The Ricochet Podcast - City of Lakes

Episode Date: May 29, 2020

We don’t tend to do location work on this show, but when a major news event happens in the city where one of our hosts live, we get a up-close and personal view. And when that host is James Lileks and Minneapolis, the amount of detail, insight, and thoughtfulness could fill a dozen podcasts. James describes what the last few days have been like, and where he thinks his city is heading. Source

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Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots.

I'm looking forward to saying I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University. Donald Trump knows nothing about the strength of Minneapolis. We are strong as hell, but you better be damn sure that we're going to get through this. I'm the president and your fake news. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lilacs. Today we talk to Barry Weiss of the New York Times and John Yoo. So let's have ourselves a podcast.

I can hear you. It's the Ricochet Podcast. Welcome to number 498, in case you're wondering, and keeping score at home, making those hash marks on the wall, waiting until we get to 500. I'm James Lylex here in Minneapolis with Rob Long in New York, Peter Robinson in sunny Clement, California. Gentlemen, any questions? Well, we should say for our listeners, James Lilacs is coming to us from Minneapolis, which is currently the headline in the Star Tribune was a state of agony. Is that an appropriate characterization, James? Yeah, it is. It's heartbreaking. It's ruinous.

It is devastating. It has hollowed out the heart and soul of the people who live here. And we're stunned. We are stunned. And at many levels— James, can— Yes, Peter? I was just—just for people who are tuning—people in California who just watched the news for a few moments last night and said, what? Just give us—give us the kind of—there was a horrible police incident. Just give us the kind of TikTok of was a horrible police incident. Just give us the

kind of TikTok of the last few days. What on earth has happened? The police from all appearances murdered a man. A police officer sat on a guy's neck, put a knee in a guy's neck for eight minutes, and then he died. And it's on film. And some people are debating, well, we don't know what happened between the time that he got out of the car and the time that he was down on the ground. I mean, we need to know, which makes people ask, all right, exactly what could he have done then that would justify when he wasn't moving, being essentially executed on the spot by the knee of a bad cop. And people are wondering when the cop is going to be charged. They want the process to be accelerated as quickly as possible and things to go forward, which is completely understandable. I mean, it's an injustice like

this. The cop who had his knee on, it's Floyd. I can't even remember whether Floyd is the first name of George Floyd. George Floyd. George Floyd. Thank you. So the cop who is pictured with his knee on the back of George Floyd's neck as George Floyd is face down on the ground. And the three other cops who were on duty with him have all been fired, were fired almost immediately by the Minneapolis police. And yet we're told, so that presumes that the police department made an official decision. These guys were out of line. They're gone. The union can't protect them, won't protect them. But now we're told there are investigations going on and charges haven't. I don't, this is, I don't, can you explain to you? No, I can't. Okay. Yeah. Well, I, I, yes, I do. But I, when I say I work at the Strib at this point,

the old days of congregating around the office water cooler and having discussions with guys who are covering other beats are gone because we're all atomized and we're all sitting at home. And pardon me for not leading with that or for not having those, those particular details, you know, fresh at my fingers. Because at this point for us in Minneapolis, for a lot of people, you're way past all that. Well, we're, we're, we're bobbing on a piece of wood in the North Atlantic ocean. And somebody is saying, all right, now describe the point at which the Titanic first got those telegrams about ice. It's like, yeah, OK, that is very salient. And that's how it all began.

And we can go back there. But I'm sorry, my mind is sort of where last night was at this point. And last night, my mind was where the day before and the day before that. We've watched the complete abandonment, it seems, of the city to a feral element. And it's stunning. The general consensus, as far as I can tell, is that we have been failed by government on every single possible level, from the injustice perpetrated by the cops, to the decision by the city to sort of let things happen, to step away from the third precinct and let it burn,

to the governor's inactions. It just, nobody feels as if this has been handled with any degree of competence whatsoever. And as such, is sort of appeased with the rest of 2020 when the great institutions in which we had placed a modicum of faith, assuming that they kind of sort of knew what they were doing because isn't that what they spend all their time planning for, is revealed to be utterly incompetent in almost every single aspect. But that's a whole different discussion. What we're dealing with now is, yesterday was horrible. It was this riot that spread throughout

the city to the fact that what had been concentrated in Minneapolis marched down the street into St. Paul, our adjacent sister city, and began to attack that locus of evil, the target. And at that point, the rest of the targets, all of the targets in the entire city decided that they had become a, well, target. And they're all closed today. Last night, I went to a far-flung distant suburb to go to a grocery store, and the grocery store had taken all of their firewood and all of their loose things that they could move and packed them up in front of the door as though miles and miles away it might be coming to them, too. So the whole city is shuddering and quivering with that. Now, to be fair, it happened in specific districts that are neighborhoods, I hate to use the phrase because it's so cliche,

vibrant is what they always call neighborhoods that have a lot of commercial activity and multicultural aspect. But it's true, they were, and they aren't anymore. Where are the police? Where are the police? I haven't seen them. I mean, I saw them downtown last night. Downtown, they seem to do a pretty good job, as far as I could tell, to keep people from destroying downtown and breaking all the windows and the rest of it. On the 30 seconds, 90 seconds or so of Fox News that I caught, they played an interview with the chief of police of Minneapolis. He was being interviewed by a local reporter. And the local reporter said, effectively asked, where are the police? And the chief of police answered in so many words, certain areas are now too dangerous for my cops. I'm pulling them back

and trying to protect other neighborhoods. Is that correct? Do I have that right? Yes. Yeah. I mean, obviously they pulled back. You look at the footage of the burning police station and the people exalting in the riots, in the glow, in the flames, in the destruction. They were down shooting off fireworks, shooting off fireworks in celebration. And it's obvious the police were absolutely nowhere in sight. And the people who lived around that building, you might understand, were understandably afraid of what was going to happen next. There was a report in the middle of the night, about two o'clock or so, that a gas main had been cut. And they were really worried that the whole thing was going to go up, which would take out a block. And there's houses right next to it. There's historic buildings right all around it. It would have been gone. It would have been devastating. And all the people that I was watching, tweeting in wonderful support of this. I mean, people

saying, oh, this is great. Where do I send matches? And then you look at the person who sent the tweet and it's somebody who runs a sustainable energy company in California. That's part of the conversation that we have to have. It's difficult to discuss this because there are so many caveats and praises that you have to make before you get everybody to agree that this sort of destruction is wrong. Several things can be true at one time. What the cop did was wrong. What the Minneapolis Police Department does and the relationship with the African-American and minority community is wrong and troublesome and the result of a culture that needs to be addressed. But if we can't then have the conversation about how this is not some sort of righteous anger and get out the MLK quotes, I'm sorry. We have to have that.

