Andrew Clavin’s JOE BIDASTAN skewers Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal as a "wickedness"—mocking his blame-shifting, Taliban comparisons to Trump supporters, and the chaotic evacuation’s human cost while framing U.S. retreat as strategic folly. He ties the debacle to broader imperial decline, warning isolationism emboldens adversaries like China and Iran, then pivots to climate skepticism via Stephen Koonin’s data debunking alarmism. Parenting advice on consistency clashes with a conservative artist’s defense of "authentic" dark themes in culture, culminating in a call for unflinching realism over sanitized idealism—all wrapped in Daily Wire promotional flair. [Automatically generated summary]
President and venal house plant Joe Biden says he takes full responsibility for the disaster in Afghanistan being totally not his fault.
To demonstrate his commitment to the American people and other fat liars who aren't as smart as he thought they were, Biden begrudgingly took time off from his vacation to read a whole long 20-minute speech, which meant he had to pause a rerun of the Andy Griffiths show right at the good part.
Here's video of his return to Washington, D.C. In his speech, the president said, quote, I will not shrink from my responsibility to blame everyone but myself for this absolute debacle.
I alone made the decision to withdraw from a 20-year war in the most hurried, senseless, and destructive way possible.
And today, I stand squarely behind this podium to tell you the buck stops here so I can then pass it on to Donald Trump, the Afghan people, and the American voters, blaming them for the horrific tragedy that inevitably followed my massively idiotic actions.
Don't believe Republicans who try to tell you that watching Afghanis desperately try to join the American evacuation from Kabul is like watching the Vietnamese falling off the landing skids of choppers trying to evacuate Saigon back in the 1970s.
For one thing, Saigon starts with an S, whereas Kabul clearly starts with a K.
So that's an obvious difference right there.
And the Afghanis are falling off the landing gear of transport planes.
So that's not the same as helicopter skids at all.
Plus, after the Democrats forced us to abandon Southeast Asia, Cambodia suffered years of unimaginable atrocities at the hands of the communist Khmer Rouge.
Whereas here, the unimaginable atrocities will be committed by the Islamist Taliban.
So there's no comparison.
In fact, the only thing that's the same in these two situations is the Democrats.
⁇ White House spokeswoman Jen Pasaki was out of office during the abandonment of an entire generation of Afghani women, but she left a recorded message saying everything would be fine because the Taliban would be sensitive to their reputation with the international community.
The Taliban responded by opening an online merch store featuring t-shirts with their official slogan, the Taliban, insanely homicidal savages since 1994.
Twitter CEO Jack Boots Dorsey said he would ensure the Taliban would not be able to spread their message of Islamist hatred by banning them from the social media site if their tweets ever became as mean as Donald Trump's.
Dorsey said banning an American president while allowing the Taliban, Iran, China, and Russia to use the Twitter platform was not hypocrisy at all.
It was openly cynical wickedness, devoid of even the pretense of decency or honesty.
So basically it was in keeping with the principles on which Twitter was founded in the first place.
Accelerate Death Risks00:02:50
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, you guys, you really did it this time.
You know, I started talking about the Clavinless weekend back in the days when I was doing this show four days a week, and every Friday I would take the day off and some incredible disaster would happen.
So I take a week off, and there's two weeks without the show, and basically you've essentially let the entire American experiment go down the drain.
But we're back, and so at least we can laugh our way through the fall of the Republic.
Please go on Apple Podcast and subscribe and leave a five-star review.
It's incredibly helpful to the show.
It really is.
It does all kinds of things I won't talk about, but it's great for the show.
So please go on and subscribe on Apple Podcasts.
And of course on YouTube, if you subscribe to the Andrew Clavin channel and you press that little bell, you'll hear a little ping and that will just continue for the rest of your life or until you get medical help, whichever comes first.
Also, you can leave a comment, and if the comment is completely disgusting and just hateful and evil, we'll read it on the show as fitting right in.
This is from, I guess it's pronounced Gingy, who says, the prospect of two clavenless weeks is unbearable.
I'm almost tempted to listen to Knowles so as to accelerate my death and avoid the terrible suffering.
Yeah, try not to do that because it actually works and it will accelerate your death.
And you'll avoid the suffering, but in the worst possible way.
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Forcing Women's Evolution00:13:01
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no E's in Clavin.
So not long ago, I visited a war memorial with my six-year-old grandson, and we were reading an inscription about tyranny, had the word tyranny, and I was trying to explain what tyranny was to a six-year-old, which is not very easy.
Six-year-old is very young.
So I talked to him about his favorite video game.
He and I often play this video game together.
It's very touching to me to play with him because I used to play with my own son, Spencer Clavin, no relation.
So we've been playing Super Mario Odyssey, and I said to him, in Super Mario Odyssey, there's this mean dragon turtle thing named Bowser, right?
And Bowser, in almost every Super Mario game, kidnaps Princess Peach and tries to force her to marry him, even though she doesn't want to.
And I said, that's tyranny.
That's what tyranny is.
It's when you think you have the right to force someone to do something just because you have more power than they do.
You're stronger than they are.
And that's why Super Mario fights Bowser, because Princess Peach has the right to make decisions for herself, and so does everybody, even if powerful people don't like those decisions and think they're deplorable.
Well, just a few days, I mean, maybe a week after I made this explanation to my grandson, we began to see what's going on in Afghanistan and heard the rumors and then saw pictures and then had reports of these steaming piles of Taliban soldiers forcing girls as young as 12 to quote unquote marry them.
I mean, you know, we use these terms.
They're forcing women to marry them.
They're not.
They're forcing little girls.
They're raping little girls.
That's what they do.
That's what the Taliban does.
That's who they are.
And I realized that in describing what tyranny was to a six-year-old, I had not just described tyranny.
I had actually described something that stands at the very heart of what tyranny is.
If you strip man naked, if you take from him every machine he has and every comfort he has and every vestige of civilization, you come down to this.
You have women who are smaller and weaker than men and not only possess the power to give men physical pleasure, but also the exclusive power to perpetuate a man's genetic material in the form of children.
And you have men who are bigger and stronger than women and who want the pleasure that women can give them and who want to perpetuate their program to perpetuate their genetic material.
And then you have powerful men and less powerful men who all want the women.
That's what you get if you take civilization away.
Now, given that that's the natural human situation, the question we should ask ourselves, and we should ask ourselves this question every single day, is not why is there tyranny, it's how in the world is there ever not tyranny?
What is it that makes men say, I want to possess this woman or this womb or this piece of property or this gold or this power to make decisions, and yet I will not possess that thing because it belongs to somebody else and they have the right to it.
Why is there ever not tyranny?
Why is there anything besides rape and warfare?
Why does any man take into account the rights of men who are weaker than him and even more amazingly, the rights of women?
So there are some people, let's call them materialists or social scientists or idiots.
Those are all synonyms.
There are some people who think the reason that there's not tyranny is evolution or some kind of game theory, a natural game theory, where we figure out unconsciously that if I respect your rights, you'll respect my rights and so on.
And this is just the natural way and just kind of grows up inevitably because in materialism, everything has to be inevitable.
It's just material working off material.
So to those people who think that, who think that human rights are just the natural evolution of man and the treatment of women with respect and giving them rights and ensuring their rights is just the natural treatment of men, I would like to make the counter argument of the Taliban, of the Taliban.
These Islamist pieces of walking garbage are just as evolved as we are.
They're just as evolved as any other human being.
They're just as capable of instinctive game theory as any other human being.
And yet they feel fine using the euphemism, forcing women to marry them, which is just raping little girls.
They feel fine doing that.
They feel fine.
They feel that God approves of them doing that and stripping away the rights, not just of women, but of anyone who is weaker than they are, who doesn't have the power to fight back.
And in fact, many, many people around the world, some of them in this very country, but not as bad, but many people around the world feel that they have the perfect right to take power away from anybody.
These guys, the Taliban, they are Bowser.
They're Bowser the Dragon come to life in real life.
This thing that my grandson plays as a game is actually happening in Afghanistan.
Obviously, the difference between them and us is not evolution and it's not game theory.
Evolution may give us a moral sense.
It may give us a natural sense that something is fair.
But the choice to actually be fair is exactly that.
It's a choice.
It's a choice based on philosophy and ideas.
Ever since this eruption in Afghanistan, this tragic eruption, and we're going to talk about it at great length.
I'm going to tell you exactly what I think of the whole thing.
But ever since this happened, I have heard these shallow corporate leftist goons like Stephen Colbert comparing Trump supporters to the Taliban.
Here's a quick clip of this.
American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.
He's right.
We have had troops there for 20 years.
They fought.
They sacrificed.
Their families sacrificed so that we wouldn't have a terrorist attack in America planned in a foreign country.
Why should our soldiers be fighting radicals in a civil war in Afghanistan?
We've got our own on Capitol Hill.
I just want to congratulate Greg Gutfeld, who's now getting higher ratings than Stephen Colbert, and it gives me a little hope for our country that somebody's watching a witty, intelligent, informed host like Greg instead of watching this shallow, mean, small-minded, ignorant clown who does not know anything outside the million-dollar Hollywood job he has and what the rest of the people in this country are thinking.
