Speaker 1: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask
Speaker 1: what you can do for your country.
Speaker 2: Mister Gorbachew, tear down this wall.
Speaker 3: It's the Ricochet Podcast with Stephen Hayward and myself James Lotlax.
Speaker 3: Today we talked to Noah Rothman about things domestic and
Speaker 3: cultural to international and military everything. So let's ever So
Speaker 3: it's a podcast.
Speaker 4: I went on a left leaning podcast and they asked
Speaker 4: me about my son and I said, he was you know,
Speaker 4: he's he's a football player and he wants to be
Speaker 4: a policeman. And their joke was about my fifteen year
Speaker 4: old son, Oh, how does he feel about minorities? Like
Speaker 4: the idea that he wants to be a policeman, therefore
Speaker 4: he's racist? And I thought to myself, this.
Speaker 2: Is why you so losing elections.
Speaker 3: Welcome everybody, This is the Ricochet Podcast, number seven hundred
Speaker 3: and forty three. Why don't you you go to ricochet
Speaker 3: dot com right now sign up to be part of
Speaker 3: the the most stimulating conversations and community on the weapon.
Speaker 3: We wouldn't say it if we couldn't back it up.
Speaker 3: I'm James Ladox, Minneapolis, Minnesota, where it's a beautiful end
Speaker 3: of May day, Stephen Hayward is, well, what are you
Speaker 3: in a cabin Alaska or something like that. I'm looking
Speaker 3: at you.
Speaker 1: I am in the I'm in the highlands of Iceland,
Speaker 1: which I've decided, James, is the Minnesota of waterfalls.
Speaker 2: They have a waterfall every.
Speaker 1: Fifty feet that they do in Minnesota has a lake right,
Speaker 1: and it's quite amazing.
Speaker 3: We're the amazing rainbows in the air as the mist
Speaker 3: hits the sun. And of course what I loved about
Speaker 3: it you can go to the top of it and
Speaker 3: look down. There weren't any handrails on the steps, the stairs.
Speaker 3: It's just we don't have the ada here. You know,
Speaker 3: you can't figure it out. Don't fall, That's basically, it
Speaker 3: don't fall. So you're finding Iceland to be as fascinating
Speaker 3: as people said, even though the streets are filled with
Speaker 3: unpronounceable words you cannot begin to sound out. Oh yes, yeah.
Speaker 1: I thought Welsh was a difficult language and challenging on
Speaker 1: purpose for foreigners. Every place I go to, I just
Speaker 1: say I'm in far Fordnugan, because I'm farm from anywhere,
Speaker 1: and it's I can't pronounce anything, and yeah, it's impossible.
Speaker 3: So it's mumble, Yeah, the extraordinary country. But that's another podcast,
Speaker 3: and I hope they had that right sometime soon, maybe
Speaker 3: when Charles C. W. Cook is not joining us this time.
Speaker 3: He's a bit under the weather. I don't know what
Speaker 3: the weather is like in Florida, but apparently he's suffering
Speaker 3: from it, which leaves us to discuss this. Who knew, Stephen?
Speaker 3: Who knew there's a Court of International Trade?
Speaker 1: I did not, And I thought I knew most of
Speaker 1: these specialized federal courts, like the Court of Federal Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Court of Federal Claims, a few other obscure ones.
Speaker 1: I do know a little bit about that.
Speaker 3: Said, let us, of course be instant experts on the fact.
Speaker 3: So the Court of International Trade has struck down the tariffs,
Speaker 3: Yeah for now, And I think the judge stated for
Speaker 3: a couple of weeks or something like that. This is
Speaker 3: the usual ya judicial activism from some nay judicial activity injunctivitis, say,
Speaker 3: some judge shopping what right have they to do? The
Speaker 3: executive No, there was a nineteen sixty two congressional act
Speaker 3: that gave him the power, etc. Can you make heads
Speaker 3: or tails out of this? Where we are now and
Speaker 3: whether or not you think it's going to stick.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I think it's not going to stick, and
Speaker 1: I think it in an odd way, it makes it
Speaker 1: more likely that Trump's tariff power may survive what otherwise
Speaker 1: would have been a more formidable legal challenge in regular
Speaker 1: district court. So this is one of these specialized courts
Speaker 1: set up by Congress to handle things that the judiciary
Speaker 1: doesn't want to have clogging their regular docket. So, as
Speaker 1: I understand this court, it exists for people to bring
Speaker 1: appeals that they're not charged the correct tariff rate on
Speaker 1: you know, whether something is improperly classified as this kind
Speaker 1: of product versus that kind of product. And so if
Speaker 1: you can get your let's take an example, an old
Speaker 1: Teddy ruxpan doll might have had something like a ten
Speaker 1: percent tariff. It's been important from somewhere, but if you
Speaker 1: claim it's an educational tool, then it would have maybe
Speaker 1: a five percent tariff. So to hear cases like that,
Speaker 1: this is kind of like people's court stuff, right with
Speaker 1: Judge Wantner.
Speaker 3: And so for this court to.
Speaker 1: Assert its jurisdiction and take on this huge question of
Speaker 1: Trump's worldwide tariff strategy seems to me politically suicidal for
Speaker 1: the court, and it's very badly reasoned. I think I've
Speaker 1: skimmed through it quickly. I haven't mastered it. But there
Speaker 1: are legitimate questions about whether Congress can delegate the sweeping
Speaker 1: tarff powder power that Trumps exercised on some Emergency Economic
Speaker 1: Powers Act from the seventies. And there are other suits
Speaker 1: filed by formidable conservatives like Phil Hamburger at Columbia in
Speaker 1: district court. And this court completely ignores some of the
Speaker 1: classic constitutional arguments that could be brought to bear against
Speaker 1: Trump's power, and instead and one thing, and then I'll
Speaker 1: shut up. I could go on too long about this
Speaker 1: too easily.
Speaker 3: Is they said?
Speaker 1: Well, Trump has justified these tariffs, saying it's needed to
Speaker 1: fight the national emergency of fentanyl and the drug overdoses
Speaker 1: and whatnot. But tariffs are a terrible tool for doing that. Well,
Speaker 1: you know what, if the president has given the power
Speaker 1: to declare a national emergency, the means should be beyond
Speaker 1: the scrutiny of an obscure court that you've never heard of,
Speaker 1: with judges who are even Article three judges with lifetime tenure,
Speaker 1: and they completely skipped making any constitutional arguments. And it's
Speaker 1: mind bogglingly bad. And I think an almost any federal
Speaker 1: court that here's the appeal of this decision, is going
Speaker 1: to overturn it in a second, and Trump's going to
Speaker 1: claim victory, and it's going to make it I think
Speaker 1: harder to assail his power in a regular lawsuit.
Speaker 3: Maybe not Judge Wapner, but Judge Judy, don't EPA on
Speaker 3: my leg and tell me it's raining. The EPA being
Speaker 3: the International Emergency Powers Act of nineteen seventy seven. We
Speaker 3: talked about that, and I agree with you. I mean,
Speaker 3: the emergency portion of this has always seemed to me
Speaker 3: to be a little bit suspect. Gathering up these powers
Speaker 3: by claiming we have an emergency, and emergency seems you
Speaker 3: seem to want to reserve that word for actual things
Speaker 3: that come out of nowhere quickly and spiraled into very
Speaker 3: bad problems. It must be faced immediately, right, and fentanyl
Speaker 3: wall bad does not seem to be a justifiable rationale
Speaker 3: for that. Of course, other people can make the arguments,
Speaker 3: and they happen. What do I know, But you're right.
Speaker 3: I mean to say that tariffs are a bad way
Speaker 3: of doing this. It's well that that's a subjective question.
Speaker 3: That's that's not an objective finding. That's that's saying, well,
Speaker 3: we really don't who knows if you've composed one thousand
Speaker 3: percent tariff in China in Mexico unless they instantly went
Speaker 3: in and blew up all their fentanyl factories might get
Speaker 3: their attention. I don't know that seems to be the reasoning.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I think you're correct, and it'll probably be
Speaker 3: struck down. And if nothing else, we will have all
Speaker 3: learned that there is a Court of International Trade, which
Speaker 3: which which sounds like one of those Brussels organizations that
Speaker 3: make you roll right right, you roll your eyes and say, well,
Speaker 3: you know how many? You know how many troops? Is
Speaker 3: the pope? It's one of those. But well, apparently this.
Speaker 1: Is this is there are some anti scenes to this,
Speaker 1: to go back over one hundred years. Uh, here's a
Speaker 1: trivia point that you may know. When Franklin Roosevelt declared
Speaker 1: the bank closed all the banks in the country, state
Speaker 1: and federal alike in his first weekend office in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty three, he invoked something called the Trading with the
Speaker 1: Enemy Act from nineteen seventeen, pasted during World War One.
Speaker 3: Well, who's the enemy in nineteen thirty three.
Speaker 1: I was absurd and no one thought to file a
Speaker 1: lawsuit then, but it was so it's very similar now.
Speaker 1: In other words, what we're seeing now is not that unusual.
