The Ricochet Podcast - Bad Hair Day

Episode Date: September 4, 2020

Well, it’s crunch time now: we’re into the final lap of the election and things are going to be intense for the next 8 weeks or so. But first, some personal business: one of our intrepid cast is sending his youngest child off to college. Is his purpose in life now over? We discuss. Then Mr. Flight 93 himself, Michael Anton joins to discuss his new book, The Stakes: America at the Point of No... Source

I have a dream this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. When they said what we're able to accommodate people one person at a time and that we can set up that time. I trusted that. As it turns out, it wasn't set up. I'm the president and you're fake news. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson.

I'm James Lalix and today we talk to Michael Flight, 93 Anton, and Sally Jenkins, the greatest sports writer in America. So let's have a social podcast. I can hear you. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 511. I'm James Lallex here in momentarily peaceable Minneapolis. Rob Long, I assume, is in New York. And Peter Robinson in Halcyon, California. Gentlemen, how are you? I'm unsettled. Tomorrow morning, for an entirely personal reason, but those can be the most... Those are the best reasons to be unsettled. Tomorrow morning, my fifth child, the baby of the family, the apple of my eye, leaves for college. And on the one hand, I'm excited for her. She's just thrilled. Of course, it's going to be masked and social

distance, and she's going to have to attend many classes, if not all classes, remotely. She had the option of a gap year, and she decided she wanted to go to college now. And she's got some dormitory that's 110 years old, but even that doesn't matter because this child who shared a small bedroom with her big sister all her life gets, because of the social distancing, she gets a room that was designed for three girls and she'll be the only one there she'll have it'll be a palace okay but as for me well you're for you your work here is done it's time to douse yourself in lighter fluid that is exactly douse yourself in lighter fluid get on the barge push out and head out and strike a match and that's it it. You're done.

Exactly. That is exactly. I find myself thinking the biggest thing I will ever do in my life concludes tomorrow. I will have raised, I will have done the best I could, let's put it that way, with five kids. And now what is the rest of it for? A century and a half ago, I'd be decrepit and dead in five years, right? But the miracle of modern medicine can keep me up and tottering around for another quarter of a century. What for? What for? As somebody who's been there for a while, I just give you this happy little piece of advice, Peter. From now on, it's just a series of endless little loops and diversions to keep your mind occupied until you die. So enjoy it and find those good loops, and I wish you well. You know what? A wise man,

the Yeti, once gave me a piece of advice. He said, it's different, but it's not bad. It's just different. And he's absolutely right. I mean, daughter's been home for some time now, and I'm going to be picking her up from work in a little while. It's different, but it's okay. It's good you learn. But, you know, it's going to be hard for you with a vacant house and knowing that they're all gone. Speaking of vacant houses, though, Rob, is there anybody left in your building? Yeah, they're all here. New York is all here. I think it's the people who've left and left for the summer. Everybody I know is coming back. I will just say, I feel like I'm the repository of either good news or

bad news for you, Peter. I recall distinctly at one point in your home, you're looking at me with sort of anguish and exhaustion and basically saying, if not these exact words, very similar words, I cannot wait until they are all gone. That's exactly. So there was a time when this was something that you look forward to. And I suspect that there are going to, you know, there will be times in the near future where you'll be, you'll be, you'll be grateful that the house is empty. And you can watch whatever you want to watch without being attached. James and I are trying into the beer and Rob comes along and says, oh, knock it off.

Well, you know, I mean, I don't know about James, but you've had a very busy house. We have had a very busy house. All right. Enough of that. Thank you, everybody, for listening to Sally, Jesse, Raphael with Peter Robinson and Rob. I wanted to state this before we go any farther. I have been looking at what is afoot in the land today, and I have just come to one conclusion. That the party has gone so insane, so crazy, has been so corrupted by the strange ideology behind it, that the only way the republic will survive is the complete and utter, distinctive, unequivocal destruction at the polls. And then the party will find its soul again and will be back to a healthy nation. That's why the Democrats have to be defeated on every single possible level come November. Right, gentlemen? The Democrats. All right. You said the party, the party. And I thought there was going to be some sort of trick ending in which you said that is why the Democrats

must be defeated and that is why the Republicans must also be defeated. And that was the trick ending. That's the joke, as Rainier Wolf-Castle said. I see, I see, I see. And I am so distraught about the departure of my daughter that I have lost my sense of humor. I better just shut up for the rest of the podcast. Rob, what do you think about that? Nobody ever said, I mean, everybody says the Republicans have got to be defeated in order to get their soul back. But nobody says the Democrats are in a similar situation when it comes to the health of the Republic.

No, but the Democrats, you know, they lose the White House and they lose the House, they lose the Senate. The thing about the Democrats is their chief advantage, I guess, or just the chief difference is that they're just bigger. They're just more of them. And when you have a big party just people forget just you forget how big the democratic party was my god it included like these crazy polarities that we now would just think about is insane i mean there there were democrats uh and not that long ago i mean i know i'm getting older so it does seem like longer and longer but not that long

ago there were democrats who who now would be publicly guillotined as members of the Democratic Party by AOC and the squad. So when you're large and you're big, the existential threats tend to be kind of less. You're just a big old whale and you can be harpooned left and right and still swim around the world. When you're slightly smaller, the Republican Party is slightly smaller. It's just everything's much bigger of a threat. It does seem to me that there is a market imbalance now, which I sense, but I don't know, in that both of these parties seem to have given up the idea that there's a persuadable middle, the way they used to love. That's what they used to love the most, right? That's exactly right.

Politicians love the persuadable middle because you can kind of like weasel word a little bit and you can buy them off and do all sorts of things. But both parties have seemed to have given that up. And I think it's – I'm not quite sure why, but you can see it in the volatility, you know? I mean, I would always say, I did a poll once. I actually paid for it myself. Well, I split it, but I did a poll like about a year ago. TV viewers. And we sort of polled about, I think it was like 2,500 people. We didn't do a poll. We just, we bought three, four questions on a larger poll. Pretty good pollster.

Pretty good, you know, very solid methodology. And we asked of the Trump voters, what percentage of Trump voters agree with the following statement? There is nothing on broadcast television or there's nothing on television right now that speaks to me or my values. And that we had about a 63 percent agreement with that from Trump voters. And then we went to Hillary Clinton voters. Or I think at that point we didn't say Hillary Clinton voters. We said registered Democrats because there was no, you know, she wasn't there anymore. So registered Democrats.

How would you relate to what is your percentage agreement with the statement? There's nothing on television that that reflects me or my values. And it was about a 62 percent, 61 percent agreement. Really? Yeah. Which was surprising to me. But what it says to me is that the voters are the audience. But I think it's out of the audience but i think it's true about voters

the voters are trying to have a conversation with their leaders and they're not getting it and that is the one of the reasons why it seems like we are in this period of great volatility in politics right now it seems to me um because whatever you say whatever side you're on it's it's it's volatile i mean we've had the house over overturned more times in the last 20 minutes it seems than we did for 50 years and uh that's um i mean i'm not saying it's bad but i'm saying it's different and i think we're we are either in the high mark of volatility or we're coming out of the volatility or we're just getting getting started but volatility is not something that um you know the most of the 20th

century in america was built on and well you will be told will be told that a lot of the emotional and intellectual volatility that has wracked the country for the last three and a half years has been because of donald trump a change agent who came into this completely static stable system and started tweeting and then everything went crazy it's like having the tasmanian devil all of a sudden dropped into your china shop i think it was the volatility was on route before he got there he was the catalyst in the spur but volatility like in kenosha that was a heck of a lot of joyous volatility if you believe that author thinks that looting is a liberatory act uh and they both went there this week how did you guys see their visits and uh what were they what more importantly what were the optics love that word hate that word

um honestly i i'm just i'm struggling to sort out my thoughts on all this. I thought Biden's, this may just be the partisan me, but I thought Trump actually did a better job. His political purpose in going to Kenosha was to say to people who are upset by the rioting, I'm on your side. And Biden's problem is much harder because as we discussed last week, there are really two Democratic parties. There's a kind of Clinton, and I mean Bill Clinton, Democratic Party, which is even now more moderate than not. And then there is a really very radical left. The money is on one side, but the energy is on the other side. And Biden has this problem that he has to try to hold that party together. He has to hold both sides of that party together.

