The Megyn Kelly Show - "Experts" Mislead on COVID Origins, and Biden's Afghanistan Baggage, with Josh Rogin and Robert O'Neill | Ep. 366

Episode Date: August 3, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by Josh Rogin, Washington Post columnist and author of "Chaos Under Heaven," to talk about the compromised "experts" pushing faulty COVID origin studies over the lab leak theory, how science and mainstream journalists are compromised too and misleading the public, the ramifications of the "shell game" about the origins of COVID, how Fauci has shifted his positioning, what will happen if the GOP takes over the House, Pelosi's Taiwan visit and the China fight ahead for America, what the real effect of the visit will be for the Taiwanese and Americans, how China wants to harm us and change the world, and more. Then Rob O'Neill, former Navy SEAL and host of the new podcast "The Operator," joins to discuss the Biden baggage after the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, the truth about the killing of terrorism leader al-Zawahiri, the lies of the terorrists in Afghanistan, the Biden spin about the terror fight ahead, the alarming drop in military recruitment, the divisive military messaging in our culture now, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest and provocative conversations. Hey, everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Big show today with guests we love. Former Navy SEAL Robert O'Neill, the man who killed Osama bin Laden, is here to react to the killing of al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and whether President Biden has some nerve talking about Afghanistan like it belongs on his list of accomplishments. All right. Plus, we're going to get into the military's recruitment issues and what Rob believes is behind the massive drop that we are seeing this year, just as we're backing a war in Ukraine, on the Ukrainian side, and are saber rattling with China and behaving provocatively with respect. Is this a good time to have the military recruitment dropping? What are we doing about it?

Drag shows and woke military and lectures about white rage? Okay, we'll get into it. But first we begin with Josh Rogin of the Washington Post. He covers foreign policy and national security. He was one of the very first, he might have actually been the first reporter to look into the lab leak theory involving China's Wuhan lab. This is at a time, and he was looking at it right in the beginning when you were still called racist for doing that. It was being completely covered up by Fauci and Collins and by most of the media. But Josh saw something, continued to investigate, and is one of the few mainstream reporters

who you can really trust. He's not biased. He doesn't have an agenda. And he's been taking a hard look from the start on whether or not China has been covering up the real origin of this virus. Recently, our team noticed major news outlets touting two new studies claiming to bolster evidence that COVID emerged from the wild.

It started in that Wuhan market. It wasn't from a lab. Really? Unlike the mainstream, we actually took a look at the research and who authored it and who funded it and what we found will infuriate you on a couple of different levels. Josh Rogin, welcome back to the show. How are you doing? I'm doing great, Megan. Thanks for having me on again. Okay. So we see two studies just out. Now they've been peer reviewed. They came out in February 1st and now they've been peer reviewed. So we're supposed to listen to them. And they suggest that COVID began in the Wuhan market and not in a lab. So I looked at this and I thought, okay, who studied, who are the authors of these studies? One has 19 co-authors. One has 30 co-authors. And my my my eyes lit up when I saw it's all the same people

who have been touting the Wuhan market theory as opposed to the lab leak theory all along, except for the very beginning of the pandemic, when many of these same scientists took a look at the virus and its genome sequence and all of that and said, holy shit, this looks like it came from a lab. This looks like it came from a man, like it was manmade. And then they had a conference call with Fauci and Collins, which was documented by the U.S. Congress pursuant to emails that they get their hands on. And within 48 hours of that meeting, back on February 1st, 2020, these scientists did a complete 180 and said, not only do we, within 48 hours,

suddenly no longer believe in the lab leak theory, but it's racist. It's bigoted. It's wrong. And here they are again saying the same bought and paid for manufactured nonsense. And the media, of course, without doing any investigation, just repeats it and touts it and sort of puts the finger in the thumb of the then that the thumb in the eye of those who said looks man-made looks like it's probably from that wuhan lab do i do i summarize the events correctly yeah and what a damning recounting of events that you i agree with every word you said we're two and a half years into this pandemic and we still don't know how it began and the reason one of the main reasons we still don't know how it began is because all of the people who have that information rather than spending all of their time and expertise and our money actually trying to figure out have spent it

trying to obscure the origin that's what they're doing here they're using abusing science to tell us something that uh they themselves know is not uh accurate which is that they know how this started and you know take away the charts and the graphs and the and the and the data and that motivation is an allegation that i'm making based on a mountain of evidence and And you pointed out some of it. They say different things to themselves in private than they do in public. They attack anyone as a conspiracy theorist who doesn't agree with their point of view. And they are constantly engaged in exaggerating the data and the science that they are so expert in using to project something onto society, which they is disingenuous,

which is that there's firm evidence that this thing emerged from the market, which we simply don't know. OK, and then they go out into the press and mostly the science press, which is honestly is like a subset of the media, which is sort of the most captured source captured part of the media I've ever seen in my life, because theyunder this uh narrative which is oh we definitely know it came from the market and if you look at the report itself it says there's insufficient quote-unquote insufficient evidence it's in the report that that they know that where this came from at all and more more than that the paper admits now after it got reviewed that they have no

idea what happened before the market in other words they don't know all they're saying is that it was a super spreader event not the origin of that we already knew that already and yet here they are in in major papers saying that oh yeah this proves that the market theory is true and the science right journalists run with that and it's it's it's it's a pattern for two and a half years and it's uh egregious and this is just the latest example of these people who have a conflict of interest, Megan. That's the other thing that I think you're pointing out here is if the lab leak theory is true, we don't know, but we should investigate it, don't you think? If it's true, all of these people have a lot to answer for, and they don't want to answer for it. That's the bottom line, all the way up from Francis Collins and Fauci to Anderson and all of these guys who have a clear conflict of interest cannot be seen as independent adjudicators of this issue because their careers depend on

convincing us one theory and not the other. That's exactly right. Everything you just said is so smart and I want to pick up on a bunch of it. So first of all, about how these so-called scientists who are just given the pen by Science Magazine, by Nature Magazine, just write whatever you want. They do consistently exaggerate what they actually know. And we'll get to the agenda. I mean, the reason they're exaggerating is knowable and we know it. They have an agenda. Fauci and Collins have an agenda. Collins no longer there, but had and have an agenda. And it's all the same. These guys want to do what Fauci tells them to do. And these studies were, that's important. So they constantly exaggerate,

you said. Okay, so here's what they did. They come out with these two studies in February, first of all, non-peer reviewed, and just pop them up in Science Magazine like, okay, we've solved it. We've solved it. And this is what they wrote initially. Together, these analyses, these two studies that they're publishing, provide dispositive evidence for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 via the live wildlife trade and identify the Hunan market as the unambiguous epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, OK, and this is I'm quoting because this is a great little sort of comparison done by somebody named Francisco Diaz, who's done a lot of he's done a lot of great COVID reporting. Sure. And he noticed the differences. So that's what they said. Dispositive evidence that it came from a market. Now, they say after it's been peer reviewed, while there's insufficient evidence to define upstream events, meaning they don't know what caused this. The exact circumstances remain obscure. Again, we don't know what caused it. Our analysis indicates

that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 occurred via the live wildlife trade in China and show that the Hunan market was the epicenter, no longer unambiguous epicenter, but just epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. So what peer-reviewed version of the article basically just says, we have no freaking clue what happened before it infected a bunch of people at that market. But that market seems to have been the epicenter of the pandemic.

That tells us nothing. Not only does it tell us nothing, the reason that it's funny, I mean, not ha-ha funny, but like ironic funny, is that they already got their first news story from the preprint the new york times did a front page article on the preprint which made the false claims that didn't even survive the review and again from just from a journalism standpoint you got an unpeer-reviewed paper that's making

a serious allegation and you're just going to put it on the front page of the new york times without any serious scrutiny and big flashy headline. Oh, it looks like the wet market did it. Oh, what are you going to do? And then here we are, what, four months later, and it's totally changed. Are they going to put another front page story on the New York Times to tell us that actually none of that was true at all, even by the paper's own logic? No. All you see is like, oh, well, we're pretty sure it came from the market, which is, I mean, if you just step back for a second, Megan, because people can get lost in the mumbo jumbo.

And, you know, I find that when I'm trying to explain this to people, it's really important to point them to the experts like Alina Chan at MIT. I mean, she just went to, she's just MIT. But anyway, give her her scientific analysis a look. But the big picture here is that why are they going out of their way to push one or another? Is that what science is now? Is science about, I'm going to decide what happened before I do the research and then find every little bit of evidence that I can to support what I already think and ignore all of the evidence to the contrary? Because what's more important than the data points in this paper, which is like, oh, well, there was a raccoon dog at the market, maybe.

And we also found COVID at the market and maybe COVID went through a raccoon dog. But we never found any raccoon dogs who had the that's the logic. That's the argument. And then all of a sudden we definitely know what happened. I mean, it's an insult, really, to the intelligence of the American people and the readers and the viewers, because if you just think about it for two seconds, you realize, oh, wait, they're taking tiny bits of data that they're cherry picking and then trying to convince us of something that they must know is a super weak argument. Why are they doing what's the what's the scam there? And then the other thing is they're ignoring all the other evidence, which is that, you know, we don't know when the pandemic started it may very well have started in september okay so they've got an entire field of research or 30 scientists and nih fund and all this stuff to get you a paper that assumes that it started in december when there's plenty of evidence that's not the case you know it may

very well have started in September of 2019 or October, when a lot of people got sick at the Wuhan military games. And if you just think about that for a second, you see the lie, you see the scam, the misdirect, the shell game. It's like, if you believe every single piece of data we picked and ignore every piece of data that we decided to ignore, then maybe you could think that this is what happened. But the bottom line is that there's zero direct evidence that came from the market. Zero.

Not one animal. Not one raccoon dog. Not one mink. Not one... What was that? The other one that came up with... The pangolin. Yeah, where's that pangolin?

