The Ricochet Podcast - Guns and Rhetoric

Episode Date: June 15, 2017

Another busy week with much to talk about and to help out we’ve got (along with @jongabriel sitting in for Rob Long) the great Yuval Levin and Adam Carolla. Yuval schools us on the rumors that the President will fire Robert Mueller and the black box that is the Congressional Budget Office, and Adam stops by to talk about his upcoming film the Dennis Prager ( they’re raising money to underwrite it... Source

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$2.50, and you'll be one of those people who supports Ricochet. Five bucks a month is too much. You won't think so after trying that $2.50 offer. But it goes forever, by the way. So if you want to stick at that level, stick at that level. So what do we do now that Rob isn't here? Well, of course, John Gabriel steps up to the plate, knocks it out, says Rob who? And Peter Robinson is with us as well. Hello, gentlemen. It's been a harsh week. It hasn't been a good week if you look at what happened in D.C. Here's the question.

Because we have a guy shooting Republicans, the debate is about gun control. And if it had been the other way around and the guy had shot the press, we would be talking about rhetoric. Jim Garrity makes the point that really, you know, we shouldn't talk about rhetoric on the right because we don't want to give them that argument we don't want to say yes political speech makes people crazy on the other hand rachel maddow this guy's fave no one's going to say to her what did you do to head up this guy peter ron john yeah this is all this is tricky territory the new york times the new york times appallingly had a put up an editorial going back to the um shooting of representative giffords gabby giffords and saying that the shooter there had been inspired by right-wing rhetoric of which this shooting took place six years ago now.

As far as I am aware, there is no evidence, zero, none, that has emerged in those six years that the shooter was indeed inspired by right-wing rhetoric. On the other hand, we have this shooter yesterday who does seem to have been very much a man of the left, a Bernie Sanders supporter. He had a Facebook page in which it seems to be clear that he's following a lot of the left media. Let's put it this way. In my judgment, we ought to stick very tightly to actual definitions here. To incite violence is to incite violence i'm not aware of anybody on the left even rosie o'donnell who talked said the administration had to come down even former attorney general loretta lynch who said it was time to to oppose the new administration that in the past people had opposed movements like this and yes had bled for it. That's pretty close to violent talk, but they didn't incite this man

in any direct sense. So that, I believe, needs to be said. At the same time, I've been in Washington for several days now, and it struck me the first day I was here, that is to say a couple of days before the shooting that this town has gone crazy. It has just gone crazy. Two thirds of the town hates Donald Trump from the left. A third of the town hates Donald Trump from the right. Even those who are trying to support him or generally supportive of him have had it up to here with being undercut and surprised and having him cause his own problems. And up on the Hill, well, let's put it this way. I got together the other evening, again, before the shooting took place with my old friend, Haley Barber.

We've known each other since we were young men in the Reagan White House together. Haley's now been chairman of the Republican National Committee. He served two terms as governor of Mississippi. He now divides his time between Mississippi and Washington. Haley's been in this town, except for when he was governor of Mississippi, for four decades, 40 years. And Haley Barber said he's never seen anything like the present atmosphere in Washington. It just seems mad. It seems, in fact, I have to say my final comment,

I'm going on too long here, but if you read Richard Pipe's History of the Russian Revolution, he said there was a, in the Duma, before the revolution occurred, there was a kind of revolutionary psychosis that people became so overwrought that it was though the entire country or at least all the leadership of Russia at the time was suffering from almost a psychologically, clinically diagnosable condition. And it feels that way in Washington right now to me. Well, there was revolution in the air. I mean, there were ideas afoot that were devoted to tearing down and upending the structure of society. Well, that's true, but those had been in the air for four decades in Russia. Right, right.

So it steeped and brewed and collected and coalesced, and it was part of what people were breathing miasma of. Now, you can say that in Washington, D.C., people are angry because, hey, drain in the swamp. You're going to get some pushback. It's a sign the right things are being done. And we'll get to that in a second. But, John, I want to go back to the idea of incitement. We are told on college campuses everywhere that use of certain words, that exhaling air in the shape of certain phonemes is violence, right? That people can be triggered. They can be knocked out of their safe space. They can have all sorts of horrible things happen to them psychologically if words are used. So are we not then to turn that against the people who are saying not inciting people to go kill Trump, but essentially saying that this that he's Hitler, that he's fascists and fascists must be opposed with violence. Is it not,

is there not a case to be made that they are just as responsible using their terms, using their concepts of what it means to incite? I think the new standard on campuses, sticks and stones will break my bones, but words are violence too. That's it. What I think is so frustrating to those of us on the right.

And again, this kind of falls into the complaining about media bias. You know, it's, it's there. We know it. We've been hearing it, you know,

our whole lives and it's only gotten worse. Rob Long does not want you to talk about media bias. Right. But the, the double standard is so apparent. It's just kind of frustrating to constantly run against this double standard of a Republican does something wrong, and know, this guy, I don't know if he's a registered Democrat. He was a Bernie Sanders volunteer. Sanders, for his part, gave a fantastic denunciation of this man right away. I actually saw his denunciation before volunteer doing the violence again, the Republicans evilness is pointed out yet again.

I saw several stories yesterday afternoon about how we're very concerned about how the Republicans are reacting to this shooting and they might be overreaching and it's become such a joke. But once again, this is always the issue. I certainly am a big free speech proponent. I am rather radical on that point. I want people to say anything they want. The press has to understand, the Democratic Party understand, if they're going to use this cudgel of climate of hate and all these vague terms they use, it's going to be used against them as well, rhetorically at least. Right, but it will have no effect.

I mean Bill Clinton got up after the Oklahoma City bombings and basically pointed a finger at Rush Limbaugh. Right. bombings and basically pointed a finger at Rush Limbaugh. And that resonated with popular culture because there were fewer means of disseminating news and fewer places for people to discuss it. There was talk radio, but there wasn't the internet yet. So nowadays, however, there are such non-contiguous information streams that if somebody starts really hammering Bernie and Rachel and Ed Schultz and everybody else who's been saying that Trump is a fascist, it will have absolutely no impact in the culture at large. These people will not feel compelled to reexamine their approach and what they say. It'll just be more ideological walling off and yelling.

