Speaker 1: All right, we're gonna leave you now. I'm gonna make
a bunch of and or references, so I know that
would be so totally over your head. I don't want
to embarrass you.
Speaker 2: So yeah, well look I'm cool. Yep, not green.
Speaker 3: Make him go away.
Speaker 1: Guys, ask not what your country can do for you,
ask what you can do for your country. Mister garbach off,
tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Stephen Heyward,
Charles W. Cook the last but I'm James Lonax with
you and we're going to talk to Henry Olson about
the events in Europe and elsewhere. Gilette's Episode's a podcast.
Speaker 4: Now we're in a diverse nation like ours, and I
celebrate that these rules become even more important. Without them,
we were becoming an island of strangers. So yes, I
believe in this. I believe we need to reduce immigration significantly.
Speaker 1: Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number seven hundred and
forty two. I'm James Lllloxs in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I'm joined
by not Charles E. W. Cook. A. Last last we
heard of him his roof was leaking, so for all
we know, he is standing in a flooded house bailing,
or he's just off having lunch somewhere in sunny Florida.
Stephen Hayward in California. I presume, step and how are you?
Speaker 3: I'm good, but busy week. It's hard to keep up
with everything.
Speaker 1: So much stuff to do. Well, we could go with
something that actually happened minutes ago, I think, well three
hours ago, a little tweet from Harvard here and says,
without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard. And that
struck me at first as the University of Minnesota saying
without our students from Wisconsin, the University of Minnesota is
not the University of Minnesota. I think it possibly could be.
But the idea of the international students somehow having an
automatic cachet because they simply are not American, and when
you are not American, you bring an ineffable quality to
things about to find out how that plays. What do
you think is even of this idea that the administration
has said, well you know what, Nope, sorry, no more
international students, none of that wonderful full tuition that they pay. Sorry,
Is this just another negotiating tactic like what I believe
is a fairly significant tax on endowments to get them
to do what exactly as you see.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So first of all, I think, James, you mispronounced
the word cash. You said cachet cash. You're right, Yeah,
I mean, this is, of course, the business model for
many universities is to have foreign students come who pay
full freight. Some students have, some colleges have high numbers
of Chinese students who will pay, you know, the full
freight for universities, and it is a I've had college
administrators confess to me that it is a primary revenue
model for them. But second of all, Harvard is not
Harvard without it's apparently seven thousand foreign students is their
average number that they role was the number I've seen reported,
And Harvard wouldn't be Harvard without their fore students. And
I thought, oh, maybe they're starting to get the point
here that Harvard isn't Harvard. That's the point. That's that's
the object of the Trump administration. And you know, I'm
all for them. I mean, I you know, I know
some Harvard faculty that are good, and I feel bad
for them, except most of them privately say we richly
deserve it. So anyway, I think this is just one
more turn to the screw by the Trump people. And
Harvard has i think late yesterday or maybe this morning,
filed suit saying this is an illegal move. But you know,
the Harvard can afford a lot of lawyers, but the
Trump administration has an unlimited number of lawyers in time
to pursue this.
Speaker 1: So I'm sure the fund of judgeho believes and agrees
with them. You see this back and forth all the time,
the judge who says, no, you actually can't fire those
people because that impeedes their ability to do the work
of the agency, and such and side it which you know,
it has got to come to some sort of point
where these judges simply are not are are restrained show
we say, from over reaching their bonds because we're reaching
a point where there's a legitimacy of competency and confidence
in the courts, which is not a good thing. Where
people may say, good good, there are a bunch of
rogue activists. Get them out of here. Let's just spend
that you don't want that you really don't want that
post court post rule or law world. You mentioned you
know some Harvard educators who believe that they richly deserve it.
Speaker 3: Why Well, because the administration has coddled the left for
so long and you know, allowed all these you know,
firm intive action programs, quote the DEI stuff, ideological hiring also,
you know, refusing to hire. I mean I'm familiar with
a few hiring cases where they had a strong conservative
candidate and the person who ought to have been hired
was rejected. This is going back twenty years now. I
mean there's been systematic bias, not just at Harvard, but
a lot of universities against hiring well qualified conservative professors.
And so I think the Harvard faculty is the most upsided.
I think it's ninety eight percent registered Democrats.
Speaker 1: That's what I figured. But so you're speaking to the
two percent who are not the people who are suppose
you with the you know, with a cone of silence
over there. You were going to mention something else about this.
Speaker 3: Well, I thought you mentioned, you know, judges and injunctions.
I thought maybe you had in mind this case that
came out on Thursday, Trump H. Wilcox. It's one of
those shadow Dockett rocket docket cases. It's not a complete case,
but by a six to three vote, the court said,
you know what, Trump can fire members of some of
these boards and commissions, because you know they've been saying, oh,
these are independent agencies. The president can't do that. And
so anyway, this augurs well for this when the full
case comes before the court, or turn the old Humphreys
executor's case that said a president couldn't fire the head
of the Federal Tray Commission. There is one sentence in
Justice Kagan's descent that really jumps out at me. That's
very short. She said that the principal and a president
can't fire somebody. Here's a quote Undergirdz. A significant feature
of American governance bi partisan administrative bodies carrying out expertise
based functions with a measure of independence from presidential control.
That is the most perfect one sentence encapsulation of the
progressive idea of expert government unaccountable to political bodies, letther
Congress or the president. But it's also got the history wrong.
And so you know in thirty seconds, the reason we
set up the commission model, going all the way back
to the eighteen eighties with you five members, two from
the minority party and three from the president's party, was
to replicate the partisan divisions that exist between the two
parties and their views of how policies should be made
and what its goal should be. Congress figured out one
hundred and fifty years ago that you couldn't escape the
essential disagreements of American politics, and therefore let's copy it.
