The Ricochet Podcast - Burning Issues

Episode Date: August 29, 2025

This week's podcast starts out on a somber note, as this week's tragic news of the attack on Annunciation Catholic school hits unsettlingly close to home for one of our hosts. James, Charles, and Steve then chat with Will Chamberlain about next week's NatCon conference taking place in Washington, DC. The trio also weighs in on flag-burning.- Sound from this week's open: Jesse Merkel, who lost his 8-year-old son Fletcher in the Annunciation Catholic Church shooting on Wednesday speaks to the media.

While the hole in our hearts and lives will never be filled, I hope that in time our family can find healing. I pray that the other victim's family can find some semblance of the same. I'm hopeful that all the wounded are able to make a full recovery and return home to their families. and finally all the people and especially the children impacted by this horrific event are able to recover mentally and find strength to live loving, happy, and full lives. Welcome everybody to the Rickettshire podcast, episode number 755. I'm joined by Stephen Hayward in California. and Charles C.W. Cook in Florida.

And gentlemen, welcome. Thank you. So, I guess I should start with the news. I live technically, I'm on 51st, and the Annunciation Church in Minneapolis is on 54th. So I'm close. There's the creek between us, beautiful rushing water that goes down to Minneapolis Falls.

Lovely neighborhood. Beautiful neighborhood. Beautiful day. And I get a call for, for my sister-in-law, or a text for my sister-in-law who lives a block away from the church, that there had been a mass shooting and enunciation. And she goes

out and talks to her neighbor who had actually seen the demon do it. And within seconds, it seemed as if every as I wrote in ricochet, every siren in the world was heading our way. This, this chorus of whales that was astonishing. And

it was a bad day here. And the only thing I can think of that's that's that's apt is 9-11 and I know people drag that into everything but the same sense of after the event and the and and just the stunned feeling this ghastly myasma that descends over the community and how the TV is always on the TV is is your friend it's right there and it's it's always on all the local channels we dumped their judge Judy and went to this and you know we all know now what it was about

We all, well, we do. It seems some of the authorities are still scratching their head and trying to figure out what the motivation was. We may never know. The strange thing for me was that I was getting on X, the identity of this guy, about 45 minutes before the authorities announced it. And I don't know how that happened.

I don't know. Obviously, I did the miscreant right away, and the FBI was on the scene, and the FBI was able to pull the stuff down from YouTube. Apparently, there's a protocol for this. There's a red phone that rings, and they know it's the FBI telling him to take something down because his manifesto that he put up was gone,

but somebody had scraped it and taken screenshots and put the whole thing up and got the guy's identification, and I'm still trying to figure out exactly how that happened. And it's just, once again, shows you how the world has changed. It used to be, you sit by the television and wait for Walter Cronkite to break in

and take off his glasses and wipe his eyes and tell you something. But now, no, it's blasting, out of that little magic glass rectangle in your pocket. And what we know about the guy, of course, is fascinating, not in a good way. It's a look, I thought, for a lot of people, into a part of the dank, in-cell, moist, miserable, nealistic cave in online in which so many of these people dwell.

And a lot of, I mean, if you looked at what he wrote on his gun, his rifle and his in the magazines it was a compendium of internet memes and cliches and references and i hope a lot of people take a look at that and and study what it means and figure out exactly what to do about guys like this because my first instinct is not to ban the guns oh i always try to go by the 72 hour rule in these things which is wait till you have some information and confirmation of things uh this is one case for can set some of that aside because first of all James I'm a little curious too that we got photos of the guns and other information came out so quickly maybe it was some you know random people

on social media who got out no no I don't think so the most likely thing I think the most likely explanation is that he set this thing to go to be to go public at a certain time and one of his mutuals got a notification oh and when they got the notification they scraped it downloaded it and then sent it to somebody to give themselves some distance from it. That's the only thing that I can imagine. That makes some sense. Yeah, I'm not going to be conspiratorial about this and say that it was all, you know,

this is all black rock, deep state stuff, man, false you know, no, no. I think, I think, sorry, Jay, if we cast our mind back to the shooting in Nashville, what a year and a half ago, also by a transgender student of great trouble, who had a manifesto that was actively suppressed by the police and the authorities. Parts of it have finally leaked out, and I thought maybe

somebody's leaking it out to get ahead of the suppression effort, which is point number two, which is I'm watching the media turn somersaults to avoid bringing up the chosen identity of the shooter. So they'll say, you know, troubled person, maybe mental illness issues, NPR kept talking about they shot themselves. Right. This person used the they, them pronouns. I was watching NBC nightly news about it the other night, and I thought how ironic that they won't mention this at all, and yet they have an ongoing segment right now in NBC90 News called

the cost of denial. It's about health insurance and all those problems that are not new to be reported on, but I thought, talk about cost of denial. The media and all of our authorities are going out of their way to deny that any sort of the mental illness and mental unbalance of this person could be in any way related to his gender identity issues. Oh no, we can't talk about that. That's bigotry and hate and everything else. Charles? Well, I'm sorry that happened so close to you. I'm sorry I happened at all,

but it sounds as if it was more harrowing for you than most. I am the least important element of this story. No, I know, but still, but still. It's worse when things happen close to you. Well, I don't think it's the guns either. And not only do I not think it's the guns, but I think that this is an irrelevant factor because even if you wanted to, you can't ban

guns, there's hundreds of millions of them, so then the question is what can you do? And I never know the answer, James. Well, can you keep a guy from walking into a pawn shop, passing the background check because he has no criminal record and walking out with one of these things? No. Well, you can