So, yeah, you can try. You can hold them to their standards, but it's not going to do anything. There's a precedent here. It may make things worse for Democrats themselves. If you go all the way back to the assassination of John Kennedy, and then if you reread Death of a President by William Manchester, which I did, what was it, a couple of years ago, when it was the 50th anniversary of the assassination. And William Manchester does two things in that book. First

of all, he gives the historical moment by moment account in a way that no one had done before and that no one has ever done since. So it is absolutely fascinating to see the chaos at the hospital, all of that. But at the same time, that book is from beginning to end a denunciation of right-wing hate speech is the term he would have used if he'd been with us now, Manchester, but of the right-wing atmosphere in Dallas. And he ties Lee Harvey Oswald, this strong suggestion, in fact, it's explicit in a couple of places, that the right-wing Texans in Dallas somehow or other got inside Lee Harvey Oswald's mind and made him do this to John Kennedy. Now, there was never a shred of evidence for that. To the contrary, to the extent that Lee Harvey Oswald seems to have been cited by anyone, it was by his own warped understanding of communism.

This man spent time in the Soviet Union. He got in touch with the Cuban embassy. He was a believing, in his own warped way, Marxist. If you're going to argue that John Kennedy was a martyr to any ideology, he was a martyr to communism. He was a casualty of the Cold War. Nevertheless, that marks the moment when the Democratic Party, the leaders of the Democratic Party, and at least a wing of the Democratic Party become really alienated from their own country. They really feel as though their own country is no longer their home, that it's a violent, unworthy place. But they've an ideology that was that was

more foreign to America than the thing that they supposedly hated which is all these guys with big hats and big cigars and bourbon in one fist down in texas saying that damn catholic kennedy that's what they hated but they they couldn't believe that it was a social that was somebody on the left who had done this to their beloved leader so i mean that's exactly right they engaged in hatred of their country in order to protect some shining ideal of leftism. It made no sense then and it makes no sense now. It makes less sense now. Somehow or other, Republicans are responsible for establishing some kind of low standard of speech in the country, which drove this guy to shoot Republicans. This makes absolutely no sense. Zero. None. And yet that seems to be the emerging consensus on the left. I won't say the Democratic Party as a whole, but on the left. Somehow or other, this man killed Republicans and Republicans are responsible. It's that crazy. But party proper, it'll make them even crazier and alienate

them from their own country even further. And I think it has seeped in deeply in that what we used to call a liberal party is now increasingly progressive and left ideas that are antithetical to classical liberalism. And you could say the ideas haven't just seeped. They've grabbed the minds and souls of so many people. It goes back farther than Kennedy and the people who just decided to lie about Oswald. It goes back to the 50s, the whole post-war era, where you have this culture of American self-criticism, this neurotic intellectual conviction that America was a sick society, America had nothing exceptional about it. And what started out with a couple of guys in Greenwich Village clubs

chattering away and making cheap laughs eventually becomes the dominant cultural theme, the dominant cultural tone. So this self-criticism, this self-hatred, this bristling reflexive anger at anybody who insists that there's such a thing as American exceptionalism has become the dominant intellectual theme in the democratic leadership, I'd say. Not necessarily the people who vote for them, but the leadership, yeah. Spend time on Twitter and figure out how much grief you get if you defend America as being anything particularly special. Holy boy. Man. Hey, James. James, I see the Blue Yeti has just put up a note here.

A correction. The New York Times. This is miraculous in a way. The New York Times has just published a correction. Quote, an earlier version of this editorial incorrectly stated that a link existed between political incitement and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords. In fact, no such link was established. You know why they wrote that in the first place? Because that's what they believed. Yes, that's exactly right. Because that's what they believed. Yes, that's exactly right. Because that's what they believed.

They believed that this guy saw a Sarah Palin-generated map with crosshairs on it and said, I must kill somebody because Sarah Palin says so. And that that was a typical response from a gun-crazed right-wing lunatic. Of course, it's this madman who believes that grammar is part of a government mind control system. But of course, the New York Times will sail on without thinking, perhaps, that saying that without checking it and being wrong might be indicative of a general mindset that has a few other lacuna in it. Do you think? Exactly, exactly. That's the point. The editorial board was sitting around. They took it for granted. In their mind, oh, it's just, anyway.

Because they're absolutely, they have not, right, because there's no, none of their preconceptions that they have probably reexamined since college. They're simply entirely too comfortable with what they believe. And comfortable is great if you're trying to sleep because the three most important words for getting a good night's sleep are comfortable, comfortable, and comfortable. If you want the best sleep of your life, you need to be comfortable, and that's what all those sleeping pills are trying to do for you, but you don't need that. You just need bowl and branch sheets. Now, what makes bowl and branch sheets unique is that each sheet is crafted from 100% organic cotton, and that means that bowl and branch sheets not only feel incredible, but they also look amazing.

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He's the editor of National Affairs, a quarterly journal of essays on domestic policy and politics. He's also the Heretog Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributing editor at National Review and the Weekly Standard. He's the author most recently of The Great Debate, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and The Birth of Right. Thanks very much for having me. Well, while all this news has been going on in Washington, actually things are happening up in the hills. There is a VA bill that is making progress, and the Senate is writing a health care bill as we speak, apparently in deepest secret, which Trump believes is mean. What have you heard about this bill and what might we expect? Well, it is somewhat secretive.

The bill certainly began from the House version, which also started as a secret, but eventually was passed by the House. It seems like the Senate, in order to make it through, is pulling that bill somewhat to the left, and that has me worried. But it's hard to know. For now, we have not seen it. It seems as though they're in conversations with the Congressional Budget Office about various elements of it, and I suppose we'll know more next week. Yuval Peter Robinson here. Thanks for joining us. If the Senate produces a bill that extends the Medicaid payments beyond 2020 to get to 51 votes, is that the end of the world? At what point does the bill they pass do no good, if you see what I mean?

