The Ricochet Podcast - Beautifying the Buildings that Shape Us

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

The National Endowment for the Arts has been with us for sixty years, coinciding conspicuously with the ascendancy of nihilistic works that pollute our public spaces. Justin Shubow aims to change all of that. He's a top candidate to chair the NEA under the second Trump administration and has a particular interest in the proper design of federal architecture. What have columns and Roman arches to do with the re-moralization of the free citizen? Listen in to find out. Plus, James, Steve and Charlie adjust to Biden's just-declared 28th amendment; they work their way through the confirmation hearing highlights; and lose themselves in a David Lynch-like daydream.- Sound clips from this week's open: David Lynch on movies (KGSM MediaCache) and “Mr. Baseball” on family (MLB Media)

At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar and the chance to reward you. That's why every day of the festival, we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to €10 if your horse loses on a selected race. That's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing. Cheltenham with LiveScoreBet. This is total betting. Sign up by 2pm, 14th of March. Bet within 48 hours of race.

Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie Well, you know, the little detail is, you've probably heard this, is Hunter Biden is claiming millions of dollars in losses from the fire of his hard work. We've lost a few original hunters.

Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Charles C.W. Cook and Stephen Hayward. I'm James Lallix, and today we're going to talk architecture and the NEA and the future of arts in America with Justin Schubau. So let's have ourselves a podcast. You know, they call it a film business,

but money is the last thing a person should be thinking about in my book. My family is here today. My boys, my girls. My kids used to do things to aggravate me too. I'd take them to a game and they'd want to come home with a different player. Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast. And if you can believe it, it's a podcast once again. And if you know what I'm referring to, you you're wondering are they going to get around to that at the end of the show i certainly hope so in the meantime we have sparkling conversation as ever here with uh charles cw cook and steven hayward gentlemen

welcome good morning james Thank you for having me. That desultory acceptance of my good wishes. You can at least attempt to gin up a little enthusiasm for the endeavor, Charles. No, I just thank you so much. I mean, it's a remarkable day. We have a new constitutional amendment, apparently, has been ratified. Is this true that Joe Biden is at the National Archives about to set himself on fire if the National Archivist doesn't adhere to our norms and just waive the ratification of the ERA into the Constitution? Am I getting this right?

No, you're getting it wrong because he has declared it. That was the word he used. He actually put out a graphic and it said, I declare on the graphic. Did he also declare bankruptcy? Because I remember there's an office scene where Michael Scott does the same thing,

believing, declaring it to be sufficient. He declares it. He declares it as well that's on the way out so good james it's so good it will tell us a little bit about it charles i just think this is my favorite thing that has happened in a long time and it's made even better by the fact that one half hour after he declared it there was a piece up at crazy jennifer rubin's new website the contrarian written by lawrence tribe saying it's true he's declared it it's the 28th amendment that's all he needed to do and explaining why it's now the 28th amendment i just you can't write this nexus joe biden jen rubin lawrence tribe

the 28th amendment i if somebody had proposed writing this as a parody for me i would have said this is too absurd but it's not so for those who don't know the background here is that in the 1970s and 80s there was an actual debate over the ratification of the equal rights amendment i think we may have been through this on a previous podcast. Anyhow, it expired in 1982, and it wasn't ratified. Phyllis Schlafly won. And whether you think that's good or bad, it's a fact. Ruth Bader Ginsburg said it out loud that it wasn't ratified, and the DOJ has said it for years, and Barack Obama has said it, and everyone has said it, and the National Archivist has said it, including today. It didn't get through. But in the last three weeks or so, there's been this real push that has built atop this percolating desire

to pretend that it just passed because subsequent to the deadline, some states ratified the amendment. I never thought, though, that this would culminate in Joe Biden publicly saying, it's in the Constitution. I mean, Kirsten Gillibrand, fine, we expect that from her. But the President of the United States pretending he has this authority is just such a great story um and those are our norms and they have nothing to do with any sort of autocratic bending and shaping and perversion of the laws and statutes at all uh steven you no doubt have some thoughts about this as well as other farewell items items that Biden has said on his way out. Well, I mean, my view is, why stop here? Why don't we just proceed on a Harrison Bergeron style to the 210th, 211th, and 212th amendments to the Constitution,

giving us complete equality, right, with the handicapper general, if you know that great story from 1961. I mean, I don't know. I feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, except the horse won't die. Just to give you one example of the plasticity of the law and the Constitution for the left. So, you know, my dean at Berkeley Law, who's very nice to me and nice to John Yoo, but he's way out there, Erwin Chemerinsky, he has argued with a straight face that the supreme court the supreme court should declare the electoral college and the united states senate are unconstitutional why because they violate the one man one vote principle in the text and the equal protection clause but so in

other words you know never mind the theory behind and all the rest of that that they think that it's perfectly legitimate or whatever note of power can be controlled by the left, to say one principle of the Constitution trumps others that are stated in plain black and white text. That's how little you really think about the text of the Constitution. So, you know, the left wants what it wants, and they want the Equal Rights Amendment. And then my final word is, I do like to ask the people worked up about this, can you name anything, any right that women have not achieved through the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause and other ordinary legislation? Maybe one or two things you can

think of, but it's almost all the things they wanted in the Equal Rights Amendment have been achieved by other legal means over the decades. Well, yes, plasticity, the Constitution being living and breathing. So is Kim Kardashian, but I'm not exactly sure we're talking factory parts here. The other thing, and you might call it hypocrisy, some dare. That struck me this week was Biden coming out in a series of tweets and talking about the importance of veracity in social media. And everybody knows he didn't write the tweets. Somebody wrote them for him. He's not sitting down there steepling his fingers and thinking, what exact point do I want to make about misinformation and truth on the variety of internet platforms that we had? No, somebody just

