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Aug. 19, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
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FALLEN ANGEL Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep157
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How do you lose a war in a manner that actually strengthens your enemy?
I want to talk about how to win a war and how to lose one.
What does Obama have to do with the Taliban's return to power?
I'll tell you. And Gold Star mom, Karen Vaughn, the mother of fallen Navy SEAL Erin Vaughn, joins me to talk about the fateful downing of the SEAL Team 6 helicopter that killed her son.
On August 6, 2011, in Afghanistan.
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.
The scenes of flight, disaster, humiliation at the Kabul Airport are seared on my and probably many other people's minds.
Here is an image that I don't think we'll forget anytime soon.
Take a look at this.
We're talking about exiting a battlefield, exiting a scene in such a way that we are leaving our people behind.
We are leaving all kinds of equipment and assets behind.
We are making our enemies stronger in the process.
This takes a special kind of incompetence, if not malice, to achieve this.
Think about this. If you can think of terrorism around the world as a kind of Olympics, It's like the Taliban have come from behind.
They've come from nowhere, and they're now in first place.
ISIS is like a distant second.
Al-Qaeda is not even in the running.
Now, you know, if the Taliban gave a victory speech, I wonder if they'll thank, you know, I wish to thank my supporters in the Biden administration who gave us all the training and all the equipment that we needed to get to the finish line and win the gold medal.
Wow. I mean, what an indictment.
Now, how is it possible that this disaster occurred in this way?
I mean, not just in the sense of the evacuation, but the war in general.
The Afghan army was 300,000 strong.
The Taliban, about 80,000 strong.
Now, the stronger side, the 300,000, was supported by the strongest military in the world, the best equipment in the world, over 20 years.
How do you lose a war under those conditions?
Well... The first thing I have to tell you, and I kind of hate to break it to you, is that the Afghan army was not 300,000 strong.
These were what, in fact, on the basis in Afghanistan, were sometimes called ghost soldiers.
They were made-up numbers, made-up people by corrupt Afghan commanders who were collecting salaries.
Think of it. The Americans didn't pay the Afghans directly.
We paid the commanders who paid the soldiers, many of whom, alas, did not even exist.
So this gives you a sense of how a war can become a fiction.
And you're fielding, in theory, these soldiers, but in fact, there are no soldiers to speak of.
Now, to win a war, and you can kind of get this from any of the great writings on war, Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, even a healthy dose of Machiavelli.
To win a war, you need, number one, sufficient force.
We did have that. Number two, you need the will to persist.
And for a time, we did have that.
Number three, you need a sense of purpose.
What is this war trying to achieve?
As I will argue, we did not have that.
Four, wars must be brief.
This is a critical point.
In fact, it was Machiavelli who said, I'm not quoting him, the Romans said, It's time to establish the new regime and it's time to essentially enforce the peace.
Notice that the American war in Afghanistan is the opposite.
Instead of it being short and big, it was sort of long and small.
Now, why? You have these generals, people like Milley, but also at the lower level, H.R. McMaster, you remember, was in Afghanistan, General Petraeus, and all these guys are supposedly our best and brightest.
These are people who supposedly have had the best kind of education.
But I think, unfortunately, and General Milley's recent comments are kind of a sign of this, instead of reading Sun Tzu, they're reading like Ibram Kendi.
Instead of reading Machiavelli, they're reading like the 1619 Project.
Evidently, they have forgotten, or if they ever knew, the very basics of how you fight a war.
Now, Machiavelli says somewhere, I always thought this was a very insightful comment by Machiavelli, whenever an enemy makes an obvious blunder...
Always suspect deception.
In other words, don't think your enemy is all that stupid.
When they do something, and it seems like it makes no sense, they're obviously carrying out a strategic plan.
Now, let me give you an example of how that applies to this situation.
The Taliban are showing up, and they showed up, to meet with the Biden administration for, quote, peace talks.
Now, think about it for a minute.
The Taliban are winning the war.
They're capturing one city after another.
They're encircling Kabul.
Why would they want to have peace talks?
Why would you want to share power with somebody when you can beat them outright?
Why would you want to draw in an MMA fight when you've got the other guy on the canvas?
The answer is, you don't.
There's no reason to have the peace talks.
And therefore, the peace talks were a charade.
The peace talks were not for peace.
They were to convince these senile buffoons on the Biden side, hey, listen, you know, we want to lull you into a sense of calm and distract your attention as we gear up for our final blitzkrieg.
So from the beginning, the Taliban have showed a kind of single-mindedness of purpose.
Now, contrast this with the United States.
Now, very early on, I mentioned this yesterday, it was Condoleezza Rice in the Bush administration who said, we don't want to play whack-a-mole with the Taliban, with the terrorists.
We don't want to go whack them and then leave and then when they come back and start planning their shenanigans again, whack them again.
