The Ricochet Podcast - Bomb Throwing Like a Liberator

Episode Date: March 13, 2026

For decades, war game experts have produced dire predictions for American-Iranian war scenarios. While it's still early days, the circumstances are much more favorable than strategists had supposed. Noah Rothman returns to break down what's going right in Iran, what remains worrisome and uncertain, what the public ought to anticipate, and what the administration ought to tell them. (Noah also gives us a quick preview of his upcoming book, Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America.)The fellas wrap the interview with theme-appropriate drapings: Brits are removing their greatest citizens from the nation's banknotes, reminding us of waning resolve from Western allies, and a thwarted terrorist plot in New York has the media and politicians twisting into knots to conceal the truth.(This episode was recorded on Thursday, March 12th to accommodate the hosts' travel schedules.)

When I mentioned political violence, I just saw him on the Zoom look like a dog who hears his name, or a particular... Or the owner's whistle, yes? So first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. It's the Rickashay podcast with Stephen Hayward and Charles C.W. Cook. I'm James Lilloch. Today we're going to talk to Noah Rothman about, well, what else? The war. But there's more.

So let's have ourselves a podcast. Their Navy is gone. 24 ships in three days. That's a lot of ships. Their anti-aircraft weapons are gone. All of their airplanes are gone. The communications are gone. Missiles are gone.

And launches are gone. Other than that, they're doing quite well. Welcome, everybody. This is the Rikoshae podcast number 780. I'm James Lillings, and I'm joined, of course, by Stephen Hayward in California or somewhere else in the world in Charles C.W. Cook, not on the Scepter dial, but in Florida.

Gentlemen, welcome. Hello. Good morning. They're other understated, almost English there. Hello, hello from Charlie. And so since you are indeed from the, from Blighty, we have to talk about one of the most consequential issues of the week. And I'm not kidding.

Britain's decision to scrap all of the human beings from their money, go to important British things like the British tree, which I think is the larch, and badgers and likewise. And it's causing something of a tempest in a teapot. It goes with abolishing jury trials for most

people and getting rid of hereditary lords and the rest of it all of a sudden these traditions stripped away, but there's something about getting rid of Churchill and replacing him with a badger that has struck a nerve in what seems to be a small remnant dying reflex reaction in British culture. So you wrote about this, I expect, and tell us,

tell us what you think of it. Well, I did write about this. You're right. What do I think about it? I think that it is a sign of chronic underconfidence and the rejection of national identity, is what I think. I think that if you look back at this, the history of the British Banknote, you will find all manner of impressive people having been depicted. Thereon, you will see Shakespeare and Jane Austen and Florence Nightingale and James Watt and Winston Churchill and Admiral Nelson and the Duke of Wellington and so forth. Those people, I think, are what people think about when they think of Britain, far more

than, say, a hedgehog. I have nothing in particular against the wildlife of Great Britain, but it's not what Britain's known for, is it? And it's not particularly interesting relative to other countries. Every country has wildlife, but not every country has Shakespeare. So if they had said, do you know, we're a little bit monomaniacal. in our money art, and so we're going to rotate Britain's heroes.

I think that would have been defensible, but they didn't do that. What they said is, it is overdue, what a word, that we take those heroes, and I include Jane Austen, Shakespeare, and James Watt in that category, we're going to take them off the money completely and replace them with no other people. And the reason for this seems quite,

obvious to me and that is that animals are uncontroversial animals are an abstraction. I know people like their own dog but when you see a badger you don't say oh it's Terry you say it's just a badger but with a person you have to think about that person as a sinful human an imperfect human somebody who may have had some views of his era that we don't like today and I just don't think the British at the moment are courageous or sophisticated or adult enough to do that. And so the moment that someone says, well, Florence Nightingale probably had some really weird views about,

then they say, oh, should we took her off the money? Because everyone has to get. No, that's not what you do. You say, yeah, but that's not why we know her. And I'll finish with this. About 10 years ago, there was this campaign to get Nelson's column removed from Trafalgar Square. And these things have been there so long. They are literally named.

after Admiral Nelson and his most famous moment. And the argument was that Nelson had some pretty horrible views about slavery, which he actually did for a short period of time. And my rejoinder, which I wrote up, was, yeah, but that's not why he's famous. I don't think it's particularly problematic if outside of a courthouse, as happened here in Jacksonville a few years ago, a statue of Alexander Stevens is removed. Because Alexander Stevens' whole thing,

the thing for which he is known and famous, is black people aren't equal and can't be, and the United States should, as its cornerstone institution, celebrate slavery. That's why his name is in the books. But that's not true of Nelson. And it's not true of any of the people on the money. Maybe Winston Churchill had a few quirks.

He did. Maybe he had some views on race, although he was actually pretty progressive for his time, to be honest. But maybe he had some views on race that today we might, but that's not why he's known. He's known for saving the world. So I think this is insane,

but I think it is very sad because I think what Britain has essentially said is that it wishes to denude itself of all that makes it Britain and instead point to things that don't make it Britain but just happen to be there. Yeah, so I do have this prediction for you, Charlie, which is from the menager of animals

that may pick from, I have a hunch they will omit the bulldog. for the obvious reason, right? That was always a symbol. Well, it might remind people of Churchill if you put a bulldog on the pound note, right? And, you know, a lot of comments on Twitter has been, boy, the British ruling class really hates the country these days. And I think I'm increasingly believing that may be literally true. But I also think this is the logical next step for the radical egalitarianism that, you know, intellectual circles, it started with, you know, in history many decades ago, of rejecting the great man theory of history. and you know the rise of social history, which is really, you know, just a derivative of Marxism. What drives history or all the social forces and materialism and not Napoleon or de Gaul or Churchill or Franklin Roosevelt, right? They hate that. Because those examples of human excellence, whether you agree or disagree with their acts, are an implicit rebuke to the sort of flattening egalitarianism of the radical left for decades now. So it's going to come to America sooner or later. I can't believe we still have some of the people.

people we do. I mean, it was Grant still on the $50 bill, I think. I should look. But it's, Jefferson's on the $2 bill. My goodness, he was the prime offender in slavery and, you know, raped as slaves and all the other stuff you hear that it's the most important things about Jefferson now, we're told, right? So it'll come here, I think, or there'll be a motion for it, at least. I saw some statistic the other day that said that 85% or something of all the $2 bills are in strip clubs. You're right there. Poor Jefferson. This episode is brought to you by Spreker, the platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives,

and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin's swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com.

