Speaker 1: No, I just wants to hang out with me all
day out of my fucking shot. I know this that
nobody in history has solved eight wars in a period
of nine months.
Speaker 2: It's the Ricochet Podcast with Steve Hayward and Charles C. W.
Cook today with special guest Noah Rothman of National Review
on the Middle East Peace Agreement. So let's have ourselves
a podcast. Well to those voters, Okay, so you I
don't want to keep doing this, I'm gonna call it.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 4: You're not gonna do the interview with them?
Speaker 1: Nope, not like this.
Speaker 2: I'm not not with seven follow ups to every single
question you.
Speaker 3: Ask every other candidate has I don't care.
Speaker 1: I don't care, and we're just going to circle a
RYD and I ever had to do this before.
Speaker 2: Ever. Welcome everybody to the Ricochet Podcast, number seven hundred
and sixty one. It's Steve Hayward sitting in the host
chair today for the vacationing James Lilacs, joined as usual
by Charles C. Will you Cook, who I'm assuming is
maybe in a good mood this week, because Charlie, your
jaguars won a game in rather spectacular fashion. I must say.
Speaker 1: And against the Chiefs. So a few stats for you.
The Jaguars hadn't beaten the Chiefs since two thousand and nine. Wow,
And they did so on Monday Night Football in front
of the sixth largest audience that Monday Night Football had
gone it in twenty years.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: What a way to do it.
Speaker 2: Well, what a way for listeners who didn't see it
or didn't read about it. Did you stayed on the end, Charlie,
You didn't bail.
Speaker 1: Also, I stayed at the I was there. I've rarely
been in that stadium when it was that loud and jubilant,
even when it looked in the last minute and a
half as if we were going to lose. The only
comparison point that I can find is with the comeback
against the Chargers in the playoffs three years ago, when
the Jags were down twenty seven points and we eventually
won thirty one to thirty. That was a raucous evening.
This was almost more so. And then with that bizarre
what are they calling it slip six trip six that
Trevor Lawrence managed at the end, the full range of
emotions was felt in the space of about seven seconds.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, do you want to describe that for
listeners who didn't see it, or do you want me to,
I mean, you were there, so I was there.
Speaker 1: I think the best way of describing it is that
Lawrence fell over twice, or rather was tripped by his
own offensive line and looked like horses or deer. Look
when they're first born, they come flying out and they
have no idea how to stand up or walk, and
then they suddenly know. And Lawrence got up after falling twice,
realized that there was a lane. The offensive linement Ezra
Cleveland just flattered and everyone in his way, and he
somehow made it into the end zone. For the way,
it was just you couldn't write it. It was astonishing.
On the Monday night football broadcast with Eli Manning and
Peyton Manning the Manning cast, Eli Manning asked, I think
earnestly at first, was that planned? You couldn't plan this.
There's no way you could plan this?
Speaker 2: Right, Well, there is that. You can see the highlight
clip of Eli mann no sorry, Peyton Manning doing a
quarterback bootleg because he's not the fastest guy. Football fans
may know this clip, and he did this fake the
hand off and did a bootleg around the left and
nobody saw him, and so even as slow as he is,
he managed to pull it off. Or if you're really
an old timer, and this goes back to I think
nineteen seventy one, as when Joe Capp was the quarterback
of the Minnesota Vikings and was a really slow guy
but managed to ramble in. He didn't fall down like
Trevor Lawrence did, but he managed to rumble in from
five yards out and knock the Rams out of the playoffs.
And for old La Rams fans like me, that was
a low moment that sticks in our break anyway. That
was fun to watch, and I thought of you as
I sure hope Charlie's stuck it out to the end
for this extraordinary finish. Well, right, We've got a lot
of serious things to talk about today and not enough
time to get to all of them. But here we are,
government shut down. I guess we're up to day eleven,
and it doesn't look like there's been much movement. I
don't know if that's a good or bad thing. I'll
give you one thought I have is I don't know
Republican incompetence here. What democrats want are endless, huge subsidies
for Obamacare, and it seems to me that this ought
to be a moment for Republicans to say, although the
Republican record is mixed, they had the chance to repeal
Obamacare under Trump won and didn't do it, But now
is the time to say this is completely failed. We
should a polish it now and start over again and
do some serious kind of healthcare reform. And there doesn't
seem to be any thinking about that or any talking
about that, And maybe this isn't the time to do it,
but I'm very frustrated that Republicans look, if anything, like
they're weakn and may give in at some point.
Speaker 1: They certainly shouldn't be weakening, although I agree they look
as if they are, I don't know of now is
the time to do that when there's no agreement within
the party on how Where I am a bit disappointed
with the Republican messaging is that they have the upper
hand here. The Democrats are trying to have it both ways.
We discussed this last time. They're simultaneously saying the Republicans
shut down the government and that they are fighting for
the middle class. But those two things can't both be true.
You can't be fighting for the middle class if you
had nothing to do with the shutdown. Republicans should just
be saying over and over again in every interview, with
perfect message discipline, we continued the existing government funding. We
can have these arguments once the government reopens, because it's true.
