The Ricochet Podcast - On The Cusp of the Volcano

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

There are few on planet Earth who’ve spilled as much ink over concerns on Western Civilization’s decline as today’s guest Douglas Murray. Nevertheless, he’s betting long on America even though he’s well aware of the onslaught recounted in his latest bestseller, The War on the West. (Order your copy today!) Murray takes us through the complications of finding things to agree on when the past is... Source

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Innovate. The IT solutions people. We bring together unparalleled expertise to serve businesses like yours. We can help you discover partners in new markets, advance your digitization and gain valuable insights into EU funding opportunities. Take advantage of free expert advice and innovation resources. Visit EEN-Ireland.com and take your business global today. With a much less impressive background than you, I feel very background underdressed. I have a dream this nation will rise up. less impressive background than you. I feel very background underdressed. I have a dream this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire has more followers and engagement,

many times more than the New York Times or CNN. That is a problem for democracy. With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast. I'm James Lallex.

Rob Long. Peter Robinson are here. And we're all going to talk to Douglas Murray, who's got a great new book, The War on the West. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! 597. Wow. Can we get to 600? I don't know. Something's going to happen between now and then. It's an uncertain world, but probably so. You can make sure that we do, by the way, by going to Ricochet.com, joining up and be part of the most stimulating conversations and community on the web where we talk about everything. And as you might well imagine, we're talking about the thing that bedevils the nation the most, according to some, not according to others. I'm joined byeter robinson and rob long peter in new in california rob in new york i presume i am in fact in new york oh good and peter where else

would you be but lovely california which unfortunately is not going to have the governor that we thought but that's a conversation for a bit later obviously we got to talk about the hearings it is possible let me posit this to be disgusted at absolutely everybody. At Trump for the statements and the actions. At the yahoos, the cretins, the cue-addled morons who thought that by walking around stealing a coat rack they were going to change an election and overthrow a government. And the progressives who winked and waved at an actual bloody, fiery insurrection that gripped the country in 2020 in city after city after city and now seem to be going their usual route which is not to ask for jail or punishment but to just sit and wait until the people responsible for these things end up with what they truly deserve which is tenure so that's where we are a pox on all houses or is that just what about ism and both sides ism and the rest of the things that keep people from taking

a stance one way or the other i don't know uh That strikes me as a very good summary and just about all that the January 6th committee meeting is worth. Just a pox on both their houses. Not a word. We now know that in the first two years of the Trump administration, the Russian hoax was started by the Hillary Clinton campaign, pursued in a manner that was at a minimum outrageously improper and unethical by the FBI, but very likely, well, we know, we have one FBI agent who has already pled guilty to altering a document, so we have the corruption of our intelligence agencies, or at least one of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies in the FBI. Not a word about that.

Not a word about that. I'm with you. I'm not suggesting that January 6th deserves any praise. And now we have Chuck Schumer, some months ago, on the steps of the Supreme Court, calling out Justice Kavanaugh, Justice Gorsuch by name, and saying, I can't remember the words precisely, but the paraphrase is, you're in trouble now. You will pay a price. You will pay a price. Thank you very much. You will pay a price. And now a heavily armed young man has been arrested outside Justice Gorsuch's house, and he admitted that he was

there to take a shot at a Supreme Court justice. Not a word about that. Not a word about that last night. It was a mostly peaceful attempt, though, because he didn't actually do anything. He didn't do anything. And Peter, if Hillary Clinton had been successful in getting Trump tossed out, not elected because of the Russia thing, then our democracy would not be in peril because of what Trump subsequently did. Don't you get it? I mean, she was kind of right, wasn't she? I mean, the means, okay, we can argue about that, but she was trying to save the country from the specter of Trump. Nobody's not talking, Russiagate has gone down the memory hole completely. Rob, your thoughts on this um i can imagine well i'm mindful of the

fact that uh if you are listening to this podcast and you are not a member of ricochet we really do need you because we have a gigantic lawsuit to pay off um and um uh my thoughts on trump i'm sure has cost our little company some members, people who love Trump, don't like to hear bad things about him. There are only two ways to look at this, right? I mean, because it's not urgent, obviously. If it was urgent, it would have happened a year ago or a year and a half ago. So it's clearly done for two reasons. One of two, right?

History, which I mean, a quaint, you know, quaint idea. The actual job of Congress to have a record, a historical record, and or politics. So as a matter of history, I'm not sure it's a very good one. I mean, I'm not arguing whether or not, I mean, you know, none of this was new to me, I guess. That's right. Even catching it up in the newspaper.

All of it seemed horrible at the time, as you recall, for me, and continues to seem horrible. And in many ways, disqualifying for more than one political figure I can think of. Not just Trump, but I believe his coterie of eunuchs in the Senate. I saw a coterie of eunuchs play open for prince they were really good by the way that's that's that's back when they sold out right um but as a matter of politics it feels to me like you know if you're just put your democratic hat on for a minute like what what else can you do like you it isn't like you can have a celebration on the white house lawn for the accomplishments of the biden presidency or the triumphs of this, you know, benighted Congress.

You have nothing. This is the only era you got. And you got to fire it and you got to fire it as close to November as you possibly can and hope that it hits something. And I just don't think it did. So I think it failed as a matter of politics. But I think it also failed as a matter of history. I mean, I remember Labor Day 1998, maybe, was it, when the Starr Report came out. Remember the Starr Report? Three old men are talking about the Starr Report. That was the report that the independent counsel released investigating the Clinton administration, Bill Clinton especially, for improprieties and for pressure and for a lot of other stuff. And when that came out, it was published in the New York Times. And people bought the time. I remember I was waiting,

I was in line trying to get a ferry somewhere, and I was way, way in the back, and I was going to be there. Everyone was sitting, waiting for the ferry, but they're all on their roof, on their, leaning against the hood of their car with the newspaper spread out, drinking a cup of coffee. And it seemed to me like a printed book or a printed something is what you do when you want somebody to be in history.

Primetime TV specials, what you do when you want something to be politically powerful. But if you're the Democrats in 2022 i just i feel like they're missing the mark they should have printed yeah they should have printed the report and it's incendiary as you want you can have all the pictures and all i mean the transcripts and the and the the trump administration figures are what damned the trump administration

last night you could easily do that in a book and then if you want to have a primetime special have one about all of your successes but if you don't have any you're kind of stuck so that's my you're saying this is like the summer replacement variety show that the networks used to do back in the 70s it's like the hudson the january 6th is like the hudson brothers or i mean one of Watergate hearings, we really didn't know. That's true. I mean, you didn't know how it was going to turn out. You didn't know what happened.

You didn't know. It was an actual investigation into the hearings. The hearings were an investigation, right? This is like, what is it, a year and a half ago? The hearings, by the way, repeat that. The hearings were an investigation. It's not just that the staff work was an investigation, and then they trotted it out in front of the senators who asked prepackaged questions.

No, no, they really didn't know. They really didn't know. Howard Baker asking, now I can't remember the man's name, what was it? In any event, it was spilled in open hearing on live television that President Nixon had a taping system. Nobody knew that until the hearing itself. Right. So that was drama. This was really a package show. President Nixon had a taping system. Nobody knew that until the hearing itself. Right. So that was like, that was drama. This was really a package show.

He was pretty good. If you're like me and you already agree with it, I don't think it's going to convince anybody. And I think it's only going to remind Americans. I think it's going to remind American voters that of the two parties, one is living in the past and you don't want to be living in the past with inflation at eight percent and an economy that's sputtering down into recession and um uh gas prices at eight dollars in california six dollars everywhere else you don't you don't want that yes that's surprising that they i mean that they didn't put this on the television screens that you have in gas stations now. But even if you did, and you taped people to their cars while they were fueling and opened their eyes like Malcolm McDowell in Clockwork Orange, people would still, their eyeballs would not be fixated on the hearings.

