The Ricochet Podcast - Everything is Everything is Revolutionary Praxis

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

What exactly do the fight to save Piddington in Oxfordshire, the public betrayal of Najya Hannah-Jones by her activist mom, Trump's deal with Greenland, Russia's cultural inferiority complex, and a lesbian bar in Massachusetts have in common? For those of us who haven't worn an N-95 mask in at least five years, the distinctions are clear. Even so, they each command the attention of James, Charles, and Steve, who remind us that praxis rarely makes perfect. Opening sound this week: Nikole Hannah-Jones talks about her child’s school at the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication in 2018 and lesbians on TikTok say, “Keep it on the QT.”Closing music: "Revolution" by Willow McKenna via MotionArray.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ricochet-podcast--5817275/support.

We cannot live in this world and only be concerned about ourselves. Our faith should be tied to each other, and we should be, our children's face should be tied to each other, because this is actually why integration matters. A New York Times reporter in a high poverty school, fucking changes the school, right? Like, there's certain things that just are not going to happen in that school. I can go to that school and say there's a problem, and it gets fixed immediately. It's the Rikoshae podcast with Charles C.W. Cook and Stephen Hayward. I'm James Lillings.

Today we talk about education. We fixed it, but we're not going to do anything about it. Also, Greenland, also football. Also, you're just going to have to listen because let's have ourselves a podcast. Guys, we've got to stop talking about the COVID-conscious lesbian bar in western Massachusetts, okay? We're too close to the midterms, and Republicans can't know about this. Welcome, everybody. It's the Rickin-Shay podcast, number 808.

I'm James Laleck's back. I took a week off, which I rarely do. I apologize for that. But I'm back happy to talk to Charles C.W. Cook in Florida and Stephen Hayward in California. Gentlemen, how are you? Stephen, you go first. I'm great. It's been a busy week. I can't believe it's gone already. And I still have a week's worth of work to do today. All right. Well, we'll get cracking on that. Get cracking. That's what they say in England. That's where I've been. I'm full of Britishisms now. Aluminium. Put it in the boot. Charles, how are you?

I'm doing well. Boot is the back. Bonnet's the front. That's the really funny one. Yes. The hood is the bonnet. It's very Jane Aust. And Boots is also a major pharmaceutical like a Walgreens or something like that. And see ISB. And throw a spammer in the works just doesn't land in America, unlike, you know, we can cope with boot, but spammer. Isn't that what you call a wrench?

Spanner. Spanner. Spanner. Spanner. A spamer. A spammer would be somebody who either puts together molded meat in the Hormel facility in Minnesota or somebody who's on the internet. doing bad things and message boards. I will mention this about the trip to England. Everyone says, oh, did you go to Piddlington? I did not go to Piddlington. That is the town that has voted to

secede because they have 125 people there and they're getting 1,125 migrants. People who just showed up and they're going to be housed there. And the women are saying, look, you know, you look at the stats as to how many men do bad things. And there's a fight and chance. There's a lot of bad ombris, as a man one said, in this group. We don't want the, we don't want the quality and character of our village to be completely overwhelmed by a foreign population that does not share our culture. This is being regarded, depending on what newspaper you read, with outrage or with sympathy. I think the Piddlington people did something brilliant. Instead of just voting to secede, which of course is not going to happen, instead of writing strongly worded letters to the editor, sir, what they did was they filed an environmental lawsuit because they both.

believe they claim, they insist that the presence of all these men will be harmful, injurious to the habitat of the great crested newt and to the only breeding pair of otters, I think, in the neighborhood and a couple of kingfishers. So they're using the green wokery against the people who want to put the migrants. You can't bring them here. It'll be harmful to the nukes. There's something called a nature crime, apparently, in British law, and now they're trying to sort that out. So they may actually have to remove the nudes in order to install the migrants or have some sort of no-go zone where nobody can go and step on the nudes for fun. So that's about the only thing of interest I have to add to my trip to England other than every time you look at the news and say, what has become of the old other country. I go to a place like I went, Suffolk, Walburwick, Southwold, and everything that you think of when you think of rural Britain is still there. how long I simply can't say. Anyway, so we've got other things that have been going on this week.

It has been fun, and so, you know, we're going to choose some cuds, but of course, with Charles and Stephen, there's always something new to be said. One of the favorite stories this week, oh, where do we begin? Was Nicole Hannah Jones, who wrote a piece for the New York Times and was excoriated, quite brilliantly, flayed down to the bone by Charles. a piece that said, maybe I made a mistake choosing racial solidarity with my, when it came to my child's school. And what the heck is going on in these schools anyway? It turns out gobsmacked, V8 forehead slap. They're not getting an education. Charles expound on this.

Well, it's hard to know where to stop because that piece was such a mess. But the gist of it is that in 2016, Nicole Hannah-Jent, who would subsequently have learned about via the 1619 project, that is to say, she doesn't just have very strong opinions as to how her own child should be educated. She has very strong opinions as to how your children. In fact, everyone in the United States ought to be educated. Anyway, back in 2016, she decided that she was not going to try and sent her child to a parochial school or a charter school or a private school, but was instead going to put her in a worse school. And she did this, and this is where it all gets a little bit messy, to fight segregation. But the school that she chose for her child was a school at which

most of the students had the same skin color as her child, and the one that she decided not to her child to wasn't. So first off, I'm not quite sure how that fights segregation. She then advanced this theory that the reason that it's important to send your kids to the local school, regardless of whether it's good or not, is that parents will get involved. And parents make education, they make a school. But then she didn't get involved in her kids' education.

So we fast forward 10 years, and her daughter has discovered that her mother sent her to a bad school for ideological purposes, and is livid. The word used was betrayed. And Nicole Hannah-Jones now thinks this might have been a mistake, which of course it was. I had a few takeaways from this. one was that although she relates to the views of her daughter and suggests implies hints that it might have been a mistake, she at no point explains why. She at no point confirms that she's learned anything.

