The Ricochet Podcast - Muzzles Not Masks

Episode Date: June 5, 2020

Now, that was a week. We try to put it all in some perspective — the protests, the riots, the looting, and the politics and we do so with the help of our guests, Andrew C. McCarthy and Victor Davis Hanson. And yes, the Lileks Post of The Week is back to blow the lid off knitting clubs. And, Rob outs himself as a super hero, Peter deals with civil unrest induced anxiety by reading biographies... Source

I'm going to be saying I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University. People are worried about the protesters and looters, and it's just people who are frustrated. I'm the president and you're fake news Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long I'm James Lylek, today we talk to Annie McCarthy about the Floyd indictment and other legal matters And Victor Davis Hanson about the generals and ancient history So let's have ourselves a podcast

I can hear you! Welcome everybody to the Ricochet Podcast. It's number 499. Chances are looking good, I'd say 60-40 that we all make it to 500. After that last week, who knows, I'm here with Rob and Peter. Rob obviously in a jovial mood, being in the worst governed city of America, having been trashed and looted. And Peter in Stanford. I'm a superhero at this point. You can't touch me. I've been bitten by a radioactive spider named Bill de Blasio. I am impervious. I am ubermensch.

Rob has been through despair and come out the other side. Yes. I used to think that looters in New York City were merely over-excited and celebrating the impending 500th Ricochet podcast. No doubt. So we could look at this and say, the last week, and say that actually this was worse than 9-11. Oh, for sure. Because we, at least then, we knew who attacked us, and the nation was united about it. The curious thing about this is that the nation is pretty much all on the same page that what happened to George Floyd was unacceptable, was murder.

Whether he was killed or the people who did it should be put away. There's no debate about that. We're on the same page. But yet there was this orgy, this delirious glee of appropriation of property that a large part of our political establishment could not bring themselves to control or condemn because for some reason they were conflating this with the protests. And also in the back of their mind, they're sympathetic to the idea that really what we do need to do is to appropriate property and spread it around protests and also in the back of their mind they're sympathetic to the idea that um really what we do need to do is to appropriate property and spread it around and it's acting out and all

the right which is incredibly condescending in the first place but it's it's it's the lack of spine on so many people to be able to say this is wrong this is wrong this is just this is i want a little lives in neighborhood i want a little eyewitness rob how, how bad did it get? You live in a very nice neighborhood. I mean, I live in the epicenter. I kept hearing Fifth Avenue, and I thought, whoa, whoa, whoa. Rob lives only a few blocks. It's lower fifth. It's lower.

Yeah. Give us eyewitness. What did it sound like? What did you see in the streets? What was it like? It was, you know, I lived through two riots. You know, one in L.A. in 92 and one here. The one in 92 was significantly different in the sense that it was located in a specific neighborhood. L.A. is all spread out.

You could be in Santa Monica and walking around and feel fine. And this was sort of global and everywhere. In fact, it was the, for me, the most striking pictures are the ones in L.A. where there were places where there should never be anything other than idle shopping in the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica that was sort of looted. The same here. It was incredibly, also incredibly specific. That's what I find so dispiriting about the response. It isn't so much the, you know, the excuses and the pandering.

I get it. Okay. That's bad. But it's the inability to make any kind of distinctions, even though those distinctions are being made for us on camera. The people on camera looting the Nike store were not protesting. They were asked about it. And they say, oh, no, I just want some free stuff. That is actually normal human behavior. It's lousy human behavior, but it is in fact human behavior that we've witnessed and recorded for thousands of years. And the idea that we are now in a position where

we can't as a culture make a distinction between things and we can't as a culture recognize bad behavior for what it is so strange to me i know you asked me for an eyewitness i'm sorry the eyewitnesses are this if you walk down a sixth avenue or you walk up um uh fifth or you walk into in close to Square, which is really two blocks from Rilam, you see specific places looted. The Verizon store was looted. The sneakers store was looted. The Nike store was looted. A couple other places were looted.

Electronic stores were looted. So this is not random destruction. No, no, no. It's like people want brands. They want stuff. They want brands. The crowds got too large for the cops to control. The only way to control them at that moment for the cops is to actually aggressively fight, which they didn't do.

They were told not to do, which is actually considered cop best practice, has been for years. And then once that happens, it all just floods. And we realize that you can have 100,000 cops on the street in New York City, but New York City's big. Same thing with LA. So it's a cascade of things that happen, but it just seems strange to me that we are unable as a culture to say, boy, that's terrible. Those people should be arrested. It's not right what they're doing. And it in no way could possibly have any rational or legitimate connection to civil protest, which is something that Americans have been doing for 250 years. So the most depressing thing about it is that we've actually lost our ability to recognize human behavior for what it is and to condemn it and to not feel like we need to twist ourselves into some kind of pretzel to explain it, especially when you walk around and you see what was stolen.

Well, you know what I mean. You know what I mean. We as a culture. We as a culture. Okay, fine. Yes, they. But it is something that is deeply embedded in our culture now, and it's hard to get out. And the looters were behaving in ways that do not require interpretation.

When you loot the Chanel store, I get it. Like, you want the cool stuff in the Chanel store. And when the looting stops in New York City, it didn't stop because the cops were on the streets or because the National Guard came in. It stopped because Bill de Blasio was somehow lucky three times in a row in that it rained. And when it rains, people say, they don't say, I'm no longer mad about what happened in Minneapolis. They say, I don't really want to go out in the rain and get my new stuff wet that I steal from the Chanel store. How did people come into the city to loot? Or were these, this does not sound like it was denizens of Manhattan.

Were the trains running? Trains are running, yeah. So people came in from the outer, I don't know, I'm asking this. People came in from elsewhere, from New Jersey, from the outer i don't know i'm asking this people came in from elsewhere from new jersey from the outer in other words were there people going home carrying nike boxes on the subways they're cops on the subway there's no effort no what am i saying i don't know i'm not there i wasn't there but it seems clear there were a number of points where the police could have taken action if it if they'd had if they'd been trained to do so, if they'd been backed up, if they'd felt the city was behind them.

We should get Heather MacDonald on this podcast next week. She knows all of this stuff, and I remember talking to her at length about it, and I'm going to absolutely mess this up. She is, in fact, an expert in all this stuff. It is part of the training and part of the best practice, quote practice quote unquote for uh for you to stop if you can't it's a continually the police are continual in continual retreat so if they don't nip it in the bud they have to continually retreat to corners and to streets and to attempt to control at least one part of the city which eventually, if the cascade gets big enough, you can't do. I see. I see.

