The Ricochet Podcast - The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

Episode Date: May 21, 2022

Rob’s off on vacation, but Peter’s back from the Promised Land! Thankfully you won’t have to wait until his next episode of Uncommon Knowledge is released to hear from Yoram Hazony, author of Conservatism: A Rediscovery. Yoram has revisited the past in the hopes of finding something new that conservatives will desperately need in order to offer something other than a another variant of liberalism. Source

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Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson. He's back.

Rob Long. He's gone. I'm James Lilacs and I'm here. Today we talk to Yoram Hazoni about conservatism. Let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you. Welcome everybody to the Ricochet Podcast number 594. Hey, good idea here. Join us at Ricochet.com and be part of the most stimulating conversations and community on the web. It's cheap. You can help us, well, you know, extend our podcast streak into the thousands if we last long enough. I'm James Lytleks, Minneapolis, and I'm joined by my first guest, Peter Robinson.

I'd say co-host, but, you know, you've been gone for so long that I think at this point you have to earn your status back. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Welcome. Where have you been? Thank you. I have been all over the place, but the biggest part of the trip, the biggest part of my absence was about 10 days in Israel for the first time in my life. Have you been? I haven't. I'd like to. And we'll talk about that at the end of the show and we catch up on your thoughts there. And we'll also talk about, Rob isn't here, by like to. And we'll talk about that at the end of the show and we catch up on your thoughts there. And we'll also talk about Rob isn't here, by the way. Rob is off somewhere in some undisclosed location, son of himself, recuperating from the the rigors of the bar crawl that Ricochet hosted last week in New York. And we had another event coming up, too. We'll tell you about in just a second. So we'll leave that at the end of the show. Now, of course, people want to know know instantly what do we think about things well what are the things

peter what things have happened and what do you think about them specifically let's say there are some primaries and if people who are absolute political junkies are watching the returns the results the tea leaves the entrails do you take anything from this or is it a fool's errand to try to tease wisdom out of just an isolated series sure what what what i take from it what do i take from it what i take from it is that donald trump's endorsement is not a slam dunk for a candidate any longer jd vance won in ohio the republican won the republican primary in ohio what was that, 10 days ago, something like that, 10 days or two weeks ago, he was endorsed by Donald Trump. It looked as though he got at least a little bit of a bump out of it, but not that much because he was already moving up in

the polls when Trump endorsed him. In Pennsylvania, where they're going to have to count all the absentee ballots, it's going to take another couple of days to get it done. It looks as though Trump's endorsed candidate, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the television doctor... By the way, I know a couple of people who know Mehmet Oz, and apparently he's a remarkable person and a thorough and genuine conservative. In any event, he's only a thousand votes ahead of the non-Trump endorsed candidate, David McCormick, an impressive person, former Rhodes Scholar, very rich man after running a hedge fund. So the Trump endorsement, and in Georgia next week, it looks as though Trump's unendorsed candidate, Brian Kemp for governor, gubernator, running for the GOP nomination for governor of

Georgia, is going to crush David Perdue, the candidate that Trump has endorsed. It looks as though Kemp is running something like 25 or 30 points ahead of Perdue in the polls. So there we have some assistance from a Trump endorsement in Ohio to a wash in Pennsylvania to no help at all in Georgia. So that looks like a wash overall to me for the continuing relevance of Donald Trump. On the other hand, the Republican candidates are all sounding, let's put it this way, the pre-Trump Republican party is not making an appearance anywhere in these how would you define that primary what issues and what stances would

you define that i would define the pre-trump gop as not particularly concerned about the border all the candidates now are concerned about the border, not particularly concerned about what trade with China did to American workers. All the Republican candidates are very concerned with jobs here at home. So those are changes. I would agree and disagree. I think maybe before they used to feel required to make noises about the border. Now, they may not do anything when they get in there. They may turn right around to the Chamber of Commerce and say, all right, guys, marching orders, please. But they had to make noise about it. But I think you're right about China. I think that that wasn't an issue before and is now.

So we'll see. Are there more issues than that that you can see? Trump-wise, does national security seem to play a role in this anymore? We used to look to the GOP as being the party. Well, we have something coming up right away. In fact, our guest will, I want to ask our guest about this, Joram Hazony, who's going to join us in just a moment. Finland and Sweden have both petitioned for membership in NATO, and just days later, days after they formally petitioned NATO for membership, I think only 48 hours later, both the Prime Minister of Finland and the Prime Minister of

Sweden turned up at the White House where Joe Biden endorsed their membership in NATO. And this is a pretty interesting question. It looks as though the Biden administration is expecting this to skate through the Senate without any discussion, certainly without opposition, but here's the question. Finland has a border of over 800 miles with Russia. And if I recall my history correctly, Finland has been at war with Russia three times in the last 150 years, most recently during the Second World War, outright shooting war with Russia. And in recent decades, NATO, whatever you say about NATO as a defense pact, it has for sure represented a mechanism for permitting the wealthy publics of Europe to free ride on the American taxpayer. So here's a question. If Finland joins NATO, the United States immediately agrees to defend 800 miles of border with Russia.

But what the Finns get out of it is the full might of the United States of America. Question, what do we get out of it? And it worth it further question will that even be raised will it be debated in any rigorous way at all no I don't think so because I think it will be it will be swept in on a wave of emotion that has followed Russia's invasion of Ukraine that that obviously Russia is an aggressive nation and so if these guys are petitioning us for help, the whole big move, the whole big swing from heart to head is to oppose Russia. And, you know, good. I'm not in favor of giving Putin an inch of slack. But you're right to ask those questions. You're right to point out that they probably won't be answered. The interesting thing, though, is that supposedly this whole war in Ukraine started because Russia feared being encircled by NATO with the Ukraine membership.

Ruski Lazarev said the other day that the admission of Finland and Sweden is no big deal. You know, no big deal. Which sort of puts a lie to the idea that they're panicked about being surrounded. Look, NATO is not... Lazarev, the Russian foreign minister, said that the other day. Yeah, he said no big completely. No big deal. No big deal. I mean, NATO is not there to invade Russia.

