The Ricochet Podcast - Earthquakes and Political Shaking

Episode Date: April 5, 2024

AEI's Matthew Continetti joins the Ricochet Podcast to discuss the internecine fight over the future of conservatism and the Democratic Party's abandonment of Israel. Plus, Peter and Rob have a bit of fun with earthquakes and hippie terrorists; swap lab leak theories and cheer themselves up with a reminder of the country's abiding unsung heroes.- This week’s audio: NYC Mayor Eric Adams on this morning’s earthquake.

I'll tell you if the ground shakes. Yeah, well, let me know. 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 Rick Shay Podcast. I'm Rob Long in New York, joined by Peter Robinson in Palo Alto. Our co-host, James Lyle, is once again AWOL, south of the border.

Stay tuned. We've got Matt Contenani, a lot coming up. Let's have ourselves a podcast. All of us felt in some way or another the earthquake that hit our city around 10.23 a.m. We felt the impact of this 4.7 magnitude earthquake. New Yorkers should go about their normal day. America is a nation that can be defined in a single word. I was going to put him... Welcome to the Ricochet Podcast number 686.

It's insane. No, no, no. Just lop off one digit one finger uh 686 i'm rob long in new york uh co-founder of ricochet and with me as always is peter robinson my co-founder peter in palo alto how are you in california well i am suffering a kind of bizarro moment the californian the californian is about to say to the new yorker how bad was the earthquake uh and i i don't know because i didn't feel it i don't know what i was actually i was either in kill you to make something up i was either in the subway meaning like somewhere in the in the subway system you're on a subway train or somewhere or i was walking

on the street and i just didn't feel it but then you know i'll tell you i i live in a very old house um um in very old part of town and when a truck goes by the whole house rumbles and um so you know for a second it probably would have had i felt it i probably thought i was just a truck very old you're you're down in the village very old is what second half of the 19th century first half of the 19th century first half oh really oh okay all right all right you're in the village proper i'm in the i'm in the village village proper um in fact so weird uh i am in this fantastic house which uh you know i just trust everybody not to like you know camp out in front of my house when i tell you where i live i live very close to in fact next door to the house that i think i've said this before that obama's friends blew up

are you serious i didn't know always tell the right-wingedness of the people i'm talking to because the right-wingers when i say that go oh yeah i know that house yeah and the left-wingedness of the people I'm talking to, because the right-wingers, when I say that, go, oh yeah, I know that house, yeah. And the left-wingers say, what are you talking about? Obama didn't know anybody who blew up a house. Well, he did, of course he did. In fact, one of his dear friends, Bill Ayers, was the whole twisted story of those, the way they're underground is so infuriating.

Give us the date-ish. In the early 70s? No, I think early 70s. They were going to blow up a ROTC recruiting center, an armed forces recruiting center, and they were going to blow up a bank, and they ended up killing a copper security guard, for which they did. So it was a couple of, Bernadine Dorn did time?

Yes, yes. And so did, she just died. I forget her last name. It's a weird last name. Boudin. Yeah, Chessa Boudin's mother. Chessa Boudin was the far-left progressive do do nothing DA in San Francisco, as we're called. And they committed murder and they went to prison and they got out.

And one of them became a tenure professor at Columbia. So in Columbia University, if you say to somebody, if you're a professor and you say to a student hey nice shirt you will be arrested and fined and fired for a sort of microaggression if you misgender somebody that's out you're out if you commit murder you're in you're tenured you get tenured yeah so why did they blow up the house because they were working go ahead tell the story they were trying to build a bomb and they were barring their grandmother's house. Because this now is a very, very fancy neighborhood. But at the time, it was really not. And it had always been in New York City, kind of a working class, you know, not working class, middle class, upper middle class neighborhood.

It was never the fancy neighborhood. But it was just fancy enough that people, the top floor garret where i live um that was where the the irish maids would hang out uh and or hang out it's a nice way of putting it um they would live they would suffer they would swelter in the summer and freeze in the winter and so you know over time people's grandparents decided they can't keep up this house so they just left it and a lot of these houses were empty for a long time and so this grandchild you know hippie grandchild so you imagine her grandma her grandmother must have been you know born maybe in the 18th 19th century right um uh she built up they're building a bomb but of course they're dumb kids and they're stupid

dilettantes stupid hippies and they just did it wrong and they blew themselves up and they killed i think one or two of them died unfortunately they all didn't on honestly considering they went on to kill other people uh and they blew the front of the building off and then the side but the wall behind me as you can see that wall um that's what's rebuilt in the 70s early 70s and you can always tell this building this house because it's the one house on the street that doesn't look at all in this sort of neo-federal style or the federal i guess the federal style they call it it's got the because the facade was redone in the 70s you couldn't do that now if you if the right the terrorists blew up their mom's grandmother's townhouse today

in a historic neighborhood they would have to sort of rebuild it according to sort of historical standards but back then you could make it a 70s facade which is what they did but you can still see people if you google it granite village bombing um dustin hoffman because dustin hoffman lived in the garden apartment here apparently uh you can see dustin hoffman's very picture of dustin hoffman who's by then you know pretty much a movie star looking at absolutely stunned and shocked at the at the with his back to all the trouble and there's fire trucks and rubble and stuff. It's pretty interesting. Well, that was better than the earthquake. Yeah, so better than the earthquake. In fact, I was walking home and I talked to the guy who owns that,

