Speaker 1: When I mentioned political violence, I just saw him on
Speaker 1: the zoom, look like like a dodger. Here's his name
Speaker 1: or a particular or the owner's whistle. Yes, let me
Speaker 1: assert my family.
Speaker 2: That's the only thing we have to finish.
Speaker 1: So it's the Ricchet Podcast with Stephen Hayward and Charles C. W. Cook.
Speaker 1: I'm James Lylyx. The day we're going to talk to
Speaker 1: Noah Rothman about well what else the war, But there's more,
Speaker 1: so let's absolve the podcast.
Speaker 3: Their navy is gone, twenty four ships in three days.
Speaker 3: It's a lot of ships. Their anti aircraft weapons are gone,
Speaker 3: all of their airplanes are gone, the communications are gone,
Speaker 3: missiles are gun launches are gone.
Speaker 4: Other than that, they're doing quite well.
Speaker 1: Welcome everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, number seven hundred
Speaker 1: and eighty. I'm James Lylyx and I'm joined, of course
Speaker 1: by even Hayward in California or somewhere else in the world,
Speaker 1: and Charles C. Cook not on the scepter dial but
Speaker 1: in Florida. Gentlemen, to welcome, Hello, good morning. There were
Speaker 1: other understated almost English there. Hello Hello from from from Charlie.
Speaker 1: And so since you are indeed from the from Blightie.
Speaker 1: We have to talk about one of the most consequential
Speaker 1: issues of the week, and I'm not kidding Britain's decision
Speaker 1: to scrap all of the human beings from their money
Speaker 1: and go to important British things like the British Tree,
Speaker 1: which I think is the large, and badgers and and
Speaker 1: and likewise, and it's it's causing something of a of
Speaker 1: a tempest in a teapot. It goes with abolishing jury
Speaker 1: trials for most people, and getting rid of hereditary lords
Speaker 1: and the rest of it. All of a sudden, these
Speaker 1: traditions stripped away. But there's something about getting rid of
Speaker 1: Churchill and replacing him with a badger that has struck
Speaker 1: a nerve in what seems to be a small, a
Speaker 1: dying reflex reaction British culture. So you wrote about this,
Speaker 1: I expect and tell us what do you think of it?
Speaker 2: Well, I did write about this, You're right. What do
Speaker 2: I think about it? I think that it is a
Speaker 2: sign of chronic under confidence and the rejection of national
Speaker 2: identity is what I think.
Speaker 4: I think that if you look back at.
Speaker 2: The history of the British banknote, you will find all
Speaker 2: manner of impressive people having been depicted thereon you will
Speaker 2: see Shakespeare and Jane Austin and Florence Nightingale and James
Speaker 2: Watt and Winston Churchill and Admiral Nelson and the Duke
Speaker 2: of Wellington and so forth, and those people I think
Speaker 2: are what people think about when they think of Britain,
Speaker 2: far more than.
Speaker 4: Say a hedgehog.
Speaker 2: I have nothing in particular against the wildlife of Great Britain,
Speaker 2: but it's not what Britain's known for, is it, And
Speaker 2: it's not particularly interesting relative to other countries. Every country
Speaker 2: has wildlife, but not every country has Shakespeare. So if
Speaker 2: they had said, do you know, we're a little bit
Speaker 2: monomaniacal in our money art, and so we're gonna rotate
Speaker 2: Britain's heroes, I think that would have been defensible.
Speaker 4: But they didn't do that. What they said is it
Speaker 4: is overdue.
Speaker 2: What a word that we take those heroes, and I
Speaker 2: include Jane Austin, Shakespeare and James Watt in that category.
Speaker 2: We're going to take them off the money completely and
Speaker 2: replace them with no other people. And the reason for
Speaker 2: this seems quite to me, and that is that animals
Speaker 2: are uncontroversial. Animals are an abstraction. I know people like
Speaker 2: their own dog, but when you see a badger, you
Speaker 2: don't say, oh it's terry.
Speaker 4: You say it's just a badger.
Speaker 2: But with a person, you have to think about that
Speaker 2: person as a sinful human, an imperfect human, somebody who
Speaker 2: may have had some views of his era that we
Speaker 2: don't like today.
Speaker 4: And I just don't think the British.
Speaker 2: At the moment are courageous or sophisticated or adult enough
Speaker 2: to do that. And so the moment that someone says, well,
Speaker 2: Florence Nightiger probably had some really weird views about then
Speaker 2: they say, oh, we took her off the money because
Speaker 2: someone has to. No, that's not what you do. You say, yeah,
Speaker 2: but that's not why we know her. And I'll finished
Speaker 2: with this. About ten years ago there was this campaign
Speaker 2: to get Nelson's column removed from Trafalgar Square, and these
Speaker 2: things have.
Speaker 4: Been there so long they are literally.
Speaker 2: Named after Admiral Nelson and his most famous moment. And
Speaker 2: the argument was that Nelson had some pretty horrible views
Speaker 2: about slavery, which he actually did for a short period
Speaker 2: of time. And my rejoinder, which I wrote up, was yeah,
Speaker 2: but that's not why he's famous. I don't think it's
Speaker 2: particularly problematic if outside of a courthouse has happened. Here
Speaker 2: in Jacksonville a few years ago, a statue of Alexander
Speaker 2: Stevens is removed because Alexander Stephens's whole thing, the thing
Speaker 2: for which he is known and famous, is black people
Speaker 2: aren't equal and can't be, and the United States should,
Speaker 2: as its cornerstone institution, celebrate slavery. That's why his name
Speaker 2: is in the books. But that's not true of Nelson,
Speaker 2: and it's not true of any of the people on
Speaker 2: the money. Maybe Winston Churchill had a few quirks he did.
Speaker 2: Maybe he had some views on race, although he was
Speaker 2: actually pretty progressive for his time, to be honest. But
Speaker 2: maybe he had some views on race that today we
Speaker 2: might go at. But that's not why he's known. He's
Speaker 2: known for saving the world. So I think this is insane,
Speaker 2: But I think it is very sad because I think
Speaker 2: what Britain is essentially said is that it wishes to
Speaker 2: denude itself of all that makes it Britain and instead
Speaker 2: point to things that don't make it Britain but just
Speaker 2: happened to be there.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So I do have this prediction for you Charlie,
Speaker 5: which is from the manager of Animals.
Speaker 6: That may pick from.
Speaker 5: I have a hunch they will omit the bulldog for
Speaker 5: the obvious reason, right, that's always a symbol. Well it
Speaker 5: might remind people of Churchill if you put a bulldog
Speaker 5: on the pound note.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 6: And you know a lot of comments on Twitter has been.
Speaker 5: Boy, the British ruling class really hates the country these days.
Speaker 5: And I think I'm increasingly believing that may be literally true.
Speaker 6: But I also think this is the logical next step for.
Speaker 5: The radical egalitarianism that you know, intellectual circles has started with,
Speaker 5: you know, in history many decades ago of rejecting the
Speaker 5: Great Man theory of history and you know, the rise
Speaker 5: of social history, which is, you know, just a derivative
Speaker 5: of Marxism what drives history or all the social forces
Speaker 5: and materialism and not Napoleon or de gaul or Churchill
Speaker 5: or Franklin Roosevelt.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 6: They hate that because that.
Speaker 5: Those examples of human excellence, whether you agree or disagree
Speaker 5: with their acts, are an implicit rebuke to the sort
Speaker 5: of flattening gallitarianism of the radical left for decades now.
Speaker 5: So it's going to come to America sooner or later.
Speaker 5: I can't believe we still have some of the people
Speaker 5: we do. I mean, it was Grant still on the
Speaker 5: fifty dollars bill. I think I should look.
Speaker 6: But it's the Jefferson's on the two dollar bill.
Speaker 5: My goodness, he was the prime offender and slavery and
Speaker 5: you know, raped as slaves and all the other stuff.
Speaker 5: You hear that that's the most important things about Jefferson.
Speaker 5: Now we're told right, so it'll it'll come here, I think,
Speaker 5: or there'll be a motion for it, at least.
Speaker 2: I saw some statistic the other day that said that
Speaker 2: eighty five percent or something of all the two dollar
Speaker 2: bills are in strip clubs.
