The Ricochet Podcast - Our [EXPLETIVE DELETED] Cities

Episode Date: May 5, 2023

New York! San Francisco! Our once grand cities are fast turning into... Yikesvilles. To help our hosts work up a diagnosis, The Ricochet Podcast needs the great Victor Davis Hanson. The quartet talk universities; they consider the unique top-down nature of this new wave of revolution and discuss whether the country is in graver danger than it was in those dreadful 1970s.Then James, Peter and Rob muse on the recently discarded standards of public decency vis-à-vis debased internet content and all-to-common swear words.

Well, kind of, sort of, yeah, maybe. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Read my lips. No new action. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lylex.

Today we talk to Victor Davis Hanson about cities, culture, the future, and all that stuff. So let's have ourselves a podcast. And the numbers have been improving. The number of crimes on subways has been declining. And I don't want people to feel anxious again when something like that comes to light. It is deeply disturbing. Believe me, you'll never get bored with winning. We never get bored. Hello, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. Let's go to ricochet.com, shouldn't we? Where you can find the most stimulating conversations, civil conversations,

mostly, on the internet. It's a wonderful place to be, and it's the reason that we are at episode number 642 right now, or something like that. We're getting up there. I'm the Ricochet Flagship Podcast, which this is. I'm James Lylex in the comforting, calm, sane bosom of the Midwest. Peter Robinson is in California in a civilized enclave with barbarism all about, I predict. And Rob Long, as usual, is in Gotham, which is either the epitome of civilization and fine living, or a hellscape in which the tunnels that run underground are beset by madness and murder of the most dystopian order. Hi, gentlemen. How are you today? Hey, a little bit of both, I think is true.

Probably so. Well, that's the news this week, of course, is that there was a gentleman who was talking loud on the subway and got choked out. And so everyone is retreating to their usual stances. Are we going to get more of Curtis Sliwa types to guard the population because the civic authorities seem unlikely to do so? Is this another opportunistic way of taking somebody's death and making from it a bunch of statements that aren't applicable? Give me your take. Rob, it's your town. It's my town. Well, I mean, I don't think it's going to sound like a Bernie Getz moment to some people, depending on how you're disposed. Bernie Getz, famous subway vigilante Bernie Getz, if you're under the age of 90, maybe you need to have a refresher.

He was on the subway. Somebody attempted to mug him. Some robbers attempted to mug him yeah he pulled out a gun it turns out it was a screwdriver he pulled out a gun and he shot and um so he instantly became either a vilified vigilante in the you know in the style of the time right which was sort of a time of charles bronson runs and clinton eastwood etc 1984 was the year i just checked on that wow or he became a folk hero it's important to know by the way that the crime still like soared in new york city the

high water or low water mark depending how you look at it murders in new york city was 1990 um uh so he sort of crystallized what a lot of people thought about new york city which was that it was you know this dangerous place where um where uh thieves uh were all over and they you put a sign in your car in window back then i mean really up until the early 90s saying no radio in car because they had did a thing called smash grab people just smash in your car and steal your radio and run um this is different because everyone who's ridden the subway feels, has felt at risk, not from somebody trying to steal, not from some violent but rational actor, right? A thief trying to take your money. I want your money.

You have money. Give me your watch and your phone and your money. But by some ambulatory psychotic who has been in and out of some version of prison and psychiatric care and is now wandering the streets and is capable of any kind of irrational, sudden irrational violent movement, like pushing you in front of a train. That's very different. I mean, I think at this point, muggers would be a welcome relief. They'd be, oh my God, the return of the muggers would be a welcome relief they'd be oh my god but the return of the muggers would be like well thank god people you know regain their sanity professionals yeah so this this is i think a watershed moment for a lot it is unfortunately it is not a watershed moment for a lot of people who for whom it should be which is their reflexive attack on the guy who

protected people in the subway from a known criminal a known violent criminal who'd been arrested 42 42 prior arrests 42 outstanding warrants and an outstanding warrant on him um this this this this this actually is a great big divide it's not between liberals and conservatives really it's between um progressive politicians elected politicians who are uh busying themselves with you know idiotic wastes of time um like you know trans education and prosecuting a former president and citizens of the city that just think okay that's all cherry and ice cherry and hot fudge sauce on top let's stick to your knitting the subways are dangerous places,

and they shouldn't be. And the fact that they are isn't a failure of the police, right? It isn't like in the 60s and 70s and 80s where you said, well, you know, the NYPD is pretty corrupt or this or that. It's not a failure of policing. It's a failure of policing it's a failure of the of the of the system that is being administered this guy was arrested 42 times so it's not but it's not a failure if this is exactly what the intended outcome should be i mean it would be a failure that could be but i don't know what i mean i mean it from the perspective of a citizen yeah if if if if they the point is to not get these people criminally justice system involved and to remand them to some sort of restorative justice program that is not a failure at all that he's been then he's walking around the streets with 40 warrants is the

it's the exact outcome they desire and believe is good for society or at least the individual or at least their sense of justice um i would just say the difference here is that that no uh this is a no one is saying that this guy is a the point about this guy isn't that he was a bad guy it's that he was an insanely an insane person who was dangerous right and he's wandering around the streets um and that seems to be um but that that is actually crossing a lot of partisan lines right now in New York City, which is sort of a good thing. Thank God they still vote any differently. Peter, you have in California and it's a large place. It's huge. I know I can't just make broad sweeping generalizations.

But you also have a problem with the unhoused, as this phrase has it now, mentally unwell with lots of people who are in various throes of psychosis walking around the streets with their pants hanging down or frozen in place because they've taken Crocodile or Trank or something. Here's the thing. We have more of this now than before. When Rob said that previously it was just your basic thugs who were going car to car and shaking people down or stealing radio, now we have just crazy ambulatory people who are doing mad, crazy things.

