The Ricochet Podcast - Hurricanes, Knees, and Dr. Suess

Episode Date: September 30, 2017

This week, we call of a couple of our most popular podcasters to help us parse the week’s events: Michael Graham, the Boston based host of or daily podcast Michael in the Morning sits in for Peter Robinson, while Michael Stopa from the Harvard Lunch Club podcast stops by to talk about how the President is doing so far (and yes, he and Rob Long get into another one of their epic rap battles). Then... Source

We have special news for you. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Are you going to send me or anybody that I know to a camp? We have people that are stupid. Well, maybe from where she's standing, it's a good news story. When you're drinking from a creek, it's not a good news story. When you don't have food for a baby, it's not a good news story. When you don't have food for a baby, it's not a good news story. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

It's the Ricochet Podcast with Michael Graham sitting in for Peter Robinson and Rob Long's back as well. I'm James Lylex and our guests today, Michael Stopa and Jason Reilly. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 371. I'm James Lilacs. Rob Long is here, which means, of course, Peter Robinson isn't. I don't know what's going on between us two. It's a feud. Yep. Grab your shooting irons and head for the hills. How do we get here this far? 371 episodes. That's because we're brought to you by a variety, a flanks, a panoply

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so you can delve deeper into areas you love to learn about. Sign up now at thegreatcoursesplus.com slash ricochet. And we're brought to you by Ring Doorbells. Ring's mission is to make neighborhoods safer, including yours. And today, over a million people using the amazing ring video doorbell help protect their homes you can save up to 150 off a ring of security kit when you go to ring.com slash ricochet that's ring.com slash ricochet uh all together now ring.com slash ricochet and when i say ricochet i mean this the entity that is and this is great because here's usually where rob long if he does deign to appear shows up and and gives you a desultory pitch for why you should pay money to the enterprise. I'm going to make Rob read somebody else's copy, which as a creative sort ought to just drive him crazy.

Welcome back, Rob, and read somebody else's copy. I am thrilled to read somebody else's copy and nice to be here, James. Just to clarify, I think Peter Robinson is traveling around. I dined with him, though, just so you know. We dined together Thursday night. So he's doing well. But I would like to say that Peter and I founded Ricochet many, many years ago, 371 podcasts ago, to create a space for lively, civil conversation among and between the center-right. And we've done a pretty good job of keeping the doors open.

We've done a terrible job of marketing. So luckily for us, Ricochet members helped us market, and Ricochet member Henry Rousset posted this, and so I'm going to read it. I've been on social media for more than a decade, written hundreds of pieces of conservative commentary. Usually, not always, I've been preaching to the choir, enjoying a receptive audience within my own little bubble chamber. It's pleasant, but not very productive. more than a decade, written hundreds of pieces of conservative commentary. Usually, not always, I've been preaching to the choir, enjoying a receptive audience within my own little bubble chamber.

It's pleasant, but not very productive. I've tried blogging, but building a successful blog takes time, focus, commitment. It also requires knowledge of search engine optimization, SEO, and other arcane aspects of building a digital presence. Most of us are too busy with our brick-and-mortar lives to compete in the crowded blogosphere. Ricochet provides a platform for the conservative voice to handle the nuts and bolts of managing an internet presence while providing normal conservatives, those of us who spend our days in the real world, with a platform for expressing our ideas to a larger audience.

Ricochet is a group blog for the rest of us, a well-known conservative site that can propel thoughtful conservative content from regular people out into the wide world of conservative bloggers and conservative news. That is true, by the way. That's an editor's note. For a few dollars a year, Ricochet makes it easy for us to share our views with thousands, tens of thousands who are searching for an alternative to mainstream media. So please go to ricochet.com slash join and join us. We need you. If you've been putting it off, it's the weekend.

Do today. Do today. Please. I like Blagesfeld instead of Blagesphere. I'm tired of Blagesphere. And Blagesfeld sounds like I could walk around now with black glasses and my silver shock of hair and call myself Carl Blagesfeld. I like that. Are we going to the Blagesfeld already?

Yeah. Well, this is usually where we have Peter Robinson. But Peter, as we say, is out swanning about in a custom style, which means we welcome Michael Graham to the show. Sitting in for Peter Michael is one of the newest hosts at Ricochet's audio network. The show he has is called Michael in the Morning, and it's available every bleeding frickin' day around 8 a.m. Eastern time. Informative, funny, and indispensable. Subscribe to it and listen to it on your way to work. And here he is, Michael.

All right. Why? Why should I listen to this? Sure, it's free. It's brilliant. It's funny. But what else is there in it for me? Well, I have to start by correcting you.

Everyone knows that Blagesfeld was the rejected villain from one of the early Bond movies. And so I feel bad that I already have to step in and step on Rob Long's pop culture credentials. I will say that, like Peter Robinson, I am originally from California. I was actually born in L.A., although we moved to South Carolina. My mom is from Long Beach. My dad is from Myrtle Beach. So I'm bi-coastal, except you can't tell people you're in South Carolina that you're bi-coastal because they think you date guys on the beach. So I try to keep that to myself. But I will do my best. I will effort to hold up the

West Coast wing of the podcast, which I listen to religiously. So it really is a thrill to be here. Oh, well, wonderful. Get up off your knees and unlace your fingers. This doesn't need to be a religious experience at all. We don't take ourselves seriously. Wait a minute. No, we do. Of course. That's why we're here. We have important things to do to discuss a religious experience at all. We don't take ourselves seriously.

Wait a minute. No, we do. Of course. That's why we're here. We have important things to do, to discuss. News. Tom Price out. Resigned.

