The Ricochet Podcast - Civility and Humility

Episode Date: October 25, 2019

After several weeks of different combos for different reasons, The Big Three® are reunited and bring a power hitting show with them. First up, we talk southern cooking (Rob is hosting from Oxford, Mississippi, site of this year’s Southern Foodways Symposium — and please, it’s a serious symposium — not “an excuse to eat fried chicken…”). Then, the hosts debate impeachment and the White House... Source

Oh, sorry, we don't have time for small talk. I'm reported to say I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University. As government expands, liberty contracts. It's funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. That's a good thing. First of all, I think he missed his time. Please clap.

It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lalix, and today we talk to Daniel Krauthammer about Charles Krauthammer and Victor Davis Hanson about defending Trump. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, and it is number 470, and it is the first time in a while that we've all been together. I take full blame for that. I'm sorry. Hello, Peter. Hello, Rob. Where were you, James?

Well, I had technical difficulties a couple of weeks ago, and last weekend I was in Boston for the first time in my life. Never been to Boston. Really? Never had. What did you think? Well, at first I was underwhelmed, and then later I was whelmed, and I like it and want to go back. It's interesting. It was parent-student weekend at Daughters College where I learned that, to my amazement, on a Saturday night, right in the heart of campus, everything closes at 10 o'clock.

I had mentioned this to a cabbie who was from Brooklyn, or an Uber driver from Brooklyn, and I asked him how he liked Boston. He said, it's nice. Everything closes kind of early, though. And he's right. Excuse me, but as the father of a child in college in Boston, you want things to close early. I do. And I'm happy for that. Really? When you want to when you want a meal after the hockey game is over and there's nothing but, you know, this wing joint, you kind of want something more. But on the other hand, you're absolutely right. This focuses the mind wonderfully.

But I got to see the architecture, which interested me much, the ancient creaky subway system, the ghastly city hall, which itself should just be detonated as a public service to everybody. And then the best part of it, and the most American part, was we went to Fenu Hall, where they had a historical reenaction of a debate about the Fugitive Slave Act, where, of course, people got up in period costumes and discussed the issues. But then everybody there, and there was about maybe 50, 60 people who'd wandered in, were given a card that had a quote from somebody who actually participated in the actual debate in 1850. So you stood and you read your statement opposing or supporting the Constitution or higher laws, as it was put. And it was fascinating.

Everybody really got into it. So you have all these Americans standing up there and reenacting this event with passion. And they just wandered into it. It was marvelous. Then they took a vote. And, of course, higher law won. Constitutional law did not. And so we went off to legal seafood and had a long argument about these very issues playing out today. The importance of the law, how it is necessary to maintain it versus higher moral questions.

And it was just fast. I've never had anything like that in a city. May I take you back to step one of your response to Boston? I cannot imagine you, of all people, feeling underwhelmed by Boston, the architectural – it's nothing like as physically surrounding or encompassing as New York, of course. But A, the sense of history, and B, yeah, there's a lot of lousy architecture, modern stuff. But you don't have to look that hard to come across some 19th and even 18th century jewels how could you have been underwhelmed by boston for a moment what struck you as blue well that's because of where i was i was at boston university which is not a campus in the sense that i construe one in my mind with a you know jeffersonian style mall of column buildings and ivy and the rest of it had some

of the most meretricious modern architecture i'd ever seen and no sense of campus. So, my initial reaction was that, was responding to that. I was interested, but I wasn't necessarily swept off my feet. When we went downtown and you found yourself standing by Benjamin Franklin's grave in this shrouded boneyard with these tombstones worn away by the hand of time, no name visible, you realized, A, how old this is, and yet, B, how young this country is, and C, how much extraordinary effort and ingenuity and capitalism and markets have done to build this place up to what it is. So, I mean, I can't wait to go back. Let's put it that way, because towards the end, we lingered for a day, Dotter and I, in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts,

which is now my favorite museum. And I was just knocked over. So, yes, in the end, I came away saying, I love this town. I can't wait to go back. I certainly like it more than New York. Ha! Oh, wait, you had to stick that in. I did, because it's just more humanely scaled. The older I get, the more tired I am.

I love New York. It's exciting, but after three days, I'm just, okay, you win. You win. Speaking of humanely scaled, how's that for an embarrassingly crude segue? Rob is at this moment in... I am in Oxford, Mississippi, which does have all those things that James was wondering about. It does have a town square. The famous Lafayette County Courthouse is there, which if you've read your Faulkner, is Yucca-Napitofa County. This is where he lived, and last night we were all gathered at Roanoke, which is his house. And it has all the things you want, including this incredibly long history of complicated history of being both, you know, in many ways a soul of the Confederacy and also a soul of the Civil Rights Movement.

And, you know, like everything else in Mississippi, it's a very complicated position of trying to figure it all out now. Well, peripatetic country hopper that you are, what brought you to this place? I am part of the Southern Foodways Alliance, and we have our annual symposium here. And so I'm missing some fascinating presentations to be here with you fellas. Hey, Rob, the Southern Foodways Alliance, is that, let's face it, is that just an excuse to get together and eat fried chicken? What's the output

other than lovely food? Well, I mean, there's obviously lovely food, and of course fried chicken is kind of a slur that you... Did I just insult all of Southern cooking? I'm sorry. Well, no, you just reduced of southern cooking i'm sorry well you know you just reduced it all you big city uh you know could have elite northerners like yankees like to say

um you know you can get perfectly good fried chicken in maine as a matter of fact um no no the south is the country's attic in many ways right it's where all the sort of memories are stored and where the memories are sort of kept alive and so the southern foodways alliance does we do we celebrate and document and record the foodways of the American South, which is like saying the foodways of America. You know, who grew it, how they grew it, what they grew and who cooked it and how they cooked it and who they cooked it for. All those things are kind of interesting and important.

And, you know, it's a very strange thing because for years and years and years, nobody paid any attention to food as a subject. Food is something that was like. No, we can't stop talking about it. Well, we can't stop talking about it. We also can't. I mean, we're sort of catching up to the fact that this is this thing that we do three times a day. And, I mean, even scientifically, we don't know that much about it.

You know, we know more, I think, about the genome and certainly more about the way protons move around than we do about what happens to enzymes in our stomach. We don't know much about that. And the same way we don't know much about what we should be eating and how we're eating and how we should grow it. I mean, here's an example of what I mean. Full disclosure, I blame the U.S. government and the federal government first and foremost for almost every bad thing. And we had a food pyramid

for years that told Americans to eat more bread and pasta. Lies, lies, lies. Not a lie, but a very dangerous lie. But we also did this thing in the prosperity in the 40s and 50s taught us that what we needed to do was to eat more beef. So we tried to eat more beef, and we started raising these cows.

Cows are vegetarians. They're vegans, really. They eat only grass. And so they are naturally a very lean animal. And so we instead decided to raise these animals fat, and we gave them corn. And so they get sick. So now we have to pump them full of antibiotics. and we have to raise a very lean animal, very fat.

