I mean, I'm moderately scattered the alligators that live outside my house, but
I don't want them to be president. Ask not what your country can do
for you, Ask what you can do for your country. Mister Gerbatschev,
tear down this wall. Read my lips. It's the Rocochet Podcast with Peter
Robinson and Charles C. W. Cook's sitting in for rob Long. I'm
James Lilacs and today our guest is newt So let's have ourselves a podcast.
But we're going to win and we're gonna help. We have plans to build
a railroad from the Pacific all the way across the Indian Ocean. We have
plans to build in Angola, one of the largest solar plants in the world.
I can go on, but I'm on. I'm going off script,
and we're gonna get in trouble. You'll never get bored with whenny we never
get bored. Welcome everybody hits the Roocoche Podcast, number six hundred and forty
six. Why don't you? Yes, you join us at rookochet dot com.
Sign up part of the most stimulating conversation at community on the web,
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lyleas in Minneapolis. In case I neglected to mention that Peter Robinson's in California.
Rob is on an anabasis somewhere where his peregrinations have taken him this week,
we know not we'll know next and sitting in for him as Charles C.
Cook c not standing for conventional wisdom on gentlemen, welcome, Thank you,
James Ana basis and peregrinations and sentence. No I gea. I could
have added some other word with plenty of closives to it, but I didn't.
So that gets my pretentious language out of the way. So let's go.
Let's go to something else. Plane spoken. We could talk about we
could talk about the indictments, but you know, there's a lot of places
where you can talk about that. I was casting my mind around for something
else to discuss and open the show with today, and I encountered on Twitter
the story that just seems local and doesn't seem to matter very much what it
does to me because it's indicative of a huge, large thing, and that
is Seattle attempted to pass an ordinance against graffiti, and a judge struck it
down on First Amendment grounds that you have the right to take out your spray
can and to write a message on a federal building. Now, part of
me says that, yes, to deal with tyranny, such things should not
be bad. But on the other hand, it's indicative of every single little
example of social decay and urban decay that is being encouraged by people who simply
leaves seemed to say, there's absolutely nothing that we can do except to let
our cities devolved into these hideous jungles of paint and miscrey. And sprawl to
the ground. So that's something to discussed. But then again you may discuss
who wanted to talk about the fact that we now have another story from The
Times which says well about that lab leak theory that everybody was decrying as being
xenophobic and racist and the rest of it in anti science, and we must
shut down social media to keep these things from spreading. Well, it turns
out that's probably the case, and that Patient zero was one of the guys
who was involved in it does make much of a splash. Do you think
this has already accepted sort of sullenly? Why aren't we using things like this
to have some sort of accounting, that account of that accounting that we always
wanted right at the end of this that it's obvious we're never going to get.
Those are my two things that are bugging me today. Graffiti and Fauci
telling us what he told us. I'll go, I'll take the first and
tell us the second. To Charlie, Charlie prepared to discuss the lab leak.
Here's all I have is a comment, an observation. I'm not going
to go for any deep insight here, not for the first time, Charlie
May went away in on this as well. Not for the first time,
I find myself thinking, oh, thank goodness, this country is so big.
Thank goodness, there's still room for regions to be different from each other.
You mentioned Seattle. The story in my family runs as follows. Not
quite two weeks ago, now ten days ago, my oldest son moved from
San Francisco to Austin. And as he got in the car excuse me,
as he was going out from his apartment, the movers had just emptied it.
To get into his car, he discovered that his car window had been
smashed and broken into on the streets of San Francisco for fourth time in this
past year, which of course delayed his getting started on the road to Texas
because he had to go have the window replaced. And didn't you have to
go file a police report, because they'd be right on. Well, actually,
well, as I say, this was the fourth time, correct,
you're right, you're the insinuation. It's correct, James, this was the
fourth time this year, So by now he knew not to waste his time
with the police. They wouldn't even try, they wouldn't even make an effort
anyway. Then he gets to Austin and within his first now, Austin is
a liberal town. I think it's the liberal town in Texas. But what
Sun Number one discovers very quickly is that the liberals are a kind of donut
in the middle of Austin's. It's the biggest state capital in the country,
and that state capital is run by Texans. And those Texans, in a
state with no income tax, are this year in their session this year proposing
to cut the property tax, which is the main source of state revenue.
They are cutting the taxes they do have, and on and on. It's
a genuinely, thoroughly intelligently conservative state that's in the middle of the donut,
and outside the donut is a land known as Texas, and those liberals control
that little donut of Austin, and that is just fine. So he gets
to Texas after a three day drive, and within less than twenty four hours
he calls and says, I am never leaving Texas again in my life.
That is the story from this front. Thank God. It's a big Charlie.
Yes, yes, Charlie. So I think the graffiti story that you
just relate is an example of a historical interpretation of language that militates, for
once, in the direction of over zealous defense of the Bill of Rights rather
than under zealous normally. What happens is people say, but it says well
regulated, or well, it says general welfare. Therefore, and you have
to explain. We'll know those words didn't mean the same thing at the time.