And the question I want to ask is, why not?
It seems to me that that would, in fact, have been A vastly preferable strategy to the one we actually employed, which was deploy all these troops at huge expense, not only create a base, but create a base of corruption.
Essentially, what happens is the military contractors are salivating.
They're making money left and right.
And then you start having the NGOs, the women's rights groups, the education groups, they're all swarming into Afghanistan.
Oh yeah, we started 71 schools.
Give us $85 million.
Oh yeah, we're making sure that women's voices are heard.
Give us money. And here's the U.S. government foolishly in a culture that doesn't even understand.
Meeting with all these tribal guys and basically sitting around in a quote, shura.
Oh yeah, it's very interesting.
This is called a shura.
And so what you have is this madness has been going on for two decades.
Instead of the very simple, just think of what the British or the Romans would have done in Afghanistan.
Something completely different from this kind of disgraceful, incompetent performance by a group of fools who don't even know what they're doing at home, let alone abroad.
So this is how you lose a war.
You lose your sense of purpose.
You don't really even know why you're there.
You utter meaningless phrases, development, human rights.
Notice the Chinese don't do this.
They have a very simple transactional model.
That's what they're going to apply right now in Afghanistan.
They're going to mosey in there and basically tell the Afghans, listen, we're going to build a railway.
It's going to go right through Afghanistan.
It's going to create... 52,000 Afghan jobs, and we're going to basically give you material to be able to complete this.
Of course, the Chinese have their own purposes, so the Chinese know what they're doing, the Taliban knows what it's doing, and their relationship is based on mutual self-interest, not a bunch of pompous phrases and ridiculous clichés, which are ultimately nothing more than a form of self-delusion.
So I think at the end, what you really see is that we have a globalist elite, That doesn't know anything about itself, doesn't know very much about how to fight, doesn't know very much about how to conduct a war, doesn't know very much about Afghanistan, doesn't know very much about anything.
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There was a pastor many years ago who said that whenever something truly evil happens in the world, look carefully, Satan's fingerprints are all over it.
And there's a kind of a political equivalent to that.
Whenever something really bad happens for the United States, even domestically or internationally, Obama's fingerprints are usually all over it.
And that is the case here, even with the return of the Taliban, believe it or not.
Now, you might remember several years ago, 2014, I believe it was, That Obama arranged the Bergdahl trade.
Think of it. One military deserter, Bo Bergdahl, is returned in exchange for a group, I believe five seasoned Taliban commanders, one of whom was at Gitmo.
Listen to Obama talking about this.
The Taliban, who were being held in Guantanamo, Now, Obama carefully hedges his remarks and he says, you know, these five Taliban commanders are not going to be sent back to Afghanistan.
They're going to Qatar, where we will be keeping an eye on them.
Of course, no eye was ever kept on them.
Qatar is playing a dirty double game.
They work hand-in-hand with Iran.
They work hand-in-hand with the Taliban.
In fact, the Taliban leadership has been sitting in Qatar and is returning from Qatar to take full power in Kabul.
Now, one of these five guys is a guy named Kairullah Karikwah.
And this guy, very seasoned battlefield commander, very bad guy.
It surfaced recently when he appeared with a group of Taliban to meet Biden's envoy to Afghanistan, a guy named Zalmay Khalilzad.
So Zalmay Khalilzad is representing America, and here on the other side of the table is a Taliban guy who happened to be one of the exact five guys that supposedly Obama sent back, but sent back in a manner that he would be under constant supervision.
Not causing any trouble whatsoever, except he happens to be one of the key guys leading the assault on Kabul.
Now, this guy was also on television recently, the same guy, the Gitmo release guy, talking about how he was in Gitmo and how America has, quote, been oppressing our people for 20 years.
He is believed by many to be the mastermind of regime change in Afghanistan.
Think about the significance of this.
We've got a guy in our own captivity.
We let him go. And this is part, by the way, of a Gitmo catch-and-release plan.
He's not the only guy.
Just recently, Biden released a prisoner, the accused terrorist Abdul Latif Nasser.
And there's a whole bunch of other prisoners, by the way, with left-wing civil rights attorneys representing them, petitioning for all of them to be released on civil rights.
They haven't really had a proper trial.
They haven't been convicted by a jury.
So the bottom line of it is that these thugs...
These Islamic radicals are getting out.
And this is just a conspicuous example of a guy who gets out.
And essentially spearheads the final assault that has led to the fall of Kabul, the humiliation of America.
And I think Obama somewhere is sitting back smiling and thinking, wow, you know, I was able to, even out of power, looking back on all the things I did, look at the mortal blows I've been able to inflict on my own country.
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How do you change hearts and minds in another country?
In this case, we're not talking about any other country.
We're not changing hearts and minds, let's say, in France, which would be difficult enough.
The obstinate French, why would you wish to change your hearts and minds?
