Speaker 1: Well there was that. Again.
Speaker 2: You and I are the only people old enough to
Speaker 2: remember this, but there was that. One of my favorite
Speaker 2: Andy Griff of scenes. When you know Ronnie Howard at
Speaker 2: four years old, Loksander says, what do you learn in school?
Speaker 1: Day? Hope?
Speaker 2: He says, uh, I learned pie are squared? Sheriff Andy says,
Speaker 2: well that's wrong, Ope, pie are round, cornbread or square.
Speaker 2: Ask not what your country can do for you, Ask
Speaker 2: what you can do for your country. Mister Gorbachoff, tear
Speaker 2: down this wall.
Speaker 3: It's the Record Shape podcast with Stephen Eyward and Charles C. W. Cook.
Speaker 3: I'm James Lollace today, Iran Mondami Minnesota and more So,
Speaker 3: let's have risols a podcast.
Speaker 4: We will draw this city closer together. We will replace
Speaker 4: the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.
Speaker 4: If our campaign demonstrated that the people of New York
Speaker 4: yearn for solidarity, then let this government welcome everybody.
Speaker 3: It's the Ricochet Podcast, number seven seventy one. Why don't
Speaker 3: you join it? I said, ricochet dot com. Why don't
Speaker 3: you just why? I want to be part of the
Speaker 3: most stimulating conversation and community on the web. That's why.
Speaker 3: I'm James, Lilyax and I'm joined because I'm falling apart
Speaker 3: by Stephen Hayward. Stephen, Hello, Hi James, how are you?
Speaker 5: Uh?
Speaker 3: Fraud question? Maybe Charlie can answer that. Charlie will be
Speaker 3: along in just a little bit here. How am i?
Speaker 3: I'm I'm in Minnesota once again, the episode of the
Speaker 3: stuff about about which we are not happy. Let's go
Speaker 3: right to it. Everybody has been doing the Zappruder bit
Speaker 3: on the film back into the left frame by frame analysis,
Speaker 3: trying to figure out where they stand on this issue.
Speaker 3: I refer, of course, to the shooting of a woman
Speaker 3: who was interfering in the protest of a nice apprehension,
Speaker 3: and I will ask you what you thought. I have
Speaker 3: read a lot of nuanced commentary on this, and I
Speaker 3: say nuanced because it generally aligns with what I think
Speaker 3: I've read in flammatory common I say inflammatory because I
Speaker 3: don't agree with it naturally. I have this sensible, moderate,
Speaker 3: clever position here, and I'm wondering if yours is the same.
Speaker 2: I don't think there's a sensible modern position on this.
Speaker 2: I think we're divided into two camps. I mean, there
Speaker 2: are some cooler heads in the middle. I thought, Charlie,
Speaker 2: I can speak for him, since he's not here, wrote
Speaker 2: a very good, very sober piece weighing all the different
Speaker 2: aspects of this for a national view one line, and
Speaker 2: maybe we can get him to reprise some of that
Speaker 2: when he joins us. I also worry about I mean,
Speaker 2: I've seen several different angles. Also, I am a little
Speaker 2: worried about whether we're going to get some fakes right,
Speaker 2: you know, the AI stuff these days. That wouldn't surprise me,
Speaker 2: because I've seen a couple. I thought, huh, that doesn't
Speaker 2: look quite like the other angle. But you know, we
Speaker 2: all know, racham on, everything looks different from which corner
Speaker 2: of the street you're on.
Speaker 1: So I.
Speaker 2: Think sort of the you know, beyond the particular aspects
Speaker 2: of this thing that happens in a split second, are
Speaker 2: some of the wider issues of where does the culpability
Speaker 2: lie for organizing resistance to federal government law enforcement officers?
Speaker 2: And I connect this, This is an opening thought. I
Speaker 2: connect this to the fact that we have been allowing
Speaker 2: protests to go unpunished for quite a while. People blocking
Speaker 2: streets to airports and blocking streets and just the blocking
Speaker 2: streets part of it because you want to stop climate change,
Speaker 2: and most of those people have gone unpunished, and so
Speaker 2: it shouldn't surprise us that we escalate to something awful
Speaker 2: like this. But I also will say, and I think
Speaker 2: some listeners will find us harsh or maybe outrageous.
Speaker 1: Well, let's go back to James.
Speaker 2: You will remember that in the Chicago Convention of nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty eight, Tom Hayden and all the organizers of that
Speaker 2: they wanted to provoke police violence on purpose, and you know,
Speaker 2: they got it right, the so called police riot, as
Speaker 2: was later called, even though public opinion polls showed that
Speaker 2: a majority of Americans were on the side of the police,
Speaker 2: as they were two years later for those poor young
Speaker 2: National guardsmen who fired on and killed four students at
Speaker 2: Kent State in Ohio, public opinion was on the side
Speaker 2: of the National guardsmen because they thought, you know, these hippies,
Speaker 2: these bombs, as Nixon called, and remember the fuss about
Speaker 2: Nixon calling them bombs.
Speaker 1: So here we are. And I do think that if
Speaker 1: we're going.
Speaker 2: To talk about okay, you know ice and the police,
Speaker 2: and you know one are the standards of self defense
Speaker 2: for the police in a circumstance like this, I think
Speaker 2: we needed that broad a conversation about the left wants
Speaker 2: this to happen. I actually believe that is true, and
Speaker 2: they now have their martyr, and I think we should
Speaker 2: not let that slide.
Speaker 3: Well, the left sanctifies protest because it is holy, it
Speaker 3: right and good only if it's of a particular kind.
Speaker 3: And the I hate to say the media because that's
Speaker 3: a lot and a lot of the organs that we
Speaker 3: call the media have less influence than they ever did before.
Speaker 3: But let's just say that general idea on the left
Speaker 3: of the people who form opinion or repeat it is
Speaker 3: that basically, the protesters may be irritating, but their hearts
Speaker 3: are in the right place. And if their hearts are
Speaker 3: in the right place because they want to stop climate change,
Speaker 3: because they want to stop this, because they want to
Speaker 3: stop immigration enforcement, etc. Well there's a certain automatic sympathy
Speaker 3: that attends to them. So when they see people who
Speaker 3: are blocking the highway and it's not them trying to
Speaker 3: get to the airport to get home for a funeral,
Speaker 3: they say, yeah, well, you know, sometimes drastic, drastic problems
Speaker 3: require drastic solutions, and consciousness is being raised. That's the
Speaker 3: other thing. We're always told that consciousness is being raised,
Speaker 3: but most people are sick of it. Most people see
Speaker 3: the people who are tying up the airports just stop
Speaker 3: oil gluing themselves to the ground and just wishing somebody
Speaker 3: would flow it. There is just an increasing patients and
Speaker 3: lack of patients and fatigue with this, with these people, who,
Speaker 3: as you say, suffer no consequences. You can walk into
Speaker 3: a museum and a hurl a can of paint and
Speaker 3: a turner, a JMW. Turner, and some people will say, well,
Speaker 3: what's the difference, But other people will say, you know, yeah, okay,
Speaker 3: but you know what is a painting when compared to
Speaker 3: the dire existential crisis that we face with climate chicken jay.
Speaker 3: So we have since the sixties elevated protest on the
Speaker 3: left to a sort of holy ritual performed by a
Speaker 3: sacred cast which can't be criticized because their hearts are
Speaker 3: in the right place. Now, what we have going on
Speaker 3: here is something different in that it is not particularly organic.
