Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do
for your country. Mister Gerbatcheff, tear down this wall, read my lips.
It's the Ricoshe Podcast with Stephen Hayward sitting in for Peter Robinson and Rob
Long. I'm James Lileax. To day, we talked to Patrick Denin about
regime change and Annie McCarthy about the indictments. So let stefrasels a podcast.
Our country is going to hell and they come after Donald Trump, weaponizing the
Justice Department, weaponizing the FBI. So I just want to tell you I'm
an innocent man. I did nothing wrong. Either you were with us or
you were with the terrorists. Welcome everybody. It's the Ricoche Podcast, number
six hundred and forty five. I'm James Lileax in Minneapolis. Stephen Hayward is
sitting in for what's his name again, Peter Robinson. He'll be back next
week to remind us who he is. And Rob Long? Are you in
New York? Your zoom feed seems I'm not clear. I expect that there's
some sort of a post apocalyptic blade Runner orange myasthma that's going through every corner.
Well, there is, but it's only on the ground. I'm in
San Francisco, so it's not clear it's foggy. Um it's uh San Francisco
where the air is clean, but the needles are dirty. Right, So
are you walking around then, since you're an SF Frisco as they hate to
be called, just to get you know, dodging around the street. Pooh
and no, you know what I mean. I mean, I think there
are. I actually feel like I just took a long walk yesterday, so
I shouldn't. I won't even hear two days. But um, I actually
feel like it's maybe just coming from New York and then having lived in Los
Angeles for such a long time that Las seems much worse to me than San
Francisco. Just anecdotally looking at my window and taking a walk to the Civic
center where all the homeless people are, it didn't seem chimps didn't seem nearly
as bad as sort of skid row in LA or Los Angeles Street in LA
which has been terrible for years. I mean this pre dates covid or for
that matter, Venice where I used to live in Venice, or the Ocean
Front Walk. So Stephen, where where are you right now? I'm down
in the central coast area of California, whereas I'd like to tell people,
I have two hundred mile buffer zones between LA and San Francisco, so I
stay away from the craziness. Oh but Rob, are you? I'm curious,
Rob, are you by any chance? Probably not? But are you
staying in either the Hilton or the Park fifty five? I should say both
of those hotels have declared. I think they filed chapter or something. No,
I'm not, but that was a big story. I was reading about
it yesterday. It was a big story. What I love is the is
the US are the people trying to make it the idea that two big hotels
have essentially closed because there's no NUSS convention business and this john Ton is pretty
empty. I got to say, um, I mean, anyway, the
spate separate issue. But I'm not saying there. But I like the people
sort of defending it, defending the city, saying things like, well,
you know, I mean they're just filing chapter. It's really it's a corporate
thing, Like well, no, when you close your business, it's not
you know, it's not a corporate thing. It's a no business thing.
And I would just say that I think, I mean, maybe I'm doing
the deep diving right now, but um, I think actually think it's going
to be Um, what what what killed San Francisco? And I think what
or what it is trying to kill it? I don't think it's dead.
I think there's it's just resting, resting. Um, it's going to be
less. I think it's ultimately going to be when you actually add up the
human damage and the economic damage, it's going to be either less or equal
to the sort of woke nonsense that runs the cities. Um less equal to
the ridiculous behavior of this state under COVID. COVID I think did more damage
to certainly to the downtown la at downtown New York or San Francisco then,
um, I mean people here have always been woke, but when you add
woke on top of woke, you add you know, crazy panic, completely
unscientific but bizarre kind of regulations. And they tore up the benches in the
Union Square as a COVID precaution so that people wouldn't sit outside in a beautiful
city square like you know, a lot of the stuff is I mean,
some of it obviously is the crazy wokeness of San Francisco, which has always
been crazy woke. But boy, you put in completely indefensible COVID policy and
you just amplify that by one hundred rant over. Yeah, or apply that
in every city that you want. You had the code of policies which emptied
out the downtowns, destroy the economic ecosystems, and then you had a concombinant
desire to be nice to all the people who are causing the civic disorder.
Between the two of them, you have fewer eyes on the street. You
have Jane Jacob's ideas about what makes a city safe and a Liverpool turned on
their head. And then you have a waving away of any sort of consequences
for people who apparently we're gonna be talking about this with our guest in a
little bit, the people who bring the disorder to the streets. And every
time, I mean, I'm keen to follow all the arguments and read it.
For example, which has various subreddits devoted to Minneapolis and Saint Paul about
the disorder on the public transports in downtown, and it's always the same,
It's like, well, you can't do anything about civic order or disorder until
you fix the problems that caused it in the first place. Well, no,
that's absolutely not how it works at all, unless you believe, of
course, that there are vast number of people who are walking out there who
were struck by meth addiction, like by by you know, a thunderbolt,
or that a needle flew from the sky and penetrated their neck and caused them
to be addicted. And I know it's simplicitic to say that people have choice
over it, but people kind of do. Maybe. So the idea that
we have any consequences is, you know, we've failed as a society if
we actually require consequences of the people who are causing the disorder. So,
yeah, San Francisco, I hope it comes back. I'm not particular particularly
hopeful. Yeah, well, I can do a pro and con on Rob's
optimism. Let me do the con first, which is things are even worse
than they look. And I'll just one measure is nationwide, I get these
figures from Leohni and down at Hoover, nationwide, housing prices are down about
three and a half percent. Mostly that's high interest rates and mornage rapes have
gone up. In San Francisco. The so the sales price of houses have
colned down seventeen percent. He calculates that the loss of property value for homeowners
and Francisco is something like two hundred and sixty billion dollars and go one on
that. I think, you know, Milton Friedman used to joke that if
you put a socialist in charge of the Middle East, you'd have a shortage
of sand And I think it's then underestimated the capacity of progressives direct cities like
San Francisco. But that's the converse, right, isn't it. Rob Is
that you know right now the exos from San Francisco is greater than any two
year period Detroit ever experienced. But San Francisco's not Detroit. I remember asking,
I think it was Arnt Laugher, who's always great with a sensible line,
you know, how can California get away with this level of taxation and
regulation? I mean, Arkansas couldn't do that. And he said, that's
like asking why pretty girls are mean, because they can be so. California
has these amenity values that people will pay a high freight charge to be here.
I do, right, and you know you have for many years and
so yeah, you gotta think sam'sis is going to come back. And then
finally you mentioned that it looks not as bad as la. I think what's
going on right now, I've picked this up by just my observations around the
Bay or because I'm there a lot, either at Berkeley or over in San
Francisco is I think the city and the police are quietly trying to get a
handle on the homelessness and cut it back some. They're not eliminating it,
and I think they're doing it quietly because if they actually disclosed that they were
trying to crack down homelessness, trying at the margins to nibble it and contain
it and roll it back, the progressive left would go nuts and make their
lives miserable. So they're doing it quietly. I think you're right. I
mean, my larger theory is that for two years we had these crazy crackpot
regulations that in which people crack down on things like going to your grandmother's funeral
and or going to church, or walking around or sitting outside in a public
square, and so all the sort of normal law abiding people just now they're
just home. Fine, you don't want me, I'm home. And they're
sort of opening up other places. Right. The one area that was completely
unregulated was in social disorder. And that social disorder, which is like,
well, okay, well, you know, if you're you're not really going
to grab a homeless person and give them a ticket for breaking COVID regulation.
