Speaker 1: Yeah, oh, I missed it. You know. It's one thing
I do keep up with closely, Charlie is your Twitter game,
which is one of the top five percent in the world.
But I think, ask not what your country can do
for you, ask what you can do for your country.
Mister Garbachoff, Tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast
with Steve Hayward along with Charles C. W. Cook breaking
it all down with our special guests Scott Jennings, author
of a Revolution of common Sense, So Let's have ourselves
a podcast in which she's quoted as referring to you
as excuse me and again not my words, sir, but
a conspiracy theorist of a decade.
Speaker 2: As like I'll trust I'll trust what you said. I
haven't looked at the article. I of course have heard
about it, but conspiracy theorists sometimes I am a conspiracy theorist,
but I only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true.
Speaker 1: Welcome everybody to the Ricochet Podcast, number seven hundred and
sixty nine. I'm Steve Hayward out in California along with
Charles C. W. Cook in Florida. James is indisposed overseas
a lot to get to this week as always, but Charles,
since I have the host parrogative this week, I've been
curious for a long time, and I'm sure some listeners
are too. What does c W stand for in the
middle of your name?
Speaker 2: It's Christopher William Charles, not real concealed weapon.
Speaker 1: Oh, I think that's what we're spreading around though. That's
a good one, right, right, I mean it's I think,
as you know, it's slightly unusual for Americans to have
two middle names.
Speaker 2: Although my way i've been you know why I write
with it? Maybe I've told you because I had repeated yes,
because of Charlie Kirk the post. Yeah right, it's getting
my hate mouth, so I thought it was only fair
to distinguish myself from the right.
Speaker 1: And Yeah, although the names are the same, you're pretty
different people, both in appearance bearing views what you write it.
But you know you can see how it happens. There
is actually a Canadian born novelist named Stephen Hayward, exact
same spelling as mine. I don't think he's very political.
I haven't read any of his novels, but he happened
to be down at I think he's still teaching at
Colorado College in Colorado Springs, and he was there. It
was that year that I came to the University of
Colorado at Boulder, and we would get confused once in
a while, which I thought was the poor man, because
I was the controversial one and he's just teaching English literature. Yes,
when I used to write a lot of cover stories
for the Weekly Standard, I would get fan mail saying,
what of a great article? And my wife loves you
because she says you're the cute one on Fox News.
And then we have gotten each other's email a couple
of times when people have both of them, and including
one day my wife missus twenty years ago when our
kids were small and we were both working in downtown Washington,
and my wife sends out an email saying, Hey, can
you pick up the kids from preschool? But she sent
it to Steve Hayes.
Speaker 2: Did he do it?
Speaker 1: No? He wrote back and said, happy to, but you
want to check with your husband first. So we've had
fun with that over the years. Yeah, that does happen.
So all right, gosh, it's on that happy note, which
I wish we could continue. What a what a horrible week?
I mean, this shooting in Australia, this Brown University shooting
which apparently involves also apparently it's now i think confirmed,
the same person shot the scientist at MIT, making this
quite different from your normal campus mass shooting event. So
it was still a lot to learn about that, and
then the terrible Rob Ryer story. But I think let's
maybe spend a minute or two on Australia. You know,
the Muslim angle, of course is well known and well
talked about. But Charlie, especially with you being the Second
Amendment advocate, liberals are being notably silent on the fact that,
as they've been telling us for twenty years, there are
no guns in Australia. How could this possibly happen?
Speaker 2: Take it away, Well, there are guns in Australia. There
are four million or so guns, and there are more
guns now than there were twenty five years ago when
the last vestiges of the reforms of nineteen ninety six
went into force. What Australia did in the nineteen nineties
after the Port Arthur massacre was past. All of the
gun control provisions that American gun controllers would like here,
including confiscation and the melting down of guns and bands
on most modern weapons, but there are still guns in Australia.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: I'm of the view that thenineteen ninety six law didn't
do a great deal. I think it may have very
slightly reduced the suicide rate. Suicide rates are tricky and
nevertheless interesting, because you will find nations where there are
no guns really at all. South Korea and Japan have
much higher suicide rates than say the United States, because
we get substitution effects. But I think in Australia it
may be fair to say that their suicide rate was
slightly diminished out last thing on that I don't think,
and this is the American in me. I don't think
that you should pass gun control laws to protect people
from themselves. Maybe that makes me a libertarian, but I
think the case is much stronger, although I'm against it,
when you're arguing that you should protect people against others. Anyhow,
Australia did that in nineteen ninety six. I don't think
it did very much. What did did not do, clearly
was make it impossible to stage a massacre because you
can't stop this. You can't stop it with guns, in
my view, but really you can't stop it at all.
And if you look around the world, when people who
wish to harm large numbers of innocent people cannot get
hold of guns, which they usually can. There are mass
shootings in Sweden and Germany and France and the Netherlands
and so forth. But when they can't get hold of firearms,
they get hold of cars or trucks or knives or bombs.
And I'm something of a fatalist on this, and so
I don't turn this answer into a two hour disquisition.
Let me put it like this. My view, basically, Steve,
is that it is possible, with good policing and a
lot of thought and effort and sometimes money, to reduce
daily crime. I think we've learned this around the country
over the years. If you know where the crime is committed,
if you know who's committing it and why, then you
can reduce it. I don't think it is easy to
reduce mass killings mass shootings. Once the guns are in
a country, somebody who wants to do a lot of
harm at a random point that could never be predicted
is most likely going to be able to do it.
And as such, the fact that Australia has responded to
this by saying, well, now will gun control even harder
is to me ridiculous and an application of responsibility. And
if you look at the one big thing that they're
trying to do, which many gun controllers in America would
like to do as well, it's reduced the number of
guns each person or household is allowed to own. But
what's that going to do? I only have two hands, Yeah,
I mean, I'm not being facetious. If you are not
of my view, if you don't have the Second Amendment,
if you don't have an American conception of individual rights,
what's that supposed to do. These guys needed one gun each.
They did have more, but I think they had a couple.
