The Ricochet Podcast - Pumping Iron

Episode Date: September 8, 2023

The boys are back! That's right: you can hear Peter, Rob and James on the same podcast. They consider Eric Adam's unwitting vindication of the migrant-to-sanctuary city assistance program, along with the precipitous decline of Hollywood's major studios.And Barton Swaim visits to expand on his Wall Street Journal column where he applies the left's favorite terms of the Trump era to the president of whom they are more obviously applicable. He also has some encouraging words for those of us who worry for the future of the printed word.

At some point, I'll disappear for 37 seconds to go get it. We'll time you. 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 access. It's the Ricochet Podcast.

I'm James Lilacs with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. That's a first in some time. And we're going to have a lot of fun talking to Barton Swaim from the Wall Street Journal about Joe Biden's iron grip and some other stuff. Lots of it. So let's have ourselves a podcast. This issue will destroy New York City. We're getting 10,000 migrants a month. I said it last year when we had 15,000. I'm telling you now, with 110,000, the city we knew we're about to lose.

Welcome, everybody, to the Ricochet Podcast, number 657. I'm James Lylex of Minneapolis. I was not here for 656 because I was at the State Fair, the great Minnesota get-together, the state fair. The great Minnesota get-together, sweat-together, when in the daytime it's absolutely fantastic and the twilight comes and the lights pop on and it's magical and then it gets to be about 11 o'clock at night and all the miscreants try to storm the gate and there's gunfire. But that's another day and another story. Happy to be here

back with Peter and Rob for the first time in some time. Peter, how are things in California? This feels like a family reunion. Well, it depends on the family doesn't it are there certain things we shouldn't talk about and i'm much much fonder of the two of you it turns out that i would have guessed absence it's called absence or or abscess and uh rob good good to hear you too new york i was just here this morning hearing an angry t rant, and I know I repeat myself, from a New York mother who is not pleased at all that her child has to present in just a huge trench of documentations to get her kid in the school.

But all of the migrant children are waved right in instantaneously. And so you're there in the New York that Mayor Adams says is going to be lost or gone. And so, of course, you have all the people on the right saying, well, you know, reap your sow is what you voted for. I have no sympathy whatsoever. Go enjoy your dystopian hell.

What is it like? Because I've seen the film outside the Roosevelt Hotel where I stayed once. Yes. It's closed anyway, we should just say. It was closed. Owned, I believe, by a Pakistani hotel group, too. They're getting a nice amount of cash

from the city. What is it like? Do you notice or do you just live in a bubble? The migrants? No, I don't notice migrants. I notice the normal New York City chaos, but I also notice there's a little bit migrants no i don't know it's migrants i noticed the normal you know the normal uh new york city chaos but i also noticed there's a little bit there's a lot more um a lot more addicts on the street mostly because i love the village and they can um every now and then like uh well once every

eight weeks the neighbors around washington square park complain and scream and yell and um and they clear it cleared out but that's pretty much where people can score your drugs so if you're looking to score drugs james that's where you want to go the well watch the north that was the epic corner yeah that was the epicenter in in uh yeah panic panic and needle parker when panic and needle park was actually 72nd it was way up there you go there now it's like was it really yeah you go up there it's like uh so so that's and then every eight weeks it's gonna it'll it'll die down because parents have just arrived because it's nyu basically nyu kind of de facto owns washington square park they're they're they

they were given it for a lot of other concessions um and so you know then every now and then people complain the the the the migrant thing is interesting because I just have to say that I thought the little trolling jokes kind of thing that people like Ron DeSantis did sending, you know, migrants up to Martha's Vineyard were kind of cute. But basically, what's, you know, a lot of energy for nothing but i think you have to say that the groundswell of of rage in new york city and new york state but between the mayor and the governor and the elected representatives in congress um is precisely because the problem that they got to philosophize and theorize about came home. And, you know, you have 100 plus thousand migrants in New York City, a city with sort of stretch budgetarily always. It's going to and you passed a law promising them all sorts of things you now can't get out of because you just never thought it would come. Right. You never thought it'd be here.

It's one thing to be a sanctuary city. New York City is like, OK, fine. Like, how are you going to know? Like, like you're not gonna get all the way up here well wait a minute and then does the plaque on the statue of liberty face toward the ocean or towards the city because if it faces towards the ocean i can give them a break that they haven't seen it but if it faces toward the city they ought to have been able to see it and the legal promise that it that it contains they they know all that and and of course the problem here is not legal the word legal does not apply here um and so uh you may find that the what i thought to be the silly little you know i mean i was in favor of it i applauded it but i just kind of shrugged

and let me on and ho-hum that stuff that uh like rod desantis did um actually man has managed to galvanize a whole portion of the country that just kind of didn't care because it was happening down there in places where we were going to go. And they spent past quarters saying crazy things like, well, New York City doesn't have the resources

that Brownsville, Texas has, which is hilarious, right? So now you're starting to see people like Mayor Adams say, we got to do something. Hey, what's going on? And that is probably good for the country. By the way, I just checked. You said correctly, and fairly enough, I think, that New York City is always stretched for resources or that the budget is always stretched.

