The Ricochet Podcast - Tyrants, Missiles, and Drones...Oh, My

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

James, Steve, and Charles are back for a Halloween treat: H.R. McMaster joins at the top for a chat about military matters: the Maduro regime and boat strikes; UAVs and the fight in Eastern Europe; the Department of War and our readiness. Plus, the fellas defend cultural confidence, brave the Great Feminization, and name the most horrifying flick they've seen.- Sound from this week's open: Senator John Kennedy on the shutdown. 

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can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall. It's the Rikishay podcast with Charles C.W. Stephen Hayward. Today, our guest is H.R. McMasters to talk about the world, the war, then everything else. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I voted 13 times to open government back up. Senator Schumer, my colleague, eagerly, greedily, wanted to become the face of the shutdown. The American people, in the American people's opinion, Senator Schumer is a, he's a wet match in a dark cave. Happy Halloween and all of that. It's the R ricochet podcast number 763.

I'm James Lillickson, Clammy, Minnesota, with Stephen Hayward in Sunday, California, and Charles C.W. Cook in Florida. Who knows what the weather is there? Who cares? Let's skip the throat-clearing palaver with which we usually commence our shows and go straight to our guest, H.R. McMaster.

Retired Lieutenant General and former assistance to the U.S. President for National Security Affairs. He's a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution where he lectures and hosts the series Today's Battlegrounds and Goodfellows is the author of multiple bestsellers including Derelliction of Duty Battlegrounds, the fight to defend the free world

and most recently at war with ourselves my tour of duty in the Trump White House. Welcome, sir. Hey, it's great to be with you guys, James, Stephen Charles. Thanks for having me. You know, we've got a whole bunch of questions but I want to go right to today's battlegrounds because I wouldn't have thought this would be the case

two years ago, but it is. Ukraine. A lot of people are saying that we're looking at seemingly two different worlds here, one in which Russia, by throwing more and more and more, untrained conscripts into the meat grinder, is actually making an inking out incremental progress, while at the same time Ukraine is engaged in a massive and brilliantly categorized and strategized destruction of the oil, energy infrastructure, and transportation sector. What do you see going on there, and what do you see happening in six months, let's say? Well, what you're seeing is Ukraine is using it, I think, long-range capabilities in a very smart way. They're going after military facilities. You saw how they've used drones, for example, like to sink the Black Sea fleet and to push it away from Ukraine.

And these deep strike targets on refiner is kind of the right target set because Russia has old infrastructure. It's got very few really big oil refiner that you can see them from space, right? And so they've identified, you know, kind of the narrow point in the funnel here for Russia. And they want to bring the war home to Russians in a way that, you know, that doesn't really place the Russian people at risk, like the Russians are placing Ukrainians at risk with these massive onslaughts against, you know, schools and apartment buildings as well as Ukraine's infrastructure. And it's starting to have an effect. You know, there are gas lines, you know, in Moscow. And so this narrative of, hey, this is just a special military operation.

Well, hey, it's a special military operation during which Russia has incurred a million casualties, dead and severely wounded, as wrecked the economy. And so I think this is putting a tremendous amount of pressure on Putin, who's in a very weak position at the moment. H.R. and Steve Hayward out in California, and I distinctly recall the last time we had you on, I think it was I who raised the question. We're all talking about the Middle East, of course, and Ukraine. And I said, what about Latin America? And so between then and now, as we know, the Gerald Ford Aircraft Terrier Strike Force has moved off the coastline. There's the whole controversy about taking out drug boats and so forth. But what's you're reading and what's going on there?

What's this all about? Is it about Guyana? Is it about we really think the Maduro has to go and we're ready to try and help with some effort to do that? Or how do you see it shaping up? well it is largely about the medora regime remember this is a regime that has just destroyed that country between him and chavez and there are 8 million

they drove 8 million venezuelans one third of the population outside of the country in the last election 70% of venezuelos voted to get rid of that jackass but he clung to power anyway you know so but what's significant I think from our perspective is this is a hub

for what I would call the axis of aggressors in the western hemisphere Chavez depends on on Cuban and Russian security capabilities and intelligence capabilities. He relies on Chinese cash for cash flow, and he relies on the Iranians to a large degree. And of course, he's aiding and abetting Hezbollah as part of that, because now with Hezbollah really decapitated and decimated by the Israeli defense forces and Israeli intelligence, the Western Hemisphere is their main money-making enterprise. for Hezbollah. So really, Maduro is the nexus for these, what I would call them,

far-left progressive dictatorships in Latin America, as well as far-left progressive movements, which he funds, and he funds them really through the illicit economy. We have some pretty significant sanctions on Maduro, but it's the illicit cash flow largely through narcotics that is a big source of strength. And this is what President Trump is going after is his cash flow by trying to interrupt the trafficking of drugs to North America and to Europe, by the way, that this is the trafficking network that Medora runs as the head of a major drug cartel. What does our response look like?

I mean, it's possible that something will happen and we'll never hear about it because there's simply a bunch of burly guys with face paint in the middle of the night who did the job, and that's that. Or do you expect that there's more robust and kinetic action, as they say in support of this? Again, who knows? But what should we look for and what should we not be surprised not to hear about? Yeah, James, well, you know, what I'd like to see and what I'd like to barely not see

and just have, make sure it's there, is a comprehensive approach to this problem with clearly defined objectives. Are the objectives just to weaken Maduro and to weaken his ability to support, you know, Nicaragua and Cuba, you know, the, you know, Petros in Colombia, his political movement, you know, to Silva and in Brazil, right? I mean, he's the patron for all these guys. Or is it to really help the Venezuelan people restore the Constitution? So I would not even use the word regime change.