They wouldn't have cared about that law, and they wanted
to kill Jewish people on Hanika. That the idea that
you're going to stop this by slightly tweaking and already
draconian set of laws is preposterous. So I think this
is a great example of the limitations of gun control
and the magical thinking that always goes into the claim
that if we just tweaked it a little bit more,
then we could stop this, or that you can't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And the fact that normally you would have expected
this kind of shooting to have been at a mosque
or some Jewish community center or something. The fact that
it was done out of Bondi Beach, which I've visited
many decades ago, is I think, you know, unexpected, you're
not going to police everywhere. The other thing, just briefly
about suicide rates. That long story while I'll skip over it,
but maybe fifteen twenty years ago, I was trying to
do a deep dive into American suicide rates by method
and so forth, and what I discovered was, are the
quality of our suicide statistics are very poor For a
simple reason. A lot of times suicide invalidates certain life
insurance contracts, so you want to not have that be
listed as the cause of death on a death certificate
or a corner's report. Other times there's families who want
to not have an acknowledge that somebody has overdosed deliberately.
And whereas a gun suicide that you can't I mean,
maybe you could call it accidental, but I think when
the police and corner investigate, they can't fudge that too far.
And so our statistics are skewed and incomplete. And but
in the case of where like Australia. Our gun suicides
are harder, going to be harder to disguise or classify
something else than maybe the statistical difference is significant and measurable.
I don't know the other. Uh. I don't want to
make a shooting comparison. But Susie Wiles shot herself on
the foot this week, or so we're told with her
Vanity Fair interview where she made all these comments about
Trump has a alcoholic personality. Russ VOIGHTDT is a right
wing zealot Dvance believe in conspiracy theories and so forth,
and they're all saying it's taken out of context. I
have some theories about how this happened. Actually it's not
a theory. I'm surprised that someone as shrewd and effective
as Susie Wiles would have thought she would be treated
fairly by Vanity Fair. And I mean I've been around
long enough to know and to study this also that
what I call ventriloquist journalism runs rampant right and it's
the social skill. I mean, these elite media reporters Eric
Wemple in this case, But sixty minutes is the best
example I know. A couple of people have been on
sixty minutes, and Mike Wallace took him to the cleaners.
And they say, the way he does it is you
get relaxed with him. He makes you think he's your
best buddy, and then you start saying things you shouldn't say.
And there have been so many examples us over the years,
going back to in my recollection David Stockman in nineteen
eighty one to The Atlantic, to a very left wing
reporter named William Grider, who took things out of context,
got Stockman to drop his guard and say embarrassing things
about Reaganomics, and why else appears to have done the
same thing. And I'm just astounded that an administration who,
more than any other is self conscious that the major
media is their enemy, would have fallen under this trap.
Speaker 2: That's exactly my takeaway. I do think some of the
things she said are impossible to imagine in context being
any better than they were out of context. And for example,
saying that Elon Muskus a ketamine addict, unless she said
and that's a good thing at the end, then you
do wonder. But I can see some of it. What
shocks me, like you, is that she thought that the
inflammatory parts of what she was saying, We're not going
to be lifted out and either printed in isolation or
at least emblazoned on the front cover. And I say
that because Susie was is actually a fixture of where
I live, Jacksonville. She moved to Jacksonville in the eighties
and she's run a bunch of businesses here. Some of
them were PR firms. One of them she ran with
Tony Biselli, who was Jacksonville Jaguars Hall of Famer, played
in the NFL for eight or nine seasons. So I
am aware how solid her reputation is and how many
times she's been around the block. She's not twenty five.
So when I saw this and then the inevitable tweet
that said, well this is outrageous media bias and I
was taken out of context, I wanted the same, How
could this possibly have happened? I will say that I
think she might get away with it because I think
Trump will recognize the instinct. The only thing she said
about Trump was that he has the personality of an alcoholic,
which is something that Trump has set himself on stage
over and over again. And he has a very funny
line about this where he says, can you imagine what
I'd be like if I drank so because he didn't
go after him, sorry, because she didn't go after him,
and because she behaved in the way he does, which
is just to let it all out. I wonder if
he will actually recognize the mode and say, all right,
it's fine.
Speaker 1: Well I think he did. I mean I caught secondhand
or a little clip of him saying, oh, yeah, that's
an accurate description. And then Jade Vance. I thought it
was also very clever he said, well, I believe conspiracy
theories that are true. That he rattled off three or
four and so sort of. And the calmness of the
White House reaction I think is kind of curious. I'm
reluctant to go as far as the saying I wonder
not that this is on purpose, but they knew it
was coming. He decided reacting calmly was better than going
off with a tantrum. The other thing I wonder, though,
is I mean, I don't know how much intrigued there is.
Unlike Trump one, nobody has been dismissed yet or fired
or moved around. And I think Trump has screened more
carefully for loyalty that's a plus the minus, of course.
On the other hand, I don't know if you caught this.
Maybe three weeks ago, there was a very our story
about Cash Patel in the New York Post by Carol Markowitz,
who's otherwise a very pro Trump columnist and knowing nothing
and not having any inside information. I did wonder, I
wonder if that's a planted story. You know, you're hearing
a lot of stuff, a lot of criticism of Patel
from other Republicans and people in Washington, and Dan Bongino
this week announced that he's leaving as the number two
person at the FBI. I wonder if the Markowitz story
was planted, and whether some of what Susie Wilds was
saying to the reporter is also playing the Washington game
of getting some damaging stories circulating in the press to
ease some people out. I don't know if that's just
pure speculation on my part, but that's interesting.
Speaker 2: I mean, if one assumes that Trump is unhappy with
Pam Bondy, which probably should be, that was the yeah,
guess criticism that she could have leveled. She essentially said, look,
she blew this big task. There's no getting around that. Again,
that's not taking out of context. That's an attack. So
perhaps you're right either way. I think there was some
damage done there. I don't think the whole thing was
a setup. I don't think this is all seventy two
d chests. So I'm surprised that it happened.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it seemed surprised me. That's right, because she seems,
for one thing, she doesn't do interviews, she doesn't go
onto Sunday talk shows like most chiefs of staff do,
and seems to run a pretty tight ship there except
for here's an exit question. We'll get out quickly here.
But so you know, Trump had that really appalling tweet
about Rob Reiner. One thing I've noticed about Trump's tweets. Oh,
by the way, you know, the deal has been as
we've heard, I'm happy with mean tweets if I get
three dollars gallon gasoline, okay, But this ABU is the privilege.
