The Ricochet Podcast - All Smiles

Episode Date: July 21, 2023

The days of Carter era malaise were bad, bad, bad. But at least the man had the decency to speak honestly about the nation's troubles. Joe Biden on the other hand insists on telling us that everything's great. We discuss this along with the frowny faced Republicans who hope to challenge him and the proscpects for an American rebound with Kim Strassel, author of the just-released The Biden Malaise.Charles, James and Rob cover New York's claim to be uniquely burdened by illegal immigration; the akward position Democrats are in by wanting to rid themselves of the formerly uber inspiring Kamala Harris; and the media's flip on state governments pressuring schools to follow their rulings now that Newsom's twisted team doing it.

Really? Is that what they say? They say beta testing? Alpha, beta, yeah. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Read my lips. No new answers. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long.

I'm James Lylex, Charles C.W. Cook, sitting in for Peter Robinson. And today, well, welcome back, Carter. We're going to talk to Kim Strassel about malaise. So let's have ourselves a podcast. It's clear that the true problems of our nation are much deeper, deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession. America is a nation that can be defined in a single word.

I was going to put him in... Excuse me. Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, number 651. I'm James Lilex, Minneapolis. Peter Robinson is out for the week. Rob Long is freshly back from some cake-eating enclave somewhere, rested and relaxed. And Charles C.W. Cook is sitting in for Peter. Gentlemen, welcome. Good to be here. Cake-eating? What does that mean?

I don't know. It's a term used to describe... Does it mean fancy or does it mean, like, gluttonous? Very fancy. Very fancy. Yes. Not the hoy not the hoy poloy but the eloy uh gentlemen and and rob of course you are in new york which i understand now is full mayor eric adams has unilaterally uh just destroyed the rule of law that is written on the plaque on the statue of liberty i mean as we all know that's a binding set of principles to which we almost adhere and he says that new york is full it's full and has passed passed out flyers to those who hope to come for jobs and housing telling them there ain't any

we're full don't come here and he says that new york is bearing the unjust undue excessive burden of immigration not texas not the border states not the small towns no but new york is just crumbling under the weight of this onslaught onslaught so you are there um i'm here tell me is this actually the is new york full well it's not full i mean there's plenty of room there's lots of empty office buildings in Midtown. There's tons of space. But it is interesting that what he means is it's full of, I guess, whatever the term is, but, you know, illegal immigrants, right? Which is what happens when the illegal immigrants don't cluster themselves around the border states and and instead go places with where they haven't been before and then suddenly those people discover hey we've got a border problem uh that is what you know we're about six months or nine months away from the from the uh the mayor

of new york city discovering that uh um america needs to get control of its borders uh so in that respect i have i i think we owe a debt of gratitude, and I don't mean this in a presidential endorsement way because I'm not sure about him, but I think we owe a debt of gratitude to Governor Ron DeSantis, who was the first, in my mind, publicly the first person,

the first governor of a state that's been hit by illegal immigration to say, hey, wait a minute, why don't we just send these guys up north where the standards are different apparently and i think that was so he should be he should be lauded for that um but that that is really what has happened um when you let common sense in and you let actual uh experience in suddenly you discover that you're not quite as uh roomy and generous as you thought well Well, Charles, you're in Florida, which is currently groaning, of course, under the boot of Ron DeSantis.

And the anti-immigrant sentiment there, I assume, has led to a complete emptying out of people who are fleeing in terror for their lives, going to places like New York. What is the mood in Florida when it comes to the immigration situation? Well, as an immigrant myself myself i spend most of my day in fear i i don't know james if i'll be on the podcast again at any moment the door i've put my camera like this so you can see the the two doors in case someone comes flying through and takes me out i mean i just think this is hilarious i am no more in favor of illegal immigration as a legal immigrant than i suspect anyone else is but even if i were i would not think that there was something magical about the border towns of texas that was able to deal with it that was not also true in New York or Chicago.

And yet, if you listen to the way that the elected politicians in those places talk, they genuinely sound surprised. They end up saying things like, but when these people come here, they cost money. They use our resources. Well, yeah, okay. And follow the logic through if they're using up too many resources in new york city one of the great cities of the world one of the wealthiest cities in the world a city of seven or eight million people an enormous city what on earth do you

think they're doing in the border towns but i find the surprise the most interesting part of it not the hypocrisy yeah well it's something people have been saying about that immigration forever which is that you can and i think new york city now is the is the you know exhibit a in this you can either have a very robust welfare state yeah which they have in california and they have in new york or you can have open borders but you cannot have both and something one of those two things needs to stop and my i suspect which is what people have been saying for years and years and years is let's start with stopping people coming over the border um illegally let's start

with that um before we start um going broke and um that is certainly that that is the underpinning of what of what uh the mayor adams is saying he's not really saying that we're out of space what he's saying is we're out of money um and um the we'll know that the left is serious about border policy when they say things like well we're out of out of money, because that's the truth. Yeah. And you know, it seems to me that stopping people coming in really is our only option as well. And this is why I was relatively comfortable with the prospect of building a wall. I have this debate and have done for a while with my libertarian friends. I wrote about this in my book a few years ago about the order in which one ought to do this. And libertarians will often say, you know, the problem is the welfare state. That's the problem. And if we had no welfare state,

then we could have unfettered immigration. I'm not entirely sure I agree with that per se. I do think there are cultural consequences to immigration, given that we allow people to vote but leave that aside i don't think that americans would be willing to put up with the consequences of completely denying immigrants welfare i just don't think we are culturally able to do that i i just i mean it's all very well to say get rid of welfare deny welfare to immigrants who come in with nothing i i just don't think we have that culture i mean i i think there's a lot to having that culture at one level i think it would help regulate the flow but i we don't have it and i don't think we're going to have it and as a result you just really do need to stop them coming in in the first place because once they're in we're just not that right that people we don't do that we don't say we'll die on the street well we can't do that