Speaker 1: And by the way, I've said this before here. I
Speaker 1: keep telling liberals, this is the presidency. You've always wanted
Speaker 1: strong executive power to do all these good things. You know, Wilson, Franklin, Roosevelt,
Speaker 1: John F. Kennedy. They always use these powers. And DIAC
Speaker 1: is mad because you don't like what Trump is using
Speaker 1: them for. But maybe you want to get back to
Speaker 1: an old thing called the constitution.
Speaker 3: As we keep saying. Yes, well, you know Ben in
Speaker 3: a phone and bold, persistent experimentation. It seems to me
Speaker 3: that's what we've been seeing. Yeah, bank Holiday, there's something
Speaker 3: of a euthanism there. Oh, I'm so giddy for the
Speaker 3: upcoming bank holiday. What do you hope you find under
Speaker 3: the safe tomorrow when it's a bank hall, a bank
Speaker 3: closure is what it is, and dire straits because of it.
Speaker 3: Oh you Govald? All right, there's that. And speaking of
Speaker 3: money that we found in banks and also in bills,
Speaker 3: we have one that is both big and or beautiful
Speaker 3: or not. I don't know how a got called the BBB,
Speaker 3: which sounds like some sort of thing you'd find in
Speaker 3: a chat room where people are seeking out particular pleasures.
Speaker 3: But what about this here? I keep hearing the same
Speaker 3: thing is that when I was talking to somebody about
Speaker 3: this the other day, they said, well, there's all these
Speaker 3: medicare cuts, so well they're spread out over ten years. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but it's going to it's going to hurt the communities
Speaker 3: because they're not going to be able to be able
Speaker 3: to pay for you know, well, for example, emergency rooms
Speaker 3: are going to hit because they're going to be having
Speaker 3: illegals coming in who have no means to pay. And
Speaker 3: I said, well, you know, the idea is is that
Speaker 3: there won't be them, the illegals, because they will have
Speaker 3: been dispensed with, and so you will have the savings
Speaker 3: from that. And so all of this seems like just
Speaker 3: conjecture about something that I don't know. The cuts are
Speaker 3: going to lead to death. We know specifically, I've already
Speaker 3: been hearing all these dire things that are that are
Speaker 3: meant to say, But are they really cuts? Are we
Speaker 3: really talking about a slowing of the rate of growth
Speaker 3: as usual? Yes, if we were to go back to
Speaker 3: the Medicare budget of five years ago, would that mean
Speaker 3: a mass die off? How bad is the is the
Speaker 3: Medicare cut? Because we all know, I mean we know
Speaker 3: from Mitt Romney wanted to take Gramm and put in
Speaker 3: a wheelchair pusher off a cliff. We all know that
Speaker 3: the point of this is to kill people. That is,
Speaker 3: you know, the Republican idea for continued electoral strategy, to
Speaker 3: tell the electorate that they want as many of them
Speaker 3: dead as possible. So how is this going to play
Speaker 3: on it? Do you think? Right? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean net neutrality failed to kill millions, as we
Speaker 1: were told of what happened, So I guess we have
Speaker 1: to cut Medicare instead. Of course, James, it's it's a
Speaker 1: reduction of future rate of growth. I think, well, first
Speaker 1: of all, one of my rules of a big congressional
Speaker 1: legislation is I don't really start paying close attention until
Speaker 1: the Senate's had its say. And the Senate here is
Speaker 1: going to make a lot of changes, and so to
Speaker 1: read the builds exist now is I think mostly a
Speaker 1: waste of effort unless you have to write a major
Speaker 1: feature about it. But yeah, so Medica, it's just one
Speaker 1: part of it. We're controlling the rate of growth. And
Speaker 1: I think what ought to be said is two things.
Speaker 1: One is, as a general matter, Democrats quite a while ago,
Speaker 1: going back at least the financial crisis of two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight, so all programs like social security, disability, medicare
Speaker 1: as proxies for wealth transfers for redistribution of wealth.
Speaker 3: They want.
Speaker 1: That's why they want to expand eligibility to as many
Speaker 1: people as possible, including illegal aliens, and broad the things
Speaker 1: covered and so forth. And then the second thing is
Speaker 1: I think what's going to happen here is you may
Speaker 1: see some Washington monument strategy. That's what you really described
Speaker 1: is you know what, we're going to have to cut
Speaker 1: emergency rooms instead of limiting eligibility, which some states are
Speaker 1: starting to do, like California. I think I meant in
Speaker 1: the previous week that Governor Newsom has said illegal aliens
Speaker 1: currently getting medicator are going to have to start doing
Speaker 1: one hundred dollars a month copey or something like that,
Speaker 1: and no new enrollments. And that's even before the big
Speaker 1: beautiful bill passes. But in any case, this is all phony.
Speaker 1: It's the same drill we've seen since the Reagan years.
Speaker 1: At least you're cutting something when the budget's actually going
Speaker 1: to grow by You know what that means is a
Speaker 1: cut is when the projected rate of increase the liberals
Speaker 1: want doesn't happen. So they want ten billion and they
Speaker 1: only get five billion, and that's a cut a five
Speaker 1: billion more. Right, So this is an old game, and
Speaker 1: I got to think that, you know, like certain other
Speaker 1: aspects of liberal rhetoric, that it's not going to work anymore.
Speaker 3: But we'll see. They're also concerns. Apparently Tom Tillis has
Speaker 3: mentioned something like this that ought to be a name
Speaker 3: of a country Western singer known for his yes man humor.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry. Tom till has warned about the the the
Speaker 3: abrupt and sudden termination of renewable energy incentives for a
Speaker 3: couple of reasons. One because well, renewable energy is the
Speaker 3: only think it's going to keep the planet from turning
Speaker 3: into a burnt out cinder going around the sun. And two,
Speaker 3: I said that we're not going to be able to
Speaker 3: meet the rest of the demand for petroleum products because
Speaker 3: the investors are still skittish after Keystone, Keystone being canceled
Speaker 3: by Biden because he too wanted to save the Earth,
Speaker 3: and the Green New Deal didn't allow for that nasty,
Speaker 3: sinful icher to flow through the pipes of America. So
Speaker 3: I'm not so sure about that. It seems to me
Speaker 3: as if we've got a pretty pro oil pro pipeline
Speaker 3: guy in there now, And it does make you think
Speaker 3: if they couldn't build one of these things in three years,
Speaker 3: then something is perhaps awry with our initiative, or perhaps
Speaker 3: we are too burdened, dare I say by regulations that
Speaker 3: keep these things from happening swiftly? I mean Hoover dam boom, blink,
Speaker 3: it's up, Empire State Building. It was just a hole
Speaker 3: in the ground yesterday. Look at it sixty stories now.
Speaker 3: I mean we used to be able to do things
Speaker 3: with dispatch. So I'm not exactly. I'm completely pleased that
Speaker 3: the long grift that has been the renewable energy incentives
Speaker 3: maybe coming to an end, because I frankly don't want
Speaker 3: to depend on the wind in the sun. I want
Speaker 3: to be able to depend on us, which that goes
Speaker 3: on because the currency is well balanced and powered by plentiful, clean,
Speaker 3: modern progressive nuclear energy.
Speaker 1: Well, first of all, I wish tell us we're less
Speaker 1: confused about these things. If we gank all of the
Speaker 1: green energy subsidies, you'll still be able to build wind
Speaker 1: and solar power if you want to. You'll just have
Speaker 1: to pay for it yourself. That's very different from what
Speaker 1: happened with the Keystone Pipeline. I thought it was one
Speaker 1: of the most shocking things a president has ever done
Speaker 1: when Biden on day one shut down the Keystone pipeline.
Speaker 1: That was not a subsidized project. It did not need
Speaker 1: federal funds or tax breaks.
Speaker 3: It was a.
Speaker 1: Privately funded project with what five thousand people, many of
Speaker 1: them Uguonize, working on it. And I think it's the
Speaker 1: first time a president has ever revoked a permit for
Speaker 1: a project in progress. It's one thing to block a
Speaker 1: permit from happening in the first place, but to actually
Speaker 1: stop something being built by the private sector, I don't
Speaker 1: think has ever happened before. And if Tillis had been
Speaker 1: threatening to impeach the president for that, I would now
Speaker 1: maybe listen to him a little bit more attentively. I
Speaker 1: have to say the Biden people were very clever with
Speaker 1: their what was a build Back No Inflation Reduction Act,
Speaker 1: which even Biden admitted it was just a green subsidy.
Speaker 1: They spread the money around lavishly to Red States on purpose,
Speaker 1: hoping that as years. To comment, it was, you know,
Speaker 1: these things were projected to last for years, not just
Speaker 1: for Biden's term. Especially some of the tax credits are
Speaker 1: open ended entirely, and I think they thought, ah, if
Speaker 1: we lavish enough money to the Red States, that will
Speaker 1: guarantee they have political supports that they'll survive a change
Speaker 1: in administration. And lo and behold, Tillis is right on
Speaker 1: the spot, offering to prove the Biden administration and the
Speaker 1: Democrats right. And so I think you should go pound
Speaker 1: sand into solar panels on the beach in North Carolina
Speaker 1: and let the rest of us get back to having
Speaker 1: real energy.