But in this case, what's happened is people and apparently judges as well,
have looked only at the action part of the sentence. In this case,
Congress will make no law with the Second Amendment shall not be infringed,
and forgotten that those prohibitions apply only to whatever it is that we are talking
about in the first place, and that you have to therefore determine what the
First Amendment protects and what it doesn't. And there is just no historic understanding
or record or even hint that it protected people who were spraying public or private
property. That's not the First Amendment. Men, So yeah, you have
to uphold the First Amendment. It's just that that's not what the First Amendment
is. And I just increasingly find it frustrating that, especially on the left,
there seems to be this this massive pool of very influential people who are
extremely attached to the constitution that doesn't exist, and disdainful toward the one that
does. You have people in this case saying, well, of course the
graffiti is protected by the First Amendment, but you know what's not religion speech.
We don't like political advocacy, lobbying, it's inferiating. I would argue
that the founders had no idea how this would play out because they did not
have pressurized spray cans at the time, high capacity, high capacity assault cans.
So one of the people looking at this saying, well, perhaps the
judge is saying that this is too broad because it includes chalking, and chalking
is not as permanent as ink, so we have to go back and recraft
the ordinance to permit chalking. It's the idea that we have to accede to
all of this. So we have here in the city's these beautiful blank walls,
which I'm sure of Paul somebody, because they should be smeared with all
manner of tagging and the rest of it that periodically become a tagged and defaced
by people who have no better nothing better to do, and no concept of
civic responsibility and I call I did a piece on this. I actually wrote
about this, and I call them the Department's transportation and asked them why this
is a low priority. They said, well, it's just you know,
it really is. It's a low priority and other stuff to do. I
wrote that column and within four days all the graffiti was gone after it hit
There's probably the most the single most important thing that I've done in the last
five years. So if they realize how much people dislike this, perhaps something
will be done. But to have judges step in and say no, no,
no, you can't is to invite your cities to become I mean,
we're always told that we should follow the model of Europe. European cities are
dreadful when it comes to this manner of graphy. It's awful. You go
to Rome and you see these marvelous old buildings that have been there since the
sixteenth century, and they're completely spattered in this in this feral nonsense. I
know, and the Latin it's grammatically incorrect, and it is You've got the
centaur and who comes up and tugs on the year and goes to the declension
and the rest of it life right, you know, John Cleese is stated
by the way that that's supposed Seene, that they were going to take out
of life of Brian because it's the transgender I want to have a baby.
Thing doesn't fly anymore. His clisus. It's that's staying in. He'll have
none of it taking it out, which is good, brother's hope. Not
for the first time, I find myself wondering, what do we do?
What do we do? This is not rhetorical. I really want to hear
what the two of you think of this, what you make of it?
What do we do? Without a press? It used to be not that
long ago, within my living memory, at least, that every major town
in this country had at least two newspapers, and one of them, if
only to find a market, tended to be more conservative, or at least
its editorial page tended to be more conservative. So in the old days you
had the Boston Globe, and what was it called the Boston Harold? Was
it the Boston Harold? And the Harold would talk back to the establishment.
The Globe was clearly the paper the town that everybody in town read, But
there there was still a market for the Harold. Seattle, the Post intelligencer.
I think now has whatever is left of the market entirely to anyway,
you get the point. Where is the columnist who immediately writes in a newspaper
that's going to be read by thirty forty sixty thousand people in Seattle that the
judge is a bonehead? Where are the reporters to about this muhan leak now
that we know that the that well, one way to put it is the
ja Bodichari was right from the get go, and Fauci was wrong, and
Collins was wrong. And where is the press demanding and accounting. It just
doesn't exist. I don't know. I keep waiting. The sub stacks are
starting to appear. Charlie God bless him. If you want to know what's
happened with the correct way to interpret the Constitution, you read Charlie Cook,
you go to National Review. But it still feels to me this is your
business, James. Of course, it still feels to me as though the
local newspaper in big towns used to be the second newspaper, and big towns
used to be really important because it would talk and talk back reliably. I
do not know how we operate in the absence of such organs. Boys,
well, it's more difficult. I mean, those newspapers are gone. They've
been battered all the industries by the industry's contraction or by being taken over by
chains and or investment groups that stripped them in their assets and manage them poorly.
So you don't have that anymore. And then you have a generation coming
up that isn't trained to read newspapers or regard them as important in any possible
way. It's just not part of their life anymore. So they've lost that,
so they've gone to the web. So you have, in a way,
perhaps a reversion to the nineteenth century, where instead of one or two
big solid papers as you had, you had a whole you had a score
of smaller journals with extraordinarily small readership. You know, New York was like
that. You look back at the welfs or number of papers that they had,
and yes, each would stake out their own little ideological positions and would
cater to the people who read it. Consolidation generally meant that, yes,
you had a columnist in every paper in the town that everybody read, and
that could move needles at person. Yes, yes, those people are don't
exist anymore exactly. But people want that, so they go looking for it,
and they find it. They find it in the endless stream of Twitter,
they find it in the old folk chatter on Facebook and next door and
the rest of it. So the prism has scattered this light in all directions,
and the result of it is that it's hard to wrastle rope and correl
public opinion to do something. So that's that, and I wish it weren't
so, but that's where we are. Charles. What's the newspaper where you
are? And do you read it? No? I don't. What is
it? But that's in part because I want to get a break from my
job, so I'm probably not the best person to ask. It's the same
reason I haven't watched House of Cards. I have nothing against it per se.
I'm sure it's very good. I just can't leave my office having done
what I do all day, and then watch political dramas. What is it?
