The Ricochet Podcast - Decision Day Smackdowns

Episode Date: June 27, 2025

Even bunker-busters dropped on a major enemy can't top the news cycle for a whole week these days, but James, Charlie and Steve get to that along with today's Supreme Court decision drop. They're joined by Manhattan Institute president Reihan Salam to discuss New York City voters' decision to let Zorhan Mamdani turn America's largest city into a hipster paradise. 

And I made my decision at the base of the Tarkin Rock, which is where they used to throw the criminals off. You'd get convicted of a crime and they'd drag you to the rock and throw you off. And if you look in the guidebook, it says that it is not wheelchair accessible, which isn't surprising. And all the guidebook also said, good for kids. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Charles CW Cook and Stephen Hayward.

I'm James Lylex and today we talk to Ray Anselam about the events in New York, plus Iraq, plus Supreme Court, More than enough for a podcast. So thanks to this decision, we can now properly file to proceed with these numerous policies and those that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis, including birthright citizenship, ending sanctuary city funding, suspending refugee resettlement, freezing unnecessary funding, stopping federal taxpayers from paying for transgender searches. Welcome everyone it's the Ricochet podcast number 747. Buckle up as they like to say on the internet when they're about to tell you

something. We've got some interesting things to talk about. I'm James Lilacs in Minneapolis where it's very cloudy, very but the carillon atop the city hall tower was playing blue skies which was just a nice way to end the week steven hayward i assume is in sunny california charles cw cook is in sun drenched and probably human beyond human belief florida gentlemen we span the nation how are you today and uh... what's in your mind well i think both for charles and i it, it's a banner day at the Supreme Court. That's the end of the term.

All the lingering decisions we've been waiting for were released here this morning, Friday. And Charles, I think you've actually read them because you had a three-hour head start on me. I did. But it sounds like it's a clean sweep for our side. And so I'll toss over to you and you pick out what you think is most notable. Well, it wasn't quite a clean sweep. So I'll toss over to you and you pick out what you think is most notable. Well, it wasn't quite a clean sweep.

There was a case, consumers research, which was about the non-delegation doctrine and Neil Gorsuch was so upset by the majority opinion in it. Joined in his upset by Alito and Thomas. And he wrote a 35 page dissent. I would recommend reading. I was disappointed by that. I can't say I was surprised by that, Steve, because the court has not been good on non-delegation questions since about 1935. So we've got 90 years of precedent here. And then there was a case about the structure of an agency that has to do with Obamacare and was very, very complicated. And I instinctively sided again with Gorsuch, Alito and Thomas, but on the big cases

that everyone normal was paying attention to, it was a clean sweep for the originalist and originalist adjacent side and the biggest case of the day, perhaps of the year, was one that started off as a challenge to President Trump's executive order on birthright citizenship. But somehow along the way became not a case about that or the merits of that question, but about nationwide injunctions. that question, but about nationwide injunctions. And six to three, the court decided that with a couple of caveats and with a standard that will need to be applied to be understood properly, nationwide injunctions in the way that they have been used for the last 20 or so years are gone. John Podhore had said that Bunker Busters were used twice this week, once in Iran and once in Amy Comey Barrett responding to Justice Jackson. I don't know if you've seen that.

There is some delicious language in this before Charles goes on to tell us why this is a great thing. She said, we will not dwell on Justice Jackson's argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We only observe this, Justice Jackson decries an imperial executive while embracing an imperial judiciary. I mean, meow, bowl of friskies for the lady. That is a... Anyway, so Charles, tell us more about the... We all hate the national injunctions because they seem like a drastic overreach of the court's authority that anyone could just step in and say, nope, executive can't do that. That's the end of it. I'm here in Hawaii. I say what it's going

to be the law of the land. You said that there were some things yet to be ironed out. Might those things mean that the injunctions still continue to be a thorn in the side and the paw? Yeah, I'm sometimes squishy about national injunctions. We've talked about this before. I don't know if you were on that episode, but I am persuaded by the majority opinion. The only question the court was authorized to look at is whether or not they're constitutionally permissible and how they interact with statute. And I think the majority got it right. There are points elsewhere in the opinion, James, in which Amy Coney Barrett is equally disparaging

to Walter Jackson. She describes her at one point as having offered a startling argument that is completely unmoored from the Constitution or American history. It is a tour de force. So I think the court did get this right. And as this goes, that's the only thing that matters because the court is the court and not a dictator. So there are a couple of caveats here and I'm not a lawyer so I'm understanding this as best I can having read it through once. First off, anything that has to do with the Administrative Procedure Act is exempt because Congress included an exemption when it passed the law. So if there is litigation over APA claims there can be a Nationwide injunction. Second, there is a thing called rule 23 that I don't perfectly understand but rule 23

Litigation could still yield a national injunction. Apparently it's quite hard to satisfy the provisions of rule 23 But Justice Alito is worried that what will happen now is lower courts will just say oh Injunction. Apparently it's quite hard to satisfy the provisions of Rule 23, but Justice Alito is worried that what will happen now is lower courts will just say, oh, it's a Rule 23 issue and start doing the same thing that they've been doing all along. And of course this is obvious, but it needed to be said. The third exception is the Supreme Court itself, which is allowed to impose national injunctions because that's what it's there for. Here is my take on it before I shut up. I think this was the right decision legally.

I think it is also the product of congressional abdication. Congress is allowed to set a whole bunch of rules around this that it hasn't. So the court was only asked to do this because Congress hasn't laid out in what circumstances national injunctions are permissible. It should now do that. I worry a little bit though, that unless Congress starts taking back some power from the president, that this is going to empower the executive branch even more than it has been empowered.

