The Ricochet Podcast - Summit Song and Dance

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

Donald Trump and Xi Jinping have ended their two day summit in Beijing with lots of talk and no announced breakthroughs. James and Steven break it all down.Speaking of breaking down, we welcome back National Review senior writer Noah Rothman to talk about the left's embrace of political violence that he covers in his new book, Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America. It's a riot.

We should be partners, not rivals, achieving mutual success and common prosperity, finding the right way for the two major powers to coexist in the new era. The world has arrived at a new crossroads, whether China and the United States can navigate the so-called Thucydides Trap. It's the Rikishay podcast. I'm James Lilley's with Stephen Hayward, and we're going to be talking again to our favorite Noah Rothman. has written a book, Blood and Progress about left-wing violence. Let's have ourselves not a riot, but a podcast.

With the U.S. defend Taiwan if it came to it? I don't want to say. There's only one person that knows that. You know who it is being? Welcome, everybody. It's the Riggasheye podcast number 789. I'm James Laleck's on a beautiful spring day in a dinah, Minnesota. Stephen Hayward is in California, where, of course, the sun always shines.

So, Stephen, how are you today? I am good, James. Good to see you. Well, as Spock said, In Star Trek 6, only Trump can go to China. What do you make of what has been done? The headlines that I'm getting, of course, it's always amusing to read the headlines in my feed. I use Apple News and they gather up all of the things that are said

and everything is fraught with terror and failure and worry and uncertainty in the rest of it. And I've come to just discard 90% of it, waiting for history to make its final judgment. of course by then I'll be dead. But so what have you been able to glean from what you've heard about this meeting with G. Well, not much, really, because we don't really know what's available for public consumption can be at wide variance with what's actually happening at the negotiating table. And all the side discussions that go on between the large entourage from brought with him. So I am amused by the fact that what the media seems most concerned with is that the traveling press corps from the United States has been roughed up.

by Chinese officials. Really? I haven't heard this. What happened? Oh, yeah. Apparently there have been these scuffles. And anyway, the media's complained that we're being treated very badly by the Chinese. And I thought, ah, I wonder if Trump put them up to this. Well, I hope not.

I hope not. I don't want the president of the United States, as much as we may feel about the mainstream media as we do to use the instruments of state power in China to give these guys a bad time. Now, it could be that being roughed up means, you know, being put in a room and given a flat Coca-Cola and made to sit there for an hour so I don't know. But if they're actually manhandling them and the rest of it, no. This is the point where I say, no, we are all Americans and they're the Chikoms, the Reds, and I say it's spinach and to hell with it.

Well, there's, well, there's an interesting point on that media angle. I mean, you hear it actually had some physical altercations. I haven't tried to chase after detail, but there is one little detail that is interesting to me. So, you know, Barry Weiss has been trying to turn the ship at CBS News. and one interesting thing is last weekend it was Major Garrett on 60 Minutes had a long interview with Benjamin Netanyahu Apparently this has outraged Leslie Stahl because she's a senior person

She's been trying for months to get an interview with Netanyahu But at least she wasn't trumped by So to speak by a minor Garrett That would be even more insight At least it was a major Garrett Right exactly right Anyway this is causing trouble there But the more interesting thing at CBS

what relates to the China question is. So Tony DeCopold is the new anchor. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me or that I haven't seen explained satisfactorily, is he was not able to get a visa for the trip to China. So he's reporting on the summit all week from Taiwan. So that's a little odd. But he always doing a lot. Every night he's doing some Taiwan stories.

You know, how is Taiwan think about China? What are they doing to defend themselves against a possible attack? But the first night, it would have been Monday or Tuesday. He came on at the end with a little, you might say editorial. And he said, yeah, China's a rising power. They make everything, but everything they make is made in America.

And then he goes on to talk about, you might say American exceptionalism, American innate superiority. I thought, ah, isn't that interesting? That, you know, people in the media and at the CBS, Old Garter probably think, well, that's just irresponsible jingoism. But I kind of like it. And it's a sign maybe Barry is succeeding and turning the ship of state there. So do I. But the idea that China somehow has learned that it is an exceptional. exceptional nation that they borrowed that concept from the United States.

I'm sorry, they believe themselves to be the center of the world, the Middle Kingdom, and it is their right, their right to rule. So that's a bit odd. But as far as having them, you know, they make everything. It's interesting. I have been, because I've been furnishing and tricking out this apartment here, I've had more interface with Chinese goods than I have in an awful long time. And nearly every single one of them has turned out to be shoddy substandard.

It doesn't fit my needs, breaks easily, comes from a company that disappears almost instantly. I left a one-star review of a desk tray, a pull-out desk tray, which is impossible to assemble, and was promptly given a, got a letter from Doris. I'm sure it was Doris somewhere, who said that they were taking a very close look at my comments that the engineering team had been spoken to and they were retooling everything and they were going to give me a $50 gift certificate. If I could just change my review from a one-star to a five-star. And I thought, yep, that's what we're up against right there. And no, sorry, got your number.

Well, it'll be interesting to see what comes. I mean, one of the interesting things and pieces of news that we had the last week was that drug overdose deaths are down, like something like two-thirds in the country. And they're blaming that on interdiction. They're blaming that on less fentanyl. They're not blaming. They're ascribing it to those things to less immigration and the rest of it. It's a good deal.

It's a good thing, right? So you have no idea whether behind the scenes there was some arm twisting and table pounding and saying, you've got to stop shipping fentanyl precursor chemicals to Mexico or we're going to start having some accidents or something. Or something. I don't know. You never know. I mean, Nixon goes, somebody goes to Russia and comes back and says, well, went very well, we signed a very heavy cream piece, cream-colored piece of paper that was embossed with all of our signatures about nuclear weapons. It's going to make sure the future is safe, and we're going to sell them Pepsi, and they're going to sell us Stoli.

