The Ricochet Podcast - Black Friday

Episode Date: November 24, 2017

We were going to take this week off, but then we decided why not gather a couple of hosts (that’d be Rob Long and James Lileks) and let them just riff on the events of the day and other topics, freeform for an hour or so. So that’s exactly what we did. Enjoy it! Music from this week’s podcast: Black Friday by Steely Dan... Source

We have special news for you. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Are you going to send me or anybody that I know to a camp? We have people that are stupid. You cut the turkey without me? Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long. I'm James Lylex, and our guests today are James Lylex and Rob Long.

Let's have ourselves a podcast. This is the Ricochet Podcast, and it's number 379, one away from 380, a meaningless number we'll probably tout next week for some reason. How do we get this far? Why, we're brought to you by fine people like the ones at Bombfell. Bombfell is an online personal styling service for men that helps you find the right clothes for you. You only pay for what you keep, and there's no charge to send your returns back.

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For $20 off a suitcase, visit awaytravel.com slash ricochet20 and use the promo code ricochet20 during checkout. And we're brought to you by Casper. Listen, start sleeping ahead of the curve with Casper tonight. Get $50 off any mattress purchased by visiting casper.com slash ricochet and use that promo code ricochet at your checkout. And we're brought to you by ricochet.com, which is a marvelous technological apparatus. Yet somehow, somehow, we've been sitting here for 17 minutes trying to figure out how to talk to Rob Long, who is in some place that lacks, what shall I say? Rob, there used to be, throughout the nation, this vast wired telecommunication apparatus whereby people could pick up a handset and then using a series of digital manipulations of a circle to be able to contact anybody in the country.

We've lost that. I love your homespun folk tales from the heartland of America, James, to conjure up a yesteryear, especially around holiday time. It's so warm and glowing. Yeah, I get a new phone, and it's all different, and I don't know how to fix it. Well, the fact that you're a little bit sonically challenged here, and I will tell you, yes, it was homespun in those days. I remember grandma getting out the hog grease to lube up the phone before you could make a call.

Party line stuff, you could just pick it up and talk. But if you were calling into town with all of that dial in there. But that said, you can't find a phone anywhere around to talk, but let's say you're coming through on the most crystalline, perfect signal ever, and you wanted to tell people about a certain website. What would you say? Well, listen, I would say that if you are listening to this podcast and you're a member of Ricochet, we are thrilled that you have joined us. If you are listening and there are maybe a couple hundred thousand of you that are who are not members of Ricochet, we really do need you. We are now well into our annual year-end membership drive,

and through the end of the year we'll be telling you all about why you should plunk down your hard-earned money, five bucks a month to become a Ricochet member, because it isn't just a commentary site where people pay to comment. It's much more than that. It's a community, and our members voluntarily agree to a simple code of conduct. We have a dress code in other words for comments and that keeps trolling and nasty stuff out and civility in and you know guess what we're conservatives it's a free market solution and it works you know we don't regulate we have a free market solution we opt in so in this environment in the internet kind of crazy stuff we have found

a fruitful interesting conversation we allow that to flourish and blossom for everything from politics to culture to star trek although you know maybe i don't check in on the star trek stuff as much and you know every now and then a monitor step in just because every now and then you got to do that but there is a reason why so many ricochet members stick around year after year right i mean we have an incredible retention change it's kind, it really is amazing. When I meet people, potential, you know, partners, investors, and we tell them what our member retention rate is,

they just sort of look, their eyes get wide because it means that we're doing something right, which means that you as members are doing something right. It's the cancellation form that makes it very difficult, the 404s. It's hidden. The resets, the lost connections, the 503 database.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm in business. But's hidden. The resets, the lost connections, the 503 database. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm in business. But we would love to have you if you enjoy this podcast to be a member of the community to support this podcast and a bunch of other podcasts

and our ability to start new ones and experiment and really go to town. So if possible, if you can find it in your heart of hearts, we would very much like you to do it today.

People tell me they've been putting it off for a year, for a month, for six months, for two years. We would very much like you to do it today. People tell me they've been putting it off for a year, for a month, for six months, for two years. We really need you end of the year. We really need you now. Do it today, please, and I will be eternally grateful. We just ought to go away for a month and shut the site down

and let people just realize the gap in their lives, and they'll pony up but fast. But they would queue orderly if they were if they were the sort of people interested in ricochet because we do have that code of conduct and civility today is black friday the weekend in which this podcast appears is the time in which everybody supposedly flocks to the mall and i hope lord i hope that we are not visited by the brawl videos that you get oh yeah people for two yeah... Yeah, for two reasons. One, it's just

disheartening to see people in this time of togetherness and friendship and happiness and peace hitting each other in the face with purses or fists over that last sweater as though they're fighting for the last potato in the Warsaw Ghetto. And two, the knowledge that whoever

films it is going to be filming it with their phone in vertical mode. So you just see civilization aesthetically and personally collapse. That's what you find the most horrible, right? It is. But supposedly we're going to have a good Christmas, I guess, because consumers' rude spirits are up. I'll throw it to you, Rob Long, never Trumper. Is this new bounce in our step that's abroad in the land, is that because of Trump?

Well, I mean, yes and no. It's hard to know. I mean, I'm a conservative, so I like to think that a president, any president, has only a marginal effect on the huge, vast, chaotic, gloriously chaotic economy of the United States. So that means that when things get markedly better under Obama, I don't give Obama the credit. And when things continue to get better under Trump, I can't give Trump the credit. And then I really couldn't give George W. Bush much credit,

and I couldn't give Bill Clinton much credit. And it means that, you know, I'm a conservative. So I do feel like I could give Reagan credit, but I was after a lot of pain. I mean, Reagan suffered through a lot of economic pain to get to a Reagan recovery, and I suspect that we are, who knows, who really knows right now, we are on a fantastic plane right now of low energy prices and abundant energy and low interest rates, which creates this urgent need for people to invest and borrow and grow. And that could be a good thing. Let's say that 10 months ago, President Sanders had said that the vast oil and energy wealth of America should be given to the poor. We should have an egalitarian approach to disposing of

our oil revenue so he was going to nationalize the oil industry since he'd won the senate and the house he attempts to do so and it begins wall street responds to this sort of guy in the white house by falling by you know six seven hundred points a day for a week uh people look at their people look at their 401ks investors pull back because the whole nationalization idea is crazy. And then Christmas comes along and everybody's shoving their shekels under the bed because all of a sudden there's great uncertainty and financial downturn in the land. Now, that would be the direct result of a president and his ideology. Likewise, if something went up, I didn't necessarily credit Obama because I thought the great engine of the American economy had gotten past whatever regulatory barriers he put in. And likewise, if you have a president who is committed to regulatory reform, you know, 16 gone for every new one in and seems to be signaling low energy prices forever.