She at no point lays out why the school that she sent her daughter to was bad. She doesn't say where she should have sent her daughter. She doesn't credit her husband who told her back in 2016 that this was a bad idea. and she repeats a whole bunch of progressive nonsense that simply isn't true about there being horrible funding gaps between schools for white people and black people or rich people and poor people. And it's just not true. In fact, that school, I think, spends $52,000 per student, which is much more than they spend, for example, in the local public schools here in my county in Florida, which are A-rated. So that's the first takeaway. The second takeaway is that nobody should ever listen to Nicole Hannah-Jones ever again about anything.

If you are wrong in the course of your life, you're human. If you're wrong on the one thing for which you are known, then you're still human, but you probably ought to get another job. I just do not want to be told ever again by Nicole Hannah-Jones what education should look like in the United States. because her own daughter now hates her because of stupid decisions she made. Last thing on this, I wrote about this, it was fairly caustic. The one passage in it for which I got a little criticism is the one of which I'm the most sure,

which is that the position Nicole Hannah-Jones took in 2016, in 2024 and takes again here, is that her daughter is not more important than anyone else. and I think this is evil. Now, I don't mean that in a cosmic sense. Obviously, if you have religious beliefs, no one person is intrinsically more important than another. I don't want the law to teach that people are more important than others. But to me, the person who's making their decisions for them at this stage in their lives,

of course my children are more important than everyone else's. Of course I'm going to try and advance their interest. And historically, the only thing that has ever managed to intrude against that supposition, which is pretty much universal around the world, is ideology. Only ideology can prevent people from playing that role in their children's lives. Only ideology could get families in the Soviet Union to inform on one another, because the glorious future of the communist project was more important than the family unit. Now, of course it's not the same thing here.

less of a sin. But when you write in the newspaper that your daughter is not more important than anyone else, you are succumbing to ideology. Your job is their parent is to get them the best education possible and advance their interest because they can't do it aside from anything else. They're minors. And I think for this she should be disdained as somebody who is more interested in abstract politics than the flesh and blood of her own child. Well, you know that she believed that child was more important because he is hers. But the ideology requires everybody to lie in public about it. Stephen?

So I summarize Charles' blast on this is Nicole Hannah-Jones' bubble is firmly intact. And that's the problem, right? The data and all the evidence has been out there for a long time. By the way, Charles, if you think she's even superficially chasing now, just imagine how indignant she's going to be, speaking of bubbles, when someone tells her the sad fact that half of all Americans are below the median, right? She's going to erupt in fury about all that. The other thing, though, is I'm not sure how many listeners know this or follow the Times, but she's a very highly paid writer who writes, on average, one article a year. Yeah. That's it. It's unbelievable.

And I do have this prediction, though, Charles. I think this magazine article becomes her daughter's college application entrance essay. This article is probably going to win Nicole Hannah-Jones a second Pulitzer Prize. And her daughter will be admitted to any Ivy League school she wants. Yeah, of course. And that just shows you that you can all play out what all that means, right? And so, yeah, I'm pretty disgusted too. And enjoying the fact that some people on the left are mad at her for spilling the beans that the schools are bad.

Well, that's the question. That's the conversations. They say that we need to have. And you would think that this would occasion that. But every single time, there is an opportunity. or need to have that conversation, the conversation never occurs. And it doesn't occur because it's full of inconveniences. It's full of things that nobody wants to address. It's full of the fact that not everybody comes to school with an equal temperament or an equal set of mental facilities or any

number of things. People are different. People are equal under the law, but people are not equal according to what they have at their disposal to learn. Some of those can be helped. They can be help by intervention and kind and cautious and patient teachers, but they should be set aside in a place where that can be done. Some of them cannot be helped and it's unfortunate, but they're simply disruptive. They come from miserable circumstances. They've not been socialized and they disrupt the classroom. They sit and look at their phone and they yell in the talk and they, you know, upbraid the teacher. Those people should be put elsewhere as well so that the kids who come and want to learn and come from families that want them to learn as well and have read to them and look at

their homework and the rest of them. Those kids should have the opportunity to learn. But for some reason, we have just decided that we have to concentrate on the 15, 20, 10% of people who completely make it unable, make it incapable of anybody else of learning because of their behavior. That it is injurious, wrong, old style to put them in another classroom. But that's the only way that any of this is going to be done. So we always, it's the easiest possible thing. If you walked into a school and there were five kids who were making things impossible for everybody else, you would wonder why they were tolerated. You would wonder why they were indulged.

But we're not going to do that. We just simply are unless you go to a voucher and the parents can go wherever they want with the money that they have. Imagine in New York if you had $52,000 that you could take to some school for heaven's sakes. You could spend the money on a neuralink implant that would give them access to Grock and Gemini and the rest of it. of it, the kids wouldn't even have to study. Anyway, you're going to say something? Well, only that I'm not sure how many people are aware of the fact that first the Obama administration and then the Biden administration are essentially imposed dictates on the public schools that their disciplinary proceedings against students had to be racially balanced.

Dispid impact. Right. Dispresent. Exactly. And I, you know, I met a couple of black teachers who quit their jobs teaching because they said, you know, it's a sad fact, but still the facts are facts. And he says, I was told I couldn't kick black students who were disrupting class out of class and made an impossible teach to everybody else. And, you know, this one teacher I met a few years ago, so that's when I quit and went to work for a private Catholic school. And so, and that is, of course, the racial ideology that Nicole Hannah-Jones stoked more than anybody are demanding of us. And until, among other things, until that ends, the schools aren't going to get any better. No, Charles, it's a positive imagination to believe somehow that the only

reasons the kids are acting out and not wanting to learn the rest of it has to do with systemic economic conditions and that once those are charged then everybody else is going to show up with an apple for their teacher and their books are with the you know with a belt around their around their shoulder right yeah and look let me just make another unpopular argument that were I a politician I would end my career by making him there are lots of things in the world that are unfair And many of those things take a long time to fix if they can be fixed at all. Education policy takes decades to contrive and implement. I think that we are seeing in states such as Mississippi and Tennessee the fruits of good education policy,

education policy that privilege children over unions and that goes back to the basics. But we will see there as well. need to see this over the next three, four, five, ten years to know if it's permanent. Parents don't have that time. Countries have that time. Governments can sometimes have that time. But parents don't have that time. Parents have at the moment at which their children are eligible for school to make hard decisions. And if you look at what we know about education, you don't get too many second chances. If your child's behind by 11, that's bad.

