Speaker 1: Well, whiskey coming Take pains, don't you?
Speaker 2: From power Line blog dot com and produced by Ricochet
Speaker 2: dot Com. This is the Three Whiskey Happy Hour with
Speaker 2: your bartenders Steve Hayward, John Yu and power Lines International
Speaker 2: Woman of Mystery Lucretia has.
Speaker 3: Gotta giving let that whiskey clone when you're feeling in love,
Speaker 3: down and loa.
Speaker 4: Well, welcome everybody to this very special and it is
Speaker 4: indeed very special edition of the Three Whiskey Happy Hour
Speaker 4: because we can see and I took a picture Steve,
Speaker 4: so that you can actually put it up. All three
Speaker 4: co hosts of the Three Whiskey Happy Hour in the
Speaker 4: United States of America and in their own homes over zoo.
Speaker 4: It doesn't last long because, of course, our world traveler
Speaker 4: friend John is taking off again for Switzerland, and Steve's
Speaker 4: going other places in California. I, on the other hand,
Speaker 4: am staying home and not leaving anywhere. I've decided I
Speaker 4: no longer want to be a world traveler for a while.
Speaker 4: But anyway, we do want to talk momentarily one more
Speaker 4: time about our trip to Tuscany, because, as we talked
Speaker 4: about last time, we all visited the castle the Brolio Castle,
Speaker 4: which is the main castle of the Ricossoli family, and
Speaker 4: tasted their wines, had a lovely, lovely time at lunch
Speaker 4: with their wines. And one of those wines is actually
Speaker 4: on Wine Spectators one hundred best. Steve's showing it. Maybe
Speaker 4: I take a picture of it there so I could
Speaker 4: get it all at once, Steve, hold on, keep holding it.
Speaker 4: Did you know that, John? It's number fifty? Isn't that.
Speaker 5: One more time? That is a bargain? Oh?
Speaker 6: Sorry, Okay, there it is?
Speaker 5: Uh okay wow? Which which one of the twenty vintages
Speaker 5: that Steve was drinking won the prize?
Speaker 1: It's the It's the Baron Ricosoli Kanti Classical, Guyoli, Cordi
Speaker 1: Colada grandwy One. I didn't get that all right, but
Speaker 1: those long things no. Look of course John doesn't know this.
Speaker 1: I mean he pretends to be a dad.
Speaker 5: I'm the only one who has the bottle right in
Speaker 5: front of me.
Speaker 4: Okay, I have that one still, we didn't.
Speaker 5: I have it right in front of me on my desk.
Speaker 4: I did find, you know. We had a difficult time
Speaker 4: locating where you can buy some of the Ricossoli family wines,
Speaker 4: but I did go to my local total wine local,
Speaker 4: you know, an hour and a half away, and find
Speaker 4: uh a couple of bottles of from the Brolio Castle.
Speaker 4: So it is a.
Speaker 6: What's that? Oh wow?
Speaker 5: On a show.
Speaker 4: That doesn't mean a bad thing.
Speaker 6: No, I think that's it's got photos on it. It's
Speaker 6: the fortieth anniversary of Camus.
Speaker 1: Camus is one of the better stags Leap, you know,
Speaker 1: sub Appalachians in Apple Valley.
Speaker 6: That's usually a very expensive bottle of wine. John, I'm
Speaker 6: not sure what Lucas.
Speaker 5: Was talking about, but no, no, it's I mean my
Speaker 5: opinion as a gift giver just went up. Yeah, sure, yeah,
Speaker 5: they have expensive wines.
Speaker 4: They have two three hundred dollars bottle of wine that
Speaker 4: costc So, I don't know, I don't remember what that
Speaker 4: one is. I do want to tell you really quickly, John,
Speaker 4: before we move on to real stuff, is that I
Speaker 4: was at a Christmas party for the college last night
Speaker 4: and somebody had brought there a student who just came
Speaker 4: to us from South South Korea. So I went over
Speaker 4: to welcome her and talked to her and I said,
Speaker 4: you know, my good friend is has a lot of
Speaker 4: students Asian students. You come to him, and he insists
Speaker 4: that it's a Korean cultural tradition that you have to
Speaker 4: bring your professor's bottles of alcohol and the whole you know,
Speaker 4: you know how they are at my university, the teetotalers,
Speaker 4: that they are their faces all, you know. And I said,
Speaker 4: and she's she looks a little bit shocked, and she goes,
Speaker 4: do you like him?
Speaker 5: It was very funny, Lucretia, you just outed another North
Speaker 5: Korean agent.
Speaker 6: I know, I know, because there's no way that person's
Speaker 6: really Korean.
Speaker 4: Answer exactly. All right, gentlemen, how are we doing this week?
Speaker 6: Are you?
Speaker 4: Are you both caught up now? Back with the happenings
Speaker 4: of the world. I don't know how anybody stays caught up, right.
Speaker 4: I thought my email was going to get better after
Speaker 4: the after the election was over, you know, because I
Speaker 4: was getting a thousand a day with politics. Now of
Speaker 4: course I'm getting still politics, but cyber Monday, Black Friday.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, anyway, so sorry about that, go ahead.
Speaker 5: Thought I thought that actually the things had were a
Speaker 5: little bit calm when we had left the country to
Speaker 5: go to Italy, right, they compared to what it's like now.
Speaker 5: But I think this is I think we all forgot
Speaker 5: the speed at which things happened in the Trump years.
Speaker 5: I think it's just come back to the average for
Speaker 5: the four years under Trump. Remember we had the Russia
Speaker 5: hoaks and a Special Council and Ukraine, and I mean
Speaker 5: that's just we had impeachment twice, we had COVID lockdowns.
Speaker 5: To think of all that, We had an amazing economy,
Speaker 5: think of all the stuff that happened in that For
Speaker 5: I think we're just returning to the pace that's Trump normal, you.
Speaker 4: Mean, as opposed to somebody who's brain dead and living
Speaker 4: and basically living in the basement. I do want to
Speaker 4: say before one more thing before we go on with
Speaker 4: the serious stuff, that how happy I am that both
Speaker 4: of you were not washed away out to see with
Speaker 4: the tsunami that followed the earthquake.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah it never happened, but yeah, go ahead, Well
Speaker 1: you were, but I was still overseas John.
Speaker 6: And I'm oh I was.
Speaker 5: But yeah, the minute I got the warning, I headed
Speaker 5: for the Golden Gate Bridge and I was actually on
Speaker 5: it at I actually was on it at twelve ten
Speaker 5: when the tsunami hit. Because Steve and I am Stephen
Speaker 5: and I've talked this. I wanted to see if it
Speaker 5: was Godzilla. I was hoping to see some Kaiju come
Speaker 5: out of this huge wall of water like in the
Speaker 5: movies and then tear the Golden gate bridge into shreds.
Speaker 5: Nothing happened.
Speaker 4: Nothing happened, but I gave the bathtub. I do want
Speaker 4: to tell you that, John. This was John's comment when
Speaker 4: I said I was worried about him. He says, I'm
Speaker 4: thirty feet above sea level. But but I'm about to
Speaker 4: drive into San Francisco across a golden great gate bridge
Speaker 4: at the time the tsunami is to hit. This will
Speaker 4: be so cool parenthesis, famous last words. John was looking
Speaker 4: forward to it.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I really was.
Speaker 4: Regardless. We're glad you're here. So my theme for the
Speaker 4: podcast is Trump has Trump has in fact a revolution?
Speaker 4: What would be the right word, Steve, help me with
Speaker 4: a good word here? Trump The world is now Trump's world.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, I've been saying this for you know, months now,
Speaker 1: or maybe longer than that, that Trump is the dominant
Speaker 1: political figure of our time. I mean, it's you know,
Speaker 1: the age of Trump on the global scale. I mean,
Speaker 1: and occasionally I get I'm not say mystical about it,
Speaker 1: but I've been saying there's something about him. He's a
Speaker 1: figure of destiny, he's a force of nature, all those things.
Speaker 1: And you know, one of the things that you're saying,
Speaker 1: things are happening fast John already is Isn't it.
Speaker 6: Interesting that Trump it seems like he's president already.
Speaker 1: I mean, you have Justin Trudeau hopping the first plane
Speaker 1: tomor a lago after Trump raises a threat about tariffs.
Speaker 1: You have I think one interesting thing is Trump is
Speaker 1: en route maybe today Saturday, to parents to and apparently
Speaker 1: he was asked to come personally by Macrone, who's in
Speaker 1: a whole heap of political trouble. And Biden's not going,
Speaker 1: Jill's not going, Vice President Harris is not going. But
Speaker 1: Trump is going. It's like he's president already. And even
Speaker 1: the people in Europe who hate him and fear him,
Speaker 1: they wanted me next to him and they want to
Speaker 1: get on with him. And I think that's extremely significant.
Speaker 1: He's going over to do that, and so there you go.
Speaker 6: It's like he's already ruling our.
Speaker 1: Country and and you know, taking over foreign policy, and
Speaker 1: I you know, I can't think of any I mean,
Speaker 1: there was the long interregnum between Hoover's defeat and thirty
Speaker 1: two and Roosevelt taking office those days still in March.
Speaker 1: Remember it was after that we moved it up to
Speaker 1: January twenty, during which time Hoover kept this long story.
Speaker 1: But I'll just say, in one sentence, Hoover kept saying, Roosevelt,
Speaker 1: what would you like me to do to help you know,
Speaker 1: we're going to Cristis. Tell me what you'd like me
Speaker 1: to do, and I'll try and do it and ease
Speaker 1: the transition and speed things up. And Roosevelt refused to respond,
Speaker 1: and you know, wanted to get a fresh start of
Speaker 1: his own. And that's a long, controversial story. But instead,
Speaker 1: you know, Trump's not paying attention to Biden.
Speaker 6: He's just gone.
Speaker 1: And you know it's it's going to be a long
Speaker 1: four years in this sense, in a good sense that
Speaker 1: because Trump does so much, so much turmoil, it's gonna
Speaker 1: be a wild ride.
Speaker 6: It's gonna be a lot of fun.
Speaker 5: I think, Look, I'm gonna get down and dirty. I
Speaker 5: did not know Steve was a follower of Rousseau and hegel.
