King, we should be partners, not rivals, achieving mutual success and common prosperity, finding the right way for the two major powers to coexist in the new era. The world has arrived at a new crossroads where the China and the United States can navigate the so called Thucydides trap.
It's the Ricochet Podcast. I'm James Lilynx with Stephen Heyward and we're going to be talking again to our favorite Noah Roth has written a book Blood and Progress about left wing violence. Let's say Resol's not a riot, but a podcast with the.
US Defend Taiwan came. So only one person that does said you know it is me.
Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number seven hundred and eighty nine. I'm James Lilyx on a beautiful spring day in a Dina, Minnesota. Stephen Hayward is in California. Or of course the sun always shines. So Stephen, how are you today?
I am good, James, good to see you.
Well as sparks in Star Trek six, only Trump can go to China. What do you make of what has been done? The headlines that I'm getting. Of course, it's it's always amusing to be the headlines in my feed I use Apple News, and they gather up all of the things that are said, and everything is fraught with terror and failure and worry and uncertainty and the rest of it. And I have come to just discard ninety percent of it, waiting for history to make its final judgment.
Of course, by them, I'll be dead. But so, what have you been able to glean from what you've heard about this meeting.
With Gi Well, not much really, because we don't really know what's available for public consumption can be at wide variance with what's actually happening at the negotiating table and all the side discussions that go on between the large entourage brought with him. So I am amused by the fact that what the media seems most concerned with is that the traveling press corps from the United States has been roughed up by Chinese these officials.
I haven't heard this, what happened?
Oh yeah, apparently there have been these scuffles. And anyway, the Meatia is complained that we're being treated very badly by the Chinese, and I thought, ah, I wonder Ifrump put them up to this.
Well, I hope not.
I hope not.
I don't want to bring in the United States, as much as we may feel about the mainstream media as we do, to use the instruments of state power in China to give these guys a bad time. Now, it could be that being roughed up means, you know, being put in a room and given a flat Coca cola and made to sit there for an hour. So I
don't know. But if they're actually manhandling them and the rest of it, no, this is the point where I say, no, we are all Americans and they're the chicoms, the reds, and I say it's spinach and hell with it.
So well, this, well, it's an interesting point on that media angle. I mean, here's I've actually had some physical altercations. I haven't tried to chase after in detail, but there is one little detail that is interesting to me. So you know, Barry Wise has been trying to turn the ship at CBS News. And one interesting thing is last weekend it was Major Garrett on sixty Minutes had a long interview with Benjamin Netanyahu. Apparently this has outraged Leslie
Stall because she's a senior person. She's been trying for months to get an interview with Netan Yahoo.
But at least she wasn't trumped by, or so to speak, by a minor Garrett That would be even more insight. At least it was a major Garrett R.
Exactly right. Anyway, this is causing trouble there. But the more interesting thing at CBS, what relates to the China question, is so that Tony Dekoppel's the new anchor for reasons that are not entirely clear to me or that I haven't seen explained satisfactorily. Is he was not able to get a visa for the trip to China. So he's reporting on the summit all week from Taiwan. So that's a little odd. But Hill was doing a lot every night, He's doing some Taiwan stories. You know, how does Taiwan
think about China? What are they doing to defend themselves against the possible attack. But the first night, it would have been Monday or Tuesday, he came on at the end with a little you might say, editor and he said, yeah, China's a rising power. They make everything, but everything they make is made in America. And then he goes on to talk about you might say American exceptionalism, American innate superiority.
I thought, ah, isn't that interesting that. You know, people in the media and at the CBS Old Garter probably think, well, that's just irresponsible jingoism. But I kind of like it, and it's a sign maybe bury A succeeding and turning the ship of state there, so do I.
But the idea that China somehow has learned that it is an exceptional nation, that they borrowed that concept from the United States, I'm sorry. They believe themselves to be the center of the world, the Middle Kingdom, and it is their right to rule, so that's a bit odd. But as far as having them, you know, they make everything.
It's interesting. I have been because I've been furnishing and tricking out this apartment here, I've had more interface with Chinese goods than I have in an awful long time, and nearly every single one of them has turned out to be shoddy, substandard, doesn't fit my needs, breaks easily comes from a company that disappears almost instantly. I left the one star review of a desk tray of to pull out desk, which is impossible to assemble and was
promptly given a got a letter from Doris. I'm sure it was Doris somewhere who said that they were taking a very close look at my comments, that the engineering team had been spoken to and they were retooling everything, and they were going to give me a fifty dollars gift certificate if I could just change my review from a one star to a five star. And I thought, yep, that's what we're up against right there, and no, sorry, got your number. Well, it'll be interesting to see what comes.
I mean, one of the interesting things and pieces of news that we had the last week was that drug overdose deaths are down like something like two thirds in the country. And they're blaming that on interdiction. They're blaming that on less fentanyl. They're not blaming they're ascribing it to those things, to less immigration and the rest of it. And it's a good deal. It's a good thing, right.
So you have no idea whether behind the scenes there was some arm twisting and table pounding and saying you've got to stop shipping precursor chemicals to Mexico or we're going to start having some accidents or something or something. I don't know. You never know. You never know. I mean Nixon goes somebody goes to Russia and comes back and says, well, went very well. We signed a very heavy cream piece, cream colored piece of paper that was
embossed with all of our signatures about nuclear weapons. It's going to make sure the future is safe, and we're going to sell them pepsi and they're going to sell us as Stoly And I think it was probably a little bit more than that, but everybody thought, oh good, we get Stoley, which is you.
