I don't know what the solution is yet, but I think there's a solution.
Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can
do for your country. Mister Garbahaw, tear down this wall. It's the
Ricochet Podcast. Peter Robinson and rob Laws they're together in New York. I'm
James LLWX here in Minneapolis. We've got to talk to Andy McCarthy about Trump's
trial and more so, let's eversos a podcast. But this is a rib
that should never happender should have been thrown out a long time. If you
look at it, Johnathan, Jery, Andy Pause, all great legal scholars.
It is not the one that we've been able to said he should be
a trial. America is a nation that can be defined in a single word.
I was gonna put him in put excuse music. Welcome everybody. This
is the Ricochet Podcast, number six hundred and eighty eight. As a matter
of fact, I'm James Lelex in Minneapolis. Or it's gold again and knowing
rob Long and Peter Robinson are together in New York now. Peter Robinson in
New York is just is one of those movies i'd like to see, you
know, as he wonders around, full of California optimism, looking up at
the tall buildings in twenty stories. That is exactly how That's exactly right.
That's what I would like to think. So Rob, you, the cynical
Gotham Dennison, you know, Van, you though you are. You've taken
Peter around to show them the science Statue of Liberty, top of the Empire
State the rest of it Storm Club twenty one exactly. It's been like one
of those some montages with the with the you know when Peter looking up at
the big all the lights of Times Square like that's what it's been. Well,
that's American in Paris. So I would you know, have to have
up on the batteries down. How's there we go? There we go,
gentlemen. There's so much to talk about today. We can we can go
over the the AI generated woke bought musings of NPR's new host. We can
talk about the fact that Google finally found a spine and fired some people for
doing something or that that have been arrests in Colombia over a pro Palestinian an
astonishing moment. Yes, and people would look at this and say the tide
is turning. On the other hand, I saw on Twitter the other day,
granted Twitter and granted a lot of people, but they were shouting hands
off Iran. Upon hearing that Iran had launched an attack on Israel, they
said, well, don't you retaliate now? Don't don't you don't, don't
don't you do that? Well, we have the retaliation now. And perhaps
rather than thinking and talking blathering about what the college students are doing, this
seems to be a more consequence as real struck. Iran hit a military base.
The place where they hit happens, by some odd coincidence, to be
the home or one of the homes of the nuclear and conventional missile programs that
Iran has. Is this a proportional response? Is it time to stand down
now? Message sent. I don't know the details, because all of this
was starting to break last night. I looked at my computer just after taking
my ambient which I always take to get three times on. So there I
was reading about the destruction the beginnings of World War three o'clock and I fell
sound asleep. And for the traveler that I am getting down here to Greenwich
Village to see Rob meant that I didn't look at the news today astonishingly enough.
So I don't know the details. My general sense of it is I
do not understand how Israel could have permitted Iran to attack with more than three
hundred armed drones and ballistic missiles. Even if they knock them out of the
air, Iran still attacked, engaged in a massive attack against Israel. I
do not see how any nation but Israel above all, could fail to respond
in some pretty direct, pretty forceful manner. So it feels to me as
though something necessary has happened proportion What will happen next, That's all. I
don't know that Rob. Maybe a you know, a regimeed decapitation was considered
but waved off by Joe Biden, fresh from telling the Israel not to attack
Haifa. He may have put his thumb on the scale here too. He
may have said to them, don't and found though you know, the one
nation on earth that actually listens to him. Do you think this was enough?
Or do you think this is as we've been doing since nineteen seventy nine,
kicking the can down the road? Well? I mean yes and no.
I mean the beauty of the system right now, or the situation we're
in, which is kind of a disaster, but it's also the product of
a strategy, right. Israeli strategy has been the past ten to fifteen twenty
years, and it's been effective, has been to isolate Hamas, drive them
into Iran, to create one unified enemy under the Iranian umbrella because and then
to sort of make piecemeal, small boar probably ultimately trivial, but still significant
peace with the big Arab neighbors that were traditionally enemies, so not just Egypt,
but Saudi Arabia and Jordan places like that. So bombing and the people
who really misunderstood this new dynamic has been Iran. Because there's nobody protesting the
bombing of Iran except in American universities. Iran has no allies in the region,
Saudis don't care, and the King of Jordan Is especially doesn't care.
And so it isn't so much that the trouble for those countries isn't so much
that Israel attacked Iran or responded. It's that Israel was tacitly allowed and maybe
even encouraged privately to do so by its former enemies Saudi Arabia and and and
Jordan. And this is the product of a very very long game of chess
the Israeli has been playing, and I think they've been playing really well.
That doesn't mean having is perfect. Obviously, the minute you isolate Hamas and
you drive them into desperation, they do something spirit like they did in October
seventh. So you know, you don't get what you want in life.