I also saw AOC, I won't play it because I just can't stand listening to it, AOC saying that she was worried on January 6th that she was going to be raped because this was patriarchy on patrol.
So now we know what her fantasies are, but that's not true.
The fact is, of course, there are evil people here.
There are evil people everywhere, but the entire country on both sides opposes those people and opposes rape and opposes that kind of behavior.
The entire culture does, despite the fact that there are individual evil people, what we're talking about with the Taliban is an entire culture of evil, not the culture of Afghanistan, the culture of the Taliban, which is a culture of Islamism, which is spread all around the world.
And the difference between them is not evolution, it's philosophy, right?
The philosophy of the West is different than their philosophy.
The philosophy of the West is based on what I call the great speculation, okay?
Speculation is a kind of a guess, but it's a guess based on thinking something through.
And the great speculation is this.
I speculate that you, whether you look like me or not, whether you are a man or whether you're a woman, whether you're deplorable or have less power than me or agree with me or not, I speculate that you have an inner experience of life that is as rich and full and urgent and deep and important to you as my experience of life is to me.
That no matter what else in this, we are created equal, that we have an equal right to our experience of life.
The great speculation has existed in the West from the earliest hour of freedom.
In ancient Greece, 400 years before Jesus Christ, an Athenian playwright named Euripides wrote a play called The Trojan Women.
And this is an amazing thing when you think about it.
In the play, The Trojan Women, Euripides examined the emotional agony of the women of Troy after their city had been conquered in the Trojan War, defeated in the Trojan War by Greece, and the women were being taken slaves, right?
In other words, Euripides wrote a play in which he showed compassion, not only for the enemy, the Trojans, but for the enemy women.
He showed that he speculated that the Trojan women's pain and suffering at the hands of his fellow Greeks was as worthy of compassion as his pain and his suffering and Greek pain and Greek suffering.
And this play wasn't just a play.
He wasn't just making stuff up.
It was a political criticism.
It was like an op-ed against his fellow Athenians for the way they were treating their defeated enemies during the Peloponnesian War, which was going on at the time.
Euripides was saying, other people, even our enemies, even their women, have inner lives that are worth noticing.
The opposite of this, the opposite of the great speculation, is what I call the pornographic imagination.
The pornographic imagination is where, yeah, rape is great.
Rape is fun and exciting because other people are just shapes.
It's just a shape on a screen, right?
Because when you have a fantasy, all the parts are played by yourself.
So there are no other people, right?
So you can watch a, you know, people who get addicted to pornography watch more and more violent pornography, and they can do that because those are just shapes on the screen.
But once you speculate, once you imagine that the woman you're talking about, the other person you're talking about, has the same inner life that you have, that's about to hurt somebody, to cause somebody pain, to force somebody to do something, is just about the least erotic thing you can do.
So we have in this, in the West, we have the great speculation, and we've had it from the very, very beginning.
We have made an art of it.
We've made religion of it.
The great speculation has its finest expression in the words of the Bible, love your neighbor as yourself.
That's the great speculation.
That is the end of the great speculation.
That's the golden rule.
That's agape love.
And agape love has a corollary.
It has something that logically proceeds from it, which is other people's freedom.
You know, I'm sure you've seen some of this if you follow the show.
Leftists are always attacking me for things I say about women in fiction.
So I watched that show, The Witcher, which I really enjoyed.
And there was a scene where a woman was having a sword fight.
And I said a woman in a medieval sword fight would be killed in a second.
And the left made the usual idiotic answers to this, like, oh, I know a woman who could kill you in a sword fight.
And I said, you know, they're not going to be fighting a scribe.
They're going to be fighting a person as young as they are, twice as strong, twice as powerful, twice the size, and they'd be killed in an instant.
That's why there weren't women warriors with swords.
I was watching over the weekend, I was on the elliptical machine at the gym, and I was looking for something to take my mind off my exercise, and I turned on Zack Snyder's Justice League, another one of these stupid superhero movies that are made for 10-year-olds.
And I saw this scene with Wonder Woman where she races in, she takes out all these evil right-wing terrorists, because we know we have a lot of those.
She takes them all out, and then she turns to a little girl, and this is what she says.
Okay, princess.
Can I be like you someday?
You can be anything you want to be.
See, I would have rewritten that line.
If they called me in to doctor that script, I would have rewritten that line.
She would have said, can I be like you someday?
And she would have said, no, not even I can be like me.
I'm a cartoon character invented by a sick guy who liked being tied up and flogged by women.
And my point isn't, ha ha ha, men fight better than women.
Men are better with swords.
That's not my point at all.
My point is that Western women are not protected by their fists.
They're not protected by their strength or any kind of physical strength at all.
They're protected by the great speculation.
They're protected by philosophy, by thousands of years of people saying, hey, you know what?
The other guy exists as well as me.
The other girl is also a human being, and we have to start to philosophically deal with that speculation.
And that's developed over slow time, right?
People had these ideas and they made choices and they fought for these ideas and they won battles and they won wars and we owe to their sacrifice and to their traditions and to their history respect and gratitude even as we make changes going forward, even as conditions change.
Because if you take that history away, if you take that tradition away, if you take that slow march of civilization away, and if you take away the people who defend that tradition, as Joe Biden just did to the people in Afghanistan, then the rights and dignity of your fellow human beings, beginning with the women but not ending with the women, will disappear like that.
Stephanopoulos's Pillow Talk00:11:41
That tradition, the great speculation, the respect for other people's inner lives and their inner choices and their freedom, that is what America should stand for here, but also everywhere, all the time.
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So this is going to take a while to unpack this Afghanistan thing.
As I was coming on, Joe Biden was making a new speech, so I want to address that just a little bit.
I didn't have time to get any clips from it, but I'll at least tell you what he was saying.
But let's start with this.
What's happening in Afghanistan is one of the worst military disasters in American history, and it's going to have ramifications for decades to come, just like the disaster in Vietnam did.
It is going to have huge effects on us, on our allies, on our enemies.
It is a genuine, genuine problem.
And I listen, let me be honest with you.
I am perfectly capable of taking pleasure in the failures of my political opponents, and I absolutely love making fun of the left because they're idiots and they're fools and they're mean and they're bullies and I love making fun of them and I love laughing at them.
But I really cannot take any joy, obviously, in this because this is affecting all of us.
Joe Biden is a venal, small-minded, low-intelligence, empty-hearted cynic, and he has been his entire life.
And he's now entered his dotage and he is well into decline, but he was never a genius.
Barack Obama, when he would start talking, used to pass notes around saying, kill me now.
Obama said, what did he say about him?
That you can never underestimate Joe's ability to screw things up.
The guy is a second rater from the get-go.
He has been venal from the get-go.
This thing with Hunter Biden selling his paintings for half a million dollars, the way he has been protected by the press just shows how willing our press and our power centers are to huddle around this mediocrity.
He's not just an intellectual mediocrity, he's a moral mediocrity, and he has now involved all of us in an act of wickedness.
What's happening now is an act of wickedness.
And he just came on and made a speech that was utterly infuriating.
I mean, just a minute ago, as I was coming on the air, he was still talking as I came on the air.
He was still pretending to answer questions that were obviously set up.
He had a little list of friendly reporters he could call them, and they were asking quote-unquote difficult questions, but he was clearly prepared for them.
And he made a speech as if none of what we've just seen in the last few days had happened.
He said, oh, you know, we're going to get those people out, and no American is going to be left behind, and we're going to get rid of our dear friends, the Afghanis, who worked so hard with us.
We wouldn't leave them behind.
This is after days, days of absolute panic and destruction and chaos, things happening, pictures coming over that I haven't really seen since Vietnam, but really just absolutely horrifying, horrifying scenes of chaos and death and rumors that we've heard about.
We haven't seen some of the things that, of course, the Taliban is doing and will continue to do to people who worked with us when we were over there and to women and girls who now, remember, these girls, we were there for 20 years, so these girls have been in school.
They weren't raised under the Taliban, and now they're going to face Sharia law.
So Just about the one of the ugliest things of this happening, forget about the ramifications for a minute, we'll get back to those, has been the cynicism and dishonesty of Joe Biden and anybody who protects him.
You know, a lot of times we get angry at the Republicans because we'll say, oh, the Republicans didn't stand behind Trump, but at least the Republicans, it makes it harder to get things done, but at least they will come up and say, you know, I don't like what Trump is doing.
I don't like what our leader is doing.
Nobody really is coming out against Biden.
A few people have made very pale statements that this maybe isn't the optimal way to do things.
But just look for a minute at the cynicism and the dishonesty of this guy.
This is what Joe Biden told us before any of this happened.
I think this is in July.
This is 14.
Do you see any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam with some people feeling complicated?
None whatsoever.
Zero.
What you had is you had entire brigades breaking through the gates of our embassy.
Six, if I'm not mistaken.
The Taliban is not the North Vietnamese Army.
They're not remotely comparable in terms of capability.
There's going to be no circumstance where you're going to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan.
It is not at all comfortable.
So then we had, I'm laughing, but I'm not laughing because it's funny.
I mean, I'm laughing because it's so horrific.
