The Ricochet Podcast - Trending and Blowin' Up!

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

Perhaps you're failing to vibe with Bin Laden and thus feeling a bit behind the times. Then again, you could be a sane person with a moral compass. James, Charles and Steve cover this and more with Noah Rothman, author of The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives' War on Fun. Aside from his anti-Osama stance, Noah takes us through the relevant considerations about America's interests abroad, the nearly abandoned project to promote democracy and the modern world's Western neurotic who's always clamoring for a club to beat their own civilization with.The hosts also cover anti-Israel influencers on the right — edgelords or anti-semites? — and worry that the U.S. is picking a most inopportune time to be frivilous.

That escalated quickly, right? Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast, usually with Peter Robinson and Rob Long, but today we have Stephen Hayward and Charles C.W. Cook sitting in for them. I'm James Lylex, and we talk to Noah Rothman about the world and where it's at. So let's have ourselves a podcast.

This morning I read Letter to America, which is Osama bin Laden's letter to America explaining why he attacked Americans. It's wild. America is a nation that can be defined in a single word. I was going to put him uh, foot, excuse me. We never get bored! Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, number 667. I'm James Lylex, and a crisp fall day here in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

It was 61 degrees yesterday, 69 or something like that. It's an absolutely fantastic fall. It takes your mind off everything that's going on in the world. But of course, you can only stay in that little bubble of happiness for so long before the real world intrudes. And here, dragging the real world behind them, like Jacob Marley's cash boxes, are Stephen Hayward and Charles C.W. Cook sitting in for Peter Robinson and Rob Long, who at this point, after two weeks, I see them now just off somewhere, holding hands, skipping merrily through a field of dandelions and daisies or something.

I don't know where they are, but I hope they're having fun and enjoying themselves. And I'm glad to have you guys here. Welcome. Well, thanks, James. Although I think Charles and I are both starting to feel like the replacements in the NFL strike from 20 years ago, whenever that was. We're hanging around way too long. Or more like when the quarterback gets knocked out for an injury

and somebody else comes along and electrifies the team and the fan base with their brilliant performance. So we expect nothing less than that from you today. Gentlemen, before we get to the surprising resurgence of Osama bin Laden in the TikTok community, which itself is kind of two stories. You know, last week we were talking about the rise or the revelation of anti-Semitism on the left. I think it's fair to talk about the rise and or revelation of anti-Semitism on the right as well. I mean, in both cases, you have the usual suspects.

You have stupid people and you have credulous intellectuals whose depth is way overestimated by most people. And this week we had, well, I think we had Charlie Cook, sorry Charles, we had Charlie Kirk. You can understand why I would make that mistake. Charlie Kirk talking about Jewish money behind anti-white causes. Jewish people, Jewish money, the ADL to Black Lives Matter, Jewish money and Jewish people in cultural Marxism debates, which seems to conflate blood and religion with an intellectual stance. It seems to say that there's something intrinsic about Judaism and being Jewish

that inclines one to these positions, as opposed to them simply being intellectual stances that some people take regardless of their ethnic makeup. But lurking in the background, you just wonder if these guys are six months away from tweeting out a picture of some uh you know black lives matter financier with an octopus for a yarmulke and a her block tag coming off him that says ripless cosmopolitan are you surprised dismayed i expect so but uh what's your take on this guys oh boy i this I've been noticing this, too, and it's been bothering me even well before October 7 came along. And there's an old problem here that goes back 100 years or more. It was often said, gosh, why is it so many of the Bolsheviks and the revolutionaries of Europe are Jewish? And that fed in some of the kinds of anti-Semitic sentiments of, well, the Nazis, right? And that has persisted. You know, that was part of, although McCarthy,

Joe McCarthy I don't think was an anti-Semite, but the phenomenon of McCarthyism sometimes trafficked in those regions too. And I have noticed in amongst the younger, very online right, it's sometimes called, a lot of, I'll just put it this way as gently as i can snarky comments that i find um disturbing about jews and judaism even among some very very smart young people i know who otherwise are thoroughly fluent with and students of jewish philosophers and jewish thinkers so this really bothers me and now you see the popularizers, people like, well, Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk, whom I would never confuse with Charlie Cook, by the way. Thank you. Anyway, this is very disturbing, because I think that anti-Semitism is overwhelmingly the property of the left these days, and to the extent that you have people on the right giving it aid and comfort, it's a big

problem. Yeah. The most charitable reading might be, well, you're not supposed to say that, and so we're the people who say the things you're not supposed to say, so we're going to say snarkily these things, and everyone will sort of go, oh, he said it. But it's still not good. Charles, your take? Well, you know, it's funny you say that, because I've heard that theory as well, and I can't think of anything less conservative than that. I think sometimes it is imperative to say that conventional

wisdom is wrong, or that taboos are there for a bad reason. There's nothing wrong with, over time, noting that a particular intellectual climate is false or yielding bad results but as a rule you probably should at least wonder why it is that certain things have become taboo and this particular one has become taboo because of all of human history. The idea that you would just blow past that, really, it's not

conservative, and people on the right should resist it. I have, again, been shocked. I'm happy to own my naivety here. I knew that there was anti-Semitism in the world, and I knew there was some in America, but the scale of it once again has has alarmed me i think the question of whether it's stupidity or evil is difficult to answer but actually does matter a great deal there are different sorts of bigotry i asked on my podcast this week why it was that i'd been so alarmed by some of the scenes out of college campuses which is the left-wing version of this and the answer that I came to was that the the nature of the anti-semitism was different than any bigotry that I've ever encountered

myself the vast majority of the bigotry that I've encountered myself, I don't mean against me, I just mean I've been witness to, has been promulgated by people who hadn't thought it through and who didn't want to defend it, whether because they actually realized under closer inspection it didn't make any sense, or they were just embarrassed by it. You know, people, mostly in England where I grew up, who would say things about English people who are non-white, maybe soccer players. You'd hear it, you know, go back to wherever. And you say, but you like him. You know, you like that player.