But one thing about his tweets so far in Trump
two is that there's still very much in character as
we know in but they seem to be proof read.
I'll put it that way right now.
Speaker 3: He dictates is that it okay seeing the video of him,
I think it was from election night where he sits
and there's a young lady in this video and he
dictates it and then he says, read it back to me,
and then he says.
Speaker 1: Send, I didn't know that. Actually, Well that explains a lot,
but they seem a little different than Trump one, where
you know, we haven't had kofifi yet, which my favorite. Right, Okay,
well we'll leave that for now, and let's take a
quick break for some sponsor messages, and then we will
come back with our special guests. And now we welcome
to the podcast. Scott Jennings the senior political correspondent for CNN,
America's favorite pundit, as a lot of people say of him.
He's been a long time political consultant, a lecture at
Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and just announced the week
the replacement on Salem Radio on weekdays for Charlie Kirk's
old radio spot. He's also the author and the book
We Want to Talk About Today, A Revolution of Common Sense,
How Donald Trump stormed Washington and fought for Western civilization.
Speaker 4: Scott, welcome. It's a real pleasure to have you join us.
Thank you, and good to be with you all. Honored
by the invitation. I'm a regular listener, longtime listener, first
time caller.
Speaker 1: As they so, revolution of common sense, and you know,
I've read enough to know and listened to you enough
to know that you point out that Trump differs from
the usual even conservative politician in Washington. He doesn't use
the normal Beltway vocabulary. He's the major figure at The
other person who's like this to some extent was Ronald Reagan,
but Trump even more so. So you know, he won't
call them undocumented immigrants or undocumented aliens, right, which is
the politically correct term. They've been forced down on float
for thirty years, and it's not accurate, right. You know,
he ridicules paper straws, you know, a man in women's bathrooms,
a so forth and so. Anyway, So when did you
first pick up on that? I know that you've confessed
to being sort of a late convert to Trump, or
maybe medium convert to Trump, But when did you first
pick up on the fact that that common sense turned
out to be Trump's superpower?
Speaker 4: Well, I was thinking about writing a book after the election.
Speaker 5: I'd never written one before.
Speaker 4: But I was sitting on the set at CNN on
inauguration day and Trump uses this phrase a revolution of
common sense and his inaugural address, and I turned to
Van Jones and I said, that'll make a great book title.
And a couple of weeks went by and I thought about,
how would I do this, and I went to pitch
him on it in the Oval office in early February.
But it really all started with hearing him phrase his
own political branding that way. Later in the book, I
go to Michigan with him on his one hundredth day
in office, and he says to the crowd in Warren, Michigan,
whether you're right or your left, or whatever the hell
you are.
Speaker 5: It's just common sense.
Speaker 4: And so my interactions with him, my observations with him,
is that that's how he thinks of himself. I asked
him once, actually, do you consider yourself more of a
conservative or more of a common sense person? And he said, well,
most of the time conservative is common sense. But he
left himself a little wiggle room, you know, But that's
how he portrays it. I told him, I thought one
hundred of the usual suspects would come along and write
books crapping on him for the first one hundred days.
What he intended to do, and then somebody who has
voted for you three times, likes you and wants you
to succeed, ought to get a crack at it, and
he eventually agreed.
Speaker 1: And here's the book. Yeah, so you're from western Kentucky.
I think that's interesting because while all the political commentators
have tended to look at how Trump broke the blue
Wall states in twenty sixteen and again in twenty twenty four,
you know, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and so forth, but a
few astute people I know said, you know, the really
interesting state to look at for Trump is Kentucky. Not
because it was a state that flipped, but maybe you
know Elliott County, which I think is out in eastern Kentucky.
It is so Elliott County is a sign a political scientist,
so I know these weird things. Elliott County has been
deep Democrat forever. It did not even vote for Ronald
Reagan in the nineteen eighty four landslide election. Year it
went heavily for Barack Obama twice, and then in twenty
sixteen it went heavily for Donald Trump. That tells you
something about Trump Democrats. We used to talk about Reagan Democrats,
but the Trump Democrats story in places like Elliott County, Kentucky,
and I think elsewhere you mentioned your own father is
an old Clinton loving Democrat who came around to Trump.
So I mean, isn't your state your home state, in
some ways the most emblematic state for what Trump did.
Speaker 4: Yes, I mean we had been trending somewhat read since
the Obama years, but Trump put it on blast. In fact,
Kentucky was the last state that had a Democrat at
state legislature in the South until twenty sixteen, the night
Trump was elected, we finally flipped the state House in Kentucky.
We'd had the Senate for a number of years, and
so it had been somewhat resistant to the movement towards
the Republican Party in the way that the rest of
the South had moved, particularly at the local level. And
we still have a Democratic governor today, although I think
that's going to change in twenty twenty seven. But yes,
there are a lot of people in Kentucky, in east
and West who had been a career and lifelong Democrats.
Their parents and grandparents were Democrats who referenced my father,
Jeff Jennings from Dawson Springs, Kentucky.
Speaker 5: Where I grew up.
Speaker 4: I mean, these are the biggest Clinton people I knew
when I was growing up. They were in unions, they
loved Bill Clinton. They were Democrats. My grandfather was a
New Deal Democrat. I was a recial Republican from the
time I was eighteen. I came of age during the
gingrich Republican Revolution of the nineties, and so I felt
kindly towards that and it always appealed to me. But
you know, I grew up around all these Democrats. But
my dad was the first guy to tell me Donald
Trump was going to be the next president. And I,
of course, as a trained political operative, told him he
was full of crap. But it was not the first
time in my life that my father was right and
I was wrong. It sure it won't be the last,
but you know, eventually, throughout the course of writing the book,
the President gave me his hat and signed it for
my dad, acknowledging that he, in fact, was the first
Trump supporter in western Kentucky.
Speaker 1: So I want to ask you one more question before
I turned you over to Charlie Cook, and it's how
you do your show prep for CNN. And but the
reason I ask it that way is every time I
see you or see the clips that get circulated on
social media, you're landing a knockout blow. I mean, if
this surprise fight, you be landing a knockout blow in
every single round. And so I'm wondering, first two part question,
what show prep do you do to be so good
at it? Maybe you're just a natural like Rocky Balboa.
