TikTok’s Ticking Clock: National Security Vs. Free Speech; Dr. Evil And James Bond

>> King-Slutzky: Well, first of all, we're saying that they're obligated to provide food to students who pay for a meal plan here. Well, I guess it's ultimately a question of what kind of community and obligation Columbia feels it has to its students. Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill even if they disagree with you?

If the answer is no, then you should allow basic. I mean, it's crazy to say because we're on an Ivy League Campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we're asking for. Could people please have a glass of water?

>> Bill Whalen: It's Wednesday May 1st, 2024, May Day. Welcome back to GoodFellows at Hoover institution broadcast examining social, economic, political, and geopolitical concerns.

I'm Bill Whelan, I'm a Hoover distinguished policy fellow, and I'll be your moderator today. That means I have the great honor and privilege of introducing the stars of our show. The GoodFellows, as we call them, include the historian Niall Ferguson, the Economist John Cochran, the former presidential National Security Advisor, historian, strategist, lieutenant general HR McMaster.

All three gentlemen are Hoover Institution senior fellows. Guys, welcome to the fifth month of the new year and what a busy past week, it's been a lot to get into. We're gonna talk about, obviously, what's going on on the campuses in the second segment of the show. But first, we're gonna take a look at intelligence in a time of wars, plural.

And joining us for that conversation is our colleague Amy Zegart. Dr. Amy Zegart, is the Hoover Institution's Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox senior fellow. And a professor of political science by courtesy here at Stanford University. She's also a senior fellow at Stanford's Human Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

The author of five books, Dr. Zegart specializes in US intelligence, emerging technology and national security. Grant strategy and global political risk management. Award winning research includes the leading academic study of intelligence failures before 9/11. Its title is Spying Blind, the CIA, the FBI, origins of 9/11. Her most recent book, which we discussed the last time she was on our show, is the bestseller Spies, Lies and Algorithms, the history of future of American intelligence.

Her fine book nominated by Princeton University Press for the Pulitzer Prize. Amy, welcome back to GoodFellows.

>> Amy Zegart: Thanks for having me. It's great to be with you all.

>> Bill Whalen: So a lot to get to in about 30 minutes here, but let's see how far we can get. We'd obviously like to talk, Amy, about intelligence gathering at a time of wars both hot and cold.

I'd like to get your thoughts on how intelligence gathering moves forward with the proliferation of artificial intelligence. I'm curious as to the intelligence community's role in the campus protest. I know John is just chomping a debate to talk about TikTok as a national security threat. And if we've got the time, I'm gonna find out what your problem is with James Bond, which will be Naill's clue to do his best Sean Connery imitation.

But Amy, let's start with the events of 10/7. 10/7 like 9/11 ghastly, barbaric, but also a massive intelligence failure. So much so that the head of Israel's military intelligence resigned last week, fell on his sword for the failure. I've seen some analysts, Amy, suggest that there's a lesson here and that Israel became overly reliant on technical surveillance.

And at a cost of not enough human intelligence, and human intelligence maybe could a better job of foreseeing what was coming down the road. Do you disagree or do you agree you disagree with that assessment?

>> Amy Zegart: Well, Bill, I don't think we know yet. There's an urgency to try to figure out what went wrong.

But as you know, with intelligence failures, it takes time to get to the bottom of, of exactly what happened. So I think, there are number of things, at least at this stage, that could be going on. Number one, was it only an intelligence failure or was it also a policy failure?

So intelligence agencies warn, but the policymakers have to act. There's some indication already evidence that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did receive some warnings and, in fact, did not reposition his forces. So that's sort of thing one is, is it really only an intelligence failure. The second thing, I've heard a lot from Israel is, the over reliance on technology and that was a challenge.

But in addition, there's a broader problem of, did Israeli intelligence understand discontinuous change, right? So in intelligence, understanding when your adversary is gonna zig instead of zag, that discontinuous change is really hard. Was that one of the problems? I suspect that third problem is, did Israeli Intelligence sufficiently understand Israel?

And by that, I mean, we now know, right, the domestic political crisis in Israel, leading up to 10/7, likely emboldened its adversaries to act when it did. So in the US, for example, our intelligence agencies almost all look outward at foreign intelligence, but what we do affects what our adversaries do.

So understanding the domestic picture, the domestic political crisis or climate can affect what adversaries do. And then finally, what did Hamas do well, right? Hamas was really good at concealing its capabilities, its operations. It was in many ways a sophisticated attack, in some ways a low tech attack.

So we have to understand what Hamas did right to be able to evade Israeli Intelligence, not just what did Israel do wrong.

>> H.R. McMaster: Amy, I love your book, and you're the clearest thinker I know, and I have nothing really to add to that answer except to expound on it.

And just to note that, intelligence failures oftentimes are really command failures because of the factors that you mentioned. Because, you have the information available, but you just haven't really thought deeply enough as a commander or somebody who's going to allocate sufficient forces to stop the kind of attack that happened on October 7th.

And in particular, I just wanted to highlight your point about being able to discern pattern breaks. I think that's really important. And I think a lot of intelligence analysts, they work really hard on pattern analysis, but they aren't thinking hard enough. Commanders often aren't thinking hard enough. Hey, what are the indicators that this pattern might break, and how can I prepare for that?

But I have really nothing to add to your really clear analysis of, I think, what we know and what we don't know about how October 7th was allowed to happen.

>> Niall Ferguson: Amy, when I was in Israel a few weeks ago, a number of people said to me, the problem was not just a failure to anticipate Hamas act or acts, but a failure to respond swiftly once they happened.

Naftali Bennett gave me a very moving account of his attempts to respond to WhatsApp messages that he was getting from people who were being attacked. And the chaos that he encountered when he reported for active duty. And I wanted you to talk a little bit about that connection point.

