The Ricochet Podcast - Showdown at the Not-So-OK Corral

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

It's just Steve and Charles this week, taking in another wild one. Don and Elon are on the outs — but is it permanent? The courts are busy, and a handful of great, unanimous decisions get their due cheer; Karine Jean-Pierre goes independent; Ukraine's drones remind us that modern warfare has changed; and Sam Tanenhaus published his long-awaited Buckley bio. Tune in for Hayward's review preview.- Sound from this week's open: Elon Musk distances himself from the Trump Administration in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning 

Oh, yeah, I've had people say they want me to get at least two good Charles CW Cook rants out of you, with a Molly Caudill in each one, or something, or a sequence. Right. I'll try and find some word that marks me out. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast. Steve Hayward sitting in the host chair today,

joined by a recovered Charles C.W. Cook. So let's have ourselves a podcast. And, you know, it's not like I agree with everything the administration does. So it's like, there's, I mean, I agree with much of what the administration does, but we have differences of opinion. So then I'm a little stuck in a bind where I'm like, well, I don't want to speak up against the administration, but I don't want to, also I don't want to take responsibility

for everything the administration is doing. Welcome everybody to the Ricochet Podcast, number 744. It's Steve Hayward sitting in for James Lilich today who is cavorting somewhere over in the wilds of Italy. I am in the North Atlantic where it is snowing at the moment. I'm so far north, but I'm pleased that we are joined by the fast recovering Charles C.W. Cook, who has been down with the bubonic plague or something like that. Charles, how are you feeling and what have you been going through the last couple of weeks?

Ah, man. I don't quite know what it is. I thought it was strep, because I woke up with a horrendous razor blade-esque sore throat, and then it wasn't strep because that went away pretty quickly but all these other symptoms came along and now I have what is really a glorified cold. That's the best part thus far of my journey. I feel like I'm on the exit ramp. Ah ha. Well, sounds like I'm about to put to sea by the sound of that horn blowing in

the background. I don't know if you heard that or not. You're not on the exit ramp then. No, I am not. Right. Well, you sound good, Charles, so it's good to hear your voice again. I don't know whether you've been, you know, in bed, in your cozier sheets, perhaps, avoiding all the news, but the thing that is amazing me, and I think everyone, is the – I think what some people thought was the inevitable divorce of Donald Trump and Elon Musk has finally occurred. Who knew that the long-perspected civil war for America would turn out to be between the forces of Duke Elon of Musk against the Viscount Donald of Trumplandia,

but here we are. And I don't know where you want to start. I'll give you one of my opening observations, which is I'd long expected something you want to start. I'll give you one of my opening observations, which is I'd long expected something like this for reasons that I think are obvious, but maybe are worth discussing. But one of the blows that Musk threw down, which I thought was quite outrageous, was saying Trump is in the Epstein files. Yeah. And first of all, I'll say this, I don't think there are any Epstein files or an Epstein list or if there was one that was long ago destroyed and recreating it is a difficult

thing. And second, if there was such a list, I don't know how Elon Musk would know who was on it. So that's my first observation. And then I have several, but I want to hear what you have to say about this, which I'm sure you may have expected to? Pete Well, unless that is true, which for the reasons you outlined strikes me as very unlikely, that is a truly outrageous thing for Musk to have said, and we ought not to lose sight of that purely because the drama is so interesting. You just do not accuse people of being a sex criminal accuse people of being a sex criminal in the midst of an argument for

giggles I Think that Musk is on a manic episode I mean the closest analog that I can find to the last 24 hours of Musk is Kanye West now I say that as somebody who admires Musk in many ways That's a great American eccentric inventor of a long line of such people all of whom are crazy but the Behavior yesterday struck me as being red-lin of someone who has got to be in his bonnet and Is now looking for any weapon at hand. In the course of yesterday's, uh, to raid Musk suggested that Donald

Trump is a sex criminal and is on the Epstein list. He said that he was going to dismantle SpaceX's program. He said that he wanted Donald, no, didn't say, that's not fair. He retweeted the suggestion that Trump be impeached and replaced with JD Vance. I mean, these are extreme rhetorical positions to take and he just did it one by one and I think it just struck me as being manic. Yeah, well now he, if I have this right, he made his formal exit a week or more ago, which I think was on the way anyway. I mean, he was always going to be a temporary government employee, and there's a link specified

in the law of how long you can be such a person without all kinds of complications happening. But then it was shortly after that he criticized the big, beautiful bill. I think, rightly, I think you'll agree that it didn't cut down the deficit, that it's really, I forget what he called it, a travesty or worse. It seems to me, Charles, he's right about that, isn't he? I mean, we've talked about this before and should say more about it, but that seemed to set off Trump. Karl. One caveat with that, I think he is right about that. Donald Trump doesn't care about spending, he doesn't want to reform entitlements. And he has different political imperatives than Musk.

Musk is more of a free marketeer. But the one thing Musk has done on this that I have found irritating, Steve, is that he will not say aloud the truth about our fiscal problems. He will not say that this is being caused by unfunded entitlements, that without reforming Social Security or Medicare, you cannot fix the budget. He's still saying, as he did throughout his foray with Doge, that this is the question of pork. That's the word he used in his tweet criticizing the bill. Pork. No! There is pork. Of course there is. There is discretionary spending that should be cut.