NATO is there to keep Russia from reaccumulating the parts of Europe that it believes belong within its own borders. So, yeah, they may have been fighting with Finland, but whether or not they regard Finland as the same sort of Russian, as something that belongs by history and by God's will to Russia, it being full of true Russians, I don't think so. I don't know enough to say, but if they try that, they're going to find that, as in the Ukraine, there are people who believe themselves to be quite distinct from Russia. Thank you, and want no part of belonging to it. While you were gone last week, Rob and I did the podcast from New York, and I did it from a hotel.

And I'm here to tell you that as much as I love New York, it was great to get back to my own house, my own bed, because my own bed has what? That's correct. It has Bowling Branch sheets. They were scratchy at the hotel. You could tell they were the kind of, if you kept washing them and using them,

the hotel sheets would just evaporate, disintegrate. Unlike my wear forever Bowling Branch sheets. They're not just buttery and breathable and impossibly comfortable. They get soft through with every wash. Now, you may ask, that's all well and good, James, but what is the thread count? Forget your thread count, really. Bowling Branch gives you thread quality. Because it doesn't matter how many threads your sheets have if they aren't the best threads possible. So when I slipped back into my bed at home, I knew, well, you know, the position

of everything, the furniture, the smells, the aroma, the dog barking. I knew I was home, but that was the final little touch. You know you're home finally when you get back to your Bolland Branches. And might I add that they were the signature ham to sheets from Bolland Branch, and they are a bestseller for a very good reason. Bolland Branch uses the highest quality threads on the planet for a superior softness and a better night's sleep. They feel buttery to the touch, as I mentioned, and they're super breathable, so they're perfect for every season, winter, hot, whatever. They did not get 10,000 stellar reviews, over 10,000 stellar reviews for no reason. No. When you got the best sheets on the market, people notice. They are so confident,

in fact, you're going to love them, that Bullen Branch gives you a 30-night risk-free trial with free shipping and free returns on all your orders. So head on over to Bull & Branch to get total, complete, and utter sleep satisfaction. Get 15% off your first set of sheets when you use promo code RICOSHET at bullandbranch.com. That's Bull & Branch, B-O-L-L-A-N-D, branch.com, promo code RICOSHET. And we thank Bull & Branch for sponsoring this the ricochet podcast and now we welcome to the podcast yoram hazoni president of the herzl institute in jerusalem and chairman of the edmund burke foundation one his 2018 the virtue of nationalism book was selected as the conservative book of the year and his latest conservatism a rediscovery

was released earlier this week welcome to the the podcast. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. Obvious question from the title of the book. What is it, then, that conservatives need to rediscover? Oh, well... Where do we begin? Yeah, where do we begin? Exactly. I begin in the introduction by taking a look at what I understand to be the landscape of political ideas in America and Britain and beyond. Since 2020, I think that the old hegemony of liberal ideas that was established after World War II has crumbled. Woke neo-Marxism, or whatever you prefer to call it, is making its bid to replace liberalism as sort of the hegemonic force. And the question is, is there a distinctive thing called conservatism whose focus is on issues of what it would take to actually conserve and transmit great and important things from past generations on into the future.

I think it's pretty clear that the various forms of liberalism, you know, which have all sorts of things going for them, but they are extremely distant from thinking about questions of what it would take to conserve and transmit things. And, you know, the collapse of liberalism in the face of the woke onslaught should tell us something about liberal ideas and about the kind of institutional structures that have been created by liberals. They don't seem to have the capacity to last in the face of this. And so we need something new. And what I'm proposing is that conservatism understood not as a variant of liberalism, but understood as a traditional Anglo-American political philosophy, which places conservation and transmission at the center of it, needs to get a new look. Do you think that Western liberalism was unable to stand up to what you call woke neo-Marxism because it had simply opened the door to anything. It had simply said that these old ideas have to be reformed, they

have to be remade, and once they've done that, the landscape shifts and anybody who comes along with a more interesting and radical and egalitarian idea naturally has more credibility. Or was there something about the liberal ideas themselves that could not compete and might be folded into a new of purchase, I think, they explicitly assumed that human beings can reason and that everybody who reasons is in a mature and serious way will come to the same conclusion. So, this kind of original assumption that liberalism just is a universal truth and that reasoning people will come to it. The problem with this is that when you try it, it turns out to be false. If you set up universities that allow competition from people who are reasoning according to Marxism, then it turns out that a whole lot of people, you know,

they exercise reason and they come out being neo-Marxists. And so, the part of the liberal, the aspect of the liberal theory that says all we need to do is reason ends up being quite revolutionary because it doesn't provide resources for someone to say, look, without tradition, we don't have any way of maintaining anything. And then we need to think about. Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. out. networking portfolio, and they deliver. That's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center AI ready. Someday is here with Nokia. How traditions are transmitted, and as soon as you start doing that, it'll turn out that maintaining traditions either at the local level or the national level or in the family or in the

congregation, maintaining traditions means restricting freedom in some way or another. So there actually is a trade-off between liberalism and conservatism, and that trade-off is, in Anglo-American conservatism, has just not been discussed very much over the last two generations, and now we'd better. Darrell Bock Hey, James, I had Joram to myself earlier this week. We recorded an episode of Uncommon Knowledge. James Jacobson So you know what to ask, Peter, so go right

there. Darrell Bock Well, actually, I have second questions now. I have second thought questions now. But I want to – you come in, James, you come in any old time you want. I can ask my follow-on. These are in the nature of follow-on questions because I've been pondering things for the last couple of days. So, Yoram, here's one way. I tried this out on Chris DeMuth a couple...I guess he and I chatted about, we found ourselves sitting next to each other at a dinner six weeks or so ago. Chris DeMuth, longtime director of AEI, now at the Hudson Institute, sophisticated conservative, major figure beginning in the Reagan, beginning even

before the Reagan years and throughout. And he is now a big ally of Yoram Hazzoni. Honestly, to the surprise of many people, Chris DeMuth has embraced national conservatism. Okay. So, I said, Chris, am I mostly correct that national conservatism seeks to conserve the founding principles of this country with, however, the difference that certain aspects of the founding that the founders themselves were able to take for granted, we must now make explicit and emphasize and insist upon, as for example, the importance of borders, as for example, every one of the founders understood and was deeply read in the Bible, the scriptural tradition, as for

example, traditional morality. Some of the founders had difficulties with their family life, but they all understood marriage as between man and woman, the fundamental family structure that until just a few years ago was unquestioned. They were able to take all, these were all assumed, even the English language, of course they assumed that the business of government, the business of the nation would take place in English. We can't assume those anymore, We have to make them explicit.

