The Ricochet Podcast - An Explosive Week

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

In times such as these, the challenge is packing all the news into a single episode. James, Steve and Charles do their best to move with lightning speed through Biden's shower of clemency, UFOs in New Jersey, then across the Hudson River for the hard left's justifications for last week's coldblooded murder in Manhattan side-by-side with their fury over Daniel Penny's acquittal. All of this before sitting down with Noah Rothman to get an early glimpse at the change of management in Damascus.... And did we mention Charlie Cooke's restaurant explosion experience?- Congressman Jeff Van Drew (R - NJ02) tells Fox News that the drones over his state belong to Iran

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Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Charles C.W. Cook and Stephen Hayward. I'm James Glilix. Today we talk to Noah Rothman, eventually, about Syria. But before that, all sorts of stuff. So let's have ourselves a podcast.

And from very high sources, very qualified sources, very responsible sources, I'm going to tell you the real deal. Iran launched a mothership probably about a month ago that contains these drones. Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, I'm in the final weeks of my presidency. You don't have to clap for that. You can if you want. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast number what is it? It is 720. Wow. I'm James Lileks in bone-achingly cold Minneapolis, but the Vikes are 11 and 2, and I'm joined by Charles C.W.

Cook in Florida, where the Jaguars are in the latrine, but I assume it's warm. And Stephen Hayward, who is where exactly? I'm in the L.A. area today. I'm finally back from running around over in Europe for nearly a month, but I'm back on the left coast. Like a colossus, we straddle the nation. Before we get to the interesting things of the day, something else that is an interesting thing of the day. I understand, Charlie, that you survived a restaurant explosion. I did. This is so bizarre that i still can't believe that it happened and i especially can't believe no one was hurt

badly yesterday i went for lunch with a friend we sat at the bar as we often do the bar is relatively close to the kitchen and about eight to ten minutes into having sat down, we order a glass of wine, and there is an almighty explosion. And the rush of air that comes out of the kitchen, along with a noise I've never heard before, pushes us partially off our seats. It was that strong. And we quickly sort of looked around, realized we were fine.

No pain. All our limbs still on. And we look over at the kitchen, and it's evident that the oven in the restaurant's kitchen has exploded and the doors have flown off. And I thought, all right, I'm fine, but someone's dead in the kitchen. That was my next fear. It was not for myself because by this point it was clear that I was fine

and my friend was fine and everyone else around us was fine. But I thought someone must be dead in the kitchen because it was an enormous explosion that's caused damage to the restaurant, and the doors have flown off, and we were nearly knocked off our seats and so on. Well, no one was. As it happened, the chef who had been operating the oven had walked out of the kitchen on the other side just before this happened. So he was fine.

The others in the kitchen were too far away from the oven to have been hit by anything. But it was just the most bizarre thing that has happened to me in a long time. And it really does make you realize how random life can be. I mean, we didn't go to that restaurant because it's some sort of tradition. We don't go there every week. I just said, do you want to have lunch? He said, when? I said, 12.'t go to that restaurant because it's some sort of tradition. We don't go there every week. I just said, do you want to have lunch? He said, when? I said, 12.

He said, sure. I said, you know, I won't mention it. I don't want to get them in the bad books. But I said, what about there? And he said, sure, why not? I mean, I could have picked any other restaurant off the top of my head. There's a bunch of them. And it just happened to be that one.

It just happened to be after we sat down. Had things been slightly different, I suppose I could be telling this story now from the hospital, but really, apparently what had happened was that the oven was new. It had only just been installed. And when it had been installed,

something evidently had gone wrong in the installation process. Someone had screwed up and there'd been a buildup of gas, which then... I was going to blame on your the souffle you ordered charlie but my goodness me what a bizarre experience i still can't believe it happened i i i woke up this morning i thought did i dream that but no i didn't i hope they comped your desserts at least they didn't you know that's a weird thing. I was waiting for them to say,

obviously this glass of wine is on us, because, you know, we never killed you. Right. Well, we're glad you survived, and gas explosions do not usually end well, and this one seems to have done so. So, good. We can tick that one off. You can look over your shoulder for a little while

wondering if actually the gods are throwing bolts down at you and missing, but we hope not. James, can I tell you a 20-second story just before you start? But of course. Absolutely killed me recently. So I was reading this book about the Second World War, and when bombs started falling on London, it was clear that they'd come from airplanes, and so the public was aware of what was going on. But when the Germans started developing their rockets, you couldn't see or hear them until the last minute. And the British found out what was happening, but they

didn't want the Germans to know that they knew what was happening. And so they weren't allowed to acknowledge or report on it. And so the British government's line, when the v1s and v2s started hitting london was their gas mains it's a gas explosion and so the british public was much smarter than this started wryly describing the explosions to each other as flying gas mains oh that's tremendous ah yes that indomitable British spirit, the stiff upper lip to the face of, etc. Well, that's grand. Let us cast our eyes about the country here. We will be talking about the killer of the Bryant of the UnitedHealthcare CEO a little bit later and things in New York, penny-wise.

