The Ricochet Podcast - Familiar Parts of the Body Politic

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

Sometimes our topsy-turvy world is more dizzying than usual—and in those times, it's best to stand on a firm foundation and in the company of dependable people. Rob Long returns to chat with Charles and Steve about controversies of all shapes, sizes and comprehensibility, from Bo French and the "NETTR" movement, a right planning to buy votes with $5,000 checks and a prudish left shocked by the... apolitical appeal of Sidney Sweeney. Sound clips from this week's open: Gavin Newsom hubris on Hollywood and Sydney Sweeney seduces the betting manClosing Music: "Can't Stop," by Wake the Wild via MotionArrayBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ricochet-podcast--5817275/support.

California is the entertainment capital of the world, and it's going to stay that way for decades to come. Welcome to the Rickashay podcast. It's Steve Hayward hosting today, joined by Charles C.W. Cook and brother Rob Long. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Think you know sports? Prove it. No betting on wars or deaths. And no politics. Just you? Your takes on sports. Welcome everybody to RICOchet podcast. number 807.

It's Steve Hayward hosting today. James Lillick is away on vacation. Charles C.W. Cook is here along with, as we now call him, brother Rob. How long do we call you brother Rob? No, you can call me Brother Rob. Right. Well, of course, since you're here and we're one of the architects of this site way back at the beginning when dinosaurs were on the earth, I'm supposed to remind all our listeners

to please join us at ricochet.com and be part of the most stimulating conversations and community on the web. And since we have you, Rob, and I know I bugged you about theology before, so, and I know you retired from show business for the most part, but I do have to ask you. You know, you have all these attorneys generals around the states, Democrats, all of them, trying to block the Paramount. Was it Warner Brothers merger? Yeah. And I think you're doing that just out of political peak. They're mad at David Ellison for supporting Trump, even though he supports Democrats too.

But so the latest talk in California is that Paramount might up and leave. They're supposedly shopping for office space in Nashville, and Warner Brothers would go with them, presumably. And is this the last nail in the coffin of Hollywood? I mean, I don't know if you thought the story in the LA Times a few months ago, just to ramble for a second, but it was all about not only the numbers of people in the industry collapsing to pre, you know, mid-COVID levels,

but also the people complaining about how it's so hard to do film business in L.A. For all the general reasons that L.A. is dysfunctional, right? They were saying it's easier to do a production in Manhattan than Los Angeles. And that was pretty shocking thing to say. So is it the last nail in the coffin? Do you think that they do it? Well, I don't know if it's that last nail. I mean, you know, you have facilities and filmmaking still, even though it's a lot of

it's computerized, it's still one of the last industrial processes there is. I mean, they lay little train track. They still do. So it's like that that counts, right? But on the other hand, there's no center to Hollywood. It's a concept. And so Hollywood is wherever two or three of us are gathered, Hollywood is, that's, we create Hollywood, right? So you can do that now on Zoom.

You could do it distributed. I mean, I have friends, colleagues, former colleagues who are in writers' rooms and they've never met. And they just do it on Zoom. I don't think it's good. I think the product is bad, but that never stopped Hollywood, right? So I suspect that he may move his offices and the corporate, whatever, to someplace that's more tax advantage. It's hard to build. Look, a soundstage is a stucco box with mattresses and newspapers stuck really, quite literally, in the walls. So I was on stage 25 of Paramount Studios. They shot King Kong

there. And they put, you could see on the stucco line on the roof where they put the roof in because at first they were just designed to build sets for silence, right? The soundstage wasn't a soundstage because they were shooting silent movies. So eventually, you know, you need to have space to do something. There's no back lot anymore, and there's no, nobody's shooting Westerns, and if they do shoot Westerns, they go to Arizona and shoot Westerns. So this may be just a little detail, one more step as it's decentralized, but, you know, LA's a fun place to be, in a fun place to live. And so there, you know, there's always going to be people who live there. They just may be the CEO of a company that's incorporated in Texas or Delaware.

also want to catch up on, oh, let me actually give it this preface. Charlie Cook has been saying to me, are you ever home anymore because I've been traveling extensively this summer? And my response is always, somebody has to fill in the Rob Long Chair of the Peripatetic Rob Long Chair at Rickachay. So you've been all over the place, more exotic places than me. I've just been to the conventional European places. And you've been to, you know, Balochistan or I don't know where you've been. But what's this been about a spiritual pilgrimage? Or just to you walk out? Every journey is a spiritual pilgrimage. As you know, Steve. you. I had a great summer. I traveled all around the summer. It was a lot of fun. I guess what I would say is the two sort of interesting, you know, tidbits here. One is I was in Tunis for a few, about a week, and I went to the Anglican church in Tunis. I'm not an Anglican. I'm an Episcopalian. There's a difference. We're woke and they're not. And that's, we can talk about that. That's a separate volume. But I went to the Saturday afternoon Eucharist in

Tunis in Arabic, which is a language I do not speak. But, you know, liturgy is liturgy. You kind of know where you are in it. It was a, you know, the church that may be half full of Tunisians, of native Tunisians, people who were born in another faith, as they say, and have found this one. That's sort of interesting to me. And then I also was in Georgia, in the country of Georgia, in Tbilisi. And in Tbilisi, there's a, you know, it's a couple dozen maybe weirdo misfit young Georgians who kind of don't fit in in the current Georgian Orthodox tradition, which has become very Putinized over the past two decades since I was in Tbilisi last. And they have become self-described Episcopalians. They have a book of common prayer.

