I can't believe that Trump hasn't thought of doing Trump branded social Security bracelets. That would be the authors next step. Right, I got it.
So you've fallen, you can't get up. So okay, are we ready?
Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
Mister Gorbachow, tear down this wall.
It's the Rocchet Podcast with Charles C. W. Cook and Stephen Hayward, James Lelex David. We talked to Doah Rothman about well basically the world. So let's have reselves a podcast.
Under the authorities vested in me as the President of the United States, I'm officially invoking Section seventy forty of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act. You know what that is.
I stand with the people of Washington, d C.
I stand with Mayor Bowdler, and we are strongly supporting their efforts to stop this scheme.
This is Liberation Day in DC, and we're going to take our cat capital back. We're taking it back.
Welcome everybody to the Ricochet Podcast and which one is it? Why You're right? It is Episode seven hundred and fifty three. You can join us at Ricochet dot com. You really can, and you can be part of the most stimulating conversations in community on the web, the place you've been looking for all these years. Forget Twitter, forget x forget facebooks. You'll find your friends at ricochet dot com. I'm James Alex.
I am joined as ever by Stephen Hayward in California, I presume, and Charles Setel you cook in Florida, I presume, And gentlemen, all eyes in the nation are turned to d C, where the continuing withard atarian fascist takeover continues
to this day, with people being arrested. So the interesting thing about this to me is that there are, as we keep saying, there's a big middle lane there for somebody to drive through when it comes to all of these social issues, and the Democrats can insist on going to the narrowest part on the left, like the like the gutter in a bowling alley, and staking out their
claim there. It appears now that you've got to in order to be anti Trump, you have to be pro the crime in DC, which isn't that bad, mind you, It's not that bad. It's really not that bad, and we've got the figures to show it. Well, you juke the figures, but it's not that bad. So let's uh, Stephen, you want to take this first. And then Charles respond to what our friend says.
Well, it is Trump has a genius for this, of making the Democrats overreact and try and persuade us of what our own eyes tell us is not the case. Forget the official statistics, which like the Feerau of Labor statistics job figures, which are now very contentious. The statistics being reported are very iffy these days. I mean the DC actually put on leave someone credibly accused of faking some of the statistics. But I say forget those statistics.
Everyone who walks into a CBS or a Walgreens in an urban area and everything is behind a locked case, or people who see all the videos of shoplifting going uninterrupted and unpunished, that may into climb, but it's still happening. I think it's hard to persuade the general public that there isn't a general problem of disorder and crime. So what what did I hear? James? I think you had something like was it one hundred and twenty four car
break ins? Or is carjackings last weekend or something? Or a few nights ago, something crazy.
You know what's been happening all over the city. One hundred and twenty here, one hundred and twenty another ninety is that they go through the neighborhoods and they just break the window of every single car in the street, and then they rifle through it looking for rifles or cards or door openers or anything, and then they move along. The police are under orders not to pursue them, so even if they see them doing this, the guys getting their cars and race off and the police say, well,
what are we gonna do? Hands are tied. And it hit our neighborhood two three nights ago or so. We had about ten windows on the street shattered, and everybody the next morning with you know, the tape up and the plastic and the rest of it. It's just grand, absolutely griand so yeah, and does that thing. Does that qualify as murdered and assault in the rest of it? No, But it's quality of life. Everybody look over their shoulder and grind their teeth and be angry at the officials who do nothing.
Charles, I have many thoughts. Where to even start, that's always yeah, I was going to start with a song. I usually start with structure, how the constitution works, and this is a slam dunk.
DC is a federal district.
D C is no more able to resist the authority of the federal government than was the Northwest Territory. It can if it wants to have a council or a mayor, but Congress can.
Take those away. That is a delegation of choice.
So the idea that this is somehow an imposition for the federal government to run the federal district, it's completely ridiculous. That's not authoitonism. If this were happening in Louisiana, then those who were griping would have a case. If President Trump work up tomorrow and said I am so worried about crime New Orleans or Baton Rouges that I will send in federal troops and we now have martial law, well yeah, okay, that's a state. It has sovereign claims.
We have a federal system. The federal government has numerated powers, et cetera, et cetera. But that's just not the case here. And on the material point, I just don't think the good question is is crime coming down? Even if you believe the statistics, and I agree that a lot of them are duked. But even if you think that that's true, the question is yes, but is crime tolerable? Now, sure people will say no crime is tolerable, but we live in a free country. You're never going to have no crime.
I don't know anyone on the left or the right, and I know both in Washington, d C. Who thinks that crime is tolerable, especially women. It just seems to be a terrible place for women to exist. And if that is the case, then the federal government is totally within its rights to look at the existing mechanisms for dealing with crime and to say you're not doing your job.
We are ultimately responsible, especially when the last two or three weeks have brought crimes that are connected intrinsically to the functioning of the federal government. We had an intern in Congress, the Article one branch murdered while going to McDonald's. And then we had this doge employee known as Big Balls, who got himself into a fight through no fault of his own because he was trying to help someone who had been assaulted. So you don't even need to fall
back on the can. That's an ought sort of question. If Congress's interns and federal bureaucrats are being routinely assaulted in the federal district, then I think it is not only reasonable, but imperative for the federal government to do something about it. So I'm very much in favor of this. What I'm not in favor of, just as a caveat, is what James Comas had on Cable News yesterday, which is, well, this is a great recipe for the rest of the country. Maybe we'll start doing some other cities.
No, you won't.
Those other cities are not federal districts have a different responsibility. But this fine with me.