Speaker 3: There are and again here's where you just sound like
Speaker 3: a nutcase. There are shadowy organizations behind it. Well, no
Speaker 3: they're not shadowy, they're out in the open. They're organizations
Speaker 3: whose point it is to get people to the place
Speaker 3: where these were the approation apprehensions. I see it all
Speaker 3: the time on my Twitter feed I go. And apparently
Speaker 3: more than that, there's a whole group of these trained
Speaker 3: quote observers end quote, who subscribe to telegram and signal feeds,
Speaker 3: who get information on where they're supposed to go, and
Speaker 3: they show up and they yell, and they have their
Speaker 3: whistles and they film and the rest of it. Now, yes,
Speaker 3: they ought to be able to show up and film
Speaker 3: and blow whistles if they wish, but getting up close
Speaker 3: and interfering and screaming the same tired litanies of you know,
Speaker 3: where's the warrant, what is your badge? Why you're doing
Speaker 3: this doesn't stop anything from happening. They haven't stopped anything
Speaker 3: from happening. But what they've done is they've raised the
Speaker 3: temperature on this so that every single act which is
Speaker 3: their intention, is attended with a great deal of you know,
Speaker 3: of sound and fury and volume and protesting and the
Speaker 3: rest of it, giving the impression I think that there
Speaker 3: is some sort of grassroots people just pouring under their
Speaker 3: houses to defend their neighbors. Some are, but it's not
Speaker 3: that it is. It is an organize. There are organizations
Speaker 3: that are involved in doing this, and what's their endgame.
Speaker 3: I don't know because they're because they're not going to
Speaker 3: stop these things. If anything that we learned is that
Speaker 3: things are different than they were in twenty twenty, is
Speaker 3: that now the ICE the next day just simply went
Speaker 3: back to doing what they were doing the previous day,
Speaker 3: you know, took a little operational pause and said, no,
Speaker 3: we're back at it and we're not stopping. We're not
Speaker 3: taking a knee, we're not putting on you know, said
Speaker 3: we're not going to be po faced about this. It happened.
Speaker 3: There's going to be a process, but we had a
Speaker 3: job to do and we're going to do it, which
Speaker 3: is different I think this time than it was in
Speaker 3: a lot of the you know, the kneeling and the
Speaker 3: begging and the apologizing that went on in twenty twenty.
Speaker 3: You're not seeing institutions, corporate institutions, all of a sudden
Speaker 3: scrambling to figure out how they can get on the
Speaker 3: right side of social justice in this case.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, not this time. They're not going to bend
Speaker 2: the knee this time. Look, you asked what is the
Speaker 2: end game here? And I mean I can give you
Speaker 2: approximate answer in a general one that are complementary. I
Speaker 2: think the general answer is remember the I think it's
Speaker 2: David Horwitz whoever said the issue is not the issue.
Speaker 2: She was always the revolution. Now maybe that's a little
Speaker 2: bit hyperbolic, but not too much. I think that it's
Speaker 2: always the impulse, you know, to go on a large
Speaker 2: scale attack and exploit things like you know, George Floyd
Speaker 2: six years ago, and now this and so forth. It's
Speaker 2: also true that the left, especially in Minnesota, especially Governor Waltz,
Speaker 2: is desperate to change the subject.
Speaker 1: From the massive social services fraud that has.
Speaker 2: Unfolded there, and which, by the way, we can come
Speaker 2: back to this perhaps, I think, maybe a big issue
Speaker 2: in this election cycle and again in twenty twenty eight nationwide,
Speaker 2: because don't think this is only limited to Minnesota. No,
Speaker 2: But there's one other thing to say about the sort
Speaker 2: of protest culture.
Speaker 1: You know, Americans.
Speaker 2: I think I think I take your point about how
Speaker 2: Americans say, well, this is annoying. It's especially if you're
Speaker 2: trying to get somewhere inconvenient have the roadblocked On the
Speaker 2: other hand, it's possible that a lot of Americans, not
Speaker 2: the ones in the media, but ordinary Americans, every day
Speaker 2: Americans can hold two thoughts in their mind at the
Speaker 2: same time. And one of the things that was true
Speaker 2: about the Vietnam era is that the Vietnam War was
Speaker 2: increasingly unpopular, but the anti war movement marching in.
Speaker 1: The streets was even more unpopular. And you know, this
Speaker 1: is something.
Speaker 2: That the smarter people on the left, the late Todd Gitlin,
Speaker 2: for example, figured out late in the game. And so
Speaker 2: I think that same dynamic can be playing out now.
Speaker 2: So you know, I say, listeners and everybody else, pay
Speaker 2: no attention to the braying hounds of the media who
Speaker 2: are all on the side of the Democratic Party, apparatchicks,
Speaker 2: desperate to change the subject, desperate to stay on the
Speaker 2: attack against Trump and anything Trump is doing, and pay
Speaker 2: attention to the real facts on the ground. So, you know,
Speaker 2: for Waltz, this has been hate to be totally cynical
Speaker 2: in crasts, but this has been a godsend for him
Speaker 2: this week because it is allowing him to change the subject.
Speaker 2: And so this is this is how.
Speaker 1: It's going to play out over the next I don't
Speaker 1: know several weeks at least.
Speaker 3: I think that's different, and that instead of having government
Speaker 3: organizations which do audits which are thenkyboged by the people
Speaker 3: on top, instead of you know, a couple of you know,
Speaker 3: if you hope, high profile trials as we had here
Speaker 3: with feed My Future, where the issue just sort of
Speaker 3: goes away after a while and the general conclusions are
Speaker 3: made for it. You have an army of people who
Speaker 3: have decided to take it upon themselves to go around
Speaker 3: their communities and figure out exactly what these daycares are doing,
Speaker 3: what these transportation centers are doing, what these autism centers
Speaker 3: are doing, what these home healthcare centers are doing, and
Speaker 3: they're finding an extraordinary amount of front wherever they happen
Speaker 3: to look. So you're right, it's an issue in the
Speaker 3: coming election but also in the election to come, because
Speaker 3: it underscores this feeling that we started to get during DOGE,
Speaker 3: that there is such an extraordinary amount of money being
Speaker 3: shoveled out that does not serve any purpose, accomplish anything
Speaker 3: except line the pockets of people who figured out how
Speaker 3: to game the system. And so what was initially set
Speaker 3: up as a as a an active empathetic government a
Speaker 3: good thing. We will make sure that the elderly are
Speaker 3: transported to their hospital. We will make sure that children
Speaker 3: actually don't starve. We will make sure that this need
Speaker 3: will be met. No one really argues anymore that we
Speaker 3: shouldn't be helping old people get to the hospital. But
Speaker 3: we found that in almost every single instance, when a
Speaker 3: program is unable to do these things, it balloons, It mushrooms,
Speaker 3: it grows, it becomes what was once a balloon that
Speaker 3: you could hold in your hand is the Hindenburg. And
Speaker 3: now we're seeing the whole gas bag just go open
Speaker 3: flames because people are realizing, my god, my god, the
Speaker 3: amount of money that I pay that is shoveled out.
