The Ricochet Podcast - Ancient Ideas and the Spectacle of the Union

Episode Date: March 8, 2024

It's the Cooke and Lileks Show today! The duo delve into the egregious State of the Union address, and lament the erosion of the enumerated powers doctrine. They talk TikTok and the Energy and Commerce Committee's unanimous bill against the company's Chinese parent ByteDance; Charles has high hopes for the upcoming ruling that may well overrule the Chevron doctrine; and James has a few Oscar reviews and an ode to old Hollywood.- Soundbite from this episode: Joe Biden decrying the Dobbs decision in his SOTU address.

We can make it if we try. Yes, indeed. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast. I'm James Lylex. Usually I'd be talking to Rob Long and Peter Robinson, but they're out, about, in the world, and so we've got Charles C.W. Cook. Let's have Ricochet Podcast. I'm James Lilex. Usually I'd be talking to Rob Long and Peter Robinson, but they're out about in the world.

And so we've got Charles C.W. Cook. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the power of women. But they found out when reproductive freedom was on the ballot. We won in 2022 and 2020 and we'll win again in 2024. Well, thank you very much. They call it Super Tuesday for a reason. This is a big one. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 682, if you're making hash marks on the wall. I'm James Lalix in Minneapolis. Peter Robinson and Rob Long, the founders, as we call them when we want to speak of them in hushed, august tones, aren't here. But who is Charlie Cook? And couldn't be

happier to see him. Charles, how are you? I'm good. How are you? Before we began, he was describing the meaning behind his cap. And part of American identity, of course, is to proclaim your interests, your solidarities, your affiliations with your baseball cap. Yeah. And he's wearing one from a summit, a one Utah summit. And I asked jokingly in my way whether or not there was some deep bifurcation in Utah that they were attempting to weld together by having a one Utah. Because you don't sort of think of states as being, you know, but of course they are. And what may look solid from the outside, you know, polity actually has its own internal fractures. So before we get to the pressing news of the day, Charles, tell us about the actual bifurcation of Utah, that it's not one monolithic culture, but two.

Well, or at least that's what they're trying to avoid, because there's the southern part of the state that is more rural, and then you've got Salt Lake City, which is increasingly urban and young and cool and sprawly. And I don't think this is true at all of their current governor, Spencer Cox. But I think historically there has been a great deal of focus on Salt Lake City, perhaps at the expense of the rest of the state. So they have the One Utah Summit, which I spoke at last year, to address this and remind them and say, hey, we're here. And it seems to have been a huge success. It's a great state.

If you haven't been to Utah, you really should go. It's incredibly beautiful. It is. I'm glad you helped stitch it together. But it's like that with all states the big city has its own little culture in the out state you know or greater minnesota in this case uh see this at the imposition of moors and ideas from the from the the godless cosmopolitans and the metro centers everywhere but of course when we're attacked from the outside then we all then we're all one state. We all bind together. It's like the Dakotas.

People from North Dakota will hate people from South Dakota and vice versa. But if anybody attacks the Dakotas as an idea, we are brothers in soul and blood and the rest of it. Well, so it is with the nation. When attacked, of course, we are unified. When we're not, we dither with all sorts of meaningless internal contradictions and arguments and the rest of it. All of which was on magnificent display, I'm sure, yesterday in the State of the Union speech, which I completely forgot to watch, thereby relinquishing any ability whatsoever to speak about it here. And probably because I hate the speech entirely in its concept and its execution. I wish it was a letter that was delivered to Congress as it used to be. I can't stand the imperial presidency trapping of it.

I can't stand the mendacious and meretricious political class lapping to their, you know, bolting their feet and clapping with the sclerotic, senescent people who seem to run the government. All of it. The laundry list of things that are wrong and the equally long laundry list of expensive ways in which they'll be rectified like that, it is meaningless. It is irritating. But from what I understand, Biden's performance is being described as fiery. Everyone's using that word, fiery, which makes you think, given the number of speeches we've seen lately of him where he is staring into the distance and cannot find where he is and mumbles and seems like an old man who got off at the wrong bus stop and is waiting for something to come along,

it makes you wonder whether they went back to the National Archives and figured out what kind of B-12 cocktail they jabbed in the butt of a Kennedy before his back pain medication made him too goofy when he had to go out and give a speech. So, you know, from the clips I've seen, I'll have what he's having. Charlie, what was your impression? Well, it seems to me that most of the praise of Biden, other than that that's been issued by hardcore Democratic partisans, is, congratulations, Mr. President, you didn't die up there right that's facetious but that is the tone of it well people said people said that he could what not get through a one and a half hour speech because that was actually a worry 86 percent of americans think he's too old 65 percent of americans think he's going to die in a second term, or at least have to step down.

And he managed to give a speech, and he managed to do so while angry. So congratulations, you've passed that test. I mean, look, James, I hated it. You and I are going to agree on this. It's always better when people disagree, but you and I are going to agree. Because I think, like me, you don't think the State of the Union in its current form should exist. No.

It's not great within a republic i say this when there's a republican president as well as a democratic president i'll come on to my specific objections with biden in a moment but this should not exist in its current form it is a telling historical fact that the man who got rid of the state of the union as an address as a spectacle was Thomas Jefferson, and the man who brought it back as an address and as a spectacle was Woodrow Wilson. And I think that tells you everything you need to know. Yep.

