The Ricochet Podcast - E.T. and His Boundless Orks

Episode Date: June 9, 2023

From the esoteric and the imperian to the specfic and the political. And then on to aliens! James, Rob and Steve Hayward chat with Patrick Deneen, author of Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future. They discuss the deliterious effects of liberty without restraints, the bipartisan quest for progress and consider a reassessment of some of our cherished philosophical forebears. Next fan favorite Andy McCarthy stops by to give his first take on the indictment of Donald Trump. San Francisco and UFOs are on the docket as well.

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Read my lips. No new taxes. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Stephen Hayward sitting in for Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lalix. Today we talk to Patrick Deneen about regime change and Annie McCarthy about the indictments. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Our country is going to hell

and they come after Donald Trump weaponizing the Justice Department, weaponizing the FBI. So I just want to tell you, I'm an innocent man. I did nothing wrong. Either you are with us or you are with the FBI. So I just want to tell you, I'm an innocent man. I did nothing wrong. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 645. I'm James Lilacs in Minneapolis. Stephen Hayward is sitting in for, what's his name again? Peter Robinson. He'll be back

next week to remind us who he is. And Rob are you in new york are we your zoom feed seems i'm not here i expect that there's some sort of a post-apocalyptic blade runner orange miasma that's going through every corner well there is but it's uh only on the ground i'm in san francisco so it's not clear it's foggy um it's uh san francisco where the the air is clean but the needles are dirty that's what i'm saying right so are you walking around then since you're an sf uh frisco as they hate to be called just to get you know dodging around the street poo no you know what i mean i mean i think there are i actually feel like i just took a long walk yesterday so i i uh i shouldn't i won't even hear two days but um i actually feel

like it's maybe just coming from new york and then having lived in los angeles for such a long time that um la seems much worse to me than san francisco just anecdotally looking out my window and taking a walk to the civic center where all the homeless people are it didn't seem simply it doesn't seem nearly as bad as sort of Skid Row in L.A. or Los Angeles Street in L.A., which has been terrible for years. I mean, this predates COVID. Or, for that matter, Venice,

where I used to live in Venice, or the Oceanfront Walk. And Stephen, where are you right now? I'm down in the central coast area of California where, as I like to tell people, I have 200 mile buffer zones between L.A. and San Francisco, so I stay away from the craziness. of California, where, as I like to tell people, I have 200 mile buffer zones between LA and San Francisco. So I stay away from the craziness. Oh yeah.

But Rob, are you, I'm curious, Rob, are you by any chance, probably not, but are you staying in either the Hilton or the park? 55?

I know. I should say both of those hotels have declared. I think they filed chapter or something. Yeah. No, I'm not. But that was a big story. I was reading about it yesterday. It was a big story yeah what i love is the is the uh it's the are the people trying to make it a

the idea that two big hotels have essentially closed because um there's no um convention business convention business and this downtown is pretty empty uh i gotta say um i mean anyway separate issue but i'm not saying there but i like the people sort of defending it defending the city saying things like well you know i mean they're just filing chapter it's really it's a corporate thing like well no when you close your business it's not you know it's not a corporate thing it's's a no-business thing. And I would just say that I think – I mean, maybe I'm doing a deep dive into it now, but I actually think it's going to be what killed San Francisco. And I think what – or what is trying to kill it.

I don't think it's dead. I think it's just resting. Resting. it's just resting resting um it's going to be less i think it's ultimately going to be when you actually add up the human damage and the economic damage it's going to be either less or equal to the sort of woke nonsense that runs the cities um less or equal to the the ridiculous behavior of this state under COVID. COVID, I think, did more damage to certainly to the downtown LA, downtown New York or San Francisco than, I mean, people here have always been woke. But when you add woke, on top of woke, you add, you know, crazy panic, completely unscientific, but bizarre kind of regulations.

And they tore up the benches in Union Square as a COVID precaution so that people wouldn't sit outside in a beautiful city square. A lot of this stuff is, I i mean some of it obviously is the crazy wokeness of san francisco which has always been crazy woke but boy you you put in you know completely indefensible covet policy and you just amplify that by a hundred rant over yeah oh apply that in every city that you want. You had the COVID policies, which emptied out the downtowns, destroyed the economic ecosystems. And then you had a concomitant desire to be nice to all the people who are causing the civic disorder. Between the two of them, you have fewer eyes on the street. You have Jane Jacobs' ideas about what makes a city safe and livable turned on their head. And then you have a waving away of any sort of consequences for people who apparently we're going to be talking about this with our guests in a little bit. Um,

the people who, um, bring the disorder to the streets and every time, I mean, I'm keen to follow all the arguments and Reddit, for example, which has various subreddits devoted to Minneapolis and St. Paul about the disorder on the public transports in downtown.

And it's always the same. It's like, well, you can't do anything about civic order or disorder until you fix the problems that caused it in the first place. Well, no, that's absolutely not how it works at all. Right. Unless you believe, of course, that there are a vast number of people

who are walking out there who were struck by meth addiction, like by a thunderbolt or that a needle flew from the sky and penetrated their neck and caused them to be addicted. I know it's simplistic to say that people have no choice over it, but people kind of do maybe. So it, the idea that we have any consequences is, you know, we've failed as a society if we actually require consequences, the people who are causing the disorder so yeah san francisco uh i hope it comes back i'm not particularly not particularly hopeful yep well i can do a pro and con on rob's optimism uh let me do the con first which is uh things are even worse than they look and i'll just you know one measure is nationwide i get

these figures from leo honey and down at Hoover, nationwide housing prices are down about 3.5%. Mostly that's high interest rates and mortgage rates have gone up. In San Francisco, the sales price of houses have gone down 17%. He calculates that the loss of property value for homeowners in San Francisco is something like $260 billion. And go on on that I think you know Milton Friedman used to joke that if you put a socialist in charge of the Middle East you'd have a shortage of sand and I think he's underestimated the capacity of progressives to wreck cities like San Francisco but that's the converse right isn't it Rob is that uh you know right now the exodus from San Francisco is greater than any two-year period Detroit ever

experienced. But San Francisco is not Detroit. I remember asking, I think it was Art Laffer, who's always great with a sensible line, how can California get away with this level of taxation and regulation? I mean, Arkansas couldn't do that. And he said, that's like asking why pretty girls are mean, because they can be you know california has these amenity values that people will pay a high freight charge to be here i do right uh and you know you have for many years uh and so yeah you got to think sam's just going to come back and then finally you mentioned that it looks not as bad as la i think what's going on right now and i've picked this up by just my observations around the bay area because i'm there a lot either at berkeley