We have to have that. James, how close are you to this? I mean, in your way, you look 20, 20, 25. That's a lot. I mean, that's not a lot. It's close. Well, I've been closer. I mean, I've been closer in when the D.C. riots happened.

I was just, I was two blocks from it. So, so here you're the problem. I mean, where were you in LA in 94, by the way? The interesting thing last night is I was coming, I was speaking to my daughter from, from a friend's house. And as we were driving home, this car passed me on this normal street, about 50 miles an hour with another one behind it and blew right through a red light, followed by another car, followed by another car that just decided we're going to do this too. And in this neighborhood completely removed from all of the violence, there was nevertheless this sort of injection of the rules are gone. We are liberated. We are free. This is our time to go 50 miles an hour down a residential street and blow through a line.

And that was the feeling that everything had last night. So even though I'm quite removed from it, 25 blocks doesn't seem nice. We're not. None of us are. None of us are. Well, OK. I'm going to deputize you for the next couple minutes, however long you want to take. Mayor, Minneapolis governor of the state, president of the United States, what do you do?

Well, never mind the president of the United States. I don't care. I just don't. If I'm the governor, I would have called in the National Guard after the first night. I would have had them there the next day and I would have had them standing around to prevent this from happening again. And then we wouldn't have lost neighborhoods. If I was the police, if I was the mayor, I would have facilitated that. And I would have made sure the neighborhoods were safe and that the destruction did not continue apace for a second night. That's what I would have done. Now, am I an expert on how to do that?

No. I can't tell you exactly the mechanisms by which those things could be done, but this is the problem with these things, and I saw this in D.C. First night, you have the righteous eruption. The second night, you have the tourists. You get the people who come for the excitement, who come to loot. And then the third night- That happened in LA too. That is classic, yes. Right. I mean, I was watching last night on some of these live streams of independent reporters

are going around talking to people. They're not from here. One guy said, it's a mess, but I don't live here. I don't have to clean it up. So you have that tourist class. You also have something else that I'm sort of waiting to be discussed, and that is there's a big debate about whether or not this white guy who's for masking their faces and are known for carrying crowbars and things and break things. They really get into this. They love this. They're called Antifa. And the fusing of Antifa, DSA, direct action, you know, tear it all down, burn it all down with this event is not inconsiderable. And the grimly, darkly amusing thing is that you're going to have people who don't see that connection

blaming the African-American community for something that was, in many cases, fomented and encouraged and egged on by white Antifa. Right. I mean, it doesn't help that the incident in Minneapolis is two weeks after a shooting in Brunswick, Georgia, which also took a long hot summer, which was a couple years ago, three years ago, it was one or two or three events in close succession. Is there any sense – like when you saw the tourists, is there any sense – are they connecting it to that, to Ahmaud Arbery as the guy, young man, the young jogger in Brunswick who was murdered? No. I mean, but just because I don't hear that doesn't mean that it isn't the case among some. I mean, it's certainly part of the stew. But no.

I mean, in as much as commenters and tweeters are saying that this is – that like the Aubrey case was indicative of society in general. Yep, they're making that point. But I mean, you know, the conversation seems to be pretty focused on localities. But again, every single reaction you can imagine is as predictable as you want. You can tell exactly who's going to defend the destruction of property and who's going to oppose it. Where is the property? Just, I don't know enough about Minneapolis. Where is it? And I guess my real question, my specific question is this, and I'll just say it and be blunt, that one of the hallmarks of the riots in Ferguson and also the riots in LA 20 years ago, 25 years ago now, has been, were that they were in the, they were in the neighborhood of the aggrieved in a sense, right?

Same thing in Baltimore. They actually did it. They didn't take place where the people who are viewed as the oppressors live. They took place in the neighborhood that the, um, the, you know, quote, protesters unquote lived in. Is that the same thing here? Yeah. Well, the, it depends how you describe aggrieved and the rest of it. I mean,

North Minneapolis is mostly where the African-American population is. This happened in South Minneapolis. Southwest Minneapolis is overwhelmingly white and doing okay. South Minneapolis on the other side of the freeway, a dividing line that was created during the freeway construction, is mixed. And it's a great neighborhood. It's incredibly diverse. So you've got white folk, you've got Hispanic folk, you've got African-American, you've got a whole bunch of people in this area. Now, specifically where the burning of the police station was, I mean, they went after the precinct station. The event itself happened on 38th and Chicago, which is to the north and to the west. But this area right there.

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Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie It's very interesting. It's south of the University of Minnesota. I used to live near that neighborhood. That was not my target because it wasn't there when I lived there. But it's seen a lot of history. It's seen a lot of ethnic changes over the years. But it's not economically, it's not this gutted place where nothing grows. I mean, there's businesses all up and down of every stripe of every kind of ethnic food that you would like. There's a school for indigenous Americans. There's a Hispanic radio station next to an Indian restaurant owned by a guy. I mean, so it's the whole kaleidoscope that the urbanists want us to have. And when you go there, you see that this is a fascinating place to be. And that's what they destroyed. But they destroyed it from a line from there going west down Lake Street, which is so named because it terminates in our lake districts. And along the

way, just savage historical structures and burned out businesses. And the target where my daughter was supposed to start work today is guttered and closed. And that's not the target you saw on the news. It was a little pocket target that they built. She was going to have a job there. And they, you know, but again, things happened elsewhere, too. There was opportunistic writing elsewhere. There was a clinic that's part of my wife's, or she works her system. They broke into that and looted it looking for drunks.

Opportunistic looting is one of those phrases that unfortunately we all know the definition of. But again, the people who will defend this will be telling you that Target is a faceless corporation. They're completely insulated. It doesn't matter. They can bear this. And the good thing is that a family has got, maybe a family has an Instapot tonight and the kids have some new toys, as a Jezebel writer was saying. Well, when you look at the store itself,

savaged with two inches of water and F God spray painted on the floor by somebody and realizing that it's entirely possible that all these jobs aren't coming back, that Target may just shrug its shoulders and say, nope, not, nope. Right, right. And when the grocery store is gone, you've destroyed what the people in the neighborhood depend upon

for jobs and livelihood and medicine and food and the rest of it. But that's okay because Target is insured. So, again, it's like you can't have a conversation about the absolute physical destruction of a neighborhood because of the precipitating episode, because of the murder of George Floyd. We got to talk about both. And we have to, because while you can say, you know, the loss of a building is not tragic, it can be restored, the loss of a life is different. And that's true. What loss of life we're going to have at the end of this ride, I'm not exactly sure. But some of the buildings that were destroyed are integral parts of the urban fabric. They're necessary portions of the visual and cultural history of the area. They are

what defines the place. So, you know, again, I could just simply ramble on forever. I'm not sure how illustrative it'll be. No, it's interesting. It's interesting. Well, let me collect my thoughts and perhaps I'll have a little bit more pointed and piquant and rambling at the end of this. But right now we've got other things that we have to do. For example, it's quite astonishing. I was watching this last night and the entire family was watching it on various devices and we depended on the internet to be able to tell us what was going on. That was our lifeline to the world. Yeah, good internet is important. And if you get Eero, you can actually binge watch television on your bedroom and no longer fall asleep on the couch. What is Eero? Well, Eero is the Wi-Fi your home deserves.

