Speaker 1: All.
Speaker 2: This is all about our country right now.
Speaker 3: I love the USA, I love my teammates.
Speaker 4: It's unbelievable, the US or hockey brotherhood.
Speaker 3: It's so strong.
Speaker 4: In that shame.
Speaker 2: You should be ashamed of yourself, not standing. He should
be ashamed of yourself. It's the Ricochet Podcast. I'm James Lilyx.
Stephen Hayward is here and we're going to talk to
tal Fort Gang about the Democratic Socialists of America. Can't wait,
Let's have results a podcast. Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast,
number seven hundred and seventy eight. I'm James Lylyx here
in Minneapolis, calm it seems for the moment, and I'm
joined by Steven Hayward in California. I presume Charles is
still out and about. We hope to get him back soon.
He's not entered the pantheon of hosts who've come and gone.
He will be with us again. But it's just us
here to do today with our guests to come, which
would be fun. And I gotta say USA, right us A.
So it was like a replay of the old Olympics,
you know, where we beat the hated Ruskies, except now
apparently we've got the hated Canadians. And I heard a
term the other day that just absolutely put me on
the floor, referring to the Canadians as syrup peans.
Speaker 4: I had not heard that one.
Speaker 2: That's good, not bad, not bad. I for one, don't
like a state of m the t and discord between
our I mean, they're right up there, they're closed. You know.
I've been living close to Canada all my days. When
I was a kid, I used to get in a
bus when I want to play a contest at the
Fargo Forum Delivery Boys, and would go up to Winnipeg,
which was sort of like this mirror image of Minneapolis
up there. I love the whole civilization out in the
outskirts and the prairies and the planes and the winds
swept world. I've been to Canada on the on the
west coast and seen their monumental architecture and marveled at
what they did. I like them. But here we are,
I guess where they don't like us. We'll show you.
We're not going to go to vacation in Florida. We're
going to go to Port of Iarta anyway. So the problem,
Stephen is you may have known is that some people
were moved to jingoistic displays scoundrel like refuge in patriotism.
And if you felt bothered by that, said the said
the Hoff post, you're not alone.
Speaker 4: Well where do you start? It is a curious Well,
it's not curious to me. This is quite obvious and
not surprising that the efflorescence of American patriotism over the
i think unexpected win of our hockey team over Canada
in a really revera performance, right, especially that goalie who
you know, only let one shot through. But I'm not
surprised that the left is upset about this because well,
the latest finding out from the Gallup poll people, which
again does not surprise me. But if you go back
to two thousand and one, that's the pole Gallup did
two thousand and one to the president, and it's do
you have pride in America? And even before nine to eleven,
but in the years after that, Republicans Democrats were about
two or three points apart, all around ninety to ninety
five percent up with pride in America. Well, guess where
Democrats are today, thirty six percent, down from you know,
eighty eight percent twenty twenty five years ago, and whereas
Republicans haven't moved all. You could balance a glass of
water on the pole line of the time series from
two thousand and one to now, including when Obama was president.
In other words, liberals lost their mind when Trump became
president and they haven't gotten it back and they're not
going to get it back. Whereas Republicans who didn't like
Obama worth the darn, they did not abandon their pride
in the country at all. They didn't make their their
patriotism contingent on whether they liked the president. So okay,
that's just another description too long, of course, of Trump
dearrangement syndrome. But I don't remember yep.
Speaker 2: To be fair, do you think that they have if
asked that they would have empirical, sighted sourced reasons for
not being proud of America anymore? What do you presume
would be their responses to that?
Speaker 4: Oh, well, the whole bunch of things. I mean, let's
leave a side of cliches about fascism, but let's take
note of the fact that, and I'll assert this that
the patriotism of most liberals, many liberals, has been superficial
because and the way they betray this is that think
about the countries they always say they admire more and
wish we were more alike. Well, the Scandinavian countries of course,
but also Canada because they have single payer healthcare and
gun control and they're all nice up there. Supposedly they're
not actually nice at all. The way they suppress speech
in dissantras we saw the last several years. So there's
always been this envy of liberals of someplace Steltz is
better than us.
Speaker 2: So when are that's also pretty darn white, pretty darn white.
Speaker 4: B Right, Well, I mean two or three more things.
I mean, I really want to dump on Canada. And
let's stipulate that Trump was over the top with about
making Canada the fifty first state and all the rest
of that. But look, I'll assert this Canada only works,
and especially it's healthcare system only works, and that is
badly because they're a free rider in the United States.
I mean, just on healthcare. If you're an upper middle
class Canadian and you have to endure a year long
waiting list for a routine but important procedure, you come
to the United States. We're their safety valve and it's
only you know, it's a tiny country. The entire population
could fit inside California with lots of room to spare.
I mean, we're bigger than what twice the size of
Canada almost in California. So it's this big, spread out
country of just a few cities where most of the
population lives. But then the other finding out recently, and
James maybe you saw this is GDP per capita in
Canada is now lower than GDP per capita in Alabama,
and this is really causing some embarrassment.
Speaker 2: Well, the Globe and Mail. The Globe and Mail went
and did that story, and apparently Alabama in the national
imagination of Canada consists of just a bunch of hicks
sitting around with Billy beard cans in a trailer park somewhere,
or dispossessed, disenfranchised African Americans toiling and fields. And when
they went there they actually discovered something else. I remember
somebody talking there was there was some rocket company. I
don't even know if it was ex or somebody else
that was saying, you know, we're thinking of opening up
some operations in Alabama. And the people on Twitter were
just laughing at them. Alabama, like there's rocket scientists in Alabama. Well, yes,
quite a few.