So there's by saying bi partisan administrative bodies, as Justice
Kagan said, No, there's a look. Everybody who pays attention
knows that the Securities Exchange Commission, Federal Communications Commission, they
are partisan fights in those commissions every year, every week,
and that's on purpose. And so you're trying to pull
the wool over our eyes saying, oh, it's nothing here
about us bipartisan expert people unaffected by politics, and it's
about time for that whole game to end.
Speaker 1: The belief seems to be that the civil service is
this non partisan sort of cadre of experts that floats
over things and makes decisions according to the best data,
unswayed by personal beliefs, which is nice to believe, but
unfortunately it doesn't work out that way. And the people
who seem to believe that it do also believe that
the technocratic expertise will be slightly left coded, if not
explicitly so, because that's just simply the right, correct and
smart thing to do. So while it would be nice
to believe in that sort of civil service, we're being
disabused of a whole lot of notions of our institutions.
Which brings to something else is that if you can't
get the courts to do exactly what you want to say,
or the courts are thwarting you, well then just figure
out a novel way to go around them. Who's reading
a story this week that what ICE is doing with
the Homeland Security is doing as dropping charges on some
guys so they you know, we need our day in court?
All right, Well you know what, we're dropping the charges,
but we're arresting you right now. Yeah, which does focus
the mind. Yes, uh so DC shooting, Jew shooting in DC.
I don't know how else to put it. It has
had the immediate effects, as I wrote on Ricochet was
one You're not gonna hear an awful lot about stochastic
terrorism this week, where people talk about how bad, how
rhetoric that seems to be inflaming people has his story
of voltage that leads to actual terrorism, speeches, violence, et cetera.
Not gonna hear a lot about that this week. And secondly,
Luigi Mangioni, the previous darling of a certain set of
the progressive left, has now been replaced by somebody else
who has had the courage of his convictions. Hasn't burnt himself,
but he's done something brave, he's struck a blow, etcetera, etcetera.
And a surprising number of people are self identifying as
fans of alludism of a murderous lunatic by saying, yes,
this is the inevitable result. It is a necessary result.
It is what happens when you have a genocidal government,
its emissaries are free to walk them among the planet.
Even though these people weren't emissaries of the government at all.
They actually were, from what I understand, interested in outreach
to the ballast Indian community and finding some way to
foster peace. But it didn't matter because it comes down
to it, they're Jews. So yeah, so where does this
go exactly?
Speaker 3: I'm afraid it's heading in some very dark directions. You know,
I have been reflecting the last several years that as
bad as things are, you know, black lives matter, riots
and especially things going on on campus. At least, it's
not yet as bad as it was in the late
sixties and early seventies when we were averaging what one
bombing every three days. I mean, there's something like a
thousand bombings, including on college campuses that killed some people
at the University Wisconsin. I thought, at least, we're not
bombing college campuses yet, We're not having political assassinations yet.
Now I said this before they took shots at Trump
a few months ago, and I'm worried that we are
very quickly edging our way back to that. The Left
is clearly going to legitimize violence. We're going to get
more of it. And this takes us back to the
university story once again. I mean, where did this kid
learn this stuff? He was an English major at the
University of Illinois, Chicago, and I couldn't find out much
about it. But I bet their English department is just
as bad as every other one these days. But they
teach this stuff in the universities or even earlier. I mean,
one problem is is this guy. I suspect this Rodriguez
kid probably arrived at university fully Howard zinified already in
high school, and so the problem goes all the way down.
By the way, interesting news tidbit this morning. This guy's
father was a guest of a Democratic congressman from Illinois
at Trump's speech to Congress two three months back. Now,
you don't blame parents for the sins of the children,
I understand. On the other hand, that's going to be
difficult to explain, and we'll have to see where that
story goes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the grenade doesn't fall far from the tree. Now,
English major, you're probably right that the curriculum that he
into which he was steeped and marinated was probably not
the same as mine. When I was an English major.
I don't remember, you know, spending a lot of time
on Canterbury Tales and you know Kate Chopin's The Awakening
and deciding that I should go out and shoot somebody.
But maybe when you talk about politic I mean, we
can have the whole conversation about how political violence has
been normalized by the left and has been exalted as
the voice of the people, the unsung, et cetera, et cetera.
We're told, of course that the biggest threat in the
country is political violence from the right. But yet we
keep seeing these things happen. But I don't think you're
going to have a summer of riots over Gaza. I
think you need some approximate cause here in the United
States that gets that gin's up, the particular excuse. And
right now it seems to me the well on the
left has a great deal of grievances about Trump. They're
sort of indistinct, free floating, confusing. It's a miasma of gnats.
That's just they can't really do any wave their hands
to try to dispel them. There's no focus point yet,
but there might be who knows everything changes and moves swiftly,
such as your host moving from our general discussion to
one of a particular nature, with Henry Olsen, Senior fellow
with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, author of The
Working Class Republican, Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue
Collar Conservatism, and the host of Beyond the Polls, which
is an election podcast. You can find it right here
on Ricochet. Henry, welcome, Well, thanks for having me. Well
we get to Europe, because yes it matters, and they
had elections and they are significant. But we want to
bring up a piece he wrote last month for unheard.
It was called Trump's dirty hairy theory of justice. And
you explain, with the voters today are unusually ammenable to
the president's methods. I was just talking with somebody about
this yesterday. It's like, you know, if you guys don't
do anything, then and you don't do anything, and you
import more of the problem and you gaslight the people
who say that there is a problem. Eventually somebody comes
along to try to solve the problems and the excesses
that the margins are not going to bother the people
who are concerned about these things because fine, something's finally
being done. Is that what you're talking about?