Where's the magic pangolin? What happened to it? How did the virus get from the caves in Yunnan, a thousand miles away, to this Wuhan market without spilling over on the way? How is it you didn't find like a string of pangolins and the people that they infected? And how come the virus happens to have a furin cleavage site that was being worked on by the- Wait, wait, wait. Stand by, because furin cleavage is important. I just want to add to what you're saying, because the second study, you know, that we're supposed to so revere touted by the New York Times concludes the most probable explanation for the introduction of SARS-CoV-2 into humans involves zoonotic jumps. Again, they're saying it came from an animal from as yet undetermined intermediate host animals at the Hunan market as yet undetermined. What they mean is we've never found the animal. Eighty thousand plus animals have been examined. Not one had this virus. So they have to admit

as yet undetermined host animal. They haven't found it. And yet we have all this evidence on the other side, including this lab asking for permission. Well, I mean, through EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak's group, for money to do exactly to a coronavirus, a back coronavirus, what was done, what appears to have been done to this COVID-19 situation where they inject the furin cleavage site, which makes it more transmissible, potentially more dangerous. And I'll let you pick it up on a furin cleavage site. Right, right, right. I mean, you're bringing up a really crucial point, which is that the real motivation behind a lot of this sort of, you know, weak research pushed

as conclusive evidence is that they want to tell people not to look into the other theory. Right. And, you know, that was easy for the first year of the pandemic because Donald Trump was president and he said it probably came from the lab. So all the people who wanted to stop you from thinking about that, all they had to say was, oh, that's a Donald Trump conspiracy theory. And most of the media was like, oh, we're not going to touch that thing. You know, we don't want to be pushing a Donald Trump conspiracy theory. But then something crazy happened, Megan, is a guy named Joe Biden said out loud on the record in a statement that the lab leak theory is one of the two possible theories and we should investigate them both. And then another crazy thing happened theory is one of the two possible theories and we should investigate

them both. And then another crazy thing happened. The head of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros, who rejected his own WHO COVID origin studies because he didn't investigate the lab. And he said, we really need to investigate the lab. And why should we investigate the lab? And baked into all of these news stories about this weak research that cherry picks data on behalf of conflicted scientists who are trying to cover their tushies. Baked into every one of those stories somehow is this idea that like, oh, well, this is settled now. We can forget about the lab. But the problem is it doesn't work anymore because, you know, there are now millions and millions of Americans who understand that that that that con game, that shell game that, you know, let's say we believe everything in this paper, which I don't, we still need to look into the lab because it's another theory.

And the people who are telling you not to look into the lab, like the Collins and Fauci's and Daszak's of the world, have retrenched to a new rhetorical position, which is like, oh, well, I guess it could have come from the lab, but we'll never figure it out because the Chinese government won't let us into the lab. And that's a retreat from their previous position, which is that you're a racist conspiracy theorist if you even mention the lab. But it still serves their same goal of saying that there's nothing we can do. So we might as well just accept what they say and go about our business. The problem with that, of course, is- They don't want us to look under the hood.

They don't want to look at the lab, but they really don't want us to look at their work with those labs. And they don't want us to look at how American taxpayers funded the work that somehow, you know, was centered around the very similar research to the research at the Wuhan lab that somehow spilled out in the town where that lab was not a thousand miles away where the bats were. And yeah, I'm sure that market had a lot of people from Wuhan walking through it. It's natural that a market would be a super spreader of a market, a lot of people from Wuhan walking through it, it's natural that a market would be a super spreader of a lot of people in the market. But that has nothing to do with the fact that the unique characteristics of this virus suggest, according to people like Anderson,

when they were talking privately but not publicly, that it might be connected to the lab in some way. He believed that, you know, so I think we need to check that out. And the problem is no one is checking that out because the Biden administration did a 90 day intelligence review and then concluded they couldn't figure it out and wash their hands of the matter. And the Democratic Congress doesn't want to touch it because they don't want to get in the way of their own base because progressives have concluded that this is now a political issue, which is not.

It's not a political issue. It's not a scientific issue. 10 million people are dead. We need to know how it started. Peter Daszak, the guy whose EcoHealth Alliance we were funding, Fauci kept throwing money at. That was our taxpayer money funding for this very dangerous research that we were not overseeing. He was one of the first to beg to have the lab leak theory publicly rejected and warned, quote, that public release of the virus's genetic sequencing would bring, quote,

very unwelcome attention. This was the guy doing the most dangerous... Right, for him, right? For him, for him. And to take a look at the players, all the same players now are authoring these two latest studies being touted by the media

as like putting an end to the debate. All these players have been involved in this from the beginning, trying to back up what Fauci and Collins wanted them to say, which is it wasn't a lab leak. It came from an animal. And one of them we've talked about this. I did a talking points memo on January 14th about this very thing and got into all the the details we learned from the leaked emails. So here's one of them. Christian Anderson, he's with Scripps Research, a professor, Robert Gary, two R's in Gary, Tulane professor, both of them on these two papers, and again, which were funded by Fauci and the NIH. They were involved earlier. And Anderson is quoted in the study as saying,

I was quite convinced of the lab leak myself until we dove into this very carefully and looked at it much closer. Does he mean very carefully in 48 hours from that February 1st, 2020, 21st, 2020 conference call with Fauci and Collins? Because just to refresh the audience's memory about how we're being lied to. We're being lied to. And the media is complicit in it. Just to refresh you, Feb 1, 2020, Fauci and Collins had a teleconference about origin with 11 top virologists. The next day, Christian Anderson's belief that this was a lab leak was communicated to these guys through a British scientist named Sir Jeremy Farrar. Same for Robert Gehry, both of whom are authoring two of the authors on these latest studies. Fauci and Collins' preference that this, quote, very destructive conspiracy

needed to be, quote, put down because it could do, quote, great potential harm to science and international harmony is on record. It's all over the emails, black and white. They're not contested. No one's claiming they're fake. Fauci called the lab leak theory a, quote, shiny object and assured colleagues that it would, quote, go away. All right. That's two days after Christiane Anderson's belief in it being a lab leak theory was expressed as something between 60 and 80 percent. Two days after that initial teleconference, this guy, Robert Gary, Anderson and others did a complete 180 writing an article for Nature saying it was clearly not from a lab, clearly not manmade. And now this guy is the nerve to say in this study, I was quite convinced it was a lab leak until we dove into it very carefully, looked at it much closer.

You're a liar, Christiane Anderson. You lied. And six months later, after they published that article in Nature magazine, after, you know, the 180, Anderson and Gary got an $8.9 million grant from Fauci and Collins. And now they're at it again. Yeah, I mean, so what again, what a sort of damning, clear recitation of the events that prove the bias of these guys and prove also their likely intention to deceive us, because of course, he says that he changed his mind now when the emails came out now when he's caught having said it his explanation is i changed my mind and don't

you change your mind when people when the facts change but he didn't tell us that at the time and that's where the deception is he didn't reveal at the time that oh yeah when i took a look at this virus i thought it probably came from the lab and then maybe I changed my mind later. No. So that two years was the crucial time when this narrative was set. And these guys were in charge of setting the narrative. There are early letters on this, again, with a million different Ph.D. degrees and M.D. and papers and the best schools in the world, blah, world blah blah blah everyone bought it except for the trump people and people didn't like the trump people and that shaped the narrative that we're still dealing with that's how the issue got politicized in the first place the

scientists politicized it on purpose again to cover their own asses and so as far as i'm concerned they've lost credibility these scientists have lost credibility on this issue now there are a lot of other scientists out there who belatedly to be sure because they were under a lot of pressure not to do this have now started to look at the other side of the ledger and when you that's why peter daszak got uh required to step down from the the covert the lancet covert origins uh uh investigation because they finally realized he had a clear conflict of interest because there's a good chance it came from the lab and And then that entire study went away. Peter Daszak was on the WHO investigative team. He's investigating himself and his best friends

in the Wuhan lab. That was amazing. 60 minutes is a great piece on that. Who's investigating? Can you imagine if they were like, hey, OJ, we need to find out what happened to Nicole. And OJ was like, oh, don't worry, I'll figure it out. I knew her really well. Don't you want me to figure it out? You know, I knew Ron, too. Yeah, we were all good friends. I'll get to the bottom of this.

That's the mentality of putting Peter Daszak in charge of the COVID origins investigation, especially since we later found out a year later that he had proposed putting furin cleavage sites on bat coronaviruses in china sometimes he actually talked about doing that and then here we have a back coronavirus with a furin cleavage site breaking out in the city where his best friends are in the lab i mean forget about occam's razor common sense dictates that we should look into that lab and we should look into all the now you you talked about that eight million dollar 8.9 million dollar nih contract which is egregious but what if i told you that usa got a contract for 125 million dollars 125 dollars they put out to restart the project of virus hunting in foreign

countries uh the same project that 200 million dollars before was called the predict program which didn't predict the pandemic which may have contributed to sparking the pandemic. So the NIH is only one part of it. Fauci and friends are going back to the well, but also all of about how it started and that they are trying to investigate how it started. Nevertheless, didn't blink an eye when USAID put out one hundred twenty five million dollars. Now that's held up right now by a guy named Lindsey Graham, who's the appropriator in charge of that committee. Then you've got this investigation. You know, that's the other thing. They want this to go away. Well, I'm sorry, but we're not going to be able to let it go away because we have to figure out what happened so we can make sure that it doesn't happen again. And, you know, any disaster in the world, a plane crash, a nuclear meltdown, the obvious thing to do is to figure out what happened. Otherwise, how do you know what to do so that it doesn't happen again?