Know, well, two things have been well. One thing's been reported that again we don't know how concrete it is, but that China has agreed that Iran should not control the Gulf of the Straits of hor Mews and maybe that they're going to restrain or supplying of arms to Iran. I'll believe that when I see it. The other one is that Trump. It was announced ahead of time that Trump was going to bring up the case of Jimmy Lai, imprisoned in Hong Kong, and I hope, I assume that
he did, but I don't know. We haven't heard any reporting on that that I've seen, at least. Uh so, uh, that's that's I'll bet that's a sticking point for China. I'll bet they're like the Soviet Union was when Reagan and Schultz kept bringing up human rights and they say, this is a purely internal matter, and our guys will say, no, it isn't, and finally the Soviets relented. But I don't think China is in a mood to relent on that.
They're they're very intransigent about these I don't know if we have.
Any Chinese agent mayors in this country that we could swap for them.
You know, right that city's right next door to where I grew up. I know Arcadia quite well.
It's a very very curious story, and it makes you realize the Chinese penetration of our institutions. I mean, this isn't This isn't paranoid talk. This isn't I'm Joe mccarthyen I'm gonna eat a stick of butter before going out and drunkenly accusing a bunch of people to stuff. Although he was right in all of these instance, this is this is, this is what anybody knows to be the case. When they send people over here for a variety of purposes.
They could dual use, as they say, when the intradiculous ship that has machinery on it, that, of course they are. Why wouldn't they Why would they not send agents over to do all sorts of things for all I know? You know the Florida orange blight was caused indeed by Chinese agents spreading pathogens. It's people look at you and say, you're absolutely daft to believe that you've been spending too much time on the Twitter.
Why would that be ridiculous?
Why would your geopolitical economic enemy not want to sew as much discord as possible to take advantage of your liberal policies to seed the country with as many people as they could, wouldn't you?
Yeah, well, yes, I've had a number of Chinese students over the last twenty years, and I've just assumed or concluded that a number of them were essentially spies, and or in several cases I learned that they were over here to get a degree. But really it was a vehicle for rich Chinese to get money out of the country, which is otherwise restrictive. But some of these Chinese students had brand new Mercedes or BMW's, and in the case of Pepperdine where we USEDEPP quite a lot fewer than
before COVID. A lot of them were living in two million dollar houses over the hill in Westlake, which you know, Oh, the kids gotta have housing. They're sort of housing on campus center, right. Oh, this is a way to get some capital out of the country. But I do remember vividly one of the first Chinese students I ever had, young lady very Bright. Her work was really good, which made me suspicious that, you know, for Ai, that someone was writing papers for But she says to me, Oh,
I've looked at your internet. Everything on your internet about ten and Men's Square is wrong. Those protesters and thugs and hooligans they were shooting are police and army people, and so anyway I would get that I thought was quite candid and maybe more too revealing, more revealing than it should have been.
Well, the Great Firewall does keep a lot of information out of there, and it's unfortunate that they have to marinate in their own ideological bubble. Good thing that doesn't happen here in the States. Yes, they move a lot of money out of China to go to the property markets. Canada has this and a great extent, and you always look at them and say, don't you guys have an awful lot of empty cities that you pro simply could sink your money into, But they don't because they know
it's not going to work. I keep hearing that Chinese economy is always about a day and a half away from collapsing entirely because of their property situation, and it never seems to happen. Another day will pop up and there'll be another video of somebody who's gone through a city that was intended to house eight hundred thousand people and has four of them, and they're all janitors who
spend their day sweeping up an empty mall. And it is astonishing to me how they continue to creak along with these real estate bubbles that they have that make ours look absolutely same by comparison, But yet they do so who knows, you know, we'll see down the road. But China is I mean, you've been reading of the purges, right, You've been reading the g is shaping the army to do as you want, which brings us to somebody else in a similar position, perhaps a little more perilously so.
And that is where Putin happens. To be. All of the stuff that's coming out of there suggests that there is a strange softening. Somebody noted that for the very first time Putin referred to Zelensky with the honor, with the word mister, and that this somehow was some great signal that a reproach mall might be possible. That they are no longer going the whole zine denotification thing, but they're starting to create an ideological, verbal political landscape where
they can actually make an agreement. I don't know. I don't think so. I think that staggers on until until Putin is either out, which you know, where do you stand on that? And again, this is something we've been saying for two years. As the elites are hurt, then they will turn against him. Well, the elites have been hurt first by the sanctions, then by the way now you know, with the trashing of the energy infrastructure. Unless money flow in ETCA, the elites are hurting even more.
I've hearing all of this for a long time since the war began.
I have no idea what to make of it. We puzzled over Putin before, and I've expressed my bafflement. I do think two things. One is it is the logic of aggressive tyrants to either go on or be destroyed right but internally, and that's something that is I don't quite understand the impulse to want to risk total destruction for yourself in your country, but it does seem to
be endemic to dictatorships. Second, I do get the sense for some of the reasons you mentioned that he is looking for a way out, but it has to be has to be beyond just a face saving way out, because that won't save his own head, you might say. And what that might be. I think it's not only keep all the territories got and maybe be given some more, but I think he wants some kinds of guarantees that Ukraine will not join, for example, the European Union. Never
mind NATO. I don't think there's an appetite for NATO to invite Ukraine to join, but the European Union and our closer ties to the West is something Putin would like to foreclose in some solid way, and I think there'll be great resistance to that, both by the European Union and by Zelenski himself. So we're just gonna have to see. Ukraine is apparently exactly more and more pain on Russia. It's drone strikes and so forth. So we're just,
you know, we'll just have to see what happens. As the President likes to say.
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Well, enough of us blathering. Let's get somebody else to blather. Noah Rothman, We welcome back to him, back to the podcast with the anticipation. American writer, editor, former MSNBC commentator, hmmm, podcaster, author, senior writer and podcast guests for National Review. And we love, we love, we loves us some NR, as people used to say on the internet. And he's here because he has a new book, Blood and Progress, which sounds like the bioh of Bismarck, but it isn't. It's about left
wing violence, and we welcome Noah here. Hey, how you doing.