There's also some waste, fraud and abuse, although there's not that much of it. There's also spending that the executive controls, as in, for example, USAID, that absolutely should be cut by a Republican administration, but that's not why we're hurtling off the cliff. We're hurtling off the cliff because however much we raise taxes, we cannot outpace the growth in Social Security and Medicare. And it's just telling to me that Musk won't say that either. In that sense, he's being Trumpian while criticizing Trump. But generally, yes, I'm on Musk's side with this question. Yeah, that was a good warm-up rant, Charles. Listeners will appreciate that.

Clearly, your vigor is returning in a rapid clip. Well, let's linger on this for a minute. I thought one notable event of the last 10 days was Jamie Dimon, the very capable chairman of JP Morgan. Let's remember that JP Morgan was one of the only big banks that was not in serious trouble back in 2008. And I think Diamond deserves a lot of credit for that, as any CEO should. And he's a Democrat.

It was widely rumored to have been on a short list to be Treasury Secretary for either candidate, but especially if we had had, God forbid, President Harris. And he made this speech last week out at the Reagan Library, significantly perhaps, that gosh, we can't keep going on like this. The spending is so far out of control and the debt is piling up so fast that sooner or later, and I think he said he thought sooner, the bond market was going to make this clear. I guess my gloomy view has been all along is that nothing is going to happen until we have a crisis, at which point the solutions will all be much worse than what could be done now, no matter how difficult things are

now. I think that's exactly right. It's also worth noting that while that crisis might come in the form of a rebellion within the bond market, there are automatic cuts to social security that will kick in if we don't fix this. So some of the rhetoric you hear, especially from the Democrats, that we should not do anything. Hillary Clinton said when she was running for president, we should decrease the age of which one is eligible for Social Security and Medicare. That is certainly a popular idea among the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez types. Well,

that's not an option. That is not going to happen. If we do nothing, we don't move into sunlit uplands in which everyone keeps getting Social Security and Medicare and we just risk some sort of default. The law, as it stands, that would have to be executed by whatever president is unlucky enough to be in office at that time will do the cutting For congress unless it is amended so Yeah, I think we're headed for either a crisis in the bond market or some sort of catastrophic economic catastrophe you know that is that is caused by

uh debts being unable to be repaid or We're going to see exactly what it is that those who don't want to cut entitlements say is a crisis, because it has to happen. Well now another aspect of this fight that's been going on is Trump saying, well, I know how we could, you know, balance the budget or reduce the deficit, and that's to cut off the billions and billions of dollars of Tesla subsidies. So, first of all, I don't think it amounts to billions and billions. I don't know. I haven't looked at the numbers for a long time. Second of all, the odd thing about

the electric car market is if you go back to before the election, I remember distinctly, Musk telling, I think, the Wall Street Journal that, gosh, it'd be fine with me if we got rid of all the subsidies that Biden laid out. It might actually be good for Tesla, because as you probably know and many listeners may know, Tesla is actually able to produce their cars profitably, with one caveat I'll come back to, while I think GM and Ford are still losing something like $30,000 or $40,000 for every single electric car they produce. And they're not making it up on volume, as the old joke goes. And so, I think that what Musk realizes is that he has a competitive advantage, having

been at this now for more than 15 years of making electric cars, that the other companies are not able to catch up with and haven't been able to. And it gets worse, and this is the caveat. So we talk about the subsidies, which the Biden budget blowout tried to limit to middle-income people and strip away from higher-income people who were collecting most of the tax credits for electric cars beforehand. higher income people who were collecting most of the tax credits for electric cars beforehand. But it turns out that Tesla makes a lot of money selling emission credits to the other automakers who aren't able yet to meet some of the ambitious targets for lowering the emissions or the mileage requirements of their car fleets.

So that's actually a more important subsidy in my mind, because I think that's a more reckless and dumb subsidy anyway that distorts the market. So, and I haven't seen any acknowledgement of that in the media coverage or the social media fury about what's going on. No, and I think Trump is being really unfair here. To mask, this is a line that has been picked up in Congress as well. He's just against this because he doesn't want to lose his subsidies He's been pretty consistently Opposed to those subsidies the one thing that he has said alongside Opposing subsidies for EVs is that he doesn't want any subsidies for oil and gas either

So he'd like a level playing field, but it's just not the case that he is angry with this bill Because it kills the subsidies. It should kill more subsidies Steve. I think Republicans are missing an opportunity. I have said and I always miss out the Board of Funding so that's my fault because I do support that but the bill I would like to have seen and we'll add in the Board of Funding as well would have said the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is hereby renewed permanently. The 2022 Inflation Red jobs act is here by renewed permanently the two thousand twenty two inflation reduction acts is here by repealed

in its entirety there's no reason republicans should be allowing any of these subsidies to go through in the left has got this idea that we simply can't compete with china technologically without the inflation reduction act which is a preposterous thing to think given that we were doing pretty well at competing technologically with China prior to 2022. So I don't think that Musk is basing his opposition to this on EV subsidies or mandates or what you will. I think he's genuinely worried about the nation's fiscal situation.