Speaker 2: Pretty much? You know what Dirty Harry was For people
who may not have seen the nineteen seventy one movie
made Clint Eastwood's career in a sense, as he played
a cop who was consistently frustrated by Warren Court era
rulings that basically put procedure over justice and let criminals
go free and employed extra legal methods to pursue justice.
And I think that's what's going on here is it's
quite obvious that there are millions of people here who
were let in in violation of law. Many of them
are not committing crimes, but way too many of them are.
And even if they aren't, they're not supposed to be here,
you know, violating the law. And so Trump is pursued
doing that and sometimes looking a little askance or looking
the other way when procedure gets in the way. And
I think for his voters, as long as he's dealing
with the problem, he's pursuing justice and not letting law
get in the way, and they're justifying with that.
Speaker 1: I was talking to somebody yesterday about the proposed Medicare
cuts and they were saying, this is going to be
very bad for hospitals. It's going to be it's going
to be dreadful, and I said, well, and again in
this conversation, I was not defending. I was just simply
explaining what the logic was. Well, that there will be
significant cuts because the hospital is no longer have to
because Medicare will medicate whatever we're talking We'll never have
to give money again to illegals, to which the person responded, oh, well,
then grade fine, they'll just go to the emergency rooms.
And I said, well, no, actually, the idea is that
they won't be here, and that seems that seems to
be like a stunning revelations like that we have no
choice but to fund these people because they're the option
of just saying no, I'm sorry, you don't belong here,
you're not a citizen, and here you came, and you
slipped through, you ignored all your court dates, you are
going to be deported. Seems to be off the table
for an awful lot of people. But it's it's pretty
much everything on the table for a lot of others,
isn't it.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I mean, look, going back to COVID, nobody
could get together outdoors until you were protesting something approved
by the progressive a lead, and then nobody can get
COVID if you're protesting racism, right right. So the thing
is that what they're shocked about is that somebody is
pursuing matters of culture and matters of law, of economics,
but predominantly matters of culture using all the same techniques
and the same sort of intensity that the left is
pursued for fifty or sixty years, and they're shocked, shocked
to discover there's gambling going on in this new federal
government state. Now, hello, McFly, you built it. You are
now have to deal with that. And the fact is
that these Medicaid cuts are not cuts. You know what
they are is, well, if you serve through state funds
illegal aliens, people who shouldn't be here anyway that you
recognize in your state law, we're going to not reimburse
your Medicaid program at the same rate. So the states
get to make a choice. You know, nobody is boarched
off the rolls, and you know they're the other thing.
It's that the biggest so called cuts are saying, well,
you have if you're able bodied and you don't have
dependent children, and you're not pregnant, and you're under the
age of sixty five, you have to at least try
to work or go to school or provide community service
twenty hours a week. And the CBO says, well, that
means millions of people will lose their healthcare, to which
most Trump voters would say, damn straight. If you can't
help yourself, you don't deserve our help. So these aren't cuts.
And this is the sort of thing that the left
is used to having a monopoly over the language, and
we can't let them do that. And I think what
they're finding is increasingly the right is not letting them
do that again. They're they're shocked to discover that the
right is not simply the Washington generals paid different for
the hard.
Speaker 1: Should should note to everybody that we did, indeed catch
the fact that you made both the Casablanca and a
Back to the Future reference. I think in the span
of about seven seconds.
Speaker 3: That's and Dirty Harry too, right now.
Speaker 2: No, hey, look, I am just a rolling culture machine
for anything made before the year nineteen ninety four. Well, James,
I can do I can call fiction too, and that
was nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 3: So I don't know, James, if you've caught the news
out of California where Coveror Newsom has not only announced
no further enrollments of illegal aliens in Medicaid, but existing
illegal alien enrollees have to start making a copey, maybe
Henry should talk about Newsom's obvious crab march to the
right to try to run for president. But by the way,
you mentioned Dirty Harry. I can't resist this. I think
it was Richard Granier who pointed out that that was
the first mainstream Hollywood movie that talked back to liberalism, right,
I mean, you laid out theme about the war in court.
But my favorite scene you may remember it, James, is
when dirty Harry Callahan gets his new partner, a young
Hispanic guy named Chico. Nothing subtle about that, and he
looks at him skeptically. He says, what's your background? He says,
degree in sociology from San Jose State Hallahead looks at
him and says, oh, you'll go far. That just perfect, right,
I mean, fifty years ahead of the whole DEI world
we see these days, right, But I was especially interested
in catching up with you on the scene in Europe,
which is of a piece with ours in a lot
of ways. And you know, you know, things down to
the precinct level, which is scary because I don't, I mean,
there's something wrong with you, Henry. I've been saying this
for forty years. But let's start with the United Kingdom.
You know, I woke up here two weeks ago and
saw a tweet from Prime Minister Kirs Starmer saying, you know,
immigration to Britain is not a right, it's a privilege
that has to be earned, and I thought, well, this
is new for those guys are even more open border
than Joe Biden was and then I picked up the
news that Nigel Faraja's Reform Party swept the municipal elections.
