Speaker 1: Come straight from the fountain of youth. So I'm ready,
Speaker 1: I listenally have that's where it was.
Speaker 2: It shows, Charles, you can tell we put the Voting
Speaker 2: Rights Act together because there was an issue because they
Speaker 2: were cheaping people from voting. They were literally shooting people.
Speaker 2: That problem is gone. It's not gone because you're still
Speaker 2: doing it.
Speaker 3: The Supreme Court did the right thing in deciding that
Speaker 3: we should end rachel terry mandering. Chief Justice said, as
Speaker 3: we said, best weight to stop discriminating by race is
Speaker 3: to stop discriminating by race.
Speaker 4: It's the Ricochet Podcast, number seven hundred and eighty seven,
Speaker 4: Steve Hayward sitting in the host chair today with Charles C. W.
Speaker 4: Cook and our special guest Spencer claybn. So let's have
Speaker 4: ourselves a podcast.
Speaker 5: So that's good. That's the kind of ruling.
Speaker 6: I like, when did that happen both this morning?
Speaker 4: Really?
Speaker 6: Is that right?
Speaker 5: You tell me about the ruling.
Speaker 4: Welcome everybody to the Ricochet Podcast. Steve Hayward hosting today
Speaker 4: for the vacationing I guess James Lilas with Charles C. W.
Speaker 4: Cook and Charles So, you know, another week, another assassination attempt. Hohum, Right,
Speaker 4: another piece plan from Iran that isn't. But I guess
Speaker 4: really the biggest news of the week for me, and
Speaker 4: I know for you is this Supreme Court decision on
Speaker 4: the Voting Rights Act. And I have thoughts, but I
Speaker 4: suspect you have more of them, because I haven't had
Speaker 4: a chance to read the opinion yet.
Speaker 1: Well, I did read it. I read it the moment
Speaker 1: that it came out, and I found the majority opinion persuasive,
Speaker 1: and I found the two paragraph concurrence by Clarence Thomas
Speaker 1: joined by Neil Gorsuch even more persuasive. Thomas did the
Speaker 1: thing he does every time and has been doing on
Speaker 1: this topic for thirty years, where he said yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: now go further.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 1: In effect, the argument here is that the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: has merely assumed that Section two of the Voting Rights
Speaker 1: Act requires majority minority district and Alita says it doesn't.
Speaker 1: And he takes a swing at the Court in the
Speaker 1: eighties and correctly says that the holding opinion until now
Speaker 1: had been written at a time when the Court didn't
Speaker 1: pay that much attention to the text and breathed in
Speaker 1: all sorts of meanings that simply weren't there. That case
Speaker 1: was a case called Gingles from I think nineteen eighty two. Anyhow,
Speaker 1: the logic works a bit like this. If the Voting
Speaker 1: Rights Acts second section does not require majority minority districts,
Speaker 1: then majority minority districts drawn by definition on the basis
Speaker 1: of race are unconstitutional because considering race in government policy
Speaker 1: is illegal. And Alita proposes that there are now only
Speaker 1: two exceptions to that rule. One is race riots. In
Speaker 1: a sense, he says that government is allowed to make
Speaker 1: public policy on the basis of race to separate people
Speaker 1: if they're rioting on the basis of race, because it
Speaker 1: would be completely absurd to say, we can't stop this
Speaker 1: prison riot where the white prison population and the black
Speaker 1: population are trying to kill each other, because that would
Speaker 1: violate the fourteenth Amendment. This is a long standing rule,
Speaker 1: it seems. And the other exception, he says is if
Speaker 1: there is a government policy that is designed to prevent
Speaker 1: an explicit and current racial discrimination, then you can consider race.
Speaker 1: But he says you can't consider race here, and I
Speaker 1: just think I think, first off, this seems to be
Speaker 1: correct if you read through the opinion. The law itself
Speaker 1: has a provision in which it says that nothing in
Speaker 1: this Act should be construed to assume that the various
Speaker 1: racial populations of the United States are entitled to proportional
Speaker 1: representation along racial lines. So I think that the statutory
Speaker 1: argument is obvious. I also think this should just be
Speaker 1: celebrated given that the argument is clear. I'm amazed reading
Speaker 1: all these complaints that I say, if they did the opposite.
Speaker 1: Every time, it seems the Supreme Court strikes a blow
Speaker 1: for racial equality, for color blindness, for treating citizens equally
Speaker 1: under the law, just as it did a few years
Speaker 1: ago in the affirmative Action case. The media says it
Speaker 1: stunees the opposite and treats it as if it's reintroducing
Speaker 1: Jim Crow. So, as an American citizen having been satisfied
Speaker 1: by Aluto's opinion, I think this is a really great
Speaker 1: moment in American history. That once again, not that he's
Speaker 1: always great in the court, but we're John Roberts line
Speaker 1: that the way that you stopped discriminating on the basis
Speaker 1: of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Speaker 4: Yes, well, of course, as I'm sure you know and
Speaker 4: many listeners will know, that statement of Roberts made many
Speaker 4: years ago. Now, yeah, represented a direct challenge to was
Speaker 4: it Justice Brennan or Bly I forget who back in
Speaker 4: the seventies had written the only way to get it
Speaker 4: beyond race and racism is to take account of race.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 4: It was a convoluted or welly and logic to it. Now,
Speaker 4: let me play devil's advocate a little bit perhaps, and
Speaker 4: maybe you hinted to this in one of the things
Speaker 4: you just said, which is remedying clear cases of discriminatory intent.
Speaker 6: If you'd go back to the fifties and sixties.
Speaker 4: When the Voting Rights Act was written, one of the
Speaker 4: practices in the South that the authors of the Act
Speaker 4: had in mind was not just barious to voting for
Speaker 4: blacks in the South, but things like cities. I think Jackson, Mississippi,
Speaker 4: was one that had all at large elections for the
Speaker 4: city council, which meant that that although you had a
Speaker 4: substantial black population, it wasn't a majority, and they could
Speaker 4: never get a black elected the city council. So they said, no,
Speaker 4: you have to have districts. Now, I don't think they
Speaker 4: specified they had to be racially jerrymandered, but that was
Speaker 4: I mean, I don't know. It seems to me that
Speaker 4: that is, while still perhaps problematic, a sensible thing to
Speaker 4: have gone after at the time. But that's very different
Speaker 4: than say, house districts let alone.
Speaker 6: Right. We can't jerrymander senate districts, right, because the senate's
Speaker 6: the whole state.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And of course there are cases such as Reynolds v. Sims,
Speaker 1: which I think is wrong, for it's worth got rid
Speaker 1: of the Senates in states, right, at least in so
Speaker 1: far as they represented the same sort of body as
Speaker 1: the United States Senate, where the populations that they represented
Speaker 1: were unequal. I think that it is of course entirely
Speaker 1: true that throughout Jim Crow, the states in the South
Speaker 1: that wanted to disenfranchise African Americans often did so while
Speaker 1: pretending they weren't in gun control. This comes up time
Speaker 1: and time again. For example, there's a famous law in
Speaker 1: Tennessee passed in eighteen seventy in which the state legislature
Speaker 1: does not say because it knows this is prior to
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy six, so it's still largely occupied. It knows
Speaker 1: that it will pay a price if it does. It
Speaker 1: does not say blacks can't have guns. What it says
Speaker 1: is that the only guns that you're allowed to buy
Speaker 1: are on this list, and the list just so happened
Speaker 1: to only contain guns that were issued to Confederate soldiers
Speaker 1: in the Civil War. Now that's a great example of
Speaker 1: the sort of law that would need to be struck
Speaker 1: down because it was facially racially neutral. And so that's
Speaker 1: the argument that you will hear. I think that it's
Speaker 1: a fair one on its own terms. But I think
Speaker 1: that there are a couple of objections to it, and
Speaker 1: one of which makes it into Alito's opinion. The country's changed,
Speaker 1: and you now have the statistical outcome that those who
Speaker 1: wrote the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Sect wanted,
Speaker 1: which is that African Americans voted about the same rateless
Speaker 1: whites in many areas they vote. Now, if that were
Speaker 1: the basis for Alito's opinion, I think it would be insufficient.
