At some point I'll disappear for thirty seven seconds to go get it. We'll
time you ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you
can do for your country. Mister Gerbuschoff, tear down this wall. Read
my lips. It's the Rickorsche Podcast. I'm James Liviacs with Rob Long and
Peter Robinson. That's the first and some time, and we're gonna have a
lot of fun talking to Barton Swain from the Wall Street Journals about Joe Biden's
iron grip and some other stuff. Lots of it. So Let's Abrise was
a podcast this issue. We'll destroy New York City. We get in ten
thousand migrants a month. I said it last year when we had fifteen thousand.
I'm telling you now when I went to two thousand, the city we
knew with about the loose Welcome everybody to the Ricoche Podcast, number six hundred
and fifty seven, and James, I'm like in Minneapolis, I was.
I was not here for six fifty six because I was at the State Fair,
the great Minnesota get together, swept together when in the daytime it's absolutely
fantastic and the twilight comes and the lightspop on it. It's magical eleven It
gets to be about eleven o'clock at night and all the miscreans try to storm
the gate and there's gunfire. But that's another day and another story. Happy
to be here back with Peter and Rob for the first time in some time.
Peter Howard things Howard things in California. This feels like a family reunion.
Well, it depends on the family, doesn't it. Are there certain
things we shouldn't talk about? And I was much fonder of the two of
you, it turns out, than I would have guessed. Absence. It's
called absence or abscess. And Rob, good to hear you two New York.
I was just here this morning hearing an angry TikTok rant. And I
know, I repeat myself from a New York mother who is not pleased at
all that her child has to present in just a huge trench of documentations to
get her kid in the school. But all of the migrant children are waved
right in instantaneously. And so you're there in the New York that mayor Adam
says is going to be lost or gone, And so of course you have
all the people on the right saying well, you know, we reap yourself
is what you're voted for. I have no sympathy whatsoever. Go enjoy your
dystopian hell. What is it like? Because I've seen the film outside the
Rosevelt Hotel where I stayed once. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's closed.
Anyway, we should just say yeah, so it was it was.
It was closed owned I believe by a Pakistani hotel group too, So they're
getting the nice amount of cash from the from the city. So what is
it? What is it like? Do you notice or you just live in
a in a migrants, No, I don't most migrants. I notice the
normal, you know, the normal New York City chaos. But I also
noticed there's a little bit there's a lot more more addicts on the street,
mostly because I love the village, and they can every now and then,
like uh once every eight weeks, the neighbors around Washington Square Park complaint screaming
and and they clear it cleared out. But that's pretty much where people can
score your drugs. So if you're looking to score drugs, James, that's
where you want to go. There. Well, north that the corn Yeah,
that was the epicenter in in uh yeah, panic, panic and Needle
Parker Panic Needle Park was actually seventy second seal. Yeah, you go up
there, it's like, uh so, so that's and then every eight weeks
it's it's gonna it'll it'll die down because the parents have just arrived because it's
NYU bas basically ny you kind of de facto owns Washington Square Park. They're
there, they they were given it for a lot of other concessions, and
so, you know, and then every now and then people complain. The
the migrant thing is interesting because I just have to say that I thought the
the the little trolling jokes kind of thing that people like Rona Santist did sending
you know, migrants up to Martha's vineyard. We're kind of cute, but
basically, what's you know, a lot of energy for nothing. But I
think you have to say that the ground swell of rage in New York City
and New York State, but between the mayor and the governor and the elected
representatives in Congress is precisely because the problem that they got to philosophize and theorize
about came home and you know, you have one hundred plus thousand migrants in
New York City in a city, woulds going to stretch budgetarily always it's gonna
and you you passed a law promising them all sorts of things you now can't
get out of because you just never thought would come right, You never thought
be here. It's one thing's Sanctuary City New York City's like okay, fine,
Like, how are you can gonna know? Like you're not gonna get
all the way up here? Well, wait a minute, and then does
the plaque on the statue of Liberty face towards the ocean or towards the city?
Because if it faces towards the ocean, I can give them a break
that they haven't seen it. But if it faces towards the city, they
ought to have been able to see. And the legal promise that it contains,
they know all that. And of course the problem here is not the
illegal. The word legal does not apply here. And so you may find
that the what I thought to be the silly little you know. I mean,
I was in favor of it. I applauded it, but I just
kind of shrugged and let me on and ho hum. That's stuff that,
like Rodney Santis did, actually has managed to galvanize a whole portion of the
country that just kind of didn't care because it was happening down there in the
places where we are gonna go, and you know, and they and they
spent past quarters saying crazy things like, well, New York City doesn't have
the resources that Brownsville, Texas has, which is hilarious. Right, So
now you're starting to see people like Mayor Adams say we gotta do something.
Hey, what's going on? And that is probably good for the country.
By the way, I just checked you said correctly. I'm fairly enough.
I think that New York City is always stretched for resources, or that the
budget is always stretched, but may I note that that is because they choose
to run the city that way. Here is the size of the twenty twenty
four budget for New York City. One city population about eight million people,
one hundred and seven billion dollars. Here is the budget for the state of
Florida, an entire state, what is it twenty five million people now or
actually, now that's a little high, and in an event, an entire
state one hundred and sixteen billion dollars. New York City spends so much money,
so lavishly that it has a budget that's ninety five percent as big as
the budget of the entire state of Florida. This is right, But Peter,
beyond the city do you have to you have to understand, I mean,
where does that money go. It goes for the fantastically well maintained,
clean and efficient subway system that at the envy of the world. It goes
for infrastructure so that the bridge to themselves are never a crumble. It goes
for all kinds of every you go to New York City, you see it's
worse than that spend you It's worse than that. It's the state that hope
runs the subway, pays for it, and it's the state that runs the
infrastructure. A lot of that stuff is like for the deputy assistant to the
chairman of the subcommittee of the Diversity school Board, controlling authority or whatever.
