The Ricochet Podcast - Caravan

Episode Date: October 26, 2018

This week, the bomber is apprehended and Rob Long is not surprised, there’s a caravan headed our way, professional prognosticator Patrick Ruffini opines on his epic Tweet storm and makes some mid-term predictions, and the great Heather Mac Donald stops by to chat about her new book The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture. Finally... Source

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The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Are you going to send me or anybody that I know to a camp? We have people that are stupid. Who doesn't love Diana Ross? She wants to look like Diana Ross for one day. I don't know how that got racist on Halloween. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lilacs, and today we talk to Patrick Graffini with some internet tweet wisdom

and Heather MacDonald about gender wars on campus. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 422. We're going to give you a bunch of blazing hot takes in the news. It'll be eclipsed by events before we get this thing up. Or we'll play the long game, and you can listen to this at leisure years from now and say,

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I figured either some lone nutwad or a couple of brothers engaged in a folly idea like the Sarnoffs. The speculation about false flags seemed to be a bit misguided. But who knows? Keep an open mind. What did you think? Individual nutcase. As soon as it became clear that the bombs were badly constructed, maybe not even intended to explode in the first place. By the way, I say this.

Who knows what the story will be in an hour or two hours? Rob, you have news. You were just looking at the internet right i mean there there is they have a guy in custody a guy from florida who apparently has new york ties all of this is just nuts right because it's going to change in in 24 hours but they do have somebody in custody he's in florida he has new york ties uh they took the van in i saw a picture of the van i think it's the van they said it was the van if it's not the van don't yell at me but they said it was the van in. I saw a picture of the van. I think it's the van. They said it was the van. If it's not the van, don't yell at me. But they said it was the van,

and the van is covered with pro-Trump stickers, which is not a surprise because Occam's Razor suggests – Occam's Razor is, of course, the rule that you take the most obvious answer first. It did suggest that it was a Trump supporter doing this, I mean a misguided one. There are misguided Trump supporters. There are misguided Bernie Sanders supporters. Nonsense, I think, is one of those crazy frenzies that people come up with because they don't want to admit the truth because they're worried that someone else will draw conclusions from it, which is the very worst reason to evaluate facts. It's actually the worst possible way to evaluate facts. It is exactly kind of what leads us to the crazy climate change things where the earth is going to die in five years.

Look, there are nut jobs in the country, and those nut jobs do terrible things. Sometimes they shoot congressmen. Sometimes they send pipe bombs. That's it. I'm done. That's my only insight. There's very little to add to that as far as I can tell. Yeah, I mean we have to wait and see.

What's surprising to me is that everything is so insanely overheated. Yes. Everybody is so just having this constant, constant freak out that. I mean, it's it's a miracle and a blessing that none of these bombs went off and they all got stopped and or they were inoperable in some way um but i mean we you know we've kind of reached a a fever pitch of madness i think um i mean when when we're obsessing about they sent one i guess to the former head of the former DCI, John Brennan, the former attorney general, Eric Holder. When we're assessing about these past administration functionaries, there's a problem. Don't you think, Peter?

Well, yes, but I'm willing to move on to the next topic because I'm perfectly happy. It seems to me correct that this was the work of one disturbed person. If it turns out to be more than one or two, it will turn out to be half a dozen tops and they will all be nut jobs, ill people. They should either be – Or evil. Well, if they're evil, they should throw the book at them, try them, put them in jail. And if they're sick, whatever the legal remedy is there, get them treatment. But again, get this person or these people locked up and put away.

I just don't see that this is any – CNN, MSNBC, the left generally has no more right to hold this nut job against Donald Trump and the Republicans than our side had to hold the nut job shooter who almost killed Representative Stephen Scalise and opened fire on some – it turns out that the House Republicans play baseball together every so often. He went to one of these baseball games and opened fire and hit a lot of people and almost killed one representative. He was a sick, twisted person. They exist. On we go. Yeah, I agree. I don't know.

James, you seem dissatisfied with our – No, no, no, no, no. I'm listening and agreeing. I just the idea that we should be now having a conversation about mental illness is I wish I wish that's exactly what we were going to do. But that's not going to be the case. This will be seen as a case of somebody who was, if not radicalized by Donald Trump, responded sympathetically, like or like an Aeolian harp over which the ethers from the gods played and and a horrible melody came forth and this is uh you know there was somebody tweeting the other day that remember this day in history when a plot was was revealed that wanted to kill all of these people as you know as though there were some dark satanic forces gathering in the margins that were going to do this as opposed to one guy um if you want to look at the idea that somehow that this was unique in american history

uh is a historical because we've had waves of bombings before the difference is this is one crazy nut job doing stuff he's not sane The waves of bombings that we've had before have been by people who have been perfectly sane and coldly sane and organized and devoted to a concerted nationwide effort to bring down the order. I mean, the 60s, the bombings of the 60s and 70s. In the 70s.

James, just a little personal point of information. I am coming to you, not 10 yards maybe. I'm next door, maybe 11 yards, from a townhouse not because I always say I live near the house that Obama's friends bombed. And if you're right, we like, oh, I know that house, that damn weather underground. But if you're left wing, you're like, I don't know what you're talking about. What? I mean, the idea that this, you know, that this guy is going to go to prison and then 10 years, 20 years later is going to be rewarded with a professorship at Columbia. It seems unlikely.

But yet that seems to happen on the other side. And you can go back 100 years to 1919 when there was a wave of anarchist bombings around this country that killed an awful lot of people. Unionists blew up the LA Times building, if you want to talk about the war in the press uh it was a bad panic and it left it it led to the palmer raids which were i mean which now are sort of seen by the left as a precursor to the mccarthyism period and the red scare and the you know all the rest of it's this holy era in which these really good pure-hearted individuals were persecuted by the government but everything we're talking about now you can apply back then a hundred years ago to the way the society was riven and the violence that was bubbling up. The difference being is that that was actually organized ideological violence as opposed to this guy.

But we're going to be told that this guy is an example of the alt-right weirdos brawling in Portland and marching in Charlottesville. Go on. I want to say thank you, James. Honestly, I couldn't think of anything to say about an individual nutcase. James Lilacs puts it in historical context and does so just beautifully.

I would not have expected that I would be hearing from James Lilacs about the Palmer raids at this hour on the morning. Why? Just brilliant. Am I that? You underrate me that much, Peter? No, no, no. palmer raids at this hour on the morning. Why? That was just brilliant. Am I that? It's just marvelous. You underrate me that much, Peter?

No, no, no. No. It's early in Palo Alto. One, I'll give you an example. Actually, I'll just toss this out there to see what James does with this because James is on a roll. I reread, what was it? We had the 50th, was it the 60th?

60th anniversary, 50th, 50th anniversary of the assassination of JFK. And so I reread William Manchester's book, Death of a President. And as best I can tell, there are two components to that book. One is the meticulous reporting, which as far as I can tell, has not been surpassed and really can't be surpassed because he went back and talked to eyewitnesses. Who was the nurse who was in the hospital? The priest who gave JFK absolution.