But to try to do this in Afghanistan, of all places, and yet this was the shared mantra, bipartisan mantra, over the past 20 years.
The Bush people talked about the world, we're there to change hearts and minds.
The Obama people talked about it, we're there to change hearts and minds.
This went on and on and on.
But I've been thinking a little bit about how you actually do this.
Now... In a recent book, Catherine Boo, the writer for the Washington Post, spent some time in an Asian Indian slum, and she describes in great detail what happens inside a slum and what the people are like, and you begin to realize you are in a completely different world.
And the idea that modern Americans, using maybe a combination of military force and maybe starting some schools and publishing some newspapers or websites, the idea that you can take those people, even a small number of them, and change their hearts and minds is beyond stupid.
I mean, it requires a special level of idiocy to say things like this.
Now... I'm not saying that mines can never be changed.
Yeah, the British did change mines in India.
But first of all, they did it very carefully.
Most of India they left alone.
The British model in India was leave India alone.
And so if there was a local sort of head man or the so-called, it was called the Panchayat system of local governance, the British said, keep doing that.
If there was a local king running an Indian kingdom, the British goes, keep doing that.
So the British, in no way, were trying to change the mores or the diet or the underlying beliefs or the religion or any of that of the Indian people at all.
And in fact, even things like democracy only came to India...
After the British left, the Indians today have a British-style parliamentary system and a British-style court system.
But let's remember, the British were in India physically for 150 years.
Englishmen moved to India, ruled the country from India itself.
That's how it was done, and only over a long period of time.
Now, historically, we have people who have changed hearts and minds, but sometimes the hearts and minds that were changed were not of the conquered people, but of the conqueror.
It's famously said that in taking Greece captive, the Romans became the captives of the Greeks.
In other words, they recognized the superiority of Greek culture.
They began to really worship the Greek gods, read Greek literature, practice or imitate Greek philosophy.
So changing hearts and minds is a complicated business.
The Jesuits were able to change hearts and minds in China very slowly, but the way they did that is they took mechanical clocks that the Chinese had never seen and they used the clocks to demonstrate the technological superiority of the West.
The Chinese then said, well, show us your maps and show us what else you've got.
And so a dialogue begins to emerge.
And even then, once the Jesuits left, you could ask, what did the Jesuits really leave What is the footprint? There are Christians, for example, in China, but not all that many.
We were not. The Jesuits were not able to change the hearts and minds of the entire country.
In general, you can change hearts and minds by example.
Mother Teresa produced a whole bunch of converts, Hindu converts to Christianity in Calcutta.
How did she do that? She did that by putting on a sari and giving up all her possessions and moving to India and hugging lepers on the street.
And so through personal holiness and personal example, she gets people to be struck by a sense of wonder and they go, wow, there must be something to, what is motivating her to do that?
Maybe we need to find out more about the religion that she practices and the God that she worships.
So this is how you actually do it.
Now, ironically, we're out there to change the hearts and minds of the Afghans, and by and large, the Afghans, and this would be even more true of the Taliban, are, in a sense, stronger believers than we are.
Think about it. These radical Muslims...
I saw an interview with a Taliban guy, one of the Taliban judges, and they were talking about women's rights.
He said, we'll protect women's rights within the limits of Islam.
And what does within the limits of Islam mean?
We'll protect women's rights as long as it says to do it in the Quran.
He points to the Quran and he goes, all the answers are in there.
All the answers are in there.
Now, how many Christians even today, even if they give lip service to this, believe that holding the Bible...
All the answers are in there, and when I'm faced with a problem, I need to look in there to get my answer.
There's nowhere else really to look.
That's what the Taliban guy was saying, and that's probably what a majority of Afghans believe.
So, what's going on here is that even if you're able to, say, impose democracy in Afghanistan, democracy means that the majority of Afghans are going to vote for, by and large, things like Sharia law.
They're going to vote for Islamic schools.
They're going to vote for the Islamic way of life.
Why? Because they firmly believe in those things.
So, the Muslims are more secure in their beliefs, by and large.
than Americans are in our beliefs.
And that is even more true of American progressives who have sort of lost confidence in their own civilization, don't believe in their own founding documents, and moved away from Christianity.
So here you have, you may say, a group of people who don't really know what they stand for.
And on the other hand, you've got a religion, Islam, that has still, to this day, 1,300 years later, not lost the force of its original religion.
And we're going to try to change their hearts and minds.
This is a Don Quixote enterprise.
This is basically charging a windmill.
This is basically mistaking what century you live in.
This is getting things wrong in a manner that doesn't even recognize a distinction between what's wrong and what's right.
This has been a very foolish and foolhardy enterprise.
Unfortunately, we're going to pay dearly for it.
And maybe the lesson we take from this is let's not worry too much about changing the hearts and minds of other people.