I mean, we didn't do that to any of the people who were protesting
in the summer of twenty twenty. So that right there, when you talk
about, you know, encouraging social disorder, when you the riots here in
twenty twenty were quite extraordinary, and if you watch the live stream, you
had an awful lot of people milling around in close contact, work out any
maskt whatsoever. And if this had been, of course, the plague that
we thought that it was, they would have done something about it. But
they didn't. So right, so you have all of these strange, peculiar
messages. But you know, yes, mean girl, pretty girls can be
mean, because they can be, but eventually they age and cities, cities,
the cities can micro awave the seed corn for a snack for a long
time, but they run out of it. And what haunts me about all
of this is the idea that we really kind of fixed it before. We
had it pretty good. When it came to cities, the renaissance in American
cities in the odds and the teens was something to behold. They became destination
places, they became safe place. I remember when I lived in DC.
You didn't walk through downtown at night. You didn't. But then in the
night, you know, in the late teens, I remember going to a
whole bunch of conferences and walking back to my hotel at three o'clock in the
morning and feeling absolutely safe. Now could have been because I, you know,
drunk, but I think I don't think so. The cities had turned
themselves around in extraordinary ways. Every time every one of these that you look
at, you realize that all so much of that progress has been absolutely lost
and squandered. And I don't know if it's because they think they can get
right back to it again by snapping our fingers, or if they just don't
care. Because the existence of disorder and the people who manifest these certain these
social ills proves that the system that we have as ill legitimate needs to be
completely dismantled and replaced with the utopian thing that'll fix all of these things.
And until then, they're all very handy markers for the fact that capitalism failed
and America has failed. In America's a failed project, dissenters, I'd seem
crazy or not inter stunned into silence. Change. Yeah, I mean,
I'm an old Reaganite optimist about you know, don't bet against America. That
problem is Joe Biden is now saying don't bet against American And if he says
that, I'm going to sell short right away the way things are going right.
But I do think and this will come up with we get Patanina on
a little bit. You know, there are great reserves. I mean,
remember what Reagan's message was is essentially, you're going to fix America. The
one difference between say a Reagan or that kind of conservative and a liberal is
the liberals say we're going to fix it here in Washington. And remember Reagan's
message from day one as president was You're going to fix it the American people.
We're gonna help you, We're gonna get out of your way, We're
gonna do things to help you, the people of America, fix what's wrong
with the country. I still in my bones believe that is a winning message
in a correct strategy. So how to how do the people of San Francisco
then pull themselves out of this morass They seem they seem inclined to be voting
for the very people who keep the quicksand well moist sand discus they don't.
Well, there's a funny thing happening in San Francisco, in the whole Bay
area the last few years that I never thought i'd see. This predates COVID,
by the way. There is a organized yimb movement meaning yes in my
backyard. And I'm listening to all these liberals who I used to battle about
regulation thirty years ago, especially land use regulation, and they say, gosh,
you know, our planning process and our building codes and our regulations make
it hard to build housing. We've got to do something about this. Now
they're often confused. Still, you know, it's I never thought i'd see
such a thing happening, and so I don't I think there is a spot
for a progressive in San Francisco to say I'm for all progressive things, but
we really need to have simpler regulations so we can build the things we need
at a reasonable cost. And there don't seem any of them. But there
are activists agitating on this front. And that's also the data is now coming.
Not that they were persuaded by data, but the data. There is
data that suggests that, i mean, part of the problem when you should
build housing, and we goes, yeah, we should build housing, we
should build affordable housing, and should be built by the government. And the
truth is that you walk through pretty much any city, but then there's a
there's a I can't really see it. But on the other side of where
I am there was a neighborhood called the Fillmore that was incredibly vibrant neighborhood that
was filled with people and the houses and it was a majority black and it
had some kind of very famous um nightclubs and music venues for one time,
and the city decided during the city Beautiful, not city beatiful, but during
the sort of urban renewal movement, well we'll just tear all those down and
that, you know, the Embarcadero in San Francisco had this beautiful sort of
waterfront. It was, you know, gorgeous, and well, you're just
gonna put a freeway there, and they did all this stuff. And these
were all people who were acting under the best practices of the time because and
it doesn't really matter what your solution is, because their solution was, we
need to plan this, we need central planning. This kind of chaotic neighbors
kind of working it out thing doesn't doesn't work anymore in the you know,
the modern twentieth century. And so what they did was they sort of tore
away all of the little, tiny, little ligaments that hold all people together
and neighborhoods together and cities together. Not that they were safe, not that
there was no crime, not even that the cops weren't brutal, especially in
San Francisco during the time, lots of issues, but this fundamental thing that
makes people live together in a community, whether it's a big one and a
dense one or a rural community, they just decided, well, we're smarter
than that, and pretty much that's almost that's to me, it's almost always
the problem. It's these things are never done by dumb people. They're always
done by very very smart people, because only very smart people can be this
stupid. Can offer you a mind blowing footnote to that story, Rob,
which is you probably noticed that it was in the early sixties when neighborhoods in
San Francisco effectively stopped an interstate from being run through the town stopped at cold
And here's the mind blowing part. The ring leader of representing that particular point
of view was a Republican state Assemblyman from San Francisco named Casper Weinberger. Well,
now wait a minute, because if you're true, if you're under ninety
the podcast, you're Casper Weinberger was in the rate, was a California politician,
was in the in the Reagan administration Secretary Defense, Casper Winberger, George
Schultz, and Ronald Reagan. Well, working for Ronald Reagan following his lead,
managed to do a lot of great stuff, including when the Cold War.
No, Rob's right. The smart people are the ones that you have
to walk on. We're look on for because they always have a new theory
of urban design. The new urbanists are always absolutely correct about the the the
paradigm they should impose on the city, and it never really works. Unfortunately,
we can never get rid of the guys who think they're too smart and
know precisely what to do. But there are some different tools in the quiver
to mix my metaphors. We'll get to that maybe a little bit later.
Because right now we should just get to our guest. We'd love to get
to our guests. Who would be Patrick Demon professor of political science at Notre
Dame, where he concentrates on the history of political thought, liberalism, conservatism,
and constitutionalism, and twenty eighteen he wrote Why Liberalism Failed, and earlier
this week he published his latest book, Regime Change Towards a Post Liberal Future.
