Geopolitical Challenges in Iran and Russia

This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human . This July 4th, come celebrate at America's Block Party, hosted by America 250. America's Block Party is a can't miss 4th of July concert happening at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Experience music performances from major artists, patriotic tributes, and the kickoff to Giving Forth. Helping to make July 4th the largest day of giving in American history. It's more than just fireworks . Learn more about this landmark celebration at America250.org. Airtasker helps you check off your to-do list. I need the wasp nest gone. House cleaned, and my dog taken to his overpriced haircut. Go to airtasker.com or download the app. Airtasker, get anything done. The brilliant Noah Rothman is the author of a brand new book entitled Blood in Progress: A Century of Left Wing Violence in America. It's Armstrong and Getty Extra Large. Because four hours simply isn't enough. This is Armstrong and Getty Extra Large . What a pleasure this is to talk to Noah Roth man, senior writer of with the National Review, author of a number of terrific books through the years. Thank you, sir. I'm very well. It's a pleasure to be here. Excellent. Thanks. So uh I have uh dived into the book uh with great enthusiasm. My compliments, first of all, it's one of those momentum reads. The more I read, the more I was enjoying reading it. Um and one of the one of the points you made early on in the book, I should uh just as an aside, uh fan of your work on the National Review Podcast and I remember when you first brought up that you were working on this book, my immediate reaction was, Oh my God, there's gonna be a an avalanche of what aboutism about right wing violence. But you made the point early in the book that the way we as media and society react to left wing violence and right wing violence are very, very different. Can we start there? Of course, sure. Um so um my book is B Blood in Progress, A Century of Left Wing Violence in America is an attempt to answer a question that I think we all probably encounter too frequently, because we often hear about how the right in America is uniquely violent, the primary threat to the civic compact and individual life and liberty. We hear about it after an attempted or successful assassination of a right wing figure, an armed assault on an ICE facility or a CBP facility, the mobs that descend almost nightly on places like Portland, Oregon. We hear about it all the time. And there's something of a taboo in there, right? If you're if you're finger pointing, you're saying, no, no, no, you're the violent one, there's a concession there that the public doesn't like political violence. Therefore you're imposing this on the other side so that they'll have to defend themselves. But the degree to which we hear this reflex, this inversion, is reflective, I think, less of a desire to get the facts right and more of an attempt by uh left of center Americans and institutionalists in venues that happen to have progressive proclivities to avoid looking at the problem, to to turn their eyes And that's why we have so much violence in this country. It's a reciprocal phenomenon. Those who are inclined towards political violence take inspiration from the those who execute attacks on their side and especially to meet out vengeance against their political adversaries, who they already perceive to be violent. That often includes the state. Both sides of this equation perceive the state to be on the side of their political enemies. So you're never going to get your hands around this problem if you refuse to acknowledge its contours and scope. And that's what I do in this book. I look not only at the wave of left wing violence that we're experiencing right now, which is a genuine wave of left wing violence. I have I put together a ton of evidence inod Blo in Progress to demonstrate that we are experiencing a classic wave of political terrorism from the left. But I also explore the other waves of political terrorism from the left, all of which have been described by their scholars who study them as forgotten the nineteen tens, the nineteen twenties, the nineteen seventies, the nineteen eighties, and today the twenty tens and the twenty twenties. All of this history has some similar features, predictive and prescriptive elements, and I argue that it's not an obscure hist ory. It's a suppressed history. And I'm my goal with Blood in Progress is to uh remove the omerta , you know, des tigmatize the notion that we can talk about left wing violence um with the authority and clarity that it deserves because otherwise we're never going to get our hands around this problem. I I like the way you pointed out that if there is right wing violence we have a long, solemn faced national discussion about it, many, many articles and panels and that sort of thing. And if there's agreed completely, we abhor all political violence around here. But if there's left wing violence, it becomes well he understands and it it's an expression of people 's discontent with health care or what have you. No long discussion. Let me give you my best example, uh Noah. I think you guys talked about this maybe in one of the many podcast interviews I've heard you do. When Trump