The Ricochet Podcast - Why Can't We Be Friends?

Episode Date: October 11, 2019

This week on The Big Show®, we converse about the Kurds, talk about the limits of woke corporatism with David French, and get the low down on Kim Strassel’s new book Resistance (At All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America (buy it!). Also, Ricochet member @doctorrobert wins this week’s coveted Lileks Post of The Week for his two (!) posts Why We Need People Who Have ‘Too Much Money’ and... Source

I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston Telephone Directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University. As government expands, liberty contracts. It's funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. That's a good thing. First of all, I think he missed his time. Please clap. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lalex.

Peter's off today, but we've got conversations with David French about the NBA and Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 468. I'm James Lylex here with Rob Long, and it's time for the biannual betrayal of the Kurds. Washington's favorite amnesia game. How are you doing today, Rob? I'm doing all right, James. How are you? We're missing Peter today. I don't know where he is. I think he's on an airplane.

I don't know where the airplane's going, though. I hope he does. I hope the pilot does. Something's got him. Yeah. So today, we're having this week, we've had this wonderful discussion about the Kurds and Turkey. And I was listening to NPR this morning, and nobody seemed to point out the fact that if

the United States, what would have been our response if Turkey had rolled into this Kurdish area and the 50 special forces or advisors that we have there were injured? Would America be obligated then to fight against a NATO member? And if so, Turkey being a NATO member and having the right to call in other NATO members, how would that work? Would France go with them and England go with us? How precisely does it work engaging in a war with a treaty member, somebody with whom you have a treaty? With an ally. Technically with an ally, yeah. Yeah, we don't have a treaty with the Kurds. It'd be great if we did, but this is the way things are on the ground. And we're always told that Trump is going to tear NATO apart. It's the worst thing that ever happened to NATO, et cetera.

Going back to the election, you can see why from some of the things he said. But the people who are upset about the Turkish situation now seem to be saying that he should attack a Turk from their air base on their territory. Yeah, it gets very complicated there, which is one of the reasons why we need another uncomplicated ally. Part of this is the strategy here has always been this kind of – I don't know what it would be. It's not really a cliché, but it's like a shibboleth really. It's an article of faith that people believe and repeat over and over again without really thinking about, which is that, well, you can't have an independent Kurdistan. And that's what they've been saying since 2001. You can't have, we're actually probably the first Gulf War, you can't have this thing. That would be a disaster. And so, because we're trying to avoid the thing that's going to be a

disaster, we've gone and contorted ourselves in policy and in military and in diplomatic circles into all kinds of pretzels just because we can't face the thing that actually when you really say to yourself, well, wait, why can't we have an independent Kurdistan? Why can't the United States have two reliable allies in the region that it protects, one, you know, Kurdistania and the other Israel, and then call it a day? Kurdistan is, obviously they benefit because they have access to all these oil wells. But you could easily say to them, listen, all of your plans to get more Kurdistan from the Turkish border or get more Kurdistan from

your eastern border, that's all, you've got to give that up. And in exchange, we're going to say, these are your borders. This is, this is Kurdistan and we support you. It's the thing that we've said we can't do. And so we've done a lot of other dumb stuff because we can't do this. It will be, I think it'd be in our, in our interest to do this. And the Turkish government can't really say much about it. I mean, they would have to accept it. It's just for us, I think it requires a commitment to a small, frankly, a very small geographical area to a longstanding American ally, despite the fact, as you pointed out, that we seem to betray them at every turn. And since it's the one thing

we've said for 20 years we can't do, and we've done a lot of other dumb things, maybe we should just give that part up and just do that part that we can't do, which is to have an independent Kurdistan that's a U.S. ally. Oh, you romantic Wilsonian visionary. Well, you know, it all sounds well and good and great, except for a couple of things. As we learned from our own dear departed Clara Berlinski a long time ago, that when we talk about the Kurds, it's not a monolithic thing. There's lots of threads. There's lots of factions and whatnot. So let's say, however, we do the Rob Long thing. We pack in and we say, this is going to be independent Kurdistan.

You're all going to have to deal with it. And everybody smiles and agrees and signs with a piece of paper and there are handshakes across the table, we know, given the region, that about six months later, everybody's going to start sharpening their shivs and maneuvering a way to screw this up and get more territory. The endless, endless Byzantine, literally, intrigues of the area will plunge the place into chaos again. What you say to the Kurds is, we will not protect you if you do that. You're purchasing our protection by agreeing to our terms, which, you know, look, if you have the courage, that might be a bitter pill to swallow. But it's certainly better than the alternative, which is what they're facing right now.

Yeah. Well, and, of course, they might say the United States, having made a pledge not to protect us, will probably violate that pledge like every other one and come in and they will protect us okay that's true that's true you can't you can't fix that but right but it just seems to me that what we have is we have sort of in general in that region we have um we have an inability or unwillingness to sort of accept sort of the clear the the clear cold reality of it um and by not accepting that we find ourselves now in a position where we are essentially aiding the aims of the powerful actor in the region, Russia, in its desire to sort of take over really in terms of influence that entire region. So Russia, Iran, and Syria, and whatever counts as Syria now, are the chief influencers of the area, area and we are not and i suspect that's something that we're going to regret yes when we look at syria though people are talking about whether or

not this should there should be some sort of partition because we have this fictitious country right it's just the lines drawn and it really doesn't represent the tribal realities on the ground and what you're probably going to have is you're going to have the the western part which will belong to the Assad regime, which will be supported by the Russians because they want to keep their base there. And the rest of it just seems to be sort of this mass of shifting alliances and satraps and all the rest of it. And what exactly do we get from participating in that mess? And again, I'm yeah, I'm just the reason that I ask this is because what we're hearing from the liberals, from the press, from the establishment is that we have to be there and we have to fight. OK, I get that. But we've been involved in that region for an awful long time. But what exactly do they want us to do? To hear these people say the military, the Pentagon is appalled at Trump's decision. All of a sudden puts them in the position of saying, you've got to listen to the military.