if you simply say you can't do that in Minneapolis, but then of course you can go to Richfield. Well, right, but also you can go to the black market. And this guy unfortunately was obsessed with other schools. shooters. He was clearly in a line of mass shooters and that's how he saw himself. He'd written their names on the magazines. So if you're that determined, you know, the argument that adding

friction into the process is problematic in many ways. It's a constitutional right. If you do that, you also end up preventing people who need guns to defend themselves from getting them and so on. but the argument in favor of adding friction between a gun purchaser and a gun makes sense in certain circumstances from a purely practical perspective if for example you wish to stop somebody killing himself on a whim or if somebody is very angry and would have calmed down had he not been able to get a gun that's the theory at least but in this case i mean you're talking about somebody who wrote a manifesto and the manifesto is crazy and And I do think we ought to keep that in mind.

It's crazy in so many different ways, some of which touch politics. But the most crazy thing about it is this bizarre schizophrenic flipping between I want to kill children. I thought that is abhorrent to almost everyone in the world. And, hey, Tommy, be nice to mum. Make sure that you do your homework. What? What sort of person is concerned about the relationship between their sibling? and their mother, but also is talking about killing children.

This is the part that I think is impossible to interrogate. I share Steve's absolute irritation with the press, because the press does not take the view that I usually take, left or right, trans or not, man or woman, that the people who do this are usually crazy. The press likes to focus in on details. And you can bet your ass that if this guy had had a magnet, hat, even if every other thing he had said was left wing, if he had one MAGA hat in his bedroom,

or it would have been caught in the frame, or if a red hat for an oil company had been caught in the frame of the video, they'd have talked about it, but now it's too nuanced, it's too difficult to know. So what they're doing is they're systematically and selectively suppressing what we are allowed to know and talk about. I find that wildly annoying, even though I'm not somebody who tends to take the view that, hey, somebody of the other side did this, therefore, I think that's usually useless. But the press doesn't. So we get it only in one direction, and I find I'm furiousing. But they can't, because the information is out there and everybody's having the conversation. And there's some conversations that they don't want us to have. They're just,

not because they, you know, I hate that thing. Tend tricks that, you know, dentist doesn't want you to know. What I mean by that is, it's an uncomfortable conversation that exposes. his hypocrisies and flaws in arguments and theories. And it has to do with the guy's transgender identity. One, I don't think, I'm looking at this guy. I don't think he was on anything, to be frank. I don't think he was going through any medicalized transition. I just get that feeling.

And I had that, that was reiterated by a transgender advocate who was in my Twitter feed, who said, no, this person was just trying on an identity. They put their hair in pigtails, didn't take any drugs, didn't do any surgery, et cetera, et cetera. So not really a transgender person. I thought, wait, hold on a second. That's not what we've been told before. We have been told the whole basis of self-ID is that one need not have to go through any of these things that simply declaring oneself to be another gender is sufficient because they know, because our children know, listen to the children.

They know and therefore everything should flip and they should have all of the access to the other sex that, you know, that natural born females or males have. So that's part of the other part is, is that if you want red, flag laws or people who have manifest signs of mental instability if you want to say no that crazy person walking into the gun shop should not get a gun what do you say about a hulking man in a dress with pigtails and makeup are you allowed to say I don't believe that that person has the mental stability that we generally require from people to you know to possess this because then all of a sudden you then you're classifying their way of presenting and identifying themselves as a mental instability and we can't have that

So, I mean, what the whole, everybody has suppressed, not suppressed, but just declined to discuss the nuances that surround the whole transgender, gender identity, gender ideology thing. They just, they just state what is, what must be agreed upon, and that we must be kind, and then we move on from that point without ever being able to discuss, but people want that discussion, and online is exactly where we're having that discussion. Well, other discussions to come, and that will be this. We are going to talk to, oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, talk. Why talk when you can, you know, do something else like check your bank balance? Have you done that recently? Have you? How about your investments?

Look at those? Well, I'm sure, of course, the answer to this will be to invest in our community, invest in this, and invest in that. Whenever you hear a politician use the word invest, they mean anything except what invest means, but you're probably thinking, well, I should invest. I like to invest. Investing is good, but you've got to ask yourself, are you being lied to? Hmm? You know, they tell you to defer paying your taxes by saving in a 401k or an IRA because you'll retire at a lower tax bracket. If that's true, where are so many retirees in the highest tax bracket of their lives? Look, it's time to

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That's bankonyself.com slash ricochet. Bankandyself.com slash ricochet. And we thank Banking yourself for sponsoring this. Ricochet podcast. And now we're welcome to the podcast, Will Chamberlain, Vice President for External Affairs at the Edmund Burke Foundation. He's also the Senior Council at the Article 3 project and the Internet Accountability Project. Well, welcome. Good to be with you. Will, of course, I'd like to know about the Vice President for Internal Affairs, but more than that, I'd like to know about the Edmund Burke Foundation. Tell us about it. It's having its fifth annual national conservatism convention conference in D.C. next week. What should people know about the organization? Well, it's found by Yoram Hizoni, the author of The Virtue of Nationalism, and really, if you want to learn precisely, like, what the political beliefs of the organization are, what we're trying to put forward, there's a statement of principles available at the website. I think, you know, it's really a conservatism that's deeply rooted in nationalism that, and I think it orientes itself and it finds itself very much at the center of the modern right. not as you know there's not a uniform view on foreign policy certainly but it's more oriented towards restraint than previous dominant intellectual strengths in conservatism it's also very much focused on you know the right of peoples to maintain their sovereignty and that's very focused on immigration

and it is not certainly not you know the orthodox kind of libertarian view on economics it you know we're not very much heterodox although i mean we're not you know socialists or anything but we're perfectly willing to see tariffs used judiciously. And so we find ourselves very much in approval of much of the Trump agenda. Nationalism is one of those words that probably gets you red flagged over in Europe. Here in the States, how would you, would you regard nationalism as having the same sort of bad odor that it does in the, well, you know, I mean the EU is this wonderful transnational project that's going to dissolve borders and have everybody grouped into this happy union of shared ideas. And, you know, America is a country based on an idea. but we're also based very firmly in the fact of our geographical location, the fact that we are a nation.