But may I note that that is because they choose to run the city that way. Here is the size of the 2024 budget for New York City. One city, population around 8 million people, $107 billion. Here is the budget for the state of Florida, an entire state. What is it, 25 million people now? Or actually now that's a little high. And in any event, an entire state, $116 billion. New York City spends so much money so lavishly that it has a budget that's 95% as big as the budget of the entire state of Florida. This is on them. This is on the city. You have to understand. I mean, where does that money go? It goes for the fantastically well-maintained, clean, and efficient subway system that is the envy of the world. It goes for infrastructure so that the

bridges themselves are never a crumble. It goes for all kinds of... You go to New York City, you see every time spent... It's worse than that. It's the state that runs the subway. It pays for it. And it's the state that runs the infrastructure. A lot of that stuff is like for the deputy assistant to the chairman of the subcommittee of the diversity school board controlling authority whatever right a lot of it is crap that is for sure but the point is um that they can't i mean

you want you can make decisions about how you want to spend your money and you can spend it luxuriously if you want and you can waste it if you want on yourself right so the city can tax everybody and then spend it on some nonsense thing. And then that's, you know, that's not the right way to be, but there's nothing wrong with it. When you add to it 100,000 plus and growing number of people who've arrived here with nothing and then have a right to all sorts of things that some of the city residents don't have a right to because you passed a law in a grandstanding um you know well uh virtue signaling well a series of of movements that you thought would never ever you'd never promises you never ever have to keep and now you got to keep them you know this i hope people watching this are enjoying it because you you you don't get this kind of you just don't get this kind of symmetry

this is fantastic it rarely happens in life and at least in my lifetime that something so obvious happens exactly the way you predict it and this is it and i think it's good for the country because it is time now for people all over the country to realize that border security and border policy is central to the future and that we cannot have you cannot have a welfare state and open borders you can only have one or the other if If you have both, you go broke. And that's what's happening in New York City, and that's partly what happens in California. Rob Long, when you're really conservative,

you're just beautiful. All of these things are good object lessons. The University of West Virginia, for example, is cutting a whole bunch of programs, but as people have noticed, they're cutting the things that are useful, they're keeping the social sciences, and they're keeping the administration state

perfectly intact. So the people who are on the liberal side, who are inclined to support education of this nature, are appalled, and they're the ones who are making the complaints. In New York, you have the liberals who are making the complaints about this, and I mean, a part of you wants to say, look, you don't get to have these issues, these have been our issues, we've been talking about them, but on the other hand, say, look, you don't get to have these issues. These have been our issues. We've been talking about them. But on the other hand, if this is what it takes to get the issue to the table, then fine, as long as we can then agree and move forward. And if they want to take credit for it down the road, I don't care, as long as we have change. This morning I was listening to the BBC, a show called Hard Talk, in which they had a Swedish politician of the liberal leftist stripe who

was talking about the need, they have organized crime, huge amounts of organized crime, and it's connected to immigration. And he was talking about how they're going to crack down on that and solve, address the problem of integration, of the integration of these immigrants into Swedish society. And he was attacked by the host for using the language of the far-right Swedish Social Democrats, who themselves have been talking about it, merely to bring these things up. To use these terms to this British guy was to validate practically Nazism, whereas in Sweden, the left now is having to come around and say, hmm, maybe we should start to take up these terms before, indeed, the really bad guys get to take them well when it comes to looking at stuff at other you know uh other countries of the cultures it's yeah you know you can you can you can go on and buy streaming service or you can watch television from other countries or sometimes if you want to save a little money and we all want to save a little

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Expressvpn.com slash ricochet to learn more. And we thank ExpressVPN for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And now we welcome to the show, Barton Swain, the author of The Speechwriter, A Brief Education on Politics. He has a regular column in that Wall Street Journal newspaper you might have heard about. He reviews books on a range of topics. And earlier this week, he penned an excellent op-ed titled Joe Biden's Iron Grip on his party. Barton, welcome. Barton, you're on with three writers, and you may think that we asked you on to talk about politics, discuss your recent columns, and so forth. The truth is, we have news for you. Between your book reviews and your op-eds, you're doing too much work.

Yeah. Making us look bad. Kid, you need to slow down. You're making the rest of us look bad. I have seven pieces due this week thank you very much seven pieces do this week seven i'll talk to barton about what it's like to be a productive member of society and the rest of you can stare at your blank page okay listen you wrote a piece your latest op-ed i think it's your latest and i haven't looked at today's paper uh you wrote a piece about joe biden's iron grip on the democratic party in which Rob is going to resist this a little bit, but it was, I thought, just a beautiful piece of angry whataboutism. And Rob is so sick of

whataboutism or claims to be. But would you please make the case for us that you made in that column. Well, I like whataboutism. The piece was a product of a longstanding annoyance that I have had since like 2017 when I started reading in the New York the washington post uh article after article about donald trump's grip on the republican party his uh his iron grip conversely uh various republican office holders uh fealty to donald trump and i remember reading this and well i should i should point out that at the time i was working at the Weekly Standard, and so my views were colored by that, and I thought, gee, it doesn't feel to me like much of an iron grip. And I don't see a lot of fealty at the Weekly Standard, but that was his own its own thing so uh i remember thinking as i would read these pieces that i'm not a huge fan of donald trump but he is the head of his party uh he is the president of

the united states so you would expect you know republicans to to you know bend their views somewhat to whatever he wanted to talk about granted itanted, it was done in many cases in unseemly ways, but that's the nature of politics. So that was in my mind for a long time, and every time I would read one of these pieces with the word fealty particularly, it was like one of those words that you had to learn at that point. And then suddenly everybody was using it, you know. And then fast forward to, it occurred to me recently that like on the Democratic side, there's virtually no criticism. What criticism there is, is expressed in the vaguest possible terms. And, you know, in a piece, I just pointed out two things, but there are others.