Patrick, thanks for joining us in the podcast today. Thanks well,
I you know, I hate to sum up erroneously or thesis. And we
have two failures. We have the failure of kin of the economic liberalism.
We have the failure of social liberalism. What we need is to sweep away
the order which is strangling us now and create a new regime. But before
we get to that, there's a word that keeps popping up in your work
that I read the piece and Impact, and the word is unbounded us that
the central preski pardon compact, Compact magazine, Compact, I'm sorry, Compact
Impact, right right, It's like, what are you? Yeah, commentary
and descent emerging in form um. Unbounded was this word that appeared again and
again and and I liked it. It has a sense of It reminded me
of David glertn Are talking about the culture of obligation of the nineteen thirties.
How were there were these boundaries and structures put into place that we're that we're
done away with. Um, tell me a little bit more about why you
like that word, and what sort of boundedness you think society would profit from
having. Well, I guess, I mean, I was been trying to
think of of an appropriate or fitting word to capture I think what you were
just saying, which is the what I see as the sort of extreme forms
of you could say unbounded liberty that I think has come to define aspects of
what we think of as the contemporary right or the contemporary left. And what
would be the correct term? And I thought about both borderlessness or limitlessness,
could could in some ways describe them, But I thought of boundedness in part
because it's it seems to both suggest the need for boundaries, of course,
the need to draw boundaries around either places or people or behaviors that applied,
it's seemed to me, could be thought of to apply to kind of both
of the forms of liberalism that I see as the dominant strands on both the
contemporary right and left, and that I think represent the kind of somebody's the
furthest reaches of the development of this liberal border that we are now either enjoying
or suffering under, depending on your perspective. Right, So, I mean,
societally used to be like those invisible senses that my neighbors want for their
dog sense, and the limits of what you where you would go and there
would actually be a little jock in the collar if you walk through it.
But I believe that Stephen Hayward has has some questions and I'm going to defer
to Stephen. Well, Hi, Pad, it's it's great to see you
again. It's been a long time. I did. I did promise listeners
though, Pat, that we're both have a backwind and political theory. But
we will not get off in an esoteric discussion of how to understand walk correctly.
You and I can do that separately, and I'd actually like to do
that with you. But but I do think we ought to be clear.
I mean, we introduced one key point point of about unbounded liberalism, and
I want to bore in on that. But I think we've got to there's
clearway definitions for people. I think that's really are sort of three parts of
what we mean by the liberal tradition. The first part is uncontroversial, I
think, and you're understanding. The second part gets more interesting, and a
third part is where all the action is so so part one, when we
say you and I say liberalism, we don't primarily mean the Democratic party platform
of higher taxes and spending and regulation and all the rest of that. I
mean lots of reasons to criticize that, but that's not you know, the
contemporary way people understand liberal That's not really what you mean. I think that's
you agree with that. Yeah. Well. Part two then is the institutional
and constitutional aspects, and that has four parts plus an idea, and we've
got to put in brackets and it's going to sound like a Supreme Court syllabus.
They're two key asterisks here, but the four or five parts are.
One is equality under the law, no special privileges, thready cast of people,
a second representative government. The third is a market economy or often we
say a free market economy. Oh, that's kind of redundant. And then
fourth is the idea of robust individual rights. And that's where one of the
ass risk comes in. Then the bracketed idea is the idea of progress,
and you talk about that a lot in your book. So I mean,
I think you're in fact, I know you're not saying we're going to throw
out that whole tradition. We're not throwing out constitutionalism, representative government, even
individual rights. You're after something bigger. Is that so far, so good?
Patrick, I haven't. I think that's a correct Yeah, the institutional
constitutional aspects, yes, right. And so this last part, I instead
of saying unbounded, I say the idea. I think you use this phrase
alternately yourself, the idea of unlimited individual autonomy. It's the John Stuart Mill
idea that liberalism means we all get to pursue our own self chosen purposes.
But the problem is is that it does not fill the whole in our soul
when we're detached from communities and families and religion so forth. Or you know,
I know you're familiar with the line from Leo Strauss that the end result
of Lockey and liberalism would be the joyless quest for joy. And so now
we live at a time and here's the problem. What bounds anything? Well,
nature does right and so just because you say a man doesn't become a
woman by saying that I'm a woman, right, Just like you remember Lincoln's
famous line, if you call a tailor leg, how many legs does a
dog have? And the answer was for because calling a tailor leg doesn't make
it a leg. Well, today we have the Biden administration refusing to use
the word woman in official policy documents, and this is crazy. Right,
So this is some of the stuff that you're after, And so let me
stop there. That was a long opening speech, but say a little more
about because I hear I'm in very strong agreement with you. While I may
have some reservations about other aspects of your argument, but I'm very strongly agreement
with you about that core point of individual moral autonomy is become a moral disaster
for Western civilization. Yeah, yeah, well, so that was really the
Obviously, this is a continuation of the argument that I made in my last
book, Why Liberalism Failed. The liberalism fails because it succeeds. That's the
short summary of that of the argument of that book. It's not that we
don't have enough liberalism or that the cures of liberalism is more liberalism to play
on John Dewey's old phrase about democracy, but in fact by becoming fully itself
and some ways by overcoming in part what Toville, of course, I've described
as in some ways the kind of inherited boundaries, right that that America had
inherited from its book, from the old world, and also from practice as
it was able to develop. It was able in some ways to constrain the
tendencies of liberal democracy what he calls democracy, But I think what he means
is fundamentally liberal democracy to kind of spin out of control and really move in
a direction in which the individual was detached, unattached, came believing in their
unbounded perfectibility, limitlessness, the restlessness of the human soul. And so once
you know, in somebodys Tokeville writes this book and says, don't do this,
don't go down this path. Try to retain those elements that you've inherited
or that you've kind of developed that limit this temptation of developing this bounded understanding
of individual autonomy. And my book, that book, and I guess this
current book is kind of an effort to say, well, what happens when
Tokeville's warnings you know when we've we've neglected them, or we simply said,
well, too bad for that, and what do we do then? And
I think, look, I mean, this has been a project that we've
all been engaged in, you know, for forty or fifty years, those
of us who call ourselves conservatives, we've all been concerned about this. And
I suppose maybe what makes me something of a heterodox thinker is that I think
that in some senses, both sides of the liberal tradition have gotten the answer
wrong. And by by by liberal tradition, I mean both the classical liberal
as well as progressive liberal aspects of this tradition. So yes, I think
we bring out points one and three, and maybe that the sticking points.
It's this point two. Yeah, yeah, well you have I just we
could go on a long time on this, and I don't want to.