It would be going up to the numbers ticking up and up and up and up as they continue to pump. By the way, I have it. I just opened it right now. The New York Times website, This is updated two hours ago. Prices rise rapidly in May. Live updates. We're now getting live updates on inflation. The inflation rate for the month of May was 8.6%. 8.6%. Higher since 81. The highest since 81. Exactly what here's why this is a diversion and you're just simply thinking about the wrong things peter a tweet from matthew dowd one party used the fears and frustrations of a group of white working class voters during a time of economic turmoil and high inflation to overthrow a democracy and too many other voters were more concerned about inflation than the potential loss of the democracy 1932 germany so if you're not if you're

waving away january 6th while being fixated on things like the complete you know hollowing out destruction of the american economy and the destruction of our purchasing power and the confiscation of our wages by inflation you don't have your eye on the ball you have to keep your eye out for hitler um and i'm not sure if he means necessarily the Hitler we just had or the Hitler to come. You know that, of course, the next guy will be hit. Well, the next Hitler is really bad. Next Hitler is really bad. I think actually if you did a search, I may have been the first person to say in the future everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes. Long time. That could be. But just as strong as Hitler.

Bush was Hitler before before so we're having an ever escalate i mean it's gonna they're gonna have to say the hitler factor what hitler x2 hitler x3 give us the actual concentration of hitlers that we'll be having the next time i guess the problem with it is to me is that i mean at no point mean, it isn't like if you storm the Capitol, you get to then make the laws. That's not how it works. It's not capture the flag. It's like you don't, if the mob had been 10 times the size and had they gone in, just assume they went into the Capitol, they killed everybody. They still wouldn't have gotten, they still would not have been able to subvert and take charge.

That's not how America works. It's just too, it just doesn't, it isn't. So all of the high sort of dudgeon and, oh my God, we almost lost our country is really, I mean, I think people see through that. Now, I'm not excusing the day and I'm not excusing the president's behavior, which as you know, I think he's a lowlife. So I'm not excusing any of that. But as a matter of politics, it's a failure. And as a matter of the historical record, I think it's also a failure, because none of it seemed, none of it, the hearing, the primetime hearings, by definition, don't seem serious. They seem about publicity. And history is is serious and politics is publicity and i think it failed in both cases right across from where i am right now are the government buildings that

were boarded up and behind a chain fence for months months right and who exactly were they afraid of were they afraid of uh ultra magas uh maybe some proud boys one or two are sprinkling therein but they were the people for them that they were afraid would come and burn them um i turned out to be the constituency actually for a lot of the politicians and again have they reputed any of this no because it was righteous what happened here the burning the looting the shooting the rest of it was right oh it got a little out hand it got a little zesty people's high animal spirits but in its essence it was it was right. Oh, it got a little out of hand, it got a little zesty, people's high animal spirits, but in its essence, it was righteous. And when you look at Portland, which had a government building under siege with firebombs being thrown into it, seemingly on a nightly

basis, and the authorities unable or unwilling to do anything about it, images like that sear into people's memories, I think, a lot more than some Yahoo walking out with a coat rack. Right. If you ask Americans which political statement they found the most dangerous in the past, you know, just the Trump administration, which sentence they found the most dangerous? Was it any of the crackpot, insane ramblings of a mentally and emotionally unstable president about how he really won a landslide? Or was it three words? Defund the police. I think if you ask Americans of all stripes, of all races and creeds, which words they thought were the most destructive or had the most impact, I think they would have to say, I think they would say, I think politically, I think you

can make this argument. I mean, if you're Chesa Boudin, you can make the argument. If you're Mayor Eric Adams, you can make the argument that defund the police had more negative impact on American life and culture and society and future and Americans' way of life and quality of life than the insane ramblings of a mentally and emotionally unstable, unfit president. Three points about Donald Trump. One, he came into office claiming that the crowd for his inauguration was the biggest in history. Anybody with eyes for the drone shots of the crowds assembled could tell he's just

yakking. His lips are moving. He's not saying anything important. Outrageous, but not important. He goes out of office claiming roughly the same thing, same kind of thing. He won. Looking for reliable IT solutions for your business? At Innovate, we are the IT solutions people for businesses across Ireland. From network security to cloud productivity, we handle it all. Installing, managing, supporting and reporting on your entire IT and telecoms environment so you can focus on what really matters, growing your business. Whether it's communications or security, Innovate has you covered. Visit Innovate today. Innovate. The IT solutions people. Take your business international.

Enterprise Europe Network is the world's largest network providing free support and advice to SMEs with global ambition. With over 450 partner organisations worldwide, we bring together unparalleled expertise to serve businesses like yours. We can help you discover partners in new markets, advance your digitization and gain valuable insights into EU funding opportunities. Take advantage of free expert advice and innovation resources. Visit een-ireland.com and take your business global today. Looking for reliable IT solutions for your business? At Innovate, we are the IT solutions people for businesses across

Ireland. From network security to cloud productivity, we handle it all. Installing, managing, supporting and reporting on your entire IT and telecoms environment so you can focus on what really matters. Growing your business. Whether it's communications or security, Innovate

has you covered. Visit Innovate today. Innovate, the IT solutions people. Landslide election. Sacred landslide. And the third point is, he's gone. Now, I know there's some thought about whether he'll run again or not, but right now, he's gone. Against that, we're paying seven bucks a gallon for gas here in Northern California. I know the two of you keep reminding me that I happen to live in the place in America where gas is more expensive than anywhere else. Yeah, you pay the California premium. I pay the California premium.

Still, gas has doubled since Joe Biden took office. And you mentioned Chesa Boudin. For listeners who don't follow California politics, Chesa Boudin was the progressive, the woke district attorney here in San Francisco who announced that for all kinds of what he considered minor infractions, he would not instruct the police to make arrests. And if the police made a mistake of making arrests, he would not have his staff bring charges. He reversed the broken windows policing that had done so much to establish safety in our big cities. In other words, low-level disorder, as he viewed it, was unimportant with the result that we have feces and needles all over the streets of San Francisco,

with the result that corner drugstores can barely stay in business because they're being looted again and again. And I shouldn't say looted, there have been lootings, but shoplifting has become totally routine in San Francisco, and on and on it goes. And what happened last week? Actually, I'm sorry, earlier this very week, on June 7th, we had a primary and this was on the ballot. Chesa Boudin was recalled and yanked out of office by the voters of San Francisco. And if you look at a map, this has gone viral at least out here, if you look at a map of San Francisco precinct by precinct by precinct, rich white people voted to retain Chesa Boudin, but everybody else wanted him out. voted to retain jason budin but everybody else wanted him out right right and coulter who is as

you know our dear friend my dear friend who's gonna join us next week i think on the podcast or pretty soon um it has a podcast of her own which we are hoping to uh put on our network soon um had a very funny joke about jessica budin she said um well the good news for him is that his life's not going to change because he won because he still won't be prosecuting any crimes, which is exactly true. And I think that, I mean, that's why I mean, the January 6th, 2021 hearings, and I always say 2021 to remind everybody that it was like a year and a half ago, the 2021 hearings um were were politically i think a political mistake but although maybe just a political necessity for a party that has no other accomplishments but i think also an historical mistake because if you really want to i mean look

the the bill barr book bill barr was a guest on this podcast his book says it all like you you know pretty much all you need to know. So I'm not sure it accomplished anything it's supposed to accomplish. And it may have hurt them a little bit by just reminding people that they are continually sifting through the clues of yesteryear

instead of facing the problems that Americans have right now. Why are there no homeless encampments in front of the U.S. Capitol? In Venice Beach, your old town, Rob, I'm sorry, I follow these accounts that look at what Venice has become, and the space across from the library was Centennial Park or something like that, had been completely taken over. There's nothing they could do about it until, I guess, there was a fire and there was some hazard and they started cleaning them up and there was the

usual tweet saying that this is absolutely barbaric and they're like but what why isn't the area around the u.s capital completely completely covered in it with tents how do they get away with that exactly is that a rhetorical question or is it a um yes you know the answer i mean i don't know the answer i don't know the i imagine that there is some instrument that keeps that from happening it's a natural the capital the capital is still they've still got huge a huge boundary around the capitol building itself right fenced off with chain link fence and the capitol police are patrolling and all of this is to create the impression that the capitol is still under any under, that the barbarians could appear over the horizon at any moment.

