We can make it if we try it. Yes, indeed, ask not
what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your
country. Mister Garbitschaw, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast.
I'm James Lylac. Usually I'd be talking to Rob Long and Peter Robinson,
but they're out about in the world, and so we've got Charles C.
W. Cook. Let's eversos a podcast the dragging about our turning road.
We might have no clue about the power of women, but they found out
when reproductive freedom was on the ballot. We won in twenty twenty two and
twenty twenty, and we went again in twenty twenty four. Well, thank
you very much. They call it Super Tuesday for a reason. This is
a big one. Welcome everybody eats The Ricochet Podcast, number six hundred and
eighty two. If you're making hashmarks in the wall. I'm j Alex in
Minneapolis. Peter Robinson and Rob Long, the founders as we call them when
we want to speak of them in hushed august tones, aren't here. But
who is Charlie Cook? And couldn't be happier to see him? Charles,
how are you? I'm good. How are you? Before we began,
he was describing the meaning behind his cap, And part of American identity,
of course, is to proclaim your interests, your solidarities, your affiliations with
your baseball cap. Yeah, and he's wearing one from a summits one Utah
summit. And I asked, jokingly in my way whether or not there was
some deep bifurcation in Utah that they're attempting to weld together by having a one
Utah, because you don't sort of think of states as being, you know,
but of course they are. And what may look solid from the outside
in a polity actually has its own internal fractures. So before we get to
the pressing news of the day, Charles tell us about the actual bifurcation of
Utah that it's not one monolithic culture but two. Well, or at least
that's what they're trying to avoid, because there's the southern part of the state
that is more rural, and then you've got Salt Lake City, which is
increasingly urban and young and cool and sprawly. And I don't think this is
true at all of their current governor, Spencer Cox, but I think historically
there has been a great deal of focus on Salt Lake City, perhaps at
the expense of the rest of the states. So they have the one Utah
Summit, which I spoke at last year to address this and remind them and
say hey, we're here, and seems to have been a huge success.
It's a great state. I haven't been to Utah. You really should go.
It's incredibly beautiful. It is. I'm glad you helped stitch it together.
But it's like that with all states. The big city has its own
little culture in the outstate, you know, or Greater Minnesota. In this
case, I see at the imposition of mores and ideas from the godless Cosmopolitans
and the metro centers everywhere. But of course when attacked from the outside,
then then we're all one state. We all bind together. It's like the
Dakota's. People from North Dakota will hate people from South Dakota, and vice
versa. But if anybody attacks the Dakota's as an idea, we are brother's
soul and blood and the rest of it. Well, so it is with
the nation wanted to act. Of course we are unified when we're not.
We didther with all sorts of meaningless internal contradictions and arguments and the rest of
it, all of which was on magnificent display, I'm sure yesterday in the
State of the Union speech, which I completely forgot to watch, thereby relinquishing
any ability whatsoever to speak about it here, And probably because I hate the
speech entirely in its concept and its execution. I wish it was a letter
that was delivered to Congress as it used to be. I can't stand the
imperial presidency trapping of it. I can't stand the mendacious and miniatricious political class
lapping to the bolting their feet and clapping of the sclerotics, sedescent people who
seem to run the government, all of it, the laundry list of things
that are wrong and the equally long laundry list of expensive ways in which they'll
be rectified. Like that, it is meaningless. It is irritating. But
from what I understand, Biden's performance is being described as fiery. Everyone's using
that word fiery, which makes you think, given the number of speeches we've
seen lately of him, where he is staring into the distance and cannot find
where he is and mumbles and seems like an old man who got off at
the wrong bus stop and is waiting for something to come along. It makes
you wonder whether they went back to the National Archives and figured out what kind
of B twelve cocktail they jabbed in the butt of a Kennedy before his back
pain medication made him too goofy when he had to go out and give a
speech, So he would, you know from the clips said, I've seen
all have what he is having. Charlie, what was your impression. Well,
it seems to me that most of the praise of Biden, and other
than that that's been issued by hardcore Democratic partisans is congratulations, mister president,
you didn't die up there, right. That's facetious, but that is the
tone of it. Well, people said, people said that he could what
not get through a one and a half hour speech because that was actually a
worry. Eighty six percent of Americans think he's too old. Sixty five percent
of Americans think he's going to die in a second term or at least have
to step down. And he managed to give a speech, and he managed
to do so while angry. So congratulations, you've passed that test. I
mean, James, I hated it. You and I are going to agree
on this. So it's better when people disagree. But you and I are
going to agree because I think, like me, you don't think the State
of the Union in its current form should exist. No, it's not great
within a republic. I say this when there's a Republican president as well as
a Democratic president. I'll come on to my specific objections with Biden in a
moment, but this should not exist in its current form. It is a
telling historical fact that the man who got rid off the State of the Union
as an address as a spectacle was Thomas Jefferson, and the man who brought
it back as an address and as a spectacle was Woodrow Wilson. And I
think that tells you they really need to know. Yep, it shouldn't be
as it is. It smacks of the speech from the Throne. I don't
like the image of the head of Article two going into the lower House of
Article one and lambasting them, demanding things, telling them off, fighting with
them what you were. So I was primed to dislike this, as I
always am from the beginning, but this speech was particularly grotesque in that it
was a campaign event. I don't begrudge campaign events that's great, have as
many as you want. Let's all argue our differences out. I don't like
this modern aversion to rough political debate. Let's do it. We all disagree,
Let's argue with each other. But maybe not at the State of the
Union. When you're the president of the United States and you've been asked to
deliver and address articulating how a country is now, you can never depoliticize that.
