The Ricochet Podcast - Question Time

Episode Date: June 12, 2021

We’ve got another Happy Hour show this week! (If you haven’t heard, we like Happy Hour.) And who better to spend it with than our very own members? Rob, Peter and James field questions from the men and women who make Ricochet the best “place” for civil conversation and debate. So grab your favorite cocktail, beer or wine and enjoy another episode from the website whose biggest problem is that we... Source

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We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. You haven't been to the border. And I haven't been to Europe. And I don't understand the point that you're making. With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Democracy simply doesn't work.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lylex, and today the guests are Peter Robinson, James Lylex, and Rob Long. Let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! podcast. Welcome everybody to the Ricochet podcast, number 548 flagship podcast, the top number one, the first of ricochet.com. Of course, it's joined by many, many, many other great podcasts and you should go there and find them. As a matter of fact, while you're there, you should sign up because you can be part of the most stimulating conversations in community on the web it's question time today which means that the members of ricochet have

all these things they want to ask the founders and perhaps myself as well the founders being rob long and peter robinson gentlemen welcome how's your july july yeah it's been it's been it's been 99 degrees here for a week which which is why. Has it really? It has. It has been punishingly hot. And so that's why I said July. And what do you think you're being punished for? Oh, where do I begin? To tell the sweet love story of a city that is at odds with itself in so many ways.

On the other hand, I just got off a conference call with all the editors and reporters of the paper. We won a Pulitzer for breaking news for the George Floyd. Oh, great. Which is nice. Congratulations. We promptly go to Reddit and we're being excoriated for being a right-wing rag that is in the pocket of a right-wing conservative billionaire. It's just always amusing to people to think that the newspaper I work for is conservative. But they do. I suppose if you're coming from a Marxian-Gramsian perspective,

it might be, in that it doesn't preach the end of capitalism every day on the front page. Who's the evil billionaire? His name just fell completely. Glenn Taylor. Okay. So that must be the future of newspapers, right? To be owned by somebody who actually lives in the area and cares about it?

Yes. That's exactly what it was. As he described it to us when we were meeting the guy many years ago. When he was a kid growing up in the farm, he used to get the paper in the mail. And he would spread it open on the parlor floor and read the doings of the world and the great beyond. And he had a connection with the paper that went back decades. I just happy about that i felt the same way about my fargo forum what was the newspaper when you were growing up guys were you the kind of guys who had ink stained elbows because you'd be sitting on it reading don d and mark trail and the rest of it

the binghamton evening press was the newspaper when I was a kid. And that's actually something that no longer exists, is evening newspapers. Yeah. The Sun Bulletin was the morning newspaper, but that was the Democratic paper, so my father never subscribed. And the Evening Press, I never got my hands on, because my father had a perfectly invariable routine. Home from work, pick up the paper, sit down and read it that was his quiet time and yeah yeah yeah fold it under his arm and go down to the throne room in the case of our family i see uh well we had like i was a young kid like until i was eight we would get the um the baltimore sun and then there was an evening paper that news American,

I think was called. So you read, you read Mencken when he was fresh. Right. Well, yeah. Right. Before anybody got it.

Uh, and we, uh, and I think I like the afternoon paper more. Cause I think maybe had better comic strips and had a jumble. Um, I think it was a jumble had something in it no it had to find a word thing yes which i really did like and then uh and then we lived in europe we didn't get a paper we got we got

tons of news magazines and so like kind of like once you break the spell of the paper you just break the spell of the paper um but now i get i really enjoy one of my joys every day is getting the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal on my front stoop. I go half that far. You spoke about the connection to the newspaper. This world is gone and it's not coming back and we shouldn't mourn it, I'm sure. But my mother described the scene to me on her family farm, which was outside Montrose, Pennsylvania. And this was, she was remembering this from her childhood. This was before they got a telephone, certainly before the radio. It was just a farmhouse and the isolation in those days.

In any event, my grandfather, her father was by the standards of their little community, a wealthy man. And he subscribed. He could afford to have one pay. And it was delivered. Somehow or other, it got delivered when the roads were clear to the Sunday New York Times. And on Sunday evening, the family and the hired man would gather around the dining room table. And they would pass around sections of the Sunday New York Times and sit in silence.

And every person at the table read every word in the newspaper. I know that world of which you speak. There's a term that you use, Peter. There's a term you use that just made me smile, and that was the hired man. Yes. At the farmhouse, there was this little tiny room off the back entrance where the hired man lived. It was just a bed and a dresser. And they were interchangeable. They came and they went. Sometimes they were scary. Sometimes they were genial. And it was only later that I realized that next to that, next to the hired man's room was an enormous freezer. They had a big deep freeze, which was actually the brand name of the thing at the time. And now I wonder if the hired man at the end of the year when he asked to collect his wages was simply put in the deep freezer and later fed to the pigs but probably not uh rob mentioned the jumbled and the uh the the word

and the rest of them the number of fillers that used to be out there in newspaper syndicates was just extraordinary because they had to they had to fill every single inch of that thing nowadays with these yeah i mean it's part of the fun of the paper, right? Oh, it was. I read it for the filler. I don't read it for the newspaper. Right. The papers of the 1920s had so many columnists just doing one-liners, just doing three daughters. The number of serials that they would have, the little tiny cartoons that they would write. I mean, John Hill Jr. for a couple of years just dashed off something on a cocktail napkin and 400 papers printed it. I remember in the Fargo Forum because there was no blank space they never had blank space so they

