The Ricochet Podcast - Hot and Free

Episode Date: July 15, 2022

This week, it’s another round of Question Time, this week with actual (OK, former) British person Charles C.W. Cooke sitting in for Peter Robinson, We cover Florida, guns, newspapers, — an entire smorgasbord of topics (what’s British for smorgasbord?). Music from this week’s episode: I Know There’s An Answer by The Beach Boys... Source

Three, two, one. I have a dream this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. Do you believe that men can get pregnant? No, I don't think men can get pregnant. So you're denying that trans people like to think? And that leads to violence? Is this how you run your classroom?

With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Rick Dupche podcast with Rob Long and myself, James Lallex. Sitting in for Peter Robinson today is Charles C.W. Cook. And because he's British, we're going to take a little hint from the way they do things over there and have question time. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 601.

Hey, why don't you join us at Ricochet.com? And do so fast before we go under like the Lusitania, taking a big hit, rolling over under the waves in 17 minutes. No, we're not going to do that. But as Rob Long will tell you, boy, we need people. And the people who come are going to find the most interesting, stimulating conversations and community on the web. Peter Robinson is usually with us, but he's not. He's off in some secret location, I believe. He's been covered with honey and nuts and is being sacrificed to a flaming owl, the cremation of care ritual. So we may never see him again. But in his stead is the estimable Charlie C.W. Cook from Florida,

National Review, other places. Welcome, Charlie. Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure. And Rob Long, of course, freshly back from the Apple store because he dropped his phone and broke his glass. Is that right? Sounds like a nursery.

No, it's even more instructive. I cracked the glass a while ago and I took it to one of those little places. You take it and you know, we can fix your screen. He fixed the screen, but now the screens are too complicated really to be fixed. So that way. So I had the screen that which occasionally would just erupt on its own.

And just suddenly the phone sitting across the room from me would be sort of doing things um like i don't know i kept being terrified it was going to send texts or something or send things from my drafts file that should remain in my drafts ever talking about um and so then i finally had to take it to get it replaced which i did last uh yesterday afternoon they said oh yeah there's a you have to get it. So I went through this weird evening and morning where I didn't have the phone, and I noticed not having it. So it was instructive. Was it good, though?

Did you enjoy severing the cord that binds you to the wonderful world? I don't know if I enjoyed it. I think what happened was that i learned that i have a have a problem with it right well as i've always said if you'd gone back 40 50 years and you'd seen people walking down the street reading books paperback books we would have been impressed by what a literate age it was right even if it was a mickey spillane novel if everybody's walking around looking down at a book as they walk down the street, we think, good Lord, it's the golden age

of reading a fiction of information. But because it's the glowing slab, we just assume they're scrolling through Instagram, whereas, of course,

we are reading important stories on Medium and the like. Yeah, I'm doing something important. Yes. Not true. So, Charles, in Florida, we should probably ask,

Florida is either the hellscape dystopia that we're all going to be pitched into soon, or is the place from which salvation shall arise how are things down there pretty good it's nice and hot

nice and free nice and hot and nice and free nice and income taxless I have a friend who lives in Florida and during COVID he said Florida's state motto is live free and and maybe die which i thought was good covid do you know it is especially

interesting to me as somebody who comes from england where there are no animals are you from england you're women you're from england? Really? England is not a very dangerous place. We don't have extreme weather. We don't have any animals that can kill you. And then you move to Florida and you have both. And actually, if you walk outside my house around the back, you will see alligators on the bank. They're not likely to come and

attack me, but it could happen. Is that why families have more children? Just in case. I mean, if you have five or six and you lose one to the gator, I mean, you can chop it up and move along. Well, there's lots going on. I don't think so.

Lots going on in the world today. Charles was just telling us before we got on the air uh and you should join ricochet so you're fascinating off the cuff conversations in this zoom world you were talking about biden's trip and how simultaneously he managed to dis israel and england and somebody else and tell us tell us again what uh what marvelous plover flowed out of that endlessly inventive brain of his. Well, he managed in the space of a single sentence to criticize Israel and Britain. Yeah, right.

Now, that is... Two allies. Well, two allies, but it's also quite impressive. I mean, because you have to connect them somehow. And I mean, there is obviously a longstanding connection between Britain and Israel and the British Empire and that whole part of the world. And yep, that's where Joe Biden went.

He said that, and by the way, he's in Israel when he says this. He said that he understands how the Palestinians feel because he's Irish American. And the relationship between Israel and Palestinians is similar to the relationship between Britain and repressed Catholics in Ireland for 400 years. This was actually in a speech. Well, I think that's actually the most significant thing right this these are in prepared remarks presumably it we focus a lot on how old and doddering he is but i i don't think that's the problem with joe biden i mean i think in many ways people voted for him because they thought he was old and doddering wasn't going to to do anything. I think the problem with Joe Biden is that he has a crazy, ultra woke. Administration and he himself is maybe too weak to fight back, or maybe he just that's who he is, too.

I mean, if you replace everything Joe Biden has done as president and just say it was done by a vigorous 40 year old andold in the peak of health, he'd still be at 29% popularity. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And funnily enough, I actually think that the idea that he's so old and so doddering that he can't be president again is a gift to the left because the left will be able to make it seem as if many of biden's mistakes are the product of his being old and doddering and not of his reflecting the same progressive ideology that we would get out of gavin newsom yeah what would gavin newsom do differently what would he would be doing exactly the same but but at base you have that problem which you have with with the biden now i think he's going to meet um the he's meeting right now i'm just got this breaking news push

alert biden is meeting right now with saudi crown prince muhammad bin salman um uh attempting to end the feud that they call it a feud now because um muhammad bin salman uh has ordered the deaths of death of reporter he's sort of a bad guy. Don't say Washington Post reporter. They make it sound. Yeah, I know. I mean, it was a bad thing. Yes, I know.

He's not a good person. And it's perfectly legitimate to say to a guy who you don't like, hey, we don't like you. We're going to ostracize you. That's perfectly fair. But you can't do that if the guy has all the oil and then you're not drilling and making and producing your own oil. So you have to make a choice. You either have to kiss his ass or you have to drill. And Biden has chosen kiss his ass.