Speaker 5: And when the Globe we heard of NASA Huntsville, right, yeah, right,
And when when the Globe and Mail went to Alabama,
it came back with us with a picture of a
place that was self confident that that was actually inhabiting
the twenty first century, that had restaurants, that had you know,
hospitals and stuff.
Speaker 2: People weren't all living in double wides, single minds. And
they had to tell people, you know, we are kind
of wrong about this, and maybe some national self examination
should be going on. Nah no, no, no, no, let's
elbows up whatever that means.
Speaker 4: Well, so let's throw in Mississippi and the comparisons too.
We've known now for several months when the National Educational
Assessments came out that Mississippi has been crushing it. I mean,
they're they have the biggest improvement in reading scores, including
among their minority children African Americans. And I forget now
who it was, but there was some liberal might have
been a politician or at least one of their leading pundits,
said you know, we ought to pay attention to Mississippi.
Well you can imagine a reaction on Blue sky right,
and I don't need to tell listeners have what that?
How that went? And the other thing is back to Canada.
Speaker 2: But again I have to stop you. Why is Mississippi
doing better? What did Mississippi do that made all of
a sudden their educational metrics.
Speaker 4: Improved well, higher standards and accountability right, and a basic
curriculum back to phonics to teach Phoenix rhoenics.
Speaker 2: I feel like I'm mad. Absolutely well, no, phonics doesn't work.
What we have to do is whole word teaching where
they look at the whole word and to it and
context and no far x. But you know, get hooked
on that. And apparently that's the trick. That's the one
weird trick you expect to see, like an Internet ad,
the one weird trick to make your kids actually read.
It's genius anyway, So right, your next point on Canada.
Speaker 4: Well, so you know, the the talking point for our
country now, at least since Trump came along, as we're
heading for a civil war. The country's going to fall apart,
We're gonna break up. But meanwhile, those you know, fuzzy
warm social democratic Canadians, they look more likely to break
up than we are. And there's the paradox there that
I think is explainable. But you know, for years, you know,
the the Nre French speaking Quebecois have wanted to secede
and what they had a referendum twenty years ago that
only narrowly failed. But now Alberta, which is the Texas
of Canada, right it's the once the one province that
would surely vote Republican if it were in America, They're
having a referendum sometime soon about whether they should separate
from Canada. So I don't know if it'll pass or not.
I'm not really in touch with Alberton politics beyond what
I can read in the papers, which means I don't
know anything. But if that passes, I'll bet the people
over in Quebec and maybe the Maritimes are going to say, hey,
wait a minute, and then let's see what happens after that.
It could be interesting because I don't think it's Mark
carneg guy you know who want on kind of a
flu with a you know, an unintended assist from Trump.
I don't think he's all that popular. I think he's
heading for cure Starmer territory. In the fullness of time
with Canadians, and so I think they've got a much
bigger problem than we do.
Speaker 2: I think so too. You have to ask yourself what
defines Canada as a nation? What is it? Well, it's
this this fusion of I wouldn't say it's a fusion
of French and English culture. It's just it's two different
territories that got welld it together into one country. And
it defines itself by not being American. And in some instances,
you know you've got you know, television must contain ten
percent Canadian content, or radio stations must have ten percent.
I mean, I get the sense of not wanting to
be overwhelmed by the big, bumptious neighbors to the south,
especially when you're more well mannered in your own mind,
and you're kinder, and you are more civilized and all
the rest of that. But is that enough to hold
a country together? It is if you hold to the
old values, if you see yourself as part of an
inheritor of what we always talk about it the Western
civilization tradition, If you see yourself in that as a
different offshoot of the themes that made America America. In Mexico,
Mexico for that matter, you have a really interesting North
American continent with Mexico, Canada, the United States, three different
takes on Western CIEV, and two of them quite similar.
But if you don't have that, and you have a
rootless sort of political philosophy unmoored from any of that,
and going towards the usual prog utopianism, then you really
don't have much to hold the country together. You just
have an idea of yourself as being well, what it
means to be Canadian is to be tolerant and generous
and empathetic, and those things usually just end up in graft,
failed institutions, open borders, and diluting of your own civilization.
So good luck with that. I mean, I don't want
to live long enough to see Canada split up. I
think that would be really weird. I don't know how
it would work. Berta is its own country, the middle
part kind of becomes America, Quebec becomes a separate French
en clive, and the maritime province has also become America.
I guess it's no longer something that's ridiculous to even consider.
Speaker 4: Well, it could be if Trump were And I don't
mean this as an insult of Trump, like it will sound.
But if Trump were more historically facile to put it
that way, he probably revived the old fifty four to
forty your fight slogan from this, you know, the middle
of the nineteenth century, right right.
Speaker 2: I always love that fIF fight. That's a great one,
typically new and Tyler too. You know, you grew up
knowing these things, thinking I'm I'm old, I'm a rotary
phone old. Well, we had a State of the Union
speech which dialed it up, but didn't dial it up
in the way that people might have thought it was.
Some people said it was more disciplined, that it didn't
have the sort of wobbly, meandering middle that Trump does,
that it was focused to end, that it had an intention,
and that was to create a lot of television ads
for the upcoming mid terms. And I assume you listen
to every single minute of it. Give us your version
of the highlights and perhaps the low lights.
Speaker 4: Yeah, amazingly, I did watch the whole thing, and I sir,
I'm on record for a long time of hating State
of the Union speeches and wishing we'd get rid of them.
