The Ricochet Podcast - Under The Influence

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

Even a pessimist would have reason experience surprise and consternation by the extent of our institutional crises. It's revealed that American students know nothing of the history of the Holocaust and the story of the Jewish people in its aftermath. We've seen our government progressively possessed by the whims of influencer representatives. Even today's guest Yuval Levin, who's painstakingly documented this descent, is a bit bewildered. He joins Rob, James and Peter as they cover everything from Jewish students being forced to hide in a library, to priorities for Israel and of course on to the People's House and the hopes we may yet hold out for it.- Audio from today's opening is new Speaker Mike Johnson's first address to Congress.

What did I just walk into here? 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 with Rob Long, Peter Robinson, myself, James Lileks. Today we talk about, well, the world. With Yuval Levin, who knows his way around it. So let's have ourselves a podcast.

The status quo is unacceptable. Inaction is unacceptable. And we must come together and address the broken border. We have to do it. Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, number 664. I like to say 666 because it's Halloween week, but no, that'd be a little bit too much on the nose, as Rob, Hollywood writer, would tell you. I refer, of course, to Rob Long and Peter Robinson, the founders of Ricochet.com, where you ought to go right now. Take a look if you haven't before. I mean, I've been telling you this for half a thousand episodes. And you will find the place on the Internet you've been looking for all these years. A home for sane, civil, center-right conversation. Join today, why don't you?

Guys, all right. One week gone from last. More protests. Hear about what happened in Minneapolis? I did not. No, I didn't. I've been too busy thinking about what happened here. Right.

Every city's got their own. Well, we had a little brouhaha, a little kerfuffle down by the Walker Arts Center. People said it was in a highway, but it wasn't. It's just a of it. And then he had to pull out a Yui, which point they started screaming, oh my God, oh my God, as though standing in the middle of the street doesn't kind of set yourself up for this. But what was interesting about this to me is that there was a guy on a four-wheeler going up and down Hennepin with a Hamas flag, a very big Hamas flag on a pole. And I thought, I mean, you mean the, the, the, the triangly thing, the green, the green and white flag or the, the Hamas flag, green background, white lettering, which somebody

said, no, no, no, that, that, that's, that's the Saudi flag as if these guys would have the Saudi flag. No, I took a screenshot of it and I compared it to the actual Hamas flag and it's the Saudi flag, as if these guys would have the Saudi flag. No, I took a screenshot of it, and I compared it to the actual Hamas flag. And it's the Hamas flag. I thought, first of all, where do you get a Hamas flag that size on moment's notice? Can you go to Amazon? Can you get one-day delivery? Didn't even seem to have any creases in it.

It had been apparently ironed with care. What is somebody in minnesota doing with a large hamas flag waiting for the opportunity to go up and down the street and it was the the malevolent liberation that you see in these people when they're ripping off the posters when they're pounding on the doors you've got trapped in the library this this to me inexplicable joy in being able to finally voice these sentiments, to get it out in the open, and that it's coming from the left, which is supposedly just so steeped in intersectionality and identity, D-E-I, that they're the ones who seem to have manifested the most ancient of all of the human hatreds in our society. It's stunning to me, absolutely stunning, that you would with pride fly the flag of the people who raped ladies so hard their pelvises broke. Because finally, you've got this revolutionary

violence that you can just steep yourself in, and it nourishes every neuron that you've been suppressing for how long it is stunning to find this erupting over and over and over again you guys either side of the country you've seen it happen where you are right yeah i mean it happens in new york it's it happened at cooper union about four blocks from my tell people what tell people tell people what cooper union is well it's an ancient american college it's been around forever and i've been lucky enough to actually be on stage oh uh in the cooper union basement which is uh where abraham lincoln spoke correct um although a slightly different apparently slightly slightly different layout. It's a terrible, terrible, terrible room. It is one of the worst venues,

speaking venues in all of New York City, has giant pillars that obstruct view no matter where you are, you can't actually see the stage. It feels very 19th century to me. We built it, and then we put stuff in the basement, and we're going to make Abraham Lincoln speak here,

but no one's going to be able to see i think there are no somebody took notes somebody overheard lincoln backstage saying i can't work like this i can't work this way um so there's a protest that was supposed to be outside of you know free palestine protests freeing palestine always seems to me very interesting like i'm in favor of freeing it too uh from the clutches of hamas and the um arab states that funded i think but they don't mean they don't mean that they're not but they don't say free gaza right it's palestine so anyway go on right um so so there was a protest and then um it got ugly and then um the protesters were supposed to stay outside, and it moved inside. But the bitter irony here, or not irony, like echo, is that there were some Jewish students inside in the library.

And they could be seen through the windows, the windows on, I think it's 4th Avenue. You can look right in. And they began to be ta and by the crowd outside. Uh, and they were told, um, they should just go and hide. And the,

I don't think this is exactly true, but, um, apparently somebody on the staff said, if you want, you can go upstairs and you can hide in the attic, which is just almost too perfect, uh, to say um like it's one of those

things that you're saying if you're writing this you'd say well this is too good to check and if you're writing it um in a script you'd say i don't know i don't know too this is too too rich um you know it's the strange kind of mental illness um that the need to be part you need to make a a faraway drama your drama and a faraway conflict your conflict you're demanding that palestine should be free just like the united states should be free um it's so weird and such a neurotic behavior on the part of American progressives. But it is not accompanied. I mean, say what you like about Karl Marx.

