The Ricochet Podcast - Facing Reality with Charles Murray

Episode Date: June 18, 2021

They asked for an honest conversation on race, right? Enter this week’s guest Charles Murray, author most recently of Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. He and guys jostle on this most sensitive of subjects, but do so with the kind of generosity you can only find on Ricochet (We let things be too chummy around here!) Rob, Peter and James also get into the G7 and a rudderless Biden... Source

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Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie Alright, let's start. Ready? 3, 2, 1. I have a dream. This nation will rise up.

Live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. I have never seen a president who is so protected by his aides in terms of often not wanting him to answer some questions. With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lylex, and today we talk to Charles Murray.

Say no more. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Join us, why don't you? Join us and become part of the most stimulating conversations and community on the web. I'm James Ladex in Minneapolis, peaceable at the moment, although they did find a severed leg behind the Ukrainian center yesterday. Town's a bit abuzz with that. It's a nice bit of a diversion from the other things that are going on. Peter Robinson, I believe, is on vacation looking at the redoubt where he is with a stone wall behind him. I can guess he's back in some sort of castle where he's holding forth, no doubt, to a bunch of eager young minds full of mush waiting for instruction. Rob Long is taking up the complete total mindset of New Orleans and is sort of having a laissez-faire attitude towards all. He's not here yet, I expect. Right here. Oh, there you are. I take it all back.

Okay. Your New York sense of crispness and obligation has attended you well then. You're in New Orleans. And here we all are. All eyes, of course, this week, gentlemen, were looking to the G7 summit where Joe Biden, crisp, sparkling as a freshly uncorked bottle of effervescent water dazzled everybody with his trenchants, his piquants, his piercing insights, and just the snap in that man's walk. How do you think it actually looks to the rest of the world that isn't to be sotted by the idea that it's somebody other than Trump? Do you think people sized him up and thought, there's something not there and we're getting played. And actually, I should put you

this way. Do you feel confident in knowing that there are only 16 critical infrastructures in this country? That's all. 16. The list that he gave to Putin, don't touch these 16. I would like to think that Ricochet's servers are amongst them, but I guess we'll find out, won't we? I don't know a thing about what happened in the G7 or the summit with Putin, because I have spent the last couple of days at Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. So while Joe Biden was talking to Vladimir Putin, I was looking at Buffalo and enjoying the middle of America. I hereby yield my time to brother rob long who i'm sure is a current on all the news but if you'd like if you'd like to hear about old faithful i can tell you all about old faith by the way i will tell you all about old faithful here's what

you need to know it delivers it really delivers. Rob? There's probably a joke in there somewhere. I don't know where it is. I leave that to you, of course. I give you the material. You have to find it. Yes, right, right. That's too suspiciously like work for me, so I'm not going to touch it. I don't, I mean, you know, aside from the normal stuff from Biden, which is the sort of bumbling weirdness where you wonder if he's really there or what's really happening. The problem with all of this is that I don't, it isn't clear what the strategy is. So there's actually no way to, I mean, that alone is a failure because it's inconceivable to me that you'd be, you would be robustly remonstrating to a world leader by sitting down with him in a living room setting and joking around. That is not how you do it. If you really feel that Putin is a threat, and I think he is, and he really is a bad guy, and of course he is, you don't make little chummy

jokes with him unless it's part of a larger strategy. I mean, nobody, Reagan was friendly to all of the Soviet leaders he met, but nobody believed that he didn't have a strategy. He was going to end the Cold War. That's what he said. I just don't know what the strategy is. It's just so strange to me that this administration, this administration of all of them,

the people in this administration have been, these are old faces. We've seen a million. This is the establishment you think that they would at least be able to communicate five sentences of what the strategy is with china with russia and with the g7 the strategy is simply hey guess who's not here the guy who is before me that's the strategy and who cares g7 doesn't matter but for our adversaries and strategic competitors worldwide what what like what's the what's he trying to do i mean you could you could only grade him this kind of not even an incomplete because that would

imply that he had a plan i don't know what the plan is what was he what was the was the sit down with putin successful or was it not successful we don't know because we don't know by what standard to judge that i i would i would i would posit that every time you sit down with a world leader with whom you have serious and unpleasant business if you don't know what this if everyone doesn't know what the strategy is it is a failure i agree actually now that i'm taking my mind out of Yellowstone and putting it back into world affairs to the extent that I can, it's worse. I agree with every word Rob said, and I even suggest that it's a little bit, actually possibly even quite a bit worse than that.

Vladimir Putin was a colonel in the KGB. One thing they were very good at, they were bad at all kinds of things. It was a bureaucracy. They believed ridiculous things to the extent that they believed them. What they seemed really to have believed in was power. So, oh, fine. But they were good at a number of things. And one thing they were good at was searching for weaknesses. They were also extremely good at interviewing or examining subjects. We now have all kinds of files. There's a colleague of mine at the

Hoover Institution, Mark Harrison, who's been going through files of the way the KGB kept the Baltics quiet. They bring somebody in and question them and probe for their weaknesses and drop a line about, well, of course, we know what your family is up to. Vladimir Putin knew what he was doing in that interview. We know that. Now, Joe Biden goes in knowing that within the last few weeks, hackers based in Russia almost shut down energy to the entire east coast of the United States. minimum a pro and he comes in and jokes around with Vladimir Putin and then walks out and says well I really gave it to him I gave him a list of 16 things he'd better not do that just doesn't strike me as an adequate response it reminds me a little bit I don't know in detail how the conversation went between the two of them but it reminds me a little bit of JFK's meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna, right? Eisenhower had just left the presidency. Khrushchev knew Eisenhower. Eisenhower was a guy who crushed Hitler. Eisenhower, there was no attempt to

call that bluff. But who is this glamorous young playboy up against me, a battle-hearted peasant, Nikita Khrushchev? Let's push this kid around and see what he's got and we know from all the accounts that in vienna john kennedy was talked to as he had never been spoken to before in his life and he didn't have good answers and he got shoved all around by nikita khrushchev with the result that if we had the cuban missile crisis without doubt right that was exactly the cause of the cuban missile Crisis was somebody without a plan and a goal simply thinking that the solution here was I'm going to show up and it's going to be fun. And I think that's what I find that so – I actually literally find that surprising. I really do. I mean, at the very least, these people should be a competent, uh buttoned up establishment toady so the very least

there should have been some kind of i mean we should be to discern a strategy that we you know i'm sure everybody on this podcast doesn't like but the idea that we that that didn't happen isn't clear is worrying it's worrying to me it's it's possible it's an unshakable institutional delusion that characterizes the entire class, that they're so invested in this notion of a nice transnational order where everybody subscribes generally to the same principles that they can't even see that they're dealing with two large adversaries who regard this as an opportunity to play everybody else. I mean, and I wouldn't say that except for the fact that when these people get back in, what do they want to do? They want restart negotiations with iran why why because it's

