Speaker 1: And now what I'm asking for is a piece of ice,
Speaker 1: cold and poorly located that can play a vital role
Speaker 1: in world peace and world protection.
Speaker 2: It's a very small ask compared to what we have
Speaker 2: given them for many, many decades.
Speaker 3: It's the Rigorshete Podcast. I'm James Lillix. We have Charles
Speaker 3: see Could Cook and Steven Hayward and we're going to
Speaker 3: talk about Trump term two year one. So let's so
Speaker 3: that's a podcast.
Speaker 4: So again, I'm not popular with you now because I'm
Speaker 4: defending Donald Trump, but I really believe you can be
Speaker 4: happy that he is there because he has forced us
Speaker 4: in Europe to step up to face the consequences that
Speaker 4: we have to take care more of our own defense.
Speaker 4: I'm absolutely convinced without Donald Trump, we would not have
Speaker 4: taken those decisions, and they are crucial.
Speaker 3: Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, Episode number seven, one
Speaker 3: hundred and seventy three. You can join us at ricochet
Speaker 3: dot com. Everybody can. You can be part of the
Speaker 3: most stimulating conversation in community on the web. But we'll
Speaker 3: tell you a little bit more about that later. If
Speaker 3: you don't already know, I'm James lonnox In Minneapolis, where
Speaker 3: the temperature has climbed to seven degrees to minus fourteen
Speaker 3: after a certain point. It's just moot. It was just cold,
Speaker 3: That's all there is to it. Some we're up in
Speaker 3: the northern part of the state. They were getting windshills
Speaker 3: of fifty below, which is you know, some folks will
Speaker 3: never lose a toe, But then again, some folks will.
Speaker 3: If you go outside improperly dressed, you're going to suffer
Speaker 3: the loss of some digits. But in warmer places, friendlier places,
Speaker 3: better climbs. We have Charles C. W. Cook in Florida.
Speaker 3: I presume it Stephen Hayward, who the globetrotter that he is,
Speaker 3: is probably ensconced in the utopia of California. Am I correct,
Speaker 3: a gentleman.
Speaker 2: Except for the utopia of California Park.
Speaker 5: Yes, I am in California, but it's no utopia anymore.
Speaker 3: Well, what a week? What a week? What a week? Okay, Greenland,
Speaker 3: that's overdone, settled. Now Cuba, let's get rid of the
Speaker 3: communist government bout twenty twenty six. Wait a minute, what
Speaker 3: about Venezuela. No, no, comed He's out of Cuba. Cuba
Speaker 3: by twenty twenty six, it's baffling, but you know, it's
Speaker 3: it's it's been a year like that. It's been one
Speaker 3: year of this administration, and on Ricochet people were banning
Speaker 3: about the various ways in which it has succeeded or failed,
Speaker 3: as that falls along the usual lines, as you might think.
Speaker 3: The people who believe that he's been a rhino disaster,
Speaker 3: that's he's actually, you know, enforced a whole bunch of
Speaker 3: leftist ideas about government intervention, that he's contravened Congress, that
Speaker 3: he's behaving like a Caesar, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. If you
Speaker 3: look at the Daily Beast today, the Daily Beast says
Speaker 3: that Donald Trump last night went on a late night
Speaker 3: truth social rant following his European humiliation. And what they
Speaker 3: mean by that, of course, is that he was humiliated
Speaker 3: in Europe. I took a look at what was said
Speaker 3: and saw a lot of cold truths that needed to
Speaker 3: be slapped on the table, and Davis was just a
Speaker 3: place for it. So it's hard to know where to
Speaker 3: start when you look at the last year. I guess
Speaker 3: the best thing to do is look at yesterday. What
Speaker 3: do we have yesterday? But let's cast our eyes back
Speaker 3: three hundred and sixty five. Gentlemen, your assessment, if you will,
Speaker 3: on the first year of the second term.
Speaker 5: Well, as I've been saying for a while, if you're
Speaker 5: on the left, you measure the Trump administration Trump two
Speaker 5: in dog years, right, I mean, because every day he
Speaker 5: does so.
Speaker 2: Darn many things.
Speaker 5: They talk about energy and executive in Hamilton's famous phrase.
Speaker 5: And so what I've been taunting my leftist friends is.
Speaker 2: Cheer up. You only have twelve more years to.
Speaker 5: Go of the second Trump term, right, because it's gonna
Speaker 5: seem forever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can go down a scorecard and do a
Speaker 2: lot of stuff.
Speaker 5: I think of it in general terms that the disposition
Speaker 5: of this administration has been so much more aggressive, even
Speaker 5: than Trump's first term, which was pretty aggressive itself. And
Speaker 5: there's a lot of swings and missus of course, and
Speaker 5: there's you know, he'll claim that he has cured teenage
Speaker 5: acne and everything else and every other speech, whether the
Speaker 5: facts back it up or not. And that's just his style.
Speaker 5: But look the dabosing everyone thinks that.
Speaker 2: I say everyone. People keep thinking, oh, this Greenland thing.
Speaker 5: I was not sure if there's really a deal or
Speaker 5: if it's just him wish casting, but it's another art
Speaker 5: of the deal attempted by Trump, and there's probably something
Speaker 5: to that. I think people are missing the bigger story,
Speaker 5: which is he squashed Davos. I mean, what's Doavos supposed
Speaker 5: to be about. It's supposed to be about climate change
Speaker 5: and Gaza and inequality and anything but Trump And so instead,
Speaker 5: by doing his temper tantrum over Greenland and threatening war
Speaker 5: and all kinds of other ridiculous stuff and tariffs, he
Speaker 5: dominated the whole darn thing. So that my favorite little
Speaker 5: cherry on top of the whole story, James, is that
Speaker 5: al Gore was there. I don't know why I talk
Speaker 5: about it has been, but his has been status is
Speaker 5: ratified by the fact that he had some little meeting
Speaker 5: he called to talk about climate change, and I think
Speaker 5: something like twenty people showed up, So you know, you know,
Speaker 5: Trump absolutely took over the thing and killed it, which
Speaker 5: in it so much deserves killing, doesn't it.
Speaker 6: Girls Ah, then, Steve, I think we disagree on this.
Speaker 6: I think if the question is has Trump done a
Speaker 6: lot of good things in the last year, the answer
Speaker 6: is obviously yes.
Speaker 7: Reneed the tax cuts.
Speaker 6: Closed the border, got rid of a lot of racist
Speaker 6: policies that the federal government had been executing for decades.
Speaker 6: I don't know to what extent it's attributable to Trump.
Speaker 6: I'm not saying it's not. I just don't know. But
Speaker 6: crime is apparently at its lowest rate in the United
Speaker 6: States since nineteen hundred, especially the murder rate.
Speaker 7: So there is a lot to like, there's a lot
Speaker 7: to dislike.
Speaker 6: Tariffs I think are illegal and counterproductive. But I don't
Speaker 6: think the last week has been good. In fact, I
Speaker 6: think he has embarrassed himself in the country and got
Speaker 6: very little for it. I'm open to the idea that
Speaker 6: we would buy or take more control of not via
Speaker 6: an invasion Greenland, but he has emboldened.
Speaker 7: The left in Europe.
Speaker 6: He's upset some of our closest allies with unnecessary comments.
Speaker 6: He said, for example, that the British didn't fight on
Speaker 6: the front lines in Afghanistan. When they did. Four hundred
Speaker 6: and eighty seven of them died in Afghanistan on the
Speaker 6: front lines. Some of them were my friends, as it happens.
Speaker 6: So I think the last week has been the bad
Speaker 6: side of Trump. I think it's been the liability that
Speaker 6: isn't to say it wipes out all of the good.
Speaker 6: I think he has had a relatively successful first year,
Speaker 6: but I don't like how he behaved in Davos.
