The Ricochet Podcast - More Hot Water

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

Canada is back in the news, but not in the good way like you want. So Steve and James find themselves weighing in on another renamed body of water while wading through the latest wave of weekly events. There's also curiously leaked reporting on CIA chief John Radcliffe's mission to Moscow, investigations into the Soros-backed DAs responsible for catch-and-release criminal justice, and another rich-kid commie duty-bound to lecture from the family's waterfront property. This week’s opening sound: Al Michaels starts Prime’s Thursday Night NFL schedule from a city on the Great Lakes and Alice Weidel (AfD) declares Germany is finished with immigrants.Closing music: "County Waltz," by promusic24 (via MotionArray)Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ricochet-podcast--5817275/support.

That is Lake Erie. We think it is still called Lake Erie. On the right, we're not quite sure at this point. Yeah. But we'll be by Lake, something like Ontario or whatever it's going to be called, but when we get the Buffalo. Anyway, you know what I'm talking about. Some of us are.

Yeah, right. We need the news. It's the Rickishay podcast with Stephen Hayward, myself, James Lillinx, and we're not going to talk about Dolly Parton. We love her, but there's so many other things to talk about as well. So let's have ourselves a podcast. We have the answers. Yes, a plan. We have a plan for the future of Germany that we will tackle in the first 100 days of government participation.

Completely close the borders without exception. Turn back anyone entering illegally and without papers and send a very clear message to the entire world. German borders are closed, dear friends. They are closed. Welcome, everybody. It's the Rikershap Podcast number 805. I'm James Lylex in sunny Minnesota, where the state. State Fair is going on. Just started hundreds of thousands of people pouring in to get their sweet Martha's cookies and their corn dogs and pet the pigs and all the rest of the wonderful bucolic things you do at a

state fair. And Stephen Hayward has joined us back from Iceland. Charles C.W. Cook is on the, is in, well, he's not in hospital. He's just not well, so he won't be joining us today. We'll see him next week. Stephen, welcome. You were in Iceland. bore everybody with a brief 90-second synopsis

of how incredibly curious and interesting that country is. Yeah, I'll do it in 30 seconds, I think, because I'll bore people with the YouTube highlights of some of the video I took. Look, it's a fascinating country, if for no other reason the geography of it, there are almost no trees there. I think that's partly its latitude

and partly I think the Vikings cut them all down a thousand years ago and they never grew back. So you have these amazing vistas where you can see, one, on a clear day, you know, 50 miles, you can spot the gigantic glades, from 50 miles away on the South Coast. And so this trip, I rented a four-wheel drive vehicle to get up on what they call the F-roads. Those are the dirt roads that they don't allow people to drive in a regular rental car.

And I had to cross a number of streams. I only destroyed one tire crossing a stream. When I hit a rock, I couldn't see. But it was great fun. I had a blast. It is great. It's a wonderful place. Everyone there is, as far as I can tell, an alcoholic and in a band.

Right. And it produces a unique culture. And I'd move there, you know, except the language, of course, is an insurmountable barrier. It's like Finland. You go to Finland and look at the science and you say, oh, I'd be lost all my life. Well, here in America, we've had some interesting times. And I'm sure that you caught up on everything while you were away because the world is interconnected. And nobody can stay away from anything.

And there are silly season topics, would you say? I don't think so. Perhaps the silliest of all is renaming one of the Great Lakes. Can you name all of the Great Lakes, Stephen? Go. Let's see. Superior, Huron, Michigan, Erie, and Ontario. Sorry, the Lake of America. Lake of America. I'm not crazy about this.

I don't think it's true. I think it probably has the same force of law as the presidential rankings that he tweeted out the other day. But are we really going to do this? what exactly is transpiring between the United States and Canada? Because when I grew up, of course, Canada was just like, you know, Minnesota and North Dakota, except way big up there and stretched out and kind of French in some spots. But now the enmity between us and them, it's not something I like. On the other hand, I still hear to a conception of Canada that's probably decades out of date

and has a little resemblance to what the country has morphed into in the last three or four decades. What's going on with Canada, Steve? Yeah, so it's hard to tell. I mean, there are some news reports, but I never know these days how much you can credit news reports, even from leading organs like the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. And, well, I'll come back to the White Lake of America is, I think, probably counterproductive, although there's a certain way I kind of like it that I can talk about. Supposedly, we were close to a deal. And then things fell apart for reasons that are not clear, Mark Carney, who I think really has it in for Trump. and I think that is the end of the day why the deal didn't go through.

I think Carney is enjoying the popularity that comes with standing up to Trump. And I think at the end of the day, what his decision was, is, you know, there's more for me and my party, which is otherwise unpopular, by standing up to Trump and not making a deal. And so now we have a possible trade war that I think would be very damaging to us. I mean, we do want to win the Senate rate week. Republicans want to win the Senate race in Michigan. And, you know, 50% tariffs on Canadian-made auto parts is going to make that difficult, I think.

And so supposedly It was close to a deal Then it all blew up And then what Carney has apparently said is Well, Trump is agitating For the independence of the Quebec, right? Which has been a festering problem.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I missed that. Well, I've seen as alleged. And Trump denied it actually, quite forcefully. He's picking the wrong province. He should be agitating for the independence of Alberta. Yeah.