I'm doing great, Thanks so much for having me again.
Fantastic left wing violence. Come on, come on going, come on. Talk to anybody in the left and they'll say, well, you know, violence from the left is entirely justified. It's the riots are the voice of the unheard, and the destruction of cities is a necessary way of dismantling white supremacy. But we never do it.
It's essentially that's a really good summary of the business.
It's the right that does it. They're the ones. I mean, take a look at the ADL, take a look at what the Southern Poverty Law Center says. It's the right that commits it. And J six and JA six. But you and your book. There's an excerpt today for people who have Apple News, you can find an excellent excerpt free from NAR which discusses said scourge and puts it in the context of its most recent efflorescence, which would be twenty twenty.
I have a very keen.
Relationship with the violent urban violence of twenty twenty because it happened in my city. It happened twenty blocks from my house. I drove through it every day. I heard it, I smelled it, I lived it, and I watched on live streams which have since somehow just disappeared from the Internet of what was going on and what they did and how much fun they had doing it. So let's unpack all of this. They will say that, actually it's
justifiable that it is idio. Well, it's your book. Give us the premise and tell us exactly what you want us to take away from this book.
I don't know you were taking me on a journey here. Actually it sounds like you've got this thing pretty much down, all right, Thanks for joining us, No, folks, Yeah, I
mean that's essentially what this book is about. The reflex that you encounter, that we all encounter whenever there's an act of confirmed or suspected left wing political violence designed to advance a political agenda, whether it's the sustained looting and burning of American cities, an attempted or successful assassination of a right wing figure, attacks on ICE or CBP facilities,
one of which last year was really sophisticated. It was a small cell terrorist attack using pretty sophisticated ambush tactics all the time. What you hear right after that as well. You know, the right wing is the most urgent and acute threat to American civic comedy, and so you shouldn't even really be talking about this. What is that reflex? Where does it come from?
That?
That's what this book confronts, and that excerpt one of the phenomena that amplifies this and gives the left permission to look away, which is all that is that reflex that you encounter when this say, oh, the right is really much more violent. It's just a psychological excuse to avoid confronting the phenomena that is all around us. There was a document that was prepared for the Department of Homeland Security in twenty twenty one group named INSIGHT, which very bravely demons.
Or let me, let me stop you right there, and INSIGHT stands for because when I saw it in your book, I started sounding it out myself, thinking this has to be clever, And indeed it was in nc it is.
Correct National counter Terror, National counter Terrorism Innovation, Technology and Education Center, and they contributed to the Department of Homeland Security, and the document that they prepared articulates why researchers in the field that study ave violence anarchistic violent extremism, which is the turn of art that the FBI uses, captures a lot of left wing political violence. Not all, but typically you're left wing, politically violent people will fall into
that category. Within the universe of domestic violent extremists. On the right, you have racial and ethnically motivated violence, sovereign citizen violence, that sort of thing which tends to capture more right wing figures. And those who study aves encounter a variety of intimidation tactics from the left and from
people within their own fields, social isolation. They describe smear campaigns, a loss of professional reputation, the fear that their research could provoke harmful responses, which is a very sanitized way of saying they're being terrorized, that they have effectively been
terrorized by a campaign of terrorism. And lastly, the extent to which the people who do research into the field of left wing political violence are themselves members of groups or apologists for groups that execute violence in the name of progressive causes. And that is to say nothing of the adulterated and suspect data sets which purport to flatten
the phenomenon of right of left wing political violence. In order to claim that the right has the the majority of cases of political violence are on the right, and some of those data sets are really corrupted to the extent that they incorporate violence inside prisons, for example, between gang members or gang members, or family members or prison official CEOs. For example, there are episodes in which homeless people who deploy racial slurs while assaulting business owners has
countered as right wing violence. Somebody who sprays graffiti on the side of a church, that's right wing violence. When you flatten these things out into statistics, try to create a database, which is why I don't even attempt to do it.
I think it's a fraught enterprise.
It just flattens the whole phenomenon, leaves you less informed about it than more. And statistics are important, you can't just ignore them or dismiss them. But to try to create a database is in my view of fraud enterprise, which is why I don't do that. I tell stories, and the stories that I tell are illustrative. I think of the phenomenon that is observable with our own eyes.
I mean, you don't.
Need a database to tell you that the amount of the left wing political violence designed to create in the minds of the adult thinkers who execute violence in the name of political motives designed to change in shape society.
That is just.
Rampant, and it is You don't even need to really examine the deeply the philosophy behind it, although I do in this two hundred and fifty page book with eighty pages of notes. The last attempt on Donald Trump's life was by a guy who Norah O'Donnell, we can assume thought was a pretty rational thinker. Why do we think
that because his actions did not discredit his thought. His manifesto is adult manifesto was presented to the president and the president was made to answer for his delusions, presumably because Nora O'Donnell, like the rest of the media apparatus, encounter the things that he believed on a daily basis. It's the sort of thing that Blue Sky Bandy is about on a regular basis. The President is obviously a pedophile,
a traitor, and a criminal. That's what he believed, and that's what a lot of people in the mainstream left believe, and they don't understand the extent to which it is motivated. It has motivated the atle minded, the delusional, and the unstable to meet out violence in the name of what they believed to be a righteous cause.
Right. Well, no, Steve Heyward here out in California, when you talk about the media, you're talking about the same people who this week believe the incredible story that Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners, I mean, and the media swallows that, just like they did all the bogus claims forty years ago that these preschools with little kids were taking students to the San Diego little kids to the San Diego Zoo to be raped by elephant. That
was actually reported by the media years ago. No, people, I'm gonna write a peace about how we're repeating the media credulity for completely ridiculous things. In this case, you know the guy the White House correspondents in it was, he's the one who was the Caltech grad. Right, He's not some fringe person from some commune or something like that.