The Jacksonville Times Union? I hope that's correct. My big issue with
the coverage of the lab leak it's not that the press was wrong, but
that it was wrong on purpose. The question was not examined as if it
were an open matter of objective truth, and those who speculated provided evidence were
not treated as if they were equals. Discussing one of the great issues of
our time. The presumption from the beginning was that anybody who thought there was
anything too the lab leak theory must have an arterior motive. There must be
xenophobic, They must be trying to rile up the mob. And in fact,
if you go back to the early days of COVID, you will see
that the partisan polarization and its consequences were reversed. At first, canceling events
because of COVID was deemed by the beyond ponsant class as being anti Chinese.
Ncy Pelosi said as much in Chanuine February. Then it flipped. Had Donald
Trump come out in May of twenty twenty and said, my one devout wish
on this earth is that everyone wear a mask. The politics around masks might
have been yes, exactly, and so we saw it here. So Tom
Cotton was not told that he might be wrong or that he lacked sufficient evidence
to make the suggestion when he said that this was most likely a lad league,
and he wasn't wrong, he was right, but he was an agent
of evil and intolerance and superstition. Why because some activist groups somewhere in Washington
managed to convince highly impressionable politicians that to blame this on the people who most
likely did it was damaging for international relations or national comedy or diversity or equity
or whatever other buzzword we're using at the moment, and so everything flowed from
that. That's what bothers me. It's not that people get things wrong.
People get things wrong all the time. The wilfulness, well, the wilfulness,
but also the total subordination of the truth to a pre existing set of
narrative precepts so that it would be a bad thing. I mean, we
do this whenever there's a massacre. Unfortunately, there is this hope. You
can see journalists sitting around praying, I hope this is someone I don't like
R then I can weave it in. And if it's someone who they hoped
did it, then that instantly becomes indicative of what we all knew all along,
rather than a fact that we have learned and that should be processed dispassionately.
Well, the peculiar thing about it, and of course this is obvious
and it's been said before, but it doesn't stop me from saying it again.
Is that the idea somehow that it came from a lab was xenophobic and
racist. But the idea that it came from a wet market where people slurping
down pangolin ross soup while standing barefoot in blood, that wasn't the odd thing
about it. But when you say that people were urged to downplay the LAB
leak because they had, you know, these ideas about the wrong thing that
it might inspire, that assumes that they were actually altruistic people concerned about the
international order and the way we think about things. I'm more inclined to think
that the reason that they backed up from the LAB league was because of the
I don't want to use the word coordination. I just did the tentacular interweaving
of US health organizations and the wuhunt of Viril Institute and their study of weaponizing
and humanizing and advancing COVID research. I mean gain of function stuff had been
banned here by Obama. But if I'm correct, and then what they did
was they decided to outsource that to Chinese labs, which had obviously demonstrab poor
health standards than we have. So they wanted to do this, not because
they were evil people who wanted to design the perfect germ to control the world
in some Blowfield like style. No, I believe them when they say,
we're trying to learn about this so in case we get a bad break an
outbreak, we can learn how to fix it. But these things become self
perpetuating, and then you become you know, well let's just do a lot
of this stuff. So you had eco Health and you know the others people,
these names that were connected to it, that a forgiving society might actually,
if told the truth, I think, have asked for some accountability and
some resignations, but they wouldn't have asked for heads, right, But they
wanted to protect this pipeline. They wanted to insulate themselves from criticism and blame,
which I think they owe, which I think they know they can be
rightly blamed. And so we all got steered away from this, and the
press went along with it. And I'm still trying to figure that part out
exactly, because did the medical establishment qui bono follow the money? Anthony Fauci
and Francis Collins are implicated in one way or another in this gain of function
research in China, having funded it indirectly, perhaps, but having funded it.
And between those two men, they have given away over decades tens of
billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars to researchers across the country.
The whole medical establishment, the whole research establishment of the United States, was
effectively on their payroll. And one reason I actually I was just talking about
this with Jay the other evening, Jay Bardicharia. It just happened. Jay
realized he made no effort to stay off the Fauci payroll. It just happened
that his research interests never led him to request a grant from NAIAD. It's
just in any event, and good for him and good for him, and
we hope to have him on soon to talk about this and other things.
But in the meantime, let's go to our guest. Why not, because
it's newt we got Gingridge served as fifty Speaker of the House, architect of
the contract with American leader of the Republican victory in the nineteen ninety four congressional
election. It's just published a book about it, March to the Majority,
and you can order your copy on his website. Which is Gingrich three sixty
dot com Gingrich three sixty dot com to order your copy. Mister gang Rich,
welcome to the Ricochet Podcast. We're glad to have you so um.
Tell us about the book. It's I'm sure an account of the march to
victory then and there are lessons for the present day. Are they're not?
Well? The real purpose of writing the book was to create a set of
principles that we learned, frankly by hard work over a twenty year period,
both on how do you win and then how do you turn victory into policy
changes? And I think that it's fair to say that you worked. It
was a much bigger mountain than we thought it would be to try to get
to be a majority, and so we lost in eighty eighty two, eighty
four, eighty six, eighty eight, ninety ninety two, and then we
won in ninety four, and we won big. We had fifty four seat
pickup, and we had a policy in the contract with America which included things
like balancing the budget, welfare reform, and the result was that we were
able at that point to drive the agenda in Washington in a way that very
few Congresses have. Bill Clinton was faced with a choice. He could have
defended liberalism, in which case he would have been defeated in ninety six,
or he could decide to accept that the American people wanted real change and he
would probably get reelected. And they had a big fight in the White House
about June of ninety five, and his staff all said, you know,
you've got to defend liberalism, and Clinton said, if I do that,
I'll get beat And he'd lost in nineteen eighty in the youngest governor in the
country in nineteen seventy eight, and losing was really painful, and she said,
I'm not going to lose. I want to find a way to work.
