The Ricochet Podcast - Change Is Good

Episode Date: June 12, 2014

This week, we’re all about change: change the Majority Leader, a change of life, loose change, and more. Our guests are The Campaign Stop’s Jim Geraghty, (read his new book The Weed Agency: A Comic Tale of Federal Bureaucracy Without Limits) to discuss the political earthquake that happened this week, and Kevin Williamson, who stops by to talk about Iraq, his transgendered controversy... Source

activate program more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism well i'm not a crook i'll never do a lot but i am not a bully mr gorbachev tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long, and Rob Long's dog in the background. I'm James Lilacs, and our guests today, well, it's a National Review Roundup. We've got Jim Garrity, author of The Weed Agency, and Kevin D. Williamson. Lots to talk about, as you might well guess. Let's have ourselves a podcast. There you go again. Welcome, everyone. This is the Ricochet Podcast number 218,

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It's an interesting book, and we'll be talking about that as well. But we remind you that none of this stuff on Ricochet would be possible without Ricochet itself. And Ricochet is made possible, of course, by the founders, Rob Long. And we used to have Peter Robinson, but in a stunning earthquake that people in Washington are still talking about, Peter has been completely replaced by somebody you've never heard of, who's an economics professor from Iowa. We'll introduce him in a second. But, Rob, I believe you have a pitch to make as to why people should –

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Go with a good old-fashioned American one. Really? The American pronunciation of the French word. But speaking of things bouncing off other things and going into directions you don't expect them to, Peter, George Bush handed Barack Obama a reasonably functional, stable sort of, at least by the standards of the area, country in the Middle East, Iraq. And it appears now that racing towards Baghdad appears to be the worst kind of people possible. And it's entirely within the realm of conceivability that the entire Iraq adventure ends with Islamists in power. What say you?

It's tragic. One-third of the country seems to be home and dry. The Kurds up in the north really do seem to have set up a functioning – it's a country in every regard except diplomatic recognition and a seat at the United Nations. They have two political parties. They hold elections. The economy is growing. They're home and dry. The Kurds will start to get that sort of respect once they start killing Jews. They hold elections. The economy is growing. They're home and dry.

The Kurds will start to get that sort of respect once they start killing Jews. But go on. That's the way the Middle East works. And as for the rest of it, what is there to say? It's horrifying. It's just horrifying. I mean you could argue either way that George Bush should not have gone in in the first place. And I am willing to say that there's an argument to that effect. John Yoo of all people who wrote the so-called torture memo and has been vilified ever since as a central player in the invasion of Iraq himself has said on the record to me that he wishes we had never gone in and thought at the time it was a mistake.

Legally justified but still a mistake. Or you can say that he did exactly what he had to do. But whatever view you take of how it all got started 11 years ago, nobody can be happy that Iraq was functioning. It had a chance and now it's circling the drain. Well, it's one more – I mean obviously the Kurds have problems too. But it's one more betrayal of the Kurds. It's one more betrayal. mean obviously the Kurds have problems too, but it's one more betrayal of the Kurds. It's one more betrayal. So that's the problem.

We tell them at one point early on after the war, which again I was ambivalent about, but we tell them you do not – you will not have independence. You cannot have independence. You don't have an independent state. A unified Iraq is part of what we're trying to do. We are – we're going to build a unified Iraq. You just have independence. You don't have an independent state. A unified Iraq is part of what we're trying to do. We are – we're going to build a unified Iraq. You just sit tight. And then now that it's falling apart, they have every right and I think every justification and it's a rational decision for them to break away, which I don't think was's going to be – it's not going to leave the rest of Iraq in very good shape. It will probably lead to a certain amount – to a civil war of some kind. But they have every right. We betrayed them.

By the way, I know the signal the president should send. He should take five top-ranking Taliban from Gitmo and release them as a – oh, no. He did that, didn't he? Yeah, no. He should find the ones who are more comfortable in Iraq. Yeah. But it's really what's going to happen. It's the only thing that can happen at this point. Unless everybody suddenly decides, oh, big mistake.

Let's go back to the way it was. No, they won't. New York Times today, as the threat from Sunni militants in Western Iraq escalated last month, Prime Minister Malakai secretly asked the Obama administration to consider carrying out airstrikes against extremist staging areas, according to Iraqi and American officials. The Times continues. But Iraq's appeal for a military response has so far been rebuffed by the White House, which has been reluctant to open a new chapter in a conflict that President Obama has insisted was over when the United States withdrew the last of its forces from Iraq in 2011. So they asked us, hey, you've got a lot of jets.

Could you just wrap these guys? Could you just really give them a pasting because it would help? And no, we can't do that. No, because it's over. See, it's not that we – victory is irrelevant. The idea of actually staying and winning and accomplishing something is irrelevant. What counts is that he made it over. And for that, he expects to be patted on the back by history unto the end of days.

It's funny, though. I mean, I was at dinner last night with a bunch of people, and I said, remember Boko Haram? What? Bring our girls back. Remember that? That was a couple weeks ago? Bring our girls back. Remember that? That was a couple weeks ago. Bring our girls back. That was the most important foreign policy initiative of the Obama administration is bring our girls back.

And then a bunch of other stuff happened, and then we forgot that. And there does seem to be this crazy, very strange, odd kind of spinning out of control. I mean I was just looking at Iraq. OK, there's Iraq and there's also the Middle East right now. I'm talking specifically foreign policy. Sort of a very strange position happening right now in the South American Southwest where there are thousands, tens of thousands of young children from Central and South America and Central America and Mexico who've come up through the border because they've been hurt. They've heard that this amnesty. I mean, when is all when do all these chickens come home to roost? It's a very strange.

This is a very strange, chaotic beginning to the summer is I guess what I'm trying to say. Yeah, yeah. Well, one time they come home to roost, of course, is in November, Election Day. None of this is good for the Democrats. But the more frightening prospect is that this man still has more than two years to go in office. I cannot recall – I cannot recall our lifetimes, Rob. My lifetime is longer than yours. It's longer than James's.

Since the Second World War, has there been a – yes. It's the way things felt. Actually, you two are probably too young to remember this. I can actually remember it. It's the way things felt in the final year of Jimmy Carter's administration. I remember that. I remember that very well. I exactly remember what that was like. This feeling of complete national shrinkage, this feeling that there was nothing that we could do, that the world was no longer something that we could influence, and that it was actually pointless to try, and that what we had ahead of us was a future of pollution and scarcity. But of course, that didn't happen, did it? No, it didn't. Soil and green did not

come about. And why was that? Well, part of the reason, of course, as the good liberals will tell you, is that government agencies interceded on behalf of mankind and made sure that there was no pollution and made sure that there was no scarcity. Because if there's anything that you want to do to make sure that society runs as well as possible, it's put a government agency in front of it. As a matter of fact, something like, oh, an agency to control to maybe, I don't know, weeds come to mind. The Weed Agency, actually, now that I think about it, is a title of a book by Jim Garrity, a hilarious novel that is getting rave reviews everywhere and is into its 58th printing or something like that. And of course, novelism is only one of Jim's attributes.