Well, I think the question is, how do we understand what the purpose of the bill would be? We're at a point now where if they were to make the case that lacking the ability because of the constraints of the budget reconciliation process or lacking the political will, they're going to stabilize the individual market under Obamacare and advance an important reform of Medicaid, you could imagine an argument for that. I think it would be hard for me to support it, but it would be an imaginable case to make as the best thing to do in this situation. If the argument they're making is that this is a repeal and replacement of Obamacare, but in fact they are, as we hear, they are leaving in place the tax credits, leaving in place most of the regulation, and leaving in place most of the Medicaid expansion. I think it becomes much more difficult to make that case. Now, it may be that the political constraints of the moment mean they can't advance a replacement of Obamacare. I think Medicaid reform is very important, and if that's what they want to do with this opportunity, I would welcome that. But we have to be careful about how we're explaining this to ourselves and to others. House bill really was, at least as far as they could get it. If the Senate is moving away from some of the most important elements of the House bill, they could face real trouble.

So I just want to make sure I understand. You've all understand the politics of the moment. They're doing this under the reconciliation process that limits what they can do. They have to get to 50 votes, at least 50, so Mike Pence can break the tie and get it to 51. You get all of that, obviously. And as long as what is produced is somewhat better than Obamacare, and this is what I take to be the critical part of what you're saying here, and it is stated by the members of the Senate, by the Republicans in the Senate, we are making the best of a bad situation, this is an improvement,

we will be back to get it better next year. That would be okay with you? I think that's right. If they honestly explain that this is the best that can be done, that is politics. If we pretend that this is what we've always wanted, then I think we're in trouble. So, Yuval, could I just ask, I mean, I'm visiting Washington for a couple of days,

and of course what just gets you, hits you in the face, turn on the television, pick up a newspaper, it's now the special counsel, Robert Mueller, or Miller or however it's pronounced, according to all the newspapers today,

Trump is now himself a target of the investigation, and Mueller is investigating Trump on grounds that he may have engaged in obstruction of justice. Does that sound to you – so there are series of – I'd just like to hear your comment. That could only have been written if Mueller's investigation leaked to the press. Does it strike you that there are grounds for going after the president? What's your feeling about Mueller? Would he be going after the president and letting people know that he's going after the president, even though there are very few grounds for doing so, just to tidy things up? What do you make of all this?

Or do we have an outrage on our hands? Well, look, I think this, in a sense, it's become a kind of classic Washington political investigation where now the investigation is focused on how the investigation is going. And it is looking into various obstacles to itself and seeking to see whether those might be crimes. This happens a lot at this sort of level, but I think we have to be clear that what this investigation began by looking into seems not to have happened, right? There's no underlying crime. And now, you know, you could make the case that the special counsel is obliged to look into potential criminal activity that comes up in the course of the investigation.

But, boy, has that happened quickly. In the course of just really a couple of weeks, maybe at most a couple of months, we've moved from looking into the possibility of collusion with Russian involvement in our elections, which has always struck me as extremely unlikely, to now just asking whether the investigation itself is being interfered with. Interference would be serious. Obstruction of justice is a serious crime. But we have to keep in perspective the fact that we are now basically looking at an FBI investigation into cooperation with an FBI investigation.

I think it's a bizarre place to have ended up at this early point in this new administration. Go ahead, John. Oh, all right. Yes, hi, this is John Gabriel. Welcome and thanks for being on. You recently said a lot of the problems in the current legislative process stem from the budget process that was enacted in the early 70s um i know i'm well outside the beltway in a beautiful cool balmy mesa arizona and uh you look at washington and try to it's like look i watch schoolhouse rock so i'm obviously a constitutional expert what is what are these people doing why is nothing getting passed now um since we have this new political reality where everything seems to be breaking down at least least to someone outside the process like myself, what happened to the budget process in the to problems that arose at that time.

And what Congress did then was try to consolidate the budget process to empower itself against the president. But that was 40 years ago, and over these 40 years, a variety of things has changed on the ground, the most important of which is that the idea that Democrats would control the Congress forever has turned out not to be true. And our budget process is actually based idea that Democrats would control the Congress forever has turned out not to be true. And our budget process is actually based on that idea. It is a process intended to advance the expansion of the great society state. And that's really no longer the goal of congressional majorities, or at least not always. And we now have a budget process that I think makes worse the two biggest problems that Congress faces when it comes to budgeting and legislating.

On the one hand, it's a process that keeps entitlement spending off budget. And so it's not considered each year along with all other spending when, in fact, it is our biggest fiscal problem by far. And on the other hand, it's a process that encourages the two parties to argue with each other about broad abstractions. The budget resolution is just a bunch of numbers. It's a spreadsheet, and it's tied to a kind of governing vision that the party in power puts out. And then each year, you end up having this debate about that abstract vision. It doesn't go anywhere, and Congress ends the year by voting roughly at midnight before it shuts down on one big, massive budget bill, and it's an up-or-down vote. So what

we've had is a kind of reversal of the roles of the executive and the legislative branch. Congress now exercises a kind of veto power over the budget. One up-or-down decision at the end of the year, yes or no, instead of legislating throughout the year. And I think the budget. One up or down decision at the end of the year, yes or no, instead of legislating throughout the year. And I think the budget process that was created in the 70s by the Democrats to serve their goals at the time reasonably is now not serving the goals of today's Congress and today's Republican majorities. And this would be a great moment for institutional reform in Congress. They could do it themselves. They don't need the president. It would help them think about what their job ought to be now, but it's not the case that too many people today are thinking about institutional reform. I think they ought to.

James Lollix here in Minneapolis. They don't want to. They're not thinking about it because they become so accustomed and friendly to the idea of passing this massive wad of pork that they get benefits from it. What incentive is there for the Republican Party to change anything institutionally right now? Yeah, well, I agree with you. I think they've become accustomed to thinking that this is how Congress ought to work. The incentive to do it ought to be that, well, it would actually allow them to legislate and to advance their agenda, to reform government programs, to repeal government programs, to make changes that the budget process makes much more difficult.