Right. A lot of it is crap, that is for sure. But
the point is that they can't mean you want you can make decisions about how
you want to spend your money, and you can spend it luxuriously if you
want, and you can waste it if you want on yourselves. Right,
So the city can tax everybody and then spend it on some nonsense thing.
And then that's you know, that's not the right way to be, but
it's nothing wrong with it when you add to it one hundred thousand plus and
growing number of people who've arrived here with nothing and then have a right to
all sorts of things that some of the city citizen city residents don't have a
right too because you passed a law in a grandstanding you know, well,
virtue signaling well a series of of of movements that you thought would never ever
you promises you never ever have to keep, and now you've got to keep
them. You know this. I hope people watching this are enjoying it because
you you you don't get this kind of You just don't get this kind of
symmetry. This is fantastic. It rarely happens in life, at least in
my lifetime. That's something so obvious. Happens exactly the way he predicted,
and this is it. And I think it's good for the country because it
is time now for people all over the country to realize that border security and
border policy is central to the future and that we cannot have You cannot have
a welfare state and open borders. You can only have one or the other.
You have both, you go broke. And that's what's happened in New
York City, and that's partly what happens in California. Rogers long. When
you're really conservative, you're just beautiful at these things are good object lessons.
The University of West Virginia, for example, is cutting a whole bunch of
programs, but as people have noticed, they're cutting the things that are useful.
They're keeping these social sciences and they're keeping the aspirations stay perfectly intact.
So the people who are on the liberal side, who are inclined to support
education of this nature, are appalled, and they're the ones who are making
the complaints. In New York you have the liberals who are making the complaints
about this. And I mean a part of you wants to say, look,
you don't get to have these issues. These have been our issues.
We've been talking about them. But on the other hand, if this is
what it takes to get the issue to the table, then I'm then fine
as long as we can then agree and move forward, and if they want
to take credit for it down the road, I don't care. As long
as we have changed. This morning, I was listening to the BBC IS
show called hard Talk, in which they had a Swedish politician of the of
the liberal leftist stripe who was talking about the need they have organized crime,
huge amounts of organized crime, and it's connected to the immigration, and he
was talking about how they're going to crack down to that and solve address the
problem of integration of the of the integration of these immigrants into Swedish society.
And he was attacked by the host for using the language of the far right
Swedish Social Democrats, who themselves have been talking about it into merely to bring
these things, to use these terms to this British guy was to validate practically
Nazism, whereas in Sweden the left now is having to come around and say,
hm, taking you know, maybe we should start to take up these
terms before indeed the really bad guys get to take them. But when it
comes to looking at stuff at other you know, other countries of the cultures,
it's yeah, you know, you can, you can you can go
on and buy streaming service, or you can watch television from other countries,
or sometimes if you want to save a little money, and we all want
to save a little money. You know, you can figure out a way
to watch the shows in other countries themselves, And you think, wait,
a matter, how how do I do that? A lot of you spend
a lot of money on streaming services, right Netflix and Disney Plus and Prime
and you name it. But but if you use Express VPN, you're able
to cut back and save so much money every month. Let me expline.
See all these streaming services like Netflix, they actually have thousands of more shows
than you actually suspect. You don't see all of them? Can they give
you different shows depending on what country you're in. So what you see on
Netflix here it's completely different from what someone in Italy or South Korea sees.
But using the Express VPN app, you can change your online location and choose
from over ninety countries to see what they're watching right now. For example,
you can watch The Big Bang Theory even though it's not on Netflix in the
US. That's right. Some of these things just vanish and where are they?
Well, you know they're in South Korea. With the Express VPN package,
you tap one button to change your country to England, refresh the page,
and Big Bang Theory shows up. You don't even need to pay extra
for Apple TV or Prime just to watch it. And on top of that,
though, you can even use express vpn to get discounts. Some services
cost list and in other countries. For example, if you buy Netflix from
Argentina cost a fraction of the price, so you're saving money and at less
than seven dollars a month, Express vpn pays for itself and so much more.
It's a no brainer. So if you want to get way more shows
and save money while you're at it, go to Express vpn dot com slash
Ricochet. Used our link, you know, because you can get three extra
months free. That's right, use our link three extra months free. That's
e xp R e ssvpn dot com, slash ricochet Express vpn dot com slash
Ricochet to learn more, and we thank Express vpn for sponsoring this the Ricochet
Podcast. Now we welcome to the show. Barton Swain the author of the
speechwriter of Brief Education on politics. He has a regular column in That Wall
Street journalmate newspaper you might have heard about. He reviews books on a range
of topics, and earlier this week he penned an excellent op ed titled Joe
Biden's Iron grip on his party. Barton. Welcome Barton. You're on with
three three writers. And you may think that we ask you on to talk
about politics, discuss your recent columns and so forth. The truth is we
have news for you. Between your book reviews and your op eds, you're
doing too much work. Yeah, kid, you need to slow down.
