The Ricochet Podcast - Law and Order

Episode Date: August 19, 2016

This week, author and Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald joins the show to discuss her important new book, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. Also, Paul Manafort exits, auto promotion and Ricochet’s editorial voice (or lack of one), and a heartfelt “bye-bye!” to John McLaughlin, who’s long running show, The McLaughlin Group is a distant... Source

All right, coming to you, coming to you in three, two, one. Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. North and South American, all the ships at sea, let's go to press. Hello. On a doomsday scale of zero to ten, zero meaning zero doom, ten meaning absolute metaphysical doom, a total wipeout, annihilation, nothing remaining. How much doom does Hillary face in the November election? One of the things people love about you is you speak your mind and you don't use a politician's filter. However, that is not without its downsides.

What Boehner is angry with is the American people holding him accountable. If I become president, oh, do they have problems. They're going to have such problems. I don't know why that's funny. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lileks, and today we have Heather MacDonald to talk about the war on cops. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody, to this, the Ricochet Podcast. It's number 316, if you're keeping track, of course, and it's brought to you by the Trunk Club.

They're new, and we can't be more happy to have them on board. Make it easy to look your best in clothes that fit you perfectly, handpicked by your own personal stylist. Go to trunkclub.com slash ricochet. Type in your measurements. Share your likes and dislikes. And you'll get your very own personal stylist. A little bit more about that later. And we're brought to you by The Great Courses. Get a free month of unlimited access to all of their lectures when you sign up.

Go to thegreatcoursesplus.com slash ricochet today. And we're brought to you by Harry's Shave. For a great shave at an even greater price, go to harrys.com and enter the coupon code ricochet. and we're brought to you by Harry's Shave. For a great shave and an even greater price, go to harrys.com and enter the coupon code RICOSHET and we're brought to you by, oh man, it's on the tip of my tongue. I just said it. There's a word that I've been saying here and I can't, Rob, help me out. What else have we brought to you by?

Oh, well, you're brought to, we are, you are brought to us by, or we are brought to you by Ricochet. Oh, right. We are, as you know, we are sort of trying to make sure that we can right the ship of state here financially and sail into the future because we believe, A, there is going to be a future, and B, that we would like to be there with it and we would like to be able to talk about it with you. And that's what Ricochet is. It's a fast-growing, very, very civil online community, and we bring you these podcasts, but we also bring you a great site called Ricochet.com.

Please check it out. We need, the number of members we need to join Ricochet to make this all work is a tiny fraction of the number of people listening to this podcast. So if you've been putting it off and putting it off, don't put it off today. I'm serious. You get a one free month.

It's absolutely no risk to you. We know that you'll love it. And, um, we of course will love having you support us. So ricochet.com, please join today. That's right. If you've been listening to 315 free podcasts and you haven't made the decision to join Rob's pitch there, I know pushed you over. I know I'm, I'm terrible at it, but I do it every week and I'm not sure quite – some very kind members have written better copy for me.

Maybe I should just say – just write me a better copy. That's actually – let's do that. Let's do that. I did it once before. It really worked. Yeah. That is a good idea. Crowdsourcing, we used to call it the newspaper business when we were reducing ourselves down to 10 employees.

Let's crowdsource this. It's easier than actually sending our employees because we don't have any anymore. We do now, of course. Our newspaper is turned around. We're a great source of information. For example, you turn on – look at the front page and you find stuff about what's going on in town and the world. And then you see things like – well, there's another side of the media entirely and that's the side of sites like Breitbart.

Andrew used to talk about the democratic media complex, right? How there was this incestuous relationship between government and the press. Are we developing our own version of that now on the right when you have Breitbart and Trump apparently merging into one single firm that will guide us all to our glorious future? Over to Rob. Well, look, I mean I think – I mean whatever you want – I mean if you were just talking about a generic political campaign, right, and you weren't – and you weren't specified with Trump because Trump – the name Trump, always the people just have an instant reaction to it. But it was just a presidential campaign.

This would be the time where you want to have a shakeup. You want to replace the person at the top. So Paul Manafort is gone and I guess Steve Bannon is in and Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway are in. And that – I'm not sure I understand Kellyanne Conway there there but I do understand that there need to be a change at the top. But my feelings are that the problem, just the technical problems with that candidacy are with the candidate and not with the management. The last thing he needed was to replace a political operative with a political neophyte, Steve Bannon, who used to run Breitbart. I mean in terms of like whether there's this like open revolving door, I mean I sort of – what do you call the – what do you call pretty much every big reporter in network television?

It's usually a former democratic staffer. The guy who runs to the Good Morning America, Sir Stephanopoulos, was a political operative. So I mean the problem is that it's not a political operative from a winning campaign or a longtime government official into a – or back and forth from a big piece of media. It's a – frankly, it's a kind of – it's a niche website when you think about all the people there are who vote and the number of people who go to Breitbart.

It's a niche website. It's not convincing anybody. Breitbart doesn't sway anybody. And it's a guy who doesn't have any experience. Rob, draw the connection explicitly. Steve Bannon does what at Breitbart? Why are we connecting the two? And it's a guy who doesn't have any experience running an international campaign. Rob, draw the connection explicitly. Steve Bannon does what at Breitbart? Why are we connecting the two?

He's the chairman and CEO of Breitbart. So he basically took – And has been for how long? Andrew died how many years ago? How did all this happen? Andrew died in – four years ago, five years ago, four years ago. Sounds right. OK. And I –

Andrew Breitbart dies and then how does Steve Bannon come into the picture? Well, it's a little bit murky. But Breitbart – I mean look, Andrew was a good friend of mine and a lovely person. But kind of a – it was kind of a mess, a spaghetti plate of organizational details there at Breitbart. And he was sort of launching new Breitbarts. You call it the big Hollywood, big this, big that. And there was – there was like any growing entrepreneurial bootstrapped organization. There was – there were financial constraints and constraints and things that happen when you put together an organization like that, which is of course why you need to join Ricochet.

But anyway, and then I think Steve Bannon and a couple of other guys helped unpack it and Steve had been in Hollywood for a while and he was part of – ironically, of course, he's a former Goldman Sachs banker and I think he was on the board or was a major figure at Castle Rock, which was a movie and TV company best known now for signing a deal with a then obscure comedian, Jerry Seinfeld, and helping him put a TV show on the air. So there was some – there's some money there and some business acumen. And Steve is really smart and Breitbart – I mean look, Breitbart, whatever you want to say about it, yes, it's totally in the tank for Trump. Of course, they're honest about it unlike say Picket Place, Vox or any other – the New York Times, right? And it's doing – and from all I understand and although it's very closely held, it's doing financially well. And I think a lot of that is Steve.

Steve is – he's no dummy. My daughter's betta fish isn't in the tank as much as they are for Trump. Yeah, but look. I mean their response and I think it's fair, is like, yeah. And you watched NBC News lately or CNN lately or read the New York Times or Washington Post lately, and they have a very good point. I mean it's hard. Who's going to complain about – is George Stephanopoulos going to say,

I can't believe that a media figure is going to work in a political campaign? That's ridiculous, right? Well, let me ask you this. Peter, try this. Tim Russert, Andrew Cuomo, every single one of them, all of them, former Democratic. All work for Democratic – and all work for prominent, extremely partisan Democrats. It's not as if they were like, well, he was working for one of the – Chris Matthews is another one.

