The Ricochet Podcast - The Revolution Is Always The Issue

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

James, Steve, and Charles are back for a new year that seems determined to outdo its predecessor. Lileks reports from the Twin Cities, a site dead set on being the epicenter of American chaos. Then the fellas step out of the Minnesota cold to warm their bones by the fire of collectivism. And they round it all out with a chat about the ever-surprising Don Doctrine, which put an end to one tyrant last week and has many wondering what it could mean for Iran.

Well, there was that, again, you and I are the only people old enough to remember this, but there was that one of my favorite Andy Griffiths scenes when, you know, Ronnie Howard at four years old walks in. He says, what did you learn in school today, Ope? He says, I learn pie are squared. Sheriff Andy says, well, that's wrong, Ope, pie are round, cornbreadder square. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, take you. down this wall. It's the Rickusay podcast with Stephen A.ward and Charles C.W. Cook, I'm James Lally.

And today, Iran, Mondami, Minnesota, and more. So let's have ourselves a podcast. We will draw this city closer together. We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. If our campaign demonstrated that the people of New York yearn for solidarity, then let this government foster it. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ruricey podcast number 771. Why don't you join us at rickashay.com. Why don't you just, why? Well, be part of the most stimulating conversation and community on the web. That's why. I'm James Lillax, and I'm joined because I'm falling apart by Stephen Hayward. Stephen, hello. Hi, James. How are you? Fraud question. Maybe Charlie can answer that. Charlie will be along in just a little bit here.

How am I? I'm in Minnesota. Once again, the epithetero of stuff. about which we are not happy. Let's go right to it. Everybody has been doing the Zapruder bit on the film back and to the left, frame-by-frame analysis trying to figure out where they stand on this issue. I refer, of course, to the shooting of a woman who was interfering in the protest of a nice apprehension. And I will ask you what you thought. I have read a lot of nuanced commentary on this,

and I say nuanced because it generally aligns with what I think. I've read inflammatory comment, and I say inflammatory because I don't agree with it. Naturally, I have this sensible, moderate, clever position here, and I'm wondering if yours is the same. I don't think there's a sensible, moderate position on this. I think we're divided into two camps. I mean, there are some cooler heads in the middle. I thought Charlie, I can speak for him since he's not here, really a very good, very sober piece, weighing all the different aspects of this for National Review Online, and maybe we can get him to reprise some of that when he joins us.

I also worry about, I mean, I've seen several different angles also. I am a little worried about whether we're going to get some fakes, right? You know, the AI stuff these days. That wouldn't surprise me because I've seen a couple. I thought, huh, that doesn't look quite like the other angle. But, you know, we all know Roshamon. Everything looks different from which corner of the street you're on. So I think sort of the, you know, beyond the particular aspects of this thing that happens in a split second

are some of the wider issues of where does the culpability lie for organizing resistance to federal government law enforcement officers? And I connect this, just an opening thought, I connect this to the fact that we have been allowing protests to go unpunished for quite a while. People blocking streets to airports and blocking streets and just the blocking streets part of it because you want to stop climate change. And most of those people have gone unpunished. And so it shouldn't surprise us that we escalate to something awful like this. But I also will say, and I think some listeners will find us harsh or maybe outrageous, well, let's go back, James.

You will remember that in the Chicago Convention of 1968, Tom Hayden and all the organizers of that, they wanted to provoke police violence on purpose. And, you know, they got it. right, the so-called police riot, as it was later called, even though public opinion polls showed that a majority of Americans were on the side of the police, as they were two years later for those poor young National Guardsmen who fired on and killed four students at Kent State in Ohio. Public opinion was on the side of the National Guardsman

because they thought, you know, these hippies, these bombs, as Nixon called them. Remember the fuss about Nixon calling them bums? So here we are, and I do think that if we're going to talk about, okay, you know, ICE and the police and, you know, what are the standards of self-defense for the police in a circumstance like this? I think we need that broader conversation about the left wants this to happen. I actually believe that is true. And they now have their martyr.

And I think we should not let that slide. Well, the left sanctifies protest because it is holding it right and good, only if it's of a particular kind. And the, I hate to say, the media, because that's a solidly. lot and a lot of the organs that we call the media have less influence than they ever did before. But let's just say the general idea on the left of the people who form opinion or repeat it is that basically the protesters may be irritating, but their hearts are in the right place. And if their hearts are in the right place, because they want to stop climate change, because they

want to stop this, because they want to stop immigration enforcement, et cetera, well, there's a certain automatic sympathy that attends to them. So when they see people who are blocking the highway, and it's not them trying to get to the airport to get home for a funeral, they say, yeah, well, you know, sometimes drastic problems require drastic solutions. And consciousness is being raised. That's the other thing. We're always told that consciousness is being raised.

But most people are sick of it. Most people see the people who are tying up the airports, just stop oil, gluing themselves to the ground, and just wishing somebody would floor it. There is just in increasing patience and lack of patience and fatigue with these people, who, as you say, suffer no consequences. You can walk into a museum and a hurl, a can of paint, at a Turner, GMW Turner, and some people will say, well, what's the difference?