first started running for president before it became all controversy and it was still kind of just fun and a joke. He flew into Sacramento in the big Trump plane, and I took my kids, which in retrospect seems crazy. Taken, I think they were they were like six and four or something like that. I mean, they were little kids, but it was still just kind of fun to go to a Trump rally. That was in Sacramento on like a Wednesday night. The next night, he's in San Jose and some Trump people wearing Trump hats got beaten up on the sidewalk, got beaten up in the middle of the day, and it got zero news coverage. And nobody was bothered by it. And I was like, holy crap, when did political violence become okay? Since then I've been highly disturbed. Yeah, I I remember writing a piece for Commentary Magazine where I was employed at the time in twenty sixteen. Um I had written a bunch about uh sharing the apprehension that the national press had over the degree to which the president was inclined to excuse or even give license to people on his side who would react violently to the protesters who were protesting his events, demonstrating against his events, infiltrating his events and harassing his supporters. I was unnerved by that. But I was just as unnerved by the degree to which Trump supporters were being attacked. Yes in the streets. In Sacramento, as you said, in places like Arizona and Chicago. They shut down a rally, they beat up cops, beat them bloody , had the clothes torn from their backs, bell pelted with eggs, etcetera, etcetera. Got no coverage. And throughout the course of the Trump presidency, first Trump presidency, which got much, much worse than Joe Biden's presidency, I've been unnerved by the degree to which there's not an excuse making exercise necessarily on the part of the left, but certainly an effort to contextualize left wing violence and render it, as you say, an excusable uh or forgivable response to environmental conditions, many of which are completely subjective in the minds of progressive activists. And you noted, you know, the degree to which you've got to understand the violence. A lot of that came in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of CEO United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, where you heard leading lights in the Democratic Party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy, Bernie Sanders, all of them condemn the murder. But then say but big pregnant but that renders everything that came before it dismissable and perfunctory. But you have to understand the healthcare system is broken, in Bernie Sanders' case buttons Therefore what is necessary a revolutionary social upheaval, something that will reset everything to year zero, where we can get back to the the kind of con social contract that we know we need. And how do we get there? In the minds of the revolutionary activists , throughout the centuries now, it has been that one galvanizing act of violence and bloodshed, human sacrifice, will ignite passions that are otherwise dormant in the public, and they will rise up in jo in us in our campaign against these oppressive structures, these this civilizational oppression that the public is just yearning to slough off themselves and they only need permission to do so and we're going to give it to 'em. This is a violent mindset . This is a violent activist mindset. And it's the sort of thing that is very pervasive on the left, even among political professionals and responsible institutional stewards. What I'm about to ask about is not all left wing political violence, Lord knows, but I've been fascinated by what Matt Taibe recently called upper class twits promoting revolution. Uh since I was a kid, I grew up in a very pleasant suburb of Chicago uh,, where the Harris family that were central to the Patty Hearst kidnapping deb acle uh lived, their parents lived there, and it it astounded me that somebody coming from a very pleasant place, well educated, certainly affluent enough to get by in America, would turn to revolution. And I've since learned that that's that's far from uncommon. Uh a pretty good common thread from the seventies uh violence through Oh my gosh, yes. And we have some very recent evidence of this. The third not first, not second, third attempt on Donald Trump's life was executed by a man who the press seemed to be confused by because he was erudite, because he was educated, um, because he came from the same milieu that they come from. CBS host Nora O'Donnell asked the president to opine on the ramblings of a madman who tried to kill him. In years past, the guy's actions would have discredited everything that came before. But no, Nora O'Donnell didn't see much there that was uh beyond reason. Therefore, maybe the president should have to answer why he's not a pedophile, a traitor, a criminal. That's the sort of thing that strikes those of us who are familiar with the history of and the profile that's associated with those who execute violence in the pursuit of positive social change, which is its own sort of disordered thinking. Um that the profile is that guy especi,ally the education part. You know, the sociologist there are sociologists that I quote in this book who does who find that within the context of Islamist terrorism at least, the common