Speaker 1: I got so into that story for what I was
talking about.
Speaker 2: That was a great story. Though, So who you know
can who can bother?
Speaker 3: As not what your country can do for you, as
what you can do for your country.
Speaker 2: Mister Gorbachev teared down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast
with Charnleals, C. W. Cook, and Stephen Hayward James Lilacs,
and today we go over the week that was and
what a week it was. Indeed, so let's Arisela's a podcast.
Speaker 4: The criticism of the content, which was basically that maybe
specifically in this political climate, like white people shouldn't joke
about genetic superiority like that was kind of like the
criticism broadly speaking. And since you are talking about this,
I just wanted to give you an opportunity to talk
about that specifically.
Speaker 1: I think that when I have an issue that I
want to speak about, people will hear.
Speaker 2: Welcome everybody, It's the Ricochet Podcast, number seven hundred and
sixty four. I think you might know better if you're
sitting there in your cell doing hashmarks on the wall
saying no, it's seven sixty five. I drew the line
across the other ford. Well, you know, let's just say
we've done a lot and we're gonna do more. Why
Because ricochet dot com keeps going and going and going,
and you can help. You can if you go there
and be part of the most stimulating conversations and community
on the web. That's ricochet dot com. I'm James Allix
in Minneapolis, where it is very much in November. It
is dank, it is overcast, it is cloudy, it is misty.
It's a nice autumn day. The trees are fully inflamed,
and we're barreling towards Thanksgiving with that feeling of well Thanksgiving.
This Stephen Hayward is not in his accustomed place, if
I can tell by his zoom feed, he appears to
be in I don't know, have you been abducted and
you're been somebody's attic or something or what?
Speaker 5: Well you might think.
Speaker 3: So, I'm actually in Washington, DC, attending the annual National
Lawyer's Conference of the Federal Societ. Even though I'm not
a lawyer, but I slumme it with these lawyers, right,
you got to keep up with them. Where About an
hour ago, as we are, as you and I are recording,
I did hear Senator Ted Cruz launch into a fairly
blistering attack on Tucker Carlson and calling out the cowardice
of people who won't challenge Tucker Carlson. So, for what
it's worth, that's what's going on here up in DuPont
Circle area of Washington this morning.
Speaker 2: Interesting. I was seeing a tweet by somebody that I
like and follow the other day on Twitter, and they
were saying that the whole intern I scene squabbles in
the right, with some people coming down on Tucker, and
some people coming down on Tucker for platforming Nick Fluentes,
and some people just coming down on Nick Fluentdays in
the first place. It makes him feel like a dad
who wants to reach around in the car back seat
and tell him, if you don't stop squabbing, I'm gonna
turn this guy around and go right thinking, No, that's
not what it's like, that's not what it's like at all.
If this indeed is going to be the new face
of the party, if this is going to be something
that we have to consider because we're just asking questions
because we've just been enthralled for so long to this
poisonous element of international hand rubbing. Hook knows jewry You know,
if you can't say anything about them, you know, then
tells you who you're leaders. I'm sorry, I don't want
anything to do with these people, and I don't want
anything to do with anybody who makes excuses for them.
They can go to hell. Somebody who sits there in
this interview with Tucker Carlson and says, you know that
he's got admiration for Joseph Stalin, I mean, yeah, the
other side's got that too. I think there was a
guy on Mundami's election night who was saying, you know
what we need more in this country is more class consciousness.
You know, the United States with the country that defeated
the USSR unfortunately, moron, absolute moron. So yeah, the other
side does have their people who believe a variety of
stupid things about authoritarianism, but this id I no, you
don't get to say Stalin was a badass and get
to be in this party. Go go away, or I'm
heading for the exit, and I don't care what the
ramifications are.
Speaker 3: The closest I've ever come to not real appraise of Stalin,
but I've occasionally used the joke, which I think came
from Joe Sobrin a brilliant but somewhat dodgy guy, right,
He commented years ago on the Supreme Court, saying, just
imagine what Stalin could have done if only he'd had
the commerce clause.
Speaker 5: I think it's funny.
Speaker 2: I think that's pretty good. Yes, yes it is, Yes
it is very much so. But let's think what Stalin
actually did when he had had uncontested power in the
country where he could just simply do what he wished
and send everybody with the Gulag. I would like these people,
I mean, I would love nothing more than to have
this Flint Day's character, or anybody who's making apologies for
the Soviet Union, to be strapped down into a chair
like Malcolm McDowell in Clockwork Orange with his eyes held
open as somebody dropped in you know, lubricant, and be
forced to read the entirety of one day in the
Life of Yvon Denissa, followed by the Gulag, you know,
the whole thing. You can just sit there for six
months and let that scroll across the screen and take
it all in. Joseph Stalin was an admirable character. Ah,
but there seems to be some sort of well it's
Tucker after all, and you know, Tucker's gotten a little
strange lately. He always was with a UFO thing. But
you know, Tucker was always saying the things that other
people wouldn't, and he's got a contrary perspective. And we
like people who aren't, you know, we like the heterodox think.
I don't know what's happened to the guy I don't.
I mean minimum once we did a panel together, and
he's a great guy, smart guy, funny, no indication whatsoever
that down the road would be this boy. You know what,
I really do hate the Christian Zionists and those Jews
are blowing up Christian churches and guys and killing me.
I would say I didn't have that on my Bingo card,
but no Bingo card ever has. Tucker Carlson goes off
the you know, the cliff, the under the letter I.
So what do you take? What do you make of
the of all this? Is this just you know, squabbling
on the right that doesn't bleed out into the general population,
or is this one of those things where people say, oh, great,
well they're complaining that we've called them Nazis, and a
look who they're bringing in. Look who seems to be
a okay by the heritage boys.
Speaker 3: Well, I have lots of thoughts, but I see Charles
has entered the chat. So Charles, good, give us an
opening bid here.
