The Ricochet Podcast - Good Listeners

Episode Date: August 14, 2014

This week, we listen. We listen to Paul Rahe on the Middle East. We listen to Victor Davis Hanson discuss immigration, William Tecumseh Sherman, and his plans immediately following the podcast. Finally, some thoughts on a couple of recently departed cultural icons, meditate (but not mediate) on the rapprochement between the President and Mrs. Clinton (phew!), and on the troubling events in... Source

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you know how to whistle don't you steve you just put your lips together and blow blow. Activate program. More than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. Well, I'm not a crook. I'll never tell a lie. But I am not a bully. I'm the king of the world! I'm the king of the world! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lilacs and our guests are Paul Ray and Victor Davis Hanson. In other words, just ask a question, sit back, and bask in the brilliance. And there's a lot of it to come. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, and it's number 226. And it's brought to you by Harry's Shave.

For the finest shave for the best price, go to harrys.com and use the coupon code RICOCHET at your checkout. And brought to you also by Encounter Books. For 15% off any title, go to encounterbooks.com and use that self-same coupon code RICOCHET at the checkout. This week's featured title is... Is... Different. That's right. This week's featured title is, is different. That's right. This week it's Making David into Goliath, How the World Turned Against Israel.

It's by Joshua Maravchik. It's a great book. And we're also brought to you, of course, obviously, by the Internet, which the highest example of which is Ricochet. And here to tell you all about it is Robert and Peter. Hey, guys. Hey, guys. Hey, James, how are you? Good morning. Hey, James, you know, we're going to try something different,

not this week, but next week. This is the part where I say pretty much the same thing. If you are listening to this podcast and you're a Ricochet member, we thank you and we are pleased and honored to be members of Ricochet along with you. But if you're listening to this podcast and you're not a member of Ricochet, you may be wondering why on earth should you pay for something that you're getting for free and enjoying. Well, because being a member of Ricochet gives you more than just this. It gives you the option to check out the member feed, to post and comment, to contribute to a fast-growing and influential conversation that people in the corridors of power read

and to be part of the Ricochet community with meetups and conferences and things coming. But starting as soon as I get to one spot, as I'm driving across the country, I'm going to post something on the member feed and I'm going to try to get an 800 line, a toll-free line with a little voicemail attached, probably like a Google voice.

And I would like people who like Ricochet, who are members, to call in and record a very short reason why they like it and why they're members and we're going to play that in this spot instead of having me just blabber on so not not not not content to set up a site where other people provide your content for free you're now having them do the you're now having them do the commercials for free. Yes, you figured it out. Brilliant. You can't help me paint this, whitewash this fence. But there are, of course, three tiers of membership.

There's the Calvin Coolidge level, which is the sort of basic level, which is named after the saint in Calvin Coolidge, one of the greatest presidents ever. There's also the Mrs. Thatcher level, which is sort of mid-tier, which is wonderful. And that gives you some extra goodies and some swag and some podcasts, et cetera. And then there's the third tier, which is, of course, the sainted Ronald Reagan tier, which is the highest tier possible. There's no tier that will be higher than the Ronald Reagan tier.

I think we can all agree to that. And that gives you some stuff. Plus, we're throwing a big dinner and we've got a conference planned in the works for later this year or maybe early next year, depending on how schedules unfold. We would like to thank our newest Thatcher members, the Bernern, Data4, Michael Lucart, and Gary Mullen. Thank you very much for joining us as members of Ricochet. Thank you especially for becoming Mrs. Thatcher-level members. And what are you waiting for if you are not a member? Join Ricochet today.

You will not regret it. And if you're a first-time listener to the podcast, this is usually where Peter rifles some bills close to the microphone so you can hear the nice, soft, sibilant sound of all the money that you're getting. There we go. That would be the thing. All right, sign up, join up, pay our sponsors, support the podcast because you get things like this.

We've got VDH coming up. We've got Paul Ray. But before that, I've got to ask you guys, posts on Ricochet this week about Ferguson and the situation there. The point was made in one of the posts that the cops made their first real terrible mistake with national implications

when they arrested some journalists in McDonald's. That's how you really turn the press against you. But, Peter, short take on this. Can it happen anywhere, and do we really know what happened yet? My short take is no. I don't think we do know what happened yet. I mean, what's clear is there was a terrible incident. It's not obvious that the police did the right thing. It's not obvious they did the wrong thing, that the chief of police has

stopped action and called for an investigation, and then rioting broke out. So very hard to justify. The rioting is wrong, that we know, but we don't quite know the level of indignation people ought to have. We don't know if there was a racial motivation or if it turned out to be a perfectly straightforward police action where the use of force as it sometimes does just plain goes wrong. I don't know. I just, I, this is one of those things where I don't actually have an instinctive response because I just plain don't feel that I have enough for my instinct to go on. I have to say I haven't read everything the New York Times has printed about it either. Well, I think in many ways there hasn't been that much substantive – I mean there is now, of course, now that they're making this terrible error of arresting reporters.

But before there was not that much substantive reporting of the events. Jim Garrity, if you don't get Jim Garrity's email, morning email, you really should sign up for it. It's really wonderful. And he links to a blogger, and I just, I'm sorry, I was reading on my phone. I don't have the link, who did a very interesting piece, and I will link to it, we will link to it on the podcast, in which he describes the events of Ferguson as if Mitt Romney had beaten Barack Obama. So it's Mitt Romney in Martha's Vineyard having dinner with the 1%.

It's Mitt Romney and his attorney general, which I love this thing, Attorney General Rob Portman, which I really enjoyed, not responding to what's happening in Ferguson. There is something – look, we don't know what happened. And it does seem like the kid was shot in the back, though, which is not a good thing. We don't know exactly what happened, but we do know what the response has been. And there is something disproportionate and inappropriate and slightly chilling about the militarization of Metropolitan Police. Bingo.

That's where I was going to go. Snipers and in not, these are not SWAT teams. These look like, you know, Marine urban assault units in American streets. And it's all okay. And I, you know,

I, James, you feel free to take me by the back of the head next time you see me and slam me against a wall because I'm about to do something that I always complain when other people do. But if there were a Republican president and a Republican attorney general in power in the White House, this would be the story of the year that under a big, bad Republican, the police are becoming – we're entering an actual military government. Those pictures are scary even if you're a reminder that this is what awaits us if you vote Republican, so don't. And that Barack Obama and his type are the only sole individuals for holding us back from this nightmarish future. Which you're right. The militarization of the police just somehow happened in the background.

And you look around and, gosh, it's like Barney Fife has got one hellfire missile and he keeps it in his pocket and sometimes he has to take it out and threaten to use it. No, it's a horrible sight. Anybody who's lived through a riot, and I did in D.C., right in my neighborhood, right in my neighborhood, happened around the corner where a cop shot somebody. And the first day was protests. Second day was mayhem and the third day was shopping. And people came from elsewhere. You could see people getting off the subway and walking into town at dusk for the fun that was to result. And then it was just anarchy and mayhem for the sake of fun.

It doesn't mean that there wasn't a point to it the first day. And the second day there was. But by the third day, it becomes just anarchy and society breaks on it. At that point, you really don't say, hmm, I wish that policeman there had less armor. You don't find yourself saying that. You find yourself saying, I hope they can come in and make the streets safe because I can't get a pizza delivered to my house because there's martial law. It was not a pleasant time.