would have to cram something in everything and so they'd have little fillers little fact fillers that they would put at the end of the column there'd be a little space a little line and then it would say something like ants will go to any lengths to get water but that would be it and so as a kid you would just imagine hordes of ants with knives and guns and torches and the rest of its storming villages to go down their wells the rest of it anyway who did prince valiant prince valium we did not have prince valiant in our paper no you didn't do you remember it do you remember it rob and i do remember it i think that was sort of the high arty end of the comic page my favorites were prince valiant bringing up father can you

imagine and uh and dick tracy bringing up father yes tracy i'm i'm stuck with i'm stuck with bringing up father which is dick tracy you guys are both watching wearing i will i i watches are you thick tracy the thing of the it's just astounding it exists now the nation that controls magnetism will control the world as tracy was always telling us bringing up father by george mcmanus do you know do you remember what that whole strip was even about not really i couldn't quite get it jigs uh won the lottery and so jigs was pitched into this world this high society world which his wife wanted to belong to but he still wanted to go down to the club and drink with dinty moore and the rest of the boys and

they did that for 50 years anyway uh so newspapers a whole different culture and i lament that it is a as peter said a dying one whatever people think about them there was something about a paper town having a paper that was vitally important to the shaping of the of the town's identity and what the people thought and i'm you know i'm glad that we i live in a two newspaper town and i'm glad for that so anyway congratulations to the star tribune so uh what else is going on in the world out there that has bedecked bedeviled and be bothered uh the two of you before we get to the next question, which,

well, my wife is in a bad mood. She's in a bad mood. I just got home. I took one look. I knew what had happened. Djokovic beat Rafa. Oh,

yeah. My wife has got that on tape delay, so I can't say anything about that. I'm sorry. Did I just spoil it for you? No, no, not at all.

Not at all. I just will have to refrain from saying, boy, it's going. Did I just spoil it for you, Jim? No, no, not at all. Not at all. I just will have to refrain from saying, boy, it's going to be a great one tonight because you know, Rob, there's that paramount in your mind on this fine Friday. Well, nothing really paramount. I mean, this is actually the kind of fun part of the summer

when it's just about to begin. Yes. And you kind of feel like oh yeah it's gonna happen and um there's a i think there's a very uh taciturn nasty i mean he was a test train kind of nasty guy robert frost who um at when uh we always complain about the summer and i think even racy said well you know when the fourth of july this summer shot me ass that's what my mother always said my mother said by the way when the 4th of July, the summer shot me ass. That's what my mother always said. My mother said, by the way, when the 4th comes, that's it.

Summer's over. And so that is a very bleak way to look at the world. I can't shake it. I cannot shake it. It literally isn't true either. I mean, summer has only been around for about a week and a half before you started complaining it was over, which I think was the subject of his painting of his poem. It's called The Oven Bird. What to make of a diminished thing. But it's like, I mean, give me a break. It's like the 4th of July is the subject of his of his painting of his poem um it's called the oven bird what to make of a diminished thing but it's like i mean give me a break it's like the fourth

of july is the beginning of summer when i when i see the fight when i see the the red white and blue stuff start to appear in the store seasonal section of the stores in june my mother's voice kicks in off force around the corner it'll be over which leads right to our first question from winter mute who asked us this seems like a fine occasion to momentarily shed my lurker status i've been in a poetry kick lately so do you fellows like poetry and do you have a favorite poem or poet i can go right away because it it in it has emerged from this conversation rob mentioned robert frost and james and i were talking about the hired hands, the death of the hired hand is just... Oh, right, yeah, right. That's beautiful.

It is a... The dialogue is just... And if you're like James and me, and you have a family connection, I never met the hired hand out at my grandparents' place, but I heard about him over and over again when I was a kid. And it contains that great line. So the death of the hired...

The hired hand comes home, comes back to the house that last employed him. And the husband, the farmer, doesn't want him back. He doesn't want to let him in. He wants to send him away. And the wife reasons with him and says, no, we have to take him in. Of course, they do take him in. And by the morning, he he's dead but it contains that line home is where when you have to go there they have to take you in anyway so that anything by i think frost may be my favorite almost anything by frost yeah home is where um when you go there they have to take you in that's right that is but well he incredibly ble incredibly bleak, bleak poet. I mean, I am a fan of Philip Larkin. I'm a huge Philip Larkin fan.

Not much less bleak. No, no. I mean, my God, I mean, who could be bleaker? I mean, they out-bleak each other. I also like, I like Yeats a lot. And I think for a while, I think the thing about poetry that makes it what i like about it is i like the memorizing of the poem that's how old-fashioned i am but if you don't you haven't memorized one or two i think you're you're not really a fan you got to memorize one or two just one or two just to kind of odd and actually wrote a great one called um musee de

beaux-arts about uh broigel's fall of icarus the painting where he's like this beautiful landscape and up there a tiny little corner you just see icarus falling from the sky and uh he sort of elaborates on that like there's always there's always bystanders in the most amazing scenes who just don't aren't paying attention don't really care this is this is this is getting a little high-flown. Ogden Nash, The Turtle. Oh, funny. I think it clever of The Turtle, twixt plated decks to prove so fertile.

Done. Yeah, that's right. Dorothy Parker. James? Dorothy Parker. As I grow older and older and I totter towards the tomb, I find that I no longer care who sleeps with whom. Rob's right about memorizing a few of them.

And I would like to just, I would like to begin by, by performing in its entirety. The, my favorite poem that I memorized in mezzo della camina de nostra vita. That's the first line of Dante's Inferno. Of course, it's very long.