They have a Sunday morning Eucharist. And they are slowly becoming a church. They're a mission church down. And that's kind of interesting. I just kind of, I don't know, a little two, two tidings. bits from the hinterlands for those of you who care about this stuff, but it is always amazing to be to go into a basement that was a converted wine cellar in a place where about a dozen people are reading the, whatever we call the modern Western Christian liturgy, who are kind of outcasts

in their own country. It is about as early church and experience as you can imagine. So, you know, I have a little bit of experience with Christian Arabs. I've been to a couple of services in Arabic myself. And that actually brings us to our first major topic of controversy today about which I expect Charlie will have a lot of opinions as do I. So item one is this fellow running for the Texas Railroad Commission, which, by the way, regulates everything in Texas except railroads, I think. It's a very powerful organization. And a guy named Beau French Republican running for a seat on the, it's a very important. selected the commission. And he put out a tweet and it was a picture of a lot of students who looked

to be South Asian, they look in India Indians celebrating Texas's astonishing, astounding late upset of Ohio State, which was lovely to see. And they're all celebrating. And his tweet was, I'll just read it here. It's very short. I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn't believe it. The problem was now obviously far worse than anyone imagine. And everyone is saying, you know, Carl Rove has said in the Wall Street Journal, I'm boarding for the Democrat. This is beyond the pale. It is being taken, and I think probably accurately, I'll see what you think, Charlie, as, you know, too many immigrants, especially, you know, immigrants from these places we don't like.

First of all, dumb. Second of all, now I guess maybe I'm a little cynical about this, but I know a little bit about Indian Indians. Guess who they hate above all. They hate the Muslims. They would like to go to war. Pakistan. I mean, I'm sorry. It's not encouraged that by the last. They are a civilization.

They're a civilizational ally for those of us who think the West is seeding too much ground to Islam. Sorry, I'm ranting now about the ignorance behind this, but I don't know if you're following this and you reacted as bad as a Charlie. Well, I spoke at length this morning about this on the other podcast I'm on, so I will spare any listeners of both the full soliloquivism. So you've got out of your system a little bit, maybe. Well, yeah, but my view of it.

it is that whatever arguments that one can make about immigration with that as the jumping off point were not made by Beau French. In other words, if one thinks the H-1B visa program is a bad idea, which I do. I don't think that that is the optimal immigration system. He didn't say that. If one thinks that we have too many immigrants, that the velocity of immigration is too high, which is a defensible position, you do want to keep it at the right pace, he didn't say that. If you think that immigrants in various areas are not assimilating or the softer version of that, which is that they create enclaves, fine, but he didn't say that. What he said was completely indefensible because he showed a picture of Indians at a college football game

and then said, oh, you see, it is as bad as they say. And the only way to interpret that is to say because of the way they look. In other words, because they're foreign, because they have dark skin, which is grotesque. So what I've seen subsequent is some people say, look, he's right and then start speaking German, which is really ugly. And most people say, oh, well, what he really meant was, and then insert their own much more respectable immigration criticisms there, which is fine. I am, in some respect, hawkish on immigration, especially illegal immigration. He didn't say that, did he? he said something really ugly that really ought to be condemned.

Well, and to the extent that I think most conservatives believe that we should be, we should be oriented toward assimilation and we've got to add at that. The picture, listeners can look it up, the picture, they're all wearing cowboy hats and UT Longhorn T-shirts and big cap. Yeah, let's get, let me just to be frank here. First of all, it's the world's most populous democracy. You know, democracy may be in scare quotes, but it really is. So, and to get into UT, you have to be, you know, you're mostly a Texas resident.

I mean, and you get in, there's a certain way to get in. These are Texans. And look, I actually, it is considered politically incorrect or unwoke or something to say what I'm going to say, which is that the problem that people have with the huge wave of immigration is the assimilation problem. And that we want you to come here and act like you're American. and there's something about that hyper-patriotic, arch-conservative, fresh-off-the-boat immigrant that's a fantastic American character, right? That's a great, great American character.

And I see a bunch of young guys screaming and yelling at a college football game wearing their college jerseys, thrilled to have won a squeaker. And I think, well, I mean, I don't know, how much more similar they could you be? I don't know. I don't know what else they could do. to be more American. And there's another side to this, which is, and I'm just going to be super blunt, which is that there are, there are ethnic groups in this country that are non-white that who have a, what we would, some people, some psychotherapists would consider to be a family culture of achievement and excellence. And maybe a little pushy, maybe a little tiger momish, maybe a lot tiger momish.

and they are qualifying to get into these schools. If, you know, the old statistic is still true. I don't know if it's still true by Cal, but it used to be true for Cal, if Cal Berkeley let every academically qualified student in from California, from the state of California, it would be 99% Asian. Not quite that bad, but you're, you're 10% Jewish, right?

And I feel like there's like some of this is the argument that, okay, we don't like it. Well, they don't assimilate, and then they assimilate. Well, we don't like it when they get better grades than our kids. And, you know, there's a solution to that. That's solution's at home. That, I think, is another error that since Steve will know more about the details here than I do, that has infuriated me about this, because for the last 15 years since I've been in the United States, I have seen, and I have approved of this, 100%, a concerted effort on the right to get rid of affirmative action. On the grounds, that affirmative action is racial discrimination and racial discrimination is wrong. I agree with this. I was thrilled by the Supreme Court's decision. And this isn't controversial,

whatever the media says. 80% of Americans dislike affirmative action and liked that decision. So we get rid of affirmative action. Then we get the University of Texas, which, as far as I can see, has adopted all of the policies that conservatives said they wanted. They don't do affirmative action. They reserve 90% of their spots for Texans, that is to say, not foreign students. And they don't look at your racial demographics. They look at your grade. So within that system, a lot of Indians have done very, very well. In California, the equivalent, as Rob says, would be Asians. A hundred years ago, it would have been Jewish students in the Northeast.

And now the same people who said that they wanted to get rid of the consideration of race in college admissions are going on about race in college admissions. And I just feel like that's cheap. I feel like that's having it both ways. Yeah, yeah. So there's a – this isn't the only rucketka. this week in this domain. Can I tell a story that's going to get me into trouble?

I don't think I've told it here before. A couple of years ago, I woke up. I had vertigo. And I didn't know I had vertigo. All I knew was I was dizzy and fallen over. Went to the doctor, went to the hot, went to the urgent care. And they, you know, it was so serious. I looked so terrible.