It shouldn't be as it is. It smacks of the speech from the throne. I don't like the image of the head of Article 2 going into the lower house of Article 1 and lambasting them demanding things telling them off fighting with them what you were so i was primed to dislike this as i always am from the beginning but this speech was particularly grotesque in that it was a campaign event i don't begrudge campaign events that's great have as many as you want let's all argue our differences out i don't like this modern aversion to rough political debate let's do it we all disagree let's argue with each other

but maybe not at the state of the union when you're the president of the united states and you've been asked to deliver an address articulating how the country is. Now, you can never depoliticize that. But Biden last night went so far beyond it. It was us feed them. He shouted at Republicans. At the beginning, he seemed to compare Trump to Hitler. Ugh, this is not becoming of a republic.

No, we're being too—I mean, one of the things, the theme of this year is that democracy itself is on the table. This is our last shot. This is it. And if we don't make the proper decision, every single one of the institutions and traditions that we have will evaporate in the face of the withery fire of Donald Trump, which is nonsense. But there we are. And it seems to be to continue. I mean, we've always we've always heard this is the most important election of our lives. This is the most consequential election of our times. I'm used to that. But for it to be an actual existential hinge, it seems to be a bit much. And I don't know if Biden believes it. I don't think that Biden

believes anything. I've been watching this man for 30 years, 40 years, and everybody knows that he is an empty, self-regarding, mendacious, to use that word again, politician from Delaware who is way over his head, basically, when you look at the intellectual capacity of the man. So I, you know, he gets up there and clutches his fists and starts warning us about these things. So the speechwriters are the ones who ought to be taken to task. And apparently, we're being told, this is a quote I'm given here that's floating around, the issue facing our nation isn't how old we are. There's a way to sort of dodge that. It's how old are our ideas. Hate, anger, revenge, and retribution are the oldest ideas, but you can't lead America with ancient ideas.

It's rhetorically incoherent, but actually, ancient ideas are part of the American DNA, and I would like to think that we would keep those. But we're talking about a speechwriter class that is probably enamored of all the year zero ideas where we're going to start fresh because now today us here the inheritors of everything i'd know better than anybody else about how to adjust manage and massage human nature to produce the perfect utopia um so yeah i mean that's totally backwards isn't it in that yeah of course you don't want hate and revenge to be your guiding stars but the great insight of the founders and what separates them from utopian revolutionaries such as we saw in the french revolution or in the soviet union or in communist china is that they did not believe that you could create new soviet man they didn't think that

man was perfectible they thought man was flawed flawed. Now, some of them, most of them, although not all, believed that that was because man was fallen in a religious sense. The others just thought that people didn't change, that human nature was a constant, that the political questions that animated the Romans were broadly the same as those that animated the American colonists. And the constitution that they wrote reflects that. So, it seeks to harness all of those ancient vices, ambition being one of them. Not to get rid of it, not to channel it through the right people, but to harness it and set various branches off against others. Anger and revenge will always be with us. That's why we have a constitution. If we didn't exhibit those emotions and traits throughout history, we wouldn't need a constitution. Madison says this very clearly.

If we were angels, we wouldn't need a government. So, to say, well, we can't be governed by ancient ideas, it's incomprehensible to me. We are governed by a document that acknowledges the existence and the permanency of ancient ideas, but also that taps into other ancient ideas, like law and love and comity, and not as it's used today, but the general welfare. You know, these are ideas that are just as old as, hey, that's the whole point. Again, irrespective of your religious belief, there is no human tradition that doesn't revolve around the interplay between bad ancient ideas and good ones.

Mm-hmm. You mentioned the French Revolution, which, you know, when I was growing up, it was sort of taught to us that this was like an echo of our own. Well, we had a revolution and threw off the king, and then France did too. And it got a little messy, you know, guillotine and all that stuff. But, you know, it was good that it happened. And it's only later when you go back and really study the French Revolution you realize what a clusterfag it was. There was one piece I was listening to on the radio the other day in a podcast that was about the French Revolutionary attempt to decimalize the clock. Because they looked at the clock with its 60 seconds and 60 minutes, and they thought it's not rational enough for the New Age.

So they came up with a clock that had 10 hours, and then, you know, just reconfigured everything. And imposed upon people a completely different way of telling the time, which everybody's brains have been wired to understand for their entire lifetimes. It did not go well. It really didn't. And eventually, of course, they would come up with dual clocks. And then eventually, of course, they would abandon the thing altogether. Another podcast was describing how the Soviets had a problem with the weekend because, you know, they just, it wasn't right. It didn't, the idea that you would get off on a Sunday had religious overtones. So they started randomly appropriating or randomly handing out weekend days based on a lottery system,

which meant that your Sunday may be on a Tuesday or Friday or Thursday. And then it all varied, that you would come to work and you would get a slip, and the slip would be put up against the chart, and there's your weekend day. Well, the problem was that nobody could take time off for the dentist because your dentist was no longer at work. He was on his work and at the DACA or whatever. So nobody could coordinate anything. Families couldn't coordinate anything.

