Speaker 1: Welcome back every once with a new episode of You
Were Wrong with Molly Hemingway, editor in chief of The
Federalist and David Harsani, senior writer at The Washington Examiner.
Just as a reminder, if you'd like to email the show,
please do so at radio at the Federalist dot com.
We love to hear from you. Molly, Happy Holy.
Speaker 2: Week, Thank you very much, and to you, you're welcome.
Speaker 1: Thank you to passover for me. But yeah, same, not
the same idea, but it is.
Speaker 2: They're strongly related. So the passover story in the Old
Testament is where we mark when God directs choose to
place blood on their door posts to pass over the
angel of death. And then Jesus is the ultimate passover
in the that he dies for the sins of the world.
So they are related. And also it takes place at
the same time as the passover, when Jesus is preparing
for the past, when everyone's preparing for the passover is
when the passion takes place.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about politics, Molly, and let's start with the
Supreme Court. Now, let me just preface what we're going
to talk about by saying that I don't think that
the founder has ever envisioned the Supreme Court taking such
a aggressive or assertive role in governing the country. I think
the country would have fallen apart a long time ago
if it hadn't been for this Supreme Court, which is,
I believe imperfect, but upholds constitutional order more than any
other branch right now, And you know, we've talked about
this before, and I wrote about it last week again,
So why don't you talk a little bit about sence.
I think you have a much more expertise on this,
about the case, about the recent case with the Al
Salvadoran who well, I believe the administration said that they
had accidentally sent him to this prison in Al Salvador,
but I'm not exactly sure how the Supreme Court ruled
on it.
Speaker 2: I actually just want to take issue with a couple
of things you already said about the Supreme Court. I
do think we know that the founders never intended the
court to be particularly strong, because they said as much.
You know, Federalists number seventy eight says that the judicial
branch will have less power than the executive and legislative
branches because they have neither force nor the purse. They
can't sorry that loud sound. It can't have the power
that these other people do. Then we have early on
in the Republic's history, the Chief Justice of the United
States taking quite a bit of power, asserting that the
Supreme Court determines whether something is constitutional or not, you know,
which we just take for granted, but is kind of
an invention. And then you said that the Court was
the You didn't say least dangerous, said it was the best.
Speaker 1: I am saying that, yeah, it's the best functioning branch
as far as the constitutional order goes.
Speaker 2: Right now, that line the least dangerous branch is another
line from Hamilton in Federalist seventy eight. But the Supreme
Court actually caused a great deal of damage in its
history when it started being used as a legislature. You know,
when FDR was trying to push through some of his
radical progressive ideas and threaten the Court to comply or
else be packed. And they you know, there's a debate
about whether that happened or not. But you had like
fifty years of the Court just ignoring the Constitution and
just deciding to do things that they thought that the
people should have decided through the legislative branches, and that failure,
that decision that they made, and the length that that
went on, and you know, still still can go on.
I mean it's it was like fifty solid years but
it petered out. It's still you know, it still happens
so much.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm not saying I'm not saying it's always been
for sure, it has been a destructive force.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, before I would say, kind of originalist philosophy
came back and then finally to whatever extent, was successful
in the Supreme Court. Yeah, one hundred percent agree. I mean,
in recent years, starting maybe with Citizens United onward, I
think it's upheld constitutional order and freedom is better than
any branch. Of course, it's made big mistakes. I think Obamacare,
for instance, was a massive mistake, but just generally that's
all I mean.
Speaker 2: Sorry, Yeah, no, I think it has been the best
and that is a very low bar.
Speaker 1: Yes, it certainly is. But what I mean is you
feel like things have fallen apart sometimes where judge it,
you know, lower court judges just interject themselves clearly undermining
the present the executive's power and ways it shouldn't and
then also you have the executive you know, so you know,
and it's not just Trump. I think it's been actually
really accelerated under a bomb and so forth, acting in
ways that they also think they're a legislature, which they
are not. You know, you have presidents just signing declaration
and edicts, you know, left and right, and it's not
how it's supposed to be. So anyway, sometimes I think
the court comes in and they reinstitute some kind of
procedural you know, normalcy into what's going on.
Speaker 2: Yep, okay, So what were you asking about about.
Speaker 1: The L Salvadorian guy? What was his name? Kilmar Garcia.
I have to say I'm slightly confused about this case.
He was picked up and he was sent to one
of these L. Salvadorian prisons. Now I have a very
different outlook on someone like Mukhaliel, who I don't think
I want here as a citizen or as a student
or anything. That we send him back home. And it's
a little different when you pick someone up and you
send them to a form prison, right. I just you know,
and I believe the administration said that it was an
administrative error to send him. That's not to say he's
not in a gang or whatever, but don't you whatever.
I feel like we need a little higher level of
process in these cases, because you're not just sending someone
to another country or sending them to a prison. And
how I you know, what I see happening is that
the court said you have to facilitate his release from
that prison, not that you have to bring him back.
I might have that wrong. And that the Trump administration says,
we can't tell El Salvador what to do. We can't
bring this guy back. I think Jdvan said, what are
we going to do? Invade L Salvador? But honestly, if
we want L Salvador to do something and we pressure them,
they will, I think do it. So anyway, I don't
know exactly what to make of all that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and forgive me if I get any of these
details wrong as well. But okay, so this guy who
the media call a Maryland man is not a Maryland man.
He's actually an illegal alien and a member of MS thirteen.
