Speaker 1: We got him.
Speaker 2: On the evening of September eleventh, a family member of
Tyler Robinson reached out to a family friend who contacted
the Washington County Sheriff's office with information that Robinson had
confessed to them or implied that he had committed the incident.
Speaker 1: Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, episode number seven hundred
and fifty seven. I'm James lolaxs Minneapolis. I'm joined by
Charles C. W. Cook in Florida. And it is a
somber week for anybody with any shred of decency in
their heart. And that is something that we've learned and
will discuss. Now, Charles, what you well start perhaps with this.
I heard somebody the other day on Twitter read that
there are three kinds of assassinations. There's the zealot, there
is the nut, and there is the pro And they
were breaking it down as to what they thought the
temperament of the shooter of Charlie the assassin or who
Charlie Kirk would be. And I thought, you have to
add to that another category, that's a loser. The guy
who shot at the church around here in my neighborhood
was a loser. Leharvey Oswald was a loser. Arthur Bremer
was a loser. James Earl Ray was a loser. The
guy who shot MANGIONI was a zelot. I think this guy,
and I'm not going to say his name, that they've arrested,
might fall into the zelot category as well, and a
peculiar modern sort somebody who just sort of drifted into it,
fell into it, adopted the language, the moors, the cliches,
the in jokes, without having that sort of burning revolutionary desire.
You associate with Serbitia nationalists in the you know, the
First World War, or Bolshevik communists, sort of lazy basement zealot.
What are you think? I think you're right.
Speaker 3: Usually in these situations, I say, that's not ascribe motives.
Let's not assign killers to a particular group. You know,
in the French language, where you have masculine and feminine
nouns and verbs, if you have ten thousand women and
one man, you take the masculine form. And my view
has always been that if someone is a Trump supporter
with a Trump hat, but they also think that they're
microwaves trying to kill them, that crowds out the rest,
whatever the rest is that crowds out the rest. They
think the walls are attacking them or the FBI is
watching them through their toaster, And as a result, usually
I am reluctant to say, yeah, this guy was an
ideological zella, and it really matters what he thought. But
I think you're right in this case. From what we know,
this guy was an ideological zalot. This was done for
political reasons, and it really matters what he thought.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it matters what he thought, and it matters what
sort of social infrastructure is in place, encouraging, helping, assisting, guiding, breeding,
all of these things. I mean, we're going to find
out what the you know, which discord he hung out
it has been wiped. We're going to find out, uh,
you know, friends, the whole social media trail, all the
rest of it. But as I was walking the dog
this morning, I thought, Okay, the guy's twenty five. Is
that what we got? He's twenty five? Yeah? Or was
it twenty two? He's twenty two? Right, he's twenty two,
which would have meant that he'd been about seventeen or
so in twenty twenty, which may have meant that he
lost a year senior year to COVID, which may have
meant that at an impressionable age, he saw this incredibly exciting,
thrilling wave of revolutionary violence in gulfed the country in
the summer, and you wonder what impact that made? You know,
it's it's when you look back at twenty twenty, and
when you look back at the at the glee of
destruction of the burnings and the and the toppling of
the statues, you you realize what a poison was injected
into the into the body politic, and this I think
is a manifestation of it finally seeping out. And whether
or not that's the body expelling a poison, i'd like
to think. But we'll find out. This is not going
to be arrest him, it's over. I think there's going
to be. I mean, if there's any connection to Antifa,
what is Antifa? Is it? You know? Does it exist
as as an organized national political organization? I don't think so.
But there's going to be more of that, especially when
the guy is pretty much Antifa from what he writes
on his bullets and what he said right right.
Speaker 3: I have a few preliminary thoughts in this area. I
think we're going to see an attempt to wriggle out
of this one on the left. Now, I don't mean
by that to say that people on the left are
somehow to blame.
Speaker 1: He was the guy who did this, but there is.
Speaker 3: No doubt that he had swallowed the idea that words
are violent and that you kill people with whom you disagree,
And that is the.
Speaker 1: Notion you're obligated as a citizen of to kill Massy.
Speaker 3: Right, And that is the problem here. Spencer Cox's, the
governor of Utah, was exceptional, I think in his remarks
twice in drawing this distinction. That is the problem here.
The guy's own father reportedly told the police that he
had become increasingly of this view, that he believed that
Charlie Kirk was spreading hate, and he killed him because
of it. This is not a story about temperatures being
too high in America. It is not a story about
fundamental disagreements between free people. It is not a story
about guns. We can argue about guns in many circumstances.
