The Ricochet Podcast - Lockdown Rant

Episode Date: May 1, 2020

This week on The Big Show, we inch our way back to normal with our first show in weeks without a COVID-19 specific guest. That’s not to say we don’t talk about it — we do, and then some. But the new cycle means that we have to address those icky charges against Joe Biden and to do that we call on the Ricochet Podcast’s Senior Sex and Gender Correspondent, the great Mollie Hemingway (yes... Source

I'm going to be saying I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University. No, it is not true. I'm saying unequivocally. It never, never happened. And it didn't. I'm the president and you're fake news. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lilacs and today we talk to Molly Hemingway about Biden and Bill McGurn about China. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome to the WSJ Podcast number 494. I'm James Laddix here in Minnesota. Peter's in California,

Rob is in New York, and as we all know, we want you to stay home and stay safe because the air outside, according to the latest studies, is 97% coronavirus. So if you step outside, that's it. It's over. How are you doing, guys? I assume you've got your N95 masks on and that you are not venturing outside until every single possible orifice has been stuffed with saran wrap and camphor and all the rest of it. Or are you inclined to say, hmm, I'm going out today and nobody's going to stop me well i okay i'm fine because i'm in california and what we seem to be learning here more and more and more is that we all should be worried about rob because new york is just the anomaly new york has the higher infection rates the higher

death rates it's just a lot here in californ, I'm thinking to myself, as I think a lot of Californians are, I've condensed my rant, my anti-lockdown rant, and here's what it comes to now. We know that the coronavirus, that sunlight and warmth destroy the coronavirus quite quickly. We know that there's very little evidence of transmission outdoors. Overwhelmingly, the transmission seems to be taking place indoors. I say we know this. These are what the statistics seem to be indicating. We also know, come to think of it, that one of the things that is turning up in hospitals is vitamin D deficiencies. After being cooped up for all these weeks,

people haven't been getting enough sunlight to manufacture enough vitamin D within their own bodies. Governor Newsom looks at all of Also, Governor Newsom looks at all of this. Governor Newsom looks at all of this data and says, I have an idea. Let's close the beaches this weekend. And my rant is simply this. I'm with Andy McCarthy, who had a wonderful piece on NRO, what was it, last week, arguing that at this stage, the burden of proof, or at least the burden of argument, shifts to the government. If you want to prolong this lockdown, particularly in places like California, where we look around and say, it didn't hit in anything like what

happened in New York. If you want to prolong this lockdown, if you want to keep people off the beaches, cooped up in their houses with vitamin D deficiencies, you need to explain yourself. And Governor Newsom has not done that. I'm done. That's my rant. Sorry, James. Go ahead. No, I was going to say the vitamin D thing is important, too. They've also found, according to some French studies, I believe, that people who smoke, who have nicotine in their system, are better at combating it. So essentially, head off to the tanning booth and light up a lucky, is what I'm saying. Well, you know, in winter, I have vitamin D deficiency all the time, so I'm not quite upset about that. Oh, you do? Yeah, I take a little vitamin D pill,

especially in the winter. People on the East Coast get vitamin D deficient in the winter. That's normal. That's okay. It's easily okay i i i think for me correct yeah for me look new york is clearly the worst place in the country and new york should the tri-state area the new york greater metro area is the worst place if you remove new york metro area from the all the the country which i think a lot of people want to do anyway and you separate it you suddenly have a a something like the littlest pandemic that ever was like basically no pandemic at all in america um the but i guess what i my feeling is and i i answered james's question by saying i walk around i saunter at the streets of new york city at uh in the afternoon smoking a big cigar without a mask, and I feel fine about it. Because my job as a citizen, I was told, and I think those people were right,

and they met well, and I think they were essentially correct and properly cautious. My job as a citizen of New York and the country was to stay at home and to, you know, whatever the, it's not shelter in place place it's not that what we're doing we're staying at home and we're trying not to overwhelm the health care system because we don't know how many people are going to end up in the hospital or end up on respirators and we don't want to live in a country where people are dying in the hospital hallways in hospital parking lots so we did that and we discovered a very interesting thing which is that look actually we whether whether we needed more icu beds or not whether we needed more ICU beds or not,

whether we needed more masks or not, we have plenty. We have plenty in the worst part of the country, New York, we have plenty of all the things that we need. It turns out that a lot of people are getting it and recovering at home. They're miserable, but they're getting it and they're recovering at home, and then they're going off on their merry way. So now that's over. So let's, now we know, we have all the information we need. Let's go back to work. The people who are arguing that we should not go back to work,

I think are curiously exempt from all of the things that are hurting people who are now losing their businesses and their jobs. And in New York City, where it's a greater than 20% are in service jobs, greater than 20% are people who, you know to do rest work with the public two things are true one is a lot of people are losing their jobs and losing their rent and losing their businesses and their landlords are not saying it's okay if you're two three months late or two three months in arrears forever on

your rent which sort of makes sense i mean they, they are in business too. But there are also those people who were in the public sphere, meaning meeting, greeting, driving people around, doormen, and all those people are getting sicker at a much higher rate. And some are getting severely sicker. The death rates for those people are much higher. So we are in danger of creating a very, very bad social problem, worse than vitamin D deficiency, when people who are in service positions realize that they are being sacrificed because, honestly, because a lot of people in the media like drama. And a lot of people in government like calamity, and they like the sort of extraordinary powers they've been given. And Governor Newsom just likes the ability to wake up in the morning and roll over in bed in Sacramento and say, you know what, no beach this weekend. Ask me, pretty please. Yep, yep. I'm afraid that that, okay.

To continue, the other thing that, I'll just say it quickly because I've said it before, but it continues to concern me. Governor Newsom is overriding local officials to close the beaches. Last weekend, local officials said throughout much of Southern California, about Orange County down south through to San Diego, roughly, beaches are open. The local officials, it's our job to make these decisions and the beaches are open. Observe social distancing, come here by cars, which Californians do anyway, not by subway. It's not Coney Island. There's not mass transit involved, by and large. Okay. And Governor Newsom is overriding their decisions. And I haven't seen a single account in which a journalist has asked

and tells us, the public, what legal authority he has to do so. Now, the governor's office has, of course, a large legal office. They've probably gone through this. But I just don't like the idea that we're now in a position where a guy gets up and uses the coercive power of the state to tell tens of thousands of people who might have gone to the beach this weekend to stay home, and nobody says, okay, governor, you may have have your reasons but a you please tell us what they are you're supposed to work for us not the other way around and b cite the legal authority make sure you're doing this under color of law tell us exactly why you have the authority to override our local officials and it just ain't happening this there's just too much. The more I think about this, the more I find myself

inclining toward the following pretty simple conclusion, so simple that I'm worried that I may be missing something large here. But because the politicians, not all of them, but many of them have been sloppy in telling us the reasons for the shutdown. Rob, you just, of course, explained it perfectly, which is to flatten the curve. The aim here is to make sure that the hospitals don't get overwhelmed, not to make sure that none of us ever gets the coronavirus ever again. Well, the hospitals have not been overwhelmed. In California, they didn't come close to being overwhelmed. We've done what we could do with the shutdown but politicians are very frightened of ending it because they they have constructed a situation in which they're likely to get blamed for whatever comes next

yeah can i right it's as simple as that in some basic way i think you're totally right and i just think that my larger my sort of my larger realization is this media and politicians have believed that the worst possible thing in this pandemic is to leave it up to the people's own intuition and good sense. And so you cannot be trusted. The people's intuition and good sense cannot be trusted. We cannot tell them about masks because then they'll go crazy by masks. We cannot tell them that you can't really get it from a subway seat because then they'll all get on the subway. We can't really tell them that, look, if you Purell and you wash your hands a lot and you're careful and you don't go to large events, and if you do, you're really careful, they won't be careful and we'll have a pandemic. We can't tell them any of those things things so we have to tell them other things and the truth and same thing with

the media and the truth is that the one group that has actually behaved flawlessly really flawlessly the one group you can say in this entire pageant who have really behaved without reproach without any kind of you can't really criticize the behavior of the American people. Donald Trump has been loathsome. The Democrats have been loathsome. The state and local authorities, especially New York City, have been loathsome. The American people, on the other hand, the citizens of New York City, on the other hand, have been heroes. And that, to me, is the takeaway from all of this. Well, that's generally how it works when you have a disaster in this country. When you have a disaster in this country and something goes horribly wrong,

the leadership class instantly fears that people are going to rape and pillage and the rest of it. What happens is that people queue up asking what they can do. How do I help? You need somebody to go dig that collapsed building? I got a brawnyony brother let me go get him that people behave but even though even though we've been behaving well they still know our betters do that that mass disobedience and armed conflict on the part of these nazi sympathizing people who don't want to stay in the house uh is right around the corner i mean when i say nazi sympathizing i'm quoting a local weather person who described the people protesting at the Capitol as such. Are you kidding? In Minneapolis? Yes. Right. Because if you are doing if you are refusing to accept the wisdom that is in Minnesota government has been pretty good about this. I think, you know, I argue about this, about that.

