The Ricochet Podcast - Buying Greenland?
Episode Date: August 16, 2019Hey, don’t laugh — we could do it ( and another President reportedly thought about it too). So yes, we discuss that, a troubled Congressional trip to the Holy Land, the great Kevin Williamson on h...is new book The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in an Age of Mob Politics, and the WSJ’s Bill McGurn on the turmoil in Hong Kong (he knows the city well — he lived for ten years. Also... Source
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I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.
As government expands, liberty contracts.
It's funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food.
That's a good thing.
First of all, I think you missed his time.
Please clap.
It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson.
I'm James Lilacs.
Rob Long somewhere, but don't worry.
We've got Kevin Williamson and Bill McGurn for you today.
So let's have ourselves a podcast.
Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 460. Rob Long is in the wind. We don't know. He's an international man of mystery. We'll
find out next week. But Peter Robinson is here, of course. Peter, how are you? I'm extremely well.
I don't know. You say, how are you? And every single time I say, I'm fine. Weather's beautiful. It's northern. And that's just such a boring response. What should I say,
James? I'm fantastic. I'm effervescent. I am effervescent. I am imbued with the mysteries
of life or, you know, not as you may see fit. Let's put it this way. I got a really good night's
sleep last night. So I am feeling a little on the effervescent side. We've been having a heat wave here and it's thrown off everything. Now, I don't want to start
weather whining against a man who lives in Minneapolis. But there are moments, and the
last couple of days have been one, when Stanford University's air conditioning system can't keep up.
And if they send out emails to the whole university,
and it's like watching the United States go from DEFCON 1 to DEFCON 4, chilled water
containment level one. I don't worry about that, but I worry about it when it gets to level three.
Anyway, I worked fine in my office. I didn't work fine. I worked with increasing grouchiness. And then I just,
I started, I couldn't, and I looked at the thermostat, it was 82 degrees in my office,
and I thought that's it. Then I went outside and it was 98. Anyhow, but then we, the temperature
dropped overnight and I actually slept and I'm feeling pretty chirpy. In the future, I'm fine.
Do you care about any of that? Blue Yeti has my permission to edit it all right out. Just take it out. It's boring. In the future, I'm fine. Do you care about any of that? Blue Yeti has my permission to edit it all right out.
Just take it out.
It's boring.
In the future, I'm fine will suffice.
All right.
I'm kidding.
I didn't get a good night's sleep.
I got about six restless hours during which I had a dream in which all of my novels were crap.
I went back and looked at them, and they had no plot, and they were impossible to rewrite.
So I awoke in a sour mood.
But I'm better today, and we're happy to be here.
We've got guests coming up.
The drone.
The drone. The drone.
What about the drone?
What about my drone?
Go ahead.
I've got a drone for my birthday.
And as I tweeted out, it takes four days to master a drone.
And I know that because on the third day, I put mine into a tree.
And it's up there still.
Oh, you still haven't gotten it out?
Oh, Lord, no.
It's a tall, tall tree.
So either I'm waiting for the leaves to fall and for it to drop of its own accord or for some stiff wind to take it out.
But I did get some interesting footage of it, and it taught me that these things are amazing.
I'm standing there looking at this device that's hovering in the air with its camera looking back at me, reflected on the cell phone that I've got in my hand.
It's an age of miracles and wonders and mysteries and the rest of it.
But let's get to the fun stuff before we have the guests and a punditry round table, fast lightning round. Peter Robinson,
should we buy Greenland? Yes or no? Yeah, actually. I mean, there are all kinds of problems,
including who's selling. I thought Denmark, Greenland used to be. But I like the idea of having a huge additional territory added to having an Alaska in the Atlantic to counterbalance our Alaska in the Pacific.
What am I?
How do I know?
But I'm just telling you that my gut reaction is be sort of cool.
Who's selling?
I don't know.
What are the constitutional ins and outs?
I had once had a long conversation, as listeners of Law Talk will know, long conversations
are pretty much the only option with Richard Epstein on the Louisiana Purchase, which it
became pretty clear a couple of weeks after Jefferson launched into the Louisiana Purchase.
It wasn't exactly unconstitutional so much as that the Constitution
had never envisioned any such thing. And they had to spend quite a few years working out
how to adapt the Constitution to the Louisiana Purchase. I have a feeling that buying Greenland
would be one of those all over again. But yeah, I sort of like the idea. I can't tell you why.
What about you, James? I like the idea too, specifically because it enhances the size of the United States. It's great to think of that big chunk, even though, of course,
we're thinking of the various projections that we had back in our schoolhouse days,
what made it look much larger than it is. But yeah, why not? Who has to say the United States
has to remain the size that it is? But you're right. Who do we buy it from? It'll be fun if
we have to go through some sort of title search on it and it turns out that it's actually owned by one guy and you know in denmark somewhere who
has deeded it by relatives past and has no idea that he actually owned the whole thing and he's
probably thinking wow i i wonder if i've got to get an inspector by check the plumbing and the
roof on denmark or on greenland before i sell it but yeah sell it sell it, buy it. For years, I believe it was considered the property
of the crown, the Danish crown. But then sometime in the last 20 years, didn't Denmark grant
Greenland some sort of independence? They came up with some kind of cockamamie legal relationship
where they still have some legal relationship, which I guess enables the Greenlanders to
receive Danish welfare benefits. But I think Denmark is a tiny, in terms of population, but sovereign state.
You can't just buy one of those, I don't think.
But details to come.
And I am sure that by the time I yap away about this and people hear it, we will have in the comments section on this podcast people who've gone into this and will be answering the question.
Well, whoever owns it, they've done bleep all with it.
And to echo what Rob Long says, buy it and then turn the whole thing over to Disney, which would turn a vast portion of it into a frozen theme park.
But actually, we get some money and some resources and jobs out of the thing.
Question two.
What happened in Russia?
What blew up?
Oh, I don't think we know yet, do we?
Well, we kind of sort of do.
Oh, we do.
Well, this morning I was listening to NPR, to the Festival of Uptalk, where the people always talk like this and end every question like this.
And it's just really annoying until you really are happy when they stop.
But unfortunately, after the person who stops talks like this and talks like this constantly,
they go to the guy from BuzzFeed.