And it took decades. And eventually, they brought back the concept of the weekend for a few. And eventually, they brought back the weekend for everybody. You look at the blank slaters, and in every attempt, they try to rewrite human nature, human history, and completely go against the grain of what a society has become. And eventually, the gods of the copybook return, and the lessons are learned. And it's a question whether or not we're going to relearn them in our rue or in a condition that lets us realize that those ancient ideals have been in place and informed us for a very good reason. And for Joe Biden, at his age, to be the advocate of year zero thinking just shows you you the wind sock that that fellow is and uh I'd like to say I'd really like to know who wrote the speech and and their perspective on the ancients

do you think they might have one Charles I don't think they would be great fans of the ancients that's my suspicion here people often ask who's running the White House. And this often ranges into conspiracy theories. Is Barack Obama still the president? No, he's not. You know who's running the White House? The progressive blob. Right.

The progressive blob is running the White House. of interest groups and university presidents and political activists that you see in Washington, D.C. and around is running the White House. And that's why the White House has made some really baffling decisions. It's why the White House decided to open the border when it knew not only that the public doesn't like that but that the most likely opponent biden would be facing in 2024 would be donald trump whose thing is the border it's why the biden administration decided to engage in what has to be the single most counterproductive and regressive policy i've seen in my time in the United States making people who didn't go to university pay the tuition of those who

did because he's surrounded by people who care about that they're the people who went there they're the ones who have the jobs that didn't pay them as they thought they would and who have a lot of debt people to be fair though I mean you mentioned cornucopia isn't the cornucopia the the mythical thing which which produces infinite amount of fruit that it's a you know it's a it's a yes an intermediary object of the gods when you have a cornucopia from which pours a bounty in in in unstinting quantities which is how they actually regard the federal government, because the tax money isn't coming from the people. They don't think at all that the people, you know, the

janitors who work in my building are being taxed to pay for the ridiculously useless degrees of people who went to college. No, the money is just generated MMF. It just comes out of the printing press and nobody has to be taxed, except, of course, when you have to have tax for social policy. Now, one of the reasons that I like the flat rate tax is that it's it's fair. It's it's equitable to use their terms and that it applies to everybody. And it's not one of those laws that's rejiggered according to how much money you make, which seems to me like unequal treatment. But I gather that this has all been hashed out in the courts, and it's a moot point. But if you have a Biden-esque proposal, as we had last night, to tax the wealthy more in the corporations,

to make them do what? Pay their fair share, as ever, to pay their fair share. This is not to generate income in order to pay for the... It's simply to achieve a particular social end. So the idea of using the tax code on individuals and institutions and companies whatsoever in order to achieve a social purpose that makes them feel good ought to make them think that they are contorting and distorting what the government actually should be. But of course, we're what, 60, 70 years past that point? Well, this is a problem with the 16th amendment

if i may explain the people who passed the 16th amendment seem largely not to have anticipated that it served as a crowbar and opened up the federal government in a way that was not supposed to happen but that is what's happened the federal government is a way that was not supposed to happen. But that is what's happened. The federal government is a charter of enumerated powers. That means that the federal government can only do what it is explicitly allowed to do. Now, that has been eroded over time, particularly in the New Deal. But that was the idea.

James Madison made this very clear. He enforced that rule while he was president, famously in 1814. And he wrote about it in the Federalist Papers. He opposed the Bill of Rights because of it. Because he said, why do we need a Bill of Rights when the government can only do what we've allowed it to do, and we haven't allowed it to do any of that? When you have a long period in American history in which the Enumerated Powers doctrine remains largely in force. The 16th Amendment is then passed.

Of course, the Enumerated Powers Doctrine is still there, which means the federal government can only do a few things. But clever people start to notice, well, if we can't directly do this, we can use tax policy to affect the same end. And you start to see the tax code building and building and building as it now is. And this is now what we do see the tax code building and building and building as it now is.

And this is now what we do with our tax code. It's not just that we don't want, if the Democrats, that is, the rich to have money. Barack Obama famously said that in 2008. He was asked, if you raise the capital gains rate and it brings in less revenue, is it a good idea? And he said, yes, because the people it will affect have too much money. But it's that we can't tell people what to do in lots of direct ways federally. So we encourage them financially, either by sending money to the states and taking it away if they don't do what we want, or just by giving people tax breaks. And that's how you get Obamacare.

But in a less controversial, although perhaps it should be way, that's what the mortgage interest deduction is as well. Essentially, they reward you for buying a house. They reward you for having children. I mean, we can debate the merits of all of this, but they can't make you have children. They can't make you buy a house.

They can't change your status under the law based on those things. But they can encourage that behavior by saying, if you want to do this and this, we'll let you keep more of your money. And so much of the resistance to a flat tax, your preference, comes from social architects who have realized, especially with this Supreme Court, that if we took away that ability to micromanage via the tax system, the federal government would actually lose an enormous amount of power. I think that would be great, but to them, this is the worst thing in the world.

Right. You cannot retool the society according to get the end that you want, unless you have a quiver of many arrows, a toolbox with many implements in it. And it's not just the tax code, of course, it's regulations. The other side of this is that you can get around the enumerated powers by somehow just regulating things sneakily, and something that has the absolute force of law and directly affects the way people live and spend and the rest of it, but it's a regulation, so it doesn't count.