But Biden last night went so far beyond it. It was us for
them, He shouted at Republicans at the beginning, seems to compare Trump to
Hitler. Ugh, this is not becoming of a republic. No, we're
being too I mean, one of the things the theme of this year is
that democracy itself is on the table. This is our last shot. This
is it, and if we don't make the proper decision, every single one
of the institutions and traditions that we have will evaporate in the face of the
withering fire of Donald Trump. Which is nonsense, but there we are.
It seems to be to continue. I mean, we've always we've always heard
this is the most important election of our lives, this is the most consequential
election of our types. I'm used to that, but for it to be
an actual existential hinge, it seems to be a bit much. And I
don't know if Biden believes it. I don't think that Biden believes anything.
Watching this man for thirty years, forty years, and everybody knows that he
is an empty self regarding mendacious to use that word again, politician from Delaware,
who is way over his head. Basically when you look at the intellectual
capacity the man, so I know if he gets up there and clutches his
fists and starts warning us about these things. So the speech writers are the
ones who ought to be taken to task. And apparently we're being told this
is a quote I'm given here. This is that's floating around. The issue
facing our nation isn't how old we are. There's a way to sort of
dodge that. It's how old are our ideas? Hate, anger, revenge,
and retribution are the oldest ideas. But you can't lead America with ancient
ideas. It's rhetorically incoherent, but actually ancient ideas are part of the American
DNA, and I would like to think that we would keep those. But
we're talking about speech writer class that is probably enamored of all the year zero
ideas where we're going to start fresh, because now today us here the inheritors
of everything. I'd no better than anybody else about how to adjust, manage,
massage human nature to produce the perfect utopia. So yeah, I mean
that's totally backwards, isn't it. In that now, of course, you
don't want hate and revenge to be your guiding stars. But the great insight
of the founders, and what separates them from utopian revolutionaries such as we saw
in the French Revolution, or in the Soviet Union or in communist China,
is that they did not believe that you could create new Soviet matt They didn't
think that man was perfectible. They thought man was flawed. Now some of
them, most of them, or they're not all, believed that that was
because man was fallen in a religious sense. The others just thought that people
didn't change, that human nature was a constant, That the political questions that
animated the Romans were broadly the same as those that an mated the American colonists,
and the Constitution that they wrote reflects that. So it seeks to harness
all of those ancient vices, ambition being one of them. Not to get
rid of it, not to channel it through the right people, but to
harness it and set various branches off against others. Anger and revenge will always
be with us. That's why we have a constitution. If we didn't exhibit
those emotions and traits throughout history, we wouldn't need a constitution. Madison says.
It's very clearly if we were angels, we wouldn't need a government.
So to say, well, we can't be governed by ancient ideas, it's
comprehensible to me. We are governed by a document that acknowledges the existence and
the permanency of ancient ideas, but also that taps into other ancient ideas like
law and love and comity and not as it's used today, but the general
welfare. You know, these are ideas that it's just as old as hey.
That's the whole point again, I respective of your religious belief, there
is no human tradition that doesn't revolve around the interplay between bad ancient nineties and
good ones. You mentioned the French Revolution, which you know, when I
was growing up, it was sort of taught to us that this was like
an echo of our own. Well, we had a revolution and threw off
the king, and then France did too, and it got a little messy,
you know, guillotine and all that stuff, but you know, it
was good that it happened. And it's only later when you go back and
really study the French Revolution you realize what a cluster farg it was. There.
There was one pista I was listening to in the radio the other day
in a podcast that was about the French revolutionary attempt to decimalize the clock because
they looked at the clock with its sixty seconds and sixty minutes and they think
it's not rational enough for the new a right, so they came up with
a clock that had ten hours, and then you know, they just reconfigured
everything and imposed upon people a complet letely different way of telling the time,
which everybody's brains have been wired to understand for their entire lifetimes. It did
not go well, really didn't, and eventually, of course they would come
up with dual clocks, and that eventually, of course, they would abandon
the thing altogether. Another podcast was describing how the Soviets had a problem with
the weekend because you know, they just wasn't right. It didn't the idea
that you would get off on a Sunday had religious overtones. So they started
randomly appropriating or randomly handing out weekend days based on a lottery system, which
meant that your Saturday, your Sunday, maybe on a Tuesday or Friday or
Thursday. And then it all varied. That you would come to work and
you would get a slip, and the slip would be put up against the
chart and there's your weekend day. Well, the problem was that nobody could
take time off for the dentists, because your dentist was no longer at work.
He was on his work week and at the doc, go or whatever.
So nobody could coordinate any Families couldn't coordinate anything. And it took decades
and they brought back the concept of the weekend for a few, and eventually
they brought back the weekend for everybody. You look at the blank slaters,
and in every attempt they try to rewrite human nature, human history and completely
go against the grain of what a society has become. And eventually the gods
of the copybook return and the lessons are learned, And it's a question whether
or not we're going to relearn them in our roule or in a condition that
lets us realize that those ancient ideals have been in place and informed us for
a very good reason. And for Joe Biden at his age to be the
advocate of your zero thinking is just shows you the wind spuck that that fellow
is. And like I say, I really like to know who wrote the
speech and their perspective on the ancients. Do you think they might have one,
Charles, I don't think they would be great fans of the ancients.