How can you not say that that's a result of what people perceive to be the guy at the top? Yeah, I mean, look, that's exactly right. That plus low interest rates plus the sense that now is the time to raise money. If you're a big company or even a small company, now is a good time to raise money and invest in capital expenses. That's actually a good thing. I mean, yeah, I would give Trump credit for that, absolutely. But, you know, the irony about the energy issue is that if Bernie Sanders did say he wanted to nationalize the American energy industry, and he did want to distribute energy profits or even energy for

free to the poor, that would still be a net benefit for the economy, because that meant that we'd be actually exploiting our energy resources, right? I mean, the problem with our energy resources for years and years in America has been they've been untapped. We were not allowed to tap them, and now we are, and we are now, if not this quarter, next quarter, going to be a massive net energy exporter for the first time in, I don't know, decades.

That's a good thing. Now, the bad side of that is it does nothing to help, zero to help, the vast sort of, whether it exists or not, I think it does, invisible Trump army of the forgotten laborers that were traditionally mostly white, Democrats, Roosevelt Democrats, we'll say, Reagan Democrats, who've been forgotten in Appalachian, Central Valley, places like that. Because all this does is increase productivity, and productivity, not trade, but productivity is what has created such distress in those areas. Economic distress and unemployment. The increase in productivity has meant that real wages haven't really gone up up while at the same time the economy has boomed.

Because one person is doing the work of three. Just walk into a bank. Or walk into a restaurant. And that's that you can see already that that's happened. So nothing else. The great Thomas Sowell said there are no solutions, there are only trade-offs. Right, but I never expected you to go full chavista on us in that first part there where you were saying it'd be great because we'd be

tapping our resources. That's true. Any sentence that begins if Bernie Sanders nationalized the oil industry, the upside would be. You've got my attention once you've said that. I'm all ears. Keenly attuned. It would be

a slight improvement over a crazy Obama-era environmental weirdo, do not leave all of our energy resources untapped. crazy obama environmental movements but it what it does it means that you are absolutely in in the pocket desperately desperately um dependent upon foreign oil uh and and these arabian peninsula with all of its chaotic nightmare civil wars becomes your nightmare civil chaotic civil war i mean the reason i understand that but you know the minute that we nationalize all this stuff uh that's the point at which we stop investing at it because there's nothing in it for anybody else, and we just start bleeding what we have, and you end up like Venezuela. Venezuela, largest proven reserves, can't pump as much as it wants because they haven't spent a dime on upgrading anything. So, I mean, unless you have some nice, orderly Nordic society where there's such an excess of social capital that people generally all behave, any system like that – Like good Norwegians.

Good Swedes, good fans – breaks down into chaos and lassitude and the rest of it quite quickly. So, yeah, that's why I'm willing to say if there is this spirit abroad in the land, it would – the president doesn't create jobs, but the president does, in a variety of ways, set the conditions under which jobs can flourish or be discouraged. Absolutely, absolutely agree. And I think you have to give this president credit for doing exactly that. I mean, the regulatory reform is the most important thing for economic growth that a president can do, and he's doing it. Stop right there. However, I think it's important for everybody listening to this podcast, you and you know where i'm coming from you know exactly where i'm coming from the metal of matter of donald trump but they need to

say here you say i am willing to give credit to this president donald trump say the words i am willing to give credit to this president donald trump i mean okay I was always just you just bought yourself a whole lot of insulation with that. That's all I'm saying. Oh, no, no, no. People who really will maybe from ricochet listeners and podcast listeners who just tend to be smarter. But but there's a whole vast number of Trump supporters who remind me of no one so much as the Obama supporters. Just they just change one man's you know godlike qualities for another man's godlike qualities but if you look at twitter and you look at a lot

of trump supporters on twitter you'd think that that that trump had no flaws zero had made zero mistakes he he was the most effortlessly genius politician since uh you know kim jong-un and that to me is is that to me is concerning for people who have principles because, for instance, I do believe in a low regulatory environment, but that also means I'm in favor of a very, very, very, very free trade. And I think that is a demonstrable benefit to the country overall. And in that respect, I am at odds with many, many Trump supporters. Not all of them, of course, but many Trump supporters, including Donald Trump himself. You're probably one of those. Yeah.

Go on. This is all just marginal stuff happening, and we are facing this gigantic debt know, a responsible Republican, certainly, should be you know, rattling the cages and warning the townspeople of this incredible bomb that's going to approach. Instead, we had a Republican president who says he's not going to touch

that. He's just like a Democrat, just like Bernie Sanders. Well, the debt bomb's a bad bomb. Bomb fell is a good bomb, Bombfell is an easier way for men to get better clothes, period. Look at that, folks. Rob Long just- You're welcome, by the way. Just gave me a lateral for that segue to get into the ad. But I'm glad that he did because all you need to do when it comes to getting your clothes and your wardrobe right,