Speaker 3: Well, let's take a look at that then a little
Speaker 3: bit more. When it comes to the whole Greenland situation,
Speaker 3: if I understand this, a ridiculous assertion was made at
Speaker 3: the beginning, backed up with the threat of extraordinary action,
Speaker 3: and then at the end of it a deal was
Speaker 3: struck that made the position struck in the end look moderate.
Speaker 3: Have we seen this before from this fellow. I think
Speaker 3: we have, And it's just amazing to me that everybody
Speaker 3: nobody gets it yet that that's how it always goes.
Speaker 3: It starts we're going to have a nine tariff on China,
Speaker 3: and everybody freaks out in the market's crash, and then
Speaker 3: you end up with a you know, a four percent
Speaker 3: tariff on spatulis from the plastic spatula factory. I mean,
Speaker 3: we've seen this before. So if the end result is
Speaker 3: actually getting something, is getting more mineral rights, more security,
Speaker 3: more in this and that out of Greenland. Okay, fine,
Speaker 3: we've had interested in Greenland for a long time. You're right,
Speaker 3: of course about the optics and You're right about the
Speaker 3: tone of voice and the rest of it. But I
Speaker 3: think what a lot of people are liking is the
Speaker 3: fact that we don't have the same old consensus, technocratic
Speaker 3: go along cow towing at DeVos that you might have
Speaker 3: gotten from definitely from a Democrat and probably from you know,
Speaker 3: a Rhino wants to fit into the the ethos of Davos,
Speaker 3: if you will, and then hard truths need to be
Speaker 3: told to them, just simply to lay Doun a marker.
Speaker 3: Nobody has said yet to them. Well, maybe Trump has,
Speaker 3: and others have noted it on Twitter that there are
Speaker 3: problems facing Europe that are going to lead to its
Speaker 3: inevitable and total decline. And if that emboldens leftists, that
Speaker 3: just shows that they have a culture that is unable
Speaker 3: to save itself and pull itself out of the morass
Speaker 3: in which it is you want to disagree with.
Speaker 6: It, I just don't recognize that as a description of
Speaker 6: what has happened this week. I have historically been sympathetic
Speaker 6: to Trump's approach, which is to throw his weight around
Speaker 6: and do things differently than others. I also am sympathetic,
Speaker 6: and I've written as much to his lecturing Europe alongside
Speaker 6: j D. Vance on questions such as freedom of speech,
Speaker 6: how much they contribute to their own defense, they're hurtling
Speaker 6: towards socialism and so forth. But this isn't that they
Speaker 6: got nothing. They got nothing of any consequence, and they
Speaker 6: have cost American interests for it. I think this is
Speaker 6: a bad deal. This is not me saying I don't
Speaker 6: like mean tweets. It's not some form of Trump derangement syndrome.
Speaker 6: I think that the cost of Trump's behavior in the
Speaker 6: last week massively outweighs the benefits. The temper tantrum that
Speaker 6: he had a few months ago over Canada, where inexplicably
Speaker 6: he started saying that Canada had to be absorbed into
Speaker 6: the United States meant that we now have for the
Speaker 6: next four or five years a Canadian government that is
Speaker 6: hostile to American interest rather than one that is friendly
Speaker 6: toward American interest.
Speaker 7: That was not a good deal.
Speaker 6: Very often with Trump, it is a good deal, and
Speaker 6: I don't care about the niceties.
Speaker 7: I want the good deal. But there is no good deal.
Speaker 7: We didn't get anything for this.
Speaker 6: We now have a whole bunch of pissed off people
Speaker 6: and countries that are historically sympathetic toward US, and the
Speaker 6: parties in countries such as Denmark and Scandinavia more generally
Speaker 6: have been emboldened not on the right where we can
Speaker 6: make better deals with him in the future, but on
Speaker 6: the left. And I don't think we got much for that.
Speaker 6: So I think this was stupid. I don't think this
Speaker 6: was normal chump deal making. I think it was stupid,
Speaker 6: and I think it's an example of the downside of
Speaker 6: him rather than of his upside.
Speaker 2: Steve, Yeah, you know, I tend to. I mean, I
Speaker 2: agree with a lot of what Charlie says.
Speaker 5: And by the way, James, when you say Europe needs
Speaker 5: to have some truth told of them here, I am
Speaker 5: with Charlie.
Speaker 2: They do need to be true.
Speaker 5: Some of the things he's saying, many of them were,
Speaker 5: and some of them weren't, as Charlie has mentioned rightly.
Speaker 2: Look, here's how I look at it differently.
Speaker 5: In part because I'm right now, literally this weekend, watching
Speaker 5: the spot market for natural gas electricity price, which you're
Speaker 5: going to be very vuluable because of the weather system,
Speaker 5: and I think of Trump in the same way. If
Speaker 5: you think of Trump as the volatility measured in the
Speaker 5: spot market for Trump's latest eruption.
Speaker 2: This set a new high, There's no doubt about that,
Speaker 2: but I.
Speaker 5: Do think it tends to regress to the mean. Now
Speaker 5: the mean is mean tweets. Okay, I did be to
Speaker 5: make that pun, But I think this will be forgotten,
Speaker 5: as so many Trump things are. I mean, is anybody
Speaker 5: still talking about his really ridiculous true social about Rob
Speaker 5: Reiner from six eight weeks ago?
Speaker 2: No, No, that's sort of forgotten now.
Speaker 5: And this is more important than that, of course, But
Speaker 5: I do think this will blow over. I think that
Speaker 5: the liberal governments in Europe that get overconferenent from this
Speaker 5: are they may enjoy a temporary spike in popularity.
Speaker 2: And one of the criticisms.
Speaker 5: That people make, and I think Charlie hint of this,
Speaker 5: is that some of the populist parties that like Trump
Speaker 5: and that Trump likes are being set back by this
Speaker 5: last week. And I think that's true in the short run,
Speaker 5: but I think that won't be true in the long run.
Speaker 2: So I don't know. Maybe I'm optimistic about it.
Speaker 5: I just think that Trump is generally right when he's
Speaker 5: setting the Europeans. The Canadians have put aside for some
Speaker 5: reasons Charlie mentions, but I think it's good putting the
Speaker 5: Europeans on their back foot. And Trump's basic understanding is
Speaker 5: always be on offense, always be setting the agenda.
Speaker 2: Now, the difficulty with that is, to use the.
Speaker 5: Great analogy of Churchill about the offensives in World War One,
Speaker 5: it's like throwing a bucket of water on the floor,
Speaker 5: and to keep it going you have to throw more
Speaker 5: and more buckets. And so there's one problem is Trump
Speaker 5: faces the problem of diminishing returns and we are only
Speaker 5: one year into it, and where's it going to be
Speaker 5: a year from now? I do think that does call
Speaker 5: for more caution and sort of measured approach on his part.
Speaker 3: And good luck with that, Charles. When we talk about
Speaker 3: setting back the right wing elements in Europe, are we
Speaker 3: talking about the sort of moderate center consensus, there's that
Speaker 3: word again, technocratic, there's that word again, institution right in Europe?
Speaker 3: Or are we talking about the AFP, Are we talking
Speaker 3: about Lapan? Are we talking about the organizations that get
Speaker 3: shut out because they are outside of the guardrails of
Speaker 3: proper European thought?
Speaker 7: I mean, who.
Speaker 3: Exactly in the right is losing influence here? When the
Speaker 3: institutions around them are seemingly devoted to keep them from
Speaker 3: having any influence at all in the government.
Speaker 6: I think we're talking about both. Also, we need europerson
Speaker 6: ally and we need to cajole Europe into being a
Speaker 6: better ally, and I don't think we did that. If
Speaker 6: you use Canada as the example.
