Speaker 1: Well Whiskey coming day don't From power Line blog dot
Speaker 1: com and produced by Ricochet dot Com. This is the
Speaker 1: Three Whiskey Happy Hour with your bartenders Steve Hayward, John
Speaker 1: You and power Lines International Woman of Mystery Lucretia.
Speaker 2: Gott A giving Wilon where you're in loud.
Speaker 3: Down and lod Welcome everybody to a special Turkey Day
Speaker 3: edition of the Three Whiskey Happy Hour, where, if you
Speaker 3: haven't already fallen asleep by watching three terrible NFL games
Speaker 3: yesterday while eating turkey and red wine guaranteed to make
Speaker 3: even the Philadelphia Eagles look like a boring team, put
Speaker 3: you to bed. We have for you now now a
Speaker 3: special out of order holiday episode of the Three Whiskey
Speaker 3: Happy Hour, And as usual, I'm joined by my co
Speaker 3: host Steve Hayward, who is if you can't see him,
Speaker 3: and I hope he posts a photo of this has
Speaker 3: some deliciously inviting landscape behind him.
Speaker 2: Where are you, Steve? I am still in Italy. I
Speaker 2: didn't come home like you guys did. I'm in Positano
Speaker 2: on the Amalfi Coast, where I've spent today. Mostly I've
Speaker 2: spent the day outside of my balcony writing until it
Speaker 2: started raining. But it's great.
Speaker 3: I hope people are following Steve's feet on Facebook, where
Speaker 3: he's been posting pictures of the Italian countryside and food
Speaker 3: and Lucretia, where are you.
Speaker 4: I'm home. I am happy to be home. No. I
Speaker 4: had a lovely time in Italy, especially with our friends,
Speaker 4: the Baron and the Baroness. I got to spend some
Speaker 4: quality time with the Baron after the poor Baroness had
Speaker 4: to go to Japan, which was really sad. But what
Speaker 4: a lovely man he is. And I'm just I'm sort
Speaker 4: of still warm and basking in the fun of it all.
Speaker 4: But I'm back to the usual Lucretia grind, cooking, cleaning,
Speaker 4: playing with the cat, you know, playing with the dog,
Speaker 4: that sort of thing. So life is boring again.
Speaker 3: But I have to say listeners that Lucretia was in
Speaker 3: an uncommonly good mood in Italy, because if you looked
Speaker 3: at the Steve's substack, there's a photo of Lucretia and
Speaker 3: I at a very high window in a castle in Kante.
Speaker 3: She's not trying to throw me out.
Speaker 2: Well, that's what commenter said, is it's dangerous for you
Speaker 2: John to be standing so close to Lucretia near an
Speaker 2: open window. I guess he thinks you're a clumsy Russian
Speaker 2: or something.
Speaker 3: No, she thinks she equates he obviously she or she
Speaker 3: obviously creates Lrisha. Lucretia with the effectiveness of the KGB
Speaker 3: just something.
Speaker 2: I never doubted.
Speaker 3: Okay, so well, I'm back in the good old United States.
Speaker 3: But we did have a wonderful trip talking about natural rights,
Speaker 3: common good, constitutionalism, and the elections all in Italy. And
Speaker 3: we're going to talk about our reflections on the election,
Speaker 3: which I think are actually enhanced by being in another
Speaker 3: country and seeing it from the outsider's perspective and trying
Speaker 3: to explain to them what happened in the November election.
Speaker 3: But before we get to that, let's just talk. Let's
Speaker 3: mark a little bit that we're here on Thanksgiving weekend
Speaker 3: and start with Steve, what do you have to be
Speaker 3: thankful for? Howard did you celebrate Thanksgiving in Italy? Points
Speaker 3: to any listeners who know the Italian word for Turkey,
Speaker 3: it's a kino, which makes no sense at all. I'm
Speaker 3: sure the Turkey must have come over from Europe from
Speaker 3: the United States. I don't think they had turkeys before
Speaker 3: the discovery of the New World.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure.
Speaker 3: But anyway, Steve, did you have turkey?
Speaker 2: Did you drink?
Speaker 3: You watch bad football?
Speaker 2: What do you do? No? No, we we had some
Speaker 2: pizza and some good Italian or derbs and things like that.
Speaker 2: I we didn't know. That's just that's just every day
Speaker 2: in the Hayward house.
Speaker 3: Or why did you go two thousand miles for that?
Speaker 2: Well not really, don't eat that much pizza at home.
Speaker 2: Oddly enough, Well, there wasn't any turkey around that I saw,
Speaker 2: or turkeno or whatever you call it. By the way, Tino,
Speaker 2: by the way, it's one of the I mean, there's
Speaker 2: no reason to waste more than ten seconds on this,
Speaker 2: but it's one of the attacks of the left on Thanksgiving,
Speaker 2: you know, because a colonial set colonials of oppression thing, right,
Speaker 2: But that you know, they didn't really have turkey at
Speaker 2: the first Thanksgiving in Massachusetts. It was just some wild
Speaker 2: bird they found there, so who knows what it was.
Speaker 2: But no, So I've just had Italian pluisine, and I
Speaker 2: have to say that I like coming here. I've never
Speaker 2: been to the Mouthy Coast, and I wanted to try the.
Speaker 3: Other example of o. Steve Hayward is a Barbarian and
Speaker 3: a Cretn But.
Speaker 2: Go on, Well, it's the off season here and most
Speaker 2: of the hotels are a lot of other places are
Speaker 2: still open, and I'd say at least three quarters of
Speaker 2: the restaurants are closed, in part because they're doing major
Speaker 2: road construction and nobody can get to them. It's a
Speaker 2: little tricky getting around. So but we're having a great time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's good.
Speaker 2: I'm reading about crazy football games, but I did not
Speaker 2: see any of them.
Speaker 4: Isn't it funny how nobody ever challenges other cultures, other
Speaker 4: countries' longstanding traditions. So if Turkey was or wasn't at
Speaker 4: the first Thanksgiving, does it really matter the fact that
Speaker 4: there's this lovely American It's hard to establish traditions that
Speaker 4: are sort of country wide nationwide, but Thanksgiving has become
Speaker 4: one of those. And I think that every time somebody
Speaker 4: wants to make some snarky comment about colonialism or imperialism
Speaker 4: or you know, Native American genocide or something like that,
Speaker 4: I just smack them. I'm tired of it, really. I mean,
Speaker 4: Thanksgiving is an absolutely lovely tradition, and I saw some
Speaker 4: dull article in the Washington excuse me, what's it called?
Speaker 4: The Wall Street Journal? The Wall Street Journal the other
Speaker 4: day about don't pretend to be grateful if you're not grateful,
Speaker 4: because that's more harming to your soul. I think they
Speaker 4: use the word soul. That's more. That's more harming to
Speaker 4: your well being than if you're just acknowledged that you
Speaker 4: have nothing to be grateful for.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, I think in your well, I think
Speaker 2: from a point of view of the cultural left, Europe
Speaker 2: may be worse than America because it's holidays go back
Speaker 2: many you know, Millennia are more right. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 2: I was in I was in Rome one year, many
Speaker 2: years ago. I think it's August fifteenth as the feast
Speaker 2: of the Assumption, and the whole country closed down. I
Speaker 2: mean there was nothing open.
Speaker 4: But nobody celebrates it.
Speaker 2: They just well, okay, yeah, well that could be right.
Speaker 2: But the point is there are explicitly religious holidays here
Speaker 2: and ours are sort of that typical America and mix
Speaker 2: a religious and secular together, which confuses you know, our
Speaker 2: Supreme Court.
Speaker 3: Needless to say, I did the fun of being a
Speaker 3: visiting professor for a semester in Italy, and it was
Speaker 3: the best because all Roman Catholic holidays were state holidays, right,
Speaker 3: so we got we had almost we had vacation after vacation.
Speaker 4: I think Germany had more. Actually it was very interesting.
Speaker 4: I think Germany has more state religious holidays. I guess
Speaker 4: for Luther or something. I don't know. But every other
Speaker 4: day you couldn't do anything because it was a federal
Speaker 4: holiday and you had to stay home. I do want
Speaker 4: to say something before we move off this topic about
Speaker 4: my I'm going to be serious for a moment. It
Speaker 4: is my firm belief that the most important what would
Speaker 4: you call it, the most important virtue, I guess, is
Speaker 4: gratitude and the absolutely beyond any anything else in the
Speaker 4: world that someone who is grateful, shows gradude, lives with gratitude,
Speaker 4: is happy. And I think that if I were going
Speaker 4: to in two sentences define what's wrong with the left
Speaker 4: is they're bitter and resentful and they're not grateful for
Speaker 4: what they have. And you see that all of the time,
Speaker 4: whereas the people who are happy, the people who are content,
Speaker 4: it doesn't matter what they have or how much they have,
Speaker 4: they're disgrateful for having it. And so that's my Thanksgiving
Speaker 4: Day message.
Speaker 2: Great, you're here.