And they go, well, yeah. Well, why do you want him to go back? Well, I guess I don't. That I can comprehend. That I can deal with. Even if the person ends up just being an unreconstructed you know bad guy i can i can comprehend it what i find truly alarming is watching interviews on on uh youtube with people who have phds or who have positions within the academy who will give you a really calm and ostensibly well-reasoned explanation for their anti-semitism or why they won't condemn Hamas

or why they think that some international terrorist is actually a good person that I find scary because I know what that has led to in the past and I'm not quite sure which one of these is insinuated itself into the right because frankly I think charlie kirk is very stupid um but i don't know whether he is echoing something that is more deep-seated or whether he's just mouthing off because he thinks that it's edgy and will lead to more clicks on his you know on his podcast but i do think it matters what the answer is yeah well the edginess is uh well, you know, Shylock, he did charge too much interest. I guess we can't say that. Can we say that?

And I find it hard to believe that he's for this that somehow conveniently taps into an ancient hatred. That's the thing. I mean, amongst the left, the anti-Semitism nominally springs from a new cultural Marxist prism of oppression and oppressor and seeing it all through the lens of colonialism and the rest of it. But they seem very comfortable to settle into it it's it's like i have a very good intellectually satisfying reason for lowering my bottom into this this warm broth of uh ancient fecal stew i don't know what it is and frankly i don't care um what i do like is that it it unmasks people who are intellectually facile and and have been have been elevated to positions way beyond their intellectual capabilities simply because they say that they say things that well you know you can't nobody else is saying what

candace owen is saying nobody else is saying what charlie cook is saying uh yeah but are they saying it particularly well uh do they have have they come to this through some long, drawn-out, complicated intellectual process? Or are they just saying the things that they know are going to get them the clicks? And they're grifters got to grift. And I think in the case of a lot of these people on the right, it's that. It's just they say those things and nobody else is saying them. It's the stuff that comes from email from you know from people that i can't wait for thanksgiving to come around we all have these conversations around the table and one

of those conversations i'm sure if you have young people um i'm just tempted if there are any young folk coming to the thanksgiving table to say so obl what do you think because there have been and this is a two-pronged story. One, there are a bunch of TikToks that are going around about people who read some of Bin Laden's letter to America and are saying, guy makes some good points. He really does. Scales fell from my eyes with a clang-like manhole cover. Saw all on the road to Tarsus.

I see it all now. Kids who have no idea what 2001 was like, 9-11 was like all of a sudden saying you know what he sounds pretty damned progressive probably as i read in a tweet today that uh his his work was ghost written by a uh socialist uh american who joined who joined the islamist faction and may have been uh the guiding force between i mean do you really think that osama bin laden was particularly interested in the qaeda records i don't and if you explain to these kids, you know, you're talking about a Nipo baby here. You're talking about one of those guys you supposedly ate. His dad was in construction, which was horribly carbon intensive, and he inherited a bunch of money and, you know, basically lived off his folks in capitalism.

And you like an oil, and you like that guy. So that was worrisome. But hold on a second second that was worrisome but how widespread was it was it more widespread that somebody capitalized this and took because from what i understand it was a yashir ali uh retweet of all this that just went absolutely massively viral that may have exceeded the actual quantity of osama bin laden admiration that is out there is all I'm saying. Well, I don't know. I think there's some chance that you can see Osama bin Laden t-shirts rivaling the old Che Guevara t-shirts, right? And this is not, I mean, it is outrageous. It's not

new. You know, several months ago, I think we talked on this program about how when Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, died, you had all these articles saying gosh you know he really had some good points about technology maybe we've read him wrong uh an awful lot what's going on like right now reminds me of the campuses during the vietnam war when of course the chant of the lot of the student radical anti-war movement was not that it was a foolish war that we shouldn't be there or even that this was colonialism but they were on actively on the other side right remember the chant james ho ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, chi, min, the NLF is bound to win? So I think some of that is going on now. This is what the late Roger Scruton liked to call the culture of repudiation. Whatever it is about our civilization, use whatever club comes to hand.

And that club is this 20-year-old letter from Osama bin Laden. Well, the club that was in my hand the other day was a long silver pipe. And I had a dog in one hand and the pipe in the other. And I was going to deliver the pipe. And I was very, very angry that somebody would stop me. But I knew that if I could, I could brain them on the noggin with the pipe that I had or stick the dog upon them. Now, that was a dream. And I have great dreams. And one of the reasons that I have great dreams and great sleep, frankly, is beam. Yes, sleep is important. And you probably know poor sleep can cause unhappiness. But what kind of unhappiness? Well, weight gain, mood issues, poor mental health, lower productivity, too. And if you sleep less than six to seven hours per night,

