The Ricochet Podcast - Bigly Gains and Bigger Bets

Episode Date: March 7, 2025

Nearly fifty topsy-turvy days into Trump 2.0, we thought it'd be a good idea to zoom out some to better distinguish the signals from the noise. To that end, the gang sits down with Wall Street Journal Editor at Large Gerard Baker. Gerry covers everything from Trump's tariffs and geostrategic reshuffling to the media's collapsed institutional repute. Plus, Charles, Steve and James notice hints that ambitious progressives are maneuvering to sound like normal people; and they bewail the caprices of the muses now that they've repossessed the recently-acclaimed (and highly profitable) artistic inspiration from Hunter Biden. - Sound clip from this week's open: Mike Johnson restoring order during Trump's address before Congress on Tuesday.

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Ask what you can do for your country. Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet podcast with Stephen Hayward and Charles CW Cook. I'm James Lylex and today we talked to Jerry Baker, Editor-in-Large of the Wall Street Journal. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Mr. Green, take your seat. Take your seat, sir.

Take your seat. Finding that members continue to engage in willful and concerted disruption of proper decorum, the chair now directs the sergeant-at-arms to restore order. Remove this gentleman from the chamber. Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast number 731. I'm James Lylex in Minneapolis. Beautiful, crisp day.

We got about 10 inches of snow. Yeah, we can take it. It's orange. I'm joined by Stephen Hayward and Charles C.W. Cook, who are, I believe, respective polls of the country, Florida and California. And where to start with this week? Every day it seems to be something and then we forget that we, did we annex Greenland last week I don't know that what a swirling constellation of stars around your head like somebody in a cartoon has been whacked on the noggin with a frying pan so where to begin what do you guys what what stands out at the end of this contentious week as the most important

issue to you or the one perhaps that flew under the radar that will that will be something we're talking about a little bit now Could it be the Supreme Court decision that appeared to slam the knuckles of Doge Stephen Charlie? Well, I'm not quite sure it did that it's a little bit. It's a little bit Obscure and maybe technical and narrow I think actually the biggest story of the week is still unfolding today Friday as we're talking First two days ago. We had the news that Gavin Newsom is now a podcaster. By the way, I predict he's going to do as well at podcasting as Mario Cuomo did at talk radio 30 years ago.

And he'd be the rival for Rush and he was just boring as could be. But what the news was that Newsom suddenly sounded like a Republican centrist. I'm against boys and women's sports. I don't want to use latinx. Defunding the police was idiotic. So this is clearly someone gearing up to run for president. But then it's followed up by the news that after Senate Democrats voted unanimously to block the Republican bill to ban trans women from women's sports, suddenly they're changing their tune

and now they're out with a new proposal. Well, let's let the states decide, sort of their equivalent of the Dobbs decision on abortion, I suppose you might say. And I think you're seeing the weakening here on some of these cultural issues on the left because they realize they're getting killed on this. And so anyway, I think that's the sleeper story that's going to grow and it's going to cause

great divisions inside the democratic coalition. Interesting. Well, yes, watching Newsome molt and shed his skin is, is interesting. Um, but then there are some people who say, well, I'm looking at this bill here. They're talking about boys and women's sports that don't like it. But on the other hand, I looked at my IRA the other day too, and I really don't like that. Uh, yeah.

And it seems to be getting worse. If you look at the stock market right now, it's worse than it was this morning. And that in turn is worse than it was yesterday. It was okay. 12 days ago. It seems to me, James, and I don't know if you think this is maybe a conspiracy theory or me putting pieces together that don't belong, but do you think this might have to do with the tariffs?

I think it might. Yeah. And you know, as somebody who is on the cusp of retirement and, uh, you know, I, I generally don't check those things. They go up, they go down, you know, whatever. We, you know, I, uh, don't like it. And I especially don't like it because it seems to be what we call an unforced error on our own goal. Um, I was not not in the mood particularly for a trade war with Canada and while Canada may indeed have onerous tariffs on American milk, it's just it's not it's not really up there.

Now I understand the long-term reasoning is to do this to bring back you know manufacturing to the country and we have to go through short-term pain and then in five years it'll all be better because we'll have more industries and businesses here. One of the major car companies announced that they're gonna start building some stuff in America. Again, I get that. I get that. But I hate tariffs. I just do. I just do. And maybe it's because I associate them, you know, with a smooth end or holly and think that didn't work and maybe this doesn't work now. So yeah, the Mexican tariffs have been abated for a month, though,

have they not? Did they not decide to step away from those for a while? Well, they're showing us tariffs, you see. Well, because they both exist and don't exist. And they're both good and bad. Because when they're introduced, there's all these reasons that we need them, we need to be more like America in the 1890s. When we were apparently rich, we need to be like William McKinley, we need to protect industry and create

jobs and potentially even get rid of the income tax. And that's just terrific. And that's why tariffs are so good. And it's most beautiful word in the English language, and we all love them. Also, they're so horrible that if you threaten people with them, then you get things that you want. So we don't really want tariffs. What we want is to threaten tariffs and then I'll do them. Because obviously we wouldn't do tariffs.

