Speaker 1: Make sure that I get it right. It's ruly to
Shara to share Teshierra.
Speaker 2: It's a Allen on the screen. But whatever, yeah, all right, changed.
Speaker 1: That one, and then we welcome back to the podcast.
Speaker 3: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask
what you can do for your country.
Speaker 4: Mister Garbaschoff, Tear down this wall.
Speaker 1: It's the Ricochet Podcast with Charles C. W. Cook and
Stephen Hayward. I'm James Lillings. Today we talked to Luie,
to Shara, Liberal Patriot.
Speaker 2: How did we get here?
Speaker 4: Because the mainstream wing of the party is scared the death.
Speaker 5: Of the Moon wing.
Speaker 2: They won't speak.
Speaker 4: Up and they don't stand for anything anymore. All they
stand for is whatever UH is against whatever President Trump
stands for.
Speaker 2: This is I think typical of Trump the man.
Speaker 4: This is the kind of character or lack thereof who's
now president.
Speaker 1: Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, episode number five hundred
and seventy four, Not just Kidding, seven hundred and fifty four.
Join us at ricochet dot com. You can be part
of the most stimulating conversations and community on the web.
It's the place you've been looking for ever since they
plugged this thing in. I'm James Lollox in Minneapolis, Cloudy Misty,
and I'm joined by Stephen Hayward in California and Charles C. W.
Cook in Florida. And as I say, we have the
entire country covered. Gentlemen, how are you good? Good? How
are you could be better? Last week I had absolutely
no opinion about cracker barrel whatsoever, and never been to one,
never never set foot in one, had no desire to
set foot in one. But now I've got an opinion
about cracker barrel. We'll get to that in a second.
Last week, I wasn't really thinking very much about over
the road truckers and exactly what problems some of them
may face. And now, of course, first and foremost in
my mind, both of these things are things that have
been bubbling around on Twitter for the last week and
have yet to really hit the news, but I think
they will now because Marco Rubio has made a statement
that the government is going to suspend all renovation of
the cracker Barrel restaurants. No, I'm sorry, he's going to
suspect they're going to suspend the people coming in to
get driver's licenses from other countries. CDLs, And I wonder
what you guys think about this, because what's interesting to
me about it is the speed with between this issue
surfacing and actual government action seems to be new but
also a defining characteristic of our age. Before we would
have a blue ribbon commission that would turn out a
white paper at the end of it, and recommendations would
be made and it would work its way through dot
and eventually there would be something and nothing would change.
But now it's sort of like, which.
Speaker 3: I look, long haul truck driving, actually any truck driving,
but especially those longer haul the bigger trucks, which require
a different classification of license. That's not an easy job.
And you know, my brother was a teamster. He drove
one of those trucks for a while and he used
to say, and my perception when I drive out on
say a Interstate five in California, is that, you know,
there's a I'm not sure if it's the bell curve
for truck drivers is the right phrase for it, but
they are short of good qualified Almost every truck, especially
independent line or even the big chains like Hunt Brothers
or something. They'll have big banners on the truck saying
drivers wanted call one eight hundred, get paid right, and
a lot of those jobs pay six figures pretty fast.
For whatever reason. I think because it's a lonely job.
You know, you're away from your family. They're under a
lot of pressure to get your destination in time. On
the other hand, and now all have GPS widgets in them,
and so your maximum hours are capped, and so anyway,
I think it's kind of a miserable life. And I'll
bet that a lot of trucking comp and he's pick
a lot of people at the margins who are, shall
we say, if he drivers? And my observation is the
quality of truck drivers I see on the road. Some
of them it's not what I remember when I was
younger and putting in a lot of miles on the road.
But there's more of them. The other thing, if you
ever want to see, I should take a video sometime
if you take Interstate five out of Los Angeles north
up toward what we used to call the Grapevine, and
there's a couple of very steep hills, and the truck's
all bunch up there going up the hill at about
twenty five miles an hour in low gear and it's amazing.
And of course, you know, we know Long Beach is
one of the leading ports in America and a lot
of that ends up on trucks going all over the country.
But the truck traffic is just enormous these days. And
I've never looked for data to see how much it's grown,
but I'll bet it's been quite substantial in the last
twenty thirty years.
Speaker 1: My father was a truck driver. I mean, he owned
the oil company gas business in Fargo, but he drove ry.
He loved to drive semi. He could find I mean,
he could climb into a cabin and look at that,
you know, sixteen years and he could find the right
one could he could back up up a double tanker
to a loading dock to get product filled. I mean,
it's just amazing. So I respect that. But at the
same time, one of his drivers had a diabetic episode
back in the day and actually started driving the wrong
way on the other side of the highway with oncoming
traffic with a full load of number two in the back.
Oh boy, that was a disaster reverted. So yeah, it's
always been a dangerous job, but it seems to be yes,
they aren't getting enough so we have more accidents. We
have more guys who are going down hills just jamming
on the brakes and sitting letting the engine throttle. At Charles,
we would have to ask you about your opinion about
LORI drivers, wouldn't we You would?
Speaker 5: You would? Do you know?
Speaker 6: I actually said that word on my trip to Pigeon Ford's, Tennessee,
and my wife said, don't say Laurie like that. Normally
she likes my accent and linguistic foibles, but this time
I think that one was not attractive, so she said,
don't say Laurie. Don't But I did say Laurie anyhow. Yes,
this story which happened in Florida is horrible. A family
was wiped out. I think there are some obvious government
interests here. One of the problems, beyond truck driving proficiency,
about which I.
Speaker 5: Know very little, is English speaking.
Speaker 6: That is the complaint that I have heard from people
over the last three or four years.
Speaker 5: It's always pooh poohed.
Speaker 6: I submit that it won't be from now on, but
I've heard it said over and over again that we
have a big problem in America because there are a
bunch of illegal immigrants who do not speak English who
drive trucks, and they can't read the signs on the road,
and that's very important if you're expected to know where
the runoff lane is, or look at the gradient information,
or see where the way station is located. So I
do think that that's a problem. And I say this
having come fresh off speaking at a naturalization ceremony here
in Jacksonville yesterday. I was the featured speaker at the
big citizenship ceremony.
Speaker 5: Was very moving.
Speaker 6: But of course everyone who went through that and followed
the rules has to display a proficiency in English. And
there's a good reason that we have these expectations. So
I don't know enough about it to give you a
white paper answer, but I do think reformers in the cards,
because that was a horrible thing that happened, and it's
not something that came out of the blue. It's an
odd thing to have been told about, but I have
been told about this problem for years. People have brought
it up, and now we have this this tragedy.
Speaker 1: Well, one of the things that came out of the
blue was the rating of John Bolton's house. John Bolton,
of course, a man who possesses the best, most accedence
in Wilford Brimley. I think he bought it from him,
actually or actually no, I think it's more he's up
there with the sam Eliot quality. In any case, Bolton
got rated. BI director Cosh Ptel said on Twitter, of course,
because that's what we say these things, is that no
one is above the law. I FBI agent's on the mission.
