The Ricochet Podcast - A Warning Against Nihilism

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

They say Labor Day marks the ordinary American's starting point for following a particular election cycle, setting off a scramble for undecides by campaigners and a busy couple of months for pollsters. Henry Olsen returns to discuss where things stand in the presidential race as we head toward the first debate; he offers some potential outcomes that will determine the extent of the Republican majority in the Senate; and he expands on his piece about the populist parties' successes in eastern Germany, explaining "Ostalgie," and detailing the adjustments mainstream parties will have to make if they want to maintain stability in the West.Plus, James and Charlie are emphatically pro-Churchill.- This week’s opening sound: Darryl Cooper's take on Winston Churchill in an interview with Tucker Carlson.

And it's always a good day when you can bash Hitler. Yes, we do take on the difficult issues here. It's normally less controversial. Yeah. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Charles C.W. Cook.

I'm James Lilex, and we're going to be talking to Henry Olson about behind the polls, before the polls, Hitler, Germany. Well, let's just have ourselves a podcast. I thought Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War. He didn't kill the most people. He didn't commit the most atrocities. But I believe, and I don't really think, I think when you really get into it and tell the story right and don't leave anything out, you see that he was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, becoming something other than an invasion of

Poland. Welcome everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast at number 707, 707, once a great plane. I can't remember the last time I was on one of those. In any case, we'll be flying for the next hour or so, talking with Charles C.W. Cook and a guest to be named shortly, discussing things here, thither, yon, in particular in Germany. Oh, good. We're talking about Germany this week. Charlie, I don't know about your Twitter feed, but mine was substantially concerned this week with revisiting, refighting, rethinking World War II. There's a certain element that was just

vociferously arguing in Twitter that the received narrative is all wrong, of course. And when you look back at it, actually, FDR was the man who personally intervened to reject Adolf Hitler's application to art school, sending him on another path. And actually,

if you study photographs of the Wannsee Conference, you can see Churchill front and center with this trademark cigar. There's this weird, strange mirror image of the far left and the far right to have their own 1619 project where we rip up the received wisdom and you know on the left it's because the fundamental sin of the country from which it was born was slavery and racism and on the far right the fundamental sin seems to be that we were insufficiently concerned about the perils of international jury i don't i don't like it i don't like it at all and i'm I'm sure you follow the controversy in your own way. What thoughts have you?

Well, I will confess that I am not, in fact, worried about the perils of international jury. It's not something that keeps me up. Well, as a binational, rootless cosmopolitan, I would expect you to say that. Well, no, I'm proud of the fact that i am a citizen of both countries that fought the bastards and won you know you said this is a horseshoe you didn't say that literally but that's what you implied left and right weird weird people on each side who have come to this view and i think that it explains the view i think that what america hating lefties have in common with the people who have decided that the West and America and Britain and the Anglo countries in particular are no good.

And when you do that, you end up with a hole because you have to explain the world. You have to have a theory of the world. I don't mean that in a pretentious way, but if you say to me, well, which countries in the world do you think are good, which are bad, which things in history do you think are good, which are bad, which people do you think are good? I can answer that. If you say, why is it the case, for example, that the United States is very rich and Malawi is not? I can answer that. And whether I'm right or wrong, that informs my worldview day to day. Well, if you decide that actually America is not good and Britain is not good and their

pasts are evil or full of myths, then you have to create new ones. And I think that what you've seen is an exercise in trying to fill the hole. And the problem is that there isn't much to fill the hole with if you don't take the standard conservative narrative or the standard progressive narrative. You have to look at other stuff. And what these people seem to have found, I'm afraid to say, and this is not the same thing as being a Nazi, but is the sort of pro-German revisionist propaganda that had sprung up as early as 1946 in Germany. I mean, if you look at what was being argued here, this is what the neo-Nazis, literal neo-Nazis, the paleo neo-Nazis, if you like, in Germany, right from 1946, 1947, said, when asked to explain the war, right down to, and this has been more ancillary, the obsession with Dresden,

which was the real Holocaust, you see, Dresden, the bombing of Dresden, that was the real, not, there wasn't, there wasn't a Holocaust, that was it. So I just, I think this should be, anyway, this is a warning against nihilism, because you don't find some grand, virtuous replacement for whatever you think is myth-making. You find this garbage. And garbage it is, and it's insidious. I read a piece in the Telegraph the other day, not the actual Telegraph itself. Oh, would that I could get the Telegraph to deliver to my house. It's just such a wonderful big paper. It's huge. The piece was talking about how recent polls of the Brits about how they feel about their country, that nationalism, patriotism, has declined precipitously to just historically low levels where everybody's sort of glum. And it's not just

because things aren't going as they would like. It's not just because they're seeing the police more interested in cracking down on somebody who was mean on social media as opposed to actual knife crime in London. It's because they've absorbed the whole idea that the West, and in particular Britain, shares a particular sin. And you look at this and you think, how did, I mean, there's always been, there's always a self-hating class that arises among the elites, and I use that word, you know, advisedly, in which they are, they show their cultural sophistication by being above patriotism, by being above the smelly little orthodoxies of their own people. I'm using that term as Orwell would have not wanted me to.