Speaker 4: Poor Jefferson.
Speaker 1: Well, when I saw this story, I also read elsewhere
Speaker 1: that one of the reasons that they were doing this
Speaker 1: was to avoid giving offense. They didn't specify that, but
Speaker 1: it made you think that perhaps the depiction of the
Speaker 1: human form might be the human face the visage might
Speaker 1: be offensive to some people, that they're anticipating that objection
Speaker 1: in the future, to which you want to say to people, look,
Speaker 1: this is British culture, pound sand or quid sand or
Speaker 1: whatever you wish, that this is who we are and
Speaker 1: that we are going to continue to do this. But
Speaker 1: when Charlie mentioned Tofalgar Square, yes, I mean it's taking
Speaker 1: down Nelson's column is not something I have in the cards,
Speaker 1: but I wouldn't be surprised because there is in that
Speaker 1: space a famous empty plinth I think it's called the
Speaker 1: fourth plinth, that tack down the corners of the square.
Speaker 1: One of them is empty, and it's constantly being used
Speaker 1: for new art. And the new art is generally meretricious, scolding,
Speaker 1: ugly celebrating any sort of current days zeroism, and it's
Speaker 1: never up to snuff with the rest of the stuff
Speaker 1: on the corners, which is classical and British and full
Speaker 1: of lions and you know, all the rest of the
Speaker 1: things that people expect out of their British statuary. And
Speaker 1: so the whole culture seems to be pushed towards being
Speaker 1: an empty plinth on which the leaders can PLoP whatever
Speaker 1: they want at the moment in order to rewrite the
Speaker 1: past and usher us into the glorious new future. And
Speaker 1: what I don't understand is the roots of I don't
Speaker 1: get why they would be so so uncomfortable with their
Speaker 1: own culture that they find the need time and again
Speaker 1: to make these conspicuous public efforts to undo it. If
Speaker 1: they wished, a lot could be accomplished on the labor
Speaker 1: and the leftist agenda without these things that stand out,
Speaker 1: but like big red, flaring lit flags that they get
Speaker 1: people's backup. But as we've talked from time to time
Speaker 1: to time, does it matter really if people's backs are
Speaker 1: gotten up in how many backs actually are there gotten up?
Speaker 1: I know a fellow, you know, one of my friends
Speaker 1: in England as as British as you can get. He
Speaker 1: bought Tony Hancock's hat from an old television show that
Speaker 1: has a glass case. He has a British minor a
Speaker 1: card in his driveway to the core. But I can't
Speaker 1: see them actually doing anything about this or getting a
Speaker 1: bit upset about it, because what is one to do.
Speaker 1: Life in the village goes on, and a piece with
Speaker 1: what we saw about their participation in the war with Ron,
Speaker 1: that the whole British spine, the whole British glory of
Speaker 1: the Navy, it just seems to have evaporated. The special
Speaker 1: relationship is gone, and I again despair. But again I'm
Speaker 1: here and it's not my country, and perhaps I should
Speaker 1: just divest myself of those emotional feelings. Huh.
Speaker 5: Well, can I give listeners a book recommendation on this?
Speaker 5: You know, Roger Scrutin had that great phrase about how
Speaker 5: we live at a time with a dominant culture of repudiation.
Speaker 5: And one of my favorite books about the whole European
Speaker 5: wider scene, I mean, Douglas Murray's written about this, but
Speaker 5: as an older book from ten to fifteen years ago,
Speaker 5: is The Tyranny of Guilt. I love the title Tyranny
Speaker 5: by a French writer named Pascal Bruckner, and I've met
Speaker 5: this guy a couple of times. What I like about
Speaker 5: him is he was one of those radical students on
Speaker 5: the barricades in Paris in May of sixty eight, which
Speaker 5: is still you know, a big Americans don't really appreciate this,
Speaker 5: how big a deal that was in France. Still today
Speaker 5: is a factor in French politics in ways that I
Speaker 5: think are beyond most Americans to know. And he his
Speaker 5: book is a terrific attack on the insidiousness of the
Speaker 5: self imposed guilt of the European culture today. And he's
Speaker 5: still very much a social democrat and as ordinary political economy,
Speaker 5: you might say so anyway, it's and he's a splendid
Speaker 5: writer if you like that French style that they often have.
Speaker 1: Do you think that's what's driving a Charnally guilt or
Speaker 1: is it just this sort of this late sixties eternal
Speaker 1: desire to repudiate the past but to make this glorious.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think there's a lot that's driving it. I think
Speaker 2: part of it is leftism, which Steve says doesn't like
Speaker 2: the great man theory and therefore doesn't like great men.
Speaker 2: I think some of it's immigration. The British have persuaded
Speaker 2: themselves as of some in this country, but it's less
Speaker 2: prevalent that the way you welcome.
Speaker 4: Immigrants is to.
Speaker 2: Remove your own culture, which is weird given that the
Speaker 2: immigrants largely move.
Speaker 4: To places because of that culture.
Speaker 2: That's a really strange reaction to say, welcome to Britain,
Speaker 2: which you want to be in, rather than Pakistan.
Speaker 4: Whatever. We'll get rid of it, don't worry.
Speaker 2: Then there's the stupid racial bean counting which we have
Speaker 2: here as well. All those people I mentioned earlier, they're
Speaker 2: rather white, aren't they. Well, yes, that's what you'll get
Speaker 2: on an island that is still ninety percent white and
Speaker 2: twenty years ago is ninety five percent white, and two
Speaker 2: hundred years ago was one hundred percent white.
Speaker 4: If you're going to.
Speaker 2: To a memorial for great victorians, probably aren't going to
Speaker 2: be too many Hispanics among them in London. And then
Speaker 2: there's the final part of it, which is that the
Speaker 2: British elites don't actually like Britain very much. I never
Speaker 2: really have, and they are finally getting their revenge. What
Speaker 2: really alarmed me, though, James, was that the polling on
Speaker 2: this seemed to be confirmatory. I saw that sixty percent
Speaker 2: to thirty two of British people who were asked and
Speaker 2: I don't know what the question said, said that they
Speaker 2: would rather have animals on the money than people. So
Speaker 2: I can't quite blame this on, you know, the labor
Speaker 2: government or Islington or what you will. This does seem
Speaker 2: to be a general cultural malaise.
Speaker 1: Well then they'll get their money with the Budgies on it.
Speaker 1: All I can say is this it's probably continuation of
Speaker 1: an insidious planned to get rid of money or together
Speaker 1: and its institute of digital currency. Because these days I
Speaker 1: hate British money. It's plastic, it doesn't fold right, it
Speaker 1: slips around in your pocket. I don't like it. And
Speaker 1: if they make it so esthetically unpleasing and unpleasing to
Speaker 1: in a tactile fashion, then people will just say, oh, yes,
Speaker 1: Heaven's sakes, bring on that digital currency. Or they will
Speaker 1: say bring on noelh Rothman, Right, that's what I'm gonna do.
Speaker 1: Noah Senior writer a National Review where he writes about
Speaker 1: well everything, especially you know, foreign affairs and stuff we
Speaker 1: have going on from time to time. Is the author
Speaker 1: of Unjust, The Rise of the New Puritans and the
Speaker 1: upcoming Blood and Progress a century of left wing violence.
Speaker 1: And we'll talk about that, but first welcome Noah.
Speaker 7: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1: James, all right, a recent piece from you, what's gone
Speaker 1: right in the Iran War if you listen to the press,
Speaker 1: of course, it's just been an excuse for wasting money
Speaker 1: on lobster lobster gate, lobster gate being the story of
Speaker 1: the day, not the targeted assassination of the guys are
Speaker 1: doing checkpoints.
Speaker 8: But see, there does seem to be an assumption abroad
Speaker 8: that Pete hag Seth himself can consume seven million dollars
Speaker 8: worth of lobster and steak. I accept the challenge. If
Speaker 8: that is the premise.