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blood. It's in your ichor. It's in your fiber. Are they rocked and to the very foundation by what's going on here? Is this the clearing of the decks of an entire creative class? The changing of a culture? The ascension of the female empowered executive what what's happening well i there's okay there are three things right so i'll let me stipulate at the outset number one which you have to do now because i just want to make sure it's very clear when i start getting

to the cynical stuff that i'm that i acknowledge that there has been there's a problem in hollywood probably a lot of other places too where powerful people feel like they get to push unpowerful people around and that means that powerful old men mostly powerful old you know unattractive men feel like they can push young mostly attractive girls around um and that isn't going to change anytime soon. Certainly not, because it seems like evil human behavior, but it's human behavior. Nobody says, oh my God, that's weird. Although some of the stuff that these old rich men were doing

seems weird to me, but that's probably something to be discussed, not in a Code of Conduct podcast. But the second thing that's happening is that there is this – I spoke about it in my commentary this week on public radio. There's an idea in Hollywood, and I think it's obvious what you're doing and it's obvious what your work product is and it's obviously if you've done the job or you haven't done the job right you have written code you have code either works or doesn't in hollywood like nobody's job is that like it's not that defined it's it's um we're all kind of like in this mishmash and sometimes people are really good at something and sometimes people just seem to be good at something but everybody's got

this vague and poet sense of i don't really know what i'm doing here let me stop you right there uh first of all and congratulate you for not saying in chote which is always what most people like to say uh and second you're right when we see for example that somebody is a dp a director of photography on a film we figure the other person who is who has technically arranged the shot and also brought their own aesthetic skills to bear to make the shot as well as it could be but the director of the movie is also responsible for these things so is this a collaboration with the dp and the director what what does that job mean and after all of these names you know grip and best boy we know what they do.

That's a very specific union, you know, identified task. But all these other creative things that we see in the screen, the credits, it all comes up to that last one. Here are all the people who made the movie, and then we get produced by. And most people just sit there and look at that and say, I really don't know what that means. What does that mean? Are they standing in this room sort of glowing and exuding this money power that makes it happen? Yes.

Did they take the meeting? Yeah. The producer of a movie produced by is a much higher credit, more meaningful credit than executive producer. The executive producer of a movie is usually somebody maybe they just own the original book or they were the the heir of the person who wrote the novel or some weird or they they tried to develop it 10 years ago and and then they lost they lost control over it right a million there are a million ways to become an executive producer but to be the producer of a picture is a big deal.

But it's hard to know that. And even producers, it's hard to know what it is that they do, what is their skill. I don't think there's a director or a writer or even an actor around who's never asked themselves, what does that producer do? Okay, so this leads to this sort of entitlement mentality or leads them to act out and swing the johnson about in inadvertent ways well then but then apply that to politics because in politics they have slut they have incredibly defined jobs don't they yeah maybe i just think that what happens is when people when people feel weirdly insecure about their ability to be replaced they overcompensate by believing that they are unreplaceable they must be if i can't tell you why i'm important to um this project it must be because i'm insanely important

to this project now a normal person says oh i guess i'm not important at all but i think there's a certain kind of egomaniac who thinks i don't even know what i do here i just which must make me like a godlike creature because i'm responsible for a little bit of everything and once you let that attitude sit in the i cannot be replaced attitude um it almost it's like a hall pass a free pass to to do whatever you want carte blanche to like well everyone exists in my orbit as a satellite of the great me. And so you lose, the strange thing about this stuff is that what you lose is the sense of like mortification and embarrassment. And,

and you know, the Charlie Rose story to me is so funny because all these young women keep saying that suddenly he would appear naked. He would just like show up and he would have no clothes. If you're Charlie Rose, you're a, you know, a man of a certain age.

And not to put too fine a point on it, you're not getting more attractive. Your body is reacting to the forces of gravity in a way that cannot be described as appetizing. You are a sagging bag of bones. And your theory is that if I appear naked in front of this girl, she's going to be so stunned by my physical beauty that it's going to be like she's going to not be able to control herself. To have that level of delusion means that you must think you're really big stuff and if you're charlie rose and your job is to sit around a table and interrupt your guests and ask them stupid questions and then sit in the morning and ask dumb questions and read from a teleprompter i mean what on earth do you how crazy do you have to be crazy in a way that i think most people and most jobs aren't because they know they could be replaced i think the irony is i said in my commentary this week, the irony is that

what is happening besides all the sort of being fired and the apologies and all that stuff is that all of these guys are being replaced, which is the one thing they didn't think could happen. They are being replaced one by one in a month. The thing about the ironclad rule in Hollywood is a rule that

everyone, or media in general, it's a rule that everyone forgets, which is you can be replaced in one month. You are not so special. Faster than that, and I don't understand why people in that industry would not get that lesson given the examples that they see before them. Hey, you guys are doing that Han Solo movie? Sorry, you're gone. Here comes Ron Hard.

In my business, I always feel like I can be replaced, and I got a union job. I mean, they can come in, they can take away my call. They can take away my column. I could still, I'll still make my union salary, but I always feel like I have to audition for my job every time I do it just to make sure that they don't think that I'm sitting back here twiddling my thumbs. Ted Baxter in the Mary Tyler Moore show, when he would go on vacation, when they finally forced him to go on vacation, he didn't. He would go to a hotel room and sit there and watch the replacement guy that they put in to see if he was better. So if what you're saying is that the lack of a defined job with these guys makes them sort of crazy and insecure about what they do,

but then they assume that they must be fantastic because they're doing it, I mean, none of this would happen if these people actually had to go and work with their hands at nine o'clock in the morning after a whistle blew. Let's take this back to politics now. Now we're in Washington where it's a different sort of thing,

where Al Franken is doing the, I'm a warm guy. That's what he wrote for the Star Trek where I work. He wrote that he's a warm person and he hugs people. Let me tell you from personal experience, there is nobody I would ever, the a warm person and he hugs people let me tell you from personal experience there is nobody i would ever the term warm person just applies to l franken only if he's on fire across the street

and i'm still not crossing um so but he hugs people and when he hung out so rob when you hug people do you do the natural butt cup is that your hand just goes mine doesn't i don't like hugging people i don't Mine doesn't. I don't like hugging people. I don't like hugging people. First, I don't like hugging people that I don't know. There is sort of a huggy culture in show business, which is weird.

There's a famous studio president who is just famous for his hugs. He hugs everybody. I don't think there's, so far, I don't think there's been any talk about him. I always feel it's weird and creepy,

and it's like, it puts the, it puts this thing that we're doing, which we're doing for the money, and we're doing it for the money, and it's a career, in the realm of, no, no, this is my family, and it's not your family. This is the family you work with.

