The Dispatch Podcast - American Defeat

Episode Date: August 18, 2021

For the large majority of today’s podcast, our hosts discuss the ongoing crisis in Afghanistan and how it will affect domestic politics in the United States. Perhaps David summed up the conversation around the Afghanistan situation as succinctly as possible, “There’s no way to spin this as anything other than a direct American defeat.” Plus, short conversations about the state of COVID-19 and the new census data. Show Notes: -The Remnant with Eli Lake -The Sweep on issue polling -All of Thomas Joscelyn’s latest Vital Interests -New census data -Americans Color Outside the Lines - Chris Stirewalt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French. We will obviously be spending a lot of time talking about Afghanistan today, both what we know that is happening on the ground and the political ramifications here at home. We will also talk about COVID, need for a booster shot, and what is happening with hospitals around the country, and end with the new census data, what we know and what we don't. Let's dive right in. Steve, going to you first. Well, it's been a week since we last talked about Afghanistan with this group. And it's been a really, really awful week for Afghans and a really, really awful week for the United States. We've seen the entire country fall to the Taliban, including the capital of Kabul. There is one region that is up for, that's contested, we'll say, in the middle of the country, but basically the Taliban control the rest of the country.

The U.S. has botched the evacuation of its own citizens and Afghan allies to a degree that I don't think any of us could have imagined if we, predicted this one week ago today. You now have top U.S. diplomats negotiating with the Taliban, pleading with the Taliban to allow us to extract our citizens. The Biden administration can't tell us how many citizens have been abandoned in Afghanistan. The White House says 11,000 plus. the Pentagon says between 5,000 and 10,000, I think the fact that they can't give you a ballpark suggests that this is a very dire set of circumstances and that the Biden administration has been caught totally unprepared. Beyond that, on Tuesday, Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor gave a press briefing at the White House in which he was asked about the billions of dollars

of advanced military equipment that was left behind in Afghanistan and whether the U.S. knew where it was and whether we had any prospect of getting it back. And he sort of casually shrugged and said, you know, we assume much of it is in the hands of the Taliban. And we don't have any sense that they'll be returning it when they go to the airport. This is a calamity that I think is hard to appreciate in the current context in the day to day. I was watching one of the cable networks this morning and heard someone assessing the politics of this, which we'll get to in a moment, but saying, boy, this has the potential to be a problem for the Biden administration for the next couple weeks. David, I want to start with you. Setting aside the

politics of this. For the United States, how significant is this moment and are the events of the last week. Well, I mean, this is arguably, you know, history is going to tell, of course, ultimately, but there's an argument that this is more significant than the 1975 evacuation of Saigon in this sense. Obviously, there was more blood and treasure spent in Vietnam. It was a war that took far more American lives. But one of the key differences, then a key difference between Vietnam, the abandonment of Vietnam and what we have been watching in Afghanistan is that Vietnam had not attacked us. The intervention to try to prop up the South Vietnamese regime was a war of choice from day one. This is really something that if I'm trying to find a precedent in American history

for it, it's really hard to find it. This was a war in which the entity that attacked us, us in our homeland, in the middle of our cities, near the 20-year anniversary of their attack, as is claiming victory, like unmistakable final victory over the United States of America and a war they started against us. And this is something, you know, Joan was talking about on the remnant, which I'd recommend that anybody, everybody listened to, after you listen to this podcast, go listen to Jonah's podcast with Eli Lake.

This was a war, we're hearing all of this stupidity online. Like, oh, you're, are you the part of the neo-cons who got us into this? I mean, are you kidding me? This was a 98 to nothing in the Senate. We're going to Afghanistan. I believe 420 to 1 or something along those lines

in the House with only Barbara Lee. holding out. This was not a war of choice. This was a war of necessity brought home to us in our cities. And we are now not just pulling out, not just ending it, but handing control of the country over to the combination of, and this is very, very important, Taliban, the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Who did we chase out of Afghan, out of Kabul 20 years ago? Taliban and al-Qaeda. We're handing back to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. And there's no way to spin this as anything other than a direct, direct American defeat. And this is the kind of thing that there's just not, there's just no real precedent for it at all. And in the thing that

makes it so frustrating, so infuriating is it's a defeat entirely by choice. It's in it's a it's entirely by our choice that we have chosen to lose to the Taliban here, that there's just no two ways about it. It's a defeat by choice. And then finally, it's a bipartisan defeat by choice. I was on a radio interview yesterday, and somebody was at, and the interviewer was asking me, you know, like, when are the American people sort of going to figure out what they want here?

And I said, guess what? they did. They did figure out what they want to an extent, I mean, Sarah's probably going to, after reading, you know, Sarah's newsletter, the sweep, a lot of the polling is very weird here. But to the extent that the political parties believed they knew what the public wanted, it was this defeat, not necessarily of this kind and this rapidity, but it was this withdrawal. And so it's just hard to look at the situation. with anything but a feeling of dread at what might happen in the future and despair at what has already happened. Jonah, the president in his speech to the country on Monday afternoon said that his administration was clear-eyed about the risks of withdrawal and had planned for every contingency. Is there any sense in which we look at what's happened over the past week and believe what he said? no it is uh and i'm going to try not to curse on this podcast i also should let people know i'm

doing this from a car in southern california and if i run out of battery life and my voice disappears uh i haven't been canceled it's just i have been canceled i've just been canceled by electrons anyway um i am so infuriated by all of this and i think one of the the key points to answer your question that I think is vital to keep making and distinguish is, look, I think at least among, at least David, Steve and I, Sarah was more, I'll let her state her own position, but she was more equivocal about this, about, you know, we didn't think we should completely withdraw. And, and, and, but lots of serious people, including, you know, Sarah thought there was a worthy position. And I think there are, it's an intellectually defensible

