Really is that what they say? They say beta testing alpha, Peter Ye, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Mister garbut Schaff, tear down this wall, read my lips. It's the Ricko Shae Podcast with Rob Lone. I'm James Lilax, Charles sepul You cook a sitting in for Peter Robinson today. Well, welcome back, Carter. We're gonna talk to Kim Strassel about malaise, so let's eurseose a podcast. It's clear that the true problems of our nation are much deeper, deeper than cassoline lines, are energy shortages, deeper even an inflation or recession. America's a nation that can be defined in the single word I was foot as Welcome everybody. This is the Rico Shae Podcast, number six hundred and fifty one. I'm James Lilax, Mine out plus Peter Robinson is down for the week. Rob Long is freshly back from some cake eating enclave somewhere arrested and relaxed, and Charles CW. Cook is sitting in for Peter. Gentlemen, welcome, good to be here. Cake eating? What does that mean? I don't know term used to describe fancy or does it mean like gluttons, very very very fancy, very fancy, Yes, very not the hoy ploy but the eloy. Yeah, gentleman and Rob. Of course you are in New York, which I understand now is full. Mayor Eric Adams has unilaterally, uh just destroyed the rule of law that is written on the plaque on the statue of liberty. I mean, as we all know, that's a blinding set of principles to which we almost here. And he says that New York is full, it's full, and has passed passed out flyers to those who hope to come for jobs and housing, telling them there ain't any We're full, don't come here. And he says that New York is bearing the unjust, undue excessive burden of immigration. Not Texas, not the border states, not the small towns, No, but New York is just crumbling on the weight of this onslaught. So you are there, I'm here. Tell me is this actually the Is New York full? Well, it's not full. I mean there's plenty of room. There's lots of empty office buildings in Midtown, and there's tons of there's tons of space. But it is interesting that what he means is it's full um up of I guess whatever the term is. But you know illegal immigrants, right, which is what happens when the illegal immigrants UH don't cluster themselves around the border states UH and instead go places with where they haven't been before. And then suddenly those people discover, hey, we've got a border problem. UH. That is what you know. We're about six months or nine months away from the from the uh the mayor of New York City discovering that American needs to get control of its borders. So in that respect, I have I think we owe a debt of gratitude. And I don't mean this in a presidential endorsement way, because I'm not sure about him, but I think we owe a debt of gratitude to Governor Ron De Santis, who was the first, in my mind, publicly the first person, the first governor of a state that's been hit by illegal emigration to say, hey, wait a minute, why don't we just send these guys up north where they are where the standards are different, apparently, And I think that was so he should be he should be lauded with that, But that is really what has happened. When you let common sense and you let actual experience in, suddenly you discover that you're not quite as roomy and generous as you thought. Which as you're in Florida, which is currently growing, of course under the boot of Ron de Santis, and the antiimmigrants sentiment there, I assume has led to a completely emptying out of people who are fleeing in terror for their lives going to place it like New York. What is the mood in Lurida when it comes to the immigration situation. Whilst an immigrant myself, I spend most of my day in fear. I I don't know James Ivar be on the podcast again at any moment the door. I've put my camera like this so you can see the two doors in case someone comes flying through and takes me out. I mean, I just think this is hilarious. I am no more in favor of illegal immigration as a legal immigrant than I suspect anyone else is. But even if I were, I would not think that there was something magical about the border towns of Texas that was able to deal with it. There was not also through in New York or Chicago, and yet if you listen to the way that the elected politicians in those places talk, they genuinely sound surprised. They end up saying things like, but when these people come here, they cost money, they use our resources. Well, yeah, okay, and follow the logging through if they're using up too many resources. In New York City, one of the great cities of the world, one of the wealthiest cities in the world, a city of seven or eight million people, an enormous city, what on earth do you think they're doing in the border touth? But I find that the surprise the most interesting part of it, not the hypocrisy. Yeah. Well, it's something people have been saying about that immigration forever, which is that you can and New York City now is the is the exhibit. As you can either have a very robust welfare state, which they have in California and they have in New York, or you can have open borders, but you cannot have both and something one of those two things needs to stop. And I suspect, which is what people have been saying for years and years and years, is let's start with stopping people coming over the border illegally. Let's start with that before we start going broke, and that is shortly. That is the underpinning of what the mayor Adams is saying. He's not really saying that we're out of space. What he's saying is we're out of money. And we'll know that the left is serious about border policy when they say things like, well, we're out of money, because that's really that's the true. Yeah, and you know, it seems to me that stopping people coming in really is our only option as well. And this is why I was relatively comfortable with the prospect of building a wall. I have this debate and have done for a while with my libertarian friends. I wrote about this in my book a few years ago about the order in which one ought to do this, and libertarians will often say, you know, the problem is the welfare state. That's the problem, and if we had no welfare state, then we could have unfettered immigrations. I'm not entirely sure I agree with that, per se. I do think there are cult for consequences to immigration, given that we allow people to vote, but leave that aside. I don't think that Americans would be willing to put up with the consequences of completely denying immigrants welfare. I just don't think we are culturally able to do that. I just it's all very well to say, get rid of welfare, deny welfare to immigrants who come in with nothing. I just don't think we have that culture. I mean, I think there's a lot too having that culture at one level. I think it would help regulate the flow. But we don't have it, and I don't think we're going to have it. And as a result, you just really do need to stop them coming in in the first place, because once they're in, we're just not that people. We don't do that. We don't say we'll die on the street. Well, we can't do that because I mean, because what you're talking about then is born only in one thing, and that's axenophobia. Right. But I agree with you that there's no national will to deny welfare benefits to people in need. And we've seen that in states like well Mine, where it's a well, they're here, they're driving, so we should give them driver's license so we can make sure that they have insurance. Well, they're