And I think that is unpresidential. Yeah. It's also quite funny, though, because if you if you had told me yesterday, Biden is going to go and meet with the Saudis. This is controversial. The is terrible and while he's on this trip he's going to say rude things about religious intolerance from a major player in the world scene you would have thought that that would have been saudi arabia right i mean if but no it's israel and britain so he's moved from criticizing Israel and Britain to going to suck up to the Saudi dictator.

Exactly. Perfect. Strange choice. And all of these things could have been solved simply by building pipelines and authorizing the building of refineries and just attempting to remain energy independent. That's all you really need to do.

And then you can tell the Saudis anything you want. You can go there and scream obscenities at them. attempting to remain energy independent. That's all you really need to do. And then you can tell the Saudis anything you want. You can go there and scream obscenities at them. Meanwhile, it turns out that the Saudis and the Israelis are conducting joint sort of sub-rosse and military maneuvers against the Iranians. So we actually have two allies in the region. Isn't Saudi Arabia admitting air flights now from israel for people on the hajj so i mean that's that's that's the difference it's not black and white which is

quite right rob i mean if we just had opened up the pipelines or continue their construction or approve more refinery capacity drilled more and more and more but then again that wouldn't have meant that the wonderful transition that we're going to to the inevitable new world wouldn't have happened as fast but from what i I hear, the Supreme Court's decision, according to Rolling Stone, mind you, so I'm not just making this up, it's some lunatic saying this, Rolling Stone says the Supreme Court decision on EPA admissions and regulations means the world is going to burn. It's going to burn. And Joe Manchin saying that he's not going to get behind the climate expenditures means, again, that the world is going to burn. It's now baked into everything expenditures means again, that the world is going to burn.

It's now baked into everything, literally baked that the death of the planet is foretold. You're averse. Right. So why then does any of this matter to these people? Why are they then pushing for batteries and windmills and solar and the rest of it? If it's a bootless proposition,

I have a theory. We are dead. Then build the nukes then open the pipelines let it all gush because there's just no point but they seem to believe somehow that there is going to be a tomorrow i have a theory um and i i'd like to hear what you guys think but my theory is unformed theory is all my theories are. But that the problem the left is facing now is that people, their side anyway, has has has has believed their alarmist rhetoric. And so now they seem very pessimistic about the future. You look at what Americans are saying about the future now. It's very, very pessimistic. I mean, it's extremely downcast considering. Well, I mean, inflation is is terrible we've had terrible inflation um i mean the jobs picture is pretty good i mean

the economy's not great and um there's lots of problems but we've faced all these things before the level of pessimism in america among american voters is so high right now that it's as if they had been reading the new york times and I think the problem for the progressive left is congratulations. You succeeded. Everybody believes the world is over. So no one believes anything's ever going to get better. So it's awfully hard to get your policy prescriptions enthusiastically backed. It's like, you know, but this is the strategy.

Your strategy has worked. But unfortunately for you, you've dispirited your own base. Miserable ism is a bad, bad. It's not a good it's not good politics. You reach Ali or do you think that they'll be able to gen up some enthusiasm and optimism come the next election time? I don't think that. No, I think I think, Rob, you're broadly right. I think they have convinced people of all sorts of things that aren't true, and now they're suffering from having been too successful. This is a slightly more nuanced version of this,

but one of the left-wing insistences that has caused them the most trouble over the years is that people have believed what they have said about medicare and social security right and then they berate people for having believed them so you know 10 years ago 12 years ago obamacare is the big topic of the day and you see republicans holding signs that say keep your government hands off my Medicare, right? And we're all supposed to laugh about this. We're all supposed to think how funny this is.

These dumb Republicans, they don't understand that Medicare is a government program. Where did they get that idea? They got that idea from being told with Social Security from 1935 and Medicare from 1965 that it's not a government program. It's not a handout. It's not a handout it's not an entitlement it's not welfare you earned it it's a savings account it's your savings account somewhere out there there is a number it's next to your name this isn't a generalized fungible government initiative this is you no different than saving in an ira And then Republicans, 40, 50, 60, in the case of Social Security,

70 years later said, do you know, that's my Medicare account. And it's got my name on it. And now they're talking about taking money out of it. Keep your government hands off my Medicare. And the same people who've been telling the lie went, ha, ha, you believed all of that. You fool.

I get regular. And they're trying it again now. I mean, they're already talking about borrowing from Medicare. Of course, this upsets people who believed literally that Medicare is an individualized savings plan. And then they laugh at them. So, I mean, they do this quite a lot. I get letters regularly from the Social Security Administration since I'm getting into a certain bracket. And they tell me what I will get if I retire this year, this year, that year.

There's a number down to the penny as to what I will receive. And I think, you know, if my financial people sent me letters like that, they'd probably be in trouble because they can't promise that's going to happen. But here is this letter from the government telling me exactly what my account is going to have. Is this legally binding? Or if they remove that number or cut it in half or whatever, am I able to take this paper and wave it around saying, but you said this? No, you are not, sir. No, because I think that would be dead numbering them. That would be...

Good twist there. Yeah. Speaking of twists, sometimes your guts get in a twist, and all good twist there. Yeah. Speaking of twists, sometimes, you know, your guts get in a twist and all of a sudden you're sitting with people and you realize, Oh, I got to leave. I will be right back. And you head to the public restroom and what do you do? Wow.

That's a crazy segue. I know where you're going and I find this segue to be shocking, but go ahead. It's all me. Even what it was at the time. Anyway, what do you do? You close the door, right? You need public bathroom.

You close the door and it's, you hate those ones that have a hinge doesn't really work and it creaks open and the rest of it. It's, you know, it's no privacy in the first place, but you close the door because you get the privacy at least that you can. Well, you don't want random passerbys looking in on you. So why would you let people look in on you when you go online? I have to ask. Using the Internet without ExpressVPN, I'd like to go into the bathroom and not close in the dark, frankly. Did you know, did you know that your ISP, that would be your internet service provider, knows every single website you visit? Yes, even that one. What's worse, they can even sell that information to ad companies and tech giants who want to use that data. Well, to target

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You get some guests into the house, and you maybe set up a little special little account for them. It's going to fall under your ExpressVPN from the router, so they don't get tracked, and all of a sudden stuff doesn't happen to them. And it's easy. One button. It's as easy as closing the bathroom. It's even easier than closing the bathroom door,

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At Ricochet, there's been a thread that's been open for a few days by people saying, hey, what about this? What about that? I'd like to know this and so forth. And they knew that Peter wasn't going to be here. So there are Charlie specific questions to come. It's great. It's one of the things we love about Ricochet, the conversations we have going back and forth, the curiosity. I mean, when is the last time? It's like open mic for the internet. And here we are first from Mowgli Rob. This also might be for Charlie. Why does DeSantis only serve up the red meat to the base when he could pivot to a more measured approach?

