What We Can Do About Afghanistan

About This Video

A response to the fall of Kabul in August 2021, and one of the channel's most explicitly political episodes. Van's framing: what we can do about Afghanistan. Refuses both the helpless spectator posture and the armchair-general posture, searching instead for a response that acknowledges moral complicity without pretending to have solutions. The video is uncomfortable because it's honest about the limits of individual agency against geopolitical catastrophe.

Transcript

foreign I just I have an idea and I um about getting those about getting the interpreters out and I just wanted to see if I understood the problem correctly but the way that the times

told the story was that it's essentially paperwork like there's all these service men and they're naming names like this

man I worked with Zach he's stuck because XYZ like we can get him out of there it's just like the the

it's not getting pushed through I mean that's part of it that's definitely happening

and but and so you don't have any information about whether the White House is Expediting things or it's not even a matter of the White House is it

it's it's legislature um yeah stop recording and take me off speaker okay

[Music] your reward for sitting through this boring uh Civics exercise is that I'm gonna tell you in the end why Southern

California has the best donuts in the world but before we get to that I want to talk some business

and we gotta get those people out of Afghanistan those people who helped us

and who we promised we would protect and the way we're going to do that is we're going to and I know it's a pain in

the neck and everyone says it's easy but it's nerve-wracking we are going to call our senators

and representatives and we're going to tell them we want these people safe we want these

people out of Afghanistan this is neither a controversial nor is it a partisan issue I just saw a CBS poll

that said 81 percent of Americans say we should help Afghan translators

enter the U.S and I'm going to show you exactly how you do it and then I'm going to leave a link in the description so you can click

and just follow the directions and probably takes you know what I'll time it I'll see how long it takes and I'm

slow you're going to go to this website that I found on Google there's a link to this site in the

description of this video unclick local County and state we don't care about them

put in your home address click search and here they are I'll admit that I

didn't know who my representative and one of my senators were before I did this click contact over here and bang you

have their phone number in Washington you're probably going to get their machine when you call now I tend to ramble obviously so I wrote a script

which was the most difficult part of this process and the script I wrote you can download a PDF from a link that's in

the description [Music] okay this is the scary part you gotta call them after you do the first phone call you're gonna feel pretty tough like

a like a secret service agent and the other two are much easier and more fun

I'm calling today to ask you to draft or support legislation that helps the state department and this Department of

Defense evacuate and bring to safe havens Afghan translators and other helpers

in particular I'm asking for legislation that extends the evacuation time frame and reduces the Afghans paperwork burden

thank you for your assistance with this matter my phone number van neistat

n-e-i-s-t-a-t goodbye and to the influencers in particular

people like me who can earn a living off of their social media platforms

be sure to tell them the number of subscribers and or followers that you have

I'm a YouTuber my channel has 414 000 subscribers say the number and they

will their pants because their elections these days are so close sometimes it's a couple dozen people and

when they hear 20 million three million a hundred thousand ten thousand they will

even if we fail at this it will change their perception of where

their influence is coming from n-e-i-s-t-a-t goodbye I would make these calls with a desktop

computer in front of me so you can jog through the script and phone numbers and whatever this is um Senator

Feinstein and if you do happen to get a human I didn't but you might just tell

them you have a prepared statement you'd like to read then read it to them according to my YouTube analytics most

of you watching are millennials which makes you a hero generation

well here's an opportunity I'm just a punk ass Gen X nomad whatever that means

s-t-a-t good night [Music] thank you foreign these legislators in Washington there are Waiters and our waitresses and they will do what we tell them to do the problem is we

never I never call them and say Hey I want you to do such and such okay Donuts

the reason why Southern California has the best donuts and the reason why they come in a pink box is because in

1975 President Ford and Congress passed the Indochina migration and Refugee assistance Act of 1975 the year I was

born and thousands something like 18 000 to 50 000 I couldn't really

thousands of immigrants came from Cambodia after the fall of Phnom Penh and the taking over by the khmera Rouge

they came to Camp Pendleton in California and one of them this guy named Ted started from nothing a basically

system of donut shops all over Southern California and it became this system for

Cambodian refugees to have these little businesses and support their families and now we have I mean a lot of their

kids like ended up you know they go to college become professionals whatever but we still to this day two generations

later we have their grandchildren um running these amazing donut shops in

California and that's why we have the best donuts in the world [Music] thank you

People Referenced

Senator Feinstein

Films & Media Referenced

• documentary referenced