We're hearing that phrasing awful lot. Trump said, I don't
know anything about it. What's going on here? I have
no idea.
Speaker 3: I don't know if it's some kind of payback by
some people in the Trump administration. We know that Biden
was sloppy about keeping documents, and you know Trump, like Lise,
you know, I know John a little bit. My office
was right next door to his at AEI way back when,
and he always.
Speaker 2: Struck me as someone who's not sloppy.
Speaker 3: I mean, he always had a neat desk, he was
always worth long hours, was always very precise about things.
So I'd be surprised if he was sloppy about keeping documents.
Speaker 2: But I don't know.
Speaker 3: I mean, who knows. I'll be curious to see if
we ever find the affidavit behind the warrant at some point.
Speaker 1: His persistence in the national political theater is something of
a mystery to me. But I gather that he's getting
more currency lately because he's not exactly a fan Donald
Trump and Charles, what do you take of this? Is
this more authoritarian payback? Or is this as somebody said, well, look,
if you're going to take on the deep state in
all of its manifestations, doesn't hurt to go after people
in your own party first, just to show that it's
not partisan. Although although.
Speaker 6: Wow, that one I'm not sold on. I don't think
Donald Trump thinks they're at the same party. Right, How
long have you got? This is a really complicated issue.
The answer is there is a Steelman case for this
which goes something like this, John Bolton did it. He
is not the president, therefore is not protected by his
ability to declassify information and all the Supreme Court case
Trump for the United States, we do and should prosecute
people who violate the rules surrounding classified information.
Speaker 5: No one is above the law. That's the steel Man argument.
Speaker 6: That might be completely irrelevant in this case because this
could be political payback. The worrying possibility is that the
Trump administration simply hates John Bolton is still smarting at
having been targeted by Joe Biden and wanted to make
somebody who doesn't like pay. The broader thought that I
have given that I don't know any more details than
you do, is that the original sin here was James
Comy's treatment of Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton was guilty of
violating the law. Now I am open to the idea
that that is a bad and in some sense unconstitutional law,
the Wilson ere Espionage Act, and that it was not
in the public interest to prosecute her. But James Comy
found a loophole and he used it to let her
off the hook. And then that loophole was not applied
equally to everyone. Joe Biden got the advantage of it,
although there was another excuse with him. Donald Trump did not,
And I don't think you can run a country like this.
So when the Biden one broke, my view was you
can't touch Biden because you didn't touch Hillary. And when
the Trump one broke, my view was you can't touch
Trump because you didn't touch Biden and you didn't touch Hillary.
Speaker 5: And I still hold that.
Speaker 6: So if we are talking here about equal crimes alleged
crimes which I don't know.
Speaker 5: Then my view will be the same here.
Speaker 6: You can't touch Bolton because you didn't touch Trump, and
you didn't touch Biden, then you didn't touch Hillary. I
think James Comey did something really really bad. Was that
rather than try and establish a rule of prosecutorial discretion
that was broad and clear and could be applied to everyone,
he's simply made up the law. And when you make
up the law, you create really difficult scenarios for your successes.
And that could be what we're looking at here. So
I am, in a sense giving you a non answer, James,
I'm all the way from could be still manned, could
be complicated, or could be tyranny.
Speaker 1: It's one of the three. There's more no touching in
that last thing. You said that in a Fargo Lutheran
church in nineteen SISO. So is there anything more to
say about this? Or should we move along to other things,
such as the Trump find being tossed half a billion?
Speaker 2: Guess not well before we do that, James, or maybe after.
I don't care.
Speaker 3: I thought Trump was going on a ride along with
a DC police or National Guard last time. I haven't
heard anything about it. I mean, my joke was Trump
has gone from just trolling the left to patrolling.
Speaker 1: Against the left. Yeah, I know. I mean there was
an MSNBC or an ms NOW person who was saying
the other day that before he decided that he said
he was going to go on the right along. They
said that when it came to d C crime, Trump
thinks he's Batman. And I thought, that's not a very
good argument to make people like Batman. You want to
make the case that he thinks he's bane. That's something else.
But people kind of like a rich guy with lots
of tools who goes around at night and keeps the
bad guy and drows them off roofs. Anyway, So should
the fine has been tossed? And what is that that that?
I mean, everyone is still going to call him a
fellon thirty four counts, et cetera. But now the fine's tossed.
Is that indicate that there might be success on the
appeal because it's still appealing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it looks to me like it's going to fall
apart like the Georgia case against him did. And I
don't know, I kind of expected this all along. The
one question is what took the court so long. The
New York Court of Appeals whatever their high court is called,
it usually works with great dispatch.
Speaker 2: So and apparently it's a split ruling.
Speaker 3: I haven't chased it down yet, but my guess is
this is the first big step to the whole thing
going away.
Speaker 1: Well, speaking of going away, one of the things you
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and we thank bank on Yourself. Responsoring this the Ricochet podcast,
at Ali, welcome back to the podcast. RUI to share
on He's a senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute,
co founder and politics editor of the SUBSEAC newsletter The
Liberal Patriot. He was a founding fellow of the Center
of American Progress and co author The Emerging Democratic Majority
in two thousand and two. More recent publications have included
The Optimistic Leftist and Where have all the Democrats Gone? Welcome, well,
thank you, glad to be here. A lot of talk
this week about how the Democrats are losing some of
their customary support, that they are pulling horribly with young men.
As a matter of fact, there seems to be a
move from young men to the Republican Party. As somebody
else was pointing out this morning, that they got a
Karen problem, and they refuse to acknowledge it. Problem is
that Karen's are their base, and Karen's vote all the
rest of these things. So the change in their appeal
seems to have been rather size maicing, tectonic, and it
shifts due to a variety of reasons. So I'm gonna
ask you if indeed you see that big of a shift,
and if you do, if you share what the writer
of pinning as the reasons for it. Mainly a sense
of cultural disdain, looking down, being scolds and no fund
and all the rest of that stuff, right.
Speaker 7: Right, Yeah, No, I do think they're in a bit
of a pickle. I mean, I think the data is
pretty clear in this. Obviously, we all know what happened
in twenty twenty four A and what so many Democrats
kidded themselves could never happen, That Trump would actually do
better in the selection they'd ever done before, and there
would be this shoe, these huge shifts among working class Hispanics, Hispanic.
Speaker 2: Men, young men.
Speaker 7: You know, there is even shifts among women who were
just smaller than among men. So it was generally an
all around, you know, clock cleaning by Trump. Since then,
we've seen Democrats fail to really break out. Despite all
the vulnerabilities that Trump is as evidence and a lot
of the things he's done, they just aren't very popular.