the family who lives downstairs, they own the house. I said, you know, we got to have the insurance people come in to check something and we're trying to figure out a time for them to come in. And I said, what are they worried about? This house has been through hell, including an earthquake. It's fine at this point. Don't touch it. Don't mess up. Don't look under the hood. That's for sure. Because whatever's holding it together is working so far. Well, last note on the earthquake. I have a daughter in here beginning her senior spring in Hanover, New Hampshire, who did feel the earthquake. It couldn't have been much of a rumble up there. I have a feeling she may have been having trouble getting her mind into her studies. Yes, she's looking for a natural disaster to take her mind out of. Was that an earthquake? You can

just see all the seniors saying, oh, great, we have something to talk about this morning. Yeah. We don't have to study. Well, I well i mean it is true i think if you are a uh a californian i should say well your kids are native californians basically yes that you um you kind of have this i mean i think you kind of have this attitude where you wait you hear the ground feel the ground shaking and you just kind of wait and see okay what's happening now like is, is this going to stop? Is this going to keep going? Are things going to come falling down? I mean, that's the question. Yes. When I was in business school, there were a number of little tremors.

And I would, because I was an Easterner coming to business school out here at Stanford, the first thing I would do is look at the native Californians and see if they looked worried. And during the 1989 earthquake, I was in the office of an accounting professor whose course I simply could not follow. I was stopping by to beg for help. And he had lived in California for 30 years. And oddly enough, the first thing that I recall is a kind of sound. You could hear the rumble before you could feel it. And his face went instantly white. And he said, oh, this is a bad one, and disappeared under his desk. Okay, where do I disappear to?

I really didn't have much of a place. There's a little table. I climbed under the table. And that whole building bucked and rolled and rocked and the books came off the bookshelves. That was an unambiguous earthquake back in 1989 oh god yeah i remember it but i was slightly slow to get under the table because i thought wait a minute i've been through these little tremors before when his face went white i knew it was different yeah it's also not a terribly i mean at least my my in my um animal reaction to it i was just trying to remember that then i was in la and

then i was in the la for 89 uh quake and then i was in 80 in la for the 94 the really big one really really big one that collapsed the freeways and and did a lot of damage northridge quake we call it happened at 5 in the morning or 4 30 some early time and i woke up because a glass of water that was on my bedside table i sort of a higher shelf above the bed, it fell over and fell on me. And I woke up soaked. I woke up because somebody had splashed cold water in my face and then dropped a glass on my nose. And that was, but my, then of course we were in,

I think we were in production at that moment. I'm trying to remember. And there was a massive, it was a big quake. So'm trying to remember. And there was a massive series. It was a big quake, so huge aftershocks. They're telling us now there are going to be aftershocks today, too. Oh, there are? Apparently, yeah. And

we were in the stage. The stage was built in 1920-something. Stage 25 at Paramount Studios. It was originally built. They shot the original King Kong in there. And so this place had been retrofitted to to a fairly well when they first built the sound stages obviously they were built not as sound stages they were built as just silent stages they didn't have roofs right right uh and they would string they would like they would put a white canopy a white silk over the roof to kind of diffuse the sun and they called it

they call it silks and then sometimes if you're shooting outside just as a side of shooting outside and it's um and it's just cloud cover it's perfect you know right right right right they call it god silk we're gonna use god so they put us and and um but now since since over the time they you know put they fix the roof and they do the two pipe and chain the roof so they can hang the lights, and there's heavy lights everywhere. This is where they shot I Love Lucy, when they shot I Love Lucy when they moved to LA. And we were in an earthquake, and everything was shaking. And I stood there, and I thought, okay, don't panic. And my assistant was standing next to me, and I could tell he was panicking. Like, what do I do? What do I do? And I just grabbed his arm, and I held it. I said, look up, look, don't panic. And my assistant was standing next to me and I could tell he was panicking.

Like, what do I do? What do I do? And I just grabbed his arm and I held it. I said, look up, look up, look up. And then it was over. And we waited a minute. And then we sort of went about our business. But everybody else scurried to the side.

And I thought I was being very, very, very, very smart. And in fact, people told me later, like, you idiot. That was the worst place to stand. Stupid. Dude, don't stop idiot. That was the worst place to stand. Stupid. Dude, don't stop there. Go to the side. It's okay to run to safety. But I thought, oh, I don't want to panic.

But in fact, that was dumb. And it could have gotten me and my poor assistant horribly, horribly maimed and disfigured. And I don't know how. We don't have James. James is in Mexico. So James would do a segue at this point. I can't do a segue from Earthquake to this great commerce platform that revolutionizes business and has done so worldwide people buy and sell things. It's the commerce platform that has revolutionized business worldwide. They've already taken the cash register online, helping millions sell billions around the world. But did you know that Shopify can do the same thing at your retail store?

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shopify.com slash ricochet. Go to shopify.com slash ricochet. Take your retail business to the nextchet podcast. Next, we have an old friend on the site. He wrote on the site for many years and has gone on to be the founding editor of the Washington Free Beacon, which has caused trouble up and down the line since its inception, thank God. He is the author of The Right, The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism, which is a wonderful sweeping story of the conservative movement in America. He is the director of domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

He's an old friend, and we welcome him, Matt Continetti. Matt, welcome. Gentlemen, thanks for having me. We obviously are going to have to get into the things, the wars abroad. But before we talk about the wars abroad, can we just talk a little bit about the war at home, and specifically the internecine war for, I guess, the heart, the soul, the direction of American conservatism? I find more conservatives yelling at each other about who is the real one and who is not a real one than I have ever encountered, I think, in my long life, which is, I hope, going to go longer.

