The Ricochet Podcast - Sex, Lies and Notebook Computers

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

Andy McCarthy returns to help us get through the shocking discovery that maybe it's possible that the Bidens are a little bit not entirely 100 percent ethical. This week we've got money laundering, not one but two prostitutes; another big chapter in the border crisis, and a good samaritan being charged for trying to protect New Yorkers on the subway. And as if our hosts are going to talk about American cities two weeks in a row without having a word about architecture... Pshaw!

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Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie You're stonking mad as they say. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Read my lips.

No new action. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lilacs, and today the subjects are, well, Romania, laptop, subway crime. That means it's Andy McCarthy. So let's have ourselves a podcast. You held on to those documents when you knew the federal government was seeking them and then had given you a subpoena to return them. Are you ready? Are you ready? Can I talk?

Yeah, what's the answer? Do you mind? I would like for you to answer the question. Okay, it's very simple to answer. That's why I asked it. It's very simple to... You're a nasty person, I'll tell you. Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, number 641. I think, if you're in your cell making little Roman numeral marks on the wall,

if I'm wrong, drop me a line at ricochet.com. And what is ricochet.com? Well, it's just the place you've been looking for all these years on the internets. It's a sane, civil, center-right conversation where, actually, as Rob coined long ago, people have skin in the game. Not actual, literal skin, but metaphorically, as game. Not actual literal skin, but as possible. That is Rob Long, by the way. Peter Robinson will be coming along shortly, we hope.

Perhaps right now in California, Peter is looking at the border and wondering exactly when the throngs will reach his stately little corner of the world. I'm looking at this and thinking, this is unusual. Apparently a law elapsed, and now we have to let everybody in. Kind of what it's like. We're powerless to do anything about it. There's nothing you can do, as a matter of fact. The only humane thing you can do is to make sure there's enough buses to take them elsewhere. If this was an actual foreign, I mean, if this was a foreign invasion by people inimical to the United States, hostile to us, shall we say, you'd like to think that there might be something we could do to get the people out.

And by the people, I mean the people who are coming here as economic migrants, as they're coming here for various reasons. But I'm sorry, we have a process, don't we? Nah, now we don't. There's nothing we can do. Right't there's nothing we can do right rob nothing we can do well which is interesting thing the idea like well there's a law you got to obey the law it's a law law expired we got to obey it you can't do much about the law the idea that we're somehow hamstrung by a law that'll that that allows other people to break the law meaning just sneak in a country anytime they want. It's a very strange

I always try to figure out what the strategy is, left and right, and this one I just don't understand. A bold move to secure the southern border by a sitting president, the current one, running for re-election, seems to me to be a wise move a dinner winner brainer yeah like why would you do that i'm not quite sure i get the the the larger sort of conspiratorial issues that replace me stuff maybe i have never known a president or studied a president in my entire life in the history of this republic who would not toss out long-term planning long-term

thinking for a short-term political gain in my life yeah i dare you to find me a president any president even the great ones who would ever do that this president is a just recently made 49 50 approval is facing a pretty uphill climb in in 2024 it it is just sheer political incompetence that he wouldn't just say hey let's uh let's get that border secure incompetence is it is it i mean you may think okay no this is cloward biffin oh no this is this is marxism this is all these things yeah no more likely there's just simply incompetence and an inability to do anything and no reason to think why they should i mean perhaps their instincts say well these people they you know they should come here they land of opportunity you know what it says in the statue of liberty and the rest of

it okay okay let's let's quadruple the numbers let's say that 40 000 people a day are streaming over and there's nothing we can do and they are all we are obligated to put them up in southern in in the border states and to give them phones and to give them a little piece of paper that says, well, drop by in 2027 and we'll take a look at your claim, which means they evaporated into the country. But when you add this to everything else, this general sense that the government, which supposedly is here to protect us, is doing absolutely nothing, willfully so, then you wonder exactly what's the state of the social contract. They're supposed to keep us safe. They're supposed to have law and order, reasonably so. But we watch every day a video of somebody walking into Walgreens and filling up a trash bag and then running out to go sell it somewhere. We watch every day some subway nonsense going on. And of course, the Neely thing that's going on in New York right now is a prime example of that. We see here, as we have in Minneapolis, roving gangs in Kia cars,

running around terrorizing people. And what does Baltimore do? We're going to sue the Kia people for making their cars so easy to steal. All of these examples in which we as a people have ceded to the government the right to use force against other miscreants in order to keep things working. And in every instance we look around, they're not doing it. I walked past the television here at the office, CNN was playing, and apparently they've got a special coming up, What Happened to San Francisco? Which is good that they're going to take a look at it, but it's a real head-scratcher. What happened? What happened? What happened? Peter Robinson. My phone hasn't rung. They don't need to do a documentary. I can give them a list of the top. I predict that San Francisco will be cleaned up and crime-free before anybody

on the left understands what happened in San Francisco. That's more likely to happen. Well, what happened, Peter? What did happen? Can I just get back to the border? Yes. The Speaker of the House should already this morning have gone to the cameras and made a statement saying that although debt limit is a serious matter and the risk of default is, of course, grave, that doesn't come for another month. What's happening right now, as of today, is a threat to the integrity of the nation itself. It is a crisis that must be dealt with, and therefore, at noon, I will be introducing legislation. The House of Representatives will be voting on it at one o'clock. We will send it to the Senate by two. This is a crisis, And the nation itself is at risk. That's what should be...

Greg Abbott should have been given a speech by now. Where's Ron DeSantis by now? It's just... All this falls to Trump. DeSantis is actually taking action. As of this morning? Already today? Previously, there was legislation in Florida

that banned the hiring of illegals. Am I correct? I'm sorry illegals. Am I correct? I'm sorry, undocumented. Am I not correct? No, you're being high-minded. You're talking about policy. I'm talking about politics. Who's in front of the cameras this morning to reassure the public and to take advantage, frankly, of the gigantic political opening?