Speaker 3: We saw with Doge how money from the state would
Speaker 3: go to an NGO, or go to university, which would
Speaker 3: apportion it to an NGO, which would give one hundred
Speaker 3: thousand dollars to a Peruvian lama, a farmer who is
Speaker 3: trying to teaches indigenous people new you know, modern methods
Speaker 3: of basket weaving, whatever. And you multiply that times a billion,
Speaker 3: and you realize that we have been playing for suckers.
Speaker 3: I was writing out my advanced tax payment to the state.
Speaker 3: And I was furious because every single dollar that I
Speaker 3: was I could just see as I was writing the numbers,
Speaker 3: I felt like every one of them was going to
Speaker 3: be wasted. And if it wasn't wasted this year, I
Speaker 3: could count back year after year after year after year
Speaker 3: and just see all of those dollars flowing, not to
Speaker 3: the things that we had agreed that the Social Compact
Speaker 3: required us to fund, but going to scams that they
Speaker 3: let go because they didn't want to seem like bad people,
Speaker 3: because the money flowing was too good, because the whole
Speaker 3: sweet arrangement made everybody happy in the Union Party state.
Speaker 3: And yep, you know, I don't pay, I go to jail.
Speaker 3: The people who did this scams? Are they going to
Speaker 3: go to jail? People writing their checks saying I don't
Speaker 3: think so I go to jail if I don't pay.
Speaker 3: But these guys who took the millions of dollars to
Speaker 3: have a daycare in their basement where no kids ever
Speaker 3: showed up for three years, are they going to jail? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Probably not. That would be mean, That would be mean
Speaker 3: and insensitive.
Speaker 2: Right, Well, so I have a field theory for all
Speaker 2: this which comes in two parts. One is if you
Speaker 2: go all the way back to the financial crisis of
Speaker 2: two thousand and eight, after which we committed what a
Speaker 2: trillion dollars of the whatever it was called then under Obama,
Speaker 2: and then you get to COVID, where I think we've
Speaker 2: spent three to four trillion dollars between Trump one and
Speaker 2: then Biden, and I actually think it was more money
Speaker 2: than the government knew how to spend.
Speaker 1: I mean, now stipulate the spend it. But the point is,
Speaker 1: and I.
Speaker 2: Think the left, which has been, you know, exploiting all
Speaker 2: these programs for years, you now had the whole thing
Speaker 2: expand by two orders of magnitude overnight, with little or
Speaker 2: no controls, little or no oversight. And that's on purpose,
Speaker 2: by the way. I want to come back to that point,
Speaker 2: but I say it's a national story. Out here in Californi.
Speaker 2: The latest estimate is as much as seventy billion dollars
Speaker 2: in state and federal money may have been misappropriated or
Speaker 2: fraudulently spent.
Speaker 1: And this is not brand new news.
Speaker 2: I mean, we knew two three years ago there was
Speaker 2: an auditor's report that thirty billion dollars of unemployment money
Speaker 2: out of COVID was perhaps spent fraudulently. We learned at
Speaker 2: some convicts in prison were collecting some of this money,
Speaker 2: including what that Peterson kid who murdered his wife twenty
Speaker 2: five years ago. Whatever it was. Now, why wasn't Waltz
Speaker 2: concerned about this? Why was he suppressing the whistleblowers who
Speaker 2: kept bringing up up that this was going on. I
Speaker 2: think it's because for a lot of people on the left,
Speaker 2: and Waltz seems just dumb enough to be one of
Speaker 2: them easily, is that for them, this is a form
Speaker 2: of airsats redistribution of wealth. In other words, they don't
Speaker 2: think it's fraud at all. They think it's it may
Speaker 2: be inefficient, it may be you know, not universal enough,
Speaker 2: et cetera. But I think a lot of people on
Speaker 2: the left think this is just this is good, it's
Speaker 2: not fraud.
Speaker 1: They deserve it. The middle class Americans should be.
Speaker 2: Made to pay, like you know, Mondami's household housings are
Speaker 2: has just said. And so I actually think that really
Speaker 2: is at the core of this is that the left
Speaker 2: doesn't think that welfare fraud is actually even possible because
Speaker 2: it's deserved. And then the last thing I'll say is
Speaker 2: you know the business about oh so oh racism. Okay,
Speaker 2: it's racism too, because it's happening among Somali's. Well, so
Speaker 2: here's a problem. There's a whole bunch of embarrassing social
Speaker 2: science data out of Europe. We always admire Europe's great
Speaker 2: cradle Degrae welfare states. Turns out some social scientists found
Speaker 2: more than ten years ago that support for the high tax,
Speaker 2: high benefit welfare states in England is closely correlated with
Speaker 2: ethnic homogeneity. It's Swedish Lutherans who all share the same
Speaker 2: work ethic, right, and that is collapsing in real time
Speaker 2: in Europe, so much so that in Denmark, just in
Speaker 2: the last couple of weeks, the socialist primates has said,
Speaker 2: you know, some of these migrants we've taken in, they need.
Speaker 1: To be deported.
Speaker 2: And they've cut way back on benefits from making available
Speaker 2: to their migrants from the Middle East and Africa who
Speaker 2: aren't working, who don't know the language, aren't learning the language.
Speaker 2: And so if that's happening in Europe, boy, the Overton
Speaker 2: window is really moving.
Speaker 3: Very much. So. Yes, when when you have an ethnically
Speaker 3: homogenous country of six million people, you can have a consensus.
Speaker 3: Now that consensus can be stifling in that you know,
Speaker 3: people say that there are guardrails in Swedish conversations that
Speaker 3: keep the dialogue and the national conversation in between, you know,
Speaker 3: in a certain lane. But those guardrails are breaking down
Speaker 3: because simply when you don't have a homogeneous society anymore,
Speaker 3: you have people who are going to game it. And
Speaker 3: it's the same in Minnesota, I mean, Minnesota adapted that
Speaker 3: Scandinavian model. We had Wendell Anderson on the cover of
Speaker 3: Time magazine and rolling up a walleye the good life
Speaker 3: in Minnesota because we had made an arrangement. In the
Speaker 3: arrangement would be everybody's going to pay nine taxes bought.
Speaker 3: You're going to get good schools, good roads, good government,
Speaker 3: up and up. We acquiesced to sort of technic technocratic
Speaker 3: rule by the met Council which will tell us how
Speaker 3: we should grow and where the highway should be and
Speaker 3: how the water should be distributed. And people just generally
Speaker 3: went along with it because the ideas were sound the
Speaker 3: practice it seemed to work. But that only works if
Speaker 3: you have everybody buying into it. It only works if
Speaker 3: the social compact is shared and you have a high
Speaker 3: trust society, eventually you can maintain that or when people
Speaker 3: from other ways of thinking. And again again we're told
Speaker 3: that one of the great things about diversity is that
Speaker 3: it gets other ideas, other ways of looking at the world,
Speaker 3: other cultures. But it also seems to presume that everybody
Speaker 3: who comes here is going to have a Scandinavian mindset
Speaker 3: and slot right into it. No, so yeah, what Minnesota
Speaker 3: is experiencing is what the Scandinavian countries is experiencing, and
Speaker 3: where it ends up we don't know. I mean Sweden
Speaker 3: other countries are hampered by laws that they've compacts that
Speaker 3: they've signed about migration, an asylum and the rest of
Speaker 3: it that keep them from doing things. So it's curious
Speaker 3: to see exactly what they expect to do about it.
