The Ricochet Podcast - It's Russia Hour

Episode Date: December 10, 2021

It’s a big scary world out there–or so we’re told. But how do we sort what to worry about and what not to? We say: bring on some guys who know their stuff! That’s why Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is back. He wants to keep us calm, despite the return of variant hysteria; he and the hosts talk Omicron and a world limping its way back to normal. Then, Seth Cropsey, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute... Source

This is Andrew Gutman, co-host of Ricochet's new podcast series, Take Back Our Schools. Join me and my co-host, Bethany Mandel, this week when we talk with Erica Sanzi of Parents Defending Education. It's a fascinating discussion from someone who's seen the problem from all directions, as a teacher, as a school board member, and as a parent. That's Take Back Our Schools, releasing Monday, December 13th on Ricochet.com and wherever you get your podcasts. No, I mean, I wrote a piece for Ricochet about California.

You know, you hear all these bad things and then you go there and it's paradise on earth. I have a dream. This nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.

Today, I want to take a few moments to talk about the new COVID variant. It's called the Omicron. With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet podcast with Peter Robinson and Bob Long. I'm James Lalix. Today we talked to our own Dr. J about COVID and Seth Cropsey about Ukraine, Putin and other items. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you!

Welcome, everybody. It is the Ricochet Podcast, episode number 573. How do we get this far? Well, because of people like you. What? You're not someone like us? You can be. You can join us at Ricochet.com. Be part of the most stimulating conversation and community on the web. One of the things you get when you sign up is access to special little features like No Dumb Questions. It's one of our recurring little motifs. Next Tuesday, it's another edition of No Dumb Questions. You can join our editor, John Gabriel, and Selena Zito of the Washington Examiner and the New York Post. Any questions on the 2016 campaign trails?

Speculation about 2022. Curious about the formation and reformation of American populism. Have you got any Steeler fans in the house or haters? Because we'll talk about that too. So join us next Tuesday, December 14th, 8 p.m. Eastern, 7 p.m. Central, and 5 Pacific, of course. You've got to be a Ricochet member to participate, though, so don't be dumb. Sign up today at ricochet.com, join and get your first 30 days free. No credit card.

Check it out. Test it out. You'll be a member for life. I'm James Lilacs, back from cloudy California, which was beautiful. We have Peter Robinson in California now, which I believe is probably golden and gorgeous. And Rob Long, the peripatetic flaneur, who is where today? I am back home in New York City. Oh, amazing.

I have to say, the No Dumb Questions thing, it is, yeah, the No Dumb Questions thing, it's a very cool thing, if you're a member, please join. What we mean by,

I realize that I may be, I think I helped name this and I did it wrong. No Dumb Questions doesn't mean- Help name it, the whole thing was you're doing okay you can't ask it doesn't mean that you're not allowed to ask a dumb question it means that all questions are cool and there aren't any is no way for you to ask a dumb question and it's it kind of comes from the fact that i sometimes feel like i'm i'm asking a dumb question and i need to get approval for that

because i'm what the title means is too long for the title, but what the title means, there is no such thing as a dumb question on this podcast. Right. For sure. And you never know. Maybe your dumb questions can be smart. And we'd put it out for everybody,

but that would be free. And there ain't no such thing as a free lunch either. So we're just telling you what there is and what there ain't in the world. By the way, James, and speaking of football, what was the final score last night? I quit in the second when Minnesota was already up 23

zip. What happened? It went to 29 zip and then as usual, the Minnesota Vikings sort of lost their focus and allowed about 028 points or so. Are you kidding me? I'm not kidding. You missed a good game.

Came down to a couple of interceptions and they marched all the way to the end and it was going to be one of those touchdown and then two point things. Two seconds left. We managed to stop them in the place. Exploded. I've never been to the U.S. Bank Stadium, the Vikings Stadium and seen a Vikings game.

And it was pageantry and tribal glory. The likes of which I've never seen. You watch the game at home and you're with your friends and it's fun. And the rest of it, you get in there and there are all these rituals that kick in and you have to participate in that are absolutely delightful. There is a horn that they blow this two note horn that is meant to, to instill our viking blood

it just froth is the minnesota marrow in a wonderful fashion two notes being the the extreme upper limit of viking capabilities very very funny but the weird thing about it is that nobody seems to point out is the first time i heard this horn i said i know where they got that from that's what the martian ship plays in the spielberg town cruise war of the worlds it's a terrifying sound i don't know if they bought it or what but it's the Martian we're about to kill everybody sound, but it's now been repurposed. Spoiler alert, the Martians also lost in that movie.

So anyway, it was a great day to be a Vikings fan, and it was just wonderful to be amongst them in this, in the most normal thing in the world, to be in a stadium with 60,000 people, nobody wearing masks, everybody shouting and drinking and feasting and the rest of it. It was just great. But speaking of speaking of masking, you know, in California, I had to go through that little charade, put your mask on to enter the restaurant,

walk to your table, take the mask off. I don't get it, but it's what they do. And I don't know about you guys, but for the last week, I've sort of been living in a world in which COVID is just, yeah, yeah, you know, okay. All right. I'm vaxxed and boosted. I don't know about you guys but for the last week i've sort of been living in a world in which covet is just yeah yeah you know okay all right you know i'm vaxxed and boosted i don't care but that's not what's that's what some people think some people think differently so why don't we talk to somebody you know something dr j dr j barachari a ricochet's resident good doctor newly minted just fresh senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, professor of public health policy at Stanford Medical School, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and none of which he would have been able

to accomplish, of course, without his frequent appearances on this very podcast, which do qualify as published research. Welcome, Doc. You can follow him on Twitter at Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. And we welcome him back. Dr. Jay, how are you today? Thanks, James. Nice to be here. Well, are we all calling it Omnicron now? Because that's what President Biden called it. They skipped new and she. So now it's Omnicron. One of my favorite things in the coronavirus subreddit is that somebody pointed out that indeed she would have put some obloquy on China.