That was hardly reported in the US press. I had
to go to the British press to see the full
dimensions of it. It was staggering. And they're now polling
number one, and I think the Tories have fallen in
number three. So first of all, the two part question
is Farage for real? I mean, is Reform now going
to replace the Tories? Are the Tories in such deep
trouble that will they come back? I mean, give us
your thumbnail assessment of what the turmoil that's going on
in the UK.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Parage is for real, Reform is for real, and
the Tories are in an existential crisis. There's a book
written many years ago about how the Liberal Party went
from running Britain. Oh yeah, right, the Strange Death of
Liberal England. There's a better than fifty percent chance that
we are in the middle of the strange death of
Conservative England that the Tory Party. And the basic question
is simple is that throughout the Western world, conservative voters
are increasingly pushing back against a liberal elite, and liberal
includes many Conservatives because I mean the liberal with a
small continental l that doesn't care about nationalism and doesn't
care about citizenship, and you see it in immigration and
you see it in trade. They just don't care. It's
open borders all the way. And conservative voters say, no, actually,
we don't think that's right. We think that UoS a
duty as citizens and that means protecting our way of
life and our standard of living, to which most elites
in the conservative movements say, sorry, I can't hear you.
You say you want more freedom, more liberty, and that's
not what they're saying. So what's happened is is that
the right in Britain has finally given up. In the
Conservative Party well ram things for fourteen years and didn't
keep any of their promises. And the most stunning thing
was in twenty nineteen when they basically have a Trumpian
victory where they win votes that they've never gotten before
from blue collar, former labor voters, and then they proceed
to govern and ignore all of their promises. And what
Reform is doing is getting the right of the Tory
Party and the former labor working class voter in the
same party. And that's a plurality in British poety.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well with a dirty Hall Harry that you know,
where people are constrained by what they believe they're allowed
to say and to think, and there's an inevitable reaction
that exceeds what people.
Speaker 1: Thought it would be. Is this not going all the
way back to Enoch Powell? Is this not going back
to the idea of some sort of British identity that
deserves to be maintained. It's an idea that's been delegitimized
in the upper British culture time. You know.
Speaker 2: The thing is that Enoch Powell spoke in a language
that Nigel Farajen never uses, you know, right, Nigel Farage
never talks about rivers of blood is of blood. There
are plenty of non white British citizens who are part
of Reform, which is one of the things that always
shocks people is why is it that, you know, the
chairman of Reform is somebody from either Pakistan or India.
I forget where's the a us off is from? But
you know, and the fact is that there are plenty
of people who are British even though they are not
of white heritage. And that's not something I think that
Powell could ever have admitted, and then you've got the
non conventional economic Well.
Speaker 3: Just look at the leader, sorry interrupt, just look at
the leader of the Tory Party right now, Kemmy Badanock, right,
born of Kenyan parents. Yeah, okay, sorry.
Speaker 2: And succeeding Rishish Shunoch, you know, Adu of Indian parentage,
who is British, born in and raised in Britain. But
that's the Conservative Party. And the fact is the Conservative Party,
like all conservative parties built in the post war era,
is coming apart. It's coming apart because the Liberal and
as John Howard of Australia said that the Liberal Party
of Australia, which is the Conservative party down there, big
l like classical right, could contain liberal and conservative elements,
you know, which is say people who are concerned first
about freedom, that people concerned first about tradition can find
their homes are. What happens is people who are concerned,
who are upper income and educated now don't care about
conservative culture the left, and there's no longer a chance
to combine them in opposition to something when the center,
when the left has in fact embraced some form of capitalism.
So all of these Western parties are finding there nineteen
forty five to nineteen ninety nine era coalitions going away,
and the Tory Party remains split between people who would
actually rather be the right wing of the left than
those who would rather be the establishment wing of the right.
And I don't think they'll solve that problem before the
next election. And I think they will be I think
there's a better than fifty percent chance that they'll have
fewer than fifty seats in the next parliament.
Speaker 3: Wow. Well, the one more question about the Tory Party.
You know, in America we still talk about our rhinos,
right Republicans in name only, who they aren't endangered species
like African rhinos, And you know, the Republican Party became
more self identified conservative party, which we are going to see
that now. What I hear from our friends like Andrew
Roberts and others is that that never happened to the
Tory Party in Britain, even with the strong influence of
Margaret Thatcher. After she left, it snapped back and you
have a lot of I guess we'd call them Tino's
Tories in name only, right right, And I mean Andrews says,
you know, half the members of the Tory Party in Parliament,
and this was true under Boris Johnson. Are actually not
very ideological. They're Tory Party members out of convenience and
ambition because that's the way there are constituency rules. And
I think you can see that the party really lost
its way, and I don't know is there a chance
that they can Well you just said your prediction is
they're going to get wiped out, but I don't have
to solve that problem if they're ever going to come back.
Speaker 2: I think those of us who are small Sea Conservative
or not ought not to be wedded to the big
C Conservative. Yeah, okay, I would have voted reform if
I were in Britain in four I am enthusiastically for reform,
not that I agree with everything Forage says and so forth,
because I think the Tory Party in Britain is essentially
now an expression of class preference.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. The people I know who in Britain who
are voting reform were not Tories before. So there's this
there's a spectrum of legitimacy, it seems. In Europe, right,
there's reform, then maybe a f D and then down
below that the French, because the French are always castigating
their own right, but respectability seems to be coming up somewhat.
Are Let's look at AfD first, which I believe was
you know, investigated and found to be beyond the pale.
But they're not going away.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 2: Well, that's the thing that you in a democracy, you
can't abolish voters. And the elites have this sense that well,
if we can whole control the narrative, or we control
the leadership, you know, we can put this thing to bread.
But in a democracy, public opinion is everything. To quote
somebody who once had a beard and ended the Civil war,
you know, is that so they could aband AfD tomorrow
and it wouldn't matter. It wouldn't matter because a quarter
of Germans want the policies that AfD have. So somebody
would come and create a new party called DFA and
you know, and yeah, this happened in Belgium, is that
they had a right wing party, a populist anti immigrant party,
and they actually moved to abolish Vlam's Block, and Vlam's
Block dissolved itself ahead of the court hearing and reconstituted
itself as Vloms Belong.
