The Ricochet Podcast - Holy Moses

Episode Date: January 16, 2021

Another in a seemingly endless series of very busy weeks but we’ve got you covered. First up: The Oracle himself, Governor Haley Barbour. He’s got a perspective of 50 years in politics, so we thought we have him on to see what he thinks of the last few months. Prepared to get schooled. Then, as freedom of speech on digital platforms –like the one you’re reading right now– is now one of the most... Source

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comes next. I'm muddling through. I have a dream. This nation will rise up. podcast, which, incidentally, comes next. mob violence goes against everything i believe in and everything our movement stands for no true supporter of mine could ever endorse political violence i'm the president and you're fake news mr gorbache, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lytleks. Today we talk to Haley Barber about the future of the GOP

and David Sachs about the future of tech. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 527. I'm James Lilacs here in Minneapolis, where I've just finished shoveling a block and a half of widowmaker slush. It's so named because men of a certain age attempt to lift it and the ticker goes. But I'm still here. Good. So my wife is not a widow yet.

Peter Robinson in California, where I imagine it's absolutely sunny and beautiful. The Elysian fields in which he tromps are green and pleasant. And Rob Long in New York. And Rob, as we were just discussing before the show began, a fact that's always interesting to people. You were saying that New York, the mood has changed. The mood has shifted. Yeah, it has. I mean, partly I was away, and so I didn't notice all those little changes that now I know.

I can now tell. i was away and so i didn't notice all those little changes that now i know i cannot tell i think um you know it's it's funny if you live in new york city and you are a liberal or you're a conservative matter there's a total failure of government everywhere you're the chief executive of the city is a monstrous incompetent um and and worse like not even a hapless incompetent but an active and irritating and and and an enraging incompetent the governor is a meretricious uh smug arrogant i think you're saying things about cuomo that are true and of course we don't have to go about we don't have to rehearse what i feel about the president uh the chief executive officer of every branch of government that or every section

or tranche of government that has any jurisdiction over me is uh monstrous and monstrous and i just it's just you know but i think the problem in new york City is that the mayor is so dumb and so awful and that the rollout of the vaccines was so, so ludicrous. And now it's changing. But he got the message. I mean, I cannot wait until he is relegated to the ash heap of history. May we pause for a moment to meditate and feel a little sorrow on what once was, in two ways, in what once was in New York and what once was the man Rudy Giuliani. When I was writing my book on the Republican Party, which was published in 2000, it's now totally out of date. You appear in it, Rob.

That's how we met, isn't it? I think that is how we met. But I spent a day with Rudyy giuliani the mayor of new york in city hall and i sat in on his talk to the mayor radio show and it was an amazing performance you may not like rudy's person i mean rudy was still rudy but boy was he a mayor meaning a lady would call in and say, look, I'm in Queens. He said, we're in Queens. She said, I've got trouble with the garbage pickup.

He said, where are you? He knew the nearest intersection. He knew exactly what the route should have been. I mean, it was just amazing. People were calling in with potholes and trouble with the garbage. And he was right on top of every borough. There's also that great story of him um in doing one of these i mean the early the the the nascent crazy rudy was there too but it was incredibly entertaining and perfect

for new york someone called up and said how come the city won't let me like to keep a cat or a dog as a pet or a hamster or even a snake but i couldn't keep a ferret and just somehow that just hit rudy wrong because why what's wrong with you that's why you you have such a lot and he just went off on this guy and it was great it was like exactly what you want a mayor of new york city to do and sort of be incredibly irrationally furious uh but in the spirit of the city um so i don't know you know it'll it'll all come back as it always does but i i i fear for the independent restaurants i fear mean, look, the employment numbers came out this morning, and they're terrible, but they're terrible specifically in leisure and hospitality. And that's a huge part of what keeps New York City running.

Well, we presumed, we didn't think these guys were gods. We didn't think that they were these brilliant technocrats who could instantly spring into action and solve all of our problems. But ever since COVID hit and the lockdowns began, we've been surprised at the systemic collapse of authority and the idea that these guys know what they're doing. So for a vaccine rollout at this point to be bungled, you would think that they'd had time to plot and plan. You would think that when they realized the extent of this, somebody would have said, all right, you guys over there, long view, sit down, figure out how we're going to distribute the vaccine when we get it.

But it's ad hoc. It's make it up as you go along and every single step of the way here. When you have governors and the mayor of Chicago saying it's absolutely essential to open up the restaurants, it needs to be done. Turning on a dime without a single word about how they previously had said that this was the road to death. And here in Minnesota, the governor's emergency orders have been extended another 30 days because of course, why not? And so we have a simultaneous investment in almost unlimited power in these people at the same time they reveal themselves to be utterly incapable of deserving to wield it. And that's top to bottom. That's absolutely top of the country to the absolute almost bottom.

You see that, at least in those people who are making policies. In the federal system, which I, of course revere um the the problems of the leadership have been revealed right i i make no i i make no i mean this is not no surprise to anybody that i'm not a fan of the sitting president at all i have very strong feelings about wait a minute hold on i'd like to go a little. However, the federal government did its part. They said, look at all this money we have, which is the thing about the federal government that's the best. They said, we're going to give you these big pharma companies. We're going to give you all this money if you come up with a vaccine that works.

They came up with three. There's three vaccines, really. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine apparently is very promising. They did. The federal government, to the extent that it could, did a big, big job. really the johnson johnson vaccine apparently is very promising they did the the the federal government to the extent that it could did a big big job that and and if you ask the governor cuomo he was not caught unaware by this by the by the process of giving people vaccines he did not feel like he wasn't thinking about how to organize it the problem was he was thinking too much about organizing it he was obsessed with who was going to get it who wasn't going to get obsessed with the list of punishments that you would you would suffer if you gave it to somebody else they had this enormous right the first thing they did was come up with a regulatory structure

that was the first thing they did that took a month because that's what they love and that to me is this this should be a shining moment for conservatives federalism works the. The governors are incompetent and should be replaced by conservatives. The free market did its part and came up with not one, not two, but three and probably four, when we're all said and done, useful and valuable vaccines. The public sector failed. Who would you rather have giving you the vaccine, Jeff Bezos or Governor Cuomo? Right. But the problem with Cuomo sitting down and saying, yes, we're going to think a lot about the vaccine for six months.