And there were about 500 comment removed by moderator because the moderators just didn't want everybody. Everybody went there in the moderators. And of course, Reddit is. Can I just say, I actually I'm not sure how X is actually pronounced in Greek. So, you know, We can go with she. So we got Omicron, or maybe we don't, or maybe we do and we don't even know it because it's mild. Give us what we know. So there's still a lot left to learn about it. But what we know is that it was first discovered in South Africa

by South African scientists who have a very good screening sort of program for looking for these variants. They found, I think, like, I mean, you know, 100 some cases to date or more now, all of which have been mild to date. We then promptly put in place these travel restrictions from the one country that had found it and found then that 38 countries, I mean, 54, we've now been found in 54 other countries. So you can see the travel restrictions have worked. And every case, nearly every case so far seems milder

than the equivalent Delta cases. I mean, I don't know that that will continue. But I think in order to be really safe, to like really nail that down, I'd like to know if they're younger cases or older cases. If there's older people getting this and they're getting mostly milder than these, that's incredibly good news. Not according to the Atlantic and everybody else. They're calling this the pandemic of the vaccinated, and they're almost gleeful and relieved that it's going to continue on. We've gotten in a cycle where fear feeds on itself,

and I guess you get credit for spreading panic and fear. I think it's an enormous mistake. Because I think if you're looking at this uh the disease is is endemic is or is mean what that means is uh it's not ever going away at least that's what i mean by it it's going to have variants uh coronaviruses always have variants uh forever It's going to come and go. The key thing is, if you have the disease and recovered, or if you've been vaccinated, then if you get it, it's likely to be mild. And mild means what?

Mild means like on the scale of one to the flu. Is it an eight? Is it an 11? Is it a 10? Mild means, I mean, to me, if you don't get hospitalized, it's mild. I mean, you could have a fever. You stay home. Yeah.

They're not even finding people with a lot of loss of sense of smell and taste. So it is like a cold to some extent. I mean, that doesn't mean that you can't get really sick when it's possible but the point is that if you've had the disease before or if you've been vaccinated and boosted why worry about this it's like it is it is um well then that is the question why why worry why why are people worrying i mean i i just come back from three a three-week trip through europe i went france spain hungary italy in france uh every time i tried to show my vaccination card in a public place they kind of looked at me like oh really like i'm the narc you're the kid in the class who raises his hands as you forgot to ask us for home you gotta get

signed home right and in spain they were a little bit more kind of once they didn't they didn't look they didn't care in hungary never nowhere they they nowhere um and in italy a little bit more but still like okay i had to get a uh what the government called a viral test which was meaningless to me i had to get one 24 hours before you fly which means it's going to be a it's going to be an antigen test right the q-tip up the nose and i and basically the guy came and stuck the q-tip in my nose and put it in a little plastic box the way they do it at the one you buy at cvs that's the level of you know accuracy here i tested negative on the spot three hours later they send me an official looking document which i get the hotel to print out i carry the document and my passport into the airport and i show it to this woman at the day

where i'm checking my bags and she kind of looks at it and gives it back it was the worst kind of theater at least kabuki theater they they put an effort into this with did anything i do was anything of that valuable in stopping the spread of COVID, stopping the spread of a variant, stopping the spread of Omicron, whatever you have? Is any of that helpful? I think most of it is theater, I believe. I mean, I think, you know, if you are sick, you should stay home, right? So I don't recommend flying around if you're sick. And, you know, maybe an antigen test if you feel sick before you go off on that European adventure is probably wise.

But you just tell people to do that. Mostly people do it. They're not going to spread the thing. You know, all through Europe, we've had these massive protests against these vaccine passports. Right. And in some places places they're taking it really seriously austria i hear they're going to fine you if you don't get vaccinated thousands and thousands a month the austrians do have a history of enforcing bureaucratic rules let's

just say actually it fills me with happiness to hear that in france they're just they're not they're not actually enforcing the thing because it's it's insane like you if you're not if you're not if you're not if you're feeling fine i mean if you don't look if you don't look sick you should be able to participate in regular life i mean this idea of asymptomatic spread i mean nothing can't happen it's that we have tools to address the thing if you do get sick we have the vaccine that reduces the severity of the disease we have we have monoclonal antibodies which if you take them early keeps you out of the hospital uh we have rapid antigen tests so that you can check to see if you're positive before you go visit the grandma um i mean i think we have all these tools that is the message that we should be sending now

use what we got so i have two questions peter wants to get into this my first question is super practical um uh state of play a year ago was uh if because a year ago i got coded pretty much close to a year ago uh state of play was if you get it you test positive you take a steroid shot a z-pack uh massive doses of vitamin. And if you're in a progressive, forward-thinking, future-conscious location, the doctor might prescribe hydroxychloroquine to me, which he did, or to my brother who's symptomatic, ivermectin. Today, it seems like, what I read yesterday was ivermectin actually probably is not that useful, or did I misread that? I mean, there's a major NIH yesterday was ivermectin actually isn't probably not that useful or am i did i misread that i mean there's a major nih trial ivermectin but nobody knows

about it's called active six it's due to be done in march 2023 when we'll have the definitive answer perfect excellent time that's a time for the alpha alpha when they have to go through the variant the alpha variants right alpha squared we'll say robin just and so my next question is this is like um uh my uh totally unscientific cursory research through some you know tiny fraction of the world's population but it included some substance a very kind of really kind of moving conversation i had at a bar in milan with a young couple um uh very i mean young like in the 20s um and when i said listen we're all going to get this thing my friend jay badacharya here's his email

uh he uh we're all going to get it uh it may be multiple times in our lives you young people should protest and you should go live your life. Go live your life. Old people, you know, nice knowing you, but young people, you know. We're young people. That's how it works, Rob. I mean, look, it worked for me up close. Yeah.