They put forward a clean continuing resolution. Even the New
York Times has admitted this. They run a whole piece
on it, saying this isn't even a trick, this is
actually a clean in continuing resolution. It's the Democrats who
are asking for changes. And I think to the average
person who is not invested in the ideological or political
fight here, I'm not downplaying the importance of that fight,
but to the average person who's watching from the sidelines,
the moment you establish yourself as the ones who say
we are trying to maintain the status quo, the others
shut down the government to force change from the minority,
you look more reasonable. So I've been a bit disappointed
with the republicans inability to do that. I think this
is probably the product of neither side being within its
comfort zone. The Democrats are the party of government. They
don't want to shut down that government, and they don't
want to say they shut down that government, and they
don't know how to say they shut down that government.
Republicans are usually the ones who are pushing for changes,
have no real issue with shutting down the government, and
they don't know how to play the elder statesman and
say we can deal with the argument when we've reopened
the government. So neither one is playing to its strength.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, you know, I've been racking my brain, but
have that time to research. But how many times to
have over the years Republicans instigated a government shutdown. It's
got to be at least eight or ten, and I
don't think they've ever won a single one of them. Now.
Supposedly in nineteen ninety six that was a very long
shutdown under Gingrich. It was later reported by some people
doing Clinton biographies that Clinton was about to give in
and Republicans blinked first, and so we didn't have to.
But it seems to me the track record is Republicans
lose these things, and in general, I think I generalized
it further and say the president usually wins, the president's
party usually wins. And I've got to think privately, Schumer
didn't really want to do this, he didn't do it
in March, and oh it is significant. I think you
go back to that the famous Clinton shutdown in ninety five,
ninety six, that gay birth, to the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
As we know, Bob Dole was the Senate Republican leader
and was against the shutdown, but he got steamrolled by
Nuke Gingrich and the House Republicans. And then again in
twenty thirteen when Ted Cruz wanted to shut down the
government to try and roll back Obamacare, Mitch McConnell was
not only against it, but was wishing afterwards, is there
some way hed get Cruz on the Supreme Court to
get him out of the Senate. Right. There was no
love loss there. So I've got to think Schumer, who's
a very smart Paul, must have been against this but
had no choice but to go along with it, Which
is another reason Republicans should hold firm because at some
point I would think Schumer would say, we need to
cut our losses.
Speaker 1: Well, I think Schumer is in a difficult position because
not only does he have to reflect their anger and
frustration of the base, and that's what this is really about. Yeah,
he has to protect his flank. I think he believes
that he's going to be primary, perhaps by Alexandria Acazio Cortez,
and so there's a self interest at play here as well.
Even if he understands that this isn't a great move,
he will now be able to say, look, I led
the party in shutting down the government to fight Trump's
insert whatever the cause is here, or to fight for
healthcare reform. I don't think that's going to help him.
I think that if he's going to be primaried from
the left in New York, he's going to be primaried
from the left in New York. I don't think there
is anyone who is considering doing that who's going to say, well,
we got what we wanted. He shut down the government.
But I think he thinks that that will help him.
So this has been part of his calculation.
Speaker 2: Well, speaking of shutdowns, let me use that to shift gears.
I think that my culinary vocabulary has just changed, and
so the phrase juicy porterhouse steak will never have the
same meaning from here forward. When contemplating the magnificent spectacle
of Katie Porter out here in my home state of California,
So I assume most of our listeners have heard about this.
A Katie Porter, who's it was well known as an
awful human being out here in California, and I think
also in Washington, d C. Has now made it clear
to the nation as a whole what an awful human
being she is. The way she snapped at a reporter
and trotting to walk off the stage, and other things
have tumbled out anyway, this I mean, first of all,
if you want to comment on Katie Porter further, please do.
But I do want to spend a couple of minutes
to say, why is it so many liberals turn out
to be such awful people? I mean, Kambla Harris has
a bad reputation, Amy Klobashar, you know legendary stories about
the way she treats staff, and I can itemize several others.
And that's before you even get to Jay Jones in Virginia,
which we should talk about too. But I don't know, Charlie,
what are you as a fascinated with a Katie Porter
meltdown as I am?
Speaker 1: I am? I want to know why and how she
has a political career. I can't find a single thing
about her that is redeeming. She's not charming, she's not eloquent,
she doesn't have a nice voice. She's not much to
look at in nor does she try. She seems to
be horrible to her staff. She's not bipartisan or well
respected within the legislature. Why does she exist? I find
it astonishing that she might be the governor of California. Now,
obviously there are many people who have been governor of
California or who are currently governor of California. I don't
like a great deal, but I can see why they
got there. Gavin Newsom is oleagnis, but he's a good
looking man, he presents well, and he's quite good at
pretending to be bipartisan. On his podcast, the benefits of
Jerry Brown were clear. Again, not my kind of politician,
but he was an intelligent man. He'd been in politics
a long time, he had experience. And then you have
Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had celebrity, and you go all the
way back to Reagan, who had pretty much the whole package.
But why is she a contender. She's the least likable
politician in the United States. She makes all of the
other unlikable politicians look talented. She makes Elizabeth Warren and
Masi her owno look ugly and warn I just don't
get this person. The most interesting thing in that clip,
which if our listeners haven't seen it, they should rectify that.
Just go and find this three minutes of Katie Porter
melting down on YouTube. The most interesting thing about that
I thought was that it illustrated the downside to media bias.
And we talk a lot about media bias, and we're
quite rightly upset about it, and it does distort our politics.