We're going to come up with a strategy as to who gets it according to their position on the grievance pyramid. That's not what I mean. I mean, for example, what I keep reading is that everybody who tries to get an appointment in New York and goes to the website has to answer 54 questions before they finally get to the point that says there aren't any appointments available today. And so you have a population that itself is not, you know, you got the, we got to get to Denny's at six o'clock before, you know, the rush starts. The certain demographic is not going to be all that great at answering 54 drop-down fields on their site. So the simplicity, I mean,

designing a simple, effective, fast thing is what they should have done and they didn't do it but you're right i mean the government did give us vaccines by throwing an awful lot of money at private enterprises so i would i wouldn't say yay federal government for that i would say that's the baseline of competence for me understand who can do it and help them but that's not been the rest of the response all this is fast may i may i make observations steal observations from two people both of them a lot smarter than i am and one is dr j two other people so three two additional people and one is dr j jay baddha charia and jay makes the point that this is as rob i think used the phrase, it is a kind of systemic failure of the government, of our democracy.

But here's why. In the federal government, which we all revere, you know who to get angry with. I've got a congresswoman. You can look up these people and write to their office and say you jerk right but when it came to covid the political responsibility was so diffuse that even donald trump didn't know what wait who there's a county health official in san mateo california who can do certain things the governor of california can do other things we've got the The whole system is so diffused and so confusing and so misunderstood, simply not understood by anyone in the political system, let alone ordinary voters. You know, over and over again, I've had conversations out here. Our county health official has acted yet again in a draconian.

How do you get at a county health official? This poor person is in your crosshairs yeah well it's metaphorically it's metaphorically we don't even quite know how how do you how do you get it somebody like okay point one point two this is this is uh having a chat the other day with steve hilton steve hilton who was an advisor to david cameron prime minister cameron he knows politics very very well and of course, Steve now has a show on Sunday nights on Fox called The Next Revolution. Steve is a friend. He's a neighbor here

in Northern California. And he said the internal political dynamic of this one is a problem. Because everybody in the political system realizes that the press and voters will punish them more for not doing

enough to prevent COVID deaths than they will be punished for all the misery and mayhem which is diffuse, which nobody's counting, which we know in a vague way is taking place. Depression, suicides, drug abuse, and so so forth all the pathologies that come from unemployment they're diffuse nobody's counting them they're not a story and so and steve said it takes real political courage to stand up to that and we you know there are examples of very few but ron desantis governor of california has stood up to that dynamic. Governor of Florida. I beg your pardon. Governor of California in my sweetest dreams. You had a little petite stroke there, Peter.

Yes, yes, yes. Yes, the wish was the father of the thought. He stood up to it. And what happened to him? He got skewered and lambasted and roasted by the press week in and week out. Now that it's demonstrable that floor is florida is doing pretty well in terms of covid he's okay but what what a hiding he took in the press and from his own public for a long time anyhow those are two problems they're pretty

specific to this horrible thing i'm just still stuck like my snag my sweater on a nail of the point where peter said the federal government which we all revere well no federalism the federalism oh thank you thank you okay i'm a local is better guy and but uh the only local the only local organization that i tend to revere at this point are the guys who plow our streets because they're pretty good and they keep getting stuck. And one of the things that I hate to do at this time of the year is to always carry a big bag of kitty litter in my trunk because you get stuck, you got to get out and pour the kitty litter in. So I haven't done that for an awful

long time. Yeah, that's right. We had the kitty litter in the trunk just in case you needed some traction. Some people have grits, some people have pebbles and the rest of it, but grit and pebbles don't work for actual kitty litter, no. Now, let me ask you this. Working from home, that means more time for your morning coffee, right? Or an occasional afternoon nap. I love to take mine at about four. Can't wait for one today. Of course, you have the opportunity for your friends to interact with you more, your furry friends. Let's talk about your furry feline friend walking across your keyboard in the middle of your Zoom call, right?

You know, you love having your cat around, but you don't love being around that litter box. Now, do you? No. Zoom has no olfactory thing, so people on the call really can't tell if the kitty box litter is getting a little high, but you can.

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And trust me, you'll want to sign up for this just for the fun of saying to other people, kittypooclub.com. And now we welcome to the podcast Haley Barber, the former governor of Mississippi and the former chairman of the RNC. She's a founding partner of the BGR Group. And listing all of her other jobs and accomplishments would record a three-hour-long podcast. So let's just say we're happy to have her back here. Welcome.

I want to write a quote by you from Ben Domenico. He said, quote, For many voters, the GOP as a party is largely useless as anything but a hedge against the encroaching cultural war of the left. It's a guardian against a future that the left wants, and that's it. The message of Republicans was anti-Soviet, anti-communist, anti-terrorist, and now it's effectively, when the left takes power, you know, you know, nuns are back in the menu for, end question, end quote. Is it that hopeless, Governor? You were chairman of the party. Has it become useless, or is there some spirit and gumption left in there that can actually get back the old spirit and raw animal vigor. Well, in my experience, when the Republican Party is doing its best, when it's performing best, both in government and in political campaigns, it's when we're the party of ideas.