That's my suspicion here. People often ask who's running the White House? And
this often ranges into conspiracy theories. Is Barack Obama still the president? Now
he's not. He's running the White House? The progressive blob, right,
the progressive blob is running the White House. All of the cornucopia of interest
groups and university presidents and political activists that you see in Washington, DC and
around is running the White House. And that's why the White House has made
some really baffling decisions. It's why the White House decided to open the border
when it knew not only that the public doesn't like that, but that the
most likely opponent Biden would be facing in twenty twenty four would be Donald Trump,
whose thing is the border. It's why the Biden administration decided to engage
in what has to be the single moment counterproductive and regressive policy I have seen
in my time in the United States, making people who didn't go to university
pay the tuition of those who did. Because he's surrounded by people who care
about that. They're the people who went that. They're the ones who have
the jobs that didn't pay them as they thought they would, and who have
a lot of dat people to be fair, to be fair, though,
I mean you mentioned cornycopia. Isn't the cornycopia, the the mythical thing which
which produces infinite amount of fruit that it's a you know, it's a it's
an intermediary object of the gods when you have a cornucopia from which pours a
bounty in unstinting quantities, which is how they actually regard the federal government.
Because the tax money isn't coming from the they don't think at all the people,
you know, the janitors who work in my building are being taxed to
pay for the ridiculously useless degrees of people who went to college. No,
the money is just generated mm. It just comes out of the printing press,
and nobody has to be taxed, except of course, when you have
to have tax for social policy. Now, one of the reasons that I
like the flat rate tax is that it's fair, it's equitable to use their
terms, and that it applies to everybody. And it's not one of those
laws that's rejiggered according to how much money you make, which seems to me
like unequal treatment. But I gather that this has all been hashed out in
the courts and it's a moot point. But if you have a Biden Esque
proposal, as we had last night, to tax the wealthy more in the
corporations to make them do what pay their fair share, as ever, to
pay their fair share, this is not to generate income in order to pay
for it's simply to achieve a particular social end. So the idea of using
the tax code on individuals and institutions and country companies whatsoever, in order to
achieve a social purpose that makes them feel good ought to make them think that
they are contorting and distorting what the government actually should be. Of course,
were what sixty seventy years past that point. Well, this is a problem
with the sixteenth Amendment. If I may explain, he people who passed the
Sixteenth Amendment seem largely not to have anticipated that it served us a crowbar and
opened up the federal government in a way that was not supposed to happen.
But that is what's happened. The federal government is a charter of enumerated powers.
That means that the federal government can only do what it is explicitly allowed
to do. Now that has been eroded over time, particularly in the New
Deal, but that was the idea. James Madison made this very clear.
He enforced that rule while he was president, famously in eighteen fourteen, and
he wrote about it in the Federalist Papers. He opposed the Bill of Rights
because of it, because he said, why do we need a Bill of
rights when the government can only do what we've allowed it to do, and
we haven't allowed it to do any of that when you have a long period
in American history in which the enumerated power stopped and remains largely in force.
The Sixteenth Amendments then passed, of course, the enumerated powers doctrine is still
there, which means the federal government can only do a few things. But
clever people start to notice, well, if we can't directly do this,
we can use tax policy to affect the same end. And you start to
see the tax code building and building and building as it now is. And
this is now what we do with our tax code. It's not just that
we don't want if the Democrats, that is, the rich, to have
money. Barack Obama famously said that in two thousand and eight he was asked,
if you raise the capital gains rate and it brings in less revenue,
is it a good idea, And he said yes, because the people it
will affect have too much money. But it's that we can't tell people what
to do in lots of direct ways federally, so we encourage them financially,
either by sending money to the states and taking it away if they don't do
what we want, or just by giving people tax breaks. And that's how
you get to Obamacare. But in a less controversial although perhaps it should be
way, that's what the mortgage interest deduction is as well. Essentially, they
reward you for buying a house, they reward you for having children. I
mean, we can debate the merits of all of this, but they can't
make you have children, they can't make you by a house. They can't
change your status under the law based on those things. But they can encourage
that behavior by saying, if you want to do this in this we'll let
you keep more of your money. And so much of the resistance to a
flat tax, your preference comes from social architects who have realized, especially with
this Supreme Court, that if we took away that ability to micromanage via the
tax system, the federal government would actually lose an enormous amount of power.
I think that would be great, but to them, this is the worst
thing in the world. Right. You cannot reach to all the society according
to to get them the end that you want. Nless, you have a
quiver of many arrows, a toolbox with many implements in it. And it's
not just the tax code, of course, it's regulations. The other side
of this is that you can get around the enumerated powers by somehow just regulating
things sneakily and something that has the absolute force of law and directly affects the
way people live and spend and the rest of it. But it's a regulation,
so it doesn't count. But this is coming up before these coders soon,
isn't it. It is. This is really one of the biggest issues
facing the United States, this bureaucratic sprawl that has put an enormous amount of
power in the hands of people who were never elected and who aren't accountable to
those who were. And it's been made worse by this case from the nineteen
eighties that's known simply as Chevron Right Chevron, which which makes you think it's
about oil or pollution or something like that. That's an environmental case that so
many of these were, and whichever on held was that if the law is
deemed to be ambiguous by an agency, the courts must defer to the agency's
interpretation unless that interpretation is crazy. And the problem with that, especially in
an era of gridlock, and gridlock's generally a good thing, is that it
has allowed agencies to come in and twist the law to do what they definitely
could not get through Congress. And when you say this, people who love
that administra to power say stability, but actually we're seeing the opposite of stability.