The list just goes on and on. Matthews is for Tip O'Neill. Right. Right. Anyway, I'm sorry, James. I just wanted to underline – No, I was going to ask this. Many people are saying that if Trump loses, what he is going to do afterwards is construct his own news brand, that he's been bashing the press for being a broken, dishonest model that shouldn't be allowed to say that.

And that when he's done, what we're going to have is a channel that will vault over Fox, that will vault over CNN and go directly to We the People and MAGA. Do you think that's the case? Do you think actually that we're – No. No. You don't. I think that's hard work.

It requires a lot of capital. It's very hard work. The space is now full. When Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes started Fox, and I think it was 1996 is when the network finally got launched. I say finally because they were planning it for some years beforehand. It was CNN had the market to itself. Then Fox moved in. Now it's a very full market.

People have their own channels on YouTube. Actually, excuse me. I guess what I'm saying here is that my reading of the character and person of Donald Trump suggests that this is a man who does not actually like to do hard work and take and raise money. The nuts and bolts, the logistical underpinnings of a major effort like that would be akin to those involved in running a presidential campaign. Pretty big effort. And by the – so if I – I don't know. I disagree actually. You do?

Go ahead. I mean I agree with your premise about the hard work business. But look, all it needs is a star and he'd be the star. He doesn't have to like raise the money. That's Bannon's problem. And look, just like whatever you want to say about Trump, there is a solid 14 million people, maybe 15, but I don't think more than that, who are – but that's a lot. For cable news, it's a lot.

When you want to run a cable – look, it's a lot for a lot of things. It's a lot to do – it's a lot for – 15 million people is not quite a $200 million movie, but it's not nothing to sneeze at. It's an actual niche business. It just doesn't get you anywhere close to becoming president of the United States. But it actually can make a lot of money. On a huge night, O'Reilly gets, what, two and a half, three million viewers? Barely, yes. So what you're saying here is that maybe in the back or maybe in the front of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon's mind is the following.

Look, we've got 14 million. We need 65 to get to be president. That's not going to work. So let's just use the remaining 100 days here to – but it's a great number for cable news. So let's position ourselves. Let's just start branding our next – Do you think that he could merge with RT? Not anymore.

I wouldn't. Paul Manafort. Yeah. RT. Not anymore. Paul Manafort. I believe Donald Trump wants to win and wants to be President of the United States. I don't think he's playing a game here. I think he really wants to do it. I'm not a fan. I don't support him. But I don't think he is

some con man in his tower swindling those people and saying I've got him on the run. But I think if you're Steve Bannon, you don't – I mean Steve Bannon is not a fool. He can look at polls. He knows that it's going to be – it's more than uphill at this point that Donald Trump becomes president of the United States. But there's always an upside and there's always ways to make money. I mean here's my analogy, which is because I'm doing it now.

This minute, I was – I've been doing it for the past six or eight weeks trying to get a TV show or a couple being bought or at least the script, right? There's cable and there's broadcast, right? Cable, you can make money putting on interesting niche little dramas and comedies that are – can be really off-putting to the majority of people. But for certain people, they just love it and um you pay a little more for cable but but we but there's a cable attitude which is that it's we don't have to really obey the fcc standards you don't have to really do a lot of things you have to do in broadcast broadcast is different i love that cable attitude boobs and that's word is what we're talking right okay well what i know and that's fine that's great stories in in the or different kinds of stories in the comedies and the drums

um and then there's broadcasts and broadcast television is you know the big networks and you know they're still going for a huge number of people and they and because they get a lot of people they have to be a little less incendiary and a little less what they call edgy here. So I've got a project and we took it to two networks and they've always said, we want to be edgy. And then they hear, they go, oh, whoa, this take, please take this to our cable side. And that I think is what's, that I think is what Donald Trump is discovering in American politics.

And what I think a lot of, a lot of us have to relearn, which is that American politics is still broadcast television. And if you get too niche or you get too fiery or you just get too exhausting to the audience and they drift away. I mean the worst news for Donald Trump isn't that he's having trouble in the battleground states, et cetera. It's that his popularity is shrinking, meaning people who once liked him now don't. It's not that it's being held fast. It's that it's shrinking a little, and that's a problem. When you're talking about numbers that small, like when you're like – if you're a 20 million viewer television show and you lose a million viewers one week, it's OK. But if you're a million and a half viewer TV show, which is what a lot of these cable shows are, and you lose a million viewers, that's a huge – that's 60 percent.

Anyway. Let me ask – since we have a Trump voter here in Peter, let me ask you, Peter. Donald Trump did the pivot, we're told, and acted – He did. Well, grown up and responsible and apologized for causing personal pain. Now, did you – do you think that this comes from the heart? Do you think this was something that, like his speeches, is handed to him and he is told to read?

Or do you believe that he genuinely believes that he said... I really and truly just don't know. I've lost... I'm numb at this point, trying to read Donald Trump and the Trump campaign. So I agree with at least 90% of Rob's analysis. It concerns me because although I know that Paul Manafort is a character who this dealings with the Russians were much deeper or the Ukrainians much deeper than I was aware of. But when you run a campaign, it seems to me you do need somebody who's a professional, who knows how to buy ads, who knows who the state party chairman are, who knows how to raise money on Wall Street.

Paul Manafort trained in the 80s under Jim Baker, who knew how to do all those things. I barely know Steve Bannon. I've met him a couple of times at events of Rob's. I've known Kellyanne Conway for years. She's a wonderful person. She's a thorough conservative. Even at the human level, she's a lovely mom. Kellyanne, I just love her. As far as I'm aware, she's not run large organizations. So A and B. A, oh my goodness, what do they think they're doing?

A campaign is a large, complicated operation, as Rob has just said. And it doesn't look – it looks to me as though they got rid of the one guy who has an inkling how to run it. On the other hand, I will say this much. If the mantra is now let Trump be Trump, I feel pretty sure with Rob, I think with you, James, although you're the man who hasn't spoken yet, will let you do so. I feel pretty sure that letting Trump be Trump means your audience is limited and it's not going to get bigger and you're going to lose by a lot. But at least there's a certain honesty in it. I guess my feeling is that in these decisions Trump has made over the last 48 and 72 hours, he's come down hard on I'm going to be me. And I guess then when he, that sets him free to say things like,

I'm sorry about, he didn't quite say he's sorry. He's used the word regret. It's almost like watching the emperor of Japan try to parse his words so that he doesn't really surrender at the end of World War II. In any event, yeah, I guess – I suppose I incline toward the view that it's more genuine than not and maybe in a certain sense, it seems to me extremely likely that he'll lose and lose big, but there's a certain authenticity. Fine. Let him go ahead. Be authentic.

Well, he does have some smart people on his side advising him to do the right things. For example, I mean we've got Baton Rouge, which is underwater. And if Bush was president, of course, we'd be hearing all about this as a systemic racist incident that's happening. That's why the town is being allowed to drown. The president, meanwhile, is golfing. And we got pictures of him waving his big golf club at everybody. Trump goes down there. Trump makes an appearance. All of a sudden shows that he cares. That's better. He's done a better thing. And then, of course, the media is going to come right back and say that's irrelevant. What we really want to talk about is this silly little membership that he's sending out to people to join the Trump Club for 70 percent off a $200 membership and the rest of it and look at this tacky thing. And that's what they'd concentrate on.

