The Ricochet Podcast - Seeking Cloture

Episode Date: October 5, 2018

Sometimes, people ask why we wait until Friday afternoons to publish the podcast. The last couple of weeks should answer that question for at least a while. We’re lucky to have a full contingent of quality guests this week to help us sort through all the outrage, er, news that has accumulated since last week’s show. First up, Ricochet’s own Bethany Mandel who has a few opinions on the Kavanaugh... Source

We have special news for you. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Are you going to send me or anybody that I know to a camp? We have people that are stupid. Don't you wave your hand at me. I wave my hand at you. When you grow up, I'll be like... When I grow up, you and I grow up.

How dare you talk to women that way? Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lallex, and today we talk to Bethany Mandel. She's on a tear. And Andy Ferguson, he's been reading some books. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Bye-bye.

Welcome, everybody, to the Ricochet Podcast number 419. The podcast is brought to you by the fine people at Audible. Audible has the largest selection of audiobooks on the planet. And now with audio originals. Three, two, 1. Welcome, everyone, to the Ricochet Podcast number 419. The Ricochet Podcast is brought to you by the fine people at Audible. Audible has the largest selection of audiobooks on the planet.

And now with Audible Originals, the selection has gotten even more custom made with content made just for members. Start a 30-day trial your first audio book is free. Go to audible.com slash ricochet. And we're brought to you by Lending Club. With Lending Club, you can consolidate your debt or pay off your credit cards with one fixed monthly payment. Go to lendingclub.com slash ricochet. And we're brought to you by Calm.

The Calm app gives you the tools you need to live a happier, healthier, and more mindful life. Just five minutes of Calm can change your whole day. Ricochet podcast listeners get 25% off a Calm premium subscription at Calm.com. And, of course, we're brought to you by Ricochet itself, and we want you to join. It's important. If Rob were here, which he will be in just a second, don't worry about it, he would tell you that he is reading under duress a statement by Max, director

of technical operations and the like, who has been putting words in Rob's mouth for many weeks now about why Donald Trump is the greatest thing ever, and Rob reads it because he knows at the end of it Max has got a point at which we all can agree. Ricochet is crucial. And, you know, I'm not going to give you this whole bit about, oh, we need your money, oh, we've got bills to on which we all can agree. Ricochet is crucial. And, you know,

I'm not going to give you this whole bit about, oh, we need your money. Oh, we got bills to pay because that's not your problem. What your problem is, is going to ricochet someday and finding it's not there because a lot of people listen to podcasts and thought, eh, they're just giving it away. What do I need to pay them for? Well, you pay a little tiny bit of money and you can comment on the podcasts, which is great because the curated civil conversation and ricochet, which is mostly self-policing. I mean, because people have skin in the game, as Rob said, oh, 418 podcasts ago. It keeps it a place that's unlike any other on the Internet when it comes to talking about these things. You've been to all of those chat places that have discus or something or

other, and it's just a sewer of people hammering at each other. That's not Ricochet. Join, and you can start conversations about anything. I mean, this week in the member feed, we were talking about what was behind the OXO or OXO Good Grips line of kitchen tools, and that was a conversation as fascinating as the ones that we have about cabin on the like so join ricochet keep us going and i don't say that for us i say that for you peter before rob comes along um here we are let's have the real let's have the real podcast right now before he turns up oh no that's what we're doing we're doing that we're just he'll he'll come and swan swan in with you know brushing the croissant dust off of his jacket, his velvet jacket. I was thinking today because I was reading there was a protest again, of course, a protest.

And they were making fun of Kavanaugh's beer drinking, which is now the new standard for debased behavior. And it just struck me. When I was in college, the liberals, the leftists would say, we're the fun people. We're the ones who understand the Dionysian spirit of life. We're all about sex without thinking of the consequences. Shed your inhibitions. Shed your inhibitions. Have a drink and feel the energy of the light course through you.

Let's all get together with some camels and sit up all night and talk about politics and the rest of it. And, hey, women dressed like patriarchy never existed, and you can be free of your own body. Oh, excuse me here. I just got a memo. All right, everybody dress modestly. Nobody should – everybody should have a seven-point checklist before sex. Drinking is out.

Smoking is out. Language has to be policed. But, hey, we still got weed so i guess i guess we won the left has become the blue-nosed scold party i think it's just simply for convenience sake and they'll they'll turn in to something else the moment they need to you know i'm i'm not sure yes yes yes what we're what we saw last over the last couple of weeks among the 10 democratic members of the judiciary committee was for sure straight nietzschean will to power that was politics top and bottom but what we saw among particularly among women in the response to dr ford's testimony i think was something different where they found her credible as i said in the podcast last week the well of

anger and resentment frankly at the sexual revolution where for three decades now or longer what since the 60s much longer than three decades conservatives have been saying the so-called sexual revolution sets unleashes men it damages women it disadvantages women and advantages men and you know what in the reaction to dr ford and i'm not saying the political reaction but the notion that she's something happened to her and you know what something happened to me or a friend of mine or my daughter. Of course, that's – and that's what conservatives and notably conservative women such as Midge Dechter, John Potthorne's mom, and Mary Eberstadt have been predicting all along. the one thing about women's liberation it liberated men um and it made it gave women the extra burden of having not only to maintain a kind of a you know modern libertine view on things but also to maintain a heightened sense of security of things and this was and without any help at all from the culture at large which is what we used to be the culture at large used to believe that

its job was to protect women. And now the culture at large believes the job is half of the time to protect women and half of the time to tell them that they're just being prudes and uptight. It was that famous thing that Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda's ex-husband, who was a member of the SDS, the Students for a Democratic Society, a big hippie agitator in the 60s. Someone said, what's the position of women in your organization? And he said, prone. Wow. And that is a generational issue, and he clearly has benefited and benefited from a libertine and kind of a pseudo-equino-fake equality, almost Trojan horse equality culture. I mean it's Trojan horse equality because men and women are not equal.

Men are stronger and men are more aggressive and men have more testosterone, which makes them more aggressive. And there's evolutionary biological reasons for that to be the case. But at no point are you allowed to say that. In fact, we're facing the differences between the sexes in the culture. Oh, it's just a construct, as the people say, without actually admitting that it's not. And there's a reason why, you know, men need to be socialized and civilized and sometimes brutalized into better behavior.

Beautifully stated. And end of rant. Where's James? I'm here. That just i i that was concise no i agree i'm i'm astounded that rob and he started and he stopped right i love that james a very good throwing shade i'm just astounded that it was so concise and that he when he was finished with his point he ceased speaking it was the. I'm not surprised by your concision. I am surprised by the fact that you left it right there.