Say what you like about Pol Pot. They knew their history. They'd actually done the work. Pol Pot was an insane psychopath, but it wasn't like he wasn't educated. These people do, if you put a gun to their head and said, explain to me what happened in 1948 or 1973 or 1968 or the zionist movement in the late 19th century explain that they wouldn't be able to they wouldn't be able to give you a even the wikipedia top paragraph of that just the level of i mean that's what i said to a friend of mine i have a friend a friend of somebody i admire a lot young guy um uh um is a young um i don't know he's an american citizen

but he was in he was maybe he's an israeli citizen young guy uh flew home from his legal startup he was doing he's doing a legal startup somewhere in florida and he flew home to join the idf he's a reservist he's in he's there every now and then i get pictures from him and he's you know standing there and it's you know with his old unit um and i was talking to him earlier and he was asking about this like what's happening back there um if i move back to new york city should i have a gun should i get a gun um i said no probably not new york city because if you if you're forced to use the gun in new York City, they will find a way to put you in jail, you know, say in Florida, where they won't. But he said, what's happening? And the only thing I come up with is that it's a new pandemic

here. It's a pandemic of stupid. And that all these kids are wrong, and they're emotional, and they're emotionally wrong, but they're also dumb. It isn't just that Harvard and Northwestern and Cooper Union and all the other universities are teaching them crackpot values and crackpot theories. It's that they are not teaching them history. They don't know anything. In a debate with these children, if you ask them, all right, we're going to have a real debate, it means you have to stop screaming. You're going to have to listen and make an argument. They could not marshal the facts. They could not marshal the facts in a normal debate because they don't know them. You don't need the facts if you know the truth yeah but this is a yeah but this is part this is the problem i think with us in our culture is that we adjust it's just a strange therapized emotional culture where screaming is argument and it seems very strange because we've

never had more ability we never had more tools to tools to our at our disposal to have an actual debate. I mean, you could you could have an online debate online with anybody in the world and you can Wikipedia is available to everyone. You could you could tell me what happened in 1948 if you wanted to or 1973. You could marshal those arguments, but no one wants to. It's very strange we've never been we've ever had more of a more capability to exchange interesting thoughtful even very very different views and been so disinclined to do that that means equivocating right that means equivocating with evil though if you argue with people about these things, if you discuss 48 and 73, then you are arguing with evil. Because they know what the truth is, and the truth is, frankly, colonization.

That's all you need to know. Settlers, that's all you need to know. Oppressive power balances. That is an extremely simple prism through which not a rainbow emerges, but one simple color, and that's the blinding white of their particular truth. So, I mean, it's irritating to them to actually have to discuss these things because they're irrelevant. History is irrelevant. Anyway, Peter, before we go to our guest, anything from you on what Brother Rob stated so eloquently? The piece of the history, of course, I agree with everything that Rob says. And it is astonishing that so many of these protests are taking place at elite campuses where the kids are

demonstrably very intelligent and by contemporary standards, exquisitely educated. They know nothing about the history of Israel or so-called palaces, just nothing, nothing at all. But the other thing that they don't know, they don't know why Israel exists, why we feel a special, America has felt a special obligation to Israel, why Harry Truman recognized the state of Israel mere minutes, literally only minutes after it declared itself an independent country. They don't know the history of the Holocaust. This distinctive, this singular event in all of human history. And what's shocking to me is that I thought that

still got taught. I can remember one of my mother's friends bringing her mother, so this would be sort of my grandparents' generation, over to our house for coffee one time. And my mother, I was a little kid, and my mother calling me over, it must have been during the summer because I was home from school, so it was three ladies and I'm out playing. My mother called me over and I was shown, the older woman turned over her arm and I was shown numbers on her arm. And my mother said, well, we'll discuss this later, but I wanted you to see this. You needed to see this. And I thought that kind of, my mother's, I mean, Christian, upstate New York, small town, if that kind of respect for what had happened, that kind of consciousness for what had happened in the Second World War penetrated to middle class, probably I guess we were in the lower half of the middle class

in a small town in upstate New York. I thought it had kind of penetrated permanently to the American consciousness. And you don't taunt Jewish students through the windows of a library of a venerable American. I mean, it's just unthinkable. And here it is happening. It is a breakdown of something pretty basic. The manifestation of something that broke down. Yeah, quitting. Quitting, quitting, quitting.

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Thank you very much for having me. Well, we were talking about the zesty events nationally and internationally, but of course what really grips the mind of the nation is the Speaker of the House situation, which now, thankfully, our long national nightmare being over, and everybody's trying to figure out exactly who this guy is we have op-eds new york times msnbc i'm sure it's fulminating rachel maddow's crying somewhere um what do we know uh what should we think you've written a lot about you know influencers taking over our institutions was this was this an example of somehow of of a small little niche noisy people dominating and shaping

national politics or or what's going on here you well yes i mean i think in some ways we got here as an example of that uh matt gates is an example of an influencer uh acting as as as a political actor i think the outcome of this is a little less clear on that front um and you know i think a lot of people are spending their time now trying to figure out who the new speaker of the house is. If you were a writer of a second-rate show about Congress, you would probably choose Mike Johnson as the stand-in name until you decided what to call the Speaker. But, you know, I think that Johnson is not an influencer pretending to be a politician. He's been a decent member involved in the

Republican Study Committee, interested in policy up to a point, to the degree that House members are. So this certainly started as an example of influencer politics, but it remains to be seen exactly how it ends. We'll see what we've ended up with here. Yuval, listen, fascinated by the ins and outs of American politics, and you're the expert on American institutions, but you know what? I myself have to set that aside. We were just talking about the pro- Rob lives four blocks from the Cooper Union where there was a pro-Palestinian protest, was it yesterday or the day before yesterday? Rob Baillie The day before, yeah.