I mean, the listeners should know that what we're used
to our entire adult lifetime is something that was really
brought back by Woodrow Wilson. He had a deliberate purpose,
which was to, I won't say humiliate Congress, but try
to overawe Congress by saying, I'm the boss. The president's
the leader of the country, not the Congress. In Article one,
because all presidents but I think maybe Jefferson gave one
speech to Congress, but all presidents in the nineteenth century
sent letters letters. And by the way, the Article two
says the president shall, well, from time to time submit
information on the state of the Union. It doesn't say
every year. Most of them did the annual message to Congress.
But I wish we'd go back to that. That said,
and I did write something about how Reagan he had
relatively short state of the Unions. Yeah, in one of
the State of the Unions was only thirty eight minutes long,
and he delivered them crisply and even with all the
applause interruption. And they started getting longer under George H. W. Bush,
and then under Clinton they became almost castro esque. And yes, well,
my joke about Trump the other night is that if
we measured this on the castro scale. That speech was
a half castro.
Speaker 2: A half castro. I like that. Well, the part that
people are getting upset about is the part about how
we have to close the borders, that illegal immigrants are
coming here to take the jobs of people. They're straining
the medical system, they're straining the schools, and we have
to do something about this right now. Oh wait a minute,
that was Clinton in ninety six. People were playing back
and forth versions of that. It just shows you how
much the landscape has shifted. So yeah, I'm with you shorter.
If you have to do it at all, a letter
would be nice. Maybe put it on a postcard, and
that's I want a federal government. You can drun in
a bathtub in a state of the Union. You can
put it in a postcard. Yeah, well, but oh sure,
go ahead, no go, I mean it had but it
too well.
Speaker 4: I was gonna say, I you know, normally when I
hear these laundry lists, you know working well. By the way,
you mentioned Clinton, one of my favorite Clinton moments was
the famous State of the Union rre. He said, after
the Democrats had gotten humbled in the ninety four election,
the era big government is over, and then we had
an hour of ninety five new ways the government bigger
and do more things for you. But most State of
the Unions are the laundry list speeches, and you know,
the occasional nod to a person in the in the gallery. Instead,
this was the work of art, a work of showmanship.
I've found it riveting, as I say, even though I
hate these things. And the way Trump paced out throughout
the entire speech, signaling out someone in the audience and
giving him award or recognition, that kept your interest because
every time the speech was about to flag into a
laundry list, he had another spectacle with the person. And
you could tell at the beginning this was going to
be different. When the hockey team they weren't sitting there,
he announced them, and the doors opened and they came
down the steps. I mean as spectacle. And you'd expect
this from the guy who was got the top ratings
with the Apprentice for so many years. So and you know,
he called out all the Democrats' worst behavior. And for Trump,
that was a fairly disciplined speech. Oddly enough, right he
I mean here and there he had lived and did
his usual things. But I thought it was Masterville I
couldn't believe it. Oh one more footnote to that, the
Democratic response by Abigail Spamberger. And by the way, Trump
going on so long when she was on after eleven
o'clock Eastern times, so nobody watched it. But I've noticed
that some of the well two people in particular Rick Pearlstein,
a very far left historian, and Corey robbin An even
further further left celebrity on the intellectual left, they hated
her speech and they both wrote pieces jumping on it,
and they thought it was not small enough, it wasn't wimpy,
they didn't yell at Donald Trump enough. And I thought,
I think they're on the pulse of the party, which
is they want, you know, red meat that's still bleeding,
still attached to the cow. I don't know what metaphor
you'd use, but they didn't like it, and I thought, Oh,
that doesn't occur well for Democrats heading into twenty twenty eight,
because they're going to want people just you know, all
this pent up anger at Trump for more than ten
years now, they're going to want that. And I think
the serious moderate candidates, if there are any, are not
going to want to do a lot of that, and
it's going to be an interesting problem for them.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, But I still think that immigration moment was
the best you could summon all down to that. That's
the one thing that no matter where I look, people
seem to have taken away, if either to defend it
or to to point out exactly what it meant, because
it is it's it's not. I mean, you want to
talk about authoritarianism and fascism when discussing the tariffs. I
mean Trump said that it was a regrettable ruling, sad
ruling or whatever he said, but he's going to abide
by it. It's not as if he says how many
legions of the Supreme Court had, But it was the
it's the job to defend the citizens of the United
States before over and not illegal aliens. And if you
sit on your hands for that, you've made a very
very clear statement as to your priorities and the priorities
of your party and movement. There's there's no there's no
get well, I agree with what he I think one
of somebody the interviewed afterwards, well, you know, I agree
in principle, but it's how we do the defending. It's
the way that. It's what's behind it. It's the racism
of this. No, no, you can't. You can't parse your
way out of that. You can't. Hi, I'm Ben Sass
and I'm Chris Steierwald. And this is not dead yet.
We're all dying, but some of us have been brought
face to face with that reality. However long each of
us have to do it though.
Speaker 4: We all want to live a.
Speaker 2: Good life, one with meaning, love and joy, and our
guests are here to help us do exactly that. Now
available for download and streaming at.
Speaker 3: Rick Ricochet, join the conversation.
Speaker 2: So we will not go to our guest, tal fort Gang.
I hope I got that right. If not, we'll here.
Legal policy fellow and advisor to the President at the
Manhattan Institute. You can find his writings of the pages
of City Journal, National Review, Yay Commentary, Law and Liberty,
and The Wall Street Journal. Del Welcome.
Speaker 6: Thank you so much for having me. Can I just
say that I am a regular listener of the to
the Ricochet podcast. It's part of my Friday afternoon pre
Sabbath routine. My job is to do the dishes in
our house, to make sure that everything is perfectly clean.