And when Republicans take over the House, their investigation will be reinvigorated. And guys like Peter Daszak and Fauci, if he doesn't retire right ahead of this, which he might, are going to be called to the carpet. And they're going to and if they don't produce the documents, then they're going to face, you know, subpoenas and other pressure. Well, why don't we do criminal prosecutions if you can if you can prosecute Steve Bannon for not cooperating with Congress or why not Anthony Fauci? You know, it's like this is the precedent that the Democrats have set and they're going to have to live with it if

and when the shoe is on their foot in terms of control. Well, it's interesting because you know, there's a lot of sort of loose talk about, you know, criminal prosecutions of Fauci. I say, let's do the investigation. And here's the other thing. It's before we get to criminal prosecutions, why not let the fbi have a

crack at the origin investigation you know when the intelligence community uh investigated for 90 days and then said case closed we couldn't figure it out there was one agency that had a moderate degree of confidence that the lab was connected to the outbreak that was the fbi okay and because they're forensic investigators they actually know how to do a forensic investigation they don't care about you know anderson's paper they want to just figure out what happened. Something bad happened. So what about that? Let's go back to them. And I think you should have on your show, Senator Roger Marshall, who's written to the FBI to ask them what what why is it that they think it came from the lab and what what happened with that investigation? So I think this is not over and this is far from over, actually. And there's no statute of limitation on a million dead Americans back yet. No statute of limitation. Those cases never get closed. And there's the crime and then there's the cover up. And the cover up is what we're seeing right now. And it's ongoing and it involves Americans and members of the U.S. government. And it needs to be exposed. And, you know, we've talked about this, of course, but just in the news today, it's not, of course, just the deaths. It's the extreme

disruption, not just economically, but to children and people's lives. And there's news today on how the insanity continues here, Josh, you know, even with obviously there's still COVID out there and some are reacting as though we're still in the midst of Delta or we're still in the midst of the original strain. And this is in the news as the D.C. public schools have now made the vaccine mandatory for 12 years old and up. They've made it mandatory. OK, 85 percent. Washington Post reporting 85 percent of all students between 12 and 15 have been vaccinated. But when you look at black children only, that number drops to 60%. So the Washington Post notes, black kids who

experienced disproportionately large academic setbacks during the pandemic could basically be banned from school in huge numbers next year in the name of safety and wellness, even though these kids have virtually no risk from COVID to begin with. The Washington, D.C. public schools are not alone. New Orleans in February added the COVID vaccine to its list of mandatory required immunizations for kids five and up. So they're looking at that coming the beginning of this. And here's where that goes. And just the covid policies in general. Look out at L.A. They had they had said that they were going to make the covid vaccines mandatory. And now they've delayed it. And why have they delayed it? They had to. They they said, oh, it was a low transmission in schools. And, you know, some 78 percent of our students, 12 and up, have already been fully vaxxed. Here's the truth.

Half of their students were not showing up. Parents fully vaxxed. Here's the truth. Half of their students were not showing up. Parents don't wanna do this. Only 31% of parents of five to 11 year olds have fully vaccinated their children. The vast majority of parents are not going to do this for their five to 11 year olds. And even those with 12 and up are a little reticent because the kids face very little risk.

So LA school district now estimating tens of thousands of students are missing right now from their back to school rosters. They say it could be more than 20,000 missing. More than 200,000 were chronically absent during last year's school year. That's nearly half of all their students, much due to these unnecessary quarantines

for close contacts who are asymptomatic. We dealt with this in my own school. So all the COVID insanity and the loss learning and the social setbacks and so on that the children have suffered, this is all based on something we still haven't gotten to the bottom of. Who caused it? How? Is there a person who could be held accountable or a group of people? And most. Brighteningly, are they still in charge right now? Yeah, the economic and social impact of the pandemic is ongoing and just epic, not just in America, by the way, in countries all over the world. You know, and the economic and the cost to our children i don't have any children my wife and i are expecting november so i i don't

know exactly what i would do with my child but i would like to think that they would live in a society that has clear and and and well understood standards for taking care of each other's health i'm pro vaccine and i you know i don't i don I'm you and I may disagree on that, Megan. That's fine. We don't have to agree on everything to agree on something. Just just just not mandates. I'm not pro-mandate. But the the greater point that I think we definitely agree on is that the suffering is ongoing and and accountability is crucial crucial and without knowing what our government knows about this virus we can't have confidence in our government to tell us what to do and what i saw through the course of the pandemic so far is that uh our government didn't trust us

with information and told us what to do without explaining to us uh why they were saying that and when they were wrong, they didn't admit it. And that applies to masks. It definitely applies to schools. It applies to social distancing. And when the science changed for political reasons, both administrations, actually, the Trump and Biden administration, are reluctant to admit that they might have gotten it wrong because they don't have the courage to level with the American people. And I think, you know, this is a virus that doesn't care about our politics. It level with the American people. And I think, you know, this is a virus that doesn't care about our politics. It treats us all the same. And we need to find the common ground to get together on this thing because it's not over and it's not going to

be over for a very long time. That's right. OK, such an interesting discussion. We're going to hold Josh over because his area of expertise, one of them is China. And he just came out with a piece suggesting that the real crisis on Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan will start after she comes home. So thank goodness she did not have her jet shot down. She was not attacked while she was there. She's gone. She's left Taiwan now. But this is not over. And are we prepared for what's coming our way? We'll pick it up there right after a quick, quick break. All right, Josh. So you wrote a piece that is entitled The Real Crisis, in which you posit the real crisis will start after Nancy Pelosi comes home. There was not a complete meltdown, at least not militarily, when she went over there.

The tensions were high. And so what do you mean the real problems are going to start after she comes home? What's China going to do? Right. Well, Megan, for weeks, the Biden administration has been leaking to every reporter in town that this was the most dangerous trip ever and the Chinese were really going to do something crazy. As it turns out, the sky didn't fall. You know, we didn't get into world war three

the chinese didn't decide to start a war over nancy pelosi's visit to iwan they were certainly angry about it you know it was certainly inconvenient for the biden administration at a time when they were trying to downplay the tensions in u.s china relationship rather than stoke them they didn't want nancy to to go. They thought that this was an ego trip for her, a legacy item to add to her resume. And for them, the timing was downright inconvenient. So they begged her not to go in private. And then President Biden blurted out that she was going and that the military was against it. Actually, it was the White House, but close enough for Biden. And and boom now we have an international

scandal you know and that's just bad that just makes us look like uh we don't know what we're doing you know what i mean like go or don't go but don't have your dirty laundry inside the democratic leadership laundered by the president united states and then of course the chinese communist party's like oh that's great we're to pounce on that. We're going to threaten everybody, scare the crap out of everybody. Maybe we can scare it. They're not going either way. We win. So it was just amateur hour over there, you know, between Pelosi and Biden.

And that's embarrassing for America. OK, but at the same time, when push comes to shove, we can't let the Chinese Communist Party tell our lawmakers where to go. It's not going to work. I'm sorry. That has to be a firm principle that, you know, if Nancy Pelosi wants to go to Taiwan, she gets to go to Taiwan and that's that. And don't tell her that, you know, at the same time, the reality is that, you know, while they didn't shoot her down and they didn't, you know, do anything crazy while she was there, they're gonna use it as an excuse to to turn up

the heat on the taiwanese people right the chinese communist party always punishes the weaker party they don't want to confront us it's much easier for them to wait till lizzie goes home she forgets all about it she got her photo op and now they're gonna uh torture and punish the taiwanese people and they already did it they banned a hundred taiwanese export goods in a day just for the sacred they turned off weibo which is like that's how like people there communicate that's like they're it's like twitter plus your text message and and and whatsapp all together and they just turned it off for the whole island of 20 million people just just to be you know jerks about it you know and that's just

the beginning so you know i i support you know anybody who wants to go to taiwan i love taiwan i've been there i'm going there again soon uh at the same time it would be nice if the u.s could get its act together so that when we do send people to taiwan uh it's not just uh oh let's make sure her plane doesn't get shot down that it fits into a strategy to help the taiwanese people deal with what's menacing them, which is an increasingly aggressive Chinese Communist Party that's acting increasingly crazy and building a crazy war machine in order to eventually attack. That's what their goal is, is to attack Taiwan when they can manage it. They can't manage it right now, but they're working towards it.

Yeah. So she she gets her Yas Queen moment. Exactly. And Taiwan is left to deal with the fallout. I mean, that's really the question is taiwan exactly in a better position today than they were prior to her visit right no they're actually they're they're much worse off you know and they're going to continue to be worse off now that's not to say it's too late we have a uh you know congress could pass legislation to help taiwan

to support taiwan to give them more stuff the stuff they're going to need when china invades first of all uh we could put more of our military the administration could put more of our military assets in the region they could sell taiwan more arms they could get more involved diplomatically they're not really doing any of that i mean they're doing some of it to be fair but not enough and meanwhile you know the taiwanese people are looking 100 miles across the taiwan Strait at a monster. And that's building a thousand new nuclear weapons for what? Why does China need a thousand new nuclear weapons? Oh, yeah, to deter us from helping Taiwan.

You know, they're building, you know, an amphibious landing force for what? Oh, because they're going to land there. OK, so this is happening, people. OK, we better wrap our minds around it. Now, I get the and that doesn't mean that we're going to have a war. It means that in order to prevent the war, we have to increase our deterrence, that the Ukraine war should have taught us, in my view, that whatever we thought about deterring these totalitarian murdering dictators, aggressive dictators like Putin and Xi Jinping, we were wrong.

We miscalculated. Somehow he thought he could pull it off. Now, Putin failed because the Russian army is a paper tiger. But the Chinese army is different. OK, and when they failed yet, he hasn't failed yet. He hasn't failed yet. That's a really good point. But at least the Biden administration was wrong in that he was going to win in three days. But that's a separate issue. But to get back to Taiwan, what that should have taught us is, you know, I asked President Zelensky, I was in Singapore, Megan, at this conference, and they pipe in President Zelensky onto the big screen. And I got to ask a question. I said, what would your advice be to the people of Taiwan? And he was very clear. He said, you've got to help the small countries before the big

country attacks, not after. Once the attack happens, it it's too late so that's why i think that the trip was uh uh uh probably you know again defend her right to go absolutely that's an important principle at the same time to just show up it's not like she what you know she didn't didn't sign anything she didn't bring it you know what i mean she got her name so and then leave and now the body administration's got to clean up her mess okay and the Chinese are saying okay now we've got a good excuse to do all this evil stuff to menace the Taiwanese that we didn't have an excuse for before so we actually gave them

an excuse so all I'm saying is that the threat is rising and this situation let me ask you a question about what you said I know Thomas Friedman the New York Times had a piece the other day saying we need to sort of turn help Taiwan turn itself into a porcupine. Like you got to get it now to sort of what you were saying, not entirely, but he was making the same point of like now's the time to get them armed to the point where the Chinese would recognize it would be folly to go in there and try to take control.