Speaker 7: I am much.
Speaker 6: More conservative than Pierre Polief, but he was a good
Speaker 6: antidote to the Canadian government that has run that country
Speaker 6: for nearly a decade. He is far preferable to Mark Karney,
Speaker 6: who's a bloodless type. He's obviously far preferable to feed
Speaker 6: Orchestro's so I mean Trudeau, and the same is true
Speaker 6: in Europe. And if that message is going to be
Speaker 6: heard in Europe, where it will go down very hard,
Speaker 6: then it's going to have to be delivered in a
Speaker 6: way that doesn't put up the backs of the public
Speaker 6: and make them do what the Canadians did and say,
Speaker 6: despite all of the things we're angry about, including immigration,
Speaker 6: free speech and so forth, we're just going to pick
Speaker 6: the bloodless left. I watched this closely in England, where
Speaker 6: anti Americanism is an interesting phenomenon that ebbs and flows.
Speaker 6: Trump made it worse there this week, and if there
Speaker 6: was something that he had got from that, I think
Speaker 6: that would be worth it, but there wasn't. Now I
Speaker 6: will say where I do agree with Steve, I don't
Speaker 6: want to give off the wrong and prayer.
Speaker 7: I don't think this is the end of the world.
Speaker 6: I've read some articles in the European newspapers this week
Speaker 6: that are just profoundly ridiculous. They say, this is the
Speaker 6: end of NATO, this is the end of the Transatlantic Alliance,
Speaker 6: this is the end of the special relationship with Britain.
Speaker 6: The stock market will ever recover, bonds are going to
Speaker 6: skyrocket forever. The housing market in the United States as
Speaker 6: a result, will stay unobtainable. The Europeans are going to
Speaker 6: exit American treasuries. The Americans are going to retaliate by
Speaker 6: kicking the Europeans out of the cloud. That's all nonsense.
Speaker 6: This is already blown over in the most part. I'm
Speaker 6: just saying that where Trump is at his best is
Speaker 6: where he does weird and unusual things that other politicians
Speaker 6: don't and then get stuff for it. The border is
Speaker 6: a perfect example of this. Trump says some things on
Speaker 6: the border and immigration that make me feel uncomfortable.
Speaker 7: But look at what he's done. He shut that thing down.
Speaker 6: Now we have net outflows of migration for the first
Speaker 6: time in a long time, and illegal immigrants of being
Speaker 6: deported on math.
Speaker 7: That's good, that's great. Good for him.
Speaker 6: I don't care about the the ugliness of it.
Speaker 7: But here he didn't get anything.
Speaker 5: Well, there is one thing, Charles, that you ought to
Speaker 5: be celebrating that's not connected to this last week except
Speaker 5: only the coincidence of the calendar, and that is that
Speaker 5: Trump is now imposing I guess he's pulled the trigger
Speaker 5: on imposing these five hundred percent tariffs on countries that
Speaker 5: trade and illicit Russian goods and maybe other right, right, great?
Speaker 5: That of course, that was a congressionally past statute, which
Speaker 5: again conforms to the Charlie Cook principle that Congress ought
Speaker 5: to be involved in teriffs, which I agree with. And uh,
Speaker 5: I mean, it's early yet, but I've seen some news
Speaker 5: reports that the Chinese banks in India and others are saying, yeah,
Speaker 5: I guess we're going to have to go along with this,
Speaker 5: and so suddenly they're really finally turning the serious economic
Speaker 5: screws on Russia. Everyone's thought that you know, Trump is
Speaker 5: soft on Russia and whatever, but this is a serious
Speaker 5: measure and maybe it helps. I don't know if the
Speaker 5: last week helps or hurts the European cooperation in that,
Speaker 5: although I note another news item out this morning is
Speaker 5: the French Navy has intercepted and boarded one of the
Speaker 5: Russian Black Fleet oil tankers. So it's not just us
Speaker 5: in the Caribbean, it's some of the Europeans are getting
Speaker 5: in on the action too.
Speaker 3: Yes, I saw a headline this morning that said the
Speaker 3: attempt to build a united EU front against Trump hampered
Speaker 3: by Franco German tensions, and I thought that just feels
Speaker 3: so nineteenth century to see Franco German tensions in the
Speaker 3: news again. I just it pleased me. No, the tariffs
Speaker 3: and the Chinese reaction to it, and exactly how much
Speaker 3: of their wonderful unlimited relationship military wise they're going to
Speaker 3: do puts Russia in another spot. Of course, we've been
Speaker 3: all waiting for three years for the imminent collapse of
Speaker 3: the Russian economy. It's one of those things that very
Speaker 3: very strangely refuses to lie down and die. But it
Speaker 3: might be actually happening now. But I'm not going to
Speaker 3: say that because nothing ever happens or might it. We
Speaker 3: can get to Ukraine in a secondary But I want
Speaker 3: to circle back just for one thing and what Charlie said,
Speaker 3: And he can, of course again slap me with a
Speaker 3: wet mackerel if he's first. When when a population is insulted,
Speaker 3: as the Canadians or some Europeans were, and I understand that,
Speaker 3: I get that, and I'm you know, I'm a northa
Speaker 3: Kotein for Effan's sakes, I'm a Minnesotan. I'm a practically
Speaker 3: Canadian and temperament when it comes to go to getting
Speaker 3: along and being nice, I don't like it. I don't
Speaker 3: like smash Mault politics. That's just not my thing. But
Speaker 3: if you, if they do feel insulted, the notion that
Speaker 3: will all show you I'm going to vote against my
Speaker 3: own interests and the interests of my country just a
Speaker 3: just a show where I am about this, Well, then
Speaker 3: let them live with the consequences. And I'm not prettying.
Speaker 3: I mean that fine. If you're going to have a
Speaker 3: petulant fit about a petulant fit and elect in the
Speaker 3: worst government you can that won't do anything about your problems,
Speaker 3: that's on you, that's not on Trump.
Speaker 6: Except my interest is not in them, it's in us.
Speaker 6: My objection here is that it hurts American interest. I
Speaker 6: don't care if silly countries want to elect silly people
Speaker 6: who do things that are against their interests. I care
Speaker 6: about the United States, and my point is that we
Speaker 6: hurt ourselves in Canada. I have no objection to the Canadians.
Speaker 6: I like the Canadians. I think they are a good
Speaker 6: ally and a good and neighbor to have given the alternatives.
Speaker 6: But if they want to do silly things in Canada,
Speaker 6: that's their look at.
Speaker 7: But we would have been better.
Speaker 6: Off with five years of Pierre Polief than we will
Speaker 6: be with Mark Carney on the world stage domestically as well,
Speaker 6: and I think the same is true in Europe.
Speaker 7: So I agree with you.
Speaker 6: Of course it's ridiculous, but that is what seems to happen,
Speaker 6: and I don't think it helps America, which is my concern.
Speaker 3: I agreed, as it is questionable what Beer could have done.
Speaker 3: It would have been great if he'd, you know, all
Speaker 3: of a sudden, showed up like a frozen Argentinian and
Speaker 3: started doing the things that needed to be done.
Speaker 6: I probably wouldn't have started overtures to China, for one thing,
Speaker 6: And he wouldn't have made anti American speeches in Europe,
Speaker 6: and he wouldn't have called for a new world order
Speaker 6: that excludes the United States. So I do think it matters.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, you know, sometimes I just feel like the
Speaker 3: Canada in your in my head is just already gone,
Speaker 3: you know, with with with the mounties and the square
Speaker 3: jaw and the hats and the frozen wilderness and the
Speaker 3: beautiful European accented architecture built in the middle of nowhere
Speaker 3: by hardy people. Somehow, I just feel as if that
Speaker 3: national temperament is as gone as the Australians. The Australians,
Speaker 3: for Heaven's safety, you'd like to think of, you know,
Speaker 3: your Paul Hogan type A knife A knife.