So where do you think nationhood, nationalism polls these days? I think it would poll pretty strongly. Donald Trump famously said, I am a nationalist, and that he didn't think it was a bad word, and all of a sudden he's the leader of the Republican Party in the President of the United States. I think it's broadly popular. J.D. Vance actually, I think, described what nationalism is pretty well at last year's conference, where he was a keynote. I mean, he said, you know, it's not, we're not merely just an idea. We're a common people with a, you know, a common history and a common future. And there's,

there's, I mean, there obviously people can join that. This isn't a, like, this isn't blood and soil. People can join that, that people, but it's more than just an idea. Well, here's our, here's our Berkey and Charles C.W. Cook to, to ask you the next question. Charles. So what is not a nationalist? Maybe that's a better way of looking at. Who do you not want to be like on the right or the left? Oh, I mean, who do we not want to be like on the left? I mean, it's pretty easy to, you know, this is people, I mean, the kind of people who think national identity is bad, that we should, you know, submit to a single world government or some sort of global, some sort of other type of liberal imperial arrangement. And then further centrists, I think

that kind of the tack, you know, not tacky, but the sort of simplistic way to put it would be invade the world, invite the world viewpoint, which is the idea that we ought, you know, you know, that it's perfectly fine for us to be, you know, have a global empire where we're, you know, running everything everywhere, but simultaneously have no discrimination about who we admit in. Because, hey, if you just, you know, say, you know, say the words of the oath, you can be an American just like everybody else. And I think it's a little, it's quite a bit more than that. And then I think on the right, we certainly don't want to be like the, you know, I think truly blood and soil and really, you know, aggressively bigoted people. I think that's a

really simple way to understand it. But there, you know, there are, there are groups on the right that, you know, seem to believe that things like Jews are subverting the white race, like all sorts of silly nonsense like that. And that's definitely not us. And we, we really don't have any time for it. I think, you know, Yoram himself is Israeli. And, you know, the kind of, if you actually look at the conference leadership, it kind of comes from all over the place, you know, Anna Welles is Polish and lives in America. I'm, I'm American, but of, you know, like, you know, My dad's a wash. My mom is Jewish. So it's, you know, there's a lot of, and then there's plenty of, you know, Protestants and Catholics.

So it's a, it's a wide, it's a wide range of people from different backgrounds, but it's, it's a, there's a deep Americanism to it. And it's, and, you know, these are people, most of these people, especially on the American side are people who've been, you know, been here. They aren't just necessarily like recent immigrants. Mm-hmm. I think some of the people who are very critical of Trump and I have been at times, they miss. remember how much nationalism was in the Republican Party historically. They think that there was this time where there was no one who was in favor of tariffs and immigration restrictionism and so on. It's just not true, right? So obviously you have your

figures like Pat Buchanan, who's opposed to boy for a certain portion of conservatism. But if you go back to Reagan, do you see Reagan as a nationalist in some ways, or is this project in opposition or tension with the Reaganism? I think it's a little bit of both. I mean, I think our attitude towards Reagan will be some good, some bad. I think we would probably look back at some of Reagan's amnesty decisions as some of the, you know, the worst policy decisions he would have made that really set us back in a number of ways.

And it's, you know, on the other hand, obviously Reagan bringing back the Republican Party as a brand and a lot of nationalist ideas. And I think much of his foreign policy approach was something we would broadly. agree with. So it's a mix of both. It's also kind of hard to criticize. You know, when Reagan was around, when Reagan was president, you know, I was three. So I'm sort of, I'm always a little skeptical of presentism with regard to criticizing Reagan. You have to wonder what was the debate about immigration like what were people thinking? And I don't know. I mean, it's quite possible that there were more prescient people who were extremely critical of Reagan from the right on his

immigration policies. I don't really know. And so I'm willing to give the man himself a bit of on that, but I think we would look back at that part of his record and say that that was certainly a mistake, and there needs to be a corrective towards it. Yeah, just one very quick thing on that. In the late 1980s, National Reviews is to run these editorials and a favorite running line when they criticized Reagan was, this would never have happened if Ronald Reagan was still alive. Even in NR, there was some of that. Yeah. Well, can I jump in here on that point? It's Steve Hayward out in California will.

