The Ricochet Podcast - Panda-monium and Other Evils

Episode Date: November 10, 2023

We've made it to number 666! Unfortunately among the three of them James, Steve Hayward and Charles Cooke haven't a single sinister plan to reveal. They do however have lots to say about Wednesday's debate; progressive love for Hamas and what it means for the intersectionality coalition; and they wonder why there are no DACA protections for beloved pandas!

It's amazing what your body can find to regurgitate when it feels the constant need to do so. It draws on deep reserves. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I was going to put him in front of the front. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long, who are not here this week. In their stead, Charles C.W. Cook, Stephen Hayward.

I'm James Lilex, and our guest, we don't need no stinking guests. I agree. You'll never get bored with winning. We never get bored. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 666. Yeah, I know. Super, double, extra, evil, mark of the beast and all that. Well, it was inevitable. The great thing is, is that we got to 666.

We got to 660. How many podcasts out there sputter and fail and fade away, never to be heard again after 50, 60? But no, we're still going strong into our 666 podcast. And we intend to be here in the 700s as well as we discuss the things in the world. Usually we've got Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lottles. You've got me, unfortunately. But they are both off on unknowable peregrinations so we have

stephen hayward and we have charles cw cook gentlemen welcome well it's good to be here but boy peter and rob i'm starting to wonder about those guys they sure are gallivanting a lot they do they do spies ah yes that makes sense. Well, you know, you may be right, Charlie, because I've seen pictures of them together in foreign capitals dressed in tennis clothes with tennis rackets. So I think they've got kind of an I spy thing going on there where they seem to be mild mannered pundits at large. But actually, they are international agents of intrigue. Who did the I spy guy works? Who did they work for? Was it one of those, you know, organizations with an acronym with a, with an uncle, with a smirch, with a specter, with a Zowie, who did I spy work for?

And does anybody, can either of you tell me who was the most famous employee of Zowie? Boy, you got me there. Okay. Well, I'll have to tell you, we'll tell you that at the end of the show because he was one of the world's greatest secret agents who at the time as a kid i thought was just absolutely awesome it's only later that i realized that half the show was a complete and utter joke that it wasn't going over my head because i wasn't aware of the conventions they were playing off of okay it's derrick flint everybody knows it's Derek Flint. He worked for Zowie. What Zowie stood for, I don't know. What we stand for here at Ricochet is four square commentary

and analysis of things you're already tired of hearing about. No, I'm kidding. But the debate, there's probably maybe 36 minutes, 45 minutes left of oxygen on that one. If you watched it, if you cared, or if you want to draw any conclusions from it, I assume, gentlemen, you were there taking notes, watching keenly as they vied for position. What did you take away from the last debate? I actually did not watch it live. I'm traveling this week, and I find these things tedious, and I don't feel a professional responsibility to hang on them like a lot of people do, but I watched some highlights and read a lot of analysis. And one thing that, and there's a new snap poll out apparently today

showing Nikki Haley the winner. These kinds of online polls are not scientific, but they're often right, I think. They often turn out to catch something. Now, in this case, I've been remarking for several years now that the parties have switched places in their presidential selection process. The old cliche used to be Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line. In other words, Democrats always swoon for the new face, especially a charismatic one. Going back to John F. Kennedy, but certainly Barack Obama is the example par excellence. Whereas Republicans were always like a monarchy. There was always a succession. The nominee was the person whose turn it was next. And you could trace that back to, you know, Reagan in 80 and Bush in 88 and so forth. That's how we got Romney and McCain, people who were acceptable to conservatives, but no great excitement of them. And Trump upended all that. And now,

as we saw in 2020, it's Democrats who fall in line when they're ordered to get behind Joe Biden, who was never anybody's idea of Mr. Excitement or Mr. Charisma, and Republicans who in 2016 swoon for the new face. So that's all a long preface to say, I don't think anybody thought that Nikki Haley would be one of the top tier candidates six months ago or a year ago, and yet she's clearly emerging as one, and she seems to be performing very well. And the big question is, as we get into the rough and tumble of actual votes cast, is whether she'll hold up. We did see, even before Trump, and then I'll shut up and let Charlie get on this, we did see Republicans have boomlets for people, precursors to Trump. Pat Buchanan, maybe, but certainly Herman Cain in 2012, I guess it was, Ben Carson, you know, Pat Buchanan maybe, but certainly Herman Cain in 2012, I guess it was, Ben Carson, you know, Newt had his innings where he was at the top of the polls until Romney took him apart in the primaries in 2012. And so we will see if Nikki Haley really emerges as, say, the number two candidate, whether you'll have a, you know, a pincer movement from Trump at the top of the polls

and DeSantis trying to hang on. And so that's the interesting dynamic to look at. The fact that we're not hearing about any zingers from the debate, with the exception of Nikki Haley's five inch heels or whatever it was, that suggests that the accounts that it really was a debate that was closer to being on substance is correct. Now, that will all change if Trump actually shows up for one, which I doubt he will. No, he won't. Charles, why do you think that Nikki Haley was seen to have heard it, to have won it? Well, I think because she won it. I think this was the most substantive debate, and I think that it was a debate because of October 7th that was geared somewhat toward foreign policy. And while DeSantis

