Konstantin Kisin

at hillsdale.edu.

Mark, welcome to Trigonometry.

Great to be with you.

Great to have you on.

We're going to talk about the Vietnam War.

And as we discussed before we started, both the two of us and quite a lot of people watching this might not know very much about that war, but we feel like some of the conversations that have been happening in American society lately, there seems to be some connection with the things that happened, the conclusions that were made at that time, the impact on the collective psyche of this country.

So tell us what happened.

What was the Vietnam War?

How did it happen?

When did it happen?

Why did it happen?

Well, the French surrender once again.

What a shocker.

So how do we get from this situation?

The communists have the north.

The American-backed non-anti-communists have the south.

How do you get from that to American boots on the ground?

Can I pause you for one second and just come back to the Gulf of Tonkin incident?

Because our friend Joe Rogan, he brings this up as like, I think when I asked him what his favorite conspiracy is, he said, well, the Gulf of Tonkin is one of them because it was a pretext for war that was false.

What's your reading of some of the narratives around that situation?