Did he miss an opportunity to explain to Disney that the hostile work environment that, you know, that I'm sorry, that hostile work environments that take a side on an issue counter to the legislative process can't be rewarded by the government. Did he blow that one i think charles has an opinion on this as well so let's throw that to you desantis disney is that going to hurt him or irrelevant by the timing charles should go first he said he's a constituent i think that the legislature's response to Disney was bad. All right, next question from Mike. But I don't think it's going to hurt him.

I think it was bad because I think it was clearly vengeful. And I think it was bad because the Reedy Creek Improvement District is a good idea that has worked well. There are an awful lot of these special districts in florida uh there's about 1800 maybe 18 000 i can't remember and they're a good way of dealing with odd projects the villages is one the orlando airport is one but i don't think that anyone's going to cry themselves to sleep over Disney's special district status. And I think given that the law in question, which has been erroneously described as don't say gay, is popular, not just in Florida, but nationally, then anything that flows from it

is likely to be considered in the same light. I actually don't think DeSantis has been focused on throwing red meat. I think if you live in a different state, you only hear about the red meat because that's what breaks through in the national press. But I think DeSantis has been quite interesting as governor because he has picked up a bunch of issues that Republican governors of Florida, and we have a lot, 30 years worth in a row, don't normally pick up. If you go back to his inauguration speech, he did the standard conservative stuff, tax cuts, charter schools. He also talked a lot about the environment. They've plowed a lot of money into environmental questions, not let's shut down the

economy environmental questions, not Green New deal style environmental questions not oil is bad environmental questions but well we have a lake here that's polluted what are we going to do about it environmental questions or we're running out of manatees sort of makes it sound as if we eat them doesn't it um unfortunately uh nearly extinct um so i i think what he's done is is be a fairly balanced governor but i think it's it's offset by a couple of things one clearly he is not averse to speaking plainly taking the media, attacking progressives in a way that conservatives like when the issue calls for it. And two, COVID hit.

And because COVID hit, he ended up having to work out what to do. And his view was at odds with the rest of the country. I think he was broadly right. And that has coded him as right wing bomb thrower. But if you look at what he was doing prior to COVID, I would say he he has been actually an interesting mix. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's as best as this is a political question, I think, ultimately. And my argument would be that I think he's doing everything right. I think that's how you want to run. If you're running for the Republican primary, you want to red meat. That's how you want to run if you're running for the republican primary you

want to red meat that's what you want that's you know that's the old nixon reagan plan which is run to the right get this get the nomination and then move to the center think about um desantis he's very very very smart and he can talk and so the thing about what i find interesting about desantis is that for once you're going to have a Republican candidate. I mean, maybe if he is a candidate who your heart is in your mouth, it's not a high wire act every time that he meets the press. He's actually smarter than they are. And he's articulate. And that that is a terrifying. That's one of the reasons why they hate him so much is because it is very hard to you can't really roll your eyes and scoff at a guy who's clearly smarter than you. And it's clearly not afraid of you, which is something even, you know,

even the successful Republican presidents have always had that look of dear the headlights when they meet the press. So he's smart. Stay to the right. I mean, he's doing things that I personally disagree with. I, my,

I find, you know, I'm not, I'm not bored. I think, I think the Disney thing was silly and um and was and was clumsy and ultimately didn't make uh any had no impact and made him look like he was uh reacting to uh you know talk radio essentially um and i think the the the lawsuit provision in the what they're calling whatever it is that don't say

gay bill i think that was that's clumsy and he's gonna bite him in the butt and they're gonna have to fix that a lot of stuff he's doing that i wouldn't necessarily agree with i don't think it's bad politics i think it's good politics and i think if he uh continues along this this this uh this path he's going to be extremely extremely hard to beat in certainly in the early primaries and that is small because the united states i think he's doing everything right. I've seen matchups that say Kamala Harris actually walks away with that. Yeah, can you imagine? Alright, question for Rob, because I want to get as many of these in here. Well, we've got to get some in here. Rob has stated, this is from Glenn Amurgus. Glenn, Rob has stated

that rather than conservative donors giving to another think tank, you should invest in entertainment and studios. Daily Wire, they've done that, right? If you watch the Daily Wire product, what do you think about it? Do you think this is a viable distribution channel? Because I've seen reviews of the Daily Wire movie, the Matt Walsh one, I believe, where they just say, well, I'm not going to see it, but I'm going to review it

because I'm just going to tell you why all of its predicates are wrong and it's able to actually exist. It seems to me that the Daily Wire thing sort of falls into the same bucket as a Gosnell movie, a Dinesh D'Souza movie, that they have these alternative pathways that preach and are resonant with people who already agree with them that they don't have a mainstream impact i mean i've heard more people talk about the matt walsh movie on the other side if only to hate on it then i've heard anybody talking about 2000 mules or the gosnell movie or stuff like that so is that really the thing i mean do you think that's the case rob start up your own channels or try to do what i hate about questions like this is like well we have to set up our own colleges, our own media,

or all the, because they've got the others. Well, they had their long March and they got the, I don't know why I have to seed to them all of these major cultural institutions. I don't know why we can't simultaneously come up with our own stuff and have a little long March on our own. And given the short attention span people have today, the long March might actually took, you know, a couple of months.

All these things are different, too. I mean, the problem with conservatives making me right, I guess you're right. The problem with conservatives and this kind of media argument that sometimes conservatives make is it's it's yes, you're right. It's unfair. I mean, what do you want to do? You want to hold your breath till you turn blue? I mean, it's unfair. They get to make the movies they make that sometimes are infuriating progressive and make you furious and okay like yes i get you can well you want to stand up from the studio and scream and shout now at some point you have to build something so i admire what daily wire is doing i feel like there is no hunger or appetite in america among audiences for documentaries. Those are designed to make

true believers believe. If you've seen 2,000 Mules and you already believe what they're selling, then you think 2,000 Mules is a case closed. If you've seen 2,000 Mules as I have and you don't already believe that, then 2,000 Mules seems like a flimsy attempt to steal $29 from everybody who bought the video. But a movie, Gosnell is a movie. That's a genuine movie. That's a movie that's not a documentary. It's a docudrama at most. And it's pretty good.

