The Ricochet Podcast - Screed Adjacent

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

With Israel's stunning string of victories over its enemies and the approaching anniversary of October 7th, Eli Lake returns to the Ricochet Podcast. He gives his take on the reasons for the administration's dithering support and rallies for the West to give its ally a greenlight!Plus, Charlie, Peter and James discuss the Veep debate, the averted longshoremen's strike and an ineffective Federal Emergency Management Agency... We count three rants out of Charlie Cooke. - Sound clips from this week's podcast: Churchill's "We shall fight on the beaches" speech and Tim Walz's "Knucklehead" remark 

Jaguars are 0-4, so I obviously did something wrong and I apologize to the sports gods. You'll note how I've not mentioned it. Charlie, the gods will ensure that that team loses as long as you continue to mispronounce it. The gods, the football gods are American, my boy. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Charles C.W. Cook and Peter Robinson.

I'm James Lylex, and today we talk to Eli Lake about Israel and the effects of the Mideast on the election. So let's have ourselves a podcast. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender. Now look, my community knows who I am, and I'm a knucklehead at times, but it's always been about that. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 711.

That's right. We're not brought to you by the Southland Corporation, but we are happy to be here anyway, providing all the things you need for your daily internet podcast joy. I'm James Lilacs in Minneapolis. Beautiful fall day. And I'm speaking, again, with Peter Robinson in sunny Clement, California, and Charles C.W. Cook in Florida, where the weather could be humid or not so much, or sunny or beautiful or hurricane-stricken or whatever. In any case, you're here. Good gentlemen, welcome. Thank you, James. Thank you. So we had a debate. We indeed had a debate. And there was some stuff that had been leaked before that said that Waltz was actually kind of nervous about this. And people were saying, you know what, they're just trying to, they're trying to massage your expectations. So you're really impressed when

he just knocks it out of the park. And I spoke to a few people who were in Waltz's corner and came away from that. The big permanent wince creased on their face for any number of things the moment to me that summed it all up was you can't shout fire in a crowded theater being spoken by a man who presumably is smart enough to know better run the country what were your takeaways from that and uh do you think any lasting impact on the election? The way you put that question, and it is now mandatory for us to give Charlie a moment to explain why that 1919 constitutional decision is no longer of any. Well, it's of relevance. I said, go ahead, Charlie, take it. You guys have just wound me up.

You put me on the floor and wound me up. Because this annoys me, as you know. Immensely. This is a bat signal for me. Because there's everything that possibly could be wrong with an American politician talking about

free speech is encapsulated in that moment from Tim Walls. First off, it's falsely in a crowded theater. There's nothing wrong with shouting fire in crowded theaters if there's a fire. You're just not allowed to do it if you're lying, if you're trying to cause a stampede. Charlie, the phrase comes from, give us the historical anchor. I was going to say, more importantly, though, it's an an analogy and it's a horrible analogy that thankfully was overturned by brandenburg v ohio in 1969 the analogy is with an immigrant who didn't speak english protesting against world war one so it wasn't actually about theaters or fires or

falsehoods or panics the argument, if you are out on the street handing out leaflets in Yiddish telling people not to sign up for the draft because it violates their constitutional rights, because you oppose a war that is happening three and a half thousand miles away, a war that was fairly disastrous, you are the equivalent of somebody

who ran into a theater and shouted fire and caused a bunch of death. Which is insane! It is insane given the american tradition of free speech the entire purpose of the first amendment which above all else says the freedom of speech which is a term of art that meant something at the time of ratification above all else protects the rights of american citizens to debate whether or not what their government is doing is legitimate. What could be more core to that than a war, a foreign war? So that Tim Wall said this at all is ignorant, but that he was saying it in the interest of justifying one of the worst laws ever passed, the Espionage and Sedition Acts of the

20th century under Woodrow Wilson, and a Supreme Court decision that has thankfully been made moot and forgotten and is disliked broadly, is even worse. Awful man. Awful man who proved his awfulness in that moment. But hold on just a moment. The 1919 decision, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who even if the decision was wrong, was a pretty remarkable figure. Let's see, Bill Buckley used to say, Alistair Cooke, your countryman, Alistair Cooke, arrived in this country in the 30s, and one of the first interviews he conducted was with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. And Holmes shook his hand and said, my boy, you have just shaken the hand of a man who shook the hand of Lincoln. And Bill would then, Bill, of course, would then say, you've shaken the hand of a man who shook the hand of a man who shook the hand with Lincoln. All right. Oliver Holmes wrote, quote, the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely

shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic, close quote. In isolation, the sentence is sensible, Charlie? Well, yes, but the analogy that it draws is used to justify the imprisonment of anti-war protesters. And if you go back to that series, there are three cases around that period. And it should be said, I'm not a fan of Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Buckley savaged him in National Review's opening issue. But he did change his mind on this question, I think, because he saw it as untenable. Around that period, 1918, 19, 1920, the US Supreme Court upholds a whole host of grotesque imprisonments on free speech grounds, one of which involved the Wilson administration imprisoning Wilson's opponent, the socialist Eugene Debs. I mean, this is a really low moment.