Speaker 2: Interrupt real fast, James, I haven't checked on this lately,
Speaker 2: but Sweden is having an active debate in their parliament
Speaker 2: about changing their constitution so they can revoke the citizenship
Speaker 2: they've granted some of their recent migrants. That's how fast
Speaker 2: things are changing. And the famous Scandinavian social democracies, beloved
Speaker 2: of our left. By the way, you can here and
Speaker 2: there if you look at the leftist the media, you
Speaker 2: can find that they're starting to get unhappy about this.
Speaker 2: They're starting to sour on Denmark and Sweden and the
Speaker 2: whole rest of the scene, which again shows you how
Speaker 2: the Overton window is changing.
Speaker 3: Right. Well, as somebody said the other day in the
Speaker 3: protest in New York City, actually there's no such thing
Speaker 3: as in the legal immigrants, since this has stolen land.
Speaker 3: Therefore everybody here has the same legal status, which she's
Speaker 3: a recipe for national dissolution. But speaking of Europe, Charles C. W.
Speaker 3: Cook has finally joined us. In Charles, we were talking
Speaker 3: about the shooting in Minnesota, Minneapolish boy, I wish I
Speaker 3: didn't have that. It's like I got a macro key.
Speaker 3: I can just type and you get that, you know,
Speaker 3: dropped into a piece. You wrote a piece for n
Speaker 3: R about it, about the video, about the about your
Speaker 3: thoughts on it. Steven said it was extremely nuanced and wise.
Speaker 3: I'll be the judge of that welcome, Welcome, and tell
Speaker 3: me what you were saying in that piece that everybody
Speaker 3: should go read.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 6: I said, of course that we should probably sell Minnesota
Speaker 6: to Canada. Yeah, no, I didn't I was trying to
Speaker 6: dispense with a lot of the nonsense that has made
Speaker 6: it difficult to hone in on the question here, the
Speaker 6: question that would come up at a trial, although I
Speaker 6: don't think there will be one, which is did the
Speaker 6: officer have a reasonable suspicion that his life was in
Speaker 6: danger such that he could open fire? And I noticed
Speaker 6: that this was getting bogged down in all manner of
Speaker 6: other claims. So while I'm not entirely sure what I think,
Speaker 6: although on balance I think he did have a reasonable
Speaker 6: suspicion and that he would be acquitted, I thought it
Speaker 6: was perhaps more useful rather than pil in and write
Speaker 6: a hundredth piece on my views on that, to point
Speaker 6: out all the silly things that people were saying that
Speaker 6: really are re elevant, for example, that this was an
Speaker 6: execution or an assassination, which it very obviously wasn't. The
Speaker 6: shooting was in response to the car moving, whether justified
Speaker 6: or not. That this could have happened to any of us,
Speaker 6: that's not true. This wasn't a lightning strike. Again, whether
Speaker 6: you think it was justified or not, this was the
Speaker 6: product of this person who seems, per The New York
Speaker 6: Post to have been protesting Ice having made certain decisions.
Speaker 6: The claimed that this was somehow inappropriate because it involved
Speaker 6: a thirty seven year old woman who had toys in
Speaker 6: her Honda Pilot. And the Honda Pilot is a car.
Speaker 6: It weighs four and a half thousand pounds. The car
Speaker 6: responds the same irrespective of whether it's being driven by
Speaker 6: a very strong man or by a computer or by
Speaker 6: a very weak woman. It's like a gun in that respect.
Speaker 6: The physics doesn't change. So there are always things that
Speaker 6: people were saying that really have nothing to do with it.
Speaker 3: And I think, but let me, let me stop every
Speaker 3: one second, and if you argue any of those, any
Speaker 3: of those, they get angry with you for somehow nitpicking
Speaker 3: and getting away from the central issue, which is the
Speaker 3: that's what I've I mean, people get in furiated when
Speaker 3: you say it's also you're blaming her. Also you think
Speaker 3: it's okay to shoot a thirty seven years It's not
Speaker 3: what I'm saying. I'm sorr right that these ancillary issues
Speaker 3: don't get to the core of it, and the ancillary
Speaker 3: issues somehow become this mush, the sweet smelling mush that
Speaker 3: gets painted over, it gets daubed over everything where we're
Speaker 3: supposed to ignore the particulars anyway.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and the other one, of course, is that she
Speaker 6: deserved or didn't deserve it, which is not a useful
Speaker 6: question here because this is not a cosmic matter. We're
Speaker 6: not debating here whether or not those who find themselves
Speaker 6: in her situation ought to be awarded a death penalty.
Speaker 6: And I think in this regard this is similar to
Speaker 6: the Ashley Babbitt shooting, where people get very hung up
Speaker 6: on those words deserved. But these are again I don't
Speaker 6: think it will go to trial, but if it did,
Speaker 6: these are questions that revolve around details and my NUSI.
Speaker 6: And another point that I make is they revolve around
Speaker 6: details in my NUSI as they were experienced in the
Speaker 6: brief moment by those involved, not as they have been
Speaker 6: processed by us. Because we have access to information they didn't.
Speaker 6: We can watch it over and over again. We know
Speaker 6: how it ended, we have background information. We can slow
Speaker 6: it down, we can see it from eight different angles,
Speaker 6: we can freeze frame the wheels, we can run experiments
Speaker 6: on ice, and so forth. But that's not what happened here.
Speaker 6: From the perspective of the officer, or in the case
Speaker 6: of the Capitol Riots, the police officer who shot Ashley
Speaker 6: babbittt who didn't know how it ended. And I just
Speaker 6: think that it's quite annoying that people and I include
Speaker 6: conservatives to some extent on this. I think Trump did
Speaker 6: get way out over his skis when he said that
Speaker 6: it was a willful, violent and that was another word
Speaker 6: he used, but running over that's not true. And if
Speaker 6: you hadn't seen the video, you would have a false
Speaker 6: impression of what had happened here. But I don't really
Speaker 6: understand why people are trying to draw these grand narratives
Speaker 6: out of this when it was an incident involving two
Speaker 6: particular people in a split second that led people to
Speaker 6: have to make decisions. I mean, that's what matters, right.
Speaker 3: Yes, they're drawing something out of it because it's useful
Speaker 3: to do that. And so, you know, when I was
Speaker 3: talking to people about this, and they were saying, Okay,
Speaker 3: let's I don't know exactly who they were apprehending. I
Speaker 3: don't know what he was guilty of, but let's say
Speaker 3: that he's illegal, he's come into the country three times
Speaker 3: after deportation, and he's committed sexual violence on minors. What
Speaker 3: instrument of government would you use to remove that person?
Speaker 3: And would it not look identical to what we are
Speaker 3: doing right now? And there's no answer for that because
Speaker 3: you can't say, well, judges, well you know you should
Speaker 3: have just showed up at the airport with a with
Speaker 3: a boarding pass and gotten on a plane. Well you know,
Speaker 3: the thing of it is is is that everybody starts
Speaker 3: the year with great hope and the rest of it,
Speaker 3: and something usually comes along in the first fortnight that says,
Speaker 3: uh right, it's back to the same old bleep. But
Speaker 3: I don't know about you guys, how your New Year's
Speaker 3: Eve went. You know, we had celebration here. Of course
Speaker 3: we had resolutions. Resolutions are usually often towards health and fitness.
Speaker 3: Go to the gym. I already go to the gym.