Do we have an increase in the number of people who are biologically insane because something got unwired in their brain? Or, as I would suspect, this is the result of a class of drugs that is flooding the markets and rewiring people's brains and making them nuts. This is not a natural sort of mental illness. This is an assumed mental illness by people who've gone down the route of drugs, facilitated, of course, by massive amounts of them from China and Mexico. That's one take. What do you think? I'd go for that. The crime rate in New York is still lower than it is in Detroit and Chicago. We get that tossed at us, even as right out here in San Francisco,

we keep getting reminded that the rate of violent crime remains low. I'm happy it does. It takes place. But the streets out here are still in San Francisco, not where I am in Palo Alto, but San Francisco is 30 miles away. You don't have to walk far to find streets with empty syringes, sidewalks with empty syringes. One of my kids drove up and parked his car to see some buddies, and within three hours, the window had been smashed. This happens over and petty crime, dirt, a sense of danger. Now, here's what happened earlier this week. Nordstrom announced that it's going to close both of its downtown San Francisco stores. That's going to be over 350,000 square feet of retail space empty. Here's what Nordstrom said in its email to employees, quote, the dynamics

of the downtown San Francisco market have changed dramatically over the past several years. Yeah, have they? Impacting customer foot traffic to our stores and our ability to operate successfully, which means the ability of employees to get in there and out of the store and feel safe while they're going to the store and from the store and in the store. So, it seems to me that the crime is one thing and that there's a blazing incident that gets everybody's attention like the one we opened talking about, but this overall level of unease that things are not, are spinning out out of control that the city is no longer being run with a primary view to simple safety and cleanliness both in new york and in san francisco and the feeling that these cities are well new york is so big and so vibrant but it's just the feeling that there's something dying something dying dying. This is all unnerving.

There is some good news, or at least here's, can I give a silver lining here? Sure, I'm sure. Is that in New York City, I don't know about the stats for San Francisco, but in New York, but I suspect it might be the same or similar. In New York, the crime is not higher than it was in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and early 90s. The murder rate's lower. Assault rates. I mean, all the indications are better than they were if you go back far enough. Which means that there's a whole population of New Yorkers who have a, I mean, and they're young, too.

Maybe they've only been here 10 years, 15 years who um have a memory of this city as incredibly livable right i mean new york city even now has has a lower crime rate than with a lot of american cities um and a lot of world cities um but their their standards just were raised under um very very good firm law and order management you know the the one-two punch of ria giuliani and mike bloomberg so their standards for what what an urban environment should be are very very high and they're very upset now james is right that may not translate for a whole bunch of reasons into sort of something happening at the ballot but it in the past it has and it it the difference here is that the people who were living in the city in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, early 90s felt that there was an absolutely inevitable decline.

Yes. That there was just no way to stop it. You couldn't stop it. This is just what happens to these cities. And then it was turned around. They suddenly saw, oh, no, actually, you can have people sitting outside of the street and little tables. And suddenly, Bryant Park is this beautiful place that has seasonal events. And it's lovely.

It's not a crack den. It's not an open-air drug market anymore. But it doesn't have to be the way it was. And I think there are enough young people, I hope, that think, oh, well, this is simple. The way to solve this problem isn't we have to change human nature or change the course of history um we just have to get the successful policies back and the successful policies though some will say uh included stop and frisk it included a whole bunch of things that are now off the table because of disparate impact uh you have the left parties have all made that shift

we're not going to do that anymore. This is contrary to our foundational beliefs about the way society operates. So, I mean, there was an appetite for it back then because people wanted something done. But now there's all of these intellectual guardrails that keep people from adopting the things that worked before, it seems which is what's worrisome on new york against san francisco is different in a number of ways but on new york i thought kevin williamson had a wonderful line when he was with us last week this is a paraphrase i can't quote him exactly but this is a close paraphrase new york is the greatest place in the world to live as long as the streets are safe and the subway works it's just not complicated it's just not complicated out here our our violent crime rate again i'm talking about san francisco

the violent crime rate remains low but the petty crime rate is way up and you can feel it you can sense it we don't have uh we don't have a subway out here like the sub, but there are buses, there's the BART system and so forth. People rely on that less. For San Francisco, again, it's not complicated. The city is so beautiful, so filled with bright young kids, just such a spectacular place that all you have to do is make sure the streets are clean and safe and they can't do that it's just astounding well again peter you're talking about victimizing the people who are the uh the victims of capitalism since we have an unfair system that is shot through with inequity and houselessness is everywhere and untreated mental illness abounds because ronald reagan personally kicked open the

doors of the mental asylums and ushered everybody into the sunlight blinking uh we can't do anything can't you anything that you try to do is going to victimize the victims which seems to be the take that they have in minneapolis we have not a subway but we have a light rail system which is becoming well has become unusable for most people because it's overrun with people who are doing meth and fenty and smoking and weed and the rest of it and and being in their seats did you say fenty fenty yeah is that what is? Good use of the lingo, yeah. Good druggy lingo for you. So you have people who are rightly discouraged from using it because they fear for their personal safety.

And that sort of, I mean, when we built this thing, this huge multi-billion dollar system, it was supposed to be the jewel of our transit system, shuttling people from the burbs to the jobs downtown. The whole model is broken because the jobs aren't downtown anymore. And this elaborate expensive system has been taken over by people who have no vested interest in maintaining any sort of social public order. And again, we know what the solution is. Send in the Metro Transit Police who will remove the people, who will make them pay, and say, no, it is against the rules of our society as we understand them for you to do drugs on this train but they don't they're talking about it but they don't plane going overhead sorry about that the perils of living here in the urban city that i do um you know i gotta tell you this though it is may right You know, I got to tell you this, though.