Speaker 3: As you say, Yes, there's debates up here in Minnesota
Speaker 3: as to whether to mine in an area known as
Speaker 3: the near the Boundary waters, and people are concerned about
Speaker 3: run off and pollution, and wells they should. But the
Speaker 3: thing is is that they do need an awful lot
Speaker 3: of copper for those big, wonderful, beautiful windmills. They need
Speaker 3: a lot of virgin copper, and that means means you
Speaker 3: have to dig into it with industrial equipment that dare
Speaker 3: I say, might be powered by fossil fuels. So they
Speaker 3: want it always. They want the planes to be dotted
Speaker 3: with these dark, satanic machines. But at the same time
Speaker 3: they don't want anybody to actually get the copper out
Speaker 3: of the ground to make them do it. But somehow
Speaker 3: it will happen. And then you just look and say, look,
Speaker 3: we have fuel, we have diesel, we've got gas, we've
Speaker 3: got nuclear. It works. Nope, can't have it. Another thing
Speaker 3: that is in the bill that will probably be a
Speaker 3: source of contention is that the government is decided it
Speaker 3: is no longer going to use Medicaid to fund facial
Speaker 3: feminization procedures exactly for people who have decided that they
Speaker 3: are of a different gender. Now, when the cuts are
Speaker 3: to gender affirming care, I don't know if that actually
Speaker 3: goes towards the secondary or tertiary cosmetic qualities. But again
Speaker 3: it's like you said, with the pipeline, it's you're still
Speaker 3: free to do it, you just you just have to
Speaker 3: pay for it. And the idea that the taxpayer should
Speaker 3: be obligated to do this is it has, as it's
Speaker 3: predicates a whole series of ideas which themselves I don't
Speaker 3: care how much they say are not empirically scientifically valid.
Speaker 3: I mean, they just aren't. I mean, it's it's it's
Speaker 3: I'm sorry. You can talk about brain chemistry and gender
Speaker 3: theory and all the rest of it, but I don't
Speaker 3: see why that is necessary for the taxpayer to fund
Speaker 3: these things. Second thing that I found that was interesting
Speaker 3: in discussion about the bills that there's a tenure ban
Speaker 3: on state laws regarding the regulation of AI and AH.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure how I feel about this because I'm
Speaker 3: I'm hesitant to allow AI to be crimped by governments
Speaker 3: that don't know anything about it or acting out of
Speaker 3: fear or ignorance. But at the same time, I'm terribly
Speaker 3: terribly concerned about what AI is going to do, and
Speaker 3: not in some luddite, stupid it's going to take the
Speaker 3: jerb stuff. I'm deeply troubled about the effect that it's
Speaker 3: going to have. I had a situation the other day
Speaker 3: where I was where I asked Google something. I was
Speaker 3: researching something, and it came up with because you no
Speaker 3: longer get at the top of the page, you ad
Speaker 3: your ad and then your link to the story, you
Speaker 3: get an AI summary. Google has decided We're going to
Speaker 3: step in and use our AI to give you the
Speaker 3: answer to the question that you just did. And the
Speaker 3: answer was wrong. It was very wrong, and it was
Speaker 3: wrong in such a way that anybody who came across
Speaker 3: the same thing in the situation that I did would
Speaker 3: have emptied their bowels and their bladders simultaneously at realizing
Speaker 3: that if this was true, things were very bad for
Speaker 3: you at this instance. And I'll be able to talk
Speaker 3: about this perhaps in a couple of weeks. So I
Speaker 3: don't trust state solons to regulate it necessarily with the
Speaker 3: brilliance that they bring to other members of other issues.
Speaker 3: But at the same time, where is this ban on
Speaker 3: a ban on regulation of AI coming from.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it does concern me too. So by the way,
Speaker 1: I've had the same reaction to those Google summaries. It
Speaker 1: puts me in the mind of the late famous Caltech
Speaker 1: physicist Richard Feynman, who one time saw something like that
Speaker 1: and he said, that isn't right. Why that isn't even wrong?
Speaker 1: I've seen that some of the bizarre results from those
Speaker 1: Google things.
Speaker 3: Look.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a very familiar argument that industries made
Speaker 1: for decades about various regulatory schemes you'd rather have instead
Speaker 1: of state by state regulation. For example, suppose some states said,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, Coca Cola can only be sold in ten
Speaker 1: ounce cans, that Coca Cola has to make a different
Speaker 1: can for that state, and the automakers and chemical companies
Speaker 1: they've always wanted to have uniform federal regulation. It's better
Speaker 1: to have one size fits all, or you just have
Speaker 1: chaos commercially. I get all that, and you don't want
Speaker 1: states also erecting airsat's trade barriers against out of state
Speaker 1: companies and so forth. On the other hand, I do
Speaker 1: think I'm very you know, just this stuff makes me nervous,
Speaker 1: and I think state legislators, as bad as they often are,
Speaker 1: should not be told that, no, I'm sorry, you can't
Speaker 1: pass a regulation, say, protecting your citizens privacy. I'm very
Speaker 1: concerned about how AI may be used to invade your
Speaker 1: privacy or sell your data, manipulate your data, and so forth.
Speaker 1: And if the federal government is not going to do it,
Speaker 1: I think it's probably maybe not wise to say states
Speaker 1: can't get into looking at that also, but I don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't understand all this stuff. I have to confess,
Speaker 1: But it does worry me.
Speaker 3: Yes, well, we'll have a white paper, We'll have congressional here,
Speaker 3: We'll have a blue coat, will have a blue ribbon committee.
Speaker 3: We have all of these things, and by the time
Speaker 3: they're done with it, everything that they come up with
Speaker 3: will be incredibly outdated because the AI has become exponentially
Speaker 3: smarter by a factor of thirty seven while they've been
Speaker 3: flapping their gums. So yeah, I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 3: what is the state going to do? You can VPN
Speaker 3: around that, what is the state going to say about,
Speaker 3: you know, misinformation? I don't want them to be the
Speaker 3: ones who tell me what he is and is not.
Speaker 3: All of that stuff. I get it, but we're going
Speaker 3: to end up not regulating it, and we're going because
Speaker 3: there's perhaps no way to do so effectively, and then
Speaker 3: we're going to end up with some societal consequences from it.
Speaker 3: Reading a study today was talking about the blood bath
Speaker 3: of mid color of mid level jobs. It's going to
Speaker 3: go away, and it's entirely possible a lot of them
Speaker 3: will be automated by AI if it gets infallible or
Speaker 3: at least fallible to them like human beings. But as
Speaker 3: somebody pointed, out. When computerization was supposed to eliminate fast
Speaker 3: swaths of jobs, what people did basically was come up
Speaker 3: with other jobs, email jobs and PowerPoint jobs and managerial
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Speaker 3: sponsoring this the Ricochet podcast. Now we bring back to
Speaker 3: the podcast. Noah Rothman, Senior writer at National Review. I've
Speaker 3: heard of them, and the author of the Rise of
Speaker 3: the New Puritans, fighting back against Progressives, war on fun
Speaker 3: and unjust social justice, and the unmaking of America get
Speaker 3: into this in a bit here. I don't want to
Speaker 3: get to to Russia, but I also want to talk
Speaker 3: about fighting back against the progressives war on fun. We
Speaker 3: just had first of all, welcome though, thanks, thanks for
Speaker 3: coming back right pleasure, thanks for having me. We just
Speaker 3: had the DNC come out, not through Hogg, who of
Speaker 3: course is their manliest of spokesman, the most large lumberjackie
Speaker 3: testosterone field guy, but that they have to appeal to
Speaker 3: young men's scratching their head and saying, how are we
Speaker 3: going to exactly do this? Like anthropologists studying some hominids
Speaker 3: in the wild, do they have a chance of this?
Speaker 3: Because so much of the progressive agenda now seems to
Speaker 3: be based on a series of assumptions about society and
Speaker 3: men that a lot of young men have just figured
Speaker 3: out and tuned them out for good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think they've earned that.