I do, but this gun was precisely, quite literally, the
sort of hunting rifle that gun control activists will tell
you if you ask them is the type. They don't
want to ban your grandfather's hunting rifle. We're not talking
about that. They say it didn't even have a magazine
that you would recognize assay magazine. It wasn't a high capacity,
it wasn't an ar whatever it is that they say next.
So to me, this is a very straightforward case of
the poisonous idea, the idea that is incompatible with the republic,
that it is okay to shoot people if they say
things that you dislike. Now, of course, in academia this
gets filtered through all sorts of secondary jargon. They will
say it only applies to those who have power or
the structural inequalities undergirding Charlie Kirk's words render his words violence,
but others not.
Speaker 1: All of that's guff. It's guff.
Speaker 3: We've spent five hundred years in the West, particularly in
Anglo America, setting up two inviolable precepts. One, you do
not discriminate against, or attack or suppress or kill people
for their religion. Two you do none of those things
to people for their political views. And this guy blew
right through that. And I think that's the story.
Speaker 1: It is, but piecing it together in retrospect. And I
know you know this is that Charla Kirk's views what
they believe them to be, what they believed anybody's views
on the right to be are not just simply political
views like saying I disagree about the marginal tax rate
or whether or not we should recycle plastic bags. They
are all existential threats. They are existential threats to the world.
The utopia that is about oh six or seven days
around close around the corner, if we just do this
and do that. They are existential threats to the planet
because they deny climate change, and they are existential threats
in the sense that they do not accept the foundational
precepts of a lot of lazy people who've cobbled together
various elements of socialist marksians leftist progressive theory, that which
is to say that the West, in American particular, are
uniquely evil on this planet in human civilization, and that
we are all the product of a variety of malodorisisms
from colonialism to settlerism, to capitalism, to all hetero central
is whatever you want to call all of these things,
that all of these boogeymen that have been stuffed under
the beds by these people. There's if you want to
fight these things, where do you go? Exactly? You can't.
It's not as if there is a you know, a figure,
a place where you can go and fight the slavery
of the nineteenth century. There's no place. There's a thing
you can do to dismantle whiteness. You can't. You're constantly
being told about all these bad things, but you were
really feeling internally powerless to do something that is a
tangible act. So what occurs in the minds of point
zero zero zero one percent of the population, I guess,
is to kill somebody who is saying the things that
go against the doctrine, the liturgy, the theory, everything that
undergrades what they do. So it's not speech that they
think he's doing. They think what he is doing is
an excess cidential threat to the culture that they want
to bring into being now right, and there will always
be those one percent, there will always be those crazy
people who take it to that extreme. Right. Anyway, you
wanted to say something about what.
Speaker 3: Well, that's why I mentioned religion before speech, because of
course I agree with everything you said, But it's not
much of a freedom to be able to debate marginal
tax rates. The tax rate is going to be twenty
eight percent or forty percent. That's the settlement we have
arrived at since nineteen ninety. Religion, though, is a much
more impressive feat as a tenet of Western smaller liberalism,
because it could.
Speaker 1: Not be more important.
Speaker 3: You cannot reconcile, for example, the claims that are made
by Islam and the claims that are made by Christianity.
You can't reconcile the claims made by Christianity and the
claims made by me as a non believer. These are
genuinely existential. These relate to core precepts about how the
world works, what happens to human beings, how we should live.
And we have managed, in the most part in the West,
to agree with each other that will just disagree. And
you would think that if we can do that, because
we don't have much religious violence in America, you would
think that if we can do that, then we could
also agree to disagree on political questions that are more
fraught than the tax rates, such as what as a woman.
But it's odd, isn't it, that for some reason we've
managed to maintain this religious tolerance. But we're now seeing
assassinations over disagreements about climate change or transgender ideology, and
that is terrifying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I agree, But I would note that the
ability to reach an uneasy or cold or sometimes warm
and ecumenical peace with people of different religious beliefs came
at a great cost. And when Europe started going through
the convulsions of the Protestant Revolution and such, or when
you come to England and the c of E and
the Catholic I mean there have been deep, deep, deep,
fundamental disagreements which to us now may seem a little
remote and not that important, that were incredibly important and
led to a lot of blood being built. So Europe
reached its ability to have sort of a truce within
the warring parties partially, I think, because they cease to
believe in them at all, and it's easy to get
along with people with whom you don't. You might not
necessarily agree about the you know, the differences in doctrine
if you really don't believe in the doctrine at all.