Trump actually did this yesterday, James. He actually said yesterday when he was announcing that he might give some tariff relief, that he was going to rescind some of the tariffs to protect American industries from them, but you put them on. He's both the provider and the taker. Yeah, I mean, I think the embarrassing irony here is that if you go back to 2016, Trump was most prominently talking about tariffs to save American auto industry jobs and save auto factories in America. And those are the first tariffs or that sector that he relaxed within

hours of imposing them. Because I think someone pointed out to him that the supply chain for automobile manufacturing and parts is more complicated and it's not so simple. I still wonder if, well an old word comes back to me, James, you'll remember from the 70s, we were going to fight inflation by jaw boning, remember jaw boning? And that meant we'll talk about it a lot and what shame people in the lowering the price of eggs I don't know But I do wonder sometimes and I think Charlie put his finger on it right here just now how much Trump really believes in tariffs and how much this is Trump's typical supercharged exaggerated rhetoric in service of trying to be you know, it's jaw-boning on steroids And you know, look, all presidents going back,

Reagan put up with some tariffs under political circumstances that were difficult, he kind of had to, but Bush put on tariffs to protect steel, so did Biden. But there are aluminum tariffs, we've had tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber on and off over the years, I don't keep up with it. But so I don't know. I'd like to think that

in my optimistic moments that Trump is got a serious game here and he's playing it the way he does everything else and maybe it will get some results. But at some point people are going to figure this out as we have suggested before. Well those were individual tariffs. I mean they're targeted specific tariffs. We've been doing that stuff. This sort of broad brush stuff. tariffs. I mean they're targeted specific tariffs. We've been doing that stuff, this sort of broad brush stuff. If it was just talk, there'd be one thing, but he did them. So that's another. And if he backs off from this because I'm wondering what would make him back off from it, if anything, because everything, the wins that you've had, all of the rhetorical philosophical symbolic wins that Doge has been racking up by saying look America you there you guy you who paid $5,000 in taxes last year actually what we did is

that your entire tax payment for the last 20 years has been going to one alpaca farmer in Peru. And again we no longer need to make up absurd examples of spending like this because that's where it was. I think it was not you know ninety thousand dollars for alpaca farming in Peru. So somebody looks at that and says well exactly how is that supposed to work for me then I am driving around on roads that are pothole. There's there's there's miscreants and lolling about in my park

that isn't clean, et cetera. I mean, we know these are all complex state, local issues, but people just basically get the idea. I'm paying a lot of money for taxes, and if we lived in an absolute utopian clean paradise like Tomorrowland in the movie, yeah, throw a couple of nickels at the guy in Peru, but we don't, and why?

So that's a win, because I think that then as nonpartisan, I think people, especially the middle, get that. But when all of a sudden you have shuddering economic contraction because of something that was put on that nobody really, really, really was voting for, I wonder at what point Trump looks at this and says, I'm gonna cut my losses and back off of this.

I don't know if he has it in him, or if he's just going to be bullheaded about it and keep going forward. Charles? I think he definitely has it in him because he keeps rescinding them when the stock market goes down. Look, this is a real risk. So let's look at this both from the perspective of somebody who might hate Trump and from the perspective of somebody who really likes Trump, I think the argument against this course of action is applicable from both sides. If you hate Trump, you look at this and you say, well, he's doing tariffs, they're stupid. He's a stupid person and he's being stupid and I hate him. Okay, fine. If you like him, you don't want this problem, and it's become a problem to overshadow all of the other things that you want him to do. Because the maxim that it's the economy stupid is still true. It's the primary reason that he won the election.

He won the election because Joe Biden and his party made inflation a great deal worse in 2021 by pumping a whole bunch of money into the economy that the economy did not need and creating the worst inflationary environment in 40 years and then saying it's not happening and then saying it's transitory and then saying, well, maybe it is happening, but it's not too bad. And then this is the worst part of all passing a bill called the Inflation Reduction Act that had literally nothing to do with inflation. Well, look at Trump's policies right now, many of which I like, but look at what he wants to do in the next six months. He wants to expand the tax cuts from 2017, including no tips on taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime, no taxes on social security benefits. Besant, the Treasury Secretary said two days ago

that their aim is to bring interest rates down and he's imposed tariffs, supposedly at 25% on everything from Canada and Mexico. At least that's the aim. All those things are inflationary and inflation hasn't gone. People won't put up with it. Most people aren't ideological like we are. Most people don't follow politics like we do. They're gonna say, ah, wait, everything's expensive. I don't want things to be expensive.

And when that happens, you don't get to do all of the rest of the stuff that I like. All the reform of the executive branch and the destruction of DEI and some of the foreign policy, not all of it. But I think this is a real risk for him that he is taking and not just again, from the perspective of people who don't like him who are going to say that anyway, but for the people who do like him. Agreed. Although we can have this argument about taxing Social Security another day, perhaps. But I agree with you. And if inflation doesn't go down, then people are going to

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your health and go to lumen.me slash ricochet to get 20% off your Lumen. That's L-U-M-E-N dot M-E slash ricochet for 20% off your purchase. You'll love this thing. And thank you Lumen for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome the podcast, Gerard Baker, the editor at large, the wall street journal. And you'll also find his weekly free expressions column every Tuesday. There he hosts podcasts with the same name, along with the interview series WSJ at large with Jerry Baker on Fox business.

Welcome. Thank you very much indeed for having me. It might be my first time. It's my first time for a while. Anyway, I think we've done this before, but back in the back in the ancient days of the perhaps the Biden administration. That would be a long time. You know, we've been doing this forever.

This is podcast number 7,742. So, you know, we may have had you back in the 2000s or something like that. So here we are, you know, we're halfway through the hundred days and we get a little tired of the hundred days thing, but it's hard to shake, I guess it's inevitable. Trump has packed more into the first half of the hundred

days, I think, than I can imagine. And it's this baffling welter. It's like standing in front of you behind a jet engine into which somebody has fed feathers and tacks. And it's just, it's so what's your impression so far? Yeah, it's the, uh, we'll call the, uh, everything everywhere all at once, uh, uh, to approach the governing. And by the way, there's obviously there obviously, there's method in that, right?