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and we got plural now, in Ukraine and Israel. Or as some people say, the Ukraine and the Israel. No, they don't. He's the author of The Rise of the New Puritans, Fighting Back Against Progressives' War on Fun. Welcome back. We're going to let Charlie go first because we've been just yelling our heads off here about this Osama bin Laden TikTok thing that's going on. Yeah, no. So my question is the American support for Israel and Ukraine is just another example of imperialist warmongering led by Raytheon, right? Literally, it goes without saying. For those listening, I work with noah so he and i uh chat about this this stuff but uh that is an argument that you hear why is it wrong well i mean it's

absurdly foolish um there's a reductionist sort of marxian habit um where quite a lot of events are analyzed from the perspective of the outcome rather than the impetus for the outcome. And very often that leads, in the Marxian perspective, or at least those who are partial to that framework, towards the idea that capital and the pursuit of it, or thereof is the motivating factor. Various other competing frameworks like the intersectional framework would substitute race for capital. But by and large, they seek to force events to comport with the framework rather than the other way around. That's part of the reason why frameworks are something that I find increasingly detrimental to at least the discourse, if not the psychology broadly or psychology, political psychology. But that's, I suppose, the answer to that is just

an effort to force events to make sense to those who use these frameworks to navigate the world. All right, well, let me put it another way. Why should we give Israel and Ukraine money? So, I was just having this conversation, actually. One of the concerns that seems to be dominating Washington now, as they're talking about this dual aid package, is why is Israel getting less money than Ukraine? Why do we need $500 billion for Ukraine and $15 billion for Israel. And the answer is Israel doesn't quite need it. One of the few things that we provide to Israel are the interceptor missiles. They have long range capabilities. It's a very capable, competent military, the IDF. To the contrary, Ukraine needs more support because

it's fighting a broader war against a more significant power. The Russian military is a broader, bigger power. But the answer to both of those questions is that it's in America's interests. On the other side of those conflicts are all of America's adversaries. We like to fool ourselves in the West with the notion that there are profound distinctions between the Chinese and the Russians and the Iranians and the various terrorist proxies that orbit around them. And they're all hostile to one another because the Shiites don't like the Sunnis, and the Chinese have profound historical grievances with the Russians, and so do the Iranians for that matter, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And the bottom line is they can subsume all of these distinctions, which are real, to the imperative that they're all aligned behind, which is putting an end, hastening an end, to the American-led order. They don't see these distinctions. They are all aligned behind this goal. It is in the United States' interest to forestall or prevent their objective for as long as we possibly can, and we just don't want to do it. And the United States and the West broadly do not like that fact. We don't want to do it. The United States and the West broadly do not like that fact. We don't want to think that there are countries arrayed against our interests that want to hasten a very Hobbesian reality, which we've seen on the ground in Ukraine,

which we saw on the ground in southern Israel. We don't want to think that that future is in the offing for us, but it most certainly is, and it will be, if we decline to see to our own interests and keep the jungle, as Fred Kagan called it, from growing back. Before Stephen jumps in here, I have to ask as a follow-up to Charles' question. So we've given them this money, these aid packages, and I support both of them. Are we going to see any of it back? In what form?

What's our ROI? It depends. of it back in what form what's what's our roi it it depends i mean the r the roi can be said to be geopolitical you know that there's there's something to be said for spending this money and no american blood to bleed russia dry that could be that i mean it's been made but the other is um you know actually getting some money back from these guys um is that on the is that is that even discussed because i think most people kind of think that these packages are like loans or something where eventually ukraine and israel has to sit down and write a check and hand it back to us and say thanks and we're not asking

for a lot of interest on this but maybe some of the money back well it strikes me as a profoundly parochial concern if that is the. The advantage that we get from preserving the American-led geopolitical order is most certainly capital, is most certainly material. If you were to hasten the return of inviolable spheres of influence, for example, like what we had between 1914 and 1989, you would see a profound contraction of the geopolitical economy. We have a global economy for the first time beginning in 1989, you would see a profound contraction of the geopolitical economy. We have a global economy for the first time, beginning in 1989-1991, for the better part of a century, and it produced a flourishing of the human condition that, like we haven't seen at any

point in the existence of civilization, but it most certainly redounded to americans benefits in the form of untrammeled unmolested navigation of the seas maintained by the united states uh and the g the global traffic in commerce and trade uh expanded our economy dramatically in that interim and the rest of the world's economy too so if we were to see the restoration of the truncating of global maritime navigation routes, for example, or the cutting off of certain parts of the Middle East or the European continent to American commerce, then you would absolutely feel it in your wallet. You would certainly feel it in your taxes, because they would go up, required to sustain the forward presences that our

allies would demand, because the deterioration of the international security environment ensures that we would have to contribute more to our collective defense, not less. But you would also see a contraction of the global economy, and most certainly you would feel that in your wallet. So if Americans are so parochial, and I don't think they are, but if they were so parochial that they concern themselves only with their pocketbooks and not the stability of the world that they're bequeathing to their children, then yeah, that concern is on the table too. Right. But seeing things beyond our border, as you described, the freedom of maritime movement, all of these things, the interconnectedness of the world, it's a fairly sophisticated argument. Do you think there's a politician out there who can make that case convincingly in the next election? I don't think... Oh, I do. I do. I certainly do. But I also think

that they're convinced that their interlocutors in the electorate are just not sophisticated enough to understand it. Just the way that you said it, I think they think so little of the voting populace that they would dumb down the argument or decline to make it. And I think that's a profound disrespect to their voters. And I think that's a profound disrespect to their voters. I do think Americans are capable of comprehending the geostrategic situation and America's obligations to its own security and the security of its allies. And it only takes somebody with the courage to make the argument at the risk of offending a particular class, a very vocal but still nonetheless not representative portion of the electorate