One, his obvious mental decline. And the other is the pullout from Afghanistan. On the Republican side, if those things had been true of any Republican president, I think I'm right in saying there would be maybe not uproar and demands for resignation, but at least, you know, significant criticism. And I just do not see that on the democratic side so that's that's basically the where my annoyance came from so not only so fealty is the word for trump but it's a kind of omerta for biden they all have to take this they're behaving as though there's an oath of silence they're not allowed to see what's in front of everybody else's eyes yeah yeah rob will now tell

you why you're mistaken to engage in what no i don't know if you're i don't know if you're mistaken i just think that i mean if you're you know as a as a conservative i'm not a republican but i'm conservative i like you know free trade-ish stuff i didn't really think we needed to renegotiate nafta and if we were going to renegotiate it we shouldn't renegotiate it with the big you know labor unions um at the table setting the terms. I felt like we, you know, if we're going to go into a trade dispute with China, as Trump did, we should, you know, stick to our guns and not give up on the first day the important stuff like intellectual property rules. So, you know, I can criticize Trump from a conservative point of view.

I thought maybe he should have built the wall. He said he was going to, and he didn't um didn't even come close um i just wasn't a serious person so i was arguing from him because i had uh you know conservative beliefs i want a conservative president it feels to me like the democrats at least the liberal democrats are getting everything they want from this puppet president right it's like he's he's the Emperor Puyi in Manchuria. The administration's filled with Obama loyalists. They seem to be unaware or unalarmed by the incredible collapse in polls. It's almost like, I mean, I was at a dinner party last week,

a bunch of right-wingers um and me uh peter so you don't say that uh and no the only thing we could think of was we could spin weird fantasies about what happens as they sort of carry this old man through the convention and then replace him in september right after labor day which they can do in democratic party rules i'm solving two problems at once the biden problem and then the problem b which is the kamala harris problem but nobody thought that he wasn't going to nobody in no point did we think that he was going to get replaced because he seems to be doing everything the liberals want i mean is that fair or not i mean i think it is fair um and if we could distinguish maybe we should distinguish between between policy on the one hand and political follies on the other.

So, like, you know, Trump did a lot of things that conservatives like. Yeah. And he didn't get criticism from conservatives for doing those things. He did get criticism for being a clown, saying idiotic things, mainly saying idiotic things, actually. So Biden doesn't, well, I was going to say he doesn't say idiotic things. He doesn't mean to necessarily. Only when he speaks. Yeah, sort of idiotic things. But there are a lot of sort of political follies on coming from the president, the current president and his administration. And but so even on this, to your point, Rob, one policy issue that there's no pushback on with the student loan forgiveness.

Right. I rank Democrats said, including Nancy Pelosi, said, no, the president doesn't have that power. He does it. OK, he doesn't have that. He does have that power. Silence. No one says anything. It's a mystery to me. And I think I think a lot of people on the right, not necessarily in this sort of political media class. Right. But just ordinary folks, they look at the Democratic side and they sort of admire it. They sort of why can't we get behind our guy and just and stop arguing? It's I don't know whether to admire it or or to be just outraged by it. Yeah, well, that's the problem. Politics is that what we want to say to them. Republicans want to say to each other is why can't we get behind our unfit candidate the way they've gotten behind their unfit candidate? Are these parties just dead? Should we just I mean, are they just out of gas? It just seems to me like I look at the Republican leaders, the Democratic leaders, and I just think you all should just go home. You should be replaced by younger, more energetic people who aren't insane. parties um has always uh it sort of leaves me cold i take this sort of disraeli view of parties

and think that they're all they are is organized opinion um opinions are going to organize themselves somehow and in our country they organize themselves into two big groups and they can be led by idiots or not but i don don't think the parties are going away or anything like that. The age issue is really kind of perplexing, and I don't understand it. People, I've heard different theories. I don't know which are true. But it stands to reason that some of them will have to go soon. Whether we get a better crop, I have no idea. So Barton, here, shrewd observer that you are, this is the way I've begun to think

about it. Although I resist it because it seems too sort of creepy crawly, too grassy knoly as Bill Buckley would have said, too sort of conspiratorial. But the deal that has been made within the Democratic Party, the deal to which, I was about to say Joe Biden is a party, but he's gone. He's not a party to anything anymore. But the deal to which the sentient Democrats, including old figures such as Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders, but above all, the deal is as follows. We are working a slow, I don't want to use the word revolution, but it is a revolution.

It's a kind of constitutional revolution. Peter Robinson Transformation? David Schawel Transformation in which we are asserting the policy agenda of about the progressive policy of agenda of actually only about 15% of the country. We are formalizing the power of the deep state and all this is possible because we have reduced the president of the United States to the status of a mere figurehead. Now, that's fine for us. And if we get another us, the technocrats, the progressives, if we get another four years of this, we will be able to make changes in the country that are effectively permanent or extremely hard to roll back, the green agenda, all of that. And that seems to me to be roughly what's going on. Biden is now sinking in the polls, even Trump is beating Biden. So, this

grand scheme of theirs that Biden can win against Trump, but he can't even win against Trump, maybe. So, we'll see whether they get shaken up enough to try to do something about it. But the general idea that they subvert in slow motion the Constitution, Article 2 of which tells us we need an executive and that the executive power is vested in one human being. We now have a situation in which nobody really knows where the executive power is vested. The press, the incuriosity of the press on exactly who's running the White House, how decisions get made in this White House, where the president is apparently only awake and alert for four or five hours a day. In any event, so we've got this,

