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