Decision Day Smackdowns

How are you today and what's in your mind?

And then there was a case about the structure of an agency that has to do with Obamacare and was very, very complicated, and I instinctively sided again with Gorst, Chelita, and Thomas.

but about nationwide injunctions. And six to three the Court decided that with a couple of caveats and with a standard that will need to be applied to be understood, properly. Nationwide injunctions in the way that they have been used for the last twenty or so years are gone.

observe this. Justice Jackson decries an imperial executive while embracing an imperial judiciary. I mean meow boll of friskies for the lady, that is anyway. So Charles tell us more about the We all hate the national injunctions because they seem like a drastic overreach of the Court's authority that anyone could just step in and say, Nope, executive can't do that. That's the end of it. I'm here in Hawaii. I say what it's going to be in the law of the land. You said that there were some things

yet to be ironed out. Might those things mean that the injunctions still continue to be a thorn in the side and the paw.

Amy Coney Barrett is equally disparaging toward Jackson. She describes her at one point as having offered a startling argument that is completely unmored from the Constitution or American history. It is a taught force. So I think the Court did get this right. And as this goes, that's the only thing that matters, because the Court is the court and not a dictator. So there are a couple of caveats here. And I'm not a lawyer, so I'm understanding its as best I can, having read it through once.

First off, anything that has to do with the Administrative Procedure Act is exempt because Congress included an exemption when it passed the law, so if there is litigation over APA claims, there can be a nationwide injunction. Second, there is I think called Rule twenty three that I don't perfectly understand, but Rule twenty three litigation could still yield a national injunction. Apparently it's quite hard to satisfy the

provisions of Rule twenty three. But Justice Alito is worried that what will happen now is lower courts will just say, oh, it's a Rule twenty three issue and start doing the same thing that they've been doing all along. And of course this is obvious, but it needed to be said. The third exception is the Supreme Court itself, which is allowed to impose national injunctions because that's what it's there for. Here is my take on it, before I shut up.

I think this was the right decision legally. I think it is also the product of congressional abdication. Congress is allowed to set a whole bunch of rules around this that it hasn't, so the Court was only asked to do this because Congress hasn't laid out in what circumstances

national injunctions are permissible. It should now do that. I worry a little bit though, that unless Congress starts taking back some power from the president, that this is going to empower the executive branch even more than it has been empowered. Not criticism of the Court. Again, Jackson's obsessed with She shouldn't be. It's not her job to worry about that. But as a citizen, I want Congress now to say, all right, here are the things the president

can and can't do. Because although Kavanar is clear at one point to say that the court should take emergency applications, you are in effect going to be left after this with a situation in which it will take a lot

longer to litigate pretty important questions. And if you look at something like, for example, Joe Biden's obviously disastrously deliberately unconstitutional student loan order, by the time that that had been decided by the Supreme Court, he could have spent two or three hundred billion dollars.

an oral argument late. It was heard in what a month ago, six or eight weeks ago, and we have the decision today. And I think that was the Chief Justice or a majority of the Court anyway, saying we can't let this linger into the next term because it's just creating too much uncertainty. So they moved with really quite astonishing speed for the Supreme Court. You're not allowing it to filter through the DC Circuit or the other circuit courts of appeal, which would resulted in circuit splits

and no decision at all. There was the you know, the executive immunity case, wasn't I think that was this term, wasn't it?

substance of that. But now we'll have to. And so that case will be probably coming up next year and so a year from now, and there they can't I think repair to process and history. Well, I shouldn't have said that it won't be a process argument or a jurisdiction argument. They're going to have to rule on the substance of the teeth Amendment and that's going to be a big fight.