Oh, okay. But what they said to me was, no one's saying that. No one is saying that. We wish people were saying that. So I guess how big would you say the gap is now between ordinary sentient citizens paying attention to the world around them who are like, well, okay, well, I got the vaccine and got the booster and you know i'm doing my thing and the world medical establishment feels like the world medical establishment is yelling fire in a crowded movie house and the world world normal citizens are just sitting there trying to enjoy the movie i think the i think the people have had enough i think that finally people are saying look

we've cried wolf too many times, and the world hasn't ended. You're crying wolf this time. The emperor has no clothes. I mean, which is actually unfortunate, right? Having a populace that distrusts public health is bad for public health, which is not that important, but it's also bad for the populace. You need a public health worthy of trust and that trusts the public. That would be a much better situation. The second best is what we're currently having is that a lot of people are looking around saying, you know, why do I have to wear the mask on the way to sit down in the restaurant and then I can take it off?

How does that make any sense? I mean, why do i have to like quarantine for 14 days just because i was next to somebody who may have been sick and i have no symptoms at all like why does it make sense to like uh scare get scared every single time there's some some scientist somewhere comes up with some variant um i just it doesn't it's for a lot of the populace they've said enough and i think i mean the thing is is like it's that's much more reasonable than what the public health authorities are doing they're still trying to stoke fear in a very different situation than we had last year we have all these tools last year we didn't have the vaccine last year we didn't have uh rapid energy tests widely available last year we didn't have

a monoclonal antibodies last year we didn't have a whole host of things that have essentially if you use them defang the disease that if you tell people that go live your life and here are these tools if you get sick well isn't that just how we treat almost every other disease right i mean you know we live with the prospect of getting cancer any day it could happen um you know do we do we end do we go hide and panic over it no do we do we you could get you could get yellow fever that still goes around um you can get the flu and die you have 200 pathogens in human circulation it's sort of the commonly infect humans um and yet we don't restructure our lives around that that's not that we don't restructure our lives around that. It's not that we don't think about it once we get it,

but the point is that we live in a world of risk, and we balance that risk against the other things we value in our lives, you know, going to a church, going to a concert, going to a play, hugging my kids. You know, I think all of those things are always put in some balance and perspective public health should be doing that instead of this panicking jay i was feeling fine until you turned up and started talking about cancer and yellow fever jay several polls out in the last week or several polls that received major attention in the newspapers i read and one reason the biden administration is suffering so the reasoning goes is that the administration promised it would handle

covid and it hasn't at least that's what people perceive so i think the argument your argument would be that the biden administration was silly to put itself in that position. Of course, they were trying to make Donald Trump look bad, but he screwed it up. We'll get it right. You won't have to worry about COVID six months or nine months from now. If you were advising the Biden administration right now, would you say lower expectations? Would you say declare victory and change? What would you advise? I would say declare victory and change the, what would you advise?

I would, I would say declare victory and move on. Like this is what they should have done in July. I mean, remember the July 4th, go have a barbecue with your friends. I mean, that was a golden opportunity for the Biden administration to declare victory. You know, cause even by then we, we had vaccines, monoclonal antibodies and rapid tests.

They could have just, they could have declared. And that's what they should do now. had vaccines, monoclonal antibodies and rapid tests, they could have declared, and that's what they should do now. They should say, look, this is a disease that will be with us forever. If you're older and more vulnerable, you still need to be careful, but here are these tools to make it so such and so bad.

If you're not, don't get vaccinated if you haven't. Here's the monoclonal antibodies. Do what Governor DeSantis did. Make them If you're not, go get vaccinated if you haven't. Here's the, here at Monocle Antibody Center, do what Governor DeSantis did, make them widely available to have strike force teams. You just call them up and they come to your house and infuse you. Push really hard for rapid evaluation,

for good trials of these relatively cheap drugs. I think, and then just say, look, we have these tools now. Go live your life. That's it. Declare victory. I mean, it would be a bipartisan victory. They need to rein in the CDC, which has been spreading this fear. And instead of like, instead what they did is they decided that they were going to use

the vaccination campaign as a tool to to marginalize republicans uh the weird thing is that it's not just the republicans that started distrusting them large fractions of minorities in the united states aren't vaccinated why because they don't trust public health large fractions of of younger populations are not vaccinated because right you know the benefit is marginal and people again don't trust public health i think that's the problem they just need to they need to like restore trust and declare victory jay i know we need to let you go and actually so do all our listeners because in introducing you james listed the 27 jobs that you have of course you're busy but the most important one is this one yes exactly i have one last question. When you and I spoke, when we taped an episode of Uncommon Knowledge, which is up on YouTube

now, which has attracted, what, 1.6 million views? People like to hear what you have to say. You argued that this would not have ended properly until public health authorities gave the American public an apology. Obviously, that hasn't happened. Anthony Fauci still says, I'm the science. But what I'm curious about is what kinds of emails, what kinds of response to that statement have you received from public health professionals?