Speaker 1: And guess what they're still gidding bo AfD, though for
those people who don't know describe what they are. Two
main things would be there are two primary issues that
are gaining them popularity.
Speaker 2: Well, the two primary issues that would be gaining them popularity,
first of all overwhelmingly as immigration, and the second is
i would say, German culture. It's where does AfD do best.
It does best in places that are not doing well economically,
and they also do well in places that historically have
been very supportive of particularly Catholic identity. You see where
they're take a look at the same regions on the
Czech Bavarian border that backed the Bavarian People's Party and
the Weimar Republic and gave huge majorities to the Christian
and Social Union in the post World War two environment
are still voting for the CSU, but they're giving the
AfD their strongest level of support in the West, and
that's not depressed industrial territory, that's Catholic ritory. So mainly
those two things that are gaining them gaining them supporting, but.
Speaker 1: They are tightly bound together, the immigration and the idea
of German cost.
Speaker 2: They are tightly bound together, but they're also several, you know,
and this is the thing is that if suddenly the
government tomorrow decided well, actually we're just going to steal
AfD's immigration policies, which is what the Social Democrats did
in Denmark, it wouldn't mean the AfD would go away
any more than the populist right went away in Denmark.
You know, populist right in Denmark still gets about twenty
percent of the vote, split a number of different parties
because there are other things that are pushing it. It's
not a one issue thing. And that's one of the
things that people tend not to understand. They tend to think, well,
this is just a protest party, and you move the
source of the protests and the party will go away. No,
this is an identity thing. This is a worldview that
has its expression and its saliens from immigration, but it
extends well beyond that and is simply uncoalitionable with a
move a political element that is dominated by a progressive
left that sees not know. Basically, the progressive lefts argument
worldwide now is if you backed a system of government
and a series of laws that were normal throughout the
West when we defeated Nazism, you are now a fascist.
Yeah yeah, And so these people still believe that, you know,
the system of laws that we had as recently as
like nineteen eighty are you know that society was actually
pretty good? And why can't we have something like that today,
you know, not turning back the clock, but preserve and
conserving if you will, those values, and that is simply
uncoalitionable with the modern left.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let's let's head east a little bit. I mean, uh,
you know, we know that, Uh they're doing law fair
in France against marine Lapan and in Germany against a
f D, and let's have to see how that plays out.
But in Eastern Europe you're seeing other weird things that
hard for Americans understand because of those peculiar parliamentary systems.
And by the way, sometimes when you post the europolls, Henry,
I can't tell. Is the color coding also red for
conservative and blue for liberal and everywhere else.
Speaker 2: In the world blue is conservative?
Speaker 3: Is that okay? Because and then you also have eight
parties to cope with and it's just a nuisance. But
but you know, so you Poland and.
Speaker 2: Romania in the Netherlands.
Speaker 3: But right, yeah, the smaller the country, the more parties.
You know, I want a party for my own block, right,
it's for Prince and groct andance. I don't know. Uh
So Romania invalidated an election. I knew. I knew that
was a mistake for me to bring that up. Uh So,
Romania they invalidated action here recently because of suppose Russian
I don't want say suppose. I'm sure there was Russian interference.
That is not new. I'm well schooled on the way
Russia has mucked around in Bulgaria's politics for at least
the last twenty five years, and we don't seem to
be bothered by that, but or invalidate their elections. But
they invalidated and then the establishment candidate managed to speak
by here in the last few days, I guess. And
then I'm confused in Poland too, where I think there's
similar lawfare, and Shenanigan's going on break those two down
for us briefly, if you will.
Speaker 2: What happened in Romania is that the thing to remember
is that in what gave Trump his victory was over
the span of a decade, he has transformed a minority
movement into a tenuous majority coalition, and he's done that
by gaining the support of people who actually don't like
a lot of his policies, but they prefer him to
the left, and that's kind of like the nikky Haley
wing of the Republican And by adding opula and working
class voters across the spectrum from Democrats who have just
thrown up their hands at a modern party that doesn't
seem to care about them anymore, that's how he gets
to a majority. The Europeans haven't gotten to the majority
status yet, Okay. That's basically what happened in Romania is
that this party that didn't exist seven years ago has
suddenly come and gotten forty five I think they ended
up with about forty six percent of the vote. And
what held them back finally was that it's just too new,
it's too radical. So the sort of people who say, well,
I prefer Trump to Clinton said, well, actually I prefer
this nik Kashur Dan to George Simeon. So the center right,
the Hailey voter of Romania backed the establishment in four years,
that may not be the case. Yeah, And then you've
got inter ethnic things, you know, like sur five to
eight percent of the population is Hungarian and this guy
is an ultra Romanian nationalist. So the Hungarian Vogue turned
off on mass to oppose him, and that was another
reason why he lost in Poland. Yes, the establishment is
going on law fair against law and justice, which is
the populist conservative party there. But guess what, you can't
engage in law fair against twenty million Poles. And well
you can, but that's called Putin's Russia. And even the
establishment in Europe isn't willing to actually have phony rigged
elections and put people in jail and have people fall
out of fourth floor windows consistently. So what's happened is
is that you've got the mayor of Poland, the mayor
of Warsaw, who is a cultural liberal and an economic conservative,
perfectly at home as a Nicky Haley Republic who is
the running for president. He has called for abortion in
a country that's the most religious in Europe. He has
called for the ban. As mayor of Varce's imposed a
ban on the wearing of religious symbols even at your desk,
so you can't have like a crucifix on your private
desk if you're a Warsaw person. He supports LGBTQ rights issues,
again in a country where people have traditional views about
homosexuality and same sex marriage, and his coalition that got
him into parliament included socially conservative, rural voters who didn't
like law and justice. So guess what's happened now You
look and they say, well, if we support this guy,
then we're basically endorsing social liberalism, and a lot of
these voters refuse to do that, and that gives Law
and Justice a chance to win the runoff is that
their candidate finished second. The three anti abortion candidates got
a majority of the vote in a very high turnout
first round where the turnout was highest in the cities
where the liberals, the a Republicans and people to their
right and to do well. So if you look at
this and you say, in a democracy, public opinion is everything.