Speaker 7: See you've played knife before.
Speaker 3: Right, pretty I have grilling and the barbie. You Sometimes
Speaker 3: you listen to their correspondence, ask questions of the American
Speaker 3: tennis players and say, how do you feel about representing
Speaker 3: that flag, that horrible flag of oppression, death, Nazism, fascism
Speaker 3: and the rest of it, and you realize, yes, really
Speaker 3: has gone too well anyway, So let's go to Ukraine.
Speaker 3: It's still going on. We were told that he was
Speaker 3: going to get a piece seel really quickly. I don't
Speaker 3: think you should have said that because or whatever he
Speaker 3: said about it. But here we are, and on go
Speaker 3: the negotiations, on goes, the war, on goes, the attacks
Speaker 3: on the oil facilities, and then none of that for
Speaker 3: a while, and then a barbon billy in Kiev goes.
Speaker 3: It's incessant, it's interminable, it's horrible, it's deadly, it's massive.
Speaker 3: It can't go on forever. But yet it seems that
Speaker 3: it will if the tariffs do indeed cut off the
Speaker 3: spigott and if indeed there is a Russian contraction of
Speaker 3: the economy. And I mean, right now, they just raised
Speaker 3: their vat, they just raised more attacks in the middle class.
Speaker 3: You know their feels. At some point, don't they have
Speaker 3: to correct and come to the table. You'd think all
Speaker 3: the Russian dead end, all the Russian dead enders right
Speaker 3: now we're laughing at that.
Speaker 5: Well, the dead enders. I mean, I guess there's a
Speaker 5: lot to rulers and regimes like Putins, which is you
Speaker 5: have to go on to the bitterer.
Speaker 2: End, or you lose everything.
Speaker 5: I've never been quite sure if that was true, but
Speaker 5: it certainly seemed to be true of you know, the
Speaker 5: Nazis in World War two and so forth. And I
Speaker 5: guess that logic is right because look the deal. I
Speaker 5: think the outline of deal is in.
Speaker 2: Front of us.
Speaker 5: Russia gets to keep most of the territory they've conquered.
Speaker 5: They want some more concessions, which maybe you're worth doing
Speaker 5: just to end it along with apparently you know, we're
Speaker 5: part of tendedly at least a security guarantee, and you
Speaker 5: know it's we gave them a security guarantee once before,
Speaker 5: and look how that worked out for them. So you know,
Speaker 5: if I'm the Ukrainians, I'm like, well, if we have
Speaker 5: to swallow that bitter medicine, we might be willing to.
Speaker 2: But that deal is out there.
Speaker 5: I think maybe there's something we don't know, but I
Speaker 5: think it's the stubbornness of Putin. I think he knows
Speaker 5: he can't win, but he's afraid of a negotiated deal might.
Speaker 2: Be entered in the loss. Call him in Russian politics.
Speaker 3: I think the negotiat a deal at this point, if
Speaker 3: they got to keep what they have, would be trouted.
Speaker 3: It would be touted as a win, the absorption of
Speaker 3: the portion of a little Russia back into a mother
Speaker 3: Russia objective, and who is going to say otherwise. Everybody's
Speaker 3: going to get back to business. Everybody's going to be
Speaker 3: happy when all of a sudden they get absorbed back
Speaker 3: in the West because the war is over and the
Speaker 3: rest everybody's going to make money. The oligarchs will be happy.
Speaker 3: People will stop falling out of windows, you know, or
Speaker 3: dropping their tea with a sudden stricken look in their face,
Speaker 3: and you know, and Putin goes on the idea that
Speaker 3: if he somehow stopped now didn't control the whole country,
Speaker 3: kept the dambas, and everyone around him is going to
Speaker 3: say that's that's the regime is weak. Now we strike
Speaker 3: and and he's deposed. I don't think that would happen.
Speaker 3: I think he declared victory, go home and continue to
Speaker 3: roll around until he dies in bed.
Speaker 5: More turns his attention to the old Baltic states. I mean,
Speaker 5: that's what you keep hearing about as a possibility. You know,
Speaker 5: what's the old Churchill line that Russia is the riddle
Speaker 5: wrapped in inside a mystery, inside of an enigma.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, my go to.
Speaker 5: Person on these matters is Gary Salt Morrison at Northwestern University.
Speaker 5: He's maybe the finest professor of Russian literature in America.
Speaker 2: I know him a little bit. He's written some great.
Speaker 5: Articles where he says, look, Russian imperialism is part of
Speaker 5: their sort of cultural and national DNA going back centuries.
Speaker 5: It wasn't just a Soviet thing or a Communist thing.
Speaker 5: And so he thinks what's going on is a regression
Speaker 5: to the mean there, which is, you know, they do
Speaker 5: have these ambitions of empire they've always had.
Speaker 2: I was always struck when.
Speaker 5: I visited the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg that what Catherine
Speaker 5: the Great and all the others they collected, all this
Speaker 5: wonderful Western European art, and I went through room after
Speaker 5: room of that giant place, and where's the Russian art?
Speaker 5: That there is an inferiority complex I think the Russians
Speaker 5: have always had. And so if you know, if they're
Speaker 5: not part they were never part of the great overseas
Speaker 5: empire game of the Europeans in the nineteenth century and whatnot.
Speaker 5: So I don't know if all those things are right,
Speaker 5: but I'm going to follow Professor Morrison and thinking that
Speaker 5: this is what they're like, and we have to recognize
Speaker 5: the enemy of it and not think they can be
Speaker 5: bought off by just by commerce alone.
Speaker 3: So they may have an inferiority complex, because except for
Speaker 3: certain areas of literature and music, they're absolutely mediocre.
Speaker 6: Any which, Aska says a funny meme that I saw,
Speaker 6: and it says literature in different countries, and in the
Speaker 6: first pane all as a Frenchman, and underneath it says
Speaker 6: I will die for love. And then in the second
Speaker 6: one there's an American, and the American says I will
Speaker 6: die for liberty, and then the Russian one it just
Speaker 6: says I will die.
Speaker 3: Right exactly, exactly precisely. Well, Charles, do you agree with
Speaker 3: my assessment about the business as usual getting on to it?
Speaker 3: If they just take what they've already got and declare
Speaker 3: victory and go home.
Speaker 7: Unfortunately, I.
Speaker 6: Resent that that is the most likely and at this
Speaker 6: stage perhaps the best outcome, given the number of people
Speaker 6: who are.
Speaker 7: Dying every day.
Speaker 6: Still somehow it's almost three years since this started. Just
Speaker 6: reminds you that whenever anyone says it'll be over by Christmas,
Speaker 6: you should slap them with a wet mackerel, because it
Speaker 6: never is. This has been a war of attrition in
Speaker 6: the way.
Speaker 7: The First World War was.
Speaker 6: But I do agree with you that that's the outcome
Speaker 6: and that there will be a lot of people on
Speaker 6: both sides who will.
Speaker 7: Be happy with it. But it isn't good.
Speaker 6: I think we should be able to be grown ups
Speaker 6: and say that's what's going to happen without having to
Speaker 6: convince ourselves that it is good.