But there are no homeless people. There are very few tourists. You have to stand in long lines to get anywhere. So what I'm saying, all the consequences of progressive leadership in these cities that we have to deal with, which is the feces and needles, which sounds like something out of a lyric of a... I saw them open for... No, it's more of a... Feces and needles and needles.

All of these consequences... Feces and needles and buttons and bows. There we are. There's the title of the podcast. The people who vote for these things are insulated from, actually, their manifestations, whereas the people who don't, or at least the people who vote the same way but have a different way of perhaps defining what is acceptable in the public sphere vote for them and then you know when in san francisco do you have a sea change

where all of a sudden the people who say okay i'm going to vote for every single progressives on the ballot because there's no other option but i'm going to draw the line here as if they expect that when they put the same batch of progressives in, they're going to be somehow motivated by a different way of looking at the world. Because the progressive view right now is that it is humane to let people expire twitching in the street from drugs. That is humane.

That is freedom. And it is wrong to prosecute anybody who walks into a drugstore and just simply puts everything in a bag because he's probably the spiritual inheritor of jean beljean and we don't want to have that that that right you know that that that uh you know shoplifting to prison pipeline where these people actually suffer consequences the fact that they've been driven to do this in the first show is consequence enough but at some point but at some point you have a critical mass of people

who say that our cities are becoming unlivable because we have to step over dead people and shite in the streets and needles and the rest of it. And we have to ask them to get out a key to unlock the shampoo. Right. That's right. This can't go on. So what party, what politician actually steps up and explains what they're going to do to make this stop go on rob i'm just i'm just predictable voters rarely have an opportunity um to make a surgical uh make their cert their their wishes known in a surgical way they've had two in

california this was one that's right right but they but they but occasionally they do and what they really do is they put they put a head on a pike right because it's easier for voters to say especially in a progressive place with all sorts of you know progressive problems it's easy for them to say not this guy you know they didn't choose anybody he didn't lose an election he didn't he would nobody they didn't vote in somebody else they just said not him um and part of the benefit of that is that you can kick the can down the road of what to do, but you now, anybody taking that, sitting behind that desk knows there's a head on the pike in front of the DA's office and it's Chesapeake Dean's head.

And if you want your head on that pike, do what he did. And I feel like that's you know that's not nothing that's not nothing that's pretty good right that is kind of in this big broad way that we vote you know which is kind of crazy and a little bit large and massive and imprecise that's a press it's about as precise a message you can send in new york city about as precise a message you can send is that most people voted for the law the former cop guy who talked about law and order now how he governs is something different who knows um but they did express a kind of a broad feeling which is that stick to your

knitting take care of the streets you know keep the streets safe and don't spout nonsense and the people making the schools i think you can add yeah absolutely the people making that argument or making that or making that protest the most vocal right now are um ethnic minorities in cities so in in new york city african-american women basically um they were a huge, huge part of Eric Adams' constituency. And they elected Ron DeSantis. And they elected Ron DeSantis, right. And in San Francisco, it was not the rich enclaves, not Noe Valley, not Pacific Heights. Correct.

But the places around there where people really do experience crime. If you have a billion dollars, you don't experience crime. But if you don't, you do. And so that I feel like is that instead of, I mean, a smart Democrat is looking at that voter map, the heat map of the American voter right now and saying, we're in trouble and we got to change. And I think the smart Republicans are doing the same thing.

So do you think it's possible that what they will do is not actually change their direction and what they do but simply change their rhetoric in other words lie low don't say stupid things behave the same way because you're beholden to a part of the party that believes that homelessness crime drug abuse all of these things are useful manifestations of a corrupt system that has to be washed away and you don't want to irritate those people i mean once you start getting what once you start pushing back against all of the systemic systems that the people are talking about and the usual rhetoric about you know then you're in trouble with that base so i mean but it's sorry peter but just no no go ahead because because rob has said this and he's right that it this is a really softball pitch to the democratic party

because they can solve they can address homelessness the Democratic Party because they can address homelessness, they can address crime, they can address petty crime, all the rest of these things, without selling out their base ideas. If they want to go back to the party that they were once and talk about how they care about crime and safety in the neighborhoods of minority people, if they care about independent businesses, not the big chains where they're fascist they can reshape their old idea their old rhetoric into into things that would be palatable to a liberal leaning audience but they don't and they won't because it seems as if they are constrained by the fear that some washington post writer is going to start tweeting mean things about them and consume the weak discourse for that. Right. Here's a little reason for optimism. At least I'm feeling a little bit optimistic. A little tiny bit optimistic for the following reason. During the Trump years, began beforehand, but we saw it vividly, unmistakably, during the Trump years,

both political parties behaved as if they had consultants, and they probably did have consultants, but they certainly behaved this way, telling them, don't bother trying to reach to the middle. Don't bother trying to expand your base. The name of the game is getting the base you already have to the polls. Agitate them, anger them, excite them, infuriate them, drive your base to the polls. Donald Trump tried it. He believed he got elected that way first time around. He tried it again the second time around and it didn't work. Now what do we have? Look at the Republican candidates, Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania. Mehmet Oz knows perfectly well that he has no choice but to reach out to try to expand the Republican base

in Pennsylvania. And what's happening with Mehmet Oz, excuse me, Mehmet Oz is the celebrity doctor who just won the primary for the Republican senatorial nomination in Pennsylvania. Mehmet Oz and Republican candidates around the country are back to the old and healthy game of trying to figure out how to bring more people into their base, how to persuade their neighbors. And the Democrats, as this January 6th committee demonstrates are stuck with the old game they're trying to drive up their base they're not even making an attempt to understand the thinking of the people who are who are disgusted with them let alone attempting to reach out to them so the

polls it's just hard to imagine event, of course, it's a long time still. It's hard to imagine though events that could emerge that will prevent the Republicans from recapturing the House. And that would put Republicans, by the way, I'm going to stipulate for the sake of argument, this is an argument in itself, I'm going to stipulate for the sake of argument that Donald Trump will choose to rededicate himself to the sacred game of golf and remain in Mar-a-Lago. So absent Donald Trump, you've got at least a dozen really smart, very appealing, prospective candidates, every one of whom is going to be in the business of reaching out to the middle of the country of persuasion, which is American politics when it works. I hope so. I'd bet money on it if I was a betting man. I'm not, though, because I'm sort of a penurious and cheap and the rest of it. I like to think ahead to the financial future, which is why, for example, well, insurance comes to mind. Because if somebody relies on you financially,

and I'm sure somebody does, a parent, child, a business partner, like Rob, life insurance gives you peace of mind that they have financial cushion if something happens to you, heaven for a fan. Typically, life insurance gets more expensive as you age. Makes sense. So it's smart to get a policy sooner rather than later, right? By making it easy to compare your options from top companies, policy genius can help make sure that you're not paying a cent more than you have to for the coverage that you need. And having life insurance through your job might not be enough. Most people need up to 10 times more coverage to properly provide for their families.