of course i mean because what you're talking about then is born only in one thing and that's xenophobia right um but i agree with you that there's no national will to deny welfare benefits to people in need. And we've seen that in states like, well, mine, where it's a well, they're here, they're driving. So we should give them driver's licenses so we can make sure that they have insurance while they're here. Right. And they're they're impacted to use the horrible word by the things that our elected officials do. So they should have the right to vote. There's this natural sort of, you know, this feeling that, well, you know, they're here, so we have to accommodate a number of things. When you point out that every single one of these things dissolves and dilutes the meaning

of citizenship, they look at you a bit askance because they're not sure exactly why a word like that or a very, very concept like that seems so old should particularly you should particularly matter but i think charles is right you stop people coming in in the first place i you know what do they think happens in texas i think they look at a map of texas they see a big empty state and they figure that people just are sort of absorbed into it like water into the desert after an infrequent rain but yeah well you know it depends on it depends on which delusion you want to which delusion you want to hold in your heart right there are a couple of them but there was one i and i think this is actually true it was true for a long time and the reason the way we got here

was that in the 70s especially the 90s in california anyway because that's where i was living i was living in california at the time um there was this uh incredible economy growing economy um and there was relatively low unemployment i remember in the clinton era walking past an outburger with a sign part of this in the middle 90s saying uh you know help wanted uh 12 dollars an hour which in the middle 90s was like really really really that's a lot of money it's like i don't twice three times whatever the minimum wage was then um because the economy was growing and they needed people and so there was simply there was no discernible downside to it for a lot of the business and agriculture and like you know the the industries that drove california and it was like this unholy um marriage between the people

the the business society industrial and agricultural society who had this delusion that you could continue to do this and there would be no downside and then the delusion of the left which could continue to do this and there'd be no problem with paying welfare benefits and uh and the only people really statistically were hurt by this and something that actually victor hansen writes about in mexico fornia which is really still is a very important book um the only people who were hurt by this were uh black males young black males um statistically that's just what what happened um and so it's probably no coincidence that we seem to be reaping a little bit of the whirlwind in californ New York for the sort of twin delusional policies that people had. You know, when strange bedfellows agree on something, sometimes we say, isn't that great?

It must be absolutely right. Or it could be the worst idea ever. And I think that's what in the immigration laboratory of California, at least least it was the worst idea ever and uh so it's kind of weird to suddenly discover that the mayor of new york city is has has recently noticed that there is no way to square his social policies and his immigration policies yep anyway well as rob noted at the top of it there there's a lot of space in new york unfortunately it's empty office space and it will be i mean there's a new york magazine cover story this week is about how all these prime properties are just empty jp morgan built a huge tower i think on park avenue and they're making everybody come back because they don't want to be another empty skyscraper a class a space that sits there vacant so at some

point somebody's just going to propose well why don't we take over why don't we use the state's power to take over these empty places and fill them up with the with the immigrants? And the idea of the Manhattan skyline, once the glory and the power of American industry, with all the great cap, with all the great firms in their own little Mies van der Rohe towers being replaced by essentially high rise squatting villages in which people who do not have jobs are simply existing at the behest of the state is a depressing way to look at the skyline. But, you know, when you have a great time and then the next morning comes, you're not feeling so hot. We all know what that's like, and real estate's going through that right now. Hey, and you know, sometimes that goes with your personal enjoyment of life itself and when you tip a little, let's say. Okay.

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And we thank Zeobotics response like this i can't wait to try it i cannot wait to try this i'm do you remember i remember that i could probably look back in my journal tell you the day and date where i woke up one morning and discovered okay uh i can't do that like i'm now in my i was like i think it was 24 25 i was like it's that moment where you're like oh no this is no i can't do it so i'm looking forward to it right well keep us posted i'm going to do the same thing and if my wife wants to scan to me this weekend i'll say hey it's a job hey okay i have to lady welcome back to the ricochet podcast kim strassel editorial board member and columnist at the wall street journal co-host of

the potomac watch podcast and author of the fresh off the press, The Biden Malaise. America bounces back from Joe Biden's dismal repeat of the Jimmy Carter years. Kim, welcome. Hi, but I don't know if I can focus on this because I just need to go get some Z-biotics. As do we all, right. Especially this week. That's why we do a Friday podcast. I'd slip you some, but of course, you're remote. Rob's about to burst in here, but I think I remember the Carter years better than anybody else. I remember the Malay speech such as it was. I think I was

sitting in a motel in Paris, Tennessee, working as a seed salesman for North of King. And I remember listening to that and just thinking that nadir, we had been, I've been driving around all summer long in this rented van around the South. And one of the songs they kept playing was sky labs falling which is somehow a perfect example of what america had become once we strode the heavens and went to the moon and now we're all cowering in fear because sky lab is going to fall out of the sky and hit us on the head not a good time not a good time so uh but let's talk about those comparisons between now and the 70s. How apt are they? So outwardly, the comparisons are really quite striking, which is why I went and wrote the book. I mean, inflation, obviously, high energy prices, foreign policy disorder, border disorder.