But as with Doge, he is mischaracterizing a little bit what is causing that, and that's going to be a problem for him in this fight. Right. Well, now, the subsidy question, the Biden people were damnishly clever in directing a lot of the money to real states. Yep. And so, you know what happens. It's just like the whole ethanol game in Iowa all over again, right? Republican presidential candidates are always petrified against coming out for the ethanol

mandates and subsidies because that's the first in the nation primary, as we all know, or caucus, every four years. And this has now expanded that idea. So you have a lot of these red state senators in the Midwest who love these subsidies for wind and solar power because it's, you know, creating the phony government-funded jobs there. It does turn out, I did a calculation on this a long time ago now, but it turns out that one mischievous proposal would put an end to a lot of this, which is, alright, let's have uniform subsidies based on not the technology, but on the energy output that you're able to

produce. Because it turns out that even if you say the oil and gas industry get X millions of dollars in subsidies, they produce 80% of our energy. Right. Right. Right? And so the subsidy, and you can argue about what qualifies as a subsidy, but if you go by the subsidy per BTU or WAD or whatever energy measurement you wish to use, you find out that the subsidy for oil and gas is tiny. It's minuscule. And if you got rid of all the subsidies, oil and gas wouldn't change their output a bit,

whereas if you reduced the subsidies or made it linked to the energy output, wind and solar in particular would have a really good time. I do think the one wild card here, and sorry to ramble a bit, is nuclear power. I'm very frustrated with this whole subject, and I don't understand why we have not been able to figure out over all these years how to drive the cost down. And so there the argument is, well, if we really want big baseload power, it might by the way still survive under my theoretical proposal of having a uniform subsidy per unit of energy produced. I'm not sure. I'd have

to do some advanced math on all that. But that's the other caveat about, and apparently it's been a big argument among Republicans in the House and the Senate as to how to treat the nuclear subsidies in the big, beautiful bill. Yeah. Nuclear is an odd one in that I almost feel that we should subsidize nuclear just to offset all of the crap that those who want to put nuclear power into effect have had to deal with over the last 50. Yes, you know, we had a small Look, I'm not big on

great national plans, you know, I Romantic about the highway system because I love cars, but I do take the conservative Criticism of it, which was that it was ultimately a federal program But I would be much more open to a grand national project to nuclearize all of our power than to almost anything else. So I can see some sort of room for that. The system you just described, though, with subsidies does make the case for abolishing the minuscule oil and gas subsidies, right? Because if they wouldn't output any less energy as a result of it going away, then why do we need it? It's just a small distortion in the market. But yeah, I, I think that the bill is a problem if you are worried about our fiscal situation

and it's a problem if you want Republicans to do more. Where Trump also, Steve, and I wonder what you think about this, where Trump also has the upper hand is just as a matter of elemental political gravity. It is the case that we have what one to vote to spare in the House of Representatives and that a lot of the people who are going to be expected to push this over the line are squishes. Squishes now yesterday Elon Musk tweeted out should we create a new party third party For the 80% of people in the middle who don't feel represented by the GOP or the Democrats. I think that is an exaggeration

I don't think it is quite 80% But of course there are a lot of independents who don't what I think is unusual about this suggestion though and does demonstrate a certain naivety on Musk's part is Number one we have what was a fairly decisive victory from Donald Trump in 2024 and still he can't get half of what Republicans would like to do done Why does Musk think that would get better if you created a party in the middle? And second, is he really under the impression that the middle of the political spectrum in the United States is desperately in favor of cutting entitlements? Because I don't think it is, is it? Right. Well, this is one of those cases, and I've experienced this from Silicon Valley

and tech people for years now, is they tend to not understand why social and political problems can't be solved exactly like an engineering problem. And look, Musk is in some ways the perfect median voter. Let's recall that 15 years ago he was all in for Obama. And I don't remember if he was for Biden or not eight years ago or whatever, or four years ago, but then he flipped to Trump, and now he's flipped to somewhere in the middle, and I think that's just someone who doesn't really understand politics. I think that's exactly right.

We've been hearing about the angry middle is going to rise up and organize for at least since Ross Perot, if not earlier, and it never happens. It doesn't work that way. So, well, let's get out on this. You know, the way, you know, we're sort of known now that Trump's insults often have an expiration date or can be turned around quickly. It's entirely possible that by the time this episode goes live, they will have kissed and made up. Stranger things have happened. The other one is, is people think that there's, people, there's some conspiracy theorists saying this is all fake news, it's professional wrestling, which they both attend,

and this is to distract the median Democrats from something. And in fact, some Democratic group did call for now for releasing the Epstein list, which I think is pretty darn funny. Anyway, do you have any predictions on how this is going to unfold? Is it just going to go away in a few days or are they going to kiss and make up? What do you think? Well, I think one of those two things I certainly don't think that it's going to have catastrophic consequences for the republic I've seen some people say this is it for the right. This is it for america No, I don't think so. I think we'll forget about it in six months

I don't think the space program is going to be set back forget about it in six months. I don't think the space program is going to be set back by it. Donald Trump is already sounding somewhat conciliatory, albeit from a condescending position where he says, well, that guy's crazy. I don't want to talk to him, but I hope he gets the help he needs. And Musk started to back off yesterday. I don't know if you saw this. There was some user with 17 followers who said, you know, like a mother to the two of them on Twitter, come now, this is silly. I don't like this. We don't need this. And Musk responds, all right, fine. I won't cancel the space program. Some guy on Twitter with 17 followers may have saved

the future of the United States as presence in space. I don't think that ultimately this is going to cause big problems for America. I suspect they'll either make up or it will just go away. But look, they are both very rich, successful men with egos. They don't agree on everything. And this was inevitable as a result. So those of us, which was everyone who said, I can see what's going to happen, shouldn't be shocked that it's finally come to fruition. Right.

