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