Speaker 5: He thinks all the spirit of the age has concentrated
Speaker 5: into one leader who can recognize it and ride the wave,
Speaker 5: like Napoleon or somebody.
Speaker 6: Well, yeah, I mean I knew it. I knew it.
Speaker 5: Hegelian, Hegelian. This is like what happened. I was with
Speaker 5: a bunch of Straussians and that's what they were yelling
Speaker 5: at each other. Really, but the other I was at
Speaker 5: Ai for this Natural Law and the American conference, and
Speaker 5: after dinner there are accusations of Hegelianism being thrown about
Speaker 5: left and right. I wasn't sure what they were arguing about, but.
Speaker 6: Now I get it.
Speaker 5: Steve thinks that Trump is one of these world what's
Speaker 5: the first world historical figures?
Speaker 1: Well, yes, yes, but you know it doesn't have to
Speaker 1: be a gay and to believe that, all you need
Speaker 1: to do is think about supremely talented people like like
Speaker 1: Napoleon or Marlborough, you know, Churchill's great ancestor or Churchill.
Speaker 6: Right, that's that's all you don't have to go John, Okay.
Speaker 6: I was working out this morning, blow man, I know God.
Speaker 4: And I was working out this morning and the Ricochet
Speaker 4: podcast appeared on my podcast list, you know, right front
Speaker 4: and center on my phone. So I decided to listen
Speaker 4: to it because you were on.
Speaker 5: It, and that's what happens when Steve's in flight.
Speaker 4: I guess so. But before you came on, I don't
Speaker 4: know if you listened to the Yeah, they're they're boring
Speaker 4: without you. I hate to see it. But anyway, I
Speaker 4: didn't say that out loud, but one of the one
Speaker 4: of the things they said that was actually very interesting.
Speaker 4: They were all talking about their especially James was talking
Speaker 4: about his uh international travels and that he was in
Speaker 4: I believe he said, can kun somewhere in Mexico, and
Speaker 4: that all of these Europeans and Canadians and on and
Speaker 4: on and on, we're there and they all hate their
Speaker 4: country right now and they're all thinking that America. It
Speaker 4: was part of a whole discussion about what you're thankful for,
Speaker 4: that America was just the number one prime place on
Speaker 4: Earth to be and the rest of the country is
Speaker 4: so jealous of us because of electing Trump and all
Speaker 4: that that means.
Speaker 5: You know. I was reading something about how when we
Speaker 5: wrote to how depressed the Europeans are, Yeah, and why
Speaker 5: and one reason that I think I really was struck
Speaker 5: by being there again, how everything is in stasis. There's
Speaker 5: no growth, there's no innovation. They even will say that
Speaker 5: about themselves. They're worried about at least in Italy, all
Speaker 5: their young people are coming here. There's a brain drain
Speaker 5: in Italy for the United States and England, the Anglo
Speaker 5: Saxon countries, as the French dismissively call us. But one
Speaker 5: statistics suck with me. I think I read that during
Speaker 5: the Bush ministry George W. Bush took office, the size
Speaker 5: of the European Union economy and the US economy were
Speaker 5: us roughly the same.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Now we're fifty percent larger somewhere around there, and the
Speaker 5: European Union economy is roughly the same as it was
Speaker 5: in two thousands. There's been almost no growth there, and
Speaker 5: we've clearly done despite all of the terrible policies of
Speaker 5: Obama and Biden. Despite them, we have still you know,
Speaker 5: the American economy is still dynamic compared to the rest
Speaker 5: of the world. I would be depressed too if I
Speaker 5: lived in those countries. They're becoming a bit like Disneyland
Speaker 5: for adults. You know. You know, you go there for vacation.
Speaker 5: The people who live there seem to enjoy the life there,
Speaker 5: but there's no thing productive going on there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So, you know, I've for years referred to England
Speaker 1: as History Land, you know, sort of Disneyland for right,
Speaker 1: And yeah, no, I've looked at some of those same
Speaker 1: figures too, John. It's really stunning how little growth there's
Speaker 1: been in Europe for quite a while now. If you
Speaker 1: can look at stock market capitalization which has been flat
Speaker 1: while ours has been soaring, startups, you know, I pos.
Speaker 6: All those kinds of things are lacking, way behind. And England.
Speaker 1: By the way, you said people want to flock to
Speaker 1: the Anglo American world. I think you really want to
Speaker 1: say the American world. Most people don't know this, but
Speaker 1: real per capita income in England is lower than Mississippi,
Speaker 1: our poorous state. Really, I mean seriously, England, you know,
Speaker 1: the great nation of the Empire, and you know their incomes.
Speaker 6: Of stagnant, so bad or below Mississippi. So it's an
Speaker 6: amazing thing.
Speaker 1: And the other thing I'd add to it is the
Speaker 1: thing why they're excited about Trump and so many places.
Speaker 1: And I wanted to make this point that our presentations
Speaker 1: we made in Florence two weeks ago now, but didn't.
Speaker 6: Have the time every time.
Speaker 5: By the way, the reason Steven have time because he
Speaker 5: was mobbed with students.
Speaker 6: I hope people saw the photos.
Speaker 5: Mob people ignored me, and the Kresha absolutely ignored us.
Speaker 5: No student asked me single they were twenty people. Steve,
Speaker 5: we still don't know why.
Speaker 6: It's my raw animal maggotism job.
Speaker 5: It was your raw animal world historical magotism.
Speaker 6: I just give off that Hegelian aura wherever I go.
Speaker 1: Now, No, the play is every ruling party is losing
Speaker 1: votes and getting clobbered. And by the way, it's a
Speaker 1: bipartisan thing. I mean as I did mention but didn't
Speaker 1: explain the point. The great cautionary tale for populace of
Speaker 1: the right is Boris Johnson, who you know ran and
Speaker 1: won a smashing victory in twenty nineteen and then governed
Speaker 1: from the left, and that was his mistake. He totally
Speaker 1: capitulated the left and the Tory Party five years later
Speaker 1: was nearly wiped out.
Speaker 6: There were showing in two hundred years.
Speaker 1: And you know that's the That's what faces say Marine
Speaker 1: Lapan if they allow her to be president of France
Speaker 1: or by the way, breaking story. I haven't gotten the details.
Speaker 1: I've only seen the headline is that some court, I
Speaker 1: guess a constitutional court in Romania has invalidated the presidential
Speaker 1: election that went on this week because a conservative populace
Speaker 1: was in the lead and they're claiming Russian interference.
Speaker 6: The boy, isn't this interesting?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 6: Again?
Speaker 1: My definition of populism being when the wrong person or
Speaker 1: party wins an election from the establishment point of view.
Speaker 6: So there, you know, that kind of thing is going
Speaker 6: on in France.
Speaker 1: They're trying to disqualify Marine Lapin from running for president
Speaker 1: through you know law fair So the stuff that was
Speaker 1: done against Trump is spreading overseas fast.
Speaker 6: So things are going to get worse before they get worse.
Speaker 4: I'll stop there, Okay, John, anything else to add to that?
Speaker 5: Let me oh, I already accous Steve of being a
Speaker 5: Hegelian several times or something.
Speaker 4: That I think that he probably is.
Speaker 6: I think so too.
Speaker 4: He is a.
Speaker 6: That's even worse than being called a pretentious intellectual. John.
Speaker 5: This is really I've studied what I know what's considered
Speaker 5: an insultant trouse world.
Speaker 6: Ah, the mun slinging hasn't begun, all right.
Speaker 4: So if my theme, my belief, my theme is it's
Speaker 4: Trump worlds Now. We're actually gonna start with a really
Speaker 4: interesting article that John wrote the other day. Which he
Speaker 4: was worried was untimely because this happened what seven days ago.
Speaker 4: We no longer can discuss major events that happened seven
Speaker 4: days ago because they've been preempted by other events. But
Speaker 4: really interesting article. Let me make sure I get the
Speaker 4: title exactly right, because that was my favorite part of it, John,
Speaker 4: There was a good article. Why an international arrest warrant
Speaker 4: for Net and Yahoo is legal trash? Now let me
Speaker 4: set you up like this, John, and say that the
Speaker 4: Biden administration, as you point out in there, has gone
Speaker 4: along with you know, the I should let me say
Speaker 4: that again, something on which Net and Yahoo and Biden
Speaker 4: and the Biden administration agree. I'm wondering, though, if the
Speaker 4: fortunes of the Biden administration were stronger, if if Trump
Speaker 4: was not on the scene, if the Biden administration would
Speaker 4: have been so quick to condemn the International Criminal Court.
Speaker 4: Your thoughts, your article, you give me your thoughts.
Speaker 5: Well, I agree with you that if Obama or a Biden, well,
Speaker 5: first of all Obiden Obama Obiden, we should call it Obiden.
Speaker 5: Their administration always played foot see with the ICC, just
Speaker 5: like Clinton did. They call the Clint administration actually signed
Speaker 5: the treaty creating this International Criminal Court, which is an
Speaker 5: abomination of the rule of law. Here's this institution which
Speaker 5: is politically unaccountable. No one allocts a prosecutors, there's no juries.
Speaker 5: The judge and the prosecutors are the same office. There's
Speaker 5: no way that nations can actually influence what they do.
Speaker 5: They don't take into account that Israel is a democratic
Speaker 5: country with its own legal system, a very vibrant legal system,
Speaker 5: and a very vibrant democracy where if the president did
Speaker 5: something wrong, as as we've seen, the people think they doesn't,
Speaker 5: they'll prosecute. I mean Yahoo was under prosecution for corruption,
Speaker 5: and that this abomination is allowed to police the way
Speaker 5: the United States and our Western allies fight wars that
Speaker 5: are fought to defend Western civilization and world stability. I
Speaker 5: think the whole thing was a travesty.
Speaker 6: That's just one.
Speaker 5: And so here's the positive thing which I saw lacking
Speaker 5: in most commentary is what could Trump do about it?