And I'll just say straight out that I've been fascinated by the National Conservative project for a while. I attended the very first one, which was like 2017 now or 18 in Washington. Yeah, 2018, 2019, I think. Yeah, whatever it was. And I wanted to come to several more. There was either I had a schedule conflict or in one case I was going to come to a Miami meeting and the airlines didn't cooperate. I couldn't make it. And I can't make it next week, unfortunately, which I'm sorry because I'm delighted to see you're giving your big Beaconsfield prize to one of my mentors, Chris DeButh, you know, good friend and so forth. I go one point. One point, about the Reagan business. Now, of course, by the time the failure of that amnesty of 8,6, 87 became

obvious by the mid-90s, really. You know, Reagan had his Alzheimer's, but Ed Meese told me several times, oh, yeah, that was a terrible deal. We should never have done it. We believe the Democrats that Congress would, and the bureaucracy would enforce employment verification, other things that didn't happen. They said, we should not. So, I mean, they regretted that fairly early on. But Reagan was always something of an immigration dove, going back to his experience as California governor, when you had a guest worker program for agriculture. Okay, that probably worked decently. Anyway, but it's true. Charles was a good point. One of the things people forget, it's including a lot of pro-Ragan nostalgia, who I am at least half the day,

is during the 80s, there were a lot of conservatives, and I was among him who were very frustrated with Reagan over arms control, Soviet Union. Immigration was not as big, but there were some people and certain fiscal matters, which now look very differently in retrospect, but I won't get into that. I wrote a large book about all that. A couple of things about, well, let me do one big one, is you may reference a moment ago to J.D. Vance last year saying, I forget how he put it or how you summarized it, but I understand what he's on about, which is, well, there's always been this debate about whether America is a creedal nation. no, we get our identity, really for the Declaration of Independence,

or whether we're a historical nation. And I remember Margaret Thatcher saying once that Europe is a product of history, America is a product of philosophy. She tilted toward the creedle part. And as you may know, we've been having these rather bitter debates about some aspect of that question for decades among conservatives. I'm scratching my head thinking, why can't it be both? Why can't someone produce an intellectual synthesis that blends them together?

which I actually think is the right answer to things. And maybe you guys will be the ones who come up with that in the fullness of time. I mean, I think I think Yoram's book is, I mean, he's really, I think he does a good job of integrating the, you know, the creedal part to an extent. I mean, it is, you know, he talks about kind of the nation as this sort of middle ground between the tribe and the empire, right, is, you know, and it's sort of tribes unifying. And he roots it in kind of the experience of these, of biblical Israel and the Bible. you know, and I think that there's something to the idea of kind of the expanding circle of loyalties.

Vance also talked about this when he had that whole discussion about Ordo Amorris, the idea that, you know, it's like the people closest to your family you've most loyalty to, then it expands. And the degree of loyalty and care reduces as you expand outward in the concentric circle. You know, I think it's a difficult way thing to balance because you have these obviously truths, right? idea that we have immigrants. They come in and they really do truly become American. But on the other hand, simply saying the words clearly is insufficient. And when you go simply embrace the idea entirely that you're just a creedal nation, you end up admitting a bunch of people who have no meaningful loyalty to the country. Like I could, I actually name specific names. People, you know, it blows my mind that's or I'm not a, Mammani is running for office in New York. The guy was,

wasn't even a citizen until five years ago. Right. I think that, you know, a guy named Warren McIntyre had a great epithet for this. It's a paperwork American. Like you're, you've signed the words, you said the oath, but do you actually agree with any of the founding principles? Do you, do, does your politics resemble anything that like 20 years ago, Americans would have thought, ah, yes, that's, that's something we can recognize as an American viewpoint. And and I look at Zorn Mandani and I think, no, not really. Yeah, well, you know, I'm reminded of the story that may be true told about the battle of bulge of the World War II when apparently there was a unit of Germans dressed in American or British uniforms who could speak English.

And what was the question you asked them to determine if they were authentically not German? And the question wasn't, what's the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence? It was something like who won the World Series last year. Right. Something only an American would know, right? So I say, I don't know if that story is true. It gets often told. Let me switch to another sort of issue that's, I would say, troublesome to me.

I'm fascinated by it, and you're going to have another debate about it at this conference I see from the agenda, and that's industrial policy. And here, see, I wasn't three years old when Reagan was president. I was, you know, voted for the third time in 1984 when National Review and conservatives like me all said Walter Mondale is out of his mind calling for industrial policy and saying America needs to have destiny over making its microchips and computer screens and all the rest. Oh, domestic content legislation for cars and machine tools was a big. And this was socialism. This was central planning, we all said. And now suddenly I'm hearing it from some national conservatives. I don't categorically say, like we did in 84, that this is socialism or central planning, but I'm not entirely persuaded by Oren Cass. And again, I haven't made the meetings, but I haven't seen a lot of progress in really refining this. And how do you make it something that we're confident will work? and how do you avoid all the pitfalls of rent-seeking and special interests and simply deadweight mistakes? Yeah, I mean, it's, there's a, I think part of, part of the answer to that is you have to be intelligent about how you do it, and part of the answer to that is you have to embrace some amount of that as the cost of having industrial policy and therefore trying to, you know, achieve the positive ends that you're trying to achieve, you know, that there's going to be some amount of rent-seeking with regard to all this.