And I think it was probably a little bit more than that. But everybody thought, oh, good, we get Stoli, which is, you know. Well, two things have been, well, one thing's been reported that, again, we don't know how concrete it is, but that China has agreed that Iran should not control the Gulf of the Straits of Hormuz. And maybe that they're going to restrain their supplying of arms to Iran. I'll believe that when I see it. The other one was that Trump, it was announced ahead of time that Trump was going to bring up the case of Jimmy Lai imprisoned in Hong Kong. And I hope, I assume that he did, but I don't know. We haven't heard any reporting on that that I've seen at least.

So that's, I'll bet there's a sticking point for China. I'll bet they're like the Soviet Union was when Reagan and Schultz kept bringing up human rights. And they say, this is a purely internal matter. And our guys would say, no, it isn't. And finally, the Soviets relented. But I don't think China's in a mood to relent on that. They're very intransigent about these things. I wonder if we have any Chinese agent mayors in this country that we could swap for them.

You know, that city is right next door to where I grew up. I know Arcadia quite well. It's a very, very curious story. And it makes you realize the Chinese penetration of our institutions. I mean, this isn't paranoid talk. This isn't, I'm Joe McCarthy. I'm going to eat a stick of butter before going out and drunkenly accusing a bunch of people to stuff.

Although he was right in all of his senses. This is what anybody knows to be the case. When they send people over here for a variety of purposes, they could dual use, as they say, when the interdiction ship that has machinery on it. But of course they are. Why wouldn't they? Why would they not send agents over to do all sorts of things?

For all I know, you know, the Florida orange blight was caused indeed by Chinese agents spreading pathogens. People look at you and say you'd be absolutely daft to believe that. You've been spending too much time on the Twitter. why would that be ridiculous? Why would your geopolitical economic enemy not want to sow as much discord as possible and take advantage of your liberal policies

to cede the country with as many people as they could? Wouldn't you? Yeah, yeah. Well, yes, I've had a number of Chinese students over the last 20 years, and I've just assumed or concluded that a number of them were essentially spies. And or in several cases, I learned that they were over here

to get a degree, but really was a vehicle for rich Chinese to get money out of the country, which is otherwise restricted. But some of these Chinese students had brand new Mercedes or BMWs. And in the case of Pepperdine, where we used to have quite a lot fewer than before COVID, a lot of them were living in $2 million houses over the hill in Westlake. And which, you know,

oh, the kids got to have housing. They're short of housing on campus, etc. Right. Oh, this is a way to get some capital out of the country. But I do remember vividly one of the first Chinese students I ever had, young lady, very bright. Her work was really good, which made me suspicious that,

you know, before AI, when someone was writing papers for her. But she says to me, oh, I've looked at your internet. Everything on your internet about Tannen Men Square is wrong. Those protesters and thugs and hooligans, they were shooting our police and army people. And so anyway, I would get that. I thought was quite candid and maybe more too revealing, more revealing than it should have been. Well, the great firewall does keep a lot of information out of there. And it's unfortunate that they have to marinate in their own ideological

bubble. Good thing that doesn't happen here in the States. Yes, they move a lot of money out of China to go to the property markets. Canada has this in a great extent. And you always look at them and say, don't you guys have an awful lot of empty cities that you possibly could sink your money into, but they don't because they know it's not going to work. I keep hearing that Chinese economy is always about a day and a half away from collapsing entirely because of their property situation and it never seems to happen. Another day will pop up and there'll be another video of somebody who's gone through a city that was intended to house 800,000. people and has four of them and they're all janitors who spend their day sweeping up an empty mall.

And it is astonishing to me how they continue to creak along with these real estate bubbles that they have that make ours look absolutely sane by comparison, but yet they do. So who knows? We'll see down the road, but China is, I mean, you've been reading of the person. You've been reading the G is shaping the army to do as he want, which brings us to somebody else in a similar position, perhaps, although more perilously so, and that is where Putin happens to be. All of the stuff that's coming out of there suggests that there is a strange softening. Somebody noted that for the very first time Putin referred to Zelensky with the word mister, and that this somehow was some great signal that a rapprochement might be. be possible that they are no longer going the whole zine denotification thing, but they're starting

to create a ideological, verbal, political landscape where they can actually make an agreement. I don't know. I don't think so. I think that staggers on until Putin is either out, which, you know, where do you stand on that? And again, this is something we've been saying for two years. as the elites are hurt, then they will turn against him. Well, the elites have been hurt first by the sanctions, then by the way, now, you know, with the trashing of the energy infrastructure, and less money flowing in, et cetera.

The elites are hurting even more. I've been hearing all of this for a long time since the war began. I have no idea what to make of it. We puzzled over Putin before, and I've expressed my bafflement. I do think two things. One is it is the logic of aggressive, tyrants to either go on or be destroyed, right?

Internally. And that is something that is, I don't quite understand the impulse to want to risk total destruction for yourself and your country, but it does seem to be endemic to dictatorships. Second, I do get the sense for some of the reasons you mentioned that he is looking for a way out, but it has to be beyond just a face-saving way out because that won't save his own head, you might say. And what that might be, I think it's. not only keep all the territory he's got and maybe be given some more,

but I think he wants some kinds of guarantees that Ukraine will not join, for example, the European Union. Never mind NATO. I don't think there's an appetite for NATO to invite Ukraine to join. But the European Union or closer ties to the West is something Putin would like to foreclose in some solid way. And I think there'll be great resistance to that, both by the European Union and by Zelensky himself.

So we're just going to have to see. Ukraine is apparently exactly more and more pain on Russia with its drone strikes and so forth. So we're just, you know, we'll just have to see what happens, as the president likes to say. Indeed. Hi, I'm Ben Sass. And I'm Chris Dyerwald. And this is not dead yet. We're all dying, but some of us have been brought face to face with that reality.