But also at the same time, how do you keep
your equanimity? You're bearing, you never lose your temper, you
never lose your cool. You're always calm, and I think
that adds forced to when you lay a knockout blow
on somebody. I mean, do you do breathing exercises? Are
you taking some kind of experimental zen drugs? Tell me
how you go about your role on CNN? Sure?
Speaker 5: Well thanks.
Speaker 4: First of all, I think the debating show has been
a great thing for CNN. They used to have debates
and then they went away from it, and now it's
like the only show like it on TV. I think
the country is hungry for debates. I think they want debates.
Everywhere I go, I hear two things. I love you
and I love the debates. I don't care for you,
but I love the debates. The commonality is the debate,
so it's a good thing. I ingest a huge amount
of information all day every day. I'm reading virtually every
mainstream source. I'm reading a lot of conservative sources. I'm
reading a lot of independent sources. I'm watching things happening
in real time. I spend a huge amount of time
on the phone with policymakers. If I don't understand something,
I'll pick up the phone and call the people involved
and have them walk me through it. I'm also ingesting
a lot of things on the left to try to
predict what vectors they're going to take in the evening.
Thing I've learned about the left is that they're very
authoritarian in their communications. Once the argument vectors go out,
once the debating points go out, they all tend to
adhere to it. So if I can learn what that
is during the day, I'm pretty sure I'm going to
hear it at night. And what you see out there
is really authentic. I don't have a script. There's nothing
on the teleprompter for me. I don't know what Abby
is going to say. I don't know what clips she's
going to play. So what you're getting is my ingesting
and analyzing the news all day and an authentic reaction
to what I'm hearing. You know, sometimes I hear crazy things.
A lot of nights I hear crazy things. But what
you're getting my authentic reaction and I and just to
address the issue of how do you stay calm, Preparation
breeds confidence, And if I've learned anything from Ronald Reagan,
it is that we will win more arguments by being
happy warriors than by being angry. And virtually everyone I'm
debating against is in a constant state of being in rage,
which I still don't understand why they're so enraged about
being America, but they are and I'm not, and I'm
happy to be here.
Speaker 2: Hi, Scott Charles Cook care. So the book is about
Trump fighting for Western civilization as much as common sense.
What does that mean? And why did it take him?
What was happening before?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 4: I put that in the title because over the course
of the election and over the course of writing the book,
it sort of really hit home for me that we're
not fighting about day to day politics anymore. We're not
arguing about you know, marginal tax rates and this and that,
and we are, but there's something bigger going on, the
cultural attacks on our Judeo Christian heritage, the mass migration
crisis that's going on that has overrun Europe and threatens
to overrun the United States.
Speaker 5: And so I just I started to see.
Speaker 4: Politics through a much larger lens than just Okay, we'll
be in and then they'll be in, and we'll be
in and they'll be in.
Speaker 5: There's something bigger going on in the world.
Speaker 4: And when I interviewed Elon Musk about this for the book,
he he laid out his views. That's why he got
involved in politics. For Trump, he thought something larger was
at play. He thinks our fiscal situation, the devaluation of
our currency, the mass migration crisis, the low birth rate crisis,
and he thinks all of this is conspiring to threaten
America but threaten the future of the West. And so
for Trump, I don't know whether he knew he was
signing up for it or not, but whether he likes
it or not, he is on the wall of defending
the West against a lot of crazy things, and whether
it's very real things like October the seventh, which I
think has been the Central front, military front and the
fight for the West over the last couple of years,
or cultural things like the transgender ideology or the climate
people or whatever. There's a lot of things out there
converging in a very aggressive way, and he is kind
of standing up to all of them at the same time.
And it's sort of the person who's willing to say
what we're all thinking. But a lot of people have
been afraid say when Democrats are in power, because they'll
come after you.
Speaker 5: And so for a lot of reasons, we had to
have him back.
Speaker 4: If Kamala Harrison won the election, all of these fights
would be lost, all of the wrong.
Speaker 5: People would be encouraged.
Speaker 4: We wouldn't be able to tell the difference between right
and wrong, and civilization and barbarism. And I think Trump
for right now is our best bet in the fight
for the West. We'll have another election in twenty eight
and hopefully the next people that come along and see
it the way he does.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I want to ask you about that. I
want to ask you what you think happens next. Obviously,
there's been a great deal of debate on the right
in conservatism, in the Republican Party about Trump. I am
critical of him in many ways. There's a lot of
things he does and thinks that I don't like, although
he also does a lot of things that I do like,
and I think much of his legacy will be positive.
When we talk about this at National Reviewer on the
Ricochet podcast, we often bring it into broader ideological fights
have obtained for years. But Trump also is Suey Gennaris.
Trump is a rock star. He has been for years.
It's one of the reasons he won the nomination. He's
extremely charismatic, he's quite funny. He's larger than life. Even
when he's being awful. He's interesting. I wonder how much
of the Trump phenomenon do you think is Trump and
how much is it a reflection of real changes in
the way that Republican voters and Americans generally started to
think ten years ago.
Speaker 4: Great question, and I should have said in my answer
about Shoprev. One of the first things I do every
day is see what Charles is saying about any particular issue,
because you and I don't always track, but like ninety
eight percent of the time I'm tracking, and so your
your takes and your insights on things are actually quite invaluable.
Thank you, although we've never met in person, and I
was wanted to do this because you're You're my hero,
I am, so I asked him about this once. I
asked Trump, who who is best prepared to carry on
your political coalition or your political movement? And he answered
me for about five minutes and didn't name a single
name because I think he knows that he's singular and
his personality, his charisma, the way he does it, his humor,
he's singular. Now, this is true of a lot of
two term presidents, and who replaced Obama? Nobody really who
replaced Bill Clinton? Nobody who replaced Reagan Bush wins the election,
but then as a one term president. So you know,
I don't think anybody can replace him in the way
he does it. So replicating it is impossible. But can
someone hold it together, add to it, build their own coalition,
bring new people in. Absolutely the biggest challenge for that
person is going to be how do you get people
who have only ever voted for Trump to vote for you?
When we haven't really fixed this in the Republican Party.