And they show themselves to be internationalists in the sense of the people who populate the last third of things to come. White-coated technocrats who are able to fly in and solve all difficulties, people who have transcended all these petty things that led to war and the rest of it. But it's more than that. Somehow the population of Britain, according to the Telegraph, has absorbed the notion, pommeled into them, promulgated for decades, that there is something uniquely evil about the colonial enterprise of England and about its history and about its supposed claims to have, you know, had glorious revolutions and documents that established rights and the rest of it, that it's all a horrible, oppressive fiction that has resulted in untold global misery, and they ought to feel bad about it.

And again, I find this extraordinary because it seems to put on America and on England actions that are, you might say, consistent with every human civilization that has ever strode the globe. Why us? Why are we so self-hating? I'd actually go one step further than that, James. I would say that it's not just the case that we aren't evil, or that our flaws are those that have been exhibited by human beings from the beginning of time but that we are better than everyone else i don't say that in any other context other than culturally you can shove it if your view is that this race or that race is bad or good or that you can divide people up by their immutable characteristics.

I want nothing to do with that, which, by the way, is because I'm the heir to Anglo-American conceptions of individual rights. But culturally, all nations are not equal. And what separates Britain is not that it had slave trade, but that it abolished it. And what separates the United States is not that it was hypocritical about its ideals, which it was, but that it promulgated those ideals in the first place. So, you know, of course, if you, as I do as a conservative, believe that human nature is immutable, then you're going to have good people and evil people and greedy people and dishonest people and so forth. And you are always going to fall short of whatever it is that you hold up to be the correct way of doing things. But to look

at the last two, three hundred years of history and say, you know who the bad guys are? They're Britain and America. To me, it is to commit the greatest sin of all, it's to lie. I think it's very important that people have a conception of history that binds together their nation. And I think it can be important to have it even if it's not true or it's exaggerated. For example, the founders had this idea that there was this thing called British liberty that had existed since the mists of time and occasionally been violated by kings. And so they would talk about Magna Carta as if it did things that it didn't. And they would talk about the liberties to which they were heir when they weren't. And they overstated it. But it was good that they

thought that. And so I do think it's good to have that. I do think every nation has to have that. But the great thing about ours is it's true. It's true. We did fight and beat Hitler. We did get over the stupid feudal collectivism of the past. The British Navy, which you didn't have to, did go around the world sinking slave ships and telling, for example, Brazil, you're not have to, did go around the world sinking slave ships and telling,

for example, Brazil, you're not allowed to transport people in chains anymore, just because we didn't like it. And America did have a civil war, and it did reconstruct its country. And we did become a beacon of hope, such that if you go to Hong Kong now, as it's being taken over by the Chinese, my wife was born in Hong Kong, so I feel this somewhat vicariously personally, if that's such a thing, you will see people on the streets waving the Declaration of Independence or American flags while they talk about their rights in Hong Kong. So we did that. That's good. Well done us. At Tiananmen Square, they didn't build a replica of the, you know, glory to the motherland statue that looms over some city in

russia they built uh a statue of liberty you said two things there one of which is that our culture is better and this irritates an awful lot of people on an atomic level abraham kendy has said famously that the existence of that the proclamation of any sort of hierarchy is in itself proof of racism. And when he says that, and he doesn't even seem to understand the internal contradiction between what he's just said, because what he's just said is that a society that does not believe in hierarchies is superior to ones that do, therefore there is a hierarchy. But leave that aside, he's not a particularly deep thinker. The idea that you can actually judge these cultures and different societies against us and find them wanting appalls people just on some level of fairness and rightness. And who are we to say, well, that's okay for us to say. Our ideas are good for us, but we can't tell them

that their ideas are lesser than ours. And as a good jingoistic chauvinistic American, I'm here to tell you that yes, you can, if you have one which provides more freedom, more individual freedom, more opportunity, more extravagant ability to rise above your stature and make sure that your children do better. A freer place is better than a place that is mired in ideas that haven't grown in a thousand years and have ossified into just nothing but mud. So, yes, I will make that assertion. And the great thing is that the American ideals are exportable and that anybody can come here. We are a protean nation.