here, and they're they're impacted, to use the horrible word, by the things that are elected officials do so they should have the right to vote. There's this natural sort of you know, this feeling that they will you know, they're here, so we have to accommodate a number of things. When you point out that every single one of these things dissolves and deludes the meaning of citizenship, they look at you a little bit of scans because they're not sure exactly why a word like that, or every fairy concept like that should particularly so you should particularly matter. But I think Charles is right. You stop people coming in in the first place. And I you know, what do they think happens in Texas? I think they look at a map of Texas, they see a big empty state and they figure that people just are sort of absorbed into it, like water into the desert or an infrequent rain. But yeah, well, you know, it depends on in terms of which delusion you want to which delusion you want to hold in your heart. Right, there are a couple of them, but there was one, and I think this is actually true. It was true for a long time. And the reason wait we got here was that in the seventies, eighties, especially the nineties in California anyway, because that's where I was living. I was living Californias the time. There was this incredible economy, growing economy, and there was relatively low unemployment. I remember in the Clinton era walking past it down Burger with a sign this in the middle nineties saying, h you know, help wanted twelve dollars an hour, which in the middle nineties was a really really really that's a lot of money. It's like, I don't twice three times whatever the minimum wage was then m because the economy is growing and they need to people, and so there was simp to be there was no discernible downside to it for a lot of the business and agriculture and the you know, the the industries that drove California. And it was like this unholy marriage between the people, the business society, industrial and agricultural society who had this delusion that you could continue to do this and there would be no downside, and then the delusion of the left, which you could continue to do this and there'd be no problem with paying welfare benefits and uh and the only people really statistically were hurt by this. And this is something that actually vic Victor Hanson writes about in Mexifornia, which really still is a very important book. The only people who were hurt by this were black males, young black males. Um Statistically, that's just what would happened. And so it's probably no coincidence that we seem to be reaping a little bit of the whirlwind in California and New York for the sort of twin delusional policies that people had. You know, when when strange bedfellows agree on something, sometimes you say, didn't that great? It must be absolutely right, or it could be the worst idea ever. And I think that's what in the in the immigration laboratory of California, at least, it was the worst idea ever. And so it's sort of weird to suddenly discover that the mayor of New York City has recently noticed that there's no way to square his social policies and his immigration policies. Yep. Anyway, well, as Rob noted at the top of it, there there's a lot of space in New York. Unfortunately it's empty off the space and it will be. I mean, there's been New York magazine cover story this week is about how all of these prime properties are just empty. JP Morgan built a huge tower I think on Park Avenue, and they're making everybody come back because they don't want to be another empty skyscraper class a space that sits there vacant. So at some point somebody's just going to propose, well, why don't we take over, Why don't we use the state's power to take over these empty places and tell them up with the immigrants and the idea of the Manhattan Skyline, once the glory and the power of American industry, with all the great cap with all the great firms in their own little niece vendor Row towers being replaced by essentially high rise squatting villages in which people who do not have jobs are simply existing at the behest of the state is a depressing way to look at the skyline. 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Jim Strassell, editorial board member and calumnist at The Wall Street Journal, go host of the Potomaca Watch podcast, and author of The Fresh of the Press. The Biden Malaise America bounces back from Joe Biden's dismal repeat of the Jimmy Carter Years. Kim, why, but I don't know if I can focus on this because I just need to go get some zbiotics, as do we all Right, I will, especially this week. That's why we do a Friday podcast. I hip, you said, but of course you're you're remote. Rob's about to burst in here. But I think I remember the Carter Years better than anybody else. I remember the Malay speech such as it was. I think I was sitting at a motel in Paris, Tennessee, working as a seed salesman for North of the King, and I remember listening to that and just thinking the native we have been. I've been driving around all summer long and this rent advent around the South and One of the songs that kept playing was sky Labs Falling, which is somehow a perfect example of what America had become once we strode the heavens and went to the moon, and now we're all cowering in fear because sky Lab is going to fall out of the sky and hit us on the head. Not a good time. Not a good time. But let's talk about those comparisons between now and the seventies. How apt are they? So outwardly, the comparisons are really quite striking, which is why I went and wrote the book. I mean, inflation obviously, high energy prices, foreign policy disorder, border disorder. A lot of people don't remember this, but one of the only other presidents who had a run at the border was Jimmy Carter, different state. It was a Merrio boatlift out of Cuba, tens of thousands of Cubans escaping Castro high crime back then. But the kind of fun part about the book is, you know, despite all these kind of top line comparisons, the more I kind of dug into each man's behavior and how we got there, I realized that the comparison was just deeply unfair to Jimmy Carter. Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm now old. I can say I'm old enough to remember it the Carter years, but I'm also old enough to be have read some of the histories of it. And you know, he gets a lot of for the malaise speech. But I mean, the thing about Jimmy Carter was he wasn't living in a weird cocoon bubble where everything was going great and people in his oval office were telling him, do everything's terrific. As a president, everything's terrific. He was kind of like paying attention to the world around him. Get that impression from the current administration, right, I mean, yeah, yeah, no, not at all. I mean, look, he wasn't tune and that speech. If we want to talk about that speech, sort of fascinating story, right, is it. I mean, Jimmy Corner. The reason he gave that speech is he did this kind of listening session and had all these people send them letters, and he understood the mood of the nation and that it was really bad. And how that speech ended up happening is unfortunately he had an advisor, Pat Cadell, who told him, yeah, everyone feels bad, but it's essentially their fault. And she was like oh okay. And the other thing the interesting at the beginning of that speech, Jimmy Carter, no one remembers this part. He spent the first part