Speaker 1: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask
Speaker 1: what you can do for your country.
Speaker 2: Mister gorbachaw tear down this wall.
Speaker 1: It's the Ricorche podcast with Charles C. W. Cook and
Speaker 1: Stephen Hayward. I'm James Lylyx. Today we talked to Nolah
Speaker 1: Rothman eventually about Syria, but before that all sorts of stuff.
Speaker 3: So let's saberselfs a podcast and from very high sources,
Speaker 3: very qualified sources, very responsible sources.
Speaker 2: I'm going to tell you the real deal.
Speaker 3: Iran launched a mother ship probably about a month ago
Speaker 3: that contains these drones.
Speaker 4: Ladies and gentlemen. As you know, I'm in the final
Speaker 4: weeks of my presidency.
Speaker 5: You don't have to clap for that. You can if
Speaker 5: you want.
Speaker 1: Welcome everybody eats the Ricchet podcast number what is it?
Speaker 5: It is seven hundred and twenty.
Speaker 1: Wow. I'm James Lylyx in bone achingly called Minneapolis, but
Speaker 1: the Vikes are eleven and two and I'm joined by
Speaker 1: Charles W. Cook in Florida where the jaguars are in
Speaker 1: the Little Trine but I assume it's warm. And Stephen Heyward,
Speaker 1: who is where exactly?
Speaker 2: I'm in the LA area today?
Speaker 3: I'm finally back from running around over in Europe for
Speaker 3: an earlier month.
Speaker 2: But I'm back on the.
Speaker 5: Left coast like a colossus.
Speaker 1: We straddle the nation before we get to the interesting
Speaker 1: things of the day. Something else that is an interesting
Speaker 1: thing of the day. I understand, Charlie, that you survived
Speaker 1: a restaurant explosion.
Speaker 6: This is so bizarre that I still can't believe that
Speaker 6: it happened, and I especially can't believe normal was hurt badly.
Speaker 6: Yesterday I went for lunch with a friend. We sat
Speaker 6: at the bar, as we often do. The bar is
Speaker 6: relatively close to the kitchen, and about eight to ten
Speaker 6: minutes into having sat down, we order glass of wine
Speaker 6: and there is an almighty explosion, and the rush of
Speaker 6: air that comes out of the kitchen, along with a
Speaker 6: noise I've never heard before, pushes us partially off our seats.
Speaker 4: It was that straw.
Speaker 6: And we quickly looked around and realized we were fine,
Speaker 6: no pain, all our limbs still on. And we look
Speaker 6: over at the kitchen and it's evident that the oven
Speaker 6: in the restaurant's kitchen has.
Speaker 4: Exploded and the doors have flown off.
Speaker 6: And I thought, all right, I'm fine, but someone's dead
Speaker 6: in the kitchen.
Speaker 4: That was my next fear.
Speaker 6: Was not for myself, because by this point it was
Speaker 6: clear that I was fine, and my friend was fine,
Speaker 6: and everyone else around us was fine. But I thought
Speaker 6: someone must be dead in the kitchen because it was
Speaker 6: an enormous explosion that's caused damage to the restaurant, and
Speaker 6: the doors have flown off, and we were nearly knocked
Speaker 6: up our seats and so on.
Speaker 4: Well, no one was, as it happened.
Speaker 6: The chef who had been operating the oven had walked
Speaker 6: out of the kitchen on the other side just before
Speaker 6: this happened, so he was fine. The others in the
Speaker 6: kitchen were too far away from the oven to have
Speaker 6: been hit by anything. But it was just the most
Speaker 6: bizarre thing that has happened to me in a long time,
Speaker 6: and it really does make you realize.
Speaker 4: How random life can be.
Speaker 6: I mean, we didn't go to that restaurant because it's
Speaker 6: some sort of tradition. We don't go there every week.
Speaker 6: I just said, you want to have lunch, he said,
Speaker 6: When I said twelve, he said sure. I said, you know,
Speaker 6: I won't mention it. I don't want to get them
Speaker 6: in the bad books. But I said, what about there,
Speaker 6: and he said, sure, why not? I mean, I could
Speaker 6: have picked any other restaurant off the top of my head.
Speaker 6: There's a bunch of them, and it would just happened
Speaker 6: to be that when it just happened to me after
Speaker 6: we sat down, had things been slightly different, I suppose
Speaker 6: I could be telling this story now from the hospital.
Speaker 4: But really, apparently what had.
Speaker 6: Happened was that the oven was new, it had only
Speaker 6: just been installed, and when it had been installed, something
Speaker 6: evidently had gone wrong in the installation process. Someone had
Speaker 6: screwed up, and they'd been a build up of gas,
Speaker 6: which then.
Speaker 2: I was gonna blame it on your soufle you ordered try.
Speaker 6: But my goodness me, what a bizarre experience. I still
Speaker 6: can't believe it happened. I woke up this morning, I thought, did.
Speaker 4: I dream that? But no, I didn't.
Speaker 5: I hope they comped your desserts. At least they didn't.
Speaker 6: You know, that's a weird thing, is I was waiting
Speaker 6: for them to say, obviously, this glass of wine is
Speaker 6: on us, because you know we killed you right.
Speaker 5: Well, we're glad you survived.
Speaker 1: And gas explosions do not usually end well, and this
Speaker 1: one seems to have done so so good. We can
Speaker 1: take that one off. You can look over your shoulder
Speaker 1: for a little while, wondering if actually the gods are
Speaker 1: throwing bolts down at you and missing. But but but
Speaker 1: we hope not.
Speaker 6: I tell you a twenty second story just before you start.
Speaker 6: Of course, absolutely killed me recently. So I was reading
Speaker 6: this book about the Second World War, and when bombs
Speaker 6: started falling on London, it was clear that they had
Speaker 6: come from airplanes, and so the public was aware of
Speaker 6: what was going on. But when the Germans started developing
Speaker 6: their rockets, you couldn't see or hear them until the
Speaker 6: last minute, and the British found out what was happening,
Speaker 6: but they didn't want the Germans to know that they
Speaker 6: knew what was happening, and so they weren't allowed to
Speaker 6: acknowledge or report on it. And so the British government's
Speaker 6: line when the V ones and V two started hitting
Speaker 6: London was their gas maines. It's a gas explosion. And
Speaker 6: so the British public was much smarter than this. Started
Speaker 6: Riley describing the explosions to each other as flying gas maines.
Speaker 1: Oh that's tremendous. Ah, Yes, that indomitable British spirit, the
Speaker 1: stiff upper lip in the face of et cetera. Well,
Speaker 1: that's grand. Let us cast ourize about the country. We
Speaker 1: will be talking about the killer of the Bryant of
Speaker 1: the United Healthcare CEO a little bit later, and things
Speaker 1: in New York. Penny wise. One of the things that
Speaker 1: caught my eye this morning was Jim Garritty at National
Speaker 1: Review gave a tweet thread which was also a piece
Speaker 1: that he wrote for n R, detailing the number of
Speaker 1: the exact crimes of the people who have been pardoned
Speaker 1: by the administration. Now, we always expect that, you know,
Speaker 1: when you look at these and like, oh, I already
Speaker 1: pardon that guy? Whoa, Yeah, that wouldn't that doesn't sound fair,
Speaker 1: We kind of shrug and we're accustomed to it. But
Speaker 1: it does seem like a remarkable list of financial fraunsters.
Speaker 1: And for an administration and a party that is supposedly
Speaker 1: on behalf of the little people against those elites who
Speaker 1: extract money from the system becauld satisfy their raw capitalistic urges,
Speaker 1: it's quite quite the rundown. Stephen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I think what's going on here, and
Speaker 3: I think we'll want to scrutinize the list closely see
Speaker 3: if Jim Biden and other members of the family or
Speaker 3: snuck in under a pseudonym or something, right, I mean,
Speaker 3: it doesn't seem that maybe it's preparing the ground for
Speaker 3: those self serving pardons that he wants to give. But
Speaker 3: it also makes my mind run back to those flurry
Speaker 3: of pardons that Bill Clinton gave on his last day
Speaker 3: in office, which we remember Mark Rich, you know, had
Speaker 3: what he debated, one hundred million dollars in taxes or something,
Speaker 3: and lots and lots of other people, including as I recall,
Speaker 3: one person who had been jailed whose crime I don't
Speaker 3: know why it's a federal crime was rolling back automobile odometers.