Which could then become that really would be the good 51st state for America's Alberta. It'd be the Texas of the North. So, and then, okay, it's one thing if you get a trade spat and you trade insults, but the Lake of America is ever calling, America Lake, whatever we're calling it, that's just dumb and this, you know, it's schoolyard taunting and back to Trump as a five-year-old, which I think is not useful. I did say, you know, I didn't mind the Gulf of America at the beginning of his

president, the beginning of this term. Right. For this reason, you know, the left has been denaming and renaming things for the last decade or more. You know, our military bases and then renaming stuff after obscure Native Americans from 200 years ago. And I thought, you know, Trump's impulse to rename the Gulf of America and put his own name on the Kennedy Center. I think that's a, you know, smash in your face. You know, two can play at this game. So why don't we all just stop this nonsense?

Well, yeah, I don't think it's going to take. I mean, I'm not a one for renaming either, although I was pleased when they went back to Cape Canaveral, because for some reason that just brought back the Glory Days of the Space Program and Larry Hagman living with Barbara Eden and all the rest of it. But, yeah, the Canada situation, I'm not sure many people follow. You mentioned Alberta. I mean, so let's say Alberta becomes the 51st state and all of a sudden we've got all this new oil revenue and the rest of it. We've also apparently taken over the Venezuelan oil fields. Have you noted that story on the news that we're going to just, we're going to take them?

Well, I keep hearing this. And I also, again, wonder how true that is or what's really going on. As I say, I no longer trust anything anymore I read in the newspapers. Because the quality of reporting has just gotten so bad. Never mind, ideological skew, which is an important problem. Did you? Ah, we moved on from Canada too quick. Did you see the announcement the last couple days of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,

their BPC, has said that, you know, we're what, a few days away from the 25th anniversary of 9-11, and they've instructed their news readers to not refer to that as a terrorist attack. Instead, it was a hijacking that turned into, how do they put it? The euphemism is just unbelievable. Something about, you know, passenger planes crashing into buildings. And, okay, that's the kind of thing that goes on in the media that drives us all nuts. But then just the quality of fact gathering is so bad. So I always say wait and see.

And also, I've had this experience. You probably have two, and you worked at a newspaper. I think it was Michael Crichton who wrote 20 years ago now that anytime I've been inside a story, I'd recognize how bad the reporting was and made me realize I shouldn't believe anything else. Or you think about this clip that's been recycled recently from Bill Murray being on Joe Rogan's show. And he said, I read the first five pages of Bob Woodward's book about John Belushi, who I knew really well. And I thought, oh, my God, they framed Nick. and didn't they. So, you know, I think that's kind of my approach to the media these days,

is I don't know what's going on. And, you know, I'm happy to engage the news, but I'm not going to necessarily believe it. I have to wait and see what happens, as someone likes to say. Not calling it a terrorist attack is not because they want to somehow soften the euphemism, because that's a, it's because they possibly don't regard it as such. Yeah. The man who made the decision may not regard it as such. that it was an incident. It was an acting out. It was a response to historical injustices and the rest of it. But who are we to say? Who are we to say? One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Yeah, there you go. So one of the interesting things about the 25th anniversary coming up. I read the other day that something about the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And I thought, oh, it's one of those on this day 25 years ago. No, it's about fixing the date for his. upcoming trial in 2028.

Yeah. In 2028. They're finally going to get around to putting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the dock. And I brought a column about it for National Review for this weekend, paywall, alas, unless you've got some free ones left over. It's like Herman Gary waddling up to the dock at Nuremberg in 1972. This is really taking an awful long, I mean, speedy trial and all that. But so I honestly almost.

expect him to get off and go back to Michigan somewhere and say that. Right. And, you know, a lobbying organization. Well, this is the story of America these days. It's process out of control on everything. You know, here in California, we're 20 years into the high speed rail and still haven't laid a single foot of track. And I do, I remember the figures on this. So, yeah, you remember McGaring in the Nuremberg trials.

They were pretty speedy. And the guy who shot President McKinley, I think it was, I can't pronounce his name, It was like Leon Solgaws or something. Yeah, right. He was tried and executed nine weeks after that happened. So then you go to 1969, I guess it was. And Sir Han, Sir Han, who killed Robert F. Kennedy, it was 45 weeks, I think, until the trial started.

And then it lasted nine or ten weeks. And that's just process, legal process, gotten out of control. And so I'm not surprised that we're, I'm still skeptical. we'll see a trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed even in 2028. Well, I'm expecting that by the time that he finally is found guilty, if he is found guilty in sentenced to death, he'll probably be about 65, 66, and the administration will be accused of murdering a senior citizen. Son Piper will be there to protest flags and have masked and hamtrack.