Speaker 5: Trump could, I think, right sanctioned countries. Here's the other
Speaker 5: n I think this thing is supported by the countries
Speaker 5: that are pleading with us to protect them. Some of
Speaker 5: the greatest financial donors to this body are Japan, Western
Speaker 5: Europe and so on. They're the ones that want us
Speaker 5: to fight the wars to save them. So I thought
Speaker 5: one thing Trump should do is saying, oh, Japan, you're
Speaker 5: the I think they're like the number three or two
Speaker 5: donor to the ICC. Well, maybe we're going to use
Speaker 5: military spending in Japan by the same amount or more.
Speaker 5: Maybe we don't need the base in Okinawa to be
Speaker 5: as large as you would like it. Why should our
Speaker 5: troops be under threat of prosecution by this rogue court
Speaker 5: when we're fighting for our allies and those same allies
Speaker 5: are essentially funding this institution is sticking a knife in US.
Speaker 4: Yeah, ste have any comment on that?
Speaker 6: No, I agree with all of it. It shows that,
Speaker 6: you know, even Hegelians have their redeeming virtues.
Speaker 1: Well, I will say this much. You know the military
Speaker 1: commitments in Japan Okinawa. You know, my dad was in
Speaker 1: the Korean Wars, a Navy flyer based in Japan and
Speaker 1: flying essentially spy missions, trying to track Soviet fleet movements up.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, well, you know, seventy years ago now. But
Speaker 1: one could imagine the scenario in which North Korea gets
Speaker 1: risky and an American pilot fires on a freighter that
Speaker 1: they think is a spy or something with military purposes,
Speaker 1: and maybe it's a mistake, maybe it's a civilian after all.
Speaker 1: And suddenly the international criminal courts is, oh, those American
Speaker 1: soldiers who made a mistake, or even it's not a mistake,
Speaker 1: they bring an indictment, and you know, Japan's giving them
Speaker 1: money behind all this. As though I think your point
Speaker 1: is a good one, we got to tell them, look,
Speaker 1: you cut this nonsense out or you know, we're going
Speaker 1: to rethink entirely our committment, which Trump wants to do anyway,
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways, right, And it's a whole
Speaker 1: separate question about whether that's a good idea because we're
Speaker 1: overextended militarily or not.
Speaker 6: But still I think it ought to be done.
Speaker 4: Okay, So to show my incredible reputation for flexibility on
Speaker 4: these things, I'm going to flip things around. I had
Speaker 4: actually put John's legal trash article under my categories of
Speaker 4: the legal world, but because we started talking a little
Speaker 4: bit about Korea, I'm going to move to Trump's influence
Speaker 4: on or why it's Trump's world now in world politics,
Speaker 4: and ask John to talk to just a little bit
Speaker 4: about South Korea. I do want to say I had
Speaker 4: dinner the other night with the general who just last
Speaker 4: duty station was in South Korea, and he gave me
Speaker 4: some interesting insights which I probably won't repeat, but I'm
Speaker 4: interested to see if you have the same ones, because
Speaker 4: he loved, loved the response that you gave, which was, no,
Speaker 4: it wasn't a coup. If it was a coup, they would.
Speaker 2: Have called me.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm like, I know, I'm like Lucretia's favorite public figure,
Speaker 5: John Bolton, when he said about the January I think
Speaker 5: he said this about January sixth, he said, that wasn't
Speaker 5: a coup.
Speaker 6: I've done coups, that's no coup. So what is going
Speaker 6: on there?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so it's interesting, you know. So I think what's
Speaker 5: going on is the president of President Yun, who's a
Speaker 5: former prosecutor and had never held public run or held
Speaker 5: public office before or elected office. His approval ratings are
Speaker 5: really in the dumps. One is because of the economy,
Speaker 5: which if you had any other country in Europe had
Speaker 5: South Korea's economic figures, they would be joyous. They would
Speaker 5: be re electing the party empowered by huge majorities.
Speaker 4: But people are because he can't be re elected, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's interesting. The presidency there and the constitution is
Speaker 5: reaction to the military dictatorship that existed there for a
Speaker 5: long time, and so the president can have only one
Speaker 5: term and it's easy to impeach the president. It's a
Speaker 5: very strange way to impeach at the National Assembly has
Speaker 5: to pass a super majority of impeachment and then it
Speaker 5: goes to the Constitutional Court and they actually decide whether
Speaker 5: to remove the president. It's really interesting by a supermajority.
Speaker 5: So the Supreme Court, the Constitution Court career, has to
Speaker 5: vote by a supermajority to remove the president. The previous
Speaker 5: president was impeached and removed for what I think of
Speaker 5: as a minor corruption scandal that comes nowhere near what
Speaker 5: Hunter Biden.
Speaker 6: Was up to.
Speaker 5: By the way, what happen is his in the dumps.
Speaker 5: This is the other thing is he's also in the
Speaker 5: dumps because everyone hates his wife. So in Korea, if
Speaker 5: you're unpopular, you blame your wife or your mother.
Speaker 6: His wife.
Speaker 2: His wife.
Speaker 5: His wife is very glamorous and has an affinity for
Speaker 5: designer clothing and bags and accepted a few gifts, including Philippines,
Speaker 5: but much more attractive than.
Speaker 4: Not saying much.
Speaker 5: I mean, look, Korea is like the capitain Asia of
Speaker 5: cosmetic surgery and everyone and everyone Korea. I'm just don't
Speaker 5: giving you what people of Korea talking about, Like, oh,
Speaker 5: did you have cosmetic surgery? Why does she like all
Speaker 5: these designer handbags. It's like a lot of there's a
Speaker 5: lot of resentment against elites, and she kind of looks
Speaker 5: like that. And so because of those corruption scandals, his
Speaker 5: is really low, so President Yune claimed, and so this
Speaker 5: simply is about to impeach him. His arrange are in
Speaker 5: the dump. So I think he thought the Claring Marshal
Speaker 5: law and he claims that he expected the Parliament to
Speaker 5: overrule him, which a can. He expected that it would
Speaker 5: just jar the system loose and get it out of
Speaker 5: this funk, and it really backfired terribly on him. It
Speaker 5: was overruled. But now everyone thinks he's reckless. It does
Speaker 5: seem reckless to me. But he was trying to get
Speaker 5: out of this sort of logjam because the parliament. Oh,
Speaker 5: by the way, the Congress there is controlled by the
Speaker 5: opposition party, and they were investigating him, they were going
Speaker 5: to impeach him. They were refusing to pass any of
Speaker 5: his spending bills. So the president is there. But you know,
Speaker 5: here's one thing. I think this shows the virtue of
Speaker 5: the Framers by not having a single term presidency. And
Speaker 5: it was actually considered, it was actually i think included
Speaker 5: in early drafts.
Speaker 4: It was actually pushed by Feral You had to.
Speaker 5: Have a single term six year I think it was
Speaker 5: maybe six years, four years. They changed the well, remember.
Speaker 4: Let me just mention quickly Virginia two years and that
Speaker 4: was a model original.
Speaker 5: The Virgi plan. That's right. So the problem is that
Speaker 5: when you're a single term president like this president is,
Speaker 5: there's without the discipline of having to run for reelection
Speaker 5: and also the prospect that you can go to the
Speaker 5: people and get affirmed. I think it deprives the executive
Speaker 5: branch of a lot of legitimacy and power. And you're
Speaker 5: seeing that, I think played out here. So you might
Speaker 5: have seen just today the Congress and Korea failed to
Speaker 5: hit and impeach the necessary votes for impeachment. The opposition
Speaker 5: party refused to cooperate. I don't know if that sounds
Speaker 5: familiar to anybody, But so the president there's not going
Speaker 5: to be removed from office. Their impeachment, which means it'll
Speaker 5: just be more chaos.
Speaker 6: Can I do a follow up cultural question?
Speaker 2: John?
Speaker 1: Now, I know that you actually don't speak Korean, and
Speaker 1: you were born in Philadelphia, but still you go over
Speaker 1: and I.
Speaker 5: Was born in Korea. I was born in Korea. But
Speaker 5: you speaking any Korean? Yeah?
Speaker 6: I oh, I saw. I thought my parents of the time.
Speaker 5: Came in the sixties. My parents were big believers in
Speaker 5: the Melting Pot.
Speaker 6: Oh, okay, well so I mean, but I hope I
Speaker 6: have this history right that you know, South Korea.
Speaker 1: After the war was evangelized, I think, especially by Baptist
Speaker 1: and now is largely a Protestant country religiously.
Speaker 6: Is that right?
Speaker 5: There's a lot of Catholics too, but I believe. But case,
Speaker 5: I think it is in Asia, not counting the Philippines.
Speaker 5: I think in Asia it is the most Christian country.
Speaker 1: Right right, well, the other far and maybe we don't
Speaker 1: want to chase this tangent, but I wondered if a
Speaker 1: certain puritanical aspect of Protestant Christianity contributes to the sort
Speaker 1: of resentment of the leads, and especially a first lady
Speaker 1: who likes glamorous use and flowthing and gifts and things
Speaker 1: like that.
Speaker 6: I don't know, I'm just it's a chicken.
Speaker 5: And egg thing. Yeah, no, no, I think it's a
Speaker 5: chicken egg thing. But Calvinism is a strong factor in Korea.
Speaker 5: Not necessarily belief in Calvinism, but Calvinism is moral codes
Speaker 5: very strong. It's very similar to Korean culture before Christianity
Speaker 5: came ah, so Confucianism is kind of similar in many ways.
Speaker 6: So there's yeah there.
Speaker 5: This is a huge problem in Korea is this conflict
Speaker 5: between all the wealth that was created and basically fifty
Speaker 5: years they went from the second porest country in the
Speaker 5: world to the tenth richest country in the world in
Speaker 5: two generations. So there's a huge amount. If you go,
Speaker 5: we'll go who wants to go to canty anywhere? Let's
Speaker 5: go to solve from this trip, I guess that a
Speaker 5: really different experience. So you have enormous wealth but in
Speaker 5: a society that's still very socially conservative. There it's actually
Speaker 5: a perfect combination. So when you go on this I
Speaker 5: love this lucretia like this, when you go on the
Speaker 5: Korean subway, which is an amazing subway system, there are
Speaker 5: this is just understood. All seats are given first to
Speaker 5: the elderly. So if you see a young person sit
Speaker 5: down and not yield the seat to an older person,
Speaker 5: people will go up and slap the guy in the
Speaker 5: head until he actually gets I've seen old women roll
Speaker 5: up newspapers and continuously hit young people in the head
Speaker 5: until they get up, to the applause of everyone on
Speaker 5: the train.