Speaker 3: How did that guy qualify for a pardon? Well, I
Speaker 3: think the psychological explanation then was this was Clinton stabbing
Speaker 3: back at the prosecutorial mindset that led to Ken's starr
Speaker 3: and this was just him lashing out and latching back
Speaker 3: and wanting to poke an eye in the law enforcement.
Speaker 3: So here's Biden who's looking to top Clinton's perfidy and
Speaker 3: abuse of the pardon power. I mean, the one that
Speaker 3: jumps out of me is the lady in Illinois who
Speaker 3: embezzled fifty three million dollars from the city of Dixon.
Speaker 3: Not a major I don't know if it's a major
Speaker 3: city or not in Illinois. It's not Chicago. But that's
Speaker 3: a lot of money. And this is a fairly recent conviction,
Speaker 3: I think, And he's pardoned this person, and I, you know,
Speaker 3: I bat one to me, is where what's the case
Speaker 3: for leniency there?
Speaker 5: I can't.
Speaker 3: I have a hard time making one out except that
Speaker 3: this is Biden again trying to like emulate Bill Clinton.
Speaker 3: And maybe it's part of Biden's psychology of still being
Speaker 3: mad that he was pushed out of the the re election.
Speaker 5: Campaign that assumes that he's behind these things at all.
Speaker 1: Charles, do you think, so.
Speaker 4: Did she give the money to the Democrats?
Speaker 5: I did not, good question.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: And Charles, you believe that actually the president was responsible
Speaker 1: for these himselves, drawing up the name after careful consultation
Speaker 1: and deep thought as he walked around the office with
Speaker 1: his hands clasped behind his bed, weighing this gate back,
Speaker 1: weighing the scales of justice, and so.
Speaker 4: Well, I think you mean ran around the office during
Speaker 4: one on push ups and play.
Speaker 1: You're right, you're right, we forget that he had that
Speaker 1: remarkable spirit and so yeah, no, probably a Stafford. But again,
Speaker 1: you just wonder exactly what's going on behind. Three of them,
Speaker 1: from what I understand, were Chinese spies whose arrangement had
Speaker 1: been whose swap had been worked out before. Now the
Speaker 1: whole spying thing does bring to mind something else that's
Speaker 1: going on in New Jersey, where the government is telling
Speaker 1: us now that they appear to be lawful manned aircraft
Speaker 1: to these drawings, but we really can't tell you much
Speaker 1: more about that, my favorite being, of course, that they're
Speaker 1: all coming from an Iranian ship offshore or disappearing into
Speaker 1: a submerged Iranian base or some nonsense like that, or
Speaker 1: that they're from other planets, or that they are a
Speaker 1: manifestation of American technology that is light years beyond what
Speaker 1: we can imagine and manifest itself as four D plasma bile.
Speaker 1: I don't know what to think. I don't know what
Speaker 1: to think. So let me ask you, guys, what do
Speaker 1: you think is going on?
Speaker 2: I have no idea.
Speaker 3: Pardon me, wants to think if you're going to do
Speaker 3: tinfoil had things, it's the latest products of area fifty one,
Speaker 3: or it turned out that that famous Orson Wells broadcast
Speaker 3: from nineteen thirty eight was a documentary.
Speaker 2: It was just ahead of its time. They were now
Speaker 2: getting the martial invasion.
Speaker 5: I don't know. I think we.
Speaker 3: I mean, you've probably seen some pictures and accounts of this.
Speaker 3: You know it's sports stadiums now security is equipped with
Speaker 3: these Essentially, I'm going to say there's something like, you know,
Speaker 3: electromagnetic pulse guns or something to shoot down or capture
Speaker 3: drones and bring them to the ground, because you don't
Speaker 3: want drones flying around a sports stadium when you don't
Speaker 3: know what they are. And so I don't understand why
Speaker 3: somebody isn't bringing down these drones in New Jersey, which
Speaker 3: makes me think that maybe it's our guys testing these
Speaker 3: drones out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if we let it out that those things were
Speaker 1: full of copper, there would be guys, there would be
Speaker 1: tweakers out there bringing those things down in a halo
Speaker 1: of ar fifteen fire. Charles, what do you think is
Speaker 1: going on?
Speaker 6: I've been a little skeptical overall because years upon years
Speaker 6: of supposed UFO sightings have brought us only very grainy photographs.
Speaker 6: But I just saw that. The governor, former governor of Maryland,
Speaker 6: Larry Hogan, tweeted out that he's seen these things and
Speaker 6: he's alarmed by it and he's angry with the federal government. Now,
Speaker 6: Larry Hogan is on the opposite end of the spectrum
Speaker 6: of a conspiracy theorist of somebody who is excitable. He
Speaker 6: is probably somewhat of a skeptic like myself. I mean,
Speaker 6: I just want to be clear. I'm not a Larry
Speaker 6: Hogan Conservative, but that's my point is that he is
Speaker 6: not the sort of person you would expect to come
Speaker 6: out and say I saw it, and yet he just did.
Speaker 6: So there's clearly something going on. I've thought up until
Speaker 6: now that maybe these were just refracted light or planes,
Speaker 6: because the videos are all sped up.
Speaker 4: I don't know, James, it's beginning to make.
Speaker 5: One weather balloons.
Speaker 1: Well, as I said to my wife the other day
Speaker 1: as I was sculpting Devil's Tower out of mashed potatoes,
Speaker 1: it does not.
Speaker 5: I mean, the least likely.
Speaker 1: Thing is that this is the beginning of some sort
Speaker 1: of revelatory episode and that we have been we have
Speaker 1: been groomed and massaged for the last two years with
Speaker 1: stories of UAPs and tic TACs and verified photographs from
Speaker 1: navy flyers showing these things traveling at absurd velocity and
Speaker 1: doing things that physics ought not to let them do.
Speaker 1: There it's been the dribs and the drabs and the
Speaker 1: drabs and the dribs and the drip, drip drip of
Speaker 1: all this stuff, which says with the government practically saying, yeah,
Speaker 1: the real we don't know what they are, but they're
Speaker 1: not ours, not a foreign power to know if they're
Speaker 1: from Dunnald, you know, we're stomped, frankly, and then you
Speaker 1: will have somebody come back and walk that back, and
Speaker 1: then you will have.
Speaker 5: The usual whistleblowers.
Speaker 1: Believe me, if you're if you spend any time in
Speaker 1: the subreddits that are devoted to these things, you will
Speaker 1: find that the the the chattering ecosystem of people who
Speaker 1: who swear that they've been on the inside and they
Speaker 1: know what's going on and have been releasing all this information.
Speaker 5: Is extraordinary, and.
Speaker 1: Within this sphere exists nonsense upon nonsense that actually we're
Speaker 1: finally seeing the manifestation of the reptilian race that lives
Speaker 1: beneath the earth, that is coming up to your work
Speaker 1: it's a while to the people who are just no,
Speaker 1: we have the faintest idea, to the Tucker Carlson types
Speaker 1: who are saying, actually, actually they're demons.
Speaker 5: But we have had so much rapid change.
Speaker 1: In this in the last two or three years that
Speaker 1: it would seem that we're a little bit more psychologically
Speaker 1: ready to say, yeah, they are UFOs, they're from another planet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: non human intelligence. But that I guess that's all we know.
Speaker 1: Guess we're not alone. Let's move along. What's on what's
Speaker 1: on Netflix?
Speaker 3: Oh but look, you know, you know what happened James,
Speaker 3: is that the first time the government comes out and
Speaker 3: says that the subreddits or another group of them will
Speaker 3: come out and say, ah, this is just a distraction
Speaker 3: by the government so they can really unfold what they're really.
Speaker 2: Going to do, which is the invasion of Siria or something.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's all a distraction, but it's weird. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's like we're finally being told that yes, it's real,
Speaker 1: there are aliens, but it's it somehow has the public
Speaker 1: profile of an Apple television show. I mean in that
Speaker 1: it's it's out, it's out there, but it's not. It's
Speaker 1: not top of the news. So I mean in Close
Speaker 1: Encounters of the Third Kind, which is a wonderful movie
Speaker 1: back in the and I think kicked off the whole.