it's a kind of slow motion revolution taking place. And in the interest of that revolution, they're all willing to clam up. That's the price they're willing to pay. Tell me I'm mad. You're not mad? Look, in my view, something happened in 2016, and that was that the American left hit the jackpot. They didn't know it, and they didn't feel it was the jackpot, but it was. They got what they wanted, which what I mean by that is, as an inheritance, I think, of even early 20th century progressivism, and certainly sort of modern revolutionary leftism, they never really believed in the old liberal idea of different points of view coming together, forming compromises, i.e., the entire, the system that our entire republic is based on with different interests showing themselves in congress and so forth they always were technocratic in their outlook

and technocrats see a thing that needs to be done and they think that they should be empowered to do it like now and so when trump first was nominated and then was elected, that was, I think, in the American leftist, liberal progressives' mind, all the excuse they would ever need to completely ignore and dismiss any legitimacy coming from the other side. And it has grown. They've become more openly dismissive of the right and anything coming from the Republican Party. And now I just don't think that they care. There's a great line in Casablanca where the Peter Lorre character asks the Bogart character, do you despise me? And Bogart says, if I thought about you, I might. And that's perfect. You know, it's like they can't even be bothered to despise the right. And so I just don't think that they feel obliged in any way to acknowledge any shortcoming,

any mistakes that Biden makes. And I also think that that is why they sort of secretly want Trump to stay in politics. Right. They're divided about it, but they want him to be the nominee and i think that they even want him to be president again although they would never admit that yeah i kind of agree with that i mean oh yeah i think i think i agree with that i um there's also this other thing going on which is that nobody wants to be the guy who elected donald trump on the left right so if which is that nobody wants to be the guy who elected Donald Trump on the left. Right. So if you run against the incumbent, you are the guy. Right.

You know, everybody knows that Ralph Nader elected George W. Bush, probably. Right. And so you don't want to be that guy. What you're waiting for, I think, is sort of party leadership. If you're if you're I mean, you know, the Gavin Newsom's doing a really good job of running for president without running for president, right? He's just kind of like announcing his availability. Showbiz, we would call this person, you know, they are circling the studio in makeup. They are ready, right?

Yeah, understudy houses health today. They are ready to go. If you're Gretchen Whitmer, you might be feeling the same thing, right? I mean, it's not like, I mean, I don't think the Democrats have a very big bench. That's the legacy of Obama. He sort of destroyed their bench.

But on the other hand, they don't, it's not like they don't have nobody. They got somebody. But nobody wants to be the guy because you are terrified of this other outcome. Half of you are terrified if you're a Democrat. And the other half think, have constructed a house of cards and a sort of a mental landscape, which means it'll be a good thing. That's who we want. That's who we want.

That's who we want. don't they have ambition i mean i was i always thought politicians are just endlessly ambitious right they want what happened you know why are you so scared all of a sudden yeah of course there are dangers but you guys are the most uh self-serving narcissistic ambitious people on earth right but they somehow became they somehow became the bureaucrats they've empowered haven't they they said they like it they don't really like the getting on a car and you go to your office and people like kind of bounce scrape and use a separate elevator and it's kind of nice and it's like you can't do anything anyway and so maybe maybe there's something really reassuring about having this

ancient ossified bag of bones in the oval office and this like monster dragon on the outside and it kind of keeps everything everybody in line right i mean republicans are in line and it took how many republicans have dodged the even mike pence i mean arguably someone that the his boss the president of the united states said they should hang and even he won't name him in a new wall street journal editorial he refers to a leading presidential candidate i mean the weird cowardice and eunuch disease that's a i said affected both these parties that's i guess that's why i'm saying like how can this last i mean no monetary systems don't last political parties don't let these things don't last they almost always refreshed are we at a period where they're going to be

refreshed or is it more like well we'll just be filled with different people because it doesn't seem like it's about to be filled with different people. Yeah, there is sort of this pathology in both parties in which the worst thing on earth is to be blamed or criticized for anything. So I really saw it in a sort of gruesome way during the pandemic when we're just following the science. It's those guys over there telling us what to do. We have no capacity to make any decisions. So look, don't yell at us. We just believe in science, okay? And you see that across the board in all sorts of ways. And it may be that what our politics is headed to is just to have this sort of debilitated figurehead off in an attic somewhere that we call the president. And sure, you can get mad at him if you want, but we're doing what we

want. And when you get mad, you know, it's somebody's fault. And that's the dynamic with the administrative state. You know, we don't actually make decisions. It's all the regulators at the EPA and so on. And there's no accountability. There's not only no accountability. There doesn't seem to be a demand for accountability. If we had a national nationwide movement that wanted to interrogate every aspect of the coronavirus handling, maybe we would learn something. Maybe there would be some people who would do the sensible thing and perform a ritual disemboweling of themselves, you know, in the old Japanese style, and be shamed and be drummed out.

Rob has spoken about one of the things that bothers him about the 2008 financial crisis, that there wasn't enough bankers jumping out of windows, paraded around in hair shoots, humiliated for what they did. We just went on. So there's no institutional accountability at a time when we seem to have no faith whatsoever in any of our institutions, having failed us spectacularly and all the way. So it breeds, it seems, sort of a passivity in the electorate, which, as you spoke before about the gift that Donald Trump was in 2016, is an excellent opportunity for this great force to come in and flood.