I know, President Trump hates that to begin with. But, I mean, this is helping Venezuela to restore the Constitution. If that's the case, there should be a concerted effort to dry up his cash flow, which you're seeing part of that now. But there could be other actions associated with that as well. There could be cyber actions and certainly financial actions and so forth. I think also what you want to do is you want to divide. and the security forces that he relies on.

And I think this is probably what, you know, what our government agency that is involved in that is probably doing. It's probably trying to make an approach to some of these guys. Hey, you know, you're on a sinking ship. You know, if you want to get off the ship, you can get off the ship and maybe encourage some kind of revolt of the elites within that security force. You know, the third thing you want to be able to do is reach the population to kind of trace the grievances of Venezuela's back to him.

You know, he's at the top of these criminalized patronage network, so a lot of people see Maduro as a patron, but he's the one who's destroying the country. And then finally, you want to kind of work on this problem from the outside in to insulate him from sources of external strength and support, whether, you know, really, you know, as I mentioned before, China, Russia, Cuba, and Iran. And so I hope there's a comprehensive approach to this. And I think the goal should be, you know, to weaken the regime, but also to ensure, sure that what we're doing strengthens the opposition. And of course, you know, we had, you know, the leader of the Venezuelan opposition just received the Nobel Prize. I think there's an opportunity to take advantage of that as well. But HR and Steve again, I want to shift gears to the Trump White House here in Trump, too. I do want to preface it by saying that I never get tired of telling people that your dereliction of duty book is one of the five best books ever written about the

Vietnam War. And, you know, our mutual friend, Mack Owens and I talk endlessly to see who can won up each other about how great it is. But it's also a great book about the question of civil military relations, which, you know, as you know, Mac is a great expert on. You've been very candid, but also measured in your observations and lessons from your time with President Trump in the first term. And I'm sort of going to bring up that question of civil military relations because so much of the Trump cabinet in the second term is such unconventional. people. There are very few people in the cabin who you recognize from a normal Republican administration. And of course, one of the persons who is controversial is the

defense secretary, but also the people he's put in charge of negotiations like Steve Whitkoff and his own son-in-law, right? So there's two forms of this question. One is, is there a parallel between the problems of civil and military relations that you laid out in your great book from almost 30 years ago? Or if you want to just answer the question a more general form, those thoughts would be welcome to. Well, hey, thanks, Stephen. I am concerned about dragging the military into partisan politics, right? So you've had visits to military bases or ships that kind of look like a rally. I think there should be more of an effort to make them not look like rallies.

You know, for example, the hat the president wears. There should be no selling of maga merchandise, you know, to troops and that sort of thing. We know that that kind of thing has happened. And I think that what you see happening is in, I think, the legitimate effort, an important effort to reverse some of the policies of the Biden administration, the policies associated with pushing what some people call a woke agenda. I don't think that's a, that's really useful word. But what I'm really talking about is an approach in the military where they were advocating for equality of outcome instead of a quality of opportunity, the associated kind of valorization of victimhood. you know, and this idea, this crazy idea that you should judge, you know, the soldier next to you based on their identity category instead of their courage, their toughness, their commitment

to the mission and to one another, which is associated with their willingness to sacrifice for one another. And their sense of honor, right? That's how we, that's how we judge our fellow soldiers and servicemen and women. So I think in the process of applying a corrective, the Secretary of War now, Secretary Exit, I think he seems to me to be fighting a rear guard against phantoms. I mean, this idea that there are woke generals and admirals, hey, I'm telling

you, Stephen, I don't know any woke generals and admirals. I mean, there are probably a few professors I know who were, you could fall in that category, but not generals and admirals. And so the people who were pushing this agenda besides the auto pen in the Biden administration were

the political appointees in the Department of Defense and in White House. They're gone. Hey, you know, President Trump won, declare victory. And so I see that there is this misunderstanding that where all this nonsense came from, it didn't come from the military, it came from political appointees. And by the way, that's how the chain of command works. It goes from the president to the secretary of war, to the combatant commanders and the service chiefs. So, hey, I think that there's just a misunderstanding, and I worry about, I worry about like the left, you know, trying to label the military extremist, which is not.

and I worry about the far right or some people on the far right trying to label the military as woke. Just keep the military out of this nonsense. What has afflicted our society? We don't want that coming into the military. A lot of what he's doing, though, in terms of reinstating standards, you know? I mean, it got ridiculous. I mean, there were people who were declaring themselves, you know,

some Norse religion, you know, so they could, so they could grow a beard, you know? And I'll say that the women's soldiers, I know, they want gender neutral standards and tough standards. They want the standards to drop, right? So I think what the Biden administration did in many ways was a disservice to women, to service women and to minority leaders as well. I mean, you know, if you make it clear that you want a quality of outcome, what happens is when the best qualified person who happens to be a member of a minority group gets promoted, oh people might look at him or her go like oh well yeah i guess i know why that person got it i mean it's just it's terrible it's destructive uh to cohesion and it had to end i just don't want the cure to be worse

than the disease you know and and and then the other thing that bothered me i guess a little bit was this idea that when you're fighting brutal unscrupulous enemies that you should be equally as brutal right i mean it's our warrior ethos you know is based on you know those principles i mentioned right, our sense of honor, our commitment to one another, a willingness to sacrifice, you know. But we're also committed to overmatching the enemy in every combat engagement, but also to employing, you know,

firepower with discipline and discrimination, to do our best to protect innocence. And this is, I didn't come up with that. I mean, St. Thomas Aquinas came up with that. So I think, I think, you know, there are a few things that bothered me about the conclave and, you know, the relationship of the military. but on the other aspects of, okay, what does the military owe the president and the secretary of war?