You're making the rest of us look bad. I have seven pieces do this
week. Thank you, very seven pieces do this week. Seven. I'll
talk to Barton about what it's like to be a productive member of society,
and the rest of you can stare at your blank page. Okay, listen,
you wrote a piece your latest op ed. I think it's your latest,
and I haven't looked at today's paper. You wrote a piece about Joe
Biden's iron grip on the Democratic Party, in which Rob is going to resist
this a little bit. But it was I thought, just a beautiful piece
of angry what aboutism? And Rob is so sick of what aboutism or claims
to be. But would you play please make the case for us that you
made in that column. Well, I like what about is him? The
piece was a it was it was the product of a long standing annoyance that
I have had since like twenty seventeen, when I started reading in the New
York Times, in the Washington Post, article after article about Donald Trump's grip
on the Republican Party, his iron grip. Conversely, various Republican officeholders fealty
to Donald Trump. And I remember reading this and well, I should I
should point out that at the time I was working at the at the Weekly
Standard, and so so my views were colored by that, And I thought,
Gee, it doesn't feel to me like much of an iron grip,
and I don't see a lot of fealty at the Weekly Standard. But you
know that that was his own, its own thing. So uh. I
remember thinking as I would read these pieces that I'm not a huge fan of
Donald Trump, but he is the head of his party. He is the
president of the United States, so you would expect, you know, Republicans
to to, you know, bend their views somewhat to whatever he wanted to
talk about. Granted it was done in many cases in unseemly ways, but
that's the nature of politics. So that was in my mind for a long
time. And every time I would read one of these pieces with the word
fealty particularly, was like one of those words that you had to learn at
that point and then and then suddenly everybody was using it, you know,
and then uh fast forwards. It occurred to me recently that like on the
Democratic side, there's virtually no criticism. What criticism there is is expressed in
the vaguest possible terms. And you know, in a piece I just pointed
out to things, but there are others. One his obvious mental decline,
and the other is to pull out from Afghanistan. On the Republican side,
if those things had been true of any Republican president, I think I'm right
in saying there would be maybe not uproar and demands for resignation, but at
least, you know, significant criticism. And I just do not see that
on the Democratic side. So that's that's basically that where my annoyance came from.
So not only if so fealty is the word for Trump, but it's
a kind of omerta for Biden. They all have to take this their behaving
as though there's an oath of silence. They're not allowed to see what's in
front of everybody else's eyes. Yeah, yeah, Rob, will now tell
you why you're mistaken to engage in words, No, I don't know if
I don't know, if you're mistaken. I just think that I mean,
if you're you know, as a as a Conservative'm not a Republican, but
I'm a conservative. I like, you know, free trade ish stuff.
I didn't really think we needed to renegotiate NAFTA, and if we were going
to renegotiate it, we shouldn't renegotiate it with the big labor unions at the
table setting the terms. I felt like, we, you know, if
we're gonna go into a trade dispute with China, as Trump did, we
should you know, stick to our guns and not give up on the first
day the important stuff like intellectual property rules. So I, you know,
I can criticize Trump from a conservative point of view. I thought maybe he
should have built the wall. He said he was gonna and he didn't,
didn't even come close, and he wasn't a serious person. So I was
arguing from him because I had, uh, you know, conservatively, if
I want a conservative president. It feels to me like the Democrats, at
least the liberal Democrats, are getting everything they want from this puppet president.
Right. It's like he's the Emperor pu Yee in Manchuria and the administrations filled
with Obama loyalists. They seem to like be unaware or unalarmed by the incredible
collapse and polls. It's almost like, I mean, I was at a
dinner party last week, a bunch of right wingers and me, Peter,
So you don't say that. And no, the only thing we could think
of was we could spend weird fantasies about what happens as they sort of carry
this old man through the convention and then replace him and set every after a
labor day, which they can do in democratic party rules. I'm solving two
problems at once, the Biden problem and then the problem b which is the
Kamala Harris problem. But nobody thought that he wasn't gonna Nobody, no point
did we think that he was going to get replaced. Because he seems to
be doing everything the liberals want. I mean, it's not fair or not.
I mean, I think it is fair. And if we could distinguish,
maybe we should distinguish between policy on the one hand and political follies on
the other. So, like, you know, Trump did a lot of
things that conservatives like. Yeah, and he didn't get criticism from conservatives for
doing those things. He did get criticism for being a clown, uh,
you know, saying idiotic things, mainly saying idiotic things. Actually, so
on Biden doesn't well I was going to say, he doesn't say idiotic things.
He doesn't mean necessarily but when he speaks, yeah, the sort of
idiotic things. But there are a lot of sort of political follies on coming
from the president, the current president and his administration. And but so even
on this is, to your point, rob one, one policy issue that
there's no pushback on with the student loan forgiveness. I rank democrats said,
including Nancy Pelosi, said no, the president doesn't have that power. He
does it. Okay, he doesn't have that. He does have that power.
Silence, No one said anything. It's a mystery to me. And
I think I think a lot of people on the right, not necessarily in
this sort of political media class, right, but just ordinary folks, they
look at the democratic side and they sort of admire it. They sort of
why can't we get behind our guide and just and stop arguing it's I don't
know whether to admire it or to be just outraged by it. Yeah,
well that's the problem of politics is like, what we want to say to
them, Republicans want to say each other is why can't we get behind our
unfit candidate the way they've gotten behind their unfit candidates. Are these parties just
dead? Should we just are they just out of gas? It just seems
to me like I look at the Republican leaders, the Democratic leaders, and
I just think you all should just go home. You should be replaced by
younger, more energetic people who are insane. Yeah, I don't know.
We talk about parties has always, uh, it sort of leaves me cold.
I take this sort of Disraeli view of parties and think that they're all
they are is organized opinion. Opinions are going to organize themselves somehow, and
in our country they organize themselves into two big groups, and they can be
led by idiots or not. But I don't think the parties are going away
or anything like that. The the the age issue is really kind of perplexing,
and I don't I don't understand it. People. I've heard different theories.
I don't know. I don't know what's which are true. But it
stands to reason that some of them will have to go soon whether we get
a better crop. I have no idea. So Barton, could hear shrewd
observer that you are This is the this is the way I've begun to think
about it, although I resist it because it seems to sort of creepy crawly
two grassy Knollie, as Bill Buckley would have said, two sort of conspiratorial.
But the deal that has been made within the Democratic Party, the deal
to which I was about to say, Joe Biden is a party, but
he's gone. He's not a party to anything anymore. But to deal to
which Nancy, the deal to which the sentient Democrats, including old figures such
as Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders. But above all, the deal is as
follows. We are working a slow I don't want to use the word revolution,
but it is a revolution. It's a kind of constitutional revolution, transformation,
transformation in which we are asserting the policy agenda of about the progressive policy
of agenda of actually only about fifteen percent of the country. We are formalizing
the power of the deep state. And all this is possible because we have
reduced the President of the United States to the status of a mere figurehead.