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And we thank Bowland Branch for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Now we welcome back to the podcast Victor Hansen, Martin and Ilya Anderson, Senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He's written more than a dozen books on a variety of fascinating subjects, and most recently, The Dying Citizen. You can find his latest pieces along with his podcast, The Victor Davis Hanson Show, at VictorHanson.com. Welcome back, Victor. Good to talk to you.

Thank you for having me. You know, we're going to get to the book and the matter of immigration a second, Cinco de Mayo being upon us. But we were just talking before about the possible death of American cities, the double whammies of crime, people feeling unease, and the emptying out of the office infrastructure and the rest of it. We've seen this before. We've come back from it before. but are we a unique inflection point in the life of american cities that may actually not be retrievable there wasn't the work from home option when urban cores were dying before and now why go downtown yeah i think i think we're it's a little different because of what you said i had just been in san francisco and i was shocked

but 30 to 40 percent, it looks like these beautiful buildings that were built during the Renaissance between 2000 and 2015 are empty. And when you go down Market Street, it looks like a medieval city. But the other thing is, this isn't the Democratic Party anymore that's running those cities this is a jacobin party they have ideological agendas that are not compatible with the old democratic party they don't really believe that crime is an individual act they believe that it reflects uh critical legal theory critical racial, that if you go in and you smash and grab in Walgreens in San Francisco and you take out allergy medicine or something, that's only against the law because wealthy white elites don't steal allergy medicine. So, therefore, they make laws

against it. So, all the laws that are being broken are subject to debate. And you'd see these people. So that means, and then the people who live there, they're kind of like, when you talk to them and you see them interviewed, they're sort of like H.G. Wells' Eloy. They're just kind of, I don't know, impotent. They just think, wow, I voted for all this. And in the old days, it was great. And maybe it'll come back.

But I'm afraid now these other people that I can't condemn for various reasons have taken my life away. And I'll just sort of take it. So there's no, I mean, once in a while they get angry and they recall a school board member or they tell you that, oh, we've lost Lowell High School, it's now a mess, but London Breed's not doing this, or they recall Boone, but they don't, they're not, they're being shepherded off to oblivion and they don't seem to want to, or they're not able to object. So, it's different. I think it's much different. So, Victor, could I ask, on that point, is it that the tech, the long, long tech boom that we've had here in Northern California, this applies to the rest of the country as well, as you'll see in a moment, but it's especially vivid here if I'm right about it, and I'm not

sure I am, but the rich are now so rich that they can simply insulate themselves. It's a little inconvenient to have to navigate dirty streets in San Francisco, but you know, the streets aren't that dirty up on Pacific Heights. The streets aren't that bad up on Knob Hill. So, this dispersion of income, the rich have really become old days, Rob and I are old enough to remember, that town would drift a little bit too far to the left. And then you'd have, then there would be the sort of big boys, the big guys in Wall Street would get together and say, okay, this is far enough. Well, there'll be some community organization or they'll back a camp. And the wealthy people, it wasn't they alone who saved New York, but they backed Rudy Giuliani. There was a limit to how bad things could get because there were adults and they tended to be people of wealth who would enforce the limit.

And in San Francisco, it's as though this is the rich. I don't know. In their minds, they've simply walked away or they've said, the top of this city, the hilltops, Pacific Heights are still pretty good. That's where we all live. We're fine. I think so. I wrote an article in the current new criterion about Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and Stanford. And one of the themes was that these people are never subject to the consequences of their own ideology. That's it. There's not $9 trillion of market capitalization in Silicon Valley. So we've never seen, history of civilization, that concentration of wealth.

It's not just, you know, Mark Zuckerberg or the Google people. It's low-level management that have $5, $10, $15, $20 million. Right, thousands of million. And they were able to... Right, thousands of millionaires. Thousands of them. And they go, they drive around. I talk to people now and they drive in and knock on people's door and say, I'd like to buy this house for $5 million. And so that's a lot of it. And you can see how that permeates. California used to be run by Los Angeles money and members of Sam Yorty, the LA Time, the Chandler family.

It's run now by the Bay Area, which wasn't the dominant force. But after Silicon Valley came in, you can see what's happened. If you look at kilowatt charges, what they've done to PG&E, it's the highest electrical scale in the country, but it's predicated on people living there that don't have a 110 degree August like we do down here, where all the Mexican-American people that are poor are in Walmart trying to keep cool. And when you look at charter schools, they oppose charter schools, they oppose teachers' unions, but they find a way with prep schools to get around that. So they always, and that raises a really

interesting question, whether it's sort of a medieval penance or what it is, but they feel so bad about all these problems that they voice their morality in cosmic terms. But when you actually look at their lives, they're completely selfish, and they don't integrate with people that don't look like themselves necessarily but they they they hector everybody and you can really see it on the stanford campus but you can see it in san francisco too the other thing is if you add to that mix uh you don't if you i was walking around san francisco two weeks ago i just noticed that when you look at recesses of schools, there's no kids out there. There's no families living in San Francisco. The schools are dying. So you don't have a lot of

upper middle class people who say, I can't let my child get on the bus or they're crazy in my school. What you do is you have a lot of wealthy people, and they put their kids, you know, down on the peninsula or somewhere in prep school. So there's no families except for the Asian community, and they're starting to change a little bit. Even they, you know, they're more bewildered than angry. I talked to some people, and they say, you know, we sent our kids to Lowell High School. It was the best in California. It's one of the worst now. Victor, for our listeners, we should talk. Lowell High School, correct me on this, but Lowell High School,

