Speaker 1: King, we should be partners, not rivals, achieving mutual success
Speaker 1: and common prosperity, finding the right way for the two
Speaker 1: major powers to coexist in the new era. The world
Speaker 1: has arrived at a new crossroads where the China and
Speaker 1: the United States can navigate the so called Thucydides trap.
Speaker 2: It's the Ricochet Podcast. I'm James Lilynx with Stephen Heyward
Speaker 2: and we're going to be talking again to our favorite
Speaker 2: Noah Roth has written a book Blood and Progress about
Speaker 2: left wing violence. Let's say Resol's not a riot, but
Speaker 2: a podcast with the.
Speaker 3: US Defend Taiwan came. So only one person that does
Speaker 3: said you know it is me.
Speaker 2: Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number seven hundred and
Speaker 2: eighty nine. I'm James Lilyx on a beautiful spring day
Speaker 2: in a Dina, Minnesota. Stephen Hayward is in California. Or
Speaker 2: of course the sun always shines. So Stephen, how are
Speaker 2: you today?
Speaker 3: I am good, James, good to see you.
Speaker 2: Well as sparks in Star Trek six, only Trump can
Speaker 2: go to China. What do you make of what has
Speaker 2: been done? The headlines that I'm getting. Of course, it's
Speaker 2: it's always amusing to be the headlines in my feed
Speaker 2: I use Apple News, and they gather up all of
Speaker 2: the things that are said, and everything is fraught with
Speaker 2: terror and failure and worry and uncertainty and the rest
Speaker 2: of it. And I have come to just discard ninety
Speaker 2: percent of it, waiting for history to make its final judgment.
Speaker 2: Of course, by them, I'll be dead. But so, what
Speaker 2: have you been able to glean from what you've heard
Speaker 2: about this meeting.
Speaker 3: With Gi Well, not much really, because we don't really
Speaker 3: know what's available for public consumption can be at wide
Speaker 3: variance with what's actually happening at the negotiating table and
Speaker 3: all the side discussions that go on between the large
Speaker 3: entourage brought with him. So I am amused by the
Speaker 3: fact that what the media seems most concerned with is
Speaker 3: that the traveling press corps from the United States has
Speaker 3: been roughed up by Chinese these officials.
Speaker 2: I haven't heard this, what happened?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, apparently there have been these scuffles. And anyway,
Speaker 3: the Meatia is complained that we're being treated very badly
Speaker 3: by the Chinese, and I thought, ah, I wonder Ifrump
Speaker 3: put them up to this.
Speaker 2: Well, I hope not.
Speaker 3: I hope not.
Speaker 2: I don't want to bring in the United States, as
Speaker 2: much as we may feel about the mainstream media as
Speaker 2: we do, to use the instruments of state power in
Speaker 2: China to give these guys a bad time. Now, it
Speaker 2: could be that being roughed up means, you know, being
Speaker 2: put in a room and given a flat Coca cola
Speaker 2: and made to sit there for an hour. So I
Speaker 2: don't know. But if they're actually manhandling them and the
Speaker 2: rest of it, no, this is the point where I say, no,
Speaker 2: we are all Americans and they're the chicoms, the reds,
Speaker 2: and I say it's spinach and hell with it.
Speaker 3: So well, this, well, it's an interesting point on that
Speaker 3: media angle. I mean, here's I've actually had some physical altercations.
Speaker 3: I haven't tried to chase after in detail, but there
Speaker 3: is one little detail that is interesting to me. So
Speaker 3: you know, Barry Wise has been trying to turn the
Speaker 3: ship at CBS News. And one interesting thing is last
Speaker 3: weekend it was Major Garrett on sixty Minutes had a
Speaker 3: long interview with Benjamin Netanyahu. Apparently this has outraged Leslie
Speaker 3: Stall because she's a senior person. She's been trying for
Speaker 3: months to get an interview with Netan Yahoo.
Speaker 2: But at least she wasn't trumped by, or so to speak,
Speaker 2: by a minor Garrett That would be even more insight.
Speaker 2: At least it was a major Garrett R.
Speaker 3: Exactly right. Anyway, this is causing trouble there. But the
Speaker 3: more interesting thing at CBS, what relates to the China question,
Speaker 3: is so that Tony Dekoppel's the new anchor for reasons
Speaker 3: that are not entirely clear to me or that I
Speaker 3: haven't seen explained satisfactorily. Is he was not able to
Speaker 3: get a visa for the trip to China. So he's
Speaker 3: reporting on the summit all week from Taiwan. So that's
Speaker 3: a little odd. But Hill was doing a lot every night,
Speaker 3: He's doing some Taiwan stories. You know, how does Taiwan
Speaker 3: think about China? What are they doing to defend themselves
Speaker 3: against the possible attack. But the first night, it would
Speaker 3: have been Monday or Tuesday, he came on at the
Speaker 3: end with a little you might say, editor and he said, yeah,
Speaker 3: China's a rising power. They make everything, but everything they
Speaker 3: make is made in America. And then he goes on
Speaker 3: to talk about you might say American exceptionalism, American innate superiority.
Speaker 3: I thought, ah, isn't that interesting that. You know, people
Speaker 3: in the media and at the CBS Old Garter probably think, well,
Speaker 3: that's just irresponsible jingoism. But I kind of like it,
Speaker 3: and it's a sign maybe bury A succeeding and turning
Speaker 3: the ship of state there, so do I.
Speaker 2: But the idea that China somehow has learned that it
Speaker 2: is an exceptional nation, that they borrowed that concept from
Speaker 2: the United States, I'm sorry. They believe themselves to be
Speaker 2: the center of the world, the Middle Kingdom, and it
Speaker 2: is their right to rule, so that's a bit odd.
Speaker 2: But as far as having them, you know, they make everything.
Speaker 2: It's interesting. I have been because I've been furnishing and
Speaker 2: tricking out this apartment here, I've had more interface with
Speaker 2: Chinese goods than I have in an awful long time,
Speaker 2: and nearly every single one of them has turned out
Speaker 2: to be shoddy, substandard, doesn't fit my needs, breaks easily
Speaker 2: comes from a company that disappears almost instantly. I left
Speaker 2: the one star review of a desk tray of to
Speaker 2: pull out desk, which is impossible to assemble and was
Speaker 2: promptly given a got a letter from Doris. I'm sure
Speaker 2: it was Doris somewhere who said that they were taking
Speaker 2: a very close look at my comments, that the engineering
Speaker 2: team had been spoken to and they were retooling everything,
Speaker 2: and they were going to give me a fifty dollars
Speaker 2: gift certificate if I could just change my review from
Speaker 2: a one star to a five star. And I thought, yep,
Speaker 2: that's what we're up against right there, and no, sorry,
Speaker 2: got your number. Well, it'll be interesting to see what comes.
Speaker 2: I mean, one of the interesting things and pieces of
Speaker 2: news that we had the last week was that drug
Speaker 2: overdose deaths are down like something like two thirds in
Speaker 2: the country. And they're blaming that on interdiction. They're blaming
Speaker 2: that on less fentanyl. They're not blaming they're ascribing it
Speaker 2: to those things, to less immigration and the rest of it.
Speaker 2: And it's a good deal. It's a good thing, right.
Speaker 2: So you have no idea whether behind the scenes there
Speaker 2: was some arm twisting and table pounding and saying you've
Speaker 2: got to stop shipping precursor chemicals to Mexico or we're
Speaker 2: going to start having some accidents or something or something.
Speaker 2: I don't know. You never know. You never know. I
Speaker 2: mean Nixon goes somebody goes to Russia and comes back
Speaker 2: and says, well, went very well. We signed a very
Speaker 2: heavy cream piece, cream colored piece of paper that was
Speaker 2: embossed with all of our signatures about nuclear weapons. It's
Speaker 2: going to make sure the future is safe, and we're
Speaker 2: going to sell them pepsi and they're going to sell
Speaker 2: us as Stoly And I think it was probably a
Speaker 2: little bit more than that, but everybody thought, oh good,
Speaker 2: we get Stoley, which is you.
Speaker 3: Know, well, two things have been well. One thing's been
Speaker 3: reported that again we don't know how concrete it is,
Speaker 3: but that China has agreed that Iran should not control
Speaker 3: the Gulf of the Straits of hor Mews and maybe
Speaker 3: that they're going to restrain or supplying of arms to Iran.