We then had Afghanis clinging to the wheels, the landing gear of these transport planes and falling to their deaths as they desperately tried to get out because they had closed Bagram Air Force Base and they were leaving out of, trying to leave out of Kabul airport.
And now, so that's what he told us before it happened.
And now with George Stephanopoulos, they put out an interview.
They cut out the parts of the interview where he was babbling incomprehensibly.
But they put out this interview.
And here's Biden with Joe Stephanopoulos saying, with George Stephanopoulos saying this.
The idea that somehow there's a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don't know how that happens.
I don't know how that happened.
So for you, that was always priced into the decision?
Yes.
So as a district attorney, a prosecutor would say, is he lying now or was he lying before, right?
Was he lying when he said, oh, there's not going to be chaos.
You're not going to see Saigon.
They're not going to see anything like that.
Taliban's not the army.
And then he's saying, well, yes, I put that in.
And of course, you know, we know that the diplomat Richard Holbrook, who was in the Obama administration, he had notes of a 2010 meeting with Biden when he was the vice president when they were discussing leaving Afghanistan.
And Holbrook said it would be a humanitarian disaster, especially for the women.
And Holbrook's notes quote Biden as saying, F that, we don't have to worry about that.
We did it in Vietnam.
Nixon and Kissinger got away with it, okay?
And he came in and he made this speech, this 20-minute speech, took no questions.
He went back on vacation.
He's on vacation.
The guy, he is literally on vacation.
He comes back, makes a 20-minute speech.
He goes back on vacation, comes back and makes a speech about COVID because he thinks it's going to go away.
Reuters is reporting, President Joe Biden is brushing off criticism of his administration's chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal because he and his aides believe the political fallout at home will be limited, according to White House allies and administration officials.
They think they can get away with it.
And the uncaring, you know, the fact that he's indifferent to what's happening, these little girls being raped, people being killed, the people who are supposed to be being our allies trapped thousands of Americans still trapped behind enemy lines.
He said in his speech today that no American was having trouble getting out.
People are reporting, reporters on the ground are saying people with American passports cannot get out.
They are handing the passports over to the officials.
They still cannot get out.
That's what reporters on the ground are saying.
And then he had this other exchange with Stephanopoulos, just absolutely amazing.
Stephanopoulos brought up the fact that there were people falling off the landing gear of these transport planes.
Here's Biden's response.
We've all seen the pictures.
We've seen those hundreds of people packed into a C-17.
We've seen Afghans falling.
That was four days ago, five days ago.
What did you think when you first saw those pictures?
What I thought was we have to gain control of this.
We have to move this more quickly.
We have to move in a way in which we can take control of that airport.
And we did.
So do you not think this could have been handled?
This actually could have been handled better in any way.
No mistakes?
No.
It was four days ago.
First of all, it was two days ago when they were having that conversation.
But what if it was 10 years ago?
What if it was two years ago?
You know, I mean, what difference does it make?
That's the giveaway.
That's the tell.
He is telling you that he expects you to forget.
But you're not going to be able to forget because this is going to have ramifications going on.
And the other thing that I just have to mention one other thing before we get into the nuts and bolts of it, the blaming other people for this.
He has blamed Trump.
He said, oh, well, Trump made a deal with the Taliban, and Trump made a contingent deal with the Taliban.
The Taliban violated those contingencies.
And by the way, Biden hasn't done any, followed anything, any deals that Trump has made.
He could have ditched this deal, but suddenly it's all Trump's fault.
He blamed Bush for being there.
This was the one that got me the most, though.
He blamed the Afghan fighters.
This is CUP 19.
There's some very brave and capable Afghan special forces units and soldiers.
But if Afghanistan is unable to mount any real resistance to the Taliban now, there is no chance that one year, one more year, five more years, or 20 more years of U.S. military boots in the ground would have made any difference.
Here's what I believe to my core.
It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan's own armed forces would not.
So I'm left again to ask of those who argue that we should stay.
How many more generations of America's daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan's civil war when Afghan troops will not?
How many more lives, American lives, is it worth?
How many endless rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery?
Well, let's lay aside the fact that no American soldier has been killed for over a year in Afghanistan.
But, you know, you can say a lot of things about the Afghani people.
Ring Alarm Security00:02:16
You don't have to like them.
You don't have to agree with them.
You can call them primitives, whatever, all the things that Americans throw at foreign people.
But you can't say they're not tough.
These are tough people.
These guys will kill you barefoot.
And they have fought every empire on earth, including ours, and beaten all of them.
These are very tough people.
We built over there, the Americans built an army of Afghans based on the idea that we would give them air support.
That was the way the soldiers were built.
When we withdrew that air support, they didn't have an army.
They didn't have the strategies and the capabilities to continue doing what they were doing.
And they were fighting.
Remember, they're not just fighting the Taliban.
The Taliban is supported by the Pakistani secret services, who are all Islamists as well.
And so we've been fighting Pakistan all this time.
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You know, I'll tell you something from experience.
When you get old, you become more yourself.
When you get old, you become more yourself.
You lose the power to hide anymore.
You don't have the energy.
You don't care enough to hide who you are.
You become more yourself.
Negotiating with Evildoers00:11:52
And this is a venal, incompetent, cynical, uncaring son of a bitch.
And he has always been that guy, but now he's old and he's not pretending anymore.
And we're not even talking about the policy yet.
We are just talking about competence, closing Bagram Air Force Base.
When I was in Afghanistan, I got stuck at Bagram Air Force Base, very hard to get around for good reason because the soldiers had priority over me.
I was there as a reporter.
I got stuck at Bagram Air Force Base and I got so fed up after a couple of days there, I said, you know what?
I'm going into Kabul, Kabul, and I'm going to just go to the commercial airport and I'm going to go out.
And everybody tried to talk me out of it.
They said, you're going to get killed.
You're going to have your head cut off.
And, you know, I said, come on, it's like an hour away.
I'm going to get in a cab.
I'm going to go to the Kabul airport.
I'm going to get immediately on a plane and I'll be gone.
And I wouldn't be talked out of it because I can be a jerk sometimes.
And they actually had, they were smart enough to have a female officer who I liked from Nuristan, which was out in the middle of nowhere, call me up personally and say, I don't want you to go because they knew I do whatever women tell me to do.
So they knew I would do that.
And I said, all right, you know, I won't go.
That's when we were in control.
That's when we were in control of the country.
You couldn't go into the Kabul airport.
Biden closed Bagram, and now people are trying to get out through Kabul airport without the people there.
And he's had to send more troops back in.
So he got more troops when we were there before.
Now he's making speeches saying, oh, we'll get everybody out.
Why didn't he get everybody out before we left?
Why didn't he get everybody out before we left?
He wanted a 9-11.
He wanted on the anniversary of 9-11 to say, look, I ended the endless war that wasn't even going on anymore.
It wasn't even really a war anymore.
He wanted that photo op.
So he pulled out precipitately.
You know, this is before we even argue whether he should have pulled out at all.
He pulled out incompetently.
He could have gotten the people out first.
He could have gotten our allies out first, our TERPs, our interpreters out first, everybody else.
He said in this speech, by the way, that no problem here with the international community with NATO.
The British just held him in contempt for what he did because he didn't even contact NATO.
NATO has been left flat-footed.
This was their battle too.
They lost people too.
NATO has been left flat-footed.
So all this talk about America's back and at least we don't have evil Trump insulting NATO anymore.
That's down the drain.
All of this.
And then, of course, there's what they call the fighting season.
You've probably heard a lot about the fighting season.
The fighting season is during the winter.
The Taliban escapes into the Fatah, the kind of tribal lands, the empty tribal wilderness between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And the Pakistanis support them, as I say.
They give them materiel, they give them shelter, they give them all those things that they need to keep going.
And then when spring comes, they come back.
So he leaves in the spring because he wants this September 11th photo op.
So it was just utter, utter incompetence.
And as a result, we have this disaster.
This is part 70 Saigon.
This is part the end of the Vietnam War.
After Nixon achieved a negotiated peace in Vietnam, a Democrat-led Congress took advantage of the Republican weakness over Watergate because Nixon was a weakened president and then Ford was a weakened president.
And they cut the funding.
They voted to cut the funding for American troops.
And they had enough people to do it to override a presidential veto so that it wasn't only Democrats.
It was a Democrat-led operation.
And that led to our troops being withdrawn.
And that led to the victory of the communists, which then led on, of course, to the Khimar Rouge slaughtering millions of people.
If you ever watch that movie, The Killing Fields, they blame, they say, well, if we hadn't gone over there, we wouldn't have made the Khimar Rouge so angry.
They forget these people are adults with philosophies.
The Khmer Rouge philosophy was communism.
Taliban's philosophy is Islamism.
You kill people for those philosophies.
That is the philosophy, basically.
So it's part that.
And that really made us afraid to use our power overseas for 20 years.
It really weakened us.
People forget back in the 70s that the communists were on the march.
They were taking over Africa.
Communism itself was on the march, supported by the Soviet Union, taking over Africa, South America, even Europe and Italy and Finland.
There were major, major communist movements there because the communists were the stronghorse, the USSR were the stronghorse, and we looked like the weak horse after Vietnam.
So you're going to see some of that right now.