Darrell Bock Which seems to have culminated in Jewish students being taunted through the windows of this great institution, which is, am I, I thought, I thought, I thought they clearly, as Rob was arguing, they clearly just can't recite even the basics of the history of the creation of Israel and what happened and why God, there are arguments to be made, but they can't make them. They have no idea what they're doing. But to me, what's even more basic is I thought in this country, kids were still taught to respect this singular event in human history of the Holocaust, and you don't do that. You just don't do that. And yet, this outbreak of anti-Semitism is taking place

in city after city and campus after campus, and I just have to ask what you make of it all. Yeah. I mean, look, I do think we're at the beginning of something really new here, at least in my lifetime. That's not to say that anti-Semitism is new. I mean, I've been writing in public with a very Jewish name for 15 years now and encounter anti-Semitism constantly, but in a very low-grade way from people who are identifiably crazy and have been able to sort of put it in a corner of my mind and say, that's not really the essence of what happens in America to American Jews. This is the safest place in the world for Jews in our history. It's safer than Israel. It's safer than anywhere has ever been. I do think that what we've seen in the last few weeks is the emergence of the liberation, freeing up of a kind of underlying anti-Semitism that is really extraordinary. And it's already

fairly widespread. It's not just on university campuses, though it does seem to have emanated from there. And I think it's going to get worse, because clearly what Israel has to do in the coming weeks is going to create more excuses and opportunities for it in the United States. And I do think we are in a new place, and it's a place that's going to compel a lot of American Jews to confront the reality that this really does seem to happen in every generation, that we should not imagine that we're somehow beyond it, and that we have to think about how to keep our children safe and to work with our neighbors to make sure that a rising generation understands that this is not what America is about. Pete You're going to know this isn't the

centerpiece of the conversation, but you just said Israel's going to have to do certain kinds of things. Can I just ask about the military question in Gaza? I've heard it said several times now, and I have to admit, I wonder myself. After Munich, Israel created a list of the bad guys who had murdered Israeli Olympic athletes at the Munich Olympics, and it went after them, and it took every one of them out. Is this kind of, we're all bracing ourselves for street-to-street fighting in Gaza for a horrible ground invasion. What is the military situation? Why is that required this time instead of some list of the top 50 Hamas bad guys that they, if they have, it may take

a time, but they have to go after them, they could go after them one by one? Why is this, why does this require a big horrifying mission on the ground instead of something as precision targeted so to speak, as the Munich instance? Well, let me say, Peter, first of all, this is not my expertise. I care about it a lot and watch it closely as an observer. You're an expert on everything. I view you as an expert on everything. It's dangerous to pretend to be an expert on everything, and I don't want to pretend to be an expert on this. I will say this as someone who observes it and tries to do it closely. This is very different from Munich. This is not a small group of operatives attacking a small group of Israelis

and acting in a way that shocked the world. Hamas governs Gaza, whether we like it or not. It has been in charge of Gaza for 15 years. It has developed an extraordinary infrastructure of terrorist militancy there. And it is clear after what happened at the beginning of the month that that means that Israel is unsafe. What they did was on a scale that Israel has not experienced before. And an attack on civilians, an attack on Jews that has not happened since the end, on a scale that has not happened since the end of the Holocaust. An attack on civilians that Israel has not seen before. And the idea that you can just assign blame for that to some small list of people and make sure that those are taken out, Israel can certainly do that. But I think they are of the view now that they have to change the reality on

the ground because they cannot be safe as long as gaza is governed by the people who made the decision to do this and i think they're right hey you've all thanks for joining us i'm gonna try to thread the needle here and sew two things together um uh putin invades uh ukraine serious thing happening china seems to be um making incredible moves as a not just a regional hegemon but a world leader and mischief maker and is joining forces with probably iran probably russia who knows um hamas is emboldened to invade uh uh israel and and and and it was like a 1400 little manson family murders incredible right serious this is serious serious stuff and the republican party is now led by what you call influencers.