Yeah, it used to be a lot more speedy. Absolutely. They used to, I mean, the galloping sense of justice, when you got the verdict, you was probably one shot for you to have an appeal on the rest of it and then nine weeks, ten weeks later you were strapped into old sparky and they flipped the switch and they did it an awful lot. It's one of the interesting things

about listening to the old Dragnet radio shows. The number of times that they actually send people to the chair for things that today you wouldn't think that they would or just the severity sometimes with the punishment. I mean people would get 20, 30 years for things that nowadays we just shrug our shoulders

at apparently. And again, this isn't because somehow we become more enlightened. It's because we are under the thumb, well, not in the thumb, because people in big cities keep electing people who are predisposed to excuse all manner of criminality. And a lot of those prosecutors, of course, got their bones and their cash from George Soros. I know the minute you mentioned George Soros, people roll their eyes and say, oh, you're a conspiracy theorist, you're anti-Semitic, all the rest of it. No, I'm sorry. If you look at the Tides Foundation, open society and the rest of it, they spend.

money on people who do the sort of justice that they want. But that day is coming to an end, some say. The IRS is going to be investigating this. Stephen, isn't this another example of the administration using lawfare to punish its ideological enemies? Well, if that's literally in whole of the story, I'm all for it. I mean, you know, it's about time to get some of the medicine they've been dealing out to our team. I mean, let's remember now, it's now an old memory, but, you know, the independent council was created to persecute Republicans, essentially, after the Watergate years. And then suddenly, when Democrats found it could be used against Bill Clinton, they said, never mind, let's let the statute expire, not do that anymore. So this is classic elementary game theory.

But I also think there's some merit to this, right? I mean, we have these very credible reports of Act Blue, the big money aggregator for the left, where in one spectacular case, but I'll bet there's more if there's one, you have some retired lady living in a trailer park on a very modest income who has somehow donated in small increments something like $75,000 to various Act Blue accounts. Something's fishy about that, shall we say, right? And if they're doing it there on the money side, and this goes back to the Clinton campaign in 1996, getting all this foreign money. Remember these names of Charlie Tree and John Huang and the Lippo Bank? Absolutely, I do. Those were great times.

Missile technology transfer that probably ended up in North Korea. Right. All of those things, I remember it well. And you would mention it at the time, and people would roll your eyes like you were crazy. Right. Right. And let's remember that, you know, you go back to the, well, actually, it's the Justice Department on the eve of Obama's election. And two things happen.

One is, you know, they improperly prosecuted Ted Stevens, a senator from Alaska, causing him to lose that race, causing, giving the Democrats there's 60 votes, you know, without, and it was later turned out prosecutorial misconduct. I don't think anyone was ever punished in the Department of Justice for that. And then you may also remember, you know, I'm an old guy now, and I hang on these things like an embittered spouse sometimes. You know, there was the Governor Blagojevich of Illinois, and they caught him on tape saying, I'm going to sell the Senate seat, and they rolled him up really fast, and said, sent him to prison later pardoned by Trump.

There's one of the oddities of all that. But the rumor going around the time was that, boy, we better shut this down fast because if we don't, it may end up reaching out and stinging Obama. The rumors that Obama was somehow behind the scenes trying to help pick his own successor and so forth. So, you know, lots of bad stuff goes on. And yeah, I'm sure there's some overreach. There usually is by the Justice Department. But I think on the whole, a lot of these targets are deserving a very close group. me. Well, when you mentioned Chicago and Illinois politics, the idea that somehow that there is money and corruption involved, really.

I mean, that level of cynicism, the Republic cannot withstand. You have the Chicago Teachers Union, which is uniformly unpopular amongst the people that it supposedly serves. And you can't tell me that that sloshing money around that they have doesn't have an oversized influence there. I don't think Obama was ever corrupt. I never got the feeling that the guy was corrupt. I think he knew that he could probably make many millions of dollars just simply by being. and by just showing up and people would throw money bags at his feet for the opportunity to be in the presence of the Lightbringer. But the teachers unions are

a different thing. Here in Minnesota, the teachers union is advocating a boycott of Target because Target was insufficiently opposed to Operation Metro Search. They were insufficiently opposed. They didn't get on record. They actually were moments where people noted that there were ice trucks

convening and using a target parking lot as a staging op. That was the That was the theory. So we're supposed to boycott Target now. I find this fascinating. For so many, I don't know how many targets you have in your area. You have, do you? Yes.

Yeah. Several. Right. For so many years, Target was this, this stellar example of Minnesota ingenuity and commerce. The fact that they could take sort of a Kmart like atmosphere, upgrade it, give it style. Parge, as people used to call it. Right. They had Michael Graves, the architect and designer, do ladle.

You could buy a Michael Graves dust pan. Here's the architect of some of the most interesting buildings of the 80s, and he was designing your freaking dust pan. So they had all sorts of panash. And over the years, they managed to spend that capital in interesting ways. And one of the ways that they did so was by saying, hey, come pride, we're going to have a whole bunch of pride stuff here. And so the people who didn't really care about this, kind of ground their teeth and, you know, went past it and, you know, whatever. Okay, pride.