A lot of people don't remember this, but one of the only other presidents who had a run at the border was Jimmy Carter. Different state. It was a Mariel boat lift out of Cuba, tens of thousands of Cubans escaping Castro, high crime back then. But the kind of fun part about the book is, you know, despite all these kind of top line comparisons, the more I kind of dug into each man's behavior and how we got there, I realized that the comparison was just deeply unfair to jimmy carter yeah i mean i'm i'm now old i can say i'm old enough to remember it the carter years but i'm also um old enough to be have read some of the histories of it and you know he gets a lot of uh for the malaise speech but i mean the thing about jimmy carter was he wasn't living in a weird cocoon bubble where everything was going great and people in his oval office were telling him dude everything's terrific mr president everything's terrific he was kind of like

paying attention to the world around him um we don't get that impression from the current administration right i mean yeah yeah no not at all i mean look he he was in tune and that speech if we want to talk about that speech sort of fascinating story right is it i mean jimmy corder the reason he gave that speech is he did this kind of listening session and had all these people send them letters and he understood the mood of the nation and that it was really bad um and and how that speech ended up happening is unfortunately uh he had an advisor pat caddell who told him yeah everyone feels bad but it's essentially their fault um and jimmy carter was like oh okay um and the other thing though interesting at the beginning of that speech jimmy carter no one remembers this

part he spent the first part of that speech talking about his own mistakes you know and that's another thing very different from this administration not only are they disconnected but when have you ever heard this administration uh come out and say like wow we screwed that one up and i need it we need to do better well to be fair you rarely hear that i think that was one of the things that hurt the ears of the american voter in 1979 it was like this is especially coming after uh you know the first presidential resignation and sort of like this general sense that america taken a wrong turn but i i think that what i i suspect that one of the differences and maybe you can talk about between now and then is that at least then you really could talk about massive inflation and high unemployment and a cratering economy and a year, almost a decade of trouble and hangover from the 60s and the early 70s. And now I think one of the things that's bewildering or maybe makes it even more meaningful is that unemployment is much, much lower than it was in 1979. And inflation,

which is, you know, this is an issue now hasn't been for a while. It's much, much lower than it was interest rates are much, much lower. I mean, we are not in the kind of shape we were in in 79. And yet people really do feel like on the wrong track. Yeah, I mean, look, I think you're putting your finger on something really important, and it's one of the big themes of the book here, which the reason I say this comparison is unfair is, as you say completely correctly, Jimmy Carter inherited a lot of his problems, right? The world was in the middle of the great inflation, as it were. We'd had civil rights unrest in terms of the culture in the country.

We didn't really have a domestic oil or gas industry to speak of. And that really put us on the wrong side as we went through that first oil shock. And, you know, there was just a lot of problems. He promised to come in and fix them. It turns out he didn't do a lot of things right in the end. So things got worse. One of the points I'm making here is no, we're not the same situation uh statistically as uh we were back then however my point is we needn't have been here at all meaning that's why i think biden bears greater culpability in that he started with 1.4 percent inflation you know he started with a country that the year prior to his inauguration had become a net exporter of oil he started with

relatively low crime rates um and because of an agenda a progressive agenda they took steps that landed us in this situation it was purposeful as it was weird weird number of choices made it seems very strange yeah like despite advice despite the histories of carter yeah and economics 101 and uh adam smith's the wealth of nations yeah i'm sorry charlie i cut you off no i i suppose what bothers me is what happens next because we all know what happened to jimmy carter ronald reagan won 44 states then he won 49 states carter was vanquished the democrats went into a spiral the point at which they came back was 1992 they take these two southern democrats these new democrats clinton tries a little bit of carterism fails then there's the republican revolution we all lived happily ever after but i don't think that's about to happen so why is it that biden is not being or at least he doesn't seem to be being meaningfully punished for this

behavior because although yes he lost the house and although his approval rating is low the next republican candidate is not going to win 44 states well no they're not although the book is making the case that this is potentially another moment if republicans were to play their cards right now we all know what the chances of that may be uh maybe not high i mean if you go out and you uh look and you dig into the polls people are actually feeling particularly bitter with biden in this administration on the things that matter to them most on a day-to-day basis in fact he bears even worse than jimmy carter in issues like the econ handling of the economy so you know when people

go to the grocery store when they have to fill up their tank of gas they're they're bitter but i give democrats incredible i give i give them heads i mean i i congratulate them they are so good at distracting from those questions and making the race instead about Donald Trump and his threat to the country and the threat the Democrats pose to your ability to vote and have an abortion. And they suggest that those are the things that are most at risk. And they've been very good at it so far. So if Republicans want to make a use of this moment, and I do think it is a moment uh they're gonna have to find a nominee that can have a message like reagan had and by the way here's

the other thing have a little optimism like reagan had like learn to smile like reagan did yeah yeah that was actually my follow-up question because this is a big theme of mine at the moment is a why don't republicans talk more about the economy they have a 12 point advantage on the economy polling shows and b why are they so dour i mean i do understand you need a little anger you do you need some yeah there's some emotion to show that you two are annoyed by what is happening you don't want to seem detached from it but there is too much frowning i think on the republican side at the moment oh i couldn't agree more you know if you go back and you listen to reagan's election eve address for the 1980 election um he actually

you know he's he's very optimistic in it but he addresses what was also then real anger in the country at where things was. He says, oh, the American people are angry and they have right to be seeing what's been done to this blessed country. You know, I don't see any reason why you can't have Republican candidates acknowledge and actually acknowledge the real bitterness that many base voters feel about a lot of things that have happened in the recent years um but then you got to turn around and talk about uh why that's why that's wrong and how you're going to make it better um and i agree with you i couldn't agree with you more i really hope if rumors are true that ronda santos is going to do a reboot of his campaign you know two things happen He starts talking about the economy instead of just Florida all the time

and Disney and woke this and woke that. I know it gets the blood pressure up, but I also hope he has a coach that sort of tells him how to smile. Like just smile once in a while. I remember in 1979, 1980, I remember that campaign. It was really the first campaign i was paying attention to i think it was 15 and um the press typically they focused on the anger

right ronald reagan for the press in 1980 was an ang candidate he rooted a kind of a revolt you know he was a the child the political child of the the California tax revolt, the angry fish shaking. We're going to burn the place down. And that was how they saw him. But how the rest, I think the voters saw him was like as somebody who believed that the strength and the future of America lie in them. And that was what he kept saying over and over and over again. Look, we just got to get out of the way and let the American people do the work. Now, it's such a weird cliche to hear that but in 1980 those words i mean were i mean astonishingly revolutionary but they were not

