The Ricochet Podcast - Alpha, Omega and all the Letters in Between

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

Rob Long takes a break from Biblical Greek to catch up with a few of his favorite laypeople. He gives James and Steve his early impressions of the coursework and classmates at Princeton Theological Seminary. Then the trio moves onto our favorite events since we've last seen the future father: the post-Brat Summer letdown for Harris; the meltdown over Trump's shift at McDonald's; and the left's resurrection of their favorite f-word for Republicans.- Soundclip from this week's open: Matt Walsh and Robin DiAngelo's first meeting in the documentary Am I Racist?Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code RICOCHET at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: http://incogni.com/ricochet

You know, I got to say, school, it turns out, school is hard. It turns out that it's not just the alpha and the omega. There's 22 other letters in between. And they all make different words and different declensions. And I, for some reason, forgot that I was an Episcopalian and didn't have to know any of this stuff. And I'm taking this Greek class and it's killing me. 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.

It's the Ricochet Podcast with James Lilacs, myself, Stephen Hayward, himself, and joining us again, brother Rob Long. So let's set ourselves a podcast. Hi, Robin. Hi. And what's your name? I'm Matt. Matt. Hi, Matt. Nice to meet you. I just had to ask who you are because you have to be careful.

Never be too careful. I agree. You'll never get bored with winning. We never get bored. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 714. I'm James Lovicks. Coming to you today without a microphone. I think somebody stole it. I mean, I know things are bad in the newspaper industry, but I don't think we're at the point yet where people start pawning things they find in people's desks. But we'll know.

We'll figure out exactly what happens. Coming to you live from Macbook Air and coming to you from, well, from someplace, an undisclosed place where I believe there was ceremonies and rituals, perhaps, maybe, that he will explain to us, is Brother Rob and Stephen Hayward as well, too. Stephen, Rob, welcome to both of you. Good good to be here it's good to be here yeah good to see you james yeah you do look like you're in some dark dungeon or something yeah we should let everybody know that this um that the the low quality audio for james lilacs is like a specifically designed torture for him like nobody else would care but i know it's killing him because i can see like little veins the the video is good enough i can see the veins on your forehead just kind of getting like oh i'm getting whatever i don't even know what the words would be but no i'm sure it's actually That's actually the testosterone supplement. So, Rob, you're back. Where have you been?

Well, as you know, James, I'm a student now. I went back to school. I'm at the Princeton Theological Seminary. I am a graduate student surrounded by incredibly smart young people who have these incredibly moist brains that they can remember Greek stuff. I idiotically elected to take Greek. I don't have to take Greek to be an ordained Episcopal minister, which is sort of my eventual

end here. But I did it anyway, because I was like, you know, Greek's important, and if you don't know a little bit of Greek, then you're always at the mercy of the people who do, and it's not a very good thing. Oh, I find myself all the time at the mercy of people who know Greek. Well, and if you don't know a little bit of Greek, then you're always at the mercy of the people who do, and it's not a very good thing. Oh, I find myself all the time at the mercy of people who know Greek. Well, you do. You're studying the New Testament, and you find yourself

thinking to yourself, wait, what was that word? How did they use it two verses back and two verses forward? A perfect example of that would be the, and there is dispute about this. Correct me if I'm wrong. There should be dispute about the parable, the homily

about it being easier for a rich man to, easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to go in the eye. There are many interpretations of that. The beautiful parable. But they seem to center around this translation and misunderstanding, perhaps

what they mean by the eye of a cat on the rope and the rest of it. The richer you are, the more insistent you are that there are some textual translation issues there. You could tell pretty much someone's net worth by their interpretation of that verse. The most famous one, I think, is actually in the most famous prayer i think is in the world is it actually in the most famous prayer maybe the most one of the most famous prayers ever the lord's prayer where um if you are a um you know you kind of on our side kind of a you know larger debate a western christian augustine latin kind of

christian right um it's deliver us from evil and if you're kind of on the Eastern side, you know, the Greek church fathers, like Cyprian or Origen, those people, you read that not as the neuter noun, evil, but as the masculine. So, deliver us from the evil one. and i may seem little but it's like you know you but then you look back okay well how was this used you know in the verses before how does that you have used the rest of mark and all that's matthew sorry and like you get on all that stuff and like you i mean um this stuff i could do by the way this is not my problem my problem is the second declension of greek adjectives in the special cases of the word otos and uh and so i'm doing all right and the other thing i've discovered and this we could talk about current events apparently there's an election going on is that i've discovered that um being a writer professionally for 40 years

is um well more than that yeah 40 but not 40 it's like 35 years 30 something plus years it helps you to realize you could sit down and write you know i can turn out you want 1200 words in an hour i can do that it's my job i can do that um but they don't want it interesting they want it like they want you to support your thesis with facts and citations and um i find that rude although i have to say rob that uh i've always preferred the brooklyn version of the lord's prayer that culminates with lead us not into penn station yeah right right even the new one yeah right you want to talk about evil and uh you know, the pit of hell. That captured it for me. Well, can I ask you this?

This may be a segue into the election topic. I forget which conservative luminary 20 years ago described our colleges and universities as seminaries of intolerance. And you're at an actual seminary. Right, and of course it's not a place of intolerance. And you said before we started going live, you said that you're finding it hard. And I take that seriously, because you are there, and your co-students there are asking about the most serious questions, about the transcendent versus the end, which is the election, right? But I am curious.