Speaker 3: We've also learned about the new age of warfare. Drones
Speaker 3: have made a difference in this war like I can't
Speaker 3: imagine anywhere else in my lifetime, a new invention, a
Speaker 3: new rapid development. War is great for teching. You know,
Speaker 3: war is the health of the state, but it's also
Speaker 3: pretty marvelous for R and D and a lot of
Speaker 3: assumptions you would like to think in the Pentagon have
Speaker 3: been upended by seeing what we have seen there. And
Speaker 3: I think, who did we have on? Was it McMasters
Speaker 3: we had on? We were talking about whether or not
Speaker 3: the United States it is intellectually adapting to this, because
Speaker 3: all of a sudden, you think we've got these great,
Speaker 3: incredible aircraft carriers and these battle groups and the rest
Speaker 3: of it, and oh, we just lost one because of
Speaker 3: because two million Chinese drones just appeared over the horizon,
Speaker 3: you know, and dropped on them, and he just couldn't
Speaker 3: take them out. Worry about that. I worry about us
Speaker 3: not getting the right lessons. But yes, so you say
Speaker 3: they'll then turn their attention to the Balkans. Have they
Speaker 3: learned anything? Do you think has the Russian leadership or
Speaker 3: Putin learned anything from the last three years?
Speaker 5: You know, I draw a blank. I can't answer that question.
Speaker 5: I have no idea what lessons they may be thinking
Speaker 5: they're learning.
Speaker 6: I was going to ask you that Tim was slightly
Speaker 6: differently phrased, which is, do you think regrets having gone in?
Speaker 6: Which is a separate question from whether he can back off.
Speaker 3: I think he would regret it. If it meant that
Speaker 3: he is deposed and dies in cold room, then I
Speaker 3: think he would, as long as he maintains his personal
Speaker 3: level of comfort and authority. I don't think that he does, really.
Speaker 7: I mean, suggests he's not a good person.
Speaker 3: I don't think he is. Right. Yeah, well, I looked
Speaker 3: into his soul and I didn't see him as being
Speaker 3: particularly good either all right, well that's that, and we
Speaker 3: would like to think that the presence of Russian activity
Speaker 3: the Baltics would concentrate the mind wonderfully and all of
Speaker 3: a sudden the United States will seem like an awful
Speaker 3: great guy to have around two. So we hope now.
Speaker 3: Ross Dufatt, I think over at the Times was arguing
Speaker 3: something that again we were talking about on Ricochet ricochet
Speaker 3: dot com. Go there Sina talking about how Reagan's second
Speaker 3: term has quote ended the conservative era and he's talking
Speaker 3: about a post Trump GOP. And I was thinking about
Speaker 3: that the other day when somebody in the comments was
Speaker 3: talking about that Trump is a rhino and that you know,
Speaker 3: but unlike other previous rhinos like Mett Romney and John
Speaker 3: McCain and the rest of it. And I thought, those
Speaker 3: turn that term doesn't mean anything anymore. We It pains
Speaker 3: me as a an old Reagan eighties kind of guy.
Speaker 3: But that's that's gone, that's that's that's dead. I remember
Speaker 3: before the Trump election. I think it was an American
Speaker 3: It was one of those interest American interests. It was
Speaker 3: where the flight ninety three piece ran that somebody was saying, basically, well,
Speaker 3: we're going to have a Caesar. We're going to have
Speaker 3: a Caesar, so it might as well be our Caesar.
Speaker 3: And there's a lot of that thought here. We're going
Speaker 3: to use the instruments of the state to accomplish the
Speaker 3: good things because they need to be done and they're
Speaker 3: not being done by other means, and if we don't
Speaker 3: do them, then the country and the Republic is gone.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure I agree with that, but I understand
Speaker 3: the appeal, and I understand argument, or am I wrong
Speaker 3: think wrote The new Nationalist era and again I'm a
Speaker 3: nationalist is still defined primarily negatively in terms of the
Speaker 3: things that probably won't return to Republican politics anytime soon.
Speaker 3: The nation building efforts of George W. Bush. Yeah, Okay,
Speaker 3: done with that. The immigration amnesty of the Reagan era, Yeah,
Speaker 3: done with that. The sweeping changes to entitlements pushed by
Speaker 3: Paul Ryan, the button up moralism Pence. In terms of
Speaker 3: a positive agenda, douthor rights, there are a lot of
Speaker 3: very different ways that the Republican Party of twenty twenty
Speaker 3: eight or twenty thirty two could be nationalist, and many
Speaker 3: the fiercest battles inside the Trump Coalition, especially the Great
Speaker 3: influencer war that broke out after Charlie Kirk's assassination recommend
Speaker 3: fundamental divisions over what exactly a nationalist right should want.
Speaker 3: So I'll ask you, guys, Charles, what should a nationalist right,
Speaker 3: which sounds terrifying to some people, what should they want?
Speaker 6: This is very hard to answer because I think they
Speaker 6: should want what I want.
Speaker 7: Yes, and I'll start here. I don't think that we
Speaker 7: have a caesar.
Speaker 6: I know others have argued otherwise, I don't think we
Speaker 6: have a caesar. I stort't think for the record that
Speaker 6: Trump has done anything in his excesses that comes close
Speaker 6: to Joe Biden trying to spend half a trillion dollars
Speaker 6: without Congress.
Speaker 3: That's not to tweeting a constitutional amendment.
Speaker 6: Yes, now, that's not to defend Trump. I've been critical
Speaker 6: when I think he's wrong, and I think he is
Speaker 6: wrong quite often, and I think in general the balance
Speaker 6: between the executive and Congress is off, and that Trump
Speaker 6: exemplifies that as much as anyone else. But I don't
Speaker 6: think we have a caesar, and if we do, then
Speaker 6: we had one last time around as well. I don't
Speaker 6: agree with doubtat entirely. I think a couple things. One
Speaker 6: is that trump Ism is hard to imagine. Absent Trump,
Speaker 6: he can change opinion on the right with one tweet,
Speaker 6: But then if he changes his mind back, so do
Speaker 6: the people who had their minds changed. So I need
Speaker 6: to see evidence of a profound shift in thinking that
Speaker 6: is divorced from Trump before I believe that conservatism, which
Speaker 6: I think is a natural instinct in.
Speaker 7: Polities, is dead.
Speaker 6: The second thing I would say is that there has
Speaker 6: always been a balance on the right between the ideas
Speaker 6: that were perhaps crystallized by Ronald Reagan and the ideas
Speaker 6: that doubt that thinks have taken over. Pap Buchanan challenged
Speaker 6: George H. W. Bush for the presidency, probably cost him
Speaker 6: a second term. The conservatism of many in the twenties
Speaker 6: and the fifties at Taft, for example, Senator Taft debt
Speaker 6: is were different on tariffs and foreign pope. There has
Speaker 6: always been this debate on the right, and I don't
Speaker 6: think that it is currently a sign that one side
Speaker 6: has lost forever that another side is ascendant.
Speaker 7: So I think sometimes there is this.
Speaker 6: Binary conception of conservatism where there's Reaganism and I'm a
Speaker 6: reaganide and then there is everything else, and if everything
Speaker 6: else gets to take the floor for a while, then
Speaker 6: the Reaganism must be debt. One caveat before I shut up.
Speaker 6: There obviously have been a couple of genuine shifts. One,
Speaker 6: as you say, an end to foreign adventurism that incidentally
Speaker 6: was a Bush era approach, not a Reagan era approach.
Speaker 6: Reagan was not a foreign adventurist. And there's been a
Speaker 6: shift on immigration, which I think is salutary because the
Speaker 6: Bush era Republican Party was way out of kilter with
Speaker 6: the base. It was the biggest problem that George W.
Speaker 6: Bush had he over and over again, and then the
Speaker 6: Republicans in Congress in twenty ten, twelve fourteen echoed this,
Speaker 6: tried to push an immigration policy that Republican voters absolutely hated.
Speaker 6: But I'm not convinced outside of that that we have
Speaker 6: yet seen this big shift. And I'd recommend Rome Entrepreneur's
Speaker 6: piece in the Washington Post that responds to Rostathat on
Speaker 6: this point.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So I'm I'm I was actually almost done with a
Speaker 5: long article for our friends at the Civitas Institute on
Speaker 5: what I'm calling the different phases of the New Right.
