The Ricochet Podcast - Need More Dong

Episode Date: February 22, 2019

This week on the Ricochet Podcast, we’ve got…us. Once in while we just let the hosts host the show and let them talk off the top of their heads. Not going to synopsize it here except to say the conversation spans the globe from Saigon to Fargo and the topics are as far-flung as well. Finally — we have heard your pleas, faithful listeners: behold the new Ricochet Podcast open! Music from this week’... Source

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. As government expands, liberty contracts. It's funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. That's a good thing. First thing, I think he missed his time. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lylex, and today I talk to Rob Long and Peter Robinson. Let's have ourselves a podcast.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Gentlemen, welcome. Wait, wait, that's awesome. We should just say that is the new podcast opening composed and assembled and edited and created by James Lylex. It's fantastic. James, it's wonderful. It's not even the most recent version. The version, actually, that I sent Yeti a little while ago has a little Russian national anthem after Bernie issues his comment. That's right.

It's got a Jeb Bush quote in there, and it's got a music bed that trails off under us as we speak. So we'll tweak it. It's the beta version. It's the beta version. The beta version. It's the beta version. The beta version. By the way, you somehow or other discovered or elicited or teased out from Bill Buckley that I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people. But it was in the beat. You somehow – who would have – who but James would have thought, wait a minute, I hear rap music when I hear Buckley say that? I've never actually heard him say – I read it.

I know the quote, but I never heard it. And I never heard Bernie say that. That's fantastic. Well, what he's saying is that's a good thing, because in other countries you got people, the rich people get all the food and the poor people starve. So if you see a line, it means that the society is working. It's getting it's getting right. So I'm glad you like it. And I'm holding my payment in my hand right now, which I believe is a hundred kroner note. No, really, it's a hundred kroner note from the Ceb La Banca Islands, which I've never heard of. I'm scanning my entire useless money collection back from my website, and I've got a lot of useless money. I have tottering stacks and stacks of money here, and it's all worthless, which is a fascinating lesson

when you think about it. The only money that I have today that's still worth anything is the Canadian dollar and the American dollar. Everything else is just meaningless paper, just Charmin. It's quite remarkable and it's a nice lesson. Some of these nations don't exist anymore. Right. You never want to live in a place where when you look at your money, it's been stamped with the word nuevo i've got this you've got this brazilian money where you have 10 000 cruziados one nuevo cruziados uh because they had to go and rejigger it because they're coming out of whack let that never happen to us i was in yeah well i was in um

when i traveled to vietnam in 1993 which is the year they i think it's 393 the year they lifted the travel restrictions because you could only travel originally to Ho Chi Minh City, to Saigon. Of course, all Vietnamese people refer to it as Saigon and all non-Vietnamese people refer to it as Ho Chi Minh City. But in 1993, they lifted the restriction, and they weren't prepared for – they really hadn't figured out the currency situation because what most of these countries do is they issue what they call a foreign exchange certificate. It's FEC. And you have to buy a certain amount of FEC, and the FEC you could use to buy things in the country, but it's a way of tracking the currency and keeping inflation at bay. But everybody in Vietnam is ready to exchange their FEC – your FEC for their currency, which is – the name of their currency is the dong. And you think it's only going to be funny like for like the first day, and then you realize after you've been in the country for too much, you're still laughing at people asking you, coming up to you and saying,

would you like dong? Or you say to somebody, hey, listen, I've got to go in here. Would you hold my dong while I'm inside? I'm just carrying around so much dong right now. And you just – you think that's not going to be funny and that it's still funny. Well, I always wondered if the EU realized that they were naming themselves after an American expression for distaste. If you look at their money, the euro, which I don't know what the health of it is these days. It has all these wonderful classical vistas on it. But none of those places exist.

They conjured up an imaginary artwork of an imaginary city for this imaginary project in which they live. Well, we can either, of course, here talk about our dongs for the rest of the hour or we can actually get to the news, which will probably be eclipsed by the time this gets out. You just – Let us hope. Really? You want to be irrelevant by the time people queue up? No, no. to be irrelevant by the time people queue up no no i just the news the news the news of the moment is so uh on the one hand slightly distressing but on the other hand very uninteresting to me at least i don't know what do you i mean you could be referring to any one of a million things i don't

know what you're talking about what i'm referring to small it he did it he staged it it's over forget about it not uninteresting m Mueller, when is the report coming? For goodness sake. There's nothing there. There's just nothing there. To me, I'm just reading items that the fabulous Blue Yeti has suggested we discuss. And I just don't – McCabe? Oh, for goodness sake.

Kevin, we've listened to Andrew McCabe over and over and over again. Have we though? I mean – Oh, good. Something fresh. I mean I actually find myself – and I'm – as you know, I'm no Trump defender. But I am now treating all these stories the way I would treat for a long time and still kind of do any stories about the Middle East.

I just kind of like – I just blow right by them in the paper. I'm just – no. The word is mego. You know what that means? My eyes – my eyes glaze over. Exactly. And I just kind of like – sometimes with names in a Russian novel, I'll just go bleh in my head and then I'll – which is not a good thing because then you just get confused later on because Dersazov and President Yusupov and all these – all the pobs are different. that there are now two, there are two sort of competing. And I think probably getting each other's lunch investigations here means that when this thing comes out,

when the report is written or anything, it's going to take an enormous amount of my time and effort and everyone's effort to really understand what it is that happened. And I, I suspect or very strongly feel that the underlying crime, you know, capital C crime is going to be one of those things where we're like, okay, all right. I get, all right, yes. The letter should not have had that word in it. That

is a violation of federal election law. Okay, yes. But it's going to be tiny and insignificant, and everyone's going to feel deflated, but they'll still scream about it. So I'm dispirited. It's dispirited. Yeah, I guess what I'm – James will correct me here. But this is – I'm trying to save myself time by being pre-cynical. The Mueller report will come out. It will be just what Rob says. There will be some technical violation of who knows what federal election campaign statute. Who knows?

