The “Wea Culpa” Edition

Kate, you've been with us for months now and somehow we have not gotten you a proper microphone. You're recording off your laptop mic? Yeah. Well, I have a microphone, first of all. It's a very good microphone. It was sent it to me by none other than Hawkeye for taping his podcast. You mean Clint Amy Coney Barrett? No, Alan Alda. Oh, Alan Alda. Oh, that is even better. That is a charismatic man. Yeah, he's kind of like. Also, just on a personal note. There are so few cool guys named Alan in the world and the fact that Alan Alda exists and spells it the right way. Spells it the right way. It's like up there with Alan Alda and Alan Turing. And who's the guy that plays Jack Breacher? That's another. I mean, that's just a jacked Alan. Alan Alda have a Z and an S-H-T in Alda? Yeah, sadly. Sadly, not the last name is too much to hope for, but I'll take a first name, Alan. But I have this great mic, and it's fantastic. And it was like, it's like, you know, it has like a sentimental place in my heart, obviously. And I need to, my computer won't recognize it. So I need to upload a driver. And I feel like it's like 1998. like that I uttered that sentence. I just say as a as a cranky elder millennial, I just want to make the point that this generation doesn't know how good it has it. We used to have to download drivers for our keyboards over like a and walk both ways. 14k uphill to school. I mean, certainly wait 25 minutes to download the latest smash mouth MP3 over Napster. Or Homestar Runner. Oh, Homestar Runner. When GIF animations were all you could get, exactly, just three moving images. I teach, you know, so in my internet law class, there's always a moment where I have to be like, so in the first Facebook, it was static pages. Well, the Facebook. And people hid. The Facebook. That they were like, and people thought it was like dating. And dating online had a huge stigma. And I used to go to weddings. And I used to be like sworn to secrecy that they'd met each other on like match.com or like E-Harmony. Can I share an embarrassing profile photo? I think it explains the dangers of being an elder millennial. So I was like one of the very first Facebook generation that came out like my freshman or sophomore year of college or at least came to my college. Hey man. I'm user 173 of Facebook or something like that. Really? Oh, wow. Okay. You got me. Definitely. low triple digits, 100%. Impressive. It came to like pretty early to college. And so, of course, I had like for a while, particularly before you had photos, you kind of could just do your profile photo as your main photo. So I had a bunch of like fun college guy profile photos that I would replace. But they get saved as your profile photos on a history. And so I, you know, later in my life, spent a year and a half in Iraq. Didn't have the most active romantic life, needless to say. It was like a 12 to one gender ratio. And so came back to society and civilization. I was like, I got to start dating getting out there. I signed up for a...

What hinge or bumble? I can't remember one of the dating. Coffee meets bagel. There's so many. Something like that. And what it does is it takes all to populate your photos. It takes all of your old Facebook profile photos. So they literally had me being like smoking cigarettes, drunk off my ass, like big long beard. At one point I had Christmas ornaments hanging from my nipples for holiday I would do. And it was so embarrassing. Well, that's the name of the rat. This, that's the name of the rat sec episode, everyone. Here you go. Leave it in. I just look forward, Scott, that when you are nominated to be the legal advisor at state in the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez administration, and you're at your Senate confirmation, Ted Cruz asks you about the Christmas ornaments hanging from your nipples in college. I just can't believe of all of you. Photos out there somewhere. They gave you, that they gave you, like, security clearance, all of you, like, morons after that. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Rational Security, the show where we invite you to join members of the Lawfare team as we try to make sense of the week's big national security news stories. Joining me this week, we have a couple of old hands back on the show. First off, we have, of course, co-hosts, Emeritus, and Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Netanyahu. What has been? Thank you for coming back on the pod. Always at your back and call, Scott. Often very much at the last notice, last minute, and very much appreciated. Thank you, Ben. And also joining us, another co-host, Emeritus, Alan, thank you for coming back on the podcast. Thanks for having me, though mostly you've come on to take advantage of my pained mea culpa. It is. We're excited about this vehicle, but this was the impetus for this episode, admittedly. We're excited about it. And joining me to revel in your shame and humiliation is a lover, senior editor and recent serial guest, Kate Klan. Kate, thank you for coming back on the podcast as well. Well, today is really a pleasure. I mean it after this time. Can we call this the Chadenfreude edition? Perhaps, perhaps. We have a lot of interesting stories happening in the news. A lot of them have been with us for a number of weeks. And we wanted to dig into a couple of slightly interesting angles or takes or aspects of some of these stories that we're going to focus on this week. So a little bit more offbeat topics. But things that we thought were interesting to talk about that we've been talking about around the office and that a few of us have been writing on in lawfare and in other places. Our first topic for this week cracks in the Foundation. The Conservative Heritage Foundation and the broader conservative movement, it plays a central role in, has been going through a very public crisis over the past week after its president, Kevin Roberts, came to the defense of right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson after Tucker Carlson chose to host white nationalist Nick Fuentes on his... Not television show on his show of some sort. I think it's a streaming show, a streaming channel. Regardless, this has led to resignations at the Heritage Foundation, a condemnation by certain figures of the right on other figures of the right, a pseudo-apology by John Roberts at this point, and led to a little bit of a reckoning, or at least perhaps the beginning of a reckoning, over how folks on the right, and to some extent, Americans more broadly, have dealt with accusations of anti-Semitism, its relationship to various policy questions.

as well as hate speech and other sort of political perspectives. What should we be making of this crisis and what does it tell us about the different policy aspects that intersect with this question of anti-Semitism? Topic two, turning back the clock. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent promised that President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping would, quote-unquote, consummate a TikTok deal at your face-to-face last week. One of the creepier things that Treasury Secretary has ever said from one of our creepier Treasury Secretaries, if you look at him really closely, it's a lot. But no details have emerged on the deal to date, which we make of the apparent holdup and of the TikTok saga altogether. And Alan in particular may have some heartburn over this one with a few months of hindsight. And topic three, a foe by any other name. As the Trump administration has continued its military campaign against narcotics traffickers in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, U.S. officials have continued to draw parallels between current policies and the global war on terrorism, calling detainees, unlawful, immediate combatants, and the groups being targeted designated terrorist organizations. If you are a narco-terrorist, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently tweeted in relation to one of the strikes, we'll treat you like we treat al-Qaeda. But how accurate are these parallels, and why is the Trump administration deploying them in this way? So our first question is something I think a lot of people have been talking about this week. We have seen a ton of political speech, particularly around sort of folks on the right. But it's particularly also something that we've been talking about internally and ties into a lot of conversations we've had on rational security at lawfare and other places over the past few years. And that is this heated, heated debate, internal debate on the right over Tucker Carlson's decision in the first place to host Nick Fuentes, a prominent figure on the... kind of extreme right in the white nationalist circles, a neo-Nazi, somebody who said something, things that are very flattering of Hitler, somebody who's pretty openly a white nationalist, somebody who has openly a Holocaust denier to various stripes, hosted him on his live stream show. This led to people in conservative circles criticizing Tucker Carlson. A few people pushing to take action against him. There were some reports at the Heritage Foundation where Tucker Carlson has various associations, that his name was being taken off on aspects of the Heritage Foundation. That appears to have led President Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation to release a tape statement where essentially he came to Tucker Carlson's defense saying, we're not going to cancel Tucker Carlson. He's an ally. People criticizing him, even they disagree with him are people who are weakening the movement and are doing bad things. You had a couple people around John Roberts kind of echo these sentences. A few people saying even after there started to be resignations from the Heritage Foundation saying essentially this would be addition by subtraction, welcoming the resignation by people.

