Speaker 1: I can't believe that Trump hasn't thought of doing Trump
branded social Security bracelets. That would be the authors next step. Right,
I got it.
Speaker 2: So you've fallen, you can't get up. So okay, are
we ready?
Speaker 1: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask
what you can do for your country.
Speaker 3: Mister Gorbachow, tear down this wall.
Speaker 2: It's the Rocchet Podcast with Charles C. W. Cook and
Stephen Hayward, James Lelex David. We talked to Doah Rothman
about well basically the world. So let's have reselves a podcast.
Speaker 4: Under the authorities vested in me as the President of
the United States, I'm officially invoking Section seventy forty of
the District of Columbia Home Rule Act. You know what
that is.
Speaker 5: I stand with the people of Washington, d C.
Speaker 3: I stand with Mayor Bowdler, and we are strongly supporting
their efforts to stop this scheme.
Speaker 4: This is Liberation Day in DC, and we're going to
take our cat capital back. We're taking it back.
Speaker 2: Welcome everybody to the Ricochet Podcast and which one is it?
Why You're right? It is Episode seven hundred and fifty three.
You can join us at Ricochet dot com. You really can,
and you can be part of the most stimulating conversations
in community on the web, the place you've been looking
for all these years. Forget Twitter, forget x forget facebooks.
You'll find your friends at ricochet dot com. I'm James Alex.
I am joined as ever by Stephen Hayward in California,
I presume, and Charles Setel you cook in Florida, I presume,
And gentlemen, all eyes in the nation are turned to
d C, where the continuing withard atarian fascist takeover continues
to this day, with people being arrested. So the interesting
thing about this to me is that there are, as
we keep saying, there's a big middle lane there for
somebody to drive through when it comes to all of
these social issues, and the Democrats can insist on going
to the narrowest part on the left, like the like
the gutter in a bowling alley, and staking out their
claim there. It appears now that you've got to in
order to be anti Trump, you have to be pro
the crime in DC, which isn't that bad, mind you,
It's not that bad. It's really not that bad, and
we've got the figures to show it. Well, you juke
the figures, but it's not that bad. So let's uh, Stephen,
you want to take this first. And then Charles respond
to what our friend says.
Speaker 1: Well, it is Trump has a genius for this, of
making the Democrats overreact and try and persuade us of
what our own eyes tell us is not the case.
Forget the official statistics, which like the Feerau of Labor
statistics job figures, which are now very contentious. The statistics
being reported are very iffy these days. I mean the
DC actually put on leave someone credibly accused of faking
some of the statistics. But I say forget those statistics.
Everyone who walks into a CBS or a Walgreens in
an urban area and everything is behind a locked case,
or people who see all the videos of shoplifting going
uninterrupted and unpunished, that may into climb, but it's still happening.
I think it's hard to persuade the general public that
there isn't a general problem of disorder and crime. So
what what did I hear? James? I think you had
something like was it one hundred and twenty four car
break ins? Or is carjackings last weekend or something? Or
a few nights ago, something crazy.
Speaker 2: You know what's been happening all over the city. One
hundred and twenty here, one hundred and twenty another ninety
is that they go through the neighborhoods and they just
break the window of every single car in the street,
and then they rifle through it looking for rifles or
cards or door openers or anything, and then they move along.
The police are under orders not to pursue them, so
even if they see them doing this, the guys getting
their cars and race off and the police say, well,
what are we gonna do? Hands are tied. And it
hit our neighborhood two three nights ago or so. We
had about ten windows on the street shattered, and everybody
the next morning with you know, the tape up and
the plastic and the rest of it. It's just grand,
absolutely griand so yeah, and does that thing. Does that
qualify as murdered and assault in the rest of it? No,
But it's quality of life. Everybody look over their shoulder
and grind their teeth and be angry at the officials
who do nothing.
Speaker 6: Charles, I have many thoughts. Where to even start, that's
always yeah, I was going to start with a song.
I usually start with structure, how the constitution works, and
this is a slam dunk.
Speaker 5: DC is a federal district.
Speaker 6: D C is no more able to resist the authority
of the federal government than was the Northwest Territory. It
can if it wants to have a council or a mayor,
but Congress can.
Speaker 5: Take those away. That is a delegation of choice.
Speaker 6: So the idea that this is somehow an imposition for
the federal government to run the federal district, it's completely ridiculous.
That's not authoitonism. If this were happening in Louisiana, then
those who were griping would have a case. If President
Trump work up tomorrow and said I am so worried
about crime New Orleans or Baton Rouges that I will
send in federal troops and we now have martial law,
well yeah, okay, that's a state. It has sovereign claims.
We have a federal system. The federal government has numerated powers,
et cetera, et cetera. But that's just not the case here.
And on the material point, I just don't think the
good question is is crime coming down? Even if you
believe the statistics, and I agree that a lot of
them are duked. But even if you think that that's true,
the question is yes, but is crime tolerable? Now, sure
people will say no crime is tolerable, but we live
in a free country. You're never going to have no crime.
I don't know anyone on the left or the right,
and I know both in Washington, d C. Who thinks
that crime is tolerable, especially women. It just seems to
be a terrible place for women to exist. And if
that is the case, then the federal government is totally
within its rights to look at the existing mechanisms for
dealing with crime and to say you're not doing your job.
We are ultimately responsible, especially when the last two or
three weeks have brought crimes that are connected intrinsically to
the functioning of the federal government. We had an intern
in Congress, the Article one branch murdered while going to McDonald's.
And then we had this doge employee known as Big Balls,
who got himself into a fight through no fault of
his own because he was trying to help someone who
had been assaulted. So you don't even need to fall
back on the can. That's an ought sort of question.
If Congress's interns and federal bureaucrats are being routinely assaulted
in the federal district, then I think it is not
only reasonable, but imperative for the federal government to do
something about it. So I'm very much in favor of this.