So I'll put you out down as a qualified Okay, then when you talk about being a horrible place for women, I mean you have anchors on television talking about how they have been assaulted outside their studio, how there are weedy waggers in the stairwells of the Metro. I mean, yes, When I moved to DC in the early nineties, it was it was bad. It was very bad, and I'd come from a place that was not characterized at all
by this kind of disorder. By the murders, so many murders and so many potholes, and so many vagrants, and and I looked at this place as with horror. That was my initial impression of DC. I didn't like it. I didn't like it at all, and I got out after three years. But I went back in the teens when I was doing some books for Encounter books, and I would stay up late and walk back from the tabern into my hotel at two o'clock in the morning with the totter and my step and it was absolutely fine.
I mean, it really got good. It got good for a while because they were doing something and the something was working. Now, the interesting thing about it, though, is that while they were doing something and achieving results and getting a safer street by many metrics, they weren't addressing
any of the root causes. But now, of course, what we're always told is that it's pointless to do enforcement and all the rest of these things, because what really matters is our old friend, root causes, and that unless you adjust the sociolomic problems socioeconomic problems that causes in the first place, you're doing a bad thing. I mean, you can't do anything unless you address these things, which of course we've been addressing for fifty sixty years. And
that's why. One of the reasons that the Lift seems paralyzed about this is that even though they would kind of like to walk into a CVS or people's drug as we used to call and get some tied without having to call somebody over and run the tumblers what it would take to do that, they really are kind of squeamish about that. And besides the people who are stealing these things, or Jean Valjean's who just just need to wash their drawers.
I think root causes are generally nonsense in crime. I just think this is such guff. I mean a, it's incredibly patronizing. My family historically was very poor. They didn't commit crimes. They were not looked upon favorably in the social class system of Great Britain. They didn't commit crimes. I don't know what that's supposed to imply it. But second, it doesn't work. Even if you feel bad for the people who commit crimes, that's your prerogative, it doesn't work.
To go after the root causes. You have to do something about it. You have to put cops on the street, you have to arrest them, and you have to give them sentences. I'm a squish on this question when it comes to procedure. I am very much a small L liberal when it comes to the due process part of the equation. But that doesn't mean that you can't have rigorous policing, and it certainly doesn't mean that once you have satisfied all the due process steps, you can't punish
people harshly. You just have to make sure they did it. You have to make sure that the accusations are correct, that the jury is convened, that the promises that we make constitutionally, and half the Bill of Rice is about this, are satisfied. But once you've done that, there's no obligation just because you have a liberal, small L liberal attitude towards due process, to say, oh, let him off then, or let him out after a week, or it doesn't really matter.
Nonsense. But none of this works. We know how to fix this. It's so annoying.
We know how to fix this, and we don't do it.
Yeah, that's exactly it.
Yeah, I'm reminded of one of Reagan's great lines when he was governor of California in the sixties. He says, a liberal's idea of being tough on crime is giving a longer suspended sentence.
That was right.
Isn't that typical? Right? I'm sure it's one of its originals. Yes, And you know, I grew up in those years as so you did to James, and root causes was the great banner of reform liberalism in the Great Society and so forth. And I don't know if it was Juliani or who back in the nineties when we were getting a handle on it, said we finally figured out that the root cause of crime is criminals. And you know, while the left has sort of learned nothing and forgotten everything.
I mean, I go back to twenty nineteen when presidential candidate Kamala Harris was talking about one how great bussing was and the need to get back to finding the root causes of illegal immigration and so forth. So the left still says that the root cause of crime is poverty, except most poor people, the overwhelming majority, are not criminals. And on the other hand, and no one's ever been able to do even one of those fancy regression models to demonstrate that you know what level of poverty or
where our so forth. On the other hand, we do know the data now goes back decades that these are rough numbers, but it's something like, you know, eighty percent of crimes are committed by about twenty percent of the criminal population. And one of the things that did work, Charles mentions, we know what works was identifying and giving sentences to those people, and we stopped doing that. And
partly again, this is the academic left pushing democrats. If you are an inmate in higher education, as I unfortunately have in for a while now, one of the big phrases, and maybe Charles you've heard this is the carceral state. Yes,
America is the carceral state. And the decarcoral movement, which I think never makes the sort of mainstream press very much, but boy, it's huge in the academic journals and classes and so forth, has been very big and influential, and so you know, the Democrats have gone with that, and here we are the.
Decarceral movement, which is very very noisy online, eventually devolves down to this is that while we shouldn't put anybody in prison, if somebody does commit a horrible rape or murder, they will be dealt with in other ways by society.
And basically it comes down to vigilanteism. In the end, with all of these things, instead of having somebody go to a place where they're children and fed and clothes for the rest of their life, I will just beat them to death with sticks on the outskirts of town. Great Charles are gonna say.
Well, I've always thought that the decastoral people missed the follow up question. So one thing that they like to say is the United States has a greater percentage of its population in jail van and then they insert.
Whatever, Italy, Europe, the West.
And my follow up question that never gets asked is always Okay, what do they do? Because if the answer is they jaywalked, then I have a problem with it. If the answer is, which it's not, by the way, they smoked marijuana, then I have a problem with it. But the answer actually is that they did back things. Because America is a more violent and lawless place than Europe, especially Western Europe.
I don't think that is a good thing.