So you got your golf clubs. You got your trunk club. But then you got your trunk club. And that is what you really want to concentrate on now, because you are one of two types of men. That's brilliant, because I was like, yeah, go ahead. There are two types of

men, one who let the guy finish the No, I was going to say something, and then I realized that I was interrupting, so go ahead. Right, so just to bring you all up to speed, the golf club, trunk club, but trunk club is what's really important here, because there are two kinds of men. There's the guys who love for shopping for clothes but are short on time and people who just hate shopping for clothes. Well, either way, take heart.

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I know we have to go to Heather because I know you're – but before we do, I just want to add to the trunk club thing because I've used it. And if you – and I'm just going to just say one thing about the way it really is. I was nervous about it not because of the clothes, not because of any of this stuff, because of the returning thing. Like now I got to find a place to return it. The whole thing comes in this cool box and you just – and it comes with its own tape and its own label sticker. So you just put what you don't – I mean it's incredibly effortless and I actually used it once in a speech I was giving about how to get consumers, get people, how to solve actual problems for people. And I used it because like when I heard like, oh, it's going to be hard in the box, and I don't have any tape. I mean, that's how I make decisions,

and they've already thought it out for you. It is really, really, really, really great, and it's really, really, really easy, and it's one of those things. It's a lot like a lot of the other brands we have as sponsors. They've actually gotten inside your head, or at least my head,

and solved the problem that you had with something like this. And notice, everybody, that Rob gave that whole spiel without using the term disruptive. head or at least my head and solve the problem that you had with something like this. So – And notice everybody that Rob gave that whole spiel without using the term disruptive. No. Right. Because in a weird way, it isn't – like part of like connecting to people, right, even consumer or brands or politicians even is anticipating what the real friction is

and then solving it. The problem with calling a taxi for years and years and years wasn't that you couldn't call a taxi or you couldn't dial a phone. It was that you weren't really ever sure they were going to be there. You didn't really even know where they were. And Uber said, okay, we'll prove you were going to be there by showing you on a map the car coming towards you. And that is a – It's a great thing. It's a great thing. But let's not underestimate the friction of the sponsor who's listening to Rob Wander off in another direction and saying, is he going to get back to the thing he has to say?

And I am. And I did. And it's right here. You can get started at trunkclub.com slash ricochet. Okay? I got to say that. Must be said. Needs to be said.

Trunkclub.com slash ricochet. Did I mention that's trunkclub.com? You can enjoy it. I'm a customer. I love it. And not to be outdone by Mr. Rob Long, I have a consultation with a trunk club scheduled for this very afternoon. If they can dress me, they can dress anybody. I would pay so much money not only to hear that consultation but to hear the conversation in trunk club HQ afterwards. So we got this guy, he wants sweaters, but he wants them pre-tied.

Apparently he doesn't wear them. He just wants to drape them around his neck pre-tied. Now, do we have like a wire that we can put in the sleeves or should we just dip them in lacquer to put them around? They would, they would, they would fit him perfectly. I tell you, well, we'll have the Robinson effect the next time we talk to you and find out exactly what you did. But then there's the Ferguson effect, which has been a subject of discussion on editorial pages and communities around the country.

That brings us to our guest, Heather MacDonald. She's the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal, recipient of the 2005 Bradley Prize. And her new book is The War on Cops, How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. Welcome. Tell us about your book, about The War on Cops, exactly how it's playing out in communities across America. Well, thank you so much for having me on, James. I greatly appreciate it. My book is an attempt to describe the consequences of this massive anti-cop narrative that this country is living through. And contrary to the claims of Black Lives Matter activists, the police are the

biggest government agency most dedicated to saving black lives. Right now, black lives lost in nearly record numbers because officers are backing off of proactive policing and crime is going up. That's what I've called the Ferguson effect. Hey, Heather, it's Rob Long. Thanks for joining us. I talked a little last week on the podcast because, you know, it was the day, I think the morning after we had all had dinner in L.A. and you were sort of riveting about 20 people around the table. Let me just ask you a couple, just a couple of true or false questions just to get everybody acclimated.

If you're a black suspect, you are more likely to be shot. If you're an unarmed black suspect, you're more likely to be shot by the police than if you're an unarmed white suspect. False. If you are a policeman, you are less likely – or you are more likely to be shot at by a black suspect than a white suspect. True. President Bill Clinton with his imaginary son, Trayvon Martin, and your young African-American son is going out at night, does it make any sense at all for you to be worried about what might happen to him at the hands of the police, statistically? Demagoguery and paranoia and dangerous falsehood. And then my last question is, do you think these people know this?

Do you think Bill de Blasio and Barack Obama know the facts that you've reported? First of all, I should say the book is The War on Cops, How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. Buy it. Go and buy it. It is not only great research but it is really spectacular reporting. So do you think these guys know this? Do you think that the media knows this? Or do you think it's just, they're just willfully ignorant? Or is there a plan here? Hard to know. That's a great question, Rob. I think that they are willfully ignorant. I think the pull of ideology that we are now surrounded by constantly, the entire black victimology industry

makes people utterly impervious to facts. Even people in high crime neighborhoods, while I give voice to the thousands of law-abiding black residents who are desperate for the police and who support them 100 percent, there are still people who are living with these insane drive-by shootings that are perpetrated, of course, not by cops, not by other whites, but by other blacks who still choose to focus on this this phantom epidemic of racist police killings. To go back to your questions, it is simply absurd for de Blasio and for President Obama and for Hillary Clinton, all of whom who have invoked this meme that black parents are rightly frightened every time their black child goes out on the street,

that that child may be shot by a police officer. It is completely preposterous. And yet, this remains the dominant meme that we're living with today. Heather, Peter Robinson here. Question. So, the Ferguson effect is that as cops come under political pressure, Black Lives Matter, protests in the street, this begins with Ferguson, Missouri, they stop doing their jobs in the same way. And what I'd like to do, can you explain to me why that is? I mean, you could just get us onto the street with the cops. Their job is still their job. It almost, I mean, there's even a way in which you could spin the Ferguson effect as racist in itself. Let them shoot each other. The heck with them. If they're going to make our jobs

harder, we'll just pull back and let them shoot each other. That's not quite what's going, what is going on? Why does the Ferguson effect take place? From the point of view of the cops, what's going on. What is going on? Why does the Ferguson effect take place? From the point of view of the cops, what's going on? Well, Peter, that's a great question. There's two sorts of policing, mandatory and discretionary. The mandatory policing is responding to 911 calls. Somebody's been shot. Somebody's been robbed. He calls 911 and the police get a call over their radio and they go dashing to the scene to take a crime report. And that sort of policing was the dominant policing through the 1990s. Departments were obsessed with getting their response times down.

You see those statistics. How long does it take to respond to a call? That's because it was called Comstat, right? That was the idea of policing through numbers. Well, Comstat was most revolutionary in changing the philosophy of policing and asserting that police can actually prevent crime and not just react to it. The 911 policing is purely reactive.