These are the wise hands. Whereas the whole construct of their intellectual worldview is that these are the warmongers, the military industrial complex who want nothing more to make money. Trump comes out, calls them the military-industrial complex, and says there's a lot of money to be made. In other words, parroting everything the left says about the military and the right. Right. And gets absolutely no credit for it. Why? Because they don't believe him or because it's inconvenient that he used their terms? What? I don't know. I really I'm not quite I don't quite I can I can no longer follow the twists and the turns of the the partisan left and right arguments when it comes to foreign policy, because I simply I don't understand them. I mean, I do understand the idea that there's sort of American interests that are in our interests. There are American interests that are in our sort of broader interests if we accept the fact that we want a more peaceful world and a more prosperous world. And then there are things that are not in our interest that are bad and sad and unpleasant

and unhappy but aren't really anything we can do about anything and don't really benefit of us to solve. In this case, we are in many ways trying to protect one, probably exactly a century old borders that do not reflect necessarily ethnic lines, and that are going to be subject to the same kind of ethnic strife and nationalism, you know, that hit Europe 100 years ago, and also uh the balkans uh i don't know what is it now it's 20 years 20 years ago 30 years ago um and we acted like then like this we were we were absolutely stunned by by the things that were happening in europe um when we really shouldn't have been i mean you know you should never be stunned by predictable human behavior. You may not like it, you may rue it, and you may condemn it, but it's predictable human

behavior. It was predictable human behavior for the religious sects in former Yugoslavia when the Soviet Union fell to split apart and to fight each other. That actually is what people do and have done for 16,000 bazillion years. So it's kind of like I think it's probably a mistake to look at all these things through the prism of a president. It doesn't really matter who the president is. I know we're not supposed to say that, but it doesn't really matter. The only big thing a president has done in the region was George W. Bush, who broke the borders.

He busted up the region, it was George W. Bush who just, who broke the borders, right? He busted up the region. And, um, but that's about it. I mean, all of this, this sort of American foreign policy analysis that comes from the, from the idea of the right or the left or the Democrats or Republicans is sort of, it doesn't make any difference to the Kurds or to the Turks or to the Syrians or to Assad or to any of those people those people. They're in a fight for their lives and fight for their border. And we should just – I mean, again, I don't understand why an independent Kurdistan or a busted-up former Iraq or even a busted-up former Syria is necessarily a bad thing. I mean – Possibly because Turkey doesn't want an example on its border where the people inside its borders will want to join that.

And so which would happen. Yeah, but that might happen. But again, that's – I don't understand. I mean the idea of trying to avoid that is not that you start another war or that you allow a protracted civil war, which is what's going to happen in you know the little nasty corner of kurdistan turkey and and and former iraq i mean at a certain point it is what it is it's gonna it's it's so so why so why isn't your point the point of the left if they're all about individual if they're all about the palestinian cause and stolen land and people deserve their own state i mean the problem with the kurds is that they're kurds is that they're stateless

they got they they right state it would be better for them if they did. Why isn't the left out there with t-shirts and bumper stickers and the rest of it? It'd be safe for them to have t-shirts and bumper stickers because China wouldn't probably get, well, that's our next subject. But why aren't they advocating for that? Is it because now the way it seems to be that the left side of the American political equation is all about the preservation of the old order, and the right is all about, look, this is great for a while, but it's not suiting our needs in the future, and it's time to reevaluate these bargains and deals and borders and the rest of it. I mean, that seems to be the dynamic that's going on here. The left are the reactionaries, and the right are the progressives

who are saying, we've got to take another look at how we're doing things. I'm not saying that the prescriptions they have are correct, but that seems to be the dynamic now when it comes to who's trying to conserve and who's trying to remake. Right. But if Donald Trump suddenly woke up tomorrow, I mean, which could easily happen, he's very erratic, and decide that he was a newfound convert to the Palestinian cause, and he also believed that climate change was a serious, the most serious threat we face, existential threat that we face, the left would take the opposite view. Whatever Trump thinks, they think the opposite. And so really, it doesn't really matter what Trump's foreign policy is, even though I, in my opinion,

it's just all scrambled eggs. It doesn't make any sense one day to the next. But it doesn't really matter what Trump's foreign policy is, even though I in my opinion, it's just all scrambled eggs. It doesn't make any sense one day to the next. But it doesn't really matter what position he takes. They're going to take the opposite one that not only is he wrong, but he is catastrophically wrong. And in this case, it's there's not really there's not really a policy here. I mean, these are the you know, the there are some people in administration now cheering this who are egging him on to bomb Saudi Arabia a few weeks ago. I mean, bomb Iran a few weeks ago. In exchange for the Saudi Arabia strike. Yeah, there's no particular strategy here or consistent philosophy. The ugly truth here is that I know we want to move on. But the ugly truth is here is that is that this was what we the world we see in the Middle East right now is sort of plan C or plan D or if all else fails, this will happen plan as they prepare as this country prepared for the invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s after 9-11. The idea was a plan A is Iraq magically transforms itself through democracy.

And, oh, my God, we have a wonderful country there. Plan B is Iraq is busted up, but it's still kind of over time, kind of develops into a shape. The most democratic of countries in the region, which has also not happened. Plan C or Plan D, which is the worst comes to worst, the whole region erupts into a variety of civil wars, which has happened in Saudi Arabia and Yemen and Syria and now in northeast Iraq. And that disruption and that instability occupies the region. They don't have time to blow up Americans in an office tower. That really was a stated not a stated goal, but an ancillary benefit to failing in which we have, I think, failed in the region, which is just like, you know, when you in the September 12th, if you looked at 2001, if you looked at the map of the region, what you saw was Israelrael surrounded on all sides the entire region was stable i mean these are stable countries assad um uh the egyptian president was stable uh we had a kingdom

in saudi arabia you had uh saddam who'd been in power for 30 years um you had the iranian revolutionary government which had been there since 77 i mean you you had stability there and stability is what brought us 9-11, some people say. So now instability has kind of made us safe. It's ugly, but it's sort of true, right? Yeah, no, that's an excellent point. And I was listening to you very carefully, figuring out how to pick something out of that to make a segue into our commercial. But frankly, I just stopped and was admiring the plan A, the plan B, the plan C, the plan D. In between plan A and plan B, I think, was an idea,

was something that was never considered, which was democratic, yeah, but strongman. Our kind of strongman. The idea that we shouldn't have debathified the entire political structure and maybe installed somebody who was a little less ruthless and on our side and could hold the thing together. I don't know if that's possible, but that's another alternative history book for somebody to write. Hey, I mentioned a commercial, and you've got to say, boy, spinning the roulette wheel. What's it going to be today? Is it going to be the same old copy as it was before? No, absolutely not. I got a new copy, which is great. But if I had the old copy, I'd still be excited about it because it's one of my favorite products ever. And I got one for my wife. What is it? It's a quip. That's right. Now you're saying, I know everything about the quip.

