Speaker 1: I got a ten second out take that you that
you could use or not use, and James, you may
want to add to it, but I can't resist. And
it goes like this, Segway juice. James, did you really
just say Segway juice? I think it's an instant classic.
Speaker 2: Okay, all right, trot that in. If you please, ask.
Speaker 1: Not what your country can do for you, ask what
you can do for your country.
Speaker 3: Mister gorbut you'll tear down this wall.
Speaker 4: It's the Rickorshe Podcast with Steven Hayward and Journals a
CW of cook.
Speaker 2: I'm James Lilax.
Speaker 4: Today we talked to our old friend with Victor Davis Hansley.
So Lett's as the Golden Age of America begins right.
Speaker 3: Now, you're gonna do a sig hail.
Speaker 5: You're gonna do a hail Hitler or there rebrand a
Roman salute from behind the residential seal of the United
States of America.
Speaker 3: It's on.
Speaker 5: It's on.
Speaker 4: Welcome everybody. It's the Brickashet Podcast, number seven hundred and
twenty five. I'm James Lilx in Minneapolis, where it's not
thirty two below, you know, for a change, which is nice.
And I'm speaking with Charles C. W. Cook, who was
in Florida, and Stephen Hayward, who I assume is in California.
Correct me if I'm wrong, Yes, correct, Good. Going through
the list of executive orders here, finding there's a lot
to like. I mean, a number one hundred and ninety eight,
for example, decrees that Starbucks Shell in the future use small, medium,
and large for their sizing nomenclature.
Speaker 2: I like that.
Speaker 4: I think it's overdue. This one surprised me. One fifty
four stated that it shall be the policy of the
United States Government going forward that all Sherlock Holmes reboots
shall be set in eighteen eighties London, which I again
a plot. Now, a lot of people are looking at
these things and they're they're they're horrified by this. But
then you look and you say, well, wait a minute. Here,
I thought. I thought Bold's persistent experimentation was the was
the hallmark of a political genius and a great leader.
We used to talk about one hundred days. I think
in the future they're going to be talking about one
hundred minutes.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So how's it going so far for you guys?
Speaker 6: It's going great.
Speaker 1: I mean, I can't I can't believe the speed and
the depth and the reach, also the care. I have
to say a lot of these, James, I mean, I
have my own jokes, such as the executive order I
want to see firing Kathleen Kennedy from overseeing Star Wars
and removing the prequels.
Speaker 6: And sequels from the cannon.
Speaker 1: But aside from that, there are a lot of these have
clauses in there to try and make them bulletproof from
legal challenge, and some of them will fail at that,
but they really put the care into them, unlike the
first ones, you know, four years ago, when I guess
what's eight years ago now, when Trump was so they
didn't quite know what they were doing, and things fell
apart really fast in some cases. So no, it's been
breathtaking to watch. And I mean to say, I'll just
add as a general observation that you know, you use
the old Roosevelt phrase, James so Bold, persistent experimentation. And
you've seen the build up of executive power over the years,
which is something the Democratic Party and liberals favored. So
now they're getting a taste of their own favorite medicine,
and I hope they get it good and hard.
Speaker 4: Charles, I know that you, like me, probably share the
opinion that the issue of how much pressure is in
your shower head should not be a matter for the
president to address.
Speaker 2: That.
Speaker 4: A lot of these things that we're talking about, we
wish were legislative in nature, so that they couldn't be overturned,
and that they would also express the will of the
people and the government and system that we have to
enact them. That said, how do you feel about all
of this feeling, of course, being the most important thing
of our era.
Speaker 7: Well, the vast majority of the orders are in areas
that Congress has delegated. Now, it shouldn't have delegated in
as many areas as it has. I wish we had
a system that were different. But it is not a
problem for presidents to come in and set policy in
cases where Congress has said the Secretary chal or the
Department shar or the president. And when we're talking about
the ev mandate or shower pressure or DEI or the
Paris Climate Accords or most of this, the Congress has
given too much power to the executive. So you can't
do what I've seen on the left, which is to say, well,
I thought you guys didn't like executive orders, Well, we don't.
But the problem with executive orders is when they usurp
congressional power. This is not the instability that it creates
as a problem, but that's on Congress's head, not on
the president's head. I have an issue with two of
the executive orders because they don't fall into that category.
One is the TikTok order, which I think is flatly illegal.
The president does not have the power to delay for
seven five days, it's ninety and not on the grounds
that he's delayed. You can only delay when there is
a bio under contract with a written agreement that needs
a little more time to be finalized.
Speaker 3: That's not the case.
Speaker 7: And I think that the executive order redefining the meaning
of the fourteenth Amendment when it comes to birthright citizenship
is just going to be struck down, and in my view,
probably should be. But other than that, these have been
good because they have stayed within the law and they
are solid on the merits. And one of the most
interesting things about this is probably the lack of pushback
from the left. Instead, they've been talking about Elon Mask's
supposed Nazi salute. Because if you look at the substance
of almost everything Trump has done here. It's popular, it's
seventy thirty. These are not eso aims. These are not
representative of overreads. This is not what happened to Joe Biden,
where he became president narrowly. Then John Meacham told him
he was FDR, and all of a sudden he's talking
about reconstituting the entire country and spending six to ten
trillion dollars. These are common sense moves that should have
been done a long time ago. So I'm very happy
with with the couple of exceptions that I mentioned. And
I'm excluding from this discussion pardons, which is a separate topic.
Speaker 1: Right Well, you know, I think I I think I've
maybe dissent from Charles. Maybe I'm not sure. We disagree
on the issue, but on the legal status of the
birthright citizenship business. Let me put it in this terms.
As we know, Trump once again put Andrew Jackson's picture
up in the cabinet room, and he's our other jack
Trump's our other great Jacksonian president. It's worth reading, and
it's something I teach the students. Jackson's veto message of
the Second National Bank of the United States.
Speaker 6: Which he wrote himself. It's very compelling.