But when it happens, you don't think, gosh, they're over-militarized. When you're standing back from a distance, though, or you're a reporter and you're getting hit with a rubber bullet, or you're somebody who's being hauled out of their backyard because you shouted something, then, yeah, then this becomes all of a sudden a very, very piquant reminder that we've turned every small-town police department into SWAT. But it escalated very quickly. It escalated very quickly into armed,

into that kind of assault police action against – yeah, unruly protests. I was through in a riot too, the LA riots of 94. couple of years ago that there were so many police, so many police departments were sort of becoming more militarized and buying up former military equipment or used military equipment. That does seem unusual. The strange thing, of course, is that there is we have there's a governor of Missouri. I mean, the governor of Missouri is a guy named Jay Nixon, a Democrat of Missouri, who has been completely absent for these four days, five days.

Absolutely absent and now apparently he's going to show up sometime today. Oh, good. Tin soldiers and Nixon coming. Well, what do you think, Peter? Do you think Rob's right that if a Republican was in power to use the – and I know we're all tired of Rob saying that if a Republican was in power, it would be different. OK. You get to punch me in the nose when I see you at the cruise. Hey, Rob, wouldn't you like to add a word or two about press bias?

Just to touch – just to punch all the tickets you normally refuse to punch? You know, I'm not – they're not going to let me into the next Rhino club meeting. So I – Robinson here has one – what I want to see is an interview with Ray Kelly, the former police commissioner of New York City under Michael Bloomberg, because as I understood it, one of the reasons Kelly was so successful was the rule in New York among the New York cops was as follows. Flood the zone. If there's trouble, you send a lot of cops to where the trouble is and you send them quickly. I don't believe you send them in riot gear with obvious heavy weapons. I don't believe you give them the order to start using tear gas, but you just send in a presence. I would like a real professional and as best I can tell, the two most accomplished professionals are Ray Kelly, who would be available for interviews because he's a former commissioner and William Bratton, who's the sitting commissioner in New York, probably wouldn't want to comment on a current police action. All I can say for sure is

our own George Savage put up a post on Ricochet, this would be something like two months ago, in which he simply took a picture of an item in the local newspaper up in, as I recall, it was Redwood City, which is the next town north. I'm in Palo Alto. Then comes Menlo Park. Then comes Redwood City. Maybe a population of 30,000. It's Silicon Valley. It has no particular – it's not urban. There's no urban blight.

There's no blight of which I'm aware. There are various degrees of income and so forth. But it's a prosperous town. And the police had bought and put in – there was a story in the newspaper. I beg your pardon. They had been given a grant and had been given the equipment at some sort of below price, whatever the market is for these things. An armored personnel carrier had been given to them at cut price by the United States Army or they'd been given a grant. And what George found striking, what I find striking is that it was put in the newspaper without any explanation as if the need for this thing spoke for itself. It was exactly the same kind of cheerful little item you'd find in a local newspaper if the fire department got a new truck.

What? An armored personnel carrier? What's the training involved? What's the maintenance of one of these things? And above all, what do they think they're going to need one for in Redwood City, California? That's what I know for sure. Police are getting militarized and it, at a minimum, that requires a word or two of explanation. What do they think they're doing? Well, just remember, Peter, that when the left complains about that, they're on to something.

And they're seeing a creeping militarization of the police. And they are correct. And we should join with them. When we see, however, things like the Bureau of Land Management having a lot of guns, too, and we wonder exactly about that, we're absolute crazy, absolute nutbags. Completely. Yeah. Well, the difference between the two positions is rather cryptic to me. And you know what rhymes with cryptic?

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And it's time for Paul Ray. You know him from Ricochet, of course. He's a professor of history at Hillsdale College, where he holds an endowed chair. And his academic year this time, he's a national fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He's the author of Republic's Ancient and Modern, Classical Republicanism, and the American Revolution.

And he's one of Ricochet's most popular contributors. And we welcome him back to this, the Ricochet podcast. Hello, how are you? Hey, Paul, how are you? Where are you, I should say? It's Rob Long in L.A. Where are you now?

I'm in Hillsdale, Michigan, where we are sweltering with a heat of 61 degrees. This is the coolest summer that I've ever experienced here. Usually it's pleasant, but I mean, I'm wearing a sweater right now. Well, you know, it's the climate change. I know you're concerned about that. Yes, yes, yes. Actually, if there were global warming, we here in Michigan would welcome it. Well, Paul, I know Peter's got a bunch of questions he wants to ask you, but I want to ask you one question before Peter jumps in. Are you pleased to know that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have sort of patched things

up? They had a lovely dinner, I think it was last night or the night before, on Martha's Vineyard. I know you were concerned about the rift between Hillary and Barack. I'm deeply, deeply concerned. I mean what might it mean? I think this is another case of Hillary being out of it. I don't mean she was not right in the criticism she made of the foreign policy of Barack Obama. But it was an impolitic move before she gets the nomination. And I think she's losing it. You know, that book rollout was a disaster.

She went on Fresh Air and other shows, and they sent her softballs you know the hard questions she's going to have to cope with and in the campaign they threw softball versions of these questions at her and she flummoxed she just blew over and over again she blundered so she seems to me to be blundering about and i i suspect frankly uh that uh there's something mental that's not quite right. She's no longer young and she's no longer quick. And she looks like she's going to get herself into deep trouble. Wow. Paul, Peter here.

Wow. Indeed. You will return to Hillary Clinton's age and dementia before we're done, I'm sure. But you just spent some time in Israel and I just have to – I've never been to Israel in my life. You put up some beautiful posts from Israel. You spent time there. You talked to people. You really observed as only you can observe.

Here's my sort of bottom line question. How do people continue to lead normal lives in that country? Well, look, the same way that people in New York City lead normal lives or in Chicago or, God help us, in Detroit. It's safer in Israel during war than it is in some American cities during peace. So what do you do if you live in Washington, D.C.? Well, you stay out of certain neighborhoods. And there are certain corners of Israel near Gaza where it's kind of rough some of the time. But look, I was in Jerusalem for 10 days and there was simply nothing. The most disturbing thing that happened to me was being dumped by a taxi driver at the wrong place in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood on Shabbat and trying to figure out how I was

going to find where I was supposed to be having dinner. Hebrew being the only language you don't speak fluently, as I recall. Well, I don't speak any Hebrew at all. So now, you know, everyone just about in Israel speaks some English. Right. But no, it's, look, I was there during the second Enifada for about a week to give some talks. And then it was a little bit tricky because... That's getting on a decade ago or so, right?

Yeah. Okay. Then it was a bit tricky because there were suicide bombers wandering about. And if you got on a bus, you didn't know whether something would happen. But even then, it wasn't much of a problem. The only thing I would say about the period that I was in Israel

is it was not a time to go to the old city, which is largely Arab, where people were probably very angry and where there might have been an incident, a knifing or something along those lines. But they live normal lives because their lives are pretty much normal. The only effect it has is there's a military call-up every once in a while and then you worry about your friends and relatives who are in the armed services. Paul, one other question that always perplexes me, and then I know Rob and James have questions as well, but Brett Stevens put it best, summed it up, actually put it far better than I could.

