Speaker 1: Don't forget. Yeah, I was gonna say, Ryan, don't forget
to record.
Speaker 2: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask
what you can do for your country.
Speaker 3: Mister garbachaw tear down this wall.
Speaker 4: It's the rickorchet Pond Gust with General C. W. Cook
and Stephen Awero Lyles. Today we're going to talk about Oh,
every thanks. So let's azel's a podcast.
Speaker 5: My show had values and that that then what I
was doing. Head value, he value. And in the end,
I'm not I try not to cry on TV, and
I say this kind of like me on TV.
Speaker 6: So I apologize.
Speaker 5: Those are the things that I was taught were of God,
and so I'm not sorry. I'm just proud of my show.
Speaker 4: Welcome everybody. It's the rickychet Pon Guest number seven hundred
and thirty. I'm James Lylyx in an over asked Gray
Moody Contemplative of Minneapolis, and I am joined by Gerald C. W.
Cook in sunny Splashed Florida and Stephen Hayward, who may
be in Riga or real or where do you happen
to be today?
Speaker 1: I am sitting right now in John Hughes's office at
Berkeley Law school. I'm actually here teaching a short seminar
over the weekend with him and Richard Epstein, which means
I won't say anything, but that's okay.
Speaker 4: Don't forget to smell the knobs with McDonald's McRib barbecue sauce. Gentlemen,
Today we are facing a world that is well, it
looks a lot like the one we had last Friday.
But there have been several media quakes, and of course
we all know how much we love to talk about
the media and castigated for its sins, imagined or real.
Where do we begin, Well, there's the Washington Post. Jeff
Bezos announced this week that he's going to refocus the
editorial page instead of doing the thing where you got
some syndicated columns all who are going to say things
that you know exactly what they are going to say. Uh,
he said, you know what, you can get that from
the internet. We're going to do something different. We're going
to crusade and Bezos. And of course this era of
of incipient fascism is concentrating on two things which ought
to really scare the Coulottes off anybody, and that's free
markets and personal liberty. And I know pearls clutched elsewhere
all over the newsroom. The editorial page editor of the
opinion page editor resigned after having been given such an
unfortunate edict marching orders. But it's really interesting that this
is the sort of thing that's now regarded as dog whistles,
you know, for this, for the for this, this this
night of horror, terror and UH and authoritarianism that is
enveloping us personal liberties and UH and UH and economic freedom.
What do you about this, guys? And how do you
put this in the context of the actual A Washington
Post itself, which used to be so tremendously important, and
b newspapers, media organizations in general.
Speaker 1: Well, all right, I guess i'll start. You know, I
keep trying to go on a diet, but I'm getting
fat with all the extra popcorn. I'm having to pop
up right now for all these wonderful stories, I mean,
two opening thoughts, and then I'll be interested in what
Charles thinks of this. Amongst the rending of garments going
on I had.
Speaker 4: And gnashing of teeth, and.
Speaker 1: Right, I haven't seen anybody make the point or the
observation that Bezos chose to make the announcement to the
public on Twitter rather than through a press release of
the whatever. And of course that has to annoy everybody
because Twitter is now, you know, the node of fascism. Second,
and here's what I'll be interested in, Charles, what you think.
I thought the wording of one part of the message
was curious or interesting. It's what he said. We want
to change the focus to, you know, free markets and
individual liberty. I asked her very talented editor, David Shipley
to lead the effort, and then Bezos said this. I
think I've got this committed to memory. He said yeah,
And I told him if the answer wasn't hell, yes,
then the answer in fact was no. And so David
has chosen to leave. But I thought that was an
interesting way of putting it. It sounds kind of like an ultimatum.
Maybe Bezos didn't think so, but I thought that post
facto really kind of put Shipley in a box that
I think that's a little Maybe he intended to be
a little twist of the knife to the editorial staff
of the paper. I'm not sure, but I that jumped
out at me. Charles. I don't know if something if
it jumped out at you or maybe something else caught
your eye.
Speaker 7: Well, you know what's funny about that, was he says
in this missive as you note that he had told
him that if his answer wasn't hell yes, then it
was in effect no. And then he says, Shipley went
away to think about it, right, which is such a
great juxtaposition. Is your answer hell yes? I need to
think about it. It's also funny because when I was
offered the chance to be the editor of In Our
Own twenty fifteen, I was at breakfast with rich and
my first words were literally.
Speaker 1: Hell yes.
Speaker 7: So I think the Bezos is into something good here,
which is the understanding that I'll go away and think
about it is probably not what you need when you
want enthusiasm from your editor. What I find most interesting
about this is the response, which seems to me to
be of a piece with a general progressive conception of
the people who own or use services as being there
to pay progressives to advance their agenda and then shut up.
Jeff Bezols owns the Washington Post. You might not like that,
but he does. It's not too long ago that we
were being told that the ownership of various social media
was protected by the First Amendment, which it is that
the federal government had no business interfering, which it didn't,
and that if you wanted to change those institutions, you
had to build your own build your own Twitter, build
your own Facebook, well, build your own Washington Post. It's
owned by Jeff Bezos. He gets to do what he
likes with it, and it is ridiculous to suggest that
he has no say or should have no say over
its direction. I used the analogy when talking about this
yesterday of the Virginia public school system. Bezos reminded me
of Terry mccauliffe when he said, you don't get to
determine what your kids are taught. You don't get to
have a say over the curriculum. That's the preserve of
experts who know better than you do. Okay, So what
is the point of the parents then? Is it just
to write the checks and provide the children and then
go away. Jeff Bezos isn't going to lose one hundred
million dollars a year forever on this newspaper. He's going
to at some point want to have some say over it.