So said I to Demuth, Chris, have I got that mostly correct? And Chris said, mostly correct. Yoram? Well, first of all, I definitely agree with everything you just said. Good start, good start. Could start. Used to be that that that the view you just articulated was was pretty common among conservatives. almost word for word what you're saying in his big famous essay on Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. And basically the posture that he sets up is liberalism could make sense in the generation of Adam Smith. The problem is that they just didn't know what we know. Like, we've seen romanticism and neo-paganism and Nazism and communism, and every last one of these things has its articulate defenders among people who are reasoning brilliantly. the family and without religion and without independent nations, all of this liberalism is, you know, it's finished.

It has no future. So that was his view. The one thing that I would add to this, you know, maybe interpreting Chris's saying that this is almost right, is that there is an argument, sort of an ongoing argument about the extent to which the American founding was liberal. And since, you know, my own view, this is not, I'm not speaking for all national conservatives on this, but my own view is that the American founding has to be regarded as having taken place in the tension between two different schools of thought, one of which is the Jeffersonian one is more liberal and one of which the party of Washington and the Federalists is more traditionalist and conservative. And, you know, as soon as you put it that way, then you have to ask yourself, when did America come to be associated exclusively with liberalism, I think the answer to that question is after World War II. That's why liberalism comes to mean things like, you know, banning God and prayer and

scripture from the school system. You know, that would have been inconceivable in earlier generations, but after World War II, there is a new ideology, a new kind of liberalism. Go ahead, James. I promised you and I meant it. You come in any time you'd like. After World War II, didn't you have an institutionalized, bureaucratic, technocratic best and the brightest that had just come out of the war, that even though you may have had a Republican administration, you had the idea that we were going to run the country by this sort of this organization that knew what they were doing, the experts, the authorities, which fell apart. And, you know, over the decades has been shown to be utterly unsuitable for the task, but they see what you're saying. But what Peter mentioned as the definitions of Christian nationalism, or I hard cells these days, aren't they? I mean, the majority of the

country may say, yes, we should speak English. We should have a good idea who's coming into the country. The family is a foundational part of society. But you have the general zeitgeist to the culture, the wind that seems to fill the cultural sails on the coasts, are people who believe that in every one of those ideas, even though they themselves may personally practice them or believe in them, they believe that they're a kernel of something that is intrinsically rotten in America. That when you talk about immigration, actually it's xenophobia and nativism. When you talk about the family, it's actually a sort of homophobic, Christophobic, patriarchal imposition. When you talk about language, again, I mean, these things seem obvious to us,

but they've already been pre-branded in the intellectual marketplace of today as signs that somebody is of the old school that ought to be swept off the national stage so that the new enlightened people can come in? Or is it possible that we can repackage these ideas in a way that's palatable to the modern culture? Well, I think everything you just said is true. I think that... Okay, we'll stop the podcast right here. Thank you very much. Yeah, you said everything I said was true, too. This is getting too easy, Joram. Look, gentlemen, you're going to have to

try harder if you want me to disagree with you. What can I say? You're just being too reasonable. No, I think it's simply a fact that the Bible, the family, God, the, you know, the nation, nationalism, the constitution. I mean, you could just keep going on. The common law tradition. I mean, you know, every one of these things are things that if you look at the revolutionary, the cultural revolution that's taking place, it sees all of these things as not just passe, but… The enemy. The enemy. Immoral. Immoral.

There's a moral… Immoral. Immoral. Illegitimate. Immoral and politically speaking, illegitimate. So, that's absolutely true. immoral and politically speaking, illegitimate. So that's absolutely true. That is what's coming out of the machinery of culture generation in America and in Britain and in other countries. Okay, well, then I will try to give you something that you can disagree with or work with here.

Because unfortunately, you're right, we're on the same page, and that's a big problem here. We need some fire and some passion, some argument. I'll say this, then, that in a post-religious America, as we seem to be moving towards, that the opportunity to restore traditional Christianity, traditional religion, as a moral foundation for the country is done forget about it it's not gonna it's not it's not gonna happen there well you know um the trend is going in that direction but i'm i'm very skeptical of trends i i just think we're terrible at at at seeing the future there there's you know how many people how many people saw that that that the soviet union was going to, you know, how many people saw that the Soviet Union was going to collapse? You know, there was like two guys.

Peter. Not me. There were maybe two or three guys out of like 10,000 who were paid to know what was going to happen and didn't. And the same thing is true with the renewal of nationalism in the Trump and Brexit years, the collapse of the housing bubble. You know, you get to make a movie of the four guys who got rich because they saw it coming, but everybody else didn't. And the same thing is true with this upheaval in 2020, which left neo-Marxists on the verge of hegemony in the cultural institutions of America, nobody knew that was about to happen. So, I want to be humble, which I mean, I think is just realistic. I don't think we know what's going to happen. And so, I see the trends just like you see them. I think if we keep

going in the direction that we're going, and maybe that's the most probable thing, then this is all finished and America becomes completely unrecognizable in the coming years without any hope of restoration. But because we're not good at seeing the future, I think that we absolutely have to do our best to organize a plausible path of resistance that can, under certain conditions, succeed. And what I've been proposing in this book and in discussions with Christian friends, Protestants and Catholics in America, is that there still are states in the United States where it's possible to muster a pro-Christian majority, maybe even a Christian majority, but a pro-Christian, a coalition that sees this woke neo-Marxist wave coming and understands that the only way to defeat it is with a powerful counterforce, and that

