual in political activism that is then being imposed on others.
This isn't a mere reading.
This is actually an imposition, isn't it?
Yeah, let me give you one example of something that demonstrates this point that you make.
There is a diversity and inclusion reading room that's been established at the United States Air Force Academy.
We happen to know what books are in it.
They're, largely speaking, left-wing activism type books.
I'm not going to go through the list, but there's a group of retired general officers who asked the superintendent of the Air Force Academy, why don't you put Matt Lohmeier's book Irresistible Revolution in there as a counterbalance for your students to help them understand a different perspective on some of the literature that they've got.
And they responded on at least one occasion, declining that invitation to add my book.
They said I'm a controversial figure and they want nothing to do with my book or my views.
I won't call it an attempt, and I certainly wouldn't call our leaders Marxists.
And I've been careful in how I've used language in both my public appearances as well as in this book.
But there is a left...
Leaning, and I will even say a radical left social justice or critical social justice activist impulse at the moment, a foot in the military, and it shows up just about everywhere.
And to point it out and say, hey, that's extremely partisan, is to start to be labeled maybe even a right-wing extremist.
I mean, they've created a new extremism category.
it's called patriot extremism. If you think in any way that the government is off base, or that's essentially it, or if you display overzealous support of the Constitution, as you'd hope kind of your service members in uniform would, then you're in the risk of being labeled an extremist right now. And as you're aware, there's a lot of talk about rooting out extremists from our armed forces, and we know what kind they're after. It's white supremacists,
white extremists, white nationalists, because that's been all the talking points. Except there's a big problem that we face in trying to root them out is that most people have never met one who serve in uniform. All we know is the uniform others wear. We've never really paid that much attention to anyone's race at all until this last year where we've started to politicize race once again. That's like Thomas Sowell says, racism isn't dead, but it's kept alive on life support by race hustlers and politicians who profit from keeping racism
alive. And that's exactly what I'm seeing at the moment, both in the country and in the military.
I mean, one thing that disturbs me greatly is a sort of two-track, on the one hand, the hunting down of, I would call it, patriots, Republicans, and Christians who are then labeled white supremacists, very often without any evidence that they have been proclaiming the supremacy of the white race or anything even resembling that.
and then the deployment of the, you may say, police and military agencies of government against citizens who are labeled the exact same way.
So you have patriots and Republicans and Christians and the idea is these are all potential domestic terrorists And so we've got to fortify DC against them We've got to mobilize the Capitol Police and the FBI and so mobilizing all these what are supposed to be neutral and force the law agencies of government against in cleaning out you may say this extremism which is really republicanism from their own
ranks and then mobilizing the firepower that they have to go after extremism read republicanism in the Body politic at large. I mean, do you see these two trends beginning to emerge?
They may not have emerged full-blown, but aren't we seeing the beginnings of it?
Yeah, if I would have heard you say that a year ago or before a year ago, I would have thought you know, that sounds like conspiracy theory.
And I think most viewers, even very conservative viewers, might have said the same thing like, well, maybe that's possible, but that's highly unlikely.
I guarantee you today and...
What month is it? August of 2021?
I bet you that there's a great deal of people in this country who don't find that far-fetched at all.
And I do see that. That's a terrible threat.
I've talked to people in the police force and in the military recently in the past month.
And there are a lot of good people who are discouraged right now.
And we need good people in both of these institutions.
And one more thing.
The reason the American military has had the trust of the American people for so long is because politics as such, as we're talking about today, haven't been a part of the daily life and operations of our military uniform wears.
It's always been true that they have different Maybe political persuasions, but it's never come up.
It didn't matter, maybe except in private conversations.
We have a mission to do.
We wear the same uniform.
We go and bleed and die for our country if required, and we allow the private citizen to engage in partisan political squabbles, and we defend the right to do so.
But never has political ideology been imposed upon men and women in uniform, and then they're expected, of course, still, nevertheless, to remain apolitical.
Matthew, I really appreciate your comment on the podcast.
You've given a sober, but also sobering account.
And I think you're being punished, if anything, for your clarity and for your honesty.
Thank you very much. Thanks, Dinesh.
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Is there a conservative case for environmentalism?
To put it somewhat differently, if we are conservatives, we conserve things.