who they blamed as essentially virtue signaling over this sort of issue. Just in the last 24 hours, John Roberts has walked back a little bit. He's kind of tried to cast it as saying, I was really trying to speak out about cancel culture. Obviously, we need to object to when people use hateful rhetoric, try and do things that lead the United States to a dark direction, to paraphrase his comments, suggesting that he doesn't agree with Nick Fuentes or his views and that's okay to criticize and reject them. Frankly, in the same of that's kind of hard to... to square with what Robert said a few days ago. Alan, I want to kind of come to you first for your thoughts on this. I know we've been chatting a little bit on Slack and other kind of communication channels about this. Talk to me about your sort of initial reaction to this. Because I think this ties into a theme we've talked about for years on the podcast, which is this strains of genuine anti-Semitism on the right and on the left in circles up times. And then accusations of anti-Semitism being deployed that. Sometimes correlate, but don't always correlate with those. So what's happening here? What is this dynamic and what does it tell us about these kind of broader trends? Yeah, I mean, I think to me it's just a sign that Jews control everything because, of course, it was only when you went after the Jews that this caused the Civil War and the conservative movement. So I really don't have much to say about that. Except, you know, look, sometimes people like Nick Fuentes. Except you can't wait to be on Tucker Carlson's. Oh, yeah. Tucker Carlson, baby. The invitation is coming. I got a Z. I got an S.H in my last name. I'm here for you, man. Take that, Alan Alda. The problem, okay, the problem with the no enemies on the right is that the right has Nazis at some point. I'm not sure how much more there is to say about that, right? Like, this is the problem with no enemies on the left. There are lunatics on the far fringe of the left. There are also lunatics on the far fringe of the right. And although there is absolutely anti-Semitism on the left, right? And like real, like a real unambiguous prejudice anti-Semitism. We can have an interesting debate whether being anti-Israel at a certain point is anti-Semitic in a structural sense. It's an interesting conversation. We can have that. But like, we don't have to have that conversation right now, right? Because... Just as there are real out-and-out anti-Semites on the far left, there are real out-and-out anti-Semites on the far right, and there are more of them on the far right than there are on the far left, right? This is just a fact that you can, you'll confirm with a ton of social science data, both historical and current. You know, we call those people Nazis, and Nick Fuentes is one of them. And it's just, it's not, like this is not a complicated issue, right? This is not like Nick Fuentes has like interesting views about the role of the Israel lobby. No, no, that's not what we're talking about here, right? He just hates Jews, which you're allowed to do in a free country, right? Enjoy. But you're also allowed to be upset about that and you're allowed to criticize people. And you're also allowed to criticize people like Tucker Carlson, who himself has gotten a little weird over the last years. And look, when you invite someone like Nick Fuentes on. to your show and you basically don't ask any questions, you don't push back at all, not because frankly that's your schick, right? You have no problem pushing back against Ted Cruz, right, when he comes on. No, you've made a conscious choice. Well, then we can, I think, criticize you for that. And if you have just a no, no enemies on the right mentality, it's going to lead you to very bad places. And, you know, I think what we're seeing is that

On a universal sense, I don't know if there's specific comments he thought he was responding to. You can't really tell that from what John Roberts is saying. Although I haven't gone back to watch the Tucker Carlson interview, if I'm being honest, but from readouts of it, I understand. And then he's essentially saying people who try and use that divisiveness are the enemy. So he's making a point saying, hey, it's people who lump anti-Semitism and critique of Israel in. He's trying to divide those two and put Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes in the latter. The irony is that this is kind of the opposite move. Heritage has been playing with folks on the left for a long time. Remember, Heritage is the founders of the project Esther, right, which is kind of the strategy. I think it formed a lot of what the Trump administration has been doing to target pro-Palestinian networks, of which I think we should acknowledge there is an anti-Semitic vein that often weaves its wealth through there, but along with many other veins that I think. can be really separated from that. But describes it, I'm taking this from the top line of the summary. There's literally the first line of the summary to the report from late 2024, this project release. Americans, virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American pro-Palestinian movement, quote unquote, is part of a global Hamas support network that is trying to compel the U.S. government to abandon. It's a longstanding support for Israel. So Heritage is switching the game on this. And I think it's really telling that they are trying to do that now, albeit a little unsuccessfully. And it mirrors something, a difficult conversation that sometimes happens on the left, too, although somewhat with lower stakes, I think that's the reason that you describe, Alan. Ben, how do you react to this? Am I on to something here? Does this strike you as like a weird shift in how at least this prominent element of the conservative movement is thinking and talking about this stuff? Yes, absolutely. But it's a grave they dug for themselves, frankly. So the first thing that... people who are not steeped in this stuff need to understand is that anti-Semitism is not political uh there is such a thing as political anti-Semitism but there is no thing there's no ideological thing in all of american political debate that is as old as anti-Semitism racism johnny come lately right that's a creature of Spanish and Portuguese and British confrontation with native peoples in various continents, 1,500 years more recent than, you know, than anti-Semitism, right? Antisemitism is old and it is primal, and it exists in all political movements. And the mistake that the conservative movement under Trump made was to declare war on anti-Semitism as though it is a creature of the left. And sure, there is left anti-Semitism. Left anti-Semitism tends to disguise itself as anti-Zionism, though anti-Zionism is legitimate and real and has its own autonomous arguments. If you're a lefty who hates Jews, you tend to direct that at Israel. You tend to think of it in terms of just not minding Hamas very much, right? This is not the right wing.