Swamp drained. Or was this an example of... Somebody on Twitter, I believe, said, or maybe it was on a blog, Ernst Stavro Bloggesfeld, said that there's something actually refreshingly normal about the whole price thing. Yeah, I agree. I agree with that. I also feel like there's orders of magnitude of scandal. There's this kind of scandal, which is, let's be honest, it's how many times, many presidents have heard about the use of military transport, all that stuff.

Turns out, of course, that under the Trump administration, there's been fewer military flights appearing in his cabinet, his administration. Those little facts are always useful. But the orders of magnitude of scandal are hard to argue with now because we have the regular scandals which are a cabinet secretary uses the wrong plane or somebody's scamming the federal government out of dough that's standard then there's the second order scandal which is the sort of use and abuse of executive power so far this president hasn't really done that. But the last president, in my estimation, did. Just because you didn't cover the IRS scandal doesn't make it not a scandal.

So people now say, well, Obama had a spotless, clean administration. It was really done by fiat, right? And then there's the third-level scandal, which I think is going to happen. The Trump administration is probably going to be facing soon, which is you have an independent council looking for stuff. And you've got sort of complicated things going on. That will probably end up being real. But like everything else about this president, he gets his opposition to turn it up to 11 at the first moment. So that by the time he actually reaches 11, they're all. Well, remember that Betsy DeVos was attacked early on when they were trying to make this into a pattern.

Oh, my gosh, she's taking private jets. And then someone pointed out, yeah, it's hers and she pays for the gas. Russia, Trump bad. So that's where they go. What I like about this is that we got rid of some dead weight. Do you guys remember? In fact, once again, I'm serious. I am a regular listener to this podcast. And as Rob Long will tell you, because of the three times he said go to court, I'm also a stalker of his. that this guy was going to – Tom Price was going to be the best pick in the Trump cabinet. He was the guy who knew healthcare, and he was the guy who knew the system, and he was a Washington insider, but he wasn't a swamper. And he was going to really use the power that Obama mistakenly put into the commissioner's hands, the secretary's hands, and go out, and he was going to use their tools against them.

And then he disappeared. I mean, it was like he had testified against the corleone family he was just gone the weird thing about it is that if you if you're a conspiracy theorist which you're not but if you are he was the right cabinet secretary for the swamp or the you know the progressive what are the deep state media industrial complex to take out, because the Secretary of Health and Human Services has a huge amount of power, enormous power. Pretty much most of the teeth and the stuff we don't like about Obamacare can be adjusted by the Secretary's pen. So getting rid of that person delayed action.

But I think you're right michael michael there wasn't that much action coming mostly because i think uh you need what you need in that position is somebody persuasive that that is now a political position because you have to persuade a whole lot of people even people who voted for trump in fact a lot of people voted for trump that they what they need to do is to give up Obamacare. Obamacare is a fun thing for people to complain about, but it turns out that a lot of people who voted for Trump and a lot of supporters actually like it, which is why it's been so hard to dismantle. And someone doing that is doing that through the administrative pen and not through legislative

action, which I, by the way, I support wholeheartedly. But I think maybe what they needed in there was somebody who could charismatically explain what they're doing to a president can't in the office and not have to leave it to sort of the clown car on Capitol Hill to sort out. Well, you're right. It would be great to have the president make the points. The problem is, you know, we were talking before about Bryce being gone and how this was a scandal and it's not a scandal and robs three levels of scandal,

is that the accumulating effect on the left is the increasing guiltiness of everything that Donald Trump is, does, touches, etc. And we saw this on the right as well. I mean, even though there would be an implication, an accusation made against Obama, if it didn't come to fruition the way that we wanted, we still sort of kind of regarded that as sort of kind of maybe proven and added it to the pile of things that were the reasons for which we opposed him in the administration. It's the same on the left.

But the thing is that their ability to keep shifting those goalposts, that we went from Russian meddling and collusion to now just sort of Russia took posts about Black Lives Matter. By the time that Mueller is done and they have discovered that there is some connection between one of his lobbyists and a hotel plan in Kazakhstan or wherever, that will be the end thing that's going to be that will be the end thing that they get and that will be sufficient for them and you will add to that every other failure and emolument and and katrina-like failure i the thing is they think that that's the truthful narrative that the rest of the country sees because that's what they see on rachel and msnbc

and the rest of it just as the right during during the years of Obama thought that that was the thing that was going to put Romney in office because everybody knew about this guy. Right. Right. And so I think that they have the same sort of surprise coming perhaps in two or three years. And we have another presidential election as the right got when Obama was was kicked back, especially if the economy is kicking along at three point two, 3.6, 3.8. Where I disagree is that the comparison with the Obama is because you're right that there was this presumption of guilt about Obama. But when you said the pricing is going to add to the left's assumption that Trump is guilty, everything he touches turns to fertilizer. Dude, they've been full spinal tap since January 20th. It goes to 11. The whole, there is nothing that is not an 11 with these people. During Obama, talk radio would sometimes settle down to a, you know, six, seven or eight, but it is nothing but nonstop. It is

impeachable. And so I think it's going to have even less net effect on voters. I think, guys, I'd like it from you. I think people, non-Trump haters are already tuning it out. Well, I think the problem, the challenge that Trump faces, and we know we want to save some of this because we've got a Trump expert,

a Trump-spert coming, my old friend, coming up. But the problem he faces, and we should talk to Michael about this because he's a dyed-in-the-w the wool trump supporter is that he's he that trump's got a ceiling you know even though his whole numbers are going up a little bit they go up in the always in the low 40s is good for him um and i think after this weekend which we should get to uh i think it's going to go down again trump's best uh strategy which i think whether

it's his own or it's just intuitive is to to continually troll the aggressive left so they go insane and they they have this derangement um uh and deluded view of of america the american populace and and nominate i talked to a friend of mine who is you know kind of a moderate john kerry and people like that and said he said to me look what's going to happen is the democrats are going to look at trump and they're going to nominate a crafters and um i will happily then vote for trump yeah and and you get that's that's a very it's a high wire act yeah. You will have people who before had no intention of ever voting for the man or regard him as an aberration in the American

political scene, eventually going and voting for him for the same reasons that people told him that they should in the previous election, that it's a binary choice and what are you going to do? But I think it will be because you're right, Rob, because of who they nominate and also be perhaps because the rude animal spirits of the economy have been opened up and let loose and we're actually seeing growth as opposed to the anemic limping around nonsense that we saw. I'll take that.

