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