According to various court holdings who is in He was
in the country illegally, and he had gone through all
sorts of court processes for being deported. Right at the
end when he loses, like the final case, he starts
saying that actually he cannot go back to El Salvador,
which is where you normally send people who are from
El Salvador here illegally, because he, like fifteen years prior,
his mother had been involved in a bakery business or something,
and then bad elements had tried to take over that business,
and so if he went over, if he went back home,
then he would be in danger of being killed by
these thugs from like a rival gang or something. So
it's like a last minute plea he makes that because
of some very long ago history, he can't go back
to El Salvador. It's widely understood that this was not
a real claim so much as an attempt to stay
in the United States and anything you can do to
kind of like slow down the process helps, But the
court did find for him that he couldn't go back
to El Salvador. So this guy who's to be deported
is accidentally sent to El Salvador, he can go to
another country. He will go to another country, or if
the Left has its way they think they're trying to
get him back, he's not coming back. He will go
to another country other than El Salvador. If they're able
to effectuate that. But it's not a question of whether
he should be in this country here illegally or could
stay in the country here illegally, but whether he was
to be sent to El Salvador or not. But he
was sent to El Salvador. He was, and the United
States has admitted that they made an error in that
when all the other ms thirteen people were sent to
a prison in El Salvador, he should not have been
in that group. He should have been sent to like
Gimo or a different country. No, I guess not Gypmo,
Maybe GYPMO or another country to have his stay at
that point, so it works its way through the courts
and makes it to the Supreme Court, and this left
wing judge in a lower court, a Maryland federal judge,
I think Obama donor. She said that basically they had
to immediately facilitate and effectuate his return to the United
States by Monday, April seventh. Well as Trump appeals that
order from her, the deadline passes, he appeals to the
Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court issues it's a response
in which they say that part of her order is
upheld and part isn't. And they point out that her
word use of effectuate, they don't really know what that means,
and that she should clarify that, and also, you know,
the deadline had passed and various other things. But it
was a very mealy mouthed order from the Supreme Court,
albeit unanimous. You rarely get unanimous things from the court,
or you rarely get unanimous things on contentious issues. And
as soon as it was released, the judge in the
case and the Trump people just had wildly different interpretations
of what the Supreme Court meant, and so much of
the criticism now is directed at the court, for you know,
clearly they wanted to just send it back to the
judge and kind of hint to her that she should
issue a new order that was not so crazy. She
didn't get that message, and the Trump team saw that
message loud and clear, and so they're now disputing what
the meaning of the message is. So it's going to
go back to the court, and my point just being
they should just issue much more decisive orders immediately. It
saves them time, and a bunch of them are too
scared to do that, or they're playing games with each other,
and it's kind of getting ridiculous. I agree, with you.
They are far and away the best branch we've got going,
but they need to just grow some spines and clarify
things decisively. They're not helping anybody with these mealy mouthed,
confusing orders where they expect other people to stand up
without clear direction.
Speaker 1: So I'm going to push back on something you're doing.
I guess is that perhaps it is not a clear order.
But it seems like nothing in the order says leave
the dude in a prison and all Salvador. So I
mean it's understood that the administration has to make some
effort if it's abiding by a court order, to facilitate
the person's release or bring them back. Certainly, saying oh,
we can't do anything is not the correct answer to
any interpretation of that order. Or I read that wrong.
Speaker 2: So no, I think you're right. The Supreme Court said
that the District Court's order needed clarification. That particularly, they
they did believe that the lower court order requirement to
facilitate the dude's released from custody in El Salvador was proper,
but they didn't think that the term effectuate was clear
and that it exceeded the District Court's authority and then
they ended their order by saying that the district Court
should clarify its directive, but the government should be prepared
to share what it can. I mean, I don't know.
It was just it was very confusing to people. I
don't think anyone has a clear understanding of what the
court was saying.
Speaker 1: It feels like it feels like to me that Joe
Biden and Democrats open the border purposely let people come
in here, did very little to facilitate their departure. Right
so Donald Trump comes in immediately, the border is shut
down from what I'm reading, right like, all that nonsense
about having to pass new laws, having to do this
or that was nonsense from the beginning. But it seems
like because of this urgency they are, you know, and
I think rightly I want to say to me, this
isn't about whether I want gang members here or not.
I don't want any gang members here. In fact, I
don't want anyone who's illegal in this country here, so
I want to get rid of them. But that they
are using every tool possible and sometimes maybe pushing the
limits of what the of kind of bypassing any kind
of process to do it and making mistakes do you
think that's a fair thing to say, and that maybe
that's going to backfire on them and undermine what they're
trying to do in a large you know, in a
broader sense, I don't know.
Speaker 2: Barack Obama and Joe Biden completely flung open the border,
welcomed millions upon millions upon millions of illegal immigrants in
made it very difficult to get rid of them. Nobody
said boo about the violation of rule of law with
just bringing in millions of illegal immigrants, many of them
like who were released from prisons in order to in
order to help foreign situations and brought right to the
United States, who commit like major crimes, who are burdens
on the healthcare system, who are burdens on the educational system,
frequently in not wealthy communities, and nobody cared about the
rule of law at this time. Nobody said, like, this
is a violation of the rule of law to allow
and welcome in illegal immigrants, like it was all just
viewed as great, and there were sanctuary cities and sanctuary
states and people saying, like, what if we gave a
lot of federal taxpayer money to NGOs to help these
illegal immigrants and it was just a complete and utter
breakdown of rule of law, and the courts basically did nothing,
including like the Court once upheld thanks to John Roberts
IIBL this was upheld Obama's Dreamers program, and then when
Trump tried to close it, they said, you can't do it.
He through executive order could just like allow a bunch
of people to become citizens or get a pathway to citizenship.
That was fine. And when Trump used the same power
to shut it down, they said, you can't do that.
So the Supreme Court is not covered in glory here.
They were part of the problem in allowing a complete
breakdown of rule of law and a major part of
prohibiting the solution to it under the first Hump administration
and allowing these lower courts to just run wild with
injunctions against various immigration orders. And it is appalling to Americans,
I think, to see just how it's like you just
can't win. You can't do anything to stop people opening
up the borders, and you can't do anything to close
the border, and you just don't have a country if
you have that. So I don't think we should downplay
the seriousness of the problem, the role the Court had
in perpetuating the problem and how weak they're being now
that the American people, you know, they did vote for
someone different than Washington, d C. And a big part
of his consistent message has been to deport illegal aliens,
and the courts are saying, well, what if we have
a vote and we say you can't, not based on
rule of law, but just based on like shenanigans in
game playing. And the Supreme Court doing anything other than
saying stop, You've got to respect like, you've got to
respect the other branches and you can't do this. Anything
other than anything short of that is for many Americans
pretty appalling.
Speaker 1: All right, I'm sure you know. Unfortunately, I think we're
going to be talking about this a lot.
Speaker 3: It's time to embrace the suck once again. The watch
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Speaker 1: The next topic Harvard UH Donald Trump cut off was it?
How much money was it? I'm sorry, I think it
was two billions two point two billion, and the federal
funding that went.
Speaker 2: To the UH yes, two point two billion, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Went to Harvard. He had a list of demands that
Harvard had to meet. They did not. They said they
would rather not take the money and the demands. I honestly,
I'm up two minds with this. I think it's good
that colleges don't take money from the government, no matter
who's in charge of the government and who wants to
dictate how they teach private colleges. So the idea that
we've been giving them this much money, taxpayer money, is
insane to begin with, considering Harvard has a massive endowment.
Speaker 2: Went two billion dollar endowment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just just a Hedge funded right, I mean, so
it's insane. Now, of course, I want there to be
less anti semitism at Harvard. I want Harvard to have,
you know, to not to continue to lean on affirmative
action which courts found is you know, is illegal. So
all of that's true, but I don't like when government
dictates what they do, even if I agree with what
the government's asking the school to do. My position on
this is, I'm not sure why we're giving any schools,
private schools, any money. Did you know? This is a
stat I learned yesterday. I don't know if you knew this.