The idea that Donald Trump colluded with that will not be there. It'll be some technical thing that nobody really truly cares about. At the same time, Andrew McCabe, former very senior official in the FBI, is giving interviews all over the place. He was on 60 Minutes on Sunday. I caught him in the car a few minutes of him talking to Terry Gross on Fresh Air the other day. And in every single interview, he is saying again and again and again, he's just stating it as though it were necessary. Things were very chaotic after the president fired James Comey. That is to say, after he engaged in an undeniable exercise of his clear constitutional rights to fire a subordinate official of the federal government. But things were so chaotic that we actually considered removing him.

And we, the deputy attorney general and I, number three or four at the FBI, actually had conversations about wearing a wire to eavesdrop or to capture conversations with the president about sounding out the cabinet, about invoking the 25th Amendment. That is outrageous that unelected officials in the intelligence arm of the United States government who clearly had already engaged in improprieties A, B, C and Z. Andrew McCabe is clearly anti-Trump. Memo after memo leaking in that way. That is outrageous. And it is staring us in the face. And Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes is just nodding as though this is an interesting but not particularly inflammatory story. And McCabe is just telling him the story

is, well, this is what good federal officials do when they encounter a chaotic moment. It's outrageous. And yet Mueller is going to get whatever is in the Mueller report, and it'll be nothing, is going to get all the attention. James will now tell me. James will now correct the way I'm looking at this. No, I think you're right. And at the same time, the left is going to want to find something else to seize upon. What they're not going to want to do is entertain a single moment

in which there's any oxygen for the idea that there was, you know, the deep state soft coup, the rest of it. Even though these guys can confess that actually in these days, we are trying to figure out ways in which to sabotage the presidency, which ought to be words that make anybody of any stripe politically prick up their ears and starts to worry. But we're not going to have that conversation. It's just not going to happen. This whole thing is going to, the air will leak out of the balloon and there will be something else in way i mean you can't really tie this to small it but you can in the sense that if there's no russia there there it won't matter it won't matter because of the things that he said not the things that he did uh they will they will never abandon the idea that he's Putin's puppet. They

just simply won't. They won't. And the idea that they should be alarmed that somebody tried to remove the president, it is manifestly obvious to them that this guy is dangerous, crazy, a racist, a homophobe, an authoritarian. All of the things that everybody was saying about at the beginning, they haven't gotten off the dime a millimeter. So while some people have looked at what's been done as opposed to what's been said, how the man is governed as opposed to how he acts, et cetera, et cetera, and mollified, modified the way they think about it, they still might not like him. They still may not respect him. But their hair is not been on fire for one hundred and four weeks. These people love the smell of their burning hair and they're going to continue to emulate a daily basis.

Sell Rogaine to anybody, you know, there's also a certain meta quality to all of this, which is that the underlying Russia collusion argument is that I guess that they feel that Russian hackers hacked into John Podesta's emails. And that in some way hurt Hillary Clinton's chances of becoming president, which is a ludicrous statement, just a ludicrous and absolutely indefensible proposition. And the second thing they say is that the Internet Research Institute or whatever it is, the Russian bot farms in Moscow, by tweeting and spreading fake news – that was the origin of the term fake news. By spreading that, they helped Donald Trump and they sort of worked for him and they were campaign – essentially unpaid campaign workers of a foreign power. That is also like so credulous. I mean your understanding of the scale of a presidential campaign has to be so childishly small and also so entirely based on the media. That's the weirdest thing about it is that you have to believe that everything that's important that happens in this country, that every way you get elected is somehow has to do with a discussion that someone might have on CNN or Fox News or MSNBC, which is just a joke. Nobody's watching those news channels. I mean, those news channels are absolutely not significant in getting people to the polls and actually becoming president of the United States. But the echo chamber of everyone who's in media, and now that includes everybody who

thinks there's some kind of like Twitter activist, is now so enormous that you can convince yourself that the three million people that watch Tucker or the two million people that watch Rachel Maddow are somehow marching in the streets and effecting change. And that's just not so. So the Twitter reach is amusing, too,, I mean, I sit there at the newspaper and look at the stats of where all of our inbound traffic is coming from, and it's 2%. If Twitter is lucky, 2% of our links coming into our website are from Twitter.

It doesn't have the reach that people does. It's important because the chattering class is obsessed with it and can't take their eyes off of it. But the idea that somebody who was I'm with her from the get go would see a meme on Facebook and switch their vote is preposterous. It's just it's ridiculous. The people who are loving and loving and, you know, just lapping up all of the nonsense the Russian troll farms are turning out with the people who are already sending each other pictures of Donald Trump on a tank with an eagle on his shoulder and the flag in the background. So it doesn't speak to all of their – but as I said before and what you said about the meta sense is that if there's nothing in the Mueller report, really doesn't matter because this is a racist country and virtually every day somebody somewhere is being bleached and noosed. So, I mean, in the future of that, with our accomplishments, that somebody can spin themselves up and find so much great back padding self adoration for realizing that John Wayne and 71 had some appalling motion, which was yesterday's firefight on Twitter.