powerful counterforce is not going to be liberalism circa 1985, which is already lost. My proposal is that those states, those regions, where such a coalition is possible, they should move from simply being a Christian yes-man to liberal democracy and propose conservative democracy, which is, you know, some version, an updated version of what existed in America prior to World War II. And there are places where that still has the ability to succeed. And if a new Christian public philosophy proves itself as being something that's capable of tolerance and capable of building coalitions and capable of compromise and of running a better society than the one that we're headed into, then there's some hope of it being adopted. Peter Robinson Yoram, this kept tripping me up when we talked

the other day, so I'm going to ask again. Liberalism is a tricky word for us Americans. I'm including you because of course you grew up in this country and you know the country extremely well even though you live in Israel now. So, on the one hand, liberal can mean the classical liberal who believes in the very limited state and an emphasis on the kind of sovereignty of the individual. Margaret Thatcher often referred to herself as a classical liberal. But early in the post-war period, certainly by the 1980s, liberal in this country came to mean someone in favor of the big state,

the kind of ongoing sexual revolution. The weird thing is that these terms almost came to mean opposites. So let me ask you this, and you've said several times now that the trouble started after the Second World War. What was Ronald Reagan? What kind of figure was he? Hmm? Ronald Reagan was an intuitive old-school conservative who was heading a movement that was dominated by liberals. Matt Continetti, we had a conversation about. Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia, super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated, the whole data center networking

portfolio, and they deliver. That's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center AI ready. Someday is here with Nokia. About this week in new york and and matt continetti emphasized that look you can't draw the lines that sharply because there are plenty of things that are liberal about somebody like reagan and i completely agree with that you know i i i think that that by the way i didn't mean that tentaciously i'm just using reagan so that we can understand what you mean i'm just honestly i'm just asking you to sort of clear up your use of the term. I think, reasonably as consisting of three pillars, religion, nationalism, and economic growth, of which he considered religion to be by far the most important of the three. And I think that Reagan, if, you know, asked, does this make sense to you, would have said, yes,

Irving is expressing eloquently my intuitions. I see it that way, too. And by the way, I also think that Thatcher would have agreed to it. And what's confusing about this is that it turns out, like we didn't know it at the time during the Reagan-Thatcher years, that the struggle over against communism abroad and socialism at home, that it was instead of leading to a victory for that kind of old school Irving Kristol, Ronald Reagan conservatism, it in fact was just kind of a front for a big liberal internationalist movement, which as soon as Reagan and Thatcher are gone, it seizes power in conservative circles as soon as Reagan and Thatcher are gone. And Thatcher is actually deposed because of her nationalism. I mean, in part, it's, you know, her Bruce speech. It's saying, no, we're not going to enter the EU and give away our sovereignty. That's a big part of the reason why Thatcher's ministry ended.

And with Reagan, the same thing. Reagan leaves the stage, and George H.W. Bush begins talking about the new world order in which the rule of law is going to replace the rule of the jungle. You know, a hundred years we've struggled in order to attain that, but now it's at hand. This is utopian, crazy stuff. It's not conservatism. And it is straight— Can I ask you then to address for our listeners and for me, all I say for our listeners, what I really want is you to answer my questions, Joram. Right.

So how would you describe George W. Bush? Because, as you know perfectly well, all the mainstream media today would describe George W. Bush, without hesitation, as a conservative. In fact, they might even describe him as a member of the extreme right. What does George W. Bush stand for in your schema? Yeah, but I think you're right, but it's so tendentious. I mean, why is he extreme right? He's extreme right because he likes warfare in their eyes, because he likes warfare, and because he talks like a Christian. But I think that he is the pinnacle of liberalism run amok, okay? And it's fair to

call him a fusionist it's fair to say look he's privately conservative but he's publicly liberal but but his his his agenda his freedom agenda his worldwide rule of liberant liberal internationalism it it just is liberalism so the notion from the second inaugural address which i I can only paraphrase, not quote, but it's a pretty close paraphrase, that the United States cannot be safe as long as there is tyranny anywhere in the world. argument about whether uh whether americans should support the french in their call to destroy to bring down to to to uh urge urge rebellion and destruction in every every country of every government on the face of the earth that doesn't live up to the ideals of the french revolution and jefferson and pain on, they were on that side. They were in for the project.

They were in for the project. And George Washington, when he becomes president, he, in his famous Thanksgiving address, he says, we wish well-being and God's blessings for every government on the face of the earth. That's the conservative view. We're not in this in order to run worldwide liberal revolution. We're in this in order to secure our own interests, and we'll fight when we have to, to secure our own interests. Okay. I've got one more question, then I'm going to insist that James get back in. But here's the question. Yoram, I have now talked to you twice, three times if you count the lunch we had after we recorded a show. You're a lovely human being. You're appealing in every way. You're intelligent, refined, lovely in conversation,

the father of nine children, which to me... Yoram Stapeli Can I tell my wife this? Wait, wait a second. I have to write this down. Pete Slauson Yeah, no, no no i'll put it i'll put it in writing i'll put it in writing and yet you drive a lot of people crazy and a lot of people who are who who are otherwise perfectly reasonable and appealing people themselves so for example you mentioned matt continente i know that you and matt are friends but matt wrote actually he was attacking a piece that ch DeMuth published in the Wall Street Journal, and Matt wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal saying that he would take his conservatism without an adjective. That is, he's no national conservative, he's a conservative. And he said that at the recent National Conservatism Conference, this is about three conferences ago when you had a big conference in Orlando, there were just too many speakers

who were trying to say that what was good for Hungary, where we have a prime minister who's widely condemned as authoritarian, what was good for Hungary would be good for the United States. So you're being accused of trying to sneak into the American program as kind of dark European conservatism. That's one side. Here's the other side. Saurabh Akhmarie put up a tweet. I'll bet you haven't seen it. It's two hours old. I just noticed this as we were preparing to go. Did you see it? I saw it. I'm online. All right. So he says, the same old alliance this is just before we started getting ready to record this the same old alliance between the right wing of american

capital euro atlantic hawks and wispy traditionalists except get this this time we call it national conservatism so continente is saying you're um you're a bad guy because you're trying to sneak this dark European Christian. There may be, you know, Matt, there may be even a suggestion that it's anti-Semitic, that conservatism into the United States. And Sorab says, Yoram, you're a bad guy because you're trying to dress up the same old thing. Why do you so arouse such ire? I hold you responsible for your critics i i i spent a few hours in in conversation uh with with matt this week a lot this this past week and next next week there's going to be a uh another book launch event with him and me and kevin roberts the the head of the Heritage Foundation in D.C.