But you have a very provocative phrase where you say we should use Machiavellian means
to Aristotelian ends. Now two points on that one is I totally understand what
you mean and agree with it. I'm on team Nick of the people who
say we've get them all wrong because we only read the Prince. But it
does remind me a little bit. And here's where the trouble starts. Of
Herbert Crowley's famous phrase and progressive error. You remember he said we're going to
use Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends. Were you self consciously paralleling that with that
phrase, Pat or yeah, sure, sure, I mean I teach Crowley
regularly, and I was using it in part because I think it's it's such
a it's a powerful way to phrase or two things that in the American tradition
we've understood to the opposite. Right, in the American tradition, you were
either on team Jefferson for a long time, you're on Jeam Jefferson, or
you were on team Hamilton at least until relatively and so but and you know
this, Steve, in the those for those who study political philosophy, we
do kind of divide ourselves, you know, with their different camps. But
one of the big divisions is are you on team Aristotle or are you on
team mafia Velli? Are you a modern or are you on ancient? And
I thought it was you know, it was worth sort of trying to make
a play on Crowley, but also to Um suggests that maybe these two could
be um and somebody's brought a little more closely together. Well, in that
case, I'll just call you crowlier than thou and leave it there a moment.
I think you are bounded, Steve. Yeah, well one more,
one more quick set of questions, and then Rob has a couple for you.
I was delighted to see. I mean, you're a theorist, and
often theorist to stick with theory. You at the end of the book have
several suggestions, including a couple of radical ones that I have made in speeches,
I haven't written them down. And then I want to suggest one to
you that you haven't had but fits with your theme. YEA for the paper
back right, Well, universal service. I think if you want to actually
have the classes, A mixed the idea of universal service. And by the
way, you pretty much say what I say, which is including at least
six weeks of training and how you shoot a gun like Israel does. Right.
Pro family policy, I go one step further than you, and I
floated the idea that I do have several specific examples, but one I have
is how about we exempt two parent families to have more than three children from
all income taxes? And then watch people's heads explode. I have a lot
to say about meritocracy. I'll skip over that for a minute. But then
you talk about how we need to reinvigorate our public Christian culture, and I
have one specific idea for you. Almost nobody and no Red states had to
wit to propose this, but I think forty eight of the fifty state constitutions
have an acknowledgement of God or the Almighty as the source of our rights.
So you live in Indiana, Indiana's constitution begins, we the people of the
State of Indiana, grateful to Almighty God for the free exercise of the right
to choose our own form of government, do or day this constitution. My
proposal is school prayer. Of course, while Reagan's the last president to talk
about how we really shouldn't have got rid of school prayer, how about we
just passed laws saying that the school children in our public schools shall recite the
preamble of the state Constitution every morning at the beginning of the school day.
And watch leftist heads explode, and dare the federal course to say the state
constitution is unconstitutional? Constitutional? Yeah, yeah, that's excellent, that's excellency.
I've long actually I've taught many classes in which I do point out not
only do many state constitutions have a positive acknowledgement of God, some state constitutions,
including the state of Massachusetts, have beginning their preamble by saying, by
enjoining a positive duty to recognize and worship God. So imagine the heads exploding
in Boston and the areas of New England when they suddenly discovered that their own
constitutions have these have these pastors. Of course, my fear would be that
places like Massachusetts, which would quickly introduce constitutional amendments of racing and scrubbing those
passages. It's it's the would be the version of tearing down the statue.
So one has to be one has to be careful what one wishes for.
Well, yes, I'm a million sorry, No, I think at the
very least you could have you could pass this in red states where for example,
in Indiana, where this would be where this would naturally lead to the
recognition a public acknowledgement of a creator. But you know, I would actually
like to see, you know, push the envelope even further. I would
like to see, let's test some of these older cases. Let's test some
of these cases about prayer in school. Let's see where the Supreme Court is
now on these questions. Obviously, we have a different court than we did
in the nineteen sixties and seventies. And I think, sadly, you know,
it's interesting you mentioned Ronald rig and it seems to me that the Republican
Party or Conservatives in America have kind of they've they've abandoned certain stances and the
belief those are lost causes or those are effectively lost causes. So now we'll
move from prayer in school and we'll just defend religious liberty. We'll take a
much more defensive stance. And I actually think this might be a moment for
really for people to begin to think about a much more you know, a
stance which actually tries to regain some ground um and maybe if it doesn't work,
to begin to say, well, maybe we need to think about jurisprudence
that would allow these cases to win. Well, I've got a bunch more
questions and some objections, path, but I want to foot a rob promantic
who wants to get them on the fire. Expect, I expect you'll have
objections. Yeah, Yeah, he's you know, that's his that's his sticked
objections. Thanks for joining us. I'm good to see you again. I
think I think I saw you last in the summer or last summer in um
in Hungary of all places. Um right, right? Uh so, I
have you talk about lost causes some of these issues, you know, and
lost causes and the social conservatives who are advocating for them in the eighties and
baking Er kind of gave up. Um it was stipulated. They're at least
presently lost causes right there. They have lost till now, Um who lost
them? I mean, there's there's a kind of a I've going to reveal
my theory that this sort of a kind of a vanity on the part of
the right to say that we lost them because these evil, faceless bureaucrats infiltrated
um state governments, local governments and federal government where you know, they really
didn't declare their their biases, and they've undermined traditional sort of American Americanism left
and right. That and and what I mean is, whenever you lose something,
you always ask yourself one question, did I lose it? Or was
it stolen? And you always want it to be stolen by bureaucrats or something,
because it means there's not your it's not your fault who lost this stuff?
Did? Was it just the inattentiveness by the right or was it a
kind of a larger American cultural decline brought upon by wealth and good news?
Maybe? So who's gonna so when your book is really called regime change?
Like what regime do we need to change? The regime in the state houses
or the city halls, or the Congress, or the regime culturally that we
have sort of slipped into. I mean, who's the book for? Well,
I don't you know, you never know who the who a book is
for. But the book, the book, I hope, is for people
who are you know, like me, and I assume like you, fairly
unhappy about the situation we find ourselves in right now, thinking that the nation,
maybe the broader Western worlds, and it is in a state of what
appears to be terminal decline, in which efforts to fight back again. This
always seemed to be kind of you know, at the same at the same
time, there's still fighting spirit. You're always you're always fighting, you know,
you're always fallen back to the to the further defensive point, and it
almost feels like we're at the you know, we're at the keep right now,
and and how much further can you retreat? Right when? Uh?
When when we can't define a man and a woman? When we can't uh
uh you know, when when when to be a Christian is now in this
country? Is is a reviled uh you know, um form of identity?
If to use the current parliance, that feels pretty much like we're at the
keep. And well, well, let let me ask you this as a
practical question of um years and years and years, the uh, the pro
life movement has said has been, as their strategy has been, we need
to change the makeup of the Supreme Court. We have conservative justices to overturn
row rows overturned. And it turns out that the pro life political operation hasn't
been that successful anywhere, even in places where you think it would be.