Speaker 1: I don't think it would be the role of the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court to second guess Congress if the argument here
Speaker 1: were Look, the Fifteenth Amendment allows Congress to make rules
Speaker 1: in this area, but we think that we're now so
Speaker 1: enlightened that those rules are unnecessary. So Congress doesn't have
Speaker 1: the authority. I think that would be outrageous because the
Speaker 1: fifteenth Amendment explicitly give to Congress the power to pass
Speaker 1: legislation in this area. But that's not Elita's or the
Speaker 1: majority's opinion. The majority says the law doesn't say that.
Speaker 1: In other words, as a secondary argument, even if you
Speaker 1: believe that the court should ignore the text and do
Speaker 1: good things for the country, that justification is weak. I mean,
Speaker 1: you don't need to get there, though that's the thing, right,
Speaker 1: You don't need to get there because he's saying as
Speaker 1: a textual matter, it just doesn't say that the Congress
Speaker 1: gets to superintend Gerrymanderin. It says that you're not allowed
Speaker 1: to deprive people of their right to vote, and they
Speaker 1: are criteria for that that are not Gerrymanderin. But if
Speaker 1: you're going to take an expansive view of the law
Speaker 1: and ignore the text, that doesn't make sense either, because
Speaker 1: we now don't have the same problem that we had
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty five. So I agree with you that
Speaker 1: was a real problem, and I think there are some
Speaker 1: circumstances in which courts ought to look at that, but
Speaker 1: I don't think it holds up here textually or otherwise.
Speaker 4: Well, right, I mean you mentioned that black turnout has
Speaker 4: actually been higher than white turnout in a few recent
Speaker 4: national elections, and maybe that was a bomb on the
Speaker 4: ballot or Kamala Harris, but I think a more telling statistic.
Speaker 4: This is a little old, but I can't imagine it's
Speaker 4: gone backwards. But I remember when the Thornstroms, Abigail and
Speaker 4: Stephen Thornstrom, put out their blockbuster book American Black and White,
Speaker 4: which is now almost a thirty year old book. But
Speaker 4: what some of the figures they assembled, including something like this,
Speaker 4: but something like there were only one hundred black elected
Speaker 4: officials in the Southern States in nineteen sixty and by
Speaker 4: the nineteen ninety five there were several thousand. So I
Speaker 4: mean that just the country's changed, you said, And that's
Speaker 4: one indication of it. And I think the figure I
Speaker 4: read the other day, and I haven't gone and tried
Speaker 4: to check. You need Michael barn or Henry Olsen for this,
Speaker 4: but something like half of the black members of the
Speaker 4: House representatives today are actually from districts with a white
Speaker 4: majority or where the black population is a minority, which
Speaker 4: shows that you don't have to have a This is
Speaker 4: part of the racial essentialism of the left that is
Speaker 4: so destructive, and so it's a blow for that.
Speaker 1: But at the risk of beating a dead horse. All
Speaker 1: of this is very important politically, but it's not something
Speaker 1: the court should consider. That is to say, I saw
Speaker 1: some people saying, look at how the Republican Party has changed.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty two, they were happy to expand the
Speaker 1: Voting Rights Act. And in two thousand and two the
Speaker 1: Bush administration, maybe six two thousand and six, the Bush
Speaker 1: administration renewed the Voting Rights Act preclearance statute. And now
Speaker 1: it wouldn't even get a vote. That's where it matters
Speaker 1: that the country has changed. But it shouldn't matter here
Speaker 1: because the constitutional argument is and ought to be very clear,
Speaker 1: and it runs like this. The Fourteenth Amendment and the
Speaker 1: Fifteenth Amendment ban the use of race in government decisions.
Speaker 1: That is superior as a principle to all statutes, including
Speaker 1: at the state level. So the only way that you
Speaker 1: could have a constitutional ability to mandate, as Louisiana had
Speaker 1: been mandated, racial gerrymanders is if the Congress, acting under
Speaker 1: the auspices of the Fifteenth Amendment, did that, and it didn't.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is the thing, right, Like all of
Speaker 1: the hand waving falls at that point. It just didn't
Speaker 1: do it. It didn't you. You can't get past the
Speaker 1: fourteenth and fifteenth Amendments ban on the consideration of race
Speaker 1: unless Congress did it under the fifteenth Amendment. I just
Speaker 1: didn't do it. And to me, this is the big
Speaker 1: fight duris prudentially between left and right, and it's why
Speaker 1: on this topic I am so firmly on the right.
Speaker 1: I think that you either believe that the law is
Speaker 1: an objective thing that can be understood by the common man,
Speaker 1: and I don't say that disparagingly. That's the whole point
Speaker 1: of writing the law down is so that non lawyers,
Speaker 1: non commentators, can point to it in a court, can
Speaker 1: stand up and say no, it says here that I'm
Speaker 1: not expected to do that, and you can't do that.
Speaker 1: To me, the only point of having a rule of
Speaker 1: law is for that. And you know, if you read
Speaker 1: the dissent, there's a lot of harroring history in it
Speaker 1: that I really do believe we should be cognizant of.
Speaker 1: But it can't get past that basic fact that the
Speaker 1: law doesn't say what it had been assumed to have said.
Speaker 1: And you know, that's why I'm a conservative, and it's
Speaker 1: why I'm an originalist, and it's why I'm a text
Speaker 1: to list on statutute grounds, and it's why I really
Speaker 1: like this Supreme Court majority we have because time and
Speaker 1: time again that is their loads start. Is it in
Speaker 1: the law? No right that it doesn't count?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 4: One last question to bring up on this. Having now
Speaker 4: planted the right flag in the right place on the
Speaker 4: Voting Rights Act and the application of the protection Clause,
Speaker 4: I think the next step is to revisit the doctrine
Speaker 4: of disparate impact, which we got from the Griggs case
Speaker 4: back in the seventies. Right, so you know, in the
Speaker 4: thumbnail sketches, disparate impact said if there's a I think
Speaker 4: the original intent was, if there's a statistical disparity between
Speaker 4: populations and employment schools or whatever, that would be a
Speaker 4: trip wire for investigating whether conscious race discrimination has taken place.
Speaker 4: Of course, it didn't stay there and longer than about
Speaker 4: thirty seconds, and disparate impact statistical variances became assumed to
Speaker 4: be proof that discrimination was taking place was taking place,
Speaker 4: and therefore the legal justification for race conscious remedies lots
Speaker 4: of consent decrease with corporation, cities, fire departments, et cetera.
Speaker 6: So, and I know, I don't.
Speaker 4: I've got to think somebody is working on a case,
Speaker 4: whether it's our friend Ed Bloom who brought the Harvard
Speaker 4: case or our friends at the New Civil Liberties Alliance
Speaker 4: who brought similar cases.
Speaker 6: But it seems to me.