If they're behind by 15, they're really in trouble. I don't understand, I will concede, and maybe I'm selfish. I just don't understand any parent who says, I'm going to engage in a long experiment here. No. That doesn't mean that it's fair. That doesn't mean there aren't people who are going to be left behind. I just don't think it's normal for somebody to volunteer.

to sacrifice their child to it. Right. We should note, this is not new. There was a JD panic back in the 50s and early 60s. JD standing, of course, for gentlemen, do you know? Juris doctor. Is that what you mean? No.

No. Juvenile delinquents. Oh, yeah. Yes. JDs. And they would be the guys, according to the movies, who'd be hanging around on the asphalt jungle, combing their elaborate greasy pompators with a comb that was also a switchblade and speaking with with with with with malice and sarcasm to their to their teachers so we've been

here before and the sputnik panic that caused everybody to look up and say i never quite understood that we must have a better educational system because the russians beat us into space well you know it wasn't exactly fifth and sixth graders who were responsible for that you know unless russia actually did have fifth and sixth graders designing sputnik but we had pumped all of this money into it and all of this attention on increasing it. And it seems to me that what that did was it made primary school education change from what was fairly simple and transactional and basic year

after year into something that was considered a laboratory for experimentation. So because it was a lab, you needed smarter people for it. So the old teachers who would go to teachers college for two years and then come out, it's now a four-year degree. Or you get a master's in teaching for heaven. So you don't need a master's degree to teach three third graders. You memorize the curriculum. It's not rocket science. Well, if it's, unless it's Sputnik class. And then you teach them what happened. But now it's this exalted educational system

that not only requires all of this preparation on the part of the teachers, but also requires seemingly a new theory to roll into the system every 10 or 15 years or so and disrupt the tried and true methods that actually worked in the past. I remember new math, primarily because Tom Lairerer is saying about it. But I had to go through that. I was sitting in class trying to figure out base eight, which I guarantee has had absolutely no impact in my life whatsoever. And then there was the destruction of phonics in favor of whole word reading or something like that, where you recognize words to sit and breaking down into their phoneme, constituent elements, which disadvantaged an entire generation of children who were not able to read. But yet we seem to trust these educational

establishments with the guidance of our children, even though everything that they have done to supposedly improve the schools has made it worse. So we've been through the JD thing before. And so, you know, we will probably, I don't know, not make it out this time unless there's serious action. And we've got to stop with the theories. Charles pointed up Mississippi, perfect example. They went back to phonics and all of a sudden, surprise, surprise, children can learn.

Yeah. So one observation about this, you know, we, the. Sputnik moment when the government decided we better get into the education business was the first of two steps that broke the constitutional bounds of what the federal government can do. It's one thing to say we need to step up our science education and our universities for the space race and, you know, there was a national defense component, I think in the title of that act in 1959, whenever it passed. Then you fast forward to the great society and the first Johnson era educational and secondary education act stripped that out. And you know, the late

James K. Wilson said that was the moment we crossed the legitimacy bar because there's nothing in the Constitution about a federal responsibility in education, right? It's arguably unconstitutional, the Department of Education. And so now we've had, you know, the blob is taken over the bureaucracies and centralized things. States still have a large amount of autonomy, but things like even George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act made things worse in many ways. I like to say that's an act that has a little bit that some people like and a little bit that a lot of other people don't like. We used to call that compromise, but probably bad legislation.

Well, we can't have standardized testing anymore because, as Charles was mentioning, before we have disparate impact. Explain for people what that means, Charles, and what actually you think of the concept of disparate impact and what the impact it's had in society. Has it any of disparate impact had a disparate impact on our society? I know what disparate impact is, but I feel as if Steve would be better suited to explain it. Well, it has come to mean currently in the hands of the dominant left that,

that any statistical disparities between groups have to be the result of racism and oppression. And that's why we, and over the years there have been, I remember 1990, the civil rights community was pushing race norming on tests. So if you were, say, 92% among blacks or Hispanics, you would be, but you were 10% below white students or 15% below Asian students, you'd have the score adjusted so you're all at 92 together. right and and first there's a famous court case don't want to go on too long about this but griggs versus duke power in the 70s made this a principle of civil rights law what has said was you can't have employment tests anymore unless they're very job specific because it was thought and by the way one of the problems here is there probably were a few companies in the south and you know i remember clarence thomas when he ran the eEOC talking about finding specific cases of this and bringing

civil rights action against them. But they might have had tests designed to diminish black employment. But of course, general employment tests are actually useful for certain kinds of, you know, large organizations where a person might get moved around. But you can't do that anymore or and almost no companies do anymore except for specific, you know, engineering or, you know, you have to have a CPA if you're going to be a bookkeeper with a company. So they still allow that.