And the guy from BuzzFeed is telling you what we do and do not know. But I managed to glean from this the general parameters of how the intelligentsia is regarding this.
One, it's sort of funny to them that Russia had something nuclear blow up and they're acting like the old Soviet Union and saying nothing to see here.
It's kind of, as the guy from BuzzFeed said it's the most russia thing we've seen in a long time
okay okay well what we have is a nuclear accident a lot of dead people and some radioactive material
in the air why the russians have admitted to that much or it's already well sort of kind of no i
mean they say they said if there's five people dead that's probably 650. It's not great. It's not terrible. They have admitted deaths. All right. All right. Yeah. Right. And 3.6
range exposure. Right. So the question is whether or not they were developing a nuclear powered
missile or a really super fast missile that could deliver nuclear payload. And it seems to be
what I hear is that they're working on a nuclear propulsion system. And that's what went back.
So they're talking about how this impacts the Russian military and they've been overstretched and they're really not as good as they used to be,
et cetera, et cetera. Then the host says, mind you, that just a few minutes before somebody
had said that Putin announced this particular missile development two years ago. Then the host
says, well, Donald Trump has pulled out of a nuclear arms treaty with Russia, did that impact their decision to go forward with
this? Because it always comes down to Trump. That isn't even an intelligent question. That's just
ignorance. It's foolish. Just pig ignorant. Why did Donald Trump pull out of this thing? Because
the Russians, being Russians, were cheating on it, right? And so the idea now that after we did this, Putin long-faced in the Kremlin said,
you know, my trust in the process
has been completely destroyed.
I must go back in time now
and approve the construction of this missile.
It just shows you where their attentions
and their sympathies are.
Everything has to be seen through the prism of Trump.
And sometimes that's right.
Sometimes that's apt.
But there are no other villains in the world greater or more influential than him, which
brings us back to lightning round question three to members of hold on. Hold on. There's one bit.
There's one bit that I want to I want to defer a little not this is not a complete surrender.
This is not exactly a backtracking, but it is me demonstrating a certain cognizance that you,
James, were on have been on to something because this is a running theme of disagreement between us.
You're pro-space for all kinds of romantic – what I view as romantic reasons.
And I say, well, you know, during the Cold War, it was a demonstration of our prowess and it was an important demonstration because it helped crack the – it mattered then.
Now, private sector. I don't want my tax – anybody's tax dollars going. Okay. So that's the theme between us.
This question of nuclear propulsion, I found that fascinating during the PBS, what was the name of
the PBS series on the moonshot, the three-part series. And one of the people they quoted was
Freeman Dyson, the great physicist who's now deep into his 90s, I believe, although still with us.
And it turns out that way, way back in the old days at the origin of the moon program, there were two competing propulsion systems proposed.
Van der Vaan Brown was on the winning side. You put together, essentially, you send these things up on a huge tank of kerosene, on top
of a huge tank of kerosene, or, and Freeman Dyson was investigating nuclear propulsion
systems.
So it's been thought about.
The technology has been gone into.
It has a certain reality.
And lo and behold, so it makes all the sense in the world, first of all, that the Russians
have a failure and things blow up.
No surprise there.
But how long have they been working on this?
How long is it possible that somewhere in some great physics academy in St. Petersburg, two or three physicists have never permitted the idea of nuclear propulsion system to die?
That's fascinating. And I would never have been open to thinking about it if you hadn't told me how thrilling and fascinating the space program was
and how many interesting things there were still to come out of it and so on and so forth. So I am
bowing to you, James. Well, the answer is I don't know. I don't know what nuclear propulsion
necessarily looks like because you need an awful lot of lift to get those things
off the ground but once you get into space it's a different matter because you don't have the
gravitational resistance there's talk now for example i mean there's the ion drive there's
supposedly nasa's actually working on a warp drive which sort of kind of sounds like they're
theoretically thinking about star trekky things where you use wormholes and et cetera. And then there's a guy who wants to build a huge laser array that will use the lasers to push a very small object a great distance at very high speed.
So it seems like nuclear –
You're up on this stuff.
I think I may draw the line at wormholes though, James.
Even in your case, I may draw the line there.
By the way, Chasing the Moon.
Chasing the Moon was the name of the series, the PBS series.
Anyway, before we go to the break, I would like to ask the third question, which is Israel has denied the two members of Congress to come in.
And supposedly, again, listening to NPR this morning where they're talking about this, they were saying that just as this is bad because.
And the guy actually said Israel used to be one of those things that the Democrats and the Republicans agreed upon.
True in the fact that both did. But his point was that Trump and Netanyahu are causing this because they're the ones who are politicizing Israel.
Again, perfectly incredible.
Simply on the Democratic side, nobody has politicized Israel at all. The ability to deny entry to people who are – who have pro-anti-Israel, pro-various groups dedicated to the destruction of Israel views.
And Omar and Tlaib say what you will.
You may be soft on their global warming stuff, but they have both said things that are undoubtedly anti-Semitic and anti-Israel.
Trump was within his rights to point that out.
And the government of Israel was certainly within its rights.
And I believe even within its technical legal, there is standing, there is a procedure for denying people of that type entry into the country within their rights.
And the idea that Omar and Tlaib, whose name I'm sure I'm mispronouncing,
I'm getting everything wrong here. You can tell, James, after a good night's sleep,
for some reason, my brain isn't functioning. But the idea that they are more sinned against than
sinning is absurd, just absurd. And it says something about the Democratic Party.
Harry Truman, as you will recall, within hours of the state of Israel's proclaiming itself,
Harry Truman recognized the state of Israel.
And it has been one of the glories of the Democratic Party that it has been a stout
friend and defender of the state of Israel, along with the Republican Party.
And now the Democratic Party is permitting open anti-Semitism within
its, not just within its ranks, but among prominent members. And it is a disgrace.
I couldn't agree more. There's the issue of whether or not the United States has ever in
the past refused admittance of somebody from a member, from a parliament into our,
our shores. And then we have, then it happened under Obama, but that's irrelevant because Trump,
because that reset everything.
So we'll see how this plays out.
Big news here, the headline in the local paper was that it happened after a Trump tweet,
which suggests that Netanyahu, of course, felt his chain yanked and did what his master bid,
which is a little simplistic and not how it works.