This is the low moment. I will shut up in a moment. But let me just say this. I talk a lot about free speech around the country. And I often know that there is a great paradox, which is that free speech in the United States is now more legally protected than it has been at any point in the Republic's history. The protections that the Supreme Court has afforded the citizenry under the auspices of the First Amendment have never been this good, at the same time as we have probably less cultural respect for free speech than we've had in a very long time. And when I run through the history of it, because we've always had attacks on free speech, slavery powers were big into this in Congress and at the state level. Abolitionists were often

targeted. But the worst period, without a shadow of a doubt, is the progressive era. The progressive era is the nadir of. The Progressive Era is the nadir of free speech in the United States. And if there is one case that sums it up, it's this. Because it takes an entirely sensible precept, which is you can't go into a crowded place and lie and cause a panic and be held innocent. Fine. It takes that and it applies it to core speech and thank goodness the court in the 1960s said no we're not doing that anymore charlie you're beautiful when you're angry james there's nothing more to say at all he's said what needs to be said and it i mean walton said this before about the need to combat

misinformation, as do so many people on that side of the political equation. They would like to use the instruments of the state to influence or prohibit social media from saying certain things that fall outside the parameters of what they believe to be the truth. Even though we know now later with years of experience with COVID, for example, the things that people were being banned for saying, the hammer coming down on Dr. J, turns out to be, the other Dr. J, turns out to be correct, pretty much, and their efforts to stifle it only led to the erosion of the respect and trust we had for those institutions. So, yeah. No, let me speak. Let the marketplace decide. Let people figure out whether or not what I'm saying is BS or not. That seems to be a basic core American principle, and anybody

doesn't think that's the case, well, then they're full of spinach and to hell with them. Second thing, we have this week, we've dodged a bullet when it comes to the strike. There was going to be the guys who offload the containers from the big ships were going to strike. And normally, I don't think that would really penetrate most people's flow of information, except that we got these interviews with a guy, the head of the union, who was sort of bragging about his ability to cripple the country. And it seems to be one of those things that doesn't strike you as the most patriotic of sentiments as he clambers off his long yacht and tells us that we're all going to have no Christmas because the toys won't be coming. Luckily, it's not going to happen. They kicked the can down the road.

There's going to be more negotiations. But what was illustrative about this were two things. Biden, President Biden, and I'm using air quotes here for President Biden because we have no idea exactly whether he's involved in any of these things or whether he's just being shuffled around from one bingo session to the next, said he wouldn't invoke Taft-Hartley. He doesn't believe in it. And then Governor DeSantis actually stepped in and directed the Florida National Guard and the Florida State Guard to the ports to ensure that things went as they should. Which made a lot of people say, oh boy, I kind of wish that guy had been the candidate, but that's not how it was going to work out. What do you guys think of how this plays out?

The unions, I don't think, come off very sympathetic in this, particularly when it comes to automation. Now, you know, we're all looking around our shoulders saying AI is going to come and eat our jobs. But if the port people had had their way, there would be no automated systems at the ports at all. They would be taking everything out, you know, in a bucket brigade of hands.

You can understand why they're making the statement that they are, but in the issue of keeping the ports modern and the rest of us, where do you fall on this? Or do you just not care? I'll give you what's in my head. Not that I've come to any particularly incisive conclusions about this, but I start with, was it 1954, maybe the Ilya Kazan movie on the waterfront? Because that shows the way shipping was handled in the United States before the advent of container shipping. Or Eric Hoffer describes it a little bit in some of his work. Eric Hoffer, who was, the term used to be stevedore. So if you have in your mind a picture of cargo nets coming up and big burly men walking back and forth and shouldering huge loads

and carrying them from the pier up to the warehouse, that's the way it used to be. So I suppose if this union president had been in place in the 1970s, we wouldn't have container shipping, which would, of course, solve all the problems with globalization because we wouldn't have international trade to speak of. Peter, just so you know, you're actually exactly right because that guy is part of the same union that opposed container shipping and is on the record having done so. Is that so? Okay, over to you, Charlie, because then you know more about this than I do. No, no, no, carry on. I just want wanting to know you're totally right it's not a hypothetical that actually happened they tried to block container shipping right right so what's going on as far as far as i can tell it's it's a version of the hollywood writers strike the writers see

ai coming at them in this sense obviously obviously. Longshoremen and writers are different kinds of people. But the Hollywood writers saw AI coming at them. I myself couldn't quite get what they were so worked up about because I thought AI as a threat to writers was off in the distant future. And then a friend of mine who actually is in the Director's Guild, I guess, yeah, the Director's guild said, oh, no, no, no. And he sat down with me and said to AI, said to ChatGPT or one of the others, five minutes amusing Trump and Biden playing ping pong.

And up popped a sketch that needed a little tightening up, but had four or five different jokes in a five minute. In other words, writers rooms are really under threat already. Okay. They see that coming. Likewise, the teamsters, excuse me, not the teamsters, the longshoremen, longshore people, have they renamed the union? And they want to extract the sitting guys who know they're likely to be the last generation who can count on this work for a whole career. As they head into retirement, they want to grab everything they can get. As far as I can tell, it's as simple as that. And on the other side, the shippers, the counterparty, want to give them as little as possible, but for sure reserve to themselves the right to introduce automation as the robotics become

smarter and smarter and powered more and more by ai so it's just a straightforward commercial um conflict of interests and let them let them at it as far as i can tell the what we saw last week was an attempt to to hold up the country's politics that's and then of course it thanks largely to the new york post we found out that the president of the union is a very rich man and a hypocrite in all kinds of ways anyhow so my view is this is one more it's going to be difficult this transition to ai and robotics no doubt about it but it's one more place where the government ought to stay out charles i think it's preposterous rent seeking is what i think the same guy you're referring to

is in favor of mandating unionized toll booths even though we've had easy pass since 1987 so he wants people in them who stop the cars and slow down the traffic. And it seems from the studies that I've read, increasingly, where they do exist still, do nothing other than pay for the pensions of the people who are slowing the cars down. So you're slowing the cars down to pay for the people who are slowing the cars down. The docks are not anymore a justifiable excuse for union tactics i am and have always been hostile toward unions but i was born in 1984 my dad was born in 1947 he really dislikes public sector unions because he lived through england in the 70s but right but he has always said to me and will still say, no, no, there is a good historical role in certain circumstances for unionization. And if you walk up our back stairs in their little house, you'll see photographs of my ancestors, some of whom were miners or worked in textile mills or what you will. And my dad said, and it's a reasonable point,

you know, if you were in a mine in 1900, you really wanted a union because it was dangerous work and you needed somebody to stand up for you. And I think that that's a fair point. But that's just not what's happening here. What's happening here is they just want more money. They already make a lot of money, by the way. They already make about $200,000 a year on average.