They owe those to their best military advice. And what I'm concerned about is, you know, this kind of idea that they're not going to get that because somebody in a senior military rank like worked for Mark Millie, who they hate. They worked for Mark Millie because the guy was the chairman, man. It's not because, you know, it's not because that they were against President Trump or something. then there's no way. I mean, so I just think we've got to really work hard to keep that bold line in place between our military and partisan politics. Employers, rewarding your staff, why choose between a shop voucher or a spend anywhere card

when with options card, you can have both. With options card, your team gets the best of both worlds. They can spend with Ireland's favorite retailers or choose a spend anywhere card. It's simple to buy and easy to manage. There are no hidden fees, it's easy to use, and totally flexible. They can even re-gift or donate to a good cause. Make your awards more rewarding. Visit optionscar.i.e. today. Hi there, Charles Cook here in Florida.

I wonder if I can ask you about drones. I've been watching some of the footage coming out of Ukraine. I've read a little bit about developments within the Chinese military. And perhaps I'm falling for the latest buzzwords and hype. But it seems to me that this could be huge. This could be a massive change in the way we fight. Am I right? And if I am right, is America keeping up?

Yeah, Charles, you are right. It already is a massive change in the way that we fight. America is keeping up in terms of the technology, you know, and our ability to develop drones that have the capabilities you want them to have. Of course, they come in all different sizes with different payloads and they have different roles, right? They have, you know, reconnaissance roles, deep strike roles, as you've seen, with many of these, like, lower cost Shahed drones that have, that have, you know, greater, you know, greater range. And then, but then also you have these tactical drones. And I think what has really changed the character of combat is these first-person view drones, which are, which are wire guided.

But the wire guide is like 30 kilometers now, instead of, you know, six kilometers, which it was maybe at the outset of the war. So what this has created, Charles, is kind of a no man's land that is reminiscent, I think, of World War I. So whereas this has really shifted in a significant way, the character of warfare and combat, you know, there's also a lot of continuity there. It looks like World War I because remember World War I, the problem initially was machine guns and then massive artillery. You know, what the Germans called Materielschlocked. And so to get around material schlock, they changed their tactics. They put in elastic defense, defense in greater depth, smaller outposts forward, sound familiar? That's what the Ukrainians are doing.

And then the Germans with the Ludendorf offensive in the spring of 1918, which they launched simultaneous with unrestricted submarine warfare to try to knock France and Britain out of the war before America came in. They used infiltration tactics, small groups to try to get around the front lines, and then attack artillery and command posts and logistics facilities. That sounds like what's going on around Pekrosk right now in Ukraine. But I think the fundamental conditions have not shifted in terms of having decisive capabilities because the Russians have not been able to sustain those offenses. And they're taking massive losses as they do it. Now, but to your question, hey, how does this change warfare? It changes warfare because these capabilities, along with some others,

like intelligence collection capabilities, especially those in lower earth, orbit, you'll like imagery and RSRF collection or radio frequency collection capabilities have shifted the battlefield into the realm of more transparency. And so all forces have to act almost as if they're in visual range of the enemy. So what this means for future war is we need countermeasures to that. And in the opening phase of the next war, I think we're going to have to apply a range of capabilities designed to blind the enemy. to blind the enemy by shooting down drones,

and you're seeing some of these countermeasures now coming out with drone against drone, right? Drone v. drone warfare, where swarms of drones are kind of protecting you, but also directed energy capabilities, and as well as the range of electromagnetic warfare capabilities, which have already been employed against drones. So those are all coming online,

and so what you're going to see is this interaction, like you always see in war between dueling capabilities. You know, machine gun tank, tank anti-tank missiles, submarine sonar, bomber, radar. But the next war is obviously going to be fought also in cyberspace, as this one has been, but in low Earth orbit for sure. The next war is going into space. Because to blind your enemy, you're going to have to dazzle or destroy their space-based collection capabilities. So we're developing a range of those capabilities, but we haven't done to get to your question.

how are we doing? We haven't been able to do it at scale. I mean, the scale of what Ukrainians and Russians are doing is astounding. And also, the speed of innovation. I mean, what will happen is there'll be a countermeasure developed, Russian countermeasure, Ukrainies will detect it. And then within certainly a couple weeks, but often within days, they have an adaptation to their drones that mitigates the effect of that countermeasure. So I think also what we're learning is not only, you know, the effective drones, but also the importance of open architectures for weapon systems so they can be, they can be modified on the fly. It's all fascinating anybody who studied warfare, and you believe, and you hope that maybe