And those, by the way, probably weren't even his most incendiary ones of the time, from what I recall. Fill me in on the John Wayne story. I just missed that one totally. What was he supposed to have said? Is it repeatable? The 71 Playboy interview comments on people who are not white, shall we say, less than admirable. Horrible. The, you know, it was very, it had a very sort of Civil War era kind of genteel,

genteel Southern aristocrat quality that they'll get their rights when they, you know, when they develop as a people. That was basically that theory. But it was 40 years old. Yeah, 71. But, you know, let's be fair. I mean, John Wayne's career, it's over now. I mean, no one's going to touch that.

Oh, there'll never be another movie again. But, you know, they love it because John Wayne, American icon, it turns out that like everything else in America, poison is at the heart of it. Poison and darkness in a unique fashion that the planet has never seen before. And, I mean, if you get your personal sense of identification from carrying around that private knowledge with a little smirk that everybody else doesn't know, why give it up? It's very satisfying. I mean, it's really – it makes you feel good to feel bad about everything else. Oh, that wasn't a segue? No.

Yeah, except if you – it did sound like one. So in my humble opinion, James, you are onto something extremely profound there. One of the distinguishing features of conservatism – of course, you'd like to remake this and reform that, but conservatism appreciates what is worth appreciating right now. And the liberal or progressives or whatever they're calling themselves at this moment, they are in love with America only in the abstract. They are in love with America only as it can be reformed, remade, reshaped by them. America right now is something of no interest to them. In fact, it's distasteful, if not shameful. And I could see this, I must have mentioned this before,

but senior staff would try to climb in the limousine with Ronald Reagan and think they could get him to go over documents and make decisions as he was going from the White House to some event where he was speaking. And they would always be disappointed because Reagan loved looking out the window and waving at pedestrians and just taking it all in. I always thought that in itself was kind of profound. He loved the country as it was. That's our side. We appreciate what's worth appreciating right now. Not anymore. No, I disagree. We don't. All we do is complain and whine about it. Our side has become like them. All we do is see what's wrong and sort bad at a time when even politically the Republican Party was at a high watermark. I mean had the House and the Senate and state houses and governorships. My god, the repudiation of Obama during the Obama presidency was almost biblical. It was enormous.

It was much stronger backlash against him than it was against Clinton. And our side, all we did was mope around and stare and whine and moan and complain. If you watch the millionaires on Fox News, very good broadcasters, all they do is tell you the sky is falling. That's all we do. The sky is falling. Civilization is over. The country is gone. That's been our – the song we've been playing since I think 2008.

And you're right. It's very dangerous. But I just heard somebody mention this. It's not true. Go ahead. Well, I just heard somebody mention that nobody listens to those shows exactly. But the true believers do actually. But the problem is that culturally they do.

You're right and Peter's right. And let me tell you both where you're both right. It all starts in the trenches of World War I, which spawned this fog that has gone through the Western civilization and got its tentacles into absolutely every single crack of our existence and our structures. And we'll eventually become a worldwide epidemic like stress. Stress is a worldwide epidemic and we're working longer hours. We're inundated with constant news cycles, which drive us crazy, and we're more connected than ever before. Stress is part of life, but it can very easily affect our overall well-being, and that's why we're partnering with Calm, the number one app to help you reduce your anxiety and stress and help you sleep better. More than 40 million people around the world have downloaded it.

Wow. If you head to calm.com slash ricochet, you'll get 25% off a calm premium subscription. And that includes guided meditations on issues like anxiety and stress and focus, including a brand new meditation every day. There are also sleep stories, which are bedtime stories for adults. If you sing, they're designed to help you relax. You can head into the magical lavender fields of Southern France with Stephen Fry or explore moonlit jungles of Africa with Leona Lewis. They even have soothing music and more. Ah, Calm.

Right now, Ricochet listeners get a 25% off a Calm premium subscription at Calm.com slash Ricochet. That's C-A-L-M.com slash Ricochet. Get unlimited access to all of Calm's content today at Calm.com slash Ricochet. Get calm and stop stressing. Rob, you're right. Of course, the true believers are spun up about this. And I would say to a certain extent, they have a point. Even though Barack Obama didn't succeed in fundamentally transforming every aspect of America, as was so gleefully announced at the start of his administration, we do see a lot of things that are – a lot of concepts that we held for granted that seem to be upended.

Not just upended, but people are persecuted and have their livelihoods and reputations destroyed if they don't instantaneously flip their moral compass to whatever the new thing is. And that's important. And, I mean, people are always, oh, we're losing our country. It's never the same. And sometimes there are reasons for that. Sometimes it's good to losing our country. It's never the same. And sometimes there are reasons for that. Sometimes it's good to lose your country and it's not the same when, for example, there's no longer slavery. That's a good fundamental transformation when that's gone.

But now what we see are a lot of the things that make America different are under attack. How many socialists are we going to have running by the end of this thing? How many young people are we going to have waving their hands and saying, Hey, socialism is absolutely fantastic. Bernie comes out of the gate and gets more money than anybody else. Kamala Harris and, uh,

and, uh, Elizabeth Warren have come out now saying maybe reparations are a very good idea. The notion of, you know, of race guilt, the notion of government control of,

of enterprises that are, that are large and vast and private. All of a guilt, the notion of government control of enterprises that are large and vast and private, all of a sudden, these seem like very possible things that can change the warp and woof of America. So we're holding to – I mean we're not holding to some idealistic notion when everything was perfect and it was Andy Griffith, et cetera, although a lot of that's true. We're holding to the concepts that we like as well. So, I mean, Peter made the point that they don't like America as it is. They're in love with this theoretical America that can will into being.