The problem with that, of course, is when you have
an element of your society that really does truly believe
in those things and those and believes in a set
of religious ideas that are antithetical to what you and
the West have established. Now that's Europe. In America here,
I think it's just more of the I mean. And again, America,
we had massive anti Catholic prejudice for a while, massive
anti semitism for a while, and a lot of those
religiously based. But we've gotten past that, not because I think,
like Europe we cease to believe there's a little bit
of that, but because something in the American character put
getting ahead, forming a civic identity and improving the body
of the nation ahead of those things. But you know, again,
with any with any town, you will find, you know,
the people who belong to this church and the people
who belong to that church, and within the people who
belong with that church, they wouldn't be caught it dead
at that other church in their same organization because of
a liturgical difference or something like that. So there's still
lots of schisms about. But you're right, it doesn't come
to the fore and we're blessed that it doesn't. But
when you replace ideology, when you place the part in
the soul that yearns for something other than greater than themselves,
and when you replace it with the dreary ideas of ideology,
then you then news elets are born and the violence
starts all over again. It's I mean, of this crooked
timber in the streat house shall be built.
Speaker 3: There's this weird idea on the academic left as well,
that it's different for them, that they are driven to
justify this sort of thing because the stakes are higher
that anyone who is a normy or a moderate or
right of center already has everything that they want and
therefore would never consider the need for violence. But this
is nonsense, James, and I'll give you an example. I'm
pro life. I'm pro life because I think that abortion
is killing. I think that abortion doctors are murdering humans.
But I have agreed, as an American and as a
member of a polity, not to go and kill those doctors,
not to abortion clinics. And when that does happen, which
is rare but it does occasionally, I say no, no, no, no, no,
don't do that. Partly because killing doesn't help, but mostly
because that is the deal. We on the right spent
fifty years overturning Row in the courts. We didn't start
a revolution. We didn't start assassinating people ri at large.
And I think that needs to be pointed out to
our friends on the other side. No, no, no, we
believe all sorts of things are really truly terrible and
are accepted in our culture. Two, it's not just you, We.
Speaker 1: Have our own. Yeah, they'd be surprised, right. It was
done through you disagree, But it's done through argument, through law,
and not through attempting to force it into being by
forced by violence, which some would say is you know,
some of the right would say it's absolutely necessary because
in a sense they're being murdered and if you don't
do anything to directly stop it, you're complicit in it.
But you can apply that to a wide variety of things.
And it's a very elastic concept, and staying away from
the staying away from the seductions of its elasticity is
one thing that civil societies and smart people do. One
of the things that's absolutely smacked my gob And it
shouldn't have because I should have known. I remember nineteen
eight anyone, when Reagan was shot. There was this Herodine
sitting at the bar where I worked, and she was
pissed off about it, and she said why couldn't they
have shot him after the soap operas were over because
everything that she wanted to see was being preempted. Never
forgot that writ large a millionfold on TikTok and Twitter.
This week we have seen an expression of ghastly and
ghoulish and horrifying reactions. And they vary from you know,
the people who just say, you know, rest in this,
to these women, these women with their bright eyes and
their perfect teeth and their manicured nails, having all of
these elaborate gesticulations as they smile and perform and dance
for the little magic mirror in front of them that's
telling them they're virtuous and telling them they're good. And
it's stunning the way people reveal themselves in this way.
And then when you read the posts on Facebook that
people are putting up again on twe it, you look
at what it's not some Ted Kaczinski sitting in a
cabin somewhere. It's a fireman, it's a military recruiter. It's
a nurse, it's a it's an army guy. It's a teacher,
so many teachers, elementary school teacher. You read the most violent, vicious, nasty,
ichor dripping statement, and then it's from it's from the
assistant principle of pony Field Elementary and Happy Glen, Ohio.
And you wonder what percentage of the population somehow has
become sociopathic over the last ten years or was it
always such? And they just now have a platform.
Speaker 3: Well, this, I think we can judge. I would hesitate
to take this horrendous killers deeds and condemn the left
side of the country for it, and I didn't say
anything about the motive until we knew for that reason.
But this I think is fair game. We have seen
on the left an extraordinary amount of grotesque behavior, speech, reaction,
what you will. And it's taken two forms. The worst
form is the celebration of his death, the notion that
this was a good thing, that it was a forward
for progressivism. And then we've seen people who took the
opportunity simply to lie about what Charlie Cook believed, and
that is unforgivable per se, but also because of all
the people in the world, you did not have to
guess what Charlie Kirk believed. Charlie Kirk spent hours and
hours and hours on his show and in speeches telling
people what he believed and just as much time, and
indeed he was doing it when he was murdered, arguing
with people. If you choose now to try to posthumously
lie about the man.