or over in san francisco is i think the city and the police are quietly trying to get a handle on the homelessness and cut it back some. They're not eliminating it. And I think they're doing it quietly, because if they actually disclosed that they were trying to crack down on homelessness, trying at the margins to nibble it and contain it and roll it back, the progressive left would go nuts and make their lives miserable so they're doing it quietly i think you're right i mean so my my larger theory is that uh for two years we had these crazy crackpot regulations that in which people crack down on things like um you know going to your grandmother's funeral and uh or going to your grandmother's funeral and or going to church or walking around or sitting outside in

a public square and so all the sort of normal law-abiding people just now they're just home fine you don't want me i'm home and they're sort of opening up other places right the one area that was completely unregulated was in social disorder. And that social disorder was like, well, OK, well. You know, if you're you're not really going to grab a homeless person and give them a ticket for breaking COVID regulation. I mean, we didn't do that to any of the people who were protesting in the summer of 2020. So that's right there. When you talk about, you know, encouraging social disorder, when you, the riots here in 2020 were quite extraordinary. And if you watch the live stream, you had an awful lot of people milling around in close contact without any mask whatsoever.

And if this had been, of course, the plague that we thought that it was, they would have done something about it, but they didn't. So, right. So you have all of these strange, peculiar messages, but you know, yes, mean girl, pretty girls can be mean because they can be, but eventually they age and cities, cities, the cities can microwave the seed corn for a snack for a long time, but they run out of it. And what haunts me about all of this is the idea that we really kind of fixed it before. We had it pretty good when it came to cities. The renaissance in American cities in the aughts and the teens was something to behold. They became destination places. They became safe places. I remember when I lived in D.C., you didn't walk through downtown at night. You just didn't. But then in the late teens, I remember going to a whole bunch of

conferences and walking back to my hotel at three o'clock in the morning and feeling absolutely safe. Now, it could have been because I'm drunk, but I don't think so. The cities have turned themselves around in extraordinary ways. And every one of these that you look at, you realize that so much of that progress has been absolutely lost and squandered. And I don't know if it's because they think that we can get right back to it again by snapping our fingers or if they just don't care because the existence of disorder and the people who manifest these social ills proves that the system that we have is illegitimate and needs to be completely dismantled and replaced with the utopian thing that'll fix all of these things. And until then, they're all very handy markers for the fact that capitalism failed and America has failed and America is a failed project, et cetera.

Does that seem crazy or not? We're stunned at the silence, James. Yeah, I mean, I'm an old Reaganite optimist about, you know, don't bet against America. The problem is Joe Biden is now saying don't bet against America. And if he says that, I'm going to sell short right away. The way things are going, right? But I do think, and this will come up with, we get Pat DeNino a little bit, you know, there are great reserves. I mean, remember what Reagan's

message was, is essentially you're going to fix America. The one difference between, say, a Reagan or that kind of conservative and a liberal is the liberals say we're going to fix it here in Washington. And Reagan's message from day one as president was, you're going to fix it. The American people, we're going to help you. We're going to get out of your way. We're going to do things to help you, the people of America, fix what's wrong with the country. I still, in my bones, believe that is a winning message and a correct strategy. So how do the people of San Francisco then pull themselves out of this morass? They seem inclined to be voting for the very people who keep the quicksand well moist and viscous. They don't see it. Well, there's a funny thing happening in San Francisco and the whole Bay Area the last few years that I never thought I'd see. This predates COVID, by the way. There is an organized YIMBY movement.

YIMBY meaning yes in my backyard. And I'm listening to all these liberals who I used to battle about regulation 30 years ago, especially land use regulation. And they say, gosh, you know, our planning process and our building codes and our regulations make it hard to build housing. We've got to do something about this. Now, they're often confused. Still, you know, I never thought I'd see such a thing happening. And so, I think there is a spot for a progressive in San Francisco to say, I'm for all progressive things, but we really need to have simpler regulations so we can build the things we need at a reasonable cost. And I don't see many of them, but there are activists agitating on this front. And that's –

Yeah. Also, the data is now coming – not that they were persuaded by data, but there is data that suggests that – I mean, part of the problem when you say build housing, everybody goes, yeah, we should build housing. We should build affordable housing. and should be built by the government and the truth is that you walk through pretty much any city but then there's a i mean i can't really see it but on the other side of where i am um there was a neighborhood called the fillmore that was incredibly vibrant neighborhood that was filled with people and houses and it was a majority black um and it had some kind of very famous um nightclubs and music venues for a long time and the city decided during the city beautiful

not city beautiful but during the sort of urban renewal movement well we'll just tear all those down and uh you know the embarcadero in san francisco had this beautiful sort of waterfront it was you know gorgeous and well you just going to put a freeway there. And they did all this stuff. And these were all people who were acting under the best practices of the time. And it doesn't really matter what your solution is. Because their solution was, we need to plan this. We need central planning. This kind of chaotic neighbors kind of working

it out thing doesn't work anymore in the modern 20th century. And so what they did was they sort of tore away all of the little tiny little ligaments that hold all people together and neighborhoods together and cities together. Not that they were safe, not that there was no crime, not even that the cops weren't brutal, especially in San Francisco during the time. Lots of issues. But this fundamental thing that makes people live together in a community me, it's almost always the problem. These things are never done by dumb people. They're always done by very, very smart people. Because only very smart people can be this stupid. Can I offer you a mind-blowing footnote to that story, Rob? Which is, you probably know this, that it was in the early 60s when neighborhoods in San Francisco effectively stopped an interstate from being run through the town.