And I've seen others write. That's insane. Just as soon as we start shipping weapons into Taiwan and any increased basis or increasing our military presence in the region, they'll just act immediately. They'll just do it now. The Chinese, they're not entirely rational actors. They don't seem to be very afraid of us, nor should they be right now. I mean, you could make the argument anyway, we're distracted in Ukraine. Our military is not what it used to be. We can't even meet our recruiting goals, which we're going to get to with Robin O'Neill in a minute. But what's to stop them? Why if we did something like that, right, shipping a bunch of arms to Taiwan now, wouldn't they just go in now?

Right. Well, they're not ready. Otherwise, I think they would. You know, there's two things that determine when an aggressive totalitarian expansionist dictator attacks his democratic neighbor. Intent and capability. They have the intent they don't have the capability they can't pull it off they don't have enough literally they don't have enough ships to land they don't have enough missiles to flatten the place so that nobody's around to say boo and they don't have enough nuclear weapons to make sure that we don't come

to their defense so they're building those three pillars you know what else they're doing they're siphoning off all their banks why oh so we can't sanction them it's going to take some more time for them you know what else they're doing they're hoarding foodstuffs 20 times they're what they need in all sorts of grains and cassava and soy and corn and you know chinese people don't even eat cassava it's not the point the point is that they're making sure that when the conflict comes that they're prepared that comes, that they're prepared, and he's doing it as fast as he can, believe me. So we have a small window. Most people think three years, maybe four, maybe five on the outside to arm the Taiwanese to the teeth so they have a reasonable chance of defending themselves, because who knows,

A, who's going to be president, but B, if we're going to be able to get there in time and who's going to make that decision. So the only choice to save Taiwan's democracy is to imagine if we had given Ukraine all those weapons that we're going to be able to get there in time, and who's going to make that decision? So the only choice to save Taiwan's democracy is to imagine if we had given Ukraine all those weapons that we're giving them now. Last year, as many people said that we should, well, maybe thousands of Ukrainians would still be alive today.

And that's how we have to think about it. Now, there's big problems with that, right? There's a risk that you're going to escalate, that the Chinese are so crazy. I get that. I'm not saying we shouldn't ignore the risks. I'm not saying we shouldn't do it thoughtfully. But I'm saying the bottom line is, as George Washington once said, preparing for a war is one of the most effective means of preserving the peace. OK, and, you know, that doesn't make it easy, but it does

mean that we have to start now and it does mean the window is closing. Now, we talk about Thomas Friedman's piece. I mean, if I'm'm remembering it correctly he said that her visit was reckless right now i think that's wrong i think the chinese response to her visit was reckless now again i'm not defending the way the administration handled it but for her to go he's saying we she shouldn't we we just can't do that kind of thing i disagree with that you know but what did we get out of it i mean mean, I he wasn't really making this point, I don't think. But Tucker made this point the other night and I got it the way he put it. Like, what do we get out of it? You know, Nancy Pelosi is 82 years old. She's almost out of office. Everybody knows she's about to get booted as

the House speaker because the Republicans are likely to win. So what? You know, I think sort of the prediction of like we get very little Taiwanwan gets hurt she gets her yas queen moment as i said but like what why right no i guess again sort of what i'm saying is that i think the important nuance is that we have to these trips in and of themselves are important but not when they're handled badly so she handled it badly sure and the administration handled it badly sure so we didn't get what we should have but we the the the the idea of throwing support to Taiwan, including by going there and showing the Chinese that they can't tell us where to go, is important, mostly because of what it means to U.S.-China relations. Because the more space that we give them, the more they'll take. And their appetite grows. But we're already, but let me ask you my questions on this,

you know way more about this than I do. I know know what I read in the papers. But it seems like we're already in a very weak position right now to require anything of China. You know, they own half of the United States. They provide us with half of our electronics and our medicines. And, you know, you could go down the list. They're buying up half of our farmland. And we're trying to set up these so-called guardrails. I saw you write a piece about this as well. We're like, OK, let's make the trade at least more economical or more fair. And they don't have to agree to that. And they probably won't agree to this. So it's like, what position are we in right now to do anything to saber rattle with respect to that? We we are military's weak.

We're already backing a war in Ukraine. We just lost a war in Afghanistan. We've been publicly humiliated. This is not a good time to go punching China in the face, is it? Right. No, I understand that argument. The problem is that they're being aggressive on their timeline, not our timeline. And sometimes you have to respond to the aggression of a bully, even when it's not convenient, even when you're doing something else in another continent. And, you know, but you're very right to sort of broaden it out to what's going on in the U.S.-China relationship,

because that's really the context here. It's not really just about Taiwan, because the Chinese Communist Party is expanding everywhere, not only around the world, but into our own society and on our campuses and in our tech industries and in Wall Street. And, you know, and this is a very complex and multifaceted threat. And the military is not really the best answer. Like on that, I think you and me and Tucker but the china threat is not a military threat for most uh they're trying to change the international order you know to advantage repression and autocracy against they are freedom and the rule of law and democracy and that's the way we live our lives so that should be really important to us and it's much more difficult than uh shooting down a bunch of tanks or drones or something like that.

And that's how we have to think about it. And, you know, I know. Let me ask you this, too. Let me ask you this, too. OK, so David Goldman over at Compact wrote this piece saying we're sleepwalking into war with China, which could be the worst calamity that ever befell the human race. And he talks about how we've wasted six million, sorry, six trillion or more and failed nation building campaigns over the past 20 years while China's been focusing its military resources on service to ship missiles, modern aircraft, submarines, electronic warfare measures on its coast, saying, quote, if we fight China on its home seas, we'll probably lose. He goes on to cite a 2020 book by Air Force strategist Stanford

professor Oriana Schuyler Mastro saying, quote, China's offensive weaponry, including ballistic and cruise missiles, could destroy U.S. bases in the Western Pacific in a matter of days. Recent war games have shown that a military clash between the U.S. and China over Taiwan would likely result in a U.S. defeat, with China completing an all-out invasion in just days or weeks. They have 1,300 state-of-the-art ballistic missiles. They can destroy American aircraft carriers as well as bases in Okinawa and Guam and on it goes. And saying Beijing will go to war to prevent Taiwan's sovereignty, but it would tolerate the status quo unless we get too obnoxious about promoting the sovereignty. So do you agree with that? Paint a picture that like we're going down.

If we if we enter this battle, we're going down in Taiwan. I know if if any of those things in that what you just read were true, I would agree with them. In other words, but it's such a blinkered description, really unfair description of the situation. We're getting aggressive. Therefore, the Chinese are reacting by menacing Taiwan. It's wrong. It's not the truth.

It's not what happened. The Chinese got more aggressive. The Taiwanese are scared out of their wits because they don't want to live under the ccp they saw did you see what happened in hong kong is that our fault too yeah the uyghurs and the genocide in the camps did we do that too is that because the china hawks in dc are itching for world war three no it's it's a it's it's just something to say to lull us back into sleep while the threat builds and you know and and also everything that you read there is again again, related to the military threat.

But, you know, let's say we have I mean, I'm all don't get me wrong. You know, a war with China is is the worst case scenario. But if you think about it, the the last worst case scenario is what we have now, which is essentially they don't call it a Cold War. It's not the Cold War. But that's what we're in. That's what they think. If you read what they're slowly taking over the united states of america and we're allowing it but not to say that all

the lessons of the cold war apply or anything like that but it is a systems battle and only one is going to win okay and that's a battle that we can't avoid and that doesn't involve ships and it doesn't involve missiles it involves our economy and when you see things like the chip bill chip spill for it's like okay great but we should have a hundred things like that you know and and so the problem is that all you have is people out there like this guy being like oh what do you want a war no you don't want a war i guess we just got to let the chinese take over everything what are you going to do you know and that's essentially the position that the vichy french had in the 1930s and how did that work out okay you can't just look across to the

aggressive totalitarian expansionist dictator and say, oh, well, I guess they're so powerful and we don't want a war. So let's just sacrifice our way of life by never provoking them. That's exactly what they want. That will have the opposite effect of what you want because it will embolden them. And then that will only make the situation much more dangerous. So the hot war is the worst case scenario. The Cold War is a less worst case scenario. But avoiding the problem is not an option. And if we care about the things that we believe in, including freedom rights, human rights, and the democracy that we live in, well, then we're going to have to come together on this thing and not just tell everybody that we just have to let China

be China and it's all America's fault because it's not the truth. Josh Rogin, you're so good. It's so great to have you back on. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. Great to be with you. All right. And coming up, we will have the man who killed bin Laden, Rob O'Neill, on the assassination of bin Laden's successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan. He was in a safe house provided to him by the Taliban,

by the very leader, by the very Taliban leader who wrote an op-ed in the New York Times. Okay, that guy who was saying, let's strike an agreement, too much bloodshed, was hiding Al-Qaeda's number one man. Okay, we'll get into all that with Rob and we'll talk about China and the war threat and the military next. Joining us now is veteran Navy SEAL and one of the most highly decorated combat vets of our time, true American hero Rob O'Neill.

You may know him as the man who killed Osama bin Laden. He is here to share his perspective on Ayman al-Zawahiri, the military's massive recruitment problems, and his new podcast that will be released starting next week. So happy to hear that news, Rob. Welcome back to the show. Thank you for having me, Megan. It's always great to be on here. I appreciate you giving some props to my podcast. I'm excited to start that off to have a little bit more of a platform than however many jobs get fired from tweeting. So this should be good. This needed to happen. I will download this just as soon as it drops. What's it going to be called? Just like, you know, thoughts from Rob or what? No, we're calling it The Operator Podcast because my book's called The Operator, but it's not calling myself the operator.