Speaker 1: Oh no, he's been splashing around a giant Scrooge McDuck
Speaker 1: vault that is filled to the brim with steak and
Speaker 1: lobster tails. So let's start with what's going right. We
Speaker 1: were told a couple of days ago that there's something
Speaker 1: new on route that it was pager like in its
Speaker 1: depth and its scope, and its surprise was that the
Speaker 1: ability that we have, or Israel has, or both seems
Speaker 1: to be to use drones to track individual guys where
Speaker 1: they live, hit their checkpoints, get them as they're taking
Speaker 1: out the garbage. What's the most recent thing that's gone right.
Speaker 8: Let's say, well, I have seen those reports, and I'm
Speaker 8: not entirely sure if those are happening now or we're
Speaker 8: only just getting video of them happening recently. The theater
Speaker 8: is opaque, and there's we have to be humble about
Speaker 8: what we can assess in real time. However, we'll step
Speaker 8: back a little bit and take a look at this
Speaker 8: campaign on its twelfth day, which is where we're at
Speaker 8: right now. I've been following this for the better part
Speaker 8: of twenty five years. We've been war gaming scenarios with
Speaker 8: the all out regime change war with Iran for the
Speaker 8: better part of three decades, and all of those scenarios
Speaker 8: were dire. The notion being that Iran would activate its
Speaker 8: sleeper cell terrorist organizations HESBLA or otherwise in Latin America,
Speaker 8: Europe and North America not an idle threat. We consistently
Speaker 8: and regularly arrest has below linked operatives, charged them and
Speaker 8: imprisoned them for acting on orders from Iran to execute
Speaker 8: terrorist attacks inside the United States or target American civil
Speaker 8: heacivic leaders, civil servants, and even the President himself with murder.
Speaker 8: Those were expected to execute dramatic attacks on soft targets,
Speaker 8: kill a lot of civilians in the process, and frustrate
Speaker 8: our activities domestically. Likewise, we were expecting dramatics cyber attacks
Speaker 8: on commercial ventures, in particular, making financial transactions difficult, frustrating
Speaker 8: operations for commercial ventures as well as government ventures. And
Speaker 8: we were expecting that the Iranian regime would mine the
Speaker 8: Strait of Hermus. The Straight of Hermus is presently closed
Speaker 8: to traffic quote unquote, but it's not because of an
Speaker 8: abundance of mines in the strait. The threat of ballistic missiles,
Speaker 8: short range ballistic missiles, or even fast attack boats that
Speaker 8: would swarm a boat and try to sink it. That
Speaker 8: was another scenario that was a very much a live
Speaker 8: prospect in these wargames taking out a US warship. That way,
Speaker 8: the strait is not closed because of that. The strait
Speaker 8: is closed because of a financial artifact. Insurance insurance makes
Speaker 8: it too difficult for these ships to cross the strait.
Speaker 8: That is much easier to resolve than it would be
Speaker 8: if we were dealing with a thoroughly mined straight And
Speaker 8: of course, a regime change war was forecast to require
Speaker 8: upwards of a million US combat troops, not even support troops.
Speaker 8: Combat troops of Iranian cities were expected to be in
Speaker 8: rubble a million casualties on all sides of this conflict,
Speaker 8: at least before combat operations were over, after which you
Speaker 8: couldn't be sure that the regime itself would survived. Some
Speaker 8: rump regime might have survived, and there's probably likely to
Speaker 8: be pockets of instability and ungoverned areas inside the Iranian
Speaker 8: land mass which would incubate transnational Islamis terrorist groups. So
Speaker 8: that's the baseline from which we're starting and on twelve day,
Speaker 8: day twelve of this war, you don't see anything like
Speaker 8: those kind of outcomes. In fact, we've achieved air superiority,
Speaker 8: if not supremacy. We're standing away from these exquisite standoff munitions,
Speaker 8: you know, rockets, long range rockets in favor of because
Speaker 8: we have command of the skis in favor of gravity.
Speaker 8: Bombs which are fitted with jay dams make them precision
Speaker 8: guided bombs. They're a lot more abundant, a lot less expensive,
Speaker 8: and to make it easier to achieve our objectives. The
Speaker 8: Iranian Navy is fodder now for artificial reefs at the
Speaker 8: bottom of the Persian Gulf. All of their Solomoni class
Speaker 8: ships are dead. Their fleet of mine laying boats is
Speaker 8: largely in ruins. We've struck ten of their eighteen airfields
Speaker 8: when last I checked. Their ballistic missile capabilities are down
Speaker 8: about ninety percent. Their missile launchers are down sixty percent.
Speaker 8: We're loitering over these missile cities where these missiles are entombed,
Speaker 8: and we're either striking the entrances or if we monitor
Speaker 8: and see activity, we strike them, rendering these missile silos
Speaker 8: inoperable until such time as a massive penetrating ordinance hits them,
Speaker 8: digs two hundred feet down and blows them up. We
Speaker 8: have incredible command of the battle space. What everybody's concerned
Speaker 8: about is what happens with these asymmetric attacks moving forward.
Speaker 8: Iranian drone capabilities are not neutralized. And because there was
Speaker 8: some vestigial hostility in the Pentagon to Voladimir Zelensky in Kiev,
Speaker 8: we did not purchase and should have these really cheap
Speaker 8: interceptor drones that they developed in Key, which would have
Speaker 8: helped us take down these Shaheeds. But yesterday they managed
Speaker 8: to launch all of thirty nine Shaheed drones and get
Speaker 8: through our American air defenses and layered air defenses around
Speaker 8: the Gulf.
Speaker 7: Now that's not nothing.
Speaker 8: It hits real targets, it hits infrastructure, and it creates
Speaker 8: big headaches the Gulf. But we're not talking about this
Speaker 8: massive onslaught. These are headaches, you know. And we just
Speaker 8: see these videos and they look really devastating and dramatic,
Speaker 8: but they are deal with the ball and they're nothing
Speaker 8: even remotely light what we expected. The question is always
Speaker 8: compared to what and compared to what in this campaign
Speaker 8: was a devastating conflict that would really chase in both
Speaker 8: sides of the equation and just not what we're seeing.
Speaker 5: So no, let me jump in here and let's tick
Speaker 5: off a few of these factors individually. I'm a little surprised,
Speaker 5: and there's reasons to think that maybe Trump and his
Speaker 5: people hadn't fought the matter through my first data point
Speaker 5: on that Trump reversing course on releases from strategic Petroleum
Speaker 5: reserve and certain other things. I'm a little surprised that
Speaker 5: we didn't have a more forward strategy on the potential
Speaker 5: closure of the Straits of more news.
Speaker 6: You mentioned mining. I'm thinking, is I'm so old.
Speaker 5: I remember nineteen eighty seven when Iran tried to close
Speaker 5: the straits with mine They had I guess to be
Speaker 5: a fifty thousand minds then, and we, along with our
Speaker 5: British partners, who then had a navy, very effectively squashed that.
Speaker 5: And you know that's back when they you know, we
Speaker 5: did have a ship hit by an Irocky missile by mistake, right, and.
Speaker 6: We shot down and running an airliner by mistake, so
Speaker 6: you know, flog of war. That's sort of very tiny
Speaker 6: conflict compared with now.
Speaker 5: But I'm a little surprised that there isn't more capacity
Speaker 5: to stop Iran from harassing the Strait.
Speaker 8: Yeah, so there is military capacity. We have contingencies developed
Speaker 8: over the course of decades, as you said, and executed
Speaker 8: them forty years ago in the effort to reopen the strait.
Speaker 8: We know what Iran's plan is and how they execute that,
Speaker 8: and we've sought to interdict that and had relative success.
Speaker 8: It's my understanding, and I could be wrong, because again,
Speaker 8: the battlefield isn't opaque, and we only know what we
Speaker 8: know and what people are telling us. But it doesn't
Speaker 8: seem to me from what I'm gleaning that the strait
Speaker 8: is closed because it is mined because Iranian traffic is
Speaker 8: transitting the straight.
Speaker 7: It's not closed.
Speaker 8: Because of the threat from short range ballistic missiles or
Speaker 8: swamp or boat swarms are overwhelming. It is a financial issue.
Speaker 8: And listen, the president without an Act of Congress, seems
Speaker 8: to be able to muster about twenty billion dollars. You
Speaker 8: need about four hundred billion dollars, and the president can't
Speaker 8: do it himself. But you mean to tell me that
Speaker 8: we can't. We can't just scrounge up four hundred billion
Speaker 8: dollars to reopen this key waterway.