There was also something I read that said
that Netanyahu reneged on the agreement to let them in after some information had been given to
him. And I'd love to know what that was. And we may at some point, the whole Omar story is actually
not over. There's things to come out. And if they don't, then I'm following the wrong people on
Twitter. Hey, which is entirely possible, because who am I to tell you anything?
You know, what authority do I have?
Absolutely none.
What I can tell you, however, is about something that you can choose for yourself and decide for yourself.
And I'm pretty darn sure that once you do, you will say, my, that Lilacs fellow, he endorses some fine products.
Well, I do.
They're all great.
They're on Ricochet's podcast. They're selected for a reason. This one, this one's kind of special.
It's Helmsman Shave Cream. Helmsman Shave Cream is intentionally designed for men who demand the
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If the Helmsman founder supports Ricochet, the least I can do is support him. And on top of that, I got into a long conversation yesterday with the Blue Yeti about Barbasol.
And he tells me that Barbasol – excuse me.
I shouldn't mention a – I got into a long conversation yesterday with the Blue Yeti about shave creams, of which I go through quite a lot because I have two shaving sons at home who just refuse to buy their
own. I just reach for my shave cream and suddenly it's gone. Blue Yeti tells me that my shave cream
is beneath my dignity. Helmsman is not. We now welcome to the podcast Kevin Williamson,
roving correspondent for National Review, co-host of the Mad Dogs and Englishman podcast,
and a very snappy dresser, we might add. His new book is The Smallest Minority, Independent Thinking in an Age of Mob Politics.
Hey, Kevin, welcome. You begin your new book with a warning to the reader, quote, the original sin of the American intellectual is his desire to be popular, end quote.
And that really describes you right down to it, doesn't it? Well, I think even I'm vulnerable to that from time to time. But
you've been on national review events and stuff with this, and you've seen in writers, I think,
and other sorts of public intellectuals, this need to play to the crowd, to be applauded.
And increasingly, people who write about politics really play the role of pseudo-politician rather
than writer.
They think of themselves as having constituents, as being a voice for a particular kind of political movement.
They work very hard to get certain candidates elected, that sort of thing.
And so it's really changed the role of the writer.
You know, I was at a fundraiser a couple of years ago, and someone asked me, well, what
are you doing to try to help us get Republicans elected?
And I told her, well, nothing, because it's not what I do.
And she was genuinely perplexed by this, because people think that's the role of the writer,
is to be a leader and to be popular in the way certain politicians are popular.
And I think that writers who do that are doing themselves and their readers a disservice.
Well, popularity today is achieved by being from the right and castigating the right as much as possible.
Max Boot comes to mind this week, having cast National Review into the Sarlacc pit of white supremacy.
There was a tweet from Oliver Willis, who's a 10-watt bulb in the firmament of intellectuals on Twitter,
noting that David Frum, Max Boot, Bill Kristol, all these
people are not good people and we shouldn't welcome them as allies, etc. Sort of saying that all of the
protestations that a lot of people are doing in the public sphere to become popular are not going
to get them popular at all. The people that they that hated them before will continue to hate them
and the people who used to be their allies will resent them. So how much of this sort of what they call woke performative art in public is actually effective?
How much of it works?
Well, I think you're talking about a very small world there.
So out of all the names you just groved, Bill Kristol's the only one of those people that anybody's ever heard of
outside of the world, of relatively small, you know, the relatively
small world of political junkies and journalists and such.
You know, this is slightly old news.
I should check in on it.
But there was a poll that I found very heartening a couple of years ago where someone was asking
about various pundits, you know, Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann, to give you an idea of how
old the poll is back when Olbermann still had a show.
And you trust them.
Do you not trust them?
Do you like them?
Do you not trust them? Do you like them? Do you not like them? And with the exception of Rush Limbaugh,
the most common answer in every case by far was never heard of him.
So we, we tend to think that, you know, this is a real, real big deal.
You know, when, um, when I went through that nonsense with the Atlantic and,
uh, you know,
there were articles about me in the New York Times and in the Washington Post.
And a week or two after I got fired, I called my dad and he was like, so how's the new job
going?
He didn't know.
I like your dad already, Kevin.
Outside of our little world, you know, these things that seem like such a big deal to us,
nobody cares about.
I guarantee you that not one person in a thousand in this country knows the name Oliver Willis.
Right. But here's the thing is that even though it's a very, very small, noisy minority of people yelling on a platform that is used by a vanishingly small percentage of the American people,
they have an outside influence in that they can get you fired. And they did. And corporate corporations and organizations seem terrified that these anonymous mobs of yowling morons are going
to come to their door and demand scalps when in truth, they ought to just tell them to bleep off
and pound sand. Yeah, that's not entirely true. You know, it wasn't Twitter that got me fired
from the Atlantic. And it wasn't Twitter that got, you from The Atlantic, and it wasn't Twitter that got Roseanne Barr fired from her television show.
As I wrote at the time, you can talk about these social media mobs and blame them for this stuff, but most of this stuff is internal.
There's no way some executive at a multibillion-dollar broadcast television company is making enormous programming decisions based on what
Caitlin one, two, three, nine on twitter.com has to say about anything.
They don't do it. Sometimes we use it as a pretext, but they won't.
And you know,
the Twitter mob tried to get rid of Brett Stevens and Barry Weiss and Sarah
Jong at the New York times and the New York times said, well, no,
institutions are perfectly capable of standing up to this stuff if they want
to.
You know, if you look at the cases like Google with James Damore, this was all internal stuff.
It wasn't really driven by the external stuff.
So these mob phenomenon are probably a lot more relevant to cases like a Starbucks manager in Philadelphia who lost her job after basically trying to enforce
company policy the way she's paid to do. And one of the things I get into in the book, and I really
just can't emphasize enough, is that this culture is a lot bigger problem for people like that and
for people like us who are more or less professional controversy merchants.
Right. Kevin Peter here. The book, again, is The Smallest Minority, Independent Thinking in an Age of Mob Politics. Congratulations on the book. Congratulations on having recently
become a married man. Listen, we are taking it for granted, but you'd better tell the story.
You've mentioned it a couple of times. It's in some ways the point of departure for the book.