Mr. Garrity also writes the campaign spot over at National Review, an email that you can get daily, giving you wisdom and amusement from the heart of the beast. It's a great email. It is. It's absolutely deathless and indispensable, which is why Hugh Hewitt calls him Garrity the Indispensable. And we have him here now on the podcast to talk about what happened to Mr. Kander. Jim, welcome.

We just gave you props for your novel, and we'll get to that in a second. But, of course, we have to pick your brain here on the earthquake of D.C. Excellent, yes. A mega earthquake. Tsunami, earthquake, forest fire, Hindenburg, Titanic, you know. Really? Really, Jim? This is Rob, by the way.

Yeah, hey, Rob. Good to see you. Metaphorically see you. Yeah. It is a big deal because you don't usually see House Majority Leaders lose by a bunch to a guy who they had, you know, nobody's ever heard of when, you know, I was spending the other guy 40 to one. And, you know, there's, you know, everyone's like, say, well, let's let's find our reason and pick it and focus on that and kind of ignore all the other ones. I'm one of those guys who believes, look, you cannot ignore the immigration issue in this in this debate.

And I really kind of feel like there are times where the immigration issue is really big in the news. And then there are months where it kind of fades to the background. You've got to figure the tsunami – there we go with the disaster metaphors again – these tens of thousands of kids coming across the border unaccompanied, and that being a big story on Drudge and a big story on Fox and all that kind of stuff. It was a very visceral way of illustrating the illegal immigration problem in this country and how even seemingly well-meaning ideas like, well, how about the kids? It's not the kids' fault they

came to the country illegally, so let's give them a path to citizenship. They're not drug dealers. They're not gang members. They're not the problem. And then all of a sudden you create this humanitarian crisis because you've created this giant incentive here. So Cantor found himself himself not defending the indefensible, defending an approach to the issue that was very tough to sell to Republican voters, and that was a catalyst. Now, did he not do enough town halls in his home district? Sure.

You know, all these other factors, the idea of him, you know, spending too much time focusing on, time focusing on leadership issues and not enough on his district. Yeah, I'm sure that's a factor. But that – he's not the first guy to take a position in the leadership and maybe kind of slack off a bit and the tsunami and the tidal wave, Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, a couple of other prominent Republicans said, well, I still believe in immigration reform. No, in comprehensive immigration reform, which is our dear friend Mickey Kaus. My dear friend Mickey Kaus says it as always, it's a dog whistle. It's code word. It's amnesty. All right, that's fine.

Are they crazy or do they know something I don't? Is the situation, the humanitarian situation, which seems to me from the verbal descriptions because we haven't seen that many pictures of what it looks like, it seems to me the problem in the southwest right now is a bad problem, but it doesn't seem to be on the front page in the kinds of pictures you would need to galvanize an American outcry. Are they crazy? Are they going to get what they want anyway?

I'm right now something of a relative optimist compared to Mickey Kaus, who, by the way, can, you know, can with only slight tongue in cheek, call himself the King maker out in Virginia. I know, I know. We can talk about that too. I had looked at the situation and said, all right,

you know, brought, we'll do better than your average challenger. Maybe get about 40%. He'll put a bit of a scare into, into Cantor, but come on, you know,

uh, Cantor's just got all of these big institutional advantages. And so obviously, you know, it shows you how much I know. I think, look, it is going to be very, very tough to get any immigration bill through the House. And barring some dramatic change in the political environment, Republicans are not going to lose the House in 2014. So Barack Obama's going to be dealing with a Republican House for the rest of his presidency.

He kind of thinks he's going to – at some point, they're going to fold. At some point, they're going to say, oh, we desperately need to pass this. And one, I think at least 218 Republicans aren't convinced that they have to pass this. Now, there are some, and I think Boehner might be one of them, who think, no, no, we've got to do this. We've got to get back warm and fuzzy with no, no, we got to do this. We got to get back, you know, warm and fuzzy with the Latino vote, and this will do it. But Jim Peter Robinson here, you're putting it in a weak way, it seems to me. I just want to question your formulation. 218 Republicans are not convinced that they have to do it.

Good Lord, Eric Cantor just got his backside handed to him on a platter. There are at least 218 Republicans who are totally convinced that they had better not do it. I mean, Boehner, Paul Ryan, call your office. Wake up. It's done. Isn't that right? The flip side, though, is that they'd like to be able to look like they're doing something. Right? I mean, here's the thing.

Maybe Mitt Romney is the wrong example. I am one of those guys who actually could live with a path to citizenship at some point in the future. Once you secure the border and once we go through the 11 million people here and you weed out the gang members, the drug dealers, those with DUIs, anybody who's not going to be a good American. And then once you've got those folks left, then you can look at them and say, all right, how many people actually want to become U.S. citizens, and how many of you actually just want a work visa? But my suspicion is that a large chunk of them aren't interested in becoming American citizens. I think a lot of them just want to make a living here and return to some home state. Which, by the way, I think to a lot of Republicans would be a lot more acceptable.

The Democrats view this entire issue as, when do I get my 11 million new voters? And it's like winning the lottery to them. And that's like, well, can I get it today? Can I get it next year? How about two years from now? When can I get my 11 million new voters? And that's obviously what Republicans not wishing to self-immolate aren't willing to do this. The problem is how do you, you know, how you, because the Democrats are so determined to get to that 11 million new voter point that one, they don't care about the border

stuff. They don't care about any solution short of them winning the lottery and getting 11 million new voters. But isn't what's happening right now in Arizona and other states, aren't these the wages of amnesty? Oh, yeah. So it's hard for me to see that there could be – I mean, look, the Obama strategy was simple. You play it out and then you wrap it around Republicans' heads in the midterm and the general by saying they don't like Hispanics. They're racist.

But this seems to me to be a category different from that. And were I Barack Obama, I'd be thinking this is bad news for me. This is a blunder. And there seems to be zero action on the part of the federal government, zero action in the part of the president to sort of grapple with this. I think he wants it all to go away, right? So – Yeah, that's – I assume you guys saw the great Politico article that basically said,

look, Obama's post-presidency is beginning now. I mean he's mentally already checked out and thinking about his memoirs and stuff like that. We say we're not doing anything. Look, we're doing – we're opening up new military bases to use as temporary housing for these folks, these poor kids. And that's the idea of a response there. Now, a rational president would say, okay, this is, one, devastating to these communities. We have the military and all these groups that are not designed to be processing illegal immigrants.

Suddenly running around trying to deal with a humanitarian crisis, I've got to do something about it. Obama seems to think that I think we've really reached the point where he only sees things through the lens of domestic politics. And as a result of that, he's got to say, look, this just illustrates

why we need this even more, why we need to give these kids a path to citizenship even more. I mean, he still thinks he won the competition. Is that going to work? What? Is that going to work? Well, here's the thing. He's not up for reelection anymore.