Speaker 5: I'm so old James like you that I can remember
Speaker 5: several iterations of the New Right being announced by the
Speaker 5: media and by various leaders in the world, and by
Speaker 5: my calculation, we are today living in the era of
Speaker 5: New Right four point five. I won't go through all
Speaker 5: the different ones why I gave him those numbers or
Speaker 5: started sounding like a Ricochet rebranding's that's Charles's department, but Ricche.
Speaker 5: But New Right four point five is Trump's nationalism with
Speaker 5: all the changes that have already been mentioned, and hostility
Speaker 5: to trade and certain other u turns of what was
Speaker 5: traditionally conservative consensus. I think, except for Charles's right to
Speaker 5: point back to the whole Taft era, which is when
Speaker 5: all the new rights started showing up after World War Two.
Speaker 2: And the point.
Speaker 5: Five is is whether the so called young disaffected gropers
Speaker 5: as they're called, or groperism, if it's actually a thing,
Speaker 5: is really something to be reckoned with endurable or is
Speaker 5: it just a generational revolt like the new left against
Speaker 5: established liberalism in the nineteen sixties that remains to be seen.
Speaker 2: Leave that aside for now.
Speaker 5: So Ross's peace, I thought started off strong saying, you know,
Speaker 5: trump Ism is really trump and he's holding together with
Speaker 5: the force of his personality a lot of discordant elements
Speaker 5: and they won't be sorted out until he's gone. I
Speaker 5: think that's absolutely right. But then you can almost hear
Speaker 5: the air going out of the balloon of the piece
Speaker 5: the further along you got, because then he starts saying, well,
Speaker 5: it could be this, it could be that.
Speaker 2: I'd kind of like something. How did he put it?
Speaker 5: He said, I'd like, uh, you know, national solidarity and
Speaker 5: technological dynamism and economics, you know, a multi racial, religiously
Speaker 5: informed idea of what it means to be an American
Speaker 5: and so forth.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: And that's all fine. I guess it's too general for
Speaker 2: my taste.
Speaker 5: There are two things missing right now, I think from
Speaker 5: the people speculating about what New Right five point zero
Speaker 5: will be. They'll sound familiar to you and me, James,
Speaker 5: but missing in Rossi's peaks. One is individual liberty. You know,
Speaker 5: the old idea of your freedom, and it's dropped out
Speaker 5: of the trumpest vocabulary, in the nationalist vocabulary. And in fact,
Speaker 5: you see some people like Pat Denine, who he had
Speaker 5: on the show here a couple of years ago, is
Speaker 5: actually hostile to the classical liberal tradition. I'm still an
Speaker 5: unreconstructed follower of Hayek and the classical liberal tradition and
Speaker 5: think we're gonna need it again, perhaps soon. And then
Speaker 5: the other thing that's related to that is free markets.
Speaker 3: Pause right there, Pause right there, because it is possible
Speaker 3: that in an era of identity politics, the idea of
Speaker 3: focusing on the individual seems like a waste of time
Speaker 3: and a wasted effort, because what matters is group solidarity.
Speaker 3: That's what I hate about this era. It's what I
Speaker 3: really hate about this era. And it's a natural outgrowth
Speaker 3: of everything that came out of the sixties and seventies.
Speaker 3: But if we're going to group together people by if
Speaker 3: people say, well, okay, if I'm going to be as
Speaker 3: an individual seen as being deficient morally, philosophically, spiritually, historically,
Speaker 3: and all these things because of some of the attributes
Speaker 3: that I cannot change, then I can either, you know,
Speaker 3: accept your definition, or I can get with the rest
Speaker 3: of the prison gang that's on my side and form
Speaker 3: a block to oppose you. And so that's why it's
Speaker 3: going to be difficult I too. I mean, one of
Speaker 3: my favorite books is clockworkornge because it's about the individual
Speaker 3: versus the state. That is the fundamental building block of
Speaker 3: a free society as individual liberty. So I agree, but
Speaker 3: unfortunately we've been moved into blocks for the spoils. Anyway.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, I'll just add a code of to what
Speaker 5: you just said, which is it's entirely understandable, and I
Speaker 5: think there's some extent legitimate for white males who have
Speaker 5: been on the brunt of you know, cultural and legal
Speaker 5: discrimination for quite a while now to say we as
Speaker 5: a block want to stand up for I mean, the
Speaker 5: phrase I don't like is you know, ethno nationalism. Now,
Speaker 5: as I say, I totally understand it. It's a predictable
Speaker 5: and in some ways just reaction to what has been
Speaker 5: going on. But it's also a mistake for the long term,
Speaker 5: and I hope that a New Right five point zero
Speaker 5: does not make that a front and center principle of
Speaker 5: what should come next.
Speaker 2: By the point was, you know, free markets, right, it
Speaker 2: goes along with individual liberty.
Speaker 5: You know, an awful lot of the nat cons some
Speaker 5: of them anyway, they're all for well some of them
Speaker 5: say they like the new Deal.
Speaker 2: And here's here's a shout out for National Review.
Speaker 5: From this beginning, you know, new Right one point zero
Speaker 5: was some names now forgotten like Peter Vierek and Clinton
Speaker 5: Rossiter and even Walter Littman is some extent. And what
Speaker 5: were they saying in nineteen fifty They said conservatism should
Speaker 5: support the New Deal and we should accept coexistence with communism.
Speaker 5: And then you go to National reviews of founding statements,
Speaker 5: and by the way, National Review, I think you can
Speaker 5: say starts new Right two point zero and it was
Speaker 5: called the New Right by the media in nineteen fifty five.
Speaker 5: And you know, Buckley says in that famous Mission statement
Speaker 5: that you know, no, we're not making peace with the
Speaker 5: New Deal, and anybody who does is not a conservative.
Speaker 5: He was directly attacking Rossiter and Viereck and people like
Speaker 5: that and so and then of course, you know, coexistence
Speaker 5: with communism is unacceptable philosophically, he would say, as a
Speaker 5: practical matter of course, they have nuclear weapons, but we
Speaker 5: cannot accept ideologically that they're legitimate.
Speaker 2: Okay, that history is well known.
Speaker 5: But now the nat coons are bringing back some of
Speaker 5: the old neo statist ideas of you know, Peter Vierek
Speaker 5: and all those SOEU de Son Conservatives of nineteen fifty
Speaker 5: and you know, I tend to resist these cycles of
Speaker 5: history theory, but it does seem sometimes like we're cotton one.
Speaker 3: Charlie.
Speaker 7: I agree.
Speaker 6: I think that despite the preference of many nap cons
Speaker 6: for throwing tomatoes at National Review, if you read National
Speaker 6: Reviews statement from nineteen fifty five, which is brilliant piece
Speaker 6: of writing by William F. Buckley Junior and others, you
Speaker 6: find that we essentially believe the same things as we
Speaker 6: did then, and individual liberty is core and free markets
Speaker 6: are core. And even if you don't like those two things,
Speaker 6: I think as a practical matter, they are the cause
Speaker 6: of everything else that is good about America. That doesn't
Speaker 6: mean that there are no trade offs, please don't misunderstand me.
Speaker 6: It also doesn't mean there are no downsides to those things.
Speaker 7: There are.
Speaker 6: But the reason that America is militarily pre eminent, the
Speaker 6: reason that America outlived the Soviet Union, the reason that
Speaker 6: America is technologically advanced, is because of individual liberty and
Speaker 6: free markets.
Speaker 7: I think there is a tendency.
Speaker 6: Certainly this is true on the left, and it does
Speaker 6: exist to a smaller extent on the right to believe
Speaker 6: that this is the natural order of things, that there's
Speaker 6: something intrinsic to America in the soil or the sky
Speaker 6: that has led to it being wealthy and powerful.