It's sort of like, imagine, you know, tying your kid to the sofa for five years and feeding him only Doritos. Like, that's what you do. It's not very healthy. And on the other hand, we have this incredibly delicious animal, the pig, and we said, well, we want to make that the other white meat. Let's raise this fat animal that eats everything. I mean, the pig will eat everything. People will be halfway eating its own foot before

it realizes it. And we decided to raise that animal lean. You know, the other white meat, people said, oh, it's not just chickens, pork. You can eat pork, it has no fat in it. So we took this lean animal, we raised it fat, and we took this fat animal and raised it lean, and we sort of wonder why people just, you know, would rather eat chicken nuggets, you know? Rob, I have in my mind, I just finished watching the latest Kenneth Burns on country music, and I have to say I'm a little tired of the slow, slow pace of Ken Burns. Nevertheless, this turned out to be just fascinating, and what you realize every so often,

of course, the documentary is dominated by performers and the performers' families in the present day, but they cut every so often to scholars of country music who knew there was such a thing. But it turns out for some decades now, people have been scouring the South with tape recorders or whatever they're called these days and actually noting where songs came from. And you're telling us that that's roughly what the Southern Foodways Alliance does? There are people who go off and say, so where did this recipe come from? And where did your great-grandmother come from? From Scotland or from, is there an African influence?

They're actually documenting this. Is that right? It's exactly right. It's exactly what people were doing. I mean, look, in the 1920s, the Ken Burns documentary, by the way, is fantastic. I mean, it really is interesting. It was a 1920-something, and I'm just blanking on his name, a recording executive from New York City. In those days, from the Victor Recording Company, in those days, the company that made the player also had to make the records.

So the Victor Company, which made Victrolas, also made the record that you had to buy. So you bought your music and your record player, your Victrola, in the furniture store. And he went down, he got $60,000, which at that time was an enormous sum. This is before the Depression, technically, but of course the Depression started early in the South, as everything else did. And he took it down to, and he went to Bristol, Tennessee, among other places, and the Bristol Sessions, which they were now called, where he just, he paid you, like, you could go in, if you recorded, he recorded you, you got 50 bucks or something. So there were families, the Carter family, that's how the Carter family was discovered. June Carter, who then became June Carter Cash. They all trooped into the department store on the main street in Bristol, Tennessee, and they recorded three or four songs.

And they left with like $400, $500 in cash. And that is really, that was the birthplace of country music. That was the birth of that kind of American music being heard as far west as San Francisco, as far north as Maine. Otherwise, it would have been a little niche local product, but when you're broke and you don't have much to do, but it turns out you have a lot of faith, right? You go to church a lot. So you sing a lot. You can play the guitar and you can play the piano and you can write music and you can sing and you can sing in harmony. And that made a lot of people in the South, it was their living, surprising living. Between that and radio, National Barn Dance and the Opry and the rest of it, it's brought to the rest of the country.

Well, it's interesting to hear, Rob, the cultural carpetbagger, of the east coming down to the south you know well marvelous it's marvelous down here it's very authentic you do know your food is more than okra and grits right you do know that don't you yes um before we get to our first guest however we probably should do some politics because there's something going on there uh impeachment polling a little better i'm still i mean better i mean if you if you're in the pro impeach camp you're like in the numbers but i'm not sure that uh and i'm i'm not sure that anybody knows exactly why this is going on i mean i just i i'm i'm not quite sure that the specifics of it, I mean, we knew what was going on. I mean, everybody could pin it down with Clinton. Everybody could pin it down with Nixon. But this, I think everyone says, well, the Ukraine, there was the Ukraine, and then he had a pro-quid, a real, you know, not an amateur quid, but he had a completely pro-quid going on there.

And how do you think this is reflecting on the hustings, shall we say, or where Rob is for that matter? You want to go first, Rob? Sure, I'll go first. I think four things, right? Here are the four things that I think. Wow, I am so impressed. I'm having trouble forming one thought. Go. Four separate separate thoughts they don't necessarily hang together um the democratic strategy is um to to draw to drag this out i don't think it's to remove the president i just think it's to remind people that he's objectionable in a lot of different ways so they used um the ukraine

phone call as a wedge thin edge of the wedge to sort of get in there and dig around and find something else. And they are, I think you're looking at the jump, in some polls it's been a single-digit jump in independents and sort of non-aligned voters saying they approved of the inquiry. I don't think that means that they know more about what happened in the Ukraine, and so they now believe that this one event was actionable or objectionable. I think what the Democrats are trying to do is just to generally show a president out of control who needs to be removed. And so the impeachment inquiry is kind of a shadow campaign against him that will actually blend into the presidential campaign. They are nationalizing and federalizing the anti-Trump campaign right now. The Republicans, on the other hand, are trying to remind everybody that this is strange and unconstitutional and politically motivated and designed at all about one thing, right? And so you see this Republican support in general, and that right

now they're going to pass the Senate, pass a resolution condemning what's going on in the House or demanding that they have a vote. And I think that is simply designed to, like, there'll be a lot of these showings to try to remind Republicans outside of Washington and also a lot of Republicans in the Senate that there's still a lot of juice left in the Trump orange, right? He's still got leverage. He's still the president. He's not dead. as it was going to be a bloodbath, just from sheer numbers, just the facts on the ground, the minute they sense that Trump is no longer worth supporting, he's done. Because he doesn't have anything to give. He only needs, he has no agenda. There is no particular reason

why you, if you're a Senate Republican, facing a tough re-elect, need to stand by the president. But there are going to be a lot of votes and a lot of shows of support, and it's going to cut two ways. There's a third thing I'm going to say for the Republicans. One way it's going to cut by saying, you know, rallying the troops. Senate Republicans hold full firm. But the second way it's going to be is saying, if you feel like you're's going to be is saying if you're if you feel like you're eventually going to have to cut this president loose which could easily happen he is in free fall right now i don't think he's had a worse month than he's had the past

month both politically and in popular terms if you think you've got to cut him loose you will at least be on record with your republic your Republican voters in your home state as having defended him, you know, a dozen times. I voted a dozen times to condemn the inquiry, but a dozen, so that if you have to cut him loose, you have a paper trail saying I did support him. And the last thing I'm just going to say is that what I, this is what I really believe, and I tried to get, talk about it last time we were talking about this issue, and I was sort of shot down, but I think I'm right, which is that it is from a piece of opposition research to the Justice Department, to an independent counsel, and to an investigation, to the FBI investigation of Trump and Trump campaign, that is now in a race for juicy convictions and juicy details with the impeachment inquiry. And if Trump and Barr get there first, even though they're not really totally related, it's going to really hurt

impeachment. So those are my four things. And it'll depend on how it's played in the press, which is remarkably incurious about this at all. The same people who came up with all the president's men and the CIA is a malevolent force in the world are now backing the CIA attempts to bring down a president because it's the right thing to do. Because, I mean, when I say incurious, the president will tweet out something. A couple of days ago, I think he mentioned the phrase insurance policy harking back to something that

Page instructed in the text and the rest of it. knows this stuff but you never find the press saying here's what the president meant when he referred to the insurance policy because they don't because they don't care because it's irrelevant oh her emails i roll you know insurance policies are something that everybody should have and you may be putting off getting yours because you think it's complex oh my goodness it's been so long since we heard james do that that it's a fresh astonishment. He's so good at it. He's so good at it. Well, so is ethos when it comes to giving you the best life insurance you can.