That's not a criticism of the court. Again, Jackson's obsessed with, she shouldn't be, it's not her job to worry about that. But as a citizen, I's obsessed with, she shouldn't be, it's not her job to worry about that. But as a citizen, I want Congress now to say, all right, here are the things the president can and can't do, because although Kavanaugh is clear at one point to say that the court should take emergency applications, you are in effect going to be left after this with a situation in which it will take a lot longer to litigate pretty important questions And if you look at something like for example, Joe Biden's

Obviously disastrously deliberately unconstitutional student loan order by the time that that had been Decided by the Supreme Court. He could have spent two or three hundred billion dollars Supreme Court, he could have spent two or $300 billion. So unless this is accompanied by the Supreme Court's willingness to take cases quickly and Congress taking back its power from the executive, I do worry that not just under Trump, but under the next Democratic president, let's say President AOC, you could see some really disastrous consequences, but that's a Congress problem, not a Supreme court problem. That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. AOC will be the, AOC will be the vice president to Gavin Newsom. I just wanted to correct that.

Steven, you're taking. Well, I think I agree with Charles. I think the rule 23 business, um, connects to the whole class action. Um, that's right. That's right. Classification. So yeah, I think you Rule 23 business connects to the whole class action classification. That's right. So, yeah, I think you're right. The judges will be quicker to try and grant class action status. I do think that, I mean, I actually need to go back and look at the numbers here, but I actually think the Supreme Court moved with great speed, greater than maybe they ever

have, which is why I'd have to go back and look in history. But you think of the cases that were taken up and decided in the last, well, just take this one. You know, it was about an executive order Trump issued his first day in office back in January, so barely six months ago, and the Supreme Court scheduled an oral argument late, it was heard in, what, a month ago, six or eight weeks ago, and we have the decision today. And I think that was the Chief Justice or a majority of the court anyway saying, we can't let this linger into the next term because it's just creating too much uncertainty. So they moved with really quite astonishing speed for the Supreme Court, not allowing it to filter through the D.C. Circuit or the other circuit courts of appeal, which resulted

in circuit splits and no decision at all. There was the executive immunity case. I think that was this term, wasn't it? Anyway, I think the court is now stepping up to try and fill the gap for some of the last two of Congress that you rightly point out, Charles. So right now you have Congress as a spectator to the judiciary and executive trying to work out a new equilibrium here on these things. And it's probably very encouraging that that note in the decision was written by Kavanaugh, who is now the median justice on the court

rather than by Clarence Thomas, because it does signal perhaps a willingness to step in. Yeah. So where do we go from here then? I mean I love Charles' argument that this actually now sort of deprives us of a tool that you can use to get these things to the Supreme Court faster. Should we just develop, like Disney has, a fast pass lane for certain cases? Well, they have been doing the shadow docket business, they call it, for a while now, where they do take cases and dispose of them quickly without necessarily a full oral argument and briefing and so forth. I think now in this particular case, once again, the executive order was about the birthright citizenship controversy. And they sidestepped that, as we expected. It was pretty clear

that they weren't going to take up a substance of that. But now they'll have to. And so that case will be probably coming up next year, and so a year from now, and there they can't, I think, repair to process and history. Well, I shouldn't have said that. It won't be a process argument or a jurisdiction argument. They're going to have to rule on the substance of the 14th Amendment, and that's going to be a big fight. I think, James, one thing that is always important with court decisions to stress is that the court is not expected to or allowed to come up with an answer that makes everything perfect. And you say, where are we now? There are some downsides to this, even though I

think it's the right decision. For example, it is offensive to our constitutional order to have circuit splits on matters that are really crucial. For example, let's suppose that your president Gavin Newsom says that he intends to start confiscating firearms. And let's suppose that the Fifth Circuit says that's illegal under the Second Amendment and there's no statutory justification. But the Second Circuit says it's fine. What you have then is a situation in which it is okay for the federal government to confiscate firearms in New York, but not in Texas. Which, by the way, would be a sensible way of doing it given how heavily armed everyone is in either place. Now that is a problem, right? And if you take the

country's history just after the Civil War as perhaps a more realistic example, it would be a problem if it were fined to discriminate racially in some parts of the country and not in others. But that is, it seems to be the way that the system works until the circuit splits are resolved. But we aren't always going to like it. And I think what I just find so annoying about some of the responses to this that I've seen and about Jackson's dissent is she seems to think, and those who have criticized this

decision seem to think that if there is any potential downside to any decision that is faithful to the law, it's the job of the Supreme Court to step in and prevent that, but it's not. We're going to have times in our life as American citizens where things are bad. So, you know, one of the things that it leaves us with should be the expectation that we elect people who aren't bloody awful. Exactly. And there we are, a new slogan for the conservative side. Sometimes things are going to be bad. I mean, it actually is the truth of the matter. And one of the ways you make them better is to get together with friends. And we'd like to remind you, as always, that Ricochet has meetups where people get together in person. And if you're

thinking, you know, I just want to sit around with people and I don't want to do that and talk politics, you'd be surprised how little we talk about politics. Actually, it's everything under the sun because you meet people like-minded, you find you have similar interests, hobbies and passions to great fun. Last one I had was in New York. I got COVID. It was worth it. Matt Balser is holding the annual German Fest meetup.