version. The right wing version is more about just hating Jews. And it's as Alan described. I mean, have you met any of us? I mean, we are contemptible. And so what happens is the Trumpies, the Project 2025 Project Esther crowd, thinks you can lop on to... and adopt as a kind of ideological position, anti-anti-Semitism, meaning You'll go after the left because they're pro Hamas, to the extent that some of them are, you go after universities, it's a good way of yelling about, you know, post-colonialist ideology, right? And then you have this inconvenient fact that it's not the left camp that houses Tucker Carlson or Nick Fuentes, right? And you suddenly realize that... There are a bunch of people who have really kind of old, traditional, undisguised fangs-beared anti-Semitic attitudes. And, you know, Nick Fuentes is particularly noxious in this regard. But Tucker Carlson's no picnic himself. And, you know, he talks about Jews in ways that, you know, did not. Until quite recently, we're just not respectable in mainstream modern American society, and that Tucker Carlson of 15 years ago would never have dared talk. And so you realize as the Heritage Foundation that you've... You've created a house in which you actually can't live because there are too many of the people who you've declared to be rats and pests and vermin of, like right inside your own house. And then you have to defend them because... you don't actually have a neutral principle here, like that anti-Semitism is bad. What you have is that your side is right and fights against anti-Semitism, by which you mean fights against the anti-Semitism, the particular varieties of it that are anti-Semitism of the left. And there is one group of people who really, really should know better than to fall for this shit. And that's Jews.

And the remarkable thing about the last few years of the debate about anti-Semitism is how many Jews sign up for one side or another and say, yeah, like, the problem is the anti-Semitism of the left or the problem is the anti-Semitism of the right. And, you know, the truth of the matter is that if you look at anti-Jewish violence around the country, It is pretty distributed. Sometimes people who attack synagogues are people who just hate Israel and cannot distinguish from a left point of view and cannot distinguish between their local Jews and the Israeli government. And sometimes they are neo-Nazis. And you would be surprised how diverse. the population of people who really hate Jews is. And so the thing that mystifies me about all of this is how unsophisticated Jews are about the anti-Semitism and the politics of it. And, you know, a Native American friend of mine once said to me about, I promise this is relevant, about state borders and Canadian and Mexican borders in relation to tribal identity, your political borders don't map onto our reality. And that's how I feel about anti-Semitism. You know, your politics, America, left, right, center, you know, Groyper, you know, free Palestine. Your politics do not map onto... a 3,500-year-old Jewish reality. And if you want to understand anti-Semitism, you got to start in ancient Greek. I feel like every Jew should have, you know, next to their Mizuzza, a horseshoe, like, just to remind them of the reality of politics, right? Which is that, like, to be a diaspora Jew. I'm not talking about a Jew in Israel, right? They can pick whatever politics they want, and I don't think Judaism is naturally a quote unquote liberal religion, right? It's an old, like if you read the Old Testament, like it's quite a book. But diaspora Judaism needs liberalism, small L liberalism, right? Because that's in the middle of the horseshoe. And if there's, you know, the ends of the horseshoe meet and it's very ugly. And I will say to your point, Ben, about kind of the most annoying thing about this being the sort of naivete of so many Jews, right? Again, some on the left, some on the right. as much times over the years, right? My parents are Soviet Jewish refugees or they came into the 70s and 80s, and a lot of their friends came in the 90s. And so, like, a lot of the family friends that I grew up with, right, are these sort of former Soviet, former Russian Jews. And the number of them that have become Trump supporters in the last family friends in the last few years, and look, you're allowed to become a Trump supporter for whatever reason, fine, okay, right? But the specific reason that they were worried about anti-Semitism on college campuses. It's fine to worry about, you can worry about anti-semitism on a college campuses. I am, you can, you can be worried about that. Totally fair. I'm worried about that, right? But to throw your lot in with these blood and soil nationalists, like how do you think this ends well for Jews, right? Like, which is, by the way, not the only important question in American life, but even if it's the only thing you care about, this does not end well for Jews.

As, I mean, I've been sitting here as they, as always, as Ben knows this and Alan knows like as the non-Jew and is that, as the kind of the one who's kind of ignorant a lot of these. If you work for law fair, you're honorary. Scott Anderson is like, what are you like Swedish or something? So I'm like, that's the I have never met anyone more Jewish than Scott R. Anderson. And I am assumed that R stands for Rizdal or something. But I just want to like, I just got to say that like this has been as an outsider kind of looking at this and watching this debate to go take it back to the Tucker Carlson kind of moment in the heritage moment. I've got to say like nothing. I'm like what was what did they think would happen? Like what did like there's nothing. It's kind of where you started out, Alan, which was like I'm like, okay. So like am I missing something here? Like. This is just an inevitability. There was always going to be Maga had a insane white nationalist faction that was like a huge part of it. And then there was the Jewish son-in-law of like the president and all of the people that he represented and the people that he brought in under the Maga tent in that capacity. And somehow because of Donald Trump's like insanity, kind of like his, his, his, his bringing people together under kind of this banner of something, making America great again, which also people read as making Israel great again, like basically brought these two things together. And then the war happened in 2023 and there was this conflation of. like this, I thought, like kind of a rapid collapse of like being anti-Israel's anti-Semitic and this kind of thing. And I was like, this is just not going to, this isn't going to end well. Like this is not like there's like there's just like inevitable point as you said it's like on the horseshoe that they're just going to be under the tent together and suddenly Nick Fuentes is going to be sitting next to somebody with like like a Yamika and there's like and he's going to be eating like pork ribs and the guy next to him's going to be you know there's no way there's no way and so like I guess it's weird for me that it was Tucker Carlson but also not that weird because geez what is like what is reality anymore anyways but But, like, to me, this is just kind of like, also, I don't know who, Alan, you were calling the woke right, but like, you know, the white nationalists are like the ultimate, the ultimate policers of identity politics. Exactly. And cancelers. That's the other irony of this. Well, that's why calling the woke right is so endlessly entertaining because they lose their mind because that doesn't match their lived experience. I mean, the jokes, I mean, it just runs, the rights. I mean, totally. I mean, it's just kind of like, you know, when you remind people that actually the KKK and things like that used to be like not just anti-Jewish, but anti-Catholic, people are like, what? Like it was, you know, there is like there is not this understanding that about how much that is like a policed, police, police nonsensical space that has its own like kind of crazy man definitions. And so anyways, I just.

