What did I just walk into here? Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Mister gorbachaw tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long, Peter Robinson, myself, James Lilax. Today we talk about well the world, but you've all even who knowses the way around it. So let's have for sos a podcast. The status quo is unacceptable, inaction is unacceptable, and we must come together and address the broken border. We have to do it. Welcome
everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast number six hundred and sixty four. I'd like to say six sixty six because it's Halloween week, but now they'd be a little bit too much on the nose, as Rob how Hollywood writer would tell you. I refer, of course to Rob Long and Peter Robinson, the founders of ricochet dot com where you ought to go right now take a
look if you haven't before. I mean, they've been telling you this for a half a thousand episodes, and he will find the place on the Internet you've been looking for all these years, a home for sane civil center right conversation joined today. Why don't you guys all right, a one week gone from last more protests. Hear about what happened in Minneapolis. I did not, I didn't. I've been too sy. I have it here, right, every city's got their own. Well, we had a little had a
little brujja, a little kerf fluffled down by the Walker Art Center. People said it was in a highway, but it wasn't. It's just a very broad street. He blocked it off the street for a protest to free Palestine, and a confused old man who seems to be a staple of these things, found his way into the crowd and was swarmed by the protesters, who kicked at his car and the rest of it, and then he had to pull out a yui, at which point they started screaming, oh my god,
oh my god, as though standing in the trap. You know, standing in the middle of the street doesn't kind of set yourself up for this. But what was interesting about this to me is that there was a guy on a four wheeler going up and down, up and with the Hammas flag,
a very big Hammas flag on a pole. And I thought this, I mean, you mean the triangle thing, the green and white flag, or the Hammas flag, green background, white lettering, which somebody said, no, no, no, that's that's the Saudi flag, as if these guys would have the Saudi flag. No. I took a screenshot of it and I compared it to the actual Hammas flag, and it's the Hammas flag. And I thought, first of all, where do you get a Hammas flag that size? On moments notice? Can you go to Amazon? Can
you get one day delivery? Didn't even seem to have any creases in it. It had been apparently ironed with care. What is somebody in Minnesota doing with a large Hammas flag waiting for the opportunity to go up and down the street. And it was the malevolent liberation that you see in these people when they're ripping off the posters, when they're pounding on the doors and got trapped
in the library. This to me inexplicable joy in being able to finally voice these sentiments, to get it out in the open, and that it's coming from the left, which is supposedly just so steeped and intersexuality and identitydi and that they're the ones who seem to have manifested the most ancient of all of the human hatreds in our society is stunning to stunning, absolutely that you would with pride fly the flag of the people who raped ladies so hard their pelvis
is broke, because finally you've got this revolutionary violence that you can just steep yourself in and it nourishes every neuron that you've been suppressing for how long it is stunning to find this erupting over and over and over again. You guys, either side of the country, you've seen it happen where you are, right, Yeah, I mean it happens in New York. It's happened Cooper Union, about four blocks from mind. People would tell people, tell people
what Cooper Union is. Well, it's an ancient American college. It's been around forever, and I've been lucky enough to actually be on stage in the Cooper Union basement, which is where Abraham Lincoln spoke correct although a slightly different, apparently slightly different layout, it's a terrible, terrible, terrible room. It is one of the worst venues speaking venues in all of New York City. Has giant pillars that obstruct view no matter where, like, no matter
where you are, you can't actually see the stage. It's a very It feels very nineteenth century to me, like they we built it, and then we put stuff stuff in the basement, and we're going to make Abraham Lincoln speak here, but no one's going to be able to see. I think there are no somebody took notes, somebody overheard Lincoln backstage saying I can't work like this, I can't work this way. So there's a protest that was
supposed to be outside. You know, pre Palestine protests for the freeing Palestine always seemed to be very interesting, like I'm in favor of freeing it too, from the clutches of Hamas and the Arab states that funded But they don't mean they don't mean that. They don't say, but they don't say free Gaza. Right, it's peal aste, So anyway, go on, right. So so there was a protest and then it got ugly, and then
the press stay outside and it moved inside. But the bitter irony here or not irony like echo, is that there were some Jewish students inside in the library and they could be seen for the windows, the windows on I think
it's fourth Avenue, you can look right in. And they began to be taunted by the crowd outside, and they were told they should just go and hide and the I don't think this is exactly true, but apparently somebody on the staff said, if you want, you can go upstairs and you can behind in the attic, which is just almost too perfect to say, Like
it's one of those things that you're saying. If you're writing this, you say, well, this it's too good to check, And if you're writing it in a script, you'd say, I don't know too, this is too rich. You know. It's the strange kind of mental illness that the need to be part. You need to make a far away drama, your drama, and a far away conflict, your conflict. You demanding the Palestine
should be free, just like the United States should be free. It's so weird and such a neurotic behavior in the part of American progressives who but it is not accompanied. I mean, say what you like about Karl Marx, say what you like about Paul Pott. They knew their history, they'd actually done the work. Paul Pott was an insane psychopath. But it wasn't like
you wasn't educated. These people do if you put a gun to their head and said explain to me what happened in nineteen forty eight or nineteen seventy three or nineteen sixty eight, or the Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century. Explain that they wouldn't be able to They wouldn't be able to give you even the Wikipedia top paragraph of that, just the level of I mean, that's what I said to a friend of mine. I have a friend, a friend somebody admire a lot. Young guy is a young I don't know.