are really crucial. I mean, for example, let's suppose that your president, Gavin Newsom says that he intends to start confiscating firearms, and let's suppose that the Fifth Circuit says that's illegal under the Second Amendment, and there's no staturgy justification,

but the Second Circuit says it's fine. What you have then is a situation in which it is o k for the federal government to confiscate firearms in New York but not in Texas, which, by the way, would be the sensible way of doing it, given out heavily armed

everyone is in either place. Now, that is a problem, right, And if you take the country's history just after the Civil War as perhaps a more realistic example, it would be a problem if it were fine to discriminate racially in some parts of the country and not in others. But that is it seems to be the way that the system works until the circuit splits are resolved. But

we aren't always going to like it. And I think what I just find so annoying about some of the responses to this that I've seen and about Jackson's descent is she seems to think, and those who have criticized his decisions seem to think that if there is any potential downside to any decision that is faithful to the law, it's the job of the Supreme Court to step in and prevent that.

How little will we talk about politics? Actually, it's everything under the sun. Because you meet people like minded you find you have similar interest hobbies and passions. It's a great fun. Last one I had was in New York. I got COVID. It was worth it. Matt Bauzer is holding the annual German Fest meetup that's July twenty fifth, twenty seventh in Milwaukee. And our old friend Randyandy Wandy Wivova,

Sandy Rivo, Randy you know you love. He's assembling a group to meet in Detroit and that will be interesting seeing the revived state and status of some of the most beautiful skyscrapers in America. So go to ricochet dot com, check the member meet up panel, and if you're in the neighborhood, you know, show up or start your own and just see how Ricochet people come to you. We're like that. One of the things we're also like is that, you know, we want a little solace at the end

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matters an enormous amount. You already mentioned the weather in Florida and the humidity, and as I point out, every time, you really need to get sheets right because the amount of time that you spend asleep in beds kind of disgusting when you think about your life, and I'm pleased that I spend that time on becuzy sheets as opposed to some other brand.

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com code Ricochet Sleep Cooler, lounge, lighter, stay cozy. And we thank Cozy Earth for sponsoring this the Ricochet Podcast And thanks to Charles, we not only have the new Republican slogan sometimes things are going to be bad, but we have another slogan as well, you have to get your sheets right. So I can't argue with any of those things. Joining us now. Ryan Salam, president of the

Manhattan Institute. In two thousand and nine, he co authored A Grand New Party with the Rosstatt, and his latest book is Melting Pot or Civil War. He can also find his writing in The Atlantic and National Affairs.

a really profound affordability crisis. Is it something that is the product of a free market in housing. Decidedly not. It's the product of a crazy accretion of rules that essentially treats building private housing as though it is a kind of suspect activity, you know, borderline criminal. You know, it's just, you know, any number of things. So on one level, you know, I am tempted to get drawn into the discontinuity. This is a guy who says things

that are incredibly alarming to me as a conservative. And by the way, I should stipulate, I'm speaking on my own behalf, not as a spokesperson for the institution I lead or anything like that. So just to make that crystal clear, I will say that this is someone who says totally alarming stuff all the time. But we should also just recognize that, like the proverbial frog and the boiling pot, it's not as though we're flipping a switch and we're going from robust free market capitalism to a

bolivarian revolution by the Hudson. You're just really the conditions that created this were the accretion of failed policies, call them socialists, call them progressive, call them whatever you want that actually contributed to this real crisis.

say there's continuity. There's somebody like Deblasio, But Deblasio struck me as both sort of lazy and incompetent and not particularly motivated to do the things that would destroy New York. This guy seems to have a fire under him, or is he just a striver who's got a good presentation and is going to use this tool set of ideas that appeal to the shoot to the Luigi Manjohni fan club in order to insert himself into the machine and profit thereafter.

