The Ricochet Podcast - South of The Border

Episode Date: March 27, 2021

We’re late –really late– so we’re going to make this brief: we’ve got our old friend Mickey Kaus to talk about Biden’s immigration policy, California politics, and other assorted ephemera, and we’ve got Mary Eberstadt on her book Primal Screams:How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. We also punditize (yes, we just invented that word) Biden’s press conference, and debate what city... Source

Starting this again, we're going to rewind this because this copy is all over the road and repeats itself. I'm starting again. 3, 2, 1. I have a dream this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. We agree that it's racist. It is a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie. With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Paul. I'm James Lilacs. Today we talk to our old friend Mickey Koss about immigration and Mary Eberstadt about identity politics. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 537, the flagship podcast of Ricochet.com, might we add.

We note that because there are 478 other podcasts here, but there was only one when we started, and this is it. Welcome again. So, join Ricochet, why don't you, and become part of the most stimulating conversation and community you can find on the web. If you're listening to this by any chance and you're thinking, do I have to pay for this? Hey, Ricochet.com slash radio gets you three free months of Ricochet. Three free months. How about that? I'm joined, as ever, by Peter Robinson in California.

And, oh, good. Rob Long has come up from the parlor where he was resting, and now he's joined us here. The garden floor. The garden floor. The garden floor. And welcome, guys. It's been an exciting week.

It's been a thrilling week we had a pulse pounding press conference from joe biden if you listen to jen rubin there's words i don't say very often for a good reason uh it was the re it was the it was churchillian in its majesty and precision if you listen to other people well i'm just going to run this quote by him byron that, that would be our own Byron York. Biden's performance wasn't the worst in the East Room on Thursday. The 10 reporters selected by the White House to ask questions ignored major issues, failed to follow up, and at least one instance attempted to flatter Biden

in a performance that added up to an embarrassment for the White House press corps. That's one way of looking at it, but I think part of the responsibility for what some regarded with a little cringe was Biden himself drifting in and out and maybe not the fellow we remember from the 80s and the 90s. So welcome to the podcast, guys. And what did you think of the podcast? And how do you think this will affect Western civilization going forward from this day? The long, slow decline continues.

Oh, you know, you know, you know, you know, I was a young man in a different White House. And if Ronald Reagan had stumbled through a press conference the way Joe, if he had had charts where he was selecting people by name that his staff had identified, the staff had actually numbered the sequence and was reading to them from reading to them from his briefing books. If Ronald Reagan had done that, of course, this means nothing to at least 95% of our audience because they're too young or they don't care, but I suppose that there's something to that. I don't know.

He's he, he managed to remain compass mentis for an hour. He's clearly lost a step or two. Every physician I have asked about this, and I want to stress I haven't conducted some sort of massive poll. I've asked five different doctors, and every single doctor I know says, oh, no, no, that's early onset dementia. The only question is how quickly it progresses. But the shock, the shock to me was the tepid, flattering questions he received, and still worse, the way the entire performance was received in the wider world of the press. Who was it? Somebody for the Washington Post, whose name I've forgotten,

probably because I'm trying to forget all of this already. Biden's no genius, but he has a genius. He has a genius for being human. Jen Rubin, of course, this is all but Churchillian. The obvious way that they're covering for this guy, how can they, and so it all left me with even, in a certain sense, the same questions about the press, but more so, I thought, I remained naive, Rob is going to just chuckle and say, oh, Peter, Peter, Peter, when I say this. But I thought when Trump was gone, the press would return to some semblance,

not necessarily of fairness, but just of doing their job, wanting to go after stories. And that is simply not, of course, the big story here is who's really running the white house no questions about well as we all know when it comes to the media narrative and both sides ism and what about ism it's it's one of those things that transfixes rob you're really you think a lot about how it plays and how it's unfair so i think we all knew that there was going to be softballing but the reporter praising biden for his people voted for you because of your humanity because of your decency it's it's a bit odd to have that mantle draped around uncle joe at this point isn't it for those of us who remember him grinning like

a jackal and beaming in the senate well with an aboundless amount of unearned self-regard uh well no i mean it seems to me i mean the the press conference is kind of what i imagine although worse i i don't i don't i i'm agnostic on the case of whether he has early onset dementia i don't know enough about it i'm not a doctor i don't think it's hard to diagnose somebody from far away he definitely is old he's an elderly man so he's gonna you know lose his car keys every now and then he's gonna run for re-election but wait but whether that means he's going to lose his car keys every now and then. He's going to run for reelection. But wait, but whether that means he's in unqualified, I don't know what was. I mean, but were I giving Joe Biden, even in the in the in assuming he has his full mental faculties, were I giving him advice? The advice I would give him is pretty much to do what he did yesterday, which is to slow down.

Joe Biden should not say a thing if i were his media advisor don't say anything until you've thought about it frame the sentence first joe biden is a gaffe machine um that that would be what i would do for your first press conference don't answer the questions you get no credit for speed all the trouble he's gotten into in his past has been because he talks too fast he doesn't talk too much he talks too much he says stupid stuff and he says baffling bewildering things now he is aided in this by an incredibly lickspittle compliant press corps um that i i i didn't expect it to be well it's sort of it's hard to know whether they are uh whether it's worse or not it was so bad under trump they were so adversarial under trump that this that we maybe we forgot what they really are like

um the new york times today printed a correction box you know they a fact checking box for some of you know joe biden's bigger um well i mean we used to call them lies right and for four years we were taught to call them lies his four big lies from yesterday that they printed that box i mean they they said this was untrue this is false this is untrue on page a19 what they didn't call them were lies right but now now you we can just just we can you know argue about the terms but donald trump had trouble telling the truth sometimes he lied because he was actually lying sometimes he lied because he didn't know the answer and was just making one up and the press by the year two year three decided we're gonna making one up. And the press, by the year two, year three, decided, we're going to call those lies. That's what they are.