But the big miscalculation isn't Netanyahu here, and it isn't Saudi Arabia. It's
Haamas and Iran. And I wouldn't want to be them right now because there's
nobody they can call except maybe Putin. So now we have you know,
the chess game has isolated the bad actors into one group. The weird thing
that always talking about, of course, is the Putin problem, because that's
the Putin problem for Israel because Netan Yahoo, for all the things people love
about him, he has been a Putent apologist for years. There's an entirely
too much connection between his party, the government of Israel, and Russia,
especially technologically, especially in technological issues that are you know, some companies that
were starting in Israel are now owned by Russians. Not so great. Declining
to mention some of them, because some of them have been past Africas.
So there's like a lot of chickens coming out of roost. But I don't
see how they had a choice. But I also don't think that I also
don't think it was that much risk, because they have been mitigating the risk
privately, quietly for the past twenty years. A lot turns on intelligence,
and of course the Israelis know a great deal more than Little Robinson does.
But I see that Andy McCarthy, whom I'm always tempted to call the Great
Andy McCarthy, has changed, that has joined us and has joined us,
and I want to ask him the following question. So it's clear that the
response to the Iranian attack would have been unthinkable just a decade ago. The
Israelis have the Iron Dome, that anti ballistic missile system worked. Americans participated
in the defense of Israel, knocking missiles out of the sky. So did
the British, But so did Jordan, and so did, according to at
least some reports, so did Saudi Arabia. Unthinkable a decade ago. So
now Israel is able to coordinate. Now, let me put it in another
way. Now Jordan and Saudi Arabia are participating in the defense of the state
of Israel, and an Iranian attack fails completely. I am hoping, and
this is the question for Andy, that the Israelis were not just engaging in
a kind of necessary tit for tat. They couldn't permit the Iranian attack to
go unanswered. I'm hoping there's also a strategic opportunity there. They sense real
weakness. They're getting intelligence from the ground in Tehran that the Iranian population is
that regime's entire legitimacy rests on pure raw strength. If they no longer look
strong, I would like to hope there will be moves against them. Andy,
what do you make of that notion? Hold on here? We have
informally introduced him and not here. I'm sorry, No, he is here,
but we must we must respect gate format and now were welcome to the
podcast. Annie McCarthy, senior Fellow of the National Review Institute, contributing editor
there as well as Fox News. Andy, welcome. Do you remember what
Peter's question was? Go? I sure too, It's the It's the question
we've been working on for thirty years, right, yeah or more? Yes?
Uh, you know, Look, I think the deck has been reshuffled
in a very interesting way. For I think it better part of a decade.
It really goes back to the to the Arab Spring, so longer than
that. But there's a lot of there's a lot of tumult here and I
don't know whether we know yet how it will all shake out. I do
agree that anything that shows the UH the internal weakness of the gime in Iran
is a very good development. I also think that the for all the hullabaloo
about Kashogi, which I think was not covered in a way that completely conveyed
how that incident fit into the the shifting dynamics UH in the region. To
me, the biggest, one of the biggest positive developments over the last decade
plus has been this this breakup between the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood, which
in in many ways UH has allowed this situation where the Saudi's, without saying
so out loud as much as we'd like to have, have been drawn into
a kind of a tacit alliance with the Israelis. Part of that is the
breakup with the Brotherhood and the stuff that came out of the the Arab Spring,
and some of it a lot of it is the way Obama's policy shift
and this insane idea of like putting distance between us and our allies in Israel
and our traditional at least to call them allies I think over states, but
the governments that were the Sunni governments that were traditionally friendly to an extent toward
the United States, to put distance between us and them and empower or Ran
so that it became more of a closer to a potential regional hedgemon. I
think was a nutty, reckless idea and that has that has done wild risk.
At the minimum, it was a wild risk, yeah, but hasn't
worked out well. It has, It has worked out, but not the
way, not the way intended I think in it, when the dust settles,
the region may turn out to be more stable for us, but the
dust hasn't settled. James, your job now is to segue from Iran to
a courtroom in New York. I will do so. You know, there's
a lot of people out there who are going to vote for Trump to matter
what. There's a lot of people out there who are who are have shrugged
off the legal maneuverings because they're bored with that. They're tired with it.
They can't figure it out, or they have figured it out, and they
don't believe that it's anything other than a star cord and political prosecution. And
it's based on zip it's based on animus, it's based on Adams coming up
with we got to do something. I could not have predicted this, actually,
but my whole view on the election has shifted over the last two or
three months. The impact of these court cases is I think, becoming white
noise to a lot of people. So bring us through what we got today.
We got a judge who did something based on something that happened before,
and there's Stormy Daniels in there and don't know why and Cohen and the rest
of us sum it all up for us and tell us A what you think
is coming up next? And b your evaluation of whether or not it counts
matters. I think it matters. What is the what is the it?
Though? We got to get the expert as you are on porn stars,
Andy, tell us what tell us the latest? Judge la Playboy Models.
I can address it porn So I don't know, Judge. Uh so,
Judge, I think like the thirty thousand foot view of this is that the
people who engineered the law Fair campaign, the upshot of which are the effect
on the election, of which we can't really at this point assess, but
we I do agree that it's it is becoming a lot of white noise to
a lot of people. But I think they're nightmare scenario is to have Bragg's
case go first, because Bragg's case is like a dog's breakfast of a case.
