The Ricochet Podcast - Where and When to RUNRWAway

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

Do you ever get that queasy feeling by the occassional thought that the people running our foreign policy agenda are, well… dumb? We do too. And so does our guest Rich Goldberg, who had to explain some basics to the House Foreign Affairs Committee earlier this week. He joins today to discuss everything from UNRWA and the tangled mess that is the United Nations, to Iran’s nuclear capabilities and our administration’s weakness in dealing with a middling power. Steve Hayward fills in for Peter this week. He, James and Rob talk about the economics lesson our criminals are giving the US; plus there’s talk about pop sensation psyops and the comfort that some feel by the thought of a world controlled by malevolent grownups.

Hey, what are we still arguing about? God. What we're doing here? The point. Yeah. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.

UNRWA has done and continues to do invaluable work to address the humanitarian situation in Gaza. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Steve A. We're sitting in for Peter Robinson. I'm James Lilex. Today we talk to Richard Goldberg about Iran and UNRWA. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 677. I'm James Lilex in sunny, warm Minnesota, where it's been plus 50 degrees, which, of course, everybody believes portends the end of the world.

Once upon a time, we'd just go outside and say, ah, lean up against the wall and bask like people in Leningrad, you know, who got the temperature of 22 degrees in January. Now we are just, you know, it's the end. It's the end, I tell you. But this is just the beginning of the podcast with Rob Long, as usual, and Stephen Hayward sitting in for Peter Robinson. Gentlemen, welcome.

Hey. Hi. Steve, how are you doing? I'm good. I'm great. Thank you for sitting in. So many things to start off the week with, but of local interest to me is the

firebombing of the Center for the American Experiment Office, which is unusual here to have. What is the Center for the American Experiment? Is that... Let me just shorthand. Do I like it? Do I not like it?

You like it. It's the center of the American Experiment. Yeah, we like it? Do I not like it? You like it. It's the center of the American experiment. Yeah, we like it. They've been around for an awful long time, and they do good work. And I like the guys who are involved. And it's connected to the Powerline blog in ways that are sort of official and unofficial. It's just a good, smart place. And they put out a magazine, the only conservative magazine to come out of Minnesota,

which, I should note, has hosted some writings by one of Ricochet's own, Jenna S. So applaud for them for seeing talent and surfacing it. But yeah, Hinderocker posted at Powerline the other day, they firebombed my office, he wrote. They were incinerated along with the office for Take Charge, which is an organization to, quote, inspire and educate black and other minority communities of their full rights and privileges as Americans, end quote. And the Upper Midwest Law Center, who, quote, pursue pro-freedom. Uh-oh. Pro-freedom.

You know what those buzzwords mean. Yeah. Dog whistles mean, don't you? Litigation, safeguarding against government overreach, left-wing special interest agendas, constitutional violations, and public union corruption, end quote. Those are the organizations that were targeted. So we can expect, perhaps, that the arsonists will be quickly found, the ATF is on the case, and then spun out with probably zero bail. They'll give a middle finger to the cameras and get on a bus for california i'm just saying that's what that's what happened in new york rob you are

in the in new york um yeah and this was this is one of those stories where you think once upon a time if you were on camera actually beating the sawdust out of a couple of cops you're trying to do so you would find yourself um if not experiencing giuliana time giuliani time you you you'd be in the gray bar you you would be in the tomb and things would not go well for you and if you were illegal if you were not even here legally right you might be um removed to the place from which you came but that's that's you it's impossible to to ask now isn't it yeah it's a very very weird uh story because you keep thinking um you keep thinking that it was invented by chat gpt you know like what you know siri or chat gpt please come up with the most incendiary story you can so that 95 of all americans will read it and think we have to do something about crime in the streets law and order and the border like it it's like a fever dream and it happened

it really happened they beat up a cop and they're getting away with it they're going to california um and there was a report today on cnn this morning which i think but by the time but anyone hears this i think this i cannot imagine this clip will not go viral i think it was this morning maybe yesterday but a report on cnn said listen i've talked a bunch of detectives and here's how it works works. These are organized gangs. A lot of the things that are happening in New York City right now that seem like random crime are not, in fact. They are organized crime.

And that is actually what was true in the 80s, too, apparently. So, it's organized. Gangs come from Florida or somewhere else, and they come to New York City, and they organize, and they do the snatch and grabs, they grab your phone, they do all that stuff. And then they get the money, they go down to

Florida to spend it. And so someone says, so why don't they just, why don't they come here? Why don't they just stay in Florida and do it? And the answer was, well, because in Florida, they'll be arrested and put in jail. So if you ever have doubted pure free market economics, the natural human impulse to mitigate risk and opportunity, to balance risk and opportunity, it is right there. It is easy and cheap, basically, to to new york city where there is no law enforcement you maraud do whatever you want you grab snatch and grab however you want it you get all your money and then you quickly hightail it down to a fun warm place so you can spend it because in new york city you know that they're the is low, and in Florida, the reward is high.

It's, you know, this is an economics class. And I just don't quite understand the sclerotic nature of American politics, both local and federal, and the idea that ordinarily there'd be torches in the streets for this guy. Alvin Bragg would be out. They'd be calling for his head on the City Hall Plaza. Well, we might not be far away from the torches in the street, figuratively speaking. It seems like we have to go through what Tom Wolfe called the great relearning. And not long ago, I dusted off the classic book from the 70s by James Q. Wilson, Thinking About Crime.