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That's policygenius.com. And we thank Policy Genius for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast Douglas Murray, the author of 10 books, including The Strange Death of Europe, The Madness of Crowds, and the newly released The War on the West, How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason. He's an associate editor in The Spectator and is considered a leading figure in the ominously called intellectual dark web, which is why probably his Zoom feed has just simply a black room with a Take your business international. Enterprise Europe Network is the world's largest network providing free support

and advice to SMEs with global ambition. With over 450 partner organizations worldwide, we bring together unparalleled expertise to serve businesses like yours. We can help you discover partners in new markets, advance your digitization and gain valuable insights into EU funding opportunities. Take advantage of free expert advice and innovation resources. Visit een-ireland.com and take your business global today. Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data

center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia. Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated. The whole data center networking portfolio, and they deliver. That's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center AI ready someday is here with nokia

strange glowing orb somewhere too well here we are uh the west the war on crowds mad europe strangely dead and uh an age of unreason how do you prevail in an age when emotion seems to have swamped the gunwales of every single vessel on the sea and where do we start is there one particular type of unreason that if we if we get our hands around that one and persuade people that the rest actually will be easier to deal with well that's a very good question and there's there are a couple of very straightforward answers and let me just give you one i've had a uh in recent years, through the turmoil and madness that's gone on in Western nations, I've often said that the absolute minimalist suggestion I have had to give readers, friends, and others is the following advice.

Don't go mad. Don't go mad. If you can. I mean, maybe you can't help it. But just try not to go mad. Try to hold on to some things. Try not to go all the way down various of the

snakes that now exist on particularly the American board game of snakes and ladders. Don't go all the way to the bottom of the board um try to hold on to something now by the way there are pieces of advice i give for how to do that one of them is try to agree on something and this is something i say quite i say in the war on the west and by the way one of the interesting things about bringing out a book often is that you discover um aspects towards what you've been writing from people in other disciplines that you weren't aware of.

And since the War on the West came out, I mean, a couple of groups of people I've heard from in particular, and one of them has been people involved in marriage counseling who have said some of the advice you give is what I recommend to couples. That is, try to find things you agree on. And that's one of the pieces of advice I give in The War on the West. One of the reasons why people have gotten so deranged in recent years is because, firstly, they want to hurt their political opponents, not just beat them. They actually want to hurt them. They want to find ways to kick them as hard as possible in the groin. That's a very unpleasant, very demeaning political activity. But the second thing is people don't agree even on facts. I've said quite often, having different opinions is very last century. In the 21st century, we have different facts. We have different versions of

what's just happened. For instance, obviously something going on at the moment some people say january 6th absolutely nothing to take any notice of doesn't matter unbelievable you're going on about it and then another group people think say this is the biggest attack on the american homeland since before 9-11 in fact it's bigger than 9-11 this is is the big, this was an insurrection. It's an attempt to overthrow the government. I would say try to agree on something. You may not agree on January 6th. It's in some ways, it's a bad example, but it's so divisive. But try to agree on some things. And one of the things I suggest in the war in the West is, how about coming to some kind of common agreement about our past? And of course, again again that's tricky in certain

ways we're never going to have a single narrative about the past but for instance one of the reasons why so many people have found recent years so deranging is because everything in the past has been upended as well you know only a few years ago you would have been insane to have said the founding fathers were just appalling and there was nothing good to be said about them. You'd be mad. Who'd say that? Now, very commonplace. The city in which I'm sitting in New York, the statue of Thomas Jefferson last year was boxed up, winched down and wheeled out the back door of the council chamber. It had been there since the 1830s and one of the members of the New York council who voted to remove the statue of jefferson said well thomas jefferson doesn't represent our values so if you're in that position but as a nation it's not just you disagree on who didn't win or won the last election or the one

before that or it's not just you can't agree on who's won elections in america or anything else it's that you don't agree for instance instance, that the founding was a good idea. In that situation, absolutely everything on the train underneath you turns to jelly. And of course, people fall through. So as I say, I've discovered that some of the advice I give, find one thing you agree on and work out from there, actually turns out to be very practical advice for people's lives. I agree. We can agree that there was a date in January that was the 6th. Let's start from there. No, you're absolutely, I mean, we mentioned that with the marriage counselors, that the marriage counselors will tell you that when contempt becomes the operating emotion in a marriage, it's over. And what we have here today are two sides that are not simply

left and right with a common core center, but they are contemptuous of each other as destructive elements that cannot be reckoned and bargained with. They just simply have to be vanquished. Peter, Rob? Hey, Douglas, I'm going to be in Washington next week where I'll interview a couple of people, including Christopher Demuth. Now, you've just joined us. You know Chris, or you know who Chris is. Chris Batchelor Yeah, of course. I'm very admired of Chris. Peter Robinson All right. So here is what Christopher DeMuth,

the most urbane, sophisticated man in the conservative movement, has now announced that he considers himself a national conservative. And here are a couple of sentences from a piece he wrote, published late last year in the Wall Street Journal. When the American left was liberal and reformist, conservatives played our customary role as moderators of change. But today's woke progressivism isn't reformist, it seeks to turn the world upside down. When the leftward party in a two-party system is seized by such radicalism, the conservative instinct for moderation is futile. National conservatives recognize that in today's politics, the excesses are the essence. We must shift to opposing revolution, close quote. All right. Now, you have just given us lovely but moderate sounding advice.

It almost sounds as though your advice is, let us return to civility. And as civil a man, as Christopher Demuth said, no, this is a time to fight. What do you make of that? This is a question less of substance than of attitude. What's the correct attitude for our side? Well, clearly on the conservative side in America, there are, broadly speaking, let's say, of the many divisions you might say exist. One particularly strikes me, and it's relevant to this, which is the conservatives who essentially do liberalism at the speed limit, as somebody once said. They slow the liberals down a bit, fight the next battle.

They know they're going to lose and much more. That sounds more derogatory than I mean it to be, because it's a perfectly healthy instinct to say that the nature of the dialectic in politics could be that the left puts out ideas, the right says, well, hang on a minute, and refines them and works them, allows some through and doesn't allow others through. That might be one version of the dialectic. However, there is certainly a movement in America, much more so than in my native country

of Britain, which says, no, we've been doing that for too long and we've been losing. We've been losing ground all the time. We're not happy just giving in and giving in and giving in. And one of the things, of course, is that they look to, particularly national conservatives, I would argue, look to certain states which don't seem to be doing that, look to countries which are saying, obvious examples are, say, Poland and Hungary,

which are saying, no, we actually are going to fight for our petitions in a conservative way. We're going to put the left on the back foot and much more. And there are many Americans who say that's American conservatives who say that is the position we should be in. And I think it's an understandable thing because it's not pleasant to always be a loser, for instance. It's not pleasant to feel that you're the one who's always giving in, in politics any more than in a marriage or relationship. So I understand this instinct. I do think, though, that there are, what you have to be aware of

if you move the boundaries like this is exactly where you place them. My own analysis is that the boundaries of the right have been slightly inaccurately placed in recent years. People have been put beyond the margins, beyond the wall, as it were, who should not be beyond the wall, who are definitely part of the conversation, who should be part of the story, who have views. I mean, many things I've written about, like immigration, you know, put beyond the wall, who are definitely part of the conversation, who should be part of the story, who have views. I mean, many things I've written about, like immigration, you know, put beyond the wall are people who include quite often the majority of the public.

Well, that's not a sustainable position. But the question is, of course, if you move that wall, are you sure you know exactly where you're placing it again? You know, if you expand the barriers, the boundaries on your own political sides if you expand them what do you allow it and this is of course really this is a this is a work of extraordinarily careful surgery that's effectively needed um do you uh move that barrier slightly that wall slightly and allowing a significant chunk of the public who must be spoken to and for and who want things done? Or do you also let the demons in?

Do you allow the things that exist to all political sides that effectively trounce and destroy much of that political movement? I'd argue, by the way, that that's obviously one the things that that the trump era worried people over which was you know the parts of the left and these parts of the conservative movement tried to put everybody who supported trump beyond the pale i think you can't do that because you're talking here about the american public on the other hand occasionally famously at charlottesville famously on january the 6th people get a glimpse of something that is in the woodshed that suddenly comes out and it terrorizes and terrifies, quite understandably. And it terrifies them not least because the political left then says, aha, we told you all along.