Speaker 6: So I need for the New York subways. It just
Speaker 6: import a whole lot of Koreans to start writing the mirror.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, yeah, you don't need any Daniel.
Speaker 5: You don't need to know Daniel Pennies. You don't need
Speaker 5: any Daniel Pennies. You know, Korean grandma would take care
Speaker 5: of the problem.
Speaker 4: What would a Korean grandma have done. I don't know
Speaker 4: if you guys saw the viral video of some pre
Speaker 4: adolescent approximately young African American girl just walking through the store,
Speaker 4: just kicking things over, taking bottles and throwing them and
Speaker 4: just walking through and causing and everybody's just standing around watch.
Speaker 4: Instead of somebody walking up and slapping her across the
Speaker 4: face and putting her hands behind her back and sending
Speaker 4: her over to the police, they just stood there and
Speaker 4: watched her. It's like it's ridiculous. So, yes, we don't
Speaker 4: need them just in the subways. We need them everywhere, John, everywhere.
Speaker 5: And they make great food too. It would be such
Speaker 5: an improvement to our country.
Speaker 6: Yeah, now, of course we'll postpone this.
Speaker 1: But the problem, John, is that the fertility rate in
Speaker 1: Korea is one of the lowest in the world now,
Speaker 1: and if the current fertility rate doesn't change, the last
Speaker 1: Korean is going to be born about eighty years from now.
Speaker 5: And I mean barely anyone speaks the language anyway.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean even in Korea.
Speaker 6: No, no, I'm just trying.
Speaker 5: Aren't that many Koreans around all right?
Speaker 6: Yes, it is.
Speaker 5: I mean, this is the solution to the problem is unification,
Speaker 5: because North Korea has a lot of people, right, and
Speaker 5: they are you know really it's a huge you know,
Speaker 5: labor pool and same culture. So that'll solve the problem temporarily.
Speaker 5: But no, by the way, this is unfortunately this is
Speaker 5: South Korea is also given to extreme politics too, because
Speaker 5: it's young democracy. It sort of reminds me of the
Speaker 5: politics at the time of the founding and the fighting
Speaker 5: between Federalists and Jeffersonians. But remember we talked about it
Speaker 5: just a few episodes ago. Korea is where this refused
Speaker 5: to date or get married movement by women comes from that. Now,
Speaker 5: all the leftists here, yes, all the leftists here are
Speaker 5: adopting right and in response to Trump. But in Korea
Speaker 5: it was because it was a response to sexual harassment,
Speaker 5: because it is still a patriarchical society, but women are
Speaker 5: now gaining good quality and so Korean young Korean women
Speaker 5: feel that the government and the legal system don't respond enough,
Speaker 5: so they're protesting ad by saying I won't date, I
Speaker 5: won't I won't reproduce until the society, you know, treats
Speaker 5: women better. So strangely that's converted into this any Oh,
Speaker 5: I don't know. I don't okay, I just asked.
Speaker 4: Really a huge movement or is it just sort of
Speaker 4: the a spearhead of want to be feminists?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I don't think it's very many people, and it's
Speaker 5: certainly not converted into a partisan thing the way it
Speaker 5: is here where people who lost an election say I
Speaker 5: threatened to punish you by making our demographic even smaller.
Speaker 6: Right, I love these people.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're okay, we are never going to get through
Speaker 4: my very ambitious agenda. Not that this hasn't been fascinating.
Speaker 4: So let me ask my quick question for you both
Speaker 4: of you. Are we already in World War three?
Speaker 2: And is it?
Speaker 4: Because this is my favorite, my second favorite to your
Speaker 4: to your article title, John, it's the warhors of the
Speaker 4: military and industrial comp are lighting the world on fire
Speaker 4: in order to make the world a horrible place when
Speaker 4: Trump takes over, as in you know, World War three, Syria,
Speaker 4: you could go Ukraine, on and on with all of
Speaker 4: the disastrous things going on in the world, mostly being
Speaker 4: pushed by the idiots in charge like Jake Sullivan and
Speaker 4: Anthony Blincoln and so on. What are your thoughts on that, John.
Speaker 5: I actually think what's happening is Syria is a good
Speaker 5: thing for us. It shows that one of our main opponents,
Speaker 5: you know, the Russians, by spending so much effort in Ukraine,
Speaker 5: they've had to pull back around the world and so
Speaker 5: they can't pop up all these allies they used to have,
Speaker 5: like Syria.
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 5: I actually think the amazing thing to me is that
Speaker 5: the Biden administration has been incredibly lucky. They almost lost Ukraine.
Speaker 5: I mean, I think the Russians came very close in
Speaker 5: the very beginning of the war of taking Ukraine. This
Speaker 5: real troublemaker, this real threat to the reach in Israel Syria.
Speaker 5: It looks like they're how they might collapse. I don't
Speaker 5: think this has anything to do with the Biden administration policies.
Speaker 5: I think they've actually been way more fortunate than their
Speaker 5: passivity and weakness would allow. So I think, I actually think,
Speaker 5: I think actually things might be in good shape for
Speaker 5: Trump to strike some deals now to UH to stabilize
Speaker 5: things in the Middle East and in the Ukraine and
Speaker 5: in Ukraine and Russia.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I have been saying for a while now, and
Speaker 1: getting some blowback from readers, that we are, in fact
Speaker 1: in the early stages of.
Speaker 6: World War three. Really yeah, And I mean, I you know,
Speaker 6: maybe you're.
Speaker 1: Right about Syria, John, I could see it the other
Speaker 1: way around, which is the instability there.
Speaker 6: See.
Speaker 1: I think I think Israel is a stable equilibrium with Syria.
Speaker 1: I think Asada is terrified of Israel, so they're not
Speaker 1: a huge problem for And by the way, every time
Speaker 1: Israel attacks something in Syria, including in downtown Damascus, to
Speaker 1: kill sin Iranians, Syria does nothing, and they even say
Speaker 1: nothing thing near as I can recall and and who
Speaker 1: knows what might replace them. It could be chaotic, and
Speaker 1: it could be another Iran who the heck knows.
Speaker 6: I don't know.
Speaker 1: But but drawing back from that more broadly, I don't know, Lucretia.
Speaker 1: If I'm quite as cynical as the author of that
Speaker 1: headline that they're deliberately trying to screw up the world
Speaker 1: to make Trump's life miserable, that's possible, I suppose. I
Speaker 1: think it's more born of ignorance. And I go back
Speaker 1: to what's around October first of last year, when it
Speaker 1: was either Sullivan or Blinking. It doesn't matter which one
Speaker 1: because they're both.
Speaker 4: Idiots, and it was Sullivan. But I know what you're
Speaker 4: gonna say.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Sullivan has said, gosh, the Middle East is quieter
Speaker 1: than it's been in decades now. Now, only a fool
Speaker 1: would say something like that. You know, the absence of
Speaker 1: a visible conflict does not mean there aren't the things
Speaker 1: behind the scene that led to October seven, And anybody
Speaker 1: with their head on straight would know that, it would
Speaker 1: never say something that stupid. In fact, they should think
Speaker 1: the other that's been too quiet? What's what's building here?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 5: So wait, here's another here's another person Lucretia loves. But
Speaker 5: isn't this this isn't a rumsfeldianism. It's the absence of
Speaker 5: evidence is not evidence of the risence.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I think, you know, I think back to
Speaker 1: my great teacher strategic studies at Paramont, Harold rud who
Speaker 1: had always point to little things going on that aren't
Speaker 1: in the papers or aren't in the headlines and say,
Speaker 1: this adds up to something or is he like to
Speaker 1: put it? I love this phrase, nothing happens for no
Speaker 1: good reason, and I think that's you know, a lot
Speaker 1: of things you can say. You know, the Ukraine invasion
Speaker 1: October seven. Now we have what ten thousand North Korean
Speaker 1: troops fighting for Russia inside their own territory. I don't
Speaker 1: I mean, don't get off on the weeds of tactics
Speaker 1: and all the rest of that. But that's not just
Speaker 1: a military statement. That's a political statement too, I think.
Speaker 1: And so all this adds up to a whole world
Speaker 1: of trouble that we did not see when Trump was president.
Speaker 1: And maybe that's because you know, the I also, like,
Speaker 1: I suppose the in addition to the alien world spirit
Speaker 1: that is Trump, he's also the ultimate crazy man because
Speaker 1: you don't know what he's gonna do, and you know
Speaker 1: that actually is useful in world politics.
Speaker 4: Another let me, I was just gonna add onto something
Speaker 4: John said. I'm not convinced. I'm not convinced that you're
Speaker 4: right or Steve's right about this not being purposeful on
Speaker 4: the side of the Biden administration, even purposeful to the
Speaker 4: point of wanting to hand over Trump a world in chaos. However,
Speaker 4: what we know is that Trump will be able to
Speaker 4: handle that chaos, and he will for all the reasons
Speaker 4: you both have talked about. I think that if they
Speaker 4: if they are purposefully doing this, they will be very,
Speaker 4: very sorry. Because I think you're gonna see Trump make
Speaker 4: make some deals. Right, He's gonna make some deals, and
Speaker 4: he's gonna bring about peace in Ukraine. He's already been
Speaker 4: threatened by the NATO guy saying the world is going
Speaker 4: to be in a dangerous place because somehow if Trump
Speaker 4: negotiates a deal on Ukraine, it's gonna make us look weak.
Speaker 4: I mean, what a more on that guy is. You
Speaker 4: guys heard that I'm a sue.
Speaker 6: I'm not sure I did, but I mean, I'm just
Speaker 6: back to the first term for a moment.
Speaker 1: There's two bookends to Trump's first term that I think
Speaker 1: will repeat itself.
Speaker 6: So first is in reverse order.
Speaker 1: You know, he kills Sulamani, the you know, the one
Speaker 1: of the senior Irani military guys, which shocked everybody.
Speaker 6: Neither Biden or Obama would ever do something like that.