And that book, you know, just update the figures and the dates. And it reads exactly like a description of what's going on today, including what needs to be done. And it did occur to me. So here we are. It's 2024. If memory serves, it was 40 years ago sometime the summer of 1984 we had the famous episode of bernard getz remember the guy in the subway who pulled out the gun and shot four muggers he was not charged in that particular case things were

starting to turn in i think kotch was the mayor then maybe uh he wasn't charged with uh uh manslaughter or anything like that he He was ultimately charged and convicted for illegal possession of a handgun, which of course was illegal in New York in those days, probably still is, although there's some doubt about that after the Bruin case. But in any case, you know, we saw this case a few months ago of the guy on the subway, the ex-Marine, I forget his name, who put that menacing person in a chokehold who died, and he is being prosecuted for manslaughter. i can't imagine that even a new york jury will convict him of that but i think we're not far away from

citizens uh and frustrated police they're going to say you're going to see some more bernard getz incidents that's what i think is going to happen yeah i mean i i suspected that you're right or or or or something like it i mean it just to me it's but also it seems to me that two things have were revealed to me recently one is that in the 80s in new york city everybody had a sign in front of their in a car saying no radio in car right don't you know because people break into the car ceiling and the theory at the time was this was kind of random distributed petty theft and then since revealed studies have revealed that it wasn't really it was an organized it was actually organized crime i think it might have

been actually what we now consider to be organized crime like the mob or something and they were doing it and they were sort of collecting the radios and they would come up with an economic way to sort of dispose of those things and make some money and it was a low, again, low-risk, high-reward kind of business. And I think we've discovered that maybe early here in this one story. Obviously, the story is not dispositive proof, but it's emblematic of a problem. And that there are people who have seen weakness, and they are going to take advantage of it because they are economic individuals they are already here illegally so there's not much they can do but by actually ironically by being here illegally they are protected in ways that an american citizen is not protected right i mean there's no you know non-profit organization trying to help somebody who just beat up a cop

you first have to be here illegally to receive that benefit um and they are acting exactly as you would expect the human economic animal to act the only people who are falling short are us in this city and i think in the country in general because we simply have lost the nerve or the words or the vocabulary for emphatic disapproval and punishment we just don't know how to do it anymore as a society but we do some people vote with their feet they leave and i certainly understand that but um it just seems astonishing to me that this happens so quickly man is not just an economic man is not just an economic animal he's a moral animal and so these people do share primary culpability for what they're doing for the.

Yeah, no, you're right. I mean, I just like, you know, I like to think of, you know, I like to be a cold, you know, Adam Smith. You know, we're just robots trying to maximize return. When you take it all in aggregate, though, when you look at what the Democratic Party in other states is doing, you have I think it would I think it's Illinois that is doing what many states have done. Cities have done is saying we're no longer going to enforce traffic laws because of disparate impact. You had a vote, I believe, or where was it? Was it also in Illinois where the 150 Democrats voted against, against deporting illegals who are convicted of drunk driving? Well, that was Congress, James, not Illinois. That was the United States House of Representatives yesterday. yesterday. Then I misread the piece. Now, it passed, but 150, because their constituents believe that any of these in the country after being convicted of being drunk, that's based on your attitude toward their ethnicity, all of these things. It's insane.

So they're apparently still afraid of a handful of very loud activists as opposed to the people who live in the neighborhoods and have their lives affected by the people who do these things. It was Boston the other day where this man is unburdening himself at the cops because the local community center, he was homeless. He said he worked 40 hours a day, could not afford an apartment. He was homeless. He depended on this community center and it had been turned over to an illegal immigrant, I'm sorry, migrant outreach outreach center and he is every right to be incensed he's a citizen and this continual blurring and erosion of the distinction between is one of those things that i think we can probably get most people in the same around the same table completely there's a think there's a panel in dc yesterday um a community panel the bunch of dc residents and they're mad about the violent crime spike in dc it's great you know they're really upset

they're there and they're you know and you know most of them are black right because it's a dc's very predominantly black town this guy stands up and is like complaining to the dc attorney general ryan schwalb says you know what are you gonna do about this this is like complaining to the dc attorney general brian schwalb says you know what are you gonna do about this this is really a problem the crime in the streets is a problem you got to do something about this problem what are you going to do it's your job you're the attorney general and he says uh and the response from this from the dc attorney general brian schwalb was this he says listen you know talks about these are big problems crimes big problem he says we cannot prosecute and arrest our way out of it now i think there are just two kinds of people in the

world right there's kind of people who believe that really that's how you actually take care of crime you arrest and prosecute your way out of it and those people have been you know more or less in charge for 2 000 years and there's a lot of people who now think you know what actually you can't um i just what was staggering to me was that i think that that the common sense line gets bigger and bigger and bigger but those people seem whether they are or they are not more and or they feel less and less empowered and that i find very strange in american politics um ordinarily when you're part of a big burgeoning populist group you feel powerful you get to do big things you get to pass civil rights legislation you get to amend the constitution to uh outlaw alcohol these amazing stuff that you can do um and it seems to me like there's 90 percent of

americans agree on basic stuff um but they just in a world where we're all networked they just feel like well i don't have any power it It's very strange. I'm not sure I understand why. Rob, can I pose a question to you? I want to get this down to the personal level, but you gave up the sunny, gonzo, bohemian climbs of Venice Beach for the bohemian, not-so-sunny climbs of Greenwich Village many years ago now. Have you changed, in what ways, if you have,

have you changed your personal habits of living and walking around and maneuvering in New York? Have you changed, in what ways, if you have, have you changed your personal habits of living and walking around and maneuvering in New York? Have you made adjustments because of the increasing anarchy of the place? Well, I mean, you know, there's anarchy and there's anarchy, right? I mean, where I live, I live in Venice, very close to the beach. Before that, I lived in Santa Monica on the beach. And there was like, there were crazy homeless people there all the time. That was, you know, my friend Harry Shearer used to used to refer to Santa Monica still does as the home of the homeless,

because it really was. And it was like, it was kind of a fun little, you know, group theater because you could watch incredibly, incredibly ardent progressives, just absolutely dead, you know, dead set liberals and progressives in their multi-million dollar mansions, just torn up inside because homeless people were, you know, just kind of going to the bathroom in their bushes.