One of the things that caught my eye this morning was Jim Garrity at National Review gave a tweet thread, which was also a piece that he wrote for NR, detailing the number of the exact crimes of the people who have been pardoned by the administration. Now, we always expect that, you know, when you look at these and like, oh, I already pardoned that guy. Whoa, that wouldn't sound fair. We kind of shrug and we're accustomed to it. But it does seem like a remarkable list of financial fraudsters and for an administration and a party that is supposedly on behalf of the little people against those elites who extract money from the system to satisfy their raw capitalistic urges. It's it's quite, quite the rundown. Stephen. Yeah. You know, I think what's going on here,

I think we'll want to scrutinize the list closely to see if Jim Biden and other members of the family are snuck in under a pseudonym or something, right? I mean, it does seem that maybe it's preparing the ground for those self-serving pardons that he wants to give. But it also makes my mind run back to those flurry of pardons that Bill Clinton gave on his last day in office, which we remember Mark Rich, you know, had't what he debated a hundred million dollars in taxes or

something. And, and lots and lots of other people, including, as I recall, one person who had been jailed, whose crime, I don't know why it's a federal crime was rolling back automobile odometers. How did that guy qualify for a pardon? Well, I think the psychological explanation then was this was Clinton stabbing back at the prosecutorial mindset that led to Ken Starr. And this was just him lashing out and lashing back and wanting to poke an eye into law enforcement. So here's Biden who's looking to top Clinton's perfidy and abuse of the pardon power. I mean, the one that jumps out at me is the lady in Illinois who embezzled $53 million from the city of Dixon, not a major, I don't know if it's a major city or not in Illinois, but it's not Chicago, but that's a lot of money.

And this is a fairly recent conviction, I think. And he's pardoned this person. And I, you know, that one to me is where, what's the case for leniency uh there i can't i have a hard time making one out except that this is biden again trying to like emulate bill clinton and maybe it's part of biden's psychology of still being mad that he was pushed out of the uh the re-election campaign that assumes that he's behind these things at all charles do you think so did she give the money to the democrats i did not good question i don't know and charles do you believe that uh actually the president was responsible for these himself drawing up the name after careful consultation and deep thought as he walked around the office with his hands clasped behind his bed weighing the scale back weighing

the scales of justice and so i think you mean ran around the office doing his hands clasped behind his bed, weighing the scales of justice and so forth. Well, I think he even ran around the office doing one-arm push-ups and playing the harpsichord, right? You're right. You're right. We forget that he had that remarkable spirit. So, yeah, no, probably a staffer. But again, you just wonder exactly what's going on behind. Three of them, from what I understand, were Chinese spies whose arrangement

had been, whose swap had been worked out before. Now, the whole spying thing does bring to mind something else that's going on in New Jersey, where the government is telling us now that they appear to be lawful manned aircraft, these drones, but we really can't tell you much more about that. My favorite being, of course, that they're all coming from an iranian ship offshore or disappearing into a submerged iranian base or some nonsense like that um or that they're from other planets or that they are a manifestation of american technology that is light years beyond what we can imagine and manifests itself as 4d plasma. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to think.

So let me ask you guys. What do you think is going on? I have no idea. Part of me wants to think, if we're going to do tinfoil hat things, it's the latest products of Area 51. Or it turned out that that famous Orson Welles broadcast from 1938 was a documentary. It was just ahead of its time. They were now getting the Martian invasion. I don't know. I think we,

I mean, you've probably seen some pictures and accounts of this. You know, at sports stadiums now, security is equipped with these, essentially, I'm going to say there's something like, you know, electromagnetic pulse guns or something to shoot down or capture drones and bring them to the ground. Because you don't want drones flying around a sports stadium when you don't know what they are. And so I don't understand why somebody isn't bringing down these drones in New Jersey. Which makes me think that maybe it's our guys testing these drones out. Somebody has the security. If we let it out that those things were full of copper, there would be tweakers out there bringing those things down in a hail of AR-15 fire.

Charles, what do you think is going on? I've been a little skeptical overall because years upon years of supposed UFO sightings have brought us only very grainy photographs. But I just saw that the governor, former governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, tweeted out that he's seen these things and that he's alarmed by it and he's angry with the federal government. Now, Larry Hogan is on the opposite end of the spectrum of a conspiracy theorist, of somebody who is excitable he is probably somewhat of a skeptic like myself i mean i just want to be clear here i'm not a larry hogan conservative but that's my my point is that he he is not the sort of person you would expect to come out and say, I saw it! And yet he just did.

So there's clearly something going on. I've thought up until now that maybe these were just refracted light or planes, because the videos are all sped up. I don't know, James. It's beginning to make me wonder. Weather balloons. Well, as I said to my wife the other day as I was sculpting Devil's Tower out of mashed potatoes, it does not. have been groomed and massaged for the last two years with stories of uaps and tic tacs and

verified photographs from navy flyers showing these things traveling at absurd velocity and doing things that physics ought not let them do there it's been the dribs and the drabs and the drabs and the dribs and the drip drip drip of all this stuff which says with the government practically saying uh yeah, they're real. We don't know what they are, but they're not ours. Not a foreign power. Don't know if they're from Spain. Don't know, you know, we're stumped, frankly.

And then you will have somebody come back and walk that back. And then you will have the usual whistleblowers. Believe me, if you spend any time in the subreddits that are devoted to these things, you will find that the chattering ecosystem of people who swear that lives beneath the earth that is coming up to work its while. To the people who are just, no, we have the faintest idea to the this in the last two or three years that it would seem that we're a little bit more psychologically ready to say, yeah, they are UFOs. They're from another planet. Non-human intelligence. But I guess that's all we know. I guess we're not alone. Let's move along. What's on Netflix? Oh, but look, you know what happened, James, is that the first time the government comes out and says that, the subreddits or another group of them will come out and say,

ah, this is just a distraction by the government, so they can really unfold what they're really going to do, which is the invasion of Syria or something. I don't know. Yeah, it's all a distraction. But it's weird. I mean, it's like we're finally being told that, yes, it's real, there are aliens, but it somehow has the public profile of an Apple television show. I mean, in that it's out there, but it's not top of the news. So, I mean, in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which is a wonderful movie,

back in the end, I think, kicked off the whole, you know what? They're on our side. They're great. Right? They smile. They bring our lost airmen back you know they're they're they're really interesting dudes uh and musical too we can jam with them you know uh it lent a whole sort of uh you know we're gonna get along it's gonna be nice it's gonna