I think it's interesting to, you know, I've talked with a number of kind of people, intellectual influencers my age in the conservative movement, you know, the people who grew up, went, you know, went to high school when Bush was president, for example. And, you know, we all, we all had this experience. Many of us went to, you know, like conservative fellowship type things or, you know, put things put on by the Koch Foundation and were taught all the free trade stuff. And, and then I remember having this discussion with somebody, we're like, you know,

So when somebody actually started making arguments about why that wasn't true, I realized, like, I didn't really listen to the counter arguments. I literally had just heard the arguments, the free trade arguments, and I hadn't heard any of the other arguments. And I think, you know, Rubio had an interesting speech or he was in a, he was just being interviewed at one point where he said during his presidential campaign, you know, he was saying the free trade line. And then he visited the Rust Belt and said to himself, you know, there's a, there's a real downside here. And we have to look back at NAFTA and say that this, whatever this was, it certainly was not helpful, not good for these voters. And these voters are our people, the people who vote, you know, people who, you know, people who. we want to vote Republican. So, you know, I think there's two obvious angles

that industrial policy makes sense on. First is obviously there's a huge national security angle, which is that there's a, you know, having supply chains of important things controlled by China is very risky to our national security. And so reshoring a huge slew of manufacturing just needs to happen, pharmaceuticals, important, strategically important military assets,

rare with metals, you name it. And then the second thing is, Yeah, we need to, we can't be cavalier about the jobs of working, the working class Americans who vote Republican. We just can't be cavalier about that. Those people demoralize means, and it's, it's self-defeating to not want to make sure those people are doing well. And the reason it's self-defeating is because if they're demoralized, they don't vote and the socialist take over. So, you know, I think that that has to be, there has to be a real politic element from the right about, you know, whatever inefficiencies result, there has to be a real politic element about if our voters are not doing well, even if then we're going to be in trouble and the end result is going to be bad for everybody. One more, then I'll turn, we'll turn you back to the tender or untender mercies of James and Charles, and it'd be the other hot button or divisive question, which is foreign policy.

And I see you are going to have a whole panel on United States in the Middle Eastern War and, you know, Israel and Gaza. And if it looks at the lineup, that's going to be a barn burner. And so we now have, as I think a subset of the NACONs, the restrainers who, I mean, Dan McCarthy is a friend of mine. And I, you know, I have a lot of agreement with a lot of what they have to say. But this looks like one of the naughtiest problems the NACONs because I think the disagreements there are serious and deep and hard to harmonize. I think that's right. I mean, it's, it's, it's our biggest challenge. It's, it's really the only panel, I think, where there's explicitly, it's almost explicitly set up to have a really distinct clash of viewpoints. That's not necessarily the case on a lot of other panels where the participants and our movement are basically aligned. You know, there isn't, there isn't some open borders immigration advocate debating somebody else on on immigration, for example. But on the Iran strikes, you know, there, there were definitely our competing factions that would, I would think of as both within the NAC content, you know, the American conservative restrainer types and then more kind of, you know, hardcore realists. I would say, I don't even think of it as neoconservatism. I think it is a straightforward, very pragmatic

realism that's, you know, says, I mean, you know, I personally find myself on the realist side. I think that the basic, you know, I joke about trusting the plan, right, you know, borrowing all that from Q and on. But I think there's something, I could actually develop that into an entire theory of foreign policy approach, which is deference, right? I elect a guy who, I think of as sharing my general perspective. And then when he makes decisions, I assume he's making them in the right way because he has, I have enough evidence of him viewing the world the way that I do that I assume that his decisions are rooted in the intelligence and make sense.

And I think those people who did that with regard to Trump and Iran, even if they were not inclined towards intervention, found themselves vindicated because, of course, the war, you know, the strikes were very effective and the war wrapped up in 48 hours. you know we to get back to industrial policy for just a second now that you're not making interesting points there but here's the deal we always say nowadays well you know we warned you you wouldn't like the rules when they were applied to you it's something we tell the left because they change things they they say law fare is great and now you know shoe on the other foot the shoe's going to be on the other foot at some point and if we start to become accustomed to and and normalize a great deal more government intervention in corporate policies. The left is going to take that right up. They're not going to do it for a nationalism reason.

They're not going to do it because of nation. They're going to do it simply because they want the control in order to make the industries do what they want them to do. Or to use it as a pretext for nationalizing them without actually having to do it or go through that. Is there a point where you would be concerned about the government's intertwining with business? 10% of intel's okay, but 55 is that ain't,

what's your comfort level on the on the amount of intervention that the uh with industry yeah i i there is obviously a level at which i would be uncomfortable we're not i don't think we're there really particularly close to there is the answer to that specific question um in terms of the argument about kind of precedent setting i have a a general perspective on this this sort of argument which is that it is not it is not a productive use of time to worry about the precedents you are setting for Democrats when you constantly complain about them doing unprecedented things all the time. When they have power, they do unprecedented things all the time, which means that the consequence of the precedence you said, you really should think about is this this uniquely

a precedent they would not exploit but for our having opened the door. And I don't think that's true at all with regard to economic policy. I mean, you know, did we, do we criticize Biden for being one of the most absurdly, you know, corporatist presidents? Yeah. I don't think that was, that was not a product of Trump suddenly bringing up industrial policy. Again, that was a product of Biden wanting to shovel something like $2 billion out the door at the end of his presidency to all sorts of his political allies. So I think that this is a very, very strong view that I have, at least with regard to precedent. I always find the arguments about, oh, well, the Democrats might exploit this precedent. I mean, think about all the judicial wars. The Democrats have always been the

first to defect on every issue of consequence with regard to the judiciary, you know, deciding to revive the legislative filibuster for judicial nominees and then revoke it themselves. Like this is how Democrats operate. Gerrymandering, another great example, right? The Democrats have been aggressively gerrymandering. So you name it, you find a place where the Democrats have always been the first movers. And I think that's rooted in the kind of basic democratic vibe in their politics, which is we are morally righteous. So we don't care about the rules ultimately.