Probably did. They're over one hundred colleges and universities that
have over a billion dollar endowments. Right. The average college
endowment of major schools is two hundred and forty three
million dollars, right, Why are they taking getting any more
tax money? In fact, why are we even guaranteeing or
giving student loans. Why don't they loan money to their
own students and that way, maybe they'll bring the tuition down,
or maybe they will give those kids that kind of
education and degrees that will actually help them in life.
Because right now there's a moral hazard where schools just
stand out money to anyone because they know that the
Feds and the taxpayers will back those loans. So I
think the whole situation is insane to begin with. Setting
aside what's happening exactly with Harvard.
Speaker 2: Harvard is one of the wealthiest corporations in the world
and gets two point two billion dollars in taxpayer funding
a year. It's not just insane, it's enraging. It's such
a great example of the corruption of our country and
our system. And they didn't say they wouldn't take the money.
They said they just weren't going to comply with Trump's demands.
Now people point out that that might mean that they
don't get the money, But if any federal judge in
America has anything to say with it, in a week,
Supreme Court to back them up, they're going to get
the money. There's nothing you can do. Harvard seeks the
destruction of our country, and you're paying for it, and
I'm paying for it, and you can do and I mean,
I kind of wish the elites who run things would
think about the downstream effects here of what you do
to people when you tell them you are subsidizing one
of the wealthiest institutions in the world, which seeks to
destroy the American family, the founding ideals capitalism, you know,
borders whatever. Like they're the bad guys, and you're paying
for it, and you're paying for it, and there's nothing
that you can do to stop it. One of the
things they refused to do was to check their faculty
for plagiarism, which I just found kind of funny.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for AI run it through plagiarism machine and AI checker.
I mean, the member wasn't the president of Harvard, like
not long ago, Like, didn't we find out she had
all kinds of plagiarism. She did all kinds of plagiarisms.
Speaker 2: It's maybe a hiring requirement that you plagiarize other people's
works and get taxpayer funded for it. The other thing
that was bothering me about this is I'm affiliated with
Hillsdale College. I'm senior Journalism Fellow there and we have
not taken federal funding ever. And it is hard to
not take federal funding. As we just noted, there's lots
of money to be had and to raise your own
funds and to build an elite institution as we have,
it's just it's taken a lot of work, a lot
of vision, and it's been very, very difficult. We have
created a school that undoubtedly provides a far far better
education than Harvard, and we've done it without taxpayer subsidy.
It's unfair that Harvard gets to compete, you know, with
Hillsdale and become this like massive corporation with taxpayer subsidi subsidizing.
It's just like an unfair economic practice. And the idea
that you know, and I'm emphasizing again, they didn't say
they wouldn't take the money. They just said they weren't
going to comply with the demands from the federal government.
They'll probably still get the money. It just strikes me
as a problem.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a huge problem. It's a huge problem because
it's you know what it is, it's cronyism in the
same way corporation. You know, cronyism works in government. For instance,
you have Harvard or Columbia or Georgetown or whoever, rent
seeking with government, getting all kinds of goodies, getting all
the funding for like you know, research or whatever. Oftentimes
you know, left wingers run all this, so they send
you know, the funnel money to like climate change research
or gender studies or whatever nonsense is going on, and
then real, you know, so then everyone knows I have
to go into those fields to get the money. Like
they distort education in a completely ridiculous way. And then
a school like Hills there or some private school that
doesn't want the government because usually it's the Biden administration
or Obama some left when you're telling them what to do,
not Donald Trump. You know, this is new to them,
all of a sudden. Academic freedom and all of that.
But they don't care about academic freedom at all in
places like you know, Harvard and Columbia, as long as
the academics are transgressive and hate America, you know, and
all that. So the whole system is distorted in the
way you distort capitalism. I'm sorry. You know, these things
should be privatized, not relying on government funding. It's kind
of unfair now because you have these schools with massive
insallets and other small schools trying to compete with them,
and they're still funneling money, send money to private schools
that teach kids a classical education or whatever. I mean,
it's ridiculous. I mean, I'd rather not do that either,
But because I just don't think I want the government
involved in educating people anymore, because they've done they do
such a horrible job in public schools, we're going to
let them do it in higher education as well. I mean,
I think we have a real problem where there are
so many graduates and so many people I see credentialed
out in the world who sound like dimwits to me.
You know, they don't sound like they're like they have
a holistic understanding in the world or a understanding of
traditional ideas. I don't know. I think they're a cancer.
A cancer. I don't know how to fix it. But
cutting off the money, and you're saying they're not going
to have this money cut off.
Speaker 2: I'm just assuming a federal judge will place function the
Supreme Court will say you need to clarify how you're
going to do this, and then it'll drag on for
four years. Then there will be a new administration, and
in the meantime there will be yeah, there will be
a stay on as if it passes prologue, there will
be a judge will put a stay on the freezing
of funds, meaning the funds will have to continue as
it works its way through the court. And then eventually
Amy Cony Barrett and John Roberts will side with the
left wing justices and say that Harvard has an absolute
right to billions of dollars of taxpayer funding.
Speaker 1: A year.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's my prediction.
Speaker 1: I mean again, like I don't have a letter in
front of me, but the Trump administration, I think asks
for like merit based firing, you know, merit based admissions.
You should be like, of course we want these things.
Of course we want these things in Harvard.
Speaker 2: Well, when you take federal funding, you're supposed to do
what the federal government says, which is a big reason
why Hillsdale doesn't take the funding. And for a long time,
the federal government has just said do all these like
really bad things that hurt the country. Trump's trying to say, okay, well,
what if instead of the bad things that we demanded
that universities do, we instead said good things like check
for plagiarism and do merit based pay and protect your
students and stuff like that. That check that comes from
the government comes with many strings attached, and Trump's trying
to say the strings should be good strings instead of
bad strings. He'll fail, like presumably if the courts have
it anything to do with it, and the Supreme Court
will do nothing to stop it. But it does remind
me of my favorite thing from the first Trump administration,
which is when Princeton responded to the shakedown from the
BLM movement by saying that they were an evil, corrupt,
racist institution. One of the things in the Marxist BLM
movement that you had to do was to say that
you're racist. And until you could say you were racist,
you weren't allowed to talk about it. So I just
want to say, I think I've shared this before, but
in my neighborhood, my neighbors put up signs with little
maps to their houses that said ending racism begins here,
meaning it begins in this house because that house is
full to the brim with racists, and so they're going
to end racism in their house and then they're going
to end it elsewhere, so you have to admit it yourself.