of that speech talking about his own mistakes, you know, And that's another thing very different from this administration. Not only are they disconnected, but when have you ever heard this administration come out and say like, Wow, we screwed that one up and I need it, we need to do better. Well to be very rarely hear that. I think that was one of the things that hurt the ears of the American voter in nineteen seventy nine was like this is especially coming after, you know, the first presidential resignation, and sort of like this general sense the America had taken a wrong turn. But I think that I suspect that one of the differences and maybe you can talk about between now and then, is that at least then you really could talk about massive inflation and high unemployment and a creating economy and a year at almost a decade of trouble and hangover from the sixties and the early seventies. And now, I think one of the things that's bewildering or maybe makes it even more more meanful is that you know, unemployment is much much lower than it was in nineteen seventy nine. And inflation, which is you know, is an issue now it hasn't been for a while. It's much much lower than it was. Interest rates are much much lower. I mean, we are not in the kind of shape you're in in seventy nine, and yet people really do feel like on the wrong track. Yeah, I mean, look, I think you're putting your finger on something really important. And it is one of the big themes of the book here, which the reason I say this comparison is unfair is, as you say completely correctly, Jimmy Carter inherited a lot of his problems right. The world was in the middle of the Great Inflation, as it were, We'd had civil rights unrest in terms of the culture and the country, we didn't really have mastic oil or gas industry to speak of, and that really put us on the wrong side as we went through that first oil shock, and you know, there was just a lot of problems. He promised to come in and fix him. It turns out he didn't do a lot of things right in the end, so things got worse. One of the points I'm making here is No, we're not in the same situation statistically as we were back then. However, my point is we needn't have been here at all. Meaning that's why I think By bears greater culpability in that he started with one point four percent inflation. You know, he started with the country that the year prior to his inauguration had become a net exporter of oil. He started with relatively low crime rates, and because of an agenda, a progressive agenda, they took steps that landed us in this situation. It was purposeful as it was weird. Weird number of choices made it seems very strange despite the histories of Carter, Yeah, and economics one oh one and the Adam spits the wealth of Nations. Yeah, I'm sorry, Charlie, cut you up. No, I suppose what bothers me is what happens next, because we all know what happened to Jimmy Carson. Ronald Reagan won forty four states, then he won forty nine states. Carter was vanquished. The Democrats went into a spiral. The point at which they came back it was nineteen ninety two. They take these two southern Democrats, these new Democrats. Clinton tries a little bit of Carterism fails, then there's a republic revolution. We all lived happily ever after. But I think that's about to happen. So why is it that Biden is not being or he doesn't seem to be being meaningfully punished for this behavior. Because although yes, he lost the House, and although his approval rating is low, the next Republican Canada's not going to win forty four states. Well, no they're not. Although the book is making the case that this is potentially another moment if Republicans were to play their cards right now, we all know what the chances of that may be. Maybe not high. I mean if you go out and you look and you dig into the polls. People are actually feeling particularly bitter with Biden in this administration on the things that matter to them most on a day to day basis. In fact, he bears even worse than Jimmy Carter in issues like the econ handling of the economy. So you know, when people go to the grocery store when they have to fill up their tank of gas, they're they're bitter. But I give Democrats incredible I give them heads. I mean, I congratulate them. They are so good at distracting from those questions and making the race instead about Donald Trump and his threat to the country and the threat the Democrats pose to your ability to vote and have an abortion, and they suggest that those are the things that are most at risk. And they've been very good at it so far. So if Republicans want to make use of this moment, and I do think it is a moment, they're going to have to find a nominee that can have a message like Reagan head And by the way, here's the other thing, have a little optimism like Reagan head, like learned to smile like Reagan did. Yeah. Yeah, that was actually my follow up question because this is a big theme of mind at the moment. Is A why don't Republicans talk more about the economy They have a twelve point advantage on the economy polling shows, and b why they so Dowa. I mean, I do understand you need a little langa, you need some Yeah, there's some emotion to show that you too are annoyed by what's happening. You don't want to see him detached from it. But that is too much frowning. I think on the Republican side at the moment. Oh, I couldn't agree more. You know, if you go back and you listen to Reagan's election eve address for the nineteen eighty election, he actually, you know, he's very optimistic in it, but he addresses what was also then real anger in the country at where things was. He says, Oh, the American people are angry, and they have right to be, seeing what's been done to this blessed country. You know, I don't see any reason why you can't have Republican candidates acknowledge and actually acknowledge the real bitterness that many base voters feel about a lot of things that have happened in the recent years. But then you got to turn around and talk about why that's why that's wrong and how you're going to make it better. And I agree with you. I couldn't agree with you more. I really hope if rumors are true that Ronda and just is going to do a reboot of his campaign. You know, two things happened. He starts talking about the economy instead of just Florida all the time, and Disney um and woke this and woke that. I know it you know, it gets the blood pressure up. But I also hope he has a coach that sort of tells him how to smile, Like just just smile once in a while. I remember in nineteen remember the campaign, It's really the first campaign I was paying attention to. I think it was fifteen, and um, the press typically they focused on the anger. Ronald Reagan for the press in the nineteen eighty was an ang candidate. He did a kind of a revolt. You know, he was the child, the political child of the California tax revolt, the angry fish shaking We're gonna, you know, burn the place to and that was how they saw him. But how the rest I think the voters saw him was like as somebody who believes that the strength and the future of America lie in them. And that was what he kept saying over and over and over again. Look, we just got get out of the way and let the American people do the works. Now, it's such a weird cliche to hear that, but in nineteen eighty those words, I mean, we're I mean astonishingly revolutionary, but they were not angry. We're gonna get government out of your way, and then