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