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a Quip. Quip starts at just $25, and you get your first refill pack free at getquip.com slash ricochet. This is a simple way to support the show, start brushing better, but you've got to go to getquip.com. That to getquip.com. That's getquip.com slash ricochet to get your first refill pack free. Go right now, now to getquip.com slash ricochet. And thanks to Quip for sponsoring this Ricochet podcast. Now we welcome back to the podcast David French, the founding father of David Frenchism,

senior writer for the National Review, senior writer for National Review, soon to be at the Dispatch, senior fellow of the National Review Institute, veteran Operation Iraqi Freedom. Also a rabid NBA fan. And if you follow him on Twitter, you know never to believe or respect anything that he has to say about movies. David, welcome. Wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah. My pop culture takes are my best takes. Oh, boy. Well, that may be true, but that's

Paging Sunny Bunch. It's the NBA thing here because this week we saw some amazing kowtowing to use perhaps inaccurate words, to China. And this whole conversation about Chimerica, about the way that we thought the trade was going to make them more susceptible to our values, and it turns out the intertwining makes us more susceptible to theirs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So the same companies that would say we're not going to go to North Carolina ever because they have a bathroom law is now perfectly content to shut down speech if it offends a

country that puts one and a half million Uyghurs in camps. What's your take on this issue? You know, look, I mean, this is fascinating to me because the NBA has long kind of irritated conservatives. But now it has really irritated a lot of folks on the left. And it's because they've exposed that they're not really what they sold the public. They sold the public that they are the league of conscience, that they are the league that will not only, it was sort of a one-two punch.

One, the league sort of as an official matter is quite progressive. But then also that the league is not progressivism, but I liked that it seemed to really protect free expression and to sort of say, hey, look, you know, just because you're an NBA player doesn't mean you have to kind of hide your ideas under a bushel. And so what this whole China thing did was exposed, at least for a time, the latter half of this is sort of being garbage, and the first half of it is being garbage, because a truly progressive league does not kowtow to Chinese communists, number one. And number two, a league that is fully committed to free expression doesn't initially react to Daryl Morey's tweet in support of Hong Kong the way that it did. And now it's kind of tried to do this damage control, but it keeps getting undercut by its own action. So a Houston Rockets official cuts off a CNN reporter who's trying to ask James Harden and Russell Westbrook about political activism,

and then the league apologizes. Then you've had these two incidents, one in Washington, one in Philadelphia, where fans were silenced or ejected when they held up signs that said, free Hong Kong, or even something as simple as Google Uyghurs. And so it keeps getting in its own way about freedom of expression. And so it's been fascinating to me, and then I'll stop my little TED Talk here, is what's fascinating to me is it's not just conservatives jumping up and down and stamping our feet on this. I mean, we have seen Deadspin has been roasting sort of ESPN's cover for this, Jamil Smith and Rolling Stone, Jamil Hill from The Atlantic, Zach Beecham from Vox. I mean, they've all just roasted both the NBA or Disney or other companies like Activision Blizzard, which is a whole other conversation. That's a whole other conversation, and that's a fascinating one right there. Yes, yes. So, I mean, this is where we

are, and they've been exposed, and neither left nor right likes it. To go back to activision blizzard um there was a tweet thread the other day by one of the guys who came up with world of warcraft saying that he was no longer going to he was going to talk about what he'd been through with getting chinese money he was never going to accept chinese money again and he was withdrawing from world of warcraft and all the rest of it what happened was you had you had i believe uh bl Blizzard had a, there was a Twitch stream where they were interviewing somebody and he came out in

favor of Hong Kong freedom or simply said the phrase and he was fired on the spot, fired on the spot. And the gamers went absolutely crazy about this. And it's, you know, it's strange what actually gets them motivated, but this is one of those things that all sides of the gaming community seem to get exercised about and to start to cancel en masse their subscriptions to Activision Blizzard. These are big companies with a big cultural reach, David, and a big stake of their future is China. Is there a point at which they realize that this isn't going to work for them domestically here in America? And that this is not good. There's not going to blow over.

Yeah. And you you rate. There was a key word in that that statement. And that's future. Because if you actually look at the present, the American market is the dominant market for these companies. Yes, there are. You know, yes, Activision the dominant market for these companies. Yes, Activision Blizzard has a big Asian presence, but that also includes Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong. It's not all mainland China, of course. And the NBA gets the vast, vast lion's share of its profit

from the United States. And they've been banking, though, on this Chinese future for this extraordinary future growth. But here's the thing. The argument for big time, there used to be a combination of an economic and moral argument for big time investment in China. And it went something like this, which is traditionally, if you look at history, when markets open up, so do societies. And so if you have Chinese communism opening up to capitalism, you can come in there and you can do good and do well at the same time because you're kind of by just the magic of the market, you're going to open up this society. And what China has done is sort of said, nope, that's actually not the deal. We can open up our market without opening up our society. And so you may do well here, but you're not going to do good. And in fact, you will probably do the opposite.

And so these companies that have sort of these giant dreams of this billion-person market that continues to grow and grow and grow, they're going to have to reckon with the fact that the do-good-while-do-well sort of paradigm is yesterday's news. They're going to have to go into it with their eyes open that they may make some money here, but they're going to become a bad actor in the process. Well, David, I can just follow up on that because it does seem like China has these two competing strategies, Chinese business for Americans has two competing strategies. One is that no matter what you do there, you are propping up an oligarchical system because the banks are controlled by the government and the investment agencies are controlled by the government and the factories and the businesses are controlled by the government and the investment agencies are controlled by the government and the factories and the businesses are controlled by the government

or government entities and then the second thing is is that they're they're just historically china has been a place a great place a fantastic place to buy things but not a very good place to sell things so it's a good place to go buy if you're apple buy labor to make your ipads So it's a good place to go buy, if you're Apple, buy labor to make your iPads. But it's a pretty bad place to sell iPads and iPhones because, especially now, the Chinese don't really have a lot of respect for copyright or trademark or any of the things that we sort of consider bedrock building blocks to a thriving capitalist economy. So the idea that the NBA think, I mean, is it possible that the NBA is making, some people say, an economic argument here? Like, well, the Chinese market is too rich and fat for us to offend. Or is it the NBA is making the same mistake that American importers and exporters made during the opium wars, which is Chinese ain't going to buy it.