Speaker 3: But there comes a time to think actually about what
Speaker 3: comes after all those resolutions about health and fitness, to
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Speaker 3: we think meat fabric responsoring this the Ricochet podcast. Well,
Speaker 3: I get a warm feeling thinking about life insurance, they
Speaker 3: really do. But some people get a warm feeling when
Speaker 3: they think about collectivism collsm the warm gentle death in
Speaker 3: which we will all bob rugged. Individualism of pulling up
Speaker 3: your bootstraps is an old notion of a scary thing
Speaker 3: in some cowboy days. No, we're going to join hands, comrade,
Speaker 3: and march forth into the alfalfa fields to do our
Speaker 3: communal reaping. Well, yeah, this is what Mandami has said,
Speaker 3: and it's of a piece with the statements they've drug
Speaker 3: up about his housing advisor, who the other day was
Speaker 3: seen to be walking away in tears and going into
Speaker 3: the house in tears because she was asked hard questions
Speaker 3: about the idiocy, the sort of dorm room bond rip
Speaker 3: stuff you say about capitalism and kill all the white
Speaker 3: men and reduce the middle class and the rest of it.
Speaker 3: Now she's in a position of power, these comments are
Speaker 3: coming back to bite her, perhaps, and we get a
Speaker 3: true view of these sort of theater kids Marxist and
Speaker 3: what they want, and they're a little bit stunned to
Speaker 3: find that people think no, this is spinach, and I say,
Speaker 3: ame with it.
Speaker 1: Well, first of all, who's gonna say it, Charlie? You
Speaker 1: were me? Iron Rand is calling and wants your villains.
Speaker 2: I mean, what Whole's inaugural address of Mondamie was right
Speaker 2: out of the pages of Atlas Shrugg. It's amazing, you know,
Speaker 2: I've myself never cared that much for Rand until Obama
Speaker 2: became president, and now in New York City, for certain,
Speaker 2: there is an interesting thing about that Sea whatever her
Speaker 2: last name is. You're right, And one of the questions,
Speaker 2: by the way, James, is that apparently her mother lives
Speaker 2: in a one point four million dollar house in Tennessee
Speaker 2: or somewhere, and so it looks like hypocrisy to you know,
Speaker 2: this privilege persons. There's a pattern now that I've observed
Speaker 2: for several years, which is people like the theater kids,
Speaker 2: as you put it, like to spout off on social
Speaker 2: media and elsewhere about social justice or universities like to
Speaker 2: have crazy programs, and then suddenly, when you expose it
Speaker 2: to a wider public, the university scrubs the website instantly,
Speaker 2: and this poor lady breaks down in tears. My observation
Speaker 2: was I used to think that maybe the characterization of
Speaker 2: these folks as snowflakes was a little bit overbroad. Well,
Speaker 2: guess what turns out she turns out to be a
Speaker 2: snowflake when she's confronted with more public attention for the
Speaker 2: things that she said and apparently thinks and can't handle it. So,
Speaker 2: in an odd way, I'm kind of encouraged about all this,
Speaker 2: although it's going to be crazy. Mandamie is staffing his
Speaker 2: administration with pretty crazy people.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: I mentioned earlier James that California may have had as
Speaker 2: much as thirty billion dollars in misspent unemployment funds during COVID.
Speaker 2: The person who oversaw that was Julie Sue, who Obama
Speaker 2: wanted to be Labor Secretary, and Senate would in confirm her. Well,
Speaker 2: Mandamie has a point I heard of some senior post
Speaker 2: which just seems.
Speaker 3: Perfect, Charles. We are constantly told, of course, that communism,
Speaker 3: real communism, has never been tried, And I read a
Speaker 3: quote the other day I can't remember exactly who it was,
Speaker 3: pointing out that the Soviet Union was staffed start to
Speaker 3: finish with people who were the best communists you could
Speaker 3: come up with these were people who went to college
Speaker 3: to study Marxist Leninism, and a lot of them really
Speaker 3: believed it. They weren't just putting a sort of gloss
Speaker 3: on their own ability to their own desire to get power.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I think communism has been tried. I think
Speaker 3: we got a pretty good look at the track record.
Speaker 3: But we're supposed to be feeling good about collectivism because
Speaker 3: it's what it's a nursery schools, everybody sitting together in
Speaker 3: a warm room on the sharing their fruit roll ups.
Speaker 3: Do these people have absolutely no idea how this stuff
Speaker 3: plays out in real life. They can't be that stupid.
Speaker 3: Wait a minute here, yes, they caain.
Speaker 6: They can be that stupid. I'm glad you used the
Speaker 6: sea word, because that's what this Sea Weaver person is.
Speaker 6: She's a communist. She's also a racist. Half of her output,
Speaker 6: maybe moral is racism as much as it's communism. I
Speaker 6: know academic types will say it can't be racism because
Speaker 6: her horst involved power. I think that's garbage. I've always
Speaker 6: thought there was garbage. She wants white people to suffer,
Speaker 6: she wants to destroy the white middle classes wealth, and
Speaker 6: she even said she wished she'd believed in God, because
Speaker 6: if she believed in God, she would think that white
Speaker 6: people would burn in the afterlife.
Speaker 5: Perhaps that's the warm collectivism she is, and white men
Speaker 5: would particularly right, that's racism.
Speaker 6: I just want to make this very very clear to
Speaker 6: anyone who's fuzzy on this, that under the fourteenth Amendment
Speaker 6: and the Civil Rights Act, that is racism. There is
Speaker 6: no such thing as positive or negative discrimination. There's no
Speaker 6: classes of people who are exempt or bumped up. The
Speaker 6: Supreme Courts made this abundantly clear, especially recently, that is racism.
Speaker 6: So she's a racist. But she's also a communist and
Speaker 6: her ideas are ridiculous. And although she has labeled as
Speaker 6: tenant protection or tenant advocacy or what you will, her
Speaker 6: aim here is to nationalize property in New York City.
Speaker 6: And if you look at the way that she wishes
Speaker 6: to go about this, this becomes clear. She says rent
Speaker 6: control fixes everything. That's her view, stated view. So what
Speaker 6: you do is you first set rents at such a
Speaker 6: low level that landlords can't make any money on their properties.
Speaker 6: So what do they do. They cut back on maintenance
Speaker 6: and repairs and improvements. And then you go to those
Speaker 6: buildings on which you've imposed rent control, and you say, well,
Speaker 6: the landlord hasn't been doing repairs, maintenance or improvements, so
Speaker 6: the city has to take the building. She says exactly
Speaker 6: that on a show with Sam Cedar, from last year,
Speaker 6: not six years ago, from last year. That is communism.
Speaker 6: It's absolutely appalling. I don't think it's surprising because I
Speaker 6: think mum Danni is a communist as well. So the
Speaker 6: question is will she prevail? Will she managed to push
Speaker 6: this through in a country that is not communist and
Speaker 6: that doesn't tolerate communism legally, but they're going to try.
Speaker 6: Why did she cry? I saw two theories. One is
Speaker 6: that she's a cry bully that she doesn't like being questioned.
Speaker 6: The other I thought was really interesting. Someone said, no,
Speaker 6: she's upset because the manner of the questioning made her
Speaker 6: realize that other people aren't enlightened in the way that
Speaker 6: she is, and that makes her sad. I don't know
Speaker 6: why she cried, but I hope she cries more.