It's just unbelievable entitlement. So I found that the most
interesting thing is that the people who work they are
still not worked out. That, Yeah, you can criticize the
way newspapers are run, but it is his newspaper.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think all add a thought, James, that I
think beyond the sense of entitlement that you see amongst
people on the left in so many places and in
so many ways, there's a deeper through line. And I
guess partly, you know, my background academically is in political philosophy,
so I run to mom at moments like this. But
I've long thought that the real problem, at the end
of the day is the progressive philosophy that manifests itself
in that favor cliche of Obama and others. The side
of history, right, I mean, if you think that if
your fundamental premise, usually unreflective and not really grounded the
way say Hegel did, is that you're on the side
of history. You represent the vanguard of all those good
and true and beautiful. You don't have to think very hard,
makes your life easy. And when somebody comes along, whether
it's Donald Trump or Ronald Reagan, or Georgia Maloney in
Italy or Jeff Bezos buying the paper, and they say,
we think something different. They can't cope. I mean it
just it does get to the core of their almost
theological being. I'll put it that way. Maybe listeners will
think that's too recondite an abstract, but I can trace
that out at some length, and some day maybe I
should write a book on this. I don't know well.
Speaker 4: A a theological basis that is not theological at all
and has place to actual theology. The moral arc of history,
which of course bends very slow, as we know, and
is destined to end up where the progressives wanted to
be began with the Enlightenment and the dethronement of various
ideas which they believe it held mankind back. And so
over the centuries we have seen the continual refinement of
the human being and his institutions, until more and more
liberty are granted to more and more people, the franchise
is extended, ideas become more broad minded, et cetera, et cetera.
And we can argue about the Enlightenment, but I tend
to think that generally, yes, the idea that societies become
more free, that people are granted the franchise, that there
is equality. These are all good things and these are
advancements in human civilization. However, that does not necessarily mean
that the the end result of this is supposed to
be technicocratic rule by transhumanists who believe that they've come
up with a completely new paradigm that dumps everything we've
known before in favor of a brave.
Speaker 1: Bold, new world.
Speaker 4: And over the last twenty years, I've seen myself how
the Democratic Party has shifted to the left and embraced
ideas with a wholehearted passion that would have horrified people
well like myself, and did horrify people like myself. Do
we end up where we are today. We have some
very curious people with some very curious ideas who also
have the state, I hate to say the deep state,
but this governmental ngeo technicorette rule blob, which is supposed
to do the good work and is supposed to tug
that arc of history where it ought to be. And
that's one of the things you're finding at the Washington
Post with people screaming as they are. When I worked
in Washington, DC in a news bureau, of course, the
gold standard was always to go work at the Washington
Post because that would be perfect. They had money, Galore,
you'd have a job forever. I mean, the Post was it,
and the Post was it in the sense that it
was a great company town paper. It was thick, it
was well written, it was interesting, but it was a
company town paper. It told you what you needed to
know about, you know, living in trantor everybody I knew
in the bureau was who was married, was married to
somebody else who was in the blob. My wife worked
for Justice. Somebody who was a beat reporter on Alabama
or something, you know, might be dating somebody from the
Chlorine Institute. I mean, we were all, as soon as
we got there, fitted neatly into these slots where we
would do the reporting and they would do the lobbying
and this other group would do all the money spending
and the rest of it. And it all went on
for so long, and everybody thought that we were all
doing such good things. Until today you open Twitter and
you find there's a controversy because my god, the end
of the USAID money has meant that the only transgender
medicine clinic in India has closed down. Now, when you
pair that with hegss's decision to keep to not to
kick everybody transgender out of the military. You have a
real shift in the way people are thinking, or tell
me this, do you think we have an assertion or
reassertion of why the most people actually think, and that
this silent group is finally saying, now, we're not going
to do this, We are not going to pay for this.
We don't actually should not have people who have these
gender issues in the military. And it's stunning to the
people who believe that the moral arch of history was
supposed to deposit them at the place where you know,
the transgender president was probably two three elections off. There
wasn't a question at all. That was just a ranting
a statement.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, it does look like they're doubling down
on a lot of this right you had, is it?
Who's the governor of Wisconsin. I'm forgetting his name already,
but he is putting in a state law to change
mothers to uh yeah, pregnant evidence than Charles though. It
is so ridiculous you can't believe it. And you know
the polls on this show, this is not a seventy
thirty issue. It's an eighty twenty issue. You know, trans
men and women's sports and things like that. And but
they want to go down guns blazing with this. It is, uh,
it is amazing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, inseminated persons is such a dehumanizing term, and I
mean it's it's it's stunning, it really is. So. Yes,
the other media quake that we had this week, you
know what's coming, don't you?
Speaker 1: Ah Joy read the readout.
Speaker 4: Got canceled is part of an ongoing what let's charitably
call right sizing at MSNBC. Rachel Mattall lost a bunch
of people in their staff. Thirty people in their staff.
Speaker 7: What are the one person for each million dollars she
makes each year?
Speaker 4: I know, I think she makes twenty five million. Now
I think she got a haircut.
Speaker 7: Now I went from thirty five to thirty.
Speaker 4: Oh I see, okay, so one million for each And
I'm not exactly sure what these people do. But these
are not people in the booth, These are not people
pointing the camera, These are not people who are loading
up the teleproject thirty What does she need thirty people
to do? Exactly? And why not take some of that
thirty million dollars and toss it? Joy's way to help
her get under feet Maydock came out and said that
this was part of a very disturbing trend at her employer,
because they have also fired other people who qualify under
the diversity of entner. And I tend to think that
it probably is. And I know this may seem preposterous,
but it's entirely possible that those people were not making
enough money for the company to justify the continuance of
their show. But if you believe that networks exist, to you,
it was a public service that they're supposed to, that
they are obligated to do to put on these shows,
and that profit is just one of those bygone notions
to which we should not subscribe. I suppose, yes, you
would be appalled at this restriction again for a free speech.
Speaker 7: So can I just quickly say, James, that I incorrectly
corrected your correction of my interruption. It is twenty five million?
I was, thank you. This is typical of my inability
to do math.
Speaker 1: So I'm wrong.
Speaker 7: James's right.