And I don't think that Matt holds the position that you're attributing to him. Well, he switched because I'm just paraphrasing something he put in print. Go ahead. I understand. I spoke to him immediately after he put it into print, and I think that it's not being interpreted um correctly let's leave matt aside he's just okay he's a good friend i'll go further um he he's actually uh helped me with with uh with the construction of some things in my books i'm

not saying that that means he agrees with everything in my books, but he's a model of somebody who is willing to collaborate across all sorts of imaginary lines that people are drawing in the sand. I will agree with you about that. I just want to leave him aside. But if you want to set up the structure, let's take somebody like Annie Applebaum or Jonah Goldberg, who was attacking us just today. who are wrinkling their noses and saying, you know, you guys are importing Europeanism and un-Americanism. There's a whole school of liberal thought in America, which is taking, which loves that rhetoric. And then there's Saurabh, who was on the side of the neoconservatives for a few years when he was a protege of Bret Stephens, when he was a leading author for John Podharts at Commentary Magazine. He wrote essays like, you know, the illiberalism, the worldwide crisis. And so in those days, Saurabh was, you know, attacking us from the left and saying, oh, my gosh, you know, like Putin, Hitler is Putin and Putin is Orban and Orban is Trump and Trump is is is Hazonian. Hazonian is Chris DeMuth national conservatives in a very, very warm,

constructive, humble, and decent way, now he's a new venture. He's partnered with Marxists in a new publication. And unfortunately, he's beginning to sound a little bit like a Marxist. Well, gentlemen, let's set these internecine quarrels apart until we win the revolution, and then we can start devouring our own, is what I say. My last question would be this. Aesthetics. There's an element to aesthetics, to the way the culture views beauty, that is profoundly conservative and is held, I think, by most people. When people think of a college, they think of the columns and the ivy. When they think of a great American skyscraper, they don't think of some abstraction, some nonsense that rises 70 stories and fronts the eye. When they think of music, they think of the

stuff that accompanies the movies that they love. When they think of a book, they're not thinking of some William Burroughs automatic writing. They're thinking of something with a plot and the rest of it. Perhaps one of the ways in which we can get people more onto our side is to tell them they're already conservative when it comes to the things that give their life pleasure and meaning. But the right today doesn't seem to talk about that much. Is it simply because we have too many other things in our plate and the pretty stuff can come later? Or are we just leaving a useful weapon unused in the quiver? I'll end with that, and then we'll let you go.

Well, there's a big space that Roger Scruton created for that kind of conversation. And with his passing, the space is kind of empty. It's for sure true. I don't feel myself competent to enter into discussions of aesthetics in a serious professional way. I support it. I think it's a idea but um i i have my hands full on other fronts so um and one of those other fronts of course is the book conservatism conservatism a rediscovery which is beautifully designed it looks good so aesthetically you got everything covered it's very nice yoram hazoni thank you so much for joining us in the podcast today we hope to talk again and remember on common knowledge with peter robinson we'll have an extensive interview uh with more to say thank

you okay sure thanks so much yeah bye you know um when i mentioned the architecture when people think of you know skyscrapers they're more likely to think of the empire state building aren't they peter then they are some some real modern strange thing which seems to be from some alien culture. So explain that to me. Unless I'm stepping inadvertently, I'm stepping on a segue and you're headed to an ad. No, you know, I'm guiding you into it gently. Okay, so why is it now that you just came from New York and I listened to the show that you and Rob did, I'm sorry to say that I really enjoy the shows that I'm not on. It's a remarkable thing.

But it is still the case to my mind. I'm wondering whether it's just generational because my father took me to the top of this building when I was a little kid. But there are many buildings on the island of Manhattan now that are taller than the Empire State Building. And yet somehow or other, the Empire State Building, I think, still is in people's minds as the skyscraper, the American skyscraper. Is that right, or am I just talking sort of? It may be generally rational, but I think you're right, because it is, to use the dreaded word, iconic. There's no other building except the Twin Towers that the ape stood upon, and the Twin Towers are gone.

It has the massing of a classic New York skyscraper, which exists for zoning reasons, which is interesting, which goes back to a building before zoning. The setbacks. And I visited the building, actually, that caused the setback law. I sort of made a pilgrimage there. You're right. It's also because it's in the middle.

Which building was that? The Equitable. One of the Equitable. The Equitable of like 1912 or something like that. It was huge, tall, massive buildings. Two filing cabinets because it cast shadows for blocks. They said, we can't have this again. So they mandated the stepbacks, which then spilled and rippled out into every city in America that didn't

have any of those problems, but it created the New York skyscraper. Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia. Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated.

The whole data center networking portfolio, and they deliver. That's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center networking portfolio and they deliver that's them hey nokia right on time get your data center ai ready someday is here with nokia style also the uh empire state building is on 34th so it's midtown it commands its territory right like that's true when everything's a forest and you can't tell what's what but it's also because it's the summation of a style in it, in its simplicity and its height and its breadth, the rest of it, it defines a style.

So it's that Chrysler and a few others come to mind. One of the things that fascinated me about where I was staying down in the financial district or five eyes, I'm sure nobody there calls it was the number of just absolutely wrote the now Emery Roth skyscrapers that are the same damned thing over and over again. Here's a black box, here's a black box on top of it, and the rest. And when you see so much gilded age, 19th century, early 20th century, small-scale, by small-scale, I mean New York, commercial architecture side-by-side with this, you realize how much was lost. You're grateful for how much is still there,

but you realize that if people had a choice now, do we want an endless number of black featureless boxes, madman style marching up and down the blocks, or do we want something with brick and a face and a carving and the rest of it? And people are drawn to the latter. It's not that they hate the modernity. It's just that too much of it destroys a place and rips the history and soul out of it. So I spent about 80% of my trip to New York not going to the theaters. I didn't even get into a museum this time. I spent it all just walking around, looking at my old friends, the buildings. And that's what I went to do.