That's July 25th, 27th in Milwaukee and our old friend, Randy, Randy, Randy Wyvova, Randy Wyvova, Randy, you know, he's assembling a group to meet in Detroit and that will be interesting seeing the revived state and status of some of the most beautiful skyscrapers in America. So go to ricochet.com, check the member meetup panel and if you're in the neighborhood, you know, show up or start your own and just see how we'll ricochet people come to you. We're like that. One of the things we're also like is that, you know,

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And we thank Cozy Earth for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And thanks to Charles, we not only have the new Republican slogan, sometimes things are going to be bad, but we have another slogan as well, you have to get your sheets right. So I can't argue with any of those things.

Joining us now, Ryan Salam, president of the Manhattan Institute in 2009. He co-authored Grand New Party with Ross Douthat, and his latest book is Melting Pot or Civil War. You can also find his writing in the Atlantic and National Affairs. Welcome. Hi guys, thanks for having me. I love New York.

I'm tired of it after about three or four days I say you win and I leave but I love New York and like everybody who grew up in the Midwest casting their eyes towards Gotham I've always felt an attachment to it that seems irrational emotional, but it's America in the in its most vigorous and proud form and Lately the choices that they make Mystify us, but you think they can probably get past an Eric Adams. They can probably endure, you know de Blasio. It's a strong place now this guy, basically that's my question, and it's not even a question, this guy. So when you're thinking about Zoran Mamdani, we're tempted to think about the discontinuities

because he seems so different. He's so much younger, he just seems so dangerous to many of us. The interesting thing are the continuities. Now consider that New York City had a self-described democratic socialist mayor. His name was Bill de Blasio some years ago. Now consider also when you're looking at the way New York City is governed, we are in the thick of a really profound affordability crisis. Is it something that is the product of a free market and housing? Decidedly not. It's the product of a crazy accretion of rules that essentially treats building

private housing as though it is a kind of suspect activity, you know, borderline criminal. You know, it's just, you know, any number of things. So on one level, you know, I am tempted to get drawn into the discontinuity. This is a guy who says things that are incredibly alarming to me as a conservative. And by the way, I should stipulate, I'm speaking on my own behalf, not as a spokesperson for the institution I lead or anything like that. So just to make that crystal clear, I will say that this is someone who says totally alarming stuff all the time.

But we should also just recognize that like the proverbial frog in the boiling pot, it's not as though we're flipping a switch and we're going from robust free market capitalism to a, you know, a Bolivarian revolution, you know, by the Hudson. You're just really the conditions that created this were the accretion of failed policies, call them socialist, call them progressive, call them whatever you want, that actually contributed to this real crisis. You're right about the accretion of strange laws and bylaws and regulations that prevent good housing from being built, even at the same time that they can build the most enormous

waving in the wind pencil thin skyscrapers by Central Park. Now they can build those, but they can't build regular housing for people and the rest of the city. This guy with his talk of rent control and the rest of it and the usual progressive platitudes, yeah, you can say there's continuity to somebody like de Blasio, but de Blasio struck me as both sort of lazy and incompetent and not particularly motivated

to do the things that would destroy New York. This guy seems to have a fire under him. Or is he just a striver who's got a good presentation and is going to use this tool set of ideas Is he just a striver who's got a good presentation and is going to use this tool set of ideas that appeal to the shoot, to the Luigi Mangione fan club in order to insert himself into the machine and profit thereafter forever? Does he mean it?

Is he? If there were, it's all, it's just a matter of what does he mean, right? Because, you know, here's the thing. You know, the reason why this person is a skillful politician is that he says different things to different audiences, he's able to hit different registers. He's someone who has granted up until now

accomplished relatively little in life, but he's someone who is charismatic and he's someone who has a seductive ability to mirror to people what exactly it is they want to hear. So, you know, to the kind of revolutionary socialist crowd, they're very confident he's one of them. And he winks at them and he kind of makes it clear that he's one of them in all sorts of ways. This is someone who has really been a kind of professional anti-Israel obsessive for his entire adult life. And yet he's also able to say, how dare you

accuse me of being an anti-Semite. I will increase the amount of spending to fight hate crimes by 8X. We're going to do this. We're going to do that. This is his talent. It's the ability to be all things to all people. And there literally are the same nonprofit progressive establishment that is responsible for New York's dire state. These guys are reconciling themselves to him because he represents another face for the same kind of failed policies with more aggressive aggro language turned up to 11. That's one version of it, right? Another version of it is that how do you actually kick the door down?

People are calling him a socialist. And the problem with that label is that what people hear is they hear, well, Sweden, right? Norway, right? Denmark, right? When actually this is, you know, you're looking at the Bandung generation, you know, come back to life. What you're looking at is a kind of third-worldist position. And you're also looking at someone who's a left-wing populist. You know, if you were looking at socialism in Northern Europe, you're looking at, we have vats, you know, middle-class, working-class people pay really high consumption taxes and they, you know, and they get some stuff.

You pay with one hand, you get something else on the other hand, right? What this is instead is a kind of punitive egalitarianism. They raise taxes when they were flush with revenue. They raise taxes because they want to raise taxes on the rich even if it actually does huge damage to the working and middle class people because there's bigger fish to fry. I mean, this is a different kind of agenda, but the problem is it's totally protean. It's totally protean.

So it can be one thing one minute, it's gonna be another thing another minute. It's gonna be like, hey, Brad Lander has a million position papers here and oh, it's ridiculous to catastrophize, it's ridiculous to think, you've gotta take him seriously, not literally. It is a classic populist playbook and the democratic establishment is hollow it is dead it is bereft it is completely

lacking in talent and imagination and energy and they were there for the picking. Hey Ryan nice to see you. Nice to see you too, Charlie. Here's my question. I grew up in England, as you know, and I had this conception of history that essentially guaranteed that if things got really bad, people would be sensible. Because I learned about the 70s and then I learned about Margaret Thatcher coming in and she fixed it. But now, if I listen to my friends and family back home, they sound like people did in the 70s. New York seemed to me, especially when I lived there in the glory days, 2011 and so on, to be of the same pattern that it had been awful in the 70s and 80s.

