The Ricochet Podcast - We'll Have Manhattan

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

We'll have Manhattan, The D.A. and a jury, too...And so we begin with apologies to Rodgers and Hart as our intrepid founders find themselves in the Big Apple together just as Donald Trump's criminal trial in the Stormy Daniels hush money case seats its jury. To that end we bring on National Review's Andy McCarthy, who just this week the former president called "a great legal scholar" to opine on whether Trump can get a fair hearing in front of this judge - and this jury - in this town.We also touch on Israel's military action into Iran on Thursday night.We hate to Bragg but it's a pretty good show. 

I don't know what the solution is yet, but I think there's a solution. 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 Peter Robinson and Rob Law. They're together in New York. I'm James Lallex here in Minneapolis. We're going to talk to Andy McCarthy about Trump's trials and more. So let's have ourselves a podcast. But this is a trial that should never happen. It should have been thrown out a long time ago. If you look at Jonathan Jeremy, Andy McCarthy, all great legal scholars, there's not one that we've been able to find that said we should be in trouble america is a nation that can be defined

in a single word i was in foot him excuse me welcome everybody this is the ricochet podcast number 688 as a matter of fact i'm james lottix minneapolis where it's cold again and snowing rob long and peter robinson are together in new york Now, Peter Robinson in New York is one of those movies I'd like to see, as he wanders around full of California optimism, looking up at the tall buildings, 20 stories. That is exactly how it went. That's exactly right. That's what I would like to think.

So, Rob, you, the cynical Gotham denizen, flaneur though you are, you've taken Peter around to show him the science. Statue of Liberty, top of the Empire State, the rest of it. Stork Club 21. Exactly. It's been like one of those montages with the, you know, when Peter looking up at the big, all the lights of Times Square. Like that's what it's been. Well, that's American in Paris.

So I wouldn't have to. The box is up and the battery's down. How's american in paris so i wouldn't you don't have to have the box is up and the battery's down how's that there we go there we go gentlemen there's so much to talk about today we can we can go over the uh the ai generated woke bot musings of npr's new host we can talk about the fact that google finally found a spine and fired some people for doing something or that uh that have been arrests in colombia over a pro-palestinian an astonishing moment i agree yes and people would look at this and say the uh the tide is turning on the other hand i saw on twitter the other day granted twitter uh and granted not a lot of people but they were shouting hands off iran upon hearing that iran had launched an attack on israel they

said well don't you retaliate now don't don't you retaliate now? Don't you do that? Well, we have the retaliation now, and perhaps rather than thinking and talking and blathering about what the college students are doing, this seems to be of more consequence, Israel struck. Iran hit a military base. The place where they hit happens, by some odd coincidence, to be the home or one of the homes of the nuclear and conventional missile programs that Iran has.

Is this a proportional response? Is it time to stand down now? Message sent. I don't know the details because all of this was starting to break last night. I looked at my computer just after taking my Ambien, which I always take to get through time zones. So there I was reading about the destruction, the beginnings of World War III, and I fell sound asleep. For the traveler that I am, getting down here to Greenwich Village to see Rob meant that I didn't look at the news today astonishingly enough. So I don't know the details.

My general sense of it is, I do not understand how Israel could have permitted Iran to attack with more than 300 armed drones and ballistic missiles, even if they knock them out of the air. Iran still attacked, engaged in a massive attack against Israel. I do not see how any nation, but Israel above all, could fail to respond in some pretty direct, pretty forceful manner. So it feels to me as though something necessary has happened. Proportional, what will happen next, that's all. I don't know that. Rob, maybe a regime decapitation was considered,

but waved off by Joe Biden, fresh from telling the Israel not to attack Haifa. He may have put his thumb on the scale here too. He may have said to them, don't and found the, you know, the one nation on earth

that actually listens to him. Do you think this was enough or do you think this is, as we've been doing since 1979, kicking the can down the road? Well, I mean, him. Do you think this was enough or do you think this is as we've been doing since 1979, kicking the can down the road? Well, I mean, yes and no. I mean, the beauty of the system right now or the situation we're in, which is kind of a disaster, but it's also the product of a strategy, right? The Israeli strategy has been the past 10, 15,

20 years, and it's been effective, has been to isolate hamas drive them into iran to create one unified enemy of that under the iranian umbrella because and then to sort of make um uh piecemeal small bore probably trivial, but still significant peace with the big Arab neighbors that were traditionally enemies. So not just Egypt, but Saudi Arabia and Jordan, places like that. So bombing and the people who really misunderstood this new dynamic has been Iran, because there's nobody protesting the bombing of Iran except in American universities. Iran has no allies in the region. Saudis don't care. And the king of Jordan is especially doesn't care um and so it isn't so much that the trouble for those countries isn't so much that israel attacked iran or responded it's that israel was tacitly allowed and maybe even encouraged privately to do so by its former enemies saudi