And it's just metastasized. And without going too far down this rabbit hole, this is one of the reasons now that everyone wants to get a degree, that you will see in newspapers advertisements for a receptionist at a bowling alley, and it will say must have bachelor's degree. Because they can't do their own test. At least they can't without a serious risk of being sued. so they use the degrees as a proxy, which has had deleterious effects on our society and the way in which we regard higher education, less as being something that those who need to do something

for which higher education will prepare them ought to engage in, and something that every single person ought to get in the name of social justice. Well, yeah, when you take away the ability to test people, you're going to create something else. There was always proposals to have a sort of British like track system where people who obviously are not going to college, for a variety of reasons, are schooled in various trades, which seems to be doing people of favor, if you ask me now,

because the idea that everybody should go to college that somehow you're having wisdom and knowledge and useful skills bestowed upon you by sitting in that place for four years and accumulating a quarter million dollars with a debt does not seem to be borne out by the evidence. whereas the people who go into trades are people who can make a living for themselves. And it doesn't mean they're stupid. It just means simply that for whatever reason,

they're probably not going to flourish in an airy, fairy atmosphere or everybody's sitting down for the 178th time and trying to figure out proto-feminist medical lessons in Kate Chupan's The Awakening. The other thing is, is when you're talking about race norming, Stephen, is I remember also in the brief against standardized tests, They were saying that there were cultural terms in there that would not be accessible to people from, you know, inner city, America, or Chicago, whatever. That if a child encountered a question whose theoretical setting was on a yacht, they would not know what to do.

And I thought, you know, I grew up in North Dakota, the son of a truck driving gas station owner. We didn't have yachts. There weren't yachts going up the river or so, but yet somehow I knew of their existence and perhaps is what socioeconomic, socioeconomic class they represented because I'd seen them on television, or I'd read them in a story, or I'd seen Jackie O's swaning about with an asses on, you know, in the Aegean. It's incredibly condescending to say that these, that things outside of one's own culture are a complete mystery to people in other cultures.

Right. I mean, the one they used to pick on a lot was, you know, my cup of tea and sort of, you know, colloquial expressions like that. But it's actually worse than that. I mean, I can go on too long about this. but the SAT that students take today is not the SAT of even 20 years ago. One of the things they've gotten rid of in most of these tests are analogy questions, right? And analogies are actually, okay, I'm not sure how you teach that kind of thinking skill,

but they're a very good measure of things, and they've gotten rid of that. They got rid of it because why? Because it requires a higher concept thinking apparatus in your head or what. I mean, I refuse to believe that just because somebody has not been aware of a concept that they are unable to understand it once explained it to them. So, yeah, there's just a lot of condescension and bigotry of low expectations that we have said from time to time. Well, once again, I hate to be the meme, but nothing ever happens. I don't think that the Hanna situation is going to occasion a national discussion or will result in meaningful legislation or anything of the... No, but you have seen what's happening next, right?

What's that? Her daughter will be interviewing her as part of a special episode of this American life. I'm not kidding. I miss that. That isn't satire. That's genuinely what's about to happen. It was announced this morning. Oh, Lord is messy.

And this is one reason conservatives really do have to feel aggrieved here. So, first off, suppose that you got some new right weirdos. who wanted to repeal the 19th Amendment and believed that we ought to live in a theocracy. And they sent their kid to some absurdly peculiar school. And then the kid ended up hating them for it. Do you think they'd get a sympathetic op-ed in the New York Times? Do you think the response after that would be to treat the whole thing as if it were some curious topic for debate.

A nice little segment on public broadcasting. I mean, we, at the best of times, get treated as if our very normal opinions, like capitalism is good, or men can't become women, are freakish and ought to be relegated to the curb. And now, Nicole Hannah-Jones is in the newspaper saying, my daughter kind of hates me now because I deliberately sent it to a bad school. And public broadcasting apparatchiks have said,

that is such an interesting topic. Let's discuss this at length. What? Well, that's enough of that. I have some happier topics here. By the way, when I was in England, I was at a hotel that was notable because it's in the movie that it's in the backrooms.

You guys know what the backrooms are? I haven't seen it. But you know what the concept is, right? You need to explain it to me. All right. Well, it was a series of YouTube videos done by a young kid. He used Blender, he used some special effects in his own imagination.

He created this strange, liminal world that is beyond our ken somehow, of empty corporate suburban offices with buzzing fluorescence and yellow lights, these spaces that are immediately familiar, but at the same time, haunted and

empty and unsettling. And at one point, the point of view is the narrator goes up to a wall and he looks through the wall and he sees this strange, vacant building, interior courtyard with all of these windows evenly spaced and it's unsettling. He draws back from it and walks away. Well, that's the holiday inn at Heathrow is what it is. And I know that because I was there a couple of times and finally I was there with my daughter and when we were walking through in the skyway, she just stops yourself and she said, oh my God,

It's the backrooms hotel. And she was right. And we went and read it and we found, you know, endless numbers of posts about that people had found the bat, this, this, this location for the, okay,

so the backrooms movie is later made into a movie and makes a ton of money. So I'm sitting in the bar at the backrooms hotel. I've just had some, I've just ordered a logger of some sort. And, and I asked the, the bartender, are you aware that your hotel is actually part of an American

mythology that resulted in a movie that made $100 million? and he was not. And he called all the staff over and they're all looking at the video. And they're just reeling back gobs smacked at the site of their hotel, their workplace, having this role in this American cultural phenomenon about which they knew nothing. And I thought it was great. And I was going to stick around and have another drink, but I had to go up to my room. And this irritated me because of two things.

One, they had Guinness and they didn't tell me. And two, do you guys know about the Apple lawsuit? about artificial intelligence? No, me neither. All right. Apple came out with this announcement that AI is going to work and Siri's going to work

and it's all the rest of it and when they released their next operating system it didn't work very well. Well, as it turns out, there was a class action lawsuit and I was part of it and I got a check for $31. So at check today, I'm going to cash

and then I'm going to take it to the liquor store and I'm going to buy the Guinness that I didn't get at the backroom's hotel. But the thing of it is is I'm only going to have one because at my age, too many Guinnesses gives you a dad bod. Dad bods. They happen to the best of us.