It was so serious. They called the stroke team. And the stroke team did all these tests on me before they got my insurance. insurance information. So that's how dire situation was, right? And then, because they've got good insurance, because they want to dot all the eyes. They said, look, you probably should spend the night in Lenox Hill Hospital and have an MRI, brain MRI the next day. It said, okay. So I went down, the ambulance took me in Lenoxil Hospital. I went to the thing. I fell asleep. I woke up at 6 o'clock the next morning for my neurological consult. And I swear to you, this was my reaction. I woke up. I opened my eyes in a giant semi-circle around my hotel, by my hospital bed, where it was my neurological consulting team. Every single one was Asian or South Asian. And I thought to myself,

I'm going to be okay. You didn't think, you didn't think, oh my goodness, I was a member of the wrong religion. I died. No, well, and I ended up, I ended up in whatever it is, they believe. Fellas, listen, you didn't let me finish. There is a Dow of the... No, I actually literally felt, oh, okay, that's because I know every single one of those doctors has some screaming, stubborn, demanding parent or parents behind them.

And they struggled their way through medical school and they worked really hard and they're going to take care of my brain. So, Rob, I think I remember you telling the story maybe on the martini shot or somewhere. And how did that turn out? It was something dumb, right? You like waxing the store or something. Well, it was vertigo, and they couldn't tell me which kind. And so, by the way, all those smart neurologists and doctors, the minute they admitted they didn't know what I had or how to get or how to cure it, they wanted me out. They basically, they froze me out.

They didn't come back to the, they didn't, they were too humiliated. Doctors are like that. They can't give you an answer. They kind of want you to disappear, which is fine by me. I was happy to disappear. Yeah, and Dr. House only exists on TV, right? Yeah, I know that. Well, there is a second chapter.

to this, related to this ruckus out of Bo French, and that's the slogan, what's get shortened to Netter, N-E-T-R, no enemies to the right. And so Eric Erickson,

who has a very popular podcast, almost as popular as ours, I think, and a big audience, right? He used to be a guest host for Rush Limbaugh a lot. And he had a long article

that's getting a lot of attention on social media. I don't know if you've picked up on it or not, Charles. It's, I thought it's very smart. Yeah, I was afraid you might say,

that, Rob. I'm glad you're keeping your rhino credentials up. Yeah, look, I mean, the full-disclosure audience, I'm kind of tangentially indicated because I'm, you know, I was renowned for the founding of the Claremont Institute back in the early 1980s as a grad student, and I'm still listed as a fellow. I don't do very much with them anymore, but now and then I do. But they're sort of at the center of this as being the hub was legitimized a lot of people on the fringes, as Erickson says. And I don't know. I certainly also like this bold French guy. I do not care for some of the things I'm hearing from the fringes.

On the other hand, he takes after one person in particular who I don't even really want to amplify his name, but for praising those terrible people, Francisco Franco, Salazar in Portugal, and above all, Pinochet. And of course,

my first maybe just reputable response is about, well, about Pinochet, anybody who throws commies from helicopters can't be all bad. But here's the point. Privatize Social Security. Well, now, see, there's the point. You know, Milton Friedman is still attacked for having been an advisor to Pinnishay in economics.

And Friedman used to point out, but, you know, I also advised the Chinese government, the mainland. And I never got any blowback for that. If Pinochet made a mistake, I'm not saying to make mistakes, well, never mind. The point is Pinochet's mistake was he didn't say, oh, I'm a Marxist, too. If he declared himself, I'm just the better Marxist than Lienda was, the left would love him, right? I mean, the left still has the Che Guevar T-shirts. They love Fidel Castro. They don't mind at all that there are no elections anymore in Nicaragua, never have been in Cuba.

And so we're kind of playing by the left's rules, it seems to me. That's one thing, and it's not a simple thing, but it's something that bothers me about this. And by the way, I think you can make some defenses of Franco and Salazar. Pinnichet is harder. Some other day I could do that with you if you want. I always liked Friedman's line when he was asked why he gave Pinnishay advice, and he said, well, I gave him good advice. advice. Actually, that I will defend is Friedman because if the worst person in the world comes to you and says,

do you have any advice from me on economics and you're a genius at economics, then you should say, well, yes, here's what I would do. It seems ridiculous to tie him with that brush. Yeah, well, and I'll just, I'll just add, I mean, I do have to stick up for my Claremont pals a little bit. The irony here is that, I don't know if you ever pay attention to this, Rob, when you lived in Southern California, we're working there back in the 90s, but Claremont in those days was always under attack for being divisive on the right. Harry Jaffa picked enemies left and right. And so now they're saying, boy, you guys don't have any means on the right. I said, boy, you guys need to get in a time machine. Go back away. His. Cohn Rob. I was going to say, I mean, I mean, not to defend Pinochet and

Salazar. And for me, Frank was a little weirder, but Salazar was like, you know, a callous functionary. Salazar is exactly the dictator that people are describing when they say, you know what we need a dictator. Yeah. You know, Carlos. functionary, went, you know, went to office every day and religious sort of and had a tuna sandwich and had a mistress at 405 p.m. And like there's certain, I sort of understand that more. But the argument, I think, for this stuff is that that that isn't what that a, you know, listen, I've heard incredibly robust defenses of pino shit from people at Cato, right? So like the, these are small, this is small potatoes. What happens is that there's this kind of winking and nodding at stuff that sounds just not what I think of when I think of the conservative movement, which is about sort of liberty. And that to me is the problem. Or America.

Or America. So if you, if the Soviet Union had collapsed at the end of World War II and been replaced by. some right of center authoritarian. I would be entirely open to reading a book about how that right of center authoritarian was preferable to Stalin. My problem, Steve, is that a lot of the people we're discussing here

think that the Franco's or Pinochet's or Salsas or whatever are preferable to Barack Obama as president of the United States under our Constitution. And that's where I think people get the ick. Yeah. Because we're not talking about relative to the Spanish Communist Party or relative to an extension of the Soviet sphere of influence into South America. We're talking about the United States. Yeah. Yeah, I can fully agree with that, Charlie. And I'll tell you who drives me nuts.