Speaker 2: I think we know, Charles C. W. Cook. We have
been talking about Nick and Tucker. As you well might imagine.
It's a zesty's zingy topic that brings a lot of
things to the fore. And I'm going to let you say, hello,
how skip the weather and go right to it. What
do you think?
Speaker 1: Well, I think many things. The foundational thing I think
is that the notion that in politics you are not
allowed to decide with whom you associate is that's really unsustainable.
It makes not much sense in a free playeralist society
to have rigorous vetting of the political opinions of say
your architect or cleaner or plumber. That is a good
forum in which to live and let live. But politics
is about deciding who you are with and who you're against,
and what you believe. Obviously, so the notion that it's
cancel culture for a movement such as ours to say
we don't want Nazis in it, it's philosophically ridiculous. Before
you get to the details, the practical side of this
really annoys me, because although I am against the toleration
of people who say paint the Jews, I understand that
there is a line somewhere at which you say we
need a big coalition. We need to accept that people
disagree with us.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 1: I talk about this in that I'm a Reaganite conservative
who's for free markets and against tariffs, and is classically
liberal in most of his presumptions. And I know that
between depending on the time, thirty and fifty five percent
of the Republican Party is not. And I think it's
fine in most circumstances. That's why I'm not at the bulwark.
I'm not a Bill crystolite. I think it's fine for
the party to ebb and flow and have those disagreements.
We had throughout our history people in the party who
were much more trumpy. We had Senator Taft who was
more trumpy on foreign policy. We had Pat Buchanan in
nineteen ninety two challenged George H. W. Bush, and so on.
What I find annoying the James is that that ecumenicalism
that I have just described is claimed by the people
who now say that we have to tolerate Nick Frentes,
but not practiced. They shout at me and anyone who
disagrees with him in the slightest all the time. They're
always trying to kick people out. So it was funny
to watch all these defenses of Tucker Carson. Guys, is
an election this week. I know he didn't have anyone
running in it on or endorse them or help them,
but guys, there is an election this week. We've got
a unite. We can't be wasting our time with this infighting.
And the next thing he put up on Twitter was
an attack on Lindsey Graham. Now, look, if your view
is all against all, fine, you don't have to defend
Lindsey Graham. If you think the Republicans are better off
without Lindsay Graham, that's your prerogative. I don't because I
think that we need lots of different senators and governors
and representatives in different places to cobble together a majority.
But you can't have it both ways. You simply cannot
say that I have to tolerate Nick Fuentes, but that
Tucker Carson doesn't have to tolerate Lindsay Graham. That is ridiculous.
Speaker 2: There are bright lines. Yes, we want a big tint.
Yes we want to be ecumenical. Yes we want to
incorporate contrary views sometimes to illustrate and inform and sharpen
our own and to reach your concensus out of all that.
But if somebody believes in a lower if somebody believes
in a flat tax, but on the other hand is
a strict adherent and advocate for Carthaginian ball worship and
child sacrifice, I'm going to say, maybe that's a line
that we're not going to cross. That's a bright dividing
line that makes me not want this person in there,
because A, they're going to be boring you at the
table all the time about how the Carthaginians had it
right with the child sacrifice. But b these are things
beyond the pale, and there are things that ought to
be beyond the pale. Now, Steve and I were talking
earlier about the casual anti semitism on the right that's arisen,
which is one of those dismaying things that you just
your heart sinks, because the left, as we know, has
been asking its own anti semitism with the usual indigenous
people revolt, the oppressor oppressed dynamic, the Palestinian question. It
gives them a way to say, oh, they choose a
choose without actually coming out and saying it, because they've
got the word zionis is to uncover. But on the right,
there seems to be a very well Stephen, describe what
you were some of the conversations that you were having,
which we are sort of alarming in their in their
ignorance more than they are in their malevolence.
Speaker 3: Yeah, all right, Well, I mean I think I just say,
I mean, let me let me re reset the scene
for this this way twents is a shock jock. I mean,
I think the model there was Alex Jones, who's shown
for twenty years or more now that you can make
very good bank by being absolutely outrageous.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 3: And so I think fwent Is does that. Uh And
and now we've all we've elevated him. That's one thing
that the whole freakas has done, not just Tucker putting
him on, but then the people now rallying around Tucker,
who I think is intellectually unstable. I think if you
go through his corpus of writings throughout his career, you
can make out that as you're right, as bright as
he is, and and he's important because he was a
leading figure on Fox News and elsewhere and still has
a big audience. Okay, the thing to ask is why
do so many people like uh Nick Fuentes? And and
here I was quite shocked in going recently actually was
University of Mississippi the week before Jadie Vance went down.
There was confronted by the student said how can we
support Israel?
Speaker 5: And I thought he gave a poor answer.
Speaker 3: But I met several students there, really bright solid conservatives,
very well read.
Speaker 5: They know the cannon.
Speaker 3: And several of them said to me when I asked
you who's going to succeed Charlie Kirk because they were
still very upset about Kirk's death, and they said, well,
you know, we think it might be this Nick Twente's guy.
We kind of like him, and we know he's a
little weird. He says some crazy stuff, but you know,
he grabbed their attention. And I found that startling. After
a couple of you know, actually three four days of
meeting and doing long seminars with some of these students,
and then the young lady says to me, drive me
to the airport. Sweet girl, She's driven me the airport
to Memphis before it's an hour long trip. She said, yeah,
I kind of like this Nick Twente's guy, and I
do wonder why do we give all this money to Israel? Now,
I want to stipulate that I didn't detect any anti
Semitism among these students I met. I don't think they
have any of that, but I do think they have
been prone to the propaganda. I think a lot of
it originates overseas, and there's not been a lot of pushback.
So I mean, I explained a couple of people, well,
actually most of the ab give to Israel is military aid.