Speaker 1: You're a disgrace.
Speaker 3: There's no need to do it, there's no justification for
doing it. So we've got this vortex of grotesquery here
where you've got people who are justifying the taking of
his life and others who are trying to remove from
him after death without him being able to argue back
what he achieved. And I think that is absolutely ripe
to be judged, and in some cases it should lead
to the people who are doing it being fired.
Speaker 1: Now I understand this is our next big subject. I
just wanted to say to our producer Parry, vortex of
grotesque aries it would be the appropriate episode title. I
know they're always looking for a phrase to fit.
Speaker 3: There is a line somewhere that you don't want to cross,
even when people say things that are as horrible as
that Charlie Cook deserved to die. But I think there
are also a good number of people whose jobs make
publicly holding the position that people should be shot on
college campuses for disagreeing with you an untenable thing to say. So,
for example, one of the people I saw was a
college assistant dean. Now you cannot be the assistant dean
of a college and say in public that people who
go to colleges to speak should be shot in the neck.
That is obvious to me. I think a lot of
people who teach children fall into this category. I think
some first responders, certainly government officials, who are held to
a different standard than those within the private sector. I
don't want to buy a house from somebody who believes this,
but by the way, that's a choice, right, But I
sure as hell don't want to engage with a government
official who is bound constitutionally and statutorily to treat me
as an equal if they believe that those who dissent
from his or her worldview should be killed. So I
think we ought to be careful here not to reflexively
say we're against councel culture and miss interpret or defying
cancel culture. Councel culture is when somebody says something that
is unrelated to their current job, or said something a
long time ago that doesn't reflect who they are, and
then I can for it anyway. The great example of
councel culture, I think was when Kyler Murray is now
the quarterback for the Arizona Cardinals, won the Heisman Trophy,
and on the day that he was being given the
Heisman Trophy, someone went back through his Twitter and found
that when he was fifteen, he'd said something ugly and
that he now didn't believe. And then they put it
all over the newspapers and people said should he get
a Heisman Trophy? And you think, what the hell does
that have to do with being a college athlete. But
if you are a college dean, or a school teacher,
or a nurse, or you work for the government and
your first reaction was to publicly say that I think
this guy should have been murdered for his beliefs, then yes,
that is actually important that we know you believe that,
because that speaks to your qualification or disqualification for the job.
Speaker 1: Do you agree with that? I do, absolutely, I do.
The question is that how far do you go? Now?
The people in position of authority, those in trusted with
public safety, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Somebody who's
front facing to the public. You mentioned the realtor, I
think there was a guy in Las Vegas who popped
off about it and was relieved of his position. Yesterday
on Twitter at the end of the day it was
my feed for whatever reason, Oh I know what reason,
Algo knows what what I'm jonesing for was almost eighty
percent reporting what people had said. Now, in the past,
it would just be that look at this person, suddenlight,
best disinfect and show us. You know, they're showing us
who they are. But now you seem to have this
army of guys out there popping the riddle and going
to work and digging up and finding out exactly who
all these people are and their normies. Supposedly they are
people who work at a financial services company. There's somebody
who has a catering business. There's somebody who runs a
barbecue restaurant. And this morning the Twitter feed was a
list of consequences. It was a list. Was was the
fos to yesterday's effing about one after the other being
fired and people reacting with dismay. Of course the people
were being fired, but action school boards, yes, but private businesses, uh,
sports organizations, radio stations. I've never seen anything like this.
So and again I thought you and the right were
against cancel culture. I thought you supported free speech. Well,
of course I do. And as the man said, you know,
you get two fundamental rights in this country to do
whatever the hell you want, and also to face up.
You have a duty to face up to the consequences
of what you've done. This is that, this is the
consequence part. But whether or not it's it's good to
go after everybody who was saying these things is the question.
And there's a website. Now I've never seen anything like
this before. Again because because this was different, there's a
website that just that is, there's a database, searchable database
of everybody who said horrible things been there. It is
as long as somebody keeps paying the registery fee. Now,
you mentioned going after the people, public authority and trust
and the rest of it. What do you think about
going after the fine about publishing comments and contacting their
boss and demanding that something to be done. How do
you feel about that?