Nothing from public health officials. A lot of very, very nice emails from the public at large. I mean, I think what public health has done to this country and to this world is really deserving. They really do need to apologize. They have sort of blinded us to all of the other parts of our life, thinking that only this disease is the only thing we ought to care about. And that has caused enormous damage. You know, children, adolescent girls, 50% increase in suicide attempts in the Surgeon General's report that was just put out. You know, anxiety, one in five kids anxious, 100 million people thrown into poverty worldwide. Why? Because of this panic, because of the lockdown,

because of this overwrought response to this disease, which actually admittedly is a terrible disease. But if you had had a measured response focused on the people who are really vulnerable, without this resort to panic, we would have had much fewer harms on the collateral, sort of collateral harms. I mean, apology doesn't begin to cover it. They have to somehow restore trust in themselves, the public health authorities do. And it starts by acknowledgement of the public health authorities do and it starts by acknowledgement of the mistakes how do you do that though i mean i i'm sorry i know we haven't let you go i just just just if you could in in in 2008 the world financial system collapsed and um and we

had a bunch of reforms some of them stupid some of them weren't so stupid but we had a kind of a global financial audit of processes and regulations um i mean most of them didn't do anything but there was a process to that there were there were people we could name who paid a price maybe it was unfair maybe it was like too much but there was a sense that there was like okay there's going to be some kind of investigation here for how we made these mistakes is how would you even begin to do that in in a world in which you still if you're the if you represent the who the world health organization you still have an immense cultural authority if you are a head of the cdc you still have enormous cultural authority i mean how do you do this without firing people i don don't think you do it without firing people, Rob. I think the people that have led this

response, this absolutely disastrous, catastrophic public health policy for the last 20 months, need to resign. I don't think there's any other way. And they won't resign on their own. They have to be held accountable by political leaders that have essentially been fooled by their advice. They've been hypnotized by their advice, this panic. And the reckoning starts with that. First, an acknowledgement that there was a mistake, and the acknowledgement has to come because you're seeing already, the public at large is done with this. They're not listening. Not in crazy California where I live, but many other places.

And they have political ramifications as well. So the Virginia election was no accident. I mean, you guys do more about politics than me, but I was really heartened by that because I think I view that as a response to the watched COVID response. Jay, I had one question. It's a yes or no question, but we're going to hold it in the next time because we need to know that you've got to go. So off with you. Be gone.

Thanks so much. Thanks so much for joining us, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and we'll see you down the road with more questions about when the variant odometer turns over, as Rob says, and we're back to alpha, alpha. Take it easy. I mentioned mentioned by the way that um it was recently in california it's for a wedding and here's the thing when i looked

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Seth is a senior fellow and director of the Center for American Sea Power at Hudson Institute, specializes in defense strategy, U.S. foreign and security policy in the Mideast and East Asia, and the future of U.S. naval power. He's with us today to get us up to speed on Putin and Biden and Ukraine. Seth, welcome. We hear a lot about this power vacuum that's going to be left by the United States if we retreat, if we don't assert ourselves. But you say and wrote recently that what doesn't exist anymore, the power vacuum has been filled already by Russia and China.

And some people will say, you know, well, good luck. China can have the Uganda airport. Who cares? Russia can go in the briar patch in the Mideast. We've tried that glad route. Take us through some of the places around the world in which u.s power has receded and filled by these actors who are shall we say not people we really want the future of the world to be about well uganda's not the issue the middle east is um so uh as important as Africa is, and it is important, the Middle East is one of the three likely places for armed conflict, which I think hundreds of commentators have already pointed out could come at the same time. And we've been shifting, the United States has been shifting its economic and security focus to a diplomatic focus to the West Pacific

for 10 years now. And with that go ships, aircraft carriers. We're taking an aircraft carrier out of the Persian Gulf at a time when the Israelis and American air forces are conducting exercises at about the range of which Iran is from Israel. And the Iranians are continuing with their nuclear development program. And the Russians and Chinese, Russians

especially, are taking strong steps, successful ones, to ingratiate themselves with the Israelis, and it's working. They have air bases and naval bases in Syria, and they're continuing to build them, and it's working. And the United States is sort of gone, gone, gone. Or I should say going, going, gone. How about that? Okay. Wow. All right.

This is Rob Long in New York. So I have a question. The Biden administration, I guess, allowed the completion by the Russians of the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, which goes right from Russia to Germany, doesn't have to go through Ukraine. Is that now, was that a huge blunder? Was it a small blunder? Was it not a blunder at all? The Biden administration is claiming that the pipeline's not working right now, so we still basically, it's still our leverage. But it does seem to me that they, in the early days of the biden administration they gave putin a huge huge leg up well russia's poor and its main source of wealth is um as a rentier state as a state that uses its natural resources to provide income.

And so I think it's the Russian foreign policy, security policy, at the core is determined by their interest in exporting energy. And the North Sea line is extremely important to that and um the germans seem willing to uh to end things if the and the vitamin administration was threatened to reimpose sanctions if for if the russians use force in ukraine so uh i think to remove the sanctions in the first place was, well, certainly turns out to be a mistake. And if the United States is seen as appeasing the Russians in Ukraine in whatever form, there will be large consequences to follow not only there but in the persian gulf and certainly in the west pacific so i got two questions i know that peter wants to jump in but my first question is so the calculation with uh respect to russia i think

is comes you have two basic considerations one if you make them too desperate if the sanctions are too high or too draconian if you don't let the the pipeline go, if you make them too desperate, if the sanctions are too high or too draconian, if you don't let the pipeline go through, then you make them too desperate and they're going to lash out. And then the other side is, but if you make them too comfortable, if you give up too much, if you start giving up all your leverage, then you're going to make them, you're going to embolden them and they're going to make trouble. How would you rate the Biden administration right now threading that needle i mean how close are we to seeing the russian incursion in ukraine

that really depends upon what the administration does right um are and what nato does uh are is the united states by itself uh or together with its NATO allies going to supply more arms to the Ukrainians? Are we going to share useful intelligence? Do we have a plan for supplying an insurgency in Ukraine in the event of a Russian invasion with the arms they'll need, and they'll fight very hard. I think they'll make the opposition to Russia's invasion of Afghanistan look like a cakewalk. Wow. And does Putin really want to put himself and his popularity on the line?