Speaker 1: Lincoln liked a quote from it, and Jackson said, essentially,
I don't care if the Supreme Court has said the
National Bank of the United States is constitutional. I think
it's unconstitutional. And I have to say with a veto,
which is a little different legally true than what Trump's
doing here. But then Jackson added a very good sentence
that I think now we should bear in mind. He
says Supreme Court opinions should only be given the respect
that the force of their logic and reasoning compels us
to recognize. In other words, he's saying is if their
reasoning is not plausible, I think the other branches of government,
me and Congress ought to contest them for it. So,
you know, we only have that one case on the
birthright citizenship question from the eighteen nineties. That what is
a de Wong Arkwong and Wong arc case. And I
will go into the details of it now. But the
last clause of the fourteenth Amendment says Congress shall what
does it say Congress shall enforce this amendment with appropriate legislation,
So maybe Congress can pass a law saying we believe
birthright citizenship should be done legally in the US, just
like a done in almost all of our peer countries
in Europe, where at least one parent has to be
a legal resident. Now, maybe a Supreme Court would strike
it down, but I don't think it's the end of
the story. So I think that there is some room
for legitimate argument and maybe a change in the legal
regime short of a constitutional amendment.
Speaker 7: And does so mini lecture, Yeah, I would just push
back on a couple of things that First off, the
Andrew Jackson coat is an interesting one. I agree, but
there is a slight difference between the Supreme Court saying
the federal government may do this constitutionally and saying it
has to. And Jackson was vetoing a law that would
have created a bank that the federal government was allowed
to create, but he didn't have to create it. Congress
didn't have to generate that bank. The difference here is
an under existing Supreme Court President, and I take your
point about it perhaps being less clear cut than people say.
The Supreme Court has ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment mandates
that's the argument, at least that it mandates this birthright citizenship.
The second thing is I'm open to the notion that
Congress could do this given that text within the fourteenth moment.
I've heard that from some others, but it didn't And
I still think that's the issue with the executive order
is that this isn't an act of Congress. This is
trying to change that understanding via edict. So I think
this is likely to get struck down. Even if the
congressional option you mentioned is a possibility, that's not what
the courts are being asked to examine.
Speaker 4: Well, gentlemen, all I know, here's the dot. I don't
think ten years ago we would have been looking at
executive orders it said, okay, there are two sexes and
you have to go to the office to work. But
here we are where it's quite extraordinary, and people are
having great arguments and complaints about the fact.
Speaker 2: That there are two sexes and you have to go
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And now we welcome back to the podcast Victor Davis Hansen,
the Martin and eli adsers and senior fellow, the author
of many books, but perhaps the most pertinent might be
The Dying Citizen. How progressive elites, tribalism and globalization are
destroying the idea of America and also the case for Trump. Victor,
welcome back. Thank you for having me the idea of America.
We've seen a change over our lifetimes everybody has. Of
course in this country, it does, but there are still
elemental core portions that we do not wish to lose
or we become a different place. What's the progress now?
Have we just bought some time here or have we
accelerated the transmutation of America into something else? Or well
the empire strike back.
Speaker 8: I think we're seeing over the last four years this
manifestation of what the left dreams were on a variety
of front and they've failed. So it's not just Trump
has the corrective, he thinks, but people were starting to
come to consensus that not only it didn't work the
leftist project, but they were no longer immune from the
consequences of their own ideology. And I'm just referencing here
in California the fire they break down in fire prevention,
timber management, forest management, chaparral management, insurance management, DEI, etc.
And then when Trump gave that talk yesterday to Dobbos,
I thought they were going to their heads were going
to explode when he called you know, fuel liquid gold,
and he said that it was a new green scam.
And if you look at the transcript of the questions
by all these bankers it was amazing. Instead of getting
angry at him, it was are you sure you're going
to do this? You're really going to give us natural
you can? We can count on you to green light
liquid national gas. You really want to lower interest rates,
you wanted to deregulate. It was almost as if he
was talking to the tech people here in the United States,
and it was the same thing. He basically told the
tech people. Look, I don't know what your views are
and redistribution. I don't know what they are in taxes,
but I do know you don't like people regulating you
to death and telling you what to do. And I
can use you to make us all money. I mean,
there's dangers in that, but he's basically telling and reason
and Musk and Bezos go to AI, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence,
bioengineering and be the best and we're going to be
benefit of that. And if your tries to screws you
over and says, well, your tax rates are too low,
so we're going to make up the difference and take
the revenue. Then I'm like Biden, who approved of that
because he wanted to make up the revenue over here
and increase to thirty percent. Trump said, try it and
see what happens to you. So he's actually and so
I think a lot of people look at the last
four bid years as a and they had in a
weird strange way, it was almost faded or better than
Trump sat out those four years because he honed his message.
He got a great deal of empathy from the law
fair all the stuff he went through. But most importantly
we got to see in the raw a full fledged
left wing Jacobin agenda, and it terrified people on the border,
on crime, on hyperinflation, on Afghanistan, and the Middle East
two wars. So I think for a while at least,
that effort is almost over with. I think the Europeans,
who had almost the same GDP as we did twenty
five years ago and now we're almost double, they know it.
And when Trump gave that talk, it was almost as if, well,
we knew this, but we had to go along with
Biden because you're the leader. And now we don't have
to go along with him anymore.
Speaker 3: This is great.
Speaker 8: We don't like you, but maybe we can all make
money and survived the Chinese Victor.
Speaker 1: It's Steve Hayward, just over the coastal mountains from you, Hi, say,
my mind runs back to your terrific book from was
it twenty eighteen called The Case for Trump.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and you.
Speaker 1: Know, one of the analogies you used or images you
used in that book and then your talks back then,
was as you compared Trump to one of the sort
of the rough heroes of say, the old John Ford movies,
who the villagers want to go clean out the crooks
because he's got the will and the strength to do it.