position to say our time there is over after 20 years. And I'm happy to have that debate on the merits with people. But there's a difference between that and a fuster cluck of world historic portions so large it could easily be seen with a naked eye from space. This was, this is the equivalent of mixing, like, it's, think about it this way. At least with the evacuation of Dunkirk, the plan was to fight another day. This marries screwing, imagine screwing up Dunkirk while surrendering at the same time. And that's what we have done here. I've been screening at the TV and radio for a few days now. Man, wouldn't it be nice to have Bagram Air Base right now, we gave up, in the name of the Biden administration, and I've been writing this column

for months, kept saying that the reason they need to do this is we need to pivot to more serious geopolitical considerations, our rivalries with China, the threat from Russia, the sort of return of the 19th century great game, cold war, all this, you know, aren't we impressive, you know, manly men running the world type crap? And, um, and they thought the way to do that, is to get rid of a geostrategically important military base and listening post in the middle of their neighborhood, our adversary's neighborhood. And fine, I thought that was a wrong idea. But not only did we give it up, we gave it up so prematurely, we can't get our own freaking people out of the country. And we are now faced with a situation where we have to

beg, like John Belushi and the Blues Brothers of Carrie Fisher in the sewers, beg the Taliban to let us get our own people out of there. And the idea that somehow they planned all this. I mean, the contradictions in everything Biden says drive me nuts. He says, on the one hand, we prepared for every contingency, but we were surprised by how fast this happened. they say this was inevitable, but we didn't see this coming. And moreover, if they thought this was inevitable and the only variable was the time frame, why didn't Joe Biden say that to the American people? Why didn't he forthrightly say, look, we are giving this country back to the Taliban.

He didn't say that. He said, you know, there's a really good chance they won't. And instead, you're getting all these leaks from the administration saying, oh, we thought this was going to happen much more slower. but everyone's saying they thought this was going to happen. So they were saying, they were thinking from the beginning that we were going to surrender in Afghanistan.

Fine. But they didn't, you know, the guy who says, I'm going to tell it like it is, didn't tell it like it is, because that's not what he said when he was explaining this before everything went off the rails. And, but regardless,

the idea that this makes us look, that this enhances our position geostrategically vis-à-vis the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, is insane. And if that was the strategy, was to sort of be more serious about that stuff, this is literally the worst way possible to do that.

And one of the infuriating things about this, of this, which there are so many, is that I get why sort of progressive, you know, elite types make fun of right-wingers as not having passports and not knowing anything about the world and all these kinds of things.

I get that. I don't like it. blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there's a thing there is that Americans, there's a culture of right-wing Americanism that says, I don't really care what the rest of the world thinks. These are the people who constantly say they care about what the rest of the world thinks.

They care about the perspective from the post-colonial victims and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they completely, completely misjudged what this would look like if it went well to our enemies, to our friends. and to say that they completely misunderstand how it looks to the world now that it's gone bad. I mean, when you said this might be a problem for them for the next couple of weeks, my God, you had the British Defense Minister in tears about this.

This is going to be remembered, at least by historians. I don't know about American culture. We can get to politics in a minute. But it's going to be remembered by historians as one of the singular greatest screw-ups, not just by the United States, but by any superpower in the last 200 years. And it's infuriating because none of it was necessary. It was all the choice. I understand the complaint about getting into a war of choice.

This was a surrender by choice in a war that wasn't a war of choice. I want to separate out a few things Jonas said here. Steve, do you mind if I just hop in to Jonah? Please. Knowing that I'll have the three of you to point out where I'm wrong here. So I think we have to separate out the decision to leave from the decision on how to leave. Agreed. Because nobody can defend this.

Nobody is defending this, really, except maybe Joe Biden. So, yeah, just to get to. Sorry, just to jump in. Joe Biden really is, I think this makes your point stronger. He is defending this. Joe Biden said the events of the past week validate my decision to withdraw. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

So let's just shelve that for a second. Let's start with the weather to withdraw. I think that, who was it, Adam Kinsinger? Who was it who said this would have been the case 15 years ago, 15 years from now, and it was always going to be the case today? I think that I am inclined to believe the intelligence, which obviously some of the intelligence here was quite wrong. But the idea that you were going to have to send more people in,

there was no status quo option. Either you took everyone out, which is what they chose, or you were going to have to ramp up the number of people there because the Taliban was going to do plan this offensive, regardless, post the Trump's so-called peace deal where they felt like, fine, we'll give you a year to get out, your years up, and here we come. The Taliban was in its strongest position it had been.

That much I think we can now all agree on, but they had that intelligence at the time. And so the choice wasn't leave 2,500 guys there, and we could have just stayed indefinitely. The choice was send a lot more people, have more American casualties or withdraw. Set aside what has happened for the last week for a moment, if you can, it's hard. That is the first bucket.

That is the first decision you have to make. And I think we can disagree on, to David's point, when the U.S. is attacked, when we have national security interests in preventing al-Qaeda from running a country and the threat that we think they pose potentially in having another 9-11 style attack on our soil, maybe, or rather,

I acknowledge the argument that sending more people in is still in our strategic interest, having more American deaths, still in our strategic interest. But I think you have to acknowledge that the status quo wasn't an option and not fight the straw man

that like, why did they leave in the first place? Well, no, because we were going to have to send a lot more people and have American casualties in Afghanistan again. Okay, so then you get to the second bucket, if you will, which is, I think, the intelligence failures that they had, they thought the Taliban, even if it was at its strongest position that it had been in 10 years, was far weaker than it turned out to be, that the Afghan forces that they had trained were far stronger than they turned out to be.

And so should they have... had better intelligence. Should they believe the intelligence that they had? And should they have been evacuating people much sooner? All of that, I think, is a very interesting question, one that I'm very, very interested in. But then you have the third bucket, which is, okay, they did believe the intelligence. They didn't evacuate people sooner. And now this is happening. Now, what do you do? And Steve, this is to your point where Joe Biden is pretty defiant. He seemed defiant to not want to speak to it in the first place, not really give it presidential attention.