I don't know he's an American citizen, but he was in he was maybe he's an Israeli citizen. Young guy flew home from his legal startup he was doing. He's doing a legal startup somewhere in Florida, and he flew home to join the IDF. He's a reservist. He's he's there and every now and then I get pictures from him and he's, you know, standing there and you know, with his old unit. And I was talking to him earlier and he was asking about this, like what's happening back there. If
I moved back to New York City, should I have a gun? Should I get a gun? I said, probably not New York City, because if you're forced to use the gun in New York City, they will find a way to put you in jail, you know, say in Florida where they want right. Right, But he said, what's happening? And I just the only thing I come up with is that it's a new pandemic here. It's a pandemic of stupid and that all these kids are wrong, and
they're emotional and they're emotionally wrong, but they're also dumb. It isn't just that Harvard and Northwestern and Cooper Union and all the other universities are teaching them crackpot values and crackpot theories. It's that they are not teaching them history. They don't know anything. In a debate with these children, if you ask them, all right, we're gonna have a real debate, means you have to stop screaming, You're gonna have to listen and make an argument. They
could not marshal the facts. They could not marshal the facts in a normal debate because they don't know them. You don't need the facts if you know the truth. Yeah, but this is a yeah, but this is part. This is the problem I think with us in our culture is that we had just it's just a strange therapized emotional culture where screaming is argument. And it seems very strange because we've never had more ability, we never had more
tools to our at our disposal to have an actual debate. I mean, you could have an online debate online with anybody in the world, and you can. Wikipedia is available to everyone. You could tell me what happened in nineteen forty eight if you wanted to, or nineteen seventy three. You could
marshal those arguments, but no one wants to. It's very strange. We've never been we've ever had more of a more capability to exchange interesting, thoughtful, even very very different views, and been so disinclined to do that.
That means equivocating, That means right, that means equivocating with evil. Though, if you argue with people about these things, if you discuss forty eight and seventy three, then you are arguing with evil because they know what the truth is, and the truth is frankly colonization, and that's all you need to know. Settlers, that's all you need to know. And oppressive power balances. That is an extremely simple prism through which not a rainbow emerges but
one simple color, and that's the blinding white of their particular truth. So I mean, it's irritating to them to actually have to discuss these things because they are irrelevant. History is irrelevant, it's all. It's anyway, Peter, before we go to our guest, anything from you on what brother label stated so eloquently the piece of the history. Of course, I agree with
everything that Rob says. And it is astonishing that so many of these protests are taking place at elite campuses where the kids are demonstrably very intelligent and by contemporary standards, exquisitely educated. They know nothing about the history of Israel or so called Palate. It's just nothing, nothing at all. But the other
thing that they don't know. They don't know why Israel exists, why we feel a special America has felt a special obligation to Israel, why Harry Truman recognized the state of Israel mere minutes, literally, only minutes after it declared itself an independent country. They don't know the history of the Holocaust, this distinctive, this singular event in all of human history. And what's shocking to
me is that I thought that still got taught. I can remember one of my mother's friends bringing her mother, so this would be sort of my grandparents' generation over to our house for coffee one time and my mother, I was a little kid, and my mother calling me over. It must have been during the summer because I was home from school, so it was three ladies and I'm out playing. My mother called me over and I was shown that the older woman turned over her arm and I was shown numbers on her arm.
Yeah, and my mother said, well, we'll discuss this later, but I wanted you to see this. You needed to see this. And I thought that kind of my mother's I mean a Christian upstate New York small town, if that kind of respect for what had happened, that kind of consciousness for what had happened in the Second World War penetrated to middle class probably, I guess we were in the lower half of the middle class in a small town in upstate New York. I thought it had kind of penetrated permanently
to the American consciousness. And you don't taunt Jewish students through the windows of a library of a venerable American. I mean, it's just unthinkable, and here it is happening. It is a breakdown of some of something pretty basic, the manifestation of something that broke down. Yea quitting. Quitting. Maybe it's great on sandwiches, but there's a bitter way to break your bad habits. But actually he's hard. That's why our sponsored fume comes nice. They'll
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Well, we were talking about the zesty events nationally and internationally, but of course what really grips the mind of the nation is the speaker of the House situation which now thankfully our long national nightmare being over, and everybody's trying to figure out exactly who this guy is. We have bop Ed's New York Times MSNBC. I'm sure it's fulminating. Rachel Maddow's crying somewhere. What do we know? What we think? You've written a lot about influencers taking over
our institutions. Was this an example of somehow of a small little niche, noisy people dominating in shaping national politics or what's going on here? Well? Yes, I mean I think in some ways we got here as an example of that. Matt Gates is an example of an influencer acting as as a political actor. I think the outcome of this is a little less clear on that front. And you know, I think a lot of people are spending their time now trying to figure out who the new Speaker of the House is.