So for years and they still have them up five
years later, by the way, and I have continued to
do this On every mother bleeping walk I do with
my kids, I stop in front of the house. I
say to the kids, kids, racists live here, and I
don't want you to ever be racist. Don't be a racist.
Racists live in this house. And by the way, they
must be the world's worst racists because they've supposedly been
working on eradicating their racism for five years and they've
not made like a single step in a positive direction,
so they must be bad anyway. Princeton University says, ending
racism starts here, and we are chief among all the sinners.
We are the worst sinners on racism that you have
ever encountered. And the Trump Education Department was like, are
you now, well, as you know, that's a violation of
federal law and we're not allowed to give funding to
racist institutions. So since you say you're racist, we're going
to treat you like you're racist. And it was just
to me, a brilliant response to the BLM, but then
it all ended.
Speaker 1: But Princeton is right. They are. They were made into
an elite school by Wodrow Wilson, who graduated from there,
one of the biggest racists and worst Americans who ever lived.
Speaker 2: So I wouldn't be surprised self to see more of
this type of approach, Like, yes, Princeton was founded by
someone who was very insidious racist. Harvard is racist right now.
They seek to be racist. They took their right to
be racist to the Supreme Court. They want to be
racist in their admissions practices. They're racist and they're hiring practices,
they're proud of their racism. Well, it is illegal to
be racist if you're tax payer funded, and I think
the Trump administration should start holding all these schools to account. Like, okay,
you you in you know your board says that you
believe in critical race theory. Well that's at odds with
American law, where we do not believe you're allowed to
be racist with tax pay funding. So maybe that's a
way to try it.
Speaker 1: There are a bunch of a bunch of anti Semitic
nit you know, zealots on staff there, and let's just
say they were racist, similar kind of thing. You know,
the Obama administration wouldn't keep funding a school that had
clansmen teaching kids, right, I mean it's the government has
no responsibility to give you in money or fund you.
And if they do, they have you know, they can,
like you said, they can make rules for you to follow,
which is exactly what other administrations did. No one really care.
It reminds me of this. You know, the left is like,
we're going to do whatever we want and you're going
to help pay for it. I'm going to come to
this country and say I want to tear down Western
civilization and you're going to have to make me a citizen.
It's just this entitlement that these people have that we
have to destroy ourselves, like it's it's insanity. I mean,
we have no reason to sit here and allow people
going to be bad citizens to come here. We have
no reason to sit around and let people just walk
into the country because they decide they want to do it,
while other people follow the rules and do it the
correct way. You know, I'm just ranting today.
Speaker 2: No, I feel that way, And I was actually wanting
to mention something like that with the first topic, Like
I believe so strongly in due process and to me
is the cornerstone of civilization, and I think it was
Stephen Miller made this point. To bring in like an
invading army of fifteen twenty million illegal aliens and then
to say that they are all accorded the due process
rights of an American citizen, means it would take even
if like people got to work on it immediately and
worked around the clock two hundred years to deal with
the with the illegal immigrants brought in by Democrat border policies.
That's also an injustice to the American people. It means
immediate response, not like two hundred years from now. If
it all goes well, we'll litigate all the cases of
the people who are alive today. Like obviously that's not
going to happen, but the it's a system that is
teetering in terms of respectability and legitimacy, and court should
be aware of that.
Speaker 1: There should be I mean, if there any kind of
reform and immigration law should be to streamline the ability
to send people back home takes too long. There are
immigration judges that can be done faster, or maybe we
need more. I don't know. I'm not an expert on
the system, but it's not working.
Speaker 2: I just want to say, and again, sorry to go
back to this other thing now, that guy who was
wrongly deported to El Salvador because of his claim that
he would be endanger in El Salvador, he does not
have a right to come back to the United States.
The courts will and have found that he should not
be an l Salvador. So the best that everyone's hoping
for is that there will be a different prison in
a different country that can take him.
Speaker 1: For me, I don't even care about that, dude. I'm sorry,
you know, but when I say, listen, there's a court order.
You should try to live by that court order. It's
a system we have. It's imperfect, and people like, why
are you defending you know, gang members. I'm not. I
don't care about him. I just I think when things
start breaking down, as I've said, and I think in
the last two weeks we've spoken about stuff like this,
you know, it starts, it's become something that corodes the system.
So I don't have all the answers to it, but
that's I'm slightly concerned about that. I'm slightly concerned that
we're just you know, throwing people into probably a pretty
bad place at jail that, you know. I want to
make sure the next guy, if he is illegal or not,
is not thrown into a prison, that he is maybe
sent home, you know, or it's not accidentally you know,
it's inhumane to do something like that. I mean, I
think we can all agree on that.
Speaker 2: No, No, I don't agree with that. I'm not really
worried about him being an El Salvador and even when
he even if he were to get out of prison
and return to free life in Al Salvador, and I
don't think. I think what's in humane is what's been
done to the country, and that's what I'm really concerned about.
I am first and foremost concerned about fellow citizens that
they be free from crime from illegal elements. It's hard
not to deal with crime from legal elements. It's intolerable
to deal with the rapes, the child kidnapping and the
murder and the theft from the criminal illegal element. There's
also just the issue like I've been dealing with some
health problems recently and I had to go to the
emergency room. It was crazy. I went to the emergency
room and it was empty, and I was like, oh, right,
because we're enforcing border law and people are like slightly
worried about using ers as their primary care right now,
right very civilized. My friends in Texas report that the
walmarts are pretty much like you're able to go in
and shop and just get stuff, and like it's not
overrun with like words of people who are there illegally.
It's just there are all these things that have been
allowed to happen to the country, and everyone was told
you just kind of have to accept it. Or like
my mom was a public school t and talking with
some of her friends about just sometimes like you'd be
in a small town and it would be all of
a sudden that you had to devote all of your
resources to ESL because of a massive influx of illegal
aliens who were using the schools. These things affect people
and in real ways, and nobody seems to care. And
then they're like, well, this guy who's a criminal and
affiliated with MS thirteen might not be treated well in
this prison.
Speaker 1: Well you keep skipping, all right, Well, first of all,
that's I'm going to tell you I am not for
any of that. I want all legals out of this country.
You skip the part where we don't know whether the
man is a violent criminal or not, whether we should
just throw him out or throw him into a prison
somewhere without any due process. I think it matters, That's
all I'm saying. Of course, I don't. I want emergency
rooms not to have illegals in them and people to
follow the law. I just think it's slightly a false choice.
That's on saying you're saying you care more about Americans,
which is like saying I don't. I do.