you're gonna go and you are going to make America great again. And that isn't really what we're hearing from the Republican front runner. It's really more like, only I can fix this, and I suspects it's not going to get that crucial eleven, fifteen, sometimes twenty percent who need to be persuaded that you have a plan for me and not just for you. Yeah and more. Is a pity, by the way, because while those words may not be as revolutionary as the time when Reagan was speaking them, they are just as consequential. They mean just as much, I believe to many Americans. Look, even if if you're left of center and you might support a government more than I do, nobody has a good inner action with government ever, right, I mean, they understand the problems and the failings. I mean everybody, I don't care if you're left, right or center. We all tell the same jokes about the DMV and they're still just as potent as they are now as they were then. So I think this is going to kind of come down. The other thing that's just so important, as well as you were talking about convincing people, is if these candidates are going to continue to present everything as us versus them, you know, the right versus the left. We are we are good, but everything they stand for is bad. They are never going to do what right. You're never going to convince those people. You have to find, like Reagan did, the things that unite us, certain values and certain things. Still people believe in that everyone can unite around so that they're not scared of you and bring it in. In this fifty fifty country, if it's just going to be war, then you're never going to bring anyone to your side again. Where I live, the DMV is actually pretty good. From it's a blood from beer. It's efficient, it's brisk, it's attractive, and the people are cheerful, and you're you're out of there pretty quickly and you get it done. Maybe a Minnesota an awful lot of good social capital and things work here. And even though we complain about our governor a lot, it's still and still Minneapolis has been through the mill. It's still a pleasant place to live. Nevertheless, I remember in the seventies that there was this general feeling that the reason things were bad was just that the entirety of Western civilization was just running down. We lacked the spirits, we like, the rude animal strength. We couldn't stand up to the Soviets, who, in their own way, presented a new vision of the future that seemed to be on the march, and there was just there was no real sense of what the solutions might be. Now, Rob's right, the revolutionary thing about Reagan was coming in and saying no, we're just going to get out of the way and you guys can get on with it. And I worked. But at the time it was seen a simplistic and banal and not possibly true, because there was wrought and there was declined inherently built into the bones of our society. Now it seems as if not there are two problems. One, the institutions that we think can be reformed have completely failed us, and we don't see any way really to repopulate them in a way that makes them effective. And two, there is a general sense I think that all of the things that we see, the examples of civil disorder that we see from small to large, from the homeless camps to the naked people in the safe way eating cake, to just all of the strange devolution of societies that we've seen, that there are simple problems. Simple answers to all of them, but there is a massive, assumed decision to do nothing about them. In other words, unlike the seventies, we know what we can do to fix a lot of these things, but we just don't trust anybody to have the will or the power to do anything about them. And that leads to its own kind of futility. It may mirror the seventies, but it's a more exhausted futility in which there's nobody coming to save us, even if the government gets out of the way. Yeah, I mean, is it. I guess I don't know. Like I think, we as humanity always have a tendency to say everything is worse now than it's ever been in the past. Yeah, yeah, And I get that. I guess I'm overly optimism that I look back at the story you just told, and I don't want to. I think we shouldn't under estimate what that malaise was really like back in the seventies, and how futile people felt the entire project was that it was unreformable. And so I mean, I take great heart in the fact that we now look back at those is the battle days, because we had so many good days that followed. I'd like to think that if you have the right kind of leader, the right kind of message, and the right kind of ideas, you can do something. Look, I've been really heartened. One thing that I do think works in the favor of that kind of change if we're going to have it, is there does come a point at which it all becomes so awful that you begin having people thinking way outside the box. I love the fact that Vivic Ramaswami is the first candidate I have heard in what decades who are actually doing for the like calling to get rid of the Department of Education. Yeah, team, you know, like there's so many people who have they've kind of shied away from big, bold change anymore. And by the way, it was Jimmy Carter who invented the Department of Education. I agree, and I would love to see the same thing happen because you know, how many students do they have none? What could that money be used for? I don't know, chool, choice, school, You're absolutely right, But I was looking. I mean, I spent a lot of time looking at old newspaper source material, and I spent a lot of time looking at stuff in the seventies. Just this morning, I was finding one a story in nineteen seventy one that said San Francisco now leads the nation in heroin users. So it was there from the beginning, but a very small number. And what San Francisco did not have at the time was the sort of disorder that we hear about constantly, entire neighborhoods being left over, you know, crime, ridiculous amount of crime where people will actually it's going to get to the point where people are going to break out the windows of their own car to spare somebody else the effort of doing it, to find out that there's nothing in there. The urban disorder that we have, I think today exceeds that that we had in the seventies in many ways, and in other ways is even more distressing because the city's one we gunt them back, We turned the corner. The major American city was a tremendous success story, and hour on the verge of losing the whole thing about it. And again, it's not because we're fighting some wind that we don't understand that's coming from beyond and we can't do anything. It's because of the political will lacks. So would you rather see a candidate who gets up on his white horse like a servante's character and goes after abolishing the Department of Education, which we agree would be great, or somebody who argues vociferously and stumps all the time on the need to get our cities back, which is I think within our grasp and something we can do. I'd like to see both. Is that too much media in this fifty fifty in this fifty fifty climate, maybe it is too much to ask. And maybe when you have an electric that doesn't pay an awful lot of attention. And here's somebody say I want to get rid of the Department of Education. They're saying this guy wants this guy wants to get rid of schools so children, then we'll go to work in factories because of the labor laws. I mean, I don't know what you do with that side of the idiotic the electorate, but