But then once he's done, you know, he's a dangerous
guy ever around, and you sort of shove him out
of town and so forth. I'm wondering two part question, Well, actually, yeah, two.
Speaker 6: And a half.
Speaker 1: I can't I'm astounded at Trump's comeback. I'm stupefied by it.
I can't think of a and you know more ancient
history than I do. I mean, it's way beyond the
magnitude of Nixon's come back in the sixties, which was
very impressive. And so here we are with Trump, who
now is the highest approval ratings he's ever had because
issue positions are popular, and so I'm wondering, are we
going to need a sequel from you called The Triumph
of Trump? And what do you make of the of
this comeback?
Speaker 8: Well, you're very precient, because this week I signed a
contract with Basic Books for Trump Phoenix, Trump, Trump.
Speaker 3: We Booted.
Speaker 8: They're going to come up with the title, but I
only have I have to write one hundred and twenty
thousand words in four months, So I'm working on it,
and I agree with you. I've been looking at comebacks
both American. There's nothing like it in American history, and
the other comebacks don't. Do you know one hundred Days
of Napoleon are Churchill's closest. I think he was complete
an outsider and had no future until nineteen forty.
Speaker 3: But.
Speaker 8: There's not I'm kind of worried because you know, every
remake Shane too, and all those didn't go very well
because once the tragic hero has saved the Sawdbusters or
whoever they are, and then he rides off wounded into
the sunset, they don't really want him to come back.
Speaker 3: But in this case it's.
Speaker 6: A second victory.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm more of a political scientist in his story.
And the typical cycle of presidence is or second terms
are bad. Yeah, I think Trump, like everything else, has
turned out on his head. I think he already had
a second term. I think his first term was. It's
sort of some larger metaphysical sense, and this feels like
a first term to me, doesn't It feels a lot
more like it does one.
Speaker 8: Right, Yeah, I think part of is we're kind of bewildered.
We've never seen this in the modern era. We saw
we read about Wilver Cleveland, whose second comeback was I
think better than his first, or at least as good.
But we've never seen this before, and it sounds like
to me, this is kind of his first term, as
you've said, and with the advantage that he's been there before.
Speaker 3: Everybody you talked to that.
Speaker 8: Knew anything about the campaign, as you know, Steve, they
were all saying the same thing. We're not going to
make the same state. We're not going to bring in
Rec Tillerson, we're not going to bring in John Bolton,
we're not going to have an anonymous and we're going
to do what Obama did. We're going to get diehard
loyal as. So I'm going to hit the ground running,
and so far, with some missteps, they have pretty well.
So we'll see. But there's also this intensity now that
he didn't have the first term that he only has
four years.
Speaker 3: That's it, and he's got it.
Speaker 8: He's got to do something before the forces the media
and the left are sort of like a wounded animal
and they're licking their wounds in their cave and they
haven't come back out yet, but they will and they
have to hurry up.
Speaker 3: I think hi victim is Childs Kirk.
Speaker 7: That's a good segue into my question, which is, if
you look at most presidencies, they achieved two or three
big things. Trump has a couple of years until the
Republicans might lose the House. We've seen a flurried executive
orders that we just gus. They're all over the place
in their content. But going forward, there are so many
challenges that the country faces. What do you think the
two or three things that Trump should focus on? Hottest
should be if you could come out of the Trump
presidency in four years saying he got this done? What
should it be.
Speaker 8: If he did three things? And one was he closed
the border and we had legalmuocratic immigration. And people have
talked about maybe we should even give say if a
person knows English and they have skills and they pay
ten thousand dollars and it's diverse from all over the world.
We get people from Europe, Australia, Japan, So that would
be an accomplishment to end next of kin immigration, even
anchor baby, that would be something.
Speaker 3: And then number.
Speaker 8: Two, he's got a problem because if you total up
tax cuts on tips, tax cuts on on first responders,
military people, so that's almost a trillion dollars. Yeah, and
so he's gambling that all of this deregulation will give
you four percent GDP. It might, but it's not going
to work unless they cut a trillion dollars and I
don't think.
Speaker 3: They can cut it too.
Speaker 8: But my point is if he can get into a
bowl Simpson trajectory that we are significantly reducing annual debts
so that the time he leaves, we're not adding to
the national debt in four years, that's something and that
would set a trend. So the finance is very important.
And then number three, he has another contradiction. The Megabase
doesn't believe in optional military engagements. But he showed last
time that if people interpret that as neo isolationists, then
you've got to go in and knock some heads.
Speaker 3: Kill.
Speaker 8: Solomonia killed by daddy bomb ICE's maximum pressure on Iran.
And so this time he's entering office with two theater
wide wars, and he's already got some contradictions about the
Hamast hostages, et cetera in Ukraine.
Speaker 3: But he's got to re establish.
Speaker 8: US deterrence and reboot and refashion the military. The military
is spending billions of dollars on platforms that, while they're necessary,
if you look at what's happening in these two wars,
we don't have enough shells, we don't have enough drones,
we don't have enough platforms. We're concentrating everything in too
few platforms. And it's nice to have a one hundred and
eighty million dollars twenty two, but we I would rather
have ten thousand drones. And so he's got to reboot
the military. The military has been very disingenuous. There are
forty thousand recruits short, and every time you discuss it
with them, they just simply lower down the mount they
think they need. So they say, how dare you say
that we've met our we've met our recruitment stand And
then you look at the actual numbers and they haven't
and so and part of that is DEI and they
have a problem because when you look at the recruitment
and they have figures on race, class, gender, sexual orient
to everything, but it's very hard to find out who's
not joining. But you can find that Owen West has
written a really important paper on that it's mostly white
males from the middle class that are completely turned off
both by the losses in Afghanistan but also by this
constant hectoring and ad campaign of DEI, and they're not joining,
and they diet double their numbers in Afghanistan and Iraq
and the demographics. So we've got to get the military
and rebooted, and we've got to re established a terrence.