arabia and and and and uh jordan and this is the product of a very very long game of chess the israelis been playing and i think they've been playing really well that doesn't mean everything's perfect obviously the minute you isolate hamas and you drive them into desperation they do something desperate like they did october 7th so know, you don't get what you want in life. But the big miscalculation isn't Netanyahu here. And it isn't Saudi Arabia. It's Hamas and Iran. And I wouldn't want to be them right now because there's nobody they can call except maybe Putin. So now we have the chess game has isolated the bad actors into one group. The weird thing that was talking about, of course, is the Putin problem, because that's the Putin problem for Israel, because Netanyahu, for all the things people love about him, he has been a Putin apologist for years. party the government of israel and russia um especially technologically especially in

technological issues that are you know some companies that were started in israel um are now owned by russians not so great um uh declining to mention some of them because some of them have been past advertisers um so there's like a lot of chickens coming out of roost, but I don't see how they had a choice. But I also don't think that. I also don't think it was that much risk because they have been mitigating the risk privately, quietly for the past 20 years. A lot turns on intelligence. And of course, the Israelis know a great deal more than little Robinson does. But I see that Andy McCarthy, whom I'm always tempted to

call the great Andy McCarthy, has joined us and I want to ask him the following question. So it's clear that the response to the Iranian attack would have been unthinkable just a decade ago. The Israelis have the Iron Dome, That anti-ballistic missile system worked. Americans participated in the defense of Israel, knocking missiles out of the sky. So did the British, but so did Jordan. And so did, according to at least some reports, so did Saudi Arabia. Unthinkable a decade ago. So now Israel is able to coordinate. Now, let me put it another way. Now, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are participating in the defense of the state of Israel, and an Iranian attack fails completely. I am hoping, and this is the question for Andy,

that the Israelis were not just engaging in a kind of necessary tit for tat, they couldn't permit the Iranian attack to go unanswered. I'm hoping there's also a strategic opportunity there. They sense real weakness, they're getting intelligence from the ground in Tehran, that the Iranian population is... That regime's entire legitimacy rests on pure, raw strength. If they no longer look strong, I would like to hope there will be moves against them. Andy, what do you make of that notion? Hold on here. We haven't formally introduced him. Andy, you're not here. I'm sorry. No, he is but we must we must respect the format yeah and now we welcome to the podcast annie mccarthy senior fellow of the national review institute contributing editor

there as well as fox news andy welcome do you remember what peter's question was go i sure do it's the it's the question we've been working on for 30 years, right? Yes. Or more. Yes. You know, look, I think the deck has been reshuffled in a very interesting way for, I think, a better part of a decade. It really goes back to the Arab Spring arab spring so longer than that um but there's a lot of there's a lot of tumult here and i don't know whether we know yet how it will all shake out i do agree that anything that shows the uh the internal weakness of the regime in iran is a very good development. I also think that for all the hullabaloo about Khashoggi, which I think was not covered in a way that completely conveyed how that incident fit into the shifting dynamics in the region. To me,

the biggest, one of the biggest positive developments over the last decade plus has been this, this breakup between the Saudis and the Muslim brotherhood, which in, in many ways has allowed the situation where the Saudis, without saying so out loud as much as we'd like to, have been drawn into a kind of a tacit alliance with the Israelis. Part of that is the breakup with the Brotherhood

and the stuff that came out of the Arab Spring. And some of it, a lot of it, is the way Obama's policy shift and this insane idea of putting distance between us and our allies in Israel and our traditional, at least, to call them allies, I think overstates it, but the Sunni governments that were traditionally friendly to an extent toward the United States, to put distance between us and them and empower Iran so that it became more of a closer to a potential regional hegemon, I think was a nutty, reckless idea. And that has done it. It was a wild risk at the minimum. It was a wild risk. Yeah. And it hasn't worked out. Well, it has worked out, but not the way Obama intended. I think when the dust settles, the region may turn out to be more stable for us,

but the dust hasn't settled. James, your job now is to segue from Iran to a courtroom in New York. I will do so. You know, there's a lot of people out there who are going to vote for Trump no matter what. There's a lot of people out there who have shrugged off the legal maneuverings because they're bored with it, they're tired with it, they can't figure it out, or they have figured it out, and they don't believe that it's anything

other than a star court and a political prosecution, and it's based on zip. It's based on animus. It's based on Adam's coming up with, we've got to do something. I could not have predicted this, actually, but my whole view on the election has shifted over the last two or three months the impact of these court cases is i think becoming

white noise to a lot of people so bring us through what we got today we got a judge who did something based on something that happened before and there's stormy daniels in there and don't know why. And Cohen and the rest of us sum it all up for us and tell us a, what you think is coming up next and B your evaluation of whether or not it counts matters. I think it matters. What is the, what is the, it though, we got to get the idiot. Expert as you are on porn stars, Andy, tell us what, tell us the latest now play finance we're calling it playboy models i can address it porn stars i i don't know judge uh so judge i i think like the the 30 000 foot view of this is that um

the people who engineered the lawfare campaign, the upshot of which or the effect on the election of which we can't really at this point assess, but I do agree that it is becoming a lot of white noise to a lot of people. But I think their nightmare scenario is to have Bragg's case go first because Bragg's case is like a dog's breakfast of a case whereas um I I think the over ambition of um of Jack Smith prevented them from taking their best shot at Trump in a timely way on a serious case, which would have been to pair the Florida case down to an obstruction case against Trump. Instead, they all have stars in their eyes, these guys, and they overdo it. So Smith decided he had to bring 32 classified