They were mad about it, but they didn't know how to be mad about it. And there was a lot of crime in Venice, and there's a lot of drug crime in Venice when I was there. You know, I'm an idiot, okay? I walk around like, at night in New York City city i don't really care um i sometimes put my air uh air pods or earbuds in my ears which you're not supposed to do both

of them you're supposed to keep one in here so you can listen uh and listen to music and walk around smoke a cigar and you know just kind of i just don't pay attention i i routinely find myself standing for some reason on the white line on the subway right there. So some lunatic just pushed me for no reason. So, you know, I'm not a very good personal safety consultant. But I am starting to get remember how I used to be when I was in New York when I was younger, when New York was different or New York was the same as it is now. Which is, you know, you don't stand close to the tracks. You don't walk down that street.

You don't plug yourself into music when you need to be aware of what's going on. And, you know, you keep your eye on people. In New York, though, the thing about it is in New York, you have to stay aware of everything, but you can't let them know that you're aware. So you can't, you got to look at that guy, but you can't let him know you're looking at him because otherwise he's going to say, you're looking at me. What are you looking at? You don't let them know that you're aware so you can't you gotta look at that guy but you can't

let him know you're looking at him because otherwise he's gonna say you're looking at me what are you looking at you don't want to do that so yeah um i'm i'm uh i'm relearning all that stuff but i'm very bad at it um so not to get morbid if you you know it's this this deal don't don't don't replay this clip at my memorial podcast you're he like he even knew like three weeks ago he's telling us so there you go it's not acceptable it isn't we all got used to the idea that the cities of america had turned a corner that uh what had once been on the decline and we had the we had the decline of the of the 50s when they decided well the answer to this is to bulldoze everything and put up really soulless museum office buildings. That didn't work.

And then we had the decline in the 80s when you had crack and crime and the rest of it. And we beat that. We beat that with a set of tools that we still have. We may not have as many hands to implement them, but we know how to do it. But they don't want to so consequently this thing that was the great accomplishment really of the early 21st century was the restoration of american cities and turning them into safe places i remember going back to dc i mean i lived there for years and then i go back in the uh in the teens when we were doing all those books and c-span stuff and walking around and marveling at how absolutely safe i felt i walked

back to my hotel i think from the tabard at like two o'clock in the morning i didn't care and there's no i mean never would have done that in the early days because my head would have been stove in five times a block but now it's reverted back to that and i love i too saw the the thing rob was talking about i think he had it backwards when he said that we can't prosecute and arrest ourselves our way out of this i i think well no you arrest first and then you prosecute have you tried that yeah that's right yeah that's it that was a problem and you give it a shot you solve the form good for you so you know when you tell people though that there's there's simply not enough police presence not enough arrests and not enough people in prison they look at you as though you're absolutely mad, because the only people in prison, they

believe, it seems to be, are people who were arrested and sentenced to 30 years for possession of an eighth of an ounce of pot. That's what they seem to think. Oh, you know, and a couple of bad, violent guys, but you know. But the idea that strong societal disincentives rapidly applied judiciously to all actually does have a concentrating effect on the criminal mind yeah i mean yes well yeah i mean the way the way james q wilson put in his book was uh uh pretty simple it was criminals are not stupid they respond to incentives like everyone else and if

you make the price of crime very low the demand for it's going to go way up uh and then the other you know there is uh i keep wondering when are voters going to wake up there's you know another recall effort against um the oakland alameda county prosecutor who said the same nonsense out here in california where by the way uh uh you know in and out burgers which is rob knows is you know a cult classic closing their only location in oakland which is still profitable but there's been so much crime and you can see videos of people getting carjacked in line at the drive-thru window uh and then denny's yesterday is close announced they're closing their only restaurant in oakland uh so the recall effort there recall effort again in la with uh what's

it a gas cone but then nobody's paying much attention because it's up on the corner of the country but i think it's either king county or the city of seattle i forget which jurisdiction the last election they actually elected a republican district attorney with considerable democratic support by the way for moderate Democrats like the former governor, Christine Gregoire, who I know a little bit, is very smart. And what is a woman and what she said was what Rob was saying. An awful lot of crime these days is organized. It's high propensity criminals. And the first thing she did was let's look for people who've been arrested more than 10 times in the last year and let go.

And let's not let them go next time they're arrested. And guess what? They haven't completely turned a corner they're getting resistance from the socialists on the seattle city council but the crime rate in uh in seattle has bent down after years of just going as crazy as every place else so this is not hard it's not rocket science it's just a matter of again to use tom wool's phrase we need to relearn a lot of basic truths about it. Yeah. Yeah, but it's also kind of like, you know, the national mood, national whatever you want to call it,

it's sort of erratic, and we are impulsive, and we just kind of throw ourselves into something, and then we're kind of like done with it. Masks, not so much. i still see a lot of masks but you know what i'm saying like kind of like ah you know even when i talk to people like i'm doing this thing on but jay batacharya on covid and i was gonna be like oh man even though they agree with you know like i'm just i'm all coveted out and i actually feel like like there's a whole bunch of people who

I think even marching in the streets, even where Black Lives Matter, even really upset about what was happening in 2020 or what was revealed to be happening in 2020 or what people thought was happening in 2020, which of course didn't prove it, but it was kind of a national mania that all cops are bad. And I think they kind of want that

to be gone. We're over that now okay we did that thing remember we were all mad no we're not mad at you we want you to come back in the streets and we want you to come back and police and and it just doesn't work that way in the real way the real world when you have a mania and you go crazy it's actually hard to you know unring the bell so you it's hard as they politicians, to put the toothpaste back in the tube. You pass a lot of laws, and you elect a lot of morons, and they're all there, and they're all, you know,

the district attorney of New York City is like a fool and is responsible for these kind of crazy things happening in New York City, almost directly. So it's like, you know, when you're a kid, you have to learn, especially when you're a teenage boy, you have to learn that actually some things you're going to do, you're not going to be able to undo. They seem like they're fun at the time. And it's a fun impulse to jump out of the tree or push your friend in the wall or whatever

or try to roll out of a rolling car like Dukes of Hazzard. But actually, that's not a smart move and you're going to regret it. And so we have to learn that all the time, I guess. It's amazing that people applied the Chesterton's fence idea to the police. Of all the things, the purpose of the police ought to be self-evident, but no. Here in Minneapolis, the epicenter of the 2020 unpleasantness. I just, I had a line popped up in my newsfeed.