to people what exactly it is they want to hear. So, you know, to the kind of revolutionary socialist crowd, they're very confident he's one of them, and he winks at them, and he kind of makes it clear that he's one of them. In all sorts of ways. This is someone who has really been a kind of professional anti Israel obsessive for his entire adult life, and yet he's also able to say, how dare you accuse me of being

an anti semi. I will I will increase the amount of spending, you know, to fight hate crimes by eight x. You know, we're going to do this. We're going to do that. You know, it's this is his talent. It's the ability to be all things to all people. And there literally are the same nonprofit progressive establishment that is

responsible for New York's dire state. These guys are reconciling themselves to him because you know, he represents another face for the same kind of failed policies with more aggressive agro language turned up to eleven. That's one version of it, right, Another version of it is that, you know, how do

you actually kick the door down? People are calling him a socialist, and the problem with that label is that what people hear as they hear well sweet Sweden right, Norway right, Denmark right, when actually this is you know, you're looking at the ban Dung generation, you know, come back to life. When you're looking at is a kind of third worldist position. And you're also looking at someone

who's a left wing populist. You know, if you're looking at socialism and Northern Europe, you're looking at we have vats. You know, middle class working class people pay really high consumption taxes and they, you know, and they get some stuff. You pay with one hand, you get something else on the other hand. Right, What this is instead is a kind of punitive egalitarianism. They raise taxes when they were

flushed with revenue. They raise taxes because they want to raise taxes on the rich, even if it actually does huge damage to the working in middle class people because there's bigger you know, fish to fry. I mean, this is a different kind of agenda. But the problem is it's totally prodean. It's totally prodean. So it can be one thing one minute, it's going to be another thing another minute. It's going to be like, hey, Brad Lander has a million position papers here, and oh, it's ridiculous

to catastrophize. It's ridiculous to think you've got to take him seriously, not literally.

sound like people did in the seventies. New York seemed to me, especially when I lived there in the glory days twenty eleven and so on, to be of the same pattern that it had been awful in the seventies and eighties. But then New York has got sensible, and they brought in Giuliani, and then they kept electing Bloomberg, you know, not my favorite guy, but it's mayor of

New York, pretty terrific. And then wow, they've gone to de Blasio and Eric Adams and now this guy probably And I wonder how you see it, because on the one hand, we tend to think as conservatives, if things get bad, then people will be sensible and they'll fix it. But then I look at Chicago, and Chicago's never done what New York did, and Chicago seems basically incapable of

fixing itself. So are you worried that New York could be in the same place or do you do you think there's enough about New York, whether it's Wall Street or just the fact that it turns over all the time where it's just so dynamic. That means that even if this guy is awful and screws everything up, there'll be a backlash and you'll get sensible policies.

multi generational New Yorkers. You know, folks who are third and fourth generation, you know Italian and Irish, you know working class, lower middle class, you know homeowners, and so it's a different group of people. So the white population in New York right now is much more college educated than it had been before. You've got a lot of

folks who are transplants. But you know, so that's one thing, right, there's one narrative that, oh, you know, these guys, it's these guys are rich and this kind of thing, and you know, it's luxury beliefs. And I actually think that there's a lot to that. My colleague Rob Henderson, you know, is the is the one who's kind of, you know, advanced this luxury beliefs thesis. But another part of it

is this. So you know, if you're looking at the New York City housing market, and allow me to bore you for a moment, you know, you've got about sixty eight percent of the units are rental units, multi family rental units. Of those units, I believe it's about forty eight percent are in the so called unregulated market, and

then fifty two percent are rent control, rent stabilized. So, you know, people have observed that Cuomo seemed to win in really poor neighborhoods and then in this tiny sliver of really rich neighborhoods precincts with a median income of over let's say, tw hundred fifty thousand dollars a year. You know, Cuomo did well in those two but in that middle when you're looking at you know, people in neighborhoods with a median income. You know, look seventy five

thousand dollars to two hundred thousand dollars or so. These people aren't poor. But it's a really interesting population because if you think about the people in New York, the people who kind of make it here, it feels more and more like you make it here if you have a side deal, if you inherited a rent stabilized apartment, if you're living in Nischa housing, you know, and you have forever, which is not great, by the way, really

terrible and miserable. Public housing isn't great, but it's a place to live where you're not buffeted by the fact that you know, rents went up this last year by sixteen percent in the private market, you know the media, and rent for a two bedroom apartment in New York City right now it is fifty five hundred dollars. Wow, these numbers are completely staggering, Okay, And that's the problem is that, you know, if you're a new cumboer in New York, you're a college kid, you didn't just move

