Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I've had people say they want me to
get at least two good Charles CW. Cook rants out
of you with a Molly Coddle in each one or
something or it's equivalent.
Speaker 2: Right, I'm trying to find some what that mocks me out.
Speaker 1: Ask not what your country can do for you, Ask
what you can do for your country.
Speaker 3: Mister Gorbacho, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast.
Speaker 1: Steve Hayward sitting in the host chair today, joined by a.
Speaker 3: Recovered Charles CW. Cook. So let's have ourselves a podcast.
Speaker 4: And you know, it's not like I agree with everything
the administration does. So it's like there's I mean, I
agree with much of what the administration does, but we
have differences of opinion.
Speaker 1: So then I'm a little.
Speaker 4: Stuck in a bind where I'm like, well, I don't
want to, you know, speak up against the administration, but
I don't want to also don't want to take responsibility
for the administrations doing.
Speaker 1: Welcome everybody to the Ricochet Podcast, number seven hundred and
forty four. It's Steve Hayward sitting in for James Lilax today,
who is comforting somewhere over in the wilds of Italy.
I am in the North Atlantic, where it is snowing
at the moment. I'm so far north, but I'm pleased
that we are joined by the fast recovering Charles C. W. Cook,
who's been down with the bubonic plague or something like that. Charles,
how are you feeling and what have you been going
through the last couple of weeks?
Speaker 2: A man, I don't quite know what it is. I
thought it was strap because I work up with a
horrendous razor blade esque sore throat, and then it wasn't
strapped because that went away pretty quickly. But all these
other symptoms came along and now I have what is
really a glorified cold. That's the best part thus far
of my journey. I feel like I'm on the exit ramp. Aha.
Speaker 1: Well, sounds like I'm about to put to sea. When
the sound of that horn blowing in the background, I don't.
Speaker 3: Know if you heard that or not.
Speaker 2: On the exit round then no, I am not right.
Speaker 1: Well you sound good, Charles, so it's good to hear
your voice again. I don't know whether you've been, you know,
in bed, in your cozy your sheets, perhaps avoiding all
the news, but The thing that is amazing me, and
I think everyone is the I think what some people
thought was the inevitable divorce of Donald Trump and Elon
Musk has finally occurred.
Speaker 3: Who knew that the long prospected civil war.
Speaker 1: For America would turn out to be between the forces
of Duke Elon of Musk against the Viscount Donald of
trump Landia. But here we are, and I don't know
where you want to start. I'll give you one of
my opening observations, which is I long expected something like
this for reasons that I think are obvious but maybe
are worth discussing. But one of the blows that Musk
threw down, which I thought was quite outrageous, was saying
Trump is.
Speaker 3: In the Epstein.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: First of all, I'll say this, I don't think there
are any Epstein files or an Epstein list, or if
there was one, it was long ago destroyed and recreating
it is a difficult thing. And second, if there was
such a list, I don't know how Elon Musk would
know who was on it. So that's my first observation,
and then I have several. But I want to hear
what do you have to say about this? Which I'm
sure you may have expected.
Speaker 2: To well, unless that is true, which, for the reason
jee outline strikes me as very unlikely. That is a
truly outrageous thing for Musk to have said, and we
ought not to lose sight of that, purely because the
drama is so interesting. You just do not accuse people
of being a sex criminal in the midst of an
argument for giggles, I think that Musk is on a
manic episode. I mean, the closest analogue that I can
find to the last twenty four hours of Musk is
Kanye West.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: I say that as somebody who admires Musk in many ways,
as a great American eccentric inventor of a long line
of such people, all of whom are crazy. But the
behavior yesterday struck me as being redolent of someone who
has got to be in his bonnet and is now
looking for any weapon at hand. In the course of
yesterday's trade, Musk suggested that Donald Trump is a sex
criminal and is on the Epstein list. He said that
he was going to dismantle SpaceX's program. He said that
he wanted Donald No, he didn't say, that's not fair.
He retweeted the suggestion that Trump be impeached and replaced
with JD. Vance. I mean, these are extreme rhetorical positions
to take, and he just did it one by one,
and I think it just struck me as being manic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, now, if I have this right, he made
his formal exit a week or more ago, which I
think was on the way anyway. I mean, he was
always going to be a temporary government employee, and there's
like specified in the law of how long you can
be such a person with aut all kinds of complications happening.
But then it was shortly after that he criticized the
big Beautiful bill for I think rightly. I think you'll
agree that that it didn't cut down the deficit. That's
really uh. I forget what he called it a travesty
or worse, And it seems to be Charles. He's right
about that, isn't he. I mean, we talked about this
before and should say more about it, but that seemed
to set off Trump.
Speaker 2: One caveat with that. I think he is right about that.
Donald Trump doesn't care about spending, he doesn't want to
reform entitlements, and he has different political imperatives than Musk
Musk is more of a free marketeer. But the one
thing Musk has done on this that I found irritating
Steve is that he will not say aloud the truth
about our fiscal problems. He will not say that this
is being caused by unfunded entitlements, that without reforming Social
Security or Medicare, you cannot fix the budget. He's still saying,
as he did throughout his fora with Doge, that this
is the question of pork. That's the word he used
in his tweet criticizing the bill.
Speaker 1: Pork.
Speaker 2: No, there is pork, of course there is. There is
discretionary spending that should be cut. There's also some ways
for auden abuse, although there's not that much of it.
There's also spending that the executive controls, as in, for example,
USAID that absolutely should be cut by a Republican administration.
But that's not why we're hurtling off the cliff. We're
hurtling off the cliff because however much we raise taxes,
we cannot outpace the growth in Social Security and Medicare.
And it's just telling to me that Musk won't say
that either. In that sense, he's being Trumpian while criticizing Trump.
But generally, yes, I am on Musk side with this question.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was a good warm up rant, Charles. Listeners
will appreciate that you clearly your vigor is returning in
a rapid clip. Well, let's linger on this for a minute.