The overreach on a variety of different issues. People don't
have much faith in the economy, even despite the fact
they elected Trump to some extent to fix the economy.
None of that has elevated the Democrats, who have historically
low favorability ratings. They don't have much of a lead
in the generic congressional ballot when if you compare it
to twenty eighteen, they were already far ahead at this point.
Speaker 2: And just for recently, of course.
Speaker 7: There was this huge I mean, and people who follow
these data kind of knew a lot of the stuff.
Speaker 2: Anyway, there's a big data, deep data dive in the.
Speaker 7: New York Times about voter registration trends over the last
period of time, both up to twenty twenty four and
even since twenty twenty four, and it's all bad, bad,
bad news for the Democrats. I mean, they're just losing
ground everywhere to Republicans, particularly in important states. Somebody actually
crunched the data and looked at, for example, what's happening
with young men and young women. I was just looking
at this today, and among young women, those willing to
register as Democrats has declined only slightly. But among young
men it's just cratered. It's now under thirty percent, whereas
it was close to fifty percent not that long ago.
So so something's going on here, you know, it's Dylan said,
But you don't know what it is, do you, mister Democrat.
I think some of them suspect it, but I do
think that they're quite reluctant to really embrace it, understand it,
actually try to fix it. They think if they just
change the subject, or they turn up the volume in
economic issues, or they talk about abundance, so what have you,
this will do it.
Speaker 2: And I do not think that's true.
Speaker 7: I think the critique that they're culturally out of step
with the median working class voter and indeed the bulk
of the population is just true. I mean, that's true
in a variety of issues. You know it's true from
voting behavior. We know it's true from where they're losing ground.
I mean, this is a party whose national profile and
the people who run it and the people who are
associated with it are simply not the same type of
people who they want to vote for them. And they
have a series of cultural attitudes that in fact does
translate into disdain for the great unwashed of these United States.
Speaker 2: And I think, you know, people aren't dumb.
Speaker 7: They sense this, they know this, and they realize not
only was that true leading up to twenty twenty four,
and this is what I just wrote about on The
Liberal Patriot. There's not a lot of change since then, right,
I Mean, basically they've only backtracked very slightly. On some
issues where people have tried to break from the pack,
they've been immediately slapped down by the activists and other politicians.
And where the real action is in the Democratic Party
now is basically amping up your resistance cred And that's
why Gavin Newsom, the dreadful, dreadful Gavin Newsom, has actually
like broken out of the pack.
Speaker 2: I mean, they've sent these poles mean anything at this point.
Speaker 7: He's clearly benefited from his willingness to do anything and
say anything to maximize his resistance profile. So I think
that's what plays within the Democratic Party now, but I
think it's actually not what would play with the broad
electorate as we move, you know, toward twenty twenty eight
and beyond. I mean one way to one way I
summarize it is they still we're at a populist moment,
a populist age, right, and they still don't get it.
They still are not willing to be in touch with it,
to acknowledge their weaknesses, which go far beyond not having
you know, the best economic program or something.
Speaker 2: So I think that's where we're at.
Speaker 7: And again, like I see little evidence that they're changing
their tune very fast. In the piece I was just
alluding to, I called it two three many sister soldier movements.
That's soldier moments. That's what the Democrats need, and I
think that's true. They need to profile themselves as a
different kind of Democrat, and to do that you have
to break ostentatiously and directly with the forces in their
party and specific individuals and groups. We were pushing this
slow to say so really, let.
Speaker 2: Me jump in right here.
Speaker 3: First of all, it warms my heart as an inmate
of Gavin Newsom's stand that you call him dreadful. I
heard Mark Halpern yesterday saying he right now, in Mark
Helper's judgment, is the front runner for twenty twenty eight.
But you know, when I read your piece yesterday, one
too many sister soldier moments, I had a flashback because
it seems to me the Democratic Party has been there before,
and I'm thinking of that time after George H. W.
Bush won in nineteen eighty eight. I don't know if
you remember the book by Peter Brown, the reply to
it even right well, there's one quote from here to
share with you and listeners, and it's of the young
Democratic governor of Arkansas, and as a long passes about
how you know Jesse Jackson, who younger listeners may not know,
was a real contender for the nomination in nineteen eighty
eight and panic the Democratic establishment as much as Bernie
Sanders did twice, and he quotes Bill Clinton here saying,
I have never believed Democrats need to distance themselves from
Jesse Jackson. I think the Democrats need to disagree with him.
And of course that's what Clinton did three years later.
Speaker 7: Right well, I think, you know, it's like kind of
a semantic distinction.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think he really did distance.
Speaker 7: So he did his intervention at Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition.
I mean, it wasn't saying I hate Jesse Jackson, but
the message couldn't have been clear.
Speaker 3: So right, well, my question is is I don't think
that person is Gavenusom, but is there somebody out there?
And more to the point, if you strip away all
the sort of social and cultural baggage drowning Democrats right
now and they get back to an economic message, what
is that message? I mean, I'm a fan of the
abundance people, but I think there's some limitations to that.
Although you know, I can't make their conference next month, unfortunately.
I know you'll be there, but.
Speaker 2: I'll be there case.
Speaker 3: So that looks very promising to me as a policy
wonk that I am. But beyond that, what is the message?
What could work for a sensible democrat, say, I rot
Emmanuel who if he gets out of the witness protection
program for disagreeing about the transgender business. Right, what's the
message going to be?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I don't know. I think that's a you know,
it's an excellent question. I mean, I do think that
even a better economic program is merely a necessary but
not sufficient condition to rehabilitate themselves without the cultural shift.
I think even that won't go anywhere, no matter how.
Speaker 2: Good it is.
Speaker 7: But they do need dad say something about and what's
their plan for the economy, what's their plan for national development?
What's their plan for moving the country forward economically? And
I think right now the abundance people are having a moment,
that's clear.
Speaker 2: But whose moment is this? Right?
Speaker 7: I think this is a moment within the elite democratic discourse.
I think it's a moment within you know, those who
control the commanding heights of cultural production, right, they're willing
to countenance. The Ideamocrats have screwed up some things. There's
too many rigs, need more housing. Even our sacred clean
energy commitments, you know, are are falling under the under
the sway of all these regulations which you're holding it back.
That's a really bad thing because then we're all going
to die if we don't have more clean energy.
Speaker 2: So I think that's real. I think it's happening.
Speaker 7: But what is its cachet among normy voters who might
be interested in voting for the Democrats. What is its
cachet with the working lass, both those who are still
in the Democratic Party and those who have left it.
I don't think it's really high. I mean, I think
this is an elite discourse. I mean, even though I
support various aspects of it, I do think that it's
it's it's kind of problematic in a lot of ways.
I can use that terrible term. It's just it's not
focused on the working class. It's not focused on abundances.