But when it comes to nobody having the temerity to go up against the old bag of bones in the attic, is it because now we are sort of post-American institution and figuring that if the Democrats find a way to plug Gavin Newsom in, that's fine. And Newsom thinks that he doesn't have to go through the usual processes, that he can just be plugged in, that that's fine. And so we come up with, you know, what began as a fairly rigorous way to run a country ends up with a year of four emperors. Not a question so much as a speech, but I'm sure you can probably... Nice speech, though. You can pull something out of it that can be answered to.

You may say anything you wish, Barton. Yeah. Well, it's all very depressing. Thank you very much. That's Barton Swain. You can read him in the Wall Street. I'm sorry, go on. Yeah, this is actually one reason I sort of have an eccentric fear of AI.

I mean, eccentric in the sense that it's not a fear that is shared by other people, but I think that AI is the perfect avenue to avoid all accountability forever and completely. Right, right. Because, you know, the algorithm said to do it, and it's not our fault. So God only knows what government folly could be excused by an algorithm. Barton, I have two questions for you. The second one concerns you, but the first

one is returning us to Donald Trump and the state of the country. You said, but did not follow up on, that you thought the Democrats, or at least the progressives, secretly want Donald Trump to become president again. That is an idea that had simply not crossed my mind. Could you explain that? Well, you know, people want things without knowing that they want them. Yes. The, you know, it's more fun for one thing.

It's just generally more fun in a lot of ways to be in the opposition than it is uh in power right yeah or you have to defend everything and you have to make excuses for your mistakes and you have to you know spin everything and um when you are in opposition, you get no accountability and you get to criticize everything. And look, if there's one thing that unites all progressives and liberals, it is the need to be outraged. They love it and they always have. And I think that at the end of the Obama second term, the things to be outraged about were really small. You know, we were talking about, like, transgender bathrooms and stuff like that. Right.

That just wasn't satisfying. And when Trump got elected, it was like, oh, man, this is a long way. And I think they had a blast. Loved it. Are you kidding me? It was just a smorgasbord of outrage and um every day and now with biden being a complete embarrassment it's it's just not fun so yeah i i think that they they'd be happy with it the right is prone to its daily outrages too though i mean if you hang around twitter long enough you see that we have our own version of

the thing that we just simply cannot believe. Now, in the case of, you know, the Trump years, it was something that Trump said, or an all caps rant, or it was this, that, or the other thing. It wasn't necessarily always a policy issue, but we have those two, and maybe for good reason, because there is a lot going on on a daily basis that we ought to be outraged about and not lose our ability to do so. I think what distinguishes right and left in this way is that the left cannot concede that anything is good. Right. Nothing can be bad at all times. Uh, and, and, and the right is, is, is fully capable of acknowledging, uh, distinguishing between the good and the bad, um, which is, you know, the proper way to live.

Um, so, but yeah, we, we do have our, our, um, our need for outrage, I guess. Uh, although I would caution against, um, uh, looking at Twitter for any reason at all. That's very wise. That's very wise. So, Barton, here's my second question. This is a question about Barton Swain. The journalism business model has collapsed. All journalists who want to make a career of it need a constant presence on Twitter.

They've got to get a television contract with Fox News. They need to establish a sub-stack. And you're not doing any of this. There you are, seated at home in South Carolina. By the way, they also need to be in Washington. There you are, seated in South Carolina, and you're in South Carolina and you're a newspaper man. You're a newspaper man. Furthermore, you take books so seriously that you wrote one, brilliant book, so beautifully written that as a fellow writer, I'm forced to hate you.

You wrote one and you review books and you take the ideas in those books seriously and you even comment on how well they're put together. Barton Swaim, you are a 19th century man. What the hell do you think you're doing? Barton Swaim Go on. Go on. Darrell Bock You're putting your faith in newspapers and the written word. Well, yeah, that's a topic, the written word. I heard this interview with your old friend Peter Thiel years ago, in which he said that if anytime he's interviewing someone, you know, for a position or something,

he says, tell me a view that you hold that nobody else holds, you know, that would be widely panned if anybody knew you held it. And he said, usually, you know, they come out with things that a lot of people actually believe, Racism is bad or something. If I had to answer that question, it would be that there is a future in newspapers, which is probably, actually, probably that's the dumbest view ever. And when I say papers, I mean print papers. And that is just because when you, I'll put it this way. From time to time, I tell people, they say, what do you do? And I say, I work for the Wall Street Journal.

And they say, you know, so you write for them? I say, yes. And they say, like, online? And I say, no, I mean, in the print paper. And they say, oh, wow. Oh, okay. And so what I gleaned from that reaction is that when people see something in print, they think, well, somebody took the time to edit this into shape and spend the capital necessary to deliver it somewhere on actual paper. So it must be important. And when you encounter something online and you know that it's only online, it may be excellent. And often it is excellent. But you also know

that all somebody had to do is type it into an application and hit post, and that's it. And so I think that over time, print papers will come back, print magazines and papers. The demand will slowly reemerge. I have some very bad news for you because i get the wall street journal delivered to my door every day and if it's something that i'm doing i guarantee you it's not on its way to becoming a trend i'm usually the guy turning off the lights yeah yeah so so

barton tom wolf told me the story that he was working at the New York Herald Tribune when John Kennedy was killed. And they listened to it in the newsroom on the radio. I think there was a television. They watched Cronkite pronounce Kennedy dead. And Tom had this sinking feeling that he was witnessing the death of newspapers. Here was a major event that had taken place, and it was broadcast. And then as he walked home to his apartment, there were lines around the block at every newsstand for the evening edition newspapers. Right. Because it wasn't real until people had read it in print. Still valid? Still valid? Barton?