into it. You know, you didn't just going to find one of the handful of rent regulated apartments that are on the market. Rent regulated apartments get passed down from generation to generation, right now, Okay, what you're dealing. You moved into that unregulated sector, and then you've got I mean,

there's so many dynamics to hear to who's living here. So, you know, do you think that those guys were making you know, it's they're making decent money, low six figures anywhere else in the country that would afford you a pretty great life, But in New York City it means that you're on a knife edge. In New York City, who means you're spending a third of your income on rent and you're living with roommates, you know what I mean,

the kind of indignities that you have to endure. And then they look at the other, you know, kind of economy, the rich, glamorous economy that gets the attention in New York, the capital accumulation economy where you know, housing price appreciation is part of it. But then also just the people who own assets, they own equity, they're not just collecting a professional salary and navigating the housing market. These are the guys who are the most totally radical out there.

They want to burn it down. And these people are not the people. They don't remember New York City. And they also by the way, you know, under Eric Adams, like in the last year, he's not perfect. Yes, crime

has gone down markedly in twenty twenty five. So weirdly, the fact that some things were kind of okay and limping along actually meant that, you know, Zara Mangani could come in and zero in on the fact that your rent is a hell of a lot higher now than it was when you first moved here five or ten years ago.

been a public servant for a very long time. She knows the police department extremely well, and to the extent that there was a kind of cronyism and laziness in the department she's been really thoughtful about bringing that downe and improving morale in the police force. If you look at law enforcement around the country, morale has been a real challenge, and that's been pronounced in New York. You know,

you have a huge number of folks have retired. You have people who are experienced NYPD officers who left to other jurisdictions. When you have competent, effective leadership, that can make a difference. So again, there are many different factors. There are also real things cutting against us. You know, for example, we have a bunch of laws at the state level here in New York that are real outliers. You know, there are a ton of places that embrace

criminal justice leniency. They called it criminal justice reform. New York actually really embraced policies that were really out there even by the standards of that rush towards leniency. And so you basically have some you know, folks in law enforcement who are doing their best to manage that. And then you have prosecutors. So I would say that the prosecutors in two of our five boroughs are particularly bad. In Manhattan and the Bronx. You've got other prosecutors who

are not great. They're not necessarily the people that I'd want to be there, but they at least live on planet Earth, which is helpful. So there's a lot of complexity to what's happened on the crime front. I do think that, you know, there is more effective leadership right now. And another thing, you'll hear a lot of people say, oh, New York is actually the safest big city in America. Oh, this is exaggerated, and actually, look there's something to that.

You know, New York City is an immigrant rich city.

on the subway. So if you have, you know, someone walking down the street, you know in the suburbs of Jacksonville, who is you know, half naked, wearing short shorts and you know, kind of ranting and you know, smelling like he may or may not need a bath.

bad apples. That's why there is a natural, naturally authoritarian element to effectively running a city like New York City. That's something that you know, Mike Bloomberg, for all of his cosmopolitanism, understood it was you know, kind of a you know, an iron fist and a velvet glove. He understood how that worked. By the way, build a Blasio.

Early on he understood that if he was going to demonstrate that a democratic socialist could run a city and be the successor to Bernie Sanders, which was his great dream, that you know, actually you could not let crime get out of control. He thought that right up until Democratic party politics changed circa eighteen twenty nineteen twenty twenty. But you know, much more to say there.

mayor system. By that, I mean they've got the mayors I understand. It gets to set the budget with pretty strong authority over It gets to appoint the heads of all the departments without necessarily the unlike Chicago, where the pointees have to be ratified by the city Council and so forth. So you have a very strong executive in New York. It was always tempered. Sorry for the history

lesson here, keep it short for listeners. It was always tempered by the democratic machine that would cough up a beam, especially right. And it's been and you said itself, the democratic establishment is in New York is dead. It's been dying ever since I think ed Koch probably. So now we have this thirty two year old or thirty three year old kid who's very charismatic, as you say, and he's going to be given some powerful keys to a powerful engine.