Speaker 1: You don't want they're on our side. They're great, right,
Speaker 1: they got they smile, they bring our lost airman back.
Speaker 4: You know, they're they're.
Speaker 5: Really interesting dudes, and musical too. We can jam with them.
Speaker 5: It led a whole sort of.
Speaker 1: You know, we're going to get along. It's gonna be nice,
Speaker 1: it's going to be good. And I think that this
Speaker 1: sort of doesn't feel like that at all.
Speaker 2: You know, it's more aliens for Trump to deport.
Speaker 6: I was actually going to say something else about Trump,
Speaker 6: which is, if you were writing American history, the aliens
Speaker 6: would have course shot while Donald Trump was president. That
Speaker 6: would be inevitable, right, There's no other president that you
Speaker 6: would want to be in office other than Donald Trump.
Speaker 4: If the aliens are coming down.
Speaker 1: Right, well, I want the little Grays who were about
Speaker 1: three and a half feet tall, to be standing there
Speaker 1: while it gives them that big downward mechron handshake, you know,
Speaker 1: that a big thrusting.
Speaker 6: We were to find out whether Ronald Reagan was right
Speaker 6: when he said in the eighties. If Aliens came down,
Speaker 6: we would soon discover that we had no differences anymore
Speaker 6: in all of our politics. Was a contrivance, which, while
Speaker 6: I love Reagan, I've always thought was nonsense. But we
Speaker 6: would get to find out whether that was true or not.
Speaker 5: Well, it depends.
Speaker 1: You remember Bill Pullman at the end of Independence Day
Speaker 1: when he declared it to be a global universal human holiday.
Speaker 2: That we would have.
Speaker 6: Won reelection though, and he would have done so easily
Speaker 6: because he's obviously a Republican because he hates the environment.
Speaker 4: Right, he would not only have been.
Speaker 6: The guy who destroyed the Aliens, but most of the
Speaker 6: West and East coasts were destroyed.
Speaker 4: His electoral College victory could have been perfect.
Speaker 5: Well, he did nuke Texas. I think he did.
Speaker 6: James Houston right, so, which I endorse. FYI is a
Speaker 6: hatred of the Texans and the Astros.
Speaker 4: Look, I'm just saying that if we knewked, if we knuked.
Speaker 6: Houston, the Houston Astros and the Houston Texans would no
Speaker 6: longer exist, which would mean that the Yankees would probably
Speaker 6: have a couple more World Series. This happened back in
Speaker 6: ninety six and the Jacksonville Jaguars would have won the
Speaker 6: AFC South three or four more times.
Speaker 4: So I'm just I'm just looking at the upside.
Speaker 1: James, Well, that's good, you know. Speaking as a Vikings
Speaker 1: fan here, I find absolutely no need to drawn my
Speaker 1: soros when I watch my team perform on Like some of.
Speaker 4: You know, I deserve this because I But.
Speaker 1: If I and so I don't drown my sorrows, I
Speaker 1: may have a tiple to elevate them as we as
Speaker 1: we slap high fives and to proclaim our victorious season
Speaker 1: of wonder. But let me tell you something, though, I
Speaker 1: got a Monday night coming up game.
Speaker 5: Next week, and be a little careful. You gotta be
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Speaker 5: far away to wake up.
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Speaker 1: we're going to talk to no one a second about
Speaker 1: the shooting of the CEO. But I want to get
Speaker 1: you guys, see what your take on it is. I'm
Speaker 1: of the position that if somebody says murderer is bad butt,
Speaker 1: than everything that they say before the butt, the fulk
Speaker 1: crumb of the butt in their argument, should be disregarded
Speaker 1: the people who are saying or at least we're having
Speaker 1: a conversation about this. No, we should be having a
Speaker 1: conversation about people who kill people in streets and that's
Speaker 1: the only conversation we should be having. Or as some
Speaker 1: people are pointing out, well look the anesthesiologists, you know,
Speaker 1: they came to them right away. This is this is
Speaker 1: proof the direct action works.
Speaker 4: No. No.
Speaker 1: Most interesting thing that I heard somebody say was going
Speaker 1: back to a Slate Star Codex blog post a long
Speaker 1: time ago about how there used to be the Red
Speaker 1: tribe and the Blue tribe and now we have the
Speaker 1: rise of the Gray tribe. Which are these sort of
Speaker 1: twenty something thirty something tech guys who are sort of
Speaker 1: quasi libertarian, ethical altruists into all kinds of sort of
Speaker 1: spiritualistical stuff, but not really post religion post and that
Speaker 1: this guy seems to fit that profile, which is one
Speaker 1: of the reasons that the online people, the two online people,
Speaker 1: the people from teapot or that part of Twitter, seems
Speaker 1: to have embraced him as their champion.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I'd say two or three things about him.
Speaker 3: One is I was fascinated and remain fascinated with the
Speaker 3: fact that he's another person who seems fascinated by the
Speaker 3: unibomber and by some of these very radical ideas, some
Speaker 3: of which he learned at Penn. The dead giveaway is
Speaker 3: when he screamed out about how the American people are
Speaker 3: being fooled because what's happening doesn't live up to our
Speaker 3: lived experience. That's a college campus phrase, right, I suppose
Speaker 3: one other kind of experience right. On the other hand,
Speaker 3: but also it emerges that he's intellectually unstable, right, I mean,
Speaker 3: he apparently was a fan of Jordan Peterson for a while,
Speaker 3: also Tucker Carlson, but then swings over to the unibomber
Speaker 3: and now looks pretty leftist. I think it's also possible
Speaker 3: that he's schizophrenic, and maybe his back surgery and pain
Speaker 3: contributes to that. But you know, oftentimes, as they say
Speaker 3: in medicine, schizophrenia presents a young man in their mid twenties,
Speaker 3: and so he may just be simply nuts. And it
Speaker 3: took a political form, so I think we need to
Speaker 3: wait and see on all that. Maybe we'll never know
Speaker 3: who knows what defense he's going to give and so forth.
Speaker 3: The manifesto is actually pretty short and kind of a
Speaker 3: cliche as near as I can tell, because we don't
Speaker 3: have the whole thing, but it's apparently quite short. I
Speaker 3: think more important is the first thing you mentioned, James,
Speaker 3: which is the reaction of the left to run to
Speaker 3: his defense and make him a folk hero. And as
Speaker 3: you say, you know, violence is never justified, but then
Speaker 3: all the rest of what Elizabeth Warren and other people
Speaker 3: in the lefty media saying is but actually it's totally justified.
Speaker 2: I mean, it totally negates what they said before. And
Speaker 2: this is not new.
Speaker 3: This goes back to I think when the left began
Speaker 3: to lose its mind and mainstream liberals losing their mind
Speaker 3: in the sixties justifying the rioters.
Speaker 2: Siding with criminals, as we know, and this continues to
Speaker 2: this day.
Speaker 3: So this is just the latest and a long and
Speaker 3: I think you lamentable story of the left and America,
Speaker 3: who seems to have not learned very much from the
Speaker 3: election returns.
Speaker 1: Well, you can't make an omelet without purging one hundred
Speaker 1: thousand chickens. Charles, where do you come down on this?
Speaker 6: I think that if you in any way qualify your
Speaker 6: view of first degree murder by examining the politics of
Speaker 6: the murderer, then you've essentially opted out of society. What
Speaker 6: is society, both at the social level and at the
Speaker 6: political level. It's an agreement that, in the absence of
Speaker 6: extreme circumstances such as the need for self defense, we
Speaker 6: will not kill each other over our disagreements, and that
Speaker 6: manifests in a bunch of ways. One of the most
Speaker 6: famous is religious toleration, because for years, decades, centuries in
Speaker 6: Europe people kill each other all the time over their religions.
Speaker 6: But it also manifests itself in day to day politics,
Speaker 6: quotidian politics, of which the nature of our health system
Speaker 6: is one. You just cannot decide that you are more
Speaker 6: informed or important than other people, and therefore you have
Speaker 6: the right to kill them. And if you read the
Speaker 6: short manifesto that he put out, that's what he did.
