It's amazing what your buddy can find to regurgitate when it feels the constant need
to do so. It draws on deep reserves. Ask not what your country
can do for you, and what you can do for your Either you were
with us or you were with the terrorists. I was gonna put him.
It's the Ricochet Vodcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Lock, who are not here
this week in their stead, Charles C. W. Cook, Stephen Heyward,
I'm James Lylax, and our guests. We don't need no stinking guests.
I agree, you'll never get bored with when we never get bored to.
Let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast number
six six six. Yeah, I know, super double extra evil, Mark
of the Beast and all that. Well, it was inevitable. The great
thing is is that we got the six six, We've got the six hundred
and sixty. How many podcasts out there sputter and fail and fade away,
never to be heard again after fifty sixty. But now we're still going strong
into our six six six podcasts and we intend to be here in the seven
hundreds as well as we discuss the things in the world. Usually we've got
Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lotleys. You got me unfortunately,
but they are both off on unknowable peregrinations. So we have Stephen Hayward and
we have Charles C. W. Cook. Gentlemen, welcome, Well,
it's good to be here. But boy, Peter and rob I'm starting to
wonder about those guys. They shared are gallivanting a lot they do? They
do fies. Ah, yes, that makes sense. Well, you know
you may be right, Charlie, because I've seen pictures of them together in
foreign capitals, A dressed in tennis clothes with tennis rackets, So I think
they've got kind of an I spy thing going on there where they seem to
be mild mannered pundits at large, but actually they are international agents of intrigue.
Who did the I spy guy works Who did they work for? Was
it one of those you know, organizations with an acronym with an uncle with
a smersh with a specter with a ZOUI? Who did I Spy work for?
And does anybody can either of you tell me who was the most famous
employee of Zawi? Boy, you got me there. Okay, well we'll
have to tell you. We'll tell you that at the end of the show,
because he was one of the world's greatest secret agents, who at the
time, as a kid, I thought was just absolutely awesome. It was
only later that I realized that half the show was a complete and utter joke.
That it wasn't going over my head because I wasn't aware of the conventions
they were playing off of. Okay, it's Derek Flint. Everybody knows it's
Derek Flint. He worked for Zawi, what Zowie stood for. I don't
know what we stand for here at Rick Koshet is four square commentary and analysis
of things you're already tired of hearing about. No, I'm kidding, but
the debate, there's probably maybe thirty six minutes forty five minutes left the boxygen
on that one. If you watched it, if you cared, or if
you want to draw any conclusions from it. I assume, gentlemen, you
were there taking notes, watching keenly as they vied for position. What did
you take away from the last debate? I actually did not watch it live.
I'm traveling this week, and I find these things tedious. And I
don't feel a professional responsibility to hang on them like a lot of people do.
But I watched some highlights and read a lot of analysis, and one
thing that there's a new Snap poll out apparently today, showing Nikki Hayley the
winner. These kinds of online polls are not scientific, but they're often right.
I think they often turn out to catch something. Now, in this
case, I've been remarking for several years now that the parties have switched places
in their presidential selection process. The old cliche used to be Democrats fall in
love and Republicans fall in line. In other words, Democrats always swoon for
the new face, especially a charismatic one, going back to John F.
Kennedy, but certainly Barack Obama's the example are excellence. Whereas Republicans were always
like a monarchy, there was always a succession. The nominee was the person
whose turn it was next, And you can trace that back to you know,
reagae and eighty and Bush in eighty eight and so forth. That's how
we got Romney and McCain, people who were acceptable to conservatives, but no
great excitement of them. And Trump up ended all that. And now as
we saw in twenty twenty. It's Democrats who fall in line when they're ordered
to get behind Joe Biden, who's never anybody's idea of mister excitement or mister
charisma, and Republicans who in twenty sixteen swoon for the new face. So
that's all along preface to say, I don't think anybody thought that Nicky Haley
would be one of the top tier candidates six months ago or a year ago.
And yet she's clearly emerging as one, and she seems to be performing
very well. And the big question is as we get into the rough and
tumble of actual votes cast as whather show, Hold up, we did see
even before Trump, and then I'll shut up and let Charlie get on this.
We did see Republicans have boomlets for people precursors to try Pappy Cannon maybe,
but certainly Herman Kane in twenty twelve. I guess it was Ben Carson.
You know, Knute had his innings where he was at the top of
the poles until Romney took him apart in the primaries in twenty twelve. And
so we will see if Nikki Haley really emerges as say the number two candidate,
whether you'll have a you know, a pincer movement from Trump at the
top of the poles and Desanta is trying to hang on. And so that's
the interesting dynamic. To look at the fact that we're not hearing about any
zingers from the debate, with the exception of Nikki Haley's five inch heels or
whatever it was, that suggests that the accounts that it really was a debate
that was closer to being on substance is correct. Now that will all change
if Trump actually shows up for one, which I doubt he will. No,
you won't, Charles White. Do you think that Nicki Haley was seen
to have heard it? Who have won it? Well? I think because
she won it. I think this was there's a substantive debate, and I
think that it was a debate because of October seventh that was geared somewhat toward
foreign policy, and while the Santus is fluent in foreign policy, Nikki Haley
is more interested in it and perhaps came across as such. I think that
there's a paradox here. If you read through National Review the day after the
debate, you saw, broadly speaking, two sorts of posts one sort of
post said, this was the most substantive debate. This was the best debate.