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One more time, make sure you visit ethoslife, E-T-H-O-S-L-I-F-E dot com slash ricochet so they know that we sent you there. Our thanks to Ethos for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And if you don't have life insurance and it's been bugging you, this is your chance. Ethoslife.com. I had to avail myself of that opportunity to get the spot in there, but Peter, we haven't heard your words on impeachment yet. Rob Leda-Lazza. I'd add a couple of points, I guess.

Just a couple. This is bad for the country. The founders in the constitutional debates, as Alan Dershowitz pointed out in a piece in the Wall Street Journal, what, 10 days ago or so now, we have the debates, we have notes on the constitutional debates, and they considered impeachment for maladministration and decided not. They wanted to have a higher standard, high crimes and misdemeanors, because they did not want to create in this country a parliamentary system like the one in Britain, in which the executive and the person of the prime minister and the cabinet are directly subservient to the legislature, in this case, in Britain, the House of Commons, and you can have a vote

of no confidence at any time, and the executive gets tossed out. The founders considered it and rejected it. They wanted an independent executive in this country. If impeachment becomes a merely political enterprise, and with the Democrats holding hearings in private, refusing to permit the country, refusing to permit proper cross-examination, contrasted with Peter Rodino's hearings, Congressman Peter Rodino, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee under Nixon, everything took place in public. The Republican staff was permitted to review documents before testimony. The president's staff, the president's legal team was always permitted to have a legal representative review documents.

By the way, what this meant was that the case bit by bit slowly got built and the public was brought along. But it was always viewed as a very serious matter that had to operate according to constitutional principles of due process and innocent until proven guilty. Now we have what is clearly a purely political enterprise. It's really bad for the country. I disagree with Rob in one regard. When I think of the members of the Senate, I'm fortunate enough to count a couple of them as friends, and I know several others at least somewhat. When it comes right down to it, Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz and Ben Sasse and Rob Portman and John Hoeven are not going to cut

the president loose. When it comes right down to it, they will vote according to what they consider best for the country, which means voting on the evidence, which right now means surely voting to acquit, whatever the political consequences. I do believe that at least among Republicans, there may be one or two who are purely political hacks, but I do believe that from what I know of the Senate, when it comes to it, they will do what they consider honorable because they need to live with themselves for the rest of their lives. I agree. No, I agree. I mean, I just need to, let's just wrap this up because I definitely agree with what you're saying. I'm just suggesting that if more things come out, this is-

Oh, that's different, yes, yes, yes People forget how close Clinton came to getting removed And it had nothing really to do with Monica Lewinsky Or the underlying reason he was impeached was because he committed perjury It was because of all the other evidence in the evidence room that the senators had to look at And that it seemed like, that wasn't really germane, frankly, to the singular issue of whether he committed perjury or didn't, because he did. The question was that he did a lot of other bad stuff. And it is true that the founders wanted this to be as removed from politics as possible.

But it is also true they they understood, it is a political process, and it will be tried and heard by, but refereed by a judge, but tried and heard by politicians. And the political calculus changes all the time, which is why I think it's important for the Trump side and for the anti-impeachment side to make sure that this inquiry is seen as, frankly, in my opinion, for what it is right now, especially as a purely political theater, frankly, doomed kabuki theater in a lot of ways. But it's important to poison the well as much as they can and to get this bar inquiry, this criminal probe on the Russia matter fully underway so that they can respond to this by saying, this is just like you tried to do before.

It's illegal and wrong and entirely politically motivated. You are trying to undermine the vote of the people, just like you did with the Russia probe. And if they have the proof to be able to make, to say that, true evidence for that, it will make their case extremely strong. Well, Kabuki theater being characterized by people wearing masks of anguish, making gestures in silence, that would be me trying to get this conversation closed so we can get on to our guests. And now we welcome to the podcast Daniel Kronhammer. His writing has appeared in the Weekly Standard, National Review, New Republic. He holds degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford in economics and business administration and has worked in government policymaking as well as the entertainment

and technology sectors. Spent the last year of his father's life with him in the hospital where together they worked on the plans to complete his father's final book, The Point of It All. It's now available in paperback, by the way, and you can order the book and find out more about Charles Krauthammer's writing, his career, his legacy at charleskrauthammer.com. Welcome, Daniel. Thank you. It's good to be on with you guys. I appreciate it. As you published yesterday in the Washington Post, well, yesterday or a few days ago, depending on when people hear this, your father championed civil debate. It's one of the things we love here at Ricochet, and it's one of the things that people on the right are having a big argument about because they worry about the efficacy of it in a time when the worst people seem to be filled with the worst passions and

the worst arguments, and they seem to be winning. And you say that this example is needed now more than ever. Yeah, that comes from the preface that I wrote for the new paperback edition that you mentioned. And it really was based mostly on my experiences this last year. Since the book originally came out, I went around the country to talk about it and met so many people who read my dad and followed him and really looked to him as kind of a trusted guide for how to figure out the world. And that was the thing that everybody said was, I could trust him. He's who I could look to, to actually know that I was getting the truth and that I could listen to someone. And even if I disagreed with him, I knew I would still learn something. And I think that's not a very common thing these days. And that's something that

my dad did, I think, probably better than anybody, and it's something that people miss and something I think we should all strive to do more. Daniel, Peter here. Thanks for joining us. I've heard this story, but it's vague in my mind, and it just fascinates me. Tell the story, if you would, of how your father, a trained psychiatrist, psychologist, always get the psychiatrist is the one that requires a medical degree. He's a medical man. He devoted years of his life to that training, trained at very high levels, and he moves into punditry, political analysis. How did that happen? Yeah, it is quite a story. And he would always joke, you know,

kids would come up to him and say, you know, Dr. Krauthammer, how do I get to be a political pundit? He would always say, well, first you go to medical school. But, you know, he writes about this actually in both of his books, in The Point of It All and Things That Matter. But he had always loved politics and philosophy. And that was actually what he focused on as an undergrad. And he went to Oxford and studied that. But he felt that it was too removed from reality. He didn't want to be up in the clouds just talking philosophy. And so he looked to medicine as something concrete where he could really do something to help people. And specifically psychiatry, which he felt kind of combined a little bit of the ideas and the poetry of thought with the concreteness of medicine.

So he did that for almost 10 years. He went to Harvard Medical School and was chief resident at Mass General. But he just realized the longer he was doing it, it wasn't what he was meant to do. And he just wasn't feeling fulfilled and happy. And it was actually my mom more than anyone who encouraged him to really follow his heart, his passions, what he really cared about, which was these big ideas of politics and how we arrange our lives. So there's a funny story that his supervisor at Mass General got hired by Jimmy Carter to run the National Institutes of Mental Health. And my dad goes in and says, you know, I hear you're going to need a right-hand man in Washington.