So he came to Congress and the say, the Union said, the
era of big government is over astounding thing. An astounding thing. By the
way, nude, I just to set this up a little bit. I'm
the one man here aside from you, who served during the eighties and for
who I just want everybody who's listening, many of whom will have no memory
of nineteen ninety four, to recall or to understand that for four decades,
it had been four decades since Republicans achieved a majority in the House of Representatives.
When I went to college, it was totally standard to talk about the
presidency as tilting toward Republicans, but as Congress as the natural home of the
Democratic part. That was what we were taught. That was a standard political
science through the seventies and eighties. And then along comes Newt king Rich and
in nineteen ninety four, and it really did feel. I can remember being
at an election election night party in nineteen ninety four and our jaws just dropped.
And then of course by the end of the evening we were all just
delirious and pretty nearly drunk on champagne. It was just even the optimists among
us, We're not expecting that victory. So what you're writing about was one
of the great moments in all of American political history. I want people to
understand that. And I want to ask a question of you. Oh excuse
me, No, let's get to You talked about change in Clinton, Bill
Clinton's welfare reform, which is the way it comes down to us now,
Bill Clinton's welfare reform. Correct me on this, but as I recall,
you sent that reform to his desk three times before he finally signed it.
Is that not correct. Yeah. The first two times we included medicaid and
he wouldn't sign it. So we reformed every aspect of welfare except medicaid,
and he signed it. He did not want to run for reelection having vetoed
welfare reform, and I frankly thought the Democratic Party would explode when we voted
on the House floor, even after Clinton had said publicly he would sign the
bill. The Democrats split ninety eight in favor, ninety eight against ninety eight
who were against, were very bitter and very angry. So I wonder,
Peter, you just mentioned the history of Democrats controlling the House and then the
shift that nineteen ninety four broad Since nineteen ninety four, Republicans have done pretty
well at the congressional level. They've controlled the House for the vast majority of
that time, they've controlled the Senate for a narrow majority of that time,
and yet they've struggled to win the presidency, which was not the case for
Republicans between nineteen sixty eight and nineteen ninety two. I wonder, why do
you think that is? Why do you think that outside of a desire for
change in nineteen ninety four, outside of the contract with America. Outside of
a reaction to Bill Clinton's first two years, Republicans have struggled to win the
White House but have proven pretty good at keeping Congress well. I think,
first of all, there's a certain amount of inertia that once you win these
seats, it's a lot easier to keep them than are worse to win them.
I think second, generally speaking, the Republican Party is pretty popular outside
the biggest cities and is capable of being very competitive. And the way congressional
districts are divided up, you can you know, Wisconsin is a good example.
Democrats carry Madison, Wisconsin Dane County by such a huge margin that that
plus Milwaukee makes them competitive statewide. Now in a senatorial race or in a
presidential election, that's a big deal. But that means that in the entire
rest of the state, Democrats are the net disadvantage. So in every single
congressional district outside of Madison, in Milwaukee, Republicans have a huge advantage,
and in the Milwaukee suburbs, Republicans have an advantage. And that this is
true almost everywhere in the country. Where it gets really hard is when you
have big machines Chicago, New York, California, and the big machines have
so much muscle, mostly labor unions but also teachers' union, public compltee teachers
unions, and trial lawyers, the share amount of money they represent and that
and then, of course, frankly, with the rise of the Internet,
the fact that the Silicon Valley billionaires are all in the shadow of San Francisco
has a huge long term impact because they are generally speaking, very liberal,
and they're very rich, and they're quite happy to spend their wealth on power,
and so particularly when you get up to the Senate level, it starts
to matter. But even with all those situations, you've had twelve years of
Republicans and twelve years of Democrats. In the first twenty four years of the
twentieth first century you've had in the White House, you've had pretty consistent Republican
control. And the reason the change was once Republicans had won and we kept
them. Remember we kept the House from nineteen ninety four to two thousand and
six. All of a sudden, even when they lost it temporarily in two
thousand and six, their first reaction was, we can get it back,
yes, right now. When I got elected in seventy eight, there was
not a single Republican leader who thought we could become a majority. Well,
the difference just like entrepreneurship, I mean, the difference in energy drive,
fundraising, candidate recruitment between a party that thinks it can win and a party
that thinks it's hopeless is astonishing. As you were saying, you know,
on election day, I think there may have been five or six members of
the House who thought we'd be a majority. Nobody really, yeah, really,
wow, it was inconceivable. They just they couldn't imagine it. Yeah.
Actually, I'm thinking back now. I can remember having you to come
to lunch at the White House mess This is in nineteen eight, this is
during Ronald Dragan, and we all looked at each other afterwards and said,
well, you know, God bless him, but that guy's nuts, can't
what So even in the middle of the Reagan White House after lunch with you,
we all looked at you, at each other and thought, I don't
know, here's a question I'm going to give sort of a big question.
