The Ricochet Podcast - Big, Beautiful Emergencies

Episode Date: May 30, 2025

Noah Rothman returns to the Ricochet Podcast to discuss the troubles of dealing with an uncooperative world. He, Steve, and James discuss the fall of the New Puritans in the real world as they resist from their barracks on prestigious college campuses. The gang then moves from culture war to the shooting kind as they consider Putin's recalcitrance and negotiations with Iran.Plus, Hayward and Lileks unpack the Court of International Trade's tariff intervention, the Big, Beautiful Bill that's worked its way out of the House, and Elon Musk's DC departure. - Sound from this week's open: CNN’s Jake Tapper on The Prof G Pod defending his 15-year-old son.

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and say hello to good advice. 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 Stephen Hayward and myself James Lollix today we talked to Noah Rothman about things Domestic and cultural to international and military everything. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I went on a left leaning Podcast and they asked me about my son and I said he was you know

He's he's a football player and he wants to be a policeman. And their joke was, about my 15 year old son, oh how does he feel about minorities? Like the idea that he wants to be a policeman, therefore he's racist. And I thought to myself, this is why you f***ing should be losing elections. Welcome everybody, this is the Ricochet podcast, number 743. Why don't you, you go to ricochet.com right now, sign up, and be part of the most stimulating conversations and community on the web,

and we wouldn't say it if we couldn't back it up. I'm James Lollex, Minneapolis, Minnesota, where it's a beautiful end of May day. Stephen Hayward is, well, what are you, in a cabin in Alaska or something like that? I'm looking at your zoom. I am in the highlands of Iceland, which I've decided, James, is the Minnesota of waterfalls. They have a waterfall every

50 feet. Minnesota has a lake, right? And it's quite amazing. With amazing rainbows in the air as the mist hits the sun. And of course, what I loved about it was you could go to the top of it and look down. There weren't any handrails on the steps or the stairs. It's just, we don't have the ADA here. You know, you can't figure it out. Don't fall. That's basically it. Don't fall. So you're finding Iceland to be as fascinating as people said, even though the streets are filled with unpronounceable words you cannot begin to sound out. Oh, yes. Yeah, I thought Welsh was a difficult language and challenging on purpose for foreigners.

Every place I go to, I just say I'm in Farfurg-Nugen, because I'm far from anywhere and I can't pronounce anything. And yeah, it's impossible. So I just mumble. Yeah. Extraordinary country. But that's another podcast and I hope to have that right sometime soon maybe when Charles C.W. Cook is not joining us this time he's a bit under the weather I don't know what the weather is like in Florida but apparently he's suffering from it which leaves us to discuss this who knew Stephen who knew there's a court of international trade I did not and I thought I knew most of these specialized federal courts like the court of federal right yeah the court of federal claims a

few other obscure ones I do know a little bit about. That said, let us of course be instant experts on the fact. So the Court of International Trade has struck down the tariffs for now. I think the judge stated for a couple of weeks or something like that. This is the usual yay judicial activism from some, nay judicial activity, injunctivitis say some, judge shopping, what right have they to do the executive? No, there was a 1962 congressional act that gave him the power, etc. Can you make heads or tails out of this where we are now and whether or not you think it's going to stick? Yeah, so I think it's not going to stick and I think in an odd way it makes it more likely that Trump's terroriff power may survive

what otherwise would have been a more formidable legal challenge in regular district court. So this is one of these specialized courts set up by Congress to handle things that the judiciary doesn't want to have clogging their regular docket. So as I understand this court, it exists for people to bring appeals that they're not charged the correct tariff rate on whether something is improperly classified as this kind of product versus that kind of product. And so if you can get your, let's take an example, an old Teddy Ruxpin doll might have had something like a 10% tariff that's been imported from somewhere.

But if you claim it's an educational tool, then it would have maybe a 5% tariff. So let me hear cases like that. This is kind of like people's court stuff, right, with Judge Wampner. And so, for this court to assert its jurisdiction and take on this huge question of Trump's worldwide tariff strategy seems to me politically suicidal for a court, and it's very badly reasoned, I think. I've skimmed through it quickly. I haven't mastered it.

But there are legitimate questions about whether Congress can delegate the sweeping tariff power that Trump has exercised on some emergency economic powers act from the 70s. And there are other suits filed by formidable conservatives like Phil Hamburger at Columbia in district court. And this court completely ignores some of the classic constitutional arguments that could be brought to bear against Trump's power. And instead, and one thing, and then I'll shut up, I could go on too long about this too easily, is they said, well, Trump has justified these tariffs saying it's needed to fight the national emergency of fentanyl and the drug overdoses and whatnot, but tariffs

are a terrible tool for doing that. Well, you know what? If the president is given the power to declare a national emergency, the means should be beyond the scrutiny of an obscure court that you've never heard of with judges who aren't even Article 3 judges with lifetime tenure. And they completely skipped making any constitutional arguments. And it's mind-bogglingly bad and I think any almost any federal court adheres an appeal of this decision is going to overturn it in a second and Trump's going to claim victory and it's going to make it I think harder to assail his power in a regular lawsuit.

Maybe not Judge Wapner but Judge Judy't yes the don't keep on my leg and tell me it's raining the evening and the international emergency powers act of nineteen seventy seven we talked about that and i agree with you i mean the emergency portion of this is always seem to be to be a little bit suspect uh... gathering up these powers but can we have an emergency emergency seems to you seem to want to be reserve that word

for actual things that come out of nowhere quickly and spiral into very bad problems that must be faced immediately. And fentanyl, while bad, does not seem to be a justifiable rationale for that. Of course, other people can make the arguments and they have, and what do I know? But you're right. I mean, to say that tariffs are a bad way of doing this, well that's a subjective question, that's not an objective finding, that's saying well we really don't, who knows if you imposed a thousand percent tariff on China and Mexico unless they instantly

went in and blew up all their fentanyl factories, might get their attention. I don't know, that seems to be the reasoning, but yeah, I think you're correct and it'll probably be struck down. And if nothing else, we will have all learned that there is a court of international trade, which sounds like one of those Brussels organizations that make you roll your eyes and say, well, you know how many troops does the Pope have?