For the for the beginning of the Sabbath, and the
Ricochet podcast is an integral part of that ritual.
Speaker 4: See I told you that. I told you tal would
be a great guest and now suitable listening forgetting ready
for Shabat or whatever.
Speaker 2: That's just that's fantastic. Well, and as a fellow National
Review guy, we're all good friends here, so let's just
have an RGOSL congratulations and agree in agree with each
other in an amiable fashion. No, thanks so much for listening.
We appreciate it. And people should say, well, what's this
guy written recently? And the piece is radicals are at
the door, as you got the piece you have in
the latest National Review, and we talk about the Democrat
socialists of America. They're cuddly and cute, right, I mean,
you got that charming guy in New York. That's a
very human face for socialism. I want more of that
kind of cuddly socialism. We got a nice smile, he
cares about people. Ah, the DSA that we have here
in the Twin Cities and Minneapolis where I live are
not a happy, cuddly bunch of people. And they're insane.
But I'll let you tell me about these radicals who
are not just at the door, got one foot in
it in some places, and in other places are sitting
by the fire, you know, lighting up a pipe and
looking at what trinkets they might take from your mantlebies.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I haven't tried to cuddle with any DSA members
recently or ever, but I do think that most Americans
are under the impression that the DSSAY is little more
than the leftmost faction of the Democratic Party, which might
make them extreme or radical in their ideology, but within
the bounds, perhaps pushing the bounds of regular, acceptable, if
radical politics. But when you look at what the DSA
actually says and does, what its institutional messages are, what
its leadership says regularly, and in fact the kinds of
things that you say if you want to be promoted
within the ranks of the DSSA, it's actually it's not
a left wing flank of the Democratic Party itself. It
is aiming to take over the Democratic Party in a
hostile fashion and replace it with a truly revolutionary anti
American group. And I don't say those words lightly, and
I know that sounds like some kind of neo McCarthyist
scare tactic, but they're quite open about it. They're quite
open and saying we support America's enemies against it. We
think that America is a terrible and bad thing, and
we're here to take to take over the Democratic Party
as our vehicle to execute upon that revolution. It's not
normal politics.
Speaker 2: I expect almost that one of them will come out
some day and say what we have is a shining
path for America's future. So can we draw a direct
line between weathermen radicals of the sixties and the seventies
and whatnot who eventually sort of cleaned up their act,
sort of put on a nice disguise and strolled in
the long march through the institutions. Is there a direct
line back to the sixties radicals ideologically or do they
do they have different ideological well springs or does it
not matter because at the end of the day, they're all,
we got to get rid of the America with three
k's and replace it with the people's wisdom and power.
Speaker 6: Well, the Weathermen, as as you know, were weird. They
had weird ideas about about politics, about sex, about all
kinds of things.
Speaker 2: Okay, but not those weirdos. How about the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Speaker 6: Well, look, the DSA is weird too, perhaps in its
own way, And I would say that the biggest difference
between the weather underground, which never really went away. Some
of its leadership obviously suffered legal consequences very briefly and
then went on to the stay wished academic careers, but
the animating ideology of the DSA kind of just retreated
to campus for a few decades. The DSA takes on
part of that. Obviously. They seem to be okay with
revolutionary violence if directed against disfavored classes of people. So
you have members of the DSA quite openly celebrating the
murder of two Israeli embassy employees last year. Right, there's
a pretty regular utterance in DSA circles is free Elias Rodriguez.
That's the name of the guy who just murdered two
young people in cold blood because they worked at the
Israeli embassy. And within the DSA, it's a perfectly normal
thing to say, like, well, that's a direct action against
the illegitimate Zionist enterprise. Like who's who's to say that
that kind of violence is unjust? That kind of thinking,
I think can fairly be traced to an intellectual tradition
that might be a little bit too generous generous, but
an ideological tradition that the weathermen belong to. With that said,
the current dssay also has quite a bit of open Marxist, Leninist,
and often Maoist language. I'm not familiar with the weathermen
being particularly inspired by now perhaps I'm wrong about that,
but that is a major influence among DSA rising stars.
The other is Islamism, is that the DSA has very
apparently strong Islamist ties. They seem to be really concerned
with what's going to happen with Iran, particularly if the
United States exercises its hegemony over the Western Hemisphere and
cuts off the flow of oil between Iran, Venezuela and Cuba.
That really raises hackles in DSA circles. And occasionally they'll
just send people over to Iran to hobnob with the
with the Mullahs there and explore the ways in which
their interests are aligned in fighting the Great Satan.
Speaker 2: That's I I will throw this to Steve in a second,
I promise, and then I'll shut up. But I just
have to say, do they not understand that the Islamists
stray and that they are that they are aligning themselves
with is profoundly illiberal in all of the ways that
they hate. If they don't like America because it's patriarchal,
it's racist, it's homophobic, it's transphobic, it's it's it's it
wants to impose a religious theocracy. And yet they turn
around and make common cause simply because they have the
oppressor oppressed matrix going on in their head. Can they
not think one step beyond that and say, we are
getting in bed with the people who will kill as
at the earliest popular possible opportunity.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it seems absurd, And I think the key in
trying to to mention the challenge, the problem, the threat
that DSA represents is to try to take their way
of viewing the world seriously, which is not just to
say that they're like absurd or idiots, But what is
it that they could possibly be thinking. Is it that
their hatred of America is just their number one animating
principle and whatever follows from that, whatever Molotov Ribbentrop pacts
have to be signed to affect that outcome, they'll take it.