I'm not so sure now because he just extended the lockdown for another until May 18th with loosening and restrictions and the rest of it you know could be worse could be better but if you believe that the people who have a contrary opinion about this are doing so because they have some sort of incoherent sovereign citizen militia sympathizing idea no it's actually ordinary folk who kind of want to get out. But it's really satisfying to believe that all the people who want to get out there and shop and go to a cafe in the right, it's really satisfying to know that they're anti-science, that they're anti-government, and that they're all idiots. I mean, when Dana Milbank has it for a column headline, Georgia is now in the rush to be America's number one death destination. This is in the Washington Post. Because, I mean, they just imagine towering pyramids of bodies

separating in the hot sun. And when we look around here and we say, you know, about 80, 90% of it has actually been old folks in nursing homes, which is bad. It's horrible. Doesn't mean I want them to die. But let's take that metric as an example of what we should use going forward. And the government's response is, it doesn't matter that most of them were in nursing homes and very old and had other comorbidities. It's off the table. What counts is you people out there are playing tennis. And if somebody wrote one of the comment sections of the paper, yeah, they can be distancing, but they're picking up the balls, they're touching things, they're touching things. So we've gone from, we have to flatten the curve

to this ever extending, ever rolling, everefined idea about nobody should get sick. And while I hate to say some people are going to, and I don't want to get sick myself, and I wouldn't like to die of this. Oh, it's miserable, apparently, yeah. Well, no, and it depends, unless you're one of the people who gets it, and it's a day of sniffles. I mean, it's all over the road. Or you're 30 years old, and you have a stroke. I mean, it's all over the road. Or you're 30 years old and you have a stroke. I mean, it's awful. I get that. But when you make health to be the shining thing that that's all there is in life is to live until you're 95 and drink your slurry of kelp and fiber and the rest of it, and nobody should get sick, this is what you get. As opposed to a more stoic approach to just plowing through the sun. And it isn't even consistent on its own terms. You're quite right, James, that they accuse us

of being anti-science and they make health the one lodestar. However, note this. Here's an announcement from the past week. The Mayo Clinic is furloughing 30,000 workers. That's right. That's right. Now, what does, this is one of what it must be one of the half dozen leading medical centers in the entire world people from across the country and all the world go to the mayo clinic when they have problems that are especially so-called 30 000 i mean just begin to think what that means for my wife my wife's wife works for a physician's group and it's the same thing they've gotten rid of all of these elect elective procedures

this is what you have to wrap your brain around is the following phrase you can't go to the hospital because you might get sick right although that that has always been true i know it has but if you're telling me that the mayo was una i mean bill de blasio finally decided to stop running the subways at night and hose them down with a little bleach finally decided to do it i can't i tend to believe the mayo clinic has better disinfecting procedures than the new york subway system is what i'm saying yeah but the truth about that is that even if if there was no covid going on the subways in the middle of cold and flu season is a risk. You should be careful.

You should not touch stuff. You should not touch your face. That's just normal. They can dip it in bleach every night. But the truth is that if you get on there at 5 in the afternoon, you're too late. This place is teeming with all sorts of horrible bacteria that are going to give you all sorts of horrible grips and infections. And that is just the way it is to live in a city and you know some of us in the city we march around go i don't care you know i'm just building up this great uh this huge powerful immune system and i think that that is in many ways true but the the irony about the elective stuff is that

that is how these places make their money so you're gonna i know you're gonna have a bunch of doctors storming the state houses with signs saying, please let us continue to do breast augmentations. They are our bread and butter. And that is absolutely true. These are procedures in many cases. Some, obviously, elective is a very large category. But a lot of these cases, they're non-threatening. They are elective. They don't have to be done. And they are paid for out of pocket for a lot of people. Certainly all plastic surgery is. Those are rich areas of profit for our health care system.

And I, for one, want them to get rich on that stuff. That means they can maybe cut us some slack and we have our appendix out. Exactly. And when you talk about the subway systems, I get it. New York requires it, depends upon us, but you have to realize that those of us out here in the car world are looking at the push towards car insurance.

Car insurance prices are so high, there's no way to get them down, James. Ladies and gentlemen, I've just detected that Rob really wants to move this along. He doesn't want any of this long back and forth. I'm absolutely certain about where you're going. I know you are. I know.

It's like being in a vaudeville act, you know, and we're the guys with the baggy pants and the bowler hats, and I start the routine, and you go right to the joke. You've got to build it up. I wanted to make it clear that I knew where you were going. It's more ego stroking for me. Sorry. Okay.

Well, Rob did mention car insurance, and I'm going to mention car insurance. And you don't want to talk about car insurance, do you? Because you pay it once, what? Once a month, twice a year. It's too much. You roll your eyes. You think, I had to do something about this. But then you write the check, and you go on with your life.

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TechCrunch calls The Zebra Kayak for auto insurance. And if you've ever used Kayak to find a better flight on something, you know that's a good recommendation. Best part, completely free. You can save up to $670 a year using TheZebra.com. Now, whatever your economic situation, The Zebra is committed to helping you save. So how much can you save on car and home insurance? Go today and start saving at thezebra.com slash ricochet. That's thezebra.com slash ricochet. Spelled T-H-E-Z-E-B-R-A dot com slash ricochet. And our thanks to The Zebra for sponsoring this, The Ricochet Podcast. And now we welcome back to the podcast, Molly Hemingway, Fox News contributor, senior editor at The Federalist, co-author of Justice on Trial, The Kavanaugh Confirmation, and the Future of the Supreme Court. But, of course, she's renowned

the globe over for being a ricochet editor and the co-host of the classic podcast series, The Hemingways. Molly, welcome. Did you see Joe this morning? He seemed a little bit more animated. Previous versions of Joe in the last few days, he seems to have been novocained and coming to us through a fog of Vaseline and smoke. But he was a little bit perkier today as he denied absolutely everything. Yeah, it was an interesting interview. And I have noticed that you get different versions of Joe Biden, particularly back during the debates. There were debates where he really seemed to be struggling. And then there were ones where he seemed really perky. So today was a perky day.

Hey, Molly, it's Rob Long. Thank you for joining us. So how on a scale of one to ten, ten being 100 percent total and utter hypocrisy. Where are we now? Are we at eight? Are we at nine? Have we hit ten? Right.