But this is coming up before the SCOTus soon isn't it it is this is really one of the biggest issues facing the united states this bureaucratic sprawl that has put an enormous amount of power in the hands of people who were never elected and who aren't accountable to those who were and it's been made worse by this case from the 1980s that's known simply as chevron right what chevron which makes you think it's about oil spills or pollution or something like that's an environmental case as so many of these were and what chevron held was that if the law is deemed to be ambiguous by an agency, the courts must defer to the agency's interpretation, unless that interpretation is crazy. And the problem with that, especially in an era of gridlock, and gridlock's generally a good thing, is that it

has allowed agencies to come in and twist the law to do what they definitely could not get through Congress. And when you say this, people who love that administrative power say, stability. But actually, we're seeing the opposite of stability now. That might have been a reasonable argument in, I think, 1984 when the case was decided. But that's not what we've seen, is it, James? What we've seen is Republicans win, and they say, this law means that. And then the Democrats win, and they say, no, no, no, no, no. That law means that and then the democrats win and they say no no no no that law

means this and then we get these dueling mandates the same text underneath them and they fight it out every four years and then a new guy comes in and then they reverse it and if you are on the end of this as a business or a charity or any organization or just an individual you are screwed because the the little guy is the one who gets trodden on and the courts which would normally be your recourse when you're trodden on have sort of preemptively given the game away and said well there's nothing we can do about it so the supreme court's going to look at this and i think they're at least going to narrow the doctrine which will be a really big win for our constitutional government a start a start people will naturally say well what this what you want that is you want to go back to the old days with it where the company polluters could just pollute however

they want the epa was absolutely toothless and you want to look at them in the face and say yes that is exactly what i want i want poisoned rivers with fish dead so thick in the top you can walk across no i don't but what i want is very specific and sensible things that are spelled out and voted upon so people can be held accountable to them. I've told the parable before of the charcoal mat that affects our family business, and I'm going to tell it again. There is a spot in North Dakota where the trains stop to be refilled with diesel by our company. They're coming all the way from the West Coast with goods clattering their way across the plains. They stop in Fargo, and we fill them up up and they continue on or

disgorge some goods. The spot where they've been filled up has been a spot where they've been filled up for decades, a very long time. So I'm thinking perhaps it's not ground in which you could plant a tulip and expect it to bloom next year, maybe in 10, but it's probably got a bit of remnant oil soaked into the surface. It's not clean. And I'm guessing also probably that you don't want to pour a whole bunch of toxic chemicals on there, even though it's not on top of an aquifer, because it's just not a good thing to do. We want to be good stewards of the earth. So when we go to fill up those trains, yes, we're careful. You don't want to pull the hose out and have a dump oil or gas or diesel all over the place because that's wasteful. You're spending money on that.

Well, here's what we have to do, though. In order to get the hoses up to the trains, the guy has to carry them up this steep hill. And in the wintertime, it's miserable. So he's pulling this heavy hose up, jamming them in. And before he can start, he's got to put a big charcoal mat under it so that if anything does drip from the spout or the nozzle, the charcoal mat will absorb it. There will not be a jot, an atom of petrochemicals that seeps into this already presumably poisoned soil. If he does not do this and there is a spill, there is satellite interrogation of the site going on all the time that can tell whether or not you had a spill. And you have to report it right then. And if you don't,

there's a fine and you're probably going to get a fine anyway. So if it's 20 fricking below in North Dakota and the guy who you just hired, who's good, but he's probably going to leave because the jobs are, you know, labor market's insane. He's probably going to go off to the oil fields or something like that. If he pulls it out a little too quickly and some stuff gets down and the satellite sees it, you get dinged. I was with my brother-in-law who runs the company. We were sitting at dinner and he gets, boom, he gets a text. And there'd been a slip minute. There'd been like a couple of gallons spilled and he's just beside himself because it means paperwork,

endless paperwork for the next day or so. And having to go back to the authorities and this, that, and the other thing. Okay. Take that example of a little bit of regulatory, you know, signing off on it. Well, of course, there should be a fine if you spill some stuff and then magnify that across absolutely every part of American industry. And you have the sense of these, as I keep calling them, boat anchors that have been draped around the, you know, the vital spirits, the horses that should be pulling our economy. I'm not making an argument in favor of pollution i'm just saying it would be nice if it was spelled out voted upon and perhaps a little less invasive and onerous right and that's a rule you're describing that's not in the law what makes me crazy about this is that when you say i don't think that the environmental protection agency should be able to do whatever it wants people

say exactly what you just said which is oh so oh, so I suppose you want pollution. But the next thing they say is, no, we have to be able to enforce the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act, and so on. And you say, sorry, could you say the names of those again? The Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act. No one I know, literally no one I know, wants to repeal the Clean Air Act. It's just that they don't think that it gives the federal government the right to come into my house and regulate my vacuum cleaner. That's the problem. It's not that we want dirty air or dirty water.