Speaker 4: I'm very grateful. I mean, we live if you live
Speaker 4: in the United States. My priest likes to have this
Speaker 4: little thing in some of his homilies, and he stands
Speaker 4: up in front of the parish and and imagine this
Speaker 4: long continuum of all the people in the in the world.
Speaker 4: You can even see me doing this, But and imagine
Speaker 4: all the people in the world. And you can look
Speaker 4: in one direction or the other. If you look in
Speaker 4: this direction, you can look at the people who have
Speaker 4: more than you, who are better off than you, et cetera,
Speaker 4: et cetera. If you look in the other direction, you
Speaker 4: can see the people who who don't enjoyed the same
Speaker 4: material and other blessings, freedom and so forth. And if
Speaker 4: you live in the United States, you are in the
Speaker 4: top half of one percent if you live in the
Speaker 4: United States of the people who look back on everyone else.
Speaker 4: And you know, that's just something to be also to
Speaker 4: be grateful for that we live in a country with
Speaker 4: amazing blessings.
Speaker 2: Although I'll add one last contrast from over here in Italy.
Speaker 2: It finally occurred to me driving the terrifying roads yesterday
Speaker 2: to get out here on this very formidable coastline, and
Speaker 2: also looking at the buildings I've been in and so forth.
Speaker 2: If Italy had OSHA and NITSA and all other safety bureaucracies,
Speaker 2: three quarters of this country would be shut down in
Speaker 2: an instant, because you know, we're whiny, you know whats
Speaker 2: and there's still some Roman virtue intact here.
Speaker 4: Well, Allison and I were discussing the fact that you're
Speaker 4: driving through these crazy streets that are I mean, they're
Speaker 4: more narrow than my bathroom, right, and they've got cars
Speaker 4: on either side of them in motorcycles and mopeds and scooters,
Speaker 4: and they're driving these vans and people are in and
Speaker 4: out and there's no right of travel, right of way.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's just crazy. The entire time you're on
Speaker 4: the roads, and you never see even a fender bender.
Speaker 4: You never see an accident, you never see anybody crashing.
Speaker 4: You never know. Steve was watching my face as we
Speaker 4: were driving down this really narrow road. Then there's this
Speaker 4: whole line of motorcycles parked and the mirror on the
Speaker 4: van was like a quarter of an inch away from
Speaker 4: these motorcycles. As we're driving down. I'm probably only going
Speaker 4: about forty kilometers, but Still it's just you know, these
Speaker 4: people are One thing is they don't text while they're driving.
Speaker 4: They pay attention. You could not pay attention.
Speaker 2: So yeah, but I still don't see how any cars
Speaker 2: in this country have their mirror still on them. But
Speaker 2: they do. Somehow they all do.
Speaker 4: You don't see it. You don't see them scratched. You
Speaker 4: don't see in those tiny places where they make those
Speaker 4: redible terms with the vans and the so forth. You
Speaker 4: know how if you can go into a parking garage
Speaker 4: in the United States and there'll be a pole you
Speaker 4: get to push the button and that pole will just
Speaker 4: be absolutely covered with little crashes. You can tell that that.
Speaker 4: You know, literally thousands of cars ran into that pole
Speaker 4: as someone who was driving up trying to get their
Speaker 4: drinner to go to parking. None of that. In Italy.
Speaker 4: Nobody ever hits anything. It's amazing. They don't need.
Speaker 3: For those listeners who are studying to take the Italian
Speaker 3: driver's license exam, you can stop taking notes now let's
Speaker 3: get to this. Although I do want to reinforce what
Speaker 3: Lucretia just said, I don't I think, at least on Thanksgiving,
Speaker 3: we should appreciate despite all our nation's problems. How truly
Speaker 3: lucky we are to live in the United States at
Speaker 3: this time in history. As you said, if you were
Speaker 3: to draw a graph of and my utilitarian graph of
Speaker 3: human happiness and welfare, we would definitely be at the
Speaker 3: tail end, all the way at the right hand side
Speaker 3: of the X and Y axis.
Speaker 2: I see what you did there, John, I see it.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to take the.
Speaker 4: Base utilitarian sentence. Is there such a thing.
Speaker 2: That's what we're measuring? Utles? Yeah? Yeah, no.
Speaker 3: I thought one thing we might talk about is actually
Speaker 3: the substance of the panel that we held at the
Speaker 3: University of Florence between in front of a packed audience
Speaker 3: of Italian students and faculty. I have to say that
Speaker 3: they were, I think, really really deeply fascinated about our elections,
Speaker 3: maybe more so than their own elections. Maybe actually what
Speaker 3: happens the United States is of such critical economic and
Speaker 3: security importance to Western Europe that they should be more
Speaker 3: interested in our elections than their own. But we had
Speaker 3: a great panel, and I want to repeat some of
Speaker 3: the things that were said, which I think I think
Speaker 3: set Stephen Lucretia off and hear what they had to say.
Speaker 3: Have you here let's hear what they have to say
Speaker 3: about So one of the panels said that we shouldn't
Speaker 3: make too much of the election because one it was
Speaker 3: really really close. It's starting to look like President Trump
Speaker 3: won by one point five percent around there between one
Speaker 3: point less than two percent, maybe about two million votes
Speaker 3: or three million out of about out of one hundred
Speaker 3: and fifty million votes. So in one sense, this panel said,
Speaker 3: we're not talking about a landslide. We're talking about actually
Speaker 3: one of the closest margins of popular vote victory in
Speaker 3: the last century. I think he said, out of the
Speaker 3: forty eight last presidential elections, this was the forty seventh,
Speaker 3: the largest smallest majority that the winner had held of
Speaker 3: the popular vote. So this panelist said, rather, he was
Speaker 3: worried that President Trump and Republicans would overread the election
Speaker 3: and that they should view it as a plea for
Speaker 3: moderation in policy, which is actually something that conservative said
Speaker 3: about Biden right, that Biden also misinterpreted the twenty twenty election,
Speaker 3: Revelt Celtz, and that rather than see it as a
Speaker 3: mandate for ideological horse stable cleaning, we should just see
Speaker 3: it as a plea for more moderate policies. Rather than
Speaker 3: a man, and not to think of it as a
Speaker 3: as a huge mandate of a kind that Reagan got
Speaker 3: in eighty or eighty four. So, uh, Lucretia, how about you.
Speaker 3: I think you were seething. I could feel the heat
Speaker 3: from your end of the pen. I was the moderator,
Speaker 3: by the way, I could see the flames emerging from
Speaker 3: Crecia's air while this was being said.
Speaker 5: But luckily for the call for the okay, yeah, Luckily
Speaker 5: for the panelists, we didn't have a second round because
Speaker 5: we ran out of time, so we don't know what
Speaker 5: the creature was going to say in response to.
Speaker 4: This, So those comments were actually in response to many
Speaker 4: of the things I said originally. Excuse me, by the way,
Speaker 4: let me just mention quickly that excuse me I had
Speaker 4: been I had been prepared with remarks when I came in.
Speaker 4: And then our good friend Eduardo was kind of behind
Speaker 4: moderating this whole or organizing this whole thing, asked me
Speaker 4: to since I was the only woman on the panel
Speaker 4: to speak about women's issues, which you.
Speaker 3: Know, Throught was on the panel. Steve Steve's loves to
Speaker 3: talk about women's women's issues, and I'll come why we
Speaker 3: don't let him talk about the clean era, because eventually
Speaker 3: he starts talking about women's issues.
Speaker 4: I'll come back to what I had to say about
Speaker 4: women in a moment, but that's quite all right. But
Speaker 4: it was it was me who said that we could
Speaker 4: we could consider the electional landslide, and I stand by
Speaker 4: that because it's not in terms of simple number. So
Speaker 4: I mean, we were told that Clinton had a mandate
Speaker 4: with forty three percent of the vote, and not a
Speaker 4: single person on the left or the squishy middle the
Speaker 4: right rhinos ever challenged that for even a moment. But
Speaker 4: it's really a deeper question. It's not merely a numerical question.
Speaker 4: I would say, first the fact that Trump won despite
Speaker 4: every effort by the left to destroy him electorally, personally, legally, financially.
Speaker 4: You go on and on and on, and I mean
Speaker 4: they brought their a game to try to destroy him,
Speaker 4: and he came out Victoria victorious, which I understand was
Speaker 4: also an element in his victory because you know, there
Speaker 4: are a lot of people out there who said, if
Speaker 4: they can do that to Trump, anyway, we can go.
Speaker 4: Lots of people have spoken about that, but you know
Speaker 4: what I mean by that, So knowing that everything was
Speaker 4: stacked against him. Let me one more tangent Off and
Speaker 4: Steve may have something to say about this, But it
Speaker 4: came out last week that the New York Times, the
Speaker 4: Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post were pressuring very hard
Speaker 4: for the more accurate polls like the I don't want
Speaker 4: to say Atlas shrug, that's not what it's called, Atlas whatever.