So, yeah, I've never done that. I think what's weird about, or what's not weird, we're all among friends here, so we can say what's gleefully, deliciously ironic and spectacularly enjoyable about what's happening now to people like Al Franken is how quickly the tables turned on them how how sure and smug they were that i mean i i in my brain i keep replaying over and over again the phrase binders filled filled filled with women and how outrageous that was and the very people saying how outrageous that was are now accused credibly of groping and harassing and being dirty old men. And there is nobody on the planet, on planet Earth, to this moment, and if this happens I will, of course, be undone, but there is not a shred or a hint or a thought or an ounce of rumor or innuendo

or even arched eyebrow or even sub news or even scurrilous, vicious gossip that suggests that Mitt Romney has ever been anything in his life other than an incredibly upright, decent man. And what this progressive, he put a dog on the roof and he killed, and he killed the woman. Right.

But, but I mean, like what, what this progressive liberal sort of media political landscape has done is take a guy who really, by their standards, is impeccable. And they made him seem like he's a weirdo because he was binders filled. What kind of phrase is that? And the very people doing it were actually behaving with shocking disregard for not only their own standards, but for community standards. And to me, that I'm really, really, really enjoying that.

This to me seems one anecdote. I was at a dinner thing in Washington, D.C. early in the George W. Bush administration. So very, very, very soon after the Clinton administration. And I was there. There was a bunch of, you know, uh, liberal journalists, sort of liberal journalists, little dinner party. And, um, some sexual, the phrase sexual harassment came up and I was just like, you know, I had maybe too much wine or whatever I had. And I said, well, that's no longer an issue, right? I mean, that's no longer bad. And I would turn like, what? I said, well, it's no longer bad, longer bad right i mean that's the one thing

we've learned is that it's not it's not bad to do these things it's it's it's acceptable and the no it took me a few minutes to explain that i was sort of saying being something saying something deeply provocative but not this is like maybe 24 months less than two years after bill clinton did in the white house and people just didn't know what I was talking about. They had erased that from their memory. Like it was a bad period. Like Vichy French. The minute the Allies marched into Paris, all the French people were members of the underground.

No one ever collaborated. I don't know who worked for the Nazis. Nobody. Nobody had anything to do with it. And it was exactly what happened when Clintons left town. Well, I was against it, I guess. It isn't real. They had decided that it didn't matter.

And then the culture then took that as its lead. And so now to decide that not only does it matter, but it matters hugely, you lose your job, seems like chickens coming home to roost. It does, and I wish perhaps that they had been more like the French after the Nazis were kicked out, and that they identified the collaborators and shaved their heads and the rest of them. There was some nasty score settling that went on when people were trying to reassert a certain moral order.

But you're right. That moral order shifted according to what the liberals wanted for convenience. It shifted because they wanted certain policies to be enacted. Famous reporter said that she'd get down on her knees, etc. to Bill Clinton for keeping abortion legal. So that gave you

a pass for a long time. But then, as you were saying, I think, last week in the podcast, you have this, there's the pyramid of grievances, right? In the left, there's the pyramid of victimhood. And whoever is at the apex gets to determine the rules for those who gets to determine the pecking order, right? So now the left, there's the pyramid of victimhood. And whoever is at the apex gets to determine the rules for those who gets to determine the pecking order. So now the fact – right.

So we had the excoriation of Mitt Romney for being a weirdo. We had the condemnation of Mike Pence for being extraordinarily peculiar because he wouldn't have dinner alone with a woman who wasn't his wife, which they laughed at and saw as a sign of prudery, right? Now, they'll laugh at it again tomorrow for whatever reason they want, because it's a means of demonizing somebody they regard as sexually repressed. And for the left, sexual repression is a horrible, pathological thing that indicates just a roiling snake pot of psychoses inside. It's the people who are free and open and liberal about it who are the ones who are the most happily adjusted. That's what their whole doctrine since the 60s has told us. It hasn't worked out exactly quite that way.

What you got were a lot of women who didn't want to be pawed and a lot of men who thought, I thought the new mood and rules are I get to paw whatever because everybody's Dionysius now, right? So you've got stories of Al Franken going back to the 70s where he's dionysius now right so you got stories of al franken going back to the 70s where he's dragging a couple of girls from college onto the stage and turning out the lights and doing slow dance where he's groping all over them but let's go back to what he said about himself being a warm person this is his apology he had the quote in the line

in some of these encounters i crossed a line for women, and I know that any number is too many. This is the apology. Notice the way the accusation is now the apology. I mean, this is what you say to somebody. You crossed the line, and there were many times too many to which somebody either says, I'm sorry, I resign, or I'm sorry, and goes away forever. But this is not the apology. So let me ask you, you've seen a lot of these apologies from John Lasseter to Charlie Rose to John Conyers to Joe Barton. Everybody's coming up with their own little version of it. Is this the golden age of the apology, the non-apology apologies?

Are these just ways of people saying, I confess I didn't get out of my face. Yeah, like Louis C.K.'s, I thought um had a certain amount of um abject louis ck but i thought a lot of he got a lot of criticism for that it wasn't abject enough for a lot of people right and i thought well but he is a writer so if anybody's going to be able to craft a good one it might be somebody who's so schooled in his in expiating his own miseries as louis ck who's insulated himself you could say by trotting out his bad behavior and admitting to it fascinating but you know the one apology maybe that everyone is waiting for on our side at least bill clinton's will we get it no no no you're not going to get it absolutely not you're not

going to get an apology but i also feel like apologies are are sort of beside the point i don't really want anyone to apologize for the behavior. They don't need to apologize to me for it. They didn't do anything to me. I want them to apologize for the hypocrisy. See, what's strange about it is all the apologies are based on what I did. I shouldn't have done. I crossed the line.

