The Ricochet Podcast - Out of the Shot

Episode Date: October 10, 2025

The government shutdown drags on, but the president's pulled off his biggest deal yet. Noah Rothman joins Charlie and Steve to discuss the monumental advancement toward regional stability and the unique talents for these wins by American and Israeli leaders — talents for which they are unlikely to receive due honors. Plus, Hayward and Cooke consider shutdown messaging strategy, mock the MacArthur Foundation for its dimwitted grant giving, and scratch their heads at the fact that the name "Katie Porter" and the word "frontrunner" appear so often in the same sentence. Sound from this week's open: Gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter breaks down in an interview with CBS News’s California-based correspondent Julie Watts.- Visit today's sponsor: Go to cozyearth.com/RICOCHET for up to 20% off!

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It's the Rickusay podcast with Steve Hayward and Charles C.W. Cook, today with special guest Noah Rothman of National Review on the Middle East Peace Agreement. So, let's have ourselves a podcast. Well, to those voters, okay, so you... I don't want to keep doing this. I'm going to call it. Thank you. You're not going to do the interview with them. Nope, not like this. I'm not. Not with seven follow-ups to every single question. you ask. Every other candidate has. I don't care. I don't care. And we're just going to circle around. I am an investigative reporter. I have never had to do this before, ever. Welcome everybody to the Rickusay podcast number 761. It's Steve Hayward sitting in the host chair

today for the vacationing James Lylex, joined as usual by Charles C.W. Cook, who I'm assuming is maybe in a good mood this week because Charlie, your Jaguars won a game in rather spectacular or fashion, I must say. And against the Chiefs. So a few stats for you. The Jaguars hadn't beaten the Chiefs since 2009. Wow.

And they did so on Monday Night Football in front of the sixth largest audience that Monday Night Football had garnered in 20 years. Wow. What a way to do it. Well, what a way. For listeners who didn't see it or didn't read about it,

I mean, did you just stay to the end, Charter? You didn't bail out. Of course, I stayed at the end. I was there. I've rarely been in that stadium when it was that loud and jubilant, even when it looked in the last minute and a half as if we were going to lose. The only comparison point that I can find is with the comeback against the charges in the playoffs three years ago, when the Jags were down 27 points and we eventually won 31 to 30.

that was a raucous evening. This was almost more so. And then with that bizarre, what are they calling it, slip six, trip six that Trevor Lawrence managed at the end, the full range of emotions was felt in the space of about seven seconds. Yeah, I mean, do you want to describe that for listeners who didn't see it or do you want me to? I mean, you were there. I was there.

I think the best way of describing it is that Lawrence fell over twice or rather was tripped by his own offensive line and looked like horses or deer look when they're first born. They come flying out and they have no idea how to stand up or walk. And then they suddenly know. And Lawrence got up after falling twice, realized that there was a lane. The offensive lineman Ezra Cleveland just flattened everyone in his way and he somehow made it into the end zone for the way.

It was just, you couldn't write it. It was astonishing. On the Monday Night Football broadcast with Eli Manning and Peyton Manning, the Manning cast, Eli Manning asked, I think earnestly at first, was that planned? You couldn't plan this. There's no way you could plan this. Right. Well, there is that, you can see the highlight clip of Eli Man.

No, sorry, Peyton Manning doing a quarterback bootleg because he's not the fastest guy. Football fans may know this clip, and he did this fake to handoff and did a bootleg around to the left and nobody saw him. And so even as slow as he is, he managed to pull it off, or if you're really an old timer, and this goes back to, I think, 1971, as when Joe Cap was the quarterback of the Minnesota Vikings and was a really slow guy, but managed to ramble in. He didn't fall down like Trevor Lawrence did, but he managed to rumble in from five yards out and knock the Rams out of the playoffs. And for old L.A. Rams fans like me, that was a low moment that sticks in our brain. Anyway, that was fun to watch. And I thought of you. I said,

I sure hope Charlie stuck it out to the end for this extraordinary finish. Well, all right, we've got a lot of serious things to talk about today and not enough time to get to all of them. But here we are. Government shutdown. I guess we're up to day 11. And it doesn't look like there's been much movement. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing.

I'll give you one thought I have is, I don't know, Republican incompetence here. What Democrats want are endless huge subsidies for, Obamacare. And it seems to me that this ought to be a moment for Republicans to say, although the Republican record is mixed, they had the chance to repeal Obamacare under Trump won and didn't do it. But now's the time to say this has completely failed. We should have polished it now and start over again and do some serious kind of health care reform. And there doesn't seem to be any thinking about that or any talking about that. And maybe this isn't the time to do it. But I'm very frustrated that Republicans look, if anything,

like they're weakening and may give in at some point. They certainly shouldn't be weakening, although I agree they look as if they are. I don't know if now is the time to do that when there's no agreement within the party on how. Where I am a bit disappointed with Republican messaging is that they have the upper hand here. The Democrats are trying to have it both ways. We discussed this last time. They're simultaneously saying the Republicans shut down the government and that they are fighting for the middle class. But those two things can't both be true.