And I can't remember if we've talked about this here before or not, but it's Tucker Carlson and what? there's a lot of these young conservatives who they now hate Churchill. He was on the wrong side. He should have made the deal with him. They're taking their playbook from David Irving. If you remember that guy from 30 years ago, right? He was one of the early Holocaust deniers. And this is genteel Holocaust denialism and cloaked anti-Semitism, I think.

And drives me nuts because it's substantively wrong and wrong in every other way, too. Great. Okay. Well, all right. We're not going to fight too much. So the podcast supports Churchill. That's good. I've been gone.

I just want to make sure we're still sound. Well, all right. I'm going to jump around the order our producer proposed for us. It does seem to me that these things, along with other things, are going to affect the midterm elections and Republican prospects. You know, there were some polls, a couple of polls out here in the last two, three weeks ago that looked like, you know, Republicans are, they're not out of it. They're only a few points behind.

It might be closer to election than you think. There's some recent poll data this week that still so, some Republican strength, but there's others showing the bottom, the floor is falling out. And I think partly it's high oil prices. This is the problem with the fallout from the Iran war is lasting longer than you think. And then I think things like these, I'll just say, identity politics false missteps by people on the right like Beau French are not helping. And then you have a Miami area representative, Maria Salazar. I don't know if she's Cuban or not. But she's saying, you know, we've gone too far of the deportations and the immigration crackdown.

And a lot of Hispanics, and maybe she's talking to her community in South Florida, where Trump did very, very well in three elections. They're saying, we're getting disaffected with this. And I've heard quotes, you know, anecdotes, but the plural of anecdote is data. A lot of farmers in the Midwest who voted for Trump saying, we're going to use the midterm to send a message. Not unusual in American politics. And that all bodes very, very badly, I think, for Republicans.

I don't, maybe this is not exactly profound analysis, but how do you guys size it up? Well, look, I am a hardliner on illegal immigration, and although I accept that what Maria Salazar is saying is probably correct within her community, and that that community gets to vote irrespective of what I think, and that politics needs to take in what people, people think because that's how democracy works. I find the argument that if you crack down on

illegal immigration, it will annoy the people who know illegal immigrants profoundly irritating. That said, Republicans have two or three big problems right now. One of them is Trump's been around 11 years, and when presidents have been around six years, let alone 11 years, that's alone 11 years in the public eye, their coalitions do start to fracture and whatever the logic was that led them to ascend in the first place starts to fall apart. And that's clearly happening. I'm not saying it's happening to the point of which it will be catastrophic in November. I don't think it will be good. I don't know about catastrophic. But I do think that you're now seeing that the two coalitions in American politics are pretty irrational. The Democrats coalition is irrational and the Republicans

coalition is irrational. You have people demanding different things of the president, and because he's not ideologically consistent, he tries to keep them all on side, but can't. And the second thing I think is happening that is pretty bad for Republicans is that the president was elected because people were sick of inflation and the increase in prices. And we have inflation and an increase in prices, is not entirely disconnected from the administration, given that it imposed tariffs and has invaded Iran, or invaded is the wrong word, but has started a war with Iran, which has led to an increase in gas prices. And people know that.

And I think the problem that a lot of people within Trump's orbit have is that they were much more interested in all the other things that Trump was going to do, which I have some sympathy for because I like a lot of those things. but the average voter really did just expect, if not a reduction in inflation, deflation. I mean, you meet people and they really thought the price of pizza would go down and instead it went up. And those two things together, they ain't good. Yeah, so let me put on my political scientist hat for half a moment and it will, I think, spur a rob a little bit.

So, you know, when you say that the parties have irrational coalitions, it's absolutely right. But the more irrational a coalition gets, the more we call it. by another term, which is usually majority. I mean, I'm always explaining, but mostly it's history to kids. I tell students, you know, the New Deal Coalition that was dominant for so many decades. But what was that? That was, you know, northern intellectuals and ethnics and southern segregationists and blacks. And this makes no sense whatsoever except on election day when it come together and win, right?

And that's all. And last for 50 years. Right. And now, although, you know, again, peel back the layers there. So here's where I mean. Yeah, I agree about Trump's now, by the time he leaves office, will have been the dominant world figure, I say, in politics for 12 years. The other president, you can say that that was Roosevelt, who was never defeated for the election. But that coalition was showing lots of cracks as early as 1938 when Democrats got creamed in the midterm.

And then the one that most people don't know about or ever think about is 1942. You're just a year into the war. And, you know, all the, we all read about, well, all the country was united. We were all in for the war effort. And Democrats got creamed in that off-year election. They lost something like 45 House seats and six or eight Senate seats, and the balance became very close. I don't know. We don't have any good polls from then about this was dissatisfaction with what we're fighting Germany,

when Japan attacked us, which is what people like Pat Buchanan like to say, right? But it just shows you that even when you have an irrational coalition that you patched together in election days, they're always still very fragile and stable. That's just a data point thing to think about. Rob, I know you always like this analysis of things, right? How crazy it all is. The thing for people forget who are the true believers, right? And the problem with both these parties is they really want to win by 50.000.1%.

They feel like they can slice the voting population as finely as possible, and they can't. At the best, the best you could hope for in American politics is the C-plus version of what you want. Because you've got to like, it's got to get pushed and pulled throughout the system. And if you don't understand that, then you're constantly looking at 30% popularity. And these midterms are getting more and more volatile. I mean, American politics since, I mean, at this point, it isn't even new. But it was stable. And then it has entered a period of extreme volatility.

The idea that I grew up and went, you know, to grammar school and high school and college and was a working person in the world before there was a change in the state. Speaker of the House. And now there are so many you can't keep track is a sign that, you know, the voters are trying to have a conversation with the political authorities and the political authorities aren't listening, I think. So, look, you know, I think it's too early to talk about a wave election here. But, you know, you have some structural problems, right? It's like all the things that people don't like about a current situation and a current economy are there. All the things they don't like about the political response are there, which is to say you're wrong. everything's great. Actually, prices are lower.