It's for joint development of technology, it's to our benefit.
A lot of that money recycles back to our defense manufacturers,
and they'll said, oh, I didn't know that. I'd never
heard that before. I guess that makes some sense, right,
But I thinks are bad, and so I think we
need to figure out something fast because we are losing
a certain segment of younger conservatives over to this at
best ambiguous situation.
Speaker 2: Charles, do you think it might have to be with
just young people enjoying somebody who's taking on the shiblots,
who's taking on the sacred cows? You know, apptita bourgeoisie.
Let's say the shock value of it all is Steve
calls him a shock jack. That that, I mean, while
that's certainly part of being young and loving to splash
around in the muck, there are other directions from which
one can come that don't take this. I mean, you
can be outrageous about a whole bunch of issues. This
seems to be one that is a It's a big
warning to me. When people start to believe in this,
then it's very easy for them to slip into a
casual hatred of the people who you know, you know,
the Jews, because frankly, yeah, they say, we can't criticize them, Well,
you know what, what makes them so special? And the
next thing you know, the next thing you know, and
the next thing you know.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm in two minds on this. I will say
before I share my two minds, that there is of
course nothing wrong with anyone, especially in the United States,
separate country, criticizing Israel or American foreign policy. And if
that were the extent of it, we wouldn't be having
this conversation. I mean, two minds as to why this
problem has arisen. On the one hand, I do think
Trump is an expression of this to some extent, that Conservatives,
because they were successful in many ways, had and maybe
have still forgotten the argument that led them to their maxims,
by which I mean a lot of conservative argument in
favor of Israel, and I am very pro Israel. Does
not explain in the way Steve just did why our
relationship with Israel is important. It just declares it. They
just say we must stand with Israel, and when you
do that without the substance, the support atrophies among people
who haven't been around for fifty years. On the other hand,
while that is a problem in general with conservatism, the
people who hate Israel are quite clever, and they are
very very good at conflating hatred of the Jews, conspiracy theories,
the oldest prejudices with reasonable sounding contemporary policy disputes, and
most of the problem that we're discussing manifests itself in
ways that are simply indefensible. You'll be in a conversation
and it won't be why do we give a few
billion dollars to Israel. It will be the Israelis bombed
the USS liberty, or the Israelis have a secret plan
to flood the country with the legal immigrants, or the
Israelis they run the banks, or they've bought our politicians,
or the Jews tricked the White Star Line into sinking
the Titanic so that the federal you know.
Speaker 2: Well that was that one's not in dispute, Charles, Well, it.
Speaker 1: Did hit an iceberg, as someone pointed out to me, right,
that's right. So you know, I I do think there's
some confusion, and I do think Conservatives haven't done as
good a job as they could have. At the same time,
so much of this stuff is tied to a preference
for conspiracy theories that has come back on both sides
of the aisle in such force, and of course, into
that maelstream, we're going to put the main conspiracy theory
in the human history, which is the Truce did it,
and we should stand up against it. And we shouldn't
accept the lie that this is just about Benjamin Netto's leadership.
Speaker 2: Come on, if somebody, though, knows nothing about the situation
and they say, yeah, whay do we give so much
money to them, it indicates to me that they haven't
given the slightest look more than a second at the
region itself. And what constitutes the governments and the cultures
around it. It doesn't. It seems silling to me that
they would somehow say that this particular little sliver of
a country is is. It's very curious why we're so
attached to them, and why we're not equally attached to
these which have cultures that are absolutely contrary and antithetical
to all the things that we, as good Westerners believe.
I don't get that. I mean a cursory look at
the situation. A glance at the situation will tell you
exactly why perhaps we have thrown in our fortunes with
this little New Jersey sized sliver than the rest of it.
I don't know what there is more to go on?
Speaker 3: Well, can I just add one thought to that, James?
I mean, we've been concentrating on interest in geostrategy. I
gree complete with what you just said, but I think
we want add one other dimension. So you know, one
of things Tucker said was I hate Christian Zionists. I'm
not sure exactly what he means by that. I'm not
sure what a Christian Zionist is. I think I might
be one, rightly understood, But you know, when that student
asked JD. Vance, by the way, why are we allied
with Israel? They have a religion that's different and hostile
to ours, And my thought was Ronald Reagan would have
answered that with a single sentence. Reagan would have said,
it's called the Judeo Christian tradition for a reason, and that,
to me is ultimately the bedrock of why we are
allied with Israel. Even at the Middle East or at peace,
they would still be one of our best friends in
the world for that reason alone, full stop, right right right.
Speaker 2: And you know, when you look into Judeo Christian as
a concept, there are difficulties there. There, there are contrary strains,
there are things that you have to entangle. But at
the heart of it is like the same thing when
we say, when we refer to Western civilization, there are
basic fundamental precepts that the like pornography, you know, may
not be able to define it, but I know it
when I see it, and that's what binds them to
us and to you know, and to Western civilization, which
has done its best to try to kill them for
the last two thousand years.
Speaker 3: Kind of gave you one more sentence on that. It
was from Winston Churchill in the last volume it was
World War Two Memoirs, where he said all that is
best in Western civilization owes its origin to Jerusalem and Athens,
reason and revelation see and he understood the connection.
Speaker 1: That there's also a point at which it becomes quite
pointless trying to reason with people who've decided they hate Jews,
because the arguments are not only made in bad faith,
but are unfalsifiable. Jane Nordlegger pointed this out to me
that they switch on a dime. So you say, why
do you hate the Jews, And I'll say, wow, I
hate the Jews because they're socialists, are communists. They came
into this country with their radical politics, and they destroyed
our American system of capitalism and free enterprise, and they
created a race war and all the crap they believe, right,
And then you say, oh, okay, I don't think that's true.
