Is Nick Kristof’s blood libel this century’s Dreyfus Affair?

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a rather very detailed study of the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas after October 7th. So when it's an accusation coming from these anti-Israel types, it's more often than not a form of confession. Now, Matt, what really shocked me about this, Nick has been a friend of the program for most of the 25 years I've been on the air. I've had him on dozens of times whenever he had a book come out, occasionally when he had a column. I considered him sort of an old guard Democrat liberal, but not crazy. That column is crazy. It also cannot be verified. If you can train up a half dozen to a dozen people. to tell the same lie. Outrageous, though, it might be. The idea of dogs trained to rape humans, it's so absurd. It's just so absurd. But you can't disprove it. It's an unfalsifiable proposition. How could the New York Times have allowed that to be printed? Why would Nick Christoph go for the bait? Well, because I think great many people are given to the most lurid fantasies and conspiracies about the state of Israel. and the Jewish people. And let's not forget, we're living in a climate hue of conspiratorial paranoia. When you consider that what one in four Americans think that the White House correspondence dinner attack on the president was staged, one in three people believe that one of the... Trump assassination attempts has been staged. There's just this bent toward paranoid conspiratorial thinking that's, I think, aggravated by social media. But the point is this, is that the New York Times has very selective editorial standards. And that is, they apply no editorial standards when it comes to Israel and the opponents of Israel. This is the same people that has what lavish praise on this guy, Hasan Piker, in recent months, a person who's justified murder. who's justified theft, who, of course, is anti-Israel, wants to see the Jewish state gone. And yet he's being lionized by the New York Times, the same paper that Prince Nick Christoph's scurrilous attack on the Israeli penal system. I'm going to come back to Hasan Piker in a second because I have a proposition for you to explain. You've got to have a universal theory to explain everything that's nuts out there. But first, you're familiar with the Dreyfus affair, which was a invented conspiracy to finger a French officer who was Jewish at the turn of the 19th century. That was the first evidence of widespread anti-Semitism within the French military. Is that a good summary of it?

Yeah, yeah, I think so. And I think it was a sense of rising anti-Semitism in Europe more generally. The Dreyfus affair there in the late 19th century became kind of the signature issue, the defining issue of the time about the place of Jews in European society, in institutions. And the Dreyfus Farras, of course, signaled kind of the turn that Europe would take toward authoritarianism and totalitarianism in the first quarter. of the 20th century. So I think that Nick's column is the Dreyfus Affair for our time. And I don't know who's going to write Jacques Hughes this time, but someone has to write that. And I don't know where it would come from because the Dreyfus Affair took a good 10 years to unravel in its conspiracy. Now, it was invented by a crazy lunatic anti-Semite who had fallen for the protocols of the Elder of Zion. But... I want to go into later in the program and talk with Admiral Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman about their book about climate war in 2084. And the analogy to climate collapse, what they're positing climate collapse over the next 60 years, intellect collapse. Hasan Piker's a dummy. And Nick Christoph used to be a smart guy and now he writes something that's just sheer stupidity. Do you think we're in a, an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is brooded about as a... potential nominee for the Democratic Party. And she doesn't know anything. Are we in the age of intellect collapse? It's so funny. You mentioned that, Hugh, before coming on today, I was reading Henry Kissinger's memoirs about his trips to China ahead of Trump's trip to China this week. And as I was closing the book, I was thinking, man. how far we've come from Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon plotting out geopolitics with all these concepts, daint, linkage, right, triangular diplomacy, to write Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the Munich Security Conference, embarrassing herself with her inability to answer simple questions about foreign policy. I will say this, though, if you're looking for the Jacques-Cuse on the Christoph piece, I urge everyone to look up Javre de Gour's ex post. on this article because it is just a devastating critique of Christoph and the charges that Christoph makes. And Haviv, who's a friend of the program, of course, is just a brilliant writer. I'm glad to hear he did that. He will be on Thursday. As per Kissinger and Nixon, I went to work for RN in 1978 out in San Clemente. And the first time I sat down with him, he sent me into the library adjacent to his office to get William Blake's to Israeli. And he said, I think it's around page 270. There's a quote. And he gave me the quote. His library was massive. And his recall of what was in his library was impressive. Do you think we've got very many intellects in the public sphere now, in the elected public sphere, like Nixon was? I don't think we have as many as we did then. You know, it was something for Nixon to appoint as his chief foreign policy advisor, Henry Kissinger, or Harvard professor. And then in the first term, to appoint as his chief domestic policy advisor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, another.

Harvard professor, both of whom were kind of conservative in some ways, not so conservative in others. Nixon really, I think, enjoyed being around intellectuals because he was so bookish and he was so interested in ideas. We have people like that in American public life today, but not of the same caliber. There's just a difference, I think. in knowledge. Let's say that our vice president is coming out with his much anticipated second book in a few months about his religious journey. We have a secretary of state who is just in Italy talking about the similarities between Spanish and Italian and saying that he's going to try to learn Italian to deliver a speech there his next trip to Italy. They're out there. Tom Cotton, of course, has a fiercely sharp intellect. They're out there, but they just need to be encouraged. I think one of the reasons that Marco Rubio is shooting up in the very early opinion polling about 2028 is that he's displayed that intellect. In an era of stupidity, idiocracy is everywhere. In an era of ideocracy, when you step forward, either with JD Vance's speech in Europe in 2024 or 2025 and Marco Rubio's speech this year. People like that, man. I'm going to give you the last minute. I think that Christopped is going to mark the New York Times. I don't know. They'll cost it its puzzle subscriptions or its cooking subscription. But I think it's going to mark it even worse than the cotton op-edad explosion did it a few years ago. Agree or disagree. I hopefully agree with you. I will say one last thing, Hugh, and that is, in reference to climate wars and climate change. Anti-Israel sentiment, anti-Zionism, has replaced the climate hysteria as the linking concept on the left. And that's bad, not only for supporters of Israel, ultimately it's very bad for the left and the Democratic Party. You're right. It's going to ruin them. It's going to make them a party of cranks and conspiracy theorists that will be... open to Dreyfus level flowback when the facts come out. Matt Continenty, thanks. Hope to talk you on Friday. Follow him on exit. Continenti. Read them in the Wall Street Journal. Stay tuned to today's Tuesdays.