is fluent in foreign policy, Nikki Haley is more interested in it and perhaps came across as such. I think that there's a paradox here. If you read through National Review the day after the debate, you saw, broadly speaking, two sorts of posts. One sort of post said, this was the most substantive debate. This was the best debate. This was the debate in which the candidates got to argue about real things and elaborate real differences. The second sort of post said, none of this matters. It won't make a difference. Donald Trump is still romping. And the annoying thing, from my perspective, both as someone who's not a great fan of Trump, but mostly as someone who thinks this is a fairly important moment that ought to attract substance, is that both of those things are true. This was the most substantive,

meaningful, useful debate. and at least thus far, it doesn't seem as if it's going to matter. In evaluating who won it or did well, I would therefore propose this framework. If it is the case that Donald Trump is going to romp to victory, that all of this is talk and fluff and pundit indulgence, then it doesn't matter what was said. It doesn't matter who was good. It doesn't even matter that the debate was substance. But if Donald Trump is a paper tiger, and I think there's a 30% chance of this, something that's too high, I don't.

If we are seeing a primary in which no one really has engaged yet beyond the media if we're seeing the lead that trump has established being the result of name recognition habit reflects and so on and if there is going to be an actual fight at some point in the primary process then the winners of the debate were clearly ron de santis and nikki haley because both of them established themselves as the only two people within the primary who can pull focus who can coherently lay out their vision and who can answer questions seriously and it is going to matter that they can do that i can't say the same for tim scott i like tim's got a great deal i'm glad he's in the senate i think he's done good work in the senate but he has the opposite of pulling focus when he's on stage he just disappears

vivek ramaswamy i agree with nikki haley i think it's an ass uh and chris christie is a man made for a different time and probably a different place uh chris christie was really great to watch when he was governor of new jersey but he's just not where the republican party is he's no he seems to have walked out of a thomas nast cartoon i love you and i love him for that but you can just easily see him you know with a big waistcoat and a top hat and the rest of it and the gold chain and a watch and the rest i i just finished by saying i mentioned that because there were no zingers there was nothing that emerged it is true that nobody was really talking about it it didn't change the trajectory and all of those cliches but you can win or at least do what you need to at a debate purely by treading water and the two people who

trod water at that debate were Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, and they kept themselves in it in case a fight breaks out in a few months. Well, that fight would break out how? In the Iowa caucuses when people get together? And I mean, I remember seeing some footage. I can't remember what it is, and I'm sure it's not indicative of anything whatsoever. But it was 12 people who had been Trump supporters and have been strong supporters, and been Trump supporters in 2023, for that matter. But when they asked if they would go for DeSantis or Trump, 10 of the 12 did not go for Trump, and the rest went, I think, primarily for DeSantis. Now, that's an extremely small sample.

But it does suggest that when you get down to the room, when you get down to it, that something that maybe pragmatism applies that people set aside uh the various reasons that they have for voting for donald trump because they realize on some level he's gonna he's gonna lose but then again every time i say that um well what do you mean all the polls show my head uh national polls show me show my head of biden i just don't think that any of that is is is true and it's bizarre me it's not because i'm wish casting here and saying no i really want this thing to be happened so this this other thing simply cannot be but i i am truly mystified by people who think that donald trump who is now a known quantity

who is not on his game who has got all of these things circling around him, whether you believe that they're engineered by the deep state or whatever, that people want that again. And I know I sound like Rob Long, that I'm just so out of touch that I can't get it. I can see why people would tell pollsters that because F you. Because bleep you, buddy, when it comes to telling me that I shouldn't vote for this guy. But does that calculation change in the cold, antiseptic light of the voting booth? Well, that's the question, isn't it? Because we've done this over and over.

And that's why I say I still think there's a 70% chance Trump just wins it. Because the number of times I've said maybe this or that will happen, and then it doesn't. I'm tired of saying it but i do also think that it is early and people aren't politically obsessed in the way that we are and there is a chance that this is front runner syndrome and when it comes to it there'll be an actual examination of the candidates and if there is the only two i think that could challenge Trump realistically are Haley and DeSantis. I agree. Stephen? Yeah, so I think at this point, we ought to be at the, what's the old, the eight stages of grief, whatever the heck it is. At this point, we ought to be at the stage where we recognize there's nothing Donald Trump can do that damages him with his intense followers and with a lot of undecided voters. I mean, I'm convinced that if he gets thrown in jail here next week for contempt of court,

or if he gets convicted and thrown in jail in one of these cases of varying quality, his support will go up by five points. Maybe, I don't know, James, how quickly you want to go on to the elections this week, but there is something in the Kentucky result that suggests to me part of the deeper dynamic of Trump. So, as we know, the Democratic governor hung on in a state that Trump won by 25 points two years ago. And some of the exit polls show that of the Trump voters, 40% of them voted for Andy Beshear, the Democrat, who's a, and it wasn't a blowout win. It was what, five points against a pretty appealing Republican candidate.