Speaker 4: That that one ought to be next on the list
Speaker 4: of things to review and overturn.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because what you described is Zebram Candyism. That's Abram
Speaker 1: Kendy's view that if there is anything in the country
Speaker 1: that does not fall on perfectly mathematical lines, then it
Speaker 1: must be the product of racism. And that's absurd. Now,
Speaker 1: that's not to say, and Alito left room in this
Speaker 1: decision for extreme examples. That's not to say that there
Speaker 1: couldn't be a situation in which statistical imbalance is were
Speaker 1: the product of racism, and that the government would have
Speaker 1: a role in trying to remedy that. But the Greeks
Speaker 1: decision effectively says if there is any evidence for whatsoever,
Speaker 1: or there's an allegation even, that's how we must proceed.
Speaker 1: And you'll correct me if I'm wrong, But isn't that
Speaker 1: why we can't use is it IQ testing or Santa
Speaker 1: rized testing in the hiring of government officials.
Speaker 4: Well a lot of companies too. The testing regime is
Speaker 4: directly implicated on this. I mean, I do remember a
Speaker 4: chairman once of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission who said, yes,
Speaker 4: I've used disparate impact as a again as a trip wire.
Speaker 4: And then on close investigation we discover some obvious, conscious,
Speaker 4: deliberate discrimination for which there are remedies under the Civil
Speaker 4: Rights Act. And that EEOC chairman was a guy named
Speaker 4: Clarence Thomas.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's right there you go. Well, and we've got
Speaker 1: a problem too now because we're pretending once again that
Speaker 1: the country is the same as it was in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty or eighteen sixty. And this is the great sin
Speaker 1: of Ibram Kendy and of Chinese coats. In my view,
Speaker 1: the poll tax was obviously designed to disenfranchise African Americans
Speaker 1: at a time where there was no money being put
Speaker 1: into public education for non whites. You can't have that
Speaker 1: system in a free country. But that's simply not the
Speaker 1: case anymore. In fact, quite the opposite is true, So
Speaker 1: that case should go. It's offensive to the Constitution, it's
Speaker 1: offensive to the Declaration of Independence. It's offensive to what
Speaker 1: we teach our children, which is to judge people based
Speaker 1: on the character, not on their race. And I hope
Speaker 1: I'm with you. I hope there's a case coming.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so Charlie, our guest is here, and so we'll
Speaker 4: have to draw a veil on the subject until some
Speaker 4: sequels that will inedibly arise. So we'll be right back.
Speaker 4: We welcome now to the podcast. Spencer Claven, the editor
Speaker 4: at large of The American Mind, associate editor of the
Speaker 4: Claremont Review of Books, and a prolific podcaster and substacker
Speaker 4: by on spent, I'm jealous of you, Spencer. How productive
Speaker 4: you are the author of two recent books and also
Speaker 4: several current articles, including one just out today Friday while
Speaker 4: we're taping that we'll talk about. One is How to
Speaker 4: Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for five modern crises. Also
Speaker 4: Light of the Mind, Light of the World, illuminating science
Speaker 4: through faith. So welcome, Spencer.
Speaker 6: How are you? Oh?
Speaker 5: Thanks, Steve, it's great. Sue doing well. It's a It's
Speaker 5: been a big, an eventful week, And all I can
Speaker 5: say is, don't don't envy me my productivity, it comes
Speaker 5: at a heavy costs.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think I can understand that too. Uh So
Speaker 4: let's let's start with something that's uh topical. I mean,
Speaker 4: you've written these great pieces about the roots of Western civilization,
Speaker 4: and I want to spend a little time on that.
Speaker 4: But you have an article out today I just caught
Speaker 4: up with on this guy, Hassan Piker, who is no
Speaker 4: Piker when it comes to wokeness if I can make
Speaker 4: a pun. And I've heard about this guy, and I'm amazed.
Speaker 4: We're told that the era of wokeness was over, that
Speaker 4: peaked in twenty twenty, but from the looks of things,
Speaker 4: it is not over at all. So tell us a
Speaker 4: little bit about Piker and why you think he is,
Speaker 4: you know, the id of the Democratic Party or the
Speaker 4: left today.
Speaker 5: I said at the outset, I would really love to
Speaker 5: be wrong about this. So if you can, if you
Speaker 5: can persuade me that I am, I'd appreciate it. Like
Speaker 5: this seems like a pickle for the Democrats just from
Speaker 5: where I sit, because I've been following Hassan for a bit.
Speaker 5: He just had this big moment with the New York
Speaker 5: Times and Ezra Kleine wrote, I thought, really kind of
Speaker 5: gross article excusing him. He's a twitch streamer. If people
Speaker 5: don't know who he who he is, He's big in
Speaker 5: certain internet circles, Marxist, kind of clickable, very camera ready,
Speaker 5: sort of podcast bro, and he's been one of the
Speaker 5: candidates I think for the left Joe Rogan. That's how
Speaker 5: Climb framed him. But yeah, he was on the New
Speaker 5: York Times podcast. I guess it was with this writer
Speaker 5: Gia Tolentino, and the two of them were just kind
Speaker 5: of I mean, it was Champagne socialism on steroids, perhaps literally,
Speaker 5: since Piker's a big weightlifter, and they were just kind
Speaker 5: of joking together about micro looting and which is shoplifting basically.
Speaker 5: Charlie actually has an incredible piece about it at National
Speaker 5: Review if you want a full rundown of all the
Speaker 5: appalling things that were said. And I think for a
Speaker 5: lot of people not in the twitch very online world,
Speaker 5: this was first exposure to this guy and what he's like.
Speaker 5: But it wasn't actually the worst of how he can be.
Speaker 5: I mean, subsequently people have been seeing that he likes
Speaker 5: to joke about letting the streets run red with the
Speaker 5: blood of landlords, and he likes to call for the
Speaker 5: death of the public figures. He dislikes, you know, genuinely
Speaker 5: a bad guy. And what's funny about him is, like you, Steve,
Speaker 5: do a ton of podcasting, Charlie two, Like we all
Speaker 5: talk a lot on camera, so sometimes you say things
Speaker 5: that you don't you kind of regret afterwards. You're ranting
Speaker 5: a little bits very loose medium. You know, I can
Speaker 5: say with true confidence that you could search my entire
Speaker 5: recorded over and not once would you find me accidentally
Speaker 5: wishing that the streets would run red with the blood
Speaker 5: of my enemies. So we can kind of, I think,
Speaker 5: conclude this guy's the real deal. And what I proposed
Speaker 5: in that piece is that I don't I think people
Speaker 5: like Ezra Klin would really like to be rid of
Speaker 5: this wing of the Democrat Party, or at least for
Speaker 5: it to take a back seat. I think after Trump's
Speaker 5: twenty twenty four victory, there was a lot of soul's
Speaker 5: arching over did we go too far in the woke direction?
Speaker 5: Was this unpopular? Did we alienate a lot of our
Speaker 5: working class voters. Answers to all those questions seem to
Speaker 5: basically be yes, and that moment has sort of gone
Speaker 5: the way of the twenty sixteen moment, when the Democrats
Speaker 5: were so concerned about flying out to the flyover states
Speaker 5: and talking to your your average voter and figuring out
Speaker 5: just what this whole movement's about. Like it has proven
Speaker 5: really hard, I think for the Democrats to ditch the
Speaker 5: peak woke for a couple of reasons, one of which
Speaker 5: is that there's just a lot of energy and momentum
Speaker 5: and kind of esthetic appeal on the side of peak woke.