So they pretend they're holding their billion consumers over the heads of American businesses and manufacturers as if somehow those consumers will buy your Nikes, but they never will. I mean the number one search engine in China is not Google. It's Baidu. Right, right. And you raise a really great point. Now, the one modifier to that is TV rights. So they will buy TV rights and pay a pretty penny for that. But how many of the Kobe jerseys, for example, that you might see in Beijing or Shanghai are real versus a knockoff. Yeah. A zero. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was going to be wildly optimistic and say one out of a thousand. Right. But yeah, I mean, this trademark copyright problem is immense. And so you have hundreds of millions of fans spending not all that much money that actually gets back to the NBA.

But they're still out there. Like, in theory, you think, well, in theory, look at the market for the Steph shoe. In theory, look at the market for the LeBron shoe. But of course, if you're going to actually buy the rights to the broadcast, that's real money. But again, this is fractional compared to the American market. And so you're cutting off your nose to spite your face if you're going to sit there and make these major economic decisions based on these future projections that, as you note, have often been proven pie in the sky

by other companies and other contexts. So it just really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And there's been a lot of lost respect here, which is really unfortunate. Lost respect, which, go on, Rob. What would happen if a certain number of NBA players took a knee at the next game in support of the Hong Kong freedom movement? I mean, how many heads would explode? That would be amazing. There would be probably a roar through the arena at that moment. What about coming out with a free Hong Kong t-shirt under the warmup? You know, that would be remarkable. But, you know, I think a lot of these players, even though the

league has come out and said, well, we do defend Daryl Morey's free speech rights, and have said it more clearly now, but they've seen what's happened to him. They have seen what has happened as a result. And I think these players, and many of them who have agents whispering in their ears about this immense market and are sort of walking, talking personal brands themselves and merchandisers, look at that immense market and they have their own financial incentives that they believe are in play. And you really see this and all of a sudden, some of these players like James Harden apologized unequivocally, Steph Curry said, well, this is all so complicated.

Once again, here's what feels like it could be huge sums of money dangling in front of them and I think the point you're raising, y'all are raising, is a good one. That could be illusory. Yeah, now it's complicated for these guys when it comes to pronouncement. David, we mentioned before that people were being kicked out of arenas for holding up signs. And I can see where an arena might say, you know what, this is a non-political venture. We don't have signs. That's just the way it is. But this seems to be a little bit different in as much as the T-shirts

are next. If you show up with a Hong Kong, you know, Google Uyghur, which I believe I saw at First Avenue a couple of years ago. Or if you have free Hong Kong on your T-shirt, there might be some. What's next exactly? I think that what we're going to do, what they'll come up with, is some sort of masking technology that's able to look at these things and blur them out so that nobody in the other markets is horribly offended by disinformation like this? Or are we going to be Americans about this and say, say what you want and let the chips fall into me? You know, I think that, I mean, I think the NBA's main strategy is right now is they're just holding on for dear life and hoping the new cycle moves on. But there's still, it still raises the long-term issue. And I can easily imagine

that kind of masking technology being used, for example, in broadcasts in China to blur out any expressions of dissent. But they're going to have to figure out this arena thing because if they don't get this answer right, and the right answer is just let people hold up a freaking sign or wear a t-shirt. Um, because the, the best way to make sure more people will come with signs is to keep kicking them out. You're right. Yeah. It's illustrative that we finally get a society, which is dystopian, a surveillance state, authoritative, uh, corporatist, fascist, all of these things that everyone predicted that the West was going to become somehow magically erupts in China. And it's a perfect example of why it sucks, excuse me, why it's bad. We now have a new story that China is going to use facial

recognition for all sorts of things, for applying for credit, for getting an internet access and the rest of it. So they have this vast database of what everybody looks like. And then you see a black mirror type story like you get from Hong Kong, where people are developing devices that shroud their faces and their characteristics and distort them so that the cameras can't find out who they are and ding them for their social credit and the rest of it. Well, what seems to be interesting going forward is that the Hong Kong democracy protesters came up, grew up in a different culture than people in mainland China. Am I right? Yeah. Okay. So where you have China developing all sorts of parallel institutions to America ones, they don't have Amazon, they got Alibaba, they don't have Twitter, they got Weibo.

In other words, they have, they're developing their own movie industry studios so that they can not only compete with, but if necessary, supplant what Hollywood does. Does this mean that you have an average Chinese person, which is a ridiculous thing to say about a country that size, but the average Chinese has a certain sort of nationalism and chauvinism that says, at the end of the day, we don't need the West. And they start to become insular in a way that completely shuts off that two-way growth and trading idea that this whole thing was founded on in the first place. And that China retreats behind its walls, and that's when the real trouble starts. You know, that's entirely possible. The creation of this parallel world of social media,

parallel Google, parallel Twitter, all of this stuff, and the only real cross-pollinization, I mean, you have cross-pollinization from China to the U.S. with TikTok. But the creation of this parallel world is, I think, you know, again, one of these reminders that what we thought would happen in the opening of China, in the enormous advances in the Chinese technology and Chinese economy would invariably result in sort of openness. I think all of the creation of these parallel structures shows, again, that just turned out not to be the case. But can I just say, these Hong Kong protesters are some of the most ingenious, inventive people. I have an immigration idea that says if china really cracks down hey y'all can come here absolutely absolutely we need that talent oh my the

entrepreneurial zeal of the year of the of the island the rock essentially with no natural resources of hong kong since you know for 100 years since its founding since its colonization frankly by the brit British has been extraordinary. I mean, if you watch the old Milton Friedman documentary, Free to Choose, he goes to Hong Kong and shows you how great the buses and the trams are because they're all private. The city doesn't do it. It's fantastic. It's really it's a libertarian's dream city.