You can't be fighting for the middle class if you had nothing to do with the shutdown. Republicans should just be saying, over and over again, in every interview, with perfect message discipline, we continued the existing government funding, we can have these arguments once the government reopens. Because it's true. They put forward a clean, continuing resolution. Even the New York Times has admitted this. They ran a whole piece on it, saying this isn't even a trick. This is actually a clean continuing. resolution. It's the Democrats who are asking for changes. And I think to the average person

who is not invested in the ideological or political fight here, I'm not downplaying the importance of that fight, but to the average person who's watching from the sidelines, the moment you establish yourself as the ones who say, we are trying to maintain the status quo, the other shut down the government to force change from the minority, you look more reasonable. So I've been a bit disappointed with the Republicans' inability to do that. I think this is probably the product of neither side being within its comfort zone. The Democrats are the party of government. They don't want to shut down that government and they don't want to say they shut down that government. And they don't know how to say they shut down that government. Republicans are

usually the ones who are pushing for changes to have no real issue with shutting down the government. And they don't know how to play the old statesman and say we can deal with the argument when we've reopened the government. So neither one is playing to its strengths. Yeah. So I've been racking my brain, but I have that time to research it. But how many times have over the years, Republicans instigated a government shutdown. It's got to be at least eight or ten. Yeah. And I don't think they ever won a single one of them.

Now, supposedly in 1996, that was a very long shutdown under Gingrich. It was later reported by some people doing Clinton biographies that Clinton was about to give in, and Republicans blinked first. And so he didn't have to. But it seems to me the track record is Republicans lose these things. And in general, I think I generalize it further and say the president usually wins. The president's party usually wins. And I've got to think privately, Schumer didn't really want to do this.

He didn't do it in March. And, oh, and it is significant. I think you go back to the famous Clinton shutdown in 95, 96, that gave birth to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, as we know. Bob Dole was the Senate Republican leader and was against the shutdown. down. But he got steamrolled by Newt Gingrich and the House Republicans. And then again, in 2013, when Ted Cruz wanted to shut down the government to try and roll back Obamacare, Mitch McConnell was not only against it, but was wishing afterwards. Is there some way I could get Cruz on the Supreme Court to get him out of the Senate, right? There was no love loss there. So I've got to think

Schumer, who's a very smart poll, must have been against this, but had no choice but to go along with it, which is another reason Republicans should hold firm, because at some point, I would Schumer would say, we need to cut our losses. Well, I think Schumer is in a difficult position because not only does he have to reflect the anger and frustration of the base, and that's what this is really about. Yeah. He has to protect his flank. I think he believes that he's going to be primary, perhaps by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

And so there's a self-interest at play here as well, even if he understands that the isn't a great move, he will now be able to say, look, I led the party in shutting down the government to fight Trump's, insert whatever the cause is here, or to fight for healthcare reform. I don't think that's going to help him. I think that if he's going to be primaried from the left in New York, he's going to be primaried from the left in New York. I don't think there is anyone who is considering doing that who's going to say, well, we got what we wanted. He shut down the government. But I think he thinks that that will help him. So this has been part of his calculation. Well, speaking of shutdowns, let me use that to shift gears. I think that my

culinary vocabulary has just changed. And so the phrase juicy Porterhouse steak will never have the same meaning from here forward when contemplating the magnificent spectacle of Katie Porter out here in my home state of California. So I assume most of the same. Most of our listeners have heard about this. Katie Porter, who's well known as an awful human being out here in California, and I think also in Washington, D.C., has now made it clear to the nation as a whole, what an awful human being she is, the way she snapped at a reporter and threatened to walk off the stage, and other things have tumbled out.

Anyway, first of all, if you want to comment on Katie Porter further, please do. But I do want to spend a couple minutes to say, why is it so much? many liberals turn out to be such awful people. I mean, Campbell Harris has a bad reputation. Amy Klobuchar, you know, legendary stories about the way she treats staff. And I can itemize several others.

And that's before you even get to Jay Jones in Virginia, which we should talk about too. But I don't know, Charlie, are you as fascinated with the Katie Porter meltdown as I am? I am. I want to know why and how she has a political career I can't find a single thing about her

that is redeeming she's not charming she's not eloquent she doesn't have a nice voice she's not much to look at nor does she try she seems to be horrible to her staff she's not

bipartisan or well-respected within the legislature? Why does she exist? I find it astonishing that she might be the governor of California. Now obviously, there are many people who have been governor of California or who are currently governor of California

who I don't like a great deal. But I can see why they got there. Gavin Newsom is oliginous, but he's a good-looking man. He presents well, and he's quite good at protection. tending to be a bipartisan on his podcast. The benefits of Jerry Brown were clear.

Again, not my kind of politician, but he was an intelligent man. He'd been in politics a long time. He had experience. And then you have Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had celebrity. And you go all the way back to Reagan, who had pretty much the whole package. But why is she a contender?