Stopped it cold. And here's the mind-blowing part the ringleader of representing that particular point of view was a republican state assemblyman from san francisco named casper weinberger well now wait a minute because if you're. Isn't that amazing? If you're under 90 in this news podcast, you're like, who the hell is Casper Weinberger? Casper Weinberger was a California politician. He was in the Reagan administration, Secretary of Defense. Casper Weinberger, George Shultz, and Ronald Reagan, well, working for Ronald Reagan, following his lead, managed to do a lot of great stuff, including win the Cold War. No, Rob's right. The smart people are the ones you have to look out for because they always have a new theory of urban design. The new urbanists are always absolutely

correct about the paradigm they should impose on the city. And it never really works. Unfortunately, we can never get rid of the guys who think they're too smart and know precisely what to do. But there are some different tools in the quiver to mix my metaphors. We'll get to that maybe a little bit later, because right now we should just get to our guest. We'd love to get to our guest, who would be Patrick Deenan, professor of political science at Notre Dame, where he concentrates on the history of political thought, liberalism, conservatism and constitutionalism. In 2018, he wrote why liberalism failed and earlier

this week he published his latest book regime change towards a post-liberal future patrick thanks for joining us in the podcast today thanks well i you know hate to sum up uh erroneously your thesis and we have two failures we have the the failure of the economic liberalism. We have the failure of social liberalism. What we need is to sweep away the order which is strangling us now and create a new regime. But before we get to that, there's a word that keeps popping up in your work that i read i read the piece in impact and the word is unboundedness that the central perhaps pardon compact compact magazine oh compact i'm sorry compact impact right right it's like the what do you yeah commentary and descent merged informed and descend, merged and formed dysentery. Unbounded was this word that appeared again and again,

and I liked it. It has a sense of, it reminded me of David Glertner talking about the culture of obligation of the 1930s, how there were these boundaries and strictures put into place that were done away with. Tell me a little bit more about why you like that word and what sort of boundedness you think society would profit from having. Well, I guess, I mean, I was trying to think of an appropriate or fitting word to capture what you were just saying, which is what I see as the sort of extreme forms of, you could say, unbounded liberty. That, I think, has come to define aspects of what we think of as the contemporary right or the contemporary left, and what would be the correct term. And I thought borderlessness or limitlessness could in some ways describe them, but I thought of boundedness in part because it seems to both suggest the need for boundaries, of course, the need to draw boundaries around either places or people or behaviors that applied, it seemed to me could be thought of to apply

to kind of both of the forms of liberalism that i see as the dominant strands on both the contemporary right and left and that i think um represent the kind of at some ways the furthest reaches of the development of this liberal order that we are now either enjoying or suffering under depending on your perspective right so i mean societally you used to be like those invisible senses that my neighbors have for their dog. Right. It's just that you sense and the limits of where you would go, and there would actually be a little shock in the collar if you walked through it. But I believe that Stephen Hayward has some questions, and I'm going to defer to Stephen.

Well, hi, Pat. It's great to see you again. It's been a long time. I did promise listeners, though, Pat, that we both have a background in political theory, but we will not get off in an esoteric discussion of how to understand Locke correctly. You and I can do that separately, and I'd actually like to do that with you. But I do think we ought to be clear. I mean, we introduced one key point about unbounded liberalism, and I want to bore in on that. But I think we ought to just clear away definitions for people. I think that there really are sort of three parts of what we mean by the liberal tradition. The first part is uncontroversial, I think, in your understanding. The second part gets more interesting, and the third part is where all the action is. So,

part one, when we say, you and I say liberalism, we don't primarily mean the Democratic Party platform of higher taxes and spending and regulation and all the rest of that. I mean, lots of reasons to criticize that, but that's not, you know, the contemporary way people understand liberal. That's not really what you mean. I think that's, you agree with that. Well, part two then is the institutional and constitutional aspects, and that has four parts plus an idea we've got to put in brackets. And this is going to sound like a Supreme Court syllabus. There are two key asterisks here. But the four or five parts are, one is equality under the law, no special privileges for any cast of people. A second, representative government. The third is a market economy, or often we say a free

market economy, although that's kind of redundant. And then fourth is the idea of robust individual rights, and that's where one of the asterisks comes in. Then the bracketed idea is the idea of progress, and you talk about that a lot in your book. So, I mean, I think you're, in fact, I know you're not saying we're going to throw out that whole tradition. We're not throwing out constitutionalism, representative government, even individual rights. You're after something bigger. Is that so far so good, Patrick? I haven't.

I think that's a correct, yeah, the institutional constitutional aspects. Yes. Right. And so this last part, instead of saying unbounded, I say the idea, I think you use this phrase alternately yourself, the idea of unlimited individual autonomy. It's the John Stuart Mill idea that liberalism means we all get to pursue our own self-chosen purposes. But the problem is, is that it does not fill the hole in our soul when we're detached from communities and families and religion and so forth. Or, you know, I know

you're familiar with the line from Leo Strauss that the end result of Lockean liberalism would be the joyless quest for joy. And so now we live at a time, and here's the problem. What bounds anything? Well, nature does, right? And so just because you say a man doesn't become a woman by saying that I'm a woman, right? Just like you remember Lincoln's famous line, if you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? And the answer was four, because calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. Well, today, we have the Biden administration refusing to use the word woman in official policy documents. And this is crazy, right? So this is some of the stuff that

you're after. And so let me stop there. That was a long opening speech. But say a little more about, because here I'm in very strong agreement with you, while I may have some reservations about other aspects of your argument. I'm very strongly in agreement with you about that core point of individual moral autonomy has become a moral disaster for Western civilization. Yeah. Yeah. Western civilization. Yeah, yeah. Well, so that was really the, obviously, this is a continuation of the argument that I made in my last book, Why Liberalism Failed, that liberalism fails because it succeeds. That's the short summary of that, of the argument of that book. It's not that we don't have enough liberalism or that the cures of liberalism is more liberalism to play on John

Dewey's old phrase about democracy. But in fact, by becoming fully itself, in some ways by overcoming, in part what Tocqueville, of course, had described as the, in some ways, the kind of inherited boundaries, right, that America had inherited from the old world and also from practices it was able to develop, it was able in some ways to constrain the tendencies of liberal democracy, what he calls democracy, but I think what he means is fundamentally liberal democracy, to kind of spin out of control and really move in a direction in which the individual was detached, unattached, became believing in their unbounded perfectibility, limitlessness, the restlessness of the human soul. And so once, you know, in some ways, Tocqueville writes this book and says, don't do this, don't go down this path, try to retain those elements that you've inherited or that you've kind of developed that limit this temptation of developing this bounded understanding of individual autonomy.

And my book, that book, and I guess this current book, is kind of an effort to say, well, what happens when Tocqueville's warnings, you know, when we've neglected them or we simply said, well, too bad for that? And what do we do then? And I think, look, I mean, this has been a project that we've all been engaged in, you know, for 40 or 50 years. Those of us who call ourselves conservatives, we've all been engaged in, you know, for 40 or 50 years, those of us who call ourselves conservatives, we've all been concerned about this. And I suppose maybe what makes me something of a heterodox thinker is that I think that, in some senses, both sides of the liberal tradition

have gotten the answer wrong. And by liberal tradition, I mean, both the classical liberal as well as progressive liberal aspects of this tradition so yes uh i think we agree on points one and three and maybe the sticking points is point two yeah yeah well you you have a i just we could go on a long time on this i don't want to but you have a very provocative phrase where you say we should use machiavellian means to aristotelian ends now two points on that. One is, I totally understand what you mean and agree with it. I'm on Team Nick, the people who say we get them all wrong because we only read the prints.