But other people will say, you know, yeah, okay, but, you know, what is a painting when compared to the dire existential crisis that we face with climate? So we have since the 60s elevated protest on the left to a sort of holy ritual performed by a sacred cast which can't be criticized because their hearts are in the right place. Now, what we have going on here is something different in that it is not particularly organic. There are, and again, here's where you just sound like a nutcase. There are shadowy organizations behind it. Well, no, they're not shadowy. They're out in the open.

their organizations whose point it is to get people to the place where the apprehension I see it all the time on my Twitter feed I go and apparently more than that there's a whole group of these trained quote observers end quote who subscribe to telegram and signal feeds who get information on where they're supposed to go and they show up and they yell and they have their whistles

and they film and the rest of it now yes they ought to be able to show up and film and blow whistles if they wish but getting up close and interfering and screaming the same tired litanys of where's the warrant, what is your badge, why you were doing this, doesn't stop anything from happening. They haven't stopped anything from happening.

But what they've done is they've raised the temperature on this so that every single act, which is their intention, is attended with a great deal of sound and fury and volume and protesting and the rest of it. Giving the impression, I think, that there is some sort of grassroots people just pouring out of their houses to defend their neighbors. Some are. But it's not that. It is, it is an organization, there are organizations that are involved in doing this. And what's their end game? I don't know, because they're,

because they're not going to stop these things. If anything that we learned is that things are different than they were in 2020, is that now, um, the, I, the next day, just simply went back to doing what they were doing the previous day, you know, took a little operational pause. and said, no, we're back at it. And we're not stopping. We're not taking a knee. We're not putting on, you know, a sad, we're not going to be po-faced about this. It happened. There's going to be a process, but we got a job to do it. We're going to do it, which is different, I think, this time than it was in a lot of the, you know, the kneeling and the begging and the apologizing that went on in 2020. You're not seeing institutions, corporate institutions, all of a sudden, scrambling to figure

out how they can get on the right side of social justice in this case. Yeah, right. Not this time. They're not going to bend the knee this time. Look, you ask, what is the end game here? And I mean, I can give you a proximate answer and a general one that are complementary. I think the general answer is, remember the, I think it's David Horowitz, whoever said, the issue is not the issue. The issue is always the revolution. Now, maybe that's a little bit hyperbolic, but not too much. I think that it's always the impulse, you know, to go on a large-scale attack and exploit things like George Floyd six years ago and now this and so forth. It's also true that the left, especially in Minnesota,

especially Governor Walts, is desperate to change the subject from the massive social services fraud that has unfolded there, and which, by the way, we can come back to this perhaps, I think maybe a big issue in this election cycle and again in 2028 nationwide, because don't think this is only limited to Minnesota. No.

But there's one other thing to say, about the sort of protest culture. You know, Americans, I think, I think I take your point about how Americans say, well, this is annoying, especially if you're trying to get somewhere inconvenient to have the roadblocked. On the other hand, it's possible that a lot of Americans, not the ones in the media, but ordinary Americans, everyday Americans, can hold two thoughts in their mind at the same time. And one of the things that was true about the Vietnam era is that the Vietnam War was increasingly unpopular, but the anti-war movement marching in the streets was even more unpopular. And, you know, this is

something that the smarter people on the left, the late Todd Gitlin, for example, figured out late in the game. And so I think that same dynamic can be playing out now. So, you know, I say listeners and everybody else, pay no attention to the braying hounds of the media who are all on the side of the Democratic Party apparatchiks, desperate to change the subject, desperate to stay on the attack against Trump and anything Trump is doing, and pay attention to the real facts on the ground. So, you know, for Waltz, this has been, hate to be totally cynical and crass, but this has been a godsend for him this week because it is allowing him to change the subject. And so this is how it's going to play out over the next, I don't know, several weeks at least.

And one thing that's different in that instead of having government organizations which do audits, which are then kiboshed by the people on top, instead of, you know, a couple of, you know, few high-profile trials, as we had here with Feed My Future, where the issue just sort of goes away after a while and no general conclusions are made for it. You have an army of people who have decided to take it upon themselves to go around their communities and figure out exactly what these daycares are doing, what these transportation centers are doing, what these autism centers are doing, what these home health care centers are doing. And they're finding an extraordinary amount of front wherever they happen to look. So you're right. It's an issue in the coming election,

but also in the election to come because it underscores this feeling that we started to get during Doge that there is such an extraordinary amount of money being shoveled out that does not serve any purpose, accomplish anything except line the pockets of people who figured out how to game the system. And so what was initially set up as an active empathetic government, a good thing. We will make sure that the elderly are transported to their hospital. We will make sure that children actually don't starve. We will make sure that, you know, this need will be met. No one really argues anymore that we shouldn't be helping old people get to the hospital. But we found that in almost every single instance, when a program is enabled to do these things,

it balloons, it mushrooms, it grows, it becomes what was once a balloon that you, you could hold in your hand as the Hindenburg. And now we're seeing the whole gas bag just go up in flames because people are realizing, my God, my God, the amount of money that I pay that is shoveled out. We saw with Doge how money from the state would go to an NGO, or go to university, which would apportion it to an NGO, which would give $100,000 to a Peruvian llama,