Welcome back, America. I'm Hugh Hewitt, joined now by Rich Lowry, editor of National Review. And I'm making Rich do a distasteful thing, which is to talk about the Nick Christoff column in the New York Times. The opinion piece is entitled The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians. It is an absurd piece. It is absurd on its face. It's also disgusting in its details. And Rich, you hadn't read it when I first got you out in the line. I don't know if you had a chance to read it in between. It's so disgusting, I don't blame you, but it's a blood libel. How does it get past the New York Times editorial board? Yeah, so the standard should be you publish stories that you can actually confirm that are true. And Christoph basically admits that he can't do that with regard to many of these stories, which are utterly fantastical, reminds me a little bit of the child abuse hysteria in the United States having to do with daycare facilities in the 80s or 90s or wherever it was, where these kids just said things that just were impossible, but they were believed. because it was part of the hysteria for ideological reasons, and Zionist rapist dogs is really something worthy of the protocols of the elders of Zion that shouldn't be making it into what used to be, at least, our paper of record. Yeah, the McMartin preschool was based upon, quote, recovered memories, and that was revealed to be a falsehood. Jewish space lasers, I think that might have been Marjorie Taylor Greene. And we all just kind of had a laugh about that. Then we had the Janet Cook. She invented a serial fabulous. There were other serial fabulous. That's not Nick Christop. He's been a guest on this show a couple of dozen times. Not anymore. I'm done. But he wrote good book. What happens to people to break their brains and lose their standard? Because even if you heard this story 13 times, your internal clock would say, This is crazy stuff. Yeah, well, when you want to believe a story, your standards go out the window and you're guilty of over-curdulity, which clearly seems to be the case here. Now, I don't doubt you, right, that there are Palestinian prisoners who are abused. Prisoners are abused in every prison system in the world, including, unfortunately, and ours, if you're civilized societies, though, try to stamp it out and obviously don't encourage it, and I don't believe Israel does. But this is part of an ongoing campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state across every metric. First, there was mass starvation in Gaza. Remember that hysteria? New York Times, also guilty of... pushing bad information in that regard. And it was a myth. It didn't happen. Look, it was a difficult situation because there was an ongoing urban warfare started by Hamas, right? And could have been ended very quickly if Hamas stood up and fought like regular soldiers and been, you know, wiped out in a day by Israel. But that's not what they did. They obviously hid with among civilians and civilian infrastructure. Now we have this. It's never going to stop. There's something about Jews that drives people.

crazy. I think there's a spiritual element to it. I think it's literally infernal, and this is just another symptom. I do think it's infernal. I do think it reminds me of the Dreyfus affair. I just talked to Matt Continenti about that, the accusation against the French Jewish officer at the turn of the 19th century. He was unjustly sent to Devil's Island, later exonerated, served honorably in World War I. It was the work of anti-Semitic extremists within the French army. Usually this sort of stuff jumps out at you and you kind of see it, but I don't expect to see it in the New York Times. And I think it's a very alarming omen. Your colleague, who I greatly admire, Charles C.W. Cook, always says that's a non-falsifiable proposition. I can't argue with it. What Nick has done is stringed together a dozen non-falsifiable first-person testimonies, which reminded me of the Brett Kavanaugh testimony and the Clarence Thomas testimony. Non-falsifiable that fell apart upon scrutiny, but we can't scrutinize these people. They're not under oath. They're not in a... Public hearing. I really am astonished the New York Times published this. Yeah, so they're not coming to Congress to testify inroads, as you point out. Also, just the nature of this, and this was part of the allure of this kind of charge against Brett Kavanaugh and Thomas, right, is once you've made the charge, that itself does a lot of the work for a lot of people. All they know is the headline, they hear the accusation, they don't look into it. They just kind of believe it and go on. So that's why Thomas is so excoriating. And then Brett Kavanaugh, too, in their own. defenses because this is a libelous McCarthyite game just inherently. Yeah, and there's, I don't know what to do except to tell everyone it's ridiculous, absurd, and it's done everything to demolish Nick Christoph's reputation as a good guy. He's a good guy for decades. You know, it goes to Africa, a path appears as one of his books, he and his wife are do-gooders. He wanted to run for governor in Oregon. And all of a sudden it collapses, and it does raise this question about anti-Semitism in America exploding. At what rate do you see it accelerating? You and I are, you're an Episcopalian, I'm a Catholic. We're not Jews, but we're both concerned by its sudden explosion.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think Matt is right. I heard the end of his interview with you where he's talking about this being the new organizing principle, making all the various factions with the Democratic Party cohere. Now, it's a problem on the right. We have a lot of influencers that are pushing this stuff. It's hide, but we haven't seen it really get traction with the office holders, with the mainstream of the Republican Party. But that's not true on the Democratic side. This has real traction. You have senators voting against aid to Israel. You have these out there candidates winning primaries. Maybe the next domino to fall will be the Michigan Center primary. So this is deeply concerning. You at least have one political party compromised by this stuff with perhaps the future of the other up for grabs. Yeah, I had breakfast this morning with the Republican legislator, and I put forward the proposition. The Democrats are collapsing into idiocracy, and they're stuck with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who I don't think reads books. Do you think she reads books? No, no, she doesn't read books. No. What if she'd have time to read books? What is the evidence she's ever read a book? And Gretchen Whitmer, who can't give a coherent answer in Munich. Gavin Newsom is not going to win the spelling bee either. What's happened to the political class? Yeah, so this is the problem they have, right? Trump's standing is not great at the moment going into these midterms. But you look at that generic ballot, and depending on the polling, poll you look at, it's not terrible for Republicans. And I don't think they're doing a lot that's right. It's just the Democratic Party's image is still in the toilet. They have not recovered from 2024. In fact, have declined more since then. And you look at potential standard bearers in 2028, and there are not many that you're inherently afraid of. Now, exit question, Rich Lowry. I think the Iran war can be a political winner. It's a geopolitical winner. It has to be done. They can't have a nuke because they would use it. It's that simple. Do you think the president is making the argument they can't have a nuke, but do you think he's adequately making the argument why, which is because they're lunatics? I think he is, to the best of his abilities. I think this is one of the things like the state of the economy where it just matters whether you – what the fact is on the ground rather than what you're saying about – saying about it so you can – if he can conclude this, reopen the straight, get some sort of deal that's better than the JCPOA, even marginally so. And on top of that, you have the devastation you've wrought on the weapon systems in Iran, on their economy in Iran, such that it'll take them years to recover. I think that's a net benefit to our national security. But whether it's going to be a... upside to it politically, I doubt. I think it's mostly avoiding downsides. Okay, we disagree, Rich Lowry. I think Americans like winning conflicts, and if you can win, force the straight open, push the regime back on its heels. It'll matter in the fall. Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, follow him at Rich Lowry on X. Follow me the next segment.