It's it's I think everyone that does anything for a living is an operator. You know, the guys who don't get credit for doing stuff to keep cities running, like the guys who get up at three in the morning to pick up the trash and the plumbers. And then obviously the infantrymen in the army, the people who investigated reporters, people that are out trying to report anything, people that are out doing stuff. How about stay-at-home parents that keep the families running and make sure they're up on their education and all that stuff? So it's called The Operator, but again, and not just because of me, I think there's a lot more operators out there. I'm going to get the Bin Laden stuff out of the way maybe in the first or second episode. I'm excited to interview people.

I love to pick people's brains. I want to see how they're thinking, especially with current current events and everything from from Nancy Pelosi in China to Paul Pelosi in Northern California to whatever's going on. Yeah. Yeah. Like Paul Pelosi's having a grand old time while his wife's in D.C. and Taiwan and so on. Now, first of all, I like that name, the operator, because, you know, you call the operator. What does she do? She helps you like the operators there to help you. That's what a Navy SEAL does as well. That's what you've been doing for America for a long time. Even after you you I don't know if we say you left the Navy SEALs, but you retired. Yeah. From that from the military. I don't know. Feels like you're always a Navy SEAL. But OK, let's get to there's so much news that I want

to talk to you about. So if first of all, what did you make of Biden's sort of victorious tone when he was talking about, you know, yes, assassinating Zawahiri, Zawahiri, however you want to say it, the new number one after you took out the old number one bin Laden. You know, it's good. It's a it's a military victory. He gave the command. So you can't take that away from the guy. And it's something that that we liked. We don't want this guy alive. But I just couldn't believe sort of the audacity for him to swagger out there and even mention the word Afghanistan without a look of shame.

I know it seems like a lot less than just a year ago we had the worst military blunder or series of blunders in the military ever. And I mean, I can't, you know, he did, on paper gave the call to make this thing happen. And as someone who's basically been wrong in every decision he the Haqqani network and the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are just ruthless and brutal to us, they took the time to make sure he would be by himself. And they used a missile that a lot of people didn't even know existed that there's not, it's designed off a hellfire, which originally was designed to fire from an Apache attack

helicopter and destroy enemy tanks. Now they've got it to a point where it'll just cut things apart, split them in pieces, and no one inside was even hurt, which I think is great. You know, I always I would love to minimize collateral damage. I always think that children should never, ever be on a list. And they made they made a direct effort and it was a complete success. I can't imagine though, the pain it was to go through to make that happen. Because I know even before, you know, I left the Navy in 2012, watching the woke mentality get into places like the CIA. I had guys that were agents in different parts of the world that I won't even mention that were getting out before retirement because they

couldn't put up with it. And just that nonsense of what pronouns we use and what we can do where and how we can't offend and watch out for this. They were able to get this done. And, you know, the buck stops here. The president made the call. So he should be able to say we got him. But, you know, there's a lot of a lot of baggage behind that, too. Mm hmm.

Yeah. He didn't want you to do what you did. He had advised Barack Obama not to go in on the mission that you carried out so successfully, you and your fellow service personnel. So he was wrong about bin Laden. This one he was right on. Glad Zawahiri's gone. What do you make of the way they did it, though? Because you speak about the, you know, this sort of new Hellfire missile offtake offshoot. But there was some criticism by Mark Thiessen and others saying, why didn't we send today's Rob O'Neill in there so we could have gotten some intelligence? You know, I mean, you told me about all the stuff you guys got during the bin Laden raid.

You didn't tell me about all of it, but you told me about some. And we didn't get anything because of the way we did this. Well, this one was a tougher target to take down than the safe house bin Laden was in. And as I think Trevor Noah said on The Daily Show, they should stop calling these places safe houses. They should call them a place where you think you're safe until something happens but uh just with how they're surrounded by there's taliban hakani um al-qaeda everywhere there's the police are not on our team anyone who was on our team when we were there if their heads haven't been cut off in front of their families they're on the side of the bad guys and just to we don't have bases on the way in. There's nowhere to fuel up.

There's nowhere to go. There's not escape and evasion or anywhere to go. And so this is just an easy way to make sure he was off the deck and they knew it was him. I mean, the way they found him had to be somebody got paid somewhere, the almighty dollar or the almighty euro, whatever we were using. Someone knew there was – we had a $25 million bounty on this dude's head, Azawahiri. the almighty euro whatever we're using someone knew there was we had a 25 million dollar bounty on this dude's head as i was here and it just and it goes to show you that someone i'm still amazed that some local on the ground intelligence assets will still work for us because we've proven we

don't really have any loyalty but again this is just something with it all comes back to and this includes us we just cannot stay off of our phones we got to have the phone and even if zawa harry wasn't on his phone i guarantee someone around him was on his phone. Someone's talking about somebody. It's just they can't. It's like someone had to tag someone on Instagram. Hey, look at me. I'm with the new boss or something. And I'm not privy to exactly how they did it. But that's the gist is people don't know when to shut up. Probably present company included. Sorry. Well, it's crazy how the very guy, Al-Hakani, who wrote that op-ed in the New York Times, which led to a lot of blowback on the New York Times, even from its staffers, saying, what the hell are we doing?

This is pre the Doha agreement saying, look, we pulled a quote. For more than four decades, precious Afghan lives have been lost every day. Everyone has lost someone they love. Everyone is tired of war. I am convinced that the killing and the maiming must stop, Haqqani wrote. OK, so this guy's saying this Taliban leader, let's let's you know, let's make an end to this. Let's find an end to this. This is the guy who is housing Zawahiri. Just as soon as we left and they promised we won't protect anybody from Al Qaeda, we're not going to become a safe haven for Al Qaeda again. Haqqani's like, how about literally this little pink house that I have?

You can come live here with your whole family. You're going to love it. You can walk around, life can resume. You can do your terror videos. Welcome to Afghanistan. And in he moved. Now he's dead, but Haqqani's alive and well. And the agreement has been breached. What are we going to do about it? And what does all of this tell us about our policy? Well, the Doha agreement, we knew there's nothing there except them lying to us. And the word lie gets thrown around quite a bit.

He's not big. These guys are really lying. Instead of having diplomats try to do this, they should have had. I was a battlefield interrogator. I would we go into al-qaeda houses in iraq afghanistan different places and i was one of the first guys to uh yank them out of bed as they peed their pants and get into their heads about what they're doing and they're gonna lie so they lied during that the haqqani's they've been around since the 70s they were yeah the haqqani network radical and ruthless we were funding them when they were fighting the Soviets in the 80s.

You know, our hands are by no means clean on any of this, but we know exactly who they are. They're not going to tell us the truth. And they don't give a rip about human life. These are people that know that. And I'm not saying they think they know that when they get martyred, they're going right to heaven to be in their big mansion with 72 houses with a virgin in each and that kind of stuff. They don't care about what happens on Earth. They certainly don't care about the civilians. They don't want the war to end. Haqqani is not just this radical Islamist. They're also criminals and they love power and they love money. They can get all of this. Just get rid of the Americans. They know that we don't have the stomach for a long war. We also don't have the strategies. We don't know how to end a long war. We also don't have the strategies.

We don't know how to end a war. The last war we won, I think, was in 1945. And we, unfortunately, are the only nation in the history of nations to drop nuclear weapons on another country, which we did. But we don't know how to win it since then. We didn't know what we were doing in Korea or Vietnam. We didn't really know what we're doing in Grenada or Panama. The first Gulf War, we managed to tell the Shia that, you know, we'll get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, and we'll rush right to Baghdad. And then We didn't know what the first Gulf War we managed to tell the Shia that, you know, we'll get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait and we'll rush right to Baghdad. And then we didn't. And

then he slaughtered a lot of the Shia. And then right now in Afghanistan, which we had won in 2004, we just stay there for a long, long time. So they just they know that we don't have we're a 24 hour news cycle type of people and everyone's sick of the war and they're tired of hearing about it. And they're going to forget about Zawahiri next week. And it's just going to it's going to be a no one's going to say never forget until they come across our southern border and attack us ruthlessly again. So Haqqani is going to lie. His whole family is going to lie. And they're not living. Their biggest problem right now, other than ninja rockets coming out of the sky, is that it's about 115 degrees Fahrenheit. That's all. That's the only problem. And maybe some doors don't have indoor plumbing. Yeah, the difference was we decided to pretend that we believed them in the Doha agreement and are pulling out and so on.

Like we knew what they were going to do. It's not like this is news to any of our leaders that they lie and that they didn't intend to not harbor Al Qaeda. But our president looked at us and told us it was so. And there's to me,

that's still bothersome. I still want my president to look at me and say, these are not good guys, but we're tired of being over there. We're going to take some calculated risks. He wanted us to believe that the Taliban was going to abide by its word that it wasn't going to shelter Al Qaeda. co-press secretary for Karine Jean-Pierre because she's such a disaster. And then they got pissed off because they're like, why is the white guy covering for the black woman? It's like it's everywhere, Rob, the wokeness and the nonsense. In any event, here's Peter Doocy trying to get some straight answers from John Kirby on what the hell went wrong to the fact that they were we were housings out here in the

first place. Watch it. So we know that the Taliban was harboring the world's most wanted terrorist. You guys gave a whole country to a bunch of people that are on the FBI most wanted list. What did you think was going to happen? I take issue with the premise that we gave a whole country to terrorist groups. I mean, again, I'd encourage you to ask. The world's number one terrorist. How is that not giving a country to a terrorist sympathizing group, if not giving them permission to have terrorists just sit on a balcony? The question, I mean, Peter, the way you ask that, it makes it sound like we owned Afghanistan a year ago. It wasn't our country.