Look, let's uh, that is precisely the profile of the person who executes political violence.
It is the affluent, right, It is the educated, right, right, Bruce.
Yeah, A gentleman who I quote in this actually something that's related to Islamist terrorism but one of the most common indicators or common features shared among people who execute violence in the name of Islamist radicalism had one thing in common, and that was an engineering degree. They had
been educated into this, indoctrinated into this. It's not the average foot soldier who's just And the myth on the left is that the people who commit violent crimes in general are just impoverished, afflicted by material circumstances denied which is their due, and that is just simply not true.
It is a certain type of person who's been educated into the notion that there do has been stolen from them, and are pretty decently familiar with previous radical violent ideologies and those who practiced them in the generations that came before them. That's just elementary when you think about.
It, right, well, it's it's I mean, that's been around. I mean people who celebrate the intellectuals and upper class people who celebrate violence that we're familiar with, the people in the Spartass League and things like that one hundred years ago, or you know, the characterizations in Dostoevsky, you
can pick a lot of those. But it's now breaking out widely into the mainstream of the left, and I mean two data points I know that you know is, what's something like thirty or forty percent of Democrats think the Butler assassination attempt and the White House correspondents dinner were faked by Trump, which is you know, looney tune stuff. You also now have one A is a thirty forty percent of young liberals think that violent is justified to achieve.
In other words, the ends justify the means, which we've always rightly been a skeptical or qualified in very serious ways. So this is breaking out and we're coming back to the open embrace that violence is good, right. I mean, it's one thing is maybe come back to the riots of twenty twenty, which you talk about at length. It's one thing to have, right. We've always had riots. I think of at Banfield's famous article on rioting for fun and profit, about food riots in the Roman Empire and
ethnic riots in Europe. Those things have been happening and they break out periodically. But what's true in modern times is the riots are now explicitly ideological, and that can't be good. You know, No, sorry, last thing I'll say, you know, I always kid kid you that you're my favorite cranky, alarmed person, and I've always liked it and thought, even when I thought you were overwrought, I still enjoyed
it and thought, I never right, You're never well. This time I think, I think now you are properly wrought. And this ought to alarm everybody.
Well, thank you, I appreciate.
Yeah, I strive for the proper level of rought, and I hope I've achieved it. You had mentioned, you know, the anti Israel movement that has captured the Left and increasingly forced them to subordinate elementary discretion and even basic best practice when it comes to journalism in order to retail lurid narratives about Israel and satisfy the IDs of their audience, who is, who are just desperately starving for those narratives.
And it has been a violent movement. Since October seventh.
We experienced violence in the name of this movement, whether the Left wants to acknowledge it or not, whether the Left acknowledge is property destruction as violence or not, which
they tend not to do. But when you start to dig into it, and I dug into it for this book, the degree to which we are being bombarded by vestigial narratives created and retailed by the Soviet Union is shot in the late nineteen seventies mid nineteen seventies after the Soviets investments in the Arab armies that were defeated by Israel in nineteen sixty eight nineteen seventy three was shown to be a decidedly bad investments that was not.
Going to yield return.
The Soviet Union, as a geopolitical project, established Zionology as a study, and the study of it was to anathematize it. Zionism was described as militant chauvinism, racism, anti communism, colonial,
or a neo colonial project. The Israelis were a white colonial outpost within the brown global South, and they were guilty of unspeakable practices, the genocide of the Palestinian people, which was a narrative that we've been living with since the nineteen seventies, Engineered starvation campaigns, forcible rape as a weapon of war, ethnic cleansing, et cetera, et cetera. The destruction of the Alaxa Mosque in preparation for the reconstruction
of Solomon's Temple. All this stuff has been us since the Zionism as racism resolution was passed in the United Nations,
which was also a Soviet project. And you hear quite a lot of these arguments that are being articulated verbatim by a young, radicalized Marxian left, which to make you wonder if it's really a bunch of new developments that are making you know, curious about this stuff and reciting these narratives, or whether this is all part of a geostrategic project and the part of the geopolitical left to anathematize an American enemy, an American ally, rather and advance
the interests of America's geopolitical foes.
Are you saying that a Russian intelligence agency came up with a fictional narrative about Jews?
Hard though it may be to believe.
This is like the Protocols of the Elders of Moscow or something like that, I find that a little too conspiracy.
It can be overstated. I'm not trying to say that there are no thinking, thoughtful people in the universe of Israel critics, that is true, but the vi the attle brained, those who are who cannot think of anything, who's who simply subordinate again all their discretion in order to believe that the Israelis have managed to have figured out how
to weaponize dogs and make them rape their prisoners. I mean, that's the sort of thing that you really do need to talk yourself into, and then you have to wonder what you're what it is you're talking yourself into, and why Steve.
You well it. Let's talk for a minute about the role of what you might call mainstream Democratic party rhetoric. I try not to be partisan in these things, but it's one thing for the rabble rousers to say, you know, violence is good, peaceful riots justified, or for Hubert Humphrey.
James will remember this, Hubert Humphrey back in the riots of the sixties saying I could lead a pretty good riot myself, because you know, things are so and but now you have you know, you have leading Democrats, you know, Chuck Schumer, HACKEM Jeffreys, lots of others who also say very implicitly and sometimes explicitly violent rhetoric about Republicans, about you know, billionaires, right, eat the rich and so forth. And I'll just I'll say it this way, that just
seems dangerously irresponsible. And I don't know what the right response to that is.