part of the idea that we're going to bring them into the fold they could be talked to all the rest of it the mechanisms diplomacy and all these things will ameliorate their behavior it's delusional to think that iran is going to do any is not going to try to do everything they possibly can to push us to needle us and to get the bomb it's implied to look at china saying that china is not pursuing a self-interest that is just absolute nakedly obvious to all and there's an odds with this global order that they want to create should be obvious but they're so invested in this narrative or they just don't see any possible ramifications coming down the pike that could disturb the cocoon the soft upholstered cocoon in which they live that's the only explanation i can yeah well part part of it

is the obsession with getting a win you know i think everybody feels that way they want to have a win so they define a win is what something that you and i might define as a loss but they define it as a win so the the iran deal restarting the iran talks and then trying to re um animate the iran deal less than two weeks maybe was it two weeks ago when were the rockets flying when were the iranian supported and sponsored rockets flying into israel how many fires are actually still burning i mean how many piles of rubble are still crumbling on passersby? And then now to choose now is the time. It is impossible. It would be, the Iranians would be irrational.

Well, they are irrational. They'd be stupid, and they're not stupid, not to draw the conclusion that there are no consequences for sponsoring international terrorism. Not that there are only a few but that there are none that if you sponsor international terrorism if you pay for rockets which and orchestrate a rocket attack on a u.s ally your response will be the united states coming hat in hand saying please come to vienna let's let's let's have it we'll take the sanctions off let's talk that to me is is lunacy and and and strange and like and it's a kind of a mania, I think, because what they want is they want, they defined an Iran deal as a success. So they want to have a success.

And that is something that when, when, when administrations do that, um, bad stuff happens. Right. But they have to know that this is not in the interest of the West and the United States. I mean, if you, if you crafted a deal with Russia, whereby they promised to never launch a cyber attack again, and in exchange, we gave them back Alaska, they would say, well, that's a win. Look what diplomacy has got us. Yeah, but you gave up Alaska. Yeah, but it's a win.

I mean, even somebody that invested in the old international order has to see that people on the outside will have a valid criticism about this. And it doesn't even seem as if they recognize that there are any valid criticisms to removing sanctions on Iran and letting them back into the banking community and the rest. And I'll tell you why. Part of the reason is because, I mean, the narrative, right? The good old narrative. I was listening to NPR last night that talked,

and they led with the fact that Israel was pounding Gaza with rocket strikes, with jets, firing rockets at Gaza. That was the lead story. A little bit later in that, they said it was in response to all of the incendiary balloons that have been wafted over. So the story isn't Gaza breaks the ceasefire. The story is the fragile ceasefire is in danger because Israel is striking back against the balloons. So they have the backing of everybody who believes that, yes, any sort of win, any sort of agreement is fine, regardless of the consequence for the West and its allies. Because anyway, not spun up about this at all. You want to get spun up about something else? This is the pipeline.

But Russia, outrageous. Biden's very nice to them. Iran, outrageous, trying to kill Israelis. And the Biden administration is very nice to them. And we're just leaving out to complete the trifecta here. Of course, China just swallowed Hong Kong in blatant violation of a solemn agreement they made, a treaty obligation they held when the British turned over Hong Kong to the Chinese. And what has been the response of the Biden administration? Muted, to put it mildly, if they're thinking if they have constructed some notion of American self-interest that justifies what they're doing it has to be i think it has to be something like the existential threat to humanity is climate

change and yes yes yes it's a pity that hong kong doesn't enjoy the freedoms it once enjoyed and yes yes yes vladimir putin is a bad, and it's a pity he permits hacking of art. But we're going to need those people in order to switch over to ethanol or something like that. I do believe, whatever, to get away from, no, ethanol is a bad thing now. Ethanol is a bad thing. Ethanol is a bad thing. That's how behind I am. Anyhow, there are some people in administration who really, truly believe that climate change dwarfs every other issue, including the murder of Israeli citizens by rockets from Hamas.

All right, you get the story. So it just seems to me all three of the principal adversaries, China, Russia, and Iran in the last few months have pushed and joe biden has the administration has not pushed back in any coherent rigorous tough manner at all or or even given us the of intellectual underpinnings which you know

american foreign policy left or right has almost always had you know from the beginning from the great american move to the center stage of world politics and leadership in 1940 at live score bet we love cheltenham just as much as we love football the excitement the roar and the chance to reward you that's why every day of the festival we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to 10 euro if your horse loses on a selected race. That's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing. Cheltenham with LiveScoreBet. This is total betting. Sign up by 2pm 14th of March.

Bet within 48 hours of race. Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie In 1945, we have known more or less what's what the strategy was and the the the cliche now is we say well that was different we were in a bipolar world we were in this thing in the cold war we had this and things were very clear that that makes it all the more important for us to have

at least a vigorous debate and some kind of national strategy for dealing with international terrorism, right? A rogue, a very, very powerful, a nuke armed rogue state and Putin and a strategic competitor that has a plan and has been executing that plan for 30 years.

Right. And that plan includes the subjugation of the people of Hong Kong, probably the people of Taiwan, definitely the people to the West, definitely people to the North and that plan includes the subjugation of the people of hong kong probably the people of taiwan definitely the people to the west definitely people to the north and definitely people in the south and it just doesn't seem like it should be that hard i mean it's hard to come up with solutions but it doesn't seem like it should be that hard to to insist that there be a strategy in that strategy there doesn't have to be secret um there's no reason for it to be secret with george f kennan wrote a strategy for american

policy that lasted for 50 years and it wasn't secret everybody knew what it was well maybe that would help maybe they're not saying it because it's obvious what peter is saying that the climate change the existential threat to mankind has to be met and if that requires the diminution of american force and prosperity good i think it you know if it requires the diminution of American force and prosperity, good. I think if it requires that, that somehow neatly dovetails with the other things that they want to accomplish, which is the diminution of American success and prosperity. Why? Because this is a uniquely evil nation. As everybody who read your Howard Zinn will know, that it has done more harm than good. And that if America is reduced in stature and and importance that's a good thing for everybody and if we're as less prosperous if we're eating less meat if we're eating more cicadas roasted

on a spit that's better so if somewhere in the back of their head the idea that national comeuppance is a good thing they don't believe it would personally you know change their lives in any way but it would certainly it would certainly chasten on america that needs to be chastened because even to this day it refuses to do the work and and atone for its very very existence you know i i think it's a maybe i just think it's lazier than that i really do because i feel like i hope you're right bob i hope you're right because i feel like the people no matter what side side you're on, the people who do these jobs and take these jobs and swan around Foggy Bottom and load up the foreign policy intellectual