It's one of those. But, apparently- Well, there are some antecedents to this that go back over a hundred years. Here's a trivia point that you may know. When Franklin Roosevelt declared the bank holiday, closed all the banks in the country, state and federal alike, in his first weekend office in 1933, he invoked something called the Trading with the Enemy Act from 1917, passed during World War I. Well, who was the enemy in 1933? It was absurd, and no one thought to file a lawsuit then. So it's very similar now. In other words, what

we're seeing now is not that unusual. And by the way, I've said this before here, I keep telling liberals, this is the presidency you've always wanted, strong executive power to do all these good things. You know, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, they always use these powers. And now you're just mad because you don't like what Trump is using them for. But maybe you want to get back to an old thing called the Constitution. As we keep saying, yes. Well, you know, pen and a phone and bold, persistent experimentation. It seems to me that's what we've been seeing. Yeah, bank holiday. There's something of a euphemism there. Oh, I'm so giddy for the upcoming bank holiday.

What do you hope you find under the safe tomorrow when it's at the bank hall? No, bank closure is what it is and dire straits because of it. Oh, you go bald. All right, there's that. And speaking of money that we've found in banks and also in bills, we have one that is both big

and or beautiful or not. I don't know how it got called the BBB which sounds like some sort of thing you'd find in a chat room where people are seeking out particular pleasures but what about this here? I keep hearing the same thing is that when I was talking to somebody about this the other day they said well there's all these Medicare cuts so well they're spread out over 10 years yeah but it's gonna it's going to hurt the communities because they're not gonna be able to be able to pay for, you know, well, for example, emergency rooms are going to hit because they're going to be having

illegals come in who have no means to pay. And I said, well, you know, the idea is, is that there won't be them, the illegals, because they will have been dispensed with. And so you will have the savings from that. And so all of this seems like just conjecture about something that um i don't know the cuts are going to lead to death we know specifically i've already been hearing all these dire things that are that are meant to say but are they really cuts are we really talking about a slowing of the rate of growth as usual? Yes. Right. If we were to go back to the Medicare budget of five years ago, would that mean a mass die-off? How bad is the Medicare cut?

Because we all know, I mean we know from Mitt Romney wanted to take Graham and put her in a wheelchair and push her off a cliff. We all know that the point of this is to kill people. That is, you know, the Republican idea for continued electoral strategy to tell the electorate that they want as many of them dead as possible. So how is this going to play out, do you think? Right, yeah. I mean, net neutrality failed to kill millions as we were told it would happen, so I guess we have to cut Medicare instead. Of course, James, it's a reduction of future rate of growth. I think, well, first of all, one of my rules of big congressional legislation is I don't really start paying close attention

until the Senate's had its say, and the Senate here is gonna make a lot of changes. And so to read the bills exists now is, I think, mostly a waste of effort unless you have to write a major feature about it. But yeah, so Medicaid's just one part of it. We're controlling the rate of growth, and I think what ought to be said is two things. One is, as a general matter, Democrats quite a while ago, going back at least to the financial crisis of 2008, saw programs like Social Security,

disability, Medicare as proxies for wealth transfers, for redistribution of wealth. That's why they want to expand eligibility to as many people as possible, including illegal aliens, and broaden the things covered and so forth. And then the second thing is, I think what's going to happen here is you may see some Washington monument strategy. That's what you really described, is you know what? We're going to have to cut emergency rooms instead of limiting eligibility, which some states are starting to do, like California. I think I mentioned it a previous week that Governor

Newsom has said illegal aliens currently getting Medicaid are going to have to start doing a $100 a month copay or something like that, and no new enrollments. And that's even before the big beautiful bill passes. But in any case, this is all phony. It's the same drill we've seen since the Reagan years at least. You're cutting something when the budget's actually going to grow by, you know what that means is, a cut is when the projected rate of increase the liberals want doesn't happen. So they want 10 billion and they only get 5 billion. That's a cut. A 5... five billion more right so this is an old game and i gotta think that

no luck like certain other aspects of liberal rhetoric that it's not going to work anymore uh... but we'll see there are still concerns apparently tom tillis has mentioned something like this that ought to be a name of a country western singer known for his dead man humor i'm sorry uh... tom tillis warned about the abrupt and sudden termination of renewable energy incentives for a couple of reasons. One, because, well, renewable energy is the only thing

that's gonna keep the planet from turning into a burnt out cinder going around the sun, and two, I says that we're not gonna be able to meet the rest of the demand for petroleum products because investors are still skittish after Keystone, Keystone being canceled by Biden because he too wanted to save the earth and the green new deal didn't allow for that nasty sinful icker to flow through the pipes of America. So I'm not so sure about that. It seems to me as if we've got a pretty pro-oil, pro-pipeline guy in there now.

And it does make you think if they couldn't build one of these things in three years then something is perhaps awry with our initiative or perhaps we are too burdened dare I say by regulations that keep these things from happening swiftly. I mean the Hoover Dam, boom, blink, it's up. Yeah. Empire State Building, oh it was just a hole in the ground yesterday, look at it, 60 stories now. up Empire State Building. It was just a hole in the ground yesterday. Look at it, 60 stories. Now, I mean, we used to be able to do things with dispatch. So I'm not exactly sure. I'm completely pleased that the long grift that has been the renewable energy incentives

may be coming to an end because I frankly don't want to depend on the wind and the sun. I want to be able to depend on a switch that goes on because the currency is well balanced and powered by plentiful, clean, modern, progressive nuclear energy. Well, first of all, I wish Tillis were less confused about these things. If we gank all of the green energy subsidies, you'll still be able to build wind and solar power if you want to. You'll just have to pay for it yourself. That's very different from what happened with the Keystone pipeline. I thought it was one of the most shocking things a president has ever done when Biden

on day one shut down the Keystone pipeline. That was not a subsidized project. It did not need federal funds or tax breaks. It was a privately funded project with what, 5,000 people, many of them unionized working on it. And I think it's the first time a president has ever revoked a permit for a project in progress. It's one thing to block a permit from happening in the first place, but to actually stop something being built by the private sector, I don't think has ever happened before. And if Tillis had been

threatening to impeach the president for that, I would now maybe listen to him a little bit more attentively. I have to say the Biden people were very clever with their, what was it, buildback, no, Inflation Reduction Act, which even Biden admitted was just a green subsidy. They spread the money around lavishly to red states on purpose, hoping that as years to come – and it was, you know, these things were projected to last for years, not just for Biden's term, especially some of the tax credits are open-ended entirely – and I think they thought, ah, if we lavish enough money to the red states, that will guarantee they have political support so they'll survive a change in administration.