thread there is that they share They have an engineering degree. They come from means. They come from an educated background. And it makes it a little bit of intuitive sense when you think about it that those who would pursue violence as a vehicle for social change have at least some familiarity with uh movements that engaged in similar pursuits in history. So y it's a sort of thing that is you can chalk it up to ignorance, but it's an ignorance that's cultivated and licensed and encouraged by people in positions of power and authority in this country who in who in scan the horizon for any evidence of right wing violence, as they should, and as you say, or treat us to pr you know prolonged lectures about our permissiveness when we experience episodes of right wing violence, as we should. But the same cannot be said on the left. There is a huge asymmetry here. And as a result, I I fully expect more right wing political violence because these two things are intertwined. Those who are inclined towards violence again resolve to meet out vendetta against their political adversaries. And if they perceive that the state is no longer concerned with their safety and that of their families, then yeah, vigilantism could become a much more pronounced feature of the American social compact. And that's a big fear of mine. Something I'm hoping to stave off with my book. Armstrong and get it here for hymns. There are all kinds of great weight loss approaches that fit into your world out there. They've got to at HIMS with a wide range of affordable GLP1 options. You've got weight loss goals, but hitting them is another story. Check out Weight Loss by HIMS. It's designed to support you in losing the weight and keeping it off. And HIMS now offers access to an affordable range of FDA approved GLP 1 medications, including the Wagovie pill and the Wagovy Pen. Through HIMS, everything happens online. You'll connect with a licensed provider who will determine if treatment's right for you. And then if prescribed, your medication is delivered right to your door. 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So it's so toddry to get into a um uh a compare the left wing scorecard to the right ring scorecard to see who's ahead or behind, depending on how you look at it. But you kinda have to because the FBI director or a president or the media is going to give you a list of, you know, what percentage of violence is right wing. And I like how you break down some of the th crazy things that they put on that side of the ledger to to kind of fix the numbers. Yeah, well I I'm not I'm not dueling in databases here. I'm not competing in the database world. Um because I think it's a hopelessly subjective enterprise. As you say, there are a bunch of these uh statistical analyses that purport to conclude that the American right is uniquely violent or at least uniquely murderous. Sometimes there's a distinction there with a difference. But if you go into the databases, depending on which one you're looking at, you see a lot of stuff that the general public does not perceive to be political violence, gang violence, prison violence, intrafamily violence. Now there's a person who spray paints uh slurs on the side of a church, right-wing violence, a homeless man who wanders into a hotel and hurls racial epithets at the hotelier and assaults them. R right wing violence. It's sort of like those databases that are put out by gun control groups that purport to claim like there have been seventy school shootings this year. you And say to yourself, well, I don't remember 70 school shootings. And you look at the data and it shows, well, somebody discharged a firearm adjacent to a school property. That's just not what people think of when they think of political violence. And then most important ly, what I think is a smoking gun in the first chapter of this book is a document that was prepared for the Department of Homeland Security in twenty twenty one, in which researchers say that the study of violent left wing extremism is shot through with problems , one of them being the fact that people who are allegedly participants in these violent movements are themselves the authors of these studies of those violent movements. And then those who are not are subjected to by their colleagues, intimidation campaigns, social isolation, even the threat of physical retaliation for merely doing the job. It's an it's right for exploration. It is shot through with problems. And it's the sort of thing that a society invested in its own preservation would take very seriously. And it's a wonder why it seems like very few are, and there haven't been any real um pronounced sustained gr efforts to grapple with the problem of left fling violence in this country. That's why blood in progress I think is so necessary. Right. The oversimplified version of what I want to bring up is that uh conservatives think progressives are misguided or wrong, progressives think conservatives are evil, which is obviously a thread that runs you know directly into the violence. Uh is there anything we can do as a society to I don't know, some sort of force to interchange. So uh folks of the left can be exposed to more conservative ideals and realize we're not evil. We just see the world more uh uh uh differently than they