Speaker 3: Well, I don't quite know where the line is, and
I am less interested in doing that purely because that
is a private matter. If the boss wishes to fire him,
so be it. It doesn't particularly affect me that it
doesn't mean it doesn't matter. I think it mattered that
they went off to Kyler Mara. I think it mattered
that the Benham others got canceled from HGTV because they
were Evangelical Christians. I do think it matters within our culture.
But I'm not implicated by the decisions of a private
company that I don't use in the way that I
am by those who hold power over me with the
police to back them up. I think that's a case
by case issue. Quite clearly. If somebody went into a
job interview and said, by the way, just before we finished,
i'd like you to know that I think that Charlie
Kirk deserved to be murdered, they wouldn't get the job,
So saying it afterwards can be considered in that light
in some circumstances. I I worry more, James about what
it is that has engendered that in the first place.
I'm not trying to avoid the question, but I don't
understand things thinking that I really don't understand. I spend
a good deal of my time trying to work out
what it is that the people I disagree with believe
and why I think I have a fairly good handle
on a lot of it. Some things that my opponents
believe I used to believe. I wasn't always of these
political views. I have friends, good friends, who believe different
things than me, And I understand why I mentioned being
pro life. I'm emphatic in that view. But I do
understand the other side. I do understand what they That's
the difference.
Speaker 1: That's the difference when you said I and I understand
what they what they believe. You don't agree with it,
but you understand it without having a preset demonization of it.
The best way you cannot exist intellectually in this country
unless you understand what the other side thinks, not a
parody of it, not a shadow of it, not a
caricature of it, but actually what they think and their
reasoning behind it. Because then you can grapple with that,
you know how to argue, and you can have productive conversations. Right.
Speaker 3: But I don't understand seeing someone murdered and thinking it's
a good thing. I don't understand it in any circumstances
that could possibly obtain in America as it exists today. Yes,
of course, I can imagine living in Nazi Germany and
concluding that I had to kill someone. Of course I
can imagine that, but I cannot imagine looking at the
United States and thinking this. And you know, one of
the things that I thought was the most interesting about
the early reactions, the first firing, in fact, which I
believe was Matthew Dowd from MSNBC, was not what he
said that got him fired, which was terrible, but what
he said before that. The first thing he said on
MSNBC that day that was crazy was well, we don't
know that Charlie Kirk was shot by someone who was
trying to hurt him. Maybe it had been a supporter
who was firing off his gun in celebration.
Speaker 1: It was the most that was just absolutely stunning. I mean,
he's literally imagining Yosemite Sam in the lad exactly.
Speaker 3: But that's the point. What I took from that was, Ah,
they actually know nothing about America. To say that, you
have to know nothing about America, and in particular nothing
about the people you're critiquing to believe that this is
a thing that happens in the United States on the
right is so absurd. And then we got Stephen King,
the writer who seemed genuinely to believe that Charlie Kirk
wanted to stone gay people to death. And we also
got a correction from The New York Times that was
a beautyeah this morning that said, oh, when we wrote
that Charlie Kirk had made terrible anti semitic statements, what
he was actually doing was reading out someone else's anti
semitic statements and disagreeing with him. That these three things
strighten us being important because what it jests is that
the person who wrote that Times article, plus all of
the editors who looked at it, Stephen King up in Maine,
big figure within our culture, his starkly and Matthew Dowd
at MSNBC, don't know what America's like and what the
people who are prominent in America think, and what more
than half the country statistically believes in how they act.
And that's the part about this that I find alarming,
because I can't get into the head of the person
who thinks this was a good thing. But maybe they
really do believe that we're living in Nazi Germany.
Speaker 1: Mm hm. That these that the positions that cherlie Grek had,
for the most part, are outside of the mainstream of
any any decent pro I mean, these are the ones
who have the multi colored little statements on the front
lawn in this house. These are the ones who are
always telling us to be kind. These are the ones
who are who believe they have an intellectual apprehension of
the world that needs no revision and needs no refinement.
And they've had it all their lives and everybody they know,
and it's what the you're coming back to them from
all the selected media sources. I mean, they talk about
the right living in a Fox News bubble. I don't
watch Fox, I don't listen to talk radio. I'm perfectly
capable of adjudicating the temperature of the nation and the
ideas and the rest of it without being handheld by
any particular medium or force fed and told what to think.
They don't know. No, they have a caricature of it,
and the caricature of it is always going to be
some hang Hill character sitting downstairs and you know, you know,
you know, woodlined a rumpus room with a Maga cap on,
you know, looking at the television and fulminating about the gays.
No idea. Now, one of the things that I saw
this morning that everything's going to be taken up to
a new level a bit until temperatures, you know. Cool.