I'll take that. As we all. And if people feel economically insecure come the next election, yeah, they might be casting around for some crackpot social ideas. There's no way to be secure. There's no way to be secure. There's no way to be secure. Oh, Rob, how I missed you. It's literally impossible.

Oh, I missed you, Rob. Literally impossible. Hanging a lampshade on every single phone name I possibly come up with as I approach a commercial. You're absolutely right. Oh, come on. Wait. Oh, come on. I've been waiting for this.

You don't understand. I'm such a fanboy of this podcast. I was waiting for the chance to be the guy Who sucks up over Lilac's transitions Don't enable me In particular because I used to do talk radio So I used to have to do these things too And so I really know how hard it is To do them well and Lilac's you are

The master sir Thank you very much but of course Having Rob back ruined everything Ever so gently and quietly and stealthily You might say like a burglar in the night up to the spot that we're about to do. But, of course, the spot is the sort of thing that makes burglars run away in terror because they don't want to be seen, they don't want to be identified, they don't want to be caught.

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That's ring.com slash ricochet. And our thanks to Ring for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now let's bring on Michael Stoppa. He's the co-host of the wildly popular Harvard Lunch podcast, and he's also a nanotechnologist, which is great because it's possible he's so small, like Fantastic Voyage style, he'll actually be able to go through the wires and appear on our

desk. He's published nearly a hundred papers on the physics, chemistry, and biochemistry of very, very small things. And I believe, you know, my picture is there as a matter of fact. His main focus has always been, how do we get those small things to work for us? He's currently teaching graduate chemistry at MIT, consulting for the National Science Foundation. He's working with a startup that's developed a new type of computer memory. Until last year, he was the Harvard researcher specializing in computation and nanoscience in the physics department. Mike, welcome to the podcast. Wow, what an introduction.

Boy, who is that guy? Yeah. We were talking the other day on twitter i think terry of terry teach out i can never pronounce his last name correctly um of the wall street journal had just seen fantastic voyage for the first time and a lot of us were discussing the the science of it the raquel welchness of it the music the raquel welch in the antibodies and the white suitness of it um did you watch that at an early age and that make you think that nanotechnology is where you want to go? I was 13 years old or so, and it was really the Raquel Welch part of it that was appealing to me at the time. The science eventually seeped in.

Well, listen, you guys, hello, James. Hello, Rob. And hello there, Michael Graham. I am Michael Graham. eyes uh hello hello james hello rob and hello there michael graham i am michael graham and let me tell you guys how good uh stopa is at his job finding very small things he found the conservative movement in massachusetts i saw it it was it was absolutely amazing they you can you see you can see it every tuesday and thursday they have visiting hours and stuff a right-wing cauldron in massachusetts sort of the smallest pond with the biggest frogs.

Exactly. You guys, I wanted to charge into the Ricochet podcast, metaphorically wearing my Make America Great Again hat, but alas, I reduced it to ashes two weeks ago when Amnesty Dawn joined the likes of Rick Perry. That's my question. That's my question, Mike. How's that MAGA hat doing? And I say this with, of course, you know, you and I, we've been around and around on this Trump thing. So I want to take that Trump stuff and separate it, right? So I want to take the Trump movement things and let's just talk about them in a minute. Let's just talk right now about the politics of the moment.

So the president tweets. The president, I think, has had a last two weeks ago, three weeks ago, had a very, very bad week. That was during the Amnesty Dawn stuff and the and the deals with uh chuck and nancy and then uh we had a week where he seemed to sort of get a little bit of um of support back from some of the the more uh the more mega types uh and and now i think um and by the way his his his uh clearly a reaction to his reaching out to moderates meaning chuck and n, they're not moderates, but whatever, reaching across the aisle, I should say. Yeah. Gave him a couple of bumps in the polls.

He went up from his, you know, high mid high 30s to low 40s. Not bad. Yeah. Go ahead. So this weekend, I mean, not this weekend, I should say, at 4.19 a.m. today, this morning, he takes a bunch of potshots at the mayor of San Juan in Puerto Rico and suggests that the people of Puerto Rico want people to come in and do it. They're too lazy to do it themselves. How is this going to get your wall built? Well, OK, so I want to be as gracious and as dignified at mea culpa and and fine, fine crow cuisine as you were when when Trump won the election. And at least you were

for a while. Five minutes. Don't give me any credit. I mean, now it's back to us. This is not what we would say. I appeared on your podcast in full rage. So now I'll shut up. Go ahead. So, no, you're right. Two weeks ago, you say that he had a bad week. But according to some people, it was a great week when he reached across, quote unquote, the aisle to talk to Nancy and Chuck. And and indeed, that was when people got outraged with this DACA thing. You know, I think part of Trump's problem is, you know, there's a saying that you should keep your friends close and keep your enemies closer.