If you were if you were a writer of a second rate show about Congress, you would probably choose Mike Johnson as the stand in name until you decided what to call the speaker. But you know, I think that Johnson is not an influencer pretending to be a politician. He's been a decent member, involved in the Republican Study Committee, interested in policy up to a point,
to the degree that House members are. So this certainly started as an example of influencer politics, but it remains to be seen exactly how it ends. We'll see what we've ended up with here. You've all listened fascinated by the ins and outs of American politics, and you're the expert on American institutions. But you know what, I myself have to set that aside. We were just talking about the pro rob lives four blocks from the Cooper Union,
where there was a pro Palestinian protest? Was it yesterday or the day before yesterday, which seems to have culminated in Jewish students being taunted through the windows of this great institution which is am I I thought, I thought, I thought they clearly, as Rob was arguing, they clearly just can't recite even the basics of the history of the creation of Israel and what happened and why God there are arguments to be made, but they can't make them. They
have no idea what they're doing. But to me, what's even more basic is I thought, in this country, kids were I'm still taught to respect this singular event in human history of the Holocaust. And you don't do that. You just don't do that. And yet this kind, this outbreak of anti Semitism is taking place in city after city and campus after campus, and I just have to ask what you make of it all? You know? Yeah, I mean, look, I do think we're at the beginning of
something really new here, at least in my lifetime. That's not to say that anti Semitism is new. I mean, I you know, I've been writing in public with a very Jewish name for fifteen years now and encounter simptism constantly, but in a very low grade way from people who are identifiably crazy, and I've been able to sort of put it in a corner of my mind and say that's not really the essence of what happens in America. To American Jews, this is the safest place in the world for Jews in our
history. It's safer than Israel. It's safer than anywhere has ever been. I do think that what we've seen in the last few weeks is the emergence of the liberation, freeing up of a kind of underlying anti Semitism that is really extraordinary, and it's already fairly widespread. It's not just on university campuses,
though it does seem to have emanated from there. And I think it's going to get worse, because clearly what Israel has to do in the coming weeks is going to create more excuses and opportunities for it in the United States.
And I do think we are in a new place, and it's a place that's going to compel a lot of American Jews to confront the reality that this really does seem to happen in every generation, that we should not imagine that we're somehow beyond it, and that we have to think about how to keep our children safe and to work with our neighbors to make sure that arising general understands that this is not what America is about. You're going to know
this isn't the centerpiece of the conversation. But you just said Israel is going to have to do certain kinds of things. Can I just ask about the military question in Gaza? I've heard it said several times now, and I have to admit I wonder myself. After Munich, Israel created a list of the bad guys who had murdered Israeli Olympic athletes at the Munich Olympics, and
it went after them and it took every one of them out. Is this kind of we're all bracing ourselves for a street to street fighting in Gaza, for a horrible ground invasion. What is the military situation? Why is that required this time instead of some list of the top fifty Hamas bad guys that they if they have, it may take a time, but they have to
go after them. They could go after them one by Why Why does this require a big, horrifying mission on the ground instead of something as precision targeted, so to speak, as the Munich instance. Well, let me say, Peter, first of all, this is not my expertise. I care about it a lot and watch it closely as an observer, and you follow I was you're an expert on everything. As an expert on everything, it's dangerous to pretend to be an expert on everything, and I don't want to
pretend to be an expert on this. I will say this as as someone who observes it and tries to do it closely. This is very different from Munich. This is not a This is not a small group of operatives taking on attacking a small group of Israelis and acting in a way that shocked the world. Hamas governs Gazam, whether we like it or not. It has been in charge of Gaza for fifteen years. It has developed an extraordinary infrastructure
of terrorist militancy there. And it is clear after what happened at the beginning of the month that that means that Israel is unsafe. What they did was on a scale that Israel has not experienced before, and an attack on civilians, on an attack on Jews that has not happened since the on a scale has not happened at the end of the Holocaust, an attack on civilians that
Israel has not seen before. And the idea that you can just assign blame for that to some small list of people and make sure that those are taken out. Israel can certainly do that, but I think they're of the view now that they have to change the reality on the ground because they cannot be safe as long as Gaza is governed by the people who made the decision to do this. And I think they're right. Hey, you've all, thanks for joining us. I'm going to try to thread the needle here and sow
two things together. Putin invades Ukraine. Serious thing happening. China seems to be making incredible moves as not just a regional hedgemon, but a world leader and mischief maker. And it's joining forces with probably Iran, probably Russia, who knows Hamas is emboldened to invade Israel. And it was like a fourteen hundred little Manson family murders. Incredible, right, serious, This is serious, serious stuff. And the Republican Party is now led by what you call
influencers. The UN, which is this institution not too far from me, has been sitting on its hands for two years while a member country is invaded by another member country. It's been did about what to say about this Manson family murder that occurred in Israel. It has no perspective on or position on
anything that's really happening in the world in which people are dying. The head of a rand a Ran foreign ministry comes to the UN in New York City, threatens the United States and the Republicans are led by influencers and the say what you like. I mean, I my bonafides on my opinion about Trump is well known. But he is at the best, He's an erratic and unreliable leader. How much trouble are we in? Yeah, yeah, I