Okay. Well, I'm just sitting in my little house, like, you know, looking out the window, and, you know, there's some marchers and stuff going by, but it's like, it doesn't seem, and even during the day, people are kind of walking around with their masks on, which just seems insane at this point. Let's all get COVID.

And everybody's kind of okay i mean i was driving down the street the other day to a place that i always pass on my way to work and it was one of the spots that was hit on lake street uh about i don't know one two in the morning or so there was a gentleman walking around live streaming the riot and the looting for seven hours. And I said I was watching real time the destruction and the burning of my city. And a mob had decided that they had the numbers and the initiative and the strength and the tools to open up this cell phone store. And, of course, all of the people who are standing around watching them do so are filming it on their cell phones. But this is a marvelous opportunity for an upgrade, apparently.

And so eventually they pry all the bars open, and they begin to loot the place, and they start to throw the goods out. And the man who's doing the live streaming is making a request for particular pieces of equipment, if anybody has it. And eventually the owner shows up. And the owner is despondent. The owner is absolutely incomplete. It's 1 o'clock in the morning.

He probably lives above the place. And he helps the looters out because he doesn't want them to get hurt as they go through the iron bars. And he's being very kind and very nice to them. And then the live streamer says, oh, he Muslim. He Muslim. Oh, man. All of a sudden there's a minor sort of feeling that this might have a moral component to it in the constellation of grievances in which these people are operating. But it passes quite quickly.

And everybody's just saying, hey, insurance, insurance. And the man turns to the camera and says, I don't have insurance. I don't. This is my, this is everything. And his wife comes out and she's pregnant. And again, there's sort of a little minor, oh, God. But having been thus chastened, everybody just sort of slinks away to find the next opportunity, which is right there. Oh, look at this. We've got a National Guard we can taunt.

And they're screaming at him. The way that everything flowed in this sort of orgiastic delight of destruction was just so despairing to watch. And it ended up about a four or five, it ended up at a place where my wife used to work. This big building used to be a Sears distribution center department store. It's now office buildings for a major healthcare company. It's got all kinds of restaurants and the rest. And I thought it was going to go up. I mean, why not? Why not burn it down? They had burned down a furniture building that was standing right next to it and being full of cushions and the like and sofas and the rest, it went up like that. not? Why not burn it down? They had burned down a furniture building that was standing right next to it and being full of cushions and the like and sofas and the rest, it went up like that.

And the other storefronts in the street were all aflame as well. It's about two o'clock in the morning. There's no fire department. There's no police. There are people wandering around in a zombie-like state and you can tell by the objects in their hand and the illumination on their face that they're all recording this because even though they're seeing something that's so extraordinary, they can't understand it unless they see it through the little sort of horizontal mirror in their hand. And then finally, somebody gets the opportunity that this is a great thing for a selfie. Let's do it for the gram, and about four or five of them pose in front of the configuration, hands outstretched, faces alight with glee. And somebody takes the picture and then off they scamper.

And then the building collapses. I mean, I know that New York is still going to be there and the windows will be put up and it's just property, but this whole just property thing is just insane to me. The lives that were ruined, the businesses, there was an Indian history center that had the tapes and the written notes and the photographs of local American Indian history. It's destroyed.

There's your property. There's your building. But there's your history. I mean, I know I get what Rob is saying. so catastrophic about this and the inability of our leaders to be able to condemn it because they believe that it takes away from the righteousness of the protest is another thing. And then, of course, now we should all put on masks and we should all not congregate because COVID. Quick question here.

Donald Trump, we'll come to Donald Trump because we have to. But aside from, I'm trying to sort of ring fence him off. Donald Trump denounced the violence. I think we could all argue that he did so and he could have done a better job of it at a minimum or he did it, but set him aside. Did any other national figure, governor, mayor, particularly mayors and governors where violence was taking place did anybody else offer a strong statement in support of law order property rights i i missed it if it took place no no in fact in new york got it right in the entire country who got it right nobody i don't think anybody got it right i mean that's one of the things that, for me, capped out by genuine theory, which has been working since the beginning of the pandemic, has been a total and complete and utter failure of every single elected official.

From the top down, I don't excuse Trump at all, all the way down, except maybe for a slight detour around the governor of Florida, who I still have a crush on. But that's a separate issue. That's pandemic era. That's a pandemic era where I haven't checked it lately. The worst part was the cynicism of it. And the cynicism of, you know, I'll leave the Trump criticism to others because everybody already knows how I feel. But the cynicism of the Bill de Blasios, the anti-Trump, the communist, who said things in public in support of the riots, essentially, the lawlessness, but in private was urging his cops to get tougher so that he didn't have to actually take responsibility for being a get-tough mayor.

And what I thought the prudent thing to do on Monday night was to call in the National Guard into New York City. He elected not to. And roll the dice. And it turns out that it was probably a smart political move, right? Because when you had the National Guard in the city, you essentially announced to people that you were no longer really a mayor. And he just bet on the rain and he bet on the rain and the rain kind of won rain rain plus curfew kind of worked right so um that's nothing honorable these are questions for another podcast but as far as i can tell

there was essentially no rioting in miami or anywhere else in florida why i don't know i don't know in texas there was rioting in d. Very bad, as far as I'm aware. Not Houston, not San Antonio. Why? I just don't know. I have to believe it has something to do with leadership on the ground, but honestly, I don't know. There are mysteries within mysteries here about what happened. And I'd sort of like to know. I don't know. It's also overwhelming, so horrible that it's hard to look at the horror right in the eye. I'm sort of looking around the edges. Who got it right?

Where didn't it happen? What's the whole story here? Here's who I think got it right in a horrible, dark, cynical way. The shopkeepers I saw, I didn't see them, but the shopkeepers, the shops that I noticed on my walks through Manhattan during the day, past couple days, who put signs in their window that said, Black Lives Matter. They got it right.