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's still valid. All right. Maybe not for the immediacy. You know, the web takes care of the immediacy. But if you really want to know something, everybody knows that you have to, not everybody admits, but everybody knows you have to read it on a physical thing. It may be a mental tick just with me, but I cannot remember anything I've read online more than six months ago. Nothing. It's all just a blur. I can remember things that I read in Commentary magazine in 1996 and be able more or less to find it on the page.

I mean, it's not a memory, but you know, you oftentimes you remember things that well from long ago and yeah, you consult it and maybe it's not exactly, you know, the way you, you remember it, but you do remember it. I have no clue what I read last year online. So there's hope.

There's hope. Depends. There is. I agree. Walter Kern, great American writer has, has started his own little newspaper with somebody else's name escapes me. And it comes out periodically.

And it's an attempt to revive the newspaper as it used to be a community sort of conversation. It's not online, that paper. No, it's not. No, it is printed. It's like the way things used to be. We're going to cut down a tree. We're going to pulp it. We're going to ship it here.

We're going to spill it full of ink. And then it's going to run through this enormous machine. It's going to be mechanically folded, put it in the trucks, dropped off at street corners, and urchins will deliver it to your door, which is still kind of how we do it here at the newspaper where I am. But we all know where print is going. We all have seen where the line is going. And we're writing a demographic down into the graveyard. And we have to figure out how to get new people in eyeballs, to use those wretched terms,

to the website where everything, as you point out correctly, is digital and weightless. It doesn't have the same thing, the same heft. So the question is whether or not we can keep the shells of the institutions alive long enough to repopulate them with people who realize that there is something there, and also to do it in a way that seems counterintuitive. The Wall Street Journal is a great newspaper. It's broad, it has depth, it has intelligence, it trusts its audience,

and it's got a lot of stuff in it. I go to the UK and I see the Telegraph and I just marvel at this huge saddle blanket that I can unfurl. It's got all kinds of stories and the serendipity of going to here to there and finding something on the jump and the rest of it is an experience that cannot be reproduced on the web or you're just simply a flea on a hot plate so last question then do you think that is that that the newspaper industry as we know today has to shutters and die and then something comes out of the ashes or can we slow the decline and repopulate it that's that's my last that's my last sermon masquerading as a question i don't know is the answer but okay yeah i don't either really don't but i think that so i i've always wondered if there's if there's a way to um if

one business model and i don't maybe this has been tried is to charge this would work only at a local level i think um but that but that's that's where that's where newspapers that they're going to be revived would need to be revived and that's the local paper so people know what the school board is doing or whatever is there is one business model to charge for the online sub but to get the paper for free so maybe delivery would be a problem but on any news and the actual paper would be free but if you want to see it you know if you like the instantaneousness and all the rest of it uh you want it on your phone your desktop you're going to have to pay and pay a lot so these um these outlets are going to have to experiment with different business models. But I think that just the demand for news hasn't gone down.

I have a little wrinkle on that to suggest. I personally would be willing to pay not to have the New York Times delivered. Just a little thought for you there, Bart. Or we switch our model to a dog-wasted disposal envelope system and then give the newspaper for free. Well, I stopped my New York Times print subscription only because the art section, you know, I have kids in the house. Come on. I don't

want porn lying around. Well, I still get it because I love doing the crossword puzzle on paper. And that's that. So one last question before we go, because I know we've got to let you go. And I keep asking the same question. But it seems to me like there's a market opportunity, right?

Where is there no one in politics? Everyone has basically the same thing. There's this great big center, right that there's this great big center right there's this great big kind of shrugging center there you know the pro-life pro-choice movement is pretty much abortion is pretty much a great example of that that americans are kind of clustered in a very very very big fat center and they are looking for a party to speak to that and neither party seems to be doing that right the you have half the republicans are saying things like life begins at conception they don't

like that and the democrats are saying you should be able to have an abortion the you know second year birth of life right essentially um isn't that emblematic of politics in general i mean isn't somebody gonna gonna jump on this does it doesn't seem like i mean i don't i guess i'm just looking at economically there's a market there are buyers out there yeah yeah i mean with with the with the example of abortion there's this difference uh that people don't want to talk about abortion that's true most people are in the middle but they also don't want to talk about abortion. That's true. Most people are in the middle, but they also don't like to talk about it. They don't like to debate it. They don't want to argue about it.

And so that leaves a hole in the middle for people who do want to argue about it to take all the action. But, I mean, I think on economic issues, the market is there. And, you know, it's a matter of reforming the institutions, particularly Congress, to actually make these debates real and simply use their offices as Yuval Levin says, as platforms for a national audience. So we just need to figure out a way to make our institutions, particularly Congress, function in the way they were intended. That'll be great. Let's reform our institutions and make them work. I think we can probably get that done by the end of the month, and we

redouble our efforts. Great prescriptions and great ideas. You can find them at the Wall Street Journal under Barton Swain's byline. Also, the author of The Speechwriter, A Brief Education on Politics, and the latest piece is Joe Biden's Iron Grip on his party. As you can tell by this wide range of conversations, he's

adept in a variety of arena, and we thank him for coming, and we look forward to having you on again. Gentlemen, thank you. Thanks, Martin. Take care, man. The next time, perhaps, if you're going to quote Peter Lorre, I think you have to do it in a Peter Lorre voice.