apparatuses at Harvard, et cetera, they think that they were big strategists. They're big planners. They love it. They want to have a plan and impose a plan. They want to be the smart guys. Everyone wants to be Henry Kissinger. I think it's lazier than that. I think they think the way a lot of liberals think, hey, our superpower is we're not Trump. And that's all we have to be is not Trump. That's right. And to me, that's a, I mean, I think it's bad politics but I think it's also bad well very very bad for American leadership because the point isn't that you're not of course you're not Trump Trump is not

president you're president that's the everybody knows that everybody knows that I agree I also think it's backstopped by a ideological predisposition on that side to be completely comfortable with American decline because they regard that as something that's essential for a cleaner, safer, greener America. But I'm sorry, up to this point, I'm not going to eat bugs. I'm going to eat beef. And the reason that I eat beef is I got the best you can probably get. Hey, are you itching for the outdoors? It's a beautiful time of the year.

And I just got myself a new grill, and I can't wait to try it out tonight, because it's grilling season. It's time to get ready for those summer cookouts. But if you do not have access to high-quality meat, it's no easy task to be ready for an impromptu gathering, right? People show up, what are you going to do? You didn't go to the store? Ah, lucky you, smart you. You're a butcher box customer. You see, anyone can get 100% grass-fed finished beef, free-ranged organic chicken, heritage breed pork, and wild-caught salmon at the grocery store.

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New members get bacon for life when they sign up today. Who doesn't love free bacon? Free bacon. So just go to free bacon, people. ButcherBox.com slash Ricochet. That's a package of free bacon in every box for the life of your subscription when you go to ButcherBox.com slash Ricochet. And we thank ButcherBox for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome back to the podcast, Charles Murray, political scientist, writer, public speaker, holds the Hayek Emeritus Chair in Cultural Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and is the author of the controversially influential or the influentially controversial bestsellers, Losing Ground, The Bell Curve, Coming Apart, and most recently, Facing Reality, Two Truths About Race in America.

Welcome to the podcast, sir. We'll get to those two truths in a second, but I have to ask you, you're on Twitter, and you are a very, what's the word I'm looking for? Calming presence on Twitter. Here's your Twitter description. You said, husband, father, social scientist, writer, Madisonian, or maybe right-wing ideologue, pseudoscientist, evil, opinions differ. It's a brave thing for you to wade into that madhouse, yet you do. So how do you keep your sanity? Because you are regarded by these people actually as this hugely malevolent force, and yet here you are,

gently, sometimes abashed, conversational, and the rest of it. Do you enjoy your sparring sessions on Twitter, or do you manage not to take it to heart? No, I use Twitter as a research tool. When I was doing a book called Human Diversity, I just followed all sorts of geneticists and neuroscientists, and it was a great way to learn about the most recent developments. And I just mute people who are abusive. I don't block them, because I don't want to give them the satisfaction of knowing I blocked them, but I mute them, and they don't really get a second chance. And so I actually have a Twitter feed which is filled with reasonable people. So I don't really get engaged in the maelstrom. Ah, good. Carefully curated then, because if you're studying neurodiversity,

Twitter is the place that makes you realize the spectrum is far broader than you thought. Yes, there's a very broad spectrum indeed. Charles, Peter Robinson here. You say that you don't get involved in the maelstrom, and yet you have just published, Facing Reality, Two Truths About America. I confess I haven't read the book yet, but I did a quick skim yesterday evening. I'm on a family jaunt in Wyoming, so I got home from Yellowstone and thought, wait a minute, Charles is tomorrow, and whipped through as much material as I could. You're back in the maelstrom, Charles, with this book.

So let's lay out the basics. The two truths about America are? Number one, blacks, whites, Latinos, and Asians have different means of cognitive ability point number two truth number two is the blacks whites latinos and asians have very different levels of violent crime and yeah i guess those could be considered by people to be inflammatory statements the odd thing is that empirically these are really boring people have known this for decades and that's extremely well documented. We're talking about replications dozens of times over on these basic points. Why, you may wonder, do I say, gee, I go out and write a book about these two inflammatory differences?

The answer is identity politics is taking over. You know, these nuts that I thought were just academics exercising their penchant for recreational radicalism, turns out they have captured the mainstream media. The staffs of the junior staffs of the Washington Post, New York Times, the major television networks are overwhelmingly woke. They buy into the critical race theory, and we have a narrative out there saying that we're a systemically racist society. And they're in. Go ahead. Well, if I may quote you to yourself, so to speak. I want America to return to the ideal of treating people as individuals, so I have to write a book that treats Americans as groups, but there's no

way around it. Those of us who want to defend the American creed have been unwilling to say openly that races have significant group differences. Since we've been unwilling to say that, we've been defenseless against claims that racism is to blame for unequal outcomes. Okay. So, this is so, nobody, including your admirer, Peter Robinson, wants to hear this. Nobody wants to hear this. Could I just, on truth number one, the difference in cognitive abilities, these are differences in IQ tests and SAT scores. It's a range of different scores that show differences in cognitive ability that are long-term. The scores show this over decades right

right but you're not arguing please argue what you have to but i'm bracing myself for the way you're going to answer this one you're not arguing that the races are permanent and genetic you're arguing no not no because as everybody james flynn has shown this and tom soul when he took on the bell curve you had a not a you had a discussion with there's a malleability in these scores and the scores over a long period of time arise out of culture and behavior and education right no no all right but But look, look, look. Causes are not the topic of this book. The issues in this book are relevant because of what is, not why it is. If you want to talk about solutions, then we can get into a really fascinating conversation about the current state of knowledge of environmental

effects on IQ versus genetic effects on IQ. And I say interesting rather than scary. And I have a book called Human Diversity, which lays out the whole story that I highly recommend. But that's not relevant to trying to understand differences in outcomes today, June 19th, Juneteenth, well, that's tomorrow, I guess, in the United States of America. Understanding why is it that you have so few senior managers who are black at Microsoft has nothing to do with the causes of the difference in cognitive abilities. It has everything to do with the existence now just one other thing that i am saying in the book i am saying that look folks the black white difference

has been essentially unchanged for 30 odd years now during those 30 odd years we have had not only the regular tens of billions of dollars every year poured into education for disadvantaged children we had a thing called no child left behind which i have kids in public schools during that period convulsed the public schools in an effort to raise black test scores and they didn't budge okay so i am saying you you may talk about if you want jim Jim Flynn's excellent work and Tom Sowell's excellent work, and you may interpret those as giving us reason to think we know how to fix this stuff. And I say, that's great. Go ahead. Good luck to you.