And what was so revolutionary about William Bratton when he came to the New York Police Department in 94 was he said, we're actually going to lower crime. And he set himself numerical targets, something that had never been done, and held his police department accountable for lowering crime. And the way he did that was, yes, a fanatical attention to police data, crime data, but also asking officers to be proactive. And that is what we're talking about with the Ferguson effect.

That is officers seeing a suspect or suspicious behavior on a known drug corner at 1 a.m., getting out of your squad car. There's been no victim complaint yet. You're using your own powers of observation and knowledge of that neighborhood and going up to that guy who's standing on a known drug corner, hitching up his waistband as if he has a gun and asking him a few questions. world for the last two decades by activists and by President Obama for generating racially disproportionate statistics. Because cops, the overwhelming majority of street disorder, of gang activity, of criminal trespassing is going on in minority neighborhoods. Cops are being told that they're racist for making those pedestrian stops. And the other thing that's going on now, and you ask about what is the cop's perception and experience, Peter, is when cops get out of their car now

in inner city neighborhoods, whether they've been called to a scene by a 911 call or they are simply initiating their own investigation, they find themselves routinely surrounded by hostile, jeering crowds, cursing at them, sometimes throwing things, sticking the cell phone right in an officer's face, and that is a deterrent in itself. So you have a combination of a political message saying, don't do this discretionary policing with a level of hatred in the streets that is unprecedented. I was in Chicago about six weeks ago, and a Chicago cop told me he'd never experienced such hatred in his 19 years on the job. He said it's basically an undoable job now. I have one more question, but first that you were in Chicago. The book again is The War on Cops,

How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. And Heather MacDonald is, in my judgment, a national treasure. And here's why. She reports, Heather has gone to the streets. She's talked to the cops. This book is full of brilliant analysis, but she's not sitting in some faculty lounge going over statistics and studies. The analysis is in large measure of what she has discovered herself reporting. It's wonderful. Okay. So here's the question, Heather. Distinguish between Chicago and New York. New York doesn't seem to be experienced. Why are some cities okay, whereas we do see a clear Ferguson effect in some others? black cities, cities with large populations of blacks, which is precisely what you would expect. It's there where officers are getting the hostility and where the message of it's racist to engage in proactive policing hits hardest. New York was experiencing its Ferguson effect.

In the first half of 2015, shootings and homicides were up 20 percent. That's a massive increase. And what happened was Bill de Blasio and William Bratton were both freaking out. Mayor de Blasio and Police Commissioner Bratton? Right. Just to identify them. Any mayor in New York City now knows that his reelection chances hinge on one overwhelming reality, whether he can keep crime down. Mayor Giuliani showed that was possible. It was believed to be impossible until Giuliani and Bratton in his first tour, Will and Bratton as police commissioner, showed that, in fact, violent crime is not an endemic feature of American urban life. And so now every subsequent mayor is going to be held to that same standard. progressive mayor, who nevertheless is unprogressive enough to realize that he better keep a hold of our level of law and order there. And William Bratton were absolutely desperate.

And at one point, Bill de Blasio even said to the city, well, nothing to worry about here, folks, because the people who are being killed in this 20 percent increase in homicides are mostly gangbangers. You know, talk about black lives not mattering. the people who are being killed in this 20% increase in homicides are mostly gangbangers. You know, talk about black lives not mattering. But anyway, so what Bratton did was jumpstart a high-intensity manpower program called Summer All Out, which gets the department gets its hands on every blue body it can it can find and amass them on street corners to stand and act as physical presence deterrent. They're not doing the proactive policing because that now has been declared unconstitutional preposterously by a federal judge, but they are using what's known as command presence. And that massive mobilization of manpower put a lid on the nascent and alarming crime spike, and we ended 2015 with merely a 6% increase in homicide. That looks

great compared to cities like Cleveland, which ended 2015 with a 90% increase in homicide. Hey, Heather, it's Rob again. Can we talk a little bit about Wisconsin? Yeah. I mean, African-American cop, armed African-American suspect. City goes nuts. Why? This doesn't fit the pattern at all, or does it? Well, they've been primed for this. I'm not in the least surprised. If you have

a president who has been using every opportunity over the last two years to tell blacks that they are the victims of a racist criminal justice system, and I cannot stress enough, Rob, how false that is. Criminologists have spent decades trying to put evidence behind the proposition that the disproportionate representation of Blacks in prison is due to some pocket of racism somewhere along the way in the criminal justice system, whether it's police arrests, police stops, grand jury decisions, prosecutorial decisions, judicial sentencing decisions, jury decisions, and the honest ones, left-wingers all have been forced to conclude that the over-representation of blacks in prison is caused by one thing and one thing only, and that is their exponentially higher rates of violent crime. Nevertheless, the president of our country continues to tell blacks that they are treated differently

by the criminal justice system because of their skin color. He is playing with fire. He is creating a level of racial animosity out there that is getting very scary. And I think that the Milwaukee riots adumbrate a potentially larger race war. Yikes. Well, something I asked you last week, and I mean, you had a great answer for it, but I kind of want to ask you one more time just while everybody is here. A possible – not a contradicting theory, maybe a complementary theory is – and it was brooded about bucks or maybe 10 bucks or 20 bucks or one paycheck or half a paycheck from absolute poverty. And you also have a kind of a structure of municipal structure that is putting on a lot of fines, a lot of punishments.

You park in the wrong place and it's 100 bucks. And if you don't have it, you can't go to work. And so you have this nickel and dimed underclass that hates all authority and will lash out. It's already brought to the brink by this kind of nickel and diming and of course the cops or the infantry and so they get it first and they get it worst even if it's not rational. What do you make of that? Not as an exculpatory explanation, but maybe as an additional explanation. Well, I remember when the New York Times was on that beat as well,

and they were claiming that justifying the Ferguson riots on that ground, that there's somehow a conspiracy to soak poor blacks for municipal fees. And they quoted a black police chief in a neighboring township in St. Louis County, who said, but since when did poverty give you a right to break the law. The overwhelming category of traffic stops and outstanding warrants that were given in Ferguson, Missouri, was for people not having driver's insurance. Now that, I would argue, is a very important thing to have, and if you're hit by an uninsured driver, you're not going to be very happy about it.

I also disagree with the theory that there's some sort of concerted effort on police officers to target poor blacks for revenue raising. If that's the purpose of traffic stops, why wouldn't they focus on the white middle class or the affluent? The theory to me does not make sense. And in any case, I don't accept that as an explanation for rioting or for shooting cops, because there's plenty of blacks in inner city areas who are staying on the right side of the law. Right. And I try to give voice to them. And it's not just the elderly, but it is certainly them as well. I mean, heartbreaking stories of elderly females who are terrified to go into their building lobby

to pick up the mail because of the kids hanging out there, trespassing and selling weed. But it's also young black men that I've encountered who either have never been stopped in their life, even though they live in high crime areas, something that you would never know if you read the New York Times exclusively, or who have been stopped and who tell me, you know what, I understand what the police were doing. They were only doing their jobs.