We're definitely past 11 it is shocking it is shocking to watch people act like we're all going to forget what they did fewer than two years ago i mean it wasn't that long ago we all saw how every single democrat and major media figure threw presumption of innocence out the window set it on fire and you know decapitated it. And now they seem to have rediscovered it and think that everyone's going to let them do that. Brett Kavanaugh warned in his reopened testimony that Democrats had sown the wind, and he said he feared that for the decades to come, the whole country will reap the whirlwind. And so many people were

saying that we can't throw out these basic bedrock principles. And for that, people who said that they believed in presumption of innocence, they were called rape apologists. They were mocked and discredited and roundly derided by every single major media figure. And they cannot run away from this story fast enough, but a lot of people seem like they're not willing to let them. So, Molly, I'm sorry, Peter here, which is the outrage, what they did two years ago? I mean, if two years ago hadn't happened, and Joe Biden popped up this morning and said, look, it was a long time ago, actually the evidence, she has no evidence and i didn't do it and the reaction today would be acceptable maybe this is all a question to you if two years ago what are we really angry about

two years ago or today it's still anger over the two years ago i someone yesterday asked president trump something about the biden allegations and he said very consistently, well, I think he should address them. Sometimes allegations can be false, but he needs to address the issue, which is exactly what he said about the Kavanaugh situation. If everyone is a billion times less consistent on this than Donald Trump, you know you have a problem. But yeah yeah two years ago two years ago people saw a guy who had many decades of a good reputation get destroyed in front of his wife and children and there was so little that could be done to stop it i mean it took like half the country completely devoted to fighting on his behalf to stop what they were trying to do. And it was really one of the most

terrific things many of us had ever gone through. And to see it happen against someone like him, like there are plenty of politicians that act bad or plenty of political figures where you think, well, they're kind of getting what's coming to them. This was not that guy. But as for Biden, I don't think anyone knows what happened. I mean, they understand that he's very handsy. They understand that there is a track record of women feeling uncomfortable around him. They've seen it. They've seen it on TV. They know that this was some time ago. They know that she's been talking, the woman who's accusing him, Tara Reid, has been talking about it for the duration, but they don't know what happened. And I think people understand that Joe Biden deserves due

process, but it's that due process he was unwilling to give to Kavanaugh and that he was unwilling actually to give to Mike Bloomberg too, just a few months ago. Molly, you know what? Just this instant occurred to me, there are going to be some listeners. I realized, I thought to myself, I've read, can you just sum up when the allegate, when this is supposed to, what sum up Tara Reid's charge for us? When did it take place and what is she saying? Just so we have the point of departure for all of this in our minds. Yeah, so her story is that in 1993, she was working for Senator Biden.

That's not disputed. Everybody agrees that she knew him and worked for him in 1993. She says that he took her into a hallway and, you know, lifted up her skirt and penetrated her with his hands. And that when she raised concerns to supervisors, she was discriminated against and let go and that there should be some paper trail of this. She claimed when this story came out that she had told multiple people about it at the time it happened. That has been corroborated. She definitely told people of this incident, you know, brother, mother, friend, and a lot of people have come forward to say that she talked about it over the years. The wrinkle being that last year, she said that she had been

inappropriately touched in the same way that so many other women had, but not with this level of assault. And so some people say that because that story has changed from what she told publicly last year, that she shouldn't be treated um that that should affect whether you believe her of course nobody said that about christine blasey ford who by her own account never uttered a word of this for nearly three decades right and had a story that changed not just over the six years that she began telling it after brett kavanaugh had become a nationally known figure but even in the weeks before before her testimony you know different story to the washington post and the lie detector and her Kavanaugh had become a nationally known figure. But even in the weeks before her testimony, you know, different story to the Washington Post and the lie detector and her public testimony,

that was no barrier for people. But now people say it should be for Tara Reid. So any kind of calculating machine that simply, as dispassionately as possible, simply weighs up likelihoods, credibility, and so forth, it simply is the case that Tara Reid is more credible than Christine Blasey Ford, correct? On the very face of it. It's not really saying much because Christine Blasey Ford never had any evidence other than her claim. She has no evidence that she ever met Brett Kavanaugh. She has just nothing. So, it's very easy to pass that bar. But yes, Tara Reid absolutely

has passed that bar. She has evidence she met Joe Biden. Nobody disputes that. And she has tons of evidence that she told people about it back in 1993. I mean, there's a video, an audio tape of her mother calling into the Larry King show on CNN to complain about a senator. Molly, I've got to stop you right there. I've been to that Google Play page. That CNN interview is nowhere. It just isn't there. So this is, you know, people, this mythical tape of her mother

calling into Larry King. If that was the case, I think it would be there. You know about that, right? This is a fascinating little element here. Yeah, it was removed, and it's unclear how it was removed and who's responsible for removing it. But there is this tape, and it's out there.

Of course, I just thought if there had been audio or videotape of Christine Blasey Ford calling in to Phil Donahue, I mean, it wouldn't just be lights out. It would have been like one of the most devastating things to ever happen. And yet this has been kind of downplayed by by people in the media but yes tara reed's credibility is just by any measure or the credibility of her accusation by any measure exceeds that that christine blasey okay and then one more one more sort of forensic question uh tara reed is saying there should be a paper trail somewhere in, am I correct about this, somewhere in the Biden archives. Amazingly enough, this man has thought enough of himself to collect his papers and donate them to the University of Delaware. And the Biden reply to that is, no, no, no, we're just not going to go looking for it. And journalists are saying,

sure, don't bother looking for it. I just want to point out that when Brett Kavanaugh was accused of a horrific crime, he actually did his own document production. He brought forth calendars that he'd kept, like the nerdiest person in the history of the world. Calendars? Those are so fantastically weird. Yes. So and then so that's another contrast here. But yes, I'm not sure if Tara Reid is right, that there would be evidence of a complaint made, but she seems to think there might be. It's kind of a moot point because I gather that Biden already sent staffers to deal with the problem or to look through the records. But journalists are displaying no appetite for looking at these records themselves.

No, not at all. It's not like, you know, you remember when Sarah Palin's emails were produced, you had like 12 AP reporters all sent up to Alaska to dig through them. But there seems to be much less curiosity about the man running for president and what and what he was doing during his long public career. I mean, currently the front runner of the polls, by the way, and I had to have a match up currently the front runner to be the leader of the free world. Yeah, it just doesn't seem that important, I guess. So, Molly, I have two questions. One is, when do you think... Obviously, this is not new.

This is not new to the Biden campaign. It's not new to any... I mean, this didn't come out of nowhere. In the same way that Christine Blasey Ford, the gestation for what happened in October was started in July when she was at her with her beach friends which is a phrase i still love i was just with my beach friends i happen to

be sort of activist but whatever when do you think the biden campaign knew this was going to happen come out how prepared were they and how worried are they? I don't know because I mean, this is a guy who was already vice president. There had been things written actually at the time that he ran for the presidency back in 2008. There were things written in liberal publications claiming that he had a reputation and that stories would come out about his treatment of women, but they already kind of dealt with some of this,

which with a bunch of women complaining about how he had physically touched them. And so I think they thought maybe they could just get past it. Plus, Tara Reid's story last year was just along the lines of what these other women had complained about, not the more dramatic tale that has come out more recently. So I don't, when you have the media at your back as much as a typical democrat does you don't really have to worry about the same things as a different candidate so i guess my second question is at some point do you think or have this has already happened off the record some liberal reporter has said to you yeah we're gonna give. Oh, no, I don't think it's...

I mean, it's obvious that they're doing it, and you have to have no functioning brain to not see that, by and large, the media are doing what they can to dispose of the story. I mean, even that original New York Times and Washington Post stories, they weren't like what happened with Christine Blasey Ford, where she was given the most sympathetic,

cinematic treatment possible. It was more like a dry retelling with all the doubts you know that you could possibly muster into there um and so it's more like okay we have to cover this so we can get past it and that seems to be the attitude most people have i think half the country isn't in the mood to let them pretend that that's an okay thing well they also phrase it with stories like Republicans and GOP seize on allegations that that say that Biden in his day. I mean, they will they will come up with these elaborate, baroque ways of stating what happened without stating what's happened. So they can say that, well, we covered it. Look, here's the story that we did as opposed as opposed to saying Biden faces fresh allegations. It'd be Republicans pounce on assertion of allegations that are fresh.