If we're going to fix our country, we may want to change some hearts and minds here at home.
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I'm really pleased and what an auspicious time it is to have joining the podcast Karen Vaughn.
Karen is a Gold Star mom.
She's the mother of Erin Vaughn, who was the Navy SEAL, the SEAL Team 6 soldier, killed in Afghanistan in the Tangi River Valley.
This was on August 6, 2011, the shooting down of the Chinook Army.
And Karen, thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
By the way, Karen's also the best-selling author of World Changer, A Mother's Story in Service, and her family has a non-profit that she began in honor of Aaron.
It's called Operation 300, Operation 300.
Karen, once again, thanks for joining me.
Let me start by just having you talk a little bit about Aaron.
It takes a special kind of kid to go into the military, become a Navy SEAL, become a leader of the SEALs, and talk a little bit about the son you raised and what he was like.
Absolutely. I'm glad you asked that question.
Aaron was a kid who, I have to tell everybody, you don't even know his story unless you know this part.
Aaron gave his life to Christ at a very young age.
And because of that, we believe he had a discernment that was very uncharacteristic of a young child.
He just... He always understood right from wrong.
And he had like this core drive to defeat evil.
Just like you, Dinesh.
Just like you.
Just this core in him.
He was never afraid to confront evil.
He was never afraid to acknowledge it.
And I believe the reason so many of us don't want to acknowledge evil is It's because if we do, then we're confronted with having to do something about it.
And so most of us just pretend it doesn't exist, right?
But that was never Aaron. Even from a very young boy, he was going to do something about evil.
He would tell anyone who would listen to him that he was going to be a Navy SEAL. I didn't know what a Navy SEAL was at the time.
His father had talked to him about it one day when they were working out on the farm.
And so he conceived this notion that this is what God had called him to do.
And he followed that dream.
It anchored him in every decision he made through life.
He made in preparation to become a SEAL when he got out of high school.
That's all he ever dreamed of.
Well, his senior year of high school, he obliterated the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee, not once, but twice.
The second time that they went in to repair it surgically, the surgeon came out and said there was nothing he could do to fix it.
And that Aaron would, I quote, be handicapped the rest of his life and never do anything physical again without the use of a special brace.
So this devastated Aaron Vaughn, this kid who'd known his whole life that he was supposed to serve his country and he was supposed to fight and get the bad guys and now he'd been benched And so he went to college, got a degree, you know, just took a different course with his life, went through a great period of depression over that, and then 9-11 came.
And I don't know how to explain what happened in his heart, the rage that all of us felt as we watched those towers crumble, and we watched the Pentagon be struck, and we heard about those 40 passengers on board Flight 93 that stood up and took their place in history and said, not today,
to the terrorists. And something turned in him, like, honestly, he came back and said it was over Todd Beamer's battle cry, let's roll, and And he came home on his 21st birthday and he sat down at the dinner table and told his father and I that he'd joined the SEAL Challenge Program.
And so after just a few seconds of stunned silence, his dad said, well, son, you'll never make it.
What about your knee? And he said, Dad, I've always known that this was what God created me to do with my life.
I'm going to make it.
And he sailed through the SEAL Challenge.
They never knew about his knee.
He couldn't tell them or they wouldn't have let him in the program.
So it was a very miraculous thing that he did, an accomplishment he made.
And as you know, made it all the way to SEAL Team 6.
And that's when they found out about the knee surgeries.
And I just have to say that Aaron and I had this thing we did all through his life where we would sit and talk late into the night when everybody else went to bed.
It was our favorite time. And we would start about 10.30 and With what's going on in your life and finish about 2.30 or 3 in the morning.
But every single time that we had one of those conversations throughout his tenure as a Navy SEAL, at some point he would say, Mom, can you believe God let me do this?
That's the way he viewed his service.
He was so honored to be part of the United States military and to fight for his country.
Just so honored.
Now, here you have a guy who's, you know, I think you can hardly disagree, an American hero.
I mean, you're to be commended for raising a son like that.
And here's a guy tragically shot down with other Navy SEALs in a Chinook helicopter in 2011.
Now, this would be tragic enough, but it appears, and one of the factors, Debbie and I watched, we told you the film Fallen Angel.
One of the factors was that there was the capacity on the part of the United States to hit back, and that might have prevented the shooting down of this helicopter and all those unnecessary deaths.
And my question is, do you think that our hour here, meaning the United States' interpretation of the rules of engagement, do you think that was a critical factor?
And had it not been for those rules of engagement limitations, that your son might actually have made it?
Well, actually, I know that to be true.
We have enough documentation.
We've spoken with enough people who were in the airspace that night.
The AC-130 fires commander reached out to us about three years after the shoot down.
And I remember our first phone call.
She said these words to me.
I'd never met the woman.
She had reached out to me on Facebook and asked if she could talk to us.