Anybody can come here, assume them, live them, and they don't have to be of this, that, or the other creed. It is a set of ideas which we can export and which people who come here can take. But the other part of it, so I'm putting me down on the side of people who will say, yes, we can make that distinction. The other point, though, is that one of the tweets that went around the world had a side-by-side picture. The first was Hitler walking through Paris with the Eiffel Tower in the background. And the other was the Last Supper slash Bacchanalia from the opening of the Paris Olympics. And the tweet was, admit it, the picture on the left is preferable to the society on the right. And I thought, well, I mean, if you're really gay and you like those uniforms that the Hitler guys are doing and you want to stride around in the jackboots and the leather jackets and the rest of it. I suppose that there's a certain sort of cultural solidarity there that you can see,

but we are looking at invasion. We are looking at imposing. We are looking at shipping the children off to camps. We are looking at the diminution of freedom on every single possible frickin' level, you people. And the reason you have this thing on the right that you don't like, yes, it is decadent. Yes, it's very French. Yes, it shocked the bourgeoisie and all the rest of it.

But it is a manifestation. I hate to go all David French here, but it's a blessing of liberty in particular when you hold it up against the alternative, which is, A, put everybody in the picture on the right in the camps, and B, have everybody in your own administration doing that stuff in silent, you know, in secret, in

dank Berlin nightclubs. Anyway, end of that. Before we get to our guest, can I just take another shot at Ibram X. Kendi? Because you had the chance, you see, and you put the pinata up there, and I've got the bat right here. Forget politics for a minute. What Kendi said there is telling

because he seems to assume that when people, as we both just did, say that America's culture is superior, that we mean white people. But that's not what I mean. When I talk about American culture, politics aside, I am including all manner of people who have done all manner of things. I wrote a piece 10 years ago about why I love America so much. And sure, there's a lot of politics in there and Frederick Douglass,

but I also wrote about Ella Fitzgerald and Jackie Robinson and barbecue. And it just, the notion that the average American doesn't love the culture that is created, which has been the product of all sorts of different people, that when they say that, what they're really thinking of is some albino, is telling on himself. He's telling on himself. What he is saying is that he can't imagine that one of us, you know, obviously, James, you and I are white, that one of us could look at a

photograph of Thomas Sowell and think, that guy, that's one of the reasons I love America. Or, frankly, last night. I mean, last night, the NFL is back. Fantastic. I just watched and loved the athleticism and brilliance of Lamar Jackson and Patrick Mahomes. It didn't occur to me that they're a different skin color than I am. I don't care. That's American culture. And Ibram X. Kendi can't see it. It's odd.

That moment when he was flushed out of the pocket and ran about 10 yards to the side and then hit the receiver about 40 yards downfield was just, I mean, I just erupted in a shot. And I'm not, you know, it's not my team. And the fact that all of this Titanic struggle, all of this back and forth, all of this concussive crashing together of people, the finesse involved with getting the ball from here to there, that it all came down to one toe a half inch over, is what you love about the game.

Henry Olson is our guest. Henry's a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He's the author of The Four Faces of the Republican Party and The Working Class Republican. And might we add, he is the host of the podcast Beyond the Polls, which you can find right here at Ricochet.com. Henry, welcome. Thank you for having me back. Well, we're going to get around to the elections and talk about how things are shaken out here and what you look at. But you wrote a great piece.

We'll link to it in the website description at Ricochet.com, where you're talking about recent elections in Germany. And you were discussing the split between West and East, which to this day is fascinating. I mean, you impose voting maps, you impose religion maps, you impose all sorts of cultural maps over unified Germany, and the split, or the scar, if you want, is still there. And you talk about the rise of ost-nostalgie. Ost, what was the word that they use also nostalgia right

nostalgia for eastern germany and what it represented which i find absolutely fascinating i think i understand it but explain a little bit what the east germans feel relative to the germ the west counterparts what it means for the future of of Germany and why this is important to us. Three questions. Three questions. First of all, what they're feeling is a nostalgia for a sense of respect and a sense of solidarity that, you know, on the farthest extreme, there have always been some people who didn't want the wall to fall. And there are still some people in Eastern Germany who have a genuine hard nostalgia for the old regime. But that's not what most people feel. What they want is a sense

of genuine German citizenship. That means social and economic equality, or as close to it as you can get. And also a sense of shared social burden, as opposed to the more individualistic ethos of the West. And that's not something that's really transpired in the last 30 years. The economy is still lagging in a lot of places. Public services don't work as well there. And there's still a sense that West knows best 30 years later. To the second question about what it means for German politics, I mean, we have to gets to that difference in social solidarity, which is that a sense of a non-German outsider coming into a homogenous culture resonates more with them than

it does to Westerners who have dealt with quite a lot of immigration. That doesn't mean that it's not a huge issue and not a growing issue. What this means for German politics is, first of all, Germany is a federal state, so what you have is governments that actually are relatively independent, and the parties of the traditional center-right and center-left no longer have a majority in two of the most important states in eastern Germany are unlikely to have that when a third state votes later this month. And what that adds is political instability. And then you've got nationally.