And so I don't know if, like, the traditional check on him doing really foolish things was, well, Mr. President, this will hurt your reelection bid. That's not there anymore. And, you know, if he was really that worried about the midterms for Democrats, he wouldn't have pushed a giant new restriction on carbon emissions with a whole bunch of red state Democrats running for reelection. I mean, he is now kind of as free to be the president he wants to be. And that's kind of this, you know, there's some fairly, this is our worst case scenario in some ways as conservatives. We've got this liberal president

who's, you know, completely going to pursue wherever he wants to pursue i've got my phone i've got my pen i'm going to do it through executive orders but the good news for us is that there's that he's now at a point where he's willing to do things that are not as politically advantageous giving us opportunities i.e hold up you know keystone for endless amounts of time and stuff like that right Right. Okay. Okay, Peter, sorry. No, Jim. So I don't know if you saw it yesterday,

but Steve Hayward had a piece on Powerline that I read twice because the first time I thought, this is just crazy. And then I got to the bottom and thought to myself, but Steve isn't crazy. I'd better look at the – Steve says, hold on, here's what's likely to happen. And he actually did say he thinks that it's quite more than possible, even probable. We get to 2015, let's say, and Barack Obama simply uses his powers as chief executive of the United States to pardon every immigrant in this country illegally and tosses that in the faces of the republicans who will by then control both the house and the senate what are you going to do about that impeach me

go ahead ah what do you think i had not i have not heard of that scenario and on the way though i i have sounds crazy but it sounds crazy but not at the same time, doesn't it? No, it's not like – you notice I'm not saying, oh, Obama wouldn't do that. Or he can't do that, yeah. Peter, he has way too much respect for the rule of law and the constitution. Right, right, right. That's what nobody is saying. You're right.

That would be demagogic and uh yeah so i'll be pretty obviously he would uh uh yeah let's wait i i i would be stunned if this wasn't being discussed somewhere uh within the you know amongst valerie jared and and you know the crew like that i do think there would be a dean it'd be impressing in that scenario to see what hillary clinton did because as much as obama might say i am cement cementing the Latino vote with Democrats for a generation at least, and this will be truly my fantastic legacy, I literally, they always say politicians wish they could vote themselves a new electorate. Through this, by the stroke of a pen, I'm giving U.S. citizenship to every single person who's here illegally.

That would be literally voting himself a new electorate. The two problems there are, one, you've got to figure the Supreme Court would come down hard on that, that they would kind of argue that this is, you know, that it wouldn't be that hard to make five votes to say this is a wholesale rewriting of the law. This is not meant to be done by one man for rather partisan and obvious political motivations. Two, I'm not sure Hillary would want to sign on to something like that. Because you have to figure, amongst you, one of the great ironies of this, I had this tweet that kind of went pretty well the other night, was that, look, there are a lot of people who

like, quote unquote, amnesty, depending on how much you define it. Big industry, big businesses love it. Obviously, Democrats on how much you define it. You have the big industry, big businesses love it. Obviously, Democrats love it. They see it as new voters. Obviously, the interest groups, the activists, the media loves it. Everybody except the voters, you know, and the voters never quite get with the program. And some people say, oh, you think of, you know, these crazy racist rednecks who are xenophobic and all that stuff. But look, you know, amnesty does not play well stuff but look you know amnesty does not you know play well amongst african-americans amnesty does not even necessarily play all that well with legal immigrants because they feel like they you know follow the rules and stuff so there's this fairly wide broad um movement of folks who don't like this every time i remember

this having this fight with the bush administration back in 2007 um the problem is that the public doesn't really like it. Even if you can word the questions and get people to say, yes, I do support immigration reform. I think PP should we fix our immigration problem. Well, that's generic, huh? You can just project whatever option you wanted to that one.

But much like the gun issue, all of the intensity is on one side. And so all of the support for quote-unquote amnesty or past citizenship, it might be a mile wide, but it's an inch deep and people won't necessarily vote on it. Whereas the executive order mass citizenship process, I think – That's more attractive. Hey, Jim, you live in Virginia. What do we know about David Bratt? And here's my background question. When the results came in that Cantor had lost and Bratt had won, our friend, one of Rob's closest friends, our friend Mike Murphy sent out a tweet saying the stupid wing wins, stupid wing of the Republican Party. But it then began to become quite clear that David Bratt, whatever else he may be, is not stupid. Isn't that right?

What can you tell us about him? Sure. That's actually one of the big discussions going on in GOP circles right now. And one, I don't like the idea of calling either wing of the party the stupid party. I think there's plenty of stupidity to go around. But the second thing is that – so Brat, look, as an economics professor, he does know this kind of stuff. You generally don't get to that position without being unable to express it. Now, the Daily Rundown interview he did with Chuck Todd may not have been quite so prepared for and got asked about minimum wage and kind of had to come back to that and stuff like that.

Here's the thing. This is a R plus 10 district. This is a fairly plus 10 district. This is a fairly deep Republican district. Barring – unless Brock comes out and starts talking warm and fuzzy about Hitler or something like that, he should win this race. folks are having and that grassroots conservatives are feeling right now will evaporate because an argument will be made that the consequences aren't nearly as bad as, say, Sharon Engel against Harry Reid or Christina Donovan against – yeah. But that if he – this is an extremely winnable race and if he blows it, the argument will be, OK, Tea Party, one more time, you've just done it again. The guy who can't – But, Jim, isn't this the – I mean, depending on what side you're on, but I would say isn't this the right strategy for the – I mean there's no Tea Party, right? But isn't this the right strategy for more activist Republicans to take safe seats in safe red districts and vote more Tea Party and in bluer areas and purple districts to say, oh, we got to make a deal.

But this one seems like a no – I mean one way to look at it is say, well, what's the point of rearranging the chairs in a red district? But on the other side, that's probably the best way to get the country and the Congress to be a little bit more activist conservative, don't you think? Oh, yeah. You know, and my attitude has always been, you know, I'll cut Susan Collins a lot more slack representing Maine than I will Lindsey Graham, who, by the way, won his primary without going to a runoff. Can we talk about that for a minute? I was kind of surprised.

Ricochet member Quinn the Esk, has a great post this week. I was on the heels of that. Explaining South Carolina to outsiders, which I think it behooves everyone interested in Senator Lindsey Graham and why he's still Senator Lindsey Graham to click on and read. It's a great, great, great piece. It's very clear and it's written from a position of authority. So how did that happen? Two things. One is that Lindsey Graham – the first thing is it's always easier when you have multiple opponents than when you have one opponent.

Right. And early on, I kept saying – my parents live in South Carolina. My dad is active with the Tea Party groups out there. And I was saying, look, you can't have three guys going up against Lindsey Graham. You need one. And yes, there were runoff rules. And if they'd held them under 50%, one of the other guys would have gone to them. But if you're Nancy Mace, you want to be able to drive all of your fire at Lindsey Graham. You don't want to have to be saying, oh, by the way, and also I'm better than Richard Cash because of this and this other guy because of that and stuff like that.

So that's the first thing. The Tea Parties needed to get unified and they weren't. And I think this says something about the kind of people attracted to the Tea Party movement, that there are way too many folks who come in and say, I am the only person who can save America. And it's a one to get your egos out, you know, check your ego at the door, as they said at Live Aid or something like that. The second thing is Lindsey Graham recognized the trouble he was in starting in 2010.