The connection point between intelligence and a military response. Cuz that may have been as much a part of the problem as the initial intelligence failure that has been so much discussed.

>> Amy Zegart: Well, I'd love to get HR's take on this. He's lived the life of intelligence and response.

But in general, I think Niall is, you know what intelligence is supposed to give you is decision advantage. Not just before something happens, but enough time when something happens that you can respond, right? So even as the attack is unfolding, intelligence should be providing tactical information that can help the responders know where to go faster, better, more effectively.

And so I think you're right in what you pointed out, that there was that kind of a failure as well. I do wanna add, and I wanna hear what HR has to say about this. But before that, I wanna add one other point, because we talk a lot about intelligence failures of imagination or failures to anticipate.

This is the pattern break also that HR was talking about. This is not 9/11 for Israel, right? 9/11 was in many ways a failure of imagination. Who could have imagined terrorists with box cutters on planes? This was not a black swan event for Israel. This was a white swan event.

These were the terrorists living literally next door. This is what Israeli Intelligence was designed, trained, funded to prevent Hamas from attacking Israel. So the comparisons to 9/11, I think are very in apt. I just wanna make sure we put that on the table before I toss it to HR.

I really wanna know what he thinks about that response issue and intelligence.

>> H.R. McMaster: Hey, Amy, just a couple of quick comments on that. I think that there was complacency associated with over reliance on technology. And of course, there's always a countermeasure and a way to evade technology. And then also, there were assumptions made about intentions of the enemy, which is also quite dangerous to do.

It's very important, I think, to look at the capabilities of a determined, brutal, heinous enemy like Hamas. And base what you're doing from an operational perspective, a defensive perspective on the capabilities, rather than speculating about the intentions. Because there was really a deliberate deception effort going on by Hamas to create the illusion that, hey, what they were really interested in was really economic improvements for the Palestinian people.

Niall, on your point on mobilization, I've heard the opposite from a lot of my friends in the IDF. I mean, anything you do in the military in wartime, it's gonna be ugly, right? What the clouds would say, in war everything is simple, but the simplest things are difficult.

I think the degree to which they were able to mobilize that quickly and to put together an offensive operation in urban terrain. I think that there is a failure, obviously, to prevent October 7th, but I think it will be a positive story generally, okay? Generally, maybe not in the case of the individual you mentioned, in terms of the mobilization of the response.

The mobilization of the reserves, the formation of the units, units having the adequate training to go into what is really the gradual level of a close combat operations in dense urban terrain.

>> Niall Ferguson: Just to quickly qualify, I think Naftanis Bennett's point was that in the days, hours and days after the attack, the response was slow.

I think the IDF's operation against Hamas, despite the negative media coverage it's received in many countries, has been a military success. But there was a lag and Bennett's point was, there was a real lag in getting responders to the scene of the crimes. And many of the first responders were actually ordinary Israeli civilians, not people who were in fact organized, but who spontaneously rushed to the scene and often acted heroically and in some cases at the cost of their lives.

And this is a part of the story that's interesting to me because a little bit like when Ukraine was attacked, there was a vital period, measurable in hours, maybe days. In which the outcome was decided by ordinary civilians and reservists defending if successfully in a period when we expected the Ukrainians to lose quickly.

I'm very interested in those transition moments when you go from, now we have the intelligence, now it's happening, we missed it, now it's happening, and now we have to act. And things hinge on those hours and perhaps just a handful of days in which a society responds to an attack, even if it was surprised.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, I wanna get John in here. I just wanna recommend a book by my friend Breeder General Mayor Finkel, who's a brilliant historian as well as a great soldier, called On Flexibility. It's right on that topic Niall.

>> Bill Whalen: Let's get John in here. And John, why don't we shift topics?

Let's talk about TikTok, cuz I know you're just chomping at the bit on this. Simple question for you, Amy, and I want John to chip in here as well. Is TikTok a national security threat?

>> Amy Zegart: Yes, yes, yes. TikTok is a national security threat in so many ways.

Imagine if I said we had the capability to get right into the hands in the phones of 40% of the Chinese population, right? And we could have an algorithm that understood what they liked to give them more of it. Imagine the possibility of what you could do with that access.

That's what China has in the United States. So that sort of national security threat number one is, they don't even need to use the Russian playbook, they have their own platform. Not an American platform, it's not Facebook, right? It's not X, they have their own platform that they can divide Americans.

They can influence us in subtle ways and not so subtle ways. And then, of course, there's the data they're collecting. And we now know from what's available that it hasn't been firewalled between TikTok, the so called American subsidiary, and its Chinese parent organization, ByteDance. So major national security threat of TikTok in this case, I think Congress is actually not overreacting.

 

>> John H. Cochrane: So let me push back on that a little bit, cuz there is a lot of China, China, China, owned by China, national security threat. We are going to apparently tear down and reinstall every single crane in every port in the US, because the software was made by China.

We don't want to allow Chinese electric cars in cuz who knows? Security threat, I would be curious at an actual documented instance of some secret backdoor. And what exact data? So 13 year olds are watching. Are they watching? Which Taylor Swift song, is that a national security threat?

There's a lot of xenophobia and protectionism being wrapped in national security here. Now, what actual national security data is being collected that is not remediable by regulation, as if it were an American company? Now then you go on to, well, they're providing disinformation. Facebook and Twitter are pretty darn good at providing disinformation too, and at privileging things over in their algorithms and in censoring unpopular views.

So forcing TikTok out of the US because their algorithm provides disinformation, well, that's the sort of thing one can regulate. So what can be done by regulation? What is specific to China as opposed to US firms? And what of this is just general paranoia about China? Now you know that I want this as a question.