I mean, most seminaries that I'm familiar with are pretty, the student body and the faculty are pretty liberal. You know, they want to write a gender-neutral Bible and things like that. And I'm no less concerned about that, but are people that are worked up about the election, do they have grief counselors on speed dial in the event Trump wins, or what's the atmosphere? Are you aware of all that? It's interesting, because the Princetoneton theological seminary and princeton university have the same dna right they were born they were it was all a seminary when it started back in 18 or whatever uh and then as things sort of changed that then the university kind of got more secular and the seminary stayed a seminary and the seminary was sort of endowed and started by um the presbyterian church so presbyterian church is still it's still it is

still a seminary for the presbyterian church is not reallyterian church is still it's still it is still a seminary for the presbyterian church is not really a seminary for the anglican or episcopal church that i belong to so i have to do a little extra stuff just to kind of like keep my thing on but um and i think this is true of other places too i don't think it's just princeton or princeton seminary other div schools maybe maybe not but the purposefulness of it, yeah, it's definitely liberal. And some of it's liberal in a lovely way, exactly as it's supposed to be. But the purposefulness of it kind of helps. As I said to somebody, they didn't get it.

The other thing is there's not a lot of laughs here. Like my dean material is getting great, great response. The purposefulness of it keeps the riffraff out you're here for you know you people here the young people are here because they really really do want to serve their church um and there's also academics and phds and people who have like are much more sort of you know academic and brilliant um but they the foundational thing here is that okay we're doing something there's something bigger that we're a part of and we're supposed to be doing and guiding us and that is different i think fundamentally from the secular institution across the street

which is prince of university which i think is extremely quiet these days it's a beautiful campus prince is one of the most beautiful places in the world. And I hope that whatever happens in a couple weeks is going to be digested by these people in a way that doesn't cause them too much distress or too much, you know, I mean, either way, right? I mean, or too much whatever. But it is a different way to look at, there's not a lot of activism on the seminary campus and i walk through the university campus every day and there's not i don't i mean i see posters and stuff but i it's not nobody's yelling and screaming on the quad anymore they might start but they're right now they're they're kind of not and i think the seminary doesn't have that i mean somebody has a vocal group of students who wear a keffiyeh and are concerned about what's happening in ghazal right um they're not shutting anything down and they

they made a they had a demonstration counter demonstration to somebody who spoke at the convocation uh and that lasted 10 minutes and it was respectful and written down and wasn't you know no it was no rotating hunger strikes put it that that way. So I don't know. Maybe it's the purposefulness of it that helps. It's like you don't hear a lot of these things going on in STEM campuses, right? Because people are like, well, I've got problems that I've got to do. So maybe there's that going on. Or maybe it's just a sense that if you're really thinking about bigger things, everything else seems like a smaller thing.

Well, I'd be curious to see exactly how politically sophisticated they are, or whether they're even interested in becoming politically sophisticated. Because you can say that it's a basic biblical principle, a basic human principle to take care of the poor, for example, to be aware of those less fortunate than yourselves. Good thing to think about. It's how you do that that matters. And how you do that is a whole different series of expectations and assumptions about government, people, and the rest of it. And I just wonder, you, Rob, can be that guy who says, yes, indeed. But what if an abundant society, what if prosperity, rising tide, and all the rest of that, what if that is the most efficacious means to securing liberty, justice and abundance for all? And what if we do that by removing the state's intercession so that individuals, I mean, they're going to look at you like this thing coiled around a tree that's saying there's an apple there's a really tasty apple why don't you take a bite out of that i mean you can really be the you know the dark prince of this whole thing i think would they would they regard you as such if you started

talking about these things even that's a very interesting question even in your squishy here's the good news and the good news that that i've this is just what i've encountered was that there was a lot of talk at the beginning spent the beginning semester and for the new students like me the of um of the diversity of opinion that they're going to encounter and one professor actually said look you're going to be in this class you need to know that there are people in this class who vote differently from you, who think differently from you, who worship differently from you. And that is what makes us seminary and a place of learning and not something else. And I remember thinking like, wow, that's really amazing. I think they're like, they must be, I couldn't, I hadn't started yet, so I couldn't tell whether, is this something to tell the

conservatives? Hey, listen, you keep your whatever,. Is this something to tell the conservatives? Hey, listen, you keep your whatever. Or is this something to tell the liberals? Hey, listen, you keep your mitts off the conservatives. I don't know. I couldn't tell. What I discovered later was that part of it is just what happens is that this is a very popular place to come, unlike sort of the other two big divinity schools in the country, one at Harvard and the one at Yale. This is a place to come if you actually believe in something and you actually have some kind of faith really i mean i

don't even mean that as a joke and and so people come are and princeton has just traditionally princeton university has had a lot of connections to the south so people come from this there are a lot of people here from the south and i think the warning has always been to them, listen, we're going to be in a class with people, and your professors are academics, believing academics, but academics, and you're going to learn stuff that you may not have encountered in your time in your church.