We've got to get a physical sanity back, and we've
got to get a.
Speaker 3: We have to get rid of this idea of a
border of America.
Speaker 1: So Victor, let me stay with DEI for a minute.
Then I want to ask you a couple of Silicon
Valley questions. One of the things that's comical to watch
right now is all the DEI offices and initiatives changing
their name and changing the job titles. And yeah, I
mean that will need to be rooted out and chased
after it, but I think it's not gonna work for
a really simple reason. You know, I always been saying
for a while the DEI diversity, Equity and Inclusion. I'm
sure you've noticed this. Whenever you see a message from
a university, they all sound the same, like they were
written and in some cases they were written by artificial intelligence.
In the case of a Vanderbilt message a few years ago,
it's the Holy Trinity of the identitarian Left. Well, the
problem is you can change the name to all kinds
of different things, and I'm looking at one place here
to change their DEI office to the Division of Inclusive Excellence,
Community and Belonging. But my point is they're not going
to know what to say. This whole racket depends on
common cliches in a common vocabulary, and they're gonna have
to fracture the vocal tabulary to avoid the attention of
Trump and people who are sick of this, and it's
going to make it incoherent. This is kind of the
you know, Tower of Babbel, scattering of the languages in academia.
So I don't know, are you optimistic that this is
that we're going to succeed in rooting this out or
I mean, I know, I also share your view that
the leftist doug in and will fight hard. But right
now I'm thinking that just the fact that they have
to run away from the name is going to cause
them huge problems.
Speaker 8: You know, that's funny you mentioned I share your optimism.
I have got maybe eight emails from people in the
last two weeks that I would call white male leftist,
and that's to the extent you think he's really going
to do it. And at the Hoover Institution, I've talked
to a couple of people in other words, there's all
it's kind of like the same thing with the Hispanic
community and open borders. Here I live in a ninety
five percent Mexico. They will come up to you and said,
you really think he's going to deport We got ArcaneOS,
we got M thirteen. So there are these constituents on
the left that they think the cat has to have
a bell around his neck because they've been devouring the mice.
But they don't want to put the bell. The old
Esip's fable. So actually, I think there's going to be
a lot of covert support for it. When Trump is
very smartly starting out with the first iteration of these
horrific criminals. Nobody can and if he can glide into
a broader deportation, it'll work. And the same thing about DEI.
There's a lot of white males at places like Stanford,
for example, who have been passed over for Dean ships,
passed over for rewards, passed over, their kids can't get in.
They only let in nine percent of the student body
were white males. For the last four years, it's been
twenty percent whites. In general, there's not enough and that
comes you know, athletes legacies. There's just not enough space
for people with perfect sat scores, perfect GPAs, and you
know all these extracurricular ties, they've all been turned down.
So you talked to these parents, are these Silicon Valley people?
So yeah, what andreason? That really remarkable interview he gave
with Ross thought there was one statement that just jumped
out when he was being asked by Ross, what were
some of the motivations of the causations that made you
change And he said, well, at one point or my
top guy came in and he said, Mark, I think
these people want to destroy us.
Speaker 3: And what he was.
Speaker 8: Saying is they'd hired all of these Marquee University coders
and everybody, and they were all the They were either
DEI or they were sympathetic to it, and they were
trying to undermine the corp what his corporation was from
the inside. Another I talked to another Silicon Valley person
and he he essentially said that, he said, we don't
like to hire Stanford people anymore because the last four
years they don't know computer engineering like they used to.
They don't speak as well, they don't write as well,
but they do go to HR the first day and
cause us trouble. And in Texas a and M or
a Georgia tech guy or cal State Pomona, they don't
do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well that teas up my next question, Victor, perfectly
for listeners who don't know what you're referring to, and
maybe we can put it in the show notes staff,
is that Mark Andreson essentially said, remember he gave us Netscape.
That's who Mark Andresen was thirty years ago. He was
all in for the Clinton Gore world. They supported Obama.
They started souring on things under Obama and then were
shocked with the Biden administration. And so one of the
big stories of this last election cycle was so much
of Silicon Valley breaking from the Democrats, and there you
saw Zuckerberg and the CEO of Microsoft and all the
rest at Google at Trump's inauguration. So my question, Victor
is is you know, I've been with you about sour
about California's prospects under one party rule, but now it's
Silicon Valley has figured out the perils of identitarianism as
well as saying, yeah, we're overregulated in so many ways,
and they wanted to kill Crypto. Do you think that
might translate to California? In other words, Victor, do you
think there's a chance that Silicon Valley may turn around
and help Kiss on your turnaround?
Speaker 3: I do.
Speaker 8: I've even heard rumors at Stanford that they're debating whether
to throw thirty or forty or fifty million to recall
Newsome again after the fowls. So, especially when you look
at the first thing came to my mind when I
had you know, I had been at Pepperdine teaching, and
I went down there every fourth week or fifth and
I had just driven over Pacific Palisades, over the top.
Speaker 3: Of the mountain.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and that was one of the most beautiful drives
I've ever I hadn't realized in a long time, an't
been there in twenty years, what a beautiful neighborhood that was,
the homes, everything, and they're all gone. And it's first
thing that's I said to myself, if they get the chance,
Karen Bass and the whole La City Council will try
to go in there and get affordable housing and not
get And sure enough, today the news accounts say that
Caruso is going.
Speaker 3: To stop try to stop that.
Speaker 8: That they want to rebuild it with these government Obama
era mandates, and that will.
Speaker 3: Cause a revolution because those people are furious. They are
so angry.
Speaker 8: I've got about five or six emails, and I did
a fundraiser in Pacific Policide and I've been talking to you.
They're just really angry. It's a total systems collapse and
at their expense, and they voted for it, and they
have no one to get angry at but themselves, So
I think all and then when you look at the
Hispanic community, it's I never thought Fresno County would ever
again be read, but he flipped four or five counties.