And lo and behold, Hillis is right on the spot offering to prove the Biden administration and the Democrats right. And so I think he should go pound sand into solar panels on the beach in North Carolina and let the rest of us get back to having real energy. As you said. Yes, there's debates up here in Minnesota

as to whether to mine in an area known as the near the boundary waters and people are concerned about roughing pollution and well as they should. But but the thing is is that they do need an awful lot of copper for those big wonderful beautiful windmills they need a lot of virgin copper and that means means you have to dig into it with industrial equipment that dare I say might be powered by fossil fuels so they wanted always they want these the planes to be dotted with these dark satanic machines but at the same time they don't want

anybody to actually get the copper out of the ground to make them do it but somehow it will happen and then you just look and say look we have fuel we have diesel we've got gas we've got nuclear it works let's do it, nope can't have it another thing that is in the bill that will probably be a source of contention is that the government is decided it is no longer going to use Medicaid to fund facial feminization procedures exactly for people who decided that they are of a different gender. Now when the when the

when the cuts are to gender-affirming care I don't know if that actually goes towards these secondary or tertiary cosmetic qualities but again it's like you said with a pipeline it's you're still free to do it you just you just have to pay for it and the idea that pipeline, you're still free to do it, you just have to pay for it. And the idea that the taxpayer should be obligated to do this has as its predicates a whole series of ideas which themselves, I don't care how much they say, are not empirically, scientifically valid.

I mean, they just aren't. I mean, I'm sorry, you can talk about brain chemistry and, and gender theory and all the rest of it. But I, I, I don't see why that is necessary for the taxpayer to fund these things. Second thing that I found that was interesting in discussion about the bill is that there's a 10 year ban on state laws regarding the regulation of AI. of AI. And I'm not sure how I feel about this because I'm hesitant to allow AI to be crimped by governments that don't know anything about it or are acting out of fear or ignorance, but at the same time I'm terribly, terribly concerned about what AI is going to do. And not in some Luddite stupid, it's gonna take the JIRB stuff.

I'm deeply troubled about the effect that it's going to have. I had a situation the other day where I asked Google something. I was researching something. And it came up with, because you no longer get at the top of the page, you know, your ad, your ad, your ad,

and then your link to the story, you get an AI summary. Google has decided we're going to step in and use our AI to give you the answer to the question you just did. And the answer was wrong. It was very wrong. And it was wrong in such a way that anybody who came across the same thing in the situation that I did would have emptied their bowels and their bladders simultaneously at realizing that if this was true, things were very bad for you at this instance.

And I'll be able to talk about this perhaps in a couple of weeks. So I don't trust state solons to regulate it necessarily with the brilliance that they bring to other members of other issues. But at the same time, where is this ban on regulation of AI coming from? Pete Yeah, it does concern me too. So, by the way, I've had the same reaction to those Google summaries. It puts me in the mind of the late famous Caltech physicist Richard Feynman who one time saw something like that and he said, that isn't right, why that isn't even wrong.

I've seen some bizarre results from those Google things. Look, I mean, it's a very familiar argument that industries made for decades about various regulatory schemes. You'd rather have, instead of state by state regulation, for example, suppose some state said, I'm sorry, Coca-Cola can only be sold in 10-ounce cans, then Coca-Cola has to make a different can for that state. And the automakers and chemical companies, they've always wanted to have uniform federal regulation. It's better to have one size fits all, or you just have chaos commercially. I get all that. And you don't want states also erecting airsats trade barriers

against out-of-state companies and so forth. On the other hand, I do think – I'm very – you know, I just – this stuff makes me nervous, and I think state legislators, as bad as they often are, should not be told that no, I'm sorry, you can't pass a regulation, say, protecting your citizens' privacy. I'm very concerned about how AI may be used to invade your privacy or sell your data, manipulate your data, and so forth. And if the federal government is not going to do it, I think it's probably maybe not wise to say states can't get into looking at that also. But I don't know. I don't understand all this stuff, I have have to confess but it does worry me. Yes well we'll have a white

paper we'll have congressional hearings and we'll have a blue coat we'll have a blue ribbon committee we'll have all of these things and by the time they're done with it everything that they come up with will be incredibly outdated because the AI has become exponentially smarter by a factor of 37 while they've been flapping their gums so yeah I don't know I mean what is the, what is the state going to do? You can VPN around that. What is the state going to say about, you know, misinformation? I don't want them to be the ones who tell me what is and is not. All of that stuff. I get it. But no, we're going to end up not regulating it and we're going because there's perhaps no way to do so effectively. And then we're

going to end up with some societal consequences from it. I was reading a study today that was talking about the bloodbath of mid-level jobs that's going to go away and it's entirely possible a lot of them will be automated by AI if it gets infallible or at least infallible to like human beings. But as somebody pointed out when computerization was supposed to eliminate vast swaths of jobs what people did basically was come up with other jobs email jobs and and PowerPoint jobs and managerial puffery jobs and somehow somehow the economy managed to stagger on well you may be staggering on through your day my friend but the point of it is is that at the end of it awaits

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That's cozy earth comm code ricochet and if you get the post purchase survey Why don't you just tell him you heard about cozy earth from the ricochet podcast? We'd appreciate it Sanctuary awaits at cozy earth and we thank them for sponsoring this the ricochet podcast Now we bring back to the podcast Noah Rothman, senior writer at National Review. I've heard of them and the author of The Rise of the New Puritans Fighting Back Against Progressives War on Fun and Unjust Social Justice and the Unmaking of America. We'll get to this in a bit here. I want to get to Russia, but I also want to talk about

fighting back against the Progressive's war on fun. We just had, first of all, welcome Noah. Thanks for coming back. We just had the the DNC come out, not through Hogg, who of course is their manliest of spokesmen, the most large lumberjack-y testosterone filled guy, but but they have to appeal to young men. They're sort of scratching their head and saying, how are we going to exactly do this? Like anthropologists studying some hominids in the wild. Do they have a chance of this?

Because so much of the progressive agenda now seems to be based on a series of assumptions about society and men that a lot of young men have just figured out and tuned them out for good. Yeah, I think they've earned that. I don't want to say never, because that just implies a failure of imagination on my part. The political earth can shift under your feet pretty rapidly. So never is a long time.