So this is not some dangerous low-paid job. And they're trying to stand in the way of efficiency and to extort international trade so that they can lie in their own pockets. And I think it's insane that this would even be debated. And if I were the president of the United States, which thankfully for everyone, I will never be, and I had the Taft-Hartley Act

on hand. Funny how Joe Biden believes in all sorts of laws that haven't been passed, but not ones that have. I would use it in the national interest to stop this, because I think that what they're doing is functionally indistinguishable from the mafia. Lovely, lovely. I don't think there's anything more to add to that either so that's that's two conclusive denunciations uh by charles today and uh we can only hope for a third or perhaps the pattern here is well established james entertainingly puts the question i attempt to provide a one side on the one hand on the other hand analysis and then charlie comes in with white hot anger anger. Beautiful. Well, we'll see if we're going to go for a third

or maybe a ringing endorsement, perhaps. It all depends on where we go with our guest, who's Eli Lake. Eli's a columnist for the Free Press, contributing editor to Commentary, and host of the Re-Education podcast. Eli, thank you. Welcome.

Hey, thanks for having me. All right. So, Middle East. Kaboom. People were expecting, actually, an earth-shattering kaboom by now. They were expecting Israel to strike back at, I mean, after October 7th, the Gaza response. Then you have Hezbollah shooting into Israel. Then you have Israel taking on Hezbollah.

Then you have Iran deciding to heave 5% of their missiles over. I mean, so that's where we are now. It's not of a piece. It's all part of a very, very ongoing kinetic exercise in sorting things out over there. Anyway, so Iran threw the missiles. Israel is expected to strike back. But people were thinking that there would be some sort of immediate response, and the more the time goes on, there's only one of two things that can happen. Either one, they're not going to do anything, or they'll do something proportional, or two, being very careful to plan what is a definitive, definitive response that upends the status quo for good. What do you think's going on well um

i'm hoping in my sense just looking at what um prime minister netanyahu has been saying is that they are going for um strategically changing the balance of power and not just a proportional response and i think one explanation for why it hasn't happened yet is the Jewish New Year of Rosh Hashanah. You know, it's obviously Israel's, it's not a theocracy or anything like that, but it is a Jewish state, and that might be one explanation.

The other explanation is that I would hope that the one target that makes sense is what as much of iran's nuclear program as possible and that may not be just a matter of um you know bunker buster bombs i mean israel is proving uh ingenious in its ability to sabotage and to kind of have these hybrid intelligence strikes so my hope is that that that is what's being, you know, that is what is in the offing, and there might be some things that have to kind of happen.

And it's not such a terrible thing for the Iranians to sort of be left in a state where they know something's coming, they don't know what it is. Eli? You know, let them feel the anxiety. Eli, true or false, as we tape this on Friday, October 4th in the year 2024,

B.B. Netanyahu is the greatest man in the world. Yeah. He's Churchillian at this point. I mean, we have to... You couldn't ask for a more flawed man to be as great as he is, but he's changed the world, has he not, in the last three weeks? I absolutely think he has, and I'll go, I mean, I've criticized him in my columns over the years at times, but the real brilliance here from Netanyahu is that he has managed to withstand efforts from his greatest ally to try to unseat him from power and to box

him in i mean that you know the the the congratulations goes to the genius of israel's uh military and it's much odd for the pager attack and the walkie-talkies and and and the pinpoint accuracy of their strikes of not just asan Nasrallah, but the next two successors of Hassan Nasrallah, if the news out of Israel and Lebanon was right last night. That's something that, you know, a nation state has built that capability. And so, but it's Netanyahu's ability to navigate a really difficult situation with his most important ally. Because if America chooses to, it can lead to,

it can kind of drop a diplomatic nuclear bomb on Israel by not vetoing a resolution that, you know, from the Security Council that would really hurt and isolate Israel. So far, the Biden administration hasn't done that. That's good. But it's certainly, you know, the messages from Biden himself, I don't know how with it he is at this moment, is, you know, why wouldn't he want Israel to attack the nuclear program? That's the crown jewel at this point. As far as we know, at least as far as I've read, you follow this, obviously, you follow it hour by hour hour but the number of casualties from the iranian ballistic missile attack was single digits as i recall it was one palestinian like the last salvo from april okay so they so

the the regime that claims to defend the honor of the palestinian people is so not only um felt spectacular in their missile strikes, but they've managed to kill Palestinians. Congratulations, guys. On the other hand, they demonstrated a willingness for the second time in a matter of months to fire ballistic missiles at Israel. And this time they demonstrated that they're capable of learning in a military sense and that they clustered them, the missiles much more tightly i presume in an effort to defeat the iron dome and to that extent they demonstrate a certain degree of seriousness and

a certain degree of military prowess and they did get a few of those missiles through killing one person a palestinian what would have happened if any of those missiles... They hit an airbase. Okay, so take the airbase... They didn't do lasting damage. They didn't damage any serious infrastructure. Had that missile been equipped with even a small nuclear weapon, what kind of destruction would we be looking at?