felony counts, classified documents, felony counts. And a number of us said at the beginning of all that, and I have the scars to prove this one, if you get yourself involved in a litigation over the Classified Information Procedures Act, where you basically have to have a pretrial trial of the trial and show the admissibility of every classified document and have arguments with the government about what gets revealed in court and what doesn't. That takes a very long time, even if people are trying hard to get the case to trial. I think that he could have done away with all of that by just making it an obstruction case, and he might have actually gotten to trial on that. But of course, that

didn't happen. The Washington case was bound to be delayed by appellate litigation because of the immunity issue. Even if Smith thought he was on solid ground on the immunity issue, and I think he probably will win that at the Supreme Court, he may not get the sweeping complete win that he wants. And I could see a resolution by the court that could further slow that case down. But I'm just saying in terms of timing, and the reason we're talking about timing, by the way, is because all these guys improperly tried to orchestrate this so that this all became trials during the election year, which is the thing the Justice Department manual tells prosecutors they're not allowed to do, but they did it anyway. But if you're Smith and you're trying to orchestrate this,

you have to know that you're going to be in appellate litigation over immunity because it's one of the few issues that you're allowed to appeal pretrialtrial. And what Trump, even if Trump didn't think that he had much of a chance on immunity, what he wanted here was delay. He's trying to push everything beyond election day. It doesn't matter whether he wins the immunity. I mean, obviously he'd love to win the immunity issue, but more important for him

in terms of what he really could accomplish here was delay. And he's delayed it so much that it may be that that case never gets to trial, at least prior to election day. So what they're stuck with, I think, I haven't even addressed the circus down in Atlanta because we don't know what's going to happen with that case. That's also going to be caught up in appellate litigation. So the case that we thought was gone away was Bragg's case because Bragg, and when you look at Bragg's case, you shouldn't be surprised by this. Bragg said that he was happy to defer to the federal prosecutors. So the idea was that Jack Smith was going to get to the front of the line and try the J6 case in March. And of course, that got derailed. So now Bragg is back. And this case hasn't gotten any better. a jury much more quickly than, not only than most people thought, including me, but certainly more quickly than it looked like was going to happen as late as Monday afternoon when

I was hearing from people who were connected to both sides, but mainly the Trump side, that they were thinking the opening statements wouldn't be until May 2nd, that it was going to take that long to pick a jury. And they miscalculated on a bunch of things, including I think they thought that they were getting the Jewish holidays off next week, so the trial was only going to sit two days, and the whole thing was kind of bogging down. I'm not a fan of Judge Marchand by any stretch, but I think he's run a very efficient jury selection. They've had some bumps, but you get that in jury selection. I mean,

that's just a function of the legal system crashing into the real world, which is the kind of the most fun part about jury selection. But they've been very efficient and he's got, you know, they're going to be able to start this trial on Monday. It's a terrible trial, but they will be able to get it started. So Andy, if I may, on the jury question, John, you said something on Fox News earlier, I think this very week, it may have been Monday or Tuesday, that roughly 50% of the potential jurors were standing up in court and saying, oh, no, I already have an opinion about this man. And John said that he'd never seen anything like that, where half of the jury pool essentially, maybe I misunderstood John. But how do you go from that to seating a jury in a week? See, the thing, Peter, is that it doesn't necessarily matter if you have an opinion about the person. I've had a couple of these cases. For example, when we tried the blind shake,

back in those days, he was a pretty notorious character and everybody had an opinion about him. He tried to blow up the world towers. So yeah, he was notorious all right. Right. And we tried the case six blocks away from the World Trade Center. So right in the eye of the storm. And the thing is, you don't want like if somebody came into to jury selection and said the world trade center was bombed hadn't heard that um you don't want people who are living under a rock on your jury you know because they're weird people um and it's the thing is not so much whether people have an opinion like nobody likes terrorists. What you're trying to sort through is, can people convince you that no matter what their baggage is, they're capable of

putting it aside and deciding the case solely on the evidence that they hear in the courtroom and the instructions they get from the judge. tried a case in over 20 years, but I liked Manhattan juries. To be fair about it, we were federal, so we were drawing the jury pool from not just Manhattan, but also the Bronx and Westchester, but it's not that much different. And I acknowledge that Manhattan has changed, but I would say two things about that. First, I think it would be a mistake for people to think that the average Manhattan juror is the person who votes for Alvin Bragg in the election. There's a vanishingly small number of people who actually vote in those elections. The movement progresses. I think Bragg's election, there was like 80,000 people voted in a county of well over 2 million people.

So Trump is not without support in Manhattan. And secondly, the thing that you have to remember about this is Bragg needs 12. Trump needs one. He just if he gets if he gets a hung jury here. Right. Then that's a win for him. I also have a theory. You know, who knows if this will work or not. But I have a theory where they could convict and yet the case could get thrown out. As I understand New York law, I mean, maybe we should say – maybe I should say something just generally speaking about what the case is about.