But still, I don't recall that. Who's right? Rob, that can't be quite true, because I've been calling you a rhino for three decades. Yeah, but a rhino is still on the right. All right, all right, fair, fair. I've been working on a little toast i have to give to ed fulner one of the co-founders and longtime president of the heritage foundation

in a couple weeks and reading about ed fulner listening to him you get a sense of an individual who really came of age knowing what it meant to be an American conservative and what it meant to belong to the American conservative movement. And Fulner tells a story about encountering Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind and reading about Russell Kirk's traditionalist conservatism and the different canons of conservatism that Kirk presents in that text. And then reading Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative, published in 1960, where Goldwater really talks about what it means to be a conservative in politics, in the national life. And he said he got theory from one book and practical applications from another. And I wonder sometimes, is it possible for a young person to do that today? What would be

the texts that they would look at for what it means to be a conservative? Who would they be turning to? So many people get their information and their news and opinions from social media today yeah you know they'd be looking at uh tucker carlson i hope many of them would look at ben shapiro who i think does come closest to continuing in the tradition of the american conservative movement um but there's so many different options and it's so easy to kind of uh kind of pick the suite of political views that you like um that i i think it's very hard rob to say oh this is the true american conservatism in the year 2024 yeah but if but it feels to me like um that's the high note it's going to start to get gloomy soon yeah it feels to me like that the problem is that the that each whoever claims to be the conservative not only doesn't think the

other people are sufficiently conservative right so it's not like just screaming at old rob that he's a rhino squish although that has its reward which has always been fair but it's sort of like saying well you're the enemy. Right. That the person who agrees with you 70% of the way or 60% of the way needs to be purified. So, may I ask a subset

of this question? And Matt, as the author of The Right, is the perfect man to answer this. Actually, I can't think now why I haven't just gotten on the phone and called you, because this really is a question in my head. When J.D. Vance attacks Ronald Reagan and says he started illegal immigration, which is nonsense, but we have a highly intelligent sitting United States senator attacking Ronald Reagan. When Ross Douthat uses the phrase

zombie Reaganism, which seems to become a kind of standard phrase with Ross, again, highly intelligent, articulate. The annoying bit about all this is that you can't dismiss these people. I can see part of what might be going on. And part of what might be going on would be, I can remember back in the 80s when I was a kid, there were Democrats around who still talked about FDR as the great figure. And Democrats my age were sick of it. Just, it was purely generational. They wanted their own time. They wanted this huge figure from the past whom they didn't even remember.

They wanted it gone. That's fine. That's normal. That's perfectly human. I get that. What I don't get though is zombie, what exactly, to the extent that there's substance to what they're saying, to the extent that they're saying we are inventing something new. Are they saying, A, Reagan was mistaken, he made one mistake after another? Or are they saying, times have changed and we have to adapt conservatism to the new circumstances? And if that's what they're saying, then why do they seem so angry and so insistent about it? I do not quite get it.

Well, that's a great question, and I can't speak for either Vance or Douthat, but I'll come at it this way. First, I think it's always important to note, and you both remember this, Reagan came under a lot of criticism from parts of the right throughout his career, including while he was president. Various parts of the right, some of my neoconservative friends thought that he was too dovish when he started the INF negotiations with Gorbachev. The social conservatives felt that he was just paying lip just a cold warrior and interested in economic growth and cutting taxes, not so much about preserving traditional American culture and mores. So that happened at the time of his presidency. It's persisted ever since. What I think you're pointing to, Peter, is that in the way that the right talks to itself today, you know, I got a group of kind of weird ex-communists, libertarian thinkers around me.

We can barely fill up a room. Our message is starting to catch the energy of young people. But in order to actually convey my ideas into the national scene and to have an effect on American politics in the world, I'm going to start need, I'm going to have to make friends. And so he reached out to populist conservatives, to neoconservatives, to the religious right when it began to emerge. And instead of that type of coalition building today, we have almost a fission rather than a fusion, where people don't want to build bridges or connections between the various factions of conservatism, but are much more

interested in expelling people from the movement, whether that's on the basis of ideas or whether that's on the basis of ideas or whether that's on the basis of their views on Donald Trump, say. So, Matt, follow up on that one. To what extent, Grant, entirely what you say, and Donald Trump, although he's been leading in poll after poll after poll for six months now, still has not broken 50%. He's still in the 40s. Now, maybe that'll be good enough. Bill Clinton won the presidency with 43% of the vote.