Speaker 5: Much as it might surprise us to learn this, like
Speaker 5: a lot of the attractive, young, passionate, stupid people of
Speaker 5: whom there are many, are kind of in this vein
Speaker 5: and following Piker. Obviously, he's got a huge, a huge following,
Speaker 5: and Piker is moving in the same circles as Alexandria,
Speaker 5: Cassio Cartez, as Rong Mom, Donnie, these very buzzy politicians
Speaker 5: who have you know, associated themselves with him and I
Speaker 5: think basically agree with most of what he has to say.
Speaker 5: On top of that, all the guys that would like
Speaker 5: to now be more moderate, or many of the Democrats
Speaker 5: that would like to be more moderate in the wake
Speaker 5: of Trump's second victory. Have the problem that when they
Speaker 5: thought Trump was gone forever, when they thought they had
Speaker 5: succeeded in banishing him from politics, that I'm talking about,
Speaker 5: Like you know, in the Biden years, after the fervor
Speaker 5: of twenty twenty, a lot of these guys went on
Speaker 5: camera and said things that now in retrospect look deranged.
Speaker 5: It's not just Kamala Harris, like, you know, let's trans
Speaker 5: the felons or whatever it was, let's give state sponsored
Speaker 5: sex changes to people in prison. It's you know, the demo,
Speaker 5: it's Pelosian Schumer kneeling and Kent take cloth and you know,
Speaker 5: pledging their support for the George Floyd rioters.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 5: So that's kind of on camera. And this is the
Speaker 5: last piece of it. Not only is peak woke on camera,
Speaker 5: but a core part of peak woke is that if
Speaker 5: you walk it back even at all, if you moderate
Speaker 5: even slightly, you are a murderer. You're a tantamount to
Speaker 5: like Hitler, right, and you're alongside all those other Hilarians
Speaker 5: that voted for Trump. So now there's they're in a
Speaker 5: bit of a bind that makes it difficult either to
Speaker 5: like disavow wokeness or to cozy up to people like
Speaker 5: Piker without giving the game away, and their efforts to
Speaker 5: court more moderate voters or people who are alienated by this.
Speaker 5: So I suspect that much as like Ezra Klein might
Speaker 5: wish to kind of reframed toward an abundance agenda or
Speaker 5: a Democrat populism or whatever, you know, the Hassans of
Speaker 5: the world are at least not going away, and they
Speaker 5: might actually be the only viable brand left for the Democrats,
Speaker 5: which would be bad for everybody.
Speaker 1: Can I ask you your take on him, Spencer, Do
Speaker 1: you think he's stupid? I'm just asking that facetiously, because
Speaker 1: on the one hand, he says truly evil things and
Speaker 1: seems to have a justification for them, I think a
Speaker 1: terrible one. But for example, he said in that interview
Speaker 1: and is said elsewhere that the CEO of United Healthcare
Speaker 1: was killed Brian Thompson deserved to be killed, he says
Speaker 1: from one perspective, but he's really endorsing it because he
Speaker 1: was guilty of social murder, and that idea he ascribes
Speaker 1: to Frederick Engels, so he's he's got the citations. On
Speaker 1: the other hand, he says things that no serious socialist
Speaker 1: would ever say. For example, he says that it would
Speaker 1: be great if people robbed the Louver. Now that one
Speaker 1: is stupid, because if you look at the Louver, what
Speaker 1: is it. It's a government run institution that keeps priceless
Speaker 1: artifacts out of the hands of private billionaires and shows
Speaker 1: them to the public for free. I mean, so is
Speaker 1: he is he just stupid and just saying things for
Speaker 1: shock value, or is this an actual intellectual movement that
Speaker 1: needs countering by serious people.
Speaker 6: Hmm.
Speaker 5: You know, I'm embarrassed to say that point about the
Speaker 5: loop had not actually occurred to me. So maybe I
Speaker 5: am also like trailing in the wake of Hassan. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 5: I don't know if you saw Charlie that shot he
Speaker 5: posted of himself. I think it was on a train
Speaker 5: leading lennon what is to be done?
Speaker 1: Luggage?
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, with some ring that seemed apparently costs
Speaker 5: upwards with like, you know, fifteen hundred dollars. And there
Speaker 5: is an eminently mockable quality to him that I think
Speaker 5: he knows about a little bit, Like there's a way
Speaker 5: in which online it pays to be a bit of
Speaker 5: a bozo, and he's got that going for himself. He
Speaker 5: definitely leans into the himbo kind of esthetic, which would
Speaker 5: suggest a certain degree of idiocy. Like before this moment
Speaker 5: with the New York Times, there was another Times profile
Speaker 5: of him, breathlessly discussed. I mean, I will never write
Speaker 5: copy as funny as the New York Times article about
Speaker 5: how hot Hassan Piker is. It's really a work of
Speaker 5: art if you want to go look it up, especially
Speaker 5: the captions on the photos. But anyway, I suspect Charlie
Speaker 5: that he's probably read more than most of his audience,
Speaker 5: which is a low bar. But I do think from
Speaker 5: the twitches to the streams that I've watched of his
Speaker 5: I think he's very fluent. He's very actually, you know, eloquent,
Speaker 5: And when he cites guys like Engles, he's not citing
Speaker 5: nothing right. He's not kind of pulling stuff out of
Speaker 5: thin air or just riffing like all socialists. He hasn't
Speaker 5: thought his ideas all the way through. If he had,
Speaker 5: he wouldn't be a socialist. But then I think there's
Speaker 5: like this extra component of if. Maybe this is way
Speaker 5: over intellectualizing it, but there's this this Boudriard theory that
Speaker 5: online well, a theory derived from Boudriard that online everything
Speaker 5: becomes hyper real, like it gets so over the top
Speaker 5: that it becomes detached from the original signifiers. And at
Speaker 5: that level in that space, like is it possib do
Speaker 5: you think that looting the louver doesn't actually mean looting
Speaker 5: the louver? Like it's serving some kind of symbolic role
Speaker 5: of this is an image of the Western civilization that
Speaker 5: I despise. And so you know, at one point he
Speaker 5: says something like let's go full chaos, and I think
Speaker 5: there's like more of a like maybe in a Trumpian
Speaker 5: sort of way. It's like taken seriously but not literally.
Speaker 5: There's like a kind of poetry, a dark poetry to
Speaker 5: the way he's talking. That's my guess.
Speaker 4: Yes, Spetcer, when you said a moment ago you hadn't
Speaker 4: thought about his lover comment or the louver angle, I thought, oh,
Speaker 4: wait a minute, you actually have the answer to that
Speaker 4: problem in one of your articles out in front of me.
Speaker 4: It's your one on the Renegade Academy. Although Charlie, did
Speaker 4: you want to follow further on Piker or no?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 1: Please?
Speaker 4: Go okay, Well, then I'll change subjects because it does
Speaker 4: connect to a couple of your more recent pieces that
Speaker 4: fascinate me, the Renegade Academy in the latest Claremont Review books,
Speaker 4: and then one you wrote a month ago, now Gosh,
Speaker 4: time flies, on the Age of America. And I have
Speaker 4: to say, let's see how to summarize this for listeners.
Speaker 4: It's on the American mind, and we'll link to it
Speaker 4: in the show notes. And it's getting a lot of commentary.
Speaker 4: I know that, and I was asked to do a
Speaker 4: comment and I just didn't have time because the usual problem.
Speaker 3: But you.