Brilliant. Minute by minute. Who was where? When? The confusion at the airport when Lyndon Johnson was now the new president and JFK's people assumed that they would all sit in their same seat. I mean it was just brilliant reporting. That's piece A. Piece B, he blamed the assassination of John Kennedy on a climate of right-wing hatred in Dallas.

And that – it's an amazing thing because even at the time, there was no evidence, none that Oswald had been affected by anything that was in the air in Dallas. There's a famous right-wing newspaper in Dallas. It was an anti-Kennedy town. Incidentally, it was not Republican. It was a very conservative Democrat. It was an anti-Kennedy town, as I say. But Oswald, this strange, peculiar, troubled loner, to the extent that he had anything in his head at all, it was some mishmash of Marxism and communism. He's lived in the Soviet Union for two years.

It was known that he had visited the Cuban embassy in Mexico. Manchester knew all of this and still blamed it all on a climate of right-wing violence in Dallas. There is some impulse to be unable to deal with individual troubled, dangerous, violent people such as Oswald, such as whoever did – mailed these bombs around the other day without trying to draw vast lessons. And I'm sorry to say that then as now, the impulse on the left is to draw vast lessons about how dangerous and corrupt and cruel and violent the conservative side of America is. Just untrue. Excuse me. Now, James, do with that what you will. Well, I mean, I don't know what else I can do with it except say I agree.

The way the narrative has been rewritten to make Oswald somehow this right-wing nut job is just a thing of beauty, and you have to admire it. But, I mean, I don't know if it's because there's just this something in the back of people's heads that shuts down and says this can't be so. My side is good and virtuous. Yeah. These ideas, while he may subscribe to a more extreme version, his purity gives him a certain sort of credibility. I mean, everyone does it. Each side has their blind spots. Each side is unable to hear the overtones of their own philosophy that are actually echoing in the minds of crazy people.

So the way people locked down on day one about this, pointing out the things about the bomb that obviously I mean, again, you have to consider that there's somebody in Florida who's thinking, I'm going to ruin Donald Trump for the midterm by coming up with these fake bombs, and they'll never find me. They haven't found every one of these people. They found all of them. Yeah, exactly right. Right, except for the Unabomber, which took a long time because he put manifestos out there, which was because he was vain and couldn't stop. But anyway, so yes. I would just like to say one thing.

The danger is always – I mean just because Peter brought up the danger. I know we have to go to the next spot. But the danger is always I don't want to tell the truth because I don't want people to draw the wrong conclusion from the truth. And that is what – that is the guiding hand pretty much of the editorial decisions of the New York Times. And I think it was the guiding hand in a lot of people who were insisting, you know, with no evidence in some kind of like fever dream, that this is all just some kind of false flag operation. I don't want to tell the truth because I don't want you to draw

any conclusions that I don't want you to draw from the truth. The thing about the truth is it's the truth. And if you don't want people to draw certain conclusions from it, that's okay. I mean you can – for a long time, people looked at the sky. They drew the conclusion. The earth was flat and the sun went around the earth. That's okay. That was what they saw. And then they changed their mind. So it's okay for people to hear the truth. You just have to do a little work to persuade them otherwise – persuade them of your point. But not telling the truth is not the truth. You just have to do a little work to persuade them otherwise, persuade them of your point. But not telling the truth is not the solution. A lot of people on the left have an image of the right left over from the 60s, where people on the right are generally flag wearing hard hat dirt balls, who are kicking hippies. That's, that's what the right is. That's what it means to be a conservative and the rest of it. But the interesting rhetorical trick in the last few years

has been to identify anything that disagrees with the precepts of the left as violence. Speech is violence. Ideas are violence. So things that aren't actually violent are given that word violent, which just tends to give people the idea that the other side, root and branch, top to bottom, thought to action is violent when what we're about is conserving what we have, which requires defense but not violence. We're not the ones trying to rip things. You want to rip up – you want to fundamentally transform America, you're going to need some violence. Well, otherwise, there's a caravan coming, and we should talk about that in a bit

as well, because Mona had a post, which was violent to those who disagreed with it, on Ricochet. And one of the great things is reading Ricochet, sitting out in the backyard, having a cigar if it's a clement day, but then you're thinking, wait a minute, why can't I get internet

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I'm sorry. In 2014, he co-founded Echelon Insights to evolve the traditional ways that organizations collect information to drive their strategy. Welcome. You had a great tweet thread the other day where you were, well, let's talk about this. You were laying out a series of beliefs, manifestos, which I found fascinating because I would say, yeah, yes, but I dare say that in public, but you did. So tell us what prompted this, what you said, and what the reaction's been. Well, I think that I, I think I was just kind of looking for a way out of Twitter. Just basically say, yeah, I basically said my piece here and I'm piecing out after this. And yeah, I still haven't done that, gotten around to doing that somehow yet.

Right. But I was just like, okay, well, this actually, I would actually, in some ways, I would definitely amend this approach to anyone, you know, who, you know, I think you're just putting all of my basic premises in one place. I thought like, okay, it might be helpful because I find myself oftentimes repeating or coming back to certain themes. And I'm like, well, it might be helpful because I find myself oftentimes repeating or coming back to certain themes. And I'm like, well, here are the themes. And so I've got it pinned at the top of my profile that Patrick Ruffini people can read all the insanity contained therein.

And it is Peter Robinson here, Patrick. Thanks for joining us. Fascinating because you've got the politics we often think of as very confusing, the business of consulting, running campaigns, highly subtle, all sorts of secret data. And Patrick Ruffini, who's as good as anybody in the business, says in effect nonsense. Here are a couple dozen things everybody needs to understand. These are Ruffini's axioms. And they're in plain English. And as best I can tell, none of them is more than two sentences long. Here's one.

I'm going to read this out loud, and Rob is going to cluck, cluck, cluck with disbelief that you actually wrote this. Here it is. Patrick Ruffini, quote, Trump is a normal president doing normal things, except for the tweets. Rob? Yeah, so this kind of caused a conniption on the left right and it seems like uh this is one uh and the thread in general has has uh generated a a very interesting polarized reaction um i would say like not just a very polarized reaction between red and blue but kind of smart and dumb it really kind of feels like because i I've had a number of people.

You want even more fights. Go ahead. More fights. Well, I would say this. I've had a number of people comment. So my initial sort of reaction to this, I've had a number of people on the left who I respect know, who are smart guys say, yeah, I don't agree with all of this, but this is all, you know, this kind of makes sense, even though this kind of challenges a little bit.