Speaker 6: That's what that last couple of sentences imply. Now there
Speaker 6: is a caveat in there which makes him look like
Speaker 6: an absolute crank, which he is a coward, where he says,
Speaker 6: I don't actually know too much about this topic. I'm
Speaker 6: not the right guy to make this argument. Well, look,
Speaker 6: there are many aspects to my conservatism, James, but one
Speaker 6: of them is that if I don't know too much
Speaker 6: about a topic and I think other people might be
Speaker 6: better off making the argument, I'm not going to shoot
Speaker 6: someone over it. That's a pretty solid precept. Well, I
Speaker 6: go to work with every single day, So you know,
Speaker 6: he should have stopped there. He also should have extrapolated
Speaker 6: out from that and realized that even if he were
Speaker 6: the world's greatest expert on the topic, no one came
Speaker 6: near to him. He was universally acknowledged to be a
Speaker 6: genius on the topic. He still doesn't get more of
Speaker 6: a vote in whether or not a given person lives
Speaker 6: or dies than anyone else, and I just find the
Speaker 6: Elizabeth Warren AOC approach on this to be revolting and
Speaker 6: to be a good example of why they should never
Speaker 6: ever be trusted with power. Last thing, quickly, if I
Speaker 6: were then, and I were a member of Congress in
Speaker 6: AOC's case and in the case of Elizabeth Warren, a senator,
Speaker 6: and I wanted the government to take over healthcare, I
Speaker 6: would not be establishing the principle that if an institution
Speaker 6: denies you care that you think you deserve, you can
Speaker 6: kill them. Because in a single payer system, who do
Speaker 6: you think it's going to be making the rationing decisions.
Speaker 6: It's going to be AOC and Elizabeth Warren. It's nuts,
Speaker 6: It's it's actually beyond even from a purely self interested,
Speaker 6: totally amral perspective, it is beyond bizarre to me that
Speaker 6: that's the idea they've decided to put into the bloodstream,
Speaker 6: just as they want to get rid of the Brian
Speaker 6: Thompson's and say, hey, you know who's in charge of
Speaker 6: your health care?
Speaker 4: It's me, Elizabeth Warren.
Speaker 1: I know. Well, that's because buttressing this seems to be
Speaker 1: this notion of what I call cornucopianism, where once the
Speaker 1: government takes it over thanks to modern my ary theory
Speaker 1: and the printing press going burr and the rest of it.
Speaker 1: There won't be any denial and there won't be any
Speaker 1: rationing because everything will be provided because the government can
Speaker 1: provide all. The government has the means and the resources
Speaker 1: and the will to provide all to all, and there
Speaker 1: will be no bad outcomes. That it's people like the
Speaker 1: United Healthcare that stand in the way of cornucopianism and
Speaker 1: its wonderful benefits. The second thing that I would say
Speaker 1: is to build on what you've said and what.
Speaker 5: I said before, is that it's very, very specific.
Speaker 1: The kind of political murder that they like. If you
Speaker 1: had a man whose second cousin's niece was killed by
Speaker 1: an illegal immigrant right in New Jersey, and the mayor
Speaker 1: of that town in New Jersey had said, we are
Speaker 1: not going to cooperate with ice. We are a sanction
Speaker 1: sanctuary town, and this guy decided to shoot the deputy
Speaker 1: mayor to avenge the death of his relative at the
Speaker 1: hands of an illegal immigrant, we would not be talking
Speaker 1: about having the necessity of having a conversation about illegal immigration.
Speaker 1: We would be talking about anything. But so when they
Speaker 1: selectively do it like this. You're right, Charlie. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's madness for them to.
Speaker 5: Say, we're going to be in charge of your healthcare.
Speaker 1: And by the way, it's perfectly fine to shoot people
Speaker 1: who don't give you everything that you want.
Speaker 5: But it's also.
Speaker 1: It's also a matter of selective judgment, and.
Speaker 5: It's it's it's it's it's.
Speaker 1: Poisonous on every single possible level.
Speaker 5: I suppose it's.
Speaker 1: Also inevitable in this day and age for online media
Speaker 1: to focus on somebody who happened to have a, you know,
Speaker 1: a toothy smile and go with that. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: it's the start off, it's the you know, it's the
Speaker 1: I mean the guy where he's smiling and looking and
Speaker 1: looking up and I'm thinking somebody's going to do a
Speaker 1: Chay picture that, somebody's gonna do a Chay T shirt.
Speaker 1: It's going to put him in black ink on a
Speaker 1: red shirt and he'll be the next emblem for revolution
Speaker 1: and enlightenment.
Speaker 2: They're already free Luigi T shirts you can find online.
Speaker 3: He's gonna supplant Mouma. I remember that guy locked up
Speaker 3: from here in Philadelphia. There's one other thing that so
Speaker 3: far only a couple of people have commented on Alissa
Speaker 3: Finley at the Wall Street Journal is wait a second,
Speaker 3: I thought Obamacare fixed all this, right. We were told
Speaker 3: it was going to make health care more affordable. It's
Speaker 3: in the name of the act. And it didn't. And
Speaker 3: you know, I actually the other day went and looked
Speaker 3: at because I'm a data geek, and I looked at
Speaker 3: the data series the longitudinal trends of healthcare costs, and
Speaker 3: you can look at the slope of the line before
Speaker 3: Obamacare and after Obamacare, and it's continuous.
Speaker 1: See, didn't we lose him?
Speaker 4: We did?
Speaker 1: We did? Okay, Well, Stephen has apparently suffered what we
Speaker 1: hoped to be. Oh, I'm getting some news here. This
Speaker 1: is just coming in from California. There was a restaurant explosion.
Speaker 4: And both by a drone.
Speaker 5: That was by.
Speaker 1: Drone, and that brings everything all together. So Stephen, we
Speaker 1: hope he's okay.
Speaker 2: I think I'm back? Am I back? You are?
Speaker 1: We thought it was a restaurant explosion.
Speaker 3: No, go on, Well, I don't know where it cut off.
Speaker 3: All I was saying was Obamacare is supposed to solve
Speaker 3: all this. It turns out if you look at the
Speaker 3: slope of the cost of health care before and after Obamacare.
Speaker 3: It made no difference whatsoever to healthcare inflation. And so
Speaker 3: we're still just as unhappy with our healthcare, maybe more
Speaker 3: so because Obamacare made it worse and less comprehensible.
Speaker 2: So there we go.
Speaker 1: You're saying, we haven't bent the curve.
Speaker 2: Nope.
Speaker 5: Hmm odd to that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, some people say no, no, no, Obamacare was
Speaker 1: set up to fail. That was the ingenious thing about
Speaker 1: It was set up to fail so that the government
Speaker 1: would come in and take over that. And I don't
Speaker 1: think that's the case. I don't think these guys are
Speaker 1: ever that Macavilion, are that smarter the rest of it.
Speaker 1: I mean, do you do you do you think that
Speaker 1: they are sitting there steepling their fingers and saying, wahaha,
Speaker 1: we're going to cloud pivot this baby. I don't give
Speaker 1: them that much credit. I don't think they're that smart,
Speaker 1: that capable, or that force or have that much foresight.
Speaker 3: Well there is a subtext to that, though, James h
Speaker 3: partly get your you can say, camel's nose in the tent.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: At least if we exert some control, you can then
Speaker 3: buy degrees regulate it more and more in.
Speaker 2: The way we central planners want.
Speaker 3: The other thing, though that's still not widely perceived, is
Speaker 3: going all the way back to the failure of Hillary
Speaker 3: Care in nineteen ninety four. A part of the deal
Speaker 3: was always going to be you, private health insurance people,
Speaker 3: we want you to do cost containment and we want
Speaker 3: you to take the heat, and we'll kind of piggyback
Speaker 3: along with Medicare and Medicaid and the.
Speaker 2: Government provided services.
Speaker 3: Oh, by the way, we're going to mandate that all
Speaker 3: health insurance must cover you know, everything from manicures to know,
Speaker 3: the counseling services, and that runs the cost up higher
Speaker 3: than it needs to be for basic health care needs.