And his boss says, oh, might that be you by any chance? He says, yes, yes, it is. So he kind of just, you know, clawed his way and got, you know, that was his ticket to Washington. And once he was there, he just started trying to write samples and send them out, got a couple things published, and then applied for and got a job as a speechwriter for Walter Mondale, which everyone who watches Fox News is surprised to hear. So that's how he really got into writing.

He did that. And then after Carter lost, he started writing for the New Republic and then the Washington Post after that. And then the rest was history, kind of. And Daniel, Rob Long wants to come in here, but I have one more question. The question, of course, is Trump, the Trump era, where your dad, I did not know you, I met him a number of times. I did not know your father, but we had many friends in common.

And in the Trump era, some of his friends go in one direction. Of course, I'm thinking of Bill Kristol. And other friends go in another direction. And, of course, I'm thinking of a number of the personalities at Fox News. And your dad managed, just to me, an astonishing astonishing act journalistic act i don't want to say playing it down the middle because that sounds as though he was splitting differences remaining authentic remaining true to himself remaining true to what everyone understood about what he believed before trump came along he was skeptical of trump personally. He was offended, but he stuck

up for many of Trump's policies. Did he feel lonely? That's the question I have. Journalists, comradeship, friendship, that's especially important to journalists, I find. Did he feel lonely during the Trump era? It's a good question and one that people ask me in varying ways a lot. You know, I think on a lonely question, I think, you know, he had immense inner strength. And I think a lot of that came from knowing so deeply why he was doing what he was doing. And it relates a little bit to what we were talking about with his former career as a doctor, that he always said he left his career behind where he knew he was helping people in a concrete way. And so he said to himself, look, if I'm going to do this, if I'm going to write and be a critic and be a political commentator, I better say what

I believe. And there's a quote on the back of the book that I love that he says, if you don't say what you believe, you don't say it honestly and bluntly, you're betraying your whole life. And I think he really did believe that. And I think that's where, you know, he was just very clear in what his vocation was. He wasn't there to be an advocate for a political party. He wasn't there to be on anybody's team or any particular party as it manifests itself that given year, that given month. He was there to, I think as he saw it, work from his core beliefs, the base philosophy of enlightenment, liberalism, and constitutional democracy, and work that out through his logic, through his arguments, to the end point on whatever the argument of the day was,

wherever that would land. I think people couldn't predict where he would come out on a lot of stuff, not because he was unpredictable, but because he was so consistent with his own principles, not with necessarily the talking points of any given party. So I think he really, as you said, he just remained authentic to himself. I think that's because he believed that was his job. He wasn't there to tell people what they wanted to hear or to be an advocate for one part or another. He was there, as he said, to call a folly a folly. And he said there's no other way for an honest critic to be.

Hey, it's Rob Long. Thanks for joining us. So, I mean, he went from this career where things are life and death to a career where, let's be honest, they're not life and death. But people, it does seem like in the years that sort of certainly span your dad's career as a political or national observer, that things have gotten very, I mean, I think the term you're using in your piece is apocalyptic alarmism. Things have gotten very, people really believe everything is life and death, that if we pull out of the Paris Accords, we're going to kill people. If we vote to defund National Endowment for the Arts, people are going to die. It's as if, for your father, it must have seemed very strange that he left an emergency room, an OR essentially, and entered another area of incredible panic. I mean, when you survey the scene today, like everything we talk about, I mean, as a friend of mine says, it seems like everything's turned up to 11.

Yeah. Even small things. Yeah. No, I agree. I'd say two points to that. One, I very much agree, and it's one of the reasons I wrote that piece and the introduction the way I did, because I think it does appear to me, at least, that right now we tend to exaggerate every little thing,

and I think it's probably the media and everybody just wanting to make a big deal, but we seem to constantly be in a state of apoplectic emergency. And a point of the book, actually, you know, the book, The Point of It All, and his other book, Things That Matter, the real core point my dad was making at the core of the philosophy was that life shouldn't be about politics, that it should be about what you find personally, what gives you meaning, how you chart your life by your own path, right? Politics should be out of that. But, but what's important is to have politics that allow you that freedom and

allow you that individual space. And that's what he fought for. And, you know, I think the, the second point I make is despite how, how frustrating and depressing it is to see how overwrought everyone seems to be with politics, I think there's some comfort in the book and my dad's writing, too, that we have been here before. I mean, for instance, you know, the piece I quote a lot in that preface and in that Washington Post piece was one that he wrote in 1983 during the nuclear freeze movement. And so that was early in his career, a long time ago, when he saw similarly people acting like the end of the world was upon us. And, you know, I think it's in some ways depressing that we keep repeating ourselves, but on the other hand, a little reassuring that, you know, people have thought it's the end of the world before people have been worked up about nothing before, and we've gotten through it. So I have some faith we can get through it again.

When people argue for civility in politics and political conversation, the response from a lot of people is, well, how could I be civil? We're going to destroy the planet. Or how can I be civil? There are children in cages. How do we make an argument for civility to people who believe that there's such an urgency to all of the political questions that we face that civility is the first thing that goes out the window? It's certainly difficult, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But I think I would say maybe the primary answer is that to have civility, you also need humility. And you have to have some degree of awareness that no one is ever 100% right or 100% sure. And that's actually the whole point, not only of democracy, but the whole

idea of free speech, of an open society where we debate and figure out what's right and figure out what the best ideas are through the competition of ideas. And that when you're too sure that you're right, that is often the first step to undoing that whole way of life, to saying, I mean, essentially going down a road of, of what's more or less a religious attitude, that this is the one and only truth and you must sign up for this or else you are a bad person. You are against me. And I mean, if history teaches anything, it's that enforcing religious dogmas, whether they're actually religious or political or otherwise does not end well.

So I think just having that degree to step back and say, okay, I believe this, but I need to be able to A, put it as a good argument and convince someone else, and B, realize that as much as I believe it, I need to grant that I don't know everything. Daniel, James Lyle, I'd like to see your last question. I first encountered your father's writing when I was in college in the early 80s at the University of Minnesota's Daily Newspaper in the editorial office where we worshipped Charles writing in the New Republic. We were all good liberals at the of issues that you could point to, or maybe just one, one word that was the reason that your father made the ideological peregrination that he did? Yeah, I'd say there are two, it's a two-track answer to that. And my dad writes at some length about this, actually, in the introduction to Things That Matter and, again, in The Point of It All. And he says, basically, on foreign policy, it is the Reagan line, that it was the Democratic Party that left him, not the other way around, that he had been part of the Cold Warrior wing of the Democratic Party just moved so far to the left that he just had no home there anymore and that it really became Reagan's party that stood up for what he had always believed.