It said a video found of, uh, of new slider crimes. We have a new crime. They've given a name called sliders. Uh, you'll be pumping the gas and some burgers, somebody just slide right into your car and take your valuables and pop right out. And sometimes if you've, you know, if you leave your car running or you're an idiot, uh, they'll drive off with it. And I thought, oh, boy, where did this happen?

So I just call up the video. It's my gas station around the corner from where I live. So now do I actually have to be that guy who's always got my head in a swivel? I mean, where we are now is that they provide for us a video screen on the gas pump in case you are bored with your phone and want to look at programming on a gas pump. It's the gas station network. And they provide nationwide feeds of all kinds of ads and programming and the rest of it, which lasts for about as long as it takes for you to fill up your tank. So now they've given us these, but at the same time, society has not given us a sufficient order to make sure that our computer is going to be there in our car when we turn our backs. And that's happening here.

These are all anomalous, but they're all incremental. And the end result of it is the changing of zero minds in this city there's absolutely nobody around here who is going to vote differently for more law and order because of this because they still in the back of their heads will believe that a you don't want to get people just a system involved as the you know they call it and and b uh better that you spend your energies addressing the systemic problems that cause this behavior in the first place as as opposed to just saying, no, he's a crook. I, yeah, so you, and I think we were talking about this before. If the Democrats ever actually get their hand around law and order again, they will, they will, you know, they'll win everything, right?

Right. Well, law and order conservative southern democratic governor is an unstoppable american force all you got to do is have one which means you got to get one elected that's kind of not so easy yeah there's little things little things little things hey let's go to our guest we're going to talk to rich goldberg senior advisor for at the foundation for defense of democracies and he served as the director for Countering Iranian Weapons of Mass Destruction for the White House National Security Council. Rich, thanks for joining us today. Hey, great to be here. About those Iranian

weapons of mass destruction, where are they? I mean, how far along are they? Or, if you've already got them, where are they? Well, we know on the stockpile end of the metrics, they've been amassing highly enriched uranium for better parts of three years now since Joe Biden took office. They first escalated to 20% high enriched uranium in January 2021. Later that year, moved to 60% high enriched uranium. That's about, from a technical perspective, 90% of the way to weapons-grade uranium. And they've simply been making more and more and more of both 20%, 60%, and the low enriched uranium still at multiple facilities for three years. They've accelerated

at times, they've decelerated at times, but they've never stopped producing more and more. And so every three months, the International Atomic Energy Agency comes out with metrics of how much uranium have they produced at what levels. And you can analyze based on the data, based on how many centrifuges they have. They've continued to install more of these advanced centrifuges that spin faster, can therefore produce more. If they wanted to take all that stockpile to 90% weapons grade, they could do it in a long weekend and have at least one bomb's worth. If they wanted to make two, three, four, five, a dozen bombs, you're looking at up to six months, and they would have a dozen or so. Now, that's the uranium part.

That's the material part. You still have to build a weapon or potentially a crude device, and that's the uranium part. That's the material part. You still have to build a weapon or potentially a crude device. And that's a big distinction. If they just want to make something go boom in the desert and claim to be a nuclear power, they could do that rather quickly, and they might be able to do that in secret in certain aspects, claim there's a fire at a facility, inspectors can't come in for a couple weeks, and suddenly they've done something while they've done some secret work at an area we don't know about. So these are the contingencies

that worry us. And of course, their long-term vision of being able to put a nuclear device on a missile continues as well. We've seen them advancing their space launch vehicle program, which is a cover for intercontinental ballistic missiles. And so they're continuing a pace that, you know, it's sort of like building the assembly line without getting the order to build the car, but being ready at any moment. And so I think a lot of us fear that what we see in the Middle East right now is a weapon of mass distraction. And we're sort of forgetting about the pursuit of the weapon of mass destruction. Richard, Steve Hayward out in California. We're all waiting right now to find out what the Biden administration's response is going to be

to the death of the three American soldiers from an Iranian-sponsored group in Jordan. And they've already said, though, that they're not going to attack inside Iran. And on the one hand, you could say that's because they're afraid of actually having a wider war directly with Iran. And on the one hand, you could say that's because they're afraid of actually having a wider war directly with Iran. But my question is, does Iran essentially effectively already have deterrent capability for the reasons you just laid out? But they do not. This is not like the Soviet Union that was a nuclear power when we were having a showdown for decades. They are still nuclear threshold, if that. And of course, they are not a superpower. We are. And so for us to show a lack of backbone, to really fear escalation against the middle power like Iran, is quite the message to true superpowers and competitors on a global stage,

especially when you think of what China's planning for Taiwan in the future. Now, what could we do? We have a lot of options. We've had 250 attacks or more since January of 2021 against U.S. forces in the region. We look at the metric since October 17th, but it didn't start after the October 7th attacks. It goes back to three years ago. And not once, not once have we ever responded to any of those strikes by attacking a Revolutionary Guard commander in the region. That doesn't have to be a strike inside of Iran. It could be in Iraq or Syria or Yemen. Doesn't sound like we're planning that. Maybe we're going to hit some buildings. What I fear is two things. Number one, no policy has changed. And that, especially with respect to sanctions relief being provided to Iran.