I do think it's a fact of our history that has obtained since the colonial period. Americans were more lawless, and I think it's related to our being more freedom loving in a perverse and than Europeans. And if you're going to have a more lawless society, You're going to end up with more people in jail. You can't just focus on the consequence of it as if it's bad. So, you know, yes, in that sense, like you need to look at the root causes, which are that we are
more lawless. But once you've established that, you just got to lock people up and become circular, right, I know.
My favorite thing to be said the end of the argument about root causes comes from West Side story, which I believe came out in nineteen sixty one, in which the Jets are sitting around and singing off as a Krupky signs and they no, it's not that one. They're explaining exactly. They're progress of the social welfare system. And when they learn or that they do what they do because of their origins, they say, you know, sarcastically.
I'm depraved on a com undeprived. They knew it as a punchline in a joke the criminals. Then no, I'm not confusing, of course the Jets with actual criminals, but the line was there, and I have no doubt whatsoever that it reflected a true reality. I'm not deprived, though, when it comes though to sleep, and I'll tell you why, because I believe in sleeping comfortably, and I'm going to tell you exactly how you can do.
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we welcome back to the podcast. Noah Rothman, senior writer at the National Review, author of Rise of the New Puritans, Fighting Back against Progressives, War on fun, It must follow, Foreign policy columnists, and we, uh, well, today there might be some developments because we're the President is meeting Putin in formerly Russian territory, which I'm glad we have and bought and all the rest of it. All right now, press conference coming up. What do you expect?
I have no idea I really happen.
Thank you, we'll talk to you later. We're going to go to our next gist.
I mean, these are very bad pundit answers, but they're also honest pundit answers. And anybody who says otherwise, I think either has access to a crystal ball or is leaning too hard into their own priors and assumptions. I don't know what to expect from this. The President is very has been very mercurial when it comes to his understanding of this conflict. His navigation of this conflict, and I don't know where his head is at at any
given moment. The Russians, on the other hand, are telegraphing to the extent we can understand what their strategy is, and their strategy maybe to pull a crazy eyev In at the negotiating table, But what we understand their strategy is is really transparent. It is to provide the President with every opportunity to talk about everything other than the Ukraine conflict. They're going to offer him deals. They're going to offer him the prospect of economic integration and joint
infrastructure projects in the Arctic. They're going to talk about future security arrangements and security cooperation in Europe, and all this is going to prove very enticing. I suspect to the President. To his credit, he has said it's great. All that's great, but none of that's going to happen unless we get this war stopped concluded. But my fear is that there's a real imbalance when it comes to
objectives here. The President and his subordinates seem to want peace, and that's noble, but peace and what terms And there's a big internal argument within the administration over this conflict, And I'm frequently asked, why are you a little down on this summit? What do you think is not going to happen or is not going to go very well? First of all, the history of semetry with the Russians
is a fraud study. And the second is that you know, these people will say, well, the President's negotiated conflict settlements or at least ceasefires in Sub Saharan Africa, in Southern South Asia and the Caucuses. What makes this one different? And what I would say is that the the administration doesn't seem to be of two minds on those conflicts. Indeed, they seem to understand those conflicts within the parameters of
the conflict itself. When it comes to Ukraine Russia, there is a big internal war over the very nature of that conflict, who who the parties are, the belligerents are, and what their motives are, and how deserving they are of American support. And it has much more to do with domestic politics than it has to do with the
actual conflict on the situation on the ground. Russia's grand strategic interests in the region, NATO, all that seems to be secondary and subordinate to the domestic interests that are on one side of this conflict or the other, and that's why it's been a very confused process. And then they're going into anchorage with this confusion as opposed to Russia's which is singularly focused on its objectives, which is
taking Ukraine either today, tomorrow, ten years from now. But that is their grand strategic goal and they're pursuing it with monomania in a way that I don't think this administration quite is when it comes to it's a coach to securing peace.
Yeah, they wanted to end because warbad, et cetera. I get that. But the thing of it is is you give putin this slice of the Ukraine that he already occupies, then think he just resets his clock and waits until the next time that he can invalidate or renee gun whatever he said before and give it another shot. And Ukraine is reeling after years and years of this. What do you think what do you think is going to happen? Is? Is it?
Is it unrealistic to think, as so many did a while.
Ago, that the Ukraine was going to actually was going to win, this was going to push Russia out, was going to get crime up. I mean, there's a lot to talk about that they're going to blow up the cursed bridge and they're going to get it back, and they're gonna cripple. I mean, Ukraine has done some absolutely fantastic things in this war, and I've always been a
supporter of them always. But are we getting to the point where the reality of Russian occupation is just simply going to have to be what is accepted going forward because the alternative is just bleeding the country white and endless war. I don't know. Well.
I certainly reject the premise that acceptance is something the United States or the West must acquiesce to. We didn't recognize formally the Soviet occupation of the Baltics. At no point we recognize governments in exile. That was an illegitimate occupation from nineteen forty one, I believe nineteen forty rather
to nineteen ninety one. It would be a shift in American foreign policy to acknowledge, as Stephen Wikoff was playing with earlier this year, the notion that the illegally annexed territories Crimea or the other four oblasts would be functionally Russian territory at no point should we acknowledge the legitimacy of those gains. Occupation maybe a de facto premise, but
it is not one we should certainly should accept. And there's also those who are who are frankly, willfully ignorant of diplomacy to the degree to which they say, what's the big deal here? They're just talking, They're just sitting down. What are the material consequence is from that, you war
mongering lunatic. The material consequences of it are that the Russian government now sitting on American soil, enjoying the legitimacy conveyed to the Russian government by the American presidency, says and will say that it's diplomatic isolation as a result of the second invasion of Ukraine is over. And when they say stuff like that, it indicates to the Russian markets that their long period in the cold is going to be over pretty soon and we're going to be
re into our economic segregation is over. When that happens, the Russian markets explode. They generate a lot of capital capital that the Russian government can borrow against and undermine the sanctions regime. So you're functionally contributing to the Russian coffers. By doing stuff like this, which has a material impact on the battlefield, we will see it. And that's the sort of thing that they just gloss over because they
don't understand the subject on which they're opining. And I suspect that a lot of people are invested in that sort of ignorance. Those who want to see peace come whatever the cost agree.