typed it out in his name, saying that we have to be wary of things that are not true on the internet. And one of those things being not true on the internet is that joe biden said this so i enjoyed that i enjoyed the uh the pardon of the non-violent drug offenders now what sticks out for you guys about when you think about pardoning of non-violent drug offenders what do you what what series of thoughts go through your mind uh well my first thought is i'll bet the overwhelming majority of them are not nonviolent or are not, in fact, substantial dealers. And we know how this game is played to avoid going to trial, which is long and costly and uses a lot of resources. You get you plead down people into possession or other lesser charges and then give them the maximum sentence for what the statute says. So we're not letting out of prison, oh, somebody who's just caught with, you know,

half a pound of marijuana for personal use or something like that. And so that's why, you know, we're again being sold a false narrative of who it is who's in prison for drug offenses. And so, you know, my guess is we're going to see a lot of these people return to the drug trade and end up getting arrested down the road here well trump did the same thing if i recall i did do you not and it is if there's one federal prison you know barabas prison which is stocked with people that they can conveniently pardon at the end in order to make themselves look magnanimous and generous uh charles i'm i i know you're eager for a war on drugs conversation no no i just you know what irritates me about this so much is joe biden

spent the vast majority of his career in fact his main contributions to american law while he was in the senate were in the realm of drugs and firearms These were the two things he wanted to regulate. And he was particularly interested in regulating the intersection of drugs and firearms. People who had firearms who used drugs, people who sold drugs and used firearms. There are quotes going back to the late 1970s from Joe Biden throughout the 1980s.

In the early 1990s, when he told George H.W. Bush that he was a squish soft on the issue and then especially in the early 1990s when he helped write the crime bill in which Joe Biden says all manner of things including that he doesn't care why anyone commits a crime like this that he doesn't care what problems people have that he doesn't care if it's an addiction or not the role of the federal government must be to put these people in prison and in the last couple of years he has pardoned his son for committing a crime at the intersection of drugs and guns and is now issuing these pardons and talking as if for his entire life he has been a critic of incarceration per se and i just find

it irritating not because people can't change their mind they can but because he's never accounted for a single single shift it was the popular thing back then and he also had he also had less hair before the plugs right so i think that actually the sweat accumulating on his scalp from the lights of the television cameras made him very, very able to feel where the wind was blowing. Some people use a wetted finger. Joe Biden used a wetted scalp. But then as he got more hair, inexplicably, he perhaps became politically deaf to the shifts in public opinion. Because the hair came down over his ears. Yeah.

And blocked the sound out. Possibly it. Well, he'll be gone soon. But he has warned us, however, about an oligarchy that is taking shape in America within a tech industrial complex, hoping perhaps that he will go out, or maybe the person who's writing his speeches,

hoping that he'll go out like Eisenhower, somebody whose warnings will be echoed and referred to decades later as being remarkably prescient. I was more worried about the tech industrial complex and its intertwining with government when there was an actual concerted effort to suppress information, to suppress information, true information, in the name of public safety, public truth, the other thing.

Of all people to talk about the worries that we should have with technology and industry coming from Biden. It's rather rich. But then again, who knows if he was responsible for any of that stuff at all? I tend to think not. I tend to think that we're promulgating all the covid regulations. He was back with a dish of soft serve somewhere watching clues. Confirmation hearings. Rubio impressed. Now, you may say, well, here's the guy who was sort of all on board with all the neocon stuff before. Now he's changed his tune.

I don't really know that much. All I know is that you can tell what is being said, what people are being allowed to be said right now. And if we're tossing off this fiction of transnational identity, this sort of post-national Star Trek Federation world in which all are subsumed in one glorious conglomerate of individuals, if we're getting rid of that in favor of pure, bald, naked self-interest again, yay, I i mean i want everybody to get along don't get me wrong but the idea that the united states should bend a knee bend a knee because the eu decides that this is the way the world should be ordered uh nah yeah so well i don't know which which part of that you want us to grab hold of and run with? I don't care. Yeah, I mean, I watched some of the confirmation hearings this week,

and it's been some great theater, mostly about how completely lunatic the Democrats are still about the matter. I mean, there is this old custom going back decades now that a new president usually gets one cabinet member rejected. It doesn't matter if your own party has the Senate. It happened under Reagan, happened under the first President Bush, the second President Bush, happened for Bill Clinton, and they seem to be having trouble picking their target this time. It looked like it was going to

be Hegseth, but it looks like he's going to go through. It looks to me now like the two people who might be in jeopardy of being rejected are R Kennedy Jr., RFK Jr., and maybe Tulsi Gabbard. And I don't know if it's on the substance of Gabbard or if there's, on the one hand, anger the Democrats that she switched teams after having knifed Kamala Harris five years ago in the primaries, or if they really have doubts about her views, which have changed over the years. And then RFK, I mean, he's just a wild card and i don't think anyone knows quite what to do about that i have to say it is genius of trump to get democrats to hate a kennedy i mean republicans have been trying for 60 years with no success

and now trump's done it by nominating him to the cabinet and then finally maybe we have rfk all wrong uh all these years when i heard him attacking big oil, it turned out he was attacking big seed oil. And so here we are. Well, we already have red number three banned or red number two. So obviously the RFK influence is there. Charles, you are closer to Rubio than the rest of us. Are you impressed with his performance? Do you think he'll be a good secretary of state?

Yes. performance do you think he'll be a good secretary of state yes and yes i would note that the shift that you observed is pretty typical for rubio now i'll preface this by saying i like rubio he's been a really good senator from florida he has his flaws he is for example in the pocket of big sugar it's one great thing about ron dos santos is's not. He told them on day one to pound sugar, I guess. But Rubio is. Granulated sugar. Other than that, though, he's done really well as a senator from Florida because he does what Florida wants him to do.