Most people would define it who are not coast to
liberals who live in big metropolitan areas, right, that's what
they care about infield housing, fifteen minute cities, more wind
and solar blah blah blah. This is not what people
care about. People care about more stuff, being richer, having
a big ass truck, living in the suburbs. They want more.
And when you say abundance to a normal person, to
extent they even understand the words.
Speaker 2: That's what they think. Oh, great, you're gonna there's gonna
be more stuff. Tell me how do we do this?
Speaker 7: And let's say, oh, we have to change the zoning regulations,
and then we have to make sure that this uh,
you know this, this wind and solar project goes through
and you know, much less time than it used to.
And I don't totally do I don't think people are
say what you want what I mean? In a way,
it reminds me of the reformicons back in the day,
when we had an interesting set of ideas which certainly
could have been an improvement, and where the Republicans were
at the time, but it was again, it was part
of the elite discourse.
Speaker 2: It never really percolated down to normy voters.
Speaker 3: Yeah I was one of them, by the way, and
we get would we get run over by the Trump
train in a hurry?
Speaker 1: You did?
Speaker 2: You did? The tire tracks are still your back man.
Speaker 5: Hi, Really, it's Charles Kirk to speak to you again.
Speaker 6: So I have a question about how you get from
where the Democratic Party currently is to where you would
like it to be.
Speaker 5: I use you in the VU form. I don't think
it's your responsibility.
Speaker 6: On the right, we have a certain autoimmune deficiency in that,
for understandable reasons, we don't like the media, and we
also distrust a bunch of institutions, health institutions, for example.
But sometimes that leads us to believe nothing that is
said by a figure in authority or of expertise, and
sometimes that can lead to really bad outcomes. And so
if those who know what they're talking about are opposed
to something, then that just gets discounted and it can
be quite difficult to advance reforms within the framework. On
the left, it seems to me that the autoimmune deficiency
is a sense that compromise is allowing in evil or
bigotry or racism or whatever. And if you look at,
for example, immigration, you see this all the time. For
most of modern American history, at least since the nineteen
thirties forties, it was accepted that we have debates over
who comes in, and sometimes the consequences are ugly, and
sometimes they weren't, and sometimes we wanted more and less
and different. But that was something we debated. And in
the nineties when Clinton was president, you had Barbara Jordan
who was in the same party.
Speaker 5: People who were more in favor of open borders, right.
Speaker 6: But now the idea in a lot of the party
and certainly culturally, is that any immigration enforcement whatsoever, forget Trump,
any enforcement is racism, xenophobia, bigotry, or whatever. And that's
the sort of autoimmune deficiency, and that it prevents compromise
or moving forward. And my question is how do the
Democrats as a party get past that, because the average
Democratic voted doesn't seem to me to be of that
view at all.
Speaker 5: But no politician.
Speaker 6: Seems to be able to stand up and say, well,
we need to compromise on this, this, that and the other,
or debate this, that and the other because they get
called names and they're terrified of being called names.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: No, obviously there's a lot to that. I mean, who
are who are the Democrats these days? Certainly if you
just look at everybody who votes for a Democrat in
any race, or even people who party ID at least
leans democratic. I mean, there's certainly a lot more diversity
than you see among the people who seem to be
calling the shots in the Democratic Party.
Speaker 2: I think that's true, But I think the farther up
you go in.
Speaker 7: The food chain, right from the activists to the people
who run party organizations, to the people in the NGO,
so the people in the foundation, to the people who
control the media discourse who lean democratic, the people who
who contribute the most money, the people have the loudest megaphones,
the biggest voices. In other words, the hupper middle class
professional liberals who really set the tone for the party.
They're just way more of them than they used to be,
and they're way more liberal than they used to be.
And they are the ones who make the trains run
on time. They're the ones who are in the institutions
that really are responsible for giving the Democratic Party the
cultural legimity it has. And why should they change? I mean,
they feel these things are moral commitments. Plus they owe
their position to some extent from reading chapter and verse
from the Bible we currently have, So again, why should
they change. It may not be optimizing for the Democratic
Party as a whole, but they don't see it that way,
and they're really optimizing to some extent their own individual
position in the labor market or in the cultural discourse.
So I think, yeah, I mean, it's a long winding
way of saying I think it's really going to be
hard to change because I think the people who could
most directly change the discourse are not going to do
it willingly. And then you know, it would really come
down to a sense, it's not going to be upswelling
from the ground up of more moderate Democrats.
Speaker 2: I just don't think that's going to work.
Speaker 7: I think you would have to have, in the context
probably of the presidential contest moving into twenty twenty eight,
someone who's willing to break the crockery and thereby shift
the discourse.
Speaker 2: Is willing to take a chance.
Speaker 7: I mean, I think the most probable outcome is they're
all going to be herded toward you know, who's the
biggest resistance fighter. I mean, I already see it happening.
I mean, look at even someone like Andy Basheer, right,
the big moderate from Kentucky. What is his big applause line.
It's because he vetoed hateful bills against the LGBTQI plus population.
I mean, this tells you a lot about where even
moderates feel they have to go at this point within
the Democratic Party debate.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, you brought up.
Speaker 7: The issue of immigration. It's really quite extraordinary. I mean,
they got totally hammered on the issue. Everybody saw it
was a massive failure. But now that Trump is actually
shut down the border, there's no support for that whatsoever,
other than even maybe even there's not even a lot
of acknowledgment that it's happened, because the real concentration is
on the ice raids, the pickups, the deportations.
Speaker 2: I mean, people.
Speaker 7: Uniformly Democrats and Democratic activists are apoplectic about this. This
is a police state. This is completely unjustified. There's nothing
good about it. Well, there are obviously stuff that's happening
that's kind of noxious, But on the other hand, what
is their program for deportations? So they would believe in deportations. Obviously,
if someone can come here and if they stay for
three weeks, they can stay here forever. That's not a
viable strategy, right, that's not The incentive structure is all wrong. So,
and this is one reason why people don't trust the Democrats,
because even though they may pick up on some things
that are happening that people are viscerally apt and seem cruel.
They don't trust the Democrats to trend, you know, sort
of move on from that to an actual workable immigration
program that what, as you say, decide who gets in
and who doesn't and would stick to the rules. I
think voters have no faith in the Democrats for that
at this point, and I think again, breaking out of
that will be really hard for all the reasons we
just we've just been discussing.
Speaker 3: So Ry, can I ask you a different question about
another about economics and populism?
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: In addition to that amazing New York Times story about
the voting problems, there was also this week, uh, the
latest series of headlines I can go back to and
feature stories in the Times. I want to call it
up here about oh shoot, I'm having a trouble here.
Speaker 2: No, here it comes.
Speaker 3: Here's the headline, abolish the Senate and the Electoral College
packed the court? Why the Left can't win without a
new constitution?
Speaker 2: Now could go wrong? What could go wrong? These are
great ideas, right?