am alarmed by many many things. I don't know. If you want me to talk your ear off, I'm happy to do it, you know, for the next you know, twelve hours about basically, you know, kind of what this gentleman has said, what he evidently believes about Israel, the threat that you know, kind of this kind of third worldist brand of socialism represents to peace and security in a very diverse city, in a city that is home to a population of close one million Jewish Americans, you

know there's a lot that's extremely combustible. So make no mistake, I am not dismissing that one bit. I think it's dire and I think it's dangerous. What is even more dangerous is what has happened more broadly, if you're looking at national democratic politics, this is the reality that the people who are running against Zora Mondania did democratic primary

did not seem to understand. If you look at the views of democratic primary voters nationally and in New York about Israel, about capitalism, about a great many other basic realities of life, it is not what it had been in nineteen ninety five. So because of that, what it means is that certain attacks that people made because they believe them, because they're right, because they are legitimate attacks

to make their legitimate criticisms, did not land. Not only did not they not land, but there are people who are fueled by the fact that when something seems like an establishment stitch up, when it looks like all of the shadowy, powerful forces are uniting against you, what does that mean? So that is something that is extremely important to keep in mind. And by the way, you said the never establishment is dead, that's actually not quite what I meant. What I'm in is at their bereft of ideas.

I think there are a lot of folks who are still there. And by the way, the establishment in New York City for a while has been a non profit progressive establishment. And this nonprofit progressive establishment represented by someone like Brad Lander, they've taken off one mask and they're putting on another mask, and that now they're trying to

get behind Mandani and they're kind of deeply interconnected. And so what they're going to try to do is have another new breath of life, which is that well, we've been thoroughly irradiated and discredited and kind of this way you would be in a fair world, right, except they actually still hold all the levers of power. They're still there, and now what they're seeing is that, ah, this is another opportunity to be in touch with a TikTok generation.

So this is the contradiction here, And you know, is this, you know, going to be Havena on the Hudson Okay, On the other hand, is it a corrupt, broken nonprofit progressive establishment that actually caused the affordability crisis, that actually they were the ones who went it was fashionable to say defund the police. Did now they say Department of Community Safety and then the idea that they could to have a new breath of life by us saying that actually,

this is totally different from what came before. I don't know if we want to let people off the hook that way, Steve, That's that's the kind of an awkward question here.

weeks for people to gin up the app. Oh, by the way, he's running against the mediocre Republican incumbent who's kind of roughly the equivalent of Eric Adams. It's a great story that says, I say, it doesn't make the history books. Everyone always talks about Roosevelt being worried about Huey Long, but they were worried about Upton Sinclair being elected governor of California.

It was uh, Louis B. Mayor was the ringleader. And by the way, you know, just as Hollywood is today. The writers and actors loved Upton Sinclair rights, but it was the owners of the studios and some of the business interests, and what they did was went back through

you might say, the equivalent of Sinclair's Twitter feed. Right, He'd said a lot of crazy stuf for years and used it very effectively against him and ended up re electing this mediocre Republican Okay, so we're hearing all these machinations. Now that's well, maybe Andrew Cuomo shouldn't drop out, Maybe she'd run as an independent. Maybe we'll get Curtis Sliwa to drop the Republican line and make Adams the Republican

nom you know, all kinds of things like that. So it's going to take a while, I think to see any opposition. But my suspicion is, even if Wall Street puts up a lot of money and the sort of non or I'll put it this way, the for profits segments of the Democratic establishment try to draw a line, I could actually see that helping mom Dommy, because he's, you know, like you say, charismatic, is going to have a lot of national interest and attention, and if he wins,

he'll probably get off to a big, flashy start. And my prediction is he's his name will be immediately floated as a Democratic candidate for twenty twenty eight for president. So would you have any prognostications or expectations of how this might unfold.