100 Starlings could be self-propelled and nudge a Chinese satellite out of orbit. That's our single weapon. You hope and you think that maybe we can develop a neagea system that will just clean them all out of the skies. But then you realize when you see some of these demonstrations in China that they have of just, you know, sort of aesthetic drones where they go into the sky and form great many pictures, the ability to coordinate masses of these and the ability then to perhaps swarm and overwhelm defenses, and you start thinking to yourself, well, it's not that an insurmountable problem, but it is a problem. Now, what you've said is that the ideas are recognized, the threat is recognized, and what needs to be done, and how nimble we need to be

to counteract that, that's all baked in already. But we've all seen sclerotic procurement. We've all seen how entrenched ways of thinking keep some people from adapting because it's their, it's their fiefdom, it's their bailiwick. And you want to think that everybody is of a mind to realize that something has changed significantly in warfare in the last two years. Is the Pentagon mindset now nimble and forward-looking and impatient with those people who want to preserve this or keep this or nay-say that? Or is there a sense of urgency? I guess that's what I'm looking for. James, I think there is, you know, and I think this has been a big change and a positive change in the Trump administration. And it's mainly because, you know, the Trump administration,

you know, President Trump is unconventional, right? You know, he's very disruptive. Oftentimes he becomes, you know, maybe too disruptive and disrupts himself, you know, but let's set that aside for a second. But what he's doing is he's willing to kind of break the process, put new processes in place. There are some policies they put in place already that I think are quite promising that allow for the rapid procurement of these capabilities. And what encourages me is the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Steve Feinberg, he's not like a normal person to come into Department of Defense, right? He's the founder of a big private equity firm,

and his skill set has been to develop companies and improve the effectiveness of companies, many of which have had defense or intelligence application. He knows how frustrating the process can be. and now he's in charge of that process as the deputy secretary of defense. And so I think that one of the reasons why we didn't have reform earlier, I think, is because the same people kept coming into the Department of Defense. What would happen is a Republican administration would come in, the Democrats would go to think tanks, we're back to the private sector,

and then the same Democrat, you know, sort of political appointees would come back and vice versa. So I think you have a new group of people. The one thing that I kind of worry about, though, James, is like, you need some of the exquisite case. capabilities and, you know, the more expensive capabilities to get you into the fight, right? If you're, if you were to carry like a little drone in your hand to the front, how did you get to the front? And then also, you know, what we're seeing in Ukraine and what we saw Gaza in urban warfare is the war is still about the control of territory populations and resources. And, you know, guess what you need to do that? You need infantry. And guess what you need to get your infantry into that fight?

You need mobile protected firepower. You need tiered and layered air defense capabilities. You need the joint capabilities that can be brought to bear to disrupt the enemy in greater depth. You need logistics. Hey, that sounds like combined arms and joint capabilities to me. So, you know, I think of combat. Combat's rock paper scissors. It's like the

kids game rock paper scissors. And if you don't have the full compliment, you know, if you didn't bring scissors and the enemy brings out the paper, you're done. So I think it's important for us to have this range of capabilities and some people are saying, hey, we don't need these exquisite capabilities anymore. Well, I mean,

that's easy for you to say, but when you're in close combat, you want that exquisite capability. I, for one, enjoyed being in a 70-ton killing machine in Desert Storm. I was grateful for General Dynamics, man, and all the people who gave me that beautiful, that beautiful machine. So I think that, you know, we do need, though, to develop these capabilities so that they can, as I mentioned, be upgraded very quickly. And we have some real new design capabilities now. So, for example, like some of these new defense companies, instead of doing it the old way, James, like they'll get a request for a proposal, right? Then it'll create a spec document that's like a thousand, thousands of pages, right? I mean, and then, and they'll say,

okay, now give me money. Give me money to build the prototype. And then you build competing prototypes. There's a down selection and that, you know, that takes forever. What some of these new companies are doing is they're just building it and are saying, hey, look at this thing I built. Do you guys want it? You know, because I think it meets your requirement. So I think there are some significant changes happening, but also what we have to be cognizant of here, and this is a real danger, is we have allowed our supply change to become too dependent on single points of failure controlled by China. And of course, that's been very much in the news in the last several weeks, but it's been the case, like, since the 90s, and just got worse and worse in the 2000s, the 20-10s,

and we didn't do enough about that. So I think that's where we need a sense of urgency as well. I think when it comes to getting men into the theater, when it comes to using drones and flight capability, when it comes to using all sorts of suppressive firepower and the rest of it, I think in the future we're going to see where you take a man and you put him in a flying craft and the craft will have guns and rock. Oh, I just invented the jet. I'll shut up now. Stephen? Well, about the rocks, you were mentioning a moment ago of rock, paper, scissors. If you asked one very specific question, there's been a lot of chatter about whether we should supply Tomahawk,

missiles to Ukraine, which would enable them to strike deep into Russia. And the debate reminds me in some ways of a debate I know you know well, which was back in the 80s, long debates about whether we should give Stinger missiles to the Afghan resistance against the Soviet Union then. And I think some of the same risk factors then are on our minds now. What do you say, yay or nay? Do you have an opinion on the Tomahawk question? I say yay to it because, you know, really to be effective at countering this onslaught, I think it was 720 projectiles of various types, all different types, fired on Ukraine yesterday, right? You need to be able to shoot down those arrows, but you also have to be able to kill the

archer. And what Ukraine has demonstrated is the ability to use these long-range capabilities in a very disciplined manner by going after military bases, by going after military targets, as well as some of the infrastructure that's related to sustaining Russia's war-making machine like the refineries that we were discussing earlier. So I think that, you know, I think providing those capabilities is important. They already have some of these in limited quantities,

like the storm shadows, for example, and the Taurus is the German version. But I think we should sell them, you know, as we're doing it now, sell them to the Europeans who can provide them to, to the Ukrainians, and I know there has been some discussion about, well, it's hard to teach them how to use it. I mean, the Ukrainies are demonstrated. They are incredibly, they're ingenious at this stuff. And I think they can figure it out pretty quickly, you know, with minimal training.