And these were the first things she said to me.
She said, I have not slept a night since August 6, 2011 without taking medication to sleep.
I have not eaten a meal since August 6, 2011 without taking medication to digest it.
I finally told my family that I would rather spend the rest of my life in Leavenworth than continue knowing the secrets that are being withheld from your family.
Those were her words to me.
And that launched an entire relationship where we gave her the investigative report that the military had given us at the debriefing in October of 2011.
And she started marking Dinesh lines that were not true, things they had lied about.
And we have three gigantic binders full of 1,250 pages of documentation from that investigation.
And I would dare say there's at least 400 tabs where she marked and said, that's not true.
That didn't happen.
And one of the things about the rules of engagement was they had been watching from the air, this AC-130 gunship had been watching Taliban members run from the lower part of the Tangier River Valley and bound and increase in troop numbers to the north part of the Tangier River Valley that night after they'd been engaged with the Ranger unit in the south area of the valley.
And so as they were bounding forward eight times, Eight separate times the AC-130 gunship asked to shoot the men that had previously engaged the Rangers.
Remember this. They had opened fire on them.
Apaches had already killed a few of them, but a few more of them escaped and started bounding north to set themselves up to shoot down the chopper, we would find out later.
Eight times they were asked to kill those men, and eight times they were denied because of rules of engagement because, and I quote, we were told as families in our debriefing, In Virginia, in October of 2011, we were told we didn't shoot them because we wanted to win their hearts and minds.
Then we were told that the men who actually, they actually watched men load cylindrical objects on top of a culotte right beside the valley and they asked to shoot them.
They told them they were moving weapons to the top of the culotte right beside the landing zone for this chopper.
They were again denied.
After the RPGs were fired and 30 Americans were on the ground burning in a flame that they described as it lit up the sky like the sun, they were still denied returning We're good to see weapons returning fire on those men who fired the RPGs because of rules of engagement.
They were told there could be friendlies in the building below where they fired them and we wanted to win their hearts and minds so we didn't want any, what am I trying to say?
Return fire. And we didn't want any civilian casualties so we weren't allowed to return fire.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
The rules of engagement. I talked to so many warfighters in the aftermath of that who said things that were so horrific to me.
One, I just have to say to your listeners, this was the most bizarre thing I ever heard.
He said, I planned on retiring from the military.
I had spent my whole childhood knowing that I was going to serve in the military for my entire adult life.
And retire from the military.
And he said, So basically, some of my men had to die before we were allowed to return fire.
That's how ludicrous it got.
I've talked to so many parents who lost sons and daughters fighting under those rules of engagement as I lost Aaron.
It was a... It all started in 2009, Dinesh.
From the start of the war in Afghanistan, which was in 2001, until 2009, we had lost 630 American forces.
When the rules of engagement changed and we implemented the coin strategy in Afghanistan, the Hearts and Minds campaign, That number skyrocketed to over 2,000 and nobody was talking about it.
The wounded in action in those first seven and a half years was 2,648.
In the next three and a half years under the coin strategy, the hearts and minds campaign, that number was 18,000 and nobody was talking about it.
How horrific. We'll take a short pause.
When we come back, I'm going to ask Karen Vaughn about what's going on in Afghanistan now and whether or not it is writ large simply a landscape that resembles in a bigger scale what has happened, what happened to her son and his helicopter way back in 2011.
We'll be right back. In their recent budget proposal, the White House Budget Office forecast inflation for 2021 at 2.1%.
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I'm talking to Gold Star mom, Karen Vaughn.
We're talking about Fallen Angel.
Her son, Aaron Vaughn, killed with other Navy SEALs and others when their Chinook helicopter was shot down by the Taliban, August 6, 2011.
Karen, I want to talk about Afghanistan today, but before I do that, You said something very interesting, which was that there was kind of a shift that happened in, I think, the early year of Obama, right?
Obama comes in in January of 2009.
I don't think it was the case, was it, from 2001 to 2009 that you had these rules of engagement that required you to be basically pelted with bullets before you could draw your own holster and fire back.
So would you say that Obama and the Obama administration were...
The ones who made this change?
Oh, absolutely. The Obama administration implemented this in March of 2009.
They hated the way that the war was being fought, and we know why.
And everything changed in March of 2009, and we began losing American warfighters en masse.
The numbers are staggering of what happened in the next few years over there.
Now, there's some debate today about whether the Afghan war was an unwinnable war and so on.
But I mean, before we decide that question, one issue that you're raising that seems to be very pertinent is, how can a war be?
Before you decide it was unwinnable, you have to ask, are we giving it everything we got?
And if we're going, you know, as Rush Limbaugh used to sometimes joke, with one hand tied behind our back...
How can you even say that this was an unwinnable war?
You might have been able to win it if you didn't tie your own arms and legs before you got into it, right?