But last question, I mean, I'm not sure there's so many people who are just what's the word I'm looking for. They don't care exactly about the nationhood of Ukraine. They don't care, they don't Why are we even talking about this? Why is this conflict important? And I think it's important because of Russian ambitions. I think it's important because of looking at what Russia is casting its eye elsewhere, and they hasn't been able to do so because they've been
tied down. And I think it's also strange to grant them, as you say, the diplomatic legitimacy at a point where it becomes apparent that yeah, we can do business. Why would you want to integrate Russia back into the European economy? Why would you want to make Europe more dependent dependent again on Russian fuel. What is the disadvantage to freezing them out at every possible opportunity as a display of American soft power and economic power. Why cozy up now
and I'll stop them. I'm not a question, I'm just ranting. So maybe I should give it to somebody else.
Yeah, I don't quite know. I mean, the scenario here that makes me nervous is that the prelude to Ukraine War III consists of something like the Mensk Agreements. These two agreements, the first of which wasn't worth the paper it was written on. The Russians never observed it and kept taking territory afterwards, the second of which was also never observed, but at least the line of contact held. It was never quiet, it was always hot all the
way up into twenty twenty two. But that's the condition that we would see, and that resulted in a more security guarantees to Europe, not less. I mean that was preceded the Crimean invasion in twenty fourteen was preceded months earlier by Obama removing the very last armored division from European soil since World War Two, as well as many other divisions we had just been withdrawing from Europe in
our forever quest to pivot to Asia. The desire to pivot to Asia at the expense of the European theater makes the European theater more hot and results in more commitments to Europe's security, not less, And that's what we
would see. We would see a NATO alliance, particularly members on the frontier, get very very nervous, very very jumpy about their security and keeping the thirty three member states in line is the or most job of prima enter paris, the United States the first among equals in the NATO Alliance, and so we would see a lot of disunion and perhaps a little bit of adventurism on the part of some of our allies on the NATO frontier, which would force us to put more troops into the NATO frontier
to satisfy our NATO allies. But the big scenario that really keeps me up at night is not a fold a gap style invasion of Europe. I don't think Russia has that capacity. What they could do make an attempt is to destabilize Estonia. Take a little chunk of Estonia and say de facto situation on the ground, deal with it, or maybe even get more ambitious and attempt to establish a land bridge between Russia proper and Kaliningrad, East Prussia
as we all remember it. And that's the sort of thing that's really scary because they could very well do that, and then Berlin and Paris and Ottawa and Washington and London are all confronted with the die for Danzig scenario. Do you really want to risk no conflict with a nuclear on power over tiny tollin.
Like an origami lesson? Right?
So Noah, it's Steve Hayward out in Gavin Newsom stand as I call my miserable home state. Look, here's the difficulty is that most people who will be listening to this podcast, after we know the results, or least some of the results, it may be literally years before we know everything that passes behind closed doors today. So I want to use the Ukraine situation today to draw you out onto a broader scene of the world and about
Trump too. This caused a little bit of setup. When I heard that they were going to be meeting in Anchorage, Alaska. I go in maybe too much for historical analogies, but I immediately thought of the hastily arranged summit which was not a summit between Reagan and Garbachov in nineteen eighty six in Reikubc, and of course you remember there Reagan walked out against the intransit demands of the Soviet leaders when they offered him a deal that he really wanted,
you know, deep cuts in nuclear weapons. There are a couple of differences. One of them is this time unlike Reagan, Remember, Reagan really blindsided our allies, especially Margaret Thatcher. They were very upset that that deal nearly happened without consulting them. We know that Trump spent a lot of time on the phone with the NATO leaders in the last few
days working out red lines and so forth. We know that very interesting Wall Street Journal story that I don't know if you saw, about how Trump is very close to the president of Finland, who seems to be a pretty solid guy, a right of center person, which I didn't know Scandinavia had in any case. So I am hoping and now again people will know, maybe by the time they're listening to us, that if Putin tries to play Trump the way Gorbachev did Reagan, that Trump will
do the same thing. He will walk out also angry like Reagan did, but who knows, there are some other aspects that encourage me a little bit, And that's what gets me to a broader question. You know, just watching Trump, he's still Trump. He's very mercurial. As you say, he still fit to contradictory outbursts. You know, one day you're the worst person in the world and the next day
you're the second coming of Gandhi. But on the whole, he seems generally more comfortable in his own skin, a little more tempered, I guess, i'd say about our relations with our allies, it just seems he has act more together. So I love if you comment on what your impressions are of Trump too generally, and then from there I'd like to move on to the Middle East.