Speaker 7: I don't believe it.
Speaker 8: This is a resolvable problem, much more easily resolvable than
Speaker 8: a thoroughly mined straight would be.
Speaker 7: And even then you have the capacity to clear those mines.
Speaker 5: Well, I'm sure you can find four hundred billion dollars
Speaker 5: worth a new terraf for two.
Speaker 6: But don't leave this day.
Speaker 7: It is a global problem. It should be a global issue.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean, well, all right, not to dilate this
Speaker 5: too much, I do think that one of the issues
Speaker 5: is is the crew on a lot of these ships say, hey,
Speaker 5: wait a minute, we're not soldiers. Uh and okay, And
Speaker 5: I think there have been a couple of ships hit
Speaker 5: with something, you know, drone.
Speaker 6: I don't know, So I don't know.
Speaker 5: You can't.
Speaker 6: I can't tell anything.
Speaker 5: From afar, right, I just assume that ninety percent of
Speaker 5: what I read on social media is wrong, fake, poorly
Speaker 5: sourced and so forth.
Speaker 7: I just can't And.
Speaker 5: Even the mainstream media, I think, really doesn't know what's
Speaker 5: going on.
Speaker 6: But the next question is, is I've heard vaguely of
Speaker 6: some of the war games.
Speaker 5: Some of my old pals at AEI used to run
Speaker 5: those every year, and I don't recall, and maybe I
Speaker 5: just didn't pay attention that a complete regime change war
Speaker 5: would take up to a million soldiers. I think maybe
Speaker 5: I did once here that twenty years ago. And so
Speaker 5: that raises the question, and this has been since day one.
Speaker 5: Can you accomplish our war aims or a neutralization of
Speaker 5: Iran with air power alone? People say it's never been done,
Speaker 5: and I say, well, wait a minute. We did finally
Speaker 5: get Melosovich and Serbia to call off their war in
Speaker 5: a good scos of oth almost thirty years ago. That
Speaker 5: did take seventy one days of bombing, though, right what's
Speaker 5: the answer to that question? Noah?
Speaker 8: What?
Speaker 5: What's your opinion is?
Speaker 6: What are we gonna have to do?
Speaker 5: Are we going to have to contemplay some boots on
Speaker 5: the ground and selective ways or selected places, or you
Speaker 5: think we need to.
Speaker 6: Stay the course with the bombing.
Speaker 5: And then finally, I'd like you to say something about
Speaker 5: what should Trump be saying and doing, because right now
Speaker 5: he's all over the map, a.
Speaker 8: Lot of questions, some epistemic humility on my part. I
Speaker 8: don't know what it would take to collapse this regime.
Speaker 8: Should say that at the outset, Kosovo is a good model,
Speaker 8: except we've we've probably performed from the air roughly forty
Speaker 8: Kosovo's in terms of the ordinance that's been dropped over
Speaker 8: the course of this thing devastating, and we can only
Speaker 8: you know, we're focusing on the western half of Iran
Speaker 8: because it's harder to access the eastern half now that
Speaker 8: we no longer have Afghanistan as a base of operations.
Speaker 8: But the prospect of introducing ground forces to say, seize
Speaker 8: Krg Island, which is the primary area that Iran exports
Speaker 8: oil from, is not off the table. The notion that
Speaker 8: we would see is bonder Abbas, which is, you know,
Speaker 8: opposite the straight that's not off the table, although I
Speaker 8: don't necessarily think that's option that the President wants to pursue,
Speaker 8: and it's probably going to be a last resort. Nevertheless,
Speaker 8: it would finally throttle the revenue stream that the URGC
Speaker 8: gets from the sale of Iranian oil, and the URGC
Speaker 8: is the primary beneficiary of the sale of Iranian oil.
Speaker 8: The Iranian people don't see almost dollar one from those
Speaker 8: from those revenues. The question I forgot the second question.
Speaker 8: I can go right to what Trump should say, but
Speaker 8: what was the second question?
Speaker 5: Well, it's uh, well, what do you think it could
Speaker 5: be the end game here?
Speaker 8: Oh, how to collapse a regime from the air. Yeah,
Speaker 8: there's very few good models for that. I mean you
Speaker 8: could say Libya sort of, but that's a fraught comparison, right,
Speaker 8: And you need a ground force. You need a ground force.
Speaker 8: And the ground force that did it in Kosovo was
Speaker 8: the the Serbian people. The ground force that did it
Speaker 8: in Libya was the Libyan people. We need the Iranian
Speaker 8: people to step up and act as that ground force.
Speaker 5: Well, shoot, let me should should we arm the Kurds?
Speaker 5: I mean, I keep hearing we're going back and forth
Speaker 5: on that.
Speaker 6: Is this a good idea, bad.
Speaker 8: Idea, super fraught prospect. I don't know if it's the
Speaker 8: best idea. I don't know if it's the worst idea.
Speaker 8: I don't think it's a great idea. That might have
Speaker 8: been misinformation designed to keep everybody in Iran on their toes.
Speaker 8: Move forces, for example, to the northwest of the country,
Speaker 8: or you know, these areas are in the northwest of
Speaker 8: Iran are also arrest of population, and that would antagonize Turkey.
Speaker 8: And we already have a kind of a fraught relationship
Speaker 8: with the Syrian Kurds because we've been trying to abandon
Speaker 8: them unsuccessfully for the better part of a decade. So
Speaker 8: you know, we have the Kurds are a very reliable force,
Speaker 8: and the Israelis love the Kurds. They have a particular
Speaker 8: affinity for the stateless population of beset people for obvious
Speaker 8: cultural reasons. But it would introduce a lot of variables
Speaker 8: that we probably don't want at this point. The ground
Speaker 8: force that we want to see is in urban centers,
Speaker 8: in places like Tehran and Come and elsewhere is fahn Bhushir,
Speaker 8: and we want the Iranian people to seize the nodes
Speaker 8: of command and control in this regime and then force
Speaker 8: the Iranians to rely on their traditional base of power,
Speaker 8: which is really rural, more world than anything. But at
Speaker 8: that point, you're talking about a quasi insurgency and that
Speaker 8: would itself be a challenged to deal with, but it's
Speaker 8: a challenge for another day. What should Trump.
Speaker 1: Say, Yeah, that's my last question.
Speaker 8: Right, Trump should level with the American people, and there's
Speaker 8: never a bad time to do it. He's not given
Speaker 8: an address to the public, and I, for the life
Speaker 8: of me, don't know why. Since Obama White houses have
Speaker 8: been allergic to the Oval Office as a setting.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I don't get it.
Speaker 5: I don't Oh, I think well, I think one reason
Speaker 5: why is we no longer have the old media where
Speaker 5: you had a roadblock where President's coming on at eight
Speaker 5: o'clock prime time and all the networks would carry it.
Speaker 5: But now we have five hundred channels and social media,
Speaker 5: and I think that's one reason. I think Trump's not
Speaker 5: very good at Oval Office addresses. But specifically, if you
Speaker 5: Norah Rothman are his speech writer, what would you want
Speaker 5: him to say or what specifically would you like to
Speaker 5: hear from.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I would say I would outline the nature of
Speaker 8: the Iranian threat. I would define all the ways in
Speaker 8: which we've been at war with this state from its
Speaker 8: inception forty seven years ago, all the Americans that has killed,
Speaker 8: all the blood and treasure that it SAPs from us,
Speaker 8: and our forward deployment posture in the Middle East, which
Speaker 8: is necessitated by the Iranian threat, and how much we
Speaker 8: strategic benefits we would derive from the neutralization of that
Speaker 8: threat allow us to finally execute that pivot to Asia
Speaker 8: that every president has been frustrated by the nature of
Speaker 8: both Iran and Russia. I think we can deter Russia
Speaker 8: with NATO and with the conventional deployments that we have
Speaker 8: in Europe. The Middle East is far more tricky, and
Speaker 8: it requires surges and withdrawals, and we're very frustrated with
Speaker 8: that relationship. We love to withdraw or at least maintain
Speaker 8: a footprint that is far more, far less onerous than
Speaker 8: the one we presently have, and the neutralization of that
Speaker 8: threat would facilitate it. Likewise, I would make a moral arge,
Speaker 8: even though the magam wing is allergic to it. But
Speaker 8: the President isn't. He has said we want freedom for
Speaker 8: the Iranian people. He speculated about humanitarian intervention on behalf
Speaker 8: of the Iranian people. The American public does not necessarily respond,
Speaker 8: is not as allergic to the notion that we should
Speaker 8: intervene on the behalf of the Ranian people, and that slaughter,
Speaker 8: that massacre of what Trump said in his State of
Speaker 8: the Union speech was thirty two thousand people has sat
Speaker 8: the Iranian regime of legitimacy, both at home and abroad.
