06/21/17 Kelley Vlahos on The American Conservative Magazine and the Afghan War

All right, you guys, Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives at scotthorton.org and at libertarianinstitute.org.
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And introducing our friend, Kelly Vallejos, formerly with antiwar.com and now the new editor of the American Conservative Magazine.
Welcome back to the show, Kelly, how are you?
Great, thanks for having me, Scott.
Very happy to have you here and I'm so proud of you and I'm so excited to know that you are now the boss over there at the American Conservative.
Tell me, Kelly, what's the American Conservative?
Well, the American Conservative was started in 2003 by Pat Buchanan, primarily in response to the Bush war policy in Iraq, which as you remember, Scott, for a conservative at that time and place in American life to come out against the war policy was a dangerous prospect because most people were for Iraq, at least in the mainstream and the establishment, whether you were Democrat or Republican.
Definitely, if you're a Republican, you were on board with that war.
And for Pat Buchanan and Tacky Theodopoulos and Scott McConnell, the other founding members in the magazine to come out publicly and invest their own money in a magazine for conservatives against the war and the war policy, it was quite a risky proposition and it caught fire.
It caught fire because there were a lot of conservatives, libertarian conservatives, moderate conservatives, conservatives who didn't follow a litmus test for their values and beliefs, who believed in the constitution, who believed in smaller government, who believed that empire would ruin ultimately the Republic of the United States.
This was their only outlet, really, for thoughtful analysis and criticism of the war policy.
And that is why the magazine has been so successful over the years.
It has surpassed all of the neoconservative orthodoxy that had basically predominated conservative or Republican thought and news during those days.
We've outlived them.
Obviously we've seen neoconservatives all over the place still today in the mainstream, but I believe you talk to anybody in conservative circles or even liberal circles, and they believe the neoconservatives were discredited because of what happened in that war.
And all of what happened in that war had been anticipated by our writers.
So I'm very proud, I'm very proud of this magazine.
Yeah, well, and absolutely, there's been incredible work done and articles posted in the American Conservative all this time.
But I wanna go ahead and highlight, since you mentioned Pat at the beginning there, the article, Who's War?
And if people aren't familiar with the right-wing take against George Bush's war from that timeframe, I would ask you to go back and take a good look at Who's War by Pat Buchanan.
You know, there's Klaus Rinn and, oh, who knows?
I don't wanna start listing people because there's a million from back in 2003 and then all the way through today.
Of course, Daniel Larison is fighting for peace at theamericanconservative.com every single day.
So, you know, always great stuff there.
And now you mentioned Scott McConnell.
Can you talk to us a little bit about Scott McConnell?
He's a very interesting guy.
He calls himself a neopaleocon.
He's not just a conservative who turned into a paleocon.
He's a former leftist who became a neocon who became a paleocon.
What's up with that?
Well, I can't get into his brain, but he's a good friend of mine.
And I just believe, like many of the people who write for TAC, they don't all come from the same ideological background.
I mean, I'm an independent thinker.
I don't belong to any political party.
I sort of chafe at the idea of following any political campaign or politician in terms of my desires to see different issues played out.
So I'm coming from that perspective.
I was more liberal when I was younger, like many people, but I have a lot of interest in the sort of fighting back against the big brother and the big government.
With Scott, I just believe that he is, he's just a thoughtful student of foreign policy.
And he's seen how our foreign policy has benefited the interests of big government, big Washington, also corporate interests.
And obviously the neoconservative movement has bolstered that.
And so it's hard to square both impulses.
You can't be a small government.
You can't be questioning authority or questioning the role of the military industrial complex and be a neocon at the same time.
They're just incompatible.
So I think it was just a natural evolution of his thinking on issues like on the Middle East in particular.
I know that's bothered him.
Our foreign policy in the Middle East has bothered him.
So this is more of a home for him.
You know what it is?
I think it's a battle for the minds of the right that you're waging here between the, as you said, the neocons and the vested interests in this war.
And the right-wing public has a choice between tough, supposedly, and smart.
And what's funny is, of course, that tough is led by a bunch of soft-handed, egg-headed goons who sit around at their little think tank desks and never been in a fight in their life, certainly never won one.
And they're the ones hawking it up and sending the right-wing public's sons off to go and kill and die in these things.
And at the American conservative, this is guys who are plenty right-wing, tough enough, red-blooded American, whatever you wanna call it, conservatives, right?