Speaker 5: I don't want to say never, because that just implies
Speaker 5: a failure of imagination on my part. The political earth
Speaker 5: can shift under your feet pretty rapidly, so never is
Speaker 5: a long time that being said. You know, there's a
Speaker 5: quote that came across the transom yesterday in Jake Tapper's
Speaker 5: media tour in which he described Vibed encountering progressives on
Speaker 5: a progressive podcast that caters to progressive audiences and he
Speaker 5: was talking about his son and how his son is
Speaker 5: a football player and wants to grow up to be
Speaker 5: a cop. And the progressives responded to that by mocking
Speaker 5: his son, implying that he harbored racially hostile animus in
Speaker 5: his heart, because why else we didn't want to be
Speaker 5: a la enforcement officer. And obviously the jingoism and toxic
Speaker 5: male fantasies that contribute to anybody who would want to
Speaker 5: go into professional athletics are equally suspect. It is the
Speaker 5: sort of thing that contributes to the impression that democrats
Speaker 5: have cultivated for themselves that they're just genuinely hostile to
Speaker 5: expressions of traditional masculinity in whatever forms they take. One
Speaker 5: of the chapters in that book, Rise of the New Puritans,
Speaker 5: in chapter five and six, are devoted to hobbies, sex
Speaker 5: and booze, And over the course of those chapters you see,
Speaker 5: and this is part of the Great Wokenings. So perhaps
Speaker 5: it's on the decline, but it's not going yet. You
Speaker 5: see throughout the course of those chapters a concerted effort
Speaker 5: among progressive activists to establish their status within their hierarchy
Speaker 5: by identifying racial hostility and seemingly innocuous, fair, jogging, running, gardening,
Speaker 5: interior decorating, you know, just about every hobby that you
Speaker 5: can imagine, to say nothing of all the masculine you know,
Speaker 5: traditionally masculine things like working on cars, for example, and
Speaker 5: fishing and hunting and that sort of thing. All of
Speaker 5: them are pervaded with hostility, anti social, antisocial beliefs. And
Speaker 5: when it comes to sex and booze, you get this
Speaker 5: something akin to resembling to a degree that I found
Speaker 5: hard to ignore the Temperance movement, and the temperance movement
Speaker 5: was a an outgrowth of suffragism. It was a women
Speaker 5: led movement. Indeed, many of the activists whose rhetoric has
Speaker 5: been resurrected in the first way of movement of feminism
Speaker 5: at the turn of the twentieth century described alcohol as
Speaker 5: they describe it today. It makes and what it does
Speaker 5: to men, It makes men into brutes, It makes men
Speaker 5: into bad providers, it makes men into philanderers. All this
Speaker 5: language you hear expressed, some of it directly from the
Speaker 5: Temperance Movement and the subsequent movements that arose from it,
Speaker 5: including prohibition. All of this stuff is hostile to men.
Speaker 5: It is hostile to liberty as opposed to libertinism, although
Speaker 5: it's very hostile to that as well. And it's an
Speaker 5: expression of a sort of mistrust of the social compact
Speaker 5: that has arisen as a result of male participation in
Speaker 5: the political process that is just incompatible with the current
Speaker 5: social compact. It's the sort of thing that I don't
Speaker 5: think they can move forward and be politically viable prize
Speaker 5: unless they slough off a lot of this really hyper
Speaker 5: activist jargon that is that emerged from the campuses in
Speaker 5: twenty twenty. It needs to be relegated back to them
Speaker 5: where it can be hopefully suffocated for all time. But
Speaker 5: for now it just needs to be quarantined back in
Speaker 5: these academic removes or tumbler.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they right coded everything, because you would make your
Speaker 3: bones by finding something new to be that was right coded.
Speaker 3: Working out, for example, was for a while there.
Speaker 5: Was the picture of Paul Ryan, tell me how masculine
Speaker 5: that activity really is?
Speaker 3: Right and yeah, so again the pendulum perhaps will swing,
Speaker 3: but that sort of uh manly viga as they had
Speaker 3: with the Kennedy's would appall them now and everybody gets
Speaker 3: more points for finding something new that is right coded
Speaker 3: and generally masculine because boo his ick. All right, so
Speaker 3: we got that, Stephen, you wanted to add or go
Speaker 3: on another.
Speaker 1: I mean, I do want to before we get onto
Speaker 1: some turn headlines and things of the last ten days
Speaker 1: or so, I do want to say no.
Speaker 3: First of all, I've.
Speaker 1: Told you before you're my favorite cranky person. And but
Speaker 1: what I want to say the reason I say that
Speaker 1: or that prefaces I think you deserve a victory lap
Speaker 1: for your two books. I mean, you were reporting on
Speaker 1: the front lines about how crazy things were going, and
Speaker 1: I mean, we haven't won, but there's a fight of
Speaker 1: foot and it's crumbling in ways that I think we
Speaker 1: all thought should happen but couldn't believe that it wasn't happening.
Speaker 3: It took it took a while.
Speaker 1: And I'm actually I can make a case for pessimism
Speaker 1: or crankiness myself that if it goes back to college campuses,
Speaker 1: it will go on go to ground again and re
Speaker 1: emerge in new forms of new vocabulary in five to
Speaker 1: ten years and we'll be back in this mess again.
Speaker 3: So I don't know.
Speaker 1: But first of all, I mean you just really great
Speaker 1: writing and all that, and I you know, absolute you
Speaker 1: for all that.
Speaker 3: Let me ask about the shooting.
Speaker 1: In DC, which is now, you know what ten days
Speaker 1: ago or whatever it was.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously oct Over seven was a real turning
Speaker 1: point moment for a whole lot of things, not just Israel,
Speaker 1: not just our college campuses, but making us realize that
Speaker 1: anti Semitism is a lot more widespread and accepted promoted.
Speaker 1: It shocked me, I have to say. And then I
Speaker 1: wonder if these shootings are also because of how I
Speaker 1: keep using the word shocking again. But that was such
Speaker 1: an outrageous crime, and you know, the person looks to
Speaker 1: be a typical product of our universities, where people marinate
Speaker 1: in these hateful ideologies and we're breeding violence like we
Speaker 1: did on the universities in the late sixties. I don't
Speaker 1: know what I haven't I should have. Probably you've probably
Speaker 1: written something on it that I've missed. But you think
Speaker 1: this is also going to be a turning point or
Speaker 1: an inflection point in where this is going.
Speaker 2: I don't, I wish I did.
Speaker 5: I suspect we're going to need a few more inflection points,
Speaker 5: which is to say, horrible violence in order for us
Speaker 5: to really fully grapple with what we're attempting to reckon
Speaker 5: with here. There was no reckoning during the Biden years
Speaker 5: when this violence erupted, and there's been an effort on
Speaker 5: the part of DSA affiliates, in PARTICULARS one DSA splinter group,
Speaker 5: which is unashamedly Maoist. So there's a lot of if
Speaker 5: you go to the website, there's a lot of misconceptions
Speaker 5: about Maoism out there, and we're going to dispel them
Speaker 5: for you.
Speaker 2: And the reason why there was no.
Speaker 5: Real reckoning with what we were looking at there is
Speaker 5: because it indicts leftism in a way that leftists are
Speaker 5: are unlikely to want to reckon with.
Speaker 2: Talk about crank here we go.
Speaker 5: This all goes back in some form or fashion to
Speaker 5: the Soviet Union, as things do when it comes to
Speaker 5: just about everything I write. My colleague Dominic Pino smartly
Speaker 5: observed on the Editor's Podcast couple of episodes ago that
Speaker 5: anti Semitism became a feature of Soviet propaganda, in particular
Speaker 5: anti Zionism. Zionology was a focus of study inside the
Speaker 5: Soviet Union, and it became something that the Soviets began
Speaker 5: to export. It was an ideological export after World War II,
Speaker 5: in the end of the Stalin years, and in particular
Speaker 5: during the breshn Nev years, when Israel stopped being this
Speaker 5: archipelago of communal kibbutsim and started being somehow a tool
Speaker 5: of the West and also something that was controlling the West,
Speaker 5: and that was evolved in Soviet rhetoric into Zionism as
Speaker 5: a species of bourgeois nationalism, which was a foreign policy
Speaker 5: project that the Soviets emphasized, in particular after nineteen sixty
Speaker 5: seven and nineteen seventy three, when Israel wiped the floor
Speaker 5: with a variety of Soviet client states in the Middle East.
Speaker 5: It was a necessary project from the perspective of the Kremlin.
Speaker 5: Fast forward, we still have the vestiges of this effort
Speaker 5: to blend Soviet style Marxist Leninism with anti Zionism, and
Speaker 5: we see it in the Rhetorican behavior and activities of
Speaker 5: far left nationalists, in particular the Democratic Socialists of America
Speaker 5: and this splinter group that came out and said, you know,
Speaker 5: we need more people like this guy to shoot and
Speaker 5: kill Zionists because that's the only way we're going to advance.