And I appreciate that fact. I mean, but you're absolutely right. I mean, we have two messages going on here. And one is that women are strong and powerful and are capable of anything. And the other is that they are tremendously weak and must be sheltered by the federal government. Somehow these two seem to work in opposition, you'd think, but they don't. But, you know, when you see these theatrical events at the Capitol, when you have people yelling at senators as they get into the elevator,

which apparently is the new Woolworth's lunch counter protest, and I love the one, who was it? Was it against Daniels? Was it somebody? Maybe it was it against uh daniels was it somebody maybe it was oran hatch they were yelling at him and he waved his hand at them and said grow up um and they and one of the protesters became incensed and said you don't wave your hand at me i wave my hand at you which really was which is just beautiful i mean it just summed it all up you stand there and take it in the elevator

because I am so filled with rage at the moment that my rage and my feels gives me the right to wave my hand at you and there's a certain sort of entitlement in that voice that you heard that goes again if we truly are

30 seconds away from Handmaid's Tale, I don't think that the people going into the Senate with the idea that they have the right to wave their hands and the at handmaid's tale and we have no we're not actually going to head to handmaid's tale anytime soon we're also not heading to man maiden's tale right which is what other people oh it's horrible to be a guy today it's it's not it's it's it's not horrible it's it's perfectly fine it's just that we need actually actually you know godfather rob you come on i'm not, I'm not speaking for myself, but I think Peter knows. You don't have sons on a modern college campus. That's true. Young men these days have a wariness and a sort of what I find, you know, and I was just talking to a whole bunch of them last Easter.

I mean, my friend, the giant suite has got a young man in college. Great guy, head screwed on, decent, chivalric. He's just – he's a great kid. And I was talking to a lot of them like that in Easter and they're really interested in Jordan Peterson, not because they're all like – Yes, they are. Yes, they are. But because they're hearing something that's both intellectual, historical and masculine in a way that to them it's it's almost like forbidden that they're able to talk about archetypes like this and they feel this certain sort of amused distance from a culture

that they don't believe has their best interests at heart it's not like they feel persecuted or they're afraid a little smile comes across their face when they talk about it they know that there's a game afoot and they really don't want to be caught up in it. Peter, does that sound sort of – Oh, no, that sounds exactly right, although actually it's even more – I mean on college campuses and of course it depends on which campus you're talking about. Of course, nevertheless, there are plenty of administrators whose fundamental – well, we just saw the Senate move to cloture on a vote of 51 to 49.

That means there are 49 senators who have done – who believe in a presumption of guilt when the question involves a white male. And let me tell you, as the father of three sons that is unnerving and i can assure you that all three of those sons have stories in which they have been made to feel guilty of something now thank goodness not serious but they felt hostility for things they never ever did and so right i mean i would just like in defense of the senate that is a better ratio than at any American university. Oh, yeah. But there's a majority of senators who believe that there should be a standard of guilt, which is better. There are not a majority of residential college deans who believe that.

That's for sure. Actually, so Victor Davis Hanson, our friend Victor Davis Hanson, my colleague here at Hoover and our friend who's appeared on this podcast often had a fascinating column that appeared. Well, I don't know when it appeared, but I saw it yesterday. I'd recommend everybody can find it online, in which Victor made this very arresting point that we conservatives, and I include you here, Rob, we conservatives have assumed for years and years and years that the liberal nonsense on college campuses was isolated, that there was some kind of imaginary moat around college camp between college campuses and the good common sense people of the United States of America. And Victor argues, and I think he has a very, very good point, that now the crazy liberal politics ethics gender all of that that we used to think

oh the kids grow out of it it's only the faculty now it now it dominates the elites who run at least one of the major parties in this country much of the federal government much of our courts it's it's that's oh yeah it's it's like crazy academia is now crazy america survey the keller college campuses it's like the opening sequence of the stand you know don't fear the reaper is playing as the camera goes over the biological weapons facility and everybody's dead at their desk and the gate is open and somebody got out i mean that virus escaped a long time ago because you get attention the more woke you get the more you you you start talking this can't the more you're seen as smart too and that's i mean that's catnip for a lot of

these people they want to be seen as smart so if you come up with the appropriate buzzwords and all of a sudden you're talking about all sorts of intellectual intersectional privileges and the rest of it you're smart and since they consider themselves the smart party, of course they're going to pick up this ideology and terminology. I mean no one ever on the side of the left got credibility by moving more to the center. You're more honest. No, I agree. In about a quarter of a century, it hasn't happened. You're right.

Yes. I muttered in the old days they might have. Right. Precisely because they still had their ear to middle America perhaps. Perhaps they were still attempting to listen to what people out there who were not part of these coastal, crustal elites like Rob. They listened to these things. But it's so hard to listen. I mean who can listen? Oh, who has time? Who has time? Nobody wants to listen.

I hate – me personally, I hate listening so difficult and so inconvenient. No one has made it more – No one has made it convenient. Here's where we know that Rob is listening so carefully and so closely that he wants to choke off the idea before it even gets stated. Because obviously listening leads me to the idea of, well, listening to the spoken word on earphones or over a speaker or something like that. And while we all know that you all love to do that, because here you are listening to a podcast, there's something else. There's stories, there's books, there's adventure, there's Audible.

Now, what would it look like? What would it sound like if we all listened more? Listening to audio books is something that motivates us, inspires us, brings you closer together. I've driven car trips across the country and the radio is one thing, the satellite's great. Who wants to listen to politics? Sometimes you get hooked on a novel and then three, four hundred miles later, you're deep in the story. There's really nothing quite like it. And there's no better place to listen to these things, to these stories than Audible,

because now Audible members get even more. They get exclusive audio fitness programs, audiobooks, Audible originals, and more. Audible, as you probably have guessed by now, they've got the largest selection of audio books on the planet. And now with this audio originals that they're bringing out, the selection has gotten even more custom with content made for members. So let me think. I was reading something, listening to something the other day that actually was set in Minnesota. It was a first novel, and this is every author's nightmare. I can't remember the name, and I can't remember the title, but I liked it because set in Minnesota, it had the opportunity to do something, of course, that other that a good audio book adds to fiction. So, you know,

start wherever you wish to start right now, because every month audible members get one credit good for any audio book they choose. Plus two audible originals from a changing selection that you cannot get anywhere else. So you get access to audio fitness and health workouts, stuff like that, which is incidentally created exclusively for audible. You can't get it anywhere else either.

Plus, your books are yours to keep. With Audible, you can go back and re-listen anytime, even if you cancel your membership. Got that? Cancel, you can still go back and re-listen the books that you got. You didn't like your audiobook? Exchange it. No questions asked.

Start your 30-day trial and get your first audiobook for free. Go to audible.com slash ricochet. Or if you wish, text ricochet to 500-500. You got that? Text the word ricochet to 500-500. You can do it all with audiobooks. That's audible.com slash ricochet. Or text ricochet to 500-500 to get started.

And our thanks to Audible for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome back to the podcast, Bethany Mandel. She's an editor right here at Ricochet, co-hosts Lady Brains and That Sethany Show podcast on this very network. And if you've ever seen That Girl and you've watched Margot Thomas running through Central Park with a kite

full of the joy of living in New York, you know that Bethany's a little conflicted right now because she loves New York so much, and you're leaving. You're leaving, aren't you? Fake news. That's not accurate. I hate New York, and I can't wait to leave. I was giving you the opportunity to say exactly that. I am so excited.