angry we're going to get government out of your way and then you're going to go and you are going to make america great again and um that isn't really what we're hearing from the republican front runner it's really more like only I can fix this. And I suspect it's not going to get that crucial 11, 15, sometimes 20 percent who need to be persuaded that you have a plan for me and not just for you. Yeah. And more as a pity, by the way, because while those words may not be as revolutionary as the time when Reagan was speaking them, they are just as consequential. They mean just as much, I believe, to many Americans. Look, even if you're left of center and you might support government more than I do, nobody has a good interaction with government ever, right? I mean, they understand the problems

and the failings. I mean, everybody, I don't care if you're left, right, or center, we all tell the same jokes about the DMV. And they're still just as potent as they are now as they were then. So I think this is going to kind of come down. The other thing that's just so important as well, as you were talking about convincing people, is if these candidates are going to continue to present everything as us versus them you know the right versus the left um we are we are good but everything

they stand for is bad uh they are never going to do what like you're never going to convince those people you have to find like reagan did the things that unite us certain values and certain things that still people believe in that everyone can unite around so that they're not scared of you um and bring it in in this 50 50 country if it's just going to be war that then you're never going to bring anyone to your side. You know, Kim, where I live, the DMV is actually pretty good. Is it? So where I live, yes. Go ahead. It's a block from here.

It's efficient. It's brisk. It's attractive. And the people are cheerful. And you're out of there pretty quickly. And you get it done. Maybe in Minnesota where we have an awful lot of good social capital and things work here. And even though we complain about our governor a lot, it's still, and still Minneapolis has been through the mill, it's still a pleasant place to live.

Nevertheless, I remember in the 70s that there was this general feeling that the reason things were bad was just the entirety of Western civilization was just running down. We lacked the spirits. We lacked the rude animal strength. We couldn't stand up to the Soviets who, in their own own way presented a new vision of the future that seemed to be on the march. And there was just, there was no real sense of what the solutions might be. Now, Rob's right. The revolutionary thing about Reagan was coming in and saying, no, we're just going to get out of the way and you guys can get on with it. And I worked. But at the time, it was seen as simplistic and banal and not possibly true because there was rot and there was decline inherently built into the bones of our society. Now, it seems as if or not there are two

problems. One, the institutions that we think can be reformed have completely failed us and we don't see any way really to repopulate them in a way that makes them effective. And two, there is a general sense, I think, that all of the things that we see, the examples of civil disorder that we see from small to large, from the homeless camps to the naked people in the Safeway eating cake to just all of the strange devolution of societies that we've seen, that there are simple problems, simple answers to all of them, but there is a massive assumed decision to do nothing about them. In other unlike the 70s we know what we can do to fix a lot of these things but we just don't trust anybody to have the will or the power to do

anything about them and that leads to its own kind of futility it may mirror the 70s but it's a more exhausted futility in which there's nobody coming to save us even if the government gets out of the way yeah i mean is it i guess i don't know like i think we as humanity always have a tendency to say uh everything is worse now than it's ever been in the past yeah yeah and i and i get that um i i guess i'm overly optimistic i look back at the story you just told um and and i think i don't want to i think we shouldn't underestimate what that malaise was really like back in the 70s and how futile people felt the entire project was, that it was unreformable. And so, I mean, I take great heart in the fact that we now look back at those as the bad old days because we had so many good days that followed. I'd like to think that if you had the right kind of leader, the right kind of message, and the right kind of ideas, you can do something. Look, I've been really heartened. One thing that

I do think works in the favor of that kind of change, if we're going to have it, is there does come a point at which it all becomes so awful that you begin having people thinking way outside the box. I love the fact that Vivek Ramaswamy is the first candidate I have heard in, what, decades? Who are actually doing for the, like, calling to get rid of the Department of Education. Yay, team! You know, like, there's so many people who have just, they've kind of shied away from big, bold change anymore. And by the way, it was Jimmy Carter who invented the Department of Education. I agree, and I would love to see the same thing happen because, you know, how many students do

they have? None. What could that money be used for? I don't know. School choice. You're absolutely right. But I was looking, I mean, I spent a lot of time looking at old newspapers, source material, and I spent a lot of time looking at stuff in the seventies. Just this morning, I was finding one, a story in 1971 that said, San Francisco now leads the nation in heroin users. So it was there from the beginning, but it was a very small number. And what San Francisco did not have at the time was the sort of disorder that we hear about constantly. Entire neighborhoods being left over.

You know, crime, ridiculous amount of crime where people will actually, it's going to get to the point where people are going to break out the windows of their own car to spare somebody else the effort of doing it to find out that there's nothing in there. The urban disorder that we have, I think today exceeds that that we had in the seventies in many ways. And in other ways is even more distressing because the cities won. We got them back. We turned the corner. The American major American city was a tremendous success story. And now we're on the verge of losing the whole thing about it. And again, it's not because we're fighting some wind that we don't understand that's coming from beyond and we can't do anything. It's because of the political will lacks. So would you rather see

a candidate who, who gets up on his white horse, like a Cervantes character and goes after abolishing the Department of Education, which we agree would be great, or somebody who argues vociferously and stumps all the time on the need to get our cities back, which is, I think, within our grasp and something we can do. I'd like to see both. Is that too much? Maybe in this 50-50 climate, maybe it is too much to ask. Maybe when you have an electorate that doesn't pay an awful lot of attention and hears somebody say, I want to get rid of the Department of Education, they're saying, this guy wants to get rid of schools so children then will go to work in factories because of the labor laws. I mean, I don't know what you do with that side of the idiotic electorate, but they're there. You know, I think crime is a very motivating topic.