And now we've suddenly gone back to the more quaint custom of just referring to them, correcting them on page 819 and saying they're untrue. So it's not as if they're not covering it. They are covering it. They're just soft peddling it. Yesterday's press conference was a soft pedal but but after it's just an interesting it's an interesting challenge for people who are conservative to continue to make conservative points without trying to make uh you know my narrative points without trying to make those points because we we lose that when we start arguing about why the press isn't being mean you know we're wasting time

but the interesting thing about it is is whatever they were called in the new york times and i didn't see that did they call them misstatements they call them incorrect they said they were false they didn't they didn't characterize it at all actually but i mean the front page headline was you know biden excoriates republicans or something like that and then on page 819 it said well this was false this was false this was false this was misleading and even i mean even to the extent that they reminded everyone that the the terrible trump tax cuts which terribly benefited this terrible percentage of terrible rich people turns out didn't really do that at all and i i read that i had to read it twice because it was in the new york times like wow that's actually quite true but i was surprised the new york times

would admit that and they admitted it they it, along with admitting that the border crisis is, in fact, a crisis and all sorts of things. But it was never in the context of mean bad man lies. Right. So because there was a malevolent intent, they assumed, in Donald Trump, in everything that he did. There is a good intent, if misguided sometimes by a slip of the assumed, in Donald Trump, in everything that he did. There is a good intent, if misguided sometimes by a slip of the tongue, in what Biden does. So if you communicate what Biden said that was false, you are not guilty of spreading misinformation. It's not misinformation if you repeat what Biden says, because reasons. Whereas if you repeat a false statement or a

misstatement that somebody perhaps on the right says that is misinformation because there's a malevolent intent there to destabilize or destroy democracy to do all the rest of the things you know we had this hearing on uh big tech again you bounce back and forth on 230 but um big big hearings on big tech seem to me like it's like ramadan it's always happening whenever i open newspaper, I see that picture of Jack Dorsey looking like, you know, the Rip Van Winkle. They seem to be testifying every 10 minutes. Yeah, I mean, Dorsey looks like the answer to the question. What if Rasputin bathed and was a vegan?

Then you get that sort of a strange aesthetic character. Except that Dorsey does not bathe. He doesn't? Is he one of those? Is he taking the Steve Jobs hygiene report? Okay, great. He's famously not, yeah. Well, that's the great thing about working from home,

if your boss doesn't bathe, I suppose. But back and forth it went. Did either of you, again, so Rob, you saw that it was happening. Peter, you no doubt saw that it was happening as well. And it was all about misinformation. And this term is now starting to take on its own meaning. It's like equity and anti-racism. It's one of these words that people are always throwing around without quite precisely pinning down what it says. And what are we,

so what are we to make of this? Are we to assume that actually Congress is going to get some steel in its spine and do something. Elizabeth Warren was tweeting at Amazon today and criticizing criticizing Amazon for making snarky tweets about a senator. Oh, dare they. Exactly. If I can find the exact thing, because she had complained. What did she said here? Sorry, I'm just going to my notes. Amazon had said to Warren, you make the tax laws. We just follow them. If you don't like the laws you've created, by all means, change them.

Here are the facts. Amazon has paid billions of dollars in corporate taxes over the last few years alone, to which Warren responded. This is a senator responding to a private company. I didn't write the loopholes you exploit. Your armies of lawyers and lobbyists did. But you bet I'll fight to make you pay for your fair share and i'll fight your union busting and fight to break up big tech so you're not powerful enough to heckle senators

with snotty tweets follow the reasoning there i will fight to break up big tech and one of her cited rationales for doing so is so that they will not be able to pop be powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets there's something in there that indicates where we're going maybe yes no well yeah i mean all of those argue all of the arguments people make about that stuff almost all of them have to do with the fact that they don't like what you say um we don't want people to be able to say things on facebook or twitter or google or wherever we don't think that you should let them say these things on substack that's underpinning everything is what you're saying

um amazon has amazon's about a newspaper and has amazon prime and and they they are a giant company and they would i would prefer that their employees not unionize. That's what, you know, they're acting in their fiduciary responsibility. But the idea at the base of it is she doesn't like it when you talk. You're not supposed to talk. You're supposed to receive orders from her. And that has been the hallmark of Elizabethizabeth warren's public and political life since she entered politics you shut up i'm talking you do what i tell you to do and if you don't

you're a bad person even if what i tell you to do i'm going to change my mind a half an hour later or i said something different a month ago but peter is this like a president threatening to break up the copper trust specifically because they'd said something about his you know his mustache grooming oh sure the whole thing yeah I mean one thing you put your your finger on James is that nothing's going to happen in big tech they can hold these endless hearings these repeating these recurring these never-ending earrings like Ramadan as Rob said uh nothing will move unless it unless it's part of the progressive agenda that's just now clear biden actually certified it or or confirmed yesterday in the news conference when he spoke against the filibuster that was a way of

saying this whole hard left progressive agenda this grab hr hr1 which is going to federalize voting rules across the country if it gets through. The move to eliminate the filibuster in the Senate, these are actually radical hard left moves. And the notion that Joe Biden might say slow down, or that he might encourage the centrists in the Democratic Party, who still are about half, or maybe 40% of the members of Democratic members of Congress and Democratic members of the Senate. They're not a negligible number in Washington. That's not going to happen. Biden is in effect, Biden or whoever wrote the briefing book is in effect saying that that progressive agenda, that's not just Nancy Pelosi, that's the president of the United States. It goes. So the only question if now Rob offered advice to President Biden, my advice here is to Zuckerberg and Tim Cook of Apple.