I can't even tell you. I am dancing while I pack. We are moving from the area in nine days, and I am never coming back. Wait, why? What are you talking about? Because you prefer D.C.?

Good Lord. Because she has kids. I do. She's trying to raise a family, Rob. Yeah. There's so much fun stuff in D.C. All of my friends live there. It's going to be a blast.

Wait a minute. Wait a minute.hany excuse me peter here listen i have i signed up i've been following you on twitter and let's put it this way you're you're chirping along right now about how wonderful dc is and your tweets let's just put it this way over the last couple of weeks some of your tweets have stepped out okay some, okay? Some of your tweets might suggest that if you were ever nominated to the Supreme Court, there would be those who say you lack a judicial temperament. Oh, absolutely. And they would be 100% right. Okay. So tell us your... I'm a loose cannon. Tell us your reading. Tell us your reading. As we speak, as we record this, the Senate just voted cloture 49 to 51 to advance to a full vote on Brett Kavanaugh.

We don't know how that full vote would go. Nevertheless, that's where things stand right now. And Bethany makes of all of this what exactly? This is garbage. This whole crusade against Kavanaugh has been absolute garbage and I'm so angry about it. And I really have been very gratified to see how the polling numbers among Republicans have, among Republican women and women in general have really rallied behind Kavanaugh because I've watched all of this thinking about my husband and thinking about my son. And a woman can come forward 30 years after the fact and have absolutely no cooperation, nothing from nothing, no letter, no note. There's more corroboration that he was a drinker and that he played a drinking game than this party ever

happened and this assault ever happened. And she has just come out of the woodwork and been not entirely truthful about other things. And I, it's just been sickening watching what, what has been done to him. And I'm glad that other women are equally angry because we love men and this shouldn't be this easy to destroy a man. So wait a minute, you have, I'm trying to remember, you have three kids, but you have boys and girls, right? I can't remember. Yeah, I have two boys and a girl. Two boys and a girl. All right. So you just said that as a mother of sons, you think it shouldn't be that easy to destroy a man. But what about the line that as the mother of daughters, we can't permit a world in which our daughters could be groped and then disbelieved like Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.

What do you do with that argument? So hopefully my daughter knows that she can come to me if something like this ever were to, God forbid, happen. But the problem is you can't, just because you're a woman, you can't just say something 30 years after the fact. I mean, I sort of compare all of this to what happened with Roy Moore. And when those women came forward, they came forward with proof. They had yearbook photos. They had a time and a date that they saw him. They were able to match that up with court records contemporaneously. They had told people at the time, one of the women had told her best friend and her best friend's mother, and those two women were still alive and said, yes, I remember this very vividly. We talked about it at length. We talked about it over the years. Everyone remembers

it. And even though it was 30, 40 years afterwards, there was evidence that could be brought forth. And there's nothing like this with Ford. And the difference with also Roy Moore is that you don't commit these kinds of offenses in a vacuum. A man who does something like that doesn't just do it once. And none of the other women who have come forward against Kavanaugh have been anything resembling believable. It's just all garbage. And I think that I'd be willing to put the benefit of the doubt to Ford were she to have anything. But she has nothing to back up her story.

Hey, Bethany, it's Rob. I got a question. You're not yet a D.C. insider, but you're an insider, and you're a quasi-almost D.C. insider. So help us who are just normal americans who live outside the bubble that you dc insiders live in to yeah you're gonna get oh my god this is just this could be a six-act play this is just this is my overture anyway um last night very late chuck grassley, chairman of the Committee on Judiciary, sent a letter to Dr. Ford's attorneys.

Long letter, two-page letter. The last paragraph is igniting everyone's Encyclopedia Brown murder she wrote, the rods and cones and neurons. And it ends with this. In the last paragraph, he asks her to turn over all these therapy notes. And then for people who haven't read it, it's really interesting. Then he says, please, in light of recently uncovered information, please turn over records and descriptions of direct or indirect communication between Dr. Ford or her representatives and any of the following.

One, U.S. senators or their staffs, particularly the offices of Senators Feinstein, Hirano, other than your communication with me and blah, blah, blah. To the alleged witnesses identified by Dr. Ford, Leland Kaiser, Mark Judge and Patrick P.J. Smith and three Debbie Ramirez, Julie Swetnick or their representatives. What does that mean? It means Chuck Grassley found something out in that FBI investigation that they did not want him to find out. I think the whole thing is fascinating, and I really hope we hear what the FBI report turned up. But it definitely sounds like in the course of their investigation, they found out that there was some backside, backwoods whatever you want to call it back room that's what i'm looking for back channel with might the word be collusion might the word be

collusion that's a really interesting vocabulary word i've been hearing a lot this well i mean what do you so what on a scale of one to ten ten meaning uh you know absolutely we're gonna know and one or zero meaning there's no way we're never going to know. It's always going to be shrouded in mystery. What do you give it? 1 to 10, will we ever know how the Dr. Christine Blasey Ford story exploded onto the Senate judiciary floor? Scale of 1 to 10, will we ever know? I think so. Yeah. I mean, DC, I always joke that there's no way that 9-11 could have been an inside job because nobody in DC can keep a secret, let alone something of that magnitude.

And I don't think that anyone can keep this secret. Though I will disagree with myself a little bit, I am shocked that the New York Times op-ed writer is still unknown. Well, we got distracted. We got distracted. Hey, Bethany, I have a question about your husband, Seth. Now, I'm going to have to set this up a little bit. The Wall Street Journal had an editorial just yesterday in which it pointed out that although a lot of good people find donald trump really hard to take and your husband is one of those uh things may be a little different now because what donald

trump did in nominating brett kavanaugh was to nominate within the pool of people who are credentialed originalists that is to say within the pool of people who will read the Constitution as it was intended to be read by the founders and those who ratified it. Brett Kavanaugh is as moderate as you can find. He's an establishment Republican. He worked in the George W. Bush White House. His opinions on the D.C. Court of Appeals have been very prudent and careful. He's not a slasher or a cutter or a ripper. There's nothing revolutionary about him. And there's certainly nothing crude or unrefined about him. He is the most acceptable jurist any Republican would have nominated that the Democrats were ever going to see. And they tried to destroy him. And we have no choice, really no choice. Politics is

about choices. The man who's standing up to this is Donald Trump. And what does your never Trump husband make of that? And as you can already guess, I'm sure in the guise of a question about Seth, I'm really asking about Rob Long. You have to live with Seth. The rest of us have to live with Rob. What does a Never Trumper do now? So I love him more than life itself. He's a total squish. Wait, for clarity, you're talking about Seth, not Rob. No, Rob. I've never met Rob.