Speaker 4: Okay, let me let the record show that I knew
that I was correct and how much that Rachel.
Speaker 1: There's a famous one sentence critique of liberalism from many
decades ago that said the problem with liberalism is will
end up being the joyless quest for joy. I immediately
thought of that line, you know, the joyless quest for
the very joyless joy read right. I think the obvious
answer here is that she needs to join the View.
That would really complete the ensemble. I think if she joined,
of you who knows that might not be such a joke,
it may well happen.
Speaker 4: Does anybody watch that show? I mean, does anybody who
exactly watches that show? Because it really is as pleasant
as an hour of the of the characters from like
Beth around the Cauldron.
Speaker 1: It just yeah, I think it. I think it does
big ratings. I haven't checked for a long time, but
I think it does big ratings and actually makes money
for ABC. But James are not far away. I mean,
you know, the next step is going to be renewed
calls from the left to have state funded media. They've
already been calling for that for you know, local newspapers
and things like that, and I'd say, we already have NPR.
What do we need more state funded media?
Speaker 7: For James, you inter reflect on your gendered language and
do the work and do better. I mean, comparing the
ladies of the View to whiches oh, James, that's very helpful.
Speaker 4: When it comes to doing the work, doing better, reading
a book, reading the room. If you would like to
play the tape back, Charles, you will notice that I
did not refer to witches. I referred to characters from Macbeth.
Speaker 7: Around the cauldron.
Speaker 4: You said around the cauldron could be anybody. It could
be a deleted scene from Macbeth. It could be you know,
orson Well's brilliant version of it in which he casts
three warlocks. So don't give me that, mister Joe.
Speaker 7: And I tell you what annoys me about Joy Reid.
The Joy Reid firing has been met predictably with accusations
of racism, including from ratro Matter. Also with the presumption
that this is some sort of political move, maybe it
shifts MSNBC to the right or.
Speaker 4: What you were.
Speaker 7: Joy Reid was not on that spectrum.
Speaker 1: She was crazy.
Speaker 7: This is not a left versus right thing. This is
not whether we're gonna have networks that are friendlier or
more hostile toward the Republican Party or Trump or Conservatism,
or that have different views on Bernie Sanders or Josh
Shapiro or you will. Joy read is a lunatic. There
is something wrong with her. There was something wrong with
her on her show. There was something wrong with her
on their Instagram and TikTok videos that she made from
her house. She does not have a firm grasp on reality.
She does not know what America is like. She doesn't
know why things are happened. She is ensconced in the
extended Rachel Maddow universe, and.
Speaker 4: It it has.
Speaker 7: To have grated eventually on the executives that run the network,
who are running out of money. Again, this is not
about what color her skin is or what her political
outlook was. There is plenty of room in this country
for people who profoundly disagree with me and us and
your median Ricochet user. There are tens of millions of
those people. But Joy Reid is out of her mind.
I've been on TV before with Joy Reid. I know
this personally. That's why she eventually got fired, because she
was a total liability. It's bad enough not being able
to describe politics in the country you live in when
your job is to describe politics in the country you
live in when the president is a Democrat, but when
everything that you had said about that person and everything
that you had anticipated happening in the election turns out
to be wrong because you are a lunatic, then you
are no longer useful on a politics show. I just
think this is the most obvious explanation of why she
was canned. And I know people aren't going to write
this in the New York Times, but maybe they should.
Maybe that would actually be good for the left for once,
instead of constructing a bigger suicide machine. If they said,
you know what, that guy's crazy. We just don't want
to hang out with him anymore.
Speaker 4: I don't think they may be constructing a bigger suicide machine,
but it's certainly getting more streamlined. It's no Rube Goldberg
enterprise anymore, where there's lots of moving parts and the
result is indistinct. There is a very streamline procedure now
when it comes to defending Joy Reid, when it comes
to inseminated person, when it comes to this, that and
the other, to committing political and party suicide by continuing
to push things that people don't like.
Speaker 1: I'm Greg Corumbus.
Speaker 3: Join Jim Garrity of National Review and me each weekday
for the three Martini Lunch Podcast. We'll give you the good,
bad and crazy news of the day, and lots of
laughs too. Find us right here on the Ricochet Audio
Network at ricochet dot com or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 4: One more thing in the media before we go, and
that is Jake Tapper has written a book about the
cabal of people who conspired to keep Joe Biden's infirmities
from the American public. It's almost his if I did it,
it's very strange, and I do not know if I
don't know if he really expected that he was going
to get the reaction that he did. It is remark
to me that he would sign on for a project
like this not realizing that everything that he had said
before about Joe. Oh it's a stutter. Oh it's this,
you know. He's he's actually in the back room with
Spot playing three dchs that that people were going to say,
wait a minute, Jake is on this book.
Speaker 1: Well, I have a theory about this. It's only a hunch,
you know. His co author for the book is Alex
Thompson from Axios, and he did write a few pieces,
I think before the election, doing some of the earliest
reporting that in fact, there are problems in the Biden
White House and that he can't do his job, and
he was one of the few who ventured into that territory.
I have a hunch that he's the bulk of the
reporting in this book, but the publisher probably wanted a
big name because who's you know, most people don't know
Alex Thompson, but they know Jake Tapper, And that's one possibility,
I think. But the other one is this book and
the flood that no doubt coming are all certain to
absolve the media from any blame in all this, right,
I mean, you know the who covered it up? Well,
you know, I thought the media's job was exposing cover ups.
That's the credo number one ever since Watergate, Right, So
you know, we'll wait and see what they say. I'll
bet they're not even done writing the book the what
it's a May twenty publication date, and I think they're
trying to pre mup the field and be first out.
And so, as Trump likes to say, we'll just have
to see what happens. But I'm not expecting very much
self reflection, Charles.