The UN, which is this institution not too far from me, has been sitting on its hands for two years while a member country is invaded by another member country. It's been dithering about what to say about this Manson family murder that occurred in Israel. It has no perspective on or position on anything that's really happening in the world in which people are dying. The head of Iran, Iran foreign minister, comes to the U.N. in New York City, threatens the United States. And the Republicans are led by influencers. And say what you like i mean i my bona fides on

my opinion about trump is well known but he is a at the best he's an erratic and unreliable leader how much trouble are we in yeah yeah i mean look, I worry about this a lot. And I think that it's become perfectly clear that we're entering a serious moment of real gravity in the world. And it does seem to me that what we're witnessing is the result of calculations made by our enemies that we are not up to such challenges. I hope they're wrong. I think they will turn out to be wrong. I think Hamas made that kind of calculation about Israel, and they will turn out to be wrong. They looked at mass protests, and they thought mass protests mean the regime's about to fall, and they were wrong about that. But we don't have in the United States the caliber of leadership in either party that it would take to seriously handle the moment we seem to be entering. I do think we've been fortunate in our country that moments like this have, over time, drawn out of the woodwork serious leaders. You can look at 19th century America and, you know,

in the 1850s, you could not imagine a Lincoln arising because our leaders were petty and juvenile idiots. And that person did arise because it seemed like the public was looking for someone who wasn't a dithering fool. I hope that American voters are in a place now where they begin to look for someone who isn't a dithering fool. I think we have some people who might not be dithering fools out there. But at the moment, our leaders don't strike me as being up to the challenge. And I hate to say it, I think our country will be up to the challenge. But it's going to require political leaders who understand that the hard choices have to be made, who understand that that this has to be taken seriously in an adult way. And after a generation of influencer politics, they're not there. They're not they're not ready and again i hope it changes i do i mean i i i i'm a broken record on this and everyone will roll their eyes they always do because i'm just

old at 58 and all i could think of was that the last president that we had who was a robust speaker and a noisy speaker who said robust and noisy things and put a lot of the fear of god into our enemies and to even to his political enemies was ronald reagan but we never thought he wasn't serious we never thought when he said well i'm gonna win the cold war that he wasn't gonna win it an american candidate for president or even a president or even a senator should be saying it is time to evict the united nations from the united states it is a useless sclerotic and impotent world organization that does nothing but aid and abet mass murder um but there's no i don't think there's i can't think of a candidate who could say that and i wouldn't just think of oh this is just noise trump says it is just noise if biden said i wouldn't believe him i mean don't we need somebody

i'm not asking for somebody to give me the establishment republican well we're gonna like you know negotiate and go through the channels. We're going to have a peace process. I'm just looking for somebody to say something that where I believe that he or she is actually going to do it in as noisy and robust a way as possible to give me some of that Reagan. You know, that's what I'm looking for. Just just give me a little bit. I don't even want 100 percent. Just give me 65 percentagan and i'm in is there

is do you have any evidence that's happening other than your faith in historically that it happens no i mean look i i think i i guess i'd say a few things i there were certainly people who were dismissive of reagan in this way too and he had to prove himself um and show that he meant what he said uh And, you know, we should look for people who at least have the potential to prove themselves, who at least are saying what needs to be said, and who seem to have lived a life that suggests they might be able to do it. I think that there's a kind of demand side issue here. Voters will need to be dissatisfied with the unseriousness of the options they have in order for a more serious option to emerge.

And that option may not look like what we expect. It may not be the blustering general type to begin with. You know, if you think about where Reagan came from and what he was in the national consciousness before, or Abraham Lincoln, the least educated person who had ever run for president at that time. It was easy for his opponents to say he had a third grade education. He did. He never went to college. But the country looked at him and saw something serious and deep. And yeah, I think it will take leaders emerging in response to public demand. And that public demand has not been there.

The moment may change that. But I wouldn't say that I see somebody in the wings who I would say, well, obviously, that's the person we need to be looking to. I wish I could. Well, before you joined us, I was trying out a new theory. I tried, but not a new theory, really more of like a little phrase,

you know, see if I can get a, you know, phrase in the national lexicon and like eventually be, you know, in a quotation book. Seems to me that we, you know, we licked one epidemic, one pandemic, and now we have another one that's actually worse. It's the pandemic of stupid, and it starts in places that you're not supposed to find that much stupid,

which is university campuses, but it also is in Congress. I look at the Republican influencers, and I'm wondering what constitution they're reading, because the one I'm reading says, if you've got a thin majority, you've got to make deals. You may not like to make deals. You may not want to. It may be counter to your political philosophy, your political beliefs. That's perfectly legitimate. You can disagree all you want.

But if you want to actually get something done, or even if you don't want to get something done you're going to have to make deals that's just mass and it just seems to me there's a very strange attitude on the part of these fringe groups and i don't just mean republican fringe influencers i mean the squad the left-wing influencers that they believe that somehow their job is not to govern but to get followers and maybe that's true but it does seem to be gumming up the works i i think that in some ways this extends further than that what we're seeing is a a serial failure of collective action that results from the fact that our politicians don't think in terms of building coalitions the the the core insight of

our system of government is you can only get anything done by building a coalition to do it. Winning a narrow majority is not even enough, as it is in some of the parliamentary democracies. You have to build a broad coalition, and that means you always have to think about how to get more people to come on board and agree to what you think most needs to be done. Our political parties exist to broaden coalitions. Our institutions, Congress in particular, exist to mandate and facilitate broad coalitions. Our politicians now do not think in those terms. Both of our parties have operated as minority parties now for 30 years, since the middle

of the 1990s, neither of them has looked like what a majority looks like in the American tradition. And they're both kind of satisfied with that. Each of them thinks it could win the next election by just getting its existing voters out. And of course, they're not wrong. They could, either of them could win the next election that way, because we're at a 50-50 point. But neither of them is thinking, how do I get to a point where 60% of the public will even consider voting for me? And so they're not learning that this isn't working. They're not being shocked by a big loss into changing direction. And they're not being rewarded for a big win. They're stuck in a place where they don't think coalitionally. I think

that's what's happening electorally. and it's what's happening within Congress. And the failure to think coalitionally means our system cannot work. If politicians don't see that they need more supporters in order to succeed, then the Constitution really can't function. And I think at this point they've blinded themselves to it because of the nature of our political culture and of that kind of influencer culture, performance culture. What can shock them out of it is a big loss. And so in a sense, we need one of our parties to lose. It would probably be better for the party that loses than for the party that wins if that were to happen. But they've both managed to eke out these 50-50 elections for long enough that they don't remember how our system works.