And now I can't quote him, so I'm going to stumble to quote him. Anyway, it gets complicated. But Brett Stevens said the IDF is well capable of handling anything Hamas can throw at it. of Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., if they ever adopted nonviolence, if they simply went and sat in the dozens and hundreds against the fence and went on a hunger strike, Israel would be defenseless against them. He's absolutely right. And, you know, this was done once. It's called the first intifada. There was some rock throwing in the First Intifada, but by and large, it was nonviolent. Oh, I didn't realize that. Go ahead. Explain that.

I didn't realize that. And I know the guy who organized it. There's a man named Sari Nasebi who holds a PhD from Harvard, and we were fellows together at the Woodrow Wilson Center years ago, got to be good friends. He founded a university, Al-Quds University, outside of Jerusalem, and he is an advocate of Gandhi, Gandhiist non-violent techniques. He's also, by the way, the keeper of the keys of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. It's in the hands of of his family, has been in that family for a thousand years because the Christians can't get along and would be killing one another inside the church if it wasn't under Muslim control. I mean it's bizarre but it's true. Sari was the brains behind the first Intifada and he did a biography called Once Upon a Country that's worth reading.

And he speaks Hebrew. He's taught at the Hebrew University and his interest is Arabic philosophy and Maimonides and that kind of world. And he understands the Israelis in a way that very few Palestinians do. And his view was you use nonviolence as a way to bring home to the Israelis that the situation is impossible for the Palestinian people. Now, it is also his view that the Palestinians should make a peace with Israel. And he was a strong supporter of the proposal made by Ehud deeply disappointed that Arafat did not accept that. They didn't openly attack him because you can get killed for doing that. But they quietly indicated their dissatisfaction with the direction things went.

And Sari openly criticized the second Enifada. Why didn't the first one work? They were not able to sustain the policy of nonviolence? It did work. It got the Israelis into negotiating with the PLO. The problem was on the side of the PLO. But why didn't nonviolence become their permanent approach? Well, because Arafat was in control. Keep in mind, the first intifada was largelyables in Jerusalem and on the West Bank took over and directed.

And they had a more or less free hand in doing this. They had the approval of the PLO, but the PLO couldn't run it. These guys could run it. Okay. So when Arafat comes in, everything's in his hands from that time on. Got it. And he's not a nonviolent type. So one last sort of big think question here, and then I will revert you to the hands of Rob Long. And this may be a melodramatic question, and if it is, just scale it down to something reasonable and deal with me as a slow student

here, Paul. But I was thinking about this particularly last week when we recorded the it is just scale it down to something reasonable and deal deal with me as a slow student here paul but i was thinking about this particularly last week when we recorded the podcast on the 69th as i recall anniversary of the bombing of hiroshima and we now know we had some sense then but we now know in detail what was taking place in the japanese war cabinet. And even after two nuclear weapons and the Soviets coming into the war, the war cabinet, which was composed of six men, was divided on whether to surrender. Three, incredibly enough, wanted to pursue the war. And the emperor himself had to step in to cast the deciding vote. There was, in the Japanese Japanese military a cult of death. They actually

wanted the entire country to immolate itself in some kind of weird, the entire nation to engage in the act of a kamikaze. We know that Hitler, Berlin was collapsing around him and he refused to surrender. He killed himself. There is every so often it turns up in history that this kind of death is in one way or another what one side wants. If it can't kill the enemy, it chooses death for itself. There's a kind of cult of death. we are seeing ISIS, I-S-I-S, in Syria and Iraq, and what they're doing to Christians as they drive, and the sect, the Yazidi, if I'm pronouncing it correctly, there are beheadings and crucifixions. The question here is, to what extent, and as best I can tell, once one of these cults of death gets

its hands on weapons, as did the Japanese, as did Hitler, as Iran may soon. If you agree with me that there is some aspect of that in Iran, it can only be stopped by force. So I'm building in a lot of premises here. Do you accept the premise that such a thing as a cult of death becomes an animating principle from time to time? Do you accept that the only way to stop it is by force? And do you accept that we may be up against it now? We seem to me to be up against it in Iraq and maybe in Hamas. There's a handful for you, Paul. Yes. Well, I look. To judge this, one has to go back and look at Islam and its history. There are those who say that Islam is a religion of peace. It can be a religion of peace if you accept their terms. That is to say, if you're willing to subordinate yourself, if you're a Christian or a Jew and you're willing to subordinate yourself to a larger

community that is Muslim. But the larger history of it is that what is not controlled by the house of Islam is called the house of war. And so there is a strong warlike emphasis in it. And of course, there is an understanding of the afterlife and of martyrdom in war, in holy war, that leads to glory and salvation in the afterlife. So, you know, we're up against something pretty rough in Iraq and Syria. And we're also in a period in which the old Arab nationalism is collapsing. The, you know, Arab nationalism, it's a very, has a very interesting history. It is, it originates chiefly with the Christians who, by way of embracing a, an understanding of politics that divorces it from religion and emphasizes language and culture made a claim to citizenship. So, for example, the founder of the Baptist Party, one of the two

founders of the Baptist Party, was a Greek Orthodox Christian named Michel Afleck. And if you look at the author of the Arab Awakening, George Antonius of Jerusalem, George Antonius was also Greek Orthodox. In a way, Arab nationalism was a Christian project that others bought into. And if you look at the history of the Ba'athist party, its real appeal in both Iraq and Syria is to members of minority sects, to the Sunnis who could never hope to be a majority in Iraq, and to the Alawites who could never hope to be a majority in us. With over 250 partner organizations worldwide, we bring together unparalleled expertise to serve businesses like yours. We can help you discover partners in new markets, advance your digitization and gain valuable insights into EU funding opportunities. Take advantage of free expert advice and innovation resources.

Visit een-ireland.com and take your business global today. Syria, they too had an interest in divorcing politics from religion. In other words, an interest in secularism. The third place where it was powerful was, of course, Nazarite Egypt and the Coptic Christians bought into it. But many Egyptians of a Sunni sort did as well. But in general, what we're seeing now is a resurgence in the Middle East of an identity based not on language, not on culture, but on religion. And one consequence of this is the Christians are rethinking. When I was in Israel, one of the things I learned is that the number of Christian Arabs who have volunteered for service in the Israeli army has quadrupled in the last few years. And there's at least one Greek Orthodox priest who has come out publicly in support of the Zionist entity. That is to say, Christians are beginning to throw in with the

Israelis. And they're doing so because the rule of an outfit like Hamas threatens them. Now, let me say one other thing about this. Everything that you see in the Middle East in terms of Islamic revivalism, fundamentalism is the wrong word. It doesn't have to do with fundamental religious doctrines. It has to do with practices. So it's a kind of revivalist movement and a revival of zealotry, which is much prized in Islam. This Islamic revivalism is throwing all of the minorities into a new situation. The Druze, the Jews obviously, the Christians, the Alawites, they're beginning to rethink their situation. And I think you're going to end up with a kind of alliance between Israel and the Alawites in Syria.

If you were to take Iran off the table as an ally of the Alawites, they would turn to the Israelis tomorrow. The grandfather of the Assad who now rules Syria or claims to rule Syria, actually publicly back in the 1920s or the 1930s, embraced the Jews in Palestine as possible future allies. So strange things are beginning to happen because of the breakdown in the old Arab nationalism. The second thing I would say, because of the breakdown in the old Arab nationalism. The second thing I would say, Patrick Coburn has written a bit in the British press about the significance of ISIS.