Speaker 4: Falgar and Rasmussen, who who really are in many ways
Speaker 4: the gold standard of for accuracy, They were being pressured
Speaker 4: to wait their weight their samples better and then Real
Speaker 4: Clear Politics was being pressured to weight their polls. In
Speaker 4: other words, they were being asked to uh. Instead of
Speaker 4: just doing what they do, which is a simple average
Speaker 4: of political polls uh. They were being asked to wait
Speaker 4: for Falgar and those other kinds of polls down. It
Speaker 4: was absolutely critical to the left to maintain the fiction
Speaker 4: that Kamala Harris had a bump, that Kamala Harris was surge,
Speaker 4: and all of those things, because that was really their
Speaker 4: only hope of convincing people that they could go to
Speaker 4: the polls and vote for Kamala hair. So, knowing all
Speaker 4: of that, sorry, that was a long way to get
Speaker 4: to where we are. People are tired of what they
Speaker 4: saw the Biden Harris administration do. They're tired of runaway
Speaker 4: power and money spending by bureaucrats. They're tired of the
Speaker 4: open borders. I was at of friends who lives I've
Speaker 4: mentioned that those friends before. They're the ones who were attempted,
Speaker 4: kidnapped by illegals and being led by a cartel. Mentioned
Speaker 4: that a long time ago. There's a pathway. They don't
Speaker 4: live permanently in this house. There's a pathway through their
Speaker 4: yard where they've actually cut through a gate and put
Speaker 4: their own gate, cut through a fence, putting their own
Speaker 4: gate illegal aliens and the cartels, and put a gate
Speaker 4: in that they have the lock, the key to the
Speaker 4: lock on the gate. I mean, it's if you live
Speaker 4: in the southern southeastern part of Arizona. Any I suppose
Speaker 4: anywhere south in Arizona. You know how bad illegal immigration is.
Speaker 4: But the rest of the country got to feel that too.
Speaker 4: They saw the absolutely uneven handed there's probably a better
Speaker 4: word for it, administration of justice. You know, a mother,
Speaker 4: a young mother of three, goes to jail for twelve
Speaker 4: years for protesting outside of an abortion clinic and you know,
Speaker 4: all of the scum and the George Floyd sub human
Speaker 4: scum never suffered a single thing for the most part.
Speaker 4: You know, they're just tired of it. So to dismiss
Speaker 4: this result as anything other than astounding, in my opinion,
Speaker 4: is just to have your head in the sand. Okay,
Speaker 4: I'm done, Steve, I talk too much.
Speaker 2: Go ahead, well, Steve, Yeah, First of all, I think
Speaker 2: you're right that each call it a landslide, and the
Speaker 2: people want to say yeah, but on the numbers, it's
Speaker 2: really not. Are miss something important? So it's true that
Speaker 2: it looks like Trump will probably finish slightly below fifty
Speaker 2: percent of the total vote cast. But of course Bill
Speaker 2: Clinton never broke fifty percent. He only got forty nine
Speaker 2: percent in his second election in nineteen ninety six. That's
Speaker 2: because Pero was running again and still got five percent
Speaker 2: of the vote or something like that. But if you
Speaker 2: go back to Reagan in eighty Reagan only got I
Speaker 2: think like fifty point five percent of the total popular vote.
Speaker 2: And the reason and if you hadn't had, oh, let
Speaker 2: me go through a few numbers. So the reason he
Speaker 2: got four hundred and eighty nine electoral votes is the
Speaker 2: voters were distributed more evenly way back in that election.
Speaker 2: But on the other hand, if you hadn't had a
Speaker 2: third party candidate run like John Anderson, Reagan might well,
Speaker 2: or I should put it this way, Carter might well
Speaker 2: have won four or five more states. He might well
Speaker 2: have won New York. I think a lot of Anderson
Speaker 2: did well in New York, and Reagan won the state narrowly.
Speaker 2: I think a partner might have won Oregon. The point
Speaker 2: is everyone called that a landslide because it was so
Speaker 2: shocking and unexpected election. A couple are things about the
Speaker 2: eighty election with Reagan Reagan. One, let's see Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi,
Speaker 2: and Alabama by less than thirty thousand votes in each state.
Speaker 2: It's not the red state landslide we think of those
Speaker 2: southern states today. It was actually quite close. But he
Speaker 2: did take them from Carter, because remember Carter sweeping the
Speaker 2: South is the only reason he won the nineteen seventy
Speaker 2: sixth election. And nowadays, this was the beginning of a realignment.
Speaker 2: It was the beginning of Democratic voters were saying we
Speaker 2: could vote for Republicans for president and later for other
Speaker 2: offices as well, And so you know, it seems to
Speaker 2: me that what is important is the vote shifts that
Speaker 2: take place. It's one thing if Trump had only won
Speaker 2: by motivating the Republican base of suburban nights and capturing
Speaker 2: traditional Republican constituencies. But as we now know, he did
Speaker 2: massively well among groups he's not supposed to do well
Speaker 2: with Asians, Hispanics, black, Native Americans. He got a majority
Speaker 2: of the Indian vote. To put it that way, you know,
Speaker 2: American Indian vote, right. I guess all those land acknowledgements
Speaker 2: didn't work, and so you know if the geography. Oh,
Speaker 2: and the Democrats lost the most votes in terms of
Speaker 2: raw numbers in their strongholds in California, in New York
Speaker 2: and Illinois, which ought to terrify them, it seems to me.
Speaker 2: And then finally, no one thought, as Lucreatius said, that
Speaker 2: Trump had any hope of winning, or if he did,
Speaker 2: it would be like twenty sixteen by an inside straight
Speaker 2: with narrow victories in the electoral college, but not the
Speaker 2: popular vote, and so that is shattered and lying on
Speaker 2: the ground. So with a closely divided country like we have,
Speaker 2: it seems to me that the shift of this kind
Speaker 2: is it really does qualify as at least earth shaking,
Speaker 2: and by the way, earth shaking is what leads to landslides.
Speaker 2: And last thought is yeah, I mean the critics are
Speaker 2: right to say. The big question is can Republicans hold
Speaker 2: onto these votes? And then you know, I could see
Speaker 2: you know, bad economy or some bad events happening and
Speaker 2: Republicans doing the midterms. I'd bet on that now. But
Speaker 2: I do think that, you know, next few election cycles
Speaker 2: that will be interesting to see. And by the way,
Speaker 2: my ideal matchup for twenty twenty eight would be jd
Speaker 2: Vance against Pete Bhudha Judge and then I think you
Speaker 2: will get a real, honest to god optor vote landslide.
Speaker 2: They're the perfect exemplars of the country's divisions, and I
Speaker 2: think I know who would win that one.
Speaker 4: John, let me follow under the JD vancing really quick.
Speaker 4: That remember that, for as long as I can remember,
Speaker 4: since Trump's victory in twenty sixteen, people would say this
Speaker 4: is a Trump victory, a Trump victory, only you know,
Speaker 4: his somewhat strained relationship at times with the Republican Party
Speaker 4: itself would has led people to say, well, Trump can
Speaker 4: do it, but nobody else can. And there were a
Speaker 4: lot of people who kind of went against DeSantis for
Speaker 4: that reason. The brilliance of him choosing JD. Vance is
Speaker 4: that there is, in fact a standard bearer for the
Speaker 4: Trump Republican Party, and instead of it having to become
Speaker 4: a new party. I know I've said this before, we
Speaker 4: talked about it, there's not going to have to be
Speaker 4: a third party, a Trump Party, a make a you know,
Speaker 4: a mega party. The Republican Party is now the mega
Speaker 4: party and it has a standard bearer because of JD.
Speaker 4: Vance in the future in my area.
Speaker 2: Can I add one more thought to that point. You
Speaker 2: know Patrick Graffini, who's a Polster and a you know,
Speaker 2: serious numbers guy. He makes a pretty persuasive case that
Speaker 2: the advanced debate with Waltz was actually a key turning
Speaker 2: point in the fall campaign. Normally vice presidents of debates
Speaker 2: don't matter at all. He thinks that one did, and
Speaker 2: that's a curious fact. The other thing I'll add is,
Speaker 2: you know, the Republicans are going to have you know
Speaker 2: what like a three or four seat majority in the House,
Speaker 2: which is razor thin. That's because Trump's appointing too many
Speaker 2: Republicans to the cabinet. But for the second election in
Speaker 2: a row, Republicans won what you might call the House
Speaker 2: popular vote. Republican candidates nationwide got three percent more vote
Speaker 2: than Democrats they did in twenty twenty two. The reason
Speaker 2: the numbers are closer or for you know, a bunch
Speaker 2: of quarks, but also the way the districts are drawn
Speaker 2: and so forth. But that looks like a durable sign
Speaker 2: of a solid base Republicans. That is arguably larger than Trump's.
Speaker 4: Question Steve, about that, I mean, so the generic congressional vote,
Speaker 4: is that what you're talking about? Yes, right now, Well,
Speaker 4: so the generic congressional polling has never had Republicans up
Speaker 4: by three? Am I correct in that? Okay, that's correct.