Speaker 4: Really pushed my buttons in a couple of the right ways,
Speaker 4: ones that gave me hope. I'm one of those old
Speaker 4: fogies now who says, you know, all these younger generation,
Speaker 4: they don't know what's going on, And you.
Speaker 6: Give me hope. And this piece because you picked.
Speaker 4: Up on something I've been talking about for more than
Speaker 4: a decade, which is revisiting the famous end of history
Speaker 4: thesis of Francis Fukuyama, which has been misunderstood and misapplied
Speaker 4: for a long time. But you picked up on the
Speaker 4: last page essentially where he said, you know, maybe the
Speaker 4: triumph of liberalism is not going to be what it's
Speaker 4: cracked up to. Be and a lot of people are
Speaker 4: going to find it dissatisfying, and that, in fact, liberal
Speaker 4: individualism was going to be revealed to be, as Leo
Speaker 4: Strauss famously put it, the joyless quest for joy.
Speaker 6: And so the question I was going to ask you was,
Speaker 6: do you.
Speaker 4: Think that does explain some of the disaffection we see
Speaker 4: of the youth of the day, especially some conservative youth, right.
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, you know well that a lot
Speaker 4: of young conservatives are very disaffected from the American founding,
Speaker 4: from classical liberal tradition. They're contemptuous that some of them
Speaker 4: are right. That's what the post liberals are all about.
Speaker 4: So anyway, congratulations for that, and say a little more
Speaker 4: about that thesis.
Speaker 5: Thanks.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Well, first of all, I should inform you that I
Speaker 5: am officially an aging millennial, which means I'm definitely cringe
Speaker 5: and not anymore. I wear short socks, so that makes
Speaker 5: me old. And I actually had the experience of being
Speaker 5: in my parents' gym and thinking, Wow, this playlist is great.
Speaker 5: Whatever Spotify they've got going on, it's awesome. I love
Speaker 5: all of these songs. And then the DJ came on
Speaker 5: and said, you're listening to the oldies. And I thought, well, no,
Speaker 5: it happened. So you know, I speak not quite on
Speaker 5: behalf of the youth, but I do think, yeah, I'm
Speaker 5: part of this cohort that you are describing that raises
Speaker 5: some alarm for me and for others, you know, of
Speaker 5: your bent. Like the thing that everyone forgets about that
Speaker 5: Fukuyama book is that it's called the End of History
Speaker 5: and the Last Man. Right. People remember that it's the
Speaker 5: end of history, and they think, yeah, this guy was
Speaker 5: a fool. He believed we had terminated. First of all,
Speaker 5: he believed that history was traveling in a direction, and
Speaker 5: second of all, he thought it had a terminus and
Speaker 5: now it's over. But he wasn't really saying that at all.
Speaker 5: He was kind of wrestling with Hagel after the enthusiastic
Speaker 5: optimism of the Enlightenment had died down. And another essay
Speaker 5: I cite in that piece is by John Judas. I
Speaker 5: guess it is who talks about Trump as a Hegelian figure,
Speaker 5: and he says, you know, if you take this theory,
Speaker 5: this Hegel theory, that we kind of go through these
Speaker 5: big stages of history and there are major players like
Speaker 5: Napoleon that kind of shunt us into a new era.
Speaker 5: If you take that theory and you just sheer away
Speaker 5: all of the idea that there might be an upward
Speaker 5: positive trajectory, then you're left with something actually much more
Speaker 5: turbulent and disturbing. And for Fukuyama, what this meant was that,
Speaker 5: you know, if it's true that liberalism solves some problems
Speaker 5: which had previously been the major drivers of politics, if
Speaker 5: it resolves these these big questions about like what is
Speaker 5: a just way to decide, questions of how we how
Speaker 5: we should live, you know, then it removes a lot
Speaker 5: of sorts of conflict and tension that was previously kind
Speaker 5: of occupied the minds of the great statesmen and thinkers
Speaker 5: of the West. And there might be people then who
Speaker 5: would feel a bit listless, like what are we going
Speaker 5: to do now?
Speaker 6: You know?
Speaker 5: And these are the last men, or rather these are
Speaker 5: the post last men. They're sort of those who would
Speaker 5: regress to like he called them first men, right. So
Speaker 5: I do think that like we're seeing a lot of
Speaker 5: that energy in not just the Pikers of the world,
Speaker 5: but the Fuenteses of the world. I mean, I think
Speaker 5: like Piker and Fuantes have a lot in common. You
Speaker 5: could I probably don't need to draw the parallels for you,
Speaker 5: and I think that in both cases, like there's a
Speaker 5: LARPing element, right, there's this live action role play situation
Speaker 5: where these guys are like, it goes back to kind
Speaker 5: of what Charlie and I were talking about. It's like,
Speaker 5: maybe maybe robbing stealing from the louver doesn't actually mean
Speaker 5: stealing from the loop. Maybe like this whole thing is
Speaker 5: sort of a just a cree occur, which doesn't make
Speaker 5: it less paulling, but yeah, does perhaps explain some of
Speaker 5: the why the youth have gone so mad?
Speaker 4: Well, I thought it fit under you know, you referenced
Speaker 4: Roger Scrutin and your Claremont Review article. It goes under
Speaker 4: his heading of the culture repudiation, which is whatever it is,
Speaker 4: we're he'll smash it up.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 4: There's another part of your one other part of your
Speaker 4: essay I want to bring up with a big question.
Speaker 4: You have a couple of paragraphs about the way you
Speaker 4: put it as America proceeds from years zero or even
Speaker 4: more of the year zero country. I think you're hinting
Speaker 4: than the French Revolution, which openly said that they were right.
Speaker 4: But then you also say in some respects America is
Speaker 4: pre liberal and I thought that was an interesting thing
Speaker 4: because one question I'm asking everybody as we come up
Speaker 4: to the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration
Speaker 4: here in a couple of months, is how do you
Speaker 4: fall out under this debate that's going on between people
Speaker 4: who say America is a creedle nation, like our friend
Speaker 4: Richard Sandelson, or that America is a heritage nation. And
Speaker 4: right you have John Vice President Vans talking about heritage Americans,
Speaker 4: that we're a product of history and not so much
Speaker 4: of natural rite or rationality. Do you where do you
Speaker 4: fall in those camps? Are you in one of them?
Speaker 4: Or are you a synthesizer as I try.
Speaker 5: To be, Yeah, I definitely to answer quickly, I'm a synthesizer.
Speaker 5: I think that to be even to be like pretentious
Speaker 5: about it. I'm sort of an Aristotelian. I'm a hylomorphist.
Speaker 5: I think that there's body and soul. Everything is form
Speaker 5: and matter, right, everything's a compound of sort of the
Speaker 5: spirit and the body. And I think of the creed
Speaker 5: of America as its form, and the people and the
Speaker 5: history and all the material circumstances as it's matter that
Speaker 5: is shaped by the creed. So I think that's kind
Speaker 5: of what I'm trying to drive out in that piece
Speaker 5: and what I'm trying to work out as the two
Speaker 5: fiftieth approaches. That quote you mentioned, actually I picked up
Speaker 5: at a conference that Charlie organized about Fusionism, and it's
Speaker 5: Frank Meyer who talks about kind of America as he
Speaker 5: gives this potted history of the West, and then America
Speaker 5: is basically this little spacecraft that gets ejected at the
Speaker 5: very end of the old world, carrying like a time
Speaker 5: capsule everything that's good about it. And there's a speech
Speaker 5: by John Quincy Adams that I cite there too, which
Speaker 5: is also kind of tells this story that like the
Speaker 5: best of what the West could be was struggling to
Speaker 5: be born, but was too encumbered by old prejudices on
Speaker 5: the continent to really take route and find its full form.