Well, I think this kind of, the intensity of this is something that could only happen in a social media age, I think. I don't know. Pete Slauson Agreed. Pete Slauson Well, meanwhile, while we were all distracted by this great circus, a couple of interesting things happened this week on the legal front, which I know is your bailiwick. First, another day, another Trump decision, another federal district court judge blocking it, and it's twice this week maybe or maybe more than that. At this point I yawn, it's, you know, what else is new.

But more, unless you want to comment on that, I was going to move on to something I think more interesting that is getting glossed over, and that was the Supreme Court this week issuing two 9-0 decisions with the opinions written by the liberal justices, the two most recent, Sotomayor and Katanji Brown Jackson, that take not exactly a conservative point of view, but reject implicitly the progressive view about civil rights and religious liberty. Did you follow those? You raised your eyebrows as much as I did at that result? Sorry, which one are we talking about here?

Sorry, I should explain for listeners who may not know this because they're following the Musk Trump feud. The first case, a 9-0 case, I forget the name of it, but it was the case out of Ohio involving a woman who had sued under Title VII, Ames, the Ames case. She had sued alleging reverse discrimination, saying that she'd been passed over for promotion and I think by a state agency, by her supervisor, in favor of, you know, lesser qualified gay employees.

And lower courts had ruled, no, sorry, because she's a member of a majority group, meaning she's a white woman, not upstanding to sue for civil rights, because the assumption there is that civil rights laws are only meant to protect the officially protected classes of, you know, minorities. And was that the one Sotomayor wrote the, I don't remember which liberal woman Justice wrote which opinion. Pete So, Justice Jackson wrote that one. That's the Ames case. Jared Right. And I think what's very significant about that is for at least 40 years, I mean,

I can remember the civil rights community back in the 80s when Reagan was contesting some of this saying, no, you don't understand. I know the language of the Civil Rights Act is neutral and speaks of individuals, but really the intent was to apply it to minority groups who have been oppressed, and so it doesn't actually protect white people. They were open about this. I'm trying to remember the woman back in the 80s who made this argument quite brazenly and openly. And now for the the court to rule, the three liberals on the court to go along with the older plain reading of the text, I think it's quite significant. And I'm going to be waiting to see people on the left react with some degree of dismay about this.

Well, I was absolutely thrilled about this. I'm going to take the opportunity which you offered in passing just to quickly comment on the judge trying to prevent the deportation of the Soliman family just because on this podcast in the past I have been critical of some of the legal positions that the Trump administration has taken on deportations, not the deportations themselves, which I thoroughly support but I have thought that the strategy was ill-conceived and likely to Provoke activist judges to jump in this time Trump is a hundred percent, right? This judge who has tried to jump in here is crazy has not offered a single legal argument

And the briefs that are being filed are just funny. There was one this morning. I read the habeas briefs that are being filed are just funny. There was one this morning I read, the habeas brief that didn't offer a single argument based in statute or precedent and just said that deporting the family of this jihadist was a bit like Nazi Germany. So Trump's right on this, this judge is wrong. On the Ames case, you know, it's interesting, Steve, that you say that the It's interesting, Steve, that you say that the prevailing progressive view of civil rights law is that it doesn't apply to minorities, majorities, sorry, because that is true. But it is also inexplicable if you've ever gone back and read the text. If you read the 14th Amendment, if you read the congressional debates that led to the passage of the 14th Amendment in Congress and in the states, if you read the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which preceded it, and indeed the two Freedmen's Bureau's Act as well, and then if you read the 1964 Civil Rights Act and all of the attendant discussion, you will see that it is quite clearly in text, in intent, in original public meaning, even in legislative history, which we don't like but is there, it is a law that applies to individuals. The discrimination attaches at the individual level.

And what was so great about the Supreme Court decision, as written by Justice Jackson, probably the most progressive member of the court, is that she sounds like Justice Scalia when she is explaining the text. She says this in no uncertain terms over and over again, that there is no such thing as a majority group or a minority group, that's no reversal forward racism that there's no caveats in the law if you are discriminated against based upon your sex your race your national origin and so forth you are

able to lodge a complaint under the Civil Rights Act and This was a repudiation of all of the nonsense that has built up for 40 years, both in the courts, but especially in academia and in elite opinion, and has been unchecked. So for this to be nigh nothing is wonderful. It's also wonderful, incidentally, because each justice only gets a certain number of opinions each term, and we got to use a Justice Jackson opinion on our outcome. Pete Slauson That's right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so then the other case was out of Wisconsin and involved a state agency, or I guess it's a state tax official, denying a tax exemption to a Catholic charity. And their argument was, as well as Catholic charity, these activities

are really secular purposes or not related to their religious mission. And the Wisconsin State Supreme Court agreed with that by a 4-3 split and turned out to be the four Democrats against the three Republicans. And essentially, and I haven't read the decision, I've been traveling and goofing off, but again, a 9-0 decision with Sotomayor and the majority, and what I gather from the brief new squibs I've read is that essentially what the opinion says is no, the state does not get to decide what is or isn't anchored in the religious mission of a bona fide religion like the Catholic Church, which has been around a while, I gather. And I think that's another blow for religious liberty and against the definite undertone of the secular left for also for several decades now to try and

marginalize and squeeze religion out of the public square. Yeah, so I haven't read this one either, I'll confess. I read Ames and I read the Mexico gun case, but I haven't read this one. What I find so encouraging about this case is that it is yet another chipping away at this completely fake jurisprudence that has obtained in America, starting with the Warren Court, that invented this so-called wall of separation between church and state. It is, of course, the case that the United States can't and shouldn't have an established religion. And there are a few consequences of that that trickle down into other areas.