they're there. Yeah. I think crime is a very motivating topic. One thing that I do think is interesting, though, is I've always felt this that presidential candidates can get themselves a little bit sideways if they start promising that they're going to fix crime in America because fundamentally, ninety five percent of all law enforcement is done at a state and local level, and there's only so much you can do. Jimmy Carter actually landed himself in a problem because of that. I mean, talking about the reconstruction of our cities writ large, Yes, absolutely, but you know, I think that also has to be fit into some much wider theme because here's the other thing is I mean, I recognize you guys are in a city. I'm currently in a city, but vast numbers of Republican voters are outside of a city. They live in rural America or small town America, and they kind of feel like, well, if you're going down that rack and ruin, that's because of your elected leaders, you ought to fix it. I'll defer the other guys just a second or just I want to say two things. One, I'm optimistic about this country. I generally am. I'm probably a Pollyanna and all the rest of it. So when you're more optimistic than me, that's great. I love it, just so you know, I'm not one of those America doom and gloomers all over. But secondly, it's going to come from the cities elsewhere. I come from Fargo, North Dakota, and they had a shooting last week. Cop was shot. A guy, an immigrant Sherian immigrant, hold out an automatic weapon and started firing, and he had been googling. He had like thousands of rounds of ammunition, and he had been googling the street fair that was coming up in Fargo, and it looked like they avoided a mass casualty attack because he went too soon. I have relatives in Fargo who will not come to Minneapolis because they are convinced it as a hellhole of crime that they will just set foot the city and they'll be instantly on an isist video with as with a knife. And now those very single self same people in Fargo are facing the exact sort of thing happening has happened here. So just because they're out there doesn't mean they're immune and that I agree. I agree. I'm just saying it would kind of depend on how you would cast the message. Yeah, yeah, I'm just rocking on my hobby horse here, Kim, Just don't pay attention. I can I offer a little, just a slight comparison, because it's sort of like it's one of the things about I've been struck by what's happening in America politics, and certainly you know the kind of the kind of issues that have re re emerged after being sort of dormant for a while, like crime and law and order in order in the streets, and inflation and economies things like that, trade energy um In nineteen seventy nine, that was like a I mean, why would two decades to nap three decades of steady decline in urban quality of life so lockstep increases in crime, you know, they boil the slow fog very slowly. But by the seventies, it was just these cities were just a disaster, much work, much, much worse than they are now. I mean the low point or a high point of murder in New York City was nineteen ninety, but that was after a very very slow, steady increase every year um. Inflation was now started in the seventies and was part of the spending the guns and butter program to pay for the Vietnamore, which is also a disaster. There's three or four political assassinations. I mean, you know, the the society was breaking down on a way that we now like people talk about, you know, Antifa, it's like, oh, come on, Antifa, it does not it doesn't have it can even can even hold the the you know, the the towel for the weather underground or people like that. Um, but it seems like the recent memory, the cycles are going much faster. So I know young people in New York City who remember coming to New York City five six years ago and it felt different that we noticed the difference now, like inflation and just kind of creep up. It's suddenly we got out of it. We left our houses after ut of COVID and inflation was like eight percent. So the argument that the optimistic argument seems to be more realistic almost and also more believable. You don't have to believe in some sunny, you know, rosy tinted past. You can just say ten years ago. So my question is, first of all, why do you think the Republicans There's no Republican candidate that I can think of who's doing that. And the second thing is, if you're in the Oval office right now, giving you know, whoever is you know, standing in for Joe Biden at the present time, advice, like what advice would you give him? Because it seems like he's in kind of a bind, right. I mean I find his position to be interesting because he can't you know, when you end up saying to people, uh no, you're wrong, Actually things are better. Look you're wrong. You shouldn't be depressed because you're wrong, Like that isn't that's not you can't put that on a bumper sticker. And I have a solution for him, but I want to hear yours first, well too, So to address the Republicans first, I think the explanation is that, for whatever reason, I mean, I guess I can see it intellectually or politically, everybody's chasing Donald Trump. Right. Everybody wants to show that they can be the guy that punches as hard as Donald Trump, and they the easy pickings. There are cultural issues and banging on the left and everything. And also, I mean sadly, I actually don't think some of these people, for as long as they've been debating getting into the presidential race, I don't think they figured out what they were going to pain on in a presidential race. I mean, you know, how do you go do that? You know where? You know, where are the kind of big policy addresses from some of these guys, right? You know, you get all your supporters together, and you let the news know that Ronda Santis is laying out his national you know, his foreign policy speech, right, or Nicky Haley is laying out her economic agenda, like we got nothing so until they decided, by the way, I also think this is a fools errand because there are certain portions of the GOP electorate that are only going to vote for Donald Trump. Why are you not trying to talk to the rest of them? I do not understand. But in the White House they have kind of I mean, I guess that's where they end up with this. We embrace Bidenomics and this was all a plan, and you might not feel as good as you should, but we're getting them. I don't think that that, but I mean, I guess the only other option is to blame it on everybody else. Well, we pitch you a solution, and then I know Chrus was getting a kid starry. I don't mean to hug this, but here's my solution. Pitch it to you. Because you're a watcher of politics. If the last time a Democratic president was running for a second term, who was in political trouble, meaning not Barack Obama but Bill Clinton, the solution was a bunch of mini initiatives to appeal to the center right. So suddenly school uniforms for kids was a federal issue. Suddenly one hundred thousand new cops on the street was a presidential a Clinton issue. And he did that for about a year before he ran, and he won handily again. But in order to do that, he had to acknowledge somewhere in that whole office. They had to acknowledge that the people in the center right have a point, and they have concerns, and those concerns are not crazy. And my my question is is there a one do you think in that White House, or in the White House, or or in Planet Biden who is