But then New York has got sensible and they brought in Giuliani and then they kept electing Bloomberg, you know, not my favorite guy, but it's mayor of New York, pretty terrific. And then, wow, we've gone to de Blasio and Eric Adams and now this guy probably. And I wonder how you see it, because on the one hand, we tend to think as conservatives, if things get bad, then people will be sensible and they'll fix it. But then I look at Chicago, and Chicago's never done what New York did. And Chicago seems basically incapable of fixing itself. So are you worried that New York could be in the same place? Or do you think there's enough about New York, whether it's Wall Street

or just the fact that it turns over all the time or it's just so dynamic, that means that even if this guy is awful and screws everything up, there'll be a backlash and you'll get sensible policies again? The hard part is that when you're thinking about the electorate, you know, who are the individuals who are learning and how are they learning, you know, you always have to keep in mind that we're looking at a dynamic changing electorate. So, you know, the white population of New York City is not that much lower, perhaps surprisingly, than it was, you know, call it in 1993, 1989. What's different is that it's no longer multi-generational New Yorkers,

you know, folks who are third and fourth generation, Italian and Irish, working class, lower middle class, homeowners. It's a different group of people. So the white population in New York right now is much more college educated than it had been before. You've got a lot of folks who are transplants. So that's one thing, right? There's one narrative that, oh, these guys are rich and this kind of thing. And, you know, it's luxury beliefs. And I actually think that there's a lot to that. My colleague, Rob Henderson, you know, is the is the one who's kind of, you know, advances luxury beliefs thesis. But another part of it is this. So, you know, if you're looking at the New York City housing

market and allow me to bore you for a moment, you know, you've got about 68% of the units are rental units, multifamily rental units. Of those units, I believe it's about 48% are in the so-called unregulated market. And then 52% are rent controlled rent stabilized. So, you know, people have observed that Cuomo seemed to win in really poor neighborhoods. And then in this tiny sliver of really rich neighborhoods, precincts with a sliver of really rich neighborhoods, precincts with a median income of over, let's say, $250,000 a year. Cuomo did well in those two. But in that middle, when you're looking at people in neighborhoods with a median income, looking $75,000 to $200,000 or so, these people aren't poor, but it's a really interesting population.

Because if you think about the people in New York, the people who kind of make it here, it feels more and more like you make it here if you have a side deal. If you inherited a rent stabilized apartment, if you're living in NYCHA housing, you know, and you have forever, which is not great, by the way, really terrible and miserable. Public housing isn't great, but it's a place to live where you're not buffeted by the fact that, you know, rents went up this last year by 16% in the private market. You know, the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in New York City right now is $5,500. Wow.

These numbers are completely staggering, okay? And that's, the problem is that, you know, if you're a newcomer to New York, you're a college kid, you didn't just going to find one of the handful of rent regulated apartments that are on the market. Rent regulated apartments get passed down from generation to generation right now. You moved into that unregulated sector. Then there's so many dynamics hear to who's living here. So, you know, do you think that those guys were making, you know, they're making decent money, low six figures, anywhere else in the country

that would afford you a pretty great life. But in New York City, it means that you're on a knife edge. In New York City, it could means you're spending a third of your income on rent and you're living with roommates. You know, I mean, the kind of indignities that you have to endure. And then they look at the other, you know,

kind of economy, the rich, glamorous economy that gets the attention in New York, the capital accumulation economy, where, you know, housing price appreciation is part of it, but then also just the people who own assets, they own equity, they're not just collecting a professional salary and navigating the housing market. These are the guys who are the most totally radical out there. They want to burn it down. And these people are not the people, they don't remember New York

City. And they also, by the way, you know, under Eric Adams, like in the last year, he's not perfect. Yes. Crime has gone down markedly in 2025. So weirdly, the fact that some things were kind of okay and limping along actually meant that, you know, Zerhan Mughalny could come in and zero in on the fact that your rent is a hell of a lot higher now than it was when you first moved here five or 10 years ago. Why is crime down? Oh, there's a lot of complexity to that. You know, I have a lot of colleagues have thought very deeply about this. So, you know, part of it could be, hey, you know, there are big national trends. They're big and complex. You know, part of it could be that we have a true,

you know, we have a really excellent police commissioner right now, who is someone who has been a public servant for a very long time. She knows the police department extremely well. And to the extent that there was a kind of cronyism and laziness in the department, she's been really thoughtful about bringing that down and improving morale in the police force. If you look at law enforcement around the country, morale has been a real challenge and that's been pronounced in New York. You have a huge number of folks who've retired. You have people who are experienced NYPD officers who left to other jurisdictions. When you have competent, effective leadership, that can

make a difference. So again, there are many different factors. There are also real things cutting against us. You know, for example, we have a bunch of laws at the state level here in New York that are real outliers. You know, there are a ton of places that embrace criminal justice leniency. They called it criminal justice reform. New York actually really embraced policies that were really out there even by the standards of that rush towards leniency. And so you basically have some, you know, folks in law enforcement who are doing their best to, you know, manage that.