But it's a triumph of hope over an awful lot of experience. We have been trying real hard for 30 years and you better have some new idea because the old ideas have proved to be too tile so it's not the answer you wanted to hear but it's not that bad oh well what you present no what you present honestly this, what you present, honestly, this is just my, and again, I better stipulate, I haven't read the book yet. I did as thorough a quick skim as I could yesterday evening. Forgive me for that, Charles. Lord knows every word you write is worth reading and pondering. But the argument struck me as unbearable.

Unbearable. Without some hope of the way out tom soul's prescription is perfectly straightforward stop this welfare state nonsense stop it give african americans his his the most recent book he's written let us hope that he has time to write more books, but the most recent book that he's written was on charter schools in New York, in Harlem in particular, where Tom himself, of course, grew up, and the public schools used to be good in the 30s and the 40s when he was there, and he presented cases of charter schools in Harlem where the students were overwhelmingly African-American and Latino, and the scores were terrific. And these kids were in certain categories outscoring white kids out in Rye and Larchmont and the fancy suburbs.

And honestly, Charles, without some hope that we're all in this together, that we made a terrible mistake in the 60s by somehow, well, your argument, of course, losing ground, that it's the welfare state that has frozen these differences in place, and it's late, and we're two or three generations on, but we can still address it. Without that kind of hope, I find your argument almost unbearable. Well, Peter, I'm saying if your hope is that we're going to get rid of the welfare state, I'm the one who's going to fall under a deep slough of despond at that point, because that is not

going to happen. Alright? Alright. So that's not the way. It's not a way out. But I want to repeat this book. At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar, and the chance to reward you. That's why every day of the festival, we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to €10 if your horse loses on a selected race.

That's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing. Cheltenham with LiveScoreBet. This is total betting. Sign up by 2pm, 14th of March. Bet within 48 hours of race. Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie

I'm trying to say to my readers, let's forget about causes for a minute because just concentrating on what is empirically can be clarifying. And so that's what I did. Rob? Can I just... Can I just you're a social scientist I'm going to give you two anecdotes

and I go right ahead reach through the zoom screen and just slap me there's a new kind of woke way to describe Latinos and Latinos and Latinas. And they say Latin X.

And they put the X instead of the O or the A because, you know, gendered language is bad. And all the recent polls I've seen say that, like, 99% of America's Latino population thinks this is stupid. And they don't't they're not going to call themselves latinx that sounds dumb except for a few academics and then a whole bunch of white progressives use it almost exclusively forgetting how bizarrely weirdly racist it is to tell people who speak spanish that your language is actually bad you should speak

english because english is better talk about colonialism but all right second i'm in new orleans which is uh experiencing a crime wave as a lot of cities are uh and i'm here i've been here for a month and i love it here i've always loved it here and i'm talking to my friends and all my friends are very liberal here who live here except for a few and And I'm talking about, well, you know, stupidly, I have this app that like alerts me to crime. And so I've been getting these alerts like two, three times a day. And it seems like there's a lot of crime here. And then these, you know, white, entirely white progressive liberals say to me, well, yeah, but you know, it's not where you're thinking of living. It's not where we live. It's not uptown. It's not on Long St. Charles Avenue. It's not even in the, where I'm in now in the Maroney. It's not where you're going to live.

So my question is this, is this really, are the villains here? And I'm hoping the answer is yes. White progressives who seem to be constantly making trouble for decent, ordinary Americans of every race and creed and color. And are we just developing a cynical obedience to language and wokeism? But we are, in fact, these two truths that you talk about, facing reality, they already have faced that. They just don't want to talk about it. Is that possible? Yes.

And, well, I will tell you, I don't have empirical data on this, but if you can do anecdotes, I can do speculation. No, no, no, no. You have a higher standard. Well, by the way, with regard to your first point about the L-I-T-I-N-X, we're also talking about the people who insisted that Indians, who were perfectly happy calling themselves Indians, Native Americans, that no, we're going to call them Native Americans. And let me tell you, if you go out to South Dakota and you go onto a reservation and you start to refer to native americans you're going to see eyes rolling to the back of their heads with another white guy trying to make us tell us what we ought to call ourselves all right here's what i think about the elites i think the progressive elites are among the most racist people in the country under under the skin uh they

are well racist and classist they have open contempt for white working class the white working class it's quite open extremely open they have covert contempt for the black working class and middle class they don't deal with much um in fact they're hard to deal with them at all right and they are making their generalizations on the basis uh if they're in hollywood or la uh they're making on the basis of the the black residents of bel-air who guess what are really smart and there aren't a whole lot of them but they're really smart and they are uh lovely neighbors and helpful in cooperatives, all these things. And they're perfectly happy generalizing from that, even though if they step back from that, they know that's not the lived experience of most people in multiracial America. But they do not want to confront the extent to which they are contemptuous

of people who aren't as smart and as able and as well-bred as they are and i think that that underlies an awful lot of the outpouring of elite sympathy with the systemic racism charge i mean it was it was those there is actually data, I can't recite chapter and verse, on who made up the Black Lives Matter, those huge marches. Yes, they were huge, but there were an awful lot of millennials, middle class, upper middle class, millennial whites in those marches. So I think that the elites basically are at the root of an awful lot of our problems, because it's not just 99% of Latinos who thinks this is stupid about the spelling. I would bet that 90 odd percent of blacks think that colorblindness is an ideal, is not hate speech, it's not racist, it's just fine, and that the melting pot is just fine. But those 90-95% of blacks who think that are not the ones who dominate the public narrative. So, help me out. The black population in America has gone down.

The percentage has gone down. Is that right, Mike, correct? No, it's actually edged up marginally it was about 11 in uh 1960 it's now 12.7 but it's been quite steady it's been quite all right but in any as a as a matter of it uh sharing the stage with non-whites it's a huge difference huge difference um and you can kind of see these tensions certainly you can see these tensions in places where there's a anti-asian violence because the anti-asian violence is almost entirely committed by african by black black black americans yeah um

is this a case in sort of a marxist theory of an out group trying to reinvigorate its struggle do you know what i'm saying it's like the old civil war surgeon once said that the screaming is loudest after the change has occurred so you chop off the leg and the leg would be on a wheelbarrow heading down the surgery and that's when the patient would start to scream. It's over. It's done. Rob, I think you are holding something that is going to get a lot more attention in a few years. Look what's happened. You are still 12.7% Blacks, but you're now around 19% Latinos.