So do we have, do we have the time? Probably not. Right. The thing about memorizing poetry... Not Purgatorio. People used to have to do this. I mean, in class, they would stand up and they would have to

recite an entire poem. The boy stood in the burning deck, picking his nose like crazy and all the rest of it. And at least you had that shared set of cultural value. There was a show called Information, Please. It was a very high... It was a show called information please very high you know it was middle brow radio show but it was it obviously showed how much people knew and they would bring on you know clifford clifford fadiman i believe was the host and they'd have boris karloff with

uh you know some app some artist and then some writer and the rest of it and they would at they would be asked to fill in the famous lines or make a reference to particular pieces of poetry. And they generally could do it. And even if they got it wrong, they were summoning up some poetry, some fragment of poetry that they'd learned as a child. We don't do that anymore. We just don't. I mean, the idea of teaching anything by rote, Rob, I think you would agree,

is now seen as stifling of the imagination, not unlocking. Well, I mean, I think it might be, but I actually feel like there's a huge amount of research, neurological research, which suggests that it actually is really, really smart and that it really kind of helps your brain. And that especially as you get older, memorizing a poem or two is probably a good thing to do,

like studying the crossword puzzle, just to kind of stave off the dementia, which is- I have to go get the dog inside because he's barking. So I'm going to ask you the next question, which is from Tori Warwriter writer which is the best drink to have while enjoying happy hour i'll be right back uh at this time of year campari and soda really yeah that's kind of fancy well i the first time the first time, in my case particularly, there's a backstory.

It's an homage to Bill Buckley, sort of. I was a junior at Dartmouth, and I'd written something in the newspaper that got Bill's attention. And he invited me down to New York for magazine week. Every two weeks, they'd put the magazine to bed, and Bill would have everybody on the National Review staff over to his apartment on Park Avenue for drinks and dinner. And they'd often have a guest or two. Well, so I got invited to this thing. And I was, of course, just terrified. We were in the library, that red room of his. I said, Mr. Robinson, what would you like to drink? And at that stage in my life i could only name one drink other than beer so i said gin and tonic unable to name anything else and he looked at me

and said oh we're what was it yes yes we're out of tonic may i mix it with campari which of course is ridiculous because campari is a very strong, and I had no idea what it was. It's a Negroni with a sweet vermouth. It's a half, it's a third, two thirds of a Negroni. Two thirds is Campari, but Campari is just that you buy that in the bottle. It's already done. Yes.

My wife drinks it. So it was half gin and half Campari. And I got pretty well looped even before dinner and kept looking over at me with great amusement. Anyhow, springtime comes. Campari is light, fruity, but also a little bitter. It's a grown-up drink. I like it. I like Campari and soda. I like a Negroni, which is a third Campari.

It's a third gin, a third Campari, a third sweet vermouth. And then you put in an orange slice. Pretty good. That'll last you a long time. third Campari, a third sweet vermouth. And then you put in an orange slice. Pretty good. I kind of feel like, yeah, what's the best drink to have when you're enjoying happy hours? Kind of the drink that's in your hand is the one you want.

I mean, I do find myself, like, as the summer gets going, just not drinking whiskey. Just, I don't know why. And then also also just recently been drinking a lot of rum and really good as a kind of a haitian sugar cane liqueur called uh clarence and i like that too so summer summer is not for whiskey i bring myself i force myself to have it

on fridays but i agree with you what i've been enjoying lately has been the fine pleasures of tequila, which really just gets the spot. I don't drink that. You don't? I know. Tequila does not agree with me. Wait, but so wait, why do you force yourself on Fridays to drink whiskey? Good question. I don't know, but it's a tradition

and it's what God wants me to do. It's a tradition. I've never heard either one of you talk about beer is that i used to drink it with you or no no i love i love beer but it makes me logy um and it makes me uh bulbous because of uh of all the carbs it is and i'm almost glad that i'm away from it now because beer has become so crafty and so specialized. You can't just have a damned beer. You have to have a hoppy IPA with a clever name. And don't get me wrong, it's often great stuff.

But the role of beer when I was growing up was a cold can that you opened with a church key. Oh, wow. And it was barley pop it wasn't particularly flavorful but on a cold day after you'd mowed the lawn a grain belt a hams was just was ambrosia oh yeah hams is good too i i've discovered this since spending so much time here in new orleans where i am now i being the the invention where the cocktail was invented by antoine pate showed um invented the herb the uh the sazerac uh when what it was like 18 something but that was back when yeah that was when when all the bitters that you would buy were medicinal so antoine pate showed was not a bartender he was a pharmacist

and he invented the sazerac as a way to sort of you know cure what ails you campari was invented as a way to get the french or italian soldiers to take their quinine yeah that makes sense yeah yeah sorry go ahead well i was gonna say like and one thing i really liked here is that i mean i've liked it and i have to stop it is that the people here in the heat there's a normal bar where they're not you know people here aren't fancy about that there's they drink a lot of beer and they make a lot of beer here some of it is made kind of to remind you of the old beers that you are sometimes hard to get with super light very crisp and like on a hot day like today it's 90 degrees that's just what you want

yes that is just what you want right right right That is just what you want. Right. Right. Right. The question is, is when you go to a restaurant and you make these fantastic drinks, you know exactly how much more you're paying than you should. And boy, are you paying a lot. The markup is fantastic. But on the other hand, they have access and to, you know, fine, fine ingredients. You might wonder how does your favorite restaurant consistently make such delicious food? Well, the short answer is they have access to all the right kitchen tools that's right we're talking about made in made in professional quality cookware and kitchen where anyone is capable of making restaurant quality food at home made in products professionally quality cookware and knives for those who love to cook they source