And then they go, yeah, well, I hate them because
they're capitalists, because they came in and they run all
the banks, and they got rid of our welfare system
and now they have all the money and the average
working person can't. Then they let immigrants in so they
could exploit and you're like, hang on a minute, those
two things are complete opposites of one another. You're just
going with whatever it is at that moment. You know,
people do this with Americans too, right, it's Americans. The
problem with them is that they worship the body they
worship's hair brushing, and they're just obsessed with bodybuilding. The
other problem with Americans, if you need it to be,
is that they're all fat and o beasts that don't
care about themselves. It's just like, once you've decided you
hate someone, you can find a reason for it. And
that's why, ultimately you just have to stand up and say,
you know what, there will always be people who hate
the Jews, but they're not going to be in our
movement because that's just not what we do here.
Speaker 5: Yep.
Speaker 2: As well as far as being supervisial and body conscious,
Sidney Sweeney, goodness, she did an interview and I saw
a little snippet of it where this woman was trying
to get her to say, Okay, you can kind of
say you're sorry now because you know, the whole gens
thing and the white supremacy and it's just a bad
time to be talking about jeans, you know, this is
your opportunity to apologize and get around that. And her
response was basically no was when I have something to
say about things, I'll say it. I did a gene ad,
I wear jeans all the time, refusing to take de
bait and showing exactly how it's done. Everything this woman does, somehow,
somehow seems to be this culture war clash, which is
quite remarkable really, and it's coming from people who probably
twenty thirty years ago, thirty forty years ago would have
defended the Brooks Shields Ads because it was chic and
it was transgressive and all the rest of it. But
this is a bad ad because Nick Foent's has probably
you know, been holding up picture of her in the
jeans to the wall with one hand for three weeks. Now,
did you did you see any did you what what?
He just was trying to find some tape or some pins.
I don't know if you guys saw the interviewer or
whether or not you think women Yeah, no, I don't. Yeah,
I think you're I think you're right. That's that's well.
Speaker 1: So they keep saying on the left that this was
a beloved ad among the white supremacist and I've seen
literally no evidence of this whatsoever. It's all in their heads.
Speaker 2: I don't know who these people are.
Speaker 5: Well.
Speaker 2: It has been a weak, apparently stunning victories for the
laugh of the Democrats and the rest of it. I
generally am not all that interested in most election post
mortems because they're local, but some of them are indicative.
It's interesting that in Virginia, of course, you know, the
racist population, the white supremacist population of Virginia rejected the
opportunity to be led by a strong, smart black woman.
You had a fellow who won the ag race by
five six points who had previously announced his desire to
shoot his opponents in the head, and your little dog too,
and your children, which may, given his electoral success, have
a bunch of people trying to invent a time machine
so they too can go back and fabricate tweets about
themselves fantasizing about the death of their opponents. But the
New York mayor election was the one that probably got
most people's attention because it seemed the stupidest. It seemed
the most unforced air, seemed the most willing descent into
the worst form of politics and economics than you can
possibly imagine for the city. And it was facilitated by well,
probably by very rich people who wanted to do the
right thing and thought that this shiny new socialist was
the best hope for New York, or just liked the
idea of just putting a thumb in the eye of
America by electing him, And of course by all the
young women that I saw on Twitter and x and
TikTok who were proudly declaring that they just voted for
him because he was going to bring back well New York.
They've only been able to imagine it. Free buses, grocery
stores run by the state, and something something else. I
don't know. So, guys, what do you think it portends
for New York in the short and the long term?
Or is this just going to be another one of
those guys Deblasio style comes in, wasting off a lot
of money in the city and nevertheless manages to survive
because it's a colossus on its own right, too big
to fail, perhaps which we know it isn't.
Speaker 1: Well, it's too big to fail in the sense that
it weren't collapse. It's too big to fail in the
sense that it is unlikely Wall Street's going to move
to Dallas. It's too big to fail in that. It
turns over its population almost completely every fifty years. It
is still the center of the world. It's not too
big to fail in that. And I know you're not
suggesting this. The political leadership doesn't matter. I moved to
the United States in twenty eleven, and I moved to
New York, and my parents were nervous about it because
they'd been to New York in the eighties and they
thought it would be like that, it would be dangerous,
And in fact, in twenty eleven, when I lived in
New York, it was safer than London. And if you
were in Manhattan, as I was, it was much preferable
to being in London. Not because London had more crime everywhere,
but because in London the crime happens in all parts
of the city, including the nice bits, whereas in New
York that isn't true, or wasn't in twenty eleven. If
you were in Manhattan in twenty eleven, you were pretty
much guaranteed to be spared the crime. And I used
to tell people back in England who would ask me
about it, because their conception of New York was nineteen seventies,
nineteen eighties New York as well, that I could probably
walk around the streets with cash in one hand and
an iPhone and the other at one o'clock in the morning, drunk,
and no one would touch me. And that's not true.
Now New York is not dead, but New York is
not twenty eleven New York anymore. That Giuliani Bloomberg legacy
has been squandered. Builde Blasio did not take New York
back to nineteen seventy eight, but he certainly took it
back to the mid nineties before it got really, really good.
And that's a disgrace. It's an absolute disgrace to have
gone through what New York did, to have made the
difficult changes to know how to do it. Obviously, conservatives
know this story. Steve said, they know the canon. These
conservatives he has been talking to, Well, part of the
canon is James Q. Wilson. Part of the canon is
really Jilli High and police broken windows and all of this.
Speaker 2: This is not a secret.
Speaker 1: So I am worried for New York in that respect,
and then I'm worried for it in a second and
related respect, which is how many people are going to
move out. I don't worry about that. As a Floridian,
the people who move here tend to be more conservative.
We now have one and a half million Republican registration
advantage because people have moved in from the Northeast and elsewhere.
That doesn't hurt me here, but it hurts New York
because you need to have a critical mass of people
who are persuadable that they don't have to live like this,
which is what you got with Julianni and then Bloomberg.