But people are scratching their heads saying, how come Trump's endorsement didn't put him over the top? Well, I think as we know, but I still don't think fully appreciate, Trump appeals to a lot of independents and a lot of weak Democrats in places like Kentucky that doesn't transfer to other Republican candidates. And a lot of those people, actually, there was a pretty good book written a few years ago, and I'm blanking on who wrote it because I actually know the professor. He's at Claremont McKenna College in political science. But he went to some counties in Kentucky that had gone for Trump, and these were heavily Democratic counties that hadn't even voted for Nixon in 72 or Reagan in 84. They were that deeply Democratic, and they went heavily for Trump in 2016 and again in 2020.

And these are the kind of people who I think every, you know, we keep saying this makes Trump stronger, but I think that a lot of the people for whom Trump is a hero and he gets stronger with every attempt to try and put him in the dock are not really traditional Republicans. It's some of these independent or weak Democrats that Trump was so successful in attracting in 2016. And I don't think anyone's quite figured out that whole scene yet. I certainly haven't, but it's certainly there. And that's why people perhaps say that he would win again in 2024, is because he had to appeal to those people.

I just love the idea that he would become more popular and go up by five points if he was jailed, because I'm waiting for his verse, for the tweet from a Birmingham jail to be entered in the political dialogue. Oh, I love that idea. Well, this is the situation in which we find ourselves, James, isn't it? The chance of Joe Biden being the nominee and Donald Trump being the nominee go up if you propose to people that Joe Biden might be dead and Donald Trump might be in jail. Well, what I cared most about the election this last Tuesday was my city council election here,

because the Democratic Socialists of America and the Socialist Democrats of America, splitters, had put up a spate, a slate of candidates who I actually saw firsthand. I went to a meet and greet the candidate event in my local neighborhood where the city council person showed up. It's basement of a church, and it's one of those churches that has the rainbow flag and the all are welcome here and happy Ramadan and the rest of it is very liberal church. And in the basement, there we were, and the Democratic Socialist candidate refused to answer just about every single question that was put to her because there was no point in any of this until the workers control the means of production.

So with that absolutely riveting message and her charismatic personality, which resembled a wet newspaper that's been sitting on the stoop for a week, it was no surprise that they lost. But she still got about 7 or 10 percent of the people in my neighborhood. And so I walked around and look at these people. Who the hell are you voting for these people? But we did have more of a progressive hold on the city council here. And you may say, who cares? It's Minneapolis.

It matters because if given what the city has gone through and what the people have experienced, to actually vote for more of it is always astonishing to me. And it's not exactly we've seen that elsewhere. We saw it in Ohio. We saw it in all the places that said, yes, more taxes, please, more, more. And so I'm wondering exactly where this supposed red surge is going to come from if you have a population that is increasingly resigned to just feeding a state as long as it does things for them that they like. Don't know.

I mean, there'll always be a Florida, Charlie, right? How did things go on down there and what elections you had? Any signs that a diaspora from New York fleeing there is starting to alter your politics? Well, we didn't have any elections this year, but... That's the way to do it. But I will say on your second question, that the people who have moved from other places to Florida tend to be really reliable Republican voters. I know that isn't always the case in every place,

but if you have left New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Maryland, Washington, D.C DC and come down here you'll probably cross with those places and particularly so if you left during COVID and this isn't my view you just have to look at the registration numbers I'm going to get this slightly wrong because I'm bad with numbers but by and large um the democrats had a party registration advantage in florida from the civil war until about a year ago that didn't mean republicans lost elections they've won the governor's race for 28 years but democrats still outnumbered republicans and elections were unbelievably close half a percent every time and now republicans have a five or six hundred thousand registration advantage that has shifted after the tipping point was hit in the space of i think it's a year, might be 18 months. And that's because of people moving in who did not want to repeat the mistakes that were made elsewhere.

So I worry about that dynamic in some places. I think New Hampshire has suffered from it. I think that Arizona and Colorado have suffered from it. It doesn't seem to be happening in Florida at the moment. And from what I understand, it doesn't seem to be happening in Texas either, where you were more likely to vote Republican if you were from another state than if you were born in Texas at the last election. Interesting. Well, that's self-sorting, I suppose, and it's natural. What we have to worry about and press for and be concerned are the people who remain in blue states but find their sentiments

trending red and it's hard for them to make the switch what we've seen in the last month after the october 7th attack in israel has been a sort of revelation to many people consider themselves to be liberal in those places because they have seen that people that they regarded as as their as their allies because they're progressive, because they believe in the oppressor-oppressive matrix and all these other things, actually turn out to be sort of kind of old-style Jew haters who are anxious for a chance to rip down the flag and shout the K-word at people. And this has given them reason to do so. And I wonder exactly how many of these people are actually changing a lot of their political beliefs because of what they've seen. And I don't think

it's going to be that many. I think there are certain sacrosanct issues on the left, and they're willing to sacrifice just about anything in order to keep those issues alive. I mean, the abortion issue, for example, I mean, you can look at certain white women of a certain demographic, and there's absolutely, I mean, it's the paramount issue so economics doesn't matter national security doesn't matter or matters less as long as there's this and i read somebody say well now that abortion is in the constitution in ohio and it's enshrined maybe we can get those people back because we're no longer having this issue on the table which seems risable and also sort of demonic it's like well we'll let let's trade away all the lines of the unborn innocence here but as long as we've got that let's uh let's let's see what we can do with what we got now and maybe

that's so but do you guys see any sort of pole shift amongst those people who have been you know red-pilled in the last in the last month or so by seeing what actually is underneath the whole progressive enterprise in some ways. Oh, boy. So I wonder about that, too. If you go back to 1980, Ronald Reagan got 35% of the Jewish vote, which was unusually high for Republicans. And part of that was anger among Jews at the way Jimmy Carter had treated Israel and actually voted against Israel in the Security Council of the United Nations for the first time ever, which infuriated Jewish leadership at the time.