mean, look, I worry about this a lot. And I think that it's become perfectly clear that we're entering a serious moment of real gravity in the world. And it does seem to me that what we're witnessing is the result of calculations made by our enemies that we are not up to the such challenges. I hope they're wrong. I think they will turn out to be wrong. I think Hamas made that kind of calculation about Israel, and they will
turn out to be wrong. They looked at mass protests and they thought mass protests mean the regime's about the fall, and they were wrong about that. But we don't have in the United States, the caliber of leadership in either party that it would take to seriously handle the moment we seem to be entering. I do think we've been fortunate in our country that moments like this have
over time drawn out of the woodwork serious leaders. You can look at nineteenth century America and you know, in the eighteen fifties you could not imagine a Lincoln arising because our leaders were petty and juvenile idiots. And that person did arise because it seemed like the public was looking for someone who wasn't a dithering fool. I hope that American voters are in a place now where they begin
to look for someone who is in a dithering fool. I think we have some people who might not be dithering fools out there, But at the moment, our leaders don't strike me as being up to the challenge. And I hate to say it, I think our country will be up to the challenge, but it's going to require political leaders who understand that hard choices have to be made, who understand that this has to be taken seriously in an adult
way. And after a generation of influencer politics, they're not there, They're not ready and again I hope it changes. I mean, I I'm a broken record on this, and everyone will roll their eyes. They always do, because I'm just old fifty eight. And all I could think of was that the last president that we had who was a robust speaker and a noisy speaker, who said robust and noisy things and put a lot of the fear of God into our enemies and to even to his political enemies, was Ronald
Reagan. But we never thought he wasn't serious. We never thought when he said, well, I'm going to win win the Cold War, that he wasn't going to win it. An American candidate for president or even a president or even a senator should be saying it is time to evict the United Nations from the United States. It is a useless, sclerotic, and impotent world
organization that does nothing but aid and a bet mass murder. But there's no I don't think there's a I can't think of a candidate who could say that. And I wouldn't just think that this is just noise. Trump says it is just noise. If Biden said it, I wouldn't believe him. I mean, don't we need somebody I'm not asking for somebody to give me the establishment Republican. Well, we're going to, like you, negotiate and go through the channels and we're going to have a peace process. I'm just looking
for somebody to say something that way. I believe that he or she's actually going to do it in as noisy and robust a way as possible. To give me some of that Reagan. You know, that's what I'm looking for. Just like, just give me a little bit. I don't even want one hundred percent. We'll just give me sixty five percent Reagan. And I'm in, is there? Do you have any evidence that's happening other than your faith in historically that it happens. No. I mean, look, I
think I guess I'd say a few things. There were certainly people who were dismissive of Reagan in this way too, and he had to prove himself and show that he meant what he said. And you know, we should look for people who at least have the potential to prove themselves, who at least are saying what needs to be said, and who seem to have lived a life that suggests they might be able to do it. I think that there's
a kind of demand side issue here. Voters will need to be dissatisfied with the unseeriousness of the options they have in order for a more serious option to emerge. And that option may not look like what we expect. It may
not be the blustering general type to begin with. You know, if you think about where Reagan came from and what he was in the national consciousness before or Abraham Lincoln, the least educated person who had ever run for president at that time, it was easy for his opponents to say I had a third grade education. He did. He never went to college. But the country
looked at him and saw something serious and deep. And yeah, I think it will take leaders emerging in response to public demand, and that public demand has not been there. The moment may change that, But I wouldn't say that I see somebody in the wings who I would say, well, obviously, that's the person we need to be looking to. I wish I could, well, before you join us, I was trying out a new theory.
I try to monitor Emily theory really more of like a little phrase, you know, see if I can get a phrase in the national lexico, and like eventually be you know, in a quotation book. It seems to me that we you know, we licked one epidemic, one pandemic, and now we have another one that's actually worse. It's the pandemic of stupid and it starts in places that you're not supposed to find that much stupid, which
is university campuses, but it also is in Congress. I look at the Republican influencers and I'm wondering what constitution they're reading, because the one I'm reading says, if you've got a thin majority, you got to make deals. You may not like to make deals, you may not want to. It may be counter to your political philosophy, your political beliefs, So that's perfectly
legitimate. You can disagree all you want, but if you want to actually get something done, or even if you don't want to get something done, you're going to have to make deals. That's just mash And it just seems to me that it's a very strange attitude on the part of these fringe groups. And I don't just mean Republican fringe influencers, I mean the squad, the left wing influencers, that they believe that somehow their job is not to govern, but to get followers. And maybe that's true, but it does
seem to be coming up the works. I think that in some ways this extends further than that. What we're seeing is a serial failure of collective action that results from the fact that our politicians don't think in terms of building coalitions. The core insight of our system of government is you can only get anything done by building a coalition. To do it, winning a narrow majority is
not even enough, as it is in some of the parliamentary democracies. You have to build a broad coalition, and that means you always have to think about how to get more people to come on board and agree to what you think most needs to be done. Our political parties exist to broaden coalitions. Our institutions, Congress in particular, exists to mandate and facilitate broad coalitions.