This is a guy who saw a video of this
woman and she did a TikTok where she's doing a
pretend thought and prayers and she's dancing and she's smiling,
and she's all happy about it. She's happy that the
man got shot in the neck in front of his children.
And we found out that her husband owns this electrical company.
So the guy who shot this video went to the
husband's electrical company, walked in, confronted the husband and asked
him what he thought about his wife's TikTok, and he
was duly pushed out. Again, that's a different level, and
that's going to get somebody shot, and that's what we
got to prepare ourselves for. Well, we're happy that the
school teacher is facing consequences for saying horrible things, but
at the other end of this is going to be
unfortunate things that do not belong in this country and
ought not to happen. I mean, I don't know if
the guy who's running the electrical company believes what his
wife believes possibly does, but there's going to be a
lot the frick, let's just say the friction that is
coming is not going to abate soon. Because, as we all,
somebody did they put it, they said this, this wasn't
just ordinary bad news. This felt like an Archduke Ferdinand moment.
And I got that feeling. I did.
Speaker 3: I sort of felt that why why do you think
this broke through so much?
Speaker 1: I well, because because a lot of people, I think
who are on social media have seen an awful lot
of Charlie's debates and they've seen a genial but passionate
and committed guy engage with people without ad hominem, without
you know, calling them names, being a bomb thrower. That
he wasn't somebody who just simply sat in the studio
and took calls from only people that he wanted to
take and said what he wanted to say. That that
it was the fact that he wasn't a political figure
in the sense of running for office. He wasn't controlling,
you know, the Republican Party to the sense that he
was up there in the echelon's pulling strings. He was
somebody who was murdered for his beliefs, and that just
seems to sort of click in a way that the
others haven't, I think. And also this and also this
I think this is and what a lot of people
on the left who don't get what people on the
right are talking about. I've talked about this before, non
contiguous information streams, right, they don't know what we're worried about.
That we don't always know what they're worried about. You
can put this in a piece with the two Israeli's
embassy people who were murdered in Washington outside of a
museum event by somebody shouting Free Palestine. You add to
that the truth the loser shooting here in Minneapolis, trans
identified guy who'd written every single internet meme possible on
his stuff and you know, had all the standard bog
standard leftist grievances, but was a loser basically. You can
add to that the resurfacing of the video of the
Ukrainian woman who who was murdered on a bus by
a convicted felon who should have been put away an
awful long time ago, but it had been let up
by judges who had been soaked in the restricted justice
and the rest of it. And then you add this
and they all connect in the minds of people center
right right, because they are connected, and it's and what
exactly is the nature and the width of that connective
tissue is something that we have to figure out. But
there's been a sort of a sense of an accumulation
and acceleration of these things. And the Charlie Kirk one
added to that. I can't explain it any more than that,
but that's one of the reasons that it hit.
Speaker 3: It also seems to have broken through in particular in
sports circles. I saw Jacksonville Jaguars players tweeting about it,
which never happens. They only ever tweet about charities and football.
I saw Lamar Jackson comment I saw the New York
Yankees hold a moment of science. Last night at the
Packers Commander's game. We got a moment of science. And
I've wondered whether that's because Kirk's audience primarily was younger men, yeah,
and athlete.
Speaker 1: Yeah. If it'd been Jordan Peterson, it wouldn't have been
the same. It just wouldn't have That's partially personality, and
I mean personality has an awful lot to do with this.
This morning, I saw and again the clip just rolls
up and it's a young black Christian arguing with Charlie
about Christian nationalism and it really was a piece of work. Now,
I the Charlie made a distinction right away between being
a Christian and a nationalist. He didn't conflate the terms
into one thing. But then he was talking about the
biblical lessons that that reinforced the idea of being true
to your nation, of being such a such. And while
you know we can debate that, I'm not interested in, well,
let me stop there. What he what he evinced was
a rapid fire and very very you know, talmudic knowledge
of what he was talking about. And the back and
forth that he had with this guy was really interesting.
And even me who's outside of that particular realm of
thinking and respectful and good and meaty and interesting. And
I came away from it learning a good deal and
I think a lot of people got that as well.