It would be the end of the state of Israel. Okay, so in other words, what we have is a demonstration of a risk that is simply unacceptable, correct? Of course. Obviously. The whole thing is is unacceptable but the reason why this is uh keep thinking of like the steve winwood song when you see a chance take it um is because the decapitation strikes on hezbollah and the fact that this organization is really that, that was the loaded gun at Israel's temple right there. That was the Iranian insurance policy. So the reason that Israel hadn't done this before through subterfuge or an aerial campaign is because if they did,

there were 200,000 rockets and missiles pointed directly at Haifa and Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Now, not so clear. Now it's like, you know, that's why they're going in and they're trying to remove that threat because, and that's why Iran is, I think, you know, that's why we're seeing the Supreme Leader, you know, showing up at the Friday services and delivering some ridiculous speech. So, one more question, Eli, before I hand it back to remand you to James and Charlie. I have to believe that if we were in Israel right now, we would just feel so different approaching this holiday from the way the country has felt at any

time since October 7th. Has it made any difference in New York? Well, I'm in D.C. Oh, you're in Washington. Okay. Yeah, I'm in Washington, but I would say the people that I speak to and other, my family, other Jews I talk to in diaspora, everybody is. It's, I don't want to say cautiously optimistic. I think people are really optimistic in the long run, and they know that there are difficult days ahead. But this is enormous, and I don't think it just starts in September. September is where we begin to see it. The change came when Netanyahu, in my view, basically told the Biden administration to pound sand and sent the IDF into Rafah,

managed to evacuate this million people, which everybody said couldn't be done. And they were getting, the IDF was getting, people, they would say this, but people really weren't listening because it kind of tuned out and, you know, it's a war, you believe one side. But my understanding is that they pretty much degraded the Hamas military leadership at this point. And so they went from a terror army to an insurgency, but that is an enormous military accomplishment. And then you started seeing really precise hits in the summer with senior Quds Force Iranian people in Syria, in Lebanon. You started seeing very specific kind of targeting. And that's when I think the decision was made that they were not going to allow, I wrote a column basically saying they were not going to

allow, they were no longer going to play along with the American hug because it came with handcuffs. And that's when Israel started kind of acting out. And, you know, listen, I mean, there's a sort of bittersweet side of it. I'm a very patriotic American. And as much as I love Israel, it gives me no joy to say that American prestige has plummeted to the point where, you know, a really important ally in the Middle East has basically said, go screw to the White House. But unfortunately, that's where very

bad leadership has led us right now. That's why all of the efforts, they keep saying de-escalation, we don't want to become a regional war. It's been a regional war, dummies. I mean, sorry, excuse my frustration. It is a regional war. And yeah, it's, it's, I don't understand. I really feel like there is a, this is exposed a deeper problem than just, you know, this white house, these advisors, I think there's a rot in our strategic class that we've over learned the lessons, I guess, of the Iraq war. And at this point, we forgot that the best way

to end a regional war is to have the good guys win it Can I ask you Eli it's just cook it whether you were in any way shocked as I was by the reactions to

October 7th and the subsequent fighting. I clearly am naive because I did not expect to see, first, the wholesale abandonment from progressive America of this house of cards that they've built up, which sets a fence as the highest sin. You know, we saw on college campuses people shouting at Jewish students. Go back to Poland.

Jews were the victims, right. Second, I did not expect this lazy use of the word genocide to describe what is normal war and defensive war at that. And third, I did not expect the Israeli cause to be abandoned quite as quickly as it was by an international response that was at first sympathetic. Was I just living in a bubble, or are we actually dealing here with something that is new i think it's a little bit of both um i if you look at like there's an inherent problem in the idea of i mean we talk about the intersectionality right the idea that uh you know the struggle for gay and

trans americans is interlinked with the struggle for black americans and like with struggle for gay and trans Americans is interlinked with the struggle for black Americans, the interlinked struggle for the third world, etc., etc. And a big problem with intersectionality, to be perfectly blunt, is that if you consider Islamophobia one of the great hates that is in your kind of pyramid of discriminations that you're against, then you have to look at the fact that there are a lot of very devout Muslims who are racists and sexist and homophobic, and they've never been able to quite handle the dissonance there. And there are all kinds of other problems. You go back and you look at the history, say, of the Black Panthers, right? There's an enormous amount of misogyny in that organization, and they did terrible things to people that they suspected of being informants to the FBI. And so in some

ways, this concept of intersectionality, it was always a sham, because it meant that you couldn't criticize certain protected groups. And then the whole house of cards came down, because Jews who would obviously be, if you were thinking about this Historically or in any kind of literate way would be part of your group of people Well, that was the one group that was excluded right and so at a certain point What it's I've reminded me a little bit of like what happened in post-war Europe you had Bolshevik parties that steamrolled other liberal democratic parties because that was the one party that was willing to use violence and not play by basic rules of liberalism and that's what i think has kind of happened on campus and among this intellectual class and they uh i think they're

shamed by it but it's what it's telling in some ways that you're if you call them anti-semitic they become very offended they're like no no we don't we don't hate the jews we just hate the jewish state and people who think that it should exist which is an absurdity because most jews obviously think it should exist and when you say you're an anti-zionist well what does that mean there are you know seven million jews who live in israel so what happens to them but that this is and so they're i think that this has like been a long time coming but it was shocking to me as well, shocking coming from the international community. It was shocking. And the genocide thing is absurd.