Reagan did not keep that vote in 84. He did okay. But the point is, I think Republicans are lucky if they ever get 20% of the Jewish vote, I think is the figure. So I keep wondering if we might see 1980 repeat. There's one big difference. In 1980, it really was just the issue of Jimmy Carter had been unfriendly to Israel, and that's married to a deeper thing. You know, one reason, and abortion's one little piece of it, James, but there are other parts of it. You know, I have sort of conservative Jewish friends who I've talked to about this, and they say, well, one reason Jews have long been uncomfortable with Republicans, there's more than one, but one of them was the fact that evangelicals,

who now, the perception, of course, if you're a Jewish and live in Brooklyn, you think that's the Republican Party, right? Because that's all you ever hear, is, you know, evangelicals love Israel, but they think that that's for quirky, dispensational reasons of eschatology, and that actually puts them off. It feels—I'm not sure if condescending is the right word, but it worries them that the affection is purely instrumental. And I think that's mistaken, by the way, but that's a long subject.

Yeah, I think it's entirely mistaken. No, I think it is. Yes, right. And that is a common talking point on the left, that the only reason they do is because they think that Jesus is going to come back and convert everybody. And it's, you know, biblical revelations, six-headed monsters, etc. And that's not it at all. It's a fellow feeling for the roots of their own religion and for a state that embodies Western values as they define them.

But I think what might be different this time, and here actually I think I think I want to give a shout out to a Ricochet member named David Foster, who has a terrific post up in the member feed called The Hollow Man. And it's a wonderful diagnosis. It's quite a long piece, but he says there's one particular thing that he says that I think really marks out what's different about what we're seeing in the United States, actually in Europe right now, too. I'll just read the last sentence of a paragraph halfway through. He says, while Jews were once disliked because they were too different from the overall society, they are now denounced because they exemplify the things that progressives despise about their own societies. I think that's a wonderfully concise and on-point understanding of what's happening right here.

So many of the people, some of the stupid kids, but other groups on the progressive left are rallying to Hamas because that's a proxy for their revolutionary instincts. It's whatever tool is at hand to bash our civilization, to bash our culture. And I think a lot of Jewish voters, I think Bill Maher has picked up on this, you know, his ever-steady march to the right that we've seen Bill Maher doing has accelerated since October 7th. And I think more and more Jews are going to figure out, wait a minute, the problem here isn't just different currents of anti-Semitism and the weirdness of evangelicals. The problem is these progressives who we thought were our allies, and they're not. And if they put two and two together, they're going to have to vote differently. Well, let Charlie get into this a second, but I just want to say two things. One, that post which was in the member feed, which you can only get if you join Ricochet,

and believe me, it's worth every shekel, and there is a small quantity of shekels, but we do charge a fee to read the member fee and the post and the rest of it, and that's how we keep the site sane. That post which was in the member feed has now been moved to the main feed, so you can go read it, The Hollow Man by David Foster. And the second thing is with Bill Maher. You know, I once canceled HBO, I think, over Bill Maher, and now I have it again. And as he ages, he seems to get a little bit smarter, which could mean to me that Bill

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All right, Charles, if you wanted to take something else on whether or not we're going to see an alignment or move on to something more interesting, such as the fact that people still seem persistently to remove the posters of kidnapped children. This now seems to be the strange sort of performative thing. I'm expecting people to now want to be filmed doing, I don't know why they're still doing it,

knowing that people are being filmed doing this and being let go, shall we say, having a chat with HR, shall we say. It's bizarre to me. And my favorite is this. Somebody caught in the middle

of taking down one of these posters insisted that putting up the posters was against the law. That actually there were civil statutes in place in New York that prohibited this. And I thought, ah, finally there's one small little twig of a law that they approve of, actually. It's almost like the broken windows. It's almost like stop and frisk. I mean, we can't have any of that stuff, but they're really, really irritated by the fact that a poster has been, a handbill has been pasted to a pole in New York City, why the entire social fabric would dissolve if we don't take this down.

Why are they still doing it, and do you think that they will continue yeah that is the most specific form of vigilantism i've ever seen in my life the idea that new york doesn't enforce its laws sufficiently and so the one that people need to go out and make sure is being fulfilled is the one against illegal handbills hosts no bills yeah bills. Yeah, thanks Batman, you're really cleaning the city up. I mean, this is sociopathy on a level that I can't comprehend, and I'll confess this. I understood that anti-Semitism existed in the world, and I'm sure I understood that some of it existed in Britain, where I'm originally from, and in the United States, where I now live. But I have been alarmed and surprised by the scale of what I've seen

in Western countries, let alone the Middle East. I didn't expect this. I thought that we would witness something more akin to the aftermath of 9-11, where a few academics and hollywood celebrities went out on a limb and said america deserved it or we have to understand the plight of extremely wealthy saudi arabian zealots but this has been something else and i'm shocked by it and i have adjusted my framework a little bit and perhaps i can use that as a segue into answering the first of the two options you gave me as well.