But one year they went too far. one year after after you know huffing the fumes from the paper bag for a year and a half or two planning this they decided we're going to go all in on trans we're going to have candles that have the smell of trans euphoria we're going to have merchandise from guys who if you looked at their guys I think if you looked at their website would have a little enamel pins that said Satan respects your pronouns or a guillotine for the turfs or things like this this is who they are lying themselves with And there was the rumor that they had a little tucking swimsuits for boys. A lot of this stuff. I saw the display in my own store. And there was backlash by a lot of the moms who go to Target and say, look, I don't care about gay people. My hairdress is gay. My sister is.

I don't care. But this, this is too much because I don't buy it. I don't buy the whole thing where a man can be a woman. I just don't buy it. And so don't be doing this. And so Target backed off it. And that is. has irritated the people of the good people of Minnesota, specifically the Metro, like you wouldn't

believe. Target is now the, when Target backed off that and said, you know what, the DEI thing isn't working for us anymore and started to back off that after the administration put the screws to business in general, all of a sudden Target here is hated by the proper people. It's amazing. Now, I don't think that applies outside of the red bubble outside of the blue, red, blue, right. I'm sorry. I still can't get my brain around the fact. that the commies are blue and the conservatives are red. That slight of hand that they did 20 years ago still irritates the living bleep out of me. And I wish we could take it back, but we can't.

They've always been the Reds. You're the Reds, especially when you have the DSA people now are saying, well, actually, we're just, of course, sort of one, you know, communism is the ultimate goal. And then you say, oh, well, then you're communists. Don't call those communists. No, you're Reds, all of you. Right. Well, you know how that came about.

You probably do know how it came about. That was a television. Yeah. networks used to alternate from presidential election to election. So you can look up on YouTube, and I remember it vividly just out of college, but in 1980 in the Reagan landslide, Republicans were blue that year. All the networks were saying, well, it's a sea of blue for Ronald Reagan. And so what happened is you had the 2000 election, and that was a red year for Republicans,

and you had that protracted battle. And that's when the pundits and analysts all said, oh, look at all the red states for George W. Bush. And it's been that way ever since. and now they don't alternate anymore. Right. Because red to them meant sort of like inflamed. Yes.

You know, high blood pressure, anger, sputtering and fury because Target has, you know, that's what, that's probably how it is. And also because they would want to get away from the red connotations. I mean, from the red red red. Speaking of the reds who never, did I have a point there or was I just going on? No, I didn't have a point at all. Speaking of Reds, there's a great moment in the Simpsons where it's in the U.S. and somebody from the Russian Federation is talking,

and then he sort of laughs maniacally and pushes a button. And the little nameplate in front of him goes from Russia to USSR, which we all kind of suspected. Very interesting this week to learn that the, was it the head of the CIA, took a plane over to Moscow? Yeah. That doesn't happen every day. Right.

That's unusual. Tell me what you think that was about. Yeah. So here's a case where the news media reports, I won't say they're not accurate. What's interesting to me is that there was no attempt to conceal this, quite the opposite. They seem to be deliberate leaks that this mission took place. So what's the old definition of a covert operation is something that everyone knows is going on, but you deny it, right? This is the ultimate covert trip because I guess Biden sent his CIA director over in 2021 to tell Putin not to invade.

I think the first trip was, I've seen this report, in 2021 to tell Putin don't invade Ukraine. Fat lot of good, that did. So I think by making it public, I think there's some public diplomacy going on here, not simply saying, yeah, we've laid down a marker, but I think to reassure our European allies. I think that's the simplest and maybe the most straightforward explanation. But who knows what else may have transpired in that meeting. May well be that he went over and said, by the way, here's some intelligence we have on you and what you're up to and things like that to put a little scare into them.

I hope they did that. I would certainly hope we'd try to put some scare into the Russians as well as just saying, please don't do this, pretty please. Well, he didn't talk to Putin, though, did he? Well, they say that, and maybe that's not necessary. Who know he might have, and who knows? The Russians are denying it, and we're not saying. So who knows what happened.

Right. It was sort of a peer-to-peer thing where, why don't you tell the guy this? And I tend to think that it's kind of not in their best interest to tell him that at all. I mean, if it wasn't in the best interest of the nation to sort of get through whatever Adamantine bubble, Putin finds himself in and tell him, look, this isn't going to work well, this isn't going to go, you're not going to win.

In the interest of the nation, that would be wise. But in personal interest, no, it's a guaranteed trip out of window. Right, right. So, well, I mean, well, one of Trump's greatest assets is his unpredictability, the fact that people think he's a crazy man or a wild man, they don't know what he's going to do. There's a, there's great use in having that reputation with your adversaries and people in the middle, which is what makes me think that there may be something else to that trip, some particular aspect of the message being conveyed.

I'm sure. I say, you know, my speculation is, is we've got some particular intelligence, uh, or, or, or something very credible to threaten them with. And I mean, I'm just guessing about that. I'm sure of it. I mean, I can't imagine a press conference where we say, well, our spy chief went over and talk to their spy chief. Here's what went down. Here's what they said. You know, and somebody in the front row raises their hand and says, are you telling us everything?