Maybe it's that maybe they have these beliefs that you
and I and reasonable people will recognize as as Kakammy,
that if Iran is simply liberated from the shackles of
Western colonial influence, that they'll become progressive para coons. I mean,
it's like, it's laughable. I'm literally laughing talking about it.
But I think we have to try to get inside
their heads and seriously about what's going on.
Speaker 4: Boy, I really don't want to be inside their heads.
I don't know what you mean, but look, I mean,
I think there's two parts to it. One is, I
think that the left doesn't take religion seriously when they're
not hostile to it, right, So I think they don't
believe that the Islamists really do believe the Quran and
all the rest of that. That's one possibility. The other
one is to take off something James said is I
sometimes half joke but only half that every one of
these revolutionary cycles that we see are just replays of
the Spanish Civil War from the thirties, in which the
perceptive people like Orwell and Arthur Kessler and a whole
bunch of people you can think of who went to
Spain wanting to fight on the side of revolution and discovered, oh,
we're going to be the first people to communists kill
if they actually get power. Right, this has been seen
over and over again, and they never seem to learn
that lesson, and they don't realize that they will be
the first people the Islamists, the Islamists will kill if
they actually got power here or anywhere else. So there's
an iavitae there, but I think you could your finger
on it. The enemy, my enemy is my friend. Their
hatred for America is qualifications number one through ten, and
that's why the ally with them. And it's pretty perverse,
but I did well. Back to your article, though, my
one sentence summary is that essentially the case you make
is that what we used to think of was a
wing of the Democratic Party is rapidly becoming It's or
so right, it's it's no longer going to be a wing.
It's going to be the mainstream of the party. And
that's on purpose. I think back to the Students for
Democratic Society, the poort hereon statement. You know, their first
idea was let's take over the universities and make that
our power base. And you know that pretty much succeeded
in that, and so the next step would be the
Democratic Party.
Speaker 2: What you know what, because that's where the chicks were anyway.
Speaker 4: Okay, oh, I have so many friends you know a
little older than me from the sixties and said the
only reason they went to Andy warr rallies was to
meet girls. Yeah, okay, those people are all conservatives now.
But here's the point tal is in a question, Sorry
I'm rambling too long. Is the party is seems to
be rolling over pretty fast without putting up much resistance.
Say more about that.
Speaker 6: I mean, the Democratic Party appears to be ideologically defenseless
against the DSA. Right, there are really two possibilities here
that we're seeing play out as mainstream figures like President Obama,
Governor Kathy Hochel in New York, various others have just
rolled over and conceded all the dsay's premises and welcomed
them almost as liberators, which is kind of a funny,
a funny phrase to appropriate for this instance. But they'll
say things that really just ease the blow of the
DSA taking over, like, well, you know, they're just they're
just four more community control of our means of production. Right,
we will frame them as more moderate than they really are,
because frankly, we can't fight. They're going to steamroll us.
And the reason for that is either that they see
that that's where the political wins are blowing. The Democrats
have simply lost younger voters and ideologues, and anyone who's
going to be left of center is going to go
full DSA, and there just aren't any more kaffe Hocals
out there. That's one possibility. The other is that ideologically
they really see very little difference between their own position
and the position of the DSA. Perhaps rhetorically and strategically
they make different choices, but ultimately they're really two wings
of the same Torso. I don't know if that physiological
metaphor holds, but we'll strain it right now.
Speaker 4: I'm so old that I can remember sort of the
leading figures I think within the DSA back in the sixties,
or at least they were adjacent, and that was Michael Harrington,
the famous author of The Other America that was so
influential with the beginning of the War on Poverty, and
then a little later ALERD. Lowenstein in New York, who
was very far left but friends with William F. Buckley.
You know those were different times, right, Both of them
managed to get themselves elected to Congress, but they were
both I think you'd say serious people with a you know,
an intellectual quotion. And I look now at the DSA
and I don't see people of their stature. I see
what I see here. You know, crazy people like Naomi Kleine,
and they all seem to be named Naomi. You're half
of them to right, So I don't know who are
the Do you see any sort of significant intellectual leadership
on the DSA or is it all just crazy people.
Speaker 6: Within the DSA. I don't see serious intellectual anything, leadership,
promulgation of ideas. Nothing is serious. They have tons of publications.
I mean, it is a treasure trove to just sift
through the National DSSAYS archives, the many many chapters, many
of which have their own zines. You gotta love a
good revolutionary zone, and there's so it's a it's an
absolute gold mine in there. All of it is total
pseudo academic babble. And no, there are no individuals within
the organization who are are setting the pace ideologically. There
are external publications that will try to run cover for
DSA in its its kind of ideological program. Some of those,
I'd say the most prominent of those are actually sham
news sites like like drop site news Right, which is
a partially George Soros funded operation that seems to have
suspiciously close ties to Hamas and Hesbalat manages to get
exclusive interviews with their leadership all the time, which is
kind of interesting. But they will they will put out
what appear to be news articles that really push the
boundaries of analysis towards a framing that is very friendly
to basically everything that that DSA stands for, extremely hostile
towards the United States oddly obsessed with revolutionary violence. The
redemptive Phenanian uh Colonized defeats Colonizer with a healthy dose
of Cuban and Venezuelan sympathy is thrown in there for
quick measure.
Speaker 2: Hi, this is a young Culter. Welcome to my Ricochet oncast.
Speaker 3: And Coulter every week on Ricochet, your home to center
Right conversation.