And the percentage of Asians is now up to six percent and continuing to rise but the representation of asians in the upper reaches of professional america is way bigger than that and so is their presence in elite suburbs right of and now imagine oh and but just think you're you're a black person who is watching Latinos, for example, become absolutely indispensable to the construction industry in the United States. The Latinos have going for them at this point, even though people don't think of it usually this way, an awful lot of white developers and construction companies and so forth who are going to be fiercely protective of Latinos because they are occupying a very valued place in the American economy. And in other ways, Latinos have established a very important place. Blacks, and this is a function of public policy because of public policy blacks are

overrepresented in government uh civil service jobs right but they do not have a comparable thing anymore uh in the private sector where they're kind of indispensable meanwhile you're looking at 10 years from now let's say it's's 10%, 12% Asians. Suppose at that point you have roughly equal Asian and black minorities in this country. But one of those groups of equal size is just skyrocketing. I can't even tease out how that's going to play. play uh aren't we seeing part of it now we're seeing a kind of a strange first of all we use the word racism which everybody kind of knows well it isn't really true i mean uh you know nobody worries about chinese people and uh you know at night no you know nobody worries that we latinos and the california new york and even weirdly in the south a lot of latinos in the south which is something that i didn't really expect so much. Nobody,

we don't talk about that. That's not part of the narrative that we're talking about. If you're a Asian and you're driving and you get pulled over by a cop, you're not worried. I think the same thing for Latinos, except that except in California for a while, when they were checking, making sure you had a license and insurance and maybe even citizenship. This doesn't seem like it's going to end well.

It doesn't seem like it's going to end well at all. I have never been so pessimistic in my life. I'm old enough to have very clear memories of the 1960s, the late 1960s and all the violence then. I never had the sense that we were teetering on an edge, and I couldn't see what was on the other side of the edge, but we're teetering. And I have that feeling very strongly now. Well, can I suggest this? And I know that we have to, we have to, I don't know if you want to jump in.

Here's what I would say. There was something about the late 50s and 60s, the sort of black and white movie quality of it, in which bull connor right in a black and white photograph just was a horrible racist klansman thug and that's evil and we know that's evil we can point to it the people who seem to be wearing and this is incredibly incendiary so i i don't know why you're bringing this out of me um but the people who seem to be these days wearing metaphorically the clans were the clanhood are white progressive academics and it's very very hard to ride in the streets although people have done it against a mayor who's african-american and against a police chief who's african-american

and against a district attorney who's african-american and against a police chief who's African-American and against a district attorney who's African-American and against a police department that's sort of like 25 or 30 overrepresented in terms of Black Americans in a city like Baltimore without at some point drawing the conclusion that you can't find a Klansman anymore. Maybe they're, you know, we found the enemy and they are us and that would be i think the will be a convulsive thing for people to understand and i by the way i uh i i all all outrage at what i just said i just directed at charles murray he could handle it he'll just and by the way ladies and gentlemen the person who directed that question to charles murray just to be clear was rob long exactly am i in trouble how much

trouble i am for even thinking that or saying that uh you don't watch everybody thinks that and and and it's it's not now i suppose i should be thinking ahead a little bit uh but but look the example of baltimore that you just gave who on earth can they blame as the culprit you know but that's true of a lot of major cities at this point and the sad part of it is that it's all all so unnecessary that suppose we had, in 1966, not followed Lyndon Johnson's injunction to not be satisfied with legal equality but instead go after equality of outcomes. Suppose we had said then, come on, that's a wonderful goal,

but it ain't going to happen anytime soon because here are the known differences in test scores, here are the known differences in crime rates and things. Suppose we said, you know what we want to focus on like a laser is, are blacks getting a fair shake? Are they hearing about jobs because employers are reaching out right letting them know these jobs are here and when they walk into that job interview are they being judged by as objective criteria as the employer can devise and being hired or not hired on as close to exactly the same criteria as whites as as human nature can let us do if we had used that as the criterion for progress we could have been celebrating progress for 30 years now because we have made huge progress we've gone the other direction the job market is systemically racist but it systemically favors

blacks and to a lesser extent latinos but uh we certainly don't have a problem of blacks getting turned down for jobs because they're black. Excuse me. This is a fascinating back and forth intellectual flow between Rob and Charles. So I'd like to interrupt it with some crass commerce if I want. Fill in the blank, folks. You brush, you floss, then if you didn't say rinse, you may not getting a complete clean. Mouthwash is a key part of your whole mouth's health because it gets between the teeth to kill bad breath germs and help strengthen enamel. Thankfully, the oral care experts at Quip have created a simple way to make mouthwash part of your daily oral care routine. You know Quip, of course, makers of the electric toothbrush and floss you hear about all the time, from me,

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Poured the other stuff down the drain. I'm Quip Mouthwash now for life. That's spelled G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash Ricochet. Quip, the good habits company. And we thank Quip for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Charles, I'm going to come at, so we've been talking about the cognitive differences. The second of the two truths that you discuss in the book, Two Truths About America, we've been talking a long time without teeing up the title of the book. The title of the book is Facing Reality, Two Truths About America, Charles Murray, about great Charles Murray. I'm sorry, about race in America. The second is degrees of violence,

crime statistics. Okay. Here's, it occurred to me, this is just a question. There's a third truth, I think, and it goes way, way back to the so-called Moynihan Report. Someone, if I recall this correctly, you admire Pat Moynihan, or at least you admire the early Pat Moynihan. I admire Pat Moynihan, the social scientist. The social scientist, when he was telling the truth and doing the work and he was a serious academic. He gets into the Senate and he becomes a politician. That's a different Pat Moynihan. But he issues the Moynihan Report in 1965. And he warns against the collapse of what was then called the negro family and the signal

statistic was that 25 percent of black children were born out of wedlock and that proportion is now over 80 percent if i am recalling it correctly over 80 80% for African Americans, over 60% for Hispanic, you'll correct me, and over 30% among white Americans. So isn't, I don't know, but is there something, was there something 30 years ago, had we done what you say about focusing on fairness in employment, get that that actually kind of a thrilling idea how things could have been different was there some moment when we could have said no family matters here as you as you you tease this up you tease this out tease this out you present it in coming apart but in coming apart you limit yourself to white people only so

that you exclude that great wide avenue of attack on charles murray of race but here you're talking about race was there a moment when we could have stopped this disintegration of families of i think not because in the mid-1960s it was no longer intellectually fashionable to stigmatize births out of wedlock. And a great deal of the sustaining of low out-of-wedlock births came from social stigma. Part of it came from simply, if you were a low-income woman, it was a disaster if you got pregnant because the welfare system in 1964 was extremely small. And so that was one reason. But another reason was that you were socially stigmatized. In the early 1960s, I read a book once about blacks in Richmond, and a young black teenager who'd gotten pregnant being stood up on the church podium by the preacher and used as an example of what not to do.