There's a lot of people who leave the ballot blank.
I mean, we left like four Senate races on the
table last year because they vote Trump and then they
leave the rest of it. That'll be true for any
other Republican that comes next, who I suspect will be jd.
Speaker 1: Vance.
Speaker 4: I don't have any reason to believe he won't be
the nominee, and he has pretty good ratings right now,
and if he and Marco.
Speaker 5: Rubio team up, that would be quite a formidable thing.
But it still doesn't quite.
Speaker 4: Solve the issue of these people who love Trump, who
only participate in politics for Trump. You know where do
they go? Do they come back at all? I mean,
let's be honest. They vote for Trump because they view
him as not a politician. He's an outsider, and they
elected him to smash political institutions and to smash the
politicians that they hate, to smash the media that they hate.
In order to keep them in. You would have to
portray that same kind of attitude. I don't know if
anybody else can do it. Because of the time that
Trump came along, he came along against the Clintons. I mean,
it may be too unique to ever expect anybody to
do it again.
Speaker 1: Can I put in here, Charlie with a sequel to
your last question, and it's I mean, that's always the
succession question is always crucial. You mentioned, you know, I'm
a student Reagan and you know up with him, and
never mind how Bush squandered Reagan's legacy. But one of
the marks of a transformative president is not so much
what they do to their own party and whether they
have a succession, but how they transform the other party.
So even Democrats and took them having to get beaten
by landslides three times to return to the middle. And
you may be familiar with this. There's a whole school
thought among progressives that Bill Clinton sold out to Reaganism.
And there's a certain way in which is that is true.
And so as you're watching Democrats right now, you can
see some smartmans like ruy to Cher who've had on
this podcast and others saying, boy, Democrats got to dump
all this identitarianism stuff. They need to embrace the abundance
agenda and be pro growth like John F. Kennedy. In
other words, Democrats have to get rid of a lot
of what cost him the election. Are you seeing any
signs of that? Instead? It's Trump arrangement syndrome all the
way down. With maybe the possible exception of your home
state's governor. So two part question, tell us if you
want about Kentucky's governor, if you think he is a
plausible threat to a Trump succession. And then more broadly,
do you see any signs or what should we watch
for to see how Trump was going to transform the
other party?
Speaker 4: The shifting coalitions of the two parties under Trump is fascinating.
I mean, all the Clinton Democrats from the nineties are
now Republicans. I mean, like my dad, I mean, and
we've adopted some of the economic theories is I know,
you know, And so they've come into the Republican party,
these working class democrats who liked protectionism, who thought the
state should be doing more. So they come in for
economic reasons and for cultural reason. They're not into the
transgender stuff. You know, they're not into DEI. And so
they just totally rejected the modern cultural and economic liberalism
and the attitude of.
Speaker 5: Liberals today because it's not what they grew up with.
I don't like it.
Speaker 4: And Trump was able to appeal to them and absorb
some of what they wanted to do.
Speaker 5: Will they ever go back? I don't know.
Speaker 4: I don't think they will, because my view is, answer
your question, the Democrats haven't learned anything. I mean, I
think they're doubling down on the lurch to the left,
particularly culturally. That cost them all these people in the
first place. And look where the energy is. Look who
they nominated for this house race in Tennessee the other day.
They found the craziest person they could find videos of
her on the internet, like running into the Texas Tennessee
Governor's office, screaming, being dragged out. This sort of performance,
radical liberalism, that's what they want. They had a guy
in Texas lined up to run for the Senate. Now
Jasmine Crockett's going to run him. I bet she wins.
They have Mondani in New York.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's.
Speaker 4: Pretty apparent that the energy in their party is with
the radicals, with the liberals, with the anti America crowd,
with the people who don't believe in Western civilization, frankly,
and that's.
Speaker 5: Who they're going to continue to nominate.
Speaker 4: It. Maybe what saves the Republicans in the midterms is
Democrats just can't bring themselves to nominate regular, normal, everyday
people like where they're headed. To answer your question about
Andy Basher. I've known him since I was sixteen, were
the exact same age, and I think.
Speaker 5: He's quite liberal.
Speaker 4: He's more liberal, certainly than he has led on to
the people of Kentucky. He has saved from his own
liberalism by the Republican legislature there. We have super majorities
in both chambers. They don't permit him to do anything crazy.
But deep down he's quite liberal. Does he have the
performative piece of it down?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 4: And I think that's where he probably will fall short
in this Democratic primary. If the party wants you to
be more performance based, more radically performative, Basher will have
a hard time replicating them.
Speaker 2: So if you advising the Democrats, who would you tell
them to pick and what two things would you tell
them to cut out to have a shot?
Speaker 4: Well, their most popular governor is probably Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania.
I mean, that's what the polling currently says, and he
tends to attract some moderate and even Republican support in Pennsylvan,
a state you have to win with a population that
if you can win over people there, you can see
the appeal of it in other swing states. He'll have
quite a problem because He's Jewish, and the Democratic Party
has decided that they hate Israel, and by and large
they're skeptical of the Jewish population in the United States.
So he's going to have a hard time. But somebody
like that is probably.
Speaker 1: Their best bet.
Speaker 4: The other way to go is do what the Republicans
did and just go totally to the outside. I mean,
after the twenty twelve election, which I worked in, the
party was so depressed and demoralized. It decided that there
isn't a single electric Republican in the country that we trust.
We're going to go find somebody else. And that would
be the other way for the Democrats to do. It
find a charismatic outsider who's a little bit ideologically flexible
and gives them that gives them the flexibility to keep.
Speaker 5: Some things throw things out.
Speaker 4: I'm not a politician, you know, I don't have to
adhere to these ideological guardrails. That might be the other
way to go. And they have plenty of celebrities to
choose from. If any of them are willing to get
in to it. I suspect they might have some room
to run in their primary. What would I get rid
of I would immediately get rid of the wrong side
of all these eighty twenty issues. Jettison the transgender stuff,
jettison the DEI stuff, jettison the condescending attitude towards men.
In the Quinnipiac poll this week, they have a fifteen
percent approval rating among men, fifteen They are down to friends, family,
health insurance executives, illegal aliens, and maybe some transgenders. And
that's what they're down to right now, eighteen percent overall,
fifteen percent among men. You can't win that way, and
I wouldn't advise them to keep going down this path.