Well, why wouldn't we want to conserve nature?
Why wouldn't we want to conserve our planet?
Of course we would, and of course we do.
But conservative environmentalism is very different than climate change.
And one way it's different, I think, is that conservative environmentalism emphasizes nature that is around us, that can be experienced by us, that means something to us.
Now, think about the climate change guys when you listen to them and how they function purely at the level of abstractions.
First of all, listen to the science.
In other words, don't listen to your experience.
We're not showing you that your experience of nature is any different than it was before.
What we're doing is we're appealing to sort of anecdotal evidence.
There's like a wildfire. Oh, look, that's climate change!
This is not a model of scientific reasoning, but it's supported by a kind of plethora of computer models.
Take a look at all this data.
You look at a sea of numbers.
You're like, yeah, the data shows that the planet has warmed by one to one and a half degree in the last 100 years.
And you're like, really?
Interesting. Tell me something else I don't know.
What does this mean to me?
And the answer is nothing.
So as a result, they have to deploy their weapon of fear.
So, apocalypticism, based upon all these bogus projections, not a single one of them really is proven right, but nevertheless, they keep doing it.
Now, contrast this environmentalism of the left, uprooted from experience, with—and I'm going to focus on a short story of all things— But I'm going to read the short story kind of politically.
It's a short story by, well, not a very well-known author.
Her name is Sarah Orne Jewett.
So this would be called, you may almost call it secondary literature.
When you talk about American literature, we would talk about, in the 19th century, people like Emerson and Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, obviously the Moby Dick.
And then in the 20th century, of course, a whole slew of others.
But you wouldn't name Sarah Ornn Jewett in that company.
But nevertheless, sometimes by looking at a relatively, quote, minor piece of literature, you can get some insight into a new type of environmentalism.
So this is a story written, by the way, in 1886.
It's called A White Heron.
It's part of Sarah Orne Jewett's collection of short stories.
It's about a young girl named Sylvia who lives, well, she lives in the city, but she's visiting her grandmother in the country.
And by the country here, we mean New England, the area between New Hampshire and Maine, which is kind of where Sarah Orne Jewett grew up.
And so we're talking about farms and cows and huckleberries.
And this young girl just loves the country.
She loves being out there in nature.
She loves nature. And she says, quote, it was a beautiful place to live in and she never would wish to go home.
She almost feels, you may say, at home in nature itself.
Now, as the story goes, one day, the girl is maybe 13 or 14 years old.
We're not told exactly how old she is, but she's just kind of coming into womanhood, you might say.
A young hunter, maybe 21 or 22 years old, shows up and bumps into her and says, oh, do you mind if I come see your house?
I want to ask your parents something.
And she takes the hunter to her grandmother.
And the hunter says, well, look, I'm kind of out here on an expedition.
I'm not just a hunter.
I'm also an ornithologist.
I'm an expert on birds.
I have a bird collection.
I study birds.
I hunt birds, I stuff them, I then...
I preserve them.
I've got this amazing collection.
And I've been on a hunting expedition.
But I want to know if I can stay the night at your house.
And I will be gone on my expedition in the morning.
So the grandmother agrees to put the guy up in the barn.
She says, you can sleep on the husks and feathers.
And... But they begin a conversation, the three of them, the grandmother, the young girl, and the hunter.
And you can tell that the hunter is kind of a nice guy.
He's very interesting.
Of course, he has wide experience.
He knows a lot about nature.
He's also kind of an academic, so he knows particularities about birds and about animals.
Fascinating to the young girl.
And she sort of develops a little bit of a crush on this guy.
Not in a bad way, but just a crush that says that this guy is just really interesting.
I've never met anybody like this.
And the man points out that he has actually been pursuing or chasing a white heron.
He goes, there are no white heron in these parts.
It's a rare bird, and it's a beautiful bird.
And I want this white heron, and I want to hunt it, and I want to preserve it, and I want to stuff it, and I want to add it to my collection.
It means a lot to me.
And so he goes, you know, if someone could help me to find this white heron, I have a lot of money that I'm willing to put down For information that can help me find the heron.
I'm searching for it. I'm going to spend, he says, quote, the whole summer looking for it, if it takes me that to find it.