They're just there to be exploited. So I think the Republican approach in response to that should be, well, tit for tax. that's one you know obviously we're going to do tiff for tat we're not just going to submit and uh two just the willingness to say we're not going to sit here and worry about the president we're just going to say is this the right thing to do for us like does this help our voters does this help our does this help our politics if so then we should do it and you know and worry about like what the democrats are going to do when they do it realizing that it's not it's not a consequence of our actions in in this case well my red line would be the government taking over a

applies to company and forcing them to make Tupperware. I mean, I missed Tupperware. It's a great product, but I think the market has spoken. Orman Donnie deciding to set up state-run grocery stores. I think that's Oh, we never do that. Come on. That's ridiculous. Talk about the silliest idea in the world. You know, the guy is like seeing grocery as a high margin industry or something. But they're going to buy in bulk, haven't you heard? Yeah. Amazing new idea. Charles, you had one more before we had. I do. What do you think's going to happen when Trump's no longer in charge? So you've got three and a half years and then he leaves office. Now, just for the sake of argument for an intellectual exercise, I'm sure media matters will love this, assume that he leaves office and dies peacefully the same day,

so he's not a kingmaker even, he's just gone. What do you think happens on the right? Because Trump's obviously extremely powerful. He has the ability to move voters. He moves people who are devoted to him, but he also moves median Republicans from one position to another seamlessly. And that makes it quite difficult to tell where the Republican Party is. Where do you think it is? What do you think is going to happen? Is there going to be a grand fight? Will there be one candidate who's the old school Republican and another who's the heir to Trump?

What is being an heir to Trump like? Are you confident? Do you think it's a complete open fight? Where are we going to go when Trump's not in charge of everything? I think it's about, you know, imagine an open seat in the role of leader of the Republican Party and presidential nominee is open. It's going to be about as determined a race as we've ever had. It's going to be Vance.

I think that it's really straightforward. Vance has not just, he's not just the sitting vice president, a remarkably articulate speaker, very strong popularity ratings, and the sort of competitors to Vance, I mean, the most obvious one is Rubio, but I think it's just going to be as simple as a Vance Rubio ticket in 28. I think that's really that,

if it were anything but that, I would be quite surprised on the Republicans. side. I don't think there's, I think that this strategy of like the old school Republican has been tried and it, you know, Nikki Haley managed to clear out everybody else in the lane of the sort of anti-Trump or Trump skeptical Republicans. And her prize was nothing. Her prize was 30% of the Republican primary vote and that 70% was going to be all Trump's. I think Vance, even in the absence, if Trump just disappears and doesn't endorse his sitting vice president somehow, I think, I think dance represents that wing of the party. I think that's the future of the party. And in a sense,

we're in a strong position as a result. We're kind of, we're kind of set in terms of we have, not just the leader of the party, but also kind of the heir of parents waiting in line and the Democrats. And so there's much more message uniformity and less infighting. I think you're seeing a lot of craziness in the Democratic side as a result of somebody trying to stand out, get a little more influence and cachet. And as a result, saying more and more radical things that kind of drag them further and further away from the median voter. Yeah, Newsom is doing a wonderful job of this the other day in the air. He said that he was, Donald Trump is just not going to have the election in 2028.

He's going to figure out a way to cancel the election. And you expected Newsom to say after that, and that's why I'm running. Right. Okay. All right. Fine. Great. So, Will, the, the conferences is going to be live streamed. Will people be able to find it online? What's the website if they do? All right. So National Conservatism.org is the website. I don't believe there will be an active

live stream, but there will be plenty of clips and videos coming out. You'll see them on X. You'll see them on YouTube elsewhere, but we just don't do an immediate live stream that you can just live watch it. The way to watch it live is to attend, which is in Washington, D.C. on September 2nd to 4th. That's next week,

starting next Tuesday. There are tickets. It's an awesome conference. I mean, I've been going every year well before I actually joined the organization running the conference. It's been the, in my view, the best conference on the right from the word go. uh in terms of really yeah well you know extremely intellectually dynamic washington dc all that violence and carjacking oh wait not anymore i know somebody somebody asked me in minneapolis

whether or not i would be how well how would you feel about the national guard in your corner and i thought i would love it i would have been great if they'd been there when i was carjacked in my driveway and uh i'd love to see it when they dropped by in 2020 after the city went up and So, yes, I can see an instance in which they are useful. Will Chamberlain, thank you very much, and good luck with the conference, and we'll have you on again to talk about the Article III project and what that means for the future of American politics. Good to see you.

Thanks for dropping by. Can I just add before you go, Will, that we haven't met in person, which is regret, because I once shook hands with Wilt Chamberlain, and my hand disappeared. No, and I want to shake hands with Will Chamberlain just to keep my W. Chamberlains and all in one place. Wonderful. Thanks. Thanks for on me, guys. Bye, bye.

Of course, there's Richard Chamberlain, Dick, who we don't want to shake. So, Rickshay is many things, and it's, you know, it's not just politics. If you ever go there, and if you remember, and you go to the member feed, you know that we discuss all manner of things, religion and arts.

We've wonderful threads on television, and not just the, oh, I remember that show, but, I mean, really incisive things from people who know their business. It's great, fun. But there's also sports. And you're thinking, oh, man, sports? Yeah, yeah, because it's a big part of America football.

It is. And I'm here with a man with a vastly inferior team to my own Vikings. Charles, why don't you tell us about the fantasy football that's going on right now at Ricochet? Well, you know, I'm actually in a perverse sense, rooting for the Vikings, or at least the Vikings offense, because I am a Justin Jefferson fan. and my seven-year-old is playing fantasy football this year. It's his first year, and he has Justin Jefferson. So on his behalf, I hope the Vikings too well.