Spreaker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. Well, when I saw this story, I also read elsewhere that one of the reasons that they were doing this was to avoid giving offense. They didn't specify that, but it made you think that perhaps the depiction of the human form might be the human face, the visage might be offensive to some people, that they're anticipating that objection in the future. To what you want to say to people, look, this is British culture, pound sand, or quid sand, or whatever you wish, that this is who we are, and that we are going to continue to do this. But when Charlie mentioned Trafalgar Square, yes, I mean, it's taking down Nelson's column is not something I have in the cards, but I wouldn't be surprised because there is, in that. space, a famous empty plinth. I think it's called the fourth plinth that tacked down

the corners of the square. One of them is empty and it's constantly being used for new art. And the new art is generally meritricious, scolding, ugly, celebrating any sort of, you know, current day's zeroism. And it's never up to snuff with the rest

of the stuff on the corners, which is classical and British and full of lions and, you know, the rest of the things that people expect under their British statuary. And so the whole culture seems to be pushed towards being an empty plinth on which the leaders can plop whatever they want at the moment in order to rewrite the past and usher us us into the glorious new future. And what I don't understand is the roots of, I don't get why they would be so so uncomfortable with their own culture that they find the need time and

again to make these conspicuous public efforts to undo it. If they wished, a lot could be accomplished on the labor and the leftist agenda without these things that stand out by like big red flaring lit flags that they get people's backup but as we've talked from time to time to time does it matter really if people's backs are gotten up and how many backs actually are there gotten up i know a fellow uh you know one of my friends in england as it's british as you can get he bought tony hancock's hat from an old television show that has in a glass case in his he has an he has a British minor, a car in his driveway, to the core. But I can't see them actually doing anything about this or getting a bit upset about it because, you know, what is one to do? Life in the

village goes on. And peace with what we saw about their participation in war with Iran, that the whole British spine, the whole British glory of the Navy just seems to have evaporated. The special relationship is gone. And I, again, despair. But again, I'm here. And it's not my country. And perhaps I should just divest myself of those emotional feelings. Well, can I give listeners a book recommendation on this? You know, Roger Scruton had that great phrase about how we live at a time with a dominant culture of repudiation. And one of my favorite books about the whole European wider scene. I mean, Douglas Murray's written about this, but an older book from 10, 15 years ago,

is The Tyranny of Guilt. I love the title. Tireney by a French writer named Pascal Bruckner. And I've met this guy a couple times. What I like about him is he was one of those radical students on the barricades in Paris in May of 68, which is still a big, Americans don't really appreciate this, how big a deal that was in France. Still today, it is a factor in French politics in ways that I think are beyond most Americans to know. And his book is a terrific attack on the insidiousness of the self-imposed guilt of the European culture today. and he's still very much a social democrat

and his ordinary political economy you might say so anyway and he's a splendid writer if you like that French style that they often have do you think that's what's driving it Charlie guilt or is it just as sort of this this late 60s eternal desire to repudiate the past but to make this glorious name

I think there's a lot that's driving it I think part of it is leftism which Steve's says doesn't like the great man theory and therefore doesn't like great men. I think some of it's immigration. The British have persuaded themselves, as of some in this country, but it's less prevalent, that the way you welcome immigrants is to remove your own culture, which is weird, given that the immigrants largely move to places because of that culture.

That's a really strange reaction to say, welcome to Britain, which you want to be in rather than Pakistan, whatever. We'll get rid of it, don't worry. Then there's the stupid racial bean counting, which we have here as well. All those people I mentioned earlier, they're rather white, aren't they? Well, yes, that's what you'll get on an island that is still 90% white and 20 years ago was 95% white and 200 years ago was 100% white. If you're going to do a memorial for great Victorians,

there probably aren't going to be too many Hispanics among them in London. And then there's the final part of it, which is that the British elites don't actually like Britain very much. and never really have and they are finally getting their revenge what really alarmed me though James was that the polling on this seemed to be confirmatory I saw that 60% to 32

of British people who were asked and I don't know what the question said said that they would rather have animals on the money than people so I can't quite blame this on you know the Labor government or Islington or what you will. This does seem to be a general cultural malaise. Well, then they'll get their money with the budgies on it.

All I can say is this. It's probably a continuation of an insidious plot to get rid of money altogether and institute a digital currency because these days I hate British money. It's plastic. It doesn't fold right. It slips around in your pocket.

I don't like it. And if they make it so aesthetically unpleasing and unpleasing to a tactile fashion, then people will just say, Oh, yes, heaven's sakes, bring on that digital currency. Or they will say, bring on Noah Rothman. Right, that's what I'm going to do. Noah, senior writer at National Review,

where he writes about everything, especially, you know, foreign affairs, that stuff we have going on from time to time. He's the author of Unjust, the Rise of the New Puritans, and the upcoming blood and progress, a century of left-wing violence. And we'll talk about that. But first, welcome, Noah. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it, James.