And when he says, I'm against these guys, I'm against the people who caused this destruction, the chances are, of course, that he'll alienate the hard left, which is why he blamed it on Trump and never mentioned Antifa. We know who's causing some large proportion, some large majority of the actual destruction, and I think the polls to some extent confirm this, that there's some tightening and the tightening that's taking place is in the form of Joe Biden losing a little bit of ground to Donald Trump. I'm giving you a kind of political, my analysis of the politics of it, but the Democrats and Joe Biden are on the defensive and Trump is taking it to them. I thought that, I guess it's as simple as that i thought picture of cold water dumped over peter's head rob well and look i think it's it's easier for the challenger and i use terms challenger incumbent now because i think people just go insane when you when when you don't but it's easier for the channel the challenger's job

is to um is to say everything's happening now is the incumbent's fault. That's a smart move, right? And that's what a challenger does. It's what Reagan did. That's what Clinton did. And in a weird way, that's kind of what Trump did because Hillary Clinton was sort of when I said Clinton, I meant Bill Clinton.

Hillary Clinton was sort of running as the third term for Obama. And that's actually very, very smart. And, you know, I think that it was too late for Biden to do this a little bit. I think he's playing it entirely too cautiously. I understand why that argument is being made for him strategically, because he is, in fact, ahead and he's ahead still in Wisconsin. And after those two, the two weird Zoom conventions took place, the race seems to be solidly gelling into very specific things. And I think it's actually smart what Trump is doing because it's the only game he has to play, which I think is smart as an incumbent, is to say, don't blame me for this. This ain't me. This is on them. This is not on me. That's a hard thing as an incumbent is to say, don't blame me for this. This ain't me.

This is on them. This is not on me. That's a hard thing for an incumbent to do. Just in terms of American politics, we just tend to blame the president. Or we tend to want to change the channel from bad, the bad show we're watching now, and we are willing to throw everything out. I agree there's a kind of inversion going on. But I'm not sure. Well, we'll see.

I'm not sure it's all that hard for Trump. Joe Biden has been in public life for almost half a century. By the way, as best I can work it out, reading his bio on Wikipedia, the guy has about two and a half years experience in the private sector. He practiced law as an actual lawyer for about two and a half years. The rest of his life, he's been in government. And Trump still feels, to me, the question is how he feels to other voters, but Trump still feels to me like an outsider running. When he's at his best, he feels like an outsider who's running against an establishment that Joe Biden still represents represents and again but the democratic bet was trump is going to be the issue we can make trump the issue if we keep him the issue then joe biden doesn't have to get out on the road and really campaign trump will self-destruct the country does the country can't stand him and now the republicans have said oh, let's make these riots the issue. That's absolutely fascinating. But Trump, everything you say, I agree with.

It seems weird. But I'm not sure it's as difficult for Trump to run as a kind of outsider, even as an incumbent, as I think you're suggesting. Well, I think it's hard for him. I'm very politely different with you. Yeah, no, I think it's hard for an incumbent to do that, any incumbent. And one who, like this one, is particularly hard for him to master the subtleties of appealing to one group while not bugging another. And that's been a problem for him for years. I know people don't like to hear it.

They like to think that he's just incredibly popular, but he has never been a popular president. That doesn't necessarily have to be a death knell, but he's never been popular. He's never enlarged his base. And so now he's got to run a kind of a very, very difficult campaign. I mean, he may win, but it's difficult. What should, I think, be cheering for people who want Trump to win is that there seems to be somehow in the constant shuffling and the and the white house intrigue that seems to happen every 48 hours there seems to be some guiding spirit there with an understanding of what the deficit is and what he has to do to make it up and where where to take the fight and um and and that seems smart i mean

like you know even this week was a week of sort of a mini initiatives for Trump. And that, you know, that's great. We have eight weeks to go. So it's incompetently late and ridiculously late. But there is something shambling and incompetent about this White House that somehow managed to sort of Forrest Gump its way through some success. So it may work but this was exactly the i mean look the way you know the way you is one of the ways you win these elections is by sitting down and taking a deep breath and and reminding yourself that you're not special that as much as you want to be special and different and now it's different it's not

and not significantly different and to look at the past campaigns that have had certain deficits to overcome and certain drawbacks and have fought and how they did it. And especially when you're running for a reelect, that it's not – where the computer models, which tend to be right, don't point to reelect. They point to not. And last week, in my estimation, was the first week this campaign, the Trump campaign, seemed to be paying attention to that. And that, for people who wanted to be competitive, that is a very, very good sign. Yeah. Well, and as the memory of the riots fade, it may not, it may untighten, so to speak. And it'll be interesting to see if the Republicans can keep up this sort of rhetorical reminder that what Joe Biden,

even if you buy his moderate stance, what he signed on for, what he's agreed to, the Paris Accords, the diminution of the automobile, the end of fossil fuels and fracking and the rest of it, is this contraction of the American life and the belief that somehow we should all be living like those wonderful people in Amsterdam who take their bicycles to work along the canals and have little refrigerators that are the size of R2-D2's box. And that's how you live. I just went shopping for a fridge a couple of weeks ago, and I was looking at some monster. I really wanted to buy it, couldn't justify it.

It had a screen on it, which allowed the fridge to connect to the Internet. So I could remotely, when I was in the grocery store, I could see what was in my fridge. I could, for example, call somebody. I could look at Twitter on the fridge, which is, for example, call somebody. I could look at Twitter on the fridge, which is, I know it sounds like a dystopian nightmare, and you can load it with all kinds of apps. I needed to know, however, whether or not I could get the Quip app on my fridge so that the fridge could tell me how much I was brushing. Now, if you're wondering what in the blue blazes, in tarnation, is a Quip app, It would be this. Well, Quip, you know, is the greatest toothbrush in the world.

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free with getquip.com slash ricochet. Spelled G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash ricochet. Quip, better oral health made simple and rewarding. And our thanks to Quip for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Now, welcome to the podcast, Michael Anton, lecturer and research fellow at Hillsdale College. Former national secretary official in the Trump administration. He's also a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. And he's known for his viral 2016 essay, The Flight 93 Election. Yes, that one.

Widely praised by many, including Rush Limbaugh, who called it a, quote, home run every paragraph, end quote. His new book is The Stakes, America at the Point of No Return. Welcome, Michael. Let me quote from the book. In September 2016, I called that year's presidential contest, quote, The Flight 93 Election. My thesis was simple. A Clinton victory would usher in an era of semi-permanent democratic leftist rule. I here add the qualifier semi, only to make the point that nothing human lasts forever.

But I asserted and still believe that one party rule of the USA, blue state politics from coast to coast, could, once established, last a very long time and might only end with the country itself, end quote. So I guess what flight number is this election, and how do you address the complaint or the witty riposte that, you know, Trump's been in the cockpit of Flight 93 for three and a half years now? Well, first of all, you know, I wish this weren't another Flight 93 election. I don't know what I would number it, probably the same number because it's the same metaphor. And I wish, although I never expected, that Trump could have turned everything around in one term and America could have gone back to 1984, 85 or some other halcyon period and we could get back to politics as usual, ruling and being ruled in turn, making compromises, each side recognizing the just claims of the other and so forth.