But you know, 93% of your life, you out there listening to this, 93% of your life is spent indoors. I was outdoors for 80 80 but you and me try only do a 93 indoors but you know so many of our favorite moments are outdoors and i don't just mean walking around looking at things it's the fresh air the feeling of peace well since warmer weather is almost here well kind of sort of is let's make the most of the outdoors with outer outer the new new outdoor furniture company with purposely designed furniture to get you outdoors more. Outer makes the world's most beautiful, comfortable, innovative, and high-quality outdoor furniture,

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the Ricochet podcast. Well, Peter, you were in Israel and elsewhere, and people are dying to know what you thought about this. Give us a brief little description of your paragonation. It's a tiny country, so jammed with experience that it's difficult to be brief about it. But we spent the first two-thirds or so of the trip with Jewish friends, and in the north of the country, mainly in the north of the country, and we were there on Holocaust Memorial Day. And so, of course what you see, but it's different seeing it. There we are, Holocaust Memorial Day, 10 o'clock in the morning, everything stops.

I mean traffic on the freeways stops and sirens sound across the country for two minutes and everyone simply stands in silence. Well, that has an effect. We were also, we went up to the Golan Heights, way, way up, just a couple of hundred yards from the border with Lebanon, and there on the other side of the border, what's flying? Not Lebanese flags, Hezbollah flags. And we were given a kind of security briefing. So you have on the one hand this memory of the unthinkable, and you have on the other

hand right there, right across the border, an Iranian backed, not militia, but army. Hamas is a kind of informal militia, not informal, it's a militia. But Hezbollah, we were told, and I'm in no position to gainsay what we were told, Hezbollah is an army. It's trained, it's equipped, it's disciplined, and it's right there. On our last evening in the country, we were having dinner at a rooftop restaurant and there was an air raid siren. And after a tense moment or two, the siren continues, but the Israelis go back to enjoying

their dinners. It is quite a place to be. That was the first two-thirds or so. Our last, we then went on our own, my wife and I went on our own to Jerusalem for three days and the Crusaders were onto something in the following sense. They really understood the importance of the places. So, to go to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and to celebrate Mass as we did, Catholic, but there's a chapel for Catholics, there's a different place for the Orthodox, and yet a different place where the Copts, Egyptian and Ethiopian Copts were celebrating. It's loud, there's noise everywhere. But to celebrate Mass, just feet, just 10 feet from the place where for 2,000 years people believe Christ was crucified,

it changes things. I've considered myself a Christian almost all my life. I think I was an atheist for two weeks once in college. But when you are right there, you have to make up your mind because the claim that this really happened right there at one specific place at one moment in time, either it really happened or it's all just another wishy-washy, lovely kind of fairy tale. So, there's, and we went to, well, I could go on and on, and I won't. So, let me just say that it was, I thought that going to Israel would be, I don't know, I thought Jerusalem in particular, I thought would be like reading a book, might sort of deepen my faith, might be interesting in a kind of, I don't know, might do something that adjusted my thinking by 10%. And in fact, it's just a,

it is a massive experience. Just a massive experience. Challenged my faith and deepened it at the same time, but in both regards, more than I would ever have thought possible. There, what do we do with that? How do you find a lighthearted? Where's Rob when we need a than I would ever have thought possible. There. What do we do with that? How do you find a lighthearted? Where's Rob when we need a lighthearted out? Well, it's my turn to talk about New York, where I say that I had a good hamburger that I enjoyed. Compared to that, for heaven's sakes, you know, it's hard.

Well, you know, New York doesn't have the longevity and the age and the spiritual traditions and foundations of Jerusalem. No. So there's no comparison. But on the other hand, people were going to the meetup for a social event. I don't think anybody goes to these places of great spiritual importance for a social event, right? So we're on different pages. The fun part was actually finding out where we were supposed to meet because Robert told us it's the winery, not the vineyard or is it the vineyard but not the winery city winery snow no city vineyard not city winery and so i get there with a long-standing ricochet member hi james and uh it's the vineyard and there's nobody there and then we look at those signs and it says city vineyard City Winery. So it's the same place, or is it not?

Or does by winery mean that it is adjacent to, or that City Vineyard is brought to you by the distinct separate entity, Vineyard, which is over there. In the meantime, somebody comes up and realizes this is Ricochet and recognizes me, and says she's got an email. Oh, you were recognized in Manhattan. Yeah, I was. You can't ask for more. And she says that she has an email from the other group that we're

meeting with that says they've moved everything to the Brass Monkey, which is about a mile up north. So now everything's completely falling apart and it's beginning to rain. And Rob isn't here. That's the near year of the day. The great thing is that it was only on the way upward from then. And we ended up with a huge room with lots of people talking, talking, talking. Great, fantastic conversations with Ricochet members, as you can well imagine. Now, if you're sort of on the fence, or not even on the fence, you're looking at the fence with long-range binoculars and saying, I'm not even going to get on it and join. No, I'm never going to join for this thing. Hey, listen, here's the great thing. You may think, oh, do I really? Why would I want to sit in a room with a bunch of people and talk politics? I don't think I talked politics once. We talked Freudian psychology. I had a fascinating conversation about 70s movies with a member. I was talking with Franco about Genesis and progressive rock. I was talking to the guy next to me about Brazilian politics. I was talking to somebody else about television and Star Trek and Mystery Science. I mean, the conversation is all over the road because everybody brings something different to Ricochet, and everybody has their own little piece of information and expertise.

And it was just fun to get together and talk and shout and share, you know, not swear, share and drink, which I didn't do much because it was 3, 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and I didn't want to become you know utterly socially fabulous five uh but the end you know we ended up i think i left at 10 30 from robert de niro's bar and walked through a magical misty manhattan of the sort that you only see in woody allen movies with the tops of the skyscrapers lost in the fog and the lights twinkling and the wet pavement glistening and reflecting the lights of the subscribe the you know the the way the streetlight just glints in the blade of the man who's holding you up in the alley. I'm kidding. There aren't many alleys in New York. It was great. It was fantastic.