Welcome back, America. That was President Trump, leaving for China today on the White House lawn. They're either going to do the right thing, meaning Iran, or will finish the job, meaning a resumption of combat. I'm joined by David Drucker, Chief Political Analyst over at the dispatch. David, right now, I believe the Iran War and most public opinion polling is very unpopular. I also believe right now doesn't matter. What matters is how it is by the time. Voting opens up in October. You agree with my assessment of that? Well, it always matters more once the voting begins. And I guess we could look at early voting. You're correct there to note you. Some of this voting will get underway in October, not November. And so I'm not worried. A lot of skies falling Republicans are worried about the numbers. I'm not worried. You've got to win the war, though. David, what is your take on the redistricting wars, assuming for the moment the same number of people turn out in the same districts, and they vote the same way as they did in 2024? Who's winning? There are big assumptions. I realize that, but who's winning in the redistricting? I think, you know, I've thought about this, you haven't written about it yet, but I think the better way to look at this, or the way to look at this, is that the Republicans have a very threadbare majority. It's just, it's less than a handful of seats. And that would mean that you don't need some big blue Democratic wave for Democrats to take control of the House of Representatives. It's sort of the reverse of what was going on in 2022, where Republicans didn't need to win a lot of seats. to take back the house and they didn't win that much but they won enough to take back the house and so you know now when we're looking at the majority i think you know i'm waiting to get to a place where i can add up the number of safe seats versus safe seats what that majority looks like in theory even though those seats are still somewhat contested and then what are the true number of toss-ups i'd say that Obviously, anytime you can put yourself in a position to increase your majority, which redistricting for now for Republicans appear to have, it appears that that's what it has done, then you're going to be in better shape than you were. Is it going to be enough to withstand a wave or even a decent size swell? Probably not, but nothing is certain in politics, and so you do everything you can to maximize your position. Now, I think that's the Cook political report, which is always kind of right down the middle, that right now they say, worst case for Republicans, they have improved. in two districts, best case for Republicans they've improved in 12. I don't know how they get to those numbers because it ought to be the same. Either they've increased the Republican registration or the Trump voter registration in each of it. But generally speaking, more districts have been impacted by Republican efforts to redraw than have been impacted by Democrat efforts to redraw because of the Virginia map. Is that fair assessment?

Well, it's not just the Virginia map. It's the Calais decision out of New Orleans, right? So that allowed Louisiana to redo its map to boost Republican seats by one. And that ruling has allowed other states in the South where seats were subject to the Voting Rights Act to redraw maps. So we're seeing that in Tennessee and I think possibly Alabama. We might see it elsewhere. And so you combine that with what happened in Virginia with the state Supreme Court throwing out the net gain. I think it would have been a net gain of four for Democrats. And that, you know, that helps boost Republican margins. Again, I don't, just given the size of the majority to begin with, with so threadbare, don't know that it's going to be enough, but it is going to. to create a margin that is bigger than what the majority appears today, and it's going to mean that the minimum gain for Democrats to win back the House naturally goes up. If it is a blue wave, I also want to caution my Republican listener, if it is a blue wave in 26, that means the states that take uniparty control, both houses of the state house, except Nebraska, which is unicameral, and the governorship, they can write the maps again. We're in an era of maximum partisanship. Like, you're fully employed, David Drucker. This is your thing. You're fully employed for as long as you want because we are in the middle of partisanship time. Well, I just don't think it'll be interesting to see what happens here, but I don't know that this is going to go away anytime soon until sort of a fever subsides, right? Because there are some states that maybe didn't have time to do things this time around that'll look back on how, you know, this went and they'll do things in 28. We have reapportionment in 30. then people will be looking to mess with that in 32. Eventually, the fever will subside. When that happens, I don't know. And it also just depends on who's in charge and what the majorities look like. What I always caution people is that, you know, every 10 years, let's just take this mid-decade stuff out. Every 10 years is reapportionment. And usually by the end of the 10 years, you've seen the political character of a lot of the districts change such that they're not as safe as they once were. And so, you know, there is that to take in mind. I mean, how many times we live through, you know, there was a permanent Republican majority coming out of 2004. There was a permanent Democratic majority coming out of 08. Nothing is certain. These things always change. Have you asked anyone yet? Have you done the reporting on how AI is going to impact redistricting? They don't have to use race anymore. They shouldn't. It's unconstitutional. You can use partisanship, but that's not a great reliable indicator anymore. AI ought to be able to use shopping data, right? It ought to be able to pick up all the indicators of R or D and perfect them for whoever has drawn them out. Yeah, look, I haven't asked anyone that specific question, but I've been thinking about it.

And we're so now advanced that, you know, you're going to have to replace the word gerrymander with something else because they probably can draw maps with districts that are Ws or Q's or, you know, infinity symbols. and just overlay them because these computers, you know, even now, have been able to basically, you know, put my neighbor in one district, me in another district, and my neighbor to the other side in a third district. I mean, that's how we're fine. These things have gotten. They can cut cul-de-sacs in half. I do think it's going to be fascinating. And you're right. Gary Mandering is as old as the Republic, Elbridge Gary. And we can, however, go from red and blue to one and two. I hadn't thought about that. That's a good article. Are you going to write that? I might. Yeah. That's a very good article, David Drucker. Follow him in the dispatch, follow him on X. David M. Drucker, the maximum partisanship age in which we are embarked isn't going to end anytime soon. And neither will the employment demand for people like David Drucker who know what they're talking about. Thank you, David. I'll be right back, America. Stay tuned. Lilacs is here. Lilacs, which you can find at James Lilacs.substack.com. joins us from Minneapolis and Minnesota called James, you think we're going to win it peacefully or some other way? Some other way, I think. I'm not exactly sure what peacefully winning it looks like. I'm not exactly sure who we're talking to. I know that I have one metric. If the molas are around at the end of it, then we didn't win. I'm sorry, but that government has to go. It no longer has to be the guys looking at the well to see if the 12th Amma is going to hop out. Those guys have to go. I don't care if it's the Shah. I don't care if it's somebody we install or some domestic political, but the imams, the mullahs have got to go. Theological fanatics are the problem. And the answer is they've got to go, and I agree with that. That is regime change, and I don't think I started out there, but they are crazy. They were crazy before, and they're crazy now. And so they're the problem, and they've got to go. Now, James, the second problem is they are anti-Semitic in the extreme in Iran, and death to Israel, death to the United States, is their theology. Apparently, Dick Christov in the New York Times. who for decades I've had on this show, I thought of him as an old-fashioned center-left liberal of Goodhart and repertorial chops, and then he unleashes this 4,000 word, the silence that meets the rape of the Palestinians. Have you read it yet? I've read portions of it, yes. What do you think of it?