This was the debate in which the candidates got to argue about real things
and elaborate real differences. The second sort of post said, none of this
matters. It won't make a difference. Donald Trump is still romping. And
the annoying thing from my perspective, both as someone who's not a great fan
of Trump, but mostly as someone who thinks this is a fairly important moment
that ought to attract substance, is that both of those things are true.
This was the most substantive, meaningful, useful debate, and at least thus
far, it doesn't seem as if it's going to matter in evaluating who won
it or did well. I would therefore propose this framework. If it is
the case that Donald Trump is going to romp to victory, that all of
this is talking fluff and pundit indulgence, then it doesn't matter what was said,
It doesn't matter who was good, It doesn't even matter that the debate
was substant But if Donald Trump is a paper tiger, and I think there's
a thirty percent chance of this something that's too high, I don't if we
are seeing a primary in which no one really has engaged yet beyond the media,
if we're seeing the lead that Trump is established being the result of name
recognition, habit reflects, and so on, and if there is going to
be an actual fight at some point in the prime process, then the winners
of the debate were clearly Ron De Santis and Nicki Haley, because both of
them established themselves as the only two people within the primary who can pull focus,
who can coherently lay out their vision, and who can answer questions seriously,
and it is going to matter that they can do that. I can't
say the same for Tim Scott. I like Tim's got a great deal.
I'm glad he's in the Senate. I think he's done good work in the
Senate. But he has the opposite of pulling focus. When he's on the
stage, he just disappears. Vivik Ramaswami, I agree with Nicki Haley.
I think it's an ass And Chris Christi is a man made for a different
time and probably a different place. Chris Christy was really great to watch when
he was governor of New Jersey, but he's just not where the Republican Party.
Is he's no. He seems to have walked out of a Thomas Nast
cartoon. I love it, and I love him for that. But you
can just easily see him, you know, with a big waistcoat and a
top hat and the rest of it in the golden chain and the watch in
the risk. So I just finished by saying I mentioned not because there were
no singers. There was nothing that emerged. It is true that nobody was
really talking about it. It didn't change therajectory in all of those cliches.
But you can win or at least do what you need to at the debate,
purely by treading water. And the two people who trod water at that
debate were Nikki Haley and run DeSantis, and they kept themselves in it in
case a fight breaks out in a few months. Well, that fight would
break out. How in the Iowa caucusses when people get together and and I
mean I remember seeing some footage. I can't remember what it is, and
I'm sure it's not indicative of anything whatsoever. But as twelve people who who
had been Trump supporters and have been strong Trump supporters and been Trump supporters in
twenty twenty three for that matter. But when they asked if they would go
for Desanders or Trump, they to ten of the twelve did not go for
Trump, and the rest went I think primarily for disances. Now that's an
extremely small sample, but it was suggesting when you get down to the room,
when you get down to it, that something that that that maybe pragmatism
applies, that people set aside the various reasons that they have for voting for
Donald Trump because they realize on some level he's gonna he's gonna lose. But
then again, every time I say that, people, well, what do
you mean. All the polls show in my head. Uh, national polls
show show my head of Biden. I just don't think that any of that
is is true. And it's it's bizarre me. And it's not because I'm
wish casting here and saying no, I really want this thing to be happened,
so this this other thing simply cannot be. But I am truly mystified
by people who think that Donald Trump, who is now a known quantity,
who is not on his game, who has got all of these things circling
around him, whether you believe that they're engineered by the deep state or whatever
that that that people want that again. And I know I sound like Rob
Long that I'm just so out of touch that I can't get it. I
can see why people would tell polsters that because f you, because you know,
bleep you buddy when it comes to telling me that I shouldn't vote for
this guy. But that does that calculation change in the cold, antiseptic light
of the voting booth. Well that's a question, isn't it. Because we've
done this over and over. And that's why I say I still think there's
a seventy percent chance Trump just wins it. Because the number of times I've
said maybe this or that will happen and then it doesn't, I'm tired of
saying it. But I do also think that it is early and people aren't
politically obsessed in the way that we are, and there is a chance that
this is front runner syndrome, and when it comes to it, there'll be
an actual examination of the candidates. And if there is, the only two
I think that could challenge Trump realistically are Haley and Dessantis. I agree,
Stephen, Yeah, So I think at this point we ought to be what's
the old the eight stages of grief, whatever heck it is. At this
point, we ought to be the stage where we recognize there's nothing Donald Trump
can do that damages in with his intense followers and with a lot of undecided
voters. I mean, I'm convinced that if he gets thrown in jail here
next week for contempt of court, or if he gets convicted and thrown in
jail in one of these cases of varying quality, his support will go up
by five points. Maybe I don't know, James, how quickly you want
to go on to the elections this week, but there is something in the
Kentucky result that suggested me part of the deeper dynamic of Trump. So,
as we know, the democratic governor hung on in a state that Trump won
by twenty five points two years ago, and some of the exopoles show that
the Trump voters forty percent of them voted for Andy Basheer, the Democrat who's
a and it wasn't a blowout win. It was what five points against a
pretty appealing Republican candidate. But people are scratching her head saying, how come
Trump's endorsement didn't put him over the top. Well, I think as we
know, but I still don't think fully appreciate. Trump appeals to a lot
of independence and a lot of weak Democrats in places like Kentucky that doesn't transfer
to other Republican candidates, and a lot of those people. Actually, there
was a pretty good book written a few years ago, and I'm blanking on
who wrote it because I actually know the professor. He's at Claremont McKenna College
and political science. But he went to some counties in Kentucky that had gone
for Trump. And these were heavily democratic counties that hadn't even voted for Nixon
in seventy two or Reagan in eighty four. They were that deeply democratic,
and they went heavily for Trump in twenty sixteen and again in twenty twenty.