do. Well I really hope they read my book. First of all um I don't offer a that'd be nice, right? I mean it's step one. Um I don't offer a panacea for the problem of political violence in the United States and I would be suspicious of anyone who does. There's been political violence in this country since its founding. It's it's a feature of civic life in America, an unlovely one, but one nonetheless. Um but nevertheless, I do recommend things that we can do on the margins to address this problem. The New Lines Institute, for example, offers some um advice to law enforcement officials, for example, to deprive those who are inclined towards violence of the narrative that they uh often promulgate, in which they maintain that the the state and the police are on the side of the other side, the political adversaries, and therefore they're val valid targets too. Um, I recommend that we restore politics to its proper place. Politics currently knows no rational bounds. It's not about educ it's not about elections and legislative affairs and enumerated duties in a in a constitution. It's about the s you know commercials you watch and the shows that you watch and the music you listen to and the food you eat and the people you surround yourselves with and your hobbies and all of it has nothing to do with politics properly understood. It might be political , but it's that is a construct and it's immune to remedy from um the govern governmental entities uh by virtue of the Constitution, which is desirable. It's good. But if you're so convinced that you have this moral imperative on your hands and society is deaf to it, it's a radicalizing thing and it can either lead you to withdraw entirely from the political process or resolve to attack the foundations of this holy immoral as enterprise that is deaf to your appeals. Um so I do have a a couple of ex uh you know ideas for getting our hands around this problem, but the biggest problem that I attempt to address with this book is the fact that so few are willing to acknowledge it. If I've if all I've achieved with this book is the acknowledgement of the degree to which we're experiencing a pronounced and disproportionate wave of left This July 4th, come celebrate at America's Block Party, hosted by America 250. America's Block Party is a can't miss 4th of July concert happening at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Experience music performances from major artists, patriotic tributes, and the kickoff to Giving Fourth, helping to make July 4th the largest day of giving in American history. It's more than just fireworks. Learn more about this landmark celebration at America250.org . AirTasker handles your never-ending to-do list. Pick up the cat, get nails done, yard work, taxes . Local taskers can do all that. Visit airtasker.com or download the app. Airtasker, get anything done. Yeah, when you've got both sides constantly saying this election will be the last election if the other side wins, I mean you could justify lots of stuff, you know, if you actually believed that. How do you separate out a crazy person , like completely nuts, who happened to latch on to a a political point of view versus, you know, the somewhat sane. Uh how how do you do that? One of the reasons um why I don't tell this story in numbers and statistics is because I wanted to do just that to dive into the disordered thinking of somebody who believes that an act of political violence will be get positive That's the sort of thing you can only tell in stories. And so I did tell those stories. And some of the individuals who engage in acts of look, first of all, a a crazy person can have as big an impact on history as an act of violence. Absolutely. As a clear eyed ideologue. So there is, you know, there's a a distinction that's a fine one to certain degree. But there are plenty of people who act out uh in in uh deference to schizophrenia, for example, or other d disorders who end up committing horribly violent acts and may or may not have a political motive behind them. Some of them are explicitly apolitical. But then there's also the audience for that sort of thing. And there usually is an audience, especially for um political violence. Violence that is designed to um inflame passions and sometimes they leave manifestos behind indicating that that is their ideal. And the audience for this sort of thing sometimes give you clues as to what their motives are and what the milieu in which they're operating in is like. And one the the first thing that jumps to mind there is Shane Timora , who about two years ago walked into a high rise in midtown Manhattan seeking the offices of the NFL because he wanted to execute as many people in the NFL as he possibly could, operating under the delusion that the NFL was responsible for the concussions that he suffered as a kid. He was disordered. And he ended up going to the wrong place. He went to a real estate firm and he shot a bunch of people , one of them being Le Wesley Le Patner, who's a young real estate executive . And his act was a completely senseless act of violence. But the audience for it saw a lot of sense in it. They saw the execution of a rapacious capitalist, somebody who had it coming by virtue of her station and the degree to which she had benefited from ill begotten goods