One thing that I do think is interesting, though, is I've always felt this, that presidential candidates can get themselves a little bit sideways if they start promising that they're going to fix crime in America. Because fundamentally, 95% of all law enforcement is done at a state and local level. And there's only so much you can do. Jimmy Carter actually landed himself in a problem because of that. I mean, talking about the reconstruction of our cities writ large, yes, absolutely. But, you know, I think that also has to be fit into some much wider theme, because here's the other thing is, I mean, I recognize you guys are in a city. I'm currently in a city, but vast numbers of Republican voters are outside of a city. They live in rural America or small town America. And they kind of feel like, well, if you're going down that rack and ruin, that's because of your elected leaders, you ought to fix it. I'll defer to the other guys just a second here.

Just I want to say two things. One, I'm optimistic about this country. I generally am. I'm probably a Pollyanna and all the rest of it. So when you're more optimistic than me, that's great. I love it. Just so you know, I'm not one of those America doom and gloomers all over. But secondly, it's going to come from the cities elsewhere.

I come from Fargo, North Dakota, and they had a shooting last week the cop was shot um a guy uh an immigrant syrian immigrant pulled out an automatic weapon and started firing and he had been googling he had like thousands of rounds of ammunition and he had been googling the street fair that was coming up in fargo and it looked like they avoided a mass casualty attack because he went too soon i have relatives in fargo who will not come to Minneapolis because they are convinced it is a hellhole of crime that they will just set foot in the city and they'll be instantly on an ISIS video with a with a knife. And now those very self-same people in Fargo are facing the exact sort of thing happening as happened here. So just because they're out there doesn't mean they're immune. And that's why I agree i i agree i'm just saying it would just kind of depend on how you cast the message yeah yeah i'm just rocking on my hobby horse here kim just don't pay attention but can i

can i offer a little just a slight comparison because it's sort of like it's one of the things that i've been struck by what's happening in american politics and certainly you know the kind of the kind of issues that have re re-emerged uh after being sort of dormant for a while like crime and law and order and order the streets and inflation and economies things like that trade energy um in 1979 that was like after i mean two decades two and a half decades three decades of steady decline in urban quality of life so lockstep increases in crime you know they boil the fog very slowly but by the 70s it was just these cities were just a disaster much more much much worse than they are now i mean the the low point or high point of murder in new york city was 1990 but that was after a very very slow steady increase every year um inflation was now started in the 70s and was part of the spending

you know the guns and butter program to pay for the vietnam war which was also a disaster and there's three or four political assassinations we you know the society was breaking down in a way that we now like people talk about you know antifa it's like oh come on antifa does not doesn't have it can't even can't even hold the the you know the the towel for uh the weather underground or people like that um but it seems like the recent memory the cycles are going much faster. So I know young people in New York City who remember coming to New York City five, six years ago, and it felt different, that we notice the difference now. Like inflation didn't just kind of creep up.

It's suddenly we got out of, we left our houses out of COVID and inflation was like 8%. so the argument that you the optimistic argument seems to be more realistic almost and also more believable you don't have to believe in some sunny you know rosy tinted past you can just say 10 years ago um so my question to you is first of all why do you think the republicans there's no republican candidate that i can think of who's doing that? And the second thing is, if you're in the Oval Office right now giving, you know, whoever is, you know, standing in for Joe Biden at the present time advice, like what advice would you give him? Because it seems like he's in kind of a bind, right? I mean, I find his position to be interesting because he can't, you know, when you end up saying to people, no, you're wrong. Actually, things are better. Look, you're wrong. You shouldn't be depressed because you're wrong. Like, that isn't, that's not, you can't put that on a bumper sticker. And I have a solution for him. But I want to hear yours first. Well, so to address the Republicans first, I think the explanation is that for whatever reason, I mean, I guess I can see it intellectually or politically. Everybody's chasing Donald Trump, right? Everybody wants to show that they can be the guy that punches as hard as Donald Trump. And the easy the easy pickings there are cultural issues and banging on the left and

everything. And also, I mean, sadly, I actually don't think some of these people for as long as they've been debating getting into the presidential race, I don't think they figured out what they were going to campaign on in a presidential race. I mean, how do you go do that um you know where you know where are the kind of big policy addresses from some of these guys right you know you get all your supporters together and you let the news know that ronda santos is laying out his national you know his foreign policy speech right or uh nikki haley is is laying out her economic agenda like we got nothing so until they decide

and by the way i also think this is a fool's errand because there are certain portions of the the gop electorate that are only going to vote for donald trump why are you not trying to talk to the rest of them i do not understand but in the white house they have kind of i mean i guess that's where they end up with this we embrace the by dynamics uh and uh this was all a plan and you might not feel as good as you should but we're getting there i don't think that that sells um uh but i mean i guess the only other option is to blame it on everybody else well let me pitch you a solution and then i know charles is getting a kid sorry i don't mean to hog this but here's my solution pitch it to you because you're a watcher of politics if the the

last time a democratic president was running for a second term who was in political trouble meaning not barack obama but bill clinton the solution was a bunch of mini initiatives to appeal to the center right. So suddenly school uniforms for kids was a federal issue. Suddenly 100,000 new cops on the street was a presidential, a Clinton issue. And he did that for about a year before he ran. And he won handily again um but in order to do that he had to acknowledge somewhere in that whole office they had to acknowledge that the people on the center right have a point and they have concerns and those concerns are not

