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