He believes that it is the most important event since the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which I believe is 1916. It was the middle of World War I, between the British and the French about dividing up the Middle East. The division between Syria and Iraq is a European imposed division. Iraq is made up of a number of Ottoman provinces. Syria is made up of a number of Ottoman provinces. But the sharp distinction between Syria and Iraq is artificial. And it is now being abolished by ISIS. And what

you've got with ISIS is a return to the pre-European imperialism period, to the pre-1914 period, in which identity is grounded in religion. And of course that means that the Sunnis and the Shiites are going to be at one another's throats as they historically were in the great struggle between the Ottomans of Turkey and the Safavids of Iran. So we've got huge changes and they may be permanent. Patrick Coburn thinks that this ISIS business is a very, very big event. I'm not in a position where I can confidently judge one way or another on that. But I can tell you he could be right. And I think he is because if we look at the Arab nationalism that you've just been describing as being on the way, I mean the nations themselves were created by all of these wonderful little protocols

and treaties in the past. And when you brought up Sykes-Picot, I thought, you know, how many people in our audience are just rolling their eyes and saying, of course, Paul, I was thinking of Sykes-Picot myself too. Or were they just frantically Googling to find out what it is? You know, the thing, I was going to ask you a question, but you answered it in your statement and you brought up four more. And for that, well, we've got to have you on again. Of course, we'll see you at Ricochet, but we've got to have

this conversation continue at another point because every time you're on, Paul, it just brings up more and more things to ask you about. Unfortunately, we have to go and do this other thing. So we're just going to see you at the site and thank you for being with us today. Okay. Take care. Thanks, Paul. Okay. You know, when he brought up – So we should make a list of things that Paul doesn't know extemporaneously. The next time we have Paul on, I think we got to pick a topic and see if we can punk him, see if we can stump Paul Ray. Oh, I know. We'll start on the Hubble Space Telescope.

No, no. He's got that. He's got that. He's got that. And, you know, I had a drink with him a couple months ago in L.A. And we're sitting around and we're talking about old movies and where they were shot on location in Hollywood. He knows that too. He's just a super brain. He's a super brain. Well, some of the things you have to take their word for, don't you?

I mean if you're talking about this gun for hire and somebody says, well, I love the scene in angel's flight even though it's very funny because you know it's angel's flight but they never show the trap the car itself the funicular car but you just know because of that angle of that warehouse how are you gonna prove that you know so maybe a lot of this is just bs and for all we know he's never i don't think so you know he's never been to israel okay yeah exactly how do we really know he was – we find ourselves in a situation now where we're learning about strange, peculiar sects of the Middle East only because they're being exterminated. And I have this feeling that the more ISIS grows, the more we're going to find out about another organization they don't like and have decided to kill or drive up a mountainside.

Oh, good Lord. But you're right. They're the rampant, momentum-driven force of evil in the world. And who's the real problem, of course? Israel. Yeah. evil in the world. And who's the real problem, of course? Israel. Now, Israel is the problem. And that's why, if you went to Encounter Books, you would find Making David into Goliath, how the world turned against Israel by Joshua Marovchik to be a relevant read.

I was just hearing him on a talk show the other day, and there's a sort of sadness and rue that he uses in describing the situation, because it's almost unimaginable. Israel's been the outcast for decades, but something different is afoot these days. Making David into Goliath traces the process by which material pressures and intellectual fashions have reshaped world opinion of Israel. Now, initially, terrorism, oil blackmail,

and the sheer size of the Arab and Muslim populations gave the world powerful inducements to back the Arab cause. But then a new prevalent paradigm of leftist orthodoxy in which class struggle was supplanted by the noble struggles of people of color created a lexicon of rationales for taking signs against Israel. Thus, nations can behave cravenly while striking a high-minded pose and aligning themselves on the Middle East conflict. End quote from the Precious.

To get this book or 15% off the list price of any book, go to encounterbooks.com and use the coupon code RICO Ricochet at the checkout. And we thank Encounter for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Let's talk about that paradigm exactly, how the world is now coming up with all kinds of new reasons to mask their own anti-Semitism. We'll talk about it with Victor Davis Hanson. As you know, he's the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at Residence in Classics and History and Military History. I'm sorry, at the Hoover Institution and a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University.

Welcome back to the podcast. Good day, sir. Thank you for having me. You know, we were talking with Paul Ray before about Middle East, and I was thinking there's always been anti-Semitism in Europe, but now it seems to have this new strength ambition and it's emboldened by something. Whereas once you could just, there was the old classical predictable European anti-Semites. There was the new imported class of anti-Semites.

But now there's the young leftist pseudo-anarchist progressive worldwide joining hands type that seems to give – what's the word I'm looking for? Credence, respectability, to the idea that it's okay to shout death to Jews again on the streets of Europe. What's going on? Well, it's much more dangerous than the old easily caricatured right-wing Yahoo who didn't like Jews out of envy or jealousy and usually didn't see very many of them. But I think what's dangerous is the new one is socially acceptable because it's couched in egalitarianism, fairness, populist, underclass sentiments.

And so it doesn't earn the same degree of criticism and scrutiny that the old anti-Semitism is. And it's also focused, to be frank, on campuses, universities, academic environments. And you can see it among the faculty. So the higher up the social economic ladder it goes, the more acceptable it is. So a lot of people in the street are thinking, wow, professors say the same thing we do in journals, so what's the big thing? And when they start to boycott Israeli academics and intellectuals and professors, it sends a message that filters down.

So, yeah, it's a lot. It's part of this weird thing that we're going through in the 21st century where the left is never subject to the ramifications or the consequences of its own ideology. So it can preach, you know, diversity and tolerance all at once, but it's a very intolerant and often undiverse ideology. Victor, Peter Robinson here. Hillary Clinton and David Brooks. Hillary Clinton gave an interview to Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic in which, although she praised President Obama as a brilliant man, blah, blah, blah, blah. When it came down to policy, she was very critical. And she said, I'm quoting her, great nations need organizing principles and don't do stupid stuff, which is one of President Obama's famous lines. And don't do stupid stuff is not an organizing principle. That's what Hillary Clinton said. David Brooks says,

the Clinton approach strikes me as sound for the reason that early intervention against cancer is safer than late-term surgery. If we don't take aggressive preventive action of the sort that Clinton leans toward, you end up compelled to take the sort of large risky action that Obama abhors. So Hillary Clinton is now on record as favoring a more aggressive, interventionist, unapologetic American presence in the world. And David Brooks says he's with her. Is Victor Davis Hanson with David Brooks and Hillary Clinton? I think you know what I'm going to answer, how I'm going to answer this. I just feed you the lines, Victor. The rest is up to you, baby.

I know. That's like a 14-inch softball phone at slow speed. Gravity allowed to a batter. Both of them don't have a good record on a rack. Take a rack. That was supposed to be a muscular preemption that they both wholeheartedly supported. David Brooks wrote a lot of columns advocating that we take out Saddam, not in 2003, but even earlier, as far as the weekly standard preemptive sort of chorus. And then when things got bad, he started to ankle-bite the whole project,

and he ended up, as did Hillary Clinton, opposing it. So I don't have a lot of credence that they believe in forward, muscular American activity, because when you start to do that stuff, things happen that you didn't plan on. And when things happen that they don't plan on, both of them have a record of saying that it's his war, not mine. That's number one. And number two, everybody knew what it was about. It was Dick Morris's updated triangulation.