But Katie Porter clearly has never been in a position
in which the media we're asking follow up questions. And
you don't have to take my word for it, she
says us much. She complains that there are follow up
questions every time she makes a statement, and she can't
say that she wasn't aware of the situation she was in,
because before she starts getting all het up about there
being a camera, before she starts getting het up about
the supposedly unhappy experience that she's having, she turns around
to the camera and mugs at it and all but
points at the interviewer and says, can you get a
load of this woman? And then all of a sudden
she's saying, Oh, well, I don't want to have an
unappy experience. I don't want this to be contentious. I
don't want that camera on.
Speaker 2: Come on.
Speaker 1: She thought that the moment was for her to do
pr and when she realized that it wasn't, she wanted
no part of it. And you could only be in
that position if you've been coddled by the press for
your entire career, because no Republican would dream of going
into that interview under that false impression.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's right. I mean, I have a philosophical
theory about all this that maybe I pushed too far,
but it's, you know, that's my backgrounds in political philosophy,
and it's that, you know, the presumption of progressivism is
that they're on the side of history. That's the phrase
they can't stop using, right and and so the media
is supposed to be on their side and usually are
as you point out, and so they're not used to
being challenged. And I think this explains not only the
presumptuousness of someone like Porter and a lot of liberal politicians,
but it also explains, for example, the ferocious reaction to
Charlie Kirk. I mean, this guy's going to show up
on campus and want to argue with you, and people
went out in her mind, including one person who killed
him for right. And then you saw on social media.
I don't know if it's possible to count these things up,
but an astonishingly high number of people on the left
celebrating his killing. Now what does that tell you? I mean,
I mean, to my mind, it says that there's something.
Maybe there's some psychological aspects of that that we can
talk about. But you know, people often make the point
that boy, there haven't been any Charlie Kirk riots right
right there does seem to be that asymmetry also comes along.
And then here's this Jay Jones guy openly saying, gosh,
you know, we got to have some more police killed.
I want my opponent killed and their children to suffer.
And then you know, the hardy any democrat can be
bothered to say this is not acceptable.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think once you believe that you are on
the side of history, that is to say that you
are moving with the tide, then you have given yourself
permission to do all manner of undemocratic or unpluralist things,
irrespective of how you think the mechanism works. What I
mean there is, if you are inevitable, then what happens
was always going to happen. If you are supposed to
make these sweeping changes but are being prevented, then you're
justified in doing anything to make sure that the prophecy
comes to fruition so you can't lose. And that does
explain why progressives are obsessed with these supposedly shadowy, nefarious
forces that are preventing them from winning, because that's the
only way you can reconcile reality with your methods, the
methods being that you are the chosen one. If the
chosen one doesn't make it to the top of the mountain,
someone has to have stopped him. And I think she
did exhibit some of that. But she's also just for
a progressive, a bad candidate. I mean, there are progressives
who are good candidates. There are progressives who are good
communicators and who understand what they need to say. She
got tripped up on the most basic question anyone who's
ever asked in all of politics, which is, in effect,
will you be a good governor for the people who
didn't vote for you. She took the question literally. She's asked, well,
can you win without Trump voters? Now she can in California,
But you don't say, yeah, obviously, why would I need them? Yeah,
it's just something almost charmingly literal about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I have another theory to explain her, which
is I bet she doesn't sleep very well, And she
doesn't sleep very well because I'll bet she doesn't use
cozy earth sheets. So, you know, so much of what
happens in the world, you know, isn't up to us,
So follow us here. Winter is not far behind, and
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Speaker 1: Yeah, well, you know, I don't just have cozy earth sheets. Now,
I have a snuggle blanket, which I got from my
wife from Cozy Earth, and I think she hasn't taken
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But it is one of the softest items I've ever seen.
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the Ricochet podcast, and Noah Rothman joins us now from
National Review, where he is senior editor and one of
my go to persons on all things Middle East and
all things culture and so forth. How are you no,
Good to see you again?
Speaker 4: Doing very good? Thank you for having me. Good to
see you too.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So well, wait, we want to primarily get your
take here on the peace deal in the Middle East.
I've got three opening questions, and then I want to
get a Rothman's Realism scale score from you. It's a
special scale, it made up just for you. So the
first one is I keep reading news accounts that say
that part of the key of the deal was Trump
leaning very hard on net Yahoo, who may have been
reluctant about certain aspects of this. So is that true?
So we'll start there. I have two more after this.
But what do you hear? What was the key to
the deal? Is that really an accurate reporting or what
do you hear?
Speaker 3: I don't think it's inaccurate reporting. I think the emphasis
is wrong. I think it's being played up by those
in the press and on the left end of the
spectrum generally, who want to create the impression that the
obstacle to piece was Netanyahu. I think if you, I think,
if you objectively look at how the administration has handled
bilateral relations with Jerusalem.
Speaker 4: It has been air tight.
Speaker 3: There has been very little save a couple of anecdotes
of the President distancing himself from Benjamin Netanyahu and some
theater to that effect, this phone call between Netanyahu and
the Katari government in the Oval Office being one of
the primary examples of it. But no, I don't think
there is very much evidence to suggest that the obstacle
to piece here was Netanyahu, or that the end of
this war reflects anything other than a general alignment in
strategic and tactical approaches to this conflict between Washington and Jerusalem.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Now, the other thing that is being said by
a lot of people is that the is really strike
on Qatar. What a month ago now it was a
sobering moment to really change the game. Is that? Do
you think that's true.