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in your house. No, wherever you go in the house, you've got great Wi-Fi and that's thanks to Eero. Get yours fixed as soon as tomorrow. Go to Eero.com slash Ricochet and enter the code Ricochet at the checkout to get free next day shipping with your order. So you can't wait, right? That's what you do. You go to Eero.com slash Ricochet. Code Ricochet. You check out to get your Eero delivered with free

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Barry was an op-ed and book review editor at the Wall Street Journal before joining the Times in 2017. He's also worked at Tablet, the online magazine of Jewish politics and culture. She's a native of Pittsburgh and graduated from Columbia University in 2007. Barry's first book, How to Fight Antisemitism, will be published by Crown in September. You can follow her on Twitter, of course, at Barry Weiss. Welcome to the podcast, Barry. How are you? Thank you so much. And it was published in September, so it's been out for a little less than a year. Good. You know, the title, How to Fight Antisemitism, you know, you just think, I hope this book goes out of print someday because— Anyway, I've never said that to an author. We Jews have been hoping that for like 3,000 years.

Yeah, I was going to say it's kind of a timeless topic, but I never said that to an author. I hope your book goes out of print. Anyway, before we get to Joe Rogan and the internet and the rest of it, Minneapolis, where I am right now, the president, at I think 1.30 in the morning, our very harried neighbor who sort of has the rude alpha male spirits of Beto O'Rourke, was asked to comment on the president's tweets. What are your thoughts on the tweets and how Twitter responded to that? Well, I think that we are in a very—let's put aside the, you know, everyone knows my feelings

about the president and his boorishness and grossness and lack of restraint. But I'm struck that we have, we're in this upside down through the looking glass. Let me find another metaphor to mix up in here. You get the point. We have a Republican president who is arguing for more regulation of speech of private companies. So that is the party of small government ostensibly arguing for more regulation of speech of private companies. And then we have the progressive left arguing for private companies to have more power. They're saying like government hands off, but corporate America hands on. And I'm just struck with, you know, how did we get here? How did we get here? It is very, very strange to me. And it seems to me like, you know, we're in a sort of principlist age where the principle

doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is the outcome. The only thing that matters is, does it get team red or team blue more power? That's it. Right. Hey, Barry, it's Rob Long in New York. Thank you for joining us. So speaking of, let's get me, let's get sort of meta here. You wrote a really great piece about Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan is a podcast host, was a TV host for the Fear Factor for years, MMA commentator, kind of a guy's guy, kind of a weirdo, nice guy, funny guy. And he's got his podcast on for years, and he just sold it for an ungodly amount of money to Spotify. which is, by the way, everybody in the podcast business, of which there are several people on this podcast right now, our ears perked up, our eyes widened, we got very excited. But one of the things you said in your column is that Joe Rogan and podcasts have more media

clout and are more influential than the mainstream media. Is that true? How do you explain that for people who, I mean, remember, most of the people here are listening are conservatives. And we have a 30-year, 40-year tradition of complaining about the media. Yes, yes. And you're telling me, stop complaining. I'm telling you, well, I'm questioning, I'm asking, what does mainstream, I'm provoking,

I hope, the reader to ask themselves, what does mainstream mean? I think that, you know, you have to consider the fact that most people that I, you know, when I'd gone into bodegas and people recognize me from Joe Rogan, or I go into, you know, I remember this moment where I was in Venice, California, and I walked into this like high-end women's clothing boutique and the woman working there, you know, was an enormous Joe Rogan fan. What does it, what does that mean? And I'm trying to force people to grapple with the fact, and maybe especially the right that, you know, the right has always complained that it is sort of elite left-wing Oberlin and Yale graduates that control the culture. But maybe Joe Rogan is saying that, or maybe the success of Joe Rogan should make us revisit

the wisdom of that or the truth of it. And I write this in the column that I think that the reason that there has been such an opening, not just for Joe Rogan's, but Sam Harris's and Tim Ferriss's, and, you know, I could go on and on and on, is that I believe that the, what we think of as the mainstream media, the legacy press, the old guard, whatever you want to call it, has gotten much narrower in what it views as sort of an acceptable viewpoint, so that it is opening up. As it has shrunk the Overton window, people like Joe Rogan have about more than 150 million. 190.

Yes. Yeah, I was going to say 190 million downloads a month. 190 million downloads a month, that's a whole lot of years, right? Another Joe, Morning Joe, is currently the unholy and absolutely unhinged obsession of the president of the United States. I think it's fair to say this is a sign of some kind of bizarre obsession. And vice versa, one could add. Sure. But Morning Joe gets about 2 million viewers a day. That's about his ratings, about 2 million viewers a day. That's about his ratings, about 2 million, a little less some days, a little more some days.

So basically it averages about 2 million a day. The president's obsessed with Joe, Morning Joe, and not at all interested in Joe Rogan. Is the president making a mistake? That is a great question. I think that we have a president who is just absolutely obsessed with cable news. He watches it all day. I think that he and maybe other conservatives are making a mistake not to look at—I think people should be looking at the success of Joe Rogan, not just conservatives, by the way, but if you're the head of Apple TV or you're the head of HBO Max or you're the head of Hulu and say, hold on, this guy is making a killing doing what he's doing. What is he doing and how can we get a slice of the pie that he currently basically has on his own? But I don't seem to like the mainstream doesn't seem to be assimilating the the lessons of his unbelievable success. I'm not sure why that is. One thing with one thing with Joe Scarborough that has kind of fascinated me is that you would think that Twitter, like the outrage over the past few days among not just the mainstream press, really everyone.