For instance, the two very distinct, different, separate creation stories that begin the book that we call the Bible, right? By chapter three, you're already confused. And that is part of the, you know, as they say in software development, that is a feature, not a bug. And you're just going to have to put up with that because i think i think there have been stories of very very bright enthusiastic students coming here from very very very um committed faith backgrounds and they come and they spend you know a semester reading the old testament which a lot of people haven't done and um or reading the hebrew or reading the greek and then the new testament and then um

having a freak out and say oh my god God, nothing I was told is true. It's all a lie. It's all been a lie. And they call home and usually, often there's a parent there or a grandparent or a male relative who's a pastor. And they're like, they said, sometimes these things, they turn these absolutely 100% faithful Christians into total atheists. And they don't want to do that either, but they do want you to read the book because it's the book and the book's

complicated. And so, so I think part of that was like, Hey, don't freak out when you, when you don't, you can't answer the question who parts the red sea with a clear cut answer. And that,

again, that's like, I don't know. That's we're, we're still, we're still talking about the primeval history here i mean not primeval we're talking about the you know the early i don't know we're what are we page 50 and already we're confused like all right so i love that part

because as you know i'm i'm mr uh squishy in the middle well that's great because i i would hate to think that the diversity of opinion means people who believe in taxing unrealized capital gains above $500,000 versus people who believe in taxing them above $600,000. We've got all walks of life here, ideologically. Would you say, and I'll leave it at this, because we could just sit here and talk for hours, we do have an election. Are most of the people who are coming to this school, Episcopalian, would you say that they're more inclined to biblical literalism or more inclined to sort of the idea that it's a set of tales, divinely inspired, mind you,

but nevertheless not a direct transcription of what happened? We're not talking seven days. We're talking seven days describing a direct transcription of what happened we're not talking seven days we're talking seven days describing a vast period of time that only god could comprehend yeah i think i think i think i don't i don't really know i i don't know um i suspect that the the the thing about biblical literalists are the univocalists maybe is that that it's a hard time you have a hard time if you're reading the actual bible becauseists maybe is that that it's a hard time you have a hard time if you're reading the actual bible because it's it's got it's the guy with all these doublets and all these little things in it that just seem like okay well this is i i see here where the p

author of the old testament came in and you know the put it this in front of the thing and i can say the exodus is a perfect example because you have like this, the story of the, of leaving Egypt, which is this great adventure tale. And then that's the first half. And then you have this song in the middle of it, which is ancient and older than anything. And then the second part, the third part of it, on the other side of it is this list of laws, the rules. And they didn't all come at the same time. And so that's kind of what's lovely about it. And I mean, look, the Bible is a pretty good book.

It can stand up. As a screenwriter, that must be frustrating for you. First Acts, great, sets it up. We wonder. Yeah, right. It literally wonders a little in the second part. The third act ought to really clinch it. So, Stephen, do you have anything else to the subject?

Because, like I say, I look forward to a Rob Long podcast that is exclusively devoted to his experiences at the school. Yeah, well, I laid down a marker with Rob that I want to talk to him, at least after the first year is under your belt. I mean, not just yet. And, you know, we get into things like, you know, Karl Barth versus Thomas Aquinas, maybe. I don't know. Oh, yeah, there you go. Wow. Right.

Well, just one brief comment, though, about James's question, which is, you know, literal reading or, you know, figurative reading. And it seems to me, depends on what you mean by literal. I believe you can take the Bible literal if you accept its premise that it's divinely inspired and your revelation from God. If you start there, then it seems to me you don't have to have the position that it literally meant a seven, 24-hour day's creation, since the sun wasn't created until, what, the third day, right? Which sort of defies our sort of categories there. But once you accept that it's serious, then it seems to me that that dichotomy of, you know, what we sometimes say the fundamentalists who take every word literally, that starts to dissolve a bit.

And you think of it much more deeply and seriously, I think. And I'll just stop there because I will say I did read Leon Kass's book on Genesis. I don't know if you know that book. Oh, I do, yeah. It's a fan. Oh, it's worth reading. But, of course, it is 500 pages and very dense, and he's doing a sequel on Exodus that will also be 500 pages.

It may be done by now. I'm not sure. It could be there forever. I mean, you could spend a lifetime studying the first two chapters of this Bible. Correct. The great thing is at the end of it, Rob, I suppose, your last class is on Revelations, which is just a... Yeah, at the end of it, you know everything.

That's the great... Just a dandy way to wrap up the show right there with the six heads and then all the rest of the choirs and the trumpets. Well, great. Pin in that. Move on. Next topic, elections. Anybody has been following what Kamala Harris said in her recent appearances, where there seems to be a great uneasiness settling in on some parts of the left, that she may not be able to close the deal, that maybe the joy of Brad Summer has

evaporated and people are seeing somebody who just really isn't up to the task what do you sense from the nation's reaction and eventual adjudication of the merits of cabal heresy well i mean i think they i have to say that um her team was right 100 right when they um kept her out of interviews they kept her from talking that was a turns out that was a pretty good strategy because now we've heard her talk and we've seen her handle really easy questions from incredibly sympathetic interviewers right and she just doesn't seem to have some kind of she seems doesn't strain it i find it generationally very strange that she doesn't and i'm actually from kamala harris who i you know like she didn't arrive here i mean it's hard to believe she didn't arrive here an unaccomplished person she was a prosecutor and she ran a statewide it wasn't a great statewide but she ran a statewide

um and so she's she knows how to think on her feet. She clearly does because she went to trial. She was in court. So this terror and almost choosing to say nothing to me is the most charitable way I can put it is that it's just the terror of going from basically small-time elections to running big-time elections where you're in charge instead of taking orders that that could be it could also be that she's just a deeply unserious person which i think is also true she doesn't but i think there's a third thing happening which is like i don't think i don't think that she thinks that she needs to do any of this or have any this is what i find most disturbing is that i don't think she thinks of these things as deficiencies she thinks she's just gonna like i'm just have to do this to get become president but when i'm president i sit there and preside and gab and chit chat and and run a meeting which i can run uh and i feel like she is a classic