And these are the kind of people who I think every we keep saying this
makes Trump stronger, but I think that a lot of the people for whom
Trump is a hero and he gets stronger with every attempt to try and put
him in the dock, are not really traditional Republicans. It's some of these
independent or weak Democrats that Trump was so successful in tracting in twenty sixteen.
And I don't think anyone's quite figured out that whole scene, and I certainly
haven't, but it's certainly there. And that's why people perhaps say that he
would win again in twenty twenty four is because exactly all to those people.
I just love the idea that he would become more popular and go up by
five points if he was jailed, because I'm waya for his verse, for
the tweet from a Birmingham jail to be entered in the political dialogue. Oh,
I love that idea, But the situation in which we find ourselves,
James, isn't it the chance of Joe Biden being the nominee and Donald Trump
being the nominee go up? If you propose to people that Joe Biden might
be dead and Donald Trump might be in jail. Well, what I cared
most about the elections this last Tuesday was my city council election here. Because
the Democratic Socialists of America and the Socialist Democrats of America splitters, I had
to put up a spate, a slate of candidates who I actually saw firsthand.
I went to a meet and greet the candidate event in my local neighborhood
where the city council person showed up. It's basement of a church, and
it's one of those church that has the rainbow flag and the all are welcome
here and happy Ramadan, and the rest of it is very liberal church.
And in the basement there we were, and the Democratic Socialist candidate refused to
answer just about every single question that was put to her because there was no
point in any of this until the workers control the means of production. So
with that absolutely riveting message and her charismatic personality which resembled a wet newspaper that's
been sitting on the stoop for a week, it was no surprise that they
lost. But you still got about seven or ten percent of the people in
my neighborhood. And so I walk around and look at these people, say
the hell are you voting for these people? But we did have more of
a progressive hold on the city council here. And you may say, who
cares, it's Minneapolis. It matters because if given what the city has gone
through and what the people have experienced, to actually vote for more of it
is always astonishing to me. And it's not exactly We've seen that elsewhere.
We saw it in Ohio, we saw it in all the places that said
yes, more taxes, place more more, and so I'm wondering exactly where
this supposed red surge is going to come from if you have a population that
is increasingly resigned to just feeding a state as long as it does things for
them that they're like, don't know, I mean, they'll always be a
Florida Charlie, Right, how did things go on down there? And what
elections you had? Any signs that diasked were from New York. Fleeing there
is starting to alter your politics. Well, we didn't have any elections this
year, but that's the way they're do it. But I will say on
your second question that the people who have moved from other places to Florida tend
to be really reliable Republican voters. I know that isn't always the case in
every place, but if you have left New York, Philadelphia, Boston,
Maryland, Washington, DC and come down here, you're probably cross with those
places, and particularly so have you left during COVID And this isn't my view.
You just have to look at the registration numbers. I'm going to get
this slightly wrong because I'm bad with numbers, but by and large the Democrats
had a party registration advantage in Florida from the Civil War until about a year
ago. That didn't mean Republicans lost elections. They've won the governor's race for
twenty eight years, but Democrats still outnumbered Republicans and elections were unbelievably close half
percent every time. And now Republicans have a five or six hundred thousand registration
advantage that has shifted after the tipping point was hit in the space of I
think it's a year, maybe eighteen months, and that's because of people moving
in who did not want to repeat the mistakes that were made elsewhere. So
I worry about that dynamic in some places. I think New Hampshire has suffered
from it. I think that Arizona and Colorado have suffered from it. It
doesn't seem to be happening in Florida at the moment, and from what I
understand, it doesn't seem to be happening in Texas either, where you were
more likely to vote Republican if you were from another state and if you were
born in Texas at the last election. Interesting, well, that's self sorting.
I suppose that it's natural what we have to worry about and press for
and be concerned, And are the people who remain in blue states but find
their sentiments trending red and it's hard for them to make the switch. What
we've seen in the last month after the October seventh attack in Israel has been
a sort of revelation to many people consider themselves to be liberal in those places
because they have seen the people that they regarded as their allies, because they're
progressive, because they believe in the oppressor or oppressive matrix and all these other
things actually turn out to be sort of kind of old style jew haters who
are anxious for a chance to rip down the flag and shout the K word
at people, and this has given them reason to do so. And I
wonder exactly how many these people are actually changing a lot of their political beliefs
because of what they've seen. And I don't think it's going to be that
many. I think there are certain sacrisanc issues on the left, and they're
willing to sacrifice just about anything in order to keep those issues alive. I
mean the abortion issue, for example. I mean you can look at certain
white women of a certain demographic and there's absolutely I mean it's the paramount issue.
So economics doesn't matter, national security, it doesn't matter or matters less
as long as there's this. And I read somebody say, well, now
that abortion is in the constitution in Ohio and it's enshrined, maybe we can
get those people back because we're no longer having this issue on the table,
which seems risible and also sort of demonic. It's like, well, well,
let's trade away all the lines of the unborn innocence here. But as
long as we've got that, let's let's see what we can do with what
we got now. And maybe that's so, But do you guys see any
sort of poll shift amongst those people who have been red pilled in the last
in the last month or so by seeing what actually is underneath the whole progressive
enterprise in some ways? Ah boy, So I wonder about that too.