That being said, you know, there's a quote that came across the transom yesterday in Jake Tapper's media tour in which he described encountering progressives on a progressive podcast that caters to progressive audiences. And he was talking about his son and how his son is a football player and wants to grow up to be a cop. And the progressives responded to that by mocking his son, implying that he harbored racially hostile animus in his heart, because why else would you want to be a law enforcement officer? And obviously the jingoism and toxic male fantasies that

contribute to anybody who would want to go into professional athletics are equally suspect. It is the sort of thing that contributes to the impression that Democrats have cultivated for themselves, that they're just genuinely hostile to expressions of traditional masculinity in whatever forms they take. One of the chapters in that book, Rise of the New Puritans in chapter five and six are devoted to hobbies, sex, and booze. And over the course of those chapters, you see, and this is part of the great awokenings, so perhaps it's on the decline, but it's not gone yet. You see throughout the course of those chapters, a concerted effort among progressive activists to establish their status within their hierarchy by identifying racial hostility in seemingly innocuous fare. Jogging, running, gardening, interior decorating, you know, just about every hobby that you

can imagine to say nothing of all the masculine, traditionally masculine things like working on cars, for example, and fishing and hunting and that sort of thing. All of them are pervaded with hostility, antisocial beliefs. When it comes to sex and booze, you get this something akin to, resembling to a degree that I found hard to ignore, the temperance movement. And the temperance movement was an outgrowth of suffragism. It was a women-led movement. Indeed, many of the activists whose rhetoric has been resurrected in the first wave of movement of feminism at the turn of the 20th century described alcohol as they describe it today. It makes and what it does to men. It makes men into brutes. It makes men into bad providers.

It makes men into philanderers. All this language you hear expressed some of it directly from the temperance movement and, and the subsequent movements that arose from it, including prohibition, all of this stuff is hostile to men. It is hostile to liberty as opposed to libertinism, although it's very hostile to that as well. And it's an expression of a sort of mistrust of the social compact that has arisen as a result of male participation in the political process that is just incompatible with the current social compact. It's the sort of thing that I don't think

they can move forward and be a politically viable enterprise unless they slough off a lot of this really hyper activist jargon that emerged from the campuses in 2020 and needs to be relegated back to them where it can be hopefully suffocated for all time. But for now it just needs to be quarantined back in back in these academic removes or tumblr Yeah, they write coded everything because you would make your bones by finding something new to be that was right coded working out

For example is was for a while there was The picture of Paul Ryan and tell me how masculine that activity really is Ryan and tell me how masculine that activity really is. And yeah so again the pendulum perhaps will swing but that sort of manly viga as they had with the Kennedys would appall them now and everybody gets more points for finding something new that is right coded and generally masculine because boo his ick. All right, so we got that. Stephen, do you want to add or go into another direction? Sure. Well, I mean, I do want to, before we get on to some headlines and things of the

last 10 days or so, I do want to say no, first of all, I've told you before, you're my favorite cranky person. And, but what I want to say is the reason I say that or that prefaces, I think you deserve a victory lap for your two books. I mean, you were reporting on the front lines about how crazy things were going, and I mean, we haven't won, but there's a fight afoot, and it's crumbling in ways that I think we all thought should happen, but couldn't believe that it wasn't happening. It took a while. And I'm actually, I can make a case for pessimism or crankiness myself that if it goes back to college campuses, it will go to ground again and reemerge in new forms, new vocabulary

in five to ten years and we'll be back in this mess again. So I don't know. But first of all, I mean, you did some really great writing and all that and I want to salute you for all that. Let me ask about the shooting in DC, which is now, you know, what, 10 days ago or whatever it was. I don't know. I mean, obviously October 7 was a real turning point moment for a whole lot of things, not just Israel, not just our college campuses, but making us realize that anti-Semitism is a lot more widespread and accepted, promoted. It shocked me, I have

to say. And then I wonder if these shootings are also because of how, I keep using the word shocking again, but that was such an outrageous crime. And, you know, the person looks to be a typical product of our universities where people marinate in these hateful ideologies and we're breeding violence like we did on the universities in the late 60s. I don't know what I haven't, I should have probably, you've probably written something on it that I've missed, but do you think this is also going to be a turning point or an inflection point in where this is going? I don't. I wish I did. I suspect we're going to need a few more inflection points, which is to say horrible violence in order for us to really fully grapple with what we're attempting

to reckon with here. There was no reckoning during the Biden years when this violence erupted. And the there's been an effort on the part of DSA affiliates in particular, this one DSA splinter group, which is unashamedly Maoist. So there's a lot of, if you go to the website, there's a lot indicts leftism in a way that leftists are unlikely to want to reckon with. Talk about crank. Here we go. This all goes back in some form or fashion to the Soviet Union, as things do when it comes to just about everything I write. My colleague, Dominic Pino, smartly observed on the editor's podcast a couple of episodes ago that anti-Semitism became a feature of Soviet propaganda, in particular anti-Zionism. Zionology was a focus of study inside the Soviet Union, and it became something that the Soviets began to export.

It was an ideological export after World War II, in the end of the Stalin years, and in particular during the Brezhnev years, when Israel stopped being this archipelago of communal kibbutzim and started being a tool of the West and also something that was controlling the West. And that became that was evolved in Soviet rhetoric into Zionism as a species of bourgeois nationalism, which was a foreign policy project that the Soviets emphasized in particular after 1967 and 1973,

when Israel wiped the floor with a variety of Soviet client states in the Middle East. It was a necessary project from the perspective of the Kremlin. Fast forward, we still have the vestiges of this effort to blend Soviet-style Marxist-Leninism with anti-Zionism, and we see it in the rhetoric and behavior and activities of far left nationalists, in particular the democratic socialists of America and the splinter group that came out and said, you know, we need more people like this guy to shoot and kill Zionists because that's the only way we're going to advance. I don't think the DSA nationally would take ownership of that proposition, but they certainly did after October 7th, by which I mean October 8th, took to the streets, took to the streets and to attack Israel for inviting this violence upon itself and to preempt any particular, any possible retribution that Israel would meet out against Hamas. When it took direct influence from these attacks, one of the rallies was called flood Brooklyn for Gaza, which took direct inspiration from the Alulax of Flood, which is the name that Hamas gave to the October 7th massacre.