It's going to be very hard after the next German election to have a coherent German government when the parties of the center disagree on everything except excluding the parties of populism. And why this matters is that this is just another phenomena of what we're seeing around the world, which is increasingly people who are not part of the global elites, the people who are not economically faring well, people who are socially, if not exile, certainly not among the paladins of progressive norms, feel disrespected and not part of their own country. And they're turning to populist parties, regardless of ideology, often on the right, because the right seems to be able to channel those desires better than the left, but sometimes on the left. And what that is, is a continued assault on the neoliberal globalist Washington consensus that has reigned since at least 1999 when China was admitted into the WTO but arguably since 1991 when the Soviet

Union fell and the third point about why we in America care are we in a period now and I'll this is the last I'm going to say before I hand it over to Charlie are we in a period now, and this is the last I'm going to say before I hand it over to Charlie, are we in a period now where, you know, election time, we're, of course, all about America, but we're looking at Europe with sort of shrugging of the shoulders and, you know, cocked eyebrow, and, you know, that's the usual stuff. Who cares? It doesn't really affect us at all. I wonder about the immigration debates that are going on in Europe, I think, are fascinating and important and worrisome in some respects, what people are doing, how the government is reacting. And I think this might

be useful as a precursor to the conversation we'll have in America. Or is it just Germans being Germans? There's two reasons why Americans should care. First, about ourselves, and then about our alliances. First, about ourselves, we're seeing the same thing here. The Trump movement is simply the American expression of populism that we're seeing around the world. People who don't want to go blindly into a globalist, non-border future. And immigration is a massive issue there because it's clearly one that is putting social and economic pressure on the average American. Today's job report comes out, and once again, we see we've had two million

people, according to the Census Bureau, who are added to the labor force in the last year who are not born in this country. Their jobs are up. Native-born jobs are down. The people in Washington can want to ignore or spin that any way they want, but the fact is, in the last year, jobs have been going to people who aren't born in this country and people who are seeing fewer employment opportunities. That's a problem for the holders of the consensus. And Germany matters because whatever you might want to think about the way America ought to deal with its allies and vice versa, our security rests on one pillar, and that is maintaining a dominance among the global economies. In modern wars, we're seeing in Russia, eventually the side with the larger economy will win. That's what happened in World War II for all of the tales of valor, which were legitimate. We simply outproduced and crushed the smaller alliance. The people on our

side traditionally have had 80% of global GDP. That was as true as recently as 2000. It's now below 60%. And about 40% of that is Europe. If Germany and Europe detach themselves from the American-led alliance, suddenly the global period position of dominance we've held since 1945 is gone. So when you see parties arise and a European elite that can't deal with the desires of its own people, that should make you very, very concerned. Henry, it's Charles Cook here.

Speaking of America, simple question. Right now, who is winning the presidential election? I know you just wrote about the Senate in National Review. That was a great piece. I'd love to hear more about that, too. But we had this conversation on the editor's podcast this morning as to who is currently winning. And at least half of the people said they think Trump is winning. Is that true? Extremely narrowly, but yes. And that's because of the bias in the Electoral College towards the

Trump political coalition. If this were an election like in almost every other country in the world where the person with the most votes wins, Kamala Harris would be narrowly ahead. But this isn't. This is a question about how to get the Electoral College. And Nate Silver has been saying for the last week and a half that Trump has an edge in the Electoral College. He's moving up Trump's odds of winning every day. And there's no reason to doubt that, that all Trump needs is to carry all the 2020 states plus Georgia and Pennsylvania, and he wins. Or he can carry all the 2020 states plus Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia, and he wins. Or he can carry all the 2020 states plus Georgia,

Arizona, Nevada, and the one electoral college vote in Omaha, and he wins. The thing is that the odds of one of those things happening are slightly greater than the odds of Harris winning all of the states that Joe Biden won, minus only one minor one. And that's why Trump is the very slight favorite as we speak. And then in the Senate, you wrote a piece for NR saying the Republicans are doing well in the sense that they're likely to get to 51. What's the high watermark for Republicans in the Senate? Oh, do you want me to really get people too excited that they'll just want to go out and yell from there? Well, I just wonder, because what happens if Republicans have an unexpectedly good night?