Speaker 5: And it was only in America that like the West,
Speaker 5: reached its final boss form. And to do that it
Speaker 5: had to cut off the jettison the space ship. Whatever
Speaker 5: the right spaceship metaphor is right. And I think that
Speaker 5: that's like true and not true. You know, again, you
Speaker 5: could draw a parallel here between the Creedle Nation versus
Speaker 5: the Heritage Nation. Right, the Creedle Nation is a fresh creation.
Speaker 5: It's genuinely an advance in American or rather in Western
Speaker 5: intellectual history. The Heritage Nation is not. It's meaningfully steeped
Speaker 5: in English common law and the folk ways of the
Speaker 5: sort of four major branches that are described in Algean
Speaker 5: Sea and all that stuff.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 5: So I think it's I'm definitely both, and but there's
Speaker 5: a quistionness to that that I think doesn't always satisfy.
Speaker 4: Oh no, you know, friends of ours, what we know
Speaker 4: well or dug in on some of these questions.
Speaker 6: But let me shift heres a bit.
Speaker 4: And then I want to let Charlie get in the
Speaker 4: word edgewise again and go to your article The Renegade Academy,
Speaker 4: which of course is actually a long extensive review of
Speaker 4: the new two volume book out by James Hankins and
Speaker 4: aligelzo on the Golden Thread, the History of the Western Tradition.
Speaker 4: And yeah, I've read a couple of little bits of it,
Speaker 4: and I mean it was an unusual pairing. You know,
Speaker 4: they're from two different fields of history, but they're the
Speaker 4: right people to do what I think for a bunch
Speaker 4: of reasons. But along the way, it's one particular thing
Speaker 4: I want to pick up on, although I'll just mention
Speaker 4: in passing, I was thrilled when you mentioned Whittaker Chambers
Speaker 4: and that famous letter to Buckley where he says, you
Speaker 4: know we're going to rot from.
Speaker 6: Within and so forth. I have tried to tried.
Speaker 4: I have assigned Whittaker Chambers to students a few times,
Speaker 4: and I find that they just don't get it. I
Speaker 4: have to explain it a great length, and even then
Speaker 4: they kind of shrugged their shoulders because for today's students,
Speaker 4: but what the Berlin Wall came down on thirty five
Speaker 4: years ago, No, thirty seven years ago, it might as
Speaker 4: well be the crusades of the Middle Ages now, right,
Speaker 4: And it's just too remote. And you know, I will
Speaker 4: freely confess to being a baby boomer for whom the
Speaker 4: Cold War was the dominant matrix of how we had
Speaker 4: to think through everything. Right, wasn't just enough to refute Marx,
Speaker 4: We had to really understand the radical mind. Okay, Anyway,
Speaker 4: you then get off talking about Well, both Gilzo and
Speaker 4: Hankins have left the Ivy League for the Hamilton School
Speaker 4: at the University of Florida. You know, Charlie and I
Speaker 4: are involved with one of these similar efforts at UT Austin.
Speaker 4: And you ask a very important question towards the end,
Speaker 4: which is these sort of civic schools that are being
Speaker 4: established at public universities in Red states and a few
Speaker 4: private universities are trying this too, And you asked a
Speaker 4: very important question. I'll just quote it. The next question
Speaker 4: is whether the Renegade Academy will succeed? Were the renegades?
Speaker 4: Now that's the point for listeners to be clear, is
Speaker 4: that are these renegade efforts going to succeed?
Speaker 6: And you know, I've visited a lot of them.
Speaker 4: I'm in one, You've been around a lot of them.
Speaker 4: Walk us through how you see that playing out?
Speaker 6: Sure? So.
Speaker 5: Funnily enough, this is a little visual joke that about
Speaker 5: five people will get on the front page of the CRB,
Speaker 5: which is where this article lives. There's a piece that
Speaker 5: we have reused with the art that goes with the
Speaker 5: piece is also associated with a different piece, and it's
Speaker 5: a guy. It's a guy to tweet jacket bulldozing a
Speaker 5: kind of Corinthian column, I think, or an ionic Greek
Speaker 5: column and originally that was attached to a piece about
Speaker 5: radical leftists destroying kind of the Western Academy, and now
Speaker 5: it's been attached to this piece about kind of, as
Speaker 5: you say, us becoming the renegades. The conservative professors are
Speaker 5: sort of in exile because the takeover has been so complete,
Speaker 5: the march of the institutions has been so complete, and
Speaker 5: now you get these guys like Hankins, like Deelzo, like you,
Speaker 5: and I'm sort of trailing along, you know, in the
Speaker 5: as well among kind of teachers professors at scrappier institutions
Speaker 5: like UATX where I teach, where we're really trying to
Speaker 5: kind of revive the liberal arts in the deep sense
Speaker 5: of those pursuits that are fitting for free people, right,
Speaker 5: that train this soul for freedom, and to do so
Speaker 5: and blushingly and to really kind of endorse the old ways,
Speaker 5: if you will. And I think there are kind of
Speaker 5: two possible ways I could see this going. I mean,
Speaker 5: there's technically free because it could just fail utterly, and
Speaker 5: that would be that would be terrible, and I hope
Speaker 5: that doesn't happen. But there's two ways that could succeed, right.
Speaker 5: One would be that the renegade Academy itself is so
Speaker 5: successful that it takes on all the prestige which once
Speaker 5: attached to say the IVS, which I think have lost
Speaker 5: a lot of their luster after the Claudine gay scandal
Speaker 5: and the many other sort of you know debacles. Basically
Speaker 5: since I left Yale, it's all been downhill. You know,
Speaker 5: right after the year after I left, they had this
Speaker 5: Halloween costume flare up, and you know, the obvious have
Speaker 5: started to lose public trust. So one possibility is this
Speaker 5: is just the replacement, This is kind of the new IVS.
Speaker 5: But the other one is that the sort of renegade
Speaker 5: venture is successful enough and attracts enough attention and enough
Speaker 5: talent and bleeds off enough really top tier students that
Speaker 5: would otherwise go to IVS that the IVS themselves have
Speaker 5: to kind of take notice and reform in order to compete.
Speaker 5: You're seeing a little bit of that happening at Yale.
Speaker 5: They just conducted this big internal after the piece came out,
Speaker 5: they conducted this sort of internal review and concluded that
Speaker 5: they were too biased and they needed more ideological diversity.
Speaker 5: We'll see where that goes. You know, the students that
Speaker 5: come to UATX and I'm sure you've experienced this too.
Speaker 5: Are superb. I mean, they're genuinely they could be anywhere.
Speaker 5: So it's not like this really is a going concern.
Speaker 5: And I think I'm a little bit more hopeful about
Speaker 5: this second option, that this kind of forces some reform
Speaker 5: across the board in the academy because the market is free.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so right, I mean I think, well, the competition, right,
Speaker 4: We're all for competition, and just this school choice for
Speaker 4: K twelve this is a variation of that and higher
Speaker 4: intellectual choice in higher education, and yeah, I think it's
Speaker 4: going to attract the students who used to want to
Speaker 4: go to liberal arts colleges to actually learn the liberal
Speaker 4: arts from people who liked the teaching, who had broad
Speaker 4: gauge minds. And so here I have a heterodox proposition
Speaker 4: that doesn't contradict anything you said, but I've thought so.