Our politicians now do not think in those terms. Both of our parties have operated as minority parties now for thirty years, since the middle of the nineteen nineties. Neither of them has looked like what a majority looks like in the American tradition, and they're both kind of satisfied with that. They each of them thinks it could win the next election by just getting its existing voters out,
and of course they're not wrong. They could either of them could win the next election that way, because we're at a fifty to fifty point. But neither of them is thinking, how do I get to a point where sixty percent of the public will even consider voting for me? And so they're not learning that this isn't working. They're not being shocked by a big loss into changing direction, and they're not being rewarded for a big win. They're
stuck in a place where they don't think coalitionally. I think that's what's happening electorally, and it's what's happening within Congress. And the failure think coalitionally means our system cannot work. If politicians don't see that they need more supporters in order to succeed, then the constitution really can't function. I think at this point they've they've blinded themselves to it because of the nature of our political culture
and of that kind of influencer culture, performance culture. What can shock them out of it is a big loss. And so in a sense, we need one of our parties to lose. It would probably be better for the party that loses than for the party that wins if that were to happen. But they've both managed to eke out these fifty to fifty elections for long enough that they don't remember how our system works. It's funny about these big losses. The last big loss for the Republicans, the major last, the famous
one right nineteen sixty four, Barry Goldwall. And there are I know many Conservatives who say, yeah, you know, the Goldwater loss was bad, but you know what it teed up Reagan sixteen years later and a great society later, and an enormous welfare state later, and details or Vietnam later, at Watergate later, the idea that that was a price to pay. Whereas
I look at I mean, you know, God bless them. The drubbing that Walter Mondale took, which was would have been worse had Reagan decided to a campaign in Mondale's own state, set up a very successful two term presidency in Bill Clinton. Well right, But I would say the Democrats would say the same thing. What that took was three presidential elections in a row, one by the other party, and someone was even more than that. We
had seven presidential elections in which one Democrat won. Between nineteen sixty eight and nineteen ninety two, you had two two term Republican presidents and one one term Republican president. I think that felt to them like what the period between sixty four and eighty felt like. Two Republicans they just kept losing, and that's what it took to knock them out of their of their stupor and find somebody who could win by appealing to the middle of the country. I think that
loss on that scale a set of losses. You could say, Republicans lost in two thousand and eight pretty decisively, but they decided we'll just do it again and it'll be fine, And eventually it did feel that way. I think a real loss would help the party that loses as much as it would help the country in general. Yeah, three victories. It took three victories by Margaret Thatcher to squeeze the Marxist out of the Labor Party and produce Tony
Blair. Same kind of thing, you fall. You're talking about things that take time. And of course we were all raised on the notion that our democracy is mighty in its wrath but slow to anger. So Franklin Roosevelt engages in the lend lease program to help Britain, help Churchill remain afloat through nineteen forty. But it takes Pearl Harbor and then we turn it around, all right, Harry Truman. The Cold War, as you know, Harry Truman,
is extremely reluctant as we're bringing troops home. It takes Britain's collapse in Greece and Turkey to force Truman to announce the Truman doctrine. We move slowly, and of course the old But as far as I can tell, true observation about the bad guys is over time they're weak. They don't have the kind of unified country that we can have, But in the short term they
can move decisively China does. What is this astounding thing that a nation of one point three billion people will do whatever one man decides putin How the chain of command in Russia continues to remain intact enough for him to send young Russian men to get slaughtered in Ukraine, I do not know, but it does. He's still in charge in that country. This strange murky to me. At least chain of command that runs from Tehran through southern Lebanon and into Gaza
somehow or other it holds and they can move quickly. Do we have related I'll give you a little add a little pieceAn and then shut up and just drop this in your lap. Do we have time this time? And in particular, if you look at the front page of the New York Times already, what we're seeing is understandably it's a human impulse, but we're seeing increasing sympathy in the press for the ordinary people of Gaza who are now without electricity.