Here is a contrary idea expressed with confidence but without malice,
and it you know, he treated the people with whom
we spoke with respect in that he expected them to
realize the merits of what he was saying and how
this argument was convincing. Of course, he was talking to
a greater audience as well, but he was addressing them
if nothing else, we learned that college students are going
to college is not necessarily guarantee that you're going to
be smart, nimble of mind, and eager to entertain ideas
in a socratic dialogue. Nah, if I can just interrupt here,
I have to say it. Awful events make you look
for places that are that are places of sanctuary. Frankly,
and even in the best of times, when life gets hectic,
finding your comfort and your calm, it's essential. We all
need time for relaxation and recharging and soaking in a
sense of peace, to remind yourself that all is not
lost because of the earth. You can create a space
that feels like a personal retreat where comfort and serenity
come together naturally. And we're talking sheets here and speaking
to a man who lives in a climb that's both
soakingly humid and I imagine frigid and by Florida fridgrid standards,
probably what fifty one degrees. You want a sheet that's
going to there's going to manage all those climactic extremes
that you.
Speaker 3: Experience, right Cherman, that's absolutely right, And I have one,
In fact, we have a few. They are extremely comfortable
that's just as important. They adapt to the temperatures and
the humidity will But they're so comfortable to lie in,
and I wish I had more time to lie in them.
My children have got worse and worse and worse about
sleeping in, and worse and worse and worse about not
waking me up. But if I had more time, James,
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And we think Cozi Earth for sponsoring this. The Ricochet podcast, Charles,
you know this will hit in the weekend. People may
or may not be interested in what we have to say,
but I know they'll be keen to know what you
have to say about AI something that's coming up in
a future issue of National Review.
Speaker 3: Well, yes, I just started this for the latest issue
of the magazine. I think it will be out next week.
I've spent an enormous amount of time with AI A
the right word over the last two or three months.
I've been using it for a couple of years, but
I've really started using it in earnest over the last
three months. And one of the things I point out
in this piece is that whether one likes this or not,
whether one thinks it is good for society or not,
AI is going to be the next thing. It is
the next thing. We're no longer talking about the potential
for AI to enter into the mainstream culture. It is,
and has and will. I have noticed that, despite having
used Google since nineteen ninety eight and Alta Vista before it,
I have stopped thinking in search engine terms when I
need to look something up. How long was that nineteen
ninety eight to twenty twenty three is twenty five years?
Speaker 1: Well, weren't you there before Yahoo and ask jeeves.
Speaker 3: For more twenty five thirty years, let's say. And within
maybe a month of using chat GPT in particular for
a whole host of tasks, I no longer really know
what to put into Google because the interrogative nature of
AI is so superior.
Speaker 1: I know exactly what you mean. I find myself typing
something into Google and then it's like is and I think,
is Google going to understand this? Usually? I mean seriously,
Usually I use rock and I will say something to it,
and I know that it won't be grammatically correct necessarily,
or that I would have prefaced with something that is
irrelevant maybe, But it parses what I say perfectly and
gives me the answer and lately gives me answers that
are turned out not to be entirely correct, which is
the problem, Which is the big problem. But when it
comes to Google, Google has just absolutely in shitified itself
with this AI overview, which you can turn off, I guess,
but no one nobody goes to the pages from which
they supposedly are are scraping this information. You just get
this AI overview. We need a tendy links down at
the bottom of it. I try to find the primary
source every sin every time I possibly can. I'll give
you an example. I was looking for something. I was looking.
I think it was a town. It was some it
was in the Middle East, and it was some city
I was research. I can't even remember what it was.
It'll be in my website a year from now. And
when I googled the town, is said that it was
a very important town in Palestinian history, Palestinian antiquity. That
was it, the term at us Palestinian antiquity. And when
I went back to the original source, it was quoting
something about from nineteen twenty four, when of course it
was called Palestine. But people would look that and say,
oh look there's a you know, it's been Palestine since
nineteen twenty four, it was Palestine. So context and nuance
here was everything. And I'm still waiting for the day
where I can just say I, okay, I trust you,
but I don't. But I don't. And I know I'm
saying this to a guy who has AI composed operas
about people that he doesn't like. And I get that,
and I have been I have used AI for music
projects when I need a quick stinger for something, but
I feel guilty about it. I feel like I like
I male ordered a rubber sex doll instead of asking
a woman out on a date. So I get my
keyboard out and I come up with something that isn't
as good, but it's mine, but it's real. And I
know people in the creative professions who are terrified, terrified
that they are going to be evaporated by this. And
you know, a lot of a lot of those jobs
are going to go away. But I think that that
the ineffable human quality is going to be the killer
app for us. That you and I fear the day
when a I can replicate that so well, that human ingenuity.