I mean, it's a pretty good movie. It's spooky and it's good. So I'm not talking about conservative, polemical, pseudo-entertainment. No one's interested in that, and we'll never get that. And just speaking personally, I have zero interest in either watching that or making that. It just seems incredibly boring to me. I like movies that celebrate America and American values, of which the number one movie in the nation, and it's going to be the biggest movie of the year, is Top Gun. And that is a 4th of July picnic of a movie.

And if the studios won't make them, or they seem to just far as gump their way into making them, as they did for this, it seems like a huge money-making opportunity for rich conservatives, who, in my experience, end up sitting around talking about how they're going to give more money to some right-wing think tank that's going to go into a giant hole, or they want to support a book or a project that will get airtime on Tucker. Nothing wrong with either one of those things, but you are not going to move the needle. And as a money-making

opportunity, which what entertainment is, we don't want donors. I want investors. That's a different, there's a big difference. Um, there's a huge opportunity and the great, great benefit. investor colleagues are too scared to make the money that you're going to make if you just tell stories about uh american greatness i mean it's they that's what they did that's the entire movie business is built on and um so i i so maybe daily wire will do that i don't think they've done it yet i mean they're just one little tootin what's up they're one little company and they're they're doing a lot of different other things so who knows i admire what they're doing but when we conflate all the documentaries and all of that that's when i that's when my my red flag goes up because our side is never ever going to uh at least in my lifetime penetrate that we may as well just make fun entertainment that um that reflects our values and beliefs and I think we'll do that and make money if we did it, but we don't.

Does that answer? It does, at least for the extent of the fact that I want to move on. But Charlie kept like saying, looking like he was going to say something. No, I was listening. I have a question for Charlie then here. We're going to bounce right off. Leslie Watkins wants to know too. And it says, Charlie in particular, why don't second amendment folks,

she says herself included, attack the lack of enforcement of gun laws already in the books, especially given that the recent mass shooters were known to local authorities. I worry that the red flag provisions in the new gun control law will hurt the innocent far more than the guilty. the legislation has conceived the problem or i'll add on to her statement just an inability to follow up the laws because there's so many laws they don't know which ones there are and who knows and all we know is we need more laws to keep that thing from happening so why don't i think it's a great it's a great question and and i think it is the most promising way we have available to us of reducing crime committed with firearms. I don't know what it will do to prevent mass shootings. I'm not convinced there's much we can do about that. But everyday crime, absolutely. We just don't enforce the laws on the books. There's this conception, I think, on the anti-Second Amendment side that this is a thing that pro-Second Amendment people say because they want to distract from talking about the laws that we all secretly know we need. Of course, that's not my position, and it's also

not true. We don't enforce straw purchasing laws. We don't prosecute violations of Form 4473. Hunter Biden is a good example of this. We don't seem to follow up where we have red flag laws or laws that allow the police to arrest people who are making true threats. I'm not talking here about abuse of those systems. People say, I'm a Republican in the police shop at the door and take away their guns. I'm talking about people who say, I'm going to kill everyone, as the shooter in Highland Park had done. We just don't do it.

And when we do do it, we do it inconsistently. And I think what we are now seeing is a strange paradox in which both major players within the American political sphere, both major parties, both major ideologies, both major groups are opposed to gun control,

but at different stages in the process. People who say they are in favor of the Second Amendment are opposed to gun control on the front end. They don't want new laws. They don't want restrictions. They don't want regulations. They don't want checks and subjective criteria. And the people who want all of those things want the laws on the books, but Bulkard enforcing them. Look at what we've started to see in major American cities. Look at what we see in New York, in Chicago, in Los Angeles, in Philadelphia, in Minnesota, Minneapolis in particular.

We see prosecutors who do not want to enforce firearms laws, lest it lead to disparate outcomes. And they're not hiding this. The New York DA's race, for the first time in a long time, for the first time since Rudy Giuliani ran and made crime his focus, was full of candidates who openly acknowledged that they did not want to enforce the gun laws in New York unless they were attached to a violent crime that had already been committed. Look at the great cause celeb in New York over the last decade, the abolition of stop and frisk, which was a gun control

measure. Look for once at the amicus briefs filed in the Bruin case, which was just decided, where you have progressive defense lawyers teaming up to side with the plaintiffs because they don't want gun laws to be enforced because of the consequences, not because they support the Second Amendment, they say so in these briefs, not because they are in favor of the widespread ownership and carrying of guns, but because they don't want those laws to be used against their clients. We're seeing a strange marriage here between Second Amendment types who oppose gun laws per se and criminal justice reformers who oppose gun laws being enforced. And I think that at the very least, the response to that from people who actually wish to see violence committed by people using firearms reduced should be to demand that the laws that we already have, most of which are popular, most of which are supported even by Second Amendment advocates,

are enforced. But before that, irrespective of their merits, the idea of adding any more seems ridiculous. My daughter got a gun the other day. Now it's a fake gun. She got it for a costume

that she's going to have. She's pulling an FBI agent from one of her favorites. She took it out. She's looking at it. And it's literally a fake gun. And I'm already nervous at the fact that she's pointing it at herself, looking at it. And I'm taking it out of her hands.

I take your hands off the trigger. Just doesn't matter. Pretend it. Assume it's a real gun. Assume it's loaded. All right. And so then she starts to try to get this orange thing at the tip off. I said, no, no, no, no, no.