Just briefly tell us what happened to you at the Atlantic. Can
you compress that story? Sure. Yeah. They hired me in part because they wanted another conservative
on staff. They hired me mostly not to write opinion, but to do reporting on some of the
issues that I've written about a lot for National Review, having to do with poverty and underclass dysfunction and addiction and all that kind of stuff.
A small number of people on staff were just inconsolable to the idea of me working there.
And they made a stink about it. And the editor there eventually folded and he fired me on my third day of employment after publishing one column that was basically inoffensive.
Okay. And, but as you mentioned, you're a big boy and you ended up happily, uh, you are now writing for national review again, correct? I'm just trying to get to the, to the happy end of
the story. Okay. Now, so independent thinking, I, I've been looking at various reviews. People
compare reviewers have compared you a number compare, reviewers have compared you a
number, several reviewers have compared you to H.L. Mencken. It just occurs to me, who are your
journalistic heroes? Whom do you admire? In what tradition do you place yourself, Kevin?
Well, gosh, that's a hard question. I wouldn't say I would place myself in the tradition
of Thomas and Hunter Thompson, but they're the ones I most really enjoy reading. I like that
sort of work, but it's hard to put oneself in that kind of company. But those are the guys I've
really found the most inspirational. Okay, so here are the elements. Here are the elements I would
tick. Tell me if I'm hitting all the elements. Here are the elements. Here are the elements I would tick.
Tell me if I'm hitting all the elements that you consider important. When you mentioned Hunter Thompson, and Hunter Thompson ended up with politics of his own, but fundamentally what you get is an observer, someone who is keeping an undoubted distance between himself and the people and events on whom he's reporting.
Even though he may participate in those events,
he's keeping a clear psychic distance. He is the observer. He's not one of them. Two,
it's based on great reporting. You don't even get a flicker of Hunter Thompson or Tom Wolfe's
opinion or view until they've made you understand time, place, who
these people are, right?
Yeah.
So yeah, Hunter Thompson, I think Hell's Angels was really his best work, which was his first
book.
His problem was later in life, he started to play a character called Hunter Thompson,
which is from his work a little bit.
Whereas Tom Wolfe was pretty solid all the way through until he really gave up,
mostly gave up writing nonfiction in favor of writing novels.
And his novels are terrific too, but it's a different kind of work.
You know,
I do the daily political commentary stuff that everyone has to do in the age
of digital journalism.
But what I really like to do are the long reported pieces where, you know, when I, when I've written about poverty in Appalachia or opiate addiction and those sorts
of things, you know, my particular political views don't really necessarily come into it too much.
You know, I mean, I believe for instance, in drug legalization, but that wasn't really a big focus
of the stuff that I've written about addiction and, and heroin and all that stuff.
Because there's more to the story than what I think about it.
You know, I get this from young writers a lot.
I'll get these, you know, 22 year old,
23 year olds who kind of like to do what I do.
And I always advise them to try to go be reporters for a while.
Right.
22, no one cares about your opinion.
And there's a lot more to the story than what you think about it.
And, but that's also true when you're 46. And I think that I would rather spend more time
telling stories and reporting what's going on in the world than saying, oh, you know,
some democratic candidate said something stupid today. Let me kick him in the shins.
So I'm thinking now one writer you didn't name, but who actually comes to my mind when I think of your work, and that's George Orwell.
And Orwell had that famous, of course, virtually every line of Orwell's is famous to somebody in some way, but it takes a great effort.
It takes a great effort to see what is under one's nose.
Now, I am pretty sure that it takes an even greater effort in the age of mob politics.
What advice are you giving to yourself in this book about the right way to do your job?
Well, you know, I mean, the best thing to do is do it well, right? You know, to get stuff right,
to find things that are interesting, to tell the story in a way that's entertaining and let the political chips more or less fall where they may, which I think I've done a reasonably good job of in a lot of my work anyway.
Yes, you have.
I haven't towed anyone's party line or anything like that.
But, you know, I'm very, very lucky in that National Review and other resources like that give me the ability to do that. I don't really have to do that sort of thing. So that's, that's a great luxury to have.
The thing that I remind myself often of is that I don't really care about 99% of the criticism I get from people. There are people whose criticism I really care about. You know, if Jay Nordlinger or Rick Brookhiser or someone says, you know, Kevin, I don't think you got this one quite right.
You know, I'll mourn for days, you know, in sackcloth and ashes and try to improve.
But 99% of the people I hear from, I don't care about what they had to say about they didn't like this, they didn't like that.
What's harder and I think is more of a challenge but equally important, is to take the same attitude toward praise. Writers are very,
very easy to bribe with praise, and it's easy to distort our view of things with that. We're
very vulnerable to it. Most people don't go into journalism for the money. They go into journalism
because it makes them feel important. And if you learn to hold the praise in the same contempt you hold the criticism, you'll be happier, I think, anyway.
That's a struggle.
Beautiful.
It is, and I'd like you to praise me substantially on the way out here so I can just see how that feels and deal with it.
The problem is, Kevin, is that no matter how well you report something and go out there and talk to actual human beings in actual physical places, is that once the thing is put on Twitter, and again, I don't want to overemphasize Twitter, but it is what telling anybody to hire a U-Haul and move this time?
Because that ticks the little box and tells everybody that they needn't pay any attention
to you, and this is the reason why. And it's this expression of, as you put it in your book,
the idea of intolerance as a virtue, which you say is hardly new. And of course, we go back to
the French Revolution, which gave us so much of these wonderful things. Thanks a lot, guys.
But you write that the perceived need for ritual communal purification is practically universal and generally murderous, as we've seen. And it seems that that's how we move now, where the purification takes moderate people and either silences them or pushes them into positions that they might not actually hold, but have to note.
I mean, the transgender controversy to me is fascinating because of the way that people
are just shutting themselves up or having to believe things that you know in their heart
they believe not to be so.
You attribute this actually to a theological way of thinking.
And if you could describe that, oh, in 47 concise words before we let you go, because
the clock struck in 13 and all that.
Scandal. It's the old Catholic idea of scandal.
It's the idea that the world made a more sinful place by our tolerance of certain kinds of deviations.
So that if we allow this thing to stand, if we allow this person and their unpopular ideas to go unpunished,
then somehow we will encourage that sort of thing,
make the world more dangerous and more fallen and more profane place.