I thought one notable event of the last ten days
was Jamie Diamond, the very capable chairman of JP Morgan.
Let's remember JP Morgan is one of the only big
banks that was not in serious trouble back in two
thousand and eight, and I think Diamond deserves a lot
of credit for that.
Speaker 3: As any CEO should. And he's a Democrat.
Speaker 1: He was widely rumored to have been on a short
list to be Treasury Secretary for either candidate, but especially
if we had had God forbid President Harris. And he
made this speech last week out at the Rank and
Library significantly perhaps that Gosh.
Speaker 3: We can't keep going on like this.
Speaker 1: The spending is so far out of control and the
debt is piling up so fast that sooner or later,
And I think he said he thought sooner the bond
market was going to make this clear. Yeah, I guess
my gloomy view has been all along is nothing is
going to happen until we have a crisis, at which
point the solutions will all be much worse than what
could be done now, no matter how difficult things are now.
Speaker 2: I think that's exactly right. It's also worth noting that
while that crisis might come in the form of a
rebellion within the bond market, there are automatic cuts to
social Security that will kick in if we don't fix this.
So some of the rhetoric you hear, especially from the Democrats,
that we should not do anything. Hillary Clinton said when
she was running for president we should decrease the age
of which one is eligible for Social Security and Medicare.
That is certainly a popular idea among the Alexandria Acasia
Cortes types. Well, that's not an option that is not
going to happen. If we do nothing, we don't move
into sunlit uplands in which everyone keeps getting Social Security
in Medicare, and we just risk some sort of default
the law asset stands that would have to be executed
by whatever president is unlucky enough to be in office
at that time will do the cutting for Congress unless
it is amending. So yeah, I think we're headed for
either a crisis in the bond market or some sort
of catastrophic economic catastrophe you know that that is caused
by debts being unable to be repaid, or we're going
to see exactly what it is that those who don't
want to cut entitlements say is a crisis because it
has to happen.
Speaker 1: Well, now, another aspect of this fight that's been going
on is Trump saying, well, I know how we could,
you know, balance the budget or reduce the deficit, and
that's to cut off the billions and billions of dollars
of Tesla subsidies. So, first of all, I don't think,
I don't think it amounts of billions and billions.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 1: I haven't looked at the numbers for a long time.
Second of all, you know I'm thinking about the electric
car market. Is if you go back to before the election,
I remember distinctly Musk telling I think the Wall Street
Journal that got should be fine with me. If we
got rid of all the subsidies that Biden laid out,
it might actually be good for Tesla because, as you
probably know, and many listeners may know, Tesla is actually
able to produce their cars profitably with one caveat I'll
come back to. While I think GM and Ford are
still losing something like thirty or forty thousand dollars for
every single electric car they produce, which and they're not
making it up on volume, as.
Speaker 3: The old joke goes, right, And.
Speaker 1: So I think what I think Musk realizes that he
has a competitive advantage, having been at this now for
more than fifteen years of making the electric cars that
the other companies are not able to catch up with
and haven't been able to and it gets worse, and
this is the caveat. So we talk about the subsidies
which the Biden budget blowout tried to limit or to
middle income people and strip away from hir income people
who were collecting most of the tax credits for electric
cars beforehand. But it turns out that Tesla makes a
lot of money selling emission credits to the other automakers
who aren't able yet to meet some of the ambitious
targets for lowering the emissions or the mileage requirements of
their car fleets. So you know, that's actually a more
important subsidy in my mind, because I think that's a
more reckless and dumb subsidy anyway that starts the market.
So and I haven't seen any acknowledgment of that in
the in the media coverage or the social media.
Speaker 3: A fury about what's going on.
Speaker 2: No, and I think Trump is being really unfair here
to mask This is a line that has been picked
up in Congress as well. He's just against this because
he doesn't want to lose his subsidies. He's been pretty
consistently opposed to those subsidies. The one thing that he
has said alongside opposing subsidies for evs is that he
doesn't want any subsidies for oil and gas either, so
he'd like a level playing field. But it's just not
the ca that he is angry with this bill because
it kills the subsidies. It should kill more subsidies. Steve,
I think Republicans are missing an opportunity. I have said,
and I always miss out the border funding. So that's
my fault because I do support that. But the bill
I would like to have seen and will adding the
border funding as well, would have said. The twenty seventeen
Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is hereby renewed permanently. The
twenty twenty two Inflation Reduction Act is hereby repealed in
its entirety. There's no reason Republicans should be allowing any
of these subsidies to go through. And the left ha's
got this idea that we simply can't compete with China
technologically without the Inflation Reduction Act, which is a preposterous
thing to think, given that we were doing pretty well
at competing technologically with China prior to twenty twenty two.
So I don't think that Musk is basing his opposition
to this on eve subsidies or mandates or what you will.
I think he's genuinely worried about the name since fiscal situation.
But as with Doge, he is mischaracterizing a little bit
what is causing that, and that's going to be a
problem for him in this fight.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: Well, now the subsidy question, the Biden people were dabblishly
clever in directing a lot of the money to rip states.
Speaker 3: Yep. And so you know, you know what happens.
Speaker 1: It's just like the whole ethanol game in Iowa all
over again.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: Republican presidential candidates are always petrified against coming out for
the ethanol mandates and subsidies because that's the first the
nation primaries we all know, or caucus every four years,
and this has now expanded that idea. So you have
a lot of these red state senators in the Midwest
who love these subsidies for wind and solar power because
it's you know, creating the phony government funded jobs there.