Speaker 3: I don't think it's wrong. I just don't have the
information to be able to gauge it. I'm just not
in the loop in ways that I would have to be,
and those who are not talking so I would. I
think it's pretty safe to say that you can't rule
out the prospect that such an expansion of the rules
of engagement unforeseen In ways that I think probably impose
some sobriety on the region and actors in the capitalism
in those regions. But I don't I don't know the
degree to which it contributed to this piece deal, but
there is reporting that I trust that indicates that it was, yes,
a sobering moment and one that shaped the thinking of
Hamas's interlocutors in the region, primarily Doha, but also Anchora
and the Turkish government.
Speaker 2: Right, Okay, now, we're still working out details I gather,
and so As i As, I've often said that you're
my favorite cranky person, which I mean always is a compliment.
I like your take. Yeah, we're good because I mean
it that way, and I always enjoy when you're being
very sober and I think appropriately negative, even when I
sometimes disagree or think maybe you turn out to be wrong.
But so that is a prep Well, that's a preface
to on the Rothman realism scale, with ten one to
ten ten being best meaning good. Where do you put
the prospects of this deal right now? Well, let me
be very Rothman realism scale.
Speaker 3: You've got to be so super cranky, Steve, and I'm
going to say the notion that we're equating realism with good.
Here is something I fundamentally reject.
Speaker 2: Oh good, that's good.
Speaker 1: So I reject the.
Speaker 3: Very premise of the question insofar as we define realism
as a school of foreign policy thought that believes nations
behave nations react to material conditions, to hard power conditions,
to observable tangible conditions, where ideology plays no role, which
is not something I believe very many actually do subscribe to,
and those who do subscribe to it are wrong to
do so. So I would differ with the realism thing. Nevertheless,
if we're talking about strategic victories, is this good for Israels?
Speaker 4: Is good for the United States?
Speaker 3: I'm going to put it on like an eight and
a half right now, even if we don't progress much beyond.
We're not even at stage one at this point. And
let's just ignore Donald Trump's twenty one point plan because
if you really parse it gets pretty weird. And the
first two steps are essentially the last two steps. The
first two steps are Gaza will be terror free and redeveloped.
Speaker 1: That's the end of the.
Speaker 3: Process, in the beginning of the process, so we're really
at stage three four, and by that we're not even
at that stage, because then Israel has to give back
the hostages what have you. Nevertheless, if this falls apart tomorrow,
we still have a document that the regional stakeholders have
signed their names to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Indonesia,
like a lot of Muslim dominated governments, have said three things. One,
Hamas cannot be the government of the Gaza Strip. It
cannot be the military and political power in the strip. Two,
the Palestinian authority will have to commit to some unspecified
reforms before it can assume leadership in the Gaza Strip.
And three that the IDF has a legitimate presence inside
Gaza that will be there in perpetuity, acknowledging the permanent
strategic interests of Israel in the Gaza Strip. All of
these are foundational assumptions that will guide the evolution of
this region moving forward. They cannot be taken back.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I mean a lot of race about this.
I'm not really going to be optimistic until I actually
see the twenty hostages out and safe, because I mean
again again, you hear stories about you know, Homaso. We're
not sure where they are because they've been farmed out
to some of these you know, minor league humas teams
and stuff, and I don't know. I wouldn't surprise me
at all if some of them are missing or worse.
Speaker 3: But I believe, I believe they know where the twenty
living hostages are. I would be surprised if they have
a bead on where the remains some of the dead
hostages are. But there's a point information sharing mechanism to
try to figure that out, So you know.
Speaker 2: It's interesting. Yeah, the Indonesia angle is interesting. I don't
think has Indonesia ever been in the mix before in
any of these Middle East processes.
Speaker 3: I don't know. That's a good question and I don't
have the answer to it. It's one of the world's
largest Muslim populations, and the Prime Minister during the General
Assembly week in the United Nations in New York City
was did not share Western Europe and Canada's hostility towards Jerusalem.
Really when we see, you know, there's the fiction in
Western Europe and in Canada in particular, that you know,
there's a two state solution that's on the table and
Israel's conducting a genocide and these views are just not
reflected in the Muslim world, where you would expect they
would have a receptive audience. I mean at the street level, sure,
But in these in governments in Riad and Cairo and Aman,
the two state solution is a dead letter. So you know,
they're just operating on two trucks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Charlie, you want to come in here.
Speaker 1: I as you know, no, am of the view that
this deal is the product of Trump being a widow
and outside of our normal political structures and often norms,
and of his having Jared Kushner at his disposal for
some reason, seems to have a talent for this. How
true is that? Would this have happened under Baraco bomb
Rote George W. Bush? Or did this require Trump's endless
willingness to think outside the box?
Speaker 3: I think there's something to that. Now, let's go back
to the Abraham Accords. It's not as though those sprang
from Donald Trump's forehead Exnelio or Jared Kushner's for that matter.