Taiwan basically is gone.
I hate to predict the future because you never know, but I thought the Chinese were going to go into Taiwan the minute Joe Biden got elected.
They're certainly thinking about it now.
What is Biden going to do to stop them?
Obviously, nothing.
He is the weak horse.
So it's part Vietnam.
It is part Jimmy Carter's Iran.
And this is really terrifying because Carter was caught so flat-footed by the Iranian Islamist revolution with the Ayatollah there that he allowed famously 52 hostages to be held for 444 days.
And his weak response, they were stuck there.
They never got him out until Reagan came in and got them out.
But that was an utter humiliation.
And also, it puts us in the situation where we have to negotiate with evildoers, right?
And so there are all these guys stuck in the country.
Right now, the Taliban hasn't taken hostages.
Let's pray to God they don't, but they could, they might, and then we're going to be negotiating from a position of weakness with very, very evil, very wicked people who are going to make sure that we see every evil thing that they do.
It's also partly Obama's withdrawal from Iraq.
Remember, Obama withdrew from Iraq, and everybody said to him, everybody and his uncle said to him, leave 5,000 troops there because George W. Bush had won the war in Iraq.
But Obama, you know, they're so wise, these internationalists, these globalists, they're so wise.
They know so much better than everybody else.
He pulled all the troops out of Iraq.
And we had ISIS building a caliphate the size of Ohio in there and they didn't get out until Donald Trump came in and wiped them off the face of the earth.
And that's that kind of arrogance.
And this is Joe Bidestan.
This is what it is.
He has now created Joe Bidestan.
I mean, the pictures that are coming over.
We have that picture of the little kid being handed off to the soldier.
This is, they're trying to get their children out.
And so they're handing their babies away over the barbed wire.
The British reporters say some of the children are falling on the barbed wire.
It's impossible to look at this, obviously, but this is first, this is going to be, this picture is going to be shown next to the name.
Every time you mention the word Joe Biden for 20 years, this is the picture that's going to be shown, and he's going to be watching it in hell.
They're going to show it on an endless loop in hell.
These are babies.
These are parents handing away their babies to American soldiers.
I heard, who was it?
Oh, God, I can't remember who it was, some silly kind of middle-of-the-road commentator on Fox the other day saying, well, at least we know he's safe with the soldiers.
This is a guy handing away his child because of Joe Biden's incompetence.
And again, this is Jobidistan because of incompetence.
Finally, there's this underlying idea here.
And this is important because this is what I was saying about Obama and Iraq, this underlying idea here that there are somehow now going to be negotiations and negotiations that are a good thing.
This is the internationalist idea.
Oh, we negotiate with Iran.
We negotiate with Iran.
It's going to be great.
We're going to tell them not to have nuclear weapons and they won't have nuclear weapons.
How savage was Donald Trump for pulling out of the Iran deal, the Iran nuclear deal?
America's back.
NATO loves us now.
Of course, they just, British Parliament held Biden in contempt, but still they love us and we have got this.
And this is why Jen Psaki says the kind of things that she says about the Taliban, that they are going to not be as savage as they were last time because they're worried about the opinion, our opinion of them is cut 10.
The Taliban also has to make an assessment about what they want their role to be in the international community.
And I know that Ambassador Khalilzad made comments when he was at the political negotiations yesterday, making clear that the international community is going to watch closely how the Taliban behaves.
They have a range of tools in their arsenal as well to take steps should they choose.
They have no tools and there is no international community and the Taliban doesn't care.
But what she's really talking about is giving the Taliban legitimacy, giving people who rape little girls as a policy, right?
They don't rape little girls because they're mean.
They rape little girls.
It is their policy.
It is their religion to rape little girls, giving them a seat at the table.
They're going to wind up at the UN.
And they know it.
They know that the idea of negotiating with them is the idea of giving them legitimacy.
The chief POS, I can't pronounce his name of the Taliban, he knows this.
He made this speech.
He gave a press conference.
This is cut five, where he said, you know, you're going to have to treat us with respect as we are.
We don't want political turmoil.
And they have to respect our religious rules because the Emirate has sacrificed a lot for their religion.
Anybody wants to talk to us?
They're free.
This is our right.
This is Afghanistan's right to be able to speak according to our own rules.
This is how the world works.
Everybody wants their own rules.
Arabic countries have their own law.
So we are following our own law.
Afghans are following their own laws.
We have this right.
You have to hear what he's saying, right?
Because he's saying exactly what Jen Pasaki is saying.
He's saying, yeah, we'll negotiate.
We'll come to the table of the international community.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But we're coming to the table as us, which is murderous, raping, madmen, savages.
And now we're going to have a voice in the UN, in the international, the so-called international community.
So they have given these people, their idea of negotiation is giving the worst of it.
And the thing about it is, when you mix a milkshake with crap, the crap doesn't become more milkshakey.
The milkshake becomes crappier.
And so when you negotiate with evil, you can only move toward the evil.
And we see this in the UN.
We see this in the UN where countries, savage countries that give no rights to anybody, get on the UN Civil Rights Commission or whatever.
The Human Rights Commission will be run by Libya, you know, and you just think, like, how is that happening?
Well, once you give people a seat at the table, then they have to be treated just like as if they were civilized human beings, and that's what they're asking for.
And so people said, well, what about women's rights?
Because it's going to be very different.
They're issuing these statements saying, oh, yeah, we're going to take care of women's rights.
Here's what he said.
Here's what this POS said does, Cut 6.
Our God, our Quran says that woman is a very important part of our society.
They can work.
They can get education.
They are needed in our society.
And they will be actively involved.
The international community is worried about these issues.
We will tell them there will be nothing against women in our ruling.
Our people accept our women are Muslims.
They accept Islamic rules.
If they continue to live according to Sharia, we will be happy.
They will be happy.
Yeah, if they live according to Sharia.
Women In Sharia Society00:03:28
So we know how that's going to go, right?
We know what that looks like.
And it's not pretty.
And they've already fired on, you know, there is some brave resistance going on, but they've already killed a man who waved the Republic's flag, the Afghan Republic's flag.
They've been shooting into protesters.
Right this minute, right this minute, they are holding back.
The Taliban is holding back.
They are holding back because they know they can get stuff out of us.
And once we start paying them to give people safe passage, that means your tax dollars, when you sign that little form and you send off your check with your taxes on it, that's going to be going to them.
That's who it's going to be going to.
And so this is all this incredible incompetence.
This is beyond the question, beyond the debate.
And I know there's a debate.
I understand the debate about whether we should have been there, whether we should have been there or not.
Having been there, should we have stayed?
These are all things that we should talk about.
We're going to talk about.
But this is just the incompetence.
This is incompetence that has brought about a true disaster for American prestige.
It's going to mean the Chinese know they can come after us.
It means the Russians know they can come after us.
It means the Iranians know they can come after us.
It means that NATO knows they can't rely on us, right?
And this is pure incompetence.
This is not philosophy yet.
We're not even talking about whether we should have gone or not.
And that's what we really have to talk about now.
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So all of this, everything we've been talking about up till now, is just the incompetence of a guy who, as Robert Gates said, the Secretary of Defense under both Obama and W said, he's been wrong about every foreign policy issue for the past four decades.
This is just a guy who isn't, he's a mediocrity.
He is a mediocrity.
And as CNN lamented the other day, CNN actually put out an article that said he's not getting credit for not being Donald Trump anymore.
So now that we're looking at who he really is, he's an incompetent.
He's in his dotage.
He's a small-minded man.
He's not a man with a big heart.
Everybody always says, oh, he's lunchbucket Joe.
He's a guy who cares about the media.
He obviously doesn't.
He's a cynic.
And he's obviously also dishonest.
Why We Left Afghanistan00:15:08
We've seen all of that.
But let's put all of this aside and start to talk about whether we should have been there in the first place.
And having gotten there, should we have stayed?
And what should we do about this in the future?
Who are we?
Where are we going with this kind of thing?
Because if this is going to happen in Vietnam in the 70s, if it's going to happen in Iran in the late 70s, if it's going to happen in Iraq with Obama, if it's going to happen in Afghanistan with Biden, how are we going to get to a point where maybe this isn't happening quite so much?
Maybe we don't suffer these humiliations and disasters and these blows to our moral prestige.
So you have two basic, there are lots of variations, but you have two basic ideas.
We'll call one the Matt Walsh doctrine.
I'm sure if you listen to Matt Walsh, he's saying, you know, why should we be defending these savages?
They're living in the Middle Ages and, you know, who cares what they're going to do?
They're going to do what they're going to do.
And we can't spend all our time doing this.
You know, there's going to be atrocities somewhere on the globe.
We can't rush off to solve all the world's atrocities, all the world's problems.
And I think that there's a lot of sense to that.
I mean, I think that it is true.
We cannot constantly be sending our sons and our daughters off to fight and die because there are bad things in the world.
There are always bad things in the world.
And so that's the Matt Walsh doctrine.
And then we have the God-King doctrine.
What Jeremy thinks, and I'm sure he's either tweeted it or said it on backstage.
And I think Ben kind of agrees with this as well, which is that when you send people into battle, they stay there.
We still have people in Germany.
We still have people in Korea and South Korea.