Now that might have been a reasonable argument in I think nineteen eighty four
when the case was decided. But that's not what we've seen, is it,
James. What we've seen is Republicans win and they say this law means
that, and then the Democrats win and they say no, no, no,
no, no, that law means this. And then we get these
dueling mandates, the same text underneath them, and they fight it out every
four years, and then a new guy comes in and then they reverse it
again. And if you are on the end of this ass a business or
a charity or any organization or just an individual, you are screwed because the
little guy is the one who gets trodden on. And the courts, which
would normally be your recourse when you're trodden on, have sort of preemptively given
the game away and said, wow, that's nothing we can do about it.
So the Supreme Court is going to look at this and I think they're
at least going to narrow the doctrine, which will be a really big win
for our stratitutional government a start stop. People will naturally say, well,
what this what you want? That is you want to go back to the
old days with it, where the company polluters could just pollute however they want.
The EPA was absolutely toothless, and you want to look at them in
the face and say, yes, that is exactly what I want. I
want poisoned rivers with fish dead so thick on the top you can walk across.
No, I don't. But what I want is very specific and sensible
things that are spelled out and voted to so people can be held accountable to
them. I've told the parable before of our something, that of the charcoal
matt that affects our family business, and I'm going to tell it again.
There is a spot in North Dakota where the trains stop to be refilled with
diesel by our company. They're coming all the way from the west coast with
goods clattering their way across the plains. They stop in Fargo and we fill
them up and they continue on or disgorge some goods. The spot where they've
been filled up has been a spot where they've been filled up for decades,
a very long time. So I'm thinking perhaps it's not ground in which you
could plant a tulip and expect it to bloom next year, maybe in ten,
but it's probably got a bit of remnant oil soaked into the surface.
It's not clean. And I'm guessing also probably that you don't want to pour
a whole bunch of toxic chemicals on there, even though it's not on top
of an aquifer, because it's just not a good thing to do. We
want to be good stewards at the earth. So when we go to fill
up those those trains, yes, we're careful. You don't want to pull
the hose out and have a dump oil or gas diesel over the place,
because that's wasteful. You're spending money on that. Well, here's what we
have to do though. In order to get the hoses up to the trains,
the guy has to carry them up this steep this hill, and in
the wintertime it's miserable, so pulling this heavy hose up, jamming them in,
and before he can start, he's got to put a big charcoal mat
under it so that if anything does drip from the spout with a nozzle,
the charcoal mat will absorb it. There will not be a jot an atom
of petrochemicals that seeps into this already presumably poisoned soil. If he does not
do this and there is a spill, there is satellite interrogation of the site
going on all the time that can tell whether or not you had a spill,
and you have to report it right then, and if you don't,
there's a fine, and you're probably gonna get a fine anyway. So if
it's twenty frickin' below in North Dakota and the guy who you's just hired,
who's good, but he's probably gonna leave because the jobs are, you know,
labor market's insane. He's probably going to go off to the oil fields
or something like that. If he pulls it out a little too quickly and
some stuff gets down and the satellite sees it, you get dinged. I
was with my brother in law who runs the company. We were sitting at
dinner and he gets boom, he gets a text and there'd been a slip
minute. There's been like a couple of gallons spilled, and he's just he's
just beside himself because it means paperwork, endless paperwork for the next day or
so and having to go back to the authorities and this, that and the
other thing. Okay, take that example of a little bit of regulatory you
know, signing off on it. Well, of course, there should be
a fine if you spill some stuff and then magnify that across absolutely every part
of American industry. And you have the sense of these as I keep calling
them, boat anchors that have been draped around the you know, the vital
spirits, the horses that should be pulling our economy. I'm not making an
argument in favor of pollution. I'm just saying it would be nice if it
was spelled out, voted upon, and perhaps a little less invasive and onerous.
Right, And that's the rule you're describing, that's not in the law.
What makes me crazy about this is that when you say I don't think
that the Environmental Protection Agency should be able to do whatever it wants, people
say exactly what you just said, which is also I suppose you want pollution.
But the next thing they say is, no, we have to be
able to enforce the Clean Air Act in the Endangered Species Act and so,
and you say, sorry, could you say the names of those again?
The Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act. No one I know,
literally no one I know, wants to repeal the Clean Air Act. It's
just that they don't think that it gives the federal government the right to come
into my house and regulate my vacuum cleaner. That's the problem. It's not
that we want dirty air or dirty water. We have that legislation. It's
extremely popular. It was passed on a biopartisan basis. There may be some
little parts of it, people will change here or there. The problem is
when ideologues and radicals take these laws twist them into meaning something that they don't,
and then where's your recourse? And again, the problem with Chevron is
that if you and your example go to the court and say, obviously that's
not what it says in the law, which it sounds if it's not,
then the court says, I don't know. The agency says, so,
well, what is the agency? The agency is an executive branch that is
nominally under the control of the president, should be more so, and it's
not allowed to make law. So I think this is not just a start.
I think this is big. Although I do agree with you there's a
lot more work to do. You mentioned that you don't want the government coming
in into some pretense and regulating your vacuum cleaner, and I'm here to tell
you that that's the sort of of of earth hatred of sort of that concerns
me. I mean, I have a dice and vacuum cleaner. It's battery
operated and therefore sustainable. I plug it into this thing and there's it goes
into a thing in the wall, and the power comes from somewhere. I'm
not sure it's, but probably some nice little windmill that's going outside of town,
or the sun. God blessed the sun, Hail the Sun's soul evictus.
But you know, the battery operator one is holy. Then the corded
one that I have, of course is bad because it goes right into the
wall, and somehow it doesn't have a battery involved, so it doesn't it's
wrong. Batteries, batteries good, plug into it, all bad and if
anybody wants to, you know, is concerned about the fate of the earth.