Should we regulate it all then?
Last question.
Should the government step in and regulate social media?
Yes or no?
Really, no detailed, well-thought-out reply is necessary.
Yeah, I'd love the people who brought us the TSA
to be in charge of the national conversation.
I think that would be awesome.
I think these people are the best.
That would actually be fun if you had somebody come to your house
and say, could you unpack this idea
and put it together a little bit more concisely
and remove these liquids?
Not a bad idea.
I travel a lot, and I walk into the airport a conservative, and I get to my
gate an anarchist every time.
Well, if anybody sees a sharply dressed man with a beautiful wife and a bald head, and
he's holding a cliched anarchist's bob with a hissing fuse, you'll know it was TSA that
pushed him over the edge.
Smallest Minority Independent Thinking in an Age of Mob Politics is the book. Kevin Williamson, the author.
You can find him on Twitter, but you can find him at National Review and elsewhere.
And you're advised to seek him out. Read, laugh, enjoy, learn.
And thanks for coming on the podcast, Kevin. Congratulations, Kevin.
Thank you. Bye-bye. You know, could have talked to him for an awful
long time. One of the pleasures of the National
Review crew is often just sitting there and chatting with
Kevin about things that are not necessarily that
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And now we welcome to the podcast Bill McGurn, member of the Wall Street Journal's
editorial board, and he writes the weekly Main Street column for the journal each Tuesday.
Previously, he served as chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush, and
he lived in Hong Kong for 10 years. Welcome, Bill.
Hey, thank you.
Hey, so tell us something about Hong Kong that Americans who aren't paying attention to that part of the world, but are now, might not know.
Well, one, we have an incredible American interest in Hong Kong.
I think we have more than $80 billion invested there.
And there's upwards of 20,000 Americans living there. So we have big stakes here. And those companies, a lot of them,
you know, that's the base for their Chinese operations. So we're very affected, our economy
and so forth, by what goes on there. Americans tend to look at it as an anomaly when it comes
to China, that this strange
little thing. And a lot of people think, why do we give it back in the first place? Why exactly
did Britain hand over this free, prosperous state to a communist system that surely at some point
was going to do what it's doing now? Right. Well, look, it is an anomaly. It's called the Special
Administrative Region. And when the British agreed to give it back in 1984 in the Sino-British Joint
Declaration, they basically promised Hong Kong would get to keep its system. China would get
sovereignty, but Hong Kong would get to keep its system. And as we've seen, that's not happening.
China keeps moving the goalposts all the time, and people are very, very frustrated about it.
The reason the British gave it back is that they acquired Hong Kong in three chunks.
And the last chunk, like they acquired Hong Kong Island, then a part of what they call Kowloon, which is attached to the mainland,
and then this big area called the New Territories. And that had a hundred-year lease that was
expiring. So they felt that they had to have the certainty, right? How could they move past
1997 without something? And the problem is once they raised that, then they had to give it back.
What I think they might have done or tried to do is all the land in Hong Kong is owned by the
government. So if the Hong Kong government and so forth made leases that extended beyond that
to businesses and China didn't accept, that would be China's tacit admission that we're okay
with keeping the things going. Because it's odd for China. China never recognized those treaties.
So China could hardly demand Hong Kong back on the basis. They call them the unequal treaties
of treaties it doesn't really recognize. But this is all water under the bridge. I mean,
it's moved fast. And people are tired of the treatment from China. You know, a couple million people at a time out on the streets.
Now, here are the- Almost all peaceful, by the way.
Almost all peaceful, that's right. Until recently, and we'll come to that. But here are some of the
counter-arg. And the demonstrations have been in favor of democracy. The flashpoint was a new piece of legislation that the current, I don't know what her title is, but the Beijing's woman in Hong Kong.
Chief Executive.
Thank you. Chief Executive proposed a piece of legislation that would enable the mainland to extradite people from Hong Kong who were, according to the legislation, suspected of violating mainland laws,
they could come get them and take them back to the mainland to try, to put on trial. And the
feeling in Hong Kong or the argument in Hong Kong was, wait a minute, you can't trust the mainland
Chinese. Once they have the right to start extraditing people from Hong Kong to the
mainland, they can come take anybody. Okay, so these demonstrations get
presented to us as pro-democracy, pro-rule of law. And the other side of the argument is, as best I
can make it out, hold on. Hong Kong was for decades the bridge between East and West, the one Chinese community that was hugely prosperous. No longer so. Shanghai has a financial
capital. There are a number of cities that are becoming immensely prosperous. I don't know that
any Chinese city yet has the GDP per capita of Hong Kong, but China doesn't need Hong Kong.
What's troubling people in Hong Kong is that that city's relative importance to China and to the West is declining.
It's a city that belongs to the past.
And that's what really bothers them.
Bill?
Yeah, I think that's complete nonsense.
That is the mainland view in some ways for several reasons.
One is, as you alluded to, the real issue is, do you trust China?
Do you trust China with extra?
This is a country that within the last few years has kidnapped booksellers from Hong Kong and other countries.
That's established. That's on the record. There's no doubt about that.
Right? No doubt about that. So if you're sitting in Hong Kong and China doesn't like you, would you like to pop up in
Shenzhen and be accused of treason there or something or some other crimes? You know,
they don't always attack you with the real crime. When I was living in Hong Kong,
I met the Bishop of Guangzhou, the neighboring province. And he had spent 20 years in Chinese prisons for being a bishop right back
in the 50s and 60s. And he said when they got him, they didn't say, oh, you're a threat to
the government. It was back taxes on his cathedral. So do you trust China, given China's behavior,
given China's behavior? No. And the second part of that not trust, people like Hong Kong invest in Hong Kong. It's one comparative advantage is that it's not China. We don't do these things in China. And the idea that Shanghai, the problem is all of China's cities are third and fourth rate cities. They're corrupt. You know, people used to say, complain to me when I lived over there.
Even the glittery parts of Shanghai. Yeah, they're rich. They're rich, but they're like, you know, they're state capitalism.
You know, people used to complain to me that the law is so unpredictable in China.
That's actually the opposite problem.
In China, the law is very predictable.
If you're the foreigner, you get screwed, you know, and especially if you're going up
against the brother-in-law of the mayor or so forth.