Sure, so Trump too in his second term when it comes to foreign policy is hard to gauge because the first two months I was horrified frankly by his performance, and then the subsequent several months we're very encouraging and diametrically opposed to the administration's approach to our adversaries and allies in those initial two months, So you have to take it all with all in total, in some and sort of that prevents me from issue grander verdicts because
I just need more inputs, I need more information before I were to render a verdict. Then when we talk about the Middle East, I suspect they'll be far more complimentary to the administration's approach when it comes to this conflict. In particular, the Putin regime and the negotiators are going to put a variety of scenarios to the President. There could be a ceasefire with some modest land swaps that Russians don't want a modest landslap, they want a huge
one at landswap. They want a part of don Bass which is very heavily fortified, including some industrial towns that they couldn't take on the battlefield and would be very
difficult to take back. But also something along the lines of an air cease fire, which would also beneficial to Moscow because while it's raining rockets and drones down on Ukrainian population centers, Ukraine is targeting infrastructure sites like Russia's petroleum processing facilities, which are very difficult to put back together. You can build an apartment building in a year, it's
not that easy to rebuild a petroleum refining facility. So all these are all things that sound really reasonable, but would also advantage the Russian position more than the Ukrainian position. And that's the sort of thing that I'm worried. The Reikievik scenario. I mean, Ronald Reagan was just frankly frustrated and very mad when he had to walk away from the table. It was one of his best moments. But I submit that he shouldn't been approaching the Russians with
the kind of disarmament agreements that he was seeking. He was very wide eyed and ideological about disarmament, and he was also attached to SDI and missile defense technologies, and when the Russians said, don't research that sort of thing, he got up and walked away. Good for him, But the very virtue of the fact that he had that summit in the first place was an embarrassment that, as you said, the Europeans came down on him, the press came down on him, and cemetry with the Russians is
fraught in that way. Joe Biden was burned in the same way. Russian troops were building up on Ukraine's borders in twenty twenty one. He said, let's have a summit, and then four months later, Buttna'm sorry. Eight months later the Russians invaded. Make Putin look like an idiot or Biden looked like an idiot? Nineteen sixty both of them.
Nineteen sixty one, Kennedy goes to Vienna and is land basted by Khrushcheff gets into this high minded ideological argument about the tenets of Marxism, is on his back foot, and then concedes that the Sino Soviet Alliance ISS functionally has military parody with the United States. And then three months later the Berlin Wall goes up, and a year later we have offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba. These sort of things matter if they go wrong. They matter historically.
And I wonder if this administration is as of single minded when it goes to the negotiating table as the Russians will be.
I suspect not.
Yeah, well, we'll just have to see what happens, and thank you for your attention to this matter. As Trump likes to say, let's switch to the Middle East a bit, because I know, I know you follow that closer than just about anybody. I guess. I'd say as a general proposition that Trump has been pretty robust and consistent in the support with Israel, with of course the occasional outburst at net and Yahoo, because that's just what Trump is.
Like.
What I worry about right now is two things. One is there's this massive propaganda campaign about starvation and genocide in Gaza, all of which is nonsense, but which a lot of conservatives are buying into, or maybe not a lot, but too many. You know, the American Conservative magazine, which I used to read because I thought had interesting stuff, has gone full anti Israel in the last couple of months. And then you have a couple of our key allies
saying we're going to recognize a Palestinian state. And I haven't followed whether Trump has said anything about that. I'm kind of disappointed. If he hasn't that that maybe I missed it, but it seems to me that that ought to call for some pretty direct and forceful condemnation by our government with some consequences. I think, I mean, we're threatening people in the UN who don't take anti American positions.
I think this merits at least equivalent treatment. But so give us your grade or give us a two or three. Noah Rothman Summary Assessments of where that scene stands right now.
Well, just a quick note on the recognition of a Palestinian state? Which Palestinian state? Right are we recognizing? These are non contiguous territories with very distinct governments, which, by the way, are at one another's throat when they get the opportunity. They have different foreign policies, different economies, different
relations with Israel. So which one are we recognizing? And if you're recognizing the whole of these territories as one single Palestinian entity, are we then immediately sanctioning that recognized Palestinian entity for being governed by a lawless terrorist group, which you acknowledge is a terrorist group with European and American blood on its hands. It's a very foolish proposition.
It's not a foreign policy it's a temper tantrum, and it is one I agree s tot even that should be met with condemnation from the US government and probably a few disincentives to engage in this sort of thing. The President's conduct when it comes to foreign policy in the Middle East has been generally laudatory from my perspective.
The attack on Iranian nuclear sites was we were told supposed to beget gottardam Room, and we have not seen that, perhaps because as the conditions on the ground had changed so dramatically over the course of Russia rather Israel's war
against the Seven Armies that ringed Israel. The ring of fire that was the Iranian military proxy network decimated systematically over the course of the war that Hamas started on ten to seven, and as such we had a much more limited capacity for Iran to engage in retaliatory strikes. This was the window of opportunity, and the President took the absolute made the most of it in ways that
are very salutary, I think. And the very fact that it has not begat the kind of response that a lot of the handwringers expected, or perhaps even hoped for in a perverse way, if only to justify their opposition to this sort of thing, is an example of the kind of intuitively I'm sorry, not intuitive, the opposite of intuitive, non intuitive approach to foreign policy that has been discouraged by the Foreign Policy Apparatus and Abraham Accords are also
illustrative of that didn't exactly spring from Donald Trump's forehead, and there have been think tanks that have been working on this for a long time, but the notion that you could do one of tooth. You could do two things to unlock a new dynamic in the Middle East. The first is to push the Palestinian issue to the
back burner. Don't deal with that first, as the peace protestors insist, you had to deal with it last, and then refocus the entire region, especially the Sunni States, on the threat posed by Iran and it's Scheite militias, which Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, all of which we're engaged in this somewhat quiet cold war hot conflict, and all that sort of unlocked this diplomatic and military cooperation with Israel.