Speaker 4: Well?
Speaker 3: Yeah, aside from the merits or I think demerits of
all those ideas. I have a simple question, which I
have various answers, both psychological and philosophical for it, but I.
Speaker 2: Want to hear yours. Okay, My question is, well, wait
a minute.
Speaker 3: The Democratic Party dominated American politics for fifty years in
a New Deal era. They did just fine under those rules.
So why do we need to change them now? Well,
because they're not dominating politics anymore. They're actually losing elections.
And so I mean, you know, the partisan conservative Republican
will say, and I joined them half the time, is gee,
now that you're losing, what's your answer? Change the rules
rather than change your message or adapt to it. But
I mean, is that a is there some merit to
that objection? I mean, I want to hear from a
smart social democrat like you about how we should think
about By the way, I've got a whole file of
Times articles like that the Constitution is obsolete, we should
get rid of it, it's an obstacle to change and
so forth.
Speaker 7: Now, wasn't there someone who wrote an op ed in
the Times a while ago? I think this is before
the twenty four election that advocated turning DC into seven
hundred and twenty eight different histories, all of which would
have their own senator or something. I mean, there's been
a lot of right, there's been a lot of wacky stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're here.
Speaker 3: Sorry, here we Here are four more headlines that I've collected,
all from the last two years. The Constitution is broken
and should not be reclaimed all New York Times elections
are bad for democracy.
Speaker 2: Now, that one was just who could argue with that?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: And then but another more serious one is the Constitution
is sacred? Is it all so dangerous? In other words,
I'm an old fashioned person who reads the Federal's papers
that said, you know, Madison Hamilton's saying, you know, if
the rule of law is going to replace the rule
of men, that means our fundamental legal document must be
an object of reverence by the people. They use that
word reverence right now, I'm kind of old fashioned devote,
devote on the founding, but I'm kind of seeing a
loss of reverence for the Constitution among many progressives. I'll
stop there.
Speaker 7: Yeah, okay, obviously that's that's true. And I think your
point earlier about well, why would they be saying this now?
And they really did just fine with the rules, and
you know, long ears of American politics.
Speaker 2: It really isn't that complicated.
Speaker 7: It's like you say, the wrong people now have too
much influence, and the wrong people have too much influence
because of the way our constitution's structuralway or institution. Therefore
we need to change that so the right people will
have more influence.
Speaker 2: So this is I mean, this is basically insane, I think.
Speaker 7: I mean, the very fact that Democrats progressives would toy
with this stuff, it's just an indication they're you know,
they're they're running out of room, they're running out of
they're desperate, they're flailing, right. I mean, this is what
you do, and you can't think of anything else to say,
Let's just change the prigand rules. See, I know the
guy who wrote that op ed you you were mentioning earlier.
You used to write for the New Republic, the first
one you mentioned, he's look, I mean, he's this is
a kind of wild you know, progressivism, unhinged type stuff
that plays very well in significant sectors of the party,
and it's playing better now as the trumpetmen stration goes on,
because you know, people are in full resistance mode. How
could this terrible thing have happened? I mean, there was
like a window of maybe two months where Democrats seemed
a little chase in well, maybe maybe we did screw
it all up, Maybe we really do need to change
a lot, And they say, nah, we don't need to
do that. We need to change the constitution. We need
more people like Zora and Ondani. You know that'll totally
solve the problem. So I just think that all the
indicators are now flashing red, as it were, on their
ability to reinvent the party. So I don't expect anything
to happen anytime soon. And you know, we may have
to go through another presidential cycle where they do even worse.
Speaker 2: I can easily see that happen.
Speaker 3: That was the story arc of the eighties into the nineties,
right as you've finally lost enough elections by a lot
that a talented person like Clinton came on. By the way,
I just have to say, and then I'll shut up.
I like the way you framed the beginning of your
answer about you know, the right people the wrong people
reminds me of that great Yes Minister scene where Sir
Humphrey Applebee says to Bernard says, you know what happened
when the right people don't get power the wrong people
get it.
Speaker 2: Such a great show.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I am interested in patriotism.
Speaker 1: My question, that's my question. Now good, we're all dying
to ask this, right because the term liberal patriot warms
my heart. When I was a liberal in college in
the eighties, Democrats new republic style democrat, I suppose we're
all patriotic. We loved America. It was, you know, the
phrase that Rush Limbaugh would later use, the greatest country
on God's green Earth. We would nod along too, because
we understood a little bit of history and a little
bit of American exceptionalism. Could see exactly why this was
a great endeavor. What people get, I think nowadays, not
from the you know, from the Democrats who may work
you know, in their city, you know, in various civic roles,
but from the intellectual heavyweight to the party is sixteen
nineteen is the original sins of this country that make
it uniquely bad, and that to be a patriot is
to align yourself with an enterprise that has caused all
manner of horrors on humanity. Because the isms of the colonialism,
the Sexismombia, all of this stuff. This is a bad place.
You can be patriotic about an ideal to which we
might ascribe should it happen. But the idea of accepting
this flawed structure, this crooked timber, is something great and
being proud of seems to be lost in the party.
And when they try it, it's not authentic because how
much of the ideological energy comes from colleges and comes
from the people who have their degrees and the books
and all that stuff, which there's a little use and
seems to ignore history. Liberal patriot how many of you
are there?
Speaker 7: Well, I would not say we're a majority at this
point and left of center circles, but you know, we're
growing slowly, I think, I hope, But I do think
you're right that the whole issue of patriotism and its
identification and lact thereof with the left has become like
a mega problem, and it wasn't really so long ago.
I mean, Obama is really pretty different than the way
the center gravity of the Democrats, certainly Clinton. You know,
there's nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed by
what's right with America. That stuff is like borderline, you know, problematic,
racist and all that kind of stuff. So it's funny
you bring this up, though, because I just put out
a big report with Rick Callenberg at AI called Bobby
Kennedy Liberal Patriot, where we basically make a big deal
in this in this report, and there should be an
article about this coming out in the Free Press. That
you know, Kennedy is just so different from the way
Democrats comport themselves these tastes. He was unabashedly patriotic, you know,
pro family, pro working class work over welfare, against.
Speaker 2: Crime, law and order.
Speaker 7: You know, I mean, he was just a different cat
than we have nowadays running around in the Democratic Party,
and he was unapologetic about it. He was trying in
a sense to rescue the party from its evolving trend
away from a lot of these values and bring black
and white working class voters back together and the party. Tragically,
of course that was cut short, and who knew who
we would have worked. But I think he's an interesting model,
and you know, he suffused a lot of what he
did on his various policy positions with the fundamental idea
of patriots. Even the way he treated poverty was patriotic.
Like in a great country like this, you know, the
United States of America, we should be able to have
a decent standard of living for everybody, and people should
pay their fair share because it's patriotic. He always that
was kind of his touchstone, and I.