But it does remind me a little bit, and here's where the trouble starts, of Herbert Crowley's famous phrase in the Progressive Era. You remember he said we're going to use Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends. Were you self-consciously paralleling that with that phrase, Pat? Yeah, sure, sure. I mean, I teach Crowley regularly, and I was using it in part because I think it's such a powerful way to phrase two things that in the American tradition, we've understood to be opposite, right? In the American tradition, you were either on Team Jefferson, for a long time you were on Team Jefferson, or you were on Team Hamilton, at least until relatively. And so, but, and you know

this, Steve, for those who study political philosophy, we do kind of divide ourselves, you know, there are different camps, but one of the big divisions is are you on Team Aristotle, or are you on Team Machiavelli? Are a modern or are you an ancient and i thought it was you know it was worth sort of trying to make a play on crowley but also to um suggest that maybe these two could be um in some ways brought a little more closely together well in that case i'll just call you crowlier than thou and leave it there for the moment i think you need to be bounded steve yeah Well, one more quick set of questions, and then Rob has a couple for you. I was delighted to see, I mean, you're a theorist and often theorist,

so stick with theory. You, at the end of the book, have several suggestions, including a couple of radical ones that I have made in speeches. I haven't written them down. And then I want to suggest one to you that you haven't had but fits with your theme. Yeah, for the paperback. well uh universal service uh i think uh if you want to actually have the classes mixed the idea of universal service and by the way you you pretty much say what i say which is including at least six weeks of training and how you shoot a gun

like israel does right yeah pro family policy um i go one step further than you and i floated the Yeah. say, I'll skip over that for a minute, but then you talk about how we need to reinvigorate our public Christian culture. And I have one specific idea for you. Almost nobody has, and no red states had the wit to propose this, but I think 48 of the 50 state constitutions have an acknowledgement of God or the Almighty as the source of our rights. So, you live in Indiana. Indiana's constitution begins, we the people of the state of Indiana, grateful to Almighty God for the free exercise of the right to choose our own form of government, do ordain this Constitution. My proposal is, school prayer, of course, Ronald Reagan's the last president to talk about how we really shouldn't have got rid of school prayer. How about we just pass laws saying that the school

children in our public schools shall recite the preamble to the state constitution every morning at the beginning of the school day and watch leftist heads explode and dare the federal courts to say the state constitution is unconstitutional? I've taught many classes in which I do point out, not only do many state constitutions have a positive acknowledgement of God, some state constitutions, including the state of Massachusetts, have begun their preamble by saying, by enjoining a positive duty to recognize and worship God. So, imagine the heads exploding in Boston and areas of New England when they suddenly discover that their own constitutions have these passages. Of course, my fear would be that places like Massachusetts would quickly introduce constitutional amendments erasing and scrubbing those passages. It would be the version of tearing down the statues. So one has to be careful about what one wishes for. Well, I have a million.

Oh, sorry. No, I think at the very least, you could pass this in red states where, for example, in Indiana, where this would naturally lead to the recognition, public acknowledgement of a creator. But I would actually like to see, you know, push the envelope even further. I would like to see, let's test some of these older cases. Let's test some of these cases about prayer and school. Let's see where the Supreme Court is now on these questions. Obviously, we have a different court than we did in the 1960s and 70s. And I think, sadly, you know, it's interesting you mentioned Ronald Reagan. It seems to me that the Republican Party or conservatives in America have kind of, they've abandoned certain stances and the belief those are lost causes or those are effectively lost causes. defensive stance. And I actually think this might be a moment for really for people to begin to think about a much more, you know, a stance which actually tries to regain some ground. And maybe if it doesn't work to begin to say, well, maybe we need to think about jurisprudence

that would allow these cases to win. Well, I've got a bunch more questions and some objections, Pat, but I want to throw to Rob for a minute who wants to get in on the fun. I expect you'll have objections. Yeah, my pleasure. That's his shtick, objections. Thanks for joining us. Good to see you again. I think I saw you last summer in Hungary, of all places. Right, right. So you talk about lost causes, some of these issues, you know,

lost causes and the social conservatives who are advocating for them in the 80s, Reagan era, kind of gave up. We stipulate that they're at least presently lost causes, right? They have lost till now. Who lost them? I mean, there's a kind of a, now I'm going to reveal my theory, there's sort of a kind of a vanity on the part of the right to say that we lost them because these evil, faceless bureaucrats infiltrated state governments, local governments, and federal government where they really didn't declare their biases and they've undermined traditional sort of american americanism left and right that and

what i mean is whenever you lose something you always ask yourself one question did i lose it or was it stolen and you always want it to be stolen by bureaucrats or something because it means it's not your it's not your fault who lost this stuff did was it just the inattentiveness by the right or was it a kind of a larger american cultural decline brought upon by wealth and good news maybe um so who's gonna so when your book is really called regime change, like what regime do we need to change the regime in the state houses or the city halls or the Congress or the regime culturally that we have sort of slipped into?

I mean, who's the book for? Well, I don't, I don't, you know, you never know who the, who a book is for, but the book, the book I hope is for people who are, you know, like me, and I assume like you, fairly unhappy about the situation we find ourselves in right now. Thinking that the nation, maybe the broader Western world, is in a state of what appears to be terminal decline, in which efforts to fight back against this always seem to be kind of, you know, at the same time they're still fighting spirit, you're always fighting, you know, you're always falling back to the further defensive point. And it almost feels like we're at the, you know, we're at the keep right now. And how much further can you retreat, right? When we can't define a man and a woman, we can't uh uh you know when when to be a christian is now in this country is is a reviled uh you know um form of identity if to to use the current parlance that

feels pretty much like we're at the keep and well let me ask you this a practical question um years and years and years the uh the pro-life movement has said, has been, as their strategy has been, we need to change the makeup of the Supreme Court. We need to have conservative justices to overturn Roe. Roe is overturned, and it turns out that the pro-life political operation hasn't been that successful anywhere, even in places where you'd think it would be. So was the problem – I don't know. It's not probably would be so was the problem i don't know it's not probably either or was the problem the supreme court it was the problem that the the movement itself had failed at persuading the voters yeah so i so i think this this gets us to the broader question that you asked which is sort of how did these causes get lost? And obviously, I'm far from being able to have a comprehensive answer to this question

that none of us is able to adequately answer in its complexity. But one thing I would say is, so in the first instance, I think we can all look at the unstinting, unrelenting efforts by progressives to change and transform the fundamental institutions of the United States, and frankly, the globe, and using the power of the United States to advance its vision, its very positive vision. Not, you know, in the 80s, I remember I was a part of Steve, I think I got to know you around that time, you know, Alan Bloom, and closing the American mind, and the problem on the left was relativism. The progressives were simply relativists.