Oh, absolutely. I'm not keeping anything from you secret about the meeting between our spy chief and their spy chief. Right. Yeah. I mean, you know, we're coming up on the 40th anniversary here next month of Reagan's meeting in Reykjavik with Gorbachev. And, you know, one of the fascinating parts of that is Reagan's saying, oh, you know, we want to keep our missile defense. And we'll share the technology with you. And Corbachev's saying, you know, and Corbachev's saying,

says, you won't even sell us typewriters. How can I believe this? And in the background, though, is, you know, we learned years later that we had, we know the KGBs that was always spying on us and stealing technology like the Chinese do now. And it emerged that we managed to, I don't know, mess with software or equipment or whatever, but cause their Siberian gas pipeline to explode in spectacular fashion. You can see it from space on our spy satellites, right? And the Soviets figured out that we were behind that. So you can see they'd be a little paranoid. I'd like, to think that, again, I'm just speculating and maybe doing some wishcasting that our CIA director said something like along the nature of, yeah, remember when we did that, your gas pipeline?

Well, we're prepared to do this, this, and this. I don't know. That would be interesting. Yeah. Because what people are talking about is that, and again, what do I know? I know nothing. But people are talking about some diversionary faint towards Europe to get NATO riled up and get them to back off from selling storm shadows and all the other things. Because they just lit up another oil facility the other day.

Actually, they took out the whole top level command in a battlefield area in Ukraine. They just smoked them. They knew where they were. The guys thought they were in a safe city because it was controlled by the Ruskis. And they just blew the whole thing up and just decapitated the entire leadership, which is remarkable. But again, they're doing that with the weapons they get from the West. And so the idea is that Putin is going to do something.

He's going to poke at Poland. He's going to poke at the Baltics because you know he wants the Baltics. In his brain of brains somehow back there, he thinks that after he's wrapped up Ukraine, somehow he's going to get the Balkans back. So I don't know. I mean, yes, it would be nice if we said here are some of our capabilities, et cetera, et cetera. Not to divert into fantasy and science fiction and the rest of it, but I'm going to do exactly that. I'm watching a television show called Star City. Oh, yes.

on Apple TV. And it's a spinoff of for all mankind, which is an alternate future world, which the Russians got to the moon first and spurred a great space race that ended up with bases on the moon and going to Mars with an Elon Musk sort of character. It's fallen off in quality in the recent seasons, but it was really great at the beginning. And it had people talking to Ronald Reagan on video phones. I mean, I just loved it. The tech was great.

Ronald D. Moore, who really is, you know, Deep Space 9 and Battlestar. Galactica, he's the guy. But they've come up with a version, a Russian, a Ruski, Soviet version called Star City, which is the darkest, grimaced, most accurate accounting of what it's like to live in a

totalitarian society I can possibly imagine. It's so good, and it gets, it's like Chernobyl, the television show. It gets the decor, you know, again, what do I know, but it gives that whole Soviet 60s feel. Oh, yeah. I highly recommend it to any.

And you don't even need to know anything else about this world, except I know that the Russians got there first. And they were good at stuff and it didn't blow up in the pad like it does now. So they're in trouble. They have their biggest, you know, their Amazon is toast. Now they're going, now the Ux are going after the second one. They wiped out the guys in the command center. They hit apparently, or this was just somebody dropped a cigarette, this $11 billion joint petrochemical facility that they, Russia done with China. I mean, it's just not looking good. So I don't think that they said,

you know, tell Putin this isn't working when I think it's apparent that they know that it isn't. So yeah, it would be interesting if they had some little secret thing that if you go there, we're going to do this. I just, you know, I would like the tenor of that meeting to be the same as the end of the hunt for Red October when the SAC DAF has to, you know, look at his counterpart or the diplomat and, you know, Sergay, you've. you've lost another sub. That sort of familiarity condescension is what I'm looking for. All right, well, that's enough of Ruski.

Let's go back. Let's castorize elsewhere. I have heard reports that the locals are getting tired, tired, tired, tired of what is going on in Morocco, in a part that, you know, is Spain, but not Spain. So you have all these mean guys hanging around the beach and all of a sudden these indolent Spaniards living in this sunny place who've got to firm up and do something about it. And they're probably looking in the mirror before they head out and say, I got a dad bod. How am I going to get rid of these guys and I got a dad bod? Well, you know, dad bonds don't just happen to the best of us.

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And we thank ours men for sponsoring this, The Rikershowper. podcast. Yes, Stephen? Well, I'm wondering, shouldn't one of us check out to see if the domain women go to venus.com is available? Probably is. I'm not exactly sure what they want to what they're selling there. Because it very, we'll get back to Morocco in a second, but it very well may be some sort of, you know, it's weird how the algorithm works. Because when you start, you know, click, it's just not even liking something, but just watching something that will increase the number of times you see it. So according to my Twitter X feed, roughly 57% of the female population between the ages of 30 and 55 is clinically insane over the Lindsay trial, over the Lindsay Clark trial. The number of women who have taken to TikTok, as they say, sitting in their cars, making little bird-like gestures with their fingers and talking about who she possibly, A, couldn't have done it. Or B, the husband did it, or C, we have to understand why she did it, is alarming. And again, you have to think, no, this is not indicative of the regular population.