And then you have prosecutors. So I would say that the prosecutors in two of our five boroughs are particularly bad in Manhattan and the Bronx. You've got other prosecutors who are not great. They're not necessarily the people that I'd want to be there, but they at least live on planet earth, which is helpful. So there's a lot of complexity to what's happened on the crime front, but I do think that, you know, there is more effective leadership right now. And another thing you'll hear a lot of people say, oh know, there is more effective leadership right now. And another thing, you'll hear a lot of people say, oh, New York is actually the safest big

city in America. Oh, this is exaggerated. And actually, look, there's something to that. You know, New York City is an immigrant rich city. You know, New York City is a place that's denser. You know, we do have some firewalls against crime. But at the same time, disorder accounts for a lot more in New York City. Charlie Cook used to live here and he, like me, was packed in like a sardine on the

subway. So if you have, you know, someone walking down the street, you know, in the suburbs of Jacksonville, who is, you know, half naked, wearing short shorts and, you know, kind of ranting and, you know, smelling like he may or may not need a bath. You know, that's Charlie. Exactly. Charlie, Charlie can you describe. Exactly, exactly. Charlie can get on his golf court and then speed up and then kind of go away. If you are on a subway with this person,

you know, then that's a different situation. And actually the value proposition of New York City is density. It is the fact that you get to be kind of around other people. You get the vitality that comes with that. That can spoil rotten if you have, you know, people who are bad apples. That's why there is a natural, naturally authoritarian element to effectively running a city like New York City.

That's something that, you know, Mike Bloomberg, for all his cosmopolitanism, understood it was, you know, kind of, you know, an iron fist and a velvet glove. He understood how that worked. By the way, Bill de Blasio early on, he understood that if he was going to demonstrate that a democratic socialist could run a city and be the successor to Bernie Sanders, which was his great dream, that, you know, actually you could not let crime get out of control. He thought that right up until democratic party politics changed circa 2018, 2019, 2020. But, you know, much more to say there.

So, Rehan, you know, out here in California, we're a little bit annoyed that New York is so effectively challenging our monopoly on bad elected officials and progressive policy, right? So, and I wish I could have your equanimity about the scene. So a couple of questions, one on the substance of the mayor's office in New York, and then one about the politics of this election campaign to come. Sure. Just Steve, just want to say, no equanimity here.

What I am is a realist, and I want to look at everything that's going on squarely, dead in the eye, so people understand that things were rotting a long time before the last 72 hours when people started paying attention. But please continue. Yeah, okay. Well, all right.

So, you know, one thing that I didn't know until I learned this in graduate school 40 years ago is that municipal government is really odd in America. We have what we call weak mayor systems and strong mayor systems. And so it's always surprising for people to learn that Chicago has a weak mayor system. And you say, well, Richard Daley was one of the most powerful mayors in American history. Well that's because he was such a skillful politician and built a machine. New York has a strong mayor system. By that I mean the mayors, I understand, it gets to set the budget with pretty strong

authority over it, gets to appoint the heads of all the departments without necessarily the, unlike Chicago where appointees have to be ratified by the city council and so forth. So you have a very strong executive in New York. It was always tempered, sorry for the history lesson here, I'll keep it short for listeners, it was always tempered by the democratic machine that would cough up a beam especially, right? And it's been, and you said it yourself, the democratic establishment in New York is dead, it's been dying ever since, I think, Ed Koch, probably. So now we have this 32-year-old or 33-year-old kid who's very charismatic, as you say, and

he's going to be given some powerful keys to a powerful engine. And you already mentioned, the guy says he's going to spend more money on hate speech. Well, I don't doubt that he might well do that, but I'm worried that it's really going to be the kind of hate speech that we're worried about, meaning the anti-Semitic outbursts we're seeing all the rest of the place. So anyway, I'm just extremely, this is more of a comment than a question, but it's a sign of a prophetic reaction. I think that this is an order of magnitude more serious than de Blasio's progressivism

was. What do you think so? Here's the dilemma for people who oppose Zoran Mamdani. Okay, the dilemma is that There is a symbiotic relationship between people who are saying that you know, basically You know not that you're saying this Steve that people are gonna get shot in the streets You know, they mean there's they're gonna be firing squads in Central Park, which is not what you're saying this, Steve, that people are going to get shot in the streets. You know what I mean? There are going to be firing squads in Central Park, which is not what you're saying. But there are a lot of people might, you know, look, I am alarmed. I am alarmed by many, many things. I don't know if you want me to talk your ear off. I'm happy to do it, you know, for the next 12 hours about basically, you know, kind of what this gentleman has said, what he evidently believes

about Israel, the threat that, you know, kind of this kind of third-worldest brand of socialism represents to peace and security in a very diverse city, in a city that is home to a population of close to one million Jewish Americans. You know, there's a lot that's extremely combustible. So make no mistake, I am not dismissing that one bit. I think it's dire and I think it's dangerous. What is even more dangerous is what has happened more broadly.

If you're looking at national democratic politics, this is the reality that the people who are running against Zeron Mondani in the Democratic primary did not seem to understand. If you look at the views of Democratic primary voters nationally and in New York about Israel, about a great, about capitalism, about a great many other basic realities of life, it is not what it had been in 1995. So because of that, what it means is that certain attacks that people made

because they believe them, because they're right, because they are legitimate attacks to make, their legitimate criticisms did not land, not only did not, they not land, but there are people who are fueled by the fact that when something seems like an establishment stitch up, when it looks like all of the shadowy powerful forces are uniting against you, what does that mean? So that is something that is extremely important to keep in mind. And by the way, you said the Democratic establishment is dead. That's actually not quite what I meant. What I meant is that they're bereft of ideas.