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My wife ordered the product. It arrived yesterday, and it's a pan. And it looks serious, meaning it came with instructions for seasoning it. Is this the kind of thing can we use a made-in product the way you use say an iron frying pan will it brown meat if we use it properly oh it's yeah you probably got the carbon steel one yes yes yes yeah and that is yeah the carbon steel those are great i mean those are all right question from the audience when you started ricochet so many years ago did you think that after 548 podcasts you'd be discussing whether you could brown meat in this particular thing uh no that was our fondest dream

yeah yeah question for rob uh and peter you can weigh in on this as well from an outsider's perspective we compared to rob or outsiders joss ween appears to be a standard misogynistic hollywood leftist and yet created a wonderful libertarian sci-fi show in Firefly. I read that a lot of that can be attributed to the writer, Tim Menear. How does the process work with writing a show? How much can writers override the creator? How much power do they have? Was Tim Menear a friend of Abe?

Oh, we can't say that. We don't want to, you know. Tom and Matt's career. No, I don't know whether he was. I don't really know any tim menier's politics at all he i mean he well graciously once showed up at a fundraiser we had for um this homeless youth agency on the board of um you know look you you you um it's not a question of power it's a question of like you know when you when you're doing a show even if

it's a one hour even if it's a sci-fi show, the, the, the pitch that's the most interesting wins. And so anyone who can, anyone who pitches the best interesting story or a twist or a line of dialogue is going to have power. Whereas the someone who sits there and sort of judges and, and, and is trying to process all that through politics is usually going to lose. So, you know, you, the, the person, the creator who's, whoever's running the show has the final say, but the, the, the, I mean, I find just in terms of running a show that the trick isn't to have the right answer the trick is to hear the right answer right which means you have to have

people on the staff who are gonna feel empowered to pitch and the only time i ever lose my temper with it with the writing team is when people are are what i would say you know pitching in our area or around a thing it's like i've been known to blow my top and point to the screen where the script is being projected and shout the actor needs to say something here what is the actor what are the words the actor is going to say instead of like maybe it could be something more about like you know how much he likes green that's not a line of dialogue give me a line of dialogue so sometimes the practical stuff and a practical solution will all win um and that's where you get the... When you yourself made the transition from being a member of the writing team, from being a writer, to the guy who runs the writing team, what did you gain and what did you lose in terms of personal pleasure, interest, the intrinsic fascination of the work well i mean um writing is

really hard so i was happy that other people were doing it and it's much easier to talk you know much easier to give people notes on it than it's just sit there and do it yourself um the the the problem is that writers in general are just not just temperamentally or ill suited to run things. And the television, anything. Yeah. Anything. So the television business is really all about like giving the least

equipped, competent managers, this gigantic managerial portfolio, right? So that, you know, a TV show is a hundred and something million dollar business unit. Essentially.

It's a big deal. Yeah. And the person managing that is a writer which is insanity but there's so far there's been no other way to to to to no no improvement on that um so you again what you what you try to do is you try to sort of create this atmosphere where people uh are are working really hard and and coming up with what they think is the best stuff. And recognizing that you're going to get it, you just don't have to get it now. Like if you're doing a television show, you have a couple days to figure it out if somebody's not working.

And that there's no benefit ever in digging in, ever. Well, germane to that are our next two questions, because since we all writers here um and we shouldn't be trusted with any large complex enterprise what the devil do we have opining on anything glenn are are um mergus glenn amergus i have the feeling that it might be a play of words or some some sort of intestinal condition oh gl, Glen Amurgus has been banging me. Will there ever be a reform of the permanent bureaucracy from the IRS, Tea Party situation, to the FISA abuse of DOJ, the pushing of the Steele dossier, Russian collusion, and now the IRS leaking private citizens' tax account? This unaccountable fourth branch never seems to let up on its power. In other words, swamp, undrainable?

Yes, roughly. Roughly. on its power. In other words, swamp, undrainable? Yes. Roughly. Well, yeah. I think what you need is you need to create a parallel to it. What made the post office better is FedEx.

What would make schools better is school choice vouchers, right? So let's have the administration of justice over to Amazon. Well, I mean, in a way, there's obviously the things you can't do, but you can't task these bureaucracies with this insane amount of control i mean the irs is just the tax code in america the federal tax goes insane like there there's no way that that isn't going to be corrupted there's just no way like it's like these are human beings so you know if you if you really want to curb the abuse at the irs what you do is you just make the tax code you know for pay four

lines long and and make it flatter and simpler and if you can't fit on one page then it you don't you know you don't it is not a it's not part of the tax code anymore um that's that's how you clear the corruption as you remove the the mechanisms that create it it's not just better people i mean people are people i spent one year the worst year of my career working for the securities and exchange commission and there i observed bureaucracy up close and i came to the following conclusion which i still believe is correct and not it goes uncommented on so often so well this may be the first time you've heard it it's but it seems to be absolutely basic and totally correct and it runs as follows

in the federal government it's almost impossible to reward someone who's an unusually good worker they've introduced little bonus programs over the years, but the paperwork to pay somebody a thousand dollar bonus, it just you just don't do it. And when you do do it, it's a small bonus. It's even harder to fire anybody. So what that means is the income for someone for a federal employee is fixed. They're going to get paid what they get paid, whether they do a good job or a bad job, whether the boss likes it or not, and they'll simply get raises according to seniority. So there's one way to give yourself, there are two ways to enliven your life. One is to give yourself a raise. And since your pay is fixed, the only way to give yourself a raise is to do less work. You just get paid more per hour by doing less work. And that is an