That only works if you can distinguish between the two. And so he seems to be fraternizing with what we on the extreme knuckle-dragging Neanderthal right-wing feel are his appreciation among the forgotten people. And so as far as I don't, I haven't heard about his tweets to San Juan. My impression was that some of the people in San Juan were in Puerto Rico were were satisfied with him responding to their to their help. It's a really good. This is I think is a really good example. Perfect illustration of the Trump problem, the politics problem. He gets no help from the press. In fact, the federal response to the disaster in Puerto Rico has been pretty good. It is still, but it is a catastrophe, and so it probably needs to be better. It needs to be more robust. The palaver about the Jones Act was kind of stupid because the Jones Act is a labor

act. It's kind of an EEOC kind of a business where it's all about safety and security and workers' rights on boats. So they passed a law that said all the ships that come in between intra-US have to have a certain standard. And that's something that usually Democrats are in favor of. So he has a point. Then he ruins by tweeting, lazy Puerto Ricans, why don't you clean up your own mess? Might I interrupt? Yes, go right ahead. I want to read the tweets real quickly so people can have them.

The mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that he must be nasty. She must be nasty to Trump. Such poor leadership ability by the mayor and others in Puerto Rico who are not able to get their workers to help. They want everything done for them when it should be a community effort. And then it doesn't matter what he said after that, because once you've said that, you just, hello, where's the dumpster?

I've got the gasoline and a match, so take it away, President Trump. Well, I mean, so Trump gets into this problem a lot, but as my partner Todd Feinberg and I say on the Harvard Lunch Club podcast all the time, there's this thing called the Trump trap, and I thought that you mentioned the NFL kerfuffle, and I think that was a perfect example of it. Because the one thing we can all agree on is that the left gets completely outraged when any part of the ratchet of the motion of history that they have managed to click up gets undone in one way or another. And they depend on people. They depend on essentially obvious truths being concealed from people.

And so Trump comes out and he says what seems to be the most outrageous thing in the world, basically, that, you know, well, and he says it in the terms that a guy in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania or Ohio or Michigan can understand. Namely that, well, those guys those guys kneeling their SOBs and they should be fired. And and then this is this is an outrage to the entire mainstream media and not to mention, you know, sending the left ballistic. But but then when when the smoke clears, everybody says, well, yeah, I think that I shouldn't be kneeling either. And this this kind of head fake left and right and driving everybody in some direction,

it's endlessly entertaining, even after I had basically burned my Make America Great Again hat. You had to go buy another one. I'm saying, damn, I love the piece. I mean, it's not necessarily that this guy is really genius. Maybe he's just an ordinary businessman who doesn't know enough to keep his mouth shut. But it works like genius on some occasions. Let me follow up on that because, as you know, we go back and forth on this. How is it working?

We are stuck with Obamacare probably forever. He's making deals with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. Where we got the DREAM Act is in there. There's Amnesty Don. At the end of this, we're going to have comprehensive immigration reform probably precisely like

was offered by the Republicans four years ago, three years ago, whatever it was. I'm not convinced of that. OK, but it seems to me that you and I interpret the turbulence of the tweets and the NFL and all that stuff differently. You interpret it as ultimately he wins, but I interpret it as ultimately it's distracting and he doesn't. He then, after reminding people, hey, I'm still the loud mouth you thought I was. I'm going to be a loud mouth about Puerto Rico. I'm going to be a loud mouth about the NFL. But meanwhile, I've got Chuck and Nancy in my office. Who's being

distracted here? It doesn't seem like it's the left. It seems like it's the Trump supporters. Well, I think it is. It is distracting. And I think it's entertaining in a distracting way. But as far as the nuts and bolts of what gets done in in the legislature, in our Congress, I wonder if anything could have been any different with any other Republican. We have 52 senators. We have I mean, we've got we we've got the House, but would Jeb Bush have pushed through the repeal of Obamacare? I don't think he would have, because there's basically a rock and a hard place. You've got a few senators who aren't willing to go along with that. It's disappointing. I think eventually something will happen, and the executive branch can, you know, make some progress on their own. So what was the point then? The

point was simply to increase the entertainment value of the election and then the administration? Your point was to keep Hillary Clinton out of office, which a lot of people on the right didn't spend a whole lot of time helping us do. I was under the impression, however, that a great deal of swamp draining and making America great and reformulating of America and generally winning, beating the culture back, establishing a new standard by which the culture will be held was the whole point of this thing, that Trumpism was going to advance a panoply of ideas. And now the thing is, well, yeah, same as you would have got with Jeb. Let's at least admit that there was nothing but empty hot wind behind all of that, and just simply somebody other than Hillary was the whole point.

Anybody other than Hillary. Anthony Weiner, if he'd had sufficiently conservative policies, would have been... Wait a minute. Everybody telling me this is a Flight 93 election would have voted for Anthony Weiner, knowing everything they know about his personal life, if he had been a Republican and if he had had a few conservative ideas. There's no question in my mind whatsoever. Hey, there's a big difference between Trump and Anthony Weiner.

I mean, it's possible Anthony Weiner could actually have some conservative ideas. So, I mean, come on. Let's be fair here. Positing the idea that if Anthony Weiner had everything that we know about his personal life, but had somehow been nominated as the Republican and had a few conservative words come out of his mouth, that he would have been told he would have been Flight 93. Hillary was going to destroy the country. Weiner would have been preferable for all of his mouth that he would have been told he would have been flight 93 hillary was going to destroy the country weiner would have been preferable for all of his faults and dennis

prager would have been celebrating not celebrating but supporting him on the air hey you chew that around for a while for a second i gotta get a cup of coffee i'm right here listening to every phone well so i'm just trying to get to the to get to what i want and now i want to have your your prognostication on this are you trying to get to the to get to what I want. And now I want to have your prognostication on this. Are you going to get a wall? I think so. Yeah, I think we'll get some semblance of a wall. And and it'll it'll because basically if Stephen Miller leaves the White House, then I might say that that's not going to happen. But, yeah, there's been no kind of more forceful promise.