Now that's fine for us. And if we get another US the technocrats,
the progressives, if we get another four years of this, we will be
able to make changes in the country that are effectively permanent or extremely very extremely
hard to roll back the Green Agenda, all of that, and that seems
to me to be roughly what's going on. Biden is now sinking in the
polls. Even Trump is beating Biden. So this grand scheme of theirs that
we that if that Biden can win against Trump, maybe not, but he
can't even win against Trump. Maybe, so we'll see whether they get shaken
up enough to try to do something about it. But the general idea that
they subvert in slow motion the Constitution, Article two of which tells us we
need an executive and that the executive power is vested in one human being.
We now have a situation in which nobody really knows where the executive power is
vested. The press, the incuriosity of the press on exactly who's running the
White House, how decisions get made in this White House where the president is
apparently only awake and alert for four or five hours a day in any event,
So we got this. It's a kind of slow motion revolution. Taking
place, and in the interest of that revolution, they're all willing to clam
up. That's the price they're willing to pay. Tell me, I'm mad,
You're not mad. Look, in my view, something happened in twenty
sixteen, and that was that the American left hit the jackpot. They didn't
know it, and they they didn't feel it was the jackpot, but it
was. They got what they wanted, which what I'm I mean by that
is as an inheritance I think of even early twentieth century progressivism and certainly sort
of modern revolutionary leftism. They never really believed in the old liberal idea of
different points of view coming together forming compromises, i e. The entire the
system that our entire republic is based on, with different interests showing themselves in
Congress and so forth. They always were technocratic in their outlook, and technocrats
see a thing that needs to be done, and they think that they should
be empowered to do it like now. And so when Trump first was nominated
and then was elected, that was I think in the American leftist liberal progressives
mind, all the excuse they would ever need to completely ignore and dismiss any
legitimacy coming from the other side, and I it has grown that they've become
more openly dismissive of the right and anything coming from the Republican Party. And
now I just don't think that they care. There's a there's a great line
in Casablanca where the Peter Lore character asks the Bogart character do you despise me?
And Bogart says, and if I've thought about you, I might,
And that's perfect. You know. It's like they can't even be bothered to
despise the right, and so I just don't think that they feel obliged in
any way to acknowledge any shortcoming, any any mistakes that Biden makes. And
I also think that that is why they sort of secretly want Trump to stay
in politics, right. They're divided about it, but they want him to
be the nominee. And I think that they even want him to be president
again, although they would never admit that. Yeah, I kind of agree
with that. I mean, yeah, I think I think I agree with
that. There's also this other thing going on, which is that nobody wants
to be the guy who elected Donald Trump on the left, right, So
if you run against the incumbent, you're the guy. Right. You know,
everybody knows that Ralph Nader elected George W. Bush probably right, So
you don't want to be that guy. What you're waiting for, I think
is sort of party leadership. If you're if you're I mean, you know
the Gavin Newsom is doing a really good job of running for president without running
for president. Right, he's just kind of like announcing his availability and showbiz
we would call this person. You know, they are circling the studio in
makeup. They are ready right understudy is how's his health today? They are
ready to go. If you're a Gretchen Whitmer, you might be feeling the
same thing, right, I mean, it's not like, I mean,
I don't think the Democrats have a very big bench. That's the legacy of
Obama. He's sort of destroyed their bench. But on the other hand,
they don't. It's not like they don't have nobody. They got somebody,
but nobody wants to be the guy because you are terrified of this other outcome.
Half of you are terrified if you're a Democrat, and the other half
think have constructed a house of cards in a sort of a mental landscape,
which means it will be a good thing. That's who we want. That's
who we want. That's who we want. Don't they have ambition? I
mean I was I always thought politicians are just endlessly ambitious, right, they
want what happened? You know? Why are you so scared all of a
sudden? Yeah, of course there are dangers, but you guys are the
most self serving, narcissistic, ambitious people on earth. Right, But they
somehow became they somehow became the bureaucrats they've empowered, haven't they. They said
they like it. They don't really like the getting a car and you go
to your office and people like kind of bound scrape and use a separate elevator,
and it's kind of nice, and it's like you can't do anything anyway.
And so maybe maybe there's something really reassuring about having this ancient ossified bag
of bones in the oval office and this like monster dragon on the outside,
and it's kind of keeps everything. Everybody in line, right, I mean,
Republicans are in line. And it took how many Republicans have dodged the
even Mike Pence, I mean arguably someone that his boss, the President of
the United States, he said they should hang and even he won't name him.
In a Wall Street Journal editory, he refers to a leading presidential candidate.
I mean, the weird, cowardice and unique disease that's I said affected
both these parties. That's I guess that's why I'm saying. It's like,
how can this last? I mean, no, monetary systems don't last,
political parties don't lat. These things don't last. They almost always refreshed.
Are we at a period where they're going to be refreshed or is it more
like, well, we'll just be filled with different people, because it doesn't
seem like about to be filled with different people. Yeah, there is sort
of this pathology in both parties in which the worst, the worst thing on
earth is to be blamed or criticized for anything. So like, I really
saw it in a in a sort of gruesome way during the pandemic when I'm
we're just following the science, like it's it's those guys over there telling us
what. We have no capacity to make any decisions. So look, don't
don't yell at us. We we we don't. We We just believe in
science, Okay, And you see that across across the board in all sorts
of ways, and and it may be that what what our politics is headed
to is just to have this sort of debilitated figurehead off in an attic somewhere
that we call the president, and sure you can get mad at him if
you want, but we're doing what we want. And when you get mad,
you know somebody, somebody's fault, and that that's the that's the dynamic
with the administrative state. You know, we don't actually make decisions. It's
all the regulators at the EPA and so on, and there's no accountability.
There's not only no accountability, there doesn't seem to be a demand for accountability.