be good and i think that this sort of doesn't feel like that at all uh you know it's more it's more aliens for Trump to deport. I was actually going to say something else about Trump, which is, if you were writing American history, the aliens would of course show up while Donald Trump was president. That would be inevitable, right? There's no other

president that you would want to be in office, other than Donald Trump, if the aliens are coming down. Right. Well, I want the little greys who are about three and a half feet tall to be standing there while he gives them that big downward Macron handshake. You know? That big thrusting thing. We would get to find out whether Ronald Reagan was right

when he said in the 80s that if aliens came down, we would soon discover that we had no differences anymore and all of our politics was a contrivance. Which, while I love Reagan, I've always thought was nonsense nonsense but we would get to find out whether that was true or not well it depends you remember bill pullman at the end of independence day when he declared it to be a global universal human holiday um that we would have won re-election though and he would have done so easily because he's obviously a republican because he hates the environment right he would not only have been the guy who destroyed the aliens,

but most of the West and East Coasts were destroyed. So his electoral college victory could have been perfect. Well, he did nuke Texas. I think he did nuke Texas. Only Houston, though. Only Houston. Right, right. Which I endorse, FYI, as a hater of the Texans

and the Astros. Look, I'm just saying that if we nuked Houston, the Houston Astros and the Houston Texans would no longer exist, which would mean that the Yankees would probably have a couple more World Series. This happened back in 96. And the Jacksonville Jaguars would have won the AFC South three or four more times. So I'm just looking at the upside, James. Yeah, well, that's good.

You know, speaking as a Vikings fan here, I find absolutely no need to drown my sorrows when I watch my team perform unlike some other people. Yeah, you know, I deserve this. Because I do. And so I don't drown my sorrows. I may have a tipple to elevate them as we slap high fives and proclaim our victorious season of wonder.

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i want to get you guys uh see what your take on it is i'm of the position that if somebody says murder is bad but then everything that they say before the but the fulcrum of the but in their argument should be disregarded uh the people who, or at least we're having a conversation about this. No, we should be having a conversation about people who kill people in streets. And that's the only conversation we should be having. Or, as some people are pointing out, well, look, the anesthesiologists, you know, they came to them right away. This is this is proof that direct action works.

No, no. Most interesting thing that I heard somebody say was going back to a Slate Star Codex blog post a long time ago about how there used to be the red tribe and the blue tribe. who are sort of quasi-libertarian, ethical altruists into all kinds of sort of spiritual, mystical stuff, but not really post-religion, and that this guy seems to fit that profile, which is one of the reasons that the online people, the two online people, the people from Teapot or that part of Twitter, seem to have embraced him as their champion. Yeah, I don't know. I'd say two or three things about him. One is I was fascinated and remain fascinated with the fact that he's another person

who seems fascinated by the Unabomber and by some of these very radical ideas, some of which he learned at Penn. The dead giveaway is when he screamed out about how the American people are being fooled because what's happening doesn't live up to our lived experience. That's a college campus phrase, right?

I know. As opposed to what other kind of experience, right? On the other hand, but also it emerges that he's intellectually unstable, right? I mean, he apparently was a fan of Jordan Peterson for a while, also Tucker Carlson, but then swings over to the Unabomber and now looks pretty leftist. I think it's also possible that he's schizophrenic. And maybe his back surgery and pain contributes to that. But, you know, oftentimes, as they say in medicine, schizophrenia presents a young man in their mid-20s. And so he

may just be simply nuts. And it took a political form. So I think we need to wait and see on all that. Maybe we'll never know. Who knows what defense he's going to give and so forth. The manifesto is actually pretty short and kind of a cliche, as near as I can tell, because we don't have the whole thing, but it's apparently quite short. I think more important is the first thing you mentioned, James, which is the reaction of the left to run to his defense and make him a folk hero. And as you say, violence is never justified, but then all the rest of what Elizabeth Warren and other people in the lefty media are saying is, but actually it's totally justified. I mean, they totally negate what they

said before. And this is not new. This goes back to, I think, when the left began to lose its mind and mainstream liberals losing their mind in the sixties, justifying the rioters, siding with criminals, as we know, and this continues to this day. So this is just the latest in a long and, I think, lamentable story of the left in America who seems to have not learned very much from the election returns. Well, you can't make an omelet without purging 100,000 chickens. Charles, where do you come down on this? I think that if you in any way qualify your view

of first degree murder by examining the politics of the murderer then you've essentially opted out of society what is society both at the social level and at the political level it's an agreement that in the absence of extreme circumstances such as the need for self-defense, we will not kill each other over our disagreements. And that manifests in a bunch of ways. One of the most famous is religious toleration because for years, decades, centuries in Europe, people kill each other all the time over their religions. But it also manifests itself in day-to-day politics, quotidian politics, of which the nature of our health system is one. You just cannot decide that you are more informed or important than other people, and therefore you have the right to kill them.

And if you read the short manifesto that he put out, that's what he did. That's what that last couple of sentences imply. Now, there is a caveat in there which makes him look like an absolute crank, which he is, and a coward, where he says, I don't actually know too much about this topic. I'm not the right guy to make this argument. Well, look, there are many aspects to my conservatism, James, but one of them is that if I don't know too much about a topic

and I think other people might be better off making the argument, I'm not going to shoot someone over it. That's a pretty solid precept, where I go to work with every single day. You know, he should have stopped there. He also should have extrapolated out from that and realized that even if he were the world's greatest expert on the topic, no one came near to him. He was universally acknowledged to be a genius on the topic. He still doesn't get more of a vote in whether or not a given person lives or dies than anyone else.