But when the wall is moved slightly, when the boundaries are moved slightly, these are the ghouls that come in. And so, as I say, it it's a very very fine surgical operation that is needed uh douglas thank you for joining us good to see you again um you know the problem with american politics is american politics and its dna at the very beginning is a kind of a built-in compromise you get about the c plus version b minus version of what you want and you're always trading this and that and um you know the idea of sort of of fighting and making an argument in american politics is really about politicking that's what it is right um but that's how things get done if you're lbj and you want to pass the civil rights act you you have to appeal to republicans that's's Republicans helped pass that.

Democrats didn't. So you're always kind of horse trading. You're always kind of getting half of what you want. On the other hand, there's another great force in American life, and that's the American culture. And American culture seems to be where, you know, just to sort of take a slightly, not opposite, but maybe different position. American culture seems to be the place where conservatives in my view have been happy to fight and complain and to point fingers and if you not

want to know what the excesses of the american left are at any given moment you can watch fox news fox news is that's that's its chief item of of content is to point and say, look what the crazy lefties are doing. But in the American, I mean, I'm just looking, I was just looked this up. So in the past century, three of the biggest mega hits and the Hollywood mega hits of the past

century, even of the, this century, 21st century that weren't superhero or fantasy or animation. So just typical movies, passion of the Christ, American Sniper, and Top Gun this past week. Gigantic hits, which suggests that there's an appetite and a marketplace for American stories that are more or less positive,

that are more or less uplifting, that sort of take as the premise that this is a great nation hamilton this gigantic broadway hit took as its essence the idea that these men were great men doing great work thinking big thoughts they were flawed but they were passionately consumed with democracy gigantic made 100 million dollars a week apparently just a staggering staggering amount people loved it they ate it up so my question is really to the conservatives is all right well you know michelangelo said you criticize by creating so now i prove to you there's a market go fill it why won't they fill it well that's the very thing the question of course one is that there are some gatekeepers uh fewer and fewer now i mean it's 2023 the gates are definitely breaking down but

you mentioned the box office of course that's a very very important but you know i'd throw a statistic back for you of the films that were nominated for best picture at the academy awards this year of all the films that were nominated for best picture not one was among the top 10 highest grossing films of the American cinema last year. Right. Not one. And that will continue to be the case. So the Academy Awards, the Oscars and so on, are effectively ceremonies in which actors give awards to other actors who've appeared in films that the public haven't seen. Yes.

Okay. Not a great business model. At some point, people start to notice that and they take advantage of it. And I'm very pleased that that is happening. For instance, Ben Shapiro's outfit, The Daily Wire, is now making content. They're making movies. I think they're going to make kids' content as well soon. They're even making products.

They're making razors now because one of the razor companies boycotted them. So this is a very exciting development i think and i want more and more of it to happen now of course the world i know most is the world of publishing and i know that in the world of publishing the gatekeeping as it were still exists uh when you were kind enough to mention earlier my book three books back the strange death of europe but the strange stuff of europe not sound like I'm blowing my own trumpet, as they always say, if I'm not going to, who will? It's a

big deal. Blow your trumpet. Well, that's very kind of you to say so, Peter. But that book spent 20 weeks in the top 10 of the Sunday Times bestseller lists and was number one for quite a long time. And I was approached by a publisher after that

who told me something very interesting and absolutely typical, that she had been at a party. Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere.

So I took a little trip to Nokia. Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated. The whole data center networking portfolio. And they deliver. That's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center AI ready.

Someday is here with Nokia. She had seen the head of her publishing house and said, have you seen how well Douglas Murray's book on immigration is selling? And by the way, this wasn't an anti-immigration book, as Peter knows and anyone who knows. It was one that tried to look deeply at the question and didn't worry about saying things that were politically incorrect if they happened to be true. So she says to Habas, have you seen how well Douglas Murray's book is selling? And he says yes and she says to him do you remember i told you we should do something in this area by which i assumed she meant in the area

of immigration and his response was we wouldn't want those readers now that to my mind is a very typical was that american or british uh british but i think i heard similar stories from america oh you did not all right so the point is is that there are people for and i said to her in which case do please tell your boss that he must tell the next shareholder meetings that you're a not-for-profit entity um it'd be very important to the shareholders to know this fact but the point is is that in in in culture institution after culture institution this has been the case for a while a theater critic friend of me once brilliantly said to me some years ago the theater isn't the theater anymore douglas and i said well

what is it he said it thinks it's a think tank i said this is one of the most perceptive comments about the theater i'd heard in years they don't i mean parts of them want to put on hits of course but part of it is this is your five foot and bed today this is what's good for you right or this is what you need to know what be told you need to be the audience need to be scolded until they have all of the correct political opinions i've seen plenty of that in american theater in the last year um so all this is just opportunity though doesn't it exactly market opportunity i mean you know you throw up i mean here in you know i'm in new york too you throw a brick you hit a billionaire and

your bounty hit a conservative billionaire there's tons of them and you're or or quite a recently woken up conservative like elon musk right you're going to hit one um why is it that they would rather give money to sclerotic think tanks or or or or or pub or support books that will appear on i mean god love him tucker carlson but his audience already agrees right then to really do something big in the culture which would require them to sort of do the kind of risk do certain institutions have so much legacy prestige that it's almost impossible to dislodge them from the cultural firmament? I mean, Rob's question, a billionaire would probably say,

if you gave the billionaire, a conservative billionaire, a chance between owning the New Yorker, the storied New Yorker, or starting some scrappy little conservative thing that's going to be known by everybody as right wing, which would he rather do? Which would make life easier in new york and which

would probably give him a little bit more of a frisson of self-satisfaction owning the new yorker yes that's true um well the the nature of success in the conservative moment in recent the conservative movement of recent years in america in particular has been scrappy organizations and startups i think there are obviously now this isn't an either or of course one of the great successes of american conservatism has also been setting up legacy institutions uh their endless fallouts everybody falls out with each other they disagree about this op-ed they disagree about that but they exist and it gives a certain foundation to conservative american life on top of that you then have the sort of of upstarts. You have the people who come along and say, no, we want to do something more vigorous than that. And I think this is a great sign of

health on the American right. However, the question, I go back to the beginning, is this question of, and I've come across this a few times when I've made criticisms of the American right, as I'm very happy to do, as I am with british right and anyone else i disagree with i don't feel limited in my range of opportunities to throw invective and criticism but um what i've discovered is there is now on the american right a very big particularly on the young right there's a very big suspicion of anyone who is accused of or seem to be what i just described as gatekeeping and that can include anyone so anybody who comes along and says look this just isn't the way to do things or this is beyond the pale for instance let me give a very obvious very easy example marjorie taylor green when she was criticized earlier this year for speaking at a

conference of a horrible little anti-semite and a bigger called nick fuentes um uh marjorie taylor green appears on the platform with him is criticized for it and says in response you know i won't apologize for appearing with i think she said vigorous young you know full-blooded conservatives and i said you know vigorous full-blooded you know bloody idiot i mean you know and and and i mean these are but but the point is is that there are people on the american right particularly young american right who are who are so fed up with people saying, oh, you can't say that, you can't do that, you can't look into this idea, you can't look into that idea. But effectively, they just say, no, the whole thing's open and no one is allowed to limit

us. Now, of course, that really is a problem because they're disproportionately likely to make the same mistakes again that people before them have made. And what I mean by that is you know if you decide to go back to the metaphor i said earlier rather straightforward metaphor if you decide to lift the barrier the wall the gate whatever and just allow everything in you might allow things in but end up meaning you've got to start again you've got to go through arguments that were settled you've got to return to the thing of this is why we don't want holocaust