There's some groundwork we have to be laid before I will declare my love for him on the podcast. All right. So I love him more than life itself, but he's a squish. We always joke, and one day whenever we get back to recording our podcast when he has normal working hours again, we always joke that my fuse is a lot shorter than Seth's. And so the appeal of Trump sort of pushing back against all this garbage and not being bullied is really appealing. And it's been really frightening and enlightening how willing Democrats and the media, not that they're not different things, they're the same thing, but how willing they've been to lie and to obscure the truth for their stated aims when the stated aims are like serious enough that it's a Supreme Court seat.

The just outright lies that we've seen, one of the most glaring recently this week was, did you see the video of Lindsey Graham quoting Bill Clinton? I did not. Yes, that was absolutely extraordinary. And I chalked that, basically what it was,

explain that. James or Bethany, I missed it, fill me in. I'm talking too much to James, Why don't you go for it? Lindsey Graham was talking about the treatment of Kavanaugh, and he used the phrase, here's what you get when you drag a $100 bill through a trailer court. And he said it in the context of what the Democrats had done, what the Democrats had said about women, what James Carville had said about Paula Jones. So Yahoo News, he was quoting James Carville, right? And he was quoting him clearly.

It wasn't as though he said this, expecting everybody to get the reference. He put it in context. Yahoo or AP or whoever tried to ran the story that ran elsewhere, just just said that this was the just pulled that quote out and said and ascribed it to him, to Graham, which either means that they were willfully twisting what he did in order to make a point or. And I think this is more likely that they were just historically ignorant, had no idea what he was talking about. No, no, I'm going I'm going I'm going with choice one on that one, James. But go ahead. OK, all right. Well, I'll leave it up to you. I just I mean, it's egregious deception and distortion in order to make a political point. And if you guys are right,

and it was willful, the editor, I mean, that, that had to go past editors who surely knew the context. So you had two or three levels of people who said, and it, it caught on after Yahoo finally,

like was shamed into deleting the tweet. It caught on elsewhere and i saw joy and reed retweeting someone about it i mean it was making the rounds right and i i think a lot of people who retweeted it were stupid just didn't get the context but yeah but the point but the point is you're you if if it was volitional then and intentional then here i hate to say fake news and the rest of it but here you have intentional distortion of the truth in order to achieve a particular political position. And if that's the case, then one has to wonder, well, might this happen elsewhere as well? And you have to conclude that, of course.

Yes, it does. So, I mean, the way that the media has treated this whole thing. Well, we're just reporting what people are saying. No, you're not. You pretty much have been cheerleading for the left here because you, like the people on the left and like the Democrats, are besotted by the abortion sacrament and have to cling together with anybody who believes that it's threatened in the least. That's why Amy Schumer is our hero of the week, right? I mean, Bethany, even as a woman, you as a woman have to respect the courage that Amy Schumer showed this week in getting herself arrested. Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. So Bethany, Bethany, Bethany, I'd like to hear you hear what you have to say to Rob

that will both that will both offer him solid luck and put some steel in his spine. And the problem again with Rob is exactly the problem you face every day in your splendid husband seth that well you know we've got this problem that right now trump is our guy and rob can't stand it no no i can i just qualify here a little bit yes you may defend yourself. I can't stand the man. I think he's loathsome. However, I'm not a fool. chief of staff would have a grown-up conversation with the president and they'd call up the nominee, the Supreme Court nominee, and they'd say, hey, listen, we love you, but you're just too expensive. This is your last day. And I'm glad that that didn't happen here.

And I'm glad, too. And I'm glad, too. I sort of had a change of heart with Trump a little bit. So I've been reading a lot of books about autism recently. And I'm sorry, had a little kid walk into the room. So I've been reading a lot of like really interesting books about autism recently. And a lot of parents of autistic kids sort of are looking for cures. And I've been reading books from autistic people saying, like, we're not actually looking for a cure because the autism is what makes my kid my kid. And I don't want to change my kid.

And so I've been thinking a lot about that in terms of Trump. And I think he's an awful human being also. But I think that loathesomeness is actually what lends him the good part he won't he won't give up kavanaugh because he's a lone loathsome human being because he doesn't care what anyone thinks because he has no moral compass and even though everyone thinks he should ditch him he's like no i don't care you can all you can all go jump in a lake and you can't separate the crappy part of trump from the part of Trump who will keep Kavanaugh, who will move the Jerusalem embassy to the Israel and the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem, despite everyone telling him not to, because they're like,

I don't really care what you think. I don't care. And he doesn't care about anything. And in a lot of ways, that's actually refreshing. It's surprising though, Bethany, that given your admiration for those qualities that you want to leave New York, which embodies them like none of the other places. I know, right? We're going to let you go, but you're going to love

D.C. I lived there. I hated it. It was horrible. It was a cesspool of crime and corruption, but now it's beautiful thanks to the gushers of money that have been surging into the trans-tour. And also, we're going to be living in the Burbs. Yeah, well, okay. Virginia or Maryland. Virginia or Maryland. Which side of the river? Maryland, unfortunately. That's where the Jewsbs. Yeah, well, okay. Virginia or Maryland. Virginia or Maryland. Which side of the river?

Maryland. Unfortunately, that's where the Jews are. Yeah, well, here's the thing. We would like to live in Virginia. No, seriously, we have to live in a Jewish community. But I would just say, I know this is a little early, but don't let your kids go to parties unsupervised. I hear that they're not, I hear they're problematic in that area.

But here's the thing that's going to be great, and I'm sure you've been thinking about this too, putting the kids in the car, going to the grocery store, getting a lot of groceries, putting them in the car, driving them home, taking them out, and it's not the whole day, and it's not fraught with peril

and sweat and subway and the rest of it. It's a much easier. I live in the burbs out here in New Jersey. So the ice, it's a very similar experience. Um, but the thing that I'm really excited about is like all of the homeschool groups that there are in DC and all the activities, and there's going to be more stuff to do than we have time to do. And that's what I'm really excited about. My day-to-day sort of homeschooling life. Have fun. Everybody find her adventures on Twitter at Ricochet, of course,

on the Lady Briens podcast. And that's Bethany Schoen, the Get Runner, doing it again. And we thank her for joining us today. Always a pleasure. Thank you. Bethany, thanks. Congratulations, Seth, on the new gig. Yeah, congratulations. Thank you so much. Thank you. I'm, thanks. Congratulations, Seth, on the new gig. Yeah, congratulations. Thank you so much.

Thank you. We're really excited. Enjoy packing. You know, I was listening to NPR the other day, and they had an entire hour about what's going on in Brazil, which I'm keenly interested in since that's where my daughter is now. And they have a presidential election coming up on Sunday. And a lot of people are saying that it's going to be a runoff

and Bolasaro is going to do well. Bolasaro being described now as the... I'm hearing some talk. We received temperature-sensitive medication for you on October 2, 2018. Oh, sorry. Let me start that again. I was listening to NPR the other day because they had an hour on Brazil, of all things, and I'm keenly interested in Brazil since my daughter's spending a year there.