Speaker 7: I will defend Alex Thompson to the hilt because he
wrote over and over again about Joe Biden's problems, and
we shouted out for it. Then when Joe Biden was
thrown aside, he was the only mainstream journalist that I
could find. Maybe Annie Lynsky was another who would ask
questions of Harris. If you read Thompson every day, he
would say, I reached out to the Harris campaign to
us why she changed her mind about creating a new
breed of ponies using the bones of children, And he
was say, she's just not answering these questions. And then
he would write down what she had thought before, and
then he would write down what she said she thought now,
and he would know that it was mighty strange that
there'd been no explanation for the shift. So I think
he deserves to write this book. I don't think anyone
else does. And I suspect what's happened here is that
the advance on a book like this, if Jake Tapper's
name is attached this five times the size and the
chance of it becoming a best seller and the contents
being read by hundreds of thousands of people is much
higher because Jake Tapper has a really solid platform, and
that Alex Thompson thought, okay, I will take that deal,
and I can't entirely blame him for it. No, the
phenomenon in general of the media now reporting on the
thing that it did is infuriating, and it reminds me
of nothing more than the twenty seventeen tax cuts that
Donald Trump and the Republican Congress pass, which were lied
about assiduously day in day out, including and especially by
the New York Times. And then in twenty nineteen, the
New York Times had the temerity to run a piece
the title of which was face it, you probably got
a tax cut. The first paragraph of that piece said,
there's widespread misapprehension about what the tax cuts did. Most
people don't know what they did. Many people think that
their taxes went up, Yes, because you told them that
for two years. Well, why do you think the media
has to write books now about the cover up of
Joe Biden's sinility is because it's spent four years covering
it up. And here's the thing. They say, Well, we
didn't know. And I'm sure some of that's true. The
White House did engage in some shenanigans. I'm sure there
is some extent to which they didn't know everything. But
here's the problem. I was one of the people who
repeatedly said Joe Biden's too old, a position that was
shared by eighty percent of the American public, and we
were called names. So even if you don't know everything
about it, even if some bits are off the record,
or you don't want to go out that a problem
they didn't have during Russia Gate. But they don't want
to go out there on a limb. They shouted at us.
They said that we were being mean to a man
with a stutter, that we were falling for cheap fakes,
that we were partisan, and go to hell. Guys, you
can't now write books on this. But I will exclude
Alex Thompson from my criticism because he actually was right
from the beginning pretty good.
Speaker 1: Do you know, James, this is what happens when you
give Charlie a week off. He comes back with the
full fire and brimstone. And I like it.
Speaker 4: Oh, I love it too, plenty of plenty of vinegar.
And he's right, that's just it. And you know the
thing is that they won't be called out on this
because to call them out would be to call themselves out.
So we won't have that. But that happens that we
have alternative medias. And when they said that, when you
say charter that they were shouting at us, I mean
shout all you like. They don't have the megaphone in
the reach that they used to and they can't set
the debate and the tone that they used to. I have,
you know, adjusted my new use consumption habits over the
past couple of years to the extent where you know,
I get it from X. And people just WinCE when
you say that, because oh, that's what you mean. You're
you're trapped in your own little bubble, your own little
non contiguous information stream. No, no, no, I'd subscribe to
a wide variety of voices that bring a wide variety
of things on it. I have the fulminating of the
left end of the fulminating the right. But there's a
lot of good sourced stuff in there that either goes
to a primary source which is trustworthy, or itself is
an interesting source that did not exist six months ago.
Key example of this is Data Republicans small R. Do
you know the account to which I prefer?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 4: Okay, here's this woman. She is apparently a computer nerd, brilliant,
very good at she's a kernel engineer. She's very good
at getting rooting down into the you know, the heart
of systems and finding relationships and finding patterns on how
things work. And she's applied her skills to to DOGE
things to USAID and has produced these fascinating flow charts
of where the money goes. I think we talked about
this a couple of weeks ago, where before we never
knew exactly. We would just hear that twenty million dollars
have been granted for climate change of Bateman and low
income communities, and we think, well, that's great, unless if
you think, though, it's a scam. But that's, of course
not what happened. Twenty million would go to this institution,
which would take ten million and give it to this one,
which would shave off two, and then eight would go
to this place, and etcetera, etcetera. And somebody's coming into
the room to talk to me. Hi, Sorry, it doesn't matter, Sorry,
just had an interruption. And so's she's come and she's
applied for work a DOGE and apparently she's going to
get it. She's going to get a security clearance and
bring these incredible skills to that. So I have learned
more from her stuff, which is fairly transparent and easy
to understand but complex, than I have from any single
ever mainstream media newspapers saying well, let's take a look
at the funding of the government and break it down
and see how it goes. It just wasn't in their
interest or their appetite to do so before, But now
we've got people who have very large appetites for it
and very great interest in skills, and we're learning. We're
learning things that we should have known years ago.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean once upon a time. Well, actually, back
in the nineties and the eighties, I used to try
and get after certain data sets in the federal government
and that meant going to a government agency library and
getting bound volumes that were available in the public and
pouring through lots of tables, and then if I found
a meaningful data set, entering it by hand on an
Excel spreadsheet. Well, now a lot of data sets are
available in downloadable form. Not spending I mean, because you know,
the ledgers are huge, but likewise, if you did budget work,
you had to go through ledgers on paper and that
meant thousands of pages. And now you can use artificial
intelligence and other screens to get at it. This isn't
the only effort. There's been this great organization out of
Chicago for several years called Open the Books, and they
do something like this. They produce some very good reports.
I think. I think they have a side Open the
Books dot com or something, and they've done a lot
of work on most of the state and local level
around the country, but some federal about wasteful spending and stuff.
But now at the next generation or maybe even the
third generation of this, where you can use AI tools
and find the things you really are looking for, and yeah,
the meat is just lazy about all this. That one
parallel to that, I remember the Reagan ears, James, I
think you do too, when every time there was a
budget cut, which usually wasn't a cut at all either,
it was a reduction in the growth exactly, but the
media would find somebody who is hurt by a change
in eligibility, and oh, they give a big SOB story. CBS.