How far did the dominoes fall, potentially? 57. Oh oh my gosh okay but that's very unlikely right so but let me tell you why how you get to there you know the republicans are at 49 they're unlikely even under a worst case scenario to lose any seats because the most vulnerable republicans uh ted cruz and uh and Scott of Florida, are in states that Trump should win rather comfortably. So then you get to West Virginia is an easy pickup because Joe Manchin was the only Democrat who could hold that deep red state now. And Jim Justice will become the new senator. So that's 50-50. It's now one of the leading prognosticators uh moved montana the state that i identified into the leaning republican column as of this morning because of a new poll uh that showed

what other polls had shown that the republican tim sheehy is already ahead of incumbent john tester by five or six points on the average. They're going to win that. Then you've got Ohio, where Sherrod Brown is fighting in a state that Trump carried by eight points, may carry by nine or ten points. That would be seat 52. And then you get to Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. If Trump does very well, he could carry all three. And in the modern age, there's only been one candidate who carried a state when their presidential candidate lost, and that's Susan Collins of Maine. So if Trump carries Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan by a point or more, they could all fall. Suddenly, you're at 55. Then you've got Nevada. Nevada is a state that's been trending Republican. Adam

Laxalt lost by less than a point. If Trump wins that state, you could very well see that go. That's 56. And then you've got Arizona, where Carrie Lake is dragging herself down because of her past. But again, if Trump wins this by three or four or five, he could carry Lake across, and that's how you get to 57 wow that's that's a lot of seats that would set them up well to put it in perspective it would be the most seats the republicans have held after an election since the great depression yes i'm not predicting that but you asked me how high the no no of course of course but the when the worst scenario is 51 at the moment. Right, yeah.

And sharp eyes will notice I left out Maryland, where Larry Hogan will run much, very far ahead of Trump. You know, if Trump does much better than people think, and he breaks 40% in Maryland, Hogan could run far enough ahead. He's getting between 20% and 25 percent of Democrats now. You know, Trump does better in Maryland than most people think. Maybe even Hogan could win and that would get to 58. But that would be that would be moving into fantasy realms that even Peter Jackson and the MCU get very far into. I was going to ask whether you have any insight henry into what explains the fact that

kamala harris is now sort of acceptably popular when she was for years the least popular vice president in the history of polling of the popularity of vice presidents and suddenly i see her above water hitting 50% popularity. Is this just people coming back to their party or has something else changed? I think it's largely people coming back to their party. The thing to remember is that Donald Trump has never had in his life as a public figure in politics, a disapproval or an unfavorable rating below 50%. He's actually close to his high watermark now, 45, 46% on an average. Some polls even better than that. But he always has a majority of people who dislike him. What Kamala Harris is, is the blank slate right now,

who is not Donald Trump. And the more she can keep herself the blank slate, who is not Donald Trump. And the more she can keep herself the blank slate who is not Donald Trump, the better she will do. The more Donald Trump can say, actually, you're not electing a white piece of paper. You're electing a woman with a very clear record of either changing her mind when it suits you. In other words, can you believe her now? Or somebody who is the most liberal person in the Senate. You get to choose. That would be the message that I would be sending if I were Trump. And all he needs is a couple of percentage of people to say, yeah, I don't like Trump, but now I don't like her. And suddenly she moves from being the slight favorite in the popular vote

and basically being a little less than 50% in the Electoral College to being the decided underdog. Well, it's a big vibe election, don't you know? I keep saying this. That the issues, you know, what matters is the great joy that has been emanating from the Harris-Waltz campaign. I mean, here we are. California, good vibrations, all that stuff. Yeah, we are just falling all over ourselves here in Minnesota

that we're so proud that the rest of the country is getting to know Coach Waltz, our guy, as if he is absolutely uniformly beloved down to every corner of the state, which he isn't. But in a viable election, somebody who smiles and beams and cackles and the rest of it is preferable to the guy over there with the pumpkin on his shoulders who's telling us things are dire. And I get that. But you wrote elsewhere that I wrote or spoke, I can't quite say that Trump is actually turning off some white voters. And at the same time that Harris is stalling with some some black voters. Why is that? I mean, why do you think that that's happening? Well, you know, the thing is that Trump refuses to

maximize his appeal, that he's always suffered from the businessman's fallacy that what you need is a very large and very loyal consumer base who will buy the product over and over again. And that makes you a billionaire. But the problem is, 46 percent makes you a loser in politics. And he's never quite been willing to go over the hump and say, oh, I actually have to have a majority who's willing to buy the product sometime. And he continues to do things that turn off people who don't like Biden and want to be in a different place. And among whites with a college degree, his anger, his inarticulateness are things that weigh against him. He has time to deal with this, but it certainly seems as if he's going to bank on winning the same way he won in 2016, which is driving up the negatives of the opponent and then turning to people who agree with him on policy but don't like him as a person