It was, you know, the price of meat. So it's a 20 cents a pound, but it's not, right? Then you have this kind of weird sense that actually is very powerful in American politics, where you can cast the other guy as weirder than you are. And that is a very hard thing. If the Democrats can manage to cast the Republicans as weirder than they are, that will be a major, major event in American politics. because, you know, the progressive left is very weird. So if they could, if they could estrange that, that's very, very good. And then the fourth thing is this kind of weird attitude that people have, and they

had it under Obama, and they definitely have it on Trump, that this, their guy is like really popular and that people who say he's not really popular, that he's in political trouble are reading the wrong newspaper or believing the wrong lies. The wreck is. Yeah, right. and those things are not good. You never want to be, you can't fix what you can't measure. And so the Republicans are kind of like living in a fantasy lane now where they think,

oh, it'll be fine. It's all going to be fine. Well, I'm going to come to weirdness and candidates in a moment. But that point you make, I think, is an important one for people remember is that we have been sort of a 50, 50 nation for 30 years now. Funny, quick story. I actually know the two political scientists who in 1993 wrote a book whose title was, House Republicans, the permanent minority.

and they add right a year before the landslide had changed everything they added a question mark to it at the last minute I always say one of the I know one of the good ones quite well is that's Jack Pitney out at Plymont McKenna College I still bug him about that boy the question mark that saved your reputation anyway yeah so we had this tremendous indistibility and I think it is one of the reasons that progressives are or more and more insane all the time and now maybe I'm I'm just running to mama because I'm a political philosophy student. But if you think, if your philosophical premise is that you are, as they always declare, on the side of history and then history doesn't break your way or the wave of history hits a sandbar named Donald Trump or Newt Gingrich, it sends you into a rage.

Or at the very least, it legitimizes in your mind that your opposition is just reputable, evil, against history, right? And they don't even think through the serious Higalian premises of that, if I can be a dorky professor again for a moment. There's other factors, right? You like to win. And after all those years of dominating politics, they hated losing, right? And that's a lot, right? Charlie?

And this doesn't happen in America, thankfully. But in other countries, we mentioned the Soviet Union or, say, France during the revolution. If history doesn't go, as you were told that it would, then it has to be someone's fault. and they have to be killed. Right. And I think that's why we're seeing some of this rhetoric on the left that is a little bit alarming. You know, I'm thinking about, say, the way that this murder of Charlie Kirk has been treated.

That's not that those people sit there at night thinking, let's kill 10 million people. It's just that they're not banishing those thoughts. Right. Well, I remember I did a, I was on MSNB, once. Once, I think. And it was... And you've never

gotten over it, huh? I never, I never, I was ever invited back. Because I was, I said something about how Arizona Senator Kristen Sinema and Joe Manchin, I think this was this was sort of during the Biden administration, were the Democrats best friends because they were

pulling the Democrats into closer to the center. And that the, the alternative to either Senator Joe Manson at that time, Joe Manchin at that time from West Virginia, or Kristen Sinema at that time from Arizona, was a Republican senator. So these are, these are,

Democrats, most value, they should carry them around in cotton wool and like make sure nothing, you know, nothing hits them. And the look on the faces of the people when I said this, which is basically the most anodyne political analysis, right? Which is that like West Virginia and Arizona,

like they were, these are Republican states probably. They look to be, like I was crazy. And I sometimes get the same idea when people, when I, people in the right are complaining about rhinos, rhinos, rhinos. The truth is that you need the rhinos because you're not going to be a, you're never going to get all 100 senators. It's not going to happen.

And you're not going to have a filibuster proof majority. It's not going to happen. So you're going to have to make friends with a bunch of, you know, irritating NPR listening, you know, tote bag, carrying people from Maine. And that's just the way it is. And if you don't like it, tough. Swallow your pride and make friends with the, you know, with a rhino in your life. So now you mentioned weird candidates a little bit ago.

And I'm having some flashbacks because this has happened to Republicans before. If you go back to, I'm old enough now. I remember the Texas governor's race in 1990. And that's back when, you know, Texas was not yet solid a Republican, but it was trending hard that way. and they're routinely electing Republicans to Senate and the state legislature. Bill Clements was the Republican candidate for governor, excuse me. I forget the exact quote, but he was saying something like, well, you know, if you're raped, it's what the old cliche, just lie back and enjoy it.

Something like that. And it's like this guy we was beating up on earlier, Mo French. The eruption against him was volcanic, and Anne Richards won that race when she'd been trailing and, you know, then was defeated four years. years later by George W. Bush. Fast forward to, I think it's 2010, 2012, I forget, but you had Todd Aiken, the House Republican in Missouri, state definitely trending Republican. And he made, by the way, by all accounts of people who knew him in the House, a splendid person. But on some TV interview, someone said, what about abortion in the cases of rape? As well, you don't really get pregnancies from

cases of rape. The female body has a way of just shutting that down, which is, I think it's, A, wrong, and B, what a stupid thing to say. And his candidacy collapsed then because the media pounced on him and Claire McCaskill exploited it as she should. Well, I thought this cycle, ah, the Democrats have this problem. They have this Graham Platner in Maine. They made him go away. And then Tala Rico in Texas.

That guy's got more baggage than a porter on a Queen Mary. Well, this is where I am an angry right-winger, because this is where we really do suffer from media bias, which is a real thing. I have this argument from time to time with other conservatives who say, and this is a noble sentiment that is generally a good way of living your life, that we should just accept it. Just accept that it's there and deal with it. And that is, of course, what we should do.

That is what conservatives should do. That's what Republicans should do because they can't instantly get rid of it. but they shouldn't accept it in the sense that they should make their peace with it. It is the equivalent of starting an NFL game seven points down. And if that was the rule, then you would say, fine, well, we'll just have to score seven points then. But it shouldn't be the rule. When we nominate crazies, which we did in 2022, those people were, I call them Tim Burton Republicans, almost to a man. They were never going to win.