Speaker 8: The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution condemning Iran
Speaker 8: attacking the Gulf States yesterday, and neither Russia or China
Speaker 8: vetoed it.
Speaker 7: I think they would.
Speaker 8: Have in the absence of that massacre. It has just
Speaker 8: taken the wind out of the sales of the tankies
Speaker 8: who would otherwise defend this regime.
Speaker 7: And then lastly, I would.
Speaker 8: Tell the American people to expect that they would experience
Speaker 8: hardships as a result of this. This is not going
Speaker 8: to be a quick endeavor. American soldiers may come home
Speaker 8: and caskets some already have, and we may see more
Speaker 8: and you're going to pay more at the pump, and
Speaker 8: it's going to be a while. I think Joe Biden
Speaker 8: made a big mistake by insisting that the pain that
Speaker 8: Americans would experience in their pocketbooks would be minimal and
Speaker 8: it would be offset by administration actions. It wasn't, and
Speaker 8: the administration suffered for not telling the American public the truth.
Speaker 8: I don't I sympathize with the people who say that,
Speaker 8: you know that the president hasn't been clear in his
Speaker 8: goals or hasn't necessarily, you know, prepped the groundwork for
Speaker 8: this sort of thing. Trump hasn't really trusted the American
Speaker 8: people with the truth, and they're reciprocating they don't trust
Speaker 8: him either, and it's never, never too late to rectify
Speaker 8: that by leveling with us.
Speaker 2: Do you think now that they can be convinced? No,
Speaker 2: not the administration, the public. Do you think the public
Speaker 2: can be convinced? And I went off on a rent
Speaker 2: on the Editor's podcast we both do together. You went
Speaker 2: on that one about the show termism of the news
Speaker 2: coverage of this. I think you can blame Trump to
Speaker 2: some extent for that, and it wasn't an attempt to
Speaker 2: smuggle in a case for the war, because as you don't.
Speaker 4: I'm agnostic, but.
Speaker 2: I'm just irritated by the fact that we're doing this
Speaker 2: big thing, and you have daily tracking of oil prices,
Speaker 2: even when they go up and then go back to
Speaker 2: where they started, and the assumption that we're now in
Speaker 2: chaos and that everybody should panic.
Speaker 4: That is seen through one.
Speaker 2: Lens, just a totally unwillingness to deal with trade offs.
Speaker 2: And I wonder whether that comes as much from a
Speaker 2: public that is dispositionally unsuited to this sort of conflict
Speaker 2: as from the Trump administration's lack of communication, which I
Speaker 2: have criticized.
Speaker 4: Do you think the public can be convinced to stick
Speaker 4: with this? I do.
Speaker 8: I think the bully pulpit is a powerful instrument in
Speaker 8: the president's hands, and when it's used properly, and the
Speaker 8: case is made not once, not twice, but again and
Speaker 8: again and again and repetition until you can summon the
Speaker 8: arguments yourself by memory. I think that does have an effect,
Speaker 8: and I don't think he's starting from a baseline of zero.
Speaker 8: Polling indicates that the American public recognizes that Iran is
Speaker 8: a threat to American strategic interests as well as the
Speaker 8: safety of individual citizens. And we had that one survey
Speaker 8: which you've talked about also on the editors from CBS
Speaker 8: News that indicates if this were a week long endeavor,
Speaker 8: weeks slung endeavor rather, that it would be overwhelmingly popular.
Speaker 8: It's a seventy seven seventy four percent proposition in favor.
Speaker 8: What people are concerned about, in my view, which is
Speaker 8: just my gut, is the potential for this to be
Speaker 8: a very long drawn out conflict that involves a slow
Speaker 8: drip of US casualties akin to the insurgency phase of
Speaker 8: the Iraq War. That's what people don't want, and they
Speaker 8: want the president to reassure them to that effect. Could
Speaker 8: the public be convinced by Trump. I don't know, because
Speaker 8: he's drump and he's a very polarizing figure. But we
Speaker 8: also had the survey that I pointed out to Day,
Speaker 8: which Aaron blake Over at CNN identified that the support
Speaker 8: for the Iraq Iran wars is relatively unpopular. Let's say
Speaker 8: it's about ten twelve points underwater. But if you take
Speaker 8: Trump's name out of the question, it's an even proposition.
Speaker 8: So people are evaluating it through the lens of domestic politics.
Speaker 8: And that's really what the press is doing too. They're
Speaker 8: evaluating all of this to the lens of domestic politics.
Speaker 8: It's barely concealed their desire to brand the Republican Party
Speaker 8: with something akin to the Iraq War so they can
Speaker 8: take advantage of Iraq Wars in syndrome reducts. I mean
Speaker 8: that is, it's so obvious that there's a political motive
Speaker 8: behind the un endurable, overwhelming drum beat of stories from
Speaker 8: the press about how everything is going wrong. The Gulf
Speaker 8: States are turning on us. We can't change the regime.
Speaker 8: The regime is entrenched. But if the United States doesn't
Speaker 8: stop trying to engineer regime, regime change will be woraw
Speaker 8: for it, so we have to now pursue this campaign
Speaker 8: that's going to be a losing campaign or will even
Speaker 8: be in worse straits.
Speaker 7: You know that we.
Speaker 8: Can't we can't open the Hormuz Strait anytime in the
Speaker 8: foreseeable future. On and on and on and at the
Speaker 8: expense of the tactical victories that we're achieving, which are
Speaker 8: incredibly impressive and really detrimental to the future of this regime.
Speaker 8: I think we always talk about what America's situation is,
Speaker 8: you know, what its strategic impediments are, it's hindrances.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think about it from the regimes perspective.
Speaker 8: Let's say there's a scenario in which Trump Trump pulls
Speaker 8: out early, so you know, it declares victory in retreats,
Speaker 8: and you have a rump Iranian regime that's really nasty.
Speaker 7: Matt is a bunch of hornets.
Speaker 1: But they have no.
Speaker 8: Ballistic missile capability anymore. They're seriously degraded in their capacity
Speaker 8: to exploit an export oil. They have no nuclear capacity anymore.
Speaker 8: Just about every besiege facility is destroyed, every IRGC facility
Speaker 8: is destroyed, and you still have an angry Iranian population
Speaker 8: that wants vengeance. For the thirty two two thousand family
Speaker 8: members and friends that they lost at the hands of
Speaker 8: this regime, and in a golf region, however, quietly seething
Speaker 8: they are at the United States for being drawn into
Speaker 8: this thing. There's precisely one game in town to stop
Speaker 8: Iran from executing at any time at a point and
Speaker 8: its desire to disrupt the oil market in its region
Speaker 8: to do so. China's not going to do that, even
Speaker 8: if it had the capability. Russia is not going to
Speaker 8: do that, even if it had the capability. Israel and
Speaker 8: the United States are the only game, so they're going
Speaker 8: to play, and the Iranian regime will be constrained both
Speaker 8: by its material deficiencies and its primary threat, which it
Speaker 8: makes no bones about, its own people. If you hear
Speaker 8: the statements from whatever is left of this Iranian regime,
Speaker 8: they intend to treat anybody out in the streets like
Speaker 8: an enemy combatant, shoot them on site. They're terrified of
Speaker 8: their people, and their people will remain terrifying for.
Speaker 7: The foreseeable future.
Speaker 8: This regime's days are numbered, it's just a matter of when,
Speaker 8: and hopefully when is sooner rather than later.
Speaker 1: No one of the problems people have discussed is that
Speaker 1: they set up a system by which the caption of
Speaker 1: the regime does not mean capitulation. That there are all
Speaker 1: these autonomous groups that essentially don't have to answer to anybody.