Adducted to all of this. How does Israel continue to operate in a world in which public opinion plays such a central role, and in which I have great respect, of course for the IDEF. But they need us, They need our intel, they need us to resupply them, they need our two carrier groups in the Eastern med to secure their northern flank. And they need us, and we have to operate under conditions in which the New York Times is not helpful. How do we do this? Well, look,
that's obviously a horribly difficult question. Do we have time? I do think we have time. The question is whether we have the will. I don't think we should overestimate the strength of our enemies. I don't think we should overestimate their boldness. They are weaker than us if we are up to our full strength. My worry, therefore, is largely domestic. I think we are not, in this moment up to our full strength. You know, could America handle this moment in the world, Yes, But are we up
to it right now? We are not, And I think that that requires a sobering up on the part of the American public to put in office people who take seriously this challenge. And I don't know whether what we're seeing in the world now will make for that sobering up, and whether voters will be able to perceive who's up to this and who's not. I would say that we have a pretty good track record as a country of being able to rise to occasions like this, But track record is not enough. You know,
history is full of this worked until it didn't stories. I do have a lot of confidence in our system, I really do. I don't think there's anyone you'd rather be than the United States of America. But our system requires something of us. It requires a certain kind of responsibility, a capacity to make adult judgments in serious moments, and so this is a test for all of us. It's not just a test for other people judgments. Yeah, thing we're not supposed to make anymore these days. Hey, I've got to
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and this the Ricochet podcast. I share your enthusion, I share your faith because you look back at nineteen forty one and you don't think that a lot of Americans were saying, well, you know, when I put Hitler in the long context of Prussian militarism in nineteenth century machinations, I know what's going on. They just knew there was a bad guy, and they knew that
there was a fight to come and that we had to win it. Today, we're in a bit of a difficult position because we've had twenty thirty years of institutional rot in our educational systems. It seems to have drained from an entire generation the idea of Western exceptionalism. Rob mentioned before that we're in an age of stupid, which seems so, But the people who are at the universities are themselves not intellectually challenged. What they are is spending four or five
very expensive years necked deep in a warm bath of anti Western thought. That makes them feel special because they are no longer tied to one particular culture or nation, nationalism being a thing of the past, but they are transnational world citizens who know how to bring about the utopia to come. So how do you steal a generation of people, a population of people whose ideology and basic thought is is post national, is post western? Is somehow they've all put
in their membership to be members of the Federation. The moment it happens and start Trek becomes reality in six or seven months or so, how do you get the spine of the West back? Yeah, I do think that's the question. You know, those stories of how Harvard Yale emptied out the Monday after Pearl Harbor because all the students left to sign up, That would not happen now, I think now, fortunately, we're not dependent on Harvard Yale.
It would be very bad if we were. And so, yes, those places are I mean, look, they never really were where the best of America was, but they certainly are now where the worst of America is. They're not where the bulk of America is. And I think the question is about the capacity for judgment on the part of that median American. That median American is not a Harvard grad doesn't really care or all that much know
what's happening on the campuses. But the culture in which that person is formed has been very shaped by what happens on those campuses for two generations now. And the question is whether that has undermined our basic instincts and judgments, our habits and abilities. It is a question. I mean. The reason that I'm worried is that it is a question. We have not been tested in
that way lately. And I have confidence in our country that that judgment is there, that that capacity to tell that this is a moment where there is an evil to be confronted, and that that does require a certain kind of seriousness, a certain kind of gravity. It's not a national mobilization, this isn't World War two, but it does require an exercise of a certain kind of judgment. I have confidence that it will be there because we're Americans.
But I wouldn't say that I have confidence because we have a huge amount of evidence about contemporary America on that front. It is in that sense, faith more than confidence, right, that worries me when I whenever I share, I share your sentiment, but I also have to say that whenever I do so, I feel like Winston Smith standing at the window with Julia looking out and saying if there's any hope it will be the proles, you know.
So here's the thing, though, is that there's always been in when you said that we've had the culture shaped by two generations of these people, that's true, and a lot of Middle of America fall over country, whatever you want to call it, has got along with it to some extent because it's fun, because a more liberated, looser culture provides more opportunity for getting out
from whatever strictures you were brought into. But they also, i think, recognize that there's a limit to all this and that cultures cannot go viyemar forever
because then they fall apart and are replaced by something worse. So they've always had the you know, an a cultural distrust of elites and I hate that word, who manipulate and use a massage culture and the rest of But what you haven't had though until now, until post October seventh, is people on the left looking at these institutions and all of a sudden saying, wait a minute, hold on, look what they're allowing. We're not going to give
any money to these people. And so you have the donors who are backing off from this. Do you think that this sort of revulsion that you find on the the decent parts of the left is going to fade, and they'll go back to the usual respect for these institutions. Or whether or not there's some fundamental psychic break that took place after October seventh where they look at these places and say, oh, oh, they are wells of poison. I
think it's too soon to say. And certainly the appeal of being a donor to your own moderate is just so peculiar to me that I don't really know how to analyze it, because I just can't figure out why many serious people will put a lot of money into having a building name for them where young Americans are perverted, are turned into something less than what they were before. I don't know why you would want that to happen in a place named for your family, but so be it. I think some of that is going
to resume. Some of these donors are going are going to lose their stomach here. But the bigger question to me is ultimately again whether the country in general. I don't think that October seven is going to save the University of Pennsylvania. I don't know what could. I don't think that's it. But that's not really the question for us. The question for us is whether the
United States is going to be up to a challenging twenty first century. Thankfully, that is a much more open question than whether the University of Pennsylvania is going to get turned around, and it is an open question. I do think there are reasons for us to believe that that that we can manage that. But it's going to take public argument. It's going to take public persuasion. It's going to take leaders who present themselves as offering that path to the
country, and it's going to take voters who want to do it. Americans have risen from slumbers and stupors before to make serious decisions, and so I hope we can do it again. But you know, hope is not a strategy, and there's a lot of work to do. All you've I'm glad you said what you said a moment ago, because you have now. I've been taught trying so long to talk Rob out of it, but he's determined to set up the at Yale, the Rob Long Center for the Perversion of
American Youth, and I think now you may finally have it. Raise a lot of money listen you've all as they've listened to you. I have to admit I've felt some of the old speechwriter's instinct here Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley. Suppose one of these candidates said I need to record a talking head straight to camera two minutes to twelve or even fifteen minutes to YouTube to say two people in their kitchens and living rooms and wherever they watch YouTube, that we
are in a different moment, and I understand it. What should what are the three or four sentences that Nikki Halley or Rond de Santis, or any candidate you'd care to name should say right now. Well, that's a hard question, Peter, and your better position to answer it than I am. But I do think that you have to speak to the country about this moment. I think people realize at some level that what we're seeing is the end of a phase in which it has been possible for us to be on and
lack a day's ago, and it is ending. The world won't just stand by and give us the room to be juvenile forever. And it's evident that that is changing, and what that requires of us is leadership that takes the
moment seriously. The country has the resources to rise to the moment. The country has the capacity to do it, but leadership matters thinking about how to position those resources, how to think about that capacity, what it would mean to stand by our friends, what it would mean to oppose our enemies. And it's not a call for mobilizing everybody. We're not going to war ourselves right now, that's not We're trying to avoid that to avert that, not
to engage in that. But that will require strength, that will require seriousness, will require conveying to the world that the United States understands this moment and is up to leading through it. And you know that that's what a leader has to convey and show and do. I think the leaders we have just now are not the people who are going to do that, and so it will take somebody else. Maybe one of these people running for president is up to it. Maybe not. They'll have to prove it to us somehow.