We have that legislation. It's extremely popular. It was passed on a bipartisan basis. There may be some little parts of it people would change here or there. The problem is when ideologues and radicals take these laws, twist them into meaning something that they don't, and then where's your recourse? And again, the problem with Chevron is that if you, in your example, go to the court and say, obviously that's not what it says in the law, which it sounds as if it's not, then the court says, eh, I don't know, the agency says so. Well, the agency the agency is an executive

branch that is nominally under the control of the president should be more so and it's not allowed to make law so i i think this is not just a start i think this is big although i do agree with you there's a lot more work to do you mentioned that you don't want the government coming in under some pretense and regulating your vacuum cleaner and i'm here i'm here to tell you that that's the sort of of of of earth hatred of sort of that concerns me i mean i have a dyson vacuum cleaner it's battery operated and therefore sustainable um i plug it into this thing and there's it goes into a thing in the wall and the power comes from somewhere.

I'm not sure. It's probably some nice little windmill that's going outside of town, or the sun. God bless the sun. Hail the sun. Sol evictus. But, you know, the battery-operated one is holy. Then the corded one that I have, of course, is bad because it goes right into the wall and somehow doesn't have a battery involved, so it's wrong. Battery's good.

Plug into wall all bad. And if anybody wants to, you know, is concerned about the fate of the earth, as Jonathan Schell once gave us the phrase, uh, you would think that the more sustainable, the vacuum cleaner, the better. And since it is better, it ought to be enforced by regulation. Um, where there ought to be first rebates that nudge you that way. And if there isn't, there ought to be penalties for not using the proper vacuum cleaner. Your vacuum cleaner, what they want is for it not to suck so much. And you want to say to them about, you know, could the same apply to you? But I'm serious. Everything that they want consists of making

our life worse, that the vacuum cleaner doesn't work as well, that the soap that you put in your dishwasher doesn't get everything off, that the shower that you have doesn't have the pressure or the heat or the duration that you want, and that your toilet has to be flushed multiple times in order to get its job done because every one of the constricting regulations and things they have to make things better for the earth make things worse for the people on it. And that's kind of a feature, not a bug. I'm convinced that Brexit began when the headlines appeared in the Telegraph and other papers that the EU, that Brussels wanted to regulate kettles, tea kettles.

They wanted to regulate how hot they got and how long it took for them to boil up. And I think that was the moment at which a great number of Bretons put down their papers and looked steely into the distance and summoned the spirit of their ancestors and said, this is the line, and across that, they shall not come. Because they realized that there was no end to the things that they could do to make your life less convenient if it was draped with the mantle of the new morality of eco-wonderfulness and sustainability. I'd like to think that Americans are more resistant to that here, but, you know, when you look at what we did with light bulbs and the rest of it. We seem to have gone along just like everybody else.

Yes, although you haven't had any choice. Right. Well, I mean, we had a choice for a while. We could be weaned off the incandescence and then pushed into the awful little curly pigtail things before they finally figured it out with LEDs that let us go between the two of them. Would it have been adapted as quickly if we'd not had the mandates? No. Eventually, the superior technology would have worked. Eventually, it would have gotten cheaper, and we would have gone there. But what we had was, I believe it was under the Bush administration, thou shalt not have this kind of bulb that you like anymore. You just can't, you know, for reasons. Well, this is why I'm such a federalist, because it's very difficult for these questions to be meaningfully answered

by the public when they get rolled into everything else. We have these national elections, we focus too much on the presidency, and people do not realize or do not care that as part of that, they are voting, for example, to set tree logging policies in Oregon. But they are. It's just that they care a lot more about whatever three or four major issues are being debated. And they should care a lot more about that. That's not irrational. That's a totally rational response to the political choices that they are given.

And light bulbs is one of them. It's really hard to get people to rebel against that sort of rule when that rule is coming out of a permanent bureaucracy via a process they have not heard about and being headed up by a president who is now in charge of 760 million things this is why i want to devolve more power back to the States. I think there are a few national roles for government, the border, foreign policy, some trade, civil rights. But it's crazy. That story you just told about North Dakota and the company and the EPA. I mean, how are you going to get that resolved, James?

It's very difficult. There is, in California, a disastrous policy set by the federal government that regulates water. It's a very complicated issue. I've written a lot about it. I won't relate the whole thing here. But when I last went out there to write an update i had dinner with a bunch of the people who are to be fair on left and right who are trying to get these epa rules changed so that there's more water in the central valley for farming and the biggest allies

that they had in fixing this problem which is a federal power that is being used to make life more difficult in california the biggest allies they had were senators from other states because if you go into louisiana or probably north dakota and you say hey this is crazy right then the senator from those states says yeah that's crazy i'm sure i'll help you but they couldn't get their two senators in california at the time i believe it was feinstein and boxer maybe they couldn't get those senators to get on board because they had other concerns namely environmentalism right but you have a federal policy that is mostly affecting california and the people who want to fix it live in other states, and it doesn't matter to them.

This is ridiculous. And of course, if that problem were relegated to the state level, then people might actually be able to get across about it and get some meaningful change in their own state. But until it is, then those senators, I mean, Dianne Feinstein has passed on now, but Dianne Feinstein can say, well, I'm sorry about this, but that's not an issue for California. That's an issue for the president. Well, of course, if you support agriculture, then you're supporting monocultures, and then you're supporting, you know, the use of fossil fuels to fertilize.

We can't have that. I always love that, you know, John Kerry will come out and tell us that the greatest threat now to the planet, I guess, is the fossil fuel consumption used in agriculture. And we have to do something about this. And you sort of raise your hand and say, that's true, but I am hungry somewhat. I'm feeling a bit peckish. I would like the fact that there's lunch coming and that there will be lunch coming in a year from now. Europe is going through the same thing.