If we had a national, nationwide movement that wanted to interrogate every aspect
of the coronavirus handling, maybe we would learn something. Maybe there would be
some people who would do the sensible thing and performer ritual disemboweling of themselves,
you know, in the old Japanese style, and be shamed and be drummed
out. Rob has spoken about one of the things that bothers him about the
two thousand and eight financial crisis. There wasn't enough bankers jumping out of windows,
paraded around in hairshoots humiliated for what they did, we just went on.
So there's no institutional accountability at a time when we seem to have no
faith whatsoever in any of our institutions, they having failed us spectacularly in all
the way. So it breeds. It seems sort of a passivity in the
electorate, which, as you spoke before about the gift that Donald Trump was
in twenty sixteen, is an excellent opportunity for this other, for this great
force to I'm in and flood. But when it comes to nobody having the
temerity to go up against the old bag of bones in the attic, is
it because now we are sort of post American institution and figuring that if the
Democrats find a way to plug Gavin Knewsom in, that's fine. And Newsom
thinks that he doesn't have to go through the usual processes, that he can
just be plugged in, that that's fine. And so we come up with,
you know, what began as a fairly rigorous way to run a country
ends up with a year of four emperors. Not a question so much as
a speech. But I'm sure you can probably speech though you can pull something
out of it that can be answered to it you may say anything you wish.
Barton. Yeah, well it's all very depressing, Thank you very much.
That's Parton's way. We can read him in the Wall Street. I'm
sorry, Gone, Yeah, this is actually one reason I sort of I
have an eccentric fear of AI. I mean eccentric in the sense that it's
not a fear that that is shared by other people. But I think that
that AI is the perfect avenue to avoid all accountability forever and completely right,
because you know, the algorithm said to do it, and it's not our
fault. So God only knows what government folly could be excused by an algorithm.
Barton, I have two questions for you. The second one concerns you,
but the first one is returning us to Donald Trump in the State of
the country. You said, but did not follow up on, that you
thought the Democrats or at least the Progressive secretly want Donald Trump to become president
again. That is an idea that had simply not crossed my mind. Could
you explain that? Well, you know, people want things without knowing that
they want them. Yes, the know it's more fun. For one thing,
It's just generally more fun in a lot of ways to be in the
opposition, and it is in power. In your power, you have to
defend everything, and you have to make excuses for your mistakes, and you
have to, you know, spin everything. And when you are in in
opposition, you get to you get no accountability and you get to criticize everything.
And look, if there's one thing that unites all progressives and liberals,
it is the need to be outraged. They love it and they always have
and I think that at the end of the Obama's second term, the things
to be outraged about were really small, you know, we were talking about
like transgender bathrooms and stuff like that. Right just just wasn't satisfying. And
when Trump got elected, it was like, oh, man, carry us
a long way. And I think they had a blast, loved it.
Are you kidding him? It was just the smartest sport of outrage and every
day and now with Biden being a complete embarrassment, it's it's just not fun.
So yeah, I think that they'd be happy with it. The right
is prone to its daily outrageous too, though. I mean, if you
hang around Twitter long enough, you see that we have our own version of
the thing that we just simply cannot believe now in the case of you know,
the Trump years, it was something that Trump said her in all caps
rant, or it was this that or the other thing. It wasn't necessarily
always a policy issue. But we have those two and maybe for good reason,
because there is a lot going on on a daily basis that we ought
to be outraged about and not lose our ability to do so. I think
what distinguishes right and left and in this way is that the left cannot concede
that anything is good, right, very bad at all times. And and
and the right is is fully capable of acknowledging distinguishing between the good and the
bad, which is, you know, the proper way to live. So
but yeah, we we do have our our our need for outrage. I
guess, although I would caution against uh looking at Twitter for any reason at
all. That's very wise. So Barton my second here's my second question.
This is a question about Barton Swain. The journalism business model has collapsed.
All journalists who want to make a career of it need a constant presence on
Twitter. They've got to get a television contract with Fox News. They need
to establish a substack. And you're not doing any of this. There you
are seated at home in South Carolina. By the way, they also need
to be in Washington. There, you are seated in South Carolina, and
you're a newspaperman. You're a newspaperman. Furthermore, you take books so seriously
that you wrote one brilliant book, so beautifully written. As a fellow writer,
I'm forced to hate you. You wrote one, and you review books,
and you take the ideas in those books seriously, and you even comment
on how well they're put together. Art and Swain you are. You are
a nineteenth century man. What the hell do you think you're doing? Go
on, go on. You're putting your faith in newspapers and the written word.
Well, yeah, that's a that's a topic, uh, the written
word. I heard this interview with your old friend Peter teal years ago in
which he said that if anytime he's interviewing, uh, someone you know,
for a for a position or something, he says, tell me of you
that you hold that nobody else holds. You know, that that would be
that would be widely panned if if anybody knew you held it. And he
said, usually, you know, they come out with things that a lot
of people actually believe, you know, racism is a bad or something.
If I had to answer that question, it would be that there is a
future in newspapers, which is probably actually probably that's the dumbest view ever.
But and when I say papers, I mean I mean print papers. And
that is just because when you I'll put it this way. From time to
time I tell people that they say what do you do? And I say,
I work for the Wall Street Journal And they say, you know,
so so you write for them? I say yes, and they say like
online and I say no, I mean in the print paper and they say,
oh wow, oh okay. And so what I what I glean from
that reaction is that people when people see something in print, they think,
well, somebody took the time to edit this into shape and uh, and
spend the capital necessary to deliver it somewhere on actual paper, So it must
be important. And when you encounter something online and you know that it's only
online, it may be excellent, and often it is excellent, but you
also know that all somebody had to do is type it into an application and
hit you know, post, and that's it. And so I think that
over time there print print papers will come back print magazines and papers. The
demand will slowly, slowly re emerge. So I have some I have some
very bad news for you, because I get the Wall Street Journal and delivered
to my door every day, and if it's something that I'm doing, I
guarantee you it's not on its a way to becoming a trend. I'm usually
the guy turning off the lights. Yeah, yeah, so Barton, Tom
Wolfe told me the story that he was working at the New York Herald Tribune
when John Kennedy was killed and they listened to it in the newsroom on the
radio. I think there was a television they watched Cronkite pronounced Kennedy dead,
and Tom had this sinking feeling that he was witnessing the death of news papers.