Whereas I think the over ambition of Jack Smith prevented them from taking their
best shot at Trump in a timely way on a serious case, which would
have been to pair the Florida case down to an obstruction case against Trump.
Instead. You know, they all have stars in their eyes, these guys,
and they overdo it. So you know, Smith decided he had to
bring thirty two classified felony counts, you know, classified documents, felony counts.
And you know a number of us said at the beginning of all that,
and I have the scars to prove this one. If you get yourself
involved in a litigation over the Classified Information Procedures Act, where you basically have
to have a pre trial trial of the trial and show the admissibility of every
classified document and have arguments with the government about what gets revealed in court and
what doesn't. That takes a very long time, even if people are trying
hard to get the case to trial. I think that he could have done
away with all of that by just making it an obstruction case, and he
might have actually gotten to trial on that. But of course that didn't happen.
The Washington case was bound to be delayed by appellet litigation because of the
immunity issue. Even if Smith thought he was on solid ground on the immunity
issue, and I think he probably will win that at the Supreme Court,
he may not get the sweeping, complete win that he wants, and I
could see a resolution by the court that could further slow that case down.
But I'm just saying in terms of timing. And the reason we're talking about
timing, by the way, is because all these guys improperly tried to orchestrate
this so that this all became trials during the election year, which is the
thing the Justice Department manual tells prosecutors did not allowed to do, but they
did it anyway. But if you're Smith and you're trying to orchestrate this,
you have to know that you're going to be an impellate litigation over immunity because
it's one of the few issues that you're allowed to appeal pre trial. And
what Trump, even if Trump didn't think that he had much of a chance
on immunity, what he wanted here was delay. He's trying to push everything
beyond election day. It doesn't matter whether he wins the immunity I mean,
obviously he'd love to win the immunity issue, but more important for him in
terms of what he really could accomplish here was delay. And he's delayed it
so much that it may be that that case never gets to trial, at
least prior to election day. So what they're stuck with. I think I
haven't even addressed to the circus down in Atlanta because that we don't know what's
going to happen with that case. That's also going to be caught up in
a pellet litigation. So the case that we thought was gone away was Bragg's
case because Brag and when you look at Bragg's case, you shouldn't be surprised
by this. Bragg said that he was happy to defer to the federal prosecutors.
So the idea was that Jack Smith was going to get to the front
of the line and try the J six case in March, and of course
that got derailed. So now Bragg is back and this case hasn't gotten any
better. So where we're at now is they have picked a jury much more
quickly than not only then most people thought, including me, but certainly more
quickly than it looked like was going to happen as late as Monday afternoon when
I was hearing from people who were connected to both sides, but mainly the
Trump side, that they were not. They were thinking the opening statements wouldn't
be until May second, that it was going to take that long to pick
a jury. And you know, they miscalculated on a bunch of things,
including I think they thought that they were getting the Jewish holidays off next week,
so the trial is only going to sit two days, and the whole
thing was kind of bogging down. I'm not a fan of Judge march On
by any stretch, but I think he's run a very efficient jury selection.
They've had some bumps, but you get that in jury selection that's just I
mean, that's just a function of you know, the legal system crashing into
the real world, which is the kind of the most fun part about jury
selection. But they've been very efficient and he's got you know, he's they're
going to be able to start this trial on Monday. It's a terrible trial,
but they will be able to get it started. So Andy on the
if I may, on the jury question, John, you said something on
Fox News earlier, I think this very week, it may have been Monday
or Tuesday, that roughly fifty percent of the potential jurors were standing up in
court and saying, oh, no, I already have an opinion about this
man. And John said that I had never seen anything like that. We're
half of the jury pool essentially. Disc Maybe I misunderstood John, But how
do you go from how do you go from that to seating a jury in
a week? See? The thing, Peter is that it doesn't matter,
if it doesn't necessarily matter, if you have an opinion about the person,
and it doesn't you know, I've had a couple of these cases. For
example, the when we tried the blind Shake. You know, back in
those days, he was a pretty notorious character and everybody had an opinion about
him. He tried to blow up the world towers so yeah, he was
notorious, all right, right, and we tried the case six blocks away
from the World Trade Center, you know, I mean so right in the
to the eye of the storm. And the thing is, you don't want
like if somebody came into two jury selection and said the World Trade said it
was well, hadn't heard that. You don't want people who are living under
a rock on your jury, you know, because they're weird people. And
it's the thing is not so much whether people have an opinion like nobody likes
terrorists. What you're trying to sort through is do people can people convince you
that no matter what their baggage is, they're capable of putting it aside and
deciding the case solely on the evidence that they hear in the courtroom and the
different church. Right, So you have now, of course, you have
to worry about political animus. And it's true that you know, Manhattan is
not great for Trump obviously. On the other hand, now that let me
cop to this. I have tried a case in over twenty years, but
I liked Manhattan juries to be honest, to be fair about it. We
were federal, so we were drawing the jury pool from not just Manhattan,
but also the Bronx in Westchester. But it's not that much different. And
I acknowledge that Manhattan has changed. But I would say two things about that.