Speaker 2: Hey, that was pretty good. It's so unattractive though, The
whole Cuban Venezuelan mojo is so unattractive to people in
this country. I mean, when you when you dress it
up in a nice suit and a big grin, you
say we're gonna have free busses for everybody, a lot
of people. Yeah, okay, whatever. But when you start that
hardcore revolutionary talk, there is something in the American spirit
that just instinctively turns away from it, except for the
one or two or three percent who just absolutely love
it because they get to see the right people killed,
and they get to be in charge of all the things,
and they are going to be so well set up
after the revolution, when actually they're probably either going to
be in a pit or digging the pit. But that's
why I don't really worry that it gets a lot
of traction because of the core. The more they get
back to that sixties style Harry chay Bovara stuff, the
more people are repulsed by it at an atomic automatic level.
But I have to ask, then, is there right now
they're having the moment and everybody's you have all the zines,
you have all the websites, and everybody's getting together and
figuring out what it means to be a DSA. But
as we all know, there are inevitably splitters. What do
you see could be one of those dividing lines that
actually tends to take the movement. That fractures the movement,
it loses some of its momentum power.
Speaker 6: Well, there's still a little bit of an old guard left.
They've basically lost their positions of power on the the NPC,
the national I think National Political Committee is the name
of the uh, the central.
Speaker 2: Body and the NPC. They're the non playable characters.
Speaker 6: That's great is that it also just has like such
a great Soviet ring to it, right, like it just
now obviously like we're talking about a party, so so
to some extent that uh, that is inevitable. Most of
them have been have been replaced by open Marxist Leninists
or Maoists or you know, people who like to leave
lots of blood emojis in there in their posts on
social media, just to to tell you what they're all about.
Speaker 4: Uh, And that.
Speaker 6: Spooks some of the old guard. But ultimately I don't
think that that's where DSA shows serias fault lines. The
serious fault lines are going to be. I mean, this
is like Alcove one, Alcove two, Alcove three, right, or
you know the Popular People's Front of Judea versus the
Judaean People's Popular Front, right, It's it's like, oh, do
we do we take now as our guiding light? Do
we take Lenin as are guiding And obviously the more
granular you get and the more high you get on
your own recent political success, the more you think that
it's urgent to hash out these infinitesimally small ideological differences.
That's kind of the great hope of conservatives and free
market capitalists is that the communists will just tear themselves
to death because it's it's almost in their nature as
constant purity seekers, constant like true ideologues, people who are
are really rigidly tethered to their their ideological foundations that
eventually the differences between them will come to a four
And obviously putting differences aside is the key to coalitional
and party politics.
Speaker 4: So that's the hope.
Speaker 6: It's not obvious where that rift is going to emerge, though,
you know, I'm.
Speaker 4: Having flashbacks tell to I mean, I read about these things.
I'm not old enough for this, but not just Mao
versus Lenin versus Trotsky, but here in this country is
you may know, back in the thirties it was the
fights between the Shackedman Knights and the Lovestone Nights, right
then Mother Joe all these crazy things, and Emma Goldman
crazy stuff. But I do think, you know, James mentioned
the affinity people on the left had for so long
for these four and utopias, and that brings me back
to the famous book now, gosh, more than forty years old,
but so am I by Paul Hollander and political Pilgrims. Right.
And the point is, if you go back decades ago,
a century ago, there were all the fellow Travelers we
call them. They loved the Soviet Union until it became indefensible.
They love Cuba until you know, that came hard to defend. Two,
they were Maoists for a while, until that became indefensible.
And then he pointed out, you know, serious people saying Albania,
that's our country that we're going to hold up as
the socialist utopia. And North Korea for a while. You know,
at Peter your Collier and David Horowitz, who I knew
very well back in their days in the left in
the late sixties early seventies, they would sing these songs
in praise of as it was a kim Il song
whoever the guy was ran the North Korea for all
those decades and so there. And the point is is
today it's hard to point to a foreign left wing
utopia they can point to, and I think in a
way that most people haven't take account of that partly
fuels their anger and rage. I mean, they always had
the anger and rage and were violent and all the
rest of that, but they at least said they had
someplace to point to is their model, And now there
isn't one, is there? I can't It was in Venezuela.
I mean they tried for like a couple months what's
his name, Sean Pan and even Bernie Sanders, but that
evaporated pretty fast. So they don't have a utopia anymore.
So what are you going to do when you lose
your God?
Speaker 6: There is a strong well. I should say first of
all that the North Korean dream has not completely died.
The d Essays International Committee has sponsored multiple events aiming
to rehabilitate North Korea's image in the West and trying
to blame obviously blame every any suffering there of which
there is shockingly little. But whatever suffering there is is
the United States fault. And really, if the United States
were just less imperialist, less supportive of South Korean capitalism
than the North Koreans would be living in paradise. With
that said, China is the closest thing they have to
a model. Now it's a totally invented version of of
what China and the Chinese Communist Party have wrought. They'll
say things like, oh, it's a true ecological society. It's
the future of the world's worst polluter, right is. But
if you just if you swallow CCP propaganda whole, which
is essentially the policy of the DSA, we do not
believe anything that comes out of the United States. We
believe everything that comes out of China, and they are
living glorious future. I mean, this is like it's it's
it's so dumb. It's really hard to believe.