It's funny about these big losses. The last big loss for the Republicans, the major last, the famous one, right? 1964, Barry Goldwater. Right. And there are, I know, many conservatives who say, yeah, you know, the Goldwater loss was bad. But you know what? It teed up reagan 16 years later and a great society later and an enormous welfare state later and uh details details war vietnam later uh and watergate later

it the idea that that was a price to pay whereas i i look at i you know, God bless him, the drubbing that Walter Mondale took, which would have been worse had Reagan decided to campaign in Mondale's home state, set up a very successful two-term presidency in Bill Clinton. Well, right, but I would say the Democrats would say the same thing. What that took was three presidential elections in a row one by the other party and in some ways even more than that uh we had we had seven presidential elections in which one democrat won between 1968 and 1992 you had two two-term republican presidents and and one one-term Republican president, I think that felt to them like what the period between 64 and 80 felt like to Republicans. They just kept losing, and that's what it took to knock them out of their stupor and find somebody who could win by appealing to the middle of the country. I think that a loss on that scale, a set of losses, you could say Republicans lost in 2008 pretty decisively,

but they decided, we'll just do it again and it'll be fine. And eventually it did feel that way. I think a real loss would help the party that loses as much as it would help the country in general. Yeah. Three victories. It took three victories by Margaret Thatcher to squeeze the Marxists out of the Labor Party and produce Tony Blair, same kind of thing. You've all, you're talking about things that take time and of course we were all raised on the notion that our democracy is mighty in its wrath but slow to anger. So Franklin Roosevelt engages in the Lend-Lease program to help Britain, help Churchill remain afloat through 1940, but it takes Pearl Harbor. And then we turn it around, all right. Harry Truman, the Cold

War, as you know, Harry Truman is extremely reluctant as we're bringing troops home. It takes Britain's collapse in Greece and Turkey to force Truman to announce the Truman Doctrine. We move slowly. And of course, the old, but as far as I can tell, true observation about the bad guys is, over time, they're weak. They don't have the kind of unified country that we can have. But in the short term, they can move decisively. China does what is this astounding thing that a nation of 1.3 billion people will do whatever one man decides. Putin, how the chain of command in Russia continues to remain intact enough for him to send young Russian men to get

slaughtered in Ukraine. I do not know, but it does. He's still in charge in that country. This strange, murky, to me at least, chain of command that runs from Tehran through southern Lebanon and into Gaza, somehow or other, it holds and they can move quickly. Do we have, related, I'll give a little, add a little piece on and then shut up and just drop this in your lap. Do we have time this time? And in particular, if you look at the front page of the New York Times, already what we're seeing is, understandably, it's a human impulse, but we're seeing increasing sympathy in the press for the ordinary people of Gaza who are now without electricity, da-da-da.

All of this, how does Israel continue to operate in a world in which public opinion plays such a central role and in which I have great respect, of course, for the IDF, but they need us. They need our intel. They need us to resupply them. They need our two carrier groups in the Eastern Med to secure their northern flank. They need us. And we have to operate under conditions in which the New York Times is not helpful. How do we do this? Well, look, that's obviously a horribly difficult question. Do we have time? I do think we have time. The question is whether we have the will. I don't think we should overestimate the strength of our enemies. I don't think we should overestimate their boldness. They are

weaker than us if we are up to our full strength. My worry, therefore, is largely domestic. I think we are not in this moment up to our full strength. You know, could America handle this moment in the world? Yes. But are we up to it right now? We are not. And I think that that requires a sobering up on the part of the American public to put in office people who take seriously this challenge. And I don't know whether what we're seeing in the world now will make for that sobering up and whether voters will be able to perceive who's up to this and who's not. I would say that we have a pretty good track record as a country of being able to rise to occasions like this. But track record is not enough. You know, history is full of this worked until it didn't stories. I do have a lot of

confidence in our system. I really do um i don't think there's anyone you'd rather be than the united states of america but our system requires something of us it requires a certain kind of responsibility a capacity to make adult judgments in serious moments and so this is a test for all of us. It's not just a test for other people. Judgments. Yeah, the thing we're not supposed to make anymore these days. Hey, I've got to interrupt here and say this. Senuletics. Right, you heard about senuletics yet? It's a class of ingredients discovered less than 10 years ago, and they're being called the biggest discovery of our time for promoting healthy aging and enhancing your physical prime. Now, your life goals and your career and beyond require productivity, but let us be honest, the aging process is not our friend. Now, when it comes to endless energy