incentive to which bureaucrats and their tens of thousands respond. The other way, and this is why each White House tends to be at least energetic, if not competent. This is why the special ops units in the military, again, are are at least energetic we hope also competent the other way is to have some sense of mission some sense that what you're doing matters unusually okay so what you've got in this federal bureaucracy is people who either aren't going to work or are going to be energized by some sense of mission. And it's almost always some lefty mission, because that's the kinds of people federal employees are by and large. The only way to fix this is what you said. I mean, it's a horrible thing because it's so staggeringly inefficient,

but I discovered I was the director of a little operation inside the SEC. Most of the people there were inert. I couldn't touch them. So I got some budget and hired some other people who could do the job. I'm sure they became inert. So the Pentagon, you're a general so-and-so, you want to get something done. You can't really move this huge structure. You hire a few more people. So how you blow just uh so so how you blow it up how you or i'm sure that over time you're right you have to create parallel structures if you put the parallel structures in the private sector they create new incentives they place some pressures on the government but that's about the best i can see i mean it's just anyway i would also say that

like some of this stuff i mean you know it's like the tax code right well we don't like what's happening so we add another layer to the tax code but we don't like this so we add another layer of the tax code presents 10 000 pages that works with the what peter what you're describing with employees too so the same thing well this group isn't working so we'll hire another group to do right now we have two 400 employees um but but i mean the question also included the the fisa abuse of the the doj all that stuff i mean the whole FISA thing was supposed to be, that's supposed to be the FISA court was the, was the, the backstop, the regulatory backstop against domestic surveillance. Like we do not allow to spy on American citizens. You can spy on

American citizens, unless you have go to the FISA court and then you're allowed to. And so, I mean, someone said to me to me like every single it seems like every single progressive contemporary progressive reform movement has at its heart the undoing of a previous progressive reform yes yes yes that's what we do sure that's true yeah and I think that's kind of the problem is like well you're right I mean but also we ask, we ask a lot from our government. We ask it to do a lot. Too much. Far too much.

And we, you know, we should, we should be telling to do less. Yeah. Milton Friedman. We do, but I mean, there's a lot of things that government, I mean, yes, we ask a lot of government, but it seems to have taken that as a incentive to pretend that we've asked an awful lot more. I didn't ask the government to regulate the amount of water that my toilet flushes. I didn't ask the government. I certainly did not ask the government to get rid of incandescent bulbs at a time when the

fluorescents were more expensive. I didn't ask them to regulate the temperature of my shower. I didn't ask them exactly whether or not my gas grill should be banned at the future point. This is not a matter of responding to what the public wants. It's a matter of having people who are sympathetically, vibratorily attuned to what the rest of the progressives want and put it into place. So that's something like the EPA, which begins with a great idea. Let's protect the environment. It ends up being this vast, intacular regulatory apparatus that's got its fingers into everything else. And that's natural with any sort of institution like this that's unaccountable, more or less, that expands just until there's pushback. What I despair at is that over the last year, we have seen that we have the worst ruling class that we could possibly have, that the experts are not, and that the idea that somehow

if we just trust everything to these wise technocrats who have forsworn private industry where they could make money to go into public service and do good, if we just trust them because they're disinterested and have our interests at heart, no, no. So there ought to be, after this last year, we ought to have had a groundswell to abolish the educational system as we know it and go to school choice. But it's not going to happen. We ought to have had a groundswell to disassociate ourselves with China as much as possible. But that isn't going to happen. All of the things that ought to have come out of this tremendous year-long laboratory are not going to happen. So you wonder what shock it will take. I don't think there is a shock that actually will dislodge. So on sort of on the same theme here,

I couldn't figure out because I'm very slow on the uptake. Dr. Fauci was mistaken about a number of points. Most recently, he's mistaken about whether or not the virus may or may not have it. The plausibility of the virus being created in the lab and having escaped. We now know that's perfectly plausible. Okay. So I say to Jay Bhattacharya, how come there's not more? Talk back to Anthony Fauci.

Honestly, the country is filled with physicians and researchers who are academically more distinguished than he is. And Jay said, wait a minute, Peter. Don't you understand? He gives out $40 billion a year in research money. And he's been handing this out. He's been in the same job for over four decades. So you ask yourself, wait a minute, if you, of course, the budget has increased over those four decades, but let's say say for four decades you have the right to give out an average of 30 billion dollars a year do you think you could create a network of people who are inclined to support you and agree with you and flatter you of course you could it's money and there's no popular appetite for either because as i noticed i mentioned in a podcast past there was for sale in my local gift shop

mugs that said wwfd and had his most sainted picture what would fauci do he was elevated to the position of being this great oracle because he stood behind trump and made faces or looked pained at the rest of it at a time when the orange man was telling everybody you know to drink bleach and shove light bulbs down their throat. He was his voice of sanity. He was like Andrew Cuomo, for heaven's sakes. If only we could just have more governors like that. So, I mean, nobody wants to say that they invested their beliefs in a guy who turns out to have feet of clay and a lot of money in his pockets. But also fundamentally, I think that there's just something in the psychology of being a bureaucrat, especially a long-time one, is that you kind of start thinking that you're holding back chaos.