Oh I do condemnation, outright condemnation, and forced them to
look in a mirror. When United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot in the back right and murdered, not because he had done anything, but because he was a member of a class that this addle brained young man who was clearly beholden to left wing mythologies and left wing political ideation, he was feted by mainstream Democratic politicians even before he was His name was cheered on Saturday Night Live, before his face was blasphemously etched onto prayer candles, before
the messages that he etched into the bullets he used to murder a father of two where he sold in a popular on demand merchandise. You had people like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Caziquortes and Elizabeth Warren and Chris Murphy
and many others who condemned the violence. And yet after that facile condemnation appended a butt, and that butt invalidated everything that came before it and demonstrated precisely where they thought the energy should be the energy should be, and how people are furious with healthcare companies, and how these people are stealing your loved ones from you, because they're rapacious capitalists, and indeed the capitalist enterprise should be on
trial here as well. Not just this individual who meeted out this horrific act of violence, but maybe his violence was justified, and maybe his anger is real, and maybe that's something we can tap into and get some political traction.
Right on that is incredibly irresponsible.
Yeah, so you know you mentioned that all these people say, yes, violence is bad. But thanks to my mind and one of my favorite remarks of Milton Friedman, which wasn't about economics directly, he liked to say, nothing counts out before the butt, I think we ought to bring that around now, right the butt?
Yes, I was right right, Yeah.
I'm Greg Corumbus.
Join Jim Garrity of National Review and me each weekday for the Three Martini Lunch Podcast. We'll give you the good, bad, and crazy news of the day and lots of labs too. Find us right here on the Ricochet Audio Network at ricochet dot com or wherever you get your podcasts.
One more quick item, I want to linger for a moment. James will know about this business of Russian prop planning of propaganda which once back in the eighties I actually had a class assignment, UH to trace out the way some of those crazy aids began with the CIA stories originated. And they always seem to be planted in one or two newspapers in India and then got picked up by the European press and so forth. Well, now the Internet, that's even easier. Something I'll if I can find this.
Allies were two KGB narratives that were laundered.
That's right, right, turns out this. I'm not surprised they're still doing it and internet makes it easier. I'll find this for you if I can. I stumbled across recently, just by accident, a letter from ts Eliot, who had his own anti Semitism problems as we know, right, but it was to a group that asked him to embrace some anti anti Semitic anti Semitism effort, which he was
willing to do. This is like nineteen fifty six, and he said you should be very careful that a lot of the anti Semitism are seeing around is being manufactured and planted by the Soviet Union. I thought, wow, is that interesting. The ts Eliot, not thought of as a Cold warrior, someone who had some issues, shall we say, was alert enough to say to a Jewish group, your trouble is coming from the Soviet Union and now from Russia. So file that one away. And I did with you, well,
I stumbled, I don't think anyone knows. That's why I'm going to write it up when I find some time.
You know, No, I think a lot of people who would recoil at the thesis of your book left We're not We're not violent do so because they don't believe that these are left wing problems, that they that this is just this is simply an expression of justice, and justice does not known ideology. You quote a couple of suburban young women in your book who sort of, you know, kind of like, yeah, they had it coming, and it's kind of you know, it has to be done. These
weren't people who who huffed Chomsky in college. They got a contact high maybe, but they're just sort of part of a non ideological culture which believes that leftist ideas are the default for sensible people. So they don't view these things, as you know, in an ideological framework, because
how can you possibly have an ideological perspective on George Floyd? Oh, and you start pointing out exactly you know, what the people behind, Well, there are It seems to me that there are two kind of groups that work here, or maybe three kinds of groups. You've looked at this, tell me if I'm right. You have the you have the the anarchists. You have the you know, the cells that
you have in Washington and elsewhere, very loosely organized. They may be you know, part of some Rose City gig the rest of it, and TIFA and the rest of it, but they're leaderly loosening. Their hard to track down, and they're liquid and they you know, you know, dissolve like water, and they do a lot of the front work. And then you have the tourists. You have the you have the people who come to burn because burning is fun. I mean, I lived through the riots in d C
in the early nineties. The first day was all the people who are really angry, and the second day were the tourists who were taking the subway in to loot for fun. And so I mean, so you have you have the group that instigates, and then you have a bunch of people who are non ideological but join into it because it's it's it gives meaning and purpose and drama to their lives to be their burning and doing
the rest of it. And then you have the people who don't to participate, but nevertheless add moral support and comfort to it because they believe that overall excesses aside, this was a good thing because it's the voice of the unheard and is just etc. Is that kind of a fair breakdown of the groups involved in these urban I.
Don't think that's.
Yeah.
I think that's generally fair. Of all of those, you could probably have the most sympathy for the tourists, to the extent sympathy is warranted at all. There is something that happens inside the human brain when there's rioting and looting that the reptilian elements trigger, and typically well adjusted people can be drawn into disgusting acts of violence, brutal acts of violence, and particularly the property destruction, just by
virtue of the crowd action. Crowds are dangerous things, and as any conservative will tell you, the two groups, the two other groups, the moral supporters as you call it, Those are people with something to lose, but who nevertheless endorse and support violent action in order to advance revolutionary political causes. That is far too many figures of influence on the American left today, not just in media but also in positions of political power in office and out.
And then you have the anarchists. And the anarchists are professional, professional motivators of violence and practicers of violence. A lot of those tactics that they deploy or are starting to see the right mimic them. Some of which that are really, you know, beloved, are the black block tactics. You've seen these people before. You know exactly what they look like. Their call clad all in black, they cover their faces.
They typically wear helmets. Sometimes a truckle pull up and just drop off a whole bunch of respirators and gas masks. Who knows where they came from or who funded them. Sometimes they bring those tools and instruments to the fight themselves. And they are anarchistic, but that doesn't mean they're anti left.