First, I think it would be a mistake for people to think that
the average Manhattan juror is the person who votes for Alan Bragg Alvin Bragg in
the election. There's a vanishingly small number of people who actually vote in those
elections, their movement progresses. I think Bragg's election there was like eighty thousand
people voted in a county of well over two million people. So Trump is
not without support in Manhattan. And secondly, the thing that you have to
remember about this is Bragg needs twelve Trump needs one. He just if he
gets. If he gets a hung jury here, then that's a win for
him. I also have a theory. You know, who knows if this
will work or up, But I have a theory where they could convict and
yet the case could get thrown out. As I understand New York law,
I mean maybe we should say, maybe I should say something just generally speaking
about what the case is about. The case is a business records falsification case
which Bragg has tried if that's a misdemeanor in New York with a two year
statute of limitations, and we're talking about conduct that happened in twenty seventeen,
Bragg has inflated that into a felony with what's supposed to be a five but
turns out to be because of COVID a six year statute of limitations. That's
how he gets in under the wire. And the way he does that is
the extra fact you have to prove to make it a felony is that you
falsified your business record with the fraudulent intent to conceal another crime. So the
whole case will be did he intend to conceal another crime? That's the whole
case correct precisely, And what I think Peter, looking at New York law,
I think Trump is entitled to what's known in the law as a lesser
included offense instruction. The lesser included offense is basically, if you have two
offenses like we just described, right, falsification of records and falsification of records
to conceal another crime. The latter is called the greater offense because it has
one extra element than the lesser one. Otherwise they're completely common. The things
that jury have to find are the same elements, except the greater one has
the extra element. In those situations, even though Bragg did not put misdemeanors
in the indictment, he's got it as thirty four felonies. Correct. Trump
is entitled. Trump's defense is entitled to ask for a lesser included instruction,
which means the jury gets told if they think it's rational to come out this
way, that you can convict him on the misdemeanor and acquit him on the
felony the felony. And if that were to happen, you know, if
the jury's got an itch that they have to convict him of something because he's
Trump, but they don't think that Bragg has made the greater offense. They
could convict him on the misdemeanors and then the case would have to get thrown
out because the statue of limitations ran on the misdemeanors in twenty nineteen. So
if I'm Trump's defense, I'm pushing for that instruction. And you know,
contrary to what some people have said about this, this doesn't mean that Trump
has to cop to the misdemeanor and he's got pretty you know, he's got
some good defenses to work with here, including uh that even with the misdemeanor,
you have to show an intent to defraud, and there's no This is
kind of like the civil fraud case in the sense that there's no victim of
fraud here. You know, there was no tax evasion. There's no you
know, person or entity that got that was either targeted to lose money or
or any of the like. So I think Bragg's gonna have a tough time
with the And you ask one more four of you question that, I will
shut up and let James and Rob take it from here. But here's the
overt Rob, the noted Trump defender and partisan. I think that's exactly right.
Here's the defense. I am seeing a little ray of sunshine in your
description, Andy, and the sunshine would be as follows. Alvin Bragg should
never have brought this case. I know that because I read Andy McCarthy.
No similar case would ever have been brought against any figure other than Donald Trump.
Alvin Bragg is engaging in a travesty against justice. That's one thing,
but it would be another thing if the entire legal system, if the jury
pool here in Manhattan were some way or other likewise to engage in such a
travesty. And what you're saying is that a misguided, progressive, overtly political
da is not going to be able to get this past the legal system and
the jury and a jury of Donald Trump's peers, so to speak, in
Manhattan. The trial might be fair, even if the charges against him are
are outrageous. I think the trial has a lot better chance of being fair
than, say, for example, the civil fraud case, which was a
bench trial before an elected progressive Democrat. And you know, Peter, if
that's not true, then what the hell was the purpose of complaining about the
bench trial. I mean, everybody said he should have had a jury,
he was entitled to a jury. Well, why do we care about that?
We care about that because he might actually get a fair shake from a
jury. Now I want to be you know, this is one of these
sort of inside baseball things about how trials work. To me, the most
important unstated dynamic in a trial is how the judge treats the case, and
particularly how the judge treats the prosecution. And if the judge treats the prosecution
like it's serious business, and he doesn't seem to be overtly unfair to the
defendant. And let's remember now we're talking about what the jury will think here.
We're not talking about like what a bunch of US nerds have been reading
the newspapers about this case intensely for however many years. The jury is not
us. They don't you know, they don't live and die with this stuff.
They're not as locked into it. So this is going to be more
of a matter of first impression for them. Even if they have some predispositions
about Trump, they're going to be powerfully influenced. If Judge Merchon does not
come off as overtly unfair to Trump, the jury could be very influenced by
how he treats the prosecution. And that's a dynamic that goes on in every
trial. And it calls on Trump's lawyers to do a very good job,
because you know, they have to be kind of upbeat and friendly and appealing
to the jury and not fight with the judge if the judge doesn't seem to
be being unreasonable, and rely on their ability to convince the jury that this
case is terrible. And the other thing about Manhattan juries that we need to
bear in mind is you cannot live in Manhattan and not know that Alvin Bragg
does not enforce the laws against against serious time. So you're going to have
people who are going to be sitting in there wondering why do we have like
real criminals walking the street and we're in here on falsification of business records in
a case where no one was defrauded. That and hey, Rob, that
that to me is a as a resident of Manhattan. It seems to me
that your jury pool is tainted by this simple walk through you know, City
Hall Plaza or wherever to you that jury room. There's not a jur in
that room who had did not was not slightly on edge taking the subway down
to City Hall or wherever. This's the you know, wherever the courthouse is.