But, of course, we're being forced to face the question this year, more than most, of whether that is actually what Republicans want, having, say, for example, run for seven years on repealing Obamacare, now confronted with an opportunity to do so, it's not perfectly obvious that they, in fact, want to. I think something like that is true more generally, and it's certainly standing in the way of what ought to be an opportunity for important institutional reforms. There are exceptions to this. Mike Lee, for example, is out there constantly screaming about the need to do this.

I think he really wants to, but those exceptions are pretty rare. I know Peter wants to leap in here, but just let me say one more thing about that. Because the Republicans are going to be accused of killing at least 23 million people no matter what they pass for a health care bill. That's the rhetoric that's out there, that it's mean, even the president agrees, and that people will die. So they're going to be tarred with the worst possible outcome no matter what they do, but what they do is actually going to be such a timid half measure

that they'll get all of the hatred and opprobrium, and they'll get absolutely none of the accomplishment by actually changing and reforming something. So we have a party that is simultaneously making it easy to demonize themselves and also being utterly inefficacious in doing what we sent there to do. That's just not a question. That's just a complaint. Peter? So, Yuval, I just want to make sure I understand the reforms you have in mind.

One is to bring the entitlement programs under annual review. So those things get considered. They're not simply taken for granted every single year. That's one, correct? And then the other one, this one I'm more or less guessing at. You want to get back to the 12, what was it down the whole federal government, 12 appropriations bills as in days of old instead of this one gigantic bill which produces this game of chicken and gets voted on at midnight each time.

Is that, those are the two principal points you'd like or what would you like to see? I certainly agree on the first point. So I think that the fact that we call the entitlement programs permanent in the budget is a way for Congress to fool itself into not messing around call the entitlement programs permanent in the budget is a way for congress to fool itself into not messing around with the entitlement programs but they're not permanent congress could change them anytime they're law like anything else right uh thinking about them that way would make a big difference set on the second point i would actually go further than that i think the the 12 now 13 because of Homeland Security appropriations bills are themselves the product of the 1974 budget process.

And I actually think those are too big. I think Congress should think about the budget in much smaller chunks and should legislate all the time. I would say that in a Congress now where we don't have earmarks, where members are not throwing in little tiny bits of pork for their district in the way they used to, the distinction that Congress makes between authorizing and appropriating, between creating a program and then funding it, doesn't really make a lot of sense anymore. And I think it would make more sense for Congress to legislate the federal government's spending in smaller chunks, program by program, where authorizing and appropriating is done together,

and Congress makes a decision about what the program will consist of and how much we're going to spend on it. That would be a much bigger, as I say, institutional reform. It would be a new budget process. Congress created a new budget process for itself in the 1940s. It did it again in the 1970s, and it's time to do it again, thinking about the 21st century Congress and thinking about a much more conservative congressional majority than was in place the last time they created the budget process. Yuval, let me ask you about a couple of reforms. Well, these reforms would simply be peeling back reforms that the Republicans themselves have put in place.

So I'm about to ask you questions that this will, if you say anything nice about this, it'll be politically incorrect, but I want to hear what you have to say. So it is said, in fact, a friend of mine said it over drinks here in Washington the other evening. Nobody likes to say it in public, but limiting committee chairman to terms of six years is a problem, point one of two. In the old days when committee chairmen went on and on and on, yes, you ended up with some senile southern figures running committees. But by and large, the institution of Congress was able to function. Those old committee chairmen were able to get deals done. Point two, earmarks. It was a terrible mistake to remove earmarks because although it sounds good, you're no longer giving individual members the opportunity to stick a bridge in their district into a bill on agriculture.

In fact, the kind of log rolling, deal making, I'll vote for you if you vote for me, that used to go on in Congress is essential. It is essential. It is a tool of governance for the leadership, and it's a way of lubricating the entire system so that that machine on Capitol Hill produces important legislation. Committee Chairman and earmarks, Yuval? So I am with you or with your friend halfway. I think that you don't want to recreate powerful committee chairman and earmarks because the combination of that means that all that those powerful committee chairman do is earmark. And then every fence post in Scranton is named for Jim McDade and back where we were. I think that a powerful committee chairman could make a lot of sense in Congress, in a Congress without earmarks, where what they do is help advance a process that is an incremental, smaller-piece budget process of the sort that I'm describing, but not an earmark process. I think Congress was right to get rid of earmarks. I think it was a very important advance in the direction of the kind of way of approaching government that we need. And I do certainly see the arguments that people

make for how earmarks help to oil the machine and keep things moving. But I think Congress has to think about what it is that it wants to keep moving. Legislating for its own sake is not the point. What Congress needs to do now is clean up an enormous mess created by the Great Society 40 and 50 years ago. And the way to do that would require some very substantial programmatic reforms and some very big changes to how American government works. I think it would require a lot of devolution to how American government works. I think it would require a lot of devolution to states and localities. It would require some new thinking and a lot of big programs. Earmarks are going to get in the way of all that.

I think a powerful committee chairman could help in rethinking the way that the committee process works. I also think that replacing the Congressional Budget Office with an open source budget score, which you can now do, the technology exists for that, would also help enormously so that someone like Ben Sasse or Mike Lee could get a score on a crazy idea they have, even if they don't happen to be the chairman of the Finance Committee. Explain how that would work. That would be a stroke of sheer genius. The only reason I'm still talking is because I don't let you go until we get at least one stroke of genius out of you. Oh, boy. Well, this could take a long time. Well, so this is an argument that I've been trying to advance for the last five or six

years, and the fact that it makes people on the Hill very mad seems to me to be a very good sign about how much it could change. So the Congressional Budget Office also was created by the 1974 budget reforms, by the same bill that created the entire budget process. And the idea was basically a very technocratic idea. You get a bunch of economists together and they're going to tell you what each bill will produce over the next 10 years and then you know. The trouble is the power they have is immense, and they work in secret behind a veil, and they just give you a number. And they say, well, this will cut 23 million people off their insurance.