There's, I mean, that's done very deliberately. I remember reading an interview with Steve Bannon years ago, I think in the early days of the first Trump administration, where he said, you know, part of the purpose of this is A, obviously to give a, to project an image of activity and momentum and all of that, but also frankly, just to sort of overwhelm the media and political opponents. I mean, you know, you at one minute you're talking about Matt Gaetz being nominated for something and everybody's throwing their arms up about that.

And so, and then the next thing we're talking about, Tulsi Gabbard and said, we've forgotten about Matt Gaetz. You know, so there's no question it's a, you know, and again, everything from executive orders on everything from, you know, immigration to, from immigration to the administrative state to tariffs and goodness knows what else. So you don't have time. The media don't have time to digest and interpret and critique and do all of those things that you would normally do.

So part of it is, and you can only stand back and look at that and say, wow, that's kind of impressive management as well as impressive sort of energy. Look, I think, I do think maybe this was the week in which, you know, maybe the, maybe the, we saw some of the kind of downsides of the frenetic pace. The I mean, first of all, the tariffs, right? I mean, they're just a disaster. Let's be completely honest about it. They're not only a disaster in themselves intrinsically. I'm a believer in tariffs generally do nothing but harm.

But the back and forth and the, you know, the desultory way in which Trump is, you know, yes, they're on one day, they're not the next. And you can see the reaction of the financial markets, nobody likes that. And so that's maybe a sign of this extraordinary, this train hitting the buffers. You've had, I think, more worrying signs about the economy, jobs numbers weren't too bad today, but I think that's also going to kind of punch some holes in this performance. And of course, losing the case at the Supreme Court, or at least sort of temporarily, as I understand it, losing the case at the Supreme Court on the, again, another administrative

estate case. So it feels a little bit as though, and then by the way, you know, the European, I'm in Europe at the moment and this extraordinary revolutionary kind of temper that there is in US, you know, European relations, I think that is also perhaps a sign that things are not going quite as smoothly as planned. So look, I think there's, you I think it's been a highly productive, incredibly productive start from the executive side. We've got to see, obviously, where any of the legislative process goes. There's especially the big, beautiful bill and other stuff. But I

just think we're starting to see, for the first time this, I wouldn't say it goes as far as to say the wheels coming off, but when you start out with this kind of blizzard, then stuff is gonna start to fall by the wayside, and I think we're starting to see that. Jerry, it's Steve Hayward out in California. Hello Steve. So by the way, my Tuesday morning starts reading your column in the journal. Actually, my mornings start with reading all the Daily columnists and I wish you could get Dan Henninger

to un-retire and come back on Thursdays. But anyway, let me ask you about the European scene since you're over there. I've been playing out the theme lately with people that just as Trump is attempting to overthrow the Wilsonian legacy, Woodrow Wilson's legacy of the administrative state at home, he is also trying to undo the Wilsonian legacy in foreign policy. In other words, the Wilsonian internationalism that has been the consensus view of both parties at least since the end of World War II, if not in certain ways before all that. And I think I'm sympathetic to that project in some ways, that would take a long time to go through, but I don't think there's any way that that could be accomplished without some kind of big bang, without something that would be wrenching.

I mean, I thought I was writing actually when Obama was president that he had the opportunity if he wanted to, to reset sort of American, European relations and the NATO strategy and so forth, but he really had no interest in that. And so of course, Trump's gonna be a bumbling, but I think there is potentially an upside here. Am I too optimistic? What am I missing?

Are Europeans so thoroughly alarmed and panicky that this was an ill-advised idea? Yes, I'm here in Europe wading through the broken eggs of the omelet that President Trump is in the process of making. I don't disagree with you there, Jim. I think fundamentally, one of the things I found really interesting this week, and it got a lot of attention, it got a lot of negative attention, when of the things I found really interesting this week, and it got a lot of attention, a lot of negative attention, when Trump gave, I think he was in the Oval Office, and he was talking, you know, doing that strange thing that he does where he kind of holds a kind of a

rolling in pump tube press conference while he's signing those executive orders. He was talking on a topic, he got onto the subject of Japan and the Japan security pact that the US has with Japan, and he said, you know, it's kind of ridiculous. We have a pact with Japan whereby we promised to protect them if they get attacked. But what do they do for us? Absolutely nothing. They don't do anything for us. Who the hell came up with that idea? The answer was Douglas MacArthur and it was an essential part of the post-war settlement that actually the pacification of Japan was considered back then to be a rather important national security priority for the United States. But it did strike me then, and this is your point, but to back to your point about Europe and the Wilsonian framework, it struck me then that, of course, he has a point.

I mean, because the answer, as I just said, to who came up with that crazy idea was, you know, Douglas MacArthur and then Truman and then ultimately Eisenhower. And it was a good idea at the time, right? But that time was 70 plus years ago. It probably doesn't make any sense. We don't view Germany and Japan today in the way that we did in, you know, 1945 and 1946. So, of course, we need a new order. And I think more broadly, yeah, the kind of, you know, we call it Wilsonian, but the sort of, you know, the post-Cold War liberal order that was, you know, very much the thing for a long time.

I also agree with that. You know, the US has different strategic interests. The world poses a different set of challenges. And I think there's absolutely things to be said to it. The only thing I'll say, though, is I mean, I think Trump has incredibly good instincts and sometimes his instincts put him in a really, really good political and even geopolitical instincts and they put him in a place where, you know, perhaps almost inadvertently he discovers this is exactly the right strategic approach we should be taking.