a farmer who was trying to teach his indigenous people, new modern methods of basket weaving, whatever. And you multiply that times a billion and you realize that we have been played for suckers. I was writing out my advanced tax payment to the state. And I was furious because every single dollar that I was, I could just see as I was writing the numbers, I felt like every one of them was going to be wasted. And if it wasn't wasted this year, I could count back year after year after year after year and just see all of those dollars flowing not to the things that we had agreed that the social compact required us to fund,

but going to scams that they let go because they didn't want to seem like bad people, because the money flowing was too good, because the whole sweet arrangement made everybody happy in the unit party state, and, yep, yep, you know, I don't pay, I go to jail. The people who did the scams, are they going to go to jail? people writing their checks saying, I don't think so. I go to jail if I don't pay. But these guys who took the millions of dollars

to have a daycare in their basement where no kids ever shut up for three years, are they going to jail? Yeah, probably not. That would be mean. That would be mean and insensitive. Right. Well, so I have a field theory for all this,

which comes in two parts. One is, if you go all the way back to the financial crisis of 2008, after which we committed, what, a trillion dollars of whatever it was called then under Obama, and then you get to COVID where I think we spent three to four trillion dollars between Trump one and then

Biden and I actually think it was more money than the government knew how to spend. I mean, no, stipulate the government can always spend it, but the point is, and I think the left, which has been exploiting all these programs for years, you now had the whole thing expand by two orders of magnitude overnight with little or no controls, little or no oversight. And that's on purpose, by the way. I want to come back to that point, But I say it's a national story.

Out here in California, the latest estimate is as much as $70 billion in state and federal money may have been misappropriated or fraudulently spent. And this is not brand new news. I mean, we knew two, three years ago there was an auditor's report that $30 billion of unemployment money out of COVID was perhaps spent fraudulently. We learned that some convicts in prison were collecting some of this money, including what that Peterson kid who murdered his wife, 25 years ago, whatever it was. Now, why wasn't Waltz concerned about this? Why was he suppressing the whistleblowers who kept bringing up that this was going on? I think it's because for a lot of people on the left,

and Walt seems just dumb enough to be one of them easily, is that for them, this is a form of Ayrsat's redistribution of wealth. In other words, they don't think it's fraud at all. They think it may be inefficient, it may be not universal enough, et cetera, but I think a lot of people on the left think this is just, this is good, it's not fraud, they deserve it. The middle class Americans should be made to pay, like, you know, Mondami's household, housing czar has just said. And so I actually think that really is at the core of this, is that the left doesn't think that welfare fraud is actually even possible because it's deserved. And then the last thing I'll say is, you know, the business about, oh, so, oh, racism.

Okay, it's racism because it's happening among Somon. Hollies. Well, so here's a problem. There's a whole bunch of embarrassing social science data out of Europe. We always admire Europe's great cradle to gray welfare states. Turns out some social scientists found more than 10 years ago that support for the high tax, high benefit welfare states in England is closely correlated with ethnic homogeneity. It's Swedish Lutherans who all share the same work ethic. And that is collapsing in real time in Europe, so much so that in Denmark, just in the last couple weeks, the socialist prime minister has said, you know, some of these migrants we've taken in, they need to be deported. And they've cut way back on benefits they're making available to their

migrants from the Middle East and Africa who weren't working, who don't know the language, aren't learning the language. And so if that's happening in Europe, boy, the Overton window is really moving. Very much so. Yes. When you have a, when you have an ethnically homogenous country of six million people, you can have a consensus. Now, that consensus can be stifling in that, you know, people say that there are guardrails in Swedish conversations, that keep the dialogue and the national conversation in between, you know, in a certain lane. But those guardrails are breaking down it because simply when you don't have a homogenous society anymore, you have people who are going to game it.

And it's the same in Minnesota. I mean, Minnesota adapted that Scandinavian model. We had Wendell Anderson on the cover of Time magazine, and holding up a walleye, a good life in Minnesota, because we had made an arrangement. And the arrangement would be everybody's going to pay high taxes, but you're going to get good schools, good roads, good government up and up. We acquiesced a sort of technocratic rule by the Met Council, which will tell us how we should grow and where the highway should be and how the water should be distributed.