Speaker 5: I don't think the DSA nationally would take ownership of
Speaker 5: that proposition, but they certainly did after October seventh, by
Speaker 5: which I mean October eighth, took to the streets, took
Speaker 5: to the streets and to attack Israel for inviting this
Speaker 5: violence upon itself and to preempt any particular, any possible
Speaker 5: retribution that Israel would meet out against Hamas. And it
Speaker 5: took direct influence from these attacks. One of the rallies
Speaker 5: was called Flood Brooklyn for Gaza, which took direct inspiration
Speaker 5: from the Allosa flood, which is the name that Hamas
Speaker 5: gave to the October seventh massacre. You can see in
Speaker 5: the science there is only one solution into fought a
Speaker 5: revolution by any means necessary. All that sort of thing
Speaker 5: is radicalizing if you take it seriously, and there's going
Speaker 5: to be some people who do. There's in a country
Speaker 5: of three hundred and thirty million people. There are going
Speaker 5: to be some cranks out there who think you're being
Speaker 5: serious and literal and will act on these more what
Speaker 5: are frankly being retailed to them as moral imperatives of
Speaker 5: the utmost importance. So yeah, it doesn't surprise me that
Speaker 5: we see some really far left socialist types. Merry wed
Speaker 5: anti Semitic anti Sionism and the Marxian fervor, because that
Speaker 5: has been something that was a concerted project for a
Speaker 5: half century and we're just dealing with the vestigial elements
Speaker 5: of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So you know, anyone who pays attention to Middle Eastern
Speaker 1: studies programs at universities, as I know you do, and
Speaker 1: I try to knows that they're just cesspools. And I
Speaker 1: have thought and seminaries of intolerance. We say that generally
Speaker 1: about universities, but especially those departments. And I do know
Speaker 1: that the Columbia has cash here to a couple of people,
Speaker 1: but I would think that more university leaders, leaders, presidents,
Speaker 1: trustees would say, you know, this is the occasion when
Speaker 1: we can clean house and actually close down some of
Speaker 1: these departments completely. What really ought to happen, right, And
Speaker 1: I don't see much of that. And that say more
Speaker 1: about that if you want. But I want to connect
Speaker 1: it to the Harvard question, which is, I'll put it
Speaker 1: this way. Sure, I understand the arguments from Stephen Pinker
Speaker 1: and others that Trump is taking out after Harvard with
Speaker 1: a meat axe, and you know, you may actually harm
Speaker 1: some reasonable medical research and this and that and the
Speaker 1: other thing, all coaching arguments. On the other hand, trying
Speaker 1: to conjole universities for the last what thirty forty years
Speaker 1: hasn't gotten very far, hasn't achieved very much. And I've
Speaker 1: come to the point where I think, you know, the
Speaker 1: only thing that's going to make these universities change is
Speaker 1: a two by four to the head, which is what
Speaker 1: Trump is certainly delivering to Harvard, and by implication, he's
Speaker 1: ready to do it to other universities too. How do
Speaker 1: you feel about all that? Is that a reasonable way
Speaker 1: of thinking about it? Or you have some reservations?
Speaker 2: It's reasonable.
Speaker 5: I have more reservations than you about, for example, the
Speaker 5: war on Harvard.
Speaker 2: I don't think the public.
Speaker 5: I think the public is very mistrustful of these institutions,
Speaker 5: and I think they would welcome efforts to reform and
Speaker 5: even coerce and cajole them by the administration. I don't
Speaker 5: think they look fondly on a two by four. I
Speaker 5: think they see that as arbitrary. I think they don't
Speaker 5: believe that the president should be wielding two by fours
Speaker 5: against American private institutions, even if they take taxpayer funds.
Speaker 5: With the proper conception on their part. Frankly, that any
Speaker 5: instrument that you forge in the culture war, you should
Speaker 5: expect to be taken by your adversaries and wielded against you.
Speaker 5: They don't want to be on the receiving end of
Speaker 5: that sort of thing. Nor do I, Nor do I
Speaker 5: want conservative institutions to be similarly targeted by Democrats who
Speaker 5: would take the opportunity to use the precedents that are
Speaker 5: being set today and train them on their own ideological adversaries.
Speaker 3: And I think like having the irs, like having the
Speaker 3: irs sicked them.
Speaker 5: Oh, that never happened, though, James, you know that all. Yeah,
Speaker 5: they may have paid out settlements and admitted to doing
Speaker 5: something there, but now we know in retrospect that nothing
Speaker 5: ever happened.
Speaker 2: That's a digression regardless. I'm of two minds on that.
Speaker 2: On the whole.
Speaker 5: Antisemitism EO and the implication application of it, I think
Speaker 5: it's generally good, certainly warranted. When it comes to Colombia.
Speaker 5: For example, Colombia was desperately trying to do what the
Speaker 5: anti Semitism EO compelled them to do. It just couldn't
Speaker 5: get out from under all the entrenched interests within Colombia
Speaker 5: that were that were preventing those kind of reforms, just
Speaker 5: common sense reforms, and and things like calling the cops
Speaker 5: on the students that were constantly taking over their campuses.
Speaker 5: They were crying out for help. Harvard is a little
Speaker 5: different in so far as some of it got some
Speaker 5: of the Columbia treatment, which I appreciate. The rest of
Speaker 5: it looks very arbitrary and capricious and an effort to
Speaker 5: anathematize Harvard and rally cultural forces. That's not going to
Speaker 5: fly in the courts. So I'm afraid that this whole
Speaker 5: enterprise is going to be scuttled by the sloppiness of
Speaker 5: the application of these of the anti semitism in particular,
Speaker 5: and just by virtue of the letter of the law,
Speaker 5: will ultimately not last very long. And I think that
Speaker 5: would be pretty unfortunate. On the other part, you know,
Speaker 5: the cessput of the studies department. I came out of
Speaker 5: the studies departments and in my liberal arts school, and
Speaker 5: I think I got a pretty good education. But I
Speaker 5: was a sophomore in college when nine to eleven happened,
Speaker 5: and immediately following, I think the following fall or the spring,
Speaker 5: the following spring semester, I took an introductory course that
Speaker 5: was an introduction to you know, Islamic studies, Middle Eastern studies,
Speaker 5: because I wanted to get into the national security sphere,
Speaker 5: and there I was first introduced but to the thought
Speaker 5: of Edward said and I realized at the time that
Speaker 5: this all didn't make a whole lot of sense.
Speaker 2: Indeed, I thought it was.
Speaker 5: It's pretty antithetical to the American creed because it rang
Speaker 5: to me like race essentialism. Orientalism broadly as a theory
Speaker 5: seemed to me like race essentialism, demographic essentialism. The idea
Speaker 5: that your accidents of birth determine your course in life
Speaker 5: antithetical to the American idea. And you see, I think
Speaker 5: I've been justified in that very early preliminary impression of
Speaker 5: his thought and the subsequent encounters I've had with it,
Speaker 5: and the many progeny who have studied under Sayeed and
Speaker 5: taken his ball and.
Speaker 2: Ran with it.
Speaker 5: It is pretty much the basis of what makes the
Speaker 5: studies departments in these colleges suspect is they are generally
Speaker 5: beholden to the idea that your accidents of birth sets
Speaker 5: you on a pretty predetermined course in life. It's the
Speaker 5: sort of thing we used to call racism and bigotry,
Speaker 5: but in a particularly enlightened context, if you use the
Speaker 5: right polysyllavic D, you can get away with it. And
Speaker 5: you can, in fact, you can call it highly.
Speaker 2: Educated, right.
Speaker 5: And that's the sort of thing that I think we're
Speaker 5: encountering in colleges. I don't think the federal government can
Speaker 5: make that go away. I think they can make it worse,
Speaker 5: but I don't think they can make it go away.
Speaker 5: That'll take a change in the paradigmatic approach that Americans
Speaker 5: have towards institutions of higher education generally and what they're
Speaker 5: supposed to do, what the output the deliverables are supposed
Speaker 5: to be. Is a credentialism or is it preparing these
Speaker 5: kids to navigate a professional environment.
Speaker 2: Hopefully we get back to that sooner.
Speaker 3: Rathan ly said in Isila, all the way up to Kenny,
Speaker 3: that is so institutionally woven into the warp and the
Speaker 3: wolf of the institution. That's why when you say it's
Speaker 3: difficult to get rid of, I agree with you, because
Speaker 3: I mean, if you had seven, if you had a
Speaker 3: week after week attack where somebody is driving his car
Speaker 3: into a group of people on behalf of Palestine. The
Speaker 3: difficulty that the college studies people would have is that
Speaker 3: once you switch your allegiances and start to say, well,
Speaker 3: you know what, maybe Hamas and Gaza are are not
Speaker 3: ethically pure and enlightened in this instance, then you have
Speaker 3: to say that everything that undergirds their support of Ammas
Speaker 3: and cassod Got, the colonialism, Zionism, the imbalance of power,
Speaker 3: all of those things. They have to question all of
Speaker 3: those and those are fundamental beliefs. So asking a lot
Speaker 3: of these people in the universities is like saying, well, okay,
Speaker 3: you can still be a Christian, but you have to
Speaker 3: deny the divinity of Christ. Okay, so look with that
Speaker 3: in your head. I don't know how they're going to
Speaker 3: be able to do it without replacing a lot of
Speaker 3: these people. But how do you replace them when they're
Speaker 3: tenured in the rest of it, When the entire intellectual
Speaker 3: mission of these places is to instill in people the
Speaker 3: belief in power dynamics and colonialism and the ills of
Speaker 3: an Orientalism and the rest of it. Again, you have
Speaker 3: to either come up with a new institution that does
Speaker 3: things American things better, or you just have to promote.