But just to go back to that, I mean, just just for a minute, I mean, the Chinese pay attention. That is one of their traits. They do pay attention. And what they see is in social media in the West is they see a rising factionalism, rising tribalism, a kind of a bubble of media that individuals can fall into. And what terrifies them about that is that what happens if the Uyghurs who live in the West and are Islamic and want to have more autonomy, what happens if they kind of find their movement on social media? What happens if the Manchurians in the North who are really Korean, ethnic Koreans, decide that they're really ethnic Koreans?

Maybe they should be part of Korea. I mean, after all, I mean, they are sort of connected. Why not? What happens if the Southeast Asians to the south decide they want to be more Southeast Asian, more part of those rising economies than part of China, the Han Chinese, which controlled entirely the Han Chinese. I mean, they are in, I mean, we tend to think of them as sort of fearless, grasping, and efficient, but they are also fearful of the collapse or the falling apart or the fragmentation of their society. And it seems like we are actually aiding them in staving that off when we should maybe be mischievously encouraging it through the use of social media and media and NBA stars and all the tools that we have in the West. David, you missed the part where Rob wants to establish by himself an independent Kurdistan with himself, presumably as the American ambassador, and now he wants to break up China. I admit it's a novel idea, and I'm kind of liking it. Go with that.

Well, you know, you raise a great point, though, that we often look at our international adversaries and see strengths when the reality is they often have weaknesses that we're not – that those of us who don't study these things very carefully are not all that conscious of. I mean you squint one way at Russia, and it looks like this incredibly – especially in the last four to five years, efficient military machine. You squint another way and you think, oh, wow, that economy is tottering. It has real problems. There's dissent within the society. Similarly, I mean, China's only a couple generations away, a few generations away from actual warlordism. And so there are strains within Chinese society that we don't see when we sort of see this monolith. But there's also another aspect to this, and it's China sort of made this bargain with its people. And the bargain is, hey, the Communist Party stays in charge. The Communist Party is unquestioned.

But you know what? You're still going to get all the goodies. You're going to have higher standard of living. You're going to have all the movies you want. And they've delivered on that. And they have. Now, what happens if they can't deliver on it? What happens if the NBA says, you know what you're doing with the Uyghurs and the way you've tried to dictate our own internal policies is a bridge too far. No more tours with Steph and LeBron.

No more NBA training camps. No more NBA broadcasts. No more Marvel premieres. Right. You start to take away the goodies because they've really been able to tell kind of the Chinese Communist Party has kind of been able to have its cake and eat it too, give the people all the goodies of capitalism while retaining all of that ultimate control. And so that – and companies, as I said earlier, they kind of made this bargain in part because there was a thought that it would lead to change. They could morally justify it. Well, now that that notion that it's going to lead to change anything beyond economics is increasing to justify.

So then what? And that's why this is sort of a crossroads moment. Has an American brand, to your knowledge, or I mean a big American brand, Apple, NBA, places like Google, Facebook, have they ever said no to China? Well, Facebook, for example, just this last week, not only has it really allowed its WhatsApp platform to be used by the Hong Kong protesters, just this week it took action to shut down WhatsApp tip lines that the Hong Kong police had established to inform on protesters. So Facebook is pretty decisively taken aside in Hong Kong, which, you know, it's interesting as much as, excuse me, as much as Facebook gets a lot of heat in the media, that they should be applauded for that. That's, that is, you know, that's Facebook taking a stand in a very concrete way, in a way that can actually help the protests in Hong Kong. So not everybody has bent the knee. And Facebook, of course, last time I checked, pretty profitable, tells you that you don't have to

be operating in China to be an economic colossus. And Apple apparently is going to make some of the new pros in Texas. We'll see. David French, thanks for joining us. Enjoy the drag queen story hours of the dispatch man. You made me, I was already on my way to Drag Queen StoryHour when you interrupted me so rudely. Right. The good thing about your bald head is you can put any number of wigs on it. So go enjoy. Talk to you later. Thanks for dropping by the show today.

Thank you. Thanks, David. David, yes, who was, of course, with National Review going on to the dispatch, was of the – I don't know where he got his law training to become a JAG. Where was that? Was it in some sort of academy? It was an online academy. I'll get you that, though. But, hey, you know what?

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How Trump Haters Are Breaking America. Welcome back, Kim. It's great to be back. We had a Donald Trump appearance here in Minneapolis where I live last night. And I tell you, people were girding as though the very fabric of society itself was about to come. There was a frightening, large, mocking balloon. Can you imagine that? From what I read on Reddit, there were all of these worries that the mosques and the synagogues were going to be bombed, that there was going to be armed warfare in the streets. Stay safe, everybody. And as it turned out, the only sort of nonsense that happened were the protesters with the chanting and the knocking of the hats and the obscene signs and the burning of the mega

merchandise. Oddly enough, the left seemed to exemplify everything that they were convinced the right was doing. What happened here? Yeah, well, I think they have a psychological term for that, and it's called projection. And we've been seeing a lot of it in the country ever since Donald Trump was elected. And that's kind of the theme of the book I just wrote, which is that, for three years, we've been told that Donald Trump is this wrecking ball. He's undermining every institution we have in the country. He's undermining democracy. He's a threat to the republic.

He's a budding autocrat. over the last three years. And objectively, you will find that most of the actual damage and the lasting damage that we have seen happen in this country, whether it be to the reputation of the FBI or to the Senate confirmation process or to the impeachment process, it's happening in the hands of the left. Hey, so Kim, it's Rob Long from New York. Thanks for joining us. The book is called Resistance at All Costs, How Trump Haters Are Breaking America. Are they really breaking it? I mean, is that I mean, I guess what I mean is like that has a kind of a flight 93 election quality to it. And I'm wondering whether is it permanent? You think these changes or is it just momentary, temporary insanity on the part of the Trump haters? Well, one of the things that I try to make a distinction between in the book is, let's be clear, okay? Donald Trump breaks a lot of norms, all right?