and i say this as a member of my generation because she's in my generation, she's a consultant. And she's running it like she's a McKinsey consultant. And so her answers are word salad and nonsense. And you think, well, I'm not hiring a consultant. I'm hiring a president. And I think that to me is like – she's not even a very good one. I mean, she wouldn't be at mckinsey or bcg or something she'd be like one of the gray d ones because her word salads aren't that good

um but i've been around enough consultants to know that they can talk for 30 minutes and it sounds good but it means nothing and she could talk for 30 minutes and it doesn't sound good no but she's a she's right she is that the generation of uh of americans that believe that the highest form of enterprise is a consultancy and unfortunately that is not the job that she is auditioning for yeah i keep expecting her to to offer concave solutions to convex problems right yeah the ideal consultant cliche right uh yeah i mean the way i've been putting it is that uh we can talk about the polls if you want but the body language of the body politic is clearly signaling discomfort on all sides with

her and her her brat summer has become as i'm calling it a splat fall uh and look i mean i've talked about this before i think but look her reputation in california is that she was a terrible boss i've known people who work for in in the AG's office, Democrats, career Democrats who hate her. And since she was just the most horrible person to work for, she had, what, 92% turnout. I'm sorry, turnover in the vice presidential staff. And that's an amazing thing because people kill to have those jobs in the White House. And they're willing to put up with a lot of misery to be the center of the action there, right? And then finally, there was a story that came out a few months ago that now, I think you

mentioned that she took a couple days off to prepare for the CNN town hall, where she did miserably. The story out three or four months ago, that sometime in the last couple of years, she was invited to one of David Bradley's famous salons. Now, David Bradley, for listeners who don't know, he was he used to own the Atlantic before Maureen Powell Jobs bought it. And a major publisher, major man around Georgetown, has a big house up on Embassy Row, I think, in Massachusetts Avenue. And he has these salons where he invited dinner. It's all high-powered people. She was so nervous about going that she had her staff do a rehearsal dinner for her and they thought about well maybe

we should actually serve wine at these rehearsals you know what kind of what are people going to be asking me what do i need to talk about how do i so she was that nervous about going to what ought to be a layup for anybody in washington because everybody in washington i mean i lived there 15 years james has been there you know the geor Georgetown cocktail party is what you aspire to, and it's easy. There was no pressure on her whatsoever, but she was nervous about it, which shows that she's not ready for prime time. And we can go on all day about that. Yeah, but I would say, can I just, I want to, it's, I'm just taking as a given, which maybe not, but I, when you say somebody's just dumb then it's over right it is dumb right and like okay that she's dumb i don't think she's dumb um i mean she you know

she passed the bar she told us other it wasn't a great law school all those things you know i just did a podcast with john pedoritz and you know john pedoritz is very very critical of her he like he's an idiot and i get it i get that answer i get that answer i just mean that it to me it feels to me like she doesn't she she has no courage which you desperately need to to join this campaign this this late there are enormous enormous her problem is really simple as It's a political problem. It's not that hard. She needs men, and she needs moderates. That's it. And she needs to paint the other guy as a lunatic.

Well, he's going to do that part himself. And all she needs is that part. And she seems to have a act like she wants it. It's a weird way. It's almost like she thinks that, okay, well, I'm going to – it's like a gig. It's like, no, no. You have to want to take the country in a direction. If you answer a question, hey, look, this is a very complicated question, then you have to want to take the country in a direction you know when you you if you answer a question hey look this is a very complicated question then you have to give me a complicated

answer you can't just you know i i don't know i i find it um i find it amazing looking at her now that's how terrible this campaign has become because it started so great i mean you got to give him credit she raised a billion dollars she made all the right phone calls she looked really good i mean i was saying a month ago you know weirdly about her she's actually good at this and it's all kind of you know what it's all kind of evaporated the way it does when the consultant packs up and leaves and the company's left to actually make the things work she was good at this she was good at that when everybody saw the picture you know the big smiling picture and oh different kind of energy so different than the glowering orange man and the rest of it a A lot of that was just vibe and imagery. I think

part of the problem, I don't disagree with anything either of you said, but I think part of her problem, her inability to comport herself well and impressively in these interviews, is that she's suffering, she's experiencing the consequences of a lifetime of intellectual disinterests

in the word, lack of curiosity. Isolation. Isolation, but also lack of curiosity. If somebody who's hungry about the world will know enough about it to be able to BS for a few minutes with a question that's asked, they'll have a template about that issue in their head because their mind is ranged all over the place. That's just kind of what you would like to expect. She doesn't have that. Right. If I I mean, right. I mean, Bill, if I can interrupt, I mean, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, remember, both had taught constitutional law in law schools. Clinton in Arkansas, Obama in Chicago.

And I know people in classes for Obama at Chicago Law School. And they said he knew what the conservative arguments were. He assigned us to read Robert Bork in our classes with him. So they knew what the other side thought. I don't think Harris has ever for a moment picked up a copy of National Review or heard any conservative argument ever. Yeah, I find it very baffling.