However long, each of us have to do it, though, we all want to live a good life. one with meaning, love, and joy. And our guests are here to help us do exactly that. Now available for download and streaming at ricochet.com. Rikoshae! Join the conversation. Well, enough of us blathering. Let's get somebody else to blatherer.

Noah Rothman. We welcome back to the podcast with glee and anticipation. American writer, editor, former MSNVZ commentator, hmm, podcaster, author, senior writer and podcast guest for National Review. And we love, we love Zuff. some NR, as people used to say on the internet. And he's here because he has a new book, Blood and Progress,

which sounds like the bio of Bismarck, but it isn't. It's about left-wing violence. And we welcome Noah here. Hey, how you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me again. Fantastic. Left-wing violence.

Come on. Come on, come on, come on. Talk to anybody in the left, and they'll say, well, you know, violence from the left is entirely justified. It's the riots are the voice of the unheard. and the destruction of cities is a necessary way of dismantling white supremacy, but we never do it. That's essentially,

that's a really good summary of the position. It's the right that does it. They're the ones. I mean, take a look at the ADL, take a look at what the Southern Poverty Law Center says. It's the right that commits it. And J6, J6, J6.

But you and your book, there's an excerpt today for people who have Apple News. You can find an excellent excerpt free from NR, which discusses said scourge and puts it in the context of its most recent efflorescence, which would be 2020. I have a very keen relationship with the urban violence of 2020 because it happened in my city.

It happened 20 blocks from my house. I drove through it every day. I heard it. I smelled it. I lived it. And I watched on live streams, which have since somehow just disappeared from the internet, of what was going on and what they did

and how much fun they had doing it. So let's unpack all of this. They will say that actually it's justifiable, that it is illegal. Well, it's your book. Give us the premise and tell us exactly what you want us to take away from this book. I don't think. You were taking me on a journey here, actually. It sounds like you've got this thing pretty much down.

I do. All right. Thanks for joining us. No, it's great. Right, folks. Take care. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, that's essentially what this book is about. the reflex that you encounter that we all encounter. Whenever there's an act of confirmed or suspected left-wing political violence designed to advance a political agenda, whether it's the sustained looting and burning of American cities and attempted or successful assassination of an right-wing figure, attacks on ICE or CBP facilities, one of which last year was really sophisticated. It was a small-cell terrorist attack using pretty sophisticated ambush tactics. All the time, what you hear right after that as well, you can use.

know the right wing is the most urgent and acute threat to American civic comedy. And so you shouldn't even really be talking about this. What is that reflex? Where does it come from? That's what this book confronts. In that excerpt, one of the phenomena that amplifies this and gives the left permission to look away, which is all that is, that reflex that you encounter when they say, oh, the right is really much more violent. It's just a psychological excuse to avoid confront. confronting the phenomena that is all around us. There was a document that was prepared for the Department of Homeland Security in 2021, a group named Insight, which very bravely demonstrates.

Let me stop you right there. And Insight stands for it because when I saw it in your book, I started sounding it out myself thinking this has to be clever. And indeed it was. NC-I-T-E is. Correct. National Counterterrorism Innovation Technology and Education Center. And they contributed to the Department of Homeland Security.

And the document that they prepared articulates why researchers in the field that study AVE violence, anarchist violent extremism, which is the turn of art that the FBI uses, captures a lot of left-wing political violence. Not all, but typically your left-wing politically violent people will fall into that category. Within the universe of domestic violent extremists, on the right you have racial and ethically-motivated violence. sovereign citizen violence, that sort of thing, which tends to capture more right-wing figures. And those who study AVEs encounter a variety of intimidation tactics from the left and from people within their own fields. Social isolation, they describe, smear campaigns, the loss of professional and reputation, the fear that their research could provoke harmful responses, which is a very

sanitized way of saying they're being terrorized, that they have effectively been. terrorized by a campaign of terrorism. And lastly, the extent to which the people who do research into the field of left-wing political violence are themselves members of groups or apologists for groups that execute violence in the name of progressive causes. And that is to say nothing of adulterated and suspect data sets which purport to flatten the phenomenon of left-wing political violence in order to claim that the right has the majority, the majority of cases of political violence are on the right. And some of those data sets are really corrupted to the extent that they incorporate violence inside prisons, for example,

between gang members or gang members or family members or prison officials, COs, for example. There are episodes in which homeless people who deploy racial slurs while assaulting business owners is countered as right-wing violence, somebody who sprays graffiti on the side of a church, that's right-wing violence. When you flatten these things out into statistics, try to create a database, which is why I don't even attempt to do it. I think it's a fraught enterprise. It just flattens the whole phenomenon and leaves you less informed about it than more.

Statistics are important. You can't just ignore them or dismiss them. But to try to create a database is, in my view, a fraud enterprise, which is why I don't do that. I tell stories. And the stories that I tell are illustrative, I think, of the phenomenon. That is observable with our own eyes. I mean, you don't need a database to tell you that the amount of left-wing political violence

designed to create in the minds of the adult thinkers who execute violence in the name of political motives, designed to change and shape society. That is just rampant. And it is, you don't even need to really examine the deeply the philosophy behind it, although I do in this 250-page book with 80 pages of notes. The last attempt on Donald Trump's life was by a guy who Nora O'Donnell, we can assume, thought was a pretty rational thinker. Why do we think that? Because his actions did not discredit his thought.

His manifesto, his addled manifesto, was presented to the president, and the president was made to answer for his delusions, presumably because Nora O'Donnell, like the rest of the media apparatus, encountered the things that he believed on a daily basis. It's the sort of thing that blue sky bandies about on a regular basis. The president is obviously a pedophile, a traitor, and a criminal. That's what he believed. And that's what a lot of people in the mainstream left believe. And they don't understand the extent to which it is motivated, it has motivated the atal-minded, the delusional, and the unstable

to meet out violence in the name of what they believe to be a righteous cause. Right. Well, Noah, Steve Hayward here out in California, when you're talking about the media, you're talking about the same people who this week believe the incredible story that Israel trains dogs, to rape Palestinian prisoners. I mean, and the media swallows that,

just like they did all the bogus claims 40 years ago, that these preschools with little kids were taking students to the San Diego, little kids to the San Diego Zoo to be raped by elephants. That was actually reported by the media 40 years ago. No, and people, I'm going to write a piece about how we're repeating the media credulity for completely ridiculous things.