We're in love with the America that is and was and also the ideas that will guide it in the future. So we got the whole package there. So I think we're right to be concerned. Otherwise, Ricochet would not have as many posts. Maybe, but Ronald Reagan looked outside the window and he saw a country he really liked and he saw people that he really liked and he conveyed that. And he conveyed the sense that the future was bright. Yes. That the future was bright because we have a system and it works and we're going to win and it's going to be great. And that the rising tide lifts all boats and that's what we're all about.

And I never doubted for one minute that Ronald Reagan was a true organically sunny optimist, that he wasn't putting it on. And to that extent, I think we've lost that. I think we've lost the thread of that. All we do is complain and whine and like everything seems so angry all the time. And so what the product we're selling to – look, the left is selling to the – if we're talking about the young people and they're going to go socialist, I think you're right. They are. But the left is selling them this utopian idea that everything can be great if only

certain things happen. But everything can be great. It's going to be great for you. And what we say to them is like it's all over. It's going to be a disaster, and the institutions aren't worth – have been corrupted. And so people like the happy face more than they like the sad face. And what's so ironic is that we're the ones who have an actually optimistic story to tell. Everything we have in this country, every great thing we have in this country has been because of the political system making adjustments when it needed to and because of the capitalist system innovating and bringing richness and incredible wealth all the way down to the previously extremely poor classes. They always say like a lower middle class American economically lives better than JP Morgan in his day. Right, right. And that's what capitalism is.

May I – an open-ended question for the two of you. This is something that genuinely puzzles me. If you're a college kid, 5,000 colleges and universities in this country, some of them are elite, some of them are not. Nevertheless, you're a kid in college. You're doing – you've got four years. The society is rich enough to send you for four years to study what's the complaint what what have you got against the system as it now stands that is so dire a complaint that it justifies the radical changes that bern Kamala, Cory Booker – Well, I'll tell you.

Yes. So what are the – what's the list of particulars? First of all, that it costs too much money, which they blame on capitalism instead of the government backstopping loans that cause the increase in prices. And they blame the fact that they're not going to be able to live in New York and have a good job doing what they want to do, which itself is probably a very little utility. That's it. I mean, you have a lot of kids who don't want to do STEM because it's hard. They don't want to do the math stuff. They want to go in and get a soft degree that they believe will entitle them to- Be careful, James. You're describing me. You're describing me. I didn't do it. I bailed out of architecture because I thought there was

math involved. Little did I know. It would be Frank Gehry and just crush up some aluminum foil and some jiffy pop and some glass. Between the three of us, we could not solve one quadratic equation. No, my father provided for the entire family by picking up large objects here and putting them over there and doing that for 50 years. That was work. What I do is not work. But they want to be able to go and live in New York and have a good life because they will have been credentialed. They will have spent $200,000 in order to become part of the credentialed class. And when that doesn't happen and they're writing piecework for BuzzFeed at $50 a shot,

they're angry. And they're also angry because other people like Jeff Bezos and the rest of them are making an awful lot more. Why? The Waltons made $3.3 billion yesterday. Like somebody just hoovered the money out of the people standing in the parking lot before they even got in the stores and put it in the Waltons' bank account and nobody got anything. There's no exchange of goods or anything. Inequality is what drives them absolutely crazy on some level because they see other people

having an awful lot and they don't. Therefore, it must be the system. The system is they feel as though they live in a system that is designed at every single opportunity to screw them. They don't see it as a system that gives them opportunity at all. OK, next question. To what extent then is the socialist impulse in this country, which is huge? There's no there's just no denying it. All the polls pick it. To what extent is it driven simply by one of the seven deadly sins that humankind has known about for centuries, and that is envy? I would say that. Partly, that could be true. The other part of it, I think, depending on how old you are, is that it's governed by realism. You are subsidizing, if you are a young wage earner, an absolutely unaffordable, upside-down, utterly bankrupt in any meaningful way, federal entitlement program in which your paycheck is getting marauded and ravaged every pay period to send money to people who are rich and old and have money and don't need it.

And there are fewer of you working and there are more of them taking. And that's just an elemental piece of math that eventually is going to, like, if you were young, well, why wouldn't you want to relapse that? I never hear any young people complain about Social Security. I just don't. I mean, maybe they look at their taxes and they don't like that it's coming. Well, they complain about FICA, yeah. But what they want is more of that for

everyone yeah well i would too yes right but medicare for all because old people have it and they don't have to worry about it so i want that social security for everyone sure i would want that too they don't think this is they don't think this is going to be coming out of their paycheck they think it's going to be coming out of i mean the way they talk you know what about norway what about sweden it's like i almost think sometimes they think it's coming out of the I mean, the way they talk, you know, what about Norway? What about Sweden? I almost think sometimes they think it's coming out of the Norwegians and the Swedes paychecks. But no, they believe that if you have the 70% taxes, AOC on people making X over, you'll be, the money will just be there. And if it's not there, according to MMT and the rest of their quantitative easing, you can just make it. They don't believe that they're going to have 50,

60% of their income taken by the state and redistributed. They don't. Right, but they also don't understand – they have internalized I think 30 years of what is essentially a liberal welfare state with republican presidents and democratic presidents depending on – emphasizing different pieces of it but still emphasizing it. They've accepted that, and they realize that what they really see as their paycheck is their allowance, and that daddy, meaning the government, mommy, the government, pays for all the stuff that you need, right? They take care of your needs, your food, your rent, your health, your education. That comes out of the government. What you get left is your allowance. That's the kind of citizenship that they see, and it's wrong maybe, I mean definitely wrong, but it's completely a very rational conclusion for them to draw looking at the past 30 years. A 23-year-old working as an intern at Condé Nast in Manhattan probably thinks that.