What I'm not in favor of, just as a caveat,
is what James Comas had on Cable News yesterday, which is, well,
this is a great recipe for the rest of the country.
Maybe we'll start doing some other cities.
Speaker 5: No, you won't.
Speaker 6: Those other cities are not federal districts have a different responsibility.
But this fine with me.
Speaker 2: So I'll put you out down as a qualified Okay,
then when you talk about being a horrible place for women,
I mean you have anchors on television talking about how
they have been assaulted outside their studio, how there are
weedy waggers in the stairwells of the Metro. I mean, yes,
When I moved to DC in the early nineties, it
was it was bad. It was very bad, and I'd
come from a place that was not characterized at all
by this kind of disorder. By the murders, so many
murders and so many potholes, and so many vagrants, and
and I looked at this place as with horror. That
was my initial impression of DC. I didn't like it.
I didn't like it at all, and I got out
after three years. But I went back in the teens
when I was doing some books for Encounter books, and
I would stay up late and walk back from the
tabern into my hotel at two o'clock in the morning
with the totter and my step and it was absolutely fine.
I mean, it really got good. It got good for
a while because they were doing something and the something
was working. Now, the interesting thing about it, though, is
that while they were doing something and achieving results and
getting a safer street by many metrics, they weren't addressing
any of the root causes. But now, of course, what
we're always told is that it's pointless to do enforcement
and all the rest of these things, because what really
matters is our old friend, root causes, and that unless
you adjust the sociolomic problems socioeconomic problems that causes in
the first place, you're doing a bad thing. I mean,
you can't do anything unless you address these things, which
of course we've been addressing for fifty sixty years. And
that's why. One of the reasons that the Lift seems
paralyzed about this is that even though they would kind
of like to walk into a CVS or people's drug
as we used to call and get some tied without
having to call somebody over and run the tumblers what
it would take to do that, they really are kind
of squeamish about that. And besides the people who are
stealing these things, or Jean Valjean's who just just need
to wash their drawers.
Speaker 6: I think root causes are generally nonsense in crime. I
just think this is such guff. I mean a, it's
incredibly patronizing. My family historically was very poor. They didn't
commit crimes. They were not looked upon favorably in the
social class system of Great Britain. They didn't commit crimes.
I don't know what that's supposed to imply it. But second,
it doesn't work. Even if you feel bad for the
people who commit crimes, that's your prerogative, it doesn't work.
To go after the root causes. You have to do
something about it. You have to put cops on the street,
you have to arrest them, and you have to give
them sentences. I'm a squish on this question when it
comes to procedure. I am very much a small L
liberal when it comes to the due process part of
the equation. But that doesn't mean that you can't have
rigorous policing, and it certainly doesn't mean that once you
have satisfied all the due process steps, you can't punish
people harshly. You just have to make sure they did it.
You have to make sure that the accusations are correct,
that the jury is convened, that the promises that we
make constitutionally, and half the Bill of Rice is about this,
are satisfied. But once you've done that, there's no obligation
just because you have a liberal, small L liberal attitude
towards due process, to say, oh, let him off then,
or let him out after a week, or it doesn't
really matter.
Speaker 5: Nonsense. But none of this works. We know how to
fix this. It's so annoying.
Speaker 1: We know how to fix this, and we don't do it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's exactly it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm reminded of one of Reagan's great lines when
he was governor of California in the sixties. He says,
a liberal's idea of being tough on crime is giving
a longer suspended sentence.
Speaker 5: That was right.
Speaker 1: Isn't that typical? Right? I'm sure it's one of its originals. Yes,
And you know, I grew up in those years as
so you did to James, and root causes was the
great banner of reform liberalism in the Great Society and
so forth. And I don't know if it was Juliani
or who back in the nineties when we were getting
a handle on it, said we finally figured out that
the root cause of crime is criminals. And you know,
while the left has sort of learned nothing and forgotten everything.
I mean, I go back to twenty nineteen when presidential
candidate Kamala Harris was talking about one how great bussing
was and the need to get back to finding the
root causes of illegal immigration and so forth. So the
left still says that the root cause of crime is poverty,
except most poor people, the overwhelming majority, are not criminals.
And on the other hand, and no one's ever been
able to do even one of those fancy regression models
to demonstrate that you know what level of poverty or
where our so forth. On the other hand, we do
know the data now goes back decades that these are
rough numbers, but it's something like, you know, eighty percent
of crimes are committed by about twenty percent of the
criminal population. And one of the things that did work,
Charles mentions, we know what works was identifying and giving
sentences to those people, and we stopped doing that. And
partly again, this is the academic left pushing democrats. If
you are an inmate in higher education, as I unfortunately
have in for a while now, one of the big phrases,
and maybe Charles you've heard this is the carceral state. Yes,
America is the carceral state. And the decarcoral movement, which
I think never makes the sort of mainstream press very much,
but boy, it's huge in the academic journals and classes
and so forth, has been very big and influential, and
so you know, the Democrats have gone with that, and
here we are the.
Speaker 2: Decarceral movement, which is very very noisy online, eventually devolves
down to this is that while we shouldn't put anybody
in prison, if somebody does commit a horrible rape or murder,
they will be dealt with in other ways by society.
And basically it comes down to vigilanteism. In the end,
with all of these things, instead of having somebody go
to a place where they're children and fed and clothes
for the rest of their life, I will just beat
them to death with sticks on the outskirts of town.
Great Charles are gonna say.
Speaker 6: Well, I've always thought that the decastoral people missed the
follow up question. So one thing that they like to
say is the United States has a greater percentage of
its population in jail van and then they insert.
Speaker 5: Whatever, Italy, Europe, the West.
Speaker 6: And my follow up question that never gets asked is
always Okay, what do they do? Because if the answer
is they jaywalked, then I have a problem with it.
If the answer is, which it's not, by the way,
they smoked marijuana, then I have a problem with it.
But the answer actually is that they did back things.
Because America is a more violent and lawless place than Europe,
especially Western Europe.