When we talk about we're for smaller government, and here's why. We're for lower taxes and less spending so the people that work and earn the money get to keep and spend more of what they earn. About rational regulation. I mentioned all three of those because those are things that Donald Trump did, but didn't talk about very much. And I think if you look at the research of the last four years, you will see that about a third of people really liked Trump, liked what he did. And about 40, a little bit more percent, didn't like Trump, didn't like what he did. But there was about 25% of voters, pretty consistently consistently that said they did not like Trump, but they liked the policies that he had and the results of those policies. deal. We had gone from a very, very weak recovery,

economic recovery, the weakest since World War II ended, and we had just great economic growth. Economic growth that more than usual in recessions, the income increases went predominantly to the lower income people. You had more African Americans employed than ever before, lowest unemployment rate among African Americans and among Hispanics or Latinos, depending on what part of the country you're

from. And that got shut off by the government lockdowns, and I'm not criticizing, but what really hurt the economy was government said to businesses it hadn't done anything wrong, whether it's trucking companies or retailers or bars or restaurants or whatever, you can't work. You've got to close. And there's a health reason, we believe, that you've got to close. But that's what stopped this very strong recovery

that in the name of, and again, I'm not being critical of them, to fight the pandemic, there was a huge, massive shutdown of businesses that until then were just making money, employing people, doing great. So I think when the Republican Party is a party of ideas, when we talk about why we're for strong national defense and we talk about why we're against nation building or when we talk about we do not favor giving illegal immigrants free college, Medicaid, free health care. If they come here legally, then that's one thing and that's fine. But you get my point. I think that's what makes us a strong party. And that's what I think President Trump, who, look, got 74 million votes.

I'm not saying he was a terrible politician, because he wasn't. But the fact is, if he'd have spent a lot more time talking about his policies and the results, he'd probably still be president. Haley? Hey, Peter. So we've got headline after headline after headline civil war and the republican party impeachment deepens divisions in the gop on and on and on i've got just a kind of a complex of questions but in a way they all go together have you ever seen this press this overwhelmingly against the Republican Party and in some ways against the values of ordinary America?

And I'm including there getting shut down by Twitter and YouTube and so forth. I had one of my shows censored by YouTube. Little inoffensive little old me got shut off by YouTube for one show I did. And then what the heck is the way forward for the GOP? Well, have I ever seen it worse than this? I was executive director of the State Republican Party in Mississippi in 1974. When President Nixon resigned. And I can remember Mary Louise Smith, the chairman of the National Party, proposing that he appoint a committee to determine whether we ought to change the name of the party.

Wow. Things are so bad, you got to change your name. I would say that's near the bottom. Right. your name, I would say that's near the bottom. I do think what President Trump's encouragement of these demonstrators,

protesters, whatever you want to call them, I don't have any knowledge of what kind of people they are or anything like that. But they got carried away, did something they had no business doing. He had no business instigating.

But look, I also remember when the Democrats, the day after President Trump was inaugurated, had a big demonstration in Washington. The streets were just filled and filled with people. We've had a lot of civil unrest in this country in the last year, and the left is not very critical of a lot of it. In fact, the Democrats stirred on. How many Democrat

members of Congress, before Trump got inaugurated, called for him to be impeached? You know, Peter, you and I grew up when the losing party referred to itself as the loyal opposition. Right. This party refers to itself as if they were some guerrilla army fighting the Nazis. The resistance. And so have I ever seen it this bad before? Well, for the party,

yes. For the country, no. I remember I was a college boy in 1968, which was a tumultuous, crazy year that many, many bad things happened. Murders, assassinations, bombings. But this year, in my opinion, has been worse. Or 2020 was worse than 1968. And of course, the compounding of that by the

pandemic is unbelievable. And candidly, it was the root of some of those things. All the changes of election laws that were done because they were afraid older people, people not in good health, wouldn't go vote because they'd be afraid they'd get sick. We started mail-in voting or walk-in voting in states that had never

had it. Unlike the president, I don't say mail-in voting is bad. Oregon's had mail-in voting for 25 years or more. But I do say that it has to be done right and that a number of states just either didn't have the time, didn't have the expertise, didn't have the desire to make sure that mail-in ballots were actually signed by the person who registered to vote

and match registration signatures and voting signatures. So I don't part of this is the fact that we had a pandemic that is the worst since the Spanish flu in 1918, 1920. And having gone through Katrina and my state bore the brunt of the worst natural disaster in American history, I feel sorry for the people that had to deal with the pandemic. bore the brunt of the worst natural disaster in American history.

I feel sorry for the people that had to deal with the pandemic and are having to deal with it. When we were dealing with Katrina, after four or five days, you pretty well knew what had happened. Right. And pretty well where the problems were going to be. These guys, these governors and the president, they don't know what's going to happen two weeks from now. Hey, Governor, can we just drill down on this a little bit?

Because the polls out yesterday, Quinnipiac, a bunch of them, have Donald Trump somewhere in the high 30s in terms of his popularity. So he's a pretty unpopular exiting president he may actually match uh bill clinton who had of course the pardon scandal when he left which sort of gave george w bush a little bit of a bump when he took office you said the future of the party is in the ideas. So what are those ideas? And before you join, we were talking a little bit about COVID vaccine. It seems like the federal government's response to COVID, in one instance at least, which is to partner in, I think, a very smart way with the private sector to get not one, not two, but three vaccines, probably four at the end of

the spring, that seems like something that Republicans should and conservatives should be pointing to. And the public sector response, which I live in New York, has been sort of dismal at best, is a sign that the private sector did their part and the public sector didn't. Is that a winning strategy for us, or should we just kind of tiptoe away from COVID and pick something else? We shouldn't tiptoe away from it. not only on the market, but being used and applied in well under a year. This is record time. This is moonshot stuff, right? Yes.

For somebody to get this done by the FDA. And it's not because the FDA is not competent. They're supposed to be cautious. But everybody knew what the states were here. And so three, and you've got other things that have happened here on the medical side. Peter made one of the points, the press hates Trump like the Pope hates sin. Actually, a little bit more. This Pope actually is on the fence when it Pope hates sin. Actually, a little bit more.