This is not a good look for the DA or the DA office as
you make your way through a borough of Manhattan that seems ungoverned and unpoliced to
a very strange accounting irregularity trial that is being covered by worldwide media. I
mean, I guess I would say, is like, is there anything I
mean, I could have it wrong? The the larger crime, right the
one that's on top of the misdemeanor is going to be something like that,
like election like kind of a is that? How are they gonna call him
that? I understand the business records, but what's the bigger one called?
What's it's? Well, there's two. Basically he's got a tax theory too,
but that really doesn't doesn't work, and just quickly so we can dismiss
it. The tax theory doesn't work because the way they paid Cone was this
is about the reimbursement of Cone, right, okay, pone pays Stormy,
then Trump reimburses Cohen, and Trump being Trump, he doesn't just pay him.
They have to do it over and installments over eleven months and all this
stuff. The reason I think the tax theory doesn't work is what they did
to pay him back the one hundred and thirty grand. They doubled it,
and they call that grossing up to accounts for the taxes he would have to
pay if that was considered to be income. So they actually specifically thought about
the tax situation and paid him extra. So so not only do those jurors
have to walk through, you know, the jungle of Manhattan to see what
the DA's priorities are. But they've also four days ago filed their complicated,
impenetrable, impossible to understand federal tax return. This is not this is not
going to be a sympathetic jury. Okay, now I understand. And the
other thing I'd be worried about is if you get off the subway as I
used to do at Brooklyn Bridge when I worked at the US Attorney's office,
and walk walk the three or four blocks to the criminal court, you could
be high on marijuana by the time you get there, if you've been walking
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podcast. What you know in a sense though, when you were saying before
that you could get high between the time you get off the subway and you
get there because clouds of choking reefer fumes settled upon Manhattan. We have the
same thing here in Minneapolis is a little bit less extent, and I almost
want to do to pull away from the Trump thing here and go to a
general question about society where we're headed here in Minneapolis, they're about to raise
the price of cigarettes to fifteen bucks a pack before taxes. That's expensive,
and at the same time the state is telling us, here is your marijuana,
Go smoke this. And we have a strange set of priorities being handed
to us by our betters, a disconnect that Rob spoke about before and that
you were spoke speaking about. To what extent do you think this actually is
going to grow and play a role in moving forward when everybody takes a look
at what was done with Trump and what isn't done with the people who,
shall we say, upbraid the you know, the the cities and societies in
which we live. Are we just kind of now conditioned to slump and take
it. And as long as they're going after guys like Trump gears, it's
not affecting me. I think people feel really powerless to to do anything about
it. Part of the part of the appeal of Trump. I think even
among people who you know at bottom don't think he's a very good person,
what they like is he's like the one thing that puts a thumb in the
eye of all the things that they feel powerless about. And I think that's
a big part of the attraction. But I don't know, I don't,
I don't. I don't get the sense that James that that people, you
know, people suddenly got pushed to the point where they can't take it anymore
and they're going to push backing it. Yeah, And I always remind people
even as we as we get alarmed by the fact that murder is creeping up
in New York again. I think it's down from twenty twenty, twenty twenty
three, was down from twenty twenty two, but it's still significantly higher than
it was in twenty nineteen, and almost twice as high. But you know,
what we're worried about or talking about is like four hundred and fifty homicides.
I don't remember what the exact number is. I think in nineteen ninety
one we had close to twenty five hundred homicides in New York City. And
I just point out that despite we're talking about like five times more than we
have down, we had record crime from you know, the late sixties into
the nineties before crime was driven down in a very revolutionary way, but it
got awfully awfully bad before there was a backlash against it. People were willing
to vote for Rudy. Yeah, and they weren't really happened. Yeah,
it's true. And Peter, they weren't four years earlier. You know,
Dinkins beat him. I wouldn't say handily. He was fairly close to election,
but he lost four years before and then went back to the well after
four years of Dinkins. And the way crime got pushed down from nineteen ninety
one to about twenty fourteen or so was astonishing, But it was awfully bad
from the late sixties until nineteen ninety one. So I just don't think in
my experience at least, and I've had a lot of experience, unfortunately with
crime in that area in New York, I just think things could get a
lot worse before they get better. So stop and I hope that's wrong.
Stop whining, Rob, It's going to get much worse. Yeah, Andy,
do you ever feel like I mean? As a New Yorker there was
a constant cultural story from the end of World War Two to nineteen ninety which
was the high water mark of low water mark of murders in New York City,
depending on how you look at it. You know, classes half full
of glasses half empty. That's a long time. Forty years, forty years
of culture, and the forty years said one thing over and over again.