They should never have been nominated. And had they been elected, they would have been freaks. And the media made this very, very clear that Herschel Walker was a cook and that Carrie Lake was a cook. And now it's the turn of the left to do this. And maybe those people will lose anyway. But the media doesn't do that. And it's very difficult for us to do it because they run interference. And this is something I find very difficult about American politics.

that we do play uphill on the right. I mean, James Talariko, and this is nowhere to defend Paxton, who's a lech, but James Tala Rico is a creep. He is a creep. And El Cayed should be nowhere near power in the United States, nor should Mamdani have been. I haven't kept up with it because I lazily defer to James. But the woman Peggy Flanagan is it in Minnesota,

who's running for the Democrats. She's a weirdo. You know, it's just irritating that the hygiene seems to only go one direction. Yeah, and yet it does. So if we're talking about an election, that's just, and look, Republicans win elections. They do win elections. They win the White House. They win the House. They win the House. They win the Senate. They do win this idea that Republicans have sometimes that we don't win anymore. My God, they, they took the House and the Senate back from one of the most popular presidents ever. So they win. The question is what constitutes weird? And I think that Republicans and the Conservatives of General have been having a pretty good time of it the past five years

anyways, mocking and using the weirdness and the craziness of the left against it. I mean, when all you have to do is demand that your opponent explain what a woman is and that opponent can't do it, kind of like, that's great. That's great TV, right? So we do it too. We just have to be more careful because our, our, our, our, but the Republican craziness often comes out as angry and vindictive, and it scares people. And you don't, people don't vote for you if they think you're a lunatic. Well, I mean, it's always been thought that Republicans had the, well, advantage in terms of they kept their money and they kept, they held their fire late. And so you do the big ad barrage to overcome the media in the last month. And the Republicans do have a big money

advantage in a cycle. So we'll see if that tells. I will just mention again, I'm sorry, I keep doing it back to academia. There's a very good book several years ago. I forget the title, but the author is Timothy Gross Close. He was in the COLA. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that book assembled some really impressive empirical data that said, friend of the podcast. He's a good friend of the different. Oh, well, I'll have it on again sometime and update his book because he's more than 10 years old. But he concluded that media biases were five points to Democrats. And one of his quotes in there, I forget the data now. One of his quotes

was Evan Thomas, I think, 2008, saying, oh, you know, media biases worth 15 points for Democrats. And he later thought, that's extravagant. I better scale it back to five. But, you know, the people you listen to sort of get it, right? Well, let me give you that book radicalized me. Oh, really? He's a great writer.

That book radicalized me against the press. That's exactly what I'm talking about. But we used to say people on the right used to say that our great institutional disadvantage was that we were telling the truth, that we were telling you things that you don't really want to hear, that you know are deep down are true. Government can't give you money. The government can't be sending people checks. I know the Democrats will tell you that they can just keep sending you money, that you can

print money downstairs in the basement, but you can't. We're the party that says, the conservative party anyway, says this, there's no free money. Rob, are you cheating and looking at my notes? Well, we have, we have, we seem to have given up on that point. Well, that was going to be my next point of how I know Republicans are almost sure to lose the midterms is this idea from Trump to give $5,000 to all Americans. I mean, this is out and out bribery, right? It's, and there is some survey evidence that Republicans hated by a huge margin. So how is this helping, aside it from being a dumb idea, right?

But there we are. If that, oh, to the extent Republicans have more money to spend on ads, is that what they want to run on? I hope not. I don't know. I think this is gross in every way that is possible. The one thing I will not hear is left wingers complaining that the president's trying to buy a vote.

That is the one argument that I just do not want to hear. Because all Trump's done here is what he very often done, which is cut out the middleman and all the youthful. But once you get past that, which I also oppose, then I hate this. Let me count the ways. His biggest problem is inflation. He is already wrong about interest rates. He's desperate to get interest rates cut, which will make inflation work, which will make

it less popular. And now he wants to send out $5,000. He's advancing this idea at the same time as he's correctly accusing Democrats of becoming socialist. And I keep seeing people say, it's not socialism. Everyone gets the same. Yeah. And they don't pay the same in taxes. So it's very literally socialism. Every single person gets $5,000, but they don't all pay $5,000 in taxes every year. Only 30% of Americans pay $5,000 in taxes. 42% of Americans pay 0% in federal taxes. So it is socialism. Another one is that it's a dividend of what? The federal government is not a company.

The voters are not shareholders. And there are no profits. We're what, $40 trillion in debt? This year the deficit is going to be $2 trillion. And then it's the audacity to say it's a dividend of the tariff revenues. This, if it were implemented next year, would cost 10 times next year's projected tariff revenue, which he's already spent lots of times, incidentally.

He keeps saying he's spending the tariff revenue on stuff. But even if all that money came in and then he sequestered it, and they handed it out, it would still be 10%, which means borrowing another 90%, which means next year's deficit, would be $3 trillion. And, and this bit just doesn't get said enough by people on our side, because it sounds censorious and mean, but, and it's immoral. It's just immoral to randomly send people checks. Even if they didn't have to borrow to do it, it is immoral.

That's not what the federal government's for. We don't have a national government so that it just takes money from people and then randomly hangs it out and checks. It's just, it's a moron wrong. And I think he stepped on his own convention because the message wasn't bad. The message was the other side is crazy, which it is. And then he just threw this in. Yeah, I am so disoriented these days. I'm so old. I was in high school, but I remember when George McGovern proposed a thousand dollars a person, which would be about $5,000 a day. And what? We all called him, other Democrats called him a social. And now we're Trump was proposing it.

And, you know, some of our friends among the Nat cons, like Oren Cass, are proposing, we need industrial policy to prop up the industries in the heartland. And I'm saying, wait a minute, where have I heard? Walter Mondale ran on that. We called him a socialist. Can we run Walter Mondale now exhumed

from the grave as a Republican? I just totally That's the most extraordinary thing I've noticed is the people on the left are saying, like, can you believe it? Trump and his tariffs and his checks to people. Like, wait, that's, I'm supposed to be saying that about Dick Gephard, who was a big protectionist, and Walter Mondale, who was an industrial, you know, a policymaker. Yeah. Like, this is what we're supposed to be fighting against

and suddenly it's been, it hasn't even be represented to us. It's the, it is the same stuff. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. We were talking about steel. We're really talking about steel mills in America in 2026. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about something, I think, a happier story, at least it's more fun. And that's the return to the spotlight of Sidney Sweeney, who really doesn't need any spotlight to get your attention. So she is, as you may know, she's listeners, I think, may know about this.