It's nonsense. Within probably, I don't know, an hour or so after the piece was published, a couple of things happened. And it shows with the new media environment that we lived in. In the old day, somebody would have come out with something like that, and it would have been a Time Magazine story. It would have been sitting in the dentist's office for everybody to read. It would have been part of the media firmament. It would have been widely disseminated. Now, it shows up not as a news story, mind you, but as an opinion story. It shows up online. And the first place a lot of people see it is when it gets debunked. And it gets debunk by people who know the Middle East and who know the actors involved and are able to say, well, actually, this guy, this is what he said. This is what he does. This is what he was accused. And lays out for you exactly all the things that Christoph declined to add to the piece. So while I read part of it, and I'm looking at this, I was able, thanks to X, thanks to Elon Musk, to be able to see an almost real-time dissection of the piece that led me to believe that this was all, this was a fabulous nonsense. And it made me wonder why. And again, it's the searching and the grasping and the trying to find some reason to be legitimately anti-Semitic is one of those strange things that people that seems to animate the culture today on both sides. So, yeah, I mean, it's, it does this rise to the level of the... The Drathus Affair? You know, probably not. But I did see a lot of Jacques Hughes from a lot of people on Twitter almost instantly. And that's good. Now, if everything in the piece is shown to be true and he can back it all up, then Twitter is where it's going to play out. That's what we see the argument take place. The media environment into which it dropped had furrows plowed in it for years by... The Abu Ghraib photos, which was a real scandal that really did happen, and we did abuse prisoners, and we paid the price, by the Clarence Thomas hearings, and by the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, and by the Me Too movement. And that all kind of creates a media environment in which, if you can find 12 people who may or may not have communicated with each other, but there's no way to check their story, and there's no other reporter involved, and there's no B team checking it, because it's in the opinion section. Apparently you can publish anything, James, in the New York Times. That is extraordinary. I mean... Even though I worked in opinion, I've been an opinion in newspapers all of my life. I was never an actual factual reporter where I had to do the hard leg work of getting quotes and the rest of it. When I would meet young journalists and I would tell them, you know, the thing to do when you go out there in the field is make sure you get the quote that you want. So you don't have to make it up later. And they would look at me stunned. And I have to tell them. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Always be truthful. But opinion is different. Opinion you can shade. Opinion you can give your arguments. But what Christoph did, even though it was opinion in peace. It's factually grounded. And so I don't know how there aren't, as the New Yorker used to say, levels and levels and levels of fact checking or whether or not it's just become so underpopulated at that place that they haven't got the means of the opportunity or the manpower to do it. But I'm surprised it got out, and I'm going to be interested to see what the response is going to be of the New York Times. If I was for seven years in opinion columnists for the Washington Post, every column for the post, and there were hundreds, was fact check.

Everyone. And if I couldn't defend something, if I couldn't point to something that backed me up, if I was making an assertion of fact, it got dropped from the call. I mean, I could say I like Donald Trump. I don't like Donald Trump. That's pure opinion. But if I said Donald Trump appeared in Pittsburgh three times in the campaign for, I have to prove that. And I just don't understand how you can get away with this stuff. No, and the thing is, any journalist will know this, opinion or otherwise. The most mortifying emotion you can have is that sluice of dread that shoots up your esophagus the moment you realize that you've got something wrong. You don't want to get it wrong. First of all, your boss is going to be staring at you. Secondly, there's going to be a correction in the paper and nothing makes you just shrivel into a prune of failure than a correction. And I've had a few in my days, and you do anything to avoid them. You check, you look, you read, you stuff. So, again, maybe there's a certain amount of hubris that attends at a particular level where you just say, I am a columnist for the New York Times. Ergo, I say what I wish. I don't know. But it seems to me that, we'll say, anyway, it's going to be forgotten in a week or so because we'll be talking about UFOs or Ukraine or something. I don't know because it's peak anti-Semitism in America. We've got a lot of Jew haters in America, and they've been around for a long time. They were mostly on the crank right. Yeah, but it's right, but it's not being seen through that lens. I don't think so. You can say this isn't about the Jews. It's just simply about Zionists and the behavior of some people in Israel. It's not about anybody. We're always told that Israel is a multicultural state. How do we know that there aren't Muslims who are abusing these people? I mean, I'm not saying that's true. I'm just saying they have cover if they want to go that route. The Jewish space lasers, do you remember that story? Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Marjorie Taylor Greene, right? You know, their ability to control the weather, Jewish face lasers, and, you know, all the other things. Right. And we instantly knew they were idiocry. We instantly knew they came from nowhere. How come we don't instantly know that dogs trained to rape people? It's just idiocry. Um, it, because it just, it may not be true specifically in this instance, but to the people who want to believe it, it's generally true. If you believe that your enemy is a dehumanized monster, that they will do absolutely anything that they'll get in German shepherds and isn't that ironic to perform their torture. Uh, yeah, they'll believe this. It, you know, okay, so it didn't happen to this guy, but we know what they're capable of because we have seen the film. Well, no, you've seen the AI. You've seen the story. You've seen the rest of it. If you have the mindset where you've, conflated Israel's Zionism, Jewishness, all into the modern-day Nazi equivalent of committing genocide because of Gaza, which apparently Israel just did for no reason in the world, then yeah, you're going to believe anything. You're absolutely, because you, in the words of Fox Mulder, you want to believe. You live in one of the hot houses of idiocracy, and I don't think it's getting better. You might want to move to the burbs, James. I know you went downtown. You may want to move to the burbs. I am in the burbs. I am in the burbs now. I'm in the din of Minnesota, the burbiest suburbs, my brother. Oh, you are?

Oh, okay. Well, welcome to suburban Minnesota. Time for you to get out of the city. I'm glad to hear that. Lilacs can be read at james lilacs.substack.com. Thank you, James. I'll be right back. I'm Hugh Hewitt. Byron New York is the chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner. I'm a columnist for the examiner of Byron. I've got a column coming out tomorrow about the fact I think President Trump had been very good about messaging the objective of the battle with Iran. They don't get a nuclear weapon. But not the why, which is lunatics can't have nuclear weapons. Do you think he's been good on the second part? No, look, up until pretty recently, he hasn't been great on any parts of it. And you and I've been talking about this ever since February 28th when he started this war. and really did not explain until after it began what was going on. But actually, I just watched the extended, about 15, 18-minute meeting with the press that Trump did on the way to the helicopter at the White House heading off to China. And he really had refined everything down to three sentences, which are Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. Preventing that is worth an economic hit. As soon as the war is over, the U.S. economy will boom. That's it. One, two, three. He said it over and over and over again. But the why. My argument is you've got to tell people, well, Pakistan's got nukes. India's got nukes. China, the United States, France, England, we've got nukes. Why can't Iran have nukes? Israel's got nukes. And the answer is they're lunatics, and they'll use them. And I think that's the part that's missing. What do you think? Well, they could make it a four sentence right now. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon because crazy people cannot have nuclear weapons. That's it. That's all of the hell. That is worth an economic hit. As soon as the war is over, the economy will boom. There you go. Okay. Over and over and over again. Over and over. We got a comma in a clause and explain the whole darn thing. That's it. Over and over again. Now, let's go to redistricting. You have a scorecard in your head. What is it? Well, I think that, you know, first of all, I just want to say before this, I think it was a bad idea to get this whole thing started with Republicans in Texas. I don't really like the idea. I'm up with the idea that states' populations can change dramatically inside of a 10-year period between censuses and need some sort of redistricting. But the way this has been done has been pretty terrible. Can I give you a counter? Can I give you a counter?