It was an independent sovereign state. And the president made a bold decision to end a war that had been going on for 20 years because he believed then and still believes now that our national security interests are best met by meeting the threats of today, not the threats of 2001. And we, you know, I don't want to relitigate the whole war here, but obviously no one anticipated the Ghani government to fall as fast as it did. But we said at the time that as we depart Afghanistan, we're going to keep vigilant. We're going to stay ready and we're not going to let Afghanistan become a safe haven for terrorists who threaten our homeland. And this past weekend, we proved that case precisely. Yeah, Rob, my first thought is he better watch it because there is no way Zawahiri was the only guy being harbored by the Taliban.

And for him to sort of say, hey, we did it. You know, we've done it. We took care of it. We see. We've been watching. We took out the guy. It's a lot more complicated than that. Oh, it's a lot more complicated than that oh it's it's a ton more complicated that someone's

going to step up and take power and he's not going to be as well as famous as zawahiri who was not as famous as bin laden and eventually you know you know the agency people will keep their eye on the ball but we're going to forget about them and admiral kirby's got a tough job he's he's pretty much the only one that sounds like you know he knows what he's got a tough job. He's, he's pretty much the only one that sounds like, you know, he knows what he's talking about, but you got to figure when, when they're saying we didn't, nobody predicted the Afghan government was fault would fall as quickly as they did. I wish he would have given me a call. I would have told him that about 30 seconds. That's not a problem at all. We, if you're, I don't care what your special specialization is in defense or mixed martial art. If you can't learn to fight in 20 years,

you're not going to stand up to anybody else. And, and he, you know, Admiral Kirby's trying to, to not, you know, tell it like it is that we're not going to lose this country. It's, these are people, Joe Biden included, he's been a Senator since what, the seventies. Okay. So these are people in suits and, you know, God love general officers, admirals, the admirals never been on the ground anymore where there's someone shooting at them. These are people that have had yes men work for them for their entire careers. Joe Biden has had someone tell him exactly what he wants to hear for his entire career. That's why when he gets out there, he can't believe he's still not hiding in the Senate like he did. He you know, he now he needs to be expected to make decisions. But these

these spokespeople, and a lot of these suits up there just they have someone that wants their job. So they're never going to give them bad news. And that's just the way it works. There are sergeants in the Marine Corps who could have told you what's going to happen. I've trained with these people on the ground. I mean, these are people that honestly, when we're, say back when we're training them, if we're going to do anything at all tomorrow, say, okay, training starts at zero seven tomorrow, they would say, inshallah, meaning God willing, if God wants me to be here at seven, I'll be there at seven. Guess what? I guess it doesn't show up. Well, I guess God didn't want me to. So it's a different planet over there. It's not like it is here. And the lies to TV and the stuff that they tell each

other, the straight brutality. I mean, if you think it's bad here because someone uses some word at a at a at a they them on campus, you should see what they do to women that show that any skin from their ankles underneath their burka. This is a different place. It's a different time zone. And the people in Washington, you got to figure that. So the Beltways in Washington, that's where most reporters are. And the other reporters are up in New York. They all know each other. They only talk about each other. They have no idea. But Afghanistan, here's a good way to describe it. If you look it up, their time zone is however many hours and a half past ours, because that's as far away from normalcy as you could get. They're that and a half. So that's why you go on Zulu time. So at least we know something is normal.

The thing with women is, you know, I mean, I know a lot of people say that's not our concern, is a backwards sort of culture that would allow that kind of thing. But, you know, I mean, I know a lot of people say that's not our concern is a backwards sort of culture that would allow that kind of thing. But, you know, it's another thing that we were told we were told by the administration. Oh, you know, they've made promises. The Taliban's made promises on how they're going to treat when, well, they've been kicked out of public offices and they've been kicked out of running businesses. And now there is a mandate that they can only show their eyes. They have to cover their entire body and they have to have escorts wherever they go. And even the Washington Post and not just an op ed, the Washington Post editorial board took aim at Joe Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal in the wake

of this news. Right. Like there were some headlines yesterday ripping on more conservative commentators for saying, oh, it was great that Zawahiri was killed. But and mocking those who said but after, well, you know what? There is a but we need to talk about the but because the fact that he was being given safe haven there to begin with, and he wasn't the only one and isn't the only one, is cause for concern. Here's how the Washington Post editorial board put it. Quote, what was Zawahiri doing on Afghan soil in the first place? Sheltered in a building owned by a top aide, a senior Taliban leader and interior minister, Haqqani. This indicates the terrorist chief had Taliban protection. How many more al Qaeda operatives are nestled in Kabul's residential districts? They go on to say after 9-11, the goal was to deny al Qaeda a safe haven in Afghanistan. Now it is back and seemingly safe. And they go on to say the new Taliban regime is no

better than the old one. It's perhaps worse than the one that ruled during the 1990s. This is what Biden's chaotic withdrawal has wrought. That's that's that's a pretty big shift from The Washington Post. Yes, it is. And it would be a glimmer of hope to think that a lot of these journalists are not editorializing in their main story, putting the truth in paragraph 15. I hope they are. I doubt they are. But it almost seems like they're sort of enjoying, they being the reporters, the fact that no

one in the Democratic Party is supporting Biden for a second term, which kind of tells you where he is. And they only need to keep this lame duck going for another two plus years. And that's about it. But if you even claim that you're for human rights, if you could see what happens in Afghanistan, I mean, on a good day. So they don't let girls get educated. Think about the women who became doctors and attorneys and judges when we were in power, which they did. Now they're in a place where, and it's not just an escort, it has to be a relative. And you can't leave the house without a relative and you're walking behind them. And when they're, they're at home, it's not only do they not get to go to school,

they don't get it. They don't get to get educated. They don't get to learn. They get to sit in a room. They're in solitary confinement, sometimes with family. And that's their existence. Hopefully they have the girls grow up to be women who have children from a neighbor who bought her from her dad. That's all they have to look forward to is raising kids. And that's it and staying inside. It's a horrible, I mean, it turned from, you know, we kicked the Taliban's butt. We kicked Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan. We stopped right there. The Taliban and Haqqani have always been given safe haven to al-Qaeda.

I mean, I think Zawahiri was in Qaeda Pakistan the entire time. And if you're worried about why are they harboring al-Qaeda, I mean, go to Karachi, where the port is. They're everywhere. Go to the Torkham Gates. That's the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The federally administered tribal area is the only thing they could name it because no one knows what a border is. They don't know where to build roads and schools for people who do not want roads and schools. And then it doesn't matter what your intentions are, or how many languages you speak. If you spend enough time in someone else's backyard, you are the occupier. And it's so backwards again, with the time thing, the time zone thing.

They don't know what day it is. They don't care. I met guys there when we were, when we had, I bring up safe house again, we had a safe house that I lived in, in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. And we were hiring locals because the way to get hearts and minds is to hire locals for, if you can hire an electrician, make sure he's a local or a plumber or even chefs and security. The security guys I was interviewing, I was in a back, I remember being in a backyard, a huge opium field, wild opium. And these dudes I'm getting interviewed thought we were the Russians and they didn't know why they were coming to work for us. And then the other guys thought that 9-11 was a direct response to us invading Afghanistan. And those are the educated guys. So we're not going to go in there and give them some

Jeffersonian democracy out of nowhere and start making schools. They don't want it. And you can't just force, we can't force our way of life on people who don't want it. But now that we they're learning from us and we're not learning from us, we don't learn from our mistakes. We keep saying this is the way we've always done it. And we think we made them stronger. Other than a couple with Bin Laden and Zawahiri being two of them, pretty much everyone that was in charge is in charge again. Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm delighted to see this guy dead. You know, my only my only regret is that it was too peaceful. You know, I mean, dying like that is easy. It's, it's a pleasure. I mean, most people would like to anyone listening here. I'm talking to any left or right, gay or straight, black or white person out there listening to this. Any single one of us they caught, it would take them weeks to kill us because they're going to do it in a really, really unpleasant way. They don't care that you're not at war with them. torture inflicted on a guy like Zawahiri thinking about the little kids who were on the airplanes that went into the buildings on 9-11-2001, which he was responsible for planning along with bin Laden. So it's like, I hate to see him die so quickly and painlessly, but dead is dead and it's

a good thing he's gone. All right, let me shift gears and ask you about China with our first guest, Josh Rogin, expert on China and all sorts of things. We were talking about China and whether Nancy Pelosi's visit is a good idea, is now a good time to be sort of provoking China or saber rattling with China or just upsetting China. And his position was basically can't live our lives that way. China has been infiltrating the United States in many ways, many times. And, you know, we can't worry about provoking them because they're all about sort of this

slow takeover. So, you know, like we kind of have to do what we do. However, I was given some pause when I read how strong the Chinese military has gotten. I knew it had gotten strong, but it's like really strong. And ours, which we'll get to in our next segment, is not as strong as we'd like it to be. And we're having real difficulty recruiting new members of it. So before we get to us, let's talk about China, how strong their military is, and your thoughts on the Pelosi visit and provocation. Well, China is very, very strong. And if you look at the file footage, everything from their

close-in weapon systems on ships that are shooting down planes and missiles, to their missile systems, to their Navy and their ships, and I'm assuming there are, a lot of it looks like our stuff. And that's because it is our stuff, because they've got spies all over the place, the United States to include teaching at our universities. So I mean, they had a basically the exact same stealth helicopter that we flew into Abbottabad, Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden within a few months, because our good allies that we give a couple billion dollars to the Pakistanis sold it right to China. So they've got a powerful military they uh and and again they don't care about attrition they'll they'll fight the war of attrition like they have been for hundreds and hundreds of years their navy is strong they're expanding their fleet by building man-made islands that they're

militarizing and they've got a loyalty that we haven't had in this country i think since the greatest generation it's all about China strong. They're all about just talking themselves up. The president is the emperor, basically. And they really care. And they've been studying us. They know how to fight us. Fortunately for us, we're designed to beat large armies and navies, which we can still do.

But we're really heading down a rocky road because they have the land, they have the will, they do have the firepower. And it's almost like one of those, well, we have defense shoot one of their anti-ship missiles at the bridge of the Reagan? And they'd say, well, we'd shoot it down. Okay, cool. What if they shoot 10,000 of them at the Reagan? Are we going to shoot all of them down? So, I mean, they haven't been lying to their youth. They haven't been lying to their population about what they're going to do in world domination.