What do you want me to say so you don't smash my store? And I will say it. The talismanic daubing of the door, so the angel passes by. Just, what do you want me to say? I'll say it. I mean, that's kind of how, if you run a business in America, in some way,

if you run the New York Times, right? What do you want me to say? Just tell me what to say, and I'll say it. I don't care whether I believe it or not. What I believe is that I don't want you to destroy what I worked hard to create. That's right, but that is the most fundamentally un-American thing you can possibly imagine. You want you to mouth these pieties. And if you don't,

all of the things that we can ascribe to our enemies, we'll ascribe to you, and you're an un-person, and you're going to be destroyed. Having said the piety, having bent the knee, having done all these things, there will immediately be another raft coming along of things that you will then have to approve and agree of. And if you don't approve and agree of those, it'll happen to you. Oh boy, you know, I think we could go on this subject for a little bit here, but we got to get to our guest.

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and our contributing editor and the author of Bollock Collusion, That's What the World Is Today. I'm sorry, no, The Plot to Rig an Election to Destroy a Presidency. Andy, welcome back. I'm in Minneapolis, and as you can well imagine, there's a particular legal case that has everybody focused on the particulars and learning about

first, second, third degree murder and the rest of it. You wrote, Keith Ellison, that's the AG in charge of the case here, is alleging that the arrest and accompanying restraint of Floyd was felony assault from the start. To pull that off, he realized he needs to soft pedal Floyd's resistance. Otherwise, physical restraint by the cops may appear to have been reasonable, at least from the start. Ellison wants it to look unreasonable through and through to the point of assault. That's always the difficulty here,

is finding the right charge so that the jury says, yes, yes, that's the one, and yes, yes, he's guilty. Yeah, and I think it's a challenge under Minnesota law. It's a challenge whenever you're dealing with police, because, you know, I know I listened to Reverend Sharpton yesterday talking about how, you know, how can you look at a tape and not see probable cause, because I think that was a reference to the failure to arrest Chauvin for close to a week, or I guess it was five days, which I must say, I shared, I think he should

have been arrested a lot quicker than that force that the rest of us don't. And it's not a question of simply looking at a factual transaction and saying, I see that force was used, and therefore, you know, I have an assault. You have to decide when in time the police have gone from what they're allowed to do, which is use sufficiently superior force to deal with somebody who's being recalcitrant to the point of aggressive or excessive force, which obviously they are not allowed to use. And that's a tough call. And it's going to be a tough call for a jury trial if you have a fair jury trial. Hey, Andy, it's Rob. Welcome. Thanks for joining us. Hey, so I got a question, separate question about this a little bit. And I'm just basically just trying to throw some red meat to my own conservative roots here. How hard is it to get

rid of bad cops? It's really hard. It's more hard than it. On a scale of one to 10, 10 being get rid of bad teachers, where is it? It's, you know, getting rid of bad teachers is hard too, Rob, but it's up there. Let me give you just an example. When I was a boss at the U.S. Attorney's Office the last few years I was there, and this is something and they would come to me and they'd say, we need you to indict somebody who stole mail, you know, a postal police officer or a postal person. Right. And I'd say, okay, how much? And they say, you know, $5 out of a birthday card or whatever. And I'd say, why don't you just fire them you know five dollars right um and they'd say it's really hard to fire them if you won't indict them and i said but if i indict them i don't need you to fire them and those kind of those kind of stalemates go on all the time but they do ask the

prosecutors to take legal action because it's such a morass to cut through all of their civil service protections yeah that's a real problem okay my next question just as a civil libertarian if you'd asked me two weeks ago before all this what am i worried about i would have said you know i'm worried about all of this the new government controls over our lives i'm worried about bureaucrats telling me how far my table has to be from somebody else's table and when and where I have to wear a mask, when and where I can walk and go to the park. I feel like we have given up a lot of our civil liberties. Two weeks later, you asked me how I feel, and I say, I'm not that crazy about unmarked, unbadged,

unidentified troops, either law enforcement-looking, you know, law enforcement, military-looking troops, or regular troops marching around the Capitol. Are those two things totally different, and I should just stop conflating them in my head? Is it a coincidence these two things have happened so close together? Should I be concerned by both of those things? Tell me, as a civil libertarian, what I need to be worried about, what I don't. You know, I guess as Oliver Wendell Holmes used to point out that the divisions of authority in the Constitution are not black and white, that they're gray areas because there's a lot of looseness in the joints in our laws and in our constitution because things aren't static they they change they

you know conditions change that the times that you need that you know we have times in our history where you had to have martial law for example you know in i guess in new orleans in the War of 1812, toward the end, right? And then you have other times where, and this, Rob, I think is like a big part of the problem that we have because this is people's exclusive historical memory, it seems, these days. But we've had a generation, really 30 years, of historical or historic domestic tranquility where you've had this revolution in in sort of intelligent policing and they've managed to you know figure out ways to deploy people to where the hot spots are and suppress them quick and you know we've had economic flourishing and and plunging crime rates and all and all that stuff and i think part of the problem we're

dealing with is that um people don't remember what it was like before then. You know, just as somebody who grew up in the Bronx in the 60s and 70s, and I saw John Podhoretz wrote a great column about the same thing in the Post, and he grew up in the same city I did around the same time. The bad old days can come back in a hurry, and that's because things are dynamic. You know, sometimes we have a certain set of threats, and therefore we have a certain set of expectations about our security. And then other times we're like, you know, why are the police around? They don't need to be around. Andy, Peter here. You just made an absolutely fascinating point.

I was thinking the other day I was too little to understand it then, but I understand it now how upset my father was during the rioting of 1968. And I see now he was thinking we fought a war for this country. Why are you ripping it apart? And, you know, the generation, he was the generation. And now, I'm old enough to remember the 70s, putting the pieces back together after Vietnam, after a decade of stagflation, was hard. Okay. So, the question is this. Do you look at what's happening and say to yourself, well, this is just one more in the cycle of American history. This generation has to see how bad it can be before it straightens up.

Or do you find yourself saying, whoa, this kind of comprehensive breakdown, not only in order on the streets, but in the political will, the political. Very few mayors or governors are giving, are saying, saying we're here to protect property. Do you look at this and say, this is something new? This is something really unprecedented and therefore frightening? No, I don't, I don't think there's anything new. I really don't. What? That's exactly the right answer. I feel so much better. Well, I just, you know, I remember, I don't think about this a lot, but I remember, you know, sitting in all college philosophy classes and, you know, going through Plato's dialogues and, you know, the wonder among the people who were in those deliberations over whether we can only build good citizens by having them have to go through the fire of military conflict. And that's the only way that you come to appreciate what's, you know, what's really important and what's, you know, you have to be in dire circumstances to realize the good and the important. And that if you're not in those circumstances, and I think maybe if you protect people from those circumstances for too long, it's not that the human impulse to agitate over things goes away. It just gets devoted to smaller things.