All right, a recent piece from you. what's gone right in the Iran war. If you listen to the press, of course, it's just been an excuse for wasting money on lobster. Lobstergate being the story of the date, not the targeted assassination of the guys who are doing checkpoints. But we all see...

There does seem to be an assumption abroad that Pete Hagseth himself can consume $7 million worth of lobster and steak. I accept the challenge, if that is the premise. Oh, no, he's been splashing around in a giant Scrooge McDuck vault that is filled to the brim with steak and lobster tails. So let's start with what's going right. We were told a couple of days ago that there was something new en route that it was pager-like in its depth and its scope and its surprise.

Was that the ability that we have or Israel has or both seems to be to use drones to track individual guys where they live, hit their checkpoints, get them as they're taking out the garbage? What's the most recent thing that's gone right, let's say? Well, I have seen those reports, and I'm not entirely sure if those are happening now or we're only just getting video of them happening recently. The theater is opaque, and we have to be humble about what we can assess in real time. However, we'll step back a little bit and take a look at this campaign on its 12th day, which is where we're at right now. I've been following this for the better part of 25 years. We've been war gaming scenarios with the all-out regime change war with Iran for the better part of three decades. And all of those scenarios were dire.

The notion being that Iran would activate its sleeper-cell terrorist organizations, Hezbollah, or otherwise, in Latin America, Europe and North America, not an idle threat. We consistently and regularly arrest Hezbollah-linked operatives, charge them, and imprison them for acting on orders from Iran to execute terrorist attacks inside the United States or target American civic leaders, civil servants, and even the president himself with murder. Those were expected to execute dramatic attacks on soft targets, kill a lot of civilians in the process, and frustrate our activities domestically likewise. We were expecting dramatic cyber attacks on commercial ventures in particular, making financial transactions, difficult, frustrating operations for commercial ventures as well as government ventures. And we were expecting that the Iranian regime would mine the Strait of Hermuz. The Strait of Hermuz is presently closed to traffic, quote unquote. But it's not because of an abundance of mines in the strait, the threat of ballistic missiles, short-range ballistic missiles, or even fast attack boats that would swarm a boat and try to sink it. That was another scenario that was a very much a live prospect in these war games, taking out a U.S. warship that way.

The strait is not closed because of that. The strait is closed because of a financial artifact, insurance. Insurance makes it too difficult for these ships to cross the strait. That is much easier to resolve than it would be if we were dealing with a thoroughly mined. straight. And of course, a regime-changed war was forecast to require upwards of a million U.S. combat troops, not even support troops, combat troops. Iranian cities were expected to be in rubble. A million casualties on all sides of this conflict, at least before combat operations were over, after which you couldn't be sure that the regime itself would have survived.

Some rump regime might have survived, and there's probably likely to be pockets of instability and ungoverned areas inside the Iranian landmass, which would incubate transnational Islamist terrorist groups. So that's the baseline from which we're starting. And on day 12 of this war, you don't see anything like those kind of outcomes. In fact, we've achieved air superiority, if not supremacy. We're standing away from these exquisite standoff munitions, you know, rockets, long-range rockets, in favor of,

because we have command of the skies, in favor of gravity bombs, which are fitted with J-dams make them precision-guided bombs. They're a lot more abundant, a lot less expensive, and to make it easier to achieve our objectives. The Iranian Navy is fodder now for artificial reefs at the bottom of the Persian Gulf. All of their Soleimani-class ships are dead. Their fleet of mine-laying boats is largely in ruins.

We've struck 10 of their 18 airfields when last I checked. Their ballistic missile capabilities are done. down about 90 percent. Their missile launchers are down 60 percent. We're loitering over these missile cities where these missiles are entombed, and we're either striking the entrances or if we monitor and see activity, we strike them, rendering these missile silos inoperable until such time as a massive penetrating ordinance hits them, digs 200 feet down and blows them up. We have incredible command of the battle space. What everybody's concerned about is what happens with the these asymmetric attacks moving forward, Iranian drone capabilities are not neutralized.

And because there was some vestigial hostility in the Pentagon to Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev, we did not purchase and should have these really cheap interceptor drones that they developed in Kiev, which would have helped us take down these Shaheeds. But yesterday, they managed to launch all of 39 Shahid drones and get through our American air defenses and layered air defenses around the Gulf. Now, that's not nothing. It hits real targets. It hits infrastructure, and it creates big headaches in the Gulf.

But we're not talking about this massive onslaught. These are headaches, you know? And we just see these videos and they look really devastating and dramatic, but they are deal withable and they're nothing even remotely like what we expected. The question is always compared to what. And compared to what in this campaign was a devastating conflict that would really chase in both sides of the equation and just not what we're seeing. This episode is brought to you by Spreeker.

The platform responsible for a rapidly spread. condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin's swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at

spreeker.com. Spreaker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. So, Noah, let me jump in here and let's tick off a few of these factors individually. I'm a little surprised, and there's reasons to think that maybe Trump, as people hadn't thought to matter through. My first data point on that is Trump reversing course on releases from strategic petroleum reserve and certain other things. I'm a little surprised that we didn't have a more forward strategy on the potential closure of the Straits of Hormuz. You mentioned mining. I'm thinking as I'm so old, I remember in 1987 when Iran tried to close the straits with mines. They had, I think, estimated 50,000 mines then. And we, along with our

British partners who then had a Navy, very effectively squash that. And, you know, that's back when they, you know, we did have a ship hit by an Iraqi missile by mistake, right? And we shot down an Iranian airliner by mistake. So, you know, fog of war, that sort of very tiny conflict compared with now. But I'm a little surprised that there isn't more capacity to stop Iran from harassing the strait. Yeah. So there is military capacity. We have contingencies developed over the course of decades, as you said, and executed them 40 years ago in the effort to reopen the strait.