And I just find the Elizabeth Warren AOC approach on this to be revolting and to be a good example of why they should never, ever be trusted with power. Last thing quickly. If I were them, and I were a member of congress in aoc's case and in the case of elizabeth warren a senator and i wanted the government to take over health care i would not be establishing the principle that if an institution denies you care that you think you deserve you can kill them because in a single-payer system who do you think it's going to be making

the rationing decisions it's going to be aoc and elizabeth warren it's nuts it's it's actually beyond even from a purely self-interested totally amoral perspective it is beyond bizarre to me that that's the idea they've decided to put into the bloodstream just as they want to get rid of the brian thompsons and say hey you know who's in charge of your health care it's me elizabeth warren i know well that's that's because buttressing this seems to be this this this notion of what I call cornucopianism, where once the government takes it over, thanks to modern monetary theory and the printing press going brr and the rest of it, there won't be any denial and there won't be any rationing because everything will be provided because the government can provide all. The government has the means and the resources and the will to provide all to all,

and there will be no bad outcomes. That it's people like UnitedHealthcare that stand in the way of cornucopinism and its wonderful benefits. The second thing that I would say is to build on what you've said and what I said before, is that it's very, very specific, the kind of political murder that they like. If you had a man whose second cousin's niece was killed by an illegal immigrant in New Jersey, and the mayor of that town in New Jersey had said, we are not going to cooperate with ICE, we are a sanctuary town, and this guy decided to shoot the deputy mayor to avenge the death of his relative at the hands of an illegal immigrant. We would not be talking about having the necessity of having a conversation about illegal immigration. We would

be talking about anything but. So when they selectively do it like this, you're right, Charlie. I mean, it's madness for them to say, we're going to be in charge of your health care. And by the way, it's perfectly fine to shoot people who don't give you everything that you want. But it's also a matter of selective judgment. And it's poisonous on every single possible level. I suppose it's also inevitable in this day and age for online media to focus on somebody who happened to have a toothy smile. And go with that. I mean, it's the Sarnoff. It's a, you know, a toothy smile. Um, and, and go with that. I mean, it's,

it's the Sarnoff, right? It's the, uh, you know, it's the, I mean, the guy where he's smiling and looking and looking up and I'm thinking

somebody is going to do a Che picture of this. Somebody's going to do a Che t-shirt. It's going to put him in black ink on a red shirt and he'll be the next emblem for revolution and, uh, enlightenment. There are already free Luigi t-shirts you can find online. He's going to supplant Mumia. Remember that guy locked

up for murder in Philadelphia? There's one other thing that so far only a couple of people have commented on. Alyssa Finley at the Wall Street Journal is, wait a second, I thought Obamacare fixed all this, right? We were told it was going to make health care more affordable. It's in the name of the act, and it didn't. And, uh and you know i actually other day went and looked at because i'm a data geek and i looked at the uh the data series the the longitudinal trends of health care costs and you can look at the slope of the line before obamacare and after obamacare and it's continuing. Did we lose him? We did. We did. Okay.

Well, Stephen has apparently suffered what we hoped to be. Oh, I'm getting some news here. This is just coming in from California. There was a restaurant explosion. Caused by a drone. Caused by a drone. And that brings everything all together. So, Stephen, we hope he's okay.

I think I'm back. Am I back? There you are. You're back. Okay. We thought it was a restaurant explosion. Go on. Well, I don't know where it cut off. All I was saying was Obamacare was supposed to solve all this.

It turns out if you look at the slope of the cost of health care before and after Obamacare, it made no difference whatsoever to health care inflation. And so we're still just as unhappy with our health care, maybe more so because Obamacare made it worse and less comprehensible. So there we go. You're saying we haven't bent the curve? Nope. Hmm. Odd, that.

Yeah. Well, some people say, no, no, no, Obamacare was set up to fail. That was the ingenious thing about it. It was set up to fail so that the government would come in and take over that. And I don't think that's the case. I don't think these guys are ever that Machiavellian or that smart orious thing about it. It was set up to fail so that the government would come in and take over that. And I don't think that's the case. I don't think these guys are ever that Machiavellian or that smart or the rest of it. I mean, do you? Do you think that they are sitting there steepling their fingers and saying,

wah-ha-ha, we're going to clobber Piven this baby? I don't give them that much credit. I don't think they're that smart or that capable or have that much foresight. Well, there is a subtext to that, though, James. Partly, you could say camel's nose in the tent, right? At least if we exert some control, you can then, by degrees, regulate it more and more in the way we central planners want. The other thing, though, that's still not widely perceived is going all the way back to the failure of HillaryCare in 1994. A part of the deal was always going to be, you private health

insurance people, we want you to do cost containment, and we want you to take the heat. And we'll kind of piggyback along with Medicare and Medicaid and the government-provided services. Oh, by the way, we're going to mandate that all health insurance must cover everything from manicures to the counseling services, and that runs the cost up higher than it needs to be for basic health care needs. So the other talking point you hear sometimes is, well, gosh, Medicare only has a 1% overhead in management cost, and private health insurance is like 25%, 30%. Now, I think those numbers are bogus. I think it's apples and oranges. But let's note that Medicare and Medicaid now have, it's its estimated $200 billion

a year in fraud. So it's easy to have a 1% overhead if you're willing to tolerate that level of fraud, and if private health insurance tolerated that, you can imagine what employer-based health care would cost. It would be even worse than it is today. So it's a god-awful mess, and all the interventions of the government just make it worse and worse. The overhead figure is also really unfair, because if you're a private health insurer, you have to do all of the aspects of being a health insurer on your own. You have to do collections, you have to do bureaucracy, you have to do the actuarial stuff. Whereas with the federal systems, both Medicare and Medicaid, well,