And then when he did give it attention, to basically say, this fell in my lap is what it is. We're going to move forward. That's an interesting choice. And you, you know, obviously the airport and securing the airport and having to now send thousands of Marines over to try to secure the airport, telling Americans they can't guarantee your security

getting to the airport, negotiating with the Taliban. I mean, all of this now is the decision process that the United States is in and the current. Can I interject real quick about the... I think Sarah raises a very fair point that I do wish would be addressed more completely. And that is, I think if you're...

are going to say we should have stayed. The we should have stayed is not 2,500 troops. Okay. That that was not going to be enough. What we should have stayed was roughly the level we had before Trump entered into the unbelievably bad peace deal with the Taliban. So Trump remember enters into this unbelievably bad peace deal with the Taliban, which has two components. One is a precipitous decline of American troops. And the other one is, a release of Taliban to the Taliban. 5,000 prisoners, including Al-Qaeda operatives. So it's decrease American troops by more than 5,000, increase the Taliban by 5,000. That's why when I write about this, I keep going back not to, it is true that the last, and I do mention that the last combat casualties were in early

2020, I go back, like Paul Miller did in a very excellent piece in the dispatch, to 2014. What we're talking about really is returning to the status that we had from 2014 through 2019, which was a very low rate of casualties, but there were casualties. It was a very low rate, and it was still a really small deployment of our military strength. And I think this is a reasonable debate, David. I am happy to have this debate with you all day long, but acknowledge that the vast majority of people on both sides, frankly, are not having that debate. They're pointing to like, well, we have troops in Japan.

That's not the same. Give me a break. Or like the list of countries that we have people in. The status quo that we had in 2015 is unlike any of those. And I think that I think you're exactly right. I think we need to have a debate over whether that status quo in 2015 was sustainable or a positive thing for the United States. And I absolutely, by the way, want to agree with you that Biden had this decision to make going back to the 2015. And by the way, getting back to 2015 was not going to be like snap your fingers, send a couple guys in and all of a sudden we're back to 2015.

That this started very, very much in the Trump administration. and was caused by the Trump administration, what the decision-making of the last four months was. Sarah, I just to interject, because it sounded like you were going to really disagree with something I said, and maybe I said something poorly. But I said we can make this distinction and that your position is an intellectually defensible position

that I just simply disagree with. I disagree with your position. But I don't think it's outlandish to say we should have gotten out. I don't think it's outlandish to say the status quo was untenable. Those are all fine positions. and I agree with you entirely. We should distinguish between that intellectually defensible position and this absolute debacle, which, you know,

conflates the policy with, which I think is wrong, but like defensible, with the execution, which I think borders on criminal. And that's my point. Let me just say something from a military standpoint. Okay, so grant, I grant that if you're going to stay this level of 2,500, troops was not going to be enough. It was going to have to be more like what we saw

2014, 2015, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, before the dramatic drawdown in response to that awful deal with the Taliban. And it's just worth underlying awful deal that Trump made. But if you're talking about, say, 2018 troop levels, again, a fraction of our military strength, B, fraction, tiny fraction of the casualty rates that we had during the surge,

nowhere in shouting distance of that. And then here's C, if we had troop levels like that and the Taliban came out into the open to attack in the way that they have come out in the open to attack, it would have been a massacre for the Taliban, just a massacre for the Taliban. And that's something that, and goes back to something I wrote yesterday, there is a giant difference. And we saw this in Iraq. We see this in Afghanistan between our allied forces when they're supported by American troops and our allied forces when the Americans rip the rug out from under them.

There is just an enormous difference in the way these things go. And one of the best evidences of that is the collapse of the Iraqi army in 2014 in the face of the Taliban, especially in Mosul, combined with in 2016, in 2016, the Iraqi army goes back and fights house to house, block to block, hour by hour, week by week, month my months to retake Mosul with just a tiny number of few hundred Americans with them along with American air power. When we're there and supportive, there is a dramatic difference. And that's is the thing that people don't understand about our presence. It's not just that our presence that we then engage in all the fighting.

It's that, again, going back to Jonas, a phrase Jonah used yesterday, and I recommend it again with Eli Lake. What ends up happening is when our presence is there, our allied forces are a massive force multiplier. When we're gone, the allied forces have the rug ripped out from under them, and they can't even fight the way they have been trained to fight. I think that's a very, very important factor here. So we rip the rug out from under them and then cannot then go back and say, well, see, this is how they were anyway, because they fought and lost 50,000 men alongside of us.

That's about 20 times more than the casualties that we've lost. 50,000 fighting alongside of us, rip the rug out from under him where they can't even fight the way we've trained them, and you're going to see a collapse. And that just also that just points to the moral depravity of Biden's defense of all of this. where he says, I take full responsibility, but it was all the Afghan people's fault. I take full responsibility. The buck stops with me, but it was the military that screwed all of this up.

On every single point, he makes it sound like he is bravely, you know, wearing the mantle of, I meant to do this. Well, at the same time, whenever I asked an explanation for why things are going wrong, he has somebody else to blame.

And look, the Afghan government was corrupt. That military wasn't as good as it should have been. some of that is on us for training it the wrong way. But when you take away air support and you take away maintenance and you take away resupply and you take away logistics and intelligence from a military that was only trained to be a force multiplier for our military and then say, ha ha, look at those cowards who only lost 50,000 people fighting for their country, refuse to fight for their country. They deserve to have their daughters dragged off and married to Taliban fighters. That's grotesque. And that's what Biden is saying. And it is shamed.

And so, again, the execution of this is such a moral horror that I really do think it raises the question of the guy's fitness for office. This is a guy, according to so many leaks, keep saying the one thing we have to avoid is a Saigon situation. And then you expect Ron Howard to come in as narrator and say, they got a Saigon situation. Except this is worse because we got, you know, we don't know how many Americans are still scattered out around the rest of the country who are being held by de facto hostage or legitimately hostage because of all of this, all because this was so poorly planned and executed for no strategic reason whatsoever. This was just let's throw this country under the bus and see what happens. And it's infuriating to me. Hey, I've got one thing that I think we can agree on

on this point, that the actual good guy to come out of this who is not getting any credit right now is former Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis, who resigned over the quick pullout that Trump wanted in Syria and Afghanistan because he could see,

presumably, exactly or some version of how this would end. I'm really curious. I wish we could hear more from him right now on how this all would have played out much sooner if Trump had had his way. And I think a big difference between the Trump administration

and the Biden administration is that people in the Trump Department of Defense understood for better or worse. I'm very torn on whether this is a good thing. But they did not trust their commander-in-chief And so they pushed back on stuff he wanted to do over and over again. There were threatened resignations. There were real resignations.