All these. The only question you have to concern yourself with for the next two years is how to get along with the hard left and the Democratic Party. Right. Full stop. That's it. Well, opposition to H.R. One is voter suppression and voter democratic party right full stop that's it well opposition to hr1 is voter suppression and voter suppression is right that's right is predicated on racism and founded in white supremacy the same goes with the filibuster which now everybody has decided is a relic of jim crow

i i mean biden that that inelegant phrase that he said that that the uh the the opposition to hr1 voter suppression is not just jim crow it makes jim crow look like like jim eagle or some some really just clanking statement like again my advice slow down don't say anything right i don't know if he came up with that for him i think i think somebody i don't know what it means i think somebody well it means that the that the horrible days of jim crow are elevated to to a greater eagle-like status when you compare this. So, in other words, declining to federalize all of the elections and take from the states and the localities the power to do what they wish, that itself is worse than what was specifically done in the Jim Crow era to specifically disenfranchise a racial group. Right.

Correct. Which is nonsense but but all you have to do is is is slather the right terms on it and and everybody's stunned into silence we have here in minneapolis or well actually in a distant suburb the um a dinner theater has canceled cinderella because they looked around and they said the the cast everything it's 92 white which is pretty much the suburb too they canceled it um and they said the cast everything it's 92 white which is pretty much the suburb too they canceled it um and they've the statement from the direct the artistic director of the dinner theater is how much they are committed now to anti-racism he uses the term like everybody

else not knowing quite what it means and how they have an equity and diversity committee that's going to examine everything that they do going forward at the dinner theater so the minute you i mean it's it's like you know the the woke nova went off in his brain and everyone looks around and says what what can we then how can we reshape the world to show our virtue and show the rest of it it's the problem of course with the dinner theaters it has to now send out fundraising appeals to the very people who kind of wanted to go see Cinderella and now aren't going to see Cinderella. They do, and a lot of that stuff, you're right, Rob, a lot of that goes through

email, but there still is, I'm sure, a lot of direct mailing that you go, and people like my wife who order tickets, she likes to get the tickets in her hand, and that requires somebody at the dinner theater going to her. All the stamps you have to get, forget it, get a post office, get the right quarter. But you can never, you know, all the stamps you have to get, forget it. You can learn at the post office.

You know what? Forget it. Email. There's zero solution to the buying of the stamps or the mailing of the post office problem. Actually, no. There is another way. What? I can't believe it.

There is. If you don't want to go to the post office, well, there's one thing you can do, and that's you can stay home and do it with stamps.com. Stamps.com. Yes, thank you, Rob. Stamps.com. They allow you to mail and ship anytime, anywhere, right from your computer. Send letters, send packages, and pay a lot less with discounted rates from USPS, UPS, and more. Stamps.com has saved businesses thousands of hours and tons of money. With Stamps.com, you get the services of the post office and UPS all in one place, and big discounts on mailing and shipping rates. Stamps.com is a must-have for any business. Put all these services right there, right on your computer. So whether you're a small office

sending out invoices, an online seller shipping out orders, a giant warehouse sending thousands of packages a day, or a local theater that just wants to communicate with your fans, stamps.com can handle all of it with ease. Simply use your computer to print official U.S. postage 24-7 for any letter, any package, any class of mail, anywhere you want to send it. Once your mail is ready, just schedule a pickup or drop it off. It's that simple. With stamps.com, you get discounts up to 40% off post office rates and up to 62% off UPS shipping rates. Not to mention, stamps.com is a fraction of the cost of those expensive postage meters. Stamps.com is a no-brainer, saving you time and money.

It's no wonder that 1 million small businesses already use stamps.com. So stop wasting your time and go to the post office and go to stamps.com instead. There's no risk, none. And with this promo code, which is, drum roll, Ricochet, you get a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus free postage and digital scale. No long-term commitments, no contracts. Just go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in Ricochet. That's stamps.com, promo code Ricochet. Stamps.com. Never go to the post office again.

And we thank stamps.com for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And I wonder if I've said stamps.com enough times. Probably not. Probably not. And now because border and immigration is in the news, we're having Mickey back on. It's been a while. It doesn't mean that everything's been great on the border. It just means it hasn't been in the news. Foolish us for not having him in on more often because he's a great friend of the program. Mickey Cowes, written for Slate.com, the New Republic, Harper's, Washington Monthly, Daily Caller, and other publications. In 2010, he was a candidate for the U.S. Senate in the Democratic primary and we're all the worse for the fact that he didn't win. The author of The End of Equality, published in 1992, which is about how to be a liberal when the gap between rich and poor is growing and, quote, no one knows how to stop it. In other words,

just as relevant today as it was 19 years ago. He started Kaus Files in 1999, in the early days of the web, and helped invent blogging. Yes, he did. I will arm wrestle him for that, too, because I was blogging in 97, but, you know, pistols at dawn. Follow him on Twitter at Cows Mickey. Mickey, welcome back. You tweeted recently, quote, yes, Biden shoveled a bunch of garbage about the border, but the key takeaway seems to be this. He wants them to come. They are like his Irish ancestors. That is the underlying motivation for his policy. Legal immigration limits be damned. He wants them to come. The administration is saying administration saying no we didn't invite anybody and then roll tape of him saying i hope there's a surge so why does he want them

to come and uh how many does he want to come when it's all done well that's that's the question you know there was some debate before the press conference does he want to keep it under control, or does he actually approve of as many people coming and applying for asylum as want to come? And with the talk about his Irish ancestors and how these people are just like his Irish ancestors, which in a way they are, I think he settled that question. His idea of a solution to the problem is we set up these courts and and they decide whether people meet the asylum criteria they can apply back in their home countries and if they meet which 70 percent do usually meet the initial criteria they get in so we'll be sluicing a whole hundreds of thousands of people from Central America into

the United States. And that's okay with him. And it's okay with a lot of people. And that's, that is his solution is everybody who meets the criteria gets in and you should just apply. One more before I hand it over to Robin, Peter, I just wanted to, the difference is, of course, is that when the Irish came here, there was not a large amount of social services provided by the taxpayer and now it's a completely different situation people are on the hook for medical care for housing for education the rest of it well yes and we we we we just we changed the law in in 19 in the early 1900s to limit immigration. We decided we weren't open to all comers. And we still needed unskilled labor. We need unskilled labor less and less as machines take over more and more tasks.