even just like saying neatly at the meaning we could do something like this, or is it just are we there's not MSNBC control room. Yeah, yep, there is none. And by the way, and there's a million times now. Now, look, they will claim that they have worked with Republicans um and they'll point out the Infrastructure Bill and the Chips build. The problem politically for them is that they didn't do any policy work. They just convinced a number of big spending Republicans to spend money alongside them, and that doesn't necessarily win them points. In fact that you arguably can blame all of them for making the situation worse having spent yet more money which is feeding into inflation. So it doesn't win him any points among the public. But on the questions of actual legitim at le policy concerns, there is no one in this White House willing to at this moment, which is a pity, confront the progressive left, right right, and that is going to be I mean, if he did that, I mean, you can't predict the future, but that would be the no bringing your way to simply coast to re election. Oh, I totally agree with you. Yeah, but it might be too late at this point. I agree with that. Girls. Before we leave, I just think one of the strangest parts of this as well is that a lot of people in the modern conservative movement seem to have forgotten that while we now know how this stuff ended up, the people who were engaged in it at the time did not. So you'll read these criticisms of a Reagan or a gain Rich or anyone who tempered their criticisms by saying America is a great place and worth saving. You'll read these strange assumptions that, well, it's different now because things are really bad, which, of course you know they were bad in nineteen eight two, a massive information high interest rates the Cold War. I just wonder how you think we can convey to Republican primary voters and many people who write in the same spaces that we do, that there's nothing new under the sun, and that you know, there's nothing unique about our era, and that it's just not that useful to say, well, it's different, because when it's not. Here's here's a useful trivia question. Does anyone know the very first senator to have endorsed Jimmy Carter for the presidency. It's a lot more obvious than you think. Yeah, it couldn't mean there are any there's no American politicians that are around anymore. They'd all be so incredibly old. It's Joe Biden. Joe Biden. True. Wow. So and then Jimmy Carter once and wrote in his diary that he considered the Delaware senator his most effective supporter during the nineteen seventy six campaigns. So to your point that has anyone actually lived through this and do they know the truth. Yeah, the guy in the Oval office does live through everything. He's lived through everything. But I think I think you know the answer. We've got to have some We got to have some Republican candidates who are making that case and reminding people. And that's part of the optimism, right, Like we have met challenges before. Uh, we're actually smarter now than we were back in the nineteen seventies. Um, you know, remember Milton Freeman. He was making a few kind of you know marks on the on the steam back then. But people, most elective politicians just slavishly followed Kane. See in economics. You know, we know better now, So we got to have some people that maybe aren't talking about Kenzie and economics. That would not be great politics, But we just need some politicians. So we're saying we know what works, we know how to make it better, and here's how we get back on the right path. I'd be great if the first British politician to endorse Carter had been Neil Kinnock. Full circle, it was way too conservative for Neil Kenny. I look forward to your next book, which goes into the seventies again, because I want to know exactly why if we're repeating the seventies, we're not getting the same sort of musical alternative that we did back then, when all of a sudden people put on thrift our jackets and skinny ties and picked up guitars and made a lot of glorious racket that undermined all of the California soft rock stuff. We've been living with all of our lives. We need punk rock to save us from from the Biden years. Stay tuned the Biden malaise, how America bounces back from Joe Biden's dismal Repeat the Jimmy Carter Years. It's been a pleasure. 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Last time I saw him the IRL was it a Ricoche meet up in New Orleans, which is a lot of fun, which I hope becomes a regular event because I never need an excuse to go to New Orleans. We have two more meetups coming up for the summer, and then after that we have an autumn schedule. There's a German FESTI meeting in Milwaukee, and a couple weeks July twenty eight or the thirtieth, that's the weekend, and then in Cookeville, Tennessee, Labor Day weekend that's upteen through four. If you're a member of Ricochet, just show up. And if you are not a member of Ricochet, just join and show up. And if you are a member or not a member and you want to go to one of these meetups and meet ups that are scheduled reader the wrong time or the wrong place, you become a member. You put the sign on the member feed saying hey, how about a meetup here and at this time, And I guarantee you people will show up because that's what Ricochet members do. So we would love to see you at one of these. It's like putting a pineapple on your door in a cruise ship without all the polyamory. Of course, we would like to see you at one of these. So join Ricochet and we'll see you at the minute, great grant, all right, a couple of things on the way out. Have you guys heard I alluded to this about future president Gavin Newsom. I really fear that's going to be case. They'll find a way to slide Biden out the stage Newsom will step in. Who will be as deep as the only question. It won't be Kamala Harris, right. I want to watch this fight, James, Do you want to watch the fight between Gammel Harris and somebody else? Or well? I do, because the Democratic Party is obsessed with identities, is its main motivating idea at the moment. And I have been told for years how inspiring it is that Kamala Harris is the vice president, and I want to know why it is inspiring for her to be vice president but not president. I just want to hear someone make that argument. I cannot wait until they are obliged to do it with a straight face and tell me why all those little girls out there can look up at the Naval Observatory and say that could be me. But when it comes to the White House too much, m oh, the delicious joy you're going to have in that and and I share it. So I don't know who it's going to be. I think I don't know Amy Klobushar. I'm always throwing Amy Aby Colombus Shar into the presidential b ring here because we've been had We've had this, We've had m problem before. I mean politically in America we had at nineteen two because there were a lot of people who felt that the vice president at the time was former Indiana Senator Dan quaile M was you know, not up for the job and certainly couldn't be president the United States. And so there's a lot of talk about it could way to get Quail off the ticket with their way to get Quail off, so he wasn't going to run for a reelect um with George HLW. Bush. And it seems to me like, well, first of all, that didn't happen, but all seems to me like the Democrats, but just they're in the same position kind of. They they have a VP that is generally accept fairly