All of that, although obviously hasn't happened, nor do I think it was foreordained to happen. If we are to get back to some kind of normal, decent politics, it's going to take longer than one term. I think it's going to take longer than two terms. I think, as I say, that it's a generational project in all likelihood. Now, as for the second point, yes, I recognize that witty riposte is coming, and I addressed it in a piece that I, an excerpt from the book, a sort of expanded, adapted excerpt of the book that I posted on American Greatness on Friday. Yes, Trump has the White House, but can you name a single other commanding height or power center of U.S. government or society that either he or his

allies or people aligned with his vision control. Because if you can, I'd love to hear it. I can't. Everything else that I know of, the universities, the foundations, the corporations, the banks, the tech companies, you name it, and the federal bureaucracy above all, which doesn't take Trump's orders, even though on paper they all report to him. They are aligned with the, not with Trump's vision, but with the vision that he ran against in 2016. So to me, it's not surprising at all that three and a half years in, you know, he hasn't accomplished everything he said he was going to try to accomplish. I've never seen resistance like this. And I was in the Bush 43 administration, which is, when you look back on it, seems like child's play compared to what Trump is facing.

Boy, did the federal bureaucracy hate him on a lot of levels. And, you know, the mass protests you get in the streets, the Bush derangement syndrome, that was a phrase coined then. Well, Trump derangement syndrome, sorry, syndrome makes Bush derangement syndrome look like a minor annoyance. So I'm not at all surprised by what I've seen. And I know I will get that argument. I find it, frankly, kind of facile. But, you know, I state my objection to it just to show people that I've actually thought it through.

And there is an answer. Michael, Peter Robinson, good to have you with us. Thank you. Quoting you in the book, the Democrats look forward to imposing nationally what they have achieved in California, close quote. Now this gets to, this gets to, what do they want? Do they really view what has happened in California? One party rule, high on, high, the highest poverty rate in the nation, I believe that's the, or no, I think it's the third highest poverty rate in the nation in a state for which there is no excuse whatsoever for poverty. Riches, beauty, talent. The only thing wrong with California is government.

Do they think this, the mess they've created in the Golden State is something to are they proud of it? Some of them do. I mean, I quote in the book, I believe it's even on the first page of the first chapter where Mike Bloomberg and his I don't know how long how long was it about his 16 minutes he was running for president this year. He came out to California and said that California is a model for the rest of the nation. Well, if you're Bloomberg and you're an oligarch and you only care about the top, you know, not even the 1%, the 0.0001% and major institutions like banks and so on and the information economy, and you want to make sure, remember Mike Bloomberg's rationale for open borders once when he was mayor on a radio talk show is he said, well, who else is going to cut the grass at my country club's golf course if we don't have open borders? If that's the way you see the world, then yes, California absolutely is a model.

But to the broader question, what do they want? In chapter four of the stakes, I divide up the sort of the leftist coalition into three. And I say that there are three motivating factors or motivating passions. And that's not to say that these are three motivating factors or motivating passions. And that's not to say that these are three separate distinct groups, because a lot of people are motivated by all three or by some combination. But that if you just look to it, not to try to slice and dice the electorate, but just to try to understand what the motivations are, there are three. And they are the free, I call them the freeloaders, the woke karate, and the avengers.

And the freeloaders, you know, are the, yeah, this passion has been around for a long time, which is I want free stuff. I don't necessarily want to have to earn it. I don't have as much as I think I ought to have. I should have more. Therefore, I'm going to take it from you or from somewhere. The classic example of a freeloader, at least in terms of motivation in the 2020 primary cycle, is the Bernie bro, right? The democratic socialists. A woke erotty is a true believer in the woke religion, but not necessarily somebody who feels that they personally have been harmed by all of the endemic sins that they see in America, right? They, in fact, are often the people most willing to go out and self-flagellate and say, I am so privileged.

I am evil because of the way I was born, because of my DNA, and because of what my ancestors did. But I, therefore, pledge fealty to this religion. And that's who? That's Al Gore? I mean, Elizabeth Warren, to me, is that. Right, right, right. Okay, got it, got it. But everybody out there on the streets protesting with black life every let me put it this way another great i don't know if you saw this but when all of this mayhem began in america there was this incredible demonstration in of all you know chevy chase

bethesda maryland one of the wealthiest parts of the country right across the dc line beautiful multi-million dollar homes very very income, highly credentialed population, and almost all white. And at a BLM demonstration, hundreds, if not, I don't know how many, but hundreds of clearly super privileged white people took the knee and started saying a prayer of forgiveness, like please, begging people, please forgive me for being- That was in Chevy Chase. I saw a picture. That's incredible. Yeah, yeah's right. And so then that brings you to the Avengers.

The Avengers are the people who feel genuinely... They usually only get on their knees when they're looking for their golf balls. Right. Well, yeah. The Avengers are people who genuinely feel aggrieved, harmed. They and their ancestors and their population and whatever identity group they feel that they belong to has had the short end of the stick or worse, and they're going to get it back. And they're going to return evil with evil, in a

sense. And to them, Ta-Nehisi Coates, to me, is an ultimate Avenger, Ibram X. Kendi. These are people who feel aggrieved and feel that the only way forward is to mete out something like a punishment that their side or their group has endured. So they all, a lot of this, as you can see, overlaps. But there's some inherent tensions in this coalition that I flesh out to that I wonder how stable it can be over the long term. When you talk about Kendi, it's interesting because his concept of anti-racism, the way he's defined and framed the issue, has come to stand. It's a phrase that's now being used by everybody from corporations to diversity trainers as such and means something different than what most people think that it does. Right. Yeah. I mean, to me, anti-racism means don't be racist.

You're against people who are. Right. You do not believe that any race is superior or inferior to any other, nor do you believe that people should be judged on the basis of their race rather than on their individual character and accomplishments and things like that. That, to me, is what anti-racism is. Anti-racism is colorblindness. Well, colorblindness in this radical vision has been explicitly redefined as racist. So to say something like, I'm colorblind, I don't see race, or I look past it, or I only look at qualifications, I only look at merit, I only look

at character, I only look at morality. Those kinds of statements, which seem to me to be true and just, and also the only glue that can possibly hold a multiracial society together, are now being attacked, and not merely dismissed, but attacked. So by this absurd standard, by the way, the I Have a Dream speech of August 1963 by Martin Luther King is a racist speech. If you're going to take this garbage completely seriously, then you have to say that that's a racist speech. Right. But, I mean, Kennedy, his defenders will say, well, he wants to work through the system. He wants constitutional amendments that would establish a department of anti-racism. He wants to use the legal framework such as we have.

Well, that will never happen. But you will have seeping into every corporate diversity center, into all of the agendas, into every Facebook discussion, the term anti-racism and the thought that unless you spend every single day as your modus vivendi opposing a system that has a disparate outcome, you are a racist. But the interesting thing about that is that you may call him one of the activists, but it's not the, you know, the H-Rap Brown style that we think from the 60s with the burn it all down. It's much more institutional and it's much more academic, but I think the effect is going to be more powerful and pernicious in the end. And it is that's true. On the other hand, I don't know. I've read a lot. I'm from Northern California.