She's the least likable politician in the United States. She makes all of the other unlikable politicians look talented. She makes Elizabeth Warren and Mazzi Hirono look oddly and warm. Right. I just don't get this person. The most interesting thing in that clip, which if our listeners haven't seen it, they should rectify that. Just go and find this three minutes of Katie Porter melting down on YouTube. The most interesting thing about that, I thought, was that it illustrated the downside to media bias.

We talk a lot about media bias, and we're quite rightly upset about it, and it does distort our politics. But Katie Porter clearly has never been in a position in which the media were asking, follow-up questions and you don't have to take my word for it. She says us much. She complains that there are follow-up questions every time she makes a statement. And she can't say that she wasn't aware of the situation she was in because before she starts getting all head up about there being a camera, before she starts getting head up about the supposedly unhappy experience that she's having, she turns around to the camera and mugs at it and All but points at the interviewer and says, can you get a load of this woman?

And then all of a sudden, she's saying, oh, well, I don't want to have an unhappy experience. I don't want this to be contentious. I don't want that camera on. Come on. She thought that the moment was for her to do PR. And when she realized that it wasn't, she wanted no part of it. And you could only be in that position if you've been coddled by the press for your entire career. Because no Republican would dream of going into that interview under that false impression.

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I have a philosophical theory about all this that maybe I push too far, but it's, you know, that's my backgrounds in political philosophy. And it's that, you know, the presumption of progressivism is that they're on the side of history. That's the phrase they can't stop using, right? And so the media is supposed to be on their side and usually are, as you point out. And so they're not used to being challenged. And I think this explains not only the presumptuousness of someone like Porter and a lot of liberal politicians. But it also explains, for example, the ferocious reaction to Charlie Kirk. I mean, this guy's going to show up on campus and want to argue with you, and people went out of their mind, including one person who killed him for it, right? And then you saw on social media, I don't know if it's possible to count these things up, but an astonishingly high number of people on the left celebrating his killing. Now, what does that tell you? I mean, to my mind, it says that there's something, maybe there's some psychological

aspects of that that we can talk about. But, you know, people often make the point that, boy, there haven't been any Charlie Kirk riots, right? There does seem to be that asymmetry also comes along. And then here's this Jay Jones guy openly saying, gosh, you know, we ought to have some more police killed. I want my opponent killed and their children to suffer. And then, you know, hardly any Democrat can be bothered to say this is not acceptable. Yeah, I think once you believe that you are on the side of history, that is to say that you are moving with the tide, then you have given yourself permission to do all manner of undemocratic or unpluralist things, irrespective of how you think the mechanism works. What I mean there is, if you are inevitable, then what happens was always going to happen. if you are supposed to make these sweeping changes but are being prevented then you're justified in doing anything

to make sure that the prophecy comes to fruition so you can't lose and that does explain why progressives are obsessed with these supposedly shadowy nefarious forces that are preventing them from winning because that's the only way you can reconcile reality with your mythos, the mythos being that you are the chosen one. If the chosen one doesn't make it to the top of the mountain, someone has to have stopped him. And I think she did exhibit some of that. But she's also just for a progressive, a bad candidate. I mean, there are progressives who are good candidates. There are progressives who are good communicators and who understand what they need to say. She got tripped up on the most basic question anyone has ever asked in all

of politics, which is in effect, will you be a good governor for the people who didn't vote for you? She took the question literally. She's asked, well, can you win without Trump voters? Now, she can in California, but you don't say, uh, yeah, obviously, why would I need them? Yeah. It's just something almost charmingly literal about it. Yeah. Well, I have another theory to explain her, which is I bet she doesn't sleep very well. And she doesn't sleep very well. And she doesn't sleep very well because I'll bet she doesn't use cozy earth sheets. So much of what happens in the world, you know, isn't up to us. So fall us here, winter is not far behind, and it's going to get cold whether we like it or not. But at home, we make decisions about all kinds of matters,

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Let's go home with Cozy Earth, and we thank Cozy Earth for sponsoring the Ricochet podcast. And Noah Rothman joins us now from National Review, where he is senior editor and one of my go-to persons on all things Middle East and all things culture and so forth. How are you, Noah? Good to see you again. Doing very good. Thank you for having me. Good to see you too. Yeah. So, well, we want to primarily get your take here on the peace deal in the Middle East. I've got three opening questions, and then I want to get a Rothman's realism scale score from you. It's a special scale I've made up just for you. So the first one is I keep reading news accounts that say,

that part of the key of the deal was Trump leaning very hard on Netanyahu who may have been reluctant about certain aspects of this. So is that true? So we'll start there. I have two more after this. But what do you hear? What was the key of the deal? Is that really an accurate reporting or what are you here? I don't think it's inaccurate reporting. I think the emphasis is wrong. I think it's being played up by those in the press and on the left end of the spectrum generally who want to create the impression that the obstacle to peace was Netanyahu. I think if you objectively look at how the administration has handled bilateral relations with Jerusalem, it has been airtight.