They're talking about the upcoming presidential election and the surprising surge of the right-wing, right-wing, crazy alt-right, Bolasaro. And they were comparing him to Trump, as everybody does, because he's brash, he's forthright, he says things that other people can't. And they asked one of the panel members, a Brazilian gentleman, I believe, if this was true, if he was indeed the Brazilian Trump. And he says, no, Trump is much more sophisticated. And you could hear everybody in the panel say, what? Surely, surely that's a slam against, you know, against Bolasaro. And I gather that it was, but he went on to say that Trump has experience. He has experience in business. He has experience in dealing with banks. He has experience in a world that Bolasaro has never entered, has never done anything, run a business or anything like that. And the reason that people are voting for Bolasaro is that they're just so fed up with the current corrupt regime and they don't want to put the

workers party back in. As it stands, the workers candidate is moderate but everybody thinks we don't want the bunch of crazy leftists in here again so you have people who you might think would be opposed to this alt-right scary trump guy saying what good have the establishment swampy guys gotten us so far let's try something new what can we what can it hurt the question of course is whether or not he's going to be able to if he gets in anything with the economy, because it's going to require a whole lot of restructuring and cutbacks and re renegotiating. And, you know, the sugar high may wear off for a little while. But he's right. I mean, Donald Trump did have a lot of experience with going to banks and saying, I know that I owe you some money.

That's really your problem. Now, let's see what we can figure out. But you are you and me. We we can't we're not at that scale. If we owe the bank an awful lot of money, it's still pretty much our problem, isn't it, wouldn't you say? Okay. Well, you might, for example, have gotten debt because of your credit card situation. Decades, decades now credit cards have been telling us that we'll buy it now and pay for it later with a little bit of interest, of course.

And despite your best intentions, that interest can get out of control fast. Well, with Lending Club, you can consolidate your debt or you pay off your credit cards with one fixed monthly payment. Since 2007, they've been around for a while. Lending Club has helped millions of people regain control of their finances with affordable fixed rates and personal loans. No trips to the bank. No high-interest credit cards. Just go to LendingClub.com. Tell them about yourself, how much you want to borrow.

Pick the terms that are right for you. And if you're approved, your loan is automatically deposited into your bank account in as little as a few days. LendingClub is the number one peer-to-peer lending platform with over $35 billion in loans issued. So go to LendingClub.com slash Ricochet. Check your rate, minutes, borrow up to $40,000. That's LendingClub.com slash Ricochet. LendingClub.com slash Ricochet. All loans made by WebBank.

Member FDIC. Equal housing lender. And now we welcome back to the podcast Andy Ferguson. Yay! National correspondent for the Weekly Standard. And he likes beer, we understand. And you've been reading a lot of books. I assume with a fine beer in one hand and a pen in the other to jot down what you find spectacular or meretricious about the various books you've been reading.

Give us a hint of something that we might want to read. Something we might definitely want to avoid. Well, first a correction. I don't like beer. I only read, I only read what is put in your bio. So it makes me feel all goofy.

Okay. Well, I actually got the assignment from my editor here at the Weekly Standard one week in August to take the New York Times bestseller and the six top, not all top books, but the six of the ten books were about Donald Trump, which I thought was kind of an amazing thing. And then he said, would you please read them all and then write about them? And he put his gun to my forehead and I said yes.

And so I spent the next three goddamn weeks reading six Trump books. And it was hell. It was hell. How conscientious are you? Did you really read them this is peter yes i know peter i know your voice um well i'll tell you you know malcolm mugridge had a a great rule for this is not a yes for book reviewers he said if you're going to praise a book you don't have to read it you don't have to read it at all actually but if you're going But if you're going to criticize a book, you're duty-bound to read more than half of it.

So I actually read just about all of six of these books. And one of them, I have to say, one of them was an absolute delight that I recommend to anyone who's interested at all in Trump world. And that's the, at the time was the number one bestseller in the United States by Amorosa, who is, you know, of course became famous on The Apprentice. It's kind of the chief villain of her,

of the first season of The Apprentice. And she wrote this memoir called Unhinged that is so scurrilous, so filled with malice and vituperation that it was just, you couldn't put it down. It was so delicious. Hey, Andy, I don't know if you know my voice or not, but this is Rob.

So I have two questions. One, are there actually more books about Trump at this point than there were about, say, Clinton? It seems like there are a million books about Clinton at this point in his administration. Yeah. One thing that was different with Clinton was after his first two, three years, there were already several kind of memoirs and tell-alls. And I think actually after the first two and a half years of Clinton, Bob Woodward had done two books about him.

There's only been one so far on Trump's first two years by Woodward. I didn't read Woodward's book, actually. It was outside of my time frame, thank God. Congratulations. All right, so the second thing is, like, you actually say in the piece, and I'm paraphrasing, or maybe I'm just... You're making it up.

Maybe I'm making it up, imputing into you these things. But you actually think, even though it's hilarious and crazy and aptly named Unhinged um that the omarosa book is the closest to capturing the the actual you know gestalt of the trump administration is that right even though it's crazy and filled with vindictive stuff and you know yeah well i think that's why i the better word is uh embody It embodies vindictiveness. It's like an example of it, of how, you know, the Trump world is just sort of this daisy chain of backstabbing and prevarication and self-interest and score settling. And that's what this book is.

She also, I have to say she um she had a great ghost writer there's this woman named valerie frankel uh who wrote her book who actually interestingly enough is a professional ghost writer who also worked for ivana trump uh and uh snooki polisti from jersey shore these are people you don't you don't know who snooki Polisi from Jersey Shore. These are people you don't know who Snooki Polisi is. You do not. It was my favorite show when I was in high school. Oh, yeah, okay. Isn't it that one?

Oh, no, I guess that's one. That's Nefalopolis or something. Potsy. And she also wrote a book for Judge Jeanine Pirro, who was number two on the bestseller list when I looked at this. Unfortunately, Judge Jeanine didn't hire Valerie Frankel this time to write her book. But that hasn't kept it off the bestseller list. It's really maybe one of the worst books I've ever read. I'm a man who specializes in bad books.

And it's really, I mean, it's really, it's just sort of, you know, I'd wake up in the morning and I'd see it sitting there and I realized I was going to have to read another couple of chapters of it. And I was just ready to put my head in the oven.

It was so dispiriting. And because she's, because she's, what's the word? Dumb, dumb. That was the word I was looking for. And she just didn't hire a good enough ghostwriter to try and hide the fact of her dumbness from the reader. So it's just like out on display everywhere.