Russians don't like having their sons killed either. How vulnerable is Putin right now in Russia? You know, I think the Russians are sort of apolitical, unless they're really being pinched by something or other. They're not being pinched by anything new. The economy is, you know, rumbling along at a slow pace. The oligarchs are getting fatter. Putin's popularity is not what it was in the past but he can survive it

he's able to imprison or kill off the opposition so I think it's more or less the way it's been in Russia for a long time certainly under the two decades, more or less, two decades of the Putin reign. If you're Putin, though, what are you worried about? Who are you worried about? Three things. Oil, natural gas, and oil.

Does Putin really think that even if ukraine became a member of nato that um they uh the consequence would be uh a an attack uh a ground attack or any kind of an attack from ukraine from ukraine into russia if he thinks that then he's not as smart as i think he is but but it's understandable it's understandable that he's concerned about uh ukraine which has all kinds of historic and emotional attachments for for russians uh having uh nato on his borders i'm not i'm not i don't think that it would mean anything more than giving Ukraine and Ukrainian citizens more confidence of security against a Russian move. It does have implications for the Black Sea, and that extends into the Eastern Mediterranean, the Central Mediterranean, and all the way to the Straits, the Bab al-Makdab, at the end of the Red Sea. But look, I agree with your characterization, Rob, that it is difficult to walk the line between actions that will increase tension or result in military action on the one hand and appeasement on the other. And I think that it's important for American policymakers to understand

that Russia and China's current relationship is unusual. And the more important strategic fact is that their long-term strategic interests are not conjoined at all. Xi Jinping wants to dominate the world, and Putin would be happy to regain a portion of the Soviet empire. And insofar as that happiness extends to Central Asia, for example, or Siberia, their two interests diverge.

What are the bulk? Well, insofar as Russia could be helpful to the United States in the future. It makes sense to try to thread the line between forcing a conflict and an appeasement so that the Russians could be played as a card in the same way that the Chinese were played as a card by the Nixon administration. For the Balkans, I'm sorry, I just had to ask, what of the Balkans? You mentioned those places that the so the russians have interest in i mean they have no right to ukraine ukraine is a separate country separate culture same with the balkans so what's what's keeping him then from nobody's going to expect that he's going to invade but doing what he can to absorb them as as much as possible into some new soviet co-prosperity sphere? You need more amphibious forces. You have to get from Syria to the Balkans.

Ask the Ottoman emperors if you can communicate with them about doing the Dalmatian coast and doing the Balkans. You need supply lines, and you need to get troops in large numbers there and you need to do that with the Navy, with at least naval support. And the Russians are building up their naval forces at Tartus and building up their forces at Khmeimim in Syria. And yeah, Russia has historic connections there. The languages bear some similarity.

Some languages do. And the Balkans. Did I understand you correctly? The Balkans? Yeah. Well, you need more amphibious forces. You have to get from Syria to the Balkans.

Ask the Ottoman emperors if you can communicate with them about doing the Dalmatian coast and doing the Balkans. You need supply lines, and you need to get troops in large numbers there, and you need to do that with the Navy, with at least naval support. And the Russians are building up their naval forces at Tartus

and building up their forces at Khmeimim in Syria. And yeah, Russia has historic connections there. The languages bear some similarity. Some of the languages do.

And The languages bear some similarity. Some of the languages do. And there are longstanding connections between Serbia and Russia. I think it's a little bit early for that, but I think that the armament of the eastern mediterranean um and the disagreements between turkey and russia over uh over libya are a sign of russian ambitions into the central mediterranean so i expect it's uh that absent some other some change in the in the way things were going that the russians will display more interest in the balkans in the future seth when you and i were little boys back in the 1980s when we first got to know each other here's what happened in the 1980s reagan gets elected and there are people who know what needs to be done and there are people who do it meaning that by the time he gets elected there is a kind of intellectual infrastructure

people understand how our position has eroded against the soviets you get and then you get john lehman in going into the navy and we never did quite get to 600 ships, but there were people, including John Lehman, who knew what kinds of ships we needed, how much money they would cost. Cap Weinberger went to Congress, got the support, and the military by that point had reformed itself after Vietnam, and military morale is high at the moment reagan gets them the money and they start building okay so two questions today do we know what to do do we even know what needs to be done and then the second question is can we trust the military to do it? In other words, to what extent has wokeness corrupted the United States military, has diversity and justice and DEI, whatever all that stands

for, diverted them from the strictly military mission and undermined their ability to do their job? I don't know. I mean, that's not even a leading question that's a question i just don't know the answer to either piece of that but you do i think that the military is recoverable um i don't think that it's been devastated by wokeness i think it's been harmed and where members of the military ought to be training and exercising and learning how to do their jobs. The time is being spent on lectures and all that kind of stuff. Having been an officer at the time when the Navy was lecturing about the tailhook incident and watching the Chief of Naval Operations, Mayor Culper, and advice about it,

I can tell you that the reaction of my shipmates was, okay, saw that. Thank you very much. And, you know, it's useful for the administration to be able to say that it's giving lectures and doing videos and all that kind of stuff and uh um but i don't think that means that the military cannot or will not um respond to uh to lawful orders and i think that when there's a i think that the whole uh political and movement, or maybe I should say cultural and political movement that's responsible for this inside military is a kind of fever that seizes the country from time to time, and that the fever will break at some point or another, and some of the nonsense stories that we read every day will gradually go away because the nonsense will go away. And so on that, I'm not as pessimistic as some.