If they've all moved, even if it's just in New
Jersey or southern Connecticut, how does the city fix itself?
Chicago hasn't had a Republican may since nineteen thirty four.
It cannot fix itself because everyone's left. So that's the
bit that worries me, is that Mam Donnie will make
it worse. He'll squander what's left of that legacy, and
then no one will stick around to fix it, so
it will spiral.
Speaker 2: Well, they'll stick around, perhaps, but only forty nine percent
of the year. If you can move to Florida, really,
if you can, If you can move to Florida and
have that as your primary residence, but also have a
piedoitar in Billionaire's Row or in Park Slope for that matter.
Then you're able to come back and avail yourself of
all the things you love about Manhattan. The store is
Times Square, you are my wife. Goodbye city life and
the you know, the shops and the restaurants, and then
go back to Florida and pay no taxes and live
a much more comfortable life. So they're not going to
go They're just going to exacerbate this thing that supposedly
they're so mortified by, which is the class distinctions they're
going to make. It's not going to get cheaper. Rent
control will only make it more expensive and mean that
nobody won't build anything. We just lost here in Saint Paul,
the city across the river got rid of their mayor
who had been part of the whole rent control apparatus,
and it's been disastrous for the city. Everybody saw it. Immediately,
all the building permits dropped to one, you know, from
you know, from one thousand to one, and that'll happen
to New York. I mean, nobody will notice exactly the
additional economic boat anchors being draped around the next of
the companies, because nobody notices the person they don't hire,
Nobody notices the skyscraper that doesn't get built. Actually all
of the I mean, there's just less of things that
you don't notice because they don't happen because of what
was done.
Speaker 3: Well sorry, well what they will notice in New York
is when the buses, the free bus has become rolling
homeless shelters, and they will know who to blame because
he was so associated with it. Whether he can make
that actually happen is he might actually people say, oh,
there's the MTA or whatever it's called, have the real authority,
but he can. He can pressure the MTA or appoint
new members and so forth. But the brightside sort of
is this mondami is now the leading progressive celebrity in
the country and he has responsibility. I mean, unlike Elizabeth
Warren and AOC and Bernie Sanders, what do they do?
They give speeches? Mondamie actually has to perform a lot
of his wreckage will happen somewhat slowly, but at a
certain point. You mentioned Chicago. I think Charles mayor Brandon Johnson,
I think his approval rating is in the single digits.
Speaker 5: I think nine percent last I saw.
Speaker 3: It, and you know, Mondamie, you could easily see three
four years from now Mondamie plumbing those deaths even with
New Yorkers. Now, is there's somebody, even a sensible Democrat
who's come along. Maybe not, but you know, out in
San Francisco, I can tell you since I live out
there and visit the city from time to time. It's
getting better in a hurry. It's coming back fast. Why
they elected a Democrat who's not an idio law He's
actually from the what lotter is his name, Dan Lourie.
He's from the Gap family or something like that, or
Levi Strauss maybe one of the big parel companies that
goes back to a gold rush. He's not interested in
making rhetorical fights with Trump. He says, I just want
to fix the city, and he's moving fast to do that.
So you know, I mean, this will sound kind of fancible,
but it wouldn't surprise me if five years from now
we're talking about the first term of the comeback under
Mayor Bill Ackman.
Speaker 1: Ah, that would be interesting. I think he wants to
be president, but he may have to settle Chicago, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the progressive left. A big part of it is
that worse is better. I mean, that's always kind of
an idea for the left, because the worst things are
that means that you just haven't you just haven't done enough.
If the bus has turned into rolling homely shelters and
everybody's being assaulted by wide eyed men who are waving
around box cutters, well the solution for that, obviously is
to abolish capitalism, because it's it's it's what's produced this inequity,
et cetera. But people don't go for that. People don't
buy that. People hear enough stories about somebody being garrotted
on their subway platform, and the last thing they think of,
you know what, we really do need to up end
this order completely and start fresh from years here. Know
what they want is for guys in uniforms, burly people
to come along and take them and put them away
into bins. And that I hope, as Stephen was saying
that six years from now, that's what we'll be hearing.
But it's a lesson that has to be learned over
and over and over again. And you just don't know
why the aggregate effect of this kind of rule doesn't
sink into New Yorkers. It's just is it? Because there's
just a lot of ruin in a society. And you know,
as I said before, the city is not going to
fall apart, but there's a lot of ruin in society,
and there's a lot of things that have to happen
in New York before people start to demand more. Well,
one of the republic one of the Democrats, the other
day said that we're getting to the point of the
shutdown where planes are going to start falling out of
the sky and maybe that will put people to the
negotiation table. I thought it was a new twist on
wishing your opponents dead, and again it's one of those
worsest better things. Haven't any planes fall out of the
sky yet. Planes are being canceled because the FAA shortfalls.
But thirty eight days in as of this podcast, record
breaking shutdown, I guess we have to say something about it.
So it's supposed to vote again. I think for the
one hundred and forty seventh the time on a house
pasted CR clean, CR. I think, not filthy as the
others are. More. Do you think this goes Do you
think the Democrats will eventually cave and say, okay, okay,
clean cr we'll hammer out the stuff later or not.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I think if I'm keeping up with the news today,
and I'm never sure if I am, I think it's
already failed in the Senate today.
Speaker 5: Oh okay.
Speaker 3: And I think you know, I did predict last week
that Democrats wanted to wait for the election and that
they had a big result it was going to stiffen
their spines to hold out for more. So I think
they are, now i'll say it, greedy. I think they
think that they're going to get Republicans to fold, and
so I think they are not at all bothered by
airline cutbacks and so forth.