You can see in the signs, there is only one solution, Intifada revolution by any means necessary. All that sort of thing is radicalizing if you take it seriously. And there's going to be some people who do. There's in a country of 330 million people, there are going to be some cranks out there who think you're being serious and literal and will act on these more, what are frankly being retailed to them as moral imperatives of the utmost importance. So yeah, it doesn't surprise me that we see some really far left socialist types, Mary,

wed anti-Semitic, anti-Zionism and their Marxian fervor, because that has been something that was a concerted project for a half century and we're just dealing with the vestigial elements of it. Yeah, so, you know, anyone who pays attention to Middle Eastern studies programs at universities, as I know you do and I try to, knows that they're just cesspools. And seminaries of intolerance, we say that generally about universities, but especially those departments. And I do know that Columbia has cashiered a couple of people, but I would think that more university leaders, presidents, trustees would say, you know, this is the occasion when we can clean house and actually close down some of these departments

completely. It's what really ought to happen, right? I don't see much of that. And that, say more about that if you want, but I want to connect it to the Harvard question, which is, and I'll put it this way, sure, I understand the arguments from Steven Pinker and others that Trump is taking out after Harvard with a meat ax and you know he may actually harm some reasonable medical research and this and that and the other thing.

All coach and arguments. On the other hand, trying to cajole universities for the last what 30, 40 years hasn't gotten very far, hasn't achieved very much, and I've come to the point where I think you know the only thing that's gonna make these universities change is a two-by-four to the head, which is what Trump is certainly delivering to Harvard and by implication, he's ready to do it to other universities too. How do you feel about all that? Is that a reasonable way of thinking about it or you have some reservations? David Klingerman It's reasonable. I have more reservations than you about, for example, the war on Harvard. I don't think the public, I think the public is very mistrustful of these institutions and I think they would welcome

efforts to reform and even coerce and cajole them by the administration. I don't think they look fondly on a two by four. I think they see that as arbitrary. I think they don't believe that the president should be wielding two by fours against American private institutions, even if they take taxpayer funds with the proper conception on their part, frankly, that any instrument that you forge in the culture war, you should expect to be taken by your adversaries and wielded against you. They don't want to be on the receiving end of that sort of thing, nor do I want conservative institutions to be similarly targeted by Democrats who would take the opportunity to use the precedents that are being set today and train them on their own ideological adversaries.

Like having the IRS like having the IRS sicked on them. Oh, that never happened, James. They may have paid out settlements and admitted to doing something there, but now we know in retrospect that nothing ever happened. That's a digression. Regardless, I'm of two minds on that, on the whole anti-Semitism EO and the implication application of it. I think it's generally good, certainly warranted when it comes to Columbia, for example, Columbia was desperately trying to do what the anti-Semitism

EO compelled them to do. It just couldn't get out from under all the entrenched interests within Columbia that were, that were preventing those kind of reforms, just common sense reforms and things like calling the cops on the students that were constantly taking over their campuses. They were crying out for help. Harvard is a little different in so far as some of it got some of the Columbia treatment, which I appreciate. The rest of it looks very arbitrary and capricious and an effort to anathematize Harvard and rally cultural forces. That's not going to fly in the courts. So I'm afraid that this whole enterprise is going to be scuttled by the sloppiness of the application of these, of the anti-Semitism EU in particular,

and just by virtue of the letter of the law will ultimately not last very long. And I think that would be pretty unfortunate. I, on the other part, you know, the, the, the cesspit of the, um, the studies department, I came out of the studies departments and in my, in my liberal arts school, and I, I think I got a pretty good education, but I was a sophomore in college when nine 11 happened and, um, the immediately following, I think the following fall or the first spring, the following spring semester, I took an introductory course that was an introduction

to Islamic studies, Middle Eastern studies, because I wanted to get into the national security sphere. And there I was first introduced but to the thought of Edward Said. And I realized at the time that this all didn't make a whole lot of sense. Indeed. I thought it was pretty antithetical to the American creed because it rang to me like race essentialism, orientalism broadly as a theory seemed to me like race essentialism, demographic essentialism,

the idea that your accidents of birth determine your course in life, antithetical to the American idea. And you see, I think I've been justified in that very early preliminary impression of his thought and the subsequent encounters I've had with it and the many progeny who have studied under Said and taken his ball and ran with it. It is pretty much the basis of what makes the studies departments in these colleges. Suspect is they're generally beholden to the idea that your accidents of birth set you on a pretty predetermined course in life. It's the sort of thing we used to call racism and bigotry. But in a particularly enlightened context, if you use the right polysyllabic

jargon, you can get away with it. And you can, in fact, you can call it, you know, highly educated. Right. And that's the sort of thing that I think we're encountering in colleges. I don't think the federal government can make that go away. I think they can make it worse. But I don't think they can make it go away. That'll take a change in the paradigmatic approach that Americans have towards institutions of higher education generally and what they're supposed to do. What the output, the deliverables are supposed to be. Is it credentialism or is it preparing these kids to navigate a professional environment? Hopefully we get back to that sooner rather than later. Sayyib, and Azil, all the way up to Kendi.

There's, that is so institutionally woven into the warp and the woof of the institution. That's why when you say it's difficult to get rid of, I agree with you. Because, I mean, if you had seven, if you had a week after week attack where somebody is driving his car into a group of people on behalf of Palestine, the difficulty that the college studies people would have

is that once you switch your allegiances and start to say, well, you know what, maybe Hamas and Gaza are not ethically pure and enlightened in this instance, then you have to say that everything that undergirds their support of Ham Mazenkasad, the colonialism, Zionism, the imbalance of power, all of those things, they have to question all of those, and those are fundamental beliefs. So asking a lot of these people at the universities is like saying, well, okay, you can still be a Christian, but you have to deny the divinity of Christ, okay? So look with that in your head. I don't know how they're going to be able to do it without replacing a lot of these people, but how do you replace them when they're tenured the rest of it? When the entire

intellectual mission of these places is to instill in people the belief in power dynamics and colonialism and the ills of an Orientalism and the rest of it, again you have to either come up with a new institution that does things American things better or you just have to... I mean there's a chicken-egg situation here when it comes to anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism as just a really general expression of bias in these institutions. Are they taking their cues from the activists or are they producing activists? So in the wake of the 10-7 attacks, what we would hear from, for example, anti-racism