So the labor need isn't there in the long run. So things have changed. But that is what he is thinking okay the former president united states campaigned on building a wall um sort of popular uh campaigned against the kind of lack almost lack of immigration policy or lack of enforcement of any policy at all he was i think in my opinion he was at his most articulate when he was saying look we don't even we don't have a policy we just let anything happen um and he lost and now we have a president who won who is gonna probably do nothing and go

back to the old days who does not believe that uh we should continue to trim back the uh welfare state actually he's gonna probably undo some of the welfare reform of the mid-90s um why isn't that why isn't that good politics i mean i don't agree with it and i know that you don't agree with it you wrote a wonderful book about called the end of equality and you've spoken out against you know unfettered illegal and at least unfettered even legal immigration but that doesn't seem to be a winning political issue what am i missing you're you're missing that uh trump had the border under control and didn't really campaign on immigration and he lost narrowly and now that the border seems to be out of control voters decide they don't like that uh you know the poll there there are polls including one from

politico showing uh support for amnesty for illegal immigrants uh plummeting and uh you know the issue is shifting it the support for immigrants rose under Trump as a reaction to his policies, and now it's declining under Biden as a reaction to his policies. You know, the polls, it's a lot like the polls for welfare. It's basically 50-50, depends how you ask the question. But, you know, the polls are definitely moving in Trump's direction and against Biden, which is why I think actually the issue you pointed out, which is their appeal of welfare reform, is a greater threat at the moment than any sort of huge amnesty, although that is had to, I mean, one of the reasons we, one of the reasons a lot of people have a problem with legal immigration is, you know, that old state, the old Milton Friedman line, which is you cannot have open borders and a welfare state at the same, together. It's really one or the other, right? Well, you know, they get $1,400 checks.

It's like, what more can you offer? You have to sweeten the pot more yeah okay yes yeah milton friedman had a point you can't have you can't have open borders and you know a vox.com style welfare state so part of me the cynical part of me sees uh certain politicians going now uh agitating on the border i mean doing probably good sound bites on the border. I mean, doing probably good soundbites on the border. You know, this Kamala Harris is going to go and she's going to be negotiating. And also Ted Cruz is on the border. Part of me thinks of my thinks to myself that this is just all the kind of political kabuki theater that goes on when everyone has a stake in not changing or not addressing the current crisis would you buy it's certainly political kabuki theater uh and biden actually referred to that uh last night in his press conference he said uh

you know they have to posture for a while uh and so he's he's well he's hoping it's all posturing uh and and you have a large donor class that will push for some sort of amnesty. I tend to think every Republican knows that if they support some sort of amnesty, they will face blowback in their primary. I think that the only way that it goes through is if they get rid of the filibuster, which is a very real possibility. I mean, the defense of the filibuster is crumbling even as we speak. D.N. Feinstein says, you know, well, I support it for now. It's not exactly confidence inspiring. Talk about Kabuki theater.

There's this whole Kabuki theater where the Democrats realize they can't pass anything without getting rid of the filibuster, and they reluctantly conclude that they have to get rid of it. That's transpiring now, and I don't quite see what stops it. decade and a half maybe i remember i was sitting outside uh in an outburger in venice and uh while my car was getting an oil change and it was a sunny saturday and mickey kaufs walked up and i said hey mickey how you doing and he's not great they're gonna they're they're gonna vote for amnesty uh and that was 15 maybe 20 i mean it's a long time ago and mickey we were both young men at the time um so uh so part of me kind of wanted to just, hey, you know what? Just do amnesty. Just get over it. Get this over with.

Just have a solution. It's better than listening to this for the past 15 years. But just say you were in charge. What would you do today? What are the two things you would do that you could actually maybe convince America to be behind? Well, the two things I would do is finish the wall and have an e-verify system, which isn't perfect. So legitimate businesses have to check on your citizenship or your legality before they hire you.

I would do those things. I'd wait. I'd have a pause until the ACLU sues, and it goes all the way to the Supreme Court and it's ratified and it's in place and working. And then we can have an amnesty. You know, then I would then I would I would I would have a reasonable amnesty for the people who are here and also i would uh i would also like to end uh chain migration which means that people you only really get in if you have a family member here uh i would like to import also immigrants who have no family members here uh you know if you're some if you're some schnook in nigeria you have no way of getting to and you want to be in America, and you have no chance of getting to the United States unless you already have family here. You're pro-schnook.