Is there documentable? What kind of actual national security threatening data can has a TikTok enabled iPhone passed on to China that they wouldn't otherwise be able to get in a hundred different ways? Especially given, iPhones do have security. We can demand security as we do of our own domestic companies.

Try to make this a little more concrete. Not just China, China, China.

>> Amy Zegart: Yeah, I appreciate that, John. And there is a lot of xenophobia. There is a lot of anything Chinese must be bad, but we have to triage what is actually really at risk from what is a relatively low risk.

I would put TikTok in the high risk category, because we're talking about the cognitive battle space. I don't think it's the right approach to say, show me the evidence that TikTok has performed this function in the past. The point is to prevent the CCP from using TikTok to influence Americans in nefarious ways in the future, right?

It's not just 13 year olds, John, that are listening to Taylor Swift, but many a large and increasing percentage of Americans get their primary news from TikTok.

>> John H. Cochrane: Okay.

>> Amy Zegart: It's not just entertainment. It's news, it's a source of news.

>> John H. Cochrane: They're calling for government censorship here on the grounds of national security.

There's two cases. One case is that it's funneling data to China that's national security secrets. Okay, tell me about that.

>> Amy Zegart: Potentially.

>> John H. Cochrane: Now you're going to in the US we're perfectly good at spreading bad news on our own and on regulating the news function.

>> Amy Zegart: That doesn't mean we open the doors for everybody to spread bad news.

Just because there's some disinformation doesn't mean we make it easy to have more disinformation.

>> John H. Cochrane: Don't we have a first amendment here and sort of property rights?

>> H.R. McMaster: John, we're not talking about xenophobia here. I mean, we're talking about a hostile, authoritarian government that is determined to drag us down.

And wants to drag us down on this battleground of perception by altering the perceptions of Americans on the key issues that are relevant to them. Trying to extend their influence and extend their power at our expense, and to rewrite the rules.

>> John H. Cochrane: You guys are saying we want our government censoring what's said on media in the US by legal companies on grounds of the battle space of ideas?

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Okay, it's not like any other company, John. It's a company that has to, by law, act as an arm of the Chinese communist party based on the national security law, and even worse, by the recent reinterpretations of that law. The other thing is on the data. They've already used the data to track down US journalists who are publishing negative information about TikTok.

So it's not a theoretical case, John. And then also in terms of even the cranes at the ports, there are many examples of not just software, but hardware that's compromised. Remember the super micro incident from years ago? The public still doesn't know all that story about that. Huawei, remember all of our allies and partners were so reluctant, show us the proof.

Well, we showed them the proof and they began to shut Huawei down and rip it out of their communication systems. I know it sounds kind of Dr. Evil Esquea, and maybe I'll do my imitation. We thought that China was the Diet Coke of communism, but actually, hey, man, they're the real Coke of communism.

They're more than one calorie, and they're trying to tear us down. And TikTok's a way to do that.

>> Niall Ferguson: I'm just trying to imagine the 1930s. If US radio airwaves had been open to propaganda from Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany, well, would that have been a triumph for the First Amendment?

I dont think so, John. I mean, I think that the founders certainly did not have in mind opening the United States to propaganda. Now, you might be in a stronger position if young people in America were behaving quite normally going about their business, preparing for their finals. But as it happens, and we'll be saying more about this later in the show, young people in many universities are behaving in ways that are, to say the least, disruptive.

And it's not too difficult to show that in the way that it covers the crisis in the Middle East. TikTok is massively skewed against Israel and in favor of Palestinian organizations. And I think there's a pretty good, at first blush, case to be made that you can see the evidence of TikTok's influence on American campuses today.

And as Amy and HR are saying, that could just be the beginning. This is a very powerful tool that has been designed. And the fact that it's a Chinese owned tool, not a Facebook tool or a Google tool, I think, is a serious concern. It's trivializing the first amendment to say anything should go.

The propaganda should be a kind of free market. I don't think you can have a free market in propaganda when totalitarian regimes are posing a threat to the stability of our society.

>> John H. Cochrane: I was told that the 1930s had an American communist party. They had American fascists, they were owned subsidiaries of those.

They got to say what they wanted.

>> Niall Ferguson: The reach of those organizations, John, was absolutely trivial.

>> John H. Cochrane: They were trivial cuz more Americans were sensible not to listen. The proudest moments of this country are not the censorship during World War I, good old Wilson, not the Alien and Sedition acts, not the efforts of the government to moderate what it is.

And remember, you don't get to be in charge of determining what's disinformation or not. The people who censored Facebook who decided that the Great Barrington Declaration was disinformation. That's gonna be who's in charge of deciding what's disinformation or not. The project of our government being in charge of deciding what's disinformation is a very dangerous one.

 

>> Amy Zegart: But, John, the proposal is not for the US government to determine what is on that platform, right? What's currently before us is that the ByteDance has to divest of TikTok. And by the way, Chinese law mandates, right, that you have to turn over data that the CCP wants if you're a Chinese company, no matter what.

So to say that there's no concern about data sort of migrating from the United States to the CCP is just flat wrong. It's right, so there's that-

>> John H. Cochrane: Let's get to data. Let's be specific. You've mentioned that they can find journalists. It's not hard to find journalists, even without TikTok, secret backdoors in TikTok embedded on your phone, finding journalists is pretty darn easy.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, John, actually, just to clarify, first of all, John, I'm just glad you're here to challenge us on this, because this is an important debate. And it's gonna keep going on, especially with the various aspects of freedom of speech and where the limits are and so forth.

But it was really tracking the journalists so they could find their sources, they could uncover their sources. And you can see that used for all kinds of nefarious means, because we know the Chinese students here at Stanford University, if they make critical statements about the Chinese Communist Party, their parents can get a knock on the door because they're being informed on by various means.