And we're going to be having another one, I understand, soon. You got to join Ricochet. Do it, though. And it's worth it. It's cheap. Here's what's coming up. Save the date for this. Ricochet's own, well, I wouldn't say own. He's ours, but he's kind of promiscuous in his affiliations.

Byron York, the Byron York Show. The Byron York Show will be recorded live at Hillsdale's Washington, D.C. campus with Federalist Editor-in-Chief and Fox News contributor Molly Hemingway. Yay, next month. Join them Wednesday, June 15th at 6 p.m. for what should be a very fun evening with two conservative superstars. More sign-up details are going to come very soon. I'd love to make it. Maybe, I don't know. Gosh, my wonder was this year.

What day? June 15th. June 15th. It's a month away. Coming to these events is another great reason to join Ricochet. You can sign up today at ricochet.com. Join and get 14 days for free and figure out if it's for you. You may go in the member feed and say, These people are crazy. That guy's kind of fun. That guy's sane. But these,

and then you go in the member feed and say, my people, it all depends. There's so many personalities, so many styles, so many moments, so many ways to enjoy Ricochet. And I have to tell you just meeting everybody was fantastic. It really was. And so thanks for coming. You know what, Rob, I think we'll be, I don't know if he's joining us next week or so. It'll be a while before we're all three here back together, which would mean, you know, another 107-minute podcast. But what do you say, Peter? I think this might be one we bring in under an hour. There's so much more we could talk about, but on the other hand, we could get out at a

reasonable podcast time and one for the books, one that is not Dan Carlin length. I mean, when Dan Carlin goes our length, he's discussing the entirety of World War II. We're just babbling on about this and that. Hey, I hate to interrupt here. And you know how that's like sometimes that you're talking to somebody and then somebody else barges in like that. We all hate that. We all hate it even more. If somebody comes in and they're talking close to you, like you're at some social event, you get a whiff of what they used to call the old halitosis. Oh, no fun. Well, some people really don't worry about that because they know they have good oral care, good health. It starts with good habits, like good oral care and quip. Quip makes it easy. They deliver

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and the rain, that of course is the mood of film noir. Yes. Here's the question. Now, I'll give you the setup and then I'll give you the setup, and then I'll give you the question. The setup is my wife and I were in a black and white mood two, three evenings ago. And we clicked our way in. Oh, here's a. Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center.

And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia. Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated. The whole data center networking portfolio. And they deliver. That's them. Hey, Nokia. Right on time.

Get your data center AI ready. Someday is here with Nokia. Classic that we've never seen. Neither of us had ever seen. Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, The Big Sleep. So we get about 20 minutes into it and we're gritting our teeth and we go another 20, 25 minutes and then we just can't stand it anymore. And the question is, what was the big deal with Humphrey Bogart? So here were the problems that we just didn't expect. I don't even know where to begin, Peter.

Peter Robinson That it's the dialogue is talky. It's talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. The script is unbelievably confusing. New names get introduced, new suspects, new this, new that. And then Bogart, what was the big deal with him? This guy's kind of a shrunken chest. He's got bad teeth. By the time he's filmed this movie, his complexion, you can almost smell his breath from all the cigarettes he's smoked at this point in his life. He wears his tie six inches above his belt buckle. He looks ridiculous. And he also

looks much too old for Lauren Bacall. How the whole country, of course, it turns out he wasn't too old. They got married in real life. But the whole thing just doesn't work. So, and I thought to myself, the question is, what was the deal with Humphrey Bogart? Casablanca, I'll give you, but that's a one-off. It's a one. What was the deal with Humphrey Bogart? Casablanca, I'll give you, but that's a one-off. It's a one... What was the deal with Humphrey Bogart? I thought to myself, James will know. James? The real question is, what's the deal with Mr. and Mrs. Robinson?

Is the deal. I don't know where to begin. I don't even know where to begin on this one. I really don't know where to be i don't even know where to begin on this one i really don't i'll grant you that the big sleep has its moments plot wise we who i mean i think they asked um they asked the author raymond chandler afterwards so the deal with a car that went off the pier in the water who was that what was that right and he said i don't know i don't know part of the problem was that a lot of the novels that uhler wrote were jammed together from different short stories.

He'd mash them together. And he came up with some great ones, which made for wonderful movies. By the way, one of the screenwriters was William Faulkner. He's credited in the role at the beginning. Right. And in his Barton Fink style, I imagine him throwing up his liquid lunch every morning in the uh in the commissary but anyway i mean bogart obviously had something because yes as you noted he did manage to land the call so there was a certain element of charisma there and he had a he had a a absolutely authentic uh unhurried unworried cynical but genuinely inhabited masculinity that resonates then and now you take you you take

you take any young man of an impressionable age and you haven't watched the maltese falcon and he's not going to want to be uh elisha cook he's not going to want to be peter lorry he's not going to want to be sydney greenstreet he's going to want to be bogart because okay that'll grant although that's another movie That's too talky just too much dialogue. Stop talking so much. I will say That when Bogart speaks when Bogart speaks it does slow down you do find yourself drawn in you do listen to him He slows down the whole scene everybody else is sort of 1930s 1940s rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat tat tat style and bogart takes a draw on his cigarette

and tells you tells you what's really going on okay i get that because he has presence he has commanding presence he can he can absolutely stop the thing cold smoke a cigarette give you a look through the eyes and then just and then and slur something out and uh in in a way that that just defines the performance. I'm not sure you can explain these things to somebody who just, who doesn't, if you don't feel it, if you don't get it, if it doesn't resonate and connect, there's no empirically proving. Then you're just lost. Well, I wouldn't say lost.

I would just say that I'm surprised it took you guys this long to get to the big sleep. Okay, we're 45 minutes in. Are you telling me that we should just force ourselves to watch the rest? No, I never start to come alive. I don't think anybody should watch a movie that they don't want to watch. My Netflix queue, now that I have it back from the people who spammed it

and took it over, all of whom seem to be in the Philippines, another story. My next queue is littered with movies that i just bailed on after 20 to 30 minutes because life's too short they didn't interest me but when it comes to there's there there's certain like for example i was i was watching bosh did you watch bosh oh yes yes yes so there's a new series of bosh there's a new one on Freebie, formerly IMDb TV, which they are continuing the story on

with about one-fifth of the budget, which kind of shows. Wait, with the same character with Judson Welliver playing Bosch? Yes, Titus Welliver. Titus Welliver. Sorry. Really? And he's great.