Speaker 2: I do not kill people who are like so folk like. Also,
I'm just really annoyed that a bunch of people who
did not care at all about the violation of the
rule of law with the border openings, not to mention
like a whole string of assaults like the war against
any Republican who challenged the twenty twenty election, whether they
were the lowly J six protesters or Donald Trump or
John Eastman, all of a sudden coming out and saying,
you know.
Speaker 4: If we don't care about rule of law hear her
for illegals, then we might see a situation in the
future where rule of law isn't isn't something that other people.
Speaker 2: Are held to. It's like where have you been? Like
where have you been? The previous Attorney general openly oversaw
a complete breakdown of rule of law, and there was
no calls for impeachment. They were like, oh, Merrick Garland here,
he's a nice guy, you know. Like just these silent,
silent or very meek voices are now very loudly saying
I'm very worried about the due process rights of this
MS thirteen member.
Speaker 1: Hey all, I'm going to say, and.
Speaker 2: By the way, breaking into the country is a crime,
and I'm sick of people saying it's not a crime.
He is a criminal, he's illegally illegally, he was illegally
in the country. That's a crime. We need to treat
it like a crime, because it is a crime.
Speaker 1: I just want to speak on my own behalf and
say that I spoke up against all that stuff in
Merrick Garland and everything else. And I'm not I agree
with what you're saying, but there's levels of criminality we
can acknowledge that. I you know, you don't want to
throw everyone in the same terrible prison. You want to
get him out of the country. That's all I'm saying.
I just want to know that we're sending people to
the right place, don't. I don't think that that is
such a I don't think that underminds any of my
other positions or anything you've actually said.
Speaker 2: I just want to also say you said that a
court has never found that he was S thirteen, and
he wasn't like charged with being MS thirteen, but a
court did say that evidence showed Abrego Garcia is a
verified member of MS thirteen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I want to say I don't think that
an illegal alien here should have the due process rights
of an American citizen. We can do that. That's impossible,
but there should be some kind of level of some
standard that we make a distinction between people who have
engaged in violent criminality or gang members and a person
who wanders into pick some whatever. Orange is right.
Speaker 2: After all of the process for concluding that he should
be deported back to El Salvador, you know, had happened
like six months later. His lawyer was like, wait, I
have an idea. What if we say you can't be
deported to El Salvador because of like this alleged ancient
history gang intro warfare or something like that. So they
do that. He he has already been subject to a
deportation order for like six years. This attempt to keep
him from going back to El Salvador was like a
last minute attempt to figure out a way to keep
him in the country by applying for asylum. You're right
that the court did hold that he can't be sent
back to El Salvador, and so there, you know, who
knows what can be done about that. I don't know
if I don't know how much the US can do
to effectuate that. But it was a mistake that they
sent him there. But nobody should feel like super bad
about it because I mean, I guess I don't want
to downplay it, but I don't I don't think many
observers view it as like a real thing.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's talk a little bit about what happened. And
I actually would would kind of connect this to the
Harvard issue a little bit. But Jos Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania,
his house was burnt down by an arsonist. It wasn't
completely burnt down, but it was a dangerous thing. People
die in houses at night, you know, when there's smoke
inhalation whatever. And this they found the guy and this
is all alleged, but you know, he was a leftist
and one of the reasons he gave for doing it,
or I forget how it came about, was that he
was mad at Joshapiro for what Jos Shapiro was doing
to Palestine and the Palestinian people. Now, I wish I
could explain to this fellow that Josh Shapiro is a
governor of Pennsylvania, does not do anything as far as
foreign policy goes, and does nothing to the Palace, to
Palestine and Palestinian people. And let's face it, Joshapiro, he's Jewish,
and that is probably why this person made this connection particular.
You know, to him, there are many governors and many
senators and many politicians who are pro Israel out there.
We're kind of importing ideas of the Palestinians. Frankly, so
when I want to get rid of malch Mkhalil, and
everyone's like, well, he put his foot down in this country,
so now he's got to be here forever. You know,
it's not illegal, like an illegal, But to me, he's
just as dangerous as any guy you know who walks
over the Mexican border. And there's no reason for us
to make people like that citizens, and there's no reason
for us to have them stay here anyway. What you
would you think when you heard that what happened.
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, I just think it's horrible what happened.
The photos were alarming because I mean, it was not
a poor attempt at arson. It was clearly he was
using fast moving accelerant. You know, the pictures of one
of the rooms in the mansion showed pretty serious damage.
And fire is uncontrollable, so it can quickly get out
of control. The kids were in the house. This was
an attempt to assassinate Josh Shapiro and his and kill
his family. It's serious, and I'm also somewhat concerned that
the guy was able to get that access to You
would hope that Governor's mansions would have more security than
is evidenced by the success of this attack. And thanks
be to God that nobody was harmed or killed in it,
although just even the act of arsenal itself can be
very traumatizing to the family, and I worry about, you know,
just what the kids feel about how safe they are.
Adults can process and handle this perhaps better than young children,
and so it should be treated with the utmost seriousness.
I saw the report that he was motivated in part
by Josh Shapiro's stance toward Palestinians, and I wasn't sure
what the sourcing was, but it was from the search
warrant that the police wrote for going into properties associated
with the alleged arsonist, so they presumably had a basis
for this. And looking at this individual, it seems, and
looking at his online persona, it seems that he, a
like most people who commit political violence in this country,
was not the most sane person out there, and that
he had a wide variety of beliefs and hatred across
the political spectrum, but was probably best identified as like
a Democrat socialist or as a left lingening socialist. I
think his voting record is Democrat, and I do wonder
if this combination of information is why people aren't spending
as much time focusing on him as on the act
of violence as they should. He doesn't fit into the
you know, it's not a right winger who went after Shapiro.
He's a left winger, and he's a left winger who
happens to share the viewpoint of that fringe, but solid
not fringe, that minority, but solid portion of the Democrat
Party that opposes Israel.
Speaker 1: Every time something happens like this, and I'm not saying
that political violence only comes from the left, I know
that's not true. But whenever this happens, we wait, we
see what, who did it and when. If a right
winger did it, we have a national conversation about right
wing violence and everything, and if a left winger did it,
we have a conversation about right wing violence again. You know,
like it's always the same. But I've written this many times,
and the left wing has a far larger, broader history
of political violence in this country going back to the
early nineteen hundreds than the right. It's not even close.
I mean it's not a competition or anything, but this
idea that you know, you know, maga people are terroristic,
is Garland said? Or that actually parents who go to
school boards to complain are terrorists. But never talk about
the left. They pretend this has nothing to do with them.