But then he does also, frankly, and you know, this is also the question at the back of everybody's mind, is he really kind of unconsciously undoing the Wilsonian order and consciously undoing the global liberal order? Does he just have a bit of a thing for Vladimir Putin? You know, and I'm sorry, I can't, I'm not being too flippant about that. And I certainly don't buy the, you know, Putin's got something on him, compromise kind of thing, but it just does seem in his case, he just really has a thing for the man and never says a bad word about him.

I'm conscious that he, you know, just actually has called the post sanctions or something. So, so you know what it's all I'm saying is we do, we do this with Trump all the time. Like he's this incredible, Charles wrote a terrific piece recently about the, you know, I'm picking the absurd observation claim that Trump plays 4D chess. You know, everything he does is like, Oh, why? You know, I think we're coming.

It was a Taleron said of Metternich or the other way around when they died. You know, I wonder what he meant by that. And that's what we tend to do that with Trump. We do that with Trump, right. And it's like, you know, he just he like, you know, he just, he just, you know, he just, you know, sent out a text tweet saying, Kofiifi that's a dreadedly sophisticated observation on the state of the world. No, I just, that's the problem with him. I mean, you know, you know,

his instincts are good often, sometimes not that terrible, but is it instinct or is it, you know, grand strategy? Well, right. I mean, it's a good question. There is a headline, a news headline in your paper today. I haven't read the story, but the headline goes something like, Germany considers acquiring nuclear weapons. And I wonder, is this for real or is this the Germans learning how to play Trump's game? I have a very dear, very dear friend, a Jewish journalist friend and

colleague who, you know, when we were having these arguments years back about burden sharing and whether the Germans should be doing more and that the Germans were, you know, useless militarily and he would say and we'd have this argument he'd say to me, he'd say Jerry said, we are having an argument about how bad it is, about whether or not the fact that the Germans aren't militaristic enough. That is a good thing. That is something anybody in the last 200 years would be celebrating. Why on earth are we worrying about it?

So when you see a headline saying the Germans want to get nuclear weapons, on one level you might think, uh-oh. But one of the things I wrote quite recently, I wrote a column sort of just looking at kind of the implications of this new world order, and nuclear proliferation is absolutely one of them. I mean, that's, you know, if I am Germany for that matter, and you know, Friedrich Merz, the soon-to-be chancellor, has said this, but if I'm Poland, if I'm the Baltics, and if I don't think NATO is in effect a dead letter, which I think frankly, if it isn't now, it will be soon, the first thing I want is to get my hands on a nuclear weapon because I want to be able to say to Vladimir Putin or whoever his successors are, you come and come after our cities, we're

going to annihilate Moscow. So yeah, this is the reality. But I do think, James, the larger point here is that I do think NATO, even if it's not formally dead, and I think Trump will probably come back and say some nice things about it, or be persuaded to say some nice things. I saw Pete Hegseth yesterday saying some very nice things to the British defense minister. But I think in practical terms, do you think, for example, that Donald Trump would take America to war to defend Estonia if Vladimir Putin invades tomorrow? I don't. I mean, maybe I just don't.

Hi, Jairus. Charles Cook here. Hello, Charles. On the question of 456 or maybe 70, Chess. What is your take on Trump's attitude toward tariffs? Because it's certainly been a feature of his rhetoric for years, since the 80s. But it is totally incoherent, and he does seem to impose them and then back off. You can't reconcile the way he talks about tariffs as being the greatest thing that have ever existed with his conduct and his incorporation of them into this art of the deal myth. So what do you think he's doing?

Because it is inscrutable to me. It looks chaotic. It does look chaotic. I agree. I think he... It does look chaotic, I agree. I think he, so first of all, I think he has a very, dare I say simplistic, but sort of simple view of international economic relations, not even a mechanicalist. It's just a very simplistic, arithmetical view, which is that if one country has a trade surplus or current account surplus with the United States, then it's cheating. You know, it's just cheating. We're being ripped off. I mean, he keeps using phrases like subsidize.

He says, you know, when he talks about the US having a trade deficit with Canada, he says Americans are subsidizing Canada, which of course was economically nonsense. It's not a subsidy. It's an economic transaction. But you know, we get oil and the Canadians get US dollars and they're very happy. Both sides used to be very happy with that arrangement. But I think he genuinely, I think that's how he thinks of the international economic system,

that it is a kind of zero sum game. And just probably just as when he was a real estate guy, if he was winning, if he got it, if he got a, if he beat somebody to a deal, that was, that meant he was winning and the other guy was, was losing. And so I think, so I think, so I think it stems from that, that, that basic view that the world is unfair and that, that what you need to do then to redress that unfairness, to, to, to redress that injustice is tariffs. Tariffs are, you knowiffs are obviously an obvious way to do it. They hurt us, but they hurt the other side more because they will have the effects, other things being equal, of reducing the other side's exports. So I think it's that simple. And then I think he's built on top of that this idea that tariffs will generate huge amounts of

revenue. He keeps talking about William McKinley and how tariffs generated the vast bulk of federal income back then. That's when the federal government represented about 2% of GDP. So I think from that basic sort of economic equation, kind of false economic equation that if your trading partner has a surplus, then they're cheating and they need to be hauled in. He then builds on these other ideas like tariffs will produce great revenue and he's not wrong about that tariffs ultimately will induce and incentivize American, or indeed any company to come and build in the United States.