That you're the one that if not for you and these rules and these processes, that everything is going to fall apart because people can't be treated. I used to say this, like, was they kind of the yoga teachers problem? You know, these yoga teachers, they're all like, Hey, welcome. We're all very open and we're all yoga teachers. Right. But after a couple of days of like, you stand in front of a room and you say, bend over and everybody bends over, get on your knees. Everybody gets on their knees, like stretch. Everybody stretches. Like even if you're a good person, you can't help, but think, wow, I'm like, I'm in charge here. And I think that these bureaucrats do it and they, it's just a natural, the natural way it goes where you begin to love the thing that is the rule book and the process book. And you can, you are absolutely in your mind, inextricable from that. I mean, I had a, and then, then there's the other possibility, which is, I mean, I had a, my car was towed on Monday or Tuesday, Monday, because I parked it in a stupid place and I just didn't check. And it was towed. I went to get a

haircut. I walked out. So basically an hour, the car's gone. And I'm like, it couldn't have been stolen. But then I look at the sign and realizing, yeah, I'm been stolen but then i look at the sign i'm realizing yeah i'm like mom i look at the sign i'm like oh well you know what maybe i so i go into this hotel right there to go into the hotel and i say where they tow cars when they tell them i said oh they told me right here so they gave me the address i got an uber i went to the bling this is you know and i was gonna meet somebody right um and uh i go and i uh you know it's like two people two ladies who are sitting out in the impound lot, which is below the Claiborne overpass.

And, uh, Hey, I'm getting here. My car. She would go over there in that little room, go in a little room, give me your, your, your, your driver's license. Then you go get your registration for your car and you pay him 200 bucks and you get your car. The whole thing, the whole contraption, the whole experience from the moment I realized that the car was stalled, was, was towed to the moment I got back in the car and drove away was maybe 30 minutes.

Maybe 30 minutes. And I'm like, that, okay, it's a shakedown. I mean, I did park. It was a fair tow. But at least it was easy. There was no speech about it. There was no, hey, you you you better not do as well give us 200 bucks and you get your car back that's how this works and there was something

incredibly refreshing about that because i mean new york i would take two hours three hours and whatever here like in the south the deep south in this in a city that is not known for its efficiency they efficiently got my 200 bucks. And I don't know. The ladies who run, I'll go this far, the ladies who run the New Orleans City impound lot should be put in charge of the FDA. I think William F. Buckley had something to say along those lines. Yes, yes, yes. No, I mean, when I go to the DMV here,

it's remarkably efficient and fast for the most part. You get in, you get your stuff. I mean, people are friendly, they stamp it, and you're gone. And if we could have the rest of the government sort of done by those standards, it'd be absolutely fantastic. But, you know, what Rob said before is that they believe that they're the only ones holding back the chaos. Après moi, les déluge, right? Except you would have to wonder what the pronouns are and whether or not we're gendering the deluge. And when you think about it, après moi, après nous, if anybody can use the they, it's the king, right?

The third person. So that whole phrase may have to be thrown in the scrap heap of history, lest it cause harm. Speaking of harm, yeah, when it comes to harm, you know that HR issues can kill you, if you're running a business, that is. And if you are, you want to listen to this. You know that wrongful termination suits, minimum wage requirements, labor regulations, it's too much. An HR manager salary, it's not cheap.

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a cage match with joe biden uh but he ends with one that i think this this is uh this may stump peter but rob may be able to answer it. The question is, what's your favorite drill tweet? Peter? Drill tweet? What's a drill tweet? I know, I know. It's unfair. Sorry.

Rob? I have no idea. Oh, this is interesting. Interesting. It's a yes, yes, no here, as they used to say on Reply All back when it was a good podcast. Drill has added a Twitter account for not a long time. It just says funny things, funny aphoristic things, which are hard to describe.

I'll give you one of them. Probably his most famous is a correction. What was it you do um i you do not under any circumstances have to hand it to isis which was meant that at some point previously he had tweeted you know say what you will about isis you got to hand it to him when it's something like that and so he was walking it back in this intercept and it And it's used over and over again as a reference. And this, I know, would probably make Peter despair of the levels of things which he is unaware. But corncobbing on the internet, on Twitter, is insisting that you are not wrong and continuing to pound with the point, even though

you are obviously wrong. And it refers to a drill tweet about somebody screaming, I have not been owned. I've not been owned. He said, I say, as I slowly turned into a corn cop and I know I'm speaking like a crazy talk to Peter, but this sort of lingua franca, the internet,

as I said before, and drill isn't even that new. He's been around, I don't know, 10 years or so. Drill is an individual's name is an individual, right? There's an actual person called drill or don't know it's if it's drill or if it's wind which is also what the handle is don't know if the actual twitter avocados a very blurred photograph

of jack nicholson don't know can't none of these things matter what counts as i said before is that the first politician who can fluidly speak this this language is going to be immensely popular and be able to make a reference that is not, you know, it's not like from three weeks ago, dad, but is able to show that they are, you know, up to their nose in internet culture is going to have tremendous currency. And none of them seem interested in being able to figure out how to do that. They can't meme. Their memes are lame. Ted Cruz is the only one who actually seems to be able to play people on Twitter with any degree of, you know, AOC is just a humorless scold all the time. Cruz at least seems to be having a little bit of fun. So there you go.

Drill is not well known amongst our founders i actually i try to limit my to my twitter exposure and twitter participation is that because it makes you it angers up the blood or is it because you regard it as irrelevant or because you a little bit it's a little bit irrelevant but also just i mean and i'll scroll through it just if there's news or something but you know mostly it just seems like people having having arguments that are like no i didn't say you said it no i you said that i didn't say you said like i don't want to like i'm not even going to get into this so i'm either too late for the beginning of the argument or i just don't care about it or i don't i don't necessarily need to and open up my day to that kind of anger.