So was the problem, I don't know, it's not probably either or was
the problem Supreme Court? It was the problem that the movement itself had failed
at persuading the voters. Yeah, So I think this gets us to the
broader question that you asked, which is sort of how did these causes get
lost? And obviously I'm far from being able to have a comprehensive answer to
this question that I think none of us is able to adequately answer in its
complexity. But one thing I would say is so in the first instance,
I think we can all look at the unstinting, unrelenting efforts by progressives to
change and transform the fundamental institutions of the United States and frankly the globe,
and using the power of the United States to advance its vision. It's very
positive vision, not you know, in the eighties, I remember I was
a part of Steve I think I got to know you around that time,
you know, Alan Bloom and closing the American mind. And the problem on
the left was relativism. The progressives were simply relativists. And now, in
retrospect, that seems like a kind of charming argument, because all along this
wasn't The problem wasn't relativism, It wasn't the lack of a belief in anything.
It was a very strong and firm belief about what the vision of the
world should be like. And it's it's increasingly it seems to be the one
that we encounter in the world, you know, they a world in which,
again it's now crime thing to say that there's biological difference between a man
and a woman. So I think I would I think we'd be in strong
agreement that the left plays a really powerful and profound role in this transformation,
and maybe we might differ a little bit in terms of the role of the
right. And I think you know, what you suggested in your question,
was it inattentiveness on the part of the right, And I think it was
more a problem in the way in which the right kind of constituted itself as
a response to the left, going back to the nineteen eighties, even earlier
than that, when it began to articulate itself as a form of opposition to
this incipient movement that we've seen come into full flower today, and it was
to say that the problem lie in the kind of exercise of political power.
The exercise of political power, state power was the problem. So these bureaucrats,
these and trench figures in government, the use of political power was the
problem. And if we could in some ways create a world in which that
no longer applied, which there was an absence of political power, we would
see the kind of flourishing of a good society emerge. So it's a kind
of in the background life theories of spontaneous order, that in the absence of
any kind of public authority, the goodness, the kind of inherent goodness of
human beings would emerge, and those of Steve Knows as better than anyone.
But you know, Robald Reagan had some some qualities of this. He would
often say his favorite political philosopher wasn't Edmund Burke, it was Thomas Payne,
and Thomas paineo famously argues that, you know, the government only exists to
restrain the evils of human beings. But as an Aristotelian, myself, as
an Aristintilian, I also understand, or at least I believe that government also
exists. We could say, the public order exists to cultivate the potential virtues
of human beings that, left to our own devices, were not naturally good.
We have the capacity for good, but we need those capacities to be
developed. So I think that that you have on the one side, the
left willing to use more or less unbridled exercise of political power to pursue its
ends, and the right saying what we really need is just to have the
disassembling of the political order of government use of government power. And so there
was always asymmetric kind of an asymmetric kind of warfare that was going on that
I think. I think these are the people who might be interested in reading
my book, or the people who are saying, well, how do we
how do we actually begin to fight back? And do we actually we need
to rethink what we thought in the nineteen eighties, going back even to the
sixteen seventies and development of conservatism, that what seemed to be the answer then
may not be the correct answer, certain from the standpoint today. And that's
where I think there is a really, of course, it's a it's a
pretty sometimes let's say, unpleasant, sometimes civil, sometimes productive debate taking place
within the right today over these questions. I just jump in with one last
item, just the placeholder. Really, I love this argument. I will
say that I'm not quite ready to give up on liberalism or progress, but
let's delay that to another day. But it does promptly nostalgic memory. I
had forgotten until I was catching up with all this, that I lost a
bet to you about fifteen years ago I don't know if you remember this.
I do. I still up you paid me with Yeah, they'll see.
That's just it is that you were I was actually right, accept in a
larger sense of your point is better. The bet listeners was Pat had written
some sympathetic comments about the peak oil theory, very popular back around two thousand
and five, and I said, Pat, that's all wrong. I'll bet
you that three years from now oil prices will be back down to seventy five
dollars a barrel. Pat Gamley took the bet. It was a rerun,
by the way, the famous Julian Simon Paul early bet. And three years
came along right, and uh and by the way, you know all the
people the Goldman sacks and oil was heading to two hundred dollars a barrel.
I me, there's lots of people experts on your side. And three years
rolling around and oil prices were still high. And so yeah, are the
terms of our bet. You can tell where academic nerds was there? The
two parts, Pat, It was a two books from Liberty five book catalog
and I think dinner, which I don't think I ever paid off. So
that office, I'll told you to that Steve. Yeah, you should.
But and of course it wears oil today about seventy dollars a barrel, so
adjusted for inflation, I was totally right, But that's a different art.
Your your argument was beyond that, which was never mind oil and resources.
It's uh material progress is not filling the whole in our soul. That's the
large argument you're making. That's the one I'm most enthusiastic about, even if,
as I say, my cavit is I don't think we should entirely give
up on liberalism and progress just yet. Right. Well, so, well
now it's it's you know, it's there was just an article that appeared in
Politico yesterday about my my majestic powers of influencing all things in American politics today.
I was I was reading and wandering, who is this? Who is
this wizard of our right here? Who who's who's operating? You know?
If only but um, but it did it did Actually, you know,
the reporter admirably uh you know, went went into my uh went into some
of my older publications and revived, um revisited and talked a little bit about
some of those arguments that I was making. I you know, it brings
me back to something that you had said earlier, and this was really I
think the thing about peak oil that really most interested in me was within the
liberal order, did liberalism have the capacity in somebody's to recognize natural limits?
So you said earlier, what what can bind or limit the autonomy the desired
autonomy of the individual, and you suggested that those limits would be nature.
And I think, on the one hand, the right has always been very
attentive to the ways in which nature, of course is a limit, especially
when we think about the human being, what we are as human beings.
I mean, we both cut our teeth in political philosophy. And what attracted
me to political philosophy, I'm sure what attracted you. It's it's really just
an endless discussion about what is human nature? And once we have the answer
to that question, then we give begin to think about what is the appropriate
political form that follows from that definition of human nature. But so on the
one hand, conservatives conservatives have always been very keen critics of the way in
which the left has been has argued for the transcendence of natural limits, and
in particular the transcendence of natural limits in what it is a human beings.