The other question, I'm not as optimistic as some, and that is the question you ask about, do we know where we're going? And I'd like to be able to give you a different answer, but I'm not sure I can. I don't know what the military or the Navy's

idea of victory is in the um in the west pacific um i know that a lot of attention is spent on force structure which is to say what kind of ships we build and make and build and sail operate with um a lot of a lot of attention spent on the budget issues needed to fund those ships. And I don't see quite as much attention on what do we do if we get those, what does the Navy do if the Navy gets those ships? So we're talking about a transformation that the Navy is trying to achieve at a very relaxed pace from larger ship, from smaller numbers of larger ships

to larger numbers of smaller ships, including drones, aerial surface and subsurface. And that's fine, but what do we do with them? Is the idea to contest the Chinese if there's a conflict in the South China Sea? Is it to sink the Chinese Navy? Is it a far blockade that would have a crippling effect on the Chinese economy? I don't see the answers to those questions. I don't see them being raised and debated publicly. I do think that when the maritime strategy at the end of the Cold War was in place,

the Soviets, that we trained for it, that we built for it appropriately, and the Soviets were very aware of the divergence on its seaborne flanks, its coastal flanks, that would prevent their concentration on the Fulda Gap, the central front of Germany. I don't see that we're doing anything like that with China right now. And that would be this. Some people are saying that the whole point of having an aircraft carrier and all of the things that used to defend it is now moot because China has a hypersonic missile that can just dart over the horizon and knock them out is that the case uh no i don't think so um good phew all right thank you thank you very much i think you have to know where where where the ship is. I think we need,

we certainly need more robust defenses for aircraft carriers. And some of those defenses are not necessarily to defend the ship, but to move the ship out of the range of Chinese missiles. And that means not a change in operations as much as it does a change in the kind of aircraft that are carried on the decks of an aircraft carrier, because the current ones and the future generation, the AF-35, they are within range of Chinese missiles.

If the Navy makes a transition to aircraft that can fly long distances and execute their mission successfully, that puts the carriers away from the Chinese missiles that are advertised to threaten it currently. Well, I'm just happy that when we're talking about the Navy transitioning, we're talking about going to a different type of capability as opposed to reassigning its gender identity. Seth, we know you got to go, and we thank you so much for dropping by the show today. Good to talk with you all, Peter. Seth, a pleasure. A pleasure. Keep writing. Rob, James. Thank you. today good to talk with you all peter that's the pleasure a pleasure keep writing rob james thank you you know what i'd like to think is that uh that chinese hypersonic missile does come arcing

over the horizon that our aegis systems could take care of it from what i understand those are just guns that just shoot lots of bullets just fire a cloud through which nothing can get through and there are times frankly when I'm on the internet, that I wish I had one of those AEGIS systems myself to deal with what you have to deal with. I mean, the internet's great, right? We love it. It's connected us with the latest news,

with long-distance friends, and funny animal videos. Yeah, there's no protection for any of that stuff. I mean, your finances, your personal information, it's all very vulnerable solution to that. Rob is sounding like somebody who's concerned about hackers and cybercriminals. They're concerned. your personal information. It's all very vulnerable. There's no solution to that. Rob is sounding like somebody who's concerned about hackers and cybercriminals. I'm not concerned. I've surrendered.

There's no weapons in the arsenal to fight back, James. That's all there is to it. Well, I'd say that Rob didn't get the memo, but it's apparent Rob didn't get the free trial of Aura, actually. Aura, A-U-R-A. Aura provides digital security protection to keep your online finances, personal information, and your tech safe from online threats. It's all-in-one protection from identity theft, financial fraud, malware, scam sites, and so much more. With Aura, you'll get alerted to fraud and threats fast, like now. Like if your online accounts or passwords were leaked online, or if someone tries to open a bank account in your name, you want to know about that right away, don't you?

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to your phone, Aura keeps you in control, keeps you in control, and guides you through solving any issues. For a limited time, Aura is offering our listeners up to 40% off plans when you visit aura.com slash ricochet. Go to aura.com slash ricochet to get complete protection and savings of up to 40%. That's aura.com slash ricochet. And we thank Aura for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, before we go, there's always, of course, 732 issues we haven't addressed, important things. Wall Street Journal, for example example has a new poll they find that hispanic voters i'm sorry latinx uh are split between the parties and i tend to think that one of the reasons you have hispanic voters going more to the republican side is latinx is the idea that there's some sort of uh you know some social movement they really

don't want to be associated with that that spells a whole bunch of other stuff they don't like either yeah that's actually true i mean in fact when you when you think about the the the changing of the phrase latino or latina to latinx or you know people say latinx is a joke um what you're really saying is in a colonial white oppressive way is that your language which is gendered is no longer acceptable you people who speak spanish or come from a spanish-speaking heritage you need to speak english because your language is um wokelish they need to speak wokelish is outdated and and it should be no surprise to anybody that um 40 40 i think was 42 of latinos and latinas

say not only do they not use the phrase they find the phrase offensive i mean when you actively are choosing to piss off 40 of a group uh and doing so in a condescending and uh a dismissive manner um what do you expect i don't i i peter i will say like a bunch of years ago um and i forget the other co-authors name but roy texier to share yes yes yes that's right uh wrote uh the coming a book about called the coming democratic majority or as close to that in which he posited, in which they posited, demographically, when you looked at the number of Hispanics coming into the United States, the number of Hispanics who had already been to the United States, and their birth rates, what you were looking at was a Democratic majority as far as the eye could see, starting, I think, about five years ago. And everyone thought, oh, that's just fantastic. On the left and on the right they thought oh my god let's build a wall what nobody anticipated is that what would

happen is the democratic party would move so crazy left wing that the sort of general moderates in the hispanic community were kind of in the middle like everybody else would be naturally drawn to the more republican views despite in despite um trump's immigration rhetoric right so that was supposed to kill republican chances with hispanics and it did actually the opposite and there is absolutely this you can see roy tisera is a very smart guy but you can see him trying to explain away his mistake by saying it's like AOC's fault, or it's the Black Lives Matter fault, or it's to fund the police's fault. At no point did anybody in the progressive left anticipate the fact that Americans are not sympathetic or in support of the progressive left like that just never occurred to them ever and i think that is probably the conservatives or at least the republicans secret

uh weapon maybe even their superpower uh which despite their manifest false mistakes they manage to succeed is that the is that at least at least conservatives are more willing to believe that people disagree with them than liberals. You're saying that it's the fault of the progressives, not AOC, Black Lives Matter, and defund the police? Those things seem inextricably intertwined with moderators. No, it is their fault. That's what Roy Tixera is saying. That's the reason why his prediction has been delayed uh was in fact their prediction has not just been delayed it's been denied

correct correct correct correct easier and if well let me let's just finish this but yeah go ahead finish oh well the place to look is texas the argument was when when Texas goes blue, it'll be over for Republicans. The Democrats will have New York and California, and if they have either Texas or Florida reliably in their column, there will never be another Republican president elected ever, ever, ever. And it looked as though Texas, because of the large Hispanic population and growing Hispanic population, growing as a proportion of the Texas population, would be the one that would go blue. Two points about Greg Abbott, the current governor. He's not a perfect governor, but he's pretty good.