I love Ben's speech about how anti-Semitism doesn't have politics. I think it's completely right. I don't think I've ever heard such a great line spontaneously, Alan, as someone should have a horseshoe. It just came to me in a flash of inspiration, but I do quite like it. But anyways, I just like, you know, this is just to me, the really interesting part, again, is just that this is bubbled up. This is like somehow made it into, into that the, that we, whether we know that this is happening. I always go to like the New York Post or whatever. And like, I'm kind of like, oh, interesting. They're taking a side. That's weird. Like, you know, like literally, like the New York Post go to is to make some random crime against a young white girl, like the cover of like the news for X number of weeks until the scandal passes on Trump or the scandal passes on the left or on the right, some other right wing figure. And right now it's kind of like acknowledging it. And I'm like, oh, that's, that's weird that they're acknowledging the infighting. Well, and I think the timing may not be total coincidence. So I'm wondering if this is in place where Allen and Ben and UK may disagree with me. But I think it reflects a little bit of an intellectual shift that has been quietly happening. And that actually has hit like a bit of a tipping point in the last few weeks, particularly around the Trump administration. Where we've seen in Trump administration historically. exceptionally supportive of Israel and particularly the most kind of nationalist, you know, vision of Israel, you know, occupying the West Bank, annexing the West Bank, excuse me, you know, making broad territorial claims, embracing the fact that there will never be either equal citizenship for Palestinians nor Palestinian state. That vision of Israeli politics, very live, still the dominant vision of the current coalition, although who knows how long it will be with us in Israel, close allies of Trump administration all through Trump one. Still close Trump, too, but noticeably more tension. And in the last two or three months, we have seen a lot more of a divide, right, between the Trump administration and the Benjamin Netanyahu administration, that whole political movement they represent in Israel. It's a very quiet tension because. Trump is very popular in Israel. You see a lot of people who really support him, still believe in him and have faith in Benjamin Netanyahu's avoided any sort of public break. We get lots of reports about infighting. And you look at the terms of the ceasefire that the Trump administration so far is still trying to impose with very mixed success. It's very contrary to what the Benjamin Netanyahu government wanted and said they wanted going in. I'm wondering if you don't see a moment here where people who are critical of the posture towards Israel, which has been a mainstay of conservative, particularly mega foreign policy for the last eight years or so or a little bit longer and conservative foreign policy longer than that, don't see an opening or they're trying to.

wedge in. And that's actually a big deal, not just because of the ceasefire deal, but also because, of course, we have the renewal of the U.S. security support for Israel coming up in the next few years that I think a lot of people expect there to be a real clinched down on by the Trump administration because of it's generally hostile attitudes towards foreign assistance. Am I off on that? This just strikes me as maybe a little bit of a tremor. That has gone off because there is actually a broader with political significant shift, not just about any Semitism, but also about the potential posture towards Israel. And that mirrors a shift that's happening on the left where we've seen the left actually be much more unified and being willing to openly criticize Israel in a way that 20 years ago, even on the left, really didn't happen except in far circles of the left. But on the establishment, left, was really not a thing. Much more common today, even in, you know, Democratic Party platforms for the last few cycles. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, I think one of the reasons why people have been freaking out so much about the Nick Fuentes Tucker Carlson heritage thing. In addition to the fact that it is actually grotesque, right? And you're allowed to freak out on the merits is because I think a lot of conservatives, whether they're conservative pro-Israeli Jews or they're just conservative pro-Israelis who are not Jews, are realizing that the support for Israel is weakening. And it is weakening, you know, not just because of anti-Semitism, but because Israel's conduct over the last... year or two with respect to the war in Gaza has alienated a lot of Americans. It has in particular alienated a lot of American young people, and it has alienated American young people not just on the left, but also on the right. And so I feel like part of the concern here is that we must push back against Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, not only because they are grotesque and awful, but because we are increasingly feeling uncertain about our own position. And also, by the way, you know, Trump's support for Israel is, as with all things, purely transactional and very fragile and at any moment could reverse, right, if it becomes inconvenient for him, right? And it is notable, I think, that Trump is not waiting into this. He is not using his power as head of the party and head of the Magum movement to try to intervene because he knows that Groipers might be a useful part of his coalition. And, you know, he wants to make space for them just as he refused to, you know, condemn the Jews will not replace those people in. in Charlottesville. And one thing that's unfortunate about the Nick Fuentes Tucker Carlson thing is that it is, I'm not sure distracting is the right word because it itself a very important issue, but it is taking out all the oxygen from the room, such that it is very difficult to then have a more normal conversation about, you know, the merits or demerits or whatever it is of, you know, Israel's actions both generally and with respect to the war in Gaza and how that may or may not be affecting support in the Republican Party and among young people. So I actually disagree with you about this, Scott. I think the structure of the MAGA, you know, blood and soil nationalist slash Israel alliance is very strong. And the tolerance for anti-Semitism among the Israeli leadership, at least the Benjamin Netanyahu government, and its...

progeny on the Israeli right will be very near infinite. And the reason for it is that unlike in the 1940s, Jews do not spend a lot of time, or Israeli Jews anyway, do not spend a lot of time fearing white nationalist Jew hatred. They spend a lot of time fearing Arab nationalist Jew hatred and and Islamic fundamentalist Jew hatred. It is not Groypers who conducted October 7th. And so the willingness of the Israeli right and some other components of Israeli society actually to say we will do business with the Viktor Orban of the world, we will do business with the Polish law and justice. people, we will do business with Donald Trump because there are easy transactional relationships. They will support Israeli nationalism is almost infinite. Now, then you say, ah, but Trump just forced down Benjamin Netanyahu's throat, a deal that is very close to the deal that Biden wanted to get. nine months earlier. And fair enough. And to which Benjamin Netanyahu would say, yeah, but I bought nine months by having Trump. And I killed a lot of Hamas guys in those nine months. And I stayed out of prison. And oh, by the way, I'm no worse off for dealing with Trump than I was. And so at the transactional level, they're not wrong to think they do better with the blood and soil nationalists than they do with, you know, human rights oriented center lefties and center righties. And so I actually think the structure of this relationship is pretty stable. And it will take a lot more than a few Nick Fuentes'es. And Kevin Roberts is to disrupt it, to which I say, you know, see earlier, I can't believe the naivete of Jews, and including in this, the Israeli government, that, you know, in the long run, you do not have a relationship with the United States if you have a relationship with one political party. And they have... in the name of this relationship with MAGA, they have destroyed the Israel-America relationship, as we've known it for 50 years. And that was predicated on a much more widespread sense of values commonality between Americans. and Israelis. And that is just gone now for all the reasons that Alan said, at least among people below a certain age. And so I think it's very foolish, but I'm not sure that it's unstable in the way that you describe. Hey, folks, Scott R. Anderson here.