And then, of course, when you say, well, you don't want want us to have good healthy food and you don't want us to eat meat so you just want us to eat the bugs right and then of course they look at you no that's that's paranoid nonsense we don't want you to eat the bugs but they are a good source of protein you know what cracks me up though about this all is that california yes federalism great root raw but when california does something and passes a lot it ripples throughout the rest of the country because it's such a large market they say we're not going to accept any chicken we want all of our chickens to have a six foot by six foot living environment and so if you want to sell chicken here then your chickens have got to basically live in studio apartments somewhere. They did the same thing with pork, and it all of a sudden shuts off the market.

People in faraway places have to adapt to a California regulation. California or Texas makes a change in their textbooks, and that too ripples out. It's insane for them to have as much clout as they do. But by the same token, I would rather, you know, then people say, well, who do you want actually then to set the national standard? Do you want it to be business? Because in a sense, in American history, in the 20th century, the American chain stores came into every single little town and changed the way everybody did business. It's funny now that when we look back at the old postcards, we smile and say, look at that.

It's a Woolworths. There's a Kresge. There's a Kress. Gosh, I remember those old variety stores. But at the time, they were bitterly opposed by the retail merchants who correctly saw that they were being put out of business by these people. But still, eventually, you know, things changed. And these chains were able to set a national standard and a national attitude. But it was to the benefit of the consumer. It didn't destroy the small towns like Walmart did. And it brought goods from all over the place to these small places. Now,

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Take your payments by smartphone, transform your tablet into a POS system, or use Shopify's POS Go mobile device for a battle-tested solution. And they'll tell you more about that if you ask. Plus, their award-winning 24-7 help is right there to support your success every step of the way. So do retail right with Shopify. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash ricochet. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash ricochet to take your retail business to the next level today. Shopify.com slash ricochet, lowercase. And we thank Shopify for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Charlie, I mentioned there something called the TikToks.

Unpopular with people in positions of power who want to do something about it. I'm a free speech, free platform kind of guy. I also hate TikTok with every fiber of my being, right down to the pith of my marrow. What say you on the attempts to divest or change or do something about the TikTok peril? Well, I hate TikTok too. There are two reasons for that.

One is that it is a hive of stupidity and civilization-destroying nonsense. The other is it's Chinese spyware. And I think that the federal government has a role in addressing the second issue and not the first. That vote yesterday in Congress in the House was 50 to nothing i know and there's a reason for that and that is that there is no doubt whatsoever that tiktok which is owned by a company called bite dance is really owned or at least extremely close to the Chinese Communist Party. And that is a problem. The people I have seen who have reverse engineered TikTok's apps

have left me in no doubt whatsoever that it collects an extraordinary amount of information that is accessible by one of our geopolitical adversaries that to me is a question for congress i was just talking about federalism i very rarely think things are a question for the federal government but that is one of them and so the federal government is asking nicely tiktok either to completely move from the grips of the chinese communist party into american ownership in a sense bite down so they have to divest or be banned i have no problem with that whatsoever if the federal government had said we think that this is a grotesque app for grotesque people and it's corrupting our youth i would agree with that but i would have a problem with them trying to get rid of it and so with the first amendment but that isn't the case that's being made the other

part of this which is not currently being debated, but has in many places already been debated, is whether government agencies should permit TikTok to appear on employees' phones and computers and networks and so on. And the obvious answer to that is no. Wait a minute. Hold on a a second this comstockism i'm hearing from you if you say that the the employees of the federal the young staffers who come to dc full of idealism are not going to be allowed to have this entertaining necessary social life in the television the next thing you're going to be telling me is that they shouldn't be allowed to have sex on the table in a senate hearing room. Yeah, that's another of my radical opinions, actually. They shouldn't

be having sex on the table in a Senate hearing room. It's like the plot of a 1980s or 1990s movie. Somehow, they managed to get a device onto the staffer who walks around the White House that's enabled them to remotely map the exact dimensions of the place. Well, you know,

as I keep saying about everything that had to do with 1984, it turns out that we all volunteered for it. It wasn't imposed upon us. Everything that Norwell predicted, we signed up for, waved our hands and said, can I have that toy, please? Can you bring the telescreen into my house so I can do it? I mean, there are times when I... You know what's odd about this, though, James. And I'm not extending this criticism to Democrats in Congress, because clearly there is an admirable bipartisan impression here that was yesterday manifested 50 to nothing. But there are parts of the progressive coalition that are crying about this and suggesting that it's incipient fascism. the same people who thought that because the trump campaign had bought a few thousand dollars of facebook ads the election had been stolen right they're the same people who constantly go on about

data mining quite rightly by facebook and twitter and isps and so on but for some reason tiktok is exempt when tiktok is the problem and will finish by saying this, forget for a moment, government power and this bill. If you are listening to this and you have any sort of control over your home network whatsoever, do not allow TikTok on it. I don't allow it on my home network. It is blocked. It is blocked at the DNS level. Anyone in this house tries to go to TikTok.ok it just doesn't work it won't even look up the information and that goes for all of their cdns and backup servers and so on as well this is extremely pernicious and especially if you have children get them off tiktok you know put them on something else if you like social media use whatever you want but