She's doing these commercials for a sports gambling site. Novig. Sounds Norwegian to me, Novig. And she's posing, you know, video ads and, you know, billboards with no clothes on, but covering herself up strategically with, you know, sporting equipment, you know, footballs and baseball catchers, Mets, and stuff like that.

And I do like the closing line of the ad. It goes, no betting on wars or deaths and no politics, just you, your takes, and sports. And the cultural left is going nuts. I'll just say that my contribution to this is going to be a scholarly article on, what I got to call here? Oh, shoot, I've already forgotten my title, but it's going to be how you can't stop the sweetie juggernaut.

Okay, sorry, I couldn't help it. Anyhow, I had a great title now. I'm blanking on it. But look, I mean, so first there's the hypocrisy of it. You guys might not remember this, but, oh, 10 years ago, one of the climate change groups, it's always hysterical. They did a video ad, and it was supermodels, you know, thin ones, not the body positivity ones in five years ago.

And they're all wearing fur coats and gosh, it's getting so hot because of climate change. And then you can guess what happens next. They start taking off their fur coats. And pretty soon they're all standing around in their underwear. looking like it's a photo shoot for Victoria's Secret. That wasn't objectionable to anybody on the left. That was not objectifying women and all the rest of that. It's pretty clear that they don't like Sweeney's politics or lack thereof, right?

I mean, it's not clear she's very political, but she's not a lefty and she's not a wokster and they can't stand it. And I love it. I am there for it. That's all. I have some embryonic views, but I think to form a full opinion, I need to see more photographs. Yes. You know what's been weird about this one is that the left has transmuted an ad aimed at men

for sports betting into women in sports. The headlines were all Sidney Sweeney has set back women in sports. But Sidney Sweeney's not a woman in sports. She's a model slash actress who's selling a betting product. to men. How did we get to that claim? Yeah, right. It's, uh, yeah. Well, I, I do know that, I do follow, you know, I'm a big track and field fan and I, I, I just say for what it's worth, is I think, um, middle distance running in track and field was always my events in high school and college, some of the best competition in, in years going on right now. Um, but, you know,

the women, uh, there's been this controversy about, gosh, the women have to wear these, you know, very tight, I guess you'd say bun-hugging shorts and, you know, their midrifts open. And I've heard arguments about why it's more comfortable in sprints and running for women. But there's been a, apparently guidelines have been put out to the TV people who broadcast the track and field events, not to show them from low angles, not to focus in on, you know, their back sides as they're doing the high jump and. So not to make money, in other words. I don't know if it's that, but whatever you do.

I find this all pretty amusing. So by the way, I remember now my article title is going to be Sidney Sweeney and the Body Politic. I'm sure it'll be accepted. That's good. That's good. I'm sure that'll be accepted by the American political science. Well, so just to catch up. So we now know that the institutional left is against tariffs and industrial policy and giving checks to people and also provocative nudity in ads.

I mean, the moral majority of the. This is what Jerry Falwell was talking about in 1981. Right. Isn't that funny? Oh, there's a New Yorker article just out about has the right captured sexiness. Now, I don't subscribe the New Yorker, so I can't get the article. But it's on their mind. Oh, my God.

How do we? And other people have been saying, you know, when suddenly the left become the scolds, as you're saying, Rob, and we've got sex drugs and rock and roll or at least the rock and roll. Not to overly dignify the weirdo left theories. But there is a genuine intellectual movement within the DSA that believes that being thin or good looking or well-groomed or having all your hair or whatever it is that is fascist. Yeah. Oh, yes. I've seen those tweets. You see this?

Yeah. Yeah. They talk about it at conferences. Right. Because, of course, Hitler liked. people who had muscles and were able to lift dumbbells. And so that must be wrong. And so I do actually think this is part of it with Sidney Sweeney.

But the biggest part of it with Sidney Swini is that they can't bend her to their will. And I've seen this tweet online for years that I've always thought was completely spot-on-on-on. which says that the left is obsessed with the idea that artists are all left wing, but they bully everyone in the arts constantly, and if they say they're not left-wing, then they try to cancel them, and then they turn around and say, see, he's left-wing, and they can't do it with Sidney-Sweeney. She's not interested in it.

They can't get her to apologize. They can't get her to talk about politics. They suspect she's a registered Republican. That's what the data seems to show. and she just doesn't care. And that must be the most infuriating feeling if you're used to getting people to do what you want. Yeah, and it appears from what I...

I don't really study this, but the little I've read, it appears she's pretty shrewd from a business point of view. And I think she knows that, you know what, she's got a window of only a few years to exploit her good looks to make money and she's doing it like crazy and good for her. Yeah, they hate that too, right? Capitalism and so forth, right?

Yeah, okay. To be continued. For a while I was saying, what, Sophie Cunningham was my new number one crush for women who, you know, depart from the leftist orthodoxy. But Sweeney has now pulled back into the lead. I'm happy to see. Well, Sweeney's superior because she's apolitical. And actually, we need many, many more people in public life who are apolitical who just play football or are a model or act or a musician who they're not left wing or right wing. They don't love all the things I love. They're just like Anthony Hopkins, when asked about it,

go, I don't want to talk about that. Yes, right. Yeah, right. All right. We got time for one more thing quickly and it's going to be back to Hollywood Rob. So you know, apparently you're going to make another, we're going to reboot the Narnia movies, you know, from the C.S. Lewis books. And what we just had those 20 years ago. Yeah, did we? Yeah. And I thought they were pretty faithful to books.