Speaker 4: My data point is my wife was at Stanford in
Speaker 4: the eighties and was there when Jesse Jackson went, and
Speaker 4: you mentioned it in your article and said, hey, hey,
Speaker 4: ho hoo, Western sieve has got to go. And what
Speaker 4: she said, and I've heard of from a lot of
Speaker 4: students back in the late seventies early eighties that the
Speaker 4: Western sieve required courses weren't very good. And I think
Speaker 4: the reason for that is some of the reasons that
Speaker 4: you know about is the specialization of the academy, the
Speaker 4: rewarding of niche radical things, and so you didn't I
Speaker 4: think the professors, many of them, were no good at him,
Speaker 4: and they boarded students to death, and a lot of
Speaker 4: students just shrugged their shoulders, said why are we required
Speaker 4: to take it from? And often these courses would be
Speaker 4: taught by graduate students and not by professors, or the
Speaker 4: senior professors didn't want to teach it. You know, it's
Speaker 4: a rare person like John Taylor at Stanford who likes
Speaker 4: to teach econ one oh one to a thousand students there, Right,
Speaker 4: it was very rare to find those kind of Hankins
Speaker 4: was like that at Harvard. He would teach survey type
Speaker 4: courses of the old School, and those people that dwindled
Speaker 4: and as you pointed out, were not hired. And so
Speaker 4: now I think all these schools look to me like
Speaker 4: they're creating that older culture.
Speaker 6: By the way, I look a lot of observation on Yale.
Speaker 6: I mean I looked through it.
Speaker 4: I know a couple of people who are on that committee,
Speaker 4: like Beverly Gage. She's not a conservative, but she's not
Speaker 4: a leftist. She's not a liberal. She's doing a biography
Speaker 4: of Ronald Reagan for Simon and Schuster. That's very rare
Speaker 4: for academic historians now, right, David Bromwich, who's a liberal
Speaker 4: but is always written intelligently about Edmund Burke, for example,
Speaker 4: Yale was really kind of the outlier among the ivs,
Speaker 4: whereas Harvard, as Hankins put out, that he's the last
Speaker 4: of the old school types, right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And so that's my hope for them too.
Speaker 4: But I'm also worried that, as you may know, there's
Speaker 4: intense hostility to these centers, you know at Ohio State
Speaker 4: and the University of Toledo and at Florida and even
Speaker 4: at U T Austin, but you know, the politics and Texas,
Speaker 4: there's so much wind at they're back to. I think
Speaker 4: our friends there are going to succeed in a big way.
Speaker 4: But that's a thing that worries me.
Speaker 5: That's really interesting. You know. It speaks to something I
Speaker 5: touch on on the piece, which is that a lot
Speaker 5: of these surveys that got deleted in the convulsions of
Speaker 5: the sixties and the eighties were already concessions. They were
Speaker 5: the last ditch effort to save this what was previously
Speaker 5: simply the remedial curriculum. And yeah, it's like Harvey Mansfield
Speaker 5: is the last guy standing or was the last guy
Speaker 5: standing who taught intro courses at a high and enthusiastic,
Speaker 5: exciting level. And you're making me think, you know, for
Speaker 5: me at least, intercourses are the most fun to teach
Speaker 5: and have fun.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think so too, right, But that's where people
Speaker 4: like you and me really differ from leftist faculty who
Speaker 4: want to do their narrow stuff.
Speaker 6: A quick story then that Charlie wants to jump in.
Speaker 6: I was.
Speaker 4: I forget now when it was or what the occasion was,
Speaker 4: but I was on zoom at some deliberation about whether
Speaker 4: a university should hire conservatives explicitly, and you know, I
Speaker 4: was one of those at the University of Colorado, and
Speaker 4: one of the persons speaking was PIPA. Norris, who's very
Speaker 4: eminent in the government department at Harvard, And so I asked,
Speaker 4: Harvey Mansfield is retiring soon, is the department going to
Speaker 4: try and hire somebody like him. And there's a long pause,
Speaker 4: and she said maybe, and I said I'll take that
Speaker 4: as a no until I hear different, and then we
Speaker 4: moved on. So, Charlie, how do we.
Speaker 1: Make it clear to the public that the institutional cachet
Speaker 1: on which the useless types that were implicitly condemning rely
Speaker 1: has gone.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: I'm a big opponent of credentialism. I think that it
Speaker 1: is not only hollow per se, but that it leads
Speaker 1: to a societal instinct that doesn't suit America. For example,
Speaker 1: I think it is completely absurd that we instinctively believe
Speaker 1: that somebody who went to college is better in some
Speaker 1: manner than somebody who become a plumber. And I don't
Speaker 1: think you can run a proper society if you believe
Speaker 1: that the left great trick is to take over these institutions,
Speaker 1: then to be mediocre or worse, but then to point
Speaker 1: to the institution and say, well, yes, But I'm at Yale.
Speaker 1: And I was talking to someone the other day who
Speaker 1: is a centrist, but it is very critical of conservatives,
Speaker 1: and he said, you know, your problem is that the
Speaker 1: public still thinks that what's in the New York Times
Speaker 1: is true and still thinks that if it comes out
Speaker 1: of Harvard then it's correct, and still thinks that Hollywood
Speaker 1: is cool and you are never going to get over that.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if that's true or not, but
Speaker 1: I do think we haven't made as much progress there
Speaker 1: as we need to. How do we do that? Because
Speaker 1: I love all of the institutions you just mentioned, and
Speaker 1: I work with them, but I still notice that if
Speaker 1: at the I'm about to use a cliche, but if
Speaker 1: at the cocktail party someone says, well, yes, my son
Speaker 1: just got into Dartmouth, everyone goes ooh.
Speaker 5: Oh, yeah, it's very hard to get.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what I mean. That's what I mean. It's
Speaker 1: even it's funny. You go to these conservative events and
Speaker 1: the first forty five minutes is spent condemning all these institutions,
Speaker 1: and then someone says, well, my son just got into Dartmouth,
Speaker 1: and everyone goes, congratulations.
Speaker 5: I'm once on a podcast which shall not be named,
Speaker 5: where I had you know, sometimes you wait in the
Speaker 5: wings and the is doing a routine somewhere else about
Speaker 5: something else, and so help me. The host was talking
Speaker 5: all about the terrible rot at the Ivy leagues and
Speaker 5: the institutions and the way that they've been captured, how
Speaker 5: grotesque it is. And then she said, and my next
Speaker 5: guest is Spencer Claven She went to Yale. This is
Speaker 5: emblematic of I mean, this is the skin suit problem, right, yes,
Speaker 5: is like the right people worthless people take institutions of worth,
Speaker 5: hallow them out, and then use the kind of appearance
Speaker 5: of worth like like zombies where he's gets I mean,
Speaker 5: I don't have a good answer to this question because
Speaker 5: brands are so powerful. It really does still sit even
Speaker 5: with me. You know, when somebody has a fancy name
Speaker 5: on their resume, I have to stop myself from thinking like, oh,
Speaker 5: this is a smart guy I needed. You know. The
Speaker 5: only thing that I can point to is I suspect
Speaker 5: we haven't yet really spent enough time or realized how
Speaker 5: much depends on our being exceptionally good at whatever it
Speaker 5: is we're trying to do in you know, as a
Speaker 5: parallel institution. And I say this because like there's a
Speaker 5: phenomenon in the arts, let's say, where cancel culture is
Speaker 5: a thing. We all know this. It's clear that there
Speaker 5: are conservatives who've gotten blacklisted for no other reason than
Speaker 5: that they wouldn't take the COVID vaccine or they but
Speaker 5: said something that was perfect and in jectable. And also,
Speaker 5: at the same time, there are a lot of mediocre
Speaker 5: conservative artists who find it extraordinarily convenient to account for
Speaker 5: their actual failures by way of reference to cancelation. And
Speaker 5: that's not so much of a problem except that it
Speaker 5: ends us up in a situation where when somebody tells
Speaker 5: you I've got a world class novel that Presses won't publish,
Speaker 5: your immediate reaction is to think, oh no, like an
Speaker 5: head for the door, you know, because it's always going
Speaker 5: to be some guy, and so like, we have to
Speaker 5: be sending our best right. And one of the things
Speaker 5: that's heartening in academia, as I was just alluding to,
Speaker 5: is like we've only really just begun. I said this
Speaker 5: in the piece about Hankins and Gelzo. It's like these
Speaker 5: guys are actually the real deal. You know. They're not
Speaker 5: particularly political actually until they became politicized by their opponents.