He's great. I've seen one episode. It's got Mimi Rogers as Honey Chandler, although unlike the previous- Wait, she was killed? Is this a prequel? She survived. No, it's not. Oh, she pulled through. She survived the shoot.

She was killed in the book. Sorry, spoiler, although the book's been out for 25 years. So she now is working in her own practice, but it's one of those things where prior to the, when they had the big budget, she was working in a big glass office skyscraper, 20 floors up. Now she looks to be working in the producer's study. I mean, it's, it just doesn't, it doesn't have the same feel, but at the very beginning of it, there's something that is a nod to the big sleep. And one of those things that just makes you know that they're, they're respecting the basics and you saw it here when they Peter. When he goes to the

client's home, the client is, of course, William Devane, or as we know him, JFK, because he played, you know, JFK in seemingly every movie back in the 80s, or a JFK-adjacent-like figure. And William Devane is in a wheelchair, and he's all bundled up. Ah, General Sternwood. The appearance of the old man bundled up but still with vinegar mind you oftentimes in a hothouse because he can't get what is a is a classic of the genre ever since the big sleep and it's repeated over and over and over and over again in noir and stories and movies and the rest of it it's always a nod when the when the private detective which

is what bosch is now goes to visit the old, the old rich man and his musty old mansion and he's in the wheelchair. That's right to that. So, yes, I it's you know, do you watch the big sleep to find out who done it? You really don't. Do you watch it to kind of understand what forties culture had to offer? What Carmen Sternwood was up to was sort of interesting. No, you, you watch it for the performances. You watch it to go along with the ride.

And I, you know, I prefer the Maltese Falcon. I think it's a better movie. I don't know. But again, like you, I don't understand the appeal of Mary Astor in that one at all. I think she's the idea that she's this gorgeous femme fatale when she strikes me as anything, but, but you got to get over that because the movie is telling you just as you thought wife, I guess I'm supposed to assume that Bogart is charismatic. I can't believe I said that I'm supposed to assume that Mary Astor is, is, is desirable. But did you know

there was a sequel by the way, to the Maltese Falcon? Did you know that I have seen The Maltese Falcon? I mean, I have seen the actual prop. The actual Maltese Falcon. Really? Where was it? Steve Wynn. In Steve Wynn's apartment when I did an interview with Steve Wynn before he fell. Steve Wynn, the man who invented modern Las Vegas, purchased, took me around, showed me his Picassos, and showed me he was almost proudest of all of owning the original prop used in the Maltese Falcon. Does it have the knife marks on it?

So there. Does it have the knife marks on it? Oh, I didn't look that closely, no. That would be my first question, and if it didn't, I would say, it's a fake, sir. Sir, sir. Well, Wilma, shall we go and by the by the way they the interesting thing about malty's falcon is the line that bogart lives after he disarms uh elisha cook jr is that the goddier that the goddier the guns the cheaper the god the cheaper the guns all the goddier the patter or something

like that well the term gunzel after that sort of got retrofitted and reused and converted into a term for a for you know for a gunman but that wasn't what it was at the beginning that gunzel was sort of somebody in prison who took show we say the catamite posture the submissive posture so he was using a term there that was even more insulting to it to you and the guy's name was wilma more of it but i i mean i was watching listening the other day to an old-time radio show called called Michael Shane, which is one of those endless number of private eyes. This guy happens to be Irish and living in New Orleans. And somebody, the small effeminate man with a noticeable perfume and a violent tendency who was paired up with a large fat man named Mr. Sick, who was trying to find it as well. And there was a brutish character who, in this case, happened to be an old sailor with a peg leg

who was doing the enforcers. It's the Falken template over and over and over again. The resonance and the importance of that story and how it created these archetypes that would echo for 20, 30 years in popular culture. We've lost it today to the point where Bosch can sit down with William Devane in a wheelchair and 99% of the audience is not thinking, ah, call back to the big sleep. But Peter, having seen the big sleep, two final points. Final point number one is that the Sid Caesar show, I seen The Big Sleep, you would have gotten it. I have two final points. Two final points. Final point number one is that the Sid Caesar show, I must have seen this on YouTube, but

there was one of these, although of course in this case it was a satire, and the diamond that was at the center of the sketch of the drama was called the cumbersome diamond. That's perfect, isn't it? And second, I just got a note from the Blue Yeti who was with me when I filmed that episode of Uncommon Knowledge in Steve Wynn's apartment. And he tells me that, yes, the Maltese Falcon did have the knife marks. Well, good.

He looked. The Blue Yeti looked. Fantastic. In that very strange cutaway scene where he's chopping at it, and it's this cut back to Green Street. And it doesn't work. It's all kind of done post in editing. But, you know, who cares?

It's a great scene. Great movie. Great podcast. Great time. Great to have you back, Peter. It's been a pleasure, everybody. And I would like to thank you for listening. By the way, Bowl and Branch, Outer and Quip, those are our sponsors.

We're proud of them. Support them for supporting us. And your life will be better for it as well. And might I say, you could join Ricochet. Would it kill you? No, it wouldn't. And you would also get access to the upcoming member event with Byron York and Molly Hemingway. Take a minute, if you will, to leave a five-star review. Heck, take five minutes, one minute per star at Apple Podcasts. We're thankful for that because the reviews allow new listeners to discover us, which keeps this show going. If Rob were here, he'd tell you, we got sued. We need the cash. So I'll just note that you got sued, need the cash. So join everything your life is now. We'll be better with a little

bit more Ricochet in it. Thanks, Peter. Thank you, everybody, for listening. And thanks to our guest. And we'll see all of you in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, James. Ricochet. Join the conversation. Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia.

Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated, the whole data center networking portfolio, and they deliver. That's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center AI ready. Someday is here with Nokia.