Here was a major event that had taken place, and it was broadcast
rather than And then as he walked home to his apartment, there were lines
around the block at every news stand for the evening edition newspapers, right,
because it wasn't real until people had read it in print. Still valid,
Still valid, Marton, Yeah, yeah, I think that's still valid,
all right. Maybe not for the immediacy, you know, the web takes
care of the immediacy. But if you if you really want to know something,
everybody knows that you have to Not everybody admits, but everybody knows you
have to read it on a physical thing. It may be a mental take.
Just with me, but I cannot remember anything I've read online more than
six months ago. Nothing, It's all just a blur. I can remember
things that I read in Commentary magazine in nineteen ninety six and be able more
or less to find it on the page. I mean, it's not a
memory. But you know, you oftentimes you remember things that well from long
ago, and yeah, you consulted. Maybe it's not exactly you know,
the way you remember it, but you do remember it. No clue what
I read last year online. So there's hope. There's hope, depends as
there is. I agree. Walter Kern American Writers has started his own little
newspaper with somebody else who's name escapes me, and it comes out periodically,
and it's an attempt to revive the newspaper as it used to be a community
sort of conversation. It's not online that paper, No, it's not.
No, it is printed. It's like the way things used to be we're
going to cut down a tree, We're gonna pulp it, We're gonna ship
it here, we're gonna spell it full of ink, and then it's going
to run through this enormous machine. It's going to be mechanically folded, put
it into trucks, dropped off its street corners, and urchins will deliver it
to your door, which is still kind of how we do it here at
the newspaper where I am. But we all know where print is going.
We all have seen where the line is going, and it's writing a demographic
down into the graveyard, and we have to figure out how to get new
people and eyeballs to use those wretched terms to the website, where everything,
as you point out correctly is digital and weightless, it doesn't have the same
thing, the same heft. So the question is whether or not we can
keep the shells of the institutions alive long enough to repopulate them with people who
realize that there is something there, and also to do it in a way
that seems counterintuitive. The Wall Street Journal is a great newspaper. It's broad
is it has depth, that has intelligence and trust its audience, and it's
got a lot of stuff in it. I go to the UK and I
see the Telegraph and I just marvel at this huge saddle blanket that I can
unfurl. It's got all kinds of stories and the serendipity of going to here
to there and find something on the jump and the rest of it is an
experience that cannot be reproduced on the web or you're just simply a flea on
a hot plate. So a last question, then, do you think that
that the newspaper industry as we know today has to shutters and die and then
something comes out of the ashes, or can we slow the decline and repopulate
it. That's that's my last that's my last sermon masquerading as a question.
I don't know is the answer, but okay, yeah I don't either,
really don't. But I think that So I've always wondered if there's if there's
a way to if one business model, and I don't maybe this has been
tried, is to charge. This would work only at a local level,
I think, but that but that's that's where that's where newspapers that they're going
to be revived would need to be revived, and that's the local papers.
So people know what this school board is doing or whatever is. There is
one business model to arge for the online sub but to get the paper for
free. So maybe delivery would be a problem. But on any newstand,
the actual paper would be free. But if you want to see it,
you know, if you like the instantaneousness and all of the rest of it,
you want it on your phone, your desktop, You're gonna have to
pay and pay a lot. So these outlets are going to have to experiment
with different, different business models. But I think that just the demand for
news hasn't gone down. I have a little wrinkle on that to suggest I
personally would be willing to pay not to have the New York Times delivered.
Just a thought for you there, Bertie, or we switched our model to
a dog wasteed disposal envelope system and then give the newspaper for free. Well,
I stopped my New York Times print subscription only because the art section.
You know, I have kids in the house. Come on, I don't
want born lying around. Well, I still get it because I love doing
the Crossroad puzzle on paper. And that's that. So so I I well,
well, a question before before we go, because I know we gotta,
we gotta let you go. And I keep asking the same question,
but it seems to me like there's a market opportunity. Right, Well,
you look at the where where is there? Where is there no one in
politics everyone has has basically the same thing. This is great, big center,
right, This is great, big kind of shrugging center there. You
know, the pro life pro choice movement is pretty much abortion is pretty much
a great example of that that. Americans are kind of clustered in a very
very very big, fat center, and they are looking for a party to
speak to that and need a party seems to be doing that right. Half
the Republicans are saying things like life begins the conception, they don't like that,
and the Democrats are saying you should be able to have an abortion the
you know, second year of birth of life. Right. Essentially, isn't
that emblematic of politics in general? I mean, isn't somebody gonna gonna jump
on this? Does does it seem like? I mean, I don't,
I guess I'm just I'm looking at economically, there's a market, there are
buyers out there. Yeah, yeah, I mean with with the with the
example of abortion, there's this difference. Uh that people don't want to talk
about abortion. That's true. Most people are in the middle. But they
also don't like to talk about it. They don't like to debate it,
they don't want to argue about it, and so and so that that that
leaves that leaves a hole in the middle for people who do want to argue
about it to get in to take all the action. But I mean,
I think on economic issues, the market is there, and you know,
it's a it's a it's a matter of reforming the institutions, particularly Congress,
to to actually make these debates real and simply use their offices as juve all
evince as platforms for a national audience. So we just need to to figure
out a way to make our institutions, particularly Congress, functioning the way they
were intended. That'll be great. Let's reform our institutions and make them work.
I think we can probably get that done by the end of the month,
and we redouble our efforts. Great prescriptions and great ideas you can find
them at the Wall Street Journal. Under Barton's Ways is a byline also that
the author of the speech, writer of brief education on Politics and the latest
pieces Joe Biden's iron grip on his party. As you can tell by this
wide ranging conversations, He's adept in a variety of arena and we thank him
for coming and we look forward to having you on again. Gentlemen, Thank
you, Thanks Marton. All right, take care man the next time.