I think Phil Ancho was behind them and he's an evangelical Christian and I thought they were pretty good. But this new one is going to be Greta Gerwig is adapting them. And I don't know. You know, I actually kind of thought the Barbie movie was fun. I didn't get spun up about it like some conservatives did. I

kind of enjoyed it, I have to say. And I think Gerwig's kind of a talent. I remember her first from what is my favorite of the Witt Stillman movies and it's Damsels in Distress. I don't know if you know that one, Rob. It's a great movie. Great movie. I mean, I like all his movies, but that was my favorite, and she's the lead in that movie.

And it's more thanly funny about your college campus life. Anyway, but not only is Gerwig going to be helming the production, but Merle Street is going to be the voice of Aslan. So, I don't know. I, you know, it's, I sort of worry about this. I've been long about some movies lately. I don't know if I mentioned here that I was very suspicious to this movie out a month or so ago, the brink of war about Reagan and Reykjavik in 86 because Jeff Daniels played Rakey.

Yeah. And, you know, well, he's a left-wing loon, right? You probably, right? The movie, oh, go see it, Rob. The movie, it's really good, right? It's really good. I could, I was astonishing how, it's got a few things that annoy me, but they're minor. I think it's a triumph.

Reagan's the hero. Yeah. Full stop. I was astonished. By the way. The thing about the Reykjavut movie, as I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong, it includes the kind of sheer terror that Reagan's advisor that Schultz and Weinberger had, that he was in there alone with Gorbachev without their supervision.

But maybe it was not in the movie, but that was true apparently about Reykivik. They were terrified. The questions coming out were like, uh-oh. I didn't pick up too much of that in the movie. What I thought was most impressive was that really captured Gorbachev. bad temper and petulance, and Reagan's calm and steely nerves. And the climax of the movie is Reagan just getting him. And anyway, by the way, all right, I didn't mean to go on this long, but I got curious, how did this movie get made and, you know, it was a theatrical release.

Turns out it was not made by Hollywood Studio. It was paid for by Iceland's Ministry of Culture. I think they conceived it as a travel promo because, you know, every scene, not every scene transition. But a lot of scene transitions where they're showing some of the glorious waterfalls and glaciers around the country, totally gratuitous. But then I'll watch the credits, and it's all a Scandinavian crew producing it. So the American content is really just the actors and the young director who I don't know anything about. But so anyway, I'm suspicious of Gerwig. And why I want Rob's theological opinion on this, because I'm not a panicker either when it comes to movies. And I spend a good amount of time defending Christopher Nolan and the

Odyssey against what really was an absurd cultural moment in which I personally was described as a traitor to Western civilization because I went to see it. I enjoyed it, but anyway. I did too. But the Narnia thing instinctively bothers me because it strikes me as being important that Aslan is male because Aslan is supposed to be Jesus. But am I wrong, Rob, theologically? Is that important?

Well, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, who knows what voice she's going to use? I mean, you know, she's pretty good at she could, if she could lower voice. The problem for me is that Aslan is a lion and he has a lion's main. He's not a lioness. Now, if she's going to say it's going to be, no, I'm going to do Aslan as a lioness. Okay, interesting. I don't know why you would walk into that. I just don't understand why you would do that.

I don't, I don't really know why you'd make the movies again. anyway, but that to me is the question. It's like you're having a female voice, a male character, and a visibly male character. We know the difference when you're a lion and a lioness. And so that's going to be weird. Unless she, like, lowers her voice like that. I mean, she could do, because she's no street, she could do anything. Then why do that? I love Merrill Street, but why do that? And I'm with you. I don't understand this decision because my family and my kids are 8 and 10, would go see this. But I bet you anything, my wife is going to question whether we should, based on that.

She also loves Merrill Street, but she's going to think that the movie's going to be woke because it's weird, yeah. They made this weird decision that they didn't have to make. Yeah. Well, I'm just worried that we could be in for Jesus as reimagined by James Talarico. Right. He's some freaky, you know, right. But, all right.

I will mention one other movie on my radar. In about two weeks, or maybe it's only a week, Netflix is coming out with a movie on the Unabomber. Feature film, Russell Crowe plays his Harvard professor. And I can't tell from the trailer, but I'm worried that it might be problematic. I think they may be setting up a narrative that the CIA is what created Kaczynski. And so stay tuned.

I hope I'm wrong. Hey, Steve. Yeah, right? Have you ever watched the Netflix documentary on Ted Kaczynski? I may have. I've watched a couple. they're doing a bunch of them. It's a pro or con.

No, I was so appalled by this. Again, I'm not the guy who writes the letter to say, I turned on the television and I was so appalled. But this documentary is sympathetic toward him, and half the people they interview are sympathetic. And then they have a guy who worked at the prison where he was incarcerated, who is the sole voice of reason in this thing,

and keeps saying, in the increasingly exasperated tones. this guy was a murderer who blew people up. This guy blew people up in front of his kids. And the only thing that was left of him was his boots. And then they cut to some other environmentalists. He's like, I just think it's very important to understand the context in which he was making his complaints. And then they cut back to the prison guy. And then he's like, the guy's head rolled across the room in front of his five-year-old.

But it's disgusting. So I share your worry here that they're going to be sympathetic. Yeah. Well, stay tuned for that. Put a placeholder in it. And we may come back to it for review. afterwards. But that's it, listeners, for our show this week. I would be remiss if I didn't remind you that this podcast was brought to you by ricochet.com. Please join us as the best place

for civil-center-right conversation, even though we were roughing up some other conservatives today. Sivily. Take a minute to give us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and come back next week for, is it Charlie, is it officially Rickashay 5.0 public? yet or are we still? Well, it'll be the next couple of weeks. So the website's done. All of the service side work is done. I have Android and iOS apps.

They need to be approved by Google and Apple. And there's a few bugs that are being ironed out on those. So once those get approved by Google and Apple, a launch date will be announced on existing ricochet and we'll be off to the races. This has been the biggest buildup since we heard that Nolan was doing. the Odyssey. Hopefully it gets a better pre-reaction. Thanks, guys. See you soon. See you soon. Take care, Rob.