the u.s government is absolutely correct about this. And I hope this goes through. And I hope what it does, it annoys the Chinese Communist Party immensely. And we can all move into broad sunlit uplands afterwards. So I hope. You want to offer the assurance to young white women that they will be able to sit in the front seat of their car and cry about something on another platform that's what facebook's for there's reels right we used to have this wonderful thing called vine which essentially was tiktok but was just didn't feel as creepy and ooky and and and awful and the rest of it um there will be something that will come along

and and you'll all be fine but for now we'll just look at this. I mean, yes, you're absolutely right to block TikTok at the DNS level because I feared that if I let it in my house, it would instantly leap into the network, talk to my smart oven somehow, and then handshake with an unused fire stick that's plugged into an inert television downstairs. But within a couple of days, it would have gained root access and I'd be locked out of all of my accounts.

So screw it. To hell with TikTok. Be gone. Before we go, let's take one other cultural little leap over here, because we've pretty much covered the waterfront from politics to the culture. But, of course, the Oscars are coming up, and I put the Oscars in the same category as the State of the Union speech. I don't watch it. My wife will, as women will, because they like to see what they're wearing on the red carpet, and they like to see

how the actresses get dolled up and the rest of it, and they like to see you, Juan, and all that stuff. But I care not about it. I think, did you see Oppenheimer, for example? I did. I went to the movies to see it, which is rare.

So did I. So did I. I went to the actual movies and was impressed, very much so. I was one of those guys who, when you hear the names, when he meets the various people and the names sort of open up a little box in your head where you've stored the names of famous historical nuclear physicists and the rest of it and you feel all proud of yourself for recognizing the name um but i you know i i'm the only guy in the theater who's who's uh who's cheering um oh who's the character's name oh my god we're gonna have to i'm straws um no um i'm thinking of is it it was it teller who wanted to bomb everything? Yeah, that's right. Right, Edward Teller. And he's a little fleshy and a little sweaty and the rest of it, but I'm saying, there's my guy. There's Mr. Teller.

Go, team Teller. And the fact that the movie lavished about an hour, it seems to be on his inability or difficulty in getting security clearances. But I was carried right along with it. A marvelous performance, and I'd be perfectly happy if the sole movie gets all of the awards because then I can preen that I made the right move.

But I also think that Barbie is probably up for something. And Charles, I know that Barbie probably wasn't your first choice to see. Did you get dragged to Barbie, or did you go willingly looking to see what this is all about? I didn't see it. And I still haven't.

You should. I should? You absolutely should. Because it's not what either... The people who are running around the room with it on their shoulders as proof that their side is right, I think, get it wrong. It's both sides are right and both sides are wrong. It's not an ideologically settled thing. And it starts, I think, with a brilliant series of images that the director, Gerwig, she's too smart not to know what she's setting forth here, how she literally is saying that the era of sexual liberation destroyed the nurturing motherhood instinct in a generation of young women. And you can either say that she's celebrating it, but I don't think that she is. The whole replacement, well, the movie starts with the 2001 sequence that Stanley Kubrick

took half an hour to do, but that Gerwig does in about five minutes, where instead, you know, they're all these little girls, the monkeys of the Savannah, the African plains, are pushing around carts and having tea parties and the rest of it with their dolls until the monolith appears, but the monolith is Barbie. And it brings about enlightenment as the monolith did, and they start smashing their dolls. Well, we all know monolith did, and they start smashing their dolls. Well, we all know where that led, and it did not necessarily lead to a generation of fulfillment and happiness. And there's a lot of that that informs the rest of the movie right up until the last line, which itself people can take either way, that it's either an expression of the

desire of innate femininity to nurture and give birth, or it is a doorway to meaningless sexual pleasure. It's not a stupid movie. And so it's one of those things that I think that people ought to watch. I'll take it over half of the Netflix stuff that comes gushing through my television every single day. So I'll leave you with this. What are you watching that you think people should watch and why? Okay, I just have to quickly admit, confess

that I am a notorious movie idiot. I like talking with those because I'm generally proven to be, I sound smarter than I am. No, but I'm blown away with everything that you just said because I don't do that. I can do that with music.

I can do it with music, too. I know, you're just better than I am. But I can't do it with movies. I like movies, but I like most movies. That's my problem. I'm not a good critic. There are a few movies that I don't

like. For example, I saw Independence Day 2 on a plane and turned it off. It's very rare for me. Oh, it's awful. Very rare for me. It's awful. Yeah, I always finish things. I'm a completionist.

If I start something, I have to finish it or I get jittery. But that I actually did not finish and don't regret. But the problem is, James, I don't have the deep and intelligent thoughts that you just had. And I've written about this for National Review. There was this movie called The Boys in the Boat. Did that you just had. And I've written about this for National Review. There was this movie called The Boys in the Boat. Did you see that?