I mean, and especially because it's like we're looking at these two desperately bad circus bears grappling. And, you know, like like last week suddenly trump goes to mcdonald's oh rob you as a show business person you have to thought that was a masterstroke it was brilliant oh i totally know i think it was absolutely but what i thought to myself like

it took them how long it's october, whatever. He was October 20th. It's a couple weeks before the election, and this is the first time this guy has done this. The laziness with which that campaign has like, well, let's give him another rally. Give him another rally. No, no, no. You put him at McDonald's. I would take him to Costco. I would put him.

I would have him do the checkout at Home Depot. I would have this guy, this billionaire, orange billionaire, at every real job in America once a week. Don't do the stupid rallies where he blathers and lies his way through 50 minutes of nonsense. He was great at McDonald's. And people, the voters, like to see that the president knows what a McDonald's looks like inside. And, I mean, yeah, he was there 15 minutes. He made some jokes. That should have been

i tell you i honestly believe if from labor day on he had a job a week and not a stupid embarrassing insulting rally he'd be 20 points up you would have to be a job a week because people absolutely would forget the next thing we i mean we've moved on past the assassination attempts attempts plural and he would have to you're right rob do this every single day rotate through all forget the next thing. I mean, we've moved on past the assassination attempts. Attempts, plural. And he would have to, you're right, Rob, do this every single day. Rotate through all of the various franchises, sparing none. He'd love it, too. I mean,

just imagine the jokes and the self-deprecating jokes that could be done if he put on the orange apron. You know, he'd just sit there and talk about how it matches his costume and the rest. Home Depot, yeah. Before we go any farther though i'm i'm going to welcome rob back by forbidding him the opportunity to bust my segue i'm simply going to go right into a spot oh yeah no let's let's i want to say this james i as you know i'm i'm on

my way to taking religious orders and so i'm trying to take take seriously the only two commandments that we as Christians have to follow, which is one is to worship your God, honor your God, basically gratitude, and the second is to love your neighbor. And so in the spirit of that, I'm not going to interrupt your segue to your spot. It is a philosophical disquisition I would love to have. If somebody is saying they are not interrupting your spot, but yet they are are interrupting your spot does intention count or does the effect of their actions we can talk about that a little bit but it's a christian paradox james is what i think certainly there's no

paradox when it comes to data security you need it you want it and it's a big problem because when you interrupt somebody's spot you know it i mean you do it you just go right to it it's like a you with intention that's the most important thing that's actually the most important thing theologically i think is the is intention is like this is what i have you know this is there's no half measure anyway right uh you were in the middle of something you're right and but if someone believes actually that their interruption is actually improving that it's a bit that is enjoyed by all then there's a little bit of the overweening ego in there that says that you're not actually doing a good thing.

You're doing something to aggrandize yourself. Say, having said that, I would like to remind people, I had made a point about data security and why it's important. I thought this all the time. I was just over in Europe, and every time I waved my phone at something or tapped this or acceptor, the rest of it, I thought, exactly where is my data going?

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if it's incogni. I want to see the Italian language lessons that I took back in college make me want to... incogni, but probably not. And anybody who speaks Italian has probably just wet themselves in my accent. All right, back to the lecture that we have. Now, Rob was saying it would be a great thing if Trump continued to do this,

but the blowback would be so delicious. I mean, the fact that that one McDonald's trip generated so many pieces of hair on fire about, you know, he wasn't wearing a hairnet. Two of them I saw about that. Somebody else went back and pulled the record to see. You know, it's not real hair. It's an antibacterial micro antimicrobial fiber. Well, I would like to know that. But, you know, for being the most vetted candidate in modern history, somehow we haven't gotten around to the microfiber nature of its here. But they don't see the latest thing, of course. And I'm going to say something which I know is going to be shocking to you guys. But it appears to me as if they're trying to make Donald Trump sound like Hitler. I know. Oh. I know. Or a fascist. Now, we all are old enough to know

that every single president of a Republican nature in our lifetime has been Hitler. And I was the one, if you go back and search in LexisNexis, I am convinced that the first mention of this phrase is mine a long time ago, which was,

in the future, everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes. On the wall. And I mean, Reagan was Bush Hitler. Bush Hitler. One word. I I mean, Reagan was Bush, Bush, Hitler, one word. I and Kamala Harris, I believe, gave a speech today where she called him a fascist.

And these people have very little understanding what fascism is, other than it's the things I don't like. Yeah, they know they don't like it. They don't like it. So I'll give it to you then. Is ninth time the charm for the

old hitler fascist thing you would have thought that at some point let's let's do this let's stipulate that trump is as awful as they say he is or that rob sometimes says he is i think he's not but all right the point is you would have thought thought that somebody in the Democratic hierarchy would have at some point have read the old fable of the little boy who cried wolf and reflect that they shouldn't have made such damn fools out of themselves going back 70 years now. By the way, I have all the receipts on this. The first instance I can find was 1940, when Henry Wallace and the Democrats charged that Wendell Willkie he was a one-world right wendell wilkie was hitler's preferred candidate in the election that year and by the way hitler was a real thing going in 1940 right i can't remember this from the history books yeah and then it can't you know uh tom dewey was hitler uh that's what harry truman said actually right about the same week in the 1948 election cycle late october and then goldwater oh my god i mean i i go on for pages about all the ways that he was made out to be hitler and then you go on down the list uh you

know reagan was hitler uh right uh the only republican who was never called hitler was eisenhower if you think about it for two seconds it's hard to make it stick on the guy who actually routed hitler on the battlefield right right but so i mean i think they made damn fools of themselves saying this they can't seem to come up with anything original, and it just shows their desperation in my mind. They just said one other thing. Well, no, I'll stop there and let Rob weigh in on the Hitler question. I was just going to say the fascist thing. The thing about fascism is like, I mean, okay, stipulate that fascism is bad.