Speaker 3: I'll believe that when I see it. The other one
Speaker 3: is that Trump. It was announced ahead of time that
Speaker 3: Trump was going to bring up the case of Jimmy Lai,
Speaker 3: imprisoned in Hong Kong, and I hope, I assume that
Speaker 3: he did, but I don't know. We haven't heard any
Speaker 3: reporting on that that I've seen, at least. Uh so, uh,
Speaker 3: that's that's I'll bet that's a sticking point for China.
Speaker 3: I'll bet they're like the Soviet Union was when Reagan
Speaker 3: and Schultz kept bringing up human rights and they say,
Speaker 3: this is a purely internal matter, and our guys will say, no,
Speaker 3: it isn't, and finally the Soviets relented. But I don't
Speaker 3: think China is in a mood to relent on that.
Speaker 3: They're they're very intransigent about these I don't know if
Speaker 3: we have.
Speaker 2: Any Chinese agent mayors in this country that we could
Speaker 2: swap for them.
Speaker 3: You know, right that city's right next door to where
Speaker 3: I grew up. I know Arcadia quite well.
Speaker 2: It's a very very curious story, and it makes you
Speaker 2: realize the Chinese penetration of our institutions. I mean, this
Speaker 2: isn't This isn't paranoid talk. This isn't I'm Joe mccarthyen
Speaker 2: I'm gonna eat a stick of butter before going out
Speaker 2: and drunkenly accusing a bunch of people to stuff. Although
Speaker 2: he was right in all of these instance, this is
Speaker 2: this is, this is what anybody knows to be the case.
Speaker 2: When they send people over here for a variety of purposes.
Speaker 2: They could dual use, as they say, when the intradiculous
Speaker 2: ship that has machinery on it, that, of course they are.
Speaker 2: Why wouldn't they Why would they not send agents over
Speaker 2: to do all sorts of things for all I know?
Speaker 2: You know the Florida orange blight was caused indeed by
Speaker 2: Chinese agents spreading pathogens. It's people look at you and say,
Speaker 2: you're absolutely daft to believe that you've been spending too
Speaker 2: much time on the Twitter.
Speaker 4: Why would that be ridiculous?
Speaker 2: Why would your geopolitical economic enemy not want to sew
Speaker 2: as much discord as possible to take advantage of your
Speaker 2: liberal policies to seed the country with as many people
Speaker 2: as they could, wouldn't you?
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, yes, I've had a number of Chinese students
Speaker 3: over the last twenty years, and I've just assumed or
Speaker 3: concluded that a number of them were essentially spies, and
Speaker 3: or in several cases I learned that they were over
Speaker 3: here to get a degree. But really it was a
Speaker 3: vehicle for rich Chinese to get money out of the country,
Speaker 3: which is otherwise restrictive. But some of these Chinese students
Speaker 3: had brand new Mercedes or BMW's, and in the case
Speaker 3: of Pepperdine where we USEDEPP quite a lot fewer than
Speaker 3: before COVID. A lot of them were living in two
Speaker 3: million dollar houses over the hill in Westlake, which you know, Oh,
Speaker 3: the kids gotta have housing. They're sort of housing on
Speaker 3: campus center, right. Oh, this is a way to get
Speaker 3: some capital out of the country. But I do remember
Speaker 3: vividly one of the first Chinese students I ever had,
Speaker 3: young lady very Bright. Her work was really good, which
Speaker 3: made me suspicious that, you know, for Ai, that someone
Speaker 3: was writing papers for But she says to me, Oh,
Speaker 3: I've looked at your internet. Everything on your internet about
Speaker 3: ten and Men's Square is wrong. Those protesters and thugs
Speaker 3: and hooligans they were shooting are police and army people,
Speaker 3: and so anyway I would get that I thought was
Speaker 3: quite candid and maybe more too revealing, more revealing than
Speaker 3: it should have been.
Speaker 2: Well, the Great Firewall does keep a lot of information
Speaker 2: out of there, and it's unfortunate that they have to
Speaker 2: marinate in their own ideological bubble. Good thing that doesn't
Speaker 2: happen here in the States. Yes, they move a lot
Speaker 2: of money out of China to go to the property markets.
Speaker 2: Canada has this and a great extent, and you always
Speaker 2: look at them and say, don't you guys have an
Speaker 2: awful lot of empty cities that you pro simply could
Speaker 2: sink your money into, But they don't because they know
Speaker 2: it's not going to work. I keep hearing that Chinese
Speaker 2: economy is always about a day and a half away
Speaker 2: from collapsing entirely because of their property situation, and it
Speaker 2: never seems to happen. Another day will pop up and
Speaker 2: there'll be another video of somebody who's gone through a
Speaker 2: city that was intended to house eight hundred thousand people
Speaker 2: and has four of them, and they're all janitors who
Speaker 2: spend their day sweeping up an empty mall. And it
Speaker 2: is astonishing to me how they continue to creak along
Speaker 2: with these real estate bubbles that they have that make
Speaker 2: ours look absolutely same by comparison, But yet they do
Speaker 2: so who knows, you know, we'll see down the road.
Speaker 2: But China is I mean, you've been reading of the purges, right,
Speaker 2: You've been reading the g is shaping the army to
Speaker 2: do as you want, which brings us to somebody else
Speaker 2: in a similar position, perhaps a little more perilously so.
Speaker 2: And that is where Putin happens. To be. All of
Speaker 2: the stuff that's coming out of there suggests that there
Speaker 2: is a strange softening. Somebody noted that for the very
Speaker 2: first time Putin referred to Zelensky with the honor, with
Speaker 2: the word mister, and that this somehow was some great
Speaker 2: signal that a reproach mall might be possible. That they
Speaker 2: are no longer going the whole zine denotification thing, but
Speaker 2: they're starting to create an ideological, verbal political landscape where
Speaker 2: they can actually make an agreement. I don't know. I
Speaker 2: don't think so. I think that staggers on until until
Speaker 2: Putin is either out, which you know, where do you
Speaker 2: stand on that? And again, this is something we've been
Speaker 2: saying for two years. As the elites are hurt, then
Speaker 2: they will turn against him. Well, the elites have been
Speaker 2: hurt first by the sanctions, then by the way now
Speaker 2: you know, with the trashing of the energy infrastructure. Unless
Speaker 2: money flow in ETCA, the elites are hurting even more.
Speaker 2: I've hearing all of this for a long time since
Speaker 2: the war began.
Speaker 3: I have no idea what to make of it. We
Speaker 3: puzzled over Putin before, and I've expressed my bafflement. I
Speaker 3: do think two things. One is it is the logic
Speaker 3: of aggressive tyrants to either go on or be destroyed
Speaker 3: right but internally, and that's something that is I don't
Speaker 3: quite understand the impulse to want to risk total destruction
Speaker 3: for yourself in your country, but it does seem to
Speaker 3: be endemic to dictatorships. Second, I do get the sense
Speaker 3: for some of the reasons you mentioned that he is
Speaker 3: looking for a way out, but it has to be
Speaker 3: has to be beyond just a face saving way out,
Speaker 3: because that won't save his own head, you might say.
Speaker 3: And what that might be. I think it's not only
Speaker 3: keep all the territories got and maybe be given some more,
Speaker 3: but I think he wants some kinds of guarantees that
Speaker 3: Ukraine will not join, for example, the European Union. Never
Speaker 3: mind NATO. I don't think there's an appetite for NATO
Speaker 3: to invite Ukraine to join, but the European Union and
Speaker 3: our closer ties to the West is something Putin would
Speaker 3: like to foreclose in some solid way, and I think
Speaker 3: there'll be great resistance to that, both by the European
Speaker 3: Union and by Zelenski himself. So we're just gonna have
Speaker 3: to see. Ukraine is apparently exactly more and more pain
Speaker 3: on Russia. It's drone strikes and so forth. So we're just,
Speaker 3: you know, we'll just have to see what happens. As
Speaker 3: the President likes to say.
Speaker 5: Indeed, Hi, I'm Ben Sass and I'm Chris Steierwald, and
Speaker 5: this is not dead yet. We're all dying, but some
Speaker 5: of us have been brought face to face with that reality.
Speaker 2: However long each of us have to do it though.
Speaker 3: We all want to live a good life.
Speaker 5: One with meaning, love and joy, and our guests are
Speaker 5: here to help us do exactly that.
Speaker 2: Now available for download and streaming at ricochet dot com.
Speaker 5: Ricochet Yeah, join the conversation.
Speaker 2: Well, enough of us blathering. Let's get somebody else to blather.