As Jonathan Schell once gave us the phrase, you would think that the
more sustainable the vacuum cleaner, the better. And since it is better,
it ought to be enforced by regulation. There ought to be first rebates that
nudge you that way, and if there isn't, there ought to be penalties
for not using the proper vacuum cleaner. Because your vacuum cleaner. What they
want is for it not to suck so much. And you could see and
you want to say them about you know, could you the same apply to
you? But I'm serious. Everything that they want consists of making our life
worse. That the vacuum cleaner doesn't work as well, that the soap that
you put in your dishwasher doesn't get everything off, that the shower that you
have doesn't have the pressure or the heat or the duration that you want,
and that your toilet has to be flushed multiple times in order to get its
job done. Because every one of the constricting regulations and things they have to
make things better for the earth make things worse for the people on it.
And that's kind of a feature, not a bug. I'm convinced that Brexit
began when the headlines appeared in the Telegraph and other papers that the EU that
Brussels wanted to regulate kettles tea kettles. They wanted to regulate how hot they
got and how long it took for them to boil up. And I think
that was the moment in which a great number of Bretons put down their papers
and looked stealily into the distance and some of the spirit of their ancestors and
said this is the line and across that that shall not come, because they
really that there was no end to the things that they could do to make
your life less convenient if it was draped with the mantle of the new morality
of eco wonderfulness and sustainability. I'd like to think that Americans are more resistant
to that here. But you know, when you look at what we did
with light bulbs and the rest of it, we seem to have gone along
just like everybody else. Yes, although you haven't had any choice, right
well, I mean we had a choice for a while. We could be
weaned off the incandescence and then pushed into the awful little curly pigtail things before
they finally figured it out with LEDs that let us go between the two of
them. Would it have been adapted as quickly if we'd not had the mandates.
No, Eventually, the superior technology would have worked, Eventually, would
have gotten cheaper. We would have gone there. But what we had was
I believe it was under the Bush administration. Thou shalt not have this kind
of bulb that you like anymore. You just can't you know for reasons,
Well, this is why I'm such a federalist, because it's very difficult for
these questions to be meaningfully answered by the public when they get rolled into everything
else. We have these national elections, we focus too much on the presidency,
and people do not realize or do not care that as part of that
they are voting, for example, to set tree logging policies in Oregon.
But they are. It's just that they care a lot more about whatever three
or four major issues are being debated, and they should care a lot more
about that. That's not irrational. That's a totally rational response to the political
choices that they are given, and like Bob's is one of them. It's
really hard to get people to rebel against that sort of rule when that rule
is coming out of a permanent bureaucracy via a process they have not heard about
and being headed up by a president who is now in charge of seven hundred
and six million things. This is why I want to devolve more power back
to the states. I think there are a few national roles for government,
the border, foreign policy, some trade, civil rights. But it's crazy
that story you was told about North Dakota and the company and the EPA.
I mean, how are you going to get that resolved? James? It's
very difficult. There is in California a disastrous policy set by the federal government
that regulates water. It's a very complicated issue. I've written a lot about
it. I won't relate the whole thing here, But when I last went
out there to write an update, I had dinner with a bunch of the
people who are to be fair on left hand right, who are trying to
get these EPA rules changed so that there's more water in the Central Valley for
farming, and the biggest allies that they had and fixed this problem, which
is a federal power that is being used to make life more difficult in California.
The biggest allies they had were senators from other states. Because if you
go into Louisiana or probably North Dakota and you say, hey, this is
crazy, right, then the senator from those states says, yeah, that's
crazy. I'm sure I'll help you. But they couldn't get their two senators
in California at the time, I believe it was Feinstein and Boxer. Maybe
they couldn't get those senators to get on board because they had other concerns,
namely environmentalism. Right, but you have a federal policy that is mostly affecting
California and the people who want to fix it live in other states and it
doesn't matter to them. This is ridiculous. And of course if that problem
were relegated to the state level, then people might actually be able to get
a cross about it and get some meaningful change in their own state. Until
it is then those sentences, I mean, doan Finestein's passed on now.
But Diane Fins you can say, well, I'm sorry about this, but
that's not an issue for California. That's an issue for the president. Well,
of course, if you support agriculture, then you're supporting monocultures, and
then you're supporting you know, the use of fossil fuels to fertilize, and
we can't have that. I always love that, you know, John Kerry
will come out and tell us that the greatest threat now to the planet,
I guess is the fossil fuel consumption used in agriculture, and we have to
do something about this. And you said, raise your hand and say that's
true. But I am hungry some what I'm feeling a bit packish. I
would like the fact that there's lunch coming in, that there will be lunch
coming in a year from now. Europe is going through the same thing.
And then, of course when you say, well, you don't want us
to have good, healthy food and you don't want us to eat meat,
so you just want us to eat the bugs, right, And then of
course they look at you, No, that's paranoid nonsense. We don't want
you to eat the bugs, but they are a good source of protein.
You know what cracks me up up though about this all is that California.
Yes, federalism great root raw, but when California does something and passes a
lot, it ripples throughout the rest of the country. Because it's such a
large market. They say, we're not going to accept any chicken. We
want all of our chickens to have a six foot by six foot living environment.