The use of race is unconstitutional and should have ended years ago, decades ago. And every district drawn with an eye on race, it would have, except for Anthony Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s incoherent jurisprudence. So for the court to finally come out in Calais and say, no mas, I'm all in favor of that. Well, yeah, but that's, to me, that's separate. I mean, the redistricting fight started. The Texas effort started before the Sanford decision. Yes. And so, and now Texas, I thought, had the best case because of the way their population had changed in the last five years. So they made a good chance, a good case for kind of like mid-cycle redistricting, but it was done in a non-systematic way. Let's say that. They just went ahead and did it. So now with, I mean, with the defeat of the Virginia plan, You basically have the benefits that the Republicans may have gotten in Texas, countered by the benefits that Democrats got in California. But then you have the benefits that Republicans are getting in Florida. And then you have possible benefits in South Carolina. There was some in Indiana. A couple of seats in Ohio. One in Missouri, two in Tennessee, and I think four in Alabama, maybe. Yes. So, my opinion had been earlier. that this midterm situation looked so bad for Republicans, just looking at it in terms of history, the generic ballot issue, the general sort of run of issues, and the way midterms have run out in the past, including President Trump's first midterm in 2018, and the fact that Republicans have a historically narrow margin. If they lost literally... a handful of seats, that is five seats, they would lose the house. So just looking at that, you thought, well, this is just the fact Democrats are going to win. That's just all it is to it. This redistricting stuff has made it a lot closer. CNN has a new poll. Harry Anthony came out and was talking a lot about it today about how the generic ballot question. is not moving in Democrats' favor right now. People really, as much as they disapprove of what a lot of things Republicans have done, they equally disapprove and things Democrats have done. So it's more of a contest than me just saying, no way, although I still think Democrats are favored by a margin that is larger than whatever the redistricting changes amount to. That's where I am, simply because of what I call the title charts of American politics. It's the sixth year of a presidency. People get tired of that president's party, and they vote for the other one. And that doesn't always happen, but in the six year, it usually does. And if you can dodge the bullet, great. So this has got enough weird stuff in it, but generally I'd rather be the Democrats than the Republicans right now, wouldn't you?

Oh, yeah, yeah. And, you know, there's another thing, which is Americans generally don't like United Government after they voted in. You know, it lasts two years a lot of times. You've gotten cases of United Government right now in the first, you know, the first two years of a number of presidencies, and then they get rid of it. So I just think that's probably going to happen, and we should say. that we're not talking about the Senate. I do think that it looks right now like Republicans would hang on to the Senate, which is absolutely essential because losing the House means that, one, Trump loses any sort of legislative agenda he might have had, which I don't think he really had, and he could well get impeached, which he's been there, done that. I'm a bit more pessimistic than you are. Byron. Only because... No nominations. Yeah. We get zero. But that's a tough thing for the average voter to figure out. But I do think we're vulnerable in Ohio in North Carolina. I don't think Susan Collins is vulnerable. But if John Cornyn doesn't win the runoff with Jackson, we're vulnerable in Texas. That's three. Then it takes one upset, right? And that's not good. You're right. I mean, the Republicans have 53 seats in the Senate, which is a fairly large margin in recent historical terms. But you're right. Look, if they lose the Senate, then basically you just have warfare for the next a la Hakeem Jeffries for the next two years. Plus, Trump using his executive authority to do stuff, which is what he's been doing for the first two years anyway. And a record number of pardons that will be coming from the White House if that happened. Maybe that will happen anyway. Byron York, fellow Fox News contributor, Washington, Examiner, Chief Political Correspondent. Follow him on X at Byron York. Follow him in the next segment of today's Hugh Hewitt. The Beltway joined this hour by United States Senator Deb Fisher from Nebraska. Senator Fisher sits on armed services. Senator Fisher, big budget hearing today for Secretary Agseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Kane, about the $1.5 trillion budget request. First of all, your general reaction to the $1.5 trillion. What did you think of that? Well, I applaud the president for getting us a number that we need to see. You know, we're looking at a number of threats to this country. The president understands that, and he is determined to meet the needs that those threats present us with, whether that's the continued on-time modernization of our nuclear triad and the platforms. building we have of Golden Dome. And remember, Hugh, this $1.5 trillion, that's a little less than 5% of our GDP. That's what we expect our NATO partners to do. So I think that's good that we focus on that, that we're meeting an obligation there that we've put on our NATO partners. So it's something we need to do if we're going to continue to protect our homeland.

Now, a couple of details. The Secretary proposed a 7% pay hike for our troops. That would be the largest pay hike in my memory. I think it's long overdue, as well as housing improvement for our enlisted men, women, in all of the branches, wherever that is needed. That's also long overdue. You think there's going to be any pushback on those two numbers? I hope not. You know, we've always been very supportive of the troops. We've never seen an increase like the president is going to be proposing with this 7% increase. But remember, too, we have an all-volunteer force. These are the best of our country that step forward, the men and women to serve, to defend their fellow citizens, to protect our homeland. We need to compensate them fairly. We need to make sure that they have decent places to live. That's because of the service that they give this country. It's what they deserve. So I hope we can work that out through the budget. If we can meet it, that's fine. If we can get close to it, that's fine. But that is a number one priority to take care of those men and women who step forward to serve this country. Now, Chairwoman Susan Collins, who is the Senator from Maine, who is the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, and Leader Mitch McConnell, both raised questions about using... a supplemental, or using reconciliation, supplemental is a different thing, using reconciliation because I believe it was Leader Mitch McConnell who said, hey, look, we've got to put these things in the budget, otherwise it's hinky-dinky-stop funding. How do you view that? Does it really matter if the money comes in? You know, I want to make sure we follow regular order. And with the Appropriations Committee, under the leadership of Senator Susan Collins, we have been able to get the bills to the floor. John Thune has put those bills up as he said he would, and we have gotten them passed and followed regular order. I worry about reconciliation. If that's the way we have to go, then I think we have to do it. But I'm hoping that our Democrat colleagues are going to step forward and really. fund the military as it should be funded. You know, programs like Golden Dome, Hugh, there's I think 24 million in for that. Well, that was to be able to put up the radar sensors, the interceptors. Now we need to continue the funding for that. And if it's all in reconciliation, I worry that it's not going to be sustained.