Speaker 2: Noah Rothman, We welcome back to him, back to the
Speaker 2: podcast with the anticipation. American writer, editor, former MSNBC commentator, hmmm, podcaster, author,
Speaker 2: senior writer and podcast guests for National Review. And we love,
Speaker 2: we love, we loves us some NR, as people used
Speaker 2: to say on the internet. And he's here because he
Speaker 2: has a new book, Blood and Progress, which sounds like
Speaker 2: the bioh of Bismarck, but it isn't. It's about left
Speaker 2: wing violence, and we welcome Noah here. Hey, how you doing.
Speaker 4: I'm doing great, Thanks so much for having me again.
Speaker 2: Fantastic left wing violence. Come on, come on going, come on.
Speaker 2: Talk to anybody in the left and they'll say, well,
Speaker 2: you know, violence from the left is entirely justified. It's
Speaker 2: the riots are the voice of the unheard, and the
Speaker 2: destruction of cities is a necessary way of dismantling white supremacy.
Speaker 2: But we never do it.
Speaker 4: It's essentially that's a really good summary of the business.
Speaker 2: It's the right that does it. They're the ones. I mean,
Speaker 2: take a look at the ADL, take a look at
Speaker 2: what the Southern Poverty Law Center says. It's the right
Speaker 2: that commits it. And J six and JA six. But
Speaker 2: you and your book. There's an excerpt today for people
Speaker 2: who have Apple News, you can find an excellent excerpt
Speaker 2: free from NAR which discusses said scourge and puts it
Speaker 2: in the context of its most recent efflorescence, which would
Speaker 2: be twenty twenty.
Speaker 3: I have a very keen.
Speaker 2: Relationship with the violent urban violence of twenty twenty because
Speaker 2: it happened in my city. It happened twenty blocks from
Speaker 2: my house. I drove through it every day. I heard it,
Speaker 2: I smelled it, I lived it, and I watched on
Speaker 2: live streams which have since somehow just disappeared from the
Speaker 2: Internet of what was going on and what they did
Speaker 2: and how much fun they had doing it. So let's
Speaker 2: unpack all of this. They will say that, actually it's
Speaker 2: justifiable that it is idio. Well, it's your book. Give
Speaker 2: us the premise and tell us exactly what you want
Speaker 2: us to take away from this book.
Speaker 6: I don't know you were taking me on a journey here.
Speaker 6: Actually it sounds like you've got this thing pretty much down,
Speaker 6: all right, Thanks for joining us, No, folks, Yeah, I
Speaker 6: mean that's essentially what this book is about. The reflex
Speaker 6: that you encounter, that we all encounter whenever there's an
Speaker 6: act of confirmed or suspected left wing political violence designed
Speaker 6: to advance a political agenda, whether it's the sustained looting
Speaker 6: and burning of American cities, an attempted or successful assassination
Speaker 6: of a right wing figure, attacks on ICE or CBP facilities,
Speaker 6: one of which last year was really sophisticated. It was
Speaker 6: a small cell terrorist attack using pretty sophisticated ambush tactics
Speaker 6: all the time. What you hear right after that as well.
Speaker 6: You know, the right wing is the most urgent and
Speaker 6: acute threat to American civic comedy, and so you shouldn't
Speaker 6: even really be talking about this. What is that reflex?
Speaker 6: Where does it come from?
Speaker 2: That?
Speaker 6: That's what this book confronts, and that excerpt one of
Speaker 6: the phenomena that amplifies this and gives the left permission
Speaker 6: to look away, which is all that is that reflex
Speaker 6: that you encounter when this say, oh, the right is
Speaker 6: really much more violent. It's just a psychological excuse to
Speaker 6: avoid confronting the phenomena that is all around us. There
Speaker 6: was a document that was prepared for the Department of
Speaker 6: Homeland Security in twenty twenty one group named INSIGHT, which
Speaker 6: very bravely demons.
Speaker 2: Or let me, let me stop you right there, and
Speaker 2: INSIGHT stands for because when I saw it in your book,
Speaker 2: I started sounding it out myself, thinking this has to
Speaker 2: be clever, And indeed it was in nc it is.
Speaker 6: Correct National counter Terror, National counter Terrorism Innovation, Technology and
Speaker 6: Education Center, and they contributed to the Department of Homeland Security,
Speaker 6: and the document that they prepared articulates why researchers in
Speaker 6: the field that study ave violence anarchistic violent extremism, which
Speaker 6: is the turn of art that the FBI uses, captures
Speaker 6: a lot of left wing political violence. Not all, but
Speaker 6: typically you're left wing, politically violent people will fall into
Speaker 6: that category. Within the universe of domestic violent extremists. On
Speaker 6: the right, you have racial and ethnically motivated violence, sovereign
Speaker 6: citizen violence, that sort of thing which tends to capture
Speaker 6: more right wing figures. And those who study aves encounter
Speaker 6: a variety of intimidation tactics from the left and from
Speaker 6: people within their own fields, social isolation. They describe smear campaigns,
Speaker 6: a loss of professional reputation, the fear that their research
Speaker 6: could provoke harmful responses, which is a very sanitized way
Speaker 6: of saying they're being terrorized, that they have effectively been
Speaker 6: terrorized by a campaign of terrorism. And lastly, the extent
Speaker 6: to which the people who do research into the field
Speaker 6: of left wing political violence are themselves members of groups
Speaker 6: or apologists for groups that execute violence in the name
Speaker 6: of progressive causes. And that is to say nothing of
Speaker 6: the adulterated and suspect data sets which purport to flatten
Speaker 6: the phenomenon of right of left wing political violence. In
Speaker 6: order to claim that the right has the the majority
Speaker 6: of cases of political violence are on the right, and
Speaker 6: some of those data sets are really corrupted to the
Speaker 6: extent that they incorporate violence inside prisons, for example, between
Speaker 6: gang members or gang members, or family members or prison
Speaker 6: official CEOs. For example, there are episodes in which homeless
Speaker 6: people who deploy racial slurs while assaulting business owners has
Speaker 6: countered as right wing violence. Somebody who sprays graffiti on
Speaker 6: the side of a church, that's right wing violence. When
Speaker 6: you flatten these things out into statistics, try to create
Speaker 6: a database, which is why I don't even attempt to
Speaker 6: do it.
Speaker 4: I think it's a fraught enterprise.
Speaker 6: It just flattens the whole phenomenon, leaves you less informed
Speaker 6: about it than more. And statistics are important, you can't
Speaker 6: just ignore them or dismiss them. But to try to
Speaker 6: create a database is in my view of fraud enterprise,
Speaker 6: which is why I don't do that. I tell stories,
Speaker 6: and the stories that I tell are illustrative. I think
Speaker 6: of the phenomenon that is observable with our own eyes.
Speaker 4: I mean, you don't.
Speaker 6: Need a database to tell you that the amount of
Speaker 6: the left wing political violence designed to create in the
Speaker 6: minds of the adult thinkers who execute violence in the
Speaker 6: name of political motives designed to change in shape society.
Speaker 4: That is just.
Speaker 6: Rampant, and it is You don't even need to really
Speaker 6: examine the deeply the philosophy behind it, although I do
Speaker 6: in this two hundred and fifty page book with eighty
Speaker 6: pages of notes. The last attempt on Donald Trump's life
Speaker 6: was by a guy who Norah O'Donnell, we can assume
Speaker 6: thought was a pretty rational thinker. Why do we think
Speaker 6: that because his actions did not discredit his thought. His
Speaker 6: manifesto is adult manifesto was presented to the president and
Speaker 6: the president was made to answer for his delusions, presumably
Speaker 6: because Nora O'Donnell, like the rest of the media apparatus,
Speaker 6: encounter the things that he believed on a daily basis.
Speaker 6: It's the sort of thing that Blue Sky Bandy is
Speaker 6: about on a regular basis. The President is obviously a pedophile,
Speaker 6: a traitor, and a criminal. That's what he believed, and
Speaker 6: that's what a lot of people in the mainstream left believe,
Speaker 6: and they don't understand the extent to which it is motivated.
Speaker 6: It has motivated the atle minded, the delusional, and the
Speaker 6: unstable to meet out violence in the name of what
Speaker 6: they believed to be a righteous cause.