Everybody is looking at images right now and saying well i guess we're stuck with trump he's the only one who's going to talk about this that cannot be the case sorry boys we were talking about political malpractice and i just had to jump in on that well i mean there is that question right i mean like i keep asking myself yeah i don't i'm not i'm trying not to come up with a singularity argument but is everyone lost their minds like at some point like what baltimore and then and then like i mean look say what you like about joe biden i mean you know he's a fool in many ways but he's not a foolish at least in the past has not been a foolish politician it's one of the reasons why he's been in government

for so long he's been able to stay there the idea that there's not an easy lob here for even a liberal to take on the eve of a presidential election just seems ridiculous you can probably find footage of joe biden 20 years ago saying if it were up to me i would go down to the border and whip the immigrants with reins you know i mean he's all over the road and all over the map now of course that's what the press court in dc brings up is the fact that well you know we can't do anything because we had that whipping incident which to his credit majorca said no that's nonsense i got to correct you right but that's underscores a lot of this is that it is cruel it is it is trump like to oppose this it doesn't matter in the merits whether or not we should oppose the uncontrolled flow of immigration because it is identified with the with the the the tip of the spear of fascism in american political parties today it must be opposed nobody want they well

it's what's yeah i mean the derangement is the derangement is so amazing i mean i i i know we don't really want to get into the cnn interview with or town hall wherever you want to call it with trump because oh why not talk to death right well that's true everybody lost their minds at cnn the idea i mean i said this this is not my insight this is ben shapiro who who uh wrote this and i think he's absolutely right because i was watching this thing thinking why is this so weird what's wrong what is what is not working about this interview for me and then it's not just that i don't like trump but just like but there's something so strange about it and i think that this was the premise of the town hall was a the number that the the depending on how you look at it the most popular republican running

for president in 2024 the front runner is having a town hall meeting with republican primary voters and the questions asked of this frontrunner in a Republican party were questions that are utterly uninteresting to the Republicans in the audience. So none of those questions had anything to do with the Republican primary. And that was what the distance was so bizarre. It's like, you know, one of those people were laughing and hooting. They're like, this is not what we came here for. We came here to ask why he blew it.

If you're against him in a to ask why he blew it if if you're against him in a republic why he blew it and brian kemp and ron desantis didn't when it came to covet why he blew it building the border wall which he didn't build any of it and he promised he was going to build it so all those are good questions to ask instead it was all this weird you know so everybody lost their minds that's my that's my my working theory for the next six months is- All the questions he got, as far as I can tell, all the questions he did receive reduced to one. Mr. President, Mr. Trump, we, CNN, the media, the FBI, the CIA, the Democratic Party, we have spent six years trying to humiliate you why aren't you humiliated

that's really what it came down to that's right why aren't you embarrassed have you no shame at all the answer is no of course not we knew we already knew that well the the prospect of a presidential election coming up that is Joe Biden versus Donald Trump is mortifying on so many levels. And not just because we almost felt that, you know, in the last presidential election, this is the last gasp of the gerontocracy. I mean, Trump was vital, but, you know, you're not that old. But still, this is the the last hurrah that generation. And for four years later to be presented with the same choice is is is just there's no last gasp when everybody's on a ventilator. It's just I keep these guys wheezing away. So very point it's a great line and also the argument is like just

political pure politics it's like you knew almost always beats old change almost always beats more of the same there have been very rare instances where that hasn't been the mantra in in the first bill in bill clinton won i remember that was this thing that everybody's always say well we change, change. We need change because there have been X number of years of Reaganism and because we had a downturn and i still remember when i was covering the democratic convention in new york there was a button for sale that had this frazzled looking woman in the words worried about everything vote democratic and that was pretty much what they had and that's pretty much kind of what people did and it was change we need change we need change change change and of course that went with all the people who were walking around around Manhattan, or rather slumped up against a building with a cup rattling at saying the very same word. Oh, I remember that convention well. It was in New York, and New York in the summer is a hot, hot, hot, steamy, uncomfortable, smelly place. But it's

still New York, at least back then it was. I don't know what it's going to be like now. Rob can tell us. Maybe it's a little bit emptied out. Maybe the smell of weed wafts over everything in a way that it didn't in 92. But here's the thing. That's for sure. Here in Minneapolis, where it's getting warm, it is just, it's great. It's great. And pretty soon, I'm going to turn my AC on. And you're thinking, well, if you're going to do that, you better change your sheets.

Well, first of all, I change my sheets all the time. But secondly, just because it's getting warmer and I'm turning on the air conditioning doesn't mean that I change my sheets. Well, first of all, I change my sheets all the time. But secondly, just because it's getting warmer and I'm turning on the air conditioning doesn't mean that I change my sheets because I use... That's right. You said it yourself. You thought it yourself. Bowling Branch. Bowling Branch is the bedding expert. They make the highest quality sheets with incredible craftsmanship. Each sheet set is slow made for unmatched softness with 100% traceable organic cotton. It gets softer with every wash. The Signature Hemmed Sheets from Bolden Branch, they're a bestseller and for a good reason.

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See side for details. And we thank Bowlin Branch for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar, and the chance to reward you. Gagee podcast. in racing. Cheltenham with LiveScoreBet. This is total betting. Sign up by 2pm 14th of March. Bet within 48 hours of race. Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie And now we welcome back to the podcast our old friend Andy McCarthy, Senior