It does turn out I did a calculation on this
a long time ago now, but it turns out that
one mischievous proposal will put an end to a lot
of this, which is all right, let's have uniform subsidence
the East based on not the technology, but on the
energy output that you're able to produce. Because it turns
out that even if you say the oil and gas
industry get x millions of dollars in subsidies, they produce
eighty percent of our energy, right, and so the subsidy
and you can argue about what qualifies as a subsidy,
but if you go by the subsidy for per BTU
or water or whatever energy measurement you wish to use,
you find out that the subsidy for oil and gas
is iiny, it's minuscule. And if you got rid of
all the subsidies, oil and gas wouldn't change their output
a bit, whereas if you reduce the subsidies or made
it linked to the energy output wind and solar in
particular would have a really time. I do think the
one wild card here, and sorry to ramble a bit,
is a nuclear power. I'm very frustrated with this whole subject,
and I don't understand why we have not been able
to figure out over all these years how to drive
the cost down. And so there the argument as well,
if we really want big baseload power, it might, by
the way, still survive. When are my theoretical proposal of
having a uniform subsidy for a unit of energy produced,
I'm not sure.
Speaker 3: I'd have to do some advanced math on all that.
Speaker 1: But that's the other caveat about And apparently it's been
a big argument among Republicans in the House and the
Senate as to how to treat the nuclear subsidies in
the big beautiful bill.
Speaker 2: Yeah, nuclear is an odd one in the I almost
feel that we should subsidize nuclear just to offset all
of the crap that those who want to put nuclear
power into effect I had to deal with over the
last fifty years. You know, we had a small look,
I'm not big on great national plans. You know, I
am romantic about the highway system because I love cause,
but I do take the conservative criticism of it, which
was that it was ultimately a federal program. But I
would be much more open to a grand national project
to nuclearize all of our power than to almost anything else,
So I can see some sort of room for that.
The system you just described, though, with subsidies, does make
the case for abolishing the minuscule oil and gas subsidies, right,
because if they wouldn't output any less energy as a
result of it going away, then why do we need it.
It's just a small distortion in the market. But yeah,
I I think that the bill is a problem if
you are worried about our fiscal situation, and it's a
problem if you want Republicans to do more. Where Trump also, Steve,
and I wonder what you think about this, where Trump
also has the upper hand, is just as a matter
of elemental political gravity, it is the case that we
have what one two votes to spare in the House
of Representatives, and that a lot of the people who
are going to be expected to push this over the
line are squishes. Now yesterday, Elon Musk tweeted out, should
we create a new party, a third party for the
eighty percent of people in the middle who don't feel
represented by the geopy or the Democrats. I think that
is an exaggeration. I don't think it is quite eighty percent,
But of course there are a lot of independents who don't.
What I think is unusual about this suggestion, though, and
does demonstrate a certain naivety on Mask's part. Is Number one,
we have what was a fairly decisive victory from Donald
Trump in twenty twenty four, and still he can't get
half of what Republicans would like to do. On why
does Musk think that would get better if you created
a party in the middle? And second, is he really
under the impression that the middle of the political spectrum
in the United States is desperately in favor of cutting entitlements?
Because I don't think it is.
Speaker 1: Is it right? Well, this is one of those cases,
and I've experienced this from Silicon Valley and tech people
for years now. Is they they tend to not understand
why social and political problems can't be solved exactly like
an engineering problem. And look, Musk is in some ways
the perfect median voter. Let's recall that fifteen years ago
he was all in for Obama and I don't remember
if he was for Biden or not eight years ago
or whatever, but or four years ago, and now he's
then he flipped to Trump, and now he's slipped somewhere
in the middle. And I think that's just someone who
doesn't really understand politics. I think that's exactly right that
we've been hearing about the angry middle is going to
rise up and organize for at least since Ross Parrot,
if not earlier. It never happens. It doesn't work that way.
So well, let's get out on this, you know the way.
You know, we're sort of known now that Trump's insults
often have an expiration date or can be turned around quickly.
It's entirely possible that by the time this episode goes
live they will have kissed and made up.
Speaker 3: Stranger things have happened.
Speaker 1: The other one is is people think that there's people
there's some conspiracy theorist saying this is all fake news.
It's professional wrestling, which they both attend, and this is
to distract the Median Democrats from something. And in fact,
some Democratic group did call for now for releasing the
Epstein list, which I think is pretty darn funny. Anyway,
do you have any predictions on how this is going
to unfold? Is it just going to go away in
a few days or are they going to kiss and
make up?
Speaker 3: What do you think?
Speaker 2: Well, I think one of those two things. I certainly
don't think that it's going to have catastrophic consequences for
the Republic. I've seen some people say this is it
for the right, this is it for America. No, I
don't think so. I think we'll get about it in
six months. I don't think the space program is going
to be set back by it. Donald Trump is already
sounding somewhat consideratorly, orbeit from a condescending position where he says, well,
that guy's crazy. I don't want to talk to him,
but I hope he gets the help he needs. And
the mask started to back off yesterday. I don't know
if you saw this. There was some user with seventeen
followers who said, you know, like a mother to the
two of them on Twitter, come now, this is silly.
I don't like this, we don't need this, and Musk respond,
all right, fine, I won't cancel the space program. So
some guy on Twitter with seventeen followers may have saved
the future of the United States' presence in space. I
don't think that ultimately this is going to cause big
problems for America. I suspect they'll either make up or
or just go away. But look, they are both very rich,
successful men with egos. They don't agree on everything, and
this was inevitable as a result. So those of us,
which was everyone who said I can see what it's
going to happen, shouldn't be shocked that has finally come
to fruition.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: Well, I think this kind of the intensity of this
is something that could only happen in a social media age.
I think, I don't know.
Speaker 2: Agreed.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, while while we were all distracted by this great circus,
a couple of interesting things happened this week on the
legal front, which I know is you're Baileywick first, another day,
another Trump decision, another federal district court judge blocking it.
And it's twice this week, maybe or maybe more than that.