The case is a business records falsification case, which Bragg has tried. That's a misdemeanor in New York with a two-year statute of limitations. And we're talking about conduct that happened in 2017. Bragg has inflated that into a felony with what's supposed to be a five, but turns out to be because of COVID, a six-year statute of limitations. That's how he gets in under the wire. And the way he does that is the extra fact you have to prove to make it a felony is that you falsified your business record with the fraudulent intent to conceal another crime. So the whole case will be, did he intend to conceal another crime? That's the whole case, correct? Precisely. And what I think, Peter, looking at New York law, I think Trump is entitled to what's known in the law as a lesser included offense instruction.

A lesser included offense is basically if you have two offenses like we just described, right? Falsification of records and falsification of records to conceal another crime. The latter is called the greater offense because it has one extra element than the lesser one. Otherwise, they're completely common. The things the jury have to find are the same elements, except the greater one has the extra element. In those situations, even though Bragg did not put misdemeanors in the indictment, he's got it as 34 felonies. Correct. Trump is entitled, Trump's defense is entitled to ask for a lesser included instruction, which means the jury gets told if they think it's rational to come out this way, that you can convict him on the misdemeanor and acquit him on the felony. The felony. And if that were to happen,

if the jury's got an itch that they have to convict him of something because he's Trump, but they don't think that Bragg has made the greater offense, they could convict him on the misdemeanors. And then the case would have to get thrown out because the statute of limitations ran on the misdemeanors in 2019. So if I'm Trump's defense, I'm pushing for that instruction. And contrary to what some people have said about this, this doesn't mean that Trump has to cop to the misdemeanor. And he's got some good defenses to work with here, including that even with the misdemeanor, you have to show an intent to defraud. And this is kind of like the civil fraud case in the sense that there's no victim of fraud here. There was no tax evasion.

There's no person or entity that was either targeted to lose money or any of the like. So I think Brexit will have a tough time with the- Andy, may I ask one more overview question, then I will shut up and let James and Rob take it from here. But here's the overview. Rob, the noted Trump defender and partisan, I think. Yes, exactly. Here's sort of the overall- I'm seeing a little ray of sunshine in your

description, Andy, and the sunshine would be as follows. Alvin Bragg should never have brought this case. I know that because I read Andy McCarthy. No similar case would ever have been brought against any figure other than Donald Trump. Alvin Bragg is engaging in a travesty against justice. That's one thing. But it would be another thing if the entire legal system, if the jury pool here in Manhattan were some way or other likewise to engage in such a travesty. And what you're saying is that a misguided, progressive, overtly political DA is not going to be able to get this passed, the legal system and the jury, and a jury of Donald Trump's peers, so to speak, in Manhattan, the trial might be fair,

even if the charges against him are outrageous. I think the trial has a lot better chance of being fair than, say, for example, the civil fraud case, which was a bench trial before an elected progressive Democrat. And, you know, Peter, if that's not true, then what the hell was the purpose of complaining about the bench trial? I mean, everybody said he should have had a jury. He was entitled to a jury. Well, why do we care about that? We care about that because he might actually had a jury. He was entitled to a jury. Well, why do we care about that? We care about that because he might actually get a fair shake from a jury. Now, I want to be, you know, this is one of these sort of inside baseball things about how trials work.

To me, the most important unstated dynamic in a trial is how the judge treats the case and particularly how the judge treats the prosecution. And if the judge treats the prosecution like it's serious business and he doesn't seem to be overtly unfair to the defendant. And let's remember now we're talking about what the jury will think here. We're not talking about like what a bunch of us nerds have been reading the newspapers about this case intensely for however many years. The jury is not us. They're not they don't you know, they don't live and die with this stuff. They're not as locked into it. So this is going to be more of a matter of first impression for them, even if they have some predispositions about Trump. They're going to be more of a matter of first impression for them, even if they have some predispositions about Trump. They're going to be powerfully influenced. If Judge Merchan does not come off as overtly unfair to Trump, the jury could be very influenced by how he treats the prosecution.

And that's a dynamic that goes on in every trial, and it calls on Trump's lawyers to do a very good job because they have to be kind of upbeat and friendly and appealing to the jury and not fight with the judge if the judge doesn't seem to be being unreasonable and rely on their ability to convince the jury that this case is terrible. And the other thing about Manhattan juries that we need to bear in mind is you cannot live in Manhattan and not know that Alvin Bragg does not enforce the laws against serious crime. That is true. You're going to have people who are going to be sitting in there wondering, why do we have real criminals walking the street and we're in here on falsification of business records in a case where no one was defrauded? this simple walk through you know city hall plaza or wherever to you that jury room there's not a

juror in that room who did not was not slightly on edge taking the subway down to city hall or wherever this thing you know wherever the courthouse is um this is not a good look for the da or the da right his office um as you make your way through a borough of Manhattan that seems ungoverned and unpoliced to a very strange accounting irregularity trial that is being covered by worldwide media. I mean, I guess what I'd say is like, is there anything, I mean, could I have it wrong. The the the larger. Crime, right, the one that's on top of the misdemeanor is going to be something like said, like election, like kind of a is that how are they going to call that? I understand the business records, but what's the bigger one called what's it's well there's two basically he's got a tax theory too but that really doesn't doesn't work yeah um and just quickly so we can dismiss it the tax theory doesn't work because the way they paid cone was this is about the reimbursement of

cone right okay cone pays stormy then trump reimburses cohen and trump being trump he doesn't just pay him they have to like do it over in installments over 11 months and uh and all this stuff the reason i think the tax theory doesn't work is what they did to pay him back the 130 grand they doubled it and they call that grossing up to account for the taxes he would have to pay if that was considered to be income. So they actually specifically thought about the tax situation and paid him extra. So not only do those jurors have to walk through the jungle of Manhattan to see what the DA's priorities are, But they've also, four days ago, filed their complicated, impossible to understand federal tax return. So this is not going to be a sympathetic jury.