We know what Iran's plan is and how they execute that, and we've sought to interdict that and had relative success. It's my understanding, and I could be wrong, because, again, the battlefield is opaque and we only know what we know and what people are telling us. But it doesn't seem to me, from what I'm gleaning, that the strait is closed because it is mined, because Iranian traffic is transiting the strait. It's not closed because the threat from short-range ballistic missiles or boat swarms are overwhelming. It is a financial issue. And listen, the president without an act of Congress seems to be able to muster about $20 billion. You need about $400 billion. And the president can't do it himself.

But you mean to tell me that we can't scrounge up $400 billion to reopen this key waterway? I don't believe it. This is a resolvable problem, much more easily resolvable than a thoroughly mine straight would be. And even then, we have the capacity to clear those mines. Well, I'm sure it can find $400 billion with a new tariff or two, but don't leave this up on our day. It's a global problem. It should be a global. Yeah.

Well, I mean, well, all right, not to dilate this too much. I do think that one of the issues is the crew on a lot of these ships say, hey, wait a minute, we're not soldiers. And, okay. And I think there had been a couple of ships hit with something, you know, drone, I don't know. So I don't know. I can't tell anything from afar, right? I just assume that 90% of what I read on social media is wrong, fake, poorly sourced, and so forth. I just, you can't, and even the mainstream media, I think, really doesn't know what's going on.

But the next question is, I've heard vaguely of some of the war games, some of my old pals at AEI used to run those every year. And I don't recall, and maybe I just didn't pay attention, that a complete regime change war would take up to a million soldiers. I think maybe I did once hear that 20 years ago. And so that raises the question, and this has been since day one, can you accomplish our war aims or a neutralization of Iran with air power alone? People say it's never been done. And I say, well, wait a minute. We did finally get Milosevic and Serbia to call off their war in Kosovo, almost 30 years ago. That did take 71 days of bombing, though, right?

What's the answer to that question, Noah? What's your opinion? What are we going to have to do? Are we going to have to contemplate some boots on the ground in selective ways or selected places? Or do you think we need to stay the course with the bombing? And finally, I'd like you to say something about what should Trump be saying and doing? Because right now he's all over the map. A lot of questions.

Some epistemic humility on my part, I don't know what it would take to collapse this regime. I should say that at the outset. Kosovo is a good model, except we've probably performed from the air roughly 40 Kosovo's in terms of the ordinance that's been dropped over the course of this thing. devastating. We can only, you know, we're focusing on the western half of Iran because it's harder to access the eastern half now that we no longer have Afghanistan as a base of operations. But the prospect of introducing ground forces to, say, seize Karg Island, which is the primary area that Iran exports oil from, is not off the table. The notion that we would seize Bandar Abbas, which is, you know, opposite the straight.

that's not off the table, although I don't necessarily think that's an option that the president wants to pursue and is probably going to be a last resort. Nevertheless, it would finally throttle the revenue stream that the IRGC gets from the sale of Iranian oil, and the IRGC is the primary beneficiary of the sale of Iranian oil. The Iranian people don't see almost dollar one from those revenues. The question, I forgot the second question. I can go right to what Trump should say, but what was the second question? Well, it's, well, is what do you think it could be the end here. Oh, how to collapse a regime from the air. Yeah, there's very few good models for that. I mean, you could say Libya, sort of, but that's a fraught comparison. Right. And you need a ground force.

You need a ground force. And the ground force that did it in Kosovo was the Serbian people. The ground force that did it in Libya was the Libyan people. We need the Iranian people to step up and act as that ground force. Well, should we arm the Kurds? I mean, I keep hearing, we're going back and forth on that. Is this a good idea, bad idea? Super fraught prospect. I don't know if it's the best idea. I don't know if it's the worst idea. I don't think it's a great idea.

And that might have been misinformation designed to keep everybody in Iran on their toes, move forces, for example, to the northwest of the country. Or, you know, these areas are in the northwest of Iran are also a restive population. And that would antagonize Turkey. And we already have a kind of a fraught relationship with the Syrian Kurds. because we've been trying to abandon them unsuccessfully for the better part of a decade. So, you know, we have a – the Kurds are a very reliable force, and the Israelis love the Kurds. They have a particular affinity for the stateless population of beset people for obvious cultural reasons.

But it would introduce a lot of variables that we probably don't want at this point. The ground force that we want to see is in urban centers in places like Tehran and come and elsewhere. Yitzvahan, Boucher. And we want the Iranian people to seize the nodes of command and control in this regime and then force the Iranians to rely on their traditional base of power, which is really rural, more rural than anything. But at that point, you're talking about a quasi-insurgency, and that would itself be a challenge to deal with, but it's a challenge for another day.

What should Trump say? Yeah, that's my last question, right. Trump should level with the American people. And there's never a bad time to do it. He's not given an address to the public. And I, for the life of me, don't know why since Obama, White Houses have been allergic to the Oval Office as a setting. Yeah.

I don't get it. I don't get it. I think, well, I think one reason why is we no longer have the old media where you had a roadblock where president's coming on at eight o'clock prime time and all the networks would carry it. But now we have 500 channels and social media. And I think that's one reason. I think Trump's not very good at Oval Office addresses.