There has been very little, save a couple of anecdotes of the president, distancing himself from Benjamin Netanyahu and some theater to that effect, this phone call between Netanyahu and the Qatari government in the Oval Office being one of the primary examples of it. But no, I don't think there is very much evidence to suggest that the obstacle to peace here was Netanyahu or that the end of this war reflects anything other than a general alignment in strategic and tactical approaches to this conflict between Washington and Jerusalem. Yeah. Now, the other thing that is being said by a lot of people is that the Israeli strike on Qatar, what, a month ago now, was a sobering moment to really change the game. Is that, do you think that's true?

I don't think it's wrong. I just don't have the information to be able to gauge it. I'm just not in the loop in ways that I would have to be. And those who are not talking. So I would, I think it's pretty safe to say that you can't rule out the prospect. That's such an expansion of the rules of engagement, unforeseen in ways that I think probably impose some sobriety on the region and actors in the capitals in those regions.

But I don't, I don't know the degree to it. which it contributed to this peace deal, but there is reporting that I trust that indicates that it was, yes, a sobering moment and one that shaped the thinking of Hamas's interlocutors in the region, primarily Doha, but also Ankara and the Turkish government. Right. Okay. Now, we're still working out details, I gather. And so as I've often said that you're my favorite cranky person, which I mean always is a compliment. I like your... I take it as a compliment. Yeah, well, good, because I mean it that way.

And I always enjoy when you're being very sober and I think appropriately negative, even when I sometimes disagree or think maybe you turn out to be wrong. But so that that is a prep. Well, that's a preface to, on the Rothman realism scale with 10, 1 to 10, 10 being best, meaning good. Where do you put the prospects for this deal right now? Well, let me be very. The Rothman realism scale.

I'm going to be super cranky, Steve. And I'm going to say the notion that we're equating realism with good here is something I fundamentally reject. Oh, good. That's good. So I reject the very premise of the question. Insofar as we define realism as a school of foreign policy thought that believes nations behave, nations react to material conditions, to hard power conditions, to observable, tangible conditions where ideology plays no role, which is not something I believe very many actually do subscribe to. And those who do subscribe to it are wrong to do so. So I would, I would differ with the realism thing. Nevertheless, if we're talking about strategic victories, is this good for Israel? Is this good for the United States? I want to put it on like an eight and a half right now, even if we don't progress much. We're not even at stage one at this point.

And let's just ignore Donald Trump's 21 point plan because if you really parse it, it gets, it gets pretty weird. And the first two steps are essentially the last two steps. The first two steps are Gaza will be terror free and redeveloped. That's the end of the process, not the beginning of the process. So we're really at stage three, four, and by that, and we're not even at that stage, because then Israel has to give back the hostages, what have you. Nevertheless, if this falls apart tomorrow, we still have a document that the regional stakeholders have signed their names to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Indonesia.

A lot of Muslim-dominated governments have said three things. one, Hamas cannot be the government of the Gaza Strip. It cannot be the military and political power on the strip. Two, the Palestinian Authority will have to commit to some unspecified reforms before it can assume leadership in the Gaza Strip. And three, that the IDF has a legitimate presence inside Gaza that will be there in perpetuity, acknowledging the permanent strategic interests of Israel in the Gaza Strip. All of these are foundational assumptions that will guide the evolution of this region moving forward that cannot be taken back. Yeah. I mean, I'm in a lot of worries about this. I'm not really going to be optimistic until I actually see the 20 hostages out and safe.

Because, I mean, again, you hear stories about, you know, Hamas. So we're not sure where they are because they've been farmed out to some of these, you know, minor league Hamas teams and stuff. And I don't know. I wouldn't surprise me at all if some of them are missing or worse. But I believe they know where the 20 living hostages are. I would be surprised if they have a bead on where the remains of some of the dead hostages are. But there's a joint information sharing mechanism to try to figure that out. So, you know, stay. Yeah, the Indonesia angle is interesting. I don't think, has Indonesia ever been in the mix before in any of these Middle East processes? I don't know.

That's a good question. And I don't have the answer to it. It's one of the world's largest Muslim populations. And the prime minister during the General Assembly Week in the United Nations in New York City did not. share Western Europe and Canada's hostility towards Jerusalem. Really, when we see, you know, there's the fiction in Western Europe and in Canada in particular that, you know, there's a two-state solution that's on the table and Israel's conducting a genocide.