Speaker 3: Right. Well, no, Steve Heyward here out in California, when
Speaker 3: you talk about the media, you're talking about the same
Speaker 3: people who this week believe the incredible story that Israel
Speaker 3: trains dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners, I mean, and the
Speaker 3: media swallows that, just like they did all the bogus
Speaker 3: claims forty years ago that these preschools with little kids
Speaker 3: were taking students to the San Diego little kids to
Speaker 3: the San Diego Zoo to be raped by elephant. That
Speaker 3: was actually reported by the media years ago. No, people,
Speaker 3: I'm gonna write a peace about how we're repeating the
Speaker 3: media credulity for completely ridiculous things. In this case, you
Speaker 3: know the guy the White House correspondents in it was,
Speaker 3: he's the one who was the Caltech grad. Right, He's
Speaker 3: not some fringe person from some commune or something like that.
Speaker 6: Look, let's uh, that is precisely the profile of the
Speaker 6: person who executes political violence.
Speaker 4: It is the affluent, right, It is the educated, right, right, Bruce.
Speaker 6: Yeah, A gentleman who I quote in this actually something
Speaker 6: that's related to Islamist terrorism but one of the most
Speaker 6: common indicators or common features shared among people who execute
Speaker 6: violence in the name of Islamist radicalism had one thing
Speaker 6: in common, and that was an engineering degree. They had
Speaker 6: been educated into this, indoctrinated into this. It's not the
Speaker 6: average foot soldier who's just And the myth on the
Speaker 6: left is that the people who commit violent crimes in
Speaker 6: general are just impoverished, afflicted by material circumstances denied which
Speaker 6: is their due, and that is just simply not true.
Speaker 6: It is a certain type of person who's been educated
Speaker 6: into the notion that there do has been stolen from them,
Speaker 6: and are pretty decently familiar with previous radical violent ideologies
Speaker 6: and those who practiced them in the generations that came
Speaker 6: before them. That's just elementary when you think about.
Speaker 3: It, right, well, it's it's I mean, that's been around.
Speaker 3: I mean people who celebrate the intellectuals and upper class
Speaker 3: people who celebrate violence that we're familiar with, the people
Speaker 3: in the Spartass League and things like that one hundred
Speaker 3: years ago, or you know, the characterizations in Dostoevsky, you
Speaker 3: can pick a lot of those. But it's now breaking
Speaker 3: out widely into the mainstream of the left, and I
Speaker 3: mean two data points I know that you know is,
Speaker 3: what's something like thirty or forty percent of Democrats think
Speaker 3: the Butler assassination attempt and the White House correspondents dinner
Speaker 3: were faked by Trump, which is you know, looney tune stuff.
Speaker 3: You also now have one A is a thirty forty
Speaker 3: percent of young liberals think that violent is justified to achieve.
Speaker 3: In other words, the ends justify the means, which we've
Speaker 3: always rightly been a skeptical or qualified in very serious ways.
Speaker 3: So this is breaking out and we're coming back to
Speaker 3: the open embrace that violence is good, right. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's one thing is maybe come back to the riots
Speaker 3: of twenty twenty, which you talk about at length. It's
Speaker 3: one thing to have, right. We've always had riots. I
Speaker 3: think of at Banfield's famous article on rioting for fun
Speaker 3: and profit, about food riots in the Roman Empire and
Speaker 3: ethnic riots in Europe. Those things have been happening and
Speaker 3: they break out periodically. But what's true in modern times
Speaker 3: is the riots are now explicitly ideological, and that can't
Speaker 3: be good. You know, No, sorry, last thing I'll say,
Speaker 3: you know, I always kid kid you that you're my
Speaker 3: favorite cranky, alarmed person, and I've always liked it and thought,
Speaker 3: even when I thought you were overwrought, I still enjoyed
Speaker 3: it and thought, I never right, You're never well. This
Speaker 3: time I think, I think now you are properly wrought.
Speaker 3: And this ought to alarm everybody.
Speaker 4: Well, thank you, I appreciate.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I strive for the proper level of rought, and
Speaker 6: I hope I've achieved it. You had mentioned, you know,
Speaker 6: the anti Israel movement that has captured the Left and
Speaker 6: increasingly forced them to subordinate elementary discretion and even basic
Speaker 6: best practice when it comes to journalism in order to
Speaker 6: retail lurid narratives about Israel and satisfy the IDs of
Speaker 6: their audience, who is, who are just desperately starving for
Speaker 6: those narratives.
Speaker 4: And it has been a violent movement. Since October seventh.
Speaker 6: We experienced violence in the name of this movement, whether
Speaker 6: the Left wants to acknowledge it or not, whether the
Speaker 6: Left acknowledge is property destruction as violence or not, which
Speaker 6: they tend not to do. But when you start to
Speaker 6: dig into it, and I dug into it for this book,
Speaker 6: the degree to which we are being bombarded by vestigial
Speaker 6: narratives created and retailed by the Soviet Union is shot
Speaker 6: in the late nineteen seventies mid nineteen seventies after the
Speaker 6: Soviets investments in the Arab armies that were defeated by
Speaker 6: Israel in nineteen sixty eight nineteen seventy three was shown
Speaker 6: to be a decidedly bad investments that was not.
Speaker 4: Going to yield return.
Speaker 6: The Soviet Union, as a geopolitical project, established Zionology as
Speaker 6: a study, and the study of it was to anathematize it.
Speaker 6: Zionism was described as militant chauvinism, racism, anti communism, colonial,
Speaker 6: or a neo colonial project. The Israelis were a white
Speaker 6: colonial outpost within the brown global South, and they were
Speaker 6: guilty of unspeakable practices, the genocide of the Palestinian people,
Speaker 6: which was a narrative that we've been living with since
Speaker 6: the nineteen seventies, Engineered starvation campaigns, forcible rape as a
Speaker 6: weapon of war, ethnic cleansing, et cetera, et cetera. The
Speaker 6: destruction of the Alaxa Mosque in preparation for the reconstruction
Speaker 6: of Solomon's Temple. All this stuff has been us since
Speaker 6: the Zionism as racism resolution was passed in the United Nations,
Speaker 6: which was also a Soviet project. And you hear quite
Speaker 6: a lot of these arguments that are being articulated verbatim
Speaker 6: by a young, radicalized Marxian left, which to make you
Speaker 6: wonder if it's really a bunch of new developments that
Speaker 6: are making you know, curious about this stuff and reciting
Speaker 6: these narratives, or whether this is all part of a
Speaker 6: geostrategic project and the part of the geopolitical left to
Speaker 6: anathematize an American enemy, an American ally, rather and advance
Speaker 6: the interests of America's geopolitical foes.
Speaker 2: Are you saying that a Russian intelligence agency came up
Speaker 2: with a fictional narrative about Jews?
Speaker 4: Hard though it may be to believe.
Speaker 2: This is like the Protocols of the Elders of Moscow
Speaker 2: or something like that, I find that a little too conspiracy.
Speaker 6: It can be overstated. I'm not trying to say that
Speaker 6: there are no thinking, thoughtful people in the universe of
Speaker 6: Israel critics, that is true, but the vi the attle brained,
Speaker 6: those who are who cannot think of anything, who's who
Speaker 6: simply subordinate again all their discretion in order to believe
Speaker 6: that the Israelis have managed to have figured out how
Speaker 6: to weaponize dogs and make them rape their prisoners. I mean,
Speaker 6: that's the sort of thing that you really do need
Speaker 6: to talk yourself into, and then you have to wonder
Speaker 6: what you're what it is you're talking yourself into, and
Speaker 6: why Steve.
Speaker 3: You well it. Let's talk for a minute about the
Speaker 3: role of what you might call mainstream Democratic party rhetoric.
Speaker 3: I try not to be partisan in these things, but
Speaker 3: it's one thing for the rabble rousers to say, you know,
Speaker 3: violence is good, peaceful riots justified, or for Hubert Humphrey.
Speaker 3: James will remember this, Hubert Humphrey back in the riots
Speaker 3: of the sixties saying I could lead a pretty good
Speaker 3: riot myself, because you know, things are so and but
Speaker 3: now you have you know, you have leading Democrats, you know,
Speaker 3: Chuck Schumer, HACKEM Jeffreys, lots of others who also say
Speaker 3: very implicitly and sometimes explicitly violent rhetoric about Republicans, about
Speaker 3: you know, billionaires, right, eat the rich and so forth.
Speaker 3: And I'll just I'll say it this way, that just
Speaker 3: seems dangerously irresponsible. And I don't know what the right
Speaker 3: response to that is.