There's you know, there was a wave of anarchist violence and nineteen tens and nineteen twenties, and they were anarchists, but they were also self described socialists and communists, and the historical record has preserved what were otherwise esoteric debates within that community, and you can kind of picture them from our remove, you know, the smoky salons in which the socialist left would argue about whether the state could dissolve at the outset of the revolution, or maybe a
proletarian dictatorship would be required before the state could have resolved. This is what we're talking about. They are all socialistic, but there the aims that they had at the outset, but their violence was designed to achieve differed. The anarchistic set was far more violent at the turn of the twentieth century than the socialistic left. The socialistic left was much more proceduralistic, which is something that the Italian anarchists
in particular had profound problems with. But we still have these distinctions today. Anarchist violence Avees describes left wing political action left wing violent political action with left wing motive. It is anarchistic, not in so far as because you know, those distinctions allow the left to wiggle out of it. They say, what does anarchism have to do with the state. Right, we want a bigger state, not no state.
Right, the two groups whoich seem to be ideologically at polar opposites, will unite in their opposition to the state as it is currently constituted.
They consider the state, yes practice a facet of the right wing ecosystem that is against them. By the way, the violent right thinks the same thing. The state is always on the other side, especially when it's targeting them. If the state is targeting them, it is an enemy of their side, and they resolve to meet out vengeance and reprisals to the state as though it were an instrument of their political adversaries.
Right, and then once the left wing and the Marxist get the state, they have the monopoly on power, and the anarchists are all of a sudden rounded up and it's down to Lubianca.
I get that, But this is the thing that you wouldn't get if you were to boil this down in a spreadsheet and create and just make these people into numbers. You have to actually explore what they think, but they say what they want politically in order to identify what you're looking at is left wing political violence right wing political violence. There's why I'm not I don't dwell in statistics, although they're in there. They're very useful, but it doesn't
make up the bulk of the argument. The bulk of the argument is made up in stories and the exploration of individuals and their individual political motives and their actions, and what affect their actions had both on their victims and the extended universe of victims who are afflicted by violence, which ripples out in all directions and has.
Absolutely right heil on it. You're absolutely right to tell it in terms of the stories, because the stories are illustrative in ways that simple numbers don't. One of the things I remember is that the corner of it was Lake and what was it, Lake Chicago. I forget. They decided to torture building. It was three stories tall, and they may or may not have known that it was a furniture store. So it was full of mattresses and sofa cushions. So the whole thing went up and it
was quite a spectacular fire. To this day, nothing has been built on that corner. It's empty, and the neighborhood suffers because of it. The people who used to get cheap furniture there suffer because of it. But again, you know, nobody,
nobody cares, because righteousness was done. But I remember there were a bunch of people who were standing in front of the building posing for the gram they were They had arrayed themselves almost like you know, you know, you crouch, will stand here, will all flash And people were just taking mad pictures of them with the flames in the background.
And all of those people, I thought, every one of them expects that tomorrow morning, when they get up, water will come out of the faucet, lights come on, food will be available at the store. Every single one of them can presumed the society that had given them all of these material advantages and political advantages and all of the culture would be would still function tomorrow, that this was simply a vacation from order. This was the purge night.
And for those people, I have nothing but unending contempt. But there was another group that was breaking into a store, that cell phone store. They pried the bars off the front, and they were going in and they were handing out cell phones. And the owner came down because he lived upstairs with his wife who was pregnant. And the guy who was filming this I will never forget when he
saw the owner, he said, oh, guys, he's Muslim. All of a sudden, this a number of moral authority had descended upon this shopkeeper because people of his religious faith were hated by the people that we hate, and we're doing something there something as lamophobia, so and and and so. The crowd did not know exactly what to do here.
They were trying to calculate where the moral shift was going on, and eventually they backed off and let the guy hand out a few things and tell them to go away, and the rest of it.
So there was I don't want to interrupt you. I'm sorry.
I don't know what your conclusion is, James, but that, to me is just the perfect illustration of social justice in practice.
Yes, that's exactly what it was. Between the instantaneous recalculation between the fact that there that there was nothing political and ideology ideological about what they were doing, the fact that underneath it all would every single one of them would say that they were doing this because George Floyd, and that there were people who were directing it because they wanted the maximum amount of black block activism to tear down the state.
I mean, victim and perpetrator cannot be evaluated neutrally. They have to be evaluated within the context of the group that they come from, their immutable characteristics with which way that they were born, and the historical narratives that attend around those accidents of birth, which are by the way, subject to dispute, but not in the minds of those who are filled with righteous indignation and are meeting out violence in the name of historical retribution.
Absolutely so, if you just to check to see where this person is in the intersectional victim pyramid, I mean, if the guy had come out and he'd been seek, I would have wondered what the guy would have thought. I mean, hey, guys, he's seek and everyone would looked around and say, where are they exactly in this I'm not exactly. I know they got special ceremonial underwear and they all have little necklaces of I don't get it, but it's a turbine. And okay, the guys from outstate
Minnesota would hate him because he has a turban. So he's good.
It's there's an intersection matrix card for that. Is it there, guys? I mean, I think you can look up with a It would take a minute because they're not normally you know, the top of the list that you encounter, right, So I.
Don't mind when you the two young women that you talk about. I sort of expect that from dumb young people who don't have a sense of history or how fragile civilization. Is what really makes what grinds my gears is people like the main the governor of Minnesota's wife who like to open the windows and smell the burning tires because to her, you know, I love the smell of burning tires in the morning, smells like victory. I
mean that. To me, that endorsement at that level from the politician class is indicative of the psychology of the Yes, the psychological and the political and moral rot that has attended the party. You would like to think that Hubert Humpford would say, Humphrey and as Day would have said, no, we don't burn things down. That's not how we do it.