or unfairly. I think in dan Quail position was unfairly. I think he actually he was a smart guy. He was maybe a little awkward on screen, but he was not He was no lightweight. He's a smart man. Um and uh and could put two and two together and could Frank had a coherent worldview that he could articulate. Uh. And Kamala Harris is sort of like the Dan Quail without the brains and um. It just seems like that this should be this shouldn't there's a template for this already. But as Charlie pointed out, there's everything is so fraud with them. They can't make a move without like checking it nine times with their you know, the head of their di or whatever it is that the hrs are that the rules the Democrat world. Um, They're gonna be stuck with her. There's no way to get rid of her, Um, unless you can trade her out for somebody who is even more inspiring quote unquote, which I'm not sure there is anybody more inspiring Rachel Levine. Um, okay, yeah, okay, but I mean, really, trans representation at the presidential election is something I think that Democrats are very concerned about down the road. This story, anyway, briefly sort of tangentially relates to that. It's in the Daily Caller today and I've been checking all the links to find out if it's true, and it's actually kind of weird. California Governor Gavin Knewsom fine Temecular School District one point five million dollars after it rejected a proposed curriculum from the Governor's office for it it's LGBT content. The school board voted to reject a curriculum that included a social studies book that referenced Harvey Milk. Opponents are reportedly concerned about an alleged relationship Milk had with a teenager while in his thirties. According to a CBS news it's more than that. It's I don't think they just saw Harvey Milk's name in there and said no, we can't do this. They were handed this curriculm, they they decided not to do it, which would seem to be within their rights as a local school board, but of course that's not the case. Newsom said in a press release. If the school board won't do its job by its next board meeting to ensure kids start the school year with basic materials, and apparently that this qualifies now, the state will deliver the book into the hands of children's and their parents and will send the district the bill and find them for violating state law one point five million dollars. So we're going to take one point five million dollars out of their school system to find them to punish them. We're going to put the books directly into the hands of the parents. Against what people seem to want to have happened. And why because a the governor says that they cannot ban books, Well, they haven't banned a book. Declining to include a book in the library is not banning a book. It's not tossing it on the pyre. But secondly, and this maybe which fascinated me the most about the story, is that he was saying that if they don't do this and the school board is allowed to have the curriculum that they want, in this respect, they'll be using an outdated textbook from seventeen years ago. And this has stated like we're all supposed to rear back and horror, Wait a minute, they're using textbooks from two thousand and six. This goes back to what Charles was saying earlier about, you know how they didn't know what they were doing, and they didn't how it was going to turn out in nineteen eighty. But now we're doing how Rob was saying about how kids know from ten years ago what things were like. That's true, except kind of. We had a great resetter on twenty twenty. The etch A sketch got turned upside down in a lot of people's minds, and everything on the other side of that wall is pre Enlightenment everything post twenty, which set up a whole structures of lockdown and compliance and sudden efflorescence of a whole variety of new ideas that were flowing into the cracks of the Sundard society. Twenty twenty is kind of like your year zero, and that Newsom would say that two thousand and six they're teaching things from two thousands extraordinary? Do we have time for me to likely disagree with you, James So on the merits, I agree with everything you've just said. It is preposterous for Newsome and the California state legislature to take this position. I think what bothers me about this, though, is the completely different way in which the same people are treating this happening in California compared to Florida. So I think it's a really good thing that parents can decide what's in the curriculum. I like it when school boards are empowered. But education is a state question, and schools and counties and school boards are all determined and created and funded by the state legislature. So if the state legislature also wants to get involved in the curriculum, that's okay. I've not objected when Florida has said we will allow or prevent these things being in the curriculum. Everything else is up to parents, and I wouldn't in California either. What bothers me is that Florida made its decisions based on what Florida voters wanted and what school boards in Florida wanted, and then the state of Florida enforced those rules. So when it came to masks, there were some schools that were threatened with fines. When it came to the curriculum, there are schools that have been you know, we have received a phone call from the Department of Education. If you're going to have these rules, you have to enforce them, right, And I just find it incredibly annoying that the same people in the press took the view in Florida, how dare fascist Hitler look alike Ron de Santiss tell schools what they can teach? And in California it's how dare parents think that they can defy the governor? No, you're absolutely that makes me crazy. Just pick one. You're correct. And while the state can set the curriculum for this, I think that one of the things from what I'm looking at this a little deeper than the school board was objecting to was some of the material, which is again it's very odd. I don't know why they want to die on this hill. They're always insisting about the banning of books and the stamping out anything that says gay, when people are objecting to a very specific set of graphic novels and instructural manuals that do not seem to be necessary to make fourth grades aware of the rich panoply of human life, and it wasn't for fourth grade. I believe that the Harvey Milk thing was doing. So. I think it's possible that the state can set guidelines and the localities that can then find a community way of of of of fulfilling those guidelines. As I suspect we'll have seeing in the Michigan where you have your police like Hamtrack, which are not exactly going to want to do the same things as some other really progressive places. So I think you should have a lot of leeway there for people to be able to do what they need to do. Otherwise, You're right about the dichotomy and the hypocrisy. It's absolutely so. All it takes is for somebody to point these things out though, and pull a Marjorie you know, do a Marjorie Green and hold up a picture of this in front of the amor like she did with Joe Biden, who we haven't talked about this time at all. So I should shut up about this and then briefly say we've got five minutes Biden whistleblowers. I was overwhelmed by the way the papers didn't really seem to cover it an awful lot. I don't think this seemed to be page one, was it did? I just not look at the right newspapers. This is so depressing, and it's actually yielding a profound