And every conservative health economist in the country is banging his head against the wall for a week after that comes out, but there's nothing you can do about it. They're banging his head against the wall because the number doesn't seem right. He can't figure out how they reach the number. Exactly, and they don't tell you how, and you can't work with them. So today, if you want to publish a paper in an economics journal, you have to put your model online, even in political science. The model you're using has to be public. The CBO is scoring something and they could also play around with it and propose ideas and think differently about how it could be improved. Part of the problem that the structure of CBO creates now is that somebody like Mike

Lee, who has a lot of very creative ideas, can never get them scored. He's a backbencher. He's not on the right committees and good luck. You have to put it out there and if it ever gets anywhere, then after two years of work, the CBO will tell you, well, we think this would crash the budget. It would make a lot more sense for Mike Lee to be able to have somebody in his office who can run the CBO open source model, and all kinds of ideas can be tried out. And we can have a sense of why the official score looks the way it does, and we can also improve on it. So the technology is obviously there to do this.

The resistance to it is really about protecting the power of basically, honestly, an entrenched bureaucracy in Congress. And it would be easy to blow that up now. And again, because what we need to do is not grow the great society state, but pick up the pieces that's left behind and think very differently about American government in the next coming decades. We have to think about institutional reform. We have to think about what are the tools we need to make conservative governance possible. And we control the Congress and we control the state legislatures. We can make these tools, but we're just not thinking in these ways right now.

The reform of CBO that you just proposed would require what? A piece of legislation? Yep, it would require a law. CBO was created by statute, so a law passed by Congress, signed by the president. Got it.

I think this Congress and this president could do that. What's missing is that law. That's one of the things they've, one thing they could get done before the August recess, just get it all right. I'm curious how it would be spun. Who would it hurt? I mean who would be negatively impacted by this so that the New York Times could fulminate and worry about the evil intent behind this? I think what you'd find is some kind of an anti-science argument, right?

Yes, yes, yes. All these rubes who want to play games when, in fact, we already have the authoritative MIT-trained economists who can tell us what all these things would cost and what their effects would be. Yeah, that would be it. Expertise, because expertise actually will be going to some sort of medieval thing where the budget will be placed on a raft, and if it sinks, then it's sorcery.

Okay, alright. Well, thanks a lot for coming by today. John, I don't mean to run along without giving you a chance to say what you meant to say. That is alright for me. I was just wondering if we have the technology present today to clone Mike Lee. We could use about 70 more of him, and that would –

We sure could. You know, I will tell you, the one person in Congress who has proposed a bill to do what I'm suggesting with CBO is Mike Lee. So if you can give me 60 of him, I'm on. Yes. Well, maybe one day when we have the majority of the state houses, the House of him, I'm on. Yes, well, maybe one day when we have the majority of the state houses, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the presidency, maybe when that crazy day comes, I know, I'm just dreaming.

It sounds like nonsense. Yuval, thanks for joining us today. We'll talk to you again down the road, and good luck and enjoy the rest of your weekend. Thanks a lot. Thank you. You're welcome. Thanks. Doesn't it seem, though, sometimes as though we're saying, you know, these are great ideas that they could put together. And we know it isn't going to happen. I mean, all these marvelous theoreticians that we have with these great and grand ideas, but it's not going to happen. I don't know. That's the count.

Despair. I just I think despair is not allowed i'm talking a reasonable evaluation of the congress and the president that we have right now if you had a thousand dollars to bet and you had to bet that it would be done oh i see yeah yeah yeah sure you know you're right as a political reality no it's not going to happen between it won't happen between now and the August recess. On the other hand, you know who was in favor of, I actually, I wish I'd known about this proposal when I interviewed him, but Mick Mulvaney, the director of Donald Trump's Office of Management and the Budget, said in my interview with him that the Congressional Budget Office has far, far too much power. There are a lot of people who understand sophisticated scoring who are outside the CBO.

So, you know, if you've got a director of OMB, that's the budget official in the administration. If you've got Mike Lee, all you need is Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan to say let's do it. Yes, people talk about the CBO, but do they ever talk about the SBO?

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So we're going to give the next spot to John. Okay. Busting and bursting with testimonials though. He may be, you know, this week, by the way, marks the 30th anniversary of the tear down this wall speech. And by some odd coincidence, we happen to have the author right here. Peter, you're going to be giving a lecture soon, a ricochet podcast to meet up. Peter, you're going to be giving a lecture soon, a Ricochet podcast meetup. Oh, that's right.

I'm glad you remember. And I don't want you to give everything away because otherwise, why would people show up? But tease them a little with some of the backstory on the speech and how 30 years later it looks. Here's the tease. The tease is there was a big, big fight over that speech. And you called me the author of the speech, and that's true in the narrowest possible sense.

I wrote the darn thing. But I wouldn't have written it for anybody other than Ronald Reagan. I had worked for George H.W. Bush. I knew Howard Baker. In other words, I knew people who might have been president in place of Ronald Reagan. I would only have written that for Ronald Reagan, and Ronald Reagan alone would have done what he did, which was to overrule objections from across the government in order to deliver that speech. So I'll tell that story in more detail. But the author of that speech, the one who called it into being and the one who stood up for it and then delivered it was Ronald Reagan.

It's a story of, you know, Rob thinks I get sappy, but Reagan was a great man. He just was a great man. And he seems to me to loom larger and larger as the years go by. What do we make of Germany now? Well, you know, what do we make? All human affairs are disappointing in some way. It's easier if we just stick to 30 years ago.

Well, we're glad Germany is back together. Yeah, we're happy Germany is reunited. I actually, so, you know, for maybe 10 years after he left office, maybe that first decade, it made sense to say, what would Ronald Reagan have thought of this or this or that? We still in some ways inhabited the same world that he had inhabited. But at this point, asking what would, and I get this a lot, what would Ronald Reagan have made of Donald Trump's wall?