We still have people around the world.
And once you're in the battle, you have a responsibility to sort of make sure that the things that you have earned by blood and treasure are maintained.
And so you leave a force there.
And their argument with Afghanistan specifically is we had 2,500 people there.
They weren't getting killed.
They weren't in the fight.
They were just supporting the fighting of the Afghanis.
So, you know, what was the problem?
That's just not that many people.
Joe Biden has been making the argument that if we had stayed, eventually we would have been engaged by the Taliban again.
But that, you know, I don't really think like everything Joe Biden says, it's very hard to take it seriously because we did have a massive army of Afghanis.
They were fighting with backup from American air.
And so basically the argument on that side is like, this is what it's like.
This is what it's like to be an international power.
And we had Cliff May on this show before I left for vacation two weeks ago.
We always give you tomorrow's news today.
And we had Cliff On from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and he made the argument, basically the same argument that we have to stay.
It's not that many people.
It's something we have to do.
And we've also made promises to people.
We have created a world in which women can go to schools.
We created a world in which people can walk the streets.
And now we're just saying, oh yeah, too bad.
We're going.
Sorry, folks.
Time's up.
We're out of there.
So In the broadest sense, forgetting Afghanistan specifically for a minute, but in the broadest sense, I think that plausible moral arguments can be made for either side of this, plausible and moral arguments.
Can be made for a kind of isolationism, the Donald Trump America first agenda, where we say, you know, we're just going to do what's right for us and other countries do what's right for them and that's the way it's going to go.
And for the kind of broader, what you call the American order doctrine, where we say, look, the order of peace in the world is based on the fact that we will kill you if you mess with our friends and if you mess with people.
You know, that England doesn't have enough soldiers to defend England.
France doesn't have enough soldiers to defend France.
The reason they have all those wonderful social services that they're always bragging about is because they know they don't have to pay for an army big enough to protect them from Russia or China, because if Russia or China attacks them, we will fight back.
We will join the fight.
And that's what NATO is.
That is why our NATO troops are in Afghanistan, because we were attacked on 9-11.
And as part of the mutual defense deal of NATO, everybody had to go to war when we went to war.
But you can make a plausible decision for isolationism that goes something like this.
We're in tremendous debt.
We have vast welfare programs that keep us from having the kind of army we need to have places all around the world.
The Soviet Union, after the Russian Revolution, they pulled back their borders.
They pulled back their borders so that they could regroup and recoup and steady their country.
And then they moved out and became the Soviet Union slave empire.
Other countries have done that.
The French did it after the Revolution.
You pull back when you are in debt, when you're in trouble, when you need to regroup.
And that's kind of what Donald Trump was selling.
And you have this idea of a different America, an America that doesn't get involved in other people's country goes back to George Washington, George Washington's farewell address.
He said, you know, we're different than other countries.
We are isolated.
We have the oceans between us and Europe.
Don't get involved in European affairs.
Now, obviously, a lot of that has gone by the boards with the invention of the airplane, which George Washington didn't live to see.
But a lot of that has gone by the boards and it's gone by the boards with our involvement in World Wars I and II, which gave us this international position that we now have.
But you can still, it is very ingrained in the American consciousness from George Washington on that we are not an empire.
We are not going to come and conquer.
At the World War II Memorial, beautiful memorial in Washington, D.C., it says, we came to liberate, not to conquer.
And so this idea that we have enough problems, we have to take care of our people, we have terrible debt, we have, you know, our borders are exploding, all this stuff is happening, we have to pull back.
We cannot be spending money fighting the Taliban overseas.
That is an argument that you can make in general.
Forget about the fact that once we're there, we're there.
Still, at some point, at some point, if you are an isolationist, you have to pull back.
And there's going to be scenes like we saw in Kabul.
There's going to be scenes of disaster.
But the other argument is also plausible.
The other argument is that we are the world's biggest superpower.
We are the biggest superpower, certainly, that is in favor of freedom, that has a moral conscience that is recognizable to anybody in the West.
We have to defend those people who are free, because when we defend freedom overseas, it enhances our freedom.
It makes the world a safer place.
It makes trade better.
It makes people more willing to trade.
Free people are less likely to go to war because they're busy trading and making money and they don't have to go to war.
They don't want to take anybody else's freedom away.
And that order has to be defended by us.
And this is a really, you know, again, we're still in Germany.
We're still in all the places we've had to go.
Now, both of these arguments are plausible and both of them are moral, but not at once, okay?
You can take one side or you can take the other.
And one of the things that's been going on now for a long time, at least since World War II, is that we go back and forth.
So in Afghanistan, it's a good example.
We went in, we said, we've got to get bin Laden.
We've got to get rid of the Taliban.
They've let them stage the 9-11 fight, the 9-11 attack.
We have to go and stop that from happening again.
And for 20 years, nothing has happened.
You know, we haven't had that kind of major attack staged in Afghanistan.
We've been fighting the Taliban and keeping them busy over there.
And then we started to say, oh, yes, we have to build a civil society in Afghanistan.
Now, I went to Afghanistan.
I came back.
I said, that's not going to happen.
We're not going to build a civil society.
We may build civil cities, but it is a place of dispersed villages, of tribal, you know, tribes with memories going back hundreds of years where they're still fighting with each other.
I do not believe we can build a civil society in Afghanistan as I thought we might be able to do in Iraq and could have done had Obama not thrown our victory away.
But we were not going to do it in Afghanistan.
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So we changed the rules of the game.
We changed why we were there, and we sold it as a nation-building exercise, which gives people an excuse to pull out, right?
So first we say, oh, we're just going over to kill terrorists.
And then we say we're going over to build a civil society.
And then we say, we can't build a civil society with those savages.
We're out of there.
And then the civil society that we've built is destroyed.
We cannot have both arguments going on at the same time.
We can't have a Republican president who says we're going to do this, and then a Democrat president who says we're going to not.
We can be isolationist or we can be imperial, but we cannot be both.
We cannot flash back and forth because it ends with stuff like this.
And this is not just a matter of communication.
It's not just a matter of George W. Bush should have said, you know, we're going into Afghanistan.
We're going to be there for a long time.
This is a long-range deal.
We're not going to be able to build a civil society.
All we're going to be able to do is chase the Taliban back and forth into the Fatah and out of the Fatah.
And we're going to keep them so busy and kill so many of their leaders that they're not going to be able to attack us at home.
And maybe one day after 20, 30, 40, 50 years, they'll manage to build a civil society.
But we're going to have some people over there that whole time.
There's not going to be a lot of them.
They're not going to be in harm's way very much, but they're going to be there.
And this is going to happen.
If George W. Bush had said that, we would have known it to begin with.
We would have said yes or no, yay or nay, and then we would have sent them over.
But it's not just that.
It's a question of American identity.
Who are we?
Are we still George Washington's country that says we're isolated, we're different, we're exceptional, we're not going to get involved in the world, or are those days gone by and we haven't adjusted to the fact that we are now an imperial power.
And I know the word imperial has a dirty connotation, especially on the left, but I'm not sure it should have that, okay?
Because our vacillation between these two positions is absolutely what's killing us.
And my feeling is this.
We are kidding ourselves that we can avoid imperial responsibilities.
Empire is a stage in the life of great nations.
It is something that happens because you have to defend your borders and your borders get further and further away.
That's just the fact of it.
The fact of it is if people, if everybody, if you are free and everybody around you is not free, eventually you will not be free.
I got into an argument once with a Swiss guy at a dinner table who said, well, we had no problem with the Nazis because we could defend ourselves against the Nazis.
I said, you can defend yourself against the Nazis until everybody's a Nazi and you're the last country left.
Then you can't defend yourself against the Nazis.
I don't care how many Alps you have.
Eventually, if you're the last man standing, if you're the last free country standing, you will go down.
So you defend yourself.
You have to defend yourself.
And that's how countries get empires.
And as Pericles told the Greeks, an empire may be wrong to acquire, but it's very, very dangerous to let it go.
Now, because we have this Washingtonian idea that we should not get involved in foreign affairs, which has stuck with us, we come to liberate, not to conquer, because we have that idea.
When England gave up their empire after World War II, there was a tacit understanding with the English, a silent understanding that they were handing the world over to us.
That was the idea.
But we didn't want to do that because we have this peculiar attitude.
We were not going to become an empire.
We were not going to conquer.
We may have some troops over there in Germany, but we're not telling you how to run your country.
We're not doing any of that.
And that has been part of our philosophy, as I say, since Washington.
But the fact is, we can't do that anymore.
We cannot do that anymore.
We are a world power in a world where people want power, and we have to defend that world, okay?
And one of the funny things that happened, a kind of a strange thing that happened, is we didn't want to become an empire after the British gave their empire away.
And then we got into this fight with the Soviet Union, this Cold War with the Soviet Union.
And every time we would go overseas to fight them in some place, like when we fought the Chinese in Vietnam, or we would send materiel into Nicaragua to fight them there, the left would say, oh, it's imperialism.
This is imperialism.
They elected these communists.
This is imperialism.
And my response to that would have been, you're right, it's imperialism.
We are in an imperial world.
Empire is a phase in the life of great nations.
It's not a question of whether there should be an empire.