You might remember, I think in eighty two or eighty
three did a week long series Primetime called People Like
Us and there was an hour a night of people
being hurt by Reagan policies, and you know, Reagan, who
was very disciplined about ignoring the media, was so angry
he called up Dan Rather and yelled at him about it,
how biased it was, and so okay, they're trying to
rerun that now. Of course, with the federal workers losing
their jobs, who are you know, saving babies in Zimbabwe
or wherever? And I don't know, I don't think it's
getting quite distraction. But oh and finally, maybe did you,
Charlie or somebody say this a while ago, did the
media ever interview a single person who lost their job
when Biden shut down the Keystone pipeline on day one?
I think the answer is I think we know the answer.
Speaker 4: We don't, and we never You never get an interview
with a person who wasn't hired because of a regulation,
who never got the job in the first place, because
the company had contracted three percent because an onerous regulation
came down. You never hear about those people. When you
do hear about the people who are being hired, sometimes
you hear about the stories that, oh, the nightmares that
business owners have when it comes to hiring. I mean,
if you're a business owner, you probably sometimes have felt
totally lost when it comes to HR and hiring. You
know that's okay, that's okay, HR, hiring, onboarding. It's not
what you do best because you're all about your business.
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sponsoring this the Ricochet Podcast. I'd like to move to
England now, Well, actually I wouldn't. Actually I would.
Speaker 1: I would.
Speaker 4: I mean, if I had my druthers, I would pack
everything up and I would buy a house in Suffolk
by the Sea, and I would live there very happily,
in a wonderful little community that I know. But England
as a whole, and perhaps in its urban centers, is
having difficulties of which we find news. Here. We are
the fine news of the way that immigration patterns have
resulted in changes to English culture that may not sit
well with the locals. We also find that there is
a bizarre desire to emulate the most banal portions of
nineteen eighty four and knock on people's doors with things
that they've set. Well. Trump is going to meet with
British Prime minister here and they're gonna I think they
already have met. Yeah, and I believe that Starmer objected
to JD Vance saying what he said about UK free speech,
at which point he was roundly excoriated on x and
Twitter by people who are saying, you're putting Grandma's in
jail for Facebook post. For sake, Charles, looking back on
your former country, we of course know that you're a
proud American citizen by choice and by effort. How do
you regard Are we over exaggerating exactly the extent to
which free speech, supposedly a cherished British value, is being
trampled upon? Or is it really that bad?
Speaker 5: Ah?
Speaker 7: I think it's really that bad. It's not as bad
in England as city is in Scotland. Scotland, which has
certain devoluted paws, devolved powers, I suppose you would say,
has gone truly crazy with laws that are effectively modern
SATs progressive versions of the old blasphemy laws just only
applied to the people they hate. But Britain, having no
constitution to stop this, has failed to stop it, and
you've got a bunch of laws on the books that
are designed to stop people talking about subjects that the
government doesn't want to talk about under the guise of
protecting people from hatred and discrimination. And in America those
laws would be struck down under the First Amendment in
about seven seconds. The most egregious example recently has been
the arrest and prosecution in some cases of people who
are praying silently outside of abortion clinics. Now, this topic
gets slightly complicated because when you look into some of
these cases, including ones in America, you find that some
of the people who were supposed to be praying or
standing were actually blocking the entrance, and of course blocking
an entrance is not speech. But in the English case,
they've actually been arrested and prosecuted for praying. In fact,
one woman who was arrested literally said while she was
standing there, I don't wish to stop anyone or coerce anyone.
I'm just here to pray for you and talk to
you if needed, because I know sometimes people are coerced
into abortions and that was too far. When I was
at Oxford, there was a kid in my year who
was famously and very amusingly arrested because he called a
police officer's horse gay. This is a real story. This
is a real story that you can look up and
you'll find instant Google results for the case. He told
the police officer, by the way, may your horse is gay?
Speaker 4: Like that.
Speaker 7: He had a few drinks, he was being facetious, and
he was arrested under speech laws that prohibit not because
it was a police officer, because he was belligerent, but
the content of the speech. And I think I'm right
in saying that case was dropped. But for years we
had all of these absurd examples. There was a guy,
a singer on Pierre at one of the English seaside resorts,
who sang the song Kung Fu Fighting in front of
a Chinese person, not because the Chinese person was there,
but because he was a singer at a beach resort
and he slung the song and he was arrested. We
are equal opportunity prosecutor is when it comes to religion.
We prosecute Muslims for criticizing atheists and criticians for Christians
for criticizing Muslims, and atheists for criticizing both. There was
a guy who was arrested because he leafleted Liverpool Airport.
The leaflet said there is no God. I mean, it's
it's very, very silly, And yeah, it is a problem.
It's not just the media getting over excuse.
Speaker 4: Well in America, I don't hold on Stephen. In America,
I think under the new anti misinformation idea, you could
actually bring somebody up on charges if they had said
in social media that everybody was kung fu fighting, because
it's it's demonstrably not true. I'm looking up my window
right now. You may have a portion or a fraction
of the audience engaged in kung fu fighting. But to
say that everyone, that's.
Speaker 1: A great issue.
Speaker 7: You've seen that T shirt where it says surely not
everybody everyone.
Speaker 1: Oh no, I haven't you see how I had the
same joke in my head. Look at it. It's worse,
I mean say, it's worse than that. They're getting more
brazen about preemptive censorship. So earlier this week, what's her name,
Elizabeth Vander later Hoose and I call her the President
of the European Commission. She gave a speech that bring
open about what they want to do, and what she
said was, you know, the problem of misinformation and disinformation
is so serious that I'm not sure to used the
word prior restraint. But the phrase she did use was
it is easier to prebunk something than to debunk it
after the fact. So that's just sugarcoating for we're going
to stop people from dissenting and making criticisms and saying
everyone's kung fu fighting and all the rest pre bunking.
I know, I like that, right.