I'm pro-schnook. I'm a sub-schnook. You know, they have sub-schnook. How about a shlemiel from Nigeria, though? Or a shlemazel. They have sub-schnook pros, and I'm a sub-schnook. Hey, Mickey, Peter here. Yeah? or a schlabazzle they have sub-tech pros and i'm a sub-tech schnook hey mickey peter peter here yeah this is i'm if i understand your position and it's been a while since we spoke although of course i read your your stuff but your build the wall why build the wall and mickey kouse's

answer is because he's a good liberal and he wants the wages of american workers to go up the way they did under trump is that correct that's the basic your basic argument is um is is is for it's a kind of old-fashioned workers first argument correct correct? Correct. And also, the decline of wages at the very bottom of the labor market really has threatened the cohesiveness of our society as a society of equals. We have people who are basically dropping out of society at the bottom, and they need to make more money. Okay. As it happens, I agree with you, as I rob and james agree with you but i want to ask one more question which is i use the term old-fashioned and that really is the question you're putting forward a kind of it would be easy to imagine franklin roosevelt making just the same

argument that mickey kauf is today. And yet the Democratic Party has moved someplace else. The Democratic Party, you're an America firster. I mean, honestly, you share that with Donald Trump. The Democratic, as best I can tell, there are really only two reasons, two motives for Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi to say, open the borders. One is the crass straightforward reason, which is those people are going to vote for us. We'll get them citizenship sooner or later, and they'll vote for the Democratic Party. So it's a power grab. The other reason, though, is, and I feel that there's an element of this, they're all internationalists. Mexico, the United States, well, the border is contingent. It's there for specific

historical reasons. We could talk about the Mexican-American War, and maybe that wasn't such a good idea in the first place. Let them in. They're human beings like us. They're like Joe Biden's Irish ancestors. So the question is, what's the difference you still consider yourself a democrat and a liberal what's how but how did the party change how did your own people your own your fellow liberals and fellow democrats change in their views what happened here it's a very good question and you know labor had to give up for that to happen because labor traditionally was in favor of protecting the borders. And Cesar Chavez was in favor of protecting the borders. Right. And right. And Barbara Jordan was a big, big on the borders.

She chaired a commission for Clinton that decided we needed to to do something to control the inflow. And so African-Americans also had to give up. And how they got steamrollered, I don't quite know. Labor, part of it is they saw that their future growth potential was in these industries like the service workers and the grocery workers, where there were a lot of Latinos, and that the recruiting of more members was more important to and that they the recruiting of of more members was was more important to them than that maintaining the wages of their existing members in in low skilled uh positions uh and african americans just just got their elite got bought off or they got

steamrollered i the the i guarantee the average african-american voter is not unsympathetic to uh trump's position on the borders. They don't vote for Trump for a lot of other reasons. So that is the big question is why did the Democratic Party go whole hog? You know, I you know, I I one of the reasons I did that run for Senate in which Rob is is implicated and it'll be a black mark on his record you uh but you helped me in that you're you're tied in you're a crony was to see if there was any support in the democratic party for immigration restriction and however incompetently it was run by my conclusion was no there was no support democratic election like could it be that

the old democrats tired to willing to go along are just simply acceding to a new firebrand cohort that believes that massive immigration is morally justified because of the sins of colonialism the sins of capitalism the various sins of america so we we deserve this this is this is rebalancing the scales i think i think that's part of it it's also you know the the latino community is where the energy is they're the new they're the new force in town there are more of them than there are african-americans uh and they're they're they they know what they want but keep in mind that it's not for the democrats are doing themselves any favors here i don't think if you had a clibden position that said you know we need to control the borders but uh but we need

to help low-wage workers and we need to you know and and is pro-latino and pro-civil rights on a bunch of other grounds, I'm not sure that that wouldn't be better for the Democrats than where they are now. It's one of those cases where they've been captured by the left in bizarre ways that are somewhat inexplicable. Mickey, I have a recommendation. No, this is a request. Get your name on the recall ballot.

The problem is it's governor. To be governor, you have to have a certain skill. No, that's not the problem. The problem is you have to actually campaign. I worked tirelessly for Mickey as senator. He primarily Barbara Boxer, which is about as punk rock as you can get in California. And still be a nominal democrat and i helped him do some radio spots and i'm sitting enjoying my uh my cup of coffee at my

little coffee shop but there's mickey kouse sauntering up and down the street as if he's got all day like no no the candidate he's like you should have been in tracy you should have been in mcleod you should have been in ukiah you should have been everywhere uh you're completely right and after uh after the election i i ran into a a political consultant for the democrats beloved named cam kawada who's now dead uh and he said mickey he may have had a few drinks mickey i thought your campaign would have more oomph. And what he meant was exactly what you say. You have to be out there every night with a different event. You have to have somebody to schedule these events and plan them. You have to have advancements.

That's what I said. I'm just a media guy. Does the recall have any oomph? Oh, it has a lot of oomph. The recall has a lot of oomph. I think Newsom will win. But he does something every day to to piss people off he he he appointed as attorney general the guy who got rid of cash

bail uh you know people are worried about crime that turns the crime issue against him uh so it's it's possible that that that he would lose uh that as john ellis uh pointed out you know it's possible trump could pick the governor of california if trump anoints somebody in the field who's a republican or any or anybody and they get 15 of the 20 of the vote with 150 candidates you can win with 15 20 of the vote uh so it's uh it's entirely possible so can we can we chase that down i mean if you were um uh sitting in uh uh mar-a-lago as part of uh the former president trump's um you know kitchen cabinet i mean that is one way to stay super super super powerful is to go to California, the biggest state, and to help King make the governor.