Yes, I did. It spawned a whole bunch of reviews at National Review. And I didn't read any of them because I wanted to see it. So I saw it. And then I read what people had written about it. And then the movie was ruined for me because all of the criticisms that they made were obviously true, but they hadn't occurred to me when I was watching it. And I just think this is a sign of an imbecile,

the imbecile being me. Well, we're all, we all have different things on which we want to lavish our attention. They're short span or more mortal allotment here. And if somebody doesn't want to delve deep into the mechanics' bones and the language of cinema, but simply wants them to wash over them to be enjoyed as a part, there's nothing wrong with that. No, but it's can't, not won't.

I'm stupid, is what I'm saying. So I'm just letting you know before I answer your question that there is no insight or valuable criticism that you will hear from me because I'm just dumb. Well, in that case, then you are a shining example to people who feel the same way. There's absolutely nothing wrong with it. I mean, in the boys in the boat, within about five minutes, I thought, wow, he's going to do it. He's going to tick every box he's gonna give us an every single cliche yeah with a barton fink feeling of the sports movies of the time right down to the you know the the salty coach right down i mean right down to the good gal love interest right down to

the funny friend and he and at the end he even gives you hitler you know my gosh pounding his fist in fury over these americans every cliche in the book but done so not in parody not with irony but simply as archetypes rolled out to say i wonder if this still works yeah it still works it all works the montage works the uh the relationship all of the all of these of these things that Hollywood used to turn out by the dozens. Fun things I like to do is go back and look at old, you know, I spent a lot of time in old newspapers. And if you go back to the movie sections of the big towns, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and you will find in the 30s and 40s pages just stuffed with movie ads.

98% of them you've never heard of. And of those that you have, you'll find movies that you never heard of with big stars because these guys made a lot of movies. They were in the system. They went one right after the other. And the corpus of American cinema is extraordinary. And we only really get the ones that, you know, the top ones,

the one that stuck around, but the rest are still there somewhere. Every day on YouTube, every week, I will find some example of American noir cinema from the 40s, 50s. I've never heard about it. Great, crisp, lean, mean, brilliantly shot, great jazzy theme never heard of it but you know they made 40 of them that year by all the studios and so i'm working my way through that so what you're telling me james is out there somewhere there is an enormous library of american movies about which i would have nothing of value to say um pretty much but that might in but might teach you here's here's one of the things even the most boring and banal of these movies i find myself pausing and looking at the street just looking

at the inadvertent documentary that was presented to these guys when these guys went out and took a look and even if even if it's a set and they rebuild it they're telling you what people would recognize as real and it's fascinating And you realize how much of the vitality, the visual language of our streets we have lost. And a lot of that was through regulation. Lady Bird Johnson and the rest of the Beautify America people, they hated neon signs. They hated the garishness of it. They hated the American vernacular of the roadside. So they would pass laws that restricted the signage because a lot of the signs that people put in were perpendicular to the building and some of the bolts might get loose

and they might fall. They passed laws against those. So you used to be able to look down an American street and see this forest of signage that would go in different colors and typefaces and styles and all the rest of it, glowing in the golden hour and then illuminating the street at night. And it's gone. And it's gone partially by regulation, partially by the desire to beautify, partially because these places have emptied out and there's nobody there to begin with.

But when you go to the old movies, you get a sense of the tremendous vitality, even the smallest American urban downtown place. And it's good. And it's sad. And it makes you think is something we have to get back. You came to this country, you came here from another country. A lot of the people who come to the big cities used to come. The idea has always been that the small town is the feeder to the big cities. The small town bring the values and virtues of the small towns into these cosmopolitan places, and their naivete somehow

blends with the cynicism of the coastal cities or the, whatever, and from this comes an American amalgam that is still idealistic but also realistic in a way. That sort of crucible, that mortar and pestle stuff, I don't know if that dynamic still exists, and it's not going to exist when borders are open and the cultures are changed by people who come from places with completely different values. That is the most rambling thing I've said all week. And I'm a guy who did a 40-minute podcast on National Cereal Day yesterday. Anything before we go out? Anything you want to say as a parting shot to the Ricochet audience? Oh, well, if you have been on the site recently, you will have seen that we've

partially integrated the new search function into Ricochet to train it on real posts written by real people, clicked on by real people, commented on by real people, and so on. So although that isn't version 5, and although it is not, the search function that you'll get in version 5 will be much more spiffy. It is at least much better than what came before, hopefully, and hopefully you'll enjoy it. Right. They've been training the new search

function on large language models, which means when you search for my posts, instead of coming back with a red kilowatt icon, you will get an Asian Viking. But, you know, bugs to work out. We could probably spend an hour talking about Google Gemini, and maybe next week we will. Hope to talk to you soon, Charles. It's been great fun.

Charles C.W. Cook, National Review, and Ricochet and other places and the rest of it. Where can people find the next thing you're going to write? At National Review. Probably on Monday. Monday. Sign up, subscribe, the rest of it. And you, also, also if you haven't done so you should go to ricochet.com sign up explore the member feed oh sorry you can't because you're not a member but you know it's just pennies a day and you'll find access to a sane civil right community that you've been looking for your entire life on the

internet i'm to the point where i just want a new internet. I want to start from scratch. I'll pay somebody 25 bucks a month so I can have access to it without the chum ads, without the junk sites, without the AI, without the control of YouTube and Google and all the rest of it. I want a new internet, but until we get to that point, there's Ricochet.com. See you there. Charles, thank you, and we'll see everybody here at this podcast next week. Ricochet. Join the conversation.