If you go back to nineteen eighty, Ronald Reagan got thirty five percent of
the Jewish vote, which was unusually high for Republicans, and part of that
was anger among Jews at the way Jimmy Carter had treated Israel, and it
actually voted against Israel in the Security Council of the United Nations for the first
time ever, which infuriated Jewish leadership at the time. Reagan did not keep
that vote. In eighty four he did, okay, But the point is,
I think Republicans are lucky if they ever get twenty percent of the Jewish
vote. I think is the figure. So I keep wondering if we might
see nineteen eighty repeat. There's one big difference. In nineteen eighty. It
really was just the issue of Jimmy Carter had been unfriendly to Israel, and
that's married to a deeper thing. You know, one reason and abortions one
little piece of a James But there are other parts of it. You know.
I have a sort of conservative Jewish friend, so I've talked to about
this and they say, well, one reasoned Jews have long been uncomfortable with
Republicans. There's more than one, but one of them was the fact that
evangelicals, who now the perception, of course, if you're a Jewish and
live in Brooklyn, you think that's the Republican party, right, because that's
all you ever hear is you know, Evangelicals love Israel, but they think
that that's for quirky, spensational reasons of eschatology, and that actually puts them
off that it feels I'm not sure if condescending is the right word, but
it worries them that the affection is purely instrumental. And I think that's mistaken,
by the way, but that's a long subject. I think it's entirely
mistaken. No, I think it is. And that is a common talking
point in the left that the only reason they do is because they think that
Jesus are going to come back and convert everybody, and it's you know,
biblical revelations, six headed monsters, et cetera. And that's not it at
all. It's a fellow feeling for the roots of their own religion and for
a state that embodies Western values is right as they define them. I think
what might be different this time? And here? Actually, I think I
want to give a shout out to a Ricochet member named David Foster who has
a terrific post up in the member feed called the Hollow Men, and it's
a wonderful diagnose. It's quite a long piece, but he says there's one
particular thing that he says that I think is really marks out what's different about
what we're seeing in the United States, actually in Europe right now too.
I'll just read the last sentence of a paragraph halfway through. He says,
well, Jews were once disliked because they were too different from the overall society.
They are now denounced because they exemplify the things that progressives despise about their
own societies. I think that is. I think that's a wonderfully concise and
on point understanding of what's happening right here. So many of the people,
some of the stupid kids, but other groups on the progressive left are rallying
to Homas because that's a proxy for their revolutionary instincts. It's whatever tools at
hand to bash our civilization, to bash our culture. And I think a
lot of Jewish voters. I think Bill Maher has picked up on this,
you know, his ever ever steady march to the right that we've seen Bill
Maher doing has accelerated since October seventh, and I think more and more Jews
are going to figure out, wait a minute, the problem here isn't just
different currents of anti Semitism and the weirdness of evangelicals. The problem is these
progressives who we thought were our allies, and they're not, and if they
put two and two together, they're going to have to vote differently. We'll
Literarlie get into this a second, but I just want to say two things.
One that post which was in the member feed, which you can only
get if you join Ricochet, and believe me, it's worth every shekel,
and there is a small quantity of shekels. But we do charge a fee
to read the member fee independently post and the rest of it, and that's
how we keep the site sane. That post, which was in the member
feed, has now been moved to the main feed, so you can go
read at the hollom End by David Foster. And the second thing that is
with Bill Maher. You know I once canceled HBO I think over Bill Maher,
and now I have it again. And as he ages, he seems
to get a little bit smarter, which could mean to me that Bill Maher
has discovered senulytics. Have you heard about senulytics yet? It is a class
of ingredients discovered less than ten years ago, and they're being called the biggest
discovery of our time for promoting healthy aging and enhancing your physical prime. Now
I'm not saying you want to look like Bill Maher. But if you want
to have a mind that seemingly collects along at the piece which you preferred before,
well it's time to look at how you're aging your life. Goals in
your career and beyond require productivity. Right, Well, let's be honest.
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thank neural hacker for sponsoring today's Ricochet podcast. All right, Charles, if
you wanted to take something else on whether or we're going to see an alignment
or move on to something more interesting, such as the fact that people still
seem persistently to remove the posters have kidnapped children. This is this now seems
to be the strange sort of performative thing. I'm expecting people to now want
to be filmed doings. I don't know why they're still doing it. Knowing
that people are being filmed doing this and being let go, shall we say,
having a chat with hr Shall we say it's just it's it's it's bizarre
to me. And my favorite is this somebody caught in the middle of taking
down one of these posters, insisted that putting up the posters was against the
law, that actually there were civil statutes in place in New York that that
prohibited this, and I thought, Ah, finally there's one small little twig
of a law that they that they that they approve of. Actually, you
know, there's it's almost like the broken windows. It's almost like stop and
frisk. I mean, it's it's it's we can't have any of that stuff.
But they're really really irritated by the fact that a poster has been a
handbill has been pasted to a poll in New York City. Why the entire
social fabric would dissolve. We don't take this down. Why are they still
doing it? And do you think that they will continue? Yeah, that
is the most specific form of vigilantism I've ever seen in my life, the
idea that New York doesn't enforce its laws sufficiently, and so the one that
people need to go out and make sure is being fulfilled is the one against
illegal handbills post no bills. Thanks a bat Man you're really cleaning the city
up. I mean, this is sociopathy on a level that I can't comprehend,
and I'll confess this. I understood that anti Semitism existed in the world,
and I'm sure I understood that some of it existed in Britain, where
I'm originally from, and in the United States, where I now live.