There is a waiver in effect right now where Iran is drawing on $10 billion or more in cash we've opened up. That hasn't changed. Never stopped. Still transacting. Still accessing money. So if you're in Tehran, you're looking at the game board here in the full picture, Washington's still giving you money as part of some sort of accommodation policy while they're saying oh we're going to take some military action

number two we have been signaling throughout this process what we're thinking what we're planning there's there's breaking news that left and right oh we might have a b1 bomber taking off here oh we might attack over here literally telling the iranians what we're going to do so they can clear out and avoid any casualties the intelligence community now having some phony assessment that we now have an assessment that maybe Iran doesn't control the proxies after all, as if we have now justification not to hit back hard against the Revolutionary Guard Corps. We won't put the Houthis in Yemen on the actual foreign terrorist organization list. We put some sanctions on because of political pressure, and then we put exemptions on the sanctions so that the Houthis don't actually feel any pain while they continue throwing missiles into the Red Sea. This is a

policy that's completely distorted and is overridden by an ideological, almost pathological commitment to pursuing a nuclear deal at all costs with Iran. That is the reason why I don't think you're going to see a very big response and why the reason why attacks on U.S. forces and our allies will continue. Hey, Rich, it's Rob Long in New York. Thank you for joining. So I guess I'm trying to figure out what that strategy is. And you keep saying, you said, you know, get a nuclear deal with Iran. I mean, couldn't you get a nuclear deal better if you had more leverage i mean it seems to me like that i mean it's a unique position that we're in with iran is that or am i missing something iran has some powerful friends of convenience they're not very close right i mean

putin was in a is it was in a very losing war with ukraine for a while and then really had to go hat in the hand to iran um they are sponsors of terrorism around the world around the world but in that region there aren't that many certainly the the ones that are alive the kingdom of saudi arabia aren't allied with iran i mean what's holding us back from a coalition to you know bomb them i try to come up with a diplomatic term but the but for having them pay the price well what's the common thread rob across all these foreign policy decisions go back to afghanistan you know the the taliban are marching on kabul our allies are about to fall and the president goes to camp david and won't take anybody's phone call we cut off ukraine for military assistance uh for a year to avoid angering vladimir putin we give a press conference saying if he just has a limited

incursion we might be okay we close our embassy with we withdraw our military trainers and later literally hand keeve over to r Russia. And now the Iran policy. What's the threat? The threat is a fear of escalation. It's like FDR's warning of there's nothing to fear but fear itself. Joe Biden fears fear itself, is my view, whether it's Iran or anywhere else. Yeah, I guess. I mean, I'm just trying.

Here's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to figure out a way that I can understand this so I don't end up with the queasy and unpleasant feeling going into the weekend that the people running American policy towards a nuclear emerging nuclear power run by religious fanatics, that those people are dumb. And I'm terrified that the answer is that they might be. And so I guess what my question is, I mean, I know we want to go to another topic first, but eventually, my question is like, what kind of thinking are we locked into that we could just unlock? And I guess what I mean is that my example is

that we seem to be locked into the idea that you could only strike at the actual bad actors. You can't strike at their supporters. That you can only strike in measured escalating terms, which means first you have to have sanctions. First you have to shut down the bank accounts. Then you have to say a lot of mean things. And then you have to say, well, listen, we're going to be sitting in Vienna at a table. You come to negotiate. And then only then do you say, by the way, on March 11th at three in the morning, you better expect

a sneak attack or a surprise bombing, right? What could we do in the next 72 hours if National Security Advisor Rich Goldberg is in charge? Well, we cut off all the sanctions waivers. We send a message to China saying, we're cracking down on all the oil imports you're receiving. Cut them off within 48 hours. Otherwise, you're going to see us start taking action, and we're going to work our way up to state-owned enterprises, any banks or companies involved. So you start moving on the pressure on economics. We're going to say to our allies, we're going to the UN our allies we're going to the un we're snapping back all the un sanctions to isolate iran so you have political pressure in isolation and then you basically go ahead you don't give warnings you don't leak out overthinking this thinking that

you just look for the intel you say we have a standing order you see an irgc commander take them out and you send and then you send a message over to the regime saying we have a target list of 50 people in sites some are outside iran some are inside iran you tell us if you want to dance that's it that's it i mean we're not locked into anything we're choosing to do this it seems funny because i think you could do all of that and also say to americans who are naturally wary of this kind of stuff because you know the endless war people etc is like and we have no intention of liberating iran or governing

iran or doing anything with iran that's up to the iranians um our intention is merely to punish people and to stop um so let me pivot just because i know we want to talk a little bit about um israel and gaza uh the uh uh the last time a brilliant counter iranian nuclear plant nuclear program move that i can remember was stuxnet which was a computer virus that was sort of invented in a shadowy lab somewhere but we know where it was invented it was probably invented a hypha um and it was somehow put into their uh whatever they had i don't you know pretend to understand all this stuff i think they got they smuggled it into printers printers perfect right because printers never work um and um and we rely and i think we still rely on iran on israeli intelligence

um to guide us in our actions in the region and i just feel like the last six months what we discovered is that israeli intelligence isn't all that great um you know they knew a lot was going on but they didn't know about october 7th which is sort of the whole point of having israeli intelligence is to avoid an october 7th um who are our friends in the region who are who's helping us aside from israel because we're talking about a second who do we who do we trust aside from the israelis to give us the information that we need? Jordanian intelligence is very good.

We have a close working relationship with the Jordanians on the intelligence side. Saudi intelligence is fairly good. We have a close relationship with the Saudis, especially in the counterterrorism missions. You think about al-Qaeda and ISIS and things like that, but Iran as well. But nobody has what Israel has as far as assets on the ground except Iran. Nobody has it. We don't have it. The United Kingdom doesn't have it.

Nobody has it. It's obvious we rely on Israel heavily, and it's obvious that it's Israel and Israel alone that carries out clandestine operations inside of Iran, and the Iranians know that as well. Now, they're obviously testing and trying to figure out tactics to evade surveillance, evade, you know, doing this or that. So, you know, the idea that we had this intelligence assessment after October 7th from the U.S. so that Biden could justify not doing anything to Iran. Well, we haven't seen any smoking gun that Iran was

behind October 7th. Well, yeah. What are they going to do? Sit in a meeting where they think they're being listened to and say, hey, october 7th going well of course that didn't happen um that's not how they operate it's the same you're just seeing this leaked out of they don't control their proxies this is a new assessment so we don't do anything to iran of course they control their proxies um but i mean the answer to your question is the israelis are still operating the mosad is still conducting. Stuxnet was very high profile. We've seen other cyber attacks since then. We've seen assassinations.