Speaker 2: The usually run at least two points ahead of what
Speaker 2: the generic ballot says.
Speaker 6: Yes, sorry, yeah, well I thought just my own two
Speaker 6: cents and then maybe one more round on the election
Speaker 6: and what it means for in the left's favorite policies
Speaker 6: like TI you.
Speaker 3: Know, there's this just this is your guys world. There's
Speaker 3: this theory in political science about what they call critical
Speaker 3: elections and they don't. There's lots of argument about what
Speaker 3: causes a critical election or even how you mention it.
Speaker 3: I mean measure it, but you know they are basically
Speaker 3: they agree on or you know, Washington's election, which has
Speaker 3: to be the first one. Then Jefferson Lincoln, uh, and
Speaker 3: then after Lincoln is a sorry Jackson Lincoln, and then
Speaker 3: a long period of Republican stability. The next one is
Speaker 3: not till FDR and then I think this was hard
Speaker 3: for Wells is a kind of an anomaly. So the
Speaker 3: and then Reagan is the last one. So this doesn't
Speaker 3: mean like the Republicans or the Democrats win all the
Speaker 3: elections in that period. But the way you can tell
Speaker 3: allegedly coined to these theories is that even even people
Speaker 3: in the opposing party like Eisenhower winning, they don't try
Speaker 3: to upset the basic choices or values of that time.
Speaker 3: So Eisenhower didn't try to get rid of social Security,
Speaker 3: for example. So I will I do think this was
Speaker 3: an important election. I actually read it as a reaffort
Speaker 3: that we're still in the Reagan period. Obama and Biden
Speaker 3: are the anomalies, and you don't see people saying really,
Speaker 3: I mean saying we should raise taxes would be and
Speaker 3: getting away with a majority support with that would be
Speaker 3: a sign that the Reagan peeriod was over or saying yes,
Speaker 3: we really want big government. Only government can solve our problems.
Speaker 3: But even Biden and Obama when they ran, they would
Speaker 3: not say things like that. They all couched it as
Speaker 3: so I still I think, I actually I don't see
Speaker 3: us entering some different.
Speaker 2: Kind of time yet.
Speaker 3: I mean, maybe this or conservative populism would have been
Speaker 3: saying that, maybe it will become that by the next election,
Speaker 3: But so far to see this as a reaffirmation of
Speaker 3: the values Americans voted into office in nineteen eighty. Okay,
Speaker 3: but go ahead, Lucretia, do you want to talk about that?
Speaker 3: And also you want to talk about what this means
Speaker 3: for some of what this election means for some of
Speaker 3: the liberals favor pieties like DEI for example.
Speaker 4: And I think the answer all goes together to some extent,
Speaker 4: John I, whether it's a critical election, whether Obama was
Speaker 4: a critical election that moved the entire populace into a
Speaker 4: different direction, like say FDR. I leave that to the
Speaker 4: real political scientists to decide that. That's a little bit
Speaker 4: uninteresting to me. But what I will say is that
Speaker 4: the left has been incredibly successful since at least George H. W.
Speaker 4: Bush and to some extent in destroying some of Reagan's
Speaker 4: better possibilities for a true political realignment, not so much
Speaker 4: of voters, but of actual policies. I mean, Reagan did
Speaker 4: some things, but he never stopped the march of the left.
Speaker 4: He never stopped our culture, our institutions from becoming more
Speaker 4: and more leftist all the time. So that's what I
Speaker 4: consider different than what you're saying. And excuse me, even
Speaker 4: I mean, to the great extent, even Trump is not
Speaker 4: going to dismantle He's not going to have Elon Musk
Speaker 4: dismantle the federal government and fire eighty percent of the
Speaker 4: workers like Elon Musk was able to do. For Twitter, right,
Speaker 4: we could do that, We could do it very easily.
Speaker 4: But I do think that the fact that the less lies,
Speaker 4: and I believe that's true. You said it yourself. They
Speaker 4: always had to hide what they really wanted to do.
Speaker 4: I mean, Obama, I'm going to transform America. He said it,
Speaker 4: he meant it, and people took that to mean something good,
Speaker 4: when of course he had in mind the destruction of
Speaker 4: the entire country. And so I think that Trump is
Speaker 4: the only one who has truly been able willing to
Speaker 4: call out the left on what's really happening, and they
Speaker 4: they're still shocked by it. They're still shocked that somebody
Speaker 4: would doubt their lies, doubt their attempt to dissemble and
Speaker 4: be disingenuous about things. In you mentioned is I think
Speaker 4: the perfect example of it. I can remember a time.
Speaker 4: Actually it's probably still true at my university. Let me
Speaker 4: scratch that start up. It's impossible for you to challenge
Speaker 4: the idea that there's something fundamentally evil and racist about
Speaker 4: the entire DEI project. To do so makes you a
Speaker 4: Nazi or something worse than a Nazi if there is
Speaker 4: something so. The fact that Trump is willing and able
Speaker 4: to begin to dismantle DEI at the federal government, and
Speaker 4: everybody else is looking at it. Michigan's going to dismantle theirs.
Speaker 4: You know, all of that is I think the success
Speaker 4: of Trump's election is it's so deep that people like me,
Speaker 4: I've never been afraid, but you know what I mean,
Speaker 4: people like me can actually go out there and say, no,
Speaker 4: this is crap. We don't need to do this anymore.
Speaker 4: We need to go back to a meritor a system
Speaker 4: of merit. And let me one last thing, and I'll
Speaker 4: let Steep, go that the fact that they have gone
Speaker 4: so hard after some of Trump's appointees, like the Pete
Speaker 4: haigesf thing, what a you know, a whole pile of crap,
Speaker 4: that whole he raped a woman thing? Is you know,
Speaker 4: they haven't given up on that tactic because they've got
Speaker 4: nothing else. All Right, Sorry, Steve, go ahead, Steve.
Speaker 2: I don't really have too much to add to that.
Speaker 2: I mean, I can keep going on realignment theory and
Speaker 2: all the rest of that, but we'll really bore listeners.
Speaker 2: I think there is one more thing though, and maybe
Speaker 2: you wanted to go in this direction, is it is
Speaker 2: one thing is what's this? Realignments also involved new coalitions
Speaker 2: of voters. And that's why, by the way, eighteen ninety
Speaker 2: six is considered a realigning election, as McKinley for Republicans
Speaker 2: assembled a new coalition of voters going forward, and the
Speaker 2: new deal does the same. Okay. One of the odd
Speaker 2: things is if you look at Trump's cabinet picks, you
Speaker 2: have some really solid people. You have some former Democrats
Speaker 2: like Tulca Gabbard. Then you also have this Labor secretary pick,
Speaker 2: this former Republican. Well, see, the thing is is Uh.
Speaker 2: Everyone says she's pro labor and pro unions in a
Speaker 2: way that has actually pleased even Randy Winegarden of the
Speaker 2: American Federation of Teachers, who I think is a stalinist.
Speaker 2: Really Uh, and that's what's going on here. I mean
Speaker 2: that thing.
Speaker 4: Don't forget my favorite, my epithet for her, the world's
Speaker 4: worst female person.
Speaker 2: That proud. Okay, here's the thing we've been hearing for
Speaker 2: years now.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 2: That part of well, it's part of the working class, right. Uh.
Speaker 2: And you have a lot of the people who are
Speaker 2: in the nationalist conservative movement who are saying the conservative Republicans, Trump, whoever,
Speaker 2: need to be more pro labor or more pro union.
Speaker 2: And I think this is very problematic in a bunch
Speaker 2: of ways. But this is an odd way. Possibly it
Speaker 2: may be deliberate of wanting to, you know, reshape the coalitions.
Speaker 2: I mean it was other time. Maybe we'll talk about
Speaker 2: the tariff questions, and that's completely heterodox Republican economics. And
Speaker 2: you know, Trump was kind of restrained about it in
Speaker 2: his first term. He did some but I think now
Speaker 2: we're going to get We're going to get it for real.
Speaker 2: And that's would have been heresy up until Trump arrived
Speaker 2: on the scene.
Speaker 3: I mean that's true. I think you're seeing an economic
Speaker 3: policy that would not really have been Reagan's economic policy.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: And so that you have a kind of realignment of
Speaker 3: the issues too, that may be part of a realignment
Speaker 3: of the coalition, although, like I said, I don't think
Speaker 3: we've seen enough yet in this election.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Let me add, you know, it's just as Trump
Speaker 2: is going to Royal foreign policy with his heterodox views.
Speaker 2: I'll add the good, the really unalloyed good part of
Speaker 2: it is. You know, I know Chris Wright quite well,
Speaker 2: his Energy Secretary designate, and Doug Burgham. I hear nothing
Speaker 2: but good things about Actually Chris because he does a
Speaker 2: lot of his oil drilling in North Dakota, knows Governor
Speaker 2: quite well. So they don't need to get to know
Speaker 2: each other. And I think they're not only going to
Speaker 2: be aggressive about energy production at home. I think, together
Speaker 2: with Trump and other people in the White House, they
Speaker 2: are going to smash the little bits the entire international
Speaker 2: energy climate nonsense. And in fact, you already see them
Speaker 2: in retreat. But I think they're gonna smash what's left
Speaker 2: of it into nothing before they're done, and that'll be
Speaker 2: a great thing to watch.