I wouldn't bet my house on it, though. I think it's possible that we won't. But I look at the Internet every day, and I Google ICE and deportations, and I see that this myth that the left introduced a long time ago, the left and the Chamber of Commerce introduced a long time ago, that you can't undo the illegal immigration problem. It'll never happen. People are never going to go back.

I said, well, this has been exposed as a big lie because people have now realized just how fragile the situation is. Only having Jeff Sessions as the attorney general, that alone is, to me, a win. People talk about Gorsuch in the Supreme Court. Gorsuch in the Supreme Court, that's fine. The other justices throughout the country, those are fine. But somebody who's actually taking into account the rule of law. You know, I've told you many times, Rob, to me, this illegal immigration thing, just like Ann Coulter, just like Mickey House, is really far and away the most important thing. The fact is, if we don't do something about that, then in a generation,

the Republican Party will really be a tea party of people just sitting around a house having tea. That's a good line. Well, let me ask you this, because I know we got to let you go, but I want to ask you this, to talk about just political politics for a while, because you've been, you know, you worked on a Trump campaign. You've got some presidential campaign chops now. The way it looks to me, I mean, if the economy keeps clipping along at 3 percent, which is pretty good, that's going to – and if I'm sitting next to President Trump and he keeps zigging through doing what successful presidents do, frankly, political successful presidents do, you give a little bit of red meat to your face and then you make some deals. You give a little bit of red meat and you make some deals. That's what Bill Clinton did.

That's what Lyndon Johnson did. In many ways, that's what Ronald Reagan did. It's a successful political strategy. Whether you agree with the outcomes or not is a separate thing why would he just keep doing that and keep the left going bananas and energize the far left part of the democratic party so they nominate some crackpot i mean somebody that makes hillary clinton look like a moderate and scoop up all middle. Because it doesn't seem to me that the Democrats have figured out that there's a whole middle part of the country that is now, doesn't know where it belongs. And if you had, the unthinkable happened, which is that if you had

a Democratic Party candidate who was patriotic, like Trump, who thought the players should stand for the national anthem, who was a robust border security guy like Trump. It seems like that would be a really winning combination, but they're not going to do that. So do you think at the end of the day, 2020 is going to be about whether the wall was built or not, or whether Obamacare was repealed or not, or do you think it's going to be about that crackpot loony left person running against Trump? Well, I think you're right, first of all, that Trump has managed to keep the left utterly perplexed and enraged and beside themselves and and consequently um it doesn't seem like the the democrats are inclined to do something in their best interest like nominate somebody like like like hickle hooper or somebody you know some or or bennett from colorado these

are people who could actually looper okay i gotta run the hickle hickle Hooper was the side guy to Blagesfeld who could throw his hickle at people and kill them. He was my favorite character. Well, Hickle Hooper probably could win the election against Trump. So in any case, those guys are a few – there are a few other people actually on the Democratic bench who could probably beat Trump. But you're right, Rob, they're not going to nominate somebody like that because the passionate people, the people who are just completely flummoxed right now, happened in 2020. A lot of this is interesting and playing out now with this Alabama election in particular, that the Bannon forces are going around saying, OK, screw Trump, you know, forget about him. We're going to resurrect Trumpism, whether he's going to be the leader of the party or not.

Now, Trump's not going to be the nominee, but it all depends on whether or not the people who were the forgotten people were the people who listened to his message and, however discombobulated it was, heard the siren song, whether they're going to be there next time. I mean, you know, Michael was talking about the cauldron of conservatism here in Massachusetts. 300,000 people voted for Donald Trump in Massachusetts in the primaries. So there's a really white-hot group out there. But he does, I mean, he's got to hold on to at least a couple of issues. And I think the wall is one of them. But the question, does he really understand? And I don't know.

I don't know. Yeah. Well, white-hot. I heard the dog whistle, the whole supremacist thing. Thanks, Michael. You can hear more on the Harvard Lunch podcast, and we advise everybody to go do so and get a perspective that you won't get from the people who are constantly hammering the president and, you know, may have good reasons for doing so. Thanks, Michael. You know, the phrase, who's he talking about? Hickled Ruber, was that it? Hickled Ruber, the governor of Colorado.

By the way, funny name, but the Democrats are fools not to put him front and center. He's a Rocky Mountain governor and he's a pro-energy. And his brownies are fantastic. I don't know what he puts in them, but jeez. Exactly right. Every time I visit the Statehouse, I'm like, all over these brownies. But Herman Hicklegruber sounds like the name that Adolph Schicklegruber would use when he was signing into some motel.

He didn't want to be caught. But he wouldn't do that, of course, because he had sexual issues and probably only one testicle. Is that true? I don't know. Maybe if you study your history books, you could find things like that. It's impossible to study history now. I love it.

It's too old. Wouldn't it? All over again. You can't educate yourself later. You know, the interesting thing about having a new dog, and I have one, is that their digestive system is working through all the things that, you know, the puppies, they eat constantly. They do the grass. We kept them off the scraps, but, you know, the different foods that you try.

And he's had a little bit of an upset stomach. However, the dog has the ability to issue a potent room-clearing, eye-watering flatulence without ever actually making a sound. It just sort of inhabits the room and it sneaks into your your your breath just exactly like Rob Long's ability because you're just breathing in and life is going normally and then This high, loaderous, miserable. But you love it. Like you love your new puppy, you love that. It's just one of those things. Rob, you know the joke that I'm thinking of right now, don't you? About the guy who goes to the date to pick up the girl and he's in the living room with the dad and the dog.

You must know that classic joke. You don't know that joke? No. I know. Off the air. Off the air, I'll share. Uh-oh. Okay. You can't tell it off the air. You can't tell it on the air. You tell everybody there's this

really funny thing, and you're going to deprive it of them. You're going to give it to somebody later in private. Exactly. Join Ricochet, and I will post, no joke, I will post at my page on Ricochet the date dad dog joke for people who like comedy.