So on foreign policy, he really did stay consistent essentially his whole life. On domestic matters, that's where he said he had more of an evolution himself, that he had always been a Great Society Democrat. He cared about the objectives of that program to help those less fortunate make life more fair. But he said essentially as the social science data started to come back in during the 80s from the Great Society programs, from all the welfare programs, he essentially became convinced that they were doing more harm than good. And as he said, you know, he was trained as a doctor, and if the medicine is hurting your patient, you stop the medicine. And so that's, I think he had always believed in the core principles of limited government, but he saw more and more that

on the practical scale, that was actually going to do more help than government being over-involved. And so he moved further to the right towards limited government, towards opening up more space for civil associations and volunteers to take care of those problems. Those stories and more in the book, The Point of It All, Daniel and Charles Krauthammer. You can order the book and find out more about Charles Krauthammer's writing career and legacy, as I said before, at charleskrauthammer.com. Daniel, thanks for joining us today on the podcast. Thanks so much for having me. Daniel, thank you.

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Martin and Illy Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, author of the enormous bestseller, The Case for Trump. You can hear all of his musings on issues great and small, current and otherwise, on Victor's own podcast, The Classicist, which happens to be available right here on the Ricochet Audio Network. Victor, you literally wrote the manual on how to defend Trump, but this was written before this whole latest imbroglio started up, the impeachment. So if somebody wants to defend the president but is casting a bond for tools with which

to do so, well, what would you say? Help us, Victor Juan Kenobi, as somebody wrote in a note that I'm looking at you with a cocked eyebrow. What would one do to defend the president in this situation? Well, I'm not sure there is a situation. I mean, we have a whistleblower who took advantage of a mysterious change in the IG law that said that you could introduce second and third-hand gossip as a complainant. And then he violated the statute by not going to the IG, but he went to Adam Schiff's staff who lied about it. And then that promulgated a whole series of rumors that he had contacts with Joe Biden, that a legal team from a Democratic law firm had helped him prepare.

Whatever that is, the net result is suddenly Donald Trump released the transcript, and it shows probably bad judgment or crude Trump, but it doesn't show anything different than what most presidents do. I mean, it wasn't like he got caught in a hot mic saying, tell Vladimir to take it easy during my reelection, and I can work with him on missile defense, which we dismantled. So my point is that I don't know what all this is about because all of a sudden the whistleblower disappeared. He was supposed to come in here and give all these revelations. And then in his place, we don't have a House Judiciary Committee. We have the House Intelligence Committee, which we never did under the impeachments of proceedings of Nixon and Clinton. And there's no way to, you know, just selective leaks of what's going on. Nobody knows what's going on. Adam Lake kind of throws his brow and grimaces and says,

worst thing he's ever seen in the leaks, but he won't let anybody actually read the transcript. So what is all this about is what I'm getting at. I think what it's about is the stuff we're hearing today. And that is that this investigatory work by John Durham and William Barr has turned into a criminal investigation, probably based on information in part from Michael Horowitz's FISA report. And then when you collate that with this lawsuit to dismiss the charges of Flynn, you're starting to see that the 302s that Peter Strzok supposedly took right after the interview and that were exonerating were at least somehow massaged by Lisa Page, who denied she ever did it, and now says that she might have done it. And she communicated with Peter Strzok about doing it, and that was pretty much the basis to indict Flynn.

Victor, explain what a 302 is just briefly those are the notes of people that fbi agents make immediately within a particular time frame after they interview somebody so they have it fresh and that had been and then it's filed and lisa page denied that she um edited it but it's clear that she did from communications with her paramour, Peter Strzok. What I'm getting at is that you almost get the impression that this half-cocked race to impeachment was some type of preemptory effort or anticipatory effort that they knew the news cycle was not going to be good and it's not going to be good because they waited 22 months for for the muller report they didn't want to dare talk about impeachment and suddenly one little whistleblower's uh rumored

contact with adam schiff set them off to the races. And you wonder whether they would do that again if they had known that the whistleblower was sort of compromised and that Trump himself would release this so-called incriminatory transcript, which actually didn't quite jive with what the whistleblower said it was. And, Victor, you mentioned the hot mic moment where Obama said, I'll have more flexibility after the election, and you mentioned the removal of the missile systems from Poland, which would seem to be the sort of thing you would do if you're Putin's puppet, like cutting off domestic oil production in order to strengthen the Russians' hands, delivering natural gas. All of these things, I mean, even when you mentioned Page and Strzok,

these are names that are slipping back into the antique mists of history. Is this because we have a press that is, A, supine and completely willing to obscure past Clinton-esque Obama-era mistakes, or is it because they're just simply of a generation that rewrites history every week or so, upends the etch-a-sketch, and regards everything that went before the current crisis as irrelevant? I think both. These people are not talented in the way that the old journalists were. They're photogenic. They're social media creatures.

That explains part of it. But Trump was sort of chemotherapy, or he was some kind of strange concoction that pressed every one of their buttons. He wasn't part of the Republican Mitt Romney, Marcus of Queensberry Rules establishment. He had that awful Queens accent. His past was notorious. He promised to drain the swamp.

He came in. He didn't listen to sober and judicious counsel on foreign relations type. He just moved the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He canceled the Iran deal. He got out of the Paris. These were all commandments that you don't touch. So I don't think they understand. They still don't control the news cycle. So there's alternate media. There's people like you. There's talk radio. There's social media. There's Fox News, whatever they are. And the other media is that they did a lot of things that were felon on the air. And Brendan said the week before,

I was just obeying orders. And now you see Strzok and McCabe is on the airwaves today. And I think all it's going to take, and it will happen, one of those people will want to be leveraged and will start talking. And then we're going to learn that our top intelligence agencies in 2015 and 2016 for, quote, unquote, noble purposes, put informants in a campaign, deceived a FISA judge to surveil Americans, leaked confidential and classified information and lied about it. And requested names of people they thought would embarrass the Trump transition, especially Samantha Power, and then leaked those names illegally to the press. Not winning or not succeeding in subverting that campaign, they tried to subvert the transition, and then after that it took on a life of its own. So I think the worm, to use that old English expression, the worm has turned.

And I don't think they're going to like the news cycle. I think, I don't want to be conspiratorial, but I think that explains the bizarre behavior of Adam Schiff, what he's doing, because it's inexplicable that the head of the Intelligence Committee would lie about not having contact with the staff, the whistleblower, or do that parody reading of the transcript, or come out every 20 minutes and say this is a bombshell, but not let anybody listen to the bombshell transcripts. So there has to be an explanation for why this sudden impulsiveness. And I think it's because they're scared stiff that Uber and Durham and Barr and Horowitz are going to change the news cycle. And they want to damage Trump or damage Barr or somebody.

Talk about impeaching Barr now, probably. Hey, Victor, it's Rob Long. Thanks for joining us. So, I mean, how much of this, you know, when you're looking at this sort of just to talk about the public, the public face of this and the polls, the polls don't look good for Trump. But they seem to be all mixed up in a larger sort of vague sense that, you know, he's always been a kind of a weak president politically. He's always had trouble in the polls. He's you know, these endless personnel changes. I mean, isn't this what's going to bring him down, if anything brings him down? It's not going to be a phone call with Ukraine, which I agree seems kind of small potatoes. It's not going to be, I mean, and when the report comes out, when the bar report comes out,

or the investigation is, you know, in full career, we are, I when the report comes out, when the bar report comes out, or the investigation is, you know, in full career, we are, I think I agree with you, I think we're going to see that there was an incredible, incredible subversion of natural, of normal standards, and an involvement by the CIA in domestic politics, which is sort of a shocking anti-constitutional event. But won't this disarray? Isn't this kind of part of the Democratic plan? It's just to kind of make everybody feel like, let's just put this guy already.