What would Ronald Reagan have made of Germany today? Is almost like asking, would James Madison have supported the Cavaliers or the Golden State Warriors? I mean, it just doesn't, it no longer even coheres as a question because we live in such a different world. Anyway, so I can give you my own view. I am sort of, I am kind of, this is a hard thing to say in Washington at this moment, which is where I'm sitting, which is just in a froth and a fever, but I am broadly pro-Trump on NATO, meaning the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, will only function

well if it is made up of self-respecting nations, and the members cannot be self-respecting unless they do the minimum of ponying up the amount of money that the agreement themselves, to which they are signatories, requires them to pony up. The idea that they've been free-riding is corrosive to them, including the Germans, and I believe that the president has been right to call them on it. And the second point is that the main threat, Russia, is a problem. But Vladimir Putin does not have tanks on the Elbe. We are not in the old days. The larger threat, in my judgment, is going to come from the South. And NATO has to pull itself together to work out how to handle that threat. Donald Trump, it seems to me, senses that, and in my judgment, stipulating that everything he does, he does crudely and blunderingly, but still the underlying issue is he's on to something in both

cases, I believe. And so what am I... Go ahead. From the South, you mean immigration? I mean immigration and terrorism. Imm immigration isn't really the right word because the way it's been going it's been i mean we know for example that of those millions of supposed refugees who streamed north and who mangal a merkle permitted to enter germany over a million because it was a million in the first year alone we know for example that they were overly overwhelmingly young males now refugees would include women and children and old people. Young males are not, they're not purely fleeing. Something else is going on there. So I'm not sure that I accept the word refugees or immigration. But the growing

population in Africa and the Middle East, the constant strife there, the shrinking population in Europe, and the terrorism. If you think through the next five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, that seems to me where the threat lies. And that's where NATO has to pull itself together and work out how to handle this. Well, their model will be Germany, not Hungary. Hey, a couple of weeks ago,

we had Dennis Prager talking about Adam Carolla. And today we've got Adam Carolla talking about Dennis Prager. They've got a movie that they're working on, and we're here to tell you why you should contribute it. Adam, Evergreen University is the latest marquee college. Lately they've announced that they are no longer going to be tolerant. They're done with tolerance. They're tired of tolerance because tolerance just allows evil to flourish.

You're a representative, representative apparently of that evil. Uh, tell us what this, what this movie attempts to, uh, to do to, to, to wise up people and open their eyes.

Well, uh, essentially, I mean, and by the way, I don't want to correct you, but you had, uh,

Dennis around and talk about Amcarola and I haven't had Amcarola. I mean, he's going to talk about Amcarola. Oh, just do it. Just tola. Just to be clear. Dennis and I, I've been a big fan of Dennis for a million years. We finally got together a few years ago, and we became thick as thieves. And I think we both, just from slightly different vantage points,

have been watching what's going on on campuses for the last couple of years. And finally, somebody from Dennis's camp said, why don't you guys make a movie about it? And we just thought it was a capital idea. Are you going to be reenacting some examples of the great and wonderful open-hearted tolerance that some of the speakers have received? Or are you actually going to be going to the heart of the beast and seeing what they do to you? We're going to go to the heart of the beast.

We're going to see what they do to us. I'm going to hide behind Dennis. He's called Spinnish Joe. Yeah, he's big. And we're also going to do some reenactment stuff. It's not going to be a straight documentary. It's going to be a film. So it'll be young Dennis and young Adam, reenactments from her childhood and things that brought us to where we're at today, what shaped us.

Well, where we're at today is increasingly resorting to baseball bats and bike locks in towels. I mean, a few years ago when you went to a college campus, you saw a lot of people upset and blowing air horns and looking angry and shaking their fists. Now there's violence. Now these anti-fa types with their masked faces and black hoods are actually in the business of beating people with sticks. It's escalated quickly, hasn't it?

Yeah, it has. And, you know, it's not their fault. They're 19 and, you know, have been huffing copier-toner for the last five years. It's the adults' fault. It's the administration's fault. It's the campus police who are getting called off and pulled to stand down. It's the, you know the police, the actual police, who are just setting up a perimeter and watching people burn things and smash Starbucks windows. We need to bring back the rule of law.

It's insane. It's starting to spin out of control. I mean, you see what's going on in the airplanes. You saw what went on in the airport a few weeks ago, this whole melee because they canceled the flight. I mean, I'm looking at video footage of women punching other women while cops are trying to separate them. Nobody would throw a punch when a cop showed up back in the day. You would have a fight if the cop showed up. It was time to scram. Now now think of what we're doing in front of cops think about that crazy insane cowardly doctor who claimed his nose was broken and hammered the lawsuit that guy was

pulled 159 security to get off of the plane we have no respect anymore for authority well adam this is john gabriel and it seems like every time I fly now, there's a millennial with an emotional support aardvark or something with them. I don't think the emotional support animals are doing their part exactly. The great thing about this movie, go to nosafespaces.com and you'll be kicked over to an Indiegogo site. There's a great video kind of giving you a preview of what you'll see. I saw a few of my friends in the video.

It's great. Obviously, Hollywood is not going to fund this movie on their own. We have a great idea. Let's take on the PC culture on campus. What does crowdfunding do to the model? It seems like it's completely upending it and uh just reaching out directly to people yeah well it's it's doing what i'm able to do with my podcast which is sidestep sort of hollywood and corporate american just go right right to the people yeah hollywood is you know they have 15 movies uh on

fracking the uh the perils of fracking that are in the pipeline. I was actually thinking to myself, you know, it's a popular Hollywood term to say, I have a couple movies in the pipeline, but I bet they're not even going to be able to say in the pipeline anymore. It's got a negative connotation to it. Like Mark Ruffalo and Leonardo DiCaprio have announced you can't use the term in the pipeline. Well, in the solar panel, in the windmill. They can't say it's green-lighted either, because that's ableist against people who don't distinguish that color. Yeah, oh, that's true, yeah, yeah.