it used to be competitive to be admitted. Yes. It's a public school. It's a public school. It's like Bed-Stuy in Manhattan, for example. Boston Latin School. Exactly. And then they did away with the entrance exams, or in one way

or another, they eliminated or very much dumbed down the standards and totally changed the character of the school. Correct? Yeah, they did. But they didn't, remember what they didn't do, they didn't fire the faculty or at least immediately change their curriculum. So, when you admit somebody on the lottery, that is considered by the advocates of that new policy as synonymous with graduation. So, the teachers then have to graduate those people or that they exhibit a systematic plan or evidence of illiberality. It's like Stanford University. The class of 2026 that's coming in, according to the Stanford website, is 22% white, and the SAT was optional. They will not reveal the mean score of the people who chose to take the SAT to enhance their application,

but they did release to the press that somewhere between 60% and 70 percent of those who chose to take the SAT and were among the one percent in the nation that got a perfect score they resected 60 to 70 percent of those applicants and they were proud of that and so what does that do to the faculty at Stanford if you can't you either have to do one of three things. You either have to change the curriculum. So if you're teaching history of Western humanities, Homer to Dante, you have maybe half the number of authors that you did. Or you can inflate the grades. Or you can do what one professor said to me, I'm not going to die on the altar of standards. You can keep your standards and then you exhibit a systematic prejudice that will be evident to a diversity, equity, and inclusion czar. There's 80 of them on campus, I think.

So it's happening everywhere. And I did a Hoover fundraiser to a bunch of Silicon Valley guys. And a guy came up and he said, you're so passe. And I said, what? He goes, for the last three years, we give our own tests. Don't you think that we're going to do that someday? We already do it.

We give our own private tests on coding. And even for people in HR and PR, we want to have a test. If they're not going to do it at Stanford. And he said, by the way, I would rather any day hire a Georgia Tech coder, electrical engineer than the Stanford. So I think it's happening. People are reacting to this. So, hey, Victor, it's Rob in New York. Thanks for joining us. So when standards fall, right, they don't just fall in a day or overnight they fall slowly and nobody kind of notices right the old frog

frog doesn't know it's being boiled um but i just just to interrupt myself if i'm listening and i'm not from california stanford and i'm i am needing one of those things and you say that people are going to be more interested in hiring somebody from george tech or somewhere else i think that's great that's actually the market working right i do i do i think it's great so if the market works here do you think the market's going to work um do you think it can work the way it worked in 1990 in the 1990s when um the most dangerous city in america new york, did a law and order mayor, and within a short order became one of the safest cities in America. Do you think that's an attractive,

an attracting force to young people around the country and around the world to come to the city because it's New York City and it's not a cesspool? Do you think it's a market correction that could happen here? Yeah, I think there's all these natural centrifugal forces. They always react. The biggest one that we've seen, 500,000 Californians in the last 18 months left.

They just left. And another example is we in this community that I live near is about 90% Hispanic, and we're one of the drop-off points for the open border policy, the six and a half million illegal entrants. But that is creating a huge backlash by people who will tell you their mom can't get into the dialysis clinic. Their kid is roughed up at school because he doesn't speak Spanish. And these are Mexican-American people voicing these complaints. So there always is going to be a reaction to the reaction. I don't know. But the problem is, eventually it works out. But it's kind of like Hemingway said of going broke, you know, gradually and then it was suddenly.

It's suddenly now. I think the COVID lockdowns, the George Floyd aftermath, the rioting, the Trump, the whole Trump controversy, all of that, and then the change in the Democratic Party, all of that was a perfect storm. And this is the most crisis. I've never seen this country, even in the 60s, at this crisis level. Well, that's interesting. We'll get to that in a second. But when you mentioned the 500,000 people in California who move out,

the worry is that this diaspora seeds these now red places with people of blue. Yeah, I think that depends on where they go. You know, if you're conservative in California, you tend to go to Texas or Tennessee or Florida or Wyoming. If you're liberal, you tend to go to Colorado or Nevada or Oregon or Washington. Washington doesn't have a place that you left that's the that's the word when you said that we're you've never seen the country in a set of christ let's let's go back to the battle days of public conspicuous political assassination

and uh and and horrible divisions in the country over an unpopular war 67 through 73 inflation oil shocks just the general feeling of i don't feel that there is a sense of america in permanent irreversible decline i mean we got problems but the sense was all pervasive in the early 70s we can't make anything what we do make breaks we're dead for innovation we're militarily useless it was all across the board the america the sense of american decline and crisis in the late 60s early 70s as compared to today that's my that's my pushback to the classical scholar who knows more than i do yeah but if you look at uh the stanford electrical engineering department in those days or you look at the harvard english department or you look at the people who were in the state Department, there was a professionalism still.

And there was an Americanic system. I went to UC Santa Cruz right in that period you're talking about. And I remember my father brought me from the farm. He dumped me there and he said, hey, Victor, I just walked out of your co-ed dorm and there's a guy and a woman fornicating in the shower and i said oh wow this is going to be interesting and then he said look at that door and there was drugs listed in the cal college morrison house uh you know marijuana psilocybin with a price tag so it was wild but then when i went in to take a class in classics. It was almost Renaissance type. It was, there was, you had to turn your paper in time.

You had to know Greek grammar and Latin. It was, this is at UC Santa Cruz. And that's not true today. And I know that it was more chaotic. And some of it is, you know, we, some of it was the Reagan revolution that stopped the continuous 60s. There was a hiatus for 12 years between Reagan and Bush. And then the younger Bush, that eight years, there were roadblocks. I'm not saying that they were perfect, but there were impediments.