These views are just not reflected in the Muslim world where you would expect they would have a receptive audience. I mean, at the street level, sure. But in these, in governments, in Riyadh and Cairo and Amman, the two-state solution is a dead letter. So, you know, they're just operating on two tracks. Yeah. Charlie, you want to come in here? I, as you know, I am of the view that this deal is the product of Trump being a weirdo and outside of our normal political structures and often norms and of his having Jared Kushner at his disposal,

who for some reason seems to have a talent for this. How true is that? Would this have happened under Barack Obama or George W. Bush? Or did this require Trump's endless willingness to think outside the box? I think there's something to that. Now, let's go back to the Abraham Accords. It's not as though those sprang from Donald Trump's forehead, Exnelio, or Jared Kushner's, for that matter. There was an intellectual latticework, a framework that had been established

at the think tank level by conservative thinkers of this region. But it was not one that the foreign policy establishment was prepared to accept. I mean, the pre-supposition that the blob, as it were, the foreign policy establishment believed was that you had to solve the Palestinian conflict first. And only then could you unlock peace agreements in the Middle East. And the Abraham Accords formula reversed that, said, you do that last. And it took significant advantage of some of the Obama events. administrations, machinations in the region where they elevated, for example, Iranian proxies

in Iraq, in particular, to supplement the Iraqi security forces when they bugged out in 2010. And that spooked all the region's Sunni powers. So the Abraham Accord's formula was twofold. It was one. Let's put the Palestinian issue on the back burner. We'll do with that later. First things first, and that's the threat by Iran. And that focused the minds of the region's Sunni powers.

and it began to unlock security agreements, first sort of covert, Sotovoche, and then overt. And that was the formula that worked. And it was a sort of thing that you could only do if you had a proper contempt for the foreign policy establishment. I was having this conversation with our colleagues

today on our editorial, Charlie, that there's this, I forget what it's called, the phenomenon where you read something in the newspaper that you know about and it's all wrong. And then you say, and then you keep going and you read, well, that must be true, even though you just identified the thing that was wrong. So when it comes to the State Department, for example, whenever there's a

purge of State Department personnel, I'm one of those guys like, yeah, let's go. Because for all of my adult life, the State Department functionaries have been obstructing Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice. Whenever there's a Republican in charge of the place, they find that everything they want to do just becomes that much harder and really frustratingly difficult. And there's a lot of obstacles in the way that shouldn't be there. But then Trump goes around and conducts a purge of the Justice department and I say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Because maybe I don't know enough, perhaps, perhaps. But when it comes to the conduct of American foreign policy, it has been held hostage by

individuals who are beholden to a lot of shibbolists that are resonant in the academy and in elite think tanks and, you know, the, the feat world of high-level diplomacy, and which does need a little bit of disruption. And the objective success that the Trump administration has had in a pro-eastern. these things in a novel way owes is owed a lot to that but it's also that this president has a unique capacity to understand middle eastern politics at a very high level again not the Arab street but at the at the at the level of governments in Riyadh and Cairo and what have you because he's transactional because he's not ideological because he wants to get things done and

doesn't care how things are how do you get to XYZ the process is not the point he's not to the process. He's looking for outcomes. And that is something that speaks very much to how the Arab world politics at a high level in the Arab world is conducted, to say nothing of the fact that they are very materially interested in the trappings of material wealth and excess. And that also speaks to something that the president holds quite dear. So he's uniquely positioned to navigate the Middle East. And it shows in the Middle East in ways that it does not in a lot of the rest of the world, in Europe, in East Asia, in Latin America. You can't point to the kind of successes that he's enjoyed in the Middle East.

Will he be rewarded for them, or will people pretend that it was going to happen anyway? Oh, they'll pretend that it was going to happen. And they are, they roughly are. You've already seen erroneously the notion that this deal, this particular deal that we're talking about now was on the table a year ago. Joe Biden offered it. Something similar was on the table under Whitkoff. Anybody could have pulled the trigger on this when they wanted to. All it took was, you know, giving Netanyahu sufficient elbowing in the ribs for him to come to the table in acquiesce.

And it just doesn't make any sense. It discounts the fact that they were just rending garments about two weeks ago over the president's nonchalance with the IDF offensive into Gaza City to really roll up the underground city there, which I think contributed a lot to the pressure that Hamas was under. Hamas didn't give up these hostages. The last of it hasn't yet, but will give up the last of these hostages. It's only negotiating position because it wanted to, because it was just feeling good about itself. It ran out of material to conduct this war. It's just out of options. And the nations that serve as conduits to the rest of the world, nations like Qatar and Turkey,

came in and said the jig is up. I don't think that would have happened, absent the kind of military pressure that the IDF was putting on Hamas and Gaza City. Yeah, so first of all, a couple things you said. One is that, well, I'll put it this way. I think that the phrase PLO reform is one of the great oxymorons of the world. I mean, I can't really see any reason to suppose that the Palestinian authority is ever going to reform itself in any serious way. Do you? No, I don't. It would be wrong with me to say that I have my finger on the pulse of Palestinian politics. Mala or anywhere else. But yes, I find it hard to believe the Fatah would reform itself seriously with a boss at the head of it. The guy is, you know, a decrepit in his mid-80s at this point figure, which is one of the reasons why Israel will not release Marwan Barguti, despite Hamas's desire to see him released as well as all the Hamasniks in the information space that we're all intimately acquainted with by now, in part because he was one of the archivocity. of the second Intifada has a lot of blood on his hands, but the other part being he's the likely

successor to Mahmoud Abbas and would focus the energies of those who want to see terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians continue, mostly in the Western world, but also inside the Middle East. And that's a cultural problem inside the strip and inside the West Bank. There is a culture of death in these places that celebrates the murder of civilians. It has not changed. And until it changes, there will not be a permanent peace. But until then, the Israeli military will continue to play probably a mow the lawn strategy, not desirous of some sort of big military campaign like they just went through. This is the longest war in Israel's history. They're not going to want to go back to it again.