I mean, it's hardcore, like, Palestinian activists have said genocide for a long time, but it was just taken up, like, overnight. And now you have Ta-Nehisi Coates, you know, joining in with it, which I guess no one should be surprised about either. This is, you know, he's steep which i guess no one should be surprised about either this is you know he's steeped in this kind of ideology but you know at this point my view is like the only way out is through and i'm glad that i've been on the right i think it's much harder for jews after october 7th who kind of saw themselves as being in good standing with the left and they're saying oh well we were with you for me too we were with you for black lives matter and where would you be for us and my view is like well i could have told you but i don't want to you know play that game i just feel that the right is better equipped to kind of deal with

it because they've been making this critique for a longer time and and we sort of understand what's happened kingsley amos told rob bob conquest that when he published his new edition and after the fall of the soviet empire when he published his new edition after the fall of the Soviet Empire, when he published his new edition of Harvest of Sorrow, he should retitle it, I Told You So, You F-ing Idiots. I love Conquest, and Conquest's book was proven out by the archives. Incredible. This could turn into a seminar on its own, but just as a kind of mental experiment to show why the anti-zionism stuff is crazy so here's the question wouldn't we all be better off if somehow or other the

united states had just given the jewish people delaware no what no no no in other words the notion that if if jews need a country of their own why did it have to be right in the middle of hostile Arab populations? That's sort of the anti-Zionist impulse. I've heard, and this may be just rumor, in fact, but that there actually is an ancestral connection to that part of the world. Could be wrong. More so than Delaware. Not to Delaware? Or Rhode Island?

Yes, of course. The Jews would love Delaware because of their money-grubbing tactics would lead them to love a place with liberal corporate incorporation. Delaware? Why would they want Delaware? I mean,

the idea somehow that they are a colonial imposition, that a bunch of white Europeans all of a sudden under the poisonous intellectual fumes of Herzl decided, oh, let's just go steal this land right there. It is absurd the amount of things that I see paraded around on Twitter. They're pointing to a manhole cover that says Palestine, as if this is proof that a nation existed. Well, the British Empire gives them that fig leaf, unfortunately. It's not true,

but it's a bit like the Second Amendment saying the word regulated in it. It didn't mean that at all, but people point to it and they go, aha, it says regulated. Well, there's all these quotes from British imperialists, and they think, well, I'm an anti-imperialist, and so that must be bad. But that was sort of part of my question, Eli.

There's so much nonsense that has been latched onto by people who should know better, and I've been shocked by it. It's shocking. I'm in the middle, actually, of finishing a script right now titled The Hundred-Year Intifada for my next podcast, and it's basically about the history of Palestinian nationalism. And it wasn't like there was this land of Palestine and the British came and conquered it and then gave it to the Jews, which is the simplistic and false story that is told

by anti-Zionists. It was a possession of the Ottoman Empire, made quite cruelly, I should say, by various pashas. The British then acquire it at the end of World War I because the Ottoman Empire has collapsed. So they are there with the remit from, at the time, the League of Nations to create a Jewish homeland because lots of people believe that. And there was, at one point in the, maybe you could say the first two or three decades of the 20th century, there were Palestinian leaders who got along very well with the early Zionist leaders.

But it really was the rise of a British invention, a guy by the name of Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was the first Palestinian leader. The British made this grand buffeting. They created a position for him in Jerusalem, and he became the kind of recognized world leader. And he did not have a vision, really, to create an independent—he called for an independent Palestine in the 30s.

But what he really was focused on was driving the Jews out and stopping immigration of Jews into, you know, the Palestinian mandate during the rise of the Nazis, which eventually, of course, those of us who know our history, Haj Amin al-Husseini really liked Adolf Hitler and joined their cause in World War II, much to the shame of Palestinians today, which they've totally forgotten him. But that's the history of Palestinian nationalism. It is not a very nice history. And we can play this. I love historical counterfactuals. What if the British had not appointed this guy, who had, by the way, already shown that he was a vicious anti-Semite when they made him the Grand Mufti?

He was the leader of what is known as the Nebib Musa riots of Jerusalem in 1920. What if they had not appointed him? What if they had not done that? And it gets back to a problem that America has inherited from the British Empire, which is a belief that the more violent a local leader is,

the more extreme a local leader is, the more authentic they are, which demands that the great power has to sort of accommodate them and bring them inside of the tent. And this is seen as a great strategy. The British did this all the time. And oftentimes they ended up kind of empowering really vile monsters.

Not all the time, but a lot of the time. And this was certainly the case when it came to the Palestinian threat. And I would argue it was the case in the 1990s when the United States embraced Yasser Arafat as a sort of peace partner. And I have to say, as much as I appreciate the initial policy from the United States after October 7th, the speech that Biden gave in Israel was really to be commended. But I think that the way it was going with this constant, incessant, droning on of a ceasefire discussion, when every single time Hamas wasn't even participating in the talks, it would have ended up with some representative of Hamas, possibly even Yawa Senwar, being elevated as a peace partner, and we would have another round of these kinds of

negotiations. And it's like, enough already. Sometimes you have an enemy that is implacable, and it is good for the world, and it advances the cause of peace to utterly defeat them. And that's what Israel is doing. That's why, in my view, he is Churchillian. And unlike Churchill, although, I mean, obviously, nobody touches Churchill. I'm a huge fan, obviously.

But unlike Churchill, he didn't have an American partner like FDR or Truman. He has Joe frickin Biden. You know what I mean? He's got he's got a Chamberlain in Washington. So it's really that's that's the part of it that really I think history will judge him so well. Eli, back to American politics for a moment. Does all this lead to cognitive dissidence among American Jews who have been for so many decades such firm supporters of the Democratic Party? Is that all we get, a little discomfort? Or at the other extreme, is there a serious realignment going on?

