 I've told this story many times over the years. The operation, the bombing of Afghanistan, the original bombing at Afghanistan, was called in the invasion of Afghanistan, was called Operation Infinite Justice. And less than 12 hours after the operation began, they changed the name because the Saudis complained. Only Allah can inflict infinite justice. So don't pretend that you have God in your side or something and the Bush administration changed the name of the operation because the Saudis didn't like it, because the enemy, the enemy didn't like it. We only do enemy friendly names. We don't offend our enemies. We'll bomb them, but we don't offend them, right? It's mind-boggling. So the weakness, the groveling, the pathetic nature of the campaign, they had bin Laden in the crosshair a number of times. They didn't shoot because of civilian casualties. They could have wiped out the Taliban from the air, but they wouldn't bomb Kabul because of civilian casualties. There's another movie that I just saw recently about the first Special Forces soldiers who went into Afghanistan to try to capture Mazhar al-Sharif in northern Afghanistan. And they worked with the warlords. And it was like, they're struggling. And carpet bombing is never an option, right? Where it would have saved gazillions of lives of the people actually, the good guys trying to, but nobody, you couldn't just send missiles into Mazhar al-Sharif and destroy the enemy because who knows, we'll die, right? You have to actually, you have to check your targets before you shoot. Otherwise, and if you get shot while you're checking the targets, so be it, who cares? I think what that did to American culture, what that did to American confidence, what they did to American self-esteem and the sons of life, it's impossible to fully appreciate the damage that the one you walk in, the one Afghanistan, the way they were conducted had done to American culture. Not only has it caused this kind of sensitivity to who you're offending, but it's caused us to lose the idea of anything special about America. If you think about, we associate today with the wars, we associate the neo-conservatives and the neo-conservatives immediately attacked as, oh, they believe in American exceptionalism. I mean, there was Trump attack against the rest of the Republican party. It's the attack today of most modern conservatives. Neocons are the ones they believe in American exceptionalism, and we don't. I mean, I don't agree with Neocons, I wrote a whole book attacking neo-conservatives with bad times then, but that's not what they're wrong on. They're wrong on a lot of things, but America is exceptional, at least was exceptional. Maybe it's true that it's no more exceptional. But we've lost, I think the only reason that Trump could win is because Trump rejected American exceptionalism. You made a case, I mean, Trump's basic message in this regard was the world is full of thugs. We're a thug too, we're just American thugs. And it says, well, Americans, let's be patriotic around our thuggery versus everybody else's thuggery. I mean, it really became clear in the campaign in the, early in the campaign, the primaries, I think it was still primaries. When in an interview, he was asked about Putin, and he was, why was he so friendly with Putin? Because Trump and Putin had this very close relationship. And this was before he was president. And he was asked, why are you so friendly with Putin? Putin is, he murders journalists and he kills his political opponents. And I saw this on television, this is not some quote made up by the mainstream media. And Trump says, yeah, so we kill people too. Everybody kills people. I mean, that's what countries do. I eat all thugs. There's no difference. The only reason America special is because it's America. It's because we were born. This is antagonism to immigrants, right? It would count as where you're born. That makes you an American. And all these countries, and the first president, so there only being two presidents who rejected American exceptionalism explicitly. Obama, who clearly viewed America as morally equal to the rest of the world, if not inferior to the rest of the world, but was very explicit about his moral egalitarianism. And there was nothing exceptional about America. He was, I called him at the time, the most anti-American president in American history, Obama. But that's only because I couldn't imagine a Trump. But Trump is very similar to Obama because Trump is anti-American. He's not, if you understand America to be the founding fathers of America. And he is against American exceptionalism just like Obama was. In that sense, I think Trump captured a political moment. He saw that the country was basically moved away from the idea that America was special in any important regard, and that he could capitalize on that. So those are the only two presidents, Biden. I don't consider Biden an enemy of American exceptionalism. I consider Biden a zero. So I don't think Biden for, he doesn't think America is exceptional. He doesn't think it's not exceptional. I don't think he thinks. I don't think he has the mental capacity anymore to think if he ever did. So he's just a zero. And I think his presidency is one big zero. And that's why everything in Washington is not being dictated by Trump. It's by Biden, by the people around him. They run policy, they run everything. And he's just a yes man or a rubber stamp, I think, to give it kind of presidential aura. But there's no there, there. And whereas with Trump, he was constantly fighting with his advisors. And what you got was Trump. Sometimes his advice is one. And sometimes it was Trump. But for the most part, it was Trump. And with Obama, I do think Obama was a leader. So I do think he led his advisors. With Biden is just a follower. Always, again, always has been throughout his career. I don't think he's ever had an original thought. So 9-11 has really shaped the self-esteem of America. It shaped our attitude towards ourselves, our world in the world, the value we see in our own country. And it's value to us, and it's value from a foreign policy perspective. It shaped our attitude towards our politicians and to some extent towards our intellectuals, our elites, the people who kind of dictate kind of the terms of the culture. And it has eliminated any kind of confidence we have in our ability to overcome. I think the second big event in the 21st century was the financial crisis. And I'll leave that for another time. I think I've talked about that quite a bit and how that changed our attitude towards capitalism and markets and freedom. And that really, but that in 9-11 were the two