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