Speaker 5: I don't think that is a good thing.
Speaker 6: I do think it's a fact of our history that
has obtained since the colonial period. Americans were more lawless,
and I think it's related to our being more freedom
loving in a perverse and than Europeans. And if you're
going to have a more lawless society, You're going to
end up with more people in jail. You can't just
focus on the consequence of it as if it's bad. So,
you know, yes, in that sense, like you need to
look at the root causes, which are that we are
more lawless. But once you've established that, you just got
to lock people up and become circular, right, I know.
Speaker 2: My favorite thing to be said the end of the
argument about root causes comes from West Side story, which
I believe came out in nineteen sixty one, in which
the Jets are sitting around and singing off as a
Krupky signs and they no, it's not that one. They're
explaining exactly. They're progress of the social welfare system. And
when they learn or that they do what they do
because of their origins, they say, you know, sarcastically.
Speaker 7: I'm depraved on a com undeprived. They knew it as
a punchline in a joke the criminals. Then no, I'm
not confusing, of course the Jets with actual criminals, but
the line was there, and I have no doubt whatsoever
that it reflected a true reality. I'm not deprived, though,
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Speaker 6: For years, and sleeping comfortably and sleeping in what can
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we welcome back to the podcast. Noah Rothman, senior writer
at the National Review, author of Rise of the New Puritans,
Fighting Back against Progressives, War on fun, It must follow,
Foreign policy columnists, and we, uh, well, today there might
be some developments because we're the President is meeting Putin
in formerly Russian territory, which I'm glad we have and
bought and all the rest of it. All right now,
press conference coming up. What do you expect?
Speaker 3: I have no idea I really happen.
Speaker 2: Thank you, we'll talk to you later. We're going to
go to our next gist.
Speaker 3: I mean, these are very bad pundit answers, but they're
also honest pundit answers. And anybody who says otherwise, I
think either has access to a crystal ball or is
leaning too hard into their own priors and assumptions. I
don't know what to expect from this. The President is
very has been very mercurial when it comes to his
understanding of this conflict. His navigation of this conflict, and
I don't know where his head is at at any
given moment. The Russians, on the other hand, are telegraphing
to the extent we can understand what their strategy is,
and their strategy maybe to pull a crazy eyev In
at the negotiating table, But what we understand their strategy
is is really transparent. It is to provide the President
with every opportunity to talk about everything other than the
Ukraine conflict. They're going to offer him deals. They're going
to offer him the prospect of economic integration and joint
infrastructure projects in the Arctic. They're going to talk about
future security arrangements and security cooperation in Europe, and all
this is going to prove very enticing. I suspect to
the President. To his credit, he has said it's great.
All that's great, but none of that's going to happen
unless we get this war stopped concluded. But my fear
is that there's a real imbalance when it comes to
objectives here. The President and his subordinates seem to want peace,
and that's noble, but peace and what terms And there's
a big internal argument within the administration over this conflict,
And I'm frequently asked, why are you a little down
on this summit? What do you think is not going
to happen or is not going to go very well?
First of all, the history of semetry with the Russians
is a fraud study. And the second is that you know,
these people will say, well, the President's negotiated conflict settlements
or at least ceasefires in Sub Saharan Africa, in Southern
South Asia and the Caucuses. What makes this one different?
And what I would say is that the the administration
doesn't seem to be of two minds on those conflicts. Indeed,
they seem to understand those conflicts within the parameters of
the conflict itself. When it comes to Ukraine Russia, there
is a big internal war over the very nature of
that conflict, who who the parties are, the belligerents are,
and what their motives are, and how deserving they are
of American support. And it has much more to do
with domestic politics than it has to do with the
actual conflict on the situation on the ground. Russia's grand
strategic interests in the region, NATO, all that seems to
be secondary and subordinate to the domestic interests that are
on one side of this conflict or the other, and
that's why it's been a very confused process. And then
they're going into anchorage with this confusion as opposed to
Russia's which is singularly focused on its objectives, which is
taking Ukraine either today, tomorrow, ten years from now. But
that is their grand strategic goal and they're pursuing it
with monomania in a way that I don't think this
administration quite is when it comes to it's a coach
to securing peace.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they wanted to end because warbad, et cetera. I
get that. But the thing of it is is you
give putin this slice of the Ukraine that he already occupies,
then think he just resets his clock and waits until
the next time that he can invalidate or renee gun
whatever he said before and give it another shot. And
Ukraine is reeling after years and years of this. What
do you think what do you think is going to happen? Is?
Is it?
Speaker 7: Is it unrealistic to think, as so many did a while.
Speaker 2: Ago, that the Ukraine was going to actually was going
to win, this was going to push Russia out, was
going to get crime up. I mean, there's a lot
to talk about that they're going to blow up the
cursed bridge and they're going to get it back, and
they're gonna cripple. I mean, Ukraine has done some absolutely
fantastic things in this war, and I've always been a
supporter of them always. But are we getting to the
point where the reality of Russian occupation is just simply
going to have to be what is accepted going forward
because the alternative is just bleeding the country white and
endless war. I don't know. Well.
Speaker 3: I certainly reject the premise that acceptance is something the
United States or the West must acquiesce to. We didn't
recognize formally the Soviet occupation of the Baltics. At no
point we recognize governments in exile. That was an illegitimate
occupation from nineteen forty one, I believe nineteen forty rather
to nineteen ninety one. It would be a shift in
American foreign policy to acknowledge, as Stephen Wikoff was playing
with earlier this year, the notion that the illegally annexed
territories Crimea or the other four oblasts would be functionally
Russian territory at no point should we acknowledge the legitimacy
of those gains. Occupation maybe a de facto premise, but
it is not one we should certainly should accept. And
there's also those who are who are frankly, willfully ignorant
of diplomacy to the degree to which they say, what's
the big deal here? They're just talking, They're just sitting down.