There was an intellectual lattice work, a framework that had
been established at the think tank level by conservative thinkers
of this region, but it was not one that the
foreign policy establishment was prepared to accept. The presupposition that
the blob, as it were, the foreign policy establishment believed
was that you had to solve the Palestinian conflict first
and only then could you unlock peace agreements in the
Middle East, and the Abraham Accords formula reversed that said
if you do that last, and it took significant advantage
of some of the Obama administration's machinations in the region
where they elevated, for example, Iranian proxies in Iraq and
to supplement the Iraqi security forces when they bugged out
in twenty ten, and that spooked all the regions sunny powers.
So the Abraham of course formula was twofold. It was one,
let's put the Palestinian.
Speaker 4: Issue on the back burner. We'll do with that later.
Speaker 3: First things first, and that's the threat by Iran, and
that focused the minds of the region's sunny powers and
it began to unlock security agreements first sort of covert
soda voce and then overt and that was you know,
that was the formula that worked, and it was the
sort of thing that you could only do if you
had a proper contempt for the foreign policy establishment that
was having this conversation with our colleagues today on our
editorial call Charlie that you know, there's this I forget
what it's called the phenomenon where you read something in
the newspaper that you know about and it's all wrong,
you say, and then you keep going and you reget, well,
you know that must be true, even though you just
identified the thing that was wrong. So when it comes
to the State Department, for example, whenever there's a purge
of State Department personnel, I'm one of those guys like, yeah,
let's go, because for all of my adult life, the
State Department functionaries have been obstructing Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice.
Whenever there's a Republican in charge of the place, they
find that everything they want to do just becomes that
much harder and really frustratingly difficult, and there's a lot
of obstacles in the way that shouldn't be there. But
then the Trump Trump goes around and conducts a purgea
of the Justice Department, and I say, who whoa, whoa,
because maybe I don't know enough. Perhaps perhaps, But when
it comes to the conduct of American foreign policy, it
has been held hostage by individuals who are behold into
a lot of shibbylists that are resonant in the academy
and in elite think tanks, and you know, the feat
world of high level diplomacy and which does need a
little bit of disruption and the objective success that the
Trump administration has had in approaching these things in a
novel way, ohs.
Speaker 4: Is owed a lot to that.
Speaker 3: But it's also that this president has a unique capacity
to understand Middle Eastern politics at a very high level,
again not the Arab street, but at the level of
governments in Riod and Cairom, what have you. Because he's transactional,
because he's not ideological, because he wants to get things
done and doesn't care how things are. How do you
get to X y Z. The process is not the point.
He's not hostage to the process. He's looking for outcomes.
And that is something that speaks very much to how
the Arab world, politics at a high level in the
Arab world is conducted, to say nothing of the fact
that they are very materially interested in the trappings of
material wealth and excess. And that also speaks to something
that the president holds quite dear. So he's uniquely positioned
to navigate the Middle East and it shows in the
Middle East in ways that it does not in a
lot of the rest of the world, in Europe, in
East Asia, in Latin America. You can't point to the
kind of concess successes that he's enjoyed in the Middle East.
Speaker 1: Will he be rewarded for them or will people pretend
that it was going to happen.
Speaker 3: Anyway, they'll pretend that it was going to happen, and
they roughly are. You've already seen erroneously the notion that
this deal, this particular deal that we're talking about now,
was on the table a year ago. Joe Biden offered
it something similar was on the table under Witkow. Anybody
could have pulled the trigger on this when they wanted to.
All it took was, you know, giving Net and Yahoo's
sufficient elbowing in the ribs for him to come to
the table and acquiesce. And I just it doesn't make
any sense. It discounts the fact that they were just
rending garments about two weeks ago over the president's nonchalance.
The with a idef offensive into Gaza City to really
roll up the underground city there, which I think contributed
a lot to the pressure that Hamas was under. Hamas
didn't give up these hostages, the last of it hasn't yet,
but will give up the last of these hostages. It's
only negotiating position because it wanted to, because it was
just feeling good about itself. It ran out of material
to conduct this war. It's just out of options, and
the individual the nations that serve as conduits to the
rest of the world, nations like Gatar and Turkey, came
in and said the jag is up. I don't think
that would have happened absent the kind of military pressure
that the idea of was putting on Hamas and Gaza City.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So, first of all, a couple of things you said.
One is that, well, I'll put it this way. I
think that the phrase PLO reform is one of the
great oxymorons of the world. Mean, I can't really see
any reason to suppose that the Palestinian authority is ever
going to reform itself in any serious way, do you.
Speaker 1: No, I don't.
Speaker 3: It would be oh, it would be wrong with me
to say that I have my finger on the pulse
of Palestinian politics in Ramala or anywhere else. But yes,
I find it hard to believe the Fatah would reform
itself seriously with a boss at the head of it.
The guy is, you know, a decrepit in his mid
eighties at this point figure, which is one of the
reasons why Israel will not release more one Barguti, despite
Hamas's desire to see him released, as well as all
the Hamasniks in the information space that we're all intimately
acquainted with by now, in part because he was one
of the architects of the second into Fada, has a
lot of blood on his hands, but the other part
being he's the likely successor to Mahmoudabas and would focus
the energies of those who want to see terrorist attacks
on Israeli civilians continue, mostly in the Western world, but
also the inside the Middle East. And that's a cultural problem.