It created a new dynamic in this region that would not have been realized in the absence of American leadership. I think we're seeing some of that here with the
dynamic between Israel and Iran and the United States. There's a lot of political pressure, as you say, on the West in particular, as a result of this propagand and distic campaign which alleges that Israel engage is engaged in the most cartoonishly evil campaign of em miseration and genocidal reprisals against civilians that you could imagine, the motives for this are allided. Nobody ever really describes what Israel gets
out of the deal. How does how does it end up with this, you know, placid condition in which everybody's ethnically cleansed because they've starved and murdered them all. I mean, the population seems rather stable, so they're doing a terrible job, as Genisi dares. But nevertheless, I mean, it's just assumed on the part of people who assume the worst of Israel, that that this is what's going on. It's taken at face value, and it's an extraordinary claim that lacks the
extraordinary evidence you should have to support it. And the president deserves a lot of credit for just bucking And this is one of the things that he does very well because he is he's so on the outside when it comes to the conventional wisdom, be it cultural or political or foreign policy's, he's rather suspicious of it and often contemptuous of it, and sometimes it serves him well, and in particularly the Middle East, it has served him
very well. Donald Trump will go down in history as someone who presided over a revolutionary change in the geopolitical situation in the Middle East for good or for ill, and I think mostly for good. But it's all because he approached it in a way that was really contemptuous of the staid and unchallenged assumptions that had calcified in the American foreign policy establishment over decades.
Okay, I give up, Charles. You try to draw this guy out because we're coming up with nothing.
Am I not performing to expectations here?
I know you know who I am.
I've heard of you because we work together, and in fact to hung out together forty five minutes ago to do the other podcast, which you should listen to. I have a question that is broad and we can zoom all the way out into spice. Tim Curry would say, I don't obscure rep I get it. How dangerous is the world because the prevailing view of younger people seems to be that everything is.
Very dramatic at the moment and.
America has never been like this, and the world has never been like this. And I'm habitually and reflexively hostile to these claims because my great grandfather fought in World War One and then lived through the depression that my other grandfather's fought in World War two.
And then they live through.
The people of the fifties and sixties, and I just am not persuaded. On the other hand, we have got wars going on, and there is a situation in Israel, and that's the prospect in the Pacific of an invasion of Taiwan and China really is a threat. So and how dangerous are things relative to any point you want.
To pick in history, Well, let's start one hundred and twenty five years ago. Let's just start at the turn of the century. The if you look on you know, if everything's relative. But if you were to plot on a graph casualties from warfare, you would find the prior to October seventh, the wars in October seventh that began then, or let's say, prior to to the Ukrainian invasion of twenty twenty two, you've seen fewer casualties from warfare and
battlefield conflict. Then in the whole of going back into you know, the treaty was failure to the extent that we have actual numbers, and we do to a certain degree about battlefield casualties. The condition that was that arose amid American hegemony, unquestioned superpower status across the planet Earth was one of unparalleled peace, unparalleled safety and security. The
human species had never known that kind of security. And there are basically three dynamics that typify the geopolitical landscape since that period. The first is the one that we're experiencing now, US hegemony the United States. For all of China's rising power capacity and what have you, it cannot yet, to the extent that we understand it project power across its borders in a sustained way. We haven't seen that yet.
It might, but it hasn't attempted that. It certainly can't project power across the other side of the planet Earth in a sustained way. No other power on Earth can but us. The second dynamic is bipolarity, which is roughly what defined the Cold War period between roughly equal superpowers, the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies. And that was a very bloody time.
It was a very dangerous time. That's not to say it was unstable, and I think that stability is largely a result of the existence of our respective nuclear arsenals.
But to the degree to which the United States and Soviet Union fought proxy battles across the planet Earth, many of which were very bloody, many of which had absolutely no concern for the individual civilians and the proxy forces that were fighting on our behalves, and Cuba to a lesser extent, if you look at Angola, that was a far more unstable condition if you want to just measure a geopolitical stability in terms of the number of people dying in the number of wars that were being fought.
And the third dynamic is multipolarity, and that's when you have multiple geopolitical polls that have rough a parody between each other militarily, economically. That is the least stable dynamic, but it is the least predictable dynamic. And to the degree that we're entering into a multipolar world when it comes to nuclear power, that is one that is that's a very disconcerting dynamic because there are just more variables at play and more powers that have the capacity to
alter their geopolitical environments. But we've experienced nothing like even during the Cold War period. Well, we've experienced nothing like the kind of violence and the prospect for violence that we had during the multipolar period, in which you had a variety of states that had inviolable spheres of influence that were policed and that you could not penetrate. For example. Now just say this, the global economic marketplace that we
have now is a pretty new invention. It actually coincided with another new invention, which is roughly Hyeki and Milton Friedman's conception of what should be market economics. These are all pretty new things. We talk about these things like they're ancient ideas that were just you know that the wisdom of Adam Smith and you know Montesquieu, was this this vision of the world that we're living in today.
It was not.
It was basically built in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, but within my lifetime it's pretty new. The old condition is state control of economics, state intervention in cultural affairs, and a variety of spheres of influence that locked powers out of their their backyards, of a great powers backyard.