Speaker 4: About women. Wait, because I was forced to talk about women,
Speaker 4: let me just say this really quickly, John, You know,
Speaker 4: I could not be ungracious and decline the opportunity. Uh So,
Speaker 4: what I really said was women were expected to vote
Speaker 4: for kam Lem and Ding Dong. They didn't. I mean
Speaker 4: they didn't in the numbers that they were expected to
Speaker 4: that as a matter of fact, Trump is not going
Speaker 4: to make them all wear handmaiden's costumes and take away
Speaker 4: all of their rights and turn them into sex slaves.
Speaker 4: And I don't know whatever else. I think that I
Speaker 4: offended a few of the women lawsuits in the audience
Speaker 4: because I was sort of unwilling to unwilling to couch
Speaker 4: my remarks in the feminist terms. And anyway, I very
Speaker 4: quickly brought it back to a subject that you know, matters.
Speaker 4: Who cares about women? Sorry, I'm just kidding. All right,
Speaker 4: that's enough of that.
Speaker 2: Well, we did have that one. The student questions audience,
Speaker 2: by the way, were great, but there was that one
Speaker 2: lady who sounded like she attended an American university because
Speaker 2: it's all about the patriarchy and being hostile to women.
Speaker 2: That's sy What are you gonna do with this?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 2: Well, it's fun.
Speaker 3: I will I will say that this, as far as
Speaker 3: I can remember, this was Steve's favorite panel ever in history,
Speaker 3: because at the end of the session all the students
Speaker 3: crowded around Steve and basically ignored the rest of us after.
Speaker 4: He was too lazy to get and Steve.
Speaker 2: Steve did not.
Speaker 3: This is also a first Steve refused to go to dinner.
Speaker 3: Steve wanted to stay behind and talk with all the
Speaker 3: students and had to be torn away from his new
Speaker 3: Italian fan club. So let's move on, actually to another
Speaker 3: related issue involving the new administration. What do you guys
Speaker 3: make of this Department of Governmental Efficiency DOGE that's been
Speaker 3: created by President Trump is being headed by Elon Musk
Speaker 3: and Vivek Ramaswami. A strange committee that has no government authorities,
Speaker 3: not actually to be located inside the government. It's going
Speaker 3: to be outside the government and supposed to identify ways
Speaker 3: to save money and shrink the government. Gosh, I remember
Speaker 3: Reagan did something like this called the Grace Commission, And
Speaker 3: I remember even Al Gore said that he was, yeah,
Speaker 3: we may forget that we forget most things about al Gore,
Speaker 3: but al Gore is vice president was also in charge
Speaker 3: of a government committee to reduce fraud, waste, and abuse he.
Speaker 2: Would call it.
Speaker 3: So let's start with Steve this time. Steve, what do
Speaker 3: you think of this committee? Do you think is just
Speaker 3: political posturing? There's no real chance that such a committee
Speaker 3: would actually succeed, That it will crash on the same
Speaker 3: shoals of bureaucracy that have defeated numerous other efforts to
Speaker 3: slim down the federal government. How much money can you
Speaker 3: really save when we're spending so much money on entitlements
Speaker 3: and interest on the national debt.
Speaker 2: Steve, Yeah, all right, Well, well, first of all, let's
Speaker 2: just stipulate and not waste time on the fact that
Speaker 2: the real money is in the entitlements, and you're not
Speaker 2: really going to shrink the deficit and the debt until
Speaker 2: we get a handle on those, and that's not going
Speaker 2: to happen anytime soon. I think that, unfortunately, it may
Speaker 2: require a major financial crisis on the level the one
Speaker 2: we had in two thousand and eight. But let's leave
Speaker 2: that for another side. Trump is appointing people who understand
Speaker 2: this problem, like our old friend Kevin Hassett is going
Speaker 2: to go back in and he understands as well, so
Speaker 2: we'll see. But look, I mean the Grace Commission you mentioned, John.
Speaker 2: I wrote a piece about the lessons of the Grace
Speaker 2: Commission for DOGE for our Political Question Substack a few
Speaker 2: weeks ago. The Grace Commission is kind of thought of
Speaker 2: as a bus They identified I think three hundred and
Speaker 2: twenty five billion dollars of savings over three years that
Speaker 2: was real money in nineteen eighty five, and the General
Speaker 2: Accounting Office as it was called then, they said, yeah,
Speaker 2: it looks more like ninety billion to us. A lot
Speaker 2: of these savings aren't real, and there it is true
Speaker 2: that some things were accounted for by the weird and
Speaker 2: byzantine accounting of the federal government. And you can also say, well,
Speaker 2: that's the government covering for itself. It's probably a valid
Speaker 2: criticism to make. But the point is a commission, whether
Speaker 2: it's official or not, that has the president's backing, especially
Speaker 2: with an administration of this disposition, might actually make some headway.
Speaker 2: So I'm optimistic about it. I'm sure they'll come up
Speaker 2: with some really wild ideas that will be crazy. We
Speaker 2: to'll probably come up with some good ones that get through.
Speaker 2: But I think the model it ought to be followed.
Speaker 2: I said, fine, if you don't like an unofficial commission,
Speaker 2: let's have an official one. Why don't we recreate for
Speaker 2: cutting the budget the something like the Base Closure Commission
Speaker 2: of the nineteen nineties. I don't know if you remember that, John,
Speaker 2: you were, you know, down Washington, right. And for listeners
Speaker 2: who don't remember this, you know, after the Cold War
Speaker 2: we had a lot of military bases we didn't need anymore.
Speaker 2: It cost a lot of money. But the problem is
Speaker 2: if you say let's close you know, Norton Air Force
Speaker 2: Base in San Bernardino, the local California Congressional delegation will
Speaker 2: scream and yell, oh, you can't do that. It's important
Speaker 2: to the local economy. It has these functions and the
Speaker 2: dynamics of politics and the House for such especially the House,
Speaker 2: such that there'd be lag rolling going on. You know,
Speaker 2: you give me your vote to keep this base open,
Speaker 2: and all vote for your base, so you couldn't break
Speaker 2: the logjam. And it was dick army, you know. It
Speaker 2: came in part of the Gigrich Revolution. Is said, I
Speaker 2: have an idea, Let's have a base closure commission that
Speaker 2: tries to weigh on the merits what basis should be closed.
Speaker 2: And the deal that Congress had to vote for to
Speaker 2: set it up was the commission will send back their
Speaker 2: list of base closures and Congress has to vote it
Speaker 2: up or down, with no amendments, no fiddling around, no exceptions.
Speaker 2: And that worked. Now it's hard hard, well, I know there, No,
Speaker 2: I know, yes, I understand. No, listen, I understand how
Speaker 2: the politics went on the commission itself. However, in terms
Speaker 2: of actually doing something rather than nothing, it is a
Speaker 2: relative success, I think. But forget whether that particular case.
Speaker 2: How about a budget cutting commission? Uh, and again it'd
Speaker 2: be subject to massive political pressure. But what about that
Speaker 2: vehicle of saying to Congress, Okay, here's things we can
Speaker 2: start to cut up or down, vote no, you know, no,
Speaker 2: no amendments and so forth. And maybe that's something we
Speaker 2: got to propose.
Speaker 4: We didn't we had that. What the heck was it
Speaker 4: the guy from Texas that brought about sequestration. They tried
Speaker 4: that one that was.
Speaker 2: But that was that was but that was sort of
Speaker 2: yes and no, that was sort of automatic cuts that
Speaker 2: kicked in and we tried it again. By the way,
Speaker 2: under George w USh, I think under Obama, but actum Obama.
Speaker 4: OK. So I'm going to disagree with Steve never mind
Speaker 4: about Brack. By the way, I I can't get upset
Speaker 4: about Brack because I of course live right next to
Speaker 4: an army base that has lost since we lost John McCain. Uh,
Speaker 4: we've got idiots for senators now, or at least in
Speaker 4: Mark Kelly. We have lost quite a few missions from
Speaker 4: Fort wa Chuka over the years because we don't We've
Speaker 4: lost them to you'll never guess Alabama. But anyway, that
Speaker 4: being said, Uh, the Lucreatia compound was immeasurably benefited by
Speaker 4: the last BRAC because they talked seriously about shutting down.