and saying, between this choice of less two evils who do you dislike least i'm just wondering that answer was biden in 2016 it was him and i think he's banking that uh kamala harris is no joe biden yeah i'm just wondering who at this point says you know i've taken the measure of donald trump in the last couple of weeks and decided i don't like him it just seems as if that would be baked into the whole equation long ago. But I think he blew his one best chance to get people to look at him again, and that was after the assassination attempt. Whereas if he had said, you know, look, I still believe blah, blah, blah, but maybe adopted less confrontational language from time to time and a little more aspirational language. You know, again, a percent matters.

Going from 45.5% to 47% favorability, 98% of the people who like you on Election Day will vote for you. On the other hand, it does sound kind of strange to say, all right, okay, now that you've been shot, it's time for you to start acting nicer, as opposed to using that as a spur to uh to get even more uh aggravated but you're right i mean there was there was there was uh i thought the election was over the minute we saw the photograph of the bloodied face and the fist in the air i thought that's it that's that's the image and yeah well joe biden might have thought that too since it was two days later

when he dropped out what about the other side of the answer to the question James asked, which is black voters? How real is that? I think it's very real. It's been persistent, not only during the Biden years, but it's been persistent since Harris entered into the race, is that with black voters, you always have an issue because if you have a thousand person poll, they're going to be 130 or so of a sample an issue because if you have a thousand person poll, they're going to be 130 or so of a sample. And that means you have a much wider error range. But the fact is consistently he's doing better in his low polls than his low polls in 2020, doing better in the high polls, the high polls, the average is better. And all you need to do is cut the Democratic victory margin from 80%

or 85% among blacks to closer to 70 or 75%. You do that in Georgia, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and hold everything else equal, and Trump flips the states. What is it about Trump that is attractive, that is increasingly attractive to the black population? Is it immigration? Because is there some unspoken story we're not supposed to talk about, about the friction between competing groups in various cities and the rest of it, where the black voters are saying he's more likely to get us towards the outcome that is more beneficial to us? Yeah, I think part of it is that the black population is a working class population, and it's the working class that is hit hardest by immigration, the competition from immigration.

It's the working class that hits hardest by upticks in crime. It's the working class and the poor who get hit hardest by inflation. And the fact is, the younger black generation is three generations removed from the civil rights era. Every poll of black shows that the older you are, the more staunchly Democrat you are. So if you live through, if you're 80 or so, and you live through the civil rights era, you're almost certainly not going to vote for a Republican. But their grandchildren are different in their grandchildren look. And there's a large number of them who say you haven't done what you've you know it's 60 years later you haven't delivered you continue

not to deliver this guy seems to understand me i think i'm going to give him a chance and again you don't have to have a huge movement if trump wins 15 and kamala wins 80% nationwide. That's a 65% margin. That's a 15-point margin drop from national in 2020. That is a huge problem in all of the swing states because of the large black population. Republicans are not going to do great with the black vote, but all they have to do is significantly less awful. And it creates huge problems for Kamala Harris and the Democrats. The age question with African-American voters you just mentioned is fascinating because something similar happened after the Civil War, I remember when I was at university reading that in the 1932 presidential election, the Roosevelt campaign put billboards up in African-American areas that read Abraham Lincoln is not a candidate in this election. It didn't work so well in 1932, but they absolutely crushed

it with the black vote in 1936. And it was younger black voters who's peeled off but if you were a 70 year old african-american in 1932 you still were a republican because they you know they'd been on the right side of it and i suppose what we're seeing now is sort of the the reverse of that yeah that's exactly true that is exactly right and the fact is the reason why blacks switched allegiance between 1932 and 1936 was because as the working class, they were massively hit by the Great Depression. And when they received, you know, certainly not as many benefits, perhaps, as white working class voters because of the lingering, not even lingering, because of the racism of many in the democratic coalition uh but certainly uh they received a lot and by 1932 they switched from two to one republican to two to one

democrat and it only got more democrat from there yeah henry olson you can find him at the podcast beyond the polls and you can find that at ricochet.com senior fellow at the ethics and public policy center we look forward to everything that you write, the insights to come, and we'll have you on again, I hope, before the election. And if not, we'll have you on afterwards to tell us exactly what the hell happened. Henry, thanks. Have a good weekend. Thank you. You too.

I should clarify, actually. When you say immigration these days, people think, because they want to impute evil, dire motives to you, they think, oh, you're opposed to people coming into the country. You're opposed, you just, you don't want anybody to come. Put up the wall. No, no. If that was the case, Charles would not be among us.