I'm being fed Chinese, sire up by the algorithm, et cetera. But then you look at the news and there's all these women lined up in pink making heart symbols for Lindsay. It's not good. It's not a good thing. It's not a good thing. So you combine that craziness with, you know, I can't see men getting together to support a guy, you know, who was a family annihilator because he had. surging hormonal levels of any sort. And also the idea that you can't be held responsible because of hormonalness just seems to do away with the entire rationale behind the 19th Amendment. I mean,

so this just isn't working well. Social media is not working out well. Well, you know, I sometimes run these thought experiments in my head. And one of them goes back to the Michael Jackson trial for sexual assault, which is more than 20 years ago now, I think. But that trial actually took place in Santa Maria, which is not far from where I live. And I remember watching the verdict. And the point is, is this madness has been around for a while, and now social media sends it into overdrive. Because

there was a woman outside the courthouse listening to the different charge, listening to the acquittals and all the various charges. And with each acquittal, she opened a box and released a dove. It was the most absurd thing I've ever seen. I could easily see that happening if this

linty crazy person is acquitted. You'll see women jumping up and down for joy. The opposite is they'll be yelling and menacing at the courthouse if she is convicted, as I hope she will be. It's just, it's unusual. There's a great little video out there of somebody who shows up with the protest in a handmaid's outfit. Yeah. Having not gotten the memo, but they're off that now. We're on to this.

This is the new thing right there. The Handmaid's tale, of course, was an attempt to use to reenact what the author saw as Islamic persecution and oppression in an American stage. And it's just fascinating that you see all these people in Europe and elsewhere saying, I absolutely am opposed to everything the Handmaid and Steele was about and I don't want that society. Oh, let's bring in some patriarchal oppressive man in large quantities in their 20s. Well, that's the problem that the Spanish colony has in Morocco. And apparently the locals are taking matters into their own hands and destroying their shanties and their shacks and the rest of it and trying to beat them back. I still think this whole thing is Morocco's way of probably taking this territory back.

And, you know, and that seems kind of obvious. But there's a couple of things about it. One, I absolutely love the specter of Europeans defending this little tiny carve-out that Spain has on the African continent. The same people who will probably tell you that they're all in favor of decolonizing the institutions are absolutely insisted that this part might should remain Spain when it isn't. But the other part is that it just, it's a microcos. of the entire continent itself. And I, it,

it, it goes to show what happens actually and what is happening to city after city after city after city. I'm, I think we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, the town of Piddlington in England,

which is just, most wonderfully English name is possible. If Charles were here, he would roll his eyes and tell us that this is what he expects of his fellow Britons. But it's the countries that haven't done this, Poland, Hungary, to a less extent, that are sort of looking at everybody else now and saying, well, see, this is what we warned you about, which brings us to AFD.

Today, I think some municipality or the government itself has banned the kids from wearing AFD themed merchandise in school. There was a piece in the Atlantic, I said. Oh, right. Do you remember this? Yes. imagine the first month of AFD rule. And everybody looked at that and said, oh.

Right. Is this criticism or an endorsement, right? It was just like, oh, oh, oppressed me harder, Daddy. It was all just fine. Well, what's behind that, as you may know, is there's an upcoming provincial election, I think next week or the week after in the old East Germany parts of Germany, where AFD has been the strongest from the very beginning. but the poll shows them at something like 43, 44%.

And the other five parties, none of them get much above 12%. So they may win an outright majority. I never, how they apportion these things and those systems is, never mind. But the point is, they're likely to roll up a landslide victory. And then we're going to watch the spectacle of these five other parties trying to form an incoherent coalition to stop them. And there's another province where apparently elections are coming up in a few months. And, you know, Germany does have something of a federal system still.

It can be compared to ours of certain differences, I guess. But they have their equivalence of governors in the different regions. And so the AFD may actually run some areas, and they're promising to, you know, really crack down on things. And I think they're underway to winning a national election in Germany. Yeah, I mean, the ruling parties are so discredited. I'll mention two. One other thing, you know, we mentioned Iceland at the beginning. On my way out of town last weekend, I stumbled across an English language news outlet or translated.

And so it turns out the international scouts, we don't call it Boy Scouts anymore, they were having a jamboree in Accurri or the northernmost town that's the second largest town in Iceland. Well, lo and behold, they had a contingent of young men from Qatar. Hunter, however we say it, right? And guess what? They misbehave towards young women who were there. And they were warned and they were warned and they didn't behave. And so they had to be arrested and deported. But isn't that? See, what a surprise, right? They don't, not a lot of Muslims have yet made it to Iceland. There is a mosque in Reykjavik. But I thought, oh, okay. I've seen this story before, haven't I? And so there we go. I don't know why there would be a significant Muslim contingent in Iceland. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, it's the same, there is not a significant Icelandic contingent in Saudi Arabia for very specific reasons.

Right. Let me read that thing from the Atlantic in case people. Oh, yes. Please do. Imagine that it's October, 2006, and one of Germany's 16 federal states has come under the control of a far-right government for the first time since the Nazi era. With an absolute majority in the state parliament and one of its own installed as state premier, the alternative for Germany. or AFD quickly begins implementing its agenda. Cue the horse vessel song.