But I have been alarmed and surprised by the scale of what I've seen in
Western countries, let alone the Middle East. I didn't expect this. I
thought that we would witness something more akin to the aftermath of nine to eleven,
where a few academics and Hollywood celebrities went out on a limb and said
America deserved it, or we have to understand the plight of extremely wealthy Saudi
Arabian zealots. But this has been something else, and I'm shocked by it,
and I've adjusted my framework a little bit, And perhaps I can use
that as a segue into answering the first of the two options you gave me
as well. I don't know what this will do to our electoral politics,
and I suspect that we won't see a nineteen eighty situation purely because while Donald
Trump remains the face of the party, I think many people who might be
tempted toward that will demur. But I think this is going to strike a
real blow at the integrity of intersectionality. There is a big difference between liberalism
with the capital l and progressivism. They're not the same thing. They're often
friends, they're often allies, they often work together on projects, but they're
not the same thing. And I've never seen an international incident separate the liberals
and the progressives in the way that this one has. Intersectionality requires for its
sustenance on various members of that coalition shutting up. It is, in a
sense a suicide pact. You have to be quiet because you have to agree
that you don't understand the feelings and the life experiences and the suffering of people
who have different intersectional qualities than you do. Well. What we've seen in
the last month, quite understandably is some of the people in that coalition who
have dutifully shut up while the stupidest things have been argued and advanced, saying
no, I will not shut up anymore. I don't actually like you,
and this is not a philosophy. I'm willing to go along with and I
think whatever it does to our electro politics in the short term, in the
long term, that's going to matter because it says for the first time,
from within the tent to the crazies, not in my name. So I
wonder if that's going to be the most obvious immediate shift as a result of
October seventh in America. Well, it requires abandoning a whole nomenclature that defines
your political outlook, the way you see the world. It requires you to
actually realize that the phonemes that you have been spouting are not just a meaningless
series of things round and cobbled together by an academic that gives you a gene
that you can have it. You were in public and at parties, well,
of course I'm progressive. Of course I believe in decolonization. Who wouldn't
Colonization was awful? Well, this is that the specifics of what they talk
about, when you get down to it, involve what Hamas did. So
if you realize that all of these things that you're talking about about oppression and
the whole dynamics and everything about the power relationships, that is not just simply
this intellectual game of pickup sticks that you can play with your friends and feel
good, but actually at its foundation is a fundamental, violent reorganization of society
along lines that we do not want because they are ineugal to the Western experience.
Do you then realize, wait a minute, I've been I've kind of
been talking nonsense here. I've kind of been duped. If this is what
they mean, I'm not on board with this. There was a cool so
of it doesn't apply to you. Well by that It's like the meme,
you know, the meme with Hayden criticism and Natalie Portman, yes, Star
Wars movies and yeah, and then the third panel, you know, he
says, so you'd right, and he just keeps it blank face. I
just feel like this has been applied to here where an awful lock. Perhaps
millions of American Jews who lean left have heard all of this talk about safetyism
and oppression and protecting people and so on, and in the third panel of
the meme have looked at progressives in the last month and said, and you're
going to apply this to Jewish people, right? And then they've seen the
blacks stare in the fourth panel and said, wait a minute, what do
you mean, how on earth can it not be that we are now the
ones who benefit from this framework. For a while, then it seems we
were ab to laugh at the campus snowflakes because they were demanding safe spaces against
the horrible idea that somebody walking past the campus may be thinking in their head
something that was contrary to what they believed, and so they had to have
their plate o rooms with the stuffed animals and the rest of it, and
we laughed at all of that. And in a sense, that's kind of
what they were up to. I mean, they were in this ideological bubble,
this sort of cultural world in which anything that pierced it was violence.
Okay, well that may apply to the overly pampered college students, but underneath
that as a group of people who really do want to have speech codes and
are very keen on enforcing what is and is not said. And it is
based on a pyramid of grievance that can be adjusted slightly, but we all
kind of know where that's going. So yeah, it doesn't apply because it's
no longer venian for it to apply to everybody. They can't have the safe
space, they can't have that because it's it's been denied them. And I
had something else was going to say before your excellent interruption there. I'll hand
it over to Steve. Yeah. No, no, no, no,
I prefer you interrupting me than than Rob because well he only interrupts your segues,
but completely completely lose the gist in the drift of what I said.
Right, Well, I think let me give you two data points from Berkeley,
where I'm embedded as an inmate, as I like to put it.
The first one was, you know, I noticed that there's been a conspicuous
silence from universities all around the country from their officers of diversity, equity and
inclusion. That's the whole unit that's supposed to address these kinds of problems.