Speaker 7: And I don't think that's true. I think that the.
Speaker 6: Power and the wealth are the product of assumptions that
Speaker 6: are baked in right back to the Declaration, and that
Speaker 6: if we lose those or substitute them and become sort
Speaker 6: of mediocre, fluffy European social democracy type country.
Speaker 7: Will lose the rest of it.
Speaker 6: So I don't just think that it is a good
Speaker 6: in and of itself, although I am an individualist, free marketer,
Speaker 6: I think that it undergods everything else that we like
Speaker 6: on the right about the United States.
Speaker 3: Yes, Charles, Well, that's just you down there in your
Speaker 3: nice house living in America's wang for the rest of
Speaker 3: the country suffer. You're absolutely right. I agree with everything
Speaker 3: you said. But the counter argument is, why should we
Speaker 3: believe in these things because they have brought this country
Speaker 3: to the state in which it is. You have an
Speaker 3: overall optimistic impression of the country. You like it, you
Speaker 3: see good in it, you see strengths. There are people
Speaker 3: who do not see good in it, who do not
Speaker 3: see strength and the rise of anti Americanism on the
Speaker 3: right is that mirrors the anti America of the left
Speaker 3: is one of those curious things and one of those
Speaker 3: bothersome things. And it has to do with people who say, well,
Speaker 3: look where we are. All the factories are gone, pointless,
Speaker 3: wars in other countries, sold everything to China, the white
Speaker 3: men can't get jobs, miserable, awful wine box when in
Speaker 3: a running h R. Why should we have any investment
Speaker 3: in this? And we've come to this because of what
Speaker 3: you've described of individual liberty, instead of thinking of deep
Speaker 3: consciousness and of free markets, instead of saying the government
Speaker 3: is going to control and make things right for the
Speaker 3: right people. I don't agree with any of that, but
Speaker 3: I think that's what they're thinking, and that's the problem
Speaker 3: that we have to address.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 5: I think all three of us have said we're all Reaganites,
Speaker 5: and you know, someone who has written so much about Reagan,
Speaker 5: I get. I take it personally when I hear the
Speaker 5: young and up and rising people talk about how we
Speaker 5: don't want any zombie Reaganism or the more general form
Speaker 5: of that is what is conservatism inc As they like
Speaker 5: to say, ever done for us? What is that Conserve.
Speaker 5: It really does remind me of Monty pythons. What are
Speaker 5: the Romans ever done for us? We go through roles
Speaker 5: in schools of water. I can take off a lot
Speaker 5: of things. And some of this is just simple ignorance.
Speaker 5: I mean a lot of people who trash Reagan, just
Speaker 5: to take that central example, truly haven't boughted to study
Speaker 5: them at all. They really literally don't know what they're
Speaker 5: talking about. They don't stand as I wrote an article
Speaker 5: about this also recently for Civitas, about how the Trump administration,
Speaker 5: especially in its comprehensive attack on what we call the
Speaker 5: administrative state, learn from the experience and some of the
Speaker 5: failures of the Reagan years and the Reagan people. I
Speaker 5: think they learned by the end of two terms that
Speaker 5: the problem of our administrative state was much more serious
Speaker 5: and fundamental than they thought. They thought some simple reforms
Speaker 5: would make great progress. They made only limited progress. But
Speaker 5: without that experience and that perception, I think we wouldn't
Speaker 5: be seeing the fight going.
Speaker 2: On today, especially in the courts and elsewhere. And for
Speaker 2: that they.
Speaker 5: Owe a debt of gratitude to the Reagan years and
Speaker 5: that conservative movement that really National Review has such a
Speaker 5: large part of the story.
Speaker 2: And so I don't know.
Speaker 5: I'll just add this, James, because some of the things
Speaker 5: you ticked off is a discussion I often bring up
Speaker 5: with students, is is the American Constitution pro capitalists? Because
Speaker 5: remember Wadam Smith's Wilson Nations was also published in seventeen
Speaker 5: seventy six. Maybe not entirely a coincidence, I don't know,
Speaker 5: And I can point to a number of clauses I
Speaker 5: won't do it now that differ significantly from Oh, I
Speaker 5: don't know any European constitution, and they're implicitly pro open markets,
Speaker 5: pro competition. Implicit in our constitution is an embrace of
Speaker 5: competition between states. That's part of federalism, but it also
Speaker 5: means economic competition, and we seem to be losing sight
Speaker 5: of that. And so what I hear last point, sorry,
Speaker 5: what I hear from a lot of the younger disaffected
Speaker 5: people is well, our founding was really defective. Why because
Speaker 5: it proved insufficiently robust to stop the century long progressive assault.
Speaker 5: Now that's a decent criticism, But is the answer then
Speaker 5: to say the founding was defective or we need to
Speaker 5: fight our way back through? What's been going wrong for
Speaker 5: one hundred years, and you know, that's a serious fight
Speaker 5: going on these days, and I think they ought to
Speaker 5: join the right side of that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a lot of people who want to return
Speaker 3: with a v It's not just they're not content with
Speaker 3: going back to basic American foundational ideas and strengthening those.
Speaker 3: What they want is this sort of efflorescence of a
Speaker 3: lost European culture that they romanticize to the cathedrals and
Speaker 3: the whole disposing with modernity in its various ugly forms.
Speaker 3: And I understand that, and I'm slightly sympathetic to it.
Speaker 3: But the other day in one of these forums on Twitter,
Speaker 3: somebody was somebody posted one of those return videos that
Speaker 3: has this is the vision vouchsafe to you of what
Speaker 3: we could be if only we did these, you know,
Speaker 3: these sort of ethno nationalism things. And I slowed it
Speaker 3: down and I noted with interest a frame from a
Speaker 3: Jack Benny movie that had some celestial stairs, which I
Speaker 3: thought it was curious. And then I noticed something else
Speaker 3: that thought was weird, And these shots appeared, but a
Speaker 3: duration of a quarter to half a second in this montage,
Speaker 3: this millange of all the wonderful things that were build
Speaker 3: built by the White race. And it was a very
Speaker 3: large domed building that I recognized as having never been
Speaker 3: built in Berlin. It was spears, big monumental, ugly piece
Speaker 3: of garbage, over scaled nightmare, you know whatever. The house
Speaker 3: of the German people were supposed to be various approving
Speaker 3: angles of it. And I say, oh, okay, I got you.
Speaker 3: I know where you're coming from. Charles. I want to
Speaker 3: ask you this before we begin to wrap it up here.
Speaker 3: When Steve was talking about the administrative state, the stranglehold
Speaker 3: that it may have on the it does have on
Speaker 3: the economy, we have learned now of the extraordinary level
Speaker 3: of fraud that we have in this country, in the state.
Speaker 3: Might I add in this country we've been hearing for
Speaker 3: years about fraudened abuse. I always see that as one
Speaker 3: German word. I'm going to cut the budget by tackling
Speaker 3: frauden abuse. And now we have it. And now some
Speaker 3: people are saying that ten percent of the government, ten
Speaker 3: percent of the economy is fraud. I think that maybe
Speaker 3: understating the issue. We have a bunch of people who
Speaker 3: are today leaving work in order to go to the
Speaker 3: protests about ice and the local the Democratic Socialist Party
Speaker 3: is telling them, hey, use that new Minnesota time off
Speaker 3: family lead law. It just never ends. It never ends.
Speaker 3: Did we see? Do you think to us enough to
Speaker 3: extend to penetrate the general American consciousness? Between DOGE being
Speaker 3: or between USAID being a massive money washing scheme that
Speaker 3: sloshed it from the government to a Soros institution to
Speaker 3: someplace else in Peru, and the combination of fraud that
Speaker 3: we have. Do you think that we have enough rage
Speaker 3: to tackle an attempt to do something about the administrative state,
Speaker 3: the reparation's retribution redistribution state, or is the swamp just
Speaker 3: too deep and de fetted?