Okay. I understand. And the other thing I'd be worried about is if you get off the subway, as I used to do at Brooklyn Bridge, when I worked at the U.S. Attorney's Office, and walk the three or four blocks to the criminal court, you could be high on marijuana by the time you get there if you've been walking around New York City. That could only make it better. Yeah. I was able to do my taxes in my head, actually, without any calculator or assistance whatsoever because I do not have the problem of aging brain cells, of zombie cells. But you, Mike, have you heard about senolytics yet?

It's a class of ingredients discovered about 10 years ago. They're being called the biggest discovery of our time for promoting healthy aging and enhancing your physical prime. Your life goals in your career and beyond require what? Well, many things, but productivity is high amongst them. But let's be honest, the aging process, it's not our friend when it comes to endless energy and productivity. And that's why we recommend qualia senolytic. If someone had told me that there's a science-backed ingredient that could help me

feel 15 years younger in a matter of months, I would not have believed it. But then we became aware of qualia senolytics, and I added it to a routine that includes, just personally speaking here, going to the gym and changing what I eat and all the rest of it. I feel so much better than I did a couple of years ago, which is unusual because as we age, everyone accumulates what they call senescent cells in their body. They're also known as zombie cells. Yeah, that's because they're old and they're worn out and they're not serving a useful function for your health anymore, but they're taking up space, taking up nutrients from your healthy cells. Now, you need to prune off the yellowing and dead leaves from a plant,

right? Well, qualia senolytic removes those worn out senescent cells to allow for the rest of them to thrive in your body. So like I say, they're interesting approach. It's not something you pop every day. No, it's not like that. It's not something you pop every day. No, it's not like that. You have this regimen of them that you take, concentrate it, does what it does, and then you lay off it for a while, and then take it from me, like I say. Two years ago, if you'd have told me that I felt as good as I do now, I would have said, gee, what happened? Well, a lot of things happened, a lot of personal choices, and things like getting rid of the senescent cells. You too can resist aging at the cellular level. Try quality of senolytic and how? Go to neurohacker.com slash ricochet for up to a hundred bucks off.

Use the code ricochet at checkout for an additional 15% off. Interesting? Yes. Neurohacker.com slash ricochet for an extra 15% off your purchase. And we thank Neurohacker for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, you know, in a sense, though, when you were saying before that you could get high between the time you get off the subway and you get there because clouds of choking reefer fumes settled upon Manhattan. We have the same thing here in Minneapolis to a little bit less extent. And I almost want to do, to pull away from the Trump thing here and go to a general question about society and where we're headed.

Here in Minneapolis, they're about to raise the price of cigarettes to 15 bucks a pack before taxes. That's expensive. And at the same time, the state is telling us, here is your marijuana, go smoke this. And we have a strange set of

priorities being handed to us by our betters, a disconnect that Rob spoke about before that you were speaking about. To what extent do you think this actually is going to grow and play a role in moving forward? When everybody takes a look at what was done with Trump and what isn't done with the people who, shall we say, abrade the cities and societies in which we live. Are we just kind of now conditioned to slump and take it? And as long as they're going after guys like Trump, who cares? It's not affecting me. I think people feel really powerless to do anything about it. Part of the appeal of Trump,

I think even among people who, at bottom, don't think he's a very good person, what they like is he's like the one thing that puts a thumb in the eye of all the things that they feel powerless about. And I think that's a big part of the attraction. But I don't know. I don't get the sense that, James, that people have suddenly got pushed to the point where they can't take it anymore. Not yet.

They're going to push back. Yeah, we're not Howard Bealing it yet. And I always remind people, even as we get alarmed by the fact that murder is creeping up in New York again. I think it's down from 2020. 2023 was down from 2022, but it's still significantly higher than it was in 2019, and almost twice as high. But what we're worried about or talking about is like 450 homicides. I don't remember what the exact number is. I think in 1991, we had close to 2,500 homicides in New York

City. And I just point out that despite, we're talking about like five times more than we have now. We had record crime from the late 60s into the 90s before crime was driven down in a very revolutionary way. But it got awfully, awfully bad before there was a backlash against it. Before people were willing to vote for Rudy. Yeah. And they weren't willing. That's really what happened. Yeah, it's true. And Peter, they weren't four years earlier. Dinkins beat him, I wouldn't say handily, it was a fairly close election, but he lost four years before and then went back to the well after four years of Dinkins. And the way crime got pushed down from 1991 to about 2014 or so was astonishing, but it was awfully bad from the late 60s until 1991. So I just don't think, in my experience at least, and I've had a lot of experience, unfortunately, with crime in that area in New York, I just think things could get a lot worse before they get better

I hope that's wrong stop whining Rob it's going to get much worse Andy do you ever feel like I mean as a New Yorker there was a constant cultural story story from the end of world war ii

to 1990 which was the high water mark or low water mark of murders in new york city depending on how you look at it you know glasses half full glasses half empty um that's a long time 40 years 40 years of culture and the 40 years said one thing over and over again. The city is going to get worse and worse and worse. This is normal. It is normal for the city to get worse. It can never get better. So you look at the culture of the 70s and you look at what they were people talking about the city. It was always gritty and nasty and horrible.