The center left and the establishment allies on the right
continually thumbed their nose at public opinion, considering them troglegite
or fascist. And guess what it's, you know, a revenge
of the Jedi. Ah. My point is that Poland is
divided like we are, and it matters. And if you're
going to be an elite that basically says public opinion
doesn't matter because we're right and you're wrong. You should
expect to have a come up and sit the balance
box at some point, and I think Europe is maybe
five to eight to ten years behind US and a
strong minority becoming a tentative majority.
Speaker 3: Well. Now, one of the interesting things about Poland right
now is that I was not aware of this, but
their economy has been booming, and I think like they
already have passed Japan in per capita income, which is
an amazing thing to think about. And that suggests to
me that the election really is going to be decided
not on the old mix of economy and culture, but
it's going to be culture over economy. Maybe I don't know,
it sounds like it might happen that way. Yeah, okay,
well now let me let me ask you. Let's turn
to hungry for a moment. We're less than a year
out from another national election. I hear polls showing Orbon
and his Fidees party is in running behind, is in
some trouble, but they've always been very clever and hardy campaigners.
What maybe it's a little earlier for you to make
a call, But what are you expecting? What are you
looking for there?
Speaker 1: What?
Speaker 3: What?
Speaker 2: Which we call an election, not a tenant, I know,
I know, but what I.
Speaker 3: Have they have they outlaid, they're welcomes. It's just they're
tired of having this one party in for fifteen years,
or there's something else happening.
Speaker 2: What I argued years ago is that again this is
you know, let's be let's be honest. Orbon has engaged
in some what would be considered thugish techniques, you know,
which isn't He doesn't put his opponents in prison and
so forth. But they do have some sort of consolidation
overall lot of mass market media through interlocking ownerships and
so forth, that tends not to report about the opposition,
you know, not just attacking like what they do here.
And you know, it's not like they at least mentioned
Trump's name and you know, give him a chance to
say something before they have ninety seconds of telling you
how terrible he is, you know. Orbon doesn't even do
that with some of the media, cantill they don't even
mention the opposition. But again, public opinion is everything unless
you're going to abolish the voters. Orbon is kind of
facing the same problem that the elites and Brussels are facing.
So Their argument I made years ago is why should
you be surprised that Orbon wins? Is that he's combined
economic capitalism with social support and Hungarian nationalism. And oh,
by the way, if you look at every single election
going back to nineteen ninety, which are the first free
elections after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that coalition
gets a majority. It used to be split between four
parties and now it's in one party. Why should you
be surprised that a guy who I don't know represents
public opinion of Hungarians wins an election in Hungary?
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, what's happened.
Speaker 2: The economy is in the toilet. They've got high inflation,
they're cutting back on subsidies and so forth, and they're desperate.
They're engaging in price controls. They're desperate to restore economic
growth and low inflation. Before the election, and they're running
It used to be they were running against representatives of
the Brussels e League. And you know, it's kind of
like if you were if you were the mayor of
New York and Ghostbusters, here's here we go, and you
had a choice.
Speaker 1: That's the fourth between.
Speaker 2: Doctor Vankman and people who say there's ghosts or the
guy and the beard from the EPA department, right, and
and what is it that Bill Murray says. He says,
you know that if you believe us, you know you'll
you know, you know, you know, we basically we represent
the people you care about, millions of registered voters, and
that's when they get the okay to go checkout goes
on the side. Yeah, they used to run against elites
who are Social Democrats who were based in Budapest. Now
they're running against a former PETESH person who is basically saying,
you can have what you like about Orbon with me
Hungarian nationalism. And so it's he's kind of like Orbon plus.
And so yeah, he's running ahead in the polls. I
have looked at all all the constituencies. I know exactly
where the election is going to turn, somewhere around Lake Balaton,
and I might be there too.
Speaker 1: I like to ask one of my trademark vague, interminable
and ignorantly sourced questions. Here we're seeing the rise of nationalism, obviously,
and I just remember all my life being told this
is very bad thing by the left. Nationalism is bad.
Nationalism gave us World War One. One World War Two.
Nationalism is good when Woodrow Wilson is trying to give
everybody there in a little country. But nationalism is bad.
Nationalism now is good for Gaza and the Palestinians, and
on some parts of the left, nationalism good for Ukraine.
It's nice to see them standing up for that. But
in general, no, it's a bad idea. But what we
had there eventually in the post war Europe was a
movement towards a unified Europe, the Common Market, the EU,
et cetera, that would respect national identities but at the
same time subsume them into a general transnational project. And
my question to you is might that have worked, because
I think that it would have. I think it would
have been cape. It would have been possible to create
a regulatory, legal, economic structure that spanned all of Europe,
but at the same time was keenly interested and invested
in maintaining national identity. But I think that it fell
apart because of the overweening desires of the people in
Brussels to absolutely control every elemental atom in the various
constituent states. I think Brexit happened when people woke up
one day and looked at a a story on the
front page of the Telegraph and the Mirror in every
other paper that said the EU was about to regulate
kettles and how fast they boiled in order to stave
off climate change. And I think that's when people said,
that's it. I'm not going to be part of this anymore.