No one should pretendanor, okay? And that's not necessarily a good thing, but I'm just saying that that's kind of where he tends to be most edgy, right? Right. Versus institutional damage, meaning are you using the Department of Justice for nefarious purposes and therefore losing trust in the American people's trust in that department? I would argue that actually because the running of his administration has largely been at the hands of a lot of people that were tapped to do that. You haven't really seen that happen in terms of this has actually actually been a fairly conservative and law-abiding administration in that regard. I'm talking about breaking institutions, and there has been damage done by the left. I'm not sure it's entirely Flight 93.

Look at the FBI. If you look at the polls out there right now, the American trust in the FBI is at incredible lows. And that's not because Donald Trump is mean to the FBI. It's because the American people watched a bunch of people who clearly disliked Donald Trump, who were in the top ranks of the FBI, abuse their power to start a counterintelligence investigation into a sitting presidential campaign. That was unprecedented, unheard of. And so that's how you damage institutions. And that's the sort of thing I'm talking about in the book. So, I mean, if I could, let me just see if I summarize, see if this makes any sense.

I mean, Donald Trump is a singular personality, and for many of us, a singularly unpleasant personality. But there's no, there are no more Donald Trump's on the horizon. I mean, it, there's no Trumpy, uh, Trumpy kind of person on the left or, or the democratic party, or even in the Republican party, but the FBI and the department of justice and the standards of, for impeachment and the standards for sort of just, just standard congressional deal-making, those are things that will last forever. Is that sort of? Yeah, I'm not saying last forever, but they certainly have been harmed now. And look,

you know, we've both been around politics for a very long time. For instance, I go through in the book, the Kavanaugh hearing, okay, and the number of standards and norms that were broken during that process. And that included everything from committee members on the Senate Judiciary Committee withholding information from the chairman to actually releasing class or at least sensitive information to the public when they were not supposed to, to the way the press ran smears that didn't actually have a corroborated basis. These are all standards that were broken and norms that were broken. Now, we can hope that Washington comes back to a place in which it doesn't do stuff like that anymore. But again, we've been around a long time. And one of the arguments I make in the book is once you let genies like that out of the bottle, Washington doesn't tend to

improve its behavior. It tends to go even lower. But we have reached a different phase in the culture, right? And when Nixon was in trouble during Watergate, people may have argued whether it was right or wrong what he did, or whether he whether he instructed justice or whether in fact, you know, Nixon himself said if the president does it, it's not illegal. People during the Clinton impeachment, they may have argued whether Paula Jones' lawsuit was valid or not or politically motivated or not or whether a perjury in a deposition, the way Clinton committed perjury in a deposition was the worst thing in the world or not. But we all agreed on the facts. Everybody agreed that Nixon did what he did. Everybody agreed that Clinton did what he did. But we really don't. I mean, if I'm with a bunch of people who are,

who don't like Trump, and I tell, and I say casually, of course, we do know that the Steele dossier, a piece of political opposition research was used to start a Department of Justice FBI investigation of a presidential campaign, they kind of roll their eyes and say, no, that's not what happened. Oh, it's remarkable. Yeah. I mean, I get there, though. I don't see, we used to rely on people who were in positions of power. And I'm not talking about politicians here, okay? I'm talking about institutional heads. Like, we used to rely on the head of the FBI to be straight up when asked questions about things. Well, first of all, not to abuse their power, but also to be straight up about things. So we have this problem right now where you and I know that the Steele dossier was used, and we know that that stings, okay? It was a piece of political opposition. But when you

have the head of the FBI making excuses for it and muddying up the circumstances when they were used, and when you have John Brennan, the head of the CIA, going on cable television to say all of this was necessary. And by the way, we're also just talking about norms. Why are we in a position where former CIA heads are acting as political pundits on cable stations, by the way? But these people, there used to be a sense of responsibility associated with these jobs that somehow we lost. They became more, I don't know if partisan is the word, but certainly opinionated, certainly. And so now people can't feel like they can't trust any source of information. Well, the CIA is now the hero to the left.

I mean, it used to be back in the 70s, of course, you know, Church Commission and the rest of it, that the shadow government is the worst thing in the world. Robert Redford is the only person who will save us from their evil deprivations. And now they're the only ones who will save us from Donald Trump. And so anything that the, quote, deep state, end quote, does is justified because he's horrible. I mean, that's the odd thing that we're seeing now. The IG report, what are you expecting and what political effect do you think it might have? Well, I believe that it's now going to be out toward the end of October. That's the latest that I am hearing.

And here's a couple of things that makes me feel confident that it's going to tell some hard truths. Because, I mean, first of all, you see the left already trying to attack Michael Horowitz and the credibility of Michael Horowitz, which is really quite unfair and insane. This guy was appointed by Barack Obama. He's been very straight up on both sides. You know, I think he put out what was a very useful and fair report on what happened in the Hillary Clinton situation, the FBI. But I think it says something that he has gone out of his way to issue two early reports, one at the former head of the FBI, Comey, and one directed at the former acting head of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, that were very harsh about their conduct and how they broke rules while they were there. And that, to me, suggests that Michael Horowitz is not scared to speak truth to power and that we'll probably get a pretty honest assessment of what happened. Now, the one thing I am warning people in terms of expectation management is,

remember, Horowitz does not have the power to summon a grand jury or to subpoena people or to even talk to people outside of the Department of Justice who don't want to talk to him. And he was also given a limited remit to look at FISA abuse. And so we may have to wait for John Durham, the U.S. attorney, to get a fuller answer of everything that happened. When it comes to Ukraine, where a lot of the attention has been shifting, are we ever going to get a full account of exactly what the Democrats were doing with Ukraine prior to the 2016 election? Because it seems to me that there's a lot of that projection going on here, too, where they're accusing the Trump administration of doing what actually the Hillary Clinton administration was attempting. Right. You know,