So, you know, so we have i felt this i felt this before but i've never felt it quite as intensely as at this moment can't we make you governor someplace oh god so i'm i'm content to stay one step ahead of indictment the way things are going so here's one other question and it's open-ended i don't even know quite how to put it to you tightly. Protests, peaceful protests, long history in America, grant that some large element of what was taking place at least started as protests. Grant it. But we also know that it devolved into violence and sheer theft, sheer thuggery. You're the cop of, I don't know, New York, beg your pardon, you're the mayor of, I don't know, New York or an imaginary city. It's happened. We are where we are. What do you say to the chief of police? How do you start to put things back together? What are the techniques?

Well, one of the things I think you have to recognize, and this is why you try never to let things get to that point, is that, and this again goes back to the 30 years of unprecedented America, which is not easy to continue half million people the resources of the police and even their resolve is simply not enough to restore it which is why we've had this discussion about the insurrection act i i'm stunned to hear uh people like general mattis who i have a lot of respect for say with a straight face that what's being discussed by people who in good faith are just trying to figure out what the right thing to do here is turning the United States into a battle space. In case he's missed it, the United States is a battle space right now. And what we're talking about is not making war on our own people. It's protecting our own people from people who are from evil people who are who are doing precisely that.

So I just think that's a practical to have a conversation about how you enforce the laws, because right now they're trying to restore order and they simply don't even have the resources necessary to do that. And I've always been one, you know, I have my my hopes clashing forever with with what I know to be the truth or what I think I know to be the truth, or what I think I know to be the truth. And I don't think rioting exhausts itself or burns itself out. Oh, you don't? I don't. Okay, I sort of assumed that it would, but that's just not so. I keep hoping it will, because I do get that there's a natural exhaustion that happens. But I think Rumsfeld, you know, that trenchant little thing he always said about, you know, weakness is provocative. I think that's right. I think, you know, when you convey to the bad elements out

there that the laws are not going to be enforced, I don't think people get tired of doing bad things. What may happen is that we have alternative ways of providing security that people may not like too much. But I don't see this just kind of burning out after a few days and everyone will get exhausted and we get on to the next thing. I hope I'm wrong about that. I'd rather not have to call the military in to do this. Andy, one last question for me, just a kind of practical, tactical question, and then I know James has a question. I've vented so many times already about the lockdown that I don't want to start that as an issue. But I believe, correct every word I say if I'm wrong about this, I believe we know that the trouble in an orderless situation like this overwhelmingly comes from young males. And it just seems to me sensible to argue that with the whole economy

locked down, young males being young are likely to have entered the workforce most recently, therefore they're going to be laid off more quickly. What we've got here is bored young men who are unemployed. And so am I losing my mind or is it just obvious that this is another argument for reopening the economy as quickly as we can? Or can we simply not do that until we've restored order? How does the shutdown economy play into what we're watching? I think it plays in a lot, but it's not just this as a cautionary tale for why we should reopen the economy. I think that the exploding anger that you're seeing on the streets can't be disaggregated from what's been on the last 10 weeks or however long it's been. And I may be over-personalizing this, but I have an aunt,

my father's older sister, who passed away from coronavirus and a whole lot of underlying conditions about a week ago and my cousin her daughter who was um a nurse was not permitted to be in the hospital with her at 1 30 in the morning on saturday when she passed and you know the doctor pleaded with the administrators and That's horrible. hundreds and hundreds of times across the country. And every time I think about it, it makes me boiling angry. And I can't for a second think that I'm unique in that regard. I think there's a lot of anger here. And the more this goes on, you have people who are already angry that have turned this tinderbox into something much worse. But now you also have people who say, I couldn't be with my relative when my relative died. My son lost his whole senior year of high school. This terrible thing happened. And then you look at what's going on

on the streets, where the same people who kept us locked down for two and a half months are now saying, oh, 1,000 people, 2,000 people together to demonstrate on this. Sure. They're just trying to express themselves. I don't think that's going to satisfy people. I think it's going to make the anger even worse. And it is making the anger worse. Oh, yes. I have a hard time though however believing that the people who would gleefully throw a brick through a window and help themselves with the contents of the store were those who said no i gotta stay home it's the law andy last question um our mayor immediately tweeted out upon the inauguration of the of

the unrest that the city was under siege from white nationalists, in addition to gangs and outside, perhaps, foreign members. White nationalists. That was the big bugaboo. Big, big, big, big, what do they call them? What is it, the bugaloo? No, not the bugaloo boys. And it turns out now that a lot of these pasty-faced, dead-eyed guys in black may have been associated with various loosely knit anarchist groups, black bloc types.

The general flotsam and dreadful people that you find in Antifa and otherwise. Now, I know that Antifa is not some super secret smirch specter organization, but it is something, and the DOJ apparently is going to take a look at it. What do you think is going to be the outcome of that?

So you were going to Antifa. I thought you were talking about my family gathering at Christmas. So I'm looking at that straight down. You know, I think the president got himself sort of twisted around the wheel as he does from time to time by this word designation. In part, it's because he's not a lawyer and he doesn't really understand, maybe didn't understand what the word means. In part, it's because his supporters say, we designate al-Qaeda and we designate ISIS. We need to designate the Antifa to show how tough we are in terrorism. What was necessary, James, is what I think Barr did, which is make it clear that we are going to regard these organizations as terrorists. And you need to do that because it's kind of an investigative discipline.

It efficiently organizes the way that you're going to go about trying to collect information and make cases. But when the president said he wanted to designate al-Qaeda, we only designate foreign terrorist organizations. And the reason for that is not because we think they're worse than domestic ones. To the contrary, the thing is, with domestic terrorists, we have a million laws that we can use against them. I prosecuted terrorists who were attacking us domestically in 1993 before there was a formal designation process. It didn't matter a whit that there wasn't. We prosecuted them as terrorists, indicted them, investigated them, sentenced them, et cetera, as terrorists. We designate foreign terrorist organizations because they operate outside the jurisdiction of our investigative agencies and outside the writ of the court. So Congress has to try to put a measure of U.S. jurisdiction on them so we can do things like keep people who get training in terrorist training camps overseas out of our country and freeze assets and stop

transactions and that sort of stuff. But we don't have to do that domestically because we have these other laws that make it very easy to investigate and prosecute terrorists. What we have to do is have the resolve and make the decision up front that this is how we're going to go about investigating an outfit like Antifa. And we have plenty of laws that allow us to do that. It doesn't have to have the regiment of the military. It can be a very loosely organized movement, and we can still reach it with our laws as long as they're organizing themselves around criminal goals. So I think that's what Barr is doing. Andy McCarthy, author of Ball of Collusion. We could have you on for another 20 minutes to talk about, you know, some of the other

stuff that's going on, but maybe in weeks to come. Thanks for joining us again, my friend. We'll talk to you later. Thanks, Jens. Have a great weekend. Andy. Good night, Andy. Thank you.