Well, we've covered a lot, and I think there's a few more things in the world that we could probably get around to, but we know you have to go and we'll leave them for the next time, Unless, of course, peace is broken out globally and there's nothing to do but sit back and bask in the shine of it all. Might not happen. H.R. McMasters, it's been a great pleasure. At war with ourselves, my tour of duty in the Trump White House is the book you might want to pick up or any of its other fine, fine works. And it's been a pleasure talking to you, sir, and we hope to have you back again soon. Hey, always great to be with you guys. Take care.

Take it. Bye-bye. And Charles, do you have a drone? My seven-year-old has a little drone he got for Christmas. but I don't think it's a threat to anyone. We need to pot you up a bit. Your 7-year-old has a drone. Is he skilled enough to be able to control it with one of those things with all the little toggles

and the joysticks and the rest of it, or does he use his phone to manipulate it? No, no, it has a remote control with the joysticks. It's not a phone-based drone, but I tend to fly it because he tends to fly it into a tree. Yes, well, that'll happen. Stephen, what kind is yours? I'll bet it's a DGI.

Oh, yeah, I've got some. several of them. Actually, I've been a drone nut from the very beginning. I've still got one of the big old giant ones from 12 years ago, whenever and now I'm just a drone nut. I'm really a doctor. The equivalent of the satellite dish in the backyard and some, you know, some Ozark

place, yes. Yeah, I have a little DJI Neo that is packable and I take it with me and fly about, and I'll still never remember. I forget standing on the shores in England and Suffolk and looking at the picture and admiring the view I had before I realized that I was sending it out to its death.

to its doom. It was, I had no idea. And it reached the limit, and it just, it's sort of, it pulled back and came back to me. And the film of these, because it has an automatic landing ability or it just comes back to your hand. I don't know if yours does. It's just like watching this bird come back to a very worried parent that's happy to see it. And then, of course, I put it in a tree. So it's lots of fun, yes.

But when you realize that these are indeed the instruments of war, that the very same thing that we play around with and have panoramic shots of our backyard are following men into trenches. followed by a no signal indicates that there's a very horrifying and personal aspect to these that has changed a lot of the nature of warfare. I mean, men in combat in a trench never had to fear like a personal demon that was set on them on harvesting their soul, which is what it feels like in some of these places. But then again, we've been predicting this war was going to come to a cracking point for years now, and it hasn't.

Shifting domestically. Checking my watch. Do we have a government still shut down? I can't tell. You guys? What are you feeling about this? Well, I mean, I think I've made this speech before that all of our other governments, including a lot of the federal government, are still open, but certainly state and local

government are open. My latest thought about this is that nothing will happen until at least next Wednesday. And that's pure politics. I think Democrats are expecting or hoping that they're going to sweep the governor's races in Virginia and New Jersey and maybe some other races around the country, probably the Proposition 50 in California that will allow the Democrats to carve up the congressional districts to take out what few Republicans remain that will pass and maybe pass handily, and that will give them a big talking point.

Well, I think otherwise it's not going to, nothing will happen before Wednesday. But Will it? I'm interested in this because I agree, Steve. That was my view as well. And then I read a really interesting piece this morning in National Review. by Henry Olson, who of course, writes, does a podcast with Ricochet. And he says that, yeah, the Democrats are probably going to win those races. And yeah, they're probably going to get the 60, is it 60% they need in California or just 50% for the proposition to go through.

But they're not walking away with it in Virginia. They're not walking away with it in New Jersey. Jersey, there is no blue wave. Wave. And you would expect to see a bigger reaction against Trump. Mm-hmm. So, yes, I have no doubt they'll say it. They've been pretending they didn't shut down the government.

They'll say anything. But I do wonder whether they're going to be underwhelmed. And if somehow Citarelli were to win in New Jersey, that argument is going to fall on deaf ears, because that will then be the story. Yeah. No, it's a gamble on their part for sure. But I think that's what they're hoping for. Charles, you had a fun tweet this morning here.

And it's almost a stick this one anywhere, Charles E.W. could tweet, which consists of nobody actually believes this. It's absurd. Now, you're actually linking to something, which is one of my favorite talking points about the culture and these social wars and all the rest of it. Some fellow, I don't know why you're referring to, how many followers is this guy? What sort of low number of people are you engaging with? Oh, he's got to, he's got 141,000 followers. All right. There you go.

He said, sorry, quote, some cultures are inferior to others, end quote, is just racism with extra steps. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So tell me, I'm, this, this conversation fascinates me. Tell me exactly why you thought this was absurd and that nobody believes it. Well, I'll tell you why, because both the left and the right in America clearly believe, that some cultures are superior to others. So the right, and I think this is probably not just the right,

but it's most people evidently think that there are bad countries because they have been made aware in their lives of, say, Iran or Saudi Arabia or Mali. There is a difference between saying the people there are inferior or their skin color makes them inferior, or, under all circumstances, irrespective of their surroundings, they would be inferior, which is a thing I very strongly do not believe, and saying there are cultures that are different than the cultures that obtain there, that are better. So that is the obvious case.

But the case that seals it for me is as applied to the left. What was the 1619 project, if not the assertion correctly in this particular, that say the Confederacy was an inferior culture than the Free North. They believe it too. If they didn't, they wouldn't go on all the time about their politics. I know. It's one of my favorite contradictions. They think it.