At this point I yawned, it's you know, what else
is new? But unless you want to comment on that,
I was going to move on to something I think
more interesting that is getting glossed over. And that was
the Supreme Court this week issuing two nine zero decisions
with the opinions written by the liberal justices, the two
most recent Soda Mayor and Katanji Brown Jackson, that take
not exactly a conservative point of view, but reject implicitly
the progressive you about civil rights and religious liberty. Did
you follow those? Yes, raise your eyebrows as much as
I did at that result.
Speaker 2: Sorry, which one are we talking about here?
Speaker 3: Sorry?
Speaker 1: I should explain for listeners who may not know this. Yes,
they're following the Musk Trump feud. The first case a
nine zero case. I forget the name of it, but
it was the case out of Ohio involving a woman
who had sued under Title seven aims the Aimes case.
She had sued alleging reverse discrimination, saying that she passed
over for promotion and I think by a state agency,
by your supervisor, in favor of lesser qualified gay employees,
and lower courts had ruled no, sorry, because she's a
member of a majority group, meaning she's a white woman,
left standing to sue for civil rights because the assumption
there is that civil rights laws are only meant to
protect the officially protected classes of minorities, and was that
the one sodo My wrote the I don't remember which
liberal woman justice wrote.
Speaker 2: Which James Jackson wrote that one. That's the Aims case.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 1: And I think what's very significant about that is for
at least forty years, I mean, I can remember the
civil rights community back in the eighties when Reagan was
contesting some of this, saying, no, you don't understand. I
know the language of the Civil Rights Act as neutral
and speaks of individuals, but really the intent was to
apply it to minority groups have been oppressed, and so
it doesn't actually protect white people.
Speaker 3: They were open about this.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to remember the woman back in the eighties
who made this argument quite brazenly and openly. And now
for the court to rule the three liberals on the
Court to go along with the older plain reading of
the text, I think it's quite significant. And I'm going
to be waiting to see people on the left react
with some degree of dismay about this.
Speaker 2: Well, I was ably thrilled about this. I'm going to
take the opportunity which you offered in passing just to
quickly comment on the judge trying to prevent the deportation
of the Soliman family just because on this podcast. In
the past, I have been critical of some of the
legal positions that the Trump administration has taken on deportations.
Not the deportations themselves, which I thoroughly support, but I
have thought that the strategy was ill conceived and likely
to provoke activist judges to jump in. This time, Trump
is one hundred percent right. This judge who has tried
to jump in here is crazy, has not offered a
single legal argument, and the briefs that are being filed
are just funny. There was one this morning I read
the habeas brief that didn't offer a single argument based
in statute or precedent, and just said that deporting the
family of this jihadis was a bit like Nazi Germany.
So Trump's right on this judge is wrong on the
Ames case. You know, it's interesting, Steve, that you say
that the prevailing progressive view of civil rights law is
that it doesn't apply to minorities majorities. Sorry, because that
is true, but it is also inexplicable if you've ever
gone back and read the text, If you read the
Fourteenth Amendment, if you read the congressional debates that led
to the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in Congress and
in the States, if you read the eighteen sixty six
Civil Rights Act which preceded it, and indeed the to
Friedman's Bureaus Act as well, and then if you read
the nineteen sixty four Civil Rights Act and all of
the attendant discussion, you will see that it is quite
clearly in text, in intent, in original public meaning, even
in legislative history, which we don't like, but is there.
It is a law that applies to individuals. The discrimination
attaches at the individual level. And what was so great
about the Supreme Court decision as written by Justice Jackson,
probably the most progressive member of the Court, is that
she sounds like Justice Scalia when she is explaining the text.
She says this in no uncertain terms, over and over again,
that there is no such thing as a majority group
or a minority group, that there's no reverse or forward racism,
that there's no caveats in the law. If you are
discriminated against based upon your sex, your race, your national origin,
and so forth, you are able to lodge a complaint
under the Civil Rights Act, and this was a repudiation
of all of the nonsense that has built up for
forty years, both in the courts, but especially in academia
and in elite opinion, and has been unchecked. So for
this to be nine and nothing is wonderful. It's also wonderful, incidentally,
because each justice only gets a certain number of opinions
each term. When we got to use a justice Jackson
opinion on our outcome.
Speaker 3: That's right, Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So then the other case was out of Wisconsin and
involved a state agency or I guess it's a state
tax official denying the tax exemption to a Catholic charity.
Speaker 3: And their argument was, as well.
Speaker 1: As Catholic charity, these activities are really secular purposes or
not related to the religious mission. And the Wisconsin State
Supreme Court agreed with that by a four to three split.
It turned out to be the four Democrats against the
three Republicans. And essentially I haven't read the decision. I've
been traveling and goofing off, but again, a nine zero
decision was so to my orn the majority, and what
I gather from the brief news squibs I've read is
that essentially what the opinion says is no, the state
does not get to decide what is or isn't anchored
in the religious mission of a bona fide religion like
the Catholic Church, which has been around a while together.
Speaker 3: And I think that's another.
Speaker 1: Blow for religious liberty and against the the definite undertone
of the secondar left for also for several decades now
to try and marginalize and squeeze religion out of the
public square.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I haven't read this one either. I'll confess
I read AMS and I read the Mexico gun case,
but I haven't read this one. What I find so
encouraging about this case is that it is yet another
chipping away at this completely fake jurisprudence that has obtained
in America, starting with the war in court that invented
this so called wall of separation between church and state.
It is, of course the case that the United States
can't and shouldn't have an established religion, and there are
a few consequences of that that trickle down into other areas.
But generally speaking, most of the rules that have been
imposed since what nineteen sixty five, Yeah, nonsense, they're completely
Maybe you think they should be that. Maybe you think
that's they're a good thing, or if we were right
to a constitution from scratch, we would insert them. But
they are totally a historical, that's totally a textual. And
this was too. I'm just surprised that it was nine
to nothing. I'm shocked. Thoughts of my old wrote this one.
But you know, the courts moved to the right and
that is a good thing.