And so if you want to sell chicken here, then your chickens have
got to basically live in studio apartments somewhere. They did the same thing with
pork, and it all of a sudden shuts off the market. People in
far away places have to adapt to a California regulation California or Texas makes a
change in their textbooks, and that too, ripples out. It's insane for
them to have as much clout as they do. But by the same token,
I would rather, you know, then people say, well, who
do you want actually then to set the national standard? Do you want it
to be business? Because in a sense, in American history the twentieth century,
the American chain stores came into every single little town and changed the way
everybody did business. It's funny now that when we look back at the old
postcards, we smile and say, look at that so Woolworths. There's a
Creskey, there's a cress Gosh, I remember those old variety stores. But
at the time they were bitterly opposed by the retail merchants who correctly saw that
they're they put out of business by these people. But still, eventually,
you know, things changed, and these chains were able to set a national
standard and a national attitude. But it was to the benefit of the consumer.
It didn't destroy the small towns like Walmart did, and it brought goods
from all over the place to these small places. Now. Granted, yes,
there was the cheerful sound of the cash registers and we don't have that
on main Street anymore, but you do have the occasional beep beep here and
there as people are using new tools like Shopify can bring you the new tools
for commerce that can revolutionize the way you do your business. Shopify by Friendly
because Shopify is the commerce platform that is revolutionizing business worldwide. They've already taken
the cash register that I used to speak of, that happy little thing where
you know, the numbers would come up and the rest of it, and
I remember those sounds. But they've taken the cash register online helping millions sell
billions all around the world. But did you know that shopif I can do
the same thing at your retail store, your brick and mortar place. Give
your point of sale system a serious upgrade today with Shopify Now. Shopify pos
point of sales system is your command center for your retail store, from accepting
payments to managing your inventory. Shopify has everything you need to sell in person.
You get a powerhouse selling partner that effortlessly unites your in person and your
online sales into one source of truth. And by that we mean you can
track every sale across your business in one place and know exactly what's in stock,
which is helpful. Connect with customers inline and online. Shopify helps you
drive store traffic with plug and play tools built for marketing campaigns from TikTok to
Instagram and beyond. Get hardware that fits your business. Take your payments by
smartphone, transform your tablet into a POS system, or use Shopify's pos go
mobile device for a battle tested solution, and they'll tell you more about that
if you ask. Plus their award winning twenty four to seven help is right
there to support your success every step of the way. So do retail right
with Shopify. Sign up for a one dollar per month trial period at shopify
dot com slash ricochet. That's all overcase. Got a shopify dot com slash
ricochet to take your retail business to the next level today shopify dot com slash
ricochet lowercase, and we thank Shopify for sponsoring this the Ricochet podcast, Charlie
I mentioned there is something called the TikTok's unpopular with people in positions of power
who want to do something about it. I'm a free speech, free platform
kind of guy. I also hate TikTok with every fiber of my being,
right down to the pith of my marrow. What say you on the attempts
to divest or change or do something about the TikTok peril? Well, I
hate TikTok two. There are two reasons for that. One is that it
is a hive of stupidity and civilization destroying nonsense. The other is it's Chinese
spyware. And I think that the federal government has a role in addressing the
second issue and not the first. That vote yesterday in Congress in the House
was fifty to nothing, I know, and there's a reason for that,
and that is that there is no doubt whatsoever that TikTok, which is owned
by a company called byte Dance, is really owned or at least extremely close
to the Chinese Communist Party, and that is a problem. The people I
have seen who have reverse engineered TikTok's apps have left me in no doubt whatsoever
that it collects an extraordinary amount of information that is accessible by one of our
geopolitical adversaries. That to me is a question for Congress. I was just
talking about federalism. I very rarely think things are a question for the federal
government, but that is one of them. And so the federal government is
asking nicely TikTok either to completely move from the grips of the Chinese Communist Party
into American ownership. In a sense, Bite Dances would have to divest or
be banned. I have no problem with that whatsoever. If the federal government
had said we think that this is a grotesque app for grotesque people and it's
corrupting our youth, I would agree with that, But I would have a
problem with them trying to get rid of it and sow with the First Amendment.
But that isn't the case that being made. The other part of this,
which is not currently being debated, but has in many places already been
debated, is whether government agencies should permit TikTok to appear on employees phones and
computers and networks and so on. And the obvious answer to that is no.
Wait a minute, hold of say this calm stockism I'm hearing from you.
If you say that the employees of the Federal the young staffers who come
to DC full of idealism, are not going to be allowed to have this
entertaining, necessary social app in the telele, the next thing you're going to
be telling me is that they shouldn't be allowed to have sex on the table
in a Senate hearing room. Yeah, that's another my radical opinions. Actually,
but they shouldn't be having sex hearing room. It's like the plot of
a nineteen eighties or nineteen nineties movie. Somehow they managed to get a device
onto the staffer that a lot who walks around the White House's enabled them to
remotely map the exact dimensions of the play. Well, you know what I
keep saying about everything that had to do with nineteen eighty four, It turns
out that we all volunteered for it. It wasn't imposed upon us everything that
or Will predicted. We signed up for, waved our hands, said can
I have that toy? Please? Can you? Can you bring the telescreen
into my house? Now? Fucking do it? I mean, you know
what I thought about this, though, James, and I'm not extending this
criticism to Democrats in Congress, because clearly there is a admirable bipartisan impression here
that was yesterday manifested fifty to nothing. But there are parts of the Progressive
Coalition that are crying about this and suggesting that it's in Sibian fascism and They're
the same people who thought that because the Trump campaign had bought a few thousand
dollars of Facebook ads, the election had been stolen. They're the same people
who constantly go on about data mining, quite rightly by Facebook and Twitter and
ISPs and so on. But for some reason, tech totok is exactly when
TikTok is the problem. And I will finish by saying this forget for a
moment government power and this bill. If you are listening to this and you
have any sort of control over your home network whatsoever, do not allow TikTok
on it. I don't allow it on my home network. It is blocked.