Hey, we'll get to our next guest in a second. But a lot of you, no doubt, have been dealing with educating your kids at home because school is closed, right? What if school is closed in the fall? We've all been thinking these nightmarish things, and you realize that, you know, schooling at home has been something of an adjustment, and it hasn't really worked for a lot of people. Times like these may inspire you to look around and say, well, who exactly can do this learning from home well? Well, there's a placement. They've been doing it for an awful long time, and it's called Laurel Springs. Online learning might be new for your family, but Laurel Springs has been doing this for nearly 30 years. They're experts in online learning. Laurel Springs has the tools

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waived registration fee. laurelsprings.com slash ricochet. And our thanks to Laurel Springs for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And now we welcome back to the podcast, Victor Davis Hanson, the Gentleman Farmer, Scholar, Historian, and California Chronicler. Also the Martin and Ellie Anderson Senior Fellowolar, Historian, and California Chronicler. Also the Martin and Italy Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and star of The Classicist podcast right here on the Ricochet Audio Network. His most recent book is The Case for Trump. Welcome.

Thank you for having me, you guys. Hey, Victor, it's Rob Long. Thank you for joining us. We just had Andy McCarthy on, and I asked him a question, and he gave me the typical weasel word lawyer answer that he's famous for so i'm gonna ask you because you and i differ about trump i think i know but um but i still need to hear from you because i still need to i need you to set me straight here um taking away the trump i'm not gonna talk about trump i just gonna talk about the federal response. I get, what's the word? Creeped out is the word.

When I see cops put, for whatever reason, black bands over their badge number, and I see sort of unmarked, unidentified quasi-military police force in the Capitol, that creeps me out and makes me, gets my civil libertarian spidey sense alert. Am I just being a wuss? Do I need to grow up or do I have a point? You don't have a point. And I'll give you three reasons off the top of my head if I could. Sure. And I'll do deference to you. It's not new. James Madison put down a state revolt, I think, over a Supreme Court decision.

Andrew Jackson threatened to go in with federal troops into South Carolina. Abraham Lincoln used troops about draft resistance. Herbert Hoover, as you remember, sent Douglas MacArthur into the bonus marchers after World War I. John Kennedy nationalized the Alabama State Guard. Eisenhower had done it earlier in Arkansas. LBJ did it. George H.W. Bush did it in Los Angeles. So they've all done it. The only reason that I'm aware that they might have disguised their badge numbers is that that was an antifa modus operandi to go up and stand next to officers and copy down their badge numbers or their material and then send people to their homes. And that was sort of the threat, whether it was real or not. That might explain the paranoia. And then I don't know whether their uniform was bothersome, but we have had wide-scale looting, arson, and calls for more. I mean, I don't think I can remember

some time when downtown Santa Monica was essentially destroyed and people were defacing everything from the World War II monument to the Lincoln Memorial and promising to go after policemen. And then each night in New York, I think we've had over 120 officers that have been beaten up, brutalized. A few have been shot, one or two have killed. So it's serious stuff. And I don't like the idea of the federal troops there. But I do think that the criticism of Trump, qua Trump,

is not commiserate with what people said about George H.W. Bush and Kennedy and Eisenhower and Hoover doing the same thing. And by the same thing, just to be specific here, Peter here, Victor, by the same thing, you mean invoking, what is it called, the Insurrection Act and using federal troops to put down violence in this country? One of two things. Trump actually hasn't been as radical as they have. What they did was, in the case of Arkansas and Alabama, they nationalized the state guard. They told Orval Halvis and George Wallace that they were no longer the commander-in-chief of the Alabama State National Guard. And then I think they took the 82nd or they put federal officers in charge of them.

I don't think Trump has gone into Minnesota and said, you know what? No, he hasn't. But I think that's part of the times where, because he's Trump, and he tweets and whatever, that people, and I'll be happy to talk about the military resistance to him, which I think is actually more dangerous than anything Trump has done, that when you have a coordination of high-ranking four-star admirals and generals coming out of the woodwork and using certain military tropes and political...

Well, let's talk about that. What I'm aware of... It's Peter here again, Victor. What I'm aware of... You've been reading more widely than I have over the last few days, I know, because we've been exchanging emails. Here's what I'm aware of uh you've been reading more widely than i have over the last few days i know because we've been exchanging emails here's what i'm aware of admiral michael mcmullen former i believe he's former chairman of the joint chiefs he was had a statement in the atlantic magazine uh well at least on the atlantic website and i believe it was titled why i can why i cannot remain silent

and it was a blast at trump personally or by name and then whatever it was a day or two later jim mattis our friend let it be stated jim mattis same site atlantic magazine again a a broadside against trump so explain what the danger of those two is. Go ahead and explain that. And also, if I've missed more. Okay. Well, first of all, the Code of Uniform Military Conduct, as you know, was drafted in 1950 and went into effect in 51. And why was it? It's like the First Amendment. The First Amendment is not there to protect nice words but bad words. And that code was to protect unpopular presidents from popular generals, a beloved Douglas MacArthur or Edwin Walker threatening the authority of an unpopular Harry Truman over Korea. And that was where it came from.

Now, we've never adjudicated whether retired officers who are on military government pensions are still subject to that code. But in times of crisis, you would at least think they would observe in their criticism of a president at least three or four, I don't know, ethical caution, caveats. They're not hard. One was, I don't think you should ever have a four-star admiral with a reductio ad hitlerum. By that is resorting to the Nazi card. And yet we know that James Mattis, to invoke a simile about the dangers of Trump, talked about the Nazi slogan of divide and conquer versus his slogan.