These are maybe some of the weak points in the Democratic coalition or the Democratic argument at this point. I mean, I wish this weren't the case. So you have I feel like we've had I have a number of, you know, again, I, you know, work oftentimes work, I find myself working with people who are on the left and have a lot of respect for who generally say, you know, I may not agree with, the blue checks on the left, you know, and I'm looking up sort of my verified mentions on Twitter and just the stream of invective from usually from a mix of screenwriters, freelance writers, somebody who wrote, you know, you know, for a comedy show once and that gave them a blue checkmark. I mean, I have one, too, so I know how broken that system is for assigning those blue checkmarks. But what I'm trying to get at here, right, because clearly Trump isn't normal, and clearly Trump isn't normal in all ways.

But you actually kind of look at the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, the Neil Gorsuch nomination, the fact that he has essentially come around to basically supporting every single establishment Republican position in Washington, D.C., candidate after putting himself, you know, initially kind of, you know, taking, you know, suggesting that he was going to take out a whole bunch of incumbent Republicans. He now seems to be the establishment Republican best friend in certain respects. And so I'm kind of looking at this as like, well, yes, he's saying very strange things. He's saying very abnormal things, and especially for a president. But the actions seem more normal. But beyond that, regardless of, yes, I think we can have legitimate differences of opinion on whether Trump is normal or not.

Clearly, there are many ways in which he is not normal. My, you know, I look at this and say voters perceive him as normal in a lot of ways. You have, that's kind of his 16. That's hey, it's Rob Long. I was going to say, like, that's kind of his his superpower, right? I mean, he's a guy who lives in a golden tower in a golden apartment, and he's more real and more blue collar than, um, yeah, I think the thing he says make, um, don't sound that weird or that outrageous to a lot of people who, um, you know, who are just going about living their daily lives and they can agree with those things or they can disagree with

those things. But the fact is that Trump was like any other normal Republican candidate in 2016. He got 90% of the Republican vote and he got like less than 10% of the Democratic vote. There wasn't like some abnormal, hugely abnormal pattern to how people reacted to him. People took Trump, voters took Trump at face value, even if pundits and elites did not take Trump at face value in the 2016 election and even now. And I think failure to recognize this is going to set the left up for a lot of defeat. Hey, Patrick, this is Rob Long. Thank you again for joining us. So I want to get into some of this stuff because some of the stuff I thought was great. I mean we're going to post a link to it obviously in the show notes. But what I loved about it was that your basic umbrella premises, stop freaking out.

Things aren't different. It's not like the world has changed. And one of the things I've heard over and over again from Trump supporters and also from Trump haters is, oh, it's all different now. And what I liked was that it was a really useful bromide against it. But let me ask you a question because it seems to me that the Democratic strategy is going to be or has been, aren't you tired of this? Don't you have Trump exhaustion? Isn't he horrible? And this Republican strategy, which I don't think is a strategy, but I think it's emerging as a strategy, is aren't you tired of their outrage? Aren't you tired of their Trump freakouts? really does feel like, you describe it in your tweet storm, as what we've always known, which is that you've got to go for the somewhat disaffected, independent middle.

You've got to go for the, not for the interested middle, but the disaffected middle. The middle is like, ah, I'm sick of this. I mean, is that correct? Am I reading it right or am I reading it wrong? I think this notion of exhaustion is absolutely right. And I think that it's, you know, I think that it's very easy following the media to say that that is a one sided argument. But in fact, you know, you have Democrats who are reacting to Trump in a way that I think is probably not as productive as it could be, you know, in terms of from that, from a from a political and strategic perspective. And, you know, in some ways, I think that's right. And, you know, there's always going to be, you know, this anti-Trumpism,

but there's also going to be anti-anti-Trumpism, even if there's not pro-Trumpism. In one of your great tweets, you say, for Democrats, you're not going to beat Trump in 2020 with a Harvard professor. So who could they beat Trump? I mean, understanding that it's unlikely at that point that we do seem to be a two-term, kind of in a two-term mode. The economy is not going to sell. All those things, right, in the presidential predictive model, whatever that counts as. But if you were in charge for a day and you could do whatever you want,

who would you put up there? I think somebody who kind of can in some way break out of the partisan mold and does not seem like an avatar for the cultural left. And I know that's very easy to say, but I think, you know, and I would say, look, I think Barack Obama did this in 2008, that even though he was in some ways embodied sort of the highest hopes of the left and, you know, with this constitutional law professor from a big city and, you know, with the first African-American president, all of that in some ways, he kind of had this confluence where he wasn't – he seemed more apolitical than Hillary Clinton did.

He seemed like a down-the-line, partisan Democrat. Is that good news for Joe Biden? Blue-collar roots? I would point to him as somebody who says, you know, somebody who, you know, we used to think of, maybe we still do, right? But we used to think of him as this unhinged sort of, you know, crazy Uncle Joe, right? And it's funny how he's been able to remake himself in contrast to Donald Trump, where he's now this sober, responsible figure who has remarkable self-control, right? And I think like that, there are sort of like all the negative points about Joe Biden sort of been subsumed by Donald Trump. But I do think, I think he is somebody I can think of who could act, who may seem a little bit less, you know, returned to normalcy, to borrow.

This will be the 100th anniversary of the Warren G. Harding campaign, who I think very effectively employed that slogan after the chaos of Woodrow Wilson in World War I. So can I ask one nerdy question, though? I mean, I know James wants to jump in because I just want to talk a little bit about just geeky, nerdy stuff. You say there's no excuse for an RDD election poll. The norm against RDD should be about as strong as the injunction against pure IVR. So RDD is random dialing, right, when they just dial a random number. And IVR is interactive something. Explain those two ways of polling. For a moron.

Explain them for – I For a moron. Explain them for a moron. This is like, you know, I have gone from the mega sort of Trump takes to sort of the very nitty gritty nerdy stuff. So this is like the, you know, the thread like kind of veers off in so many different directions. The fact that like, you know, I mean, we have a lot of polls out there and we've got a lot of, you know, potentially garbage polls in this, in this election cycle. And, uh, you know, it's not like you will have different methods of doing this, but the fact is, um, you know, we in our business know, cause I'm, I do a lot of this for a living and we know who our voters are. We kind of have a good sense of who's going to turn out based on who has turned out in the past. So it's kind of insane that we would not use this information. And we're simply apt to just ask people, are you going to vote or

not when people lie on that question all the time, and especially so when we're just randomly calling people and we don't really know who we're talking to on the other end of the phone. So this is, you know, this has changed a lot. I mean, not all the surveys. It used to be most of the surveys you see published in the media worked like, you know, they were randomly calling people. And now it's a little bit more, you know, we are actually calling people up, photo files. This New York Times project is great, for example, on that respect. But we also have this function of, you know, and talk about this sort of this no-no in the polling community of using these auto-polls, which everybody kind of thinks are garbage. And I

think to some extent they are, you know, when you're only doing that. But these auto-polls that, you know, nobody really has a landline anymore. And it's all the old people who have landlines, that sort of thing. But so I think like that's sort of the currently like the bet noir of the polling communities never do that. Well, I think this should also be sort of a problem. We should know who we're talking to. One of your tweets was there will never be a permanent Democratic or Republican majority. True, but given that the most mild Democrat will acquiesce to the expansion of the state or push it or both, and the Republican will necessarily try to fight against the expansion of the state, which usually ends up to be a permanent thing, isn't this an argument for voting for the most extreme Republican you can every single time to keep the state from creeping even more? It feels like, you know, it feels like there has been less of a

penalty for extremism on both sides, whether it's Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. Now, extremism of what kind is sort of the question. I think in the Bernie Sanders case, it's a very clearly ideological thing, whereas in the Donald Trump case, it's just a temperamental extremism, but a moderation in terms of his overall policy views, in terms of how we understand the left and the right. He's marrying the big labor narrative on trade with a kind of far-right view of immigration. And he's not particularly doing anything to fight the expansion of the state and the deficits and whatnot.