Heather, Peter here. One last question from me. And so I hear you talking about what's behind the Ferguson effect. And again and again, you go back to Barack Obama saying things that are simply untrue. The words of a president alone have done a great deal to create this situation, undermining morale among the police and encouraging those who want to harass the police. Set aside everything else you may think of him, would the election of Donald Trump help? Clearly it would. His speech in Milwaukee was sadly undercovered because everybody wanted to write about the campaign shakeup.

And also, I think it's undercovered because of an ideological bias against it. That was a very important speech. And the irony is he was talking about saving black lives and the fact that when the police back off, it's black lives who are being taken. And the irony is that now that's being accused, you know, that the law and order theme is being categorized as a racial dog whistle. Well, if you can't talk about crime because implicitly you're talking about black crime, a that shows that the left actually understands that the overwhelming majority of people engaged in street crime today are black, but it also means we cannot talk about crime. I understand your hesitation about giving an all-out endorsement of Trump, and believe me, Peter, I share it. But on this one issue, he is absolutely right, because where he's wrong is to say there's policies that are to blame

and that I will change. He's wrong. This is a rhetorical problem. This is a narrative. It's not policies that have resulted in the Ferguson effect. It's the narrative. And if we need to stop this narrative, and if it gets shut off, the spigot of hatred gets brought down. That, I think, will make a large impact and a positive one. Thank you. Heather, James Lanlix here. And this is our last question. You said something that pricked up my ears. You said that we don't want to talk about crime. When I look at the responses to your latest piece in the Washington Post, there is this anger really with you for bringing this up and this mulish refusal to consider that you may actually have a point and that the true victims of this war on cops are the people who live in these neighborhoods. Now, Trump aside, even if Trump wins somehow with 1 percent of the African-American vote, the cities are going to remain in democratic control.

Milwaukee, Chicago, New York, Minneapolis for that matter, institutionally historically ruled by democrats. So how are these democrat governments going to respond to the problems that increase exponentially in the inner city if they are intellectually incapable of admitting that the problem are the actions? Isn't it just that the minute that you start to talk about that, you're swamped by the activists who insist that the real issue you have to address is systemic racism, et cetera, reparations, et cetera, and you'll never get off the dime confronting the actual social dysfunctions that are causing these problems?

Well, that's possible, James, but I'd sure like to try the opposite situation. It may not be enough, but a president who is willing to maybe not just talk about the absolute desperate need that law-abiding blacks in inner cities have for the police, but actually take the next step and throw out some of the crime data, for instance, blacks commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. Black male teens between the ages of 14 and 17 commit gun homicide at 10 times the rate of white and Hispanic male teens. You know, those facts are assiduously suppressed by the media. And as long as the public remains so ignorant of them, they are vulnerable to this lie that disparate police statistics where, you know,

it's true, blacks are stopped at rates higher than their representation in city populations, but at lower rates than their violent crime commission would predict, as long as those facts remain so ignored. And I would say this, James, we have been having this debate about phantom police racism for the last two decades, precisely in order not to talk about black crime. So it may not be enough, but for sure, changing the discourse at the top is a prerequisite. Necessary, perhaps not sufficient, but certainly a necessary cause to change what is happening in the cities. And what I fear is the start of a reversal of the nation's 20-year crime decline. I fear so too. The war on cops, of the new attack on law and order, makes everyone less safe. Heather MacDonald, we thank you for joining us in the podcast today.

Good luck, and we hope to talk to you down the road. Such an honor. Thank you so much. Thanks, Heather. It is a great book. She mentioned the old ladies who live in fear, the guy selling weed in the lobby. That's true. But also my wife was on jury in Washington, D.C. when we lived there. And it was a case of – they actually went to trial, a guy who had been chased through the yards by a couple of cops, black cops in Southeast, and ran into somebody's house. He's throwing drugs everywhere as he's running. He's got little packets of crack as he's going through the yards where kids play and the like.

And they catch him and they book him and they bring him in and he goes to trial, which is odd. So what happened was, as my wife reported later, was that they want to let him go, basically the journey. The old ladies wanted to let him go because they just didn't want to send another black man to prison, period. So even though the evidence was overwhelming, they just did not want to send another black man to prison. So they didn't.

And my wife is sitting here feeling strange because she – I don't know if she was the only white person in the room, but she may have thought that she felt like the only rational person in any room. But what to her was a rational idea, i.e. the guy is guilty. He should go to jail, was different from their rational idea, which is that being so, there may be reasons and it's not good to send him to jail and it will hurt, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I mean they rationally agreed or they came rationally to two different conclusions. But if you want to learn how to be rational though, it's a skill and it takes some training and that's why The Great Courses has got one actually called The Philosopher's Toolkit,

How to Be the Most Rational Person in Any Room. And you can get it for pennies for pittance. Well, let me start here where I should have started at the beginning because we all love to learn, right? That's why you're listening. That's why you listen perhaps to The Great Courses Plus already or would like to. Well, The Great Courses Plus video learning service has a wide variety of engaging lectures that are taught by award-winning professors on topics like history, politics, business, even photography and cooking. It's a perfect way for people like you who love to learn to get unlimited access to over 7,000 high-quality lectures. So what are you waiting for? Get started now with The Great Courses Plus and you can dive deeper into areas you love to learn about. There's the aforementioned how to be the most rationalational Person in Any Room, taught by Professor Patrick Grimm.

It'll teach you how to sharpen your problem-solving skills and make better decisions and arguments. It's a dynamic course that puts you into philosophy's most practical tools and puts them into action, right? Thinking is fundamental to our daily lives. You know that. And the course surveys strategies for improving that thinking. Visualization, simplification, the principles of debate, and the technique for social reasoning. Don't you wish you could just give this to a lot of people you argue with? Well, you can't.

So why don't you learn better yourself and then beat them, crush them beneath your rhetorical boots? I just added that. Now, it's not just that. It's cool rationality and hot thought, thinking like Aristotle, the flow of argument, rational discussion in a polarized context. These are all things we need in these days. The lectures in the series are about 30 minutes each. Perfect to listen to when you're commuting to and from work, while you're preparing

dinner, or just in the evening to wind down instead of watching people shout at each other in the news. So you'll love The Great Courses Plus like we do. We guarantee it because we're going to give you a free month of unlimited access to all of their features when you sign up. So don't wait. Free month right now, today. Sign up at thegreatcoursesplus.com slash ricochet. That's thegreatcoursesplus.com slash ricochet. Now we, what did my voice do there? A little hitch there.

Yeah, what's going on? Puberty was returning or such. We wander to the member feed where many interesting topics, I mean, if you just hit the main page as an outsider, you will see good chunky things to think about, but the member feed is just... Good chunky things to think about. It's just bubbling away

with all kinds of stuff here. A few words about upvoting. This is one of these things that puts the power into the hands of the mob. I'm sorry, the common folk. Yeah. And lets them surface pieces from the – Yeah.

As opposed to us aristocrats. Right. Well, yes. I mean – right. I mean when you post, Peter, I don't know if you see it on your end, but it says founder under your picture and there's this sort of glowing throb that comes from your animated avatar. I thought it said foundering, foundering, floundering. Right. There's founder under your picture and there's a sort of glowing throb that comes from your animated avatar. I thought it said foundering, foundering, floundering. The idea here is that there's a lot of great stuff on the member feed and that it's absolutely – The member feed is where the action is.