And they're saying, wait, wait, wait, don't listen to that egghead.
He's actually not that smart.
Here's what's going on here.
And all it really is is it's a fight between different conservative values.
As you're saying, you have, well, jeez, you want a small government and a limited Republican freedom and all of these things.
At the same time, you wanna go and kick butt.
Hey, there's a limit how much butt you can kick before you turn your country into something you don't want it to be anymore.
And I think, I'm sorry, my real point was, I think I've underestimated the success that you've had.
I think the right-wing American population is a lot more sick of war than anybody's given them credit for.
If there was a public debate between Bannon and McMaster about escalating the next one, I think the right-wing public would side with the less interventionist.
Yeah, I agree.
I feel that it's a testament to our movement and our point of view here that we have so many members of the military and former military, retired military, as our writers and our audience.
Because they've been there, they've done it.
We have recent veterans, we have Vietnam veterans, like Andrew Bacevich, who is one of our most popular writers right now, who, they know war, and they know where things went wrong.
And they scoff at the idea that, A, we could have won the Vietnam War if we just did more counterinsurgency, which is like the David Petraeus point of view, or that Bush had won Iraq before Obama basically lost it by withdrawing.
They scoff at that because they know the deal, and they know the history of counterinsurgency, they know the history of the policies of the last century.
And so they're not thwarted in that.
And they've joined our ranks as both writers and readers.
So I think that says a lot, because I'm sure one of the criticisms at the outset were that Papu Cannon and his supporters or fans were all a bunch of old paleocons, who, isolationists, worse racists, worse anti-Semites.
I've heard all of it over the years.
I've been writing for them since 2007, and I have invariably come across people who will say, why are you writing for that rag, that racist, anti-Semitic rag?
And that's just, that's an ad hominem attack, because that's obviously not what it's about.
I wouldn't be writing for an anti-Semitic paper or a racist paper, but those are the bald attacks, because they can't get at the fact that you can be anti-interventionist on a number of grounds, whether it be constitutional, pro-Republic, a smaller government, for all the reasons we just talked about, and you can do that without it being just that you just wanna bury your head in the sand, and you don't care about the rest of the world, because that's BS, we know that.
And you know what, as far as those accusations go, I think more and more people understand that unless they actually heard somebody say something that's blatantly anti-Semitic, if they only hear someone accusing someone else of being anti-Semitic without any real evidence of it, then I think that they understand that that's a cover for got no argument.
Right.
And anybody, you couldn't find a single neocon in D.C. who could win an argument with Daniel Larison in print back and forth about what's right about any of these things.
Right.
He'd tie them in absolute knots, because they're completely wrong, that's why.
You know?
Well, yeah, and we all know the early attacks against Pat Buchanan, and we all know the neocons came out in full force against the magazine, and came out against Pat at the beginning of the Iraq War, calling him one of the unpatriotic conservatives.
This was David Frum and his famous article, which, or screed, in which he lashed out at all of the anti-war conservatives, like Robert Novak, was the other one, they actually called.
And I think, and subsequently called the magazine, I have to look it up, you know, part of that anti-war, unpatriotic, conservative ilk.
But see, that's where we're coming from during the war.
Yeah, unlike Richard Perle and Michael Ledeen and William Crystal, those great American patriots, they're the ones who know what to do.
Well, you know, I'm just, I'm about to, this afternoon I'm gonna interview a group that just did a massive study on the civilian deaths in Iraq, and they've determined 180,000 civilians that were killed since the start of the war up until today.
So that includes all of the high-level killings.
You're talking about Iraq War III?
Huh?
You're talking about Iraq War III or Iraq War II?
Iraq War III being?
Well, since 2014.
Yeah, so I guess II and III?
No, no, no, no, it's way more than that.
Well, this is basically from the Iraq fight.
It was 100,000 dead by 2004.
I mean.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, no, well, we should talk about that.
Yeah, we could talk about that, but I mean, even if Scott, it's 180,000, that's unbelievably just unacceptable, considering that this war, I mean, none have been, all of this was because of the war, the initial invasion and the aftermath of that wrong-headed policy, supported and promulgated by the neoconservatives and the Bush White House, so.
I'd say add another zero to that, but anyway, yeah.
So yeah, no, I mean, you're right.
That's the thing about it is, and it's funny sometimes, funny in a horrible way, to think back on the way that the war first was played out ever since the invasion.