But generally speaking, most of the rules that have been imposed since what, 1965, are nonsense. They're completely... Maybe you think they should be there. Maybe you think that's a good thing. Or if we were writing a constitution from scratch, we would insert them. But they are totally ahistorical, they're totally atextual, and this was too. I'm just surprised that it was nine-nothing. I'm shocked Sotomayor wrote this one. But, you know, the courts moved to the right, and that is a good thing.

Pete Well, you go back now, well, a decade or more, when Justice Kagan said, we're all textualist now, which is her, you know, sort of accommodation of originalism. I think that was actually quite significant, and it seems like that view has taken hold in ways that, like I say, this has to be giving a heartburn to liberal jurisprudence in all the law schools. You mentioned, I didn't put this on my list, the Mexico gun case, that was the Supreme Court saying, No, we're not going to hear a suit from Mexico about guns. Is that if I got that basically right? Yeah, how long have you got? This is obviously my area. But this was maybe the craziest lawsuit I've read in a long time. but I want to go back a few years first just

to introduce this because this is a hobby horse of mine in 2005 while George W Bush was president Congress passed a law that extended certain protections to gun manufacturers in order to stop a whole host of lawsuits that had been brought to try to create through the courts gun control that could not be achieved legislatively. Now this is pre-Hela, so there's no prohibition on gun control at that point in quite the way there is now, although it should be said at that point, 44 states did have state level right to keep him bare arms. But the left had got into the bad habit, which started really in earnest under the Clinton administration and Andrew Cuomo as HUD director, of bringing

court cases against gun manufacturers on the grounds that their products were dangerous to do what they couldn't do legislatively. So they would say this gun is very, very dangerous, it can kill a lot of people, and therefore commercially it should not be available. And Congress said no, that's not how this should work. The liability does not attach in that way, and it passed this law. And it was a bipartisan law in both the House and the Senate. Bernie Sanders voted for it in 2005. The National Association of Manufacturers was very much in favor of

it despite having no great interest in the gun control debate because it understood the threat that was being posed. It did not, as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden have both lied about relentlessly, it did not make gun manufacturers immune in such cases as guns are badly manufactured or go wrong. What it did was it said if you kill someone with a gun that works, you can't sue Smith & Wesson. In the same way as if I drive my car into you, you can't sue Ford. If the brakes go wrong in my car, of course I can sue Ford. If a gun goes off, which doesn't happen by the way, but if it were to happen because of a

manufacturing defect and kill someone, of course you can sue Smith & Wesson, but you're not allowed to use the law to get what you can't get politically. That law has been on the books now for 20 years despite the Democrats obsession with getting rid of it. If you look back at the 2016 and 2020 elections the Democratic candidates went on and on and on about this. Well Mexico, the country of Mexico, the sovereign state of Mexico, a couple of years ago, decided that it might try to affect gun control in the United States as well. And so it brought this case that argued in effect that American gun manufacturers knew that the guns that they were making and marketing would make their way into the hands of the cartels that they wanted that to be the case not just that they were negligent in the usual way of not caring about whether they did but they actually wanted the

American gun cash to go down south and they tried to impose all manner of restrictions on what guns you can and can't buy through this lawsuit and this went to the Supreme Court. It was considered under this 2005 law and uniformly, nine to nothing in a decision written by Justice Kagan of all people, the Supreme Court said, you just can't do that. That is exactly what this law was designed to stop. I find it amazing that anyone ever took this seriously, Steve. And they did. The gun control groups were all over this. They pretended that this was a meritorious

suit and so on and so forth. It was quite honestly the stupidest, most cynical pretextual lawsuit I've ever read. And I think it's a good thing for America that this was unanimous. Well, I've got one that may equal it or exceed it that I'll come to, but I'll just say that I think we can file these three cases as legitimate entries in the So Much Winning file. Yeah, totally. Here's the the coronary case just out in the last 10 days or so. It's a state case out of Washington state. The climate crazy people have brought a wrongful death lawsuit against the fossil fuel

man, you know, oil companies essentially. And the circumstances were a woman essentially died of heatstroke in her car on a hot summer day. Now what's left out of the story is why is she in her car on a hot summer day with the windows up? There's something they're not telling us here. Was she passed out from fentanyl? Was she drunk? Was she homeless? We don't know that, but my suspicions are on high alert here. But even if it was someone who fell asleep because she was tired or something like that, and none of those factors come into play, the idea that you could now attribute the hot day to the oil companies who sold their, and a woman who apparently bought their product for her car, well that suit has been filed.

I think with both these suits, the gun cases which I've been aware of, but these climate suits I've been following for a while that want to hold the oil companies liable for global warming, even though the big oil companies in the US and Europe account for such a tiny amount of emissions on the global scale going back decades, if you actually do the math on this. It shows you that the impulse on the left to try and use the judiciary as the primary mode to get what they want still runs very strong. But boy, it's sure hitting a wall right now, I think. That's absolutely right. For a very long time. The left has done that and look sometimes it's been Legitimate you do need to be able to take cases to court that are unpopular in vindicating your rights if those rights exist

Unfortunately, the left has recognized for decades that if it gets the right people on the court It can go to the court and ask the court to make up rights that don't exist court. It can go to the court and ask the court to make up rights that don't exist. Abortion, gay marriage, and so on. And that era does seem, at least for now, to be coming to an end at the Supreme Court. Do you agree? Yes, I think so. Yeah, yeah. And a lot of things to be unwound or modified, so they have a lot of work ahead of them. Not to mention all these crazy district court injunctions that the court is...we'll see what they do here. We're now down to the last several weeks.