What are the material consequence is from that, you war
mongering lunatic. The material consequences of it are that the
Russian government now sitting on American soil, enjoying the legitimacy
conveyed to the Russian government by the American presidency, says
and will say that it's diplomatic isolation as a result
of the second invasion of Ukraine is over. And when
they say stuff like that, it indicates to the Russian
markets that their long period in the cold is going
to be over pretty soon and we're going to be
re into our economic segregation is over. When that happens,
the Russian markets explode. They generate a lot of capital
capital that the Russian government can borrow against and undermine
the sanctions regime. So you're functionally contributing to the Russian coffers.
By doing stuff like this, which has a material impact
on the battlefield, we will see it. And that's the
sort of thing that they just gloss over because they
don't understand the subject on which they're opining. And I
suspect that a lot of people are invested in that
sort of ignorance. Those who want to see peace come
whatever the cost agree.
Speaker 2: But last question, I mean, I'm not sure there's so
many people who are just what's the word I'm looking for.
They don't care exactly about the nationhood of Ukraine. They
don't care, they don't Why are we even talking about this?
Why is this conflict important? And I think it's important
because of Russian ambitions. I think it's important because of
looking at what Russia is casting its eye elsewhere, and
they hasn't been able to do so because they've been
tied down. And I think it's also strange to grant them,
as you say, the diplomatic legitimacy at a point where
it becomes apparent that yeah, we can do business. Why
would you want to integrate Russia back into the European economy?
Why would you want to make Europe more dependent dependent
again on Russian fuel. What is the disadvantage to freezing
them out at every possible opportunity as a display of
American soft power and economic power. Why cozy up now
and I'll stop them. I'm not a question, I'm just ranting.
So maybe I should give it to somebody else.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't quite know. I mean, the scenario here
that makes me nervous is that the prelude to Ukraine
War III consists of something like the Mensk Agreements. These
two agreements, the first of which wasn't worth the paper
it was written on. The Russians never observed it and
kept taking territory afterwards, the second of which was also
never observed, but at least the line of contact held.
It was never quiet, it was always hot all the
way up into twenty twenty two. But that's the condition
that we would see, and that resulted in a more
security guarantees to Europe, not less. I mean that was
preceded the Crimean invasion in twenty fourteen was preceded months
earlier by Obama removing the very last armored division from
European soil since World War Two, as well as many
other divisions we had just been withdrawing from Europe in
our forever quest to pivot to Asia. The desire to
pivot to Asia at the expense of the European theater
makes the European theater more hot and results in more
commitments to Europe's security, not less, And that's what we
would see. We would see a NATO alliance, particularly members
on the frontier, get very very nervous, very very jumpy
about their security and keeping the thirty three member states
in line is the or most job of prima enter paris,
the United States the first among equals in the NATO Alliance,
and so we would see a lot of disunion and
perhaps a little bit of adventurism on the part of
some of our allies on the NATO frontier, which would
force us to put more troops into the NATO frontier
to satisfy our NATO allies. But the big scenario that
really keeps me up at night is not a fold
a gap style invasion of Europe. I don't think Russia
has that capacity. What they could do make an attempt
is to destabilize Estonia. Take a little chunk of Estonia
and say de facto situation on the ground, deal with it,
or maybe even get more ambitious and attempt to establish
a land bridge between Russia proper and Kaliningrad, East Prussia
as we all remember it. And that's the sort of
thing that's really scary because they could very well do that,
and then Berlin and Paris and Ottawa and Washington and
London are all confronted with the die for Danzig scenario.
Do you really want to risk no conflict with a
nuclear on power over tiny tollin.
Speaker 2: Like an origami lesson? Right?
Speaker 1: So Noah, it's Steve Hayward out in Gavin Newsom stand
as I call my miserable home state. Look, here's the
difficulty is that most people who will be listening to
this podcast, after we know the results, or least some
of the results, it may be literally years before we
know everything that passes behind closed doors today. So I
want to use the Ukraine situation today to draw you
out onto a broader scene of the world and about
Trump too. This caused a little bit of setup. When
I heard that they were going to be meeting in Anchorage, Alaska.
I go in maybe too much for historical analogies, but
I immediately thought of the hastily arranged summit which was
not a summit between Reagan and Garbachov in nineteen eighty
six in Reikubc, and of course you remember there Reagan
walked out against the intransit demands of the Soviet leaders
when they offered him a deal that he really wanted,
you know, deep cuts in nuclear weapons. There are a
couple of differences. One of them is this time unlike Reagan, Remember,
Reagan really blindsided our allies, especially Margaret Thatcher. They were
very upset that that deal nearly happened without consulting them.
We know that Trump spent a lot of time on
the phone with the NATO leaders in the last few
days working out red lines and so forth. We know
that very interesting Wall Street Journal story that I don't
know if you saw, about how Trump is very close
to the president of Finland, who seems to be a
pretty solid guy, a right of center person, which I
didn't know Scandinavia had in any case. So I am
hoping and now again people will know, maybe by the
time they're listening to us, that if Putin tries to
play Trump the way Gorbachev did Reagan, that Trump will
do the same thing. He will walk out also angry
like Reagan did, but who knows, there are some other
aspects that encourage me a little bit, And that's what
gets me to a broader question. You know, just watching Trump,
he's still Trump. He's very mercurial. As you say, he
still fit to contradictory outbursts. You know, one day you're
the worst person in the world and the next day
you're the second coming of Gandhi. But on the whole,
he seems generally more comfortable in his own skin, a
little more tempered, I guess, i'd say about our relations
with our allies, it just seems he has act more together.
So I love if you comment on what your impressions
are of Trump too generally, and then from there I'd
like to move on to the Middle East.
Speaker 3: Sure, so Trump too in his second term when it
comes to foreign policy is hard to gauge because the
first two months I was horrified frankly by his performance,
and then the subsequent several months we're very encouraging and
diametrically opposed to the administration's approach to our adversaries and
allies in those initial two months, So you have to
take it all with all in total, in some and
sort of that prevents me from issue grander verdicts because
I just need more inputs, I need more information before
I were to render a verdict. Then when we talk
about the Middle East, I suspect they'll be far more
complimentary to the administration's approach when it comes to this conflict.