But specifically, if you, Noah Rothman, or his speechwriter, what would you want him to say? Or what specifically would you like to hear from him? Yeah, I would say I would outline the nature of the Iranian threat. I would define all the ways in which we have been at war with this state from its inception 47 years ago, all the Americans that has killed, all the blood and treasure that it saps from us, and our forward deployment posture in the Middle East, which is necessitated by the Iranian threat, and how much strategic benefits we would derive from the neutralization of that threat allow us to finally execute that pivot to Asia that every president has been frustrated

by the nature of both Iran and Russia. I think we can deter Russia with NATO and with the conventional deployments that we have in Europe. The Middle East is far more tricky, and it requires surges and withdrawals, and we're very frustrated with that relationship. we'd love to withdraw, or at least maintain a footprint that is far more, far less onerous than the one we presently have. And the neutralization of that threat would facilitate it. Likewise, I would make a moral argument, even though the magam wing is allergic to it,

but the president isn't. He has said we want freedom for the Iranian people. He speculated about humanitarian intervention on behalf of the Iranian people. The American public does not necessarily respond as is not as allergic to the notion that we should intervene on the behalf of the Iranian people and that slaughter, that massacre of what Trump said in his state of the Union speech was 32,000 people, has sat the Iranian regime of legitimacy both at home and abroad. The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution condemning Iran attacking the Gulf states yesterday, and neither Russia or China vetoed it. I think they would have

in the absence of that massacre. It has just taken the wind out of the sails of the tankies who would otherwise defend this regime. And then lastly, I would tell the American people to expect that they would experience hardships as a result of this. This is not going to be a quick endeavor. American soldiers may come home in caskets. Some already have, and we may see more, and you're going to pay more at the pump, and it's going to be a while. I think Joe Biden made a big mistake by insisting that the pain that Americans would experience in their pocketbooks would be minimal, and it would be offset by administration actions. It wasn't. and the administration suffered for not telling the American public the truth.

I sympathize with the people who say that, you know, the president hasn't been clear in his goals or hasn't necessarily, you know, prep the groundwork for this sort of thing. Trump hasn't really trusted the American people with the truth, and they're reciprocating. They don't trust him either. And it's never, never too late to rectify that by leveling with us. This episode is brought to you by Spreaker. The platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition, known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds

to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Spreaker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. Do you think now that they can be convinced? Honest? No, not the administration, the public. Do you think the public can be

convinced. And I went off on a rant on the editors podcast. We both do it together you weren't on that one about the short termism of the news coverage of this. I think you can blame Trump to some extent for that. And it wasn't an attempt to smuggle in a case

for the war because as you know I'm agnostic. But I'm just irritated by the fact that we're doing this big thing. And you have daily tracking of oil prices, even when they go up and then go back to where they started. And the assumption that we're now in chaos and that everybody should panic, that is seen through one

lens just a total unwillingness to deal with trade-offs. And I wonder whether that comes as much from a public that is dispositionally unsuited to this sort of conflict as from the Trump administration's lack of communication, which I have criticized. Do you think the public can be convinced to stick with this? I do. I think the bully-pulling. I think the bully-pulling bit is a powerful instrument in the president's hands, and when it's used properly and the case is made, not once, not twice, but again and again and again in repetition until you can summon the arguments yourself by memory. I think that does have an effect, and I don't think he's starting from a baseline of zero. Polling indicates that the American public recognizes that Iran is a threat

to American strategic interests, as well as the safety of individual citizens. And we had that one survey, which you've talked about also on the editors, from CBS News, that indicates if this were a week-long endeavor, weeks-long endeavor, rather, that it would be overwhelmingly popular. It's a 74% proposition in favor. What people are concerned about, in my view, which is, you know, just my gut, is the potential for this to be a very long-drawn-out conflict that involves a slow drip of U.S. casualties akin to the insurgency phase of the Iraq War. That's what people don't want. And they want the president to reassure them to that effect.

Could the public be convinced by Trump? I don't know, because he's Trump, and he's a very polarizing figure. But we also had the survey that I pointed out today, which Aaron Blake over at CNN, identified, that the support for the Iran war is relatively unpopular. Let's say it's about 10, 12 points underwater. But if you take Trump's name out of the question, it's an even proposition. So people are evaluating it through the lens of domestic politics. And that's really what the press is doing too.

They're evaluating all of this to the lens of domestic politics. It's barely concealed their desire to brand the Republican Party with something akin to the Iraq War so they can take advantage of Iraq War syndrome, redux. I mean, it's so obvious that there's a political motive behind the unendurable, overwhelming drumbeat of stories. from the press about how everything is going wrong. The Gulf states are turning on us. We can't change the regime. The regime is entrenched, but if the United States doesn't stop trying to engineer regime change, will be worse off for it.

So we have to now pursue this campaign that's going to be a losing campaign, or will even be in worse straits. You know, we can't open the Hormuz strait anytime in the foreseeable future, on and on and on. and at the expense of the tactical victories that we're achieving, which are incredibly impressive and really detrimental to the future of this regime. I think we always talk about what America's situation is, you know, what its strategic impediments are, its hindrances. Yeah, I think about it from the regime's perspective. Let's say there's a scenario in which Trump pulls out early, says, you know, declares victory in retreats.

And you have a rump Iranian regime that's really nasty, mad as a bunch of hornets. But they have no ballistic missile capability anymore. They're seriously degraded in their capacity to exploit and export oil. They have no nuclear capacity anymore. Just about every besiege facility is destroyed. Every IRGC facility is destroyed. And you still have an angry Iranian population that wants vengeance for the 32,000 family members and friends that they lost at the hands of this regime. In a Gulf region, however quietly seething they are at the United States, were being drawn into this thing,

There's precisely one game in town to stop Iran from executing at any time and point in its desire to disrupt the oil market in its region to do so. China's not going to do that, even if it had the capability. Russia's not going to do that, even if it had the capability. Israel and the United States are the only game. So they're going to play, and the Iranian regime will be constrained both by its material deficiencies and its primary threat, which it makes no bones about its own people. If you hear their statements from whatever is left of this Iranian regime, they intend to treat anybody out in the streets like an enemy combatant, shoot them on site. They're terrified of their people, and their people will remain terrifying for the foreseeable future. This regime's days are numbered.