You know, Milton Friedman once went to China, and then he came back,
and he delivered this lecture in Hong Kong.
And you have to be over there to appreciate this.
So I don't know if you've ever seen a business card from China,
and it might say Peter Robinson, Deputy Foreign Minister, right?
And then it folds out like an accordion.
It has Robinson Trading Company, Robinson Steel, Robinson Waterworks, right? And then it folds out like an accordion. It has Robinson Trading Company,
Robinson Steel, Robinson Waterworks, right? This is so common. And Freeman said, this is a
prescription for corruption. No other Chinese city can do what Hong Kong does because it's
built up a reputation for fairness and a non-political economy and contracts and so forth.
So I think that actually one reason Xi has not gone in all the way is realizing Xi Jinping,
because if they lose Hong Kong, they can't build it back.
That's a reputation for honesty and the rule of law.
You lose that, you can't get it back, and China would suffer.
China wants to be a world-class country.
You can't be a world-class country with third-rate cities.
And that's the difference between Tiananmen Square in 89.
That was Beijing, the capital, government capital.
And this is Hong Kong, a world-class financial city.
Odd that it should have all of those stabilizing influences
after horrible,
extractive imperialist colonialism, which we were led to understand. Well, here's the thing about
colonialism that should be an embarrassment. Two things I'll just say. You know, the Chinese
government is blaming this all on Western influence and America pushing it, I wish.
And it's always amazed me that Xi Jinping is considered the guy
returning China to ideological purity. The most malignant Western export ever is Marxism. And
China, this whole system is based on a noxious 19th century German idea.
So when they talk about other people and foreign influences, it's just a joke that worked anywhere.
And how is it that the British, with a handful of people,
ran Hong Kong smoothly for all these years, right?
Except for there was a period during the Cultural Revolution in the 60s
where there was a lot of rioting in Hong Kong.
But that was all stoked by China. And except for that, I mean, how is it the British colonialists treated Chinese people in Hong Kong better than Chinese colonialists from Beijing?
Bill, Peter here one more time. Here's my theory. My theory is that Hong Kong has us all transfixed because it puts just below the surface, just barely below the surface, this question.
What do humans really care about?
The mainland Chinese, and I happen to be the case there.
I know some and they're traveling through Northern California
so I've talked to about this to some mainland Chinese in the last month or so and
That view comes down to this. Oh the political cake claims
That's the freedom to my that's all superficial
What really motivates them is economic grievances?
They're losing their route they the people of Hong Kong are losing their relative importance What really motivates them is economic grievances.
They, the people of Hong Kong, are losing their relative importance.
People in China are becoming rich enough to buy real estate in Hong Kong.
Native Hong Kongers are being priced out of their own housing market.
What really moves people is questions of material well-being and status.
And the Hong Kong argument is the other way around.
We'd give up some of our wealth.
Yes, we're rich, but we don't care about that
as much as we care about freedom,
democracy, individual liberty.
That's what's deep.
The economic arguments are at a relatively super, they're
important as far as they go, but that's not what this is about. Does that strike you as in some
deep, basic way, the right way to frame the question? What makes human beings human beings?
No. And I think that this is not a new charge. You know, we're always told that people in other parts of the world don't really care about democracy.
Weren't we told that about the Vietnamese and so forth?
That would be much better for them.
Yes, yes, that's the whole argument.
Koreans, we were told, right?
Taiwanese, none of these people really cared about freedom and so forth.
They were peasant cultures.
All they wanted was order and prosperity.
Right. Right. So this wanted was order and prosperity.
Right. So this has been an old thing. And I will say, when I was in Hong Kong, I was there right after the Joint Declaration was signed in 1984.
And Hong Kong, if you ask the Chinese person in Hong Kong, what are you?
You know, like if you ask us, we'd say American or something.
They wouldn't really say I'm a Hong Kong person. They would likely say I'm Cantonese because they kind of describe themselves by their dialect.
And they're part of Canton, you know, Guangzhou.
Canton is the old way of saying Guangzhou.
And so they would say that they were Cantonese.
That's changed since the handover.
There is now a definite Hong Kong identity. And, you know, people were saying from like 1984 to 1989, the Hong Kong
people don't care. They're just materialistic. All they want to do is make their money and so forth.
When Tiananmen Square happened, you know, something like a million Hong Kong people
took to the streets. It took everyone by surprise. And they turn out in these numbers all the time. It turns out that they do care.
They also understand that their future prosperity depends on this freedom. It's a lot easier for
China to go from people where they were starving and didn't have anything up to a certain standard
of living. It's a lot harder to maintain that level at the Hong Kong level, and you can't
do it with Chinese-style freedoms. It just can't be done. You know, if you want to be a world-class
financial city, you have to have a convertible currency, which China does not have. You have
to have free flow of information, which China does not have. There's all these things in the
rule of law, which China does not have. So, you know, I've heard that's been a libel on the Hong Kong people
all the time. And a lot of these people are really, really desperate. In a sense,
if you and I were over there, like a lot of middle class or upper middle class families,
what they say to their children, go to school in America, in Canada, Australia, Britain,
make your life there. But a lot of those people out in the
street, those young men, they don't have that choice. This is it for them. You know, this is
it. And they're just tired of Chinese colonialism coming in on them. And I think it's put Xi Jinping
in a real quandary. You know, the other thing we don't know in all this is we know from history that within communist parties, there are often huge battles for power, right?
We just don't know about it because they're not free to say that.
To say that out front.
We don't know who's rooting for Xi to do this and have him fall flat on his face so that they can maneuver.
I think Xi Jinping is in a really, really bad position. If you remember what happened after Tiananmen Square,
remember H.W. Bush got in trouble for sending,
I think it was Lawrence Eagleberger over there,
clinking champagne glasses.
And I would argue that some of what he did, he had to do.
You know, it's a big country.
We have interests.
I don't think he did it the right way.
This is so different because, again, Hong Kong is
this world-class city. Back then, it was CNN and fax machines. Now, everyone in Hong Kong has cell
phones, and we can see what they're doing. And I think if they really crack down the bad way,
there'll be Magnitsky Act sanctions against some of the Hong Kong leaders and maybe some of the ones in Beijing,
I think it could be really, really horrible.