Speaker 6: Oh I do condemnation, outright condemnation, and forced them to
Speaker 6: look in a mirror. When United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson
Speaker 6: was shot in the back right and murdered, not because
Speaker 6: he had done anything, but because he was a member
Speaker 6: of a class that this addle brained young man who
Speaker 6: was clearly beholden to left wing mythologies and left wing
Speaker 6: political ideation, he was feted by mainstream Democratic politicians even
Speaker 6: before he was His name was cheered on Saturday Night Live,
Speaker 6: before his face was blasphemously etched onto prayer candles, before
Speaker 6: the messages that he etched into the bullets he used
Speaker 6: to murder a father of two where he sold in
Speaker 6: a popular on demand merchandise. You had people like Bernie
Speaker 6: Sanders and Alexandria Caziquortes and Elizabeth Warren and Chris Murphy
Speaker 6: and many others who condemned the violence. And yet after
Speaker 6: that facile condemnation appended a butt, and that butt invalidated
Speaker 6: everything that came before it and demonstrated precisely where they
Speaker 6: thought the energy should be the energy should be, and
Speaker 6: how people are furious with healthcare companies, and how these
Speaker 6: people are stealing your loved ones from you, because they're
Speaker 6: rapacious capitalists, and indeed the capitalist enterprise should be on
Speaker 6: trial here as well. Not just this individual who meeted
Speaker 6: out this horrific act of violence, but maybe his violence
Speaker 6: was justified, and maybe his anger is real, and maybe
Speaker 6: that's something we can tap into and get some political traction.
Speaker 4: Right on that is incredibly irresponsible.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you know you mentioned that all these people say, yes,
Speaker 3: violence is bad. But thanks to my mind and one
Speaker 3: of my favorite remarks of Milton Friedman, which wasn't about
Speaker 3: economics directly, he liked to say, nothing counts out before
Speaker 3: the butt, I think we ought to bring that around now,
Speaker 3: right the butt?
Speaker 2: Yes, I was right right, Yeah.
Speaker 3: I'm Greg Corumbus.
Speaker 7: Join Jim Garrity of National Review and me each weekday
Speaker 7: for the Three Martini Lunch Podcast. We'll give you the good, bad,
Speaker 7: and crazy news of the day and lots of labs too.
Speaker 7: Find us right here on the Ricochet Audio Network at
Speaker 7: ricochet dot com or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3: One more quick item, I want to linger for a moment.
Speaker 3: James will know about this business of Russian prop planning
Speaker 3: of propaganda which once back in the eighties I actually
Speaker 3: had a class assignment, UH to trace out the way
Speaker 3: some of those crazy aids began with the CIA stories originated.
Speaker 3: And they always seem to be planted in one or
Speaker 3: two newspapers in India and then got picked up by
Speaker 3: the European press and so forth. Well, now the Internet,
Speaker 3: that's even easier. Something I'll if I can find this.
Speaker 6: Allies were two KGB narratives that were laundered.
Speaker 3: That's right, right, turns out this. I'm not surprised they're
Speaker 3: still doing it and internet makes it easier. I'll find
Speaker 3: this for you if I can. I stumbled across recently,
Speaker 3: just by accident, a letter from ts Eliot, who had
Speaker 3: his own anti Semitism problems as we know, right, but
Speaker 3: it was to a group that asked him to embrace
Speaker 3: some anti anti Semitic anti Semitism effort, which he was
Speaker 3: willing to do. This is like nineteen fifty six, and
Speaker 3: he said you should be very careful that a lot
Speaker 3: of the anti Semitism are seeing around is being manufactured
Speaker 3: and planted by the Soviet Union. I thought, wow, is
Speaker 3: that interesting. The ts Eliot, not thought of as a
Speaker 3: Cold warrior, someone who had some issues, shall we say,
Speaker 3: was alert enough to say to a Jewish group, your
Speaker 3: trouble is coming from the Soviet Union and now from Russia.
Speaker 3: So file that one away. And I did with you, well,
Speaker 3: I stumbled, I don't think anyone knows. That's why I'm
Speaker 3: going to write it up when I find some time.
Speaker 2: You know, No, I think a lot of people who
Speaker 2: would recoil at the thesis of your book left We're
Speaker 2: not We're not violent do so because they don't believe
Speaker 2: that these are left wing problems, that they that this
Speaker 2: is just this is simply an expression of justice, and
Speaker 2: justice does not known ideology. You quote a couple of
Speaker 2: suburban young women in your book who sort of, you know,
Speaker 2: kind of like, yeah, they had it coming, and it's
Speaker 2: kind of you know, it has to be done. These
Speaker 2: weren't people who who huffed Chomsky in college. They got
Speaker 2: a contact high maybe, but they're just sort of part
Speaker 2: of a non ideological culture which believes that leftist ideas
Speaker 2: are the default for sensible people. So they don't view
Speaker 2: these things, as you know, in an ideological framework, because
Speaker 2: how can you possibly have an ideological perspective on George Floyd? Oh,
Speaker 2: and you start pointing out exactly you know, what the
Speaker 2: people behind, Well, there are It seems to me that
Speaker 2: there are two kind of groups that work here, or
Speaker 2: maybe three kinds of groups. You've looked at this, tell
Speaker 2: me if I'm right. You have the you have the
Speaker 2: the anarchists. You have the you know, the cells that
Speaker 2: you have in Washington and elsewhere, very loosely organized. They
Speaker 2: may be you know, part of some Rose City gig
Speaker 2: the rest of it, and TIFA and the rest of it,
Speaker 2: but they're leaderly loosening. Their hard to track down, and
Speaker 2: they're liquid and they you know, you know, dissolve like water,
Speaker 2: and they do a lot of the front work. And
Speaker 2: then you have the tourists. You have the you have
Speaker 2: the people who come to burn because burning is fun.
Speaker 2: I mean, I lived through the riots in d C
Speaker 2: in the early nineties. The first day was all the
Speaker 2: people who are really angry, and the second day were
Speaker 2: the tourists who were taking the subway in to loot
Speaker 2: for fun. And so I mean, so you have you
Speaker 2: have the group that instigates, and then you have a
Speaker 2: bunch of people who are non ideological but join into
Speaker 2: it because it's it's it gives meaning and purpose and
Speaker 2: drama to their lives to be their burning and doing
Speaker 2: the rest of it. And then you have the people
Speaker 2: who don't to participate, but nevertheless add moral support and
Speaker 2: comfort to it because they believe that overall excesses aside,
Speaker 2: this was a good thing because it's the voice of
Speaker 2: the unheard and is just etc. Is that kind of
Speaker 2: a fair breakdown of the groups involved in these urban I.
Speaker 4: Don't think that's.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I think that's generally fair. Of all of those, you
Speaker 6: could probably have the most sympathy for the tourists, to
Speaker 6: the extent sympathy is warranted at all. There is something
Speaker 6: that happens inside the human brain when there's rioting and
Speaker 6: looting that the reptilian elements trigger, and typically well adjusted
Speaker 6: people can be drawn into disgusting acts of violence, brutal
Speaker 6: acts of violence, and particularly the property destruction, just by
Speaker 6: virtue of the crowd action. Crowds are dangerous things, and
Speaker 6: as any conservative will tell you, the two groups, the
Speaker 6: two other groups, the moral supporters as you call it,
Speaker 6: Those are people with something to lose, but who nevertheless
Speaker 6: endorse and support violent action in order to advance revolutionary
Speaker 6: political causes. That is far too many figures of influence
Speaker 6: on the American left today, not just in media but
Speaker 6: also in positions of political power in office and out.
Speaker 6: And then you have the anarchists. And the anarchists are professional,
Speaker 6: professional motivators of violence and practicers of violence. A lot
Speaker 6: of those tactics that they deploy or are starting to
Speaker 6: see the right mimic them. Some of which that are really,
Speaker 6: you know, beloved, are the black block tactics. You've seen
Speaker 6: these people before. You know exactly what they look like.
Speaker 6: Their call clad all in black, they cover their faces.
Speaker 6: They typically wear helmets. Sometimes a truckle pull up and
Speaker 6: just drop off a whole bunch of respirators and gas masks.
Speaker 6: Who knows where they came from or who funded them.
Speaker 6: Sometimes they bring those tools and instruments to the fight themselves.
Speaker 6: And they are anarchistic, but that doesn't mean they're anti left.
Speaker 6: There's you know, there was a wave of anarchist violence
Speaker 6: and nineteen tens and nineteen twenties, and they were anarchists,
Speaker 6: but they were also self described socialists and communists, and
Speaker 6: the historical record has preserved what were otherwise esoteric debates
Speaker 6: within that community, and you can kind of picture them
Speaker 6: from our remove, you know, the smoky salons in which
Speaker 6: the socialist left would argue about whether the state could
Speaker 6: dissolve at the outset of the revolution, or maybe a
Speaker 6: proletarian dictatorship would be required before the state could have resolved.