And, you know, the naked city, all that stuff. People have been saying that to tell that story forever. And then suddenly changes. 40 years though 40 years of sort of your brain imprinting that the new york city is a gritty place and it kind of changed and went and became this place that you know when i came back to it after giuliani but there was kind of unrecognizable there's people sitting outside people sitting outside of herald square having a sandwich brian park was this glorious place you could go and enjoy your afternoon. You could get a glass of wine at Bryant Park and sit outside and drink it.

It's crazy. Like Paris. I live right close to Washington Square Park. Washington Square Park was surrounded by fencing for most of my growing up. And now it's like you walk. I mean, it's plumes of weed and some other trouble there. But basically, it's kind of a big city park. It's lovely um it does feel like people's tolerance for going back is shorter the idea there's a

whole bunch of young people who live in new york city who do not remember new york city 1985 they remember new york city when they moved here when it was not a dump i mean it's not and even now their standards i hear people complaining about new york city all the time i'm like listen New York City when they moved here, when it was not a dump. I mean, it's not. And even now there's standards. I hear people complaining about New York City all the time. I'm like, listen, you weren't here in 1989. You should have seen it. Do you think that helps that there's this tighter cycle now that there's a snapback that's much faster that nobody believes that the city has to be? A chaotic, crimeridden disaster. I think you're right about the short time frame

and that having a lot to do with people's tolerance. To me, and I don't want to read my view on it too much on people who haven't been in law enforcement, but one of the things that's really frustrating about the surge in crime for the last 10 years, and especially the last five years or so, is that up until 1991 or thereabouts, you could say we were in this miasma of what are we going to do about this? But crime didn't come down randomly. Crime came down because of a plan. We have a plan. We know what works. They called it broken windows. That was part of it. It was really intelligence-based policing, where instead of this idea where the cop goes out to same assignment every day, and they stay in their cars and they don't do – what Bratton and those guys did under Rudy's stewardship, and Ray Kelly was great on this as well in his two tenures, was they would study the stats and they would deploy police to the places where crime was starting to signal that it might be surging so that they didn't allow it to surge. But can I just, I guess my pessimistic note here is that we're not really talking about crime. We're technically talking about crime. But when

I walk around New York City, I'm not worried that someone's going to mug me. I'm worried that some lunatic is going to do something unpredictable irrational and violent and so i'm asking law and for i mean broken windows theory is great but we're not talking about broken windows here we're talking about broken brains and i just don't understand how you're asking cops and and um i mean even God forbid, D.A. brag to solve a crime problem. And notice they always go when you talk about crime. Well, actually, you know, crime is not actually, you know, crime is down.

They have all the statistics to prove that it's not a problem. Whereas the evidence, your eyes and ears is that you walk around New York City, walk around any big city in America, that there is a problem. It's a mental health problem. And it is dangerous. It's not funny. It's not cute. It's not quaint. It's not. Remember the bag lady? People make fun of bag ladies. It's kind mental health problem. And it is dangerous. It's not funny. It's not cute. It's not quaint. It's not.

Remember the bag lady? People make fun of bag ladies. It's kind of fun. No, this is like these are weirdo, crazy crackpot ambulatory psychotics pushing people in front of trains. And I'm not sure that the old solutions are going to do much. Yeah, we always had a little crazy on the street, but nothing like now. The other thing, Rob, is that when I was a kid, New York was always a leftist center place in terms of just the political elites, but it wasn't like a hard left marxist progressive

the dutch owned it when you were a kid right when your kid was still talking well when i was a kid though i grew growing up where i grew up in the bronx everybody was a democrat and the neighborhood and the neighborhood was conservative yes there were conservative democrats these are the people who voted for bill buckley in 1965 uh 65 i think it was, right? And discovered that there were people in Queens and the Bronx and Staten Island who were for this crazy conservative Republican because they were conservative people. Yeah.

And they were the least patient with John Lindsay, who was like the original limousine liberal, right? But the thing is, back then, it wasn't like we didn't always have like this marxist fringe it's the problem is it's now not a fringe they've actually taken over right right the government and um it's much worse than it than it ever was at that level and as a result even though even though i don't think this is representative of ordinary people's sensibilities, the government is officially hard progressive. And as a result, we have the mental health policies that the way you deal with this is by dismantling the carceral state, which means let everybody out of the prisons, even though the people in the neighborhoods which are – who are tormented by crime actually want more policing but the policing the the city's being run by mostly white lefty lunatics and the people who are living with the consequences of it are the people who live in these uh poorer

neighborhoods where the crime is the highest they have false consciousness that's the problem uh you're absolutely right andy and i know we got to let you go but you're absolutely right as rob was saying before we couldn't do anything about crime, and then Giuliani, we can do something about crime, and now we shouldn't do anything about these issues. That's what I always hear from these people. We shouldn't do it until we address the root causes and the systemic systemism that they're not interested in doing anything about these things at all. They're illustrative and they're not interested in doing anything about these things at all. They're illustrative and they're helpful. And you, as usual, have been illustrative and helpful. And I hope our listeners have a clearer grasp, a firmer, drier grasp on what's going on with the Trump cases.