So to me, I kind of grew up with the half life of the new left, like warmly glowing my my my my bones. It was all around me. These, you know, Angela Davis was on the faculty for a long time at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where thankfully I did not attend, but is based in my hometown. Did they burn as many buildings in the 60s as have already burned in a three-month span in 2020? So when you say, yeah, they don't want to burn it all down, I don't know. I check the news every day and something's burning somewhere. It seems- Oh, they do. I'm just talking to the people that you mentioned, Coates and Kendi did not

strike me as the people. But Coates and Kendi have created, and Robin DiAngelo and lots and lots of others, have created a toxic environment that even if they personally are saying, well, we think we can do it within the system, leave aside whether what they want, whether it's accomplished within the system or not, is good. I would say it's awful. But they create through their really incendiary rhetoric this environment in which people do take to the streets and feel justified. I mean, look, here's an example. And maybe you guys saw this, but it sure struck with me. My grad school professor and mentor, Charles Kessler, professor at Claremont McKenna College and the editor of the Claremont Review of Books, wrote an article for the New York Post very recently saying, call them the 1619 riots. In other words, let's blame these riots on the New York Times' infamous 1619 project, which is only meant to delegitimize the country and encourage people to hate it. And Nicole Hannah-Jones, the author of the 1619 project, when she saw that from the New York Post, tweeted, great, I'm all for it.

Yes, call them that. I'll own that. And I thought, wow. I mean, she's basically said, raising her hand and saying, I want to take credit for having created the rhetorical environment that is now burning down America, getting people killed, including, needless to say, a lot of black people and burning black owned businesses and so on. I found that astonishing. Hey, Michael, it's Rob Long in New York. Thank you for joining us. So can I talk about Flight 93 for a minute? Sure. Because, you know, it was almost four years ago, or in fact, it was exactly four years ago that I read your piece.

And you described the 2016 election as a Flight 93 election. I thought it was really compelling, kind of haunting over the past four years to rethink that. So in Flight 93, brave heroes stormed the cockpit and they crashed the plane into the ground. That was what they chose. They chose a giant, a huge sacrifice, personal sacrifice for a greater good. So four years on, what have we sacrificed? What was the Flight 93 sacrifice? What have we lost that we haven't gotten? I'm not sure they chose a sacrifice. No one can ever know exactly what they were intending to do. I think, as I recall, having not now read about this for a while, people on several of the flights were in cell—on all four, actually, were in cell phone contact and were calling. And so by the time you get to flight 93, which was the final plane to crash, the people on board

knew what had happened to the other three. And so they knew what the fate was. And it's, it's at least some, there's some evidence to suggest that they weren't intending simply to crash the plane, but they thought however vainly or however, however, um,ly or however unlikely or a long shot it was, that maybe they could take control of the plane and fly the plane or land the plane or something. But they also appear to have thought if they couldn't do that, they at least were not going to let it hit its target. Whereas they knew that if they sat still, the end for them would be… So I guess the analogy then breaks down for me. Because my understanding of the analogy was that sometimes you have to do something drastic and sacrifice something for a greater good. And what I wanted to know was what you thought we had sacrificed for the greater good.

The analogy that was for me was more certainty versus uncertainty, right? If you sit still, if you let this happen, if Hillary Clinton wins this election, because everyone can't, you know, first of all, I actually found Trump had a positive program that I was attracted to and I could make a case for. But I thought the negative case is also very strong. I believed then, and I still believe now,

that had she won the election, that would have really been it for small R Republican government. No, I understand. I guess what I need to clarify is that I then didn't understand that had she won the election, that would have really been it for small-R Republican government. No, I understand. I guess what I need to clarify is that I then didn't understand, because I really did think, I guess what's haunted me is that I feel like every time you choose, in politics, obviously, you get something and you have to pay something. No one gets everything they want. You always have to give it up, especially in American politics, right? We're a 51% nation. We don't get everything we want. And I just wanted to know what you thought we as,

well, what you thought the Trump voter, the successful Trump voter, was sacrificing by voting for Trump. And I guess your answer is nothing. Yeah, I didn't think that, I don't, I voted for Trump. I didn't feel like I was sacrificing really anything. I mean, if you want to say, well, and I've been asked this, you know, was Trump the, your ideal candidate for 2016? No, I suppose not. He was I do, however, think of the people who appeared and actually ran for president and competed for votes. I don't think any anybody but Trump could have won the 2016 election. If I were to sit down at a sketch pad and design a candidate who had the immigration agenda that I wanted and the foreign policy agenda that I wanted, a trade and economic agenda that I wanted. But maybe he, you know, tweeted a little less about certain things and he did this a little differently,

like, okay, I could have sketched that person, but my sketch wasn't going to come to life and run for president and win an election. Michael, last question. If Hillary Clinton had won, it would have been different. Yes, obviously. A lot of people think that it would have been standard institutional liberal leftist politics and that the fact that she didn't win meant that there was four years of pressure building up in the left that came up with all sorts of new ripe demands that we might not have seen in a Hillary Clinton administration. So exit question. Do you think that the Hillary Clinton administration would try to pack the Supreme Court or initiate the removal of the Electoral College as we expect an emboldened left to do the next time? I doubt it, but I think not out of any sense of moderation, but because of a lack of a sense of need or urgency. I think that the left had exactly the same assessment of the 2016 election that I did. Just the question is, you know, what's your opinion of the outcome? I think they were convinced

they were going to win. They were convinced that it would be the last meaningful election, that they had secured what Judas and Texiera had described in 2002, the emerging Democratic majority, this kind of permanent electoral blue electoral lock. And it could all happen in a very smooth transition. And like, you know, we'd get Obama's third and fourth term and so on going forward. And the shock of that election, which they were not only were they certain that that election was in the bag, they were certain that the permanent democratic future was in the bag, unhinged them to the point that now they're contemplating things that, you know, they probably wouldn't have felt that they had to do. But the basic policy outcome that we would have

gotten out of the Hillary administration, eight years of it, would have been, I don't think it would have been any different. It just all would have kind of come into place maybe more calmly. Michael, Peter here. The New York Times summed it up the other day. I guess it was the day that Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination was their big editorial on sort of weighing Trump. And they said something, this is a close paraphrase, on policy he has governed better than we expected, and on personal comportment he has behaved worse than we hoped. What strikes me as a pretty neat formulation, and whether he wins or loses will result from the way ordinary voters weigh those two sides of the equation. So what do you say to not-never-Trumpers, people who have spent the last four years denouncing the man, are not going to change their minds.

But what do you say to the people who just find him hard to take even now? Well, so you're describing my own dear mother who won't vote for Biden, who will just write in someone. You know, I don't whoever strikes her fancy at the moment. She'll write in her beloved son. Yeah, I'll adopt that because she knows I'm voting for Trump. What I say to her is, look, there's almost nothing that I cherish more than complete freedom of conscience and freedom of thought. And if in your heart you just can't bring yourself to see your way to vote for Trump or you really do just genuinely think that his deficiencies, as you understand them, outweigh his strengths. I begrudge no their vote, right?

I try to persuade where I can persuade, but I begrudge absolutely no one their vote. I've made my case. I have a positive case for Trump. I like his agenda. I wish he'd accomplished more in the first term. I think that he mostly what he hasn't accomplished has been from the extraordinary resistance that he's faced, which has been outdone by any prior opposition to any president that I know of except Lincoln. And then I have a negative case, which is I really don't like what I think we're going to get when inevitably Kamala Harris is president of the United States. And she's going to be by far the most, I mean, talk about a combination. There's an Avenger soul for you. I mean, I, I know Peter, you're in California, you know, I'm from California and, and, and spend a lot of time in California and I've seen her up

close. It's, she just almost out of every pore of her body, you just see kind of a kind of seething vindictiveness coming out of her. And it's going to be very unpleasant when that is matched with the leftist wishlist, I think, for all of us. And I'm kind of dreading it, to be honest. So even you, Michael, what I'm teasing at, and then I've got the last and obvious question, but what I'm trying to tease out, you worked in the White House. I worked in a completely different White House. What I discovered talking to former speechwriters was that John Kennedy's writers loved him.