But I do think it really stems from that. And I think Charles and I remember looking, I remember I lived in New York in the late 80s and I remember him taking out those ads in the New York Times when the trade deficit was with Japan and they would have an enormous trade deficit and he would say, you know, when the trade deficit which was with Japan, and they would have an enormous trade deficit, and he'd say, look, this is wrong. They're cheating. This is absolutely a rage. And I think it really do think it comes from that. Yeah, his rhetoric is the same. He used to say politicians in

America are feckless, and they're allowing Japan to cheat. It's pretty much a through line from that. My second question is about the budget. Republicans historically have talked about the deficits we run every year, they've talked about the budget. Republicans historically have talked about the deficits we run every year. They've talked about the debt that those deficits create. They've talked about the issues that we have with entitlements. And Trump doesn't. Now, you can make the argument that this is politically smart because it is.

People don't want to hear it. The public is not there. Republicans who talk in that way lose. But the math remains the same. Do you expect Congress to just blow open the deficit this summer when they pass their spending and tax bills? Or do you think any say in a voices will prevail? No, I think they'll I think they'll go for broke. And I think

with one caveat, which I'll come to look, I think the I think if the economy is slowing as it really which I'll come to, I think if the economy is slowing, as it really does seem to be doing, I think we're getting the usual kind of hail of not necessarily consistent data, but it usually points broadly in one direction. Even today's jobs numbers were on the softer side, and we've seen two months of relatively soft employment growth, certainly the markets think the economy is slowing very sharply. That's why market interest treasury yields have fallen. And I think there's a pretty good chance that we get to the middle of the year as this budget and

tax cut goes through Congress. I think the nervousness about the economy will grow and I suspect that will be enough to silence whatever remaining deficit hawks there may be because the argument is going to be we really need a stimulus. Of course, the caveat I was going to say is at the same time, inflation is certainly not going away, it's getting worse. I don't think as it happens, for reasons we don't need to go into, I don't think tariffs are inherently inflationary. I think they lead to a one-time increase in the price level and they're not necessarily

recurring, which would only be inflationary. But they will raise, if they ever get into, if we ever actually impose these tariffs, we keep going through this sort of hide and seek with tariffs that we've been doing for the last couple of months. But if we ever get the tariffs, then they will push up prices. And you know, by the way, and then and a big fiscal blowout, even though it might be advantageous for demand in the economy, if demand is really weakening, could also, you know, will will certainly make the inflation picture worse too. So you could you know, this is this, this is the stagflation scenario, obviously the other caveat on the conditional is if we, you know, if the market really, we, if we have a market event where it looks like the market suddenly takes

fright bond yields spike, um, you know, and people think this is not sustainable at 125% of GDP debt level. And that causes a real rethink. But I think that's a low probability outcome. I would say, yeah, I'd say they push it through. Jerry, it's Steve Hayward again. I want to ask you a question about your column this week about the consequences of collapsing public trust in the media. And what I want to do for listeners is just quote two sentences from it to get the flavor of it, and then I'll give you my question about it. Here's what you write. What happened is that news organizations were transformed in character and purpose.

They went from being quasi-legal institutions to quasi-religious ones. They are more like prayer books for a believing congregation. Their purpose is to strengthen believers' faith by offering reassurance and imparting moral guidance." And you have any more harsh things to say after that. I agree with all of that. I do wonder if the problem of the collapsing public trust in the media goes deeper and shares something in common with a parallel collapse in public trust with universities and education. And I'll put this proposition to you.

I think it was a great turning point or a mistake that decades ago, journalism went from being a working class profession, like being a policeman or something like that, to a skilled profession with people getting journalism degrees from Columbia and so forth. And so beyond the problem of having people

who are very progressive going to newsrooms, and you point that out in a sequel paragraph, is we have people I think who are actually not that well-educated. And here's my bold proposition. I think you go back seven or 80 years ago to a daily newspaper reporter who had only a high school education, probably had a better grasp of history and American civics than

a lot of our professionally trained journalists do today. And I think that's as much of part of the problem as ideology is. Is that completely outrageous to say? No, it's 100% correct. And in fact, there's a chapter in my book, Steve, which I will encourage your listeners to the American breakdown. Wow, trust has collapsed. The whole chapter of my book in which I absolutely go through

the kind of demography of the news business. You're absolutely right. Now, let me tell you just one fun story, which I think I refer to in the book actually, but when I was editor of the journal, a friend at a magazine, actually a news magazine, a conservative-leaning magazine, recommended a bright young reporter to me and he said, you'll love him. You said he's looking for a job and he wants to work for, he'd love to work for the journal

and you know, talk to him. He said, I'll give you, this is an example of why you'll like him. He said he's only three or four years out of some Ivy League college, very bright, but a very good reporter, very, very thoughtful, very fair, very analytical and scrupulous. But they sat him down and when he said he wanted to be a reporter at the Wall Street Journal somewhere else, they said, well, you know, why do you know, you're bright, you're smart, you've got great prospects, you're working for a magazine, you could be a commentator, a columnist, an opinion writer. And this young man apparently said, I'm 26 years old, I've been out of college for four

years, who gives a shit what I think of me? And I just thought that's absolutely the kind of reporters we need. And that is exactly it. I mean, there's, you know, you're absolutely right, Steve, you know, they come out of university and they've been, you know, expensively educated and they have been bribed all that, you know, nonsense, unfortunately, that's taught at most of these universities. And they come out with a, you know, they come out with that sort of Marxian approach. What did Karl Marx say? The philosophers sought to interpret the world.