We've seen buildings and facilities just blow up. But we've seen even more dramatic events like drone strikes inside of Iran, launched inside of Iran, likely by Israel. We've seen people kidnapped, IRGC generals taken hostage inside of Iran, interrogated, videotaped, and then released back into the wild, likely by the Mossad. So their capabilities are still pretty strong. The question is, how long can you keep up these types of operations against the clock that the Iranians are on as well and in the end you know there's a big facility that people should be watching by one of their existing nuclear plants natanz deep underground uh supposedly according to the report it's supposed to be very hardened more hardened than their underground one at fordo the impenetrable to military strike if that facility gets completed and it really is

impenetrable to military strike it's sort sort of the game over moment. So we are approaching this moment where, whether it's clandestine, cyber, whatever you want to call it, there's going to have to be a decision made on the nuclear program soon. Right, yeah. Richard, Steve Hayward again, and I think we should shift gears for a moment to Israel-Gaza specifically. In particular, something you've done some sterling work on, which is exposing the rot, and that's too kind a term, for the UN refugee, what is it, UNRWA, right? Yeah. And so, two-part question here. One is, for listeners who may not be keeping up, just give us a couple of bullet points on some of the really shocking facts that have emerged here, such as a quarter of the UN staff are Hamas people on the UN staff. And then second,

it's too broad to say what is to be done about this. I'll put it this way. My default assumption about the UN is that something like this is just the tip of the iceberg. I think UNICEF and a lot of the other agencies are also thoroughly corrupt when they're not actually on the wrong side, actively on the side of evil. I mean, we've known for years now about child sex trafficking involving UN officials in Africa and so forth. I mean, what's to be done here? I mean, I'm tempted to go full populist, old-style John Birch society

saying it's time for the United States to say the UN is over, you guys should leave because we're leaving. We ought to be more than just cut off the money. And like we saw with the UNICEF, after a period of years, we come back in, everybody else comes back in, and I worry that epicycle is going to repeat itself. So I'll stop there and please fill us in. Yeah, listen, your last part of the broader UN systemic issues, and we see that with China taking over un agencies advancing their interests undermining america the alphabet soup of problematic organizations the world health organization human rights council you name it uh is long and undistinguished and to me the right policy move

in general is to move away from these what are called assessed dues assessed contributions where the UN says, you owe us this money. This is how much you owe. You have to hand it over. Mandatory dues. And we go to an all-voluntary system where we say, no, we're not giving you a billion dollars here. No, we're not giving this organization any money. That's out of the budget. These guys are doing good work. You can still have our money. Or we find, if you have a governance structure where, you know, the money talks, we're 25% of the budget. So we get 25% influence and we get to choose who leads it, et cetera.

We can change policies. We'll fund you, right? That's, that's the correct way to think about policy. We're afraid to do it because our diplomats in New York would be shunned to cocktail parties. So, so everybody recommends against it. Now this UNRA UN relief and works agency just for context guys not an international organization like we think of right there's the UN high commissioner for refugees which is responsible for 30 million refugees around the world tens of millions more internally displaced persons as well it's the premier

UN refugee agency the mandate is to get people out of refugee status as quickly as possible, whether that's moving to a third country, going back to their home, settling where they're at, whatever it is. And in the case of UNRWA, you have an all Palestinian staff, 30,000 people, decades old, the only organization that exists just for one particular group of refugees dates back to the 1948 war of independence of israel where the arab armies didn't win and they told people who had left their homes don't worry stay in camps we're coming back to destroy israel soon and you're gonna you're just gonna flood back into is Israel and drive the Jews into the sea. Well, here we are, 75 years later. Those Arab armies have mostly made peace with Israel,

but this institution still exists to keep generation after generation raised to believe in this vision of manifest destiny. We're going back into modern-day Israel. We're going to kill all the Jews, wipe them into the sea, and that's that. So in Gaza, 2.1 million people living there 1.7 million being considered refugees by this one un organization unruh 13 000 employees all palestinian and what do we know now what was pretty obvious because the un doesn't recognize hamas or hezbollah or islamic jihad or you name the terrorist organization as a terrorist organization,

takes a Security Council resolution for that. And so that might not matter in parts of Africa or Asia or Europe, but it matters if you're operating where Hamas and Islamic Jihad are. So, of course, they employ Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They give aid to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and they collaborate with them when they're the host government in Gaza. And what have we learned? 12 people apparently took part in the massacre of October 7th who worked for UNRWA. We know of 10% or 1,200 or so, 1,300 employees who are actually members of Hamas, fighters for Hamas. And then half of all the

employees reportedly have a family member who's in hamas or islamic jihad another terrorist group and and we've poured so much money into this agency donald trump by the way trump administration cut them off in 2018 because he was so fed up with them and they wouldn't change their ways joe biden came in and this whole sort of pro-palestinian alignment that says, no, the refugee issue is core, the refugee issue is the future, we have to support UNRWA because this is the vision of the right of return to drive the Jews into the sea. It's a core raison d'etre of the Palestinian Authority, let alone Hamas.

So they refund UNRWA a billion dollars since 2021. Think about how much money has just gone straight to hamas yeah i mean for all this uh there's a hang gliding um so uh rich i know i don't want to keep you long but i do want to ask you this sort of larger 50 000 foot question because it does seem to me that i i that Steve, you know, it is sort of a tinfoil hat, was a tinfoil hat issue for a long time. As long as it's a sturdy tinfoil hat. Yeah, well, I mean, I'm taking the tinfoil hat off or I'm putting it on or something. Why don't we just leave the UN?