And as much as he will do stuff that will drive Republicans crazy, on the stuff that he's good at, like, say, Benghazi, he can fight like the Dickens on the stuff that he's good at. He's very good at emphasizing that. And the second thing is that, look, he campaigned his butt off really for the past two years, meeting with Tea Party groups, meeting with Republican groups, getting around the state, making sure people see him. And I think a lot of people who are kind of –

Yeah, it does. And people – no matter how mad you are at Lindsey Graham, if he shows up to your town, if he holds a town hall and you get a chance to tell him – I like that guy. They say that all the time. Every president always says the same thing, which is outside the Oval Office, it's a lot of talk, a lot of fuming. People say, I'm going to go in there. I'm going to tell the president

a thing or two. And the minute they walk in, it's like, hello, Mr. President. It all softens because the power of the office has... Just to go back for one second. How many minutes drive is it or hours drive? I don't think it's that many. How many minutes drive is it from Eric Cantor's office, former office in the capital, to his district? Oh, two or three.

He said he went back every weekend. Three? Yeah. By no means is this difficult for him to go back. He said he went back every weekend, but he also didn't necessarily – going back and you hang out with the family, which is an understandable thing for people to want to do. Are you doing enough chances for people to talk to you? And the perception was that he wasn't. He wasn't. Lindsey Graham, you say this was a triumph of two things. One, picking and choosing the red meat issues to make sure his constituents knew he was out there.

He's no rhino. He was no get-along, go-along. He was fighting the good fight on Benghazi and old-fashioned retail politics. Yeah, those are – I'd say one and two. And like I said, three, divided opposition helps a lot, really helps. Hey, Jim. Pat Toomey beating Arlen Specter, Marco Rubio against Charlie Crist. There have not been a lot of cases where the Tea Party challenger emerges out of a crowd to beat the establishment incumbent.

It usually has been, hi, I'm the alternative, and everybody kind of gravitates to that guy. Jim, Peter here. Just a couple last questions. John Boehner attempted to, this goes back 18 months now, but John Boehner attempted a grand deal with Barack Obama, to which, by the way, Eric Cantor objected.

But John Boehner was sideways of his caucus in attempting that. John Boehner has been pushing for immigration reform. Again, he's sideways of his caucus in attempting that. John Boehner has been pushing for immigration reform. Again, he's sideways of his caucus, we now know, sideways of the Republican base in pushing that. How much longer will John Boehner remain as Speaker? Is there going to be, well, Cantor has, of course, stepped down. Is there going to be a turnover in House leadership? That is a really good question, because I, for a couple months now, you occasionally hear rumors of, oh, Boehner wants to retire. He certainly looks like a guy who's exhausted and tired of dealing with this and the job is herding cats and all that kind of stuff.

But as of yesterday in that Republican House meeting they had, he was adamant in saying that he intends to be leader for at least – not just the end of this cycle, but he wants to be leader, you know, next cycle as well. So he thinks he's not going anywhere for this. Now, so that's the question. Yeah, because the one question is if you're electing a new House majority leader, are you really electing the next Speaker of the House if, you know, Boehner decides I've had it and I'm out of here? The second thing then is does everybody in the House want Boehner? And I think the problem, again, is less, you know, it's not that there are 218 people who love John Boehner. I think the problem, again, is less, it's not that there are

218 people who love John Boehner more than anybody else. It's that there are 218 people who prefer John Boehner to an alternative to any other alternative. There's probably a whole bunch of guys, Tom Price gets mentioned every now and then. There could be anywhere from

20, 30 to maybe even 60 or 70 guys who like him, but there are a bunch of other folks who don't like him. And can you unify against an alternative versus are you dissatisfied with the guy who's doing the job right now? So, Jim, before – I know we want to make sure we talk about the book, a very, very funny book. First of all, is it on Audible yet, the book? I don't believe so. I'm kind of nagging them to say, hey, guys, do an audio version. Okay.

Maybe, maybe. All right. Pressure them. So we'll get to talk about that in a minute because it's a great book. But before, one last question. Who replaces Cantor? There are three now, three Republicans saying they're into it. They're into the race.

Marlon Stutzman from Indiana, Steve Scalise from Louisiana, and Peter Roskam from Illinois. I mean this is all inside baseball, but what do you think? Yeah, I would say as of yesterday, the McCarthy line – McCarthy was the – they were saying he's already got it wrapped up, which is kind of – I think what's intriguing is that as much as there's frustration in the ranks of Republicans, there's also this sense of like – when you're only a one-third of the government and you're always playing defense against the Obama administration, there's a very limited tolerance for infighting. There's kind of this sense of like if we end up at each other's throats, Obama is just going to steamroll us. And so my suspicion is that actually this may not turn into the Game of Thrones level, relentless knife fight behind closed doors and stuff like that. So again, I think there will be enough guys who will want to say – who will see an advantage to positioning themselves as, look, I'm the conservative choice for this position. But I don't know if there is a broad-based – one, everybody's definition of conservative is a little bit different.

One guy's idea of I'm the conservative is going to be – Right, right. The idea that – who was the guy who – I just saw on my Twitter feed somebody was jumping through and saying that – oh, Labrador could be the conservative pick. Now, wasn't Labrador one of the guys who was talking warm and fuzzy, talking about immigration and stuff? So it's up for grabs. There's no frontrunner. Yeah. Again, it's going to be McCarthy versus somebody, and I've got to be honest.

I think McCarthy is, at this point, a strong favorite. You know, it's days like this, really, that I wish that I was on MSNBC, because things would be so simple. The people of the district wanting to expunge the sole Jew from the Republican Party chose a God-bothering Randian lunatic. And this is just a sign of the irrelevance, the destruction, and the complete dissolving of the Republican Party.

And the wind just blew a window open in my room here. So excuse me for a second here. But Jim, I have to ask you this. The one thing that we learned recently is that the corrosive and mesmerizing influence of money, thanks to Citizen United, means that people have no reaction whatsoever. They are helpless. And that once an ad is beamed towards them, they rise zombie-like with their

arms outstretched and go and vote for whoever has spent the most money. So, you know, next time we have you on, I want you to research this and maybe, you know, think about it as a possible book idea. Find out exactly what brain altering techniques were used by Mr. Brott to do this, because obviously if he's found something more important and powerful than money, we may be looking at supervillain status here. So just think about that. Okay. And we'll either read it at the spot or we'll read it on national review,

or we'll see you as you gallivant around the country and promote the weed agency, which of course everyone is raving about as the humorous political novel, which I gather is amenable to people who don't even care about politics but just want a rollicking, funny read. Thank you for writing it, and thank you for being here on this, the Ricochet Podcast. We'll see you on the ship. See you, James.

I very much appreciate that. I'm going to transcribe all that and put that as my next book. Yeah, you should. It's a very funny book, and everyone should buy it. Thank you, Jim. The idea is somehow, listening to talk radio and checking the blogs, this is an earthquake, a tsunami, as Jim was saying at the beginning of this. Most people out there have

no real take on this or care very much, and the notion of who is going to succeed and what is cantor's position going to be uh really really is is is irrelevant what they do again if they go on the internet to enforce their biases is on the right see something heartening which is that somebody who was established and and screwed into that socket as firmly as you can imagine anybody being was summarily dismissed by the people, which is a wonderful lesson. It encourages the others, shall we say.