And in the Biden administration, Biden said, this is what I want. And they did it. Do you all want to, Steve, last word? Yeah. So let me jump in here. I think looking at this from sort of a macro level, some kind of a mess was inevitable. when we withdrew our troops because I think the roots of the problem that we're facing now are not two years old, are not five years old, but really are 10 years old and run across

public statements and public statements that I think revealed kind of intellectual and moral rot from American leadership going back across three administrations. But the way that this happened, I think, compounds the damage done to America to such a great extent. I don't think we're going to be able to appreciate this in a month, in six months. I think we'll see the full damage in a matter of years. You think about what the president said in his speech that what we've seen on the ground in Afghanistan validates his arguments for withdrawing. It is I think unconscionable that he would make that argument. We are seeing not only the rapid rise of the Taliban to power,

but we are seeing the embarrassment of the United States in this and the betrayal of Afghan allies. It doesn't validate anything that Joe Biden has said. When you look at the statements that have come from Biden himself from Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, from National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, from White House spokeswoman Jen Saki, we're at the point now where people are laughing at the things they're saying. They're so detached from reality that nobody takes them seriously. You know, Jake Sullivan shrugging off the potential loss of billions of dollars of military equipment,

the White House and the Pentagon not having any idea how many, Americans are trapped left to fend for themselves and now Taliban ruled Afghanistan, it's this level of incompetence that I think whatever people might have thought about the withdrawal, whatever our allies might have thought about the withdrawal, watching it happen this way compounds the problem and I think makes the damage much, much longer lasting. But going back, a big part of our problem here was making clear for the past 12 years that we wanted out. If you look at the things that we heard from Osama bin Laden, the things that Osama bin Laden said about the United States before the 9-11 attacks, that we didn't have the patience for a long-term fight, if you look at the kinds of things that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the planner of the 9-11 attacks, said to his interrogators once he was captured,

that the United States, in effect, runs its calendar on four years cycles, and that al-Qaeda and the Taliban operated on a calendar that counts in generations, and that eventually the United States would get tired, and the Taliban and al-Qaeda would prevail. If you look at letters that Osama bin Laden wrote to Mullah Omar, the then-leader of the Taliban back in the 2010-2011 time frame that we captured, these letters we captured in Osama bin Laden's compound when our seals took them out. They understood that this was going to be a long, long fight. Barack Obama, when he gave a speech at West Point, announcing a surge of troops into Afghanistan, but also literally in the very next sentence announcing the drawdown, the date of withdrawal, said to the Taliban, we're getting out.

That's our top priority. And that became the top priority, top strategic priority for each successive administration. It was the opposite of the psychology of the surge in Iraq where we said we're staying. We're staying and we are going to win. It doesn't matter what the political damages. It doesn't matter how little support President Bush has. We are staying and we're going to defeat you. And there was a sense, I think, in the insurgency in Iraq, that they knew they were going to be overwhelmed eventually because we had made clear we were staying. The opposite dynamic was at play in Afghanistan? I think it's hard to underscore how important that was. But then we made additional mistakes. And if you look at the way that the Obama administration talked about

the war on terror, talked about al-Qaeda, talked about the Taliban back in President Obama's re-election campaign of 2012 and the days before that, days after we killed Osama bin Laden, they were saying, in effect, the war on terror is over. Bin Laden's death means that al-Qaeda's going to die, the Taliban's going to die, and in 10 years we won't even really be thinking about this. That was a direct claim from John Brennan, who was then President Obama's senior counterterrorism advisor. You had Joe Biden saying the Taliban is not our enemy per se.

And it was such a fundamental misunderstanding of the enemy and who we were fighting and why we were fighting. it carried through the rest of the Obama administration. They wisely didn't consummate a deal with the Taliban, but they set the stage for a deal with the Taliban and offered many, many preemptive concessions to get to that point. Then you had the Trump administration come in. Donald Trump spoke tough talk about the Taliban and al-Qaeda

at the beginning of his administration and then turned quickly. And eventually you had in service of this deal that was, again, designed to get us out. That was the top priority. You had Donald Trump saying things like the Taliban will fight al-Qaeda on our behalf. You had Mike Pompeo on Face the Nation saying things like the Taliban will fight alongside America to destroy al-Qaeda. And you had basically a reversal of the kinds of arguments that we should have had. We weren't thinking strategically, we weren't making strategic arguments.

We were making arguments in support of getting out. And we were making those arguments that directly contradicts. the reality on the ground. The Taliban understood that. They understood that they were going to win if they were patient. That's why we're seeing the big picture losses that we're seeing today. All of that, I think, was not more or less inevitable, but it didn't have to be as bad as it is. What we've seen with the incompetence of the Biden administration and the absurd arguments they're making on their behalf in defense of what they've done exacerbates that mess. And I think we are sort of a global laughing stock at this point. And you can see this, by the way, in jihadist

channels. You can see this in Taliban channels. They are celebrating their victory over the world's, you know, what once was the world's great superpower, I think, is no longer. We are more or less a spent force. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain, on top of everything else, is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy to protect your family's future in minutes, not months.