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And it's simple. You don't have to build your life around it or worry if you missed a day or something like that. It's very easy. You'll learn more at neurohacker.com slash ricochet, and you'll get an extra 15% off your purchase with our code. Thanks to Neurohacker for sponsoring this, today's episode, and this, the Ricochet podcast. I share your faith because you look back at 1941 and you don't think that a lot of Americans were

saying, well, you know, when I put Hitler in the long context of Prussian militarism in 19th century machinations, I know what's going on. They just knew there was a bad guy, and they knew that there was a fight to come, and that we had to win it. Today, we're in a bit of a difficult position, because we've had 20, 30 years of institutional rot in our educational systems that seems to have drained from an entire generation the idea of Western exceptionalism. Rob mentioned before that we're in an age of stupid, which seems so. But the people who are at the universities are themselves not intellectually challenged. What they are is spending four or five very expensive years neck deep in a warm

bath of anti-Western thought that makes them feel special because they are no longer tied to one particular culture or nation, nationalism being a thing of the past, but they are transnational world citizens who know how to bring about the utopia to come. So how do you steal a generation of people, a population of people whose ideology and basic thought is post-national, is post-Western, is somehow they've all put you know, put in their membership to be members of the Federation the moment it happens and Star Trek becomes reality in six or seven months or so. How do you get the spine of the West back? Yeah, I do think that's the question. I mean, you know, those stories of how Harvard and Yale

emptied out the Monday after Pearl Harbor because all the students left to sign up, that would not happen now, I think. Now, fortunately, we're not dependent on Harvard and Yale. It would be very bad if we were. And so, yes, those places are, I mean, look, they never really were where the best of America was, but they certainly are now where the worst of America is. They're not where the bulk of America is. And I think the question is about the capacity for judgment on the part of that median American. That median American is not a Harvard grad, doesn't really care or all that much know what's happening on the campuses. But the culture in which that person is formed has been very shaped by what happens on those

campuses for two generations now. And the question is whether that has undermined our basic instincts and judgments, our habits and abilities. It is a question. I mean, the reason that I'm worried is that it is a question. We have not been tested in that way lately. And I have confidence in our country that that judgment is there, that that capacity to tell that this is a moment where there is an evil to be confronted and that that does require a certain kind of seriousness, a certain kind of gravity. It's not a national mobilization. This isn't World War II, but it does require an exercise of a certain kind of judgment. I have confidence that it'll be there because we're Americans, but I wouldn't say that I have

confidence because we have a huge amount of evidence about contemporary America on that front. It is, in that sense, faith more than confidence, and that worries me. Whenever I share your sentiment, but I also have to say that whenever I do so, I feel like Winston Smith standing at the window with Julia, looking out and saying, if there's any hope, it will be the proles you know yeah so here's the thing though is that there's always been in the when you said that we've had the culture shaped by two generations of these people that's true and a lot of middle of america flyover country whatever you want to call it has gone along with it to some extent because it's fun because a more liberated luther culture provides more opportunity for getting out from whatever strictures you were brought into but

they also i think recognize that there's a limit to all this and that cultures cannot go Weimar forever because then they fall apart and are replaced by something worse. So they've always had a cultural distrust of elites, and I hate that word, who manipulate and use and massage culture and the rest of it. What you haven't had, though, until now, until post-October 7th, is people on the left looking at these institutions and all of a sudden saying, wait a minute, hold on, look what they're allowing. We're not going to give any money to these people.

And so you have the donors who are backing off from this. Do you think that this sort of revulsion that you find on the decent parts of the left is going to fade and they'll go back to the usual respect for these institutions, or whether or not there is some fundamental psychic break that took place after October 7th where they look at these places and say, oh, they are wells of poison? I think it's too soon to say, and certainly the the appeal of being a donor to your alma mater is just so peculiar to me that i don't really know how to analyze it because i just can't figure out why many serious people will put a lot of money into having a building named for

them where where young americans are uh perverted um, are turned into something less than what they were before. I don't know why you would want that to happen in a place named for your family, but so be it. I think some of that is going to resume. Some of these donors are going to lose their stomach here. But the bigger question to me is ultimately, again, whether the country in general, I don't think that October 7th is going to save the University of Pennsylvania. You know, I don't know what could, I don't think that's it. But that's not really the question for us. The question for us is whether the United States is going to be up to a challenging 21st century. Thankfully, that is a much more open question than whether the University of Pennsylvania is going to get turned around. And it is an open question. I do think there are reasons for us to believe that we can manage that, but it's going to take public argument,

it's going to take public persuasion, it's going to take public argument. It's going to take public persuasion. It's going to take leaders who present themselves as offering that path to the country. And it's going to take voters who want to do it. Americans have risen from slumbers and stupors before to make serious decisions. And so I hope we can do it again. But, you know, hope is not a strategy. And there's a hope we can do it again. But, you know, hope is not a strategy, and there's a lot of work to do. Pete Udall, I'm glad you said what you said a moment ago, because you've now, I've been trying so long to talk Rob out of it, but he's determined to set up at Yale the Rob

Long Center for the Perversion of American Youth. And I think now you may finally have to- I could raise a lot of money. Listen, Yuval, as I've listened to you, I have to admit, I felt some of the old speechwriter's instinct here. Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, suppose one of these candidates said, I need to record a talking head straight to camera, two minutes to 12 or even 15 minutes to YouTube to say to people in their kitchens and living rooms and wherever they watch YouTube that we are in a different moment and I understand it. What should, what are the three or four sentences that Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis or any candidate you care to name should say right now?