Speaker 6: I don't know, But let me answer that by noting
Speaker 6: something that I found interesting in Steve State, California, there
Speaker 6: are those who is to impose a so called billionaires tax,
Speaker 6: and I think maybe for the first time in a
Speaker 6: long time, they've pushed it too far because Californians will
Speaker 6: put up with a lot to live in California, and
Speaker 6: quite rightly, because California is incredible, wonderful weather, geography, food, culture.
Speaker 7: Atmosphere, and so forth.
Speaker 6: One of the things that I keep hearing the billionaires
Speaker 6: or the startup mavens who aren't billionaires but are nervous
Speaker 6: that this law will destroy their businesses say that they
Speaker 6: haven't said before, is you know what you guys don't
Speaker 6: need more money.
Speaker 7: You need to use it properly.
Speaker 6: You need to stop the waste, you need to allocate
Speaker 6: it efficiently.
Speaker 7: And then they'll point to other states.
Speaker 6: They'll say Texas managers, Florida managers, and they spend a
Speaker 6: hell of a lot less than you do. I haven't
Speaker 6: heard those people say this until this year. Often they're
Speaker 6: incredibly defensive, and they essentially say, take whatever you need.
Speaker 7: I need to keep making money.
Speaker 6: Or they'll mutter about taxes hurting economic growth, which is
Speaker 6: true in the more classical sense. But for the first
Speaker 6: time they've started saying, actually, your problem is not more money.
Speaker 6: That's not what you need. What you need is different
Speaker 6: spending choices. And I think that might sit on a shift.
Speaker 6: Whether that is going to penetrate the general electoral consciousness,
Speaker 6: I don't know.
Speaker 5: Okay, Can I just add a little footnote about that
Speaker 5: the Billionaire's Tax there's a feature in it that's not
Speaker 5: widely understood or known yet. There's a feature note that says,
Speaker 5: maybe you own on paper three percent of a privately
Speaker 5: held startup or maybe it's gone public.
Speaker 2: I think it doesn't actually matter.
Speaker 5: But if they are Class A voting shares and you control,
Speaker 5: say twenty or thirty percent, they're saying your share of
Speaker 5: the company is actually twenty or thirty percent, and therefore
Speaker 5: that's the amount of money we're going to ask from
Speaker 5: you in taxes, not your three percent share of the
Speaker 5: net worth of company on the market or privately assessed,
Speaker 5: but you know, your voting share amount. That is a
Speaker 5: dagger intended to kill the entire venture capital industry in
Speaker 5: California and drive every startup out of the state.
Speaker 2: And I kind of wonder if that's on purpose. I
Speaker 2: actually think.
Speaker 5: That, you know, they're the people like Robert Reich who's
Speaker 5: behind this, so hate capitalism and venture capitalists that they
Speaker 5: don't care that most of them are liberal Democrats.
Speaker 3: That's an unstanding feature. I think they just believe that
Speaker 3: these people will go out to the shed and get
Speaker 3: another golden goose and cut it and open it up
Speaker 3: and the coins will tumble out. I've been looking at
Speaker 3: what the list of proposed bills in Virginia, and the
Speaker 3: new legislation is just an absolute eye opener. And we
Speaker 3: actually should probably do a whole show about this because
Speaker 3: I mean, again, these things won't be passed. But now
Speaker 3: that everybody's licking their lips and saying, okay, what can
Speaker 3: we do to Virginia, it is nothing but taxes, taxes, taxes, taxes, taxes,
Speaker 3: new tourism tax raised at the hotel to tax seven
Speaker 3: points seven five percent tax and incomes over a million,
Speaker 3: creates new tax brackets and points a three point eight
Speaker 3: investment tax on top of stadium come. Allows every locality
Speaker 3: to raise the sales tax by one percent, raises rounds
Speaker 3: up the state and local taxes to the nearest five
Speaker 3: cent increment, allows localities to outlaw gas powered leaf blowers,
Speaker 3: and then taxes the electric the versions that they have
Speaker 3: to the electronic versions they have to buy. It is
Speaker 3: exactly what they do because they believe that not enough
Speaker 3: fair share is being paid, that there's just so much
Speaker 3: money out there, and if they got their hands on it,
Speaker 3: then justice would somehow follow. Not enough justice. We got
Speaker 3: to keep taking it. We got to find out more
Speaker 3: places to take it from. But justice will finally be done. Hey,
Speaker 3: I got to tell you this, folks. If you would
Speaker 3: like to meet light minded people like you're listening to
Speaker 3: this podcast and saying, my gosh, these men just they're brilliant.
Speaker 3: That's not We're not average James. That would just average
Speaker 3: Ricochet folks. And you know the women are good looking
Speaker 3: as well, and smart and just as just as mouthy.
Speaker 3: We have meetups in person, that's right. You don't find
Speaker 3: that in other sites because we actually trust to show that,
Speaker 3: to show up and not start getting stabby. Got a
Speaker 3: group coming up in Detroit, Michigan. We've got another one
Speaker 3: in early February to Florida Space Coast. Go to ricochet
Speaker 3: dot com, look for the meetup page and see what's there.
Speaker 3: It's ricochet dot com slash events and hey, if you
Speaker 3: want to meet Ricochet people where you meet and live,
Speaker 3: announce it on the page and see who shows up.
Speaker 3: You'll make new friends. And the fun part about it
Speaker 3: is you'll probably not spend any time talking about politics.
Speaker 3: That's what I always found every other direction the conversation goes.
Speaker 3: That is probably it for us today. And I should
Speaker 3: tell you maybe to give us that five star review
Speaker 3: and Apple podcasts, but I think I'm going to let
Speaker 3: that go this week. I should tell you that if
Speaker 3: you go to ricochet dot com, it's not all free.
Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, a lots of fun stuff there is free,
Speaker 3: but the real communities form on the member site and
Speaker 3: it's you know, it's a couple of centavos, liray, whatever
Speaker 3: you want to say. It does cost a little bit,
Speaker 3: not much, and what you get is the right to comment,
Speaker 3: and that's what keeps it sane and civil and center
Speaker 3: right and moderated and just good place to make friends.
Speaker 3: Trust me. So, Stephen, it's been great, Charles again, I've
Speaker 3: enjoyed every single essence jot phoneme of a conversation. I
Speaker 3: hope the other people have as well. And I trust
Speaker 3: we will convene here next week.
Speaker 2: Only only if you stay warm, James.
Speaker 3: I'll stay warm. Even if I don't stay warm, I'll
Speaker 3: be here. And Charles, we are now at what version
Speaker 3: of Ricochet four point or do you just want to
Speaker 3: just wave your hands and say you don't know and
Speaker 3: it doesn't matter.
Speaker 6: I want to wave my hands and point people toward
Speaker 6: some of the new podcasts that.
Speaker 3: We have, Oh tell them about it.
Speaker 7: Well I did.
Speaker 6: We had Henry Elson's new podcast, Conservative Crossroads, and there
Speaker 6: is another one in the work, so I can't announce
Speaker 6: it yet, but I will on a future episode off
Speaker 6: this show.
Speaker 3: And the Nighter is back and every Saturday as well.
Speaker 3: And yeah, it it's not just the post, not just
Speaker 3: the member feed, it's all the podcast as well. What
Speaker 3: a media empire we are and we'll certainly surely soon become. Anyway,
Speaker 3: it's been fun. We'll see you in the comments at Ricochet. Guys,
Speaker 3: Bye bye.
Speaker 2: Ricochet.
Speaker 3: Join the conversation.