I don't know what this will do to our electoral politics. And I suspect that we won't see a 1980 situation purely because while Donald Trump remains the face of the party, I think many people who might be tempted toward that will demur. But I think this is going to strike a real blow at the integrity of intersectionality there is a big difference between liberalism with a capital l and progressivism they're not the same thing they're often friends they're often allies they often work together on projects but they're not the same thing and i've never seen an international incident separate the liberals and the progressives in the way that this one has. Intersectionality requires for its sustenance on various members of that coalition shutting up.

It is, in a sense, a suicide pact. that you don't understand the feelings and the life experiences and the suffering of people who have different intersectional qualities than you do. Well, what we've seen in the last month, quite understandably, is some of the people in that coalition who have dutifully shut up, while the stupidest things have been argued in advance, saying, no, I will not shut up anymore. I don't actually like you. And this is not a philosophy I'm willing to go along with. And I think whatever it does to our electoral politics in the short term, in the long term, that's going to matter.

Because it says for the first time from within the tent to the crazies, not in my name. So I wonder if that's going to be the most obvious immediate shift as a result of October 7th in America. Well, it requires abandoning a whole nomenclature that defines your political outlook, the way you see the world. It requires you to actually realize that the phonemes that you have been spouting are not just a meaningless series of things randomly cobbled together by an academic that

gives you a sheen that you can have it where in public and at parties. Well, of course, I'm progressive. Of course, I believe in decolonization. Who wouldn't? Colonization was awful. Well, this is that. The specifics of what they talk about when you get down to it involve what hamas did um so if if if you realize that all of these things that you're talking about about oppression and and and the whole dynamics and everything about the the power relationships that is not just simply this intellectual game of pickup sticks that you can play with your friends and feel good but actually at its foundation is a fundamental violent reorganization of society along lines that we

do not want because they are iniqual to the Western experience. Do you then realize, wait a minute, I've kind of been talking nonsense here, I've kind of been duped. If this is what they mean, I'm not on board with this. There was a tweet... Well, also if it doesn't apply to you.

Well, by that you mean what if by that it's like the meme you know the meme with hayden crittinson and uh natalie portman yes star wars movies and yeah and then the third panel you know he says so you're right and he just keeps it blank face well i just feel like this has been applied here where an awful lot perhaps millions of american jews who lean left have heard all of this talk about safetyism and oppression and protecting people and so on. And in the third panel of the meme, have looked at progressives in the last month and said, and you're going to apply this to Jewish people, right? And then they've seen the blank stare in the fourth panel and said, wait a minute,

what do you mean? How on earth can it not be that we are now the ones who benefit from this framework? For a while there, it seems as if we were to laugh at the campus snowflakes because they were demanding safe spaces against the horrible idea that somebody walking past the campus may be thinking in their head something that was contrary to what they believe. And so they had to have their Play-Doh rooms with the stuffed animals and the rest of it, and we laughed at all of that. And in a sense, that's kind of what they were up to. I mean, they were in this ideological bubble, this sort of cultural world in which anything

that pierced it was violence. Okay, well, that may apply to the overly pampered college students, but underneath that is a group of people who really do want to have speech codes and are very keen on enforcing what is and is not said. And it is based on a pyramid of grievance that can be adjusted slightly, but we all kind of know where that's going. So yeah, it doesn't apply because it's no longer convenient for it to apply to everybody. They can't have the safe space. They can't have that because it's been denied them. And I had something else I was going to say before your excellent interruption there. I'll hand it over to Stephen. No, no, no, no. I prefer you interrupting me than Rob because... Well, he only interrupts your segues, but... Completely lose the gist and the

drift of what I said. Right. Well, I think, let me give you two data points from Berkeley where I'm embedded as an inmate, as I like to put it. The first one was, you know, I noticed that there's been a conspicuous silence from universities all around the country from their offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion. That's the whole unit that's supposed to address these kinds of problems. And so I decided to look up at Berkeley where we have a big, a vice chancellor for DEI, a woman named Dania Matos, who said fighting white supremacy was her main mission and taking the job several years ago. And I thought, I wonder if they've issued any statements. There's lots of statements from the chancellor and deans and stuff.

And I looked up and nothing since October 7. No statements from the DEI office at Berkeley. There was one statement put out on October 9th from the DEI office at Berkeley. There was one statement put out on October 9 from the Vice Chancellor of Diversity, and it was a message of concern and sympathy and offer of resources for students who are upset by the earthquake in Afghanistan. Two days after, that was the message that came out from DEI the Monday after what happened in Gaza and Israel, which is an amazing thing. And the second one that you may have heard about was the dean of the law school where I'm embedded, Erwin Chemerinsky. He's very left, but he's actually serious about free speech.