I think there are a lot of folks who are still there. And by the way, the establishment in New York City for a while has been a nonprofit progressive establishment. And this nonprofit progressive establishment represented by someone like Brad Lander, they've taken off one mask and they're putting on another mask. And that now they're trying to get behind Mom Donnie and they're kind of deeply interconnected. And so what they're going to try to do is have another new breath of life, which is that, well, we've been thoroughly irradiated

and discredited and kind of this way. You would be in a fair world, right? Except they actually still hold all the levers of power. They're still there. And now what they're seeing is that, ah, this is another opportunity to be in touch with a TikTok generation. So this is the contradiction here. On the one hand, you know, is this, you know, going to be Havana on the Hudson?

Okay. you know, is this, you know, going to be Havana on the Hudson? Okay? On the other hand, is it a corrupt, broken, non-profit progressive establishment that actually caused the affordability crisis? That actually they were the ones who, when it was fashionable to say defund the police, did. Now they say Department of Community Safety. And then the idea that they get to have a new breath of life by us saying that actually this is totally different from what came before. I don't know if we want to let people off the hook that way Steve. That's that's the awkward question here. Well alright I've been thinking back to a parallel from here in California from a

very long time ago. It's amazing how it's forgotten a New Deal history that in 1934 Upton Sinclair won the Democratic primary to be governor. And it set the same kind of headlines you're seeing in the Wall Street Journal this week. Panic in the business community, hysteria in Hollywood. And it took weeks for people to gin up the up, oh, by the way, he's running against a mediocre Republican incumbent who's kind of roughly the equivalent of Eric Adams. It's a great story that, as I say, it doesn't make the history books. Everyone always talks about Roosevelt being worried about Huey Long, but they were worried

about Upton Sinclair being elected governor of California early in the New Deal. Was it a jungle? Did he win in a jungle primary? No, no, no. Yeah, that's pretty good. I got to borrow that. I should write an article, I think, for your city, General Ehon, about the lessons of that campaign, because what ultimately turned it around, and it took weeks for people to say, what are we going to do about this guy? He's world famous, he's popular. By the way, it was called the Epic Campaign, which was short for End Poverty in California. Sounds a lot like a bon-dum-y.

And what it took was Hollywood stepped in. It was, Louis B. Mayer was the ringleader. And by the way, you know, just as Hollywood is today, the writers and actors loved Upton Sinclair, right? But it was the owners of the studios and some of the business interests. And what they did was went back through, you might say, the equivalent of Sinclair's Twitter feed, right? He'd said a lot of crazy stuff for years and used it very effectively against him and ended up re-electing this mediocre Republican. Okay, so we're hearing all these machinations now that, well, maybe Andrew Cuomo

shouldn't drop out, maybe she'd run as an independent, maybe we'll get Curtis Sliwa to drop the Republican line and make Adams the Republican nominee, you know, all kinds of things like that. So it's going to take a while, I think, to see any opposition, but my suspicion is even if Wall Street puts up a lot of money and the sort of non- or I'll put it this way, the for-profit segments of the Democratic establishment try to draw a line, I could actually see that helping Mamdami because he's, you know, like you say, charismatic, is going to have a lot of national interest and attention. And if he wins, he'll probably get off to a big flashy start and my prediction is his name will be immediately floated as a Democratic candidate for 2028 for president. So, do you have any prognostications or expectations of how this

might unfold? You've given me a lot to work with here, Steve. Yeah, sorry. So, 33 years old, I don't know about, there are a lot of different bumps in the road before you get to 2028. I made the de Blasio comparison, right? Which understandably, we recoil from, he's a different figure, but one difference is that Bill de Blasio was a Red Sox fan. Bill de Blasio is not someone who lived and breathed New York.

He didn't really kind of come across to people as someone who just really loved the city. And when you look at, you know, Mike Bloomberg, you know, he was not beloved by the city's kind of progressive cadres, but you know, he was someone who didn't have to be in that job. And he's someone, there was a certain kind of affection for him. If you look at Mamdani, Mamdani does seem to actually like New York. You know, he's someone who actually, you know, he loves the halal carts. He loves that, you know, there's something about him that seems earnest and approachable. And also, you know, he's 33, so he has a lot of time. And, you know, I think that if you want a scenario where a guy like this can become a really,

you know, formidable threat, you know, on a national scale, I actually don't think it would be rushing to a 2028 presidential bid. And my suspicion is that he gets that. And I think that when you're looking at the fact that AOC was a very critical mover in getting behind him, I think that there's a line and I don't think he's going to be looking to jump that line. When you look at this world of hard left political organizing, when you look at the DSA, when you look at the people that they look to as

their, you know, standard bearers, their inspirations, they believe in building a disciplined movement. This guy knocked on over one and a half million doors. He did not do that by himself. He did that with an army of volunteers, tens of thousands of them. And I think that, I suspect, the moves are to basically co-opt that nonprofit progressive establishment as you're governing cadres. You take the helm of certain key institutions, the commanding heights. The Department of Education employs an awful lot of people. It's educating 800,000 plus students.

That's going to be something very important when you have a grand ideological project. With the NYPD, I'm not sure exactly where they're going to land, but there are a few different places. When the kind of people who are the people that, you know, that I think of as civil terrorists in the streets, people who claim to be protesting but who are in fact intimidating and engaging in, you know, basically manipulating the fact that we are now not enforcing various laws, you know, to create menacing protests. When those people feel as though they have an ally in City Hall, well maybe they behave differently, right? Maybe, you know, kind of, this is gonna be really interesting

and complex because it could be that he's a total imbecile and that there's gonna be a crisis day one and the streets are gonna be aflame and then, you know, kind of, that's that. Another possibility is that the city is already, it's already a slow burn, it's already a death by a thousand cuts in which you basically are driving out private capital. You're driving out the kind of working class, middle class moderates. You're trying to raise the temperature to do that.