Speaker 6: This is what we're talking about. They are all socialistic,
Speaker 6: but there the aims that they had at the outset,
Speaker 6: but their violence was designed to achieve differed. The anarchistic
Speaker 6: set was far more violent at the turn of the
Speaker 6: twentieth century than the socialistic left. The socialistic left was
Speaker 6: much more proceduralistic, which is something that the Italian anarchists
Speaker 6: in particular had profound problems with. But we still have
Speaker 6: these distinctions today. Anarchist violence Avees describes left wing political
Speaker 6: action left wing violent political action with left wing motive.
Speaker 6: It is anarchistic, not in so far as because you know,
Speaker 6: those distinctions allow the left to wiggle out of it.
Speaker 6: They say, what does anarchism have to do with the state. Right,
Speaker 6: we want a bigger state, not no state.
Speaker 2: Right, the two groups whoich seem to be ideologically at
Speaker 2: polar opposites, will unite in their opposition to the state
Speaker 2: as it is currently constituted.
Speaker 6: They consider the state, yes practice a facet of the
Speaker 6: right wing ecosystem that is against them. By the way,
Speaker 6: the violent right thinks the same thing. The state is
Speaker 6: always on the other side, especially when it's targeting them.
Speaker 6: If the state is targeting them, it is an enemy
Speaker 6: of their side, and they resolve to meet out vengeance
Speaker 6: and reprisals to the state as though it were an
Speaker 6: instrument of their political adversaries.
Speaker 2: Right, and then once the left wing and the Marxist
Speaker 2: get the state, they have the monopoly on power, and
Speaker 2: the anarchists are all of a sudden rounded up and
Speaker 2: it's down to Lubianca.
Speaker 6: I get that, But this is the thing that you
Speaker 6: wouldn't get if you were to boil this down in
Speaker 6: a spreadsheet and create and just make these people into numbers.
Speaker 6: You have to actually explore what they think, but they
Speaker 6: say what they want politically in order to identify what
Speaker 6: you're looking at is left wing political violence right wing
Speaker 6: political violence. There's why I'm not I don't dwell in statistics,
Speaker 6: although they're in there. They're very useful, but it doesn't
Speaker 6: make up the bulk of the argument. The bulk of
Speaker 6: the argument is made up in stories and the exploration
Speaker 6: of individuals and their individual political motives and their actions,
Speaker 6: and what affect their actions had both on their victims
Speaker 6: and the extended universe of victims who are afflicted by violence,
Speaker 6: which ripples out in all directions and has.
Speaker 2: Absolutely right heil on it. You're absolutely right to tell
Speaker 2: it in terms of the stories, because the stories are
Speaker 2: illustrative in ways that simple numbers don't. One of the
Speaker 2: things I remember is that the corner of it was
Speaker 2: Lake and what was it, Lake Chicago. I forget. They
Speaker 2: decided to torture building. It was three stories tall, and
Speaker 2: they may or may not have known that it was
Speaker 2: a furniture store. So it was full of mattresses and
Speaker 2: sofa cushions. So the whole thing went up and it
Speaker 2: was quite a spectacular fire. To this day, nothing has
Speaker 2: been built on that corner. It's empty, and the neighborhood
Speaker 2: suffers because of it. The people who used to get
Speaker 2: cheap furniture there suffer because of it. But again, you know, nobody,
Speaker 2: nobody cares, because righteousness was done. But I remember there
Speaker 2: were a bunch of people who were standing in front
Speaker 2: of the building posing for the gram they were They
Speaker 2: had arrayed themselves almost like you know, you know, you crouch,
Speaker 2: will stand here, will all flash And people were just
Speaker 2: taking mad pictures of them with the flames in the background.
Speaker 2: And all of those people, I thought, every one of
Speaker 2: them expects that tomorrow morning, when they get up, water
Speaker 2: will come out of the faucet, lights come on, food
Speaker 2: will be available at the store. Every single one of
Speaker 2: them can presumed the society that had given them all
Speaker 2: of these material advantages and political advantages and all of
Speaker 2: the culture would be would still function tomorrow, that this
Speaker 2: was simply a vacation from order. This was the purge night.
Speaker 2: And for those people, I have nothing but unending contempt.
Speaker 2: But there was another group that was breaking into a store,
Speaker 2: that cell phone store. They pried the bars off the front,
Speaker 2: and they were going in and they were handing out
Speaker 2: cell phones. And the owner came down because he lived
Speaker 2: upstairs with his wife who was pregnant. And the guy
Speaker 2: who was filming this I will never forget when he
Speaker 2: saw the owner, he said, oh, guys, he's Muslim. All
Speaker 2: of a sudden, this a number of moral authority had
Speaker 2: descended upon this shopkeeper because people of his religious faith
Speaker 2: were hated by the people that we hate, and we're
Speaker 2: doing something there something as lamophobia, so and and and so.
Speaker 2: The crowd did not know exactly what to do here.
Speaker 2: They were trying to calculate where the moral shift was
Speaker 2: going on, and eventually they backed off and let the
Speaker 2: guy hand out a few things and tell them to
Speaker 2: go away, and the rest of it.
Speaker 4: So there was I don't want to interrupt you. I'm sorry.
Speaker 6: I don't know what your conclusion is, James, but that,
Speaker 6: to me is just the perfect illustration of social justice
Speaker 6: in practice.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's exactly what it was. Between the instantaneous recalculation
Speaker 2: between the fact that there that there was nothing political
Speaker 2: and ideology ideological about what they were doing, the fact
Speaker 2: that underneath it all would every single one of them
Speaker 2: would say that they were doing this because George Floyd,
Speaker 2: and that there were people who were directing it because
Speaker 2: they wanted the maximum amount of black block activism to
Speaker 2: tear down the state.
Speaker 6: I mean, victim and perpetrator cannot be evaluated neutrally. They
Speaker 6: have to be evaluated within the context of the group
Speaker 6: that they come from, their immutable characteristics with which way
Speaker 6: that they were born, and the historical narratives that attend
Speaker 6: around those accidents of birth, which are by the way,
Speaker 6: subject to dispute, but not in the minds of those
Speaker 6: who are filled with righteous indignation and are meeting out
Speaker 6: violence in the name of historical retribution.
Speaker 2: Absolutely so, if you just to check to see where
Speaker 2: this person is in the intersectional victim pyramid, I mean,
Speaker 2: if the guy had come out and he'd been seek,
Speaker 2: I would have wondered what the guy would have thought.
Speaker 2: I mean, hey, guys, he's seek and everyone would looked
Speaker 2: around and say, where are they exactly in this I'm
Speaker 2: not exactly. I know they got special ceremonial underwear and
Speaker 2: they all have little necklaces of I don't get it,
Speaker 2: but it's a turbine. And okay, the guys from outstate
Speaker 2: Minnesota would hate him because he has a turban. So
Speaker 2: he's good.
Speaker 3: It's there's an intersection matrix card for that. Is it there, guys?
Speaker 3: I mean, I think you can look up with a
Speaker 3: It would take a minute because they're not normally you know,
Speaker 3: the top of the list that you encounter, right, So I.
Speaker 2: Don't mind when you the two young women that you
Speaker 2: talk about. I sort of expect that from dumb young
Speaker 2: people who don't have a sense of history or how
Speaker 2: fragile civilization. Is what really makes what grinds my gears
Speaker 2: is people like the main the governor of Minnesota's wife
Speaker 2: who like to open the windows and smell the burning
Speaker 2: tires because to her, you know, I love the smell
Speaker 2: of burning tires in the morning, smells like victory. I
Speaker 2: mean that. To me, that endorsement at that level from
Speaker 2: the politician class is indicative of the psychology of the Yes,
Speaker 2: the psychological and the political and moral rot that has
Speaker 2: attended the party. You would like to think that Hubert
Speaker 2: Humpford would say, Humphrey and as Day would have said, no,
Speaker 2: we don't burn things down. That's not how we do it.
Speaker 2: We we argue, we jaw. But it's been there for
Speaker 2: a long time, ever since the valorization of the sixties,
Speaker 2: the you know, the complete ignorance and whitewashing of the
Speaker 2: bombings and the rest of it in the seventies. It's
Speaker 2: extraordinary how an intellectual class continues to believe this even
Speaker 2: after the French Revolution.