they get their collections done by the IRS, and they get their actuarial tables done by various government institutions that exist to do that. And they get all their PR and their advertising and their customer interactions done by other federal agencies. And so you never see those added in. What they do is they say, well, how much do you spend within the Medicaid institution on overheads? I just had one more quick thought, and I guess it's probably here in a moment, on whether or not Obamacare was set up to fail. I don't believe that it was set up to fail in the sense that James asked about it, which is that it was supposed to be a catastrophe that led to single payer. The public would clamor for single payer once they saw that this didn't work. What I do think is that most of the promises that were made, that it would bend the cost curve, that you would be able to keep your doctor and you'd be able to keep your

plan, were lies that they knew were lies. And the reason that I think that is that I watched the difference in the output of Obamacare's apologists from before and after it was instituted. Before it was instituted, the Ezra Klein's of the world said, it's going to do all of the things that Barack Obama has said that it will do. About one minute after it was completely implemented in 2014, Ezra Klein, Matt Iglesias, and others started writing these pieces and said, well, of course you can't bring millions of people into this system without getting rid of health plans and getting rid of people's doctors and so on. Of course,

that's an obvious economic consequence. And it seems to me that what this was, therefore, was a classic progressive moral play where they were just so offended by the idea that some people didn't have health insurance that they were willing to do anything to change it. And so when they started getting pushback from economists and other people who knew what they're talking about, saying, you know, this is going to cause X, Y, and Z, they realized that would be politically toxic. So they just went, no, it won't. Then, after it had been implemented, they said, yes, of course, it will do all those things. But we now have, we don't, but we now have universal healthcare, we now have more people who are insured, we now have a ban on blocking pre-existing conditions and so on, because that's what

they actually cared about all along. That's where I do think it was a game. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think even the PolitiFact people, who I normally don't hold in very high regard, rated Obama's claim that if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor as the lie of the year, I think in 2013 or 2014. That gets conveniently forgotten in all this. You know, there's something I teach in class to students

is there was a sociologist 20 or 30 years ago, kind of forgotten, a guy named Peter Rossi, and he used to have what he called the iron law of evaluation. And it's very short. The iron law of evaluation was the expected value of any net impact assessment of any large-scale social program is zero. In other words, none of this stuff ever works. And Obamacare is one of the premier examples of Peter Rossi's iron law. There, listeners, you learned something from the academic world that you can use at a cocktail party. And one of the reasons that Obamacare has been less deleterious than was anticipated is that its footprint has been much smaller than was anticipated.

I think I'm right in saying that that's a combination of changes that Republicans managed to make last time they were in, but also the way that it worked in practice, market decisions that have been made. It actually didn't have quite the effect that it was supposed to and so progressives will say aha you see what we need is more government involvement but i have a radical

idea steven that is maybe we should go in the other direction for a change maybe we should try that for 10 years to see what happens yeah right well you know people like to pull out the medical bill the hospital bill they got when they were born you know i think my dad my dad paid with a 20 you know and got changed right changed back and uh i have absolutely no idea what it cost to have my daughter brought into this world uh because i have all of these insulating and intermediary organizations and payments and the rest of it. But I know it was more than $20 because she had to go into a little clear plastic box, hooked up to machines that went bing.

So it was expensive and intensive and required a whole bunch of technology that was not there when I came into this world. People probably wish that it hadn't been, so you never know. Well, having solved health care, let us move along to the deteriorating quality of new york as we were discussing before it's not just the shooting of course of the guy on the street which you know can happen frankly anywhere but it is uh the subway system the the nature of our society when a humble street profile a humble subway dancer can be murdered in cold blood by a man who was apparently stalking the trains looking for somebody to choke is the way this sort of is being shown uh and regarded in some quarters of twitter by by people who are not marginal figures.

No, but, you know, by actual politicians who are decrying the ways in which society failed the man who died. And we hear this an awful lot that we've failed this. It is on us that this fellow was homeless and on powerful THC derivatives and was threatening people, that it was on us, as if there was no attempt to ever intercede in his life, as if he hadn't been given shelter and treatment before and had walked away from it. And it brings, you have to wonder, at what point, I'm not saying, at what point do we just choke the guy? Because that's not what I'm saying. But at what point do we have to sort of say done and dusted when it comes to our obligation to people who have repeatedly refused the help that is given them? the subways in which people are not worried about maniacs striding up and down waving their arms making fist gestures threatening to kill people and the rest of it does this happen on every subway and everywhere no no it doesn't and as the people on twitter have been saying look just keep

your head down be you know be cautious it's all it's it's all part of living in a big city well it ought not to be you know this when paired with the murder of brian thompson is a good window into the soul of a particular sort of progressive they are extremely angry with daniel penny they call him a vigilante and a murderer. And they are pleased with Luigi Mangione. They call him a hero. This is backwards. It would, of course, be better if we had the resources to ensure that at no point ever in the United States was anyone not under the protection of a police officer. I don't mean that quite literally. That would be creepy and totalitarian. But if you could put a cop in every subway car, that would be great. But that's never going to happen. Even if New York

were run sensibly, which it's not, that's never going to happen. You are always going to need some sort of volunteerism. Now, without veering off into my favorite topic of the Second Amendment, that is presumed by a great deal of our constitutional order that there will be people who at some point will have to step up. And Daniel Penny did that. He did that when a guy was ranging around a subway car shouting, someone's going to die. I'm going to kill someone. And he was put through the wringer for it. He was charged with second-degree manslaughter and with a lesser charge that sounds as if it would have been a greater charge.