This Pope actually is on the fence when it comes to sin. Okay. The Pope hates Trump like Pope John Paul hates sin. There we go. That took his field a little bit. And look, the coverage is 90% negative of Trump and was and it was in

2016 and 2017. And it's, you know, we've become as a country where people watch on television the station, the network that they think they agree with. And so that

actually makes the press bias worse. CNBC, I'm sorry, MSNBC and CNN are over there fighting for the same viewers, both losing market share, and they believe that the shriller, louder, most outrageous thing they say negative about Trump gets some audience. But I guess my question is that in 2008, Barack Obama won a smashing victory, really good. 2008 was a big, big victory for him, 53%. Two years later, he lost the House. won a smashing victory really good but 2008 was a big big victory for him 53 percent um two years

later he lost the house uh people like brock obama a whole lot didn't like his policy so much they liked obama not crazy about obamacare that seems like an opportunity to repeat for republicans what's the next issue that republicans can galvanize the middle voters for to maybe take back the House or take back the Senate or take back the White House? Well, we'll see if the Biden administration's proposals before Congress that are put before Congress are more like the Democratic Party platform that was passed in August or more like what President-elect Biden talked about and is still talking about. But you're talking about gigantic tax increases. There's no question

that that's what they're for. Remember, Biden did a campaign commercial that says, you know, count on me to raise the taxes, not to cut your taxes, but to raise your taxes. Where are we going to go? What does more government help on health care mean? You know, he's not for forcing everybody to be on Obamacare and doing away with private insurance, he said.

Well, how do you get to where he wants to get with a greater share of the health insurance without doing that or going in that direction? How do you spend $1.9 trillion without a massive tax increase? I don't get it. And it's just, but the reason I'm kind of hesitant on this when i got elected party chairman and in january of 1993 clinton was coming into office and my idea about what we needed to do we needed to rebuild ourselves as part of the ideas right we talk about ideas we need to rebuild our state parties have more self-reliant state parties.

What I didn't know was coming is Clinton proposed the largest tax increase in American history. That was like a birthday present to you. Well, I guarantee you, it made Easter mighty happy. And remember, he proposed Clinton care, whatever you want to call it. The Congress never voted on it. They were a Democrat majority House, a Democrat majority Senate, and they could never put it up for a vote. Now, that's what the out party's supposed to do. Here's what we're for. Here's why we're for it. And here's what's wrong with what the other guys

are proposing. Here's what's wrong with AOC, with Bernie Sanders, with Nancy Pelosi, with Chuck Schumer. And when you see their proposals and try to separate them from Biden's proposals, I think they're going to be pretty hard to separate. And it's going to be a target for Republicans to say, that's wrong, here's why it's wrong. And here's what's right. So, Governor, does the 2020 Republican Party have the discipline that the 1992 Republican Party had? Should have. When I became chairman of the party, we had 172 in the House.

Now we have 212 in the House. We had 42 Republican senators. Now we've got 50. We had 19 Republican Governors. Now we've got 27. We control 63 legislative bodies in the United States. We had not had a majority in both houses of Congress in 40 years. And I said it was a great time to be chairman. I ain't got anywhere to go but up.

Do you think the current chairman feels the same way? I don't know, but it takes leadership and also it takes elected officials who will buy in and understand why this is right i had a great ally newt gingrich and and a number of others but newt particularly because he believed fervently that you win more elections by telling people what you're for than by just talking about what's wrong with the other side. And that's why I make the point. Here's what's wrong with what they're proposing,

and here's what's right, which is what we propose, and here's why it's right, and it'll make your family and your community better. Haley, we've swore up one side and down down the other to your office not to keep you too long but to heck with them here listen i've got one more and then james i know has a question i don't know if this is your you're uh still a working a figure in washington so there may be certain things you just don't feel comfortable saying, but here's my question. I think that you'll agree that the next generation of Republican talent, and I'm afraid to name any names because I'd leave so many out, but from Nikki Haley to Marco Rubio to Tom Cotton

to Ben Sasse to Ron DeSantis, the rising generation of Republican talent is pretty damn impressive, I think. But there's Donald Trump sitting on the party. What, what, what? And now you know what's happened. I can tell right now half my listeners are putting up comments attacking me for raising that point or for putting it that way. And the other half are saying, damn right. What's the party do about Donald Trump? If you could advise him, would you say remain a figure in the party,

or would you say, please, go to Mar-a-Lago and play golf? You know, if he were my client, I would tell him, chill out for a while. See where you are. I mean, don't be trying to make decisions about 2022, much less 2024 today. I mean, I think he would be better to be prudent. I know that's a hard call, but I think that's where everybody ought to be. These other people who might want to run for president, you name some really, really good people, they don't need to be running for president right now.

They need to be helping our party get back on the right track, which is a track that's easy to define. Talk about ideas. Talk about how we can help the country solve the problems and take advantage of the opportunities that we have. And I firmly believe the left will make it easier for us than not. You know, like Clinton. You know, I never dreamed the guy would propose the biggest tax increase in American history. He knocked me down with it.

But the president has got a lot of what he's got to deal with right now. We need to remember that Trump drives me crazy sometimes. But when the choice is Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, I vote for Donald Trump every time. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, I vote for Donald Trump every time. But his issues, his policies will work because we've watched him work in his first, you know, half of his first term before the COVID. He did things that we should have done a long time ago. Challenge China on the way they cheat on the WTO. We voted to let them in the WTO in 2001, and they've been cheating ever since.

And we had two administrations never said a word about it. And Trump finally said, if not now, when? These people are trying to be bigger than our economy, and the way they're doing it is they're cheating. They're not abiding by the rules. You know, you and I both work for Ronald Reagan. I believe in free trade. But part of free trade is both sides got to honor their agreements. That makes it fair trade

as well. And Trump, to his credit, was the first guy that did anything about it or tried to do anything about it or tried to do anything about it. What I want to see us do is play to our strengths, let President Trump deal with his issues, but the people that voted for Donald Trump, they will see they need to vote for the Republicans in the House and in the Senate.

And 2022, I think, is likely to be a very good year for us. We actually, except for the presidency and Georgia, we had a pretty remarkable year compared to what everybody said was going to happen. And in Georgia, one race was decided by a point, one race was decided by two points. I mean, very close and candidly, our own people are why we lost.