And this is the early 1960s. Well, the same thing went on in white America, too. Terrific stigma. Guess what? Social stigma for a behavior produces a lot less of that behavior, and we gave up on that. So I am now convinced that even if we had not expanded the generosity of the welfare state in the last half of the 60s, which, of course, I indicted in losing ground and detail, and I still believe that had an effect, and changing the man-in-the-house rule and all that sort of thing. I think that once you lost the stigma, probably the game was lost.

I hate to be an economic determinist about this, but doesn't it seem, when you look at Appalachian communities, when you look at parts of the middle America that have been ravaged and hollowed out by a combination of job loss, family disintegration and drugs flooding in from Mexico and China, when you have reproduced then in these places, generational poverty, disinterest and lack of interest in education um no family formation doesn't that sort of argue against the cognitive difference being significant like i say i don't want to say it's all economics but maybe the cognitive thing that you talked about before matters far less than the social events on the ground because what we're seeing replicated in these places what we see anywhere where you get a you get you get you get crime and hopelessness oh first place you don't have to choose one from column a or column b you can choose both and uh you have all sorts of impacts of the kinds you just talked about that

have afflicted whites as well as blacks and latinos the only group that seems to be more or less immune from so far as asians and of course the only group that seems to be more or less immune from them so far is Asians. And of course, sooner or later, probably their cultural values will attenuate as well. I would not even try to balance out the individual unique contributions of differences in cognitive ability and the cultural changes and saying how much of which i would just say look there is a difference in terms of of the employment market the labor market which is that jobs can be performed well by people at certain levels of cognitive ability, and it doesn't make any difference what the family formation has been or all sorts of other cultural influences. The performance of you as a programmer, I'm not saying it's completely independent of all that, but it's much more dependent on your abilities as a programmer than it is on those other influences.

I haven't said that very well, but I think there's an idea in there I could spin out if I had a lot more time. Rob, we've got time for one more, and I believe you had something. I have one. Charles, you're so depressing. It's Friday. It's like a nice day. So let me see if I can come up with a little light here in the Tempest. Facing Reality is the name of the book.

And it seems to me that I'm an optimist about America, about Americans in general. America as a whole and Americans, all of them, I'm optimistic. Despite having read your books, I am optimistic. But no solution will ever work if we don't face reality. You can't fix what you cannot measure, what you're not what you cannot measure what you do not measure and the argument from the left and from the progressive left and from the woke left and from all those people the academic left which is to say the same thing is stop looking stop facing reality stop counting stop making graphs stop drawing conclusions from data, stop it.

But there are a whole lot of Americans who just are still doing it. Maybe they're doing it formally and academically like you, and maybe they're just doing it, walking around. They kind of know are the Americans, the crazy reckless American academics like you and the normal everyday Americans just walking around looking and like, well, I got it. My kids are going to a you and the normal everyday americans just walking around looking and like well i gotta my kids are going to a school and the school stinks and maybe i gotta go to a better school the black citizens of queens who've discovered just how terrible

their school is um is there hope there and the answer to that question is yes charles just so you know that's what i want to hear but i'll take i'll take i'll face reality if i have to now rob look look back in the early 2000s i think we we were in the position that was maybe as good as we could have hoped for whereby i wasn't writing about differences in blacks and whites in the early 2000s i had that one chapter in the bell curve which created a big ruckus but that's not what that book was about and i didn't write about that stuff so subsequently very much because it was you know things seemed to be going pretty well oprah winfrey was the most admired woman in america not the most admired black woman but the most admired woman in america and you had very visible

public intellectuals and black uh professionals and uh and in the media you know right it if things were going along pretty well and then lo and behold we elected black president united states what could go wrong and so i think that's where we were and i think we then subsequently saw a deterioration which has led to a situation now where good news is this and i'm struck by this my individual relationships with latinos and blacks nations are still just fine the ones that i have at the micro level are just fine and i think that's probably true for most of us there's not and the people we know there's there's not a lot of fraying of the social fabric but but if you talk about the macro story rob uh i think you just might as well uh take the poison now because there's no hope

what's gonna what's gonna happen i'll just finish with this because I don't want to leave anyone with a shred of optimism. Well, congratulations. Mission accomplished. Whites are increasingly adopting identity politics for themselves. And once whites adopt identity politics, it's all over. By it, I mean the ideal of America as a place where you're going to be judged as an individual. And we're all going to get along with each other as individuals based on what we bring to the table.

So, uh, essentially I'm kind of glad I'm 78. I don't have to, uh, I don't have to watch what's going to happen. Uh, Charles,

Peter here with two, two more questions the second of which is that i'm going to make another run at the mountain that rob just tried to get up and slid back down but here's the question i want to ask before i get to that when you retired from aei there was quite a little hullabaloo among your friends and admirers. He can't really mean it. He's not going to retire. He's going to be writing and working. And you said, no, no, no.

I mean it. I'm done. You're on your own. Goodbye. I have plenty of plans. I love playing poker at the casino. This is a little-known fact about you, Charles, that you love going to as middle American a scene as you can get, which is at a good old American casino and playing poker. Okay.

And I love my wife and my family. I'm fine. And now you have come out and written this book. Why? It's going to sound very self-servingserving okay but i'll go ahead and tell you uh last summer i saw where things were going and i saw the identity politics taking over the the the narrative completely and the and the the systemic racism and i saw the death of the american creed and i said to myself um no actually somebody else who i will not name was brought in a conversation brought home to me

the gravity of the situation and he said something to the effect that doug on it and he was talking about ai scholars uh ai scholars ought to be out there making a stronger case. And he was not thinking he was telling me to do that, but I took it to heart. And I said, he's right. If you have a platform and you are in a position to say certain things, you are obligated to do it. And a 35-year-old assistant professor could have written this this book he would have been committing career suicide what are they going to do to me? ruin my career?

cancel me? I'm 78 years old my career is what it is everybody has to pitch in at this moment in history that's the way I felt alright so and here's my, it's not even a question. It's not even a request.

Honestly, I'm imploring you. Don't think of Rob and don't think of me and don't think of James. Although all three of us hope you do in some way. Think of some 19-year-old, 20-year-old kid in college, white, black, or Hispanic. If the kid is alert, the kid will already have realized that something is not right. If he or she is in a fancy university,

he will already have learned that things are being we are required to say things that nobody can really believe a smart kid will already have picked up that there are problems so you're 78 what is a 20 year old i i am asking i'm really truly request whoever your friend was who got you to write this book rob and james and i are now imploring you to write the next book and the next book you're going to have to go away and think for a while because you are presently you see nothing to do but the next book is a letter to an american college student how to lead a good and decent life in the amer America that is about to develop. We'll take that under advisement.