We're just – I don't know why we won't accept it. And it's everything from who's being paid off to shut up about China. So China's legit. China is probably the biggest threat out there facing us right now. And the saber rattling thing, it's it's almost spooky to think of how it happened, because it's not like Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, put this on her itinerary. She was she had a call with the White House. Someone heard it and they leaked it, which, you know, there are far too many people with security clearance as far as I'm concerned anyway. And I've always said, if everyone's special, then no one's special. So you don't deserve to have a top secret compartmentalized clearance, which a lot of people do. But someone from the Democrat Party

in the Biden White House heard this and released it. Just who knows why there could be something behind it because they want Pelosi to be shown on her last hurrah as the Speaker of the House. I'm not afraid of China and I'm the lone woman and person of Congress standing up to the Chinese. So there's a lot that are scarier about this than just China riding their sabers. But they're definitely I mean, they're definitely not afraid of us right now. Why would we want to be provocative with China? Why the hell would we use her? I mean, why wouldn't we demand a full and fair investigation into the COVID origins, right? Like, why would we send Nancy Pelosi,

82-year-old Nancy Pelosi over there to go stay one night in the, you know, Holiday Inn? I don't get it. I don't think that, I don't think anyone could stop her. And I mean, I don't think Nancy, she might be third in line for the presidency, but I don't think anyone could stop her. And I mean, I don't think she might be third in line for the presidency, but I don't think President Biden is her boss. And she's going to do whatever. The way this is interesting. This is interesting. I actually want to talk about this.

I don't believe that somebody could stop her. I realize technically we have, you know, co-equal branches of government. Biden's not her boss and so on. But like, there is no way Joe Biden, if he were serious about this, couldn't have called her up and said, now is not the time. Right. We were already fighting back, you know, backfilling the war in Ukraine. We can't afford to further alienate the Chinese like we'll get there. But not now. I believe he could have stopped her. I don't know. I mean, the Democrats are real. I mean, I disagree with a lot of stuff the Democrats do, but what they're really, really good at is party

leadership. And I think that Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi are the ones in charge. I mean, she spent $80 million of taxpayer money, so she could basically go over there and see the microchip company that they just invested in. Or distract from her husband's problems. Oh, yeah. Well, that's happening today, too. We're going to find out about what happens with the new judge that they just replaced at the last second and happened to be a footnote at the end of whatever they're doing. And I'm not an attorney, but I'm smart enough to read the full article, I think. But I don't think Biden could have stopped her. I mean, if anyone could have stopped her, it would have been probably Barack Obama and Susan Rice, maybe Ron Klain, but that's about it. I mean,

Joe Biden, he's got his third dose of COVID in the past week and a half because they're trying to think of a way to keep keeping him in a basement somewhere. I don't know. I think there's more to this story. I want to know more because I do. Although there's more to the story. I'm dying to know if anyone listened and wants to tell me. The question is, why didn't he? Why didn't he? All right. You could break that news on the first episode of The Operator. Stand by because we have so much more to get to with Rob O'Neill. We are going to get into the important issue of this alarming decline in military recruitment. Do you think it has anything to do with Millie out there talking

about white rage and dissing on white families who have been serving the military and serving this country honorably for decades? We'll get into it. Okay, so military recruitment is an ongoing problem. And while it's gotten slightly better, there's a reason for that. They've had to artificially prop up the benefits to try to get people to enroll. So here's the story. As of June 27th, the Army had met only 40% of its enlisted recruiting mission for fiscal year 2022. And they only had three months left. OK, just over 40 percent, not even half. Now, they said, fear not, because the summer is typically when services recruit the most candidates following high school graduation. So now here we are at in August and political

reports that the Army is now at 66 percent of its goal for the fiscal year that ends in less than 60 days in September, the Navy's at 89%. They're still below where they, where they want to be and where they thought they would be. Um, and what they are reporting is that the army has now for the very first time offered a quick ship bonus of $35,000 in all career fields for new recruits. Um,

it used to be 25,000. They've upped it to $35,000. That has helped their numbers. It doesn't get to the root cause of why people didn't want to do it to begin with. What they're saying right now is that in fiscal year 2020, the regular army got $61,000 and change, which was 100% of their goal. In 2021, they got 57,000. So they lowered the goal, but they met it right by about 5,000. And now this year, they wanted 57,000 new recruits, and they're not there. And they don't know whether they're going to get there. Having said all this, they testified before Congress, they expect to be 10,000 soldiers short of the planned end strength for the fiscal year.

The forces are, bottom line, not going to be as strong as we want them to be, and they are having trouble finding new guys who want to be associated. And it's not just the Army, as I mentioned. There are other branches who are struggling to meet their numbers as well, other than the Marines. None of this factors in the layoffs that we've seen in the National Guard, in the reserve troops of 60,000 we lost, who can't go and fight for us now because they wouldn't get the mandatory COVID vaccine. An absurdity for these best, brightest and healthiest and most fit amongst Americans, right? We can't use them now because this is all young men, right? They're all whatever. So they can't use the ones we already have and they can't recruit enough to backfill them. Why?

There's a number of reasons. The covid vaccine is one of them right there. There are people that would either whether it's true or not, say, for religious reasons, they didn't want to get the vaccine of their choice. The whole my body, my choice thing. And then, you know, from where it came, it's a Chinese-made biological weapon they released on the world to see how we would respond. In the military, unfortunately- Allegedly. Allegedly. Sure.

In the military, you have to follow orders. When we got in, if we wanted to fight in Iraq, we had to get, I got anthrax seven to 11 different times, and we got smallpox a bunch of times, and a lot of people got sick doing it, but we knew that there were orders we had to get I got anthrax seven to eleven different times and we got smallpox a bunch of times and a lot of people got sick doing it. But we knew they were orders. We had to take them. So the vaccine thing, you know, it's six and one half a dozen. The other whether you want to do it, how bad do you want to fight for your country? But then there's other stuff that's not necessary. There's the whole you can get a tattoo or not based on a request chip that your chain of command fills out.

You can't do it here. You can do it there. Or now you can do it here. Can't do it there. Just dumb stuff like that. Um, some guys are just not physically fit. Some people too much spent too much time with their, with their head and their neck bent down, looking at their phones and they have no interest in getting out and getting fit. And then a major reason, and I've seen this personally with people who want to join is that they hear about how woke is taking over, which it is. And it's becoming just such a – it just takes up way too much time trying to train people on different woke stuff that shouldn't matter in the military. They're making too much stuff important in the military.

I love that the Marine Corps is maintaining its numbers because that's what Marines do, and people that want to be Marines are just awesome, and they've always wanted to be Marines in general, but some people just see what's happening in the army, especially in the Navy. I've seen Navy SEALs that have, I know, I know guys that are past 20, but you can do 30, maybe a little bit plus to just retire, just get out. Cause I'm over it. I don't, I don't need to take this sensitivity training before you send me over to fight Al Qaeda. If we're allowed to fight them anymore. There are Marines who would get... had been ambushed in places like Afghanistan,

gotten really, really long gunfights for even days at a time, and then when they get done, they find they're being charged with war crimes from their chains of command, things like that. The Wolfe thing's a big one. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mark Milley, getting on there saying he doesn't...

he just doesn't quite understand white rage and he's white. So he needs to be told about things like that. And just, you know, there's a conversation to be had about all that stuff. But there's also a time and a place for it. And I think with our military, as long as long as we're good to people, as long as we act like good guys and, you know, the good guys and the good women on the battlefield, then it does a lot of this nonsense. Online training is not necessary. And a lot of people don't want to do it. I've seen young men be talked out of trying to become CEOs because they heard too much about the sensitivity training. And it's just that we're,

we're putting way too much stuff in a room that doesn't need to be filled. Yeah. It's like you, you guys are out on the battlefield, actually shooting bad guys and say, I got him. And then you're going to get corrected on.

He went by them. Let's get the pronouns correct. Well, even with, I'll get asked a lot about the bin Laden raid itself and they'll say, so did you guys carry cameras on the bin Laden raid? And I said, hell no, because the general doesn't need to know how justice was served. It just was. And all it's going to do, it's the same guy that's sitting on his couch that is correcting Patrick Mahomes on a Monday. Well, if I was there, I sure would have done this. He because that's interesting to me. You know, the whole fat is beautiful. Fat is fabulous. That's like the new belief in America is like, well, not not not like in your firefighter, not in your Navy SEAL. But let's table that for a second, because I want to spend some time on the white rage and General Milley.

So we had Victor Davis Hanson on the show yesterday. He's amazing. He wrote a great piece on this and we talked about it just a little, but not enough. And he said this is from his piece about a year ago, Austin and chairman Milley took time out from assuring Americans that all would be well in Kabul to testify about Congress before Congress, about the Pentagon's effort to address white rage in the six month aftermath of the January 6th riot. What was startling about their testimony was the utter lack of data showing any general trends that white soldiers were any more or less likely to practice racial discrimination or chauvinism than other ethnic and racial groups in the military. Goes on to say they seemed entirely oblivious that the U.S. Army depends on generations of family loyalty to the armed forces.