deniers anywhere near members of congress etc etc you don't want to have that but but but that this is the the very delicate moment that american conservatism is at it seems to me is that question of the gatekeeping has been annoying the people who've done it on the right to the right have often got it wrong they've kept off majorities they've kept out the public uh but the response to it has to be incredibly carefully calibrated i mean i trust chris to move enormous i think he's an extraordinarily kind decent generous and intelligent man and intelligent man. And I would trust Chris DeMuth and many other people to carry out some of that sort of surgery. However, is it always going to be correct? I mean, I have spoken at a National Conservative Conference, and I had criticisms of

a number of people I discovered who were also there. This is in Europe, not in America. Were you at this recent one in Brussels, was it? No, I wasn't. No. Nothing in the world could induce me to return to Brussels. Nothing in the world. And, but I did speak at one in Rome, and there were a couple of people there that I was very much in disagreement with and would not have, I don't think I would have attended if I had

known were there. But then the European right is even more than the american right in a kind of turmoil here and i'm not here referring to the british right the european right whoa if you lift up all barriers on the right you wow are there some ghouls waiting to return yes yes douglas you have done a remarkable thing, which we haven't mentioned yet. You have moved from the United Kingdom to the United States. You're here now. You live in New York. Yes. Why? And if you had to place a bet, apparently you have placed a bet, but if you

had to place a bet on the politics of conservatism, the politics of the right, the politics of the West, renewing themselves. If you had to place a bet on where the Renaissance was most likely to take place, where would you place your bet? But first, how's New York? How's America? And why did you move? In a way, it's an expression of faith. I really am long on America.

All right. Long on New York. So you're answering both questions at once. That's your bet. Well, one, but a more important point is this, and this might come out, I've got to be careful always to not abuse my host as a guest in this country, but here we go. If you're a writer and you write about issues like i do you don't what you want to go straight to the heart of the problem uh america's the heart of the problem let me phrase it in another way

in my lifetime most of our lifetimes i think america was a net importer of bad ideas principally we might agree from france now that's changed in recent years. America has become a net exporter of bad ideas. It's one of America's least welcome exports. But, you know, America undergoes some cultural revolution shift, and it happens in all other English-speaking countries. You know, you get the BLM protests in the summer of 2020. They spill straight out into the streets of London, and before you know it, the Senate after the dead of World Wars and the statue of Winston Churchill are getting attacked in London.

Statues of Churchill in Edmonton, Canada are getting defaced. You know, you see what I mean? The point is that... Yes, yes, yes. And it's the same with everything. The Me Too movement starts in America. Right. Bizarrely enough, as I said last week on Bill Maher, bizarrely enough, trying to reform

sexual relations between the sexes based on Hollywood. Who could see that going wrong? The place that invented the term the casting couch. Anyhow. Hey, hey, hey, don't knock it. Well, I

don't make any response to that comment. That's my rice bowl here. But you get that starting in Hollywood, and before you know it, the defence minister in London has to resign because 20 years ago he's accused of putting his hand on a female journalist's knee. Very British sex scandal, because it involved no sex. But the point is that these things all come straight from America to Britain, to Canada, to Australia, New Zealand. So, if you're a writer like me and you're interested in ideas,

it's very important that Britain does well. It's very important to me personally. It's very important to Britain, obviously, but Britain just culturally is catching secondary infections of american virus the central propagator of the viruses at the time the intellectual virus at the time is america so to that extent as well as being an expression of trust it's perhaps a negative thing i want to

be at the center of where the problem is and try to address it here if britain does well culturally and much more, it's very, very good for Britain, and it would be a good signifier to America and others. But if America goes south, American politics, American culture goes south, you can't buy yourself very much time in a country like Britain. You really can't.

Sorry, I just want to... I interviewed Yoram Hazony a couple of weeks ago, and I said, Yoram, you're so concerned with American politics, why do you live in Israel? And his answer was very striking. He said he and his wife decided where is the place they could live that would be the most meaningful. And they decided that if they lived in Israel, if they moved to Israel, if they raised their family in Israel, they would be living on the very lip of the volcano. Yes. That's true.

And that's what you were saying about your move to the United States. Yes. For an intellectual such as yourself. He, of course, is talking about Judaism as a central part of his concern. But that's what you're saying. Yes, absolutely. It's the same thing. You might as well be on the cusp of the volcano, as you say. You might as well be looking straight into it, be right on the edge of it, be where the action is.

And by the way, I should say something that's quite important to say, and I've said this to a couple of people about the war on the West and what I'm writing about recently, which is this. I'm quite confident, actually, that with the right encouragement, this can all go well. I was speaking the other week to a wonderful young actor called Clifton Duncan. And we were talking about the arts and the art scene in New York and elsewhere. And, you know, he was very down on some of this. You know, the plays aren't getting this. The plays aren't getting written. The pieces aren't being written. The books aren't necessarily...

And I said, the thing is, Clifton, is that there are people watching. There will be people watching us, as there will be here today. There will be people watching us who will write those plays. And there will be some who will put them on. And there will be some who will write those books and those films. There will write those plays. And there will be some who will put them on. And there will be some who will write those books

and write those films. There will be those people in Hollywood who will end up watching this who will think, yeah, it's true. I mean, there's a massive market out there and we seem not to be giving them the things that they seem to want. And, you know, maybe we should try

to have the public on our side. That's a good idea if you're a for-profit entity. And there will be people realizing this, and there are all the time. I was in Los Angeles the other week. I met many people in Hollywood and elsewhere who were very, very keen not to propagandize, but to be artistically free, for instance.

And as you say with Michelangelo, to create. And this is sort of one of my self-appointed aims, is to try to help clear the clutter, clear the clutter and allow people to do these things. And I'm quite confident that they will, because the sort of censorious, often described as woke, I just think anti-Western moment, it's a very unappealing movement. It's a very, it's a censorious movement.

It's effectively a puritanical movement. It's literally an iconoclastic movement. And is that likely to exist forever? No. No, there will definitely be a counter-reformation. There definitely will be. The book is fantastic, I should say say for people who um uh thank you and i and i i say that i i would have bought it except i got a free copy so well that's a really terrible thing to say it's a terrible

thing so i will say this that i'm going to buy a copy and give it as a gift to my brother who love it it's a terrific book uh and uh i can't say enough about it and enough good things about it. That's very kind. But my, a friend of mine once said it was the worst thing you can say to an author. I liked your book so much. I lent it to all my friends. Exactly.

I feel the same way. You lent it. No, no, none of that. I can't wait to read it. Please send me a copy. That's also a terrible thing you say.

Yeah, that's an awful, awful thing. By the way, also, I should mention that it's available on Audible, an audiobook, and read by myself, and is apparently great fun, according to people who listen to it. And it's in its second month now, and the New York Times bestsellers for audiobooks. Audible? Oh, great. I've got a couple of free credits left on Audible. So I was going to buy it, but now I'll just use those free credits.

Well, that's okay. that kind of counts here's how i got my copy of the strange death of europe and this i think all by itself accounts for part of a large part of the reason that was a bestseller i got my copy from rupert murdoch who had in his office three cardboard hey move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia. Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated. The whole data center networking portfolio, and they deliver.

That's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center AI ready. Someday is here with Nokia. For boxes filled with it, he'd ordered 100 copies to hand out in meetings. So there you have it. That's very nice to hear. It's wonderful to, as I say, I really bang on about it.

I've been a writer all my life uh now 22 years 35 years almost actually the time i wrote my first book and uh the best thing for a writer as you know is to have readers or listeners and it's just such it's it's it's a wonderful thing and i and particularly i should say young readers as well i have nothing against older readers um some of my best friends are older readers, maybe all of them. But having young readers is a real, real honor. And the fact that I go everywhere in the States and I bump into people in the street who are college age and I say, I've just been listening to your book, I've just been reading your book. It's the best thing ever for a writer.