I mean, this gets to, by the way, a double standard saying when I go and talk to people in the country, this is increasingly their number one source of frustration. It's just what they feel is a double standard. I mean, how do Democrats stand there and say, we're going to impeach a president for talking to a foreign country about a rival when Hillary Clinton directed Russian disinformation to the FBI, which was used for a counterintelligence investigation against the Trump team. Anyway, that was an aside. But it's an annoyance to me as well, too. But the Ukraine thing, look, I think it's pretty clear John Durham, the U.S. attorney, is speaking to a lot of different countries. There's a realization and understanding within the Department of Justice of

people who are investigating this, that this starts earlier than the spring of 2016, which was when the FBI would have you believe that this all began. It started earlier, and I think we're going to find a lot of unpleasant goings-on between foreign countries and different elements of the United States political system. Take a look at what was going on in the debate stage last night, just to shift topics a little bit. Some interesting things from Warren and Beto O'Rourke. Elizabeth Warren banged her head on the ground and apologized for having criticized a judicial ruling that permitted incarcerated transgender person to receive state-funded transition surgery. She's now, of course, completely on board with this. It seems to be her point was, we need to put more trans women in prison. I know. This is where you get yourself. And at the same time, you had Beto O'Rourke saying that the tax-free status should be revoked from any church or religious institution that opposes same-sex marriage, which fascinates me because simply to state that you do not approve is regarded as opposing, which would mean you

would yank the status. And nobody seems to have gamed this out and to figure out how this would apply to mosque and the rest of it. But everybody claps because they're on the right side of the issue, not realizing perhaps this is not the best way to win those detestable flyover states that they want the electoral college to be able to ignore. Well, can we just remember, and it's always amazed me how quickly the political memory fades, but when we went back three years ago and in the aftermath of the Trump election, the media and Democrats spent months publicly fretting about what they'd done wrong. And one of the answers that they hit upon was that they really alienated a lot of blue collar, lower income white Americans in particular,

as you said, the deplorables. But these are people that are potentially registered Democrats or registered independents, or they hadn't necessarily been very engaged. But they felt as though Hillary Clinton, you know, wanted to put them out of jobs, right? When she went out and said, you know, we're going to put a lot of, shut down a lot of coal miners. That was very worrisome. This Democratic Party makes Hillary Clinton look friendly by comparison to those people. And when you have Elizabeth Warren out there saying, I'm going to stop all fracking in the country, we're not going to have fossil fuels anymore, the transgender issue, as you said, the cultural issue, church and the state question, I don't see, they seem to be managing to further alienating those

voters both from an economic and a cultural perspective and i do not see how this serves them in the end they're trying to gin up their base i get that but both sides understand they need more than just a base to win well if that's the case then why isn't somebody standing maybe one of the candidates has and says we have to be less concerned about telling people what we're going to take away from them and more concerned about how we're going to make everyone's lives better. Because the hair shirtness that is coming out from these people, you can't have your burger, you can't have your straws, you can't have your planes, you can't have your fracking. It's quite extraordinary. And a smart politician like if Donald Trump ever got the memo would point out if there's anything Vladimir Putin wants, it's for us to stop fracking. Why isn't Elizabeth Warren regarded as a puppet of Putin in the same way?

That's good campaigning, James. Yeah, look, you do have a couple of candidates who are saying, I mean, not quite as eloquently as you, but are making this case. Look at John Delaney, the congressman, who has been up on the stage saying, I think this party needs to be talking about not taking away people's health care that they like right now, but fixing what's actually broken. But these guys, there is a litmus test now in the Democratic primaries. They're being completely driven by the progressive party, set by the progressive wing of the party, I should say. And these guys cannot get a hearing. I think, you know, Delaney's in 1% of the polls. People don't want to hear that on the left. They want to hear Elizabeth Warren and what she's saying. But the weirdness of this is that they are, as we all know, because we've watched a lot of elections,

is that smart candidates always leave themselves an out, a place to walk back to when they're done with the primary. And I don't see anybody there leaving themselves many pathways back out. Resistance at all costs is Kim's book. Of course, if Warren is president and we oppose her, it'll be treason. But for now, it's resistance at all costs, how Trump haters are breaking America. Thanks for joining us today. And of course, we look forward to seeing you back in the paper. Thank you for having me. Thanks, Kim. Thanks. Yes, it was Elizabeth Warren presidency. That might interfere with your pocketbook, might interfere with your gas price, might interfere with your gas price, might

interfere with your happiness. And there's Rob. There's Rob right there. Wetted finger to the wind, which is a gale force to detect the presence of a Segway. Well, it's true. There are things that interfere with your happiness that prevent you from achieving your goals. What can you do about that?

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Go to betterhelp.com slash ricochet. Simply fill out a questionnaire to help them assess your needs and get matched with a counselor you'll love. That's betterhelp.com slash ricochet. And our thanks to BetterHelp for sponsoring this The Ricochet Podcast. Well, before we go, of course, we have this week's long poll question. I hate the name, but yeah. Do you want me to read it? No, I'll read it. I'll read it. I will read it. I'm conducting an experiment to see it's more of a social experiment or experiment about your social life.

And I have a theory about Ricochet members, and I want to find out if I'm right. This week's poll question, we have five questions. Which statement best describes you? One, I have liberal friends and conservative friends, and we talk about politics. Two, I have liberal friends and conservative friends and we talk about politics. Two, I have liberal friends and conservative friends and we avoid the topic. Three, I have liberal friends, but don't tell them what I really think. Four, I have liberal friends who have dropped me because of my politics. Five, I have liberal friends who I have dropped because of their politics.

I know you could probably over some of these might overlap, but which one do you think describes you right now the best? What's the one that you think about the most? And I have a theory, and I will reveal my theory next week and see if I was right or wrong. But there is a certain quality to Ricochet members that I feel this poll will reveal. Anyway, so if you're not a Ricochet member, I want you to join. Join Ricochet.com. Please join and help us grow and help

us continue to do these podcasts, but also join because we'd like to have your voice heard. We'd like to know what you think. And the best place to do that is Ricochet.com. I'm just sort of sad at the poll because it sort of presumes I have friends. Yeah,

that is a, that, that is, that is a prerequisite. Yeah. Yeah. And it's entirely possible for all five of those actually to be accurately describing of somebody.

I mean, it's, that's true, but usually you feel more, you feel more connected to one. If you feel more connected to one, that's, that's the one you should pick.