Speaker 4: I mean, these people have never seen Minority Report. I
guess the pre crime and use very that's.
Speaker 1: A model, right, That's the joke, as in the nineteen
eighty four was not supposed to be the owner's manual
for doing this right.
Speaker 4: And Minority Report and all those other Philip K. Dickian
things great, wonderful.
Speaker 7: You want to have one one quick other thing that
is gross about the English system. So I sicked up
the story that I told you about this guy at
Oxford who court. So he was drinking after his final
exams and he said to this police officer, do you
realize your horse is gay? And he's arrested for making
homophobic remarks. He spent a night in the cells before
the charges were dropped. But the reason he spent the
night in the cells was that he had been given
the chance to pay an eighty dollars eighty pound fine
without due process. They introduced that under Blair that a
police officer could say, instead of going through the system,
I will march you to an ATM right now and
you can just hand me eighty dollars. So you've got
two things there that will be unconstitutional in the United States.
One is arresting people for speech, and the other is
punishment that is determined by police officers completely outside of
the system of due process.
Speaker 4: It is cam Coon, Mexico police action right there. But
what I find what I find fastening about that, really,
when you think about it, is the bias that they're showing.
Interesting the man for saying that the horse is gay.
What if the man himself was gay and intended that
to be a compliment, that either just right, just just
you know, the way it stepped he found it an
extremely attractive uh, and that was and he was paying
it a compliment. But for them to automatically assume that
that was a slur shows the mindset of the policeman himself.
And I'm surprised that he wasn't brought up on charges.
No hum, All right, well, Stormy apparently is going to
embark on a crash defense build up. I don't know
if you guys saw that, which I find interesting because
British defense has perhaps not have been as robust as
it was at the you know, at its imperial peak,
which you know, I think we all get that, but
their ability to project power is minimal, so great that
they're doing that. On the other hand, you read that
in ongoing investigation of the art in Westminster has decided
that they have to take down a portrait of Lord Nelson,
and I find that extraordinary. I regard the way the
British seemed to be cannibalized. It seemed to be denying
their own history, the glories of for human frailties and
failings or you know, egregious misdeas or whatever, to just
wipe it all out and hang new portraits and say
that this is who we are. It's remarkable. I mean,
I mean, it's a matter of time before Nelson comes
off the column, That's all I'm saying.
Speaker 1: Do you think what did he do wrong? What did
he do wrong? Do you know, Charles, what's the beef
with Nelson his indifference to the slavery issue.
Speaker 7: Yeah he oh right. So this sprung up about eight
years ago and I wrote about it. There was a
call to take him off the column in London. And
my point, then, I don't know what you think of
this framework, was that even if you are tremendously bothered
by the fact that he was a man of his age,
he's not on the column because of that. Here in Jacksonville,
during the summer of twenty twenty, when everything went crazy,
we had a protest outside the courthouse. It was one
of the few Summer of twenty twenty protests that I
thought had a point. There was a statue of Alexander Stephens,
the vice President of the Confederacy, a man who's literally
famous for believing that slavery was quote the cornerstone of
the United States and that the Declaration of Independence was
full of lies. And some of the speakers there said,
this is not a good thing to have outside of
a courthouse. What message does that send? And I thought,
you know what, that's a good point. But Nelson is
not Stephens. Nobody, nobody looks at that and says, oh sir,
that's Nelson. The incidental slavery supporter. They think that was Nelson,
the great patriot who gave his life for the country
and won the Battle of Trafalgar, defeatesd. Napoleon's navy many times.
That's why he's on there. So to drill down on
all of these things that really weren't very important, if
they're even true about him, seems to me to be silly.
Speaker 4: I can understand taking down some statues, I can. I mean,
you mentioned Confederate vice president and other people who rose
up against the United States, secessionists, traders doing what the
is don't what they did in the Balkans. I remember
taking a tour in where was I somewhere in the
Balkans Estonia, and the tour guide had explained that they'd
rounded up all of the Marxist statues and they'd put
them in a special garden, which they called the Garden
of Soviet Monsters. And you could go there and you
could see all You could see the Lenin in his
various portraits, either Lenin, you know, gripping his jacket, the
side of his jacket, or Lenin with his hand out
like this, which they call the Lenin haaling, the taxi model,
and you know, some bristly face of Karl Marx and
then some local luminaries and forgettable people who who would
assist with Soviet rule. They put him in a place
where you could go and see him and laugh at him,
jeer at him, or study or whatever. But not to
destroy them, because to destroy them would be to destroy
the history that they represented. You can't. You ought not
to do that. So I find it so hilarious when
people are saying that we're renaming mountains now and gulfs.
It's the entire renaming project in order to create a
more serene sense of I mean, when you start taking
down the guys like Nelson, then Teddy Roosevelt comes down,
then Ben Franklin goes down, then Thomas Jefferson is dethroned
from his place in Washington, d C. And it's madness.
And I think we stopped that. I think the fever
has broken and we're no longer doing that, and I
think people are kind of happy about out doing that.
Let's switch gears again, because I want to talk about
Justice Roberts coming just to waken up in the middle
of the night and saying no, no, Somebody want to
explain that for everybody.
Speaker 1: Well, I can try what I guess some lower court
judge had said that, no, Trump, you can't halt foreign
aid that's been scheduled by previous decision decisions of the
State Department or whoever usaid you have to send it
out by midnight last night or something. And that's what
Robert stops is. No, they can hold up the they
can stop the funding. And I think it may be
pending a more complete review by an appellate court. I'm
not quite sure, but this is part of the larger
scene where the Supreme Court fairly soon is going to
have to confront issues we haven't had in front of
us for fifty years, really since the Nixon era of
presidential control over spending and then second presidential control. This
is getting more ink over the federal workforce. We're going
to revisit a Supreme Court case from what almost ninety
years ago now that said a president couldn't remove somebody.