The trouble is that once you hit a certain age, the body just does not snap back like it did in youth. A lot of people think the classic dad bod comes from just drinking more Guinness or eating chips that they put in front of you at the bar. But a lot of guys, no, it's actually not the whole story. It's like this. As men get older, our bodies reprogram themselves, and we naturally start storing more fat and losing muscle faster,

losing muscle, you don't want to do that. No, the main reason for this, testosterone. Most men's testosterone levels start dropping as early in their 30s or in their 20s if they work for NPR. And when that happens, it becomes easier to gain fat, especially around your stomach. You know the look. Well, thankfully, there is a solution. Mars men. Mars men is a natural supplement designed to support healthy testosterone levels, which can help

your body burn fat more efficiently and build lean muscle. See, when your hormones are working in the way they're supposed to, a lot of things can get easier. Workouts, your energy, even staying lean. It's basically helping your body get back to running like it did years ago. It's got no weird stimulants, no synthetic hormones, just real natural ingredients. Now get this. 90-day money back guarantee. So there is absolutely no risk. Worst case, you don't love it and you get your money back. But over 91% of users report higher energy levels. Thousands of guys are feeling incredible results. Just check out the review on the website to see for yourself. Now, for you.

limited time, our listeners, that's you, get 50% off for life plus free shipping and three free gifts at men go to mars.com. That's men go to mars.com for 50% off and three free gifts when you check out. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them and please support our show and tell them that we sent you 50% off. Men go to mars.com. And we thank men go to mars.com for sponsoring this, the Rikersay podcast. And that was the longest introduction. Segway I have ever done. I was about... Rob Long is shifting in his seat somewhere uncomfortably and not knowing why.

I was about to say, James, that I'm going to find an AI bot to scour the entire Lilix Segway archive and tie them all. And I'm sure this is the longest one ever. Now, I thoroughly enjoyed it, I have to say. It reminds me a bit of, to use a rock and roll metaphor, and we're ahead of that now, but reminds me of when the Grateful Dead would get into that long drums and space nonsense in the middle. and I always sit there watching thinking,

I wonder how the hell they're going to get out of this and back into some real music. And they always would. And that was, I thought, I wonder, I knew, I wonder how James is going to get out of this into dadbots. It was great. Yeah, well, I just saw that and I saw the beer in the ad. And then I thought back to the Guinness that I'm going to buy

and I'm going to use the cash for it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Greenland, it's ours, sort of kind of. We were told instantly that, no, this is nothing. This is just the 1951 arrangement all over again. But it really isn't, is it? So we have an agreement. What say you about it? And what do you think this portends for the future of Greenland and America?

And Denmark. Well, all right. I'll give a first bit on this. I think it's kind of important for several reasons. And I, you know, I haven't read through the terms or compared the 51 agreement. But to the point that even as just a reiteration of it, it still represents that Trump is not abandoning NATO and is not throwing our alliances over. of the side and that he is thinking of the global posture of the United States. I have been joking that it doesn't mean if you look on the map that we now have Canada

surrounded on all three sides. So they should worry about that invasion thing. But I just wish he, I think you could have had this without the bluster and the, you know, we're going to invade Greenland and all the rest of that stuff. But that said, I think it shows that it's not a total clown show going on. Charles. That is almost verbatimates. my view. As I said on the editors' podcast on Tuesday, sometimes people in politics have trouble

separating out concepts. And my example is usually the vaccine for COVID. Vaccine mandate, terrible. Unconstitutional, arguably, of not illiberal, firing all of those soldiers for not taking it, just the worst. It doesn't mean the vaccine. didn't work. Doesn't mean it's going to kill you. These are two separate questions. So it is here. Trump's behavior around Greenland has been embarrassing and bombastic and unnecessary. But this is a really good deal. And the fact that I don't particularly like how he got there doesn't change the fact that I have from the beginning thought that it would be great for us if we could get Greenland to get it. not by military invasion or violence, but if we had been offered it at a reasonable price,

I think it would have been worth considering, and that if we couldn't get it, we ought to try to expand our influence over it in any legal way we could. And that's this. So you're not going to find me pretending that because I don't like the way Trump did it, this isn't a great deal. This is a great deal. This is precisely how we should be acting. toward Greenland. It's also entirely in line with American history. I mean, this idea of our

taking over Greenland, which we haven't quite done, dates back to the mid-19th century. Seward, who was in charge of the Alaska acquisition, wrote papers about this. It was brought up in the early 20th century. It was brought up again by Harry Truman. It makes total sense to me. So I, brother, don't like the way Trump got there, think he antagonized some people unnecessarily, but let's not pretend this isn't a good deal it is. It is. And it was an occasion for people to say, hey, wait a minute, why

does Denmark have a colony so far away? Isn't colonialism wrong? Nobody ever seemed to scour them for that. Maybe we're just... Poor Denmark, leave them alone. They like their Greenland. How do they get it? Well, it doesn't matter.

What I like about this is that it keeps the Ruski's and the Chikons out. and as being an old red-baiting, you know, isolationist. No, I'm not an isolationist, but I want to keep those guys out of the hemisphere. Think back to the Biden years. Think back to the Obama years, where it seemed to me, even the Clinton years, where it was like this. Well, let's give the Chinese some advanced rocket technology in exchange for some cash. Okay, let's do that.

All right. Let's let the Chinese have, oh, I don't know, the Panama Canal. I mean, what's the worst can happen? It's the end of history. The world is flat, you know? What difference does it make if China has it or, you know, Panama has it? It makes a big difference. Let's let them, I don't know, just set up shop in Venezuela.

Not mind of China has a chokehold over the rare earths that we need for our high tech. You know, we can buy them. Everything's going to be fine. You would go nuts. You would just feel as though the administrations, the Democratic administrations, were being played at every single turn by the Chinese because they didn't believe that any of this stuff was really important. I didn't get it.

Why they didn't fight tooth and nail to keep the Chinese out of areas like our hemisphere and our need for these other things? I don't know. But now the attitude seems to be, oh, no. No, sorry, you can't come here. Nope, it's ours. It's ours. Can't come.