And this of course brings us back to old kind of Strausian themes of historicism,
that the human beings has no nature. We are really just creatures who
are defined by historical sort of circumstances. And the circumstance above all that defines
us is the idea of progress. That they're called progressives for subercise, because
progress isn't just you know, just a change, like you know, a
using a ballpoint pen instead of a feather. Progress is this sort of existential
ontological condition of what it is to be a human being. There is no
human nature. There's only a changeable, transformative, constantly altering, an ultimate
perfecting, a kind of perfectable creature that is a human being. At the
same time, though, the right, it seems to me, has similar
tendencies as well, at least as it's been constituted in the United States,
which is the belief of a kind of endless economic progress, a limitless economic
progress. And what was really interesting to I guess what interested me about these
ideas of peak oil, which I think is still in some sense it is
true, right we're going to run out of maybe not, I shouldn't say
run out of it. Become the easy, easy energy in the form of
oil gets more difficult. That's kind of what interested to me. And the
extent to which, and again these are just questions in my mind, the
extent to which what we understand to be the success of liberalism has been tied
to a kind of perhaps temporary bounty, a bountious energy form that allowed us
the belief in this kind of autonomy, in this kind of this condition of
completed, thorough going autonomy. So, in other words, the question that
really interested me out of that period was is there a quality on the right
that actually begins to collapse itself with some of the assumptions on the left as
well, which is that the economic and material form of our life is as
a limitless and subject to progress as the belief in human transformation. And it
seems to me just put a finer point in this. So I know you
want to talk about other things, but this is of course really important that
what used to seem to be a distinctive approach to progress on the left and
a distinctive approach to progress on the right has now really collapsed, because what
we are actually seeing now isn't just a kind of theory of transformation of human
nature as a kind of philosophical and historical process that takes place through political agency,
but rather now the scientific technological perfection of human beings through interventions in biotechnology
and nanotechnology and artificial intelligence and so forth. What is the conservative answer going
to be to this when we have such a strong kind of less It's basically
saying, if science progresses, then it must be a good thing. If
the material conditions of our life progress, it must be a good thing.
And I think, I think, I think we're at a really critical moment,
a kind of key Lynchin moment where conservatives need to really it seems to
me I think pretty hard about where we are in terms of those questions.
Well, if conservatives believe in smaller government, as we do, then nanotechnology
is very exciting because absolutely enable us to get small, really small, down
to the micron level and perhaps injected into people. All right, Well,
if you want to know more about this, of course, go to Impact
Compact. I'm sorry, and find the apiece which lays out the basic ideas
of regime change towards a postliberal future and why a mixed constitutional future in which
we have a virtuous elite and a virtuous, populous movement walking hand by hand
into a better place where yes, there are boundaries. You read that,
pick up the book, and we thank you Patrick for joining us. Patrick
Dennen, the Notre Dame University Political Science Department, doctor latter. Thanks Patrick,
thank you. Okay, and now we go from the esoteric and the
imperion to the specific and the political. We have Andy McCarthy here to tell
us. Well, you know, Andy has, of course senior Fello up
the National Review Institute, contributing editor there as well as well as Fox News,
served as the assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Welcome back, Andy, Trump indicted seven counts. So what does this mean?
And surely it means, if there's going to be a fair application of
the laws, that Hunter Biden is going to be indicted sometime soon. Ryan,
well, at least Joe Biden he's indicted. It's interesting because they these
guys are so political. Virtually every line of what they do is politicized.
So this is a little inside basebally, but they've charged Trump under a provision
of the Espionage Act that requires proof that he willfully retained classified documents and it
seems to me that if you combine the rationale under which they dumped the case
against former Vice President Pence last week and what they're saying about Biden, what
they want you to believe is those guys they're not really an Espionajact problem because
they're victims of sloppy staff work and inadvertent behavior, and they cooperated with the
investigation and all that. Whereas Trump, he's willful, that's why he has
to be prosecuted. But if you look at the Espionage Act, and I
think Donald Trump is going to make sure we all look at the Espionajact,
the subsection of the there's a second subsection of the Act. He's a Trumps
and charge into Subsection D, which is the part that deals with the willful
behavior. But there's this subsection F that you know, Biden's not going to
want to talk about that deals with people who exhibit gross negligence in the mishandling
of classified information. And while the Biden Justice Department and the Democrat media complex
will say, oh, well, but we don't go after people who just
make mistakes. We go after people with willful behavior, the fact is that
Congress made both of them equally ten year felony camps. And you know,
they'll say, well, but Hillary Clinton wasn't prosecuted, which is the same
thing of course Trump is saying. And the problem with that argument is it's
a travesty that Hillary Clinton wasn't prosecuted. And there's no good basis in my
mind to go after Trump on this and not go after Biden. So I
just think this is a gratuitous just for as a political matter rather than a
lead one. I think they're gonna be very sorry they went down this route.
Hey, Andy, it's Rob Long, thanks for joining us. So
I'm you say they're gonna be sorry they went down this route because because it's
going to be revealed to be completely political, or because they're gonna lose,
or both. I think because the selection of Trump to be prosecuted on this
is political. And there was a way Rob to indict this case without doing
that. You could have just indicted it as grand jury obstruction. In other
words, they could they could have just made this case. You know.
Luck we asked him for our stuff back, he wouldn't give it back,
so we gave him a grand jury subpoena and he duped his lawyers into telling
us under oathed that he had given everything back when they gave these thirty eight
documents on June third, And of course that was a full statement. We
you know, two months later they find one hundred more documents. So instead
of you could have taken the ESPNA jack completely out of it, just made
it a plane ol obstructing the grand jury case and look the country in the
eye and say, you know, look, he says, this is a
selective prosecution. But no one in America can lie to a grand jury and
get away with it. And that's the kind of thing I think people could
have wrapped their brains around. Why didn't they do that, because I think
they want to make a well a couple of reasons. First of all,
they want to run against Trump, right, so it doesn't really the more
unfair this seems to be, the more Jim's up Trump's space. And this
has the paradoxical effect of there's like a surge effect and a tail effect.
Right. The surge effect is in the four corners of the primary contest to
win the GOP nomination. It helps Trump because his base is catalyzed and none
of the other candidates can get any traction because they have to talk about Trump
all the time. But the all effect of this is if you combine this
with like Bragg's case and the EG Carol case, and in August you got
the Atlantic case, and then in October's one of those is a fundraising opportunity
for Trump. Yeah, I wouldn't go to sleep on October is the Letitia
James Broad case, the civil case, which is going to be you know,
years of the Trump organization and they're accused of this massive like you know,
insurance, tax fraud, you know, every fraud under the sun.
And then you know, now you have this, then you have Bragg's trial
coming up, and the other thing that's going to happen here at a certain
point, I don't think Trump is going to get charged with a June with
a January sixth crime. But remember Smith is a special counsel, which means
he gets to write a report. So at some moment in time when it's
propitious for them, he's going to Trump a comprehensive report on what Trump did
in connection with the with January sex. So they have this whole thing skelped
out in a way that it's very likely he could win the nomination and then
they're going to frig and kill him as it gets close to is it just?
I mean, he'll also do a number on himself. He's good at
that. I mean, now, okay, what are they all talking to
each other? Or this is just kind of the hive mind at work.