If Bobby Kennedy, on and on it goes. But what I'm wondering is, to what extent has the nature of the game changed because of technology? In the old days, it was extremely difficult to know exactly how to reach your base, how to energize them. So you were constantly trying to increase the pool because you really couldn't quite control the pool. And today we have technology, neighborhood by neighborhood, ward by ward. I can remember a friend out here telling me that Barack Obama, as long ago as Barack Obama's campaign, they had developed software that they could put in the hands of volunteers, and volunteers would go door to door and read questions off their iPhones,

and all they needed was six questions to know if this person was going to be voting for Romney, off. We don't spend money on them. If they're already committed to Barack Obama, we don't spend money on them. But if they're a swing voter, we know exactly what to... Okay, the point is you can identify by name and address exactly who your base is, and now you can work on them. Now you can concentrate on getting them out. And the political consultants will say,

that's where the return on your campaign dollar is best spent. Getting to the polls, energizing the people you already know are on your side. And that's because technology has changed. That is a pure hypothesis on my part. Well, cell phones and social media, the iPhone, all of that makes what you're describing ever more important. It's not just your base. It's a sliver of your base. It's the super fans. John Ellis has written about this phenomenon on his news item sub stack. It's the core of the core, the real fanatics who are going to go out and basically, you know, crawl through broken glass in order to support. That's who everyone is targeting right now. And the damage done to,

I think, conservatism and to just our politics nationally is very real. I just want to say one more thing about some of the critics of so-called zombie Reaganism. What some of them are trying to do is move American conservatism away from its belief in freedom and its traditional defense of the American legacy of liberty. And for so much of the history of conservatism, the conservatism that I adhere to, freedom is at the core. Your individual freedom accompanied by personal responsibility is the core of the philosophy. And there are some people for whom that is a dangerous philosophy. They look around the world today and they see actually too much freedom in the world. And so they're trying to kind of cast off Reagan, not just as someone who only talked about the

Soviets and tax cuts, but also as one of the great champions of freedom in American history. And that, I think, is a dividing line within the movement that needs to be fought over, because American conservatism without individual freedom is not a philosophy I would want to belong to. Can we just talk about nuts and bolts for a minute because because you're um i know we it's now rote that we say things like well of course with technology and the ability to slice up the uh electorate so closely you can pinpoint your ads you can pinpoint your message we sort of assume that that's going to be successful but oftentimes it's not i mean it just it seems to i i'm but i'm baffled by is that

these are very smart people running the democratic party and the republican party they're not dumb and their goal seems to be to win the white house by one vote or if they can win by half a vote right because for one reason they think they can do it right they think actually that's doable that's as technological precision that they can get but also then it it um it frees them up from the messiness of having to sort of appeal to that middle deciding ground that 10 11 15 percent because but i think in elections passed that 10 or 15 percent has been what we call undecideds they're unaligned undecideds the wait and see i i think that if you look at the american electorate

now the 10 or 15 percent in the middle hate both of the candidates with a passion and instead of trying to win them over what they're, the only solution they have is to try to make the other guy seem like a dangerous lunatic who's going to be the end of America. So Joe Biden's saying, vote for Trump and you're voting for the end of America. And Trump is saying exactly the same thing. This just feels like market failure to me. It feels like Hertz and Avis got together, Coke and Pepsi got together and decided to ruin the business. What's it going to take? It started with, of course, the rise of the attack ad, right? Politics is the only business where you go after your competition in the nastiest, nastiest, you know, most low down way.

Other companies, if they were to do that, other industries, it'd be the end of their industry. Right. I don't know if there's a solution, to be honest with you, Rob. I mean, I think your diagnosis is actually correct. This election will be determined really by the double haters, voters who hate both Trump and Biden. And it's just a question of where do they fall? You know, in 2022, a lot of those double haters ended up voting for Democrats, despite their dislike of Biden. But Biden wasn't on the ballot in 2022. He'll be on there this time. And it is a mystery to me. It's not really a mystery. I mean, it's in character with Trump.

But, you know, every time Trump spends his rallies talking about the January 6th, quote unquote, hostages, I think that's a reminder to those double haters. Oh, do you really want to live through another four years of Trump? every time Biden kind of ties himself into knots over foreign policy or, you know, keeps cheerleading this economy or seems to deny, outright deny that he issued the Trans Day of Visibility proclamation on Easter Sunday, then the double haters are like, oh, my God, can we live through another four years of Biden, right? So I continue to believe that this election will look like a toss-up until pretty late in the game. I agree. It will just be something happening in the final weeks where enough of the voters who are those double-haters say, I can't live with the other guy. And Matt, what do we make of Bobby Kennedy Jr.?

Yeah, I think he's a real danger to Biden. Yes, he has swung against Biden now. It's unambiguous now. He's going after Biden. Isn't that right? Yeah, I think so. I mean, you know, the messages he's promoting are pretty progressive. His vice presidential selection, his running mate, is very progressive, more progressive than he is. And I look at a recent poll out of Pennsylvania, actually a pretty good poll for Biden, if it's just Biden v. Trump, but you add the three independent candidacies, RFK, Cornel West, and Jill Stein in there, and then Biden's margin narrows to within the margin of error against Trump. So I do think RFK Jr. is hurting Biden more than Trump.

There's a lot of celebration about the fact that No Labels has announced it won't field a candidate. So there won't be a No Labels candidate. But in truth, the way that the No Labels movement was heading, I think No Labels would have hurt Trump more than Biden. And with them leaving the field, you have three left-wing to far-left independent candidacies who, if they combine for over 3% of the vote in states or nationwide, I don't see how Biden can win. I'm struck in the last, first of all, I was very struck by Bobby Kennedy's choosing the running mate because that made it unambiguous that he's going after Biden. And now I'm struck in the last few days, he seems to have settled on this with real anger. Biden's denying him Secret Service protection.