So I think

>> John H. Cochrane: A non-trackable cell phone doesn't seem like the hardest thing in the world.

>> H.R. McMaster: I just don't think you giving-

>> John H. Cochrane: Does China need tick TikTok in order to track journalists via their cell phones? There's a lot of data.

>> H.R. McMaster: I think TikTok's their greatest asset in their sustained campaign of disinformation and propaganda to-

 

>> John H. Cochrane: Let's get back to data-

>> H.R. McMaster: To reduce-

>> John H. Cochrane: If you journalists, don't put TikTok on your cell phone. Okay, still not clear how TikTok, I mean, there's one question of if you have an iPhone, turn off location tracking, not that hard.

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, well, governments have done it.

Local governments have done it. The federal government's done it in terms of banning TikTok. But if you're working in any kind of sensitive position, if you have a company that has intellectual property or sensitive technology that China wants, letting them into your system, into your phone, I think, is a huge mistake.

And a national security risk that goes beyond kind of government jobs and classification so, well-

>> John H. Cochrane: Don't download it, don't use it.

>> H.R. McMaster: How about just having Communist Party relinquish control of it by the sale to a US entity, which is what the bill calls for.

>> Bill Whalen: So speaking of the bill, President Biden signed last week, ByteDance as Amy reference, has 270 days to decide what to do here.

Though I think, Amy, there is a little wiggle room that can be extended to a year if need be. I want the four of you to tell me what's gonna happen in the next nine months.

>> John H. Cochrane: Wait, isn't the issue here that the current owners have said, we will not let you have the source code because what they say is their algorithms are great.

They know how to hook people on TikTok, and they don't want those algorithms going. Now, we might say, yeah, you gotta give us your source code. But then China would have every right to say, okay, every bit of American software this coming year, we want your source code.

Now, we think-

>> Amy Zegart: But, John, they've already stolen it, so we don't have to worry about that.

>> John H. Cochrane: And we're not gonna give into that. I don't see that there's a deal here. The essence of TikTok is the algorithm that hooks people on it. If you cant sell that, and were certainly not gonna agree to everybodys here their source code to get software back and forth.

So I dont see how theres a deal here.

>> H.R. McMaster: So how about this, John? How about just saying, okay, well, hey, ByteDance, you can have TikTok if you give us reciprocity, and we have the same degree of access into your market as you do in ours. Of course they wouldn't go for that because they don't use the same algorithm in China as Tristan Harris has said.

He said TikTok in the United States is crack cocaine, and TikTok in China is spinach.

>> John H. Cochrane: Well, it's about as interesting as all propaganda is.

>> Bill Whalen: We have just a few minutes left with Amy, so I'd like to shift gears here at Amy. I wanna find out what your problem is with James Bond and Jason Bourne.

You've written time, and again, you did not care for the spy genre. Maybe, Niall, if you wanna do the Sean Connery impression, go ahead, my friend. But, what is your beef with 007, Amy?

>> Amy Zegart: So I'm so glad you asked me this question, Bill. Cuz I need to set the record straight.

I actually really like Jason Bourne and James Bond. I admire your luck, Mr.?

>> James Bond: Bond, James Bond.

>> Amy Zegart: I mean, I watch a good spy show like everybody else. I love spy movies where Congress always works, right? The good guys always win. Who doesn't like that? The problem is that those movies are adult education for most of America, including members of Congress.

That's how people think the intelligence world works in the real world. And I know this not just because of anecdotal data, but of national polling I've done that shows a high correlation between spy-themed entertainment viewers, and all sorts of attitudes toward interrogation techniques, rendition, trust in the National Security Agency.

And so we have, again, it's not causality, it's correlation, but it's pretty indicative, I think, that Americans don't have a lot of access to spy facts, but they have a lot of access to spy fiction. And I have evidence that fake spies are making real policy. Justice Scalia invoked the show 24 reasoning through cases before the court.

We have Senate confirmation hearings of Leon Panetta where they asked him fictitious plot lines as though it was a real question and Panetta had to answer them. So there are a number of examples where we all watch these shows, and they're exciting, but they fuel misperceptions about how intelligence agencies work.

And it makes people think that they're omnipotent, and also incompetent. And they're running roughshod over American rights and values, when that is not the case.

>> Niall Ferguson: Now, look here, Amy. I've got a few things to say to you, and I want you to listen carefully. The one thing that James Bond has done wonders for is recruitment to intelligence agencies.

And if you want anyone to take on these frankly crappy jobs, you're gonna need some role models up there in the silver screen. And nobody's come close to me in 50 years of espionage movies.

>> Amy Zegart: That was worth the whole thing to hear that, Niall.

>> Amy Zegart: You raise a really good point, and I've heard this before, which is that fake spies and this entertainment is a great launching pad for recruitment, and it's a great launching pad for education.

So when you go to CIA, in the conference room in Public Affairs, the walls are decorated with movie posters from famous fictional accounts. Everyone loves the glamour of Jason Bourne and James Bond and Kerry Matheson. And so it is helpful for recruiting. But you also want people to know what they're getting recruited for, what the real job is to your point, cuz it takes a lot of effort and training.

You don't want them leaving disillusioned. So there is some benefit, but not as much as people think there is.

>> John H. Cochrane: Well, perhaps to emphasize your point, James Bond is fictional. But if anything, he's on the covert operations end of intelligence. And I would imagine 99.9% of the job is you go to a desk in a cubicle in Langley, Virginia.

You stare at a screen all day, try to make sense of what you're seeing, and then you go home. Hardly the glamour of James Bond's life.

>> Amy Zegart: And in fact, John, I just taught a class with our national security affairs fellow from the CIA, Sam Townsend, and we were arm wrestling over this.