The city is going to get worse and worse and worse. This is normal.
It is normal for the city to get worse. It can never get
better. So you look at the culture of the seventies and you look at
what they were people talking about the city. It was always gritty and nasty
and horrible, and you know, the naked city, all that stuff.
People have been saying. That's to telling that story forever. And then suddenly
changes took forty years though, forty years of sort of your brain imprinting that
the New York City's a gritty place. And it kind of changed and went
and became this place that you know when I came back to it after Juliani,
but there was kind of unrecognizable. There's people city outside, people sitting
out. It's not a herald square having a sandwich. Bryant Park was this
glorious place you could go and enjoy your avenue in here. Get You could
get a glass of wine at Brian Park and sit outside and drink it.
It's crazy like Paris. I live right close to Washington Square Park. Washington
Square Park was surrounded by fencing for most of my growing up, and now
it's like you walk up. Mean, it's plumes of weed and some other
trouble there, but basically it's kind of a big city park. It's lovely.
It does feel like people's tolerance for going back is shorter, the idea.
There's a whole bunch of young people who live in New York City who
do not remember in New York City nineteen eighty five. They remember a night
in New York City when they moved here, when it was not a dump.
I mean it's not. And even now there's standards here people complaining that
New York City all the time. I'm like, listen, you weren't here
in nineteen eighty nine. You should have seen it. Do you think that
helps that there's this tighter cycle now that there's a snap back that's much faster,
that nobody believes that this the city has to be a chaotic crime written
disaster. Well, I think you're right about the short timeframe and that having
a lot to do with people's tolerance to me, and I don't want to
like read my view on it too much on people who haven't been in law
enforcement. But one of the things that's really frustrating about the surgeon crime for
the last ten years, and especially the last five years or so, is
that up until nineteen ninety one or thereabouts, you could say, you know,
we were in this miasma of like what are we gonna what are we
gonna do about this? But crime didn't come down randomly. Crime came down
because of a plan. We have, like a plan we know what works,
right, you know, it's they called it broken windows. That was
part of it. It was really intelligence based policing where instead of the instead
of this idea where the cop goes out to his same assignment every day and
they stay in their cars and they don't do what Bratton and those guys did
under Rudy's stewardship and Ray Kelly was great on this as well, and his
two tenures was they would study the stats and they would deploy police to the
places where crime was starting to signal that it might be surging, so that
they didn't allow it to surge. But can I just I guess my pessimistic
note here is that we're not really talking about crime. We're technically talking about
crime. But when I walk around New York City, I'm not worried that
someone's gonna mug me. I'm worried that some lunatic is going to do something
unpredictable, irrational and violent. And so I'm asking law and force. I
mean, broken windows theory is great, but we're not talking about broken windows
here. We're talking about broken brains. And I just don't understand how you're
asking cops and and and I mean even God, you know, forbid Da
Bragg to solve a crime problem. And notice they always go when you talk
about crime, well, actually you know crime is enough, Actually you know
crime is down. They have all the statistics to prove that it's not a
problem. Whereas the evidence of your eyes and ears is that you walk around
New York City, you walk around any big city in America, that there
is a problem. It's a mental health problem, and it's dangerous. It's
not funny, it's not cute, it's not quaint, it's not remember the
bag lady. People make fun of bag ladies. Ah, that's kind of
fun. No, this is like these are weirdo, crazy crackpot ambulatory psychotics,
pushing people in front of trains, and I'm not sure that the old
solutions are gonna do much. Yeah, we always had a little crazy on
the street, but nothing, nothing like now. The other thing, Rob
is that when I was a kid, you know, New York was always
a leftist center place in terms of just a pulolitical elites. But it wasn't
you know, it wasn't like a hard left Marxist progressive and I had Dutch
owned it when you were a kid, right, when you're well. When
I was a kid, though I grew growing up where I grew up in
the Bronx, everybody was a Democrat and the neighborhood and the neighborhood was conservative.