Speaker 4: Uh that so, so we were able to buy a
Speaker 4: new piece of property to build a house on at
Speaker 4: a tiny fraction because BRACK was looming. And then Brack
Speaker 4: came through and said it was going to you know,
Speaker 4: my army base was going to stay open, and so
Speaker 4: we sold the house we were living in for a
Speaker 4: ridiculous amount of money. So I'm happy about Brack and
Speaker 4: all of that. I'm not saying that, but there was
Speaker 4: a lot more politics to it than you're giving it
Speaker 4: credit for, Steve. But anyway back to your argument that
Speaker 4: it should be official and not official. The first thing
Speaker 4: I thought of when I saw a Department of Government
Speaker 4: Efficiency inside of the government was laughing out loud, right,
Speaker 4: I mean, the only reason you can take it seriously
Speaker 4: is because it's an unofficial commission. And you know, because
Speaker 4: every it's like something out of a Joseph Heller novel,
Speaker 4: the Department of Government Efficiency that's going to cut government.
Speaker 4: But the fact a, I know that probably most of
Speaker 4: the people that work for DOGE are going to be paid,
Speaker 4: but Vivek and Elon are both volunteers. They're taking no
Speaker 4: money for this. They're doing this out of altruism, whatever
Speaker 4: you want. So let's hope that out of this they
Speaker 4: can do things like I saw today that they're planning
Speaker 4: on moving many, many, many, many of the bureaucrats that
Speaker 4: they're not getting rid of out of Washington, d C
Speaker 4: or the Washington DC area and into parts of the
Speaker 4: country where they're actually relevant. And think what that will
Speaker 4: do for housing prices in Washington, d C, which are
Speaker 4: the highest. Think what that will do for you Maryland
Speaker 4: and those really poorly governed states, Maryland, to some extent Virginia,
Speaker 4: but much more the case Maryland, Delaware. All of those
Speaker 4: places will actually have to do, if they're successful at
Speaker 4: this do without those incredible tax revenues that come in
Speaker 4: from all of those overpaid federal employees working in Washington,
Speaker 4: d C. Who not only are overpaid, but the cost
Speaker 4: of living the cola increases are the cola extra pay
Speaker 4: is ridiculous. So that's my thought on the matter. I
Speaker 4: don't want it to be official, Steve Well.
Speaker 3: One thing that's going to be required is congressional approval
Speaker 3: and cooperation. One of the proposals I saw Elon Musk
Speaker 3: came out with two days ago was let's get rid
Speaker 3: of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. I totally agree, but
Speaker 3: you'd have to get Congress to pass the law. You know,
Speaker 3: the president can't just shut an agency down and return
Speaker 3: the money, although that might bring us to an interesting
Speaker 3: constitutional confrontation because there's also a word that President Trump
Speaker 3: wants to revive the empowerment power and actually claim that
Speaker 3: the president has the constitutional authority not to fully spend
Speaker 3: appropriated funds. This actually was something that Thomas Jefferson did
Speaker 3: and many presidents did all the way through till Richard Nixon,
Speaker 3: and because of Watergate, Richard Nixon provoked a bill passed
Speaker 3: by Congress called the was it called the Budget Empowerment
Speaker 3: and Control control.
Speaker 2: That prohibits it.
Speaker 3: And also this Supreme Court is in decision a case
Speaker 3: called Train, which I teach in class, which also held
Speaker 3: that the president had no constitutional authority to refuse to
Speaker 3: carry out an appropriation. Although who knows, we may see
Speaker 3: a different outcome of this went to the Supreme Court
Speaker 3: this time.
Speaker 2: Steve Well, is that that that Train case was that
Speaker 2: Russell Train, the administrator of a certain particular agency was
Speaker 2: see that you don't remember.
Speaker 3: It is to go unnamed Steve unnamed Well.
Speaker 2: That was very sneaky of you. I know it was.
Speaker 2: I was trying to get back at you for the utilitarianism,
Speaker 2: cost benefit and market the outset. Look. I mean, I've
Speaker 2: always thought that.
Speaker 3: By the way, it is Trained versus City of New York. Okay,
Speaker 3: yes it is, and it is an environmental law case.
Speaker 3: I'm sure Training is one of the figures that you
Speaker 3: have in portraiture on in your Office of the UK
Speaker 3: Administrators every years.
Speaker 2: I believe Russell Train was the first administrator of the
Speaker 2: e PA when Nixon created it and anyway. So look,
Speaker 2: I've always thought that, but I haven't looked at it closely.
Speaker 2: So this is just off the top of my head
Speaker 2: that that Budget can Empaunment Control Act was perhaps unconstitutional
Speaker 2: or at least challengeable. Maybe not, I don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And as an empirical matter, federal spending really started galloping
Speaker 2: ahead after that act passed. I mean had already grown
Speaker 2: a lot through you know, great Society and the Nix's
Speaker 2: to presidencies. But that took off the last restraints the
Speaker 2: executive had to you might say, arm wrestle with Congress
Speaker 2: overspending because now you've got to veto everything, and they
Speaker 2: passed over your vetos and anyway, So I think that's
Speaker 2: been a very bad thing. Oh, by the way, the
Speaker 2: other side of the deal was Congress was supposed to
Speaker 2: have this new budget process where they pass it's elaborate,
Speaker 2: but you pass thirteen separate appropriation bills for the major
Speaker 2: cabinet agencies and departments of government. And I think they've
Speaker 2: only gone according to process twice in almost fifty years.
Speaker 2: And some presidents Republicans usually Reagan, complain about very late
Speaker 2: in his administration too late in my opinion, you know,
Speaker 2: sit still for this and this is what's led to
Speaker 2: the government shutdowns and these omnibus bills every year that
Speaker 2: are just a travesty. So I think it'd be very
Speaker 2: much worth challenging it. And you know, let Trump get
Speaker 2: sued by fifty different people all over the you know,
Speaker 2: all over the country, and it could be fun to
Speaker 2: see how that turns out. It certainly it'll fight worth having.
Speaker 4: So I would go back for a moment to what
Speaker 4: we discussed near the beginning, and that is whether or
Speaker 4: not this is a mandate and a landslide, because if
Speaker 4: you're going to talk about the Budget Impendment and Control
Speaker 4: Act of nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fifty years old, right.
Speaker 4: No, No, nineteen seventy four Watergate. So right, Here's here's
Speaker 4: my quick off the cuff theory about all of that,
Speaker 4: and that is that Nixon's Nixon's failures in many ways,
Speaker 4: and the failures of Republicans afterwards to challenge the growing bwocracy,
Speaker 4: to challenge the left's cultural takeover of our federal government
Speaker 4: had to do with the fact that Nixon was was
Speaker 4: bowed and defeated by the legal system. Now, you know,
Speaker 4: we could spend all day talking about Watergate. I don't
Speaker 4: intend to do that today, but one could have made
Speaker 4: the argument just as easily that Nixon didn't deserve what
Speaker 4: happened to him. He certainly didn't, he wouldn't have he
Speaker 4: shouldn't have been impeached, et cetera, et cetera. Regardless he did,
Speaker 4: he was defeated, and he and he resigned. Trump, on
Speaker 4: the other hand, refused, absolutely refused to be defeated. And
Speaker 4: I mean, how many of us really thought that that
Speaker 4: every single one of those law fair cases against Trump
Speaker 4: would fail and fail as miserably as they had. I'm sure,
Speaker 4: I know I was worried. I was. I thought they
Speaker 4: were all bogus, but I was worried that they would
Speaker 4: be successful. Not only were they not successful, they made
Speaker 4: him stronger, and so thinking about thinking about an assault
Speaker 4: on entrenched bureaucracy and government spending in all of those things.
Speaker 4: From the point of view of someone victorious versus someone
Speaker 4: constantly hampered by law fair or you know, even Reagan
Speaker 4: with around contra, I think Trump has a chance because
Speaker 4: he doesn't give a damn and why should he. You know, everybody,
Speaker 4: every other Republican wants. You know, people don't like them
Speaker 4: and Trump. I mean, why would Trump like a single
Speaker 4: person on the left or in the squishy middle that
Speaker 4: didn't stand up for him? He owes those people nothing,
Speaker 4: and Elon muscows those people nothing. You know, talk we
Speaker 4: never talk about the fact that Elon Musk, even more
Speaker 4: so than Trump, is being persecuted and prosecuted from every angle.
Speaker 4: I think I saw something that almost every single agency
Speaker 4: has some kind of what would the right word be,
Speaker 4: persecution against Elon Musk for some violation of some stupid regulation. Right,
Speaker 4: So who cares?
Speaker 2: Can I just add a little bit to that. I
Speaker 2: have a somewhat different narrative than Lucretia, but it parallels hers.
Speaker 2: You know, there's a moment after the seventy two landslide
Speaker 2: when Nixon, This is well documented in a couple of
Speaker 2: places that most people never pay attention to. But after
Speaker 2: that massive landslide, which had little, very little coattails, he
Speaker 2: didn't bring in a lot of Republicans with him. But
Speaker 2: Nixon had so much contempt for Congress and his own
Speaker 2: party in Congress that he actually amused aloud to people
Speaker 2: about maybe I should start a third party. Now this
Speaker 2: went nowhere, of course, but the point is that kind
Speaker 2: of sounds like trump pianism, right is populism or rejection
Speaker 2: of both party establishments. And why this is important is
Speaker 2: part of the fury against Nixon from the left, beside
Speaker 2: the fact that they hated him viscerally, was that he
Speaker 2: did intend on a serious attack on the bureaucracy and
Speaker 2: on the indiscipline of Congress. Cresci's dodggerhead. She knows the story.