The big case we're all waiting for is Scrumetti. That's the one about Tennessee's law restricting transgender surgeries on children and so forth. So we'll see how that all goes. I don't have anything else in legal news. I know that you're running law talk these days and it's something you like to follow. Is there something else on your mind? I have a question for you, but it's not a law talk sort of question. Ah, sure. How much, on a scale of one to ten, are you looking forward to reading

Kareem Jean-Pierre's new book, Independent? Well, I was going to bring that up. I had it on my list. You know, we didn't see this coming, right? I mean, there's all these books about Biden, right? And original sin and all the rest of that. And so, now, the Democratic firing squad, circular firing squad is reforming with Karine Jean-Pierre in the middle saying, I'm an independent now. By the way, maybe she can go to work for Elon Musk on that independent party he wants to put together, right? And I mean, boy, this only been the last 48, 72 hours about this story. And I mean, just as Biden's senility was obvious to anyone, her incapacity in the job as press

spokesman was obvious to everyone that she's a complete mediocrity, was an identity politics hire, full stop. I mean, this was obvious to everybody, and now you're seeing, you know, anonymous sources and Axios and elsewhere saying, oh, she was terrible at her job, so the knives are out for her. And here I just have to get even fatter than I already am on another 64 gallon drum of popcorn. You know, I think Mark Hemingway pointed out that this is the definitive proof of the left using the immutable characteristics of people to deflect criticism. Because some of the same people who are now saying, right, she was an idiot. We never liked her. What we're telling conservatives who criticized her, oh, you only say that

because we would say, no, we're not saying that because she's a lesbian, we're not saying that because she's black, we're saying that because she's just not good at her job, she has to open a binder every time she's asked her name. And they would say, no, no, you just hate powerful women. Well, now the same people are acknowledging that she was a liability to the White House, that they didn't like her and that she'd been hired purely for the nature of her being. And that is absurd, I think. But I just think that this is the most cynical and astonishing shift that I have ever seen, Steve.

I mean, this would be like me coming out tomorrow and saying my new book is called Why All Guns Should Be Banned. And they're not accounting for the shift. People would say, hang on a minute, we were watching you day in, day out, make the case for the second amendment. When did you, what? She stood on that podium, and this is her job, this isn't a criticism,

you have to do this if you're White House press secretary. But she stood on that podium, day in, day out, and she made the case for Biden and the White House. She said what she was told to say. She defended the party line. So every day her line is Biden is right, Biden is right, Biden is right, Biden is right. And then the first thing we hear from her, the moment she leaves that job is actually, I'm kind of an independent. Are you kidding? How cynical could you get? Pete Well, I mean, just as it was appalling that the media would avert their gaze from Biden's

obvious incapacity, I couldn't believe that, you know, self-respecting, seemingly self-respecting reporters would sit there every day and swallow and not beat back at her appallingly mediocre and often ridiculous and risible answers. I mean, I thought this has to be a rejected Aaron Sorkin script, doesn't it? Pete Yeah. Well, they would end up asking these Obama-style questions of her. So, they would say things like, does the president find it hurtful when Republicans say or what did the president like the most about his recent trip to Italy? That's how they got around it.

They didn't say, hey, you, who's supposed to tell us the truth? What about this? They would say, what do you find most enchanting about working in the White House? Yeah, you know, it reminds me a little bit, and maybe this is an apt parallel, but back in the bad old days of arms control talks with the Soviet Union, or any summits for that matter, the Soviet negotiators would always come in with big, thick notebooks. And our team, or sometimes our president, if it was face-to-face with Brezhnev or somebody,

would say X, and the Russian translation would go through, and then all the Russians would be pouring through their notebooks to find a pre-scripted answer to a question they had anticipated. So that's why a lot of those negotiations, aside from the substance of them, took forever to get anywhere. Because then, so it became a game for our side to try and think of a way of putting a question that they wouldn't have had a pre-cooked answer for, and then they would not take a break, is what the Soviets would do. So I kept thinking back to that when I'd watch a Korean Jean-Pierre pour through a notebook

and oftentimes give an answer that was often not even tenuously related to the question, and it was just embarrassing to watch, and I couldn't believe the media put up with it. So I don't know if you've ever come across this story as a historian, but I heard it related on the old Cold War series that Ted Turner commissioned for CNN that is narrated by Kenneth Branagh. Yeah. That during the, I guess, early seventies, Nixon went to a meeting with the Chinese and he wanted something from them.

I forget what it was. It could have been arms control. But anyhow, the meeting involves a dinner. Everyone's getting along famously, of course, Bill Buckley hated this, he would write, go on a tear whenever he saw this. But Nixon is being diplomatic and a great statesman. And then the Chinese premier just starts tearing into the United States for 45 minutes and describing their crimes, as he puts it, in Vietnam. And Nixon just sat there and he sensed

that this was for internal consumption, that they were gonna release it in all the newspapers. And so he just sat there and for internal consumption, that they were going to release it in all the newspapers. And so he just sat there and then when it was over, everyone sort of looked at each other and he raised a toast and they just carried on. You know, I watched this story and I thought, well, I understand that's probably what you have to do sometimes in these situations. But I don't think Trump would do that. I just don't think Trump would be berated to his face by the Chinese premier, do you?