We don't like it. But it doesn't seem like it's that much of a you know it's like racist you know it's like okay yes it doesn't have any value and i don't think it's connecting to the voters the way what you want to do what she's just they're failing at that one thing which is um we've seen it we've seen this movie already the trump movie she's change she's going to bring back change we need change turn the page he's exhausting and crazy and um and incompetent in many ways and yeah there's a little bit of a trap there for him for them because the in my opinion the thing that disqualifies him the most aside from post-election nonsense is is his handling of covid which was

atrocious and wrong yeah but they agreed with it so that that's the problem right like it really was that they agreed with everything he did they were applauding like if you could shut down the country more they would like to do that like the trump gavin newsom plan for the united states economy was to destroy it yeah he wasn't fast enough about covid yeah exactly right i mean we need a little uh ron desantis brian kemp to keep the give the trains running on time in this country um and so they but they're not connecting to what they should be connecting to and weirdly he isn't either but i think he's going to start um but i i just it's to me it's just it's it's it's banana It's like it's like a faculty lounge argument, which they still don't know is not America. Well, the proximate cause of this, the charge of this week is that General Flynn said that Trump said, I wish I had generals like Kelly.

General Kelly. Sorry. Oh, God. Yeah. Flynn was the one that yeah. Who is it? Everyone. Very different. Maybe he is the kind of. Sorry, General Kjell. Oh, God, yeah. Flynn was the one that, yeah, yeah. Liz and everyone. Very different general. Maybe he is the kind of general. Okay. The point is that apparently Trump can't name a single World War II German general. Apparently he never heard of Erwin Rommel when somebody brought him up.

So, I mean, really, you take this seriously? And, oh, Trump said this four years ago now, and we're only hearing about it now, two weeks before an election. Gosh, that seems awfully convenient, doesn't it? Maybe he was saying that he just wanted the sort of generals who leave a bomb under the table and take a phone call outside. Yeah, I mean, part of the problem is that we already had four years of Donald Trump, and he did not annex the Sedaton line. The Babylon Bee has one of their typical classic headlines. It was, Democrats tell us Trump wanted to be Hitler in his first term, but simply forgot. Right, indeed.

Well, the whole idea of nothing outside the state, nothing, that basic fascist concept is not something that sticks well on the right because the left is very very progressives are very proud to tell us how much everything should be gathered into the loving embrace of the states of the village of the rest of it um we must have collective effort for climate change we must have collective effort to reduce systemic isms and all the rest of it i mean they're all about using the instruments of the state, maximum power, in order to force, coerce, change human behavior. So I find it amusing when they make that charge, still believing somehow in their heart of hearts that it's 1968 and that they're the party of just nothing but free love and absolute total free expression and freedom for all and the rest of it, when they morphed into the very sort of authoritarian apparatus that they supposedly hated in 68 but moving uh beyond trump and kamala something even more important british election interference uh in american politics this is a weird strange story and uh steven i think you you might be the one to to describe it for people Yeah, so Keir Starmer, the new prime minister of Britain with one of the largest labor landslides ever.

They've got like 425 seats out of the 650 that you have in the House. And by the way, the opinion polls show that Starmer is more unpopular than any new prime minister has been in the last 50, 60 years. I mean, he's cratering already. And in the midst of this, he decides that he and his party, they want to come over en masse, like 100 members of the House of Commons want to come over and campaign for Kamala Harris. Now, there's two things about this. Where are the screams of foreign interference in our elections? And second, how stupid can Starmer be?

I mean, with all the momentum right now behind Trump and the likelihood that Trump is going to win, why would you want to alienate, for no good reason of your own, the next president of the United States, who you're going to have to deal with about Ukraine and the European Union and all kinds of other things? It just, to me, shows how incredibly inept Starmer is as a political leader. I was just over there, and you're right.

He's not loved. And there are a series of steps that were being touted in the Telegraph. Yeah, I know, the Telegraph, but it's not exactly a raving right-wing paper. The Telegraph was noting that there's been a series of art movements in No. 10 Downing Street paintings that have been removed because they have the wrong message. Sir Walter Raleigh, he's out. Elizabeth I, she's out of here. Slavery for both of them. Gladstone, I think, got the boot at some point. He took down Margaret Thatcher's painting because it was on the wall, and he said it had nothing to do with her politics. He just didn't like paintings in

which someone was looking down on him. And I thought, if you took Thatcher's portrait and put it on the floor, he would still be looking down on you, Mr. Tover. The other thing that he recently took out was William Shakespeare. Apparently, that one had to go, and it was going to be replaced by something that's a little bit more diverse, wonky, sparkly, etc. They took all of the paintings of men out of 11 Downing Street, a meeting room where they meet four people, and replaced them with women or pictures of women in order to show their commitment to empowering and the rest of it. So these are kind of tone deaf things. There are statements that you make to placate a certain number of your base, but they fall like a cold coal on the floors of the rest of the people in the country who are wondering exactly why this was necessary exactly to do. But that's what you get from all the years zero wage type. We think it's bad over