Understood. Unfortunately, it's where so many of these conversations are taking place that drive the conversations that eventually surface elsewhere. The nonsense that goes on in social media is risable. And you can point at it and laugh. But the next thing you know, all of a sudden, your publisher is calling you up and saying, A lot of people on Twitter and social media and Instagram were very angry about this thing you said in your book. We have to take that line out, which happened this week. Really? There was a young adult, not a young adult writer, but a, well, a writer who's a young adult. That's different

from young adult writer. I wrote a book in which, what was the question? Oh, right. So one of the, it was a liberal fantasy of politics, apparently, that makes the West Wing look like the John Birch Society or a jack chick track. And the president was saying, now I got to call up Netanyahu and apologize because our ambassador to Israel said something stupid. So people on Instagram, I believe, was where it started, were angry at the author for normalizing the existence of Israel. Let that sink in, as they say on Twitter. Mentioning Israel without mentioning it as a colonial genocidal state angered them. So they piled on, and I don't know if we're talking 11 people or 100 people or what, the author changed the line in the next edition of the book. There was another, at the same time, an author who writes these beach thrillers or beach

novels for, you know, ladies who go to the beach and have affairs and drink Cosmos and hang out and get tan and the rest of it. One of them was talking about, maybe I should stay in your summer, in your Atticall summer with nobody knowing. And the other person says, oh, you mean like Anne Frank? And they giggle, ha, ha, ha. Well, this was normalizing the Holocaust. And this was, this was incredibly anti-Semitic. The author removed the line from the book because nobody can tell whether or not

they can't distinguish between the author and the characters the author created. So you can wave all this stuff off and say, it's just Twitter. It's a bunch of people who are refugees from Tumblr just making noise. But the next thing you know, you get a call from your publisher saying there's a problem. This line has to go. We have so many questions. And the problem is the internet lets everybody say everything right now. And there it is instantaneously. Not always, though. Sometimes you want to send a message and pace it out a little bit. And you run around the house thinking, okay, I'm going to send a letter. But where's my stamps? Where's my stamp? Who has stamps these days? Off to the post office,

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long question from one of our favorite writers. Oh, you're all our favorite writers at Ricochet. Don't get me wrong. But Jenna Stocker, who also has a sub stack now, writes some really thought provoking stuff. And also sometimes I get depressed because she cares so much, she sees so much, and she's right. And sometimes I, but it's always a pleasure to soak. She wrote her question, do you think there was a certain inflection point in America that caused politics to bleed into every aspect of American life? Or was it a cascade of displacing culture and religion with ideological diversions inflection point or a cascade. And with that,

do you think the issues that have rearranged the previous left, right preoccupations like race and class will be addressed by today's political leaders and parties as it goes on? And there's, there's more to the question than that, but we'll take that part inflection point. Or was it just this sort of gradual stumbling towards Bethlehem? I guess I look back on the last year as maybe a third category,

the pandemic. It was in my judgment, released all kinds of horrible force. There are all kinds of bad stuff happened that wouldn't have happened if people had been going to work instead of locked up at home. But that, but that to me is a, is a kind of third cat.

That's like a meteor strike. It just hit us and all kinds of people behaved badly. It, it, it, it played upon frustrations and 10. Okay. So there's that,

but I'm trying to think if you go from does clint do we blame clinton yes do we do we do we start well what was the question yes start there i don't know i i know it's an interesting question because it is it definitely has happened i think i believe that we all um decided as a culture to sort of stay at home like it is a problem i mean i think that the the pandemic is kind of an um an amplified version of that but you know there's not the church going went down so you didn't really have that you don't have these great groups of people the way you used to. I think I'm just making this up now.

It may not be true. The second thing I think that happened is that things got really good. I mean, America got really good. Like the, the weird is detaily things that people scream at each other about pronouns and whatever. Like it just,

that just seems like, my God, are you serious? I mean, if you, if somebody can't, if you told somebody in the past that this is what we're going to be screaming at each other about, they whatever like it just that just seems like my god are you serious i mean if you if somebody can't if you told somebody in the past that this is what we're going to be screaming each other about they think oh my how great you can have a million pointless arguments and you're not you're not starving um and then the third thing i think that happened was that this is the success of um the 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s maybe not 50s but definitely 60s 70s 80s that this is the this is the the product what you if you set about to try to prove that america is

basically a bad place um eventually you're gonna you're gonna convince enough people that it's a terrible place and that and and if you don't believe in the experiment then all you believe in is the argument and the and the bitterness if you don't believe that things are kind of going to kind of maybe get better or they're getting better um or they've gotten better for whatever reasons then what's left but just your weird tribal rage i mean why not i mean which is strange because we didn't used to think that. Whereas now if you say things like things are better now than they were in 1963, um, that is a, people will get mad at you. That's,

that's considered like they could be considered a racist thing to say. No, you're absolutely right. The boomers, I blame the boomers. Oh yeah. I blame the first time that somebody thought it was clever to talk about those ticky tacky houses in the suburbs, which is a line in a popular song that always makes me my blood boil. They would prefer that their parents had stayed there instead of moving out to Levittown and giving them a nice lawn to romp across. The ingratitude of that entire group of progs that came out of the 60s. The ingratitude, the joy they took with putting the seed corn into the microwave and crunching along and figuring that it was all just nothing but displaced parental hatred. If we can get rid of the system, we'll just create a whole new one. Why didn't you see Woodstock? That worked out so well. Summer of Love, etc. But it probably goes back even farther than that. You can make the point, and I wouldn't, but I will, that it all