Can't do anything of the sort. One of the interesting things I've found about the new agreement, though, was it said. And this agreement will be in place even after NATO dissolves, which makes you think, and NATO's going to dissolve when and why? Which brings us to Europe. We're hearing now about all of this hybrid warfare that Putin is casting his eyes eastward, westward, that I think, who was it the other day? They were saying that he's ramping up border actions, building field hospitals, putting down lots of gravel for the tanks to go. I'm surprised they still have any left.

What is going on there? And does anybody expect, as the crowned heads of Europe seem to be saying these days, watch out something could happen very, very soon. And we're not going to know exactly what to do about it. So, I mean, what you hear in the media is, gosh, Russia is testing us, is doing these provocations, it's doing little drone strikes, some assassination squads and so forth. I'm sure all that is true.

I don't know if it adds up to an imminent war or an incursion on the Baltic stakes like Estonia or something. On the other hand, I have wondered for a long time. I used to study this back when the Soviet Union was a going thing and in graduate school in my strategic studies classes. We'd think a lot about what in those days were known as the Spetsnaz units. Those were the sort of embedded secret. It kind of what was dramatized in that American. series on what FX TV 10 years ago or so, which was drawn from some accurate, somewhat accurate

events, inspired by real people embedded. And I wondered if those units ever went away or if they're slowly being reestablished. I've always thought those were a greater menace in some ways than, you know, more missiles on the border. I don't know. But I think you've gotten Europe's attention. Again, I'm an old fossil now, but it was the Soviet buildup of the late 70s. It really got the attention of Europeans.

and I remember the public opinion polls from the time and why it was the Europeans asking America, would you please put in some intermediate range missiles, which we agree to do reluctantly, thinking we'd be able to negotiate it away and, you know, it took Reagan to see it through to, okay, we know how that story goes. So I want, I mean, somebody probably has a handle on this,

but I don't know. You know, it's, yeah. Well, the Spitz, the Spitznaster, their special forces like Delta Force, you know, and the rest of it. So, of course, they didn't go away. It's whether or not they're going to go over the border and blow up a hotel and then just say to say to everybody, oh, that, look, the Russian people in this country are in peril. They need saving, which seems to be, you know, that's a fairly well-thumbed part of the playbook, Charles.

Do you think anybody, nobody's going to believe that if that's what they do? No, I remember quite a while ago, there was a fellow who did pretty much the same thing as that in Poland. What is his name? Adolf. Oh, right. That fellow. That one was quite famous. It was a radio station, right? Yeah.

So this one is, I think, played out, I would say. The most famous example of all of them was that. Look, I don't know. This is not my area. I am still made to feel nervous by the word spets. I assume has a effect, doesn't it? It sounds like a German dish you really don't want to have. Why is there a one you do?

But it's... Heidi Klum, perhaps. What do we do, though? If Russia rolls over, what does NATO do? If they go over the border, do we say, well, that's it, Article 5, we're going to have to fight them, roll the tanks, warm up the nukes? What the hell do we do? They're counting. if they do this on Trump's just saying,

it's not worth it. They didn't spend money on their own defense, FOFA. I don't know. I think that would prompt a response because the Europeans are certainly not going to say, no, we don't care. So you've then got what I assume would be a United Europe.

And a United Europe that, can point to an agreement. And this is a problem among many with Ukraine for those who wanted America to be more involved. There has to be a point in being a NATO country. And if NATO countries get the same treatment as non-NATO countries, then there's no point in NATO. And so those who don't care about Ukraine

have been able reasonably to say, look, it's not in NATO. don't treat it the same as we would if it were France. But in this case, you're referring to countries that are in NATO. And I think Europe would be pretty much of one voice. And I think they would say, I know it was an Article 5. Was it Article 4? I can't remember. I think they would say, you know, after 9-11, you came to us and invoked, I think it was NATO Article 4. Steve, do you remember? I think it's Article 5, but yeah. It was Article 5, was it? Okay. I think so.

Well, there you are. That strengthens the case. And now we're doing the same thing and you can't back off. And I think that would be quite a difficult position for even Trump to ignore. But who knows, I might be wrong. Well, Stephen, I mean, this is the big thing. This is the show. This is the thing that all of the 80s, you know, nuclear scenarios were predicated upon was the Russians rolling west. Now, it seems to me that they're in a rather diminished military position,

that if they had all these material, this material and these forces and all the tanks ready, that they'd be using them to the south. So, I mean, I'm never going to discount the ability of the Russian army to create mayhem, as I think it was Alexander Coburn said, you know, drunk they beat Hitler, drunk they beat Napoleon, drunk they could beat NATO. Yeah. You know, and even if it is antifreeze, God, I'm drunk and they pass out later, they can do some damage. I just, I, the idea that we were talking about, absolutely meritless, non-provoked Russian incursion into the Baltics in 2026 is one of those things that just makes you sort of throw up your hands and just say, my God, I thought, I thought I could have sworn we were past that.

They're never passed it with the Russians, though. They were always the same. Whatever system of government they set up, whoever's in charge. Right. You know, I know Steve wants to talk, but I saw a really funny meme, which was literature by nation. And the first panel is a Frenchman, and he says, I will die for love. And then in the second panel, there's an American, and the American says, I will die for freedom. And then in the third panel is a Russian, and he just says, I will die.

That's the country. Yeah. Right. My go-to person on understanding Russian culture and history is Gary Saul Morrison of Northwestern University, legendary professor of Russian literature. He's written about this a lot in commentary. He says, look, they're naturally warlike people with imperial designs. And he also explains a little bit of what I picked up from walking through the hermitage in St. Petersburg. I don't know if you've been through it either of you, but filled with wonderful European art. And I kept thinking all the way through, where's the Russian art? You know what? Catherine, the Great, that's an inferiority complex there. No, you're absolutely. I went to the Hermitage at one of those midnights where the sun is still up, and it was a magical experience, but I thought the same thing.