It's just a matter of when, and hopefully when is sooner rather than later. No, one of the problems people have discussed is that they set up a system by which decapitation of the regime does not mean capitulation, that there are all these autonomous groups that essentially don't have to answer to anybody. They can just continue on the war because they have authority delegated to them regardless of whether or not there's a Ayatollah at the top. We'll see about that. But I do know that you're right about the press and that if Trump was just sitting in a wheelchair with a long cigarette holder pointed up at a jaunty angle and a fedora, he'd probably be regarded as liberator. But there are other places to liberate. We've seen an interesting selection of American activity in the last few months.

we saw the magic raid in Venezuela where the guys swooped down, used phaser guns to turn everyone to jelly and then to Camodora. We've seen overwhelming force in the Gulf, and now we're talking about a sort of diplomacy and sitting down around a table to do something about Cuba. What is going on with Cuba

and what is the end game likely to be? Personally, for me, the end game I would like to be all the Cuban regime guys on the shore of Cuba, putting together boats out of milk cartons and old 57 mercury chassis and making their way perilously to Florida where all of the other Cuban guys are sitting there waiting for them with little, you know, tapping shalelys in their palms. But we'll see.

So what's the Cuba situation? Cuba situation is, again, pretty opaque, but the regime has made, or the administration, rather, has made no bones about its desire to see the Cuban regime, change its character fundamentally, if not. cease to exist in its present form. That's a worthy and noble goal. And again, it's not exactly veiled that their intention when taking out Maduro, as they did, was to create a pliant Venezuelan regime that would give us the essentially license to direct where their energy

was being dispatched to, the design there being to throttle China's access to it, but mostly Cuba. Cuba is propped up by the Venezuelan regime and has been cultivating that regime since Hugo Chavez took power in 1999, and that's where it gets most of his energy. And without that energy, the state is very close to economic collapse. It's been economically more abundant throughout this century, but it's especially dire right now. And yeah, the goal is to neutralize that as a threat. And there is a grand strategic component to all of this. I don't know where that campaign is going.

It seems to be in much more the distant future than the administration likes to say, if not the distant future within the next several years. It's not on the immediate to-do list. But the strategic rationale, you know, on October 6, 2023, the so-called access of anti-American powers that I was very energized about looked quite robust. And it looked like an approximate military alliance, Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran. And you could throw in some Latin American hostile states in there as well. But for the most part, that was what we were dealing. with, the regime is still in place in Venezuela, but it's much more chastened and pliant.

And that was valuable ahead of the Iranian campaign because the Iranians have a significant presence. The IRGC had a significant presence in Venezuela and Latin America broadly. And they've executed some of the worst terrorist attacks in Latin America. And that was a reduced threat. Again, Cuba is a reduced threat as a result of these initiatives. And if the Iranian regime falls, it takes another chess piece off the board, one of the most unpredictable, and I would say evil of America's antagonists on the world stage. Now, this isn't going to throttle China's access to energy. China will lean very heavily on Iran in the future, or rather Russia in the future for energy exports. And it's also insulated itself somewhat with its investments in both fossil

fuel power generation and electrification of, for example, cars and what I think. They're very, very leaning heavily into electrified cars. which reduces the sting if the Iranian regime were to fall along with Venezuela and throttle China's access to oil. They won't be without oil. But we bind Russia and China together in ways that actually advantage us. What we kind of want to do now is the opposite of engineering, an anti-Kistingerian foreign policy, the opposite of the Sino-Soviet split. We want to bind these two together.

They deserve each other. They are by no means allies. all of these states are not allies in the conventional sense that we would recognize them. You know, we come to your aid if you're attacked. That's not how these alliances work. They're relationships of convenience, and their only shared principle is the desire to see the American-led geopolitical order collapse and be replaced with something else. And they all disagree on what that something else looks like.

But they don't come to each other's defense when they're attacked. They prop them up and support them in covert ways, but those covert ways, but those covert ways, are unequal to the nature of the threat when you're under bombardment from the United States and Israel. And we would like to see a Beijing that is far more reliant on Russia and a Russia that is a far more chastened junior partner

to China and the two of them stuck with each other in a world that is increasingly arrayed against them and inclined towards isolating them. That's a much more advantageous future in American, an American strategic perspective. Authoritarian states, of course, can always crack down on their own people

when they get restive. The problem with the West is that we have a group of people who don't like us and would like to do something about it. Which leads us to your upcoming book. Blood and Progress, a century of left wing violence. Blood and progress,

would that be described on the left as sort of like handmade, walking hand in hand down the aisle? A good thing, you've got to crack some eggs to, you know, to make an omelet. Tell us what the book is about, aside from the title, and whether or not the rivulets of blood that we saw in the 60s still continue to course through the veins of modern progressivism.