I agree with you, Jim. I agree with you, James, no matter what. I agree with you even if I supported Cantor. I think it's useful to every now and then to drag one of the powerful congressmen into the center square and execute him. I think that's a good thing for the good thing for the republic. It was Jefferson who said the tree of liberty must be replenished by the blood of incumbents. I can paraphrase there. And I think he's absolutely correct.

But if you're on if you're on the left, you see this as a sign that the right cannot contain its crazy elements, that essentially what happened here was that this guy did the equivalent of an old, senile man driving his car through a crowd at a farmer's market. And that's the disorder and the disorganization that exists on the Republican Party. By the way, if somebody did drive their car through a crowded, would it matter exactly what kind of car it was? If it was a Prius, yes, because that would be slow and you could get out of the way. But if it's a Mercedes with a really big engine, somebody driving through a crowded Mercedes, well, you're going to be hit by some quality German engineering here. But on the other half, I think, 47 of them.

And if you haven't caught up with Stephen King's latest edition of The Shining, you're thinking, I need to stop writing so I can catch up. Well, there's a solution for that. And the solution is maybe to listen to the book. That's why if you wanted to go over to audible.com, you could type in Stephen King. You could type in Mr. Mercedes, and there it would be. There, the entire novel, which would be $27, I think, to buy. Maybe $10 or so to get as a download to listen to. But for you, for free, you can have it.

So go to audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet. Audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet and get your free 30-day trial and your free copy of a book. Unfortunately, not yet. The weed agency isn't there. But you can get Stephen King's latest, just about everything else he's written to. And guaranteed you'll find something else. Guaranteed. He'll use you.

Guys, this would be the point where picks perhaps are things that you've been listening to, reading, that you would like to advise others to do. Peter? While James was talking, I just clicked up Stephen King, Mr. Mercedes. The answer here is that I'm waiting for you to give me picks because I now have three kids home from college. Thank goodness they all have summer jobs, but that means they have time in the car to listen to something. And I am trying to figure out something that will be fun that they actually will listen to during their commute to and from work. They've got about 20 minutes in each direction. But there will be, in one way or another, this is why they hate me, of course, elevating.

Good for the mind. Food for thought. You're ruining the summer. Man, Peter Robinson knows how to ruin the summer. Stephen King just sounds like too much fun. Rob, can you give my kids homework assignments? No. Homework is not – you don't have homework in the summer.

I tend to – I mean I have a few plane trips coming up and I tend to trying to finish there's a new Alan first which I'm going to get on audible but I'm still trying to finish the last of the Naguib Mahfouz Cairo trilogy novels which I'm loving but it's just it's a little slow going and I might actually do the audible whisper sync to the Kindle thing so that I can read a little bit and listen to a little bit and read a little bit and listen to a little bit. So that's my answer.

Well, there you have it. Peter, choose something that is uplifting for your children because heaven forbid that their minds should slack and ripen and rot in this period of the summer. That's what summer is all about, for heaven's sakes. Comic books. That's what it's about. It's about pulp literature. It's about having fun. It's about having fun.

It's about luxuriating in this long, hot stretch of indolence. I know, I know, I know it's a bad lesson for life because when you get older, you don't have summers like that. True enough. Which is all the more reason to have them when you're young. But what happens, for example, when you have an entire culture that spends its summer, its life like summer, not working, hanging out. You get a very bleak vision of a part of America called Appalachia. And if you were to look at National Review online recently, you would have found this extraordinary piece, which people in the comments are beaten up on, which probably means he's onto something, by one of the finest

writers on economics, and for that matter, social policy and observer of the American scene that there is, period. And that's Kevin Williamson, another National Review writer we are proud to have back on the podcast here. Is it back or is it the first time? Welcome, Kevin. No, it's back. He's been here a minute. Back, back. I think it's back, yeah.

Yeah, good. I think we've done this before. I have to say, I'm reading the Appalachian piece, and it's not just harrowing. It's also, as is typical for your work, it's so extraordinarily well written that it's an absolute joy. It's hard to use the word joy given the circumstances, but you have been controversial for a couple of things. I mean, the Appalachian piece, there are people pushing back in the comments saying, you got it wrong, Texas boy. But the piece I think that – By the way, I never said that Lubbock, Texas is where I come from is any less depressing.

It has a lot of similar social problems, in fact. Well, in addition to being an Appalachia-phobe, you are also transphobic. You have been revealed as a man who pretty much should be sent to the gulag if not stripped of his life. Yeah, what's your problem here? Both of those things have actually literally been suggested, by the way.

Well, I know. People have suggested I should be put to death for having written that piece, and other people have suggested that I should be imprisoned for my opinions on the subject. So, I mean, this is not hyperbole. But I can't say I disagree. Well, let's take two let's you know they might have a point let's figure let's look at let's look at two elements here because there are actually

two issues one of them is the trans issue which suddenly just flared up all of a sudden the minute that the gay marriage thing was settled i guess all of a sudden this is the most pressing civil rights issue of society that's the first issue that i want you to touch and this is the most pressing civil rights issue of society. That's the first issue that I want you to touch. And secondly, is the general issue about intolerance of anybody who does not conform to what is now a very narrowly defined set of acceptable ideas. So we'll talk about that in a sec. First, tell people what you said in the trans article and what happened. Well, I've argued, as I have argued for a long time, that we probably do ourselves and society and some fairly vulnerable people a disservice by playing along with this delusion. So the story in particular was the cover of Time magazine. It was about an actor named Laverne Cox.

Cox is a transsexual. He played the transsexual in a TV series called Orange is the New Black. He's a pretty good actor, and it's a pretty good series. But he's sort of being held up now as the face of transgenderism or transsexualism. And the piece I wrote was no matter how you feel about what role people in this condition should play in society or how we should think about them. He's not a woman. He is, as far as anybody knows, and in the great number of cases of transsexuals, physically, genetically, chromosomally normal man who decided for one reason or another that he decided that he wanted to try to live his

life as a woman. And there's probably a biological origin for this as a phenomenon. It's not like someone just wakes up one day when they're three or four years old and this does tend to manifest very young and decides, hey, I want to be a member of the sex that I'm not actually a member of. But no matter how strong that impression is, or even if that impression comes from you know a matter of brain anatomy which there's some fairly good evidence that it does it doesn't make it real you know I'm feelings of paranoia and delusion that people have when they're suffering from

dementia or schizophrenia those are biological origins too but we don't pretend like they're rooted in reality and try to go along with them. And, of course, the most extreme and disturbing manifestation of this is sex reassignment surgery, which I think is just a brutal and barbaric practice in which people are being mutilated and having healthy organs amputated in the service of what is, in the end, a delusion. A delusion to you, Kevin, of course, but that's because you don't believe that gender is a fluid social construct that can be reassigned at the will of whoever is making up their own identity. The Daily Beast today has a little review.