Speaker 5: I mean, that's what they're doing now. But it's a
terrible dead end.
Speaker 2: And what about on the right, not who would we choose?
We've covered that, but do Republicans or does Trump himself
do things that you think should be walked back or
cut out completely lest it damage him ahead of the
midterms and the party in twenty twenty eight.
Speaker 4: Well, his communications attitude sometimes interrupts better stories that he'd
rather be telling. I mean, the Reiner comment this week
is a case in point. I don't think he should
have done that, and it took focus off of other
things he wanted to be talking about. For twenty four hours.
This happens over time. You're never going to get him
to stop. And that's who he is. And you know, look,
I voted for him three times. I've learned to accept
it for what it is and for who he is,
and it's part of his ethos. It's unnecessary I think
for winning in the future. From a policy perspective, the
next person, if it's Jade Vance, is going to have
to He'll be in an interesting position because he'll be
defending the Trump legacy and.
Speaker 5: All the good and whatever the voters think is good
or whatever they think is bad.
Speaker 4: But he'll also be trying to portray his own platform,
which I actually think is somewhat different than Trump. I
think he's got different views on foreign policy. I think
he's got different views in some ways on economics. And
so while defending one legacy and promoting your own agenda,
it's a tricky thing. But you know, my general view
is is that the next person should not try to
replicate Trump's attitude that sometimes interrupts, you know, what he
wants to be the message of the day. You shouldn't
think that you have to do that because it won't
be authentic to you and no one will think that
it is.
Speaker 5: And it'll get you off track.
Speaker 4: And so I think it's fine to let Trump do
it because that's who Trump is. But to try to
replicate that, or to think that you have to replicate.
Speaker 1: That in the future, would be a mistake.
Speaker 2: Steve.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I'm gonna go back to the question that
Charles asked you about, and it's in your title. One
of the things I find so unique about your book
is in contrast to all the other books, let me
put it that way. There's so many books out there,
a lot of them very good about how Trump has
captured the populace turn recognizing things that many Republicans didn't
recognize going on in the country, and lots of good
date about that and all the rest. But you've connected
it to common sense. But then the other side of
it is, I'm really glad you connected the question of
the survival of Western civilization. And here's the part I
still have a hard time trying to understand or convey
to people. I think you're absolutely right about that. I
think he is the champion of Western civilization, and the
fact that he's so popular overseas with other populist parties
other people in Europe. I was in Dublin, Ireland last
June when there was a massive protests from the populace
there against what's the Irish government governing miserably, especially on
the immigration question. And I took lots of pictures of
all people carrying God blessed Donald Trump signs in Dublin, Ireland, right,
And we know that in the continent too. But here's
what sort of odd is when I think of the
and maybe it's because I have a PhD. And that's
my handicap, but I think of the champions of Western
civilization that we love in the modern era. And of course,
you know Churchill comes to mind, Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy,
Pat moynihan, for example, and you know they all spoke
in their elegant, highly grounded rhetoric with you know, classical
references and all the rest. And Trump is not like
that rhetorically at all, except once in a while. I know,
as speechwriters are very good either friends of mine, some
of them, and they write very good speeches. And he'll
sometimes will strike those notes in the text. Great, that's wonderful,
but it's not his natural not his natural rhetorical style,
and yet there he is and is that instinct. I
don't know if you talked to him about that in
more detail than just the headline in your book. That's
sort of a rambling question. But this, to me is
the most interesting aspect of Trump.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't think he thinks of it the way
that I do, or maybe the way that you all do,
because he's very.
Speaker 1: In the moment.
Speaker 5: He's a counterpuncher.
Speaker 1: He's dealing with as.
Speaker 5: They him in the moment.
Speaker 4: I tend to think of this over time, and if
we make mistakes today, over time, what will those mistakes
due to us? But I tend to find that when
it comes to these issues, he almost always makes the
right decision. Even though he has people in his coalition
or that claim to be in his coalition that have
constantly tried to ascribe positions to him that he does
not have but they want him to have, he tends
to shake it off and resist it, particularly on foreign affairs.
I mean, there's all sorts of isolationists out there that
have forever wanted him to be one of them.
Speaker 5: He's not.
Speaker 4: He's always supported American engagement when it was smart. He's
not an adventurist, but he has not shied away from
an American engagement. And look what's happened. You know, we
took out Solomoni in Iran in his first term. We
fired cruise missiles into Syria. We got the living hostages
home from Gaza. He has solved some of these conflicts
around the world. We've got the Venezuela surrounded by the
US Navy. I mean, he's obviously for American engagement, even
though a lot of people have been hanging on him
to change his views on that or or to fall
in line with their views. I think those things are
ultimately good for protection of the West. It's certainly good
for the protection of the Western hemisphere. But you know,
an engaged America, a strong American president has most of
the time been pretty good for the world. And I
think Trump has shown us that. I do think next
time round there's going to be another attempt by the
isolationists who believe that American engagement in the world is
bad or somehow bad for us as Americans. I think
they're going to push to make that a central part
of the Republican platform, and I think we ought to
reject that. I think we ought to follow Donald Trump's lead.
You don't have to rhetorically be into this all the time,
but as a matter of action, if you make the
right decision about smart American engagement, you can make a
very positive difference. I mean, I think a big debate
in twenty eight is what is the Trump legacy on
foreign affairs.
Speaker 5: It's going to look pretty darn good.
Speaker 4: And I don't really want to have a campaign in
twenty eight where people where both parties are arguing that
somehow Trump way of doing it over two terms was incorrect.
I think it's far superior to what the famously indecisive
and wee Joe Biden was doing, far superior to what
Obama did, And I'd rather do it the Trump way
than the way that they did it. I just I
don't want to see this lurch to the isolationist take
hold of the republic platform.
Speaker 1: So I have one last question for you before we
let you begin your show prep for today. It's a
bit of a delicate one and it concerns your friend
and I think at one time former employer Mitch McConnell
from your home state. And first of all, I am
not one of the naysayers of Mitch McConnell. I think
he's been the greatest Senate majority leader since Lyndon Johnson
in the fifties. So I don't talk smack about him
like a lot of people do. That said, I don't
think it's a secret that he hasn't been on the
best of terms or had the best regard for Trump.