Speaker 5: So now this is going to go on a while
longer yet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Charles, you'll be with me on this. One of
the things is they're saying that they're waiting for them
to fold one of the things that's the hardest to fold,
and everybody, everybody knows this is a fitted sheet. Now,
a regular sheet has got corners on it and you
can fold it nicely. But a fitted sheet has got
that elastic under it, and it's impossible to fold the
things to put them away. But you got cozy earth
sheets You're never gonna want to put them away. You're
gonna want to have them on your bed all year round.
Now it's getting cozy, to use their own word, on
this earth here in this part of the country is
the temperatures go, and the leaves fall and the winter beckons.
And what, of course you want to do is make
a refuge out of your own home from the stresses outside.
We're inside and just crawl into beds sometimes and enjoy
a nice, warm, soft place. Hey, when the holidays get
busy and they get a little overwhelming, think about it.
What's the gift you would like to give your loved
ones most. I'll bet you think I'm gonna say sheets,
and I am, but I'm going to say a specific kind.
Speaker 5: For me.
Speaker 2: It's the gift of slowing down and feeling cozy and
making home you're sanctuary to write out those bitter winter
months to come. And that's exactly what cozy earth provides. Charles.
I know you're in a place where the seasonal variation
of temperatures is about seven degrees or so. You never
have the winters that we do. Snow does not lash
at your windows, gales do not put the temperature down
to the twenties. But nevertheless, you are experienced as a
man who's used these sheets both in hot weather for
their wicking ability and I guess in what you would
call cold to keep you warm. And I know it's
only because your wife.
Speaker 1: Likes them nice, not only but she is in charge.
Speaker 2: Yes, of course I have.
Speaker 1: Used them in both circumstances. And that's the impressive thing,
because most of the time I want to stay cool.
I don't want to crawl into a warm bed. I
want to crawl into a cool bed, and these sheets
are pretty great at that. But it does occasionally get cold.
We did last year James go below freezing really up
to thirty one one night. That is still cold. Even
if it's thirty three to thirty four outside, that's still cold.
So I do love these sheets. My wife chose them,
she's in charge of the sheets. But I still sleep
in them, and I'm impressed.
Speaker 2: Well, he's been doing so for over one hundred nights.
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Let's see what up is going on here in the world.
Oh Scotas, stuff Scotus. There are there are terriffs. Now
we are told by Chris Matthews, of course that Donald
Trump is acting like a king. He wants to be
a king, So I assume that if the whole tariff
thing goes against him, there will be at least six
bloody severed heads on pikes outside of the White House,
or maybe on the gate remb me outside the Oval
Office with its new sign. What do you make of
the tariff arguments so far and what do you think
is the fallout going to be depending on which way
it goes? Scotus fan that you are.
Speaker 1: I'm just posing a second to whine myself up, James,
because this is my area. What do I think of it?
I think that the way in which the Trump administration
has used AIPA is preposterous and an obvious threat to
our constitutional order. And I thought that that was obvious
from the oral arguments at the court earlier in the week.
The foundational question here is of delegation. I am fairly
radical on this. I don't think the court will touch this.
But the tariff power is put into Article one, Section eight,
along with the power of taxes and duties, and they
are separately enumerated. The idea that Congress can hand one away,
can give the president carte blanche, can create a tariff
enabling active you will. It's preposterous and I think it
would be seen as which if we were talking about
income taxes. Imagine if tomorrow the president could just say
the tax rate for those in bracket X is now
why it would be chaos, But it would also be
a big problem. Now the Supreme Court has ruled, and
I'm not wild about this decision, but it is president
in nineteen twenty eight that to delegate tariff powers to
the president, there has to be a comprehensible principle. Forgot
what the exact phrase is from that decision, but it
cannot say the president can do already want. There is
a line somewhere, but clearly this is well short of it.
And even if it weren't in theory, it is in
practice because the statute doesn't mention tariffs. This is the
thing people don't talk about. This statute does not anywhere
mention tariffs. And that's why the Solicitor General sour who's
a very smart man, don't get me wrong, was left
having to argue that lots of different words meant tariffs.
But that's not how we run our system. That's not
how textualism works. It's not how original public meaning works.
If it were, we would have a big problem. And
so I had to concede this because he said at
some point that under his theory, a future democratic president
could start imposing all sorts of taxes in the wake
of a president declaring a climate emergency. But if this
is allowed to stand, then what we have done is
turned IEPA into an act that wipes out all the others,
because we have said that the president if he deems
there to be an emergency, in other words, if he
deems it necessary, not if there are any circumstances delineated
by Congress, like a blockade or a war, but if
he deems it necessary, he can impose tariffs. Now, the
approximate cause of these tariffs is that Trump doesn't like
trade deficits. We can argue about trade deficits, but trade
deficits have been with us for fifty years. In fact,
there were trade deficits when this law was passed. So
if this stands, we have told the President of the
United States that he has complete, unfettered plenary power over trade,
which would be a bit odd even for Trump, given
that in twenty nineteen, Trump negotiated a trade deal that
he said was the greatest in American history, So why bother,
why bother going through that process, why bother getting Congress
on side, and it passed with bipartisan support. If a
president can at any point just say but I don't
like this anymore. Canada has put out a commercial I
don't like the tariffs have changed. It's a huge problem
for our system. So even if you don't take the
maximalist non delegation position that I do, I think the
new Deal was a disaster for separation of powers in
this regard. Just the specifics of this statute ought to
be wiped away by the court and they should use
the Major Questions dot Com to do it. And bonus,
they should get Elena Kagan and anyone else they can
to go along with it and endorse that doctrine so
that next time, when it's about climate change or something
conservatives like, then they can point to her and say,
wait a minute, aren't you on board now?
Speaker 5: Right right?
Speaker 2: What a what a literal minded, textualist kind of way
to look. It's as if Charles doesn't think the Constitution
is living and or breathing.