But I think that ultimately, you've got to speak about the moment, You've got to speak about the country, and you've got to speak about how the latter can meet the form I can take or leave Yale, but thank goodness for the American Enterprise Institute, and you've all even you've all did you know Nathan Wurtzel, Yes, yes, in passing, but yes, right, I did a lot of us on Twitter. Yeah, a fighter, a fighter and a am and he passed this week. To lose him in this
moment is especially, is especially. I just wanted to call that out here in the podcast because I'm sure a lot of people who listen also followed him and were saddened by as well as me, his memory be a blessing. Well, thank you so much, Thank you very much. We'll talk again and drops in happier times and if they are darker times, then we look forward to your your ray of hope and that you can provide or of course
you're absolutely corus skating declaration of despair. You know who knows who need them both these days? Right, doctor, Tell Chris Galia to get your cup of coffee right now, will you please? You got it? Thanks guys,
thank you. You know, before we go to a couple of other things, I have to note one thing, and that is, you know you are listening to this on the internet, and it is entirely possible that you are the sort of person who has a business on the internet, as do we as do we all, We all in our own way have our
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And we think persist Seo for sponsoring this the Ricochet podcast. Well, before we go any of the news that that uh rises to the events of the day, something something funny, some bit of japery that made you smile, bright and looking for Oh, I know, it's Halloween. What are you going as? Which I never asked grown adults because it's the children's holiday. I'm sorry, it's a children's holiday. It's been co opted by people who just like this sort of pagan thing where they can put on bloody statues
on the yard. And I don't find it particularly interesting well, I just remember there was a recent Halloween when the wife of a faculty member at Yale, Yes, yes, you want to be a faculty member, sent a fairly innocuous email to the student's remind them, because there's what you're gonna come as is Halloween. It's gonna be very important, problematic. And she said,
look, essentially, I'm paraprasic. It's just Halloween. Let's called just take a deep breath here, and you know, if somebody is dressed as something that defends you, just deal with it, and you know, try to be nice to each other. And the screaming and yelling and emotional horror
breakdown that took place on Calhoun I think it was Calhoun College. The quad was at Yale was just insane, and then the students screaming at her and screaming at the master of Calhoun. Now I think there's a different name for that now, But there's also a different name for Calhoun, different name for Calhoun too, exactly right. I can't forget what it's called. It was to sew over the top. And there's you know, tears and screaming and rage and hurt, and I am unsafe and I don't feel safe, and
you've made me unsafe, and I feel it's unsafe. And then you compare that to students in Cooper Union who literally were unsafe, or to people holding up signs in college campuses with a star of David and then a trash can saying we need to make the world clean, literally unsafe Jews in Crown Heights, and then will Williamsbury being told by the NYPD, the New York Police Department, that you just, you know, stay home, don't go out,
you know, don't don't walk around wearing your religious garb, because that's in Crown in places that really were have been filled with people wearing religious garb, Jewish religious garb for I don't know, one hundred years, more than one hundred years talking about unsafe. It's funny, Like I part of I think the strategy behind the attacks on Auto over seventh was to make them so
unbelievably terrible that Israel had to respond, had to overreact. It forced everyone in the region to choose sides, and you'd think that they some calculation. They must have said, well, you know what this is going to do. Obviously, listen, when we go do this, we're going to lose our support in the United States because this is so over the top. You can't, right, you can't turn this into a metaphor or a slogan.