in society just by virtue of her participation in enterprise. And they perceived that act of violence to be a good thing that was due everyone else. It brought us one step closer to the revolution in which you and me and everybody who's a participant in this immoral network that we all inhabit, the United States, will get what's coming to us. That's the milieu in which we're we're operating in right now. This is our environment. And it's going to get worse if we don't confront it Well that's just spiteful envy. A disordered individual shoots the wrong person, but you think well that person let's find some sins and and uh y pronounce them deserving of their fate, which is horrifying, which brings us to speaking of horrifying, the the the rising numbers of uh people and most notably young people who will justify political violence of one sort or another. Where did that come from? Well, it's hard for me to say whether the degree to which it's been with us forever. Because I do think there's an element of this that can be overread. That there's an something in the young mind that is attracted to t breaking taboos, to shocking elders. Um there are so few taboos left that do shock with the commensurate uh commensurate to their desire to be provocative. Um anti Semitism is one. And violence is another. The celebration of bloodshed for its own sake is another. But that performative ghoulishness, and we saw some of it the other day outside of the trial of Luigi Mangioni , where three young ladies um into camera uh competed with one another to be as ghoulish as they possibly could, called Brian Thompson his alleged victim uh a terrorist, said his children were better off without him, his two young children, um, that they would anything that he had bequeathed them was blood money. And most importantly, in my view, was that an indictment of the country, because in the minds of one of these activists , we are the most passive and cowed population in the history of the planet that anybody, any other civilization that was experiencing the kind of oppression that we're subjected to on a daily basis, would have already risen up and overthrown their repressors. And the fact that we don't is an indictment of us and indicative of how badly we need revolutionary violence in this country to wake us from our passivity. Um that is clear eyed in my view. It is performative, it is a spectacle. But it's also designed to beget the kind of violent outcomes that are often encouraged tacitly, even if they don't acknowledge it , by Democratic political officials who attempt to co opt these movements. Why w why did they append the butt when they were condemning Brian Thompson's murder? Why did they lean into Occupy Wall Street or the twenty twenty George F loyd mobs, they see in these expressions of political zeal which may be a little excessive, maybe unrefined, but can be harnessed and directed towards productive ends and maybe contribute to democratic political prospects. It's a really utilitarian approach to what is, in my view, a um a cancer on American society and one that needs to be excised, not encouraged Are you more worried about individuals coming together under an ideology and acting out individually or the groups, the the Antifa, the Proud Boys, the whate Wow, it's sort of a matter of degrees, isn't it? Um what am I more worried about? I they're both extraordinarily troubling. Well which which is more unique in this moment? Well what is most troubling, I would say, um where is we've seen more violence from individuals, so it's a more pronounced threat. But what's what's really unnerving to me is the group violence in, particular the violence target ing police. Last year we saw three armed assaults on ICE and CPP facilities, um some of which were quite deadly, one of which featured extremely sophisticated ambush tactics. It was about ten individuals who and there was no ambiguity about what they were trying to do. They left behind literature advocating for the proletarian revolution. We know who these people are. But they used um fireworks to target this uh this facility, lure their targets out, and then open up on them from overlapping fields of fire on the tree line. That's sophisticated. That's an assault, that's a small cell terrorist act. And it's akin to what we saw in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties with the Marxist guerrilla groups who've targeted police explicitly, and it's similar to the so socialist anarchist movements of the nineteen tens, nineteen twenties, who targeted police specifically. That's the sort of thing that is a port ent of a possible convulsion, a spasm of organized left wing terroristic violence of the sort that we haven't experienced in this country in fifty years. But if you don't know that we haven't experienced it in fifty years, or the fifty years before that, you won't know what you're looking at. You won't have any immunity to it, you won't know how to stop it. That's why blood in progress is in my view so important . This July 4th, come celebrate at America's Block Party, hosted by America 250. America's Block Party is a can't miss 4th of July concert happening at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Experience music performances from major artists, patriotic tributes It's more