And people just generally went along with it because the ideas were sound, the practice seemed to work. but that only works if you have everybody buying into it. It only works if the social compact is shared and you have a high trust society. Eventually, you can maintain that or when people from other ways of thinking. And again, again, we're told that one of the great things about diversity is that it gets other ideas, other ways of looking at the world, other cultures. But it also seems to presume that everybody who comes here is going to have a Scandinavian mindset and slot right into it. no so yeah what minnesota is experiencing is what the scandinavian countries is experiencing and where it ends up we don't know i mean sweden other countries are hampered by laws that they that they've

compacts that they've signed about migration and an asylum and the rest of it that keep them from doing things so it's curious to see exactly what they expect to do about it well can i interrupt us real real fast james uh i haven't checked on this lately, but Sweden is having an active debate in their parliament about changing their constitution so they can revoke the citizenship they've granted to some of their recent migrants. That's how fast things are changing in the famous Scandinavian social democracies, beloved of our left. By the way, you can, here and there, if you look at the leftist media, you can find that they're starting to get unhappy about this. They're starting to sour on Denmark and

Sweden and the whole rest of the scene, which again shows you how the Overton window is changing. right well as somebody said the other day in the protest in new york city actually there's no such thing as an illegal immigrant since this is stolen land therefore everybody here has the same legal status which is a recipe for national dissolution but speaking of europe charles c wook has finally joined us and charles we were talking about the shooting in minnesota minneapolis uh boy i wish i didn't have that it's like i got a macro key i can just type and you get that you know dropped into a piece you wrote a piece for NR about it about the video about your thoughts on it Stephen said it was extremely nuanced and wise I'll be the judge of that welcome welcome and tell me what you were saying in that piece that everybody should go read well I said of course that we should probably sell Minnesota to Canada yeah no I didn't

I was trying to dispense with a lot of the nonsense that has made it difficult to hone in on the question here, the question that would come up at a trial, although I don't think there will be one, which is, did the officer have a reasonable suspicion that his life was in danger such that he could open fire? And I noticed that this was getting bogged down in all manner of other claims. So while I'm not entirely sure what I think, although on balance, I think he did have a reasonable suspicion and that he would be acquitted, I thought it was perhaps more useful rather than pile in and write a hundredth piece on my views on that to point out all the silly things that people were saying that really are irrelevant.

For example, that this was an execution or an assassination, which it very obviously wasn't. the shooting was in response to the car moving, whether justified or not, that this could have happened to any of us, that's not true. This wasn't a lightning strike. Again, whether you think it was justified or not, this was the product of this person who seems, per the New York Post, to have been protesting ICE, having made certain decisions. The claim that this was somehow inappropriate because it involved a 37-year-old woman who had toys in her Honda Pilot. A Honda Pilot is a car.

It weighs four and a half thousand pounds. The car responds the same irrespective of whether it's being driven by a very strong man or by a computer or by a very weak woman. It's like a gun in that respect. The physics doesn't change. So there are all these things that people were saying that really have nothing to do with it. And I think to... But let me stop here one second.

And if you argue any of those, any of those, they get angry with you for somehow nitpicking and getting away from the central issue, which is the... That's what I... I mean, people get infuriated when you say, oh, so you're blaming her. Oh, so you think it's okay to shoot a 37 year. It's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that these ancillary issues don't get to the core of it. and the ancillary issues somehow become this mush, this sweet-smelling mush that gets painted over, that gets daubed over everything where we're supposed to ignore the particulars.

Yeah, and the other one, of course, is that she deserved or didn't deserve it, which is not a useful question here because this is not a cosmic matter. We're not debating here whether or not those who find themselves in her situation. ought to be awarded a death penalty. And I think in this regard, this is similar to the Ashley Babett shooting, where people get very hung up on those words, deserved. But these are, again, I don't think it will go to trial, but if it did, these are questions that revolve around details and minutiae.

And another point that I make is they revolve around details in minutiae as they were experienced in the brief moment by those involved, not as they have been processed by us, because we have access to information they didn't. We can watch it over and over again. We know how it ended. We have background information. We can slow it down. We can see it from eight different angles. We can freeze frame the wheels. we can run experiments on ice and so forth.

But that's not what happened here from the perspective of the officer. Or in the case of the Capitol riots, the police officer who shot Ashley Babett, who didn't know how it ended. And I just think that it's quite annoying that people, and I include conservatives to some extent on this, I think Trump did get way out over his skis when he said that it was a willful, violent. and was another word he used, but running over. That's not true. And if you hadn't seen the video,

you would have a false impression of what had happened here. But I don't really understand why people are trying to draw these grand narratives out of this when it was an incident involving two particular people in a split second that led people to have to make decisions. I mean, that's what matters, right? Yes, they're drawing something out of it because it's useful to do that. And so, you know, when I was talking to people about this, and they were saying, okay, let's, I don't know exactly who they were apprehending. I don't know what he was guilty of. But let's say that he's illegal. He's coming to the country three times after deportation, and he's committed sexual violence on minors. What instrument of government would you use to remove that person? And would it not look identical to what we are doing right now? And there's no answer for that, because you can't say, well, judges, well, you know, you should have just showed up at the airport with a boarding pass. gotten on a plane. Well, you know, the thing of it is, is that everybody starts the year with

great hope and the rest of it. And something usually comes along in the first fortnight that says, all right, it's back to the same old bleep. But I don't know about you guys, how your New Year's Eve went. You know, we had a celebration here. Of course, we had resolutions. Resolutions are usually often towards health and fitness. Go to the gym. I already go to the gym. But there comes a time to think, actually about what comes after all those resolutions about health and fitness to make sure that the ones you love are covered if something happens. And yeah, I'm talking life insurance. Isn't that fun topic?