So, again, I think that there's certainly kind of different dimensions of this. And I think like what we you know, my my thesis is essentially that parties are rational actors, and they will mobilize to essentially – they will adopt whatever positions that they need to adopt to have a chance at a 50% plus one coalition, even if that means dropping support for limited governments or if it means sort of um you know and this idea and some else in my tweet storm is the fact that like republicans and conservatives seem to have settled on this path of growing their support level through more populism and sort of rebelling against political correctness and then they uh have on you know kind of going back to sort of core principles of economic and fiscal conservatism. Right. Does it matter if we don't have a permanent Democratic or Republican majority nationally? Does it matter really if we have states themselves which do have permanent Democratic majorities? I mean, Texas they want to flip, but California's lost. New York is lost,

at least if you consider it a concern. And those set the tone on the agenda, culturally, politically. If you have permanent regimes, to use the word, in those states, I think the left would be perfectly happy if they didn't. Well, I think that everyone's happy. In some sense, everyone's happy because we're all going to move to a state where like that sort of are, you know, and most people live in states that are, you know, that, you know, reflect their own personal political preferences. And that's why, you know, I think it's very important for these elections coming up to pay attention to these governors races. Right. I mean, to pay attention to, you know, is there going to be a left turn in Florida, for example? Is there and whatnot? Because, you know, the states is where the action is happening. You know, as our federal politics have become more symbolic and grievance based, you know, the states are, you know, oftentimes where you don't have, you know, governors are doing are kind of creating almost these sanctuaries.

I mean, a lot of Democrat Democratic governors have basically run on this idea of we're going to, back to federalism, ironically, that we're going to resist the power of the federal government and we're going to create a, we're going to protect Californians and protect New Yorkers from Donald Trump. And I think Republicans also did that in the Obama years, or Perry had a lot of, you know, a lot, a lot of things to say about that in Texas. So I think these federal, you know, federalism matters and, you know, these state races do are going to be very important. Okay. We have the inevitable question, lightning round, who wins the house? I think Democrats are still favored to win the house, narrowly, but they're still favored.

But I think there's been some Republican- Three out of five, four out of five, that the Democrats win the house? I think it's somewhere between three and four out of five. I wouldn't put it, I'm not as confident as Nate Silver is. I think he's got an 85% chance. I would say it's more of a 75% chance, but hey, that could still mean that, you know, Republicans one in four, one in four times they could win the House. That's still a very real possibility. Okay. Republicans pick up how many seats in the Senate? I am, I'm a little bit, I am between one and two seats in the Senate. Oh, you are? Oh, Patrick. Oh, I was so enjoying this conversation.

I am by nature a pessimist, right? I'm by nature sort of, particularly as we get close to the election. I mean, in 2014, I was like, until the final weekend, I was like, I did not believe Republicans would win the Senate. And of course they won, you know, in a landslide. So I'm, that's sort of my bias. And I'm just sort of announcing all of my bias. Josh, Josh, Josh Hawley wins in Missouri. I think so. I think, you know, I think he wins. You know, I think that definitely we're going to see, you know, Heitkamp go down. And then, you know, it's just a question. I think that definitely we're going to see, you know, high camp go down. And then, you know, it's just a question. I think it just becomes very I think in a negative political environment, as I think this is likely to be, that I feel like it's usually, you know, it's very difficult for the sort of party on the on the opposite side of it to gain lots of seats. And so we may see that offset

either by Arizona or Nevada. I think, you know, possibly, I mean, I'm not willing to say which one of those goes Democratic. I think those have been leaning Republican a little bit. I mean, I think certainly both of them could go very, very easily. But there's some chance that Democrats pick up one of those seats. You sound like a man who has his reputation at risk here. Listen to me. I have nothing to lose. Republicans are going to pick up five seats, baby. They really are. Any surprises in the gubernatorial races? Surprises. What are we going to wake up on the day after election day to find out a Democrat just took over a Republican seat, state house or governor's mansion?

Well, the thing is it's so much easier to have, it's easier to have surprises in the gubernatorial elections because nobody's paying attention to that, right? So I think there's sort of like some talk about, oh, Democrats are competitive in South Dakota. And you've got, you know, I think like, you know, I think it would be a very nice surprise if Scott Walker wins, you know, in Wisconsin. It's a very tight race, but it's just striking to me that, you know, this was like he is such a he has been such an important figure in turning Wisconsin around that we're not paying more closer attention to that as opposed to the Beto mania, you know, that we're seeing. So I think that's DeSantis Gillum, the Democrat versus DeSantis, the Republican in Florida, gubernatorial race.

I think DeSantis is done. I think DeSantis has not run a very effective campaign, and hopefully it doesn't bring down Rick Scott as well. All right, Patrick. Well, we'll call you the day after the election and hold you to all of your predictions and your credibility will rest on your hands. Thanks for joining us on the podcast today. Thank you. I would like to apologize, however, to the listeners. Even if Yeti was able to get some of it out, my dog has come in with an antler, a reindeer bone, and has been gnawing on it. And I have to –

They do love those. They do love them. But the thing of it is you can't really take it away, first of all, because he might growl. Secondly, it helps clean his teeth. These hard things that dogs chew on help to clean. Maybe I should get one because I don't know how to do that. I mean that's just the thing. It's literally impossible.

So I took this thing, and because I want him to have clean teeth, I went downstairs and I put it on his bed because he loves his bed. But, oh, if he had a Casper, he'd on his bed because he loves his bed but oh if he had a casper he'd love his bed even more oh you just completely you well you know what you did i don't know why i'm telling you what you did you know what you did but you faked me out because i wasn't looking ahead at the spot and i thought we were doing quip and now you're doing casper i did here's where we insert a link to muhammad ali who's sort of just dancing around with his gloves down, taunting. Muhammad Ali gift for you. That was basically it.

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That's casper.com slash ricochet, promo code ricochet for $50 off select mattresses. Terms and conditions apply. And our thanks to Casper for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And as long as we're shilling for everything, there ought to be some auto shilling going on here. Rob, wouldn't you say? I would totally agree. As you know, I'm a big fan of auto shilling. I would like to say this, that if you're a member of Ricochet and you are listening to this podcast as a member, we thank you and we are pleased to have you as a member.