Oh, that was a bad, bad line. Don't hope you were. I thought it was rather poetic, actually. Oh, no, that's pretty much. Very literary, dear. So the book springs from, as so many books do, a fallacy that, that is quite popular abroad, and it is reinforced by some selectively curated statistics and some motivated institutions that promote the notion that the political right in the United

States is the font from which all domestic political violence springs. That is a notion abroad that is very popular, closely held, particularly by the left, and relatively unchallenged, and it is wrong. It is supported, as I write, by some – not a conspiracy, but – selectively curated statistics, some of which are influenced as there's a particularly influential national security document that was produced for the Department of National Homeland Security, which very bravely notes that the research into political left-wing violence is tainted in part by the fact that practitioners of left-wing political violence were contributors,

if not the authors of some of those studies. There is intimidation at work to researchers in these fields who study, for example, what the FBI calls AVE terrorism, anarchist violent extremist terrorism, which is conventionally where left-wing terrorism, domestic terrorism, fits into within the broader landscape of DVE's domestic violent extremists. And so, and you have the ADL list, you have the university projects, all of which conspire to allege, for reasons that I outline in book-length detail, why the American right. is more violent than the left. And if you go through the individual incidences of violence

in our time, it certainly does seem like we're experiencing a wave of left-wing political violence that is unparalleled by the right and does not have a symmetry on the right. And if you go back a couple of decades, you see the antecedents to the violence that we're experiencing now in the form of the protests around the WTO in Seattle in 1999,

the Occupy Wall Street movement, the semi-violent protests against the Iraq War, the 2008 GOP Convention, NATO summits in Chicago, all of which were very violent and surrounded by radical elements. And those radical elements got sucker from institutions, left-wing institutions in the United States. But then you start to see parallels between that and waves of violence that we've experienced in the past from left-wing extremists, like the 1910s and 1920s with the Italian anarchist movement, which today is considered not necessarily by some considered not necessarily a left-wing terrorist movement because they're anarchists, right? What does anarchism have to do with the left? They want a big government. They want no government.

What does that have to do with anything? And you go back into, you can say also the wave of terrorism from the 1970s, 1980s that Brian Burrow documented in his excellent book, Days of Rage. These things are, and then you go back to the Puerto Rican terrorism, into Puerto Rican independence terrorism, which had ties to the Soviet Union and Cuba, which is, and it's all forgotten, the chroniclers of these things. each to a man say, wow, it's just forgotten, isn't it? As though that wasn't motivated reasoning. As though that just organically happened.

No, it didn't organically happen. This is part of a project. And the left incubates its own heroes and martyrs and justifies political violence as some sort of a romantic expression of ideological zeal. And they've been doing it for decades. And it's about time they're confronted with the results of their work. I think it is extraordinary that you downplay the influence.

fluence of men in khaki pants with teaky torches, who I think were responsible for something like 99% of the 100,000 people killed in 2018. But I guess we're going to have to have you back when the book comes out in May. And indeed, we will. Thank you from being with us again. And we'll look forward to you in the future. We are going to say goodbye until the next time. And always a pleasure, always instructive, always enlightening. Noah Rothman, you can find him a national review and other places as well. Thanks, Noah. We'll talk to you later. Thank you, guys. Be well. This episode is brought to you by Spreker, the platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain.

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Start your show today at spreeker.com. Spreaker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. The other thing about political violence, we just had a little bit of it ourselves here in New York. We had a bomb throwing, and the bomb throwing was, remarkable for a... The whole Mandami incident was remarkable for a variety of things. One, the target, two, the guys who did it. Three,

the fellow on X Twitter who was captured sort of with a bullhorn talking about the need to accept more many immigrants as possible at the same time that a bomb was being thrown over his head and then him going on X and continuing to say,

I stand by what I say and I at least I'm not being a bigot about this. And then finally the press getting it wrong and saying that the bombs are being thrown up on dummy. It's a perfect encapsulation of modern politics. Charles, would you agree? I was so irritated by this, and I just want to say, James, that I absolutely admire the finesse with which you're torturing Steve here,

who, as you say, has been desperate to talk on this topic since it was first raised, and then you went to me instead. I didn't. I do. We can't see it, but he's probably twitching like a drug addict. Well, I want to ask you some questions about progressive rock from the 70s. Next, Charles. But go on. I was revolted, and I shall focus on this partly because it's true and partly so Steve can deal with the meat.

I was revolted by the media in this circumstance. This was indefensible, and by that, I don't just mean morally. I mean, it was impossible to defend. Normally they wave their hands and they say, oh, you're just being sensitive. Or if you read to paragraph 19, you're saying, no. this was a deliberate attempt to ignore what had happened. I don't know whether it was because it was so poignant to watch the guy saying, everyone's welcome here,

while an Islamic terrorist is throwing bombs over his head, or whether it's just reflex, the notion or the suspicion, that if the press reports honestly on these sorts of things and the wrong people will hear it and draw the wrong conclusions. But the level of dishonesty on this one, was alarming. I mean, the New York Times described the bomb as, was it jars of fuses and springs?

A little bit of glass and some sprinkles of sugar and, you know, a little adult thumbtack. I had this wonderful CNN piece, which seems to have fooled everyone at the network because they've all been apologizing one by one on Twitter, which said, you know, two young men, the American teenage dream, walked into New York City on a fine day.

And they could have done anything. But a few hours later, they found themselves at the heart of a terrorist incident. They did it. They did it. They proclaimed their loyalty to ISIS. And they said they wanted to kill more people than it died at the Boston Marathon bombing. This wasn't a couple of guys on the way who got irritated by the price of sandwiches and suddenly hit someone. My goodness me.

It's sinister. It's truly sinister. because although I'm a big fan obviously of alternative media and of the internet and of lots of ways of getting around the mainstream the mainstream still exists and people take their cues from headlines and from blurbs and I mean the fact that the press decided to cover this up is alarming and the final reason it's alarming is because there are people out there who are wrong who think that everything they read is a lie. And when you go down that road, you end up at Candace Owens,

right? And the problem with this is that this is yet another example of they're actually being a deliberate lie. And the more you do this, the less you fool the public, the more you convince them everything you say is false, when actually it's not. And I thought for that reason, it was extra irresponsible. Steve, go ahead. I am astounded that CNN, which is, looks to be, about to be acquired by David Ellison, who, with her acquisition of Paramount, installed Barry Weiss at CBS News, where she's slowly making some changes for the better. I'm amazed that there aren't some adults there who said, we should at least be a little bit careful. Instead, they assigned this story to a reporter who has a degree in gender studies from Berkeley,

and whose previous job before CNN was with Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles. And if you don't know Pacifica Radio, it's a public state. station, but it's very left wing. It's just way out there. And I've actually had their financial troubles over the last few years, which is, you know, deserved. But at this point, I'm just saying, you know, I don't even think CNN can be reformed. I think they should just close it all down. I think most of their viewership is now the captive audience at airports and bars anyway. So I don't know how many real people actually watch it anymore. Or hand it over to, what's his name, Ken Jennings, and let him run the thing.