It's a question of whose empire is there going to be.
Now, Reagan pulled a brilliant trick.
He spent the Soviet Union into the ground.
So he won the Cold War.
He preserved the American empire without conquest.
But he did it by driving us into debt.
He drove us into debt, and he spent, because we were so rich and because capitalism worked so much better than socialism, he drove the Soviet Union into the ground, all while the press was condemning him as a warmonger.
That bought us 20 to 30 great years, 25 fantastic years after Ronald Reagan.
Bill Clinton, of course, they loved to give him responsibility, but all Bill Clinton was a caretaker for the Reagan Revolution, just like Bloomberg was a caretaker for the Giuliani Revolution in New York.
That era ended on 9-11.
That's what we're living in now.
And what happened was George W. Bush was the kind of president you have during the Reagan good times, like Clinton.
Kind of incompetent, not really, you know, not really the number one guy.
George W. Bush was a great guy.
He was a good guy, but he was not up for 9-11.
When 9-11 came, he was not the guy you wanted.
You wanted Winston Churchill in there.
You had George W. Bush.
End Of An Era00:04:23
Not the same thing.
That's what we're dealing with now.
We're dealing with the end of the Reagan era, which is essentially the end of the World War II Cold War era.
That is what we're dealing with now.
This is what is called, the French call it fandéciat.
It means, it literally means the end of a century, but what it really means is the end of an era.
I've been telling you this for a long time.
Donald Trump was not the beginning of something.
He was the end of something.
Joe Biden is not the beginning of something.
He's the end of something.
We are experiencing the end of an era, okay?
Something else has now got to come.
And one of the problems we have is when that era ended on 9-11, because of our educational system, because our educational system is broken and corrupt and leftist, we did not have a group of young leaders who could come forward with big, new, interesting ideas that would preserve American freedom, but still move us forward into this new global world that we are entering, whether we like it or not, whether we believe in nationalism or not.
We are entering, we are in a global world.
Somebody is going to be in charge of that global world, okay?
And we have not brought forward the leaders at all on the right or the left.
We have not brought forward the leaders who are going to engineer what that world is going to look like if America upholds its, and I use the word frankly, if we uphold our imperial responsibility.
We need a new idea of what the world looks like under an American regime, because those are the choices.
And the ideas we have now, woke is delusional nonsense.
Critical theory is 19th century Marxism dressed up in a pig's lipstick.
Trumpism was, there was a lot of truth in what Trump said, but he was no statesman.
He was no politician.
He could not implement the things that he was talking about.
We need people who can not only have good ideas and new ideas, but lead and govern.
You know, I'm going to put forward some ideas as we go forward because I've been thinking a lot about the way we have to respond to this moment.
But we are entering an imperial phase.
China is on the move, right?
And they've been very creative with their tyranny.
We have not been creative with freedom.
We've not been creative with Christianity.
We have not moved our thinking of what it means to be a free people into this new global world.
We are still trying to live in this isolationist Washingtonian world.
We're not in it anymore, and we've got to stop talking like we're in it, and we have to stop taking seriously the people who tell us we are not in it.
This is going to be an imperial world, and it doesn't have to be imperial by force of arms, but it's going to be imperial by ideas, and it's going to be imperial in the sense that we are going to either spread the culture of freedom or the Chinese are going to spread the culture of slavery.
We cannot do this in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Vietnam anymore.
When we go in, we are going to stay.
When we go in, we're going to stay.
This is the end of something, but it's also the beginning of something.
There are going to be new people.
Do not despair.
Do not despair.
This is going to be tough.
This is a tough moment.
This is as tragic a moment as I can remember in a political life, right?
This is a terrible, terrible incident brought on by Joe Biden's cynicism and his incompetence.
But Western thought has been infinitely creative, and it can be infinitely creative again.
Christian thought has been infinitely creative and can be infinitely creative again.
We have to start thinking in the realistic world.
This is not the realistic world where we can say, oh, there's an atrocity everywhere.
This is the world where the entire world is a battlefield and we are fighting for an imperial place where we are living in a free world, a free global world run by this country, at least intellectually.
It doesn't have to be run militarily by it, but run by this country at least intellectually.
It's the end of something, but it's not the end of everything.
It's a bad moment.
It's a terrible moment, but there are going to be more moments to come.
We just have to face the honest fact that we are an imperial power in an imperial world, and we cannot run away from that responsibility anymore.
So on we go.
Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.
America has been infinitely creative again.
We've been declining since the founding and we're still here.
We're in decline right now, but we're not going to stay that way.
So coming up, we've got a former scientist for the Obama administration, Stephen Kuhnin, who has broken with climate alarmism.
And he's written a really interesting book called Unsettled.
But first, the copy that I'm reading says, you deserve to wake up to the facts.
Reader Pass Submissions00:02:07
Now, I know my audience doesn't deserve to wake up to the facts, but even so, we have now started a new podcast called The Morning Wire, which I've been listening to all week, and it's been topping the Apple and Spotify charts since its recent release.
It's the only daily news podcast that values your time and the truth.
And while we're working overtime to bring you the news, you need to know, we need your help to keep the facts trending towards number one.
So subscribe, start listening now to Morning Wire on Apple Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts, and leave a five-star review if you like what you hear.
And another way to stay well-read and informed is the Daily Wire Reader's Pass.
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The Daily Wire Reader's Pass unlocks exclusive editorial content.
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I've just recently learned that Matt Walsh calls his audience the Sweet Baby Gang.
And I would like to ask you, have you no dignity?
Have you no self-respect?
And now he's got this crazy content contest where he's going to find a sweet baby anthem.
He is literally calling it this.
The Daily Wire is opening up for submissions.
Matt is looking for an original song that embodies exactly what the Sweet Baby Gang is.
That should be interesting.
All submissions should be in the form of a YouTube video link and will be judged American Idol style by me and other Daily Wire hosts.
But you, the viewer, will be voting on which song wins.
To enter, go to dailywire.com slash SBG.
Climate Models and Solar Heat00:15:42
I don't even want to think what that stands for.
Submissions end on August 25th.
So if you think you've got what it takes to impress us, then you better get started.
Voting will take place on Labor Day.
So tune in to Matt's YouTube channel to watch the judging of the submissions.
The winner will be announced September 8th on Matt's show and will wear the crown of the creator of the most important anthem to ever be created.
And this as well.
Again, to enter your song into the competition, go to dailywire.com slash SBG.
I look forward to hearing it.
That's what it says on the copy, so I had to read it.
So as we become a global world, one of the biggest issues facing us is the globe.
And I know that we as conservatives have a lot of questions about the climate, the climate panic, the climate alarmism that we feel is often a guise of power.
And I wanted to bring somebody on who has a really interesting record because he is, first of all, a scientist, but Stephen E. Kuhnin was also the Undersecretary for Science, the U.S. Department of Energy under the Obama administration.
And yet he's written a remarkable new book called Unsettled, What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters.
Stephen Kuhn, thank you very much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Pleased to be talking with you, Drew.
So you have been under attack ever since this book came out from some of your former friends.
And what I wanted to do just to start, since I'm not a scientist, I wanted to read some of the assertions that you make early on in this book and some of the things that people have been saying about them and just hear what you have to say about them so I can at least make a judgment.
You begin this book in a very, very shocking way where you just take a bunch of the assertions of the climate alarmists and you basically say they're not true.
You say heat waves in the U.S. are now no more common than they were in 1900 and the warmest temperatures in the U.S. have not risen in the past 50 years.
So Scientific American ran a story saying not true.
Heat waves have clearly become hotter and longer over the past few decades.
The nighttime temperatures are increasing most and people never get relief from the insufferable heat and more of them are at risk of dying.
Why are they wrong?
Well, you know, I think they're addressing different questions.
That the nighttime temperatures are increasing the most is in fact right there in the reports and I don't have anything to say about that.
In terms of the heat waves, you can see very clearly in the 2018 government climate report, a graph, and I refer to it in the book, that shows exactly that, that they're exactly the same as they were in 1900.
So when we hear that, oh, this is the hottest year ever, this year was the hottest year, that's not true.
Well, that's a different metric of the temperature.
You have to be careful.
I mean, the hottest year ever is about the average temperature of the globe, which averages the high and low temperatures of every point and refers them to the average and calculates what's called the anomaly.
That's a different measure of the temperature.
Heat waves, temperature extremes, all what I was talking about in that comment.
All right.
I just want to do a few more and then get to the more general topic.
You say the net economic impact of human-induced climate change will be minimal through at least the end of the century.
Scientific American says that's unconscionable to make that statement.
Well, it may be unconscionable, but it's what the IPCC and the U.S. government said.
Right.
Again, it's right there in the reports.
It takes a little bit of interpretation because they kind of obscure it.
But, you know, I don't think anybody has challenged that statement.
It might be unconscionable, but it's true.
So in general, I mean, you were the Undersecretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy under the Obama administration.
One of your roles was to increase spending on what they call renewable energy.
And there has been a lot of talk about just this panic that we are, if we don't stop this global warming right away.
Did something change your mind?
Did your mind change?
Yes, yes, it did.