Fellow of the National Review Institute. Andy contributing editor there as well as with Fox News. Served as an Assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. And we got big investigations, big lawsuits going on, so we thought we'd have him back. Welcome, Andy. Guys, great to be with you, as always. Okay, here's the deal. Laptop. The story is, it was Russian disinfo assigned by 51 people who

agreed so, and then it was real, but it doesn't matter because none of that is so, and then CNN, well, there may be 11 shell companies, but money to grandkids. But none of it went to Joe Biden. So nothing burger, nothing burger. Move along. Move along. Tell us what matters the most out of the things we've heard. Re Hunter and the Bidens over the last, I don't know, three or four weeks. I think obviously the most important thing is to prosecute Santos. I mean, under the circumstances, as you've laid them out i mean i can't see any other alternative um you know look the i thought the um house oversight

press conference that they had the other day was pretty good in the way that they uh pretty efficiently over 50 minutes laid out a lot of this financial evidence, which has, you know, goo gobs of money going into Biden family coffers over a number of years. This is not a new story. I mean, a lot of us were writing about this a couple of years ago. On the other hand, the House Republicans now have subpoena power, so they're obviously using it to advance the investigation beyond what was known. But I think the big takeaways are, you know, in any big transaction where you have, you know, whether it's a million bucks or a billion bucks or whatever going one way, you expect to see commodities, assets, things of value coming the other way. And the only thing that resembles something of value in this equation is access to Joe Biden and his political influence, which I think leads to the second part of this that for a prosecutor is very interesting,

which is that when people are doing legitimate business, even if they're big dollar transactions, they're generally very simple, straightforward transactions. I mean, there may be mortgages and all that stuff, but I mean, money goes one one way the commodity comes the other way you know steve uh cohen buys that right so he buys the mets right um and i'm sure he feels like he uh he got defrauded at this point but you know he pays what was it like two billion dollars or whatever it was and he gets the ball club you know you can see it when people are doing illegitimate business what you tend to find is what we're seeing here, which is like there's 17 different LLCs, these limited liability companies that have been created for the purpose. Basically, they're paper creations for moving money. And there are five or six different banking channels that are also used to sluice money through these entities.

And usually when you're doing that kind of business, I mean, this is essentially what money laundering becomes. If you can show that the big thing with money laundering is you have to show that the money that you start with is the proceeds of criminal activity. If it's your own money and it's legitimate money, you can change the form of it however many times you want. But people don't tend to do that with legitimate money. What happens with illegitimate money is you have to move it through a bunch of different accounts to kind of disguise the source of it and often what you find is that transactions that are you know large-sized transactions get broken into five or ten or fifteen smaller transactions in order to keep the dollar figure down uh and in this instance what we what we see uh is the money is going to like a variety of different Bidens rather than one.

Right. And all this is done. Well, they're all really good. Just like it's. There are really, really great international business people. They're excellent. Yes, they're excellent. It just so happens.

Including the grandchildren, right? Hey, Andy, isn't that a crime just in itself? I mean, I, of course, as you know, I'm not uh i did not pass the new york state bar just to be uh fully just fully transparent or any bar well i've never passed a bar without at least trying to walk in like knocking on the door um oh uh that was beneath both of you but no it wasn't is it um is this structured they call structured and that it just structuring a system so that you could isn't that also a crime i mean yeah so so rob there's two things here that are very important one is structuring and the other is another term that we heard the other day

repeatedly which is sar or suspicious activity reports um there which i think the house guys mentioned like 170 sars that they reviewed the other day so let's start with structuring because that's the crime um i think it was in the 80s that we started to put on the books these money laundering laws. And the idea was that because it was so common for drug dealers to engage in cash transactions, the laws were put in place to make it, if you do a $10,000 domestic cash transaction with a bank, the bank has to file what's known as a currency transaction report. And for international transactions, the trigger is $5,000. So there's nothing wrong. For example, if you're in a cash business, you have no problem with doing a currency transaction report with the bank because

you can show that there's a legitimate source of the money. But people who are engaged in criminal behavior, narcotics traffickers and organized crime in particular, they get a lot of cash and they don't want a paper record of it. So what they did was put these laws in so that people had to identify who was the owner of the money and where the money came from and that's so structuring that you refer to is like um i get twelve thousand dollars on a drug deal say so i don't want to go to file a ctr currency transaction report so i'll break it into, you know, four different deposits of $3,000 to make sure I don't hit the 10 grand mark, which triggers the currency transaction report, which brings us to SARS. The banks detect this kind of activity. You know,

they see my four $3,000 deposits and they said, hmm, that seems fishy, but it doesn't trigger the law violation because I haven't hit the $10,000. So they file what's known as a suspicious activity report, which they also provide to the government that says there's something fishy going on here, we maybe want to keep an eye on it. And that can be done because of the way that transactions seem to be structured to defeat the reporting requirements or and sometimes it's both. The source of the money is suspicious. So, for example, Hunter Biden, as I understand it, triggered at least one suspicious activity report because when he got money from his father to pay his outstanding prostitution bill that ended up going to just part of his monthly allowance yeah but it went to an email account that had a dot ru

for russia at the end of it which got the bank uh you know yeah not that not that there'd be any collusion with russia no no no no russian collusion no we don't believe in russian i uh i was on the wrong side of this years ago just a little personal uh just to say the uh the uh the uh currency what's the right side of this i was writing a column for the uh abu dhabi english language abu dhabi newspaper called the national i read it for about 12 years and they suspicious activities exactly and they didn't pay me for like eight weeks nine weeks 10 weeks 12 weeks they were trying to sort it out and so we're gonna wire it to you why did you watch you um they finally sorted it out i said whatever you do please do not wire me all of that money all at once

and uh and i and they said well we, and I said, can you just spread it out a little bit? And I called my accountant and I said, what do I have to say to them just to get them to not do this? And he said, you don't say that at all, because there's no reason for you to say that because you are intending to pay income tax on this money. Yes. And I said, yeah, I mean, yeah. So, yeah, it really, I mean, my idea, my level of high finance doesn't even come close or level of expenditure or interesting expenditure doesn't even come close to $100. Why is this guy not in jail yet well here's that's a very interesting question because a lot of what we know they have investigated him for is the kind of stuff that would take a competent investigator five days to pull together not five years so for example uh and this is probably the best example of this this hunter obtains a gun in a handgun in i think it was uh 2018 um it gets better every time this guy is just a gift that keeps coming so he has to fill out the required federal form he uses the

money left over from paying the prostitute well no we're coming to the next prostitute. Slow down. Get your prostitutes in order, Peter. So he buys a gun. He fills out the federal form 4473. It's like an ATF form. Everybody's got to fill it out when they purchase a firearm. And he lies in the form about his narcotics use. He's at that time. He's a historic cocaine abuser. But at that time, he's going through a jag in that in that particular time frame. And he says in the form that he does not use illegal narcotics.