Inside the Strip and inside the West Bank. There is
a culture of death in these places that celebrates the
murder of civilians. It has not changed, and until it changes,
there will not be a permanent peace. But until then
the Israeli military will continue to play probably a mo
the lawn strategy, not desirous of some sort of big
military campaign like they just went through. This is the
longest war in Israel's hill history. They're not going to
want to go back to it again, but there could
be the prospect that this thing falls apart. If it
falls apart in a spectacular way, they will have to.
But I was having this argument with Hugh Hewitt yesterday
that I don't think if there is a single Katushka rocket,
that we're going to see the resumption of a ground
offensive into Gaza.
Speaker 4: I just don't think that's going to happen.
Speaker 3: And it will be calibrated approaches to provocations from Gaza
and from the West Bank, and there will continue, but
I think we're going to see calibrated responses to them.
Speaker 2: You said one other thing a moment ago that sparks
this observation. I'll rephrase it this way. You said something about, well,
you know, the Arab street doesn't seem as worked up
about this as a lot of people in Western capitals.
My reformulation of that is that the American and European
left is more anti Semitic and more anti Israel than
many people in the Arab countries with the you know,
Hamas accept that obviously, but I don't know if that's
true or not. But the thing that worries me is
this pole reported a couple of days ago by Harry
Enton on CNN, and I didn't look at it closely,
and I don't know who did it, but it found
rising number of people thinking that a Israel is conducting
a genocide in Gaza, and be that number included a
across tab included a high proportion of American Jews who
are very critical, like forty percent saying, you know, agreeing
with the Polster question that this is a genocide. Who
knows how intensely that has really felt. The point is
that obviously there's been an intense propaganda campaign whose roots
go back decades as we know, and it does look
to me like it is unfortunately succeeding.
Speaker 3: It is at a certain point you do have to
think that rationality will intrude. First, I should say that
I don't believe that there is that Western Europe is
more anti Semitic than the average Arab street. You know.
The second that there is a provocation that these Arab
capitals want to exploit, they do, and the Arab street
is alive with anti Israeli violence happens pretty regularly.
Speaker 4: It's merely that.
Speaker 3: These the capitals. The political establishments, particularly in the Sunni
Arab world, have a different relationship with Israel now. It's
it's it's much more instrumental and utilitarian. And yeah, occasionally
it's good for them to whip up some anti Israel
frenzy in the streets, but not always, and so you
see less of it just because they're not engaged in
those kind of provocations anymore. I'm sorry, I lost myself.
What was the second part of your question. Remind me, Oh, well,
it's Probalyana campaign campaign. Yeah, so rationality, you would think
would intrude at some point, because what we've seen over
the course of this two year war is spectacular tactical
acumen from the IDF, just really impressive operations from the
beeper Pager operation, the communications operation, the decapitation strike on
has beloved, the decapitation strike on the houthis the sort
of stuff that you can only glink glean from, like
really good information and really sound military tactics. And yeah,
but they are terrible at conducting a genocide.
Speaker 2: They just just hang out and do it and I shouldn't.
Speaker 3: Managed to not even disrupt really the population of the strip.
I mean, there's nowhere for them to go. So why
is the population relatively stable?
Speaker 1: Dan?
Speaker 3: Why are all these celebrations in the streets. You can
go check out the videos yourself of all these Palestinians
with very full bellies and gold watches and clean clothes.
What happened to this spectacular misery that was being meted out.
We're talking about an open air warsaw ghetto, and yet,
and yet where is it all? You would think that
a couple of years from now, once emotions have cooled,
passions have cooled, and the political imperative to mouth these
shibboleths is no longer there, that some of the fury
that we're seeing here will decline.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, you know, I always draw historical parallels.
And you mentioned the people saying, well, we could have
had this deal months ago or a year ago. Reminds
me of what the left said for years about how
Nixon could have had Vietnam's solved in February of nineteen
sixty nine, and then the famous Christmas bombing in nineteen
seventy two. We were conducting a genocide, And of course
the statistics on that that came out later is it's
one of the lowest civilian casualty rates of any bombing
campaign in human history.
Speaker 3: Right, So right, it was ineffective. That was the problem
with these saturation bombing right right.
Speaker 2: So anyway, you know this, we know this is unseious.
So last question for me speculation that there's now going
to be if the steal goes through in some reasonable form,
there's going to need to be or should be an
election in Israel. Do you think there's going to be one?
Should net Yahoo call for one? What do you think,
Kathenik that might play out?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 3: The only thing I'm confident I have even less grasp
on than Palestinian politics.
Speaker 4: This is politics, right.
Speaker 3: That is an inscrutable even Israeli's struggle to understand where
the factions are and who's moving where and who's aligned
with whom is it is tough to force. There will
obviously be elections in Israel. Israel's a democratic country. I
don't know what Benjamin netnia Whose future is, or what
he foresees for himself. You know, some have said that
he perceived himself to be on a mission to neutralize
the Iranian nuclear threat. I don't think it's neutralized, but
it's certainly pushed back so he could declare victory and retreat,
but he's also got the judiciary hanging over his head,
and scandals involving a prosecutorial abuses of his power and
embezzling funds and all of these things. There is dispute
over the legitimacy of these charges, but they continue to
hang over him. So he may feel like he have
to hang on in very much in a sort of
Trumpian way, in order to indemnify himself. If not, if
not intimidate his prosecutors and secure his own legacy, then
just remain immune from prosecution. So who knows there, But
the political dynamic in Israel will not change. In one
regard is that the Israeli left is an attenuated force
to a degree that it is almost ignorable. There are
various flavors of right. You could say the Blue White Coalitions,
somewhat left, which was this coalition of somewhat less Licudian parties,
but labor, the traditional left in Israel has been discredited
and will remain discredited for the better part of a generation.