You know, I had an epiphany, if you like, around the beginning of 2014 when I was asked by the American Physical Society to take a hard look at their statement on climate change.
This is a society that represents 50,000 physicists in the U.S. and around the world.
And I convened a panel of three consensus scientists and three, I'll call them skeptics or credentialed people.
We sat and talked for a day.
And I came to realize that the science behind the climate concern is a lot shakier than I had been led to believe.
It's got to do with the large variability in the climate system.
The climate changes all by itself.
It's got to do with the sensitivity of the climate system and that there are many influences beyond just carbon dioxide.
And it's got to do with uncertain projections of how society is going to respond to a changing climate.
You put all that together and it's not at all obvious that we're facing an existential threat.
In fact, when I hear the politicians, John Kerry, AOC, Bernie Saunders, talk about climate crisis existential threat, I'm thinking you're not reading the reports because that's not at all what the reports say.
They just came out this UN report, what is it, the IPCC?
It was reported as if it was declaring basically that the world was over.
I mean, the press reports were as panicky and hysterical as they could possibly be.
And you wrote in the Wall Street Journal that this was simply not what was in the report.
What was in the report?
Well, what was in the report is, first of all, so, you know, we have to make scenarios or assumptions about what emissions are going to look like in the future.
And the first thing they did was to declare the most extreme scenario quite improbable, which is in contrast to previous reports.
Nevertheless, of course, you still see it used in the current report, but okay.
The second is that they gave, I think, more realistic projections of what the temperature would be under a more plausible scenario.
And the answer is that the global temperature would rise about another one and a half degrees by the end of the century under that scenario.
We've already risen one degree, so the net would be about two and a half by the end of the century.
Now, you know, the world has prospered in an unprecedented way over the past century as the globe has warmed about a degree centigrade.
To think that it's all going to come to an end if it warms another one and one and a half degrees is just complete nonsense.
And I blame the media more than anybody else, and perhaps the people who write the summary in the UN reports.
It's just immoral.
You talk about unconscionable to scare the wits out of people, particularly young people, that the world is going to end unless we make radical changes in our society.
That's just not what we should be doing.
Let's have an honest representation of what they're saying, and then let's have a discussion about what we should do.
So this is the question I think that bedevils conservatives.
The conservative suspicion is that the panic is being caused by people who want to take control, who want government essentially to take control of our energy resources, who want the power to collect at the top, who want to basically tell us how much gas we can use and fly around on their private jets to Davos to discuss about whether or not we should be able to walk to the grocery store.
And you were in the Obama administration.
Is that suspicion correct or is it justifiable?
You know, I'm not going to say because, of course, the administration was and is a big organization, and you don't know what goes on at the very political levels.
I was not a political functionary in the administration.
I was brought in to help plan what alternative energy research would look like.
And, you know, the motivations of the people at the top, I really can't speak to.
However, as I note in the book, if you go back to H.L. Mencken in the early part of the 20th century, he said the purpose of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by a series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary, so that they'll be clamoring to be led to safety.
And you see that across the political spectrum, whether it's immigration or it's COVID or it is global warming.
We can imagine many others.
It's just a generic tool that the politicians use.
Okay, fair enough.
So much of this has to do with one of the things that drives me crazy about this is the use of the term science.
I mean, I love science.
I read a lot about science.
And they use this word, but they're really talking about computer models, which actually only fall under the heading of science in a very, very contingent way.
How good are these computer models?
Yeah.
So let me first say, you know, as someone who's built computer models for many different purposes over the last four decades, they are very much a part of the science, and there is a science to them.
What most people don't recognize is their deficiencies and their shortfalls.
George Box famously said, who's a mathematician who was building models, he said, all models are wrong, but some are useful.
And the models can give guidance, but in fact, for something as complicated as the climate, and we can go into the reasons why, they're just not fit for purpose.
They can give us a general sense it's going to go up the temperature, let's say, as human influences grow, but exactly how and exactly how that's going to affect weather patterns is entirely up in the air.
And again, this is not me saying it.
It is the professionals saying it.
They just don't say it very loudly or in popular publications.
So have the, in the past, have the predictions borne out, the predictions of climate computer models.
You know, that it's gone, that the temperature, let's just talk about the global temperature, that the global temperature has gone up.
The models have in fact predicted that exactly how much the models have a tremendous variation associated with it.
When you ask for other phenomena about precipitation or storms, there's such a wide divergence among the models that you can almost claim that there's always one that's going to be right.
What they do, I mean, just is to take like 50 different models from 50 different groups and just average them all together.
And the variability among the models is so much greater than the changes you're trying to describe.
The book we're talking about is Unsettled, What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't and Why It Matters by Stephen E. Koonin.
It's K-O-O-N-I-N, who was in the Obama administration.
And, you know, Paul Krugman wrote this piece in the New York Times.
I don't know if you saw this, but.
Which one?
This.
This was, he said that I'll read just a little bit.
He says, we used to believe that achieving big reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would be difficult and expensive, although not nearly as costly as anti-environmentalists claimed.
Over the past dozen years or so, however, we've experienced a technological miracle.
As nicely documented in an article by Max Roser, the costs of solar and wind power, once dismissed as foolish hippie fantasies, have plunged to the point that quite modest incentives could lead to a rapid reduction in use of fossil fuels.
Now, I read the Max Roser article and it didn't seem to actually be saying that to me, but the reason I bring this up is because he actually credits essentially you, he credits the spending of the Obama administration for bringing renewables down until the point where they're useful.
Are renewables actually capable of being exchanged for fossil fuels?
So I've no doubt that Mr. Krugman is a smart guy.
He won a Nobel Prize after all.
He's an economist.
He's not a technologist.
And what I think he doesn't appreciate is that the grid is a lot more than just generation.
So wind and solar are great for producing electricity, but the grid is an entity that involves many sources of generation, and they all have to play together to send electricity reliably down the wires.
We've come to expect that that reliability is about four-ninths, namely 99.99% of the time, the grid is going to be supplying electricity.
The problem with wind and solar is that they only generate when the sun shines or the wind blows.
And that's not most of the time.
And so you have to figure out a way to provide electricity when that doesn't happen.
And there are basically two ways to do that if you're going to try to do it carbon-free.
One is you have to have a lot of batteries.
You charge up the batteries when the wind and sun are working.
That means you need more than just to meet the immediate demand.
You charge them up and then you discharge them.
The other is to have non-emitting sources of reliable electricity.
And nuclear is about the only way we can do that cheaply.
And so those backups are what really drive the cost of the system.
To get 95% reliability, yeah, you could deploy enough wind and solar.
That'd be great.
But to get that last 5% reliability, which we absolutely need for the few weeks when the wind goes down or it's cloudy, costs a zillion dollars, a lot more than the wind and solar hardware itself.
And so that's where these guys fall down.
They sort of understand, okay, cost of a solar panel or cost of a wind turbine, but nobody thinks about the system unless you're an expert.
And is there any possibility of creating the kinds of batteries that we would need to store that amount of energy?
Well, you know, this last spring, I ran a workshop for the U.S. National Academy and the UK Royal Society.
And I've got to admit, the prospects are not great, at least on the few decade time scale that we are looking for to decarbonize rapidly.
So I would say that the ambitions of the Obama, of the Biden administration to make the power grid emissions free in 14 years by 2035, just not going to happen.
Deal Breaker Discussions00:12:55
And what about nuclear?
It seems to me there's almost a superstitious hatred of nuclear.
It's been incredibly safe in free countries.
Is that something we should be looking into more?
Is something we should be investing in?
Yeah, so full disclosure.
First, you know, I'm trained as a nuclear physicist, and so I can tell you in great detail how uranium atoms splits apart.
I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I've been around them long enough that I can sound credible.
And yes, I think absolutely it is the largest emissions-free source of power that we have right now.
It can, it has been extraordinarily safe, apart from a couple of spectacular accidents.
We need to, in the future, look at small reactors.
They're called small modular reactors, and I helped get them started when I was in the administration.
They're about one-tenth the size of the big ones.
We could build them in a factory with a standard design, truck them on a rail car to the site, and put them in one at a time.
Much safer and much more economic because you can use the cash flow from one to help build the next one.
So there are companies trying to pursue that.
I just heard China has got one in the works as well.
We've got to be pursuing that if we're going to reduce emissions from the power sector.
What has been, you write this book, Unsettled, and you've basically dismantled the climate alarmist agenda.
What has been the reaction?
I've seen reactions in the press, but personally, are you getting a lot of blowback here?
Well, you know, what is most gratifying to me are other scientists and engineers who aren't climate scientists who say, wow, thanks for writing that.
These are things I never knew.
And I hope that they've got the tools to go dig further if they want.
There are some professional climate scientists who've told me quietly, Steve, you got it about right.
You know, I'll quibble here and there, but again, I'm glad you wrote it.
There are other people, as you saw in Scientific American or the popular press, who basically either offer ad hominem arguments, he's not a climate scientist, it's a show for the fossil fuel industry, and then other people who respond to quite different points than what I made, like the story about temperature extremes, for example.
So, you know, I haven't been called an idiot as much as I thought I would be.
I personally love reading the Amazon reviews because mostly they're people who say, thanks for being so clear and complete and well referenced.