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The American people in poll after poll, we were told, supported a full withdrawal from Afghanistan. Now, of course, we have polling that shows a 20-point drop in Biden's handling of it. His overall approval rating has dropped in the mid-40s, the lowest it's been in his presidency. Will this have a lasting political effect on the Biden administration? Yes. pure and simple. I, I talked towards this point last week when the full scope of the debacle and the humiliation was not yet apparent that you, I mean, again, I mean, you know the polls better than I do, but, you know, it really is one of those questions that depends how you answer it,

first of all, or how you ask it. If you ask, should we leave it so that the Taliban should take over, the numbers change pretty quickly. And that's, because as a bunch of people have, you know, been saying, including I had Charlie Cook on last week on the podcast, one of the reasons why our foreign policy is so schizophrenic is the American people are so schizophrenic. And the American people don't like these foreign adventures, but they also don't like the idea of losing. And I think that the, the, whatever, wherever people came down on their policy positions, the nature of the incompetence and the screw up on the execution gives everybody a safe harbor to criticize Joe Biden. You could be the

most, I mean, you just watch Fox News, all the people who celebrated Trump's decision to get us out of Afghanistan, it's not like they are in hiding. They love being able to dunk on Joe Biden for how he screwed this up and saying this would never happen under Donald Trump. And, you know, and so regardless of where people come down on the policy question or on the politics question, just the failure of execution and the dishonor and embarrassment that this brings to us as a country and the onslaught of coverage we're going to get over the next weeks and months about our interpreters being hung and tortured and beaten in the streets about Americans still stuck there and who knows what kind of ransoms we're going to have

to pay to get some of them out. There's no way that that's a good political story for for Joe Biden. And one of the amazing things I think about this entire episode. I mean, it's as a level of importance, it's pretty minor compared to everything else, but it's really shocked me is how tough and fair the mainstream media has been on this story. You just haven't seen any water carrying of note from, you know, MSNBC or CNN. I mean, there's a certain amount of existential panic from people like Jen Rubin who can't process the idea that Biden's screwing this up. But for the most part, I mean, Jake Tapper has probably been the toughest of any of the network news anchors. And everybody is saying this is a disaster and a screw up of epic

proportions. And you have, you still have reporters, including Corissa. I can't remember her last name and CNN, who's doing heroic work reporting on the ground. Clarissa Ward. Yeah, Clifford. She's doing great stuff. And like the idea that, Like, this is going to have a short shelf life for Biden, particularly when he is so clearly bad at explaining, you know, by explaining, you know, oh, we meant to do this, that I think it's going to have lasting effects. One question I have going forward, and I'll shut up after this, is if this erodes his standing in the polls and general approval and all of that kind of thing in the months ahead, does that force him to cling tighter to the base of the Democratic Party? Or does that force him to somehow scramble to get back sort of centrist, moderate, I'm in charge here, I know how to say no to people, credibility. And I just, I don't know how to game that out and I'm, and I'm suspicious that he, I suspect that he doesn't know how to game that out quite yet because it's, it really feels like he's in a bunker right now. The fact that he hasn't talked to any allies right now suggests to me that he's, he's in a profound state of denial and it's very difficult to see how he can intelligently game out the politics of this for himself when he doesn't even appreciate the,

scope of how badly he screwed this up. I do have to imagine that Kamala Harris is chain smoking cigarettes and drinking black coffee trying to figure out, holy crap, what did I get myself into here? I've been trying to figure out that political question for Biden as well. If I were advising President Biden, which direction do you go at this point to try to regain some of the ground you've lost? And yeah, I mean, I think at this moment, my guess is that you're to move further to the left because those are the people saying you're right and there's just this natural inclination to want to please the people who are standing by you right now instead of the people who are criticizing you. But that doesn't mean it's the politically smart thing to do.

It's just the human thing to do. Yeah, I can't imagine this. I can't imagine Joe Manchin's constituencies love this spectacle, right? I mean, that's a problem for Joe Manchin and that crap. Anyway, I'm sorry. David, I hear everything that Jonah's said. But, you know, the Acella Corridor talking heads and media have shown repeatedly that they do not speak for the American people as a whole. Yeah, there's some, you know, issue polling. They used to support it when they weren't paying attention. Now they're paying attention. They don't really support this that they're seeing on TV.

But there'll be some bright, shiny new object in two weeks, a hurricane. Who knows? will this really have any impact on the 2022 midterms, let alone the 2024 presidential campaigns? You know, I'm going to be a little bit more cynical than Jonah, and I'm going to argue that it is going to recede an absent, absent some of the most horrifying of images, such as, you know, Americans being murdered in plain view,

in obscure Afghan cities, I'm going to argue that it's likely going to recede the fact that there's another thing that we're going to probably move into here in a moment that is as important in people's minds, if not more important in people's minds right now, and that is the resurgence of the coronavirus. I do think that there's a couple of things here

that are of, you know, one, I mean, look, whether or not the public is going to pay attention to this, this has lasting consequence. So just putting that aside, everything that we said about the consequence of what has occurred here, we're going to feel this. Whether or not public opinion reflects that in eight months, we're still going to feel this. Number two, there is something here that was interesting to me that relates to what Jonah was saying about the media reaction to what's unfolding. and I'm beginning to notice a noticeable absence of a Biden cult, okay?

Because if there, remember, when Trump yanked the rug out from under the Kurds, one of our allies, if you're going to put in the pantheon of American allies, just below the Israelis were the Kurds. For a generation, in American minds, especially conservative minds, the Kurds were our allies. They were the ones who stood with us. Saving the Kurds was the battle cry in 2014, 2015, when Kurdistan was threatened to buy ISIS. Then all of a sudden, Trump just yanks the rug out from under him.