Well, right. And as a matter of fact, anybody who was there fighting that war will tell you that it had been won by 2002.
They had demolished the enemy by 2002.
And then we began nation building.
And I've never been opposed to the nation building if we had had a plan.
I'm honored that little girls got to grow up in relative freedom and spent the first 20 years of their life.
You know, these young women that are 20 years old now We're good to go.
How did that happen?
And in my opinion, people need to be held responsible, Dinesh.
This war was a victory that turned into a defeat of unspeakable proportions under horrific military and government leadership.
And people need to be held accountable.
There are 7,000 young Americans dead.
Through this conflict, there are tens and twenties of thousands of men and women injured and maimed for the rest of their lives.
And I know so many families personally, it's something you can't like overlook that when a person comes home with a traumatic brain injury or missing limbs, the entire family It's affected.
The ripples just extend so far.
So we've had a massive amount of our population affected by this 20-year war.
An all-volunteer military in the longest war in America's history.
And this is how we repay them, to leave that war with no exit strategy.
You know, as I listen to you, Karen, you're so emotional and you're so animated and you're talking about something right out of your own experience.
Now, I want to contrast this with the recent interview between Stephanopoulos and Biden, where Stephanopoulos was saying, look at all these desperate people fleeing to the airport, hanging out of airplanes, their lives at stake.
And Biden goes... Well, that was four or five days ago.
As if to say, you know what?
Why are you bringing that up five days ago?
Man, that's old news. Let's stay with what happened yesterday.
First of all, it wasn't four or five days ago.
It was two days ago.
But you've got this gaping, mumbling, bumbling character.
And I'm very worried that he is coming to symbolize the feebleness of America itself.
But you're saying it didn't have to be that way.
Or just even the evilness of America itself, to make a statement like that.
But we all remember, don't we, what Hillary Clinton said after Benghazi in 2012.
What difference at this point does it make?
This is the same sentiment.
Like, okay, people died.
It's a tragedy. It's horrific.
But what difference does it make now?
That's old news. Nobody needs to be held responsible for it.
it. Nothing needs to change in our system so this doesn't happen again. And I just want to say, for the record, that the press conferences I've seen with Millie and with John Kirby and with Gary Reid have been disgusting.
Talk about my communication with the military family and the Gold Star families across this nation.
We have all been outraged.
John Kirby says now, oh, if the Taliban don't do what we say as we're trying to tell Americans to come to us instead of us go get them, they'll pay.
Oh, really? Because every line that we've marked in the sand so far has been I mean, how ludicrous is this?
They still keep shoveling it out as if we're going to believe them.
This is failed leadership of epic proportion and people need to be held responsible or it will continue happening.
We have just experienced Vietnam all over again.
I mean, the real tragedy, Karen, is that you hear these empty words.
We're going to hold them accountable.
We demand this.
We deplore that.
But it's clear that there's no follow-up.
There's nothing that they intend to do.
They even said that with regard to getting Americans out, we'll kind of wait as long as the clock is still running.
What clock? Who sets the clock?
The Taliban? So you have this helpless feeling.
And it's not that we're powerless.
I mean, the Taliban are now moving into the courtrooms and parliamentary buildings.
So we have targets. If we're looking for Taliban people to pulverize, they're right there.
Some of them are actually being interviewed on CNN, so perfect time to pulverize the Taliban.
We know where they are. But you know and I know they're not going to do that.
They're going to run away with their tail between their legs.
And I couldn't agree with you more.
This is leadership that has failed on a scale that I don't even know how to describe.
And they're going to take the narrative back to COVID, back to vaccines.
Can you imagine this? We've got 10,000 to 15,000 Americans over there trying to get to HKIA. Why did we shut down Bagram Air Base?
I mean, has anybody asked that question?
Why did we do that when we were going to exit?
Why didn't we keep a lily pad over there that we could operate out of, that we would have safety in, that we could bring Americans into before we planned our exit, instead of saying, hey, if you can get to the airport, we'll get you out of here.
Can you even imagine this?
Are our SIVs over there?
This is... I know that...
I'm sorry. I get high-pitched when I get upset.
But this is an extraordinary failure.
I can't even believe this has happened in 20 years.
20 years to plan an exit strategy.
20 years.
And this is how we pull out of Afghanistan.
It's just unthinkable.
That's the only word I can keep coming up with, Dinesh.
It's the perfect word.
Karen, thank you so much for coming on.
I really appreciate it.
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I talked a little earlier in this podcast about the quixotic attempt by the US government to change hearts and minds in Afghanistan.
I want to talk now about changing hearts and minds in America, because very interestingly, the left has been trying to do that, and look how relentlessly they pursue it for the past several decades.
They're using their dominance, the left is of the culture, to change our hearts and minds, and look how hard it is for them to do that.
This election was the most secure election in U.S. history.