In particular, the Putin regime and the negotiators are going
to put a variety of scenarios to the President. There
could be a ceasefire with some modest land swaps that
Russians don't want a modest landslap, they want a huge
one at landswap. They want a part of don Bass
which is very heavily fortified, including some industrial towns that
they couldn't take on the battlefield and would be very
difficult to take back. But also something along the lines
of an air cease fire, which would also beneficial to
Moscow because while it's raining rockets and drones down on
Ukrainian population centers, Ukraine is targeting infrastructure sites like Russia's
petroleum processing facilities, which are very difficult to put back together.
You can build an apartment building in a year, it's
not that easy to rebuild a petroleum refining facility. So
all these are all things that sound really reasonable, but
would also advantage the Russian position more than the Ukrainian position.
And that's the sort of thing that I'm worried. The
Reikievik scenario. I mean, Ronald Reagan was just frankly frustrated
and very mad when he had to walk away from
the table. It was one of his best moments. But
I submit that he shouldn't been approaching the Russians with
the kind of disarmament agreements that he was seeking. He
was very wide eyed and ideological about disarmament, and he
was also attached to SDI and missile defense technologies, and
when the Russians said, don't research that sort of thing,
he got up and walked away. Good for him, But
the very virtue of the fact that he had that
summit in the first place was an embarrassment that, as
you said, the Europeans came down on him, the press
came down on him, and cemetry with the Russians is
fraught in that way. Joe Biden was burned in the
same way. Russian troops were building up on Ukraine's borders
in twenty twenty one. He said, let's have a summit,
and then four months later, Buttna'm sorry. Eight months later
the Russians invaded. Make Putin look like an idiot or
Biden looked like an idiot? Nineteen sixty both of them.
Nineteen sixty one, Kennedy goes to Vienna and is land
basted by Khrushcheff gets into this high minded ideological argument
about the tenets of Marxism, is on his back foot,
and then concedes that the Sino Soviet Alliance ISS functionally
has military parody with the United States. And then three
months later the Berlin Wall goes up, and a year
later we have offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba. These sort
of things matter if they go wrong. They matter historically.
And I wonder if this administration is as of single
minded when it goes to the negotiating table as the
Russians will be.
Speaker 5: I suspect not.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, we'll just have to see what happens, and
thank you for your attention to this matter. As Trump
likes to say, let's switch to the Middle East a bit,
because I know, I know you follow that closer than
just about anybody. I guess. I'd say as a general
proposition that Trump has been pretty robust and consistent in
the support with Israel, with of course the occasional outburst
at net and Yahoo, because that's just what Trump is.
Speaker 5: Like.
Speaker 1: What I worry about right now is two things. One
is there's this massive propaganda campaign about starvation and genocide
in Gaza, all of which is nonsense, but which a
lot of conservatives are buying into, or maybe not a lot,
but too many. You know, the American Conservative magazine, which
I used to read because I thought had interesting stuff,
has gone full anti Israel in the last couple of months.
And then you have a couple of our key allies
saying we're going to recognize a Palestinian state. And I
haven't followed whether Trump has said anything about that. I'm
kind of disappointed. If he hasn't that that maybe I
missed it, but it seems to me that that ought
to call for some pretty direct and forceful condemnation by
our government with some consequences. I think, I mean, we're
threatening people in the UN who don't take anti American positions.
I think this merits at least equivalent treatment. But so
give us your grade or give us a two or three.
Noah Rothman Summary Assessments of where that scene stands right now.
Speaker 3: Well, just a quick note on the recognition of a
Palestinian state? Which Palestinian state? Right are we recognizing? These
are non contiguous territories with very distinct governments, which, by
the way, are at one another's throat when they get
the opportunity. They have different foreign policies, different economies, different
relations with Israel. So which one are we recognizing? And
if you're recognizing the whole of these territories as one
single Palestinian entity, are we then immediately sanctioning that recognized
Palestinian entity for being governed by a lawless terrorist group,
which you acknowledge is a terrorist group with European and
American blood on its hands. It's a very foolish proposition.
It's not a foreign policy it's a temper tantrum, and
it is one I agree s tot even that should
be met with condemnation from the US government and probably
a few disincentives to engage in this sort of thing.
The President's conduct when it comes to foreign policy in
the Middle East has been generally laudatory from my perspective.
The attack on Iranian nuclear sites was we were told
supposed to beget gottardam Room, and we have not seen that,
perhaps because as the conditions on the ground had changed
so dramatically over the course of Russia rather Israel's war
against the Seven Armies that ringed Israel. The ring of
fire that was the Iranian military proxy network decimated systematically
over the course of the war that Hamas started on
ten to seven, and as such we had a much
more limited capacity for Iran to engage in retaliatory strikes.
This was the window of opportunity, and the President took
the absolute made the most of it in ways that
are very salutary, I think. And the very fact that
it has not begat the kind of response that a
lot of the handwringers expected, or perhaps even hoped for
in a perverse way, if only to justify their opposition
to this sort of thing, is an example of the
kind of intuitively I'm sorry, not intuitive, the opposite of intuitive,
non intuitive approach to foreign policy that has been discouraged
by the Foreign Policy Apparatus and Abraham Accords are also
illustrative of that didn't exactly spring from Donald Trump's forehead,
and there have been think tanks that have been working
on this for a long time, but the notion that
you could do one of tooth. You could do two
things to unlock a new dynamic in the Middle East.
The first is to push the Palestinian issue to the
back burner. Don't deal with that first, as the peace
protestors insist, you had to deal with it last, and
then refocus the entire region, especially the Sunni States, on
the threat posed by Iran and it's Scheite militias, which Egypt,
the UAE, Saudi Arabia, all of which we're engaged in
this somewhat quiet cold war hot conflict, and all that
sort of unlocked this diplomatic and military cooperation with Israel.