A 23-year-old working in the oil patch in North Dakota does not. And I think the harder your work is and the more your back breaks at the end of it, I think the less likely you are to believe that what you get at the end of the day is a stipend from Uncle Sam. Okay. Just because we tied into current events just for a minute. Sure, sure, sure. I think the fundamental misapprehension of the part of younger people or maybe all people, many Americans, on the left and the right on how things are paid for and how an economy works and how things are actually afforded and how an economy grows and that you grow an economy a lot of different ways. One way you should grow an economy grows and that you grow an economy a lot of different ways. One way should we grow economies with free trade? The way you look at that and the way you understand that informs in many ways,

your act, your actions in the real world. So, I mean, this is going to be a very tortured connection, but I think it might actually work. So Jussie Smollett, the actor in the show Empire constructed a very very elaborate hoax of a hate crime that was supposed to be perpetrated against him.

And for part of it, I thought to myself, well, maybe he's just trying – like he just wants to be an activist and he wants to be a hero. And this is this kind of weird, demented way to be a hero. It turns out – it doesn't turn out, but the speculation now is that he was doing it simply because he was unhappy with the deal he got and his his per episode fee on the show he was on and he thought if he was a little bit more higher profile notorious they'd have to pay him more and that's exactly the kind of thing that you'd think if you're you know basically a childish person without a firm understanding of economics. The reason he got paid what he got paid is because the show could do very well without him.

And even if he becomes notorious, it could still do very well without him. And the sense of being a replaceable person, a replaceable piece of labor is something that a lot of people have a hard time accepting, and it drives their kind of weirdly upside-down, crazy attitudes about their worth. Their worth not just to the enterprise that they're working for, but their worth to the culture in general. I mean look at all those online web-based reporters who are outraged and shocked that they've been turfed out, given their walking papers. But don't you want – I mean doesn't a healthy society should allow me to write articles expressly about gender?

Like where's my job? And the answer is, well, you're replaceable. You're replaceable by a million different things, including an automatic aggregator. And they just don't understand that. It never occurred to them. These are people who read Marx probably in college and Marx understood it, but they just didn't – I mean they didn't finish the book. You can be forgiven for not finishing Marx. That's true.

That's pretty hard reading. Yeah. So may I ask one more open-ended question because you guys are actually – I'm learning here. I don't know whether any of our many thousands of listeners is learning anything, but I am. Here's the next question. File that under damning under the faintest possible praise. The next question is here's another thing that we know has changed from the 1980s and still more from the 1960s, and that is family structure. When I just recorded an episode of Uncommon Knowledge this morning with Jason Riley and we talked about his new book is False Black Power.

The point of departure is the Moynihan Report, which was published in 1965. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was then an assistant secretary of labor. And he took as an alarming datum, he said that the black family was disintegrating because there was an out-of-wedlock birth rate in 1965 of 25%. And among whites, the out of wedlock birth rate is now over 30 percent among african-americans it's over 70 among hispanics it's over 50 does that play some role in the socialist impulse if the family is disintegrating kids look people look to the government for security to take care of them what is that – or is that too simple? Well, it's part of it, yes.

I mean, and given that the more authoritarian the government is, the more they want to dissolve the family structure. I'm sure they think it's very nice that people are doing it all by themselves without any prompting. There's a variety of reasons for all this. But it's larger than lack of family formation. I mean, as we know from the Charles Murray book, the elites will preach what they don't practice. They themselves cohere into family structures. They have a low divorce rate. They take care of their kids.

But they don't want to seem as if they're pushing bourgeois values and everyone else, man. So they just tolerate and endorse and applaud the dissolution of these things and other people, regardless of the fact that it would help them get ahead if they got married. But when you match that with later, getting married later, and then an increasingly non-religious population and a lack of social organizations, like for example, I spent a lot of time looking at old magazines and newspapers, and the newspapers are always full of all the Rotaries and the Lions and the Kiwanis and the Oddfellows and all the rest of it, the bowling leagues, the women's auxiliaries. There's all these organizations that people could go to, find like-minded individuals, bond into fairly coherent social structures with shared values. And when you had the church and you had volunteerism and you had social organizations and a family reasonably intact, you had the basis for what kept you grounded as a human being.

When you take those things away, you have to look elsewhere. They don't want to look to the church because the church is judgmental. They look to work because they believe in work. Like on television, we can be a family. We're all part of the same thing. Work is a family. And they look to politics because it provides them a transcendent meaning above their own life.

So yeah, I mean, socialism is the best of all because it's egalitarian. It's cool. It has a spiritual dimension, socialism is the best of all because it's egalitarian, it's cool, it has a spiritual dimension, as we're now having some European philosophers tell us, because in its altruism and its egalitarianism, it truly embodies what the religions are supposed to be getting to. But also remember there was an idea

of like a family enterprise. Like if you were, you know, I think this happens a lot for sort of Eastern European immigrants in the early 20th century. The family enterprise was we're all in this together. Your grandmother sewed buttons in the garment district, and you are going to – your enterprise is to be a lawyer, and you will – and then your son can be a banker, Goldman Sachs. And of course because of the way the world works, your grandson will be some kind of poet, barista, some horrible thing. Supporting Kamala Harris.