I'm for immigration. I think we benefit and prosper from a controlled and careful admission of people into this country. We always, you know, we have, period. What we have nowadays, and I think what a lot of people in the black community, for whom I cannot speak in the slightest, may object to is a sudden influx and quantity of people who displace them where they are. And again, this is part of the natural ebb and flow of cities. People come, neighborhoods change. It happens all the time. You go to New York and you'll see a neighborhood that once was this and now it's this.

And you can argue about whether it was better or worse, whatever. But that's what cities do. But when you all of a sudden have your local school gymnasium closed down to all the taxpayers for two months because they have to put in these people who have been seemingly brought in and put on a plane or a bus and brought to your town that creates friction that creates a sort of friction in a small i mean it's a small part in america we see it but it's a large part in europe where you have towns that are that have been ethnically and culturally homogenous for centuries, that are all of a sudden asked to change their makeup in the name of what exactly?

What seems to be this transnational EU project to spread this diversity throughout every corner of Europe. And that's going to work poorly for them in the end, I think. The question is, and again, Charlie, you can draw on your European knowledge here, is whether or not you have a population that just simply has given up in hopes of having any impact on the decisions of their bosses, be it Merkel or Macron or whoever, or whether or not there will actually be some pushback, which possibly takes a dangerous and unsavory form. Because the minute you say you can't talk about this, it's off the table.

And the minute you start penalizing for people who talk about it in rational or intemperate ways, you start a very dangerous process. Yeah, I think what's particularly dangerous at the moment is that the pushback has already arrived. A majority of Americans, nearly 60%, are now in favor of deportations, mass deportations of illegal immigrants, and yet they're not getting anything close to that. I think, particularly within the United States, one of the big problems here is that the immigration system, even prior to one illegal immigrant entering the country without permission, is not very good. Now, often when people say our system is broken, what they mean is we need to have more immigrants.

That's not what I mean. I think that this is a question that is up to the existing polity. I'm very grateful that I was allowed to come here, and I would have been heartbroken if I hadn't been allowed to. But it is up to Americans to decide that question. And if they're going to decide that question, which they should, they should set in place certain rules that work for them. And we don't have those in America. So leave aside for one second the question of illegal

immigration. Most Americans, I think, don't know that far from having a point system of the sort they use in Australia and Canada, and to some extent in Britain, where people are assigned a score based on their qualifications, their lack of a criminal record, their ability to speak English, and so on and so forth, the vast majority, up to 80% of all immigration into the United States is chain migration. And what that means is that if the system decides we want person A because they are a brilliant research scientist, and they speak English, and they're going to pay taxes and obey the law, and everyone in the whole country would say, yeah, we want that

person, they are then liable to bring in, you know, almost an unlimited number of people who weren't chosen, purely because they happen to be related to the person who was talented in the first place it's a little bit like the democratic party at the moment where the current democratic nominee is there because she was chosen by the guy who was chosen by the person who was actually talented which is barack obama so you've got this system where the vast majority of the people who are coming in are coming in because they happen to know someone who would be accepted as a good catch. When you add on top of that, two or three million people who broke in, which is what they did over the border, you have not only got a problem of resources and excess, you know, mouths to feed and so on, but you've got

a feeling among the public and a totally justified feeling among the public that says, well, hang on, what I want out of immigration is to bring the sort of people into America that as an existing American, I want. But 80% of the people who come in legally come in via a system that doesn't check for anything other than criminality. And then on top of that, we've got two or three million people who come in and they feel, I think, fairly out of control. And that does a couple of things. First off, it creates a big political problem

because the public feels as if it just has no say on who's joining it. But second, it creates the problems you were describing, where especially if you are out of work or unskilled, or you just had a really bad lot in life and you didn't have a good school and you didn't have good parents and you need jobs that are at the bottom of the totem pole so you can start to climb up the ladder. And then you're joined by 3 million illegal people and, you know, 500,000 legal people a year who don't have any skills and would never have been chosen on a skills-based system.