We flipped red our whole county did. It was amazing,
and they it was all because of Mexican American males
over the age of forty. They went about sixty percent
for Trump and they ended up giving about a forty
five to forty eight percent overall Hispanic vote. And I
think that can increase. I think it all depends, finally,
if they can get galvanized around a charismatic Reagan like
or leader, or a competent guy like Pete Wilson. Some
are made that those were all very good leaders.
Speaker 1: I have a crazy idea for you, Victor. It's partly
tongue in cheek, but not entirely. Did you catch Bill
Maher's rant about the fires on his show.
Speaker 2: A week ago?
Speaker 3: Did? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And so my thought is, you know, Bill Maher should
run for governor. It just it would cause makhim the
Democratic Party, right.
Speaker 4: Okay, if they wanted to, if they want to remake
Pacific Palisades into their vision of what a neighborhood should be.
Opposition to him in the past would have been shut
down with a series of terms that delegitimized anybody's objections.
But now, in very quickly, we have a diminution of
cultural and political power behind those words. In other words,
they suddenly seem unmasked and revealed as poisonous at worst
and meaningless at best. Does it feel somehow as did
we've ripped up the new speak dictionary?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 8: I think it's kind of like that scene in the
Wizard of Oz. You know when you have that scary
face that everybody's scared of, and then all of a sudden,
the Toto pulls away the curtain and you see this
little tiny guy with gears and levers.
Speaker 3: That's what DEI is.
Speaker 8: They get scared and terrified people after George Floyd coming
out of that crazy lockdown, that they were the majority,
and they had institutions, and they introduced all these new
things like shadow banning, deep platforming, canceling, and everybody was afraid.
I saw it where I work. There were people when
Scott Atlas was going mean hounded. I said, we've got
to write op eds and you couldn't get anybody to
do it. They were terrified. But now they're starting to
see that those people were always a loud minority, and
they didn't have broad public support, they had institutional support.
And Trump found a way to out fox the institutional support.
And so now I think you're right that people are saying,
you know what, I'm not going to do this anymore.
These four years were an aver when everybody said that
they're so happy, it's like a new golden age. That's
not just because of MAGA. It's because I think even
some never trumpets are feeling that that quietly they think
this was an aberration. The three genders, the open border,
the soils, crime, critical legal theory, critical racial all of that,
the admissions at the universities, the crazy radical Palestinians, you know,
defacing with impunity monuments, the name changing and so iconoclasm.
I just think that people feel we were kind of
on hinge. This was this was me too on steroids, literally,
like I realized on I mean, the statues that we toppled.
The But you know, and when people go back and
look over this, they will say, well, Joe Biden was
the president, how much of Biden was responsible, How much
of Biden was in this? And more and more people
are coming to the conclusion that there was very little
of Biden in it at all. He's always been a
weather vein. It is never a man of any particular convictions,
and it does make you wonder who exactly in the
White House who was driving the last four years. And
it's not a it's not a small sort of shrug
your shoulders. Who knows, interesting if.
Speaker 4: We ever find out, but on we go, I think
it's something that, you know, I don't want to screech
to a halt what we're doing, but it does bear
some some some Yeah.
Speaker 8: I think Joe Biden was playing Edith the Wilson. She
was the receptacle or the funnel, and she was growing
stuff at a time from the radicalized Nancy Pelosi and
Chuck Schumer, and they were sort of the people who
translated to Jill Biden what the squad wanted, where Elizabeth
Warren wanted, what Bernie Sanders, but especially what the Obamas wanted,
and that was channeled through Pelosi and Schumer to Jill
Jill Biden, and then I mean translate that means this
is the judge you should appoint, This is this third
in command at the National Institute of Health, this is
the person in the DoD And we got a crazy period,
you know.
Speaker 4: But it wasn't because they deeply It wasn't because Pelosi
and Schumer themselves deeply believed this. They were optimists who
were making a deal in channeling the popularities because they
wanted yes.
Speaker 8: They thought that, well, they did make a strategic mistake.
They thought that by channeling this hard left ideology to
Jill Biden and then having it rhified, that it was
going to win majority of support. I don't think in
their right mind. I think they thought, man, this is crazy,
because if you look at the nineteen ninety six Democratic
platform that was written by Mark Penn and Doug Showan.
I looked at that thing. It is incredible. There shall
be only legal immigration forrime a, youthful offenders, no excuse
from punishment. It was farther right than Maga and Nancy
Pelosi gave a really loud speech about the necessity, the
necessity to protect unions and American workers deportation. So I
don't think they have any ideology. Schumer and she they
just want power and they thought that's where the power was.
And then that got amplified, and then Jill Biden doesn't
know what she's doing either, and those people had kind
of an internal coup. It goes back to how he
was selected. He lost the first three caucuses and primaries.
He was going nowhere to Clyburne got him in South
Carolina and the deal was made that within thirty days,
Butterjig was out, so Warren was out, Bernie Sanders was out,
he was coronated. And I think they basically said to Jill,
he's going to be a waxen effigy and just play
up old Joe Biden from Scranton, and we're going to
be in control. And you get all the credit and
the celebrity, but we're going to be in control. And
he lived by the sword, the coup, and he died
by that, and then that same group removed him when
he couldn't even you know, perform that the near role.
You're right, though, You're really right though, that someone is
going to write a book about this and get the
people who did this on record, and it's going to
be almost it's going to be shocking because it is
almost a coup like that.
Speaker 3: He was never fit.
Speaker 8: When you add the irony that they used to get
Bandy Lee from Yale, the psychiatrists to testify that Donald
Trump need an intervention and should be straight jacketed. And
Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General in the term FBI
Director Andrew McCabe, We're going to wear a wire to
prove that Donald Trump was crazy. And then under pressure,
he took the Montreal Cognitive Assistance and I remember he said,
I aced it, and I can tell a difference between
a dromedary and a camel.
Speaker 3: So that's where we got.