I mean, it's- And just as an example of that, when the Christine Blasey Ford story came out, CNN immediately began round-the-clock coverage, and they ended up having 705 stories on Christine Blasey Ford. As of like 10 days ago, they had done zero on Tara Reid, zero, even though her story had been out for a month. So when you're dealing with that kind of disparity, it's unbelievable. Another thing I think is important to remember is that anybody who supported Brett Kavanaugh, whether it was a childhood friend or a sitting US senator, was called a rape apologist or really put under attack by our media and activist groups. You haven't seen that happen at all with a string of endorsements coming out for Biden.

And nobody's even asking, like, hey, do you have a rape apologist problem here? You know, the women who are vying to be his vice presidential candidate are all, you know, offering themselves as tribute, basically, to cover up, you know, or to get past what they're doing. A responsible media would try to be a little bit more consistent between what they did to Kavanaugh's defenders and Biden's. Can we talk about politics for one second and just to get your prognostication? Because you and not Molly, of course, as you know, I'm a huge Molly Hemingway fan and advocate, but we differ on Trump. No.

On the other hand... Molly, I've been working so hard for so long. Could you just... Just do the wiping up with me, please. I am doing... I do self-exploration. I've tried to listen to myself and listen to my heart and listen to what I'm being told to do.

You should listen to me and my heart. That's the problem. Let me finish i i i read this i read the pieces you've been writing about this i'm reading about this stuff and i'm i get so furious at the hypocrisy that i am i'm looking for my maga hat and by the way they say they sell them not that too far from where i live and and if i'm looking for my maga hat I am willing, I probably will change my mind at some point. But right now, I am absolutely willing to vote for the president of the United States based on my rage at what we're being, what they're trying to force down our throats. How do you think this is going to play for the rest of us who are, you know, basically negative on Trump, maybe Trump agnostic, maybe Trump curious at best. Do you think this is going to help him or hurt him?

And I'm using myself as an example. I don't know, but I do want to congratulate you on getting to the place that like a good portion of the country was in 2016. I'm a late bloomer. Where, you know, I think a lot of people who voted for Trump were really very focused on judges and political appointments. And other people were really fed up with just really fed up with this situation where people who are conservative are treated as if they are second class citizens in this country. And that's every day in the media, whether it has anything to do with Trump or not. And people have really gotten fed up with that. But I don't know how this will play out in this election. And I'm wondering if Biden has what it takes to make it for a number of reasons. This is not helping him and it doesn't

seem to be going away. And it won't go away so long as he doesn't deal with it more appropriately than he has thus far. It cannot be good for him. And it's weird because, you know, Donald Trump has a reputation for horrible treatment of women over the decades or just, you know, not moral behavior toward women, the very least. And yet there it's so baked into people's conception of him. I mean, it's a reason why a lot of people didn't like him going back to the 1980s. It's not new. And so this hypocrisy issue really is the thing that people are focused on rather than, you know, sadly, that there are a lot of men who don't treat women as they should. Right.

Right. They're the people who are just going to say that, you know, like Molly just said, Trump is worse. Ergo, I can swallow what Joe did. You can talk about Joe Biden's family's connections to Chinese business. You can shrug and say, hey, Trump did stuff in Russia. I mean, the people who are willing to make excuses will make tons of excuses because at the end of the day, they want a bigger state and yay abortion. But there's also the issue as to whether or not Joe's got it in him and whether or not, you know, he's a placeholder candidate for whoever he names as Veep. And I wonder if that factors in, if that's bubbling in there yet, if people are saying, well, if he chooses Stacey Abrams, I'm not exactly sure that I want her to be president of the United States at this juncture in human history. And whether or not his sort of infirmities and his muddledness is actually going to mean more in the end than the Tara Reade situation.

Right. I don't know. But it is kind of weird, too, because it's usually something you're dealing with on the Republican side where there are these like ancient candidates nominated. And people say, oh, why don't you just claim that you're only going to run for one term? Or why don't you pick a really good vice president, which is never a good option for someone trying trying to win the presidency it's kind of weird to see it um happening on the democrat side but it's just hard to imagine you know biden having what it takes maybe if the shutdown continues and he can be protected as he's been protected in the last month it'll help him in the same way it has in the last month but i don't know peter's got one more on Flint. Peter? Yeah, Molly, we're talking about journalists

who, I was about to say, they're sleepy. They're not sleepy at all. They're in the tank. What about General Flynn? It's only like the biggest political scandal of our time. I know, this is another gigantic story. So fill us in. You're there in Washington. You've been up.

You're already up on whatever's happened this morning in Washington. Fill us in on the latest regarding General Flynn, would you please? It's so complex that I'm not sure I can. But what is really, here's what I think is important. a political campaign of political opponents that was in effect. And then it sort of morphed into a special counsel probe where certain allies of the president were rung up on various charges and whatnot. And a lot of people felt that something was fishy about it. What I think is interesting about the news that has come out recently is Attorney General Barr, when he came in, he brought in some professionals from different districts to just kind of review what had happened with some of these Russia collusion cases. Everything we have learned about the Russia collusion issue has not gone well for the Department of Justice. And I think Barr

really needs to be commended for having this guy come in, review the documents, finding all these things that should have been turned over to Flynn's attorneys that weren't, including that the case against him was closed due to complete lack of evidence, that Peter Strzok reopened it so that he could try to set up Mike Flynn on a Logan Act charge, which is an absurd, absurd idea based on an unconstitutional 1799 law that has never been used for prosecution, that they set him up, that they tried to trap him into saying something false. They still didn't do it. They said at the end of the interview that he didn't lie or anything. Special Counsel Mueller's office later tried to say that he did lie. They threatened Flynn. They

got him to plead guilty. It's just a stinky, stinky case all the way through based on a desire, it sounds like, a desire to protect their spying on Carter Page. They knew that if Mike Flynn were the national security advisor, he'd have to sign off on these things or be briefed on them. And they didn't want to do that. And so they tried to get him fired. That is not an appropriate role for the FBI. And nothing really about how they handled things here was appropriate. And it's all coming to light thanks to Attorney General Barr and the person he put in to review the mike flynn case out of and and the and journalists across washington are tripping over themselves to put this story above the fold in

every edition of the washington post and to get it out on the websites and they're outraged on cnn and msnb correct that's uh completely false and peter it's such a good point that you say that. There was a poll that came out this week showing that 53% of Americans believe that the Russia dossier, which has been completely discredited as a ridiculous document, 53% of Americans believe that its finding of treasonous collusion with Russia was, quote, real. And the reason why is because the media spent years pretending it was real and writing stories saying it was real. And then when it turned out that it wasn't true, as shown by the Mueller report, the Inspector General report, the lawsuits that have been placed against the guy who invented it and whatnot, they haven't reported that at all. And so even though the media have

a lot of problems with their credibility, they still have a tremendous amount of power. And they're not held accountable for that political power that they wield. And I think that poll result shows it more than anything else. Fake but accurate. So really, I mean, that's the new standard going forward, is that it may be nothing in the Mueller report, nothing in the Russia accusations may have been true. But, you know, when it comes to the basic idea of corruption, being a friend of Putin and the rest of it. And I mean, yeah, that's true. So they're going to get, you know, they'll split the baby and say it's more or less. Yes.

Peter, you had one more before we go. No, no. I was just going to say. So what? Aside from aside. What do we do? No. Yeah, exactly.

Aside from living in a state of high dudgeon, which is enjoyable. Molly's terrific. I love watching her on Fox News when she has a case. I mean, it's almost worth it. No, it's not worth it. It's not close to worth it. There's Fox News. There's Molly Hemingway. We've got the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. We've got Ricochet. That's it. that's it and i and and as you know it's a big question mark one of the three one of the three exactly one of the one third of ricochet is extremely suspect i mean how on earth and and rob we were just a moment ago we were were talking about the COVID crisis, the shutdown and so forth. And all three of us agreed that the hero in this story is the ordinary American. The good sense of the American people will prevail.