It's the curly effect. That doesn't necessarily hurt you if what you're looking to kind of like raise the temperature to do that. It's the curly effect. That doesn't necessarily hurt you if what you're looking to is consolidate power over a city government that has 300,000 employees. So you know, there are many different ways this can play out. But I, and by the way, where I thought you were going is that you can imagine, I think you can imagine a spirited Eric Adams campaign and we can talk a bit about that but I think that you know, you can call it you know, is Mondani the odds-on favorite? Of course he is. But I also think that you know we should learn from having seen crazy things happen that other

crazy things can happen too. Well if Trump gets the economy back on its feet and everything hums along and industries reshore like General Electric announcing they were going to do today, then people will feel in 2028 as though they have the permission to indulge in luxury beliefs because things are going so great. Or if everything is cratered by 2028, then they'll think, well, we have no other choice. Let's give repudiation of capitalism a try and see how that goes. So yeah, who knows? And it will be interesting.

I do know this. I am, as I said at the beginning of this, I love Manhattan. I wanted to thrive, you know, however, if he crashes the office market, it's entirely possible that they will not build the Commodore Tower, which means that it won't overshadow the Chrysler building, which is something that I worry about. And why I worry about that sitting here in Minneapolis, I don't know, only that I sort of want to be able to go there and see that magnificent spire from every angle and not be blocked out by Commodore. And I hate the new JP Morgan building, I got to say.

What do you think? You know, I just love capital investment. I love employers who want to create jobs in New York City. Yep. And you know, that's where I stand. All right. From an aesthetic standpoint, we will have to, well, you know, we'll see. But yes, no, I love the commitment that it represents just like all the rest of it.

And will New York be still standing in two or three years? Of course it will. Will it be as interesting a place? Well, we'll talk to you again then about that. We thank you for joining today. We'll have you on to talk about the book, which we didn't get around to, but melting pot or civil war seems to be the question

that's in front of everybody these days. So give that a pick up and you can read his writing in the Atlantic and national affairs as well. Rayan Salam, thank you for joining us today. Thanks guys. Yeah, we didn't get to the book. Hey, excuse me for interrupting here for a second, but you know, we're talking about the effects

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What else can we talk about? Anything happened any place else? I think we sent a plane that dropped something on a manhole and then sent five precision guidance munitions after it. Well if you of course, listen to what CNN was telling us low impact, uh, didn't really do anything, set them back about a day and a half. Steven Charles, your thoughts on the Iran strike?

Wait, wait, James, did you just say manhole? I mean, that's, I mean, it's there, please. They're personnel access covers now. Ah, you're right. You're right. I'm using gendered language again. So it was what an old style guy. I still call that too. Well, look, I don't really have anything, I don't know, either original or consequential to say. I'm pleased that we did it.

And that has stopped us all when exactly here. Exactly, right, yeah. I mean, I have to say that, well, first of all, a general comment that may upset Charlie a little bit. The whole progress of Trump so far seems to be reminding me you're giving off an 80s feel, you know, when Reagan came in and things just started going well, and there are some parallels, including, you know, when the Israelis bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor in, what, June of 1981 and upset everybody, but privately everyone was

saying it was great. But here we now know that Trump practiced active deception in several ways, right? He said, well, I'm going to wait two weeks to make a decision when in fact the decision had already been made. And news has come out late in the week that there was a lot more coordination between Trump and Netanyahu, and a lot of deliberate misinformation fed out to the media to mislead the Iranians, topped with the fact that we sent a whole lot of planes inconspicuously toward Guam, which was thought to have been an effort to mislead the Iranians,

but I think might have had the secondary purpose of telling the Chinese, you know what, we're paying attention to your increased harassment of Taiwan and the Philippines. So I don't know, Trump seems to me to be dealing from a load of aces these days. And then, you know, late here in the week, NATO members say, okay, we'll increase defense spending to 5% of GDP. And another headline that, oh, European countries saying, what tariffs and barriers can we give up in trade with the United States to please Trump? that looks to me like a guy who is on a roll morning in America the the strike with the strike was the equivalent of the the Grenada invasion and I yeah I don't I don't say that lightly that was just

one of those things that said hey we actually can do something like this without crashing all our helicopters in the desert. And the feint towards Guam, as you noted, may indeed have been a reminder. Nice little three gorgeous dam you have there. Shame if anything happened to it. Which of course I don't think we would do because the loss of life would be absolutely fantastic. But you never know. You never know. Charles, you thoughts? Why would that upset me, Steve? Oh, only because I know you, you, uh, your disdain for Trump is, uh, transparent and well-worn, well-arqued.

I respect it. But I know a lot of listeners. In many quarters, sure. But I, I think I'm fair-minded in evaluating what he does. And I think what he did here was good. I am of the view that Congress is necessary, but that's a view that takes issue with 75 years of American precedent, not with Trump. Trump did nothing here that wouldn't have been done by Obama or

Bill Clinton or Harry Truman. This was a good decision. I thought it was well executed. I'm interested to see what happens next. I'd love to know who is right in the international community and their evaluation of how much damage this did. But at the very least, it seems that this has set back the program by months, if not years. And given that we were in the middle of a conflict that Israel began, justifiably, I think it was correct of the United States to piggyback and make sure that

all three of the facilities were set back or hopefully completely destroyed. This is, you know, something we would not have got under president Harris and we should acknowledge that no way, but it's interesting that people are saying that president Trump is all of his disinformation and lying in two weeks and the rest of it has lost credibility. Now nobody can really believe what he says, which is just sort of reflexive anti-Trump nonsense you hear from time to time.