And I get this kind of overtones of, don't you understand? My family made the moderate Democratic Party. Don't you understand? I lost my uncle. I lost my... It's personal. It really feels personal. And so now you have not just Donald Trump attacking Biden personally. Now you have someone who is to his left in many ways saying, this is not just an ineffective man a demented this is a bad man that's new and that strikes me as a serious danger he's right for he's to the left of biden in some ways he he's um also in a way kind of more solidaristic in his rhetoric than biden is he's talking more about our national purpose and our national community than Biden. So I think he's been underestimated throughout this process. I think it's remarkable

the level at which he's polling consistently. His real challenge is ballot access. Will he be able to be on all the ballots or especially the ballots of swing states, the seven states which will decide the election by November. If he is on those ballots, again, I find it very hard to see Biden pulling this off. All right. Now, from politics to something that really matters is the state of Israel. We have October 7th, unbelievably brutal, vicious attacks that cost Israelis, I don't know what the sort of settled number is, but it's around 6,200. 1,200.

1,200. I'm sorry, 1,200. We have hostages still in tunnels beneath of a kind of hellscape in Gaza. And now we have, I'll just name three items. Chuck Schumer gives a speech on the floor of the Senate saying it's time for a change in leadership in Israel, a breathtaking thing for a member of the United States Senate to say about a democratic ally. I think early this week, we have Benny Gantz, a member of the war cabinet, calling for early elections, and we have a renewal of massive protests in Israel, several tens of thousands of people protesting outside the Knesset at time of war. And then in the last

48 hours or so, we have, it seems to me, we have to distinguish between American policy and the Biden administration's rhetoric, but at some point rhetoric becomes policy. And we have the president having a phone call with Bibi Netanyahu in which he demands that Bibi engage in a ceasefire, make new concessions, offer new concessions, get the hostages out. We have Antony Blinken putting pressure on Bibi, and then Kirby, the White House spokesman, summed it up yesterday. As I recall, I think I'm quoting him almost exactly, unless there's a change in Israeli policy, there will be a change in our policy. What is to be done? Well, my takeaway from the past several weeks, and especially the last 24 hours, Peter, is that Biden has lost the plot on the Israel-Hamas war. The most important thing in this war

is to maintain one's sense of moral clarity, to be able to distinguish between Israel and Hamas. Israel, which was at a state of peace with Hamas, a tenuous peace, but a peace nonetheless Israel on October 7, 2023, committed all the atrocities you described, makes no distinction between uniforms, soldiers, and civilians, murders indiscriminately, is holding the hostages, is stealing the food into these convoys. One has to always remember that Hamas is ultimately responsible for everything that happens in Gaza. And I think because of domestic politics, because of a progressive inclination to believe some of the information warfare that's being waged on Israel on the internet and in the media, the Biden administration, the president himself has just lost that sense of

moral clarity. And so it's leading us to this place where if Biden administration policy were followed today, Hamas would remain intact and Bibi Netanyahu would fall. So no matter what you think of Netanyahu, he's Israel's longest-serving prime minister, he's an extremely controversial figure, he is the democratically elected leader of an ally. And yet the one consistent through line in Biden-Israel policy has been hostility and opposition to him. And so that, I think, shows you the ridiculous situation in which America finds itself. And that's why I just urge all Americans to follow the example of a Democrat, John Fetterman, a man who, you know, rocked the label progressive because he's too concerned about what that label means these days, but who is speaking a lot of sense on a lot of different issues, no more so than on Israel. on the aid convoy. Look, Hamas will be the party that ends this war. When Hamas surrenders or when Hamas is defeated, and the best way to end the civilian casualties and to restore humanitarian

aid and limit the risk to aid workers is by defeating Hamas. Everything John Fetterman says on this issue is a display of the moral clarity that we so utterly need in Washington. By the way, we should say he seems to have recovered entirely from the stroke. He's now articulate. And his depression, right? Remember, because he entered Walter Reed just last summer, and yet something had happened to him. I think he has recovered, and he has a sense of mission, and his mission here, again, is to just point out who is the enemy and who is the heroes of this story. Yeah, I mean, whatever he's taking for his depression 12 key Democrats just went on betterment meds, they'd have a much better shot at regaining the House, the Senate and the White House. truth is that if Hamas, Hamas in October 7th attacked Israel,

attacked unarmed civilians in the most savage way. It was the Manson family murders times every household. And then they came back to Gaza and they hid behind civilians and hostages that if we let them get away with that, it's over, i mean once you say that you can do that because that is the that is not hard to do and it means you don't really need to that many what i mean you you could have accomplished all of what they accomplished in in uh on october 7th with knives and machetes they did in a lot of ways you don't need to go be a client of the iranians for advanced weapons you don't need to do any of that you need to cause mayhem and then you retreat and hide behind civilians so but i guess what my concern is

that that and not so much the biden has lost the plot but that we may have lost the plot yeah that it is true that what happened to the um the um world global kitchen workers was horrible and it is true what is happening in gaza to these people innocent people or whatever gossens is horrible it is true all that is true but it seems like we need to gird ourselves for that, as that's the inevitable price that you pay, and it absolutely can't go any other way. But I don't see anybody making that – we're looking for the solution, the ceasefire solution, so attractive because it means that maybe it'll all go away. Yeah, that's exactly right. yeah and the problem is that if you yeah but it's wishful thinking leads us down a path where it's it's it's not a ceasefire it is in fact a capitulation to the strategy well and that hamas has done right so how do we get out of that the upshot of so many biden policies has been more

war and more violence i mean the withdrawal from afghanistan 13 u.s servicemen killed uh americans drone a family in response to the terror attack in Kabul Airport. ISIS-K reconstituting itself in Afghanistan most recently launches this attack in Russia. The policy in Ukraine, Biden's fear of providing the Ukrainians with long-range weapons platforms has extended that war. It undercut the offensive, the counteroffensive that Ukraine planned. It's now putting Ukraine in a position where Russia's massing forces are most likely to gain ground in the coming months. And what are we doing? We're telling the Ukrainians, oh, don't target Russian energy supplies because we don't want the price of gasoline to go up higher.