One of the problems we have on our side, the center are pleased to have you as a member. One of the problems we have on our side, the center-right, is that we complain a lot. And we complain a lot about the media we watch. We complain a lot about the shows we watch. And we complain, I think, with a lot of justification. But in this case, if you're listening and you've been meaning to become a member,

become a member today, please. Go to Ricochet.com and join. It's, you know, there's a $2.50 a month membership at the podcast level. That would be great. We'd be grateful if you want to bump that up. There are other tiers. We would love to have you – see you on the other tiers as well. Vote.

I mean obviously get a vote in the midterms. Vote also for the kind of media that you want. If somehow the earth was different, maybe we'd be doing this on National Public Radio. Maybe we'd be doing this on actually airways. But the world is not different. The world is kind of – the media world anyway is kind of bent against us and we have to bend it back. And if you join Ricochet, you will be striking a blow for exactly that. So I know a lot of people.

I meet them all the time. People say, oh, I'm going to join. I was going to join. I'm going to join. I'm going to – please do it today. We actually really do need you. This isn't just like a public TV tote bag mug, but it's all paid for by the Chubb group of insurance companies. This is entirely sponsored by you and by our good sponsors.

And the you part is where we fall a little short. So if you are trying to, if you've been putting it off, don't put it off. Join today, please. Ricochet.com. Maybe someday we'll be sponsored by the John T. and Catherine T. Which always cracks me up. There's another John and Catherine MacArthur Foundation out, McDonald Foundation, whatever it is, foundation out there that's doing it. And that T and that D have to be placed there to distinguish it from the other one.

Well, anyway, yeah, so Rob's right. Join. You'll sleep better. Now we welcome to the podcast Heather MacDonald, fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor of City Journal, and a New York Times bestselling author. She's a recipient of the 2005 Bradley Prize, and her new book is The Diversity Delusion, A Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture. Heather, welcome. Well, thanks, James.

You write and you note, as anybody who's been studying campuses for the last few years, that students emerge into the working world believing that human beings are defined by their skin color gender and sexual preference and that oppression based on these characteristics is the american experience speech that challenges these campus orthodoxies is silenced with brute force that makes them somewhat ill-prepared to go into the real world but of course the liberals are going to look at this and say that's completely exaggerating the truth of it, because you have to start by arguing with with first principles practically that the root that they believe that there is something uniquely bad and wrong about america let's start there how do you undo that fundamental concept that they all

seem to have that there is something uniquely sinful about the American experience. Well, James, I can start with a very particular example, which is where the students are right now, which is a college campus. Let's put aside for a moment their theory about America itself. But for any student, I don't care if he's green, purple, or orange, who thinks of himself as oppressed on a college campus is in the grips of a terrible delusion. There's no more tolerant, opportunity-filled environment in human history, leaving aside if you're a conservative, than a college campus. The faculty has nothing but respect and concern for history's traditionally oppressed groups.

The so-called students of color who are on American campuses today in every single selective college that exists are there because the administration wants them so badly that it has admitted them with test scores that are greatly one to two standard deviations below that of their white and Asian peers. There's not a single faculty search that isn't one desperate effort to find females and academic applicants of color to hire, to interview and hire. Every laboratory is open. Every library is open. Knowledge is at their fingertips.

These students are not oppressed. So for them to go around saying somehow they're living under a racist regime on a college campus, I think that is empirically demonstrably false. But Heather, can we turn – this is Rob Long, by the way. Thank you for joining us. Can we look at it from the other end of the telescope? I mean it does seem to me that they are at a racist institution. It was recently revealed in the lawsuit. I think it was part of the discovery of the lawsuit that some Asian students and groups have filed against Harvard that in what Harvard calls sparse county or sparse country, I guess, which is the part of the country, a lot of them in the south and in the Midwest where they don't get a lot of students.

They sent letters of – I'm reading this out from Reason. They sent letters of encouragement to those high school students in those areas, sparse country they call it, who score well on the PSAT. And so black, Hispanic, and Native Americans needed to score an 1,100 out of 1,600 to attract Harvard's attention. White students received letters if they achieved a 1310, but Asian males do not earn letters unless they scored 1380 or above on the PSATs. So, I mean, don't the plaintiffs in this lawsuit have a point? It does seem like Harvard is a racist institution, just not the kind of racist institution that the people you're writing about are claiming it is. Well, of course, but Rob, I mean, that's irrelevant to what the left is saying.

We can argue averse discrimination all you want, and I could not agree with you more, but that's not, I was responding to James' question, which is the dominant narrative. I'm changing it, though, Heather. That's my thing. I change it. I changed it. Well, okay, then I agree with you. It's my whole bit.

Okay. I got it. I got it. And certainly, and, you know, as far as I'm concerned, the most powerful critique of the universal regime of racial preferences is not the standard conservative one, which you just made, which is reverse discrimination, which is real. To be an Asian or to be a white, you have to present much higher grades and test scores than to be black or Hispanic. But the real fundamental flaw of this is that racial preferences harm their alleged beneficiaries, which is the black and Hispanic students, by catapulting them into academic environments for which they're not competitively prepared. And what inevitably happens is that they end up at the bottom of their class. This is not a way to break down negative racial stereotypes because students are living this. There's blacks who are never, almost never graduating the top of their classes

and they come into schools often intending to major in a science field and they can't keep up. Whereas if they'd been put into a school where they were competitively prepared, they would very likely graduate as a chemistry major or an engineering major, but simply not at the environment where they come in, again, with a one to two standard deviation below SAT scores.

Heather, Peter here. Peter Robinson, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for writing the book. Alright, so here's the... I want to go back. Reagan years, 1980s, those of us who were around then felt that we were making... we, conservatism,

free markets, general notion of individual liberty as opposed to identity politics. We were making progress everywhere except the universities. And the answer to that was, oh, don't worry about it. It's a very hard problem, but it'll solve itself. It's a matter of time. The 60s generation radicals who went into the universities and now have tenure will

begin retiring. And by about 2015, they'll be gone. It's 2018. And the universities are, if anything, more ideologically monolithic than they were in the first place. And I note that your subtitle is how race and gender pandering corrupt the university and undermine our culture far from representing a kind of anachronistic holdout the universities have become more culturally powerful

how did this happen what was wrong with our thinking back in the 80s that they just die out well i don't remember thinking that myself. I was deeply... You were always shrewder than the rest of us, Heather. What was... No, I guess I just... I mean, I don't know. Anybody that was keeping watch couldn't possibly think that

because the curriculum was being changed at an incredibly rapid pace. The fallacy, the ugliness, the hatefulness of multiculturalism that says that ignorant students should be given license to reject the greatest works of humankind simply because of the gonads and melanin of their authors. That was taking over from the literature department, spreading into history, spreading into philosophy, political theory. And it was clear that this ideology was perpetuating itself. Students were being brainwashed. The critique that I remember that I think is more plausible, because again, to me, it's naive to think that an ideology is going to die out

within an institution itself that is managing to work itself into DNA and like a cancer is taking over the chromosomal replication. But the Michael Barone critique of hard America and smart America, and he argued that, well, this campus nonsense is once students get out into the real world of free market competitive economics and firms that have to compete, that's going to be simply snuffed out because we can't afford to monkey around with identity politics when you've got a firm that wants to eat your lunch. I also was skeptical of that because, again, what we saw, you know, one of the most interesting

moments in far as marking the rapid, rapid influx of this destructive identity politics into the corporate world, into most worrisomely our technology firms was when Google in the August of 2017 fired a young computer engineer named James Damore who had dared to write a fact-based reason-filled 10-page memo taking issue with the feminist ideology that ruled Google. In the wake of his firing, somebody posted on an internal memo webpage for Google employees, we have to nip this diversity and sanity in the bud. Right now, our HR department, which in Google, in googly, cutesy language, you know, they have to have special names for all their functions. Their HR department is called People Analytics.