Well, that's a hard question, Peter, and you're better positioned to answer it than I am. But I do think that you have to speak to the country about this moment. I think people realize at some level that what we're seeing is the end of a phase in which it has been possible for us to be unserious and lackadaisical. And it is ending. The world won't just stand by and give us the room to be juvenile forever. And it's evident that that is changing. And what that requires of us is leadership that takes the moment seriously. The country has the resources to rise to the moment. The country has the capacity to do it. But leadership matters, thinking about how to position those resources, how to think about that capacity, what it would mean to stand by our friends, what it would mean to oppose our enemies. And it's not a call for mobilizing everybody. We're not going to war ourselves right now. That's not, we're trying to avoid that,

to avert that, not to engage in that. But that will require strength. That will require seriousness. It will require conveying to the world that the United States understands this moment and is up to leading through it. And, you know, that's what a leader has to convey and show and do. I think the leaders we have just now are not the people who are going to do that, and so it will take somebody else. Maybe one of these people running for president is up to it. Maybe not. They'll have to prove it to us somehow, but I think that ultimately you've got to speak about the moment, you've got to speak about the country, and you've got to speak about how the latter can meet the form. I can take or leave Yale, but thank goodness for the American Enterprise Institute and Yuval Levin.

Yuval, did you know Nathan Wurzel? Yes, yes, in passing, but yes. Right, as did a lot of us on Twitter. A fighter, and he passed this week to lose him in this moment is especially uh is especially yeah just wanted to call that out here in the podcast because i'm sure a lot of people who listen also followed him and were saddened by as well may his memory be a blessing well thank you so much thank you very much we'll talk again and perhaps in happier times and if they are darker times, then we look forward to your ray of hope that you can provide.

Or, of course, your absolutely coruscating declaration of despair. Who knows? We need them both these days. All right. Hey, you two both. Tell Chris Galea to get you a cup of coffee right now. Will you please? You got it.

Bye. Thanks, guys. Bye-bye. Thank you. right now will you please you got it bye thanks guys thank you you know before we go to a couple of other things i have to note one thing and that is you know you are listening to this on the internet and it is entirely possible that you are the sort of person who has a business on the internet as as do we as do we all we all in our own way have our businesses on the internet but we here at the newspaper for example are always constantly going through ways to cut through the chatter and figure out how to surface things, as they say, how to make people pay attention to what we do because it's hard, but you're not alone. You're not alone. Now, the digital world, right? It's full of hurdles, but persist SEO. If you've got persist SEO, you have a seasoned guide to all of this jungly nightmare.

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And we thank Persist SEO for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, before we go, any other news that rises to the events of the day? Something funny? Some bit of japery that made you smile? Yes. rises to the events of the day, something funny, some bit of japery that made you smile, looking for, oh, I know, it's Halloween. What are you going as? Which I never ask grown adults,

because it's the children's holiday. I'm sorry, it's a children's holiday. It's been co-opted by people who just like this sort of pagan thing where they can put out bloody statues on the yard, and I don't find it particularly interesting well i just remember there was a recent halloween when the wife of a faculty member at yale yes she went up to the faculty member sent a fairly innocuous email to the students reminding them because there's what you're going to come as halloween is going to be very important problematic and she said look essentially in paraphrasing it's just halloween let's all just take a deep

breath here and you know if somebody is dressed as something that offends you just deal with it and you know try to be nice to each other and um the screaming and yelling and emotional um horror breakdown that took place on calhoun i think it was calhoun college um the quad was at yale was just insane and then the the students screaming at her and screaming at the master of calhoun now i think there's a different name for that now um well there's also a different name for Calhoun. Different name for Calhoun, too. Exactly right. I can't forget what it's called. It's just so over the top, and there's tears and screaming and rage and hurt,

and I am unsafe, and I don't feel safe, and you've made me unsafe, and I feel unsafe. And then you compare that to students in Cooper Union who literally were unsafe. Or to people holding up signs at college campuses with a Star of David and then a trash can saying, we need to make the world clean. Literally unsafe. Jews in Crown Heights and in Williamsburg being told by the NYPD, the New York

Police Department, that you just you know stay home don't go out you know don't don't walk around wearing your religious garb because that's in crown in places that really were have been filled with people wearing religious garb jewish religious garb for i don't know, for, I don't know, 100 years, more than 100 years. Talk about unsafe. It's funny. Part of, I think, the strategy behind the attacks on October 7th was to make them so unbelievably terrible

that Israel had to respond respond had to overreact it forced everyone in the region to choose sides and you'd think that they some calculation they must have said well you know what this is going to do obviously listen when we go do this we're going to lose our support in the united states because this is so over the top you can't right um right you can't turn this into a metaphor or a slogan this is too much so we're going to give up our support on the college campuses but we're going to get the support we need from our Arab financiers. And we're going to stop a peace process in the middle

between Saudi Arabia, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the representative democracy of Israel. And they didn't have to do that. That level of savagery doesn't cause people, certain people, certainly progressive left, to say okay okay okay no no more that's too far um that to me is astonishing i mean i just i'm still like stunned by it like because it doesn't cost you anything if you're a progressive

to condemn that violence it doesn't really yes it does it yeah maybe it just seems obvious to me like like this is like a no-brainer. I'm always looking for ways to take the easy way. This seems like a very easy thing to condemn. It's a yes, but. Right? I'll take a yes, but.