For goodness sake, they think it. They never shut up about it. There's a, I remember hearing an interview, and I wish I could track this down. But what he was saying was that cultures that believe that they are higher. that there are hierarchies in the in the in the cultures of the world are irredeemably bad that that those cultures who believe in making a hierarchy of other cultures are inferior and what he's saying then is that they are inferior to the cultures that do not make hierarchical judgments which thereby establishes a hierarchy right the good one who doesn't and the bad one who

does so there's your just in america just in america Do progressives really expect us to believe that they don't think Massachusetts has a better culture than Alabama? I'm not saying that's my view, but that is clearly their view. They talk about flyover country. They suggest that there are places in which people are enlightened and places in which they are not. They dream of an electorate that looks like the electorate of Washington and Orrin. Oregon and California and not of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. That is quite clearly an endorsement of the idea that there are good cultures and bad cultures separately from race. They're looking at the right and saying that the two examples of the right would use of cultures that are in superiority, use, on my favorite non-existent words to that West, would be Africa and the Muslim world.

And because they would say that Africa's problems stem from only colonialism, which is the sin of the West, nothing else, and that Islam, which has now become a race, must be held blameless because it must be held up with a certain amount of valor in admiration because it is targeted by the people on the right. the reason that they love and embrace and get tingly over the multicultural aspects of Islam has nothing to do with the precepts and things that might horrify them if they came from Christians. It's simply because they tell themselves that all those people in flyover country in Alabama get riled up about the Muslim and they're doing so for bigoted reasons. So it's not a particularly sophisticated view of the world and it also just allies them with things that are so culturally abhorrent to them in the treatment of what they regard as marginalized individuals in the West.

an incoherent, stupid thing to say, and that it's said by somebody with 145,000 followers who apparently has some sort of academic pedigree and peddles this nonsense, just shows you there is no second order thinking to any of this stuff. It's just the proclamation of these virtuous little bits of twaddle. Well, James, you say it's an understatement to say it's not a very sophisticated view. It's even worse than that. I mean, first of all, for the umpteenth time, I'll repeat that if the left didn't have double standards, they wouldn't have any standards at all. But beyond that, what you really see at work here is what the great late Rogers Groot would call the culture of repudiation. What they really believe is that our culture

is the inferior one, right? Anything that serves the hatred of Western culture is what they're for. So you'll elevate any other culture around the world over our own. And finally, I was glad you brought this up because I was going to bring up Charles National Review article about this. What touched us off was the original statement that some cultures are better than others was from the leader of the long-suffering Tory party in England, can be bad knock, the daughter of Kenyan immigrants to England who has fully assimilated to British culture and has been very forcefully attacking wokeery to use shorthand for a very long time now. And boy, the left really wants to change the subject when it's a person of color making these politically incorrect arguments. So,

anyway, how much off to you, Charlie? That was a great piece. And one of those arguments that Kemi Badenok made was that cultures that engage in female genital mutilation are worse than Britain. Now, if you can find me a progressive who doesn't believe that, whether quietly or not, I'll give you a million dollars. That is uncontroversial, thankfully, in the West. Well, unless you're talking about certain Northern European judiciary members who seem to believe that if your culture says it's all right to rape a 13-year-old, then how can you be held accountable for it in a Western country when you don't know what... Stuff like that makes people tear their hair out. And then six years later, there's riots in Civil War or not.

I mean, I was just in England, had a great time, kind of. And it's always amusing because I go there, before I go there, my feet is full of stabbings and horrible things and riots and Palestinian demonstrations. And Bobby's knocking on the door because you tweeted something wrong. And I've seen none of that in evidence. Granted, I spend my time in the banana in the bubble. but it's just amusing to see the complete and utter contrast between everything that I read and the life that I live twixt London and Suffolk.

So there's hope. There's hope that's what I'm saying. But related to the subject is a recent piece by Helen Anderson, Helen Andrews, I'm sorry, called The Great Feminization, which basically is saying, you know what, 19th? I don't know about that. No, she doesn't go that far. But what she does say is that we have moved almost completely now from a,

culture that used to prior that used to prioritize admire uphold depend upon what we saw as traditionally masculine aspects and it's been replaced by a catty little you know hr coven that has brought a new sense of ideas and the way things go and that it's not working out for us it's stifling things it's driving people apart and it's turning us into a tiresome kindergarten where we're all being shushed by some officious nanny somewhere i did i trust you fellows read the pick you guys you read that one guys about that uh about how the chicks are ruining everything i did okay thoughts well i think she made many points i think she's very intelligent i think that she as she acknowledged at the end of the piece and in the speech she made

that prompted it she's arguing against interest at one level because she's a woman but not at another because she's objectionable those are her words I think that her piece was misinterpreted in some quarters, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not. She wasn't saying all women should be shunted away. She was saying that wokeness has female characteristics, and I think there is something to that. The most profound point that I thought she made, and one that crystallized a view that I have held for a while but hadn't quite taken to its conclusion is that, We do not have a situation now in which we have normal competition for both sexes because it's illegal in some sense for women to fail. And so the federal government has guaranteed that we will have parity or greater than parity in women's favor in the workplace.