crazy and my my question is is there anyone do think, in that White House or in the White House org or in Planet Biden who is even just like saying meekly at the beginning, well, we could do something like this? Or is it just, are we just in the MSNBC control room? Yep, there is none. And by the way, and there's a million times now. Now, look, they will claim that they have worked with Republicans and they'll point out the infrastructure bill and the chips bill. work. They just convinced a number of big spending Republicans to spend money alongside them. And that doesn't necessarily win them points. In fact, you arguably can blame all of them for making the situation worse, having spent yet more money, which is feeding into inflation. So it doesn't win him any points among the public. But on the questions of actual legitimately policy concerns, there is no one in this white house willing to at this moment which is a pity uh confront the progressive left right right and that that is going to be i mean

if he did that i mean i'm you can't predict the future but that that would be the no-brainer way to simply coast to re-election oh i totally agree with you yeah but it might be too late at this point i agree with that girls before we leave i just think one of the strangest parts of this as well is that a lot of people in the modern conservative movement seem to have forgotten that while we now know how this stuff ended up the people who were engaged in it at the time did not so you'll read these criticisms of a reagan or a gingrich or anyone who tempered their criticisms by saying america is a great place and worth saving you'll read these strange assumptions that well it's different now because things are

really bad which of course you know they were bad in 1980 we had a massive inflation high interest rates the cold war i just wonder how you think we can convey to republican primary voters and many people who write in the same spaces that we do, that there's nothing new under the sun and that there's nothing unique about our era and that it's just not that useful to say, well, it's different because when it's not. Here's a useful trivia question question does anyone know the very first senator to have endorsed jimmy carter for the presidency uh it's a lot more obvious than you think yeah it couldn't i mean there aren't any there's certainly no american politicians that

are around anymore they'd all be so incredibly old it's joe biden it was joe biden it's joe biden true wow so um and then jimmy carter once and wrote uh in his diary that he considered the delaware senator his most effective supporter during the 1976 campaign so to your point that uh has anyone actually lived through this and do they know the truth? Yeah, the guy in the Oval Office does live through everything. He's lived through everything. But I think I think, you know, the answer, we've got to have some we've got to have some Republican candidates who are making that case and reminding people. And that's part of the optimism, like we have met challenges before uh we're actually smarter now than we were back in the 1970s um you know remember milton friedman he was making a few

kind of you know marks on the on the scene back then but people most elected politicians just slavishly followed keynesian economics you know we know better now um so we got to have some people that maybe aren't talking about keynesian economics that you know, we know better now. So we've got to have some people that maybe aren't talking about Keynesian economics. That would not be great politics. But we just need some politicians who are saying we know what works. We know how to make it better. And here's how we get back on the right path. It would be great if the first British politician to endorse Carter had been Neil Kinnock.

Full circle. Full circle. Carter was way too conservative for neil kinnock i look forward to your next book which goes into the 70s again because i want to know exactly why if we're repeating the 70s we're not getting the same sort of musical alternative that we did back then when all of a sudden people put on thrift store jackets and skinny ties and picked up guitars and made a lot of glorious racket that undermined all of the California soft rock stuff we've been living with all of our life. We need punk rock to save us from the Biden years. Stay tuned. The Biden malaise.

How America bounces back from Joe Biden's dismal repeat of the Jimmy Carter years. It's been a pleasure. Thanks. Good luck with the book. And we'll talk to you down the road. Thank you guys for having me. Have a great day. Good a lot of fun bye-bye yeah the other thing that would make it perfectly malaise uh era period is all of a sudden there was a renaissance of waterbeds which for some reason people just seem to have to have uh for a while there you probably sheets that with the waterbeds well that's just it i mean what well

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topics here we have to do with future president gavin newsom uh deciding to run education in california for everybody at the molecular level rob is here to tell you about the great thing about ricochet which is just not some website where digital spirits in some atolliated form wave around in the ether. No. They get together and they drink. Yeah, get together and have fun. In fact,

Charlie and I, last time I saw him, the IRL was at a Ricochet meetup in New Orleans, which was a lot of fun, which I hope becomes a regular event because I never need an excuse to go to New Orleans. We have two more meetups coming up for the summer. And then after that, we'll have an autumn schedule. There's a German Fest meetup in Milwaukee in a couple weeks, July 28th through the 30th. That's the weekend.

And then in Cookville, Tennessee, Labor Day weekend. That's September 4th. If you're a member of Ricochet, just show up. And if you are not a member of Ricochet, just join and show up. And if you are a member or not a member and you want to go to one of these meetups, and meetups that are scheduled either the wrong time or the wrong place, you become a member. You put the sign on the member feed saying, hey, how about a meetup here and at this time? And I guarantee you people will show up because that's what Ricochet members do.

So we would love to see you at one of these. It's like putting a pineapple on your door on a cruise ship without all the polyamory, of course. We would like to see you at one of these. So join Ricochet and we'll see you at the meetup. Great, grand. All right, a couple of things on the way out. Have you guys heard?

I alluded to this about future President Gavin Newsom. I really fear that's going to be the case. They'll find a way to slide Biden off the stage. Newsom will step in. Who will be his veep is the only question. It won't be Kamala Harris, right? I want to watch this fight, James. You want to watch the fight between Kamala Harris and somebody else?

Well, I do, because the Democratic Party is obsessed with identity. This is its main motivating idea at the moment. And I have been told for years how inspiring it is that Kamala Harris is the vice president. And I want to know why it is inspiring for her to be vice president but not president i just want to hear someone make that argument i cannot wait until they're obliged to do it with a straight face and tell me why all those little girls out there can look up at the naval observatory and say that could be me but when it comes to the white house too much oh the delicious joy you're going to have in that and i and i share it so i don't know who's going to be i think i don't know amy klobuchar i'm always throwing amy abie klobuchar into the

presidential v-bring here because she's we've been had we've had this we've had um a problem before i mean politically in America, we had it in 1902 because there were a lot of people who felt that the vice president at the time, former Indiana Senator Dan Quayle, was not up for the job and certainly couldn't be president of the United States. And so there's a lot of talk about there's a way to get Quayle off the ticket. There's a way to get Quayle off so he wasn't going to run for re re-elect um with george hw bush uh and it seems to me like well first of all that didn't happen but it also seems to me like the the democrats are but just they're in the same position kind of they they they have

a vp that is generally accepted fairly or unfairly i think in what in the Dan Quayle position was unfairly. I think he actually, he was a smart guy. He was maybe a little awkward on screen, but he was not. He was no lightweight. He's a smart man and could put two and two together and could have a coherent worldview that he could articulate. And Kamala Harris is sort of like the Dan Quayle without the brains. And it just seems like this shouldn't, there's a template for this already, but as Charlie pointed out, everything is so fraught with them.