You make the obvious point that if they're lied to over and over and over again, overwhelmingly and for years, even the American people will get a little confused about what is and isn't so. So what am I saying here? How do you sleep at night? How distraught are you? I'm not having the best feeling toward our media or our situation right now, but I do think there are paths forward. It's very difficult to hold them accountable because usually you ask the media to hold things accountable or industries accountable. They have a vested interest in covering up their participation in this Russia collusion hoax or other issues that they perpetuate. And so they're not going to be the responsible party. I think that people need to stop treating outlets that behave as propaganda

or as partisan pushers. They need to stop treating them as if they're legitimate or serious. And so, you know, people say, oh, Donald Trump, like, fights with the media and they either love it or they hate it. But in general, people need to understand the power of the media and treat them accordingly and stop being so desperate for their love or affection and start calling them out and not giving them the benefit that we used to give media outlets on account of how they were supposed, you know, we thought they're helping the American people, they're helping preserve the republic. Well, they're not doing that now. And they're very, it's dangerous. It's dangerous that they put forth the Russia collusion hoax.

It's dangerous how they're turning a global pandemic into like a referendum on Orange Man. They need to behave better. And until such time as they orange man they need to behave better and until such time as they do they need to be treated as the dangerous um like purveyors of false information that they are molly dudgeon in high hemingway i'm sorry hemingway in high dudgeon uh yeah i've got relatives in west dudgeon if you see him wave hello thank you for joining us in the podcast today it's been fun uh and we'll have you back again soon as possible. Thanks, guys. Take it easy.

Bye-bye. Tell Mark we said hello. Will do. Bye. Yes. It must be weird to be Molly, though, because you've been covering this story in almost all of its aspects. I mean, I remember her first sort of series on this was about that horrible doctor whose name escapes me.

Gosnell. Gosnell, right, the serial killer in Philadelphia. And how absolutely nobody was interested in this subject. Not just because I mean, despite

the fact that it had everything going for it in terms of juicy, lurid, horrific crime stories, which the media is almost always understandably obsessed with. But because it had an anti-abortion, the possibility of an anti-abortion angle. That they just didn't want to, once again, they just didn't think that we could handle it. It wasn't helpful. It wasn't helpful, right? It wasn't helpful. That's right. It just was true, just a fact, but it wasn't helpful, right?

Ah, yes, Molly Hemingway. So an intellect, a wit, a personality as rare as hen's teeth. Speaking about teeth, got that before Rob could even get in. Let's talk about our teeth. Let's talk about brushing our teeth. 75% of us use old get in. Let's talk about our teeth. Let's talk about brushing our teeth. 75% of us use old worn out bristles that are ineffective. Even more people forget to floss daily. Good health starts with good habits. Quip makes it easy by delivering all the oral care essentials you need to brush and floss better. The Quip electric toothbrush

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now, this very moment, you'll get your first refill free. That's your first refill free at getquip.com slash ricochet. That's spelled G-E-T-Q-U-I-P.com slash ricochet. Getquip.com slash ricochet. Quip, the good habits company. And our thanks to Quip for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And now we welcome back to the podcast Bill McGurn, member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, writes the weekly Main Street column for the journal every Tuesday. And previously, he was chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush. Bill, welcome.

You've written a great column, Communists in Brook Brothers. Let me quote from the top of it here, or a portion. Quote, China's opening to foreign trade and investment proved tremendously successful at lifting ordinary Chinese out of desperate poverty. As genuine as an achievement as this has been, the mistake was assuming that just because communists traded Mao jackets for Brooks Brothers and sent their children to Harvard Business School, they would be transformed into Jeffersonian Democrats who play by liberal rules. Instead, the Chinese communist ruling class has learned that it can have it all, end quote. Let's talk about that. The Chinese communist is

a different beast than the old Russian model, which seems to be still what we think. If they're not acting like Russian communists, we don't really know how to treat them, how to view them. We sort of think that communism is no longer even a valid, dominant, binding idea in the Chinese government now. How wrong are we? Well, we're very wrong. Remember, the portrait of Mao still hangs over Tiananmen Square. And those last great protests in 1989, someone threw some paint on it and they quickly reacted to get that guy. So I think that's the problem. We kind of look at the Mao buttons and Lenin t-shirts and Che and we kind of think these guys are caricatures and that they're gone. And I would say that the new generation of communists, you know, with the exception of North

Korea, aren't quite the caricatures of the past, are a little more low-key. Again, they wear Western suits, but they're still communists. If you think communism is more about Lenin getting and holding power than Marx, how you distribute goods and services, then you see it's remarkably consistent, and we really underestimate them at our peril. Hey, Bill. Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead. No, you go ahead, Rob.

Bill, it's Rob Long here. Thanks for joining us. So the first time I met you, I don't know if you remember this, was in the early 1990s, and you were in Hong Kong. And I think we had a drink or a cigar somewhere, and we were talking about what's going to happen when Hong Kong goes commie. And, you know, there was Martin Lee, among others, people sounding the alarm. And then there were other people saying, you know, the Chinese, the Chi-Coms, as we say, they're smart.

They recognize the value of a free port like Hong Kong. What happened? Well, communism happened. You know, I was among the skeptics. I was among the skeptics. I do recall that. I, even I, never thought that within 20 years there would be rioting in the streets or clashes with the police.

The protesters don't like being called rioters but to see a city just subdued like this the military force and the effect of the economy no one would have predicted that we were all assured um china won't strangle the goose that lays the golden egg and of course they did they i mean look we should have known this from the start. A communist society cannot abide a free society, you know, within its orbits. So, I mean, I guess what I, and then in subsequent years, I was in China. I was in China not that long, actually now about a decade ago. And I was at a sort of a big event and talking to some Chinese business officials that my uncle was working for. And they were very forthcoming,

and they shared with me their concern about the future. And it was a concern that was echoed by a lot of people and sort of the China watchers here in the United States, was that the older generation, the Deng Xiaoping generation, even the Shea generation, they remember the bad stuff. They remember famine. They remember the Cultural Revolution. They remember all that stuff. They remember famine. They remember the Cultural Revolution. They remember

all that stuff. The slightly younger generation, which we I think now in the equivalent here would be the younger than boomers, but the 50-year-olds, they don't remember any of that. All they know now is the decadent, free economic go-go years

in China and the idea that there are billionaires running around and that was the that was the generation that everyone was afraid of was that is that a fair assessment in china now afraid of for for for pulling back for pulling back any of the reforms that were going to happen any of the any of the the the crackdown on um on economic reform or even political reform was going to come at the hands of that generation, the generation that had only nostalgia for the Mao years and none of the pain. Right. Well, I'll put it a slightly different way to answer the question. That's why you look at Hong Kong. You know, Hong Kong is a refugee city. When the communists triumphed in China in 1949, hundreds of thousands of people poured into Hong Kong. People thought Hong Kong couldn't survive.

Well, it turned out in freedom, those people built Hong Kong. So Hong Kong's built on people now, not the new generation, but parents and grandparents remember very well what China is and why Hong Kong is so important to them. And I think a new generation now is learning everything about communism and does not like it. You know, when these protests first broke out, I wrote how China is turning like two million people into dissidents, you know, people that just want to be left alone. And now they're actively hostile. I think more and more people have concluded in Hong Kong, we're not going to be free until there is a free government in Beijing, you know, and they would have left Beijing alone, happily. That's all they want is to be left alone. So, Bill, Peter here. Could we take a step back? Deng Xiaoping announces an opening,

not decades back, but very briefly. Deng Xiaoping talks about socialism with Chinese characteristics. He opens the markets in 1979. And here we are all these years later, and China has lifted at least half a billion people out of real poverty. And throughout this period, American policy, I can remember the Reagan years, you remember the George W. Bush years, the American expectation was they're going to follow something like the pattern of South Korea and Taiwan, in which free markets come first. but once economic freedoms have been established, political freedoms will follow. They're moving in our direction. This is good for the world, not bad. And that has not happened. Were we wrong from the get-go, or is President Xi something new?