He didn't really kind of come across to people as someone who just really loved the city. And when you look at you know, Mike Bloomberg, you know, he was not beloved by the city's you know, kind of progressive cadreds, but you know, he was someone who didn't have to be in that job, and he's someone there was a certain kind of affection for him. If you look at Mam Donni, Mam Donnie does seem to actually like New York. You know, he's someone who actually, you know, he loves

the Halal carts. He loves that. You know, there's something about him that seems earnest and approachable. And also, you know, he's thirty three, so he has a lot of time. And you know, I think that if you want a scenario where a guy like this can become a really you know, formidable threat, you know, on a national scale. I actually don't think it would be rushing to a twenty twenty eight presidential bid. And my suspicion is that

he gets that. And I think that when you're looking at the fact that AOC was a very critical mover in getting behind him, I think that there's a line, and I don't think he's going to be looking to jump that line. When you look at this world of hard left political organizing, when you look at the DSA, when you look at the people that they look to as their you know, standard bearers, their inspirations, they believe,

you know, in building a discipline movement. You know, this guy knocked on over one and a half million doors. He did not do that by himself. He did that with an army of volunteers, tens of thousands of them. And I think that, you know, the I suspect the moves are to basically co oct that nonprofit progressive establishment. As you're governing cadres, you know, you take the helm of certain key institutions, the commanding heights. The Department of

Education employs an awful lot of people. It's educating eight hundred thousand plus students. You know, that's going to be something very important when you have a grand ideological project

with the NYPD. I'm not sure exactly where they're going to land, but there are a few different places when the kind of people who are the people that you know that I think of a civil terrorist in the streets, people who claim to be protesting but who are in fact intimidating and engaging in you know, basically manipulating the fact that we are now not enforcing various laws, you know,

to create menacing protests. When those people feel as though they have an ally in city hall, well maybe they behave differently, right, maybe you know, kind of this is going to be really interesting and complex because it could be that he's a total imbecile and that he you know, there's going to be a crisis day one and this streets are going to be you know, a flame, and

then you know, kind of that's that. Another possibility is that the city is already you know, it's already a slow burn, it's already a death by a thousand cuts, in which you basically are driving out private capital. Okay, you know you're driving out you know the kind of working class, middle class moderates. Okay, you're trying to kind

of like raise the temperature to do that. It's the curly effect that doesn't necessarily hurt you if what you're looking to is consolidate power over a city government that has three hundred thousand employees. So you know, there are many different ways this can play out. But I uh, and by the way, what where I thought you were going is that you can imagine. I think you can imagine a spirited Eric Adams campaign, and we can talk a bit about that. But I think that you know,

you can call it. You know, is Momdani the odds on favorite? Of course he is. But I also think that, you know, we should learn from having seen crazy things happen that other crazy things can happen too.

So yeah, who knows, and it will be interesting. I do know this. I am. As I said at the beginning of this. I love Manhattan. I wanted to thrive. You know, However, if he crashes the office market, it's entirely possible that they will not build the Commodore tower, which means that it won't overshadow the Chrysler building, which

is something that I worry about. And why I worry about that sitting here in Minneapolis, I don't know, only that I sort of want to be able to go there and see that magnificent inspire from every angle, and I'll be blocked out by Commodore. And I hate the new JP Morgan building. I gotta say, what do you think?