And now, in retrospect, that seems like a kind of charming argument, because all along, the problem wasn't relativism. It wasn't the lack of a belief in anything. It was a very strong and firm belief about what the vision of the world should be like. And increasingly, it seems to be the one that we encounter in the world, a world in which, again, it's now a crime thing to say that there's a biological difference between a man and a woman. So I think we'd be in strong agreement that the left plays a really powerful and profound role in this transformation. And maybe we might differ a little bit in terms of the role of the right. And I think, you know, what you suggested in your question, was it

inattentiveness on the part of the right? And I think it was more a problem in the way in which the right kind of constituted itself as a response to the left, going back to the 1980s, even earlier than that, when it began to articulate itself as a form of opposition to this incipient movement that we've seen come into full flower today. And it was to say that the problem lie in the kind of exercise of political power. The exercise of political power, state power, was the problem. So these bureaucrats, these entrenched figures in government, the use of political power was the problem. And if we could, in some ways, create a world in which that no longer applied, in which there was an absence of political power, we would see the kind of

flourishing of a good society emerge. So it's kind of in the background life theories of spontaneous order that in the absence of any kind of public authority, the goodness, the kind of inherent goodness of human beings would emerge. And those, you know, Steve knows this better than anyone, but, you know, Ronald Reagan had some qualities of this. He would often say his favorite political philosopher wasn't Edmund Burke, it was Thomas Paine. And Thomas Paine famously argues that the government only exists to restrain the evils of human beings. But as an Aristotelian, myself as an Aristotelian, I also understand, or at least I believe, that government also exists, or we could say the public order exists, to cultivate the potential virtues of human beings that left to our own devices. We're not

naturally good. We have the capacity for good, but we need those capacities to be developed. So I think that you have, on the one side, the left willing to use more or less unbridled exercise of political power to pursue its ends. And the right saying, what we really need is just to have the disassembling of a political order of government, use of government power. And so, there was always asymmetric, kind of an asymmetric kind of warfare that was going on that I think these are the people who might be interested in reading my book are the people who are saying, well, how do we actually begin to fight back? And do we actually – we need to rethink what we thought in the 1980s going back even to the 1670s development of conservatism, that what seemed to be the answer then may not be the correct answer, certainly from the standpoint today. And that's where I think there is a really, of course, it's a pretty

sometimes, let's say, unpleasant, sometimes civil, sometimes productive debate taking place within the right today over these questions. Can I just jump in with one last item? Just a placeholder, really. I love this argument. I will say that I'm not quite ready to give up on liberalism or progress, but let's delay that to another day. But it does prompt a nostalgic memory. I had forgotten until I was catching up with all this that I lost a bet to you about 15 years ago. I don't know if you remember this. I do. I still have the book you paid me with. Yeah, see, that's just it. uh is that you were i was actually right

except in a larger sense your point is better uh the bet listeners was uh pat had written some sympathetic uh comments about the peak oil theory very popular back around 2005 i said pat that's all wrong i'll bet you that three years from now oil prices will be back down to 75 a barrel pat gamely took the bet it was a rerun by, by the way, the famous Julian Simon-Paul Ehrlich bet. And three years came along, right? And by the way, you know, all the people, the Goldman Sachs said oil was heading to $200 a barrel. I mean, there's lots of people, experts on your side.

And three years rolled around and oil prices were still high. And so, yeah, the terms of our bet, you can tell we're academic nerds, was there were other two parts, Pat. It was two books from the Liberty Fund book catalog and I think dinner, which I don't think ever paid off. So that offer still. Well, and I'll hold you to that, Steve.

Yeah, you should. But, and of course, where's oil today? About $70 a barrel. So adjusted for inflation. I was totally right. But that's a different argument. Your argument was beyond that, which was never mind oil and resources, it's material progress is not filling the hole in our soul. That's the large argument you're making. That's the one I'm most enthusiastic about.

Even if, as I say, my caveat is I don't think we should entirely give up on liberalism and progress just yet. right well so well no it's it's you know it's there was just an article that appeared in politico yesterday uh about my my majestic powers of influencing all things in american politics today i was i was reading and wondering who is this who is this figure who who's who's operating you know if only uh but um but it did it did actually, you know, the reporter admirably, you know, went into some of my older publications and revisited and talked a little bit about some of those arguments that I was making. You know, it brings me back to something that you had said earlier. And this was really, I think the thing about peak oil that really most interested me was within within the liberal order did liberalism have the capacity

in some ways to recognize natural limits uh so you you said earlier what are the what what can bind or limit the autonomy the desired autonomy of the individual? And you suggested that those limits would be nature. And I think, on the one hand, the right has always been very attentive to the ways in which nature, of course, is a limit, especially when we think about the human being, what we are as human beings. I mean, we both cut our teeth in political philosophy and what attracted me to political philosophy, I'm sure what attracted you, it's that it's really just an endless discussion about what is human nature. And once we have the answer to that question, then we begin to think about what is the appropriate political form that follows from that definition of human nature. But so on the one hand, conservatives have always been very keen critics of the way in which the left has argued for the transcendence of natural limits, and in particular, the transcendence of natural limits in what it is a human being is. And this,

of course, brings us back to old kind of Straussian themes of historicism, that the human being has no nature. We are really just creatures who are defined by historical sort of circumstances. And the circumstance above all that defines us is the idea of progress, that they're called progressives precisely because progress isn't just, you know, just a change like, you know, using a ballpoint pen instead of a feather. Progress is the sort of existential ontological condition of what it is to be a human being. There is no human nature. There's only a changeable, transformative, constantly altering and ultimately perfecting, a kind of perfectible creature that is a human being. At the same time, though, the right, it seems to me, has similar tendencies as well, at least as it's been constituted in the United States, which is the belief of a kind of endless economic progress, a limitless economic

progress. And what was really interesting to, I guess what interested me about these ideas of peak oil, which I think is still in some sense is true, right? We're going to run out of, maybe not, but I shouldn't say run out of, it becomes the easy, easy energy in the form of oil gets more difficult. That's kind of what interested me. And the extent to which, and again, these are just questions in my mind, the extent to which what we understand to be are just questions in my mind, the extent to which what we understand to be the success of liberalism has been tied to a kind of perhaps temporary bounty, a bounteous energy form that allowed us the belief in this kind of autonomy, in this kind of this