Speaker 3: It's interesting how we have communists who aren't actually quoting
Speaker 3: Marks and Lenen. I mean, they seem they seem to
Speaker 3: be oddly disconnected from that. They seem to assembled the
Speaker 3: whole world and inherited the whole world view and way
Speaker 3: of thinking without really interrogating the actual texts themselves. They've
Speaker 3: got this set of received wisdom that they got and
Speaker 3: where it came from, it doesn't really matter. They just
Speaker 3: know that it's correct because it makes them feel good
Speaker 3: and it makes them feel as though they are advocates
Speaker 3: for the down trodden and are here to bring a
Speaker 3: wonderful situation of total equality. But when you mentioned the
Speaker 3: whole racism thing, she gets a pass on that because
Speaker 3: she is extirpating her own heritage and she's performing, she's
Speaker 3: doing she's doing the work. Shall we say?
Speaker 6: You know what, TAM's I have become increasingly persuaded over
Speaker 6: the last ten years or so by those who say
Speaker 6: that for the vast majority of these people, it's flat
Speaker 6: out envy and a cover for the fact they just
Speaker 6: want your car. They don't like you, they don't think
Speaker 6: you should have the things you have, and this gives
Speaker 6: them a fig leaf that they can news to hide
Speaker 6: that they wish to violently dispossess you of your things
Speaker 6: or worse. I knew at Oxford, a Marxist professor who
Speaker 6: was absolutely brilliant I mean, of course it was wrong,
Speaker 6: but he genuinely believed all of this stuff, and he
Speaker 6: was well versed in it, and he could argue it,
Speaker 6: and he was lovely. Actually, he was extremely open minded
Speaker 6: and tolerant. He didn't mark anyone down for disagreeing with him.
Speaker 6: But he was a Marxist and he thought it. He
Speaker 6: had built this ideological framework up around himself and studied
Speaker 6: Marx and that was his worldview. Fine, I just think
Speaker 6: so many of these people are just envious. I think
Speaker 6: a lot of them are mediocrates who look around and
Speaker 6: are confused why they aren't doing better than they are,
Speaker 6: and ma'm Downey's come along and they've glombed onto him
Speaker 6: because they think he's going to deliver that for them.
Speaker 6: I think that that Marx bit is not, like my
Speaker 6: professor at Oxford, a real intellectual line of inquiry. But
Speaker 6: it's just the words they need to utter so they
Speaker 6: don't sound completely crazy or venal.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I'm glad you brought up envy as
Speaker 2: what Tom Sole has been saying for years, that it's
Speaker 2: the central organizing principle of the left.
Speaker 1: And by the way, Charles I also had two.
Speaker 2: Excellent radical Marxist professors, one undergraduate, one graduate. They didn't
Speaker 2: grade you according to your opinions, and they were terrific
Speaker 2: to have classes with and argue with.
Speaker 1: That's the old school style. So they are out there.
Speaker 2: But a lot of them who are, as you put it,
Speaker 2: you say, mediocre, I think that's a I think an
Speaker 2: awful lot of academics, especially lefty ones, are mediocre, and
Speaker 2: deep down inside they know it. They know their kind
Speaker 2: of frauds where they're intellectually insecure. I've seen this a
Speaker 2: lot since I marinate in academia. I'm glad you mentioned
Speaker 2: the envy for this reason. I did publish an article
Speaker 2: in National Affairs back in the spring called Envy and
Speaker 2: Social Justice, and I was asked this question. You know,
Speaker 2: our social scientists explore all kinds of things in increasingly
Speaker 2: inventive ways, especially racism. Now it's subco just racism, right.
Speaker 2: We all say that, you know, we're for the Civil
Speaker 2: Rights Act, we don't use the N word and.
Speaker 1: All the rest of that. But I say, no, you're
Speaker 1: still really a racist.
Speaker 3: Why?
Speaker 2: And they'll devise these surveys and so, for example, if
Speaker 2: you agree with the statement that the best person should
Speaker 2: get the job that's coded as subconscious racism. So these
Speaker 2: things become self proving, you know, like a self licking
Speaker 2: ice cream. And you will look around in vain to
Speaker 2: find any social scientists trying to do that same kind
Speaker 2: of analysis of envy. It would not be hard to do,
Speaker 2: but it's assiduously avoided by social scientists. And I think
Speaker 2: we can guess why. I don't think there's no secret why.
Speaker 2: And so you know, the very best book on envy,
Speaker 2: that's the copious interdisciplinary study, goes all the way back
Speaker 2: to nineteen sixty seven. Guy named Helmut Shecheck, a German scholar,
Speaker 2: wrote a book called Envy of theory of I forget
Speaker 2: what them, but there's almost I've scoured a scholar literature
Speaker 2: and can find almost nothing except now and then to
Speaker 2: exonerate it and say, it's not a series. But if
Speaker 2: we can study subconscious racism and all kinds of other things,
Speaker 2: we ought to be able to study envy.
Speaker 3: Two. I won't just speak that envy as part of it,
Speaker 3: but I think it's a way for a lot of
Speaker 3: midwind banal people to elevate themselves their post religion, so
Speaker 3: they have they don't have that framework on that they
Speaker 3: can use guiding them through the world, and so they
Speaker 3: just say these words which make them seem like a
Speaker 3: good people and smart people. It also gives them the
Speaker 3: free soul of a revolutionary, which ever since the nineteen
Speaker 3: sixties has been the mark of an interesting person, somebody
Speaker 3: who doesn't accept the current. You know, well, ever since
Speaker 3: eighteen forty eight, ever since seventeen eighty nine, we want
Speaker 3: to go back. So I think that that is a
Speaker 3: great part of it. Let a shift, because there's a whole, big,
Speaker 3: wide world out there, and part of it is on fire.
Speaker 3: I haven't heard anything from Tehran in a day because
Speaker 3: they've snipped off the internet. Even though Elon Musk, you know,
Speaker 3: the guy who made the Nazi salute, that horrible man,
Speaker 3: that oppressor of freedom and speech, has apparently turned on
Speaker 3: starling for a lot of people in Iran so that
Speaker 3: they can get some messages out every night after twelve days,
Speaker 3: is it now we see snippets of film, more and
Speaker 3: more people pouring into the streets, more and more flags
Speaker 3: being taken down, reports that the police have switched over
Speaker 3: the show. You know, the Prince makes a stay. It's
Speaker 3: it's poised more than it seemed to be before, but
Speaker 3: I swear we've been here half a dozen times and
Speaker 3: I hate to be the meme of the nothing ever
Speaker 3: happens guy. But I would hate to think that this
Speaker 3: ends with the regime still in power, especially since the
Speaker 3: president Postmaduro, flexing a little bit, said that if they
Speaker 3: start to fire on the protesters that there will be consequences.
Speaker 3: Look and learn and listen and all the rest of it.
Speaker 3: So I don't know what do you guys think about
Speaker 3: Iran in the next seventy two hours or so.
Speaker 2: Well, although first you know, my late friend Angelo Codevilla
Speaker 2: had a simple explanation for why the Cold War ended.
Speaker 1: He said it ended because.
Speaker 2: The Soviet Union lost the will to shoot its own
Speaker 2: people in large numbers. I like that blunt explanation, and
Speaker 2: I think that the test right now is is does
Speaker 2: the running regime have the will still to do that.