There was no need for that. That was not new, unfortunately. Remember, General Michael Hayden flashed a picture of Birkenwald, Auschwitz, Birkenau, to suggest that Trump was having final solution remedies to the border. And then we had... General Michael Hayden, Air Force and former CIA, former intelligence, a senior intelligence guy. And then we had General Barry McCaffrey, who was mad that Trump canceled the Washington Post, say that he was Benito Mussolini. That's one thing. The second thing is they should not give information that's not factual. So you mentioned General Mullen.

He said that they tear gas. That's under dispute. The Pentagon said they used a different agent, that it wasn't an incendiary tear gas, that he may have been wrong. When James Mattis said there was only a small number of protesters, that's belied by the billions of dollars of damage and injuries that have taken place countrywide. It's belied by the left, who no longer says there's a small number, but has changed their defense of that rioting and arson by saying that it's justified in the noble traditions of American resistance. And more importantly, it's belied by the tragic testimony of George Floyd's brother yesterday,

who took the occasion of his own brother's memorial service to tell people to stop it. And so why would a retired officer say it's a small number who are engaging in violence when it's a large number and the violence is considerable. And so it's not helpful for people to say to generals if they're going to make an argument not to be factual. More importantly, I don't think it's good to do so in unison and that means to come out all at once as we've had seven or eight of them now. We've had Mullen, we've had General Dempsey came out. Remember General Dempsey in 2016 warned Michael Flynn. He said it's not proper for a retired general, not a servant, to go in and politic.

Mullen did as well. Mullen warned Flynn as well, as I recall. Yes. And now Dempsey is doing exactly what he warned against. And so they're all coming out at once. And that's seven days in May eeriness. And I don't mean that lightly. You remember that it was 10 days after the inauguration of Donald Trump, the esteemed Rosa Brooks, Obama State Department legal counsel, wrote an article in Foreign Policy saying three ways to get rid of Donald Trump. Ten days into his presidency. The third was, she said, I thought I would never say it. It's a military coup.

And she outlined how noble officers would refuse an order and therefore remove the president from power. And that gets the fourth caution I'd have about these generals. You should never suggest that caution I'd have about these generals. You should never suggest that there is a way other than a scheduled election to remove a president. That's exactly what McRaven said when he said he has to leave and it should be better, better, quoting directly, sooner than later. James Mattis wrote three days ago that there is a way to bypass, get around the president of the United States. And we don't have to follow him and people should reject him. What does that mean, actually? If you're a citizen or you're a military

officer and one of your esteemed heroes says, you have to find a way to reject an elected president, does that mean that James Mattis and his infinite wisdom over policy disagreements, does he know better than the people who elected the president when he should leave? And then, so there are sayings, and when you hear James Clapper suggest that the president is what? A Russian asset? And this is a final point. This is the time when Robert Mueller spent $30 million in 22 months with a partisan dream team, all-star,

hunter-killer team of lawyers, and found there was no Russian collusion. So when McCaffrey or Clapper has alleged that the President of the United States is a Russian asset or traitor, it's factually wrong. In the case of Clapper, he had simultaneously, he's a retired three-star Air Force officer, gone into a secret House Intelligence Committee and sworn under oath he had no evidence of that, and then went right out on CNN and said just the opposite. And by the way, each of these generals, without exception, have said they come out because Trump has threatened the Constitution. They have not said exactly how that happened. They never say it.

And James Mattis got closest to it when he said he has made a mockery of the Constitution by nationalizing the Guard. And I just suggested that seven or eight, maybe 12 presidents have done that. But what's really interesting about this, and I'll finish, while they were doing that and giving this breast pounding about constitutional sanctity, we know from a nonpartisan Department of Justice inspector general, we know from House intelligence documents that have been redacted by the Interim Director of National Intelligence, the following, that the Obama administration, either the FBI or the CIA, inserted informants into a political campaign. We know that evidence that was under subpoena was destroyed or missing. We know that documents submitted to a FISA court were altered. We know that a FISA court judge feels that the court was

diluted and misled by members of the FBI. We know that a national security advisor was basically set up in a perjury ambush and his private calls were monitored and illegally redacted names were leaked to the press. Those are all constitutional violations. We did not hear one word, not one word from any of these generals or admirals. And what's really dangerous about this, they're setting a precedent. And what the precedent is, any time a retired esteemed general feels that he doesn't like the current president or the current president reaches a nadir in the polls, then they take it upon themselves to warn the American people that he's a threat to our existential security. Within not having the courage to say, what are you going to do about it if he's a threat, if he's a Nazi, if he's made a mockery?

Because you know what the logical extension or trajectory of that warning would be and so i find it shocking it would be as if a right-wing general came out in 2016 and said the following barack obama violated the constitution because he sidestepped the u.s senate in ratification of the iran deal he violated the u.S. Constitution by obstructing Congress, by not turning over subpoenaed documents in the Fast and Furious. He violated the Constitution because he made a quid pro quo with a foreign leader saying that he would reduce or end missile defense if that Russian leader would give him space during his own reelection committee.

He violated the Constitution when he weaponized the IRS and sifted after his enemies. He violated the Constitution, I think this is really severe, he violated the Constitution when during his administration he allowed the FBI, the CIA, and the DOJ to hire a foreign national, Christopher Steele, to collect information from foreign sources and leak them to the press for the purposes of damaging first a current oppositional campaign and then a presidential transition. Now, I don't think those are constitutionally removable offenses, but according to these generals, by their very careful reading of the Constitution, Trump has violated

the Constitution, then this will be the president in the future. We should have gone back and said, General X and Admiral Y, why don't you get a bunch of generals to come out all in unison and tell us how we've got to get rid of Obama? And that didn't happen, of course, because it would be a very dangerous precedent. And that's my two cents on them. Let's switch epochs and continents for the last question here. And this is the sort of thing where somebody who knows a sliver of the subject

makes a fool of himself in front of somebody who knows a lot about the subject. But let's go back to Rome. You're a classicist. And I'm sure people can wave their hands and say, this is the popularities versus the optimates. we've seen this before and before but do you detect the ghost of clodius pulcher hovering over this the man who renounced his privilege in order to throw throw in his lot with the plebs and get political power that way the way that our that our governing class is sort of adopting the mindset and the internalized dialogues of the rioters, let's say, in order to boost their fortunes.