Let me read this for you. It's about a book called Adam. The debut novel from graphic memoirist Alan Schrag follows straight 17-year-old Adam Friedman as he dives into the New York City's lesbian scene. Adam Friedman? Adam? Ricochet contributor in my college classmate Adam Friedman? Adam has sought refuge with his older lesbian sister from his suffocating home life and paranoia-inducing high school social scene. The hook of this not-so-typical book is that he has

fallen in love with a lesbian girl who believes he is transitioning female to male transgender now that last sentence right there um you either believe that that somehow encapsulates some very true thing about the human condition or you're one of those haters who believes that it's a a marginal problem that does not necessarily require society to pay for surgery um but yet that's where we're going isn isn't it? This is going to be... Well, I mean, beyond the question of paying for it, and of course, you know, I'm against mandatory public expenditures on pretty much everything. So, I mean, certainly that would go as far as a sex reassignment surgery.

Now, I've not proposed banning it. You know, again, I'm a pretty extreme libertarian. I'm not really a big fan of banning it. Again, I'm a pretty extreme libertarian. I'm not really a big fan of banning things. But I think that physicians and physician associations should forego doing that procedure. I think it's an unethical thing to do. I think it's something that doctors shouldn't have anything to do with. And that people who come in with those sorts of complaints, that their sense of self and their body are wildly out of whack. The answer to that is not, well, let's mutilate your body so it looks more like what's in your head. The answer to that is probably some form of therapy and treatment,

the same as it is for people who have other sorts of disorders. There's just really no way around that. The interesting thing about this is the official term is gender dysphoria, and that comes from the American Psychiatric Association. And even though that diagnosis and its predecessor diagnoses have been on the books for decades now, they've never developed clinical guidelines for treatment or care or even diagnosis of the condition. But they have changed its name a few times, which is really what we're talking about here.

You know, it's really a matter of magical thinking about language. So if I refer to Laverne Cox as he and him, I'm committing what some people believe to be a literal act of violence, even though I'm just matching his biology to his grammar, the pronouns. And there's this consequent and related belief that if we call him her, if we call him a woman, then somehow we bring that reality into existence just through using language and playing along with the impressions. So my belief is always that our fundamental first duty is to reality, and reality isn't metaphysical. It isn't a matter of language. It's not a matter of theory or any of these fine debates we have. There are certain facts that can be dealt with and should be dealt with, and I think that those should be preeminent in our discussion of this issue.

But, of course, they aren't. I mean, if you talk about the facts, then you're a hate monger and you need to be crucified. Well, that's the point. That was the pushback that you got, which is the second question that I had for you. What does this say about the nature of, is it just that it's like academic politics, the fights are so bitter because the stakes are so small, or is this exactly where the public discourse is going? You are an evil person for saying this.

I am an evil person for saying that you have the right to say this. And all the people who don't agree have got to be driven from the public sphere. That's, you know, that's, there's always an element to that in our public discourse. And it's a louder element now than it used to be simply because communication has been, you know, radically democratized. So, you know, it used to be that if you were really lucky, maybe once or twice in your life, you could get a letter to the editor into the New York Times or some other newspaper

with a large readership. Now anyone can reply anywhere, anytime. We've got the comment section and Twitter and all that stuff. So you hear from a lot more people than you used to. And I think that is why things seem crazier and less intelligent than they used to, just because there are fewer gatekeepers there. So, I mean, there's some upsides to that model of communication, too, obviously. I mean, I'm glad that it has emerged the way it has.

But you do hear from a lot of people who are not very deep thinkers and are just sort of, you know, shrill and emotional and, you know, calling for your death and that sort of thing. I think on this issue, it's been a little more insane than it normally is. And that's particularly from the, you know, male to female transsexuals who have been writing to me and about me on these issues. And I don't want to take them as being typical of everyone in that community because several of them, a disproportionately large number of them are pornographic performers of various kinds. I'm talking about here the people who've been writing to and about me. And they just don't give the impression of being super mentally stable people.

And that's, to my mind, not terribly surprising given their situation. Kevin, Peter Robinson here. May we go from transsexuals to the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, please? It's not that huge a leap. I was going to say, yeah. Either way, you're talking about purple shoes and a sequined hat. First, may I begin by just with a word to our listeners that people who engage in polemics, journalists such as Kevin Williamson who take sides and fight are doing – what you do, Kevin, is like being a matador. It is extremely difficult. You do it day after day after day. You do it in public.

And the difference between people who just do it and those who do it very well is enormous. And Kevin Williamson is one of the great acts in American journalism now taking place. Don't miss Kevin. Oh, I believe it. You're at the top of your form and you're just getting better all the time. That piece on Appalachia was beautiful. Your appreciation of National Review the other day was magnificent.

I mean, somebody who writes as well as you do, who has talent in the first place, who thinks clearly and is utterly fearless is something to watch. Bill's in the mail. You write here of the speech of Cardinal

Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras who gave a talk the other day. I'm quoting Kevin Williamson. His eminence may not entirely understand it, but the banks and boardrooms are full of men and women doing more in real terms for the poor than he is, more in fact than he would even understand how to do. And what he proposes mainly is to stand in their way for God's sake, stop it. Close quote. Kevin, explain yourself. Well, I suppose I should start this by saying that I'm, in fact, a Catholic convert, someone who joined the church as an adult who wasn't raised in that tradition

and who came to it through his own volition because I believe that the Catholic Church is a good and essential institution and that what it teaches is true. So I say this as a friend and not as an enemy, but they're thinking about the way economies actually work and the relationship between markets and states is stuck at best in the 19th century. And this is true of a lot of our political discourse. I mean, it's more significant when you have the Pope or a cardinal saying it because they do have so much influence. But we want to have these ethical disputes,

these sort of metaphysical disputes about what is our underlying theory of how the economy is organized and how should property be distributed and how should income be distributed. And none of these things intersects with reality at all. And the reality of the issue is that for all these debates we have about consumption and division, what matters most is production. And this isn't a matter of opinion because it's a physical reality that production has to precede consumption. You can't consume that which hasn't been produced. And they never even think about that. They never talk about what is it that's made possible, this ridiculous, unimaginable wealth that we have in the Western, the capitalist world,

versus what they have everywhere else. You know, I started my journalism career in India, when India was in the middle of trying to make itself a bit less poor. And I've sort of seen both sides of this. And from the Christian point of view, and from the ethical point of view, there's this mandate, we should feed the poor. The Lord says, feed my sheep. And I get that, and I agree. But feed them what, Cardinal? If you've got capitalism, you're producing a lot to feed them. If you don't have capitalism, you don't have anything. So in the United States, you've got a per capita GDP of something like $54,000 a year. In Zimbabwe, you've got $722.

Now, no matter which way you divide up that $722 per capita, you're still not going to feed anybody. So the whole argument about how should we be altruistic, should we or should we not distribute some income to people who are poor, should we have this or that welfare program, it all assumes the production of a sufficient quantity of real goods and services to make it worthwhile doing all those things. And until you've secured that, you can't talk about anything else. What's wrong with the poor parts of the world isn't that they have an insufficient ethical commitment to taking care of poor people or to engaging in altruism, either in the public or private sectors. They don't have enough goods and services. They're just not producing enough food to feed everybody. They're not producing enough value

to trade it for things in markets to get them the things that they want. So if you could change the way that production happens in places like Bangladesh or Vietnam, which some of these have been happening in those countries, Eastern Europe has seen a lot of it, then you can radically change what you actually have to distribute. But, you know, the cardinals and politicians and senators and all the rest of these people, they just assume that production is going to happen magically ex nihilo. Like, there's a production fairy out there somewhere and it's producing goods. And then the distribution fairy comes along and distributes income. And that's just not how things work. Hey, all right, Kevin, can we just talk a little bit of politics? We had Jim Garrity on,

we talked about politics. This is a political week, very political week. Eric Cantor lost surprisingly to a lot of people and a lot of people celebrating, a lot of people saying this is great. Drusus, Ricochet member Drusus had this to say. Again, I'm one of those people who was sort of – we just spoke before you got on. It's generally not a bad thing every now and then to take someone in leadership and publicly execute them. Drusus says this. So Cantor hasn't done that job with Flash. He hasn't read Green Eggs and Ham from the House floor.