Because of turnout. You know, it was a turnout election, and particularly in one part of the state, the turnout was down more than the Democrats' march. And do you know, I have to say this, on the ballot, besides the two Senate races, was another race for the state chairman of the state public service commission. A Republican incumbent.

He ran ahead of both of our Senate candidates. He ran ahead of both of our Senate candidates. Last question before we let you go, and we appreciate the time you've spent with us today too you're right about china that was a perfect example of donald trump not accepting what the predicate was the predicate in dc was always we're going to have a relationship with them they're going to be more capitalist they're going to be part of the world's family and even though it wasn't working out that way there was a lot of money to be made everybody just letting china do what they did the president looked at that and no, we're not going to do that.

That's great. But when you talk about the Republican Party being a party of ideas, there's a lot of Donald Trump supporters in that 30% that Rob meant. And there's a lot of people in the middle as well who say, you may be the party of ideas, but we're not exactly crazy about what those ideas are if the idea means accepting everything that we now accept about the way our government and our society is structured. In other words, the Department of Education, we want the Department of Education to be broken up and turned down to the local level. Why do we have a housing and

urban development when that's something that the local level can do? In other words, the notion of small government seems to be what the Republicans are about. But when they have the House and the Senate and the presidency, all of these sclerotic old D.C. institutions remain and are even strengthened. So it's like they look at the Republican Party and say, OK, your idea is what the Democrats want, just not as much of it. So is it necessary maybe going forward to make the case that we have to rethink fundamental ideas about what we expect Washington to do? And then actually, once again, Lucy in the football, put the guys in who will say, yeah, we're going to do it. We're going to change the structures so that we have a fundamentally different approach between the relationship between the government and the people.

Well, you mentioned the Department of Education. This Department of Education stands for school choice. It stands for letting parents decide where is the best place for their children to go to school. That's not just good policy that results in better education. It's good politics, too. Rhonda Sanchez got elected governor of Florida two years ago because 18 percent of African-American women voted for him, not the African-American mayor of Tallahassee. And that was the margin of error. About 6% of African-American men voted for DeSantis,

but those women were for school choice. They know that the future for their children is to get a good education, and they're not going to get a good education in some public schools That's a real idea That works And it is not done for the rich people on Wall Street If you look at Change government Donald Trump did more to rationalize

Regulation of the U.S. economy and of other government areas of regulation than anybody, any other president in history, more than Calvin Coolidge. I mean, you're talking about a guy who put his mouth, put his money where his mouth was and we had a lot a lot of people, government private business who benefited. I was in a meeting, it's been two years ago now, of small businesses. 90% of them said they would be better off if they could get truly tough deregulation than if they got a tax cut.

I mean, why did we have 2% economic growth after a deep recession under Barack Obama. I mean, your listeners know that usually at the end of a deep recession there's a sharp recovery. The recovery under Obama is 1.9% and if you adjust it give him credit, 2.1% after a very, very deep recession. His answer was government.

We're going to cure the recession by spending enough money to double the national debt in eight years and we don't have any COVID running up the tab by trillions of dollars doing that.

Donald Trump changed the policy. And the change of the policy of lower taxes, rational regulation, let people have more control at the local level, and it worked. And that's what I think people want. I've been doing this 52 years. I was a kid when Peter came to work for us at the White House. But when something works, do it

and talk about it. Trump's problem was he would do it and then he'd go running off down some rabbit trail about who knows what. And he had a great story to tell about the economy. He just didn't have the discipline to tell it. Well, we love to hear you tell it. Frankly, it's always a pleasure to have you on the show and to listen to you. And we

thank you for spending some time with us today. Do you know what you've turned into? You're Moses. You're the man who has seen everything and knows what is to be done, what the chosen people must do next. Thank you, man. Governor, have you ever been called old in such a polite and charming way? Well, you know, Peter's such a good writer. I figured he'd call me old Moses. No, no. Thank you, Governor. I'll take it.

You know, the problem is when you still have a Department of Education, they can still make regulations that have to do with school choice and the rest of it. Get them out of it entirely. Take it out root and branch, I say. Speaking of branches. Speaking of branches. Excellent. That's right. Bowl and branch. You've heard about these sheets for a long time, haven't you? Have you thought about them recently? Well, let me ask you this. The groceries that became your family's meal, the shoes you wear in your morning run, the tires you put in your car that you drive every day. No one wants to cut corners on what's important to them. And few things matter more than getting a good night's rest.

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at David Sachs and subscribe to his podcast, The All In Podcast, which is not on the Ricochet Audio Network, but it is. So welcome here, David. Thanks. So of course, we're talking about Twitter. We're talking about Parley or Parler. No one's talking about Gab. I think happens. Twitter, with its enormous power, banned Donald Trump. Is it the right thing to do, do you think? And what was the rationale for it? Jack had a 12 tweet. Jack came out of his monastery and, you know, stroking his well-oiled beard, gave his rationale it the other day, and it was very medium he found it. Do you agree with what he said? How would you characterize what Jack said about his decision, and what do you think the implications are going forward? Well, Jack is my favorite oligarch, because after taking these actions and there's a huge outcry, he then gets very contemplative and introspective about them. And I think he made actually a really important point in his summary, which is he said, you know, when we Twitter decided to de-platform the president, one of the key arguments that we considered is that he could go to other sites and

other platforms and have his speech rights that way. And he basically concedes that that argument was then undermined by the fact that every other major tech company then did the same thing. And I think he's really onto something there, which is that when one company denies you service, maybe that isn't such a big deal because you can go somewhere else to exercise your free speech rights but when all of big tech you know does the same thing they are now forming a monopolistic cartel if you will to deny you your free speech rights and this is the thing that concerns me is not specifically trump i I mean, frankly, the silence over the last several days has been blissful. You know, I'm not going to necessarily miss his tweets at all,

but I'm concerned about the precedent here that we are giving a consortium of big tech companies the power to deny us our free speech rights um if these companies had gotten together to you know as a consortium to raise prices i think everybody would be up in arms but instead they've gotten together to deny us our civil liberties and no one's saying a word isn't that more important i mean mean, aren't our civil liberties more important than money? And so that's the starting point before I come down. You've got to give Rob a moment to think that one over. Well, you know, you mentioned something interesting when you talked about cartels and getting together.