that wants America to close up shop and retreat to within its borders. There's a McGovernite impulse that is very popular, particularly in online forums, and is catered to by very loud voices in alternative media venues. But we have no indication from any reliable data in the polling that suggests it's representative of a broad array of public opinion. You would be forgiven for thinking that Ukraine is unpopular, right? It's not. We had a poll last night from, I think, Quinnipiac that shows that a majority of a registered American voter still think that the United States, it's in America's interest to contribute to Ukraine's defense and degrade one of its most capable near-peer competitors, a near-peer competitor that has a demonstrable interest

in expanding its territory and subjugating the peoples in its borders. That's not a sort of thing that's hard to comprehend. Only if you're committed to not comprehending it could you miss it. I would substitute victory for defense, but I agree with the principle. Stephen? Yeah, no, there's the blunt Noah Rothman that I came to love on the commentary podcast. No, I used to tune into the commentary podcast chiefly for you because of the splendidly cranky way you would contest John Podharris. And even when I didn't agree with you, which was actually sometimes quite often, I still enjoyed the back and forth, and so we miss you there and glad you were here. We are all flawed creatures, Steve.

I pardon you. Well, I want to, well, I'll contest you a little bit because it'll bring out the splendid crankiness. That's a compliment, by the way. Of course. I appreciate it. you a little bit because it'll bring out that splendid crankiness that's a compliment by the way of course i appreciate first is your column today about that the israel faces no alternative than to reoccupy gaza at the end of the fighting and i i see the logic of that on the other hand i mean i just think of our own bitter experience in iraq and afghanistan that it looks to me like uh you know a long difficult uh the occupation would be lots of guerrilla fighting lots of terrorist strikes on israeli personnel and the kind of thing that is i don't know how that works

um maybe there isn't an alternative but is it aren't you worried that it's just going to be a quagmire yeah i mean who wouldn't be it would be foolish not to be. The problem is not that this is a difficult mission. The problem is not that Israel would rather do anything else than occupy Gaza. They've demonstrated over the course of decades, even that long preceding the 2005 pullout and this 18-year failed experiment in autonomy in the Gaza Strip, that they have no interest in this part of the world. They don't have a biblical claim to it. They don't have a lot of interest in occupying it militarily. It's a rat's nest. They don't want anything to do with it. This has been imposed on them. And if there was some sort of alternative, some peace-loving

civilian authority that could be incepted into existence, some international organization, or even Cairo or Jordan would be interested in reassuming some authority here. I don't know if Israel would be all that disinterested in it, but that's not in the offing. It's not as though this is something that's, you know, that's an alternative that's on the table. There are no alternatives on the table. And I think that you're right, that there is an apprehension rooted in the idea that democracy promotion or post-9-11 projects was a failed experiment. That's a debatable proposition. In Afghanistan, we summarily abandoned it.

In Iraq, we have one of the more stable parliamentarian democracies in the Middle East with conditions that vastly improved on the status quo ante under Saddam Hussein, where there was no peace. We were consistently at war with Saddam Hussein's regime. We executed three strikes, three different rounds of strikes on the regime and regime targets over the course of the no-fly zone period in the interim between Gulf War I and the Iraq War. And it culminated in the invasion and dissolution of the regime. The idea that there would be peace in the absence of the Iraq War seems to me fallacious and not rooted in any history. But- Right, but how do you- Sorry, but how do you respond to people who say that, all that being true, and i agree what it's widely shared now across the

political spectrum that iraq was our biggest foreign policy mistake since vietnam well there are quite a lot of uh erroneous assumptions that i don't share that are popular nonetheless just because it's popular doesn't mean it's right i mean if it was really popular i'd be here saying 9-11 was justified right and you And Osama bin Laden had a point. Popular does not make right. Good, good. Let's switch to Ukraine for a minute. I'm with you there.

I want Ukraine to win. But three quick points. One is it's clearly now on the back burner since October 7. Second, the counteroffensive this year didn't seem to unfold the way the optimists thought it would. And then third, it still seems to me like the balance of forces, I'm no fan of John Mearsheimer, to say the least, but when he describes and others describe the superiority the Russians enjoy in manpower, materiel, never mind their morale problems, which are serious, that it's an uphill fight. And so is it time now for a negotiated settlement to enter the enter the room enter the chat and when you answer that let

me add to his second point do the people who are looking ahead to the counter-offensive and saying what should happen and what they thought would happen did they have any idea actually what they were talking about oh yeah i think they did um i you know, there's it's impossible to judge the efficacy of a military campaign before it makes first contact with the enemy. There's there's simply no way to do that effectively. You can raise a series of scenarios and outcomes, all of which are possible. I don't think anybody would say I certainly wouldn't say that the counteroffensive met its objectives. The counteroffensive failed to achieve its objectives. The counteroffensive failed to achieve its objectives. It failed in ways that the 2022 counteroffensives did not, that were spectacular in their capacity to resist the

Russian onslaught and beat back the Russian onslaught in places like Kyrgyzstan and Kharkiv. It was always going to be an uphill battle. We're talking about a much smaller country with a much smaller, less capable military against one of the preeminent militaries on the planet Earth. There was always going to be a struggle. And the administration, I think, deserves a fair amount of criticism, as they've received from people who know what they're talking about, like U.S. Army Lieutenant General, retired Lieutenant General Doug Lute, who said, quote, Our incremental approach to providing military assistance has assured that there will be no silver bullet to restore mobility to this conflict. But it's a mistake to call it a stalemate. A stalemate implies that there's no movement along the front lines. And there is movement along the front lines. Just this week, we had a regrouping effort among Russian troops to