Here's the first point. When he ran for re-election, it seemed clear enough that he would win. And what he did was devote a lot of resources to the rio grande valley he campaigned hard among hispanic texans and now that he's running for re-election four years later he's ahead of beto o'rourke by at least 10 points in poll after poll after poll. And this in a state in which Anglos have become a minority of the population. Free markets, decent schools, low crime in your neighborhoods. Who doesn't want that? The condescension that Democrats can move hard left and champion abortion and transgenderism and that mexican immigrants recent immigrants from mexico will have no choice but will be

will go right ahead the condescend and mexicans immigrants hispanic immigrants they know when they're being condescended to they know which party thinks they're stupid it ain't working it can i just look at one thing about math and this is incontrovertible and inarguable as texas became browner it became redder when texas was more white that is true they had they had liberal and richards as a governor they had democratic long-term democratic senator and vice presidential candidate lloyd benson ralph if you go back a little farther yeah they did more when texas was whiter and less brown it was more bipartisan and less blue i mean less red so the the math is sort of staring them in the face and instead of accepting

that math um they have spun fantasies for themselves and and roy takes errors from smart guy he's correct in saying that the one thing they didn't he didn't anticipate was the democratic party would go insane um and i would say that is probably the first thing I think of if I had to make predictions. But apparently that came to him late. Hey, I have to interrupt you for just a second here. We're talking about war. Sometimes people will talk about the butcher's bill. Well, there's a different kind of butcher that's a little happier to think about. That's the one that cuts your meat. Now, depending on what your store is like, where you live, sometimes you get those cuts and not so good.

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And we thank ButcherBox for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast, free bacon for life. And now back to the show. As I mentioned at the top, and I'm sure everybody's absolutely fascinated about this i took a trip to california and i experienced uh things that you don't necessarily expect if you just look at the bad news that says oh my god needles and feces in san francisco oh my god homeless i saw needles and feces open buttons and buttons needles and feces oh my as they say in the wizard of oz the only thing i saw that actually

conformed to the group to the bad stories was when we were rumbling through the la river which isn't there was a guy being held by a cop at gunpoint hands behind his back because he'd stolen something there was a whole bunch of boxes around his trucks just that it was the extent of the criminality that i saw now that's good news they're they're arresting people for stealing they didn't used to do that i know so does that mean that all the things i heard about california are not the case no it just means that it's an extremely large state a sprawling place and as somebody in ricochet's comments pointed out when i was discussing how clement and wonderful i found the state um california is like america you can't just say there's a california you can say

there's you know you can't even say there's a north dakota because there's a California. You can say there's, you know, you can't even say there's a North Dakota because there's oil patch, North Dakota, there's farming, North Dakota, there's urban Fargo. You've got lots. And when you look at California, you see a multiplicity of cultures and styles from the North to the South. It's a microcosm of America. Everything is a microcosm. America is a microcosm of America. And in that sense, it's great because this country, we know it, we know it's common culture, but we can also explore all of its niches and variations. And that's wonderful. That's what makes this Procrustean bed such an absolutely fantastic innovation in human civilization.

Rob, however, came back from Europe, where I expect, despite the fact that the EU is supposed to subsume all into a Beethoven singing European identity, that national identifications still persist. Why the Hungarians may think of themselves as Hungarians. Did you find that the case, or is everybody waving out their euros and saying, no, I'm transnational ideas, viva to us look the euro as a currency was was extremely attractive and it remains attractive to people in those countries because they they didn't trust their own central bankers right so it's like you know let's let's move it on up let's like but but that was pretty much it i mean the the benefit the the chief beneficiaries as far as i can tell right now for the european monetary union or for the eu in, the Irish, who were sort of bribed into joining this thing, and ago a lot sooner than anybody thought they would and a lot sooner than some of the other countries that were sort of worried of the italians so um in in in you know in in retrospect

the the monetary union has been incredibly successful for most of that continent it's just that all those things come with a price and the price is you can't just get um uh tough central bankers and um and budget hawks in your uh in your big bureaucracy you also get people that are measuring the size of your butterpats and are telling the french that you can no longer have sugar cubes uh when they took away the sugar cubes in france there was like this minor minor protest but it was a protest whereas they did that now after 20 some plus years of just constant bureaucratic encroachment in their lives i think there will be riots i think we'd be looking at protests in france about sugar cubes now of course they're

gone nobody thinks about them but there's a time when the the the bowl your cubes on your on your on your table at every cafe and they called it a um a canard where you take your sugar cube you dip it in your coffee or your or your cafe au lait and you give it to your children and they would sort of suck on the this the sugar cube that's been moistened with coffee and that was considered totally normal you can't do that now because the moment i knew Brexit was going to succeed was when I saw stories in the UK press about how the EU was going to regulate kettles,

electric kettles. That was the last straw. Nobody likes that. You're not touching our kettles and our tea. Right, right. I mean, I guess what I'd say is that what I think everyone is surprised with there, and everyone I think is surprised 50s, 60s, and 70s, and 80s. It just got slowly awful until the lower high-water-market, if you look at it, 1990, which I think had some zillion number of homicides in some few weeks into the year.