than just fireworks. Learn more about this landmark celebration at America250.org . Airtasker helps you get things done. First, gifts for every firehouse. Then find an ice sculpture guy. Post your tasks on airtasker.com or download the app and, local task ers will help. AirTasker, get anything done. Again, Noah Rothman's new book is Blood in Progress, A Century of Left Wing Violence in America. We know your time is limited. In the couple of minutes we have left, uh can we talk about a couple of contemporary issues? Of course. Uh first of all, uh what the hell is going on with the negotiations with Iran? Is this going anywhere or are we just getting strung along? Uh I think we're getting strung along. And I'm a little disappointed with how this has gone in the ceasefire period. I think the Operation Epic Fury was a tactical triumph. The ceasefire has been a mess. And it's not advancing our interests. And the president risks sacrificing a lot of the gains that were made in this process in in two ways. Um the first of which being that during Operation Epic Fury, the Gulf States abandoned this pretense of neutrality and gravitated towards the United States and Israel. Of course they did, because the United States and Israel were defending them against barrages of fire that were coming from Iran. We're seeing now that as the ceasefire breaks down, those barrages continue. Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE, all getting struck over the course of last night a very signific ant assault on Kuwait City, in which one person died, and sixty-three were injured. And the president is kind of taking it all in stride. So that really risks the prospect of this kind of regional realignment that was very beneficial to American strategic interests. The second being that the president is moving towards the Iranians and the Iranians aren't moving towards us in this very specific way. He confirmed Trump, confirmed today, that he did have this profanity laced tirade when he was yelling at Bibi Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, for constantly fighting in Lebanon, his words. Hezbollah attacked Israel during Operation Epic Fury. That war is ongoing , but Hiz Hezbollah started it. And now Iran, which used to deny that it had any links to Hezbollah, is under duress saying you gotta you gotta reign in Israel, Hezbollah's ri in real trouble. And he's doing that . Why? That's leverage. That's something you can use to get the Iranians to come to the table and be a little bit more pliant in talks, if they were ever going to be. That's something they really hold dear and you can hold it over their heads. But Trump's just giving it away. And he's not getting anything for it. And I'm I don't understand why. He's obviously he thinks time is on his side, and he has some evidence in that to that effect, the the blockade a stranglehold on the Iranian economy and they're starting to feel it and act like it. But at the same time, he too is operating under obvious duress and obvious pressure, political pressure and practical pressure. You know, the United States really is short on these interceptor missiles, exquisite munitions that take a lot of time to refill. Nevertheless, he picked this war. The time is now, and it's time for him to finish the job that he started. So I I've been very disappointed with the ceasefire process. Well then at stake is whether or not Iran gets a nuclear weapon, which I think has gotten lost, at least in the mainstream media or by a lot of people. But the what's at stake is not the price of gas for the summer vacation you're going on, it's whether or not Iran gets a nucle And we were saying on the air the other day, Iran getting a nuke would w be one of the biggest moments in world history. You agree or disagree? I do agree. And it's also beyond that, it's the shape of the region for a decades to come. The next fifty years is on the table right now. Why have we been unable to execute the pivot to Asia that George W. Bush wanted, that Barack Obama wanted, that Trump wanted, that B that Biden wanted? It's Iran. Iran will not let us extricate ourselves from that reason It has been at war with us and it sounds like a cliche, but it's true. It has been at war with us executing killing Americans and executing operations on US soil and on our allies soil designed to murder our allies and Americans for forty seven years, not gonna stop until that regime implodes. But we can contain that regime and the design being to collapse it so that we could finally execute our strategic priorities and other parts of the planet Earth. That's a really desirable goal. If the president were able to engineer it, it would have dividends that we would reap for generations to come. But it's a big project, and it's one that doesn't isn't going to take a couple of weeks to engineer. So yeah, I understand that Americans are feeling the price at the pain at the pump. I am too. And the president hasn't asked us to bear any burdens, which is one of the reasons why I don't blame the American people for not really being all that jazzed about this operation. He should have enlisted the public in what is a national project that would entail sacrifices on their part. He still can't. Nothing's stopping him. But he seems content to pretend that this is all