But he is and always has been somewhat protean. If you look back to the Rubio of 1998, when he was Speaker of the House in Florida, and the Rubio of 2006, and the Rubio of 2010, and the Rubio of 2018, and the Rubio of now, they're all different. Rubio became a Tea Partier. That wasn't who he was. He wasn't a Thomas Massey type who has believed the same thing for 30 years for good or ill Rubio became a tea partier and then when he saw that the politics of the party in the country were moving he shifted away from it so he's moved to fit with the moment that is in part a criticism but at another level he is going to be serving as secretary of State, which is a role that is

subordinate to the President. And if he had all these ideas that didn't comport with those of Donald Trump, who's the guy who won the election, it wouldn't work very well. So when I see people say, well, this person or that person is clearly trying to please the president. If their job is to work for the president, that doesn't bother me in the slightest. Pam Bondi, who's up for attorney general, has said some things about guns that I don't like as a Second Amendment advocate. But the villain there was Rick Scott

because she worked for Rick Scott. And Rick Scott was the one who was pushing certain laws and it was her job to defend them and enforce them. So I think Rubio will do a good job because I think he is interested in the area. I think that he has good diplomatic skills. And the last thing I'll say about Rubio is, this is really important, although his politics has changed somewhat over time, he has always loved America and seen its role in the world as being indispensable. And you need that in a Secretary of State. Unfortunately, especially given some of our recent Secretaries of State, they don't always have that as a virtue. So in other words, when we talk about

weathervans like Rubio and Joe Biden, we might say, hmm, there's a word for that. And the word is politician. But Peter Hugseth doesn't strike anybody as a politician. I mean, he may be dabbling in it, but he doesn't strike you as that. He strikes you as sort of the ramrod straight type who can keep a straight face while he's being hectored by some hand-waving heritants that did not make for the best political theater, I thought, for the Democrats. Yeah, I mean, I have three or four favorite smackdowns from the nominees this weekend. Maybe the top was when Elizabeth Warren said, in a typically imperious way, well, you have said generals shouldn't be allowed to be on corporate boards, but you won't apply that to yourself. And he just says, I'm not a general senator.

And then I have to say the Treasury nominee, Scott Besant, I knew nothing about him, but when I watched, I was quite impressed with the guy, I have to say that the Treasury nominee, Scott Besant, I knew nothing about him. But what I watched, I was quite impressed with the guy, I have to say. And, you know, one of my favorite smackdown there was Ron Wyden of Oregon has been around forever. And he says, you know, we're in this clean energy race with China. And Besant said, no, we're not. China's building 100 coal plants this year, 10 nuclear plants. We're in an energy race, not a clean energy race with China. And I thought, you know, what's Biden going to do? I mean, that's a pretty definitive smackdown.

And boy, talk about leading with your chin. Oh, fine. Maisie Hirono asked every single nominee, have you ever been a sexual harasser? Have you ever demanded sexual faith? I don't know. Are you now or have you ever been a male? I mean mean it's just astounding the way she conducts herself indeed indeed when you bring up china you bring up the imminent um re uh jiggering reconfiguration reselling whatever is going to happen to tiktok and we should probably get to that at the bottom

of the hour after we meet with our guest uh because that is fascinating especially when you have all these tiktokers in amer America fleeing to little red book or red book, which is the Chinese equivalent, which apparently is providing them with this incredible look at China. And the scales are falling from their eyes and they're realizing they've been told lies about communism. China's great. We'll get to that. I want to tell you one thing. My wife is gone. She's been gone for some time. She left me. She left me for Arizona to be with her mom. Don't worry.

She's coming back. What this means, however, in the afternoon sometimes, I want to take a nap. And since she's not in the house, I have the heat down. I have the heat turned off in all kinds of rooms because it's just me living in the big house now. And that means I go to the guest room because it's got a little electric blower heater, and I turn that on, and I have a nice little nap. Well, I did that the other day, and I realized realized, while yes, it's warm in here, B, these are bad sheets. I got bad sheets in this room. Whatever am I going to do? Well, the answer is simple. If I want better sleep, I can just wrap myself in cozy earth. Cozy earth.

Their goal is to help you turn your home into a sanctuary, a place where you can escape the outside world's demands and truly unwind. Life gets hectic, and finding comfort and calm is so important. Your time outside the nine to five or however you configure your days and work from home world, it should be about relaxation, about recharging and soaking in a sense of peace. With Cozy Earth, you can create a space that feels like a cozy retreat, a personal retreat where comfort and serenity come together naturally. Feel the difference with Cozy Earth, you can create a space that feels like a cozy retreat, a personal retreat, where comfort and serenity come together naturally. Feel the difference with Cozy Earth's best-selling bamboo sheet set made from 100% premium viscose from bamboo. I'd never heard of it either, but their breathable sheets are uniquely soft, and they only get softer with every wash.

And we're here to tell you that Charles C.W. Cook has been wrapping himself in COVID for some time. And how's it going? Pretty well. I do enjoy them. My wife chose them. I think I say this every time, but it is true. My wife chose these sheets because when I was in the process of buying them, I thought, is this the sort of decision I, as a man, will be allowed to make?

And I concluded it was not. So she chose them. And she loves them, and I love them. And it's very important that they're breathable in Florida because it's cold at the moment, James. I'm sure you're very sorry for me because it's 50 degrees. But it's not normally 50 degrees. And they are breathable and comfortable and soft,

and I use them all the time. Yes, well, it's going to be 14 below here in a little while, and that's why cozy is very important. Listen, if Charles' endorsement is not enough to convince you, rest assured with your purchase. Cozy Earth Bedding and Bath Products have a 10-year warranty. That's how much they believe in them. 10 years.

I've had sheets give out on me after a year and a half or so. 10 years. That's astonishing. It's a new year, and a better year starts with better sleep. Wrap yourself in Cozy Earth. And guys, you can make the choice, too. You don't have to wait for your wife to do it, because your wife will love them. Don't wait.

Don't. Head to CozyEarth.com slash Ricochet now and use the code, exclusive code, Ricochet, for up to 40% off. That's CozyEarth.com slash ricochet for up to 40% off. And if you get a post-purchase survey, or do please say that you heard about Cozy Earth from Ricochet Podcast, we're happy to tell you about them and you'll be happy that we did. And we thank Cozy Earth for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar, and the chance to reward you.