You can't do that. First of all, that no, no, no, you can't do that. First of all, that would be modifying a weapon. We can't do that. And secondly, that's how they know it's not a real gun. The law says you have to have that orange tip there. So within seconds of taking it out of the box, she was already sort of expressing her rights and attempting to do some illegal modifications. And I didn't want her to do that because, of course, she takes the thing off or she paints it black so it's more realistic. And then she leaves it around the house and I go to pick it up by mistake and go to the door when I answer and get the mail or

something. And I'm shot dead because that's what happens when you carry a gun. Luckily, I've got insurance. You might not have insurance. I'm not saying you're going to get shot randomly by somebody who mistakes your airsoft pistols with the real thing, but hey, it's a random crazy world out there. And also, we've got an unpredictable economy going on, don't we? So life insurance can offer peace of mind to anybody who relies on you financially, whether it be a child or parent or even a business partner. They'll have a financial cushion if something they haven't forefent happens to you. Typically, life insurance gets more expensive as you age for obvious reasons. So it's smart to get a policy sooner rather than later. And by making it easy to compare your options from top companies, policy genius, that's right, policy genius can help make sure you're not

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to be one of them. So head to policygenius.com to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. That's policygenius.com. And we thank Policy Genius for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. I mean, this is a good political one, I think. Who do you expect will argue for reduced government spending, this is from Timothy Landon, or creative approaches to tackling inflation in the 24 GOP presidential primary, if anyone? Now, I would say everyone will argue that we should do it, but it's what you have to do to make that. I mean, you're in the Reagan vice. I mean, the best thing for, I think, for a Republican candidate now is to argue that interest rates should be raised and we should enter, which is what Reagan ultimately had to do, and enter a short,

sharp recession, soak up all the excess cash, and then you set yourself for recovery. The more pain that happens under Biden administration means the less pain that happens under the DeSantis administration. But I think Republicans will probably say over and over again what they always say, which is we should cut spending, cut spending, cut spending. And at the same time, they'll probably over again what they always say, which is we should cut spending, cut spending, cut spending. And at the same time, they'll probably say, but not entitlements, which is 99% of everything we spend money on. And they could make a case that we probably need to increase spending and defense. So, I don't know. Charlie, am I crazy? Well, you're not crazy to suggest that Republicans will say we need to cut spending and then not cut spending, because that's what always happens with Republicans.

I do think Republicans are going to be given a bit of a free gift here, though, by dint for the status quo, coupled with interest rate increases, then they are going to sound far more responsible than the Democrat. I mean, we're seeing this at the moment. It's still just absolutely astonishing to me that the Democratic Party hasn't caught up with what has happened to the country since Joe Biden became president. It's not the case that all of the inflation we have seen in the United States since January 2021 was Joe Biden's fault. And in fact, I've made the case that Donald Trump and the Republican Party more broadly will probably end up being pleased that it lost the 2020 election. There are certain elections that in hindsight, you want to have lost.

The Democrats should be pleased they lost in 1928. Republicans should be pleased that Gerald Ford lost in 1976. I think the 2004 election is a toss up. You've got the Supreme Court, pretty important. Bush gets two Supreme Court justices. You also have the financial crash. Well, 2020 was a poison chalice in that Biden came in and he had COVID still raging. He had inflation on the horizon, supply chain issues. So it's not the case that everything that has gone wrong under Biden's leadership is Biden's fault.

But he just didn't adjust. Now, I know that I'm a fiscal conservative, and so I always think this, but I cannot get my head around the fact that he didn't come into office on day one and say, okay, we've just spent $5 trillion that we didn't know we were going to spend, more than we spent in World War II. We are massively, hopelessly in debt. We have no way of diminishing our deficits, even if we stand still and inflation seems to be imminent, what shall I do?

Well, he should have said nothing. He should have said what I will do is nothing except fight inflation and COVID at the time. And what he said was, I'm Franklin Roosevelt. I'll spend $6 trillion. Thankfully, he didn't get to do it. Thankfully, he was stopped. He got to spend $2 trillion, and that's been responsible for an awful lot of the pain

that we're now suffering through. But they wanted to spend more. They wanted to spend $3 trillion last summer. They're still trying to spend money. And I think relative to that, I think Republicans will look pretty good because they're going to point at that. They're going to say we won't do that.

They're going to say that Democrats still have the ambition to spend trillions of dollars, which they will and which they'll acknowledge. And I think Republicans will say we have a much better record on supply side changes than demand side changes. I also think in general that the Republicans have, the advantage they have, and I think the advantage that Republicans have who cut taxes and don't cut spending, which is what they mostly do, starve the beast,

but somehow the beast never gets starved, is that they argue that their counteractions will be to create a business environment that encourages investment and growth. So a growth economy that takes care of all those other little niggling things you have, like the fact that we're overleveraged and we're 100% barred against GDP, etc. All those little details, Republican and even conservative economists would say, well, yeah, yeah, that's all true. And yet, if you create the context for if you create a business environment for growth,

that that will sort of be OK. I mean, that was that's the that was the essence, I think, behind the Trump boom, really, for four years, a very good economy was that it wasn't like the fiscal picture of the country was any better. It was that they believed that there was investors and people who have a stake in the future believed that there was a president and an administration who generally favored growth, economic growth, who had pro-growth policies,

and in areas that are growth areas, energy and stuff like that. And when they don't then all the news seems like it's bad news because there's no other side other part of the scale for you to say well on the other hand so well you know you could say well we have enormous inflation and the government is incredibly over over leveraged but on the other hand we have an administration that is actively trying to shut a piece, big pieces of American industry down. Like it doesn't, it doesn't have the same ring,

you know? And so I think that, and I, but I also think it might lead the, the white hope will be the successful Republican. I hope anyway, who knows candidate to be, to paint a Reagan picture of,

of yes, everything sucks, but, uh, happy days are here again. Uh, the optimism of Reagan, um,

to me, it feels like it, I mean, I don't want to be the Santa's fan boy, but part of what the Santa's is doing is running very hard. Right. As Reagan did, um,

before 1980 and then, and then, and then announce himself to the American people at large when they're paying attention as somebody who's going to actually, not in an angry way, which is what Make America Great Again always seems so vindictive and furious, but in a positive way, which is like, no, no, everything can be fantastic. We're Americans.