It is blocked at the DNS level. Anyone in this house tries to
go to TikTok, it just doesn't work. It won't even look up the
information. And that goes for all of their CDNs and backup servers and so
on as well. This is extremely pernicious, and especially if you have children,
get them off TikTok, put them on something else, you like social
media, use whatever you want. But the US government is absolutely correct about
this, and I hope this goes through and I hope what it does it
annoys the Chinese Communist Party immensely, and we can all move into broad sunlit
uplands afterwards. So I hope you want to offer the assurance to young white
women that they will be able to sit in the front seat of their car
and cry about something on another platform. There's reels, right. We used
to have this wonderful thing called Vine, which essentially was TikTok, but was
just didn't feel as creepy and ooky in an awful and the rest of it.
There will be something that will come along and you'll all be fine,
but for now we'll just look at this back. I mean, yes,
you're absolutely right to block TikTok at the DNS level, because I feared that
if I lit it in my house, it would instantly leap into the network,
talk to my smart oven somehow, and then handshake with an unused fire
stick that's plugged into an inert television downstairs. But you know, within a
couple of days it would have gained root access and I'd be locked out of
all my accounts. Of screw it to help with TikTok be gone before we
go, Let's take one other cultural little leap over here, because we've pretty
much covered the waterfront for the politics to the culture. But of course the
oscars are coming up, and I put the off beers in the same category
as the State of the Union speech. I don't. I don't watch it.
My wife will, as women will, because they like to see what
they're wearing on the red carpet, and they like to see how the entry
actorses get dulled up in the rest of it, and they like to see
you want and and all that stuff. But I care not about it.
I think, did you see Oppenheimer? For example? I did. I
went to the movies to say it, which is right, so did I
so did. I went are the actual movies and was impressed very much.
So I was Guys, who when you hear the names when he meets,
you know, the various people in the names sort of open up a little
box in your head where you've stored the names of famous historical nuclear physicists and
the rest of it, and you feel all proud of yourself for recognizing the
name. But I, you know, I'm the only guy in the theater.
Who's who's who's cheering? Who's the character's name? Oh my god,
we're gonna have to I'm straw. No I'm thinking of is it it was
a teller who wanted to bomb everything? Yeah? Right, right right,
Edward tell her so? And there he's a little fleshy, a little sweaty,
and the rest of it. But I'm saying, there's my guy,
there's there's mister coach team teller. And the fact that the movie lavished about
an hour it seems to be on his inability or difficulty in getting security clearances.
But I was carried right along with it a marvelous performance. And I'd
be perfectly happy if the soul movie you know, gets gets all of the
awards, because then I can preen that I made the right move. But
I also think that Barbie is probably yet for something, And Charles, I
know that Barbie probably wasn't your first choice to see. Did you get dragged
to Barbie or did you go willingly looking to see what this is all about?
I didn't see it. You should, I still haven't. You should?
You I should? You absolutely should, because it's not what either the
people who who are running around the room with it on their shoulders as a
proof that their side is right, I think get it wrong. It's both
sides are right. And both sides are wrong. It's not an ideological,
ideologically settled thing. And it starts, I think, with a brilliant series
of images that the director Gerwig, she's too smart not to know what she's
setting forth here. How she literally is saying that the era of sexual liberation
destroyed the nurturing motherhood instinct in a generation of young women. And you can
either say that she's celebrating it, but I don't think that she is the
whole replacement. Well, the movie starts with the two thousand and one sequence
that Stanley Kubrick took half an hour to do, but that Gerwig doesn't about
five minutes where instant you know, they're all these little girls, the monkeys
of the savannah and the African plans are pushing around carts and having tea parties
and the rest of it with their dolls until the model of the Peers.
But the model is Barbie and it brings about enlightenment, as the modelists did,
and they start smashing their dolls. Well, we all know where that
led, and it did not necessarily lead to a generation of fulfillment and happiness.
And there's a lot of that that informs the rest of the movie right
up until the last line, which itself. People can take either way that
it's either an expression of the desire of innate femininity to nurture and give birth,
or it is a doorway to meaningless sexual pleasures. It's not a stupid
movie, and so it's one of those things that I think that people ought
to watch. I'll take it over half of the Netflix stuff that comes gushing
through my television every single day. So I'll leave you with this. What
are you watching that you think people should watch? And why? Okay,
I just have to quickly admit confess, uh huh that I am a notorious
movie idiot. I like talking with those because I'm generally proven to be.
I sound smart than I am. But I'm blown away with everything that you
just said because I don't do that. I can do that with music.
I can do it well. I can do it with music, doo.
I know you're just better than I am, But I can't do it with
movies. I like movies, but I like most movies. That's my problem.
I'm not a good critic. There are a few movies that I don't
like. For example, I saw Independence Day two on a plane and turned
it off. It's very rare for me, very rare for me. But
yeah, I always finished things. I'm a completionist. If I start something,
I have to finish it or I get gitry. But that I actually
did not finish and don't regret. But the problem is, James, I
don't have the deep and intelligent thoughts that you just had. And I've written
about this for National Review. There was this movie called The Boys in the
Boat. Did you see that? Yes? I did. It spawned a
whole bunch of reviews at National Review, and I didn't read any of them
because I wanted to see it. So I I saw it, and then
I read what people had written about it, and then the movie was ruined
for me because all of the criticisms that they made were obviously true, but
they hadn't occurred to me when I was watching it. And I just think
this is a sign of an imbecile, the imbecile being me. Well,
we're all we all have different things on which we want to lavish our attention.