A few days later, we now know from the infamous laptop from hell he is depicted in a video with a prostitute waving the gun around um so uh as one does yeah as one does um and a couple of days after that, I guess he was then involved with Beau Biden's wife. So his former sister-in-law now, you know, Paramore. At that time. The widow of his brother. Correct. Got it.

Okay. So she, seeing the drug abuse and the other stuff he's up to, gets nervous and basically takes the gun away. They lose the gun. And they end up trying to, I think she disposed of it in the garbage of a grocery store that was across the street from a school and eventually you know the gun is recovered and there's some reporting that says the secret service um you know insinuated itself to try to get the documents back from the gun transaction to make the whole thing go away they haven't proved that yet but it sounds very fishy what went on here but in any event that case for a good prosecutor and a decent investigator we're not talking you know i mean this isn't elliot nest stuff this is like very straightforward should have taken five days to pull that case together it's still sitting there

five years later they haven't charged it um the other thing we know that the prosecutor in Delaware is looking at, this is the U.S. attorney David Weiss in Delaware, who was appointed by, I think he's appointed by Trump. He was assigned the investigation by Bill Barr. But people should understand if he if you're the U.S. attorney in delaware you can't be the u.s attorney unless the two senators in the state have basically blessed that so you know he's got democratic connections as well as being trump appointed but in any event the other cases we know he's looking at are crimes we know he's looking at are tax evasion violations that go back years. And that resulted in liens being put on Hunter's property in, you know, 2016, 2017, 2018. So this stuff has been out there for years.

And a lot of it isn't that complicated. And yet they're sitting on it these cases have not gone forward and now we're getting reports that whistleblowers have complained to the two guys in the senate who've been looking at this the most chuck grassley and ron johnson and also to now the the house committees uh complaints from an investigator from the IRS and an investigator from some agency in the Justice Department who are complaining that there's been political interference and that they haven't been able to do the normal things that you would do in a criminal investigation. Hey, Andy, to double back just very, very briefly, when you look at what you started by describing, when you look at the way that they've set up, they've structured, moved the money around to various Bidens,

do you look at that and say, hmm, pretty sophisticated? These guys may have been up to no good, but they knew what they were doing. Or do you look at it and say amateur hour here yeah peter you know there's a combination of both is i mean it's really not that difficult to to set up these kinds of llcs and a lot of the behavior i think that the biden's engaged in here is pretty gross um You know, some of it is obviously made the money difficult to trace. And there's so many people involved in it. They were clearly trying to keep the amounts down. So that would trigger people's suspicions. But my sense of this is that, you know, I mean, with one of these Chinese outfits, the CEFC, which is really just a Chinese intelligence operation that the Biden stumbled into.

I mean, they gave Hunter a diamond as a bribe to start off the relationship, you know. And it just seems like, you know, pretty sort of low level stuff. And it makes you think that at some level, these guys just think they're invulnerable. You know, this, did this, a lot of this behavior goes back.

I don't really get that idea. Yeah. I mean, look, it goes back to like 2010, even, even a little thing. It shouldn't be a little thing,

but you know, Joe Biden being caught with classified information that he took when he was in the Senate. You know, senators are not supposed to have classified information. There's a place on Capitol Hill or places, skiffs that they have to go to to review it. It's not like, you know, there's some executive branch positions which are national security, where they come and put a skiff in your house because your whole job is national security and you're on duty all the time. That doesn't happen with members of Congress. If senators and members of the House have to go to skiffs to review classified documents. So what the hell is Biden doing with classified documents in

his house that that date back to his time in the Senate? And I think you see enough of that kind of behavior again and again. And you just think these guys have a sense of entitlement and they think that they can get away with stuff and no one's ever going to call them on it. The new wrinkle this week. I mean, going back to what you said before. I mean, the fact that the Hunter stuff has been sitting there forever is fascinating because it's like somebody came to them and said, you know, I hear this guy has got a gun that he shouldn't have, lied on his application form. He's been waving around. He's doing a lot of drugs and he's hiring hookers. And somebody says, yeah, well, that's going to be hard to prove.

Oh, well, actually, here's the video of it. Yeah, well, OK. OK. You mean the Russian, James? You mean the Russian disinformation? Right mean the russian disinformation right the russian did they're so good at that oh anyway moving forward um we had a new wrinkle this week though in which romania has entered the chat previously it was just uh china and ukraine and now there seems to be a little romanian connection here have you been following that and exactly

what was spent what was given to which grandchildren, and what the president eventually, and what Biden then later said about Romania back in the days. Yeah, this goes to what I was saying about some of the behavior being gross. You know, this is while Biden is vice president. He's over there giving speeches in Romania about anti-corruption. And the guy who ends up being the source of the bribe uh turns out to have been um prosecuted in romania for corruption and he eventually essentially he gives the biden's a million dollars and at least some of it is in the form of like $100,000 that went to one of the grandchildren. You know, just the kind of stuff that it's Romania played a big role in the in the press conference they had the other day.

I think I had a dim memory of having heard of Romania before, but there's more countries involved than just China and Ukraine. We've had, you know, there's a Russian source of about three and a half million dollars. There's a Mexican guy that Hunter did business with and had a bunch of meetings that some of which involved Joe Biden. And we don't know how lucrative that was. I have to ask that. I have to ask the question. This is a question, Rob has a serious question. This is flippant, but serious at the same time. And I stipulate, this is exactly the kind of question that drives Rob nuts. I cannot forbear to ask it all the same. If his name were Hunter Trump, how would it all have been different by now well first of all it wouldn't

have gone on for decades um which this now looks i mean this looks to me like it's gone on for close to 20 years and it would be the only story around i mean it'd be the only story we were talking about it'd be almost like let me imagine something that might be close to it like let's say the border collapsed like there was no border enforcement and tens of thousands of people pouring over the border you know if something like that happened it would be the only story in america that anyone was talking about that could never happen of course so totally hypothetical hypothetical. Something like this, yeah. Well, I get it. So, Andy, so here's my question,

since you brought up the border. Illegal question. So, and I think I had this right, correct me when inevitably I say something stupid. Federal judge in Florida blocks the Biden administration from carrying out parts of the immigration plan last night. A suit brought by Governor Ron DeSantis.