Speaker 8: But that standard and that concern never if you, I
said on Fox once, I won't repeat the person that
very early I said, I think he feels I said,
I don't want to be cruel, but he he has
moments of blankness where his jaw drops and he's ashen
with no color, you know, and he's almost like he's reptilian.
And the host said, you know, I can't believe you
said that. That's just impermissible on my show. And I
didn't go on that show for two months. But that
was the climate in twenty twenty one that you couldn't
that was ages. It was a cheap fake. You could
not talk about that. It was almost like you can't
dare me the Wuhan origins of COVID.
Speaker 7: Victor You all right, I think, as you said a
second book on Trump, I wonder how much of the
dynamic that you just described do you think is because
of Trump, and how much do you think he's a
symptom of it? In other words, yes, if you if
you take Trump out.
Speaker 3: I think it's fifty to fifty. Okay, Yes, put it
this way.
Speaker 8: If Donald Trump was not the standard bearer and it
was some other person, that's very good Marco Rubio, maybe
I don't think.
Speaker 3: It would have worked quite like it is.
Speaker 8: But on the other hand, if Joe Biden had an
administration like Bill Clinton or maybe even the Obama I don't,
I don't, I don't. I'm not sure that Trump would
have made it. But it was the combination that Trump
had this this I don't know what you would call it,
superhuman energy, and the more they tried to destroy him
with these five indictment civil criminal suits, the more they
impeached him twice, the more they tried to kill him,
the more that they tried to take him, the stronger
he got and he became and then he just he
almost metamorphosized into something he hadn't been before, with the
garbage stunt and the McDonald's, and every once in a
while he'd say these weird things that Indian American guy said,
you know, we're just ordinary. He was at the window
and Trump said, you're not ordinary, You're not ordinary. And
then his wife said, you took a bullet for us,
and he kind of paused and said, yeah, you know what,
I guess I did. I did, And that was he
was he was kind of being fueled by the torment
he was under, and that was a he was an
empathetic person for the first time people actually were empathetic
that had not supported it. But on the other hand,
I don't think that we have ever had a train
wreck like.
Speaker 3: We had this last four years.
Speaker 8: Was the hard left completely unbound, and I mean whether
it was the transgendered thing or the border. We've had
a poorest border. We've never had no border. And you know,
it was just again and again and again, draining the
petroleum reserve right before the midterms, illegally giving amnesty for
student loan any It was just lawless, the whole thing,
and then the Hunter Biden laptop, the fifty one authorities
not paying you know, owing one point five million in taxes,
and then the whole Biden crime syndicate. I don't think
we've ever seen anything like it, and that so I
guess that's a wishy Wash answered, but I think it's
fifty to fifty. And you know, you talked to Trump
supporters that have access to him, and they will say
it would made much easier by the fact that we
waited four years because were it was easier for us
to do it.
Speaker 3: We knew what we were doing. He was different.
Speaker 8: But more importantly, these people, they were kind of like
the people who the way I look at it, we're
the people who were the larger version of the La Fires,
and a lot of people voted for Biden and we
got scorched. And the people who voted for Biden have
no one to blame but themselves, And so I.
Speaker 3: Think that's part of it.
Speaker 6: I know we have to let you go. I wanted
to get them one last question.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Again, it calls in your historical imagination and you know,
political knowledge. Thinking back to more than thirty years ago,
when the Soviet Union collapsed, we were told it was
the end of history. Socialism was discredited, the left was
routed and went to ground. As we can now see
in retrospect. I remember thinking at the time, I wonder
for too triumphant, They're surely going to come back because
the urges behind the left are irrepressible, and what they
came back as is we now know it was the
whole ideology of wokery and all the rest of that.
So with that background, I think you probably agree with
that that cycle, it took them ten years at least
to regroup. But what do you think we should be
looking for? Are there any markers? Do you have any
hunches about how they're going to try to come back
and what we have to be.
Speaker 6: In regard for.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I mean after the mcgu we went through this
with a mcgovernment disaster, and it took them. It took
them from seventy two.
Speaker 3: All the way to.
Speaker 8: Well, I don't think we can call Carter or anything.
It really went from seventy two to ninety two. It
was that what saved them was a combination of Ross
Perrot and Bill Clinton's Democratic Council and all that crap,
Dick Morris. But the point is what was their message.
Their message was We're going to go back to the
middle class and concerns. We're not going to fixate on race.
So they know what they have to do. They really
do know that they have to go back to the
center left. They have to talk about the middle class.
They have to talked about this. James Carvill's railing and
railing and railing about it. But what's different, though, is
we have now thirty two percent of the population are
what you would call non white, and it's here in California.
It's twenty seven percent of the population is is foreign born,
and we have the highest number. And so the key
is are they going to alienate those people like they
started to or are they are they going to bring
them in in the way that Trump Trump was picking
them off. That's the biggest question that I see that
you've got their base, and you've got Trump space, and
the white working class and minorities are up for grabs,
and the way to get them is not to be
too extreme and to appeal to their self interest and
make class Trump race. And if they can do that,
I think they will be viable. But we only have
four years and I'm looking at that field. Everybody said, well,
you know Josh Shapiro, he's a well you look what
he's done. He's not that centrist. He's pretty left wing.
So I don't see any centrist yet that's caught on.
But that's where they have to go to win and
they know it. It's just I don't know if there's
anybody that has the courage to do that.
Speaker 4: Well, as Rob Loong says, you have to appeal to them.
Speaker 2: That's where the.
Speaker 4: Votes are, that's where the votes are, rather not the
Democrats have the ability to go there. And I mean,
if they keep making the same mistakes and assume that people,
because of the color of their skin, or the shape
of their eyes or whatever the color of their hair
necessarily then must believe in a certain set of economic
precipts is ridiculous.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but that's accelerating too.
Speaker 4: Yeah. We however, will not make the mistake of keeping
you past your appointed time. We appreciate that, We appreciate,
appreciate the time that we always have with you. We
look forward to talking.