That program has to be sustained if we're going to have missile defense here over the country. Senator Fisher, you're a Republican. You're sort of in the center of the left-right center spectrum, as is Nebraska. Is there widespread support for Golden Dome? Because if we've learned anything from the battle with Iran... and the attacks on Israel over the last three years, it's that missiles are the next 50 years of warfare, and we need missile defense. Do you have Democrats who are along with you on this? I hope so, you know, and I think we do. In the FY24 NDAA, I put a provision in there that required the department to do a study on this layered defense system to make sure we had the radars, the sensors that we needed to protect the homeland because we know that our homeland is vulnerable. We've been shown that by our adversaries who are. developing more and more capable those long-distance ballistic missiles to reach the United States. So we had that in the budget. We had it in there in the NDAA. It was in the budget. We got it done during the Biden administration. What I worry about is my Democrat colleagues many times, their first reaction to anything nowadays is that it's President Trump's. It's President Trumps. They don't want to do it because it's President Trump. Well, let's remember that we did this in the Senate, in the NDAA during the Biden administration. So I hope that they're going to step forward in order to continue. funding for this vital program that we need to be able to detect, to track, and then destroy any incoming missiles that come into the United States. Now I'd like to ask you, Senator Fisher, about munitions. On Sunday, Mark Kelly of Arizona told Margaret Brennan on CBS, we have reached critical levels in our munitions stockpile. There was some criticism whether or not he was talking about that, which had been delivered in a classified hearing. Senator Cotton on this program yesterday declined to comment on Mark Kelly's characterization, but he said, we've got what we need and we need to build more faster. What Senator Fisher say about our munition stockpiles? Well, first of all, I don't discuss what we hear in classified briefings. And as you know, Hugh, we have a number of those, especially as chairman of the Strategic Forces subcommittee. I can have two or more a week on those. But what I would do is echo Senator Cotton's comments. Our adversary should not think that we are in any kind of perilous position.

We have what we need to defend this country to move ahead with the objectives that we currently are faced with, and we will continue on a path to produce more munitions for ourselves and our allies. Now, Senator Trump, President Trump, before he left for China today, Senator Fisher, said about Iran repeatedly. We're going to do this one way or the other. We can do it peacefully or we can just resume and then the implied combat operation. What do you think is more likely? Because I don't see the Iranians in any hurry to sit down with us in a serious way to repudiate nuclear weapons and export their enriched uranium. Do you? I think they're stalling. I think they're stalling for as long as they can, and that's not something that we should accept. I agree that the president has taken the action that was definitely needed. Iran is an existential threat to the United States. We needed to take out their navy. We needed to take out those mid-range ballistic missiles that they... Still have some, but they were continuing to build, to kind of hide their nuclear program that they were building as well. I support continuing this operation until we make sure that they cannot move ahead anytime soon in achieving nuclear weapons or the capability. for those platforms to be built that would reach our homeland. Now, today, Senator Coons, this is smart guy. I've been on the show a number of times. I like Senator Coons a lot. He said the Secretary of Eggset, you're piling up tactical wins but a strategic loss. And he was challenged on that by the Secretary of War. And I have to agree with Pete Hegseth. It's been 74 days. It's hard to say strategic anything, isn't it? Because it's 74 days. This could take months. Oh, I think Senator Coons is plain politics. You know, again, what we hear from a lot of Democrats is in response to just who is our president right now. Our president is Donald Trump. They don't like that, and I think they will continue to make observations like that. They'll continue to snipe. at anything they possibly can, and people need to understand that. Disappointing as it is, I just hope when our committee comes together, the Armed Services Committee comes together, and I'm also on Appropriations Committee. When those committees come together, we are able to work in a bipartisan manner as we have in the past so that we can meet the needs that we have. in order to defend our country, to protect our national security. The most important thing that the Congress does and you're deeply involved in it, thanks for the time today. Senator Deborah Fisher, a Republican or Nebraska, on both the props and armed services. I appreciate the time very much. Stay tuned. Admiral Stafford. This has got a new book, 2084 with Elliot Ackerman. I'm going to intro it in the next segment, and then I'll be joined by the Admiral and Elliott.

In segments three and four, don't go anywhere. It's about the coming climate wars in 1984, the name of the new thriller. Stay tuned. Hi there. Thanks for listening to the highly concentrated Hugh PODcast and the Big Weekend Pod. I want to talk to you about prison fellowship and their Angel Tree Summer Camping Program. You can contribute today over at my website, Hugh Hewitt.com. We can call AAA 206-2764. AAA 206-2764. Triple-8206. 2764. Now, my kids went to summer camp. All my grandkids. Some of them aren't old enough yet, but they get to go to summer camp. But I have never been in prison, and the fetching Mrs. Hewitt nor any of my children have been. There are, well, millions of kids who have either one or both parents behind bars. Pretty tough for their family to swing it. They need help. That's where Angel Tree Camp step in to ministry of prison fellowship, and it's a great one. And thousands of my listeners to the podcast and the program over the years have stepped up to contribute. Don't you consider doing that? A full scholarship is $200. That sends a kid to camp for an entire week. AAA 206-2764, AAA 206-2764, or visit the Prison Fellowship Angel Tree Banner at the top of Hugh Hewitt.com. Thank you for listening to highly concentrated Hugh. And don't forget one of our great sponsors is Consumer Cellular. 1-800-4-1-41-44-54. When you call them, and you should, because you should want to save money, make sure you use my promo code, Hugh Hewitt-U-G-H, you'll get your second month free if and when you switch to Consumer Cellular. Whatever plan you switch with, you'll get your second month for free. I want you to call and investigate because you're probably paying too much for whatever you're doing right now with Consumer Cellular. Or you can go online, consumercellular.com slash hue. They've got great plans for every kind of person and every kind of data usage. However, They really target people who are 50 years and older. Listen to this. You get a single line with consumer cellular with unlimited talk, text, and data for just $35 a month. That's a single line if you're 50 years and older with unlimited talk, text, and data for just $355 a month when you call Consumer Cellular 800, 411, 44, and everybody, it can be under 50, you can be over 50. Everybody gets their second month free. when you use my name, Hugh. All right, 2084, coming up, Admiral Stav and Elliot Ackerman. Let me read to you the first three pages, the setup of the book, A Brief History of the 21st Century Through 2084. Like nature, geopolitics abhorred as a vacuum. The war between the United States and China in 2034 devastated each nation, upending a fragile world order based on their competition. By mid-century, both were trying to claw their way back to superpower status. Neither had succeeded. By 2050, for civil conflict, consumed the United States, stalling its forward momentum, while in China, a demographic time bomb detonated, and the fundamental imbalance between an unnaturally high number of males and a far smaller female population triggered a sociological collapse. Into that vacuum, step two dynamic new powers, India and Japan. Those countries, rejuvenated by the advent of artificial intelligence and robotics, assume positions of primacy.