And I don't know if you can. Maybe it's personal,
and I don't want to have you trying disclose confidences,
but I wonder if you might say something about that,
and whether partly it's it's an institutional thing, I mean,
among other of McConnell's virtues as a respector of the
separation of powers and the prerogatives of the Senate, which Trump,
so to say, is not always so a cognizant of right.
So I don't say a little bit about that obviously
difficult relationship.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're not golfing buddies, that's right, and that's and look,
by the way, that's fine. I don't need all my
Republicans and all my Conservatives to be hanging out every weekend.
What I need them to do is to do things
that we want them to do, like cut my taxes,
which they did, and then they made that permanent. I
need them to make the Supreme Court conservative, which.
Speaker 5: They did together.
Speaker 4: I mean, these two guys, whether they like it or not,
are going to be linked in history by saving the
Supreme Court from the liberals and changing it for a generation.
That's a great thing. They've worked together on other issues.
Sometimes they're at odds with each other. I suspect McConnell
doesn't agree with Trump, for instance.
Speaker 1: About the filibuster.
Speaker 4: In fact, I know he doesn't. But on the big
ticket issues of our day, let our taxes go down?
Did we appoint conservatives to the judiciary? Did we save
the Supreme Court? Absolutely? And so I got Look, I've
happily voted for both of them every.
Speaker 5: Time they've been on the ballot in my adult life, and.
Speaker 4: So have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of other Kentuckians.
And so you know, I don't need them to be
best friends. They're never going to be best friends.
Speaker 5: And that's okay if you look at Kentucky as a whole.
Speaker 4: Interestingly, a lot of people thought McConnell in the second
term was going to be a thorn and Trump's side.
That has not turned out to be the case at all.
It's been Paul and Massy. Yeah, I've been more vexing
to Trump than Mitch McConnell. So I think history will
probably remember a little bit about their personal differences, somewhat
stemming from January the sixth, But it's at a macro
level going to remember these two guys cut taxes and
save the Supreme Court, and that's a record that any
conservative ought to be proud of.
Speaker 1: I'm going to let your hero Charlie Cook have the
last question comment for you.
Speaker 2: So I have a final question, and I don't know
if you can answer. But you said that people come
up to you and they say that they love the debate.
And then you said you think you're on the only
show where that debate happens. And I think that's probably true.
I would know there's only one of you. They don't
have three or four of you on You're always up
against eight people. But I wonder why you think it
is that we have fewer shows then the public would
obviously want, because I hear this too. I get told this,
whether it's podcasts that I'm on or my own show.
People love the debates. They love it when you have
someone on and you're not rude to each other, but
you argue about politics, and yet it seems to happen
less and less. Why do you think that.
Speaker 4: Is because I think during the Trump years it became
unfashionable in mainstream media to platform any voice from the right,
anybody who was a Republican, anybody who voted for Trump.
So I've been with seeing n for eight and a
half years and no one's ever censored me or told
me what to say.
Speaker 5: But look, in mainstream media as a.
Speaker 4: Whole, it just there was a lot of pressure to
not allow equal footing to the Trump side of the
argument or the Republican side of the argument, which is
a shame because they deserve it. Half the country believes
in Donald Trump and voted for Donald Trump. It's been
true for three straight elections, and so I think it
was a mistake that they made. But I just you know,
one of the number one comments I hear on my
own social media, why does CNN allows Scott Jittings to
talk so illiberalism that has taken hold in quarters of
American politics. I mean, I think it had an impact
on the thinking of people who run our media. I
think CNN was genius in bringing it back. Our CEO
is Mark Thompson, British guy, American citizen like you, but
random BC Rand the New York Times. He believes in debates,
and I'm kind of shocked more people haven't followed his
lead because I think the content is desired, and I
think it's good for half the country to be able
to turn on the TV and say, oh, there's somebody
for me to watch two. But the the debating content,
the way people are consuming it in these little segments online,
I think it's good for our politics, and I wish
more people would produce it. I suspect in the future
you're going to see more of it, even.
Speaker 5: If folks are slow to do it.
Speaker 1: Scott, congratulations on a revolution of common sense, and we
are all thrilled that we'll be able to take you in.
More of you on the radio starting the new year,
and so best of luck to you, Mery Christmas in
a happy new Year.
Speaker 5: Thank you, Steve Charles.
Speaker 4: Good to meet you finally, and I'll keep listening to
really appreciate the time today guys, Thank you all.
Speaker 1: Well. Charlie. I think the other story of the week
that really grabbed me as an old Cold War baby
boomer was the passing of Norman pot Horns, who I
never knew him. I only met him once in person,
you know. I started reading him and commentary in the
late seventies when I was in college. I mean, there's
been lots of encomiums to him the last few days.
I do think there are some essays of his from
the eighties in particular, maybe he was at his peak
of influence that has stood a test of time. I
could talk about those a little bit. Maybe I will
in a moment, But I don't know if you had
a chance to medium or if the sort of commentary
National Review alliance is still as robust as it was
back in the days when Buckley and pot Hearts were
in the chair. But shares your thoughts.
Speaker 2: Well, I never met him. I never met William I. F.
Barkley Junior either, so I didn't meet either side of
the braid. I think was how John Petoritz, his son,
described it in the most recent National Review, the seventeenth
anniversary edition. Here's what I find most compelling about Norman Petorrets.
I was on a podcast earlier this week and we
were talking about Trump's takeover of the party, which I
I'm not thrilled about, as you know, and the failures
of the establishment, which I think are real. And one
of the things that I noted was that we had
a movement reached a point at which a lot of
our leading lights, be they writers or activists or thinkers
or politicians, were just saying words by wrote without much
thought behind them, and that was a problem. We've been
very successful. Reagan had come in, he'd won a lot
of the arguments with the help of a lot of
other people. And then in the nineteen nineties, although Bill
Clinton won twice, the center of gravity was to the right,
and we atrophied, and you met people who would just
stand up and they would say, we must do this,
we mist do that, we miss stand for this, we
miss stand for that. But when you asked them as
a follow up question, they had absolutely no idea what
they were talking about. And what's so interesting and impressive
about Norman Praetoris, in part because he shifted in his politics,
he was bonded to two things and then he created
this new philosophy, was that he always knew exactly what
he thought and why he never wrote a single sentence
in this entire life that was just going through the motions.