The Interior Minister announces an emergency remigration program. Remigration program. Abolishing asylum, revoking the residence permit of any foreigner convicted of a crime. My God. Pledging to review all natural decisions made during the century. My God. And incarcerating those designated for deportation. My God.

the government stops classifying Ukrainians as war refugees don't agree with that and ends their social benefits European flags you you flags disappear from public buildings replaced this vats I imagine the main steam press is shunned in favor of

influencers aligned with the party ideology the government authorizes vigilante groups to act as an auxiliary police force in regions with high crime rates I'm sure I can walk again now I don't agree with everything there I don't agree with you know kicking the Youke's back is saying that they're not war refugees because I tend to suspect that a lot of them are.

I love taking the EU flags off the public buildings. It is Germany. The mainstream press is shunned in favor of influences aligned with the party ideology, as opposed to the current situation would consist of the mainstream press being aligned with the party ideology that has the guardrails of what's acceptable to discuss in Germany. And, of course, the government authorizes vigilante groups to act as an auxiliary police force. I want to know a little bit more about that because I don't believe in paramilitary or Terry Brown shirts going and doing things even if they're doing things against the Antifa folk.

Don't like that. But when you realize that this is all wrapped up as a litany of horrors, I mean, revoking the residence permit of a foreigner convicted of a crime, can you imagine the sort of madness that one would have to have in the brain fever to come up with something like that? abolishing asylum, yeah, yeah. Pledging to review all natural decisions and naturalization decisions made in the century. Yeah.

And incarcerating those designated for deportation. You know, the number of stories that we see here where somebody's told they have to get out and they don't, and they come back and then they run over somebody, and they have to go. The number of stories you hear about that indicates this might not be a bad idea. But the thing is, the idea that this is being treated

as the first far-right government since the not. There's a lot of room in the Nazi direction for a party to go. And if you don't, you know, if you delegitimize the AFD, then you end up with the guys you really aren't going to like, right? Yeah, yep, absolutely right. I'm in heated agreement with every word including and and the. When you mentioned the Boy Scouts or the Scouts in Iceland, there was an interesting video I saw the other day from a British woman who had been,

a good liberal all of her life until she had a son. And now she was starting to say, you know what? There aren't a lot of things for my son that are just boys. And she was talking specifically about European scouts and how the scouts are mixed. And she said, which is great if you want that. But there's also the girl guides and they're not mixed. And there's nothing just for boys. And so, I mean, you wouldn't have had this problem in this small thing with the gutter misbehaviors if it had been,

single sex only, although who knows. But that's one of the weird consequences of modern life, is that we remove single space sex for one sex, preserve it for the other in the name of solidarity, and then we also

introduce into the culture aberrant elements antithetical to the culture and believe that by setting foot on the rocky lava soil of Iceland and participate in a Western institution

that they will be somehow transformed into a model EU behaving citizen. I mean, when you talk about AFD again, I think one of the reasons that people probably are going to vote AFD is a series of posters

talking about how not to harass people with the swimming pool. And it's all these fat German women who are grabbing the behinds of refugees who are missing one leg. All of those don't harass, don't rape, don't do this,

all show it going in the opposite direction. And people look at that and scratch their heads dramatically and say, but that's not true. Right. Just as I believe that the reason Brexit happened was because there was a, there were a series of proposals from Brussels to regulate the speed at which your kettle could boil water. And that was the point at which they just said, we're not going to put up with this anymore. Right. Right.

Well, you know, I think we are overdue for a return of manliness. And, you know, Harvey Mansfield wrote that book 20 years ago with that title. And it was kind of controversial because he is. And he said he was inspired to write the book when he was called by a reporter to add some quotes for an obituary. And Mansfield said, well, he was, I forget the person, this person was a great example of manliness. And there's a pause. And reporter says, could you use a different term? And, you know, we're now more than, so there's that side of it.

And on the other hand, I now remember Christina Hoff's summer's great book from at least 20 years ago called The War on Boys. And it's only gotten worse since then in all the ways that we're familiar with. but it really begins with the educational culture of the schools and so forth. I haven't speculating lately. This goes off your point a little bit, but maybe not. It's something we can come back to sometime. You know, there's all this worry that artificial intelligence is going to transform the workplace and eliminate a lot of jobs.

And I don't know what to make of all that. I don't get it all. But I am wondering if some of the jobs it might eliminate are HR jobs. I use that figuratively. In other words, AI could be. a great blow against what Helen Andrews calls the feminization of the workplace and all the professions. That would be much to be hoped for. If AI delivers that, I'll be all for it, build every data center you want. And conversely, it might actually elevate willy-nilly the status of men who are still going to be gainfully employed as plumbers, electricians, construction workers.

Right. The jobs that pay very well and we esteemed more. And I don't know. That's one possible consequence. I haven't heard anyone speculate about. So I'll speculate about it. Well, I don't believe in the zero-sum thing. I want everybody to prosper.