Why don't we just give them, you know, five years to move to Dubai or somewhere where they're building stuff or, you know, maybe make it real. Move to where the headquarters is, somewhere outside of Beijing. They've got a lot of those empty cities. You know, settle out the building,

which I think we built and that we own, and, you know, give everybody, you know, three, four years to vacate, make a lot more room for luxury housing here in New York City. What do we get from them that we would miss? I guess that's what I mean. If we just break up with this very, very bad, one-sided, abusive, toxic relationship, what are we going to lose? There's a strong argument. There's a strong case. There is.

And I think we grapple with this. Those that are very much in tune with all the corruption, anti-American interests of the United Nations are in tune with this. And I would say there's a couple of things. Number one, there are likely agencies, the World Food Program, that we would probably need to invent if we were still interested in helping people in crisis in different parts of the world quickly and having infrastructure to deliver certain assistance in certain contexts that were in our interest. And we'd have to reinvent the wheel in those cases. And so that's one argument of why you wouldn't just say everything is cut off.

The other is these due and security counsel. We have a permanent veto. We have a seat on the security counsel. And at the very least, we can enforce a policy of do no harm in the international community and in the body of international law for whatever that's worth to people legitimacy etc we can use it as a bully pulpit if you actually wanted to conduct political warfare against your adversaries we can also stop bad things from the chinese and the russians and others trying to push things to condemn israel to

do other things the way we the way you see us use our veto regularly it's not a place where we're going to advance good right it's just you know in some of these smaller organizations maybe not certainly in the general assembly or in the security council for the most part but it is a part where maybe we can use our veto to stop bad. So that, to me, is the most interesting reason why I think of staying. But again, I go back to the policy of don't just hand over money. I wouldn't hand over any dues anymore. I'd say we're going to fund what we think is good. Yeah. It seems like we could do that a la carte.

It seems like a Brexit, a UN Brexit is not a bad idea. Leon Wieseltier wrote a great piece. I think it was UN Brexit is not a bad idea. Leon Weaseltier wrote a great piece, I think it was for a new republic. This is now 30, 40 years ago, maybe. That's old school. That's the old school. This is OG, buddy.

And the headline was, let it sink. And it was like, people's heads exploded. This was crazy. You couldn't even why you you couldn't even say that um it's very old new role thing to do is to take this extreme view and kind of like you know you know like a late night dorm argument you want to make heads explode now rob donald trump should say my idea is to put the trump logo on the top of the un building after we kick them out can i make one more can I make one more suggestion here? This is really

important. The disconnect between countries' foreign policy and their capitals and their foreign policies in New York at the UN is breathtaking in many cases. We have countries that we give money to on a bilateral basis in foreign aid. We have countries that are supposedly allies of ours, and they screw us at the U.N. every day. Why do we allow that to happen? We don't have to step away from it. We don't have to do the a la carte. All we have to do is to remove diplomatic immunity from parking tickets, and they will find themselves all of a sudden present.

Hey, Rich, one last question. There's a West Wing episode about that. There is. It's a good one. One last question before we let you go, and that is, you know, some people say that ever since the Iranian revolution that they've been at war with us, and that, you know, they're just waving their hands. Come on, here we are. Let's do a war. And then we just have, you know, decided not to engage.

But do you think war with Iran in the end is inevitable? Do I think a war with Iran is inevitable? I think that a military confrontation that puts them back on their heels and likely destroys and removes their nuclear program is an inevitability at this point. I think that we do not have to consider and should not consider any sort of invasion or large-scale war the way people would think or demagogue about. But I am very fearful that, based on what I have seen over the last three years, where their nuclear program sits today, we should not allow ourselves to hand over the region and be afraid of Iran because of the fear of them going nuclear. I do think we're at a point where we need to consider military options on the nuclear program, combined with continued economic pressure and isolation due to their sponsorship of terrorism.

Agreed. And we thank you for that. And we hope that we never come back to talk to you about the aftermath of the brutal exchange, but rather define your expertise in some other matters as well. Rich Goldberg, thanks for joining us today on the podcast. Anytime. Thanks, Rich. Yeah, I mean, yeah yeah i think it is and of course nobody is in the mood for nation building for iran it's a different situation than iraq

completely different situation it's not an invented country like iraq was but uh no no we're not going back there to uh to uh do that pity though there was a time when we had them surrounded, what with Afghanistan and Iraq and the rest of it, and now Joe Biden is making noises about leaving Iraq in the same style, perhaps. Not perhaps as fleet-footed as we did in Afghanistan, but to remove what we have there. Well, gentlemen, before we go, let's go to the actual events that are gripping the minds of the nation,

at least those people on Twitter. There are actually people who believe that the Taylor Swift is part of a PSYOP to get people. We have a post on this on Ricochet where one of our members correctly says that you people are dumb as turnips if you believe this. You actually are as stupid as turnips. It's surprising. I mean, when I see somebody talk about it, I see perhaps they're just floating this for a larf, but some of them are actually, you know, clicks and griffs see what are you going to do but it is a ridiculous theory

isn't it well wait a minute i mean it's really good for a couple reasons one is because like you how do we get people to watch and vote for jo for Joe Biden? You have to come up with a conspiracy theory for why, you know, an attractive internationally famous pop star is into the quarterback of one of the great football teams. Like, like, you know, that's actually how it's supposed to be. That's like a movie. That's like a, it's a Hallmark movie. So you can't possibly come up with a theory that's that, that would explain that away because it's so obvious right um but it does show i think there is this issue i think

maybe in american politics and left too but definitely on the right of this like i um i i we are we are we are the we are more popular we everyone agrees with us so when we lose there must be a trick and um i just feel like that's a very strange position for people to be in politically on the left or the right right like the left for my whole basically education the idea was like every time the republican wins every time people vote for ronald reagan it's because they've been manipulated by the media or by big business or something and now the right has decided to take that up too um whereas the answer is really simple which is you just have to persuade people instead of like assuming that you're at 95 that's what what baffled me about the trump loss in 2020 the people found absolutely unfathomable had to have been you know hugo chavez like no he was an

unpopular president he never bothered to to to enlarge his his population if if and when joe biden loses in november are people going to say i wonder what trick they played on me no the guys we don't like him um and the people who do come up with a trick uh we rightly think are lunatics and small-minded weirdos i keep thinking that uh what is he 80 years old now? Joe Namath somewhere is kicking himself saying, why didn't I think of dating Carole King or Joni Mitchell back in 1969? That would have reduced the ratings on my salary, right?