It created a new dynamic in this region that would
not have been realized in the absence of American leadership.
I think we're seeing some of that here with the
dynamic between Israel and Iran and the United States. There's
a lot of political pressure, as you say, on the
West in particular, as a result of this propagand and
distic campaign which alleges that Israel engage is engaged in
the most cartoonishly evil campaign of em miseration and genocidal
reprisals against civilians that you could imagine, the motives for
this are allided. Nobody ever really describes what Israel gets
out of the deal. How does how does it end
up with this, you know, placid condition in which everybody's
ethnically cleansed because they've starved and murdered them all. I mean,
the population seems rather stable, so they're doing a terrible job,
as Genisi dares. But nevertheless, I mean, it's just assumed
on the part of people who assume the worst of Israel,
that that this is what's going on. It's taken at
face value, and it's an extraordinary claim that lacks the
extraordinary evidence you should have to support it. And the
president deserves a lot of credit for just bucking And
this is one of the things that he does very
well because he is he's so on the outside when
it comes to the conventional wisdom, be it cultural or
political or foreign policy's, he's rather suspicious of it and
often contemptuous of it, and sometimes it serves him well,
and in particularly the Middle East, it has served him
very well. Donald Trump will go down in history as
someone who presided over a revolutionary change in the geopolitical
situation in the Middle East for good or for ill,
and I think mostly for good. But it's all because
he approached it in a way that was really contemptuous
of the staid and unchallenged assumptions that had calcified in
the American foreign policy establishment over decades.
Speaker 2: Okay, I give up, Charles. You try to draw this
guy out because we're coming up with nothing.
Speaker 3: Am I not performing to expectations here?
Speaker 5: I know you know who I am.
Speaker 6: I've heard of you because we work together, and in
fact to hung out together forty five minutes ago to
do the other podcast, which you should listen to. I
have a question that is broad and we can zoom
all the way out into spice. Tim Curry would say,
I don't obscure rep I get it. How dangerous is
the world because the prevailing view of younger people seems
to be that everything is.
Speaker 5: Very dramatic at the moment and.
Speaker 6: America has never been like this, and the world has
never been like this. And I'm habitually and reflexively hostile
to these claims because my great grandfather fought in World
War One and then lived through the depression that my
other grandfather's fought in World War two.
Speaker 5: And then they live through.
Speaker 6: The people of the fifties and sixties, and I just
am not persuaded. On the other hand, we have got
wars going on, and there is a situation in Israel,
and that's the prospect in the Pacific of an invasion
of Taiwan and China really is a threat. So and
how dangerous are things relative to any point you want.
Speaker 3: To pick in history, Well, let's start one hundred and
twenty five years ago. Let's just start at the turn
of the century. The if you look on you know,
if everything's relative. But if you were to plot on
a graph casualties from warfare, you would find the prior
to October seventh, the wars in October seventh that began then,
or let's say, prior to to the Ukrainian invasion of
twenty twenty two, you've seen fewer casualties from warfare and
battlefield conflict. Then in the whole of going back into
you know, the treaty was failure to the extent that
we have actual numbers, and we do to a certain
degree about battlefield casualties. The condition that was that arose
amid American hegemony, unquestioned superpower status across the planet Earth
was one of unparalleled peace, unparalleled safety and security. The
human species had never known that kind of security. And
there are basically three dynamics that typify the geopolitical landscape
since that period. The first is the one that we're
experiencing now, US hegemony the United States. For all of
China's rising power capacity and what have you, it cannot yet,
to the extent that we understand it project power across
its borders in a sustained way. We haven't seen that yet.
It might, but it hasn't attempted that. It certainly can't
project power across the other side of the planet Earth
in a sustained way. No other power on Earth can
but us. The second dynamic is bipolarity, which is roughly
what defined the Cold War period between roughly equal superpowers,
the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union
and its allies. And that was a very bloody time.
It was a very dangerous time. That's not to say
it was unstable, and I think that stability is largely
a result of the existence of our respective nuclear arsenals.
But to the degree to which the United States and
Soviet Union fought proxy battles across the planet Earth, many
of which were very bloody, many of which had absolutely
no concern for the individual civilians and the proxy forces
that were fighting on our behalves, and Cuba to a
lesser extent, if you look at Angola, that was a
far more unstable condition if you want to just measure
a geopolitical stability in terms of the number of people
dying in the number of wars that were being fought.
And the third dynamic is multipolarity, and that's when you
have multiple geopolitical polls that have rough a parody between
each other militarily, economically. That is the least stable dynamic,
but it is the least predictable dynamic. And to the
degree that we're entering into a multipolar world when it
comes to nuclear power, that is one that is that's
a very disconcerting dynamic because there are just more variables
at play and more powers that have the capacity to
alter their geopolitical environments. But we've experienced nothing like even
during the Cold War period. Well, we've experienced nothing like
the kind of violence and the prospect for violence that
we had during the multipolar period, in which you had
a variety of states that had inviolable spheres of influence
that were policed and that you could not penetrate. For example.
Now just say this, the global economic marketplace that we
have now is a pretty new invention. It actually coincided
with another new invention, which is roughly Hyeki and Milton
Friedman's conception of what should be market economics. These are
all pretty new things. We talk about these things like
they're ancient ideas that were just you know that the
wisdom of Adam Smith and you know Montesquieu, was this
this vision of the world that we're living in today.
Speaker 2: It was not.
Speaker 3: It was basically built in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties,
but within my lifetime it's pretty new. The old condition
is state control of economics, state intervention in cultural affairs,
and a variety of spheres of influence that locked powers
out of their their backyards, of a great powers backyard.