activists, Black Lives Matter activists would be to layer over the Israel-Palestine dynamic the heuristic of American racial dynamics, which doesn't make any sense in the Palestinian Israel dynamic. But you would hear that everywhere. You would hear it from Tanahisi Coates, who went there and applied generally the logic of Jim Crow to the West Bank, for example, you heard activists in the streets whose names you never heard of talk about the Hamas terrorists and murderers as though they were using these words I'm taking directly the field hands who had meted out vengeance against their masters. This is all the language of antislavery rhetoric, and it is just an effort to comprehend and understand a conflict that is far more deep and far more complex than they do give it

credit for. And so they're just seeking a way to navigate that by applying something that they understand to it. The thing is, you could be forgiving of that if you hear it just on a YouTube of a guy on a street corner shouting. But when it comes from credentialed and lettered academics too, and there's very few distinctions between the rhetoric, it's hard to tell where one stops and the other begins. And so it's hard to find out what

you deracinate in order to affect the change that you want to see, because you could be going after the wrong source. It's just so far gone at this point, um, that it's hard to identify, well, except from establishing those other institutions that you mentioned. True. Well, but I think we've conclusively studied it and, uh, come up with our solutions here now so we can move on to other places in the world where bullets are flying, people are dying, drones are going in, uh, Russia, Ukraine, Stephen, I believe you wanted to go point in this one. Well, I could. No, I've been listening to you and reading you since the Ukraine war broke out,

and you've been very passionate and I think not personally invested. I don't know, maybe that's too strong a term. You're very passionate about a lot of things you write about. I am personally invested. I am personally invested. I have two degrees in Russian security policy, and I think Moscow represents a profound threat to US national interests So yeah, and so insofar as I'm invested in the future security of this country, I am emotionally committed to this cause Yeah, so I imagine I mean I want to ask a specific question, but imagine you're probably disappointed with Trump so far On the lack of progress and even making a peace deal well first of all, I think the project was ill-conceived

because it began from a place that failed to properly apprehend the nature of the conflict. So it was doomed to failure to begin with. And I've been disappointed with the process because there's been sacrifices that we've made along the way. The foremost among them is after that Oval Office dispute, which I think was February 28th, on the US cutoff intelligence sharing with Ukraine. And

the intelligence that we cut off was what they use to accurately target Russian positions with ATTACOMS and High Mars long range missiles. They couldn't use those platforms. So they were routed in Kursk in that little sliver of Russian territory that they occupied, which would have been a great negotiating chip at the bargaining table, but we literally just threw it away in the fit of peak in order to communicate our displeasure with the Lodimir Zelinsky's, uh, right. Sartorial choices.

I don't even know. Frank, it was, it was really stupid and it was a material sacrifice of U.S. interests in the process. I don't think it's the last one we're going to make. Right. Well, I thought it was possible to make out a plausible strategy. I'm not saying they really thought this, but I thought, you know, I could see that you want to put the pressure publicly on Zelensky first and then you put the onus on Putin to make the next move. And Putin has said, no,

I'm not interested. And it does seem to me that Trump is being a slow learner here. So, I mean, what should, are stiffer sanctions an effective move here? Is it too late for that? Do they work well at all? I've always been kind of skeptical that sanctions get us very far. Yeah, they may. I mean, they, to the extent that the foreign, the international relation of literature on sanctions is kind of ambiguous. Do they change the behavior of regimes? Not necessarily. But not never. The problem is, as you say, Steve, that Vladimir Putin has not said, no, I'm not interested. He's playing a more deft game. He's implying that he's very much at the table, even though he makes no gestures in the direction of either Ukraine or the United States. Indeed, he just absorbs concession after concession

and asks for more. But nevertheless, he has not washed his hands of the things that leaves open the prospect. If you're committed, ideologically, emotionally to a deal for the sake of a deal, deal qua deal, then yeah, you're going to stay at the table too. Yeah. Right. The thing is, is that the, the, the administration has been signaling that the posture could be shifting. The president himself hasn't really signaled that yet. He said he's really frustrated, but the, the administration itself has only in the space of the last month lifted a hold on arms sales to Ukraine, not the provision of arms, not, not giving them arms, but sales

to Ukraine. It has lifted this week, um, targeting restrictions on long range orders to the extent that they have it. Let me stop you right there. When it comes to the armaments that we're giving them and now saying weapons free, I mean, this is, you know, you can, we're not going to tell you what you can and cannot hit. Isn't there a bridge that goes to the Crimea that should have been gone like within the first six months of this conflict? Yeah, well, so there were a couple efforts to target that via unconventional attacks. There was these cars that exploded, disabled it a little bit. But yeah, I mean, maybe they, I don't, I couldn't tell you whether or not they

have the ordinance necessary to target that sort of thing. But yeah, that's one of those various links to Moscow that Ukraine would like to cut off. They've done a very good job of putting the Black Sea Fleet at the bottom of the sea. But they've done, as far as I remember, there have been two attacks on the Kursk Bridge, and I don't think they've... No, they haven't. ...the Crimean Bridge. I don't think they've... Which always told me that we told them they couldn't take it down. So just briefly, just a point that I didn't get they've, uh, the Crimean bridge. I don't think they've, uh. Which always told me that we had, that we told them they couldn't take it down.

So just briefly, you know, just a point that I didn't get to make previously, it's very frustrating to hear the president say, you know, something's changed in Vladimir Putin. He's changed. Why is he killing all these people? Why is he bombarding these cities? That's so weird of him, right? The only reason why we're experiencing these overwhelming bombardments now, over the last couple of days of cities like Kiev, Kharkiv, Odessa, is because Ukraine has had to triage

defensive ordinance, it has to ration defensive ordinance like Patriot interceptor missiles, because they ran out of them, because the Trump administration isn't giving it to them. So all of a sudden we're having an intense penetration of Ukrainian airspace, and the president says, whoa, whoa, whoa, what happened here? You happened here. Mr. President. This is the outgrowth of your policies. This is what your vice president wants

So yeah, take ownership of it. Don't act like the vice the the president of Russia who's never changed his stripes who's extremely clear about what his objectives are to his stripes, who's extremely clear about what his objectives are to, to right the wrong of the collapse of the Soviet Union and reclaimed the glory of Catherine the Great, who sees the Black Sea coast in the 18th century. This is what he says his goals are. We invent these elaborate structures to explain a way that he's not actually that crazy. He must mean something different, but we're diluting ourselves in that process process he's extremely clear and his behavior is extremely consistent all we have to do is recognize it there are some who say we were talking about sanctions before whether they bite whether they're biting now people point

to the imminent collapse of the Russian railway network because they've been locked out of good ball bearings in for all we know they're using Chinese ball bearings made of melted down American pennies I don't know but people seem to forget that if the entire Russian nail railway system collapsed and they were unable to get men of material to the front they would they would get donkeys and drag them there because they don't care what happens to the people that they're sending and that sort of seems to be the you know the the first thing that you realize

about the government and the society and the culture you're dealing with and trump does not so do you think that he's just ill-schooled on the matter or that he has some instinctive aversion to overt criticism because he knows that there's a substantial portion of his electorate that a doesn't care about ukraine um isn't different to it or actively hostile to it. And B, has some sort of residual admiration for Putin for whatever stupid reason that somewhere that that's influencing the things that he says or just or who can know. Yeah, somebody can know. I'm sure. I'm just not equipped to render that judgment.