He didn't inherit any of his views, and so he
was formidable because he could present them from first principles,
from the ground up. You could ask him not just
a follow up question, but eighty follow up questions, and
he would say, oh, well, of course this is what
And that is a remarkable thing to offer the world.
Is a philosophy for which you are not solely but
maybe primarily responsible, that you thought through and that you
arrived at through experience and interrogation. And I cannot think
of a better legacy to have than that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I dust at all have his memoir from
the late seventies called Breaking Ranks, which detailed his movement
from the left to the right, which took place mostly
in the sixties. Certainly it was complete by the time
a Governor arrived in nineteen seventy two. One of the
parts of it that fascinated me was how in the
early sixties, when the student New Left first started forming,
and he was intrigued by them for a little bit.
He almost printed an excerpt from the port Heuron statement
from nineteen sixty two the Tom Hayden Roade, but then
had second thoughts when he realized, I'm not sure this
is altogether there. And by the end of the sixties
one of the things that disgusted him was all the
prominent liberals he knew friends of his who had completely
capitulated to the new Left, even though pod Hartz said,
they all knew that these were ruinous, reckless, ideologically unsound
people doing great damage to the Democratic Party and the country.
And now you fast forward to, you know, the era
of wokeery from say, you know, the election of Obama
until really the tide hasn't turned until this last election.
I think that maybe a couple other things you can
point out, but and so you see again, one of
things that happens during the you know, the runaway wokery
in the last decade, was so many people, even some conservatives,
who but especially people the establishing in universities and corporations,
who utterly surrendered all the cliches of the left about
diversity and so forth. You think also of it was
the late seventies, at the most inopportune time, pot Hartch
wrote the book called Why We Were in Vietnam, And
there's almost no defenders left in Vietnam except of course.
The other one who was was Ronald Reagan, who caught
hell for saying in nineteen eighty that it was a
noble cause.
Speaker 2: Even though Jimmy stewartt I think was the right, yes,
defender of Vietnam.
Speaker 1: There you go, and you know, okay, we'll go back
and revisited that now. But he had the courage to say,
wait a minute, let's stop all this Vietnam demonization, which
was the theme of every Hollywood movie in those days,
right the demonology school, Every book was about, you know,
Vietnam demonology is I used to put it. There are
two essays in particular from the mid eighties that I
think stand the test of time. Now they may both
sound well. The second one will sound right. The first
one was one called the Why the God That Failed Failed?
And this is a little obscure. It's about the once
famous book from nineteen forty nine called The God That Failed.
It was six prominent communists and why they broke with communism.
Arthur Kester was the most famous, but the novelist Ignausio Salone,
Andre gud and France Richard Wright in America big figures
then less so now, But what part Haras caught was
they all said there against the Soviet Union and Marxist communism,
but they all remained kind of on the left and
pro socialists, so they really didn't break with what was
wrong with that sort of spectrum of philosophy. And I
think that's still true today for people on the left
are so called progressives, even the ones who say they're
against wokery and so forth. The second essay, also the
mid eighties, was if or well, we're alive today? And
again this will seem like old news for a lot
of listeners perhaps, but I remember vividly in nineteen eighty four,
when you know, the year that the book talked about
arrived and you had all kinds of people on the left,
like Walter Cronkite distorting the book, saying it's really about
us and the capitalist West too, And but Harts was saying, no,
if or we're alive, I know where he'd land to be,
right next door to me. He put it more elegantly
than that. Well, lo and behold. I don't know if
you've heard about this, Charlie, but there's this movie about
an animated versus an animal house coming out, and all
the early indications from animal Farm. Sorry, yeah, absolutely. All
the early indications are they have turned story inside out
and it's going to be a grotesque perversion. And so
you know, we need to channel the spirit of Norman
pot hearts about or Well his application for today in
this and so many other areas.
Speaker 2: So that is a hobby horse of mine, Steeve. I've
written about it over and over. George Orwell was a socialist.
He was not a conservative. He was a socialist. He
believed in democratic socialism.
Speaker 1: I do not.
Speaker 2: But he was horrified by communism. And this is the
key point. Not only was he horrified by communism, he
was deeply worried that even democratic socialism might lead inexorably to totalitarianism.
That book is not about capitalism. It's about that. It
is insane to me that they're doing this, and it's
insane that so many people believe it. So this is
obviously me going on a long time. I didn't know
that it happened in nineteen eighty four, hadn't been born yet.
I did know in twenty twelve, when Barack Obama was
running against Mitt Romney, that people started saying, oh, this
is exactly the message of Animal Farm, which is when
I started writing about it, Mitt Romney apparently, is this
the topic of Animal Farm? No, he's not.
Speaker 1: Unbelievable.
Speaker 2: And in fact, you know that book was not published
originally for a couple of years because we were allies
with the Soviets in World War Two and no one
wanted to publish a book that was such an obvious
and transparent attack on the Soviet Union.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a little quick footnote for you, and I can
make a copy and sent it to you if you like.
But I came across a review of nineteen eighty four
by C. S. Lewis, of all not of all people.
I mean, you can see why he'd be interested in it,
And what he really said was, I think Animal Farm
is a much better book than nineteen eighty four, and
his argument is coaching. But I got to thinking, I
think Lewis thinks that because Lewis wrote so many books
that had talking animals. Right, I liked I think you
liked the vibe of it. Yeah. But anyway, it was
an odd little discovery. But we have come to the
end of our hour for this week. This podcast brought
to you, as always by Ricochet dot Com. Please support
this show by becoming a member. We'll see you, all
of you in the comments and until next week. We
may be off next week for Christmas. I'm not sure,
but oh I will say this, it is scheduled. I
think it will happen. I am going to do a
special episode of Me in Conversation with Rob Long. Who
better to talk about the Christmas season than Ricochet's own seminary,
and so look forward to that sometime in the next
ten days or so. So with that, go to see
you Charles, We miss you, James, see everybody in the
comments at Ricochet four point d.
Speaker 2: Whatever it is perfect