Speaker 5: And the thing about the Golden Thread, which I have
Speaker 5: next to me and I would hold up except that
Speaker 5: I would slip a disc because it's like two thousand pages.
Speaker 5: The thing about the Golden Thread is that it really
Speaker 5: does deliver on its promise at a very high level.
Speaker 5: And my hope is, like I actually think that we
Speaker 5: haven't really been doing that to the level that we
Speaker 5: that we could be, and my hope is that as
Speaker 5: we continue to do so, we'll get a little bit
Speaker 5: more cloud, or will force the institutions with cloud to
Speaker 5: high respect.
Speaker 4: Right, nothing succeeds like competition, and Spencer, you are a
Speaker 4: golden thread of your own.
Speaker 6: I'll just put it that way, and thank.
Speaker 4: You for joining us at spending a half hour with
Speaker 4: us here in the Ricochet podcast.
Speaker 5: Don't rely on me if you need directions as.
Speaker 6: Okay, okay, thanks Spencer, We'll see you soon.
Speaker 5: This is a delight.
Speaker 6: Thanks well, Charlie.
Speaker 4: Let's get out this week, but checking in briefly with
Speaker 4: the Iran war, and look, we've got this now a
Speaker 4: stalemate with the blockades and the Gulf. We have rising
Speaker 4: gas prices that are increasing the political problem that you
Speaker 4: had predicted all along, and I think you're right about that.
Speaker 4: I do think there's one notable thing this week. I
Speaker 4: think it's quite significant, and it was the United Arab
Speaker 4: Emirates exiting their membership in Opek. And I think this
Speaker 4: is the end of a longer saga that really does
Speaker 4: a lot to Trump, but also the oil industry going
Speaker 4: back twenty years, we would I'm old enough to remember
Speaker 4: the gas lines of nineteen seventy nine and the price shops.
Speaker 4: So yeah, gas is expensive now, and that's politically potent,
Speaker 4: but we don't have gas lines, we don't have shortages.
Speaker 4: Oil is priced on the world market, which is why
Speaker 4: our costs are going up. But we actually, now because
Speaker 4: we are energy dominant, don't have to face the strategic
Speaker 4: danger that we did in the seventies, whereas our Europe, Asia, China,
Speaker 4: they're in a world of hurt right now. But then
Speaker 4: I think that all this combinance with the United Arab
Speaker 4: Emirates saying we're done with OPEK, and I think that
Speaker 4: means that whole game is over, and so we'll have
Speaker 4: to see how it goes. It could still end very
Speaker 4: badly for us, but it might end well for shaking
Speaker 4: up the whole kaleidoscope of the geopolitical energy map that
Speaker 4: has dominated our thinking for fifty years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is a sustained public policy win for
Speaker 1: conservatives who are talt never win anything. We do right, Well,
Speaker 1: we do This is a remarkable achievement over the last
Speaker 1: thirty years to turn the United State it's energy independent.
Speaker 1: Now that there's a political problem for Trump and one,
Speaker 1: as you say, I predicted, people don't like the fact
Speaker 1: that gas is four plus dollars, nor should they. But
Speaker 1: there's a picture, Steve. You can't see it on my
Speaker 1: shelf of my family in California in nineteen ninety eight
Speaker 1: in Anaheim. Of course, we were going to Disneyland, and in
Speaker 1: the background there is not on purpose, but there is
Speaker 1: a big gas sign and it says one ninety eight,
Speaker 1: and that is adjusted for inflation, more than gas is
Speaker 1: on average in the United States now, right when it's
Speaker 1: supposedly intolerably high. And that's because we made certain decisions.
Speaker 1: The only public policy failure that we've made in the
Speaker 1: last five years was that the Biden administration, when it
Speaker 1: thought that it was going to become even more unpopular,
Speaker 1: emptied the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for no reason, and we
Speaker 1: didn't refill it. And it's partly Democrat's fault, it's partly
Speaker 1: Republican's fault. But that should have been refilled when gas
Speaker 1: was it a low, because right now would be a
Speaker 1: good time to start using it. Keep the And I
Speaker 1: say that not because I think that Trump should do
Speaker 1: what Biden did, which is rescue his own political fortunes,
Speaker 1: but because it would take away from the Iranians a
Speaker 1: chess piece if they couldn't say, ah, wow, we'll close
Speaker 1: the straight up hor mooz and we'll put pressure on
Speaker 1: you domestically because we had the strategic petroleum reserve and
Speaker 1: we could keep prices down, not as much as they've
Speaker 1: gone up. That would be great. But other than that,
Speaker 1: we should be so proud of what we did. Yeah.
Speaker 4: So, I because I'm mean spirited, I wish our team,
Speaker 4: so to speak, would be reminding people that when Sarah
Speaker 4: Palin twenty years ago said drill, baby, drill, all you
Speaker 4: guys laughed at her and mocked at her. Who's laughing now?
Speaker 4: Remember this is what you know, John Carra. But we
Speaker 4: can't drill our way out. There's just not enough oil
Speaker 4: in the United States are anywhere for us to be
Speaker 4: energy independent. That's why we have to run our cars
Speaker 4: on solar panels of you know, banana peels and other
Speaker 4: ridiculous things.
Speaker 1: Well, look a look at how successful it's been in
Speaker 1: your state. The probably democratic front runner. Is what Tom Steyer,
Speaker 1: who's an environmentalist, Yes, right, it's a Pacera. Now I
Speaker 1: can't keep up with Itera is.
Speaker 4: Actually at the head of the polls right now, but
Speaker 4: which is amazing with Styer spending one hundred million dollars
Speaker 4: blanketing the airways with NonStop ass.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I can't get past this. Steve so Styre
Speaker 1: is an environmentalist and the message that he keeps putting
Speaker 1: out is cats prices are too high. Right, Just think
Speaker 1: about how much you have to win this issue politically
Speaker 1: to get the vironmentalists to complain that gas prices are
Speaker 1: too high. Yeah, the high gas prices. They thought that
Speaker 1: this was how you saved the planet, but now apparently
Speaker 1: they should be three dollars in perpetuity.
Speaker 6: That's right. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well I did once get quoted in the Economist magazine
Speaker 4: no more than twenty years ago saying that Americans think
Speaker 4: that dollar gallon gasoline is somewhere in the Bill of Rights.
Speaker 6: Yes, there's something to that, I think.
Speaker 4: All right, Charnie, this has been fun. We miss James
Speaker 4: this week. Look forward to having it back next week.
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Speaker 6: Okay, well next week, everybody, Bye bye,