Speaker 3: Stephen, Yeah, So I'm with Charles I would love to
see a big revival of the non delegation doctrine, unlikely
not to happen. For listeners unacquainted with any of the
fine points of this, the one sentence analogy would be
that the non delegation doctrine is to our jurisprudence what
changing istan Bull back to Constantinople would be, which is
something I'm for, by the way, but too Yeah, so,
you know, I listen to some of the argument, and
you know, walking around the Federal Society year, I've been
to the collection of the greatest conservative legal minds and
want to talk about it.
Speaker 5: Yesterday and most.
Speaker 3: People think it was a bad day for Trump Court,
a rough day for listener. General sour As Charles says,
But if you really shrewd observers say, not quite sure,
it's a slam dunk. There was enough play in the
joints and the way the questions went and some of
the legal questions presented about the statute and other related matters.
My best hunch on this is it might be a
five to four ruling, even I'm not sure, and it
might be very narrowly tailored to saying that Trump's use
of what's the ie whatever that statute, as you mentioned, Charles,
that that his use of it exceeds the textual boundaries
of that statute. That would still leave some tariffs in
place on other avenues, but they're harder and Trump can't
just make it up as he goes along. I have
a that's my hunch of well, how it's going to
come out, But I don't think it's entirely clear right
now because that argument, unlike some of the ones we've
had in the last year involving Trump at the Court,
where it was clear Trump won some of those nine
zero right, this one's likely not to be nine zero.
Speaker 2: Well, we've been told again by the people of the
and the other talk shows that Trump has packed the
Supreme Court and made it into his vassal and bends
them to his will, which is no. So if he loses,
it'll be interesting if any of them say, you know,
I have to readjust my preconceptions. He might not actually
be a king, since he hasn't killed the court or
overwritten it, and he might not actually have them in
his pocket after all, since they've just scotched one of
his primary concerns. Hmm. I think I'll have to be
more moderate about these things in the future. No, I
don't think that's going to happen at all. Last point, guys,
before we go, One of the things that's great about
the anglosphere is that we have two examples of countries
that show us what not to do. And when it
comes to civil liberties and speech, England is one of them.
I still worry about these things well when it comes
to a lot of things. England is a worrisome example.
But Canada, which has had the luxury to go, is
what because it wants for a long time now and
has been giving you these land and acknowledgments that take
seven minutes of every single speech, going back to who
was on this land fishing two hundred and fifty years ago,
et cetera. Now finds itself in British Columbia in a
very unusual situation. You have people who have homes who
now don't really own them because the government has figured
out that they actually belonged to the indigenous people that
were on that island two hundred years ago, and who
you know, contemporary sources describe as a nasty bunch of
people too, slavery, enslavement, killing other tribes, taking all the
other stuff. You know, not to single out Indigenous people,
but just to say they behaved like human beings. They
behave like human beings, have done absolutely everywhere in competition
for reces or just because it's fun, or just because
this is what tribal societies do, etc. So now there's
all this question about whether or not Canada is going
to be a viable economic entity going forward, because all
of a sudden, the precedent's been set, the claims are
being made, and really ought not the settlers give it
all back. Colonialists though they were imperialists, though they were
of a natural paradise.
Speaker 5: Though they were.
Speaker 2: I mean, if the whole Western colonial enterprise was an
absolute disaster, and those beautiful buildings that we see in
the western part of the country, that symbolized parliamentary democracy
and participation and rights for all the regardless of blood
and soil, why not unwind that and see what we
can do next.
Speaker 3: Well, so, first of all, there's a parallel story that
I thought you were going to bring up. I think
out of Vancouver, where there's a plot of land in
the urban core that was actually you know, Native Canadian
land whatever they call First Nations they call them up there.
And what's happened here in the last two three years
and it's finishing right now, is they have complete sovereignty
over this land the way we extended sovereignty, which has
given us all the Indian casinos in America. And because
they have complete sovereignty, they are exempt from normal planning
and zoning rules of Vancouver.
Speaker 5: So what have they done?
Speaker 3: Fielding some big high rises, very high density, not the
required amount of parking, not the required amount of street
lane widening, No bike lanes, probably I don't know about that.
Speaker 5: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, the road diets.
Speaker 5: We can talk about that separately, James.
Speaker 3: But and and But the point is this has upset
the neighbors.
Speaker 5: Surprise, surprise. Right.
Speaker 3: So either way, either you know, give all your land
back or let them ignore.
Speaker 5: The admittedly flawed regulations.
Speaker 2: Right you say the Indigenous people should be subject to
the western colonials in oceans of zoning on street widening.
I mean it goes without saying, of course, that they're
going to put in bike lanes. The bike the inheritor
to the noble horse. If you live in harmony with
the earth, of course you're going to have Bikelnes, No,
it's probably going to think, No, there's some money to
be made from there, because we're sensible, practical people and
we're going to do it. I did not have actual
anarchic libertarian on my Well, of course my bingo card
is completely unintelligible with all the words that are not
on it. Uh in there. So, Charles, what say you
about this matter? And do you think it's actually sort
of come up? And so the people who've been mouthing
these platitudes for a long time without thinking that there
would ever be any consequences.
Speaker 1: Well, I do think that. I think this is actually
one of the best criticisms of the people who go
on about Native Americans and who do land acknowledgments is
that they never say and that's why we at the
Microsoft Corporation are giving the land back. But I think
more important is that this, if taken to its logical conclusion,
and certainly if it were picked up in the courts
by rogue judges, would essentially destroy the rule of law.
We just talked about Tariff's and my argument was that AIPA,
if construed in this way as a disaster because it
supersedes all other law relating to well, if you read
it anything, well, so does this. Yes, if you don't
have confidence when you buy a house, or you buy
an office, or even you buy a tiny plot of
land to garden in or put a shed up on
that it could not be taken away from you arbitrarily,
then you lose the foundation of Western civilization, which at
least legally and.
Speaker 2: You say that like it's a bad thing I did.