Speaker 6: For God's sakes, Yeah, I don't see it as all
Speaker 6: that different. The governor's wife who celebrated the smell of destruction,
Speaker 6: and the young women who are not all that young,
Speaker 6: by the way, they were in the mid thirties, young mothers.
Speaker 4: With homes who were homeowners.
Speaker 6: Who expressed very similar sentiments, but with a little bit
Speaker 6: more retro anxiety, I suppose, because they felt that they
Speaker 6: might be victims of it. It was just going on
Speaker 6: right next door, so they were trying to rationalize it.
Speaker 6: But it's all a species of rationalization and an expression
Speaker 6: of fear, an expression of fear that the mob will
Speaker 6: come after them next. And the people who were talking
Speaker 6: on record and trying to talk themselves into the notion
Speaker 6: that torching a target store was actually good and righteous
Speaker 6: and virtuous were sort of reconciling with the fact that
Speaker 6: they had individuals who were on social media who probably
Speaker 6: were just long saying that their business was burned to
Speaker 6: the ground and they were happy about it, and this
Speaker 6: is how justice is done. And they were saying, well, listen,
Speaker 6: I'm all for BLM, I'm all for Black Lives matter.
Speaker 6: What happened to George Floyd was terrible, and justice needs
Speaker 6: to be served, and maybe this is how you do it.
Speaker 6: It felt wrong to say you're against the riots, said one.
Speaker 6: Just because you know this reaction has been violent doesn't
Speaker 6: mean that what's animating the violence is wrong. And that's
Speaker 6: just a different, different emphasis with the same expression as
Speaker 6: what Missus Walls was saying. All of them are terrified
Speaker 6: that the mob will come for them next, so they
Speaker 6: want to be the last one that's afflicted, you know,
Speaker 6: passed by me by demonstrating their right thinking, you know,
Speaker 6: the fact that they have a gun point into their
Speaker 6: head and they're saying what needs to be said. That
Speaker 6: is coercive as well. And coercion is a species of
Speaker 6: violence as recognized in the US Code. But property instruction
Speaker 6: doesn't count. Coercion doesn't count. The only thing it seems
Speaker 6: to count are the sort of cliched examples of right
Speaker 6: wing violence that make their way into hackneyed hell Hollywood productions,
Speaker 6: right like old school militia style Sovereign Citizens Movement, right
Speaker 6: wing violence. That is what they wreckoned Waco. That is
Speaker 6: what they were Oklahoma City, January sixth, That is what
Speaker 6: they recognize as the species of violence that is attributable
Speaker 6: to the right. But one of the things that I
Speaker 6: dwell on in this book, and January six is one
Speaker 6: of the perfect reasons to dwell on. It is the
Speaker 6: extent to which the right is beginning to mimic the left,
Speaker 6: and the left's tactics. We see less sovereign citizen movement violence,
Speaker 6: you know, right wingers digging holes and saying come get
Speaker 6: me to law enforcement and then meeting violence out in
Speaker 6: that fashion. We see affinity groups as we saw in Charlottesville,
Speaker 6: which is a left wing phenomenon, something akin to black
Speaker 6: block movements. The January sixth is the sort of mob
Speaker 6: violence that we've been very comfortable from seeing at this point.
Speaker 6: By twenty twenty one, it was everywhere to the extent
Speaker 6: that the left was willing to acknowledge it. But what
Speaker 6: we saw in January six was an expression of the
Speaker 6: kind of mob action that conservatives who are who are
Speaker 6: deeply mistrustful of crowds, would not have engaged on if
Speaker 6: they did not subordinate what they understand to be proper
Speaker 6: civic decency, propercific behavior to the demands of the moment,
Speaker 6: and the demands of the moment where there was a
Speaker 6: lot of social incentives created around in twenty twenty around
Speaker 6: street people in street power. Democrats have always been very
Speaker 6: attracted to that, but Trump's movement is too. Populist movements
Speaker 6: are as well, and that's the sort of thing that
Speaker 6: you know, flattens individuals, reduces the incentives to judge individuals
Speaker 6: as individuals, see people as groups, as monoliths. You know,
Speaker 6: when Trump pardoned all the January six protesters, he pardoned
Speaker 6: a lot of very violent people, But he was only
Speaker 6: following in Joe Biden's footsteps, who pardoned a lot of
Speaker 6: people based on the category.
Speaker 4: That they existed in. Yes, exactly, that's social justice.
Speaker 6: That's not seeing individuals as individuals and seeing them as
Speaker 6: avatars of a type of a caste.
Speaker 2: You shoot up the Congress because you went Puerto Rican independence.
Speaker 2: Just wait twenty years and you've.
Speaker 4: Forgotten a forgotten incident.
Speaker 6: So too is the violence of the anarchists in the
Speaker 6: Italian anarchists and the socialists of the nineteen tens and
Speaker 6: nineteen twenties. So we in the Faln and the BLA,
Speaker 6: all of it's forgotten. Why is it forgotten?
Speaker 2: Well, the Palmer Raids would remember because he was an
Speaker 2: historical overreach by the government which swept up a whole
Speaker 2: lot of people.
Speaker 4: But that's all that happened.
Speaker 6: James I in between in eighteen eighty sixty at the
Speaker 6: Haymarket riot and then you had the Palmer Raids, and
Speaker 6: nothing happened in the interim. In the popular imagination, I
Speaker 6: know absolutely nothing.
Speaker 2: I mean I spent a lot of time looking at
Speaker 2: old newspapers and I would find headlines like all reds
Speaker 2: to be deported, and I just thought, well, well not really,
Speaker 2: but you know, good on you, good on you. Right, hey, listen,
Speaker 2: we could go on forever, and we shouldn't because people
Speaker 2: eventually look at their watch and say, I've been listening
Speaker 2: to this fantastic podcast, where's the day gone? We should
Speaker 2: instead tell them to buy your book, Blood and Progress,
Speaker 2: Noah Rothman. Just remember Blood and Progress. Remember it because
Speaker 2: they are not exactly concepts that we want to twin,
Speaker 2: but some people have. And that's what Noah's done a
Speaker 2: great job of telling us about stories as well as
Speaker 2: lots of numbers, and engagingly told by one of our
Speaker 2: favorite writers and guests. No One, thank you for dropping
Speaker 2: by the podcast today. We'll see you again when you
Speaker 2: crank out another book in what six seven months is? Say, yeah,
Speaker 2: a couple of years at least, All right, doctor Lack
Speaker 2: you guys. Bye. Hi.
Speaker 5: I'm Ben Sas and I'm Chris Steierwald and This is
Speaker 5: not dead yet. We're all dying, but some of us
Speaker 5: have been brought face to face with that reality.
Speaker 2: However long each of us have to do it though.
Speaker 2: We all want to live a good life.
Speaker 5: One with meaning, love and joy, and our guests are
Speaker 5: here to.
Speaker 2: Help us do exactly that. Now available for download and
Speaker 2: streaming at ricochet dot com.
Speaker 7: Ricochet joined the conversation.
Speaker 2: I don't believe that maybe a technical definition when they
Speaker 2: say coercion is violence. I like to reserve the word
Speaker 2: violence for a feeling, hunching people in the nose, for
Speaker 2: actual violence, and not words or violence or speech is
Speaker 2: violence or hated the rest of it. But burning down buildings, yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm going to put that in the violent category. There
Speaker 2: was a writer for a newspaper who I somehow, I
Speaker 2: don't know how it got past her editors, but she
Speaker 2: made the mistake of writing a piece about building lives
Speaker 2: matter too, and the immediate response was such that I'm
Speaker 2: sure that the piece was yanked and probably the person
Speaker 2: was deplatformed and put down to you know, right to
Speaker 2: the classified transcript area. They say, you're sending me to classified.
Speaker 2: Yes we are, but there aren't any classified That's what
Speaker 2: we mean, and.
Speaker 3: They didn't get to keep a stapler. Probably not right.