Speaker 1: Well, I can go back now or a decade or
more when sus Kagan said we're all textual us now,
which is for you know, of accommodation of originalism, and
I think that was actually quite significant, and it seems
like that view has taken hold in ways that I like.
Speaker 3: I say, this has to be.
Speaker 1: Giving a heartburn to liberal jurisprudes and the all the
law schools you mentioned.
Speaker 3: I didn't put this on the list.
Speaker 1: The Mexico gun case that was the Supreme Court saying no,
we're not gonna hear a.
Speaker 3: Suit from Mexico about guns. Is that? But I got
that basically right.
Speaker 2: How long have you got ob my area? But this
was maybe the crazy lawsuit I've read in a long time.
But I want to go back a few years. First,
just to introduce this because this is a hobby horse
of mine. In two thousand and five, while George W.
Bush was president, Congress passed a law that extended certain
protections to gun manufacturers in order to stop a whole
host of lawsuits that had been brought to try to
create through the courts gun control that could not be
achieved legislatively. Now this is pre hella, So there's no
prohibition on gun control at that point, in quite the
way there is now, although it should be said at
that point forty four states did have state level right
to keep them bear arms. But the left had got
into the bad habit which started really in earnest under
the Clinton administration and Andrew Cuomo as hud director of
bringing court cases against gun manufacturers on the grounds that
their products were dangerous to do what they couldn't do legislatively.
So they would say this gun is very, very dangerous,
it can kill a lot of people, and therefore, commercially
it should not be available. And Congress said, no, that's
not how this should work. The liability does not attach
in that way. And it passed this law, and it
was a bipartisan law in both the House and the
Senate Bernie Sanders voted for it in two thousand and five.
The National Association of Manufacturers was very much in favor
of it, despite having no great interest in the gun
control debate, because it understood the threat that was being posed.
It did not, as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden have
both lied about relentlessly, It did not make gun manufacturers
immune in such cases as guns are badly manufactured or
go wrong. What it did was it said, if you
kill someone with a gun that works, you can't sue
Smith and Wesson. In the same way if I drive
my car into you, you can't sue Forward if the
breaks go wrong in my car. Of course I can
sue Ford if a gun goes off, which doesn't happen,
by the way, But if it were to happen because
of a manufacturing defect and kill someone, of course you
can sue Smith and Russon. But you're not allowed to
use the law to get what you can't get. Politically,
that law has been on the books now for twenty years,
despite the Democrats' obsession with getting rid of it. If
you look back at the twenty sixteen and twenty twenty elections,
the Democratic candidates went on and on and on about this. Well, Mexico,
the country of Mexico, the sovereign state of Mexico, a
couple of years ago, decided that it might try to
affect gun control in the United States as well, and
so it brought this case that argued, in effect, that
American gun manufacturers knew that the guns that they were
making and marketing would make their way into the hands
of the cartels, that they wanted that to be the case.
Not just that they were negligent in the usual way
of not caring about whether they did, but they actually
wanted the American gun cash to go down south, and
they tried to impose all manner of restrictions on what
guns you can and can't buy through this lawsuit. And
this went to the Supreme Court. It was considered under
this two thousand and five law and uniformly nine to
nothing in a decision written by Justice Kagan, of all people,
the Supreme Court said, you just can't do that. That
is exactly what this law was designed to stop. I
find it amazing that anyone ever took this seriously, Steve,
and they did. The gun control groups were all over this.
They pretended that this was a meritorious suit, and so
on and so forth. It was, quite honestly the stupidest,
most cynical pretextual laws I've ever read. And I think
it's a good thing for America that this was.
Speaker 1: You know, Well, I've got one that may equal it
or exceed it that I'll come to. Well, I'll just
say that I think we file these three cases as
legitimate entries in the so much winning file.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: Here's the corollary case just out in the last ten
days or so. It's a state case out of Washington State.
The climate crazy people have brought a wrongful death lawsuit
against the fossil fuel man you know, oil companies essentially.
And the circumstances were a woman essentially died of heatstroke
in her car on a hot summer day. Now what's
left out of the story is why is she in
her car on a hot summer day with the windows up.
There's something they're not telling us here. Was she passed
out from fentanyl? What she drunk? Was she homeless? We
don't know that, but my suspicions are on.
Speaker 3: High alert here.
Speaker 1: But even even if it was just someone who fell
asleep because I was just tired of something like that,
And none of those factors come into play. The idea
that you can now attribute the hot day to the
oil companies who sold their and a woman who apparently
bought their product for her car, Well, that suit has
been filed, and I think what both these suits say.
You know the guncases, which you know I've been aware of,
but these climate suits have been following for a while that.
Speaker 3: Want to hold the oil companies liable for global.
Speaker 1: Warming, even though the big oil companies in the US
and Europe account for such a tiny amount of emissions
on the global scale going back decades. As if you
actually do the math on this, it shows you that
the impulse on the left to try and use the
judiciary is the primary mode to get what they want
still runs very strong. But boy, it's sure hitting a
wall right now. I think that's absolutely right.
Speaker 2: For a very long time the left has done that,
and look, sometimes it's been legitimate. You do need to
be able to take cases to court that are unpopular
in vindicating your rights if those rights exist. Unfortunately, the
left has recognized for decades that if it gets the
right people on the court, it can go to the
court and ask the court to make up rights that
don't exist, abortion, gay marriage, and so on. And that
era does seem, at least for now, to be coming
to an end at the Supreme Court.
Speaker 1: Do you agree, yes, I think so, yeah, yeah, And
a lot of things to be unwound or modified. So
I have a lot of work ahead of them, not
to mention all these crazy district court injunctions. At the Court,
we'll see what they do here. We're now down to
the last several weeks. The big case we're all waiting
for is Scurmetti. That's the one about Tennessee's law restricting
your transgender surgeries on children and so forth. So we'll
see how that all goes. I don't have anything else
in legal news, is there. I know that you know
you're running law talk these days, and it's something you
like to follow. There's something else of your mind, A.