Speaker 2: Think that's totally lacking now.
Speaker 7: I mean, you brought up the sixteen nineteen project, because
to me, that was a bit that really was a
bit of a cut point to me when it came out.
I mean, I know a lot of people went gaga
over in liberal circles. So my first reaction is, are
you kidding me?
Speaker 8: This is terrible and you can't believe you're doing this
is gonna alienate us from normy voters and it's not
even true. I mean, this is a terrible way that
this is a terrible way to conduct yourself. But it
was the New York Times, the official.
Speaker 7: Arbiter of you know, civilized discourse, that was like foisting
this on the American public, at least the American educated public.
Speaker 2: And I was I was appalled.
Speaker 7: I could not believe it, and I said, oh man,
we're in for it now. This is this is I mean,
things that have already been going south on a lot
of this stuff. But I just thought, not only the peace,
but who promulgated it, and the rapture with which it
was greeted in most educated left leaning liberal circles.
Speaker 2: It's just just amazing. I was like, Oh, well, I
guess we're not in Kansas anymore. Wow.
Speaker 1: Those of us in the right take a look at
things like the sixteen to nine project, take a look
at the way that the culture has shifted in the
overclass and what their ideas are, and we see, to
use all the cliches, the results of the long march
to the institutions where now you have colleges, museums and
the rest of them are ascribed to a particular sad
of ideological precepts. And now when we try to push
back on that, such Trump is trying to do with
the Smithsonian, that's regarded as trying to change an objective
reality to fit the criteria of dear Leader. When a
lot of us are looking at this and saying, no,
it's rewriting the plaque under the picture of Valley Forge
so that it doesn't say that the result of the
victory was the expansion of the country and the exclusion
of the Indian I mean, investing absolutely everything less narrative.
I mean, do you guys see it that way? I mean,
you're rational, sensible man. Do you sometimes see these things
and say, why must this suffuse absolutely everything? And it's
not wrong to get back to a more positive sort
of accounting of these things without having to rub people
noses in the filth of American history every second. Of course,
I'm not making a question, I'm just ranting.
Speaker 7: Right, No, I mean I agree with that. I mean
I think it's become a huge problem. I mean, we're
just talking about the sixteen nineteen project with the exemplar
of this, and it gets back to Charles's point about
the sort of autoimmune disorder or something.
Speaker 2: I mean, you.
Speaker 7: Cannot in Democratic party or liberal circles admit that there
might be something to what Trump is doing, you know,
to the universities, to an institutional like the Smithsonian, because
by definition, what he's doing is nothing but a drive
for white supremacy and authoritarianism. I mean, there's no gray areas, right,
I mean, it can't be like he's overreaching.
Speaker 2: In some ways.
Speaker 7: This happened, you know, he went too far, but you
know there was a lot of stuff that needed to
be corrected.
Speaker 2: I mean a lot of this stuff is crazy.
Speaker 7: How they're rubbing people's noses and you know, they want
you to think about the terrible stuff before you can
think about the good stuff, and in the process, people's
sense of you know, a country that is worth identifying
with gets lost. And I think you know, Robert Bella,
I think once talked a long time ago about the
civil religion that's America, right, that's important to unifying our country,
and it's you know, attached to various symbols, to various holidays,
to various stories and myths.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's a good thing. That's a good thing.
That civil religion needs to be revived.
Speaker 7: And one thing that's peculiar about the Democratic Party today
is there adamantly one hundred and fifty percent opposed to
anything like that. They do not want people to feel
good about their country. They do not want people to
buy into, you know, a glorious vision of their country,
because that's what MAGA does.
Speaker 2: Man, that's right wing. You know, so many things are
right coded.
Speaker 7: Now that again, if you are a Democrat and you
raise some of these issues, say, well, clearly a lot
of this was bullshit. Basically that the left was doing
what people in the universities did or was it. I mean,
your persona on grata immediately, you are just you know,
you're just basically shilling for Trump, you're Trump enabling.
Speaker 6: So who in elected office is getting this right? You said,
even Andy Bisheer, Is anyone getting this right? In the
Democratic Party? Do you see any Clintonian figure on the
horizon who can pull the party back?
Speaker 2: I'd say no at this point. I think they'll have
to emerge.
Speaker 7: I think there are people out there clearly who probably
have a view that is fairly might be fairly close
to reality of what's going on, but they're afraid to
say it. I mean, you think preference falsification is off
a problem for people in bureaucracies or corporations or whatever.
I mean, upon politicians, it's huge. They hide a lot
of what they think frequently, and you know, because they
think it's in politic to say it. So there probably
are people out there Ruben Diego, for all, I know,
there might be others who are like, realize, you know,
we're lost. We really have to be out front about
that we stand for something different. There were different kind
of Democrats, but they're afraid to go through the Sister
Soldier moments that I outlined in my piece that might
actually underscore that. You know, the person who comes closer
to it, oddly enough, is Betterman.
Speaker 2: I mean, Betterman has been well, this is crazy. You know,
we can't before this. You're nuts, you know.
Speaker 7: But he's he's a you know, realistically, he's a marginal
figure in the Democratic Party universe, even though I get
a kick out of him. But you know, Jos Shapiro
is the other guy from Pennsylvania, right, And Jos Shapiro
is a perfect example of someone who probably has reasonably
sensible instincts and a lot of stuff, but is way
too measured, way too cautious to really get get out
there and do it at least I think needs to
be done to get out of the ideological prison they're
in now.
Speaker 2: I think he.
Speaker 7: Will cautiously try to feel his way to the nomination,
and I think in the process, he liked the rest
of them, will be hurted toward toward Nusimism. Right, Gaba,
Newcism has really opposed to Trump. I'm opposed to Trump,
you know, so I think realistically that's where we are.
I mean, it pains me to say it, but that's
how it looks to me.
Speaker 1: Folks. You can find more of this often at the
Liberal Patriot, the Substack newsletter that Roy is one of
the co founder and the politics editor of, and you
should and you should subscribe because you will find interesting
ideas counter to your own and sometimes intersecting with. And
it's important to understand the smart liberal patriots on the
other side of the political aisle so that we can
figure out what we can do down the road together.
And of course, you know, in slight conflict over some
of the things, work will never because you guys are
just wrong.
Speaker 2: That's for another podcast.
Speaker 1: That's another podcast, and that would be fun. But I've
enjoyed I've enjoyed this very much listening to what you
have to say. And it's been great to talk to you, Roy,
And good luck with a Substack and we hope to
have you next time you come up with a book.
Speaker 2: Absolutely happy to do it. Thanks all right, bye bye, right,
okay bye.
Speaker 1: And that was indeed a pleasure. But here's the thing, folks,
we got to figure out is that there's conflict and
then there's football conflict. And we have football conflict to
tell you about. Charles, tell them.