Just let you take it. Why don't we do two questions really, but
they go if they fit together. I think, why don't Republicans do well
in cities. Why is that in Texas? Before you came on, I
was just singing the praises of Texas. I have a son who's moved there
and just loves it. But Texas, even Texas, makes me a little
nervous. You look at the six biggest cities in Texas, and only one,
Fort Worth, I think, still has a Republican mayor. But not
San Antonio, not Houston, not Dallas, not Austin. That's the first
question. The second question is this, how do political cultures develop and sustain
themselves. As recently as eighty eight, George hw Bush was able to carry
California. California is now a one party state New York Reagan carried New York
in eighty four. New York is now a one party Democratic state. On
the other hand, we have Ohio moving in the Republican column. Texas,
of course, used to be Democratic and is now Republican under Rond Santis Jeb
Bush rohnds Santis. Florida has become for the first time just recently, we
have Republicans out numbering Democrats in Florida. We have something that I don't think
obtain. It didn't obtain for sure. In the eighties the whole country seemed
competitive in those days, and right through the nineties it was beginning. How
does this happen that states sort themselves out and you get an establishment, a
one party establishment that's dominant in California, all of New England, really New
Jersey, and yet the Republican Party manages to remain competitive and to persuade people
and to build its base in Ohio, Florida, Texas. How do these
things happen? Well, I think they're a little bit different, depends on
what you're talking about. Tammany Hall was the model machine in New York City,
and Tammany Hall was real And for most of New York history it's been
upstate against the city. As the city grew, upstate didn't grow. In
fact, upstate in many ways is closer to Mississippi and income than it is
to the city. And the policies adopted in Albany are policies which rely on
high cost, high unionization, big bureaucracy, and actually block upstate New York
from the kind of growth it could have under other circumstances. So you have
a couple, you have an alliance that's very odd. You have public employee
unions who are basically allied with trial lawyers. They're basically allied with the academic
world, and they together create an environment and then you have an ethnic machinery,
at least in the Black community. It's really not evolved among Asian Americans
or among Latinos, but in the Black community almost everywhere, the dominant political
classes Democrats, and they have a huge investment in staying unified because it keeps
their powerbase. So for them, it's literally a matter of life and death.
If all of a sudden the Black community starts to be genuinely competitive,
many of the black politicians will find themselves out of work. And so they
have a huge vested interest in creating a mindset that says, you can't even
think about being Republican. And when you get below about twenty or twenty five
percent support, the social pressures are just too great to fight and find I'm
going to be one. And this is, by the way, in terms
of the potential for indicting Trump in DC, a real challenge because the district
Columbia Trump got five percent of the vote. You would be taking him to
trial in a place where the jury pool is nineteen to one opposed to him.
I mean, hardly trial by his peers, and I think once you
get that kind of base, it takes enormous effort to try to change it.
We were very lucky when I came to Georgia. Georgia was overwhelmingly a
democratic state. It was a segregated state, it was a machine state.
They had the rules so that the rural parts of the state could dominate.
And gradually there was a tide of history, which you mean when I was
very young, I was aggressive of an entrepreneurial, But if the tide of
history hadn't been with me, we still wouldn't have broken through. But you
both had the rise of a modern republican party as people moved in from from
the north. You had the rise of younger people who were disgusted by the
corruption. You had the rise of people who just thought that segregation was wrong
and they had to be changed. Then and gradually things came together. At
the same time, you had a number of former Democrats who watched the National
Democratic Party become more and more and more liberal, and so they peeled off
because they couldn't stand the National Democratic Party. All those things came together and
a younger generation which I was then was able to ride sort of a rising
tide, if you will, there was lifting Republican boats. Well, we
haven't figured out yet, and it's it's I agree with you. I think
it's worth a much bigger effort because part of what happens is where we were
when I became a freshman. If you don't think you can ever be a
majority, you don't make any big investment and trying to become a majority.
It's Bob Michaels and John Rhodes. You make an investment and being a nice
guy, right, and you figure out you'll get crumbs off the Democratic table,
so don't anger them, right, And in that context, nobody makes
an investment to figure out in a place like Baltimore, for example, where
the city schools are so terrible and so destructive, and one of the things
we're trying to do right now. We have a program called the America's New
Majority Project, which people can see at America's New Majority Project dot com.
We've been doing polling since twenty eighteen, and I'm trying to raise the money
now to be able to take one place Baltimore City and understand how people deal
with the reality that there are twenty one schools in which not a single student
can do math, not one two thousand students. But there's no rebellion,
there's no sense of, you know, we've got to change this. And
so I want to understand the pathology that leads people to design that the failure
is an inevitable future, and their job is to learn to live their life
accommodating failure. If Tim Scott, African American senator from South Carolina, and
I've heard for years what a what a nice guy he is, how he
connects with audiences, and now now that he's running for president, I've watched
a couple of videos he connects. If he is on the ticket, does
it change anything? We don't know it. Certainly the margin change is something
we're seeing. For example, a significant number somewhere around twenty percent of African
American males who now favored Trump. Say that again, that's I can't believe
in years we're seeing we're seeing poles were about twenty percent of African American males
or Trump. And is there an age dispersion? Is it the younger men?
I don't know. I've not seen the crowd that we're trying to work
the cross cabs now of the One of the things we're doing at America's New
Majority is we're doing two thousand likely voter sample every two weeks now, so
we'll have one hundred thousand in the database by the end of the year.
But we think it's partly because they want a strong, assertive, aggressive figure
and it's impossible to identify, for example, Joe Biden using that language.