Speaker 5: Them I mean, there's a chicken egg situation here when
Speaker 5: it comes to anti Semitism and anti Zionism as just
Speaker 5: a really general expression of bias in these institutions. Are
Speaker 5: they taking their cues from the activists or are they
Speaker 5: producing activists. So in the wake of the ten seven attacks,
Speaker 5: what we would hear from, for example, anti racism activists,
Speaker 5: Black Lives Matter activists would be to layer over the
Speaker 5: Israel Palestine dynamic the heuristic of American racial dynamics, which
Speaker 5: doesn't make any sense in the Palestinian Israel dynamic. But
Speaker 5: you would hear that everywhere. You would hear it from
Speaker 5: Tanakhisa Coats who went there and applied generally the logic
Speaker 5: of Jim Crow to the West Bank. For example, you
Speaker 5: heard activists in the streets whose names you never heard
Speaker 5: of talk about the himas terrorists and murderers, as though
Speaker 5: they were using these words and taking directly the field
Speaker 5: hands who had meted out vengeance against their masters. This
Speaker 5: is all the language of anti slavery rhetoric, and it
Speaker 5: is just an effort to comprehend and understand a conflict
Speaker 5: that is far more deep and far more plex then
Speaker 5: they do give it credit for and so they're just
Speaker 5: seeking a way to navigate that by applying something that
Speaker 5: they understand to it. The thing is, you could be
Speaker 5: forgiving of that if you hear it just on you know,
Speaker 5: a YouTube of a guy on a street corner shouting.
Speaker 5: But when it comes from credentialed and lettered academics too,
Speaker 5: and there's very few distinctions between the rhetoric. You know,
Speaker 5: it's hard to tell where one stops and the other begins,
Speaker 5: and so it's hard to find out what you deracinate
Speaker 5: in order to you know, affect the change that you
Speaker 5: want to see, because you could be going after the
Speaker 5: wrong source. It's just so far gone at this point
Speaker 5: that it's hard to identify. I said, from establishing those
Speaker 5: other institutions that you mentioned.
Speaker 3: True, well, but I think we've conclusively studied it and
Speaker 3: come up with our solutions here now, so we can
Speaker 3: move on to other places in the world where bullets
Speaker 3: are flying, people are dying, drones are going in Russia, Ukraine, Steam.
Speaker 3: I believe you want to do and go point in
Speaker 3: this one, Well I could so.
Speaker 1: No, I've been listening to you and reading you since
Speaker 1: the Ukraine War broke out. Then you've been very passionate,
Speaker 1: and I think not personally invested. I don't know, maybe
Speaker 1: that's too strong a term. You're very passionate about a
Speaker 1: lot of things.
Speaker 2: You're personally invested. I am personally invested.
Speaker 5: I have two degrees in Russian security policy, and I
Speaker 5: think the Moscow represents a profound threat to US national interest.
Speaker 5: So yeah, and so in so far as I'm invested
Speaker 5: in the future security of this country, I am emotionally
Speaker 5: committed to this cause.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I imagine, I mean, I want to ask a
Speaker 1: specific question, but I imagine you're probably disappointed with Trump
Speaker 1: so far on the lack of progress of even making
Speaker 1: a peace deal.
Speaker 5: Well, first of all, I think the project was ill
Speaker 5: conceived because that's what began from. It began from a
Speaker 5: place that was that failed to properly apprehend the nature
Speaker 5: of the conflict. So it was doomed to failure to
Speaker 5: begin with. And I've been disappointed with the process because
Speaker 5: it's There's been sacrifices that we've made along the way.
Speaker 5: The foremost among them is after that Oval Office, which
Speaker 5: I think was February twenty eighth, on the US cutoff
Speaker 5: intelligence sharing with the Ukraine and the intelligence that we
Speaker 5: cut off was what they used to accurately target Russian
Speaker 5: positions with attackers and Heimar's long range missiles. They couldn't
Speaker 5: use those platforms, so they were routed in Kursk, in
Speaker 5: that little sliver of Russian territory that they occupied, which
Speaker 5: would have been a great negotiating chip at the bargaining table.
Speaker 5: But we literally just threw it away in a fit
Speaker 5: of peak in order to communicate our displeasure with the
Speaker 5: Vlodimir Zelensky's sartorial choices.
Speaker 2: I don't even know.
Speaker 5: It was really stupid, and it was a material sacrifice
Speaker 5: of US interests in the process.
Speaker 2: I don't think it's the last long we're going.
Speaker 3: To make, right.
Speaker 1: Well, I thought it was possible to make out a
Speaker 1: plausible strategy. I'm not saying they really thought this, but
Speaker 1: I thought, you know, I could see that you want
Speaker 1: to put the pressure publicly on Zelensky first, and then
Speaker 1: you put the onus on Putin to make the next move.
Speaker 1: And Putin has said no, I'm not interested. And it
Speaker 1: does seem to me that Trump is being a slow
Speaker 1: learner here. So I mean, what should are stiffer sanctions
Speaker 1: and effective move here?
Speaker 3: Is it too late for that.
Speaker 1: Do they work well at all? I've always been kind
Speaker 1: of skeptical that sanctions get us very far.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they may.
Speaker 5: I mean they to the extent that the foreign the
Speaker 5: international relations of literature on sanctions is kind of ambiguous.
Speaker 5: Do they change the behavior of regimes? Not necessarily, but
Speaker 5: not never. The problem is, as you say, Steve, that
Speaker 5: Vladimir Putin has not said no, I'm not interested. He's
Speaker 5: playing a more deft game. He's implying that he's very
Speaker 5: much at the table, even though he makes no gestures
Speaker 5: in the direction of either Ukraine or the United States. Indeed,
Speaker 5: he just absorbs concession after concession and asks for more.
Speaker 5: But nevertheless he has not washed his hands of the things.
Speaker 5: That leaves open the prospect if you're committed ideologically, emotionally
Speaker 5: to a deal for the sake of a deal, deal,
Speaker 5: quad deal, then yeah, you're going to stay at the
Speaker 5: table too.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 5: The thing is is that the administration has been signaling
Speaker 5: that the posture could be shifting. The President himself hasn't
Speaker 5: really signaled that yet. He said he's really frustrated. But
Speaker 5: the administration itself has only in the space of the
Speaker 5: last month lifted a hold on arms sales to Ukraine,
Speaker 5: not the provision of arms, not not giving them arms,
Speaker 5: but sales to Ukraine. It has lifted this week, targeting
Speaker 5: restrictions on long range ordanites to the extent that they
Speaker 5: have it and.
Speaker 2: Let me study of sanctions.
Speaker 3: Stop you right there when it comes to the armaments
Speaker 3: that we're giving them and now saying weapons free. I mean,
Speaker 3: this is you know you can, We're not going to
Speaker 3: tell you what you can and it cannot hit. Isn't
Speaker 3: there a bridge that goes to the Crimea that should
Speaker 3: have been gone like within the first six months of
Speaker 3: this conflict.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, so there were a couple efforts to target
Speaker 5: that via unconventional attacks.
Speaker 2: There was his cars that exploded disabled it a little bit.
Speaker 5: But yeah, I mean maybe they I don't I couldn't
Speaker 5: tell you whether or not they have the ordinance necessary
Speaker 5: to target that sort of thing. But yeah, that's that's
Speaker 5: one of those various links to to Moscow that Ukraine
Speaker 5: would like to cut off. They've done a very good
Speaker 5: job of putting the Black Sea fleet at the bottom
Speaker 5: of the sea. But they've done as far as I remember,
Speaker 5: They've dre been two attacks on the Kurk bridge, and
Speaker 5: I don't think they've I don't think.
Speaker 3: They've which always told me that we had that, We
Speaker 3: told them they couldn't take it down.
Speaker 5: So just really, you know, just a point that I
Speaker 5: didn't get to make previously. It's very frustrating to hear
Speaker 5: the president say, you know, something's changed in Vladimir Putin.
Speaker 5: He's changed. Why is he killing all these people? Why
Speaker 5: is he bombarding these cities.
Speaker 2: That's so new to him?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 5: The only reason why we're experiencing these overwhelming bombardments now
Speaker 5: over the last couple of days of cities like Kiev,
Speaker 5: karkhiv Odessa is because Ukraine has had to triage defensive ordinance.
Speaker 5: It has to ration and defensive ordinance like Patriot interceptor
Speaker 5: missiles because they ran out of them because the Trump
Speaker 5: administration isn't giving it to them. So all of a sudden,
Speaker 5: we're having an intense penetration of Ukrainian airspace and the
Speaker 5: president says, well, woa, whoa what happened here? You happened here,
Speaker 5: mister president. This is the growth of your policies. This
Speaker 5: is what your vice president wants. So yeah, take ownership
Speaker 5: of it. Don't act like the vice the President of Russia,
Speaker 5: who's never changed his stripes, who's extremely clear about what
Speaker 5: his objectives are, to right the wrong of the collapse
Speaker 5: of the Soviet Union and reclaim the glory of Catherine
Speaker 5: the Great, who sees the Black Sea coast in the
Speaker 5: eighteenth century. This is what he says his goals are.
Speaker 5: We invent these elaborate structures to explain away that he's
Speaker 5: not actually that crazy. He must mean something different, But
Speaker 5: we're deluding ourselves in that process. He's extremely clear and
Speaker 5: his behavior is extremely consistent. All we have to do
Speaker 5: is recognize it.