George Bush, on the one hand, as they used to say in classical Greek, the men-day argument, on the one hand, he was too interventionist. On the other hand, Barack Obama was not interventionist enough, and I'm right in the middle of the two, sober and judicious and moderate. So it was a contrived position. I'm surprised that David Brooks would really give it any credence. And then it just simply excuses five years of leadership from reset to the video in Benghazi. This is a woman who stood over the corpse of a slain American

soldier and flat out lied to his parents and said this was done because of a video maker. And when she knew that was not true, in the case of Benghazi, she pushed her plastic red reset button, even though she knew that the punitive measures the administration was under had been George Bush's kind of weak reaction to the Georgia incursion. So she reset the reset. And I don't have to go into seeing Samantha Power and Susan Rice going into Libya. They turned it into a mogadishu on the Mediterranean.

We forget, for all this talk in that interview about the pro-Israeli sentiments that she's now expressing, she came right out of the blocks in 2009 as Secretary of State, lecturing Israel on settlements, on a flotilla, and she was one of the people who put the first distance between us and Israel that a lot of people saw would widen and allow people like Hamas to come in there. So I just, with the Iran deadlines, I don't think that there's much record there of leadership. The Syrian, she can say all she wants, but in the Gates memoir, she admitted to Gates that her positions were predicated on political considerations.

I just don't think that you have a secretary of state for five years, and then you survey the world from Iran, Syria, Iraq, Gaza, Libya, Egypt, and you come away with the idea that she's sober and judicious and Obama made me do it. I think she's got a lot of problems. Hey, Victor, it's Rob Long. I'm coming to you from South Carolina, so I'm in the south here. Oh, good. I want to talk a little bit about Sherman in a minute, but before we talk about a great military leader, can we just keep talking about Hillary Clinton for a second?

Yeah. Just the opposite side. So do you think, what do you think she's doing now? I mean, you know, politically, you put your political hat on. Do you think she's rattling his cage? She's trying to appeal to the center, the moderate. She's trying to show some distance between them. I mean, do you think she's lying to Atlantic Magazine? Take your business international. Enterprise Europe Network is the world's largest network providing free support and advice to SMEs with global ambition. With over 450 partner organizations worldwide, we bring together unparalleled expertise to serve businesses like yours. We can help you discover partners in new markets, advance your digitization and gain valuable insights into EU funding opportunities. Take advantage of free expert advice and innovation resources.

Visit een-ireland.com and take your business global today. Do you think she was lying? Yeah, I do. I mean, Rob, just ask yourself, what if Barack Obama's approval ratings right now were 62%? Would she have given that interview? Of course she would have. She would have said that she was a loyal partner

and she carried out the successful Obama program. So she understands that it's not that he's 40%. He's 40% in falling. And in a midterm election, for example, his constituents will not get out. So she and Bill have cooked up this thing that we better preempt very quickly, and we've got two and a half years to remind the electorate that we're not Obama, so we're going to do this every six or seven weeks. We're going to find an occasion to put distance between us and Obama,

and then the reaction from the Obama people against us will not necessarily be bad. It'll be, you know, Obama doesn't like us, and most people don't like Obama, so they like us. And I think that's the strategy, but whether it has anything to do with reality, or is it any indication that if she were president, she would do any of the things she said? Absolutely not. We don't know what she'd do, because she doesn't know what she'd do, because she's going to do whatever 51% of the people are perceived to want.

That was a big difference between the Clintons, by the way, and Obama. They have no ideology. They just believe in 51% pulse of the electorate, which is a lot less dangerous than Obama in most cases. You made a post a few, I think it was last week, about William Tecumseh Sherman, the Civil War general from the North, on the Union side, who made his famous race to the sea. He swept through Georgia and saved Savannah.

Savannah was his gift. He didn't destroy Savannah. And you talked a little bit about that strategy, what his strategy was. I mean it's always been – depending on where you actually learn the story, what region of the country, it's either a brilliant tactical strategic move in order to sort of demoralize and remind the South that there are going to be costs at home for a war. Or it's a vicious rampage through civilian areas that can never be forgotten or forgiven. But you say what we need in the future in our military strategies is a Sherman strategy. Could you explain that? What would a Sherman strategy be for, say, ISIS in Iraq? Well, the strategy is not – people misinterpret Sherman and think the logical extension of

going into Georgia through the Carolinas, something like Dresden or the firebombing of Tokyo, where you inflict collective punishment on people who field armies that you're not very successful in defeating, as Grant was not in that summer of 1864. But it wasn't. Sherman killed very few people. He selectively targeted the property of the plantation class, the 2% who owned slaves, and he humiliated them. And he said he was going to humiliate them, and he did. And so in a case like ISIS, you would try to find out where they are, and then you would selectively blow up things,

and you would try to stop the places they hang out in, the people who give them aid and support, and you would isolate them from the population. And sort of what we did, to tell you the truth, with the surge, everybody talked about the Petraeus surge was hearts and minds, it was changing tactics. It was getting Americans out. It was, but that was sort of a veneer to go kill a lot of people who were bad and who were aiding. And basically, Petraeus said, if you're going to aid Al-Qaeda, you're going to pay a price, and it's much better to work with us. So it's giving people a choice that if you want to work with ISIS,

this is the type of stuff that's going to happen. And the best practitioner of it I know is the Israelis in Gaza, because like Sherman, they were very selective. And for all the media anger at the Israelis, when all the cameras go away, and they will, and they already are, Gazans are going to walk along those streets, and they're going to point to that house and say, why did that house survive and that one didn't? Why did mine get blown up and yours didn't? Why did this building over here is in rubble and this one isn't?

And they're going to say, ah, privately we know that this house had missiles in the living room, this one had a tunnel in the basement, and that's why they, and Hamas did that to us. And so why the consensus opinion is that everybody's going to be angry at Israel, I think it was Sherman-esque to the core that they went in and they said to the people, Hamas is an expression of you people, and we're going to pay, make the people who support them pay, and we're not going to touch the rest of the people to the extent that we can. It didn't. It really separated the group.

How can we measure that in the future? I mean, what do you say, two years from now, three years from now, four years from now, how will we know if that Sherman-esque strategy has worked for these races? Well, I think we're just going to have to count the number of missiles and we're going to have to see how well that Hamas, and we're going to have to see the popularity of the Hamas, and to the degree that the Palestinian Authority they work. And I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of people, once the cameras are off, are not going to be too sympathetic, not only because they don't like what Hamas did and they brought suffering, but they're losers. People don't like losers.

When this is all over, look at Gaza. It's a mess. And then they're going to have to do what? They're going to have to go back and say to the Europeans, the Swedes, the Danes, the Dutch, please give me some more billion dollars so I can rebuild because our children are starving and we don't have clean water and the sewage is in the street. So we want you to give us more billions so that we can rebuild Gaza City. So in five years, we can put more missiles and blow it up again. Right now, that's going to be a hard sell. Interesting. Hezbollah didn't do that.

Hezbollah had, what, 60,000 missiles, and they could have easily joined in the barrage. I don't have differences with Hamas, but the reason they didn't was that Sherman-esque strategy that Israel did in 2006. They inflicted $10 billion of damage, and Hezbollah knows that, and they knew that if they sent 10 rockets in,

they would lose apartment buildings and sewage plants and everything. And they didn't do it. So I think it's a successful strategy rather than you know, if you're not going to come out and fight Ulysses S. Grant in the field of battle, or if you do

and it's not working very well, Sherman came up with the idea that why are these people enjoying their plantations when their slave-owning caused the war and they're exempt from the ramifications of their own ideology? I'm not going to allow that to happen. I don't think it's so moral for Grant to kill 18-year-old white boys from the South who don't own slaves.