I mean, you saw the Wall Street Journal editorial board lambasting the president, which they almost never do, for Trump's conspiracy theorizing tweets about Scarborough and the intern. Why did they not fact check those tweets? Why did they choose to fact check the tweets about mail-in voting and fraud? That's a story that I would love to read. Unfortunately, I'm not sourced up enough inside Twitter to write it myself. Barry, Peter here. By the way, I just wanted to explain one aspect of Rob's line of questioning. When he said that Joe Rogan was paid an ungodly sum of money,

what Rob meant was that Spotify has never called us at Ricochet. That's very true. Barry, how big is the New York Times digital subscription list now? I know the Times has been growing. We're well past the stage five, six, seven years ago when the question was, can the Times and the Wall Street Journal survive? Can they become national digital newspapers? The answer is yes. But what are the latest numbers, roughly? You know what? I'm actually, I'm not sure. I know our stock's doing unbelievably well, and I know we've added an incredible number of digital subscribers,

especially since the pandemic began. And I think what the Times realized some number of years ago, maybe five, maybe a little more, that, you know,

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Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie Within subscription. And that has served, that insight has served us incredibly well in a time where even, I think, excellent magazines like The Atlantic are laying off something like 20% of their staff. Right, right. So I'm bullish on The New York Times right now. Yeah. 20% of their staff. Right, right. So I'm bullish on the New York Times right now. Yeah. I mean, well, you and I could have a conversation about content and have off and on over the years, but the business side of it is what interests me right now. The Times is

succeeding. Now, what about your portfolio of podcasts? I know Ross Douthat participates in a regular podcast. The Times has invested quite a lot in podcasts. Am I right about that? You are. And one thing, you know, I got a lot of flack on the Internet for this particular quote of Rogan's in the piece where he says, podcasting is freeballing, which I just thought was a hilarious and wonderful line. And it's definitely the first time freeballing has appeared in the New York Times, I'm pretty certain. But that's disputable because his podcast is free-balling, but one of his main competitors, if you look at the list inside my Apple podcast thing, whatever that's called, sorry, is he's neck and neck with

The Daily, which is not free-balling at all. It's the Daily podcast of the New York Times, which is one of the most successful podcasts in the world, and it's highly produced. So I think that there's room for both. As for the argument, the argument is, you know, the argument is the flagship podcast of New York Times opinion, but my sense is that we're going to be growing a tremendous amount in the podcasting space. Right. Okay. So here's where my question is going. And it really is a question. I'm not trying to lead you anywhere. I'm just trying to set up a question here. And the question runs sort of, not only am I trying to set you up, I'm still trying to formulate the question in my own mind. Michael Barone, whom you will be well aware of, and Michael, whose detailed knowledge of American history is always astonishing.

Back when the Internet came along and podcast blogging began, podcasting began, and it began to become clear that even the mainstream, so-called mainstream media, were now going to go after target markets. The Times was going to become liberal. Fox News was, of course, launched for Mr. Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch himself famously said, when we launched Fox News, it was to serve an underserved segment of the market, 40% of Americans. Okay. And Michael said, ah, don't worry about it. Back in the 19th century, the press was overtly partisan. There wasn't even

a pretense that this or that publication in this or that town or city was anything other than a part. They took sides and they took sides very explicitly. So you'd have, what was it, the Cleveland Democrat, right? This was all very explicit. And not only was there nothing wrong with that, but these were the days when American journalism was especially vibrant. I mean, right through the 50s and early 60s, New York City itself had, what, close to a dozen newspapers that were all viable and lively. All right. So on the one hand, you see, maybe we're going back to the 19th century model. On the other hand, I just recorded an episode of Uncommon Knowledge yesterday with Ross, Ross Dalvit. And Ross said, yeah, well, and of course, Ross is writing, we were talking about his book, The Decadent Society. And Ross said, one of the aspects

of America today is stagnation of all kinds. And he said, well—he pushed back against this, and Ross made the argument that, actually, there's been far more consolidation than you might have supposed. The New York Times, it's a winner-take-all environment. The New York Times is going to be fine. The Wall Street Journal will be fine. And we won't actually get this proliferation of lively, smaller, perhaps partisan voices that we might have been expecting. What do you think of all this? God, there's a lot there. There's too much there. I'm sorry. No, it's okay. We're out of time. Thank you very much for coming with us today, Barry.

I'm going to be honest. Where I thought you were going was the question that I am very torn about in my own mind. I thought what you were going to ask is, is it, should we just sort of, we don't even need to go back to the 19th century. Should we just become essentially the 21st century London, you know, 21st century Britain, what they have now, which is a highly partisan press. You buy the Daily Mail, you know you're getting a certain thing. And should we just give into that, or should we strive? Should we drop the pretense in a way? Right, right. And I genuinely feel very torn about this. I find it an interesting moment, though, where you have, you know, both Ben Shapiro and, you know, Ben Smith, the old head of BuzzFeed, who's our new media columnist at The New York Times, on the same side of this, which is they're both on the same,

we're, they're both on the side of, let's drop the pretense. I'm not sure I'm there. As for the question of consolidation, I think that one of the interesting reactions I saw to the Rogan Spotify licensing deal was people who are nervous that Spotify is going to become the podcasting behemoth, and this is going to be the end of the sort of open internet wild west of podcasting. So I see that argument. On the other hand, you know, Twitter has allowed for me to follow people who are not blue checkmark and not credentialed and don't have a professorship at Yale or a column at The New York Times who are some of the most brilliant people I follow on Twitter. So I agree.

I don't know. I don't know. We're at the very beginning of a revolution. It's a lot like blogging in the early days. I mean, the barrier to entry is nil. Anybody can do it. Doesn't mean they're good at it. But even though Spotify may take a big chunk, there's still all of these other platforms and ways. I mean, there's still Wondery. There's still Gimlet, there's so many places you can make podcasts, find podcasts. But here's my question, Barry, as somebody else who's in the newspaper business. What I found is that there seems to be two camps when it comes to the internet. There's a managerial editorial class, which is not particularly internet savvy. They know it's there. They know it's important. But if you ask them who Joe Rogan was

or who PewDiePie is, they have no idea. And you have internet personalities, internet subcultures with millions of adherents that's absolutely off the radar of the people who are in the old managerial class. The new people, the new young peppy kids coming up, they are marinated in this stuff. They live in it and they're too online to a fault where they sort of confuse the internet in so many ways with the actual real world. And so magnified Twitter spats into issues of national significance. Which of these camps do you think is going to prevail in the end? And what would the landscape look like if the extremely online kids are the ones who start to run the partisan media organizations? Well, I will say that, you know, Team Backay is that managerial class, and he certainly knows who PewDiePie and Joe Rogan both are.