Meh. But they're trying, and they're trying not only with relentless propaganda, you know, absolute falsehoods.
All claims about voter fraud are completely baseless.
They're trying with censorship, so bludgeoning, bullying, propaganda, and still all kinds of force being applied through institutions.
We're going to get fired from your job if you say that.
And yet people are...
Inwardly, unconvinced.
We're not convinced at all.
In fact, we see their forcible measures as merely a ruse to hide something on their side.
But you have to admire the effort because when it comes to...
I mean, if the left was covering...
If Trump had done this Afghan disaster and the left was covering it, they would never leave it.
It would go on for months. It would be articles and specials and covers of Time magazine, and there would be resolutions in the Congress to denounce Trump. Notice, I'm not even aware of Republican resolutions to denounce Biden.
Not even one. Meanwhile, the left would be putting out books, and they'd be putting out Netflix specials, and they'd be having all kinds of interminable activism on the street, demonstrations to protest the incompetence of Trump.
Bring our people home!
Go get them, Mr. Trump!
They never let up.
Meanwhile, if I talk about Afghanistan for four days, some conservatives are like, well, you know, you're kind of a little obsessed with Afghanistan.
If you made your point, you made your point.
You might want to leave it. People probably got the idea.
No, they haven't got the idea.
People rarely get the idea unless you approach a topic from one angle and another angle and again and again, and you emphasize the main point constantly.
I mean, think about what a pastor does on Sunday.
The point is always the same.
Jesus saves. But look at the demand of the pastor to always come at it from a different angle, have different examples, different biblical citations to support the idea.
You're always circling back to the same point, and yet, think of how little of that main point actually gets through in terms of the guy leaving church and going, listen...
This doctrine has now got to guide my life in everything I do, everything I think, everything I say from this moment on.
No! You've got to go back next Sunday.
Oh, wow! Oh, yeah, that's right!
Oh, yeah, Jesus saves! So, the point here is that a drumbeat is something that the right needs to learn from.
We need to do it ourselves.
If I think about my movies, for example...
You know, where sometimes we will pick up a theme in one movie, we'll introduce it in one movie, we then develop it in a second movie, and then we reinforce it with new examples and new evidence in a third film.
And I think of this on topic after topic.
Number one, the anti-colonialism of Obama.
Number two, the racism of the Democratic Party.
Number three, the so-called big switch, the party switch sides.
Well, so we have to Sort of deconstruct these things and provide all the evidence.
And really, very interestingly, and I'm thinking here a little bit of the sort of intellectual conservatives and how they respond.
And I'm thinking of, you know, when I first introduced the idea of the antiquism of Obama, but this would be true of all these main themes, there are always three stages of reaction.
The first stage is...
What? Obama's an anti-colonialist?
I thought he was a civil rights guy.
It's like, we don't really get this, Dinesh.
Why are you even talking about this?
Why are you making Obama sound like he's some sort of an African, some sort of an alien, as if he doesn't really belong to America?
So the first stage in comprehension.
The second stage, grudging acceptance.
Yeah, we sort of see a little bit of an anti-colonial streak in Obama.
Now, of course, it's not the whole Obama.
You've got to realize we have to strictly qualify what you just said.
There are many other examples to me.
The second stage is kind of like, you're half right.
And the third stage is, not only is it obvious, but we thought of it first.
It's kind of like, oh, Dinesh, I mean, yeah, obviously Obama's anti-colonialist.
Everybody knows that.
I've been saying that for years.
So, with all our topics, the reason...
I'm only emphasizing...
Are you referring to me?
Kind of, a little bit.
But... My point is this.
It is the need to reinforce an argument, to drive it home in many different ways.
We conservatives must learn from this because if hearts and minds can be changed at all, it is done not just by a single kind of eloquent statement of the truth, But the truth constantly supported and reinforced with a lot of battlements behind it.
We've got to do to the other side what they are trying, in effect, to do to us.
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I want to begin a series of segments.
I'll probably be doing this over several days.
In which I examine Shakespeare and We live in an age where diversity is kind of a mantra.
We have to be a diverse society.
Diversity contributes to enhanced performance in intellectual life, more effective organization of corporations.
Diversity is kind of like the prerequisite for American success.
And of course, one of the reasons we read great works and we read classics is they help us to understand their time and place.
But they also help us to turn a mirror onto ourselves.
They provide a kind of external critique by people who don't necessarily share our assumptions.
And they point to problems and things that we're doing, where we take something for granted and it turns out not to be the case at all.
Now, Shakespeare is an inexhaustible source of wisdom.
I mean, this is a guy, you could devote a lifetime to studying Shakespeare and never finish the project in terms of just things that you can learn, not just about Elizabethan England, but about human nature and about the cosmos and about characters and the diversity of human experience and death and suffering and humor and love and all kinds of things.