Um. I mean, you what you've sketched out as is a system,
right. I mean, to bring this case in Miami because they want to
bring it, I guess because they want it. They want it, they
don't want to suffer through a venue change. They want to just make it,
make it simple. Um. I mean, I'm just trying to understand,
like, is there anybody there in that entire operation saying, well,
listen, you know this is a little bit we're pushing this because Biden did
it, and Pence did it and Hillary Clinton famously did it. Seems like
everybody's taken stuff home and there's nobody there. There's no dissenting voice, or
is there? Or are we going to hear more about that later? I
think, first of all, it's it's it's a hive mind. But you
know, we're not talking about a complicated issue here. I mean, it's
pretty simple the way this Tea's up right, So I think everybody kind of
knows what's expected of him. I got I must have been asked ten times
today. Do you think that Smith is coordinating with Garland? I mean,
Rob you're talking about, like, are these other prosecutions in different or prosecutors
in different jurisdictions colluding. I don't think Smith is talking to Garland. That
doesn't mean Garland's not running the show, or that Biden's not running the show.
It's that Smith was brought in because he knows what's expected of him.
He knew what he was here to do. They don't have to have a
conversation about that. And I think if you're an activist Democrat, which covers
the Justice Department, and then all these politically elected prosecutors who are state prosecutors
around the country. Let's remember, the state prosecutors, unlike the federal prosecutors,
are elected. They seek office promising their constituents that they're going to use
their power against Trump, and it really doesn't matter that much how the cases
come out. They're supposed to use their power and get Strump, which they're
doing. So I don't think. I don't think it's one of these things
where it's so complicated that we all have to get together to figure out what
each one does next. I think there's a trajectory of this that's pretty simple.
They want him to win the nomination and then they think, you know,
Biden can beat him in the general and it's teeing up that way.
Probably can Steve Heyward out in California. I was glad you mentioned, but
I think you should say more about the Hillary Clinton case from what seven eight
years ago? Now? Yep. And you know what I recall from that,
and this is getting off strictly legality and the constitutional issues involved in this
Trump and its documents is we remember now that James Comey, as head of
the FBI, laid out the case of how she violated the law, but
then said, we're not recommending a prosecution because it's our ethical duty not to
bring a prosecution that could not be won in court. In other words,
what he was saying was, no DC jury will convict Hillary Clinton. What
does it tell us that now they're not applying that same standard of judgment to
Trump. I mean, it seems to me it's problematic on its face,
but below the surface, it's increasing reasons for people to be deeply cynical about
the fairness of our law enforcement oparatus in the country. Yeah, I think
it's worse than that sty because I don't think Komey believed the word he was
saying. Yeah. First one of the reasons for example, you know,
we just talked about the difference in the sp and a jack between the willfulness
thing and what it is a gross negligence provision. I thought the gross negligence
thing was like the shiny object. I thought it was a diversionary tactic.
To my mind, having done this for a while, Hillary clinton case was
the easiest wilfulness case in the history of cases. She intentionally systematically created a
communication system that was non secure and outside the government channels, even though she
was a Secretary of State who had to enforce against her subordinates the government provision
that you're supposed to do government work on government facilities. She did it under
circumstances where eighty percent of her job was national security and foreign relations work that's
foreign classified as far as the government was concerned, So she had to know
it was inevitable that highly classified information was going to transit through and be stored
on her Homebrew system. So she did that wilfully, that was not accidental
behavior. And then when they caught her on it, and there was a
congressional subpoena issued to her in connection with Benghazi, she intentionally not only deleted,
but had destroyed thirty three thousand emails, which Komy ended up having to
concede had some classified information in it and some State Department business, and it
probably quite a lot. And where they didn't go public. You know,
what Komey excised out of his statement that he gave publicly was that the FBI
was convinced that her system had been hacked by foreign intelligence services. She had
even talked to Obama over the system from Russia. So that's like, there's
no reason on God's green earth that that that case wasn't brought. I think
any reasonable prosecutor. I know a lot of people have accused me of being
an unreasonable prosecutor, but I think any reasonable prosecutor would have been delighted to
take that case to trial. But they were never going to prosecute her.
In April of twenty sixteen, while the investigation was still ongoing in an early
stage, Obama came out publicly and said he didn't want her to be charged,
and Coomey ended up not charging her, and three months later, when
he explained why she shouldn't be charged, he virtually echoed what Obama had said
in April. So the fix was in on this from the beginning. And
I hope that Trump is talking about this case every single day, because not
only I don't know if it'll read down to his benefit or not. Selective
prosecutions one of these things where it's a good argument for why prosecutorial discretion should
not be exercised to charge. But once you do charge, it's not much
of a defensive trial. It's kind of a nullification defense. But you know
the judge is going to tell the jury at trial the only person on trial
here is Donald Trump, and the question is has he'd been proven guilty on
the charges against him. It's not a legal defense for him that somebody who
did similar things wasn't prosecuted, But I think politically it's going to be a
very powerful argument. Today, Hillary Clinton reminded people that you can buy baseball
caps that say but her emails if you go to this address. She tweeted
that out in order to just let everybody know that she completely got away with
it. Absolutely, it's so much in your face and it's it's so we
don't care what you crazy people think. I'm surprised she's not having an event
at Comet Pizza to anything. And we gotta go Andy. You know,
one of these days we're gonna stop going to you because there's no news about
this stuff and the country's on an even keel and a good, good trajectory
forward. But I don't think that's going to happen. So stay close to
your phone, and we always appreciate what we're able to call you fast and
get you on all right, Let's have a great weekend. Talct you later.
Bye bye. Speaking a great weekends. One of the things people doing
the weekends, of course, he is gathered around the barbecue. They have
themselves a bigger They have a burger and the rest of it, and they
meet and greet. They're near and deer, but sometimes meeting and greeting those
who are completing other strangers can be fun too. Strangers in the sands.
They maybe you didn't meet them in the real world, but you know them
from online. And that's what we love about the Ricochet get togethers and here's
Rob Long to tell you about one that might be in all about it.
Yeah, you're absolutely right. They're not strangers. They're fellow members, club
members of the Ricochet Club. So we do that. We love the online
stuff, obviously, that's part of our identity. We like podcasts. We
love it when we mix it up in the podcast as well in the pages
of Ricochet. On the other hand, it's always nice to get together,
so we have meetups, and there are some meetups coming up in Winston Stalem,
there's a meetup in mid July. The annual German Fest meetup in Milwaukee's
happening the last weekend in July, Labor Day weekend meet up in Cookville,
Tennessee. There's some tentative meetup scheduled for Columbus, Ohio in late June.
That's late this month. And there is a meet up in Portland, Oregon,
happening in mid July. The dates specific dates coming soon. And Mammoth
Cave National Park in Kentucky in August also has some moving around it. How
do you find out about all the stuff? You go to ricochet dot com.