Speaker 1: And then early in his term, I think you'll remember
Speaker 1: this too, he's having dinner with President g from China
Speaker 1: at mar A Lago and Trump leaves the dinner table
Speaker 1: and he goes, and he comes back and sits down
Speaker 1: and says, oh, I just bomb Syria. Well, you know
Speaker 1: that's those are data points for leaders around the world
Speaker 1: who're going to say, you know, we don't know what
Speaker 1: this guy is gonna do. A deal on Ukraine may
Speaker 1: or may not be a good or bad deal, depending
Speaker 1: on your point of view. But I think you're right, Lucretie,
Speaker 1: he's going to try for one and probably is the
Speaker 1: only one who can achieve.
Speaker 6: It and make it stick.
Speaker 5: I think we're just a bookend on this. I think
Speaker 5: we're gonna look back. We're already looking back at the
Speaker 5: Biden administration as a failed presidency. Yeah, trying to look
Speaker 5: at why did it fail? And I think this theme
Speaker 5: is common. I think in foreign policy and domestic policy.
Speaker 5: We're seeing it acutely here with the examples Lucretia's raising
Speaker 5: is this is a government that went on autopilot. You
Speaker 5: don't have a commanding presidence at the top of the
Speaker 5: executive branch, and so what happens the administrative bureaucracy just
Speaker 5: takes over and puts into effect its own policies, but
Speaker 5: without any creativity, any sense of the new circumstances. It's
Speaker 5: just following the old playbook.
Speaker 2: And so the.
Speaker 4: Playbook in the old ideology of being embarrassed about being
Speaker 4: an American power, right, a great power. I honestly, I
Speaker 4: mean that that certainly pushes the ideology of Lloyd Austin,
Speaker 4: of Anthony Blincoln, of Jake Sullivan. Steve and I were
Speaker 4: laughing before that that Lincoln's Lincoln, Sullivan and Austin sounds
Speaker 4: like a really his his.
Speaker 6: Comment was a really bad law firm, but you want
Speaker 6: to avoid and.
Speaker 4: I just said it sound like a really bad beginning
Speaker 4: to a children's poem, you know, and blink in a nod. Yes, okay,
Speaker 4: So we could talk about that forever, but I want
Speaker 4: to move back for a moment because I did hear
Speaker 4: you talk about this as well, John on the Ricochet podcast,
Speaker 4: and I found it fascinating. Back to the legal world,
Speaker 4: we've heard a lot of people talk about the Daniel
Speaker 4: Penny since since you got You were on Ricochet yesterday.
Speaker 4: As you probably know, the most serious tra charge of
Speaker 4: negligent homicide, right, no negligent that's okay, was dropped. But
Speaker 4: but it did not end in a mistrial, at least
Speaker 4: not yet. But and you know, we have to wonder
Speaker 4: watching not just this case fall apart, regardless of how
Speaker 4: many jurors are responsible for the hung jury. I was
Speaker 4: paying attention, Uh, is this the collapse of Soros DA's
Speaker 4: like Alvin Bragg, like you know, all of these people
Speaker 4: who I think the election has proven that voters are
Speaker 4: just damn tired of this nonsense. The picture of the
Speaker 4: actual prosecutor's name, I can't remember. My comment about it
Speaker 4: was that she looked like all of her parents, grandparents,
Speaker 4: and great grandparents were either siblings or first cousins.
Speaker 6: You know, normally normally look as them as Lucretia's department.
Speaker 6: But I'm totally with her.
Speaker 1: There's this one great side by side picture of that
Speaker 1: really she is a repulsive looking woman, I have to say,
Speaker 1: and me, no, no. Well, the side by side picture
Speaker 1: that's now showing up on social media is the if
Speaker 1: you remember the second James Bond movie from sixty years
Speaker 1: ago from Russia with Love and the KGB assassin woman,
Speaker 1: who's this.
Speaker 5: Very with the knife in the foot.
Speaker 6: The knife in the foot, right, there's compared to that.
Speaker 1: There's a resemblance there, right, and it sort of goes
Speaker 1: deeper than looks. Look I remember. I think a contrast here,
Speaker 1: in addition to just the narrow facts of this particular
Speaker 1: case is the Bernard Gets case from the mid nineteen age.
Speaker 1: Remember he was the guy who pulled out a gun
Speaker 1: and shot four muggers were approaching him with sharp and
Speaker 1: screwdrivers demanding his wallet. Now, he was convicted ultimately of
Speaker 1: a gun charge, which maybe now wouldn't hold up after that.
Speaker 4: How many how many jury grand juries refused to indict him?
Speaker 6: Yeah, I don't remember.
Speaker 1: Yeah, grand jury would not indict him for homicide or
Speaker 1: any of the other things. They recognized that it was
Speaker 1: a you know, legitimate self defense, but they did get
Speaker 1: him on a gun charge night. I think he served
Speaker 1: six months in jail or something like that. But you
Speaker 1: remember the time before they you know, the story came out,
Speaker 1: uh and oh my god, it's you know, it's uh,
Speaker 1: what's uh what was the famous movies Death Wish and
Speaker 1: all the rest of that, And then they found out, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's spons movies, right, And so anyway, he was kind
Speaker 1: of a folk hero, and I think uh, and the
Speaker 1: media played it that way at the time. By the way,
Speaker 1: if you go back and read it, and some liberals
Speaker 1: wrung their hands, we don't want vigilantism and all the
Speaker 1: rest of that. But now contrast it with now with
Speaker 1: bringing homicide charges against this guy.
Speaker 6: And what I hear, by the way, and who knows.
Speaker 1: What's going on, but our pal Inns Stepman, who I
Speaker 1: think is well connected in New York, says she hears
Speaker 1: that the holdouts on the jury are the holdouts for conviction,
Speaker 1: not holdouts for acquittal, and in fact that the people
Speaker 1: who want to convict him are a minority on the jury.
Speaker 1: So I hope that's true, and that's a hopeful sign.
Speaker 1: But I mean, this is could be the end.
Speaker 6: Of all this. I don't know.
Speaker 1: You saw the mayor of New York, Adams saying we
Speaker 1: need more people like Penny.
Speaker 6: He's a hero.
Speaker 1: If he's convicted, I think there would be enormous pressure
Speaker 1: on the Governor of New York, Athy Hokeel, to pardon
Speaker 1: him immediately, and I think she might do it. People
Speaker 1: can well, Trump should pardon him, but it's not a
Speaker 1: federal charge, which people would not wish. People would at
Speaker 1: least understand that. But he could make a big stink
Speaker 1: about it.
Speaker 4: People on the Ricochet podcast, John.
Speaker 1: They said that John, Oh right, Okay, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: you can you could imagine Trump making a big stick
Speaker 1: about this and bringing so much pressure that they had
Speaker 1: to pardon the guy, which would be a suboptimal outcome,
Speaker 1: But there we are, John uh Well.
Speaker 5: One development that occurred since the podcast is that because
Speaker 5: of the hung jury, actually the prosecution and the judge
Speaker 5: took a I actually can't remember ever hearing of this before.
Speaker 5: They actually dismissed the charges on which the jury been hung.
Speaker 5: And the reason this is important is because the prosecution,
Speaker 5: if that was a hung charge, has the right to
Speaker 5: had the right to recharge Penny again and we try
Speaker 5: him again on it. So effectively, by hanging the jury
Speaker 5: not coming to unanimous verdict, they did effectively acquit penny
Speaker 5: of this. He can't be tried again for that. Once
Speaker 5: the charge, once the char house started, jury's impaneled, and
Speaker 5: then they dropped the charges. He's double jeopardy plies, he's
Speaker 5: you know, he's done with that. So the only thing
Speaker 5: left is now this thing called criminal negligence. And as
Speaker 5: trying to forgere out a good way to explain it.
Speaker 5: It's not that you intended to kill somebody. It's that
Speaker 5: you did something that was negligent, you acted unsafely, and
Speaker 5: then just the consequence of your act was that you
Speaker 5: killed somebody. It's not even necessarily foreseeable that you're going
Speaker 5: to kill someone, So maybe a good So here's a difference.
Speaker 5: So the first charge was how fifteen years would be
Speaker 5: like shooting a gun into a crowded area without trying
Speaker 5: to aim or hit anybody. But it's so reckless to
Speaker 5: shoot a gun off, say, in a stadium filled with people.
Speaker 5: That it's so really you're going to kill somebody highlightly
Speaker 5: and you don't want anyone doing things like that. Criminal
Speaker 5: negligence would be something the one that's now still open.
Speaker 5: Although gosh, I think they're gonna hung hang or a
Speaker 5: quidum too, So that's only four years to zero years
Speaker 5: if Penny could actually, even if he's convicted, go free
Speaker 5: based on the judge's sentence. That's sort of like drive
Speaker 5: being with your texting and driving at the same time.
Speaker 5: So you're just driving and texting and you happened to
Speaker 5: hit someone, but you weren't intending to. It wasn't that
Speaker 5: you were doing something reckless with you know, you know,
Speaker 5: any normal person would see, oh, you are going to
Speaker 5: kill someone. If you do something like that, you just
Speaker 5: don't know who. It's not planned, it's just something you
Speaker 5: shouldn't be doing. It's unreasonable, and as a result of that,
Speaker 5: you kill somebody. So that's all that's left. But your
Speaker 5: larger point, Lucretia, I think is a good one that
Speaker 5: what does this mean in terms of the big picture,
Speaker 5: is Yeah, this these rogue prosecutors, they're failing all over
Speaker 5: the country, right right here in the Bay Area. Not
Speaker 5: only did Chase of Boudin get recalled by the people
Speaker 5: of San Francisco, of course he moved immediately to Berkeley,
Speaker 5: the Colleague of ours, but the DA for Oakland, for
Speaker 5: Alameda County, another source prosecute was just recalled by the people.
Speaker 5: And these are the you know, some of the most
Speaker 5: liberal communities in the country. The DA in Los Angeles County.
Speaker 5: George Gascon another maybe the first of the Soros prosecutes,
Speaker 5: was just recalled there too. But now, recall he was
Speaker 5: beaten for reelection by a former Bush administration Justice Department
Speaker 5: official who was head of the tax division.