This is too much. So we're going to give up our support on the college campuses, but we're going to get the support we need from our Arab financiers, and we're going to stop a peace process in the middle between Saudi Arabia, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the Representative Democracy of Israel. And they didn't have to do that. That level of savagery doesn't cause people in certain people certainly progressive left, to say, oh okay, okay, okay,
no, no more, that's too far. That to me as astonishing. I mean, I just I'm still like stunned by it, Like because it doesn't cost you anything if you're progressive to condemn that violence. Yes it does. Yeah, maybe it just seems obvious to me, like like this is like a no brainer. Like I'm always looking for ways to like, you know, take the easy way. This seems like a very easy thing to condemn. It's a yes, but right, okay, but but yes, but yes. But at this point, James is is a I know,
I know, I agree with you. But but even to say yes is to give in to a whole set of definitions that only encourages the worst people. Because the worst people in the world are the ones who hate Hamas for the wrong reasons. Right, they hate them because they're Muslim, they hate them because they're liberationists, they hate them because they're anti colonial, they hate them because Nazis hate Hamas. Like wait a minute, hold on a second, Hamas is actually the Nazis in this thing. No, No,
Nazis hate Hamas because Israel is now Nazi. I've I've seen the editorial cartoons, and therefore I believe it. So yes, But it's hard because if even that yes is aid and comforted to the enemy, when you see these whole things in a grand spectrum of a revolutionary violence, which is sometimes incredibly imperative and necessary, then even the yes is to undermine your own cause it's
easier to skip to the butt. It's easier to skip to that what I spoke about at the beginning of this, that malevolent liberation you feel when you finally throw off all those little civilizational niceties that have kept you from saying what you really want to say, which is destroy Israel and kill all the Jews. I mean, so I'm not surprised that the Left has finally gone there.
That it's what we were talking about before, twenty two generations, twenty thirty years steeping them, not just I mean at least when we were talking about what we knew to argue with these people before, it was in a construct of a certain It was in the construct of Western civilization, the context of Western civilization. It was something they wanted to change. It was something they wanted to alter to their own specifications, and therefore maybe you could argue
and people could build coalitions, as lov All was talking about before. But now we are talking about a post Western civilization as an imperative in order to achieve liberation for everybody else. Because everything that is embedded in Western civilization is antithetical to what these people want. And they're dumb. As Rob said, it's a stupid thing to say, because everything that they really want is predicated
on the necessity and the maintenance and the continuation of Western civilization. But they believe somehow that by flensing it and emptying of its organs and its brain matter and its blood and its plasma, that they can simply crawl inside the skeleton of it and walk around and inhabit it just like before, with nothing having changed, the lights being on, the pizza being delivered, the phones working, and the ovens working, and the rest of it. Oh, they'll
want the ovens to work at least, So that's it. I mean, that's the dumbness of this all is that we have to get to a post western point in order to get the liberation of absolutely everybody. And it's a luxury belief the likes of which I've never seen in my lifetime. But unfortunately we're coming up against the reality of it being embedded, at least psychologically in the back of all people regard themselves as right thinking people. That's it.
That's the end of my speech for today. I'm done anybody else. I do have one fun thing, yes, that we should at least mention or direct people too. There is a video a representative Jamal Bowman of New York who has been charged by the DC Attorney General with triggering a fire alarm and a house office building, you know, to delay a vote, and he you know, remember this is a big controversy. A while ago and I just didn't know what's buttoned. Bipe was pushing the wrong thing. I went
in the wrong door. This it was confusing. There's a video removing the war signs and then turning to his I guess his left or right and pulling the fire along. And if you want to just a fun little moment in your day, it's fun to watch that because it is exactly what people said he did and exactly what other people said, OK, we he didn't do this, credulously exactly what he said he didn't do, and it's there on video for everyone to see. And it's a nice, you know, little
antidote if you want to the otherwise bleak Outlook. Just fun to see a guy doing exactly the thing that he said he didn't do, after getting all of his lickspittle acolytes in the press right to say, I he didn't do it. No this for it. And then that's kind of the lesson here
is just saved. Just save yourself when something like this happens. Don't jump into it, you know, demand to see that all the tape before you say I think Congressman Bowman is telling the truth, because there's probably a piece of video out there of surveillance camera showing him doing exactly what he was accused of doing. I saw them. I made me laugh and I enjoyed every second of it. I saw the lex bddle Acolytes open for Squeeze back in
nineteen eighty one. Peter in the tape as well, why did he take the sign off? Or that talked about the alarm and that for why was it that alarm that he was meaning to push the three seconds and then wait thirty seconds. It's all an Oliver Stone movie with Kevin Costner up there with the film going frame by frame to explain this what happened to Yes, yes it is. I I saw the video myself yesterday and it is shot in Freud to see this guy caught in alive. But we'll take our Freud anywhere
we can get it. I'll take it anywhere, right, Yeah, Well, that'll do it for us, and we thank you for listening. By the way, I'm not even going to tell you to go to Apple and give us five star reviews because you know that already and you were just waiting for a Week number six sixty four to do it. But this is week six sixty four. Do it? We are brought to you by Fume,
by Nero Hacker, and by persistent SEO great companies. Thank them for sponsoring us by going there, taking a look at their products, and availing yourself of them should you need them, and you probably do. Let's see anything else, can't think what? Have a good say? Safe Halloween, Be
safe, Have a good Halloween, everybody. And for those of us who were kids in the era when you had a sharp plastic mask with a cheap little rubber band that snapped halfway through your trip around the block, realize how lucky you got it, how lucky we still have it here in the greatest nation on God's green Earth. As a man used to say, next week, boys, We'll see you all next week. Fellas, Thanks we fellas. Ricochet join the conversation.