She's also really attracted to alliteration. So the book is called Liars, Leakers, and Liberals. And so all of the chapters are things like lying and leaking. Another one is called Lying Liberal Rhinos. These are chapter titles, you know. Liberals, you have a decision to make. She announces things like that, and she puts them all in capital letters. So it's sort of, that's when it began to occur to me that these books are not books in any conventional sense. You know, I say in the piece, it used to be that TV shows would be

spun off from books, like, you know, Maverick and the old version, The Virginian. Now, it's books that are spun off from TV shows and basically the chat shows, the talk shows on cable news. And that's what these things are. They're just in sort of three-dimensional shape rather than on a flat screen. The books should have chapters where they tell you it's a really good time to buy precious metals and also some beet extract. I mean I'm waiting for a novel that actually incorporates that where people just sit down. Judge Jeanine does have a chapter on reverse mortgages. That's true. No, I just made that up.

Andy, Andy. Yes, Peter. You've been telling us about books. I'd like a report from Trump's Washington. Could you please tell us who Harry McPherson was, what he told you when you moved to Washington, and whether that is happening to Republicans? Peter, this was a confidence that I shared with you over dinner last week, and here you are blurting it out in front of millions of people. No, actually, the story Peter's referring to is a guy who worked for Lyndon Johnson

in the White House and wrote a wonderful, really spectacularly good memoir called A Political Education about his Time in Washington. And he was one of these sort of old wise men when I first came to Washington in the 80s. And I was talking to him once about what Washington was like in the 60s. And he said that because of Vietnam, it just it tore apart the democratic establishment in Washington. And he said he lost friends for 30 years, people who had been intimate friends that he would speak to on a daily basis just suddenly became estranged. And because the intensity of the feelings about Vietnam was that severe, I mean, people really, it clouded everybody's perception of even their closest friends. And I was telling Peter, who's now told everybody else, that the same kind of thing seems to,

I just feel the same thing in Washington now, especially among Republicans, much less so among Democrats. But how one feels about Trump really is starting to determine who your friends are. And I have seen friendships ruptured over this, sometimes quite substantial friendships. And it's really unpleasant to see. Are they intrapart or inter-party friendships? What's the difference? Are they between people who are Democrats and Republicans, or are they mostly people who are within the Republican realm? Yeah, it's among Republicans.

Yeah, that's what I see. And that's what McPherson's point was. And, you know, the Democratic Party, if it hadn't been for Watergate, the Democratic Party probably would never have recovered. I mean, they had a great election in 1974 after Watergate, but really they were in bad shape for quite a long time. Well, let me do some amateur, cheap, and probably inaccurate armchair psychology here. I noticed that a lot of people who got in for Trump and were all in for Trump, despite the fact that he contradicted a whole bunch of stuff that they previously thought was really important, were angry at those people who were not able to make the mental adjustment because they felt, oh, you're better than me. Oh, you think you're better.

And there's a lot of resentment that seems to apply to, oh, you and your principles, as they love to say. It's as though the fact that if you're not as enthusiastic as they are, that somehow you stand in judgment of them, even though you may say nothing of the sort. Oh, that's absolutely true. But because it is kind of a class thing, but because this is Washington, it's all framed in different ways. It's sort of like, well, I'm more in touch with the people out there than you are.

You're the one who's really the Washington creature, even though the person speaking may have been somebody who's lived here for 30 years and, you know, runs a consulting business and all that sort of stuff. But if you're a pro-Trump Republican, that just means that within you, within your breast beats the heart of the Republican Party. And you are really so deeply involved with the salt of the Republican Party, and you are really so deeply involved with the salt of the earth who love Trump, and people who don't like Trump is just, you know, and then, of course, there's always the mention of the inevitable Georgetown cocktail

party. Oh, no, no, no, that's changed, though, Andy, I have to ask you, the new thing is the cruise ship. On Twitter, you put a little cruise ship in your tweet, and that damns the people you're talking about as being weekly standard types or national review types. The cruise ship is the new D.C. Beltway cocktail party. Oh, my God. I had no idea. See, I've actually been on a weekly standard cruise. I've never been to a Georgetown cocktail party. Actually, that's not true. I went to Ben and sally's once but that was just you did that that was just for anthropological

investigation yeah although i noticed you said ben and sally you didn't let's put it like let's put it this way tom wolf never referred to leonard bernstein as lenny right yeah or you know i was just talking to bobby bobby de niro yesterday about marty marty scorsese um uh so so i mean are you he's only you know trump's only going to be around as a president at most another six years i mean they're going to be six intense years but they're going to be six years at most i mean he may get challenged and lose uh a re-elect he may not choose not to run again he may you know just finally have some kind of health problem because he all the guy does is eat candy and cheeseburgers so um how how deep are the i mean i i understand the part parties but parties look parties can't heal themselves

they do it all the time. It's an organism designed to ooze into whatever the political opportunity presents itself. How about these friendships? Are they gone? I mean I don't know who you're talking about, but I suspect that somebody like I would say a Bill Kristol who has been incredibly, incredibly critical of Trump and has agitated politically against him. I imagine there are some people who feel like that's one step too far. Is there any hope for these friendships? I mean, I say that hopefully, right? Well, yeah.

I'd say a couple things about that. One is that generally speaking, the soothing balm of politics is winning. If people perceive that you're on the winning side, they tend to kind of forgive a lot more from one another than they do if you're not winning. That's not really true in this case. I mean, I think it's so deep that, you know, Trump has had a lot of success. And even though he's not popular in the opinion polls, he's still had a lot of success. And that hasn't been enough to sort of calm down the never Trumpers. What I suspect is really going to happen with this, and I think it's already happening to several people,

is that it's going to be a little bit like after the rupture that Harry McPherson talked about, a lot of those Democrats became Republicans. It was Irving Kristol and Norman Podmore. It's all the great conservative figures of the 70s. That's where it started. And I think what you're going to see here is you're going to see a lot of these never-Trumpers just finally admit that really they're Democrats at heart. They're more at home in the Democratic Party.

You know, Midge Dexter had this fantastic line years ago. She was a very prominent neoconservative. And someone in in early 80s asked her to be on the board of the heritage foundation and you know heritage foundation for a new yorker like midge you know it's like so you know beneath her it's like so de classe that you would ever associate with that but then midge said i finally decided i had to join the side i was on and that's what a beautiful line. What a beautiful line.

And that's that. I think, you know, you've seen it with some of these people not to, you know, mention names. But Max Max Boot is somebody who's used to be a big, prominent neoconservative. And now I think he's just a liberal democrat and bob kagan who was also a uh neo conservative this is is someone else is just a liberal democrat now and i think you're going to see that with a lot of these guys i thought actually in reading these books i mean the the anti-trump books really are as much anti-conservative as they are anti-trump even though they're written by republicans hey and i just jump in on this same, just to mention, you did mention a couple

of names. How do you explain Bill Bennett, whom from the 80s on we all viewed as a neoconservative, but he's gone in the other direction. He's all in for Trump. Yeah, I don't know. I don't want to motive monger. I don't want to impute motives to anybody. But he is a radio talk show host, and he has a constituency.