But Barack Obama was not a traditional Democrat, yet he looks that way now. But he wasn't. He was considered a more radical Democrat. And now, to the extent Joe Biden is in control of things, the people who are running this agenda, I guess what I'm saying is in the 60s, people marched on the dean's office. Today, at Stanford, to take the example I know best, the revolution's coming from the dean's office. They marched on the Pentagon. The revolution's coming from the dean's office. They marched on the Pentagon. The revolution is coming top down from the general. Mark Milley. I mean, you're short. This hadn't happened. During Vietnam, the volunteer army had

all the people we needed. We're short 16,000 people in the army. And I have a kind of a joke when I used to, when I talk this year on military affairs to audiences, I'd say, okay, anybody's kids going to go to the military? They all said no. And then I got the same refrain. Oh, my father fought in Vietnam. My husband fought in the first Gulf War. I'm not sending my son. And then when you look at the data, white males died at about double their demographics in Afghanistan and Iraq. I don't know if that's good or bad, but 75% of the casualties in frontline combat were white males. But if you go out and target that group and you say that you're going to root out white rage as Milley did or Austin did, Chief of Navalty, and you don that you're going to root out white rage, as Milley did, or Austin did, Chief of Navalty,

and you don't present data that there is an epidemic of white rage, then you alienate those people. Same thing with the transgendered, and they're not joining. If you look at all the data, that rubric is responsible for the shortfall. I haven't seen that before. That's going to affect the efficacy of the military very quickly. I think the Navy entering into a marketing partnership with Bud Light, as they have announced, I think that will turn everything around. Yeah. So I think it's a little bit, it's not as dramatic. You're absolutely right.

There's not the explosions and the Weathermen, at least yet. But the difference was when you had the Watts riots or you had the Rodney King riots, then you had the police. There was a sense George W. I'll give you an example. Colin Powell called up George W. Bush during the Rodney King as chairman of the Joint Chiefs and said, if you need 5,000 troops, Mr. President, you have them. And Bush sent 5,000 troops right into

South Central. When this happened and Trump suggested you did that, everybody thought he was a dictator. And they said, you can't do that. And so we had 120 days. $2 billion to $3 billion, 35 killed, arson, looting. They tried to torch a federal courthouse, a police precinct, the St. John's. And it was almost, as Kamala Harris said, it's not going to stop. It shouldn't stop. It's going to go on all the election. And the head of the 1619 Project said, you know, looting is not a good thing. That's new, that the authorities or the establishment was a deer in the headlights reaction. The mayor of Portland or Seattle.

I've never seen that before. Yeah, Victor, you said something I thought was really fascinating. I just want to go back to it for a minute. That the revolutionaries or the progressives or the sort of, I don't know what, the disturbers are coming from the top. In olden times, the traditional family dinner, the young person at the dinner table says something outrageous designed to give the older person a heart attack and a stroke right there, right? That seemed to be how the jungle of the family dinner table worked. The young lion is trying to give the old lion a stroke. Now, every parent I know, my age and older, is constantly outraging their children by saying something sort of anodyne and, you know, maybe baffled and not using the right,

whatever pronoun or the right word. And it really is the opposite. The sort of the radicals are now teaching. The radicals are now governing. They're now, I mean, New York City, where I live, is not a machine state in any meaningful way. What it is, it's a policy state. It's a May 5th farm. Yeah, it is. We saw that at Stanford Law School. The person,

we forget, that really ended that lecture by Judge Duncan wasn't the students. They were protesting. It was the Dean of Inclusion, Equity Inclusion, who hijacked the event and had a pre-written in expectation that she would do that and then condemned him for speaking out and that was the end of it and then she's now on leave uh but it's it it's from the top faculty administration down the pentagon hierarchy of generals who are going to revolve out to corporate boards right and they know that corporations arewing, and they prep their attitude and their profile downward. You talk to lieutenant colonels, and they all say, I'm never going to be promoted on how many shells hit the target. I'm just not.

But before we get too gloomy, Victor, because I know I want to make sure it's Friday afternoon. Come on. Yeah, I don't want to be too gloomy. So name one or two things that you think, you know, what are the indications that you might be looking for that things are turning around? I actually found, I mean, maybe I'm grasping here desperately at whatever floating piece of detritus I can. I think it's interesting that the big brands that were, you know, unimpeachable,

a Stanford diploma, a Yale Law School diploma, there are other brands like that, maybe for some people that might even include something like Disney. Those are now being shaken. And those brands now no longer have the luster they had. And part of us is sort of true conservatives. We're just a little nervous with any kind of change. We talk a big game about economic disruption and all that stuff. But when it really happens, we get a little nervous. Right. But isn't that good?

Isn't it? I mean, I feel that way about the American party system. The American party system is putting up probably may likely put up two very damaged, very unpopular politicians. It just seems like these party the the institutions we've been clinging to for 30 40 years both the big brands and maybe even the big political brands are out of gas and maybe we're looking at something new happening yeah i had a i have talked to an editor in new york and she said gone are the days you want to hire a Yale English major. So yeah, I think that the other thing that's... I want to pile in on that. I just want to pile in on that very point. I had lunch not long ago with somebody who had a very impressive 20-year career in the financial district of New York.

And this guy had been to an Ivy League school and was a very good athlete. And in those days, 20 years ago, if you were a good athlete from an Ivy, you could write your ticket on Wall Street. Rob and I were rejected by Wall Street, which shows that there were still some standards in those days. But if you were an athlete, an oarsman, okay. He said, that is just over. They don't try. Standards still matter in the financial world. You have to be smart.