People love John Kennedy. Ronald Reagan's staff loved him. People love John Kennedy. Ronald Reagan's staff loved him. You're not making the argument that Donald Trump has been hugely misportrayed in the press. He's a different, he's actually, if only you knew him, if only the coverage were fair, people would love to, you're making the case. This is a very difficult moment. He's a flawed candidate, but he is much better than the other side. You have to make an adult decision to vote for him. Is that the case? I would say that. I mean, I can't promise that everyone, I can't, I certainly can't promise that he's been misportrayed in the press. I think he's been treated badly in the press, but most of his press is just him being himself. When people ask

me, oh, you've been around him. What's he like? I say, he's exactly like what you see. And if you don't like that, I, you know, what am I supposed to say? It's like beating someone up wonderful food and they say, I don't like it. I personally loved working for him. I got along with him. Great. I thought he treated me fabulously. All of the close staff that I got to know and work closely with loved him and still love him. We still get together fairly frequently. Um, you know, he's much more polarizing than other figures in the past have been. And so I get that some people don't like him. But I'm not saying, oh, yeah, even I, you know, don't interpret that to mean even Anton admits that even he doesn't like him, but is holding

his nose. No, I'm voting for him enthusiastically. OK, that's fair. That's fair enough. I actually did want to know that, Michael, because you did work with him. You haven't you and I haven't had a chance to talk until just now. Last question, which is the obvious question. Biden doesn't seem to have gotten much of a bounce out of his convention. The president got a couple of points bounce maybe, but there seems to be dissipating today. Biden seems to be up six, seven points. That's been going on for a couple of months now. What's your prediction? What's your feeling about the way this is all going to go? My prediction and my feeling, I try never to make predictions. My feeling is that Trump is going to win, but you know, I thought he was going to lose last time anyone. And so

now I think he's going to win and he'll lose. I have no idea. I never try to predict elections because I'm just not very good at it. I do think he has a good story to tell. And I think Biden has gotten himself in an extremely difficult position where, you know, the media propaganda is hard to overcome the fact that it is it is basically Biden supporters and left wing extremists who are out there doing all of these crazy things. And they're trying hard to blame it on Trump. I'm not sure that the American public as a whole is going to buy it. And I also think, too, America has become very difficult to pull, almost impossible to pull, especially on these questions. And so

when I see these kinds of things, I remember the last time, and I don't know, Biden's supposedly up by seven right now. Does it seem very likely to you, given everything that's going on? The guy can't complete a teleprompter speech. He barely leaves his basement. His sort of street militia, which he will not condemn. He'll condemn violence broadly and then try to blame it on Trump. Does anybody think that Antifa and BLM activists that have been activists is much too kind? Rioters, does anybody think any of them are Trump are trump supporters or motivated by their support of trump they may be motivated by trump but if so they're motivated by hatred of trump

right the book is the stakes america at the point of no return by michael anton hey we'll talk to you in november 4th or 5th or so when when this will all be settled for good and we can we can make the sigh of relief oh indeed indeed all right, indeed, indeed. Michael, thanks so much. Thank you. You know, at the end of the podcast, I always say, please go to Apple Tunes, leave us a five-star review. I went and read some of the reviews. They're all five stars. They're great, except one of them said, all right, we get it.

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She was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 2019. She's the author of a dozen books and received the National Press Foundation's Chairman Citation in 2011. Hi, Sally. I'm James Lilex here in Minneapolis. I also work for a major daily, and congratulations on staying employed with a major daily. We're a dwindling group, aren't we? We are, we are, we are, but you know, it's those nice, charismatic, generous billionaires that help the thing. football um you know people have been saying that actually sports have been politicized as long as you can remember there's always been a political and particularly racial element to sports and it's ridiculous to assume that there's

always existing in some field of dreams halcyon bygone nostalgic paradise but it seems nowadays as if the penetration of sports and quote social, social justice, end quote, into sports seems more in your face, more overt, saturating almost every element of it. A, do you think that's true? And B, if it is, what do you think the effect is going to be on audiences going forward? I think two things. I think anyone who lived through 1968 finds this pretty familiar. I'm not sure that it's any really different from the last period of racial justice upheaval that we've lived through. I was pretty much of a kid back then. I don't know how old you were in 1968, but I mean, I can remember it being overwhelming, really. I mean, between Arthur Ashe and Billie Jean King and Tommy Smith and John Carlos. I mean, it was pretty pervasive.

So I'm not sure this is so different from that, number one. And number two, I mean, what is the end game here? You know, we've spent years saying that athletes needed to be more involved in their community. They needed to speak up more. And then when they say things that we're uncomfortable with or that we don't like, we say, well, go back and shut up and dribble. So, you know, I think this is a cycle that we're going through. seeing out there, but I agree a hundred percent with the impulse to speak and to get involved and to vote and to be engaged in your community. For so long, I covered leagues and groups of people that were basically sequestered in tax havens in Orlando or golf courses in Phoenix. I

mean, yeah, I just, I think it's a healthy impulse. I really do. Even though I don't always agree with every single word that's spoken, I'm glad they're speaking out. I'm glad they're acting and I'm glad they're involved. Sally, Peter Robinson here. I have a question about your career. Back to sports in a moment, but a question about your career. You did something that I can't quite imagine doing. You went into the same field as your father, and your father dominated the field. Now, it happens that you happen to be talented enough and hardworking enough so that you stand up just fine in comparisons with your old man. But what possessed you to, in some way, this is my observation, I could be just mistaken,

maybe the dynamic between you and your father was just totally different, but in some way, I have observed people who go into the fields that their parents went into, if their parents are prominent, are in one way or another sort of saying, yeah, well, they're taking it to them. What on earth possessed you to do what your dad did when your dad was one of the greats? You know, it's so funny. First of all, I don't think I'm talented. I just think I work really hard. I'll take credit for the hard work, number one. I mean, that's honest to God, the truth. There's lots of people more talented than me in this business. Number two, I mean, I kind of disagree with the premise. In fact, I totally disagree with the premise. Okay, fair enough. Yeah, because Peyton Manning and Eli Manning,

they didn't want to take it to Archie. And I don't think that, I don't think that, you know, um, an Earnhardt or an Andretti wants to take it to their old man. I think that you're raised in an environment where it's all, you know, it's kind of like Austrians who grow up skiing. Um, I mean, I literally was taken to sports events when I was three and four years old. Um, I adored my dad. He was my hero and my role model. He worked really, really hard at it, even though he made it look easy. And the only things he ever told me about the profession, he said, don't ever let a thing out of your hands until it's as good as you can make it and learn your craft. And, you know, that's all I can really say about it. I,

I actually think there's scores of people out there who go into the profession of their parents, their, whether it's their mother or their father, um, and they do it out of love for the craft because they grew up in it. Um, you know, I just, there's Kyle Shanahan, um, loves football more than human, any human being on the face of this earth. And it's not because he's trying to stick it to Mike Shanahan. He has a genuine love for the craft. So, I mean, even if Steve Kerr, if you ask Steve Kerr why he's a coach, he'll say my parents were the greatest teachers in the world. And I feel like as a coach, I'm actually sort of going into their profession.