decamp to the left bank of the Dnipro River, which is on the other side of the Kyrgyzstan, under pressure. It's not as though there's nothing happening on the front lines. It is just not the dramatic movement that we saw in 2022. And given expectations, I can understand why people would say that that's an underwhelming performance from the Ukrainian military. The alternative is, as ever, just as it is with Israel re-entering the Gaza Strip, compared to what? That is the question with which we are always confronted. And the comparison to a Ukraine that's fighting for its survival on the far eastern edge of Ukrainian territory by the Russian border is something far worse from the perspective of NATO. It is Ukrainian forces executing retrograde operations, falling back closer to Kiev, falling back closer to NATO's borders,

increasing the apprehension among NATO's allies, some of whom will see to their own defense in the absence of America, America's support, which introduces infinitely more complexity to the conflict, infinitely more potential for them to take a step that we don't sanction or support, which introduces infinitely more complexity to the conflict, infinitely more potential for them to take a step that we don't sanction or support and perhaps, well, you know, introduce the prospect of a conflagration that includes NATO allies. That's not off the table. Whatever happens in Ukraine, if we were to pare back our support and Ukraine were to consequently fall backwards, it would bring the fighting closer to NATO's borders and it would decrease our security relative to Russia, not increase it. So my question is to advocates of that sort of thing is how? How would this bring about peace?

It wouldn't bring about peace. about more insecurity and compel us to commit more resources to the NATO frontier, thereby not freeing us up from devoting our attention, for example, to the Indo-Pacific, which is precisely what people who advocate for that sort of thing say. They say, oh, we need to stop our focus on Europe because we need to devote more attention to the Indo-Pacific. Well, how? First of all, the resources that we need in Europe are the precise opposite of what we need in a naval campaign. And second, those resources are finite. They would be devoted to European security and the preservation of the alliance structure that we have now. Only if you want to see that dissolve, if you want to see that project destabilized, would you advocate for that sort of a course? And I think, frankly, a lot of

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One last question and pivot to domestic politics for a minute. As we see these shocking scenes of anti-Semitism on college campuses, but also in the streets, I hear lots of anecdotes of often progressive Jews or liberal Jews who are saying, gosh, I thought these people were on our side. that there are some second thoughts occurring to people. And you're wondering if this is the aftermath of October 7th is going to be an inflection point that makes, it's not a perfect comparison, but a whole new generation of neoconservatives or simply people dropping their allegiance to the left. I haven't seen any polling data on this. I'm surprised there isn't some survey organization asking Jews for their opinions on things. What's your sense of things? Do you think that there's a prospect that that's going to happen? Or what are you hearing and seeing? Well, I think it's a mugged by reality moment for a lot of people, actually.

And yeah, that is what I'm seeing. Does that translate into more Republican votes, more Trump votes? Nope, I don't think so. Not in the near term. But it definitely does contribute to precisely what you accurately say was the neoconservative moment. If we were to apply the word appropriately to its actual historical context, we would see left-leaning liberals who were astonished by a McGovernite sensibility that had overtaken

the party, that was no longer confident in America's capacity to project power, to defend its values, and had given up on the social covenant at home, particularly when it comes to crime prevention and the sort of promotion of American values domestically, the virtue of American liberties of freedom, religious pluralism, freedom of speech and expression. Those were all the things that contributed to the neoconservative moment. And these were not Republicans, necessarily. They were shocked out of complacency liberals they remained liberals but they were liberals in a classical sense and they were opposed to a progressive orthodoxy that had abandoned liberalism altogether now eventually that cohort became a reliably republican cohort

but it wasn't until the late 90s early 2000s that that evolution culminated in what we now today consider neoconservatives and even today a lot of people who are not neoconservatives are branded neoconservatives it's become a byword for people who support extroverted foreign policy but that's not really what it means so now i have one question is osama bin laden actually good this is a this is a nuanced nuanced claim that we need to contextualize and really parse the thoroughness that the humanities department could i was always in the bad camp well you're such a manic you're such a Manichaean about this. Yeah, that was my instinct. I went with bad early on. I stayed with bad.

But then I'm watching these people on TikTok, and they're doing those reaction videos. Like, they're watching Phil Collins' Something in the Air for the first time. But actually, they're reading Bin Laden's letter about how we all need to be forcibly converted to islam if not killed and i'm wondering i mean is he good fresh new look well if you i'm what these young unlettered or uh young people who are products of misbegotten educations need to read after they read Osama bin Laden's Letter to America is Michel Hollenbach's novel Submission, which describes a condition in which modern France

submits itself to sort of a Sharia interpretation of islam and finds new meaning a new purpose in uh steeping itself in this radical islamist milieu it was kind of absurd uh absurd satirical fiction when it was written but the outlines of that are perfectly visible today i mean these people are inadvertently, perhaps, but nonetheless, endorsing the most strict version of a conception of an Islamic social covenant, which includes hostility to gays and lesbians, and the absolute elevation of Islamic moral principles, and the elimination of separation between church and state. All of these things that and state, all of these things that progressives, you would think, would shy away from. But because it is radically anti-American, all of that is erased because being radically anti-American is hit. I mean, that is just the mark of a sophisticate, somebody who sees more to dislike in their country than to like and i think that's the primary draw that's the biggest the biggest draw for these people intellectually the temptation

to be hostile to the place of their birth and that was really the draw primarily in hollenbeck's novel does france have the same problem of self-castigation among its better thinkers as America does? Charlie's better at that than I am, but I think they've gotten better at it recently. that the bifurcated or really multifaceted sort of siloing of ethnic groups and really definitive moiety between France and French culture and the cultures that were being imported into France, I think that there's something of a recognition that that was an untenable status quo. I think particularly in the case of the French, I don't think that any of them who would mouth the ideas of a transnational European identity based on values, etc., all are welcome, really believed it. Especially when you talk to a Frenchman and get his actual true opinion on whether or not somebody who is not French in the sense that we all say, can be French in the same way.