If all you need is 15 percent, and Mickey's right. I think, what was it, in the last one, there were 135 candidates. There will be over 100 candidates. If all you need is 15 percent, Trump should get on the ballot himself. He'd have to move to los angeles um point i'm sure he can afford that he's one of the few people who can afford to move into california you think he has to be you have to pay taxes uh that's true um but i'm terrified of trump i'm terrified that he's going to decide i don't like jd vance i'm going to support one of jd vance's opponents uh in ohio i mean he's

he's a he's a mercurial danger to any any republican in the country uh it's it's a big problem mickey more on if i may more on california what is it you'll know the figure so i'll just fumble around and suggest magnitudes and you can correct me. But what is it? In the last quarter century or three decades, something like 10 million legal immigrants, most of them, some large number of Asians, but most of them from Mexico and Central America. And then some unknown number of illegal or undocumented aliens have also come to California. And California, which as recently as 1988 was a state that a Republican presidential candidate could carry, has become overwhelmingly

democratic. I used to know these statistics. Of the 40 seats in the state senate, Republicans hold only nine. Of the 53 seats in the California Senate, Republicans hold only nine of the 53 seats in the California House of Representatives delegation. Republicans are now down to 11. It's been over a decade since a Republican was elected to any statewide office. On and on it goes. To what extent is that change in ideology, growth in the public sector union, and to what extent is it simply immigration, that the demographics remove the state from two-party competition? Well, I think it's both immigration and the phenomenon that people in urban areas tend to be more liberal, and California is generally one large urban you know area southern california has an

incredible number of people packed into a small amount of space uh people packed into small amounts of spaces tend to be liberals why why true but why i i it's a it's a very good question i mean i tend to to think you the it tend to think it's mainly self-selection. People with cosmopolitan tastes tend to move to cities. And is there something about urban life that turns you into a Democrat? That's an interesting question. I don't quite see it. It seems to me if you're in a city, you have value order more more than even people in the country uh but there is an urban rural split and california is a huge urban area so um that those two factors

alone will explain it i i've never minded it because the republican party is is quite out of touch in california and i i was hoping we'd have a battle between the moderate wing of the democrats you know against uh maybe for school choice against the teachers unions sort of gary hart neoliberals and the bay area crazy left uh that hasn't quite emerged yet but um well that can't possibly emerge mickey why not everything you described is not the reformist left. Those are all to be written out. I mean, Gary Hart, school choice is routinely decried as racist. Like all of those positions are now written out of polite society, including your own for sealing the board for closing the border. No, that's out.

But I don't think the I don't think the teachers unions are very popular uh among voters i think a large chunk they never have been and yet there's a chunk of the democrats that wants to fight them as opposed to flee them which i i await i await i will i will make popcorn and watch that when it happens well we will have you back on when that does happen indeed um because you know this this border thing is going to be solved probably the next two or three months. So our raison d'etre will evaporate. So school yourself on the education thing so we can have you back as often as possible, because we'd like to fit. We'd like to think that education will be solved at least by the second year of the Biden term. So great. Mickey, always a pleasure. See you later. Thank you. Take care.

Enjoy. Next time. Thanks, always a pleasure. See you later. Thank you. Take care. Enjoy. Next time we'll win. Thanks so much, Mickey. Yep. Yeah. Well, you mentioned that the people who can afford to stay in California, stay there and the people who don't like it leave. But what do you do if you're staying there and you're stuck and you're wondering exactly how much this is going to cost you?

Yes, it's important to make your money work for you. And did you know that people who work with financial advisors end up with up to 15% more money to spend in retirement? No matter what stage of your life you're in, thinking about your financial future doesn't have to keep you up at night. Thanks to smartasset.com, the service that over half a million people have trusted to help them find a financial advisor. There's always a free and easy path to financial peace of mind. Smartasset.com, they've built a safe and a convenient tool to find vetted financial advisors in your area. You know, it's not the question of just going down the street and knocking

on doors and saying, hey, do you know anything about money? No, they find people in your area who know your circumstances and help you. Here's how it works. Begin by taking SmartAsset's short quiz at SmartAsset.com slash ricochet. I took it very fast, speedy, instantly prompted. Here are the names. Give them a call. Within minutes, Smart Asset will match you with three pre-screened fiduciaries, each legally obligated to act on your best interest. They'll also send you a free personalized retirement planning guide with actionable advice so you can feel confident in your next steps. Take control of your financial future today with Smart Asset. Receive your free personalized retirement planning report, and you need that no matter what stage of life you're in. Really, of your financial future today with SmartAsset. You'll receive your free personalized retirement

planning report, and you need that no matter what stage of life you're in. Really, you do. Go to SmartAsset.com slash Ricochet. Your report will provide personalized insights on your retirement readiness. So visit SmartAsset.com slash Ricochet today. And thanks to SmartAsset for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast Mary Eberstadt. She holds the Panula Chair at the Catholic Information Center and is a senior fellow with the Faith and Reason Institute. She's the author of several books and has written widely for newspapers, magazines, and journals. And her latest book is Primal Screams, How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. Welcome to the podcast. So let's

start with your thesis. The premise of the book, The Rise of Identity Politics, which of course we all just love so much, you argue is a direct result of the fallout of the sexual revolution, especially the collapse and shrinkage of the family, that we went from two or three basic archetypes that undergirded society to this dazzling kaleidoscopic view of human sexuality that now seems impossible to parse. So explain exactly how the collapse to the family led to identity politics. Sure. Well, first, let's take a look at the big picture out there. No matter where you look in society or along the political spectrum, what you see is many people very impassioned about the question, who am I? And this is really the defining characteristic of our age. We see this frantic flight to collective identities. To answer that question,

who am I, by resort to sexual identities, political identities, etc. So what I'm focused on is the reason for that frantic flight to collective identity. And I argue in the book Primal Screams that this goes back to the sexual revolution as follows. I think we are only beginning to understand how the sexual revolution shattered the human ecosystem. As a result of its doings, families are smaller, families are often more estranged, people are less likely to have siblings, to have fathers present in the home, to have extended family, to be in the same place, in the book. But the bottom line is this. We learn by watching each other. And we have many fewer people from whom to learn all kinds of things, including what humanity itself is about. And that is the fracturing, I think, that the sexual revolution set into place. And it has unraveled over the decades so that we find ourselves here today in a world where in summer 2020, we saw over 10,000 riots in the streets of the United States or protests, 500 of which turned into riots. We're seeing the unfolding of the revolution in places where we never thought we would.