Is that going to be effective, ineffective? I mean, I think it's effective politically um for republicans if you're running in a republican primary it looks like you're you know you're sitting in tallahassee but you've got the problems of the country on your mind um is this a little blip is it pure theater or is there something effective here hard to say at this point how the administration will react to the ruling i mean the bottom line is the framers thought that the judiciary was the least dangerous branch because they lacked the purse and the sword. And sometimes, you know, we think that everybody in government genuflects when there's a court decision. But in point of fact, you know, courts don't have a means of enforcing their rulings.

And if the government decides, if the reigning administration decides not to follow a judicial decision, it's a question of how much politically they think they can get away with. As you just said, you know, these things can be politically effective. Right. Because most people think it's a pretty outrageous thing if a judge makes what appears to be a lawful ruling and even an unlawful ruling they feel like ought to be followed until it gets reversed right so right um and i i think that you have to juxtapose that in terms of the politics of it which may be probably is much more important than the law you have to juxtapose that in terms of the politics of it, which maybe probably is much more important than the law. You have to juxtapose that with these images, at least those of us who watch some like Fox News and other places. I guess everybody is not seeing this, but these images of people coming across the Rio Grande and these lines in Brownsville, Texas.

And I mean, they're just shocking. Even for those of us who've watched this for a long time, it's just shocking to watch. Yeah. Drudge this morning, the headline is 500,000 lined up to come in. So, Andy, may I ask? Wait a minute, Drudge? Yeah, Drudge, who's no friend of Last Person in America who goes to drudge after this is done we're going to go and talk about removing bookmarks from your browser andy can you explain just give me a brief explainer rob asks the probing questions here i'll do the water bug thing skittering across the surface here's the way i've i've been traveling the last few days.

And here's what I hear as I listen to podcasts and punch the car radio. One, there's something called Title 42 that the Trump people enacted. Two, as of midnight last night, Title 42 expired. Three, because Title 42 expired, there's nothing we can do. We just have to let them all in. What the hell? What was Title 42? And why must it be beyond the ken of man and woman? Why can't the Speaker of the House go in front of the cameras and say, this piece of legislation will be enacted this day in the House of Representatives and sent to the Senate by noon. In other words, what is the legal,

how does anybody get away with saying we don't have the legal standing to protect our borders anymore because something called Title 42 expired? Well, let me start out with what the law says now and why it shouldn't even be necessary for the Speaker of the House to do what you just said. The law of the United States, by statute, says that if you are here illegally or try to get in illegally, you shall be detained. That's the words of the statute. Until your application claiming lawful admission into the United States is resolved. So under the law, even when we think people have a colorable legal basis to be here, they are supposed to be detained. Not released into the country and told to come back

three years later. Right. Now, we have about 36,000 detention spaces for people that are dedicated to people who try to come into the country unlawfully. Now, I think to me, and I may not be a paragon of common sense, but like to the common sense person, what that says is you can't detain more than 36 000 people so once you reach maximum detention you don't let anyone else into the country until you have room to detain people what the government's position has been for decades is well if more the people want to come in than we have space for obviously we have to let them in and adjudicate their claims. So that's the backward assumption that we're dealing with, that even though Congress has said these people don't

have any right or authority to be at liberty inside our country, this has been going on for decades because it's been so out of control title 42 was kind of a pretext in place to kind of paper over a lack of serious enforcement policy title 42 was a policy that was related to the pandemic that gave the government an excuse to not let anyone in during COVID because of infectious disease fears. And what a number of us argued all along, and I think the Supreme Court, especially Justice Gorsuch, said this when it came up to the Supreme Court, is the government is saying COVID's not an emergency anymore. So what you're trying to do here is take something that you did over COVID as a pretext and make it your policy because you don't have the nerve to like legislate and put in actual enforcement policies. And, you know, I think, Peter, he's right about that. He's totally right about it. But the problem is, I think in our political culture, we like to look at all these controversies with the assumption that everybody has, at some level, common ground about the betterment of the country, but they have very different ideas about how to get there.

And this is not that issue. You have some people who philosophically do not believe the United States should have a border, and they want to see radical change in the country, which they think changing the racial and ethnic composition of the country would achieve, at least more rapidly than otherwise. So I don't know how you make a compromise with people who don't think we should have a border in the first place, but that's where that's the reason nothing ever gets done. You reach out to the people who are in the communities where they're being bused to.

We saw this in Chicago. There was a town hall where they said, by the way, 250 immigrants, migrants going to be coming to stay here. And the neighborhood, which was not your, shall we say, what you might think of as a leafy, waspy suburb of Chicago, reacted poorly. They

hadn't been consulted. They didn't like it. And the interesting thing is that 250 is not particularly that much, but you get the sense that people did not want the composition of their neighborhood to be altered instantly in a large degree all at once so when you ask people about this thing you actually find common ground and so their solution of course is just simply not to ask all right it takes a i mean i don't know what i don't know what uh i think i've read like the bolsheviks had about seven percent support in russia in you know when the revolution started in 1917 so i think it takes no but it it may be yeah but i what all my point is that i just think it takes a only a small determined faction uh to make you know real progress for itself if it's willing to do things that defy what what people think are like and and and likewise at the same time i'm sorry but this will be my last vent but i know i mean

donald trump does this town hall on cnn and it's he's on form he's trump again except that we've lived with him and we know this is just not going to end well. So I'm saying to myself, wait a minute. You know what? I am now in favor of Vivek Ramaswamy because that guy is talking back. Why hasn't Ron DeSantis stepped in front of the cameras already this morning? You say it, of course, correctly. If you have a dedicated faction, and they seem to be the people in charge of this walking zombie who's the president of the United States, the people adjusting him and moving him and propping him up seem to be this dedicated faction that wants to eliminate the border. Likewise, what we need on our side is leadership.