So we had something like a global economic system in
nineteen fourteen close to it, and it was basically just
European colonial possessions trading with one another, as well as
the United States and Canada, and then we didn't have
that until nineteen ninety one. There was no mark global
market until for the most of the twentieth century. So
all this stuff is pretty new and very fragile. But
it is the case that the world that we're living
in today is relative in relative terms, the safest, the
most stable, the most predictable, and therefore was something that
you should just fall on your knees and thank the
fates that delivered you into this time and history, and
in my view, have some gratitude for it and work
to preserve it. And I see quite a lot of
people who just look upon this as though it was
this condition that our grandfathers and fathers fought and died
for in order to bequeath it to us. There's just
a lot of ingratitude for it and the assumption that
something better is available on the horizon. I just don't
know what that is, and I fear that toying with
the status quo, as the revisionist powers are, and as
some people who want to retreat behind American shores would
like to do themselves, we'll just beget a more unstable
world and hasten our descent into a multipolar world in
which spheres of influencer once again the dominant condition and
the geopolitical landscape.
Speaker 2: Ahistorical ingratitude is one of the things I hate the most,
and there's so much of it today. But on the
other hand, I was watching Twitter today. I'm sorry X.
There was an appalling video of somebody who traveled a
very long distance to go to a conference an outdoor celebration.
It was even LGBTQ plus to a spirit friendly, but
they've been denied entrance because the people at the gate
had deemed her braid to be a cultural appropriation. She
insisted that actually know it was Viking. They said, no,
it's Rostafarian, and since we're all about having a welcoming
and inclusive thing here, we cannot allow you to enter
with the braids that some people might regard as a
cultural appropriation. Oddly enough, none of these people looked like
they'd be any fun to be around ever, aside from
the here and the septum rings. But it reminded me
that there's a man who wrote a book called The
Rise of the New Puritans and fighting back at the
Progressives war on fund and if I were to have
him on the show, he might give a preseason this book.
They would encourage people to go out and bite it
in the very global marketplace at which he had spoken.
Could that be?
Speaker 5: You know, it could be.
Speaker 3: I can either confirm nor deny, but do seem to
have a lot of information to this effect.
Speaker 5: So will I do?
Speaker 6: Well?
Speaker 1: Noah, you wrote that book at the high tide of wokeness.
I think. Didn't it come out in twenty twenty one
or twenty twenty.
Speaker 3: It came out in the summer of twenty twenty two,
and I will tell you the fates conspired against it
because just about two weeks or a week and a
half before release date, the Dobbs decision was leaked. The
entire media apparatus was on fire with the notion that
the Republicans were trying to force you do not have sex,
as though that had anything to do with the decision.
But this was this was what the media was saying
on MSNBCS, which made my book tour rather difficult. So
my third is it will encounter fewer headwinds.
Speaker 1: Well, my quick question, which I say quick question, it's
not we're running short of time, so it calls for
a brief answer. But it does seem to me that
the tide has turned notably generally. But because Trump is
leading a ferocious counter attack against Woker in general. What
kind of grade you give him on that or how
things are going.
Speaker 3: I'll give him a very high grade on antio cookery,
in particular, the attack on meritocracy and his efforts to
restore meritocracy, and some of the heavy handed interventions into
the cultural spheres in which the executive branch has a
statutory and cultural role or constitutional role, those I think
are salutary. They're a backlash to a backlash, and they
deserve to have the effects that they're having on the
opposition because the opposition is finally willing to acknowledge the
degree to which they had been led astray by the
activist class.
Speaker 1: Not do much.
Speaker 3: About it, mind you, but at least acknowledge it and
sort of express quiet frustrations about it when they're in
closed doors and among like minded company.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I'll just say, you look more cheerful than I'm used
to seeing you. Noah. I like your grumpiness, which seems
to be largely absent today.
Speaker 3: So I was so grumpy earlier, Steve. I was grumpified
by the Russian the Russian talk, and then you got
okay ungrumped.
Speaker 2: Noah, we like, and you should buy his book, The
Rise of the New Puritans and just read it conspicuously
in public places because the Puritans of the left hate
to be called Puritans because they associate that with God.
Brothers like Cotton Mather and Increase for that matter. So yeah,
great book, great conversation. Glad to have you back, and
it's always interesting when we do.
Speaker 3: And can't wait until the next time we have you
on Noah, my pleasure, guys, Thank.
Speaker 2: You, bye bye. One of the things though, that I
got to mention and I should, is that after this
I'm going to the gym. I used to do that
when I was at the office. I would have my
brought worths for lunchton had to the gym. But I
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Your older self will thank you before we goo, gentlemen,
we have a fantasy football update. I know ye, I
watched the Vikings play their first preseason game last week.
It's it's begun and I love football because it begins
on a hot August day and it ends in the
absolute cold seller of winter with disappointment and bitterness. Fifty dollars. However,
cash prize cash money to the league winners. Charles tell
us about this.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well, not any can you come play and have
fun with other Ricochet members, but you can.
Speaker 5: Earn some dollars dollar bills if you win.
Speaker 6: And that's per league because there's a maximum number of
people in each league, but we are willing to create
as many leagues as necessary. We have two hundred sign ups.
We will create ten leagues of twenty people each, and
each winner of those leagues will receive fifty dollars no
strings attached, except that you have to be a Ricochet
member for the duration, so you can't join, then play
fantasy football, then rejoin and say where's my fifty bucks?
You have to be a part of the community. That's
the only rule, and we hope you will sign up
if you want to do that. You'll notice on the
site if you look to the right, there is a
little link on the homepage has a football leather backdrop
and it says play fantasy football, win some money or
some such.
Speaker 5: Click the link, follow the instructions and you're in.
Speaker 2: You know, you think about joining and signing up and
then quitting and doing that. Yeah, it presupposes a level
of craftiness that I don't think characterizes the average No.
Speaker 6: No, I didn't think anyone would actually do it. I
just said no strings attached, and then I'd rather it
was one before we go.
