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