Well, a gold star for him, and that's not surprising, but it does seem to be an anomaly as opposed to the… Yeah, maybe, maybe. I guess what's scary to me is that the people, the young people—you know, I'm 36, I'm an elder millennial, the Zoomers or whatever we're calling Gen Z—they don't remember a time when there was, where there were sort of authoritative news sources in the way that I had when I grew up. That's gone. And what happens when there is no, like, where does authority lie? Who decides what is true and what is not true? You know, that's the world we're going, like, when you ask who's going to win, well, doesn't the younger generation always win? I don't see a way back.

So the question is what we're going to do about that. And where are the new gatekeepers going to come from, you know? Well, gatekeepers are in the news right now. So I have two questions. One, we talk a lot, certainly in conservative circles, about media and media bias and the unbiased of the media and, frankly, the need for a neutral media. And people at The New York Times and CNN say, yeah, we agree. We are that. That's what we are. And then we conservatives kind of snicker up our sleeves and say, you cannot be serious. So my question is, you're The New York Times. You walk through the newsroom. Do you think they know they're liberal and are doing their best to try to be balanced? Or do you think they know they're liberal and are

trying their best to change my mind? Well, I think that, and I'll say this as someone who, has both worked at a conservative editorial page, the Wall Street Journal, and is the daughter of a longtime conservative Trump-curious person that, like, you know, my dad is DMing me, you know, razor and end all these people all day long. So I'm highly aware of the criticism, but it is way less conspiratorial than I think the right believes it to be. I think it's what happens when you have 98% of people in a company that generally have the same pedigree and the same view of the world. That is going to lead to not necessarily, to me, it's less bias inside the line by line of a particular news story and more about what we choose to cover as news and what we don't. That's where I think the bias comes out more. What's amazing to me is let's even take

the 230, the section 230 that Trump wants to either water it down or revoke it, Josh Hawley as well. What's amazing to me is in January, Joe Biden had a meeting with the New York Times editorial board in which he called for Section 230 to be revoked. And yet that has not been noted or, you know, no one seems to be curious about the politics of this in a way that I find quite strange, just to choose the news of the day. Right. So I guess what I'm trying to say is, I go back to my first question, is this, because I sort of agree with you that we know who wins, the young people win. And the New York Times, I mean, I think if you're in the news to Business New York Times,

or even frankly, in the op-ed, Business New York Times, your audience is a specific audience. I read the New York Times. I live in New York. I read the New York Times. It has a great food section. It has a great art section. It has a great crossword puzzle. I can take or leave the news. I mean, I don't really have to, you know, I don't have to rely on it for local. Even the foreign coverage, even our China coverage? I don't think there's anyone doing that better. Well, I mean, online, I can zip around. It's as easy for me to read the FT or Wall Street Journal online as it is for me to read the New York Times, right? So to me, there's no friction in switching back and forth.

If you're legacy media, big media, should you be worried about this? Should you say to the things that are happening now, the idea of what's happening on YouTube, what's happening on Spotify, what's happening in podcast world, should you be worried about it? I mean, the New York Times went through a – was on its deathbed 10 years ago and it managed through smart investment and really good management to figure its way out and to grow. But there was a time when Donald Trump's moniker, the failing New York Times, was correct. Should old media be worried? Be worried about what, though? No, I mean, just legacy media.

Should legacy media be worried? Can they learn anything from Joe Rogan? There is a tension right now, because what people seem to love about someone like Joe Rogan is his authenticity, the fact that he risks, that he's off the cuff, that what you see is what you get. And there's an enormous premium on that right now. But inside of it, the reason that he can do that, as I write in my piece, is that he's only accountable to himself. If he gets it wrong, he doesn't have to issue a correction in the way the New York Times does. And it's just a different model.

I think the best business decision the New York Times can do is by leaning in to reporting on the world as it is, reporting on the truth of the world, because I think there's still a huge market for that. There is. It's a different thing than trying to be, you know, a wild man punk on the Internet. Right. That's just a different market. Well, local legacy news can ensure its survival by doing the one thing that nobody else does,

and it's reporting on the community fairly and for the record. And that's their killer app. And when they realize that, they prosper. I hope that's what's happening here in Minneapolis. New York is a different story. But Barry Weiss, thanks for joining us today. And everybody go out and after this, of course, purchase her latest book, How to Fight Antisemitism, published by Crown. Follow her on Twitter if you like to, and get in some very online spats if you must. But be nice. Thanks for joining us, Barry. Barry, thanks. Tell the Sulzbergers to triple your salary. Thanks so much. Okay, thanks, guys. Well, at some point in the future, our tweets will probably be nailed to our IP address and our birthdate and our blood type and the rest of us, and then we'll all be

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Now, we have an exclusive link for you here, expressvpn.com slash ricochet. What do you get if you go there? Three months free, three extra months free on a one-year package. That's expressvpn.com to learn more. And our thanks to ExpressVPN for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And now, okay, we welcome back to the podcast John Yoo, who just sends a barrage of emails every day the next time he can be on. Of course, John Yoo is, he's John Yoo, and that's why we're happy to have him. Welcome,

John. Here's the question. Twitter, Twitter's flagged a Trump tweet. There's something we're going to be saying an awful lot in the future. Twitter flags a Trump tweet about George Floyd protests for, quote, glorifying violence. Perhaps that was the looting and shooting. What are the legalities of this? Is Twitter going to have, I mean, is Twitter now, we assume, if they're not flagging something, that they agree with the sentiment? Hey, guys, thanks for having me back. I'm still trying to figure out which one of you guys to eliminate so I can get elevated to be one of the permanent hosts. I want you guys to know Peter has already offered both of you up. Yeah, I accept. Game of Thrones, John and I have been supporting behind your back.

So I, you know, just the politics of it, I couldn't imagine Twitter doing anything better than helping out Donald Trump than by turning all of Trump's terrible tweets about Joe Scarborough and California mail-in balloting and turning it all into Trump being a defender of free speech in America. And that's kind of what's happening here is under the law, there's this difference between a publisher like the New York Times and then someone like a bookseller or what we call a distributor. And so under what's called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act back in the late 90s, Congress basically decided to treat most internet service providers, most websites as booksellers. And booksellers aren't responsible for the contents of the books they sell. Now, what Trump's trying to do is he's trying to say, no, no, Twitter, by

putting on these labels, by editing comments, by getting involved with what people are saying, restricting full speech on their website, they're actually becoming more like a publisher, like the New York Times. And the problem is Trump can't actually change that. That's actually a decision Congress made in the Communications Decency Act. So this executive order he signed yesterday, I think is mostly symbolic. It's not really going to change anything, but it makes it look like he's fighting these Silicon Valley titans on behalf of free speech and really on behalf of conservatives who I think these websites have shown bias towards. John, I just want to get you to repeat that from my little mind. This is not an FCC. I thought it was something Ajit Pai could tweak.