Speaker 5: It's of the virtual variety. Don't worry.
Speaker 6: You don't have to be drafted into the NFL, sign
up for a college team, and to the transfer portal
or any of that. But if you are a Ricochet
member and then you can take part in this year's
fantasy football extravaganza. And if you do is, if not
the best part, at least a good part. You might
even win some money. You might win fifty bucks if
you win the league. If you go to Ricochet right now,
you'll see on the right hand side of the site
there is a link. It looks like a football, so
it's fantasy football on it. You can't really miss it,
and that will explain everything. The draft is going to
be not tomorrow but the Saturday after that. The time
is on there, so are all the rest of the details.
There is an address that you can email expressing your interest,
so go do it. You have eight days to.
Speaker 5: Sign up and take pop grand.
Speaker 1: Well do that. And while you're at Ricochet there by
the way, if you haven't been there before signing up
just to scrape some cash out of us, it's fine,
you might take a look at some of the other
things that we have. It's great when a piece from
the member feed, which is for paying members only, and
by paying members. I mean, it's not going to break
the bank, don't worry, and you get more than you
get a lot when the member feed, stuff goes to
the main feed, just to show you what ricochet is
all about. Yes, there's politics, there's podcasts on intellectual property,
there are pieces about motherhood. There's a post about a
guy who's accusing his power company of maybe stealing his juice.
There's my diner, there's of course, and then there was
a post that I absolutely loved by Gary McVay, one
of our one of our great writers on the site,
who's talking about the rarity of television moving to film
and spends a lot of time talking about Jack Web,
and one hundred comments later, we're all talking about the
sprockets and the frame rates of kinescopes and thirty five
and sea. It's nerdy, it's wonderfully pop culture in a
way that you haven't seen before. And it's just it's
so ricochet to me to see something like that where
you can talk about what happened yesterday, and also the
fact that Jack Web was not a stupid man. He
hired Julian London. So go to ricochet dot com and
you will find everything there, in addition to meetups, of course,
because that's the great thing. If you are a human
being not a bot, you can put out a little
call and Ricochet members will come to you, and you
can sit around and drink and have hamburgers and enjoy yourselves.
And if my memory serves, probably talk about everything except politics.
When we get together, we talk about all the other
wonderful things in lives. Well, what is left to go?
Let's see Trump's going to go. He's going to put
an end to mail in ballots, which I think is
a good idea. I don't like them. I think they
lead to harvesting. I think this trend where we just
have all kinds of loosey goosey stuff for Oh, voting
is going to be over seven days. Oh it's going
to be ranked voting. Oh you can mail it in. No,
you go to a place, you show them your ID,
you sign a piece of paper, you go into a
little hacked off porta potty, and you make your marks
in the oval, like the Iowa Basics test. That's how
you vote. Now, maybe that makes me a boomer I am,
but I think that I think Drum's right here. No
mail in voting. You're here.
Speaker 3: One little trivia point that I always like to bring
up is, I don't know. It's twenty five or maybe
even thirty years ago now that Jimmy Carter and I
think James Baker got together. It did some kind of
commission on voting, and one of their findings was, we
shouldn't have mail in voting. It's just too prone to
fraud and manipulation all things you just said. And that
was the Saint of Jimmy Carter putting his name to
that report. That always gets forgotten in these debates about it,
that even the Saint Jimmy Carter of Plains, Georgia was
skeptical of mail in voting. One reason for that, by
the way, is that he nearly lost his first rate
race with the state Senate, I think in nineteen sixty
two or sixty because of some fraudulent votes in this district,
and he had to go to court to get them invalidated,
and so he won by fifty votes or something. So
he has a long memory of what voting fraud can do.
Speaker 5: Can we must?
Speaker 6: I think we split up the beginning of Trump's tweets
in the middle. The beginning is correct, I also disliked
mail in voting, although I will note that it works
fairly well in Florida. I dislike all voting that is
an election day voting in person, and would apply exemptions
only for military overseas. So on the merits of it,
I basically agree with you James, and you Steve and
Donald Trump. But the mechanism Trump suggested for implementing this
was a'tistrophically unconstitutional, and he did use the phrase the
states have to obey the federal government as represented by
the president.
Speaker 5: Now, hang on a minute.
Speaker 6: So I am a conservative, and one of the things
that I like about the federal government is that it
is a charter of enumerated powers, and the states retain
pretty much all control over everything that the federal government
has not been given. Another thing I like about the
federal government, as contrived by James Madison at al. Is
that decisions about what the federal government is allowed to
do are made by Congress, not by the President in
most cases. So in one fell suoite there, having gone
from a very sensible position, which is mail and voting
as bad, Donald Trump has articulated a view of power
that would have made Woodrow Wilson Blush, and I don't
want that power to be in the hands of anyone.
I don't want it to be in the hands of
Donald Trump, and I don't think anyone who likes Donald
Trump wants it to be in the hands of the
next Democratic president. We saw what even Congress tried to
do last time around under Biden, which was abmolished the
Philip Buster to take over the entire electoral system to
permanently advantage Democrats. And it is just worth pointing out that, yes,
he's right on the merits, but if he were to
try to do that, it would be and should be
struck down by the Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas presumably would
write a coruscating opinion of the sort that he has
written before when this was presented to him.
Speaker 5: So yeah, correct idea. When he says he will lead
a movement, that's how he starts.
Speaker 1: I'm with him.
Speaker 6: I hope Trump does a leader movement against it. I
hope he persuades the country to change how it votes.
He can't do on his own.
Speaker 1: Problem is problem is is that you're absolutely right, but
with almost everything it seems to me that Trump is doing.
I mean, we could be again the show by saying
this is a this is a wise This is a
good thing to be done. It should have been done
a long time ago. The fundamentals are sound, but I
don't like he was how he's going about it. Most
people don't care because nothing was done and now something's
being done, and that's the norm erosion that I worry about.
But on the other hand, I mean, you go back
and forth on this and say, well, let me sort
of how bad of an apologist for a post constitutional
United States it might be coming here because I say
that I'm glad it's being done. I grapple with these things.
But a lot of people will grapple because they're happy
to see ICE doing what they should have been doing
all of these years before, which is enforcing the border
and getting criminals out of the country, et cetera.
Speaker 6: Well, there's nothing wrong with that, of course, that's reasonable.
I would just say that one of the things that
has slightly disappointed me over this one, right, is that
if the Joe Biden had said on Twitter or elsewhere,
the states have to do what the federal government says,
through me, the representative of the federal government, your president.
Speaker 5: I mean we'd have gone and flicked the safety off rifles.
Speaker 1: Like, come on, Stephen, last question before we go here.
Have you ever been to a cracker barrel? You know,
I don't think I ever have. They don't They don't
have very many of them out here in California. I'm
not sure I've ever seen one out here. I know
I've seen them elsewhere. But you know, I'm worried now
about the slippery slope.