The last thing I'll say is, you know, from some of your interactions with the Chinese, I think you realize that in China, there's never been a lot of sympathy for Hong Kong,
right?
People consider them, wow, they're rich and spoiled.
They don't know how good they got it.
They should stop complaining.
Right?
And they're not saying the way some Westerners do is say, wait a minute.
If you want more freedom, you better hope that they succeed in Hong Kong because otherwise that's not how a lot of them think.
I do think that would change if there were a Tiananmen-style crackdown.
Unfortunately, it would take a lot of violence and a lot of victims,
but I think Xi would have a lot of trouble there.
One of the things I'd like to see is a restriction on mainland Chinese children
of party officials coming to school here,
an expansion of student visas for Hong Kong people and Taiwanese people.
There's a lot of things we could do.
Bill, if you look at what the protesters have been doing,
some people say they made a tremendous mistake by waving the American flag
and singing the national anthem because they lost a whole bunch of people on the left
who thought, oh, don't they realize what an oppressive symbol that is?
I mean, the next thing you know, they'll be pulling out Betsy Ross's flag,
and that'll just show what kind of racist slave owners they actually want to emulate.
Yeah, maybe they need to get Colin Kaepernick over there to take a knee, you know.
Right. Well, the question is, you mentioned Magnitsky style sanctions, denying visas and the rest of it.
How many arrows do we actually have in our quiver?
And do you think the president is using what means we have for leverage correctly today. Yeah, you know, I'm not a never Trumper,
but I've been very disappointed in the president's response so far. He doesn't seem to recognize the
U.S. interests there. And he does seem to regard it as just an internal Chinese matter. You know,
when this joint declaration was an international treaty and, you know, we have a Hong Kong Policy
Act that's designed to treat Hong Kong
differently from the mainland. I think he's been trying to walk back some of those.
There's not a lot that he can do to prevent the Chinese from going in. But I wish he would speak
a little more loudly that there'll certainly be consequences. I mean, won't it be hard
for the Trump administration to negotiate a trade deal if there were some kind of Tiananmen solution in Hong Kong?
And by the way, I was talking to a Democrat, one of the leaders of the protests, and he actually didn't think that she's going to send those troops in because of all the things we've talked about. But it is the Chinese way, the bullying of what they're going to do is release videos
of the police training of all these armored carriers over the border and so forth and
sending thugs in to beat people up and so forth.
People are tired of it.
And the main thing about these protests, the main characteristic is that they're completely
unnecessary. They didn't need this darn extradition law. And when they pulled it,
they didn't kill it. I mean, I don't know why they didn't do it. The chief executive,
Carrie Lam, didn't resign. The people want a commission to look into the police behavior.
If there were an ounce of humility from either the Hong Kong government or Beijing,
it would diffuse these in a second. But every time they appear at a press conference or something,
they make it worse. And that's the weakness of autocrats. They think humility is weakness.
Their rule is strong, but it's brittle. And they can't do, you know, Reagan apologized, right? Iran-Contra
kind of explained the thing. Clinton backed off in the health care. Bush Jr. apologized for the
lack of weapons of mass destruction that we found. You know, leaders do that, you know,
because they recognize they're out of sorts with public opinion. But in China, you know,
it's the mandate of heaven idea,
and they feel that it's weakness.
So they can't do something even though they know it's necessary.
This would be a big loss of faith for China to do something like this.
But increasingly, their options are getting worse,
and that's what they have to be looking at.
Well, Bill, I hope the next time we have you on to use your Hong Kong expertise, it's 15 years in the future when we talk about how Hong Kong values
transform China into the dynamic ally that it is today. That's what people used to say, actually.
You're right. You know, that was what people were saying in 85. Well, we can catch up on all this
and more in the weekly Main Street column in the Wall Street Journal every Tuesday. Bill McGurn, thanks for joining us today.
Thank you.
Bill, just terrific.
Fascinating.
Fascinating.
Thanks.
Well, that was great.
And you might think the podcast's over.
It's not.
We have some other things to talk about.
But before we do, see, I'm going to do the commercial here because you're going to think, ah, I've got to sit through this so I can get to the next stuff, right?
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You know, Peter, one of the things I learned this week was the existence of the 50 cent party.
You know what the 50 cent party is? I do not. No, did I? And of course, this may be nonsense, but on Twitter, somebody was dismissing a pro-China comment as just being somebody from
the 50 cent party. And then when asked to explain this person on Twitter, who was in Hong Kong, um, and detailing everything that had been going on, I think, you know, could
be a guy in his basement at Des Moines, but he seemed to know what was going on and had lots of
footage. So the 50 cent party is the derogatory term. The locals have for those people who just
sit on Twitter and post pro-government sentiments for a certain amount of money per post from the government. The 50 cent party.
And what's fascinating to me about that is that it's either the sign of a government
that wants to make sure the proper line is expressed in every single possible venue,
or it's a sign of a government that is a bit more brittle and insecure than we might think.
Or it's both, and I might think. Or it's both. And
I probably tend to think it's both. But it just shows you the totality, the panopticon that China
wants to create. From the social credit scores, from the fact that everything that you say is
being recognized and noted and responded to by the government through aliases and proxies.
When Paul Krugman said, if we could just be like China for
one day, he was talking about, wouldn't it be great if we could have shiny new airports and
trains that went fast? But I never hear any of these people who were praising China back in the
day now say that the mask has been revealed and what a lot of people have been saying about them
is obvious. It has been obvious. Is this a good partner for us to have?
Or is Donald Trump's adversarial posture actually what should be taken?
I mean, again, the guy at BuzzFeed that news on NPR this morning was talking about how Trump started this trade war.
And I'm thinking, well, in the sense of tariffs and the rest of it.
Yeah. And started the trade war.
Unbelievable.
But they have not.
I mean, we've been letting them get away with stuff for a long
time for a variety of reasons. And so I prefer sort of the revelatory moment where bad things
may happen, but at the end of the day, I hate that phrase, sorry, we're not all dealing with
a bunch of delusions that eventually will come back to bite us, to realize that they're an
expansionist power, that they want
to be a world power, that the Middle Kingdom's rightful place is to be at the top of the
heap, that they want the South China Sea, all of these things.