Well, I mean, I have to slightly disagree with you about the polls. I just looked yesterday. In late October of 2011, Barack Obama's Gallup polls were right at 42, 5, 43. So that's where Trump is, basically. And Bill Clinton's were that way into mid-October, then they started to go up. So I think he's pretty much where the other two were, number one. And then number two, whether it's the voting machines they sued the voting machines and they uh we had impeachment 1.0 when he got inaugurated and then we had the emoluments

clause emoluments clause the 25th amendment we had the mccabe rosenstein psychodrama we had the michael cohen we had stormy tax returns mueller dream team Team, All Stars, all that stuff. And there's a pattern there. What happens is they leak it, everybody goes hysterical, Trump's about 44, 45, a little higher than Rasmussen, 48. He goes down, he gets mad, he tweets, whether it's

Greenland or who knows what, it gets down to about 42. And then it bombs out. And then everybody takes a deep breath. And Trump has some good economic news, 3.5 unemployment, record energy production, another great conservative string of judges, whatever it is. And it goes back up to about 45. And then everybody gets their breath and the Democrats get together and they say, whistleblower, whistleblower, Ukraine. And we know about the whistleblower i mean

ship was leaking that stuff in august so it wasn't new but now the media they send the talking points to nsnbc and new york the whole thing and then we go down again but the question is i think what you're asking is it's either the result will be either a or B. Either we all go into a collective fetal position and say, make it all go away. I'm Trump fatigued. Why does it always surround Trump? Or people just sort of get calm and say, here they go again. Another psychodrama. Let's just wait till the election comes.

And we've never, remember, unlike we've never had in the modern era an impeachment proceeding against a first-term president. They've always been about a popular re-elected president where the subtext was, well, he's already been re-elected. We can't do anything, so we have to impeach. But now we've got an election in 12 months. A lot of people are saying, let's just let it. So the polls say, yes, 50%, let's have an inquiry. And then next question, would you want a full vote? Not so that's 50, 50. And then the next question, would you like him removed from office? That's about 40, 60, no, before the

election. So, and then we get to the election And why is all this happening, Rob? Because you heard the the first four debates, whether it's reparations or new Green Deal or wealth tax or infanticide, you name it, open borders, Medicare for every day. None of those issues pull 51 percent. And when you look at the candidates who are emerging, you're going to have, I think, an Elizabeth Warren versus Bernie Sanders. We've never had two socialists. And all that Wall Street money and Silicon, I've talked to some of those guys, and they all gave heavily to Hillary. They hate Trump. But if it's Elizabeth Warren, and as one big Hoover donor told me, my democratic loyalties are not a suicide pact and by that he

meant i'm not going to vote for someone that's going to bring in a wealth tax or thinks that i didn't build my own business so that's what they're afraid of that they don't have a they have a kind of a howard dean 2003 cycle going on or McGovern 72, or Mondale 84, and they want to abort that. And all Trump has to do is be a little bit more discriminatory about his tweeting, and that's old. He's not, but if he were, it would help him a little bit. Survive this cycle. He'll start to go when it exhausts itself because there's nothing there it'll go he'll go back to 45 and then let the news cycle the good economic

news speak for itself as far as syria goes yes i wanted to ask you about that picture yeah i've been very vocal in my support for the kurds but what i don't understand from the left is they said that Trump weakened NATO by asking people to contribute more, and he did it in a sloppy way. Okay, but that was a good thing he did. But now they're basically saying we want 200 troops in between the Kurds and the Turks as a tripwire to protect the Kurds because we don't think the Turks otherwise will go in there. Maybe, maybe not. But what if they do go in there if we have 200 people there? Then we're going to get into an Orwellian situation where we're shooting at a NATO ally, and that does not undermine NATO. Or we're going to say Turkey, who's evoked Article 4 three times,

they're going to say to us, we're in a war with Syria, just like we evoked Article 4 three times, they're going to say to us, we're in a war with Syria, just like we evoked Article 4 before about consultations. You need to consult with us and help us. We're NATO allies. So I think it's not the question of Kurds' border. It's the question is why in the hell is Turkey a NATO ally anymore? If it's, you know, if it's doing things like this, if it's non-democratic, if it's an authoritarian country, if it's leaking F-35 assemblage talking points or whatever to the Russians, if it's buying the S-400 from the Russians, if it's always groaning about our 50 nukes at the air base at Insularc that they just can't be removed. So that's the problem.

And everybody wants to say that he sold out the Kurds, but we're in a situation where we have our NATO ally in a fight with a Kurdish group that's a really good group of people but does help Kurdish terrorists fight Turks. And if you look at the polling on it, it's about 54% support what Trump's doing. I don't agree with what he's doing. I think there was a way to offer air support that would have backed Turkey down. But I would be honest enough to say that fact in itself is very dangerous, to tell a Turkish ally in NATO that if you start killing kurds we're going to bomb you and that would be the end of nato as we know it at least in the southern flank

but nobody wants to talk about that so it's very easy to say he sold out the kurds he's horrible i think when when the news cycle reaches its apex and it's starting to, if you look at the polling and look at the op-eds and things, people are starting to draw back a little bit and say, wow, I really don't know if 200 Americans in between two big armies is a wise thing when one of them is a NATO ally. Victor, Peter here. Just back to impeachment really briefly here. Just because I have one question. It to impeachment really briefly here. Just because I have one question. It's not about the substance. It's about the Trump White House.

And Mick Mulvaney, acting chief of staff, misspoke really badly last week and seemed to admit that the Ukraine call involved a quid pro quo. Substance doesn't matter there. There you have the chief of staff of the White House not up to conducting a defense when the rest of Washington and the entire press corps is after his boss. It made me think back to the Reagan White House and when the Iran-Contra hearings were taking place. There was a lot going on, but Don Regan, then Chief of Staff, left and President Reagan brought in an old, deeply respected Washington hand who seemed calm and conciliatory, but was actually quite aggressive

and tough in the form of Chief of Staff Howard Baker. And Howard Baker put together a team whose job was to get Ronald Reagan through that period. It was essentially a kind of war cabinet. John, you mentioned, John was here at Hoover last week, and John mentioned the scene in The Godfather when Marlon Brando, when The Godfather says it's time for a wartime consigliere. What do you think of the Trump White House's defense? Well, I mean, but Peter, there's a big difference. Ronald Reagan was a two-time governor

widely respected had run for president twice before he was elected he was in a second term he turned around the economy and people were sort of saying now he's one of us right and by the by the way uh arming the contras and uh using the money by illegally selling weapons of Iranians. And then that was a much greater felony, if I can use that term, than anything Trump has been accused of. I mean, that was something that was fundamental and existentially. It was against every U.S. protocol and agenda. You don't sell our archenemy weapons and then take the money and hide it and then give it to the contras and contravention of a Senate law. So that was a big thing.