Speaker 3: And thank you guys for having meg and I enjoyed
it too.
Speaker 4: Bang on that hundred, bang out that one hundred and
forty thousand, and get back to us and will we
will right Victory Davis Adsen.
Speaker 6: Okay, thank you, thank you, Yeah, thanks Victor.
Speaker 4: You know, when he was talking about the nineteen ninety
six platform and how it is markedly different, she always
saying that some of the animating ideas are left today.
You guys are gonna laugh when you say this, or
maybe you'll just roll your eyes or hold me in
pity and contempt. But as a experiment for a project
that I'm writing which will get me no money, I
have been going back and watching the Dragnet television show
from the very first season nineteen sixty. This's not a
very good piece of television at all. Jack Web was
not a particularly good director. He had a great idea.
The radio show was groundbreaking and actually changed the medium
a lot of the television show less. So it's cheap,
it's over lit, it's stilted, but it is an interesting
time capsule. Part of the show that's kind of confounding
when you look back on it is that every episode
ends with essentially a travelog for la This is the
city where he tells you all the wonderful cultural institutions
that you cannot imagine Jove Friday.
Speaker 2: Ever going to, or how great their schools.
Speaker 4: And their hospitals are, and it's just wonderful look at
the Golden State at its prime. But but there there's
a serpent in the garden, and that serpent is the
countercultural and the changes that are coming, and it's portrayed
with his ham fisted as a nature as you can
possibly imagine. It's got the smirking hoodlums that you just
want to swap, even though they look like the most
upright citizens. There's a kid who begs them not to
call his mother. Begs them because he changed clothes at
the gas station. And if you could just change back
into the clothes that he left the house and his
mother wouldn't freak out. But if she sees him dressed
like he is, she's going to have a fit. The
guy is wearing a purple shirt with a black vest,
pressed trousers with a crease boots hess and his hair
is neatly parted on the site. He's terrified that what
his father later calls a ridiculous pirate outfit will be
seen by his parents. So while Dragnet sixty seven exactly
is not a documentary, and while it is in its
own way a little bit ridiculous, you can see exactly
how far everything has been dragged in the other direction
since then. And I don't think we're the better necessarily
for it. I'm going nowhere with that. You guys can speak,
I'm sure.
Speaker 1: I thought that was just the most elaborate segue ever.
But that is, but it is James, that is, you know,
I am capable of a few more things. I just
have to you know, yankor Channel that that those Dragnet
shows I watched, that's the Los Angeles of my early childhood.
And because I would recognize some of the places where
the various plots were sat and so forth, So the
travelog aspect of it, I do remember that very clearly.
Speaker 4: What's funny because one of them starts about how they've
built things and how they have these new facilities and
the the new music center is built where adobe huts
once clustered, and it pulls out in this building and
it's it's the water Company utility headquarters. It's right right,
I mean it's next it's next to the Channeler, but
it's basically the water Company.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: So, Charles, when you were growing when you were growing
up in the UK, what was the vision of the
United States that you got from the television shows that
you saw?
Speaker 7: Well, I was listeningwhelmingly positive and so I said, I
grew up loving America in a political sense, and it
was I suppose split in that there were these big
cultural censers that you would see and the three that
were most commonly depicted with New York City, California in general,
usually Los Angeles, and then Washington, d C. Washington, DC
would always be in movies about aliens or wherever the
Pentagon was necessary.
Speaker 4: That we're right, and it was stately. It was stately.
Speaker 2: It was a stately place.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Absolutely, the New York that I saw in movies was
strange because on the one hand you had Friends and
Seinfold and that sort of show which made New York
look great. But the undercurrent of all the TV shows,
or the hint, the implication, was that New York was
very dangerous. In fact, when I moved to New York
in twenty eleven, when I moved to the United States,
my parents kept saying to me, just be careful, and
I had to explain, this isn't the case now, unfortunately,
but back in twenty eleven twenty twelve, New York was
for a while safer than London.
Speaker 3: I had to explain this, Yeah, but.
Speaker 7: This is the safest big city in the world. Because
they grew up watching TV in the late seventies, eighties, nineties,
gold New York was depicted right right, or even if
you watched Home Alone two from nineteen ninety two, he
goes into the park and it's depicted as hell. But
the part of America that I was always the most
seduced by was California and Los Angeles in particular, And
there's two reasons for that. One is TV. You asked
about TV. It was where most things were set. This
was before things began to be filmed in Georgia or
in Canada in the nineties. I think that's fair to
say most movies and TV shows were still filmed in
southern California. And the other reason was we had friends
who lived in southern California that we would visit quite often.
Southern California and Phoenix, Arizona. Big open, sunny, dry, heated,
blue skied places with mountains and all of the things
that a kid like me wanted, the Disneyland and bowling
alleys and restaurants, and I just absolutely loved it. So
I was more drawn to sunny places with palm trees.
And of course I ended up in Florida, which is
not too far removed from that.
Speaker 4: No, one of the interesting things about the regnature that
I just mentioned is that the very same speech where
they're decrying how the younger generation is losing its cult,
its morals. They have a mother complains that they've been
here for two years and that the city is an
alien place where nobody knows anybody else because everybody is
coming and going, and it's a it's a stark indictment
actually of this sort of promise, the other side of
the promise that California held out. So it's not like
people weren't talking about these things. It's not like people
weren't worrying. But I never really was interested in LA
based on as a kid at all. It wasn't It
just seemed like a place I couldn't get my hands
around New York I could, and I loved it for
its architecture, and I loved it for it's Gotham nature,
but I never ever really wanted to live there. DC
was to me and I did just just a place
where the camera pulled back, because every shot of everything
in DC is always the camera pulling back on the
White House or the Capitol or.
Speaker 2: The Pentagon or something. And I never want.
Speaker 4: Of course, that's where I ended up, But where I
really wanted to go was Minneapolis, because according to the
Marytitler Moore Show, it was an absolutely wonderful place to
live with good people and.