Speaker 3: There are some who say we were talking about sanctions before,
Speaker 3: whether they bite, whether they're biting now. People point to
Speaker 3: the imminent collapse of the Russian railway network because they've
Speaker 3: been locked out of good ball bearings, and for all
Speaker 3: we know, they're using Chinese ball bearings made of melted
Speaker 3: down American pennies. I don't know, but people seem to
Speaker 3: forget that if the entire Russian nail away system collapsed
Speaker 3: and they were unable to get medi material to the front,
Speaker 3: they would they would get donkeys and drag them there
Speaker 3: because they don't care what happens to the people that
Speaker 3: they're sending, and that sort of seems to be the
Speaker 3: you know, the the first thing that you realize about
Speaker 3: the government and the society and the culture you're dealing with.
Speaker 3: And Trump does not. So do you think that he's
Speaker 3: just ill schooled on the matter, or that he has
Speaker 3: some instinctive aversion to overt criticism because he knows that
Speaker 3: there's a substantial portion of his electorate that A doesn't
Speaker 3: care about Ukraine, is indifferent to it or actively hostile
Speaker 3: to it, and B has some sort of residual admiration
Speaker 3: for Putin for whatever stupid reason that somewhere in that
Speaker 3: that's influencing the things that he says, or just or
Speaker 3: who can.
Speaker 2: Know, Yeah, somebody can know. I'm sure.
Speaker 5: I'm just not equipped to render that judgment. I try
Speaker 5: not to go splunking.
Speaker 3: Oh we're going to have you want no no, no, no, no,
Speaker 3: no no no. You're the guest. You're supposed to We
Speaker 3: have degrees, you're supposed to come up with something. Why
Speaker 3: do we have guests and degrees? If they can't just
Speaker 3: speculate me and make it sound as if they know
Speaker 3: what they're talking about, Oh, if.
Speaker 5: You've encountered any really just a cursory review of the
Speaker 5: history of the last five hundred years, you've probably encountered
Speaker 5: a little something about Russia's strategic approach to war fighting,
Speaker 5: which is just to throw men at the front. There
Speaker 5: was a pretty disturbing moll Street Journal report, I think
Speaker 5: yesterday or the day before about the extent to which
Speaker 5: the Russian economy looks now pretty much indistinguishable from the
Speaker 5: German economy and the interwar years and the late inter
Speaker 5: war years. It is a war fighting machine, and it
Speaker 5: is dependent on the subsidies provided to the wartime economy
Speaker 5: from the government. And there are a lot of men
Speaker 5: who are earning a lot of money in services who
Speaker 5: will not earn that in the private economy if and
Speaker 5: when it pivots back to being a consumer economy. And
Speaker 5: Putin probably doesn't want a lot of those people returning
Speaker 5: from the front with a chip on their shoulder and
Speaker 5: a lot less money than they had previously and ideas
Speaker 5: in their head. I mean, this is how Stalin responded
Speaker 5: to the troops returning home, putting them in the gulag
Speaker 5: for fear, accurately frankly that they would return home. The
Speaker 5: same could be said after the Napoleonic Wars. That these
Speaker 5: troops would return home with a lot of ideas in
Speaker 5: their head that they didn't want infecting Russian society. The
Speaker 5: best way to keep those men at the front is
Speaker 5: to keep the war on. And if it's not this war,
Speaker 5: then maybe it's another, which is what Kazakhstan is worried about,
Speaker 5: which is what the Baltics are worried about, and frankly,
Speaker 5: I'm deeply concerned about when it comes to Estonian lava.
Speaker 1: Well, let me bring you to another conflict. Noah is
Speaker 1: a sort of our exit issue. One of the problems
Speaker 1: with Trump is it's hard to know exactly what he
Speaker 1: thinks or perceived. My suspicion and fear is that he
Speaker 1: wants to end two terms in office with having had
Speaker 1: no wars involving America started under his wall. Okay, nice sentiment,
Speaker 1: but I do think that that derives from his view
Speaker 1: that well, he's not any good at analyzing the character
Speaker 1: of regimes, like I mean, it's three state we just
Speaker 1: said about. He doesn't understand Russian history in the Russian disposition.
Speaker 1: He's never read any of Gary Saul Morrison's great articles
Speaker 1: in commentary about Russia. That I think are so good
Speaker 1: on this. I think he thinks dealing with Russia's like
Speaker 1: dealing with just a stubborn real estate deal with stubborn
Speaker 1: bankers and unions and all the rest of that. And
Speaker 1: now that works for him in some areas, but I
Speaker 1: think it does not work for him here. And the
Speaker 1: collateral issue right now is, although you know Trump is
Speaker 1: pro Israel, I think he likes net and Yahoo. On
Speaker 1: the other hand, it does seem that he has restrained
Speaker 1: Israel from striking Iran to take you out their nuclear sites,
Speaker 1: which they may or may not be able to do
Speaker 1: on their own. I'm not I don't have the military
Speaker 1: knowledge about that, but even if they need our help,
Speaker 1: I think they ought to have it, as my opinion,
Speaker 1: So I mean, what is your sense of things?
Speaker 3: What do you know about that?
Speaker 1: Is Trump now being a problem for Israel's a position
Speaker 1: with Iran or what do you think is going to happen?
Speaker 2: Could be I don't know. I think you're right.
Speaker 5: Your assessment of Trump is right and pretty innocuous.
Speaker 2: Really.
Speaker 5: I mean that is the experience that he takes to
Speaker 5: the presidency, his time in business and in real estate,
Speaker 5: and frankly in reality television. I think the people around him, though,
Speaker 5: have a grander vision, and that grander vision conflicts one
Speaker 5: hundred percent with Trump one point zero. Trump one point
Speaker 5: zero was a very conventionally conservative administration when it comes
Speaker 5: to foreign policy, for the most part, because he wasn't
Speaker 5: all that interested in foreign policy. He really did outsource
Speaker 5: the administration to a lot of people who had been
Speaker 5: in and around government for years who didn't necessarily share
Speaker 5: his outlook when it came to US retrenchment and it's
Speaker 5: over extension abroad. Now he's surrounded surrounded by a bunch
Speaker 5: of people who say that the president's instincts are great,
Speaker 5: that all he has to do is follow his instincts
Speaker 5: and then incept in his head instincts that aren't necessarily
Speaker 5: even his but are certainly theirs. And I see a
Speaker 5: ton of Obama in this approach. When it comes to
Speaker 5: Europe and the Middle East and the pivot to Asia,
Speaker 5: I see it all following a very similar trajectory. Barack
Speaker 5: Obama called America's NATO allies freeloaders. He attacked the Middle
Speaker 5: East saying they were prosecuting tribal grievances on our dime.
Speaker 5: He withdrew US combat divisions and the very last tank
Speaker 5: division from Europe in twenty thirteen. We know what happened subsequently,
Speaker 5: eight months later, he engineered the US withdrawal from Iraq
Speaker 5: and empowered the Iran led Schiite militias to get us
Speaker 5: out of there, which is why the Iraqi security forces
Speaker 5: collapsed amid the rise of Isis, which by the way,
Speaker 5: was something that we allowed to happen as well, because
Speaker 5: we let Russia into Syria and said they got rid
Speaker 5: of all the chemical weapons, even as the Aside regime
Speaker 5: was buying oil from the Isis caliphates, so it could
Speaker 5: create this iss Lomist opposition, which would so he could say,
Speaker 5: all my opponents are Islamists to a man, as opposed
Speaker 5: to these Western forces that I'm crushed in Syria's west.
Speaker 5: And then you have the Iran deeal and the Iran
Speaker 5: Deal was supposed to finalize our divorce from the region.
Speaker 5: All of this was designed to facilitate the pivot to Asia,
Speaker 5: but the world just wouldn't cooperate because we just kept
Speaker 5: creating a bunch of vacuums that were filled with bad actors,
Speaker 5: and we were forced to return at times and places
Speaker 5: that were not of our choosing. I see a lot
Speaker 5: of that in Trump two point zero, and I think
Speaker 5: it will evolve in the same direction and frustrate the
Speaker 5: President's ambitions and America's ambitions, by the way, in the
Speaker 5: very same way, we are counting on the world to
Speaker 5: cooperate with a grand ideological vision that just does not
Speaker 5: account for the world as it is, and is kind
Speaker 5: of contemptuous of the world as it is. And these
Speaker 5: are the same people who accuse me of being a
Speaker 5: highly ideological foreign policy actor. But all I see is
Speaker 5: ideology on the other side, and very few concessions to
Speaker 5: some unfortunate realities that maybe we wish weren't the case,
Speaker 5: but just are.
Speaker 3: Now that's the no I love. It's almost as though
Speaker 3: knowing history is a problem, and we have now that
Speaker 3: desire to be unburdened by what has come before. We
Speaker 3: will now unburden ourselves of our guest, although we love
Speaker 3: him and have him here as often as possible. The books,
Speaker 3: as I mentioned, are the Rise of the New Puritans,
Speaker 3: fighting back against Progressives, War on Fun and unjust social justice,
Speaker 3: and the Unmaking of America. And as you can tell,
Speaker 3: mister Rothman is keen to discourse on other matters as well,
Speaker 3: and it's a pleasure to talk about things domestic and
Speaker 3: cultural and foreign, international and contentious. So Noah, thanks a
Speaker 3: lot for dropping by today, and we'll have you on again,
Speaker 3: and I hope it's to talk about how everything is
Speaker 3: just going fine surprisingly, that the world is settled down
Speaker 3: and is getting along on hand, How boring would that
Speaker 3: he'd be out of a job. All right? Thanks see bidings.