Our People Analytics is an outpost of women's studies and black studies, and that is the case. Corporate America now, their HR departments are completely on board with the whole implicit bias scam, and they're being taken over as well. I mean, Heather, I just want to say – Rob, excuse me. But for the record, I want to say I don't mind being called naive by Heather MacDonald as long as I'm in there with Michael Barone. Thanks, Heather. Yeah, that's great.

Hey, Heather, it's Rob again. Just two questions. One is, I mean, I have spoken to some very cynical people in business, and what they say is some version I'm paraphrasing of, this is the tax that we pay. It's just like any other tax. We don't like it, but we pay it because it makes life easier for us. And that this is the tax, the people at Google say that this is the tax that we pay. And you're saying, I think, that this tax isn't just a tax, it has really deep negative ramifications for the country and the economy and the culture. Is that right?

Yes. You know, after the Google firing of DeMoor, you had several things happen that really, again, need to be paid attention to. DeMoor initially brought a complaint before the regional board of the National Labor Relations Board, and an associate general counsel there upheld Google's actions on the ground that by writing a memo that laid out what psychology knows about the average career predilections of males and females. Again, not speaking about any individual female or any individual male, nor speaking about the females at Google, but just noticing that females, on average, tend to gravitate towards hands-on, human-based work that is conventionally understood to make the world a better place, and that males, on average, are more interested in abstract work, you know, working with ideas.

The NLRB said that by writing that memo, he had caused harm to Google's female employees and therefore could be found liable for sexual harassment and discrimination. So now we have government agencies that have been completely colonized by the feminist ideology. What happened next? An employee of YouTube sued YouTube and Google because he had been fired. He was in the HR department, and a diktatot had come down saying you will only interview females and applicants of color for entry-level engineering

jobs. And he said, I'm not going along with that, and he was fired. So you have now firms that are deliberately turning their backs on possibly groundbreaking talent simply because they are more obsessed about their gender proportionality.

Heather, at the same time, however, white women are taking it on the chin rhetorically these days because there's two things going on. One, the need to find a new group to elevate has found the transgender people and established that they through self-identification can be as much of a woman as somebody who's always been a woman and this leads to the you know the battle over turfs the trans excluding radical feminists who don't want to have men in their spaces and everyone telling the turf to shut down and you know just shut up and sit down. And you have any number of commentators on the left who are saying that white women are the problem.

It's one of those new terms that you can say, and everybody nods, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. How's this going to play out exactly? Because this does not seem to be a group that expected to find itself on the demonized end of things. They thought they were going to be the ones who would be able to demonize the wrongdoers. It's hilarious. It is delicious. I just, I cheer it on. The totem pole of victimhood is ruthlessly competitive.

It is a hand-to-hand battle to see who gets to be top dog. Right now, trans is on top. It won't last. You know, We should have a sweepstakes. Whoever gets to guess who's going to be the next top dog victim gets a huge prize because I don't have the vision to see it, but it is coming. And yes, it is fabulous that there is this internecine warfare through the language of intersectionality where different groups are now claiming they have the highest number of victim points. And so you had, even before the Christine Blasey Ford, the Kavanaugh hysteria, which was, again, were all in Gender Studies 101. That was about as clear an example of the fact that you have to pay attention to campus politics

because what we saw in the real world was a blow-by-blow instantiation of the madness that's been going on around so-called rape on campuses. But even before that, there was breakouts where the Women's March, the 2017 anti-Trump Women's March, was criticized for not paying enough attention to trans people because the pussy hat, you can't use the word pussy because then you're devaluing trans people who don't have pussies, and blacks were saying it's not sufficiently sensitive to Black Lives Matter.

There was a woman who wrote an op-ed in Harper's Bazaar, another one of these bizarre examples where these women's magazines have turned completely left. She wrote an article saying, feminism is white supremacy in heels, saying, oh, these white women, they have white tears. But then Kavanaugh happened, and for a while, white women got exemptions. So, Kavanaugh was the embodiment

of white male privilege. Everybody ignored the fact that Ford was white and really privileged, but then when Susan Collins voted for and gave a very 45-minute rational description of due process, standards of proof, the fact that Kavanaugh was a mainstream jurisprudential thinker,

all of a sudden, then whiteness and women got blended into evil again, and everybody's attacking white women for being part of white supremacy. So it's a completely unstable set of coalitions. And the thing that I love as well is feminists that are all for Title IX and strong women being together in their sports accomplishments are having to swallow when it comes to trans bicyclists, you know, these big guys with their thick legs and upper bodies claiming to be females and taking the prize, you know, again, who do we care about most? And you see this in the women's colleges as well.

They just twisted themselves in knots of what to do about if you're a male that's gone female, does the transness cancel the original sin of being a male? And it turns out that it did. So for now, trans trumps females, but something else will come along. Heather, Peter here. A huge, inherently unstable coalition. Is Donald Trump the right man to break it up? What should sensible the sane half half of the country, as Molly Hemingway refers to it, what should the sane half of the country do? ends up having more of a positive effect or a negative effect. You know, in many ways, I think he is the antithesis of conservative values in terms of understanding the fragility of civility. I think he's the worst possible example of males, thin-skinned, vindictive, the opposite of magnanimous, yet clearly, you know, the vote for him, driven largely by immigration, but also a sort of a protest

against the whites of this country who are sick of being told that they are toxic and bearers of original sin. They're not. You know, this country is made up of very good-hearted people that really don't give a damn about race, and they are sick of being demonized like this. But on the other hand, you know, he's got some real flaws. I think what needs to happen,

and this is true for the free speech problem as well, the free speech problem cannot be taken on simply by passing little peons to free speech and urging everybody to respect the other side and tolerate dissent. The real core poison of identity politics is this belief that we began with that America is fundamentally racist and sexist. And that any, what this results in is that any disparity in representation, any institution that is not 50-50 male-female is, if you believe in