And yeah, he got off. He was acquitted, partly, I think, because the judge dismissed the first charge and thereby signaled to the jury that the case had fallen apart. And yes, it's good that he got off. He was acquitted, partly, I think, because the judge dismissed the first charge and thereby signaled to the jury that the case had fallen apart. And yes, it's good that he got off. And yes, jury systems work better than almost any other institution in our country. But that case should never have been brought. And it is a sign, I think, that we have forgotten who is good and who is bad, what is acceptable and what is not, where to blame and where to praise. Daniel Penny found himself for a year and a half facing the prospect of

spending a lot of his life in jail. And Luigi Mangione, who has been arrested, there's not any indication that he's going to be let off by the authorities, but has been celebrated and championed, or at the very least justified, by the same people who are angry about that. It is a horrible indictment of an ideology that has really jumped the shark. Yeah. So my one observation about it

is to compare this case with Bernard Goetz back in 40 years ago. I think it was 1984. And you remember he was the guy who shot, he was carrying a gun, shot four black assailants who were coming at him or threatening him with sharpened screwdrivers and so forth. At that time, the Manhattan DA was Robert Morgenthau, a legendary name in law enforcement, who asked a grand jury to indict Goetz for manslaughter. The grand jury refused to indict

Goetz for manslaughter, and he ended up being charged only with a gun possession charge and i think sort of something like six months in jail fast forward to now the decline and what let's set to paraphrase henry adams the decline or the progression from robert morgan thou to alvin bragg is enough to single-handedly refute the theory of evolution and and it was you know here we are uh with a total clown and a progressive nut and a grand jury that did his bidding and did indict Penny. And it's a travesty that shows you the decline of New York and law enforcement, I think, in a nutshell, comparing those two cases. They were comparing him to Bernie Getz, as a matter of fact, Penny, as though he said, you don't look so bad. Here's another. And then choked on a Tito Jackson impersonator. Mangione, by the way, if you look at the word and you're thinking, Mangione, you're eating? Yes,

Mangione means a glutton, a big eater. And I don't know if you're a big eater or a small eater. What you do know is that no matter how much you eat or how much you want to eat or don't want to eat or something, you got to pay attention to your metabolism. And that is why you need a lumen. Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach. It's a device that measures your metabolism. How? Through your breath. See, it's got this app, and it lets you know if you're burning fats or carbs, and it gives you a tailored guidance to improve your nutrition and your workouts and your sleep and even your stress management. All you have to do is to breathe into your Lumen the first thing in the morning, and you'll know

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It's got heft. It's got style. It just looks cool sitting in its little charger. Never mind what it does. But it's on top, and every day it tells me, as I say, how many carbs I can have. And it's like, here you go. You can have this many carbs. And I love carbs, so I enjoy them.

And I thank my Lumen. You can do the same. If you want to stay on track with your health this holiday season, go to Lumen.me Ricochet to get 15% off your Lumen. You can do the same. If you want to stay on track with your health this holiday season, go to Lumen.me Ricochet to get 15% off your Lumen. That's L-U-M-E-N.me slash Ricochet for 15% off your purchase. And by the way, it's that time Lumen makes a great gift too. And we thank Lumen for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now coming to us, finally, glad to have him. It's our old friend, Noah. Noah Rothman.

Thank you for bearing with me, guys. Well, of course, we've just been sitting here saying nothing, staring at the ball, twiddling our fingers. Sorry to put you out. Minor future emergencies. Minor, I have to tell everybody, everybody knows who you are.

But just for the one or two who don't, senior writer at National Review, the magazine we love. He's the author of The Rise of the New Puritans, Fighting Back Against Progressives, War on Fun. This week alone, he's written about Syria, the Daniel Penny case, the United Health CEO shooting Biden and Blinken, and the lunatic sympathizing with the shooter. All good reasons to go to NAR and subscribe. But since we've got a limited amount of time here, we haven't talked about Syria. And that escalated quickly and de-escalated, collapsed. All of a sudden, this iron regime of Ba'athists disappeared like cotton candy hosed down by a fire hose.

And now we're looking at who is there in power and saying experience tells us this never goes well but we're going to be oddly hopeful now for a while until proved otherwise tell us who is in charge how much assyria they really have and what we might expect in the in the months to come well all of those are actually kind of tough questions to answer because they change from moment to moment insosofar as we have a faction that is in charge in Damascus, it is HTS, which is a Turkish-backed Islamist group. It was al-Nusra, which is an al-Qaeda offshoot, or at least a pledged fealty to al-Qaeda, all of eight years ago. There's been a bit of a schism there. And this organization flew under the radar, save for individuals who are really hyper-focused

on this group. They've the individual in charge, Al-Jalani, is a terrorist. He's got a $10 million bounty on his head from the FBI. And the organization is a foreign terrorist organization, according to the State Department. But Al-Jalani had been operating out in the open for the better part of a decade within or within close to operating range of U.S. forces in a U.S. theater of combat operations. He could have been got if they wanted him to be got. They didn't. And that may have something to do with Ankara's interests. Nevertheless,