That's why every day of the festival, we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to 10 euro if your horse loses on a selected race. That's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing. Cheltenham with LiveScore Bet. This is total betting. Sign up by 2pm 14th of March. Bet within 48 hours of race. Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie. And now we welcome to the podcast Justin Schubow, President of the National Civic Art Society. I like the sound of that. He serves as the Chairman of the United States Commission on Fine Arts and is on the short list of candidates to head the National Endowment for the Arts. Justin, welcome. Thanks for having me. We've been

undergoing a civic uglification process here in the United States for some time, even though we had glimmers of hope in the 80s with a return to postmodern architecture that brought back some old styles and some flourishes and touches that touched on the great civic western heritage. We have been done poorly by our city planners by our architects by our artists who have inflicted one brutalist non-entity after the other on us donald trump tried to do something in the last administration with a series of executive orders i believe which said hey you know what going forward uh it's not going to be ugly it's not going to be a bunch of concrete it's going to have some columns okay and maybe a pediment or two, reversed by the Biden administration, since everybody believes that modernism, and I like,

don't get me wrong, I like modernism, but we've had a paucity of beauty in the public sphere for some time, almost by design. What can we do to change that? What would you do to change that? Well, as you mentioned, President Trump issued this revolutionary executive order reorienting federal architecture, which had been almost entirely modernist, typically ugly since World War II. And Trump's executive order required that new federal buildings be ennobling, be inspiring, be liked by ordinary Americans as opposed to architectural elites. And he said there should be a preference for classical and traditional design for buildings across the country. Both terms defined very broadly. So, for instance, classical included Art Deco. And as for Washington, D.C., the order was at its most stringent,

requiring that new federal buildings be classical. You know, I would love to see that order be reissued. In fact, I'd be shocked if it is not. I mean, I think it was one of the most popular things he did during his first term. And I think, you know, he's a builder, and he has his sense, his fingers on the pulse of the American people. It's not just that the architecture was modern. It's not that. The United States and WPA buildings in the 1930s built a lot of post offices around the country,

and most of them were in a modern style, federal modern, which has sort of quasi-fascistic overtones, but we did it better. We humanized that style. And the other half was, frankly, colonial-style stuff. So the government is adept at doing that and can do that.

But we're not in a period right now where the government is building an awful lot of buildings, scattering embassies of post offices around the country anymore. So how would this actually play out? local museums, in local arts funding where the NEA could change what it funds to reflect perhaps more the mood and tastes of the people? Or should the NEA's position be to instruct those people that their tastes are archaic and kitschy and they ought to really pay more attention to a banana taped to the wall. Well, as for federal buildings, and, you know,

I guess I should say that my organization had a hand in instigating and drafting the order. At times, the federal government has been the largest patron of art and architecture in the country. Not just architecture with all the buildings, but one half of one percent of all construction funds must go towards art installations at these buildings. And you add that up and it's an enormous amount. So the order, I think, applied only to buildings costing over 50 million dollars and more. And it's not as if there are dozens and dozens of buildings being constructed. But when it comes to some of these buildings in significant cities, they have tremendous symbolic importance. And one place that

would be of great importance is the site of the FBI building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. As you may know, that building is coming down. It's a brutalist design, horrible design from the 1970s, and it's falling down. Trump himself has said that he wants the FBI to stay at that site. And given the fact that he wants a classical architecture for D.C., we could get a magnificent new FBI building on Pennsylvania Avenue, which is one of the most important streets in the country. As for the NEA, I think there is incredible opportunity to change the direction of the agency. Just to be clear, it's the largest funder of the arts and arts education in the country with a budget of around $210 million a year. My vision for the NEA comes from Dana Gioia, the masterful poet and translator who ran the NEA under George W. Bush. He said, a great nation deserves great art. And I couldn't

believe more. I think that the highest art is that which is beautiful, profound, or moving. And when I go into a contemporary art museum, that is not what I'm seeing. Too often it's things like that banana duct taped to a wall, that artwork that sold for $6.2 million recently. And I think the NEA, through its patronage, could help instigate a new renaissance in American art. One more for me. Yes, of course, the duct tape banana made everybody's eyes roll. But of course, we were instructed that this is in a fine, long tradition

of going back to Magritte and the rest of them, the surrealism of confounding expectations, of questioning what is art, etc.,, et cetera, et cetera. Installations being the plague of museums for all of these years. So let's say we get a new broom, we get new people in the NEA and they say, you know what, what we're going to fund in the future are the classical, the painting, the sculpture, music, the rest of it, things that work in the rich vein of Western tradition. And that's great. We do that. But as anybody who's been to a recent museum knows, there is at the sort of elemental base intern level an ability to take these arts of beauty and to turn them into something else.

I remember being at the Hogarth exhibition at the Tate a few years ago, which they'd famously given all the interns the opportunity to write the descriptions in terms of oppression, colonialism, grievance studies, gender ideas, whatever. So you were not allowed to just perceive a Hogarth, which itself is richly detailed with story. You had to be informed about the coded messages of the wood being used in the chair because it spoke to the slave trade and the rest of it. So in other words, you can say the museums will be beautiful again and define beauty in a very broad sense, but you're still going to be dealing with a museum culture which seems to be opposed, shall we say, to just simply letting aesthetics speak for themselves. Because even saying aesthetics speak for themselves is to them a political decision, a political statement, and a wrong one. Well, there is a sister agency to the NEA, the Institute for Museum and Library Services,

that has an even bigger budget. And, you know, with money can come strings. So perhaps the IMLS can work with the NEA to ensure that when the best art is on display, it's done in the right way. But I would say that even if the curators put all kinds of text besides the work of art on the wall, sometimes the art speaks for itself and there's nothing that the curator can do to undermine it. I mean, it's not quite the same thing, but you know, when it comes to literature and philosophy, I went to college at Columbia University, which has a great books program, one of the last remaining programs, and you know, everybody reads Plato, Aristotle, Homer all the way up to the present and yes it may be true that your professor is a Marxist is trying to subvert the meaning of these texts but at the same time you've read them and there's no matter what professor says you know if you read Plato if you read Homer if you read Dante, if you read Homer, if you read Dante, you might take away