Leadership, not this. Donald Trump has his points. He's an amazing and engrossing person, but he's not a leader at this point. Let's hear from you, DeSantis. Glenn Youngkin, stop screwing around. If you're going to run for president because this is a crisis, say so. These people should be in front of the cameras before monday i'm done venting or andy is it possible that the right can never address this issue because it's been tainted with the allegations of xenophobia racism etc it can only come from somebody in the democratic party somebody to make the populist point from the

democratic party why this can't stand and why it's not to use their favorite word sustainable yeah well i i don't know i mean mean, I'm not a Trump fan, but I do think he moved what they, I guess they call the Overton window on this, right? Yeah. So I think it is possible to make these arguments. And I'm, you know, look, I'm with Peter on this. I think they ought to be getting busy.

I know DeSantis is on his own schedule in terms of when he wants to announce his candidacy, but know here here's the crisis where's the man there are times when you don't get to choose yep yeah yep you had one more before we let it yeah i got one more just just to piggyback on that i mean one person who is and who is moving the over the window a little bit on the other side is eric adams who's discovered that a city as big as New York City, which actually probably just statistically could take many more migrants from the border, right, just in terms of space and people and budget, many more than Brownsville, Texas. As long as you put the many place but the village. Yeah, truth of consequences, New Mexico. He's decided that this is a crisis for New York

City, which, of course, if you're the mayor of any of those little towns small budget towns around the border you must be rolling your eyes like are you serious dude i would i i they exist on one-tenth of one percent of his budget but since we're talking about since i brought up new york city i got to bring up another um before we let you know because you're you're uh you know you already put hunter b in jail. Thank you. On, I guess, today or tomorrow, Daniel Penny, who was riding the subway with Jordan Neely. Oh, right, right. Jordan Neely was the man who was either threatening or making trouble or doing the kinds of things that threaten people on the subway car, put him in a chokehold. He died.

The district attorney, Manhattan district attorney, has said that he is going to charge Penny for second-degree manslaughter. I think he's going to surrender today. Or maybe he's already surrendered. He said he would surrender Friday morning. Stipulated, this seems morally ridiculous, like an absolute put-up job by a Manhattan district attorney who is among the worst, maybe the worst DA we've ever had in the city,

focusing entirely on the wrong things instead of the right things um what do you think is going to happen here is this marine going to go to jail no i think he'll get he'll get acquitted if they're yeah daft enough to to follow through with this but you know i think we talk all the time about the many many things that are wrong with the federal government one thing that's right with the federal government is that prosecutors are appointed they're not elected um you know they and they get vetted they get vetted by the senate and even though this may be um you know the tribute that uh vice pays to virtue they at least pay lip service to the idea that they are going to enforce the law in a nonpartisan fashion. That is part of the expectation of being qualified

to be a prosecutor, at least in the federal system. So I think when you look at Bragg, the state system is not that way. I think it's much more accurate to look at Bragg as an elected progressive Democrat than as a law enforcement official. Yeah, right. If you inject I think if you would inject electoral politics into this instead of the things that drive law enforcement decisions, what he has to do is use his power in a way that pleases the people who put him there in the first place. And I looked at this this morning because I wrote about this for National Review for this coming weekend. There are 1.7 million people on the island of Manhattan. 85,000 people voted for Alan Bragg in the Democratic primary, which essentially made him the district attorney. So that's about 5% of the residents. So we're back again to the determined faction. I guess that's why I have it in the front of the brain today. But he's there to deliver progressive results.

He's not going to be judged by whether there are acquittals in the case, because it's not a law enforcement decision. It's a political political decision it's the same reason he charged trump in a case that he didn't even lay out what the crime is in the indictment because what he's there to do is what he campaigned on which is to use his use the powers of the district attorney's office to to further the uh woke progressive agenda and that's what he's doing. Andy, really quickly, this is on my mind because of Trump and the trial the other day. You just said totally confidently, and you said it immediately as though it's just something that is part of the ground of your being, that this guy would be acquitted if you if it went to trial

right are you can we here's the question is manhattan manhattan juries can you get 12 people to do the right thing to to stand above identity politics in manhattan it just peter here i guess i'd be i'd be reassured please reassure me that yeah here's the difference between the penny case and the trump case the trump case is a political case um the penny case is about security on the subway manhattanites ride the subway they are craving they know what a hellscape it's become they are craving police presence on it and they want somebody a man who won't just look at his shoes when some insane person gets on a train car and starts to harass the old ladies and harass everybody else on the

train car and intimidate them they they may it become the fashion in New York that men are now supposed to just like sort of stare at their shoes and look at their phones while that kind of stuff goes on. But this guy, Penny, who actually in a valorous way put himself on the line against somebody who was a career criminal, who just got out of Rikers Island after, I think, 16 months there for punching an old lady in the face where he broke her nose and broke her occipital bone, arrested 42 times and threatening to people. And what New Yorkers, even in Manhattan, want when they're on the subway is somebody like Daniel Penny who's willing to step up. So I don't see how you get 12 people to agree to convict him.

I agree. Thank you. The quantity of his arrest just simply means it's 42 times that the system failed him, is what we're led to believe. We're supposed to be told by some of these people that the fact that he was raving and screaming on the subway is a reflective of a society that refused to do anything for him. At some point, people wash their hands of that and say, no, it is the obligation of the society to make sure that people are safe in the subway. And you have this new idea amongst the left that not only should we stare at our shoes, but this is part of the rich and diverse, vibrant element of living in a city.