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when they think about collectivism. Collectivism, a warm, gentle bath in which we will all bob. Rugged individualism of pulling up your bootstraps This is an old notion of a scary thing in some cowboy days. No, we're going to join hands, comrade, and march forth into the alfalfa fields to do our communal reaping. Well, yeah, this is what Mondami has said. And it's of a piece with the statements they've drug up about his housing advisor,

who the other day was seen to be walking away in tears and going into the house in tears because she was asked hard questions about the idiocy, the sort of dorm room bong ripping stuff you say about capitalism and kill all the white men and reduce the middle class and the rest of it. Now she's in a position of power. These comments are coming back to bite her, perhaps. And we get a true view of these sort of theater kids Marxists and what they want.

And they're a little bit stunned to find that people think, no, this is spinach and I say to hell with it. Well, first of all, who's going to say it, Charlie, you or me? Irrand is calling it wants your villains back. But Holes inaugural address of Mondami was right out of the pages of Atlas shrugged. It's amazing. You know, I've myself never cared that much for Rand until Obama became president and now in New York City for certain. There is an interesting thing about that, SIA, whatever last name is.

You're right. And one of the questions, by the way, James, is that apparently her mother lives. a $1.4 million house in Tennessee or somewhere, and so it looks like hypocrisy to, you know, this privileged person. There's a pattern now that I've observed for several years, which is people like the theater kids, as you put it, like to spout off on social media

and elsewhere about social justice, or universities like to have crazy programs. And then suddenly, when you expose it to a wider public, the university scrubs the website instantly. And this poor lady breaks down in tears. side. My observation was, I used to think that maybe the characterization of these folks as snowflakes was a little bit overbroad. Well, guess what? It turns out she turns out to be a snowflake when she's confronted with more public attention for the things that she said and apparently thinks and can't handle it. So in an odd way, I'm kind of encouraged about all this, although it's going to be crazy. Mondami is staffing his administration with pretty crazy people. You know, I mentioned earlier James that California may have, had as much as $30 billion in misspent unemployment funds during COVID. The person who oversaw that was Julie Sue, who Obama wanted to be Labor Secretary and Senate

wouldn't confirm her. Well, the Bandami has appointed her to some senior post, which just seems perfect. Charles, we are constantly told, of course, that communism, real communism has never been tried. And I read a quote the other day, I can't remember exactly who it was, pointing out that the Soviet Union was staffed, start to finish with people who were the best communists you could come up with. These were people who went to college to study Marxist Leninism. And a lot of them really believed it.

They weren't just putting a sort of gloss on their own ability to, their own desire to get power. So, yeah, I think communism has been tried. I think we got a pretty good look at the track record. But we're supposed to be feeling good about collectivism because it's what? It's a nursery school, everybody's sitting. together in a warm room on the sharing their fruit roll-ups. Do these people have absolutely no idea how this stuff plays out in real life?

They can't be that stupid. Wait a minute. Yes, they can. They can be that stupid. I'm glad you used the C word because that's what this C-weaver person is. She's a communist. She's also a racist. Half of her output, maybe moral, is racism as much as it's communism. I know academic types will say it can't be racism because it has to involve power I think that's garbage

I've always thought that was garbage she wants white people to suffer she wants to destroy the white middle class's wealth and she even said she wish she believed in God because if she believed in God she would think that white people would burn in the afterlife

perhaps that's the warm collectivism she is a racist and white men would particularly Right. That's racism. I just want to make this very, very clear to anyone who's fuzzy on this, that under the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act, that is racism. There is no such thing as positive or negative discrimination. There's no classes of people who are exempt or bumped up. The Supreme Court's made this abundantly clear, especially recently. That is racism. So she's a racist. She's also a communist, and her ideas are ridiculous. And although she is labeled as tenant

protection or tenant advocacy or what you will, her aim here is to nationalize property in New York City. And if you look at the way that she wishes to go about this, this becomes clear. She says rent control fixes everything. That's her view, stated view. So what you do is you first set rents at such a low level that landlords can't make any money on their properties. So what do they do? They cut back on maintenance and repairs and improvements. And then you go to those buildings on which you've imposed rent control and you say, well, the landlord hasn't been doing repairs, maintenance or improvements. So the city has to take the building. She says exactly that on a show with Sam Seder from last year, not six years ago, from last year. That is communism. It's absolutely appalling. I don't think

is surprising because I think Mamdani is a communist as well. So the question is will she prevail? Will she manage to push this through in a country that is not communist and that doesn't tolerate communism legally? But they're going to try. Why did she cry? I saw two theories. One is that she's a cry bully that she doesn't like being questioned. The other thought was really interesting. Someone said no. She's upset because the manner of the questioning made her realize that Other people aren't enlightened in the way that she is. And that makes her sad. I don't know why she cried, but I hope she cries more.