identity politics, that disparity can only result from sexism because it is taboo to say that males and females differ in certain fundamental ways, whether it comes to high-end math skills or psychological predilections, risk-taking, an appetite for competition, they differ. You're not allowed to say that when it comes to racial proportionality and the institution that is not proportionally racially. You're not allowed to notice that there are significant behavioral differences, educational differences, the academic achievement gap is completely put off stage. And as long as you believe that it's the result of racism and sexism, quotas follow. So I think all of us, certainly in the opinion sphere, but even if you're not, that's the fundamental lie

that has to be beaten back, which is the idea that disparities are the result of discrimination as opposed to – we are a meritocratic system, but it is unrealistic to expect proportionality throughout every mainstream institution. Hey, Heather, it's Rob Long. This is sort of a – I know you're not my therapist. I'll just start with that. But when you talk about the racial disparities in academic achievement, I get uncomfortable because – and I think I speak for a lot of people, and I think people get uncomfortable, and they reach for quotas as the reason, and they reach for institutional racism as the reason because it's a specific thing that we can talk about and we can agitate against. As you said, once you say that, quotas follow. By definition, they follow. that I and people like you or people like me who are uncomfortable with this conversation, we take your premise about the academic – the difference in academic achievement and academic record. What do we do? We yank out quotas, but what do we do so that that doesn't seem so glaring?

Name one solution that we could sort of all of us who accept your premise and accept your research and accept your conclusions could do um to maybe offset that difference if possible if it is possible well and let me just state what it is i mean your average black 12th grader reads in this country at the level of a white 8th grader. There has been a 200-point test score gap in the 1600-point SAT scale for decades now. So, again, to expect that we're going to have equal numbers of black doctors or black lawyers is, again, simply delusional given what the academic skills gap is. It seems to me we have been trying in this country for a long time. There's a fierce debate that's been going on for decades about how to reform schools.

Conservatives have been for vouchers. They're anti-unions. They're for reform schools. Conservatives have been for vouchers. They're anti-unions. They're for charter schools. Obviously, liberals are for greater spending, getting rid of any kind of selective entrance exams. I don't think it's for lack of concern on the part of the public. Now, it is going on to a large extent in an informational vacuum because the public is largely kept ignorant just as they're ignorant about the even greater crime gap because it is taboo to talk about that. But at some point, I'm afraid this is not a thing that whites can solve,

which isn't to say that each side should be advocating for its form of educational reform. In my case, that would be high standards, not believing in disparate impact as a theory for school discipline, but holding everybody to the same standard of high expectations. But at some point, this is a cultural matter, and the anti-white ethic that is absolutely ubiquitous in, above all, inner-city communities, but to a certain extent it's a little broader than that, that views educational effort and being very rigorous and doing your homework as a form of acting white, that's a hard thing to overcome. If blacks, you know, I have a thought experiment. If blacks acted like Asians in all things for at least a decade with similar levels of academic achievement, doing their homework, taking their... Here's an easy thing. Take your textbooks home and do your

homework. Talk to inner city schools. That's a very... Teachers, that's a hard thing to get students to do. Don't be truant. The black truancy rate is five times higher than that of whites in California. If you're not in school, you can't learn. If blacks had the same out-of-redlock child-rearing child birth rate as Asians, if they graduated from high school at the same rate, and we still saw these socioeconomic disparities, at that point, it is time to have a conversation about racism. But when the behavioral disparities are as great as they are, to talk about racism as the only allowable explanation for those disparities,

I think is not just wrong, it is dangerous, because it puts off again and again and again the reckoning that actually does have a chance of reducing them. If you find this piquant and interesting, and we do, Heather's new book is The Diversity Delusion, How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture. Thanks for joining us today in the podcast, Heather. We'll talk to you later. James, Peter, and Rob, thank you so much. It's always a pleasure.

Thanks, Heather. Heather, a pleasure, a pleasure. Thank you. Great discussion. I'm honored. Even if you did call me naive. You are. She's right.

In a good, hearted way. In a good, hearted way, yes. I'm going to be sulking all day. I didn't know you were one of those. I don't blame her research. No, no. Stop right there, Rob Long. I'll let Heather call me naive, but not you, baby.

Thanks, Heather. Okay, thank you. Bye-bye. Rob, you missed the opportunity to ruin a segue before. Do you have any requests? Oh, um... Let me think. You missed the opportunity to ruin a segue before. Do you have any requests? Oh, let me think. No, I think I'd rather just do it improv style.

Like you just go about your business and let me, you know, yes and you. Really? Okay. Well, then what I could do is just simply talk about anything and you would be desperate to find out whether or not that word or that particular phrase was a way into it. We were going to talk about Megyn Kelly though, right? Because Megyn Kelly has just been unceremoniously – I don't know if there's any – maybe there is a ceremony involved. Well, the ceremony is she will continue to get paid. $69 million is one heck of a ceremony. How long do you think a ceremony like that would last, though, Rob, when you get called in and they have to do the professional defenestration?

Longer than you think. I mean probably longer than it takes to brush your teeth, that's for sure. Oh, boy. Yeah, I see where you're going with that one. But you really should have given me a little bit more rope with that one. Because if it takes like two minutes to get rid of somebody for $69 million, then that's – two minutes can be a long time when you're being called on the carpet by your boss. But two minutes can seem like an eternity when you're brushing your teeth. I mean seriously, if you say to anybody – you hand them the toothbrush and you say, all right, brush your teeth for two minutes. They're going to be like – but the thing with a quip is that it just seems like that. And I'll tell you why. Quip is, well,

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Yeah, I mean she wasn't really performing for them, and they paid for a lot of these turfings out is that it's an easy way to get rid of somebody and then not really have to pay them or not have to pay them their full amount. I mean they had already talked about ways to unwind that third hour of the Today Show for her. I don't think the show is – Megyn Kelly, whatever, is doing as well. They've already sort of dropped down the weekend. She had a weekend show they sort of took essentially off the air, but this is way before this. Look, these are high stakes, right? It's really high stakes. Mostly these kind of networks, especially for shows like this, try to avoid trouble.

Like that's their – they wake up in the morning like, how do I avoid trouble? And it looked like this was trouble. Like that's their – they wake up in the morning like how do I avoid trouble? And it looked like this was trouble. I mean the analog here is the Roseanne story, which is – we all know the story. Roseanne came back, was revived by ABC, did very, very well. And a lot of people attribute that to her politics, which I think was a mistake. But they did anyway. And then she sort of imploded in April or May, and they took the show off the air. They fired her and took the show off the air, and then they rebooted it just without her.