Speaker 2: I was tempted to write a piece like that too,
Speaker 2: and I was waved off it as fast and as
Speaker 2: hard as you possibly could. And because my beat was
Speaker 2: architecture and urbanism and the rest of it. And it's
Speaker 2: very odd. At a time, a vital, vibrant there's that word,
Speaker 2: A dense, urban, vibrant experience had been torched. And we,
Speaker 2: you know, we really couldn't lament that because there were
Speaker 2: greater issues at play. And I thought, no, no, this
Speaker 2: These are the These are the stores of the people
Speaker 2: who live in these neighborhoods. This is the history of
Speaker 2: the neighborhood. It is fascinating the way to see the
Speaker 2: way these buildings that were originally constructed by Swedes and
Speaker 2: Germans have been inhabited by by now Central and South
Speaker 2: American visitors who've changed the demographic of the communities. It's
Speaker 2: fascinating how this piece of neon has it survived since
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty five, How this building with its modern aspects
Speaker 2: is now gone, and the whole historical record, the whole visual,
Speaker 2: visual tapestry of the neighborhood has been torched. In history
Speaker 2: has lost. It wasn't something you were allowed to note,
Speaker 2: and I just I found I found that, I found
Speaker 2: that instructive. We can't dilute the narrative, and we can't
Speaker 2: pretend that it wasn't We can't even we can't even
Speaker 2: say it was bleepin bad.
Speaker 3: Now, now, James, can I flip the script a bit
Speaker 3: and play host for one question for you? That's been
Speaker 3: on my mind since middle of the week. I don't
Speaker 3: there's the famous line from I Think Lionel Trilling about
Speaker 3: the bloody crossroads between politics and culture, or politics and literature.
Speaker 3: So the New York Times had a story midweek that
Speaker 3: they represented as a major scandal in a news story
Speaker 3: that Israel lobbies the Eurovision Song Contest on behalf of
Speaker 3: Israeli singers and artists. And I thought Eurovision Song Contest media.
Speaker 3: I'd love to hear what James has to say about that.
Speaker 3: And you, maybe I may catch you unprepared if you
Speaker 3: didn't see the story of James, but go ahead and
Speaker 3: give me your first reaction.
Speaker 2: I did not see these stories. As a matter of fact,
Speaker 2: I'm not surprised that they do lobbyet. I don't know
Speaker 2: why they don't use the Jewish space lasers to rearrange
Speaker 2: the neurons and the heads of the judges and win
Speaker 2: every single year. The only thing I know about Eurovision
Speaker 2: is one I think that there was some strange Icelandic creature,
Speaker 2: not p York, who was really this sort of feral,
Speaker 2: scraggly dress wearing man or not creature who was held
Speaker 2: up as an avatar of modern standards and was in
Speaker 2: terms of visuals and music, was meritricious in every respect,
Speaker 2: but it was I guess it was boundary breaking or
Speaker 2: something like that. And I thought, just another march toward
Speaker 2: toward ugly ugliness that the culture seems to have been
Speaker 2: foisting upon us for the last fifty sixty years. You
Speaker 2: go to the Vienna Biennial and you see just the
Speaker 2: worst or the Venice Bienny. You will see the worst
Speaker 2: form of modern art imaginable. You go to Cannon, you
Speaker 2: see them stand and clap for a movie that is
Speaker 2: drenched with blood and transgressivism and the rest of it.
Speaker 2: And it's for people who think that we should go
Speaker 2: there to their museums and the rest of it and
Speaker 2: celebrate the beauty and the history and the tradition. They
Speaker 2: seem awfully uninterested in those things themselves and interested in
Speaker 2: perpetuating nonsense garbage. But Eurovision songs actually are supposed to
Speaker 2: be something close to, you know, hummable and singable. But
Speaker 2: I can't tell you any single one of them except
Speaker 2: for Waterloo, and I don't even know if that won
Speaker 2: the Eurovision, but I think that perhaps it did, so
Speaker 2: that I'm not surprised, but hasn't done them any good
Speaker 2: because of course, you know a lot of people refuse
Speaker 2: to be on the same stage as in Israeli artists,
Speaker 2: but that's just anti Zionism, has nothing to do with
Speaker 2: Judaism whatsoever. Well, before we go here, Stephen, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: go out in a little cultural note since you brought
Speaker 2: one up as well. We used to do this all
Speaker 2: the time, and it's not that anybody cares, but if
Speaker 2: they do, it's always nice to hear about something that's
Speaker 2: out there in the innumerable number of streaming platforms that
Speaker 2: you may have missed that people might want to take
Speaker 2: a look at. My example of what I'm watching now
Speaker 2: is unfortunately on Apple TV, which really relegates it to
Speaker 2: the niche. But I'll get to that in a second.
Speaker 2: What are you watching now.
Speaker 3: Oh my goodness, I'm not watching anything. I've been so
Speaker 3: insanely busy the last month that I barely have time
Speaker 3: even to take in the local news once in a while,
Speaker 3: so I'm gonna have to punt, I'm afraid.
Speaker 2: Oh good for you. I've had those busy periods too.
Speaker 2: Finally got out of my head though in the move
Speaker 2: and everything else, but not everything, but much of it
Speaker 2: has calmed down, so I was able to watch a
Speaker 2: new show, which surprised me because I hadn't heard a
Speaker 2: word of it. That's Apple TV. We got a great show.
Speaker 2: It's fantastic, it's brilliantly written, it's funny, it's well shot.
Speaker 2: We're not going to tell anybody about it. But eventually
Speaker 2: they break out, like a severance or a publicius. This
Speaker 2: one is called Widow's Bay and it's basically the mayor
Speaker 2: of Minneapolis, Jacob Frye, who is the mayor of a
Speaker 2: small little Massachusetts island that's very, very haunted. And it's
Speaker 2: a comedy horror, which I usually hate. It's quirky, which
Speaker 2: I usually hate. It is self aware of the cliches,
Speaker 2: which I usually hate, but the characters in the acting
Speaker 2: and the writing is so good that it's just an
Speaker 2: absolute delight and it's scary and it's just good. And
Speaker 2: I'm watching it, I'm thinking, where have I seen this
Speaker 2: actor before? I know I've seen this actor before, and
Speaker 2: it was in an HBO series where he played I
Speaker 2: hate to say it, Perry Mason, and I say I
Speaker 2: hate to say it because they went accurate with it.
Speaker 2: They went back to the thirties, they went back to
Speaker 2: the scrappy guy that Mason originally was conceived as, and
Speaker 2: they reimagined some of the characters and did them very well.
Speaker 2: But he just wasn't Mason to me, because Perry Mason
Speaker 2: is Raymond Burr, walking along like the square embodiment of
Speaker 2: the law itself and taking deep, meaningful pauses and then
Speaker 2: telling Paul Drake to go do something. I wanted that,
Speaker 2: and I don't think we'll ever get it alas, just
Speaker 2: like they're casting the James Bond now, and I imagine
Speaker 2: it's going to be reimagined and brought up for the
Speaker 2: modern day. When I just want a guy in the
Speaker 2: sixties and a tux with a cigarette that shoots bullets.
Speaker 2: That's all I want, and I'll never be given it again. Well,
Speaker 2: all you want, probably, folks, is for me to back
Speaker 2: out of this thing and let you go onto the
Speaker 2: daily life. I am going to do so after I
Speaker 2: make the usual request for you to give us those
Speaker 2: five star reviews wherever you possibly can. I want you
Speaker 2: to go to ricochet dot com if you haven't already
Speaker 2: after seven hundred and eighty nine exhortations to do so
Speaker 2: and check out the member feed. Oh I'm sorry you can't,
Speaker 2: but you could if you just signed up and paid
Speaker 2: a little bit of money and found the access to
Speaker 2: the community you've been looking for all your life. Sometimes
Speaker 2: you'll see those great member posts break out on the
Speaker 2: front page. Gary McVeigh, who is our resident film historian,
Speaker 2: and every single time he posts something about a movie
Speaker 2: or an actor or a technology or something, you know
Speaker 2: you are in for a dive and an entertainment and
Speaker 2: something that you just never get anywhere else. I scour
Speaker 2: the web looking for stuff like what Gary writes, and
Speaker 2: I just don't find it. But I don't have to,
Speaker 2: because is there. It is on Ricochet. We were talking
Speaker 2: about Doctor Strangelove and fail Safe, and that's just one
Speaker 2: of the things, and also politics and also sports, and
Speaker 2: also stuff and aging and being young and parents. It's
Speaker 2: all there at Ricochet. It's not just a bunch of
Speaker 2: people nattering out about of politics. So you can get
Speaker 2: that anywhere. That's why I go there anyway. That's that
Speaker 2: if Charles were here, he will tell you about Ricochet
Speaker 2: five point nine five or five point zero coming down
Speaker 2: the pike soon. But he isn't, so he will next week.
Speaker 2: So I'll just have to wrap it with a usual
Speaker 2: statement and saying we'll see everybody in the comments at
Speaker 2: Ricochet four point one point seven point eight point nine
Speaker 2: point two. Bye bye, Ricochet.
Speaker 3: Join the conversation.