But let's talk about this. It's just hit me. Taylor
Lorenz is on CBS the other day, CBS News. Right,
she's insane, Right, she's a CNN. Sorry, it doesn't even
you know, it's almost saying praising what was that guy's name,
Luigi Mangioni or whoever shot the United Healthcare CEO. And
then I see polling that says, you know, a significant
number a minority, but a significant number of people who
are progressive think highly of him, or think that what
he did was moral, or think that violence against someone
capitalist is justified. I mean that should be that's pretty scary.
And I think this guy, and I don't know, he
probably had a similar review right where the person who
what was that guy's name? I don't even remember the
people who tried to kill Donald Trump or the guy
who tried to who the assassin who tried and wanted
to kill Justice Kavanaugh? Kavanaugh, right, Brett kavanaughh So, I.
Speaker 2: Mean that's just like the most famous assassination attempt there was.
There have been recent arrests for other men trying to
kill justices.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's pretty scary stuff. Black Lives Matter Matters had
a lot. There was this one Charlottesville march with these
idiots and don't get me wrong, I think they're dirt right,
But then you had BLM and there was so much
more violence. There was the destruction of property. There were
people New York Times editorial board members saying that riots
are not violents, right because you have insurance, and and
on and on. I mean, these things are just popping
into my head. It's like year zero stuff. It's anarchy.
Speaker 2: And that's what I was thinking of when you're when
we were talking about the arson You know, one of
the many, many people killed in the BLM riots that
received one hundred billion dollars in corporate support, truly, and
there's a great database that lays it all down. Specifically,
one of the people killed was killed because arsonists set
fire to a building that he was in. They didn't
intend to kill anyone necessarily, but they didn't intend not
to you know, they were setting fire to buildings, burning
down police stations. Yeah, that's pretty serious. I'm on Luigi
Mangioni thing. I just want to say, I am very
concerned that people. To me, Taylor Lorenz is quite obviously
a mentally unwell individual. She's kind of like a high functioning,
mentally unwell person. She is someone who worked at The
New York Times and the Washington Post and now is
being platformed by CNN. And I judged those media outlets
far more than I judge her. She's she's not well.
She's clearly not well. She's not a mentally healthy person.
I try not to pay any attention to her, you know,
like muted all her names on my social media so
I don't see her. What is the Washington Post doing
having employed her for so many years? What is CNN
doing giving this like puffy like conversation with her where
she speaks joyfully about her romantic interest in Luigimngoni. By
the way, Fox News wrote about how she was praising Luigimanngioni,
and she responded, lol. I didn't even quote, praise, quote him.
Here's what she said on CNN in their puffy gauzy
piece on you know, profiling her thoughts on him. Here's
this man who's a revolutionary, who's famous, who's handsome, who's young,
who's smart, He's a person who seems like this morally
good man, which is hard to find. Seems praising seems
like praising language to me, Taylor. But more than that is,
you don't go down and pick up a random crazy
person and ask for their thoughts on things. You you
get them the help they need. All these people interact
with her, but they don't love her or care for
her because they're employing her rather than getting her the
mental health help she needs. Am I wrong you?
Speaker 1: No, you're right? The name of the songs, You're wrong,
but you're all right? And the it's CNN or whoever
platforms her, And I don't even have a problem with that.
If someone brought her in and challenged her in a
really tough way because what she's saying is insane and violent,
and that they would say, well, that's crazy, you know.
But these are the people who went to school and
were chay Gevarra shirts right. He was a handsome revolutionary too,
you know, mass murderer, but a handsome revolutionary. There's like
a romantic like this mystique that people at the left
attaches to these kind of murderers, and it's been going
on for a long time. Yeah, I mean, I saw, Oh,
I'm not going to get the name right, but there's
some kind of Netflix documentary on social media and not
knowing what your kids are doing and that sort of stuff,
and I believe they use her as one of the
experts to explain it to the audience. Right, So she's
constantly being lifted up by people who I think agree
kind of with her, or people like her but are
scared to say it and use them as proxies to
get it out to people. That's what I feel like
happens quite often.
Speaker 2: And so many, many many years ago. When she was
at I don't know this, Taylor Lorenz was at maybe
like a New York publication, but not The New York Times.
She docksed two girls who were influencers whose mother was
like an anti Islamist activist, thereby putting the children's lives
in danger. And the moment I saw that, I was
like this person's a crazy person, you know, just kind
of certain things that should be hands off, including children
of It just struck me as really bad, and I
immediately just remembered the name, and I was like, I
will never interact with this person. So I was just
thinking about this other thing that just happened, which is
the criminal referral of Letitia James for mortgage fraud. Did
you hear about that?
Speaker 1: I saw the top line, you know, headline. I didn't
take a deep dive in.
Speaker 2: Well. You know, it's so a lot of people kind
of finding this interesting because the New York Attorney General,
Letitia James, ran for office with a claim that she
would find she'd found the man, Donald Trump, and now
she was going to find a crime to charge him with.
This is a very popular concept in Soviet Russia. You know, fine,
you've showed me the man, I'll show you the crime. Like,
if we need to go after someone, we'll figure out
a way to go after him. And so the thing
that she went after him for was for repaying a
loan favorably to his bank, but claiming she said that
mar Lago, which was worth very little, he claimed it
was worth more or something like that. And nobody was
Nobody was wronged in this transaction. The bank did its
own assessment of whether Donald Trump could repay the loan.
They found that he was more than able, and he
in fact did repay the loan, but she went after
him over this. It was a massive ordeal and he
ended up being told to pay like a four hundred
and fifty million dollar fine for repaying a loan with interest.
And when corporations started to be worried that they since
they all had done the same thing that Donald Trump
had done, they were worried about doing business in New York,
the Governor of New York, Kathy Hochel, came out and said, no, no, no, no, no,
this is this was just the way that we went
after Donald Trump as law fair. You don't need to worry.
We're not going to come after you this way, which is,
you know, it's all deeply alarming and goes back to
what we were talking about earlier. Where the heck were
these people concerned about rule of law when this was
going on. Where were their voices? They were really silent
in hush hushy, And now they're like, oh, a criminal,
illegal alien was deported to the wrong prison, and they're like,
this is the end of the Republic. Anyway. Apparently Letitia James,
the Attorney General of New York holds an elected statewide
office in New York, was claiming that her principal residence
was in my state commonwealth, Virginia, and that she was
committing mortgage fraud. And so I don't I haven't heard
her defense of her case yet, but the documents do
indicate that she's in deep doo doo.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it seems, uh, well, we'll see what happens. I
I you know, if she's guilty, she deserves to pay.
I that case was one of the weakest of all
the law fair cases. I thought a jury I think
came up with that number as well. Right, the what
the what Trump had to pay it was just preposterous.