If you go by age, is it the case that older Jews are more democratic and younger, more open to supporting Republicans? I mean, what are the political repercussions? I mean, this is talking about a counterfactual. Imagine if the Republicans had nominated Nikki Haley. How many? I think you would have a majority of Jews voting Republican. I think the problem is, is that even though I believe that Trump's policies were very good for Israel, and I don't really think that that's debatable, his rhetoric, his indiscipline... Just can't stomach him.

It's not even that you can't stomach him. He has said incredibly anti-Semitic things, even though I believe he would be much better for Israel and therefore the Jewish people than Kamala Harris. But he can't help himself by saying ridiculous things like, if I lose, I'm going to blame American Jews. What the hell is that? So I just don't know. In my own family, there is a sense that there's a... I think the way... This is how I interpret it.

This is not scientific. I think almost every Jew understands. There is a faction of the Democratic Party that are highly educated anti-Semites. And they're a real problem. And they are a problem in big institutions. They're a problem in the institutions that a lot of American Jews care a great deal about, like universities or publishing houses. And,

boy, it would be nice to have a Republican party that also didn't have an element, at least, that sometimes catered to a different kind of anti-Semitism, kind of like know-nothing anti-Semitism, the sort of anti-Semitism of, you know, cranks in their basement.

But, in my view, at least the elites of the Republican Party, the policy makers of the Republican Party, have their heads screwed on straight. And I have questions, not about every, and there are plenty of Jews in the Democratic Party, we should say that, but it's the fact that, are you trying to have a coalition

with at least a faction of people that want to see the only Jewish state in the world destroyed? And that is the Democratic Party today. There's also a coalition on the far right that I wouldn't characterize them as know-nothing anti-Semites. They're actually, they think they know something. And they're not just the, you know, not just drooling morons who are out there talking about the Jews and coming up with crude memes I find this stuff infesting my Twitter feed all the time there will be a discussion for example on great replacement which itself is a fraught issue but I think it's one that we ought to discuss and tease out what's

true about it and what's wrong about it and what's idiotic and what actually is worrisome and look at the demographics I agree I agree it's a discussion to have but the other day just this morning when i was following a twitter thread what followed after the main point that the person was making and it had to do with uh imagery in european public service messages we'll set that aside for a second the person posted a whole series of comments and remarks about the white race, its need for destruction, the need for a genocide, and every single one of them was Jewish, and it was pointed out that every single one of them was Jewish. So you will have people on that sort of intellectual, just speaking the truth here, just know who will gleefully embrace and lean into the worst sort of anti-semitism and uh that's worrisome but it isn't as characteristic of the right as the anti-zionist

stuff is of the progressive elements of the left and i that would seem to me to be obvious to me to anybody who's looking at this situation but But, you know, I don't know. This is how I look at it. If you say, I'm a fan of the Great Replacement Theory, and you have a position of some kind of authority, again, at a university or a media outlet,

you might fire. That's a fireable offense. If you say, I don't think that Israel should exist, and it's committing a genocide, then you are just mouthing conventional wisdom in the most of the institutions. That is true. And so it's a different kind of threat. It's like, again, it's the threat of, you know, I mean, listen, I understand. I'm not, I don't want to, you know, like, I'm not trying to say I'm sure.

What is the name? Martyr made the people's historian who doesn't think Churchill, who thinks Churchill's a villain, that moron. Okay, I'm sure he has some sort of level of intelligence where he's able to read quickly or whatever it is. But I'm not worried about that guy taking over Princeton University's history department. But there are people on the left who have just as lunatic views of history and are themselves like very serious ideologues masquerading as academics who have already taken over these institutions so it's a different kind of a threat and the way our politics are now is that trump is the populist. He is the, you know, he channels,

he's the tribune of a kind of rage at a system that I think is totally fair to say is often unfair. It is unfair in how it actually adjudicates what is and isn't racism. So it's, this is a complicated question. And unfortunately, it feels like both sides have different kinds of threats to Jewish people in this country. So it's bad. Eli, one last question before we let you go, you're always wearing some good band t-shirt. Could you stand up a little bit?

You'll like this one. So we can see what this is. That's a nod. It's a nod that goes up to 11. It's final tab. Of course. Very, very good.

Which is a reminder that I should have, by the way, if I'd known Charlie was here, I have a great t-shirt that's just John and Yoko. Just to upset me. You're going to third round on this show. Yes, well, we'll get on to the lyrical profundities of Imagine after you've left. Oh, no, I hate Imagine, but that album is superb and i think imagine is a completely overrated terrible anthem but i found out is incredible so there you go i suppose but i

regard anything that yoko is involved in as as i don't know it's just it's it's like adding a dash of aromatic bitters to john is very unhappy before he met Yoko. That's true. She really gave him happiness. That's very nice for a millionaire heroin addict, but I don't really have to pay attention to his music for that. Anyway, well,

The Beatles with Eli Link is another show that we'll do down the road. In the meantime, we keep our powder dry, and we wait for the inevitable response and perhaps we'll speak to you after that. Shalom. Shalom. Thanks, Eli.

Next year in Jerusalem. So the last thing before we go here, and thank you, Eli, is that getting to the hurricane. And again, this is one of those things where if you get most of your news from social media, and I don't mean Instagram, and I don't mean TikTok, I mean from...