Exactly right. But that was the family enterprise kind of sort of worked way, which was that the family had a business and you worked at the family business and you worked at the family business when you were eight or nine and you were not paid a wage to work at the family business or to like sort laundry or to stack liquor bottles in the back of the warehouse liquor store. You were expected to work and you were free labor. I mean, in Vietnam, I mean, or in South Louisiana and the Gulf, the fishing, pretty much the entire shellfish industry is Vietnamese now. And part of its – Oh, is that so?

Yeah, part of its prosperity is because the whole family works. You're out there. And that's considered a part of your purpose. Your purpose in life is to move the family forward, and I think that when you – as James said, when you lose that, I think in many ways some governments and some – certainly even the benign government or the ostensibly benign government enterprises lean towards this. They want to bust up those loyalties. They want to bust up the loyalty that you have to something that is actually larger than the bureaucratic enterprise. They want to make sure that your first loyalty is to the government. than anything, any innovation or any competition, not because it really fears that it's going to lose its business. It's a, you know, the public school system is not a run like a business. If it was, if it, if it really quaked with fear that it was going to be a bested, it would be probably be a better system. Instead, they just don't like the fact that they don't own you and they don't own your

children and they don't own your choice. They just don't like the fact that they don't own your choice they just don't like the fact that they're not the dictators in charge and and that's a hard thing to break they have no responsibility in the sense that a parent does i mean me for example you know we got a mortgage i've got savings i got a kid to put through school you know what happens if i you know fall over tomorrow from an embolism god forbid uh that's why i have life insurance and that's a personal decision that you have to make in order to make sure that your family is taken care of. Because regardless of what the state will tell you, really, it's up to you as parents. It's what you do.

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Not available in all states. And our thanks to SelectQuote for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. May I ask another question? Because this is turning into an interview show and I get to ask the questions. I'm enjoying this. Well, you're the master. You're the uncommon knowledge master. This notion of a family enterprise, intergenerational enterprise, I want to hear whether the two of you felt that in your own life.

James, how long ago was it that your family came from whatever old country they came from? And to what extent did you feel was there an implicit – not pressure necessarily, but did you feel that you were part of an intergenerational narrative? Interesting. My mother's side was the agricultural side and the farm passed to my cousins one of whom still farms it and the other cousin who unfortunately perished in an automobile accident went to school to become a seed hybrid technician he became a smart guy who worked for a big company who made seeds so one of them stayed home to do the physical work the other went off to school to do the mental work both staying in in the same field. But that was clearly a division of labor for the family within the family.

Yep, yep. And my dad founded the service station, and it was quite apparent from a very early age that his soft-handed little son was not going to go into this, that I wasn't going to take it over. And I would work during the summer. I would work. I delivered TBA in the panel truck. That would be tires, batteries, and accessories. I'd go to all of the Texaco stations in town and see what fan belts they need and fill the orders and the rest of it. Paint some tanks, pump some stuff.

But I wanted to get out of Fargo and I wanted to go to school. My dad, that was perfectly okay with him. It was perfectly fine. It was back-breaking, smelly work. And I wasn't cut out for it, and he knew it. My sister married a guy who was, and that's where the business stays to this day. And so I'm still connected to both of them. So I still have land that's farmed by my cousin, and I still regard the family business as something that I'm sort of still connected to because it's our place, our station, RJ's.

It's there. I've been going to that corner for my entire life. Well, since 63. So, yeah, there's a connection to the work and to the place, which matters. I'm giving Rob time to think this over because I have a feeling we have to go back many generations before we get actual manual labor in the Long family. But my mom, my mother grew up on a farm in northeastern Pennsylvania. The nearest town was Montrose, and you will never have heard of Montrose probably. But and I can remember this when I was a little kid, we'd go out to the house and my grandmother still they had heating installed by this point, of course.

But she still felt the right way to start the day was by putting some wood in the oven and starting the wood burning stove. That was the right way to start the day was by putting some wood in the oven and starting the wood-burning stove. That was the right way to start the day in the kitchen. In any event, my mother was one of two girls, and my grandmother refused to let either girl touch the axe. My grandmother insisted on chopping the wood herself, and she would not teach the girls how to handle an axe because they were to grow up and move away from the farm get out of here this is hard work it's a lonely life go get an education and go yeah they sent my mother to a teacher's college as soon as they could yes yes all right rob have you thought of it? Well, there's two questions. Back in the 16th century.

Yeah, back in the 19th century, yeah, it was backbreaking work, and I'm sure there was work beyond that. I know my grandfather, my mother's father, was – ran mines, and so I guess he was on the – in Mexico and in Africa. So he spent some time on the side of a donkey carrying silver ore up and down mountains. So yeah, I guess. But I think it's more about – I mean there's two things, right? One is that there's a natural, okay progression from – generationally from one thing to another. And it's not the end of the world if there are young people who are socialists. Trey Gowdy, I heard Trey Gowdy give a speech this weekend, and he gave a great one.

It was really, really terrific. And he said, so now I live at home. I live in my house with a liberal socialist, his daughter. And he kind of rolled his eyes and everybody laughed. He told a few jokes about that. And there's something okay about that, I think. But for me, I never felt that, I mean, my parents never ever pressured me to do anything.

They were incredibly supportive the whole time. Probably, I'm sure they had a couple of white knuckle moments when I sort of drove out to Hollywood. But I think their theory was, well, we've done our best and we've given him a great education. He's got some heaps of wits about him. Maybe he'll make something of himself. But there was nothing at stake for them. I mean it wasn't as if we had arrived and climbed over a mountain of skulls in the killing fields and arrived in Long Beach and now had to make a go of it with $11 in our pocket.