Now we're in Israel. And what are we doing in Israel? Well, I think Peter's absolutely right. At some point, the rhetoric becomes a policy. And even though Biden has continued to supply Israel and to protect Israel somewhat in international institutions, that began to dissipate when the U.S. abstained from the U.N. resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire the other week. The rhetoric at some point is going to lead to just another one of these situations where Biden ties himself in knots, and the result is more war, more terrorism, not less. Matt, Israel again. Up until the 67 War, France supported Israel. Until two weeks ago, Germany, for good reasons, supported Israel. Israel has lost Europe. And now Israel has lost the Democratic Party. John Fetterman notwithstanding, we're so astonished and we rally to him the way we do,

precisely because he's an exception. No Europe, no Democratic Party. Will the Trump Republican Party stand firm? Who are the good guys? Tom Cotton? Yes. J.D.? Josh Hawley? What is your feeling there? Well, I think that the Republican Party still will have a sense of

responsibility and affection for Israel, will continue to be pro-Israel. I've been watching what Trump has been saying about the conflict. His most recent comments to Hugh Hewitt just the other day was that, look, Israel's got to finish the war quickly, and Israel's losing the PR war. Both of those statements, I think, are just correct. They're empirically true, right? So, I'm not reading them as a distancing from Israel in the way that some others have. So, I still think the Republican Party, for various historical reasons, for religious reasons, will remain pro-Israel. I do worry, though, Peter, about the lack of religious faith in the United States and religious affiliation. So many Republicans who are Christian are pro-Israel because for them,

Israel proves the Bible is true, right? The existence of the state of Israel is a miracle that shows the Bible is true. If Americans become less religious, less tied to the biblical traditions, I think they are going to be less likely to have that sense that Israel is there for a purpose. Israel has a special place among the nations, and America, as another covenantal promised land, has a special relationship with Israel. That's a trend that I worry about. I think it's very much visible in polls of young people turning against the state of Israel. And I do worry, eventually, that secularization that's already affecting the Republican Party, one day down the road, it could also affect the GOP's view of Israel.

Rob will now take us out with tap dancing and a joke. Right. Yeah. All right. But you're certainly finding that now with sort of sorting out what America first means and what America's national interest means and what it doesn't mean. That does seem to be a very serious debate that we're having in a very unserious way as we, that's what we seem to be absolutely destined to do. I'm trying to find something funny. Well, there was something funny in that Trump interview with Hugh Hewitt, because right before he made those statements on Israel,

he was going on a rant about Biden. It was a pretty effective campaign rant, but he ends up not with any of the policy disasters, but Trump ended up by saying that, you know what, that thing about Biden, he's also a horrible golfer. And there's no way, Trump said, that his handicap is as high as Biden says his handicap is. And it was just a classic Trump moment. And, you know, start girding yourself. We might have to have at least four more years of them

yeah if uh 12 of americans decide that they despise biden and they're repelled by biden but they despise and are repelled by trump just a little bit less um it's not really something you put on a bumper sticker um matthew you have to promise to come back because we didn't even touch your wonderful work on the realignment that's taking place. Why are Hispanics moving to – this is fascinating material. But our producer told us that on your side, you made him swear that we'd only keep you for half an hour. And I see you're in a jacket and tie, which must mean that you're headed to the green room at Fox. You've got to run, so I'm afraid we'll have to release you. But I want you to promise, on the record, for listeners, that you'll return.

I'll be here, Peter. Thank you, Matt. Thanks, Matt. Thank you. yeah it does seem um there was a we had a little little discussion group on thursday nights and when somebody asked like well uh what what consolations do you tell yourself what do you tell yourself so that you can look at the front page of the newspaper every day meaning it's filled with bad news what how do you what's the consolation for your bad news? And I would just say, I think I said this last week,

but I really do mean it, that I'm obsessed with the pilot of the container ship in Baltimore who in 30 seconds saved lives and did it. And nobody, you know, unsung hero, local guy, works the port of Baltimore andimore and um probably not the only pilot there not the only but certainly there's the every every port has many of them and they're all they all have to be really good um we only notice things when they go wrong and occasionally things do go wrong um i don't know what yet i tell you something. I'll give you something to cheer you.

And that is the new Dick Wolf documentary series, Homicide New York. Oh, great. It's Dick Wolf, so he's a total professional. And, of course, they're beautifully produced and paced. And this takes old murder cases in the 80s and the 90s. And it goes back and talks to the cops and the detectives who work the case. And you see in every single one of these, you get this notion of the good human beings who are just working hard and never expect to get their names in the press and are doing it to raise family. They can't afford to live in Manhattan, even though they take the train into Manhattan to investigate all these crimes. But they've got to get that when the when the phone rings, he's coaching his kids softball team out in Queens. And you just you're just reminded.