And not only was it the wrong thing to do, but they couldn't have made more of a hash of that war.
I mean, they just did nothing but win for every one bad and then lose.
Yeah.
And I mean, and look at where we're at now.
It's just, it's an absolute nightmare.
And you know what?
For the rest of our lives, it's gonna be the consequences of George W. Bush's war playing out over there forever and ever and ever.
Yeah, we see it today.
We see it today in Syria.
We see it today in Iraq.
I mean, how long is it gonna take to get Mosul back?
I mean, we've been talking about it for months now.
I mean- Yeah, I mean, they launched the attack in October, right?
Yeah, and what I find interesting is that we have U.S. assistance on the ground with Iraqi trained or U.S. trained Iraqi troops.
You would have thought that this thing would have been one and done like months ago.
Yeah, and you know what?
I need to get Patrick Coburn back on the show.
It's been a little while since I caught up with his last writings on this issue.
And he was there in Eastern Mosul months ago.
They had just a few thousand Islamic State fighters nailed down to half the city then and less than half the city since then.
I know, what could possibly be taking so long?
I don't know.
I mean, I guess I did hear that they had lost like 3,000 Iraqi troops, but then again, they got the Shiite militias.
And as you said, American Special Operations Forces there.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Well, what's scary is that ISIS makes al-Qaeda look tame and al-Qaeda made Taliban look tame.
It's like every regeneration of this terror threat is even more monstrous than the one before.
So, I just go back to like was this necessary because now we have a terror presence, which eventually will be tossed out of Mosul and these other territorial places, but we'll still be inspiring attacks in places like London, you know, and Germany and here maybe.
So, it's just one of those things where you just can't even get a handle on it.
And now they're saying in Afghanistan that there's like 15 different terror groups operating there, including ISIS.
So, I mean, what was it all for if the goal was to end terrorism or end the terrorist scourge?
It's done everything but.
Yeah.
Well, so here's the part where I brag just a little bit and apologize because geez, if I had known, I would have waited and sent it to you so I could have editor of the American Conservative.
Instead, I have Scott McConnell's blurb on my Afghanistan book, which he gave me a very nice blurb and I'm very grateful for.
Fantastic.
And he's, you know, what the editor at large or whatever his official title is there.
But so, my Afghanistan book is almost ready.
I actually, because of the Secretary of Defense and all this stuff going on, I kind of have to wait until they announce whether it's gonna be a small surge or a large one before I pull the trigger on it.
But otherwise, it's basically done but the index.
It's pretty much ready to go here.
And you're in it because you did so much great coverage of the Afghan war back at the time of Obama's big escalation there in 2009 and warned all along about what a hoax counterinsurgency was.
Before it failed, you explained why it was failing while it was failing.
And so now I'll ask you to sum up and teach the audience a little bit about what happened there with the escalation of the Obama years.
I mean, you don't have to talk all about the politics necessarily if you want.
But in terms of the war, you know, you mentioned the Petraeus signing on to the myth that Vietnam would have been fine if not for Walter Cronkite and the liberals undermining our counterinsurgency strategy kind of stab in the back nonsense.
I guess, you know, so there's my straw man for Afghanistan.
Obama didn't send enough troops.
He only sent them to the South.
He should also send them to the East and he should have left them there forever.
So says Jack Keane, so say we all.
Well, I mean, there is an argument to be made that, you know, there was never enough troops sent over to Afghanistan because if you really wanted to just completely obliterate the enemy, you would have to have sent over, I think the figure coin was like a half a million new soldiers to actually do the counterinsurgency, right?
But that takes for granted that the counterinsurgency was ever going to be, you know, a panacea.
So basically if you're willing to just bomb the crap out of Afghanistan and kill civilians right along with it, then yeah, you might have pacified Afghanistan for the time being, but it would have been at the loss of civilians.
And we were never on board as an American society with just, you know, widespread massacring civilians just to win the war like we did in Vietnam.
So that was a no-go area.
So there was already like a hindrance on the strategy at the outset.
And so just putting in 10,000 here, 10,000 there, the way Obama did is you're just putting little Band-Aids on little flashpoints and when we saw this over time, when our troops started to leave or shifted over responsibility to the Afghan troops, they were unable to keep that territory.
So it was just a whack-a-mole situation.