Within days, there are Russian mercenaries filming themselves in former American bases by American equipment. And the Trump cult unfazed, totally unfazed, so unfazed that you've seen. you said, wait a minute, I don't think Russians should be romping through American military bases. You were a warmonger. You were a warmonger. Noticable absence of a Biden cult here. And I do think that that has some lasting ramifications for Joe Biden, that he just doesn't have that absolute devotion that the core Trump base has. But the bottom line is, I think, that depending on what keeps happening with the Delta variant, depending on what happens with, you know, just as we're recording the podcast, I saw the news that a booster is now being recommended for the Pfizer and

moderna vaccines and might soon be recommended for j and j this stuff could crowd out um what's happening in afghanistan sooner than we might think and the last thing i'll say is as someone was reminding us the sagon evacuation of 1975 was not necessarily that big a deal in the presidential election of 1976. So that was the year before the 76 presidential election and the Saigon evacuation of a much bloodier war wasn't as big a deal in 76 as one might have thought. And so, again, with Americans, with foreign policy, foreign policy is kind of humming in the background, surges to the foreground, but then it can move right back to the background quickly. So that's the perfect segue to my question. for Steve because I want Steve to comment on my thesis that I am developing here, which is

this will not change a fundamental truth about America, which is they do not vote on foreign policy. But they do vote on domestic policy and sometimes things that happen elsewhere in the world become domestic policy. And so the question is whether what's happening in Afghanistan becomes domestic policy. And let me explain what I mean. Obviously, a terrorist attack on our soil, that's domestic policy, not foreign policy. And two, may be more relevant to here. How Americans view themselves, how they view what it means to be an American, is domestic policy. We pick that up in the questions like, do you believe the country is headed in the right track or the wrong track? And so I do not know the answer yet as to whether Afghanistan is a foreign policy

issue or a domestic policy issue. As of this moment, I think it's foreign policy. But I think this could turn into a domestic policy issue, even if it's at this peripheral level of how it feels to be an American, what you think it means to be an American, and degrading that notion in a way that'll be hard to ever pick up in polling or even elections for years to come. 100%. I mean, as much as I disagree with you on the substantive withdrawal question, I agree with you on this. I don't think, if you talk about this in politics, in political terms, this is any longer about Afghanistan withdrawal from Afghanistan. It's about competence.

It's about basic competence. And you remember, of course, Joe Biden, the main argument that Joe Biden made was that he would return competence and some degree of normalcy to Washington to White House decision-making. This will be, I think, in the eyes of most Americans about that. And the fact that we are, you know, that Biden spokesmen. people are laughing stocks. Nobody's taking them seriously at this point. He's getting brutal criticism from fellow Democrats on this. I think the fact that you have China already saber-rappling, talking about Taiwan, you've got Russia cozying up to the Taliban. There's so many cascading

effects from this that go beyond the immediate question of whether it was wise to withdraw from Afghanistan that I think the potential political consequences are huge, even if you buy the supposition that people don't really care that much about foreign policy and people certainly don't care about Afghanistan. But I'd also, I would also argue that we don't really know how much people care about Afghanistan and foreign policy in this context, in part because we haven't had a sustained argument about our presence there for more than a decade, right? I mean, the last major speech, Barack Obama gave his speech at West Point in 2009. He gave a follow-up speech sort of talking through what had happened there in 2014. But this is something

that presidents, the last three presidents, have sought to avoid talking about. They haven't sought to discuss in public. And when they've spoken about it, as I mentioned a moment ago, they've talked about getting out and they've downplayed, diminished the threat from the Taliban. I think one of the things we're likely to see as a result of this, people are going to see day-to-day reminders in news coverage, in discussions about what's happening, of just how bad the Taliban was. I mean, you know, you have the Trump administration, the Obama administration, the Biden administration sort of shrugging their shoulders at the Taliban and at its brutality. And while it may not be the case, certainly not the case, that most Americans are

going to wake up every day, you know, as upset as I am about what's happening to women in, in Afghanistan, I think they can look at the Taliban and say, boy, we had this really wrong. And of course, this dramatically increases the fact that this is such an unequivocal victory for jihadists, it dramatically increases the likelihood that we will see an attack here on the homeland or attacks on American interests overseas. That, I think, you know, the ability for people to make a direct connection to the incompetence and the policy decisions made here and what might happen in the, the coming months, coming years, I think could have potentially catastrophic effects for Biden's

political viability. So one point I think is just worth injecting here. I mean, I agree with that. I think, again, I think this is a Karam shot against Biden because it undermines his whole, the grownups are in charge. It undermines the sense of incompetence. And it tweaks a certain Irish strain in American culture, which says, only I can make fun of my uncle. Only I can make fun of my brother. And when you see the Taliban openly mocking Joe Biden, it makes a lot of us, you know, like, wait a second, you know, as a friend of mine says, you know, only, as I say in Animal House, you know, only we can do that to our pledges. And so I think that's one of the things that's going to have diverse political consequences. It's also worth just noting that

there is a segment on the right that is using this as an opportunity to quintuant. down on the most virulent forms of its own nativism and nasty bigotries, where, you know, the segment of the right, you know, where, which we see most in places like, you know, newsmax and that kind of thing, you know, that is, gives proof to the old, you know, sort of notion that the anti, the isolationist right and the anti-isolation left have a lot in common. And, but the isolationist right here is getting really kind of racist really quickly. And it's amazing to me that a group that claims to, a segment of the ideological spectrum that claims to be the most pro-military and the most support of the military is willing to create a wedge between itself and the most vocal people in the military on this are the ones who are almost openly weeping on TV to get, people who saved their lives home and their families home before they're slaughtered.

And, um, but you can, you know, you can, you can see it all over the place on Twitter where these people are saying, you know, the last thing this country needs is a bunch of war refugees coming in here. And it's very much like Joe Biden's position on Vietnam refugees in the 1970s, but more racist. And, um, I don't know how that plays out. I don't know. And I, what are the things it's remarkable is that it leaves Joe Biden with a tiny little opportunity to triangulate against the right on this, saying there are people here saying we don't know anything to these people, but so far it hasn't penetrated enough into the GOP ranks, the elected GOP ranks, for him to be able to do that. But it is disgusting, and it really worries me that this could get

more oxygen on the right. And the thing that's even more disgusting about it, Jonah, is, you know, we're not even talking here about some situation where millions of Afghans are swamping public resources because there's a move from one border to the next. We're talking about thousands of Afghans who, by the way, the overwhelming proportion of them would have been people who risked their lives to help us. They risked their lives. So in other words, you know, they're saying their rejection of refugees is so complete and so all-encompassing and so ingrained in their worldview. They're extending it to people who helped our troops in the field who risked their lives for our troops and the families of those who risked their lives

for our troops because there is not some sort of mass migration in the cards here. That's not even what we're talking about. We're talking about struggling to get the thousands of people that helped our soldiers who risk their lives for our soldiers here. And even that, even that is too much for some of these people. And you're seeing it across the length and breadth of this hard new, of this new right, this hard right. And it's disgusting to see. During the Volvo Fall Experience event, discover exceptional offers and thoughtful design that leaves plenty of room for autumn adventures. And see for yourself how Volvo's legendary safety