And so I decided to look up at Berkeley, where we have a big
vice chancellor for DEI a woman named Danny and Matos who said fighting white supremacy
was remained mission and taking the job several years ago. And I thought,
I wonder if they've issued any statements. There are lots of statements in the
chancellor and deans and stuff, and I looked up and nothing. On October
seven, no statements from the DEI office at Berkeley. There was one statement
put out on October ninth from the Vice Chancellor of Diversity, and it was
a message of concern and sympathy and offer of resources for students who are upset
by the earthquake in Afghanistan two days that was the message. It came out
from DEI the Monday after what happened in Gaza in Israel, which is an
amazing thing. And then the second one that you may have heard about was
the dean of the law school where I'm embedded, Orwin Chemerinsky. He's very
left, but he's actually serious about free speech. He's Jewish, he's very
pro Israel. He has criticized anti semitism when it's erupted on campus. But
he wrote that article in the Los Angeles Times is what ten days ago now
saying nothing in my life has prepared me for the anti semitism I'm seeing on
campuses right now. And the first response was, well, is he naive?
Is he clueless? Because you could see this coming, including by the
way, one of the best predictions of this was Aaron Woldowski, famous political
scientist who died I think exactly thirty years ago. This month. One of
his last essays around nineteen ninety two said, I see anti Semitism coming on
college campus. It's connected to this rising ideology of colonialism and imperialism, and
suddenly Jews have gone from being oppressed victims to oppressors. And boy, did
he not have the architecture of that nailed. And I was saying, Dean
Schamerinsky and others clearly did not pay attention to what was going on right under
their noses. But I think it's actually worse than that. What I've come
to realize, and I've thought this for a while now, is that in
fact, administrators at colleges are perfectly aware of these ideologies and they don't take
them seriously. And I could go through this for a long time, but
I'll just say that an awful lot of this is virtue signaling. It was
perfectly easy to give up the land acknowledgment statements that they all give on college
campuses these days that are ridiculous. It is perfectly fine to say, oh,
have a center for colonial and oppression studies and ethnic studies and critical theory.
And I can tell you from now, having spent ten years around conventional
liberal academics, many of whom are very good in the ordinary sense of being
serious scholars. They don't take these people seriously. And I actually think the
radicals on campus, no, they're not taking serious, not taken seriously,
and this fuels their rage. And now suddenly this whole business of October seven
comes along and they have a target to unleash their rage. And so,
I mean, that's sort of a field theory. I should write a longer
piece about all this, but I think that now suddenly administrators in college campuses
are coming face to face with their own negligence, and I'm benign neglect,
and they don't know what to do about it because they're fundamentally all cowards.
Well, the land acknowledgment, Yes, yes, exactly what exactly do we
do? When we did call in a America, there was an interview that
I saw on Twitter the other day. I'm sorry, x I. I
was interviewing a couple of college gals glasses co eds as we used to call
them, about the situation they were protesting for Palestine, and essentially what they
thought should happen was that Israel should cease to exist. Mostly well, basically,
the Jews should just go home, and she said, and she said
that what they should do is they should go they should all go back to
those other countries that they have second citizenship in. I was waiting for her
to break out, because they are ritless Cosmopolitans, don't you know. But
I think that's sort of rue. But I think that's quite beyond her,
because she was quite stupid. I want to know. Maybe she wasn't stupid,
but she was extremely poorly educated. She believed that just about everybody in
Israel could go to the junk drawer, pull out their other passport and then
go back to Yemen and live in perfect safety, in harmony, in peace,
or Iran or Libya or any of these places, and that those few
who want to stay around could do so and live in a wonderful, multicultural,
peaceful politic that would result once you handed it over to Hamas or whoever
else. And they didn't believe that AMASA was a terrorist organization either. So
these people were dumb when it comes to knowing exactly what's on the ground.
And when you ask them what should be done about America, Well, the
people who are very very serious about the whole decolonization thing would seem to have
to say that we all have to go back to because the entirety of the
American continent has stolen land. Right, so I guess am obliged to go
back. I don't know where, that's just it. Do I go back
to Canada where the first lilac came through? Now that's all stolen too.
Do I go back to some Czech village which, for all I know,
was you know, was pushed out? You know, did the Mongols have
that territory in the old day? I mean, the idea that there's some
static situation to which ideally we should all resort ourselves is absurd and contrary to
the entire expanse of human history. But yet they persist, as they say,
right, well, you don't have to get into the problem of infinite
regress, which is what your progression opens us up to, to ask a
simple question, exposed to the hypocrisy of all this. I've been hearing now
for ten years, these land acknowledgements. We acknowledge this university exists on the
historic lands and sometimes leaving state lands, and from some indigenous tribe. And
I always want to raise my hand and say, then, why don't we
give it back. Why doesn't I mean, or at least pay back rent.
Harvard could do that from their endowment. No, only Israel is supposed
to give its land up. That's the only people who are supposed to give
their land up. The rest of us, it's just costless virtues signally,
except as I say, now we're seeing the real cost of the real price
of it has to be paid right now for these progressives who indulged all this
girls in Florida. I believe your governor has commanded the universities over which he
has swayed to d fund d couple from those student groups which provide material group
assistance to hamas to find how not exactly clear to me. But how is
that going, because, of course I'm sure there's been pushback. Well,
I think the scientist is wrong on this. I think that there is simply
no way of applying good laws that prohibit people from providing material support to terrorists
to these organizations on campus. As a general matter, I have no problem
with US supporting immigrants who violate the law or who violate the terms by which
they were admitted. I tell people this all the time. The number of
occasions on which I swore that I wasn't a communist or hadn't been a member
of the Nazi Party, didn't intend to commit terrorism, or restrict people's liberty,
or engage in sex trafficking or what you were was remarkable. I had
a number of visas, then a green card, then I became a citizen.