Speaker 2: There's some evidence that the answer is yes. They have
Speaker 2: called out what the IRGC out of their barracks, the
Speaker 2: Revolutionary Guard, and there are reports that there's a lot
Speaker 2: of government violence against the protesters and large numbers of
Speaker 2: people are being killed. We really don't know. Information is patchy.
Speaker 2: Despite startling trying to break through and so forth. And
Speaker 2: I'd say the last thing is is if the regime
Speaker 2: does fall, and of course I think we all wish
Speaker 2: that it will. What an irony that the beginning of
Speaker 2: the end of the regime started on October seventh, twenty
Speaker 2: twenty three, because it's all events since then have led
Speaker 2: to this.
Speaker 1: Moment in Iran. So I'm hopeful but very worried that
Speaker 1: it's going to be very, very bad.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 6: I have watched over and over again as we have
Speaker 6: got our hopes up that the Iranian people will overthrow
Speaker 6: this horrible regime, and I've stopped believing it.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 6: That doesn't mean I'm right, but I've stopped believing it
Speaker 6: because it's never happened. The first time in was it
Speaker 6: twenty eleven, two thousand and nine, I assumed that it
Speaker 6: was going to happen because twenty years earlier the Berlin
Speaker 6: Wall had fallen, and as a younger man, I assume
Speaker 6: this is just what happened. I thought maybe there was
Speaker 6: some sweep of history that guaranteed that tyrants would fall,
Speaker 6: And now I'm just not sure. And I wonder if
Speaker 6: this has lost momentum as well. Now I'm told by
Speaker 6: people who know an enormous amount about this, far more
Speaker 6: than I do, that one of the big differences in
Speaker 6: this case is the economy. That the economy is so bad, right,
Speaker 6: and so this is going to sound odd. I don't
Speaker 6: mean that in other contexts it would be an ideological revolution.
Speaker 6: It would be abstract in some sense. Of course, there
Speaker 6: are very real material problems with the regime. But perhaps
Speaker 6: that changes it. Perhaps that prevents people from going back
Speaker 6: to their lives as it were. But I don't know.
Speaker 6: I'm getting nervous again that this is going to fizzle
Speaker 6: out and that I will never see this regime fo
Speaker 6: I share your feelings.
Speaker 3: On the other hand, we have a Venezuelan followed, which
Speaker 3: is fascinating to me because in one stroke we well
Speaker 3: we like I like, like I was repelling down from
Speaker 3: the helicopter. The United States dealt a severe blow to China,
Speaker 3: to Russia, and to Iran. Basically the don Roe doctrine,
Speaker 3: as he's calling it, is saying, no, this is our backyard,
Speaker 3: and you're not going to look about here. The days
Speaker 3: of the Biden administration and the bombed administration, just saying
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, we don't like, what you're doing, Can we
Speaker 3: give you some more money? Those days are over, We're
Speaker 3: they're done. And so now China finds itself in the
Speaker 3: back foot there and Russia, having faced one humiliation after
Speaker 3: the other, right down a little tanker that we diverted
Speaker 3: and boarded. Love to know what was in that, probably
Speaker 3: never will. Seems to have given America all of a sudden,
Speaker 3: a pop and a swinger. Along with the Iran decapitation
Speaker 3: of the nuclear program. That is I think one of
Speaker 3: those sort of turnarounds comparable to what we had in
Speaker 3: the eighties, when all of a sudden, America no longer
Speaker 3: believed that the military was this seventies falling apart, rusty thing,
Speaker 3: but actually was a competent force and a force for good.
Speaker 3: And it seems like it happened a lot faster than
Speaker 3: it did in the eighties. Is this So is America
Speaker 3: back baby? When it comes to the armed forces and there?
Speaker 3: In other words, if we're not retreating hastily with people
Speaker 3: firing at us and putting and dropping bombs and people
Speaker 3: falling out of the wheelwells the cargo plane as they
Speaker 3: drop off, we can actually accomplish something. If we don't
Speaker 3: exactly prioritize a transgender surgery for somebody so that they
Speaker 3: can be on the front, then we actually are account
Speaker 3: If we don't make the whole thing seem to be
Speaker 3: a woke enterprise, you're actually in a corn fed fred
Speaker 3: from I was signing up and saying, yeah, hell yeah,
Speaker 3: all fight.
Speaker 1: Well, the operational execution was just so stunningly.
Speaker 2: Successful and awe inspiring, and that always has what Churchill
Speaker 2: used to call a moral effect on the way people
Speaker 2: look at these things. And in particular, one thing that
Speaker 2: I think is quite significant. People have been saying, who
Speaker 2: no defense matters? Is we neutralize their Chinese supplied and
Speaker 2: Russian supplied air defense capabilities quite easily, quite swiftly, And
Speaker 2: so suddenly that makes China and Russia have to doubt
Speaker 2: how could their stuff is if they actually come toe
Speaker 2: to toe with us?
Speaker 1: Okay, So there's that. The other thing I like.
Speaker 2: About it is, you know, what of Trump's great skills
Speaker 2: is he keeps everybody always off balance. And so you know,
Speaker 2: we weren't even done with the news cycle about snatching
Speaker 2: Maduro before he was talking about Greenland and saying some
Speaker 2: crazy things, or hegsas saying some crazy things about, no,
Speaker 2: we don't rule out military force. It too, you acquire Greenland,
Speaker 2: which really is kind of reckless and insane, completely insane.
Speaker 2: But on the other hand, you can see how the
Speaker 2: world's reacting. But in the middle of all this, you know,
Speaker 2: we kind of missed this because of all these big
Speaker 2: things happening in Minnesota and elsewhere. About midweek, the Trump
Speaker 2: administration announced that the United States was withdrawing or ending
Speaker 2: its membership and participation in fifty five different international agencies,
Speaker 2: most of them in the UN, one of them being
Speaker 2: the Inner Governmental.
Speaker 1: Panel on Climate Change. That's the head of the whole
Speaker 1: climate change circus.
Speaker 2: Now, to be sure, if you had a democratic president
Speaker 2: in three years, they'll bring us all back into all
Speaker 2: those things. But still that does not without cost. I mean,
Speaker 2: that's you know, all the things Trump is undoing they'll
Speaker 2: want to redo are going to be hard to do.
Speaker 2: And maybe the cherry on top was also in the
Speaker 2: middle of the week, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, you know,
Speaker 2: the Ministry of the Media, of government run media, having
Speaker 2: been deprived of federal funds, decided to close down completely.
Speaker 1: That's a win.
Speaker 2: And you know, again bringing that back they can probably
Speaker 2: do it, but it will require some political capital, and
Speaker 2: we'll see they're not going to undo everything Trump does.
Speaker 1: Which why do you.
Speaker 3: Hate big Bird? Why do you hate big Bird?
Speaker 1: Bird makes money? Is you know I've been pointing out
Speaker 1: for years.
Speaker 2: Right, My next door neighbor who passed away was the
Speaker 2: head writer for Sesame Street and then The Muppet Show.
Speaker 1: So and he did very well at all that.
Speaker 3: So well. Yes, as the joke goes, my agent was
Speaker 3: sitting in the backseat of a car with with Sherry Lewis,
Speaker 3: and as a matter of fact, he shook her hand
Speaker 3: and said her hand was remarkably soft. You said your
Speaker 3: hand would be soft if it'd been up a lamb's
Speaker 3: rear for the last twenty years too, sort of work
Speaker 3: back when people knew who Sherry Lewis was. If you
Speaker 3: know who Sherry Lewis was, and you're eager to be
Speaker 3: amongst people who do, that's what Ricchet meetups are for. Yes,
Speaker 3: this is not one of those websites it just has
Speaker 3: a bunch of guys blathering at you. No, this is
Speaker 3: part of a larger community that includes guys blathering at you.