There was no sense that we were going to swim upstream culturally in a country that was a little suspicious of us and didn't like the way we dressed, the way we talked. So I can't believe I'm actually going to say this, but from the position of privilege, which is what I had, so I can't deny it, it becomes a slightly different journey, right? But it still is ultimately the same in a sense that you still feel that the country has these opportunities for you. And I mean, look, you can see it right now on college campuses and you can see it right now, especially among Asians in college campuses. is being refreshed by a lot of entrepreneurial and ambitious, in the best sense of the term, young people.

And if you look at the people who started these big web companies and did these big things, some of them have Asian names, some of them have East European names. Think of the people who started PayPal and how many accents there were. Elon Musk, people like that, people who weren't born in this country. And there's something kind of wonderful about that. I think that's something we should be celebrating, something incredibly optimistic about that. We on the right should be not only cheerleading but claiming as our own – as a result of our own policies, which is what they are. It all started with the graduate, the word, the phrase, the scene that was supposed to explain

everything about 20th century American culture. You know, the guy claps Benjamin on the shoulder and says, you know, I got one word for you, plastics, right? That was really good advice. I mean, that was tremendous advice to give a kid because it was a it was indeed a big booming business but at the time of course it said everything about the phoniness of america and its misplaced values that what you really needed to do was something sensitive and artistic as opposed to just making a pile of plastic so you can indulge your sensitive artistic sides peter you're going to say something no No, no, no. I'm with you 100%. I have noticed, I have a little

bit of a confession to make here. Even though in the Reagan White House and for much of my life I was writing articles defending, writing speeches and writing articles defending the free market system, I was still, I still thought to myself, well, you know, really,

to be a writer, to be a Buckley, to be an intellectual is really far more admirable than to go into business. And now, lo, these many years later, I have children, and my children are of employable age. And I notice that none of my artistic slash intellectual friends, not one of them, is in a position to offer one of my kids a job. Well, it is notable to be – it's good to live in a society that is rich enough to support a lot of intellectuals who have been thinking an awful lot of things. And you need people sitting around and thinking. You need the think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute and the rest of it where they cogitate. But the bar is pretty low these days. And it seems that anybody who teaches at college is accredited some sort of wisdom that simply is not inherent at all in the position. But I want to go back to what Rob said about his forebearer who

was working, who was working a mine or running a mine, mine. Rob's put himself on. No. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's a little, I'll be,

uh, he, he was running a mine, running a mine. Okay. All right. So I, I'm sure that I'm sure that he realized that, that it wasn't treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Well, I, I just went back. I'm just running down his chin. No, not, not exactly. But he must have known that what he was extracting from the earth, that people had to pay for it, right?

Or this whole thing wouldn't work, right? Of course. Of course he believed in that kind of energy. I mean, I'm sure that he may have thought the company might have a strategy of giving away a sample now and then of their precious ores, but eventually people would have to pay to keep the enterprise going. Wouldn't you say, Rob Long, founder of Ricochet? Yes, James, and I thank you very much for bringing this to my attention because the truth is that there's a lot of hard work that goes on behind the scenes here at Ricochet,

and there are a lot of people who deserve to get paid, and we like to pay. And there are a lot of people who listen. I met a bunch of people who are big Ricochet fans last weekend. I was in Colorado and and it was very gratifying to meet them, very gratifying to talk to them. And there were some people who were fans and they kind of looked at their shoes and said, I'm not a member. And I understand that. I understand that some people just aren't going to do it. And I don't know how to reach the people who just aren't going to do it except to say, you know, I really wish you would. I'm really talking right now

to people who love the podcast, listen to the podcast, and have been meaning to become members. And they are putting it off. And I think that you know in your heart if you've been meaning to do something and you put it off. And I want to ask you to do it now,

to turn this thing off and go and do it now. We really do need your help. We really do need and do it now. We really do need your help. We really do need to grow this business. We really do need to hire a few more people just to run the technical aspects of it, the actual knowledge work of it, which is kind of complicated. And we need to be able to expand, and we want to be able to expand. We would like to be the 24-7 center-right alternative to National Public Radio. And there's only one way we can do that and

that's with your help and your support so thank you please go to rickshay.com and join i should note the festival of dunning will continue in a second here too but just to tease you and keep you listening uh because you know you never know what's going to happen on the other side of the break peter you've got one more question why don't you pose it and let rob cogitate uh but i've used that word twice as part of it sorry um we've been discussing the uh the you want me to pose it now or hold it pose it now so that we can no no hold that thought we're going to get to peter robinson's final question after this and uh you'll be able to hold that thought and of course you're sitting very comfortably maybe you're on the edge of your seat right now. Maybe you're slumped over with your eyes half-masked because you didn't get any good sleep last night like me.

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That's B-O-L-L-N-B-R-A-N-C-H.com. Promo code RICOSHET. Bowlinbranch.com. Promo code RICOSHET. And our thanks to Bowlin Branch for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Peter, you had a last cue for Rob. Yeah. So here's the last question for the two of you.