I'm going to say X, aren't I? I'm going to give in at some point and just say X. I don't say X either. It's Twitter. It's always going to be Twitter. They will call it something else my entire life, but it'll be Twitter. Anyway, if you get most my entire life, but it'll be Twitter.

Anyway, if you get more... You choose some very strange hills to die on, James. That's all I can say. Well, I'm sorry, but X is a stupid name. X means nothing. Twitter is the historical name of it that sums up all of what it's meant. The man paid $44 billion for it. He saved freedom of speech. He can call it what he wants. And he has. I just don't have to go along with it. That's all I'm saying.

I find it hard, too. I can't call them the Cleveland Guardians. And I can't call them the Washington Commanders. And I can't call it X. It's not even a principle. I just feel odd doing it. A bit like if I started to say y'all. I would just sound weird.'s not even a principle. I just feel odd doing a bit like if I started to say you all I would just sound weird You would don't so I'd like me affecting a British ISM, which I won't but the Guardians the Cleveland Guardians though

I think they're named after statues on a bridge. I Think I think there's that is step. Yeah, which is an interesting thing So they might be the only football team named after statues. I don't say X either. I'm with you. Anyway, on Twitter, the conversations about the FEMA response in the Appalachians has been remarkable. And some of these stories, you just have to cock a skeptical Spock-like eyebrow because too many priors confirmed. But then when the legitimate news organizations start running with the story of helicopter pilots who are told, no, you can't go up there, you can't go save those people. And then you have other people talking about FEMA coming in and taking some of the supplies,

supposedly so they can do a better job of coordinating the distribution and the rest of it. You think that perhaps the organizations responsible for going in and fixing things are finding themselves flat-footed because they're A, not very good at it and B don't want To be shown up by people who do you would think that this would be one of those stories like you see in a movie or? A television show where you've got some Tommy Lee Jones character who arrives on the scene telepr you know Parachutes in comes in a helicopter and immediately snaps everybody into one coordinated effort that solves everything But no and it makes you wonder if FEMA, which we all recall, of course, Martin Landau telling Mulder in the first X-Files movie was

the secret government that actually controlled things. Wonderful moment that shows you how deep the paranoia and stupidity in the 90s was. FEMA, the shadow government. That FEMA may join the other institutions in which we have lost a tremendous amount of respect because, well, they've been more interested in handing out hotel coupons to people who ought not to be here than figuring out what they ought to do when something like this strikes. Or am I wrong? Oh, no, no, there's no doubt. The federal government cannot control the border.

The Secret Service cannot ensure the physical safety of a former president and now presidential candidate. Israel can hit back at the Houthis, but the United States Navy cannot. Why should we even expect FEMA to prove even minimally competent? The failure of the federal government in agency after agency after agency is comprehensive. And none of these are a failure of ability. It's a failure of will. It's not because we can't do these things, it's just that we decided not to, and that decision not to becomes this paralyzing venom

that seems to just cause everything to lock up. Jarman? Well, I am impressed by a man who I've seen described as president of the Southeast, Ron DeSantis, who I think has shown the way.

This is one thing Florida is very good at, had to get very good at it. And when you have to get very good at something, you do. As the British learned in 1939, 1940. And I think that FEMA is really not set up in quite the same way, because it's less important to the people who run it. And that's one reason I'm a free marketeer. And it's one reason I'm a federalisteer, and it's one reason I'm a federalist,

is I think people who have money in the game or are affected themselves tend to do things better, and I just cannot see a better example of it than the difference between the responses from the states in North Carolina and Virginia and Florida here, and Florida has sent National Guard and State Guard troops to help and FEMA, of course, because the president's a Democrat, we hear a lot less about it. We don't get the calumny that we got against George W. Bush, which is desperately unfair. But what matters

most to the people who have been affected is whether or not they're getting help. And if they are, it's likely to have a state emblem on it rather than a FEMA logo. I think one of the reasons that Bush got more trouble than Harris is getting today, aside from, of course, the natural left-leaning aspect of the people covering the event, is that you had New Orleans. You had a concentrated example of human misery. This, to the people, perhaps in the media, perhaps in the government, just seems sort of like a spread out area of the country where for all they know,

it's nothing but jet clamp. It's shooting at some food and there's nothing really going on there. And it's kind of hard to wrap your brain around. There's a road out. There's a town gone. It's not the same as having the New Orleans dome up to its gunwales in water or seeing blocks and blocks of flooded school buses. It's just, there's no visual thing that they can quite get their hands on or their eyes on, their hook. That doesn't

explain why the coverage has been, it doesn't justify why the coverage has been what it is, but I don't know. I find appalling things in my Twitter feed with photographs and stories and the rest of it. The occasional AI photo designed to get clicks, yes, but appalling things. And then when I go to my main news sources, I get dribs and drabs and it seems to be all over and we've moved on to something else. Just like, I mean, I'm looking at the news and it's just like we've moved on beyond the Iranian attack on Israel already. We've moved on.

This desperate need to keep moving on. Last question. Why is that? And a general sense of things not going well is not helpful toward the general project of electing a historical presidential candidate and taking that box. I think that's part of it. That's a lot of it. I think it's almost all of it. And I would just note that we don't move on when not moving on is useful to the press's broader political projects the assassination attempt the first one on donald trump disappeared quite

quickly that was not helpful the killing of george floyd lasted an entire summer. And that's because one allowed the advancement of a negative narrative in the country that massively skews our political conversations. Does it ever. Speaking of not moving on, Jack Smith is given permission to, or releases, I don't know, Judge Chutka, whatever, releases the new indictment against Donald Trump in the New York Times and covering it, I give them this much. They put it in the very first paragraph that it contains no new information, no new, no real, I'm paraphrasing, no new charges, no new information, but richness of detail and texture. In other words, there's nothing new here. They've just padded it out with some additional anecdotes.