You go, what the hell are we playing at here? Like, you know, and this is an issue because insofar as welfare exists within a nation such as the United States, it exists to settle scores between Americans, right? I mean, if you're going to have reparations, which I oppose, but that would be to pay back people who were Americans for bad treatment. If you're going to have a welfare system at the state or federal level, you're essentially saying, all right, you are an American, we have a duty of care towards you, and you've been screwed by the system. Now, look, I'm a conservative, I'm flatly against reparations, I think we need limited welfare. But certainly you don't apply it to people who weren't in the country until a week ago. And I think that's why this is such a

salient issue. Yeah. You have people who say, you know, some people who are living in the shadows, and I get it. I get it. You're never going to, not everybody's going to be legal. And those people who have a laissez-f never going to, not everybody's going to be legal. And those people who have a laissez-faire attitude and think that it's mean to deport people who are here illegally, who broke the law, those people eventually have a moment where they read a story that says this group or this tax-funded group is giving mortgage assistance to non-residents, to non-citizens. They're actually giving them money to buy a house, and they're not even a citizen here. They have that point where they get a little

pilled and say, well, wait a minute. Nobody's giving that to me. I'm not exactly sure why they're giving it to people who are not citizens. And in the end, they'll tell you, as we spoke at the very beginning of this thing, it's because the self-hating cohort or the people who have just been steeped in the ideas of the futility of nationalism believe that citizenship is an absurd concept that borders are arbitrary and really what we got i mean the idea that what makes you a citizen what makes me a citizen nothing but luck my soul was happened to be invested in somebody who was 180 miles from the Canadian border. Pure, absolute roll of the dice that I'm here. So for me to say that my citizenship is worth something is just for me to cling to a privilege that I didn't own.

And that's one of the things we need to abolish, another fundamental structure that we need to knock down. But that's for another podcast. Before we go, how do you feel about your Jags this year? Well, I am, of course, enormously hopeful because I don't have a choice. It is now two days before they play. First game is in Miami. I'm going down with the kids to see it. And I have vested in the Jags all my aspirations for sports in the coming months because the Yankees look very, very shaky and the Gators really look disastrous.

They might plausibly go 1-11. And Manchester United, my English soccer team, is not good. So at the moment, the Jaguars are the team that hasn't done anything and therefore can be given, in the imagination, a perfect ride where they win 17 games without breaking a sweat and then enter the playoffs as the favourites. But I don't know, James. I reckon another nine and eight season.

I have given up entirely on the season in advance, and it's very liberating. I'm going to enjoy it more, I think. Every win will be a joy, will be an unexpected gift. Every loss will be something that I've already factored into my mental and emotional state for the rest of the day. Not that I get that depressed about it, but, you know, you're watching with your friends. You want to be happy. You want to rise with your friends. You want to be happy. You want to rise to your feet. You want to be joyful.

I was watching the game last night. So anyway, Vikings, I don't know. I don't know. We'll see. I miss Kurt Cousins already. I was watching the game last night, and they went to a Bud Light commercial, and I'm just fascinated to see how Bud Light

is trying to rehabilitate themselves. They're trying to get that old football spirit back in there. And they were using a piece of NFL music in the background. And I tweeted about this. I don't know why I mentioned that. Who cares? And it just cracks me up. NFL music is, for a while there, was keeping alive the tradition of sort of martial combat music.

While everybody else was doing their hippy-dippy little sitar ramblings. There were guys who were just banging out these themes that were appropriate for highlight reels of mayhem, decapitation, clotheslining, everything, everything. They're great. But the one guy that they used for this song, for this piece that was underneath the Bud commercial, was a guy who was known for, shall we say, being liberally inspired by the works of others. And so the theme is, and I'm trying to remember the name of it. I can't. It'll come to me. It made me sit up right away the first time I heard it under an NFL highlight reel

because it's bum-ba-da-ba-da-bum, ba-da-ba-da-bum, ba-da-ba-da-bum-bum. And then the trumpets come in. And then I realize he's ripped off Henry Mancini's score for Life Force, a space vampire sci-fi movie. And it's note for note, practically, the way it's written and arranged. It's just Mancini. Mancini doing Star Wars music. And every time I hear it, I start thinking about the brand. I start thinking about football. And I just started thinking about this guy

who may have been given a tape by his bosses and said, could you come up with something like this? And composers know, guys who do instrumental, who do industrial music and soundtracks and stuff like that will know that there's a way of getting around it to sort of invert it,

to write it upside down so that it's recognizable, but it is not legally so. So I just absolutely love it. that there's a way of getting around it to sort of invert it, to write it upside down so that it's recognizable, but it is not legally so. So I just absolutely love it. And maybe, I don't know, if we could go out with some NFL music from this guy, from the Life Force theme, it would be fantastic. If not, we'll go out with something triumphal because it's been a fun podcast, Charlie.

As ever, the 707 has landed. We'll see all of you at Ricochet.com, the proud sponsor of this podcast, and by the way, join. If you think you need a place to go and talk about the election, the member feed is a zesty, vibrant, dare I say, wonderful

place where you can find friends, or people with whom you want to argue, or friends with whom you want to argue. Anyway, we'll see you at the comments at Ricochet 4.0. See you, Charlie. Have a good weekend.