He hasn't yelled you lied, Obama, during a speech or crushed debate moderators with the weight and fury of a thousand Gingriches, which I kind of like. That's a good sentence. But those things don't get us very far. They just feel good. With respect to Senator Cruz, sequestration did more to rein in spending than his filibuster ever did. It's the little things, the procedural things, the boring things, the things of which Cantor excelled. What do you say? Yeah, well, you know, I think Eric Cantor was a pretty good and honorable public servant and a pretty good House majority leader.

And he's someone that I don't know well personally, but I like him to the extent that I've dealt with him. He comes to visit National Review from time to time. But, you know, that's why we have elections. I'm not a huge enthusiast of democracy as a concept. And the idea of taking the least educated, least informed people and making a mob out of them and giving them a choice A, choice B bundle of a whole lot of issues that they don't understand and couldn't possibly, even if they spent their lives studying them because life's too complex. And saying that's how we're going to get our decisions is maybe not the best way to make most decisions. But in terms of who gets to be your representative in the House, you know, it's basically the way we do it and probably the only reasonably good way to do so. So, you know, I have, you know, used to be a love-hate relationship with the Republican Party. Sometimes

it's a hate-hate relationship with the Republican Party. I'm not a member of it myself, so I don't have super, super strong feelings about who's going to be in leadership and all that kind of thing. But I do like the fact that this election will put a Democrat versus a Republican who are both professors at the same university. The Republican's a professor of economics and the Democrat is a professor of sociology. And that to me seems just apt and appropriate. Kind of like my argument that parties ought to be forced to have their conventions every year in the city that most represents them, you know, Republicans in Houston and Democrats in Detroit.

All right. I think that's a very fine response. It sort of suits your more libertarian sensibilities that it's a jungle out there and every now and then a gazelle has got to get taken down. Yeah. Savannah out there, I should say, not a jungle. One last question before we let you go. Sometimes if you want to run down a gazelle, you get in a really fast car. And those were in the news this week. I'm just trying to make the most brutal transition I can.

Uber. Uber. Uber. However you want to pronounce it. Cities in Europe blocked taxis everywhere, restricting access to the center city because the drivers over there don't want Uber. This is – is this a fight Uber is going to win or is the entrenched industry that makes money and has great value in those licenses and medallions, are they eventually going to persuade governments to ban this. And we should say that just for people who are listening that Uber is a smartphone-based taxi service where you can call up a taxi. Usually it's a black car. You have a couple of choices for what kind of car you get, and you can do it on your

phone, and it's incredibly efficient. All right. I just want to make sure everybody knows that. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if Uber will be the party that ultimately prevails in the marketplace. It does have some competitors, and there's enough money in that market that's going to attract some others. The cartels will try to shut them down, of course. I live in New York City where a taxi medallion is worth about a million dollars,

and they certainly want to keep Uber out as much as they can. But the fact is that consumers prefer it, and it's hard to really regulate things like that. Uber has proven pretty slippery that way. But the other thing is that Uber drivers make a lot more money than New York City taxi drivers do, about three times as much. So it's one thing when people are coming saying, well, we're trying to prevent a race to the bottom in terms of wages. But it's a different thing to try to make that case where consumers want it, producers want it,

everyone wants it except the guys who actually legally control the medallion cartel. So I think that Uber ultimately will prevail, but it's going to be a nasty fight for a long time.

As well, as Glenn Reynolds says, there is insufficient opportunities for graft, which is why they're having trouble with local governments. Exactly. Exactly. Kevin, thanks a lot for being on the podcast once again.

Hope to see you down the road, and we'll see you, of course, at nationalreview.com. And later this year, we'll see you on the ship. Pleasure. Take care. Hey, thanks, Kevin. Thanks, Kevin. News just came in here. Apparently there is an online petition now to fire George F. Will. Now, we know they tried to get Kevin fired from the Chicago Tribuneune where he doesn't work uh because they run one run one of his pieces george f will is now

under fire for saying uh three cheers for rape culture which is a great thing in america we need to teach um all of our sons to rape as much as possible essentially that's what they're taking away from will who yes ron no go, go ahead. Go ahead. Sorry. Will wrote about the, quote, rape culture on campuses. He wrote about the actual incidence of sexual abuse. He wrote about the fact that they have these star chambers where people have few, if any, legal protections and find their careers and their names sullied, blotted, and destroyed. Maybe we ought to take another look at this and exactly how Washington is abetting this by making funds contingent on. I mean, when you get the federal government involved in anything, all of a sudden, you know, you take the king's coin and you must dance to his tune and jerk to

the strings he's tied around your wrist. Well, there's now an online petition, of course, to fire George F. Will. The interesting thing is who's behind it. It turns out it's the spouse of the White House media director. I'm looking at here. Let's see. Jesse Lee. Yes, the spouse of Jesse Lee, the White House's director of progressive media

and online response. Interesting. But I'm sure that there's absolutely no sort of coordination or any of those abominations that we would describe if somebody from the right was trying to get somebody fired for something that they said. It goes back to what we were saying with Kevin, which is that there are certain opinions which – not that people want to argue with them. They just simply want to drive them completely out of the public sphere and tar the people who made them. Well, yeah.

I mean that's their playbook. That's certainly – the fact that they're doing it now and they're doing it so bizarrely and also with George Will is a sign that they're running out of ammo. I mean George Will is nobody's idea of a firebrand. He's nobody – I mean George Will speaks in complete sentences. I think if anybody has an opinion about George Will that's sort of – other than I think he's a brilliant writer, it has to – it can't be that he's a loose cannon and part of the troglodyte Republican right.

So if they're going after George Will, it means we're winning. By the way, fire him from what? From everything. I mean get him out of the Washington Post. Get him out of television. Get him out of the public sphere. He's on Fox News now. So this is not likely

to, Roger Ailes is not likely to wake up one day, oh, I've got to respond to these pressure groups. I'd love to see somebody try to do that. I would think it would be kind of funny. Well, in related news, I had a post. I should probably put that.

There's a couple of things I meant to put up on Ricochet. One of them, I found a copy of a 1970s show narrated by Leonard Nimoy called In Search Of. Oh, yeah. I remember that. You remember that? Okay. And it was usually ancient astronauts. Yeah, I remember that.