Before I went in to my citizenship ceremony, I had to swear that
I wasn't a communist. I have no problem with that whatsoever. In so
far as there are people in the United States who are violating the terms of
their visas, we should deport them. And if there are people who are
materially helping terrorists, then we should prosecute them. But I don't think that
the institutions that the University of Florida and the University of Central Florida to which
DeSantis is alluding match that description, And if they did, I would want
to see the police being sent after them, not university administrators. It's good,
of course that they should have been keen to make sure that you weren't
these things. I actually got banned from about one hundred subreddits because I defended
Charles C. W. Cook. I'm serious now, I would tell you
how exactly to go and find those pieces in Reddit. But for all I
know, they've been memory hold because the digital world, as we know,
is difficult to navigate. Oh you got your Bing, you got your Google,
you got the rest of it. But it you know, that's just
the overlay on top of this huge writhing mass. This is this whorld of
ants and centipedes and the rest of it. How do you figure it out?
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for sponsoring this the Brigachet podcast. You were going to say, Stephen,
Yeah, So, by the way, I read that immigration forum that all
prospective immigrants have to fill out, and it does have as ridiculous goes on
for fifty pages, right, and another ridiculous questions like are you coming to
the United States to engage in terrorist activities? Oh? Sure, Ahbed's gonna
check yes for that, right. I mean, it's like some comedian wrote
the darn thing. But on the point on the I think where I harshly
disagree with you is what I think, strictly speaking, Governor to Santus has
done is said that students for Justice in Palestine, in which they're chapters all
over the country, can no longer be a recognized official student group on the
campuses. That doesn't mean that the students can't express their opinions, their First
Amendment opinions, as long as they're not harassing other students. Now, the
curious thing to me here, and you know this is a we could go
a long time arguing about this on both sides. I think the curious thing
to me is so far no student chapter. But nor has the ACLU brought
a lawsuit against this. Uh. I mean they're First Amendment rights are being
infringed, or their freedom of association on campus is being infringed. And I
find that a curious thing. You would think the ACO you would leap to
file that suit against the santis And I'm wondering if the fear is a lawsuit
would open them up to discovery and you will find out some very unsavory things
about some of the people involved in these clubs or some other activities, like
are they sending money to hamas front groups and so forth? And that maybe
what's holding it back. That's just material Yeah, I mean that would be
materials. But the one thing that I think is going to be a problem
for Dissantis is that those chapters are not under the management of the national chapter
or the national organization, and it's the national organization that is always used as
the problem child. And I think that lack of a nexus would be a
big problem for him in court. But I agree with you that if if
there is something there behind the scenes that will never get that fuck as you
don't want to expose yourself. I was reading about who was at the congressional
member who's accused of having Hamas ties, having fundraisers who had Amos ties,
and the Kind Hearts Foundation popped up to this. It just brought me screeching
back to two thousand and one, two thousand and two, two thousand and
three, when Kind Hearts and Care and the rest of them were in the
news in as much as they were in the news at all, forty having
relationships that maybe kind of sort of did give money or actually did or the
rest of it. It's just once you open up that lid, there's just
this stew of stuff that it's very hard, and I mean, you can
get tripped up in the legalities, but you know that there's just a lot
of money that goes over there for doing all the things that you really should
not be sending them money to do. So yeah, well, I think
Stephen. The reason that they say, are you coming here with the intention
of committing terrorist access so they can get you on it later when you actually
do them, it's like, well, see you said no to this,
so this is where we're going to. This is that's exactly right. And
that's why they also have rules in place, for example about destitution, so
that if you end up now, we don't actually enforce them, of course,
but we could. No, we don't enforce an awful lot of things
because that would be that would be mean, and we don't want to be
that. You know, if you're wondering exactly how I got banned from one
hundred subreddits for defending Charlie, it was in Lockdown Skepticism, which was a
subreddit devoted to saying maybe we shouldn't all go home and weld ourselves into our
domiciles for six months because of COVID And it was a reasonable, science based,
rational, just very interesting form in which people who did were not terrified
Covidians, went to discuss things and somebody had mentioned an article and discussed that
Charlie wrote, to which somebody responded afterwards, well, it's nice to see
there's one sane person at National And under that I put, I said,
well, I wouldn't say just one, And that comment got me banned from
one hundred subreddits because a list went around that anybody who participated in lockdown skepticism
was thereby intellectually contaminated and should not appear in all the rest of these And
so I just got this blanket band where I couldn't say anything in these places.
Now is my life worse because I wasn't able to post on reddited?
No, my life was better because I wasn't most on Reddit. It's generally
become something of assessable and a whole and I don't want to be there,
and I don't even think that I should. But there probably is some place
right now where there sharing cute panda pictures. Now you're saying, what has
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sponsoring this the Ricochet podcast, I mentioned pandas, so pandas in the news
too. He's got me all. It's got me all. Exercise James,
because where the animal rights people when we need them. There's an inverse lesson
on our immigration policy here. Apparently pandas do not enjoy birthright citizenship if they
were born in American zoos to stay here. There's no DOCA protection and being
extended to them. There's apparently no asylum process for Chinese panda bears in our
zoos, and so if Trump had any wit, he would use this as
a part of his China bashing stick. We'll explain to people what's happening with
the pandas. Oh, obviously you're obviously you were deeply invested by friend.