events that really are gonna shape the 21st century. COVID is just gonna reinforce all those trends. But it has seriously dumbed us down, caused us to have this really deep-held mistrust of everybody out there, a mistrust that is justified. Why wouldn't we trust our politicians given how much they've screwed up over the last 50 to 100 years, but certainly over the last, what is it, 21, 22 years? It's been a complete and utter disaster. And again, everybody knows it. Like there were disasters in the past, but it wasn't quite as easy to pinpoint who did it. Here we know exactly who did it. And maybe it's implicit, maybe we don't recognize it fully. But I think it's now an embedded part of the culture. I think also 9-11 was also a time where as initially in the first month or two, everybody was patriotic, everybody supported George Bush as ratings went through the roof. By the time even of their election in 2004 and certainly in the second term, the country started really splitting and tearing apart. They really started to be this approach of, and I saw it on the right, particularly on the right, there was this approach of, you cannot criticize Bush. If you criticize Bush, you're basically committing treason. We're fighting a war, you don't criticize the commander in chief during a war. And if you do, you're just in league with the New York Times. And I remember people saying that to me in the early 2000s, exactly like they said it to me during Trump's stuff, when I used to criticize Trump, oh, you're just part of the mainstream media. You're just a New York Times guy. It's the same pattern. The same pattern. And I think after 9-11 was the first time I observed this, particularly on the right of this, you cannot criticize their sacred cows and if you are, you just lumped in together with all the leftists. No nuance, no ability to differentiate. And I would say to them, I was still naive in those days. No, the most important critique of Bush is from the right. I think he's a wimp. Right, my critique is he's too wimpy. He's too, and it's important to critique him from the right. No, I mean, no matter what the critique is, it doesn't matter. It's the criticizing. And that's when I first sensed the authoritarian nature, I mean, Bush for a while, they could have done anything. And certainly in the Republican Party, they would have followed him, no matter what he proposed or what he engineered. So there was definitely this authoritarian sense. There was definitely this attitude that no criticism allowed, the left is the enemy, those guys are the enemy, those other. And that I think throughout Bush's administration got worse and worse and worse. And then Obama, Obama I think segmented the government through the country even deeper. You got the Tea Party, and which started out I think as a positive movement, but turned out to be more party about, more movement about hate, hating the other side than it was about actually understanding and loving America. And it morphed into the Trump movement. So by then, I mean, I'm still shocked and I certainly was shocked in 2016, the depth to which the right hates the left and the left hates the right. I think I said this on the other day on the show that I first figured out, the extent to which the left hated the right when that scene in Corbyn enthusiasm where Larry David is about to have sex with this amazing sexy woman. And he notices on a shelf there a picture of George Bush. And he goes, you're a Republican. And that was it, no sex. No, she was no longer attractive. There was nothing was happening. And I mean, really? Politics is more important than sex. I mean, that was a shock to me. I didn't know there were people who held that view. So it's become our tribal, I think our tribalism, you know, again, everything has its roots way back and everything ultimately is determined by ideas. But what we have today is that the ideas that are determining us are not specific political ideas that are ideas that determining us ideas about epistemology and metaphysics, ideas about where truth comes from and what is reality and the role of reason. And those ideas are the bad ideas. And those ideas don't lead to one specific outcome. What those ideas lead to is the mess we're in today. So the same ideas are leading the right to be the right and the left to be the left, they're both mystics. The same ideas about where the truth come from are leading the left to be the left and the right to be the right. So it's the same, in a sense, complete and not a relativism, subjectivism, which I think religion is, that impacts all of them, which is leading to where we are today. So when people think about ideas shaped history, it's not like this particular idea in politics leads to these things. It's the fundamental ideas about morality, epistemology and metaphysics that drive us and then there's a million different variations of wrong. There's only one variation of right and a million variations of wrong. I think Aristotle said that there's only one path to virtue, one path to the truth and many paths to falsehood. And we see that in our politics. The bad ideas infected everybody and pretty much every alternative out there is a bad idea. But so much of it, so much of it, the seeds were planted, if you will, existentially in 9-11 and so much of our culture. And you know, Leonard Peacock gave a talk, I think it was 2004, Americans versus America, right? And the idea there was powerful talk, I encourage everybody, it was just on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, so maybe it was 2003. And it was American sense of life is gone. What Americans are doing, Americans are fighting America, the idea of America, the principle of America. And he was so right, he was so right. And you're seeing that play out over the 20 years that have followed that. You're really seeing it all play out. And today, nobody even knows what America is. There's no conception of America out there, not right, not left. Used to be some conservatives had some vague idea about the founding fathers and had some understanding of it. But as I discussed about the Supreme Court, they don't understand the constitution. And certainly our politicians don't understand the constitution or the principles on which this country was founded. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran book show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star, locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those, any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran book show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course, subscribe. Press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.