And I don't take it lightly because I've certainly done books in the past that have had um fewer readers than uh than than these so it's it's uh there is a hunger in the younger demographics for something to give them a tool to fight the unreason that swamps the social media because the minority dominates i mean if elon musk bought twitter cauterized it shut it off i think we'd all be better for it as much as I love the platform. But there is a small coterie of people who dominate the discourse and shape it and distort it in a way that makes people who would otherwise fight back with reason or looking for a commonality just back off and say it's simply not worth it. So, yes, those are the people who are going to love your book, which is War on the West. It's another great one from Douglas Murray. How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason, we should note. And while it's good to have listeners, it's also good to have

watchers. And I believe in October, you'll be on Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson to discuss this and more. So if you like this, and of course, I know you did, stay tuned for that. It'll be another shot, another double shot of Douglas, as we used to say on FM Radio. Never. No, we never did.

Thanks for joining us today. It's a great pleasure. Welcome to america and we hope to have you back as soon as possible how long must you live in america before we're allowed to refer to you as doug till the grave thanks for joining us douglas that's great great pleasure peter or pete as we like to call him around here right actually no no we we we don't um you know here's the thing i had a friend after last week's podcast i had a friend from call from from high school came and we had lunch and it was kind of fun because i hadn't seen him in about 10 12 years or so and he still called me by the old nickname that we used to call each other in high school.

It just slipped out. It wasn't planned. It's just some ancient synapse fired and he said it. And there's nobody else on the planet who would call me that particular set of phonemes. And as a reminder, relationships like that, they change over time, but they burnish, they get better. Lots of things do. Your great leather jacket or your cast iron skillet and your solid wood furniture gets better as you use them. Would you ever think that sheets could be on that list? He said, gently transitioning into a commercial. Well, he did. And I am. And

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Get 15% off your first set of sheets when you use promo code RICOCHET at BowlingBranch.com. That's Bowling Branch, B-O-L-L-A-a-n-d branch.com promo code ricochet and we thank boland ranch for sponsoring this the ricochet podcast well we have a little uh home talk here uh rob i noticed that you got in the lawsuit thing uh very try to get that in as much as possible as much as possible at the top in relation to absolutely nothing and i i'm sort of what and that's great we can do it again but um are you sort of like wandering around manhattan button holding people and uh you know strangers at random and i will if it comes to that i mean look uh you know um we do want to get to the 600th podcast i'll just put it that way um that is a goal um and uh it would be uh it would help us out if you um you know if you want to help and you've been listening and you have been like looking for the reason to

do something so it would be nice if you helped us now join ricochet um if you are a member already um you know please think about giving a gift membership to somebody you know who's um like-minded or maybe needs to get persuaded uh membership started just five dollars a month you could buy a product from one of our sponsors our sponsors really do help keep us afloat and we have pretty good um response from them i mean you know we have we've had some ball and branch have been very loyal sponsors for us for a long time um so but every little bit helps so i would go to we we got to make it a 600 because if we're if we stop at 599 we're going to be like a spaceship on the edge of the event horizon of a black hole right well we're trying

we're desperately but you can't it looks very cool like a duck you know we look very placid on the surf water surface but underneath we're pedaling furiously trying to keep the trying to keep the one step ahead of the sheriff um so go to ricochet.com join get more information please join also um next week uh the ricochet hillsdale dc live taping of the byron york show it's a terrific podcast byron york as you know is a frequent guest here and is i can't think of a better reporter covering national politics than byron uh and he will be there with molly hemingway uh which is going to be fantastic it is completely full, but we are told by our partners at Hillsdale

that it's sold out in 11 hours. But as always, if you're a member and you want to come, don't despair. Email Alex Rosenwald, alex.ricrochet.com, and we will do our best to get you there. We do want you there. We're going to be doing more of these, and they're so much fun. And actually, Byron and

Molly together is sort of a kind of a dream team. And there are, of course, upcoming meetups, if you're a member of Ricochet. Big get-togethers are set for June 25 in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the last weekend in July in Milwaukee. And there's another one in the works in Northern California, which apparently is

now a hotbed of right-wing revolution. Join Ricochet. Check out the Ricochet meetup group for more details. It's then there in the member feed. We want to see you. We do. This is part of the fun of Ricochet is getting together IRL as the kids. Yes, indeed.

I want to have one here in Minneapolis, Minnesota. That would be fun. I remember doing one in a barbecue joint in Fargo, North Dakota, years and years ago. And that was great fun. So, yes, that is the part of the pleasure of Ricochet. May I ask a Lilacs summer question? Is the state fair going to reopen now? Oh, yes.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So you'll be there this summer? Yes. You know, I haven't actually gone to the fair as a fair goer to just enjoy it in however many years. I go there to work. I've been going there to work year after year after year. And what I do is I stand on a stage and talk to people at the small stage that we built in front of the Star Tribune building, which is this great big structure.

We've been on that site for decades. Do you guess their weight? Anything close to it. I mean, what I have to do is to just do something to bring people by. Very dangerous. I used to have a gimmick in as much as we gave away lip balm, flavored lip balm twice a day. And it was very popular. Every year people want to know what the flavor is going to be. Chocolate chip, grass, traffic cone. I mean, we always have some clever little flavor. And so it would come by twice. People would come by to get it twice a day,

and they would stand in a long line. And so I would have this hundreds of people that are waiting for lip balm. They're not there for me. They're there for complimentary emollients. But as long as I have this crowd, you can do something fun with them. And I'd get them all to chant things like, I love the Star Tribune. I want lip balm. I'm not going to pay for it because I'm cheap. And it was great. Hot sun pouring, pounding down. And my people in need of lip balm. I don't have that anymore. They just give it out. This is what it's come to, people. We've lost all of our standards. They handed it out to anybody who walks by. So I have to come up with something else. So one of the things that you've been able to get at the State Fair every single year is a

fluorescently-hued yardstick. And you can find them over there at the gas place where they teach who to call before you dig. And for some reason, there's this connection between fluorescent yardsticks and the gas people. It's been there, cemented for decades. So I have one of these every time I get up there, and then I try to engage people in fair trivia. Where was this? And I tell a story about the fair. Then I hand them the magic divining fluorescent yardstick, and they have the point in the direction in which they think this thing happened.

So it's like trivia, and they can fake it. And I can also fake it by helping to guide their dowsing rod in the proper direction. It's great fun, but every day when you go to the fair and stand on that stage at noon every day for 10 days, it gets a bit tiring, and I wish that I would actually just kind of go to the fair to enjoy it. I do want to say that when I die, I want somebody to put up a state fair bench with something on it that relates to my long tenure there. You can do that. You can buy a bench, and I think it's made out of recycled milk cartons or something like that, that has your name or your family emblazoned on it so that people can sit down and rest with their back to

your name and enjoy something that you gave future generations. And believe me, this year, if it's going to be as hot as I think, it's going to be a perfect day to go to the fair. But it gets boiling, as I said, and you want to sit down in the shade and you always want to find... It's the same at home. I mean, we sit outside, we've got a gazebo and it's great. I love to enjoy this outdoor weather. I just have a problem that one of my sofas is falling apart. And that's a problem because 93% of your life, your life is spent indoors, right? But so many of our favorite moments are outdoors. The fresh air, the feeling of peace.

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Peter, you gave everybody a vocabulary lesson. I did. I did. I did. I did. I did. Would you like to read it? I'd be happy to read it. I don't quite know what came over me, but Faye Vincent, the late baseball commissioner, wrote a sweet, sweet appreciation in the Wall Street Journal of the late Roger Angel. Now that I say the word out loud, I don't know whether I'm pronouncing it correctly.