But it wasn't only India and Japan. Also, Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, with huge populations and dynamic leaders, brought the global South into prominence. By the end of the 2050s, the balance of power in the world had shifted. So we're getting close to when the book begins. In the decade that followed, a new and powerful force began to make itself foul. It was not a nation far from it. It was the earth itself, a huge and tortured ecosystem that had never recovered from ecological abuses inflicted in prior decades. When the global community, vibrating between populist movements and economic excess, walked away from efforts to mitigate climate chain. Massive storms, unlike those ever seen in recorded history, battered the planet in the 2060s and the 70s. A traditional hurricane season that once peaked between August and October had become a quaint, nostalgic temporal boundary that no longer applied as storms came in on unpredictable waves during the year. Sea levels rose globally. swapping hundreds of major cities, especially the megacities of Southeast Asia, superstorms washed away coastline, hiving off entire landmasses in the global north and south. Wildfires and drought struck in the mid-latitude nations clustered near the equator. By the late 2070s, an uninhabitable band circled the middle of the planet. Nations in this ever-widening ban, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and others, saw a massive and sudden drop in the viability of their statehood as their populations became suddenly unable to sustain basic economic activity. By the 2080s, this march of catastrophic events, each more terrible than the last, consume the globe. and threatened all of humanity. Penultimate paragraph. Economies that have risen in the 2050s now found themselves in the uninhabitable ban. Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil had all invested in highly capable militaries, constructed and maintained at great cost, but these had little utility in the face of such an implacable foe. Such relics of the previous decade in prosperity and economic growth seem to mock the leaders of those nations. to the north, a weekend but still formidable United States and China, entered an uneasy alliance full of mutual suspicion, but both countries felt that given the lingering costs of their earlier war, they were better in league with each other than operating alone. They had a name for themselves, and those who would ally with them, the consortium. Meanwhile, the nations devastated by the cost of a changing climate drew closer together. They shared a common grievance, the excesses of the... lands outside of their own uninhabitable band of countries. They began to discuss reparations and new lands for their peoples as their landmasses became largely uninhabitable. In the capitals of Indonesia, Nigeria, and Brazil, clandestine plans were laid. They called themselves the reparationists, and the movement was rapidly approaching, the moment was rapidly approaching, when they would need to use or lose their military power.

A new world for their populations, fully one-third of the people on Earth, was the object of the great Armada of 2084. That's the setup. I told the Admiral and Elliot that I would have to read the setup to make the interview at all understandable. But this is a combination of thriller, techno-military forward-advance book, and, of course, science fiction. There has to be a little bit of science fiction, but nothing that is unimaginable. Everything itself is built upon steps that we can easily see unfolding over the next 60 years. When you've lived 60 years, you know that a lot changes in 60 years. So 2084, a novel of the climate war is its subtitle. I really recommended you in coming up, Elliot and the Admiral. Andrew and Todd, last sponsor that I'll mention before Admiral and Elliot show up, Andrew and Todd.com. AAA, AAA, 1172.72. The world of today, not the world of tomorrow, has houses for sale. There are interest rates that are going to be stable for a while. You might as well jump in and do it with people who actually will lend you the money. Andrew and Todd are with union home mortgage, AAA, AAA 1172, AAA 1172, or go to their website, Andrew and Todd.com. Veterans that don't want to put any money down, first-time homebuyers, people need to refinance. Senior citizens who want to get a reverse mortgage and get some money out of the house that's growing up so much in value, but they need a little extra money in the bank account, the interest from which they can put into their budget. Andrew and Todd.com will do that for you, but you've got to call them first. AAA, AAA, 1,172, AAA, 1,172, Andrew and Todd.com. Stay tuned. Admiral Stavreed, Elliot Ackerman, coming up right here on the Q. Hewitt Show. Welcome back, America, Hugh Hewitt. As you just heard me read, 2084 is the brand new bestseller from my two guests, Admiral James Stavridis, retired United States. He was the Allied Supreme Commander of NATO. And Elliot Ackerman, longtime novelist, also Marine Corps veteran, a number of tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. They are both fine novelists. They are both fine writers of nine fiction, and they have combined on this trilogy. of which 2084 is the third book. Admiral Elliott, I just got done reading the preface to set people up. And so I had a moment I throw the first one at you. When you jump from... 2054 to 2084. You're kind of in that weird, weird world of somewhere between science fiction and thriller. So how did you and Elliot figure out the leaps that you would make in science and technology to get here? Because it's a great, you've done it well, but it's hard to do. First and foremost, we look at the modern world, Hugh. And so we're looking at what's happening in Ukraine. We're looking at what's happening in Iran. And you can see the edges of what is developing because an awful lot of what we unpackage in the book is what will war look like in 2084. So point one, kind of look at the current world. Point two, both Elliot and I remain close with...

active duty military, our scientific community, our geopolitical input. We kind of factor that in. And then number three, it's a book about conflict, but it's really about humans in conflict. So we bring that empathy, I hope, to the book. You put those elements together. I think you get a snapshot of what 2084 could look like. And Elliot, I've got to tell you, Admiral Stavrida's taught me a lot about the climate change issue when he said he could sail his destroyer through places in the Arctic he could not previously do. That's kind of res jesting. The issue has decided, what did you make about the climate leaps you had to make here? How hard was it for you to imagine these? Well, I think it's important. The way that climate factors into the world we've imagined in 2084 is it's long been said that geography is destiny when it comes to nations. But what climate is doing right now is it's changing. the geography of the globe. I mean, we're seeing this up in the Arctic. We're seeing this right now with the conversations around Greenland. So we basically want to extrapolate out not only how the climate is going to change, but how those climate changes are going to change the fundamental realities about how nations interact with each other on the planet. So back to you, Admiral, the big headache for an interviewer with 2084 is you can't give anything away. So I limited my question set to the first 40 pages on the theory that no one can get too mad at me if I throw a spoiler at them from the first 40 pages. So that's the setup. Now, with that said, I can clearly see this is Jacksonville survival coded. And so you're actually saving your hometown here, are you not? I am the Free Republic of Florida in the vicinity of Military Camp Ron DeSantis. I think you can extrapolate that pretty clearly, but it's the northern part of the state that survives the rising sea levels. And that Free Republic of Florida is very involved in the alliances and the conflict that unfold. And one of my favorite characters is a kind of old school Floridian Colonel TikTok call sign TikTok Dundee, who plays a pretty pivotal role. So, yeah, there's plenty of native Florida inside baseball in the book. And Elliot, it's Marine Corps coded. Now, I married a Marine Corps colonel daughter, and so I'm kind of Marine Corps coded as a civilian. But TikTok was a Marine, but then he went over to the dark side in the Taiwanese wars. How much can people figure out what's going on in the previous two books from reading 2084? Do you recommend that they start with 2034, then do 2054 and then go to 2084?