No, I think it was an order, Charles. I don't think you were listening. If I can sum this, if I can sum this all up to people who are familiar with the book, 1984, Rob and Peter are Winston Smith and Julia looking out the window at the washer woman and saying the proles, the proles are our future. At which point winston says we are the damned peter says we are the damn charles murray knocks on the door and

says you are the damned which is a chilling scene but we've just had it play out here before us um but no i joined peter in that that command to write that book because that would be a a a a blue pin forward through as as you say the society that's about to develop uh lots to chew on charles murray thanks so much thank you charles with us and discussing charles also may i make a crassly commercial point anybody who finishes facing reality two truths about race in america will be will pay anything for the book that you write that says what is to be done. I mean, at this point I'm, I haven't even finished facing reality and I'm I'll give a thousand bucks for

the way out right now. Thank you, Charles. Get to work on your Prozac for, uh, for that one. That's what that is. I make a lot of money that way. It's been a lot of fun talking with you guys. I probably have more fun that is morally correct. I'm talking about such tough subjects. Are we as much fun as poker at a good casino? Oh, no.

Not even close. Once again, facing reality. Right. Thank you so much, you charles good day well uh folks if um if that conversation left you feeling um like a box of crap uh as peter seems to have uh at the beginning at the very beginning of this um just tell peter um you had a a mood that this was hard right yes right you felt it you and rob both felt it right absolutely well when it comes to crap that's hard that's the stuff that you probably find in your kitty poop box right there you go in the box that's a very

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get 20% off your first order, plus a free dome, scoop, and free shipping when you set up auto ship. That's kiddiepooclub.com slash ricochet. And we thank Kiddie Poo Club for giving us the opportunity to say as many times as possible the delightful phrase kiddie poo club all right on the way out to brighten the mood give us a little song dance as we head for the aisles uh something something interesting um john stewart i i you know bill maher has been out there as a guy who seems to be streaming. I canceled HBO because of what Maher said, but he's right. So Bill Maher seems to be getting sort of, I don't see as much pushback for him. He had a great little monologue about progress phobia, taking his fellow liberals, progressives to task for not realizing how better things have become. So that's great.

But Jon Stewart, did anybody expect the clown nose on, clown nose off guy to come out and all of a sudden be Mr. Wuhan lab leak theory? If you saw the clip, you loved how uncomfortable it made Colbert look because he just revealed himself as an apple polisher and terrified of the fact that the very online people might cancel him for not shutting down Colbert immediately

or shutting down Stewart immediately. Jon, go ahead. I was going was gonna say what's interesting about that I mean you know he went on he had a whole routine about how crazy and silly it was to think that the COVID-19 came from anything other than a laboratory that was you know investigating coronaviruses and everyone was laughing the audience was laughing because they just not to bring it back to what charles murray was right because they also agree right there are two ways that we speak we speak one way when we're speaking in victorian english and it is very orwellian in a way um and then we all know and nod and look at each other like yeah we know what really happened and those the people who know and exchange knowing laughs and winks and nods are ordinary americans of every race and creed and stripe and culture and culture um the only

people insisting that only people who are really living in a delusion and also insisting in only speaking delusionally are the people um in the media and in academia and eventually i i am optimistic i think they're going to be swamped by normal everyday americans who are going to not pay the not want to pay the price i mean if you think about how many the law the lie the way we have accepted i mean the the world's now cycles are so tight that it we didn't realize how much the new york times was lying about communist russia when walter durant he was writing until 40 or 50 years later we now know that the media was lying about covid 10 months later right and that i think is a I think, is a good sign. It is a good sign, but you mentioned Orwellian.

We've watched the way that language has been shaped. We've watched the way that certain words become deplatformed and ridiculous words like deplatformed surface. At least with Newspeak, you had a comprehensible rigor to it. It was binary. the words made sense they were these mashed together true words that everybody knew and all the state had to do was to remove the words that made it thinking about certain concepts impossible what we have now in the modern news speak if you want to call it, is incomprehensible blather. Nobody knows what the hell these things mean. They say the words, they say the inequity, they say anti-racism,

they say colonialism, they say white privilege and the rest of it, but nobody really knows what they mean. They just know that there's the phonemes that you have to utter in order to show that you are part of the elect. That's my point. That should make you happy. Right, Rob. And I was not disagreeing with you. I'm saying it's one of the reasons that it will be easier, I think, to overcome it is because most people told that they have to say birthing person instead of mother. Are you crazy? Most people who look at Latinx and don't know if this is Latinx or what it's supposed to be, they have given us a newspeak that is just like chewing mouthfuls of rotten popcorn, and nobody wants it. And everybody knows that it's nonsense. The thing about all that stuff, it was easier for George Orwell to imagine a ruthlessly efficient state. The truth is that people are just incompetent,

and they mostly fail, and all these programs don't work. And it shouldn't surprise us that the Soviet Union collapsed. And it shouldn't surprise us that all of our progressive initiatives, whether even whether well, well intentioned in the 1960s have had the opposite effect. The things don't work and you can't tell people what to think and what to say because it just doesn't work. No, but there's a lot of ruin in a country and you can do a tremendous amount of damage before the before the the acuity and yeah but that's also true that's true i i don't know i mean maybe i'm too sanguine because i feel the need to be a little sanguine after but after charles murray's brilliant disposition but which i by the way don't the reason i have to be sanguine about something is because i agree with him um i i i suspect that we are um here's my analogy um there's three ways

look at climate change right one way is it's not happening which is probably not true so it happened for a million it's happened it's always happening the second way is it's happening and we're doomed and we all need to live in huts and eat spiders. Bugs. And the third way is it's happening and we're smart. We figure stuff out. We're going to figure this out. And the solution to this is going to be technological. The solution to climate change, the solution to COVID,

the solution to all these things is you align the financial incentives plus regulatory relief and you get a vaccine in 10 months and i am a broken record on this this is the most glorious day for free market economics ever we did we have a vaccine that milton friedman and adam smith would have predicted you reduce the regulatory burden you increase the financial incentives. We don't have one. We don't have two. We have four vaccines. Separate teams came up with it, and they're in your arm within a year. Pretty amazing. That's pretty great. And I feel like we should be marching through the streets with flags saying, thank you, big pharma, just because we know it'll piss certain people off, but they cannot.