It's interesting how we have communists who aren't actually quoting Marx and Lenin. I mean, they seem to be oddly disconnected from that. They seem to have assembled the whole world, inherited the whole worldview and way of thinking without really interrogating the actual texts themselves. They've got this set of received wisdom that they got. And where it came from, it doesn't really matter. They just know that it's correct because it makes them feel good. makes them feel as though they are advocates for the downtrodden and are here to bring a wonderful

situation of total equality but when you mentioned the whole racism thing she gets a pass on that because she is extirpating her own heritage and she's performing she's doing she's doing the work shall we say you know what james i have become increasingly persuaded over the last 10 years or so by those who say that for the vast majority of these people it's flat out envy and a cover for the fact they just want your car. They don't like you. They don't think you should have the things you have. And this gives them a fig leaf that they can use to hide, that they wish to violently dispossess you of your things or worse. I knew at Oxford a Marxist professor who was absolutely brilliant. I mean, of course it was wrong. But he genuinely believed all of this stuff.

And he was well versed in it and he could argue it. And he was lovely, actually. He was extremely open minded and tolerant. He didn't mark anyone down for disagreeing with him, but he was a Marxist, and he thought it. He had built this ideological framework up around himself and studied Marx, and that was his worldview. Fine, I just think so many of these people are just envious. I think a lot of them are mediocrities who look around and are confused why they aren't doing better than they are, and Mamdani's come along, and they've glommed onto him because they think he's going to deliver that for them. I think that the Marx bit is not like my professor at Oxford, a real intellectual line of inquiry, but it's just the words they need to utter so they don't sound completely crazy

or venal. Yeah, you know, I'm glad you brought up envy as what Tom Sol has been saying for years, and it's the central organizing principle of the left. And by the way, Charles, I also had two excellent radical Marxist professors, one undergraduate, one graduate, one graduate, They didn't grade you according to your opinions, and they were terrific to have classes with and argue with. That's the old school style. So they are out there, but a lot of them who are, as you put it, when you say mediocre, I think that's, I think an awful lot of academics, especially lefty ones are mediocre. And deep down inside, they know it. They know they're kind of frauds or they're intellectually insecure.

I've seen this a lot since I marinate in academia. I'm glad you mentioned envy for this reason. I did publish an article in national affairs back in the spring called envy and social justice. And I was asked this question. You know, our social scientists explore all kinds of things in increasingly inventive ways, especially racism. Now it's subconscious racism, right? We all say that, you know, we're for the Civil Rights Act.

We don't use the N-word and all the rest of that. But I say, no, you're still really a racist. Why? And they'll devise these surveys. And so, for example, if you agree with a statement that the best person should get the job, that's coded as subconscious racism. So these things become self-proving, you know, like a self-licking ice cream.

And you will look around in vain to find any social scientists trying to do that same kind of analysis of envy. It would not be hard to do, but it's assiduously avoided by social scientists. And I think we can guess why. I don't think there's no secret why. And so, you know,

the very best book on envy, that's the copious interdisciplinary study, goes all the way back to 1967, a guy named Helmichick, a German scholar, wrote a book called Envy of Theory of, I forget what the... But there's almost,

I've scoured a scholar literature and can find almost nothing except now and then to exonerate it and say it's not a serious thing. But if we can study subconscious racism and all kinds of other things, we ought to be able to study envy too. I won't dispute that envy as part of it.

But I think it's a way for a lot of midwit, banal people to elevate them themselves. They're post-religion, so they don't have that framework that they can use guiding them to the world. And so they just say these words, which make them seem like good people and smart people. And also gives them the frisson of a revolutionary, which ever since the 1960s has been the mark of an interesting person, somebody who doesn't accept the current, you know, well, ever since 1848, ever since 1789, ever since. So I think that that is a great part of it. let a shift because there's a whole big wide world out there and part of it is on fire.

I haven't heard anything from Tehran in a day because they've snipped off the internet, even though Elon Musk, you know, the guy who made the Nazi salute, that horrible man, that oppressor of freedom and speech has apparently turned on Starlink for a lot of people in Iran so that they can get some messages out. Every night after 12 days, is it now, we see snippets of film of more and more people pouring into the streets more and more flags being taken down reports that the police have switched over the shot you know the prince makes

a stay it's it's poised it more than it seemed to be before but I swear we've been here half a dozen times and and I hate to be the meme of the nothing ever happens guy but I would hate to think that this ends

with the regime still in power especially since the president post Maduro flexing a little bit said that if they start to fire on the protesters that there will be consequences look and learn and listen and all the rest of it. So I don't know. What do you guys think about Iran in the next 72 of hours or so? Well, I'll go first. You know, my late friend Angela Cotevilla had a simple explanation for why the Cold War ended. He said it ended because the Soviet Union lost the will to shoot its own people in

large numbers. I like that blunt explanation. And I think that the test right now is, is does the Iranian regime have the will still to do that? There's some evidence that the answer is yes. They have called out of what the IRGC out of their barracks, the Revolutionary Guard. And there are reports that there's a lot of government violence against the protesters and large numbers of people are being killed. We really don't know. Information is patchy, despite Starlink trying to break through and so forth. And I'll say the last thing is, is if the regime does fall, and of course I think we all wish that it will, what an irony that the beginning of the end of the regime started on October 7, three because it's all events since then have led to this moment in Iran.