Speaker 3: To where you grew up.
Speaker 4: Right, it was for it was four mile or four
hours down the highway. Right, it was the cities. It's
where you went. Of course, to my parents, he was
an act of complete rejection of all the truths and
values and glories of Fargo, which was repaid to me
later when when my daughter left Minneapolis for Boston in
the exact same maneuver. Well, let's see what else we
got here before we have to go, and we do
have to go. Is the elon Musk is a Nazi
thing burned out? I don't think so yet, because Twitter,
because Reddit is busy. Every single subreddit is banning links
to Twitter x. It's been the most remarkable campaign I've
ever seen. I mean, and we're not talking political subredits.
We're talking subreddits that are that are devoted to collecting
nineteen sixties lego sets.
Speaker 1: It is so unremittingly stupid that I almost wonder if
Musk didn't do it on purpose to distract the left.
I mean, they're trying to figure out what and how
what if Trump of Trump's moves to oppose and how
and instead are just gonna yell nazi because that's the easiest,
lowest common denominator for them.
Speaker 6: It's almost like I did it.
Speaker 1: It's oh, I don't need a stipulate how stupid it
is for us and our listeners.
Speaker 3: I don't think you.
Speaker 7: Know, I want to add to the stupidity argument. Obviously,
the idea that he did that is stupid, and the
people who are repeating it are stupid, But they're also
suffering through an opportunity cost in that they're making an
argument that is self evidently stupid doesn't advance the ball,
instead of making arguments that would help them.
Speaker 3: And we just.
Speaker 7: Talked with Victor about what the Democrats can do to recover,
and then we talked a bit about the Democrats' history.
It is not the case that everyone in the United
States has suddenly become a Republican on every topic. There
are angles that the Democrats can take that will be popular.
They are not a dead party, they're not a rump party.
And instead of making those arguments, including intelevised hearings of
Trump's nominee, they're bringing this up. It absolutely astonished me
the other day to see Chris Murphy doing this to
Elie Stefani, he may as well have said to her,
Eli's let me tee you up so you can batter
me around for the cameras. Instead of asking about something
where he could have got an angle in or at
least satisfied the Democratic base or those who are on
the fence, he asked what she thought of Elon Musk's
hitler salute. And that is catnip for her. She's so
good at this, so she sort of made him look stupid.
And it's particularly amazing given the election that they just lost.
In the arguments that were made on each side.
Speaker 9: That's why they lost. That's why they lost, is this
sort of stupidity. She's sitting talking about anti Semitism and
the dangerous world and the job that she's gonna do
in reducing bureaucracy and actually get anything's done. And he
sits there and about Elon Musks hurtless.
Speaker 7: Salute, and you could just tell him almost going, oh
my god, you are the problem. It's it's so for
them as well as for the rest of us.
Speaker 1: Yeah, my favorite Babylon Bee headline lately is the one
that says.
Speaker 4: Left stops yelling death to.
Speaker 6: Israel long enough to call Muska Nazi.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, But you know, as we were saying before, when
you lose the cultural and the political power that keeps
these these absurd balloons aloft, what are these people, the
people who have been able to just repeat words and
tropes and what is being pumped out of the echo
chamber when that's no longer has any currency? What do
they fall back on? I mean, what what?
Speaker 6: What?
Speaker 4: What is Is there anything foundational there that they can
that they can you know, they realize they can come
back to earth and say what they feel and what
they mean, what do they actually mean? And does anybody
want to believe them after half after years of having
them spout the nonsense because those words just don't work anymore.
They don't have purchase, They're laughable. Were the whole portion
of the nation decided to look at the language of
the left from the last four years and doan Nelson
months from the Simpsons and go he you know, ha ha, And.
Speaker 2: What was this?
Speaker 4: I was listening to listen to a podcast the other
day and the host admitted that he'd never seen a
single episode of The Simpsons, which does brand, which does brand? Well,
he's British, He's British, which is which.
Speaker 7: Is No, that's impossible even for Britt. When I was younger,
the Simpsons was on BBC two every single day at five.
Speaker 4: O'clock, Dominic sand Well, Dominic Sandbrooke.
Speaker 7: You can't even avoid it if you tried. I used
to watch it religiously. I spise that was a golden
age too, I think, But it was on there were
only four channels. How could you at five o'clock in
the could you not see one of them?
Speaker 4: Well, I understand that. I mean, I Blanche and uh
quaver at the thought that there are more that there
are more unwatched Simpson episodes for me than there are
watched ones that you know, I fell away from the
show about the time a lot of people did. Yeah,
just just because it just happened. We just drifted away
when we never stopped loving it, we never stopped quoting it.
But at the same time, it just seemed to go
on in a way that was outside of our can
or interest. And you know, maybe when I retire, I'll
sit down and watch the other.
Speaker 2: Seven four hundred and eighty two episodes of the Simpsons.
That I've missed you.
Speaker 4: However, they're in a listening audience having listened to the
podcast number seven hundred and twenty five.
Speaker 2: If you haven't listened to the ball, they're all available.
Speaker 4: Of course, Amazon podcast I don't know, iTunes podcasts, Spotify,
all these podcast sources. Ricochet dot com is your source
for all things at Ricochet though, of course, and you
want to go there, and you want to sign up,
because if you're tired of the idiocies of Facebook and
you know the rest of these places, you will find
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Speaker 4: Yeah, you got to pay a couple of shekels to
get there, but it's worth it. Give us a good
review with your friends and family at appletoons, you know
iTunes if they still call it that, you know, the
all the usual stuff I say at the end of
the episode, except that I will also say thank you
to Bamboo hr for sponsoring us. They're new and we
love them. Thank you Stephen, thank you Charlie, Thanks to
our guest Victor, Thanks to everybody who listened, and we'll
see you all in the comments. At Ricochet four point
oho Next.
Speaker 6: Week, guys, Next week, Ricochet join the conversation.