No, no, that's for darn sure. Well, look, I think we ought to move on to a couple of things of foreign affairs, because I also think this Ukrainian attack on the Russian bombers early in the week is really stupendous. I mean, people are saying it's on the level of what the Israelis have done over the years. And one wonders how much they have any other things they might have up their sleeve, because although I think it's a thrilling thing for supporters of Ukraine, and I do still think that the underlying correlation of forces and the ambivalence, if you can put it that way, of the Trump administration still makes me rather pessimistic about the scene. How do you size it up right now?

Well, I think it's still a war of attrition and that does seem to be hurting Russia slightly more, but I'm not sure Putin cares. The drone attack was incredible. It had the effect, Steve, of both thrilling me as somebody who wants to see Ukraine win, but also as a human being terrifying me because I could see those drones coming over the American border and I wondered if we had the capacity to repel them. If this is how wars will be fought, we have some catching up to do, or at least I do in my understanding of right warfare the analogy I drew on the editors podcast when we talked about this was if you go to a meeting sorry a museum of World War one the exhibits tend not to start in 1914 but in the American Civil War and then they run through the Franco-Prussian War and possibly

the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. The point being that the technologies that eventually came to dominate World War One and make it such a meat grinder had been evident if you'd been looking carefully since the American Civil War. And I just wondered if this is what we're now going to see in the future, that in 50 years time we'll be saying, well, of course, where this started was Russia, Ukraine in 2022 to whenever it ended. It worried me a little bit just because it seems so difficult to stop. But its application was incredible. I mean, to do that much damage to the Russian Air Force, was it one third of the planes taken out? But I don't know if it changes the fundamental problem on the ground,

which is that you have two dug-in armies, you have a defensive advantage, and you have prerogatives on both sides that make it difficult to stop. The Russians want to take Ukraine, and they're led by a madman, and the Ukrainians, quite rightly, don't want to give up Ukraine. So did that really change much? Yeah, I have some of the same worries that you do. Years ago, I might have been more confident that our defense establishment was more forward-looking and anticipating and developing countermeasures

that we didn't know about. There are lots of examples of that in the past, but I kind of worry that our defense establishment may have gotten sluggish in recent years. I am reminded a bit, you mentioned some of those precursors to World War I. I do know the story of Churchill, I think before he was First Lord of the Admiralty, maybe way before that. But sometime, you know, the submarine was being developed and expanded, and the British Navy, as I recall the story rightly, said, well, submarines, yeah, we've looked at them, and they might be useful for coastal defense. And Churchill said, no, no, no, you don't understand. As these things get better and scaled up, they're going to be used for interdiction of shipping out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, which is exactly how Germany started using it as we saw in World War I and especially World War II. So, you

know, take some imagination and somebody to push the subject. There's more that can be said about Churchill and technology, like the tank and so forth. So I'm, I don't know, I'm worried about this. And a lot of the research would be classified, of course, so we won't hear about it. So I don't know, but it is something to worry about. You know, Churchill said a few days after the war in Europe ended, one of his friends or colleagues asked him if he'd been worried and he said no other than the German submarine war now that wasn't quite true he was worried he at one point thought he was gonna have to fight his way out of Downing Street with a revolver and would die on the floor choking on his own blood but he

seems to have been most worried about exactly what you described because he saw it so early, he understood the threat. Oh, well, you know, one of the, well, we'll keep going on this because I'm, you know, I'm a huge Churchill fan. It was one of his first speeches as a member of the House of Commons, so I'm going to say 1900, 1901. And remember, he'd seen some of the things that you described a moment ago in his own experience in the Boer War and in the River War in Sudan, you know, the mass killing of auto-mechanized warfare, and wrote very movingly about it in his lesser-known books, like the

River War. And one of the speeches he said, paraphrasing here, he said, you know, there's all this optimism that we're now, you know, people like Theodore Roosevelt was saying that wars are a thing of the past, this 20th century would be a century of moral progress and material progress, and other leading thinkers said, no, there won't ever be another big European war. And Churchill in one of his memorable phrases said, the wars of peoples are going to be worse than the wars of kings, and they will involve entire populations. It's very prescient, right? He was having none of this facile optimism. Yeah.

And then you just look at the casualty figures, and especially World War II, more people died in the civilian population in the world than in armies. Right, right. All right, well, last topic perhaps. The Tannen House biography of Bill Buckley is out this week. I have read it and have a long review forthcoming. I don't know if you've had a chance to read it yet. I know it's been a subject, of course, of the National Review Circle, and there have been, I will say, some, what do you say, disparate reviews on the site.

You know, Neil Freeman, who was close to Buckley forever, was very skeptical of the idea. Rick Brookhiser had a more favorable review of the book. Have you had a chance to read it yet? And what are people around the office saying, if you've been able to talk to them? So, I haven't read it yet. I have read a lot of reviews of it. I've read the two you mentioned. I've read Matt Continetti. I've read Helen Andrews, and in conversation I've spoken to Rich Lowry about it, he's read it. The floor in it, and you've read it, so I should give you the floor, spelled differently, but the floor in it that I have most commonly heard related is that it doesn't seem too interested in the main achievement of Buckley's life, which was the

creation of the modern conservative movement. Is that true? doesn't seem too interested in the main achievement of Buckley's life, which was the creation of the modern conservative movement. Is that true? Yeah, I think that's right. And he's, I'll give you just one very particular sentence from the book that I thought gives away that, I don't know, what Pannhaus' purpose was or what his disposition is, but he refers to Reagan's, and here's his words, Reagan's foolhardy invasion of Grenada in 1983. I think, why was that foolhardy? It actually deposed a communist regime.

