BUCK: We’re joined now by our friend Pete Hegseth. He is a veteran of the United States Army, and he is also the co-host of Fox & Friends Weekends, and a bud of ours here for many years. Pete, great to have you.

PETE: Buck, Clay, thanks, guys. Thanks for having me.

BUCK: Let’s start with the basics, Pete. What the heck is going on with this administration?

CLAY: (chuckling)

PETE: (chuckling) That’s the operative question really as you start to step back in foreign policy crisis, Joe Biden is absolutely nowhere to be found. We had a similar situation with my unit in Iraq in some ways with the battalion commander that was not very engaged, and what it leads to is a lot of uncertainty, equivocation, finger pointing, and no decisive action.

And that’s precisely what we’re seeing. Joe Biden can’t muster anything other than a 20-minute speech from a teleprompter, takes no questions, then four days off. Two phone calls with world leaders in the last week based on what’s going on in Kabul and in Afghanistan?

And as a result, no wonder our Pentagon can’t put a plan together. No wonder our State Department can’t put a plan together. No wonder our spokespeole look like total fools! And then they look around and say, “Well, we didn’t see this coming. There was no indication.”

Then of course the intel agencies — Buck, you know all about this — they strike back and say, “Here’s where the reports have been. We’ve been talking about how it would deteriorate rapidly.” So it is an utter lack of leadership. I mean, my wife while I’m driving on our RV trip right now looked at me about an hour ago and said, “What would you do if you could make the call right now?”

And I gave her I think a coherent answer in about five minutes that makes all the more sense than anything that’s being done right now, which is “try to rush a gate at Kabul International Airport and maybe you’ll get through and you’ll probably instead get beaten by the Taliban which we’re taking orders from”? It’s as bad as you can possibly get. And Biden is nowhere to be seen.

CLAY: Pete, we know that domestically there are all sorts of issues: The border, inflation, the murder rate, covid not having the retrenchment that Biden claimed it would. How much of the Afghanistan debacle ties in now with the overall domestic agenda, and how much of an issue does this become? I know we all have attention spans of goldfish, but it doesn’t feel like Afghanistan is going away quickly. Will it connect with the domestic failures and become albatross for Biden when it comes his own agenda inside of this country?

PETE: I think it does because it’s such a demonstration of gross incompetence. You know, I’m not yet there. I’m not yet there at the point that I think this was intentionally bungled at any level so that certain other things would happen. I think this is just what we call “a Charlie foxtrot.” This is a cluster because of a lack of planning.

They would put a date on a calendar. They told the military to do it; the military’s gonna do it by that date, and we give up assets like Bagram. But this is gross incompetence, which makes people look at other aspects of what the administration is doing — some of which is gross incompetence, others is intentional like leaving the border wide open, or the back-and-forth on covid and lack of clear information, the lack of choices for parents.

Critical race theory, which they’re not doing anything about. They’re promoting it because they’re in bed with the unions. Crime is a direct result of Democratic policies in Democrat cities supported by the left-wing of the Democrat Party. So I think it adds… For some of us who believe that a lot of what’s being done domestically is being done intentionally because they have an ideological view of how the left benefits from it…

Saying be you should have voter ID, all of those things are… There is some incompetence, but it’s more intentional. This adds a layer of sheer incompetence top of it, from the guy who’s supposed to be the foreign policy sage even though we all know he isn’t.

BUCK: Yeah, Pete.

PETE: In fact, he’s not a sage. He’s a walking disaster.

BUCK: I’m mad at myself — Buck here — I’m mad at myself for not understanding the depths of stupidity that this administration could go to. I knew it was gonna be a mess, but I didn’t think even they could mess it up this badly. We’re speaking, for everybody joining us, to Pete Hegseth here.

He’s host of Fox & Friends on Fox News on the weekends and also a veteran of the United States Army and had combat deployments. Pete, the Biden team at this point, what do you think the future of this national security team is? Are they gonna have to shake it up? Are they gonna have to give some sense of heads rolling to the public?

I mean, not literally, obviously, whenever we’re talking about the Taliban but, you know what I mean. Are they gonna actually have some people who have to give resignation letters or is the media just gonna start covering for them and in a couple of weeks we move on to the next thing, probably the insurrection?

PETE: (laughs) Probable the insurrection, you’re right. More woke training at the Pentagon which Austin is all over! You can’t get troops out of harm’s way, but my goodness, he’ll make sure there’s no gender discrimination when you’re wearing camouflage. He is all over that now.

BUCK: Can I go into that for one second, Pete? This comes up a lot. Conservatives and a lot of people I know that did serve and people that are serving and reach out to me quietly, they say, “Look, it’s not an unfair thing — it’s not like a low blow — to go after the top military brass on this stuff because it the wokeness in the military really is pervasive, it is a distraction, and does undermine readiness.” Do you agree? Is that all fair to say?

PETE: Yes, it is. If you have limited time, limited resources, that’s one thing. The other thing is, we’ve stopped believing in ourselves. We’ve stopped believing that America is a force for good, that the most powerful thing… Who we are most powerfully manifested is the picture of an infantryman with a rifle standing athwart evil and standing up for what’s good in the world, and it doesn’t mean nation building.