Perhaps if you're going to quote Peter Lorrie, I think you have to do
it in a Peter Lorrie voice. Yes, I think you do a nice,
nice Peter. It's right the lie, you know, I always thought
the line was you just I know you despise me, Rick, but it's
not. It's a what did I think? Well, in any case,
Laurie was great. I love Peter Laurie in that movie. And I was
just thinking about Casablanca the other day, what an American treasure it is,
and how the fact that it was just a wrote studio product that just became
inhabited by the best people who could possibly do any of those roles, and
how they never managed to do it again. And they kept trying, didn't
they. I mean, Robbie would know better than I. But they when
something works, they turn around and say, well, let's do that again.
As we seeded diminishing effects with the Marvel world. But we don't see
that is with you know, when a conservative movie hits, the studios don't
say, hey, what was a little lightning in a bottle that they captured
there? Let's see if we can do some of that before we go.
Then a brief account of how our things in the entertainment industry right now.
You are keeping your eye in the strike in the summer box. I'm on
strike. Has anybody learned anything or does anybody know anything? Or is it
still know? No, nobody does anything learned anything. I mean, I
think the it's coming down to two big issues. And you know, it
depends on you know, it depends on it depends on how how the market
reacts to the continued shutdown, depends on what happens when everybody realizes that if
you backdate from summer twenty twenty four, you figure that your movies have to
be either in production or finished in post production right now, and they're not.
So, you know, the long term, the tail effect of a
strike is continues and lingers, and you know you're seeing I think a lot
of sort of what they call M and a activity. Well, I think
less M and a and more breaking up is going to be happening, and
that's going to be great. The future of show business is going to be
not six big companies, but twenty seven thousand little companies, because that's what
show business the most efficient. And I think we're also seeing things like the
as you mentioned, you mentioned a movie that did very well this summer.
I think it's maybe the third biggest movie is called Sound of Freedom, and
it was I happen to know a lot about a movie because a good friend
of mine wrote it. I'm writing a piece about up for commentary and I'm
doing Martini shot about it next week next week. Probably the guy who wrote
it is a believing Catholic, a practicing Roman Catholic, as is the dog.
I don't, I don't. I don't know whether Jim Caviezels are Roman
Catholic specifically, but you know, okay, I know he's devout. I
don't know if he's the archives. There's a little little weirdly okay. Uh.
And so they made a movie, and they're gonna make about two hundrellion
dollars domestically this year, which is a lot. Uh. And the distributor
Angels' notice that James is or that Rob is a little uncertain about the religion,
but he knows exactly how much money. Yeah, well, I know
he's Catholic, but I mean I do know people I know some Catholics in
that know him that that are not Roman Catholic. They differ. So there's
that and uh and but the movie itself is just a really really great thriller,
and it's a true story, and the guy it's based on, who's
a real person, is also a believing Catholic. There really is nothing particularly
faith based about the Sound of Freedom. The next movie they're making, or
this Maide is coming out of March, is called The Cabrini and the trailer
looks spectacular about Mother Cabrini, who was very sort of first American Saint.
I think, Peter, why am I doing this Roman Catholic stuff, Peter,
you should be jumping in so there. But my friend who wrote it,
Rod Barr, who's a wonderful, wonderful writer, said he's not sure
that these big companies could even release some movie like that and afford it.
It's just too risky and small. So we're a movie that did really well
in the movie theater, by the way, two hundred million dollars, which
is pretty good in movie theater. When the conventional wisdom was no only big
movies with marvels, whatever could be in the movie in the movie theaters,
there'd be no way for them to release it to the larger public because it
had to start in a certain place, kind of following the old Tyler Perry
model, which as you start small with a small audience, you and you
grow the audience, and a big company like Disney simply just can't wrap your
head around it, which creates a huge opportunity for people to make real movies
that are good and can go in the movie theater and make hundreds and hundreds
of months. And there's space for that now because companies like Disney have just
poisoned their brand. Manesque before we go. I mean, I had I
grew up with a great fellow feeling for for you know, Uncle Walt in
the house every Sunday night, and then I kind of sort of fell away
when I grew up. But then I had a child, and all of
a sudden, I'm rediscovering this great backstory of the catalog of American wonderfulness and
learning about that, and enjoying going to Disney World and marveling at the efficient
machine, the money extraction machine that this is, while still finding myself in
a dark room somewhere in a little off of Main Street spaghetti place, watching
watching Flowers and Trees, one of their earlier color numbers, and just you
know, just enjoying the whole Disney thing. And now it's just weird to
me, not just the whole place, it's just it's just got a whiff
about it that I just don't like, and I don't think a lot about
it. But if that's if that's hit me, who was a you know,
a Disney fan, not a supern You know, I'm not going to
go there in the mouse hears and propose to my wife in front of the
Magic Kingdom. But I love the place and everything about it, And now
I'm just I don't care if they sunder and fall into the ocean. Well,
I mean that may be true, all that could be true. I'm
just making a business argument, which is that these big companies have big channels
and they can only do big things in a big way, and they really
rearrange themselves for that. I mean, I mean, we're using I'm using
disease an example, but you could say the same thing about so and you
can say the same thing about comcasts. You say the same thing about Warner
Brother's Discovery. They're just too big and they think that's going to that adds,
gives them efficiencies, but I think it really doesn't. In a way,
it opens up the market to a lot of movie makers, like the
people who made Sound Freedom and Gabrini, to do like incredible movies. Looks
not a Freedom is just a really good thriller you can want. You can
go in and eat your popcorn and watch a hero do something heroic and saves
children, and then you know, you cheer and you walk out, and
that that's a business argument. And you may be right about the other argument,
but it's not. It isn't as if there's some very exact, exact
parallel here in Silicon Valley sequoia of venture capital became too big. If you're
managing billions and billions of dollars, you can only do really big deals,
and those are not where the returns are. The returns are these little upstart
companies that you want to get them in. They're same same kind of thing.