The point is to change it. And that's how I view journalists. Journalists used to just go out and report the world exactly as you say, because they didn't have sort of highfalutin ideas about, you know, the way the world should run. They just wanted to go out and find out what was going on. And instead they've been replaced by this cast of, you know, of sort of self self-revering intellectuals who want to tell people how to think. And I couldn't agree more. The average newspaper of say the 1940s, 1950s would have probably 20, 30 stories on a page.

Now they might be car accidents or the fact that a toddler had slipped on a roller skate and hit his head. But you've got this great big panoply of life in these papers. And now, of course, you'll find maybe one or two stories on the paper, if the paper even exists anymore. And it will be something of a deep social importance or something that is happening around town that is seen through a particular prism that oftentimes is just not available. The people who are holding that prism in their heads don't know that they have that prism. They still think they're being objective, but I want to ask you this. But I was sorry, James, let me interrupt just quickly. It would be toddler slips on ice, white supremacy to blame. Right Colonial colonialism right right because because

One of the things that has been I mean I'm sitting in a newspaper office right now I've been a newspaper since 1978 and As an opinion writer because what the hell do I know? And one of the things that's bothered me the most of the last few years is this shift away from even paying abeasent lip service to objectivity because objectivity means giving credence to evil is what a new generation of journalists say when you when you pull them in these jay schools which ought not to exist in the first place as i what well you know there's no other hand when it comes to hitler there's no

other hand when it comes to climate change so let's go to the washington post and look at that paper in the competition these houses trying to do apparently the evil lockstep with garring and gerbils in the rest of it he's demanding perhaps requesting that the editorial page uh... come out for free uh... you know free economy and in the personal liberty

who which again will fascist, a fasc adjacent issues right there. That, and the reaction of the staff seems to tell me that that probably is indicative of their own blinders and their own ideology, which will continue to doom the news industry as we know it today, right? Exactly. I mean, the idea that, um, you absolutely identify the ideological issue, but just the

kind of larger, to me, and this is such a typical sort of entitled view that we have to deal with, with so many, you know, the idea that someone pays, you know, essentially pays someone's salary, loses hundreds of millions of dollars over a 15-year period to keep this thing afloat and keep these people employed. The idea that it's absolutely outrageous that that person, that owner should then actually decide he thinks he would like the paper's opinions to broadly align with his own. No, it's, you know, it's, it is that this is the problem we have. But it's one of the reasons again, I said this, sorry to revert to my own column,

but you know, why people don't trust, why people don't trust them anymore. It's they've lost all credibility and not only credibility, but also they've lost any kind of, they lost any sensibility too. You know what I mean? I think they move in such rarefied circles. They all believe that Donald Trump is the second coming of Hitler and again all that stuff that they've been taught about colonialism and all that kind of thing. They don't meet anybody who even disagrees with that. I mean I always remember a story someone telling me some time ago. They were out for dinner with a bunch of journalists back in the 2016 campaign and somebody said, well, how many people around the table voted for Trump or just after the campaign was in and not a single hand went

up. And then the more interesting question was, how many of you know anyone who voted for Trump and still not a single hand went up? And that's, again, I don't want to be too harsh. There's a lot of still terrific journalists out there doing honest work, good work, but it has, you know, as a, I hesitate to use the word profession because I don't think it is a profession, but as an occupation and as a useful function for, you know, for society, it has just lost its way incredibly badly. And I, badly and I don't think it's over. I think

there are ways in which it can be recovered but it's in a very very very bad place. I regret it too. I love it because I love this industry. When I go to England I stay with a telegraph family and there's just something about opening up that big paper, and I love the telegraph, that reminds me what the medium can be but when steven was talking before but the lack of faith in journalism and the lack of faith uh... in the institutions of education doesn't it it's it's part and parcel of a broad spectrum lack of faith in the institutions there's been a there's been a a a a suicide

of institutions institutional credibility in the last four or five years that seems to be nearly every single one of them you can take a possibly with the exception of the american military which again you know was doing things like what we got to do with you we have we have to pay for the surgeries of transgender soldiers or we simply won't be the effective fighting force we want to be uh... what instant which institutions have survived uh... the last five years or so and actually?

Gained credibility with the people or is it just pretty much everything that we look at seems to have revealed itself is made of fallible human clay and and in Bent timber I I mean I Apologize profusely because I did not come on this show which I love this I think I think it's terrific and I'm honored to do it. I did not come on the show to promote my book, but this again is… I actually go through this in the book. And actually if you look at the data, the institutions that… there are a few institutions

that have, in whom trust, in which trust continues to be relatively high. The military you mentioned, although as you say there's been sun damage to that over the last few years. But the really interesting ones are small businesses actually. People still really have a very, very high level of trust in small business. Oddly enough, they also have a high level, I shouldn't say oddly enough, that's fair, but certainly counter to the kind of broader trends. They have got a high level of trust in local government too. Again, you know, again, when local government works for them, I mean, you know, if the DMV is efficient, you know, which in many places it is, actually, I live in New York City and

to my intense surprise, New York City government is a disaster on every front. The only two things the New York City government does remotely efficiently is the DMV for some reason and of course tax collection. It's brilliant. It's incredibly efficient to both of those. But you know, so people do. So if you know, if the if their streets are cleaned and they're they can get their driver's license and they can you know, and they bet that the police are pretty good and the fire that they you know, the people that they like the fires, people have high levels of trust. And I think the larger point here and I did draw this conclusion in the book is that the closer people people are, part of the problem, I think, it's only a part of it.