Speaker 3: So before we go, I suppose we shall also notice
Speaker 3: somebody else who went, and that was Elon Musk. He's
Speaker 3: leaving Washington, and apparently he is. I wouldn't say he's
Speaker 3: the first person to come to Washington with a set
Speaker 3: of ideas and then leave with those ideas a bit
Speaker 3: tarnished and disappointed. But he not the first, but he
Speaker 3: may not be the last.
Speaker 1: What do you think, well, I mean, look, I think
Speaker 1: this story is a bit of a sigh op by
Speaker 1: the media. Trump was always going to be a temporary
Speaker 1: presence because he was officially classified as a temporary government employee,
Speaker 1: which meant he could only do his job for I
Speaker 1: don't know, one hundred and sixty days or something like that,
Speaker 1: half a year before, triggering some very difficult legal problems
Speaker 1: for himself. So he was always going to go, and
Speaker 1: this was reported back in January, but somehow the media
Speaker 1: seems to have forgotten and now they're trying to make
Speaker 1: a big deal about, oh my god.
Speaker 2: Musk is leaving.
Speaker 1: But I do think part two is, you know, Musk's
Speaker 1: probably a little naive, like a lot of Silicon Valley people,
Speaker 1: they don't understand why political problems aren't solved like engineering problems.
Speaker 1: Just add to the fact that Musk is I don't
Speaker 1: want to say autistic exactly, but he's somewhere out there
Speaker 1: in his own little world, a brilliant guy that he is,
Speaker 1: and determined and successful, and they're often frustrated by government.
Speaker 1: So I think this is not a huge surprise. I
Speaker 1: don't know more people will follow him or not, but
Speaker 1: I kind of expected something like what happened. I do think,
Speaker 1: finally point three, he may have been shocked because of
Speaker 1: his notavita, lack of experience, and how bad the blowback was.
Speaker 1: I don't think he expected there would be vandalism and
Speaker 1: fire bombings of Tesla dealerships and people keying the cars
Speaker 1: and people putting anti must stickers on their teslas that
Speaker 1: they bought three years ago and so forth. And you
Speaker 1: know that may have gotten to and bothered him a bit,
Speaker 1: because I don't think he knew what he was getting
Speaker 1: in for.
Speaker 3: I think being called a Nazi by millions of people
Speaker 3: probably right those things, yes, which do not. I mean,
Speaker 3: you can laugh it off, make fun of him for
Speaker 3: the rest of it. When you know that there's all
Speaker 3: of these people in these posters and these stickers and
Speaker 3: the rest, deeply convinced that you made a Nazi, that
Speaker 3: you are a Nazi, it's extraordinary. I was on Reddit
Speaker 3: the other day and there was a post that said,
Speaker 3: why are we not talking about the Why are we
Speaker 3: not still talking about the fact this guy gave a
Speaker 3: Nazi salute? Okay, you know, why is this thing that
Speaker 3: is not true not still first and foremost inner conversation?
Speaker 3: So I went to the post to read what people
Speaker 3: were saying, and the first thing that I noticed at
Speaker 3: the top of it was that I had been banned
Speaker 3: from participating in this conversation. And actually I find this
Speaker 3: from time to time on Reddit. I will stumble in
Speaker 3: for something oddly terrifying, mildly interesting. What should I do? Gosh,
Speaker 3: I'm old you are banned from participating. You know why,
Speaker 3: I why I'm banned in large swaths of Reddit. I
Speaker 3: made one comment in a subreddit called lockdown Skepticism, which
Speaker 3: was all about back in twenty twenty one, which is
Speaker 3: all about being skeptical of the measures being taken to
Speaker 3: do something about COVID from the lockdowns to masking and
Speaker 3: the rest of it. The rules of this subreddit said
Speaker 3: that this was not for anti scientific or anti vaccine talk,
Speaker 3: that the moderators believed that COVID A was a serious
Speaker 3: condition and was not a made up thing, and that
Speaker 3: they would brook no conversation about it. Basically, it's like,
Speaker 3: you know, let's be let's have a reasonable conversation about
Speaker 3: lockdowns and masks, shall we. So what did I do?
Speaker 3: Did I wade in there and start using a musk,
Speaker 3: flamethrower and everybody and talking about you know, crazy stuff
Speaker 3: like it it's from a lab, you know, insane stuff
Speaker 3: like that from twenty twenty one. No, somebody was quoting
Speaker 3: Charles C. W. Cook And we're going to end with
Speaker 3: that since he's not here, and we'll bring him in,
Speaker 3: you know, sort of in this in the form of
Speaker 3: this story, quoting Charles C. W. Cook about his lockdown
Speaker 3: skepticism and his experience in Florida, and a reply to
Speaker 3: that was, well, you know, Charles, it's at least there's
Speaker 3: there's one sane person left at National Review, to which
Speaker 3: I responded, well, I wouldn't say just one, you know,
Speaker 3: alluding to myself since I write there under my own name, right,
Speaker 3: that's what got me banned, Simply saying that five words
Speaker 3: in this subreddit got me banned from a large swath
Speaker 3: of Reddit, which is wondering why we're not calling this
Speaker 3: guy a Nazi. I just absolutely love it. The place
Speaker 3: is a self refuting argument every day. Well, there we are, folks.
Speaker 3: We have had a wide ranging conversation, or as they say,
Speaker 3: after the Soviet premiere, Gurmico just got out with this counterpart,
Speaker 3: a frank and honest discussion. I think of many things, Stephen,
Speaker 3: How long are you in Iceland?
Speaker 1: Another week?
Speaker 3: Well that's plenty of time to do the Golden Circle
Speaker 3: and explore all the games of throne sits and go
Speaker 3: someplace and have you know, have you wandered down main
Speaker 3: street in Reykiavik And there's a great place the second
Speaker 3: floor they serve you soup in a bread bowl and
Speaker 3: then eat the bowl, and then I think they also
Speaker 3: serve it with some sort of local fish that has
Speaker 3: been soaked in bleach. And it's the shark that's been
Speaker 3: soaked in bleach and then buried somewhere and smells absolutely awful,
Speaker 3: but everybody has to try it. I think there's a
Speaker 3: cheeseburger McDonald cheeseburger that's been under a under it's been
Speaker 3: sort of you know, under glass for like ten years
Speaker 3: and hasn't decomposed. There's that decen.
Speaker 1: There's this International Penis Museum here.
Speaker 3: There's that. There's that, and there's that great and terrifying
Speaker 3: and awesome church which does not seem to stand for
Speaker 3: any particular doctrine that I can tell, but expresses this
Speaker 3: sort of empty aspiration for divinity that I find absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 3: It's it's quite something, yeah, quite a.
Speaker 1: Culture, quite a thing. Yeah, it's very strange building.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yep. Well as they say about a country where
Speaker 3: it's way up there, quite isolated, and they have daylight
Speaker 3: for you know, then they're dark. Everybody is an alcoholic
Speaker 3: and is in a band, and that, you know, I
Speaker 3: can think of worse countries which it wants to be
Speaker 3: all right, So we'll probably talk to you there. I
Speaker 3: will be off next week gallivantink about someplace else. Charles
Speaker 3: should be back, and you the viewer, the listener, the reader.
Speaker 3: If you're just doing this on some sort of tube transcript,
Speaker 3: you might want to go to Cozy Earth, where you
Speaker 3: will get a big discout if you tell them that
Speaker 3: you came from us, And of course you'll find that
Speaker 3: in the in the posting on Ricochet out sell and
Speaker 3: if you ricochet dot com itself is where you should
Speaker 3: go after this to join. If you haven't already, you
Speaker 3: may have perused the main page for however many years,
Speaker 3: but never curious what goes on on the member side. Oh,
Speaker 3: because if you just a few coins, we'll get you
Speaker 3: into the thriving center right civil community you've been looking
Speaker 3: for all your days on the internet. Also, give us
Speaker 3: a review wherever you happen to find a review possible,
Speaker 3: because that surfaces the podcast and the next thing you know,
Speaker 3: we've got more people listening, And the next thing you know,
Speaker 3: Ricochet is is rare to go for another year, and
Speaker 3: we'll be hitting podcast one thousand, about two hundred and
Speaker 3: fifty or so, so fifteen that's five years. I hope
Speaker 3: we can make it. I'll be old by then. Here
Speaker 3: we wish filling through my store bought teeth or not,
Speaker 3: we'll see. In any case, thanks for listening to folks.
Speaker 3: I'm James Lilly. This has been on the Ricochet podcast
Speaker 3: Steven see you later and everybody else, Bye bye, yeah
Speaker 3: next week