Yeah, there was always two sloganeering by Clodius and, of course, Catiline, as Salas pointed out. And there were two slogans. One was the abolition of debt and the redistribution of property. And that was sort of an automatic Pavlovian expanse. I think what's more dangerous, though, if I could go out of my field, it was that period in the French Revolution from 1792 to 1794, the so-called Jacobin moment, when it was holistic. It wasn't just Robespierre trying to destroy a constitutional parliamentary system into

a radical Athenian-type mobocracy, but it was holistic. They went after the clergy. They killed priests. They drowned them. They renamed the calendar, as you know. Right. And they made the seven days of the week into ten days. It was a holistic effort to destroy French

culture. Here's what bothers me. In the last 72 hours, I've gotten things from a 401k vanguard saying, we have pledged to end blah, blah, blah racism, and we are taking this amount of money and giving it to them. Then I've seen we are a faculty of this particular school, and we're going to take a knee and we're going to swear this type of oath. And then I've seen a Stanford dean send out a letter to the students saying that they have to be tolerant, that this is a moment to indict America for its collective racism, quoting a convicted cop killer, Ms. Shakur, who's now in

exile in Cuba, who finished the quote that the Stanford dean sent out with, all we have to lose is our chains, that famous slogan from Das Kapital. So I feel that when people are saying we need to abolish the police or if you're a football quarterback and you say you want to respect the flag and all of a sudden you're in danger of losing your job or being canceled out on every imaginable area of American culture, that this is a holistic effort. We're in a revolutionary time when people feel that this is their moment. And it far transcends Donald Trump. People are rallying to get rid of him from all different sides that are his opponent,

but it's more fundamental. It's a fundamental remaking of American democracy from a constitutional republic of limited government into a French revolutionary system of equality by result. And we're in a revolution right now. And corporate America, academia, the state bureaucracy, Hollywood, entertainment, the media, unfortunately, are on the side of the people in the street. They are, because they believe somehow that their world will survive the scouring back to year zero. That's what absolutely astonishes me every time. It does me, too. I don't think that Robespierre got guillotined, but he did.

And the revolution, when it gets that phase, late- stage revolutions, always devours its own. When these Hollywood people from Malibu keep talking about burn it down, why wouldn't you go to Malibu and burn it down? And when Antifa, you know, at some point keeps ordering inner city poor black men to go in on television and loot, loot, loot, why they feel they're Napoleonic strategists in the shadows with their little white privilege. And they cry. Why doesn't somebody say to them, you know what? Black Lives Matter is going to stay back with the hoodies and we're going to get social media and we're going to plot the target and all you little white kids that live in their basement, you're going to go on TV and you're going to break in and get the Adidas and the Rolexes and the smartphone. But for those that think that history is boring and is

irrelevant, the events that Victor was talking about when it comes to the French monarchy, there was a statue of one of the Bourbons that was damaged in the protest. Somebody ripped his hand off. And a relative of the king had a Twitter account, you know, Louis Bourbon, and asked for the hand of his ancestor back. So in a second, we collapsed to 250, 300 years of history right back there, and the same struggle continues. Victor, thanks for joining us today. Thank you.

We've been doing it all day, but we've got to get some ads in here, and we've got to find out what Rob's watching on TV. So, you know, things to do. Well, thanks a lot for having me. Victor, thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Victor us today. We could go all day, but we've got to get some ads in here, and we've got to find out what Rob's watching on TV, so, you know, things to do. Thank you. Well, thanks a lot for having me. Victor, thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Victor. Okay, thanks.

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sounder that goes into the spot. Considering the state of the country, that was really perfect. I think we're all generous. Our hearts are wide this week when we realize that our old petty grievances were just that, petty and righteous, legitimate grievances that we will get back to being petty about when things get better.

The post of the week is Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Knitting Wars. It's here before me, but I don't see who wrote it, and I think it was she. I think she wrote it. Wrote, Greetings, fellow Ricocchetti knitters. You know who you are. I just got fired from Knit Camp. You may be wondering, what is Knit Camp? She explains, it's a knitting community I joined about a week ago at the enthusiastic suggestion of my sister,

former lefty, now not so much, who really enjoyed it because the woman who ran it hadn't gone woke and or wasn't bullying her customers about such matters. Remember, this is a knitting site. When I checked her website myself, I found she did have a all are welcome here because diversity statement, but it was quite lovely and not at all out of bounds. She goes on then to describe how she was essentially, eventually banished from a community of knitters

because she hadn't taken the knee and had the audacity to issue a contrary sentiment. Now, you're thinking, wait a minute, didn't we hear about this a year ago? No, that was Ravelry. That was another knitting crafts community that went far woke and decided to expel the people who weren't going to say the right thing about the proper platitudes. It's a great little piece, and it's one of the many you'll find in the member section at Ricochet, which you can't read unless you join. That's the thing.

In order to post and enter the conversation, you've got to join Ricochet, and it's cheap, and you will find the best community of center-right people, and we talk about everything, music to politics to sports to history to movies. It's all there in the member feed, and the front page feed is pretty darn popping as well. It reminded me of something, Rob, that I wanted to ask you this. The Washington Post television writer has said that it's time to stop all cop television shows and movies. Yeah, now. Now.

Yeah. Okay. And, you know, I thought if I respond to this, and I am. Wait, wait, that was a real? I thought that was, I glanced at it, and I thought in my way. Wait, wait, that was a real. I thought that was a Babel and Bee thing. That was real? Absolutely real.

Absolutely real. What was the argument? What were they saying? It glorifies it. All cop shows essentially are in defense of law and order. You know, one huge franchise is called Law and Order. And that seems to privilege people involved in law enforcement and order rather than, you know. I mean, I just ran out of energy even trying to explain it to you. It's a parody.

Go ahead. It also gives people the false idea that cops are competent because in every one where there's a murder, the murder is solved when the real clearance rate is only about 40%. So what she wants us to do is to stop, stop these shows and then retrain the viewer, as she put it, which I love because it has the image of Malcolm McDowell, somebody putting drops in his eyes while he watches the show in Clockwork Orange. But I assume that she means that rollout, more accurate, more interesting, well, not interesting, more realistic shows where 40% of the murders aren't solved. And at the end of the hour,

everyone just sort of walks away and says, well, no one's talking to us about this one. I mean, that's what she wants. It's dull. It's dull and it's banal and it's a petty mind. Now, here's the thing that fascinated me about that. You could write an interesting piece about how the American cop show has indeed put forth this image from, you know, from Joe Friday onward. You can even go backward before that to the 1930s radio shows about police. That's an interesting piece to have.