And there's plenty written on how the Afghan army has been and still is unable to take responsibility, security responsibility, because for all of the, say, 10 people that we have on the rolls there, and my statistics are obviously not perfect, but, you know, let's just say like seven, six or seven of them can't be found.
So we've dumped, you know, millions, if not billions of dollars into, you know, training and standing up Afghan forces.
And the system is so corrupt that many of them can't be accounted for.
So when the real fighting begins, we're not, the Afghans aren't strong enough to keep territory from the Taliban.
So we just poured money into a hole.
And then meanwhile, we have troops over there that are at these different outposts.
And, you know, and they're rocking and rolling, they're doing fine, but they can't stay there forever.
So when they leave, Taliban just comes back and now we have to deal with ISIS and other groups.
So like, for example, ISIS just ran the Taliban out of Tora Bora last week.
So you have ISIS taking over territory from Taliban in a place that we all know that we could have gotten, like Osama Bin Laden, like before 2001, and he was hiding out there.
So it's a sad situation.
And, you know, now we're starting to lose troops again because there's been this ongoing, you know, green versus blue or green on blue attacks where you have Taliban that are, you know, basically turning against, and, you know, we have had bombings in Kabul that ISIS might be responsible for.
So it's just, you know, it's a mess.
And if, do we really think that 4,000 new troops into that situation is really gonna help?
Nobody believes that.
Maybe General Mattis does, but I don't even know if he does believe that in his heart.
So here's the thing, while you're talking there about the ghost soldiers, you know, the obvious precedent is Mosul, right?
I mean, this is, Patrick Coburn was warning us for a solid year before Mosul fell that the Iraqi army is barely present there.
A lot of these guys are AWOL.
It's like having them way out on Fort Apache, but without the resources to protect them.
They're in enemy territory.
They're basically Shiite soldiers occupying Sunni land.
And without solid support from Baghdad, they're AWOL, and they're going back behind Shiite lines because they don't want to die.
And so people say, why didn't the Iraqi army defend Mosul when ISIS came rolling in?
It's because most of them were make pretend.
Most of them were just names on a roll so that the officers could get a bonus, you know, basically take home their pay.
Well, so that makes me wonder, then, when they talk about, you know, as you say, Mattis is, or the, right now the White House is leaking, or the Pentagon's leaking, that they want four to 5,000.
But, you know, there's been some trial balloons that maybe they need 20, and maybe they need 50.
Jack Keane said that to Fox News.
I don't know, he said the same thing you said, only with the opposite spin.
I don't know anybody who thinks 4,000's gonna make the difference here.
What we need is 20,000.
But, so now, I guess I'm asking you whether you think that maybe that represents actual panic on their part, that the Taliban is doing so much better now, they're making so much money off of the opium and everything.
They could basically afford to take over the whole country, other than the Bagram base, I guess.
But I wonder whether they're scared that they're gonna see a fall of Saigon-type moment there in Kabul, and that's why they want these troops.
I don't know, that's a good point.
I mean, I just don't even know what, you know, 20,000 more troops would do.
I mean, Obama did, what was it, 40,000?
Well, 70, yeah, I mean, he had 30, and he added 70 more in 2009 and 10, and so it was up to 100,000 plus with 40,000 NATO soldiers as well.
So it was 140,000 total combat troops there.
Yeah, and aren't we seeing a lot of that in which we're mostly in a training role except for counterinsurgency?
Well, and that's part of what they're pushing for is, I think Obama already last year loosened the restrictions on special forces leading native troops, and then he's also loosened the rules on the Air Force hitting ISIS targets.
They have free fire on ISIS targets all the time, and so they're gonna have to do a lot of that.
Yeah.
It's a little bit different rules, but when it comes to ISIS, the politics dictate that no rules at all, and you know, as long as we're talking about this, sorry for talking so much, but I wanna mention that, and I put this in my book.
Moon of Alabama mentioned it on Twitter, and so I followed the link to this great article at AfghanAnalysis.com, and it's a great article, and it's a great book, and it's a great book, and it's a great book, and it's a great book, and it's a great book, and it's a great book, and it's a great book, and it's a great book, this great article at AfghanAnalyst.org, which is always really serious, great stuff there, not that it's necessarily all perfect, but it's always very serious stuff, and this guy wrote this thing, and it was all about how, you know what, ISIS in Nangarhar Province, which is basically all of ISIS, they popped up in a couple of places, but the Taliban always kill them, but in Nangarhar Province, they've got a foothold, and what they really are is they're Pakistani Taliban, refugees from a Pakistani military assault against them in the Swat Valley in 2010, and they came and they ran to Afghanistan, and then guess what?