So whatever replaces net Nyahuu, it won't be the kind
of progressive left wing ideal that was dominant when Israel
was just an archipelago of kibusin being recognized by the
Soviet Union. Like, that's what they remember of Israel, That's
what they liked about it. This is the Bernie Sanders
version of Israel, and that Israel is gone and the
left in America and then your Western europe will never
forgive them.
Speaker 1: Now, is Donald Trump going to win the Nobel Peace Prize?
Speaker 3: So we argued about this a little bit on the editors,
and I would not rule it out. I don't think
that's an impossible idea. I also think that you could
have a package of recipients including Donald try Rump, his team,
Steve Woodkoff, Jared Kushner. They certainly deserve it. There could
be other parties in there to soften the blow for
Western Europeans. It could be you know, Saudi's or Jordanians,
or god knows, even Palestinians. Certainly, I believe the Yahoo
government deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. They'll never receive one,
but Ron Dhermer and Benjaminiahu and his team deserve one
in part for negotiating contributing to the negotiations of the
Abraham Accords, which represent a sea change in the dynamic
in the region, and a positive one if your goal
is actually peace. But second, because through force of arms,
he has managed to denude the threat of an Iranian
nuclear weapon, to say nothing of the ring of fire
around Israel. Hamast Hesbala, the Shieate, militias in Syria and
Iraq to a lesser extent than Huthis, all of these
were a threat to the civilized world, and through Israeli action,
we are less threatened today. And that's if the Peace
Prize is worth anything, then it should be worth that.
Speaker 2: Wouldn't that.
Speaker 3: I you know, I think that the Nobel Committee should
probably conclude the Peace Prize by just awarding it to itself. Say,
the Nobel Peace Prize has been has been such a
boon to peace in the world that we can fold
up shop and say we've our mission is complete, you know, uh,
finally compensate for the legacy of dynamite and get that
off out for right right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I remember Pat and moynihan used to
say of the Soviet Union's Lenin Prize that anyone who
wins the Lenin Prize deserves it. You know, I've always
thought the Nobel Prize has been awarded as so many
stupid and frivolous and evil people that I'm not sure
you want to win it. It's almost a badge of
dishonor right.
Speaker 3: You need it, you need a deal to get to
get the Nobel Peace Prize. But they're not above giving
it to people who engage in force of arms, or
or a orchestrated force of arms. I said, Monock and
began yeah onmar sat Henry Kissinger like, it's not it's
not outside the realm of conceivability.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know that's I exaggerated a little bit, but
only a little bit.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: Of course, this years prize was already awarded yesterday to
a Venezuelan opposition leader. It's a woman whose name I forget.
I thought that's an interesting pick, possibly worthy, I don't know.
I don't follow it closely, but it seems like kind
of a bank shot, given that Trump is pressuring Venezuela.
But in any case, no, we're gonna have to leave
that for another day. You have to move on. We
will look forward to seeing you again soon, and I'll
just say carry on.
Speaker 4: Thank you, sir. Good to see you guys.
Speaker 2: Well, Charlie, Noah, makes a good case that Trump and
an ensemble of people probably do deserve the Nobel Prize,
as was a Nobel Peace Prize as it was originally intended.
But this year's has already been given out, as I mentioned.
But another set of prizes came out this week. It's
one that I always follow for amusement value. It was
the so called MacArthur Genius Awards, and I don't know
if you follow this or not. This year it's eight
hundred thousand dollars, no strings attached to the people they
select through an anonymous process about which I want to
come back to in a moment. It's a mix of
usually scientists and researchers who do what looks to be respectable,
serious work. But then when you get off of the
social sciences and humanities and art, it's always left wing wackos.
I mean, Abram Candy got one right. My favorite one
this year is let's see if I can find this
description of the guy. Yes, an artist in Maine who
is a master of Wabanaki basket weaving, which is an
obscure technique of basket weaving from an obscure Native American
tribe in Maine. You know, when I was in college
a million years ago, we used to joke about an
easy class would be underwater basket weaving, And now it
gets you a MacArthur Genius Award.
Speaker 1: This is a great example of the progressive dilemma in
the contemporary era, which is perhaps one reason why they've
started to lose, and that is that they took go
over all the institutions, and they relied upon this latent
sense of those institutions worth and then they ruin them.
And it worked for a while. You could use the
impromateur of an institution, even when you were behaving in
a crazy manner, and get away with it. But that's stopped.
I think probably COVID is what did it more than anything.
But that's stopped a few years ago. And now people
look at this sort of thing and they say, well, yes,
I understand that it's called a genius grant, or I
understand that this has come out of an institution or
a university or a government department that was in the
nineteen fifties well regarded. But you're being crazy. So we
no longer have to maintain the respect that we once
had for that institution. And the reason it's a dilemma
is because the progressive movement needs those institutions to survive.