condition of complete and thoroughgoing autonomy. So, in other words, the question that really interested me out of that period was, is there a quality on the right that actually begins to collapse itself with some of the assumptions on the left as well, which is that the economic and material form of our life is as limitless and subject to progress as the belief in human transformation. And it seems to me, just to put a finer point on this, I know you want to talk about other things, but this is, of course, really important, that what used to seem to be a distinctive approach to progress on the left and a distinctive approach to progress on the right has now really collapsed. Because what we are actually seeing now isn't just a kind of theory of the transformation of human nature as a kind of philosophical and historical process that takes place through political agency,

but rather now the scientific, technological perfection of human beings through interventions in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, and so forth. What is the conservative answer going to be to this when we have such a strong kind of or less it's basically saying if science progresses then it must be a good thing if the material conditions of our life progress it must be a good thing and i think i think i think we're at a really critical moment a kind of key linchpin moment where conservatives need to really, it seems to me, think pretty hard about where we are in terms of those questions. Well, if conservatives believe in smaller government, as we do, then nanotechnology is very exciting because that will enable us to get smaller government down to the micron level and perhaps inject it into people. All right. Well, if you want to know more about this,

go to Impact Compact, I'm sorry, and find the piece which lays out the basic ideas of regime change towards a post-liberal future and why a mixed constitutional future in which we have a virtuous elite and a virtuous populist movement walking hand by hand into a better place where, yes, there are boundaries. You read that, pick up the book book and we thank you patrick for joining us patrick denine the notre dame university political science department talk to you later thanks patrick thank you okay and now we go from the esoteric and the empyrean to the specific and the political uh we have andy mccarthy here to tell us well you know andy is of course senior

fellow at the national review institute contributing editor there as well, as well as Fox News, served as the assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Welcome back, Andy. Trump indicted seven counts. So what does this mean? And surely it means if there's going to be a fair application of the laws is that hunter biden is going to be indicted sometime soon right well at least joe biden um the uh he's indicted it's interesting because they they're these guys are so political um virtually every line of what they do is politicized so um this is a little inside baseball-y, but they've charged Trump under a provision of the Espion former Vice President Pence last week. And what they're saying about Biden, what they want you to believe is those guys, they're not really an Espionage Act problem because they're victims of sloppy staff work and inadvertent behavior, and they cooperated with the investigation and all that. Whereas Trump, he's willful.

That's why he has to be prosecuted. But if you look at the Espionage Act, and I think Donald Trump is going to make sure we all look at the Espionage Act, the subsection of the, there's a second subsection of the act. Trump's been charged under subsection D, which is the part that deals with the willful behavior. But there's this subsection F that, you know, Biden's not going to want to talk about that deals with people who exhibit gross negligence in the mishandling of classified information.

And while the Biden Justice Department and the Democrat media complex will say, oh, well, but we don't go after people who just make mistakes. We go after people with willful behavior. The fact is that Congress made both of them equally 10-year felony counts. And, you know, they'll say, well, but Hillary Clinton wasn't prosecuted, which is the same thing, of course, Trump is saying. And the problem with that argument is it's a travesty that hillary clinton wasn't prosecuted uh and there's no good basis in my mind to go after trump on this and not go after biden so i i just think this is a gratuitous just for as a political matter rather than a legal one i think they're going to be very sorry they went down this route hey andy it's rob long uh

thanks for joining us so um you say they're going to be sorry they went down this route because because it's going to be revealed to be completely political or because they're going to lose or both i think because the selection of trump to be prosecuted on this is political and there was a way rob to indict this case without doing that you could have just indicted it as grand jury obstruction in other words they could they could have just made this case you know look right we asked him for our stuff back he wouldn't give it back so we gave him a grand jury subpoena and he duped his lawyers into telling us under oath that he had given everything back when they gave these 38 documents on June 3rd. And of course, that was a false statement. Two months later,

they find 100 more documents. So instead of, you could have taken the Espionage Act completely out of it and just made it a plain old obstructing the grand jury case, and look the country in the eye and say, you know, look, he says this is a selective prosecution, but no one in America can lie to a grand jury and get away with it. And that's the kind of thing I think people could have wrapped their brains around. Why didn't they do that? Because I think they want to make a, well, a couple of reasons. First of all, they want to run against Trump, right?

So it doesn't really, the more unfair this seems to be, the more it gyms up Trump's base. And this has the paradoxical effect of, there's like a surge effect and a tail effect, right? The surge effect is in the four corners of the primary contest to win the gop nomination it helps trump because his base is catalyzed and none of the other candidates could get any traction because they have to talk about trump all the time but the tail effect of this is if you combine this with like bragg's case and the eg carroll case and in august uh you got the atlanta case and then in october one of those is a fundraising opportunity for trump yeah i'll tell i wouldn't go to sleep on october is the letitia james uh

fraud case the civil case which is going to you know, years of the Trump organization and they're accused of this massive, like, you know, insurance tax fraud, you know, every fraud under the sun. And then, you know, now you have this, then you have Bragg's trial coming up. And the other thing that's going to happen here at a certain point, I don't think Trump is going to get charged with a June, with a January 6th crime. But remember, Smith is a special counsel, which means he gets to write a report. So at some moment in time, when it's propitious for them, he's going to drop a comprehensive report on what Trump did in connection with January 6th. So they have this whole thing sculpted out in a way that it's very likely he could win the nomination and then they're going to

friggin' kill him as it gets close to November. He'll also do a number on himself. He's good at that. Okay, what are they all talking to each other? Or this is just kind of the hive mind at work?

What you've sketched out is like is a system right i mean to to bring this case in miami because they want to bring i guess because well they want it they want it they don't want to suffer through a venue change they want to let's you know just make it make it simple um i mean i'm just trying to understand, like, is there anybody there in that entire operation saying, well, listen, you know, this is a little bit, we're pushing this because Biden did it and Pence did it and Hillary Clinton famously did it. Seems like everybody's taking stuff home. And there's nobody there. There's no dissenting voice. Or is there or are we going

to hear more about that later i think first of all it's it's it's a hive mind but you know we're not talking about a complicated issue here i mean it's pretty simple the way this tees up right so i think everybody kind of knows what's expected of them um i i got i must have been asked 10 times today, do you think that Smith is coordinating with Garland? I mean, Rob, you're talking about like, are these other prosecutions and different or prosecutors in different jurisdictions colluding? I don't think Smith is talking to Garland. That doesn't mean Garland's not running the show or that Biden's not running the show. It's that Smith was brought in because he knows what's expected of him. He knew what he was here to do. They don't have to have a conversation about that. And I think if you're an activist Democrat, which covers the Justice Department

and then all these politically elected prosecutors who are state prosecutors around the country, let's remember the state prosecutors, unlike the federal prosecutors, are elected. They seek office promising their constituents that they're going to use their power against Trump. And it really doesn't matter that much how the cases come out. They're supposed to use their power against Trump, which they're doing. So I don't think it's one of these things where it's so complicated that we all have to get together to figure out what each one does next. I think there's a trajectory of this that's pretty simple. They want him to win the nomination, and then they think Biden can beat him in the general, and it's teeing up that way. It probably can.