Even if the other others, one or two could be true, go for the one that you feel most strongly describes you right this minute. But you've got to be a Ricochet member to participate. So before we go also, there's something that Rob can probably weigh in on, Hollywood-connected fellow that he is. Hollywood's newest battle seems to be dancing with Ellen or defending human rights. Yeah. I guess Ellen DeGeneres. The reference to a piece, by the way, which is on Vulture.com,

which is part of New York Magazine and the rest of it. So, yes, Ellen infuriated people by sitting next to George Bush, not pulling out a knitting needle and gouging his eyes out, which she was apparently supposed to do with history's greatest monster, right? Yeah. What's interesting about that is that I think Ellen was shocked at the reaction from the left, which – not the left in general, but many, many people on the left who sort of took her to task. You cannot be friends with a war criminal. How dare you? And then she sort of responded by saying, hey, I'm friends with a lot of people and I don't have

to agree with everybody, but I try to love everyone and be nice to everybody and etc. Be kind. Her response was sort of basic, straight down the middle anodyne niceness, but people didn't seem to want to buy that at all. What was interesting about it is that it kind of reminded me anyway of something that a lot of people say, and I often forget, when I'm complaining about, happens a lot when I complain about Trump. And they say, yeah, well, you know, the media just hates him. But they would hate any, they hated, and they will hate any Republican. It's just that Trump seemed to get it harder, but pretty much they hated Romney. And the truth is that, and I forget that all the time, but every now and then something like this

happens where I would have expected if you told me just the first part of the story, Ellen DeGeneres was sitting next to George W. Bush and their friends, I would have expected the left, a lot of people on the left to say, see, he's a good one. He was a good one. Not like the piece of trash you got in there now, Republicans. But instead, they sort of confirmed what a lot of people who support Trump and a lot of Republicans think, which is it doesn't really matter. They would turn up the hate to 11 if it somehow was President Mitt Romney or President Marco Rubio or President whomever. It was always going to go to 11. It always does go to 11. It doesn't matter who the Republican president is. Whoever it is, he's a war criminal and a fascist and needs to be impeached

immediately. Right. I mean, now Mitt Romney is very useful because he's criticizing Trump. But are we supposed to forget everything they said about him? Are we supposed to shrug and just say, oh, that was just that sort of Carville-esque fun that you do during an election. Politics ain't beanbagging the rest of it. No, I remember. I mean, Mitt Romney was a horrible, horrible man who gave people cancer and put a dog on the roof and belonged to a church that did not do what it was supposed to do at the appropriate time. And all of those things would come right back again, and he'd be the worst person ever. I mean, that's why it seems to me interesting. They're saying, well, we've got to impeach Pence first. So we can slide Mitt Romney

into that spot and then impeach him later and somehow you get Hillary. We also have every week, in addition to the Longbow, a post of the week, and there are a couple of it that caught my eye. And I hate to keep going back to the same well, but I do because it shows the depth and or breadth of Ricochet. It's not just politics, it's sometimes culture. And Dr. Robert had two posts. One was called, Why We Need People Who Have Too Much Money, and the other was Memories of the Cleveland Orchestra.

How do these fit together exactly? Well, it's about people who have a lot of money, frankly, who endow cultural institutions, and why that's kind of a good thing. At a time when you have all the right-thinking people on the left insisting we need to cancel billionaires, there's something to be said for philanthropy and the people who had a lot of scratch and did good things with it. Now, whether or not you agree with that, Ricochet is a great place to argue about these things. And

we did. And it got into a conversation about Mahler and the rest of it and the missing, you know, the missing movement of the first. And it just shows where these things wander off. That's the great thing about Ricochet and the member feed. Everything is in there, everything. But you can't see it unless you pony up. Right, Rob? That is the deal. That is the simple deal that we offer you. We want you to join. We want you to come with us. We ask you to join at a membership level, mostly because if you are a member of the club with us, then you have skin in the game and the conversation stays civil and

interesting and polite and unlike any other place on the internet. Rob is going to tell you a very funny joke in just a second, but first I have to tell you. This podcast was brought to you by BetterHelp, Online Trading Academy, and Quip. Please support them for supporting us both ways. Great products. You'll enjoy your life better if you use them. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to go over to iTunes if you would. If you've got the new Mac operating system, you know perhaps that the podcast has been broken down into their own app. And so now all you people who say, I'm going to do that,

I have another thing not to do. If you didn't go to iTunes to give us a review before, now you cannot go to the podcast app to give us a review. Thanks a lot. That's all we ask. A measly five freaking stars and you can't even be arsed to do that. I tell you, what do I got to do? If you leave a nice review about how genial and gentle the hosts are, well, more people will discover the show. The next thing you know, bang, we're there in the Apple front page pane of podcasts you ought to watch and listen to, which would be great because then more people would join Ricochet. Now, I surprised

Rob by saying he was going to come up with a joke. I did that just to keep you listening while I did the obligatory end of the show bits. I got a joke. I just was remembering this joke the other day, and it used to make me laugh really hard. That's really not the way to introduce a joke but it's this is a pretty simple one two cannibals are eating a clown one of them turns to the other and says this tastes funny to you it's like a 17 year old joke but yeah it but yeah, it is. It's a good one.

But you know what it brings back when you say two cannibals? It brings back a visual trope in cartoons I haven't seen in a long time, which is the missionary standing in the iron pot. Yeah, remember that? Yeah, with a fire underneath him. And the guy in a waistcoat, and he always had the bone in the nose, too. The worst sort of caricature you could imagine. But that was like the lowbrow version of the new yorker desert island cartoon yeah um things which our culture perhaps is leaving behind and maybe we're not all the poorer for them um we're leaving behind you the listener now because we're done thanks peter robinson will be back next week i hope and

we'll be all together again as the song says robinson great we'll see you next week next week i mean fella just you together again, as the song says. Rob, it's been great. We'll see you next week. Next week, fellas. I mean, fella. Just you. Bye-bye. Why can't we be friends? Why can't we be friends? Why can't we be friends? Why can't we be friends? I've seen you around for a long, long time I remembered you when you drank my wine Why can't we be friends?

Why can't we be friends? Why can't we be friends? Thank you. I could not look around. Why can't we be friends? Why can't we be friends? Why can't we be friends? Why can't we be friends? I pay my money to the welfare line. I see you standing in it every time. Why can't we be friends? Why can't we be friends? Why can't we be friends? Why can't we be friends?

Why can't we be friends? Ricochet. Join the conversation.