They can't make a move without checking it nine times with the head of their DEI or whatever it is, the HR czar that rules the Democrat world. They're going to be stuck with her. There's no way to get rid of her um unless you can trade her out for somebody who is even more inspiring uh quote unquote which i i'm not sure there is anybody more inspiring rachel levine um okay yeah okay i mean really trans representation of the in the uh in the presidential election is something i think the democrats are very concerned about down the road.

This story, anyway, briefly sort of tangentially relates to that. It's in the Daily Caller today, and I've been checking all the links to find out if it's true, and it's actually kind of weird. California Governor Gavin Newsom fined Temecula School District $1.5 million after it rejected a proposed curriculum from the governor's office for its LGBT content. The school board voted to reject a curriculum that included a social studies book that referenced Harvey Milk. Opponents are reportedly concerned about an alleged relationship Milk had with a teenager while in his 30s, according to CBS News. It's more than that. I don't think they just saw Harvey Milk's name in there and said, no, we can't do this. They were handed this curriculum. They just, they decided not to do it, which would seem to be within their rights as a local school board. But of course that's not the case. Newsom said in a press release, if the school board won't

do its job by its next board meeting to ensure kids start the school year with basic materials, and apparently that qualifies now, the state will deliver the book into the hands of children and their parents and will send the district the bill and fine them for violating state law, $1.5 million. So we're going to take $1.5 million out of their school system to fine them, to punish them. We're going to put the books directly into the hands of the parents against what people seem to want to have happen. And why? Because, A, the governor says that they cannot ban books.

Well, they haven't banned a book. Declining to include a book in the library is not banning a book. It's not tossing it on the pyre. But secondly, and this maybe is what fascinated me the most about the story, is that he was saying that if they don't do this and the school board is allowed to have the curriculum that they want in this respect, they'll be using an outdated textbook from 17 years ago. And this is stated like we're all supposed to rear back in horror. Wait a minute.

They're using textbooks from 2006. This goes back to what Charles was saying earlier about how they didn't know what they were doing. And they didn't know how it was going to turn out in 1980. But now we do. And how Rob was saying about how kids know from 10 years ago what things were like. That's true. Except kind of we had a great reset around 2020. The Etch-a-Sketch got turned upside down in a lot of people's minds, and everything on the other side of that wall

is pre-enlightenment. Everything post-20, which set up a whole structures of lockdown and compliance and sudden efflorescence of a whole variety of new ideas that were flowing into the cracks of a sundered society. 2020 is kind of like year zero, and that Newsom would say that 2006, they're teaching things from 2006. Extraordinary. Do we have time for me to slightly disagree with you, James? Of course.

No, as a matter of fact, we don't. Thanks for Z-Biotics and the bad bathroom bait. So on. No, as a matter of fact, we don't. Thanks for Z-By-Hurts and Bath & Bath. So on the merits, I agree with everything you've just said. It is preposterous for Newsom and the California state legislature to take this position. I think what bothers me about this, though, is the completely different way in which the same people are treating this happening in california

compared to florida so i think it's a really good thing that parents can decide what's in the curriculum i like it when school boards are empowered but education is a state question and schools and counties and school boards are all determined and created and funded by the state legislature so if the state legislature. So if the state legislature also wants to get involved in the curriculum, that's okay. I've not objected when Florida has said we will allow or prevent these things being in the curriculum. Everything else is up to parents, and I wouldn't in California either. What bothers me is that Florida made its decisions based on what Florida voters wanted and what school boards in Florida wanted. And then the state of Florida enforced those rules.

So when it came to masks, there were some schools that were threatened with fines. When it came to the curriculum, there are schools that have received a phone call from the Department of Education. If you're going to have these rules, you have to enforce them, right? And I just find it incredibly annoying that the same people in the press took the view in Florida, how dare fascist Hitler lookalike Ron DeSantis tell schools what they can teach? And in California, it's how dare parents think that they can defy the governor. No, you're absolutely right. That's the bit that makes me crazy.

Just pick one. You're correct. And while the state can set the curriculum for this, I think one of the things from looking at this a little deeper that the school board was objecting to was some of the material, which is, again, it's very odd. I don't know why they want to die on this hill. They're always insisting about the banning of books and stamping out anything that says gay. When people are objecting to a very specific set of

graphic novels and instructional manuals that do not seem to be necessary to make fourth graders aware of the rich panoply of human life. And it wasn't for fourth grade, I believe, that the Harvey Milk thing was doing. So I think it's possible the state can set guidelines and the localities can then find a community way of fulfilling those guidelines. As I suspect we'll have seeing in Michigan, where you have places like Hamtrak, which are not exactly going to want to do the same things as some other really progressive places. So I think you should have a lot of leeway there for people to be able to do what they need to do. Otherwise, you're right about the dichotomy and the hypocrisy. It's absolutely so.