Speaker 2: That's the worst. It's it's really stupid. So we can
hope then that actually this whole movement sunders and sputters
because they're dumb enough to say, you know, North Korea
is really getting a bad shake. I mean, North Korea
is sort of a humorous meme, you know, an ex
people that have fun with it. The actual horrors of
the regime, I think everybody realizes. And when you see
the sneaked out video of these clockwork societies, it look
like some nightmare out a wrinkle in time of the regimentation,
and it's it's it's abhorred. Everything they point to is
ap porrant. Everything that they point to and want manifests
the sins they find in America times ten. So they're
dumb at the bottom angle of it. And if they
were smarter, they would realize that they could just get
away with an awful lot of things by wrapping it
up in more of an American tradition and being the
guys who come wrapped in the flag to tell us
how we can be even better if we take these
ideas on. But what you're describing as a group of
kids who just never got out of college and want
to stay there in the dorm movement with the chap
poster behind them and do bowing hits and talk about
it what it'll be great when the man is dead,
When dad is dead, I'm sorry, not dad. I'll just
say yeah, yeah.
Speaker 6: There's a lot of that too, for sure. I would
say they're dumb in a smart way, which is everything
is framed in an unfalsifiable fashion. Were it not for
America's dominance, were it not for capitalism, all these things
would occur. Now nobody knows that world, right, it's a
totally counter factual universe in which the North Koreans are
free from American influence. But as long as you can
frame your support for those hostile foreign nations as were
it not for the United States as it is, they
would be everything that we hoped we would have utopia
here on earth. Then you can say the craziest things
and just say, oh, well, all the bad things that
you've heard about the CCP, all the times you've been
told to distrust them, that's just American propaganda. It's all
a conspiracy theory about American dominance.
Speaker 4: So tell let me shift gears back to when inside
our on borders and give you what I think we'll
end up being an exit question, and it is is
mom dommy the key to the near and intermediate term
for this whole story. I mean, your article points out
how the democratic establishment rolled over so quickly for him,
he appears to be serious. He's not just a dorm
room bs er. I mean, he's really trying to do
this in New York City. And look, I mean, I'm
sure he's going to fail, but it looks to me
like he's the in person. He's clearly the new Bernie Sanders,
and he's going to be a national, international celebrity. And
so is Bondamie the key to this whole story right now?
Speaker 6: Well, he's certainly the model to the DSA takeover, right
he presents a particular archetype of the DSA candidate, who's
who's a true believer. He's got a history of that
kind of street activism that's the highest vocation for aspiring
DSA members. And then he ran a snappy campaign in
a in a winnable place and gained a lot of power. Now,
how he governs in the long run is to be seen,
and whether that form of governing serves as a model
for other jurisdictions is to be seen twice over. But
I do think that that is the key to understanding
the political st ategy. How does the DSA run candidates,
What are they encouraged to do when they govern at
a particular level, what perhaps they are encouraged to keep
in the in the quiver for when the DSA has
a little bit more sway power a little bit more
of a of a coalition of its own. That is
a really interesting and open question that clouds any semblance
of moderation that we might see from from Montani, Like
if he is truly a true believer, then then perhaps
anything he's done that appears to be moderate is really strategic.
That's not a crazy thing to think.
Speaker 4: It's a new economic plan, right yeah, mber Leno's new
economic plan in nineteen twenty one.
Speaker 6: Right yeah, Well, I don't remember that. I'm a little.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 2: Nothing we've done is working, so let's try this and
not call it capitalism. Dall has been a pleasure, and
everyone should go to National Review and read this peaceable
and get the comments here at bricochet dot com. And
if you hit a paywall, well you know that's pony up.
National Reviews got to keep the lights on. Two. I've
been to their office. They're not palatial. They're nice, but
there's no golden fountain. So Tell needs to get paid,
as do we all. And I'm sorry, I'm so sorry
Tell that you know when you do your cleaning up
this week, you're gonna have to listen to yourself. I'm afraid.
And I know that I fast forward through that whenever
I do so, grit it, Barrett and listen to yourself
and be proud because it's been fun. We've enjoyed having you.
We went forward to the mix that of man you want.
Speaker 6: Thank you so much, guys, I'll look through the archives
for this afternoon.
Speaker 2: There you go. Okay, bye bye.
Speaker 3: I'm Greg Corumbas. Join Jim Garrity of National Review and
me each weekday for the Three Martini Lunch Podcast. We'll
give you the good, bat and crazy news of the
day and lots of laughs too. Find us right here
on the Ricochet Audio Network at ricochet dot com or
wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2: Well, before we go, a couple of things. Somebody mentioned Albania.
I hadn't thought about Albania in a long time, and
I thought, who is the guy who? And Verhosa right,
and I thought, I remember that guy's name. You know
that he was the Albanian because Albania was always one
of those weird things out there. You never it wasn't
one of your marquee comed states in the Eastern Bloc,
you know. And the fact that they fastened on it
is there is the future. Ah yeah, next, next, up Liberia.
So yeah, I don't wish that. I do wish sort
of having you know, the cultural amusement we got out
of having just a parade of gray suited door idiot
functionaries in charge of countries that we could always sort
of make fun of. But it reminds me that whenever
Mission Impossible or shows of that ILK of that time
would go to a comic country, or for that matter,
one in Central America, they would always they'd never they'd
never name any of them, like they were scared of
somehow losing the future Albanian distribution rights if they said,
you're going to Albania, Peter with your staff and we
you know, yeah, so yeah, we are not done because
we have to talk about a couple of things. One
Gavin Newsom, I think everybody's sort of expecting is going
to be, you know, a real contender for the Damson
twenty the next presidential election, made a remarkable speech the
other day where he was talking to an audience largely composed,
if not entirely, of African Americans with an African American
injured low future and said, look, I'm like you guys
crap as at scores and I can't read.
Speaker 1: I'm not you know, I'm not trying to impress you.