That's PG-17. And the aristocrats. The thing I was trying to say was learning. And that was before Rob Long came along. Rob didn't learn to ruin things for people. Rob, it's natural to him. But not everything is natural to everybody, and that's why sometimes you need a little assistance, you need some instructions,

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who love to learn to get unlimited access to over 8,000 fascinating videos. I said 8,000. It's the perfect way for people like you who love to learn to get unlimited access to over 8,000 fascinating videos. I said 8,000. I meant it. So what are you waiting for? Get started now with The Great Courses Plus so you can dive deeper into areas you love to learn about. One of the ones we keep telling you about, and it's germane to these difficult days, is the Philosopher's Toolkit. It's a, well, one of the lectures is called Outwitting the Advertiser. Wait a minute, I'm the advertiser. I don't want you to outwit me. Yes, I do. I want you to learn the skills to be able to go through an ad and see

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Start your free month today. Thegreatcoursesplus.com slash ricochet. Start your free month today, thegreatcoursesplus.com slash ricochet. Thanks, of course, to Ricochet for being here, for being sponsored by The Great Courses. It's an honor. Now we bring our next guest, Jason Riley. Jason Riley is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He's also the author of a new book, False Black Power, and we welcome him back to the podcast. You wrote that you used to sit for the National Anthem as well. Yes, I was raised as a Jehovah's Witness and taught not to stand for the National Anthem or salute the flag in school.

We were taught it was a form of adultery. So that's how I spent my childhood. I left the organization voluntarily in my teens, but as a youngster, no, I didn't stand for the national anthem. Well, first of all, Jason, I'm a huge fan of yours. I love the work you do. I read your columns all the time, and you talk about the honest facts on the ground about race in America, and that's what I'm interested about this, is that you have this fight with the NFL folks trying to point us to a vague general concern they have, and not a lot of specifics to follow on. This very week, I found out, I saw a stat, that for six years in a row now, more black Americans were murdered than white Americans last year.

Which is just, if you think about the math, 13% of the population is black, that's just horrific. How is it we get spun off on flag issues and Kaepernick when you have glaring numbers like that? Well, I sort of fault the media coverage. In fact, I don't think that the NFL players' perceptions about race and policing are any different from that of the general public, given how this issue has been covered in the media. And I really think that the media has perpetrated an incorrect or false narrative with regard to what's going on out there. I don't doubt the question, the patriotism of these players. The question for me is whether what they are protesting has some basis in reality. Are they talking mainly about anecdotes

and viral videos on social media? because everything I've looked at that has attempted to look at this issue empirically does not show an increase in police shootings in general or an increase in police shootings of black suspects. In fact, when you look at the empirical data, you see the opposite has been occurring for decades. The downward trend in police use of deadly force. Hey, Jason, it's Rob Long. Thanks for joining us. You know, the work of Heather McDonald, one of your Manhattan Institute colleagues, has been pretty incontrovertible on this.

But so is it just the media turning this into some kind of firestorm for the past three or four years with Ferguson? Is it just that? Or is there something deeper happening that we're not paying attention to? Well, I think the left in general, and I think I consider an overwhelming majority of the mainstream media to be part of the left, the political left and its coverage of issues like this. But the left in general has driven this. The whole Black Lives Matter movement is based on this notion that there's an epidemic of cops gunning for blacks. But again, you look at the data, and it just isn't there. In New York City, where I'm based, police shooting have fallen by more than 90% over the past four and a half decades. In the early 1970s, cops shot more than 300 people in one year and killed more than 90 of them. By 2015, that was down to something like 26 police shootings and six police shooting fatalities in the nation's largest city with the nation's largest police force.

And you can look at other big cities and see a similarly dramatic downward trend nationally. um something like you know blacks are something like 70 percent less likely today or the rate at which blacks are shot is 70 percent lower than it was back uh in the late 60s so you see these trends nationally you see them in federal statistics uh there's an economist at harvard roland fryer who is black and put out a study last year and And this is a guy who said, he said, I was looking at all this media coverage, and I said, is this based in the data? And he looked at this, and he said he couldn't find a racial bias in police shootings. He said that black suspects were less likely than white suspects to be shot by police. So what's the agenda here? I mean, this issue, I mean, now it is like

everything that happens under President Trump, he has become Trumpified. But before it was Trumpified, it was President Obama was the president. And that's when Ferguson and Baltimore erupted into riots. It was President Obama. What is the driving motivation? Or is there one? You're right. Obama could have spoken more constructively about this. So could Eric Holder.

The two black men, they know this issue inside and out. They know black homicide rates are not being driven by police activity. They know that police have a perfectly good reason to be in these neighborhoods. They know that black crime rates are some multiple of white crime rates in all of these violent crime categories. They know all this. But it was politically expedient, I think, to let this narrative go out there, to let it continue. I think that the black left has a stake in keeping blacks in particular racially paranoid and angry and upset. I think they get a lot of political mileage out of keeping that out there. And I think that's why Obama would talk out of both sides of his mouth on this issue. Oh, all sides

need to calm down. There's sort of a moral equivalency to the way he and Holder and his Justice Department... Good people on both sides. Well, yeah, exactly. Exactly, Jason, Jason, look. It's identity politics. This is driven by identity politics. Jason, listen, I hear all your facts. In all fairness, we now have a president who also practices identity politics. I think this alt-right stuff is the flip side of what we see from Black Lives Matter.