But Trump, but you're right about that. He had institutional support. I mean, in those days, he could turn to a George Will or he could call up a Bill Kristol or he could go over to the Hoover and talk to people at Hoover or he could talk to people at a Trump can't do that. That whole Washington establishment hates his guts. When you say, well, can he in the who would come in there so he's got these people who that the republican i mean is he going to call up mitt romney and say hailey barber hailey barber hailey would be crossed with me from saying this hailey crosses my mind there's one person who's tough and knows the town and his wife but he wouldn't do it okay he wouldn't do it he's going to call up andy card andy card just for how about david gergen uh yeah i'm being facetious but my point is that that whatever he is he's sui generis and

he's there yes and his point was his brand is i am trying to be a bull in a china shop and the china shop deserves to be wrecked and the people in the china shop don't want to help him and so you get people who are unaccustomed or they're not doing and by the way i i read i listened very carefully what momeni said i think he was clumsy as you yes i think that's all he was what he was yeah what he was trying to say is that presidents do quid pro quos anyway. So if he did it and he didn't do what he said, what's the big deal? And I think what he's trying to say is there was never aid cut off. And the decision to question whether it should be cut off had been made well before the phone call. And it didn't come to pass.

And the Ukrainians were clueless about the discussions that they might lose their aid which didn't come up in the phone call and therefore it's sort of like the obstruction mueller he was guilty of a thought crime that didn't happen so maybe he thought about obstructing mueller but he didn't do it because the crime didn't exist so then they even mueller basically said you can't obstruct a crime that didn't take place. And I think the same thing, you can't have a quid pro quo if you don't have an actual quid that was realized or reified. So it was another thought crime. I'm not saying that Trump's not capable of doing that. Yeah, no, no. So, but I just want to, is it, can it be the case that my friend Victor, looking at all that's taking place in Washington, your only advice for the president and his team is, it'd be nice if you scaled back a little bit on the tweets, although I know you won't do it.

That's the only thing you wish they would change? No, I think he had a lot more discipline when John Kelly was there. I think he did. Yes. discipline when John Kelly was there. I think he did. And I think that was... But I think what I'm trying to get is that all of these conventional exegesis don't really apply so much because we're in uncharted waters. So at the height of his popularity, a George W. Bush or a George H.W. Bush couldn't have had a rally like Trump. Just wouldn't have happened. And I see things that I still can't compute. I went in town today at Walmart and I saw three Mexican-American guys that I've known.

And they came up to me just raving about Trump. That shouldn't happen. It shouldn't even be one of them. But there's things going on in the country that our traditional radar doesn't pick up. And we don't know what, we can't compute. We can't, we don't really know the effect of all these things. Trump is like chemotherapy and the deep state is like a cancer. And it's aimed at killing the cancer a day before it kills everybody else. And that's where we are now. And everybody who's second-guessed Trump, and I have a liar, that you overstuffed koi fish, that you were up in Trump Tower, you knew about a meeting in Trump Tower, that you, James Comey never told you that you weren't under investigation. All that fake news every single day.

And at some point, people are human. I mean, when Obama got very angry, the Obama administration went furious because a clown wore an Obama mask in a Missouri state fair. So the administration got mad, called Missouri. This is horrible. This is racist. It's mean. And they banned the guy for life.

And he was pretty sensitive. So presidents are that way, but we're in, I mean, Hollywood's, if it's Johnny Depp or Kathy, given the big thing in Hollywood or Robert De Niro, so you beat him up, you blow him up, you burn him up, you cut him up,

decapitate him, shoot him. What is it this week? I don't think the left ever stopped and says we've never seen anything like that. And the never Trump right has their argument is that he's so toxic

that his handprints on all the things we spend our life fighting for conservative judges low unemployment record energy production they've all been polluted and because he's so toxic but then what I want to hear from them I never quite hear from them is let's what did they say about this president and this president and this president like i gave a lecture last night and i said to a bunch of people afterwards that i said oh i don't like trump because he pulled his phallus out and said this uh erdogan have anything this big and then i said then yet, he committed an oral intercourse act in the bathroom. And that really got me mad.

And then the worst thing was that he had an affair. He had an affair in the White House and Ivanka was the intermediary. Well, I just described what FDR and LBJ and JFK and deep flowering an 18 year old scaffold. So when I hear all this sanctimonious, he's the worst. I just think to myself, why don't you just take five minutes and read about your president? And I'm, and these are people who were in many ways, very capable. And so I think some it's because of a lot of his mannerisms.

One final thing is that if Trump had just come in and been the William Welder, Mitt Romney, squishy person that everybody claimed he would be on the never right, Trump said, oh, he's switched parties seven times. And had he failed, people wouldn't have been so angry about him. If he had just, the left would have said, you know what, he's just an incompetent George H.W. Bush. We hate him right now, but when he's out of office, we'll love him just like we love the Bushes now. But why they hate him so much was he actually did try to close the border. He did try to fight China. He did get energy. He did open ANWR up. He did get out of Paris. And then more importantly, at least for now, the economy is booming.

He was successful. And that's unforgivable. Well, Victor, as a classicist, I think what you should do is take all of the tweets and string them together and call them Philippics and then annotate them. Strange to respect. I think they're called they're called diakonosophisticai that's the word that athenaeus calls table talk victor thanks so much for joining us today and we'll talk to you again okay bye-bye take care you know it's it's it's he mentioned that trump was sui generis, right? Sui generis. You all know the term.

And I just thought that absolutely was what Rob was talking about at the beginning with the fact that we should make our pigs larger and more fat. If somehow I could have found a segue to bring together Rob's opening remarks on the meat to Fattened Pigs and Sui Generous, I would have been such a happy man. Oh, that would have been great. Yeah, that absolutely would have been great. Now all we can think of is that you didn't do it. I know, I know, but I'm just stating that in order to say what I could have done. What I could have done? Ah, what I could have done. I could have invested in Apple when it was nothing. I could have divested of this when it was high and writing the rest of it. But you know what? I kind of trust that to a broker. And that's maybe my mistake

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and densely for the next 20 minutes or so, I've had about enough of it, and there's more to life than that. There's Halloween coming up, and I'm glad to see its backside soon, because I'm tired of Halloween. I don't like the month-long celebration of gruesome apparitions

leaning out at me from every corner. I loved it when I had a kid, but now, however, the candy's a different matter. So let us poll Peter and Rob to see what they believe ought to be the finest Halloween candy that should be the official Ricochet Halloween candy. I am going to set out on my front porch a big bowl of cigars and put up a sign that says, children, please, just one cigar each. Smoke them if you got them. Okay, cigars. Yeah, like, and, you know, don't vape, whatever you do.

Don't vape, it's all, yeah. I believe we're on the cusp of banning candy corn flavored vaping. So we should also figure out what the ricochet position is on candy corn. Are we for it, or are we against it? Do we believe that it's the bastard child of circus peanuts? Do we kind of like it? It's horrible. Candy corn is the worst.