from it your own personal meaning and interpretation. And so thus, I don't think that the arts, you know, mandarins can shape everything in a deleterious way. Justin, it's Steve Hayward out on the left coast. I want to stick with architecture for a minute. You like to quote one of my favorite Churchill lines, that first we shape our buildings and then our buildings shape us. And for listeners who don't know the context, that's part of that long and very eloquent speech he gave, explaining why the House of Commons needed to be rebuilt exactly as it had been after it had been bombed by the Germans, when all the modern architects wanted to have, well, let's use this as an opportunity, you know, to have a modern, semi-circular parliamentary building. And Churchill said, no, here's why we should stick

with it. I recommend people who are interested to go find that speech. It's on the internet. So I look around Washington, D.C., and I look at the old federal buildings that go back to the time of the early republic. And, you know, it's not a coincidence that Madison and Hamilton and Jay picked Publius as their pseudonym for the federalist papers, right? And I think not a coincidence that the founders chose Romanesque-style architecture for the Capitol.

And so lo and behold, today, the joke I like, which I borrow from Larry Arnn, is you walk down the street in Washington, if you see a building that has an agency in it with Romanesque architecture, like the Department of Treasury, that's a constitutional office. You look at one of the newer awful buildings, the Forrestal building for Department of Energy, the Hubert Humphrey building for Health and Human Services, likely any modern building is doing something unconstitutional.

That's for the architectural realm. What I'm looking up to is this. Sorry, James? I want to interject pedantically just to say that when you use Romanesque, Romanesque is actually a style of building which is distinct. Classical or Beaux-Arts is probably the term that we should use because we're going to have some architecture nerds saying, no, Richardsonian Romanesque with its heavy rusticated stone. Yeah, that's probably right. See, I have no great expertise in architecture except to say, and here's the question, and I've seen your slideshow, I've seen some of

these awful federal courthouse buildings that are often quite large and quite lavish and expensive, and, you know, never mind the bureaucracies in Washington, they look like they're intended to make, you know, drain people's soul out of them. They're not things of beauty. You don't even know which door to go into, and they don't really have a recognizable front. And I can't, it's hard to believe that, I mean, what is wrong with these modern architects that they want this brutalist style? I mean, is it really a philosophical core to this outlook, which is what I'm suspecting, or am I being paranoid and overreaching with that complaint? Well, that's a huge question. I mean, in the early days of modernism, which was

founded in Europe after World War I, there was certainly an ideological component. The idea that they're going to build a new kind of architecture for a new man and a new society, and thus they were drawn, these modernist architects, to extremes on the right or the left. You're not going to find many nice liberal Democrat modernist architects from that time period. And then over the years after World War II, you start getting brutalism, which is known for raw expanses of concrete, these imposing, sometimes sinister buildings. And some of the architects behind that talked about how what they were looking to achieve was an ethic, not an aesthetic. In other words, they were trying to achieve something to show the harsh truth of nature

and reality, as opposed to build something that is beautiful they just had a completely different agenda and then later on more recently when you get the rise of something called deconstructivism these are buildings that look like they're going to fall down that look like they've been invaded by alien parasites that are chaotic and you laugh but you know i would ask people to look at the san francisco federal building as an example of one of these designs it looks like an alien spacecraft that's going to kill you with laser beams i mean some of these deconstructive deconstructivist architects openly say that they're nihilists um you know rem koolhaas, this notorious Dutch architect, has said that beautiful buildings give a false sense of existential security.

Right. That's that's an ideological move that is reflected in his buildings, which actually include the headquarters of the communist television in China. And he said that that building is not supposed to be beautiful. He has a completely different agenda. Well, you know, I thought it was one of the great ironies of the first Trump administration that, you know, this flamboyant man who likes to boast of his gold-plated faucets in his bathrooms and on his airplane, and, you know, was in the casino business and all the towers and so forth, on the other other hand was the champion for classical architecture. And then on the other side of this was, I believe President Biden rescinded Trump's executive order on the first day in office. What was the hurry? I mean, boy,

somebody really wants to roll back that architectural guidance as a priority item for the first day in office. That to me was as shocking as the underlying arguments you can make. Well, the architecture establishment, which is almost entirely modernist, had been lobbying extremely hard. I mean, there's a lot of money at stake. And there is also an ideological component. Are we going to build in styles that hearken back to the past that look back to the founders for instance and in their use of classicism or are we going to build alien spacecraft or globalized buildings that have no local uh character whatsoever and at the same time

not only did you have the architectural establishment, you had cultural elites like the New York Times. They published an editorial titled, What's So Great About Fake Roman Temples? Saying that, well, the founders had to, you know, wear borrowed clothes, but we Americans today, we don't need to do that kind of thing. I mean, the implication of that editorial is that the U.S. Capitol, the U.S. Supreme Court, the Jefferson Memorial, these are all fake Roman temples, right? None of these buildings are 2,000 years old. And then you also had elites, especially at architecture schools, saying that classical architecture is racist, it's white supremacist, all sorts of crazy, to me, entirely laughable arguments. But, you know, obviously people in the Biden White House were listening and thus Biden rescinded the order.

There is, although Biden didn't give an explanation about why he did that, he did take other action that he gave an explanation for, which I think sheds light on the issue. So President Trump appointed me and six other commissioners to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, which is the Aesthetic Review Board for Washington. And we were appointed to four year terms. Biden removed me and three others in violation of the law and certainly in violation of 110 years of history in which no president had removed a commissioner. And at that time, the White House said that Biden took that action because our strong support of classical architecture did not comport with the president's values. Yeah. So one last question for me, sort of a broad one. And it's that mention in the New York Times article, which I'd forgotten about, brought it back to mind. You know, I noticed that especially when, you know, fancy liberals like to go overseas as travelers, where do they want to go? They want to go to the old medieval cities. They want to go to the Uffizi Gallery and marvel at this wonderful architecture and culture while having contempt or complete disregard for the culture that produced those works of art and produced those towns and architecture.