There will be opportunities, I believe, in this coming academic year for me to have a more significant or substantial engagement with some of the people who've been criticizing me.
And let's have it out.
I'm all up for it.
I'm out of time, but I have to ask you very quickly.
Are you hopeful that we can have a sane climate policy or do you think this kind of craziness will continue?
I think Saturday will return as the proposals that are being made by the administration start to bite ordinary people.
Electricity becomes more expensive and less reliable.
Fossil fuel gasoline costs go up.
Consumer choice gets limited because you can't buy an internal combustion car or truck.
People are going to start to say, please tell me again why we're doing all of this.
And I think there will be a lot of popular pushback because the administration wants to go too far, too fast.
The book is Unsettled by Stephen E. Kunin.
Really interesting book and very readable.
Thank you very much for coming on, Dr. Kunin.
I appreciate it.
Great to be chatting with you.
Thank you.
So the world is falling apart, but you're asking, what about me?
What about my problems?
That's why we have the mailbag.
I suggest to all my followers, you guys make, set an appointment and get the vaccine first thing.
Yeah!
I'm not responsible for these.
I don't understand at all.
This is from a fellow who calls himself Socrates.
Possibly it's the real Socrates.
I thought he was long gone, but he says he's a New York refugee writing from the free state of Florida.
He says, Dear Andrew, Lord of the Clavenverse, I have been dating a wonderful girl for the last two years, and there is a good chance I would like to marry and have children with her in the future.
However, she has indicated that she not only wants to keep her last name, but wants to give our kids her last name instead of mine, UG.
Aside from this, she is generally perfect for me and also conservative.
I'm hopeful that she will grow out of this mindset as she gets older.
Is this a deal-breaker?
And how can I reason with her that she should, in fact, let our potential children take my last name?
I look forward to your response and love your show.
I can only, there's some questions I can only answer from my point of view.
I can't tell you what your point of view should be.
In my point of view, that would be a deal-breaker.
I would literally not marry a girl who said that to me.
For one thing, the fact that she not only wants to keep her last name, which I already don't like, that would already be a deal-breaker for me, but she wants to give her kids her last name indicates that there's something deeper here.
You know, unless she's like the last of the sugarmans or something, you know, like I don't understand what's behind that.
What is the thinking behind that?
And I think that traditions like this are very deeply ingrained and they are there for reasons that may go beyond what we know.
In other words, they are so old and so important that it's a fence, a wall you don't want to tear down until you see what's on the other side of it.
And we don't know what's on the other side of it.
I myself feel that when people get married, they become a family.
They should take one name.
I feel it should be the husband's name.
In my case, that would be a deal-breaker.
And in this case, I feel that that idea that your kids should have her last name is just, I don't want to use the word suspicious, but it is just redolent of some kind of depth of feeling and of belief that is not conservative at all and should be a red flag.
And for me, it would be a deal-breaker.
So you have to make the decision, but I'd certainly try to find out what's behind it.
From Rachel, Dear Lord Clavin, how would you suggest disciplining small boys?
I have three sons, very young.
I love them so much, but I'm afraid they might be becoming spoiled.
My husband is a gentle, hardworking man as it's wrapped around their little fingers.
Do you have any good books to recommend concerning this?
You did raise a good son, so I imagine you have more insight than I do.
Yeah, I think the important thing here, and first of all, I think you and your husband should get on the same page.
I don't think you can do this alone.
I think gentle though he may be and as loving as he may be, he wants to do the right thing.
If he really does love his children, he wants to do the right thing.
And it doesn't even make any sense that the right thing can always be the easiest thing and the right thing can always be what they want it to be, right?
The important thing with discipline is consistency.
And that, you know, I never raised a hand against my kids, but whenever I said that this was what would happen if A happened, then B happened.
Then if A happened, B happened.
There was no court of appeal.
There was no, oh, okay, I'll let you off this time.
Whatever I said, the punishment was going to be, if it was a serious, you know, sometimes I just say, if you don't stop that, I'm going to drop you off a building.
And then I would actually not drop them off the building.
But when I was serious and when I would say, you know, if you do this, this is going to happen.
You're not going to be able to play video games tonight or you're going to have to, you know, you're not going to get to go to your game or whatever it was that was going to be the, as they say now, consequence, but it was a punishment.
That happened.
And my wife was very good about that and I was very good about that.
And there was no negotiations.
And sometimes that can get you in a place that you don't want to be in, but the consistency is everything.
They have to know that when you say something, that's the law and it will come through.
And your husband should, you should be able to talk to your husband about that.
It's been so long since I raised kids that I don't know what the latest books were at the time.
The writer was a British writer named Penelope Leach, who was kind of the Dr. Spock of our generation, and would talk about the fact that you don't have to be mean.
You don't have to be violent.
Really, the violence comes when you're not consistent and they start to think that they can get away with things.
And I have to tell you, I see this in stores all the time.
I'll see parents say, don't you do that.
And they'll say, I told you not to do that.
And it happens again and again and again.
At some point, early on, you have to say, if you do that, this will happen.
And if they do it, that has to happen.
And again, it doesn't have to be violent.
It just has to be things that will consequences that they will feel.
You know, it's no good sending a kid to his room nowadays because they've got all this stuff in their rooms.
But there is something that they want that you can take away from them and should take away from them if they misbehave.
And I think you really need to sit down with your husband and talk about this because it's important.
You know, it's not like the old days where dad has to bring the thunder, although usually that is the way it works.
But that is not the way it necessarily has to be.
It just has to be that your word matters.
Your word is solid.
If you say, you know, yes, we're going to get ice cream later, you should get ice cream later.
And if you say, if you do this, you will not get the ice cream.
That too should be what happens.
And it really is simple.
And once you establish that that's the case, the kids respond to that.
From Grayson, I'm an aspiring writer.
My girlfriend, now my ex-girlfriend, helped inspire me and develop my recent stories.
I chose to include some sexual situations, violence gore and swearing.
Her parents, who are strict trad Catholics, were absolutely appalled at my work after trying to explain to them the reason for what I had written.
They were quite clear that my girlfriend and my relationship would go no further.
I don't regret what I wrote.
And while it hurts that our relationship was severed by their parents, I don't regret my decisions to stick to my work.
My question is, how should American conservatives, specifically the Christian audience, deal with art and culture?
I personally feel that it is naive and useless to try and make all entertainment the Pureflix version of life.
Yeah, I've talked about this a lot.
He says art in part is there to equip us for challenges in life.
And listen, you know, if your girlfriends or ex-girlfriends' parents watch Shakespeare plays where there are people's eyes being put out on stage, where there is all kinds of, you know, sexual shenanigans and violence, if they go to the opera where there's all kinds of sexual shenanigans and violence, they are actually being hypocritical.
The arts are there to represent the world as it is.
And can you sometimes dial it back?
Can you sometimes get around things?
Yes, you can.
But you should read.
I completely support what you're doing.
You have to find your way as an artist and you have to stand up for your art.
And a woman who's going to dump you for your art is not going to be around very long.
I wrote a book called The Crisis in the Arts, which deals with a lot of these questions.
You can get it for like a dollar on Amazon.
I don't get any of that money.
It goes to David Horowitz.
Or I think you can actually find it online for free.
But it deals a lot like this.
Conservative art does not look like conservative life.
The people who wrote our Constitution didn't watch Doris Day movies.
They watched Greek tragedy with plenty of bloodshed and incest and sexual malfeasance.
They read Shakespeare.
They read the arts, the real arts that represented life.
And that's how they knew to build a country where human nature would be taken into account.
That's why they didn't build an ideal country.
They built a real country because the culture they came from was a hard, bitten culture that actually represented the world as it is.
So conservative culture does not look like conservative life.
It looks like real life.
Pureflix, in my opinion, you know, they're like romantic comedy.
Women like to watch romantic comedy.
That's not what life is like, but it entertains them.
Pureflix entertains Christians.
They can bring their children to it.
That's fine.
There's nothing wrong with it.
It just is not art.
That is not what art does.
What art does, it doesn't have to be dirty.
It doesn't have to be those things, but it has to represent life truly in some no-nonsense way.
And that depends on the subject.
So I'm on your side, and you should read The Crisis on the Arts because it does address all of this.
See, I'm almost out of time.
And this is a complicated, it's a great question, but it's complicated.
I think I will let it pass.
Next Week's Flames00:01:50
I'm going to save this question for next week.
This is a really interesting question.
And I will stop there because I'm really out of time.
Listen, we had two clavinless weeks.
It was really one and a half clavenless weeks, and you let the entire world go to hell.
Now you've got another week until next Friday.
I think you should be able to finish that job.
You will be plunged into darkness flames.
There'll probably be flames, probably eternal flames, I would guess.
And, you know, wailing, gnashing of teeth.
If you survive, we will be back again next week, laughing our way through the fall of the Republic on the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm Andrew Klavan.
Hey, if you enjoyed this episode and want to spread the word, give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe to We're available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, basically wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, remember to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Matt Walsh Show, and the Michael Knoll Show.
Thanks for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Mathis Glover.
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The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production, Copyright Daily Wire, 2021.
John Bickley here, Daily Wire editor-in-chief.
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