None of them would say yes. They would all mow the... And my French friends are very liberal. They would all mow the series of pieties that they were expected to believe as good members of the EU and the human community. But they didn't. You scratch down a quarter of an inch and you'll find national chauvinism that is very French. England is very French.

England is another matter. How are we to view what has been going on? Somebody pointed out a series of photographs of the bridge by Parliament, empty when talking about Yemeni atrocities, empty when talking about an atrocity here, but this particular one, absolutely packed in full. And we saw people climbing the cenotaph in london we saw people we saw the police standing down because they were afraid of the people that

they saw them arresting the people who had the gall and the audacity to bring the union jack to these things it seems an inversion of what we would always like to think about there always being a britain etc and now london being what it is in its current composition seems to to be facing an evaluation, and they probably will do nothing about it. And I'm not sure what they can. I'm not sure what they can either, but, I mean, the first step would be to recognize what led them to this point. There was a—I don't think multiculturalism per se is a bad thing. It is the idea that multiculturalism should be elevated to a virtue above and beyond patriotism, of fealty to one's country, of fealty to the values that have created the conditions in which you prosper and thrive. That's when it becomes something that's when it becomes something that's noxious and detrimental to the social fabric.

And that's precisely what we're confronting here to a certain degree, but most certainly in Europe, not just in England, but on the continent as well, is this assumption that the culture in which we're born is has more sin to it than virtue that it is festooned with all of these historical woes that it is guilty of uh more uh harm than good and uniquely so world stage and uniquely so more than anything and the British would say the Britain that the British have more sins uh than the Americans theish would say the britain that the british have more sins uh than the americans the americans would say the americans have more sins than the british and so on and it is it's really just um a sense of insecurity a crippling insecurity uh that is unearned but has

become cultural cachet and is certainly capital on american college campuses it is just jingoistic, chauvinistic to believe that your country is good and virtuous, that the United States has bent over backwards throughout its history to create a better geopolitical environment, and that profound sacrifices were made to bequeath to us the kind of world we live in now. I mean, that's just simplistic. You know, the real big, deep thinkers see a history littered with sins and offenses against, you know, just all that was righteous and decent, and all of it motivated by uh you know really parochial and uh you know an individual desire to to benefit ourselves in a way that is just um really trite um so yeah i think that's there's

there's a lot to be said for that and it's it's more shallow than i than i think we give it credit for it's a sort of thing that doesn't really survive in the scrutiny of the light of day. But it does in these hermetically sealed campuses. And where do these people go? We've been doing this experiment for 10 years. Where do these people who are steeping themselves in this milieu, this self-hating milieu, where do they end up? Well, they end up at the State Department. They end up at USAID. They end up at the breaking news desks of every major American media institution. And then what happens? There's a 10-7 massacre. And the first instinct is to apply these obscuring frameworks that reduce and explain away the horrors that we're privy to and make them harder to discern by applying all these other principles, these other caveats, these other efforts to contextualize the stuff away to the point where we can't actually analyze the events that we're seeing. We can't analyze the evidence in front

of our eyes. And that's the whole goal. That was the whole point of this project was to make it sure that so that there is no truth, that there is no universal set of values to which we can look to and say, well, this is a violation of it, or this is an example of it. It's all subjective. And that subjectivity has become a source of real concern. So, Bin Laden, yes or no? I mean, I'm a no, but I'm clearly behind the times.

I know, right? You're right that these things are facile and they do not stand up to scrutiny, but they are the most absurd thing said by nominally intelligent people. There was a tweet thread the other day where somebody was talking about that Israel, of course, is an illegitimate colonial enterprise, and the United States and Israel should be making plans, really, to relocate everybody in Israel because it's not going to last. History is against it. And when somebody said, so that means that they all have to leave because they're not from there? And her response to that was, well, yes, like the United States, Israel is an illegitimate settler country.

So, in other words, what she was saying, if you thought about it, was that everybody from Israel who is Jewish should be taken to America, but then they should have about two weeks to relax and not unpack, because we're going to move everybody from America to some other unspecified place, perhaps back in Europe. And what do you do with the people from Central and South America who are of mixed blood, who are from indigenous and the Spanish conquerors? We never seem to really hear a lot about the Spanishanish imperialists doing are these people supposed to go back to spain can they stay do they flip a coin do they go to a big platform in the middle of the atlantic ocean the end result of all of this decolonization stuff is is bloodshed and or bloodshed more of it but but yet serious thinking tenured people will cling to these words as though they speak of a framework to which we can fix these things once they're all gradually assumed to be the case by everybody or the people in power.

And you're right. You're very charitable. You're very charitable to say that. I mean, they are certainly thinking. I was going to say, serious thinking and tenured. The latter of those descriptions is correct. The tenured part was supposed to be, serious thinking and tenured. The latter most of those descriptions is correct. The tenured part was supposed to be a sarcastic rejoinder. If I was speaking in a New York accent, it would have been apparent.

But since I'm from North Dakota, I speak in a sort of ameliorating, you know, nice guy kind of tone. I just, I really have to wrap myself back here. And North Dakota, by the way, was a great multicultural place to grow up. Because we had the Poles, we had the Lutherans, we had the Catholics, we had the Norwegians, we had the Swedes, we had all, and nobody believes me when I say that it was multicultural, that any of these things were different. They were. Anyway, so Noah, you're going to respond to whatever word salad I just said. And the litany of colonizers in your stock renders all of those opinions rather suspect. Just call them Vikings, I think. Right.