And that, to me, is one of the great incongruities. I simply don't get that, that you simply can't – the light bulb seems to never go off, that all these things that – they all want to go and hang out in Lake Com know lake comb all the rest of that um and i i don't know that to me is as baffling as this uh this passion for brutalist architecture and contempt for classical uh the classical heritage and classical architecture that's the only question that's kind of a rant and no you're right and i and he's right to point out you know brutalism has subsided the whole i mean brutalism we we attach that word to things that look brutal, but actually it's a French term. It has to do with the raw concrete and the rest of it. He's right about the deconstructionist stuff.

That desire to not only ignore the context of a building, of building surroundings, but to actively mitigate against it. When he mentions alien embassies he's absolutely right the number of buildings i've seen in europe where you have some elegant beautiful old detailed building to which a modern architect has attached a a jellyfish or a spaceship or something like that in in it is an it is an act it is an affront to what the thing is intended to diminish and and demean it we had had the Guthrie Theater here in Minneapolis. Jean Nouvel came in, and in an area that is nothing but old brick warehouses devoted and dedicated to the river and the grain traffic and the rest of it, he puts this blue glass thing in that has nothing to do with anything. And for a theater, it has two chimneys that words go up the chimney as if it's burning Shakespeare in front of our very eyes. And everybody loves it.

And I'm wondering, maybe you can tell me, Justin, exactly, is it going to take somebody to point out that the emperor actually is parading around the town square, clop, clop, clop, with not a stitch of clothing on, and then everybody will be free finally in the architectural profession to say, yeah, too much, too much ugliness. Is that what it's going to take? Or are they just institutionally incapable of thinking, oh, I got to go back to the old forms and produce something beautiful again? Well, first, you know, you talk about some of

these ungodly additions. There's actually something called parasitic architecture, which is when additions look like they are devouring or crushing or splintering beautiful historic buildings. It really looks like an attempt to demolish the past. I mean, as for the emperor's new clothes, I don't think it's a great secret that ordinary people dislike modern architecture. I mean, it's been widely reported. My own organization did a survey by the Harris Poll, you know, highly reputable nonpartisan company that of 2000 Americans finding that 72 percent of the people surveyed preferred classical and traditional design for federal buildings and U.S. courthouses. And there were widespread majorities across every demographic, whether it's gender, race, socioeconomic and political party affiliation. So I think honest architects, including the honest modernists, know that much of their work is not popular with the public. But they are elitist in the worst possible way, just wishing to impose their what they think is right on ordinary people. And, you know, buildings are not paintings in the wall of a museum.

You're forced to see them. You're forced to live with them or work in them. And so, therefore, architecture has this small p political component unlike other forms of art. I have to interrupt you for a second and ask you, have you heard about SenoLinux yet? SenoLinux.? SenoLinux. No?

Well, let me tell you. It's a class of ingredients discovered less than 10 years ago, and they are being called the biggest discovery of our time for promoting healthy aging and enhancing your physical prime. And as somebody who is aging, I was naturally interested. Well, as we age, everyone accumulates senescent cells in their body. They are also known as zombie cells. Why because they are old and worn out and not serving any useful function for your health anymore but they are taking up space and they are taking nutrients from our healthy cells. So much like pruning the yellowing of dead trees off a plant, qualia senolytics removes

those worn out senescent cells to allow the rest of your cells to thrive. This clinically tested two-day rejuvenation regimen may hold the key to unlocking cellular health and revitalizing aging tissues throughout the body. Resist aging at the cellular level. I've got it at home. I'm working on it. And let me tell you, I've been hitting the gym for two years now, and the last six months of this have been better than ever. You, too, can try Qualia Senulitic. Go to qualialife.com slash ricochet for up to 50% off, and use the code ricochet at the checkout for an additional 15% off.

Wow. Qualialife. Q-U-A-L-I-A-L-I-F-E dot com. For your convenience, Qualia Senulitic is also available at select GNC locations near you. That's Q U a L I a life.com slash ricochet for an extra 15% off your purchase. And we thank quality of response. This the ricochet podcast. At live score bet. We love Cheltenham just as much as we love football,

the excitement, the roar, and the chance to reward you. That's why every day of the festival, we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to €10 if your horse loses on a selected race. That's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing. Cheltenham with LiveScore Bet.

This is total betting. Sign up by 2pm 14th of March. Bet within 48 hours of race. Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie I wonder who's getting it right.

There's a lot wrong. Many of the buildings that we revere are older. The US Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, the Empire State Building. Who's getting it right at the moment? Well, there are some incredibly talented contemporary classical and traditional architects. So, for instance, there is the Tuscaloosa Federal Building. It's a new classical Greek Revival building in Alabama done by HBRA. The only reason that building exists is because Senator Shelby used his power as chairman of the Appropriations Committee to get it built. He had to fight the General Services

Administration, the agency responsible for federal buildings, which wanted to give him a glass box. Some other great architects in this country include David Schwartz. There's also Bob Stern's office, which has been doing a number of large buildings around the country, including some apartment buildings in New York. There's Peter Penoyer in New York. And then in England, we have other bright spots, such as Quinlan Terry. So there is the talent out there. The University of Notre Dame's architecture school actually teaches classical architecture. It's one of only a handful of architecture schools that teaches people the principles and how to design. So there is the talent out there. And,

you know, in fact, in residential architecture, classical architects are still getting lots of commissions. When rich people build houses, they very often want something, you know, traditional. So there's work there. The challenge is to find the headquarters like the FBI where, you know, the best architects can get the job. And the other thing is, what other than architecture needs reform? You are interested in heading up the NEA. It's not just buildings. It's other things, too. What's the biggest problem we face? Well, that's a huge question. We were talking about visual art, which is very rarely

beautiful, profound, or moving. Too much of it is this conceptual stuff that's sort of the art world being so self-conscious of itself that it's the end of art, right? This goes back to Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, which was a urinal that he signed his name to, that in so many ways, it's almost as if visual art has come to an end. But, you know, the same thing can go for, you know for contemporary music. I mean, I'm not talking about pop and rock, which can pay its own way and take care of itself, but the sorts of music that's played in concert halls. Are great symphonies still being written? are composers willing to write in a tonalist, you know, medium? It's not clear to me that that is the case. And also there are big problems in literature as well.