So did they just was it overreach that doomed the
project or were the seeds of its downfall there in
the construction of it in the first place.
Speaker 2: I think it a little bit of both. You know.
Is that let's take a look at the United States
of America. The United States of America started as thirteen
separate colonies, and they became a country through a shared struggle,
the War for Independence, and then it took many years
afterwards to finally settle on the way in which you
could maintain diversity and unity. And that was the Constitution.
What the fundamental thing about the Constitution was that it
was not intended to have a government in Washington that
would regulate the things that most people would deal with
on a daily basis. They would be one with respect
to the shared project, which is foreign and removing the
seeds for discord among the states. Hence why there was
effectively established a free trade zone among the thirteen states
and everything else was left to the states. And first
of all, the European Union was not born out of
a shared struggle. It was born out of a shared
failure the feet of World War Two. So you didn't
have that sort of buy in. You know. Initially, what
you had was a buy in from the six original members,
which were basically the countries who had been conquered by
one or another of them, you know, the Germans conquering
the other five and then being conquered in turn by
the Allies, who basically said we're going to bind ourselves
together in an economic not a political union, so that
we never go to war again. Okay, that could have worked.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well right, I mean right, remember, I mean it
began as the European Coal and Steel a union. Right
now now we OUTSOEUS steel to China and we've outlawed coal.
Speaker 2: So what's left, well, well, what's left is the Eurovision
Song contest, so it's not going out of a struggle.
And then what you have not done is real is
create that clear division of responsibilities. In a weird sense,
they've inverted the American Constitution they try and regulate directly
or indirectly everything that's economic, and they have no common
foreign policy, and so you know, I would say the
invasion of Ukraine gives them an opportunity to actually create
a shared struggle, which is the preservation of freedom throughout
the European subcontinent or the European continent outside of you know,
the parts that Russia controls, by creating a unified common
defense and reverting almost everything except for free trade and
a common currency and a central bank to the nations. Now,
of course, that would mean there's no such thing as
a green New Deal. That would mean there's no such
things as a European Court of Human Rights. In other words,
the left can't go along with that. But that I
think is what the populace right would be accepted, would
find acceptable. But you know, absent that, then this can
continue to be a project that is neither fish nor foul,
and as a sense, just flounder.
Speaker 3: Yeah, all right, Henry, let's go out today with one question.
It's a big one about a scene here at home.
So you know you have been acute an early perceptor.
I guess i'd say of Trump's abilities, his appeal the
coalition he's put together. You mentioned earlier that it's a
somewhat fragile one. So this is a big subject. So
I'm going to limit you to giving us briefly the
top two vulnerabilities or hazards that Trump and his supporters
should be on guardigans right now.
Speaker 2: The number one thing is failing to recognize the breath
of your coalition. That typically what's happened in the last
thirty years is that people campaign to create a new
coalition and then they abandon the new elements of it
when they take power, give power to the base. And
you see elements of that in the Trump thing, you know,
which is there's no real desire for a ban abolishing
the Department of Education. It may not be something that
is particularly of salience to people who voted for Biden
and Clinton and Obama, but those aren't. That's why Trump
has got a majority is because of those voters. So
by giving into the temptation to satisfy the base across
the board and ignore the swing voter, that's the first thing.
Speaker 1: You have to worry about.
Speaker 2: And then just from an issue standpoint, you can't have
You have to again deal with public opinionublic opinion wants
is an economy that doesn't go into recession and where
inflation is under control, but that the gains to the
economy crew more to the workers on the margin than
to the owners of capital. Trump has been very uneven
about pursuing this. And you know, the fixation on tariffs
on tariffs, off tariffs, hot, tariffs coal. People don't want
that is that is, they'd be happy and would be
willing to give a chance to a new economic policy
that promises to over the long run, long run being
a political four years change, you know, put us on
a new trajectory. But hot, cold, up down, Yes, No,
is not something that they want. Is that Trump's job
approval ratings started to go south on or around Liberation Day,
it stopped going south on or around uh, the deal
with China. Yeah, and it started going back up. You
start going back to the up down up, you know,
hot as cold, you know blue is red sort of
what's going on then? And I guarantee you that by
July fourth, Trump's job approval rating will be down again.
Speaker 1: We will consider your fourth pop culture reference to be
tariff on tariff off as a reference to karate Kid.
And for that we salute you, and for any other reasons.
Andrew's book The Working Class Republican Ronald Reagan in the
Return of the Blue Collar Conservatism, And of course he's
the host of Beyond the Polls, which you can find
right here on the Ricochet Audio Network. Henry, thanks so
much for joining us today. It's been fun. We'll get
into another forty five minutes, but the store next time
we're going to talk to you, we expect a sprinkling
of pop culture references from the late nineties or even
the early aughts, so so stretch your horizons and your
things in your cultural cupboard. Thanks are here before we go.
There was a book, it's called Original Sin, just lighting
up Washington. Everyone's a buzz about it. I'm sure I
see the authors everywhere being asked a series of just
absolutely tough questions, just every one of them being skewered,
hoisted batards the whole business or not. Stephen, what do
you make of this? I mean, it's the couple of
things that amused me this week is well, we shouldn't
be talking about any of this because Joe Biden is sick,
and that why did the president release the her tapes?
Now when he's just trying to take attention away from
his own failures and the rest of it. Chuck Schumer
is saying, we want to move on. We're focused on
the future, which is what they always think that people
want to believe. But I think there is a general,
growing national question about who exactly was the president anyway,
And when you have revelations about the role of Hunter Biden,
I don't think a lot of people actually bought in
to that guy having a role of any significance whatsoever.