Well, I think it's a little more complicated there was some evidence for that if you looked at what happened to south korea and to uh taiwan especially how they transformed but of course they were authoritarian regimes and again we had not seen something of a communist regime like this especially on the the scale that china is china gets to write a lot of its rules because it's so big it affects so much else that people cave in you know it's why in hong kong donald trump hasn't been particularly nice to hong kong like he doesn't seem that much interested but because he stood up to china they regard him as a hero because they look around the world they don't see anyone standing up to china so i think we did underestimate that.

I mean, I was, you know, I was, first of all, I didn't take back the support for market openings or any of that stuff. Let people trade and take their own risks and so forth. And it did have, I don't think we could have had a successful strategy that we're going to keep China really poor. I mean, one thing we're seeing now is that China would be hurt by being cut off from the U.S. market, but it's involved in markets all over the world. So I don't think that's a very worthwhile policy.

I do think we need a policy to be a little more realistic about the nature of this regime that lies. One of the points of my story is that communism is always built on the lie. Solzhenitsyn said lies and violence go hand in hand because the lies are needed to justify the violence, and the violence is needed to impose the lie. And I think that's what's interesting to me about communism, no matter where it is, whether it's Polish communism, Cuban communism. So the people who come from these societies have the same experience of brutality

because these guys are about power. Hey, Bill, one more, and I have to ask this question of you because you're the only one on this podcast who is old enough to remember, not these children, Rob and James. Reagan gets elected, of course, on standing up to the Soviet Union, but after years of detente, the polls showed that the public sort of wasn't that, that there was some warmth toward the Soviet Union, toward the U.S. Why shouldn't there be that? Richard Nixon is inviting Brezhnev over, kissing him on both cheeks when he welcomes him to the White House and so forth. And then the Soviets shot down that Korean airliner, KAL 007, and the poles flipped, and support for Reagan's harder stance slides into place in 48 hours. Do you feel that with this, so Donald Trump,

there's some parallel. Of course, China's different from the USSR, the 80s are different from today, all that. But Trump is enunciating a much firmer policy toward China. And now with this COVID crisis, is there a kind of similar inflection point in public understanding of what we face? I think so. I mean, I perceive a lot more hostility to China and Beijing. Look, these are people who are brutal. They lie all the time. Say they lied about COVID. What's their response? Someone discovers a health problem, right, that's trying to warn him about. What's their response? The police come and warn him he's going to be locked up if he says anything more about it. So they lie about the Uyghurs that

they have in prison. Are we surprised? You know? They issue videotapes of the PLA with military exercises to scare Hong Kong. Are we surprised that then they lie to us and they're not honest and they cheat? I mean, I think we have, look, China is a huge country. We have to deal with them. And this idea we can cut off trade, we have to deal with them and this idea we can cut off trade we have to deal with them but it doesn't mean um we shouldn't retain some skepticism you know you mentioned reagan trust but verify and i would put the emphasis on verify and again uh you know hong kong to me is such a um an illuminating example because as i wrote about when i first met martin lee the founder of the democracy movement it was before tiananmen square and he would have these little protests in hong kong if they got a dozen people they'd be ecstatic there were these quiet little protests in the park and so forth so he drove me back we

used to work on sundays he drove me back to my office one time i had just met him and he mentioned his father had been a kuomintang general who settled in Hong Kong instead of Taiwan because he didn't like the KMT corruption. So that was, the elder Mr. Lee probably came 1949 or 1950, right? And he was given refuge by Hong Kong. And it just sums up everything that 70 years later, his 81-year-old son is arrested and treated as a criminal for participating in a pro-democracy protest. I mean, I never predicted that in 20 years Hong Kong would do that. But they have, because communists don't care. That's why communists don't care about the economic price.

We all say, oh, they won't do this because of the economy. Look at what they've done to Hong Kong over nothing. Bill, how are these guys holding up these two heroes who whom you know personally martin and jimmy lie how are they holding up how are their families doing pretty good i think pretty good you know it's interesting when i was in hong kong last i think when we adopted our um youngest daughter so it was about 15 years ago uh we had a dinner jimmy martin and i think one other democracy leader. And we had just come from China, and they were all banned from going to China. So I joked, I must be the spy. And now

they're all arrested, and so forth. You know, Martin, I think looking at Jimmy and Martin, just my belief, my reading of them, they feel this is their destiny. I don't think they're afraid. I mean, they're apprehensive. They don't want to go to jail. But I do think that there's a sense. I mean, Martin Lee had a statement after he came out saying, you know, finally, I've been watching all these kids protesting and feeling I was safe and so forth. And now I'm proud to be in that group. So I think that they feel this is part

of their destiny, that their principles have led to this, and they're not running away from them. So it's a very tough situation. Of course, the communists are going after them because they want to make an example of them and scare everyone else. I think they're gearing up to say, you know, protest season looks like it might be starting up again they're trying to send the message no more mr nice guy you know as if they were mr nice guy that's good say they're going to crush they're going to crush things right away um overwhelming force and brutality and um you know they don't care they they want to power interestingly it does point out these whole protests were started off by a hong kong

bill that would allow people to be extradited to china right for sentencing and so forth trial and sentencing imagine if that law had gone through you know jimmy and martin would be in in beijing tomorrow and locked up in some chinese prison so you maybe just people see there palpably you know what what this life means to them. And it's really sad. It reminds me, my Cuban friends say it reminds them of Cuba. Prosperous society taken over with lies and deceit and just destroyed. But, I mean, the difference here is that in the Cold War, the Cold War analogy, we really had to do only one thing with the Soviets, right? We had to count warheads from the sky and count tanks in the Warsaw Pact.

That's all we really had to do. And we weren't attempting to trade with them. They didn't make anything we wanted. In fact, we just grew wheat, which they wanted. This is a country that's enormous and is incredibly crucial to sort of the world economy, the American consumer economy in general. So we don't have that many levers to pull. What levers do we have to pull that you would suggest? And I have one that I'll pitch to you, but let me hear your answer first.

What levers do we have to pull when we're dealing with China? Well, first, I think that's exactly right. You know, I lived in Ireland as a student for a year, and I bought a Soviet-made alarm clock. It was the most horrible thing I've ever owned. I always bought a lot of it. I used to put it in the corner with like six pillows over it. Even just taking it made this huge sound like a bomb going off. You will not be late to book.

So China is much more. China is a rich communist country. You know, it's rich. It can now afford new weapons and so forth. And it's combating us sort of all over the world and using its money as a weapon, too. I have a very simple step that I would like to see us take. I would like us to ban children of party members from attending American colleges and universities. I think there's 250,000 or something.

360,000. 360,000. I don't know how many. That's the figure I found the other day. It's huge. Yeah. I don't know how many come from party families, but I would expect a lot.

I think there are two advantages to me. One is, unlike cutting off trade and stuff, it doesn't hurt us as much, right? I mean, some of the schools will whine because they charge overseas students full freight, right? But for American society, it's a tough step that we could take that doesn't have the cost of sanctions or any of the other things that are sometimes proposed. Can I also- Oh, sorry, yeah, no.

It would put a lot of pressure on Xi Jinping. All these people are sending their kids to the United States. And so, would you like it if your government meant that your son can't go to Yale the next semester? And also, I think

the third thing related to this is we admitted all these kids on the idea that, you know, we're going to expose them to Abe Lincoln and the Constitution and they're going to go back. We go to Yale. We go to Yale. We go to Yale. Yeah. And a lot of these elite kids, they go back and work for, you know, J.P. Morgan.

They realize they can have it all. I can have all the money. I can use my special privileges from my family to enhance my money-making power. So I think we have to admit it didn't really work. Well, it's better than having to come back and say, you know, we're bringing gender studies to the University of Wuhan. So let me pitch another one. I know James wants to get in here. One of the things we did, I think, very successfully in the Cold War, for partly, at least in the 50s and 60s, was foment dissent. That we had pro-dissent parties, pro-dissent groups in Central and South America, pro-dissent groups in Europe.