When you buy a plot of land, then you are
ascribing to Western notions of commodification of space. You're taking
things away from the general public, and the very idea
that the rule of law is something that protects us
all when we all know that the rule of law
is there to protect the rich. It is a fiction
that exists to extract resources from the lower classes and
then code itself with righteousness because it has the law
on its site. Charles, You're not paying attention, is what
I'm saying. You say rule of law like it's a
good thing. You say the end of Western civil like
it's a bat. Of course, I am being very specious
in an obvious entiresome fashion. But really, the people who
are behind this, the people who not not necessarily behind it,
like Jews, but I mean the ideological wind and energy
of the university and the way and the and the
leftist culture that's behind it. In their I mean, they'll
tell you that, you know, in their dream world of
everything that had been reconstituted, we would not have private property,
we would all be communal, we'd the dictariatatorship of the
proletariat and all the rest of that. And since you
know that's not going to happen imminently, we have to
do this, this, and this, this and this. But scratch
them deep and you will find somebody who, of course
will say, yes, this entire capitalist system is rotten. Marx
is right in it's time that we, you know'd be
great if we could do something about it. Well, here's
an example of them being able to do something about it.
Speaker 1: We quite rightly complain a lot. We complain about regulation,
and we complain about the New Deal and the Commerce
Clause and delegation and taxes and pretty much everything that
happens in California. But you know, we really are still exceptional,
and those other countries that are like us are dwindling
in number. I have some friends who invest in things
such as their job. They go around looking for things
to invest in, and they just tell horror stories about
India and Greece and Croatia that even if you're in
a nice area that is nominally stable and is growing economically,
it's quite difficult to do deals because the rules are
liable to change on the fly. Now, in Greece, that's
often the result of corruption. In India, it's the result
of a lack of a well established canon of law
that can be applied to markets in a way that
you would get in London or Holland or New York.
And in Croatia it's a combination of things, partly political corruption,
partly dysfunction and lack of practice. Frankly, but the complaints
are fascinating to listen to, because what you'd get is
people who will spend all day telling you that America's
in trouble and that they're so worried about this, and
the Democrats that and I agree. They will say, well,
of course, I'm going to do all my investing that
I can here. We still have the gold standard, we
still have expectations that are fulfilled. And you know, let
me just digress for a second. One of the most
moving things I ever heard in my entire life. Actually
was at a debate I took part in at the
National Constitution Center around the time of the sixteen nineteen project.
And it was me, and it was someone who really
liked the sixteen nineteen project, and there was a lefty
professor who was in the middle, and I was outnumbered
for a lot of this debate. But halfway through this
lefty professor I won't name, he said to the sixteen
nineteen project type figure, you know, after the Civil War,
the first thing that many freed slaves did in the
Southern States was open savings accounts. And he said, think
about that. You've been saying, he said, to the sixty
nineteen project type, you've been saying that the whole thing
was a fiction, that all those American ideas was a fiction,
he said. But the freed slaves didn't think so. The
only way you ever would consent to opening a savings
account is if you believe that the institution you're saving
in is stable, that it will be there next week,
next month, next year, that the government, which has until
that point been fine with you being a slave, is
going to honor the money that you've put in the bank.
He said, just think about that. That's an incredible thing.
And I think about this a lot, because if that
was true for free slaves, you've had to put it
rough for another hundred years. It's certainly true for me.
But we take it for granted. So I've actually forgot
where I started this, but I think we still have
it pretty good, and it's important to hold on to
that because we're still the most stable, most welcoming place
for investment and land. Yeah, that's where I was. And
if you are one of these people who think what
we should do is just rush in and Willie Nary
start settling hundred year old scores and handing people's houses
over to the downtrod, and then you're a fool.
Speaker 2: If you believe those retro ideas like Charles does, if
you believe those ancient, archaic, creaky notions of what makes
this country great, you might want to go to the
ocean and you can join at Ricochet members at sea.
December thirteenth, the twentieth Holland American Line is going to
be cruising through the Eastern Caribbean. And I've done this
a dozen times and it's great. It's great fun, great ships,
great people, and you say I don't like cruise ships. Okay, fine,
then take a look at your calendar for next February
sixth to the eighth, because they're going to be meeting
up Ricochet style at the Florida Space Coast Cape Canaveral,
celebrating decades of shoving huge piece of carbon spewing machinery
into the sky where it penetrates it in a very
fellocratic way and then disseminates a whole bunch of little satellites,
or even worse, goes to other planets and dump stuff
on them. I tell you, the imperialism, the colonialism, and
the extractive practices never end with us. That's because we
like them, Steven, it's been great fun, Charles this. Likewise,
we advise everybody to go to ricochet dot com and send,
you know, sign up.
Speaker 1: It's cheap.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can go to the front page and read
stuff and here's some podcasts, but the member feed is
where the communities develop and where the stuff happens behind
the sea. Just trust me, once you go there, you'll
make it a step stop for four five Timesay. We think,
of course Cozy Earth for sponsoring this. If you go
in there now, I said, you can stack our coupon
code on top of theirs and get up to forty
percent off sheets with a ten year guaranteed. I need
say no more. And of course, if you go to
Apple Podcasts to give us a review, we'd like those
five stars. I say this. I think this is the
seven hundred and thirty seventh time, because I took a
while to get into the podcast, and I'll be happy
to say it for the eight hundredth time whenever that
may be. Charles, I guess I'm going to have to
quiz you again. When people go to Ricochet, what version
are they seeing today?
Speaker 1: I think it's still four point fourteen point fourteen points here.
There is an update coming soon at which point that
number will change. So if you're obsessively refreshing the page
to look at it, then you'll have a fun week.
Speaker 2: Always working behind the scenes, Stephen Charles, thank everybody for listening.
We'll see you at the Commons section at Ricochet. Four
point ye yeah, yea yeah, you know all that stuff.
By bye.