Andy, it's Steve Hayward out in California. I was glad you mentioned, but i think you should say more about the hillary clinton case from what seven eight years ago now yep and you know what i recall from that and this is getting off strictly legality and the constitutional issues involved in this trump and his documents is we remember now that james comey as head of the fbi laid out the case of how she'd violated the law but but then said, we're not recommending a prosecution because it's our ethical duty not to bring a prosecution that could not be won in court. In other words, what he was saying was, no D.C. jury will convict Hillary Clinton.

What does it tell us that now they're not applying that same standard of judgment to Trump? I mean, it seems to me it's problematic on its face, but below the surface, it's increasing reasons for people to be deeply cynical about the fairness of our law enforcement apparatus in the country. Yeah, I think it's worse than that, Steve, because I don't think Comey believed the word he was saying. One of the reasons, for example, you know, we just talked about the difference in the espionage act between the willfulness thing and the gross negligence provision. I thought the gross negligence thing was like the shiny object. I thought it was a diversionary tactic. To my mind, having done this for a while, Hillary Clinton's case was the easiest willfulness case in the history of cases. She intentionally, systematically created a communication system that was non-secure and outside the government channels,

even though she was a Secretary of State who had to enforce against her subordinates the government provision that you're supposed to do government work on government facilities. She did it under circumstances where 80% of her job was national security and foreign relations work that's born classified as far as the government rules of concern. So she had to know it was inevitable that highly classified information was going to transit through and be stored on her homebrew system. So she did that willfully. That was not accidental behavior. And then when they caught her on it and there was a congressional subpoena issued to her in connection with Benghazi, she intentionally not only deleted but had destroyed 33,000 emails, which Comey ended up having to concede had some classified information in it and some State Department business in it, probably quite a lot. And where they didn't go public, you know, what Comey excised out of his

statement that he gave publicly was that the FBI was convinced that her system had been hacked by foreign intelligence services. She had even talked to Obama over the system from Russia. So that's like there's no reason on God's green earth that that that that case wasn't brought, I think any reasonable prosecutor, I know a lot of people have accused me of being an unreasonable prosecutor, but I think any reasonable prosecutor would have been delighted to take that case to trial. But they were never going to prosecute her. In April of 2016, while the investigation was still ongoing and in an early stage, Obama came out publicly and said he didn't want her to be charged. And Comey ended up not charging her. And three months later, when he explained why she shouldn't be charged, he virtually echoed what Obama had said in April.

So the fix was in on this from the beginning. And I hope that Trump is talking about this case every single day, because not only, I don't know if it'll read down to his benefit or not, selective prosecution is one of these things where it's a good argument for why prosecutorial discretion should not be exercised to charge. But once you do charge, it's not much of a defense at trial. It's kind of a nullification defense. But, you know, the judge is going to tell the jury at trial, the only person on trial here is Donald Trump. And the question is, has he been proven guilty on the charges against him? It's not a legal defense for him that somebody who did similar things wasn't prosecuted. But I think politically, it's going to be a very powerful argument.

Today, Hillary Clinton reminded people that you can buy baseball caps that say, but her emails, if you go to this address. She tweeted that out in order to just let everybody know that she completely got away with it. Absolutely. It's so much in your face, and it's so we don't care what you crazy people think. I'm surprised she's not having an event at Comet Pizza to solve the kind of thing.

We've got to go. Andy, you know, one of these days we're going to stop going to you because there's no news about this stuff, and the country's on an even keel and a good trajectory forward. But I don't think that's going to happen. So stay close to your phone. And we always appreciate when we're able to call you fast and get you on. All right, guys. Have a great weekend.

Talk to you later. Bye-bye. Speaking of great weekends, one of the things people do on weekends, of course, is gather around the barbecue. They have themselves a beer. They have a burger and the rest of it. And they meet and greet their near and dear. But sometimes meeting and greeting those who are complete and utter strangers can be fun, too. Strangers in the sense that maybe you didn't meet them in the real world, but you know them from online. And that's what we love about the Ricochet Get-Togethers. And here's Rob Long to tell you

about one that might be in your room. I'm all about it. Yeah, you're absolutely right. They're not strangers. They're fellow members, club members of the Ricochet Club. So we do that. We love the online stuff. Obviously, that's part of our identity. We like the podcast. We love it when we mix it up in the podcast as well, in the pages of Ricochet.

On the other hand, it's always nice to get together. So we have meetups, and there are some meetups coming up. In Winston-Salem, there's a meetup in mid-july the annual german fest meetup in milwaukee is happening the last weekend in july labor day weekend meetup in cookville tennessee there's some tentative meetups scheduled for columbus ohio in late june that's late this month and there is a meetup in portland oregon happening in mid-July. The specific date's coming soon. And Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky in August also has some moving around it. How do you find out about all this stuff? You go to Ricochet.com, you join Ricochet, and you say, I'll be there. And if one of these things or none of these things work for you for timing-wise or

geography-wise, you just say, hey, how about I meet up closer to you at a date? You can do it. And believe me, Ricochet members will show up. And that is really the most fun part about being a member of Ricochet. It certainly is. Before we go, anything on your mind before we wrap it up here? We have a few more. We're trying to keep these podcasts close to an hour or something like that. Because we know that people sit down, they get riveted, they lose track of what they're doing. They stop knitting, they stop fixing, they stop driving, they pull

over to hear something, and, you know, then they complain to us, I was immobilized by 90 minutes of brilliance, can you keep it down to 65 or 66 or 67 like that? But is there a story this week, guys, something that popped up that made you think, hmm, hmm, here's a sign of societal disclosure, or as Paul Harvey might say, the, you know, news, hmm, here's a sign of societal disclosure, or as Paul Harvey might say, the news of something that was pointed out from today's news of most lasting significance. I don't know why I thought of Paul Harvey there. I was just, I guess because I came across some Paul Harvey stuff the other day in which he was talking. It wasn't Amway necessarily, because he's got this great record, which is essentially 30 minutes of what is fine about America culminating in a praise of Amway and the rest of it.