In the old days, we imagined that these plutocrats, with their watch chains and after their launch of oysters, would sit down and carve up things they would form these monopolies now do you think that actually they sat down and planned what some people are talking the conservative purge or whether or not this was a spasmodic reaction because the staffers i mean i remember this tweet from amazon employees for global global justice came out and said trump must be demanded. I think it's more likely that the guys at the top are not sitting down at a table and figuring out how to finally enact the purge.

They're reacting to this and they're doing the right thing. And the right thing is for everybody to be safe and to keep harm from happening. Does that seem more of a realistic assessment of what happened as opposed to a coordinated little effort yeah i mean so what jack said is that uh we didn't coordinate with all these other tool providers all these providers of core internet infrastructure but we emboldened each other um and so i think if you were to apply an antitrust overlay to the First Amendment, you could call that a kind of signaling. And so there's this game of follow the leader. You know, why is everybody from, you know, Snap? I mean, does the president even have an account on Snap?

You know, why are they suddenly joining this bandwagon? Well, because, you know, Twitter and Facebook and Apple and Google especially are the leaders in our industry. And so there is this game of signaling by companies that normally compete with each other for the purpose of raising prices, it would clearly be a violation of antitrust law. What I'm suggesting is that cartels should not be allowed to get together for the purpose of regulating speech either. I would like to see some enterprising lawyer, again, run with this take and, again, provide this antitrust overlay on free speech law. Because here's the thing. What the framers, and I get a lot of pushback on Twitter for this point of view that I've been espousing over the last week. What they say to me is, well, these are all private companies. They should be able to do whatever they want and you know and and and and and but here's the problem with that is that our

free speech rights have been privatized you know when when speech got digitized when it moved to the internet that is the place where most political speech occurs these days it you know speech got digitized privatized and centralized in the hands of a small number of players, a handful of oligarchs, if you will. And the framers of the Constitution could never have anticipated that that was going to happen. You know, back in their day, there was a multiplicity of places you could go for speech. There were town squares all over the country. And those town squares have all now been replaced by a handful of social media sites. And so what are your effective free speech rights

today if you get deplatformed? You don't have that. So, David, may I? You're a lawyer. No, you're not a lawyer. You went to law school, but you never practiced. Yes, I guess I'm a lawyer, but I played a lawyer on TV, but never something like that. You're a lawyer in recovery. The point is, you have between your ears, you have some legal training. You're able to think in legal categories. The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. Clearly, the First Amendment concerns what government may and may not do. You've already stated this problem. Twitter, Facebook, Google, they're all private enterprises.

Okay. At the same time, if you get kicked off, or the argument was until three or four days ago, ah, if you get quick kicked off Twitter, go someplace else. The conservatives can start their own site. They tried that. And then Google and Apple shut down Parler. So, something is wrong here. You're talking about antitrust law. It feels to me as though antitrust law, I hear antitrust law and I'm thinking Theodore Roosevelt and the late from about the 1880s to about 1920. It just seems to me that the legal framework for dealing with questions of free

speech in 2021 simply doesn't exist. Even antitrust law is now eight decades out of date. If that's correct, who fixes that problem? Is it legislation? Should interesting work start today at the Stanford Law Review? How do you grapple with the problem, if that is the problem? Well, I think you're right that what's missing is an online bill of rights. The First Amendment explicitly does apply to, you know, Congress will make no law. It's a prohibition on government action. The point I'm making with the antitrust argument is that when a cartel of super powerful monopolies gets together and decides something whether explicitly through coordination or by emboldening each other to take the exact same position that that is effectively like a government decision. I mean, you have no effective

ability to contest that. And Jack basically admitted as much. If you look at his tweet storm, he said, you know, once everybody started doing the same thing, it felt like a government action as opposed to the action of one private company. I guess I'm putting words in his mouth a little bit. I'm paraphrasing, but he did say that, that it felt like a government action. And that's kind of my point. This is why I think we have antitrust laws, because we realize that although companies in general, as a starting point, should be free to do what they want, that their power in the market can reach such a point that they need to be regulated and constrained and there's a doctrine in antitrust law

called essential facilities which is that if a monopoly controls an essential facility like let's say there was a drawbridge only one way to get it across a river and this monopoly started denying the use of that drawbridge for its own you know nefarious purposes we would declare that to be an essential facility and stop them from doing that because they are acting they are acting with the power of a government basically and so there is there is i guess what i'm doing by pointing to this is i'm not trying to go down the rabbit hole of a legal casework if you will, but I'm trying to provide a way of thinking about what big tech is doing that should be broadly unacceptable to Americans, regardless of what side of the political spectrum you're on. But that's fascinating. So the legal analogies in antitrust law already exist.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's just that we're not used to thinking about antitrust as applying to civil liberties. We're only used to thinking about antitrust as applying to civil liberties we're only used to thinking of antitrust as applying to consumer harm but again like i say aren't civil liberties more important than money um if we want to prevent cartels from getting together to raise prices why in the world wouldn't we prevent them from also getting together to deny us our civil liberties in what you know how do we functionally still have a free speech right in this country if it can be taken away by a clique of tech elites? questions for you because people never ask dumb questions so i'm gonna that's my job but before i ask my official dumb questions i'm going to ask you another sort of ancillary dumb question this is something i'm really curious about in the constellation of powers that uh that affect a

ceo of a tech company deciding to do this there's the reputation there's potential regulation there's government there's just the you know public sentiment. How much leverage do the employees have? How much power at Twitter do the employees or Facebook, the employees have in helping or driving this decision? Yeah, I think they have a lot of power, or they've certainly banded together to create a tremendous amount of pressure on the leadership of the company. And so one of the things I've said is that these decisions are being made not in a vacuum, but as a result of pressure that comes from both below and above. So there's been tremendous pressure from the employees from below. There's also pressure coming from the Senate Judiciary