If you're big. If you're managing huge amounts of money, then the
executives can very easily convince themselves they need big bets, and that means things
that aren't as risk they need to deploy anyway. You get the pictures same
here. Yes, that's true. You I mean you need size because you
need financial resources to do some things. Although I still don't understand why digital
movies cost so much. I mean, it's not like you have to build
the sets physically. But if there were three things you would ask me twenty
years ago that I absolutely would love for the rest of my entire life,
besides the Disney catalog, it would be Star Wars because I grew up with
it and I will love it even though they did stupid things with it.
It would be Marveled because I grew up with the cartoons and my god,
I love that Iron Man and the fourth thing was so great. And it
would be Pixar because it was the genius home of storytelling, the likes of
which we hadn't seen in our entire lives. And what now happens. I
look at Disney Plus on my bill, which is Pixar, Marvel and Star
Wars, and I went eh, and I canceled it. I did too,
just a couple of months ago. It was exactly because they happening.
They had leached out every element of goodwill and interest that I had through a
combination of ideological, emotional storytelling decisions that had nothing to do with the size.
And my point to that is this the golden era of Hollywood's There wasn't
any such but in the studio system they had size. But they also had
a certain way of looking at the audience and the culture and their role in
it that enabled them to turn stuff out. It wasn't all Casablanca, but
the stuff below it was watchable, and part of it I almost sound like
Peter and Robinson there. It was watchable, and you would go to the
theater and sit there for the newsreel and the cartoon and the short feature and
the programmer and the big thing, and that was your night. And that
was big. And they owned the theaters and they owned the actors, and
Bigness worked because of the culture and the attitudes of the people who were running
the show. Says me, what do I know, Well, I mean,
I think that's I think it's partially true. They didn't own the theaters
in the thirties, they were bought busted, and they couldn't block book and
they owned the actors. But that was like the actors like that because they
got these giant fact contracts and they had to do certain certain movies, but
they put the two things that were different. One is they made tons of
movies. They made tons of pictures, like the Paramount released fifty pictures a
year and then not including b movies. And they were terrible, terrible investments.
So nobody in a Wall Street thought of investing in these crazy companies.
They were run by people, and there was cash flow business and individuals got
very, very rich, but shareholders there weren't any. They didn't They didn't
really start getting interested in show business until the sixties. And every single acquisition,
major acquisition of a company, of a large company, of a studio,
and it in tears. There isn't one that hasn't yet. So the
reality is that show business were The argument you're making that they were big was
like, but they were small, and they had a bunch of little little
contraptions within it, and decisions were not they were not vertically integrated, and
they made so many movies that there was no top down supervision of the movies.
There's no marketing department that read a script before they made it. It
was all kind of It was show business the way it's supposed to be,
and it totally worked. And I think what's broken about it now is that
you have a bunch of people who think that if only I was in charge
of everything, then I wouldn't make any mistakes. And that is just not
efficient way to run a movie studio or a TV studio. It's just isn't
like you gotta like make some room for some mistakes, which means vertical integration
is a disaster. And it used to be a law that financial interests and
occasion rules that Nixon put into place in the early seventies because he wanted to
punish the TV networks, so he said that you can't own any TV shows
and then there was deregulation, which I'm in favor of the de regulation of
it, but that doesn't mean that just because you're not regulated from doing something,
you should do it. And everyone thought, oh, you know what,
So so you have this bizarre moment where because of low interest rates,
Netflix could go to Ball Street and raise billions of dollars in debt, make
a lot of TV shows and movies and put them on their servers, and
no one is watching them. The number one show on Netflix this summer is
a USA TV rerun series called Suits, Suits, and every said, well,
that's because Megan Markle's in it. Well was you know? She was
in Suits four years ago, and two years ago and one year ago she
was not. People didn't just discover this summer that she was in Suits.
They're watching Suits because Suits is a pretty good show. It's light, it's
fun, it's interesting. You can watch an hour of it if you were
if you're a yearholder of Netflix, and the number one show on that network
is an almost ten year old rerun. I mean, what is that telling
you? It's telling me that we should end this before I get on a
big, long story about how actually I found myself spending most of my time
on YouTube. The serendiity angle of which and the fastness and the turnover and
the connectivity of it once google notes which you like is terrifying, and the
quantity of commercials is absolutely off putting. But on the other hand, Wow,
the things that you find and the things that you hear here so ladies
and gentlemen listening to this podcast if you haven't already, cancel that stupid streaming
subscription and spend the money on Ricochet, where you will find a community that
is welcoming and interesting and fascinating. The member feed, which you don't have
access to unless you remember, is you know, really where a lot of
the great stuff happens. And by great stuff I mean conversations that go all
over the road. Rob Long of course would usually in this spot tell you
about the meetups to come. But you know the thing about Ricochet meetups about
people getting together in real meat space as we used to not call it,
can be found at ricochet dot com as well. If you go to look
at the panel that says meetups, see if there's one coming into your area,
or join and start one of your own and wants the Ricochet people come
to you. Give us those five stars at Apple Review if you wouldn't mind
so much the podcast, help the show get a little bit more traction,
join, of course, goes without saying and tell us what you thought of
the show in the comments, and we'll see everybody, I usually say at
Ricochet four point Oh. But here's the thing. Thanks, to you.
Thanks to sponsors like an Express VPN, we have invested in something coming,
something good, something wonderful. I'm not in twenty twenty ten when Dave Bowman
appears from the grave and they ask it wonderful, very wonderful. Too bad
they didn't have Peter Laurie for that role. Sending wonderful ric We'll see everybody
in the comments, said Ricochet. Four for now, point out next week,
guys, next week to tell us Ricochet join the conversation.