Let's just go ahead and say it. It's sort of like that's the clubhouse, right? And it's just inefficient and impossible to – for a person or people to read and source it all and then move it all up in front into the public area, right? I mean it's public and then there's members. And so we just said, well, the members should be able to do that. With our new little 3.0 versions, we have the little features. We can do it. And I think it's going really well. We're kind of playing around with what that number should be because what is the actual number right now for upvotes to get to the – to have it bounce into the public area?

It's an art, not a science. So we're playing around with it. But I really like it. I mean I really prefer it. I mean I think it's much easier and fairer and – which sort of brings us to our second point, which is I've been seeing people saying that there's a lot of anti-Trump stuff on the podcast, James. Yeah, Rob. And like I do, I do the glop thing with Jonah and John.

And to be fair, the feud between Jonah and Donald Trump – Donald Trump started it for no reason. This is like over a year ago. Yeah, that's what John Nolte tweeted the other day. It was the reason for National Review's animus against Donald Trump because they criticize the pantslessness of their precious john i don't think so he doesn't really he needs to i'll take him to the office someday and he can find out that's not the that's not the case but um but it is true look you know three of us and at least one of us speaking for myself is you know deeply deeply disappointed and kind of nauseated at the thought of the of trump winning the primary and also running the general.

I said in April that I thought he was going to suffer catastrophic losses. I went on Michael Stopes' podcast. Michael Stopes is a member and he does a great podcast that we actually carry here and put on our super feed. And it's very pro-Trump and I respect him a lot. So we have good conversations about that. But there's no editorial position, meaning the editors have a position but we don't – I mean I don't want to compose the main page, the public page of Ricochet. And I don't want any editors to do that. I think that's the members and the members can – sometimes you want to post something just to the member feed and you just want to say, hey, I saw a cartoon or whatever. And sometimes you want to post something that you want more people to see,

in which case you get to click a box for that. And then the members should be able to say, this is really good. More people should read this. And I feel like that's the way it should be. And it's a fine-tuning art right now. Tim, we had Larry Arnn on last week who spent the whole time attempting to beat Rob into submission. And here's the thing. Go ahead.

Interesting stat about that. Yes. I got a lot of feedback from that. And I love Larry Arnn. I mean I've known him for a million years and enormous respect. I could tell what side you were on by whether you thought, oh, man, you cleaned his clock or you should be ashamed of yourself. You embarrassed yourself. I'm glad I left. Nobody who was anti-Trump thought I lost and nobody who was pro-Trump thought I won.

The only person I know for a fact doesn't like Trump and thought I didn't do well was me. That's exactly how I felt. That's hilarious. Tim McNabb who put up this post, can we back off the Never Trump a bit in the podcast? I just want to say thank you to him because he has a

line here that is just gorgeous. He said, i'm not a never trumper i understand the reservations people have but here we are and trump is the nominee flawed perhaps fatally here's the line that i just think is gorgeous perhaps he is the orange horseman of the apocalypse anyhow yeah in in in gratitude for that beautiful line, I made a point of asking Heather just now on this very podcast if the election of Donald Trump would help. And the answer is yes. And I hope that in his basement workshop, Tim McNabb hears both my admiration for that line and Heather's wonderful answer to that question. That's great.

I don't see the point in talking about it that much anymore because as Rob pointed out, there's nobody who's going to be swayed one way or the other. It just isn't going to happen. Well, I mean, look, I think here's the,

yeah, okay, sorry. I totally interrupted you for not even for a segue. The question, the question that I have is that is it, is it right then and, and productive and useful to the site and to our community and the right to

bring up some things just simply for discussion. I mean sometimes I feel like there are things that I want to post but it's just like I'm goading people. It's like – Oh, no, no. Post them. Post them. Would you please defend this?

Would you please defend – and I can just feel knowing the Trump supporters that I do or not supporters but people who will vote for him reluctantly. I can just see this sort of sagging of shoulders and exhaling of breath and saying, okay, it's not that I want to defend. It's not that I think that's a good thing that he said. It's just that the alternative is, why do you make me keep doing it? Why? I get it. Don't you get it? I mean, to me, I mean, if we're having a discussion about, say, the Clinton Foundation, and then you've got the candidates saying you should give them the benefit of the doubt. How many of these things actually do cohere into a candidate who is really not what you thought that he was? And does that matter?

But then I step away from this and say, what's the end result of this going to be? The end result of this is going to be an iteration of the never Trump versus the never Hillary conversation we've heard a million times already. So I was writing a letter to Michael Walsh yesterday who was a friend of mine who wrote a piece about how essentially never Trumpers are guilty of moral cowardice. Thanks, buddy. Thanks, pal. A lot. And I'm into this argument about how – And Walsh is a deeply lovely person.

Oh, absolutely. Michael Walsh is one of those people that you just he's got this kind of like Irish face and eyes and he's just a lovely, lovely person. I used to think so too. But after he wrote that piece, you know, screw him! No, I'm kidding.

That's what it comes down to. Old friends writing these little things and trying to keep your steam in check. But then I just backed off and said, no, no, no, no, no, no. Nope, nope, nope. Here's my – I just – I have a model for that and that's Larry Kudlow. And Larry Kudlow, whenever I see him, is the nicest person in the world to me and thinks I'm an idiot because I'm not voting for Trump. But he's a lovely guy and I would do anything for Larry.

He's fantastic. I'm deeply, deeply loyal to him because he's a wonderful guy. And the second thing I would say is the problem we're in is that this is a very unique – I mean I don't think we've had a political event like this, certainly not in my lifetime, where you have a hugely, hugely, hugely, hugely unpopular, deeply loathed candidate running against Donald Trump. And Donald Trump is even more deeply loathed and voter repellent. And so there is a thing about this moment that it is fascinating because everybody I talk to says the same thing, which is like there's 350 million people in this country. These are the two?

Like that basically we all kind of – even pro-Trumpers can sort of understand that. The second thing I would say is the difficulty with this podcast is that it is a certain amount of horse race stuff going on. We are – the sprint, the last sprint starts the Tuesday after Labor Day and it is interesting. And so what I would say to the Trump supporters and then the Trump detractors is that we are going to have to talk about – because it's just – how could you not? It's too weird not to. The unfolding, the technical and perspective unfolding of this campaign, this political campaign. And I think that for the people who are Trump supporters, it's going to be a little bit painful because it doesn't look like he is going to win.

He can easily – he can pull it out. All these things can happen. But it's highly unlikely. And we're – there are things to talk about. There are 50 states. There are important senatorial races. They're important to keep the house and that's just part of the politics of the situation. So if you're listening to the podcast and you're for Trump, that's great and I'm pleased to have you and I have boundless respect for you as I do with my pro-Trump friends.

But we are going into a political season and a lot of that news is going to be bad. Well, let me ask Peter about the pivot because it's either happened or it's going to happen or will happen. The question is whether or not, as I said before, there's so much negative publicity in place by the media that loves to hate Trump and loves that he's running. There's so much about this that perhaps they'll – if he does indeed pivot to the most presidential person possible, that they will bury it with something else. And if that's the case, will people even notice the pivot? Because I don't notice the pivot when I go around my cheek to my jaw and the blade just follows my skin so perfectly because Harry's razor is so incredibly engineered.