That's not the case at all. It's a statutory matter, and it has to go through Congress. Is that right? Yeah. So, you know, the statute's pretty brief and direct, and a lot of the definitions could be said to be ambiguous if you really wanted to push things. But I really don't think the FCC has a lot of wiggle room here because put aside even that, even behind the statute, then you get to the free speech, the First Amendment. Twitter is not the government. They can say, look, we don't have an obligation to let all views out onto our network. Like you can say Ricochet. Does Ricochet have to publish everything everybody

wants to offer on Ricochet? No. And then you could say, that's my right. That's Ricochet's right, as the free speech under the First Amendment, to choose which podcast we want to offer. Even really, really long ones that go way over time. And you could say- That are late in getting to John Yoo. We're on with the wrong hosts. Don't have enough change at the top. And so you could say – Twitter could always step back and say, we don't care what's even in this Communication Decency Act. We don't care what the FCC says.

We're a private company. We can kick off and put on anybody we want under the free speech clause itself. So yeah, I don't think the FCC, if the FCC's smart, they're not going to touch this with a 10-foot pole. They'll say this is something Congress decided. And even if Congress hadn't decided, Twitter's a private company. They're allowed to put on and take off and make whatever comments they want to on the network. So as a matter of policy, is section two, which is the error that Twitter and Google and all the others and Facebook are not treated like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal? They are given a free pass with certain legal responsibilities for what they publish. Is that the mistake? Or is

the mistake that the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and others that are treated as publishers are held to certain legal obligations for, I think the idea behind all this was to crack, to put a squeeze on people who were publishing pornography was the, well, Justice Scalia would say, don't go, don't worry about congressional intent. But which is the error here? If you were going back and could get Congress to pass whatever you wanted, you might say at the beginning of the internet, what Congress did might have been smart because it allowed for full growth, no real guardrails on the internet. Let companies figure out the policies, figure out the rules on how we're going to have discussion on the internet. But now that we've matured,

it's not clear why, because as part of this protection that Congress gave internet sites, they can't really be sued for anything anyone says on them. So if I'm Ricochet, if I were to go off and start making scandalous, libelous accusations against Peter for many of his past mistakes in his life, and I may just start making them up, no one could sue Ricochet over that. That's not really the standard that applies to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. So as Twitter, Facebook, Google, they become more powerful, they take more control over what's said on their websites, they should be subject to, it seems to me, to the same standards that apply to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. If they publish defamatory or libelous statements,

they should be sued like everybody else. Right now, they have almost a complete immunity to anything that's said on their websites. Now, people would have said back then, look, it's impossible to have people look at every Amazon review or to look at every Yelp or every Yelp rating and go through it and delete the ones that are offensive or wrong, that may not be true anymore with artificial intelligence and algorithms. So as a matter of policy, Trump is correct. Yeah, I actually think if he could, but it's not up to him.

But I think he's got the right view. I think these Silicon Valley companies do have a point of view, and they are starting to enforce it on the conversations on their websites. I don't see why they should get a broader immunity than almost nobody in society gets. Well, in that respect, the Trump position on that is the same as the Joe Biden position on that. I mean, Barry Weiss just reminded us that in mid-January, Joe Biden met with the editors of The New York Times and said that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act should be revoked. So doesn't it worry you a little bit that two powerful political candidates both think that social media needs to come under closer scrutiny from the federal government? Well, this is an interesting thing.

So they both want to get rid of this immunity for internet sites. But then what would happen to them afterwards is really different. So I assume Trump or conservatives would say, and Twitter, Facebook, you're just normal speakers in the free speech clause. You're no more different than Peter Robinson, Rob Long, and James Lilacs. You say something false and misleading on the internet that harms someone's reputation, you could get sued. What Biden and the left want to do is instead say, now that you don't have the immunity, we're going to subject you to this stricter free speech that we want to have, which means no hate speech, no insult, right? They want to-

Well, isn't that always- Ultra-cultural free speech. But isn't that always the argument of speech regulators that I only want to regulate it for fairness. The other guy wants to regulate it for content. Isn't that what every censor always says about their regulations of speech? Yeah, I think that's exactly- That's what the difference is here.

I think Biden and the left want to, as you say, regulate it for fairness. If you wanted to look at that would be a really tough case. And I think ultimately, if Nazis want to have their own website and start talking online, we're not going to shut it down. But in France, they shut that down. But we've managed to take away- Take away, John Yoo supports Nazi speech on the internet. But doesn't he? I mean, shouldn't he? I mean, I support Nazi speech on the internet. But doesn't he? I mean, shouldn't he? I mean, I support Nazi speech on the internet. I support the Skokie decision. I think they should be allowed to march. I should be allowed every speech. When did that stop? I mean, it makes me nervous when a putative, conservative Republican president is echoing a few months later the arguments of a liberal

Democrat presidential candidate. And surprising, it doesn't bother you at all? I can see why. I actually don't like it when Congress passes statutes having to do a free speech at all. My basic view is it's a marketplace of ideas. Let the good ideas drive out the bad ideas. I actually think getting rid of this immunity for websites would just restore the normal rules for free speech. I think Biden and his-

Treat them as publishers and not as distributors, essentially. Yeah. They're not running a town square, right? They're actually the speaker in the town square. And I think that Biden and the left- So is Twitter liable for, if I say stuff on Twitter right now, Twitter's not liable for what I say. And what you're telling me is that Twitter should be liable for what I say. The more that they exercise control over what the content is on their site. The solution for Twitter is simply stop putting those nanny-ish prim corrections on Donald Trump's tweets, and then they'd be fine, right? Actually, I think that's the—if I was running Twitter, that, I think, would be the best

thing to do, is just say, we'll let anything on. It's not our job to pick and choose. I don't even see how they could pick and choose between what's a legitimate thought or not. We don't even trust judges. We don't trust anyone in our society. It's the arbitrary nature of it that anybody who's been on Twitter for any length of time knows. You can be suspended for this. You can be knocked off for that. This will get Twitter's dander up. This won't. When I just said John Yoo supports Nazi speech and Rob said, well, you know, I do in as much as I am for free speech as much as possible. The argument that the people who are making these decisions are the people who believe that there's a whole raft of ideas and speech that that cannot be aired, that ought not to be aired, that are injurious, that are hate speech, that actively cause violence.