Dan Crenshaw, former United States Naval SEAL officer, newly elected member of Congress. He became famous when he was insulted by one of the comics on Saturday Night Live and then had the amazing good sportsmanship to appear on Saturday Night Live himself saying, look, it's not serious, no harm done, and giving a few comic lines himself. Very impressive. As best I can – I don't know him. I haven't met him. But he seems to me a wonderfully impressive new talent in the Republican Party. He's been elected from Congress. In one of the first interviews he gave as a newly elected member of Congress, he said that what he wanted to do with his office was make conservatism cool. This is not a Trump question. This is a question about rising talent in the Republican Party. What do they need to say? What do they need to do to convince the socialist millennials that conservatism

can be cool rob well i i you know i i think there's two ways look at that i know you don't mean it it's a trump question but you if you're thinking about it politically you have to recognize that trump is toxic and has uh driven a lot of uh traditional voters away from the republican party public party's in big big big big, big, big, big, big trouble. And it's in big trouble because the head of the Republican Party is so deeply unpopular among millennials, among young people, among suburban women, and it's really hurting the party. So there's no solution to that. That's just the way it is.

So you just have to kind of plow forward. But what I would do is I just relentlessly hit the message that we are a party about – essentially about consumer choice, about choice. We want to empower the individual. It is in your pocket only because of fairly unfettered innovation and a fairly robust risk capital system that exists only – really only in the United States, barely in Europe, barely anywhere – nowhere else. capital that is governed by basically optimistic people, investors, who want you to come into their office and tell them what a great idea you have and how you're going to accomplish it. And then if you can convince them, we'll give you money. And they're not banks. They're not the government. They are just people who just believe in the future, that that is essentially conservatism

in a nutshell, that we're not trying to preserve. We are trying to innovate and we're not trying to turn the clock back. We're trying to move it forward more quickly. And I think that that's probably the best way to explain to young people what free market and free market conservatism is all about. It's about protecting individual rights and individual property so that you can be absolutely at your best and reach your biggest potential. And everyone doesn't have to be a Mark Zuckerberg, but having Mark Zuckerbergs and Jeff Bezos and people like that around or Henry Fords does in fact lift all boats. If you were a poor sharecropper in the Delta or you were a poor laborer in Michigan, the explosion of car manufacturing in the 20th century made your life and your children's life and their children's life immeasurably better. And that's something that was because of capitalism, because of the system that we have in this country

and have to fight all the time to preserve. It doesn't mean you're going to win. It doesn't mean that the government's going to bring coal back or the government's going to subsidize your job. It doesn't mean that. It means that there's going to be lots of change and lots of opportunity. And that's a harder sell to people than security and uh you know everyone gets to see um but it's but it's why we have the things we have

it's why we live the life we live well put and inspiringly put and i would just say run for president a charismatic guy who plays an instrument instrument and is ticks off several identity boxes and makes it makes people feel good about voting for him. It's a little bit more cynical. Rob say you have to make that big, broad, ideological shift change argument. Yes, but you also have to run candidates that make people feel good about voting for them. And people want to have that serotonin rush, that sense of self-regard again. I voted for this person. Therefore, I am a good person also.

You can't deny part of that. I would just like somebody to get up and say, hey, you know what? The other side has been telling you that those of us on the right hate blacks, hate gays, hate women and want to oppress them. None of that is true. Not a single part of that is true. If they're not telling you the truth about that, what else aren't they telling you the truth about? And then start the conversation that way. Get it down to the fact that we are radical when it comes.

I mean, if the youth want radical change, radical change is not more statism. Radical change is empowering, to use a word I hate, communities to do more without the federal government breathing down their neck. Radical change is dismantling the public education system, coming up with something better. Radical change, if they want to call themselves progressive, a term with a century of dust, crust and moss hanging off of it. They want to look at Bernie Sanders with progressive notions from the Woodrow Wilson era and say that they're the future. No. They had their shot. They had their 20th century. Statism didn't work out too well. Let's see what we've got

to offer. That concludes our podcast. I'm going to bed now. Actually, no it doesn't. One last thing. Here's my sign of hope for coming up the week. There's people raging on Twitter because Netflix has got a movie coming out. Woody Harrelson and Kevin – oh, good lord. Help me out.

Kevin Costner playing the guys who killed Bonnie and Clyde. Although Bobby and Clyde would probably be the remix if they did it today. Bonnie and Clyde, of course, in that movie of 68, 69, everybody loved it. The violence, the drama, the sexiness. The tagline was they're young and they're in love. Yeah, they kill people, a lot of them. So now we're making a movie about the guys who stepped up and filled them full of lead. And people are not happy about this at all because it validates some bad atavistic revenge fantasy amongst American males.

Every dad has just penciled this into his calendar to go see because he wants to see Bonnie and Clyde killed. I think it's a healthy thing probably in a society to want to have your roaming murderers and bank robbers put down and maybe celebrate the guys who did it. But we'll see you on the movie ends. Rob? Yeah. Yeah, who knows? The great thing about these movies is that you find out who's going to watch it and who's not going to watch it, right?

Well, we may never. I mean we still don't have numbers on – well, 47 million people watch Blackbird, which is apparently one quarter of the American population. And I've yet to meet more than two or three who have. But that's another podcast we could possibly have. Peter Robinson at the movies. And now, finally, I know everybody's expecting our Oscar picks, and I couldn't care less.

See you next week, guys. We'll see you all in the comments and we can shake the tree. Next week, y'all. Next week. Next week. I thought love was only true in fairytales

And for someone else, but not for me. Our love was out to get me. That's the way it seemed. Disappointment haunted all my dreams. Then I saw her face. Now I'm a believer. Now I'm a believer. Now her face. Now I'm a believer. Now her trace.

Her doubt in my mind. I'm in love. I'm a believer. I couldn't leave her if I tried. I thought love was more or less a given thing Seems the more I gave, the less I got What's the use in trying? All you get is pain

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