Speaker 4: So they think they're so.
Speaker 6: Bad in LA.
Speaker 5: They're like, we better put criminal law in charge of
Speaker 5: a tax attorney. Right, that's how good and things are
Speaker 5: in LA. And so the counter the counter though, to
Speaker 5: my point, is for some reason Bragg was just re elected, right,
Speaker 5: I mean he's got.
Speaker 4: Big Fannie Willis.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and Fanny Willis was just re elected despite their
Speaker 5: abuses of the prosecutorial system. I don't get it.
Speaker 6: I don't get what.
Speaker 5: And in Philadelphia, my home city, well he wasn't first,
Speaker 5: but this guy Krasner, he's maybe the worst of the
Speaker 5: Soros prosecutors. I mean, he really has sort of dropped
Speaker 5: charges against violent felonies, a crime rate has gone up
Speaker 5: incredibly the Philadelphia area, and still he gets re elected
Speaker 5: by large margins. I don't I really don't understand it.
Speaker 5: I hate to say it, but it's almost as if
Speaker 5: those cities deserve the prosecutors that get if they're willing
Speaker 5: to keep an office people who are harming the communities.
Speaker 5: In fact, minority, inner city poor communities suffer this crime
Speaker 5: way the worst.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, yeah, absolutely, Okay, So give us really a five
Speaker 4: minute dissertation on the never mind the hunter, the hunter
Speaker 4: pardon That one's probably been talked to death. Although Steve
Speaker 4: and I did have an interesting conversation about I actually
Speaker 4: felt sorry for Mophead yesterday.
Speaker 5: Really why that's amazing?
Speaker 4: It is amazing. Well, the better way to put it
Speaker 4: is that for the first time she was being challenged
Speaker 4: not by Peter Doucy, but by the you know, the
Speaker 4: regime media, the White House correspondence. If Biden had apologized,
Speaker 4: she would apologie, if Biden had apologized for lying to
Speaker 4: her basically about the fact that he would never and
Speaker 4: you know, she came up with her usual word, solid
Speaker 4: answer and got out of the question. But as Steve
Speaker 4: pointed out, it really wasn't Peter Doucy, it was all
Speaker 4: these other people. And my answer to Steve was that
Speaker 4: maybe the first time ever that I actually have more
Speaker 4: sympathy for Karine Jean Pierre than I do for the
Speaker 4: White because they knew they knew she was lying, they
Speaker 4: knew Biden was lying, but they want to blame her
Speaker 4: because they didn't push back on it. Then. Anyway, I'm
Speaker 4: actually more interested in you discussing for our listeners really
Speaker 4: quickly the notion of the preemptive pardons that are being
Speaker 4: bandied about, whether a you think they might do it,
Speaker 4: and b you have your own historical but not constitutional
Speaker 4: justification for them, and I'd love to hear that well.
Speaker 5: Tutions. Granted, the part and power is one of the
Speaker 5: broadest presidential powers. There's only two exceptions. One is you
Speaker 5: can't pardon for convictions of impeachment and the second, as
Speaker 5: a president can't pardon for state law crimes because they're
Speaker 5: just outside the scope of the federal government. And so
Speaker 5: a lot of this has been determined by practice, not
Speaker 5: by clear Supreme Court precedent. You could have read the
Speaker 5: part and Power narrowly and said it should only apply
Speaker 5: when someone's already been convicted, for example, or someone's been indicted,
Speaker 5: But from the very beginning, the part and power was
Speaker 5: used in this way to immunize people who've done something
Speaker 5: potentially illegal before they're ever investigated. The first major uses
Speaker 5: George Washington, you know, the Whiskey Rebellion in seventeen ninety four,
Speaker 5: the Whisky Rebellion, which it kind of sounds like the
Speaker 5: name of Steve Hayward's House right of Rebellion exactly. So
Speaker 5: the was gear rebelly. George Washington. Remember, he comes out,
Speaker 5: he leads the army into the field to go after
Speaker 5: these people who you know, tax federal court houses and
Speaker 5: attack tax federal tax collectors in western Pennsylvania. And so
Speaker 5: Washington let the army out, the rebellion immediately dissolves, and
Speaker 5: then Washington pardons prospectively the ringleaders before they're ever brought
Speaker 5: to court. So that's early. And then the biggest example
Speaker 5: in terms of numbers is the Civil War. Lincoln and
Speaker 5: Andrew Johnson effectively pardoned everybody in the Confederacy even though
Speaker 5: every single Confederate was guilty of treason, right, every single
Speaker 5: one of them guilty treason. I looked up. I mean
Speaker 5: that's millions of people. And and so that's now the
Speaker 5: thing that's interesting that there is a difference in kind
Speaker 5: uh and the creatures right about this and that in
Speaker 5: these cases in the past and the and the Nixon
Speaker 5: pardon is just a part in over a time period.
Speaker 5: So the problem is that everybody knew what those pardons
Speaker 5: were for. We knew what the crime was and what
Speaker 5: Biden did for the first, I think it might be
Speaker 5: the first time, aside from these examples, was just say
Speaker 5: anything you might have done in this time period of
Speaker 5: at all, you're immunity from prostcation.
Speaker 6: That is different.
Speaker 5: I think it's constitutional, but as a bad policy to
Speaker 5: set because now right given despite the claims that the
Speaker 5: you know, the Supreme Court gave undermine the rule of
Speaker 5: law by immunizing the president, what has Biden done? Biden
Speaker 5: has turned around and at least I could see the
Speaker 5: argument for the presidency being unique that you have to
Speaker 5: immunize his official actions. Here you have Biden giving his
Speaker 5: son the same kind of immunity that only used to
Speaker 5: be reserved for presidents. Not even cabinet members get this
Speaker 5: kind of immunity.
Speaker 4: Steve, I know you have a lot to I want
Speaker 4: you to say. I just want to I want to
Speaker 4: harken back for just a moment something John said earlier,
Speaker 4: where he said the lack of of re electability for
Speaker 4: the president deprives the executive branch of legitimacy, and so
Speaker 4: looking at that in a kind of broader way and
Speaker 4: applying it to this situation. So Biden says he's not
Speaker 4: gonna pardon his son up until and the election's over,
Speaker 4: and he does it because he's not I mean, okay,
Speaker 4: he wasn't up for he wasn't going to be re
Speaker 4: elected anyway. But also the Democrats loss. Maybe if Kamala
Speaker 4: Harris had won, he might have who knows, It's hard
Speaker 4: to say. But my point is that the fact that
Speaker 4: they're also talking about these preemptive pardons for other other members,
Speaker 4: for uh, the guy I hate so much, Milly Mark Milly,
Speaker 4: for Anthony Fauci, you know, and the and the list
Speaker 4: goes on. What I want to say is you are
Speaker 4: absolutely right that the lack of the reelectability possibility makes
Speaker 4: it possible for the executive to act really irresponsibly, which
Speaker 4: is I think what's happening here, because the pardon power
Speaker 4: is not even though the Constitution is not very specific
Speaker 4: about its actual limitations and someone we've always understood it
Speaker 4: to mean it's an opportunity for the executive to fix
Speaker 4: the defects of the rule of law. The rule of
Speaker 4: law means general laws apply equally to everyone, and there
Speaker 4: are times when actual circumstances dictate that if the law
Speaker 4: is applied equally and equitably in the general sense, it
Speaker 4: will result in injustice. Right, so I'll stop talking, Steve.
Speaker 2: You go on.
Speaker 1: Well, the classic sample of that, I think in modern
Speaker 1: times of a pardon used correctly to correct the defect
Speaker 1: of the law, I arguably was the Patty Hirst case.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: She was convicted being part of the terrorist group, and
Speaker 1: you know, it emerged later that you know, she'd been
Speaker 1: subject to so much coercion and psychological abuse that maybe
Speaker 1: she did not deserve to be convicted in central law,
Speaker 1: and Jimmy Carter gave her a full pardon.
Speaker 6: Okay, maybe maybe not whatever.
Speaker 4: A wife who's endured years of abuse at the hands
Speaker 4: of her husband.
Speaker 6: Yes, sure, right, yeah, but not this We're miles away.
Speaker 5: Wait, does mister the Crees get a preemptive party?
Speaker 4: Might hear you?
Speaker 1: But look, I mean I think so let's step back
Speaker 1: a minute. That these perspective pardons for Millie and Pouchier
Speaker 1: whoever else, h keep in mind that what's really going
Speaker 1: on behind the scenes is Uh, you know the Biden
Speaker 1: criminal Syndicate, right, I mean, how many suspicious financial activity
Speaker 1: reports did BANG forward to the Treasury Department about the
Speaker 1: Biden banking transactions. The point is has been pointed out
Speaker 1: is you know Hunter Biden is now cannot lead the
Speaker 1: Fifth Amendment privileging against self incrimination. Well wait a second.
Speaker 1: That means you could have investigations of Jim Biden, the
Speaker 1: President's brother, who seems to have been in the chain
Speaker 1: of custody of the transactions.
Speaker 4: I might also get a preemptive pardon.
Speaker 6: That's just it.
Speaker 1: If you say I'm getting the politics of this and
Speaker 1: I'm being too circumlocucious for you, as I usually am. Look,
Speaker 1: you pardon always other people saying fauci. There're gonna be
Speaker 1: targets of a vindictive Trump. So you do all those partons,
Speaker 1: and then you slip in more partners for the Biden family,
Speaker 1: for Jim Biden, maybe for the President himself. Now, I
Speaker 1: wasn't going to comment on the law on this, but
Speaker 1: it seems to me there are only two remedies for this,
Speaker 1: both difficult. One of them, John, I'll see what you
Speaker 1: think about this is maybe there needs to be a
Speaker 1: constitutional amendment that says the pardon power shall be ineffective
Speaker 1: or or not eligible after the presidential election of a
Speaker 1: departing president.
Speaker 6: Because Biden's not the first person to abuse this.
Speaker 1: We saw Bill Clinton on his way out the door
Speaker 1: in two thousand and one, partnering a lot of very
Speaker 1: dubious cases and including his brother and Mark Rich and
Speaker 1: so forth. And the second one would be, maybe Biden
Speaker 1: should be impeached for abusing the pardon power. Now, he's
Speaker 1: only got forty days in office, and you'd have to
Speaker 1: rush things.