In this case, you know, the guy at the White House Correspondence Center was, he's the one who was the Caltech grad, right? I mean, it's not some fringe person from some commune or something like that. Look, let's... But that is precisely the profile of the person who executes political violence. It is the affluent.

Right. It is the educated. Right. Right. Bruce, yeah. A gentleman who I quote in this actually, something that's related to Islamist terrorism, but one of the most common indicators or common features shared among people who execute violence in the name of Islamist radicalism had one thing in common, and that was an engineering

degree. They had been educated into this, indoctrinated into this. It's not the average foot soldier who's just, and the myth on the left is that the people who commit violent crimes in general are just impoverished, afflicted by material circumstances, denied that which is their due. And that is just simply not true. It is a certain type of person who's been educated into the notion that their due has been stolen from them and are pretty decently familiar with previous radical violent ideologies and those who practiced them in the generations that came before them. That's just elementary when you think about it. Right.

Well, it's, I mean, that's been around, I mean, people who celebrate, the intellectuals and upper class people who celebrate violence that were familiar with the people in the Spartacist League and things like that a hundred years ago or, you know, the characterizations in Dostoevsky. You can pick a lot of them. But it's now breaking out widely into the mainstream of the left. And I mean, two data points I know that you know is what's something like. 30 or 40% of Democrats think the Butler assassination attempt and the White House correspondence dinner were faked by Trump, which is, you know, looney tune stuff.

You also now have, what, is it 30, 40% of young liberals think that violence is justified to achieve. In other words, the ends justify the means, which we've always rightly been skeptical or qualified in very serious ways. So this is breaking out. and we're coming back to the open embrace that violence is good, right? I mean, it's one thing is maybe come back to the riots of 2020, which you talk about at length. It's one thing to have, we've always had riots.

I think I've had Banfield's famous article on rioting for fun and profit about food riots in the Roman Empire and ethnic riots in Europe, those things of it happening. They break out periodically. But what's true in modern times is the riots are now explicitly ideological. and that can't be good. You know, no, sorry, last thing I'll say, you know, I always kid you that you're my favorite cranky, alarmed person. And I've always liked it and thought even when I thought you were overwrought, I still enjoyed it and thought.

I never overwrots, right? You're never, well, this time, I think, I think now you are properly wrought and this ought to alarm everybody. Well, thank you. I appreciate, yeah, I strive for the proper level of wrought, and I hope I've achieved it. You had mentioned, you know, the anti-Israel movement that has captured the left and increasingly forced them to subordinate elementary discretion and even basic best practice when it comes to journalism in order to retail lurid narratives about Israel and satisfy the ids of their audience who are just desperately starving for those narratives. And it has been a violent movement since October 7th.

We experience violence in the name of this movement, whether the left wants to acknowledge it or not, whether the left acknowledges property destruction as violence or not, which they tend not to do. But when you start to dig into it, and I dug into it for this book, the degree to which we are being bombarded by vestigial narratives created and retailed by the Soviet Union is shocking. in the late 1970s, mid-1970s, after the Soviets' investments in the Arab armies that were defeated by Israel in 1968 and 1973 was shown to be a decidedly bad investment that was not going to yield return. The Soviet Union as a geopolitical project established Zionology as a study, and the study of it was to anathematize it. Zionism was described as militant chauvinism, racism, anti-communism, colonial or a neo-colonial project. The Israelis were a white colonial outpost within the brown global south, and they were guilty of unspeakable practices. The genocide of the Palestinian people, which was a narrative that we've been living with since the 1970s, engineered starvation campaigns, forcible rape as a weapon of war, ethnic cleansing, et cetera, et cetera.

The destruction of the Alaksa Mosque in preparation for the reconstruction of Solomon's Temple. all of this stuff has been with us since the Zionism as racism resolution was passed in the United Nations, which was also a Soviet project. And you hear quite a lot of these arguments that are being articulated verbatim by a young radicalized Marxian left, which should make you wonder if it's really a bunch of new developments that are making you curious about the stuff and reciting these narratives, or whether this is all part of a geostrategic project and the part of the geostrategic project and the part of the, geopolitical left to an amethematize an American enemy, an American ally rather, and advance the

interests of America's geopolitical foes. Are you saying that a Russian intelligence agency came up with a fictional narrative about Jews? Hard though it may be to believe. This is like the protocols of the elders of Moscow or something like

that. I find that a little too conspiratorial. It can be overstated. I'm not trying to say that there are no thinking thoughtful people in the universe of Israel's critics. That is not true. But the violent, the addle-brained, those who cannot think of anything,

who simply subordinate, again, all their discretion in order to believe that the Israelis have managed to have figured out how to weaponize dogs and make them rape their prisoners. I mean, that's the sort of thing that you really do need to talk yourself into. And then you have to wonder what it is

you're talking yourself into and why. Stephen, you had a ball up here. Well, let's talk for a minute. about the role of what you might call mainstream Democratic Party rhetoric. I try not to be partisan of these things, but it's one thing for the rabble rousers to say, you know, violence is good,

peaceful riots, the justified, or for Hubert Humphrey, James, remember this, Hubert Humphrey back in the riots of the 60s saying, I could lead a pretty good riot myself because, you know,

things are so, but now you have, you know, you have leading Democrats, you know, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, lots of others.

who also say very implicitly and sometimes explicitly violent rhetoric about Republicans, about billionaires, right, eat the rich, so forth. And I'll just, I'll say it this way. That just seems dangerously irresponsible. And I don't know what the right response to that is. Oh, I do. Condemnation, outright condemnation. And force them to look in a mirror.