But there could be the prospect that this thing falls apart. If it falls apart in a spectacular way, they will have to. But I was having this argument with Hugh Hewitt yesterday that I don't I don't think if there's a single Katushka rocket that we're going to see the resumption of a ground offensive into Gaza. I just don't think that's going to happen. There will be calibrated approaches to provocations from Gaza and from the West Bank, and they will continue. But I think we're going to see calibrated responses to them. You said one other thing a moment ago that sparks this observation. I'll rephrase it this way.

You said something about, well, you know, the Arab Street doesn't seem as worked up about this as a lot of people in western capitals. My reformulation of that is that the American and European left is more anti-Semitic and more anti-Israel than many people in the Arab countries, with the, you know, Hamas accepted, obviously. But I don't know if that's true or not, but the thing that worries me is this poll reported a couple of days ago by Harry Anton on CNN, and I didn't look at it closely, and I don't know who did it, but it found rising number of people thinking that, A, Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza, and B, that number included a cross-tab included a high proportion of American Jews who are very critical, like 40 percent saying, you know, agreeing with

the pollster question that this is a genocide. Who knows how intensely that has really felt? The point is that obviously there's been an intense propaganda campaign whose roots go back decades, as we know, and it does look to me like it is unfortunately succeeding. It is. At a certain point, you do have to think that irrationality will intrude. First, I should say that I don't believe that there's, that Western Europe is more anti-Semitic than the average Arab street. The second that there's a provocation that these Arab capitals want to exploit, they do. And the Arab street is alive with anti-Israeli violence. It happens pretty regularly. It's merely that the capitals, the political establishments, particularly in the Sunni Arab world have a different relationship with Israel now. It's it's much more instrumental and utilitarian. And yeah, occasionally it's good for them to whip up some anti-Israel frenzy in the streets, but not always.

And so you see less of it just because they're not engaged in those kind of provocations anymore. I'm sorry, I lost myself. What was the second part of your question? Remind me. Oh, well, this propaganda campaign has been working. Oh, the propaganda campaign. Yeah.

So rationality you would think would intrude at some point because what we've seen over the course of this two-year war is spectacular tactical acumen from the IDF, just really impressive operations from the beeper, pager operation, the communications operation, the decadation strike on Hezbollah, the decapitation strike on the Houthis, the sort of stuff that you can only glean from like really good information and really sound military tactics. And yet they are terrible at conducting a genocide. They just just can't do it. And I should somehow manage to not, to not even disrupt really the population of the strip. I mean, there's nowhere for them to go. So why is the population relatively stable? Why are all these celebrations in the streets? You can go check out

the videos yourself of all these Palestinians with very full bellies and gold watches and clean clothes. What happened to this spectacular misery that was being meted out? We're talking about an open-air Warsaw ghetto. And yet, and yet, where is it all? You would think that a couple of years from now once emotions have cooled, passions have cooled, and the political imperative to mouth these shibboleths is no longer there, that some of the fury that we're seeing here will decline. Yeah, I mean, you know, I always draw historical parallels. And you mentioned the people saying, well, we could have had this deal months ago or a year ago. Reminds me what the left said for years about how Nixon could have had Vietnam solved in February of 1969. And then the

famous Christmas bombing in 1972, we were conducting a genocide. And of course, the statistics on that that came out later is it's one of the lowest civilian casualty rates of any bombing campaign in human history right so right it was ineffective that was the that was the problem with these saturation bombing right right so anyway you know this is we know this is unsurious so last question from me speculation that there's now going to be if the steel goes through in some reasonable form there's going to need to be or should be an election in Israel do you think there's going to be one, should Netanyahu call for one? What do you think? How do you think that might play out? Well, the only thing I'm confident to have even less grasp on that Palestinian politics is

Israeli politics. That is an inscrutable. Even Israelis struggle to understand where the factions are and who's moving where and who's aligned with whom. It is tough to foresee. There will obviously be elections in Israel. Israel is a democratic country. I don't know what Benjamin Netanyahu's future is or what he foresees for himself. You know, some have said that he perceived himself to be on a mission to neutralize the Iranian nuclear threat. I don't think it's neutralized, but it's certainly pushed back. So he could declare victory in retreat, but he's also got the judiciary hanging over his

head in scandals involving prosecutorial abuses of his power and embezzling funds and all of these things, there's dispute over the legitimacy of these charges, but they continue to hang over him. So he may feel like he have to hang on in a very much in a sort of Trumpian way in order to indemnify himself, if not intimidate his prosecutors and secure his own legacy, then just remain immune from prosecution. So who knows there? But the political dynamic in Israel will not change in one regard is that the Israeli left is an attenuated force to a degree that it is almost ignorable. There are various flavors of right. You could say the blue-white coalition is somewhat left, which was this coalition of somewhat less

Likudian parties. But labor, the traditional left in Israel, has been discredited and will remain discredited for the better part of a generation. So whatever replaces Netanyahu, it won't be the kind of progressive left-wing ideal that was dominant when Israel was just an archipelago of Kibbutzim being recognized by the Soviet Union. Like, that's what they remember of Israel. That's what they liked about it. This is the Bernie Sanders version. of Israel, and that Israel is gone, and the left in America and the Western Europe will never forgive them. No, is Donald Trump going to win the Nobel Peace Prize?