You join Ricochet and you say I'll be there and if one of these
things or none of these things work for you, for timing wise or geography
wise. You just say, hey, how about a meet up closer to
you at a date you can do it, and believe me, Ricochet members
will show up. And that is really the most fun part about being a
member of Ricochet. It certainly is before we go anything on your mind,
before we wrap it up here and we have a few more trying to keep
these podcasts, you know, close to an hour or something like that,
because we know that people sit down, they get riveted, they lose track
of what they're doing. They're stopped knitting, they stopped fixing, they stopped
driving, they pull over to hear something, and you know, then they
complain to us, I was immobilized by ninety minutes of brilliance? Can you
keep it down to sixty five or sixty six or sixty seven like that?
But is there a story this week, guys, something that popped up that
made you think, here's a sign of societal disclosure, or, as Paul
Harvey might say, the you know, the news of something that was pointed
at hopeful, today's news of most lasting significance. I don't know why I
thought of Paul Harvey there. I was just I guess because I came across
some Paul Harvey stuff the other day in which he was taking it wasn't Amoy
necessarily, because he's got this great record, which is essentially thirty minutes of
what is fine about America culminating in a praise of Amoy and the rest of
it. He was just such an interesting broadcaster to me that I lament the
loss of him. And we don't have to rust Limbaugh anymore? Do we
have Do we have anybody who commands that sort of national Because Paul Harvey came
on at noon, right and everybody stopped and listening to what Paul he was
doing. Rush came on at eleven where I was. And now in the
podcast world, it's just all diffuse. There's no sort of there's there's no
sense of those stentorian voices had come on at a particular time to mark the
phases of the day. Is there that's gone forever, isn't it? Yeah?
It probably is, James, But I mean, look, I mean,
I'm old enough to remember when seventy five million Americans watched the evening news,
when the country was half the size of this today, and now that
number is down under thirty million. I think, who watched the evening news,
the network news, right, but I am surprised, what's on your
mind? I saw a story this week that immediately thought, this has to
be cat nips for James. And that's the flurry of UFO stories. Yeah,
but I'm deeply skeptical of them, because, well, what I wait
for is a detail. They say, we have things, all right,
names from specific things. Do we have an engine? Do we have a
composite material we don't understand? Do we have control services? Do we have
a limb from an alien being in the biology lab? None of that has
been suggested. This all secondhand. I've heard this well placed sources. I
don't know. I count me as skeptical until somebody shows up with a fragment
from Alpha Centauri or something. No, I'm all about Fox Molder's poster here.
I want to believe too, but it's a tree. But again,
show me something. I mean the amount of UFO footage or I'm sorry,
up footage that right now. It was pretty incredible, and some of it's
getting actually better. I mean I carry it on in my pocket, a
four K phone that is capable of an enormous detail and the rest of it,
and so do a novel a lot of other people. So until we
start getting a welter of really convincing footage and not just something that's darting a
round of the sky, I want something that's artifact for you when you subjected
to analysis, I want I want the gray alien striding towards me with his
bighead and his black liquid eyes and his swinging hands and the rest of it.
That's what I want. In the absence of that, then I'm sorry,
I'm not I'm not going to believe any of it. I remembered in
the late nineties when we were going through this whole stuff, we had a
big UFO crace where people were being abducted. They were all over the place.
We had an alien, there was an autopsy. There was that,
and there was photographs of it and the rest of it, and it was
every single piece of evidence that was trotted. I was completely inconclusive and unconvincing.
If you wanted to be a skeptical myy, the only way to think
about this stuff is to proceed from a certain set of assumptions about the likelihood
of life in the universe, throw away everything you know about science, like,
well, I can't get here because the universe is too big and you
can't go faster than like yeah, okay, well you know, maybe they
figure that out and then get down to the third thing about how they've been
hanging around for an awful long time and nobody found them because they never crashed
because cameras weren't bad. Okay, well, now cameras are better. Now
the government is admitting we don't know what these is. All right, that's
still all a big gashes mix out there. Show me something, put it
out on display, have the journalists from all over the country come and take
pictures of it that then we can talk until we get to that point.
Shut up. I'm sorry, Yeah, I mean you think it's sort of
this. I mean, you'd think the people who faked the moon land and
could fake a UFO, and but so far that you know, we're not
even getting that. That's so much contempt they have for us. Well,
I mean, I know we got a run. But one of the things
I find interesting about this is that forever, forever, I mean I can't
remember a time, maybe every single movie, the premise has always been when
we find the UFOs or the UAPs, what are they are? Um,
we can't telp the people. The people can't know because they'll freak out because
nobody can handle this. This is just two bananas. And the truth is
that if they announced tomorrow oh yeah, yeah, we've been visited by aliens,
people be like, Oh that's really interesting. I'm gonna trust about that.
And you know, uh, how do they feel about the Trump indictment?
You know, it was really kind of I have I have an idea
that when when, when this happens, it's just going to be this thing
like oh yeah, you know, oh, well here's the alien. He's
going to be on um, you know, he's going to be on a
Twitter spaces. Okay, here's what you do is you do what they've been
doing. If you say we have to prepare the public, how do we
prepare the public? Well, we give them the idea these things exist,
and then we have a whole bunch of science fiction movies, and then we
have a whole bunch of different things to train them to look for this so
that they assume that maybe actually this is the saucers and the Dutton and the
rest of it. We we spend thirty four years si opping the people.
Sometimes we'll give him a really big, huge alien spacecraft that's friendly and pretty
and pastel and glowing, like Steven Spielberg did. And then we'll give them
the Independence Day thing that scares the bleep out of them. And it's you
know, since it's neither of those two, they won't be too upset when
we drib drab out that there are some tic teks flying around and we don't
know. I mean at this point, yes, it's a great fan there's
a great fan theory about the Spielberg movies they booked in is there's close Encounters,
right, and then there's Et and then he did the other one the
day the Earth's Are Still or whatever that one was that remember he did,
didn't he do what he didn't? That was not a Spielberg every he did.
He did the remake of War of the World. The World that's right,
So like you know that the aliens come and visit it and then one
of them is then captured by children and tortured in a closet, and then
Et goes home and they prepare the invasion force, which is War of the
World's Those ets in there. That's that's a bit much. We actually saw
the creature at the end in the Great original, The War of the World's
movie. All we saw with a little three fingered thing that just kind of
limped its way out the hole and died. Now we actually saw the Aliens
the Martians in the spe Steven Spielberg, and they were not et They were
a nasty bunch of m evers and no, I'm sorry. So anyway,
if you wanted to train the people, they were eats orcs works. Oh
yeah, I got to stop there. I got to stop there because we
have a we have a title for the podcast, we've got a graphic.
There's nothing we cannot improve upon it. Peter Robinson, we helpe. We'll
be back next week, or maybe we don't because we love having Steve Hayward
around. Steve had been great to end. Take care and good to have
you and thank you for everything you've done. Rob We hope you get back
to New York soon. But remember where you're in ninety five so that you
don't expire as the Canadian will active war frankly continues to belong at the United
States. I will see everybody in you know, I usually say we'll see
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