Speaker 1: They can just continue on the war because they have
Speaker 1: authority delegated. And then regardless of whether or not there's
Speaker 1: a I totally at the top, we'll see about that.
Speaker 1: But I do know that you're right about the press,
Speaker 1: and that if Trump was just sitting in a wheelchair
Speaker 1: with a long cigarette holder pointed up at a jaunty
Speaker 1: angle and a fedora, he'd probably be regarded as a liberator.
Speaker 1: But there are other places to liberate. We've seen an
Speaker 1: interesting selection of American activity in the last few months.
Speaker 1: We saw the Magic garraid in Venezuela, where the guys
Speaker 1: swooped down used phaser guns to turn everyone to jelly
Speaker 1: and then to Kumodora. We've seen overwhelming force in the Gulf,
Speaker 1: and now we're talking about a sort of diplomacy and
Speaker 1: sitting down around a table to do something about Cuber.
Speaker 1: What is going on with Cuba and what is the
Speaker 1: endgame likely to be? Personally, for me, the endgame I
Speaker 1: would like to be all the Cuban regime guys on
Speaker 1: the shore of Cuba, putting together boats out of milk
Speaker 1: cartons and old fifty seven Mercury chassis and making their
Speaker 1: way perilously to Florida, where all of the other Cuban
Speaker 1: guys are sitting there waiting for them with a little
Speaker 1: you know, tapping chilale's in their palms. But we'll see.
Speaker 1: So what's the Cuba situation.
Speaker 8: Cuba situation is again pretty opaque, but the regime has
Speaker 8: made the administration rather has made no bones about its
Speaker 8: desire to see the Cuban regime change its character fundamentally,
Speaker 8: if not ceased to exist in its present form. It's
Speaker 8: a worthy and noble goal. And again it's not exactly
Speaker 8: veiled that their intention when taking out Maduro as they did,
Speaker 8: was to create a client Venezuelan regime that would give
Speaker 8: us the essentially licensed to direct where their for their
Speaker 8: energy was being dispatched to the design they're being to
Speaker 8: throttle China's access to it.
Speaker 7: But mostly Cuba.
Speaker 8: Cuba is propped up by the Venezuelan regime and it
Speaker 8: has been cultivating that regime since Hugo Chaves took power
Speaker 8: in nineteen ninety nine, and that's where it gets most
Speaker 8: of his energy, and without that energy, the state is
Speaker 8: very close to economic collapse. It's been economically moribund throughout
Speaker 8: this century, but it's especially dire right now. And yeah,
Speaker 8: the goal is to neutralize that as a threat. And
Speaker 8: there is a grand strategic component to all of this.
Speaker 8: I don't know where that campaign is going. It seems
Speaker 8: to be in much more of the distant future than
Speaker 8: the administration likes to say, if not the distant future,
Speaker 8: within the next you know, several years. It's not on
Speaker 8: the immediate to do list, but the strategic rationale. You know,
Speaker 8: when on October six, twenty twenty three, the so called
Speaker 8: Axis of anti American powers that I was very energized
Speaker 8: about looked quite robust, and it looked like an approximate
Speaker 8: military alliance Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, and
Speaker 8: you could throw in some Latin American hostile states in
Speaker 8: there as well. But for the most part, that was
Speaker 8: what we were dealing with. The regime is still in
Speaker 8: place in Venezuela, but it's much more chastened and pliant,
Speaker 8: and that was valuable ahead of the Iranian campaign because
Speaker 8: the Iranians have a significant presence. The IRGC had a
Speaker 8: significant presence in Venezuela and Latin America broadly, and they've
Speaker 8: executed some of the worst terrorist attacks in Latin America,
Speaker 8: and that was a reduced threat. Again, Cuba is a
Speaker 8: reduced threat as a result of these initiatives. And if
Speaker 8: the Iranian regime falls, it takes another chess piece off
Speaker 8: the board, one of the most unpredictable and I would
Speaker 8: say evil of America's antagonists on the world stage. Now,
Speaker 8: this isn't going to throttle China's access to energy. China
Speaker 8: will lean very heavily on Iran in the future, or
Speaker 8: rather Russia in the future for energy exports. And it's
Speaker 8: also insulated itself somewhat with its investments in both fossil
Speaker 8: fuel power generation and electrification of for example cars, And
Speaker 8: we'll have it, they're very leaning heavily into electrified cars,
Speaker 8: which reduces the sting if the Iranian regime were to
Speaker 8: fall along with Venezuela and throttle China's access.
Speaker 7: To oil, they won't be without oil.
Speaker 8: But we bind Russia and China together in ways that
Speaker 8: actually advantage us. What we kind of want to do
Speaker 8: now is the opposite of engineering an anti Kissingerian foreign policy,
Speaker 8: the opposite of the Sino Soviet split. We want to
Speaker 8: bind these two together. They deserve each other. They are
Speaker 8: by no means allies. They all of these states are
Speaker 8: not allies in the conventional sense that we would recognize them.
Speaker 8: We come to your aid if you're attacked. That's not
Speaker 8: how these alliances work. Their relationships of convenience, and their
Speaker 8: only shared principle is the desire to see that the
Speaker 8: American led geopolitical order collapse and be replaced with something else.
Speaker 8: And they all disagree on what that something else looks like.
Speaker 8: But they don't come to each other's defense when they're attacked.
Speaker 8: They prop them up and support them in covert ways.
Speaker 8: But those covert ways are unequal to the nature of
Speaker 8: the threat. When you're under bombardment from the United States
Speaker 8: and Israel, and we would like to see Beijing that
Speaker 8: is far more reliant on Russia, and Russia that is
Speaker 8: a far more chasing junior partner to China, and the
Speaker 8: two of them stuck with each other in a world
Speaker 8: that is increasingly arrayed against them and inclined towards idle
Speaker 8: isolating them. That's a much more advantageous future from American
Speaker 8: and American strategic perspective.
Speaker 1: Authoritary in states, of course, can always crack down on
Speaker 1: their own people when they get restive. The problem with
Speaker 1: the West is that we have a group of people
Speaker 1: who don't like us and would like to do something
Speaker 1: about it. Which leads us to your upcoming book, Blood
Speaker 1: and Progress, a century of left wing violence. Blood and Progress.
Speaker 1: Would that be described on the left as as sort
Speaker 1: of like handmaide, you know, walking hand in hand down
Speaker 1: the aisle, A good thing. You've got to crack some
Speaker 1: eggs to, you know, to make an omelet. Do they
Speaker 1: tell us what the book is about, aside from the
Speaker 1: title and whether or not the the rivulets of blood
Speaker 1: that we saw in the sixties still continue to course
Speaker 1: through the veins of modern progressivism. Oh, that was a bad,
Speaker 1: bad line to.
Speaker 7: Rather poetic.
Speaker 1: Actually, oh no, that's.
Speaker 7: Very literary, dude.
Speaker 8: So the book springs from, as so many books do,
Speaker 8: a fallacy that is quite popular abroad, and it is
Speaker 8: reinforced by some selectively curated statistics and some motivated institutions
Speaker 8: that promote the notion that the political right in the
Speaker 8: United States is the font from which all domestic political
Speaker 8: violence springs. That is a notion abroad that is very popular,
Speaker 8: closely held, particularly by the left, and relatively unchallenged, and
Speaker 8: it is wrong. It is supported, as I write, by
Speaker 8: some not a conspiracy, but selectively curated statistics, some of
Speaker 8: which are influenced as there's particularly influential national security document
Speaker 8: that was produced for the Department of hooland Security which
Speaker 8: very bravely notes that the research into political left wing
Speaker 8: violence is tainted in part by the fact that practitioners
Speaker 8: of left wing political violence were contributors, if not the authors,
Speaker 8: of some of those studies. There is intimidation at work
Speaker 8: to researchers in these fields who study, for example, what
Speaker 8: the FBI calls AVE terrorism anarchist violent extremist terrorism, which
Speaker 8: is conventionally where left wing terrorism, domestic terrorism fits into
Speaker 8: within the broader landscape of DVEs domestic violent extremists.
Speaker 7: And you have the ADL list, you have these.