Yeah, precisely. Yeah, I find it very hard to take many of those arguments seriously because I find them so fatuous and just simply an exercise in onanism. It's just a way for them to demonstrate their own, the lingua franca of the institutions to which they belong and to navigate. population that was not native to a particular parcel of land which by the way doesn't really apply to israel as as israelis will fully tell you there's and why the the archaeological historical record demonstrates is that ties to the land are actually 5 000 years old or something along those lines um but it's of no bearing it's simply uh irrelevant to the practical matter before us, which is matters of war and diplomacy and geostrategy. It's a way to defer those conversations and to subsume them into something highly abstract and very theoretical in order to get around the problems that we are confronted with today, which are far more practical um so i don't

find them to be especially compelling right right they really reflect poorly frankly on the people who think that they substitute for any actual expertise in the region or in the in the field of military or political affairs but the fact that you would use a phallicentric term like onanism in the first place i think it allows me to discredit everything that you've just said steven old testament yes right yeah well i think it allows me to discredit everything that you've just said steven old testament yes right yeah well i think it's perfectly appropriate no you're absolutely this is what i imagine these people do in the faculty lounge so you know for sure i don't you're absolutely you're absolutely correct i'm i'm just astonished we can still use the word

without somehow being accused at some deep level of transphobia. And the amount of intellectual onanism that goes on must make the decks as slippery as those of a ship in a height. This is going downhill quickly. Which is why I'm giving it back to Charlie, who's going to give you another historical monster and ask you to approve of him or not. Charles, who would be next? Oh, I

don't know. You've thrown that one right at me. I mean, I did, I must say, see some pretty amusing jokes on Twitter implying that wait until they discover Mein Kampf. Although of all people, Tommy Vieta, is that how you say it, who was an Obama flack of the late 2000s, he said that it was a good thing that there was an Adderall shortage because that meant they wouldn't be able to get through Mein Kampf,

so perhaps we won't get newfound respect for the Third Reich. I'm not going to ask Noah Rothman whether Hitler was a good guy or not. Even though you have teed me up to do that, James, I'm going to decline on this particular occasion to do that. Well, we'll probably be at that point

next year. I mean, five years ago, if you'd asked me, do you think that French bus drivers will refuse to take Jews to a ceremony? Five years ago, I would have probably said no. If you'd asked me a year ago about that, I probably would have said, yeah, I think French bus drivers probably would for a variety of reasons. If you'd asked me in America, if we'd ever have bus drivers who would refuse to board Jews to take them to a pro-Israel rally from Dulles, I would have said no. This is the United States of America. Now, I say, yeah, I absolutely can see it, because I just did. But look, it feels to me as if this one is just so poignant for me as a 39-year-old,

the idea of Osama bin Laden being a good guy. I was 16 when 9-11 happened. But if you actually look through i'm not sure they're exactly the same people but some of the people that various enclaves online like and have re-evaluated you will find obviously the classics sheik ravara being one of them but you will find stalin i mean there is a subculture on Twitter of tankies who love Stalin and think he did nothing wrong. They love Lenin. They think he did nothing wrong. They look at the various dictators that have held power in Asia, whether that's in China or Vietnam, Cambodia, and they

say, well, you can't make an omelette without breaking it. So, I mean, I suppose I shouldn't be as shocked by this as I am, but it's because this one was the one that... I suppose it must be a little bit like if you'd been born in 1920 and people suddenly started saying, you know who's a good guy? Hirohito. That's who was a good guy. You know, that would really cut you to the quick.

So that's why. I have been saying now for a month that it is necessary to simply clean house at our universities in the country. And I think the chance of that happening is close to zero. Now, you mentioned 9-11. Go back to a couple of years afterwards. I wrote an article about this recently. You remember that Ward Churchill guy at the University of Colorado? We had it coming. Those people in the Twin Towers were the little Eichmanns of capitalism. He got fired, although they fired him for a technicality. They didn't fire him for being a left-wing loon. That was the real reason they fired him. But they found that he'd plagiarized, that he'd lied about stuff, and that's a crazy story. I see nothing of

that happening now. In other words, I don't think Ward Churchill would be fired today for saying the things that the pro-Hamas academics are saying on our college campuses, and that shows you how much worse things have gotten in the last 20 years. Let me ask Noah this. Noah, you've seen that there's been almost immediate retribution and consequences for people who have been identified ripping down posters of the kidnapped children and people, right? There are several Twitter accounts that name and shame and follow up with their dismissal. Those are grassroots enterprises, though. That's not a top-down response by authority figures. True.

It's an effort to shame authority figures who would otherwise look the other way into doing what would be their custodial jobs as institutions. Exactly. But it's a start. They're not doubling down in every instance and saying free speech. They are actually saying, oh, this is very bad. We want to disassociate ourselves from this person, if only for PR reasons. I mean, it'll take whatever reason they want, but it is happening. I may have the sequence of events wrong here, but I think quite a lot of that was incepted by the refusal of the professional class to simply accept these people that quite a bit quite a bit of this was followed by or rather institutions like colleges beginning to take this seriously was preceded by big law firms saying look if you're praising the

slaughter of uh you know jews we're not going to hire you point blank uh and at which point you were menacing the bottom line of these institutions which really focuses the mind yes it does like a hanging i know it's been a pleasure as ever just an absolute pleasure to talk to you and we'll talk again soon and uh maybe one of these days we'll talk about the resurgence of pax americana how everything is going absolutely grand china's in retreat and the west stands strong again um i can always dream. Thank you for joining us, and everybody, buy the book. Thank you all. Take care. Yeah, you know, you wonder sometimes if these people will ever have an intellectual pole shift

and realize how wrong that they've been. We all have those moments where we have to realize that we've done something that wasn't particularly wise and upbraid ourselves for it. And it's a learning lesson sometimes. But then sometimes, really, when you think about it, it's better to avoid the problem in the first place, is it not? Let me turn to the subject of quaffing an adult beverage, which is something that I enjoy doing. A fine Islay scotch whiskey. Oh, that'll be, frankly, what's on the agenda for tonight. But, you know, at my age, and I'm at the age where plan B does not mean a backup course of action,