It's going to be great. All we need to do is unleash the entrepreneurial power of this great country. I mean, what I didn't like about make america great again was i never stopped believing that america was great that that that somehow would have fallen and yes we have our problems but we are still a great nation make america better doesn't have the same sort of ring i'll be back if you can get arnie out of the you know his state to cut some

spots it'd be great but it depends again you're right on the intelligence of the people who are leading us i mean it'd be great to say i want america to be so prosperous that we can actually get back to debating and worrying about all these bs little cultural things that the left constantly wants to do i want us to be so prosperous again that we can indulge these luxury beliefs without consequences but unfortunately well this leads to our next question from old bathos mathos who says or who asked the experts in scare quotes who crafted our national covid policies have turned out to be spectacularly wrong in almost every respect. The bulk of published commentary on recent SCOTUS decisions is brain dead. Or is it true that every woman in America is now required to be pregnant?

Everyone in the United States must be carrying a gun and the EPA has been disbanded. And of course, we already know that the leading cause of death in African-American community is the police. So my question, says old Bethos, is this, Bethos, all the talk and concern by conservatives about the deep state, isn't the real enemy deep, stupid? And is there anything we can do about that? I think he's got a point. I don't know if it's stupid in the sense of being low IQ, but the failure of our institutions and our elites and our technocratic betters has been spectacular over the last year because it just when confronted with actual problems all they could do was fall back and mouth the

trendy can't and and and believe that simply saying things would do it or that spending money or exercising a government lever over here would solve the problem they were power inability to do the basic things that we entrusted them to do seems to be endemic among most of our institutions and as far as the big stupid he seems to be talking about a media that is increasingly in the thrall of people who love to believe that twitter drama is actually a you know good way of framing the issues for the rest of the world. So I don't think it's stupid. I think there's a sort of ideological blinders in place in a lot of these people that everything has to go up to 11. Everything is panic.

Everything is the worst thing ever. It's like adolescent young college drama laid on the country with an impasto depth that's infuriating. So is it big stupid or is it big dumb or is it big left or what? What do we do about it? There's a lot of stupid. Well, I think one of the problems is that you have this unholy alliance between prudentialism and ignorance. And prudentialism can no longer hold the weight of ignorance.

And yet those who are exhibiting both haven't worked out that we've noticed. And I just find this astonishing that you you read a newspaper article and there's a quote in there from some professor of law and it's all wrong but of course they're a professor of law so right presumably they should be right and if you criticize them people so where's your law degree all right i don have one. But I also didn't misrepresent the case in a national newspaper. I don't think that those people have grasped yet that we've all noticed. Obviously, the accelerant was COVID,

where we could see in real time that we were being manipulated. Now, just so I'm clear, by that I do not mean something kooky, like that Joe Biden introduced COVID into the population or that the vaccine doesn't work. What I mean is that we could see irrational policies being advanced in order to nudge our behavior in certain ways and the people who were doing it weren't even subtle about it and also we could see different standards being applied to say new york than to say florida we noticed and they don't know that

we noticed and so they fell back on this but this person person has a PhD in epidemiology. Right. Okay, well, this person's lying. So, I mean, I suppose it's not all stupid. I suppose what I'm really saying is a lot of it is manipulative too. But credentials really are no guarantee of excellence. And the sooner we break that assumption, the better. And let's hear from Rob Long, who has a long and notable career in IMDb,

whose credentials include being... Credentials include, yes. I would say the revelation isn't that stupid people are stupid or that I should say stupid. I i'm when it comes down to epidemics and epidemiology i'm stupid i'm an uneducated layman i don't know anything about it

so i'm dumb and i'm supposed to be dumb and i was dumb in november of 2019 and i sort of remain dumb now about epidemics the surprising thing was that the epidemiologists the smart people were stupid and and that actually was supposed to be the the fundamental benefit of being a scientist and being obsessed with a scientific method is that you you embraced your ignorance and you kind of there was a whole point was with the joy every scientist i've ever known the joy is the joy of discovery being proved wrong and finding something else out and that comes from humility and that's what we lost i think everyone isn't just stupid everyone thinks they're smart i mean everyone i think you know

the prognosticators on twitter who have six followers who are i'm let me tell you what's happening everyone has become a pundit now um and i find that it's sort of a weird thing that's happened um in general and i also feel like the you know on the side of the right sometimes the idea that people say like well the elites think this think this, which is sort of not, you know, it's a very easy thing to argue. And everybody then you disagree with becomes an elite. And so you don't really have to focus on the argument. You know, it's made us all, you know, look, this country is got extremely rich. I mean, people just forget, since we're talking about Reagan, since I'm talking about Reaganagan's i'm always talking about reagan that you know from 1983 to 2000 with a few little blips in

there was this astonishing 2020 sorry 2019 maybe this astonishing march of prosperity and wealth there was a giant crash in 2007 that sort of it was convulsive but you know if you look at the graph the graph is up and way up and to the right and i just think we got fat and lazy and stupid and we expected to the the news to come in 100 and whatever it is characters and um this is the this is the world but i mean you i remember during the pandemic i gotta be talking about covid to people who had read the exact same article in the new york times that i had read and all three of us had vastly different conclusions that is not our fault that's the fault of a bizarre media that went insane.

I think, well, it's all kind of nutty, but starting around the midpoint of the George W. Bush administration, just unhinged. And and now they're wondering why no one trusts them and no one believes them. And they think that it's because of Fox News, but it's really not at all has to do. Fox News is the symptom symptom not the disease the diseases they went insane about a month into the iraq invasion um and that and they've never they've never recovered and and so people now get their news from twitter or some other nonsense place but it's not people's fault i mean people are busy i mean you know i'm not so put it this way i'm not supposed to know about epidemics i just i'm supposed to know the boilerplate anodyne facts about epidemics, one of which was in November of 19. eradicate was on a slow march to endemic hood and we needed to prepare for that instead we had this

sort of neurotic nervous breakdown as a nation thinking that if we all stood in hell stayed inside and wrapped our children in plastic that somehow we'd be able to be emerge one day with a covid free world and that simply was never ever ever ever ever going to happen and if you said that i think if you say it now uh they'll take your twitter account away and the new york times will call you a freak well that was the problem the more we went to these sources to learn what we wanted to learn the more we found that uh the more we used them the more confused that we were um you would hope for example who's fault is that yeah well i mean part of it would be that twitter and facebook had their thumb on the scale,

and they thought that they were doing the right thing by keeping misinformation out there. We can't say this, but otherwise people are just going to drink bleach and eat porcelain. Well, no. So things now that we can actually say, that you can say on Twitter, you couldn't say then because it was regarded as disinformation. The idea, for example, that now everyone can brood about with the idea of a Chinese lab leak, but there was a while where you couldn't.