Why do people who started the war with all these big beautiful mansions sit here in georgia and the carolinas and right start pontificating so well you know i've been driving through the south and i and i drove uh along the the southern uh the the southern part of the gulf coast and i mean a lot of it now through past christian and past gula and that part of the coast mississippi al Alabama. A lot of it now, all those great big mansions, a lot of them are gone now. Katrina took out a huge portion of those beautiful mansions except Beauvoir, which still is there, which is the Jefferson Davis Gulf Coast home. He's got one in Mississippi and there's one in Beauvoir, which is the –

I don't think they call it the presidential library, but there's some suspicious wording in the South for what exactly it is. But it's a museum and it's a strange thing to see really because they lost. But there's still a lot of flags flying around here. But before I let you – I just want to share with you one anecdote. I was leaving El Paso. It was about maybe 10, 15, 20 miles outside of El Paso and came to an I-10, and there was a roadblock. It was a border security roadblock, and everybody had to kind of go through that little tunnel, little kind of tent area.

They're stopping every car, and as you approach it, everyone's photographed. I mean I got pictures of it. I'll post them. Everybody's photographed. Every car is photographed. The license plates are photographed. And then I sort of came up to the stop sign and I was peered at suspiciously by a border security guy whose last name I think was Garcia. And he kind of looked at me and said, what's your name? And I told him, he said, where were you born? I said, Maryland. And he said, OK. And he let me and my Subaru and my dog keep driving. But I thought, good Lord, I've just been profiled. So maybe there's some security going on in the border. I'm not sure. I'm not sure who they're trying to keep in or out. I fit a profile. Well, how do you know that

if you had said your name was gonzalez and you lived in honduras he wouldn't have said go on through that's true that's true or just wave me you may have been profiled because they were stopped because you were suspiciously a non-illegal immigrant from central america i some standing out like a sore thumb. Remember in the age of Obama, up is down and yes is no. And we live in an inverse universe. I forgot. Thank you.

I needed a reminder right then. As well, we have a saying around here. Life is short, but Rob is long. And we thank you for being with us today, BDH. I had another question to ask you, but actually it was about Greek mythology, and it was so simplistic and stupid it would probably make your teeth hurt. Oh, go, go. Ask it, ask it. How often do we...

Okay. Do you have... All right. I was in Greece recently. I was in the Ionian Sea, and I was boning up on the reasons for the nomenclature, and I read the story that it's called that. I'll be careful about the Ionian Sea. Great classicists have fallen into that trap.

Well, apparently it got its name because Zeus fell in love with a mortal, as was his wont, or a nymph. And his wife found out, and the wife starts going after Io. And so Zeus helpfully changes her into a cow. Okay. And then Io jumps off a cliff into the sea. And that's why it's named after her. And I'm trying to figure out exactly the process by which the locals said, yep, what do you

call this place? Well, we call it Ionian Sea because, well, it looks like the kind of place that a cow would go off the cliff into when running away from an immortal god jealous of her husband's attentions. And I thought, how exactly do we know this? And the source documents that tell us what the Greeks believed or supposedly thought or said or, you know, pretended to believe. The problem we have is that there's Ionia. And Ionia is the coast between what is basically Troy at the Dardanelles all the way down to what is Bodrum or Halicarnassus, about 50 miles from the Aegean inward, opposite

Samos and Lesbos and Rhodes, etc. And that's the wealthiest part of Asia Minor. And that was called Greek Ionia, Ionic columns and all that. It was a culture from which Greeks migrated to Athens and northern Greece, as opposed to the Dorian alternative. And in any case, Ionia was the wealthiest and the original site of Greek culture. It's where Thales and the pre-Socratic philosophers grew up at. However, because of the myth that you described, we had Io going across the Bosphorus, the Cowl Crossing, when she was stung. So she was in that area, and that's where the Ionian, you just correctly identified the myth.

But the sea in Western Greece, i.e. along Ithaca, Zakynthos, off the coast of northwestern Greece, is usually called the Ionian Sea, even though it's 700 miles from Ionia. And so what happens is when people today go there, or people in print, they'll talk about the Ionian Sea thinking they're logically talking about the area in the eastern Aegean off the coast of Ionia, and it's not. It's 700 miles to the west where there is no Ionia. So basically the sea off Ionia is called the Aegean, and the sea where there's no Ionia is called the Ionian Sea. It's kind of famous because a very famous Homer scholar said that he was in Ephesus on the coast,

and he wrote this in print, and he sat on the beach, and he listened to the beautiful waves of the Ionian Sea. And then people sort of said, that's not the Ionian Sea. Yes, yeah. Well, I still can't figure out exactly how they decided that that's what happened. How do we know? That's a larger question. Basically, you had a very sophisticated Near Eastern type civilization in Troy, an Akkadian situation in the mainland of Mycenae in Greek, and it was toppled, destroyed, imploded, we don't know, around 1200 BC. Then you had a 500-year Dark Age.

Then when the city-state reemerged under very different circumstances, different type of writing, different type of social, political, economic organization, Western civilization, in other words, as we know it, they inherited a Dark Age oral tradition in the Iliad and the Odyssey. And the result of all this was that people for 400 years had been making up myths, Perseus, Theseus, Io, Agamemnon, about the material objects that they could not build, they couldn't explain, but they could see. So when they saw the Lion Gate at Mycenae or the ruins of Troy, or they heard stories about the last Mycenaean expedition, they said, wow, these people were supermen. They were cyclops.

They were demigods. Zeus used to do this. It was an impoverished culture's attempt in the Dark Ages to make sense of falling into a tholos tomb or seeing linear B tablets or all of the vestigial remains of a very sophisticated Near Eastern type of palatial civilization that had been wiped out and left 10% of the population. Then when the city-state came and the Dark Ages sort faded, and civilization returned on very different auspices, they began to codify all of those myths, and they knew them as myths. And that's where they got a lot of the names. And that answers my question, which is sort of the first week of class question, and I'm sorry if it did

indeed make your teeth hurt as I said, but I understand you have a dentist appointment anyway, so off you go and thank you for showing up today. We'll see you later. Don't ride a carbon bike with a carbon fork or you'll end up going 30 times to the oral surgeon, the sinus surgeon, and a plastic surgeon.

Oh, ouch. Ouch indeed. That's where I'm headed right now. Good luck. Okay, we'll see you guys. Thank you, Victor. Thanks, indeed. That's where I'm headed right now. Good luck. Okay, we'll see you guys. Thank you, Victor. Thanks, Victor. When you talk about how cultures create these stories and they're passed on by generation to generation, and then things fall apart and the stories are revived, it makes you wonder if in 3,000 years from now,

they'll be looking back at our time and say, as far as we understand, a man named Robinus William has ascended unto heaven on a special chariot with a handmaiden of Lauren Bacall, that what we have today as absolute facts will be completely twisted around and turned and misunderstood by future generations. But that would require something to go terribly, terribly wrong, which we hope doesn't happen. Stuck here as we are in the present, it's been a week of obits, right? I think we've all discussed Robin Williams to absolute, to the end of any usefulness. But Lauren Bacall, I want to ask you guys exactly how that one hit you and what you believe.