It was a lot of fun. It was Art Bell before Art Bell came along. Yeah, I remember that. Okay. And it was usually ancient astronauts. Yeah, I remember that. Mayan. It was a lot of fun. It was Art Bell before Art Bell came along. And I found the episode that I dimly remember and have been looking for for a long time in search of. It's about the coming Ice Age. Oh, right. And it's all the stock footage of Buffalo, New York, and the worst winter they ever had and how this is extend down to Texas when the ice age comes. It's got all these pictures of the glacial mass that will completely cover the United States. And it has scientists. It's got scientists who are pretty darn sure that this is what's happening and speak with utter conviction that not only is the wonderful boon of the warming phase we've had coming to an

end, it's already over. And I actually Googled some of these scientists and found that, much to my astonishment, they seem to believe the absolute opposite thing now, to which one would say, well, of course, the data is in and the data has changed their minds. But it's not that at all. It's almost as if there's something of a professional gravy train. The one hops on when you come on board with these things. So I'm going to post a few of the screen grabs and some of the audio at Ricochet if I can. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The other is something I did on my website today. I was looking – because Father's Day is coming up, right? And I was looking for, well, a site had

an ad for fathers. It was for the Dollar Shave Club, which is, you know, you get them a buck, you get a raise, okay? And it's things you can do for your father on Father's Day. And it was how to help him online. Four little funny things, funny, that help your father online because your father is an idiot because your father can't tell he's got too many windows open because your father falls for every phishing scheme because your father doesn't know the difference between a tweet and a text.

And it's just jokey and content. And I'm looking at this thing and, you know, if my dad had a difficulty determining the difference between a tweet and a text, I might cut him some slack given that he was on a leaky boat for four years with people trying to kill him, which is an accomplishment I think that exceeds the ability to distinguish between the two. But no, not in these ads. It got me going then to look for what American Greetings was doing. And these are the people who put out an ad for Mother's Day, perhaps you saw it, went viral, where they were interviewing people about a job. And the more they described what the job was, the more people were appalled. The hours, the responsibility, the pay. And then at the end

of it, it turns out, well, the job is being a mother. Okay. Not a parent. Oh, no, not a parent. A mother, which statistically may be accurate, given that most of the moms do do these things more than fathers when it comes to the basic domestic stuff so far. But I looked at what they were doing for dads. And they put out an ad. It is exactly what you would expect it to be. Dads are funny because they may be burly, but, uh, you know, we got to slap them in a queen outfit to make them sit there with his daughter's tea in the kitchen. They start fires who needs recipes, uh, but he's good with duct tape and it's, and it's

got all these guys who have been glee'd up by a factor of 10 doing jazz hands. And I mean, it's just, it's so based on that, I went, look, I said, serious, surely there's got to be something that's a little bit more respectful of fathers. And sure enough, the same people who did the ad about the world's hardest job for moms did one for dads. actors auditioning for the role of father given scripts and acting like bumbling fools and idiots not knowing what to say and looking at the wife script because life doesn't hand you a script and i look at all of these messages that they're sending to men and say why would any guy really you know nowadays if you're going to be either a neutered idiot or somebody held in in amused contempt why would anybody volunteer for these domestic roles the way they're being presented in the ad culture or in culture

in general today? Why exactly? So Peter, you've got three sons. What do you tell them? Have you struggled with a script? Has it been a complete and total mystery to you because handling small children is women's work and you should be out there fighting something and stabbing bars or what? I smack them on the back of the head quite a lot. There you go.

And most of the time that seems to do the trick. And that's why Uncle Rob is so popular in this house. It's why every son I have has gone through a phase of wanting to be a television writer. I bring chaos. That's good. Well, Rob, you're in the industry, of course, that helps to perpetuate these things. What is the general vibe? Because what I take away from these ads is not necessarily that they're worried that women would be offended by them.

But they were worried that women would be offended on behalf of somebody else who would be offended by them. I mean that's the odd thing that they have to – if there's any subject that they have to tiptoe around, it's how to present men. They just – it's like the subject terrifies them. In television, I mean – Yeah, I mean that's – I think culturally anyway, that's the problem. The culture who's always worried about the interpretation of what one character does as applied to the group. That happens a lot. I mean that's something that people obsess over here.

I don't know why, but they seem to do that. I mean if it doesn't make sense in the context of the story or the character, then it doesn't make sense in the context of the culture. But if you do a show about a dad who's really great, that doesn't mean that all dads are really great or that you're making a statement that moms are bad. I mean it happens a lot. It happens more in dramas where people feel like they don't have to actually get a laugh. But I do think it's hurt women and it certainly hurts women's roles in comedy because you couldn't do Lucy now. I mean there are scenes in I Love Lucy where Ricky spanks her. It's kind of weird.

You couldn't do Dick Van Dyke now because Mary Tyler Moore, Laura Petrie was just a little too emotional and brittle and then people would complain. You couldn't do Maude. You couldn't do Wheezy Jefferson. A lot of things you couldn't do because people are like, well, wait a minute. What are we saying about women? What are we saying about the group? The weird thing, of course, is that if you look at any stats that matter now, you see men are on the short end. Boys are on the short end of the stick.

Fewer of them – more of them are victims of violence. More of them are unemployed. More of them are victims of industrial accidents. There are more women in medical school and in law school. You know, if there's a crisis right now, it's how we're portraying, not men, but I would say boys, but that's a separate issue. Yeah. Well, you couldn't do Maude nowadays because her catch line was, God will get you for that. And that would be privilege of Christianity. Check your privilege. We've got to roll the folks here.

But before we go, I'm going to give a challenge to everybody here. Peter had said earlier that he's got sons who are going back and forth with 20-minute commutes. What do they listen to? And, of course, we're all – Peter wants to give them something uplifting. Uplifting. He wants to listen to Cato while they're driving along. I'm of the mind, perhaps, that a story, a tightly told, compact story that's about 20 minutes in length might fill the bill for them. And what's more, give them a little window into what culture used to be

when the roles of men and women were quite different. And it'd be instructive. Here's the hint I'm going to give. This is going to be difficult because it's a very hard thing to do. I want somebody in the comments to explain what I mean when I do this. You have no idea how hard that is. What did I mean and why does this relate to what Peter's children should be listening to as they go to work? You'll have to scroll down to the bottom of the comments to figure that out. And, of course, you'll go there anyway because that's where people discuss. Sorry about that. I was whistling off the mic. There you go. All right. That's your challenge.

That and say something witty and brilliant about Garrity and Williamson. We thank them for coming along. We thank Audible.com, of course, for coming and sponsoring the show as well. Audiblepodcast.com slash Ricochet. Audiblepodcast.com slash Ricochet for your free book, your free 30-day trial. But not everything is free. Ricochet isn't. If you're not a member, be a member, and we'll see you here at the podcast at Ricochet 2.0.1.

Next week, fellas. Next week. Next week. I met her in a club down in North Soho Where you drink champagne and it tastes just like Coca-Cola C-O-L-A-Cola She walked up to me and she asked me to dance I asked her her name and in a tough, wrong voice she said L-O-L-A L-O-L-A

L-O-L-A L-O-L-A L-O-L-A, L-O-L-A, L-O-L-A But I'm not the world's most physical guy But when she squeezed me tight, she made it grow my spine Oh, but L-O-L-A, L-O-L-A, L-O-L-A Ricochet. Join the conversation. Thank you. I pushed you away you