And I think that their justification for all that and
why they didn't speak up for rule of laws, because
they said Donald Trump is hitler and doing anything to
stop Hitler is just okay. And now you know, I
think they're they're going to see where that leads, because
you can play at that game, I guess.
Speaker 2: Well, except I mean, like it's not two people playing
in a game. If she claimed Virginia was her primary
residence to engage in mortgage fraud. That's a that's an
actual crime. Claiming mar A Lago is worth a lot
of money when it is is not a crime.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know, but but yeah, but maybe they never
would have looked at her if she didn't get involved
in this thing, right, I'm sure that you know what
I'm saying. I I it's like, what is that saying
anything for my friends? The law for you? You know
what I mean?
Speaker 2: So well, you know, as Letitia James said, nobody is
above the law, right, and that would include Letitia James.
Speaker 1: So hey, I don't feel bad for her, trust me,
I think she is. She abused her power and ways
you know that were detrimental to the health of the nation. Okay,
do you want to sorry about culture?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: All right, do you have anything this week? I know
you haven't been feeling really.
Speaker 2: I've been sick and it's been making me unable to
work at the level I would like to. And I
I'm not someone who enjoys watching movies alone or anything
like that, but I was sick and in bed, I'd
been sleeping, and I was like, I'll watch a movie
and I think I watched one of the movies ever.
It was called Life or something like. It makes sense.
Speaker 1: Oh is that from Is that like Angelina Joe Lee
from like the two early two thousands. Yea with Burns.
I forgot his first name.
Speaker 2: Burns was in a bunch of movies around that time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she was famous for a few years there. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I haven't heard of heard from him or of him
in a little bit. Yeah, it was pretty bad. It
was about a newscaster in Seattle who really wants to
make it to the big leagues and is living the
perfect life supposedly, but it's all very fake. And she
encounters this street prophet who says she's going to die,
and she also is up for this big national network job,
and she asks if she's going to get it, and
he says, you're not. All of his other predictions come true,
really weird scoring for the Seattle Seahawks Broncos game, that hale,
that that there will be hale in Seattle the next morning,
you know, and there will be an earthquake. And so
she starts paying attention and then she performs her life
and it all like culminates with her interviewing Stockard Channing,
who is like the Barbara Walters of the movie and
asking if everything she gave up for this life as
this preeminent newscaster was worth it, and Stockard Channing both
is honest in kind of acknowledging how much she gave
up to be a newscaster and also is very upset
with the woman and says she can't get the job anyway.
Speaker 1: Think it was one of the worst movies you've ever seen.
So it was a bad movie. Is you did not
enjoy watching it?
Speaker 2: I like Angelina Jolie, and I think she's very pretty.
I'm like a fourteen year old boy sometimes when it
comes to movie watching. I'm like, well, she's pretty to
look at it.
Speaker 1: Burns is pretty pretty too, right, I mean he's easy
to look at. No.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not bad. And it had like those It
felt like a nineteen nine movie with the particular approach
of the music and everything.
Speaker 1: Can I talk about Ed Burns for a second. He
is like an avatar of the nineties to me, Like
he did that independent movie I think it was called
Brothers McMullen if you remember, it was kind of like
about Long Island Catholics growing up there, so really spoke
to me. I grew up around there and all of that.
And he is married to Christy Turlington, who was like
a nineties supermodel, right, wasn't she?
Speaker 2: Oh? She he is. I didn't know that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know what he's been up to lately.
But he was also in like Saving Private Ryan and
a few other big nineties movies. That's great.
Speaker 2: So when I told Mark that I watched this, he
immediately went into this huge discussion of Edward Burns and
how he did some in true indie movie and then
there was like another movie he did right after it,
and She's.
Speaker 1: The One, Yeah, so is that the that's the second
one Brothers McMullen, and then She's the One.
Speaker 2: And She's the one had and then he was like
very excited about Tom Petty doing the soundtrack for She's
the One.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he did. That had Jennifer Aniston in it and
a bunch of like of the let me look it
up for quick. So it had h Cameron Diaz, Jennifer
Aniston and it was very of the time, and.
Speaker 2: He really liked this one part of one of the songs,
how it had this great line and I was like,
can you come on tomorrow to the culture section, because
clearly this wouldn't excite people anyway. I do love Tom Petty.
Speaker 1: And when you mentioned Ed Burns and I'm like, oh,
he did this or that, I think to myself, I
have so much garbage cluttering my mind and memory that
I don't need, and I wish there was a way
to just clean it out. I should not know this
much about Ed Burns, who's probably a fine fellow, but
still was that it you got anything else?
Speaker 2: Oh? Okay? And then also Mark has been watching this
show called The Studio.
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, yeah, on Apple Plus, Yeah, I.
Speaker 2: Do think you would like it. And it's like to
say that I do not like it. So it's Seth Rogan.
It's a send up of a studio head who wants
to make fine films but is instead having to make
really trashy projects like the kool Aid Project, you know,
where you're making a movie built around kool aid so
you can market it. And it's not my form of
humor at all. Like I just kept on being like, Mark,
why are you watching this? And He's like, cause, Banni,
it's not funny for me when people pretend to be stupid.
We've talked about this before and where the whole plot
is centered around people being idiots and I cannot handle that.
Speaker 1: I did watch the first episode of that in half
of the second, which I found tedious and stopped watching,
kind of like the first episode because of the Martin
Scorsese angle, I thought was pretty funny. But at some
point in my life I turned against Seth Rogan where
I just cannot handle his personality or humor and I
just don't want anything to do with it. I don't
know when it happened, but it was just too much.
It was the same thing with Will Farrell, Like at
some point I was like, Okay, that's it, Like we've
had enough of that, you know, in my life.
Speaker 2: At least you're like okay, okay, okay done.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're done. Now, we're done with this.
Speaker 2: I thought of you at one of the very first
jokes in the first episode though, where they're talking about
very great movies Rosemary's Baby and other movies, and then
they're like, and other movies not made by sex pet.
Speaker 1: That was Woody Allen, And yeah, I don't know if
movies like Annie Hall and Rosemaries Baby and also movies
but not sex you know, perverts or whatever. That was
very funny, and then there's some good jobs.
Speaker 2: Why do sex perbirds make such good movies? And it's like, well,
you know there is something to that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think I think our art artists are strange people,
right typically. I saw a great work of art myself,
very nice cup there. I saw a great work of
art myself. It's called Smoking the Bandit. It's like nineteen
seventy seven.
Speaker 2: I genuinely love that movie.
Speaker 1: Oh me too.
Speaker 2: I hope you're not joking.