We think it's partially because they are against the current system, and so anybody
who's getting attacked by the current system, they have an instinctive identity with A
friend of mine was writing in a cab a week ago and with an older
African American man who's a cab driver, who said to him, if they're
attacking Trump this much, they must really be afraid of him. And if
they're really afraid of him, I'm for him. So there are things out
there. But I want to find out if you get a focus group together
and you are dealing with the kind of data we have about Baltimore City,
how how do they internally think it through under Is there some way that you
can offer them hope so they decide it's worth replacing the machine, because part
of the problem is in Baltimore, for example, the teachers union has I
think the budget of the school systems of a billion, three hundred million dollars
unbelievable. So even though they're failing, look how many people they're paying.
How do they live with themselves? Well, I guess that's a subset of
the questions you want to address. That's the kind of stuff I want to
I want to understand the pathology. So I wonder why Congress seems much less
effective than it was thirty years ago. I am a big fan of legislatures,
and I think our executive branch has spiraled into an almost monarchical position,
both in our constitutional order and in our culture. Obviously, in the nineties,
Congress was running pretty well. It doesn't mean you achieved everything you wanted
to, but the legislative function was performed by Congress, and the president had
to respond to the change in congressional control that really did obtain, mostly through
the George W. Bush's as well, And yet under Obama, under Trump,
and now under Joe Biden, Congress seems weak. The people in Congress
often send press releases or letters to the president saying please do this or that,
which is really a congressional function, and we don't see a great deal
of legislation coming out unless it's pushed through on party lines under reconciliation rules at
the eleventh hour. Why do you think that is well, First of all,
I think that Congress is always hard. I mean, the founding fathers
were headed dilemma. They had to have a government strong enough that it could
survive against the British and the French and the Spanish who might meddle in their
lives. But they wanted a government that didn't threaten them here at home,
and so they tried to write a constitution which was balancing power, and they
very consciously created friction in the system, and they wanted the friction in the
system. Generally speaking, you had a challenge because the presidency, I think,
has had its power expanded by the way the media has operated over the
last sixty or seventy years, and that a single centralized personality becomes dramatically more
dominant. Prior to the rise of radio and television, presidents weren't nearly intimately
a part of our lives. So you have a sort of disadvantage. But
I would also say it takes a tremendous amount of energy to understand what the
American people want and to then focus on getting that in a way which is
team building and which is prepared to negotiate head to head with a president.
I mean, it took us thirty five days working directly between Clutton and me
to get to the only four balanced budgets in your lifetime. Well, there
are very few people who can sustain that. I mean, it's just you
have to have a team behind you. The team has to know what you're
doing. It took us years to build that. That's part of the point
of the book, March the Majority. You don't get these things overnight.
If you really want to achieve large change. You know, Reagan proposes welfare
reform in nineteen sixty five running for governor. We passed it in nineteen ninety
six, thirty one years later, and so you have to really think about
I've always told people you might as well go for a very big change,
because a very small change takes about as much energy, takes about as much
time. So you might as well get you get something big done. If
you're going to spend, if you're going to spend that much time and energy,
Newt Are you optimistic right now? I mean you must be. You're
putting You're putting out this book on the notion that there are lessons to be
learned. Well, hold on, let me ask this question this way.
You and I remember the seventies a low, miserable decade. When I see
kids or Henry Kissinger gave an interview on his hundred's birthday in the Wall Street
Journal, and he said, there's no pride left, there's no sense of
unity, there's no sense of purpose. I'm paraphrasing, but these are the
words. He used, words like that, and I thought, oh my
goodness, that's the way people talked about the country in the seventies, the
humiliation of Watergate and the loss in Vietnam, the economics deg and the country
turned around. Are we capable of that kind of revive? This is addressed
Trump if you want to leave him out, if you want to The question
is this the American people being what they are today, are institutions being what
they are today? Are we capable of another renewal? Well, let me
start with where you were, which is, if you read the AA Whites
making the president of nineteen sixty eight. In nineteen seventy two, you are
recentered on how bad it was. I mean, the police riots in Chicago,
you know, the Democratic National Convention operating in the middle of the police
using gas on the crowds. You have twenty five hundred bombings in the late
sixties. You have I'd forgotten that. That's right. Whole neighborhoods in Philadelphia
got burned down because of bombs. As I recall, you you have the
Black Panthers openly running an assassination campaign and police, you have a million people
surrounding the Pentagon. I mean, it's easy to forget. We were torn
apart in the early and one of the great achievements of Nixon is to maneuver
in such a way that he diffuses the anger. He rallies the rest of
America against the left. And then McGovern comes along, and in the seventy
two book, one of the most profound sentences THEO Whites Rights, George McGovern
cannot negotiate with the left because the ideology has become a theology. Right,
this is seventy two, and the theology went to university campuses and metastasized into
the cancer we're now dealing with. So in that sense, this is just
the ongoing struggle in American life. There's a great story which you'll remember,
which explains my optimism in a way. When Reagan got elected, about ninety
of us in the Republican side were invited down one day to have coffee and
stand around in one of the big rooms in the White House, and Reagan
came in. There was those yet to know you kind of moment, and
he said, you know, he said, this, want to tell you
a story. He said there was a parents had twins. The one twin
was totally positive, the other twin was totally negative. And they said,
we've got to train these two boys. You just can't have one totally optimistic
and one totally pessimistic. So at Christmas, they arrange for the pessimist to
get this magnificent room full of toys, and they arrange for the optimist to
get a room that was filled with horsemen or and they wait about an hour
and they go into the pessimist room and he's sitting in the middle of all
of these toys crying, and they go, what, what, why are
you crying? He said, well, this toy is going to break.