Well, you know, this is just what you got to put up with. This is what you this is what we do here. If you don't like it, go back to the go to the suburbs and drive a car to which most people would say, yes, yes, I will. I don't know what you are in, Andy, or what you're driving, but we're glad you popped by today. And for those of you who are looking on the live stream, he's wearing a Chicago hat. I was just in Chicago. I actually had people were telling me, you know, you're going to Chicago as if they expected that I'd be gunned down in front of the art museum. No, it was a Saturday.

It was beautiful. And there were so many tourists around. There are so many people that had felt absolutely safe, which is what cities need and what they're not getting. But that's another day. Another story. Another podcast, another rant. Thanks for joining us, Andy. We'll talk to you later. Amen. Great to be with you guys. Thanks, Andy. Thank you, Andy. At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar, and the chance to reward you. That's why every day of the festival, we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet

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Bet responsibly. 18plusg gamblingcare.ie Rob, I was going to ask you, and this is not a segue, are the streets of New York, because I just mentioned Chicago, which was great because there was all kinds of people there and it made it safe. Now, granted, they were all just staring at the

mirrored bean or walking around Michigan Avenue, gawking at the buildings, but cities need eyes, subways.ways i mean the reason that they don't feel safe to a lot of people is because as somebody mentioned there's not the guy who's who you think is going to step up that nobody's stepping up that there's just a a rot and a drain that is plaguing our cities that is irreversible is how is new york doing which is probably not a question well you know more know, more Americans live in the city,

so I guess it is an issue. I don't think it's irreversible at all. I mean, I couldn't imagine anything worse than New York City in 1989 or 1990. I mean, the murder rate was much higher. It's reversible. You just have to decide you're going to reverse it. But also, I mean, New York in 89, 90

did not have the sort of deep hop but you still had downtown office cores that were fairly well developed and well but you didn't have try back you didn't have a half of the brooklyn was still kind of a kill zone now young people moved to new york city they moved to crown heights i know people when i first came back after being 30 years in la and i'd meet people and say where do you where do you live they'd say crown heights and i say no you can't live in crown heights right but of course you can't live in bushwick it's crazy but people live bushwick good things have happened i just and i think the best thing that's happened if everyone sort of focuses on people and we isolate and point and shout at the

people who've lost their minds which includes people on the subway and also people who are in the manhattan district attorney's office um we can easily get it back and we could easily get we could almost get like i'm an optimist so i don't think anything's inevitable and i or inevitable or irreversible decline is a i mean this is a cliche but it's true it's a choice and we bizarre it's so weird it wasn't not weird in the 60s or even the 70s to want big government programs it made total sense if you were especially if you've grown up under the new deal these are all making liberalism big government liberal policies make a certain amount of sense i mean i don't think they're right but i get it they're not irrational nobody looked at somebody who was liberal and said you're weird

it only became like in the 90s and then aughts where the weirdness started to creep in and that the strange like regulations and the strange bias in favor of like crazy people walking on the subway that that is something that is is easily winnable from an opposition you know political opposition that wants to make it i mean i remember that's the one thing that newt gingrich said newt gingrich whatever you think of him now political genius in 1992 93 94 95 and he kept saying let's's just remind America how weird the left is. Not that, you know, big government, this or that, just how weird it is and how weird some of their policies are. And that was very successful. And I think we had that opportunity now. We're kind of not taking it, it seems, people on the right, but I still have hope. Okay. By the way, I'm with both of you. I'm with James that New York is important. The one year I lived in New York, I'll be very brief about this, but I have experience of it. The one year in my life I lived in New York was 1990-1991. Now, this is after we'd won the Cold

War. The country had been turned around, but everybody with whom I spoke in New York said, get out of here. My wife and I had just gotten married. We'd had our first child, and I was asking people, what do I do, buy an apartment? Or just, no, here's what you do. You're still young. Leave. Get out now. I can remember driving out to visit people and friends for the weekend in Bucks County in Pennsylvania and pausing before going to the Lincoln Tunnel. And it was totally standard to have the squeegee men, the guys who would put some soap on your window and then you either paid them something, rolled down your window and paid them something, or they broke off the windshield wiper. Okay. And then Rudy Giuliani comes along.

We now forget this because we had a dozen years of Mike Bloomberg. He tends to get the credit for saving the city. He was an act of political will. And by then, I had left. The property values of all the apartments I might have bought at that time were starting to climb. But my friends in New York were saying, oh, we can do it. It's a choice. It's a choice. You can save the city. It's really important, really important for the whole country that the results of that experiment should be preserved, that New York should continue to function, that the subways get cleaned up again, and on and on. Yeah, I mean, my point is New York is a place to start in a way it was for so many a couple decades now the example of what could be done not just new york new york chicago san francisco portland every city in america alas one of the choices that people make is to stay

home in their pajamas and work which is completely understandable it's rational to say i would rather be home and be comfortable and walk the dog when i wish than get in my car or get on the subway and go someplace and sit in an office in a teal little veal pen and tap away for eight hours. People don't want to do that anymore, which is a rational decision that people make. And the aggregate consequences of that are ruinous. When I was in Chicago last week, as a matter of fact, but actually to the moment, about seven days ago, I was walking down a rather unremarkable street in Chicago and encountered a couple, three buildings which stood out to me because they were ordinary and normal. One of them was the Bankers Building, which is what it was named 1924 when it went up. It was presumed to be 25

stories when it was announced. They couldn't stop, I guess, when they got going because it went up to 41 stories. 1924. The ornamentation is rather rote for 1924. The building itself looks a little bit shabby because they replaced some bricks with other bricks, but it's huge. It's absolutely immense. It's 41 stories of offices where people worked in. Right next to it is the Field Building, which has now been renamed, which went up in the teeth of the Depression. It finished in 1934, 47 stories, I think. It's enormous, and the style is different. It's stripped down. It's machine-oriented. It's modernistic. It's the America that's coming. And at the absolute nadir of capitalism, the Field Company just said, screw it, we're going to build it. And they built it, and it's tall. And then across the street from that is a 1960s technocratic international style Mies van der Rohe post office building,

which itself is almost a piece of abstract sculpture. And it has a certain black presence to it, and it's also got an interesting sculpture. So take three of these buildings together, and each one of them has their different function in American society. The post office building, well, we don't send letters anymore. Nobody looks for the mail. The banker's building, well, we all bank online. Nobody goes into a hall anymore and exchanges coins through a little cage. And the field building, well, it was named after a retail empire, which is dissolving because everybody wants to shop from home on Amazon. All of these three paradigms have shifted, but these buildings remain. And they are absolutely unremarkable for Chicago. In any other city, they would be monuments.