He's Jewish. He's very pro-Israel. He has criticized anti-Semitism when it's erupted on campus. But he wrote that article in the Los Angeles Times 10 days ago now saying, nothing in my life has prepared me for the anti-Semitism I'm seeing on campuses right now. And the first response was, well, is he naive? Is he clueless? Because you could see this coming, including, by the way, one of the best predictions of this was Aaron Waldowski, famous political scientist who died, I think, exactly 30 years ago this month. One of his last essays around 1992 said,

I see anti-Semitism coming on college campus. It's connected to this rising ideology of colonialism and imperialism, and suddenly Jews have gone from being oppressed victims to oppressors. And boy, did he not have the architecture of that nailed, and I'm saying Dean Chemerinsky and others clearly did not pay attention to what was going on right under their noses. But I think it's actually worse than that. What I've come to realize, and I've thought this for a while now, is that, in fact, administrators at colleges are perfectly aware of these ideologies. And they don't take them seriously. And I could go through this for a long time, but I'll just say that an awful lot of this is virtue signaling.

It was perfectly easy to give up the land acknowledgment statements that they all give on college campuses these days that are ridiculous. It's perfectly fine to say, oh, have a Center for Colonial and Oppression Studies and Ethnic Studies and Critical Theory. And I can tell you from now having spent 10 years around conventional liberal academics, many of whom are very good in the ordinary sense of being serious scholars, they don't take these people seriously. And I actually think the radicals on campus know they're not taken seriously, and this fuels their rage. And now suddenly this whole business of October 7 comes along, and they have a target to unleash their rage. And so, I mean, that's sort of a field theory. I should write a longer piece about all this. But I think that now suddenly administrators on college campuses are coming face to face with their own negligence and benign neglect, and they don't know what to

do about it because they're fundamentally all cowards. Well, the land acknowledgement. Yes. What exactly do we do when we decolonize America? There was an interview that I saw on Twitter the other day. I'm sorry, X. Somebody was interviewing a couple of college gals, lasses, co-eds as we used to call them, about the situation. They were protesting for Palestine. And essentially what they thought should happen was that Israel should cease to exist, mostly.

Basically, the Jews should just go home. And she said that what they should do is they should all go back to those other countries that they have second citizenship in i was waiting for her to break out because they're ruthless cosmopolitans don't you know but i think that's sort of but i think that's quite beyond her because she was quite stupid i said well no maybe she wasn't stupid but she was extremely poorly educated she believed that you know just about everybody in israel could go to the junk drawer, pull out

their other passport, and then go back to Yemen and live in perfect safety and harmony and peace, or Iran, or Libya, or any of these places, and that those few who didn't want to stay around could do so and live in a wonderful, multicultural, peaceful politic that would result once you handed it over to Hamas or whoever else. And they didn't believe that Hamas was a terrorist organization either. So these people were dumb when it comes to knowing exactly

what's on the ground. And when you ask them what should be done about America, well, the people who are very serious about the whole decolonization thing would seem to have to say that we all have to go back too. Because the entirety of the American decolonization thing, would seem to have to say that we all have to go back, too. Because the entirety of the American continent is stolen land, right? So I, I guess, am obliged to go back.

I don't know where. That's just it. Do I go back to Canada, where the first lilac came through? No, that's all stolen, too. Do I go back to some Czech village, which for all I know was pushed out? Did the Mongols have that territory in the old days? I mean, the idea that there's some static situation to which ideally we should all resort ourselves is absurd and contrary to the entire expanse of human history, but yet they persist, as they say. Right. Well, you don't have to get into the problem of infinite regress, which is what your progression opens us up to, to ask a simple question that exposes the hypocrisy of all this. I've been hearing now for 10 years these land acknowledgments. We acknowledge this university exists on the historic lands, and sometimes they even say lands stolen from some indigenous tribe. And I always want to raise my hand and say

then why don't we give it back? Why doesn't, I mean, or at least pay back rent. Harvard could do that from their endowment. No, only Israel is supposed to give its land up. That's the only people who are supposed to give their land up. The rest of us, it's just costless virtue signaling, except as I say, now we're seeing the real cost of it, the real price of it has to be paid right now for these progressives who indulged all this. Charles, in Florida, I believe, your governor has commanded the universities over which he has swayed to defund, decouple from those student groups which provide material group assistance to Hamas. Defined how? Not exactly clear to me, but how is that going? Because, of course, I'm sure there's been pushback.

Well, I think DeSantis is wrong on this. I think that there is simply no way of applying good laws that prohibit people from providing material support to terrorists to these organizations on campus. As a general matter, I have no problem with us deporting immigrants who violate the law or who violate the terms by which they were admitted. I tell people this all the time. The number of occasions on which I swore that I wasn't a communist or hadn't been a member of the Nazi party, didn't intend to commit terrorism or restrict people's liberty or engage in sex trafficking or what you will, was remarkable. I had a number of visas, then a green card, then I became a citizen. Before I went in to my citizenship ceremony, I had to swear that I wasn't a communist. I have no problem with that

whatsoever. Insofar as there are people in the United States who are violating the terms of their visas, we should deport them. And if there are people who are materially helping terrorists, then we should prosecute them. But I don't think that the institutions at the University of Florida and the University of Central Florida, to which DeSantis is alluding, match that description. And if they did, I would want to see the police being sent after them, not university administrators. It's good, of course, that they should have been keen to make sure that you weren't these things. I actually got banned from about 100 subreddits because I defended Charles C.W. Cook. I'm serious. Now, I would tell you how exactly to go

and find those pieces in Reddit, but for all I know, they've been memory-holed because the digital world, as we know, is difficult to navigate. Oh, you got your Bing, you got your Google, you got the rest of it, but it, you know, that's just the overlay on top of this huge writhing mass, this world of ants and centipedes and the rest of it. How do you figure it out? The digital world, it is full of hurdles, he said, mixing his metaphors. But with Persist SEO, you have a seasoned guide. Are you feeling overshadowed? Online happens. Well, you can shine bright with their digital marketing expertise. Are you competing with the big players? Well, let Persist SEO be your sacred weapon.