The government in Kabul backed them, meaning, wink, wink, probably the CIA, backed this group to use them as revenge against the Pakistanis for backing the Afghan Taliban, and then they hoped that they could use them against the Afghan Taliban too, and then later, these same men declared themselves ISIS, but you see, the rhetorical trick is perfect for the Americans' point of view because ISIS makes it sound like they're international Arab terrorists that are gonna blow up your pub in Paris, France, or something like that, when really all they are is Pashtun tribesmen, you know, locals, more or less, just like the Taliban, and so, but it gives a whole new strength to the safe haven myth as though, oh no, Al Qaeda's coming back, which is their excuse for staying, only now it's just the locals, instead of there being a distinction, it gets to blur the distinction that now the locals are all international terrorists again, and it's just like 2001, when we're supposed to believe that Omar and bin Laden are blood brothers when actually they hate each other, and that kind of thing.
Right, right.
So, started all over again for the third time.
Let's have the same war for the third time again.
Yeah, well, we never seem to take into account that there are all these competing interests with different, you know, tribal backgrounds, and loyalties, and corruption, and, you know, we never went so far as to actually identify, and analyze, and really get a good grasp on all of these competing interests, and that's been our downfall from the beginning in Afghanistan, because it was just promoted as we're gonna create this national government, and everybody else is gonna fall into line, and even within that, we see that right now within the national government, that you have former warlords competing for power, and at any moment can turn, and they have, so it's just, that is our folly, that we thought we could create a national government in our own interest, and a national army, and a national police force, and so we'll be there forever, a graveyard of empires.
Yeah, that's what they say.
Well, and so the real paradox is that the Taliban will not negotiate until we leave.
They're just saying, as long as there's foreign troops there, we'll still fight, because they're winning, you know, why are they gonna?
And again, at the height of the surge, when Petraeus promised they were gonna come to the table with their bloody nose, and sign what he told them to sign, that never happened.
They always said, yeah, right, time's on our side, we'll wait forever.
But so the Americans, you know, I guess, I don't wanna say this as a flat fact, because I don't agree with it, but they can't leave without negotiating some kind of thing, or otherwise it's a fall of Saigon type total humiliation, and they stand to lose so much face that they would rather, you know, kill another however many hundred thousand people, than just admit that they suck at this, and that they shouldn't be doing it.
And so it's a real paradox, because what you need is for President Trump to say, you know what, this is all Bush and Obama's fault, it's got nothing to do with me, I don't care about it, do you care about it?
Me either, over, and not call it a victory or a loss, but just say, what do I care about the Bush Obama government in Kabul?
That's not my problem.
You know, some kind of way like that to make it okay, but that's not happening here.
Without that, as you said, we're just, it's like we're handcuffed to this thing.
Yeah, exactly.
What a mess.
Yeah, I really don't know, and I don't know how much the American people have an appetite for even discussing it anymore, which makes it equally dangerous, because that means the military and the powers that be in Washington can just continue the war policy unabated, and without much accountability, and we're sitting here arguing over whether or not we can afford this or that in terms of healthcare or prescription drugs or Medicaid or whatever, you know, things that affect people's everyday lives, and all of our tax dollars are being drained into these wars without any accounting.
Right.
It's funny, you know, the libertarians, we're always hearing this thing, yeah, but the roads.
Yeah.
Yeah, the roads are terrible.
30,000 people a year die on the roads, so this is like the one big last excuse.
Yeah, it's too bad that they're waging these genocides all the time, but we do need them to build the roads, you know, can't do without them, because who else is gonna build the roads?
But then people are burning to death on the roads.
Like, why is, they're being smushed.
Things are going terribly wrong on the roads, and you can see, if you're just driving, you can see all the time, man, that curb should be painted.
Man, there should be a guardrail there.
You know, you can just see the improvements.
As someone who's not an expert at all driving down the road, you can see how it should all be done better.
But where is all that capital?
All that capital sunk into the sands of Afghanistan, into the graveyards of Afghanistan.
Does that really seem right?
What's conservative about that?
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
That's not good.