So we argued about this a little bit on the editors, and I would not rule it out. I don't think that's an impossible idea. I also think that you could have a package of recipients, including Donald Trump, his team, Steve Whitkoff, Jared Kushner, they certainly deserve it. There could be other parties in there to soften the blow for Western Europeans. It could be, you know, Saudis or Jordanians or God knows, even Palestinians. Certainly, I believe the Netanyahu government deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. They will never receive one.

But Ron Dermar and Benjamin Netanyahu and his team deserve one in part for negotiating, contributing to the negotiations of the Abraham Accords, which represent a sea change in the dynamic in the region and a positive one, if your goal is actually peace. But second, because through force of arms, he has managed to denude the threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon to say nothing of the ring of fire

around Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Shiite militias in Syria and Iraq, to a lesser extent, the Houthis. All of these were a threat to the civilized world, and through Israeli action, we are less threatened today. And that's if the peace prize is worth anything, then it should be worth that.

I think that the Nobel Peace Prize, Committee should probably conclude the Peace Prize by just awarding it to itself. So the Nobel Peace Prize has been such a boon to peace in the world that we can fold up shop and say, our mission is complete. You know, finally compensate for the legacy of dynamite and get that out for details. Right, right. Yeah. I mean, I remember Pat Moynihan used to say of the Soviet Union's Lenin Prize that anyone

who wins the Lenin Prize deserves it. And, you know, I've always thought the Nobel Prize has been awarded to so many stupid and frivolous and evil people that I'm not sure you want to win it. It's almost a badge of dishonor, right? You need a deal to get to get the Nobel Peace Prize, but they're not above giving it to people who engage in force of arms or who have a co-orchestrated force of arms. I said Monarchembegan, Enwar Sadat, Henry Kissinger. Like, it's not outside the realm of conceivability. Yeah, I know. I exaggerate a little bit, but only a little bit.

Now, of course, this year's prize was already awarded yesterday to a Venezuelan opposition leader. It's a woman whose name I forget. I thought that's an interesting pick, possibly worthy. I don't know. I don't follow it closely, but it seems like kind of a bank shot, given that Trump is pressuring Venezuela. But in any case, Noah, we're going to have to leave that for another day. You have to move on. We will look forward to seeing you again soon, and I'll just say, carry on.

Thank you, sir. Good to see you guys. Well, Charlie, Noah makes a good case. that Trump and an ensemble of people probably do deserve the Nobel Prize as it was a Nobel Peace Prize as it was originally intended. But this year's has already been given out, as I mentioned.

But another set of prizes came out this week. It's one that I always follow for amusement value. It was the so-called MacArthur Genius Awards. And I don't know if you follow this or not. This year, it's $800,000, no strings attached to the people they select through an anonymous process about which I want to come back to in a moment. And it's a mix of usually scientists and researchers

who do what looks to be respectable, serious work. But then when you get off of the social sciences and humanities and art, it's always left-wing wackos. I mean, Abram Kennedy got one, right? My favorite one this year is, let's see if I can find this description of the guy. Yes, a artist in Maine, who is a master of Wabanaki basket weaving.

which is an obscure technique of basket weaving from an obscure Native American tribe in Maine. You know, when I was in college a million years ago, we used to joke about an easy class would be underwater basket weaving. And now it gets you a MacArthur Genius Award. This is a great example of the progressive dilemma in the contemporary era, which is perhaps one reason why they've started. to lose. And that is that they took over all the institutions and they relied upon this latent sense of those institutions worth. And then they ruined them. And it worked for a while. You could

use the imprimatur of an institution even when you were behaving in a crazy manner and get away with it. But that's stopped. I think probably COVID is what did it more than anything. But That's stopped a few years ago. And now people look at this sort of thing and they say, well, yes, I understand that it's called a genius grant. Or I understand that this has come out of an institution or a university or a government department that was in the 1950s well regarded. But you're being crazy. So we no longer have to maintain the respect that we once had for that institution.

And the reason it's a dilemma is because. because the progressive movement needs those institutions to survive. That's how progressives wield a lot of their power, but they are not prepared to be sane, even to the minimum degree that would be necessary to keep those institutions popular with the general public. So they've essentially killed their own distribution mechanism. Right. Yeah, I mean, I think there's only one conservative

has ever gotten to McCarthy Ward, and that was Robert Woodson for his... And it will go, right? We will see that institution go if this continues for too long. Because eventually someone is going to say, as they did with NPR, and as the FBI just did with a Southern poverty law center, which they're no longer interested in consulting. Okay, done.