I mean, I've been on this podcast many a year and it's no secret that I have differing opinions on the man and his character and the rest of it, but it doesn't matter in the end, what matters are the actions and what matters are the consequences of the actions. And I thought this was just great. I mean, the display of American power and precision is awe-inspiring. You know, and people equate this somehow with as though we'd loaded everything up and attacked a Tehran daycare center. I mean, this is a very specific application of american morals as well

as anything else and that appalls people say why just yet israel can have nukes but iran can't yes that's absolutely true that's absolutely the way it works the country that is that that it is it is a liberal democracy that grants free rights to all sorts of people regardless of their ethnicity that is a tech superpower that is remarkable in its ingenuity yes those people who pose no threat to the Western civilization they get to have nukes and these guys over here a few of whom believe that the 12 the mom is gonna clamber out of a well at some point and cause the infidels to go

up and smoke they They do not. Iran didn't pass the background check James. Progressives instinctively understand this. Israel and Iran both went through a background check for these weapons and Israel passed and Iran failed. That's a very good point because somebody on TikTok was saying, so I don't know why the conservatives are so upset really. I mean it's not not you know guns don't kill people people kill people So, you know nuclear weapons don't kill people. It's like, you know it well, yes I mean in a sense that's exactly what we're saying is that these are not the people that you want to toss an AR-15 to So there's that apparently though. I mean the NATO thing is interesting as well But it's also I think today

We're doing this as the 70th anniversary of America getting involved in the Korean War. And I always cast my mind back to that and think of the people who were still remembering the bruising conflict of World War II and the thought of getting into another and the thought of it being as protracted as it was. But yet the only lasting cultural impact that seems to have given us is MASH, which is basically a Vietnam parable. It doesn't occupy the same sort of space in the American imagination that Vietnam

or World War II is. Why do you think that is? Well, I'll give you a couple of theories, partly reflecting what my dad used to talk about in the Korean War, which he was called up for out of the Navy Reserves, having fought throughout the entirety of World War II in the Navy. And he stayed in the Reserves, because a lot of people did coming out of World War II when their formal service ended. You know, it was a hundred bucks a month, whatever it paid, and my dad was a flyer, so it was a chance for him to keep his flying current when he was a person with, you know,

no means at that time. And so it was nice to be able to fly on Uncle Sam's dime. But he said that when suddenly the war started and they called up the reserves to send to Korea, a whole lot of the reserves said, hey, wait a minute, we didn't think this meant going back to war, right? And there was a lot of people trying to get out of it and so forth. Anyway, my dad went and served again in Korea. And I think that what you had going for them then was, you hinted at this, James, there was the recollection that, you know, we did pretty well in World War II. It was long and difficult, but we won that. And so we had the track record,

you might say, of winning conflicts, and, you know, Korea became very unpopular by degrees to the point where I think Truman's approval rating in 52, which is one reason he didn't stand for reelection, was something on the high 20s or something dismal. And I think the parallel here, it's not perfect, it never is, but you know, there's this lingering unhappiness on all sides about how badly things went, you know, 15, 20 years ago in Iraq and Afghanistan. And therefore you saw, you know, we talked about this once before, a lot of our, I guess I'll use the term, paleocon friends like Dan McCarthy and others saying, absolutely

Trump cannot back Israel and get into this war in any fashion because it means regime change and 20 years of occupation of Tehran and other nonsense like that. And I think it's pretty clear that Trump has no intention of doing that, although he has teased the idea of regime change, which I think is a more important question than how bad the damage is to Fordow and elsewhere. So, I mean, I think that's, I think the pendulum goes back and forth, right? For the first Gulf War in 1990-91, we were told that that finally ended the Vietnam Syndrome, but then the Vietnam Syndrome came back 10 years later with the Iraqi-Afghanistan syndrome. So, you know, here we are. I think the lasting effects of this will be good. Uh, although that, you know, depends on events as always.

Well with Afghanistan and Iraq, we won, we just hung around and did stupid things. I mean we want, that wasn't a case of protracted a year after year, slog after slog. Afghanistan was a fairly, fairly fast walk over and Iraq too as well of course the whole pacification and deep application and the rest of that stuff is a little bit more complicated but that's another podcast Charles anything else you want to tell us before we go out is there a British equivalent to to the Korean experience in this century I

don't know the British famously stayed out of Vietnam, which gave British people and military personnel in the 80s a different view of war. But the British have the same political trauma over the Second Iraq War that the Americans have, And so they've been brought into line now. Well, that is true. But as we know, things change. Minds are focused elsewhere quickly and we'll see what the rest of the year has to go. He says, obviously wrapping things up, we'd like to thank Cozy Earth, boy, we would.

And we'd like to thank Bamboo HR as well for sponsoring the show. You can do yourself a favor by availing yourself of their fine products and making your life better, easy, more comfortable and all those things. You also might want to go, Oh, I'm not even to say it. Why do I even bother? I was going to tell you to go to Apple podcasts or any other place where you can possibly rate a podcast and give us five stars, but I'm so tired of telling you,

I'm not going to tell you to do that because well, if you did, you know, it would surface the show a little bit more, get us some more subscribers and perhaps get people to go over to ricochet.com and see exactly where this stuff comes from. And if they did that, they would find not only a front page that is bursting with interesting pieces, but a member site, a member page that you gotta pay

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listening and we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0 bye bye