They were no real threat to America, but still, there was nothing foolhardy about that, unless you're somebody deeply on the left who thinks that any use of military force or this is adventurism or who knows what. Boy, I can't believe an editor didn't raise a flag about that sentence. But I'll add that that's part of the oddest part of the book, is the book goes for, I think the count is 820 pages, taking a story of Buckley from his birth in 1925 to the election of Reagan in 1980, and then the period of time from 1980 to Buckley's passing in 2008 is only 44 pages. So it's like what? He rushed to finish the book, he lost interest, because that's when some of the most interesting

things happen, is when Buckley's favorite president is in office and they have frequent communication. Buckley had the private address that Reagan gave him to send notes to get directly to Reagan and not through some filter. And we also know that there was a lot of disagreements between them, especially on, you know, arms control and the openings to the Soviet Union in the second term. And, you know, Buckley himself published some of the excerpts of letters he had with Reagan during those years, but none of that appears in Tannenhaus's book. So I don't know if he was, like I say, lost interest in the thing. The publisher lost his patience after 27 years that they expected the book. Or he wanted to get it out in time for the 100th anniversary

of Buckley's birth, which is this year. But it's very peculiar that way, among the other defects of the structure of it and the ideological treatment. And certainly I could go on a long time, and I've written a long review that I'll flag for everybody in due course. I do think it's good that it came out after Buckley had died. Yes. It's not comfortable, I'm sure, to write an autobiography of somebody who is still living. 27 years, that strikes me as a bit excessive. It's funny you mentioned the disagreements between Reagan and Buckley because National Review was very pro-Reagan in many ways, but people forget how caustic the magazine could be in the later Reagan years, especially should say on arms control.

There was some 1985 editorial on an arms control treaty that the Reagan administration was working on that started this was never have happened if Reagan was still alive. Right. Well, I have had several biographers, Jean Edward Smith, the late Jean Edward Smith told me this once, that you should never write a biography of a living person, because while they're alive there's just going to be too many different camps. William Manchester found this out way back in the 60s when Jackie Kennedy asked him to write an account of the assassination of JFK and that they didn't like the result and hounded him for it

And I've heard of some other biographers. So On the one hand a bit and house always intended to wait until Buckley died and I think but Disappointed apparently that he didn't finish it in time. Yeah, well, especially given that Buckley asked and has to write the book I mean, it's one thing to write an unauthorized biography of a person who is still alive, but it's quite another to deliver the manuscript having been asked to do it of somebody who is still alive, because if they hate it, the book's dead. Yeah, yeah. Well, Nancy Reagan never allowed Edmund Morris's Dutch, which someone said should have been called botch, to be sold in the Reagan Library bookstore, even though she was one of the persons, along with Mike Deaver, who picked Edmund Morris to write the official biography of Reagan, it turned out so strangely. So there you go.

So I haven't read that book, Steve, you can tell me if this is true. So Danecha de Sousa, 25 years ago, said that the problem with that book is that the author wasn't as interested in Reagan as he should have been, so he starts writing about himself. Is that true? Yes. That's a good summary. I mean, I'll tell you, again, there's one sentence that tells you the defect of the book. Morris had great access to Reagan, interviewed him lots of times, and toward the end of Reagan's presidency, Morris asked him, what do you consider to be your greatest achievement? And Reagan, who wasn't introspective in that way, but he said, I think it has to be my

tax cuts and the changes in American tax policy. The next sentence in the book is Morris saying, at that point I closed my reporter's notebook. So he wasn't interested in representing what Reagan- That's bizarre. Isn't it? I thought that just betrayed the problem with Morris in that book, just in that one sentence. Just like, similar to Tannenhaus saying, you know, Reagan's foolhardy invasion of Grenada, which is tone-deaf and

wrong and so forth. So, there you go. Yeah, that's always a problem with a biographer who, well, I wrote a piece actually for the Civitas people recently about what makes a good biography, and one of the things that makes a bad biography is people who think they're smarter than the subject or understand their subject better or differently than they ought to be. They become Freudian or some other nonsense, and those are usually the worst biographies. And the best ones are the ones that try to understand their subject as their subject understood themselves. And that's not always easy to do. Well, it sounds like I'd better read this, although nobody who has told me that they

have read it has said, you must go and read this. Well, it is almost a thousand pages. I have to say the wealth of detail is amazing, and some of it's too much detail and extraneous, but I have to say that the wealth of detail, at least until you get to 1980, when he loses interest, here and there you learn some really interesting things. So for that reason it's probably worth reading if you are as devoted to Buckley and his memory as I have been for my entire life. All right, well I will put it on a list of books that I intend to read that are very long, that is already itself slightly too long for comfort.

Yeah, I have that problem too. Anyway, Charles, glad you're feeling better. Welcome back. Thank you. Do you have any closing thoughts? Or have we worn out what little of your voice you have back so far? I think we may have worn it out, but we've worn it out in an enjoyable way. So the next thing for me to do, Steve,

is start drinking wine again. Oh, well, right. Well, I'm about to, because I'm several hours later than you, I'm at my next stop, is going to be the bar. After I remind listeners, if you haven't already, to sign up as a Ricochet member, join our great community of good-hearted and civil people, and we will be back again next week. And in the meantime, we'll look for you in the comments of Ricochet 4.0.

Bye, Charles. Bye-bye. 1