When United Healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, was shot in the back and murdered. not because he had done anything, but because he was a member of a class that this addle-brained young man who was clearly beholden to left-wing mythologies and left-wing political ideation, he was fetid by mainstream democratic politicians. Even before his name was cheered on Saturday Night Live, before his face was blasphemously etched onto prayer candles, before the messages that he etched into the bullets he used to murder a father of two, where he sold a popular on-demand merchandise.

You had people like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Kosovoortez and Elizabeth Warren and Chris Murphy and many others who condemned the violence. And yet after that facile condemnation appended a butt. And that but invalidated everything that came before it and demonstrated precisely where they thought the energy should be. The energy should be in how people are furious with health care companies and how these people are stealing your loved ones from you because they're rapacious capitalists. And indeed, the capitalist enterprise should be on trial here as well, not just this individual who met just this horrific act of violence. But maybe his violence was justified.

And maybe his anger is real. And maybe that's something we can tap into and get some political traction. Right. I'm incredibly irresponsible. Yeah. So, you know, you mentioned that all these people say, yes, violence is bad, but thanks to mind, one of my favorite remarks of Milton Friedman, which wasn't about economics directly.

He liked to say, nothing counts out before the butt. I think we ought to bring that around now, right? The fulcrum of the butt, yes, I was like. Right. Right, yeah. I'm Greg Carumbus. Join Jim Garrity of National Review and me each weekday for the three martini lunch podcast. We'll give you the good, bad, and crazy news of the day and lots of laughs too.

Find us right here on the Rikoschet Audio Network at ricochet.com or wherever you get your podcasts. One more quick item. I want to linger for a moment James would know about this business of Russian planting propaganda, which once back in the 80s, I actually had a class assignment to trace out the way some of those crazy aides began with the CIA stories originated. And they always seem to be planted in one or two news. papers in India and then got picked up by the European press and so forth. Well, now the internet, that's even easier. It's something I'll, if I can find this, I'll crack cocaine in the new cities. Aides and crack cocaine in the inner cities were two KGB narratives that were laundered into the press.

Yeah. Right. Turns out, this, I'm not surprised they're still doing it. And internet makes it easier. I'll find this for you if I can. I stumbled across recently just by accident a letter from T. T.S. Elliott, who had his own anti-Semitism problems, as we know, right? But it was to a group that ask him to embrace some anti-anti-Semitic anti-Semitism effort, which he was willing to do. This is like 1956, and he said, you should be very careful that a lot of the anti-Semitism are seeing around as being manufactured and planted by the Soviet Union. I thought, wow, is that interesting? The T.S. Eliot, not thought of as a cold warrior, someone who had some issues, shall we say,

was alert enough to say to a Jewish group, your trouble is coming from the Soviet Union and now from Russia. So file that one away. And I'm with you. I, well, I stumbled across, I don't think anyone knows it. That's why I'm going to write it up when they find some time. You know, Noah, I think a lot of people who would recoil at the thesis of your book, left, we're not violent, do so because they don't believe that these are left-wing problems,

that this is simply an expression of justice, and justice is not known ideology. You quote a couple of suburban young women in your book who sort of, you know, kind of like, yeah, they had it coming. It's kind of, you know, it has to be done. These weren't people who huffed Chomsky in college. They got a contact high, maybe. But they're just sort of part of a non-ideological culture, which believes that leftist ideas are the default for sensible people.

So they don't view these things as, you know, in an ideological framework because how can you possibly have an ideological perspective on George Floyd? Oh, and you start pointing out exactly, you know, what the people behind. Well, there, it seems to me that there are two kind of groups that work here, or maybe three kinds of groups. You've looked at this. Tell me if I'm right.

You have the, you have the anarchists. You have the, you know, the cells that you have in Washington and elsewhere, very loosely organized. They may be, you know, part of some Rose City gig, the rest of it, Antifa and the rest of it. They're leaderless and they're hard to track down and they're liquid and they, you know, dissolve like water. And they do a lot of the front work. And then you have the tourists. You have the people who come to burn because burning is fun. I mean, I live through the riots in D.C. in the early 90s.

The first day was all the people who were really angry, and the second day were the tourists who were taking the subway in to loot for fun. And so you have the group that instigates, and then you have a bunch of people who are non-ideological, but join into it because it gives meaning and purpose and drama to their lives to be their burning and doing the rest of it. And then you have the people who don't participate, but nevertheless add moral support and comfort to it

because they believe that overall excesses aside, this was a good thing because it's the voice of the unheard and his justice, et cetera, et cetera. Is that kind of a fair breakdown of the groups involved in these urban? Yeah, I don't think that's, yeah, I think that's generally fair. Of all of those, you could probably have the, most sympathy for the tourists to the extent sympathy is warranted at all.

There is something that happens inside the human brain when there's rioting and looting that the reptilian elements trigger and typically well-adjusted people can be drawn into disgusting acts of violence, brutal acts of violence, and particularly the property destruction, just by virtue of the crowd action. Crowds are dangerous things, and as any conservative will tell you. the two groups, the two other groups, the moral supporters, as you call it, those are people with something to lose, but who nevertheless endorse and support violent action in order to advance revolutionary political causes. That is far too many figures of influence on the American left today, not just in media, but also in positions of political power in office and out. And then you have the anarchists.

And the anarchists are professional motivators of violence and practisers. of violence. A lot of those tactics that they deploy, we're starting to see the right mimic them, some of which that are really, you know, beloved are the black block tactics. You've seen these people before. You know exactly what they look like. They're call-clad all in black. They cover their faces. They typically wear helmets. Sometimes a truck will pull up and just drop off a whole bunch of respirators and gas masks. Who knows where they came from or who funded them. Sometimes they bring those tools and instruments to the fight themselves. And they are in a lot of. And they are anarchistic, but that doesn't mean they're anti-left. There was a wave of anarchist violence in the

1910s and 1920s, and they were anarchists, but they were also self-described socialists and communists, and the historical record has preserved what were otherwise esoteric debates within that community. And you can kind of picture them from our remove, you know, the smoky salons in which the socialist left would argue about whether the state could dissolve at the outset of the revolution or maybe a proletarian dictatorship would be required before the state could dissolve. This is what we're talking about.