So the problems are all across the board. I mean, the NEA is not going to, you know, change the direction of Western civilization, but that doesn't mean that key uses of patronage can't have enormous symbolic impact. I mean, we don't need a thousand great paintings across the land, but, you know, ten really good ones, or two really good symphonies or operas or five novels, things like that can make a difference. There are those who say that the government has no business funding this stuff in the first place, really. If there's a great symphony out there to be written, then let somebody commission it as they did in the old days. Maybe we don't need a symphony at all because we

have the symphonic tradition retreating to movie soundtracks where it's flourishing, etc., etc. We don't need the government to pick winners and losers when it comes to books. In local theater, if people want it, they should pay for it. These are all valid points, and maybe the best way to avoid conflict in what we fund is to not fund anything. So you've got about 90 seconds here. Make the case. Well, I would quote Theodore Roosevelt who said that a national greatness wholly divorced from artistic production is but a one-sided, malformed greatness.

If the American government is known to have produced great works of art, it redounds to our national greatness in the same way that when the French rebuilt Notre Dame in Paris, it said something about their civilization. There are market failures when it comes to the arts, and I think the government can play a role in those areas. Well, thank you, Justin, and thank you for reminding me, and what you said before, that I

actually meant to say Duchamp instead of greet. And Duchamp was not wrong to consider the urinal to be a piece of art, and recontextualing it as such was a brilliant move. Thing is, you can only do that once, and it seems as if we've been recontextualizing urinals for the last hundred or so years. Good luck. Hope you get in. Look forward to what you do if you do so and you know maybe after you've been in the atelier of government and you've changed the cultural shape of the nation you'll come back and speak with us about what you've done and what needs to be done still thank you Justin thanks for having me I didn't mean to give the impression I think that everything should be a classical temple because I don't one of

the things that I love about early American 20th century skyscraper architecture is yes it's classical details. And, yes, Cass Gilbert could ladle on the frosting and it looked great. And Woolworth building is fantastic with its Gothic style. And, yeah, but the greatest American skyscrapers are the ones that came afterwards, the ones that became some new idiom. The Flatiron building is very early, but it's very modern. The buildings that arose because of a change in the zoning law. They built the Equitable Building in New York.

Huge, gargantuan structure, early part of the 20th century, like 1910, 1912, like 47 stories or something. Two file cabinets. It cast a shadow forever. And they said, you know what? This is getting out of hand. We need zoning. And the zoning laws that they passed mandated setbacks so the light could trickle down to the street. Well, because New York architects were the most influential, the style of setbacks was picked up all across the country. And you'd have a building in Fargo, North Dakota that had setbacks, didn't need them, but that was the style. And we developed this american idiom that is the most one of our greatest contributions to 20th century culture the modern you know people say art deco i call it modern whatever skyscrapers of the early 30s before the crash finally took out the business

are just magnificent examples and they're anything but severe and they're anything but severe. And they're anything but classical. They're uniquely, distinctly American. Now, that said, everybody yells at the Seagram building style, the international style. It's boring. And yeah, it has its boring manifestations. Chicago is full of them. But it does have a lightness and a beauty to it when done right. I've always said that a town that has one lever house or Seagram's building is lucky. A town that has 10 is cursed.

So there's beauty to be found in all of these styles, but not so much in the brutalist and the deconstructionist. And if we can get back to those things which flourished at a time of American flourishing, I think our cities will be more beautiful. I think we'll be happier to be walking around them. That is my speech. And I have nothing more to say on the matter. No, I can't top that.

So I will I will resign from this conversation, too. All right. And Charles, I believe you have another conversation that can be found elsewhere with the gentleman probably in detail about some other things. So we've had a Justin frenzy here at the Old Ricochet Podcast Network. Well, gentlemen, before we go out, at the top of the hour, I made in a strange voice a pronouncement that it was a Friday once again, and that might be familiar to a few people who used to listen to David Lynch, who would get on YouTube every Friday and give the weather. That's all he just he just gave the weather. And David Lynch giving you the weather is

one of those things that was a mainstay for me until he stopped doing it. And I'll miss it. I'll miss him. It you could say that there are two Americas. There's the America that was bummed when David Lynch died and the America that was bummed when Bob Uecker died. I'd like to think I straddle both. I contain multitudes, but I was more hit by Lynch than Uecker. But either one. Great Americans. Gentlemen, what say you?

Yeah, I think I agree with that. I mean, Uecker was a one-joke person, right? And it was a good joke, and he got a lot of mileage out of it, kind of like Rodney Dangerfield, I don't get no respect business. Whereas Lynch, I don't know what to say about him. I mean, he was certainly unique, you know. And nobody has been able, I mean, I think we all remember, if you're old enough, Twin Peaks on TV back in, what was that, 1990?

89, 90, 91, and I've never seen anything like it. And it did kind of fizzle out at the end. More can be said about that problem with filmmakers. I think the Coen brothers often don't know how to end their movies sometimes. But that was, and I think people who try to copy that style, they're not even close. Nope. Nope. And I'll tell you why in a second, but I want to get Charles take first. Well, I'm a movie idiot and I've seen almost no great movies. I've been slowly rectifying this, but I haven't extended my journey to Lynch. So the last time I saw anything that David Lynch did was at the end of the Steven Spielberg movie, The Fablemans, where he plays

John Ford, which was really good, really memorable moment in that movie, which I liked. That's my film analysis, by the way. Yes, I liked it or I didn't like it. And I like most of them. But I did see an interview with David Lynch that made me laugh. And this, I think, sums up the man, at least what I know about him. He said Eraserhead was his most spiritual movie. And the person interviewing him says, elaborate on that. And he says, no. Well, there's one lingering controversy from Lynch's filmography. And I bet, James, you can anticipate it.