That's how progressives wield a lot of their power. But
they are not prepared to be sane, even to the
minimum degree that would be necessary to keep those institutions
popular with the general public. So they've essentially killed their
own distribution mechanism.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, I mean the I think there's only one
conservative has ever gotten a Macarthury Ward, and it was
Robert Woodson.
Speaker 1: And it will go, right, we will. We will see
that institution go if this continues for too long, because
eventually someone is going to say, as it did with NPR,
and it's the FBI just did with the Southern Poverty
lawsner which they're no longer interested in consulting. Okay, done.
You know. Another good example would be the American Bar Association,
which for years used its position to advance the interests
of left wing judges and pretend that qualified and progressive
were the same word, which then and eventually the Trump
administration said, we just don't care anymore what you think.
We're not privileging you within the nomination process. Go away. Now,
the MacArthur system is a little bit different than that
but it won't survive ad nauseam if it's really just
a mechanism for funneling eight hundred thousand dollars to people
who have wacky politics.
Speaker 2: Right, well, I do have a fun story for listeners
and for you. It's apparently they recruit people to nominate
possible prize winners. And about twenty years ago, now lo
and behold, had to have been some dreadful mistake at
MacArthur office. I was sent a letter asking me to
nominate candidates for their prize. I thought, well, this is amusing,
so I sent a letter back, nominating Victor Davis Hansen
for his work on the classics, A Christina hoff Summers
for challenging the orthodoxy of radical feminism, and Clinton Bollock
for his work on school choice. Clint is nowadays on
the Arizona State Supreme Court. And I never heard another
word from the Foundation, not even to thank you for
your nominations. Right, And but it's supposed to be confidential,
and I'm not supposed to talk about this. But A
it's twenty years ago, and B what are they going
to do to me? Not invite me again?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Exactly.
Speaker 2: I thought that was kind of amusing and never heard
a word. I'm sure somebody in the office got punished
for getting my name on a list of possible nominators.
But speaking of nominations, and I think we'll make this
our last item. Is President Trump, in an entirely unsurprising
move to sign a declaration this week or whatever whatever
the document is, to observe to Columbus Day next week.
You know, Columbus has been you know, on the radar
screen and the hit list of the left for decades
now as the original fascist or something like that. Right,
so this is a nice poke in the eye of
the you know, normality reasserting itself in America. And I
am glad to call it Columbus Day once again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he said we're back Italians when he signed it.
It's just declaration, that's right. I am a conservative, I'm
a small sea conservative, and I don't like fads and
the replacement of Columbus Stay with Indigenous People's Stay or
whatever is faddy. Now, there were many problems with Columbus
he lived five hundred plus years ago, but what was
impressive about him was that he got across the ocean
on a boat that we wouldn't even look at now,
and I think that that matters because there's been an
attempt in recent years to cancel people who had unpleasant
views or did unpleasant things that were ancillary to the
reason that we look up to them in the first place.
It's fine, in my view, to cancel the Confederacy Alexander
Stevens for the Cornerstone speech. That's why he is known.
His one contribution to American life was the proposition that
African Americans are inferior and ought to be enslaved. Cancel
that guy. But Nelson in England. Nelson is not known
for having been in favor of slavery, which he was,
although he wasn't zealous about it. Nelson's known for having
been an extraordinary naval commander and saving the British from Napoleon.
So what do you do with someone like that. I
think you celebrate them for what they were known for
and kind of ignore the rest. And that's my view
of Columbus as well. That yeah, I'm totally happy to
say that Columbus did bad things, but we don't celebrate
him for the bad things. We celebrated for getting across
the ocean, which was an extraordinary feat.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I mean I always like to bring up
an aspect of this that seldom thought of, and that's
a counterfactual. I asked the anthropologist Charles Mann this once,
Charles were a great book twenty five years ago, now
called fourteen ninety one. It was, you know, this Hemisphere
year before Columbus and European settlement came. And you know,
he is a very good book about you know what
the Inca and Aztec civilizations and North American Indian tribes
were like, and especially in Central America, quite sophisticated cities,
as we know. And they did build some boats. They
never became deep ocean going seafaring peoples. But I asked
him what would have happened if, say, the Aztecs or
the Incas or somebody had sailed to Europe. And they said, oh,
the same thing would have happened as what did happen.
They would have had no immunity to European diseases, offshoots
of the plague, and they would have died really fast
if they tried to come and settle Europe. And it's
just that's not something that was going to happen sometime
in history, right either. It was fourteen ninety two or
fifteen ninety two, that was going to happen. It's a
tragedy of human history. It would have happened if the
flow of ships and exploration had been the other direction
and had that It comes of the you know, it
was biological warfare, you know, which is we didn't even
have gym there, right, exactly right.
Speaker 1: I think I'm right in saying we didn't have a comprehensible,
certainly not a widely understood gem theory until about eighteen eighty, right,
So the idea that this was some tool in the
arsenal that was wheeled by evil colonists for years is
really quite silly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but that's sort of typical of liberal ignorance of
history that goes to a lot of things, as we
were saying before. But with that, it is time for
us to draw to a close for this week. This
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comments at Ricochet four point dot dot dot.
Speaker 1: Yes, twelve point twelve points something or fourteen point fourteen
point something. The point is go there and comment and
have fun. Don't look at the bottom, right right.
Speaker 2: Thanks Charlie, See you next week.