But it's true. And the thing of it is – Oh, man. I was typing on Slack and I like suddenly like looked up like somebody had walked over my grave. What a great, great – But it's true. I mean it's not – some of these razors now, you shave with them. It's like shaving with a ruler.

These things – there's a new flex hinge. It's a softer flex hinge for a more comfortable glide. And it's part of their new five-blade razor, which is better for trimming hard-to-reach places. It's got a lubricating strip, a textured handle for more control when it's wet. And you're thinking, oh, great, they improved it and they're charging more. No, they don't. That's

just the great thing about Harry's. I mean, you know how the other razor companies will put out new models. Try the new 16 blade model with lube strip and they'll raise the prices, which are already high. No, friends at Harry's do not believe in upcharging. And that's why they made these improvements and they're keeping the prices exactly the same. It's still two bucks a blade compared to four or more you'll pay at the drugstore. How do they do this? Well, you know how they've got the factory in Germany that's been making high quality blades for over a hundred years, and they've got this great deal wherein it comes to you every month, and you just look forward to that package because it's a nice thing to see.

Now, what are you going to get with Harry's if you go with us? Well, it's like this. You get a weighted razor handle of your choice, moisturizing shave cream, three precision-engineered five-blade cartridges, and a travel cover, which is great because otherwise it just gets, you know, you know how it is when you just throw it in your bag and then shampoo gets on it and it gets on the toothpaste. No, a little nice little travel cover snaps it all in. That's 15 bucks for that. And for limited time only, however, there's a special offer for fans of this, the Ricochet

podcast. You can get it for less. Go to harrys.com right now and enter the code Ricochet and check out to claim your offer. That's harrys.com. Use the coupon code Ricochet, five bucks off, and you'll have a pivot that you won't even notice. That's how good it is. So Peter, I ask you the question then, when he does pivot, is it going to be a story or is it going to be Trump bows to pressure from inside campaign? Because he's not to be trusted if he bows to pressure and he's not to be trusted if he speaks his mind. I mean there's no way in the narrative he can move to get out from under what the media has been waiting for all these months to do to him.

And that he's helped, of course. The pivot has already happened. It was a Donald Trump pivot as best I can tell. Trump is at least open to it. It wasn't Paul Manafort imposing anything on him. I expect it to continue after now that Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway are in charge and the pivot is what I mean by the pivot is as follows. When he released the list of Supreme Court – prospective Supreme Court nominees.

Yeah, you love that. That's your lifeline. It began there and he's continued with important speeches. He delivered an important foreign policy address. Heather MacDonald just said that he delivered an important address in Milwaukee. He has been laying out his stands in a serious way. It won't please everybody. In fact, it's certainly even when he's at his most thoughtful, he's not going to please

Rob, I don't think. But he has been laying out policy positions in a serious way in a number of speeches. What he's resisting, I think, is the idea that he should try to be something other than himself. So that's why we get rid of Paul Manafort. What the tragedy, and it may actually be a tragedy because it's making the campaign worse

than it needs to be. It's making the campaign ineffective. It's starving the, it's sucking out the oxygen with which we might actually be talking to some extent about policy. The tragedy is that the press just doesn't buy it. In the primaries, Donald Trump established himself as such a vivid mouth that when he reads from a prepared text, the press ignores it. That's

not the real him. He can't really mean it. Do you think he means it? Yes, I do. Absolutely. This guy. Did his statement stem from convictions and stem from a Reagan-esque contemplation of the issue? There's certainly not a Reagan-esque contemplation. Reagan, we know because we have the evidence and letters that he wrote, speeches that he gave and so forth.

Reagan was thinking seriously about the issues from the 1940s on. There's no evidence that Donald Trump did that. So I'm not going to overstate it. That's a high standard, yeah. That's a high standard. But do I believe it's a conviction? I really don't even care whether it's conviction.

When a guy is running for president of the United States, if he wins, he's going to need to do something. And he's going to say, hey, wait a minute. I gave a speech on that. Even Donald Trump, even if you give him – even if you think the lowest level – you take all the choices available of the level of cognition of which Donald Trump is – Go to the lowest one.

Choose the lowest one. He's going to say, hey, wait a minute. I gave a speech on crime. What are we going to do about this? He's going to go – I gave a speech on trade and I said we're going to have a 45 percent tariff. We weren't going to let countries leave. That's part of the pivot. He added all kinds of nuance to that. He said that's a starting position. That's to get the Chinese attention.

He's clearly not going to impose a 45 percent tariff on trade and he said so at this point. That's what I mean, James. He's actually in the texture. It is – as Larry Arnn said, it's very unusual for a candidate to give the caricature of his position and then fill it in with policy later. Ordinarily, the big policy position is just first. Brilliant. But still. But still. Go ahead.

Let me just add two things. One thing is that the danger for the Trump campaign just technically is and for Trump supporters is they're going to obsess about the press. True enough. The candidates' to obsess about the press. True enough. The candidate's problem is not the press. The press could be other people's problems. This candidate has big, big, big fat problems that are not press problems that need to be solved and talking about the – I know they love talking about the press and the media. That is a distraction and they – maybe they can do it publicly. But privately, it is – it's like blaming the equipment.

It is possible in a close race that the press can matter. This is not a close race. The high class problem for Donald Trump to be at this point – to have at this point is to have trouble – for it to be the media's fault. Second thing is that I don't think – I mean I think he said a very, very smart thing yesterday that I'm very hopeful shows that there's some strategy and some thinking in his campaign rather than just kind of this wild nonsense. He said in a speech yesterday, he said, well, I – in the famous apology thing that people are calling now. It was not an apology. He said, well, sometimes I can be too honest. Hillary Clinton is the exact opposite. She never tells the truth.

That's a pretty good line. That's a pretty good line. That's a pretty good line. Yes, it is. The way you win those people in the middle is you say, I'm not telling you I'm somebody I'm not. I'm not pretending to be somebody I'm not. I'm telling you that the person that you think I am and that you sometimes don't like, that's a virtue, not a sin. That is a feature, not a bug. Every successful politician has done that.

This guy did not do it until yesterday. Whoa, whoa, hold on. May I just take a moment? This is a parenthesis. I'd just like everyone to observe that something happened here. A specific – just registered a specific moment. Rob Long, whose position has been – has now – he is now – something has happened. Imaginatively, Rob is able to place himself inside the Trump campaign and figure out what

they ought to do to win. This is something entirely new. And also, I think if they continue to do to win. This is something entirely new. And also I think if they continue to do that, that's fine. I mean you don't pretend you're not who you are. You can't do it. It's really hard to do. You say the person that I am, those faults are actually virtues and here's what they are. And I think that – look, I believe that Hillary Clinton is going to have to do that too before the end.

She skated at this convention but we all have this narrative in the back of our head, this sort of themes running in the back of our head that they did not address and she's going to need to address them. You can't run away from the camera that often. Now, she's particularly lucky because right now she's looking at massive, massive support electorally. So maybe she won't have to before November. Maybe she'll just be able to like, you know, tap dance. My,

my hope is that, is that it tightens up so that, you know, you hold her feet to the fire. I think I still think she'll win, but I just hate the idea that she's going to win and think, Oh, they love me.