Committee from above. And so these tech companies are simultaneously being told by a number of senators who will now control that committee that, A, we don't think you're doing enough to censor, and B, we're contemplating breaking you up. Now, it's kind of a, I mean, isn't that sort of the protection end of the extortion racket that, you know, that, listen, unless you guys start getting tough. Yeah, nice little social media you got here. Yeah, exactly. And so I find that aspect of this very disturbing, is that we have sort of this, we have the state exercising soft power on big tech to engage in censorship that would never be allowed under the

first amendment if the state were to do it itself right uh and and that and that that's all but but this is all the vital point yes so if i guess my so my before i get to one more dumb question before my official questions if you're jack or you're just ceo x of large content platform y would you say that the actions that they took last week over the past week these are these seem like smart business decisions um in a in a in a tight labor market where it's hard to get i'm assuming hard to get engineers and hard to keep engineers and there's's a lot of people, a lot of new companies trying to poach them away. And with the sword of Damocles hanging over you in a Democrat-controlled Senate in a week, cave.

Wouldn't you cave? If you were on the board, wouldn't you say, Jack, the board votes to cave? Well, I just think our commitment to freedom of speech needs to be made of sturdier stuff okay um i mean it's it's it's it's always the case throughout history that the the the free speech test cases um require the the defense of very unpopular people and and saying very unpopular things and it's it's it's a canard that in order to defend free speech you must believe in the worst things being said you know this was the you know historical aclu position and you know i i i take i i you know i'm getting

a lot of hits on this by people on twitter saying, well, if you're defending free speech, you must be saying that you believe in incitement or violence or whatever provocation Trump or, you know, somebody in the right has said. And my point is, no, that's not really an argument. That's an intimidation tactic. Yes, it is. David, one last question before we let you go. And thanks for joining us today. It's been extremely instructive. A few years ago, when we all learned about China's social credit score, we were duly and properly horrified at the idea that the government would assemble such things and keep you from getting an airplane ticket or a good apartment, and the rest of us struck us as a totalitarian nightmare, and not surprising for China. Now we find that some people are believing there is a sort of de facto social credit score here, inasmuch as your past posts on Parler can be scraped.

I just read today on Reddit that somebody's got a two terabyte archive, that they're bit torrenting of all the videos. You've got your post history. You've got all these things that people can assemble and point to and correlate and say, this person is slightly, sort of, kind of smelling like a deplorable, and we'd best not give our Airbnb or our Lyft or our Uber, the rest of them. Are we moving towards not an official social credit score, but, as I said, a de facto one, or do we already have it?

And is this going to get worse until somebody sues the Jesus pants off somebody for it. Well, I think that the people who are decrying tweet mobs to not only deny people their free speech, but also to cancel them economically, to cancel their economic livelihoods. And it is a disturbing trend that you have this cancel culture that, that, you know, you have this, this cancel culture that, you know, I'm not just going to disagree with you, but I have to find a way to remove you, not just from social media, but again, from the, the entire economy. It's something to be, I think, very concerned about. And, and that is why I go back to the idea that I do think we need an online bill of rights. You know, the first question in law is jurisdiction. Who decides?

And right now, we are giving big tech the power to decide everything. The power to decide our free speech, what we think, what we write, what we get to see and listen to. The power to create a company. I mean, if you get denied access to this core infrastructure on the internet, to what extent can you even create a business in the modern world? And right now, they can deny you service for any reason whatsoever. And I see these people on social media trying to act as if the terms of service is somehow a protection you know there's the terms of service has almost been fetishized as this uh guarantee of due process well the terms of service just means whatever the company says it means they can modify it at any time it doesn't

give you any rights um you know and so i just wonder you know at some point trump we move beyond trump you know and hopefully um that happens very soon uh but but but i think the question will remain you know are we gonna you know once the issue of trump goes away i think people are gonna be able to see that we have allowed a tech oligarchy to take control of so many aspects of our lives without any rights whatsoever and i think people are a little bit blinded to take control of so many aspects of our lives without any rights whatsoever. And I think people are a little bit blinded to that fact right now because they hate Trump so much. And so just because they love the decision to ban and de-platform Trump, they're willing to go along with this incredible power grab by big tech. And I'm not as concerned specifically about

not being able to read Trump's tweets. I mean, like I said, frankly, it's been blissful not to get these push notifications pop up on my phone every day alerting me to some new provocation. It's like, oh, thank God. So, I mean, I'm not missing that at all, but I'm worried about the precedence we're creating here and this transfer of power that we're just allowing to happen. Right. Well, when it comes to them trying to crimp our free speech, we need to fight back. We need to fight fire with fire. And that's why I'd like to talk to you, Dave, about my app, FIRE, F-Y-R-E, which is geolocation on Twitter.

It's the meta embedded geolocation data to call down drone strikes of people who have actually said nasty things to you, but we can talk about that later. Yeah. Hey, thanks for joining us today. Really appreciate it. We'll hope to have you on. This is informative stuff. David, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You know, you mentioned the fact that people don't get the Trump tweets anymore, and there's a lot of relief about that. And I imagine also that there's going to be a lot of people who are going to miss them because they provided them with a sort of thing to get angry about and that thing to get angry about released all sorts of chemicals and it made made them happy for a moment i'm a great person because i'm offended by this what are these people

going to do when they find out that the reason that they're basically unhappy has something to do more with than with donald trump maybe issues in their life. You never know. The thing is, you, for example, however you may feel about Donald Trump, and he has nothing to do with this spot at all anymore, but there's just stuff that interferes with your happiness, right? And if there's something interfering with your happiness or preventing you from achieving your goal, you know, lots of stuff. Life can come at you in swollen, large ways and add up and accumulate. The next thing you know, you're walking around with your chin on your sternum and you're anhedonic and you just don't feel like there's a lot to look forward to. Well, there is something to look forward to and that's help. And there's better help for you. Better help will assess your needs and it'll match you with a licensed professional therapist.