Such heritage and legacy considerations have ensured a steady stream of recruits for frontline combat units. In other words, over generations, the same families, drawn from mostly middle-class cohorts, have served disproportionately in combat units in Vietnam, the various Iraq conflicts, and Afghanistan. Indeed, if the military was consistent

in its racial fixations, it might have noted that white males, the purported targets of the Austin and Millie efforts to ferret out supposed white rage cells, died in three wars at roughly twice their numbers in the general population. And here's the last piece. He says, traditional military families

are not sending their sons and daughters into the ranks. It is not the danger of combat or the rigor of military life that families fear, but the suspicion that their offspring will be targeted for ideological indoctrination and coercion that is either extraneous or antithetical to military efficiency. Yeah, he's right on the money as usual. And a lot of this has nothing to do with prof room full of people. I'm in there with Navy SEALs, but also combat support. There's men and women there. And there are people that I know damn well are gay. And looking around, I'm like, does anyone care if anyone here is gay? And they're like, absolutely not. All we, we being the person on the ground, all I cared about was if I get

shot and I'm wearing all my stuff, can you carry me out? That's it. It's that simple. And when I went through the front door, I wasn't thinking about George Bush's policies or Barack Obama's policies. I was either thinking about the man or woman in front of me or behind me. Actually, I didn't need to think about the man or woman behind me because I knew behind me was safe because they got my back. And just bringing in this – and it goes, it goes back a long way that we're seeing this in, in every aspect of our life. This, this is going to an

education. And what I've seen up close myself personally is, is you only know what you're taught. And if you're taught hate, you're probably going to grow up hating. And it's a shame that we're, we're bringing all this into a military. I just, I wrote a book that way forward with Dakota Meyer. He was, he, I think he was the only, only white guy in his sniper team and it's none of it mattered we don't think about stuff like that you don't need to blame someone for something that none of you had anything to do with in the first place and and as i mean a lot of the stuff they're trying to train people and teach them not to do is not happening anyway and especially in a combat unit if you're out there doing what the military is supposed to do or if you're on that ship and everyone from the navigator to the people who are tying the knots and the lines of the ship and everything, the guys in the tank, the people on the sub, they're not thinking about this social awareness stuff.

And it's just being pushed on everyone at a point. Why are we wasting so much energy on this? The whole purpose, I mean, you tell me, you've been through it, but it seems to me the whole purpose of military training is to equalize everybody, to get everybody sort of in the same mentality of like, we are equal, we are a team, we work together. I'm not really Rob O'Neill from Butte, Montana. I'm a Navy SEAL. I'm a US Navy SEAL.

And so is the guy next to me and the guy on the other side. And this messaging does exactly the opposite. It tries to lower the guys and the gals who happen to have white skin as some sort of they need to be shameful because they're full of rage or superiority based on their skin color, which is a lie. It's bullshit. And it's really divisive in a group that should not be divided. They shouldn't be divided. You got to figure the first day of boot camp, the first day of SEAL training,

the first day of any specialized training, the first thing you do is shave your head because there are no individuals here. You're wearing the same uniform because we're all the same. And that's the way we're going to think about it. When we're in hell week, which is five and a half days awake with no sleep, carrying boats on our head with seven guys,

I don't really care what he looks like. And like I earlier i don't care if he's gay is his boat under the head or his head under the boat can he carry the boat with us and stay with us when we're in combat as long as he's not hiding behind a rock well not for good reason but scouring and fighting back i don't care about all the other stuff that's not going to matter it's it is it is seriously one team one fight and just adding this stuff in there you know at best it's going to matter. It is it is seriously one team, one fight. And just adding this stuff in there, you know, at best, it's going to make someone look inward and say, well, maybe this guy does hate me because my skin's different than his is. And that's not the case at all, at least in what I've seen. Again, I can't put myself in anyone else's shoes, but I can put myself in a few thousand people's shoes with whom I served in combat. And none of us felt like that. Yeah. The other the other theory that Victor had was that

the military has really become politicized that, you know, during four years of Trump, we saw extraordinary behaviors from some of our top generals and officers like Milley coming out admitting that he called his Chinese counterpart around, you know, in the aftermath of the election about Trump. Like, you know, he's unstable, but don't worry. I mean, I've got it. You know, we're not going to attack you like what? And there's some of the op eds that were written by top generals during the Trump presidency talking about how, you know, they're that quoting from Victor here, Washington Post op ed retired Generals Paul Eaton, Antonio Taguba and Steven Anderson melodramatically without evidence warning the nation of a supposedly impending coup should their commander in chief Donald Trump be elected again in 2024. Stuff like that makes the

military into a political entity that necessarily rules out at least half of your potential recruiting class, right? It's like these diehard MAGA moms and dads. You think they want to send off their 18-year-old kid to go fight for those guys? It's, again, politicized because that's the swamp, that's DC, and that's where the Pentagon is. And so you get a lot of these people that they're all thinking about their next line of work. So are they going to be they're going to run for the Senate? They're going to work at Lockheed Martin or Boeing. What are they going to do? And everything from, you know, someone somewhere said something to me about my job. If I don't say this negative about Donald Trump or whatever, we need the military industrial conflicts because we need to keep the contracts going so the people can still get paid. And so I need to all the lobbying stuff that goes on like that. Someone I can't take credit for this, but

someone tweeted out something along the lines of World War Three is don't start worrying about World War Three until Paul Pelosi starts investing a ton in Lockheed Martin or something like that, because the people that make that, I don't know don't know whoever came with that was really smart and that's, but I mean, it, it is, there's so many layers to the onion of, of, uh, when we go back to, to Navy SEAL training, we, we, um, master the basics, keep it basic, keep it simple, stupid. That's our thing. Keep it simple, stupid kiss. When, when, when I get asked about, um, you know, any advice in life, um, describe your life in, in, in a, in a phrase, I would say free throws, just the basics get, do it over and over the basics and then repetition master the basics. There's no reason to make everything complex. Um, a lot of

stuff, whatever you think the answer is, is the answer and all of this stuff, 95% of the shit you're worried about doesn't happen anyway, But we're so redundant with so many different departments and so many people want that award so they can get that promotion so they can get the next job. There's just so much out there. And like him or not, Donald Trump was against that. He's trying to trim the fat, but God forbid you try to, you know, when's the last time in DC someone said, well, that problem solved. We can disband that department. Not a chance in hell. We're still, we're still taking our shoes off for the TSA because one guy 20 years ago lit himself on fire and did it wrong. Yeah, that's exactly right. We're still doing it. I mean, your point initially about how we

haven't won wars and the disgrace of Afghanistan being not exactly a morale booster for the current service personnel, nor those we're trying to recruit. It's like, look at the way we got out of Afghanistan. It was a disgrace. Then we had 13 Marines and other service personnel killed. Then we dropped a drone and killed a bunch of people who hadn't actually committed it. I mean, like, then you've got Joe Biden as the commander in chief,

who's either asleep or wandering aimlessly. He's not exactly the guy you say, I want to go take command from that guy. All these things factor in. However, here's a curveball for you. Okay, this is from, hold on. Okay, this is the Pentagon and the Democrats, okay? The Gil Cisneros, the Pentagon's Chief of Personnel and Readiness,

tried to blame the recruiting problems on the abortion ruling on Dobbs. We have concerns that some service members may choose to leave the military altogether because they may be stationed in states with restrictive reproductive health laws. Then then Representative Jackie Spire, Democrat from California, added the added the incentive for women not to serve an almost an insidious effort to encourage women to leave the military because these people would like us to believe that abortion has been outlawed

in all 50 states in America and it is impossible to achieve so women are going to be forced to have the babies, men are going to be forced to stay at home taking care of the babies no one's going to be able to have an abortion if they want, if they don't want baby. And this is really the problem with those missing 10 plus thousand. Thoughts on that? Yeah, I was having a great day today. And right now, I think I'm dumber than I was when I woke up for hearing that. That is so ridiculous.

Again, I'm not an attorney, but I know that if it's not directly in the Constitution, it's referred to the states. That's all that happened. And just today we saw a state vote for it to keep abortion. The last thing on your mind is where I'm going to get stationed because of an abortion law. Now, I mean, don't get me wrong. Maybe if you're a young sailor and there happens to be a lot of clubs around, maybe you're thinking about it more or something like that. But I guarantee it's not that woman's reproductive rights or that there's there are no women out there that didn't join the Navy because they can't get an abortion in the state. They make it. They don't even know where they're getting stationed. They don't even know where they're going. There's literally not one. This is a lie. And they're not caring that they're no, this is ridiculous. And this is just, again, more politics trying to prove a political point that abortion has got everything to do. It's like

someone's parachute didn't open. That's the most violent case of COVID death I've ever seen. What are you talking about? This is, you know, not obviously not you, but this is just some ridiculous stuff that people are just, they're trying. Yeah. I wish I consider myself to have a silver tongue. I'm having a tough time coming up with any way to talk about this. Finding the correct box in which to put that defense. Now, before I let you go, what what does your shirt say? Because I can only see the very top on the shirt says front toward enemy. And this is what it says on the front of a Claymore anti-personnel mine in the military.

And this, again, is keep it simple. Stupid. This is 800 ball bearings, but behind it are C4 and you want to point it towards the enemy. What's the easiest way to do this? It says front toward enemy. And on the back, it says back. So I tell people the shirts that I sell, this is not a shirt promoting death. It's simply an instruction manual on how to wear a shirt. Here's the front. Face the enemy. This is why the windshield in your car is bigger than the rearview mirror. Keep going that way. Face your fears.

Front toward enemy. It's great on a mind. The minds work well. If you can do this, keep moving forward. You're going to do better. You're going to do better with it. I like that. This is one of my shirts from RJO Apparel.

A little plug on RJO Apparel. I also made a mug that says you're on mute for when someone's on mute on a Zoom call, just hold it up. RJO Apparel. I love it. I'm buying it and always interested

to hear what you have to say about it. You know, I don't think you need to buy anything, Megan. I know a guy who can give you the hookup. Okay, excellent. I'll take it. I'm not too proud.

What a pleasure. Thank you again. Thanks for your service. Thanks for your thoughts. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. Anytime. I want to tell you that tomorrow we have a special episode we've again. Thanks for your service. Thanks for your thoughts. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. Anytime. I want to tell you that tomorrow we have a special episode we've been working on for some time to prepare for you that takes a deep look at the rise in teens who are detransitioning from being trans, right? The mainstream media does not like to feature these folks. They like to pretend it doesn't happen. It does happen.

And it's severely traumatic. And it's the reason why the medical establishment should not be pushing transition so quickly and ardently on our young people. We're going to get into it. You don't want to miss it. In the meantime, download the show so you don't miss it at Apple, Pandora, Spotify and Stitcher. Also go to YouTube.com slash Megyn Kelly.

And thank you so much for being with us. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.