I shouldn't have crossed the line. And that's fine. But they didn't cross the line with me. They don't owe me an apology. They didn't put me in any weird spot. I want them to apologize to all of us for being hypocrites, for being liars, for attacking certain people for certain things whilst they were doing something even worse. And that's, I think, why all these apologies, for me anyway, are totally unsatisfying. Because they just, they're not, I mean, you know, Louis C.K.

and Al Frank and all these people, they should call up those women and they should say, I really, I am so sorry. They don't do it to me. It doesn't have to be an open letter. It doesn't have to be in public. The public apology, the public statement that I want from them is an apology for being hypocritical

scum. Feeling absolutely, absolutely empowered to spout off all sorts of nonsense and live privately a different way. And that's what I would like. That's what I would like. That's the only thing that will satisfy me.

It's not the hypocrisy per se that bothers me. I mean, yes, that's the obvious thing. They say the one thing and they act the other way and they think they're insulated from it. But if we start attacking the very idea of hypocrisy, then we open up absolutely everybody to some sort of charge if they espouse an idea that they don't personally live up to in their own life. In other words, if they espouse the virtue of thrift and we find out that when they sold a book, they went out and bought a yacht, we would be able to say, ah, you hypocrite. Being angered by hypocrisy is the most adolescent of emotions. It's Holden Caulfield. It's euphonies. It suggests that there aren't actually any standards whatsoever, that there's, you know, everyone.

Well, yeah, but I mean, just these guys are so gleeful. And I'm not finished. So while I agree with you, yes, it's the hypocrisy that rankles and amuses. I don't want hypocrisy itself to become some sin that we can hang around anybody's neck. What I want them to apologize for is using the basic human desire to be hypocritical, to appear better than you actually are, to demonize and smear and pervert the notion of a whole group, a whole side of the argument. That's it. I mean, you didn't use your hypocrisy to maybe get a couple extra, but you used your hypocrisy to set yourself up in this industry as moral avatars who are therefore somehow qualified to judge the lives of the whole

vast middle of the country who does not live like you do and exists only in your imagination to be surfaced now and then to show the evils of suburbia or the redneckery of the midwest and matt mcgill shepard died for your sins and all the rest of it it's what you used your hypocrisy for and i don't don't know if that's as great a distinction as i'd like to think at the moment but uh no i i totally i mean i think it's i think we're probably saying the same thing you're just saying better i i to me the issue is um it was very very easy for them to demonize clarence tom old enough to remember demonizing clarence thomas and it was very very easy for them to sort of turn what was uh what they believed to be a consensual relationship between Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton and to make what were credible harassment, credible rape allegations, and to smother those. It was very easy for them to go back and forth and to blur the distinction between what's acceptable and what's not acceptable and who it's acceptable for.

Very easy for them to do that until recently, until four weeks ago. And then the floodgates opened. And instead of the blood, like, oh, I guess we're all, you know, it's like that we're all victims here. Oh, the times are changing and all that stuff. There's this great, my favorite moment from All in the Family was when the episode was Archie had taken some tools home from work. And he'd taken some tools home from work to do some work at home. And Meathead said, and he wasn't going to take them back. And Meathead said, you're stealing.

You're stealing. And Archie said, I'm not stealing. The company I'm taking from is rich, and it's not stealing, and they're rich, and they can afford it, and all that stuff. And Meathead, of course, was incredibly smug and said, no, that's stealing, Arch. That's stealing. You're a thief. And then Meathead got a phone call when he could do a person-to-person call for a friend of his, and he didn't accept the call by saying a certain thing to the operator. No, Mike Stivick's not here today he'll be here on thursday and that was sending a message to his friend that the job that he thought was

available wasn't available right so he communicated with his friend but for free and archie said why is that not stealing and he convinced meathead that he was stealing too and meathead's response was wow you're right i guess i'm a victim too and it was a great moment was, wow, you're right. I guess I'm a victim too. And it was a great moment. A victim? So when you do it, you're a victim. When I do it, I'm a thief. And he had some high mind. No, no, I'm a victim of corporate culture and the corporate this and the corporate that.

And so are you, Arch. We're all victims. And it's fantastic. I mean, it probably is on YouTube somewhere. It's really worth it. That's exactly what's happening now. I'm a looking too. So what you're saying then at the end of this, there will not be a generally applicable moral lesson that both sides will take to heart.

And, of course, that leads us right to a certain judge we're going to get to in a second. Think about what you're going to say about Judge Roy Moore because, Rob, this is going to be a pivot for the podcast, shall we say. And I'm saying all these empty words because obviously I'm getting to a commercial. I just want you to wonder what it's for. It's for Casper. And you know Casper, don't you? If you've been hanging around the Internet for a long time, for a short time, you just got on here today, you probably have realized that Casper is a sleep brand that continues to revolutionize its line of products

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we've been having the argument on ricochet as to whether or not people would vote for people they find to be morally reprehensible or questionable in order to prevent Adi from getting the seat. Let's have you weigh on that, shall we? Well, I mean, it's all about Judge Roy Moore, right, who I found objectionable from the very beginning. I think this stuff just makes it even worse. I'm not sure that it's the smart move. I mean, look, the House and the Senate change sides. It's not monolithic. I'm not sure it's worth selling out what seemed to me to be bedrock principles.

I mean, the guy seems beyond the pale to me. And it's not worth selling out something that's beyond the pale. And I recognize this is not sort of monolithically moral. If he had done time, if he had cheated on his taxes and paid the penalty, I think I'd be able to see beyond it. But his attitude and his personal responsibility taking is at such a low. His delusion

seems to be so high that I'm not... I think a D, certainly a D from Alabama, in the Senate does not worry me. It doesn't worry me at all. Any more really than the D in the Senate from West Virginia. Joe Manchin really worries me. It's much better, I think, and much more strategic and actually probably better politics to take a stand here. Mind you, anyway. The D doesn't bother you because you think because of their conservative constituency they will vote appropriately as opposed to

sort of falling in lockstep like we usually see where somebody needs to get whipped but good and they deliver uh maybe if you had a republic a democrat president perhaps but um there are those who will say uh and i'm not one of them so i'm not phrasing this question to be a mealy-mouthed evasive but they'll say that really it doesn't matter because the great challenge to america is the left the progressive agenda to reshape and reform and reconstitute the country and anything that that enables that such as a d in the senate is equivocating with evil is accommodating evil so you have to choose these lesser demons in order to forestall the worst

catastrophe. And that's even the people who don't, I mean, we're leaving out the people who say, who are these women? Why do they come forward now? All these years ago, doesn't matter. He didn't do it. He's morally upright as opposed to the obvious clown barker that this guy is. But so what do you say to those people who say, look, we're at a war here. We're going to lose the war unless we accommodate flawed people. Dennis Prager reminds us King David himself was quite flawed. Flawed people are not a problem. I mean, I'm a Christian.