Well, the Rickochet Fantasy Football extravaganza has returned. Last one was 2024, and this one, shockingly, is 2025. You have a few hours still to sign up. The draft is tomorrow. And if you win your league, and we'll put together as many leagues, as we need, depending on how many people sign up, you will not just win the affection and admiration of all of us, but $50. So you'll have $50 and the affection and admiration of all of us. If you go to the homepage on Ricketing, you look on the right, you'll see a little link. It looks like a football. And you can click it, follow the instructions, sign up, be in tomorrow, and then have five long months of joy and heartbreak. Yes, well, joy and heartbreak those two attributes of a Vikings fan that we know quite well. Yeah, go ahead to Rurichet, check it out.

And also notice the subtle little changes. There have been many subtle little changes, including the timeface, the headline timeface and the rest of which, all part of what Charles does behind the scenes, tinkering and adjusting and getting out his code scapple and doing his work. More to come on Rickettsay, of course, but what's there already is pretty. darn great. Had a conversation, of course, in the site about flag burning executive order. So there are two ideas in this. One, people are saying, well, this is absolutely ridiculous.

I'm going to this is a matter of free speech. And there were those who said, actually, no, this is a clever little trap by Trump, because he's not really changing anything at all. And he's just making people go out and burn flags to look silly in an American. I didn't think it was something we particularly needed. But where do you guys stand on it? Well, yeah, if you actually read the executive order, it's fairly narrow and tries to conform with the existing Supreme Court precedent and say, and connected to incitement for violence or rioting, which may be a reach. I mean, that may not stand up legally.

I do remember Ronald Reagan when he was governor, again around 1970. How do we get the kids, you know, how do we get the left to stop burning the flag? Well, why don't we subject them to our anti-air pollution regulations? And that'd be one thing that Trump could propose to the EPA that liberals would oppose because they're all up in arms about Trump and his EPA changes. But I think the real trap here, James, is not that the left is going to go out. By the way, I think I've seen some things online, some leftist, groups are calling for some flag-burning beans this weekend. So that part is working. But, I mean,

two thoughts. One is, you know, I believe, and Charles may disagree with me about this. We'll see. I still think those flag-burning cases were wrongly decided, below those many years ago. And I'm not sure the current court would not rule differently. Remember, those were five to four cases. And the reason for this is, it's a long story. And so I'll just say in one sentence, I've always thought our First Amendment jurisprudence went off the rails when it said free expression was the same as free speech. And that applies to not just flag burning, but, you know, naked dancing and things of that kind, pornography and all the rest of that has gone along for such a long time. However, it seems to me that the right remedy, and here I bet Charles will agree with me, is Republicans should propose a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning. And then let's see how many Democrats want to vote in favor of permitting flag burning to continue by opposing.

the amendment that would be fun too all right i'm going to be the squish it's my role today i'm aware that i'm on the wrong side of the public on this question i do think a lot of people who think those cases were rightly decided i'm one of those people need to understand that their position is unpopular i don't see any acknowledgement of this in the press and i think that has informed some of the coverage of trump because they don't understand that this is a wage issue but But first off, I think those cases were right. I agree with you, Steve, actually, about the expression question. I do think this is a tough one as well.

When the first amendment was written, of course, it only applied to the federal government. So you have to go through an enormous amount of law to get to the application of the First Amendment to the states. And, of course, in the original constitution, there is no enumerated power. that would allow the federal government to prosecute flagboating at all, so it wouldn't have come up. So it's quite difficult to discern what the original public meaning was in this area. But I think given that enormous numbers of Americans during the Alien Sedition Act burned John Jay and effigy, there was a tradition of burning even effigies of people to protest government policy, even on war, which was where the government was strictest in the

colonial and post-colonial eras. So I think the case was just about right. More than that, though, and this is why I say I'm a squish. I loathe people who burn the American flag, and I would never do it myself, very proud immigrant. But I do think that passing laws that empower the national government to prosecute people for burning flags is ultimately a sign of underconfidence and an unnecessary one, given the way in which Americans revere the flag and do so organically. without legal mandate. We know who the people we hate are. They're the people you just mentioned

respond to Trump's order by going out and burning flags. Those people suck. I quite like the fact that they have this way of segregating themselves from the rest of us by doing stupid things. And I think to try to use the force of law to stop them doing it,

to me, it is a sign of civilizational underconfidence. It's just unnecessary. I don't think, as some people have said, that we would lose something as a society of people couldn't burn flags. I don't think that it is valuable speech. It's also not debate. It's not a marketplace of ideas question. But I am ultimately of the view that America and its flag can stand without government force, and it would be fine if there was an amendment. That's the right way to do it.

It would be fine if the court overturned it. It's not a core case, but it's just not something that I particularly. worry about. On the amendment, it's the order itself that Trump wrote. It's very odd because on the one hand, it seems to completely acknowledge all of the Supreme Court cases. On the other hand, it is potentially a problem because he implies in it that he's going to start using whether one burned a flag as the gateway to look into other crimes. And that might have, under current jurisprudence, that might have some issues, right? You can't, for example, say, well, we can't prosecute you for your political opinions, but we can see what crimes you're committing while

expressing them. If you only look into those people, then you fall afoul of the law. So if that is how it's enforced, maybe problematic, but I actually think it doesn't do anything. I think Trump wants to be seen to be doing this rather than actually violating the constitutional mandate. I want to pick choose. I agree with Stephen that the shift from speech to expression did open up a Pandora's box. That said, I'm not willing to close it because there are things of expressions that are speech. And I side mostly with Charles on this one too. I mean, to spend all the time and energy on a constitutional amendment, I think those should be rare and necessary. And I've got a few others I'd like to see queued up before that one. But a person burning a flag tells you everything

about them at that point in time. I don't want the government to tell me that I cannot burn any emblem of authority, idea, creed, et cetera, whatever. If I want to be that jerk, then I'm going to be that jerk. And it's not the role to tell me that I can't. And he asks everybody, saying, yeah, you can burn in the backyard if you want. I get that, I get that. And yes, it is incitement.