So I love this. I love this. This is such a refreshing answer. It's such a refreshing answer that you went. I mean, it sounds as though you went into your dad's field out of affection and totally. Yeah. OK. OK. That's great. That's great. That's that's that's that's the happiest answer to that. What struck me is a pretty perplexing question that I could possibly have imagined. I actually think there's way more examples of that than there are, oh, I'm going to go out there and compete with my dad. I actually think it's the dead opposite. At least that's my experience. And that's my experience from talking to lots of other people who are in the same profession as their parent.

I mean, again, Peyton Manning, Peyton and Archie are really close. I mean, that is not a, I'm going to one-up my dad relationship. Same thing with Eli. And it's a little liberating, actually, when you run into those people and talk to them about it, and you understand that you're not the only one who feels that way. Hey, Sally, it's Rob Long in New York. I agree. I once was taken to dinner on Sunday in New Orleans at the Ruth's Chris Steakhouse, which was at that point the flagship steakhouse for that company and by the son of Ruth, as a matter of fact. And we're sitting there dining and all of a sudden the room gets very quiet. The room's filled with like

New Orleans luminaries, you know, the judges judges there's some judges that won't talk to other judges because they're the judges that put the other judge in prison stuff like that very new orleans and suddenly in walked the mannings like all of them at a big table in the back and they're very tall yeah they're very tall very big you really felt felt like a – and it reminded me of looking, you know, when they show the skybox at the Super Bowls, and they see Peyton and Archie sitting there watching Eli play. Yeah. And you really get a sense of that.

It's a family business dynasty, really. Yeah, they get so nervous and upset about it, too. I mean, I've actually – I know Peyton a little bit, and I've talked to Peyton about watching Eli play on the rare occasion when Peyton wasn't on the field himself, and he could watch Eli particularly as a rookie. I mean, you know, he was just a basket case. And, again, you don't expect everyone else to understand the dynamic.

You know, you have your own language and your own communication and your own relationship, and it's an interesting little clan that you have. Can we talk about politics and sports just a little bit? Because I accept your argument that certainly in this case, the NBA and NBA players have a right and maybe even a duty, if they feel it, to express their politics and their political views or their views on the current events. And that is certainly, that is definitely not new. I mean, I think one of my most indelible memories is watching the Olympics with a raised fist. So this is not new.

What do you think about as these sports become more global, what will the NBA allow its players to express about China? Yeah, I mean, China's a real big deal for the NBA, and no one was more disappointed than I was in LeBron James or the NBA or Adam Silver's response. You know, China is a scourge. China is, I mean, it's indefensible. But as I wrote at the time, when LeBron first came out and said what he said in the NBA, kind of ducked and cringed on that, on the issue of China, partly because they had a team over there at the time. Here's the deal.

The NBA is no different from Disney, from General Electric. of great American companies who've been over there doing business with China for years and years now because they all were under the same impression that capitalism was somehow going to win China. It's getting better. Right. Yeah. Right. And it's actually the dead opposite. China has actually, you know, everyone thought capitalism will make China free.

No, actually doing business with China has made the rest of us more unfree. And that's a fact. That is a fact. And do you think American companies, I'll just say that the NBA is not the only company dealing with that reality. Well, let's talk about another global... Yeah, it's unfair to put the NBA solely on the spot for this. No, I hear you. But what about another global sport, soccer? I mean, I don't – by the way, when I say I don't, I could be wrong. in a game that just by definition, by its global reach, should have more conflict, should have more political strife in it.

I mean, it's a 10x factor of complexity in global soccer. Why don't I see that? Or does it exist and I'm missing it? Or is it on the way? You know, I just think that the part of the Olympic movement in general has sort of hypnotized a lot of people into thinking sports are supposed to be apolitical. Right. And in fact, that's a fantasy. Actually, the Olympics have been super political, hyper political. Soccer is the same.

You cannot play games in these countries and turn a blind eye to what underpins the construction of these stadiums or in some cases the shoddy construction of the stadiums. Any more than you could go to an Olympics presided over by Adolf Hitler and watch Jesse Owens win a gold medal and say, oh, that was a completely apolitical event. These are not apolitical events. They never will be. They never were. And the more that we recognize that and we understand that play is stitched into human nature, and it's stitched into society. It's absolutely inextricable, and it doesn't matter whether you're talking about soccer or the NBA or the WNBA or Major League Baseball, you know, it's indivisible from the rest of us. And, you know, the example I always like to use, and this is pretty abstract here, but, you know, someday when we have been dead for thousands of years, an archaeologist is going to come along and dig up like a really, really big American football stadium.

And just like we do with the Greeks, right, archaeological digs, we dig up these old stadiums, and we think that we know something based on that dig about their values and their society. And it's the same thing here. If you take the really, really long view, sports are actually incredibly important to our societies. We pour millions and millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, in some cases, into the Olympic Games or into World Cup soccer. They're important to us. And more than a little important to us. We're willing to give them huge tax breaks. We're willing to give them moral breaks.

So you can't – I don't really think the NBA is any more or less guilty than soccer or the NFL. They're all part of what we're doing here as societies. And I think it's profoundly unfair to put them on the spot in some ways and hold them more responsible than we do other parts of our business. Well, to change the subject a little bit, can we put the SEC on the spot? College football? Yeah, so college football is really important, especially SEC football, which is sort of the beating bloody heart of college football or the central nervous system of college football um that's a cultural phenomenon in the south that's um you know rivals only baptist church sects and a few other things i mean it's the one of the most important traditions in the south that kind of

has held and knitted and healed that that region in a lot of ways for many, many years. What's going to happen this autumn? So, I mean, I think, you know, it's going to be pretty fractured. I defend the Big Ten and the Pac-12's decision, and I think they're looking smarter and smarter and more and more responsible all the time. The fact that some schools apparently are hiding COVID data is really, really disconcerting. You know, look, again, the SEC, I don't know what to say about the SEC. That's why I asked you. Yeah, I mean, you know, here's the thing. Different campuses have different thresholds, right? I mean, look at the ACC. Look at the difference of campuses in the ACC. Look at Boston College trying to coexist with the Florida State. I mean, one of the things that's

kind of interesting about this moment in college football is everybody is projecting that what's really going to happen is you're going to wind up with one super conference with the SEC at the heart of it and a handful of other schools that join this big, big super conference. And everybody else will be the B team in college football. Now, you can feel good about that and say, yeah, that's how it should be. We should have a handful of super schools who are really essentially the main reason for the campus's existence and the academic side becomes just a little tumor attached to the side of the athletic department. Or you can actually root for college athletics to sort of survive in its diversity, by which I mean big schools and little schools and, you know, a Boise State sort of

growing over the years. You know, so what I would like to see actually is a more organic sort of integration of college athletics on campuses. You know, I don't think there's anything wrong with saying that Alabama football is one of the great institutions of the university. I have no problem with that at all. I think that's, you're required to say that when you have to say that. But quite honestly, I have no problem with saying Nick Saban's probably the most gifted professor on that campus. And I think if we were a little less ashamed to say that and a little less ashamed to say that that guy's teaching on that campus should actually be examined and maybe even spread around to a larger portion of the student body, we'd be a lot more comfortable with what's going on right now. I'm all in favor of actually making sports performance a major on campuses. I think guys should have to write papers about it.

Guys like Saban should have to teach the general student body, and then we can really know if these people belong on campus or not. It helps that Saban is probably the second highest paid, the highest paid state employee in Alabama, and certainly the highest paid college professor, if he's a college professor in the world. Yeah, but I mean, there's people on that campus who are making scads of money, too, because they're great researchers. He's not the only one. I mean, Nick Saban is not the only guy on a college campus making an unseemly amount of money. Making a million dollars.