Speaker 8: University projects, all of which conspire to allege, for reasons
Speaker 8: that I outline in book length detail, why the American
Speaker 8: right is more violent than the left. And if you
Speaker 8: go through the individual incidences of violence in our time,
Speaker 8: it certainly does seem like we're experiencing a wave of
Speaker 8: left wing political violence that is unparalleled by the right
Speaker 8: and does not have a symmetry on the right. And
Speaker 8: if you go back a couple of decades, you see
Speaker 8: the antecedents to the violence that we're experiencing now in
Speaker 8: the form of the protests around the WTO in Seattle
Speaker 8: in nineteen ninety nine, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the
Speaker 8: semi violent protests against the Iraq War, the two thousand
Speaker 8: and eight GOP convention, NATO summits in Chicago, all of
Speaker 8: which were.
Speaker 7: Very violent and.
Speaker 8: Surrounded by radical elements, and those radical elements got sucker
Speaker 8: from institutions, left wing institutions in the United States. But
Speaker 8: then you start to see parallels between that and waves
Speaker 8: of violence that we've experienced in the past from left
Speaker 8: wing extremists, like the nineteen tens and nineteen twenties, with
Speaker 8: the Italian anarchist movement, which today is considered not necessarily
Speaker 8: by some considered not necessarily a left wing terrorist movement
Speaker 8: because they're anarchists, Right, What does anarchism have to do
Speaker 8: with the left? They want a big government, they want
Speaker 8: no government.
Speaker 7: What is it to do with anything?
Speaker 8: And you go back into you can say, also the
Speaker 8: wave of terrorism from the nineteen seventies nineteen eighties that
Speaker 8: Brian Burrow documented in his excellent book Days of Rage,
Speaker 8: these things are. And then you go back to the
Speaker 8: Puerto Rican terrorism, into Puerto Rican independence terrorism, which had
Speaker 8: ties to the Soviet Union in Cuba, which is and
Speaker 8: it's all forgotten. The chroniclers of these things each to
Speaker 8: a man say, Wow, it's just forgotten, isn't.
Speaker 7: It as though that wasn't motivated?
Speaker 8: Reasoning as though that was as though that just organically happened. No,
Speaker 8: it didn't organically happen. This is part of a project,
Speaker 8: and the left in cubits its own heroes and martyrs
Speaker 8: and justifies political violence as some sort of a romantic
Speaker 8: expression of ideological zeal and. They've been doing it for decades,
Speaker 8: and it's about time they're confronted with the results of
Speaker 8: their work.
Speaker 1: I think it is extraordinary that you downplay the influence
Speaker 1: of men in khaki pants with tiki torches, who I
Speaker 1: think were responsible for something like ninety nine percent of
Speaker 1: the one hundred thousand people killed in twenty eighteen. But
Speaker 1: I guess we're gonna have to have you back when
Speaker 1: the book comes out in May, and indeed we will
Speaker 1: thank you for being with us again and we look
Speaker 1: forward to you in the future. We are going to
Speaker 1: say goodbye until the next time. And always a pleasure.
Speaker 1: I always instructive, I always enlightening. Noah Rothman, you can
Speaker 1: find a National Review and other places as well. Thanks Noah,
Speaker 1: We'll talk to you later.
Speaker 7: Thank you, guys. Be well.
Speaker 1: The other thing about political violence, we just had a
Speaker 1: little bit of it ourselves here in New York. We
Speaker 1: had a bomb throwing and the bomb throwing was remarkable
Speaker 1: for the whole Mandammi incident was remarkable for a variety
Speaker 1: of things. One the target, two the guys who did it.
Speaker 1: Three the fellow on ex Twitter who was captured sort
Speaker 1: of with a bullhorn talking about the need to accept
Speaker 1: more many immigrants as possible at the same time that
Speaker 1: a bomb was being thrown over his head, and then
Speaker 1: him going on X and continuing to say, I stand
Speaker 1: by what I say and I know at least I'm
Speaker 1: not being a bigot about this. And then finally the
Speaker 1: press getting it wrong and saying that the you know,
Speaker 1: the bombs are being thrown bami. It's a perfect encapsulation
Speaker 1: of modern politics. Charles, would you agree?
Speaker 2: I was so irritated by this, And I just want
Speaker 2: to say, James, that I absolutely admire the finesse with
Speaker 2: which you're torturing Steve here, who, as you say, has
Speaker 2: been desperate to talk on this topic since it was
Speaker 2: first raised, and then you went to me instead. We
Speaker 2: can't see it, but he's probably twitching like a drug addict.
Speaker 1: Well, I want to ask you some questions about progressive
Speaker 1: rock from the seventies next, Charles, but go on.
Speaker 2: I was revolted, and I shall focus on this, partly
Speaker 2: because it's true, and partly so Steve can deal with
Speaker 2: the meat. I was revolted by the media in this circumstance.
Speaker 2: This was indefensible, and by that I don't just mean morally,
Speaker 2: I mean it was impossible to defend. Normally, they wave
Speaker 2: their hands and they say, oh, you're just being sensitive, or.
Speaker 4: If you read to paragraph nineteen, you're saying no.
Speaker 2: This was a deliberate attempt to ignore what had happened.
Speaker 2: I don't know whether it was because it was so
Speaker 2: poignant to watch the guy saying everyone's welcome here while
Speaker 2: an Islamic terrorist is throwing bombs over his head, or
Speaker 2: whether it's just reflex the notion or the suspicion that
Speaker 2: if the press reports honestly on these sorts of things
Speaker 2: and the wrong people will hear it and draw the
Speaker 2: wrong conclusions. But the level of dishonesty on this one
Speaker 2: was alarming.
Speaker 4: I mean, the.
Speaker 2: New York Times described the bombers, was it jars of
Speaker 2: fuses and.
Speaker 1: Spring, a little bit of glass and some some sprinkles
Speaker 1: of sugar, and you know, and then little adule thumbtag.
Speaker 2: I had this wonderful CNN piece which seems to have
Speaker 2: falled everyone at the network because they've all been apologizing
Speaker 2: one by one on Twitter, which said, you know, two
Speaker 2: young men and the American teenage dream walked into New
Speaker 2: York City on a fine day. They could have done anything,
Speaker 2: but a few hours later they found themselves at the
Speaker 2: heart of a terrorist incert.
Speaker 4: They did it.
Speaker 6: They did it.
Speaker 2: They proclaimed their loyalty to Isis, and they said they
Speaker 2: wanted to kill more people than it died at the
Speaker 2: Boston marathon bomby. This wasn't a couple of guys on
Speaker 2: their way who got irritated by the price of sandwiches
Speaker 2: and suddenly hit someone.
Speaker 4: My goodness me. And it's sinister.
Speaker 2: It's truly sinister, because although I'm a big fan, obviously
Speaker 2: of alternative.
Speaker 4: Media and of the.
Speaker 2: Internet and of lots of ways of getting around the mainstream,
Speaker 2: the mainstream still exists, and people take their cues from
Speaker 2: headlines and from blurbs, and I mean, the fact that
Speaker 2: the press decided to cover this up is alarming. And
Speaker 2: the final reason it's alarming is because there are people
Speaker 2: out there who are wrong, who think that everything they
Speaker 2: read is a lie. And when you go down that road,
Speaker 2: you end up at Candy so Owens right. And and
Speaker 2: the problem with this is that this is yet another
Speaker 2: example of the actually being a deliberate lie. And the
Speaker 2: more you do this, the less you fool the public,
Speaker 2: the more you convince them everything you say is falsehood.
Speaker 4: Actually it's not. And I thought for that reason it
Speaker 4: was extra irresponsible.
Speaker 1: Steve go ahead.
Speaker 5: I am astounded that CNN, which looks to be about
Speaker 5: to be acquired by David Ellison, who with their acquisition
Speaker 5: of Paramount, installed Barry Weiss at CBS News, where she's
Speaker 5: slowly making some changes for the better. I'm amazed that
Speaker 5: there aren't some adults there who said we should at
Speaker 5: least be a little bit careful. Instead, they assigned this
Speaker 5: story to a reporter who has a degree in gender
Speaker 5: studies from Berkeley and whose previous job before CNN was
Speaker 5: with PACIFICA Radio in Los Angeles.