So I'm hopeful but very worried that it's going to be very, very bad. I don't know. I have watched over and over again as we have got our hopes up that the Iranian people will overthrow this horrible regime. And I've stopped believing it. No, that doesn't mean I'm right. But I've stopped believing it because it's never happened. The first time in, was it 2011?

2009, I think. 2009. Yeah. I assumed that it was going to happen because 20 years earlier, the Berlin Wall had fallen. And as a younger man, I assume this is just what happened. I thought maybe there was some sweep of history that guaranteed that, that, tyrants would fall. And now I'm just not sure. And I wonder if this has lost momentum as well. Now, I'm told by people who know an enormous amount about this far more than I do, that one of

the big differences in this case is the economy, that the economy is so bad. Right. And so this is going to sound odd. I don't mean that in other contexts it would be an ideological revolution, it would be abstract in some sense. Of course, there are very real material problems with the regime. But perhaps that changes it. Perhaps that prevents people from going back to their lives, as it were. But I don't know, I'm getting nervous again that this is going to fizzle out and that I will never see this regime for. I share your feelings. On the other hand, we have a Venezuelan fallout, which is fascinating to me, because in one stroke, We, well, we, like I was repelling down from the helicopter, the United States dealt a severe blow to China, to Russia, and to Iran. Basically, the Don Roe doctrine, as he's calling it, is saying, no, this is our backyard, and you're not going to muck about here.

And the days of the Biden administration and the Obama administration just saying, I'm sorry, we don't like what you're doing. Can we give you some more money? Those days are over. were they're done. And so now China finds itself in the back foot there, and Russia having faced one humiliation after the other, right down a little tanker that we diverted and boarded, loved to know what was in that, probably never will,

seems to have given America all of a sudden a pop and a swagger, along with the Iran decapitation of the nuclear program, that is, I think, one of those sort of turnarounds comparable to what we had in the, the 80s when all of a sudden America no longer believed that the military was this 70s falling apart rusty thing, but actually was a competent force and a force for good. And it seems like it happened a lot faster than it did in the 80s. Is this so? There's America back baby when it comes to the armed forces in there. In other words, if we're not retreating hastily with people

firing at us and dropping bombs and people falling out of the wheelwells, the cargo plane is they drop off, we can actually accompany something. If we don't exactly prioritize a transgender surgery for somebody so that they can be on the front, then we actually are accountable. If we don't make the whole thing seem to be a woke enterprise, you're actually getting a corn fed Fred from Iowa signing up and saying, yeah, hell yeah, all right. Well, the operational execution was just so stunningly successful and awe-inspiring. And that always has what Churchill used to call a moral effect on the way people look at these things.

And in particular, one thing that I think is quite significant, people have been saying who know defense matters, is we neutralize their Chinese-supplied and Russian-supplied air defense capabilities quite easily, quite swiftly. And so suddenly that makes China and Russia have to doubt how good their stuff is if they actually come toe-to-to-to-to-with us. Okay, so there's that. The other thing I like about it is, you know, what of Trump's great skills is he keeps everybody always off balance. And so, you know, we weren't even done with the news cycle about snatching Maduro before he was talking about Greenland and saying some crazy things or Hegsus saying some crazy things about no, we don't rule out military force to, you know, you acquire Greenland, which really is kind of reckless. Insane. Completely insane. But on the other hand, you can see how the world's reacting.

But in the middle of all this, you know, we kind of miss this because I've always. big things happening in Minnesota and elsewhere. About midweek, the Trump administration announced that the United States was withdrawing or ending its membership and participation in 55 different international agencies, most of them in the UN, one of them being the intergovernmental panel on climate change. That's the head of the whole climate change circus. Now, to be sure, if you get a Democratic president in three years, they'll bring us all back into all those things.

But still, it's a – that does not come without cost. I mean, that's, you know, all the things Trump is undoing they'll want to redo are going to be hard to do. And maybe the cherry on top was also in the middle of the week, the corporation for public broadcasting, you know, the ministry of the media, of government-run media, having been deprived of federal funds, decided to close down completely. That's a win. And, you know, again, bringing that back, they can probably do it, but it will require some political capital. And so we'll see, they're not going to undo everything Trump does, which. Why do you hate Big Bird? Why do you hate Big Bird?

Big Bird makes money. You know, I've been pointing out for years, right? My next door neighbor who passed away was the head writer for Sesame Street and the Muppet Show. And he did very well at all that. Well, yes, as the joke goes, my agent was sitting in the backseat of a car with Sherry Lewis. And as a matter of fact, he shook her hand and said her hand was remarkably soft. He said, your hand would be soft if it had been up at a lamb's rear for the last 20 years, too. sort of work back when people knew who Sherry Lewis was.

If you know who Sherry Lewis was and you're eager to be amongst people who do, that's what Rookshay meetups are for. Yes, this is not one of those websites. It just has a bunch of guys blathering at you. No, this is part of a larger community that includes guys blathering at you. Rickashay people get together and they meet. So if you are a member of Rookashay.com, you may be wondering, hey, what's up in February?