Yes, Ricky, I think you do. Nice, nice, Peter. The line, you know, I always thought the line was, I know you despise me, Rick, but it's not. What did I think? Well, in any case, Laurie was great. I love Peter Laurie in that movie. And I was just thinking about Casablanca the other day, what an American treasure it is,

and how the fact that it was just a rote studio product that just became inhabited by the best people who could possibly do any of those roles and how they never managed to do it again. And they kept trying, didn't they? I mean, Rob, you would know better than I. But when something works, they turn around and say, well, let's do that again, as we see the diminishing effects with the Marvel world. What we don't see that is when a conservative movie hits,

the studios don't say, hey, what was the little lightning in a bottle that they captured there? Let's see if we can do some of that. Before we go then, a brief account of how are things in the entertainment industry right now. You are keeping your eye on the strike in the summer box office. I'm on strike. Has anybody learned anything, or does anybody know anything,

or is it still nobody knows anything? No, nobody knows anything. I think it's coming down to two big issues and it depends on how the market reacts to the continued shutdown. It depends on

what happens when everybody realizes that if you backdate from summer 2024 you figure that your movies have to be either in production or finished in post-production right now and they're not so um it you know the the long term the tail effect of a strike is continues and lingers and you know you're seeing i think a lot of sort of what they call M&A activity. I think less M&A and more breaking up is going to be happening, and that's going to be great. The future of show business is going to be not six big companies,

but 27,000 little companies, because that's the way show business is most efficient. And I think we're also seeing things like the uh the as you mentioned you mentioned the big you know a movie that did very well this summer i think it's maybe the third biggest movie is is called sound of freedom and it was um i happen to know a lot about that movie because a good friend of mine wrote it i'm writing a piece about it for commentary and i'm you know do a martini shot about it next week, next week, probably. Um, the guy who wrote it is a, uh, uh, believing Catholic, a practicing Roman Catholic,

as is the star. I don't, I don't, I don't know whether Jim Caviezel is a Roman Catholic specifically, but you know, yes, yes, definitely. Okay. I know he's devout. I don't know if he's, he's a little weird. Okay. Um, yes, definitely. I know he's devout. I don't know if he's of the archives. He's a little weird. Definitely. And so they made a movie, and they're going to make about $200 million domestically

this year, which is a lot. And the distributor, Angel Films... Notice that James is... or that Rob is a little uncertain about the religion, but he knows exactly how much money he's paying. Well, I know he's Catholic, but I mean, I do know i know some catholics in that know him that that are not roman catholic they they differ um so there's that and uh and but the movie itself is just a really really great thriller and it's a true story and the guy it's based on, who's a real person, is also a believing Catholic.

There really is nothing particularly faith-based about Sound of Freedom. The next movie they're making, or this made, is coming out in March. It's called The Cabrini, and the trailer looks spectacular. And about Mother Cabrini, who was very sort of the first American saint, I think. Why am I doing this Roman Catholic stuff? Peter, you should be jumping in i'm just listening so there but the my friend who wrote it rod barr who's a wonderful wonderful writer um said look he's not sure that um these big companies could even release a movie like that and afford it it It's just too risky and small. A movie that did really well in the movie

theater, by the way, $200 million, which is pretty good in movie theater when the conventional wisdom was, no, only big movies with Marvel, whatever, could be in the movie theaters. There'd be no way for them to release it to the larger public because it had to start

in a certain place, kind of following the old Tyler Perry model, which is you start small with a small audience and you grow the audience. And a big company like Disney simply just can't wrap their head around it, which creates a huge opportunity for people to make real movies

that are good and can go in the movie theater and make hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. And there's space for that now because companies like disney have just poisoned their brand menasco before we go i mean i i i had i grew up with a great fellow feeling for for you know uncle walt in the house every sunday night um and then i kind of sort of fell away when i grew up but then i had a child and all of a, I'm rediscovering this great backstory, the catalog of American wonderfulness and learning about that and enjoying going to Disney World and marveling at the efficient machine, the money extraction machine that this is, while still finding myself in a dark room somewhere in a little office, you know, Main Street spaghetti place watching, watching flowers and trees at one of their earlier color numbers and just enjoying the whole Disney thing. And now it's just weird to me. Now just the whole place has just got a whiff about

it that I just don't like. And I don't think a lot about it, but if that's hit me, who was a Disney fan, not a super, I'm not going to go there in the mouse ears and propose to my wife in front of the Magic Kingdom, but I love the place and everything about it. And now I'm just, I don't care if they sunder and fall into the ocean. Well, I mean, that may be true. All that could be true. I'm just making a business argument, which is that these big companies have big channels and they can only do big things in a big way. And they've really rearranged themselves for that. big companies have big channels and they can only do big things in a big way and they

they've really rearranged themselves for that i mean i mean we're using i'm using disney as an example but you could say the same thing about sony you can say the same thing about compcast you say the same thing about warner brothers discovery they're just too big and they think that's gonna that adds gives them efficiencies but i think it really does it in a way it opens up um the market to a lot of movie makers like the people who made sound of freedom and cabrini to do like incredible movies look sound of freedom is just a really good thriller right you can watch you can go in and eat your popcorn and watch a hero do something heroic and save children and then you know you cheer and you walk out um