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vial of bubbly green stuff that dissolves feathers but leaves the chicken otherwise intact. And the, um, The physicist stands up, goes to the whiteboard, and starts writing, assume a spherical chicken in a frictionless vacuum. I love that joke. It applies well to legal theorists as well. But the point is that when you're doing policy analysis, you can't just evaluate the policy on the merits, right? You have to actually think about how will it be implemented by the institutions that you have? You go to war with the institutions you have, not the institutions you want. There's a whole field of public choice in economics and political scientists that studies this. And, you know, as I've been reflecting on the TikTok law, and I've been writing about it for more than a year now, mostly for lawford, but also in other places, I think I still stand by my legal analysis and even my policy analysis of the law narrowly construed, right? Like, I always thought it was constitutional. At the end of the day, 12, you know, United States judges, you know, nine Supreme Court justices and three D.C. judges, you know, agreed that it was constitutional. I still think TikTok had real national security threats on both the data security and the algorithmic manipulation. I think that's true. But the thing that I completely screwed up, like, man, that I missed this. It never even occurred to me, actually. I mean, I will not make the same mistake again, is how badly the implementation could go, right? Now, I was writing about this, I guess, started in... 2020, kind of early 2024, I kind of still thought that the Democrats would win, but I thought, okay, even if the Democrats lose to Trump, I mean, Trump did try to ban TikTok in his first term, so he's not going to really do anything to stop this law. And the law is very cleverly written after all, because it doesn't really require the executive to do anything. It mostly just uses other American companies and the threats of liability as leverage. And I was just wrong in every single respect on how the law would be implemented. It's just incredibly wrong, right? I did not appreciate that the president would come in and just refuse to enforce it. I did not appreciate that Congress after like, you know, bipartisan vote and the classified meetings and it's like the worst threat ever would say, oh, we passed that thing? I actually don't want to talk about that anymore, right? Let's not ask why the president isn't enforcing this. And the thing that I really did not appreciate, right? was it just never occurred to me in a million years that companies like Oracle and Apple and Google would agree to violate the law and take on nearly a trillion dollars of liability based on, I mean, in Oracle's case, literally nothing, literally a call from not even the... Trump administration. It was still the Trump campaign on January 19th, right, when the law went into effect. And Oracle brought TikTok back online. And then for Google and Apple, I mean, they at least waited until they got those idiotic Pam Bondi letters that said nothing. But either way, to me, the real lesson of the TikTok.

saga and just a learning for me like I just I failed I just failed as a policy analyst like you're not allowed to say well it never occurred to me the institutions would fail no no I'm that's what I'm paid to figure out right like that's part of my job it just never occurred to me and and so those are those are my lessons learned right which is a policy is is worth shit if your institutions can't execute it and I won't make that same same mistake again okay so but Kate what do you think Okay, so I'm going to, I want to give you a little bit more credit. So here's the credit that I'm going to give you. One, I thought that you were right and I was totally wrong. We disagreed about this from the very beginning. I loved your analysis, but I thought it was completely incorrect as the TikTok case started on the First Amendment. Yeah, the legal analysis. The legal analysis I thought you were totally off about. I thought that there would just, I just thought that the First Amendment. would hold up more than it did. And that the national security pretext would be more obvious to the justices. I thought that this was just going to have, that was going to have a lot more sway. And I was shocked. I mean, in my defense, I don't think that I was alone. Like a lot of, like a lot of First Amendment and tech scholars thought that were surprised by how that went. But you were correct. They used the justices from the circuit court to the Supreme Court. You were completely. completely taken by the by the justification for the national security concerns around this that i thought and still think we're bullshit so so i really think you have to give yourself kind of credit for that the second thing that you're beating yourself up about i want to say is like a much broader point and not about the tick talk law at all which is just you know we have had this unprecedented moment in which no one anticipated that we would have kind of the levels of corruption and the levels of of not just like in our institutions but just the the pure just like non-adherence to the law in like all of these different ways And so there was like there is no, there was no path. Like you would have, I mean, in fact, everyone would have thought you were completely batch it and maybe you would have been, if you didn't have tenure, you would, it would be up for a review again. If you had argued in 2024, you know, before all of this happened, that like what was really going to happen was now that the law was just going to get ignored and stuck in a drawer that despite all of the fines that were the hundreds of millions of fines that can. And still as far as I know. Hundreds of hundreds of hundreds of Billions of fines that can, as far as I can tell, can still be retroactively, like, retroactively enforced against these companies by a new administration, just FYI, like that all of these things, I mean, so I just don't, like, I enjoy listening to you to say how wrong you were. You can do that as much as you want, but I will say. I'll send you a voice memo. Yeah, I, this is great. So I'll just start my day with this.

But this is like, I do think that this was a sui generous moment in time. I think, and I mean, I'm kind of, like, I always kind of like take moments like this, but like, I think that this is just actually has gotten less attention than it deserves for the very basic constitutional rule of law and institutional collapse that it represents. Because like all of these administrative institutions, always kind of thin. We've argued about this shit forever. There's all kinds of stuff about the unitary executive and the independence of the administration of like the administrative state and how all of this works. And so like the collapse of those under the weight of the presidency is like fairly fairly kind of established. The collapse of the judiciary under like after years of Fed Sock appointments and everything else under the weight of this administration. also maybe like kind of like kind of foreseeable over the last number of years but like just deciding to throw out laws that congress made like by sticking them in a drawer and making sweetheart deals with the with the doj and like having the like the attorney general write a letter like a like a you know larry ellison you can stay home from school today letter Like about the TikTok law is just like absolutely it's bonkers. And that is just like the one of the most fundamental like schoolhouse rock parts of like our entire legal system. And I can't believe it hasn't been a bigger deal that we just ignored an act of Congress. Yeah, I just want to add to this that it is not the job of a policy analyst or to say, assume that the entire system fails to work. And when we do policy analysis, we are always operating within a certain set of understandings of the way the system works. Usually in the United States, the law, capital T, capital L, is one of those parameters that you say, well, okay, they'll be interpretive, give in how they understand, but they're not going to take the, oh, fuck it, just violate it approach to the law when they're, say, major companies with a lot of shareholders or, you know. the executive branch administration, and Congress would do something to prevent that. And I think once you dispense with that, the universe of possible policy becomes infinite, because you've taken away all the constraints on it, and you're basically dealing with a warlord culture. And I don't think it's quite fair to... 2003 and 24, Alan Rosenstein, to have said, you know, he was supposed to expect that we'd be in kind of Mad Max land by now. And, you know, the last thing on anybody's mind in Mad Max land is the TikTok ban. And so I think you're being a little hard on yourself.