fear in me, James, that we are going to whether it's with this president or another Democratic president, lived through a period in which there is an actual scandal in the White House, a scandal of Watergate level proportions or more, and the press is going to cover it up or fail to cover it. I just I cannot see. I cannot see the argument for not covering a congressional hearing in which irs whistleblowers accused used the Department of Justice of undercharging the son of the President of the United States. You don't have to endorse it. You don't have to draw conclusions that are unsupported by the materials. But not to cover it is a lobbing democratic gay whistleblowers, which which you would think would guarantee some sort of I mean, when they heard that that was the actual identity of one of the people, there must have been a win. So it's like it would be harder than usual to cover it. Bad will just not do it? Rob, What do you think? I mean, you know who was it you said? I think was Norm Chomsky actually said if you really want to the one of the wise things he said was, do you really want to know what's going on? You have to read the New York Times backwards. You have to the you're a refrom the bottom the last paragraph in stories, or the last two or three are usually the ones that contain the juicy information. Um. Yeah, I mean what's obvious here is that it is that the same words which are usually the heroic words whistleblower. I mean, if you look in the history of the New York Times or the you know, just the big media outlets, and in search for the word whistleblower, it will always be positive. True until two weeks ago, and that pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the story, right, which is that suddenly it really depends on who you're blowing the whistle on, who's blowing the whistle, who's got the whistles of their lips, etc. And I also feel like we have been incredibly casual as a country, certainly as a press and as a you know, as law enforcement. I guess it would say since Obama another president who is very popular with that group, and the use of the IRS to go after your political elements, which is which is statistically the only argument for what Obama did, what Obama's i RS did with conservative or conservative leaning nonprofits and individuals who are suddenly audited ninety wearing a tan suit while he did it, because that's the only scandal he had something like that, right. Um. And one of the things we learned, one of the things that the use of the reforms that came out of the nasty seventies we were just talking about post post Nixon, uh, and the use of Nixon as like the general boogeyman for a lot of people was very helpful, I think, for for American politics and cleaning it up because a lot of things that you know, the sainted John of Kennedy did, and first Lyndon Johnson did, and probably presence before that did, um Pison did too. But when they could pin it on Nixon, they could then make it illegal, which is I think very very helpful, but it just does just shows you that even these sort of like um pompous declarations of clean government we got from the left, even those will fall for any kind of partisan game. Um and the argument I always say the same thing about the press. The press US is not liberal, they are pro democratic. They are partisan. And that's there's a difference, because a liberal press would be liberal, but would say, hey, you're not allowed to you're not allowed to play around with the irs, you're not allowed to to look the other influenced pedalan you're not allowed to do any of that. Those people go to jail, even if they are ideologically aligned with us. UM. And that that I think this is this is purely what this is. This is simply partisan cover for a partisan president that the partisans and the press want in the White House. And and because there's Trump on the other side, they can They now don't even feel guilty about it. They don't even feel like they have to hide it. They're saving our democracy, They're keeping us from falling into the black hands. I mean, that's that's it, isn't it. That's the argument is that Trump is such a threat that anything that they investigate that could potentially lead to a bad outcome for Biden and help Trump, it must be ignored because the alternatives was the other side of the other, and the other aspect of that is climate change, global warming and the rest of it. There's no both sciencism here. If the planet is dying and we're in peril of losing everything, and we must act now to adjust the temperature by point one degree, then the efforts of journalism must be brought to make this good thing happen. I mean, that's a great thing. It commenced themselves that they have the outcome of what of their stacking the deck and not being fair and throwing objectivity out the window. Never had. But at least the pretense of it is that the end result of that is a better society run by the right people and sustainable whatever that means. So yeah, so let's have the La times. I think this week's was saying, you know what, blackouts might actually be good for the planet because if we have blackouts, we have fewer emissions and that might actually help. And it was like the person on Twitter who was complaining. If you want to know anything about socialists on the Internet, it's that somebody had a big, long Twitter thread complaining about bananas and the fact that you can get a banana in January in a seven to eleven in the middle of North America is proof of the racist, genocidal night marriage, misallocation of resources that we have in the world, and with everything else, everything that they want to do makes your life worse. Your air conditioning gets shut off, your power gets lost. You yes, we have no bananas could actually be the democratic platform going forth into the future. And with that we're going to end. But if you have the kind of weekend that you're thinking about having, you might want to look into zbiotics zbiotics dot com. We thank them for sponsoring and of course Bowl and Branch when you do finally hit the hay at the end of the night, racktime, Bowl and Branch, there's just none better. Support them for supporting us, and join Ricochet today. Why don't you go there check it out? What you're not going to find is the member feed, because you got to be a member to see the member feed. But that's where the community really forms and grows, and the conversations are just all over the map, all over the board. I love it there. I'm gonna go there after this. Take a minute if you would to a five star review. No, that's wrong, that's wrong. Shouldn't take you a minute, should take you about twenty seconds, type fast. But give us those five stars of reviews. Help new listeners find the show, and it surfaces the show, and then more people come to Ricochet, and we are self perpetuating and incredibly profitable and here to tell you what to do in the twenty twenty eight election if we should live that long. Charlie Rob it's been a pleasure, and thanks to everyone for listening, and we'll see you all in the comments at Ricochet. Four point of four point zero suggesting five entering beta testing, which you would call beta testing on Wednesday. Put the results in the boot and courts of Melted Element beat it testing. It's like something that Michael Keaton would say in a movie three times and come to life anyway, Thank you great beta testing. It is by all right. Thanks guys Ricochet join the conversation.