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Stephen? Yeah, so by the way, I've read that immigration form that all prospective immigrants have to fill out. And it does have these ridiculous, it goes on for 50 pages, right? And it has these ridiculous questions like, are you coming to the United States to engage in terrorist activities? Oh, sure. Abed's going to check yes for that. It's like some comedian wrote this darn thing but on the point on the um i think where i partially disagree

with you is what i think strictly speaking governor desantis has done is said that students for justice in palestine of which their chapters all over the country can no longer be a recognized official student group on the campuses that doesn't mean that the students can't express their opinions their first amendment opinions as long as they're not harassing other students um now the curious thing to me here and you know this is, we could go a long time arguing about this on both sides, I think. The curious thing to me is, so far, no student chapter, nor has the ACLU brought a lawsuit against this, claiming their First Amendment rights are being infringed, or their freedom of association on campus is being infringed. And I find that a curious thing. You would think the ACLU would leap to file that suit

against DeSantis. And I'm wondering if the fear is a lawsuit would open them up to discovery and you will find out some very unsavory things about some of the people involved in these clubs or some other activities, like are they sending money to Hamas front groups and so forth. And that may be what's holding it back. That's just speculation in my part. Yeah, I mean, that would be material support. The one thing that I think is going to be a problem for DeSantis is that those chapters are not under the management of the national chapter or the national organization. And it's the national organization that is always used

as the the problem child and i i think that lack of a nexus would be a big problem for him in court but i agree with you that if if there is something there behind the scenes that will never get that because you don't want to expose yourself i was i was reading about uh who was it the congressional member who's accused of having hamas ties and having fundraisers who had Hamas ties. rest of them were were in the news in as much as they were in the news at all for having relationships that maybe kind of sort of did give money or actually did or the rest of it it's just once you open up that lid there's just this stew of stuff that it's very hard and you you i mean you can get tripped up the legalities but you know that there's just a lot of money that goes over there for doing all the things that you really should not be sending them money to do so yeah well i i think

steven the reason that they say are you coming here with the intention of committing terrorist acts is so they can get you on it later when you actually do them it's like well see you said no to this so this is where we're going to this this is that's exactly right and that's why they also have rules in place for example about destitution so that if you end up now we don't actually enforce them of course but we could no we don't enforce an awful lot of things because that would be that would be mean and we don't want to be that you know you if you're wondering exactly how i got banned from 100 subreddits for defending Charlie, it was in lockdown skepticism, which was a subreddit devoted to saying maybe we shouldn't in which people who were not terrified Covidians went to discuss things. And somebody had mentioned an article and discussed it that Charlie wrote, to which somebody responded afterwards, Well, it's nice to see there's one sane person at National Review.

And under that I put, I said, well, I wouldn't say just one. And that comment got me banned from a hundred subreddits because a list went around that anybody who participated in lockdown skepticism was thereby intellectually contaminated and should not appear in all the rest of these. And so I just got this blanket ban where I couldn't say anything in these places. Now is my life worse because I wasn't able to post on Reddit? No, my life was better because I couldn't say anything in these places. Now, is my life worse because I wasn't able to post on Reddit? No, my life was better because I wasn't able to post on Reddit. It's generally become something of a cesspool and a hole, and I don't want to be there. And I don't even think that I should. But there probably is some place right now where they're sharing cute panda pictures.

Now, you're saying, what has this got to do with anything? Well, I'll tell you. Again, two points. One, pandas are cute. Maybe you thought, if I think pandas are cute, other people think pandas are cute, I'm going to start up a little. I'm going to sell panda mugs. No, I'm going to do a little AI drawing of a panda. I'm going to sell it on shirts. I'm going to make a few bucks for the holiday season. But then how do you get it out there? How do you get it to people? Well, here's the deal. Shopify. Shopify has already taken the cash register online and they help millions sell billions around the world. But did you know, did you know, did you know, did you know that Shopify can do the same thing at your retail store? Yes. Give your point ofale system, what we call a POS, a serious upgrade with Shopify.

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bears in our zoos. And so if Trump had any wit, he would use this as part of his China bashing shtick. Well, explain to people what's happening with the pandas. Oh, right. Obviously, you are deeply invested, my friend. Well, China wants them back. Apparently, we have some long-term lease, or I don't know exactly what. But China is reclaiming their pandas, some of whom have been in our zoos for 30 years or longer. And this is because, you know, we're mad at China and they're mad at us.