Speaker 4: But maybe president in the set, Steve, what's that he's
Speaker 4: for an after for an impeachment process when you're out.
Speaker 6: Of all I see what you're saying, right, Yeah, but
Speaker 6: maybe that should be done. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, probably Republicans don't want to spend
Speaker 1: the time involved in doing that. But that seems to
Speaker 1: me the only other remedy that's available right now.
Speaker 4: It should It's always was supposed to be a political remedy,
Speaker 4: not a constitution. There is no real if you do
Speaker 4: if you have a pardon power that does what I say,
Speaker 4: and you guys agreed it should do, which is to
Speaker 4: allow the executive to do what's right as opposed to
Speaker 4: what's strictly legal, what's just in a special circumstance of
Speaker 4: particular situation. What's the what's the check on that? It's
Speaker 4: it's it's politics. It's it's a political check. You're I've
Speaker 4: been thinking about Ford.
Speaker 5: Your your your buddy, your Claremont Graduate University buddy Douglas Adair.
Speaker 5: He wrote this book of Fame and Rithers, and his
Speaker 5: view was, you will be, you will go down in history.
Speaker 5: It's a terrible president and that's the real right Hamilton says,
Speaker 5: that's the real check on the president's is their reputation
Speaker 5: and their legacy, which Biden cares about.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: He thought he was going to be FDR and he
Speaker 5: turns out to be Jimmy Carter. One last can I
Speaker 5: just make one last point about the other larger constitutional
Speaker 5: issue here is that this is this is I was saying,
Speaker 5: this is like, uh, constitution. This is like a constitutional
Speaker 5: pyromaniac who sets his neighbor's house on fire. And I
Speaker 5: was like, oh my god, the fire is coming to
Speaker 5: my house, right, because what why? What is this a
Speaker 5: response to law fair? Biden is the one who launched
Speaker 5: investigations and prosecutions of the previous president and you know
Speaker 5: his main advisors, And now what's he doing. He's s
Speaker 5: issuing these parties because he's like, oh my god, this
Speaker 5: might happen to me. Now if he had never broke
Speaker 5: in the you know this, our long history of not
Speaker 5: engaging law fear, these parties wouldn't be necessary. And he says,
Speaker 5: and in classic projection, he's assuming Trump is going to
Speaker 5: do exactly what he did, even though when Trump won,
Speaker 5: remember Trump went on locker up and he never had
Speaker 5: Hillary prosecuted.
Speaker 6: He didn't prosecute Comy.
Speaker 5: He didn't prosecute Comy either, for all draunistic reasons.
Speaker 4: Remember, not because he was a coward, not because he
Speaker 4: was afraid to do it, but because he didn't believe
Speaker 4: that it would be good for the country. And he
Speaker 4: pissed off, excuse the expression, a lot of his followers
Speaker 4: by not doing that. So we're going to run out
Speaker 4: of time. This is a really important one for me.
Speaker 4: I'd like you just I'd love to discuss all the
Speaker 4: cabinet picks and the fact that maybe as of today,
Speaker 4: Haig Seth seems to be rallying I guess you could say,
Speaker 4: or his chances are getting better. That seems to be
Speaker 4: the latest momentum. I don't know, it's hard to say,
Speaker 4: but I want to discuss really quickly Trump's nomination of
Speaker 4: Jay Bodicharia, our friend, Jay o friend, because we haven't
Speaker 4: discussed the whole COVID thing all the other stuff we
Speaker 4: discuss a lot. So tell me what you guys think
Speaker 4: a about that appointment, and one of you catalog a
Speaker 4: little bit about what he's promised to do if he
Speaker 4: actually is appointed in confirmed to the NIH National Institute
Speaker 4: of Health.
Speaker 5: Steve, you're the scientist on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Why don't you Well, I don't know about that, but well,
Speaker 1: I am hard pressed to think of another appointment in
Speaker 1: the past that represents such a diametrically opposite not his
Speaker 1: point of view, but repudiation explicitly of what has gone
Speaker 1: on before and a deliberate signal of a wholesale transformation
Speaker 1: of what's a big problem. And so one of the
Speaker 1: things that doctor j has said, by the way, you know,
Speaker 1: he's a very serious guy. He was called by Fauci
Speaker 1: and Francis Collins, who I always had a lot of
Speaker 1: respect for until COVID came along. They called him a
Speaker 1: fringe figure, which is absurd. But he's a mild manner guy.
Speaker 1: He's not all that politicized in the ordinary sense, but
Speaker 1: boise angry now in his soft spoken way. And so
Speaker 1: one of the things he has said in recent days
Speaker 1: that's been reported is that in considering who to give
Speaker 1: federal research grants to, and they mostly go to university
Speaker 1: outfits like Johns Hopkins, is their academic freedom and free
Speaker 1: speech ratings from FIRE the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression?
Speaker 1: And I do know, because I've you know, talked to
Speaker 1: a couple of college presidents who've gotten f ratings or
Speaker 1: made red light.
Speaker 6: I guess it is from Fire. And they don't like it.
Speaker 1: They really, you know, they don't like the reputation of
Speaker 1: being hostile academic freedom and free expression. But of course
Speaker 1: they don't know what to do about it because their
Speaker 1: college presidents.
Speaker 6: Of course, right.
Speaker 1: And anyway, I think the idea that Johns Hopkins, which
Speaker 1: I think is the leading recipient of federal research something
Speaker 1: like that stem of their budget you mean, or I
Speaker 1: don't know, now.
Speaker 4: Fift NIH grants go to Johns Hopkins.
Speaker 1: Could be I don't know, if it's it's a huge
Speaker 1: amount of money, I think it's idea. Oh yeah, I
Speaker 1: think it's in the It's over a billion and maybe
Speaker 1: multiple billions, and you know they have a formidable research outfit.
Speaker 1: But the point is is, uh, you know, boy Johns
Speaker 1: Hopkins or Harvard or anyways, they're going to be in
Speaker 1: a world of hurt if they're uh, if they're maybe lucreastia.
Speaker 6: You may know this.
Speaker 1: Every time there's a government shut down and just the
Speaker 1: basic flow of funds is cut off, it reachs havoc
Speaker 1: with the research labs and the graduate students and all
Speaker 1: the all the things at public universities that depend on
Speaker 1: all this federal large ess. So this could be fun
Speaker 1: to watch and so that's you know, it's one of
Speaker 1: my favorite appointments for sure.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Remember they they coursed universities into vaccinations because of
Speaker 4: mandatory vaccinations, or you would because they of all the
Speaker 4: federal money dumping into universities, they had to force mandatory
Speaker 4: vaccines across the board. Well, you know, everybody but people
Speaker 4: who student workers. Yeah, I mean one quick workers were
Speaker 4: for a grants right, go ahead.
Speaker 1: One quick story about Johns Hopkins is an acquaintance of mine.
Speaker 1: There is the very eminent econounist Steve Hankey, and sometime
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty or maybe early twenty twenty one, he
Speaker 1: came out with a study I forget the details of it.
Speaker 6: It was very critical of COVID policy.
Speaker 1: And he put it out you know, Social Science Research Network,
Speaker 1: because there wasn't time to go through the journal publication
Speaker 1: process that takes eighteen months at best.
Speaker 6: And even though he's he's a.
Speaker 1: Guy who's like run currency boards for countries around around
Speaker 1: the world to get into trouble with their currencies, and anyway,
Speaker 1: Johns Hopkins made him take his affiliation with Johns Hopkins
Speaker 1: off the study. And I think that's because my hunch
Speaker 1: is he got a phone call from Francis Collins or
Speaker 1: Faucy or somebody saying, you know, your grant money is
Speaker 1: in jeopardy if you allow this economist guy to be
Speaker 1: trashing us with a study like this.
Speaker 6: So you know that's how they play hardball, So we
Speaker 6: should play it back.
Speaker 4: Yes, we absolutely should. And and he says he's going
Speaker 4: to and I believe him. You know him better than anybody.
Speaker 4: I think, John, what do you think?
Speaker 1: I love?
Speaker 5: There's a great profile of him in the Wall Street
Speaker 5: Journal to just today. And I love the anecdote that
Speaker 5: starts with saying that Jay's first name in the Indian
Speaker 5: language means he who is victorious.
Speaker 1: In the end.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I love it. I love it.
Speaker 4: I know I love it.
Speaker 6: Isn't that great?
Speaker 4: I love it. I absolutely love it.
Speaker 5: So that I think is the grace ory that here's
Speaker 5: a guy who's persecuted now becoming head of the very
Speaker 5: agency that persecuted him, and he's not looking for vengeance,
Speaker 5: but he wants to do is fit make sure this
Speaker 5: never happens again. Yeah, concentrates so much power and just
Speaker 5: a few you know, he doesn't say it, but I
Speaker 5: think he applies. You know a few people who themselves
Speaker 5: are not up the stuff, like doctor Fauci is not
Speaker 5: really an epidemiologist. But I actually this ties in with
Speaker 5: Lucretia's earlier point about questions about law fair. I mean,
Speaker 5: I thought, I think doctor Fauci should could well be
Speaker 5: investigated because he I think he's lied to Congress. There's
Speaker 5: a plausmum case he lied to Congress about how did
Speaker 5: the funding get to Wuhan. And I was thinking, this
Speaker 5: is like, this is I'm actually I was curious about
Speaker 5: that Steve's thought about this is I was talking about
Speaker 5: this with someone and I said, why is this any
Speaker 5: different than Iron Contra. Here's this funding research, this funding
Speaker 5: right to engage in, uh, you know, research into viruses
Speaker 5: to make them more lethal, you know, more communicative, more lethal.
Speaker 5: There's a band in the United States, so Fauci roots
Speaker 5: money appropriated by Congress outside the federal government to send
Speaker 5: it deliberately to China. Is that like really not that
Speaker 5: different than what happened in Contra?
Speaker 4: In much different, It's much much worse.
Speaker 6: It's worse in a way.
Speaker 5: There's no national security justification, like there was a round
Speaker 5: Contrac and.
Speaker 4: The damage that it did to the world is is
Speaker 4: you know, i'mtold.