I try not to go spelunking. Oh, we're never going to have you on. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, you're the guest. You're supposed to cut you. You have degrees. You're supposed to come up with something. Why do we have guests and degrees if they can't just speculate and make it sound as if they know what they're talking about? If you've encountered any really just a cursory review of the history of the last 500 years, you've probably encountered a little something about Russia's strategic approach to warfighting, which is just to throw men at the front. There was a pretty disturbing Wall Street

Journal report, I think yesterday or the day before, about the extent to which the Russian economy looks now pretty much indistinguishable from the German economy in the interwar years, in the late interwar years. It is a war fighting machine and it is dependent on the subsidies provided to the wartime economy from the government. And there are a lot of men who are earning a lot of money in services who will not earn that in the private economy if and when it just it pivots back to being a consumer economy. And Putin probably doesn't want a lot of those people returning from the front with a chip

on their shoulder and a lot less money than they had previously and ideas in their head. I mean, this is how Stalin responded to the troops returning home, putting them in the gulag for fear, accurately, frankly, that they would return home. The same could be said after the Napoleonic Wars, that these troops would return home with a lot of ideas in their head that they didn't want infecting Russian society. The best way to keep those men at the front is to keep the war on. And if it's not this war, then maybe it's another, which is what Kazakhstan is worried about, which is what the Baltics are worried about.

And frankly, I'm deeply concerned about when it comes to Estonia and Latvia. Well, let me bring you to another conflict, Noah, as sort of our exit issue. One of the problems with Trump is it's hard to know exactly what he thinks or perceives. You know, my suspicion and fear is that he wants to end two terms in office with having had no wars involving America started under his watch. Okay, nice sentiment, but I do think that that derives from his view that, well, he's not any good at analyzing the character of regimes. Like, I mean, it's three states we just said about he doesn't understand Russian history

and the Russian disposition. He's never read any of Gary Saul Morrison's great articles and commentary about Russia that I think are so good on this. I think he thinks dealing with Russia is like dealing with just a stubborn real estate deal, with stubborn bankers and unions and all the rest of that. And now that works for him in some areas, but I think it does not work for him here. And the collateral issue right now is, although Trump is pro-Israel, I think he likes Netanyahu. On the other hand, it does seem that he has restrained Israel from striking Iran to take out their nuclear sites, which they may or may not be able to do on their own. I don't have the military knowledge about that.

But even if they need our help, I think they ought to have it, is my opinion. So I mean, what is your sense of things? What do you know about that? Is Trump now being a problem for Israel's position with Iran, or what do you think is going to happen? Could be. I don't know. I think you're right.

Your assessment of Trump is right and pretty innocuous really I mean that is the experience that he takes to the presidency his his time in business and in real estate and frankly in reality television I think the people around him though have a grander vision and That grander vision conflicts a hundred percent with Trump 1.0. Trump 1.0 was a very conventionally conservative administration when it comes to foreign policy for the most part, because he wasn't all that interested in foreign policy. He really did outsource the administration

to a lot of people who had been in and around government for years who didn't necessarily share his outlook when it came to US retrenchment and its overextension abroad. Now he's surrounded by a bunch of people who say that the president's instincts are great, that all he has to do is follow his instincts. And then incept in his head, instincts that aren't necessarily even his,

but are certainly theirs. And I see a ton of Obama in this approach when it comes to Europe and the Middle East and the pivot to Asia. I see it all following a very similar trajectory. Barack Obama called America's NATO allies freeloaders. He attacked the Middle East saying they were prosecuting tribal grievances on our dime. He withdrew US combat divisions

and the very last tank division from Europe in 2013. We know what happened subsequently eight months later. He engineered the US withdrawal from Iraq and empowered the Iran ledled Shiite militias to get us out of there, which is why the Iraqi security forces collapsed amid the rise of ISIS, which by the way, was something that we allowed to happen as well because we let Russia into Syria and said, oh, they got rid of all the chemical weapons, even as the Assad regime was buying oil from the ISIS caliphate so it could create this Islamist opposition,

which would, so he could say, all my opponents are Islamists to a man as opposed to these Western forces that I'm crushing in Syria's West. And then you have the Iran deal and the Iran deal was supposed to finalize our divorce from the region. All of this was designed to facilitate the pivot to Asia, but the world just wouldn't cooperate because we just kept creating a bunch of vacuums that were filled with bad actors and we were forced to return at times and places that were not

of our choosing. I see a lot of that in Trump 2.0 and I think it will evolve in the same direction and frustrate the president's ambitions and America's ambitions, by the way, in the very same way we are counting on the world to cooperate with a grand ideological vision that just does not account for the world as it is. It is kind of contemptuous of the world as it is. These are the same people who accuse me of being a highly ideological foreign policy actor, but all I see is ideology on the other side and very few concessions to some unfortunate

realities that maybe we wish weren't the case, but just are. Now, that's the Noah I love. to some unfortunate realities that maybe we wish weren't the case, but just are. Now that's the Noah I love. It's almost as though knowing history is a problem and we have now the desire to be unburdened by what has come before. We will now unburden ourselves of our guest, although we love him and have him here as often as possible. The books, as I mentioned, are The Rise of the New Puritans, Fighting Back Against Progressive's