It was incredible. It was the bloodiest year in murders in New York's history in 1990. And people kind of like it hit slowly. You know, they're boiling the frog. It's happened rather slowly. There's no one today. I mean, I was in an Uber yesterday and the and the trouble in the schools with liberal progressive policies that is actually that is a profound insight by the way i hope

you gave this guy five stars well you know yeah but if the other the thing at the national level i've been surprised heartened needless to say but also surprised by how quickly the country has got joe biden and the democrats number which is to say by how quickly their poll numbers have collapsed here in california we're paying in northern california we're paying over five bucks for the sub premium tank touched six dollars the other day sometime last week at chevron so of course i drove on to valero uh but people just oh yeah that's biden that's biden it's just by the way the main the next thing they're they're these spate of articles on um how biden can come back oh yeah right yeah you can't this is over what's

going to happen next what's already begun to happen is the the democrats are going to flip not a lot of them but enough to to eliminate Nancy Pelosi's governing majority in the House and enough to give Chuck Schumer real trouble, even more trouble than he's already had in the Senate. They're going to flip from pounding on Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin for defying the president. And instead, they're going to begin defying the president themselves because these people are facing re-election struggles. right yes this administration has lost control of its own party it's over irony the irony is that the solution is so clear i mean i hate you know yes it's such a jungian solution your shadow self democrats your mansions and your cinemas that is that those are that's the solution for you

you need to so you need to surrender to your shadow i mean it's and it's bizarre to me that it's not this but it's not that it's really actually only in the in the um consulting class of democrats your carvels your roy texeras those people who who are saying telling them the truth and And none of the new Democrats want to hear it, which is the weirder we are, the farther we are from the center, the worse we do. And that seems like, well, yeah, but it's a very, very hard thing to convince a gigantic organism that for years, Ben, I mean, look, the democratic party is the most successful political party in the history of earth and one of the reasons it's been successful is that it managed to move the country left and accomplish its left-wing goals even as it lost the white

the white house and occasionally the senate and then not until 1994 50 years later the house but that the message from the debt for the democrats has been make sure you have a lot of conservative democrats in your party right to balance out the marxist graduate students and when they forgot that they started to become insane and when you get to get to be insane you end up having either a 900 year old twoold two-time Speaker of the House, I think, or three, Nancy Pelosi, and a 9,000-year-old Methuselah president. And everyone else is a crazy crackpot progressive leftist who is despised by the very people that formed your base 20 years ago. And you know who's in the best position of all to embrace Joe Manchin and to reposition the Democratic Party? Joe Biden. Joe Biden could do a joint appearance in West Virginia

with Joe Manchin. And Joe Biden could say, listen, folks, I grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania. And when I grew up in Scanton the product of scranton was coal i understand what it's like to work in the mines and to have an economy of working people and that's my democratic party it's the democratic party of franklin rose he could but of course he's too old he's entirely in the hands of the progressives now it just isn't it's no longer an option you know no he can't be it's like come it's like coming out for genocide because coal yes that's right is killing the planet and everybody on it which is why i believe actually that nancy pelosi has given up because i read that nancy

pelosi has bought a seaside mansion property in florida which only means to me that she is just simply going to sit in her chair like guggenheim on the Titanic, waiting for the waters to rise around her and take her away. Well, I don't think she's going to… Price tag, by the way. Everybody here in California, you know, I live just a little south of Nancy Pelosi's district. And my wife, whoo, was my wife steamed. She doesn't follow politics that closely. But she and all her friends, and almost all her friends are liberals.

But she forwarded to me it's on zillow this house that nancy pelosi and paul pelosi bought 25 million dollars 25 million dollars for their second home in florida she's she's the champion of the working people right but but i think it's fair to say that for the pelosi's 25 million dollars for a house that's sofa change for those people yes yes she's married to a very rich man extremely rich person which is you know i celebrate good for her i mean but the idea that this ancient person should be leading a party uh be the second the second most influential democrat in the war in the country after after somebody who's even older and more out of touch is a real problem. It's a real problem when you don't have anybody in the middle saying, well, wait a minute. I mean, can we be normal? And the person who is saying that

from West Virginia is vilified by his own party. That's not a recipe for success. Well, I'm the person in the middle who's saying, well, it's over. Am I over? I mean, we're done. This podcast was brought to you. Hold on a second here because I got something to tell you. Podcast brought to you by Bowling Branch, by ButcherBox, and by Aura. Please support them for supporting us and join Ricochet today, by the way, and you will have access to no dumb questions. That wonderful little segment we pitched at the top of the show, we didn't forget about it. It's coming up. You're going to love it. Take a minute, if you will, to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts.

Of course, your reviews allow other listeners to discover us, gets our rating up there, and helps keep the show going, which we want to do because we're so close to number 600. And gentlemen, where are we going to have number 600? We should do it in person in a special location. Your house is what I heard. That's what Scott was telling me. On the bridge.

Nancy Pelosi's. We'll figure that out, and of course, we'll tell'll tell you but until then we'll see everybody in the comments at ricochet 4.0 next week next week boys America There's a growing feeling Of hysteria Conditioned to respond To all the threats And the rhetorical speeches Of the Soviets Mr. Khrushchev said

He would bury you I don't subscribe To this point of view It would be such an Ignorant thing to do If the Russians loved their children too How can I save my little boy From Oppenheimer's deadly toy

There is no monopoly of common sense On either side of the political fence We share the same biology Regardless of ideology Believe me when I say to you I hope the Russians love their children too. Ricochet. Join the conversation. Thank you. To this point I feel Believe me when I say to you

I hope the Russians love their children too We share the same biology Regardless of ideology What might save us, me and you Is if the Russians love their children too Thanks for watching!