As much as I shot in Freud or with Kate on. I'm just doing that to guilt you all to be nice to me. That's the key. You got to come in really negative on yourself because then then Kate's like, oh man, I got to be nice to this guy. He's so pathetic. To Ben's point, I think it's like the equivalent of exactly that. I think it's the equivalent of like being like, oh, the thing that I didn't foresee about this game of risk that I am playing. is the dog that would come into the room and knock the entire board off the table with its tail. Like that is like, you know, like this is just not, this is not in the realm of foreseeability, Alan. So I think that like, and like maybe it was, but like it's not an interesting prediction. And so because it's so kind of absolutely mercurial and subject to chance. And so I think that that is, I don't, you know, I think that that's kind of what I would go a little easy on yourself about. Yeah, the one part of this I go back to, which I feel like we've come back to every time we've talked about this on the podcast, Alan, is that moment in January 14th through 19th, 2025, the week before the ban went into effect, which I think was on the 19th, I think the day before Trump sworn in, where everyone on Capitol Hill, particularly Democrats freaked out and tried to pass a bill to extend it. And we're basically stopped by Mitch McConnell. because he was a big backer of this bill, you know, the exiting Senate majority leader at that point. I guess not majority leader at that point, but like, you know, Senate Republican leader. It was this moment where clearly the political backbone to do with the law said was gone. Where it existed was in corners of Trump's own party. And the takeaway I take from this is. It underscores that in the Trump administration, I don't think the law doesn't matter. I think it does still. But the Trump administration is constrained only so far as it actually gets institutional pushback, not just on the good faith norms and the unenforceable constitutional values as right founders may be that have driven past presidential administrations. And so in that context, like I look back, and I agree, I don't think I would have seen this happening at the same time. But it's a lot easier to see how you see this fact pattern come about. The real question, I think, then becomes, A, what if Congress hadn't lost its spine on this? What if there were still a colorable majority in some corner of Congress, which there really isn't at this point, that still wanted to see a law like this get passed? And the Trump administration were doing it in the face of this, would these companies have bought into this? Or what if this were happening in 2027? where Trump was just a year out. I think the fact that this is happening at the very beginning of Trump's administration and the fact that you had a complete collapse of political support for this ban really is a driver of... the political dynamics that allowed for this to happen and particularly allowed the companies to buy into it, which I think is the essential element that I wouldn't have seen coming because it is such a clear nonsense legal argument about why they're not subject to these fines. But am I, is that being too generous to you, Alan? No, no, I actually take you of being less generous than Kate and Ben and trying to explain why this might have in part been foreseeable. And no, I think you're diagnosing the situation.

I think you're diagnosing the situation correctly. You know, I think to me, the question is like, what do we do going forward, right? As, as. policy and legal analysts, right? And I think in retrospect, I kind of, I, it occurs to me now in this conversation that like this is how I should have actually ended the piece, not just like what I got wrong, but what this means going forward. Because I think to Ben's point, like, it's very hard to be a legal animist, legal analyst. The legal animist, I do like that, though, a legal analyst if the law doesn't apply anymore. Like I sometimes talk to, I have like political science friends. And they'll be like, oh, what's going to happen here and there when the Supreme Court does this? And I'm like, guys, you're basically asking what happens when the law breaks. You're the political scientists. You tell me, I'm just the umpire of the game. But if the players decide to start, like, hitting each other over the head with like bats and knives, like, you don't even, I'm just a guy. I'm just a guy. Right. And so I think that to me, the kind of most depressing thing about this is going forward. It kind of fills with a kind of nihilism, right? Because. I know, like, all of my fancy legal education is only useful insofar as it exists within a structure of the law. And if that's not even useful for that anymore, because chat GPT is going to get that for you. I guess that's- You're going to screw it either way. I'm just some guy, right? And, like, let's be clear. I don't have a lot of skills. Just end it with that. You should see this man swinging hammer. We know. Well. Speaking of some questionable legal arguments being deployed by some lawyers out there, let us turn to our third topic with our remaining time. And this is the question of the increasingly central role that some familiar terms to national security lawyers of a certain generation are intimately familiar with. OG lawfare, one might say. OG lawfare. What this site used to actually be about. Exactly. I mean, it is, it's weird. It's a weird year to be a national security lawyer. Like, as somebody who studied this stuff when it was fairly obscure, you know, 15 years ago when I was in law school, it's crazy to think that the Supreme Court's about to rule on the insurrection, well, not quite the interaction act, on domestic military deployments and the use of IEPA in unprecedented contexts and like what it means to be a national emergency. And then we have things like this, which is the return of these terms that really have. haven't been used prevalently in like a decade, at least in new ways, like unlawful enemy combatant. And the creation of new terrorist designation regimes, the fact that these terrorist groups are being called DTOs, designated terrorist organizations, I'm assuming. Not a designation that exists, but there was a period where we were making up new terrorist designations kind of every week. And particularly, we saw here now, Pete Hegseth saying quite expressly in his most recent statement on the most recent strike, or maybe I think it was actually one strike ago at this point, saying we're going to treat these people just like we treat al-Qaeda, trying to draw these really clear parallels saying this is global war on terrorism 2.0 now we're engaging in.

And I was asked, so the reason I wanted to talk about this topic is I asked to come on NPR this past weekend and talk about this, which I did, which I really appreciate them having me on. And I both thought it was interesting to have the substantive conversation about what it means specifically in that context, when they say things like unlawful enemy combatant to describe the people who survived these strikes and were brought on a ship and detained, but also. In my mind, a point that I kind of tried to write home, and they were kind enough to include in the radio segment that ended up airing, this idea that I think this is all just a faint. Like, this is a rhetorical move by the administration that has less legal import than cultural import. It is a, it's a distraction. It's camouflage. And Ben, no one's followed this stuff more closely than you have over the last. 25 or 30 years we've been living with it. Call Benjamin Netanyahu Woodhouse Old at that calling Benjamin Netanyahu Wooden's old. We've all been living with him for 25 or 30 years. I've been around. I've been aware of it, but I was living with it. So I've been, I mean, tell me, I don't know if you listen to the radio segment. I'm not offended if you're not. But, you know, my basic take is that I think a lot of this is just window dressing. I think there's less substantive import to it. It doesn't mean that they're not substantive import that they're deploying these terms, but the reason they're doing it is about. trying to guise from people what it is they're doing, to make it look more normal than it is. Am I off on that? Or why do you think they keep turning to this global war on terrorism rhetoric to describe what they're doing? Well, so I think some of it is window dressing, as you say, but some of it's worse than window dressing. Some of it is bullshit. For example, the idea that you can... conduct kinetic strikes against members of an organization because you have designated that organization as a terrorist organization is gibberish. It's not window dressing. The reason we can hit al-Qaeda lawfully is not that al-Qaeda is a designated foreign terrorist organization. That's the reason we can prosecute people for giving money to al-Qaeda. The reason we can hit al-Qaeda lawfully is that Congress passed an authorization to use military force against al-Qaeda. and declared us to be in an armed conflict with al-Qaeda and the international community, though it regrets it in retrospect, recognized that. And we... have relied on that, and nothing remotely like that exists in this context. This is a set of rhetorical games that would be merely stupid and kind of juvenile, except that it does involve killing people. And so if I sound a little bit...