I'm not against flawed people. We're all flawed. I'm not even against sinners. We're all sinners. God. Yeah, right. I'm not even against sinners, we're all sinners I'm against people who are delusional and deny it I'm against people who claim to be godly

Why? Because they'll vote the proper way, Rob They'll vote against the progressive agenda So why does that bother you? Well, but it doesn't really matter what that one vote is in the Senate Because the problem isn't that we don't have the votes in the Senate. Certainly if I'm a conservative, my problem is that I don't have the votes in the country, that the country is not sufficiently conservative for me. The country doesn't want what I want, which is a low-tax, high-growth environment where people have to look after themselves. The country doesn't want – I mean, you can ask people all you want about Obamacare and how much they hate it,

and one of the things they hate about it is that it's expensive. What they want is they want free. I mean, President Trump won in part because when he said, I'm going to replace Obamacare with something even better, which as a conservative, I would say I would replace Obamacare with something even smaller which but i will tell you what but i will tell you that these people will say again look the only way then we're going to change the minds of the people in the country is by leading is the government leading by example so we need all the hours we can to choke off every single prog initiative so that we change the culture so that we're no longer arguing about which flavor of

progressivism we enact we're arguing longer arguing about which flavor of progressivism we enact. We're arguing about something that fights back against progressivism. That's what they're saying. I get that part. I hear that argument. I don't get the war and the evil part, but I get that part. I get that part, too, but I just said that actually a dirty old man let you chase after young teenager and tween girls, once you say that, you've really given up your right for any kind of sort of moral high horse. And you need some of that moral high horse to get your policies pushed through, especially policies like ours that are unpopular. They're about doing less,

that are not free lunch policies. It's easy to run as a lech and win if in addition to running and winning you're going to give stuff away. People will say, okay, well, you know what? Ted Kennedy killed a girl, but boy, he gave us a lot of free stuff.

That's true. The final thing I'll tell you is that I get it. I just think, look, a half a teaspoon of dog poop can ruin three gallons of vanilla ice cream. Right? It doesn't

matter that... I want to know how you got that exact ratio. Trial and error? Yeah, it's right. I mean, the fact that it's there ruins it and i just i think that this is the one every now and then it's good for the your team to take a member of your team out and and uh put him out to pasture and this is a guy this would be a it'll never get easier than making a stand this way. He's not popular.

He's not – he does not connect to the rest of the country. He's never going to be a national leader. He is a flawed, deeply flawed and been kicked off the bench judge. He's kind of a crackpot in a lot of other ways. And it turns out he's also a dirty old man and maybe a potential statutory rapist. So this is an easy one. And we're having trouble with this one because we have some mythical idea of what it would be like if we didn't have an R representing Alabama from the Senate. To me, this sends the wrong message to people whom we need to persuade. Go ahead. Sorry. I agree with everything you just said, but because I took debate in high school, I'm able to argue the other side with enthusiasm

bordering on the genuine, which I'll do now. So don't mistake this for me believing what I'm saying because I don't. But the opposite argument to that is twofold. One, the other side never does that. The Democrats never take one of their own out back and shoot them or stake them out as a scapegoat because they know that the agenda matters more than anything else and they'll do anything whatsoever to do it. So if they don't do it, why should we do it? The tweet that went around, I think Sean Davis put it out saying that the conservatives were always saying that character mattered and took us handed to them every time. The Democrats never did that and they win all the time by protecting their own guys.

Why don't we play like that? I'll have you answer that in one second. The second point is that perhaps moral capital of the sort that we were talking about isn't necessary anymore, because what really we're looking for here is just basically sort of this atheistic libertarianism, whereby we constrict the government, we get the moral issues out of the equation whatsoever because nobody wants to talk about the moral issues anymore. Nobody has the courage to. Everyone's afraid to be a hater, a phobe, all of those things.

So we're just going to do kind of economic stuff. And for that, you don't need character. You don't need character at all. Well, look, when the government is simply tasked with what I think it should be tasked with, right, small things, morality, not morality, it's one of the things the founders are obsessed with, how people in power were going to behave in power and behave with that power. They never occurred to them that people in power would have this much scope over where you go to, which doctor you choose and which school you're allowed to go to and all sorts of things. That never occurred to them.

So in a perfect constitutional republic that we have or should have, you knowim flam artists would were are fine that's like they're not fine but like we'll get through it it's fine they don't have that much impact on us federal government now has some extraordinary outsized impact on us so these things kind of do matter but they sort of matter in a limited way i mean then it's like it's not a it's not a bizarre witch hunt to say that somebody who has been fletching after underage girls and has been banned from malls and like there was like the sheriff knew about him. It doesn't all that.

That's all that hard for us to say, OK, we'll let this one go. Alabama's got a lot of good conservatives, a lot of good conservative young conservatives. Well, there'll be another one coming along. This is not worth it. We're not going to worth going to the barricades this is not a hill you want to die on the judge roy more hill the reason it's different for us and the reason i understand the argument they never have to do it they don't do this they don't do that the other side doesn't do it the other side has an easier job it's a much easier thing trust me if you could somehow give up if you're a conservative and give up

your conservative beliefs politically, your life would be so much easier. Because you don't have to convince anybody. No, you say, look, yeah, you want free healthcare? Absolutely. It'll be great too. Everybody should have a free center. You want to go to Harvard? Everyone should go

to Harvard. Sure. I want to get back to that one second, but I want to ask one unrelated question. In sitcoms these days, and I haven't watched enough sitcoms to be able to answer this with any degree of authority, do they still stop, do the commercials, and then come back for a 90-second little stinger before they go to the credits?