So we had something like a global economic system in nineteen fourteen close to it, and it was basically just European colonial possessions trading with one another, as well as the United States and Canada, and then we didn't have that until nineteen ninety one. There was no mark global market until for the most of the twentieth century. So
all this stuff is pretty new and very fragile. But it is the case that the world that we're living in today is relative in relative terms, the safest, the most stable, the most predictable, and therefore was something that you should just fall on your knees and thank the fates that delivered you into this time and history, and in my view, have some gratitude for it and work
to preserve it. And I see quite a lot of people who just look upon this as though it was this condition that our grandfathers and fathers fought and died for in order to bequeath it to us. There's just a lot of ingratitude for it and the assumption that
something better is available on the horizon. I just don't know what that is, and I fear that toying with the status quo, as the revisionist powers are, and as some people who want to retreat behind American shores would like to do themselves, we'll just beget a more unstable world and hasten our descent into a multipolar world in which spheres of influencer once again the dominant condition and the geopolitical landscape.
Ahistorical ingratitude is one of the things I hate the most, and there's so much of it today. But on the other hand, I was watching Twitter today. I'm sorry X. There was an appalling video of somebody who traveled a very long distance to go to a conference an outdoor celebration. It was even LGBTQ plus to a spirit friendly, but they've been denied entrance because the people at the gate had deemed her braid to be a cultural appropriation. She
insisted that actually know it was Viking. They said, no, it's Rostafarian, and since we're all about having a welcoming and inclusive thing here, we cannot allow you to enter with the braids that some people might regard as a cultural appropriation. Oddly enough, none of these people looked like they'd be any fun to be around ever, aside from
the here and the septum rings. But it reminded me that there's a man who wrote a book called The Rise of the New Puritans and fighting back at the Progressives war on fund and if I were to have him on the show, he might give a preseason this book. They would encourage people to go out and bite it in the very global marketplace at which he had spoken. Could that be?
You know, it could be.
I can either confirm nor deny, but do seem to have a lot of information to this effect.
So will I do?
Well?
Noah, you wrote that book at the high tide of wokeness. I think. Didn't it come out in twenty twenty one or twenty twenty.
It came out in the summer of twenty twenty two, and I will tell you the fates conspired against it because just about two weeks or a week and a half before release date, the Dobbs decision was leaked. The entire media apparatus was on fire with the notion that the Republicans were trying to force you do not have sex, as though that had anything to do with the decision. But this was this was what the media was saying
on MSNBCS, which made my book tour rather difficult. So my third is it will encounter fewer headwinds.
Well, my quick question, which I say quick question, it's not we're running short of time, so it calls for a brief answer. But it does seem to me that the tide has turned notably generally. But because Trump is leading a ferocious counter attack against Woker in general. What kind of grade you give him on that or how things are going.
I'll give him a very high grade on antio cookery, in particular, the attack on meritocracy and his efforts to restore meritocracy, and some of the heavy handed interventions into the cultural spheres in which the executive branch has a statutory and cultural role or constitutional role, those I think
are salutary. They're a backlash to a backlash, and they deserve to have the effects that they're having on the opposition because the opposition is finally willing to acknowledge the degree to which they had been led astray by the activist class.
Not do much.
About it, mind you, but at least acknowledge it and sort of express quiet frustrations about it when they're in closed doors and among like minded company.
Yeah.
I'll just say, you look more cheerful than I'm used to seeing you. Noah. I like your grumpiness, which seems to be largely absent today.
So I was so grumpy earlier, Steve. I was grumpified by the Russian the Russian talk, and then you got okay ungrumped.
Noah, we like, and you should buy his book, The Rise of the New Puritans and just read it conspicuously in public places because the Puritans of the left hate to be called Puritans because they associate that with God. Brothers like Cotton Mather and Increase for that matter. So yeah, great book, great conversation. Glad to have you back, and it's always interesting when we do.
And can't wait until the next time we have you on Noah, my pleasure, guys, Thank.
You, bye bye. One of the things though, that I got to mention and I should, is that after this I'm going to the gym. I used to do that when I was at the office. I would have my brought worths for lunchton had to the gym. But I don't work in an office anymore. I'm retired. Eh, I'm retired. I just quit my job, so I have to go elsewhere for a gym. And the thing is if I don't, I feel old and I feel creaky. So you've got
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absolute cold seller of winter with disappointment and bitterness. Fifty dollars. However, cash prize cash money to the league winners. Charles tell us about this.
Yeah, well, not any can you come play and have fun with other Ricochet members, but you can.
Earn some dollars dollar bills if you win.
And that's per league because there's a maximum number of people in each league, but we are willing to create as many leagues as necessary. We have two hundred sign ups. We will create ten leagues of twenty people each, and each winner of those leagues will receive fifty dollars no strings attached, except that you have to be a Ricochet member for the duration, so you can't join, then play fantasy football, then rejoin and say where's my fifty bucks?
You have to be a part of the community. That's the only rule, and we hope you will sign up if you want to do that. You'll notice on the site if you look to the right, there is a little link on the homepage has a football leather backdrop and it says play fantasy football, win some money or some such.
Click the link, follow the instructions and you're in.
You know, you think about joining and signing up and then quitting and doing that. Yeah, it presupposes a level of craftiness that I don't think characterizes the average No.
No, I didn't think anyone would actually do it. I just said no strings attached, and then I'd rather it was one before we go.
I heard this that Trump is reconsidering, not reconsidering considering, reclassifying marijuana to a Schedule three controlled substance, and a lot of people sat up when they heard that. I didn't because I don't know what a Schedule three is. I'm not exactly sure what this means. Have either of you followed this story, and I mean AI overview from Google says Schedule three are substances that have a moderate potential for abuse and addiction, as well as they currently
accepted medical use in treatment. So I don't know if this is an upgrade or a downgrade. Downgrade, it's a downgrade. It's a four. Now.