Speaker 6: And if you don't know PACIFICA Radio, it's a public station,
Speaker 6: but it's very left wing.
Speaker 5: It's just way out there, and it actually had their
Speaker 5: financial troubles over the last few years, which is deserved.
Speaker 5: But at this point, I'm just saying, you know, I
Speaker 5: don't even think CNN can be reformed. I think they
Speaker 5: should just close it all down. I think most of
Speaker 5: their viewership is now the captive audience at airports and
Speaker 5: bars anyway, so I don't know how many real people
Speaker 5: actually watch it anymore, or hand it over to what's
Speaker 5: his name, Ken Jennings and let him run the thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, I share the sentiments that both of you
Speaker 1: just described. And I'm still astonished actually that I got
Speaker 1: most of my news on this from X. As a
Speaker 1: matter of fact, I get most of my news on X,
Speaker 1: which kind of makes me nervous. Now I've got a
Speaker 1: lot of sources that I hit every day. Every morning,
Speaker 1: I get up, I read the local paper online without charging,
Speaker 1: without being paid charged for it. I add through Apple News,
Speaker 1: I read the Telegraph. I read a variety of sources,
Speaker 1: but a lot of the stuff that's right up to
Speaker 1: the moment I get for becks and you have to sift,
Speaker 1: and you have to judge, and you have to be
Speaker 1: very careful. And that brings us to the last question
Speaker 1: we're going to have here, which is when it comes
Speaker 1: to the presentation of we're getting out here, and you
Speaker 1: can't fake an event and say that guy never threw
Speaker 1: I think when we knew that he threw it. But
Speaker 1: AI and the influence of it, whether or not you
Speaker 1: think what you're seeing on your screens about this particular war,
Speaker 1: whether or not you regard everything that you are seeing
Speaker 1: as false until proved true, whether or not you're taking
Speaker 1: on a case by case basis, fog of war is
Speaker 1: what we always have. But how do you guys feel
Speaker 1: about the presentation of this one factoring in what you
Speaker 1: know about AI?
Speaker 5: Well, I am so many things are showing up on
Speaker 5: Twitter that have video, and some of it is so
Speaker 5: comically bad and fake that you wonder if that's on
Speaker 5: purpose that they're pranking us, right, and then other things
Speaker 5: you're not quite sure.
Speaker 6: I've been worried for quite a while that I think
Speaker 6: we're not far away.
Speaker 5: From the AI productions being so accurate that it's going
Speaker 5: to be really difficult to tell when they're fake, because
Speaker 5: I mean, people who do it well are going to
Speaker 5: make it, you know, ninety nine percent plausible and the
Speaker 5: one percent you slip in.
Speaker 6: And I don't know.
Speaker 5: I'm against regulations of these things, but I am kind
Speaker 5: of open to the idea that there needs to be
Speaker 5: some kind of watermark on AI productions or some bit
Speaker 5: of code so you can tell whether this is legitimate,
Speaker 5: unadulterated video.
Speaker 6: Or whether it has been altered in some way.
Speaker 5: I'm very hesitant about that idea, but I do think
Speaker 5: this is going to be a big problem going forward.
Speaker 1: Grow does Charles have any opinions?
Speaker 2: I don't think that the as much we can do
Speaker 2: about it, and I think that it's going to lead
Speaker 2: to some combination of people believing nothing and people being
Speaker 2: far more judicious in what they choose to read. I
Speaker 2: think that it will not destroy our culture. I think
Speaker 2: it will destroy some people within our culture, much as
Speaker 2: you keep hearing stories about older people on Facebook who
Speaker 2: literally can't distinguish. There was a video I saw a
Speaker 2: guy on a magic carpet taking down an American plane.
Speaker 2: Ye see this very right. We all saw it and
Speaker 2: said that's actually very funny. It's just that there are
Speaker 2: about a million people, it seems, on Facebook that said wow,
Speaker 2: look at the technology.
Speaker 4: So I think those people may be lost.
Speaker 2: But I think a lot of other people are going
Speaker 2: to be more judicious rather than less, and I think
Speaker 2: that they're going to start thinking more carefully about what
Speaker 2: they read and why, and in a sense that will
Speaker 2: take us back, not forward. The internet made it easy
Speaker 2: just to be passive. You watch as things go by,
Speaker 2: you don't really worry about where it came from. Somebody
Speaker 2: sends you a link, you click it. It wasn't the
Speaker 2: case in the fifties and the fifties people had a newspaper.
Speaker 2: They got to live it every single day, and they
Speaker 2: trusted it until they didn't. So I think there's going
Speaker 2: to be a return to that of sorts. But yes,
Speaker 2: there's also going to be a lot of chaos that
Speaker 2: will be very bad.
Speaker 1: It's a video of a rocket hitting an American battleship
Speaker 1: or aircraft. Unfortunately it was a Soyez booster from the
Speaker 1: seventies or those you know, those great flared engine nozzles,
Speaker 1: and the ship I think was Japanese, but it was
Speaker 1: being shared around at something. I mean, the credulity of people.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm if you showed a video of Erica
Speaker 1: Kirk in Tel Aviv swinging from a skyscraper top like
Speaker 1: King Kong, Candice oh And would probably believe it, and
Speaker 1: the followers would think so Otherwise, Uh well, yeah, we'll
Speaker 1: just have to see I mean. And every time you
Speaker 1: see something now it's though, growk is this AI? And
Speaker 1: people trust? Win Grex says, yes, it appears to be
Speaker 1: so because it's shaky and grainy and the rest of it,
Speaker 1: and what you're actually seeing is something from you know,
Speaker 1: from the two thousand and three invasion of Iraq. Yes,
Speaker 1: be careful, trust, but verify. That's why we're here, of course,
Speaker 1: to say all those things that you can trust absolutely,
Speaker 1: because we know what we're talking about and we mean
Speaker 1: what we say. At least even when we just have
Speaker 1: we disagreed this.
Speaker 4: When we do, we're both write that's.
Speaker 1: Right, that's right. We're absolutely correct Schrodinger's podcast hosts. You might, however,
Speaker 1: if you want folks to go to Apple Podcasts and say,
Speaker 1: my gosh, those guys are always right, even when they disagree,
Speaker 1: even when they're wrong, they're right in a charming fashion
Speaker 1: and give us five stars or even better, you might
Speaker 1: want to bet a Ricochet if you haven't already. I mean,
Speaker 1: how did you find this podcast anyway without going there? Right?
Speaker 1: And aren't you a non member just curious what goes
Speaker 1: on behind the curtain, aren't you when you click that
Speaker 1: member site button, frustrated when you can't go and see
Speaker 1: the wonderful conversations happening there. Well, it's cheap, it's easy,
Speaker 1: and if you sign up, you can contribute, and you
Speaker 1: can write essays and let's stand alongside everybody else's and
Speaker 1: you can comment, which is what keeps Ricochet nice and
Speaker 1: civil and decent because there's a code of contact. You know,
Speaker 1: you can't can't be the jerk you are elsewhere in
Speaker 1: the internet and we all behave. Does that mean it's
Speaker 1: dull and boring and pinkies outstretched as we have a
Speaker 1: cup of tit? No, not at all. Go there and
Speaker 1: find out for yourself. At ricochet dot com. Gentlemen, it's
Speaker 1: been a pleasure as ever. We will convene again next week.
Speaker 1: Lord knows what will happen between them. But to Steven
Speaker 1: and California, where are you, Stephen.
Speaker 6: By the way, I'm in Toledo, Ohio today.
Speaker 4: Ah.
Speaker 1: Well, sometimes considered, I'd rather be that yes right to
Speaker 1: let yes well, indeed, enjoy the glorious Spanish arrivdor. Otherwise
Speaker 1: there and Charles in Florida, we hats off to you.
Speaker 1: Me here in Minnesota, which is at the moment calm
Speaker 1: and tending trending, leaning towards spring, and also expected to
Speaker 1: get twelve inches of snow by the weekend. Shoot me now, anyway,
Speaker 1: it's been fun. We'll see everybody in the comments. At
Speaker 1: Ricochet four point zero ah now bye bye Ricochet, Ye
Speaker 1: join the conversation