They were all socialistic. But the aims that they had at the outset, but their violence was designed to achieve, differed. The anarchistic set was far more violent at the turn of the 20th century than the socialistic left. Socialistic left was much more proceduralistic, which is something that the Italian anarchists in particular had profound problems with.

But we still have these distinctions today. Anarchist violence AVEs describes left-wing political action, left-wing violent political action, with left-wing motives. It is anarchistic not insofar as because, you know, those distinctions allow the left to wiggle out of it. They say, what does anarchism have to do with the state, right? We want a bigger state, not no state. Right. The two groups, which seem to be ideologically at polar opposites, will unite in their opposition to the state as it is currently constituted. They consider the state, yes, a practice.

a facet of the right wing ecosystem that is against them. By the way, the violent right thinks the same thing. The state is always on the other side, especially when it's targeting them. If the state is targeting them, it is an enemy of their side. And they resolve to meet out vengeance and reprisals to the state as though it were an instrument of their political adversaries. Right. And then once the left wing and the Marxists get the state, they have the monopoly on power and the anarchists are all of a sudden rounded up and it's down to Luw Bianca.

I get that. But this is the thing that you wouldn't get if you were to boil this down in a spreadsheet and just make these people into numbers. You have to actually explore what they think, what they say, what they want politically, in order to identify what you're looking at is left-wing political violence, right-wing political violence. It's why I don't dwell in statistics, although they're in there. They're very useful. But it doesn't make up the bulk of the argument.

The bulk of the argument is made up in stories and the exploration of individuals and their individual political motives and their actions. what effect their actions had, both on their victims and the extended universe of victims who are, you know, afflicted by violence, which ripples out in all directions and has a lot of telling it. You're absolutely right to tell it in terms of the stories, because the stories are illustrative in the ways that simple numbers don't. One of the things I remember is that at the corner of it was Lake and, oh, what was it

in Chicago? I forget. They decided to torch a building. It was three stories tall. And they may or may not have known that it was a furniture store. So it was full of mattresses. and sofa cushions. So the whole thing went up.

And it was quite a spectacular fire. To this day, nothing has been built on that corner. It's empty. The neighborhood suffers because of it. The people who used to get cheap furniture there suffer because of it. But again, you know, nobody cares because righteousness was done. But I remember there were a bunch of people who were standing in front of the building posing for the gram. They had arrayed themselves almost like, you know, you crouch, we'll stand here, we'll all flash.

And people were just taking mad pictures of them with the flame. in the background. And all of those people, I thought, every one of them expects that tomorrow morning when they get up, water will come out of the faucet, lights will come on, food will be available to the store. Every single one of them presumed that society

that had given them all of these material advantages and political advantages and all of the culture would still function tomorrow, that this was simply a vacation from order. This was the purge night. And for those people, I have nothing but unending contempt. But there was another group that was breaking into a store,

that cell phone store. They'd pride, the bars off the front. And they were going in and they were handing out cell phones. And the owner came down because he lived upstairs with his wife who was pregnant. And the guy who was filming this, I will never forget, when he saw the owner, he said, oh, guys, he's Muslim. And all of a number of moral authority had descended upon this shopkeeper because people of his religious faith were hated by the people that we hate. And we're doing something.

There's something Islamophobia. And so the crowd did not know exactly what to do here. They were trying to calculate where the moral shift was going on. And eventually they backed off and let the guy hand out a few things and tell them to go away and the rest of it. So there was not. I don't want to interrupt you. I'm sorry. I don't know what your conclusion is, James.

But that to me is just the perfect illustration of social justice in practice. Yes, that's exactly what it was. Between the instantaneous recalculation, between the fact that there was that there was nothing political and ideological about what they were doing, the fact that underneath it all, that would every single one of them would say that they were doing this because of George Floyd and that there were people who were directing it because they wanted the maximum amount of black block activism to tear down the state. And victim and perpetrator cannot be evaluated neutrally. They have to be evaluated within the context of the group that they come from. immutable characteristics with which way that they were born and the historical narratives that attend around those accidents of birth, which are, by the way, subject to dispute, but not in the minds of those who are filled with righteous indignation and are meeting

out violence in the name of historical retribution. Absolutely so. If you just check to see where this person is in the intersectional victim pyramid, I mean, if the guy had come out and he'd been Sikh, I would have wondered what the guy would have thought. I mean, hey, guys, he's Sikh. And everyone who looked around and say, where are there? they exactly in this thing. I'm not exactly sure. I know they got special ceremonial underwear and they all have little necklaces of, I don't get it, but it's a turban and, okay, the guys from outstate Minnesota would hate him because he has a turban, so he's, he's good. There's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, I mean, I think you can look up with a, it would take a minute, because they're not normally, you know, the top of the list that you encounter. Right. So I don't mind

when you, the two young women that you talk about, I sort of expect that from dumb young people who don't have a sense of history or how fragile civilization is. What really makes, what grinds my gears is people like the mayor, the governor of Minnesota's wife who like to open the windows and smell the burning tires because to her, you know, I love the smell of burning tires in the morning. It smells like victory. I mean, that to me, that endorsement at that level from the politician class is, is indicative of the psychological, of the, yes, the psychological and the political and moral rot that

has attended the party. You would like to think that Hubert Humford would say, Humphrey, in his day, would have said, no, we don't burn things down. That's not how we do it. We argue, we jaw. But it's been there for a long time. Ever since the valorization of the 60s, the complete ignorance and whitewashing of the bombings and the rest of it in the 70s, it's extraordinary how an intellectual class continues to believe this, even after the French Revolution, for God's Yeah, I don't see it as all that different. The governor's wife who celebrated the smell of destruction. And the young woman who are not all that young, by the way,

they were in the mid-30s, young mothers with homes, who were homeowners, who expressed very similar sentiments, but with a little bit more anxiety, I suppose, because they felt that they might be victims of it. It was just going on right next door. so they were trying to rationalize it. But it's all a species of rationalization and an expression of fear, an expression of fear that the mob will come after them next.