Anyway, so the thing that we're seeing here is I would actually, I'm less worried about the Cold War scenario of the tanks rolling through Poland toward the Rhine River. I think, I'm not an expert on this, but I think we'd make quick work of that. But on the other hand, what we're seeing now, I think, is a species of what we've been calling for 30 years or more now asymmetric warfare, you know, like 9-11, like terrorism, except now state-sponsored. And I think it's a, you know, if they do the, you know, little hit run attacks and, you know, or drone things and, oh, hacking. I mean, you're hacking like crazy. I think hard to know how to respond to that short of war. I, maybe we can do it to them. You know, that starts to get very messy in a hurry.

And I don't know how it's going to play out. No, neither do I. And I felt the same thing about the hermitage. absolutely beautiful, but you want to look at them and say, so everything here is inspired from your, everything here is what your architecture, your painting styles, your interiors. It's all borrowed from those guys to the west. You know that, don't you? Your city planning. I mean, there were some gorgeous churches that had, you know, the onion domes and the rest of it. But, and the religion has an iconography set up that is different. But you're right. Yeah.

I mean, cultural inferiority and the rest of it. So, yes, who knows how it will go on. know, we can strike back with hacking and we can disrupt their, you know, we can disrupt wildberries and the rest of their Amazon-like things. Oh, wait, that's been done. Well, I think there's a couple of the things to talk about before we go and perhaps it's played itself out, but then every day I wake up and I read something new. This extraordinary story in the Boston Globe, which apparently got them a whole bunch of new subscribers about a lesbian bar, the last ditch, which had the audacity to ask people to drop their COVID-19 masks on Saturday. And they were promptly accused, of course, of doing enableness and furthering genocide of the marginalized immunocompromised people

and revealed this tiresome yet hilarious series of international battles that has gripped the Twitter for a week or so. So, I mean, if you follow these things and the excesses and the outer boundaries of wokeness, none of this is this is a surprise to you. But perhaps this has been a lesson for the normies. I don't know. What do you think? Well, Charlie had, I think, the best short repost on this. So, Charlie, you should go first because I had laughed out loud at your tweets about it.

Well, what gets me about this is that we have reached the point at which it is just assumed that there's a connection between. masking and being gay. And no one stopped to say, wait, why? And the reason that there is a link is because we're not really talking about gays,

we're not really talking about maskers, masking, we're talking about leftists. And leftists have just decided that all ideologies are the same and that every question is the same and that there is just one cause. And, And they've ended up in this absolutely insane place where they're, and this was the best part of the piece, I thought, complaining that the bar they like going to is not engaged in revolutionary praxis.

Praxis, yes. Now, I don't know what the hotel was like where you didn't get your Guinness. But did you expect it to be engaged in revolutionary praxis? Because I don't think I've ever been into a bar in my life and expected it to be engaged in revolutionary practice. That's not what I want from a bar, especially as I start drinking. The more I start drinking, the less I want to be engaged in revolutionary practice. But these people do because they've absorbed this everything is everything mentality. The sort of thing that a few years ago led Planned Parenthood to start tweeting out things like abortion is climate justice, which just made no sense at all.

but seems to some sort of people to make sense. And, you know, I actually, I'll just say on this, I really think that there's a real problem here, and that is that apparently this bar was a place that we could use to confine a critical number of these people. And if we had played our cards right, we could have done what Mossad has managed to do in the Middle East, and when they were all together, send in the air,

strikes, but now, because they're all infighting, they're probably spread out across Western Massachusetts and won't ever find the bastards. Little genocide, you're not, you hate to see it. No, of course, you're right. Everything is everything. And it is a form of intellectual constriction and also intellectual Puritanism. The new Puritanism is the fear that someone somewhere is not saying free Palestine or someone somewhere is going to a bar and having a drink or a restaurant and having a glass of water without considering the multiple systemic injustices that culminated to this moment and get angry over the fact that everybody else in the bar is having a good time. It is remarkable, but I'm convinced that one

of the people who's the main quote machine in this, this Soie Noir, who was a black he-him gender-expanding lesbian, I'm convinced it's a bit. I mean, no. It's a man, right? Yes, I think, perhaps. Who can tell? Who am I to say? Who am I to assume? But there are some of these people who are so good at constructing the language of these people

without a trace of irony, dead, serious drop perfect that I think that half of them have to be at. They just absolutely have to be. Well, you know, we're missing a major business opportunity here. I think if we produced a line of masks with the Che Guevara famous image on we'd make a fortune. Because I noticed that when there was a socialist convention a month or so ago in Chicago that met for three, four days, lots of panels, lots of free entertainment. I watched a little on YouTube.

But masks were mandatory for all attendees in 2026. So there's an obsession with masks. And I don't, I think this is beyond safetyism run amok. I think Charles is on to something here that it's become implicated in the whole ideology of the crazy left. And I don't think it's going away anytime soon. And so when I see a person with a mask now because, you know, in airplanes, it could be someone who's immunocompromised or is okay. But my default assumption is always this is another nutcase left.

Yes. Well, it makes you want to drink, actually, as these people no longer do. And it makes you want to drink some good old American Tennessee whiskey. And where can you do that? Well, Rick-a-chae is having a meetup. That's right. It's not just a website where people chatter. It is a place where people actually get together.

And from my experience of past meetups, you'd be surprised how little conversation is about politics. It's about everything else in the world. It's just you meet these people and sparks fly and minds connect and it's a great time. Now, the next Rickishay meetup is in Tennessee, October 9th through the 11th. Here's some of the things on the agenda. The American Museum of Science and Energy at, that's right, Oak Ridge. You too can be an Oak Ridge boy or gal.

There will be going to be, what am I, autocorrect on my phone? There's going to be adventures on Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga and Distillery Tours, lots of whiskey, lots of fun. So go to ricochet.com slash events. Rcochet.com slash events is where you should go for more information. Before we conclude, we have to do the usual thing here, which is great if you're not looking at the podcast. We should probably post some art here to show what we're talking about.