So two can play this game, and I think both sides should cut it out. But this is what was going on under Obama. And I think that is why this narrative has been out, that this narrative that the NFL players and others are protesting. Listen, Jason, I've heard your facts. But as I learned when I gave a speech at Amherst this week, facts are hate. So you can keep your hate to yourself, mister. One of the most painfully white things that a white person can do is ask a black person to be a spokesperson for all black Americans. Jason, when black Americans look at the American flag, do they see the same flag as everyone else? Because that's the meme

I've been getting in the NFL debate, is that if you're black in America, the flag just looks different to you. Oh, I'd quote that. You do know blacks are overrepresented in the U.S. armed services. That is, and have been for some time. If that was the general attitude of blacks, why would they be entering military at the rates they do

to put their life on the line for this country? So I don't agree with that now. Do you think, can we just put your political hat on, is that a good political move for Trump to agitate about the NFL players, or do you think it's a bad one? Good in terms of what?

In terms of his approval rating? He doesn't seem to care about that uh good in terms of keeping his base riled up i guess so um they don't seem to have a problem with him doing this i don't think it helps the country in general i don't think it helps the nfl i don't think it helps the tone of the debates that we're having today. And I don't think it helps address the issue, the underlying issue that everyone seems to be concerned about here, which is the relationship between these poor black communities and law enforcement. I'd like to see that relationship improve. I think it won't improve until we get these black crime rates down. But in the meantime, we should all be looking at the same statistics.

We should all be talking about the same set of facts here. And unfortunately, what's happening is that increased media coverage of police shootings is being conflated with a supposed increase in police shootings. And they are not the same thing. And so I want to ask, if I can ask one last question, it would be from people who are traditional conservatives, small government conservatives, law enforcement conservatives, what is a policy that they could rally around or an item they could push forward that would be an open door to their fellow black Americans to say, here, here's something we can do in this area together. Here's a policy that we can set the emotion aside and the name calling aside, and we can all stand for the,

for the pledge, and we can do X to actually make things better and, and get some resonance in the black community. I don't know that there's a, there's a single policy that can do all that. I do think that if these players wanted to play a more constructive role and knowing that they have this platform, knowing that they have this bullet pulpit, they could say to these black youngsters, you know, actually, police shootings are statistically very rare. And in many of the cases we've seen, people have been resisting arrest. When the cops pull you over, do what they say. If you quibble with it, take it up in the courts. You don't fight this out in the street. If you want fewer black body bags, if you want to save black lives, if black lives matter to you, that's what we should be focused on doing. there were something like 4,300 shootings in Chicago last year.

Less than 1% involved cops. I mean, the idea that we are, that all of this attention has been focused on law enforcement is just ridiculous. That is not where we're going to get the most angst for a buck here. If we want to reduce that black body count, why are we focusing on the 1% of shootings that involve cops and not the 99%? It makes absolutely no sense. So I think that these players play a very constructive role in simply laying out the facts. I don't expect them to be up on the latest academic studies out of harvard but i do think that they could they could say and i think

they know that um that that police shootings are relatively rare and and and social media videos and anecdotes can't compensate for hard facts and the facts are what they are oh hard facts there you go with those things again hey if you want you want more of those hard facts you can for example go to Amazon.com, where right now Jason Reilly's new book, False Black Power, has got so many five-star ratings, and that's a fact, that even an army of trolls going in there with one star to bring it down can't drag it down to anything more than 4.5, because it's good, it's solid, it's well thought of, and it is something you should put on your list next to read.

Jason, Reilly, thank you so much for being with us today on the Ricochet Podcast. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. We have here in Minneapolis something of a minor little crime wave going on downtown around the bars, around the nightclubs when they close. There's beefs, there's arguments, disputations, shootings, etc. And there's also assaults during the day that people are saying that downtown is becoming increasingly unsafe. Well, the stats are you can debate them massage them you can do whatever you wish with

them the thing is though is that they removed from the police's toolkit the spitting and lurking laws because they had a disparate impact right and this is a means by which that the police would go around and say you there uh you uh shambling person who is hitting up everybody for money, harassing people, I'm going to get you on spitting. And consequently, everybody was happy for about a week or so. And then what happened was eventually disorder began to creep in because they'd taken something out of the police's toolkit. Now, we can have the argument as to whether or not that's a good idea. But when you have even the liberal politicians now angling to be the mayor of Minneapolis are saying that we need more – I mean, granted, there's one candidate who says we need to disarm the police.

Yeah, well, it's Minneapolis. You've always got one of those. But everybody else is generally saying, no, we need more and we need stronger policing and we need more community involvement and all the rest of it. Because liberals, the smart ones at least, in charge of cities know that this is not something that is going to – it's not going to go away. They can't win on it, and it alienates absolutely everybody. Yes, man. I was just going to say this is the kind of big government stuff I've come to expect from you, Lilacs.

I come from a long line of lurkers, and I want my right my constitutional right to lurk i think lurking almost made the fight it was cut at the last second by a very vindictive ben franklin from lurking particularly but i think that that you're right about the urban urban leadership uh although there doesn't seem to be any consequence um um mayor de blasio who i mean oh if only there was a consequence uh rob if only there was a consequence, Rob If only there was a consequence like finding yourself in the middle of the day dozing and napping because you didn't get enough sleep

the previous day See what I just did? Do you see how I lulled you into believing that I was actually talking about something different Yeah, you do that all the time Half of the time I'm interrupting your segues and I don't even know I'm doing it You don't even know you're doing it all the time and you ambled down and you ambled away with it i thought half of the time i'm interrupting your segues and i don't even know i'm doing it you don't even know you're doing it

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Ricochet is your promo code. Silly me. Casper.com slash ricochet. Ricochet is your promo code for $50 off. And we thank them for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. Gentlemen, before we go, my favorite story of last week, I believe, was CNN saying we have to ban this guy who said he stands for the First Amendment and boobs. And then shortly thereafter, Hugh Hefner died. CNN is all about, he was all about the First Amendment and boobs.