Speaker 3: So that are talking point. You hear sometimes as well, Gosh,
Speaker 3: Medicare only has a one percent overhead and you know
Speaker 3: management cost, and private health insurance is like twenty five
Speaker 3: thirty percent. Now, I think those numbers are bogused. I
Speaker 3: think it's apples and oranges. But let's note that Medicare
Speaker 3: and Medicaid now have it's estimated two hundred billion dollars
Speaker 3: a year in fraud. So it's easy to have a
Speaker 3: one percent overhead if you're willing to tolerate that level
Speaker 3: of fraud, and if private health insurance tolerted that, you
Speaker 3: can imagine what employer based healthcare would cost. It would
Speaker 3: be even worse than it is today. So it's a
Speaker 3: gone awful mess, and all the interventions of the of
Speaker 3: the government just make it worse and worse.
Speaker 6: The overhead figure is also really unfair because if you're
Speaker 6: a private health insurer, you have to do all of
Speaker 6: the aspects of being a health insurer on your own.
Speaker 6: You have to do collections, you have to do bureaucracy,
Speaker 6: you have to do the actuarial stuff. Whereas with the
Speaker 6: federal systems, both Medicare and Medicaid, well, they get their
Speaker 6: collections done by the IRS, and they get their actuarial
Speaker 6: tables done by various government institutions that exist to do that,
Speaker 6: and they get all of their pr and their advertising
Speaker 6: and their customer interactions done by other federal agencies.
Speaker 4: And so you never see those added in.
Speaker 6: What they do is they say, well, how much do
Speaker 6: you spend within the medicaid institution on overheads?
Speaker 4: I just had one more.
Speaker 6: Quick thought, and I guess this is probably here at
Speaker 6: a moment on whether or not Obamacare was set up
Speaker 6: to fail. I don't believe that it was set up
Speaker 6: to fail in the sense that James asked about it,
Speaker 6: which is that it was supposed to be a catastrophe
Speaker 6: that led to single Pair. The public would clamor for
Speaker 6: single Pair once they saw that this didn't work. What
Speaker 6: I do think is that most of the promises that
Speaker 6: were made that it would bend the cost curve, that
Speaker 6: you would be able to keep your doctor and you'd
Speaker 6: be able to keep your plan, were lies that they
Speaker 6: knew were lies. And the reason that I think that
Speaker 6: is that I watched the difference in the output of
Speaker 6: Obamacare's apologists from before and after it was instituted. Before
Speaker 6: it was instituted, the asraclines of the world said it's
Speaker 6: going to do all of the things that but Barack
Speaker 6: Obama has said that.
Speaker 4: It will do.
Speaker 6: About one minute after it was completely implemented, in twenty fourteen,
Speaker 6: Ezra Client, Mattaglesias and other started writing these pieces that said, well,
Speaker 6: of course, you can't bring millions of people into this
Speaker 6: system without getting rid of health plans and getting rid
Speaker 6: of people's doctors and so on.
Speaker 4: Of course, that's.
Speaker 6: An obvious economic consequence. To me that what This was, therefore,
Speaker 6: was a classic progressive moral play where they were just
Speaker 6: so offended by the idea that some people didn't have
Speaker 6: health insurance that they were willing to do anything to
Speaker 6: change it. And so when they started getting pushed back
Speaker 6: from economists and other people who knew what they're talking about, saying,
Speaker 6: you know, this is going to cause X, Y and Z,
Speaker 6: they realized that would be politically toxic, so they just.
Speaker 4: Went, no, it won't.
Speaker 6: Then after it had been implemented, they said, yes, of
Speaker 6: course it will do all those things, but we now
Speaker 6: have it. We don't, but we now have universal healthcare,
Speaker 6: We now have more people who are insured, we now
Speaker 6: have a ban on blocking pre existing conditions, and so on,
Speaker 6: because that's what they actually cared about all along. That's
Speaker 6: where I do think it was a game.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think even the PolitiFact, people
Speaker 3: who I normally don't hold in very high regard, rated
Speaker 3: Obama's claim that if you like your doctor, you can
Speaker 3: keep your doctor as the lie of the year. I
Speaker 3: think in twenty thirteen or twenty fourteen that gets conveniently
Speaker 3: forgotten and all this. You know, there's something I teach
Speaker 3: in classic students, is there was a sociologist twenty or
Speaker 3: thirty years ago, kind of forgotten, a guy named Peter Rossi,
Speaker 3: and he used to have what he called the Iron
Speaker 3: law of evaluation, and it's very short. The Iron law
Speaker 3: evaluation was the expected value of any net impact assessment
Speaker 3: of any large scale social program is zero. None of
Speaker 3: the stuff ever works. And Obamacare is one of the
Speaker 3: premier examples of Peter Rossi's Iron law.
Speaker 2: Therey listeners.
Speaker 3: You learn something from the academic world that you can
Speaker 3: use at a cocktail party.
Speaker 6: And one of the reasons that Obamaca has been less
Speaker 6: deleterious and was anticipated is that its footprint has been
Speaker 6: much smaller than was anticipated. I think I'm right in
Speaker 6: saying that that's a combination of changes that Republicans managed
Speaker 6: to make lost time they were in but also the
Speaker 6: way that it worked in practice market decisions that have
Speaker 6: been made. It actually didn't have quite the effect that
Speaker 6: it was supposed to. And so progressives will say, aha,
Speaker 6: you see what we need is more government involved. But
Speaker 6: I have a radical idea, Stude, and that is maybe
Speaker 6: we should go in the other direction for a change.
Speaker 4: Maybe we should try that for ten years to.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, Well, you know, people like to pull out
Speaker 1: the medical bill, the hospital bill they got when they
Speaker 1: were born. You know, I think my dad made my
Speaker 1: dad paid with a twenty you know right, change back.
Speaker 1: And I have absolutely no idea what it caused to
Speaker 1: have my daughter brought into this world, because I do
Speaker 1: all of these insulating and intermediary organizations and payments and
Speaker 1: the rest of it. But it was more than twenty
Speaker 1: bucks because she had to go into a little clear
Speaker 1: plastic box, hooked up the machines that went bing.
Speaker 5: So it was.
Speaker 1: It was expensive and intensive and required a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of technology that was not there when I came into
Speaker 1: this world. People probably wish that it hadn't been, so
Speaker 1: you never know. Well, having solved healthcare, let us move
Speaker 1: along to the deteriorating quality of New York.
Speaker 5: As we were discussing before.
Speaker 1: It's not just the shooting, of course of the guy
Speaker 1: on the street, which you know can happen frankly anywhere,
Speaker 1: but it is the subway system, the nature of our
Speaker 1: society when a humble street profile, a humble subway dancer can.
Speaker 2: Be murdered in cold blood by a man.
Speaker 1: Who was apparently stalking the trains looking for somebody to choke.
Speaker 1: Is the way this sort of is being shown and
Speaker 1: regarded in some quarters of Twitter by people who are
Speaker 1: not marginal figures, no, but you know, by actual politicians
Speaker 1: who are decrying the ways in which society failed the
Speaker 1: man who died, and we hear this an awful lot,
Speaker 1: that we've failed this it is on us that this
Speaker 1: fellow was homeless and on powerful THHC derivatives and was
Speaker 1: threatening people. That it was on us as if there
Speaker 1: was no attempt to ever intercede in his life, as
Speaker 1: if he hadn't been given shelter and treatment before and
Speaker 1: had walked away from it. And it brings you have
Speaker 1: to wonder at what point, I'm not saying, at what
Speaker 1: point do we just choke the guy, because that's not
Speaker 1: what I'm saying, But at what point do we have
Speaker 1: to sort of say done and dusted when it comes
Speaker 1: to our abligation to people who have repeatedly refused the
Speaker 1: help that has given them. Is this indeed our fault
Speaker 1: or is the actual fault that we should be talking
Speaker 1: about is the inability of the civic government in New
Speaker 1: York to maintain a safe environment in the subways in
Speaker 1: which people are not worried about maniacs striding up and down,
Speaker 1: waving their arms, making fist gestures, threatening to kill people
Speaker 1: and the rest of it. Does this happen on every
Speaker 1: subarate coin, No, no it doesn't. And as the people
Speaker 1: on Twitter have been saying, look, just keep your head down,
Speaker 1: be cautious. It's all part of living in a big city.
Speaker 1: Well it ought not to be. You know.
Speaker 6: This when pad with the murder of Brian Thompson is
Speaker 6: a good window into the soul of a particular sort
Speaker 6: of progressive They are extremely angry with Daniel Penny, they
Speaker 6: call them a vigilante and a murderer, and they are
Speaker 6: pleased with Luigi Mangiurni, they call him a hero.