That's right. So do you think, I mean, just I'm looking forward, and I'm talking about the autumn, the general sports package in the autumn. Who do you think has got their act together COVID-wise? Who doesn't have their act together? And who's going to pay the price? Or will there be a price to pay? I mean, or are the fans just saying, listen, just play. If you get sick, you know, beans we need we need to watch football we need to watch college

football we need to watch hockey so certainly regionally some people are saying just play we don't care what the toll is i mean there's a lot of big 10 parents saying that um but bubbles work i mean one thing we know is that bubbles work. The NBA is having, you know, I think a pretty triumphant experience. Like, they did it right. They deserve all the credit in the world in some ways. I think a lot of NFL teams are really doing it right. I mean, that draft was a real feat and very ingenious. And, you know, deserves a lot of credit for saying we can do this and

pulling it off. I think the NFL is probably going to show up as having done it right and been pretty, I mean, the big question here is the diversion of testing resources in communities. But look, the American public wants to pay for this stuff and they want it the same way they want to give tax breaks to Jerry Jones to build the Taj Mahal football stadiums. This is what people vote for and vote to do. It's what they elect to spend their money on. Hey, Sally, Peter Robinson here, you just said something that lit up a question in my

mind. You're the person to ask. It's been a question I've been wondering about for a long time. So with regard to college sports, you've got a couple of models. Alabama, which says we're all in, at least we're all in on football. We're just all in. And in some ways, maybe the administration would really rather not talk about it, how a football team fits into the campus, but the whole state is happy with it. We're just all in. And then you've got the other end of it, the Ivy League, which in the 1950s, I think it was, they'd made the decision that athletics and academic work are simply in too much tension, and we will decide to put academics first every single time. And then you've got your alma mater, Stanford, which somehow, by some long-running miracle, manages to produce

a really, it runs from very, very good to absolutely brilliant athletic program year after year after year while remaining one of the great universities on the face of the planet. Is Stanford replicable? Do you buy this notion on which the Ivies have rested their entire athletic program for six, seven decades now, that you have to choose one or the other? Well, first of all, I think Stanford's absolutely replicable. The Pac-12, by the way, has not done Stanford any favors.

They've had to cut some sports, and there's other cuts coming, I think, at other schools in The Pac-12, by the way, has not done Stanford any favors. They've had to cut some sports, and there's other cuts coming, I think, at other schools in the Pac-12 because of a really bad TV contract. But I don't actually find a huge difference. I mean, I think it's a false separation between the Ivy League and everybody else. I mean, if you look at what... Sally, that is the second time you've just rejected my premise. I'm sorry. I hate to say it. First of all, we here, you know, we Stanford people are smarter. And so you have to, you know, I'm completely kidding. Here's the thing. I just had this conversation with Tommy Amaker, the college basketball coach at Harvard. I mean, it's a really, really good question. I don't know the answer.

I just have my opinions. But, again, I'm not so sure that what's happening at a place like Harvard basketball is all that different from what's happening at Stanford football. I mean, I don't think David Shaw and Tommy Amaker are doing things that are profoundly different from each other. And that's what I mean when I said before that I would like to see universities try to integrate college athletics into the rest of the community, the campus community, better and more organically and with more of a sense of honor and a sense of what they're really

teaching, because I don't think there's anything wrong, you know, doing what David Shaw is doing with the football program at Stanford. And I just don't really think it's that profoundly different. And I actually think it's this sort of guilt complex on the part of college presidents that has created so much of this divide. Again, Yale theater majors aren't taught to feel ashamed for being on campus and being performance majors, you know? Um, right. Right. And, and I actually think there's a profound intelligence and a, um, uh, it's an entire way of thinking and of analyzing

to be an athlete. And,. And it teaches leadership. It teaches collaboration to a degree. Any player who's ever played for Mike Krzyzewski at Duke will tell you it was the greatest class they ever took at Duke. I happen to be close to Pat Summitt at Tennessee. Her, you know, Kara Lawson's about to become head coach of women's basketball at Duke. Kara Lawson would tell you Pat Summitt was her greatest professor at the University of Tennessee, and she was a magna cum laude graduate. So again, I think it's like our own guilt that's creating a lot of these problems. If we would acknowledge that these are forms of disciplines and intelligence and really

stress that over the guilty alum who's paying people under the table, he'd be much better off. You know what? That is a beautiful answer. I'll be writing it on Monday. Okay. I'm not kidding. That's good.

Yeah. Sally, it's been a pleasure to talk to you. And we'd like to talk to you again someday. I'd like to discuss the future of journalism and newspapers, particularly if we have a new crop of people coming in who believe, as a New York Times editorial said the other day, that objectivity is actually nothing but white privilege. I can't wait to see subjective coverages of. That's a trap. It is. Pardon my language, but that is such crap.

And it's insulting, too. But I can't wait for subjective covering of athletic matches where the idea that math as a Western linear rational concept has to be dethroned and the team that lost 17-87 actually won when you consider the numbers, et cetera, et cetera. It's a relieving thing to be a sports writer because the guiding principle for an athlete or a sports writer actually is Bill Parcells, which he said you are your record. You are your number. Well, your record is exemplary, and we enjoy it.

You're so kind. Back again. Back again. This was fun. I love talking to you. All right. That so kind. We'll have to have you back again. I'll be back again. This was fun. I love talking to you. All right. That's good. We've got a lot to talk about.

Sounds good. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you so much. Well, a lot of raw meat there. We don't talk about sports enough, actually, here. I think this is a nice change. She was just great.

She was so refreshing. I mean, aside from I asked two questions, and in both cases she said, well, you know, your premise is just wrong. You got her. She's great. She's just great. She's a reporter. She knows people. She knows her facts.

And yet she's thoughtful. And I just loved it. I just loved it. Well, I have to leave. So I'm going to let you guys hash this out among yourself. The big story this week, the played endlessly in cable network news in the loop, Nancy Pelosi striding magisterially across the floor of a hair salon unmasked. And some people are saying that this is a ridiculous thing to concentrate upon. Other people are saying, well, here's a perfect example of rules for thee but not for me um and some people are saying wait a minute you mean that nancy pelosi

might actually be out of touch and uh and self-centered and regard herself above the whole the hoi polloi yeah it can't be anyway uh i'll let you guys hash that out i'll see you later bye bye oh i think the nancy pelosi story Pelosi story is really it's a it's a great campaign story. It's exactly what you hope for. And and the Republicans should run with it. It's exactly what what what what will play well in places where there is a lockdown. The problem is that those places are tend to be places that are pretty solidly democratic anyway. But it's always good to remind people that centimillionaire politicians get to do whatever they want

while you've got to wear a mask and tiptoe around your kid's Zoom class for the next four months, five months. And have your hair cut outdoors, which is what is legal and which is what my poor barber is having to do, set up chairs in the parking lot and have the hair blown all anyway. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, it's a great story. It's a fantastic story. And they have every, I mean, I've been sort of

following it and following the backlash against the backlash. And they have every right to run and run and run with it. And if if uh if a republican had been in the situation of in reverse the democrats would be making a six-act play out of it too and they'd be right to it's it's too delicious it's like it's a perfect embodiment of what you're trying to say and it actually encapsulates what people feel about the the response to covid at this point which is it is the people paying the price correct are not the people preening around and swanning around use my favorite verb about safety and what we need to do and how important it is you know bill de blasio is not suffering personally nancy pelosi is not