I mean, I just can't. I also just hate the thought of holding her feet. We had this week the sad news that Gawker will not be able to report on the Hillary administration with their patented withering honesty. Gawker is going to be dead. The other sites in the Gawker media service will continue to write about science fiction and gaming and the rest of it. But Gawker itself, it's hard. Rob, you remember – sorry, Peter, if I'm going to rob for this, but I think he would know more. the rest of it. But Gawker itself, it's hard. Rob, you remember, sorry Peter if I'm going to

rob for this, but I think he would know a few more. You remember what Gawker was like when it first came out. It was not something that made you feel soiled and covered with vegetable oil after you left. No, it was unique. They had a sister site in Hollywood called Defamer. Defamer was covered in

vegetable oil? I hate Gawker. You felt greasy and disgusted. But in the beginning, it was acerbic and fun and had a very New York sensibility that wasn't completely divorced from decency. And then something happened and no one is going to be sad for them. No one. Why did Univision pay $130 million for What's Left of Gawker? That's the piece of it.

Why is it worth anything? Well, there's a collection of sites and so they own the other sites. Got it. Okay. And the other sites have an audience and it's a way to sort of reach them. I don't know why Univision did that. I don't think they should have. I don't see how it fits into their profile of possessions and assets. But look, these companies

get crazy. And I guess they thought, well, you could buy all these eyeballs for cheap now because it's court-ordered sales. So maybe we should buy them. But I'm not sure those eyeballs all go together. But – Yeah, I don't know the point. I go to io9 every day. But there's other places there that I could – there's lots of places where I could get that kind of content elsewhere just about every single site however on the web today with the exception of ricochet is dissatisfying to me in some respect um you know it was easier before we had all these choices it was easier when the only shouting show on television was the was john mclaughlin remember that which nowadays seems rather tame in and tame and learned in perspective, doesn't it?

It's insane to think how long that man was doing the show. He invented the show of a bunch of people sitting around on a Sunday talking about politics and kind of yelling at each other. He invented that, I think. Oh, yeah. For sure he did. And it was like – there are people – I mean if you're my age or older, this guy has been in many ways – or you're right around my age. He embodies television punditry. There wasn't TV – there wasn't interesting TV punditry before John McLaughlin. He's invented the idea that, well, we're going to put it on TV.

It's got to be interesting. Everyone else seemed to take it as their absolute career goal to be boring. How boring was I? 100% boring? Then that's good, right? Nothing interesting ever happened on these Sunday political chat shows. Absolutely zero. It was homework. It was homework.

You use the phrase you often use. It was a PBS show, basically. It was on PBS for years. It's remarkable. It's remarkable. He did. I remember it was like the first for years um it's remarkable it's remarkable and you know he did we uh i remember like it was like the first year second year of cheers and we had 200 we did our 200th episode and we wanted to do nbc wanted to do a special and they were saying you know oh maybe we'll ask bill moyers to do it or somebody like that and i remember that you know uh someone in the room i'm not sure it was me but someone said what about john mclaughlin and they're like wow that would be good like that would be good tv and he was it was me but someone said, what about John McLaughlin? And they're like, wow, that would be good.

Like that would be good TV. And he was. It was good TV. He had done his research. He came out. He was like – he was ready to go and it was – he kind of like – he was a little bit aggressive. I remember that show actually. It was really funny.

And he was a weird idiosyncratic TV guy. Like all this weird – I mean I don't know. I mean if you were a political nerd and a nerd pundit in the olden times, you could go to other political nerd kids and say – on a scale of one to ten, one being absolutely impossible, ten being metaphysical certitude. And like that was like something that this guy did on his talk show every week. It was sort of magic, really magic. And at the time, of course, it was regarded as this strange, wild, feral interpretation of the state art of politics with the injection of personality and the bristling emotions and aggressiveness. And now, of course, it looks like a Socratic dialogue.

Exactly. This is not – someone once shouted, I think shouldn't shout but like yelled – or no. It was David Brinkley once said to the – to two people yelling or getting heated at yelling on This Week with David Brinkley. He said, this is not Dr. McLaughlin's gong show. He said. He's got a withering contempt. Well, I walked past a television the other day. I think it was at the office because we have these banks of television sets monitoring the world and I love it.

But there were four faces on the widescreen and they were all talking. The sound was done but you just saw four heads, each of whom was disconnected in some studio staring at a glass eye, unaware of what everybody else was doing. They were all yelling their particular point out. I just – I looked at that and I said, that's why I don't watch, quote, the shows, as they're called. I just listened to them, as you've been doing here. And we thank you for that. This podcast was brought to you not only by Ricochet,

but by the great courses, Harry's, and we're brought to you also by Trunk Club, our new sponsor. Visit the Ricochet store if you will. They've got lots of great Ricochet-branded swag in there, including, including like thumb drives. Hey, you want to spread a virus somewhere? Load up a Ricochet thumb drive and go

to a hacker conference and pass that thing around and they'll all say, why is my default homepage gone to Ricochet? If you enjoy the show, please take a minute to review us on iTunes because those reviews help new listeners discover us, which helps the show keep going and helps perhaps more people become one of the 1,500 necessary people that we're going to get. We are going to get.

If you go to Ricochet, you will see a little thermometer actually that shows you how far we're getting to that point. And it resembles the pizza tracker in the Domino's app. And I just wish also that it was set up on end so it could be like those thermometers you used to have when there was a charity drive in your hometown. And there would be a big thermometer on Main Street. We had these in Fargo. And you're just waiting for the mercury to reach whatever the desired level was. We'll get there, 1,500 people. If not, we're going to go down in flames.

No, seriously. You're taking everybody's money and going to Mexico. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. If you agree with that idea or want to come with, well, come to the comments. And that's where we'll see you here at Ricochet 3.0. A pleasure, gentlemen.

We'll see you next week. Next week. See you, guys. He was running down the street when they shot him in his tracks. About the only thing agreed upon is he ain't coming back there won't be

any trial so the air won't be clear there's just two sides calling names out of anger out of fear and if you say it wasn't racial when they shot him in his tracks

well I guess that means that you ain't black it means that you ain't black I mean Barack Obama won't you can choose where to eat you don't see too many white kids lying bleeding on the street In some town in Missouri

But it could be anywhere It could be right here on Ruth Street The fact is has happened here And it happened where you're sitting Wherever that might be And it happened last weekend And it'll happen again next week And when they turned him over

They were surprised there wasn't a gun I mean he must have done something. Or else why would he have run? And they'll spin it for the anchors on the television screen. So we can't shrug and let it happen without asking what it means. What it means Then I guess there was protesting And some lo losing in some stores

And someone was reminded they ain't called colored folks no more I mean we try to be politically correct and we call names But what's the point of post-racism when no prejudice is remained And that guy who killed that kid Down the floor of a standing ground Is free to beat up on his girlfriend And wave a brand new gun around While some kid is dead and buried

And laying in the ground With a pocket full of skill What it means. Ricochet. Join the conversation. What it means What it means Astrophysics at our fingertips We're standing at the sun And some man with a joystick

Lands a rocket on a comet We're living in the...