I'm just trying to impress upon you. I'm like you,
I'm no better than you. You know, I'm a nine
to sixty SAT guy, and you know, and I'm not
trying to offend anyone, well, you know, trying to act
all there if you got nine forty, but literally a
nine to sixty SAT guy, I cannot You've never seen
me read a speech because I cannot read a speech.
Speaker 2: I'm I'm still goggling over that particular speech and why
anybody would think that was a wise thing to do,
and why there hasn't been the blowback that you would think.
There's been amusement and shrugging. Oh, I mean, I mean nobody.
Maybe you're seeing something out there that I'm not. But
I mean Newsom doesn't have that. Oh that's just Gavin
talking off the talking off the cuff. He's kind of
a babbler, he's weird in that way. That's not his
persona yet, So was this a calculated move and if so,
what the hell were they thinking?
Speaker 4: Well, okay, I can explain it all to you, but
first I do have to say I don't think he's
gonna end up being a top contender for the nomination.
I think he's going to have a glass jaw the
way Kambella did in twenty twenty. And you might not
even make it to the first primary. But first of all,
can I just set the scene for listeners? And I
hate to do this to you, James, but I'm sitting
here in my shorts in the morning, out here where
it's going to top out at eighty degrees today. Yesterday
I was watching a pot of whales swim by my
window in the middle of the day and the ocean
out in front of my house. And yet people are
leaving California. How is this possible?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 4: Only you know all the other Sun Belt states are
gaining population. We're losing it by a lot. Well, that's
the legacy of Newsom. But when I heard that comment,
my mind ran back to something you might remember too,
or at least it was close enough to your sentient youth.
It's when George Romney, the governor of Michigan in late
nineteen sixty seven, even with Richard Nixon in the polls
for the Republican nomination the following year, made the offhand
comment to Detroit TV station. Oh yeah, I went over
to Vietnam and I just got the most thorough brainwashing.
You can imagine his campaign collapsed instantly because I mean,
of course, there were some great jokes. You know, Jean McCarthy,
the air from your state, who really did have a
great wit, said Romney didn't need a brainwashing, a light
rents would have been just fought. Yes, great stuff. And
you know he never recovered from that because you know,
it just made you look like a moron. So why
is Newsome so far not gotten that kind of blowback? Well,
so here's an interesting thing. You know, I've never been
for the psychological theory we call projection, except maybe I
think it's true. And so one reason liberals are always
accusing the rest of us of being racist is because,
guess what, that's what they actually are. So a few
years ago, actually twenty eighteen, so what eight years ago now,
an African American professor at Yale and a woman social
scientist at Princeton did a study that was a very
thorough content analysis of speeches by Republican and Democratic politicians.
And you know, they code all this stuff and you
can contest the methodology, but come back to that in
a minute. What it found was democratic politicians routinely talk
down to minorities. The way they characterized it was they
profess a certain incompetence. In other words, they described in
the study exactly what Newsome did the other day. And
you know, they want to say, and I'm guessing these
professors have liberal sympathies, probably if they're social scientists at
Yale and Princeton, they're saying, oh, you know, these people
are trying to be ealitarian and non racist, but they're
betraying subtle racism in thinking the capabilities of minorities are
lower than everyone else. You remember the famous statement Biden
made about poor kids are just as smart as white kids.
Speaker 2: Right, yes, right, So I.
Speaker 4: Mean I actually think that's what's going on here, and
I think that's now deeply embedded on the left. They
are paternalistic. They really do privately believe that minorities are
not as capable without their help as everyone else. They
don't believe. That's one reason they don't believe in treating
people as individuals and equally in the sense of it.
So I think that's what's going on. But I do
think that between that problem, which I think all of
them share really, but I think between that gaff and
just generally a nuisance record, I think he's going to
get clobbered, maybe by another liberal. I mean, if JB.
Pritzker runs, he's gonna say, Illinois may stink, but we
don't stick as bad as California.
Speaker 2: So yeah, run on Illinois. That's that's an interesting, interesting thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, I need to just add, by the way,
about that study. You know, I see all these look
I read a lot of these things, and I always say,
I wonder how it turn out with a different methodology.
No one, to my mind, has either replicated a study
or done a study refuting it. I can point to
a whole lot of social science studies that give a
very anti liberal conclusion, and other social scientists avoid taking
it up because I think they fear that they would
ratify it if they did it.
Speaker 2: I think you're right. Well, let's sort of predicate predicates
underline the opposition to voter id that these groups are
too stupid and too incapable to actually go and get
vote voter idea. And there's a there's a second part
of that too, which is, well, how exactly do they
get the documents to get these voterer Id's, well, they
get them from the government. As you're saying that the
government makes it very hard to get them. Because the
government isn't very good at this, why don't you get
better at at them? I know, well, you know, I
think the main thing going for Newshim is his presidential hair.
I think people look at that and say, we haven't
seen presidential hair like that since Martin Sheen, and that's
gonna get them a certain distance. But yeah, I would
love to know that. You're right, Britzer doesn't have a
particular amount of charisma for me. I can't see them
putting up another white guy to go up against Vance,
who would have a lot more bryo energy and sideways
knowing looks at the camera during debates. We'll see, we'll
see long ways away. And I have no intention of
thinking about it. In a beautiful day like today, it's sunny,
and it's always sunny at Ricochet, he said, with a
grotesque bad transition. But that's the place where you can
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Can't post and comment if you're you don't have skin
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that's what that in the code of conduct makes it
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w probably be back with us next week if non
Steve and I look forward to the two of us
chatting to whomever comes up in the hopper, and it's
been fun. We'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet
four point whatever it is this week. Good bye man.
Speaker 4: Ricochet. Join the conversation.