The people who were talking on record and trying to talk themselves into the notion that torching a target store was actually good and righteous and virtuous were sort of reconciling with the fact that they had individuals who were on social media who probably were just lying, saying that their business was burned to the ground and they were happy about it. And this is how justice is done. And they were saying, well, listen, I'm all for BLM. I'm all for Black Lives Matter. What happened to George Floyd was terrible.

And justice needs to be served. And maybe this is how you do it. It felt wrong to say you're against the riots, said one. Just because, you know, this reaction has been violent doesn't mean that what's animating the violence is wrong. And that's just a different emphasis with the same expression as what Mrs. Walls was saying. all of them are terrified that the mob will come for them next. So they want to be the last one that's afflicted, you know, passed by me by demonstrating their right thinking.

You know, the fact that they have a gun pointed to their head and they're saying what needs to be said, that is coercive as well. And coercion is a species of violence as recognized in the U.S. Code. But property destruction doesn't count. Coercion doesn't count. The only thing that seems to count are the sort of cliched examples of right-wing violence that make their way into hackneyed hell Hollywood productions, right-school, malicious-style sovereign citizens movement, right-wing violence. That is what they – Waco. That is what they were – Oklahoma City. January 6.

That is what they recognize as a species of violence that is attributable to the right. But one of the things that I dwell on in this book in January 6 is one of the perfect reasons to dwell on it. is the extent to which the right is beginning to mimic the left and the left's tactics. We see less sovereign citizen movement violence, you know, right-wingers digging holes and saying, come get me to law enforcement and then meeting violence out in that fashion. We see affinity groups, as we saw in Charlottesville, which is a left-wing phenomenon, something akin to black-block movements. The January 6th is the sort of mob violence that we had been very comfortable seeing at this point by 2021.

It was everywhere, to the extent that the left was willing to acknowledge it. But what we saw on January 6 was an expression of a kind of mob action that conservatives, who are deeply mistrustful of crowds, would not have engaged on if they did not subordinate what they understand to be proper civic decency, proper civic behavior, to the demands of the moment. And the demands of the moment where there was a lot of social incentives created around in 2020, around street people and street power. Democrats have always been very attracted to that.

But Trump's movement is too. Populist movements are as well. And that's a sort of thing that, you know, flattens individuals, reduces the incentives to judge individuals as individuals, see people as groups as monoliths. You know, when Trump pardoned all the January 6 protesters, he pardoned a lot of very violent people.

But he was only following in Joe Biden's footsteps, who pardoned a lot of people based on the category that they existed at. Yes, exactly. That's social justice. justice. That's not seeing individuals as individuals. It's seeing them as avatars of a type of a cast. You shoot up the Congress because you want Puerto Rican independence. Just wait 20 years and you'll be a forgotten. A forgotten. A forgotten. So two is the violence of the anarchists and the in the Italian anarchists and the 2010s and 1920s. So two is the weather underground and the FALN and the BLA. All of it's forgotten. Why is it forgotten? Well, the Palmer raids we remember because it was an historical overreach by the government, which swept up a whole lot of people. But that's all that happened, James. In between in 1886, you had the Haymarket riot, and then you had the Palmer raids,

and nothing happened in the interim in the popular imagination. I know absolutely nothing. I mean, I spent a lot of time looking at old newspapers and I would find headlines like, all reds to be deported. And I just thought, well, yeah, not really, but you know, good on you. Good on you. Right. Hey, listen, we could go on forever and we shouldn't because people eventually look at their watch

and say, I've been listening to this fantastic podcast. Where's the day gone? We should instead tell them to buy. your book, Blood and Progress. Noah Rothman. Just remember, blood and progress. Remember it because they are not exactly concepts that we want a twin, but some people have, and that's what Noah's done a great job of telling us about stories as well as lots of numbers and engagingly told by one of our favorite writers and guests. Noah, thank you for dropping by the podcast today. We'll see you again when you crank out another book in what, six, seven months or something? Yeah, a couple of years of

these. All right. Talk to you later. Bye-bye. Thank you guys. Bye-bye. Hi, I'm Ben Sass. And I'm Chris Dyerwalt. And this is not dead yet. We're all dying, but some of us have been brought face to face with that reality. However long, each of us have to do it, though, we all want to live a good life. One with meaning, love, and joy. And our guests are here to help us do exactly that.

Now available for download and streaming at ricochet.com. RICOCHAY! Join the conversation. I don't believe it yet. it may be a technical definition, when they say coercion is violence. I like to reserve the word violence for, you know, punching people in the nose,

for actual violence. And not words are violence or speeches, violence, or hate, you know, the rest of it. But burning down buildings, yeah, I'm going to put that in the violent category. There was a writer for a newspaper who I somehow, I don't know how it got past her editors, but she made the mistake of writing a piece about building lives matter too.

And the immediate response was such that I'm sure the piece was yanked and probably the person was de-platformed and put down to, you know, right to the classified transcript area. They say, well, you're sending me to classifieds. Yes, we are. But there aren't any classifieds. That's what we mean. And I was-

But they didn't get to keep a stapler. Probably not. Not the lead stapler. Right. I was tempted to write a piece like that too. And I was waved off it as fast and as hard as you possibly could. And because my beat was architecture and urbanism and the rest of it. And it's very odd.

at a time when a vibrant, there's that word, a dense urban, vibrant, vibrant experience had been torched. And we, you know, we really couldn't lament that because there were greater issues at play. And I thought, no, no, these are the stores of the people who live in these neighborhoods. This is the history of the neighborhood. It is fascinating a way to see the way these buildings that were originally constructed by Swedes and Germans have been inhabited by by now Central and South America. American visitors who've changed the demographic of the communities.