Speaker 4: This is backwards. It would, of course.
Speaker 6: Be better if we had the resources to ensure that
Speaker 6: at no point ever in the United States was anyone
Speaker 6: not under the protection of a police officer. I don't
Speaker 6: mean that quite literally. That would be creepy and totalitarian.
Speaker 6: But if you could put a cop in every subway car,
Speaker 6: that would be great. But that's never going to happen.
Speaker 6: Even if New York were run sensibly, which it's not,
Speaker 6: that's never going to happen. You are always going to
Speaker 6: need some sort of volunteerism. Now that veering off into
Speaker 6: my favorite topic of the Second Amendment that is resumed
Speaker 6: by a great deal of our constitutional order, that there
Speaker 6: will be people who at some point will have to
Speaker 6: step up. And Daniel Penny did that. He did that
Speaker 6: when a guy was ranging around a subway car shouting
Speaker 6: someone's going to die. I'm going to kill someone, and
Speaker 6: he was put through the ringer for it. He was
Speaker 6: charged with second degree manslaughter and with a lesser charge
Speaker 6: that sounds as if it would have been a greater charge.
Speaker 4: And yeah, he got off.
Speaker 6: He was acquitted partly I think because the judge dismissed
Speaker 6: the first charge and thereby signaled to the jury that
Speaker 6: the case had fallen apart. And yes, it's good that
Speaker 6: he got off, and yes, jury systems work better than
Speaker 6: almost any other institution in our country.
Speaker 4: But that case should never have been brought.
Speaker 6: And it is a sign, I think that we have
Speaker 6: forgotten who is good and who is bad, what is
Speaker 6: deceptible and what is not, Where to blame and where
Speaker 6: to praise that Daniel Penny found himself for a year
Speaker 6: and a half facing the prosper aspect of spending a
Speaker 6: lot of his life in jail, and Luigi Mangianni, who
Speaker 6: has been arrested, it's not any indication that he's going
Speaker 6: to be left by the authorities, but has been celebrated
Speaker 6: in the champion or at the very least justified by
Speaker 6: the same people who are angry about that.
Speaker 4: It is a.
Speaker 6: Horrible indictment of an ideology that has really jumped the shock.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So my one observation, sorry, my one observation about it
Speaker 3: is to compare this case with Bernard Getz back in
Speaker 3: forty years ago, I think it was nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 3: and you remember he was the guy who shot he
Speaker 3: was carrying a gun shot for black assailants who were
Speaker 3: coming at him or threatening him with sharp and screwdrivers
Speaker 3: and so forth. At that time, the Manhattan DA was
Speaker 3: Robert Morgenthal, the legendary name in law enforcement, who asked
Speaker 3: a grand jury to indict Gets for manslaughter. The grand
Speaker 3: jury refused to indict Gets from manslaughter, and he ended
Speaker 3: up being charged only with a gun possession charge, and
Speaker 3: I think sort of something like six months in jail.
Speaker 3: Fast forward to now the decline and what let's to
Speaker 3: paraphrase Henry Adams, the decline or the progression from Robert
Speaker 3: Morgenthal to Alvin Bragg is enough to single handedly refute
Speaker 3: the theory of evolution. And it was, you know, here
Speaker 3: we are with a total clown and you know, progressive
Speaker 3: nut and a grand jury that did his bidding and
Speaker 3: did indict Penny, and it's Travis Staves shows you the
Speaker 3: decline of New York and law enforcement.
Speaker 2: I think in a nutshell comparing those two cases.
Speaker 1: They were comparing him to Bernie Getz as a matter
Speaker 1: of fact, Penny as though he said, you don't look
Speaker 1: so bad. Here's another and then choked on Tito Jackson
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Speaker 1: and now coming to us finally glad to have him.
Speaker 1: It's it's our old friend, Noah.
Speaker 4: Noah Rothman, thank you for nationalized.
Speaker 1: Well, of course we've we've just been sitting here saying nothing,
Speaker 1: staring at the ball, twiddling our fingers. Minor, I have
Speaker 1: to tell that everybody, everybody knows who you are, but
Speaker 1: just for the one or two or don't. Senior writer
Speaker 1: at National Review, the magazine. He's the author of the
Speaker 1: Rise of the New Puritans, Fighting Back against Progressives, war
Speaker 1: on fund This week alone, he's written about Syria, the
Speaker 1: annual Pennygames, the United Health CEO shooting, Biden and Lincoln,
Speaker 1: and the lunatic sympathizing with the shooter. All good reasons
Speaker 1: to go to are and subscribe. But since we've got
Speaker 1: a limited amount of time here, we haven't talked about Syria,
Speaker 1: and that escalated quickly and de escalated collapse. All of
Speaker 1: a sudden, this iron regime of Bathists disappeared like a
Speaker 1: cotton candy hosed down by uh, you know, a fire hose.
Speaker 1: And now we're looking at who is there in power
Speaker 1: and saying hmm, experience tells us this never goes well,
Speaker 1: but we're going to be oddly hopeful now for a
Speaker 1: while until proved otherwise. Tell us who is in charge,
Speaker 1: how much of Syria they really have, and what we
Speaker 1: might expect in the months to come.
Speaker 7: Well, all of those are actually kind of tough questions
Speaker 7: to answer because they changed from moment to moment. Insofar
Speaker 7: as that we have a faction that is in charge
Speaker 7: in Damascus. It is HTS, which is a Turkish back
Speaker 7: d Islamist group. It was Al Nusra, which is an
Speaker 7: al Qaida offshoot or at least a pledged fealty to
Speaker 7: al Qaida. All of eight years ago. There's been a
Speaker 7: bit of a schism there, and this organization flew under
Speaker 7: the radar save for individuals who are really hyper focused
Speaker 7: on this group. They've the individual in charge, al Jelani,
Speaker 7: as terrorist. He's got a ten million dollar bounty on
Speaker 7: his head from the FBI, and the organization is a
Speaker 7: foreign terrorist organization according to the State Department. But al
Speaker 7: Jelani had been operating out in the open for the
Speaker 7: better part of a decade, within or within close to
Speaker 7: operating range of US forces in a US theater of
Speaker 7: combat operations. He could have been got if they wanted
Speaker 7: him to be. I didn't, and that might have something
Speaker 7: to do with anchor as interests. Nevertheless, HTS is making
Speaker 7: a lot of pluralist noises about Syria's minorities. They're attracting
Speaker 7: foreign direct investment and opening up the economy in Syria,
Speaker 7: at least that's what the design is, to attract more
Speaker 7: investment and operate with more free market principles. All these
Speaker 7: are nice noises, and I think it would be wise
Speaker 7: for US to not necessarily discount them at face value,
Speaker 7: although not put too much stock into them either. At
Speaker 7: this early stage, the Biden administration is flirting with waiving
Speaker 7: the FTO designation. I think it's premature for that. As
Speaker 7: for how much of the country they control, it is
Speaker 7: roughly the territory that they took with very little resistance
Speaker 7: over the space of the last week, the cities of Aleppo, Hama, Homs,
Speaker 7: and Damascus.
Speaker 5: Roughly.
Speaker 7: Outside of that, there are a variety of other organizations
Speaker 7: that are in control of portions of Syria de rezor
Speaker 7: in the east where the United States has a footprint,
Speaker 7: so Kurdish backed rebels with thes are in charge of
Speaker 7: that portion of Syria they operate. They maintain a healthy
Speaker 7: supply of ISIS captives, about fifty thousand captives in their
Speaker 7: custody and SDS Kurds and Turkish backed forces have a
Speaker 7: very contentious relationship. The Kurdish forces are under attack from
Speaker 7: HTS and the US interests are at stake in that region,
Speaker 7: and they may be imperiled by HTS as hostilities, but
Speaker 7: we think al Jelani might be a little frustrated with that.