So we did this class on covert action, and he made exactly your point, which is 99.9% of what intelligence agencies do is not covert action. Why are we spending our time on the tiny sliver of intelligence activity that is covert action? And my answer is, because that's what people focus on, and those are the areas of greatest controversy.

But your point is exactly right, it's misled.

>> John H. Cochrane: I challenge you Amy, write a screenplay on a real intelligence gathering operation and see if you can pitch it to Hollywood. 37 hours of this.

>> Bill Whalen: Let me ask Niall some question. Would a Hoover senior fellow make a good spy?

 

>> Amy Zegart: Some Hoover senior fellows would make good spies.

>> H.R. McMaster: How do we know that some of them already aren't?

>> John H. Cochrane: Is it requirement? Requirement one is ability to keep one's mouth shut, which I think absolutely nobody in this room has.

>> Niall Ferguson: Don't blow my cover, HR, please.

>> Bill Whalen: Well, Amy, our time is up for this segment.

It took two years to get you back on the show. Let's work on it the next time, okay?

>> Amy Zegart: I can't wait to come back, especially with the impersonations that I got to hear. So thank you for that.

>> Niall Ferguson: We still haven't heard from John on the impersonation fund.

That's for the next segment, right?

>> John H. Cochrane: What good role can I do? I will think about that for next time.

>> Bill Whalen: Amy, thanks for coming on the show, take care.

>> Amy Zegart: Thanks for having me.

>> H.R. McMaster: Thanks Amy.

>> Amy Zegart: Bye, guys.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, let's move on to our second segment.

And that is pro-Palestinian protest, rolling college campus across the United States of America. The show gets a good timing award in that it's May the first last night at Columbia University in New York, which is the epicenter for these protests in the United States. The police went in, the NYPD went into a building and repossessed it from protesters who had seized it.

Those protesters are probably being processed in New York jails. And given new York's rather revolving door system of justice, I imagine they will be back on the campus in a few days. Added again, Niail, I wanna start with you in this regard. You look back in American history, in the Vietnam protests.

For many protesters, this was personal. Their generation was fighting overseas. Their generation was dying in battle. They had bad skin of the game when it came to protesting the war. But you look at these protests, Niall, and here's my question. How many of these protesters actually have a personal stake in Gaza?

How many have a personal stake in Israel? In other words, we've talked a lot of time in the show the past four years, Niall, about higher education, about culture, about free speech and so forth. Is what's going on in Canada campuses right now. Is it driven by Israel and Gaza, or is this what I would call a fill in the blank protest?

In other words, this issue becomes the opportunity to have a larger public demonstration.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, great questions, Bill. Part of the problem we have here is that for many people who perhaps graduated further back than ten years ago, there's a tendency to say, students will be students. Protests on campus are kind of the norm.

I remember in my young day I was in protest, too. This is all perfectly normal. And I think this is a great mistake. It's particularly, I think, a mistake to think that we're seeing something similar to the late 60s, early 70s. I mean, there are differences other than the one that you mentioned.

I think one of the most important points to remember is that compared with late 60s, early 70s, many more people are at college than were at college then.

>> Bill Whalen: Right.

>> Niall Ferguson: And at the same time, they're a smaller percentage of the electorate than young people were then. So they're simultaneously influential within the generation, but the generation feels relatively weak politically.

Whereas I think young people, and particularly students in the early 70s, felt powerful, and they were right to. So if you think about what's happened, the word epicenter that you used is inappropriate because it's happening at many universities. Columbia currently is getting a lot of media coverage, but there's also action at UCLA.

There's disruption at University of Texas, and we've had some pretty unpleasant behavior towards Jewish students on the Stanford campus. So this is actually happening in multiple universities. Coincidence? Are they all just kinda getting the idea from TikTok? No, I don't think that this is a purely memetic process of rent a mob, let's find a cause and get out in the campus.

This is organized, and the extent of the organization is the thing that is most perturbing to me. It happened very rapidly after October 7th that pro-Palestinian protests were launched, swamping any sympathy that might have been expressed for the victims of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic jihad. I don't think that was just a rapid response on the part of student activists.

I think Islamist groups, radical leftist groups, had a plan to exploit the crisis in Israel for their own ends. And I think this is something that is still underreported in the mainstream media. There is a reason why there are substantial anti-Israeli elements in American campuses, and that is that a lot of Middle Eastern money has been pouring into American universities, as well as students on government scholarships from the region.

So I don't think we should confuse this with previous eras of student protest. Finally, and crucially, in the late 60s, early 70s, students found themselves at odds with university administrations in a fairly straightforward schism. Today, substantial elements of university administrations, diversity, equity, and inclusion officers, radical leftist professors, side with the disruptive protesters.

And I think, and we've made this argument before on GoodFellows. We have a very disturbing combination of leftist or progressive or woke administrators, students, and faculty dictating increasingly what can be said on campus. Not only disinviting the speakers, that was ten years ago, but now fully disrupting the life of the university and intimidating, if not assaulting, Jewish students.

It's a very, very different picture from the picture of the late 60s and early 70s or any intervening student protests you could name.

>> Bill Whalen: John.

>> John H. Cochrane: Boy, yeah, this is an interesting phenomenon. I'll make two broad points. One, let's try to find something good about it. What's good about it is that the rest of the country is, again, able to see much more clearly what's going on, the rot at elite colleges.

This isn't just a few crazy students. This is people who pay attention to their lectures. This is what's taught. All that's taught at the 20th century at Columbia is France Fanon and Algerian resistance. So no wonder that students who don't read anything outside, this is what they pick up.

Well, America, you saw it a little bit at the House hearings with the presidents. Now, you see on your TV screens exactly what's going on at elite colleges. It's part of their self-immolation. I saw some surveys, the number of employers who think that it's a good idea to hire people from these places is plummeting.