So when we went to these institutions, these supposed information dissemination systems, and used them, the more we used them, the more we found that they failed. Now, that's different than things like a great leather jack that you got. The more you use it, it's better. The cast iron skillet, the more you use it, the better. Fantastic.

Solid wood furniture, for example. I've got to pay attention more. I missed that one totally. Yeah. Well, when it comes to things that get better the more you use them, everything, sheets could be on that list. Well, they are because they're Bowling Branch sheets. They're not just buttery, breathable, and impossibly comfortable.

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I'd like to get them all. I want one more to do. I've answered a lot of these in the thread. And Rob, you should go back to the thread and answer a few of these because they're great. They're really great. The members are smart folk, and they have lots of interesting things to say.

But this one came from Blondie. Actually, no, it came from Deborah Harry. What are your thoughts on this whole ESG score and the WEF stuff, especially in relation to farmers like the ones in Holland and elsewhere? Well, WEF is different than ESG, but kind of, sort of not. ESG is environmental, social, and governance. These are the three criteria that are now to be applied to businesses and just about any entity to see whether or not it has a good, well, frankly, social credit score. I'm going to get it.

I don't like it. I don't, because while I think it's perfectly fair and wise to look at how a company behaves and adjust your investments accordingly if you want, I don't believe actually in the impartiality, shall we say, of the organizations that assign these things. I think they have an actual agenda, and I think that agenda, well, if it doesn't dovetail with wef then it certainly is coincident and what is that agenda i don't think there's some i don't think they're a little the illuminati i don't think they're blofeld sitting in a swiss mountain somewhere with their fingers steeped or you know stroking a white cat plotting world domination i think they are as rob said we're so so incredibly materially wealthy that we can afford to have this fine-toliated 1.01% of the elites who sit around and discuss how it would be great if they had control over everything. Because if they had control over everything, well, you wouldn't own anything.

You wouldn't need to. Dystopian, it sounds like to us, but no, it's a wonderful idea to them that everything is a microtransaction. You have no possessions. You don't need them. It's all a series of fluid little microtransactions as you float through the world. And frankly, we don't have to worry about the impact of meat because, hey, you know, there's population? So these guys on the stage give vent to the stupidest stuff because they believe they're amongst the same people who believe they are the smart guys. And if we just listened to them, all these problems would be solved. They don't see it as the rest of us do, where they appear to be describing a world in which freedom is circumscribed. There is nothing but this sort of secular, empty world where we're all wearing a paper

hemp jumpsuit and happy because the planet isn't going up by 0.05 degrees in the next 10 years. I think they're ridiculous. And I'd worry about them if I didn't hear about them. But they're literally like Ernst Stavro Blofeld getting on C-SPAN and saying, well, what we're going to do is we're going to build a rocket base in a Japanese volcano. And then we're going to try to get a nuclear war exchange going by stealing the capsules of the various American and Soviet probes as they go. I mean, they're just laying it all

out there. The Ross childs and the rest of those guys tended to keep it under the, you know, under their lid. So the ESG, I don't like because I don't trust it. And the WEF is good for what they think. No, I'm worried about them, but I'm appalled by some of the notions of the Schwab and the rest. No, I am not going to live in the pod. No, I'm not going to eat bugs.

Yes, I'm going to own things and it's going to be a gas powered car and I'm going to drive in it very fast. Thank you very much. I'm not going to wear a watch that tells you where I am all the time. No, no, no, no. Charles? in it very fast. Thank you very much. I'm not going to wear a watch that tells you where I am all the time. No. No. No. No. Charles?

Is that maybe? To qualify, maybe. Well, I'm against it on both structural and on the merits grounds, in that I don't like the idea of subordinating what markets or businesses are supposed to do to some vague conception

of moral or social justice. If you're a widget maker, make widgets. If you're an investor, make people richer. If you make chocolate, make chocolate. But I also think that the sort of people who are interested in this have demonstrated to us that they are the last people who should be informing whatever decisions that structural setup would yield. You know, these are the people who think men can have babies. who were on board with social distancing until it came to a protest that they happened to like, at which point apparently viruses don't matter.

These are the people who have invented a completely new language that no one else can understand and who call you names if you don't use it. These are the people who think that economics ended 20, 30 years ago, that we're no longer going to see the sort of obvious problems that we struggled with throughout all of human history. We're not going to see inflation. We're not going to have a problem if we spend more than we earn and if we borrow more than our entire economy is worth. So it's not just that I don't like the idea because it moves us away from a Friedmanite

approach to business. It's that I don't want the people who are obsessed with it to have any power at all because they have demonstrated over and over again that they are the last people you would ever choose to give it to.

Well, you know, a lot of this ESG stuff has been written about very well. I mean, Andy Kessler had a good editorial about it in the Wall Street Journal recently. And I know Real Clear Investigations or Real Clear Markets Well, I mean, Andy Kessler had a good editorial about it in the Wall Street Journal recently. And I know Real Clear Investigations or Real Clear Markets has done a really great job investigating all this ESG stuff. And what it comes down to basically is that if your money is invested with a firm that highlights its compliance with ESG guidelines, then you are losing money.

Then you should not be at that firm. That the idea of saying, well, we lost some of your money, but we did it in such an incredibly unproblematic way. I think if that fills you with joy, then by all means, run and give them your money. But if it doesn't, then you should fight it uh like you should not be have your money invested in places that make that a priority it's also one more thing on this is it's worth saying that one of the rejoinders that you hear anytime conservatives complain about

this sort of thing as well i thought you were in favor of free market i thought you're in favor of free choice this is private this isn't government it's not a law this is private the problem with that argument is that in most cases it's actually not in that if we were talking here about you know charlie's investment fund and i'm sitting here in my house and i which by the way 400 return this year i don't know i don't know how you do education of future performance stuff. I'm telling all my friends about it. So don't you? If it's me, I'm sitting at home, I trade for myself and a few of my friends, then fine. Okay. If I have a particular reversion to say investing in soft drinks, then why does it matter? But the companies that have been colonized by this stuff are enormous. I mean, you're looking at Vanguard, you're looking at

BlackRock. So if I go to work for a company and my 401k is managed for that company by Vanguard, I can't say, actually, I wish you to use a competitor, right? I mean, if you work at Unilever and their investments are managed by BlackRock, you don't have a choice as to whether or not those decisions are limiting your earning potential, are limiting what you are able to do by investing every month in your 401k. And so it's not really a market in the sense that it's a market if you go to the supermarket and you say, I don't like old El Paso, you know what, they've upset me so much that I'm not going to get old El Paso fajita mix. I'm going to get the public store brand one. That's fine.