The Hunter businesses, the stuff that that that makes my
eyebrows go up the most, That on the auto pen,
that on the inability to do anything best at eleven
o'clock in the morning. Do you think there's going to
be an accounting because I don't.
Speaker 3: Well, there should be, And apparently the House Oversight Committee
says they're going to resume hearings, and they had not
yet subpoenaed the senior White House staff under Biden, but
they should, and the resistance of poena, then I think
that there are actual prosecutions of this. I mean, one
of the problems with this book is that it hints
at who was running the White House, but seems incurious
about what the process was and asking about any particular
or specific decisions, like really, how did Joe Biden review
twenty four hundred pardons all on one day in January?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: I mean, this is absurd. It's a whitewash for the media.
By the way, Jane, you're gonna love this, James. Here
are two headlines from the last week. The Washington Post
editorial board headline was Biden too frail for the job?
Voters should have been informed? And the USA Today Biden's
cancer diagnosis raises the question was he ever in good
enough health?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 3: You know that, God, somebody could have told us. Who
might have been that? Right? I mean, you know, it's
just a mystery, it is now. I you know here,
I'm sorry, I'm going to be very harsh and rude,
and people think I'm a moral monster. But I think
that there's a fitting irony of Biden's diagnosis of cancer,
an advanced case of it, apparently, because he has been
a malignant force in American politics in his entire career.
I mean, I think you can put an awful lot
of the blame for the toxic character of American politics
on his behavior in the Bork nomination thirty five years ago.
You know, there's a great quote I have in one
of my books where Biden said in nineteen eighty six,
right before he became chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee,
he said, if President Reagan sends up Robert Borke, I'd
probably have to vote for him. He's qualified. That presidents
should get their appointees of they're qualified. And if the
groups tear me apart, I'll just have to live with it.
I'm not Ted Kennedy exact quote. I'm memorized. And of course,
within thirty seconds of the Bork nomination, Biden capitulated to
the groups, who also we now ran his White House,
the groups and Ted Kennedy right, and he totally distorted
the U digital politics ever since. And I think that's
spread across the board in politics. And I think that
and they tried to run that drill over again, right.
Just ask Brett Kavanaugh, Just asked Clarence Thomas. Just ask
any number of nominees and other figures that we now
decide that personal attacks are legitimate and is now main
part of the Democratic playbook. He was the author of that.
So it's always been a myth that he was, oh,
good old moderate Joe from Scranton. He nevererly stood for
anything except himself. And I think that's now fully revealed everybody.
And my last word is all those people who work
for him Donalan, Jake Sullivan, Steve Schetty, all the rest,
and they should never have a job again, ever anywhere
in politics, and certainly not in government.
Speaker 1: I was having a conversation last year with somebody in
England who was a member of the who wrote columns
for a very influential paper, who was just who was
saying that Joe Biden instructor as a kindly grandpa figure.
And I said, no, No, that may be because he's dim,
and he's in the marbles, have all rolled down a
hole in his spine and clattered out somewhere on the floor.
But let me tell you, this man is a prevaricating
intellectual nullity of boundless self regard. He's an awful man,
and anybody's been watching him all these times knows that
he is an awful man. And the way his positionship
shifted from this to that with equal conviction. I mean,
just because he got soft as putting in his dotage
doesn't mean that he hasn't been a nasty fellow before.
And again the self regard, the inflation of the resume,
made the plagiarism, the constant need to I mean, it's
okay to be a guy from Scranton who makes it
into the Senate. That's accomplishment enough. But he's always going
back and finding apples from his past and polishing them
a little bit more. I just I cannot stand them
in regardless of politics, regardless of them because there were
times when I, you know, when I agreed with some
of the positions that he had, but there was just
a sneer and pointedness to him that I just that,
coupled with the with the egotism, just made him, I thought,
an incredibly unattractive figure. But they got old, and then
he got Then then he was the gravitas plug that
was dropped into the Obama administration to bring it weight
because we were so concerned about the inexperience of the occupant.
Oh good times, good times, as the kids saying before
we go out, one last little thing that we do
that bores everybody because they don't care. But I'll ask you, Steven,
what are you watching on television?
Speaker 3: Nothing?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 3: Now I'm so far behind on so many projects, and
I'm about to go traveling for a month overseas, although
I'll still show up for our weekly conversation. So I
haven't been watching any thing, not even the news.
Speaker 1: But you don't load up your iPad or your iPhone
with content before you go on a trip so you
can watch something. And one of those guys who sits
there on the plane and just looks up.
Speaker 3: Right, No, I probably will do that, but that's ahead
of me, not behind me.
Speaker 1: Well, on my upcoming flight, I plan to take as
usual to Perry Mason's, because there's nothing better sitting down
for your little airplane meal than with a Perry Mason.
You are guaranteed a story, You're guaranteed a mystery, you
are guaranteed a resolution, and then it's done, unlike most
of modern television, which will go on and on and
on for twelve fifteen episodes and drag you to the
last episode where there's a cliffhanger, and then you got
to wait for another two years before they gather everybody
together and do it up again. I am, however, happy
to say that of the many shows that I have cued,
I blasted through one end to end two nights sometimes.
But the first season of and Or as a man
who is utterly completely disgusted with Star Wars and tired
of it and found it to be the children's show
that it actually revealed itself to be. I was stunned
to find that they actually made a grown up version
of it. That an extraordinary piece of storytelling. So now
I got to start season two tonight and then maybe
find on the plane. I'll watch the last episode, stand
up a cheer at three o'clock in the morning as
the plane is arcing its way through the dark. Knight, folks,
you got to go to Ricochet, is what you have
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the comments at Rigoget four point h Bye bye next week, James,