We're hearing that this is the final link to the age of glamour that's now over. Wrong. Actually wrong. The final link as far as I can tell is Olivia de Havilland who deep into her 90s is still alive and active and still every so often granting an interview in Paris. There are still – there may be one or two other links to the golden age. But Lauren Bacall was not quite the last. So there. I would agree.

Well, it's slightly different. I mean, she was an old lady. I mean, we're not... Whenever you get the news, it's not going to surprise you. No, correct. There's a

natural progression to surprise you. No, correct. It's an old lady. There's a natural progression to the life. But I think also we kind of forget sometimes just what kind of troublemakers some of these broads were back then. I mean you think of them all now as these elegant old ladies. But back then they kind of partied. I'm not saying either one of these women, Olivia de Havilland or Lauren Bacall, was exactly Kim Kardashian. But for their time, they were a little racy. Humphrey Bogart was a married man when he took up with 19-year-old Lauren Bacall.

Yeah. She was abroad, as you say. If you last a long time, everybody who lasts a long time in hollywood becomes a national treasure that's the rule and if you last a long time uh and you last a long time and look good and laura mccall look good i just was watching her on charlie rose the other night just these clips of her and you know throughout the years she looked pretty good all the way through um you know there's something about that and she also seemed very smart too she seemed like a smart, smart girl. Oh, yes.

And she wrote well. She wrote two, I read a few excerpts. I never read the full bio, but she wrote well. She was a highly intelligent, well-spoken, articulate, poised, good-looking broad. Rob, Robin Williams, one of the themes that's emerged here in all the, not all, but in many of the obits is this. I think it actually comes pretty close to being a cliche, but I'm just wondering if it's true and you would know. And what's asserted about Robin Williams is that the inner darkness was the kind of flip coin of the manic comic energy, that you couldn't have had that kind of comic energy without some kind of inner turmoil or darkness.

And cocaine. of comic energy without some kind of inner turmoil or darkness and cocaine or you could say you know he was just a guy who's messed around with drugs and booze and uh led a disordered life and in the end paid for it it was the booze it was the drugs it was the bad behavior what do you think i don't know i'm not sure i think there's something to that i mean the comedians there is a rule of thumb about comedians, which is that they're all kind of nuts. And they're all kind of nuts in their own specific way, but they're all kind of nuts in one of two general

ways. Either they are sort of over-the-top, emotional and effusive, or they are ice-cold and completely withholding. Johnny Carson was ice cold, totally withholding. Robin Williams, you won't find a person who has a story to tell about Robin Williams where he was anything less than extraordinarily generous.

I mean there are moments where, if you're Robin Williams, the one criticism you used to hear about Robin Williams is that he used to steal people's material, right? He would show up at a comedy club, and he'd applaud, he'd laugh, and then the comic would see him, you know, three weeks later on Johnny Carson or somewhere, and he'd do a joke that he heard.

And it really bothered the young comics because they thought he should be more disciplined. They sort of understood what happened. They didn't chalk it up to any kind of evil on his part. But he should be more disciplined, which of course was something that Robin Williams couldn't do. But every time Robin Williams heard that, he sent them money. Oh, really? Yeah.

He would apologize and he would say, I'm sorry. Sometimes it just comes right out. I don't have any discipline, which is true. He didn't have any discipline. But he was an incredibly sweet guy. Everybody who knew him said the same thing, which is he was incredibly, incredibly kind and generous and thoughtful all the time. So he went the other way in a way. He was sort of the other way a little too much, a little too needy.

And it didn't help that he also had drug and alcohol problems it didn't help that he like a lot of people who have like you know heart surgery has this weird sort of right right brain chemistry problem as a result oh it didn't help that um you know he's at the tail and certainly a tail end of his movie career big big time movie career uh i mean not that we should feel sorry for him he had an os and had been in some of the biggest hits ever. But it didn't those things kind of add up. And I I think if you are if you notice thing that Robin Williams, they said, like, here's a guy who when you he was on, he was on one hundred twenty thousand percent. But then he preferred to be at home in Tiburon,

of all places, northern California, Marin County. And it's kind of a homebody. There's something about the imbalance of that. What's his permanent contribution to comedy, to American comedy? Can you say that Robin Williams has a specific comic legacy the way you could say that Jack Benny did? Yeah, I think so. I think you find it mostly from whatever relates to his earliest work, the early work he did, the sort of improvisational, wild, kind of crazy stuff he did on – I mean from me was on television. The stuff that he did on Mork & Mindy, right? I was a kid and I remember watching it and thinking this is unlike anything I've ever seen. This is not just a really good version of a half-hour comedy.

This is a half-hour comedy unlike anything i've ever seen and i used to say that to people when i've when they when i'm working on a tv show or i'm helping out on somebody's tv show it's like i don't know how to get a hit tv show if i knew how to do that i would be talking to you from my g5 right but um i do know that every hit television show certainly every hit comedy has one thing about it that's really not negotiable. That's that they have at least one character who talks differently. Language, even the alphabet is different from everybody else on TV. And when I say that, people go, oh, yeah, Mork.

Oh, really? It's this iconic character who just kind of came out of the middle of nowhere, and he talked he was like the anti-Fonzie in a way and it was interesting that he was on, that's how he started on that show, and the anti-Fonzie he was not cool, he was not in control, he was not

he was not he didn't know what was going on he was confused half the time, he got everything wrong, he was highly emotional. He was the first, you know, he's a hip nerd and we hadn't had one of those on TV

and certainly not that time. And he improvised a lot of that dialogue and you could kind of tell and they just kind of went with it. And that, I think, was really a remarkable, and I don't think anyone's ever done that since.

There's never been a talent like that where you could put that person on TV and just kind of have it go. So he's a remarkable guy. There's something about this that reminds you how skewed values become when you're famous and you're in Hollywood and you've had a fairly successful career. When you write humor for newspapers or magazines or books or something like that, it's just like shouting and whistling in an empty dark barn. There's no response. And eventually maybe an echo will come back to you in the form of somebody who writes you a letter or somebody who comes up in the store and says, I like that piece that you did, but it's very remote. When you're a standup comic on stage though, it's immediate. You're either dying or you're killing. Right.

And I read a piece that Williams liked to do stand-up as much as possible. He was getting back into it. And in one of these, he went to a comedy club and said, can I get on stage? And they said, well, we got guys booked up for the next four hours. Come back, which I find itself strange that any comedy club owner would say that. But apparently that's where he was in the picking order. And he came back midnight and did a show and tried to win the audience over, and they laughed at him at first because he was Robin Williams,

and then they laughed at him genuinely because what he was doing was breaking down his persona and being amusing. But it's pathetic to think that at that point, at 62, 63, at midnight you've got to go to a small comedy club and stand up against the brick wall like a prisoner about to be executed and try to – and do that. For heaven's sakes, you're Robin Williams. You've accomplished all of these things. But yet at the end when we hear that he was depressed about money and his career, this is how it turns out in Hollywood.

But you know – Hold on a second. Wait, wait. Is that you think it's come to this. I'm playing Teddy Roosevelt for the third time in a Night in the Museum movie. And that's a symbol of how far you've fallen. Went to most people. Did anybody look at Robin Williams and say, this guy's career is in the toilet?