Her character is now dead, and it's called The Conners. It's just the family. And it's – depending on what acts you have to grind, it's's actually but it's either a disaster because it it went down 12 15 20 percent or it's a not but the truth is it's a pretty good show and it's a pretty good performer for them it's in the top 20 um and it's a good show for every abc and what they did was they just hedged the risk they took the risk out of the show the risk was that she's an erratic person so let's take it out and see what we get. And what they get is a pretty strong comedy. So, you know, if you're a

company, that was a good choice. Go ahead. I'd like to assign an essay question to you. Yes. And the subject is, walking away from a hit because you think you can do even better. Shelley Long and Megyn Kelly, compare and contrast. Very good's a that's exactly

right shelly don't don't forget mclean stevenson and mclean stevenson right well mclean stevenson thought he should be the the star of a show and so he wanted he didn't want to be a um better remind the younger viewers yeah younger under 70 long mclean stevenson i know unfortunately mclean stevenson was the um was a supporting player in a sitcom called MASH, which was set in the Korean War. And Shelly Long was the original – was a star, co-star of Cheers. She was on before I got there from the – for the first through the fifth season. And then she wanted to be a movie star. So she left to be a movie star so she left to be a

movie star she would not sign a new deal and no one ever heard of her again and well they heard she had many many many uh disasters um and megan kelly uh i think the interesting thing for i mean people who are on the center right is that meyn Kelly wanted to get out of the Fox ghetto. She wanted to not be seen as just a Fox person. And so by moving to NBC, she felt it gave her some wider credibility in the world and certainly in the media world. And that has been – that has not happened. And people thought that Megyn Kelly was going to break the Fox window, as they say. And it turns out that she did not. And it also turns out that the minute she said something that anyone found objectionable, you can just look at some of the comments and stuff.

It felt like, of course, because they hired her from Fox. So it's bad news. It's a very bad day. You should short, if you're in the trading business, short Fox TV personalities whose contracts are up for renewal at Fox because they have no leverage as of Megyn Kelly's departure. None because they can't go anywhere else because it looks like the fatwa against Fox personalities is still or maybe even stronger than it was before. So if you're Tucker Carlson or you're Laura Ingraham or you're – I mean I don't know. If you're Shepard Smith and you want more money from Fox and you say, well, listen, if you don't pay me, I'll go over to MSNBC or NBC or CNN or wherever. The truth is you probably won't. There probably won't be an offer for you.

I think it's bad news for everybody. Well, I was reading yesterday speculation that Megyn Kelly may want to go back to Fox, speculation that CNN may crook a finger to Megyn Kelly. Megyn Kelly and I think – really? I mean is the pool of available people so small that they have to change from one network to the other? Aren't there lots of other people out there better who can be had for less money? And let's say they flame after a month. Okay, you tried it and it didn't work.

Yeah, but again, that's risk. So companies are trying to hedge risk, and the way you hedge risk in the feature film business and the TV business and the TV news business is recognizable faces and names. It's that if I have a recognizable face and a name, I'm already on second base. I may not make it to home, but at least I don't have to get to second base because people know who she is. So CNN, if CNN really was smart, they would actually go for Megyn Kelly, and they would make her – they would try to maybe bridge the gap to some of these um conservative viewers who now just do not want to watch so so question paula zahn now that we're talking grandpa talk remember paula zahn was one of the fox news early personalities and she walked away from roger ailes and i believe she went to cnn and it's not as if nobody ever heard from her again but she didn't it was it wasn't an explosion like megan kelly but her career megan kelly just blew herself up paul is on just faded away

why do certain people do well on fox and by the way the point here is that neither paul is on nor megan kelly was a sean hannity overtly right-wing figure right they were both playing it even on fox as kind of moderate observers middle of the road why don't they translate to other operations i would say two reasons one because they are they are slightly embarrassed by the baggage they brought and they don't want to you know you don't want to wear the dresses they came with so um and i think that was a mistake for megan kelly i think megan kelly Kelly is a sort of – she's personally a very conservative person. I mean she's a very religious conservative.

And it seemed to me like that would have been a really interesting thing to bring on NBC on Monday – on the third hour of Today Show. But they kind of want to like – no, no, no. All the things that you find –'s a very tv it's a very very much part of the television business is all the things that you find interesting about a person or a script or a show that's the first thing the executives want to remove right when i you know when i pitch a show or i do a show and i'm like they'll say we love it we love it we love it they'll identify the one thing that's interesting about it or different – but you don't need that, right? Because their natural inclination is to run off the edges.

So they brought Megyn Kelly from Fox because she had an audience from Fox and because people believe – okay, well, she's at least approaching news stories from my general point of view. And the first thing they said to her was like, well, don't do that. And she said, okay, I won't do that. Well, all right, that's fine, but then you're just like everybody else. And that's the downside of hedging, right? The upside of hedging is you start on second base. The downside of hedging is

you're just hitting doubles. Interestingly, a lot of people don't know this, but Gene Roddenberry originally pitched Star Trek as a World War II naval drama. No. I thought it was a blimp. No, Mar Trek.

They said, we love it, it's a great idea, but how about if it's in space, which is what he really wanted. What Rod is saying, essentially, is go in and pitch the opposite of what you want in the network suits, and their notes, by the time they're done, will turn it into the thing that you really want. Well, good luck to Megan and everybody else who won the lottery and is now walking around sloshing with millions of dollars uh if you're one of those people good for you

throw a little bit of it towards ricochet and if you're not one of those people you know you might want to still do that anyway to make sure that we're here for the 2016 2018 2020 24 all the elections that are going to matter you'll want to discuss it on Ricochet. And which we haven't really noticed, it's not just a place where there are a lot of podcasts. There's great posts, member feeds, and there's a civil discussion going on in the comments where, yeah, some elbows get thrown and maybe on occasion a sternum will get poked. But there's a code of conduct. People behave. And we all belong to something.

And it's cool. You, by the way, also want all belong to something and it's cool you by the way um also want to belong to a quip you want to belong to a casper or an era or vice versa i don't care they're just great products and you can support us by supporting them in your life be better for all of them we also mentioned every single time go to itunes please give us a good review and the new reviewers will discover us but it it does matter. It does count because more listeners, more subscribers means that the show and the podcast and Ricochet keeps going.

It's been fun. Rob, Peter, we'll see you next week. Next week. Next week, fellas. Caravan is on its way. I can hear the merry gypsy play Mama, mama, I look at Amarillo She's out playing with the radio La, la, la, la La La la la la La la la La la la la

La la la Yeah the caravan has all my friends Yeah they'll stay with me until the end Gypsy ride when the sweet amber roll Tell me everything I need to know La, la, la, la

La, la, la, la La, la, la, la La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, Hear the song Switch on your electric light That we can get down To what is really wrong I long to hold you tight So I can feel you Sweet lady of the night I shall reveal you

If you will Turn it up Turn it up A little bit higher Radio Turn it up Burn little bit higher Radio Turn it up Burn it up So you know

Radio La la la la La la la La la la la La la la Yeah the car brand is pretty red and white That means everybody's staying overnight Yeah, the brownfoot gypsy boy

On a campfire singing play Yeah, the woman tells us off her way La, la, la, la La, la, la, la Ricochet! Join the conversation. Thank you. I shall reveal you Turn it up. Thank you. Bye.