And it was kind of our covert propaganda thing we did. The one thing the Chinese, that terrifies them. And by the way, I'm the only person saying this, so I could be wrong. But I'm almost certain I'm right. The one thing the Chinese are terrified of is internal breakup. The Uyghurs, the Muslims to the west, the Koryo people to the north, the Southeast Asians, they have, in fact, in Mandarin, the N-word, the equivalent of the N-word in Mandarin is a term for what they call jungle Asian, which is Chinese people from the South. And those are all groups that, as the country gets richer, become more willing to separate from Beijing, from the Han Chinese majority.

Why aren't we helping that along? I agree. Well, I don't think the trump administration is um is in the same approach as reagan you know reagan reagan really knew communism he knew it firsthand in the you know the union that he worked in and everything and fighting them so he he knew it i think trump is more of i don't want to say he's just an isolationist but he is more of we'll mind our own business people can have whatever system they have. We're not going to do much about it.

But I agree. Look, as I say, they're most afraid of the truth. And they're most afraid of not just one man saying the truth, but a whole bunch of people. And I think we should facilitate that. The technology is even better for us now. Even if we just help people get their messages out and offered for it, like we had Radio Free Europe and so forth, then I think we should revisit some of that. Bill, last question. James Latlix in Minneapolis.

I'm a newspaper columnist. You're a newspaper columnist. And your newspaper, like mine, has probably seen its advertising revenue evaporate. It's been a really hard patch in the last few weeks because of the virus. It's absolutely devastating for smaller market papers. Let's look down the road. A lot of these are controlled by either uncaring equity groups that just starve them, bleed them, and then throw them out, or by chains that really don't have much interest in local and just just regurgitate the same wire copy in innumerable markets at the end of this what is the newspaper business going to look like is this going to accelerate the what some saw as the inevitable

shift to online only and kill print or is print still going to hang on in the major areas but just blow up and like tumbleweeds fly away. If I knew the answer, I'd be CEO of Dow Jones instead of just a little columnist on the editorial page. I'd say the journal is actually journalistically doing very well

in this crisis. People want to see our stories and our demand is going up. But as you say, the problem is the idea that we're going to escape this there's no advert you know advertising has gone down so sooner or later there's going to be a a crunch and a reckoning i do think we're going to shift more to online as people learn to use it but you know print is still pretty big for us like the um the print subscribers are still our bread and butter so i'm not sure they're going away anytime soon.

I also think, looking at my situation in a small town in New Jersey, I think people are really desperate for local news, right? I just think we haven't found a good way to monetize it yet. There've been several efforts, Patch and things like that but um i mean it's amazing how much doesn't get covered you know in a town oh it's astonishing i mean i'm with the star tribune and again our print people are our bread and butter and our sunday is huge it's big for us um but you're absolutely right they're i mean trying to monetize the the ability to tell people what went on at their sewer board meeting is actually important that they know. And if we don't do it, nobody else is going to do it.

And it's a really bad time for people in small markets who are going to be completely underserved. Yeah, we'll go to digital and bloggers will do it. No, bloggers are not going to take this time out from work to go to a sewer board meeting and tell you what the results are going to be. Well, that's a whole different other podcast discussion we can have someday. And we'll meet you on Main Street again, we hope. Bill McGurn, thanks for joining us on the podcast today. Thank you so much. Hey, Bill, take the rest of the week off.

Take the rest of the week off. Thank you. Very generous. Okay. Say hi to Julie and the girls. thank you bye-bye you know when we started this podcast um as we do sometimes we mistakenly leave our cameras on and we get to see what everybody looks like i'm mine's off rob's was on yeah you were not wearing your truman capote glasses you had a nice horn rimmed. Yes, you've got new glasses. They are. They're all the same. I mean, they're the same company.

And I just grab whatever one's there. And it's the same shape, the same size, the same plastic, the same everything. They're fantastic. And they're super, super, super sturdy. And I love them. And I sit on them and I drop them and they're fine. Yeah, you sit on them, you drop them and eventually they break. I've got a pair that I love, and I know that eventually they break. And a lot of people have that thing where they just can't find the glasses, or they're dirty, and they don't like them, and they make the switch to contact lenses. If you are one of those people who have daily contact lenses, you know that they're easy and they're convenient. That's two things we all need right now, right? You work from home, you're staring at a screen, you chase the kids around the yard all day. Wouldn't it be nice to have comfortable, technologically advanced contacts delivered right to, right? You work from home, you're staring at a screen, you chase the kids around the yard all day. Wouldn't it be nice to have comfortable, technologically advanced contacts

delivered right to your door? You know, it's not like we can go and get them right to your door. Aveo, that's the company. Aveo provides advanced, super hydrating, all-day, comfortable daily contacts at an affordable price and delivered right to your door. And we're buying these crazy expensive boxes of contacts in bulk. No, it's the only subscription contact lens company that offers both daily contacts and daily toric contacts for astigmatism. And they're designed to keep your eyes healthy. Their exclusive AquaLock technology keeps lens hydrated and comfortable even after 12 hours of use. Aveo lets you customize your delivery schedule and personalize your plan so you only get the contacts you need on your schedule. Daily contacts are the most hygienic option. There's no need for a cleaning solution or storage cases and all that stuff can harbor bacteria.

No, Aveo contacts are manufactured in a state-of-the-art clean room facility that's fully automated. So the first hands to touch your contact are yours. And because Aveo manufactures and ships their own contacts, there aren't any extra third-party markups. Plus, here's one more reason to give them a try. Aveo is donating a portion of all sales to Direct Relief, which provides masks, gloves, and other protective gear to our healthcare heroes. Aveo is offering our listeners the best deal they have anywhere. You can get a 10-day trial pack for $1. That's $1 at AveoVision.com slash Ricochet. That's spelled A-V-E-O Vision.com

slash Ricochet for your 10-day trial pack for $1. You're not going to get this deal anywhere else. So go to AveoVision.com slash Ricochet. And our thanks to Aveo for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. James, do you wear glasses? I can't remember. I do. I do wear glasses. And unlike you, you got great glasses.

I love those. But I paid retail price for glasses. I would go to the stores. Even when we go to Target, there's one company that controls them all. Yes, that's right. Andulous quantities of money for wire. Seems crazy, yeah. So I went online, and I got a pair for $49. I mean, they're trifocals, and they're great, and I love them.

I mean, the breadth and range of styles that you can get online compared to the indistinguishable little six or seven styles you get at the store is ridiculous. It's a model that needs to die. And I'm stunned that there are actually still optical stores you know there's tons of them yeah like for i you know i don't i i my i don't have glasses glasses i just have reading glasses so i buy them in magnifications and i used to buy them at the supermarket you know the cvs all the time and then i would drop them sit sit on them and i was just i would buy them a lot so i was going for a

bigger heavier plastic but i i'm always stunned i mean i know this is now we're this is not even a segue i'm always stunned by how many of these things there are and how expensive they are i know you based seven six seven hundred dollars for a pair of glasses and it is ridiculous and you know they'll say well you know you can always go into the store and get them readjusted and they'll clean them for you. Yeah, but if I'm paying $70 for glasses, I can probably re-up at a regular basis. I can get

new styles if I want to change my look. So yeah. So I've got extra pairs. I've got a pair in the car that darkens when the sun comes out, which I kind of like. It doesn't really work that well, but they're there. That's still kind of cool. Alright, ladies and gentlemen, I am now setting this up.