And Sylvia, the young girl, takes all this in, and she knows that her grandmother's poor, her family is poor, this money would mean a lot to her.
And so the next morning, very early on, Sylvia says, I think I can find the white heron.
And she goes out into the wilderness and she searches.
And of course, she knows it like the back of her hand because she's been there for several weeks now.
And she climbs a very tall tree.
And she sees it. She knew she was going to find it, and she does find it.
And there's the heron spreading out its feathers in all its glory.
And even though it takes off, it comes back to a spot.
And so Sylvia, Sylvie, knows exactly where the white heron is.
And in some ways on the top of the tree, she stretches out her own arms.
She's sort of like the heron herself in the sense that she's She's free.
She's liberated, ultimately, from the ground.
She's up in the air like a bird.
And so she identifies with the white heron.
And the next morning, the hunter comes up a little later that day, and he has breakfast.
And there's a kind of moment of reckoning, because this is the point at which Sylvie can tell him where to find the white heron.
And yet, and this is kind of the point of the story, she thinks about it, she's tempted to do it, but she can't bring herself to do it, and so she doesn't do it.
And so as a result of that, not only do they not get the money that was promised if they were able to find the heron, but this man whom she liked, and would have liked to have seen more of, and would like to have him be more around, basically disappears from their lives forever.
He's gone. And so in later, this is kind of the very last line or two of the story, she thinks back in later life and she wonders, did I make the right decision?
And the story never tells you she did, but I think she did.
And what she's really doing here is, the young girl, is instinctively recognizing that she has an attachment to nature, an attachment to the white heron.
We as humans have an attachment to our world, to our community, to our earth.
And out of that comes our responsibility to guard and to love and to protect it.
Okay, guys, it's time for our mailbox, our question of the day.
I say of the day. I don't do one every day.
But do send in your questions.
I try to do them as often as I can.
It's questiondinesh at gmail.com.
Audio and video questions preferred.
Let's go to today's question.
Listen. Hi Dinesh.
I am originally from Haiti.
Not too long ago, I asked you a question relating to immigrants who hate this country despite being here voluntarily.
I have another question. I moved to Texas from New Jersey May of last year during COVID to get away from the lockdowns and liberals.
At first, I was staying with my brother and his wife in Houston.
Upon my arrival, I was shocked to see how many liberals I was running into in Texas compared to states like Louisiana and Tennessee.
I ended up purchasing a home in a small town in the neighboring Montgomery County, Texas that leans red compared to Harris County.
I came to the conclusion that liberals may hate us, but they seem to love following us.
That is until I met a woman at my church who was telling me that her two daughters that she put through college refused to speak with her because they think that she is a white supremacist for supporting Donald Trump.
Do you think that there is a liberal migration or conversion in Texas?
Thanks, Dinesh. I love your show.
Wow, there's a lot there, and I'm just going to touch on a couple of things which are actually implicit in your question itself.
The first thing is the phenomenon that even conservative families, and here you could talk about Texan families, but you could talk also about Oklahoma families, send their kids off to college where they become propagandized, and I would have to say to some degree corrupted, by their professors.
How do their professors corrupt them?
By and large, by making it seem like their parents are yahoos, their parents are culturally backward, but they, the professors, are sophisticated.
So the professors are able to use a kind of vocabulary and style that basically says, you know, you're a...
You're a backward small-town country person, but now that you've come to, and it could be even Texas A&M, or it could be certainly UT Austin, or of course it could be an East Coast school, the idea here is that you become enlightened and sophisticated by becoming a liberal.
The other thing to remember is that although we talk about red America, there are lots of red people in the blue states.
So if you take, for example, Illinois, you go outside of Chicago, you find a lot of red counties.
Now, the population concentration is in Chicago, and that's how, ultimately, Illinois leans blue.
It leans blue because there are more blues than reds.
But similarly, in Texas, we have We're good to go.
Look, I don't think Texas is going to go blue anytime soon, but it is a fight, and we have to make sure that Republicans protect Texas values, but also keep winning over conservative-leaning Hispanics who have nevertheless been habitually Democratic.
Pull them into the Republican camp where they truly belong, and in that way, you won't have to worry about, and I won't have to worry about, and Debbie won't have to worry about, Texas.
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