Yeah, they were conservative Democrats. These are the people who voted for
Bill Buckley in nineteen sixty five, sixty five. I think it was right
and discovered that there were when the Queens and the Bronx and Staten Island who
were for this crazy conservative Republican because they were conservative people. Yeah, and
they were the least patient with John Lindsay, who was like the original limousine
liberal. Right. But the thing is, back then it wasn't like we
didn't always have like this Marxist fringe. It's the problem is it's now not
a fringe. They've actually taken over the government and it's much worse than it
than it ever was at that level. And as a result, even though
I don't think this is representative of people's ordinary people's sensibilities, the government is
officially hard progressive, and as a result we have the mental health policies that
have rafts of crazy people doing crazy stuff on the street. We have these
progressive prosecutors as crime was going up, thinking that the way you deal with
this is by dismantling the carceral state, which means let everybody out of the
prisons, even though the people in the neighborhoods which are who are tormented by
crime actually want more policing. But the cities being run by mostly white lefty
lunatics, and the people who are living with the consequences of it are the
people who live in these poorer neighborhoods where the crime is the highest. Yeah,
false consciousness, that's the problem. You're absolutely right, Andy, And
I know we got to let you go, but you're absolutely right. As
Rob was saying before, we couldn't do anything about crime, and then Juliani,
we can do something about crime. And now we shouldn't do anything about
these issues. That's what I always hear from these people. We shouldn't do
it until we address the root causes in the systemic systemism. That they're not
interested in doing anything about these things at all. They're illustrative and they're helpful,
and you, as usual, have been illustrative and helpful. And I
hope our listeners have a clearer, a firmer, dryer grasp on what's going
on with the Trump cases. And of course we will talk to you later
about the same thing, because this ain't going away. Annie McCarthy, always
a pleasure. Thanks, guys, have a great meets. Any will you
quit sitting around and appearing on Fox News and run for governor once we get
Trenton and Newmark and Jersey City show The Way to New York show the Way
will you please? Yeah? I don't know. They don't want a guy
from the Bronx. You know. First of all, I say Trenton and
you know, so come come home, come home. Time for you to
come home and run the city. Andy, have a great weekend. Thanks
you too, You know A couple of things about New York as long as
we're still on the subject and you guys are still there. One, the
the crazies, the the I'm sure it's probably a wrong word, the challenged.
It seems like there's more of them. They're more flamboyant, and they're
they're meaner, and they're weirder than they used to be. It's drugs.
I I don't think we're dealing with a lot of people here who since their
adolescent period have started to have something go awry with their brain chemistry. I
think you have a lot of people to have fried on drugs, and you
know it's I hate to say this because people get angry, but marijuana does
it too. I think the amount of psychosis you probably can get people who've
been doing a lot of we'd modern day varieties of it is hi. So,
yeah, you got more crazy people out there, not because they opened
the doors of the asylum. I still go on to Reddit and you will
still find people convinced that the reason that you have people sleeping and pushing people
in front of cars in Rob's old hometown of Venice is because Ronald Reagan threw
open the asylum doors in the nineteen eighties. Personally, Ronald Reagan opened the
doors and then kicked everybody out, dragged them out by their callers, completely
unilateral action. The second thing I would note, and both you guys there
in Gotham can give me your opinion about this. Rob and I had argued
about this before, but maybe Peter with a fresh set of eyes. The
one thing I hate hate about New York these days is all the scaffolding.
It's permanent, doesn't go away, it's not there to protect anybody. Usually,
it's part of these interminable restoration efforts. And there's tax reasons for it,
there's landmarking, there's all kinds of reasons for it. But have you
noticed that, Peter, that when you walk down the street would used to
be like you know, Manhattan, the street, beautiful old brick buildings.
You are now shuttling through these like a rat, through these dank green tunnels
with metal pipes, and it's straight out of the Batman movie in nineteen eighty
nine. Yeah, there is a huge amount of that. In fact,
I was walking down Park Caven who paid a kind of homage to where Bill
and Pat Buckley used to live in their whole building is covered in scaffolding.
Now, I took it as I did. We landed in Newark and took
an uber in and the skyline. Thought to myself, oh my goodness,
the skyline has been transformed since I moved out, and it was California.
Yeah, yeah, And so I thought to myself, I mean, you
know, in California, all you hear about New York is in decline.
Everybody's moving to Florida. That's not quite the case. There's an enormous amount
of growth and energy. Rob Long is here, for example. So I
sort of took it as these buildings have to get refurbished. This is a
good sign. There's investment. The co ops are putting up the money to
do what needs to be done to keep the buildings intent for another fifty years.
But of course it's New York, so the government will be involved.
There's some corruption involved there, a tax cuts, ice, a huge boondog,
right, because the scaffolding is very expensive and it's hard to reserve.
You had to reserve ahead of time, so they put up the scaffolding way
before they need to. And there's new kinds of scaffolding now that it's like
kind of these weird kind of pretty white umbrella things that are lit that are
making scaffolding and the building scaffolding somehow more attractive. There's with like plastic flowers
stuff, which is somehow even creepier. And there's a lot there has been
a lot of construction, but a lot of it. It's just that there's
a a few places you must have it. It's insurance and regulations and whatever
you're doing you must have. And this is sort of new, kind of
new from past twenty five years when a bunch of when a bunch of stuff
fell off masonry, fell off a building and killed somebody on the sidewalk.