here. There was a proposed legislation that new rules to govern whether or not a pub owner has an obligation to interfere when the banter between some mates in the back, having a pint, becomes injurious to the sensibilities of various protected groups. It's in order to keep the workers' health and safety, of course, that they might themselves, having their ears abraded by an off-color joke, would suffer harm and distress. So now there's talk of the completion of the banter cops, that everybody has to look around their shoulder and see now there's talk of the completion they have to be banter cops that everybody has to look around their shoulder and see if there's somebody who's taking down what they said in the local boozer and you know i talk to people who've been labor all their life and they

just they grit their teeth and they just sort of despair of this nonsense never ending yeah i mean it's like i remember years this is sort of somewhat similar but years ago um when new york city had a smoking and restaurants ordinance and of course it went it got you know everybody knew it was going to happen and those restaurant owners hated it because it's like come on let me just do anything and um you had to go when you went to a restaurant maybe you're old i'm an old man right remember when you go to a restaurant they go smoking or non right and you uh it an old man, right? Remember when you go to a restaurant, they go smoking or non. Right. And you, uh, it doesn't matter.

Like, cause there's a smoking section, non-smoking section. And of course it was like masks, no masks. It was stupid. Cause like there'd be a table that was in the smoking section next to a table.

That was the non-smoking section. Um, and you, but you had to designate a certain number of tables, a certain amount of things you had to have a, like a smoking area had to be like, it was incredibly, incredibly onerous.

And at the city council, Andre Soltner, the great chef Andre Soltner, who ran one of the best restaurants ever called Lutece, he cooked almost every meal there for 30-plus years. When he retired, it was a front page story of the New York Times when he retired. And somebody asked his wife, well, what are you going to do with all your free time now?

And she said she'd lived in New Yorkork city for 33 years because you know i've always wanted to see a broadway play but of course she could never see one because she was always working right anyway so he went down at to town hall and he was like arguing against this he said what are you doing i've run a restaurant in the city for 30 years i think i know best how to keep my customers happy i think I know how to run a restaurant. Why are you telling me how to run a restaurant? And they looked at him, they acted like he was like from, you know, like he was, well, what's the worst thing you could be? Like he was some kind of fascist, right? He was completely right. He's like, if I don't,

if I don't serve my customers, they will not come. That is the only regulation I need. And he was right. And it's the same thing for these pub owners. Like, if I let things get out of hand and I don't step in, everybody who's ever been behind the bar knows there's a time when you step in. There's a time when you move people away. That's the job of a bartender, partly. Like, you don't need a commission to tell you how to do that. if you do you're going to be out of business soon anyway if there's one thing that the ale of britain and the steak of

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Elon Musk say anything this week that we should be worried about? I'm never really worried about anything that he says. podcast before we go gentlemen um anything else that you would like to discuss elon musk say anything this week that we should be worried about i'm never really worried about anything that he says i mean he'll he'll repost something on x twitter and then say either wild or two exclamation points and from that i'm supposed to infer that he too is hit or his hand made yeah well actually i make a comment on on Rob's point and your question about having a commission to regulate what goes on in pubs. Look, you know, I always show the students the public opinion polls showing the complete collapse in confidence in our institutions. And one of the reasons for that is that our government is no longer competent at doing its basic tasks like, oh, I don't know, policing the streets uh providing quality public education uh picking up the garbage right but they want to start policing what we think and what we say because their competence apparently extends into that right uh and i think people i think

this is why people don't respect their institutions anymore as they aren't any good and the media same thing right people can see that the media is completely partisan and superficial and so forth um and that explains i think some of trump's Now, he's crude about it, but when he says we never win again, I think a lot of people import into that exactly that sentiment that, gosh, nothing seems to work. It's supposed to work. And meanwhile, they're telling us we have to wear masks. We have to police what we say. We're going to censor Twitter and so forth. And so here's where, let me try this, James. I'm going to see if twitter and so forth and so here's where let me try this james i'm going to see if i can reach concord with brother rob's i don't know if we're going to see

before the election brother rob but um let's stipulate uh that uh uh that trump may not deserve to win for all the criticisms that you and many others make right but i believe the left richly deserves to lose to Trump, not just a Republican. They deserve to lose to Trump. Wow. That's great. That's a theological question. I meant to be right.

Well, I don't you know, I don't think anybody deserves, you know, I believe in salvation by grace. I'm not sure that. Well, we may need that after Trump. We definitely need it but i i think that we um i think that we as a country and as a culture deserve president trump or president harris i don't think these are two of our best choices i don't think they're two of our best leaders i think we're kind of in a decadent phase where we think that all the questions are small and little, and they can be sort of either insulted away on X or word salad it away in some other way. And I think that we, you know, the country kind of agrees, right?

And what I object to from my liberal friends is this idea that this is somehow new and then oh those you suddenly discovered this like and it just drives me up the wall because it's like this is not new this this the the stupefication of american political conversation is something that's i mean i hate sounding like the kids saying you started it but you started it and and congratulations because you you you the the left and and and i think in many ways that the institutional left um simply operated on this assumption that the grown-ups will always be in charge the grown-ups will always hold me back i could do whatever i want i'm a spoiled kid and it's okay because daddy's they're gonna they're gonna pull me back from the abyss they're gonna they going to keep this from getting too weird.