repulsed by the whole thing. Honestly, it's because I am. And I want to explain my sense of revulsion at it. So throughout... the second Bush administration, the Obama and the Obama administration. So it's really 12 years. I spent time saying and arguing with people and in good faith that there are strong steps you need to take because this threat is very real. And some of those steps are really unpleasant and they have civil liberties implications and we hate them. And yet the law has to tolerate it anyway. And we have to build legal structures for that. And I resisted the idea that there was a slippery slope. Because kind of like Alan and TikTok, I did not say, well, you know, the next administration is going to come in and... the dog tail is going to hit the risk board, and we're going to be in a completely different universe. And actually, the first Trump administration didn't do that. The first Trump administration did some things that I'm not thrilled, wasn't thrilled about, but they were mostly coloring roughly within the lines in these areas. And it turns out that slippery slope was the wrong metaphor. It's not that we slid our way down a slippery slope. We literally jumped out a window. And I, you know, as somebody who made arguments for a lot of these authorities, really resisting the idea that you could use them in good faith against, you know, domestic targets. And let's. let's face it, these domestic deployments are about using, you know, calling Antifa a terrorist organization and using that to justify domestic military deployments. That is, you know, a domestic application of something that I really didn't believe had domestic application. So. I'm no fan of Trenda Aragua. I'm not, you know, I've not got a brief for them. But I don't believe in killing people randomly who you could arrest. We have an entire organization of the U.S. quasi-military called the Coast Guard, whose job it is to stop small boats coming across the Caribbean Sea and elsewhere carrying drugs. We have tools for this problem and the leap to apply.

these metaphors and legal concepts that were developed for really exigent circumstances, truly, truly difficult circumstances, halfway around the world, for no good reason except to thump your chest and, you know, and show how big your kahanas are. I really find it emotional, at a very emotional level, repulsive, and it makes me feel awkward about a lot of, I still don't know what we were supposed to have done about Anwar al-a-Lauki, so I'm not repenting positions that I took in that period, but it makes me really wonder, did we... inadvertently set the stage for this? Or is this a situation where, you know, the guy was going to use whatever metaphor was convenient? He happens to have used one that is of a high emotional valence to me. But if he didn't have access to that one, he would have used something else. And so it actually doesn't because... Scott's right. It doesn't really have that much substantive content. It's really just a set of window dressings and talking points. But it's really talking points that make me given my own history with this subject, which by the way includes founding lawfare. You know, like lawfare is an outgrowth of my work in this period on this set of subjects. And it makes me very uncomfortable. And in a not just in a sense that, like, it makes me wonder if a lot of what I did and thought and believed was counterproductive and was paving the way to authoritarianism. I mean, it is, it is, it is the structural similarity between the way you're thinking about this issue and me on TikTok. It's, it's remarkable, right? Like, I just think there are going to be so many examples of the, Well, unfortunately, the dog did come in and swipe the risk board. Except, no, but there's a big difference, which is that TikTok is lawlessness that doesn't kill people. And this is lawlessness at the central core of authoritarianism, which is the ability to kill people with impunity. And the moment you apply the same kind of lawlessness that you do with TikTok, which is really about who gets to keep large pots of money. And the stakes there are really big if you have a large pot of money or if you have a phone and you want to use TikTok or not use TikTok, whatever. But this is life and death. And I do think that that's different and more important to the authoritarian project is the ability to threaten people with killing them.

All right. So I do before we close out, I do want to kind of step back for a second because I would just like someone and maybe Scott as our international law guy, you can explain to me. What is the status of our current like military engagements in this domain? Like as far as I can tell, we're bombing random fishing boats. That seems illegal. We're maybe going to invade Venezuela. I think we might be invading Nigeria next. And of course, we're like 100% could invade Canada any moment. I'm just, I have, and I'm asking it's kind of in a funny way, but I have legitimately, and I'm like, I'm like, a reasonably sophisticated legal observer I like to think. I have utterly lost the plot on what it is that we are doing right now. Please someone explain this to me. So, you know, the campaign that's active, most directly relevant to this rhetoric we're hearing, is targeting these drug boats in the Caribbean now in the eastern Pacific as well. And this is where we see this terrorism rhetoric really come out, right? Like this is the focus of what they're doing. And the part that I think are strange, I think it's got kind of like three purposes that we're hearing, right? Like one of it maybe is actually describing legally what they think of the status as people is. So when they say things like unlawful enemy combatant, they're implying both that they're in an armed conflict with these terrorist groups, which is we know part of their legal argument, although for reasons I wrote about after the first strike, it's a... bad legal argument that has a lot of problems. That's the argument they're advancing. And then they're implying, well, unlawful and make combatant, that's what we call people right after 9-11 when we try to detain them and definitely prosecute them for their conduct and hostilities and engage in various conduct that could have arguably, and I think did violate various protections that P.O.W usually get under the Geneva Conventions. Their element of that argument still survive in U.S. legal interpretations today, although there's a lot of barriers to going all the way back to that sort of vision. But the key point of it is like maybe there's some legal substance in there. When you're using that rhetoric, you're actually doing two other things, right? You're saying, A, this is the same thing as we did right after. 2001 in the terrorist tax. And it's absolutely not. You don't have an AUMF. You have no congressional authorization. That matters a lot from a legal perspective, which you did in that case. And by the way, after 9-11, you were actually attacked by an organization that killed Americans through very conventional violence, through something that looked a lot like an armed attack, which is supposed to be both international law and usually under constitutional law, the sort of thing that we respond to with military force. That doesn't exist here. That's the real difference. These are people who are doing things that are harmful to Americans, undoubtedly, but very indirectly for very attenuated routes and not the sort of thing we use violence against. And by calling them terrorists, but using these sorts of lump ends, they're really trying to say what we're doing now is exactly what we did after 9-11, exactly we've been doing the last 25 years. And it's just not true.