Speaker 2: Question for you, but it's not a law talk sort
of question. Sure, how much on a scale of one
to ten, are you looking forward to reading care and
Genepa's new book Independent.
Speaker 3: Well, I was going to bring that up. I had
it on my list.
Speaker 1: You know, we didn't see this coming, right, I mean
there's all these books about Biden right at original sin
and all.
Speaker 3: The rest of that.
Speaker 1: And so now the Democratic firing squad, a circular firing squad,
is reforming with Kareem John Pierre in the middle saying
I'm an independent. Now, by the way, maybe she can
go to work for Elon Musk on that independent party
he wants to put together. Right, And I mean, boy,
this has only been in the last forty eight seventy
two hours about the story. And I mean, just as
Biden's sinility was obvious to anyone, her incapacity in the
job as press spokesman was obvious to everyone. That she's
a complete mediocrity was an identity politics higher full stop.
Speaker 3: I mean, this was obvious to everybody.
Speaker 1: And now you're seeing you know, anonymous sources and axios
and elsewhere saying.
Speaker 3: Oh, she was terrible at her job.
Speaker 1: So the knives are out for and here I just
have to get even fatter than I'm already am on
another sixty four gallon drummer popcorn.
Speaker 2: You know, I think Mark Hemingway pointed out that this
is the definitive proof of the Left using the immutable
characteristics of people to deflect criticism because some of the
same people who are now saying, right, she was an idiot,
we never liked her, were telling conservatives who criticized her, oh,
you only say that because and we would say, no,
we're not saying that because she's a lesbian, saying that
because she's black. We're saying that because she's just not
good at her job. She has to open a binder
every time she's asked her name. And they would say, no, no,
you just hate powerful women. Well, now the same people
are acknowledging that she was a liability to the White House,
that they didn't like her, and that she'd been hired
purely for the the nature of her being, and that
is absurd, I think. But I just think that this
is the most cynical and astonishing shift that I have
ever seen, Steve. I mean, this would be like me
coming out tomorrow and saying my new book is called
why All Guns Should be Banned? And in not accounting
for the shift, people would say, hang on a minute,
we were watching you day in, day out make the
case for the Second Amendment. When did you what she
stood on that podium and this is her job, This
isn't a criticism. You have to do this if your
White House Press secretary. But she stood on that podium
day and day out, and she made the case for
Biden and the White House. She said what she was
told to say. She defended the party line. So every
day her line is Biden is right, Biden is right,
Biden is right, Biden is right. And then the first
thing we hear from her the moment she leaves that
job is actually, I'm kind of an independent.
Speaker 3: Are are you kidding?
Speaker 2: How cynical could you get?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 1: I mean well, just as it was appalling that the
media would avert their gaze from Biden's obvious incapacity, I
couldn't believe that self respecting, seemingly self respecting reporters would
sit there every day and swallow and not beat back.
I can hurt up appallingly mediocre and often ridiculous and
visible answers. I mean it was I thought, this has
to be a rejected Aaron Sorkin script, doesn't it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, they would end up asking these Obama style
questions of per So they would say things like does
the President find it hurtful when Republicans say? Or what
did the President like the most about his recent trip
to Italy. That's how they got around it. They didn't say, hey,
you who's supposed to tell us the truth? What about this?
They would say, what do you find most enchanting about
working in the White House?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, it reminds me a little bit. And
maybe this is an apt parallel, but back in the
battle days of arms control talks with the Soviet Union
or any summits for that matter, the Soviet negotiators will
always come in with big thick notebooks, and our team
or sometimes our president if it was face to face
with Brezhnev or somebody would say X, and the Russian
translation would go through, and then that all the Russians
would be pouring through their notebooks to find a prescripted
answer to a question they had anticipated. So that's why
a lot of those negotiations, aside from the substance of them,
took forever to get anywhere, because then so it became
a game for our side to try and think of
a way of putting a question that they wouldn't have
had a pre cooked answer for, and then then they
would on take a break, is what the Soviets would do.
So I kept thinking back to that when I'd watch
a kreem John Pierre pour through a notebook and oftentimes
give an answer that was often not even tenuously related
to the question, and it was just embarrassing to watch it.
Speaker 3: I couldn't believe the media put up with it.
Speaker 2: So I don't know if you've ever come across this
story as a historian, but I heard it related on
the old Cold War series that Ted Turner commissioned for
CNN that is narrated by Kenneth Branna. Yeah, that during
the I guess early seventies, Nixon went to a meeting
with the Chinese and he wanted something from them. I
forget what it was. It could have been arms control,
but anyhow, the meeting involves a dinner. Everyone's getting along. Famously.
Of course, Bill Buckley hated this. He would go on
a tear whenever he saw this. But Nixon is being
diplomatic and a great statesman, and then the Chinese premiere
just starts tearing into the United States for forty five
minutes and describing their crimes as he puts it in Vietnam,
and Nixon just sat there and he sensed that this
was for internal consumption, that they were going to release
it in all the newspapers, and so he just sat
there and then when it was over, everyone sort of
looked at each other and he raised a toast and
they just carried on. You know, I watched this story
and I thought, well, I understand that's probably what you
have to do sometimes in these situations, but I don't
think Trump would do that. I just don't think Trump
would be berated to his face by the Chinese premier.
Speaker 3: Do you no, Nope, that's for dark Sure.
Speaker 1: Well, look, I think we ought to move up to
a couple of things of foreign affairs, because I also
think the Ukrainian attack on the Russian bombers in the
week is really stupendous. I mean, people are saying it's
on the level of what the Israelis have done over
the years, and one wonders how much they how many
other things they might have up their sleeve, because although
I think it's a thrilling thing for supporters of Ukraine,
and I do still think that the underlying correlation of
forces and the ambivalence, if you can put it that way,
of the Trump administration still makes me rather pessimistic about
the scene. How do you size it up right now.