So great, you get to see what's going on. The curious thing is, who are these people and what are they doing? Interviews with them shows profound ignorance. What river to what sea? What we just want is a Palestine where everybody lives together democratically and peacefully. Yeah, is that what they want?

Maybe not. And it is, of course, it's, how do people come to this worldview? Well, they think we are the good people and we've been steeped in decolonization and various things. So, of course, once we decide they're the good people, they must be on our side. So they project and decide that Hamas is for climate justice and LGBTQ rights and so on and so forth.

Not true. But look, complete ignorance about, what about the 500,000 killed in the Syrian Civil War, to say nothing of atrocities going on? It's completely unaware of that stuff. It is a little bit performative, it's the Che Guevara T-shirts of the moment. But it's interesting that this movement, which is actually pretty common on college campuses, and a large part of the sort of elite left wing progressives in the US, they used to be safetyists.

Little words are gonna hurt us. Now they are out there endorsing horrific violence. Horrific, not just killing people, torture, rape. They're all for Iran, which is having a crackdown on women and tortures its people publicly as it executes them. So it's interesting that this movement, I don't know if they understand what they're saying, but what they are saying has turned into a public endorsement of horrific violence.

Well, now you know who they are a little bit more, too.

>> Bill Whalen: HR, I'm curious about the fix, protesters will come and go. They'll either get kicked off campus, they'll graduate, they'll be gone a couple of years. But what about the faculty who are still there and either indoctrinating or encouraging this?

What do you do about the faculty?

>> H.R. McMaster: Fire them. I can fire them, and I think it should be quite easy to do that. These are people who have taken action that cuts against the mission of the university. And I think what's clear here is these are people who are inciting activities that is interrupting the education of people who are paying to be educated at the university.

These are people who are shouting others down and not allowing other viewpoints to be heard, which, again, is the purpose of university. These are people who have put forward an orthodoxy and are trying to foist this orthodoxy of self-loathing on our young people, when the whole purpose of going to college is to be able to question orthodoxy and to listen to a broad range of views.

The new left interpretation of history, the Marxist view of history, the postcolonial theories, and everything, those have always been taught on US campuses, and they should be. You should read Charles and Mary Beard and William Appleman Williams in terms of understanding American history and coming to your own interpretations.

But when that's all that you're reading, is the kind of literature that tells you to organize the world into oppressor and oppressed, to judge people based on their identity categories. To believe that our country was founded to preserve slavery rather than on principles that made that criminal institution unsustainable.

And that we fought our most destructive war in history to emancipate 6 million of our fellow Americans, and then, of course, learn all the difficulties that we encountered across trying to achieve equality of opportunity. But, I mean, I just think that this has to be seized upon as an opportunity to refocus on the purpose of the university, to remove those who act against that purpose and to maybe achieve a greater degree of diversity of view in the humanities in particular.

 

>> John H. Cochrane: Let me just add, there's a deep question. We're at a fork in the road in universities. Is our purpose scholarship, learning, integrating ideas, or is our purpose advocacy and indoctrination and fostering of political activism? And most of the people who you're mentioning, they firmly believe and will say out loud, that is the purpose of the university.

 

>> Bill Whalen: John, let me ask you a monetary question, then I would ask Niall a political question. John, here's the monetary question. My favorite headline of the week comes from the satirical Babylon Bee, which wrote the following. Columbia protesters clarify they only want death to America after America is done repaying their student loans.

Is it time, John, to look at student loans?

>> John H. Cochrane: The student loan fiasco is one of the great economic stories, last week. Those of you who haven't paid attention despite a Supreme Court order saying you may not do it, despite no congressional authorization, kinda funny. They were so punctilious about waiting for Congress on Ukraine but we can hand out hundreds of billions of dollars of debt relief.

The numbers are up around 1 trillion of loans that have been forgiven. And the other fun part about this story, remember back to the early 2000, there was a business called student loans. Banks gave you loans to further your education. And they were pretty, they wanted you to go to a decent college and get good grades and take a major that meant something.

The federal government took this over and the story was, well, we'll cut out profit in the middleman and save money a trillion dollars later that ought to give you a good chuckle. And the other concept was the federal government has the ability to get to you to repay through the IRS in a way that private people don't because there's no collateral for a student loan.

Haha, isn't that great? We took it over to save costs, cut out the middleman. And because the federal government was better at collecting money than everybody else. Well, trillion dollars later, here we are one, huge amounts of money down our deficit rat hole.

>> Bill Whalen: And Niall, the political question, does order now assume a greater role in this election?

In other words, is Donald Trump gonna play the role of Richard Nixon in 1968?

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, I, a week ago would have said, no, this isn't a big deal if you're in the swing states. And I'm changing my mind on this. And one reason I'm changing it is that, as I mentioned earlier, this is organized.

Here's a great illustration, quote from a story that just broke in the Washington Free Beacon. A New York City nonprofit that received more than $12 million from Goldman Sachs's charitable arm, encouraged anti-Israel activists to recreate the violent protests of the summer of 2020, just hours before rioters stormed occupied a building on Columbia University campus.

And this organization, The People's Forum, is one of those organizations that intends to make sure that this continues into the summer after the school's close quotes. And here I'm gonna quote its executive director, Manolo De Los Santos. They are gonna, quote, give Joe Biden a hot summer. Now, one place that will be hot, John, will confirm this in August, is Chicago.

And by a kind of ghastly coincidence, that's exactly where the Democrats held their convention in, yep, 1968. Now, if there's one thing that you can learn from history, and Luke Nicht's great new book on this helps. It is that having a lot of radical leftist protests in an election year really can help a Republican candidate to win.