Speaker 1: I'm not joking. I am not joking. I tweeted out
the other day. At the end of Smoking in the Bandit,
he says, for Big Nis, he's going to go to
Boston get clam chowder and come back in eighteen hours.
And I figured out all the calculations to that and
how it could not be done. That's two and one
hundred and fifty four miles. You'd need to do one
hundred and twenty miles prout the whole way up nine
ninety five. And people, I think you mocked me too.
But people said I was like, what's that physicist name
who ruins everything? Tyson or whatever, Like he's always like
talking about plausibility. Anyway, I love that movie. I grew up,
you know it was a big deal. Parentald's is great
in it. Rewatching it, it's still Oh. Jackie Gleason is
just a genius, as Beforte Justice a genius, So it's
fun to watch. I don't know if people realize Jerry
Reid the truck driver. Obviously he was a country singer,
but he's also one of the greatest guitarists you'll ever see.
If you go on YouTube and watch him play guitar
with Chad Atkins or something, it will blow your mind.
He's just an amazing He's like a virtuo, so just
an amazing musician. The whole movie is great. I loved it
so much that I sat that night and I started
watching Smoking the Bandit too, which lacks the elan of
the first fee it's not amazing, and there's a third
one two drop off. Yeah you drop off made no.
Speaker 2: My response to was just more like my defensiveness about
Smoking the Bandit, which I think is a great film.
So when you were like, this is impossible. He would
have to go one hundred and twenty miles per hour
in order to get the clam chowder and he couldn't stop,
and I was like, that's your point.
Speaker 1: I love how you're impression of me being that way.
It really wasn't like that. It was just like, oh,
come on, that's crazy. It's just fun to figure things out.
But one day I don't want to do this now.
Hal Needhamo made that moving to Tenniball Run and Stuff.
Used to be a stunt coordinator and a stuntman himself.
I think we need to take a deeper dive on
how amazing those eighties and seventies movies were, like Hooper
and Canniball Run and so forth. The other thing I
have is somewhat said it's Mario Vargoslosa died. He's one of,
you know, just this amazing giant literary giant, but also
a fierce defender of freedom and liberty in the world,
you know. And I love his novels. My favorite is
The War of the End of the World, which is amazing.
His most famous novel his Feast of the Goat. I
don't think anyone wrote listen. I'm not a literary critic.
I don't pretend to know that much about literature, but
I've read, you know, of the novels I've read, I
don't think anyone has ever written about like living in
you know, the sufcation of living in a you know,
in a dictatorship, or having the state come down on you.
But he wrote about all kinds of things. He was
a great defender of a freedom. I have a book
of his that he recently wrote, called to Call the Tribe,
where he goes to It's kind of like an intellectual autobiography,
and he goes through all his heroes and everything. He
wrote twenty one novels, fourteen nonfiction books, a bunch of plays,
and he had a biweekly column at a newspaper in
Spain for like thirty years. He was a machine. And
you know, I was thinking about someone had brought this
to my attention, but I thought it was something interesting
to think about. You know how, I don't think conservatives
or liberals always say conservatives can't do culture, you know,
or that like they're so illiberal or so inhibited, they
can't write great things or do right things. I think
that that's proven wrong by a lot of people in
the past. But I think Vartis Lusha proved it. Now
you know that that's not true. And he makes me
think like I wish conservatives would take culture more seriously
and do beautiful things. And he never wrote like from
He didn't start his book as a political book and
then just say something. He talked about human beings and
how they suffered, and then it was conservative on its own.
Does that make sense.
Speaker 2: Yep, because truth tends to be conservative. So even when
there are left wing artists, sometimes they accidentally speak conservative
truths because they're just being truthful. He was a leftist
originally and then became a rightist. I do think there's
a problem with arts on the right, but also people
overstate how there aren't any people on the right who
are great artists. And the particular way in which his
art is coded right wing is very similar to some
of the great Czech authors who were magnificent during sixties, seventies,
eighties under the totalitarian regime Soviet regime, in that they're
writing really personal stories about oppressive regimes and how they
affect interpersonal relationships. And again it's just truthfulness. I don't
know how certain people are better than others, Like I
don't know why the checks are so much better at
this than other communist countries and.
Speaker 1: The thing with yeah, and the thing with him was
that he was in a part of a group of
writers become very famous. But he's the kind of like
Eastern European writers or whatever. Even some Russian writers obviously
were anti collectivism and all that, but he was basically
alone fighting this battle in South America where there are
very few people who could be considered conservative. And honestly,
he wasn't a social conservative or anything, though I think
there were strands of that. He was more of a
classical liberal type of thinker, and so himself as a
man of the world, not just you know, Peru, where
he was from. And I just want to say also
that it's so hard to find some of his early
novels and translation and stuff, and I think it has
to be that because he earned against socialism. Is one
of the reasons that he's not that as well regarded here,
because the sort of literary world in the West and
especially the United States and in Western Europe is very socialistic.
So this is a person that they couldn't ignore, but
they never gave him I think the full props that
he probably deserved. I have a long piece coming out
on him this week, probably, and I go through some
of this, you know, some of his history and biography,
and I was just a big fan of his. It's
not easy reading most of the time. I would I'd
probably recommend Feast of the Gods as a starting point,
but it is high literature, and don't you know, don't
you like? I was watching an old firing line with
William Buckley and Norman Mailer, Like Norman mail Or was
another one of these huge, bigger than life kind of
you know, intellectual futilist whatever. We don't really have that anymore,
do we. I mean, I can't think of like these
larger than life literary figures who live these like Hemingway
or whatever. I just don't think we maybe retro so
perspectively we think of them that way, and maybe they
exist today and one day people will think of that.
Speaker 2: Now they don't exist today, but like for many different reasons.
So first off, people don't read anymore, and so it's
hard to have these literary giants when very few people
are reading fiction. Of the people who are reading fiction,
only a small percentage of men now. Now, partly that
might be for their own reasons. I do think a
significant reason is that publishing houses have moved like so
fully into dei nonsense that they are only publishing like
non binary, trans queer ladies who you know, want to
write about their experience. It's a huge turn off to
like a normal man. And video games and other multimedia
are such distractions for men that they're just not reading.
And you can't really have a literary giant in like
a female only reading universe.
Speaker 1: That's a great point. There's not like Hemingway, even Ruga Solutia.
We're very masculine. Their writing is masculine. Like, you don't
really get that much.
Speaker 2: Honestly, you're ostracized if you write anything friendly to actual man.
Speaker 1: All right, I think that's it. Good. Yeah, you're right. Great,
we'll talk next week. Until them be lovers of freedom
and anxious for afraid are we going to do much
they say can't be done. We've got to do it
a
Speaker 2: Short time to get there.