And I hadn't thought about that like that. But that's true when you look at the law because if there aren't enough women in a given workplace, It's a civil rights violation, but if there are more than enough, I mean, mathematically, not culturally, women in a workplace that doesn't matter. And that's the part of this, I think, that really was driven home for me, because when you set that up as a civil rights question, what you are doing is putting your thumb on the scales and guaranteeing that you're going to have more workplaces that are kind in inverted commas. than rambunctious and male. And that's where it becomes a problem. It's not a problem to have lots of places in America that are feminine. I mean, for example, I quite like the fact that my children's school is dominated by female teachers,

especially for younger grades. But I don't think it is good when you are mandating that everywhere ought to become like that because there are lots of places that probably ought to stay male. The broader question of whether or not having lots of women running around is going to destroy the rule of law, I'd need to think more about. But that I thought was really on the money. A lot of men read that piece and thought, you know, I should show this to my wife. Nah.

Well, so first of all, this article, I don't know if you caught this overseas, we're trying to follow it from afar, but it's created a huge station. Oh, David French wrote a whole poem about it in the New York Times. That shows you right there. I have been following some of the reaction from what I call some of the smarter progressives, the sort of center-left abundance liberals who are kind of interesting and thoughtful. And their reaction has been curious because on the one hand, they all rush to say, we don't agree with Helen Andrews.

But then the next sentence is, but she's actually right about a lot of stuff. And, you know, for a very long time, I have pointed out, not me, the economist Mark Perry, who's a good friend, that if you look at, I should give a preface to this. You will occasionally hear feminists say there ought to be, you know, a quota that 50% of leading professions should like lawyers, doctors, legislators should be women. And then Mark Perry likes to point out, and he has statistics that let's see, 99% of garbage workers are men. Ninety-eight percent of telephone linemen are men, right? You want to hard rock miners. Oh, and the fatality rates, much, much higher for men in occupations than women. How come we don't hear about, you know, demands for equity? Shouldn't we have 50% of garbage workers be women? And I've seen feminists presented with this question. And their answer always is, well, no, wait, we need equity in the professions where the power is. Well, you know what?

See what you think about power when your garbage doesn't get picked up. But I'll leave that aside for now. But you can see what's going on here. It is political. It is about power. And I think Helen has touched off a debate that's going to have some legs that are going to go for a while. They also play a game with that one, because while you can, comprehend the argument that this should only be applied where the power is. When you hear it,

you think politician or banker, but they never apply that rule to say schools, because teachers have an enormous amount of power, maybe the most power over people between the ages of four and 18. Women are overrepresented in those roles. They don't think that's a problem the other way around. And that's where I think feminists can sometimes play games with language that they only really define power in certain ways and they ignore it in others. Yes, I think you're correct. Now, let's grind all the gears and do something that is not weighty and does not affect the fate of the world or the nation, of the culture, the rest of it. It's a holiday weekend, of course, if this podcast goes up today great

because people here tomorrow Halloween is as dead as can possibly be on November 1st nobody cares the clammy realities of this new month they're always upon us but that doesn't mean that we can't say for the audience today what we believe to be the most frightening

movie that we have ever seen in our life and if they hear it tonight they want to watch it good Charles you go first I know you've been chewing your way through the American Uber for a long okay I'll let you go second Stephen, I know you probably have something. Well, I don't know.

I saw a few of the slasher films that were popular a few, you know, 10, 20 years ago and really didn't like them. Probably it's just a function of age. It's just liked them less. And so I'm going to give a very antique answer, and then to a you turn on it. And, you know, I saw The Exorcist when it came out in the mid-70s. I managed to, like, sneak into a theater because it was rated R, and I think I was 16. And I found that pretty darn frightening. right? In later years, when I watched that movie again, I was actually impressed with how

theologically literate it is. They actually, some of those scenes with Catholic priests and the medical doctors debating, and then the person who plays with Father Damien, I think, is his name. A wonderful performance. I forget the name of the actor. Anguished, an anguished performance. Correct. I thought it was a terrific performance. And so, although I'm still, you know, creeped out by the scenes of Linda Blair's head rotating and projectile vomiting across the room and all the rest of that. I look back on that now is actually a pretty darn good movie, but pretty darn scary. And maybe because of its seriousness in a certain way, it becomes more, has more weight to it. I think you're right. Charles, you've now had a few minutes. James, I hate horror movies.

I hate scary movies. I won't watch them. My roommate in Oxford for a while loved them. and he made me watch these movies and I just can't do it. Well, define what you would believe a scare. Are we talking guts on the floor? Are we talking creeping dreader on the corner? Atmospheric, Hammer Movies, Vincent Price, eyes alike, with madness. I mean, there's all kinds of-it. I wouldn't even go near Saw.

I've never seen that. I won't. Oh, the hostile movies. If I were censor, I would ban those. I wouldn't watch that. Or horror slasher movies that make you. joke. You know, it's so weird because I'm a nut for roller coasters. I love roller coasters. There's nothing too scary for me with roller coasters, but when it comes to horror movies, I can't do it.

So I'm going to probably make people laugh because I'm so innocent. But I think the most unsettling movie I've ever seen is The Shining. I find it really creepy. I can watch that because I love Kubrick and I love the performances and I do think it's brilliantly done. I don't enjoy myself when I watch that movie, but I do think it's very unsettling. But my sample size is just so small. That's fine. You've chosen what you've chosen. I have seen the exorcist too, and I do agree.

But that's scared the bejes out of me. I'm still freaked down by it. Shining is a deeply unsettling movie. Yes. And there's a man I have, I know only from correspondence on Twitter. Lee Uncrich, who's the director of Coco and a couple other Pixar movies who has put out a book about it.