And, of course, we will talk to you later about the same thing because this ain't going away. Andy McCarthy, always a pleasure. Thanks, guys. Have a great weekend. Thanks, Andy. Andy, will you quit sitting around and appearing on Fox News and run for governor? Once we get Trenton and Newark and Jersey City, show the way to New York. Show the way. Will you please?

Yeah. I don't know. They don't want a guy from the Bronx. First of all, I say Trenton. So I'm like behind the eight-foot bridge. Change your residency and run for mayor, for goodness sake. Come home. Just do it.

Come home. Come home. Time for you to come home and run the city, Andy. Have a great weekend, guys. Thanks, you too. Thanks a lot, Andy. Take care. You know, a couple of things about New York, as long as we're still on the subject and you guys are still there.

One, the crazies, the, I'm sorry, it's probably the wrong word wrong word the challenged uh it seems like there's more of them they're more flamboyant and they're they're meaner and they're weirder than they used to be is drugs i i don't think we're dealing with a lot of people here who since their adolescent period have started to have something go awry with their brain chemistry i think you have a lot of people who are fried on drugs. And I hate to say this because people get angry, but marijuana does it too. I think the amount of psychosis you probably can get with people who've been doing a lot of weed, modern day varieties of it is high. So yeah, you've got more crazy people out there, not because they opened the doors of the asylum.

I still go on a Reddit and you will still find people convinced that the reason you have people sleeping and pushing people in front of cars in Rob's old hometown of Venice is because Ronald Reagan threw open the asylum doors in the 1980s. Personally, Ronald Reagan opened the doors and then kicked everybody out, dragged them out by their collars, completely unilateral action. The second thing I would would note and both you guys there in gotham can give me your opinion about this rob and i had argued about this before but maybe peter with a fresh set of eyes the one thing i hate hate about new york these days

is all the scaffolding it's permanent doesn't go away it's not there to protect anybody usually it's part of these interminable restoration efforts that it's i and there's tax reasons for it there's landmarking there's all kinds of reasons for it but have you noticed that peter that when you walk down the street what used to be like you know manhattan the street beautiful old brick buildings you're now shuttling through these, like a rat, through these dank green tunnels with metal pipes, and it's straight out of the Batman movie in 1989. Yeah, there is a huge amount of that.

In fact, I was walking down Park Avenue and paid a kind of homage to where Bill and Pat Buckley used to live, and their whole building is covered in scaffolding now. I took it as I did. We landed in Newark and took an Uber in and the skyline, I thought to myself, oh my goodness, the skyline has been transformed since I moved out to California. And so I took it. I thought to myself, in California, all you hear about New York is in decline. Everybody's moving to Florida. That's not quite the case.

There's an enormous amount of growth and energy. Rob Long is here, for example. So I sort of took it as these buildings have to get refurbished. This is a good sign. There's investment. The co-ops are putting up the money to do what needs to be done to keep the buildings intact for another 50 years. But, of course, york so the government will be involved there's some corruption involved there are tax cuts it's a huge boondoggle right because the scaffolding is very expensive and it's hard to reserve you have to reserve it ahead of time so they put up scaffolding way before they need to um and there's new kinds

of scaffolding now that it's like kind of these weird they're kind of pretty white umbrella things that are lit that are making scaffolding and the building scaffolding somehow more attractive there's with like plastic flower stuff which is somehow even creepier um and there's a lot there has been a lot of construction but a lot of it is just that the there's a you know a few places you must have it it's insurance and regulations and whatever you're doing you must have and this is sort of new kind of new from past 25 years when a bunch of when a bunch of stuff fell off masonry fell off a building and killed somebody on the sidewalk and now all these buildings need to have their um their facade masonry or their facade of any kind um inspected every x number of years which means

scaffolding so um it's a it's a very strange thing but like most of these things i think it has to do with a government regulation a regulated industry shortages um and compliance with a whole bunch of um legal and and um you know city ordinances and not so much the practical need for workers to get uh and walk on the outside of a building that to me feels like like i don't know why you have to build scaffolding just to just to i mean i don't know about maybe you do but it just it. Maybe you do, but it seems to me that it is, like most things, it is the product of an over-regulated and over-insured and over-protective bureaucratic state. I'm a fast walker, which is why I like New York.

I go to New York and I'm telling New Yorkers to get out of the way. And having everybody put into these tunnels with choke points and the rest of it requires, you know, you've got to do your radar scanning down the sidewalk. Yes, yes. Much better. Until it rains and then you're like looking for the scaffolding, but I get it. Right. And so, Peter, how long has it been since you've been there to the large Apple?