Yeah. Right. I share the sentiments that both of you just described, and I'm still astonished, actually, that I got most of my news on this from X. As a matter of fact, I get most of my news on X, which kind of makes me nervous. Now, I've got a lot of sources that I hit every day. Every morning I get up, I read the local paper online.

Without charging, without being paid, charged for it, I might add, through Apple News, I read the telegraph. I read a variety of sources, but a lot of the stuff that's right up to the moment I get from X, and you have to sift and you have to judge and you have to be very careful. And that brings us to the last question we're going to have here,

which is when it comes to the presentation that we're getting out here, I mean, you can't fake an event and say that guy never threw anything when we knew that he threw it. But AI and the influence of it, whether or not you think what you're seeing on your screens about this particular war,

whether or not you regard everything that you are seeing as false until proved true, whether or not you're taking on a case-by-case basis. Fog of war is what we always have, But how do you guys feel about the presentation of this one, factoring in what you know about AI? Well, so many things are showing up on Twitter that have video,

and some of it is so comically bad and fake that you wonder if that's on purpose, that they're pranking us, right? And then other things, you're not quite sure. I've been worried for quite a while that I think we're not far away from the AI productions being so accurate that it's going to be really difficult. to tell when they're fake because I mean people who do it well are going to make it either 99% plausible and the 1% you slip in. And I don't know, I'm against regulations of these things,

but I am kind of open to the idea that there needs to be some kind of watermark on AI productions or some bit of code so you can tell whether this is legitimate, unadulterated video or whether it has been altered in some way. I'm very hesitant about that idea, but I do think this is going to be a a big problem going forward. Grock, does Charles have any opinions? I don't think that there's much we can do about it. And I think that it's going to lead to some combination of people believing nothing and people being far more judicious in what they choose to read. I think that it will not destroy our culture.

I think it will destroy some people within our culture. Much as you keep hearing stories about older people on Facebook who literally can't distinguish, there was a video I saw of a guy on a magic carpet taking down an American plane. You see this? Yeah, I did. Right. We all saw it and said that's actually very funny. It's just that there are about a million people, it seems, on Facebook that said,

wow, look at the technology. So I think those people may be lost, but I think a lot of other people are going to be more judicious rather than less. and I think that they're going to start thinking more carefully about what they read and why. And in a sense, that will take us back, not forward. The internet made it easy just to be passive. You watch as things go by. You don't really worry about where it came from. Somebody sends you a link.

You click it. It wasn't the case in the 50s. In the 50s, people had a newspaper. They got to live it every single day and they trusted it until they didn't. So I think there's going to be a return to that. of sorts, but yes, there's also going to be a lot of chaos that will be very bad. I saw a video of a rocket hitting an American battleship or aircraft carrier. Unfortunately, it was a Soyes booster from the 70s or those, you know, those great flared engine nozzles.

And the ship, I think, was Japanese. But it was being shared around as something. I mean, the credulity of people. I mean, if you showed a video of Erica Kirk in Tel Aviv swinging from a skyscraper top like King Kong, and Candice Owen would probably believe it and if followers would think so otherwise. Well, yeah, we'll just have to see. I mean, and every time you see something now,

it's though, GROC, is this AI? And people trust when GROC says, yes, it appears to be so because it's shaky and grainy and the rest of it. And what you're actually seeing is something from the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Yes, be careful. Trust it, verify.

That's why we're here, of course, to say all those things that you can trust, absolutely, because we know what we're talking about and we mean what we say. Even when we disagree. Even when we disagree. No, but when we do, we're both right. That's right.

That's right. We're absolutely correct. Schrodinger's podcast hosts. You might, however, if you want folks to go to Apple podcast and say, by gosh, those guys are always right. Even when they disagree. Even when they're wrong, they're right in a charming fashion. Give us five stars.

Or even better, you might want to go to ricochet if you haven't already. I mean, how did you find this podcast anyway without going there, right? And aren't you a non-member? just curious what goes on behind the curtain? Aren't you when you click that member site button, frustrated when you can't go and see the wonderful conversation's happening there? Well, it's cheap, it's easy, and if you sign up, you can contribute, and you can write essays and stand alongside everybody else's,

and you can comment, which is what keeps ricochet nice and civil and decent, because there's a code of contact. You know, you can't be the jerk you are elsewhere in the Internet, and we all behave. Does that mean it's dull and boring and pinkies outstretched? we have a cup of tea. No, not at all. Go there. Find out for yourself at ricochet.com. Gentlemen, it's been a pleasure as ever. We will convene again next week. Lord knows what will happen between then, but to Stephen and California. Where are you, Stephen, by the way?

I'm in Toledo, Ohio today. Ah, well, all things considered, I'd rather be there. Yes. Right. Yes, well, indeed, enjoy the glories. Spanish derived or otherwise there. And Charles in Florida, hats off to you, me here in Minnesota, which is at the moment calm and tending, trending, leaning towards spring, and also expected to get 12 inches of snow by the weekend. Shoot me now.

Anyway, it's been fun. We'll see everybody in the comments at Rickashay 4.0. All right. Bye-bye. Bye. Rickashay. Join the conversation.