You have to be hardworking. And an Ivy degree, even among athletes, is no longer considered a guarantee of that. They're looking at Ohio. In a certain sense, Rob said this earlier, it's good in a way that now Goldman and J.P. Morgan are looking to Ohio State. Absolutely. But the old to Ohio State. Absolutely. But the old world is collapsing. That's the point.

Yeah, I think so. And I think here 45% of the state of California identifies as Mexican-American. And they are integrating, assimilating, intermarrying, and they are gradually, I think it'll take another 10 years, they're gradually becoming to the point as the Italians in the 19th century. So if your name now is Giuliani or Cuomo, you can't adjudicate their political leanings. I think now, pretty soon, Lopez and Terra, and it's already starting to happen and uh the democratic party all has this elite hispanic in the legislature that have power but right below them guys that are 30 40 50 60 with families every single thing they're pushing from open borders to transgenderism to um these new attitudes toward crime.

They don't like it. And I think they're starting to vote. Here where I am, all of our board of supervisors, local assembly, state, we have Hispanic candidates, and about a third of them are conservative Republicans. Mike Gonzalez is our congressional, right, you know, 15 feet away, and then David Valadao is right over here. So it's starting to change, and that's, I think that's… And you just named, I don't know those two, I don't follow them as closely as you

do, but my impression is you just named, in Gonzalez and Valadao, you just named in gonzalez and and valadeo he's valadeo you just named two smart tough hard-working guys they are and valadeo is the only person there was only two that voted to impeach trump he called me about it i said you should have pled that you had covet that day but he but he uh he survived and i just gave a campaign. He just called me, and I introduced him in a campaign rally. He's Portuguese, but he speaks Spanish better. Every time he runs, these guys bring out these elite third-generation left-wing Hispanics to defeat him, and they don't speak Spanish. He speaks it fluently and mike gonzalez is a wonderful candidate and so i think there's there's that's hopeful as as well and then there's always the

fallback that when things get so bad people come out of the woodwork that you one other thing because i was asked this by you guys that is it when you look at Matt Taibbi and you look at Shetland Berger and you look at Barry Weiss and Bill Maher, you start to get the impression that these people feel they've created a Frankenstein and the monster now is devouring them. And they understand that that can't go on. It's not going to be the guys who run the grifting organizations that mass mail and do noisy things on campus and the rest of it. It's going to be the people that, the ones that you just mentioned.

I don't agree with them on every single issue. I don't agree with Glenn Greenwald on a whole raft of things, but there's an intersection about government restriction of information, as Taibbi's also talking about, that it's a new core. It's a new issue around which people of disparate intellectual beliefs can coalesce, and I think it's a good one, because the objective of that is maximization of freedom of speech and the rest of it, which are things that we've got to take back. And if it's a bipartisan thing that does it, and I got to, you know, be in the same bed with people who have completely different ideas economically, I'm going to do that for a while in order to restore some key, some key points. You said, and again, get back to what

you said before, before we let you go, because we have to, that a lot of these generals will go through the revolving door and end up on corporate boards that have left-wing agendas. That's true. Maybe some of those people on those boards do, but do you think that maybe it's a lot of the people in the elite circles don't necessarily subscribe to these luxury beliefs with any degree of conviction? They're very easily detached from them, but they do because A, it's a convenient and necessary means of signaling where you are in the virtue scale and b perhaps they have an exaggerated idea of how popular these ideas amongst the general population are that it's not just the mega knuckle draggers handling snakes

and speaking in tongues down in georgia no there is a broad-based distaste for a wide variety of these things because they go against a biology and be essential american ideas about our identification and i'd say 80 it's sort of how many people join were for the bolsheviks in 1917 or the national socialists 1933 or the maoist it doesn't i think you're right 70 or 80 percent do it out of necessity or perceived advantage or just, you know, in a way, sloth. But it doesn't really matter if they do it because most of these revolutionary movements start with a very hardcore, the squad, the Elizabeth Warrens, the Bernie Sanders, the Obama. And if they can convey through the institutions of which they control, corporate boardroom, Hollywood, professional

sports, K-12, academia, Silicon Valley, traditional and social media, and they can convey like they did with the Bud Light for a while, then they can win. But they don't have, you're absolutely right, they don't have people who sincerely agree with them. They just feel, my wife teaches at clovis community college she's in a history runs a little history department there and it's all it's all woke but the number of people that she knows who believes it is very small very just remember the bolsheviks were the mensheviks actually in the mensheviks were the bolsheviks yeah victor thanks so much victor hansen.com new book all that stuff we'll talk to

you again always fascinating we didn't get to the things we want to talk about because heck it's just fun to talk to you about all kinds of too many crises victor will see you this coming week yes yes you're going to washington oh you're coming down here i'm going to selma victor driving his tesla yes well he may well we may have to meet him with a bag of batteries halfway there but yeah on the farm that's great you have a tesla charger oh victor you have some explain wait wait you have some explaining to do. You have some explaining to do. My wife is a big fan of Elon Musk, so she went out and got Starlink, and then she demanded that she drive to work a Tesla so that I could put a 220 charger.

So, Scotty can charge up. Ah, well. All right, she's going to go deep and long in Dogecoin. Keep her off that particular. All right, Dr. L all right dr thanks so much i think about a survey that says something like eight percent of american people want an ev and ford loses a huge amount of money in every one of the vehicles that they have it's one of those perfect instances where nobody really wants this en masse we want the gas car but everything is mitigating against us having one because our bidders believe that we shouldn't it's like the gas stove the gas oven uh and all the rest of it um and that's where you just wonder rob's use the boiling frog thing

but you know there's just uh not a lot of evidence to me that i always feel like winston smith with julia standing at the window you know looking at the proles and saying, that will be, you know, that will be what takes us away from Big Brother. The rest of this, the proles are the future, the proles are the hope. And that never arrives. There's just the knock on the door and the arrest in Room 101.