We we argue, we jaw. But it's been there for a long time, ever since the valorization of the sixties, the you know, the complete ignorance and whitewashing of the bombings and the rest of it in the seventies. It's extraordinary how an intellectual class continues to believe this even after the French Revolution.
For God's sakes, Yeah, I don't see it as all that different. The governor's wife who celebrated the smell of destruction, and the young women who are not all that young, by the way, they were in the mid thirties, young mothers.
With homes who were homeowners.
Who expressed very similar sentiments, but with a little bit more retro anxiety, I suppose, because they felt that they might be victims of it. It was just going on right next door, so they were trying to rationalize it. But it's all a species of rationalization and an expression of fear, an expression of fear that the mob will
come after them next. And the people who were talking on record and trying to talk themselves into the notion that torching a target store was actually good and righteous and virtuous were sort of reconciling with the fact that they had individuals who were on social media who probably were just long saying that their business was burned to the ground and they were happy about it, and this
is how justice is done. And they were saying, well, listen, I'm all for BLM, I'm all for Black Lives matter. What happened to George Floyd was terrible, and justice needs to be served, and maybe this is how you do it. It felt wrong to say you're against the riots, said one. Just because you know this reaction has been violent doesn't mean that what's animating the violence is wrong. And that's just a different, different emphasis with the same expression as
what Missus Walls was saying. All of them are terrified that the mob will come for them next, so they want to be the last one that's afflicted, you know, passed by me by demonstrating their right thinking, you know, the fact that they have a gun point into their head and they're saying what needs to be said. That is coercive as well. And coercion is a species of violence as recognized in the US Code. But property instruction
doesn't count. Coercion doesn't count. The only thing it seems to count are the sort of cliched examples of right wing violence that make their way into hackneyed hell Hollywood productions, right like old school militia style Sovereign Citizens Movement, right wing violence. That is what they wreckoned Waco. That is what they were Oklahoma City, January sixth, That is what they recognize as the species of violence that is attributable
to the right. But one of the things that I dwell on in this book, and January six is one of the perfect reasons to dwell on. It is the extent to which the right is beginning to mimic the left, and the left's tactics. We see less sovereign citizen movement violence, you know, right wingers digging holes and saying come get me to law enforcement and then meeting violence out in
that fashion. We see affinity groups as we saw in Charlottesville, which is a left wing phenomenon, something akin to black block movements. The January sixth is the sort of mob violence that we've been very comfortable from seeing at this point. By twenty twenty one, it was everywhere to the extent
that the left was willing to acknowledge it. But what we saw in January six was an expression of the kind of mob action that conservatives who are who are deeply mistrustful of crowds, would not have engaged on if they did not subordinate what they understand to be proper civic decency, propercific behavior to the demands of the moment, and the demands of the moment where there was a lot of social incentives created around in twenty twenty around
street people in street power. Democrats have always been very attracted to that, but Trump's movement is too. Populist movements are as well, and that's the sort of thing that you know, flattens individuals, reduces the incentives to judge individuals
as individuals, see people as groups, as monoliths. You know, when Trump pardoned all the January six protesters, he pardoned a lot of very violent people, But he was only following in Joe Biden's footsteps, who pardoned a lot of people based on the category.
That they existed in. Yes, exactly, that's social justice.
That's not seeing individuals as individuals and seeing them as avatars of a type of a caste.
You shoot up the Congress because you went Puerto Rican independence. Just wait twenty years and you've.
Forgotten a forgotten incident.
So too is the violence of the anarchists in the Italian anarchists and the socialists of the nineteen tens and nineteen twenties. So we in the Faln and the BLA, all of it's forgotten. Why is it forgotten?
Well, the Palmer Raids would remember because he was an historical overreach by the government which swept up a whole lot of people.
But that's all that happened.
James I in between in eighteen eighty sixty at the Haymarket riot and then you had the Palmer Raids, and nothing happened in the interim. In the popular imagination, I know absolutely nothing.
I mean I spent a lot of time looking at old newspapers and I would find headlines like all reds to be deported, and I just thought, well, well not really, but you know, good on you, good on you. Right, hey, listen, we could go on forever, and we shouldn't because people eventually look at their watch and say, I've been listening to this fantastic podcast, where's the day gone? We should instead tell them to buy your book, Blood and Progress,
Noah Rothman. Just remember Blood and Progress. Remember it because they are not exactly concepts that we want to twin, but some people have. And that's what Noah's done a great job of telling us about stories as well as lots of numbers, and engagingly told by one of our favorite writers and guests. No One, thank you for dropping by the podcast today. We'll see you again when you crank out another book in what six seven months is? Say, yeah, a couple of years at least, All right, doctor Lack
you guys. Bye. Hi.
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I don't believe that maybe a technical definition when they say coercion is violence. I like to reserve the word violence for a feeling, hunching people in the nose, for actual violence, and not words or violence or speech is violence or hated the rest of it. But burning down buildings, yeah,
I'm going to put that in the violent category. There was a writer for a newspaper who I somehow, I don't know how it got past her editors, but she made the mistake of writing a piece about building lives matter too, and the immediate response was such that I'm sure that the piece was yanked and probably the person was deplatformed and put down to you know, right to the classified transcript area. They say, you're sending me to classified.
Yes we are, but there aren't any classified That's what we mean, and.
They didn't get to keep a stapler. Probably not right.