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help of an experienced professional. In fact, so many people have been using BetterHelp that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states. So this podcast is proudly sponsored by BetterHelp and Ricochet listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com slash Rico21. That's R-I-C-O-2-1. And our thanks to BetterHelp for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, gentlemen, this is the part of the podcast where everybody says, I've been sitting through these guests who know what they're talking about yeah i really want to hear rob and peter and james just free will on subjects of which they are just slightly uh some information but have conflated that into a larger expertise so gentlemen uh looking forward to the week do

you think there's going to be impeachment that's kind of a dead issue probably by the time this thing passes by the time this podcast airs do you believe it's just uh it's a final spasm of virtue signaling or they're attempting to restore order and standards to the republic what do you stand oh that's a simple one it is raw politics it is nancy pelosi attempting to keep her base shinned up and angry if that's simple simple simple simple will the senate hold a hearing who know it will not hold a hearing while mitch mcconnell is majority leader and uh chuck schumer will hold a hearing if the polls suggest that he should right those are two are two simple ones, I think. But Rob, you have made the final transition to a Trump fan. You are now mega hat man yourself because you don't want them going after Donald Trump

after he's out of office. More than that, I do not think they are legally allowed to. I don't, I mean know i read ramesh printer's piece which is excellent yesterday in nro i've been sort of following i mean i'm as you know i'm not a lawyer i'm not licensed to practice law but i have read the constitution and it doesn't it seems to me that the two things one i don't think one congress can impeach the president and then another congress. Oh, that's a good point. The second thing is that the Senate is allowed to try the president of the United States.

He is not going to be the president of the United States. The Senate, since when is the legislative body allowed to try a citizen? That's outrageous. Now, if you think you did something wrong find a u.s attorney you're about to appoint a whole bunch of them to to put haul them up in front of a judge and i'll manage jury and he's then he's subject as a citizen the way you are and i am everybody else is to the judicial to the uh to the uh judicial branch but the idea that like well if the timing sucks for us but we're going to do it anyway that That is, no, that is not how it works.

I don't like it when people try to steal, try to disenfranchise voters in Pennsylvania. I don't like it when they try to reselect electors from another state. And I don't like it when the Senate decides, or may decide, that it's just going to kind of circumvent the laws, and it's going to try us U.S. citizens. I don't like it when the Senate decides, or may decide, that it's just going to kind of circumvent the laws and it's going to try a U.S. citizen. I don't like it. I like the Constitution the way they wrote it. Wow, does it feel good to agree for the first time in, I guess I have to confess that it's been months now, to agree, but agree wholeheartedly with every word Brother Rob utters.

There you go. I feel as though... That's a sign of a problem in your life. Gentlemen, freeze that moment. Treasure it. I mean, I'm looking at you two right now in Zoom, and I wish I could just sort of bind you together with tendrils of love and just leave that where it is. We've got to stop the show now on that happy note of comedy because uh it's just not going to get

any better oh it's going to get so much better coming up i mean who the healing agents in america are majority leader chuck schumer speaking to the house nancy pelosi vice president kamala harris and president joe bide though that as hayley barber pointed out that there's going to be a banner that a lot of people are going to march uh against two years of overreach can't wait culminating in once again of course the return of the republicans of power which they will do absolutely virtually nothing except for ask for a little bit more power so they can then do the thing that we want them to do on it goes on it staggers on it struggles but uh we've come to the end of this because i think we

tried everybody's attention hope not it's been great stuff i just i the smart people it's fun to listen to smart people um it just is uh and we hope that you enjoy the show as well and we would like to say thank you to kitty poo words. Words I've never spoken before in my life, but I just said that. I don't believe that for a minute. To Smart Assets, to BetterHelp, and to Bowlin Branch. Support them for supporting us. Your life gets so much better when you take advantage of those products. It really does. And you can listen to the best of Ricochet, the best of Ricochet, the highlights of the Ricochet Audio Network, which is hosted by some short, balding guy in Minneapolis. You can hear that this weekend on the Radio America Network.

Check your local listings, as we always like to say. And, of course, the usual final doomed, hopeless plea to go to Apple, iTunes, the podcast app, and give us five stars. Would it kill you? No, it wouldn't kill you. So go do it. So that's it for us. Next time we meet, we're going to have a new president, right? Right?

Or is the global broadcast system going to be activated by Space Force during the inauguration and the president will emerge from a tunnel and everybody will be arrested and will be ushered into the second term? That's what I'm hearing from some guys on Twitter, which is probably a good reason not to listen to a lot of guys on Twitter. But listen to us. Go to Ricochet. Join.

And of course, we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week. Next week, boys. Next week. So this is where it came to have. When it ran from you. In a private detective overcoat. Dead to dead man's shoes

The pretty things of Knightsbridge Lying for a minister of state Is a far cry from the nodding head Here at Schroeder's Gate Cause the high heel he used to be Has been ground down And he listens for the footsteps That would follow him around

So mad at my love is a crime But will you still love The man of mine Ricochet! Join the conversation. There's a top and a heap and a millionaire We'll be right back. Of the public imagination For his private wife and kids somehow Real life becomes a rumour Days of touch, courage, just pretense Left to van a German sense of humour He's got a mind like a sewer

And a heart like a fridge He stands to be insulted And it is for the privilege To murder my love is a crime But will you still love a man at a time? The biggest wheels of industry Retire to shop and shop The Apple-Google operating system duopoly is even more powerful.

And having said that, he appears to have frozen. Jack found him. Yeah. You did. AWS has responded. I think we lost him. Abridging the freedom of speech. Hang on just a moment.

Peter's got trouble in the library. In terms of substance, what a good podcast. We're good at this.