Having a group meet up in Detroit, Michigan. And we're having a group meet up in Cape Canaver. I still love the way we went back to Cape Canaveral in Florida, of course, in February. And if you would like to meet people from RICOchet, all you have to do is just sort of post your idea for a meetup and they'll come to you. Now, invite it, mind you. They're not going to just show up at your house and knock with pot dish. You've got to put something together, but they will. RICOchet meetups happen all over the country, all over the world. To learn more, you can go to RICOA, join up.

Yeah, it costs a little. It does. It's hardly anything, and it's cheap, and it gives you. access to the member feed with the real communities for. Go to the meetup page at rickshay.com slash events, and there you will find out where next people will meet. Well, gentlemen, before we go, I hate to ask, but did you have any New Year's resolutions? No, you know, the funny, the irony is I actually have been working out a little bit this week,

even though I didn't make that cliche resolution that people always do. I love the Babylon B. Babylon B had a story. Planet Fitness offers two-week gym membership for it. Charles? No, I'm not a big New Year's resolution person, actually. Well, but Charles, you should be, I mean, if I were you, I would be resolving to enjoy the fact that your beloved Jaguars have performed so. I really paid attention out here on the West Coast,

but a great season they've had. Trevor Lawrence is surging and looks to me like you're going to probably enjoy a nice, deep playoff run, and who else? Oh, please, please, please. I'm so nervous, Stephen. I'm going on Sunday. They're playing the bills. Great team, great quarterback.

I'm just so nervous they're going to crash out in the first round. But, yeah, I mean, we ended 13 and 4. Last year we were 4 and 13. And I thought we'd improve. I thought we had the right coach. I've always believed in Lawrence, but I didn't think we'd go 13 and 4. We were one bad PI call away from being the 1 seed.

So it was a remarkable season, but I just hope it doesn't end. because I'm really into it. It will. It's somebody who's been there a few times. It will. You'll live and you will feel like a fool for having hoped. I know.

It'll come to the end of the fourth quarter and you will look back and you will say, why did I even, why? But the ride is wonderful. The game will, yes, the nerves that you feel on that, it's great. It's why we do it. It's why we put. I am now. James, the Dower Scandinavian existentialism is really coming out today.

But you see, I do deserve this, because at various points, I have teased James about the Vikings. Oh, of course. And so I deserve, I'm going to take my lumps here. Yeah. I wish you all the best, and I hope you and your team are happy. I have to end with this. Charles, we are on video at the moment. Can you, I knew this right away.

This is a deep, I wish it wasn't deep, but it is, pop culture reference. Can you tell by looking at Stephen who plays drums? his shirt is it a genesis shirt Phil Collins very very good but what's the album don't move so he doesn't see any more of the words

is it trick or treat yeah it's trick of the tail yeah yeah that's what you don't know what you're wearing that's right that's exactly what I was the first post Phil first post Peter Gabriel album Peter Gabriel yeah where we were pretty impressed and actually

it's a good album it's got some wonderful songs on it. And I remember when it came out, and I was a young lad listening to that and was gratified. I think he came out in 76, James. So this is the 50th anniversary, which, you know, we're old guys.

Oh, that would be. Oh. I know. I wasn't born then. Oh. I know. This is rough. Okay.

All right. Well, I'm going to go downstairs and have some, have some Metro Cal and, you know, take out my, pot my teeth and soak them. in polyden. No, you didn't soak them in polydent. Polydent was what you used to put them on. I think it was Martha Ray with her big flashing choppers

who was the person for that. It wasn't Jane Russell who did the soaking solutions. One of those glamour gals from the 40s who popped up in the greatest generation's commercials in the 60s telling them where to put their upper plates. Yes. Well, okay,

Times winged chariot, all that. But Rookishay is still young, still new, still heading forth with great vigor and enthusiasm into the new year. You can join us there and you will find a good place to read and to write because if you remember, you can write in the post this week. It which is great. We would like to thank you for going to Fabric because that's where you're going to get life insurance. And as a parent with small kids or somebody later in life who's just looking for it, go there, give it a start and support them for supporting us. Everybody works out.

Everybody pays. Everybody benefits. And, you know, five start. reviews at Apple Podcasts are always one of those things we're asking you to do. I've been doing it for about 674 podcasts now. One of these days, you're actually going to do it. The weight of responsibility and guilt will task you to do it. Your reviews allow new listeners to discover the podcast. That keeps the show going. It keeps RICOchet going, et cetera, et cetera. By the way, if you're new to this, we're not the only podcast in the Rurcache. We've got a whole audio feed with all kinds of people, including the diner, which returns this Saturday once I get down to it and decide exactly what I'm to say. Who am I kidding? I never know what I'm going to say. It's been great. Thank you,

Stephen. Thank you, Charles. Regards to all, and we'll see everybody in the country. Oh, I got to ask. What version are we on now, Charles, and ricochet, 4.4.4.4.4.4.4. Still pre-big, big update. Yeah, well, big update to come. And won't it be fun when we flip the switch and everything goes dark and scrambles and server blows up? But no, that won't happen until it doesn't though we'll see everybody in the comments at ricochet 4.0 bye-bye