Now, Shakespeare, as it turns out, is very interested.
In fact, he is an embodiment.
His work is an embodiment of diversity, but it's a diversity of a certain kind.
And I want to speak in general terms about Shakespeare and diversity.
And later, I'm going to zoom into two of Shakespeare's plays that most specifically consider the type of diversity that we see emphasized in America.
Today, we emphasize when we say diversity, we don't just mean diversity in general.
We're not talking about, say, diversity of ideas or diversity of religious experiences.
We're talking about racial diversity, diversity of national origin, ethnic diversity, perhaps diversity of religion.
Let's avoid Islamophobia.
Now, Shakespeare, as it turns out, in two of his plays considers very specifically these forms of diversity.
He considers racial or ethnic diversity in Othello.
And he considers religious differences, specifically the difference between a Jew and Christians in The Merchant of Venice.
So I'll be moving to consider those plays separately.
But here I just want to talk about diversity in general and the incredible diversity, by which I mean the varied abundance of Shakespeare.
Look at his diversity, first of all, of locations, geographical diversity.
He has plays that are set in ancient Rome.
Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra.
He has plays set in Italy, Romeo and Juliet, in Verona, the Merchant of Venice, of course in Venice.
He sets plays in late medieval England, the history plays for the most part, Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV, Henry V. He has Scotland, Macbeth, he has Denmark, Hamlet.
He has imaginary places and islands, the Tempest, as you like it.
Look at Shakespeare's diversity of genres, the kind of intellectual diversity of his work.
He has histories.
He has comedies.
He has tragedies.
He has romance. He writes in all genres.
And in fact, he is Outstanding in all genres.
Now, very interestingly, each of these genres, Shakespeare makes his own.
His histories aren't really pure histories.
He isn't just telling, this is what happened to Richard III. Richard III is an embodiment of something.
Shakespeare is getting to some deep problem of character, or problem of tyranny, or problem of secession.
What to do when a really good king has a really foolish and incompetent son, who is nevertheless entitled to To take over the throne.
How does a country handle that?
So Shakespeare is dealing with what you could call the problems of kingship, the problems of history, and this is the subject of the so-called history plays.
And then in tragedies, Shakespeare deals with different types of tragedy, not just the tragedy of a kingdom.
That would be, for example, Macbeth, That would be King Lear where the whole kingdom is rent and divided because the king made a horrible choice in who should get the kingdom.
He gives it to his two most ungrateful daughters.
But then we turn to Othello, a very different kind of tragedy.
The kingdom is not at stake.
The kingdom is actually secure.
But this is a domestic tragedy about a man, a dark-skinned man, Othello, who wrongly suspects his wife of adultery.
He kills her. It's a domestic tragedy, a very different kind of tragedy.
Shakespeare has the whole territory covered.
And then Shakespeare loves fairy tales, and he's got romances and comedies, and even, in a sense, tragedies.
The Merchant of Venice is a really good example, because is it a romance?
Is it a comedy? It's got very funny aspects to it, but it also is a tragedy.
Look what happens to Shylock in the end.
So, the Merchant of Venice, in a sense, travels across genres, and yet there's a sort of fairy tale aspect to it, which I'll get into when I discuss the play.
And then we look at the diversity of characters in Shakespeare.
The difference between Shakespeare on the one hand, and let's say Milton and Dante on the other, is Milton and Dante have a point of view.
They're coming at it from a sort of defined angle.
You know where they're coming from, from the very beginning.
You know who the good guys and the bad guys are.
Well, with Shakespeare, it's not like that.
One of the great Shakespeare scholars coined the phrase, gentle will.
And what he means by this is Shakespeare is kind of invisible.
Every character is Shakespeare.
Shakespeare puts himself so much into each character that that character, in a sense, springs to life and speaks for himself or herself.
And Shakespeare's hand, it's almost like God's hand, is invisibly present.
But nowhere evident.
Never is Shakespeare really speaking in his own names.
Not to say that Shakespeare doesn't have a moral universe.
He totally does.
There are certain things that Shakespeare always affirms.
Love is always good.
Marital love is always better.
Disobedience to parents is almost always severely punished.
There is a moral order in the universe that is physically mirrored in the moral order of nature.
In subsequent segments, I'm going to sort of zoom in to Shakespeare's two, I'm going to call them his diversity, even though he's diverse in these ways all over the place, where he talks about our type of diversity, Othello and the Merchant of Venice.
And one thing to note before I close is that in both those plays...
You find the outsider, Othello in one case, and Shylock in the other, come to a very bad end.
And what Shakespeare seems to be telling us is that there is some problem deep in the heart of diversity, some problem that we should be aware of.
We're trying to create this diverse society.
The project, Shakespeare seems to suggest, is problematic and perhaps even dangerous.
And when we look more closely at the plays, we're going to kind of find out why.
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