And there's an absolute master of the movie and what it, you know, you can tell because there's, I think it's in Toy Story 1. He actually slipped the texture of the carpet from the Overlook Hotel into the movie. I mean, the crazy theories about it that what Danny is wearing suggests that Kubrick was admitting his complicit nature in the faking of the moonshant. The way that the sets never resolve somehow psychologically works upon you to make you uneasy just with the whole physical manifestation of the place. The fact there's a can of baking soda that has an Indian.

head on it that's supposed to speak of a burial ground. I don't know. The Indians got out that eye at a big burial ground. I don't know. All these things. Crazy theories. But at the same time, possibly so. I don't know, except for the Kubrick one. It has about it an unreal nature. And Stephen King didn't like it. Stephen King was irritated by the movie.

But it is so off. It is so wrong in so many ways that it is one of the greatest pieces of sustained discomfort that ending up with Al Bowley's singing, you know, midnight in the stars with you as we pan out from that great shot of 1921. I just, I really really do. Can't say I love it that I admire the hell out of that movie.

I have, and because I'm doing the hosting thing and I control the mic and we'll shut down anybody who interrupts, I have two. And they're very different. The first is close to the exorcist and the fact that the exorcist in this movie introduced something that I don't like, which is called body horror.

But it's alien, the first one. I remember I mean when I saw the exorcist I remember being scared before it started because of all the buildup and all of the hype about it. Alien I thought yeah you know a critter in space movie you've seen a awful lot of those black and white guy in a rubber suit

from the very opening flutes descending and the credits beginning on the screen I was I was filled with dread and every single thing about it just compounded the dread and nothing had really happened until something very horrible

horrible happened and it wasn't supposed to and then something very happy that was definitely not supposed to happen in the hierarchy who gets knocked off in the movies and every pin is knocked over every expectation is sundered it was just terrified I've never been drained like that in a movie before or since and it's a masterpiece and I can't believe they keep churning these things out in the television show so bad but there's something even scarier and I think it's because you see it as a child when everybody thinks it's a wonderful little story. It's a story of a little girl just trying to get home

with her adorable companions. It's got songs. It's colorful. You know, the Wizard of Oz is an absolutely terrifying movie to a child as it should because we are convinced I wrote my free stuff

subsect this week about it. We are convinced that when that bony woman leans forward with all of her cackling and energetic malevolence fixated on this little girl and tells her that she's going to kill her she's going to get her and kill her dog too while she's at it that she means it and when she turns over that hourglass for the first time in your short life you understand mortality and the futile fear and wanting to call out to your loved ones and not being able to do so and there's no one to come to save you and no one does

there's something so terrifying about the wicked witch that i just think because they expose it to us at an early, early age, and it burns down deep. And that's why the fact that Margaret Hamilton actually went to work with this woman that I knew in her later life, and that one of my dearest friends grew up with Margaret Hamilton as her aunt, as Aunt Maggie, who would be, if you would come over and help with Halloween and open the door when the kids rang. Oh, great. Which I just loved.

I just loved. James, have we ever seen the, it's all over the internet? Apparently a TV listing from TV Guiders somewhere some years ago reads as a. follows the Wizard of Oz transported to a surreal landscape a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again yes i have seen that somebody had a good sense of humor about yes yes yes charles quickly add something to your analysis here that i found interesting my wife is much braver than i am with movies she's less brave with roller coasters so i guess we've got the field covered.

And I said recently, let's show the kids chitty, chitty, bang, bang. And she said, no, no, no, no, no, no. What? No, no, no, no. The child catcher scared the hell out of her as a kid. For the reasons you described in The Wizard of Us, she thought they're going to get them, I, e. Me.

And, funnily enough, I wasn't scared of the child catcher, so I don't know what's wrong with me that that's my lacuna. Folks took me to see the ghost in Mr. Chicken because it got Don Nott's in it and he's funny. Everybody loves Don Nott's. And it's like, I had to be taken out. I dissolved in that movie because there's a point where you come across in a dark night

there's a portrait on the wall with garden shears through its throat and it's bleeding as this organ plays this tune by Vic Mizzy, by the way, upside down. I couldn't take it. And later they took me to see Mr. Limpot, the amazing Mr. Lippet in which Don Nott's again turns into a fish.

in an animated sequence and that disturbed me greatly that such a thing was possible. So if people wonder why sometimes I get palpitations and go white as a sheet when maybe a RFD theme plays or the Andy Griffith Show, it's because of Dawn Nuts. I'm deeply, deeply scarred by that skeletal mannequin. Not really. Folks, I hope you have been deeply scarred by the fact that we've been discussing movies on a political podcast. Oh, horrors, but no, that's what RICOA is all about.

And that's why you should go to RICOA.com and sign up. It's not just what you read in the main page. It's not just the podcast, it's the community that forms in the members area as well, where you meet friends and you talk about, and yes, I mean this, absolutely everything under the sun. And if you are a fan of geomagnetic storms on Old Soul, we will talk about what's under the sun as well. Nothing is off limits. And it's civil and it's smart and it's great. And I've been there for as long as they plug that thing in and I visit it every single day, two, three times.

I'm there writing and I hope to see you there in the comments and whatnot. I know that Charles knows. I'm going to ask him which version of the software world. 4.14.14.2. You heard the man. Go there and see all those point two improvements while you can because pretty soon it'll be 14.3. Thanks, folks. Stephen Hayward, Charles C.W. Cook,

our guest, our producer, Perry, and E.J., of course, behind the board somewhere. And everybody who goes to ricochet and listens and everybody who goes and sign up, we thank you. Have a happy Halloween as internally contradictory as that may be, and we'll see you later. Bye.