Speaker 2: I heard this that Trump is reconsidering, not reconsidering considering,
reclassifying marijuana to a Schedule three controlled substance, and a
lot of people sat up when they heard that. I
didn't because I don't know what a Schedule three is.
I'm not exactly sure what this means. Have either of
you followed this story, and I mean AI overview from
Google says Schedule three are substances that have a moderate
potential for abuse and addiction, as well as they currently
accepted medical use in treatment. So I don't know if
this is an upgrade or a downgrade. Downgrade, it's a downgrade.
It's a four. Now.
Speaker 6: Well, the classification system I think sets the most dangerous
drugs one.
Speaker 2: It's schedule one. Now, yes, is schedule one, and the
who has recommended moving it, and so we are going
to be I don't know. It's like it's like Defcon.
Which order does it go? And the magnitude of stars
point is I think the entire country, well not the
entire country. I think a lot of people are rethinking
the whole Oh, just decriminalize it. I'll let people smoke
it wherever they want to do, because it leads to
a stinky streets. Then people say, oh, what's the what
do you care? Come on living in a city, you know,
just I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: I was working on.
Speaker 2: My outdoor lighting system at my house. Somebody walked past
smoking something and it was at the bottom of a
hill and it wafted up all the way to me
and it was this potent when they got to my nostrils.
I don't know when they changed the aroma of marijuana,
which my college days was not this so difference. But
it's just like I hated and I walked walked to
New York and other streets and it's just choking clouds
of it. Can't stand it.
Speaker 5: But go on, can I give a limited defense of this?
Go ahead?
Speaker 6: Well, first off, I don't think the federal government is
allowed to prohibit marijuana constitutionaling, so I would like to
see them out of it. Irrespective of what the policy
was to be, you could then have prohibition in the
States if you wanted it.
Speaker 5: I just don't.
Speaker 6: Understand why we needed a constitutional amendment to allow the
prohibition of alcohol. But then a few years later the
government said drugs, let's do that. The enumerted powers doctrine
is still there. It's still in there. You can read it.
But in terms of the smell on the street, I
one hundred percent agree with you, James. What I don't
understand is how smoking it in public became an intrinsic
part of decriminalization.
Speaker 2: What happened is sitting around the dorm room and listening
to Genesis.
Speaker 6: But the thing is right is you could have a
situation in which a state says we are not going
to criminalize marijuana, but also you are not allowed to
smoke it on the street. And I don't think this
is a weird view because a we already do this
with drinking. Most states have some restrictions or cities on
whether you're allowed to drink in public. For example, in Jacksonville,
you are not allowed to drink on the street except
on game day and between certain hours within a certain
part of the city, which makes total sense for tailgating. Second,
we have now reached the point with progressives at which
they think that if somebody smokes tobacco on the street
they should be instantly executed. Yes, but that smoking marijuana
on the street is a normal part of a functioning
civil society. And I don't understand why more people who
are more libertarian minded have not taken the view decriminalize
marijuana and ban smoking it in public.
Speaker 5: Because that's the bit that everyone hates.
Speaker 6: But we already do it for drinking, So just do it, Like,
why does this become the hell that these people want
to die?
Speaker 5: On the A would probably lead.
Speaker 2: To a disparate impact argument at some point. I know rubbish.
I'm with you there, but I completely agree, Stephen. We
know that you're the kind of guy who just gets
out his gandof bond and rips them off on the
weekend while listening to some King Crimson. But whats you
take on the mon thing.
Speaker 1: Well, first of all, you mentioned one of you mentioned prohibition,
which brought me the frame of mind of Will Rogers
great remark that well, at least prohibition is better than
no liquor at all, and I wish we could go
back to something like that. Actually, I think the terms
Charlie laid out or right, And I've joked for a
long time that the way the left operates is tobacco
is illegal and carries a death sentence, but marijuana smoking
will become mandatory. I do think, though I haven't followed
the medical literature closely, but I do think we're going
to end up having a lot of second thoughts about
our rush to legalize it. So one thing about decriminalizing it,
I'm all for that, but I do think that commercializing it,
legalizing it, giving it a social approval is a bad idea.
And you know it was true that, you know, before prohibition,
we really did have a serious problem with alcohol consumption
and alcoholism and it went way down under prohibition. It
never came back to quite the level it was beforehand.
But we still have a lot of problem people who
have alcohol problems and treatment programs and AA and all
the rest of that, and my ideal world would be
finding that kind of stable equilibrium for marijuana as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, the thing is is that a lot of
the people who were voting for this were remembering back
to their healthy on commedy college days when the stuff
they're buying ditchweed from somebody who was essentially getting it
from the guy down out in the country who would
sell it in giant hefty bags and beat like tumble.
Speaker 1: Rights for Friday. I think stuff today is more powerful, right,
I think it stuff today?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: And although James, I have to say, I do resemble
that remark of sitting around a dorm room listening to
Genesis with our.
Speaker 2: Okay, well, why did I say that? What do you think?
Speaker 7: Right?
Speaker 2: I know exactly I resembled it. I embodied it. I
just know that there's something that it's just very on
to walk into my high class grocery store, ultra high
class and they've got a whole section for THHC. And
again if you want to have, and they have a
liquor section of course too, because you can drink some
of these things and become sparklingly interesting people after half
a glass. But you drink this and you become an
insensate moron who has absolutely nothing of no merit to say.
But that's my old biases coming there. I suppose I'm old,
I'm a boomer, and I prefer the fine products of
the Scottish Highlands when it comes to an amber liquid.
As a matter of fact, I've got a space side
lined up for myself tonight, but that's hours away. Right now,
I got to say thank you podcast brought to you
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we mostly ask for you to do is come back
next week, when Charlie and Stephen been another guest, I
hope will entertain you with insight, amusement, observations, and everything
else you've come to expect from the Ricochet Podcast over
these seven hundred and fifty three episodes. Gentlemen, it's been
a pleasure, and we'll see everybody in the comments at
Ricochet or Point up. Bye bye,