War on Fun and Unjust, social justice and the unmaking of America. And as you can tell, Mr. Rothman is keen to discourse on other matters as well, and it's a pleasure to talk about things domestic and cultural and foreign, international, and contentious. So Noah, thanks a lot for dropping by today and we'll have you on again, and I hope it's to talk about how everything is just going fine Surprisingly that the world has settled down is getting along. Oh, I know how boring with that face. You'd be out of a job All right. See ya bikes. So before we go, I suppose we should also notice somebody else who went and that was Elon Musk He's leaving Washington and apparently he is I wouldn't say he's the first person to come

to Washington with a set of ideas and then leave with those ideas a bit tarnished and disappointed, but he, not the first, but he may not be the last. What do you think? Well, I mean, look, I think this story is a bit of a sigh up by the media. Trump was always going to be a temporary presence because he was officially classified as a temporary government employee, which meant he could only do his job for, I don't know, 160 days or something like that, half a year, before triggering some very difficult legal problems for himself. So he was always going to go, and this was reported back in January, but somehow the media seems to have forgotten, and now they're trying to make a big deal about, oh my god,

Musk is leaving. But I do think part two is, you know, Musk was probably a little naive. Like a lot of Silicon Valley people, they don't understand why political problems aren't solved like engineering problems. Just add the fact that Musk is, I don't want to say autistic exactly, but he's somewhere out there in his own little world, a brilliant guy that he is, and determined and successful, and they're often frustrated by government. So I think this is not a huge surprise. I don't know if more people will follow him or not, but I kind of expected something like this would happen. I do think finally, point three, he may have been shocked because of his naivety and lack

of experience at how bad the blowback was. I don't think he expected there would be vandalism and fire bombings of Tesla dealerships and people keying the cars and people putting anti-must stickers on their Teslas that they bought three years ago and so forth and you know that may have gotten to him and bothered him a bit because I don't think he knew what he was getting in for. I think being called a Nazi by millions of people is probably one of those things. Yes. Which do not. I mean you can laugh it off and make fun of it, but the rest of it when you know that there's all of these people in these posters and these stickers and the rest deeply

convinced that you made a Nazi, that you are a Nazi. It's extraordinary. I was on Reddit the other day and there was a post that said, why are we not talking about the, why are we not still talking about the fact this guy gave a Nazi salute? Okay, why is this thing that is not true, not still first and foremost in our conversation? So I went to the post to read what people were saying, and the first thing that I noticed at the top of it was that I had been banned from participating in this conversation.

And actually, I find this from time to time on Reddit, I will stumble in for something oddly terrifying, mildly interesting. What should I do? Gosh, I'm old. You are banned from participating. You know why I'm banned in large swaths of Reddit? I made one comment in a subreddit called lockdown skepticism, which was all about back in 2021, which is all about being skeptical of the measures being taken to do something about COVID from the lockdowns to masking and the rest of it. The rules of this subreddit said that this was not for anti-scientific or anti-vaccine talk that the moderators believe that COVID was a was a serious that this was not for anti-scientific or anti-vaccine talk, that the moderators

believed that COVID was a serious condition and was not a made-up thing, and that they would brook no conversation about it. Basically, it's like, you know, let's have a reasonable conversation about lockdowns and masks, shall we? So what did I do? Did I wade in there and start using a musk flamethrower and everybody and talking about you know, crazy stuff like it's you know, It's from a lab, you know insane stuff like that from 2021. No Somebody was quoting Charles CW cook and we're gonna end with that since he's not here and we'll bring him in you know

Sort of in this in the form of this story quoting Charles CW cook about his lockdown skepticism and his experience in Florida and a reply to that was, well, you know, Charles, at least there's one sane person left at National Review, to which I responded, well, I wouldn't say just one, alluding to myself since I write there under my own name. Right. That's what got me banned simply saying that Five words in this subreddit got me banned from a large swath of reddit

Which is wondering why we're not calling this guy a Nazi I just I just absolutely love it. The place is a self-refuting argument every day. Well there we are folks. We have had a wide ranging conversation, or as they say after the Soviet Prime Minister Gromyko just got out with his counterpart, a frank and honest discussion, I think, of many things. Stephen, how long are you in Iceland?

Another week. Okay, well that's plenty of time to do the Golden Circle and explore all the games of throne sites and go someplace and have, you know, have you wander down Main Street in Reykjavik and there's a great place, a second floor, they serve you soup in a bread bowl and then you eat the bowl. And then there's, I think they also serve it with some sort of local fish that has been soaked in bleach and, no, it's the shark that's been soaked in bleach and then buried somewhere and it smells absolutely awful, but everybody

has to try it. I think there's a cheeseburger, a McDonald's cheeseburger that's been under a, under, it's been sort of, you know, under glass for like 10 years and hasn't decomposed. There's that to see in Iceland. Pete Liesvold There's the International Penis Museum here too. There's that, there's that, and there's that great and terrifying and awesome church which does not seem to stand for any particular doctrine that I can tell, but expresses this sort of empty aspiration for divinity that I find absolutely fascinating.

It's quite something. Quite a culture. Yeah, that is quite a thing. Yeah, that is a very strange building. Yep. It's quite something. It's quite a culture. Quite a thing, yeah. It's a very strange building, yeah. Yep, well as they say about a country where it's way up there, quite isolated, and they have daylight for, you know, then they're dark.

Everybody is an alcoholic and is in a band. And you know, I can think of worse countries in which it was to be. All right, so we'll probably talk to you there. I will be off next week gallivanting about someplace else. Charles should be back, and you, the viewer, the listener, the reader, if you're just doing this on some sort of YouTube transcript, you might want to go to Cozy Earth where you will get a big discount if you tell them that you came from us.

Of course you'll find that in the posting on ricochet.com. And if you, ricochet.com itself is where you should go after this to join if you haven't already. And if you ricochet.com itself is where you should go after this to join if you haven't already you may have perused the main page for however many years, but Never curious what goes on in the member side. Oh, cuz if you just a few Coins will get you into the thriving center-right civil community You've been looking for all your days on the internet Also, you give us a review wherever you happen to find a review possible because that surfaces the podcast and the next thing You know, we got more people listening and the next thing, you know ricochet is

Is rare to go for another year and I mean we'll be hitting podcast 1000 about 250 or so. So 15 that's five Hope we can make it. I'll be old by then Here we wish killing you with through my store-bought teeth. Or not, we'll see. In any case, thanks for listening, folks. I'm James Lylex, this has been The Ricochet Podcast. Stephen, see you later and everybody else.

Bye-bye. Yeah, next week.