I just mean as a force for good. Instead, you’re starting to tell the troops, “We’re not actually that good. That exceptionalism thing? No! And that white rage is a real problem. Look out for your buddy in the unit.” That’s what inhibits the ability for units to simply go out and do what they’re supposed to do, which is train for situations just like this.

And then commanders’ hands are tied to actually be decisive. What I said to my wife was, “You give the Taliban 24 hours. You say, ‘In an hour, the Rangers are coming up to widen the perimeter. After that, they better not meet resistance. If they do, your fighters are gonna die.’

“‘And then you have 24 hours to let every American citizen into the Kabul airport complex and if not, the bombing commences on all your sites that are key and meaningful to you and it will not stop. We’re not gonna commit more boots to the ground. You’re just gonna feel absolute and utter pain.’ Let the Taliban make the call. We’re leaving no American citizens behind.”

Now, that’s gonna have its own pitfalls but at least it’s decisive. You don’t see an Austin or a Millie making that kind of recommendation to Joe Biden because they’re a shell of any military core that they used to have. They’re politicians. It’s feckless, and it’s really dangerous.

CLAY: Yeah, Pete, how much of this has to with the left wing’s acquiescence to Twitter? And let me explain and expound upon this, and you tell me if you think this is crazy. We heard from our U.N. representative that we had sent a strongly worded letter to the Taliban letting them know, “Hey, if you misbehave, you’re really gonna hear it from us.”

That works for the Democratic Party on Twitter because we have all these woke American corporations which really don’t understand the concept of evil or awfulness on any kind of level akin to what we see in Afghanistan right now. And as a result, the Democratic Party believes that words matter more than actions, and that is guiding the tenets of much of their decision-making. Do you buy into that idea, that this is the Twitter takeover, the social media takeover of the Democratic Party writ large now in foreign policy?

PETE: Beautifully said. Obviously. The most obvious manifestation is the fact that Taliban commanders maintain Twitter accounts and our former commander-in-chief can’t have one.

CLAY: Oh, yeah, of course.

PETE: They see that as okay. It’s rationalization, justification. The other thing is, Clay, just the left in general, how can you understand the threat of the Taliban or even the DOD, which has become a thoroughly secular organization, politically correct organization.

How can you foresee the willpower or the cohesiveness or the legitimacy of Islamists, of the Taliban who are religiously based, fanatically based but also quite coherent in their worldview? You can’t actually understand or account for that in a world that you’ve sanitized so much that the real threat is on Twitter and not from religious fanatics who are takeover entire countries and not letting American citizens out.

You can’t account. So instead you have these white-washed, sanitized views — and, Buck, you know better than I as far as where the intel agencies are on this. But we miss the heart and soul of what our enemy really believes; and as a result, we don’t actually calculate the ferocity, the will with which they will fight. And our woke corporations have lost touch. I mean, talk about faith? I mean, it’s gone, it’s all gone.

BUCK: Pete, it’s amazing to me. I’m not trying to bum you or anyone else out going into your weekend, but the woke commies have thoroughly infiltrated the intelligence community, I can tell you that. They’re all over the place and they’re at the very highest levels we saw from the Russia collusion madness. Speaking of where the threat really comes from, I thought this was fascinating.

An Associated Press piece, “Nearly 20 years after September 11th attacks that spurred Afghanistan war, more Americans say they perceive the major national security threat as being internal. This is an AP/NORC poll. Two-thirds say they are extremely or very concerned about extremist groups from within the U.S.” This is what the media has done to us. I’ve said this before. The insurrectionists including the selfie-taking grandmas of January 6th, more terrifying to American libs than the Taliban head choppers. That’s where we are.

CLAY: (laughing)

PETE: (laughing) Can I classify the federal government as something I’m afraid of and join that group as far as internal threat? Of course, I mean, they made up entire straw men so that they can focus on something, and all of it comes down to cracking down on political opponents to the point that you talked about, Buck, that if the commies are running our intel agencies and the wokesters own Twitter and the wokesters own the Pentagon?

Then they have to find a new enemy other than enemies who have morals other than ours contrary to our beliefs in other countries, and that’s going to be us and the values we hold as traditional, patriotic Americans. And they’re finding every new rationale to do it. I’m telling you, inside the FBI what’s being done as far as classification of domestic threats.

I’m in touch with someone there who’s talking about new classifications that allow for surveillance based on political and partisan affiliation. That’s exactly where they’re going, because those are the threats that matter most to their power and that’s where they want to consolidate it and everything else.

BUCK: You do a poll of leftists, of MSNBC watchers, Trump voters versus the Taliban, I think people would be shocked to see how much more dangerous the left believes Trump voters are.

PETE: Absolutely.

BUCK: But we’ll get into that more with Pete another time. Pete Hegseth, everybody, go check out Fox News this weekend as he’s gonna be hosting with our buddy Will Cain as well, right, on Fox & Friends Weekend.

PETE: That’s right.

BUCK: Pete, come back and hang out with us soon, all right, man? We appreciate it.

PETE: Anytime. I love listening to you guys. Great work.

BUCK: Thanks, Pete. You’re the man.