And so this is a little symbolic thing. And I mean, I'm kidding a little bit about the immigration status of pandas, but it is kind of interesting to me that we're, I don't know, it is symbolic of where things are going. Hopefully only symbolic. Well, Charles, you may have noticed in the last week, I think Russia withdrew from one of the meaningless, useless treaties that we were so happy to sign back in the 80s or 90s. So it's Biden's foreign policy is collapsing on all fronts. China wants their pandas back and Russia is pulling out of treaties that kept us from, of course, having nuclear war. Do you think that people out there, will you kind of close with this?

Do you think people actually believe that the foreign policy of the United States is being directed by Joe Biden? Or for that matter, do they think that anything is really being directed by Joe? Because I see all these tweets about these people, and they're young folk too, who are just so proud of Biden and the accomplishments and say, let us be honest, this is the best foreign policy president we've had for an awful long time. Yeah, I get asked this a lot. Usually people say, is Barack Obama really running the country or is Valerie Jarrett really running the country? And I just think the answer is a lot simpler than that. I think the progressive blob is running the country. And I think this is one reason why every young progressive that I know thinks that Joe Biden is marvelous and everyone

else in the country thinks he's a disaster because in reality the people running the country are the people we see every day in DC it's the think tanks and their friends and Biden's following them this is why for example Biden was so determined to issue his illegal student loan executive order because this was a considerable priority for young progressives who desperately want their student loans forgiven it's why we saw Biden having said that the eviction moratorium could not be extended having said that he kicked the tires looked at it from all angles and found he had no authority did it anyway when Cori Bush slept outside or cried or something because progressive groups wanted there's no master plan where a manchurian candidates in the white house we know who's running

the white house you just have to look at who gave him the most money at the last election useful instrument through which these desires flow when he was elected we were putting up memes of him as joe gill a character the Patterns of Force Star Trek episode where this elderly academic is just sort of propped up and used as a figurehead while the real evil goes through him and uses his authority and gravitas in order to prod the society and shape it. That was three years ago, and he's not exactly sharper now than he was back then. So, yeah. On the other hand, I was listening to a podcast this morning about design, and they were talking about the design of the Devo album cover, the first one, Are We Not Men? And how actually that strange, contorted, sort of melted-faced figure of a golfer,

it was Chi-Chi Rodriguez. There was a legal battle, and then there wasn't. And then Chi-Chi acquiesced to it. The band was talking about how when they first came up with this image they wanted to do, they believed that man was devolving. That was the whole thing behind Devo. We're devolving now, so we have to have music for that. And that they viewed this image of the golf player with a golf ball

to be a perfect example of the emptiness of American commercialism and advertising and the rest of it and so they use this this cheap tawdry image of american banality to put on their on their album well they were discussing they talked to mark montabar who's one of the members of devo who was saying that back at the time you know that's what we thought and that he he had to admit now however that he really liked golf and And he did, and what he thought was exclusionary and ridiculous when he was a young man, now he just, he really liked it. And then he paused, and as if admitting that his entire life had been a lie, he said, and I have to say, I'm also really fond of professional football. So there's hope that the guys with the weird flowerpot

hats in their 20s who are eager to tear down American capitalism and consumerism and the rest of it eventually age into a period where they are not senescent because they take what we told you about before earlier in this podcast but are actually attuned to the

true boons, joys of American life. Like football. How's your team doing, Charles? Pretty well. Six and two. About to play the 49ers after a bye week, so we'll see how that goes. Shut up.

Shut up. We beat the 49ers, so there. You did? Yes, we did. Stephen, do you have a team, or are you a baseball guy or a hockey? Well, no. I mean, I'm a sports. I'm a general sports fan.

High lie. What? High lie, right. Actually, James, I think the most interesting story, one of the most interesting stories in football is your Minnesota Vikings who have this third-string quarterback

who's, what, an astrophysicist or something and is performing very well, an engineer, and I think that's a fun story to watch. Yeah, that was just great. Yeah, our beloved Kirk Cousins goes out for the season, and they plug in another guy, and within about, oh, I don't

know, two minutes or so, he's concussed, and we bring out the third guy, at which point you really want to know how deep the bench goes, and the guy rallies them to victory. It was quite fun in a season that has been hard at times. It was fun. It was fun. Anyway, this has been fun,

and we're going to quit because we've said all we need is we could go on for another 45 minutes, you know that. But no, we're going to let you get on with the rest of your life, Charles and Stephen and the audience as well. But I got to tell you, go to Ricochet. Why don't you join? You will realize it's the place you've been looking for all your years on the web. And now you can read the front page for free, but the member feed, which Stephen referenced, you can get an advanced reading of some of the finest writing and thoughts by people you probably don't know. And that's great because they're not the same old talking heads who've been floating around, myself excluded, for years and years and years. They're smart people, fresh people, and you're going to love them.

So go there. Sign. And also, Neurohacker, Spotify, Persist SEO. You can support them and you'll be supporting us and making your life easier, better, and smarter as well. So thank you everyone for listening. I think we will see everybody in the... I'm not going to ask Charles about how Ricochet 5.0 is going because we know it's coming along any second now. But for the moment, we'll see you all in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, maybe, Stephen.

See you around, James. Bye. Ricochet. Join the conversation.