Well, the classification system I think sets the most dangerous drugs one.
It's schedule one. Now, yes, is schedule one, and the who has recommended moving it, and so we are going to be I don't know. It's like it's like Defcon. Which order does it go? And the magnitude of stars point is I think the entire country, well not the entire country. I think a lot of people are rethinking the whole Oh, just decriminalize it. I'll let people smoke it wherever they want to do, because it leads to a stinky streets. Then people say, oh, what's the what
do you care? Come on living in a city, you know, just I'm sorry.
I was working on.
My outdoor lighting system at my house. Somebody walked past smoking something and it was at the bottom of a hill and it wafted up all the way to me and it was this potent when they got to my nostrils. I don't know when they changed the aroma of marijuana, which my college days was not this so difference. But it's just like I hated and I walked walked to New York and other streets and it's just choking clouds of it. Can't stand it.
But go on, can I give a limited defense of this? Go ahead?
Well, first off, I don't think the federal government is allowed to prohibit marijuana constitutionaling, so I would like to see them out of it. Irrespective of what the policy was to be, you could then have prohibition in the States if you wanted it.
I just don't.
Understand why we needed a constitutional amendment to allow the prohibition of alcohol. But then a few years later the government said drugs, let's do that. The enumerted powers doctrine is still there. It's still in there. You can read it. But in terms of the smell on the street, I one hundred percent agree with you, James. What I don't understand is how smoking it in public became an intrinsic part of decriminalization.
What happened is sitting around the dorm room and listening to Genesis.
But the thing is right is you could have a situation in which a state says we are not going to criminalize marijuana, but also you are not allowed to smoke it on the street. And I don't think this is a weird view because a we already do this with drinking. Most states have some restrictions or cities on whether you're allowed to drink in public. For example, in Jacksonville, you are not allowed to drink on the street except on game day and between certain hours within a certain
part of the city, which makes total sense for tailgating. Second, we have now reached the point with progressives at which they think that if somebody smokes tobacco on the street they should be instantly executed. Yes, but that smoking marijuana on the street is a normal part of a functioning civil society. And I don't understand why more people who are more libertarian minded have not taken the view decriminalize marijuana and ban smoking it in public.
Because that's the bit that everyone hates.
But we already do it for drinking, So just do it, Like, why does this become the hell that these people want to die?
On the A would probably lead.
To a disparate impact argument at some point. I know rubbish. I'm with you there, but I completely agree, Stephen. We know that you're the kind of guy who just gets out his gandof bond and rips them off on the weekend while listening to some King Crimson. But whats you take on the mon thing.
Well, first of all, you mentioned one of you mentioned prohibition, which brought me the frame of mind of Will Rogers great remark that well, at least prohibition is better than no liquor at all, and I wish we could go back to something like that. Actually, I think the terms Charlie laid out or right, And I've joked for a long time that the way the left operates is tobacco is illegal and carries a death sentence, but marijuana smoking
will become mandatory. I do think, though I haven't followed the medical literature closely, but I do think we're going to end up having a lot of second thoughts about our rush to legalize it. So one thing about decriminalizing it, I'm all for that, but I do think that commercializing it, legalizing it, giving it a social approval is a bad idea. And you know it was true that, you know, before prohibition, we really did have a serious problem with alcohol consumption
and alcoholism and it went way down under prohibition. It never came back to quite the level it was beforehand. But we still have a lot of problem people who have alcohol problems and treatment programs and AA and all the rest of that, and my ideal world would be finding that kind of stable equilibrium for marijuana as well.
Yeah. Well, the thing is is that a lot of the people who were voting for this were remembering back to their healthy on commedy college days when the stuff they're buying ditchweed from somebody who was essentially getting it from the guy down out in the country who would sell it in giant hefty bags and beat like tumble.
Rights for Friday. I think stuff today is more powerful, right, I think it stuff today?
Right?
And although James, I have to say, I do resemble that remark of sitting around a dorm room listening to Genesis with our.
Okay, well, why did I say that? What do you think?
Right?
I know exactly I resembled it. I embodied it. I just know that there's something that it's just very on to walk into my high class grocery store, ultra high class and they've got a whole section for THHC. And again if you want to have, and they have a liquor section of course too, because you can drink some of these things and become sparklingly interesting people after half a glass. But you drink this and you become an insensate moron who has absolutely nothing of no merit to say.
But that's my old biases coming there. I suppose I'm old, I'm a boomer, and I prefer the fine products of the Scottish Highlands when it comes to an amber liquid. As a matter of fact, I've got a space side lined up for myself tonight, but that's hours away. Right now, I got to say thank you podcast brought to you by Cozy Earth and by Quality of s Analytics support us by becoming part of the best place for civil
center right conversation and joining up at Ricochet. And of course I would like you to leave a four star review on Apple Podcast, not a five star. No no, I've been asking for that for years and move the need a little bit. So I'm saying four star and maybe you will, out of just sheer stupporness give us
a five because I didn't ask for it. But what we mostly ask for you to do is come back next week, when Charlie and Stephen been another guest, I hope will entertain you with insight, amusement, observations, and everything else you've come to expect from the Ricochet Podcast over these seven hundred and fifty three episodes. Gentlemen, it's been a pleasure, and we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet or Point up. Bye bye,