And, you know, it's the same with Limbaugh. People accuse Limbaugh and those guys of corrupting the minds of all their listeners. It's actually the other way around. I mean, they're followers. They're not leaders. I mean, Limbaugh is doing what his people want him to do. And if he didn't, they'd go away. In the 60s and 70s, for somebody to move from the left to the right meant that they sort of woke up to the fact that the liberalism in which they'd been inoculated and marinating for years, it actually turned into a sort of leftism

that was antithetical to American concepts. And so it was easier for them to move to the right, to abandon the sort of statist dream, transnational as it was, and say, no, I'm an American, I believe in the Constitution and these things. To move from the right to the left at this point seems to abandon, it seems to believe the dream,

to say, I'm going to give, I'm going to abandon all the rational precepts by which I've lived my life and buy into this dream. Could it just be that they were statists to begin with and decided that they want to go with the statists that seem to be a little kinder and gentler as opposed to the statists who are crude and eat cheeseburgers and the rest of it that's sort of a dis a disinclination to hang around with those people and be more like with these people because they watch the right shows on hbo and they they're they subscribe to the proper magazines and they seem more civilized i mean is it just that kind of class thing that they were just moved to a better class of statism i i think that that there's a lot to that i mean we'll have to see in a couple of years where things stand. You know, I'm always skeptical of this business. I remember Reagan used to say, you know, I didn't leave the Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party left me. No, that's not true. He started making a ton of money and he hated high taxes and he started hanging around with businessmen and he realized that the economy was overregulated and he actually became more conservative i think that what's happening with these guys is you know they're they're going to want to say the republican party left me but that's not really true i mean the republican party even under trump still sort of holds to the same kind of vague set of beliefs um what i saw like in this book by rick wilson who's a very prominent-Trump who's on MSNBC all the time, I guess, was, you know, aside from the class kind of hostility that Jim's talking about, there's, you know, he's just moving left. And that's certainly true of Max Boot.

And Max, I guess, has written an entire book about this now. So it's not really them. It's not the Republican Party leaving them. I think they're just waking up to some things that they've actually believed for a long time. Do you think that – I mean I know we've got to let you go, but 9-11 for a lot of liberals was a moment where they – a catalytic moment where they became 9-11 conservatives. I can name about a dozen of them in my life. Is Trump, you know, the rights 9-11? Is it something that is this 9-11 event that a lot of Republicans are saying, wait a minute, actually, you know, when it comes right down to it, I'm not in favor of lower taxes.

Yeah, well, that's interesting. Are they still would you still consider 15 years later, would you still consider those 9-11 conservatives or Republicans still conservatives? Because I have friends who are like that, and they've kind of gone back. were absolutely stunned by it and felt like we had been too weak and we needed to be strong. And a strong, robust interventionist, which is obviously very complicated with Trump because half the time he runs against these things and half the time he's running for them. But for them,

they sort of associate him by the right, whether correctly or incorrectly, as pro-defense and anti-terrorism for all that, whatever that means. And 9-11 and the response to 9-11 blended perfectly or imperfectly depending on how you look at it to the kind of the PC culture of Islamophobia and TSA profiling, all the things that the left was really exercised about and then in general the right didn't care about, those people still remain fairly...

Trump has probably been a challenge for them, but fairly right wing. And I'm just wondering whether they're a shakeout. It could just be to continue the amateur psychologizing. What do you mean amateur? Oh, sorry.

It could just be that Trump is like 9-11 in the sense that he's a, and I don't mean to belittle 9-11. I don't mean to trivialize this, but just for the sake of the metaphor, I mean, Trump is a stunning enough event that people have to all of a sudden kind of take their own politics more seriously. And I think that's definitely what happened with people I knew in 9-11. You know, I haven't, you know, I've just been kind of going along with this left-wing claptrap. And now when I really think about it, and then they did become conservatives, and I think that Trump is forcing a lot of, especially these sort of professional Republicans in Washington, to take stocks like, well, what the hell do I really believe? And you know what?

I really don't like those people who are cheering at the rallies that Trump holds, you know? And those are not my people. And I think that there's a kind of taking stock that's going on that is similar to what happened after 9-11. Yeah, well, I think for a lot of people in Washington, Trump is like 9-11 plus Groundhog Day. Every day they're horrified that the tower falls, they wake up, it's there again, and they have to go through it again. But at some point, everybody says, you know, the people you're talking about may not like those people cheering at the Trump rally, just like some people on the liberal side may not like those people who are screaming at

people in the elevators. But at the end of the day, to use another dreadful cliche, they're useful. And to gather them into the fold helps you consolidate power and get done what you need to get done. We need to go. That's the thing we need to get done right now. Andy, can't wait to see you again on the cruise ship. It'll be great. I'm going to jump ship and swim for sure. Thank you. We'll talk to you later.

Thanks, Andy. Thank you. Bye-bye. There's just something about talking with him that calms you, isn't it? I mean, just sort of a wry, sensible, funny, learned intellect. It calms you, but the daily life, it does not always provide me the opportunity. Wouldn't you say, Rob? I would say you have to medicate yourself.

The only thing you possibly do. It's the only solution. You're the wrong guy to be talking about medicating, Mr. Microdose. You're in a hectic city. You're in a cutthroat industry. And Rob is here to tell you of the importance of being calm. And we'll get to him in just a second here. But if you, like Rob, like Peter sometimes, like me, if you feel stressed or anxious, you probably have your coping tools, something you pop, something you drink, something

you walk, something you do. Well, we're excited to partner with Calm, the number one app for sleep, meditation, and relaxation. It was even named Apple's 2017 App of the Year. That's right, an app that can make you feel calm. How? Well, Calm gives you the tools you need to live a happier, healthier, and more mindful life. Just five minutes of Calm can change your whole day. If you head to calm.com slash ricochet, you'll get 25% off a Calm premium subscription, which includes hundreds of hours of premium programs. And they're about guided meditations on issues like stress and anxiety, focusing on things that matter, relationships. There's a brand new meditation every day called the Daily Calm. And also sleep stories.

They're like bedtime stories for grown-ups in case you have trouble dozing off there's so much more rob you've uh taken advantage of this and you find yourself well you always were a centered kind of guy i was always very centered but no you're absolutely look the trick to meditation is the practice and this makes the practice really really easy and the more you do it you know the more it's part of your daily routine and you just sort of don't even think about it. And, well, there's huge amounts of research. This is not some kind of crackpot thing.

There's huge amounts of research that suggest, that prove really, that meditation is great for people with heart trouble and all sorts of little problems like that. But also just in general, it gives you a little break and gives you a little more clarity in the day. And I cannot recommend it enough. I'm going to give it a try myself, and I want to see if they have an iPhone iWatch app for it because my watch taps me sometimes when it says, hey, you've been sitting too long. Get up and move around. And sometimes you need to do that with your mind too and your soul and your spirit. You need to stop and you need to think and center and reacquaint yourself with what it feels like to be calm. So calm.com slash ricochet, 25% off.