No. Nobody did. Anyway, Rob, you were going to say. Well, I was going to say that probably – I mean I don't know. But I would say that appearing at 10 o'clock or after hours or after the card on a comedy club was probably his best choice. That was probably the best moment for him. That's the thing that these guys need to – if you're a stand-up comic, you're just nuts. I mean it's a weird job. It's horrible.

And if you can do it, there's something wrong with you. It's terrible. If you stand in front of people and make them laugh, they're kind of like – even if they pretend they're not, they're sort of dead set against it. They're trying not to laugh at you. And I think a guy like Robin Williams, for him to do that, made sense. It's like that probably would have helped him because he was funny. He really knew how to do it. He was a good standup comic. And, uh, and I think the, you know, they always say

the same thing about these comics when they sort of rise too high or they go this or their career goes sideways, like start again, start again in the club, start in front of people, start with small groups, start working out your material That probably would have given him more pleasure and actually more genuine joy than anything else. And I feel like the career problem is like – I don't know. I mean who – I just was reading the Daily Mail, which who knows if that's any – that's true. He said he had money problems, this or that. I'm sure that he's spending a lot of money and I'm sure his lifestyle is very high and I'm sure he probably needed to do these movies. But, um, look, if you're, if you're a depressed person, nothing's going to make you happy. And if you're a depressed person, everything's going to make you depressed. There's just no way around that. I mean, I, you know, anyone who's ever had any issues with mood or, you know, brain cocktail, the brain chemistry or any of that stuff knows this is true. It's like, it's not,

you're not looking for things to make you happy. Every single thing can free confirms the general bleakness of the world. Quick exit question. This week we saw Williams and Bacall both lefties I think the right in general acquitted itself well in saying put that all to the side look at the work there have been exceptions there always are

do you think that the left in general is going to behave with the same amount of general decency when somebody who's an icon who also was on the right shuffles off this mortal coil. Peter? No, because if you're Lauren Bacall or Robin Williams, and if you're a Hollywood figure and your politics are of the left, they don't get noticed. It's assumed. It's part of the background of being a Hollywood figure. If you're a Hollywood figure and you're on the right, your politics are a story.

You're running against trend. You're transgressive. You're violating the norms. So it becomes much more a part of your persona, which, as Rob has taught me over the years, is one reason people that he knows

who are quietly conservative really don't want to be publicly conservative. It becomes a story. So if some, I don't actually know who the biggest right-winger in Hollywood would be. If Tom Selleck got hit by a truck, I suppose it would have to be a big part of the story that he was a right-winger and the left would take some shots at him as he's laid in his coffin, I think. Right, Rob? I don't know. Rob would know. Rob would know better. It's really interesting. I mean I've heard from people in Hollywood for years that that's a problem if you're

on the right. And I've never found it to be a problem for me. And I suspect, although I'm not 100 percent sure, I suspect there have been – I suspect there was one project in particular that came my way that I actively sought out for by a big network because they knew what my politics were. And as a result, it was incredibly, incredibly remunerative. So I can't really complain. And then on the other hand, you have Jon Voight, who really hadn't been heard of for a long time, and suddenly got political, and suddenly was on, after 9-11, was on Fox News all the time, and was very passionate to the point of maybe being a little bit simmered down,

Jon. And the guy works now all the time, and he's up for an Emmy, and he might win an Emmy. And I don't know. I'm not saying that it helped, but it certainly didn't hurt. Well, that's good to know. Yeah. I'm not sure. I mean, I think that people like Lauren Bacall, I think she's sort of beyond politics anyway

because these are the politics of the 30s and 40s and 50s which is you know it could be a i remember bob newhart once saying to me um you know he said he kind of shrugged and said i don't know we were talking about politics or something i don't in the most bland possible terms and he said he said i guess i'm a i'm a whatever passes for a democrat now i suppose he seems to try to be like grew up in Chicago. I voted for Kennedy. I guess that makes me a Democrat. But what he really wanted to say was that I voted for Reagan, of course. And I've been voting Republican ever since.

But he's from Chicago. He's a Democrat. As Reagan famously said, the problem with the Democrats is they've moved so far left, they've left America. And I feel like that probably Lauren B McCall privately felt a certain way. Robin Williams, for all of his crackpot lefty views, which I'm sure he had, as all comedians do because they're all nuts, he was out there supporting troops. He was out there –

That is true. That is true. Very true. He really was quite generous with his time. Yep. And we've been generous with the listeners' time as well since we're a little late here, so we've got to move on. It's good to know, Rob, however, that nest of collectivist vipers in which you live, that eventually it all comes down to money, which is what we expect. Rob, what's next?

What's next on the itinerary? Where are you headed next, Rob? Well, I am in – here's what I've done. I've traveled on I-10, traveled across. I got to New Orleans, had dinner with some friends of mine in New Orleans and then got back in the car and drove along the Gulf. First of all, the Gulf – the southern Gulf Coast is the most beautiful coastline around. It's gorgeous. But I got to say, if Governor Haley Barber, former Governor Haley Barber, if you're listening, and

former Governor Jeb Bush, if you're listening, not that dog-friendly. I'm probably with my dog. And so there's not any kind of... Even at sunset, they don't like it when you throw the tennis ball into the ocean for your dog. Which I think is ridiculous, by the way.

What do they do? They have giant signs saying, don't do this. Really, every 100 yards. You can't even – what I ordinarily do is feign ignorance, which I can feign with great, great accuracy, as I know you know. But you couldn't even do it there. They were like staring, looking at me with the fish eyes the minute I pulled up in the parking lot. South Carolina is a little bit more generous with its beach.

You can bring the dog before 9 and after 5, only on the leash. But after 5, they kind of – everybody goes in for a drink and nobody pays any attention. So she'll get her run in. And then I'm going to drive back up the coast. I'm going to head to my parents' place and then see what happens after that. We had one of our beaches here in Minnesota, our lovely large urban lakes closed for an E. coli infestation. I thought, how many small kids actually have to void their bowels in the water for them to close a beach? But it turns out it's run off from the dogs.

So maybe that's it, Rob. They don't want to pollute the wonderful pristine beaches there with either dog leavings or oil washing up from the platforms. We'll see. By all means, write some sort of travels with Charlie thing like Steinbeck. Except, of course, we know now that Steinbeck made an awful lot of it up. They've been retracing his steps and some of those campouts where he met some rustic folk. Well, he was actually up at the hotel having a drink. But that's another podcast.

This one, by the way, I should mention, has been brought to you not only by the thoughts and insights of Rob and Peter, but by Harry's Shave. And you know what to do. Go to harrys.com. Use that coupon code of RICOSHADE. Five bucks off your first shipment. That's right. They ship the blades to you. And once you drag one of them across your cheek, you will never, ever pay full price for a blade again. Also by EncounterBooks.com.

Same coupon code, 15% off this or any other title. It's Turning Goliath David into Goliath, a very piquant and timely book that you need to read to discover exactly why it is and how it is that the world turned as it has against Israel, the one democracy in the area.

We'll see you all in the comments, everybody. Thank you for listening. And gosh, Peter, Rob, next week. Next week. Next week, fellas. I have a little secret for you. Huddle up. Huddle up!

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. In medicine, law, business, engineering, these noble pursuits are unnecessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. The quote from Whitman, O me, O life,

of the questions of these recurring, of the endless strains of the faithless of cities filled with the foolish What good amid these oh me or life? Answer that you are here that life exists and identity That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?