HTS is making a lot of pluralist noises about Syria's minorities. They're attracting foreign direct investment and opening up the economy in Syria, at least that's what the design is, to attract more investment and operate with more free market principles. All these are nice noises, and I think it would be wise for us to not necessarily discount them at face value, although not put too much stock into them either at this early stage. The Biden administration is flirting with waiving the FTO designation. I think it's premature for that. As for how much of the country they control,

it is roughly the territory that they took with very little resistance over the space of the last week. The cities of Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and Damascus, roughly. Outside of that, there are a variety of other organizations that are in control of portions of Syria. Deir ez-Zor in the east, where the United States has a footprint. Kurdish-backed rebels with the SDS are in charge of that portion of Syria. They maintain a healthy supply of ISIS captives, about 50,000 captives in their custody. And SDS Kurds and Turkish-backed forces have a very contentious relationship. The Kurdish

forces are under attack from HTS, and the U.S. interests are at stake in that region, and they may be imperiled by HTS's hostilities. But we think al-Jalani might be a little frustrated with that. He's trying to quell some of this unrest between these two organizations. And then there's a rebel group in the South that nobody knows about. They're just kind of a collection of rebels, all of whom have different interests. They're in control of the city of Dara and others, which is the cradle of the revolution. Druze, other minorities are a part of this amalgamation of rebel groups. And I don't really know much about them. Not enough to say they have one cohesive philosophy, for example. So there's a lot of very competing interests that aren't necessarily aligned. But these are the early days of the collapse of a monstrous regime. And jubilation is the sentiment across the board. That will fade soon. organizing behind and and flying the the green three-starred rebel flag uh and right now that that is what that is the the you know elation over the fall of asad is the dominant emotion

what comes next is anybody's question so noah we seem to have been caught in the united states quite flat-footed which doesn't surprise me with the caliber of our intelligence operation or you know anthony blinken saying the last two days gosh, who knew the Taliban was going to take over Afghanistan, right? But I'm curious that this happened so suddenly that surely somebody must have known this was coming. Israel, maybe they're distracted with other things, but how did this happen that nobody saw it coming, or did I miss something? Did somebody know that this was about to happen? I don't think you missed, well, I think probably Ankara and Turkey and the Erdogan government had some inclination of what was going on here.

But as you say, this does seem to have caught a lot of Western intelligence agencies flat-footed, including Israel's intelligence agency. And there's no better actor in the region to be aware of what's coming. It sort of betrays, I mean, as a side note, it betrays the faulty thinking that you often see from people on the left and the right who are generally predisposed to a paranoid inclination, which ascribes all actions, all events to the secret machinations in Washington and in Western capitals. That we're the Machiavellian interest pulling the strings, and anything that occurs is our doing, or if it did not occur, it's also our doing.

The agency of other foreign actors is totally stripped of them. And that's just not the case here. I've been saying for years that I wish our CIA was half as capable as every Hollywood movie made them out to be. You know, it's a joke. Well, you did mention Turkey. Two things. You said that, you know, there's an atmosphere of jubilation. Is that actually true of Israel?

I mean, I had the sense, but I'm not very fully informed, that Israel had something of a stable equilibrium with Assad. I mean, they didn't like him and all the rest of that, but Israel seemed to have free reign to, you know, assassinate Iranian officials in Damascus, to bomb sites in Syria from time to time. And Syria, they didn't make noises about it, but never fought back the way Iran did. And so I don't know. I would think Israel would be very nervous about the instability that's now going to happen in the country.

And you've seen the fact that Israel's been very active in bombing a lot of military capacity. I think rightly so. They've been making hay while the sun shines. They have destroyed naval and air force capacities, as well as the anti-aircraft battery, and practically have a free ride to Iran, except for that little patch they've got to go through Iraq. Is Israel acting in offensive defensiveness, Noah? How would you characterize what they're doing? I wouldn't characterize Jerusalem's relationship

with Assad's Damascus as necessarily stable, exactly. Certainly not cooperative. Israel has come under attack from Syria throughout the course of Israel's existence. And Saudi Arabia, or Saudi Arabia, Syria represented an unbroken corridor through which Iran filtered arms and munitions and funds to Hezbollah, relatively unmolested. So, the elimination of that corridor advances Israel's interests. It's preferable, I think, to the status quo ante. And as you say, the dozens and dozens, hundreds at this point, strikes on Syrian positions, Syrian military positions, and disabling its air force, putting its navy at the bottom of the port of Latakia, and destroying a lot of vehicles is the sort of thing you would do if you were very afraid of what comes next. But it's also something they couldn't do while

the Assad regime was there and Russia maintained an air corridor. They had airspace that you could not violate, and the United States abided by that as well. Israel occasionally would execute strikes at some serious risk because of the Assad's air batteries, the Iran-provided air batteries and Russian-provided air batteries, were pretty sophisticated. And it was always a threat that if they were going in to execute one pinprick strike or the other, that it could be disastrous. But that threat has disappeared, and we're taking maximum advantage of it, too, the United States. We've executed dozens of airstrikes on ISIS positions that were being incubated by the Assad regime and supported and protected by Russian air support. Another myth that's been blown apart by the destruction of the Assad regime is one promulgated by Assad's anti-anti-supporters and outright supporters who said, well, at least,

you know, the Assad regime, they're a bunch of monsters, but at least they're killing terrorists. At least they're killing ISIS. No, they weren't. They never were. The Assad regime incubated the ISIS threat in 2013 their fire on SDS rebels and SDF rebels, Syrian democratic forces, and neutralize what was at the outset of the Syrian civil war, a modestly pro-Western opposition. Now, the pro-Western opposition has been decimated. There's a lot of resistance to the idea that there ever was pro-Western opposition. But compared to what exists today, yeah, it certainly looks pro-Western. Both Russia and Assad and Iran managed to defeat those moderate elements and present the West with a fait accompli on the ground and a dichotomy that didn't exist previously, but a binary one. What are you going to do? You're going to go with this monstrous secular regime? You're going to go with these monstrous Islamists who want to cut your heads off. And that prevailed. That was a really

effective strategy on the part of Damascus and its apologists. But with the end of the regime comes the end of that illusion. I have a question that reflects my general simplicity in thinking on this topic. If you were God, Noah, heaven forfend, and you could determine whether or not this happened, in other words, you get to decide. We keep the status quo as it was the day before the regime fell, or we deal with what we're dealing with now. Which one would you have chosen? Well, if I were a benevolent deity, I'd be able to foresee how this would unfold. And because I'm not, I can't. I cannot predict the future, and there are far too many variables for me.