Another good example would be the American Bar Association, which for years used its position to advance the interests of left-wing judges and pretend that qualified and progressive were the same word, which they're not. And eventually, the Trump administration said, we just don't care anymore what you think. We're not privileging you within the nomination process. Go away. Now, the MacArthur system is a little bit different than that,

but it won't survive ad nauseum if it's really just a mechanism for funneling $800,000 to people who have wacky politics. Right. Well, I do have a fun story for listeners and for you. it's apparently they recruit people to nominate possible prize winners. And about 20 years ago now, lo and behold, had to have been some dreadful mistake at MacArthur office, I was sent a letter asking me to nominate candidates for their prize. And I thought, well, this is amusing.

So I sent a letter back nominating Victor Davis Hansen for his work on the classics, Christina Hoff Summers for challenging the orthodoxy radical feminism, and Clint Bolick for his work on school choice. is nowadays on the Arizona State Supreme Court. And I never heard another word from the McCarthy Foundation. Not even a thank you for your nominations, right? And but it's supposed to be confidential. And I'm not supposed to talk about this, but A, it's 20 years ago and B, what are they going

to do to me? Not invite me again? Yes, exactly. I thought that was kind of a music and never heard a word. I'm sure somebody in the office got punished for getting my name on a list of possible nominators. But speaking of nominations, and I think we'll make this our last item. is President Trump in an entirely unsurprising move to sign a declaration this week,

or whatever, whatever the document is, to observe Columbus Day next week. You know, Columbus has been, you know, on the radar screen on the hit list of the left for decades now as the original fascist or something like that, right? So this is a nice poke in the eye of the, you know, normality, reasserting itself in America. And I am glad to call it Columbus Day once again. Yeah, and he said, we're back. Italians when he signed it. It's just the Trumpiest declaration. That's right. I am a conservative. I'm a small sea conservative and I don't like fads and the replacement of Columbus Day with

Indigenous People's Day or whatever is faddy. Now there were many problems with Columbus. He lived 500 plus years ago but what was impressive about him was that he got across the ocean on a boat that we wouldn't even look at now and I think that that matters

because there's been an attempt in recent years to cancel people who had unpleasant views or did unpleasant things that were ancillary to the reason that we look up to them in the first place. It's fine in my view to cancel the Confederacy

or Alexander Stevens for the Cornerstone speech. That's why he is known. His one contribution to American life was the proposition that African Americans are inferior and ought to be enslaved. Cancel that guy.

But Nelson in England, Nelson is not known for having been in favor of slavery, which he was, although he wasn't zealous about it. Nelson's known, for having been an extraordinary naval commander and saving the British from Napoleon.

So what do you do with someone like that? I think you celebrate them for what they were known for and kind of ignore the rest. And that's my view of Columbus as well. Yeah, I'm totally happy to say that Columbus did bad things. But we don't celebrate him for the bad things. We celebrated for getting across the ocean, which was an extraordinary feat.

Yeah, and I mean, I always like to bring up an aspect of this that seldom thought of, and that's a counterfactual. I asked the anthropologist Charles Mann this once. Charles wrote a great book 25 years ago now called 1491. It was, you know, this hemisphere before Columbus and European settlement came. And, you know, he is a very good book about, you know, what the Inca and Aztec civilizations and North American Indian tribes were like, and especially in Central America, quite sophisticated cities, as we know.

And they did build some boats. They never became deep ocean-going seafaring people. but I asked him, what would have happened if, say, the Aztecs or the Incas or somebody had sailed to Europe? And they said, oh, the same thing would have happened as what did happen. They would have had no immunity to European diseases, you know, offshoots of the plague, and they would have died really fast if they tried to come and settle Europe. And it's just, that's not something, that was going to happen sometime in history. Right. It was 1492 or 1592. That was going to happen. It's a tragedy of human history, it would have happened if the flow of ships and exploration had been the other

direction. And that's become, you know, it's biological warfare, you know, which is ridiculous. We didn't even have germ theory. Right. Exactly. Right. I think I'm right in saying we didn't have a comprehensible, certainly not a widely understood germ theory until about 1880. Right. So the idea that this was some tool in the arsenal that was wielded by evil colonists, for years. It's really quite silly. Yeah. But that's sort of typical of liberal ignorance of history that goes to a lot of things, as we were saying before. But with that, it is time for us to draw to a close for this week. This podcast was brought to you by Cozy Earth. Please support us by coming part of the best

place for civil center right conversation. Please take a minute, as James likes to say, to leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever else you source your podcast material. your reviews help us attract new listeners and that keeps the show going so uh so long for now charlie see you next week we'll see you everybody in the comments at ricochet four point dot dot dot yes 12 point 12 point something or 14 point something the point is go there and comment and have fun don't look at the bottom right right thanks charlie see you next week