Speaker 2: It's the story John Marine and others tell very well.
Speaker 2: And you know, the view was among that spread even
Speaker 2: to some Republicans, is Mixon has to be stopped. And
Speaker 2: here was the excuse to do it. Right now, in hindsight,
Speaker 2: I think there's the growing I'll just mention here in
Speaker 2: passing that I just finished today writing a long review
Speaker 2: of a memoir of Pennkachigian, who was you know that's
Speaker 2: a speechwriter for Reagan. But also I didn't know this.
Speaker 2: He was one of the diehards in the Nixon White House,
Speaker 2: along with Bruce Hurschinson and three or four other people
Speaker 2: saying mister President, don't resign. You fight this to the end,
Speaker 2: and we think you can beat it, but al Hag
Speaker 2: and others said, no, no, you got to go to
Speaker 2: never mind the details of that. But I thought I
Speaker 2: was interesting to learn that about Ken, who I know
Speaker 2: slightly and is a very good guy. But I think now,
Speaker 2: looking back in hindsight, more and more serious people say,
Speaker 2: you know, boy, did we get all that? Not entirely wrong?
Speaker 2: But there was another side of that story. Nixon might
Speaker 2: well have survived. It would require several things to have
Speaker 2: been done differently than they did. And I'll bet if
Speaker 2: Nixon were alive today, he'd be looking at Trump. He'd
Speaker 2: be nodding his head and saying, damn, that guy is
Speaker 2: good and I should have been like that. So I
Speaker 2: don't know, a few stray thoughts and all that.
Speaker 3: And just to follow a note of dissent, I think
Speaker 3: Nixon is actually a bad fellow and should not have remained.
Speaker 3: We could we could have that debate later, I mean
Speaker 3: the construction of justice. And he was on the tape.
Speaker 2: Uh well, we won't get off into that. I helped
Speaker 2: Shepherd on once to talk about I will just say,
Speaker 2: uh uh in Nixon's first term was a disaster substantively,
Speaker 2: And that's why, you know, my old Palace, stad Evans said,
Speaker 2: I didn't like Nixon until after Watergate, because you know,
Speaker 2: after wage and price controls and the EPA and opening
Speaker 2: the China, Watergate was a breath of fresh air. I
Speaker 2: always liked that.
Speaker 3: So why don't we turn to the Let's see, we
Speaker 3: have a actually last issue, which is President Trump had
Speaker 3: a little phone call with the president of Mexico and apparently,
Speaker 3: according to the Trump side of the call, the president
Speaker 3: of Mexico's agreed to reduce immigration into the United States
Speaker 3: and to try to stop the flow fuendol into the
Speaker 3: United States. So that brings to my two questions, what
Speaker 3: do you think is really going to happen with Trump
Speaker 3: and immigration?
Speaker 2: Are there enough resource?
Speaker 3: Congress is going to provide enough resources for the Immigration
Speaker 3: and Citizenship Service, now headed by fellowing Tom Homan, to
Speaker 3: actually go out and remove millions of illegal aliens in
Speaker 3: the country. Will it may actually make a difference?
Speaker 2: That's one? And then two.
Speaker 3: Is Trump already having an effect on immigration just by
Speaker 3: threatening to do it? And is it going to be
Speaker 3: able to change the flow of immigration and I guess
Speaker 3: drugs into the country, whereas Mexico just going to wait
Speaker 3: a mout that it did last time. So let's start
Speaker 3: with lucretia.
Speaker 4: Yep, I think so. And here's one of the things
Speaker 4: you have to remember, is there really is how do
Speaker 4: I but it makes a difference what the official attitude
Speaker 4: I don't want to even say policy attitude coming from Washington,
Speaker 4: d C. Is So I know I've said this before,
Speaker 4: I say it quickly. When SB ten seventy passed in Arizona,
Speaker 4: illegal immigration stopped behind my house. It was a nightly thing.
Speaker 4: There was trash, there was do you know that it
Speaker 4: was constant, the flow of illegal immigrants behind my house.
Speaker 4: It stopped literally after SB ten seventy was passed. It
Speaker 4: never quite picked up as much. They found different routes
Speaker 4: after much of it was overturned. Here's the point. If
Speaker 4: you know, if you're an illegal immigrant and Biden is
Speaker 4: promising that you can come in, Biden is promising you
Speaker 4: that you will be transpor to someplace else in the
Speaker 4: country and then you can go there and you can
Speaker 4: get welfare, you can get you know, EBT cards or whatever,
Speaker 4: all of the different things that happened. Why not come
Speaker 4: here And you can say, well, you shouldn't be breaking
Speaker 4: the law. But if you're from a poor country. On
Speaker 4: the other hand, if you make it very very clear
Speaker 4: that you come here, you're likely to be deported. You're
Speaker 4: not going to be sent to live with some distant
Speaker 4: family member. So you stop the large swath of persons
Speaker 4: who were just coming here genuinely looking for a better life.
Speaker 4: I am being sincere about that, despite the fact that
Speaker 4: they're felons. They were. But when you stop that massive
Speaker 4: amount of illegal immigration, because people know that it's not
Speaker 4: going to be easy if they get here, then it's
Speaker 4: harder for the cartels and all those other people that
Speaker 4: are exploiting you know, child sex trafficking, women's sex trafficking,
Speaker 4: et cetera, and the fentanyl and the drugs. It's harder
Speaker 4: for them to mask their activities under the flow of
Speaker 4: illegal immigrants. That's what I would say, is thing one.
Speaker 4: Thing two. I am not entirely convinced that you would
Speaker 4: need to raise the to increase the resources being given
Speaker 4: to ICE and HSI and so forth. Why because massive
Speaker 4: numbers of those people are currently babysitting processing taking care
Speaker 4: of illegal immigrants as they come across the border. They're
Speaker 4: no longer doing enforcement activities. They're basically welfare workers and
Speaker 4: so if you and they don't like it. By the way,
Speaker 4: they're not happy. I talk to agents all the time.
Speaker 4: They're not happy doing paperwork all day long. They're not
Speaker 4: happy taking care of children who are supposedly, you know,
Speaker 4: being reunited with their parents and things like that. They
Speaker 4: would much rather be out there enforcing the law. And
Speaker 4: you know they've ICE has simply hemorrhaged agents over the
Speaker 4: last four years. And so my point is, maybe it's
Speaker 4: going to take additional resources, maybe not. And then I
Speaker 4: think you'd actually find National Guard activity in some of
Speaker 4: these states, if it all can be done legally and constitutionally,
Speaker 4: willing to help out. Not in Arizona. While we've got
Speaker 4: that twit Katie Hobbs as governor, but she won't last
Speaker 4: much longer. So anyway, that's my thought. Steve's laughing at me.
Speaker 4: She's a twain. That's the nicest thing I can say
Speaker 4: about her.
Speaker 2: No, I'm laughing at the image of somebody put up
Speaker 2: in the chat. Was that you or John? Oh? Well? Anyway,
Speaker 2: definitely not me. Yeah, Well, there's a I mean, there's
Speaker 2: true other things to be said about it. Who knows
Speaker 2: what actually happened on the call, but to announce publicly
Speaker 2: that they're going to agree, and then the president of Mexico,
Speaker 2: who's right left I think, has so try to yeah,
Speaker 2: but it's right trying to put some distance between them.
Speaker 2: But I think there's a you know, it's fun sometimes
Speaker 2: to declare someone has said something because who you know,
Speaker 2: you maneuver and put some people in a box. But
Speaker 2: a couple of things here. I mean, I've been going
Speaker 2: crazy for more than ten years saying, wait a minute,
Speaker 2: people don't get from you know, South American all around
Speaker 2: the world up to the American border without assistance. Mexico
Speaker 2: at the very least permits this to happen and more
Speaker 2: likely facilitates it. And you know, nothing happens for no
Speaker 2: good reason. That's the way I've been putting it this.
Speaker 2: You don't having you know, million people a year coming
Speaker 2: to the border spontaneously their help. We know there's some
Speaker 2: NGO groups and probably funded by the drug cartels.
Speaker 4: And who maybe you're wrong on our federal government and.
Speaker 2: Our federal sure all kinds of sources for it. And
Speaker 2: so that's if you can get Mexico to stop that,
Speaker 2: and if they can't stop it, by the way, or
Speaker 2: won't stop. It doesn't matter, which it gives Trump a
Speaker 2: good pretext to say, the government of Mexico is no
Speaker 2: no longer has control over its sovereign territory. And therefore,
Speaker 2: and this has been talked about for years, I'm going
Speaker 2: to declare the Mexican cartel supporters terrorism and authorized direct
Speaker 2: military action against them. Now you can easily see Trump
Speaker 2: doing this, and Tom Holman is like a real breath
Speaker 2: of fresh air speaking of a breath of fresh air.