That's the Humphrey's Executor's case, long thought by just about
everybody across the political spectrum in law schools like where
I am today to have been wrongly decided and so
fun to watch all this. The Court's going to have
to do a lot of extra work right now, and
I think they don't like that, but they don't have
a choice. They're gonna have to do it.
Speaker 4: Charlie's Some say that this is just the Supreme Court
making it known that these injunctions by the judges, these
nationwide bands of people is as you're not gonna fly anymore.
Speaker 7: I'm not sure that the Court is quite ready to
set a system wide rule on injunctions, because that is
quite complicated. I find them annoying in some cases, but
I have read some pretty good defenses of why they're necessary.
It has to be looked at on a case by
case basis. I think that the reason that the Court
in this case and I think many others to come,
is refusing to acquiesce is that the reasoning underneath most
of the interventions that we've seen is really poor. You know,
before he shifted on it, David French used to call
it Trump law, that there was this different system for
Trump than anyone else. All of a sudden, in twenty seventeen,
the plenary power over immigration, for example, that had been
assumed in American law since the start of the twentieth
century was shaved back, not because there'd been any alterations
to the fact or any Supreme Court cases that had
amended the presidents, but because Donald Trump was doing it.
And you know, I think we're seeing that. And then
there is a shift I think, coming back toward Article
two as it's actually written, and away from the New
Deal era invention of so called independent agencies. As a
case Humphrey's executor that I think Stephen Steve would be
able to explain better than I that could well be overturned.
And you know, every time you see one of these
judges jump in to try to prevent the president from
doing something that, at least in the original Constitution is
very clearly under his power, you are raising the likelihood
that it will be litigated on the merits and that
the Supreme Court will shift back to the pre New
Deal are e correct understanding of presidential power within his
own department. So I do think that the decision you're
discussing is important, but I think it is it's less
to do with the wisdom on necessity of nationwide injunctions
per se, and more to do with other.
Speaker 4: You know, you just revealed your own biases there, and
Charlie with that pre New Deal and hence correct. I mean,
why don't you just bundle some sticks together and make
it obvious.
Speaker 7: Well, I just think that I think that the way
in which the administrative state was used in much of
the New Deal was flatly unconstitutional. Now there's lots of
people who would argue with me, lots of smart people.
But the Congress after the New Deal put some protections
in place. The Administrative Procedure Act does some of the
work to prevent actual caprice in the changing of the
meaning of American law, but it doesn't restore the authority
to the White House that ought to be restored. And
so we've ended up in a weird place, James, which
is the president usurps an awful lot of power that
belongs to Congress, and Congress doesn't do much about it.
That's a problem at the same time, and people struggle
with this if you believe both of these things. At
the same time, Congress has imposed all sorts of rules
on the executive branch that don't pass constitutional muster like
that it has to preside over and execute agencies whose
staff it can't fire. It is nowhere in there, and
you get the best modern example of this, The Consumer
Finance Protection Bureau not only set outside of the President's remit,
but Congress said it's outside of its own remit now,
so it's funded by the federal reserves, so you can't
even use legislative power to amend it. I mean it's
I think these are new deal inventions that ought to
be struck from American law.
Speaker 1: I agree.
Speaker 4: And by the way, by saying bundle of sticks, I
meant the old Roman symbol of authority. I didn't mean
a British locution that you would be arrested for if
you called horse that. We've had a lot of horse here,
even going back to Charlie's note about Kamala Harrison's plan
to use the bones of children to create a new
breed of pony, which brings us back to the Lippins
on her Horse, which brings us, of course, to the
dialogue written by Quentin tarant You know, for the great
Gene Hackman. I believe in Crimson Tide, I think, and
the story is peculiar. When we heard the when everybody
heard the Gene Hackman had died, you said, oh, well,
he was very old. I'm sad, but not unexpected. And
then the story takes odd twists when you figure when
you learn more about it. I have nothing to say
about that except to wait for what we're eventually told.
But it does make one recall his various roles in
the movies. Everybody seems to be topping off with He
was great as Lex Luthor, and I thought, no, I
don't think so. That's like my least favorite Gene Hackman performance,
and I've got a lot of favorite Gene Hackman performances.
Any One of my favorites actually of his is Bonnie
and Clydehere you don't even see him, just hear him
crying out in Mad Fever Struck Nonsense from a distance.
I liked him in Young Frankenstein is a comic turn.
Loved the way he wore a hat in French Connection.
But what I loved most about people talking about Hackman
was the realization that this is one of those guys
that came out of the seventies no way, Actually we
had him in the forties two. Every era has them
guys that shouldn't be movie stars because they're not classically handsome,
they don't seem to have Just look at him, you
wouldn't but have that something and Hackman had that, and
it's on for an actor of his intensity that I
seem to remember him having. I always remembered him with
an easy grin. Liked the guy, and I just wondered
if you had any other thoughts. Charles. I know you're
still working your way with the classic American movie, so
you may not be the go to man in this, but.
Speaker 7: Yes, I haven't seen that one, although I would note
that Geene Hackman was the Jacksonville Jaguars fanily was to
his credit.
Speaker 4: All you need to know.
Speaker 6: Hello, my friends and fellow fans of the First Amendment.
I'm with Dennis Neil, host of What's Bugging Me on
the great and growing Ricochet platform. I'm a former managing
editor of Forbes and an ex anchor at CNBC and Fox,
and I don't recognize the media today. President Trump broke them.
Join my show every Thursday and into the weekend as
we take the media to task and call out phony
and effeckless politicians, and dive into stops and invest in
and explore internal affairs like health and well being, and
have a glorious day.
Speaker 4: What five things did you do this week?
Speaker 1: Go on tell me. I finished three articles that I
was passed deadline on. So each one of those counts
is one thing. So there's up to three right there.
Teaching a class here for yesterday and now the next
two days. What else did I do? I took the
trash out before I left town.