He was just such an interesting broadcaster to me that I lament the loss of him. And we don't have Rush Limbaugh anymore. Do we have anybody who commands that sort of national? Because Paul Harvey came on at noon, right? And everybody stopped and listened to what Paul Harvey was doing. Rush came on at 11, where I was. And now in the podcast world, it's just all diffuse. There's no sort of, there's no sense of those stentorian voices

that come on at a particular time to mark the phases of the day, is there? That's gone forever, isn't it? Yeah, it probably is, James. But I mean, look, I mean, I'm old enough to remember when 75 million Americans watched the evening news when the country was half the size it is today. And now that number is down under 30 million, I think, who watch the evening news, the network news. Right. But I am surprised. What's on your mind?

I saw a story this week that I immediately thought this has to be catnips for James. And that's the flurry of UFO stories that pop up. I'm deeply skeptical of them because, well, what I wait for is a detail. They say we have things. All right, names from specific things. Do we have an engine? Do we have a composite material we don't understand? Do we have control surfaces? Do we have a limb from an alien being in a biology lab? None of that has been suggested. It's all secondhand. I've heard this. Well-placed sources.

I don't know. I count me a skeptical until somebody shows up with a fragment from Alpha Centauri or something. No, I'm all about Fox Mulder's poster here. I want to believe, too. But again, show me something. I mean, the amount of UFO footage or, I'm sorry, UAP footage that's out there right now, it's pretty incredible. And some of it's getting actually better. I mean, I carry around in my pocket a 4K phone that is capable of an enormous detail and the rest of it, and so do an awful lot of other people. So until we start getting a welter of really convincing footage, and not

just something that's darting around in the sky, I want something that's artifact-free when you subject it to analysis. I want the gray alien striding towards me with his big head and his black liquid eyes and his swinging hands and the rest of it. That's what I want. In the absence of that, then I'm sorry. I'm not going to believe any of it. I remember in the late 90s when we were going through this whole stuff, we had a bigfo craze where people were being abducted they were all over the place we had an alien there was an autopsy there was that right and there was photographs of it and the rest of it and it was every single piece of evidence that was trotted i was completely inconclusive and unconvincing if you wanted to be a skeptical mind the only way to think about this stuff is to proceed from a

certain set of assumptions about the likelihood of life in the universe throw away everything everything you know about science, like, well, I can't get here because the universe is too big and you can't go faster than light. Yeah, okay. Well, you know, maybe they figured that out. And then get down to the third thing about how they've been hanging around for an awful long time and nobody found them because they never crashed and because cameras weren't bad. Okay, well, now cameras are better.

Now the government is admitting we don't know what these is. All right, that's still all a big gaseous mix out there show me something put it out on display have the journalists from all over the country come and take pictures of it that then right we can talk until we get to that point shut up i'm sorry yeah i mean you'd think this real this i mean you'd think the people who fake the moon landing could fake a ufo uh and but. But so far, we're not even getting that. That's how much contempt they have for us. Well, I mean, I know we got to run, but one of the things I find interesting about this is that forever, forever, I mean, I can't even remember a time, maybe every single movie, the premise has always been when we find the UFOs or the UAPs, whatever they are, we can't tell the people.

The people can't know because they'll freak out because nobody can handle this. This is just two bananas. And the truth is that if they announce tomorrow, oh, yeah, yeah, we've been visited by aliens. People will be like, oh, that's really interesting. I'm going to tweet about that. And, you know, how do they feel about the trump indictment you know it was really kind of i mean i have i have an idea that when when this happens it's just going to be this thing like oh yeah you know oh well here's the alien he's going to be on um you know he's going to be on our twitter spaces okay here's

what you what you do is you do what they've been doing, if you say. We have to prepare the public. How do we prepare the public? Well, we give them the idea these things exist. And then we have a whole bunch of science fiction movies. And then we have a whole bunch of different things that train them to look for this so that they assume that maybe actually this is the saucers and the rest of it. We spend 30, 40 years psyoping the people. Sometimes we'll give them a really big, huge alien spacecraft that's friendly and pretty and pastel and glowing, like

Steven Spielberg did, and then we'll give them the Independence Day thing that scares the bleep out of them. And it's, you know, since it's neither of those two, they won't be too upset when we drib-drab out that there are some tic-tacs flying around and we don't know. I mean, at this point, yes. Well, there's a great fan theory about the Spielberg movies

they've booked in. There's Close Encounters, and, there's a great fan theory about the Spielberg movies. They bookend it. There's Close Encounters. Right. And then there's E.T. And then he did the other one, The Day the Earth Stood Still, or whatever that one was. Remember? Didn't he do a remake? That was not a Spielberg movie. He did the remake of War of the Worlds.

War of the Worlds. That's what I mean. Right. So, like, you know, the aliens come and visit, and then one of them is then captured by children and tortured in a closet. And then E.T. goes home, and they prepare the invasion force, which is War of the Worlds. Those E.T.'s in there. That's a bit much. We actually saw the creature at the end. In the great original War of the Worlds movie,

all we saw was the little three-fingered thing that just kind of limped its way out the hole and died. No, we actually saw the aliens, the Martians in the Steven Spielberg. They were not E.T. They were a nasty bunch of MFers. No, I'm sorry. So anyway, if you wanted to train the people, you would do exactly what...

They were E.T.'s orcs. That's my theory. E.T.'s orcs. Oh train the people, they were ETS orcs. It's my theory. ETS orcs. Oh yeah. I got to stop there because we have a title for the podcast. We've got a graphic. There's nothing we can simply cannot improve upon it. Peter Robinson, we hope we'll be back next week.

Or maybe we don't because we love having Steve Hayward around. Steve, you've been great to end. Take care and good to have you. And thank you for everything you've done. Rob, we hope to get you back to New York soon. But remember, wear your N95 so that you don't expire as the Canadian active war, frankly, continues to block the United States. I will see everybody in, you know, I usually say we'll see you in Ricochet 4.0. But as our new leader has been reminding us, coming soon is 5.0.

Oh, I'm excited. Going to be fantastic. And probably broken for the first two days, so hurry up, get your comments in, and join, if you will, at Ricochet.com. See you there next week, guys. Thanks, guys. Thanks, you guys. Ricochet.

Join the conversation.