Unlimited access to all of Calm's amazing content. Calm.com slash Ricochet, 25% off. Unlimited access to all of Calm's amazing content. Calm.com slash Ricochet. That's Calm.com slash Ricochet. And our thanks, of course, to Calm for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, before I go, because I've got to run to the office because I work and I have a job, I hope still. Unemployment is the lowest since 1969. Wouldn't you think that there'd be cheers and brass bands and happy days are here again and all the rest of it?

But nothing seemed, I mean, the good news doesn't stick and the bad news doesn't stick. It's quite remarkable. Well, I mean, look, the good news sticks when the media likes the person who they attribute the good news to. And when it's not good news, when it is good news and they obsess on the things that the people who they attribute the good news to and when they when it's not good news then they but when it is good news and they obsess on the things that the people who were again look you know donald trump made a very very very um i think sophisticated and accurate analysis and

debunking of unemployment numbers when he was running for president and the unemployment numbers were pretty low for the time uh and now that they are a little bit lower than that he's convinced that the way we come up with unemployment numbers is absolutely perfect and can't be improved. And that is just politics as usual. The truth is, look, the economy is doing pretty well. Unemployment is 3.9. Even if it's just a little up or a little down in the next six months, that's still

pretty good. There are some worrying signs. There are always worrying signs. And the trick is to always pay attention to the worrying signs on the horizon look 1969 was a great year economically and the decade that followed it was a disastrous year

so inflation could come back all sorts of bad things could happen but the trick is how much money are Americans investing in America versus how much money are Americans investing in America versus how much they are consuming. And probably right now, we need to be investing more than we're consuming. That's a hard thing to do for us.

But prepare for the – put it this way. This is a very, very good time when money is fairly cheap and the labor market is pretty tight to be investing in productivity in the future and capacity for the future. Whether we're doing that or not, who knows? And the only thing I'll say about unemployment number is that wage growth is still worryingly flat. Just went to my local McDonald's a little while ago and they spent their money renovating it in this new dark style that McDonald's has. Quite nice. And they cut down the number of registers from three to one

yep yep and there was a big touch screen right there that i could do exactly i'm sorry i happen to be go to mcdonald's for the first time in eight months yesterday myself and there was a touch screen didn't you love it uh i sort of did to tell you the truth. There was no line at the counter. I sort of did. Hey, can I – may I close where we began with Brett Kavanaugh and college? Please. Rob, Brett Kavanaugh was a Yale classmate. Message board, text with Yale classmates, phone calls. Insane. What's going on?

What's going on? Insane. I must say, an insane amount of emails and texts and Gmail chains, Facebook messages, please sign this petition. But a lot of them were from media friends like, hey, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker wants to talk to you. If you know anything, here's her number. I mean I must have gotten that text and email about four or five or six times uh it's sort of bananas i mean the whole thing is kind of like it's impossible it's really impossible for me to to treat this seriously and i'm supposed to but it just seems so ludicrous that um that these issues and these events are being hashed out in a public – in a national forum and everyone is acting as if they're – even the accusers are acting as if these are somehow significant. It's just a lot of them. They were all – I wasn't one of them.

They were all marching around at the Yale Political Union and having spirited intellectual debates about this or that or constitutionality of X or Y or all sorts of things, right? And working really hard and studying and getting great grades in history. And all along, they knew they were going to be powerful lawyers. And they had these ambitions to the law and to that kind of thing and the one of the one classmate of mine who actually is going to be supreme court justice is the guy who was at the bar throwing ice at somebody drinking too much beer you know knee walking along the old campus and that to me uh you know it's america which is not so bad but it

just reminds me that the the last the closing credits of Animal House are the most trenchant observation of American society, and I never gave them credit for that. Everyone, if you watch the movie in the theater, you watch it at home, the last end credits are where all these reprobates are, where all these partiers and drinkers and just no accounts where they are. And I believe John Belushi's character, Bluto Blutarski, and I'm sure – I believe he ends up being a United States senator. Yes, yes. And there is something about it that is perfect, just perfect. Well, let me ask you this exit question then. Are these the new standards by which we judge anybody in politics now? They're high school drinking oh man i i mean is is that it high school drinking and their ability to control

their emotions because we used to be told for a long time that when guys just bottled it all up and did the john wayne thing that was toxic masculinity but now uh the new yorker's got a piece that said that when kavanaugh leaked a little there as he was giving his testimony that that's manipulative in the way that a small child cries to get his mommy to give him something. So is that the new standards? You'd better not have had a drink in college, and you also had better be pretty stoic when it comes to your emotions. Are we going to be holding that against liberal politicians? All I can say is if those are the new standards, that lets Robin me out. Yeah.

I know I don't think we'll hold – I know there will be some liberal sacrificial lambs maybe. There will be the Al Frankens thrown onto the – Folded like a wet towel. He folded like a wet towel, said the president, which made, I'm sure, Rob, you thought as a writer, you don't fold wet towels. Yeah, it's weird. Wet towels are wrung out, if anything. They're snapped against pert buttocks, but they're not, you don't fold, anyway. Folded like a towel, I think.

But I don't think so. I don't fold anyway. Fold it like a towel, I think. But I don't think so. I don't think anybody wants this standard in general. I mean, the people who are against Kavanaugh are not against Kavanaugh because of this. This is just what they grabbed and any weapon to hand. So they're not going to – they're going to hope they don't need to use it again. But if they do, they will. I mean, they absolutely will. Well, it's time to close this show like a cheap dog.

Brought to you by Audible, Lending Club, and Calm. Support them for supporting us. Go to iTunes, leave a review. That always helps because then people see the show exists and they leave their own reviews and more people go and give us money, which is great because, as I said before, it's not your problem that Ricochet needs to pay people money for things, but it is your problem if you go to Ricochet and it's not there anymore.

So keep that horrible theoretical day from happening. Join today. Right, Rob? Absolutely. I was on mute. I was letting you do your thing. But yes, I mean it is the most important thing you can do. And I said it before.

It's like I – give me a minute. I – just here's what I think. What this – take the Brett Kavanaugh story. What it needs is a multi-part podcast series like This American Life did with their serial platform where they go and they discuss one crime or one event and they get all sides and they do really a good deep dive. What the Brett Kavanaugh experience means, I mean what happened in that party in Bethesda, I mean how it broke into the national headlines. What it needs is a 10-part podcast series to tell that story. Real reporting in depth that's riveting and interesting and has a point and really sort of

tells the truth uh the left is not going to do that and we would love to do that we do not have the money and we do not have the money to do that primarily because we have millions of listeners and we don't have millions of subscribers so if you are listening to this podcast and you believe that's the kind of media that people should be producing, you have the opportunity to make that happen right now. Great idea. Peter, you'll be on board for the narration, right? Are you kidding?

It's your voice that people are going to want to listen to, Jay. No, I want to write the angular, jazzy, mournful, questioning music that I would accompany. Oh, cool. Yeah, let's do that. All right, Yeti, find us some Angular questioning music to go out with, and we'll just say bye. It's been great fun, and we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 3.0. Next week. Thank you. Ricochet.

Join the conversation. Thank you.