Speaker 7: He's trying to quell some of this unrest between these
Speaker 7: two organizations. And then there's a rebel group in the
Speaker 7: south that nobody knows about. They're just kind of a
Speaker 7: collection of rebels, all of whom have different interests. They're
Speaker 7: in control of the city of Dhara and others, which
Speaker 7: is the cradle of the revolution. Drew's other minorities are
Speaker 7: a part of this amalgamation of rebel groups, and we
Speaker 7: don't I don't really know much about them, not enough
Speaker 7: to say they have one cohesive philosophy, for example. So
Speaker 7: there's a lot of very competing, competing interests that aren't
Speaker 7: necessarily aligned. But these are the early day of the
Speaker 7: collapse of a monstrous regime, and jubulation is the sentiment
Speaker 7: across the board that will fade soon. But right now,
Speaker 7: all of these groups are organizing behind and flying the
Speaker 7: green three star rebel flag, and right now that is
Speaker 7: what that is. The you know, elation over the fall
Speaker 7: of a sad is the dominant emotion. What comes next
Speaker 7: is anybody's question.
Speaker 3: So, Noah, we seem to have been caught in the
Speaker 3: United States quite flat footed, which doesn't surprise me, with
Speaker 3: the caliber of our intelligence operation, or Anthony Blincoln saying
Speaker 3: the last two days, gosh, who knew the Taliban was
Speaker 3: going to take over Afghanistan?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 3: But I'm curious that this happened so suddenly that surely
Speaker 3: somebody must have known this was coming, you know, Israel,
Speaker 3: maybe they're distracted with other things. But how did this
Speaker 3: happen that nobody saw it coming? Or did I miss something?
Speaker 3: Did somebody know that this was about to happen?
Speaker 4: I don't think you missed well.
Speaker 7: I think probably Anchora and Turkey and the Innerwan government
Speaker 7: had some inclination of what was going on here. Say,
Speaker 7: this does seem to have caught a lot of Western
Speaker 7: intelligence agencies flat footed. Including Israel's intelligence agency, and there's
Speaker 7: no better actor in the region to be aware of
Speaker 7: these of what's coming. It's sort of betrays I mean,
Speaker 7: as a side note, it betrays the faulty thinking that
Speaker 7: is you often see from people on the left and
Speaker 7: the right who are genuinely predisposed to a paranoid inclination
Speaker 7: which ascribes all actions, all events to the secret machinations
Speaker 7: in Washington and in Western Capital. Is that we're the
Speaker 7: you know, the the machiavellian interest pulling the strings, and
Speaker 7: anything that occurs is our doing, or if it did
Speaker 7: not occur, it's also our doing. There's the agency of
Speaker 7: other foreign actors is totally stripped of them, right, And
Speaker 7: that's just not the case.
Speaker 3: I've been saying for years that I wish our CIA
Speaker 3: was half as capable as every Hollywood movie made round
Speaker 3: to be.
Speaker 2: Yet you know it's a joke. Well you did mention Turkey.
Speaker 2: Well at two things, you said that you know there's
Speaker 2: an atmosphere jubilation. Is that honestly true?
Speaker 1: Israe?
Speaker 3: I mean, I had the sense, but I'm not very
Speaker 3: fully informed that.
Speaker 2: Israel had something of a stable equilibrium with the SOD.
Speaker 2: I mean, like him and all the rest of that.
Speaker 3: But Israel seemed to have free reign to you know,
Speaker 3: assassinated Ronnie and officials in Damascus, the bomb sites in
Speaker 3: Syria from time to time, and Syria they didn't make
Speaker 3: noises about it, but never fought back the way Iran did.
Speaker 2: And so I don't know.
Speaker 3: I would think Israel be very nervous about the instability
Speaker 3: that's now going to happen in the country. And you've
Speaker 3: seen in the fact that Israel has been very active
Speaker 3: in bombing a lot of military capacity.
Speaker 1: I think rightly so. But they've been making Hey while
Speaker 1: the sun shines. They have destroyed the naval and air
Speaker 1: force capacities and the as well as the anti aircraft battery,
Speaker 1: and practically have a free ride to Iran except for
Speaker 1: the little patch they got to go through a rock.
Speaker 1: Is Israel acting in offensive defensiveness? No, they How would
Speaker 1: you characterize what they're doing.
Speaker 7: I wouldn't characterize Jerusalem's relationship with Assad's Damascus is necessarily stable, exactly,
Speaker 7: certainly not.
Speaker 4: Cooperative.
Speaker 7: Israel has come under attack from Syria throughout the course
Speaker 7: of Israel's existence, and Saudi Arabia or Saudi Arabia. Syria
Speaker 7: represented an unbroken corridor through which Iran filtered arms and
Speaker 7: munitions and funds to Hezbollah relatively unmolested. So the elimination
Speaker 7: of that corridor is advances Israel's interests. It's preferable, I think,
Speaker 7: to the status quo ante and as you say, the
Speaker 7: dozens and dozens hundreds at this point, strikes on Syrian positions,
Speaker 7: Syrian military positions and disabling its air force, putting its
Speaker 7: navy at the bottom of the port of Latakia and
Speaker 7: destroying a lot of vehicles is the sort of thing
Speaker 7: you would do if you were very afraid of what
Speaker 7: comes next. But it's also something they couldn't do. While
Speaker 7: the Asad regime was there and Russia maintained in air corridor,
Speaker 7: they had airspace that you could not violate in the
Speaker 7: United States abided by that as well. Israel occasionally would
Speaker 7: execute strikes at some serious risk because of the Assad's
Speaker 7: air batteries. The Iran provided air batteries and Russian provided
Speaker 7: air batteries were pretty sophisticated, and there was always a
Speaker 7: threat that if you were they were going in to
Speaker 7: execute one pinprick strike or the other, that it could
Speaker 7: be disastrous, But that threat has disappeared, and we're taking
Speaker 7: maximum advantage of it. To the United States, we've executed
Speaker 7: dozens of air strikes on ISIS positions that were being
Speaker 7: incubated by the Asad regime and supported and protected by
Speaker 7: Russian air support. Another myth that's been blown apart by
Speaker 7: the destruction of the Asad regime is one promulgated by
Speaker 7: Assads anti anti supporters and outright supporters who said, well,
Speaker 7: at least you know the Asad regime. There are a
Speaker 7: bunch of monsters, but at least they're killing terrorists. At
Speaker 7: least they're killing ISIS now. They weren't, they never were.
Speaker 7: The Asid regime incubated the the ISIS threat in thirteen,
Speaker 7: twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen. It bought oil from them, their
Speaker 7: own oil, purchased it. It managed to It turned a
Speaker 7: blind eye and de coordinated maneuvers with ISIS and certain
Speaker 7: points in order to preserve ISIS columns and turn their
Speaker 7: fire on SDS rebels and SDF rebels Syrian democratic forces
Speaker 7: and neutralize what was at the outset of the Syrian
Speaker 7: Civil War I modestly pro Western opposition. Now the pro
Speaker 7: Western opposition has been decimated. There's a lot of resistance
Speaker 7: to the idea that there ever was pro Western opposition,
Speaker 7: but compared to what exists today, yeah, it certainly looks
Speaker 7: pro Western. Both Russia and Assad and Iran managed to
Speaker 7: defeat those moderate elements and present the West with a
Speaker 7: Phata company on the ground and a dichotomy that didn't
Speaker 7: exist previously, but a binary one.
Speaker 4: What are you going to do.
Speaker 7: You're going to go with this monstrous secular regime or
Speaker 7: you're going to go with these monstrous is lomists who
Speaker 7: want to cut your heads off?
Speaker 4: And that prevailed.
Speaker 7: That was a really effective strategy on the part of
Speaker 7: Damascus and its apologists. But with the end of the
Speaker 7: regime comes the end of that illusion.
Speaker 6: I have a question that reflects my general simplicity in
Speaker 6: thinking on this topic. If you were God, no heaven forulfened,
Speaker 6: and you could determine whether or not this happened. In
Speaker 6: other words, you get to decide we keep the status
Speaker 6: cross it was the day before the regime foul.
Speaker 4: Or we deal with what we're dealing with now. Which
Speaker 4: one would you have chosen?
Speaker 7: Well, if I were a benevolent deity, I'd be able
Speaker 7: to foresee how this would unfold. And because I am not,
Speaker 7: I can't. I cannot predict the future and there are
Speaker 7: far too many variables for me and take.
Speaker 1: The theological explanation is that the benevolent deity denies himself
Speaker 1: for knowledge of the events deep.