And they've codified language as violence. And as such, the idea that they want a free and open debate where all ideas are coming to the public square is nonsense. Twitter obviously does not. When you look at the tweets of the guy who's supposedly now in charge of their truth and safety and friendliness and happiness and peace and war and slavery and the rest of it, that guy's tweets paint him obviously

as somebody who regards Rob as the equivalent of a guy walking down Skokie with an arm band. So for these people to be the arbiters is preposterous. But John, let me ask you this. Some people have said that because if they have to police, that means the end of comment sections, which I'm raising my hand and saying, fantastic, that's great, except for Ricochet, it's a cesspool of horrors because they simply don't have the resource to go through and make sure that every single comment meets their standards. What other ancillary knockoff things are going to arise from reclassifying them as a publisher? Well, first, I don't think it's going to happen.

I don't think Congress is going to pass such a thing. I think, you know, the internet companies would go to the mat to stop Congress from trying to alter one word of this provision. As Peter mentioned, back when it was passed, it was part of this delicate compromise. It was actually about encouraging internet companies to stop pornography, child pornography in particular, other, particular, other threats and violent intimidation from appearing on these sites. So I think we're like, my law talk co-host would say, Richard Epstein would say, we're at an equilibrium. We're at an equilibrium.

I don't think things are going to change. That is libel. Well, and then talk about libel and ricochet, then people make insulting arguments about how the McRib is not real pork and all kinds of comments like that. I was just thinking of that. I knew it was going to come up. But to just answer James's point, what you might have is it's not the internet we have now, but you might have maybe more people speaking, more websites being created. You could have, I always thought if Trump's angry, he's got 80 million followers, the American thing to do would be for someone else to create an alternative to

Twitter and then for people to move to it and say, this version will have no editorial comments and no labels. And that's really what I think would happen next. Should happen or would? I think it would happen. I mean, why wouldn't Facebook or Google, why wouldn't, Twitter's the market-dominant company. If you're Google, why not create just one that has no editorial guidance at all

and try to steal Twitter's market share? It's probably really cheap to create. Because the culture of those companies is impossible. Gab has tried that, and it's a cesspool. I mean, it just is. Every time somebody comes up with something, we're going to be the new this, and ollie ollie in free, it really turns into an unpleasant place. Or you could have one like Ricochet, where you say, we're going to have higher standards, right? It doesn't have to become a cesspool if you have the right people. You know, every time we get together to talk

about this, Rob and I keep saying, how can we lower our standards? This is... I mean, Spotify... Spotify called Jorogun, not us. Do you have one more, Rob? I cut you off there when I was yammering away.

No, no, I'm done. I'm done. I'm done with John. As we are. John, get what you wish for, John. You're going to have to host this podcast, and then you're going to see. You're going to come crawling back to me and saying, please censor me. I was going to say that John, you is like the McRib and the Shamrock Shake of this place,

but those are only things that are available periodically and rarely, whereas John has his face pressed up against the window of Ricochet's head office every day, please, mouthing the words, please, can I come on the show? And then we got to get out the Windex. Well, we've had you on the show, and I hope you're happy, and we are, because we always love having you. John, thanks. Talk to you later. Thanks, guys.

John, thank you. Thanks, John. What car did he drive again? Did we talk about this, or was just my imagination of him some sort of James Bond hero in a tuxedo going from Monte Carlo Casino to some act of daring do? That is certainly the impression John likes to create. Okay, BMW. Well, that's good. I'll bet John pays too much for his car insurance. It would not be ridiculous to think so, because a lot of you people do. It's been reported that Americans overpay in car insurance by over $21 billion. Well, searching for a better deal,

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From afar, gentlemen, I'm just curious, How did this seem to you? Because, you know, I go on this site and that site and it doesn't seem to be paramount to anybody's particular imagination. You can imagine why. It's not happening to them. But it is worrisome. You hate to see an American city go up. And Minneapolis probably, we still think of Minnesota as Minnesota. We, I mean, I, I'll just leave it at that. I can't speak for anybody but myself. I still think of Minnesota as Minnesota nice, as one of those places that because it's largely homogenous, where the argument always is that in Sweden and Norway and Denmark, there's such small countries and they're so homogenous that a huge welfare state sort of works because people trust each other to use welfare only if they need it. And Minnesota seemed to be that kind of, tends to be a liberal state. And at the same time, it still works. And so all of this is just deeply shocking because it plants this question in the back of one's mind. If it can happen there, where can't it happen? Well, the argument about it works, that's sort of been the bargain since the days of Wendy Anderson holding up a walleye on the cover of Time magazine and describing how Minnesota had figured it out. We're going to tax the hell out of you. But on the other hand, our corporations are going to be philanthropic and things are going to work.

You're going to get good roads, good schools, good institutions. It's going to be clean. It's not going to be corrupt. It's going to work. And that held for a while. In the 90s, it was bad. We had a murder spree, murderapolis, you know, they called us for a while because of ongoing gang conflicts. And that helped to sort of sunder that conception.

People were wondering if we were paying all these and trusting these institutions, why isn't it working? Why is it falling apart? But, you know, at this point, as I said, you know, we used I think we had a better governing class before. I think the ones that we have now are sort of what happens after 40 years of one party rule. I think there's a lot of posturing and there's a lot of self-assurances that if we are saying the proper words, I mean, if you look at the emergency proclamations that the governor has made, I think there's about 12 of them now that relate to COVID-19. Every one of them begins with a preamble that says that race and gender equity are paramount concerns.

It's right up there at the top. They've got to let you know that when it comes to this proclamation about how we're going to continue to do inspections of commercial property, race is right there in the forefront. And because they say these things doesn't mean that anything happens about it. But, you know, they say the right things. They fund the right organizations. Whether or not the money gets to the people and changes anything is irrelevant. They have the right formed groups that meet at the city hall and speak the right words. But it doesn't necessarily mean that anything changes.