But the consciousness of the new writers, the young writers in these newspapers now demands that they demand that they get all bossy and say, stop that now, as opposed to here's a cultural phenomenon we can have a discussion about. Unless you're demanding that it be stopped now with your fists balled and on your hip, you're part of the problem. And if you argue with this person, therefore, you are supporting all of the bad things that she's out there opposing. So you're either on her side that it must be stopped now, or you're there. You're Boogaloo. You're Hawaiian shirt.

You're white nationalist. You're part of the whole problem that Robespierre has got to be done away with. So it's probably not the best time to ask you what you're watching on television. But I will. Rob, Peter, closing words on this remarkable

week. Well, wait. You want to know what I'm watching on TV or you want to know closing words? Because they're two very different things. I imagine that they are. Let's have them know what I'm watching on TV or you want to know closing words? Because they're two very different things. I imagine that they are. Let's have them. What I'm watching on TV, what I watched last night was an American film with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine called Irma LaDeuce, which is lots of fun. And I recommend it. In fact, I recommend watching that on TV, not the news.

There is no interesting news for you that's actionable. There's nothing you can do about it. My new attitude is to wait at least a week or two weeks for the story to have a beginning, a middle, and maybe even an end, rather than to constantly put myself up there to get upset about what I just saw on the Citizen app five minutes ago. So that's my theory. Yeah, you've got to have Tucker right in the vein. Oh, by the way, I would say this. I did watch that.

I watched that. Someone sent me a clip of Tucker Carlson's opening monologue Monday or Tuesday, whatever it was. And it's online, and we should post a link to it. It's really, really exceptionally good um it's uh tucker's i have all sorts of disagreements with him um politically i think um over the years more so recently than over the years but every now and then he does a thing that i find just sort of astonishingly great tv and also um really really thoughtfully done so i i agree and even though he's a great broadcaster, I've got to say.

A couple of his targets I think he was unfair to. But in general, the whole thing is like, wow, what if Howard Beale had been able to keep it together? He's sort of giving that oracular cast to his work that's made it quite interesting. And he's unsparing and clear. And I watch no Fox, but I tune into his monologue. That's it. Peter? Absolutely nothing to do with either the lockdown or the violence of the last week or two. I got on a history jag, and I read Andrew Roberts' biography of Napoleon, and then I went, because Napoleon

idolized Julius Caesar, then I went back to some history of the late Roman Republic. And it turns out this was really the wrong, maybe in some ways the right reading, but it wasn't the reassuring reading, because things do end, and the parallels are just too many. Victor, I won't repeat what Victor said. I couldn't begin to say it as well as Victor said it. Victor's the only person who will say, as Salas noted, comma, and continue. And then you asked what we're watching on TV, and I walk into the room where the television is and look at Fox News for a moment or two, and I feel my pulse go up, and all this stuff worries me. And then I stop

and think to myself what Rob just said, and actually I take great solace in Andy, for Andy McCarthy, who said, oh, we've seen this kind of thing before. And Rob says, wait a couple weeks. There's going to be an arc here. There's going to be a line. We'll get through it. And in any event, I'm thinking to myself, wait a minute, what can I do? Suppose the end is in some way upon us. Suppose we are in a revolutionary moment, just as Victor said. I still have my writing assignment. I still have my mortgage to pay. I still have my mortgage to pay. I still have the kids to take care of. So I'm taking it one day at a time. That's my answer. Actually, I'm staying away from the television a little bit more than I would have otherwise

and trying to take things one day at a time and put one foot in front of the other and do my work. That's it. Yeah. As must we all. I came home yesterday from the office because I go to the office because I have to. I'm there alone. There's two or three other people in the entire building, 56-story skyscraper. But I'm there just to feel normal, like the last man on earth. Again, I like that. Came home, and the funeral for George Floyd is on. My daughter is watching it, and somebody's speaking.

And I look, and it's Al Sharpton. And it angers up the blood sort of that this man has the credibility that he does. And so I had to sort of explain to daughter what he was doing back in the days before he got gaunt and respectable. So yeah, you don't want to watch the television and I don't hang on the television, but I do watch, look a little bit too much news on the device in the palm of my hand. And yes, it does anger up the blood. But on the other hand, if this is indeed a revolutionary moment, I mean, Rob almost sounds like he'll come out of his apartment in his silk dressing gown and his monocle will fall into his martini when he sees that the flag has been replaced by the hammer and sickle. No, no, I just don't think there's anything to be gained by watching news channels which are designed to exercise and to infuriate.

They're not designed to educate. And the stories of all these things will be told much, much later. How many times do we have to learn the lesson that the smart thing to do is to shut up and wait. I mean, just a simple matter of the story and the history and the trajectory of a chemical compound called hydroxychloroquine should remind all of us to shut up. We didn't know anything about it before. We know less about it now. A study comes out a week ago that says, by the way, it's killing people. And then, of course, a week later, we realized, no, that study is completely false. There is no benefit. Here's what I really think, James, and I know we have to go, this is my rant, is that we have, and I said this to Dave Carter on the Dave Carter podcast, and it came out

of my mouth, is that I think we should take off the masks that we're wearing, but we should put on muzzles. And I think that if we all just shut up for a year and kept our little opinions to ourselves, all of us, left and right, but especially left, as you know, we would wake up and walk out of our houses the next morning in our dressing gown or a monocle, and it'd be a beautiful, beautiful day. Ladies and gentlemen, there will be no 500th Ricochet Podcast. That's Rob's way of telling you we're going to end it right here.

Shave and haircut without the two bits. No, I think you're right. I mean, yes, you're right. But on the other hand, there's something so compelling about watching civilization fall apart before your very eyes. And not through the filter of the news, but through other various sources that you can cobble together than the rest. But you're right, you're right, you're right. We've been through this before. We should wait, we should wait, we should shut up. I get that. I really do. You can be so sanguine about it after some of the stuff that I saw New York experience,

but of course we know that 20 blocks later it was probably paradise. But this was nationwide. This was bad. And these were the very people who, as Victor and I were talking about, want to scour it down to year zero. And they're frightening folk, and they don't stop, and they don't go away. And I think a keen eye to be kept on them is the wise thing. So it says me. Anyway, there you have it, folks.

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us five stars, there's going to be no 500th show, as I said before. So yeah, I'm holding you all hostage. Or not. We'll see you next week. Guys, it's been a pleasure, and we'll see everybody in the comments at 4.0. Next week, boys. Next week, fellas. Thank you. We are the same dreams, the moment days of the week. We are the watchdogs of your mind.

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