You know, 2084 is this standalone book. So you'll be able to absolutely enjoy it if you just want to pick it up off the shelf. But if you want to go deeper, you know, the whole trilogy has been designed this way. It's character base. So yes, you know, Colonel TikTok, Dundee, you know, Marine fighter pilot extraordinaire who made the decision to fly with the Floridians when they split off from the United States. But if you want to go all the way back to his lineage, you can see traces of him in the first book, 2034. So as much as we're dealing. dealing with, you know, like very serious themes in climate change, geopolitics. These are fundamentally books that are rooted in character and some pretty colorful ones at that. So it's a merger of the thriller with sci-fi. No fantasy, no magic. It's all AI, supercomputing, and climate change. I'll come back and talk with Admiral Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman. About 2084 after the break, you can go and order it right now at Amazon.com. All of you folks who are hooked on the first two. You'll love the third. And if you haven't done the first two, get those. But you don't have to, you can go and get 2084 if you just want a great look 60 years down the road. I'll be right back with the Admiral and Elliot right. after this. Stay tuned. Welcome back, America, Hugh Hewitt, with Admiral James Navrides, retired United States Navy, and Elliot Ackerman. They are the co-authors of this, 2084, the third book in their trilogy. Elie, let me start with you. Yesterday, I listened to another Marine Corps veteran who runs School of War, Aaron McLean, talking to Nick Eberstadt about demographics. Demographics drive everything in China and the United States. China and the United States are allied in 2084. Did you guys dive deep into demographic trends when you decided to kind of set up the structure of 2084? Yeah, you know, we absolutely did. And I think, obviously, you know, changing geography, changing geopolitics to make for some pretty unlikely bedfellows. So in the year 2084, we see that the United States and China, they form something they call the consortium. And the consortium is an alliance that is pitted against the nations that have really been savaged by changing geography in the world, the reparationists. And what's really driving so much of the conflict in 2084 are immigration trends that just. Whole parts of the globe are no longer easily inhabitable. And the people who live there, you know, those demographic populations, they're shifting and they need places to live too. So we're looking not only how geography changes, but how migratory patterns change. And so, Admiral, I think we can tell people, without giving away too much, the book opens hard with the flotilla off of Old Florida, or on top of Old Florida, which is underwater. There is no Key West. It's gone. And the flotilla has three groups of ships, three different combat concentrations, and they're threatening the consortium. You want to get people just a glimpse of the consortium and the reparationists?

I can. As Elliot said, U.S., China, that's the heart of the consortium. Think the industrialized north, if you will. And then from the south, the... Three lead nations are Brazil, Nigeria, and above all, Indonesia, which demographically have exploded, but find their options pretty limited. So those are the combatants as the story explodes in front of you. And I don't think it gives anything away to say something that the reparation, it's the Nigerians, the Brazilians, the Indonesians, the Indonesians. What they want is Greenland. So in that sense, again, it ties back to events quite in the present day. But by 2084, Hugh, Greenland is going to be among the most arable areas of the world, possibly. And there's a scene late in the book. where a woman is planting vineyards, planting grapes to make wine in Greenland. It looks pretty good if you're from the part of the world that's been largely, as Elliot says, savaged by the climate. Admiral, when you get to be our ages, you start planting your retirement. I go to Maine when I can. You go to Canada. So I guess we're set up well for this climate scenario, aren't we? We are way ahead of the curve on that one. But Q, you and I are both going to live to 2084, so we'll be comparing notes up north then. It's interesting in the Aaron McLean, Nick Eberstadt, discussion this week in School of War, they say don't put a... Don't put a top limit on lifespan because it's increasingly increasing so dramatically. All right, Elliot, when you sat down with the Admiral to sketch this out, you had to come up with the reparationist. And you obviously, as the Admiral just said, you picked Nigeria, Indonesia, and what's the third one in the reparationist Brazil? And the first, it's so... dark and post-apocalypse in Brazil when we first come to Brazil. It's not a very inviting prospect to be equatorial, is it? No, not at all. You know, we just, and we see, you know, we talk about in the book how they're really no longer storm seasons that. The equatorial regions have been hit so hard by recurrent storms that we stop naming them. We just start numbering them. So we're really projecting out these types of global trends. We're taking it one step further. We're saying how literally just the geography of the world change and what will happen when people can no longer live and nations can no longer exist on the terrain where they've been. And yes, it starts to look pretty apocalyptic, but we are an adaptive species. And, you know, people are going to want to find new places to live.

live, and that is going to be, we project a major political crisis. So Admiral, President Trump's on a plane headed right now to sit down with Xi Jinping. Should he take 2084 along with him and say, hey, General Chairman, we're going to be allies in 60 years. Let's get started now. You think it would work? I don't. I think it's brilliant, and I hope he does it. And what we don't want him to do is to take the first novel, 2034, which is all about a war between the United States and China with atomic bombs going off over Galveston and Shanghai. Let's keep that one back in the U.S. But this one, you bet. He can take it along. So, Admiral, what happened to the carriers in the first flotilla that is down south, headed north towards North America that isn't underwater? There aren't any carriers. What happened to the carriers? Well, as we all know, again, looking at trend lines in the world today, it's going to be artificial intelligence, drones. cruise missiles moving at hypersonic speeds. I think lasers are going to be the real coin of the realm. Robotics. You'll see all of that in the book. But carriers, not so much. Elliot, what I did appreciate, again, I'm a civilian. I've just been around military culture for 45 years or so. And I like the fact that your military, across all these different countries, retain a great value in credentials that are earned, experience in technology. Is that the way of all militaries that want to keep up, in your opinion? I think absolutely. I mean, you know, a military is only effective. It's a meritocracy. And I think one of the throughlines you see in 2084 is that even, you know, as we've seen the U.S. military change, we have the Free Republic of Florida. We see that a lot of the cultural touch points are still there across categories. So, you know, it's a story. Yes, it's about climate. It's about the future of war. But it's about people. and those institutions and how they endure. And one of those institutions is definitely not only the U.S. military, but the militaries of all the nations that are involved in this conflict that we imagine before. So Admiral, the Fetchamist Hsuitt wanted me to ask you, this is the last question. What about the other trilogy? She wants to find out what happened to your youngsters in World War II. When's that volume coming out? That comes out in November. So the first book in that one, The Restless Wave, has done very well, early historical fiction World War II. But you've got to get the second volume coming out in November. But right now, I want people to think about 2084, think about the future. Then in the fall, we can think about the past. It's all 2084. And, Elliot, are you on to the next project already as well? You guys are hyperproductive. You put to shame all the writers I know.

Thanks. Yeah, I'm on to my next project as well, but, you know, Tim and I've had a lot of fun doing this. Yeah. 2084 in bookstores everywhere. You heard me read it in segment two. It's a great, great series of hypotheses and setups. Go and enjoy it. It's the first week of the summer, I think. 2084 by Admelfare. Read it's in Elliott and Eckerman. Thank you, gentlemen. Here's something most people don't know. When Warren Buffett was just 13 years old, he didn't put his money into a savings account. While other kids were earning next to nothing at local banks, Buffett put $114 into a little-known investment. Today, that $114 would be worth over $15 million. And it wasn't a risky trade, it wasn't even insider knowledge. It was an account that's been around since 1888, and over the last 25 years, it's average 29% a year. That's what happens when your money is allowed to compound. Compare that to today's savings accounts, paying less than half a percent, while inflation quietly eats away at your buying power. Buffett understood early. Banks are great... great businesses, just not for savers. If you'd like to see what some investors call the 29% account, go now to account 29.com. That's account, the numbers 2.9.com. Again, account 29.com.