And those people will say that Big Pharma was actively involved in making sure that nobody learned about HQL or disabusing them of its efficacy. And that ivermectin, the same thing. Why, if you go on YouTube and put out a video saying that HQL and ivermectin are actually pretty effective treatments, YouTube will ban you and kick you off. So saying when though you. But everybody knows they were. and I, and I, everyone knows they were what everybody knows are effective. No, no. Right. But if you say that they're effective and you put a video up there, that's that makes YouTube. I'm just telling you,

I went to a doctor in Dallas when I got COVID and he said, do you want hydroxychloroquine or do you want ivermectin? And I said, hydroxychloroquine. And my brother chose ivermectin. And this was December of 2020. So YouTube is my answer. Yeah. But what I'm saying is that alongside of the rah-rah for big pharma, which came up with this miraculous invention, and I agree with that, there ought to be an equal amount of concern and obloquy heaped on those people who for political partisan reasons because they hated donald trump and anything that came out of his mouth made sure that effective things were not

talked about that's real lives that's that's that you know i feel like two people here's my positive spin i feel like we should just forget the obloquy and just double down on the celebration just forget the the funeral uh feast go right to the birthday party and we should be celebrating with our and trust them the next time and the next time this happens i don't think you have to but but but the doctor i went to didn't trust them so i'm i'm perfectly pleased with the outcome i would only tell you this but i want to say like i feel like we celebrate more and complain less will attract more people who will agree with us. And I don't think anyone's going to believe them next time anyway. And that actually may be a problem that we suffer next time.

It is. It is. And we won't have the choice to believe them, however, because there will be options that will be taken away from us again. I mean, the next time we have a pandemic like this, do you think that they're going to say, you know what, lockdowns didn't have the efficacy that we thought? Masks, it's kind of questionable. We, you know, contract tracing, surfaces. They're going to do the exact same thing again. Yeah, but. Because no one's holding them or any of these other institutions to account for what they did wrong.

I mean, there's no point. Obviously, we're talking about spinning hypotheticals here. But to me, and this is my positive spin, is that we already know these people are incompetent, and that was a fantastic, fantastic revelation. They're not going to be able to, say, stay inside. They're not going to be able to close the schools. They're not going to be able to do any of that stuff because we know those things aren't true. Now, unfortunately, the way karma works and the world works, the next thing will probably be terrible. And you really do have to stay home and you really do have to close the schools.

But we will be so fighting the last war. We won't do it. That'd be a separate problem. But I feel like the I don't sense anyone in America except a few very specific, very specific progressives who still think all that worked they kind of know i think so too but i've you know i'm optimistic as well but i believe that even though we know all these things that we know these things in the sense that somebody in the soviet union at the height of their own malaise and their their own rot knew it and just didn't want to say anything or didn't see the point in saying but there's been you know we go around and around on this, but like there is all of this obsession with like,

I was canceled and deplatformed. I went to a goddamn doctor in December in 2020, and he gave me hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. So it doesn't seem to me that there was all of this Orwellian newspeak nonsense. That seems like a thing that we agitate ourselves about because we're just, we're so angry about everything. And my point is turn it down, forget that, just celebrate. And the other people will realize that we're right. When you went to that doctor,

what state were you in? Oh, I was, that's all very, it was very interesting. I was not symptomatic. So the doctor said, actually didn't say take ivermectin or hydroxy he said take hydroxy um and then when my brother went he was symptomatic and he was given ivermectin in india ivermectin is like it's hard to argue ivermectin is not exactly what has brought the infected fatality rate down because the vaccine rate is still only barely three and a half percent in india yeah okay so we gotta let what state of the union what state of the union oh good point i was in the state of texas okay all i can this is my little two cents on the conversation you guys are going back and forth i'm with both of you honestly i'm optimistic and pessimistic at the same time

but here's what we have that the soviet union didn't have federalism federalism you've got greg abbott in texas who can't wait to talk back to some order from the federal government that's his first impulse and ron desantis who is signing one piece of legislation in florida after another i also have pretty high hopes over the longer term, maybe not immediately, for West Virginia, which has some smart people running the place. And that state has flipped in the last 15 or 20 years from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican. I just, as somebody who has suffered through the pandemic in California, and with the result that I've paid special attention to Texas and Florida, we should just be so grateful over and over and over again to the founders for giving us this weird quilt of checks and balances because it keeps the system loose-jointed.

It's going to make it really much harder for a Xi Jinpingping like regime to get itself established just a lot harder we still have texas god bless it right but well except when the commerce clause and title nine are used to override just anything that they possibly can we'll see i again i'm up to i'm with both you i'm optimistic in the rest of this and i just want to end by saying that the next time i'm told something and i'm told that i'm crazy for believing it and they start saying that it's true three months later without a single episode, a jot of shame. Right. Nothing will come from that. Nothing will come from it and nothing will happen except I'll get a little spun up about it and Ricochet and Rob will tell me to calm down and be cheerful.

All right. I'm cheerful. It's Friday. It's a gorgeous day. I have to go out and get my leaf blower out. And usually that's only a weekend thing, but we have guests coming. So I'm going to go out there, run the leaf blower for about four or five minutes, turn it off. Everybody will relax, and then I'll turn it back on because that's what you have to shatter their pride, their hope and go on. Thanks for listening to the podcast, folks, and thanks for our sponsors as well. ButcherBox, Quip, and Kitty Poo Club. Join today. Support them for supporting us. And listen to the best of Ricochet.

It's all glopped this week. Rob's got some great stuff you'll love to listen to. It's on the Radio America Network and check your list of goal listings. For that, give us that review at Apple Podcasts if you don't mind and I don't know why you wouldn't. And of course, as we say every week, we'll see you in the comments at

Ricochet 4.0. Next week. Next week, fellas. And I point out a and I are two for two Both for me and I'll set you free Raffle, brother, raffle Well, the only person talking about love, man, brother, is the preacher And it seems nobody's interested in learning but the teacher.

Segregation, determination, demonstration, integration, aggravation, diminution, obligation to our nation. Oh, yeah.

That's what the world is today. Yeah. The stealthy people are at an all-time high. You're both walking around with your heads in the sky. The city's aflame in the summertime. And oh, the beat goes on Evolution, revolution Got control of the sound of soul Shooting rockets to the moon

Kids going up to zoo Politicians say more taxes Will solve everything In the bandwagon So Round and round and round we go Where the world's headed, nobody knows Ricochet

Join the conversation. is today Beer in the air Tension everywhere Unemployment rising Fast the Beatles New records again And the only safe place to live Is on an Indian reservation In the Bale Gravel

Eve of destruction Tax deductions The inspectors Bill collectors Are growing the men Population Itching to get out. I'm itching because I've been outdoors. The mosquitoes are as big as the buffalo.