Press a button and take the risk. The theological explanation is that the benevolent deity denies himself foreknowledge of the event. That's how we square it. This is deep. That is truly deep. I've got to go back to philosophy. I ask that just because I've been asked by a few people who labor under the misapprehension that I am a great foreign policy mind. Is this good or bad?

And I don't know how to answer it. Well, there's a lot of good. Let's start with the good. The good is this truly evil regime is gone. It's crimes against its own people. It's attacks on the United States. It's efforts to kill Americans. The Syrian regime was responsible for funneling in Iran-backed insurgents into Iraq during

the insurgency and with the mission of killing Americans successfully. Those people who served, like Tulsi Gabbard, understand that full well. And it's inexplicable to me that they would say that Assad represents no threat to the United States because they were killing Americans. That's over. The corridors that transmit weapons and material to Hezbollah, such as it is now that it's been pretty well decimated by Israel, is going to be closed off most likely. And Israel is making efforts to do that by making incursions into the southern portion and expanding this buffer zone around the Golan Heights to ensure that Lebanon,

the routes to Lebanon are cut off. That's good. And an institution in Damascus that allowed ISIS to survive and indeed thrive in the last decade is gone. All good stuff. So what comes next? That could be the bad part, but it's too early to say if it's the bad part. As I said, Jelani is making a lot of pleasant noises designed, in my view, not to lull the West into a false sense of security, but to lull the West into a real sense of security. They want space. They want space to be able to consolidate power, to consolidate as much territory under the control of this regime as possible. And Syria is, again, very, very, you know, carved up.

There's a small corridor along the Lebanese border and the coast, which is under the control of HTS. But the rest of it is kind of lawless and under control of a variety of other factions that may or may not owe their allegiance to HTS. The worst-case scenarios are kind of concerning. The prospect of an Islamist regime arising in Damascus, bent on projecting terror, exporting terror to the West, is a live possibility. And that would be really destabilizing and could necessitate a multinational mission to put an end to that regime. We cannot, we operated under the delusion in the last half decade that some of the most fought over territory on the planet Earth is something we can afford to simply let go,

sit back, see what happens, and we would absorb no threats to U.S. interests. We will. So, in other words, stay tuned for the sequel. So, we have time for one last question, Noah, and it's kind of a big one, so we can't do the full analysis of it, but you can almost do it yes or no. We know that, for example, Putin is trying to reassemble the old Soviet Empire or maybe some older version of the Russian Empire. I'm wondering if Erdogan and Turkey have in their mind the grandiose idea of reassembling the Ottoman Empire. Is that a ridiculous thing to speculate about?

No. I mean, yes, insofar as we're not going to see Ankara with a vast declared control over the Levant and, you know, and Iraq and Jordan. It's a semi-hostile power to the United States. It's not a friend. It's not exactly an enemy per se, but it is not, it's not a, it's not a reliable partner for the West and we should be leery of its influence. It's, and Erdogan himself has been very friendly towards Islamist elements, Sunni Islamist elements. So we should, we should be skeptical of that. But the thing that you mentioned there, going back to the Tsarist period and its tensions between Russia and Turkey, is that these two powers have a very uncomfortable relationship with each other. And we got very close to a very serious crisis in 2015 when a Turkish fighter was shot out of the sky by Russian air defenses.

Turkey went to the mat. Turkey went to NATO and invoked Article 4, which is the prerequisite, the consultation phase before you get to Article 5, which is the invocation of mutual defense provisions. It was a very dangerous period in Syria between 2014-2015 when everybody was intervening in that conflict and everybody's shooting at each other's proxies in very close proximity in a live theater. That's really dangerous. That's the sort of thing we really wanted to avoid. And people like me who were saying we need to prevent that, we're getting very nervous about that sort of dynamic. And we could see something very similar in and around the Black Sea region, in Syria, and in the eastern portions of Turkey, which are hotly contested. Russia and Ankara have sort of a thawed relationship right now, but I don't suspect

that that will last permanently. The two of them are drawn to each other only insofar as they're opposed to the West's interests and Washington's interests, and once Washington's interests are no longer the thing that they are united against, then they have a tendency to conflict. So I would imagine that we would see conflict sooner rather than later between them. But yes, Ankara is an expansionist power, at least diplomatically, not necessarily in terms of seizing new territory and subsuming it into the Turkish national conception of itself.

But it absolutely has designs on its region and expanding its diplomatic influence, and it's going about it in a very aggressive way and a successful way. Syria is right now, what it had not been previously, a satellite to Ankara. If Erdogan draws a great chain across the Bosporus, then I think we should go in.

Then I think we should go in and rename the whole place Constantinople and take it back, because I'm against their colonial enterprise that renamed it as such. I know we've got to go. Absolutely. Absolutely. If we go, as long as we've got the time machine, let's go back

and let's take a look at this Balfour stuff, and let's take a look at the carving up of their region into these strangely shaped nations that had two or three warring clans within them, ensuring that they'd be in continuous discord, and allot them to the groups themselves so that everybody had their own state, and then they could fight each other in between nations instead of destabilizing the nations that they're currently in. If the principle of self-determination applies, then we should be applying it to these Druze communities that are outright stating we want to join Israel

and be governed by Jerusalem. Which I think is absolutely fascinating. You mean these people are actually putting up their hand and saying, yes, I want to be part of the genocidal state? Why, yes, they are. And with that, we have to leave. Noah Rothman, you can read everything that he does, and you should, at National Review and the magazine and the online site.

We thank you for dropping by today. And the fact that we've only had 20 minutes with you is your own dang fault. Next time, show up. Apologies again. Thank you, guys. See you, Noah. Take care. And we've got to go, too.

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