suffering personally when she wants to get her hair done she gets her hair done the question i would ask is like when was the last time n time Nancy Pelosi went to that salon and there was anybody else there? Right. Because my guess is that she's used to walking into a salon that's empty and off hours. She just goes when she goes because she's Nancy Pelosi. And so for a lot of people, there's a great story Joan Didion told once in the middle when she was a young reporter in the middle of the worst blizzard in New York City history in early in the 60s and she's been tasked with interviewing for Vogue or something um Christina Onassis so the daughter of Aristotle Onassis a billionaire arrest and she goes and she said she everything is canceled the buses aren't running the subways aren't running

and she's not sure whether she's supposed to show up or not but she figures she's just better so she shows up she walks across the park. And she's not sure whether she's supposed to show up or not, but she figures she's better. So she shows up. She walks across the park and she's in her big galoshes and everything. And she gets and she pronounces her as a doorman. They take her up to the penthouse and she walks out and there's Christina Onassis kind of in her

house pajamas in her orchid room. And she says, oh, is it snowing? And that is sort of the nancy pelosi is there is there seem to be some unpleasantness out there and that's kind of and if you can if you can wrap it around her head you should absolutely rack it wrap it around her head and she's not doing herself any favors by saying it was a setup because you know darn well she doesn't go to a crowded salon i mean we're talking earlier about uh you know what constitutes really great political stories and you know if you are the incumbent you want to use you know throw some red meat at your base if you're the challenger

you need to throw some red meat if you're and then nancy pelosi getting her hair done in the middle of a of a quarantine is a perfect perfect perfect piece of rob yeah no you can't i know i know james lilacs and you're no james i know but when it comes to red meat peter quality matters unlike in political red meat in real meat quality matters and there's more to it than texture and taste which is why high quality humanely raised meat is important first of all it's better for you important. First of all, it's better for you. It's better for the animal. It's better for the environment.

So what's your favorite kind of meat? How do you like to prepare it? Do you like to grill or cast iron skillet, broiled, whatever? Not everyone has convenient access to high-quality meat. Luckily, now there is ButcherBox. ButcherBox believes everyone deserves high-quality, humanely sourced meat. Never be without something to cook for dinner because there's always meat in the freezer. One less trip to the grocery store and a better, more affordable selection too. So every month, ButcherBox shifts a curated selection of high quality meat right to my home.

All meat is free of antibiotics and added hormones. Each box has 9 to 11 pounds of meat, enough for 24 individual meals, packed fresh, shipped frozen, vacuum sealed, so it stays that way. I can customize my box anyway. I'll go to the website. You can go with some of their bear boxes. You can make up your own. You get exactly what you want. It's a no-brainer. It's the best meat shipped right to the door, which means one less trip to the grocers or one less click on the ridiculous apps that I now use because the groceries are terrible. You have 100% grass-fed finished beef, free-range organic chicken, heritage pork, wild-caught Alaskan salmon, sugar, nitrate-free bacon. You got a lot of choices. It's the way meat should be. ButcherBox

is the most affordable and convenient way to get healthy, humanely-raised meat. With ButcherBox, you get the highest quality meat around for just $6 a meal, and they even have free shipping nationwide, except Alaska and Hawaii, sorry. Right now, ButcherBox is offering new members ground beef for life. That's two pounds of ground beef in every box for the life of your subscription. So go to butcherbox.com slash ricochet. That's butcherbox.com slash Ricochet, B-U-T-C-H-E-R-B-O-X.com slash Ricochet. And our thanks to ButcherBox for sponsoring the Ricochet podcast. Not as good as James. No, no, but I wasn't even going to say that.

But it's true. Chef Rob, quick question here. Yeah. I know this is, you're not supposed to ask a serious foodie, which you are, very serious foodie, this question, but packed fresh, shipped frozen, and vacuum sealed, as you know, I have just discovered sous vide cooking, and how long can you keep meat in your freezer until you get to it? What's that? A long time, if it's vacuum sealed the way they do it, you can keep it in there a long time, because it's the air in there, as long as it's, it's like when you sous it, you can keep it in there a long time because it's the air in there. As long as it's like when you sous vide, you want to have

contact with the meat. Okay. So butcher box, you don't have to be embarrassed if you don't eat it all before the next delivery. A lot of things, people, I think people

unfairly malign frozen food. If it's done properly, it's incredibly great. It's like IQF, like individually quick frozen vegetables, individually quick frozen shellfish are really, really good. I mean, it's very, very hard if you prepare it right to tell the difference between something that's, you know, quote unquote fresh or never frozen. Something was IQF that was frozen properly. And, you know, the shrimpunquote fresh or never frozen. Something that was IQF, that was frozen properly. And, you know, the shrimpers in Louisiana and people like that, I mean, a lot of these shrimp boats will freeze the shrimp individually on the boat. So it's about as fresh as you can get.

Oh, really? Wow. It's like when you go to the supermarket in December and you buy a tomato. And the tomato's made all the way up from South America and it's got zero taste. You should buy a fantastic canned tomato. They're picked when they're ripest, and they're put in the can, and they're delicious. There's no reason not to. I keep saying this. At some time, we just do have to just do it.

I know nothing about this, and you know everything. So we really should try it. I keep wanting you to do a cooking really should try i keep wanting to do you to do a cooking show try a cooking show but it really is a food show it's it's how to it's educating peter that's that could be the uh although that sort of puts me in as the permanent idiot well no that's fair that's no that's fine my what i always want to do is to actually do on zoom uh for the members who actual uh uh uh drink you know cocktail party and everybody kind of bring their own drink and then we sort of randomly pick people you know

to come and tell us what they made and why there is there is absolutely no reason we shouldn't do that yeah i think it's true okay holidays at the latest we members only members only members only all right now what do we do to get out we just we you and i are stuck without james At the latest. Members only. Members only. Members only. All right. Now what do we do to get out? We just, you and I are stuck without James. Well, here's how we do it, Peter. This is not how James does it. This broadcast, this, I'm so bad.

Boy, you know, it really, it really does. It's like, what's that Joni Mitchell song? You don't know what you got until it's gone. Yes. This podcast is brought to you by ButcherBox, Quip, and ExpressVPN. Support them, please, for supporting us. All three of those brands, by the way, have been indefatigable supporters of the Rigor Shaped Podcast from early, early days. And they are all terrific products.

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become a member and get ready for our cocktail palooza. Rob, it pains me to say this, but you know what you and I just did for the last five minutes? We made James look good. I hate it. I'm so mad. All right. Next week, Rob. I'm going to wash that man right out of my hair. I'm going to wash that man right out of my hair. I'm going to wash that man right out of my hair. And send him on his way. I'm going to wave that man right out of my arms. I'm going to wave that man right out of my arms. I'm going to wave that man right out of my arms. I'm going to wave that man right out of my arms and send him on his way.

Don't try to patch it up, tear it up, tear it up. Wash him out, dry him out, push him out, fly him out. Cancel him and let him go. Yes, sister, I'm going to wash that man right out of my hair I'm gonna wash that man right out of my hair I'm gonna wash that man right out of my hair And send him on his way If the man don't understand you if you fly on separate

beams. Waste no time, make a change. Ride that man right off your range. Rub him out of the roll car and drum him out of your dreams If you laugh at different comics If you root for different teams Waste no time, weep no more Show him what the door is for Rub him out of the roll call and drum him out of your dreams.

Oh, no. Oh, no. I'm going to rub, wash, wave, rub the man right out of my hair. I'm going to rub, wash, wave, rub that man right out of my hair. Don't try to patch it up, tear it up, tear it up. Wash him out, dry him out, push him out, fly him out, cancel him. And let him go, yeah, sister. I'm going to wash that man right out of my hair.

I'm going to wash that man right out of my hair. I'm gonna wash that man right out of my hair. Ricochet. Join the conversation.