And that's part of the frustration, of course, of the communities that are supposed to be served. 40, 50 years of democratic rule, and what exactly you got to show for it, precisely. So, you know, that's part about how the Minnesota self-conception will be altered by this in many ways, of course, obviously. A lot of people, as Peter said, think, well, it's a good, safe place because it's ethnically homogenous for the most part, et cetera. But, you know, the other side of that equation is, is the people who had that feeling of safety, that people, that feeling of this is a community of which I'm part and which I am safe, did not feel so because they had an, they had a adversarial relationship with law enforcement that most people don't, period. We just don't. And so, you know, I mean, the city's

tried to address this in numerous ways. They got rid of spitting and lurking laws, which is sort of a pretext for stopping and frisking and the rest of it. And consequently, people said that downtown became more uncomfortable, that it became, you know, more populated by people who were more inclined to harass and spit and behave in antisocial ways. I've seen it, but I still don't have any fears about going downtown. So, yeah, I mean, a lot of this is going to be Minnesotans waking up to something and saying, perhaps my bubble was a little bit too impermeable. Well, city management theory has been, you know,

pretty much since Giuliani in New York has been divided into two almost indistinguishable halves, not halves really, 90% or 80%, depending on how you weight it, of cities across America are extremely liberal, extremely progressive with extremely liberal progressive politics. That was true of LA in the 90s before the riots. That's true of Baltimore. That's true of New York City. That's true, as you described it, Minneapolis. And then there's a 10 or 15 or 20 percent of the city governance that is law enforcement that is run under slightly different rules, right? A lot stricter, a lot more advanced. And the theory, the Giuliani theory was, if I can keep law and order in the streets,

then that's fine. Then all the other nonsense can happen, right? Giuliani did not run a conservative city. He ran an effective police operation. So is that how Minneapolis has been running? Or do you think that's the way Minneapolis is going to run? Do you think the people in Minneapolis have an appetite for that? I mean, they had an appetite for that in Baltimore, and then they lost the appetite for it after the riots, and then the riots turned the city over into really probably the worst city in the country. It's bizarre because right now there's a general assumption that used to be amongst liberals now spreads outside of that, that there's something deeply wrong with Minneapolis police. There's just something wrong with the

culture. There's something wrong with the way it's run. 8% of the cops live outside of the city of Minneapolis. So it almost feels as if you have people who are living in much safer places who have no organic connection to the city that they're supposedly serving. And so you may get some little bandages where they say there has to be 50 percent who live here. I don't know. But simultaneous with this distrust of the institution of the police is a sudden drastic need for the police to actually do their job and save people. Right, right. And so the very people that you're castigating as the part of the problem here

are the people you turn to now and say, my God, this has gone out of hand. I mean, your average liberal watching this, the first night of this is sort of nodding with a grudging agreement. This is what happens. Martin Luther King quote about riots being the voice of the powerless. The second night it happens, it's apprehension, great apprehension. And the third night it's naked fear. And as I was saying to my daughter last night, I said, you know what, you know what you get after this? You get Nixon. You get Nixon. You get people who otherwise- You get a liberal president masquerading. Well, no, you get somebody who's going to make people feel safe. Fair point, fair point.

And it's, and you know, if this, I would not be surprised if Minnesota, if this is one of those things that throws five, ten points on the scale for Trump. But I guess what I mean is that if you look at the crime rates in the cities where these things have erupted because of police brutality. OK, so what they did to Rodney King was wrong. What they did to George Floyd is wrong. They came during a period of declining crime stats. And that's what's curious to me. I don't know. I don't have an answer for it. But it doesn't, what seems like what boiled over is a relationship between African Americans and law enforcement that is mostly

hidden and out of sight and is not recorded in official statistics of murders and drug crime, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That in L.A., crime was going down. In Baltimore, crime was going down. And I presume in Minneapolis, crime was going down. And yet there was this other thing happening. And I'm not sure. I'm not sure it explains it. I'm not sure it excuses it.

It's just an interesting juxtaposition that we wouldn't think, that I personally wouldn't think was happening. But crime going down, you can have murder going down, you can have this going down, but you can also have all kinds of smaller crimes that are increasing that make people feel less safe, more property crimes, more vagrancy, stuff like that. But even those statistics don't reflect the interactions between the African-American community and the police. I mean, you can say all the stats are going down, but if the stats are going down and you have a 30% increase in people just, you know, getting pulled over, and again, they don't pull people

over as much as they used to for reasons of disparate impact, that's the stuff that's below the surface that you don't see in the stats. Here's what I'll leave you with, though, because this is probably a larger political issue for the nation and Joe Biden. The cop, and he had to be named Chauvin. I'm not sure it's pronounced differently, but of course, Chauvin, you know who he was, right? Who's Chauvin? No, I don't. He was a man who was almost a fanatical dedication to Napoleon, coined the term chauvinism. Oh, that's interesting. I should have known that. I'm embarrassed I don't. He was a man who was almost fanatical dedication to Napoleon, coined the term chauvinism.

Oh, that's interesting. I should have known that. I'm embarrassed I didn't. Well, in the 60s, they used to see male chauvinist pig to indicate a sexist. And interestingly enough, the male and pig got stripped off of that and chauvinist came to be a sexist. But it used to be somebody who was just absolutely crazy supporter of Napoleon. I think it was Nicholas, maybe. Nicholas Chauvin. So yeah, so the cop who did this, his name's Chauvin, he's had several run-ins with authority before for excessive force.

And in one case, I believe, it was a shooting of a Native American man, an indigenous American, the correct term is, shooting that was later declared as justified, and the authorities declined to prosecute him for that. And whose decision do you think that was? Oh, this is going to be good. Amy Klobuchar. Yeah. So, I think she's toast.

It doesn't matter whether or not the shooting was justified or was a good shoot, as they say in the horrible parlance. Explain that when you get Joe Biden out through the 94 crime bill and Amy Klobuchar, who signed off on this guy. That's that's that's going to be fun for the debates anyway. So a real, real, real cheerful part for me. That was kind of a very grim Paul Harvey. And now you know the rest of the story. By the way, a reference that will only make any sense to our over 50s. Another craving appeal to the youth of America from Rob Long.

It's very millennial of me. And that little Hennepin County law enforcement officer was. And now you know the rest of the story. This podcast was brought to you by ExpressVPN, the Zebra and the Arrow. Support them. Support us. It'd be great. Go to Apple.

Leave us a five-star review in that podcast thing there because, you know, we know, we're only, I think 179.5 million downloads behind Joe and your review may be the one that pushes us over the top. Um, thanks for joining everybody. And, uh, thank you, Peter and Rob, uh, for, uh, you, all you, all you've done. And now I'm just in blathering platitude mood. So see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, fellas. Next week. There's a blood red circle on the cold dark ground. The rain is falling down. The church door's slowed open. I can hear the organ song.

The congregation's gone. My city of ruins. The congregation's gone. My city of ruins. My city of ruins. Now the sweet bells of mercy drift through the evening trees trees Young men on the corner like scattered leaves The boarded up windows, the empty streets Are my brothers down on his knees My city of ruins

My city of ruins Come on, rise up Come on, rise up Come on, rise up. Come on, rise up. Come on, rise up. Come on, rise up. Come on, rise up. Come on, rise up. Ricochet.

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