For me, it's especially effective because I think of New York as just this overwhelming, and of course, in fact, what it comes down to is New York is a town of neighborhoods and overwhelmingly good, hardworking people. It's the same sort of thing as we know that pilot, if there's ever a documentary, we know that pilot if there's ever a documentary you know that we know that pilot is just going to be a good hard-working guy right yeah okay so the country is still filled with people like that i think it's very true i think it's very true they're just just none of them are running for office you and i aren't you and i are not among them of course well it's always nice to talk to matt continetti he's incredibly smart and his columns are terrific and I recommend that you follow him

and listen to of course the commentary magazine podcast every day he's co-host of that which is not an easy job I guarantee you and if you're listening to this podcast it means you're listening to a Ricochet production and Ricochet is a website. You can find it on the web, Ricochet.com.

It's a conversation site. We also do podcasts, all sorts of podcasts. But we also do one other weird thing. Our members every now and then get together. Last year, Ricochet members got together on the National Review Cruise, which was later this year. They're going to do it in National Review Cruise in June.

There's a bunch going on in June. If you think there's still spots, so if you're looking for something fun to do in June, that'd be a great thing to do. There's a meetup in July in Milwaukee and in October in St. Louis. I'm going to do the last call for April 8th, which is Monday.

Is it Monday or Monday? It's Clips Day. It's Clips Day, which of course, after the earthquake. Today was Earthquake Day, yes. Omega Paladin, remember Omega Paladin eclipse day eclipse eclipse day which of course after the earthquake today was earthquake day yes um omega paladin one remember omega paladin is hosting uh in dallas a watch party to watch the total so because so the it's and there's a creepy name for where it's in the total effect so something like when you're in the zone part of the word yes in the zone you're in the zone where um make sure to wear those glasses yeah or just look up who cares um uh but it's happening on monday april 8th so uh join ricochet go to ricochet figure that out uh and join anyway

because these things are happening all the time and of course we need your support um i have a question for you for a couple last minute banter close showing banter you are still at work on a documentary i believe a radio yes an audio documentary yes on a couple weeks okay so tell us tell us what how that how has that changed your thinking what have you learned give us the topic well the topic is really um but you're well into it now i don't want to know how yeah yeah yeah yeah so the topic is really um at first what i wanted to do was do a very deep dive tiktok into covid right seen through the eyes of our friend dr jay batachari uh and then i realized that the the story really is um that pretty much everything we needed to know about COVID, we knew in March of 2020.

And we just chose not to pay attention to it. And so now it's a question of what do we do to the guy who was saying, hey, wait a minute. And Jay's position has been sort of character over time. Like, hey, wait a minute, let it rip. Hey, wait a minute, just let it go. And in fact, it's much more nuanced than that, much more smart than that. He wasn't asking us to do nothing he was

asking us to do something very specific um and just the way and the pattern at which we as a culture and a political culture and a bureaucratic culture and a media culture uh just went bananas is kind of interesting and um and it's sort of now is the time take a deep breath four years later and figure out what happens so that can never happen again right um but the problem is is that it's gonna happen again because we are gonna have just the way the world works is gonna be another contagion of some kind and the great thing that i don't see us recovering from i mean i'm just investigating my own heart here is the legitimate lingering skepticism i mean that's to put it nicely of um our bureaucratic public health officials and their political bosses um and then their acolytes in the media. So that little, that tripod of power is really kind of, has really lost

the confidence of most Americans. And that is not a good place to be. And so it's highly possible that there's going to be a contagion that in which you do have to stay at home and we should close the schools for a little bit. That's possible. It wasn't as if that never happens that just hasn't happened yet and it wasn't necessary for covid but when when that happens when and if that happens

who are you going to believe and i don't want to i'm going to call jay right but because i feel like jay is sort of willing to look at the at the number and then come up with an answer that may not you know i saw a great debate we have some audio of that debate and um one of the arguments he kept saying was like he was a focus protection he was for something called focus protection i know i we don't want to go over this too much um and a focus protection idea was you know you pick the people who are most vulnerable and then you protect them and you don't shut down businesses and schools and things. You let other people go on with their lives.

But you focus on the people you can help. And because you've limited it and you've focused your protection, you're much more effective at it. So if only the people who need to wear masks, really, the most vulnerable, are wearing the right mask, n95 mask worn the correct way and you focus on that you actually can save that some kind of protection not a lot but some um but if you just say everybody wear a mask then everybody kind of wears a mask and you actually get as a d minus kind of um protection um but the argument against that was, well, how are you going to do that?

Well, how would you even do, how would you even protect old people? Just can't be any harder than shutting down the whole country for good. Well, that's the problem is that actually turns out that it is. Yeah. Shutting down the country is easy.

Now the economy, the country schools, they all have an off switch. They just don't have an on switch. And that's the problem that we have. Without an on switch, you can't turn it off. So it just was the easy solution. And it also seemed to blanket the country. And, you know, in my view, not Jay's view, Jay's very scrupulous.