It helped Richard Nixon, no question. And I think more and more, the more this gets national coverage and it's getting national coverage, and the more it becomes apparent that radical leftists are organized in this mayhem. I think that more and more people are gonna be saying, you know what, I have all kinds of problems with Donald Trump.

Bad person, bad things he's done but you know what? We gotta put a stop to this and Trump's the only person who's going to. That's where this is leading us. And I think it's an extremely alarming trend. And the protesters, the people who are causing mayhem on campuses, are gonna get a very rude awakening when they discover on November 5th 6th, who's just won the election and what that could imply for them.

So I think there's a fascinating dynamic going on here between Walkey Lunacy and Donald Trump. Notice the peaks of the kind of lunacy on campus have been election years, 2016, 2020. It's gonna be again this year. I think this helps Trump. I didn't think it a week ago, and I do.

 

>> John H. Cochrane: There's a great Trump campaign commercial that needs to be done, which is putting the campus people on together with the hundreds of billions of dollars that Biden gave to exactly these people. But I think we're gonna replay 68, hopefully as far and not as ten times worse.

But even after the election, imagine the same group of people once Trump makes a narrow victory. I think this is gonna make the George Floyd protests look mild in comparison. And when newly elected President Trump calls out the National Guard, the entire forces on the other side are gonna, here comes the dictator.

And boy, boy, is it gonna be a mess?

>> Bill Whalen: Thank you for mentioning George Floyd John, that's my exit question here. It's a very simple either or question. America's anti-Vietnam protests ran the better part of a decade, from about 1964 to the early 70's. George Floyd, with John, mentioned the BLM protest.

That was the summer of 2020, pretty quick phenomenon. Here's the question, gentlemen. You look at the pro-Palestinian protest, which is it? Is it gonna be long-term like Vietnam? Is it gonna be more of a flash in the pan like BLM? John.

>> John H. Cochrane: A flash in the pan. This is, for the moment, a very narrow part of elite university students financed and organized in a narrow place.

But even in the mainstream Democrat, I mean, the mainstream Democratic Party was against the Vietnam War, so that was a much more natural thing. I think it's going to spread once it becomes about the election.

>> Bill Whalen: Mm-hm, HR.

>> H.R. McMaster: I think it's gonna be limited in time, but I'm worried about other looming sort of civil unrest associated with a contested election, as John said.

I think that's a really important point that we'll probably talk about more on this show. But I think it's important to point out that many of these groups, and certainly foreign entities who also fund these groups, like Code Pink, for example, that works through a cutout of a Chinese billionaire to funnel money into them.

What they want is they want us to not have confidence in who we are, confidence in our common identity as Americans. They want us not to have confidence in our democratic principles, institutions and processes. So let's stop helping them out by through this curriculum of self loathing, and then also by aiding and abetting those who profess to hate this country, as you mentioned, but are quite happy about getting their tuition paid by the US government.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Niall, you get the last word.

>> Niall Ferguson: Gonna run and run. This is not a flash in the pan. They intend to keep it going after we get to the summer holidays. And I think they will be able to, partly because the war is gonna keep going. It's not like the Middle East is about to just have a ceasefire.

I think that's still a highly unlikely outcome. And more likely outcome to me is we get a new round of conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. So as long as the conflict goes on, and this was true of Vietnam, the protests will go on, especially when there is an organization that is intent on keeping those protests going.

So this runs and runs, and there's always another cause. Because the great thing about wokeism is it's got this shapeshifting ability to move from cause to cause. What will the current thing be next year? I don't know, but they'll still be causing mayhem and trying their best to use identity.

Identity politics and the tactics of disruption to undermine the stability and functioning of our universities, so this is gonna run and run.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, gentlemen, good conversation, now, it's on to the lightning round.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, reminder to our viewers and listeners, if you want to send in a question for the lightning round, you can do so.

You go to hoover.org/AskGoodFellows, and you can pose a question to all three of them, or to Niall, John, HR, choose your poison. This week's question comes from Panco in Manila, Philippines, who writes the following. Gentlemen, quote, I was debating with my left-leaning college friends who are very much anti-America, anti-Israel, anti-institutionalism, and anti-Army, and yet they're also well-educated, good people.

I told them about how demonization may have influenced them, forming more than these radical ideas without deep misunderstanding or understanding of certain issues. They countered me by saying, how can you not demonize these groups that do unforgivable acts? They were referring to dirty cops, criminal offenses by the military, the flattening of entire communities for one terrorist cell, all politicians being corrupt, etc.

Question, how would you counter their take, HR?

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, since our writer is from the Philippines, would he still want to be under Japanese occupation? So I would just say when you hear this narrative of, and of course, I know that our viewer didn't ask, I should maybe ask his friends that.

I think it's important just to look at the historical record. Would the world be better off or worse off if the US didn't enter World War I? Would the world be better off or worse off if the United States didn't help defeat Nazi Germany and imperial Japan? Would the world be worse or better off if we didn't help rebuild the countries that were devastated by those wars, including the Marshall Plan for Europe.

And look at how Japan had gotten back to its pre-war levels of growth just a few years after the end of the war. Would you rather live north or south of the 30th parallel? Would you rather, if you're a Bosnian Muslim, where would you be today if the US had not intervened?

Was Afghanistan better off or worse off with the United States forces there? I mean, just look at the facts. And I think that's what is absent from much of this curriculum and these reified philosophies, associated with critical and post modernist theories is they're essentially fact free.

>> Bill Whalen: Niall?

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Philippines is increasingly a frontline state in cold War II, right HR?

>> H.R. McMaster: Absolutely.