Was it Angel or Angel? I don't know. In any event, this man who was... Angel, thank you. Roger Angel, who was E.B. White's stepson and had worked at the New Yorker magazine. Yes, yep. I did not know that. His mother was E.B. White's second wife, and Roger Angel was raised from the age of,

from boyhood by E.B. White, and Roger Angel himself became a writer in much the style of E.B. White, wry, amusing, informative, and he died a couple of weeks ago at the age, as I recall, of 102. And he was active writing baseball pieces were his kind of signature work. He was an active member of the staff of the New Yorker into his 90s. And Fay Vincent wrote that Roger

Angel was, quote, fascinated and bemused by baseball, close quote. And I wrote a letter to the editor saying, may I offer a word of gratitude to Faye Vincent? That's the first correct use of bemused that I've come across in about a decade. And I sent it off, and to my astonishment, to my astonishment, they actually printed the darn thing and this is just such a pet peeve this is a little teeny teeny tiny pet peeve in fact it shows what a peevish person i am i am so tired of having bemused confused with amused as if it's some sort of slightly lesser degree of amused yeah it's like a condescending amused. It's a wry, sophisticated amused.

Yes, David Niven would be bemused. Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia. Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated. The whole data center networking portfolio.

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because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia. Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated. The whole data center networking portfolio. And they deliver. That's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center networking portfolio and they deliver that's them hey nokia right on time get your data center ai ready someday is here with nokia who's to buy your manners it just

doesn't mean that at all and that's what bob that's the one that gets you that's the one that gets me that and i have to say i once i once became agitated enough to do a search. I was going to buy a website and I was going to launch something called the Society for the Preservation of Strong Verbs. So, for example, it's not he dived, it's he dove. It's not he sneaked up behind me, it's he snuck up behind me. A strong verb is a verb that makes the past tense by an internal vowel change and not by adding ed. And it's the whole movement of modern English to eliminate them and stick on ed. And that annoys me, it just deprives the language of a kind of sweet richness. To my amazement and pleasure, I discovered that the Society for the Preservation of Strong Verbs

already exists. Well, I don't know whether you should be bemused by that. I have two thoughts. One is, I had a writing, she wasn't a writing teacher, actually, she was a professor at college who was an English language historian and a poet. This is not Harold Bloom.

No, not Harold Bloom. It's Marie Boroff, and she did a wonderful translation, essentially, from the Middle English of Sir Gowan and the Green Knight. And she did a history of the English language. And she always said, look, if you ever want to just turbocharge your writing, I shouldn't use that phrase, but at all, use Anglo-Saxon words. Yes, yes. And don't use the Latin name. Because English is so rich, it has versions of everything. So don't say royal, say kingly.

Yes, yes. And your writing just instantly gets elevated and has more impact. And then the second thing is, I guess I'm not as bemused. I accept that as your current obsession but mine remains disinterested uninterested because it seems to remove the word the meaning of disinterested from the vocabulary so you can't say i'm looking well i think people sometimes say disinterested when they mean uninterested like you want a you do not want to judge disinterested means impartial right yes and you don't want to judge who's uninterested but you do want to judge who's disinterested

yes yes and that to me is um for that matter dis and un unorganized disorganized are two different things um but for me that's the one's the one that sets my hair on fire, is the disinterested, uninterested. In a related concept, Google this week released a list of all the map of the states, and they printed all the states that people Google the spelling for, the word that people Google the spelling for. Because you know sometimes you're stuck on a word, and the best way to do it is to ask Google to type it in or to say you know what is the spelling of and it'll correct it for you and the results were mystifying to me now some of them i get florida for example was testing the spelling of separate because and we all hang at least i do i look at separate and is that an e is that an a an a right

it doesn't look right either way texas the word that they wanted to know the spelling of was uh normal okay uh wisconsin was stumped by the spelling for lose l-o-s-e and was one of three states that was actually troubled by a word that had four fewer letters north dakota did not know how to spell sorry. South Dakota was baffled by beautiful. Nebraska by beautiful is tricky. It can be. It can be. Minnesota, in this one, just absolutely paparazzi. Okay, now I can understand where the word might confound some people, but we have absolutely no cause to use it here because we haven't any celebrities.

But I think people want to know what they want to order that dish at an italian restaurant or if paparazzi's is a is a you know it's a pizza joint that i don't know somewhere they're looking for the phone number but my favorite was west virginia because the thing apparently that people in west virginia google the most to find the spelling for was west virginia which is wonderfully self-referential. I mean, put it on the license plate, the tautological state. Anyway, so we could go on for words and words and words forever, but we probably should say before we leave that we must confess to being probably more fascinated

by the Washington Post drama than the rest of the country, and that says something about us, that we all are sort of still drawn to the insular doings. Can one of you just sum that up for me? I keep getting bits and pieces of it in my Twitter feed, but I do not understand actually quite what happened. I need a very brief explainer. Guy on staff retweets joke. Joke is problematic. Woman on staff, I am assuming, woman on staff objects to his retweeting, starts brouhaha, plugs it into context of women facing problems at the post. Male reporter is suspended without pay for a month woman continues to go on a seven day long i would say tirade because that would be sort of insulting hysterical no you can't say that i deconstruct is angry at post for things and calls out other colleagues other colleagues respond

colleagues are also called out by her. Then... All on Twitter. All taking place in public. Right. Then everyone at the paper decides this is nonsense. This looks bad for the paper. And everyone who works there starts tweeting about how they enjoy it. It's collegial. It's collaborative.

It's supportive. They like the post. Another post reporter does a survey of all these people and says, hmm, isn't that interesting? They're all white. And they're all well paid. End result, company says, this is ridiculous. We look like fools in public. We are tired of this reporter. She's been badmouthing staff.

She's fired and they fire her. So she will begin her second lawsuit against the Washington Post probably pretty soon. Rob, does that seem to sum it up? Yeah, that's basically it. I mean, I'm as out of it as anyone else. I just can't bestir myself to care or to even follow it. What, are you disinterested? I'm not, because this is my industry,

and I've noticed that my newspaper actually has avoided this kind of psychodrama. And I think the reason is, is because we're not full of Ivy League graduates. I think young people or people in their 30s who've come out of these institutions and lived in East Coast media bubbles for an awful long time and have never had to confront anything except the cultures that they've been marinating in for 15 years. Act like this. They play out these particular pointless psychodramas on Twitter and it's, it's amusing to the rest of us, but the people who went to community college or land grant colleges or the rest of work through college and did waitress jobs or waiter jobs or the rest

of it have a little bit more grounding, um, and don't go on these things. So the newsrooms that I grew up in were ranged from slangy places where everybody was sleeping, drinking, to the tired places of today that seem like quiet insurance offices. But these places sound like nightmares to me, just minefields of other people's emotions. And no.

Then again, I'm in a newsroom that has, at the moment, three people in it. Thank you, China. That'll do, won't it? That'll do. Policy genius, we thank them. Bowling branch, we thank them too. And outer, support them for supporting us. Great idea. Enjoy and ricochet today. Both of these things will help us survive to number 600, as will a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, by the way. You can leave that. It allows new listeners to discover us, keep the show going, but you matter the most. You're listening,

your patronage, your membership, Peter, Rob, it's been great. And thank you everybody. We'll see you in the comments at a ricochet 4.0 next week, fellas.

Yeah, next week. But in the meantime, they wear like iron, but they feel like silk. I am informed by blue Yeti that James just came up with that. That wasn't in the copy. I think bull and branch should include a little extra premium for that. That is a brilliant line. Next week, boys.

If they want to include the premium, I'll sign the check over to Ricochet. All right. Next week. Ricochet. Join the conversation. Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere.

So I took a little trip to Nokia. Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated, the whole data center networking portfolio, and they deliver. That's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center networking portfolio and they deliver that's them hey nokia right on time get your data center ai ready someday is here with nokia hey move those routers there oh hey it's me your data center and as you can hear i'm making some big changes in here because ai is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little

trip to Nokia. Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated, the whole data center networking portfolio, and they deliver. That's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center AI ready. Someday is here with Nokia.