started with showing Elvis below the hip. And while that's perfectly fine, I have no problem with them actually showing Elvis gyrating and the rest of it, it created this line after which everybody could object. You could not object to the loosening of a cultural standard because people would point to, well, you know, they objected to showing Elvis below the waist. Right, right. And so you're saying, I don't think we should have a show

devoted to sexualizing eight-year-olds and putting them on a pageant stage and then having old men leer at them and drag queens put them on their shoulders and run around, well, I objected to help. The idea that there's never any lines and actually the joy comes from blurring the lines and destroying them. And of course, everybody who does that always has a line for themselves

and is appalled to find that somebody believes that line should be erased as well. I just thought of an inflection point. We've given her every answer except the possible inflection point. Except the answer to her question. Except the answer to her question. So I do, I'm planning to do a little more reading and thinking about this one. But if there is an inflection point, there's a pretty good argument that it's the inflection point that would occur to all of us sooner or later anyway.

And that's the assassination of JFK. And here's what I have in mind. Up until the moment of that assassination, both of the great political parties in the country fundamentally celebrated the country. And when John Kennedy was killed, there's an element in the Democratic Party that blames America.

And this came to, I read on the 50th anniversary of his assassination. I reread the William Manchester book, which is really two books. One is it's a brilliant piece of reporting. Oh, it's incredible. Tick tock.

Yeah. It's an incredible tick tock. He knows where everybody was, what people were saying, what they were wearing. And so he's got it all down. And then there's a second book in there in which he blames Dallas. He blames the conservative culture in Dallas.

He quotes newspaper editorials and so forth. And we now know, and honestly, William Manchester should have known then that there was no evidence whatsoever that Lee Harvey Oswald was in any way influenced by the conservative newspaper columns in the in the morning news that run by the deal or there's just no evidence at all. It wasn't America that killed John Kennedy. It was a mixed up kid who'd spent a couple of years inside the Soviet Union and who two weeks before had taken a pot shot at General Edwin Walker, who was a John Bircher, not a liberal. But nevertheless, you see right there in that book, William Manchester is so furious about the loss of this glamorous, gorgeous, heroic figure. And I grant that John

Kennedy was all those things. He's so angry that he turns his anger toward the United States. And some large component of the Democratic Party does the same. That's an inflection point. There's a poison. Understandably, they're grief stricken. They're furious that this has happened, that John Kennedy has been taken from them. But there's a poison that enters the political, our body politic at that moment that I think we're still we're still living with. They couldn't accept the fact that it was a lousy, dirty red, which says something, which speaks of a devotion and a fellow feeling towards a side of the political equation that they would rather give up their love of America

than believe, perhaps, that this ideology, which, flawed as it was, did present an interesting view of how humanity could evolve. They couldn't give that up. No, it was easier to turn on their country than to confess that. Rob, we know you've got to go, and probably everybody else as well. Are you heading off to

some wonderful soiree where you're going to chicory coffee and drink sazeracs and gumbo and rice well i will not be i don't think i'll be drinking chicory coffee uh i i don't think i'm gonna have a sad i might have a glass of wine um you know what are you i've been in new orleans long enough to know i gotta i gotta you know dude up on that my god yeah which i have not done um uh but yes so i mean i have old friends who live here and they're sort of introducing their they have other friends and we're all getting together um get out of there get get out of there before you get the gout you know get back to new york city you can just you know you can walk around and yell people and bang on car hoods and say i'm walking here oh you can get out in new y just as easy. Yeah, probably so. Peter, you've got

weekend plans, I assure, of grilling. I don't know if the kids are home or with the rest of it. I await instructions. We are leaving. We're going to be spending about 10 days in Wyoming, and I do not know which day we are leaving yet. And so that's my whole weekend. My whole weekend is either going to be just enjoying myself and getting some work done, or it's going to be packing. I don't know. I await instructions as well, because I too am a married man. That's how the weekend goes. Those are man plans. God laughs. God decides something like that. Well, whoever said that wasn't married either. Hey, folks not we are out and we thank our sponsors which of course you've been listening to and you can go to ricochet.com and you can

find the great links to these great products you'll be happy that you did and to rob to peter it's been a pleasure it's been fun we managed to bring this one in in under an hour i know it can be done that can be done i'll be waiting into the questions and i'll have a few more to answer on the thread about this. Thank you for all of your questions. Sorry we didn't get to all of them, but that's what the comments are for at Ricochet 4.0. Next week. Next week, fellas.

Next week, fellas. Well, I never been to Spain, but I kinda like the music. See the ladies are insane there. And they sure know how to use it. They don't abuse it. Never gonna lose it. I can't refuse it. Well, I've never gonna lose it. I can't refuse it. Well, I've never been to England.

But I kinda like the Beatles. Well, I hit it for lost case. Only made it out to meet us Can you feel it? Must be real it Feel so good Oh, feel so good Well, I've never been to heaven

But I've been to heaven, but I've been to Oklahoma. Well, they tell me I was born there, but I really don't remember. In Oklahoma, not Arizona What does it matter? What does it matter? What does it matter? Ricochet. Join the conversation. Oh, I've never been to Spain But I gotta like the music

Say the ladies are insane there And they sure are We're going to wrap up here because Rob has to go. Oh, yeah, I've got to run. So it's a big one. Three, two, one. And leave a little extra time for him to pick up here because Rob has to go. Oh, yeah, I've got to run. So it's a big one. Three, two, one. And leave a little extra time for him to pick up his car again. Right. But I've been to Oklahoma Oh, they tell me I was born there