Speaker 5: We trillions and million lives and lives, and.
Speaker 4: So I told you I was going to say, and
Speaker 4: I tell you an anecdote. I'll make it very quick.
Speaker 4: But when when COVID started, we had these meetings of
Speaker 4: the deans, the university deans every single day over zoom
Speaker 4: of course, at three o'clock every single day. And and
Speaker 4: the at the time, the dean of the medical school
Speaker 4: was he still is a really good guy. And when
Speaker 4: fall came around and we were coming back to school,
Speaker 4: you know, but under these extreme extraordinary measures egress and ingress,
Speaker 4: things on the floor and waste water and you know,
Speaker 4: all these new things to the air systems. Anyway, he said,
Speaker 4: the best thing we could do would be to encourage
Speaker 4: students to party. Get drunk, party, party, party for the
Speaker 4: first couple of weeks of school. Let them all get COVID,
Speaker 4: get over it, and we'll move on. He said that
Speaker 4: a week before school started. The next thing, you know,
Speaker 4: he came back and said, oh, I was completely wrong
Speaker 4: about that, ah, because they threatened to the nih threatened
Speaker 4: to cut off all federal funding for projects at the university. Yeah,
Speaker 4: completely change changed his tune. And my president at the
Speaker 4: time was a good friend of Scott Atlas and Jay Bodicharia,
Speaker 4: and he caved on every bit of it too. To
Speaker 4: be honest with you, it was it was ugly, which
Speaker 4: is I mean, I'm saying that to remind people of
Speaker 4: how ugly it was and how perfectly good, respectable medical
Speaker 4: professionals were coerced, at risk of their careers into going
Speaker 4: along with the program even though they knew it was wrong.
Speaker 4: So I just a serious point one last week, I say,
Speaker 4: I know we're going way way over. But I really
Speaker 4: got to know what you guys think and if it
Speaker 4: has any any legs? Shall we say about the Ninth
Speaker 4: Circuit Court opinion dealing with the chartered flights out of
Speaker 4: some airport in Washington State where some executive order from
Speaker 4: some official there said you can't, well, yeah, give any
Speaker 4: more contracts to contract air carriers unless they promise they
Speaker 4: won't fly illegals deport illegals. And the Ninth Circuit Court said, sorry,
Speaker 4: are you aware that one? John? You're muted?
Speaker 5: John read I'm sorry. I hadn't read the opinion, but
Speaker 5: I saw the summarison. But it seems like an easy case. Actually,
Speaker 5: the state law is not allowed to impede the execution
Speaker 5: of federal law.
Speaker 4: So what if what if your guys's favorite governor gruesome? Besides,
Speaker 4: it actually gets his twenty five million dollars to resist
Speaker 4: efforts by ICE to deport illegals in California? What happens
Speaker 4: in that situation?
Speaker 5: Then I was at a panel and talking about the
Speaker 5: Trump immigration agenda and what should he do with the
Speaker 5: California's a sanctuary state, not just a sanctuary San francisc
Speaker 5: is not just sanctuary city. The whole state is sanctuary state, right,
Speaker 5: and Newsom is gearing up, you know, pulling up and
Speaker 5: trying to ask the legislature for more money to start
Speaker 5: suing the Trump administration. I think the Trump I think
Speaker 5: Trump should just cut California office as much federal funds
Speaker 5: as he feels like. And you say you want to
Speaker 5: go to court, let's go to court. And I'm not.
Speaker 6: Last time this.
Speaker 5: Happened the Trump Justice Department, I think they cut maybe
Speaker 5: fifteen million bucks out of the DJ grants of San Francisco.
Speaker 5: Trump should go bigly this time. He should say I'm
Speaker 5: going to cut the entire state of California off if
Speaker 5: you guys continue to impede federal law enforcement. And yeah,
Speaker 5: California can sue spend the twenty five million dollars on
Speaker 5: getting it back. It'll take years.
Speaker 6: Yeah, or any illegal aliens that Trump can't deport, he
Speaker 6: can send to California, you know, the Martha's Vineyard strategy.
Speaker 5: Oh that's not a bad idea too.
Speaker 1: So, by the way, I think this is partly I
Speaker 1: think this is partly bluster on Newsom's part. Look, he
Speaker 1: wants to run for president desperately in four years, and
Speaker 1: it turns out.
Speaker 6: We'll see how this unfolds.
Speaker 1: But it turns out that deporting illegal aliens, at least
Speaker 1: the criminal ones and and you know, the migrants phony
Speaker 1: asylum seekers is popular.
Speaker 4: And yeah, so what's his point here?
Speaker 1: Well, I think his point is virtue signent to progress
Speaker 1: is that he needs as his base. But I'm not
Speaker 1: sure he really wants to go too far down this
Speaker 1: road because it will kill his presidential bid.
Speaker 6: That's all.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Okay, all right, that makes sense. Okay. I want
Speaker 4: to keep discussing all this exciting stuff with you guys
Speaker 4: for days, but we're way over time, so I'm going
Speaker 4: to move to Babylon Bee, and I do want to.
Speaker 4: We didn't really discuss it other than the general terms
Speaker 4: about Trump being the invited everywhere and everybody loves him.
Speaker 4: He had that conversation with McCrone that led to some
Speaker 4: really hilarious real headlines. Of course, the Babylon b does
Speaker 4: it better than anybody. So the first one, Trump announced
Speaker 4: his plan to a next Canada and rename it Gay
Speaker 4: North Dakota.
Speaker 1: And there was you know, typical of Trump to Annexada,
Speaker 1: after all the Hollywood celebrities have fled there.
Speaker 4: Right right, that was the next one. Celebrities flee to Canada,
Speaker 4: only for Trump to ann exit tragic suspicious Biden partons
Speaker 4: Hunter for anything you might do tonight between two thirty
Speaker 4: and four seventeen. Am Oh, yes, so you guys, I
Speaker 4: don't think flew through through London, but I did. This
Speaker 4: one's one of my personal favorites. Paddington Bear arrested for
Speaker 4: telling Muslim immigrants to be more polite. Do you even
Speaker 4: get it?
Speaker 5: Something happened?
Speaker 4: No, Paddington Bears one of the things that they teach
Speaker 4: children manners and and but yeah, never mind. Anyway, you'll
Speaker 4: have to figure it out. John Prosecutors warn Daniel Penny
Speaker 4: acquittal could lead to rampant acts of heroism. That's not
Speaker 4: even funny. I don't I don't get this one, So
Speaker 4: I'm gonna I'm gonna say it and ask you guys
Speaker 4: to explain it to me. Supreme Court rules eight to
Speaker 4: one in favor of taking turns bonking Justice sodomy Er
Speaker 4: on the head with their gavels.
Speaker 1: Well, look, there's a there's a there's a contest on
Speaker 1: who's the dumbest of the two, Progressive.
Speaker 6: Jackson or Soda my ore. They're both this week really dumb.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we didn't even talk about the case that I
Speaker 5: know there was just.
Speaker 4: Way too much. Maybe we just need to have a
Speaker 4: podcast every day and we still keep up. I'm just kidding.
Speaker 4: That's just a joke. Okay, So you've probably heard. Another
Speaker 4: area we didn't talk about was so much winning. I'm
Speaker 4: I'm not yet tired of winning, but so much winning.
Speaker 6: The de I.
Speaker 4: The whole DEI structure we have discussed before, is collapsing
Speaker 4: on itself almost everywhere. Walmart has decided, as you've probably heard,
Speaker 4: to end its focus on DEI, which makes me happy
Speaker 4: because there's only one store in my town. It's called Walmart.
Speaker 4: Walmart ends DEI program. Well, now I'll treat all employees
Speaker 4: like garbage, regardless of race and gender.
Speaker 6: Totally unfair, But I get it, I.
Speaker 1: Know, I know.
Speaker 4: I actually don't think that that's true at all. Joe
Speaker 4: Biden pardons the twenty twenty four Chicago White Sox.
Speaker 6: Yeah, if you're a baseball fan, that that really hurts.
Speaker 4: Yes, the last ones since we did mention barely making
Speaker 4: America healthy again. RFK Junior announces reduction of five second
Speaker 4: rule to three second rule. Yeah, John's not even laughing
Speaker 4: at that one. Do you know what the five second
Speaker 4: rule is? John? When you when you the picture shows
Speaker 4: a checkcake dropping on the floor, on top on the frosting,
Speaker 4: and the five second rule is as long as you
Speaker 4: pick it up before it's been on the ground for
Speaker 4: five seconds, you can still.
Speaker 5: Eat it because bacteria move really slow.
Speaker 6: What's the theory of that?
Speaker 4: Step on a crack? You'll make your brothers bring their
Speaker 4: mothers back. I don't know that there's science behind.
Speaker 6: It, John, You need to have kids to understand that rule.
Speaker 5: Actually, don't you want them to eat it to build
Speaker 5: their immunity?
Speaker 4: Why it's five seconds?
Speaker 5: Zero second?
Speaker 4: Or the ants get it or the cockroaches you're okay, yeah,
Speaker 4: you know, because you don't want a cockroach growing in
Speaker 4: your stomach. More science. Okay, your turn, John, I'm done.
Speaker 5: Okay, Well we really we really do have to redo
Speaker 5: our closing now and now that when Biden leaves office
Speaker 5: because he's not going to make sense. But always drink
Speaker 5: your whiskey meat, let's go Brandon and.
Speaker 6: Steve Hamela who.
Speaker 4: Yeah, anyway, all right, by guys next week.
Speaker 6: When I drink red wine. A lot of things why
Speaker 6: I drink red wine.
Speaker 7: I'm too donna break a lot of things, but for
Speaker 7: that bottle, because I'm feel just I good kid. Well,
Speaker 7: you know I can't chell lord of good grape from
Speaker 7: a bad. Well, Lord, I can't tell lord of good
Speaker 7: grape from a bad.
Speaker 3: But I judge a bottle by how much fun I had. Well,
Speaker 3: I'm drinking red wine, drinking red wine. Well, I'm drinking
Speaker 3: red wine, drinking red wine. Well, I'm drinking red wine.
Speaker 6: Ricochet joined the conversation.