The James Lylex Member Pulse of the Week. That's better. Came too early and sounded too shrill. Well, there's my high school experience. This one this week is from Retail Lawyer. That's right. I hadn't seen him before, but Retail Lawyer popped up with a provocative piece, as Michael

Medved always used to say when he said something with which he strenuously disagreed. I called the police on my neighbors for violating lockdown rules. You're thinking, you did? Let's read. Commercial gardeners cannot operate under the new regime here in San Mateo County, yet they do. I spoke with one of their employers and very politely asked that you call them up and tell Commercial gardeners cannot operate under the new regime here in San Mateo County, yet they do. I spoke with one of their employers and very politely asked that she call them up and tell them not to come. I even offered to mow her lawn for free. I adore this particular neighbor. She requested that I ask some other employer to do so, saying that she did not want to cause trouble in the hood. I told her I'm asking her because she's a lawyer and as such, she must have no trouble whatsoever in saying no,

because what good is a lawyer that can't say no? So a retail lawyer called the cops. Now, am I saying this because I endorse calling the cops on neighbors for violating these things in the lockdown time? No, no, I do not. But there was another story from our own Max about how he couldn't throw out some lumber because of the COVID, I guess. And there was another story, Henry, it was Henry Rosetta, whose kids got called, cops came by because they were barbecuing in the front yard. So I'm here to say that Ricochet is all of these people. It's the people who want to defend what they did and the people who want to attack what they did. And there was a vibrant conversation that followed after that. And it was fun. So if we just sit here and say, the only people who welcome a ricochet are those people who absolutely agree. You shouldn't call the cops. Go away. You're a fascist. Stasi.

No, we contain multitudes. We can have this argument. We can have this conversation in a civil fashion. And it's fun at the end of the day. We're still friends. That's the great thing I love about it. But you can only get it if you go to Ricochet and join. It's dirt cheap. Just do it, and you will have access to the wonderful membership feed, which is politics and arts and cultures and families and flowers and poetry and everything you can possibly imagine. So, all right, gentlemen. I want to bring up something you may have forgotten. Do you remember when Kim Jong-un was dead? I get all my Kims mixed up, but yeah, I think I...

Do we know he's not dead? Do we know that for a fact? He's Schrodinger's dictator. We don't know. It's the damnedest thing. But if he's Schrodinger's dictator, then he is dead, right? Because he's dead even if we don't know he's dead? Yeah.

I don't know. Yeah. What's the latest? The latest I thought was that he's just sick. He's writing. He's pining for the fjords. But, you know, and we heard that there was a botched operation because, you know, that fat heart of his. They brought some doctrine from China.

His hands were shaking so much that he botched the operation, which you can well imagine. Downside of being a murderous dictator who eliminates his foes with cannonballs is that when you get a doctor to work on you, he's not going to have the steady hands. Stalin had something like the same problem. He had a stroke, and he had just completed, he had just, what, a few months earlier, he had completed a purge of physicians. You're right. The doctors lost. The doctors lost. purge of physicians you're right the doctors is that stalin i mean you know obviously great murderer great villain but stalin had some you know are you going to say he had a sense of style no but stalin had you know he had a history like to be afraid to be in the presence of Stalin and to be terrified was a legit – he was a legitimate dictator.

Like, he murdered all of his rivals. He rewrote history and airbrushed history. He was a terrifying figure with a plan and a plot. I mean, he was, you know, he was probably – I mean, you've got to give him credit. He was good at his job kim jong-un is just this fat rich kid who kind of inherited this job this this family business at least stalin was a self-made man that's what you're saying yeah but also like i mean there's something i mean almost this is bringing strange grudging new respect to stalin well i

think i think we should right but we also have to like i mean the thing about kim jong-un is that This is bringing strange, grudging new respect to a whole different level. Right. But we also have to like, I mean, the thing about Kim Jong-un is that he is a morbidly obese leader of a country that is emaciated and often, or probably within a year of another famine. So the contrast is so enormous. It's almost like you think to yourself that wow it where i that dictator i might think well i better slim down i mean i don't want people to see pictures of me and think hey wait a minute what's he eating where where is he where is he going to get his lunch because i want that too like it really does have a french revolution quality to it that seems uh dangerous i would say where i uh a series of North Korean generals

eyeing each other and probably taking forever to establish mutual trust, I might suggest that the only way to continue this form of government, which has been good for all of them,

is to replace Fatboy with somebody with a little more muscle tone. My favorite story that I saw about this a couple of days ago, panic buying grips, North Korea as rumors swirl about Kim Jong-un. And I would love nothing more than the definition of panic buying in,

in, in North Korea as to what they have on the shelves, nothing to buy and nothing to buy it with. Right. You know, there's one more question that I could ask you guys to, to wind this up and I'll do so right after this, because I have to tell you, the podcast was brought by The Zebra

Quip and Aveo. Please support them for supporting us. And also, you know, I've been really enjoying a lot of podcasts during this lockdown here, and if you've got friends who are bored with true crime or bored with a couple of people with a lot of vocal fry and uptalk, talking about pop culture things, point them here. And one

of the ways you can point people of course is to give us that five star review on apple and then uh you know everybody will get to know us they go to ricochet give us money show goes on everybody's happy parting question then uh this was provided by blue yeti who i think wants you to answer it perhaps in under 15 seconds what will american life look like after the coronavirus crisis ends? The same with masks. Oh, I hope not. The same with masks for a while

until we realize that they're not necessary. And then we have them in the car, but we don't put them on. And then when we're cleaning the car, we take them off and we remember when we always had them. It'll look masked for a while with a lot more empty retail spaces and a lot fewer bars and restaurants and the rest of it but at the end of it are we going to come out of this with a renewed respect for our rights and pushing back against an overreaching government

no are we going to come back with this with a with a fully mobilized plan in new york city to make sure that they're ready the next time this happens? No. This is much easier. Multiple choice is much easier. Right. Any more? Yeah.

No, because it's like after 9-11. For six or seven months, every time a plane got near a skyscraper in downtown Minneapolis, my heart was in my throat. But then after a while, it wasn't. And it's going to be the same here. Let's just hope, as Rob said at the beginning of this, that this isn't the big one, that this is the one that tells you how you are going to react to the big one. And I hope we've learned. And I, for one, am happy because Amazon just told me that my 50-piece glove box just arrived here. So I've got 50 gloves coming. Yeah. I would just say this about what

I hope the takeaway from this experience has been not so much from the people at large, but from our leaders in the large umbrella term of our leaders is that the American people do not have unreasonable expectations. They do not have unreasonable theories about contagion and protection and self-protection in a contagion. They don't. They're very practical, and they are already making balancing choices between a growing economy and mutual protection. And maybe all along, they should have been listened to and heeded rather than um uh nanny stated when i heard yesterday that the the stay at home was going to be advanced until may 18th after dinner i got in my car i went to the liquor store i bought a nice bottle of irish whiskey that i've been i had my eye on i got back in my car

and the the freeway was fairly deserted and i wound it up to about 85 miles an hour listening to one of my favorite songs on the way home. That was my reaction to being told to stay at home. Yeah. Such a rebel. All right, I'll be back with the other rebels, Peter Robinson and Rob Long, from California and New York, the breadth of the land we span. Thank you for listening.

This has been the Ricochet Podcast, and we'll see you all in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, boys. Next week, fellas. One, two, three, four. Busted flat and battened rouge and heading for the trains. Feeling nearly faded as my jeans. Bobby thumbed a diesel down Just before it rained Took us all away to New Orleans I took my harpoon out of my dirty red bandana

And was blowin' sad while Bobby sang the blues The Red Bandana Land That drive I knew Freedom's just another word For nothing left to lose Nothing ain't worth nothing But it's free Feeling good was easy, Lord When Bobby sang the blues Feeling good was easy, Lord, when Bobby sang the blues. Feeling good was good enough for me. Good enough for me and Bobby McGee. From the coal mines of Kentucky to the California sun

Bobby shared the secrets of my soul Standing right beside me, Lord. Everything I've done. Every night she kept me from the cold. Then somewhere near Selena's, Lord, I let her slip away. Looking for the home I hope she'll find.

And I'd trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday Holding Bobby's body next to mine Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose Nothing left is all she left for me Feeling good was easy, love, and Bobby sang the blues Buddy, that was good enough for me Good enough for me and Bobby McGee Ricochet!

Join the conversation. La la la to me and my father you