A yes, but at this point, James, is a... I know. I know. I agree with you, but even to say yes is to give in to a whole set of definitions that only encourages the worst people. Because the worst people in the world are the ones who hate Hamas for the wrong reasons. They hate them because they're Muslim. They hate them because they're liberationist. They hate them because they're anti-colonial.

They hate them because Nazis hate Hamas. Wait a minute. Hold on a second. Hamas is actually the Nazis in this thing. No, Nazis hate Hamas because Wait a minute, hold on a second. Hamas is actually the Nazis in this thing. No, Nazis hate Hamas because Israel is now Nazi. I've seen the editorial cartoons and therefore I believe it. So yes, but is hard because even that yes is aid and comfort to the enemy. When you see these whole things in a grand spectrum of revolutionary violence,

which is sometimes incredibly imperative and necessary, then even the yes is to undermine your own cause. It's easier to skip to the but. It's easier to skip to that, what I spoke about at the beginning of this, that malevolent liberation you feel when you finally throw off all those little civilizational niceties that have kept you from saying what you really want to say, which is destroy Israel and kill all the Jews. I mean, I'm not surprised that the left has finally gone there. It's what we were talking about before, 22 generations, 23 years, steeping them. Not just, I mean, at least when we were talking, when you would argue with these people before,

it was in a construct of a certain, it was in the construct of Western civilization, the context of Western civilization. It was something they wanted to change. It was something they wanted to alter to their own specifications. And therefore, maybe you could argue and people could build coalitions as Laval was talking about before. But now we are talking about a post-Western civilization as an imperative in order to achieve liberation for everybody else. Because everything that is embedded in Western civilization is antithetical to what these people want that and they're dumb as rob said it's a stupid thing to say because everything that they really want is predicated on the necessity and the maintained maintenance and the continuation of western civilization but they believe somehow that by flensing it and emptying of its organs and its brain matter and its blood and its plasma, that they can simply crawl inside the skeleton of it and walk around and inhabit it just like before with nothing having changed.

The lights being on, the pizza being delivered, the phones working, the ovens working, and the rest of it. Oh, they'll want the ovens to work at least. So that's it. I mean, that's the dumbness of this all, is that we have to get to a post-Western point in order to get the liberation of absolutely everybody. And it's a luxury belief the likes of which I've never seen in my lifetime. But unfortunately, we're coming up against the reality of it being embedded at least psychologically in the back of all people who regard themselves as right-thinking people. That's it. That's the end of my speech for the day. I'm done. Anybody else? I do have one fun thing yes that we should at least mention or direct people to there is a video of representative jamal bowman of new york who has been charged by the dc attorney

general with triggering a fire alarm in a house office building, uh, you know, to delay a vote. Um, and he, you know, remember this is a big controversy a while ago. I just didn't know which button to buy. It was pushing the wrong thing. I went in the wrong door. This, it was confusing. There's a video removing the warning signs and then turning to his, I guess his laughter, right. And pulling the fire alarm. And, um, if you want to just a fun little moment in your day, it's fun to watch that because it is exactly what people said he did.

And exactly what other people said, he did do this credulously exactly what he said he didn't do. And it's there on video for everyone to see and it's a nice you know little antidote if you want to the otherwise bleak um outlook just fun to see a guy doing exactly the thing that he said he didn't do after getting all of his lick spittle acolytes in the press to say i he didn't do it no this for it and then that's kind of the lesson here is just save just save yourself when something like this happens don't jump into it you know demand to see that all the tape before you say i think congressman bowman is telling the truth because there's probably a piece of video out there of surveillance cameras showing him doing

exactly what he was accused of doing i saw that made me laugh and i enjoyed every second of it i saw the licks bit of acolytes open for squeeze back in 1981 um peter peter in the tape as well why did he take the sign off door that talked about the alarm and that i for why was it that alarm that he was meaning to push the three seconds and then wait 30 seconds it's all it's all an oliver stone movie with kevin costner up there with the film going frame by frame to explain this what happened yes yes it is i i saw the video myself yesterday and it it is schadenfreude to see this guy caught in a lie but we'll take our freud anywhere we can get it these days i'll take

it anywhere right yeah well that'll do it for us um and we thank you for listening by the way i'm not even going to tell you to go to apple and give us five star reviews because you know that already and you were just uh waiting for week number 664 to do it. This is week 664. Do it. We are brought to you by Fume, by Neurohacker, and by Persist SEO. Great companies. Thank them for sponsoring us by going there, taking a look at their products, and availing yourself of them should you need them. And you probably do.

Let's see. Anything else? Can't think what? Have a good, safe Halloween. Be safe. Have a good Halloween, everybody. And for those of us who were kids in the era when you had a sharp plastic mask with a cheap little rubber band that snapped halfway through your trip around the block, realize how lucky you got it. How lucky we still have it here in the greatest nation on God's green earth, as a man used to say. Next week, boys.

We'll see you all in the comments. Next week, fellas. Next week, fellas, we'll see you all in the comments. Next week, fellas. Ricochet! Join the conversation.