He does not endorse my crackpot vision. In my view, the reason why nobody wanted to hear what his, you know, the whole story for me is the Santa Clara County study that Jay did in March. Right. In which he discovered that there was an enormous, that we had underestimated the number of people who've been infected uh by a by a covid by some giant factor which proved that it was much less deadly than we thought exactly the denominator was already too late and that it was already out there the denominator was much larger than we thought but the numerator was the same same number of people were sick but many more people affected that is actually great news that's the news you want. And nobody wanted to hear it.

And I think they didn't want to hear it because they kind of knew that this was something special, this virus, and that this virus was going to be mysterious in some ways. And they knew that because they paid for it. Now, Jay doesn't say that. But, you know,

I'm putting on my Hercule Poirot hat, and you're like, well, why? Somebody's giving you good news, and you're like well why somebody's giving you good news you're not listening to it why aren't you listening to it and then and at the santa clara study i mean i make fun of it with him and jay is such a nice guy he's like kind of takes it like you're el cheapo you know grade z bucket shop study that you did in santa clara because it didn't didn't cost that much um nobody did another one it's not like the cdc and fauci and the collective bureaucrats when they attacked his study or they criticized it they did some unfair criticism but they just unfair criticism which is like you know you didn't spend enough money you didn't have a sample you didn't do this you did

that all that's true they could have done and redone that study i couldn't agree anytime that's almost the point of the whole story at which i myself just lose it the cdc had a has a budget of tens of billions of dollars a year and in a crisis like that it was just unlimited absolutely unlimited and they should have had a thousand studies underway oh they should have done one a week exactly a million dollars a week two million dollars a week what do we care that's what's that's good money to spend right and they didn't do it they didn't do it why didn't they do it because they didn't want to know the answer because the answer they pretty much figured was going to be the answer that jay came up with which meant that um it's going to be without a giant you

know look if you say it's the old i mean this is completely unfair what i'm about to say but it's the same kind of idea and i've written it i think i don't think i'm gonna i don't know what i'm gonna say i'll say it here um the best way to commit a murder is to kill somebody and then burn the house down. Right. True. The best way to cover up a lab leak that was, I don't think it was, I don't think it was evil.

I think it was just incompetent because that's what happens is create a giant crisis. So it's not about the lab leak. It's not about where it came from, Peter. It's about protecting the young people in schools, which you can do, but you can only do once, because eventually people learn the truth, and then they never believe you again,

and that's not where you want to be with doctors. And when can we expect to hear this? When will this start to be released? You know, I'll do some previews oh yeah i'll do some sneak previews for uh ricochet podcast listeners maybe but we're going to release them because we're doing as you know we're doing our new initiative which is the ricochet productions which is a long-form multi-episode podcast on a topic and we've got a bunch of them in the you know in development we've got one which i'm

absolutely can i'm super excited by we have one which charlie cook is doing on the second amendment we have one about called war stories which is going to be dynamite i just have to like convince a bunch of people to tell me stories that may or may not get them arrested for revealing national secrets but i'm close we're working on one about schools school reform school choice from the parents perspective parent parental these are not these are not issue we're not on one about schools, school reform, school choice from the parents perspective, parent parental, these are not issue, we're not talking about issues here, we're talking about stories American stories, that's how we're telling our

that's how we're telling our stories so I want to make sure that when we release these things it's like released like, you know, we we got another one ready to go, right so, we promote this stuff it's been super fun and I'm excited about the stuff that's stuff that we that we're we're guiding that i'm not doing but i think it's going to be great

you know charlie cook is doing second amendment and it's the funniest thing you ever heard is this english man talking about guns and in florida buying a gun and we've we've uh we found in our budget enough i hope we may not it depends on how much these are i was with a ricochet we had a ricochet meetup uh not that long ago in new orleans and it was loads of fun and charlie came we all had a good time and we're having dinner and we're sitting around and then we start talking generally like so it's like there's a lot of people there we have a general conversation and uh because charlie knows a lot about the second amendment somebody says to him what's the deal with the Second Amendment

and what do you think about it? And Biden said, you know, somehow it came up that Biden recently said, hey, some of these gun nuts think you should be able to go out and buy a cannon. Right. And Charlie was like, his head exploded.

That just makes me so mad. He's sputtering rage. Because, of course, you can already do that. You always could do that. A cannon is not a firearm. A cannon is ordinance, and that has been legal forever. It is not illegal to buy a cannon. It's perfectly legal to buy a cannon.

You can go out and buy a cannon today. And so we found some money in the budget for Charlie Cook to buy a cannon. And that's kind of what we want. That's the title of the series, that Charlie buys a cannon. And as you would imagine, the people selling cannons are mostly in Florida. So it's going to be geographically convenient

for Charlie to go buy a cannon. So that's, I'll leave you with that. And he will start firing it at sunset every day. Yeah, not an hour. Exactly right. Exactly right. After he passes his five-day uh whatever the five-day background checked by your kid no of course you don't have to have it because you're allowed to buy a can in america um this has been the ricochet podcast brought to you by shopify

support them please for signing up at ricochet.com and take a minute to leave a five-star review on apple podcast that is important i know it sounds dumb but it really does matter it like allows listeners to find us it keeps the algorithms happy and keeps this show going uh we would love to see you at ricochet.com as a member um along with us and a bunch of other members thousands of other members around the country around the world, talking and having great conversations about every topic under the sun. Kind of like this podcast. Have a good weekend, Rob. Next week.

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