So, you know, we can say nasty, horrible, ridiculous things about President George W. Bush, or President H.W. Bush, for that matter, or Mitt Romney, or anybody we want, and we can go way over the top on that. But, you know, that's okay, because we're the kids, and we're allowed to do that. And the grown-ups will never do that. And now they've discovered, no, you've created a whole new political movement you've energized a political movement i mean half the people like that not half but a huge portion of the energy in the republican party now are people who are been republican for about 25 minutes and um and that

you created this and you you set the table for it and now guess what people are coming to eat and they're not the people you expected. And now you want to put the toothpaste back in the tube and say, oh, no, can we just please go back to when it was nice? And if you were a sentient conservative or even center-right figure of a certain age, you're like, well, you guys hated all the Republicans you love so much. You hated and vilified and called fascist as james put it so like i don't what do you expect me to do that was yesterday it was yesterday and yesterday everybody deserves everybody deserves what they everybody deserves what they're going to get and they deserve to get a good heart well yeah i'm not so inclined to believe so. I like when I say that we deserve this. I don't think we do,

but the very fact that everybody has chosen it willingly tells me that I'm probably wrong. But many things. What I don't know is, am I... Well, Robbie, you had a piece for commentary about the Daily Wire, Matt Walsh's, Am I Racist? Tell us a little bit about that on the way out. Oh, sure.

Yeah, well, I mean, if you want to I mean, in showbiz, this is a crisis of comedy. They're looking for comedy. What makes people laugh? And Matt Walsh and I guess the producer of Daily Wire, Jeremy Boring, who's a really smart guy, and Ben Shapiro, of course,

they sort of produced this movie and Matt goes around and he has these... I it's like i can't even i don't want to describe if you haven't seen it treat yourself it's it's the funniest movie you're gonna funniest and truest movie you're gonna see and it um confirms the things that we've all known which is that the sort of dei nonsense is nonsense and that it's not really serious and that those people are kind of like off their rocker. All that stuff is in this movie.

And what I love about it is that not only do I agree with it and I am applauding to it, but I'm also laughing at it because it's genuinely funny, and it is a financial box office success. Which is great. That is good news for everybody really what would it say something about the bubble in which a lot of these people live if somebody was saying i want to do a movie on what is a conservative and they wanted to talk to me and they called me up and i said sure and i show up and it's john stewart in a groucho glasses with the nose and i would say but you're john stewart man walls can go to all these people and

and nobody ever says i've where have i seen you before oh it was that movie about what is a woman that was all over the place or it was that twitter the rest of it no intersection whatsoever that's a good point non-contiguous information streams uh steven have you seen the movie and if so uh why not yeah i know i have seen some clips of it i haven't seen yeah i haven't said right i haven't seen the whole thing yet i've been i've no good reason i was overseas whatnot but at the point is is it used to be michael moore who was the funny guy who would ambush people and now our team is doing it just as well and yeah i mean walsh won't be able to get away with that many more times but it's what you just say is they didn't know who he was, and so they were utterly candid with him.

And, you know, oh, and of course, the left, like the devil, Rob, hate to be mocked and laughed at. Yeah, right. Well, I mean, you know, then don't be so funny. There's a, I start out, as always, with commentary columns. I try to, like, talk more about show business than anything else. Reminding everybody, there was a great long-running TV hit called Candid Camera. Alan Funt did it for years

if you're a certain age. He's not even that old. You remember Alan Funt and his son Peter took over after Alan got too sick or too old. There's always been hidden camera shows on TV. Ashton Kutcher had Punk'd and there was like a bunch of them bunch of them um and the tagline for um candid camera was we catch people in the act

of being themselves and it was this wonderful warm funny thing with like normal people being normal and it's just it's funny it was uh and that is exactly what matt walsh did he caught people in the act of being themselves and they will never forgive him for it i believe the candid camera grew out of candid microphone which is on the radio which is a whole different thing it's like ventriloquism on the radio i think i'm not really sure how that works but candid camera um unfortunately i think sort of spawned prank culture which was a a lot more boorish and a lot more mean, invasive and mean and the rest of it.

But I, too, remember Candid Camera when I was a kid at Grandpa's Place watching it on whatever night it was. And the sort of little giggle that people got when they realized that they were in this. And the very fact that an entire culture, I mean, the show was very popular. The idea that you might be on Candid

Camera was sort of this omnipresent question in the minds of so many millions of people. Something weird happened. For decades, you thought you could look around for the camera because Alan Funt with his little bald paint might stick himself off from a potted plant and give you a big smile and say, you've just been on the national television. Back before the days where everybody, of course, wanted to be an influencer and make a fool of themselves for absolutely no reason. Having done so that just myself here, no, for a very good reason, to promote Ricochet

and to promote Lumen and Incogni, two great products. Lumen for your metabolism, Incogni for your digital safety. And we thank them for sponsoring the Ricochet podcast. We thank Rob Long for coming back, of course. We thank Stephen again, a regular member of the flagship podcast family. And we thank you for going to Apple last week and giving us those five-star reviews. Really, we thank you. You, on the other hand, who hasn't done it yet, go do it. And also, by the way, if you haven't joined Ricochet, this is a great time because we're having a lot of fun discussing the election, and there are meetups in person, great time because we're having a lot of fun discussing the election, and there are

meetups in person, and we're going to have a lot of fun discussing the election afterwards, too, in the member feed, but you've got to be a member to be a member of the member feed, he said tonologically. That'll do it, guys. It's been a lot of fun, and I hope to see both of you next week. In the meantime, we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0.

See you soon, fellas. Great to see you, Rob. Good to see you guys, too. Bless you, my sons. Ricochet 4.0. See you soon, fellas. Great to see you, Rob. Good to see you guys, too. Bless you, my sons. Ricochet. Join the conversation.