>> Niall Ferguson: And it's interesting that in the course of the last few months, there's been more pressure exerted by the Chinese on the Philippines than on Taiwan. So it's very appropriate that we get this question from a Philipino viewer, because I think that you should say to your friends, nobody's claiming the United States is perfect, or Israel for that matter.

But they're democracies, and there is a place in those democracies for free speech and debate. Is that true in China?

>> Bill Whalen: John?

>> John H. Cochrane: Niall tries to assume China and I think Niall's exactly right, we focus on Taiwan, but it's actually going on now in the Spratly Islands and the South China Sea.

There's two things that can help, one is just facts, and the other is, for example, you mentioned the flattening of entire communities for one terrorist cell. Exactly where is that happening? But also when the facts of horrible things are happening around the world. I mentioned the Syrian Civil War, I mentioned what China's doing, the Uyghurs and Russia and Ukraine.

There's this kind of narrow focus on one thing that's going on in Israel. But also if you live in a democracy, dirty cops, criminal offenses by the military, politicians that are corrupt. The answer to that is reform. I don't know how logically you get from the problems of a democracy, especially one like in the Philippines, that needs reform, to advocacy that it's just fine to invade, murder, rape, behead, hang, drag bodies around in Israel and Gaza.

What does that have to do with reforming cops in the Philippines?

>> Bill Whalen: Next question, California's new $20 an hour minimum wage for the state's fast food chains, has prompted job cuts and moved to automation and robotics and sticker shock on the menu. John, would you go into grumpy economist mode here for a minute and give us a brief discourse on cause and effect?

 

>> John H. Cochrane: Well, cause is you raise the minimum wage, effect is prices go up, people get less jobs, and especially, the most challenged. If you're an employer, what we've seen on the minimum wage, if you're an employer and you have to pay a higher wage, what you do is you just pickier about who you hire.

So, it helps a little bit that the people who can show up on a steady schedule and already trained, the kid who doesn't speak English so well, the single mom who needs a schedule, those are the ones who really lose out on the employment effect. So, one more step on California's deep efforts to destroy its economy.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Questions for the panel. Which fast food chain has the best burger, John Cochrane, do you do fast food?

>> John H. Cochrane: Very, seldom.

>> Bill Whalen: Next HR?

>> H.R. McMaster: In-N-Out Burger man, there's no question about it.

>> Bill Whalen: Niall?

>> Niall Ferguson: I make my own burgers, and my sons consistently vote them the best in America.

My cheeseburgers are superb and far superior to anything you'll get in a drive-in.

>> H.R. McMaster: I don't know, you gotta get a double double, Niall, with fries, animal style, I'll treat you, Man.

>> John H. Cochrane: In-N-out is a real California tradition. And those of you haven't been here, when you come to California, you at least have to go try it and see what it's about.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Let's agree HR for the win, it's In-N-Out, no question about that. All right, gentlemen, final question, and we're gonna go to the video to look at this.

>> Renato Moicano: I love private property! And let me tell you something, if you care about your country, I'll read Ludwig Von Mises and the six lessons of the Austrian Economic School Mother.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, I'm assuming the three of you guys are not into MMA and UFC, but that gentleman is named Renato Moicano. He's a Brazilian mixed martial artist who competes in the lightweight division of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Question for the panel. Since when did an Austrian school economist become all the rage in South America?

 

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, if you look at what's happening in Argentina, where the president is an ardent devotee of Austrian economics, you can see that our prizefighter is no complete anomaly. Actually, what's fascinating, is the extent to which libertarian economics has made more advances in South America than anywhere else in the world in the last decade.

And that may be because alternative forms of economics, the corporatist, keynesian, peronist models, have been tried there and failed. John, I'm sure you're in favor of this, right?

>> John H. Cochrane: Yeah.

>> Bill Whalen: Without the cuss words.

>> John H. Cochrane: Without the cuss word, yeah, any way of getting the word out is just fine.

Latin America has certainly, more than anywhere else, tried everything else and is now ready to try the one thing that works. So it's an interesting phenomenon. Who would have ever guessed? But take the win.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, HR, what happens if you, Ferguson and Cochrane get inside the octagon and go at it?

 

>> John H. Cochrane: HR wins.

>> Niall Ferguson: That's not gonna last long. Even if John and I joined forces, I think we're both out for the count in round one.

>> H.R. McMaster: MMA, it's so intense, I used to box and of course, you're cognizant. Maybe head injuries, that sort of thing. I had a number of concussions for rugby already, but, man, it's just amazing the blows that these guys take.

They're so tough, these guys. And obviously they're extraordinary athletes. Being able to move and kick the way they do, it's just fantastic. I mean, it's hard to watch. It's just so brutal, man even for me, it's really intense.

>> John H. Cochrane: I got a strategy. I think I can outrun HR.

 

>> H.R. McMaster: Until I get my knees replaced, yeah, probably that's true.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay gentlemen, great conversation, let's leave it there. Our next GoodFellows is coming up in the middle of May, you don't wanna miss it for two reasons. Niall Ferguson is gonna be back in the house, and we're gonna be joined by, you guessed it, GoodFellow's favorite, Stephen Kotkin.

And we're gonna have kind of a fun show, we're gonna look at historical counterfactuals. So we're gonna ask Niall, John, and HR to all come with a few historical what ifs and talk about what might have happened if history took a different course. You don't wanna miss that and again, that's in the middle of May.

On behalf of my colleagues, Niall Ferguson, HR McMaster, John Cochrane, all of us here at the Hoover Institution, hope you enjoy today's show. We'll see you soon, until then, take care. Thanks for watching.

>> Speaker 10: If you enjoyed this show and are interested in watching more content featuring HR McMaster, watch Battlegrounds.

Also available at hoover.org.

>> Dr. Evil: You're the Diet coke of evil. Just one calorie, not evil enough.