There's short spanter or mortal allotment here. And if somebody doesn't want to
delve deep into the mechanics and bones and the language of cinema, but simply
wants them to wash over them to be enjoy it as there's nothing wrong with
that. No, but it can't not work. I'm stupid, It's what
I'm saying. So I'm just letting you know before I answer your question that
there is no insight or valuable criticism that you will hear from me because I'm
just dumb. Well, in that case, then you are a shunning example
to people who feel the same way, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.
I mean, in The Boys in the Boat, I within about five
mins I thought, Wow, he's going to do it. He's gonna tick
every box. He's going to give us every single cliche with that Barton Fink
feeling of the of the sports movies at the time, right down to the
you know, the the salty coach, right down, I mean, right
down to the good gal love interest, right down to the funny friend,
and even gives you Hitler, you know, my pounding his fist in fury
over these Americans, every cliche in the book, but done so not in
parody, not with irony, but simply as ARCHETYCS rolled out to say,
I wonder if this still works? Yeah, it still works. It all
works, the montage works, the relationships, all all of these things that
Hollywood used to turn out by the dozens. Fun things I like to do
is go back and look at old You know, I spend a lot of
time in old newspapers. And if you go back to the movie sections of
the big towns Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and you will find
in the thirties and forties page just stuffed with movie ads, ninety eight percent
of them you've never heard of. And of those that you have, you
will find movies that you never heard of with big stars, because these guys
made a lot of movies. They were in the system. They went one
right after the other. And the corpus of American cinema is extraordinary, and
we only really get the ones that you know, the top ones, the
one that's stuck around. But the rest are still there somewhere. Every day
on YouTube, every week I will find some example of American noir cinema from
the forties fifties. Never heard about it, great crisp lean mean, brilliantly
shot, great jazzy theme. Never heard of it. But you know,
they made forty of them that year. By all the studios, and so
I'm working my way through that. So what you're telling me, James,
is out there somewhere. There is an enormous library of American movies about which
I would have nothing of value to say, pretty much, but that might
but might teach you. He's Here's one of the things, even the most
boring and banal of these movies, I find myself pausing and looking at the
street, just looking at the inadvertent documentary that was presented when these guys,
When these guys went out and took a look. And even even if it's
a set and they rebuild it, they're telling you what people would recognize as
real. And it's fascinating and you realize how much of the vitality, the
visual language of our streets we have lost. And a lot of that was
through regulation. Lady bir Johnson and the rest of the Beautify America people they
hated neon signs, They hated the garishness of it, They hated the American
vernacular of the roadside. So they would pass laws that restricted the signage because
a lot of the signs that people put in were perpendicular to the building,
and some of the bolts might get loose and they might fall. They passed
laws against those. So you used to be able to look down on American
Street and see this forest of signages that would go in different and typefaces and
styles and all the rest of it blowing in the golden hour and then illuminating
the street at night. And it's gone. And it's gone partially by regulation,
partially by the desire to beautify, partially because these places have emptied out
and there's nobody there to begin with. But when you go to the old
movies, you get a sense of the tremendous vitality the smallest American urban downtown
place. And it's good and it's sad, and it makes you think we
is something we have to get back. You came to this country, you
came here from another country. A lot of the people come to the big
cities used to come. The idea has always been that the small town is
the feeder to the big cities. The small town bring the values and virtues
of the small towns into these cosmopolitan places, and there naivete somehow blends with
the cynicism of the coastal cities or the Burshue whatever, And from this comes
an American amalgam that is still idealistic but also realistic in a way that sort
of crucible that mortar and pestle stuff. I don't know if that dynamic still
exists, and it's not when it exists when borders are open and the cultures
are changed by people who come from places with completely different values. That is
the most rambling thing I've said all week. And I'm a guy who did
a forty minute podcast. I remember a national serial day yesterday. Anything before,
anything, before we go out, Anything you want to say as a
parting shot to the Ricochet audience. Oh, well, if you have been
on the site recently, you have seen that we've partially integrated then new search
function into Ricochet to train it on real posts written by real people, clicked
on by real people, commented on by real people, and so on.
So, although that isn't version five, and although it is not the search
function that you'll get in version five before, we be much more spiffy.
It is at least much better than what came before. Hopefully and hopefully you
enjoy it. Right, They've been training the new search function on large language
models, which means when you search for my posts. Instead of coming back
with a ready kill a lot icon, you will get an Asian Viking.
But you know, bugs, bugs to work out. We could probably spend
an hour talking about Google Gemini and maybe next week. We will hope to
talk to you soon. Charles, it's been great fun, Charles CW.
Cook, National Review and Ricochet and other places and the rest of it.
Where can people find the next thing You're going to write at National Review?
Probably on Monday? Monday? Sign up, subscribe the rest of it.
And you also, if you haven't done so, should go to ricochet dot
com explore the member feed. Oh sorry, you can't because you're not a
member, but you know, just pennies a day and you will find access
to a sane civil rights community that you've been looking for your entire life on
the Internet. I'm to the point where I just want a new Internet.
I want to start from scratch. I'll pay somebody twenty five bucks a month
so I can have access to it without the chum ads, without the junk
sites, without the AI, without the control of YouTube and Google and all
the rest of it. I want a new Internet. But until we get
to that point, there's Ricochet dot com see you there, Charles, thank
you, and we'll see everybody here at this podcast. Next week, Ricochet
Pea join the conversation.