You can't do that with these sorts of investments. And that's another reason it's so pernicious. Well, I think some of them use it to buy off bad criticism. I mean, we're the umbrella corporation. If we tell to if we tell everybody we're esg then they won't complain raytheon i think is probably uh yeah no it's you know it's an amazing i think gm is esg yeah there's a company that are complying with esg you know including drax chemical munitions right the russians see the hyARS coming in and think, well, I see an ESG-compliant sticker.

It's also LEED-certified, which nobody knows what that means. You see it on buildings all the time. We're LEED-certified. As if a non-LEED building, when you walk into it, you instantly are choked to death by chlorine gas. But the LEEDs, those are clean and the rest of it. All right, we've got to get a couple in here. And this is very

fast. We're talking one- answers charlie for you your favorite gun uh well my favorite handgun is my uh six hour p229 the carry version and my favorite Long gun is I have a Marlin lever action in 45. And it's so great because being a rifle, the 45 rounds, there's no recoil whatsoever. That's just a fun gun to shoot. You wouldn't take it hunting. But for target shooting, it's just glorious. That was from jim gone wild uh for occupants cdn for rob could anyone make a traditional american movie for

main street america now and blow off the chinese market or is it a central gun there we go question for me from brian i actually answered this in the uh Bryan Stevens Asked James, what do I think is the future of newspapers? Bleak. No, let me get that back. Death. No, that's not quite right either. Actually, go to Ricochet.com, where we have a big, long thread about this. And I answered this question because it's interesting.

I work for a newspaper that is surviving, that is good on local, that is great. Third largest Sunday newspaper in the country. We started a Sunday magazine, which nobody's done. We've had that for two or three years. that is good on local, that is great. Third largest Sunday newspaper in the country. We started a Sunday magazine, which nobody's done. We've had that for two or three years. And we've got a great audience who loves us. And we're converting to digital at a better rate. And we're not going away. But unfortunately, chains and equity, these people have ruined so many newspapers,

just hauled them out and turned them into nothing but just empty, useless rags that they provide no utility for people whatsoever. But the good part is that the internet tells you stuff that you wouldn't get in papers. And does the internet tell you, does your local newspaper tell you, for example, in Milwaukee that there's going to be a Ricochet meetup? No, no, but we will.

Matt Balzer is having a meetup. It's approaching July 23rd through the 31st. 48 hours of straight upup bacchanalia. Lots of members of RSVP. Any ricochet he can make it are invited. You've got to go if you're going to be anywhere close to Milwaukee on the 29th or the 31st. More than works, too. Brian Stevens is hosting one in Atlanta in August.

Quiet Pie is working at Details to get one in Northern California. Randy, I never pronounce Randy's name correctly. It's a lilac, my guy, I should know better. Randy, why vote up? Yes, he's coordinating with a few members to finally do the New Orleans meetup that was COVID canceled. Details coming soon. Rob, are you going to be there? You being a New Orleans

guy? I don't think so. You've sold your piano tear. I don't think so. No, I haven't. I never had it, so I will have to figure something else out. Making that stuff up. Well, you can keep up with that. Wait, wait, wait. Actually, no.

We're talking about 23. I'm sorry. Yes. I'm scrolling too fast. Hey, March 2023? I love when people call me up and ask if I could give a speech to their group in February 2023. I mean, of course I can't, I can't beg out of that. I was like, no, I've got plans. Of course I don't have plans. Anyway, lots of plans in the

Ricochet world. Check out the Ricochet member group, the meetup group that's available for our subscribers. Lots of fun. I mean, just ask our members who've attended one of them in New York and the more recent ones in Charlotte or Fort Worth. I had a great time meeting folks. The conversation is fantastic. I walked away hoarse, nodes of my vocal cords from shouting for six hours. It was great fun because Ricochet members are a smart batch of folk.

So make something happen in a town near you if you happen to be a member. And if not, you know, join. Guys, we should probably get out of here because we've spent a good amount of time on this. We could talk about something else and have more rank punditry, but you you know there's other podcasts to come for that and if peter doesn't make it back from his destination if he indeed is sacrificed or whatever dark uh you

know forces uh exist in the woods out there you know charles well we'll be we'll be seeing you again quite soon one thing i didn't want to talk about was the james webb space telescope and i'll say only this the fact they're talking about the Webb Telescope and also talking about the Hubble. Webb Hubble, whenever I hear people talk about Webb Hubble, I'm always a pitchback to the Clinton administration, and I'm wondering exactly what what we have to do, and that is to tell you that ExpressVPN is what you want to spend your money on. PolicyGenius. Go check them out for insurance. Poland Branch. You'll never sleep better. Support them for supporting us. And did I mention you should join Ricochet today? Rob, tell them to join Ricochet today. Please join Ricochet.

We need you, especially if you're paying off our insane lawsuit. By joining Ricochet today, you will keep Ricochet solvent. And please go to Apple Podcasts and say that Charles C.W. Cook is so erudite, and I'd love to listen to him. He's absolutely great. The show deserves five stars.

Do that today, right, Charles? No question. And if you don't like it, then don't. Just keep it to yourself. Just shut up. Just shut up. Put a lid on it. Don't splash it all over.

Thanks for listening, and thanks for the questions. We'll see you every day. Thank you, Charles, for sitting in for Peter, and we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week. I know so many people who think they can do it alone.

They isolate their heads Thank you. And what can you say that would make them defensive? I know there's an answer. I know now, but I had to find it by myself. They come on like they're peaceful, but inside they're so uptight. They trip through the day and waste all their thoughts at night. Now how can I come on and tell them the way that they live could be better I know there's an answer I know now, but I have to find it by myself Ricochet Join the conversation. Now how can I come up

And tell them the way that they think could be better I know there's an answer I know now but