I wouldn't in any way claim that it's hugely important, but I think part of the problem has been that institutions have become larger and more remote. And we've become more remote. And this is a function again, inevitably, of the digital age age that we just do spend so much, we can do so much without stepping outside of our front door that I think that has created a kind of, forgive me for using this term, sort of an alienation and a kind of isolation which breeds mistrust. But so when people actually encounter and have interactions with institutions, direct institutions, small businesses where they go into the mom and pop store or they go into

the you know, into the local restaurant, whatever, and they get a good meal, they like them, they have and again, this is reflected in data, you can you can look it up, they, they they have a high level of trust in small business, they have a high level of trust in, you know, very, very local government, they even have quite a high level of trust in local newspapers, which tells you something. So I think there's something there about the kind of bigness, that bigness and remoteness has bred mistrust as well as all these other things that we've talked about. So we don't want to be bigly. I get it.

And you're right. Local is better. Let's just record scratch up in the just sketch. And I want to get back to England. One of the things that people who are very online here in america are aware of is that there seems to be uh... two things going wrong with england one of them is immigration which uh... is reshaping the nation in ways that people perhaps don't like any other is a crackdown on free speech in which it seems as if you can stab somebody

uh... for uh... setting a current a fire but if you have a thought in your head uh... outside of the abortion clinic or if you post something critical of a local councilman on your facebook page then the with the the police will come around in place you want to caution and talk and wave badges at you uh... are we exaggerating what what's going on there are there, let's just do the free speech thing, is there a worrisome trend or an old trend worrisomely exacerbated in England when it comes to the free expression of ideas?

In England of all places. The answer is yes and yes. I mean there is some exaggeration. I mean you know to read some people over here and indeed to listen to JD Vance when he went to Munich and talked about this a few weeks ago, you'd think that Britain was essentially East Germany in, you know, circa 1967 or something, and, you know, that people are being arrested all the time for saying, you know, politically unacceptable things. It's not, it's obviously not true. You can still go and go online and send anybody who, anybody spends any time online in England knows that there is a, you

know, just a deluge of free speech. There are still newspapers and television and in fact there are more television channels than there ever were when Charles and I grew up there. So of course it's exaggerated but I won't diminish it. finish it that there is the absence of a First Amendment protection. The the the the domination of the major institutions of government, law enforcement, and by government, I mean, sort of the permanent government alone now, and I would you can add to that the elected government, but this was going on when the conservatives were in power too, and the dominance of the cultural institutions like universities and the media does mean that there have been a high level of, there's been a

considerable amount of an attempt to police speech. And I think this fits in with another thing, which I find, which I think is even more sinister, but it's related in the UK, which is a, there's been for, and by the way, Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, is an absolutely kind of first rate exponent of this. There's been this attempt, which we've had a little bit of in the United States, a lot of in the United States, I think it's going further in the UK, to essentially transfer out of democratic political decision-making very important issues of social and cultural matters and the political matters and have them reside in the courts.

So essentially to establish rights in the courts which are then invulnerable to any sort of political, to any attempt by politicians, democratic elected politicians to overturn them. That is something, so that's why you get some of these cases because there are, you know, it has been enshrined in law, hate speech, things like hate speech have been enshrined in law, or, you know, there's a big debate going on in Britain about whether or not ultimately it should have, it won't under the Labour government, but under the Conservatives, whether Britain should essentially derogate from the European Court of Human Rights, where all of these rights have been, again, on issues like on religious expression or on abortion or

many, many of these big hot button social issues, as obviously happened here, by the way, of course, with Roe v. Wade, to make them essentially invulnerable or sort of immune to the political process and to have the courts be the deciding authority. That is a very worrying thing and it's allied to this, you know, not insignificant attempts to suppress certain types of speech. Yeah. Well, as a former BBC producer yourself, I'm sure you know that the, the, uh, the deep, the deep wellspring of, uh, right wing thought at the BBC will eventually come out and, uh, yes, he's, uh, yeah, he's sitting in a, uh,

in an isolated chamber somewhere in broadcasting house and they don't, they don't let him out. But yes, did you know Paul Heine when you were there I did actually yes yeah oh I know I know Paul and Libby yes I do they live in it they live in the town in in Suffolk where I go a couple of times a year a little place called there were a few kind of you know dissenters from the BBC progressive orthodoxy but I'm not joking yeah I think they all left I mean I think every single one I knew who was you know vaguely kind of who differed from the the sort of the progressive nostrums literally you know could just couldn't stand it and left their bones

were ground for cafeteria gruel I'm sure of that Jerry it's been a great pleasure as ever and we hope to have you back as soon as possible and talk about all the great things that are happening in the fantastic renaissance of America, etc. etc. But in the meantime, I advise everybody to read his books and read him in the Wall Street Journal and thank you very much for being on the show today. It was really my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, thanks Jerry. Thank you. You know, there is, there's, you get this sort of warm feeling when your guest talks about how much they enjoy the show.

And it was interesting because I was checking his biography on Wikipedia just to catch up on a few details and the inset picture of his picture on the Wikipedia page is identical to the picture that we're looking at in our video feed it was it was a bit unnerving as a matter of fact as though all that's right i do live in a simulation of a trickster has just been updated for my own satisfaction convenience here i get it i get it i get it but he looked well rested in both didn't need to absolutely so no we don't live in the matrix we are not to you know hairless people shivering in a capsule of blue goo and

having our electricity drain which't make any sense technically. But sometimes you want to wrap yourself in something that's warm. And imagine that if you popped out of the Matrix Cube and were sort of all wet and confused, you'd want somebody to drape a nice blanket or towel around you, wouldn't you? No, we're not living in the Matrix. We're not all a bunch of people in little pods there, you know, living in liquid. No, we're not.