But by the same time, there was a video that somebody released, I think it was about four years ago, four or five years ago, that for some reason was, periodically these things just resurface. And somebody posted the video of two young women who worked for a company at the pool. One of them was in the pool, and she had her laptop on the cement. And the other was sitting by the pool with their laptop. And they were discussing what they did. And it was your phony baloney, make work BS, email jobs. And somebody reposted it and noted it and said, this was the moment with the tech bubble popped. somebody else said, all the managers looked at this and started to invent AI.

Because you look at these people, they're very pleasant and good for them for doing well and finding a company that will pay them to sit by the pool and write memos about a upcoming, you know, whiteboard get-together sprint session on onboarding new card customers, I guess. but the number it coincided with young women also doing a day at the office at meta or a day at the office at Twitter where they didn't appear to do a bleep damn thing all day

other than sit in a meeting and send something and then go to have a mocha latte and the rest of it. So it's yeah, if a lot of those jobs are done by AI I'm not going to particularly be all that sad about it. So yeah, you're right. But it's funny when you say manliness, there's different competing standards of this.

Part of it is an attitude of mind. Part of it, of course, is physical. As we think, you know, you can think back to the 80s and you think, you know, Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers and that certain sort of steroidal striding manly action hero. But there's something else, too. I mean, Teddy Roosevelt is a perfect example of this. And he wasn't a great physical specimen toward the ends of his life. He had a bit of a gut and a high voice. But yet, he had the bully spirit, right?

he had a certain characteristic of can do and explore and tame the world and all the rest of it, that is just, it's not that we've bred it out of men. It's just that men have learned to just be very quiet about it because it's pathologized by so many institutions. My favorite description of Teddy Roosevelt is that he was a steam engine in trousers, which I think is perfect. And then also, you know, the playfulness of our gender, right, is I think, It was the British ambassador to America, Spring Rice, who came in to see Roosevelt in the Oval Office. But Roosevelt was on his hands and knees chasing one of his kids around. And Rice came back to London.

And this kind of applies to Trump. The thing you have to understand is that the president of the United States is six years old. Yes. What's like, right? All good traits. Yep. Not a bad thing. We're going to go out on this.

Apparently, Lulunnen, they're calling her. She's redhead, of course, matching the hue of her hair, matching the tone of her. politics. His name is Grace Ryan, and she's known for her work in the DSA candidates. She was asked about people who said, she was asked, the reporter said, you know, people like you and your co-chair, Gustavo Gordillo, you're actually kind of rich kids, aren't you? I mean, look at the house Gordy's got and, and she said, have y'all never, have y'all never heard of the noblese oblige? Yeah.

I find that fascinating. I really do. One, that she would use that term from the French aristocracy. But two, that she doesn't really realize that the moment her and her cohorts sees power on behalf of the party is the day that she is, her days are numbered. That it's going to be the brick wall in about two months. Right? Yeah, that's right. Well, it was completely incoherent because, first of all, the noblest part of it implies some substantive idea of nobility.

And then plus the whole thing is very class-based, right? That was always the upper classes. And they're supposed to be against every premise of that phrase. And so it just shows you what lightweights all these guys are. Indeed, they are. All right. Well, Stephen has got a couple of albums for me, and I got to tell you, I can't tell either of them. They are too far away.

Charles' albums are about 25% larger. Okay. I'll move them up next week or next time. All right. Do that. Move them up and then I'll give them a crack then. And so we'll get better and maybe we'll see if Charles can get them as well. Well, I'll tell you about the top one there, which you would never have guessed. It's an album from 1981, very obscure, called Simplicity by Tim Curry, who we also watched this week. Oh, God bless Tim Curry. Yeah. By the way, coming up in October, there's going to be a meetup in Cookville, Tennessee, October 9th of the 11th.

It has an actual itinerary. We're going to go to Oak Ridge. Oak Ridge, where the boys come from, and also some stuff that blows up. Plan to go to Oak Ridge one day to learn about the past and future of nuclear power, and then they'll go to Chattanooga for a day, and we'll see Rock City and assorted other attractions. Three days and nights spent with some of the smartest people on Rickettsay, and you're saying, wait a minute, I thought this is a podcast, huh? Yes, it is, but it's a podcast connected to a website that has a community,

and people get together in real life to enjoy each other's company. and some of the best conversational interludes I've ever had on my day have been at RICOchet meetups. Did we talk politics? Rarely. We just talked about everything in the world, which basically is you know, ricochet in a nutshell.

Just the other day in the member feed Gary was posting something about AI and we got into AI movies and construction of that and how good it's getting. It's just fascinating stuff and nobody was complaining about water usage and data centers. Nobody. So go to RICOA if you haven't already.

sign up, check out the member feed. Oh, you can't unless you sign up. Well, it's cheap. And the reason it's there is because the code of conduct keeps things civil. And it's spicy sometimes, but civil. Charles will be back to Stephen Hayward. Thank you so much. Remember, men go to mars.com to improve your tea. We thank them for sponsoring the show. And we're going to be rolling out a new version of Rookashay any day now. For now, we'll see you in the comments at Rookishay 4.0. Goodbye. Rickshay. Join the conversation.