Here, they're unremarkable because Chicago has so much of this, so many tall towers, so much broad shoulders from block to block to block. And it's great. And there's an energy to it when you just look at it. And when you study the themes and the styles and the history of the American 20th century that's written on all of these facades, you cannot help but love the city and want more of it. But you also feel, looking around at everybody in their pajamas at home, that the time when America built tall towers is done.

And that's a choice that somehow we all decided to make. And it's a bad one. And I don't like it. And I do not know what to do about it. And I do not want to become marinated in my own pessimism about that because it bleeds into everything else. We built the Empire State Building when everything else was crashed. We keep going up. And Elon Musk and the rest of the guys going up, that's great in the rocket sense.

I like that. You can't apply a 20th century paradigm to everything else and expect the grid to overlay perfectly. But I worry about the death of the cities because at the height of the American Renaissance was the Renaissance in these cities as well, where they were pleasant, interesting, fascinating, artistic, good places to go. And America is both the rural, the small town, the medium-sized burg of which we've got so many, but it's also the throbbing heart of the metropolis and what each one of these places says about america and i hate to lose that characteristic and it's typical i made a rant at the end of the show where everybody's tuned off doesn't really matter but i would like to just say this uh james to make you feel better and worse at the same time they built a huge tower here in new york city tall tower in brooklyn for people no i mean in

manhattan and midtown for people for billionaires to live in and it turns out that elevators don't work and so people have been spending 30 million 40 million dollars in these apartments the thing's shaking like crazy and the elevators are working oh it's a beauty it's absolutely tiny little seedlet of populism that somehow i didn't think existed in the in the harsh soil of my soul has sprouted and we walk by that building and everybody looks because all those rich guys they got to take the stairs sometimes uh-huh are you talking about symphony place we're on we're talking about billionaires row right here which is a series of super tall buildings normally the the engineering expertise that keeps these things from waving more than five feet in the wind is pretty good.

But when they built one of these supertalls, they did not factor into... Well, my favorite story about one of them is that it's got a trash chute, naturally. And when people throw something in the trash chute, you've got 80 stories of something rocketing down. Because of the heat. And the pipes snap because it sways a little bit too much each one has their own little dampening mechanism so i know i just i absolutely i am i hate the super talls they're they're architecturally meretricious so i'm i am glad that that and then a brooklyn of course you just want too tall you're just no satisfaction i am just a goldilocks and he said

no i want tall and i want too tall but i want it to be. I am just a Goldilocks in these. No, I want tall and I want too tall, but I want it to be for a mixed use thing. And I want it to be sturdy, not some little slender read. All right. It goes in the rest. Dream on. Speaking of which,

I would love to say that there's a New York meet up coming soon. But Rob, you can catch us up on where the meetups are going to be. Well, listen, maybe we should have a New York meetup if you're interested. Let's set something up. Okay.

There's a bunch of meetup stuff. If you are not a member of Ricochet, why are you not a member of Ricochet? Join and come to the IRL events. They're the most fun. That's the perk of being a member here. The perk of joining the club. We want you to join. PJS open invitation to the Yankees game this week. I hope somebody took her up on that.

Western Chauvinist has acquired about members in the UK. Western Chauvinist is going to be in the uk the western chauvinist is going to be in the uk uh later this month so let her know you know um tory war writer is back and hoping to meet members in or around columbus ohio in late june uh columbus is a beautiful city it really is a beautiful city um people always forget about columbus it's like cincinnati cleveland they forget how beautiful. Columbus is beautiful. Randy's got another meetup set for

Winston-Salem mid-July. Lots of stuff is happening in the summer. Matt Balzer is also asking for RSVPs for the annual German Fest meetup in Milwaukee. That's also the last weekend in July. Lots of stuff. If none of these, for some reason, work for you because you are somewhere else

or you're not around that time, here is the simple solution. You simply join Ricochet, put up a post in the member feed, say, hey, how about a meetup here or there at this point? It is a guarantee that Ricochet members will come. That's what we do. We show up and have a lovely set of conversations and hoist a drink or two and make some jokes. And it's an incredibly lovely group. And we want you to join. And Bob's your uncle.

And so, James, you and I will talk about a New York time. Because I don't want to deprive you of an opportunity to come to New York so you can walk around and get depressed. No, I won't be depressed. I will be elevated by the beauty of the architecture, as I inevitably am. Depressed when I leave leave but happy to do so because after about three or four days i always look in new york and say you win and i sort of slink out of town with the din still echoing in my ears to quiet many rob i'm still thinking can i get a job as a domino's pizza delivery guy because i'm thinking that if you have to walk

up 60 flights of stairs to deliver a pizza to a billionaire, you get a pretty good tip. When was the last time, Peter, that you met a billionaire who was a good tipper? Or who ordered from Domino's Pizza. You make a point. You make a point. I think after the 60th floor, they land on the helicopter pad at the top of the roof, and the guy just rappels down the window, you know, Batman style, and drops it in.

That's it. We're done. It's been fun. Great time. Good to talk to you guys again, and I might not be here next week because I may be off again. Alas, I'm sure you'll carry on. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Bowling Branch was the sponsor. Support them for supporting us. Join Ricochet today. As Rob said, why aren't you? No excuse.

And would it be a podcast if I didn't end by asking you, begging you, to give us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts? It would not. I just did that. So that means we're done. We'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, boys. Next week, fellas. Ricochet.

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