Man, I'm so glad that, I'm so glad that the American Conservative Magazine is there because, you know, the thing of it is, like you said at the beginning, they try to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, well, you're the unpatriotic conservatives.
You're some kind of weirdos.
Yeah, maybe Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak think that, but none of the rest of us do or whatever.
But like you've said, nuh-uh.
You guys have inherited the conservative movement because the American Conservative Magazine was right all along about virtually all of this stuff.
And, you know, that's much more commonly accepted.
I don't know what your traffic is, but I'm sure it's growing.
And I certainly know that I would, you know, oftentimes prefer to cite something that the American Conservative just to prove that point.
That like, yeah, as you said, a lot of these guys are veterans.
They're clearly all patriots.
A lot of them are former Republicans.
Not that they've moved left, but they're just so anti-war, but they are conservatives.
Some of them paleos.
Some of them are too young to really be paleos, but they're- And some of them are libertarians.
Some of them are libertarians.
Got Jason Ditz in there today from antiwar.com.
Thank goodness.
But so, yeah, anyway, just the point is I love the American Conservative Magazine.
I think it's such an important project and I'm just so glad that you are the editor of it now.
That just means I know it's in good hands here.
Well, I appreciate that, but I'll have to clarify that I'm the managing editor because Bob Mary is our editor and we have two executive editors.
Yeah, so we got a couple of layers above me.
So I'm definitely not the boss, but I'm in charge.
I have been tasked with taking ownership of the website.
That is my goal.
I'm also working on the print magazine, but I have to clarify that I'm not the ultimate boss.
I'm sorry I messed that up.
The book doesn't all stop with me, but.
I guess I thought he had a different title or something.
Robert Mary is the new boss there.
I'm sorry I got that wrong.
And he's a good guy.
I've talked with him before on the show.
Oh, yeah.
And in fact, well, I don't want to get it wrong, but I know he's done some really great journalism in the past, so.
You know, just one thing with the American conservative, we still have a lot of work to do because, you know, as much as I think we've made many inroads and within like the conservative movement and thought, you know, the mainstream media still largely ignores anti-interventionist conservatives and libertarians, as you know.
So when they're picking up people to talk about the war, talk about foreign policy, they always pick like some, you know, a liberal establishment type and a neocon.
The neocons are really big on, you know, MSNBC and more liberal outlets now because they're anti-Trump.
So you still see Bill Kristol and David Frum and people from AEI like Danielle Pleca.
I saw her on MSNBC the other day because they, you know, they're the safe conservatives because they were always pro-war, pro-establishment, pro-big government.
And so I think another goal, ongoing goal, is to get more people from the American conservative, our fabulous experts like Andrew Bacevich and others, and Phil Giraldi, you know, out there into the mainstream.
Yeah.
That's, you know, that hasn't happened yet so much, so.
Well, and of course the agendas do conflict, but on the other hand, you know, they can see value in a good argument if they think they can get one out of you.
You know, I think back on Wolf Blitzer's interviews of Ron Paul, where Wolf Blitzer is such a bimbo, you know, that basically he didn't know that he was supposed to hate Ron Paul and that he was supposed to make us all hate Ron Paul.
Instead, his attitude was like, this guy's kind of a nice old guy, I like talking to him.
And he seems to have an answer for stuff when I ask him.
And so, right, like that was all the thought that Wolf Blitzer ever put into it.
And so he gave Ron plenty of fair time, you know, hours of it, you know?
And compared to others who, of course, only would use their agenda to try to, so there are openings there.
I don't know if Wolf Blitzer's the best example, but it can be done, you know?
And in fact, you know, with this book coming out, I'm going to have to work really hard because I want to get on at least a couple of these shows a couple of times if I can, you know?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, we got to get you out there because this is an important book and I'm looking forward to reading it myself.
I'm looking forward to reading it for you.
I'll try to.
All right, well, thank you, Kelly.
I really appreciate it.
Okay, well, thanks, Scott, I enjoy it.
All right, thanks very much.
Okay, you take care.
All right, you guys, that is Kelly B. Vlejos.
She is, and I'm sorry, I just don't know how to pronounce your name right.
I'm not gonna try.
Kelly B. Vlejos, she is the managing editor, which is still awesome, of the American Conservative Magazine, theamericanconservative.com.
Subscribe to it, why don't you?
All right, I'm Scott Horton.
Thanks very much, you guys, for listening.
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