Speaker 4: I don't think that qualifies. No, this is not your
wife asking you what five things you did, because if
it was your wife asking you, you would have just
had one there with the trash thing, and those other
four were just kind of waved away as things that
you do. I guess somewhere for some reason that would
be interesting if spouses begin doing what five things? If
you're done this week, Charles, are you as appalled by
this as one TikToker put it? Something that that you
that is like North Korea? M She said she was
alone with extremely luxurious hair.
Speaker 7: She would extremely pretty. I could forget her purply. Ah,
I am not appalled by it. I'm not sure this
was particularly well thought through, given that people within the administration,
who I assume I'm not to be designated squishes by
the president. Cash Tell, for example, immediately said, ah, could
you just be careful because we do intelligent stuff around here.
But there's nothing inherently wrong with asking that question. It's
certainly the sort of question you would hear a lot
in Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs was famous for asking people
what they did, and then, if unsatisfied, firing them. I
don't think that it is like North Korea. I do think,
although I've been defensive of a lot of doughs, that
it was less useful as an exercise than much of
what they've done.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, I just remembered I want to do this
last thing here, because it's yes to even go ahead.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean that I have to write. I have
to go back and find a story. About ten twelve
years back, there was the story that got a lot
of publicity about a guy at the EPA who had retired,
except he stayed on the payroll, that had a retirement ceremony,
and then somebody noticed, Hey, he's still on the payroll,
but he's not showing up for work. What's he doing?
They called Hi up and says, oh, I've been seconded
to the CIA for a special project, which turned out
to be a lie.
Speaker 4: He was working.
Speaker 1: He was some socialist Waco. He was working on a
plan to reorganize the whole American economy on behalf of
the EPA, on his own remit to save the planet,
and he went to jail. But my wonder is it
took a couple of years for someone to notice they're
paying this guy a big salary who doesn't ever show up.
There's got to be more peoples like that. Maybe not
tens of thousands, but I think they're not wrong to say,
let's see people out there are even paying attention.
Speaker 4: Yeah, when your payroll systems are actually operating on those
old IBM mainframes that have the tape spin spinning and
worrying back and forth and spinning out punch cards. Positive
but you know, possibly there may be one or two
feather bedders out there. The last thing that I wanted
to do. That means that the previous item, which was
the last, is now the penultimate. We used to do
this with Robin Peter and it's been a while. Just
very briefly, what are you watching? And I mean, you
know the world girls, I mean I mean on on
on the oh, on the television.
Speaker 1: Right, I think, yeah, I watched very little television. I
did just watch this show. I think it's on Amazon Prime.
A police procedure will called on call. It's an half
hour police procedural. It's sort of you might say, drag
that updated. We'll not quite drag that. But it's you know,
about a couple of officers on the beat in a
long beach of all unlike not maybe not unlikely places.
But it's very well made.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 1: And that's not the only thing I've seen lately, because
otherwise I don't have any time. Unfortunately.
Speaker 4: Is it a reality show? Is it descripted?
Speaker 1: You know, it's a scripted drama. Uh? Oh, Dick Wolf,
you know, the law right guy. He's one of the
producers of it.
Speaker 4: Of course, so half an hour scripted crime show. I
like that because he is not a commitment Charles.
Speaker 7: I am watching season one of Slow Horses.
Speaker 1: Now, everyone who yeah, for anyone you're joining it, I
hope it's fantastic.
Speaker 7: I think it's terrific. I was gonna say, for anyone
who listens to me on various things and recalls faintly
having heard me say about a year and a half
ago that I was watching season one slow that is
in fact correct. I am a slow horse in this regard.
We watched the episodes, then it got very busy with
many things, including football season, and then we dropped off it,
not because we didn't love it, but because we wanted
to pay it attention. And so now we're back and
we're finishing off season one with the attention that it deserves,
and it's terrific.
Speaker 4: I want to give it a shout not a shout out,
I hate that. A A stamp of endorsement for a
show on Hulu called Paradise. Nobody is watching. Apparently, well
the people are watching, some people aren't, but it's one
of those You go to the reddit subreddit for it
and it's got like twenty to thirty comments. It doesn't
seem to have broken through. It's one of the most
incredible things I've seen in a great long time. It's
a secret service agent for a president. And it's funny
how we, you know, sort of cycle our tropes of
presidents and what we expect them to be. The Morgan
Freeman era of presidents is over and we appear to
be back to the William de Vayne era of presidents.
Now I can't tell you anything about it because the
first episode ends is with a startling twist and then
it's off to the races. Extraordinarily good storytelling, remarkably well done,
and it has a penultimate episode, the seventh episode, which
simply is one of the most thrilling pieces of television
I've ever seen. I have never sat on the edge
of my chair immobile for an hour like I did.
It's really good. Paradise on Hulu. Five things folks you
need to do this week. A. You need to go
to Bamboo, hr dot com, freedomo and take a look
at what they can do for you. Two. You need
to go to any one of the platforms that offers podcasts,
suggestions and reviews and give us those five stars or
however many stars they allow you to do, because that's
great because if you do it on Apple, that means
that more people see us, more people go to Ricochet.
And that's your third thing. If you haven't signed up
for Ricochet yet, you need to do that. I mean,
I've been telling you this for seven hundred plus episodes now,
but it is the same civil center, right place you've
been looking for in the Internet all of your days.
You wonder why you didn't sign up before. Oh you
can read it for free, but it takes you a
couple of coin to get to the member feed, and
that's where the community start and really grow. And you
can post too, and like other places in the Internet,
if you don't cough up those couple of coins, you
can't post. So it keeps thee keeps the bar for
conversation high. That's why we love it. The fourth thing
you need to do is to tell other people about Ricochet.
And the fifth thing you need to do right now
is to say, that was a great show. I'm going
to just think about how much fun I had and
make sure that I'm there next week. That said Charles,
thank you, Steven, thank you, listeners, thank you, Bamboo hr
thank you, and we'll see everybody in the comments ed
Ricochet four point goodbye.
Speaker 2: Next week, guys, Ricochet, join the conversation.
Speaker 5: It was succeed from something to sho