And what about Kermit? Doesn't that bring his nationality How dare we make a mockery of Kermit It's specious to say the least All of this stuff is just making me very angry Very angry, Adam As a matter of fact, your very name Triggers me because it

Goes back to some quasi-biblical Notion of man being created before Woman And I believe there's an art exhibit now that has God as a black woman creating Eve, who's black, first. Does it seem sometimes as though it's not necessary for us to get an equality of ideas? The old ideas have to be destroyed, defeated, and intentionally forgotten. In other words, college isn't about an inquiry into knowledge now.

It's about a determined act to upend and eliminate the idea of Western culture. Well, the problem is it never worked. And here's what I mean. It's like how many times in the last 20 years have we heard women preach about the new definition of beauty and how Lena Dunham is beautiful and that's new? And I've told every woman I know, no guy is attracted to this. We are doing, I don't mean Lena Dunham, but I mean, you can't tell us what to be attracted to. We will know what we're attracted to. It's usually slender and with a nice bosom attached to it.

And it has long hair on top. And that's it. You can preach all you want. You can do as many covers on Vanity Fair. You can announce this woman is morbidly obese, is the most beautiful woman in the world. We're not going for it. And whatever it is you say about our society or what the definition of beauty is or how thirdhand smoke is a firsthand killer, you can say whatever you want. We're never listening.

All we're doing is trying to get money and see if we can hook up with someone who fits our definition of beauty. You sound exactly like somebody who didn't cry during Wonder Woman. I'll bet you didn't cry during the credits of Wonder Woman. What I love about Wonder Woman, of course, is that we're told that this is the first step in female empowerment among movies, and the heroine of it is as gorgeous and as much of the ideal as you can imagine. But yet it wasn't a couple of days before magazine came out with a question, why can't we have a fat femme woman of color, Wonder Woman? When is that going to happen?

And, of course, the idea is Hollywood doesn't have that in their pipeline. Yeah. No, they don't. And, yeah, she's incredibly skinny, which is interesting. But also, here's what I want to say to everybody. You could have a black Santa and a black Wonder Woman and a black Jesus and a black Adam and a black Abel and Cain and Ham. You could have every Batman. Everyone could be black.

It's still not going to do anything for the black community. The group that sort of realizes this is the Asians. They're just out kicking ass. They're not really worrying about an Asian 007 because they realize it's not going to help their community. Right. And I think any time Us Weekly praises a female for being brave for disrobing on a cover, that's never a good sign. Wow, you are really brave to do that. So that's never a good sign. Now, I know you visited Cal State Northridge. Ann Coulter was due to speak there.

Of course, Ann Coulter was going to Berkeley at the time, too, where she was. You were rebuffed from Northridge. Ann Colter's talk was canceled because of all the threats she was getting. What did that tell you? And frankly, did you get great video? Yeah, we did end up getting getting we got canceled the first time and we ended up uh rebooting and got back up for the second time and if you go to no safe place.com you can see us up on stage at some really short two minute snippets but uh a good dynamic between dennis and

myself uh you know we're not lightning rods of controversy. I essentially, I don't even have a political aim other than the truth. It's just what so ends up happening is the left is so far away from the truth that I end up disagreeing with the left all the time. But it's like I say to my wife when she says, why do you win every argument? And I say, I only argue when I'm right. So my batting average is exceedingly high because I don't have to defend positions that are wrong. Peter Robinson here, I'm surprised your wife has permitted you to live this long.

Listen, question. The feedback on your podcast, we're talking about college kids, and you must hear constantly from kids in college. Is it more along the lines of how dare you, you white sexist pig, or is it more along the lines of

go for it, man. You're talking for us. What do you get? You know, obviously the fans that I have who listen to the podcast cast are self-selecting groups, so I don't get the general pop, so to speak, of your college campuses. And my fans understand that I have no fight in the game.

I don't have kids in college, so I don't have a fight in the game. I don't have kids in college. Sorry, I don't have a dog in the fight or a chicken in the fight or whatever. Whoever's fighting. A rooster in the fight. My feeling is I never went to college

and my kids are some months away from going to college. I'm simply speaking the truth and I'm mostly doing it because I think the kids are miserable. I think college is supposed to be the best time of your life, and these guys are stuck pigs. I mean, they are miserable, and they should be going to football games and doing pig stands. And again, it's this sort of what the left breeds, which is this guy.

I grew up with it, which is my mom is very far left. We grew up watching Roots and Billy Jack. And I'd sit there and she'd be like, how can you enjoy your TV dinner when you see what we've done to the Native Americans, the indigenous people, the African-Americans? Like, I'd like to enjoy my Salisbury steak by Swanson. Can I do that? How can you enjoy your life? It's a misery-based political movement. It's all misery-based.

It started off with the Indian by the side of the road crying. It's endless shots of polluted rivers, baby pelicans covered in crude oil. It's all misery-based, and it's all doom and gloom-based. Of course they're unhappy. You'd be unhappy, too, if you thought we're going to be out of breathable air and drinkable water in 15 minutes. Between the stuck pig and the cockfighting, there is so much animal violence in your speech, I can't even. And I'm getting hungry, too, by the way. I'm just talking about the chicken and the bacon.

You're right. It's miserablism. And there are people who thrive on it because it sets them apart and makes them better people, but it corrodes the soul, and eventually there's no joy left in you. All you can muster is that single tear of the Indian standing by this polluted stream. Of course, he wasn't even a real Native American. He was a fraud. American who took on the Iron Eyes Cody persona and eventually was mistaken as this great symbol of the indigenous culture when actually he was an Italian actor. So, Behind the Misery is essentially a long-believed, mutually

agreed-upon fraud. But exposing that... Well, hold on. If they ever reshoot that, if they ever do a 2017 version of that it'll be with an african-american woman who's heavy set right who will just have come from the next wonder woman movie the second one because the first one but i just i love the fact that in supporting and endorsing this wonder woman they're they're also having to support somebody who was a

soldier in the is army, which has just got to gall them down to the bottom of it. But everything is intersectionally problematic. Alright, good luck. Go to IndieGo. Well, we've got a link on our site. Go there. Let Adam and Dennis make this movie. It's going to be great.