This toy is going to get stolen, and he goes around. What's just
miserable. They look at it a shrug. They walk next door and the
Optimist is running around the room throwing horsemen or in the air going we and
the parents go, what are you doing? He said, I'm looking for
the pony. Yes, and Reagan said, as a favorite joke, it's
right. He said, I want to warn you, I'm the guy looking
for the pony. Well, I think that sort of captures the American spirit
that you know, times are a little difficult. We have a president who's
an idiot and also corrupt. We have a vice president who makes the president
look like a genius. You know, we have a hard left which wants
to use the power of government to course the rest of us into weird things.
And guess what, when it's all over, we will re emerge as
Americans. We will basically repudiate all that stuff, and we will go on
to a new generation. When Elon Musk finally finishes improving his starships so that
all thirty six engines work, which will probably take five or six launches,
and they'll keep blowing up, and he'll keep trying, we will reduce the
cost of getting into space by such a huge number that Marian children will in
fact have an even money chance of going to the Moon or Mars or an
asteroid. That's the future, that's America. I have every reason to believe.
I think this is in some ways, if you combine foreign danger and
the left at home, this is the most dangerous period since Washington crossed the
Delaware and Christmas Eve. Because the foreign dangers are real. We could lose
to the Chinese and we should not kill ourselves. And we could have idiots
here at home who are totally out of touch with reality but who gained lovers
of power and due to the whole country what they've done to Chicago or to
San Francisco. But I don't think that will happen. I'm willing to gamble
that the American spirit is larger than tyrannies, and it's larger than people who
are nuts. The last question, mister Gingridge, and you've put so much
on the table there that I want to discuss that we would love to between
space, which is one of my absolute loves. And I agree with you.
Thank to Musk and once he gets that thing off the pad, without
blown it up. We're going to be great. The perils of Chinese and
the continued ability of America to project power is crucial and critical. The state
of our cities is perilous and needs attention. And the question is reaganesque qualities
that you just described, that American character, that drawing a storytelling, that
sense of easy optimism, that's in our DNA. We want to see it
again. We want to see it in a politician. But today you wrote
on your side Gingridge three sixty, you have a piece about how the culture
is being attempted to be transformed by an elite top down that is teaching American
telling them things that we do not believe, things that we do not want,
but that they insist because it is their religion that we should have and
that we should want. And you tie this to the indictments of Trump.
Now, I'll let people go to the site at Ingridge three sixty and see
exactly how you weave them together. But I want to end with this because
it does bring us to the next election. You said that the acts,
the indictments are an active cultural war against the man the elite minority fears most.
Why is it because of his persuasive power or of his loud, outsized
character, because he could win and do things which some of us are doubtful
for. It seems that they actually want him because the having trouble the election
pretty much guarantees a Democratic victory, and it means that it relegates all the
Republicans to magaheads who can be dismissed by the middle So why does the elite
minority fear him? And we'll leave it at that for our last question,
Well, because they watched him for four years. Behave is the most I
think, the most effective anti left politician in my lifetime, even more than
Reagan was brilliant in defeating the Soviet Empire and relaunching the American economy and renewing
belief in American culture. He had an enormous positive impact. But Reagan's natural
instinct was not to tear apart the left, and the result was after he
departed, the left reasserted itself, starting with forcing George HW. Bush to
give up on taxes and getting worse every day. I think what you have
with Trump is a queen's businessman who figured out that no matter how richie the
Manhattan elites would never accept him, who understood from dealing with Paige sex and
that the media would always savage him, and who decided that he would apply
common sense. And the problem with the Left is if you apply common sense,
they collapse because everything they do is based on a fantasy. I tell
people the left is made up of people who saw The Lion King and thought
it was a documentary, and they believe that the lions and zebras dance and
sing together. And we try to convince them the real world lion zebras and
they say no, no, that can't be true. And then they release
murderers back on the street and carjackers and rapists. They deal with foreign countries
from a position of weakness, and they refuse to require our children to learn
enough to know anything. And so I think that Trump comes along and says
that's all stupid. Well, that's horrifying because it actually cuts through all of
the can It comes through everything you learn it Harvard and Princeton and Yale and
Stanford, and it gets you back to common sense, and common sense destroys
the Left. The book is March to the Majority. It's available now.
You can order your copy on his website. It reduced a price today if
you had there. Gang Ridge three sixty dot com new gang Ridge, thank
you for joining us on the show, and they'd love to have you back
for another six or seven hours of conversation because I think there's a few topics
we could probably have some fun with. Take care that nude. It's a
pleasure to have you at longer than SoundBite length. Well, it's fun.
I enjoyed it. Take care yep, Space I forgot news to space guy,
and that is cool because we need to get out there. And I
know, Peter, this is not one of your things, but the idea
of I keep telling you, James, as long as Elon is paying for
it, I wanted in the private sector. I don't like NASA. Oh
that's fine, you're allowed to do that. I think that's fine. That's
great. Well, just think because of what what was it the election of
the the Republican majority in ninety four that killed Hillory care Okay, well they
got killed before that. That's one of the reasons that they were elected.