It's fascinating how this piece of neon has survived since 1955 how this building with its modern aspects is now gone. And the whole historical record, the whole visual tapestry of the neighborhood has been torched and history has lost. It wasn't something you were allowed to note. And I just, I found, I found that, I found that instructive. We can't dilute the narrative and we can't pretend that. that it wasn't. We can't even, we can't even say it was bleeping bad.

Now, James, can I flip the script a bit and play host for one question for you that's been on my mind since middle of the week? I don't, I, there's a famous line from, I think, Lionel Trilling about the bloody crossroads between politics and culture or politics and literature. So the New York Times had a story midweek that they represented as a major scandal in a news story that Israel lobbies the Eurovision Song Contest on behalf of Israeli singers and artists. And I thought, Eurovision Song Contest, media, I'd love to hear what James has to say about that. And you may catch you unprepared if you didn't see the story, James, but go ahead and give me your first reaction. I did not see the story.

As a matter of fact, I'm not surprised that they do lobby it. I don't know why they don't use the Jewish space lasers to rearrange the neurons and the heads of the judges and win every single. year. The only thing I know about Eurovision is one, I think that there was some strange Icelandic creature, not Bjork, who was really this sort of feral, scragly, dress-wearing man or not creature, who was held up as an avatar of modern standards and was in terms of visuals and music was merititious in every respect, but it was, I guess it was boundary breaking or something like that. And I thought, just another march toward ugly, ugliness that, the culture seems to have been foisting upon us for the last 50, 60 years.

You go to the Vienna biennial and you see just the worst, or the Venice biennial, you'll see the worst form of modern art imaginable. You go to Cannes and you see them stand and clap for a movie that is drenched with blood and transgressivism and the rest of it. And it's for people who think that we should go there to their museums and the rest of it and celebrate the beauty and the history and the tradition, they seem awfully uninterested in those things themselves and interested in perpetuating nonsense garbage.

but Eurovision songs actually are supposed to be something close to, you know, humble and singable, but I can't tell you any single one of them except for Waterloo. And I don't even know if that won the Eurovision, but I think that perhaps it did. So that's that. I'm not surprised, but hasn't done them any good because, of course, you will have people who refuse to be on the same stage as an Israeli artist. But that's just anti-Scientism. There's nothing to do with Judaism whatsoever. Well, before we go here, Stephen, I'm going to go out in a little cultural notes.

you brought one up as well. We used to do this all the time, and it's not that anybody cares, but if they do, it's always nice to hear about something that's out there in the innumerable number of streaming platforms that you may have missed that people might want to take a look at.

My example of what I'm watching now is unfortunately on Apple TV, which really relegates it to the niche. But I'll get to that in a second. What are you watching now? Oh, my goodness. I'm not watching anything. I've been so insanely busy the last month

that I barely have time even to take in the local news once in a while. So I'm going to have to punt, I'm afraid. Good for you. I've had those busy periods too. Finally got out of my head, though, in the move and everything else, well, not everything. But much of it has calmed down, so I was able to watch a new show, which surprised me because I hadn't heard a word of it. That's Apple TV.

We got a great show. It's fantastic. It's brilliantly written. It's funny. It's well shot. We're not going to tell anybody about it. But eventually they break out, like Severance or Publius. This one is called Widows.

Bay. And it's basically the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Fry, who is the mayor of a small little Massachusetts island that's a very, very haunted. And it's a comedy horror, which I usually hate. It's quirky, which I usually hate. It is self-aware of the cliches, which I usually hate. But the characters in the acting and the writing is so good that it's just an absolute delight. And it's scary. And it's just good. And I'm watching and I'm thinking, where have I seen this actor before? I know I've seen this actor before. And it was in an HBO series where he played, I hate to say it, Perry Mason. And I say, I hate to say it because they went accurate with that. They went back to the 30s. They went back to the scrappy guy that Mason

originally was conceived as. And they reimagined some of the characters and did them very well. But he just wasn't Mason to me because Perry Mason is Raymond Burr walking along like the square embodiment of the law itself and taking deep meaningful pauses and then telling paul drake to go do something i wanted that and i don't think we'll ever get it alas just like they're casting the james bond now and i imagine it's going to be reimagined and brought up for the modern day when i just want a guy in the 60s and a tux with a cigarette that shoots bullets that's all i want and i'll never be given it again well all you want probably folks is for me to back out of this thing and let's go of the daily life, I am going to do so after I make the usual request for you to give us those

five-star reviews wherever you possibly can. I want you to go to ricochet.com if you haven't already after 789 exhortations to do so and check out the member feed. Oh, I'm sorry, you can't, but you could if you just signed up and paid a little bit of money and found the access to the community you've been looking for all your life. Sometimes you'll see those great member posts to break out on the front page, Gary McVeigh, who is our resident film historian, and every single time he posts something about a movie or an actor or a technology or something, you know you are in for a dive and an entertainment and something that you just never get anywhere else.

I scour the web looking for stuff like what Gary writes and I just don't find it, but I don't have to because there it is on Rickache. We were talking about Dr. Strange Love and Failsafe, and that's just one of the things. And also politics and also sports and also stuff and aging and being young and parents. It's all there at RICOchet. It's not just a bunch of people gnatering out about a politics because you can get that anywhere.

That's why I go there. Anyway, that's that. If Charles were here, he will tell you about RICOA 5.5.5.0 coming down the pike soon, but he isn't. So he will next week. So I'll just have to wrap it with the usual statement and saying we'll see everybody in the comments at RICOA,

4.1.7.8.9.2. Bye-bye. RICOCHAY. Join the conversation.