Speaker 2: Well, I think it's still of war of attrition, and
that does seem to be hurting Russia slightly more, but
I'm not sure. Peutin Kaz the drone attack was incredible.
It had the effects of both thrilling me as somebody
who wants to see Ukraine win, but also as a
human being, terrifying me because I could see those drones
coming over the American border and I wondered if we
had the capacity to repel them. If this is how
wars will be fought, we have some catching up to door,
or at least I do in my understanding of warfare.
The analogy I drew on the Editor's podcast when we
talked about this was if you go to a meeting, sorry,
a museum of World War One, the exhibits tend not
to start in nineteen fourteen, but in the American Civil War,
and then they run through the Franco Prussian War and
possibly the Russo Japanese War of nineteen oh five. The
point being that the technologies that eventually came to dominate
World War One and make it such a meet go
had been evident if you'd been looking carefully since the
American Civil War, and I just wondered, if this is
what we're now going to see in the future, that
in fifty years time we'll be saying, well, of course
where this started was Russia Ukraine in twenty twenty two
to whenever it ended. It worried me a little bit,
just because it seems so difficult to stop. But its
application was incredible. I mean, to do that much damage
to the Russian air force was it one third of
the planes taken out? But I don't know if it
changes the fundamental problem on the ground, which is that
you have two dug in armies, you have a defensive advantage,
and you have prerogatives on both sides that make it
difficult to stop. The Russians want to take Ukraine and
they're led by a madman, and the Ukrainians quite rightly
don't want to give up Ukraine. So did that really
change much?
Speaker 3: Yeah, some of the same worries that you do.
Speaker 1: I mean, years ago, I might have been more confident
that our defense establishment was more forward looking and anticipating
and developing countermeasures that we didn't know about. There are
lots of examples of that in the past. But I
kind of worry that our defense establishment may have gotten
sluggish in recent years. I'm reminded a bit that you
mention some of those precursors to World War One. I
do know the story of Churchill, I think before he
was First Lord of the Admiralty, maybe way before that,
but sometime, you know, the submarine was being developed and expanded,
and the British Navy, as I recall the story, rightly,
said well submarine, Yeah, we've looked at him, and they
might be useful for coastal defense. And Churchill said no, no, no,
you don't understand. As these things get better and scaled up,
they're going to be used for interdiction of shipping out
in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, which is exactly
how Germany started using it, as we saw in World
War One and especially World War Two. So you know,
it takes some imagination and some buddy to push the subject.
There's more can be said about Churchill and technology like
the tank and so forth.
Speaker 3: So I'm I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm worried about this, and a lot of the research
would be classified, of course, so we won't hear about it.
Speaker 3: So I don't know, but it is something to worry about.
Speaker 2: You know, Churchill said a few days after the war
in Europe ended, one of his friends or colleagues asked
him if he'd been worried, and he said, no other
than the German submarine War. Now that wasn't quite true.
He was worried. He at one point thought he was
going to have to fight his way out of Downing
Street with a revolver and would die on the floor
choking on his own blood.
Speaker 3: But he.
Speaker 2: Seems to have been most worried about exactly what you
described because he saw it so early. He understood the threat.
Speaker 3: Oh well, you know one of it.
Speaker 1: Well, we'll keep going on this because I'm you know,
I'm a huge Churchill fan. It was one of his
first speeches as a member of the House of Commons.
So I'm going to say nineteen hundred and nineteen oh one.
And remember he'd seen some of the some of the
things that you described a moment ago in his own
experience in the Boer War and in the River War
in Sudan, you know, the mass killing of autumn mechanized warfare,
and wrote very movingly about it in his lesser known
books like The River War, and one of the speeches
he said paraphrasing here, So you know, there's all us
optimism that were now people like Theodore Roosevelt was saying
that war is a thing of the past. The twentieth
century be a century of moral progress and material progress,
and utter leading thinkers said, no, there won't ever be
another big European war. And Churchill, and one of his
memorable phrases said, the wars of peoples are going to
be worse than the wars of kings, and they will
involve entire populations. Is very prescient, right, He was having
none of this facile optimism.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then you just look at the casualty figures,
and especially World War two, more people died in the
civilian population in the world than in ominously right.
Speaker 1: Well, last topic, perhaps the Tenan House biography of Bill
Buckley is out this week.
Speaker 3: I have read it and have a long review forthcoming.
I don't know if.
Speaker 1: You've had a chance to read it yet. I know
it's been a subject of course at the National Review Circle,
and there have been I will say, some what do
you say, disparate reviews on the site. You know Neil Freeman,
who was close to Buckley forever and was very skeptical
of the idea. Rick brook Heiser had a more favorable
review of the book.
Speaker 3: Have you had a chance to read it yet?
Speaker 1: And what are people around the office saying if you've
been able to talk to him?
Speaker 4: So?
Speaker 2: I haven't read it yet. I have read a lot
of reviews of it. I've read the two you mentioned,
I've read Matt Continetti, I've read Helen Andrews, and in conversation,
I've spoken to Rich Lowry about it. He's read it
the floor in it, and you've read it, so I
should give you the floor spelled differently. But the flaw
in it that I have most commonly heard related is
that it it doesn't seem too interested in the main
achievement of Buckley's life, which was the creation of the
modern conservative movement. Is that true?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I think that's right.
Speaker 1: And he's I'll give you this one very particular sentence
from the book that I thought gives away that I
don't know what penan house purpose was or what his
disposition is, but he refers to Reagan's and here's his words,
Reagan's foolhardy invasion of Grenada in nineteen eighty three. I think,
why was that fool hardy. You know, it actually deposed
a communist regime. There were no real threat to America.
But still there was not nothing foolhardy about that, unless
you're somebody deeply on the left who thinks that any
use of military force or this is adventurism.