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but Jonah, I want to hear your thoughts. thoughts on booster shots, mask mandates, governor of Texas testing positive for COVID. What are your thoughts on COVID in the United States right now? I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but having just flown from East Coast to West Coast and spent literally two and a half hours waiting to get a rental car at the LAX airport in what almost seemed like. almost seemed like a refugee crisis in the sense that there was a line for the thrifty dollar rental car thing that snaked out of the building around the building

completely and it was a big building and the only reason the Hertz one was only two and a half hours, three hours long was that it was more expensive and the explanation that we got is that everyone is just wildly understaff and and there was no social distancing whatsoever people did wear masks, people were pissed off about it. And it kind of feels like where we are in America, in general to me, is that people really just don't, they're done with COVID, which is really unfortunate given the fact that COVID's not done with us. And I think that this combined with the Biden ineptness in foreign affairs, it really

does not feel like we live in a country right now on the ground that has a handle on COVID, and that was Joe Biden's chief talking point for a while. And we've seen his slippage in the polls on that stuff as well. And so, you know, I guess the question for the group is, do we get a handle on this? You know, people are starting to go back to school. Everyone's of short temper. Are we going to have anti-VAC? Are we going to have a new category of vaxed but anti-booster? people out there. Steve, where do you see all this going? Yeah, I mean, not in a positive direction.

There's so much hostility. The people who have been anti-vax and anti-mask are hardened in their positions, I think, relative to where they were six months ago. I think your sense that people just want to get back to normal and live their lives is absolutely right. And I think that we are like. likely to see a deepening of the skepticism of the FDA and the CDC and the governments in general. That is not unwarranted, I have to say. I mean, now we've got a call. We've got the

Biden administration, the FDA, the CDC, others saying that we will encourage people to get a booster shot, a third booster shot. But when Pfizer said that its research Pfizer and Biointech said that their research in midsummer suggested the need for a booster shot and that we might see five to ten times higher neutralizing antibodies than with the two shots alone. The FDA and CDC took the unusual step of speaking out, putting out a statement saying that these things were unnecessary. So once again, we have this kind of whiplash in government guidance on what's necessary and how it's all going to work. I think every time you see that, people just say, I don't know what the heck to believe here. And the more you have

that problem, I think the worst we get, particularly as the Delta Variant spreads. All right. I have a quick rant on this. It's a very specific rant. Governor Greg Abbott in Texas tested positive for COVID after receiving a third booster shot to his vaccine. At the same time, he is aggressively enforcing no mask mandates. Schools are not allowed to require children who cannot get a vaccine to go to school. I find this to be the most egregious, hypocritical, dangerous policy, all for politics, because the fact is he can argue that this is about, you know, parents' choice. Well, nope, you're only giving some of the the parents a choice, the parents who don't need other kids to be masked at school, the parents

whose kids are in a wheelchair or have any sort of pre-existing condition who need the protection of the other kids being masked to, those parents aren't getting a choice. Their choice is not to send their kid to school. And the idea that he, who I assume has some pre-existing condition, some need for that third booster shot earlier than most other people did that while having no thought for these kids under 12 who cannot get vaccinated and now just have to choose between going to school or not, I don't understand. I actually don't understand. Steve? David? Well, you're talking to a guy living in a town that trended nationally on Twitter because some

of our fine citizens decided to not just oppose mass. mask mandates in public schools in Williams and County, Tennessee, but to threaten their opponents in a parking lot live caught on video, to get in their face and to say, we know where you live, we know where you live. And I know that there are people there who are listening to this who are there and they say, that wasn't everybody. You know, you know what, you know what you call a mostly peaceful protest, violent. Do you know what you call a mostly non-threatening protest? Threatening. Okay. That's where we are. I just don't understand. Why are we not making the distinction? If you're over 12 and you're able to get the vaccine, then yeah, maybe we shouldn't

have mask mandates at high schools. But if you're under 12 and cannot get the vaccine, your choice then becomes not going to school. What? Huh? Why is that not the discussion we're having? And instead, it's just angry, yes mask, no mask, as if all schools are the same. You know, and this is something, so my youngest goes to a private school, great, great, great school in greater Nashville area.

And fortunately, she's 13, so she's been able to get vaccinated. And they have this great rule. If you're vaccinated, you don't have to wear a mask. If you are not vaccinated, you have to wear a mask. That seems like a smart rule. That seems like an easy rule. Pretty good rule. Pretty smart. Peaceful.

Nobody, maybe somebody on the fringe is really upset, but it works. People are in school. But, you know, we're at a point now where, and this goes back to something Joan has been saying, people are so many people, again, not everybody are losing their minds. They're just losing their minds right now. and the level of fury look you know one of the things about the south that i've always appreciated and i'm under no illusions that the south doesn't have its issues but one of the things i've always appreciated about this place is it's been a place of manners where people are polite to each other

people generally treat each other pretty darn well there is this really poignant piece in the york times from somebody living in auburn alabama right where i was born near where i was born And they said, it's changing. And I have noticed the same thing. It's changing. There is more anger, more short-tempered. People are more furious. It is very sad to see.

And centering it around, look, have the debate about masks and schools. Let's talk about it. But to sit there and to have shoutdowns and heckling and threatening over this is ridiculous. It is absurd. And then we have, on top of the absurdity, tragedy. So right now I'm looking at the statistics from the New York Times,

139,000 new cases. That's a 52% increase in the 14-day change. 696 new deaths. That's a 87% increase in the 14-day change. The overwhelming majority of those individuals, not all of them, have not been vaccinated. We are watching Americans die

by the hundreds every day because they are refusing a life-saving vaccine. And that is a tragedy in this country every day. All right. Last up. Census data, David. Well, it feels so light in such as so trivial by comparison.