It was his first attempt to make Dune. And I remember seeing it in a theater. theater I remember walking in and being given a sheet they gave a sheet everybody came in the theater with all the different names and some explanations and I thought oh this can't be good if they need to give you a cheat sheet to get through the movie and of course he didn't like the way that I guess the studio forced him to make cuts and put out the version in the theaters and within a couple of years if you ever saw the movie on DVD, it was always an Alan Smithy film. If you know what, Alan Smithy was always when you wanted to take your name off something. And I know there are some people who say his original cut or what he had in mind would have been genius or would have been great.

And I don't know if you have an opinion on that or not. But as someone who loved the Dune books, well, at least the first one. I'm the biggest David. I'm a really really big david lynch fan i would rather see flash gordon than dune i would rather see flesh gordon than dune it's just it's just never ever done it for me and that's fine i i mean i don't regard it as it was a you know a work for hire doesn't mean it's bad. I mean, Coppola did work for hire and it was some of my favorite movies that he did. It just didn't do anything for me. It doesn't it doesn't it doesn't have that Lynchian quality. And when you said that other people in the you know, in the early 90s were trying to recapture that some of them

did it somewhat successfully by saying, well, it's the quirky characters, but there has to be some underpinning. There has to be some underpinning goodness to it. And people just thought it was all dwarfs dancing backwards and stuff and the rest of it. No, no, not at all. People didn't get his ability to channel the language of dreams, the character of dreams. he was an uncanny master at at presenting dream logic without i mean every time he look at the dream sequences in the sopranos to see i was gonna say that that was him right no no no but he he did one i didn't he do

one sopranos episode dream sequence i i maybe a parody. I don't think so. I do not think so. I'll have to go back and check on that. But most dream sequences in television shows are, there's one episode, which is the whole thing is a dream sequence, and it's kind of close. It kind of gets the language right, but they're always too explicit. And people in dreams and television are always doing dreamlike things.

And they never accept the fact that they're actually maybe a monkey's paw just sitting on the table. I mean, which in dreams you do. It's odd. It's there. But you move along. And Lynch was just very, very, very good at that. But the other reason that Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet and a lot of the other things work. and we had a discussion on this at Ricochet, by the way, which you should go to and join, because it's not all politics. It's not all banging pots and pans about constitutional

amendments and the rest of it. It's where we talk about things like this. It has to do with his genuine love of American culture. You don't have lunch at Bob's big boy every day unless you are truly a fan of the post-war culture that produced large fat fiberglass statues of guys holding hamburgers aloft all over the country he loved that stuff unapologetically unironically and you get the sense of that that this is not a culture that he thinks needs to be shamed but needs to have its best parts amplified and appreciated and treasured and i'll always love him for that so i just looked this up james and i i am indeed wrong but there is one episode of the sopranos where there is a dream scene that is very explicitly supposed to be a pastiche of dav Lynch. That's what I was remembering. He's in the back of a car or something.

There's a slug. It's very weird. Yeah, possibly, possibly. But everybody's been trying to match his vocabulary, his way of doing these things for an awful long time, and they're not successful. If my desire as a director was to do a perfect David Lynch dream scene, I'm not sure that The Sopranos would be one of the shows that I would attempt to do. Because you end up with Tony Soprano himself in gladiatorial gear, you know, having it from behind some Italian maiden while they're going over there to talk business with the mafia.

So, no. Anyway, so, yeah, two distinct Americans on opposite sides of it, really. But both exemplars of the culture, and I'm glad that America is the place that has both of them. I'm trying to think of something that happened in Britain that Charlie can chime in on today, only to remind us that he is glad that he is here and not there. And an American citizen.

And an American citizen. Have been for seven years. Very proud. We'll end with this, very briefly briefly because I do have to run. And that is the government is upset that Elon Musk is interfering with their and calling for their government to come down because Elon Musk has some strange, bizarre fascination with sex gangs in England 10 years ago. How creepy is that of musk

is this the contribution from british culture that we're going to discuss on this thanks for that so you get david lynch i get sex gangs yeah the story is still a story because the british government has effectively covered it up and said that anyone who talks about it is a racist. So the idea that Elon Musk is being weird by talking about it is cheap. This has been percolating, bubbling for years, a decade more. And finally, not because of Elon Musk, although I don't think he's hurt. Finally, we're starting to get a few people who are not worried about being called right wingers or whatever, saying, no, we need to do something about this. And I would just say on this, something I've said for a very long time, which is one of the big problems with covering this up, aside from covering it up, which is the biggest crime, is that it has given a handful of British white supremacists who are terrible

people who have terrible ideas, something that they're right about. You want to avoid that in your culture. You don't want to give the people who are genuinely bad news something that they are right about and you are wrong about and that you are actually covering up a conspiracy that is actually true so it's good from my perspective that el musk has started to say this because for the first time in a long time other people have started to say actually maybe we should do something about this maybe we should talk about this in public and it will take it away from the fringes which is good

in and of itself that's the main reason by a very long way. Also, because it disempowers people who should never have been in a position to be said of, you know, oh, well, but. Stephen, I'm sure you agree completely, which is why I'm going to say thank you. And we're going to end the show because I have to go. I got to go. I got to go let my dog out. Stephen Hayward, Charles C.W. Cook. We thank our guest, Justin. Hope he gets into the NEA. We thank all of you for tuning in, and we hope you go to Ricochet and sign up so you can enjoy the life, verve, conversation, sparkling wit in the member feed.

We'll see you next week, same time. And gentlemen, we'll see everyone in the comments at Ricochet 4.0 next week. Ricochet. Join the conversation.