Was people right, so angry at the attempt I want to you know,
when it was saying at the beginning that you know, the election of the
ninety four Congress meant that he had to abandon liberalism. I thought, well,
then his second term is all on you, buddy. Thanks an awful
lot. Just imagine what it'd be like negotiating healthcare if Hillory Care had gone
in. Yes, health insurance is bad government, the private say it's broken.
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Crowdhealth for sponsoring Ricochet podcast. I gotta get out here in just a second
here, but I have to tell you as rob Wood, meetups are coming
up. That's right, meetups. That's where the people from the site get
together in the real world. Can you believe it? What other website does
that most of the website, you wouldn't hang around it. These people,
you wouldn't want to even meet him, but we love to do it.
On the docket coming up Winston Salem in Portland, Oregon in mid July.
The annual German Fest meet up in Milwaukee will be from September twenty eight to
thirtieth. And there's one coming up in Cookeville, Tennessee, which of course
is named after Charles C. W. Cook. I believe they're going to
give them the keys, you know, the key to the city and the
whole rest of it. That's coming up for labor. They go to ricochet
dot com. Check on the sidebar for the member of meetups, and if
you don't see when in a neighborhood, hey joined Ricochet and starts your own
in the members will come to you and they'll probably bring hot dish. If
it's in Minnesota. On the way out, then, gentlemen, it's going
to be Father's Day. Congratulations, congratulations to all and everybody here is still
married to the mothers of their children. There's something there, isn't it.
How do we manage to do that? Charlie's case, it's only been let's
not let's not get carried away here. He's still in single digits, isn't
he? Yeah? Nine nine years? Oh oh okay, Oh that's impressive.
You've made it through the seven year itch. But it's just like she's
made it through the seven year Exactly exactly did that concept exist or was it
outside of the movie before we had it? Or was it popularized by it
as such? Is that a nineteen fifties thing where people are or men are
actually encouraged to cast their eyes about in a lecherous fashion because it's been seven
years? Seven years is nothing, it seems Yes, it seems nothing to
me that seven? Yeah, how old are your kids? Charlie? Five
and seven? Seven? Would have been a real problem? Yes, wow,
So what are you expecting for Father's Day? All? I wrote a
column about this, and the Father's Day that I remember the most, for
no particular reason, was absolutely banal. But it consisted of my daughter and
I going to a movie and then going out to a restaurant. And the
restaurant was seemingly actually kind of purgatory. It was filled with old people,
It smelled strange, It smelled of mothballs and liniments. Nobody moved very much.
There was no conversation. There's a chain restaurant known for its vivacious atmosphere
and it's great bancaches, and we went to one that we hadn't known before,
gone to before, and it was just off in every way, and
it felt strange. This is a place where they bring the coffee pot and
they set it down and they don't take it away except to refill it.
Bottomless coffee, infinite coffee. But here the waitress yanked the pot away as
soon as she poured. Something was wrong about this place. And we left.
We slunk out when backs were turned, and went to another in this
chain and had a happy day. And it was a ordinary day. And
I remember it just because I loved my daughter and I love the time that
we spent together and we'd seen it Picks our movie and cried and a long
time ago, too long ago, but I know that if I asked her
tomorrow in a text, do you remember that time we went to the movie
and then we went to the Perkins that was weird? She'd say yeah,
because she remembered too. And so things like that, the father's days where
you can actually remember what your child remember because you know they remember too.
So what you're saying is that we should all hope for at least one rotten
Father's Day, because that was more memorable than the good time. It wasn't
rotten at all. It wasn't rotten at all. I always and I don't
know why it came to mind, except that the usual parade of ties and
obligatory things and barbecue tools and the rest of it, and all the other
cliches is not what fathers want. What fathers want if they're smart. I
have already received from middle son, who's in medical school in the middle of
the country, a pound of coffee beans that have been soaked in whiskey.
Now, on the one hand, I'm moved because he's combining coffee and whiskey,
which would be, I suppose, my two favorite beverages. On the
other hand, I am slightly dreading having to drink some of this stuff and
tell him how how wonderful it is. That's that's the way my father's day
is shaping up. Yeah, yeah, you have said it to me.
I'll write you a glowing review that you can you can use in five stars.
In my stead, there shouldn't be And I hate to say this,
but there's no such thing as whiskey flavored coffee. Coffee is a flavor in
and of itself, so coffee should not be flavored. If you're drinking flavored
coffee, please stop drinking coffee and wasting it for the rest of us and
choking coffee flavored whiskey, which you know, and whiskey is a flavor that
ought not to be adulterated, either either with cinnamon or hunting or any of
these things. Whiskey is whiskey with an E or not. It is not
to be It is not to be tampered or diluted or well diluted. Yes,
with the ice that opens it up and lets it breathe. Speaking of
letting it breathe, we're going to let this show decant while Charlie DeCamps because
he's got to go. Peter has to go. I have to do some
stuff. But it's been a lot of fun spending time with you folks.
As ever. Go to Ricochet right now, Oh no, stop, no,
what am I thinking? Go to Apple Tunes give us those five stars.
How are we going to live without? How we would we do a
podcast without mentioning it? And go to crowd Health as well, because supporting
them helps us. Charles, thanks for sitting in for Rob today, Peter.
Always a pleasure, and we'll see everybody in the comments. Add Ricochet
four point zero. Happy Father's Day, boys, Happy Father's Day. Ricochet.
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