Anyway, there's no segue there, because I wouldn't want to actually go to a product after having said something so depressing. So I will say to Rob that we got meetups coming where people can get together and either be joyful and optimistic and hopeful or amusing. The great thing about the meetups is that people are joyful and optimistic and hopeful in person. I think actually people and people all over are much more happy and joyful

and easy to get along with in person than they are online. Ricochet members are easy to get along with online and they're even better in person. So if you have been looking to meet your fellow members, please do. Randy's got another meetup for Winston-Salem in mid-July. Matt Balzer's asking for RSVPs for the annual German Fest meetup in Milwaukee.

That's the last weekend in July. There's more stuff going on. So you go to ricochet.com for the meetup. I think it's called meetup tab or something. If these meetups are, are inconveniently scheduled or located for you, there is a simple solution. Join Ricochet,

put up a post. Hey, how about a meetup here or there and name a date. Someone, people will show because that's what Ricochet members do. They show up. And we had a great, great meetup last month in New Orleans.

I look forward to the next one that I can make. But, but that's the fun of Ricochet. It's a membership. It's a club, and we want you to join. And remember, if you're absolutely, completely clinically paranoid, and you don't want to join any sort of site that you think will trace back to you, and your opinions will get back to you, you can always use a pseudonym.

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Well, I'm here to tell you. You could possibly go on your computer and ask ChatGPT which one they want. Because everyone talking about GPT and artificial intelligence is going to change the world. Microsoft and Google, they're all investing rather heavily in AI for search. But guess what? They're also the same big tech companies that determine your search results. And only now they get to cut out a whole new layer from the information pie that you see. So why should these companies link off to third-party websites and the search results when they can let their robot generate the perfect answer to your question?

I'm not sure about that. Every time that I ask ChatGPT this or any of the other AM models, I'm always mindful of the guardrails that are put in place and how they reflect the biases of the people who write the programs. Well, listen, you can get around this. You can use ExpressVPN to add a layer of protection between you and big tech. See, ExpressVPN app, it hides your unique IP address on all your devices. I mean, it makes it much more difficult then for big tech to identify who I am,

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number one by those of us here at Ricochet, expressvpn.com slash ricochet. And we thank ExpressVPN for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. A few seconds here before we have to go. You know, let's discuss whether... Let me put it another way. One of the things that's fascinating about this whole book-burning, book-banning-in-schools conversation

is you say, well, actually, what they're trying to do is keep from middle schools graphic novels that have rather explicit representations of sex. Maybe we don't need that. And now Utah is being banned in Pornhub because of Utah's age verification rules. And it's like, okay, we're not going to ban all this stuff all over the country and make sure that every picture of a woman has her clothes down to her ankles. We're just saying maybe make it harder for 14-year-old kids to see the most grotesque, debasing stuff out there.

Shouldn't that be? I mean, the right is really bad at making the argument about what we're trying to do because either you have a complicit media that just extrapolates from this that you just want to bat it and you're a bunch of prudes and the rest of it. No, I mean, we're just trying to carve out a period of childhood that maybe has some innocence past the My Little Pony or six-year-old stage. Well, not My Little Pony. Adults are into that. You know what I mean.

Guys? Well, I mean, part of the deliciously attractive, one of the great attributes of being young is if you're interested in brainwashing people and getting them, that's incredibly great. It's too rich and they're too vulnerable, right? If you want to sell people on something, you want to sell them on smoking, you sell them on sugary cereal or something, it's better to get them when they're young, right? Before their brand tastes have been locked in. So you can see why companies like that. And you can see why larger economic interests like that, right? And you can see why progressives like that. Because if I get them and they're in third grade, second grade, third grade, fourth grade, then I may have them for the rest of their life. It doesn't really matter what conversations happen at dinner table because I have them for eight hours. You only have them for two.

And then there's an argument about bedtime, right? That's kind of how, that's sort of the power struggle. But in general, we've had this sort of kind of laissez-faire attitude about what children, I mean, I remember when I was a kid, I never heard the F word. Ever. Ever. Ever. And I didn't hear it on the street. I mean, it would have been like, oh, my God. It would have been shocking.

Now, you walk down the street, you hear everything. If people drive by, you can hear their music and you can hear the N word. I mean, I hear it maybe 10 times a day walking around New York City. It is just a natural course. I mean, Twitter, for all of its, you know, whatever benefits it has, I'm not sure it has any, but just to say it has them, is a pornography delivery device.

That's what it does. No one pays attention to that. You keep saying that, and it isn't for me. There's nothing that pops up in my phone. That's because you're not interested in it. But if you are interested in it, if you're a child and you're interested in it, go to Twitter and you can see anything you want. You can see anything you want in two minutes. You have to be 13 years old, officially, go to Twitter. You can see anything you want. You can see anything you want in two minutes. You have to be 13 years old officially to join Twitter.

But, of course, people join it younger. And the 13 years old is pretty young. So we've sort of let all this stuff fly. And at least now we're noticing it's happening in schools instead of where it should be happening, which is furtively and whatever. But it's, in general, a good thing that we're paying attention to what our children are learning and what people are trying to teach them but that that is only i think because we have as a culture we have kind of um outsourced over the past 20 30 years outsourced a lot of stuff that we used to take care of at home and separate from government um and we just was naturally took it separately from government. And we just sort of like kind of outsourced it to,

you know, the quote unquote experts. Right. So what do I know really about this or that? I'm just a parent. The people at school, they've gone up, they have degrees in this.