I'd rather that we're honest about them and look about them than pretend that they're
somehow this hand-holding partner for a 21st century of state capitalism, which is just
completely agree.
I completely, utterly, totally agree.
The parallel here, in my judgment, would be what Harry Truman had to do. Throughout the Second World War, FDR and Churchill, for obvious reasons, the aim was to defeat Hitler and then to defeat the Japanese, the imperial Japanese, the militaristic Japanese. But throughout the Second World War, Winston Churchill and FDR praised the Soviet Union as our great ally. Joseph Stalin was a man of courage and resolve. And after the Second World War, when it became clear that the Soviets had designs on
Eastern Europe, that they were going to violate the Declaration on Liberated Europe that Stalin
had signed at Yalta, when it became clear that the Soviets were against us and not a great ally who were going to join us in building an international
world of peace, it fell to Harry Truman to sort out, A, what we were going to do about it, but B,
the politics. He had to build a coalition for the Cold War before he could begin enacting it.
And we know, for example, that when Harry Truman rode with Winston Churchill on the
train from Washington out to Missouri, where Churchill would deliver his famous Iron Curtain
speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, Truman read Churchill's draft and said, this
is a good piece of work.
I can't quote him exactly, but he had no objection, thought this was useful. And then when the train got back to Washington,
Churchill's speech had created a sensation and was viewed as alarmist, militaristic, and so forth.
The press attacked it. And Harry Truman got off the train, reporters said, what do you have to
say about Mr. Churchill's speech? And Truman said, no no comment because he realized he was politically hemmed in.
Truman had to build the political coalition, had to realize what the reality was, figure out
a strategy, strategy of containment, establish NATO and so forth, and swing the country behind
him. It falls to Donald Trump, Donald Trump, flawed vessel that he is, it falls to Donald Trump to do that now.
And that worries me.
It's hard to do.
It's sloppy.
It's messy.
And it's hard.
I'm not sure he has the attention or the interest, but we'll see.
We have a leftover member question from last week, and it's from MB Cho.
I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly.
Cho, Cho, I don't know.
Let's just call a person MB, a valued member of Ricochet.
And we say that because they pay to be members, which makes them extra special value.
Cho asks, who came up with the name Ricochet?
Why did you decide to go with that?
Did you have any other alternatives?
Oh, we had hundreds.
We, it was Rob and me and two or three others at that stage.
We had literally hundreds of alternatives.
I wish I could say that this is a story of brilliant momentary inspiration in which Rob
or I said, I've got it.
That wasn't the case at all.
We listed name after name after name after name.
And although this was close to a dozen years ago now, already the internet had reached
a stage at which people had begun locking up
prospective names and the names we wanted, we couldn't afford to buy. We just couldn't afford
them. There were names we just fell in love with. And we discover you'd go to one of the registries
and you discover it was owned by some unknown person in some unknown town. You'd put in a bid
and said, no, no, no, I'm selling that one for $100,000. Ricochet was pretty
expensive. I think it, I can't remember, but it was single digit thousands. It still cost us quite
a lot. And we were raising money for this venture. People were not throwing money at us to launch
Ricochet. It was hard work. And we had a very serious budget constraint. We liked Ricochet.
We liked the feeling of that's the way conversation
works when it's working well. People want some person says something, it ricochets around the
room, ricochets. So we liked it, but it was the name we could afford. That's a terrible,
the truth is really so prosaic. I withdraw that. James, you make up a story and we'll go with your
story from now on. I'm sure you can do better than that.
But that's the way it actually happened.
The actual truth is that they were going to go with Peter and Rob's Cracker Barrel dot com.
Just sort of a couple of guys sitting around the stove at the country store talking a little bit.
But somehow the paperwork got mangled, and they were actually given Ricochet instead for $15 at GoDaddy.
That's the story I'm going to go with, and that's what we'll stick with.
That's what we'll stick with.
Done.
We are going to conclude with one last question for Peter Robinson
in the Pundit Snap Roundup.
But first I have to tell you the podcast was brought to you by Helmsman.
That's the shave cream.
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I'm using negative psychology here because that would just help people find us and keep the site alive with more donations.
And why would we want that?
Last question, Peter.
Epstein, murdered or suicide? Yes or no? One or the other? with more donations. And why would we want that? Last question, Peter. Epstein,
murdered or suicide? Yes or no? One or the other? Take a choice.
Let's put it this way. There are just too many odd pieces about this. The cameras weren't working.
The guards had fallen asleep. How did Epstein know when to kill himself? How did he know the cameras
weren't working? How did he know the guards had fallen asleep? I have to say, I am not given to
conspiracy theories. When I have the opportunity to mark down a large event to sheer human folly
and incompetence, I take that option every time. But even for me, this one looks fishy. And I for sure want the attorney
general to make sure that the investigation into Epstein's death is really and truly thorough.
So if that makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist, I have to say this one just doesn't
look right to me. James? I'm just kicking myself. I'm just kicking. I agree with what you say, but I just realized
if I'd asked this question at the top of the show
before the first ad, I could have made a transition
from Occam's razor to
shave cream. That could have been
a segue for the ages, and I
blew it. I'm leaving the microphone
in shame now.
Thanks, Peter. Thanks to our guests. Rob will be with us next
week. We hope he's going to see everybody
saying what they want to say, of course, in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week. Next week, Peter. Thanks to our guests. Rob will be with us next week. We hope he's going to see everybody saying what they want to say, of course, in the comments at Ricochet 4.0.
Next week.
Next week, James.
1989, that number. Another summer.
Sound of the 40s, Joma. Music hitting your heart.
I know you got soul.
Listen if you're missing y'all.
Swinging while I'm singing.
Giving what you're getting.
Knowing what I'm knowing.
While the black band's sweating.
In the rhythm I'm rolling.
Gotta give us what we want.
Gotta give us what we need.
Our freedom of speech is freedom of death.
We got to fight the power.
That's me. Fight the power, that's B.
Fight the power.
Fight the power.
Fight the power.
Fight the power.
Fight the power.
Fight the power.
Fight the power.
We got to fight the power, that's B.
As the rhythm's designed to bounce with health, since death aligns, designed to fill your mind, We got the power. Outro Music Fight the power! Fight the power! Fight the power!
Fight the power!
Fight the power!
Ricochet.
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