and that that's a business argument and you may be right about the other argument but it's not it isn't as if there's a very exact exact parallel here in silicon valley sequoia venture capital became too big if you're managing billions and billions of dollars you can only do really big deals and those are not where the returns are the returns are these little upstart companies that you want to get them when they're oh same same kind of thing if you if you're big deals and those are not where the returns are the returns are these little upstart companies that you want to get them when they're oh same same kind of thing if you if you're big if you're managing huge amounts of money then the executives can very easily convince themselves they need big bets and that means things that aren't as risk they need to deploy anyway you get the picture

same kind of thing here yes that's true you i mean you need size because you need financial resources to do some things although i still don't understand why digital movies cost so much i mean it's not like you have to build the sets physically but if there were three things you would ask me 20 years ago that i absolutely would love for the rest of my entire life besides the disney catalog it would be star wars because i grew up with it and i loved it even though they did stupid things with it it would be marvel Wars because I grew up with it and I loved it even though they did stupid things with it. It would be Marvel because I grew up with the cartoons and my God, I love that Iron Man and that Thor thing was

so great. And it would be Pixar because it was the genius home of storytelling the likes of which we hadn't seen in our entire lives. And what now happens? I look at Disney Plus on my bill which is Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars and I went, eh, and I cancelled canceled it i did too just a couple

months ago it wasn't because exactly because they had happening they had leeched out every element of goodwill and interest that i had through a combination of ideological emotional storytelling decisions that had nothing to do with the size and my point to that is this the golden era of hollywood is in the i know rob there wasn't any such but in the studio system they had size but they also had a certain way of looking at the audience and the culture and the role in it that enabled them to turn stuff out there wasn't all casablanca but the stuff below it was yeah watchable and part of a i almost sound like peter robbins there it was watchable. And part of, I almost sound like Peter Robbins there.

It was watchable. And you would go to the theater and sit there for the newsreel and the cartoon and the short feature and the programmer and the big thing. And that was your night. And that was big. And they owned the theaters and they owned the actors and bigness worked because of the culture and the attitudes of the people who were running the show says me what do i know well i mean i i i think that's i think it's partially true they didn't

own the theaters in the 30s they were busted up and they couldn't block book uh and they own the actors but that was like the actors like that because they got these giant fat contracts and they had to do certain certain movies but they put the two things that were different. One is they made tons of movies. They made tons of pictures. Paramount released 50 pictures a year. And then not including B-movies. And they were terrible, terrible investments. Nobody on Wall Street thought of investing in these crazy companies.

They were run by people, and there was cash flow business, and individuals got very, very rich, but shareholders, there weren't any. They didn't really start getting interested in show business until the 60s. And every single acquisition, major acquisition of a company, of a large company, of a studio, ended in tears. There isn't one that hasn't yet so uh the reality is that show business where the argument you're making that they were big was like they but they were small and they had a bunch of little little contraptions within it and decisions were not they were not vertically integrated and they made so many movies that there was no top-down

supervision of the movies there's no marketing department that read a script before they made it it was all kind of it was show business the way it's supposed to be and um and it totally worked and i think what's broken about it now is that you have a bunch of people who think that if only i was in charge of everything then i wouldn't make any mistakes and that is just not efficient way to run a movie studio or tv studio it just isn't like you gotta like make some room for some stakes which means vertical integration is a disaster uh and it used to be um a law that financial interest and syndication rules that nixon put into place in the early 70s because

he wanted to punish the tv networks so he said you can't own any tv shows and then there was deregulation which i'm in favor of the deregulation of it but that doesn't mean that just because you're not regulated from doing something you should do it and uh everyone thought oh you know what so so you so you have this bizarre moment where um because of low interest rates netflix could go to wall street and raise billions of dollars in debt make a lot of tv shows and movies and put them on their servers and no one is watching them the number one show on netflix this summer is a usa tv rerun series called suits yep And everybody said, well, that's because Meghan Markle's in it.

Well, you know what? She was in Suits four years ago and two years ago and one year ago. She was not... People didn't just discover this summer that she was in Suits. They're watching Suits because Suits is a pretty good show.

It's light. It's fun. It's interesting. You can watch an hour of it. If you're a shareholder of Netflix and the number one show on that network is an almost 10 year old rerun i mean what is that telling you it's telling me that we should end this before i get on a big

long story about how actually i have found myself spending most of my time on youtube the serendipity angle of which and the and the fastness and the turnover and the connectivity of it once google knows what you like is terrifying uh and the quantity of commercials is absolutely off-putting but on the other hand wow the things that you find and the things you hear here so ladies and gentlemen listening to this podcast if you haven't already cancel that stupid streaming subscription and spend the money on ricochet where you will find a community that is welcoming and interesting and fascinating the member feed which you don't have access to unless you're a member, is really where a lot of the great stuff happens. And by great stuff, I mean conversations that go all over the road. Rob Long, of course, would usually in this spot

tell you about the meetups to come. But the thing about Ricochet meetups, about people getting together in real meet space, as we used to not call it, can be found at ricochet.com as well, if you go to look at the panel that says meetups, see if there's one coming to your area or join and start one of your own and watch the ricochet people come to you. Give us those five stars at Apple review. If you wouldn't mind so much podcast, help the show get a little bit more traction.

Join of course goes without saying, and tell us what you thought of the show in the comments and we'll see everybody. I usually say at ricochet 4.0 but here's the thing thanks to you thanks to sponsors like expressvpn we have invested in something coming something good something wonderful remember 20 2010 when dave bowman appears from the grave and they asked something wonderful right wonderful too bad they didn't have peter lorry for that or something Something wonderful, Rick.

We'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet for, for now, point O. Next week, guys. Next week, fellas. Ricochet. Join the conversation.