They must know. And I think we're, I think we're, we're watching American parents taking that back. And I think that's, that's a good thing. I'm going to agree with everything you just said, and I think that's a good thing. I'm going to agree with everything you just said, except that we let it all fly.

We didn't exactly let it all fly. There were laws that, in retrospect, make even more sense than they seemed to at the time. But beginning in the late 1950s, there was one concerted attack after another on censorship laws. And we end up with a regime in which there's simply no censorship at all. The notion of local standards, that was the Supreme Court eliminated, said censorship can be imposed that reflects local standards, and it turned out to be that as a matter of practice, that was impossible to uphold. And so, it was a specific sort of legal, cultural, political decision to dismantle elite decision. People didn't vote against it. It was an elite decision, case by case, part of the liberal legal movement of the 1960s that simply eliminated and now we have Utah of all places, I say of all places, it's the only place that's

trying to reassert some minimal standards. And I don't know whether it's being laughed at across the country, but things have now become so inverted that a pornography company, how do we know it's a pornography company? Because it's called Pornhub. Bans the state of Utah, supposing that everybody in the rest of the country will look at Utah and chortle. Oh, they can't get porn there anymore. What a punishment. I agree with you.'s all it's all mad and but but it's i mean i this business about never hearing the f word i can remember my parents were shocked shocked for a week when the issue of time magazine

arrived in the mailbox that reproduced segments from the Watergate tapes, and they were shocked by that phrase that appeared over and over again, expletive deleted. They could not believe that the President of the United States used what by today's standards would only be salty language in the Oval Office. And that was the world in which we grew up. It's impossible to convey that to kids these days, that it used to be that way. Well, you mentioned before the local that was the world in which we grew up it's impossible to convey that to kids these days that it used to be you mentioned before the local standards was the yes local standards turned out to be ken shabby and a raincoat down at the train station you know pleasuring himself

so they and the elites would would not be would not condemn him because once you do that once you do once you suppress the most grotesque form of degrading pornography available well you know it's just the same as saying a dh law Lawrence book must be banned and taken out of the library. They're unable to see anything between the continuum. But the F-word thing is fascinating, and it goes to Rob, and we should ask him about this because of the writer's strike, even though I know he has to go. I was arguing with my daughter about the liberalization and the normalization of the F-word the other day, because I'd walked past a television show she and my wife were watching,

and it was F, F-bomb, F F this, and I am not a language prude. I prefer that people curse ornately in an intelligent fashion with some intelligence, but just the fact that this word is now so, it's lazy. Dropping it into the show and having a character use it to make them real and legitimate is lazy, that if you took it out, it wouldn't matter. So we started arguing about this. And she said, well, Succession is a great show. And people are using the F-bomb all the time. I said, that's true. But if you removed it, you would never notice.

You would never notice if nobody in Succession used that. Because the rest of the stuff that they're saying is so well written and so well crafted that it depends on the language. It depends on the character. You wouldn't notice it. Now and then, you're sure. On the other end of the spectrum is Deadwood, in which I think about every third word might be the F word, but it's wrapped in this hallucinogenic Shakespearean language that is so beautiful and marvelous to listen to that it becomes music and poetry. So it's all context. And if everybody can do it like david milch then i don't worry about it but it's the people who keep dumping this tabasco into the water supply and thinking that they're adding saffron that just that that drives me crazy um and

now we have a writer's strike but now i believe also that rob has to do a strike of his own and leave am i correct well close i mean i you know at some point there'll be some humiliating photographs of me picketing in front of you know at some point there'll be some humiliating photograph of me picketing in front of you know 30 rock or so what will you have a little thing where they write themselves everybody has to write their own little funny thing and that's i don't know i would say thank you for the money that's what i'll probably say so uh please excuse this um yeah it's one way or the other i mean i think that there's probably a time when people put the um put the expletive deleted in a script to appear you know to make it seem more rough and tumble or but i think now it apps accurately reflects the way people talk unfortunately and so now it's

like it doesn't seem like it's a it doesn't seem like it'd be more of an affectation to not put it because just people use it constantly um and i just remember in my lifetime which i guess has been going on far too long but in my lifetime that just being like oh my lord i mean i don't think we even i think even when i was in college i don't think i can't imagine i mean i'm sure we i'm definitely used it i have terrible language but i mean just trying to think of in the official areas you know, we had an indoor voice and an outdoor voice and we had a, you know, a proper set of words and an improper set of words. And there's one great moment in Bonfire of the Vanities when after Sherman McCoy is arrested and released, he's a minor celebrity in his society and he's at a fancy dinner party and he discovers my god everybody wants to talk to me because they i'm a huge huge celebrity and uh and he kind of starts making up stuff saying to sound a little tougher and he uses the f word and he it's

a i think it's a pair it's tom wolf's about a page of description he's going to use it he's thinking about he knows he's going to use it and it's the idea being that in a salon in new york city in 1987 so it's not that long ago the use of that word would have been shocking and he says it because he says this and this is what i said i think i can't remember what he said and this is i said this to the guy to the the guard i looked at him and i said get me out of this at his way he said his voice drops and he says the f word very like gutturally and low and he acknowledges by dropping his voice that he's embarrassed to have to use that language among the ladies out of this place and um they all are shocked titillated and shocked it absolutely it's a great social moment for him but he just the idea

that back then that word would have been shocking and the use of it would have been socially kind of cool. And you had to couch it in all sorts of attitudes. And now people just scream it on the street. Great effing point, Rob. And we'd like to remind you that Rob's point and Peter's and Victor's have all been brought to you by the wonderful organizations known as Bolin Branch and ExpressVPN. Support them for supporting us and you'll get great products. Everything will be better. Everything.

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