And this is like my concern, I think, is the more people spend time engaging with these legal arguments saying, well, what if they are terrorist groups? What does that matter? Buying into these terrorist destinations that, again, this administration is mostly fabricated. Like, they call them DTOs because the FTO, SDGT designation they've applied actually don't do anything useful to them. They're about economic sanctions and terrorism prosecution have nothing to do with use of force. They're camouflage. You make it look like a counterterrorism operation and hoping nobody questions you. when you know the underlying foundation is there. And then part of on top of that is also it's camp. They want to look tough because they're saying they think the toughest America has ever been was right after 9-11 attacks. And they want to go back to that, that unburdened power, lethality, pegs that's always talking about. And it's just camp vision. And you know that as long as you don't accidentally kill an America and no one will have standing to challenge it. And so the bullshit, which you can. get away with in the public arena, apparently, but you couldn't get away with in court, actually doesn't have a mechanism to be called. Exactly. Exactly right. Until you detain someone or you kill an American. And even then, frankly, in the latter case, I haven't been able to clearly figure out how you would get a case before U.S. courts, although I think there would have to be some sort of range challenges you can bring in. Well, that brings us to the end of our time together today. Unfortunately, we're going to have lots of opportunity to revisit, particularly that last topic, as well as perhaps that pending invasion of Venezuela, that Alan mentioned that we've talked about the last few episodes that may yet be coming forward. But until then, this would not be rational security. If we did not bring you with some object lessons to ponder over in the week to come until we are back in your podcatcher, Ben, what do you have for us this week? I have a five-word object lesson. I have a... new projector. Hey. That is a hell of an object. Very nice. That's all. That's it. We'll see what with the fruits from that projector come forward. TBD. TVD. What did you bring for us this week for your object lesson? Okay. So I continue down my deep, deep rabbit hole into well-written genre fiction. So I think the last time I was on RATSEC, I... Recommended a book by the fantasy writer Robert Jackson Bennett called The Tainted Cup. It was called the Leviathan trilogy. Well, he only, God damn him, only wrote two out of the three books, so I had to go to an earlier trilogy of his. And I have been mainlining, I think what it might be an even better trilogy, the Divine Cities. I am almost through the first book, City of Stairs, and it is so good. The thing I love most about his work, I realized, is that... They're basically spy thrillers with all the political machinations and like interesting politics, but in a fantasy setting. And taking that part of the fantasy world very seriously is what I've realized is like my favorite part of genre fiction. So it's beautifully written. It continues to be a really good author. He has yet another trilogy after this that I suspect I'll be raving about in six months on RATSEC. So I highly recommend City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett. Oh, wonderful, wonderful suggestion. For my object lesson this week, I am bringing you the nerdiest object lesson I've ever brought or shared in rational security, and I'm very proud of that to bring forward today. Folks who listen may know two things about me. I think I've given enough glimpses of it here on the podcast. I both love outer space. I think space is really cool. I'm intrigued and obsessed with it. I spend a lot of time reading about it. Weird space technology, the fact that we will all be astronauts, perhaps by the end of our natural lifespan. Very exciting for me.

And I think it's really, really interesting, particularly this kind of like next 30 years that we're living through where space exploration is coming to the fore for all mankind. One of my favorite shows for that reason. And I also dabble, although I don't really have much time to do it these days, but I dabble and enjoy a wide variety of games. And that includes tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, where occasionally you pretend to be a little character and take them through adventures. And I really enjoy that sort of thing. I never get to do it, but I do enjoy it. And these two interests of mine have intersected in a very exciting way in that there is now a new... role-playing game that's being kick-started. That is all about astronauts taking the first leaps into outer space and building lunar... like habitations and then extending on to Mars. And it's super interesting. It's basically for all mankind if you were to take it and you want to tell your own stories and play your own adventures in this early space era. I'm super excited about it seems super interesting. I read their little preview and has lots of really interesting, nerdy, gritty space stuff. If you are like a hard sci-fi junkie and very excited about learning about space stuff and then maybe telling little stories with it, I think it's great. So I backed it on Kickstarter. Not something I usually do, but I thought I'd check it out. I'll I think the company is called Mongoose. Yeah, Mongoose publishing that also publishes Traveler. I think I like famous sci-fi RTTRBG from decades ago. And this is kind of like a riff on that, but it's a freestanding system. I think it looks super cool. I'm super excited about it. It's extremely nerdy. I will probably not get to play it until my kids are old enough and I can make them play it with me. But when that happens, I'm going to be ready and I'm stoked for it. So check it out. And if anybody wants to play, you know, drop me a line. Let me know. Maybe we'll find a way to do it. Kate, with that, now that I've publicly humiliated myself, I hand it over to you. You've been sharing your freakish-looking object lesson on camera for the rest of us. What is that exactly? I just want to say that you guys all have like these, like I, you know, these. super nerd like that are like kind of like oh i'm so nerdy but also i'm so cool and it's because i'm so nerdy and smart but i just want to say that i've had to sit next to for this entire hour and half of taping this episode this giant romanesque holly flower that i bought at the farmer's market and just took out of the oven and was Before Ratzak and was like, oh, I can just bring this for my object lesson to the next room. And so I did. And it is just beautiful in all its fractal glory. I love. It is such a weird vegetable. It is so gorgeous. It's like it's just so, so cool. It's like the, you know, it's the. It's the Fibonacci sequence of like the kind of the natural. So it's just so neat. And I just, if you've never seen a Romanesque cauliflower, you should, you should Google it. It's one of the most beautiful vegetables that's ever existed. I never saw one until like age 27 when I was in a farmer's market in Philadelphia and had like a small freak out in front of some friends. Because I was like, what the hell is this? Because it looks so unnatural when you look at it because the pattern is so.

perfectly like mathematical. It does not look like it's from this planet Earth. But it is. I'm very curious how you come up with it. So I have made roast. I love, as a vegetarian, like, I love big roastheads of cauliflower and broccoli. I do that a lot as like a dramatic mane for a look if I'm having vegetarian guests over or doing a meal for my kids. I have had trouble getting Romanesque right because it has this flavor that's like half broccoli, half cauliflower, and it has like a little more like. green flavor in it. I don't know how else to describe it, like a little more of that kind of like slight bitterness and earthiness, that I haven't figured out exactly like what to pair it with. So I'd be curious, curious what you find of it. If you think you found a good combination, you know, share it with me, send it my way. Or if listeners think you've got anything, send it my way about how to prepare it. Because I want to dive back into Romanesque, but after a couple of like mediocre products, I went back to regular cauliflower, but I'm not resistant to trying again. Okay. I'll let you know how this goes. Yeah, fingers crossed. Well, folks, that brings us to the end of this week's episode. But Rational Security is, of course, a production of lawfare. So be sure to visit us at Lawfaremedia.org for our show page with links to past episodes for our written work. and the written work of other Lawfare contributors and for information on Lawfare's other phenomenal podcast series. While you're at it, be sure to follow Lawfare on social media wherever you socialize your media. Be sure to leave a rating or review wherever you might be listening. Sign up to become a material supporter of Lawfare for an ad-free version of this podcast, among other special benefits. For more information, visitlawfaremedia.org slash support. Our audio engineer and producer this week was me of me, and our music as always was performed by Sophia Yan. We are once again edited by the wonderful Jen Pacha. On behalf of my guests, Kate, Ben, and Alan. I am Scott R. Anderson. We will talk to you next week. Until then, goodbye.