I was tempted to write a piece like that too, and I was waved off it as fast and as hard as you possibly could. And because my beat was architecture and urbanism and the rest of it. And it's very odd. At a time, a vital, vibrant there's that word, A dense, urban, vibrant experience had been torched. And we, you know, we really couldn't lament that because there were greater issues at play. And I thought, no, no, this These are the These are the stores of the people
who live in these neighborhoods. This is the history of the neighborhood. It is fascinating the way to see the way these buildings that were originally constructed by Swedes and Germans have been inhabited by by now Central and South American visitors who've changed the demographic of the communities. It's fascinating how this piece of neon has it survived since nineteen fifty five, How this building with its modern aspects is now gone, and the whole historical record, the whole visual,
visual tapestry of the neighborhood has been torched. In history has lost. It wasn't something you were allowed to note, and I just I found I found that, I found that instructive. We can't dilute the narrative, and we can't pretend that it wasn't We can't even we can't even say it was bleepin bad.
Now, now, James, can I flip the script a bit and play host for one question for you? That's been on my mind since middle of the week. I don't there's the famous line from I Think Lionel Trilling about the bloody crossroads between politics and culture, or politics and literature. So the New York Times had a story midweek that they represented as a major scandal in a news story that Israel lobbies the Eurovision Song Contest on behalf of
Israeli singers and artists. And I thought Eurovision Song Contest media. I'd love to hear what James has to say about that. And you, maybe I may catch you unprepared if you didn't see the story of James, but go ahead and give me your first reaction.
I did not see these stories. As a matter of fact, I'm not surprised that they do lobbyet. I don't know why they don't use the Jewish space lasers to rearrange the neurons and the heads of the judges and win
every single year. The only thing I know about Eurovision is one I think that there was some strange Icelandic creature, not p York, who was really this sort of feral, scraggly dress wearing man or not creature who was held up as an avatar of modern standards and was in terms of visuals and music, was meritricious in every respect, but it was I guess it was boundary breaking or something like that. And I thought, just another march toward toward ugly ugliness that the culture seems to have been
foisting upon us for the last fifty sixty years. You go to the Vienna Biennial and you see just the worst or the Venice Bienny. You will see the worst form of modern art imaginable. You go to Cannon, you see them stand and clap for a movie that is drenched with blood and transgressivism and the rest of it. And it's for people who think that we should go there to their museums and the rest of it and
celebrate the beauty and the history and the tradition. They seem awfully uninterested in those things themselves and interested in perpetuating nonsense garbage. But Eurovision songs actually are supposed to
be something close to, you know, hummable and singable. But I can't tell you any single one of them except for Waterloo, and I don't even know if that won the Eurovision, but I think that perhaps it did, so that I'm not surprised, but hasn't done them any good because of course, you know a lot of people refuse to be on the same stage as in Israeli artists, but that's just anti Zionism, has nothing to do with
Judaism whatsoever. Well, before we go here, Stephen, I'm gonna go out in a little cultural note since you brought one up as well. We used to do this all the time, and it's not that anybody cares, but if they do, it's always nice to hear about something that's out there in the innumerable number of streaming platforms that you may have missed that people might want to take a look at. My example of what I'm watching now is unfortunately on Apple TV, which really relegates it to
the niche. But I'll get to that in a second. What are you watching now.
Oh my goodness, I'm not watching anything. I've been so insanely busy the last month that I barely have time even to take in the local news once in a while, so I'm gonna have to punt, I'm afraid.
Oh good for you. I've had those busy periods too. Finally got out of my head though in the move and everything else, but not everything, but much of it has calmed down, so I was able to watch a new show, which surprised me because I hadn't heard a word of it. That's Apple TV. We got a great show. It's fantastic, it's brilliantly written, it's funny, it's well shot. We're not going to tell anybody about it. But eventually
they break out, like a severance or a publicius. This one is called Widow's Bay and it's basically the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frye, who is the mayor of a small little Massachusetts island that's very, very haunted. And it's a comedy horror, which I usually hate. It's quirky, which I usually hate. It is self aware of the cliches, which I usually hate, but the characters in the acting and the writing is so good that it's just an
absolute delight and it's scary and it's just good. And I'm watching it, I'm thinking, where have I seen this actor before? I know I've seen this actor before, and it was in an HBO series where he played I hate to say it, Perry Mason, and I say I hate to say it because they went accurate with it. They went back to the thirties, they went back to the scrappy guy that Mason originally was conceived as, and they reimagined some of the characters and did them very well.
But he just wasn't Mason to me, because Perry Mason is Raymond Burr, walking along like the square embodiment of the law itself and taking deep, meaningful pauses and then telling Paul Drake to go do something. I wanted that, and I don't think we'll ever get it alas, just like they're casting the James Bond now, and I imagine it's going to be reimagined and brought up for the modern day. When I just want a guy in the sixties and a tux with a cigarette that shoots bullets.
That's all I want, and I'll never be given it again. Well, all you want, probably, folks, is for me to back out of this thing and let you go onto the daily life. I am going to do so after I make the usual request for you to give us those five star reviews wherever you possibly can. I want you to go to ricochet dot com if you haven't already after seven hundred and eighty nine exhortations to do so
and check out the member feed. Oh I'm sorry you can't, but you could if you just signed up and paid a little bit of money and found the access to the community you've been looking for all your life. Sometimes you'll see those great member posts break out on the front page. Gary McVeigh, who is our resident film historian, and every single time he posts something about a movie or an actor or a technology or something, you know you are in for a dive and an entertainment and
something that you just never get anywhere else. I scour the web looking for stuff like what Gary writes, and I just don't find it. But I don't have to, because is there. It is on Ricochet. We were talking about Doctor Strangelove and fail Safe, and that's just one of the things, and also politics and also sports, and also stuff and aging and being young and parents. It's all there at Ricochet. It's not just a bunch of people nattering out about of politics. So you can get
that anywhere. That's why I go there anyway. That's that if Charles were here, he will tell you about Ricochet five point nine five or five point zero coming down the pike soon. But he isn't, so he will next week. So I'll just have to wrap it with a usual statement and saying we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet four point one point seven point eight point nine point two. Bye bye, Ricochet.
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