Often, all networks are different, but there's a tag. In some, they do a tag, yes. Right. A lot of prestige TV does not do that, but the tag. Because I always knew when you're a kid that when they have that last commercial break, there's just going to be a tag and that basically the show is over. I don't want people to get that impression here because I'm going to do a commercial and there will be much show left after that.

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And our thanks to Away for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. So where were we again, Rob? We were talking about how they do, oh, about the, how easy it is to persuade people of your position if it consists of giving them something and requiring nothing. And you're right. I mean, we're the spinach folk, or at least we used to be. Now we have a president

who isn't going to touch entitlements. Have we given up on that as well? Well, I mean, I think we have for now. I mean, there's no appetite for it. I mean, because the appetite, because it's so horrible. It's such a horrible, horrible thing we have to face. What I was used to screaming about was that conservatives, I mean Republicans, but mostly conservatives, fiscal conservatives, had this terrible, terrible job of trying to convince people that they had to pay for stuff themselves, which nobody wants to hear, and also convince them of something that they, some bedrock truth that they had forgotten, which is that paying for something yourself

and being a consumer means that you're going to get the best value, and you're going to get what you want, and that the market will actually figure out a way to supply what you want, and within, you know, obviously within, you know, with realism, but much better than the government can do it at scale scale and that's like that was sort of everybody knew that nobody ever thought that they would that the government should run giant department stores because that would be like soviet russia where you never had anything so why is it different for health care why is it different for schools why is it for all this other stuff because and because the europeans figured it out that's why because the europeans figured

it out yeah right figuring it out but but the but the what's what that what's what what i hear from republicans and conservatives now is that that they're mad that that's unfair they're mad that it's hard they're mad that it's almost quixotic they're mad they're tired of failing so they want to win and the way they win is you just stop saying those things you say other things you say yo you can have all the entitlements you want you could have a better than. You say, yo, you can have all the entitlements you want. You can have better than Obamacare, but better. You can have all the stuff that's, and you don't have to pay, and it's not going to, you can cut taxes too.

And the sad thing is it's not true. The Democrats, when we would talk about debt and deficit, we would think that everyone agreed that it was a problem. But it, the progressive left doesn't care. We do not have a debt or deficit problem in this country.

We don't. If you're progressive, it's not a problem. It's solved by a 60% marginal tax rate. And then you're done, right? Then it's all fine. And that, to conservatives, is unthinkable. The idea of taking that much money out of useful, productive hands, efficiently entrepreneurial, risk-taking, business-growing, idea of taking that much money out of useful productive hands efficiently you know entrepreneurial

risk-taking business growing economic boom hands and putting them in the in the hands of the stagnant union infested uh utterly um uh unaccountable government that's a disaster but for progressives not disaster they don't care they don. They don't really care if we spend more. They don't even care about tax cuts. I mean, the tax cuts, that's just kabuki theater to them. They would be in favor of it if they just thought more long-term. What do they care? The bigger the economic disaster, the bigger the debt bomb we face, the better it is for the progressives because the solution is simple.

It's simply raise taxes. Give the government more money and more stuff to do boom done taken care of and then suddenly we're we're uh you know a third rate uh struggling uh country with a giant um gdp that most of which is spent on a social welfare state and the op the people who oppose this will say that that's what they want. They want to humble America. They want to bring down America. They want to destroy America.

And I mean, there are some of them that do. You know, let's cloward pivot this baby. There are some mad people on the left, as we see, mostly now incubating in college atmospheres where they, yeah, they want to destroy it all. Capitalism and white people are all to be effed and the rest of it. I mean, we know they're out there. But your basic progressive working in the system today in the state legislature and the national legislature

does not want to destroy America because their livelihood consists of feeding off of remora, parasite-like America. They want to reshape it. If the end result is much more egalitarian, so that there's really no distinction between somebody at the bottom of the lower class and the top of the middle class, if they're all pretty much kind of in a big smear of equality where they all have the same access to the same crappy schools, they all have the same crappy gray cement stained flat that they live in.

They all have the same basic banal college education that teaches them nothing. If there's just a general egalitarian sameness to the people below and a nice little technocratic managing group of oligarchical collectivists at the top, that's not a bad way to turn out, I don't think. I think that you think that would be a natural a natural ordering of the way things are because it would it would allow them to have compassion for people at the bottom by saying look you're still at the bottom but really there isn't so much a bottom anymore because we brought the middle down that's that's kind of how it's working out now but that's not to hide right right and and by the way we And we taught the rich people to hide. Right. We taught the rich people to hide. Right.

And by the way, we also know some very rich people who are wonderful and contribute to the culture and the arts, and that's why they're important. That's their cult. That's why we don't take everything from them because it's important to have ballets based on an incomprehensible poem that George O'Keefe did a lousy painting of, et cetera. Okay? that georgia did a lousy painting of etc okay and the model in their head is european which is quaint which in which people mill around in these beautiful cities that were all built by a completely different social structure but that idea of small flats mass transit everyone on bike you know museums around the corner it's very attractive to them. It's a very attractive way, right down to the fact that the churches are now essentially empty places that people go to look at art. So they want Europe. I mean, and it's funny because their preferred model is not the diversity of America, the historical diversity of America.

It is to choose places that have been monocultural for millennia. And then they have some – That work only because they're monoculture that now that those places like in the northern europe that are becoming more diverse ethnically meaning they're more muslim um more latin even uh uh are sort of falling apart and and having deep deep deep deep deep trouble right that's right but i think you're xenophobic and you're islamophobic what you just said you You're xenophobic. I'm guilty. But I think what's important here is that for me, it's good to think the way the other side thinks so that you understand them. And it's one of the things that John Bedorth has said over and over again, I think he's absolutely right, is that the only superpower that conservatives have is that they all have to be bilingual. You grow up speaking liberal and knowing how to speak liberal and then also knowing how to speak conservative, whereas liberals never know how to. So I mean that to me when I was doing a lot of stuff, a lot of research in school choice and getting school choice sort of passed here and there and where it failed and where it succeeded and all the weirdness of the school choice movement.