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I did. I acquiesced. I concurred. I submitted even, but I'm glad that I did. Let's not go that far. We don't want to put that mentally. Oh, I'm glad that I did not go that far we don't want to put that in I'm glad that I did especially when we're talking about sheets I like them a great deal my wife made a good choice because yes she's a fantastic it's very important I know I always say this but it's very important to get sheets right in Florida because it's not just hot but unlike in California it's humid and so you just have to get the right sheets and these are the right sheets And if they were the right sheets, then I wouldn't sleep in them

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Thanks, and we thank cozy earth for sponsoring this the reggae podcast Well gentlemen before we go on I think we should all just for a moment you know have some fellow feeling and some empathy for those who are on their uppers and that would be a Hunter Biden apparently is broke. I from what I read. I think he spent some He sold like 24 paintings in a year for 50,000 Throw and now miraculously since the beginning of this year He doesn't the demand for his work doesn't seem to be as robust and his book has only sold 11 1,100 copies in the last six months or so, so he's broke

Why is that? Why? 11, no, 1,100 copies in the last six months or so. So he's broke. Why is that? Why? I'm trying to figure out, because the abiding quality of art should be such that Sotheby should be just jacking up the price again and again and again and again, because we haven't seen the style of it. And a talent like his in,

what is going on in this world when nobody's buying Hunter Biden's book? That's what I'm asking you. Well, it just goes to show the cruelty of the artistic gods, doesn't it? That it was for a brief, yeah, for a brief period, Hunter was touched by greatness and he produced 27 works of art, all of which sold in a two or three year period that in an amazing coincidence overlap with his father's tenure in the White House. And people thought they are the lynchpin of my collection. And in the last one year, I hear he sold just one.

And I just think that is what happens to every great artist after a while. After a while, they just sit there with the blank canvas and the brush stripping paint in their hand. And they think, why has my inspiration gone? This was what happened to the Beach Boys. Very droll, Charles. No, this is he would sit. He would sit for hours with his feet and sand next to the piano.

And he couldn't come up with another God only knows and that seems to be Hunter's lot so we should. Well this was the most predictable news story of the year. You can see this coming well you can see this coming years ago. I think the next shoe to drop in this story will will be my suspicion from the beginning is that Hunter didn't do any of those paintings. He had someone do them for him just as the book would have been ghost written too. Maybe someday an enterprising journalist will get on to that, but that'll be the the fine little cherry on top of this embarrassing melting ice cream of a crazy family. What I wish he'd done is actually go full Warhol and paint representational art. So you'd have Brillo, you'd have does, biz, tide,

dreft, name every one of his canvases after a laundry detergent just just to make it all the more blatant exactly what is going on here in the purchase of these things and still nobody would, nobody in the media really would have cocked an eyebrow with the fact that people were paying ridiculous amounts of money for this ridiculous amount of art. Well, that'll do. We've had a substantial and dense piece of work here. A noble, um, I, you know,

two English accents in one podcast really does bring the general intellectual tenor up, I think by at least 30, 40 degrees or points or whatever the down is down 600, 500. I don't know. You know, I've lived through a few corrections in my time, so you buckle up, you buy in the dips, and then you keep going. One last thing I forgot to mention. Have you guys been hearing a lot from the left about how Donald Trump is coming after Social Security? I'm hearing this a lot. I'm having my friends on the left who are warning me that I better print out PDFs of what I'm owed

because they're coming after it. I'm not exactly sure those PDFs would roll up in court, but I researched this this morning and as far as I could tell, since he, Donald Trump has steadfastly said that he will not cut social security, but he has talked about reducing the workforce by 10%, which would mean then that social security would be less responsive and you might have trouble getting your checks. Is that basically the epithet of the gist? Yes. So two things have happened here. One is that Democrats just cannot stop but say the Republicans are going

off to social security. They wake up in the morning and they say this, it's a form of political Tourette's, even if Donald Trump literally says I will never touch Social Security. I love it. I hug it at night on my cozy earth sheets They say oh my goodness. Did you hear what he said that he's gonna cut Social Security That's the first thing but the second thing is that a lot of news outlets I have noticed have either deliberately or because they're lazy Run headlines and lead paragraphs that conflate social security with the social security

administration. Because I was a bit confused by this too. It said Donald Trump plans big cuts to social security. And then you click through and in paragraph eight, it says administration stuff. Yeah, it's just not the same thing at all. No, no, it's not., no it's not. No it's not. Um so good. Well that's a relief then so I can retire on my pittance and maybe my pittance won't be taxed by the institute by the very government that held a gun to my head and demanded that I contribute to it. Uh Linda Liberty. Anyway we thank you for listening. We thank Lumen and Cozy

Earth for sponsoring. Your life will be better if you avail yourself of the virtues of their products and we encourage you to do so. We encourage you to give five stars to us wherever you possibly can on your podcast review system and we encourage, we entreat, we beg. No we offer the open arms of embracing welcome for you to come to the ricochet and join and you say why would I do that? I can read it, I can listen to it no the member side the member side is with the friendships grow where the topics range

all over the place and we're posts that eventually you see on the main page surface are initially planted and it's just it's the same place you've been looking for in the internet ever since they plug this thing in I'm James Lollix it's been great Stephen Hayward, we'll see you guys next week and we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Bye. Ricochet. Join the conversation.