And the New York Times, literally years after the event now, puts this on the front page. And it will be there. I'm sure that I haven't looked again today. I'm sure there are follow-on stories. This will go on for between now and the election, for sure. For sure. Not that it isn't an important event that needs to be dealt, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But if you put it in the moving on category, it's time. I think at this point it strikes the public imagination as Jim Garrison coming up with some more charges to file against somebody in New Orleans about the Kennedy assassination. Or strikes them as interesting as Lenny Bruce sitting on his stool at the end of his career

and reading the Warren Commission report. It's just, your eyes glaze over. It becomes added to it. It's like, yeah, he's a crook. He's a criminal again and again and again. I get it. I get it. I get it. Don't care is what most, is what the people in Trump's corner will say. And I don't think it persuades the people in the middle. I think what persuades them are arguments such as Vance made about the policies that they would enact, or as we said a couple of weeks ago, the policies that they wouldn't. I don't think people are worried so much about what Donald Trump would do as concerned that he wouldn't do things about... What am I trying to say here? Let me rewind that and be more coherent.

People aren't worried about what Donald Trump is going to do. They're just happy that he won't be doing the things they expect from a Harris and Walz administration. Exactly. You put that beautifully. What was it last week, James? I did. And then I said it inexpertly and tumble-tongued today because I haven't

had enough coffee. Well, you're still batting 500. Well, we are moving away. Could I pose one one last question myself here and it is this what do you two make of the polls they just don't seem to move um donald trump has a very bad debate performance in any way you'd care to score it. She seemed more coherent, calmer, so forth. And she got maybe half a point benefit out of that. Vance has a terrific debate performance, doesn't seem to be showing up in the polls. She seems to be retaining, I look every day at the RealClear

average, she seems to be retaining a national lead of about 2%. And in the battleground states, he seems to be maintaining his lead in several, including Arizona. It just is very, to me, very strange sense of stasis. Well, Hillary was going to win, too, I believe, a lot of the polls said. I don't know. Anyway, Charles, go ahead. I'm not a poll watcher. Polls annoy me. They just do.

I'm annoyed that I have to keep up with them. I'm annoyed that I have to parse them. I'm annoyed that I have to keep them in my head. It's my failing, but I'm bored with polls. Polls, they have allergies to them. Charles, go ahead. Well, I have a theory that makes people very cross when I say just, I'm bored with polls. Polls, they have allergies to them. Charles, go ahead. Well, I have a theory that makes people very cross when I say it, and I'm sure expressing it here will yield more angry emails and charges of squishiness and elite detachment. But I

nevertheless think that I might be onto something. I don't think the American public particularly cares about this election. That is not the same thing as saying that people aren't hurting, there aren't real issues. It is not the same thing as saying that the election doesn't matter. I think there is a disconnect between how much people who work in politics and think about politics all the time and volunteer in politics care about this election and how much people who are living normal lives who only start thinking about such things in late October care about this election. And I think that the reason for that is in part because both candidates are god awful. People are tired of Trump, even if they like him, they're tired of Trump. People do not like Kamala Harris or know who she is, or find any inspiration or joy in her candidacy.

And although there are a lot of people hurting and the world is on fire in many ways, as a historical matter, please don't write to me and say I'm saying this because I'm some super rich guy living in a Scrooge McDuck castle. As a historical matter, relative to where we were in, say, 2009, or where we were in, say, 1980, or where we were in, say, 1932, America's still pretty rich and prosperous.

And because of that, people are not out on the streets waving signs. And I think that the election is just not looming large in the imaginations of the public in the way that those on both sides think that it should. And I think that's why the polls are hovering at around 50-50, because we're a 50-50 nation. People have removed themselves back into their usual political partisan and ideological postures. And maybe something will break that down in the end, but maybe it won't and we're going to get the closest election since 2000 now go go jump in your golf cart and drive off to the course your tail finned golf court your golf cart no doubt no this little am radio set to an all

elva station i think you're right i think that's the uh that's the most insightful thing I've heard in the last hour. And, you know, that's with Eli and Peter. So you got two screeds out of Charlie, and then a third one, which I wouldn't say was screedy, but it certainly was emphatic. Oh, that was pretty screedy. That was pretty screedy, I think. Screed adjacent. Screed adjacent. Screedish.

Elements of a Philippic, but it also had... Anyway, so we are moving along. We are going away. We'll be back next week, of course, for podcast number 712. We'll be back all through the election and beyond because we're Ricochet.com. We're not going anywhere. And you, if you haven't been there yet, if you've been listening to me talk for 711 episodes, I don't know what it's going to do to take you to go to Ricochet.com,

but once you do, you'll be happy because you will find the place you've been looking for all these years on the Internet. Sane, civil, mostly center-right conversation. It's a great place. I love it. I'm there every day. I'm there five, six times a day checking it. We just had a great conversation with one with Gary McVeigh about what you're thinking.

Oh, about demographic shifts in the Southwest, about increasing trade problems with Canada, about immigration in in Southern. No, we're talking about Sergeant Bilko Phil Silver's a great movie he made and how that inevitably wound into a conversation about television and mid-century culture. And it was just great. It was so ricochet. and it's waiting for you. So go there, sign up, enjoy the member feed, and give us those five stars at Apple Podcast, if you don't mind. And I can't think of anything else,

except we'll see you in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, guys. Next week, boys. Ricochet. guys next week boys ricochet join the conversation