What was supposed to be a private matter between individuals has become the most important source of unraveling in our time. And that's what the argument of the book is about. So, Mary Peter here. I remember David Brooks wrote, my question is, at some level, we know this. At some level, we sense, even when we don't have the statistics at our fingertips that you provide in your book, we sense that the family is breaking down and that this is bad and even frightening. It was either a column or Bobo's. It was one David Brooks writing or another in which he pointed out that whereas the divorce rate in the United States is close to 50%, the divorce rate in families that send students to the Ivy League is 10%. Now, the Ivy League is a special case in all kinds of ways, but that's one of those data points that says, yeah, of course, if you want your children to be good students, give them a stable home, right?

All right. And yet we just went through a presidential election in which neither the Republican nor the Democrat said boo about the importance of supporting the American family, reinstituting the American family? Why? That's a great question. I think the answer, Peter, is that after the sexual revolution, everybody's implicated, you know, one way or another. There are very few families, even in Amish communities, that are not touched by the kinds of trends that I mentioned. And of course, people love their family members and don't want to say anything that might cast a dim light on what's happened structurally within their families. And I get that. I think we are all part of that. And collectively, that adds up to this great resistance to discuss what we're discussing here but i think

we see more and more that there is a compelling reason to go there and the reason is that people are suffering and especially young people are suffering because they are bearing the accumulated weight of these changes on their shoulders, and they're cracking under it. You know, just for example, even before the pandemic, there was a rise over the last couple of decades in psychiatric problems among the young. And I'm sure that comes as no surprise to anybody who deals with the young or has had teenagers, a rise in anxiety and panic disorders and depression, etc. And all the experts agree that this is real. I've had five kids.

I'm the one with psychiatric problems. And panic disorder. That's the way it works in my family. And panic disorder. Yeah, it's a two-way street for sure. Yeah, I'm sorry. You're making a serious point. No, that's all right. My point is that they are suffering and they don't even have the language to name where

this suffering is coming from. And I think we see this in the anguish that people feel about these identities that they drift into or run into. If you look at the absolutism with which sexual identitarianism is protected, for example, the way it is impossible to transgress anything about LGBTQ ideology, etc., the loyalty you're seeing there, I think, is a misplaced familial loyalty. So I don't dismiss that out of hand. I'm very interested by it. I think you see the same thing with the deep attachment people feel toward their various political identities. And again, this is true on the right as well as the left.

I believe that this attachment is coming from a place where the ordinary ways of attaching no longer works for people. So let me just mention two in particular to bring it down to earth a little more. In human history, if you were to ask most people, who are you? I think most of us would have answered by resorting to a couple of things. One, we would resort to our familial connections, our kinship, right? We'd say, I'm a mother, I'm a sister, I'm an aunt, I'm a cousin. And two, since religion is everywhere in human history, most people would have said, I'm a child of God in some form. So you would have addressed the question of your identity by reference to your earthly familial relationships and perhaps your transcendental relationship with

another realm. We have to understand that between secularization and the changes wrought by the sexual revolution, those answers are just off the table for many young people. And so because we are the kinds of beings that we are, we have to construct some kind of identity for ourselves and so begins the uh impassioned search for substitutes that is now all around us one more question and then we'll see if if uh james or rob wants to come back in because i'll i'll keep take you to myself very happily but one more question and i'm going to fumble around as I frame this one too, but you'll understand what I'm getting at. I hadn't thought of this, but of course you're right that Donald Trump has been married three times. And Joe Biden has one son who, by the family's admission, by Joe Biden's admission as a former drug addict.

Everybody in one way or another is complicit. Excuse me, the grownups, the people you'd be expecting to say, here's what we need to do to reconstitute the family. Everyone is in one way or another complicit. And I'm using that word intentionally in the breakup, the crack up that has happened since the sexual revolution. And that means that there's, now I start treading on, I don't know how to express it, but that means the problem in one way or another is guilt. government isn't very good at handling sin and redemption and guilt and innocence. There's no place in Washington to go to confession in the United States government. Do you see what I'm getting at?

How do you, if everybody has a cousin who's divorced or a daughter who's a drug addict, and everybody thinks, oh, I was a bad parent and I played the field. I did all kinds of things myself. How do you put those pieces back together? You said there's increasing argument to address this, but how do you put people in the position to address it? Well, it's like anything else, Peter. I think we have to realize where we are and name the animals correctly, and you just did. A big part of this picture is the decline of Christianity and organized religion more generally. One thing organized religion does for you is it gives you a way out. It gives you a path toward redemption. And without that, in a world where more and more young people don't

even know what that looks like, they are reenacting these quasi-religious scenarios of pointing fingers and exiling people. This is what cancel culture is all about, I think. Cancel culture is all about a secularizing world trying to find an answer for how you keep the community strong. It's stonings on Twitter. Stonings on Twitter. Hey, Mary, it's Rob Long in New York. Thank you for joining us. So, I just want to pick up on what you just said. I mean, what was it? 73% americans in the 30s said they went to church or they were met so they were members of a church now it's a little less than 50 but recent you know the recent survey i'm just looking at right now 2020 says about 30 percent of americans never attend church or synagogue but only 24 percent attend every week, but 40% consider themselves religious.