Charles has in his studio placed three record albums, which are infinitesimal to my eyes here. I got new glasses recently. I can see better. But the test is, do I know what? what these albums are. Now, lucky for me, he chooses rather iconic one, so it's fairly easy. The one on the left that is slant-wise would appear to be the Beatles revolver. Am I correct?

Yes. Okay. The one in the right is America, which I believe is the group America with their album, America, right? That's right. That's great. Now, the one in the middle, I'm really having to squint at this, and I had to sort of increase the size here of my browser, but I believe it's 10 CCC's album, right?

That's correct. 10 CC, the original soundtrack. There's a fourth one there. I can't see the fourth one. Oh, the fourth one looks like it's somebody in a white shirt. It's not Michael Jackson, is it? It is Michael Jackson. Okay, good. The 10CC one is interesting because that band spawned two guys who were some of the most original musicians and later videographers that rock and roll produced. An acquired taste. And I'm wondering if Stephen is familiar with the work of Godly and Crem.

Once upon a time I listen to them And I haven't for a very long time So I've forgotten Well James I've got my own entry right Oh you do Oh you do Is it too small?

I mean It's too easy Steve It's too easy Yeah Actually I can't I can't get it I can't see We're gonna let Charles do it

Charles Well it's pet sounds by the beach boys Of course Oh okay And I've got my My ridiculous Genesis trick of the tail shirt on today I thought that that was a trick of the tail

thing. The interesting thing is that the typeface is reminiscent, but it's not entirely correct. I think it's too condensed. Right. But yes. Well, we've all revealed ourselves to be pathetic middle-aged men here with our little hobbies and they're completely out of step of the world. But the album, Tense, you see, the original soundtrack had that song, I'm Not in love, which a lot of people misunderstood, seemingly. I think the point of it is that he was. Yes. But it was this gorgeous, multi-layered, many, many layers of aspirated vocals. And Godley and Crem would later experiment with that in their own solo albums, which surprisingly sold quite poorly. Even coming up with the obligatory concept album, which I think had four, you know, four records and one melody you could whistle and was meant to show off the gizmo, which was this device that one of them built, which played the guitar strings with little rotating wheels.

And it produced, it's like, okay. But some of their stuff and their vocals are absolutely, absolutely good. may know them probably from the song Cry, which was later used famously in a video that morphed faces into each other when that morphing technology was new and was also used in one of the best Miami Vice episodes ever. So there you go. 80s music, get to know it. It's a lot more interesting than some of the drivel that's being pounded out today. By the way, somebody pointed out that there has been a catastrophic collapse in the market for rap music. And they believe the theory is. I think Billy Corgan is smashing pumpkins,

Homer Simpson, smiling politely, said that it was because the the government stopped funding rock and switched. I think he said it was the CIA, the way the CIA sponsored modern art and abstract expressionism in the 50s and 60s, that

there was government funding that just dropped rock or beefed up wrap or some industry decision that they needed to do something. And now the support for it is 10% of what a used to be. I'm not even sure exactly what genre defines our time anymore, what musical genre. Can you? Nope. Taylor Swift. There you go. There you go. All right, which brings us to Kelsey,

which brings us to Sunday football. Last point going out, Charles. How's your team doing? We're one-on-one. We crushed the Browns in week one by 25 points. And then in week two, We lost a squeaker in Denver against the Broncos, which I went to. Incredible stadium. Incredible crowd. You can barely hear anything. But I'm having a big football weekend, James, because tomorrow I'm going to Ole Miss Gators in the swamp.

Oh. And on Sunday, I'm going to Jags Patriots. Well, good for you. What great fun. We're 2 and 0. We're at top of our division. Of course, our quarterback got pancaked and rung his bell. I don't know how he's out.

I don't like him. I'm a Carson Wilson. I want the come from. behind second place underdog story to drive us, but I think we're sort of kind of doomed. I did watch the end of the exciting, the boring game against the bears, but the last two minutes were exciting, and I was in England explaining to my host to what was going on, on the fly, as quickly as I could, describing all the rules and what they were trying to do and this, that, the other. And it probably adhered to the interior of their brain about as well as Dennis's

long lecture on what cricket was all about. I listened to every word he said, and I still have absolutely no idea of what the game is, except that it takes 17 hours to play a test over the course of 19 weeks. Stephen, are you a football guy, or you've got some other game going on? Oh, yeah, no, I am. I grew up in L.A. area, so I was always a fan of the Rams. And James, you will appreciate it when I say one of the most traumatic memories of my childhood

was the Joe Cap five-minute run into the end zone at the end of that playoff game when your Vikings beat my Rams. And now the Rams are following the LA Dodgers playbook and buying talent left and right and trying to buy a Super Bowl. And so I enjoy the game these days. But I'm always checking on how Charlie's team is doing because I want them to do well

because I want Charlie to be happy. I think the same thing. I think the same thing. I'd love for us to meet in the Super Bowl. And then, well, of course, all fellow feeling will disappear as I root for the severing of the spines and the ripping out of the clavicles of your side. Anyway, that's that.

Go to ricochet.com. if you might want to and you will see all of our sponsors, you will see all of our podcasts, you will see an opportunity to join the member site, which for just a few shekels, few lira, few dinari, a month you will have access to one of the most vibrant, interesting. And I say vibrant,

not in the sense when they are describing an urban area that's beset by flames and violence, but truly intellectually vibrant. It's a place you've been looking for since they plugged this internet in. Go to Mars. Men go to Mars.com to get that T boost, and you will want that. Remember, 50% off for life.

and I have nothing else to say except if you find a spot to review us, give us all the stars you possibly can. And we won't even make your mask when you come to the site. That's it. We'll see you next week in Charles. Oh, when's the launch? When is it? Next week.

This next seven to eight days, yes. Seven to eight days. Okay. Oh, what fun we're going to have to be talking about that. Charles, Stephen, great pleasure. We'll see everybody in the comments soon at Ricochet Five. 5.0. Goodbye.