Speaker 2: And so I mean, I think Trump has all the
Speaker 2: high cards in this debate. And by the way, you John,
Speaker 2: I think you asked the question, what if Congress doesn't
Speaker 2: appropriate the funds? Well, I think then President Trump calls
Speaker 2: up Governor Abbit and says, you know, you guys, do
Speaker 2: what you want with your state police. Now, California won't,
Speaker 2: Arizona won't. I'm not sure about New Mexico. Texas will.
Speaker 2: And at that point things get interesting because the pressure
Speaker 2: will be on the other states, you know, because the
Speaker 2: I think a lot of the because of Texas's measures
Speaker 2: that have had some effect. You hear that a lot
Speaker 2: more of the migration has shifted to California and New Mexico,
Speaker 2: not sure about your state, Lucretia. But so that begins
Speaker 2: to another red state blue spate division, right, And so
Speaker 2: it'll be interesting to watch. We'll just have to see
Speaker 2: what happens. As Trump like to say so often, Christia.
Speaker 4: No, no, I agree again. Never well again, never underestimate
Speaker 4: a welcoming attitude versus you're not welcome here. You can
Speaker 4: come through legally and you're welcome. And never underestimate how
Speaker 4: important it was that huge numbers of Hispanics, first generation
Speaker 4: Hispanic citizens, voted for Trump, and how important that is
Speaker 4: as well, because the left has I think, uh managed
Speaker 4: this sort of disingenuous kind of attitude. Well, you can't
Speaker 4: come out against immigration, and so the why the stupid
Speaker 4: Republicans always passed immigration bills. Oh well, we can't afford
Speaker 4: to alienate our Hispanic voters. And they've just been wrong
Speaker 4: about that. So and Trump knows it. And that is
Speaker 4: going to be a big thing, I think, keeping them
Speaker 4: from preventing Trump from uh pursuing at least some of
Speaker 4: these policies. And again, I don't think it's going to
Speaker 4: take as much force as people are arguing. That's again
Speaker 4: that's it's a straw man argument.
Speaker 2: In my opinion, it's one, you know one. Two more
Speaker 2: footnotes to this one is, you know I mentioned on
Speaker 2: the panel the other day, and I'm not sure my
Speaker 2: number is exactly right that Trump would deport I predicted
Speaker 2: Trump would deport fewer people than Obama did. I don't
Speaker 2: know what the Obama numbers were. They were pretty large.
Speaker 2: They're partly phony, but they're important for this reason.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: The Obama administration, by the way, they did it quietly.
Speaker 2: They didn't want to make a big deal about deporting
Speaker 2: people or stopping them at the border. They claimed large
Speaker 2: numbers of deportations of people who crossed the border, and
Speaker 2: they turned them back and made them go back right away.
Speaker 2: The Biden administration didn't turn anybody back that we're aware of.
Speaker 2: They let everybody in. And so the Obama people liked
Speaker 2: to brag that they were tough on immigration when it
Speaker 2: suited their purposes. And the Obama administration, the Biden administration
Speaker 2: set it for you, every come in. You know, we
Speaker 2: don't care. So that's one important point, I think. But
Speaker 2: what you hear the Trump people is they know, as
Speaker 2: a practical matter, you can't deport a or nine million people.
Speaker 2: That's just physically impossible. They want to target a million
Speaker 2: people for deportation, and they want to target the people
Speaker 2: who have bogus asylum claims, criminal records, have no vetting
Speaker 2: of what countries they come from, people who are economic migrants,
Speaker 2: and they think that will send a signal for people
Speaker 2: to stop coming and maybe a lot of other people
Speaker 2: will decide to go back where they came from. You
Speaker 2: know the old self deportation line in Mitt Romney's in
Speaker 2: felicitous phrase, and you know that'll be a significant change.
Speaker 4: In thous about it.
Speaker 2: I like it, I know what you do. It just
Speaker 2: it was clunky at the time.
Speaker 4: Okay, well that's what's changed. You know, rhinos can't even
Speaker 4: argue like Rodney did.
Speaker 2: You know there's a reason rhinos are endangered species.
Speaker 3: So we've come to the end of our episode. We're
Speaker 3: going to maybe maybe we'll just plug it now. We
Speaker 3: have more rounds about natural versus positivism that are going
Speaker 3: up on Steve's substack Political Questions, which you are all
Speaker 3: welcome to read and to subscribe to. And maybe, since
Speaker 3: I hope December will be a slower month, although there's
Speaker 3: no signs of it being, maybe we will get a
Speaker 3: chance to have that debate on the podcast, but for now,
Speaker 3: I think we have to end this special Thanksgiving episode.
Speaker 3: Lucreciate you have some Babylon Bee headlines for us, Yes.
Speaker 4: I do, so we didn't discuss not that who cares anymore.
Speaker 4: Kamala Harris's recent whatever it was, she was talking to
Speaker 4: a lot I don't even remember, but she was very
Speaker 4: obviously not sober, or at least brain did. I don't
Speaker 4: know if there's a difference, but the Babylon b Kamalan
Speaker 4: Kamala officially unburdened by sobriety. Don't let anyone take your power,
Speaker 4: tipsy aunt, Kamala tells confused five year olds at Thanksgiving
Speaker 4: table Thanksgiving kids table. Yeah, you do that. I put
Speaker 4: in the chat and maybe Steve wants to post it
Speaker 4: because I think it's hilarious. It's the headline is it's
Speaker 4: official Trump now has the hottest cabinet of all time,
Speaker 4: and it's Pam Bundy, Christine Levitt, Christy Nome and Tom Homan.
Speaker 4: And if you go into the actual article, it says
Speaker 4: I just can't stop googling that borders our guy, the
Speaker 4: hottest cabinet of all time. I guess you have to
Speaker 4: see the picture.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I'll.
Speaker 4: Back to your question about Mexico. Trump proposes twenty five
Speaker 4: percent tariff on imports from California. Report. We didn't even
Speaker 4: discuss this either. I mean, what a what a this?
Speaker 4: Let me let me stop for just a moment. The
Speaker 4: idea that the Kamala Kamalam Dingdong campaign spent what is it,
Speaker 4: one point five.
Speaker 2: Billion billion dollars billion.
Speaker 4: Dollars in one hundred days to lose as badly as
Speaker 4: they did, and then the way they spent money, it
Speaker 4: was like you know, giving your your sixteen year old
Speaker 4: kid at your credit card with no limit. And the
Speaker 4: interesting thing about it is the left is just those
Speaker 4: big left donors are are furious about the way their
Speaker 4: money was wasted. So they're not they may not even
Speaker 4: invest money into the twenty twenty six elections because they're
Speaker 4: just disgusted. So report Kamala is twenty twenty eight campaign
Speaker 4: already seven hundred million dollars in debt. That's pretty funny,
Speaker 4: if you have to admit just a couple more. Trump
Speaker 4: announced his plan to deport five thousand illegal immigrants in
Speaker 4: one three owned high on the civic You kind of
Speaker 4: have to be a border town really to appreciate that one.
Speaker 4: So just a little Thanksgiving one. A couple man does
Speaker 4: his part to prepare Thanksgiving by not going into the
Speaker 4: kitchen so you won't be in the way.
Speaker 1: I like that.
Speaker 4: Yeah you don't get it, do you, John?
Speaker 3: No, I don't. It's where the servants go who prepare
Speaker 3: my news.
Speaker 2: Yes, just check.
Speaker 4: I knew they went somewhere. I love pumpkin pie. This
Speaker 4: is man spring gallon of ready Whip over pumpkin pie.
Speaker 4: I will simply not I don't eat ready Whip, obviously,
Speaker 4: but I simply will not eat pumpkin pie unless it
Speaker 4: has real whip cream on top.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah it's not.
Speaker 4: It's there's no point. And I put in the chat
Speaker 4: this is not a Babylon b I'm not sure where
Speaker 4: I got it, but I was sending it to Steve
Speaker 4: for his weekend pictures. And it's a picture of Kamala
Speaker 4: and Oprah standing in front of a big crowd of people.
Speaker 4: It says paid two million dollars to rent Oprah and lost.
Speaker 4: And then the picture below is Trump in the in
Speaker 4: the brand new garbage truck. Put a sticker on a
Speaker 4: garbage truck and one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's about right.
Speaker 3: All right, Well, Steve, I hope you have you the
Speaker 3: next thirty seconds to think of some new sign off line,
Speaker 3: because we're gonna close it on with yeah, and we're
Speaker 3: gonna have to come up with another one once Biden's gone,
Speaker 3: which is that happened months ago, but the finally he'll
Speaker 3: be gone at the end of the year. Always drink
Speaker 3: your whiskey, meat, Let's go, Brandon and Steve.
Speaker 2: So my first draft for now I'm gonna work on
Speaker 2: it is unburdened by what has been. We won't give
Speaker 2: up the power we never had. I like that very good?
Speaker 2: All right, everybody next.
Speaker 3: To everybody.
Speaker 2: Ricochet join the conversation.
Speaker 1: S