But here's the thing, is that all candy has gotten bad. Really? Yeah, it's not as good as it used to be. A Snickers bar, which was one of the highest forms of candy, now it doesn't taste the same way as it should. I know I'm making you sound like an old man, but it is in fact true. Wait, they changed the ingredients over here? Yeah, they got cheap with the chocolate. It used to be this incredibly brilliant blend.

The same thing sort of they've done, although not, I think, as bad. The decline has not been as bad with another delicious candy, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, which are delicious. Yes. And are almost extraordinary frozen. They're so good. Well, that's the only way that I have them is frozen. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. But the peanut butter got a little cheap. It got a little grainy, but it's still good. It's still pretty good, yeah. So I agree with you, Rob. And part of the reason probably is because Minneapolis is no longer the epicenter of the candy industry in America. We used to be very important in candy in Minneapolis. Oh, yeah, that's right.

That's right. As a matter of fact, the Minneapolis Nugget, as they used to call it, that creamy white stuff that you find inside of Three Musketeers, was invented here. Most of them have gone away, but there's one that still remains. Pearson's, small little company, they make salted nut rolls, which have everything that you want. It has your salt portion. It has a dense nugget. Oh, yeah. And it's caramel that holds it together.

They have a nut goody, which is just a chocolate added to what I described before with caramel in the new iterations. It's absolutely fantastic. They also make a mint, one of those little mint things, the chocolate on the outside, creamy mint on the inside. But they brought to the office the other day because they're a local company and would like us to remember them. They just dumped a whole bunch of candy in our newspaper office. And I was surprised to remind myself that they had purchased Bit O' Honey. Oh, I rememberO-Honey. Oh, I remember that one. Yes.

What happened? Is that still available? Well, Pearson's bought it many years ago and still makes it. And I was pleased to find that this was a relatively fresh Bit-O-Honey that still could be used as window caulk if needed because it has that consistency. When it gets really hard, it's a mean thing to do to your mouth because it gets stuck in your molars and the crevices. Yeah, that's right. Bit of honey is one of those things where you're eating somebody must have been eating candy and thought, I love candy, but can it also hurt? Yes. And then they invented bit of honey. But I have to say,

here is in fact the finest of the candies since we're talking about obscure candies that you can't find. In Louisville, say, here is, in fact, the finest of the candies, since we're talking about obscure candies that you can't find. In Louisville, Kentucky, there is a candy store, and I forget the name of it, but they make a candy called the Majesco. And the Majesco is a simple square of marshmallow that's enrobed in caramel. And I know that sounds just like, well, just two things, right? It somehow is unbelievably delicious. And if you can find them, and they sell a very, very, very bastardized D-minus version at the Cracker Barrel. If you ever go to a Cracker Barrel,

like in the front part where the store is, they sell it there. Those are not worth your time or your money. But the one in Louisville is just delicious. I believe you. It's the quality of the ingredients, as you were saying before. I mean, I can find a Walnetto today, but whether or not the Walnetto has any resemblance to the original. And I'm partial to them, not because they were used in Lafayette, please. James, how does Pearson's, if everybody else is cleared out of Minneapolis, and everybody else is degrading, all the big players are degrading their ingredients to hold down prices, I'm just curious, how does Pearson's survive

on fanatical local devotion? And they charge somewhat higher prices than you'd pay for one of the big players? Not that I notice. Really? Price is no object when it comes to getting myself assaulted. No, they're competitive, but they're a regional favorite. But the reason that I like Walnetto's is because my house was built by the man who made them. Oh, really? He was a candy maker and he made and the walnetto was his big breakthrough hit as a matter you can still find it it was named the number one candy to be found in a meal ready to eat about four or five years

ago i understand and uh the ones i've tried just almost a caramel with bits of walnuts embedded in it but like rob i wonder whether or not the candy of yore was far more spectacular. The same guy made a candy bar called the Scotch Loaf, which is the most poorly named coffee or candy bar I can think of. Nobody really wants a Scotch Loaf. It brings to mind something other than candy. But if you study these things and go back and look on the internet and research, it's essentially the same constellation of ingredients that are put together in about the same way. Well, the caramel's outside the peanuts. Well, now the peanuts are outside of the caramel with the wrapper and the rest of it. But the explosion of brands that

we have today for candy is far greater than what it used to be in the 20s, the 30s, the 40s. And it's like the smells of the arrow. We don't know what they are, just the tastes of the arrow. We don't know quite what they are. And there's no really good way to be able to figure out what they are. We just have to sort of guess. And as much as I would love to speculate about the olfactory profile of the 1920s, I believe that we've said enough and done enough, unless anybody wants to talk more politics, eh? No, I think we're all politic-ed out, James. I don't think so. Well, we're going to have a recipe ingredient from Rob Long in just a minute. Rob, you're going to tell us the one thing down south that they add that perhaps those of us in the north don't, you being on your southern food tour. We'll get that to you in just a second, but first,

I have to remind you the podcast was brought to you by Lifelong, by Online Trading Academy, and by Ethos. Support them for supporting us. And of course, if you go to iTunes and leave us a five-star rating, that might get us up to the pain where people see new shows. Because right now, if you go to iTunes and you look, it's nothing but a parade of the usual suspects. And might I add, a lot of them seem to be surprised of the liberal persuasion. Let's break through. Let's give us a five-star review. What's keeping you? I don't know. So, Rob, finally, on the way out, what's an ingredient they add to food down south that those of us here in the cold bland north don't? I think it's something that it's what they don't add in some things and then what they do add in

others. So, if you order a nice tea, it's going to be really sweet. It only comes sweet tea. They add sugar to it. On the other hand, when you make cornbread down here, you do not add any sugar. A sweet cornbread is Yankee cornbread. And down here, we sort of, we kind of, in a pinch, we'll eat it, but we won't like it. I love the Yankee. We, oh, we, oh, I see. Well, like it. I love the game. Oh, I see.

Well, I'm down here now. I've got to be alone. But the truth is, I don't like it when they put, even in New York City, I do not like it when they put sugar in my cornbread. I love that our new epithet on Ricochet is Yankee Cornbread. That's as bad as Yankee Cornbread. Great. Thank you, guys.

Thanks to our guests. Thanks to our sponsors. And thanks, of course, to you who listen and, of course, have already joined Ricochet or are going to do so the moment I stop talking. So I'll shut up. See you next week, guys. It's been fun. Next week, guys.

I know you girl so sweet She's so blind to marry me I have a thing that I desire Checking the summer sun on fire I'm on a tangent Sending the summer sun on fire I won't end it I won't end it Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!

Hey! Boy, see you in the hill town Ain't no fine girl in town Man, you should puts the doctor holding She's so sweet, she makes my mouth water I won't hand it I won't change it. I won't change it.

I won't change it. I won't change it. I won't change it. Ricochet. Join the conversation. I love that segment with Daniel and the notion that to have civility, you have to have humility. And I'd like just, Rob, I intend to remind you of that the next time you disagree with me. I don't agree with it. I for sure want you to have humility.