Yeah, so the census the census has come out, census data has come out. And so for the first time, this is sort of the opening paragraph of the AP, no racial or ethnic group dominates for those under age 18. And white people declined in numbers for the first time on record in the overall U.S. population as the Hispanic and Asian populations boomed this past decade according to 2020 census data. None of this is really unexpected. We have been talking about the coming sort of majority, minority, America for a long time. I think the one thing that was a jolt was that you'd seen an absolute decline. You'd always consume that the American populations would increase, all American

populations would increase, but someone would increase faster than others. But you see an absolute decline in the numbers of white population, which seems to be driven by a couple of things, one, low birth rates. And then there's this other really curious thing going on is it seems that very large numbers of Hispanic Americans are now identifying as non-white Hispanic and previously had identified as white and Hispanic, which is really fascinating. And I don't really know what to make of all of this other than to say this seems to be it's two really significant things. For the first time, America in the lowest age demographics is majority minority. And second, that we've had this big change, apparently, where Hispanic

Americans are much less likely to identify as white. And so I don't know all the the things to make of it. So Sarah, please tell me. I actually have a very easy takeaway from this. There was enough mixed political news in this data that there is no obvious takeaway that Republicans now are guaranteed to take the House or Democrats are now guaranteed to keep the House at all. There was good news for Democrats in terms of urban growth, suburban growth, as you mentioned, potentially non-white growth. But look, demographics are not destiny, as 2020 proved. And Republicans can point to the fact that, yeah, but a bunch of the Democratic

growth, quote unquote, was in places Democrats already controlled. It doesn't do you any good to pick up more people in New York City or California, for that matter. So Republicans will control a lot of the redistricting that is done by state legislators. you know, overall, I'd say your money is still on Republicans taking the House, same as it was two weeks ago before we got this data. Jonah? Yeah, no, I think that's all right. I think I have a suspicion that some of the decline in Hispanics identifying as white probably has to do with the last two years of people talking about white supremacy and

white people are bad. And since there's a disproportionate number of young Hispanics who are probably more moved by that kind of messaging, so are a little more reluctant to call themselves white the way they would have been even a few years ago. But the larger point, I think Sarah is absolutely right. And, you know, I've been saying this for a long time. The whole coalition of the ascendant stuff that Ruiz Cheshire and John Judas and those guys pushed for a decade, which I think in many ways caused a lot of the problems of the Democratic Party as today and the way they frame public issues is just crumbling before our eyes. And I think that's a good thing.

Um, the, you know, I think almost every single county in America, the share of Americans who are of mixed race grew. And, um, these hard categorical denunciations or celebrations of one ethnic group or one racial group become much more difficult as, on the, as a, as a cultural reality when so many Americans are essentially mutts. And, um, you know, and I think, you know, the, the, the, the normal. going forward is for a lot of people who call themselves white, having at least one Hispanic parent or grandparent, and that doesn't bother me in the slightest. And I think that so much of the screaming and cultural sort of stern and drong that we get

about all of this kind of stuff just doesn't reflect where most Americans are. When one in 10 or one in seven new marriages, whatever the numbers are these days, are mixed-race marriages. The idea that somehow this is a profoundly racist country just seems kind of silly. You know, the idea that, you know, like,

oh, yeah, we're super racist, but white people are willing to have babies and get married for the rest of their lives with someone of a different race. It seems to mitigate against that. And I think that's to the good. It does, as, you know, a cultural conservative, make me want to emphasize the importance

of race-blind bourgeois values is an important thing in this country. And I fear that to the extent we're going to have real problems in the future, it's because of a bunch of, a bunch of people think that traditional values, bourgeois values, assimilation, all of these things are terms of cultural white hegemony. And I think that's incredibly poisonous and dangerous. But, you know, the fact on the ground is I think in the future, there are going to be an enormous number of people who are going to call themselves white,

who are in fact not technically white by the old standards, and that's fine. And so I find these numbers sort of encouraging, but they're also kind of messy. And so we're waiting to get more clarity from some of it, but I think those are the trend. I think I disagree with you on one point, by the way, which is I think that the census, quote unquote, race data,

is going to become useless in, if not the next census. I think the one after that, Because at the point that everyone is going to be some mixed race, et cetera, like, why are we even asking these questions? They become far less meaningful. And the thing that we use them for in redistricting is these majority minority districts, the cracking and packing, how are you going to make that a legally viable requirement in the census data in 20 years? I don't see that working out. So I think that legal regime is going to have to fall and it will be to the good. I have a question for Steve, forecasting the culture wars of the future.

Are we going to have once, because one of the central reasons for the decline in the white population was lower birth rates, are we going to move into more of a world that says to maintain a dynamic growing nation, we need to encourage more immigration or higher birth rates? Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. And I think to pick up on what Jonah was saying earlier, you have this sort of built-in tension between the increased racialization of everything on segments of the right and segments of the left. And in many cases, the most valuable segments of the right and the left. But the data suggests that the rest of the country keeps moving in a direction that would suggest longer-term racial harmony because, I mean, I think the intermarriage data is absolutely fascinating. We had a terrific piece from Chris Steyerwalt on this, on the dispatch homepage a few months ago

that we'll put in the show notes. But it gives you real reason for kind of long-term optimism if we can get over the kind of super woke trends on the left and the increasing racial hostility. being sort of manifesting itself on the right. I think there's a sort of common sense core that remains a majority in the country today that's not reflected in the increasingly shoddy cable news arguments that you see on the left and the right. All right. We're going to wrap up this somewhat long podcast with a shout out to Juanita the Armadillo. And thank you to the Cincinnati Zoo for bringing us the joy that is Juanita the

armadillo. As they put it, she is not a morning armadillo, does not enjoy her wake-up call from her caretakers. And I just, I feel you, Juanita. And Cincinnati Zoo is a great Twitter feed to follow. Thanks all. We'll see you again next week. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, you're writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one. Use one of their award-winning templates or try the new Blueprint AI,

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