And now all these buildings need to have their their facade mationary or their facade
of any kind inspected every X number of years, which means scaffolding. So
it's a it's a very strange thing. But like most of these things,
I think it has to do with a government regulation, a regulated industry,
shortages and compliance with a whole bunch of legal and you know, city ordinances,
and not so much the practical need for workers to get uh and walk
on the outside of a building. That to me feels like like I don't
know why you have to build scaffolding just to just to I mean, I
don't know about it. Maybe you do, but just it seems to me
to be Yeah, it seems to me that it's a that it is like
most things, it is the product of an overregulated, uh and over insured
and over over protective, bureaucratic state. I'm a fast walker, which is
why I like New York. I got to New York and I'm telling New
Yorkers to get it out of the way and having everybody shut it put into
these tunnels with choke points and the rest of it requires you know, you
got to do your radar scanning down down the sidewalks right, Yes, much
better to rains. And then you're like looking for the scalpeling. But I
get it right, And so Peter, how long has it been since you've
been there, to the large apple, Since I've been here for a very
quick business trip, it's probably been So I'm in the middle of Manhattan for
almost a week, and it has been probably a decade and a half since
I spent that much time in Manhattan. So you've seen some of the new
substantial construction that's taken place, which the new substantial those needle buildings. There
is nothing wrong. I was just thinking about this as Robin Andy. We're
talking about the mental homeless. There is no doubt that that's true. The
sense the anxiety is not I'm going to get a knife in the back or
somebody's going to hold me up on the street, which by the way,
did happen to me in the old days. Somebody who just stopped me on
the street and to give me your money, and I said, here,
sorry, I don't have more great physical coward good man. That's a good
man only, which it could be more, my good man. Yes,
exactly, clouds of marijuana tattoos. But from maybe the third or fourth floor
up, there's no mental illness in Manhattan. It's this is what we're talking
about, is the streets. Sadly enough, everybody, even those rich rich
people way up in those needle towers, have to come down to the street,
or every so often at least they have to come down to the street,
and the walking through clouds of marijuana getting on the subway, as I
did just now, following Rob's directions to come from uptown to downtown, and
just you know, you're scanning, you're looking more than you feel as though
you ought to for the crazy person you're looking for. Where's the car that
nobody's in, Because I shouldn't go in that car either. It's unnerve in
a place where, from the second floor up, this town is filled with
brains and talent and ambition and energy. It's an astonishing place that ought pretty
easily to be even better. When I say pretty easily, we all know
that if Andy McCarthy were made mayor, this place would get turned around in
two months. I've been on the second floor of the CVS and Times Squares
full of lunatics. But I know what you mean when the billionaires come down.
But Frand Leeboo's famously said that the outdoors is what I passed through from
my lobby to the tent to the taxi. Right, so those people are
going to be insulated no matter what in billionaire's row. But no, you're
you're absolutely correct. Still love the city, wouldn't live there if you paid
me. It takes about three or four days before I throw up my hands
or my sharma and say you one, that's it, that's it, that's
it. I'm still never forgetting anally with this. When I went to the
National Review Christmas party. Robbie should have been there. I know you were
giving a lecture to some mutes or something. I was talking to youths.
He's coming back to that. I was still a little hungry, and I
thought, and I'm walking back to my hotel through the bustling crowds, Christmas
time, lights everywhere, beautiful, just New York. And it's absolutely finest
there. It is a Sabrett's hot dog place, the Bretts Sabrettes subratrite.
Okay, I wish I've been Hebrew nationally the best. But you know,
I said, you know, I haven't had a New York street dog in
a long time. This is great. I walk up. I talked to
the guy, how are you my friend? What would you like? I'm
his friend, he's my friend. We're having a New York experience. I
gave him the money, cooks the dog. He puts the bun on everything,
and I just slather a little ketchup on it. And I'm sorry Mustard.
And I walked down the street saying, here I am. I've done
it. I went to New York with a party. I had a party
up at a skyscraper, drank fine Scotch walked through the city, was not
molested. The lights twinkling above the new cranes of the JP Morgan. I'm
in New York and I took a bite of my hot dog and it was
ice cold, absolutely ice cold. I got it for you. We make
it cold for you. We make it very cool for I extract all the
heat out of it whatsoever. And I thought I can dump this right now,
which I did, knowing that Pizza rat is going to get it some
you know, Pizza vermin is going to pick it out and in the site
continues. But I thought that was perfect. That was I may idjus your
your your culinary. I know you walked out of forty probably forty fourth Street
and took a left right on sixth Avenue. The Halal guys, I'm telling
you, the Halal guys. Yeah, a bunch of carts. Usually there's
a line. This was a whole all place. This is one of those
guys. No, no, they don't. They don't sell this. They
don't sell the dot or they sell like a chicken swarma. It is delicious.
It's so good you can door dash it. The Hallal guys, you've
got to say halal. Guys, if you can't say anything else, and
there are four or five of them, and they have they have one downtown,
too unbelievable. The next time I've seen them and I will take them.
I've just never trusted. I've always figured that getting meat from a streetcar
vendor is going to result in gut griping six hours later, the likes of
which I've never seen before and for which there is no recourse. So that's
why I cannot do it. But you know what, this is what we
should do. We should arrange. We should arrange a Ricochet meetup where by
Rob Longs to his favorite all guys, I'll give the architecture tour if you
if you don't mind, h and Peter Robinson will well, you know,
tell us of his recollections of the days when he was held up, and
between the three of us, the artistic, the cultural and historical, we
should have New York. You know, easily explained for all he said jokingly
or not. That's part of the Ricochet meetups, which of course we'll have
later. Rob next week you can tell us about some Yeah, but so
coming up. This was brought to you, of course by Ricochet Dot com
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me, gentlemen, and join New York whatever you're doing there, although I
think I know, And we'll talk to you down the road. See everybody
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