And if maybe perhaps an executive order that says that if anybody is incited by the sight of a burning flag and therefore stamps the fire out and in the process does the same to the person holding it. I mean, sorry, he was just in the way as I was stamped

out the fire. It's it's not a it's not a big burning issue. Sorry, didn't mean to say that. What is, however, this will strike some people as proof of my madness, selectivity, and effete sensibilities. But I was, you know, shrugged my shoulders at the burning of the flag, but I got really excited about the executive order that mandated the federal classical style of buildings. Oh, that's a great one. Yeah. This is something that Trump tried to do in the first administration, and Biden overturned it. And the thing is, you know, we having a conversation just the other night about this, about how architecture sort of broke the social compact with people after the war. And we developed these increasingly inhuman-scale buildings and styles. It's

better now. It's not as bad as it was in the 70s when it was really, really bad. Somebody had a beautiful Twitter thought the other day where they said, you know, this is my one strange architectural preference. I will die on this hill. And that is, brutally. with lots of vegetation and he had a point that when you actually draped these things in jungles there's a certain certain power and beauty to it but i'd prefer that they weren't there at all the best example would seem to me to be the thumb that is obama's library which looms over this neighborhood like some soul-sucking machine that's been dropped out by the necromancers in orbit it's a ghastly thing and i this probably would not have been affected by by that but yeah when they're

something small in a little town, a little post office, one of those embassies of the empire that reaches into the small corner, don't just put up a ball, you know, dull brick international style, whatever, buy. Give it some grace, even if the columns aren't true, even if they're just pilasters. And it looks like some, you know, a 1930 stripped down government F, you know, modern style. That's better than something that's just been snipped and disconnected from human history. So that's, I'm okay with that. I really am. You guys? James, you know what I find really weird? I remember Trump doing this in his first term.

I did a whole podcast with a guy who is obsessed with his topic. Justin Schubow, is that the guy? I think he was on the Rikoshae podcast too, was he? Probably, yeah, I hope so. Yeah. And I am still baffled by the contention that I hear from Progressives that classical architecture is fascist, but brutalist architecture is democratic because classical architecture comes from Greece and the early republic in the

United States based its capital on it for a reason and brutalist architecture has mostly been the preserve of the worst regimes in history and building for the masses. Now, building for the masses is sometimes necessary. I don't think that's inherently. fascistic or anything. But it's not individualistic to put up concrete blocks. So how can they say that? That is the complete opposite of the truth. Where do they get that idea? Well, Charles, you put your finger on a key point that really does not get much public recognition. I was also stunned at the reaction of, you might say, modernist architects to Trump's first term directives to build in the federal style. And they liked it. And by the way, James is not just the 70s architecture,

but some recent big federal courthouses, which have huge budgets, are just awful. And I mean, I do think that, you know, the architects are not just people who prefer efficiency or, you know, they're trying to unleash their inner flank, Frank Lloyd Wright or something. I think that it's part of the cultural rot we see in the humanities and social sciences and so many other places. I never perceive that, but Justin Schubout, maybe we should have him back again. He's in the middle of all this with the Trump administration. He really opened my eyes to the fact that this is not just a matter of architectural taste.

It's actually a deeper, more significant aspect of our culture war. Right. What they're doing is they're severing the public sphere from any relationship to something that went before. You know, the point was made that if you looked at the cities of England after the war, you would think that they'd been bombed. But no, they've been leveled by actual, by the council to build something that was anti-human. The deliberate desire to take people and sever the relationship between the four, forms of the past is seen as a way of bringing about this better world because the old

world was what do we get from the old world we got world war one we got destruction we got devastation they associate it with western culture which is white which is all of these things that have brought such unending misery to the world so if you are one of those people who has you know a marble statue in your twitter profile well first of all you're probably a guy in in india somewhere who's doing a bot farm but if you're one of those people who wants to return to certain sets of values. They see this as all right wing-coated dog whistle H-H-H-88. Here comes

you know, here comes the most horrible form of nationalism, violence and ethnic supremacy you can imagine. Well, no, we just, it's beautiful. It's beautiful and it's of our, and we respond to it in ways that go deep. So yeah, what are we

do in this show today? Nationalism and old art and classical architecture. Ideas. I used to be mainstream in the old days, but now apparently Petraeus is way out there, so I'm pretty sure we're going to get taken down by YouTube and Twitter before the day is out. But if you

found yourself listening to this, we thank you for that. If you found yourself thinking, hey, bank on yourself, I have to check that out. Do so. Support us by becoming part of the best part of the, you know, you can be you, you can be the best part of Rookashay if you just go there and sign up. Take a minute to give us a five-star review on Apple Podcast if you would

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I'm kidding this offer is not legally binding I should shut up before I get us in more trouble Charles has been a pleasure Stephen as always and hey everybody we'll see you in the comments at ricochet for what is it now what is the version I think it's 4.14.2 4.14.2 It's catchy right? 4.14.2

0.2b by the time this is up. Thank you, everybody. See you next week. Bye-bye.