Speaker 3: Ricochet people get together and they meet. So if you
Speaker 3: are a member of Ricochet dot com. You may be wondering, hey,
Speaker 3: what's up in February having a group meet up in Detroit, Michigan,
Speaker 3: And we're having a group meet up in Cape Canaveral.
Speaker 3: I still love the way he went back to Cape
Speaker 3: Canaveral in Florida, of course in February. And if you
Speaker 3: would like to meet people from Ricochet, all you have
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Speaker 3: Go to the meet up page at ricochet dot com
Speaker 3: slash events, and there you will find out where next
Speaker 3: people will meet. Well, gentlemen, before we go, hate to ask,
Speaker 3: but did you have any New Year's resolutions? No? You know.
Speaker 2: The funny the irony is I actually have been working
Speaker 2: out a little bit this week, even though I didn't
Speaker 2: make that cliche resolution that people always do.
Speaker 3: I love the Babylon Babylon b had a story. Planet
Speaker 3: Fitness offers two week gym membership for eye Charles.
Speaker 6: No, I'm not a big New Year's resolution person.
Speaker 1: Well, but Charles, you should be.
Speaker 2: I mean, if I were you, I would be resolving
Speaker 2: to enjoy the fact that your beloved Jaguars have performed.
Speaker 1: So I have really paid attention out here in the
Speaker 1: West Coast. And what a great season they've had.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Trevor Lawrence is surging and looks to me like
Speaker 2: you're gonna probably enjoy a nice deep playoff running.
Speaker 6: Ah, please, please, please, nervous Steave, I'm going on Sunday.
Speaker 6: They're playing the Bills, a great team, great quarterback. I'm
Speaker 6: just so nervous they're going to crash out in the
Speaker 6: first round. But yeah, I mean, we ended thirteen and four.
Speaker 6: Last year. We were four and thirteen, and I thought
Speaker 6: we'd improve. I thought we had the right coach. I've
Speaker 6: always believed in Lawrence, but I didn't think we'd go
Speaker 6: thirteen and four. We were one bad PI call away
Speaker 6: from being the one seed. So it was a remarkable season.
Speaker 6: But I just hope it doesn't end because I'm really
Speaker 6: into it.
Speaker 3: It will, as somebody who's been there five times will.
Speaker 3: You'll live and you will feel like a fool for
Speaker 3: having hoped. I know it'll come to the end of
Speaker 3: the fourth quarter and you will look back and you
Speaker 3: will say, why did I even why? But the ride
Speaker 3: is wonderful, the game will yes. The nerves that you
Speaker 3: feel on that it's great. It's why we do it.
Speaker 3: It's why we play.
Speaker 1: I am now James, the our scanning even existentials and you.
Speaker 6: Was really But you see, I do deserve this because
Speaker 6: at various points I have teased James about the vikings,
Speaker 6: of course, and so I deserve I'm going to take
Speaker 6: my lumps here.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I wish you all the best and I hope
Speaker 3: you and your team are happy. I have to end
Speaker 3: with this, Charles, we are on video at the moment.
Speaker 3: Can you I knew this right away? This is a
Speaker 3: deep I wish it wasn't deep, but it is pop
Speaker 3: culture reference. Can you tell by looking at Stephen who
Speaker 3: plays drums.
Speaker 6: His shirt is it? Is it a Genesis shirt? Phil Collins?
Speaker 3: Very very good, But what's the album Don't Move, so
Speaker 3: he doesn't see any more of the words.
Speaker 6: It's a trick or treat.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's trick of the tail. Yeah, yeah, that's what
Speaker 3: you don't know what you're wearing.
Speaker 1: Post Phil first, post Peter Gabriel album.
Speaker 3: Where we were pretty impressed and actually it's a good album.
Speaker 3: It's got some wonderful songs on it. And uh, I
Speaker 3: remember when it came out and I was a young
Speaker 3: lad listening to that, and uh was was was gratified
Speaker 3: that Jenny Jenny came out.
Speaker 2: I think it came out in seventy six chains. So
Speaker 2: this is yeah, fiftieth anniversary, which you know, we're oh, that.
Speaker 6: Would be Oh, I know I wasn't born then.
Speaker 3: Oh, I know this is right. Okay, all right, well,
Speaker 3: I'm gonna go downstairs and have some have some metrocal
Speaker 3: and you know, take out my put my teeth and
Speaker 3: soak them in poly No, you didn't soak them in polydent.
Speaker 3: Polydent was what you used to put them on. I
Speaker 3: think it was Martha Ray with her big flashing choppers
Speaker 3: who was the person for that. It wasn't Jane Russell
Speaker 3: who did the soaking solution. It was one of those
Speaker 3: glamorur gals from the forties who popped up and you
Speaker 3: know the Greatest Generations commercials in the sixties telling them
Speaker 3: where to put their their upper plates. Yes, well, okay,
Speaker 3: times wing a chariot all that. But Ricochet is still young,
Speaker 3: still new, still heading forth with great vigor and the
Speaker 3: bigot your enthusiasm into the new year. You can join
Speaker 3: us there and you will find a good place to
Speaker 3: read and to write, because if you're a member, you
Speaker 3: can write in the post this week it, which is great.
Speaker 3: We would like to thank you for going to fabric
Speaker 3: because that's where you're going to get life insurance and
Speaker 3: as a parent with small kids or somebody later in
Speaker 3: life who's just looking for it, go there, give it
Speaker 3: a start and support them for supporting us. Everybody works out,
Speaker 3: everybody pays, everybody benefits, and you know, five star reviews
Speaker 3: at Apple podcasts are always one of those things we're
Speaker 3: asking you to do. I've been doing it for about
Speaker 3: six hundred and seventy four podcasts. Now one of these
Speaker 3: days you're actually going to do it. The weight of
Speaker 3: responsibility and guilt will task you to do it. Your
Speaker 3: reviews allow new listeners to discover the podcast that keeps
Speaker 3: the show going, that keeps Ricochet going, etcetera, etcetera. And
Speaker 3: by the way, if you're new to this, we're not
Speaker 3: the only podcast in the Ricochet. We've got a whole
Speaker 3: audio feed with all kinds of people, including the Diner,
Speaker 3: which returns this Saturday. Once I get down to it
Speaker 3: and decide exactly what I'm going to say. Am I kidding?
Speaker 3: I never know what I want to say. It's been great.
Speaker 3: Thank you Steven, Thank you, Charles. Regards to all, and
Speaker 3: we'll see everybody in the cup. I gotta ask, what
Speaker 3: version are we on now, Charles Ricochet four.
Speaker 6: Point four point fourteen point fourteen point fourteen point fourteen.
Speaker 3: Still for three?
Speaker 6: Still pretty big update?
Speaker 3: Yeah, well big update to come. And won't it be
Speaker 3: fun when we flip the switch and everything goes dark
Speaker 3: and scrambles and server blows up. But no, that won't
Speaker 3: happen until it doesn't though, We'll see everybody in the comments,
Speaker 3: said Ricochet four point oh bye bye