Which suggests perhaps that there is a bifurcated, complicated historical relationship culturally between the left and Hugh Hefner at this moment, right? Yes, I absolutely agree. There's a complicated relationship between the left and prurience. It has been forever. On the one hand, the blue stockings in the country are almost exclusively liberal. They're almost exclusively about going through libraries, boulderizing, worrying about how bodies are being objectified. And yet, they still

can't help themselves, and they still can't help create this sort of straw man, I guess it's the thundering evangelical preacher that lurks inside their hive mind. And what they love about hefner

was that he uh stuck a thumb in the eye of the you know lost uh uptight american um middle class establishment in the 50s and 60s um it it actually is a kind of a mental breakdown um that only they can that only they can manage and i and i i say yesterday, because I, I don't know, I hate myself, I was flipping through Twitter, and I saw that a librarian from Cambridge, Right here, yes. Every year, I guess, the First Lady of the United States, whoever that First Lady happens to be, picks randomly a library and sends a bunch of books there on National Book Day

or National Children's Book Week or something. And this librarian received Nelani and Trump's books, which I think were mostly Dr. Seuss and some other incredibly, incredibly anodyne, inoffensive titles. And she responded with a screed saying uh you know i'm sending this back they're racist and as you know as you must know dr seuss is racist um i mean i think that we can decide that there are really only two americas now that matter if you those people who think that dr seuss is racist and those people who think that Dr. Seuss is racist

and those people who think that he is not racist. And I suspect right now the smaller group thinks he's racist, but I understand that the culture war is really, when it comes right down to it, is really about whether you even, whether you believe you can be convinced that Dr. Seuss is racist or whether you think that that's nonsense and i i more and more than that i think is where we are left so whether you have

hugh hefner i kind of get like okay you know there there are a lot of people on the on the right there are a lot of sort of social conservatives who disapproved and there's always always been a connection between certain social conservative views and the views of the progressive feminist left but the dr seuss thing i think is a much brighter line i mean either either he's bad or he's not you know all this week the theme on the michael moine podcast has been i can't believe the anti trump people think they're winning. I don't understand what their definition of winning is. They got their head handed to them on the NFL thing because to a typical person, they looked up at TV and they saw people refusing to stand for the American flag and the national anthem. All that was left would be for an anti-Trump person to walk out and punch a grandmother serving apple pie to children on the 4th of July.

That was all that was left. How do they think this is a win? And the same thing here in Massachusetts with the Cambridge librarian who, by the way, Rob, I don't know if you saw the photos of her wearing a cat in the hat outfit just two years ago. Yeah, she was the topic of our podcast on Friday. I urge everyone, read her actual letter, because in that letter to Melania is, quote, hashtag why we got Trump. It's all there. She's insulting. You should read more. She's rude. Who wants your books? She's completely partisan. Your husband is destroying schools.

And she's factually incorrect in the few assertions of fact that she makes. She's arrogant and she's an idiot. And if you've seen her photo, she looks exactly like the SJW that she thinks she is. You think she is? And she is out marching for the we must strip your homes of the American flag and the cat in the hat if we're going to have a decent society and stop Donald Trump. And all I can think is Trump has got his feet up somewhere. If you were the Trump I wanted to be, he'd have a martini and a cigar. He's not. So he has what?

Like a Pepsi and a pencil, whatever. But that he is they are handing him the middle of American political debate. They're handing it to him. The thing is that you never find anybody on the left who's asked, so is Dr. Seuss racist? You never find a politician being asked that. The allegations made that Dr. Seuss, including the Lorax, is racist. How do you respond? If you ask your friends about that, your liberal

friends about it, they will wave it away and say, well, that's nonsense. There are people who are crazy. And they regard them the same way, for example, that people on the right who want to censor absolutely everything because they hate absolutely everything. OK, we just sort of indulge and shake and shrug our shoulders and move along. But in this day and age, that part, if they are going to identify absolutely everybody on the right as being a white supremacist, racist, Westboro Baptist maniac, then it is entirely up to us and beholden and indeed required of us that we ask of them all the questions that they ask of us. In other words, if Seuss isn't racist, this person has identified something as being racist and objectionable and since they're more out there than you by modern standards that means they're probably right the extreme these days gets to identify what is actually correct for us all to believe and if you don't then you're enabling it then you're just permitting somebody to continue

on with their current paradigms and we're not all about that at all. Now, can I just add one more thing? The one thing that it's funny and hilarious and it's funny, she thinks Dr. Seuss is racist. Isn't that crazy? There is one sentence in there that I found profoundly disturbing, and I don't really know yet what I think of it, but there was a sentence in it that said, you know, our class is a,

the books you sent were not diverse. We want to celebrate diversity. Our class is diverse. The students come from all ethnicities and religions and races and creeds and gender expressions. Gender expressions. These are kindergartners. There's just something so creepy about that.

That is where it's suddenly the funny, funny, it's funny, she thinks Dr. Jones is racist, what a weirdo, turns dark for me. What are you, what is going on in those classes? They're kind of five or six, right? Like, that's crazy. That's a crazy sentence.

And this crazy sentence for me being trapped up here, the crazy part of the story, living and trying to be a conservative voice in the media in Massachusetts, is the CBS local affiliate interviewed people and overwhelmingly, I think almost unanimously, they all supported the teacher. And they all supported the teacher for one reason only. She hates Trump. And if you hate – this is the flip side of the I could walk down Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and you'd like me. If you walk down Fifth Avenue and gun Trump, there are a terrifying number of people on the left who will say, well, hey, you've got to break a few eggs. And that was the scary part for me because I live with these people, and I know they're not crazy, and yet they're crazy. Right.

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