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sponsoring this the Ricochet Podcast. Well, it's been a consequential week. What else can we talk about? Anything happened in any place else? I think we sent a plane that dropped the something on a manhole and then sent five precision guidance venitions after it. And well, if you, of course listen to what CNN was telling us, low impact didn't really do anything, set them back about a day and a half. Steven Charles, your thoughts on the ear on strike.

everyone was saying it was great. But here we now know that Trump practiced active deception in several ways.

the Iranians. Topped all top with the fact that we sent a whole lot of planes or conspicuously toward Guam, which was thought to have been an effort to mislead the Iranians, but I think might have had the secondary purpose of telling the Chinese, you know what, we're paying attention to your increased harassment of Taiwan and the Philippines. So I don't know, Trump seems to me to be

dealing from a load of aces these days. And then you know, lay here in the week NATO members say, okay, well, increased defense spending to five percent of GDP, and another headline that, oh, European country is saying what tariffs and barriers can we give up and trade with the United States to please Trump?

loss of life would be absolutely fantastic. But you never know, you never know, Charles, You thought.

much damage this did. But at the very least, it seems that this is set back the program by months, if not years, and given that we were in the middle of a conflict that Israel began, justifiably, I think it was correct of the United States to piggyback and make sure that all three of the facilities were set back or hopefully completely destroyed. This is, you know, something we would not have got under President Harris, and we should acknowledge that.

What matters are the actions, and what matters are the consequences of the actions. And I thought this was just great. I mean, the display of American power and precision is awe inspiring, you know. And people equate this somehow with as though we'd loaded everything up and attacked a Tehran daycare center. I mean, this is a very specific application of American morals as well as anything else, and that appalls people who say, why just you know, Israel can

have nukes but Iran kent. Yes, that's absolutely true. That's absolutely the way it works the country is that it is a liberal democracy that grants free rights to all sorts of people, regardless.

I mean the native thing is interesting as well. But it's also I think today when we're doing this is the seventieth anniversary of America getting involved in the Korean War, and I always cast my mind back to that and think of the people who were still remembering the bruising conflict of World War Two and the thought of getting into another and the thought of it being as attracted as it was. But yet the only lasting cultural impact that it seems to have given us is Mash, which is,

you know, basically a Vietnam parable. He doesn't occupy the same sort of space in the American imagination that Vietnam or World War Two is.

hundred bucks a month, whatever it paid. And my dad was a flyer, so it was a chance for him to keep his flying current when he was a person with you know, no means at that time, and so it was nice to be able to fly on Uncle Sam's dime. But he said that when suddenly the war started and they called up the reserves to send to Korea, a whole lot of the reserves said, hey, wait a minute, we didn't think this meant going back to war, right, and there was a lot of people trying to get

out of it and so forth. Anyway, my dad went and began in Korea, and I think that you had going for them then. Was you hinted to this, James? There was the recollection that you know, we did pretty

well in World War Two. It was long and difficult, but we won that, and so we had the track record you might say, of winning conflicts, and you know, Korea became very unpopular by degrees, to the point where I think Truman's approval rating in fifty two, which is one reason he didn't stand for reelection, was something you know, in the high twenties or something dismal, and I think the parallel here.

in Iraq and Afghanistan. And therefore you saw, you know, we talked about this once before a lot of our I guess i'll use the term paleocon friends like Dan McCarthy and others saying absolutely Trump cannot back Israel and get into this war in any fashion because it means regime change in twenty years of occupation of Tehran and other nonsense like that, I think it's pretty clear that Trump has no intention of doing that, although he has teased the idea of regime change, which I think is

a more important question than how bad the damage is to Ford out elsewhere. So I mean, I think that's I think the pendulum goes back and forth. Right, For the First Gulf War in nineteen ninety ninety one, we were told that that finally ended the Vietnam syndrome, but then the Vietnam syndrome came back ten years later with the Iraqi Afghanistan syndrome.

Why do I even bother? I was going to tell you to go to Apple Podcasts or any of the place where you can possibly rate a podcast and give us five stars, but I'm so tired of telling you, I'm not going to tell you to do that, because well, if you did, you know, would surface the show a little bit more, get us some more subscribers, and perhaps get people to go over to ricochet dot com and

see exactly where this stuff comes from. And if they did that, they would find not only a front page that is bursting with interesting pieces, but a member site, a member page that you've got to pay a couple of you know, shiny quarters to get to. But that's where a community has been formed. That is the thing you've been looking for all your.