Speaker 3: We've lost Aunt Jemima, We've lost the you know, the
the Indian lady on Land of Lakes. Butter, I'm worried
about Crackerjack.
Speaker 2: That could be next.
Speaker 1: Well, as he's a tired and sort of early twentieth
century naval uniform. So there's a militarism there extend. You
know that that was the time when the Great White Fleet,
oh my gosh, the White Fleet was, you know, it
was doing bad things in the Philippines. So yeah, I
think get rid of him and just keep hugged the
dug whatever the dog was named.
Speaker 3: I do know how cracker Barrel can turn it around.
This is obligatory. Well, they need to obviously start an
ad campaign with Sidney Sweeney because you know, just because
the crack.
Speaker 5: Of barrels, yes, jams, yes.
Speaker 6: Now I want to know you think of crackerball because
you are the great collector of Americana, so you must
have a take on this.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean I have no cracker barrel stuff. As
I said before, I've never been into one, never had
a particular desire to do one. I find suicidal brand
changes to be fascinating because they took rid of the
guy in the rocking chair. He has a name, he's
part of their whole corporate mythology. They got rid of
him in favor of a bland logo with the words
cracker barrel are too small, driving me nuts. But what
they're doing there is they're sort of getting away from basically,
you know, explicit chatty iconography from the eighties and the
nineties and the rest of it would have worked, but
it's dated. To them. Everything is dated, everything's brown. They
don't like the clientele because they're old, and so they
want to bring new people in. But the people that
will be brought in by a brightened up place are
not the people are going to go to cracker Barrel
in the first place. I mean, they're in a difficult position.
They have to satiate the desires of the old clientele
at the same time bring in some new people to
look around and say, I feel somewhat hip. Now this
is a modified look at what my grandma's kitchen used to.
You know, I'm just fascinated how chains die. Chili is
having a moment at present because they've just done very
well with their ads. They've come up with some price
points that hit the right spot, and all of a sudden,
Chili's is just big and it's booming. And then you
look back and you say, what was across the street
from Chili's, Well, TGIF with that explosion of an antique
store in the wall motif that they had, and TGIF
now expires and dies. What happened to Roy Rogers? What
happened to Shonyes? What happened to Big Boy? What happened
to driving out on an American street? And there's a fighting
chance you would see a fiberglass statue of a boy
in a red and white checked overalls holding aloft her.
Why did these things die? Why did they change? And
it's it's an almost spiritual question when it comes to
commercial America. So I think that cracker Barrel is in
a hard position. I understand what they did what they did.
I find it interesting, however, that this fed instantaneously into
the whole woke, go broke thing because Cracker Barrel at
one point post twenty twenty, when companies were obliged to
have a position on the major issues of the day.
If you remember back in the eighties, Charles Stephen, do
you remember what the slogan was from the AIDS activists
silence equals death right, ah right, And that was a
way of politicizing every corner of America, demanding that if
you don't say anything about a particular issue, then we
are going to assume you're on the wrong side of it.
And Cracker Barrel, which is supposed to be rural and
Middle America and all the rest of it, put out
rainbow rockers on the porches of their place to show
that everyone was welcome. Well, so that sort of inclusion,
if you want to call it, that sends a message
to people who previously had never won in a million years,
wondered what the position of Cracker Barrel was on gay rights.
And now they're looking at they're looking at a rocking
chair or as they walk in to have their hotcakes
and thinking, well, does that mean that Cracker Barrel is
in favor of puberty blockers for minors? Because if they are,
I've got a problem with that. And so when they
did that, that was part of the first problem. And
then the stripping down on the modernization and getting rid
of the old guy and the rest of it. Just sorry,
my mic field down, they got a problem. That's only
going to say nothing, just repeating myself at this point.
So would either of you like to repeat yourself or
would you like to call it a day and let
people get on with their lives or whatever they're doing
right now, vacuuming gardenings, just sitting under the porch watching
the world go by.
Speaker 6: I have a one minute take if I can delay
people watching the world go by.
Speaker 5: Take it's my take. I don't think it's woke. I
think it's crap.
Speaker 6: And I think that it's crap because we have systematically
removed creative people from corporations and replace them with those
who know how to play the game, who don't actually
have any talent. And this is true in the movie industry,
and it's true in the restaurant industry. That woman is
probably not some hyper progressive lunatic who is trying to
destroy a crack a Bower because she thinks anything associated
with the South, a rural America or America's past needs
to be obviated. She's probably just incompetent and bland. And
she looked at those designs and says, yes, I love that,
because everything in her life looks like that. And people
who aren't like that, which is most people who can't
play the corporate game that she has played, are looking
at this and saying that's crap. And now this stock
price is going to go down even further than it
has over the last five years, and she's going to
get fired. And instead of replacing her with somebody who's
actually talented, they were replaced her with the next person
in line, who has said all the right things for
the last twenty three years and has no personality.
Speaker 1: Very good. I agree with you completely. My daughter's inn advertising, though,
and so I'm here to tell you there is hope.
There is hope for imagination and true creativity in the
rest of it. On the other end, mentioned movies in
television all being crapped more or less. I was paging
through the pain the other day and then the pain
and the streaming channel, and then the other streaming channel,
desperately trying to find something to watch that didn't seem
formulaic or had stunt casting or a historical casting, and
the rest of it. And I decided that I would
give another chance to this highly tottered, highly weighted, highly
apparently desirable idea Aliens Earth. I don't know if you've
heard about this, right, Finally they do in a television
series what they should have been in the third movie,
which is to take the xenomorphs and put them on Earth.
But let me tell you something, Guys, stop me if
you've ever heard of this idea. It's actually turning into
a philosophical disquisition on the differences between humans and synthetic people.
I mean, what does it mean to be human? What
does it mean to be mechanical? I'm stunned that this
is the only the forty seventh iteration that I've seen
of this in the last ten years or something like that.
I want to take Westworld scripts, roll them up like
in the first movie, and jam them down the throat.
Whoever wrote this thing, I'm just not there, all right,
that's enough. I'm ranting too much coffee, too much fun.
I love talking to you guys, and it's been great
to do so today. This has been the Ricochet Podcast.
You can join us, of course, at ricochet dot com,
where also you'll find links to bank on yourself, support them,
support yourself. Great idea and if you could leave a
five Yeah, I was gonna say it wasn't I was
gonna say you could leave a five star review. I
don't know why I bother, but I gotta tell you
it's in the contract. If you could be a five
star review for us on an Apple podcast, we would
be very very happy about that. There, I've fulfilled my
contractual obligation and I now commend you all to the
rest of your day and we'll see everybody in the
comments at Ricochet. Four point what Charles, because man, have
you been tweaking?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 6: I think it's full point twelve point seven right now.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's spoken like a man who knows his business.
It's been great guys. Bye bye,