Just you know, I'm talking to a guy in the
ad industry the other day and I was asking him
about this, and he said, you know what, AI can't duplicate,
can't It can't duplicate bad ideas because we get great
stuff from bad ideas, we get new directions from bad ideas,
and AI doesn't know how to do that yet. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So the singular source of truth is its virtue
and its vice, and that you don't have to read
through thirty websites to get the information you want, And
the problem with that is that you don't have to
read through thirty websites to get the information you want.
In other words, it's fast and often correct. It's read
all the manuals. That's good, you don't have to read
the manuals. But if you don't know where it's coming from,
and you're not old enough to understand that it is
scraping the internet, that it is not born with Omnissians,
then you might start getting led down the garden path.
And I do worry a bit about that, because it's
intrinsically non pluralist. I like that when I use a
search engine, I can see what the sources are and
judge them accordingly. I can say, all right, this is
from the New York Times. I know what that is,
I know who writes for it, I know where they're
bias is. But the biggest problem of all, James, I
don't think, is to do with bias, although that is
an issue. The biggest problem of all is this AI,
if it's not carefully treated legally, is going to have
within it the seeds of its own destruction. At his
event on AI a couple of months ago, which was
very good in General Donald Trump answered questions about copyright
in an extremely flippant manner. He said, Look, the Chinese
don't observe copyright. We can't either, So in effect, there's
going to be no copyright where AI is concerned. Now,
JUMP can't do that. That's a matter for Congress. And
if they don't do anything for the courts, because we
do have copyright laws.
Speaker 1: But that was his take.
Speaker 3: And if that happens, it will destroy the Internet. And
I point this out on the piece because AI chat
bots scrape everything, and you only need to scrape something
once to echo it infinitely. So if you, for example,
run Charles's Rollercoaster Encyclopedia and you spent years putting it
together and you are paid for your efforts, or at
least your hosting is covered for your efforts by either
ads or subscriptions or combination of the two, and then
chat GPT comes along scrapes the entire side and can
give people the same information without crediting or paying you.
Speaker 1: What will you do, Well, either you'll stop doing it.
Speaker 3: At that point the resource goes away and the next resource,
whatever it is, never gets off the ground, or you
put it behind a paywall, it'll be more likely, but
at that point chat GPT can't access it, so the
whole Internet either goes behind a paywall or people don't
do all of the things they've done for the last
thirty five years. And these wonderful little projects you have
one on your website that are accessible.
Speaker 1: One dozens that I've been working on since they plug
this damned thing in twenty nine years. I believe it
will be.
Speaker 3: But I mean, your website's wonderful, That's what I mean.
It's one website. Then the Internet changes for the worst
and chat gpt has nothing to scrape, right, So we
are going to have to work this out because I
don't think that is a sustainable model. And the analogy
that I would draw is imagine if you were commissioned
by HarperCollins to write a book and they said you
were not I'm going to pay you a big advance,
but you will make it up on the sales, and
then you only sold one book because that's all it
took for chat GPT to scrape it and then give
it to anyone who was paying twenty bucks a month. Hey,
you wouldn't write.
Speaker 1: The book, no, absolutely, So this is a bad problem
that it's a big problem. So let's just end with
a big problem unsolved. Let's end there and look forward
to better times. But also remember that Charlie was killed
for a reason, and we owe the honor of going
back and looking at what he said and finding solace
perhaps in the fact that he was a man of
great faith and knew where he was going, and just
think about his poor family and his kids, which just
absolutely breaks your heart. The whole week. There's been one
that breaks the heart the whole damned month. It's been
a rough year, but we've had these before, and let's
all hope for some Palmer raids for the Antifa. I'm kidding,
I'm kidding, Am I kidding? Am I kidding? Jermany.
Speaker 3: I think that if they're engaged in an organized attempt
to commit crimes, then the federal government should investigate. And
the Palmer rates might not be the analogy I would drawn, oh,
but broad it was. But I do think that there
are statutes that are designed for exactly this sort of thing,
and if there's any evidence, they should be investigated.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well this will come back then, I'm sure. As
Lilax calls for a suspension of civil liberties and massive
deportation of Italians. No, thanks for joining us, folks. Thanks
to Cozy Earth, our sponsored you can make your life
more comfortable in a personal retreat if you avail yourself
with their fine products. And of course you can leave
that five star review at Apple Podcasts and say things
like who needs Stephen? I was sick of Peter and Rob. Anyway,
these guys are great. See now we'll find out when
anothery're listening. Anyway, Thanks everybody, and what the version of
Ricochet are we up to so far?
Speaker 3: It's the full point eleven points something points something.
Speaker 1: Okay, we'll see you at that one at ricochet dot com.
Bye bye,