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So remember to head to zbiotics.com slash ricochet and use the coupon code ricochet at checkout for 15% off. Thank you, ZBiotics, for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, on the way out anything else that has been bothering you gentlemen that you want to get off your chest before we uh before we close well that could take another hour good grief but charles is so saturnine i know that nothing really truly bothers him he's just got that even temper or am i wrong no i'm fairly even tempered that doesn't mean nothing bothers me. It just means I've learned to cope with it.

I mean, I actually do think that we are in a really bad moment for our political parties to have made the decisions they seem to be making. I understand that history runs in cycles, and I'm not making an overwrought Flight 93 argument here. But there is such a thing as a good year in which to be frivolous, and a bad year in which to be frivolous. And I think we've got a bad year in which to be frivolous. If you look around the world, you haven't just got the crisis in Ukraine, the crisis in the Middle East. You've got a resurgent China that keeps hinting that it's going to invade Taiwan.

You've got interest rates higher than they've been for 40 years because inflation is higher than it's been for 40 years you've now got a federal budget that has no chance whatsoever of being balanced at any point in the near future we're paying nearly a trillion dollars a year in debt repayments we've got an entitlements crisis that no one wants to talk about anymore at least 15 years ago the two parties would acknowledge it existed now neither one seems to want to do that and we seem to be headed toward an election that will be held most likely between a guy who is essentially dead and a guy who is likely to be a convicted felon. I don't think that's a good moment to do that.

The set of problems that you have laid out there clearly indicate that we need men of experience and perspective who have seen a lot in their lives. And that's why I'm with you. The idea that I still don't believe it's happening. I still don't believe it's happening. I'm going to be in the booth, right, about to cast my vote. And I'm going to look down and see Biden and Trump. And I'm going to go back and say, are you sure this is the one that five minutes ago you just weren't handed one that says Newsom and DeSantis? Because that's that that's the one that probably we should be should be should be doing now not these i mean the idea for in the last election that we will be replaying it with these men four years hence is so immensely immensely depressing about the electorate and the parties themselves steven do you think he's

going to make it i mean the dnc after he's nominated from what i understand can swap him out and they don't have to vote they don't have to ask anybody to you know what to do they can just do it and i've been saying on this podcast probably frivolously uh but increasingly seriously for the last six or seven months or so that i think that's what's going to happen that biden is going to be raised up uh he'll be nominated again and then he'll just sort of ascend to heaven like romulus or cla Claudius and into that slot that they will put Newsom because they can and because he's young and vital and he's got the hair and all the rest of it and he would he would thrash Trump for a variety of reasons yeah and I think I agree with

all that uh you know as a thought experiment and actually you know Conrad Black who was uh you know a friend of Trump's the supporter of Trump's who's now critical of him, he wrote, I think, before the end of the year in 2020, that Trump would be much advised to do the Andrew Jackson strategy. He can claim the election was stolen, but he would cease his efforts to try and stop it because he's run out of time. And then he would do what Andrew Jackson did in the 1820s. If you hadn't had January 6th and the intransigence of Trump, I think he would be 10 points ahead in the polls right now and heading for a landslide triumphal re-election. Leave aside the merits of Trump and all the characteristics and all the rest of that. And so there's the tragedy of Trump that goes with his personality, right? And so, yeah,

you know, I have actually since 2016, I've been repairing two famous statements. One, James Madison from Federalist 10, that enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. We've been testing that proposition for quite a while now. And then second, the line attributed to Bismarck that, what is it, God looks after drunks, fools, and the United States of America. We're testing that proposition, too. You know, I tend to be a congenital optimist because, you know, I grew up with Ronald Reagan and, you know, think myself still as a true Reaganite, despite all the people saying Reagan's passe and so forth on the younger generation. And I keep thinking something's going to happen. Somebody's going to replace somebody on the ticket next year. I don't know if it's true.

But, yeah, right now I keep saying, are we really going to have an election where one candidate campaigns from the basement again and the other candidate campaigns from a jail cell? This is not an implausible or impossible scenario, and it's just mind-boggling. If you said, you know, as Charlie was saying earlier, if you said even 10 years ago that we'd have a circumstance like this, you would have thought, no, if you pitched that to some Hollywood producer, they'd say, get out of here with a crazy story like that. Reagan is no longer relevant, but Karl Marx is incredibly stupid. Right.

Well, that being said, I would like to remind you, and as soon as I say these things, you're going to think the podcast is over, but it isn't. I'd like to remind you that we were brought to you by Beam, by Roan, and by ZBiotics. All of these things can enhance your life. And if you support them, you support us, the circle of life and capitalism. And if you could take a minute to leave a six-star review on Apple Podcasts, your reviews allow other new listeners to find the show, and that gets more listeners. And you

should, of course, go to ricochet.com and join if you haven't but in the meantime we'll see you all in the comments at ricochet 4.0 thank you gentlemen and thank you for listening see you around james ricochet join the conversation