Since I've been here for a very quick business trip, it's probably been, so I'm in the middle of Manhattan for almost a week, and it has been probably a decade and a half since I spent that much time in Manhattan. So you've seen some of the new substantial construction that's taken place, which- The new substantial, those needle buildings, there is nothing wrong. I was just thinking about this as Rob and Andy were talking about the mental homeless. There is no doubt that that's true. The sense, the anxiety is not, I'm going to get a knife in the back or somebody is going to hold me up on the street, which by the way, did happen to me in the old days. Somebody just stopped me on the street and said, give me your money. And I said, here, sorry, I don't have more. Great physical coward that I am.

That is not the concern. I only wish it could be more, my good man. Yeah, exactly. Clouds of marijuana, tattoos. But from maybe the third or fourth floor up, there's no mental illness in Manhattan. What we're talking about is the streets. Sadly enough, everybody, even those rich, rich people way up in those needle towers, have to come down to the street, or every so often, at least, they have to come down to the street. And walking through clouds of marijuana, getting on the subway, as I did just now, following Rob's directions to come from uptown to downtown.

And just, you know, you're scanning, you're looking more than you feel as though you ought to for the crazy person you're looking for. Where's the car that nobody's in? Because I shouldn't go in that car either. It's unnerving in a place where from the second floor up, this town is filled with brains and talent and ambition and energy. It's an astonishing place that ought pretty easily to be even better. When I say pretty easily, we all know that if Andy McCarthy were made mayor,

this place would get turned around in two months. I've been to the second floor of the CVS in Times Square. It's full of lunatics. But I know what you mean. When the billionaires come down. But Fran Lebowitz famously said that the outdoors is what I pass through from my lobby to the taxi, right? Right.

So those people are going to be insulated no matter what in billionaires row. But no, you're absolutely correct. Still love the city. Wouldn't live there if you paid me. It takes about three or four days before I throw up my hands or my shawarma and say, you won. That's it. That's it. That's it. I'm still never forgetting, and I'll leave with this, when I went to the National Review Christmas party. Robbie should have been there. I know you were giving a lecture to some youths or something. I was talking to the youths.

I was coming back for that. I was still a little a little hungry and i thought and i'm walking back to my hotel through the bustling crowds christmas time lights everywhere beautiful just new york at its absolute finest there it is a sabrettes hot dog place no the bretts sabrettes sabrettes yeah okay i wish i'd been hebrew national they're the best but you know i said you know i haven't had a new york street dog in a long time this is great i walk up i talk to the guy how are you my friend what would you like i'm his friend he's my friend we're having a new york experience i gave him the money cooks the dog he puts the bun on everything and i just slather a little ketchup on it and no i'm sorry mustard and i walked down the street saying here i am i've done it i went to new york with a part i had a party up at a skyscraper drank fine scotch walked through the city was not molested the lights twinkling above

the new cranes of the jp morgan i'm in new york and i took a bite of my hot dog it was ice cold absolutely ice cold my friends have i got a deal for, no, we make it cold for you. We make it very cold for you. It's good. It's better for you. I managed to extract all the heat out of it whatsoever. And I thought, I can dump this right now, which I did, knowing that Pizza Rat is going to get it. Some piece of vermin is going to pick it out

in the cycle of life continues. But I thought that was perfect. May I adjust your culinary? I know you walked out of probably 44th street and took a left Yeah right On 6th avenue The halal guys I'm telling you The halal guys

Bunch of carts usually there's a line This was a halal This was one of those guys They don't sell the They sell like a chicken shawarma. It is delicious. It's so good. You can door dash it.

The halal guys. You got to say halal guys. You can't say anything else though. And there are four or five of them and they have, they have one downtown too. It unbelievably. I've seen them and I will take them. I've just never trusted. I've always figured that getting meat from a street car vendor is going to result in gut griping six hours later, the likes of which I'd never seen before and for which there is no recourse.

So that's why I tend not to. But you know what? This is what we should do. We should arrange a ricochet meetup whereby Rob Long takes us to his favorite hall. All guys. I'll give the architecture tour, if you don't mind. And Peter Robinson will tell us of his recollections of the days when he was held up. Between the three of us, the artistic, the cultural, and the historical, we should have New York easily explained for all, he said, jokingly.

Or not. That's part of the Ricochet Meetups, which, of course, we'll have later. Rob, next week you can tell us about something to come. Yeah, there's some coming up. This was brought to you, of course, by Ricochet.com and by Neurohacker. Support them and you support us and everybody's happy. Go to Apple and give us that five-star review in Apple Music, iTunes, Podcast, wherever you get it. We like that, too.

It helps more people find the show, as I've been saying, for 600 episodes. And then they join Ricochet. And then there'll be the people who sign on just as Ricochet 5.0 finally hits live and say, this is fantastic. And those of us who labored in the trenches during Ricochet 1, 2, and 3

will look at them like the newcomers they are. But no, there'll be members and hence family. And we'll love them like we love you. That's it for me. Gentlemen, enjoy New York. Whatever you're doing there, although I think I know. And we'll talk to you down the road.

See everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week. Next week, fellas. Ricochet. Join the conversation. Music