Of course, follow Adam on Twitter and everywhere else. Thanks for dropping by the Ricochet Podcast again today. Thanks for having me, guys. Thanks, Adam. And everyone see the hammer and read his books. They're fantastic. You know, the idea somehow that college should be – he's absolutely right.

College should be fun. You should be going to homecoming games and having slow gin as you cuddle under a blanket with your bestie. But now it's all about making a safe space for these people where really none will exist in the world except, of course, for your home. John, if you wanted to feel safe at home, what would you do? Well, James, I'm so glad you asked that. You see, millions of Americans get home security because they want to feel safe when they go to bed at night and it's possible that while you're breaking for lunch burglars are breaking into your home and while you're doing your best work they're ready to do their worst

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You can arm your system. You can say that you're home. You can control these functions from your phone, which cool indeed so that's simply safe.com well before we go gentlemen um what do you think the next week's big narrative is going to be i think we're very quickly going to be done with the shooter because that's that doesn't um that doesn't help the left and we're going to go now beyond r Russia and to the joy that they feel at the fact that Mueller is looking for everything, anything, and eventually will find something because, of course, there's always something to find.

Now, they're not going to find anything that's impeachable, but they're going to find stuff that, well, I don't know. I don't know what they're going to find. Guys, speculate. Oh, they'll find bad judgment. going to find stuff that um well i don't know i don't know what they're going to find guys speculate oh they'll find bad judgment they'll find inappropriate behavior they'll find this they'll find that i think you're exactly right there's as best i can tell we'll have to have maybe a week from now we'll have a andy mccarthy back on to tell us the state of the legal state of play as best i can tell there is just no evidence, no evidence that the

president engaged in obstruction of justice. Where was it? I was reading this the other day. Somebody said, now wait a minute. The president of the United States has the right to direct FBI investigations, and that includes the right to end them if you wish to do so. If John Kennedy had directed J. Edgar Hoover to stop investigating Martin Luther King, would that have been an obstruction of justice? Of course not. So even if Donald Trump fired James Comey because of this Russian investigation, we know that the investigation continues. We know from Comey's own testimony that Trump said two or three different times he wanted to get to the bottom of it. If his people were involved, it would be good to know and so forth. But even if he had fired California tomorrow because being 3,000 miles away from this town of Washington, D.C., is still too close.

Yeah, so it seems like they have been investigating this for well over a year now. And what we get is smoke, a lot of smoke. This looks scary. And then they peel under that first layer and there's more smoke and there's just with as much leaking as we have seen um over the past year with seemingly as uh peter says washington gone mad uh the intel agencies the law enforcement agencies are just leaking everything to the press it seems and uh we just keep finding more smoke it seems to me that much of Washington decided to prosecute Trump the day after the election and they've spent every day since then trying to

find the crime to enable them to do that it just seems like every day right before the nightly news records there's another huge scoop with 22 unnamed sources, and it's all getting ridiculous. In our current environment, especially with that horrible shooting this week and just the madness in the streets, whether it's on a college campus or an Antifa march breaking Starbucks windows and the like, if Washington – if our political class wants to spark something far, far worse, trying to remove a legally elected president in this environment would be the way to do it. Everybody just needs to. Catholic isn't in danger. Let's work together, get a couple good things passed. But this constant hashtag resist silliness. Just please, take a step back. You do not like where this could end.

Why don't we work together for a little bit at least? But that would be people denying the work that was done by the greatest generation. And by the greatest generation, I mean the people who came of age in the 1960s. Because the period between 1960 and 1972, 73 is the holiest of periods is when the greatest things were done for this country it is when consciousness was raised when the age of aquarius led to people who themselves were so enlightened that they were able to discern international politics and grievances with a degree of specificity and genius that no other generation had ever been able to do before and And then they brought down a president. And after that was elevated the sainted Jimmy Carter

and things were good. Goodness came from all of that wonderment. So if we have another and lost wars and presidents thrown out the window, that's good because in the boomer narrative, that was the apotheosis of Western civilization. That was what it was all leading up to. Oh, for those glory days again.

Hey, thanks for listening to the podcast, folks. Before we go ahead, I tell you, Vistaprint, Bolin Branch, and SimpliSafe, all those guys got the coupon code RICOSHET, and you can get great deals if you go there. Please support them for supporting us. We might also add that the Ricochet store is open 24-7 with lots of stuff with the R

brand that you can wear and wear about town and answer the questions. And answer questions, if you will, perhaps by going to iTunes and leaving a review. Those reviews allow new listeners to discover the show, and that helps keep the show going. And remember, that new tier, $2.50 a month, cheap, as Mad Magazine used to say. Podcast listeners, join today on a brand new tier. You get to comment on the podcast and read everything on the site, including the member feed. Thank you for sticking with us.

Thanks to our guests. Thanks, John, for stepping in for Rob. Thank you, Peter. We'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 3.0. Next week. Thanks, guys. Terrific. I can't seem to face up to the facts I'm tense and nervous and I can't relax I can't sleep cause my bed's on fire Don't touch me, I'm a real live wire

Psycho killer Can't you see Ba ba ba ba Ba ba ba ba Better run run run Run run run Run away Oh

Psycho killer Can't you see Ba ba ba ba Ba ba ba ba Oh, psycho killer. Let's get sick. Fa-fa-fa-fa, fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa. Better run, run, run, run. Run, run, run away. Oh. Ay-yi-yi-yi-yi-yo. Ricochet

Join the conversation You start a conversation You can't even finish it You're talking a lot But you're not saying anything When I have nothing to say My lips are sealed Say something once

Why say it again? Psycho killer. Kiss kissy.