Well, China wants them back. Apparently we have some long term lease or
I don't know exactly what, but China is reclaiming their pandas, some of
whom have been in our zoos for thirty years or longer. And this is
because you know, we're mad at China and they're mad at us. And
so this is a little symbolic thing. And I mean, I'm kidding a
little bit about the immigration status of pandas, but it is kind of interesting
to me that we're I don't know, it is symbolic of where things are
going, hopefully only symbolic. Well, Charles, you may have noticed in
the last week, I think Russia withdrew from one of the meaningless, useless
treaties that we were so happy to sign back in the eighties or nineties.
So it's Biden's foreign policy is collapsing in all fronts. China wants their pandas
back, and Russia is pulling out of treaties that kept us from, of
course having nuclear war. Do you think that people out there, what are
you kind of close with this? Do you think people actually believe that the
foreign policy of the United States is being directed by Joe Biden, or for
that matter, do they think that anything is really being directed by Joe?
Because I see all these tweets about these people, these and they're young folk
too, who are just so proud of Biden and the accomplishments, and say,
we let us be honest, this is the best foreign policy president we've
had for an awful long time. Yeah. I get asked this a lot.
Usually people say, is Barack Obama really running the country? Or is
Valerie Jarrett really running the country? And I just think the answer is a
lot simpler than that. I think the progressive blob is running the country.
And I think this is one reason why every young progressive that I know thinks
that Joe Biden is marvelous and everyone else in the country thinks he's a disaster,
Because in reality, the people running the country are the people we see
every day in DC it's the think tanks and their friends, and Biden's following
them. This is why, for example, Biden was so determined to issue
his illegal student loan executive order, because this was a considerable priority for young
progressives who desperately want their student loans forgiven. It's why we saw Biden having
said that the eviction moratorium could not be extended, having said that he'd kicked
the tires, looked at it from all angles and found he had no authority
did it anyway when Corey Bush slept outside or cried or something, because the
progressive groups wanted there's no master plan where a Manchurian candidates in the White House.
We know who's running the White House. You just have to look at
who gave him the most money at the last election, useful instrument through which
these desires flow. When he was elected, we were putting up memes of
him as Joe Gill, a character in the Patterns of Four Star Trek episode
where this elderly academic has just sort of propped up and used as a as
a figurehead while they're really evil, goes through them and uses his authority gravatas
in order to prod the society and shape it. That was three years ago,
and he's not exactly sharper now than he was back then. So so
yeah. On the other hand, I was listening to a podcast this morning
about design and they were talking about the design of the Devo album cover,
the first one, Are We Not Men? And how actually that strange contorted,
sort of melted faced figure of a golfer was Chichi rod Rigers. There
was a legal battle and then there wasn't and then Chichi requiesced to it.
And the band was talking about how when they first came up with this image
they wanted to do, they believe that man was devolving. That was the
whole thing behind the Devo. We're devolving now, so we have to have
music for that, and that they viewed this image of the golf player with
a golf ball to be a perfect example of the emptiness of American commercialism and
advertising and the rest of it, and so they used this cheap, tawdry
image of American banality to put on their album. Well, they were discussing
they talked to Mark montabaro Is, one of the members of Devo, who
was saying that back at the time, now that's what we thought, and
that he had to admit now, however, that he really liked golf,
and he did, and what he thought was exclusionary and ridiculous at the time
when he was a young man. Now he just he really liked it.
And then he paused, and as if admitting that his entire life had been
a lie, he said, and I have to say, I'm also really
fond of professional football. So there's hope that the guys with the weird flower
pot hats in their twenties who are eager to tear down American capitalism and consumerism
the rest of it, eventually age into a period where they are not senescent
because they take what we told you about before early in this podcast, but
are actually attuned to the true boons joys of American life, like football.
How's your team doing, Charles, pretty well? Six and two bout to
play the forty nine ers after a bye week, so that goes, shut
up, shut up. We beat the forty nine so there, Stephen,
Yes we did, Stephen. Do you have a team or are you a
baseball guy or a hockey or well not, no, I mean I'm a
sports I'm a generous fan. High a lie? What lie right. Actually,
James, I think the most interesting story, one of the most interesting
stories in football is you're in Minnesota Vikings who have this third string quarterback who's
what an astrophysicist or something and is performing very well an engineer, And I
think that's a fun story to watch. That was just great. Yeah,
our beloved Kirk Cousins goes out for the season and they plug in another guy
and within about, oh, I don't know, two minutes or so,
he's concussing what we bring out the third guy, at which point you really
want to know how deep the bench goes and the guy rallies them to victory.
It was quite fun in a season that has been hard at the times,
it was fun. It was fun. Anyway, this has been fun.
And we're going to quit because we've said all we need is we could
go on for another forty five minutes. You know that, But no,
we're gonna let you get on with your life. Charles and Steven and the
audience as well. But I got to tell you go to Ricochet. Why
don't you join? You will realize it's the place you've been looking for all
your years on the web. Now you can read the front page for free,
but the member feed which Stephen referenced to, and can get an advanced
reading of some of the finest writing and thoughts by people you probably don't know.
And that's great because they're not the same old talking heads who have been
floating around myself excluded for years and years and years. They're smart people,
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be supporting us and making your life easier, better and smarter as well.
So thank you everyone for listening. I think we will see everybody in the
I'm not going to ask Charles about Ricochet five point zero is going, because
we know it's coming along any second now. But for the moment, we'll
see you all the comments said Ricochet four point zero. Next week, maybe
Steven see around. James Ricochet h joined the conversation