Speaker 3: Or or who knows what, boy what.
Speaker 1: I can't believe an editor didn't raise a flag about
that sentence. But I'll add that that's part of the
oddest part of the book is the book goes for
I think the count has eight one hundred and twenty pages,
taking a story of Buckley from his birth in nineteen
twenty five to the election of Reagan in nineteen eighty,
and then the period of time from nineteen eighty to
Buckley's passing in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 3: Is only forty four pages.
Speaker 1: So it's like what he rushed to finish the book,
he lost interests, because that's when some of the most
interesting things happen, is when Buckley's favorite president is in
office and they have a frequent communication. Buckley had the
private address that Reagan gave him to send notes to
get directly to Reagan and not through some filter. And
we also know that there was a lot of disagreements
between them, especially on arms control and the openings to
the Soviet Union in the second term. And Buckley himself
published some of the excerpts of letters he had with
Reagan during those years, but none of that appears in
Tannenhouse's book, So I don't know if he was, like
I say, lost interest in the thing. The publisher lost
his patients after twenty seven years they expected the book,
or he wanted to get it out in time for
one hundred anniversary of Buckley's birth, which is this year.
But it's very peculiar that way, among the other defects
of the structure of it and the ideological treatment. And
certainly I could go on a long time, and I've
written a long review that I will flag for everybody
in due course.
Speaker 2: I do think it's good that it came out after
Buckley had died. Yes, it's not comfortable. I'm sure to
write an auto a biography of somebody who is still
living twenty seven years that strikes me as a bit excessive.
It's funny you mentioned the disagreements between Reagan and Buckley,
because National Review was very pro Reagan in many ways,
but people forget how cauistic the magazine could be in
the later Reagan years, especially as you say, on arms control.
There was some nineteen eighty five editorial on an arms
control treaty that the Reagan administration was working on that
started this would never have happened if Reagan was still alive.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, I have had several biographers. Jean Edward Smith,
the late Geen Edward Smith, told me this once that
you should never write a biography of a living person
because while they're alive, there's just going to be too
many different camps.
Speaker 3: And uh oh.
Speaker 1: William Manchester found this out way back in the sixties
when Jackie Kennedy asked him to write an account of
the assassination of JFK. And then they didn't like the
result and hounded him for it. And I've heard of
some other biographers.
Speaker 2: So on the.
Speaker 1: One hand, I'll bet Tannon House always intended to wait
until Buckley died, and I think disappointed apparently that he
didn't finish it in time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, especially given the Buckley asked Tannon House to
write the book. I mean, it's one thing to write
an unauthorized biography of a person who is still alive.
But it's quite another to deliver the manuscript having been
asked to do it of somebody who is still alive,
because if they hate it, the book's dead.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, Nancy Reagan never allowed Van Morris's Dutch, which
someone said should have been called Botch, to be sold
in the Reagan Library bookstore, even though she was one
of the persons, along with Mike Deaver, who picked Evan
Morris to write the official biography of Reagan.
Speaker 3: It turned out so strangely.
Speaker 2: So I haven't there you go that book, Steve, you
can tell me if this is true. So daneshtises A
twenty five years ago said that the problem with that
book is that the author wasn't as interested in Reagan
as he should have been, so he starts writing by himself.
Is that true?
Speaker 1: Yes, that's a good summary. I mean, I'll tell you again,
there's one sentence that tells you the defect of the book.
Morris had great access to Reagan, interviewed him lots of times,
and towards the end of Reagan's presidency, Morris asked him,
what do you consider to be your greatest achievement? And Reagan,
who wasn't introspective in that way, but he said, I
think it has to be my tax cuts and the
changes in the American tax policy. The next sentence in
the book is Morris saying at that at that point,
I closed my reporter's notebook, So he wasn't interested in
representing what Reagan isn't it.
Speaker 3: I thought that just betrayed.
Speaker 1: The problem with Morris in that book, just in that
one sentence, Just like it's similar to Tannanhouse saying, you
know Reagan's fool hardy Invasion of Grenada, which is tone
deaf and wrong and so forth.
Speaker 3: So there you go.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's always a problem with a biographer who well.
I wrote a piece actually for the Civitas people recently
about what makes a good biography, And one of the
things that makes a bad biography is people who think
they're smarter than the subject or or understand their subject
better or differently than they ought to be. They become
Freudian or some other nonsense, and those are usually the
worst biographies, and the best ones are the ones that
try to understand their subject as their subject understood themselves,
and that's not always easy to do.
Speaker 2: Well, it sounds like I'd better read this, although nobody
who has told me that they have read it has
said you must go and read this, so it's.
Speaker 1: Well, god, well it is almost a thousand pages. I
have to say the wealth of detail is amazing, and
some of it's too much detail and extraneous, but I
have to say that the wealth of detail, at least
until you get to nineteen eighty when he loses interest
here and there you learn some really interesting things.
Speaker 3: So for that.
Speaker 1: Reason it's probably worth reading if you are as devoted
to Buckley this memory as I have been from my
entire life.
Speaker 2: All right, well, I will put it on a list
of books that I intend to read that are very long.
That is already itself slightly too long for comfort.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have that problem too. Anyway, Charles, glad you're
feeling better. Welcome back. Do you have any closing thoughts
or have we worn out what's little little of.
Speaker 3: Your voice you have back so far?
Speaker 2: I think we may have wanted out, but we've won
it out in an enjoyable way. So the next thing
for me today is Steve is start drinking wine again.
Speaker 3: Oh well, right, well.
Speaker 1: I'm about to because I'm several hours later than you.
My next stop is going to be the bar after.
I remind listeners if you haven't all ready to sign
up as a Ricochet member, join our great community of
good hearted and civil people, and we will be back
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you in the comments of Ricochet four point zero.
Speaker 3: Bye Charles, Bye bye.