All it takes is for somebody to point these things out, though, and pull a Marjorie, you know, do a Marjorie Greene and hold up a picture of this in front of the camera like she did with Joe Biden, who we haven't talked about this time at all. So I should shut up about this and then briefly say we've got five minutes. Biden, whistleblowers. I was overwhelmed by the way the papers didn't really seem to cover an awful lot. I don't think this seemed to be page one, was it? Did I just not look at the right newspapers? This is so depressing and it's actually yielding a profound fear in me james that we are going to whether it's with this president or another democratic president live through a period

in which there is an actual scandal in the white house a scandal of watergate level proportions or more and the press is going to cover it up or fail to cover it i i just i cannot see i cannot see the argument for not covering a congressional hearing in which irs whistleblowers accused the department of justice of undercharging the son of the President of the United States. You don't have to endorse it. You don't have to draw conclusions that are unsupported by the materials, but not to cover it is alarming. Democratic gay whistleblowers, which you would think would guarantee some sort of, I mean, when they heard that that was the actual identity

of one of the people, that must have been a wince. It's like, it's going to be harder than usual to cover it up. Ah, we'll just not do it. Rob, what do you think? I mean, you know, who was it who said, I think it was Noam Chomsky actually said that if you really want to, one of the wise things he said was,

if you really want to know what's going on, you have to read the New York Times backwards. You have to read from the bottom. The last paragraph in the story, or the last two or three, are usually the ones that contain the juicy information. Yeah, I mean, what's obvious here is that the same words, which are usually the heroic words, whistleblower. I mean, if you look in the history of the New York Times or the big media outlets and search for the word whistleblower, it will always be positive. True.

Until two weeks ago. And that pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the story, right? Which is that suddenly, it really depends on who you're blowing the whistle on, who's blowing the whistle, who's blowing the whistle who's got the whistle to their lips etc um and i also feel like we have been uh incredibly casual as a country certainly as a press and as a you know as law enforcement i guess i would say um since obama another president who was very popular with that group, and the use of the IRS to go after your political enemies, which is statistically the only argument for what Obama did, what Obama's IRS did with conservative or conservative-leaning nonprofits and individuals who were suddenly audited 90,000 billion times. Was he wearing a tan suit while he did it because that's the only scandal he had something like that right um and one of the things we learned and one of the things that these are the reforms that came out of the you know nasty 70s we were just talking

about post post nixon uh and the the use of nixon as like the general boogeyman for a lot of people was very helpful i think for for american politics and cleaning it up because a lot of things that uh you know the sainted john f kennedy did and of course lyndon johnson did and probably presidents before that did um did too but when they could pin it on nixon they could then make it illegal which is i think very very helpful but it just just just shows you that even these sort of like pompous declarations of clean government we got from the left, even those will fall for any kind of partisan gain.

And the argument, I always say the same thing about the press. The press is not liberal. They are pro-democratic. They are partisan.'s there's a difference because a liberal press would be liberal but would say hey you're not allowed to you you're not allowed to play around with the irs you're not allowed to uh to look the other influence peddling you're not allowed to do any of that those people go to jail even if they are uh ideologically aligned with us um and that that i I think, this is purely what this is.

This is simply partisan cover for a partisan president that the partisans in the press want in the White House. And because there's Trump on the other side, they now don't even feel guilty about it. They don't even feel like they have to hide it. They're saving our democracy. They're keeping us from falling into the black hands. I mean, that's it, isn't it? it that's the argument is that trump is such a

threat that anything that they investigate that could potentially lead to a bad outcome for biden and help trump it must be ignored because the alternative is worse the other side of the other aspect of that is climate change global warming and the rest of it there's no both sides system here if the planet is dying and we're in peril of losing everything and we must act now to adjust the temperature by 0.1 degree um then then the efforts of journalism must be brought to to make this good thing happen i mean that's a great thing they've convinced themselves that they have the outcome of what of of their stacking the deck and not being fair and and throwing objectivity out the window,

never had, but at least the pretense of it, is that the end result of that is a better society run by the right people and sustainable, whatever that means. So, yeah. So let's have the LA Times, I think, this week was saying, you know what, blackouts might actually be good for the planet. Because if we have blackouts, we have fewer emissions, and that might actually be good for the planet because if we have blackouts we have fewer emissions and that might actually help and it was like the person on twitter who's complaining if you want to know anything about socialism on on the internet it's that somebody had a big long twitter thread complaining about bananas and the fact you could get a banana in January in a 7-Eleven in the middle of North America is proof of the racist, genocidal, nightmarish misallocation of resources that we have in the world.

And with everything else, everything that they want to do makes your life worse. Your air conditioning gets shut off. Your power gets lost. You have no. Yes, we have no bananas could actually be the Democratic platform going forth into the future. And with that, we're going to end. But if you have the kind of weekend that you're thinking about having, you might want to look into Zbiotics. Zbiotics.com, we thank them for sponsoring.

And of course, Bowling Branch, when you do finally hit the hay at the end of the night, rack time. Bowling Branch, there's just none better. Support them for supporting us. And join Ricochet today. Why don't you? Go there, check it out. What you're not going to find is the member feed, you got to be a member to see the member feed, but that's where the community really forms and grows. And the conversations are just all over

the map, all over the board. I love it there. I'm going to go there after this. Take a minute, if you would, to leave a five-star review. No, that's wrong. That's wrong. Shouldn't take you a minute. It should take you about 20 seconds. Type fast, but give us those five stars of reviews. Help new listeners find the show, and it surfaces the show, and then more people come to Ricochet, and we are self-perpetuating and incredibly profitable and here to tell you what to do in the 2028 election if we should live that long. Charlie, Rob, it's been a pleasure, And thanks to everyone for listening. And we'll see you all in the comments at Ricochet 4.4.0. Suggesting Charles. 5.0 is entering beta testing, which you would call beta testing, on Wednesday.

We'll put the results in the boot and pour some melted aluminum on it. You're bad. Sorry. Beta testing. It's like something that Michael Keaton would say in a movie three times and come to life. Anyway, thank you. Great. Beta testing it is. Bye.

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