Speaker 7: That is truly deep, and I'm going to go back
Speaker 7: to life.
Speaker 6: I asked that just because I've been asked by a
Speaker 6: few people who labor under the misapprehension that I am
Speaker 6: a great foreign policy mind.
Speaker 4: Is the good all bad? And I don't know how
Speaker 4: to answer it.
Speaker 7: Well, there's a lot of good. Let's say, let's start
Speaker 7: with the good. The good is this truly evil regime
Speaker 7: is gone. It's crimes against its own people, it's attacks
Speaker 7: on the United States, its efforts to kill Americans. The
Speaker 7: Syrian regime was responsible for funneling in a round backed
Speaker 7: insurgents into Iraq during the insurgency and with the mission
Speaker 7: of killing Americans successfully. Those people who served, like Tulsea Gabbard,
Speaker 7: understand that full well, and it's inexplicable to me that
Speaker 7: they would say that the side represents no threat to
Speaker 7: the United States because they were killing Americans. That's over
Speaker 7: the corridors that transmit weapons and material to hes Belah,
Speaker 7: such as it is now that it's been pretty well
Speaker 7: decimated by Israel, is going to be closed off most likely,
Speaker 7: and Israel is making efforts to do that by making
Speaker 7: incursions into southern portion and expanding this buffer zone around
Speaker 7: the goal On Heights to ensure that Lebanon the roots
Speaker 7: to Levinon are cut off.
Speaker 4: That's good.
Speaker 7: And an institution in Damascus that allowed Isis to survive
Speaker 7: and indeed thrive in the last decade is gone. All
Speaker 7: good stuff, So what comes next? That could be the
Speaker 7: bad part, but it's too early to say if it's
Speaker 7: the bad part. As I said, Jilani is making a
Speaker 7: lot of pleasant noises designed in my view, not to
Speaker 7: lull the West into a false sense of security, but
Speaker 7: to lull the West into a real sense of security.
Speaker 7: They want space, They want space to be able to
Speaker 7: consolidate power, to consolidate as much territory under the control
Speaker 7: of this regime as possible. In Syria is again very
Speaker 7: very carved up. There's a small corridor along the Lebanese
Speaker 7: border in the coast which is under the control of
Speaker 7: s HTS, but the rest of it is kind of
Speaker 7: lawless and under control of a variety of other factions
Speaker 7: that may or may not owe their allegiance to HTS.
Speaker 7: The worst case scenarios are kind of concerning the prospect
Speaker 7: of an Islamist regime arising in Damascus bent on projecting terror,
Speaker 7: exporting terror to the West is a live possibility, and
Speaker 7: that would be a real destabilizing and couldn't necessitate a
Speaker 7: multinational mission to put an end to that regime.
Speaker 4: We cannot.
Speaker 7: We operated under the delusion in the last half decade
Speaker 7: that some of the most foot over territory on the
Speaker 7: planet Earth is something we can afford to simply let
Speaker 7: go sit back, see what happens, and we would absorb
Speaker 7: no threats to us interests.
Speaker 2: We will so an other words, stay tuned for the sequel.
Speaker 3: Well, so we have time for one last question, Noah,
Speaker 3: and it's it's kind of a big one, so we
Speaker 3: can't do the full analysis of it, but you can
Speaker 3: almost do it, yes or no. We know that, for example,
Speaker 3: Putin is trying to reassemble the old Soviet Empire or
Speaker 3: maybe some older version of the Russian Empire. I'm wondering
Speaker 3: if Erduwan and Turkey have in their mind, the grandiose
Speaker 3: idea of reassembling the Ottoman Empire. Is that a ridiculous
Speaker 3: thing to speculate about.
Speaker 7: No, I mean yes, insofar as we're not going to
Speaker 7: see Ankor with you know, a vast declared control over
Speaker 7: the Levant, and you know, and and Iraq and Jordan.
Speaker 4: It's just that's that's off the table.
Speaker 7: But Turkey's Airedowan in particular, in Turkey's position has been
Speaker 7: diplomatically expanding pretty dramatically. It's a semi hostile power to
Speaker 7: the United States. It's not a friend. It's not exactly
Speaker 7: an enemy per se, but it is not it's not
Speaker 7: a it's not a reliable partner for the West, and
Speaker 7: we should be leery of its influence. It's Airedwan himself
Speaker 7: has been very friendly towards is Lamist elements, Sunni Islamist elements,
Speaker 7: so we should we should be skeptical of that. But
Speaker 7: the thing that you mentioned, they're going back to Czarist
Speaker 7: period and his tensions between U and Russia, is that
Speaker 7: these these two powers have a very uncomfortable relationship with
Speaker 7: each other. And we got very close to a very
Speaker 7: serious crisis in twenty fifteen when a Turkish fighter was
Speaker 7: shot out of the sky by Russian air defenses. Turkey
Speaker 7: went to the mat Turkey went to NATO and invoked
Speaker 7: Article four, which is the prerequisite, but the consultation phase
Speaker 7: before you get to Article five, which is the invocation
Speaker 7: of mutual defense provisions. It was a very dangerous period
Speaker 7: in Syria between between twenty fourteen twenty fifteen, when everybody
Speaker 7: was intervening in that conflict and everybody is shooting at
Speaker 7: each other's proxies and very close proximity in a live theater,
Speaker 7: that's really dangerous. That's the sort of thing we really
Speaker 7: wanted to avoid. In people like me who were saying
Speaker 7: we need to prevent that. We're getting very nervous about
Speaker 7: that sort of dynamic, and we could see something very
Speaker 7: similar in and around Black Sea region in Syria and
Speaker 7: in the eastern part portions of Turkey which are hotly contested.
Speaker 7: Russia and Anchor have sort of a thought relationship right now,
Speaker 7: but I don't suspect that that will last permanently. The
Speaker 7: two of them are are drawn to each other only
Speaker 7: in so far as they're opposed to the West's interests,
Speaker 7: in Washington's interests, and once Washington's interests are no longer
Speaker 7: the thing that they are united against. Then they have
Speaker 7: a tendency to conflict. So I would imagine that we
Speaker 7: would see conflicts rather than later between them. But yes,
Speaker 7: Ancre is an expansionist power, at least diplomatically, not necessarily
Speaker 7: in terms of seizing new territory and subsuming it into
Speaker 7: the Turkish Turkish national conception of itself. But it has
Speaker 7: absolutely has designs on its region and expanding its diplomatic influence,
Speaker 7: and it's going about it in a very aggressive way,
Speaker 7: in a successful way. Syria is right now what it
Speaker 7: had not been previously, a satellite to Anchora.
Speaker 1: If Aragon draws a great chain across the Bosporus, then
Speaker 1: I think we should go in. Then I think we
Speaker 1: should go in and rename the whole place Constantinople and
Speaker 1: take it back, because I'm against the colonial enterprise and
Speaker 1: renamed it as such. I know we've got to go, absolutely,
Speaker 1: absolutely if we go. As long as we got the
Speaker 1: time machine, let's go back and let's take a look
Speaker 1: at this ball for stuff, and let's take the carving
Speaker 1: up of the region into these strangely shaped nations that
Speaker 1: had two or three warring clans within them, ensuring that
Speaker 1: they'd be in continuous discord and a lot them to
Speaker 1: the groups themselves so that everybody had their own state
Speaker 1: and then they could fight each other in between nations
Speaker 1: instead of destabilizing the nations that they're currently.
Speaker 7: If the principle of self determination applies, then we should
Speaker 7: be applying it to these druze communities that are outright
Speaker 7: stating we want to join Israel and be governed by Jerusalem, which.
Speaker 5: I think is absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 1: Why you mean these people are actually putting up their
Speaker 1: hand and saying, yes, I want to be part of
Speaker 1: the genocidal state.
Speaker 5: Why why? Why? Yes? They are ill end with that.
Speaker 5: We have to leave Noah Rothman.
Speaker 1: You can read everything that he does, and you should
Speaker 1: at National Review and the magazine and the online site.
Speaker 1: We thank you for dropping by today, and the fact
Speaker 1: that we've only had twenty minutes with you is your
Speaker 1: own dang fault.
Speaker 4: Next time show apoloities again.
Speaker 5: Thank you guys, so you know it and we got
Speaker 5: to go too. And that's that.
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