What was interesting about it was two things. One was interesting was that people, when you asked them, are you in favor of school choice? Are you going to vote for school choice? They would say yes. And when the election came, they had to vote for the referendum. And there were like five or six referendums around the country. They voted no.

And no in weird droves. So it felt like there had been some polling problem, but there really hadn't been. What it was was that people say, yeah, this theoretical idea that you're pitching to me about school choice, I theoretically believe it will theoretically be better. But my children are in school now or about to get into school, and I have that system figured out. So I don't want you to change a system that I have figured out. I know who the good teachers are. I know what the good school is. I moved to this city. I moved to this town. I moved here to this neighborhood because it's got a good school district in it. And now you're telling me you're going to like upend the table

and send the cards flying and eventually it'll be better. And I believe you that it'll be better, but not now, not with my kids. And it was a very interesting thing to hear that overall. That's just bizarre to me. I don't understand that. I mean, first of all, by the time everything sorts out, those people's kids will probably be out of school. It's not going to destroy the schools that they're in now to provide an alternative. And is there something

wrong with my headset, or are you actually emery-boarding your nails as we speak? No, does it sound like I'm emery-boarding my nails right now? It would, because I kind of like the idea of Rob just sort of i believe just reeling off brilliance as he's sort of just yeah as i'm getting yeah maybe it was maybe it was a little bit rubby on my shirt i'm sorry uh no it's not and soak them in palm oil well too because you'd be surprised it's so mild it's so mild you're You're soaking in it, in dishwashing liquid.

Remember that? As a kid, I remember, is this what women do? They go to these places where they get perms and they soak their fingernails. Why are they soaking their fingernails? Right, right. I remember here, just because now we're on this topic, I was remembering in the office and was remembering it. And it was an incredible divide, generational divide. People could remember this, and people couldn't.

Mrs. Chang, how does your husband get this laundry so white? Mr. Chang, how do you get your laundry so white? And so it's a white woman picking up her laundry from a Chinese, actually he looks Japanese in the commercial, but they're explaining him for Chinese. How do you get your laundry so white? And he says in his pigeon kind of fake... Let's do it together.

Ancient Chinese secret. And then they show on the reverse thing behind the door doing all the hard work. Obviously, his wife and his wife is just... She's Chinese, but she's completely Americanized. She's my husband. Some shot i don't here's his ancient chinese secret do you remember what the brand um you see i knew that i don't it was calgon calgon right but it's a 40 year old commercial and i remember it like yesterday and and and we just that was just on TV. That was a thing on TV that made use of an ethnic stereotype that all Chinese people are interested in laundry, that they all have pigeon English accents, but maybe they're faking.

Also that you can't tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese because I'm pretty sure the guy was Japanese who was playing a Chinese laundromat. And that that was just ancient Chinese secret. That was just okay. And people thought that was okay. So I don't know why I brought that up, but it does show you how culture changes. It does. It was blowing it up because the minute that that woman spoke, I mean, it's like she was born in bread and queens or yonkers or something the voice was so not away from no tiki no shirty which had been the stereotype before with the cool and the rat tail and all the rest of those horrid things right um and then le choy of course le choy was coming

up with this goop this chow mein goop that they had to sell and convince people that it was edible you know that you'd like it because it's got lots of salt and so what was their slogan le choy makes chinese food swing american which implies some sort of difference between the chinese and the american as opposed to what would come later which is all these things get hyphenated into one glorious culture in which there are differences and similarities and the similarities are that all of you should probably go right now to our various sponsors pages and save an awful lot of money some great things and that's bomb felt that's casper that's a way travel you's Casper. That's Away Travel.

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And Rob, tell them once again why they should in 10 minutes or less. I'll do it one second or less, or one minute or less. Ricochet puts out a lot of podcasts and one of the things we, and online we have a fantastic community. Both support, one supports

the other, goes back and forth. If you like this podcast, we have a fantastic community. Both support, one supports the other, goes back and forth. If you like this podcast, we really do need you to join. Just join the community. You don't have to say a word. You can just simply read, listen, do whatever you want, but I guarantee you, you will take one little timid step into a conversation, and you will feel rewarded. James and I usually do this podcast with Peter Robinson. When I'm in production, I can't do it so that somebody fills in. James and I, I don't think we've done this ourselves.

I don't know, just you and me. For some time. For some time, and it's incredibly fun. And I kind of miss doing it just with me and James because we sort of, we have, put it this way. We have 2017 media references that Peter Robinson doesn't understand. But it is part of the community. So we feel like our listeners and us, and we're all having a conversation together, and we would like you to join. So please go to RickShare.com.

I know there are probably 100,000 people listening right now that have said to themselves, I mean to do this and to keep putting it off. If 1%, if 10% of you took action today, this company would be on a much, much more sound footing and certainly the people on our payroll would be extremely grateful for the job security that you have offered them. So it does matter. It really does matter to have you join. Please do. And see you next week. I was going to start out by saying that I really, since I got a TV guy here, I'd love to talk about BoJack Horseman and Halt and Catch Fire,

two examples of television that never would have been made in the old days. But maybe that's another one down the road when Peter is off on doing something. So if you want to hear Rob, then I discuss these deathless topics. By all means, yes, contribute. 1%, 2%. Maybe we'll come up with a special an entire podcast devoted to references that Peter Robinson would

not get. There will be several, several, several hours of podcasts. Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3. Anyway, thanks, Rob. Great. Calgon, take me away. We'll see you all in the comments at Ricochet 3.0. Happy Thanksgiving, James.

Stand down by the door and catch the great men when they die from the far deep floor When Black Friday comes I collect everything I'm owed And before my friends find out I'll be on the road. When Black Friday falls, you know it's got to be. You'll make it go on. When Black Friday comes, I'll fly down to my swell pool

Gonna strike all the big red words From my little black book Gonna do just what I please Gonna wear no socks and shoes With nothing to do but meet all the kangaroos When Black Friday comes up beyond that hill You know I will Ricochet

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