And, you know, the other one is, Rob says he's old school, and my joke on this is, look, I'm still mastering the discography of Britney Spears, and now I've got to catch up with, what's her name? The Swift Boats, or whatever. And i've been leaning into it too saying the the conspiracy theory that they're going to announce an endorsement of joe biden from the middle of the super bowl after kansas city wins that's not it that's a misdirection they're going to announce that the

kelsey swift ticket will replace biden harris for the democrats in the fall so i mean there's nothing too preposterous you can say about this but i do wonder though rob that about the architecture of all this uh part of what happens these days is uh you know something gets on social media and then the two sides pounce you know the left says look how stupid these people are believe all this and you sort of wonder did this start on the left as a way to punk and drive? That's right. Yeah. If we're going to get to conspiracies, this does feel like a false flag, right? This is the way to, this is the op. The op

isn't Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey. The op is anti-Taylor. This is deep, steep stuff that the commies were doing in the 10s and 20s. This is like why hitler had this and when he was making speeches on the street he would have people walking through the

crowd saying you know he makes a lot of sense right he makes a lot of sense this is what this is this is false flag stuff so um or maybe it's just that every damn thing isn't about politics that could be that could be possible i thought the first instance of this that i observed playing out was almost 20 years ago now and rob you might remember it was the documentary called march of the penguins all these cute penguins narrated by morgan freeman it was a big hit in theaters right but i remember that was the beginning of social media and the internet we didn't i don't think we had twitter yet but a big culture war broke out online about it because somebody said well penguins have family values and no they're homosexual penguins i forget what it was but it was it was completely stupid in all the usual ways and i thought ah this is the new world it's just

going to go from here and get worse and you know you were right it it did. Twitter magnifies these things, and the people in the media are inordinately on Twitter. And so they conflate what they see in their glowing little rectangle in their hand with the truth. But my favorite regarding the NFL was the idea that the NFL logo itself, the colors of it, indicate who has been chosen in advance. Supposedly, they went back and looked at the colors, they compared the colors to the uniforms they waited uniforms and said ah you know what it's coded in here and what i love about that and all of the other psyops and all of the fascination the the i saw somebody the other day who i can't remember what it was but one of the first allegations that somebody on twitter made against him was pedo right anybody who is to the you know a degree away from you in politics you heap upon them everything

that you hate about the world in general and you call them all the bad names so all of these pedos, this huge pedophiliac I have no doubt by the way that there are people in Hollywood who subscribe to that I have no doubt that there are people in industry and religion and the rest of it who have pedophilic and epiphiliac leanings, it's a horrible part of human nature, and it's endemic.

But I don't believe that the country is led by a satanic cabal, of which Taylor Swift is a part, because if you look at her videos and break them down, you can see all these references. And I don't believe that Oprah Winfrey is the high priestess of Melchizedek, or whatever they're calling her, because purple is the color of this particular sect of demonism, and the color purple is removing the rest of it, just as I don't believe in the NFL logo being color-coded in order to tell you who the winners are.

Because if a bunch of randos on the Internet are able to look at these things and find all of these symbols, that would mean one of two things. One, that the people who control us who met who roll out every day a brand new psyop the term that we always have to use here that they are so contemptuous of us that they spatter giveaway signals in every single image right they're always telling us up front what they're really good at it conspiracy is about right and either that's the case or this is all random noise and nonsense and and and it has absolutely no reflection to a world that consists of about

six and a half seven billion moving individual parts which is lubricated by money and stupidity and that what these people believe is this grand enforced strategy to put us all into our mental cages is actually no just just what you get in a society so i i mean i and the only people of course who have figured it out are the people on the internet who've seen the science and who can look at a picture of a video from will smith from 1992 and look in the background and decode what happens to be said and show oh it's part of the pizza gate you know brain harvesting chemical formula uh yeah so i mean so there's a weird thing about it i mean i know we got to run but it's where they when i i noticed this when i this is before i noticed it on the right but when on the left when i was in school um and i all these conspiracy theories and there

was the kind of like um there wasn't so much of the outrage like we got to do something about it they kind of like it they like the idea that the world's controlled by malevolent grown-ups it's sort of comforting you know it's like at least we know it's under control right i just tell me what just just give me my orders and everybody and then there are people who want to fight back against the orders but there's still something kind of weirdly, deeply, psychologically comforting about the evil conspiracy of corporations and whatever controlling everything. And yet, when you really find out that there's nobody in the room, or there's another room or whatever, it's a little disconcerting, right? It absolves you of agency. That's it. You know the truth, and you spread the truth, whether it be Flat Earth or the Tartarian civilization that preceded ours. By the way, I'm going to go full Tartarian, because all these people who believe in this other stuff, they're just pikers. Tartarianism is...

That's the psyop to keep you from really believing in the Tartarian Empire that preceded us. But that's another post. Stephen, it's great to have you. Hope to see you soon. Rob, give my regards to New York. Step away from the line, would you please? I will step away, yeah. Thank you. I'll stay away from the gas station where guys are getting jacked and the rest of it.

And with all luck in the world, we'll be back here soon, at least in a week. So, I should remind you, I'm not even going to tell you to go to Apple Tunes and podcast and give us five stars because I know you're going to do that. It matters. It really does matter, though. I trust you, but I trust you. New podcasts, you know, software that Apple's been running is pretty good. And those algos will kick up some other stuff that you like, too, if you like us. So go do it.

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