I mean, is church attendance a metric for any of this? I mean, one of the things about – I mean, I go to church. One of the things about it is I don't go to church every week and think much about it, except it's a habit. Sometimes I go, and it's really great. But it's a ritual, and I do it, and I miss it when I don't do it, although I can't quite put my finger on why I miss it. Have we become a culture that has in its drive for every experience to be authentic and real and to sort of touch us in our soul all the time? Have we lost the power of simple ritual?

That's a leading question because I think the answer is yes but you might think the answer is no i wrote a book called how the rest or sorry how the west really lost god a new theory of secularization that was all about your question rob and the answer i think is that again what's implicated here is the sexual revolution there are arguments out there that people stopped going to church because we got smarter or you know, more with it or science proved religion wrong. These arguments don't hold up historically when measured against the facts. What holds up is that once you interrupt the family sufficiently, you interrupt the transmission belt for religion itself, even down to practicalities, like in a divorce situation with shared custody, the parents are unlikely to be taking the child to the same church every week, just simple things like that. So again, deprived of these traditional ways of answering fundamental questions. I think we see young people especially trying to reassemble

the pieces after the bomb blast. And it's a tragic undertaking. And they need to understand what happened and what the language of their suffering is. Because when I look at footage of the protests over the summer and see these kids screaming in the streets, when you see them on college campuses with their mouths duct taped shut, I think the traditional conservative reaction, which I totally understand, is to dismiss all of this and say, who are these privileged people? Who are these snowflakes, right? What's wrong with them but i'm seeing something else in this i'm seeing a deep authentic suffering uh among people who don't know the name of what

ails them and so my hope is that in entering these you know stormy waters um i'm trying to supply words to them to help them make sense of what really ails them, because I don't believe what really ails them is something like heteronormativity or the patriarchy, etc., or these other abstractions that they have come up with to give a label to their suffering. I think what ails them is the same thing that ails a lot of people after the radical social changes wrought by the sexual revolution. Mary, Peter, with one last question, if I may. In all kinds of problems, on this podcast, you won't be surprised to hear that Rob and James and I are pretty sure we solve at least one or two major problems every single week. And the conclusion is always, the president should do this, or Congress should do this, or the Supreme Court should hold this. I don't even know. I mean, I'm totally persuaded by everything you say, but I don't even know whom to address.

Whose job is it? How can the society put, unless you say the bishops and rabbis and it's diffused across our religion, whom does Mary Eberstadt address? You pick up the phone and say, Buster, you need to do this to solve the problem. Who's on the other end of your phone? Well, it's true, Peter, that a great awakening wouldn't hurt. I would settle for a small one. But that said, I think the role of government, if this argument is correct, is more like that of doctors taking the Hippocratic oath. We should look at every policy and ask, does this help strengthen families and communal bonds, or does this hurt? So, for example, you look at something like the Equality

Act, which is being much described today, much discussed rather. And it seems clear to me that this is something that will only enhance confusion out there among young people, within society. So looked at that way, I don't think we have a hard time figuring out what are good policies and what are bad policies. Good policies take us back to a kind of restoration of organic connections that we need in order to be successful, thriving people. And I think that's the lens that we should apply to politics, even as ultimately, I think, the amelioration of what I'm describing lies beyond politics. Thank you. And it's hard for people to address it because there's so many social stigmas in place going against prevailing new orthodoxies. As you mentioned before, the LBTQ

plus community itself is unassailable in certain ways. You can't speak against it without being accused of a variety of isms and phobias. But within the community itself, there are schisms. I mean, if you read Andrew Sullivan and if you read a couple of other people of his mindset, the trans issue has split the community because there are those who say that it delegitimizes homosexuality by just making it a strange gender, genitalia fetish preference. Big debate about it going on. But that's starting to spill into the mainstream culture, where you have the governor of South Dakota getting flack for, you know, funding a bill, for signing a bill, not signing a bill that would have protected girls' athletics, as they say. This is an issue that nobody knows how to talk about. Nobody knows, because everybody's

absolutely terrified of touching this brand new sparking electrical wire that has landed on their front yard. And so it's just easier for everybody to wave it away and just simply say, I support everybody. I'd love inclusion and the rest of it. And we never grapple with what are fundamental issues of what it means to be human. Isn't that the strange thing that's going on here is that even though we have this opportunity to discuss the multiplicity of human options, all of a sudden, we're not doing it. We're just sort of silence. I guess it comes down to this. Are we not entering an era sort of like where you had in authoritarian states where people knew what they believed and believed that everybody else shared the thing, but they couldn't talk about it because the official ideology said,

you agree or you're cast out to the gulag. Yeah, I agree with that. And I also think that we're entering an era in which we are just beginning to see something that will become more powerful, which is family envy. And I think this is part of the divisiveness of our politics. People who don't have those things, don't have strong connections to people who traditionally have their backs, their family members, at some primordial level, we all want those things. And I think part of the acrimony out there is coming from people who know that they're missing

something, don't know exactly what they're missing, and are increasingly acting out. Let me give you an example. Look at what happened over the summer with all of these protests that turned into harassment of people dining outside with family and friends or just being in their homes and having flashlights shined onto them, awakened in the middle of the night. I mean, what does that tell you about the primal nature of what's happening? It certainly tells me that there is an animosity against people being, just even being in the security of their homes, an animosity on the part of people whose families are now these political bands, these roving political bands. And I really believe that we're going to get to a better place in all this, or else I wouldn't be writing about this dark stuff.

But that, I think, is what it comes down to. The new envy is envy of the kinds of connections that most of the generations before us could take for granted. Primal Screams is the name of the book. Mary Everson, the author. And by the way, Primal Screams, how the sexual revolution created identity politics. And if you're interested in the way identity politics is shaping everything that seems to be going on, this is a good book to start. Thanks for joining us on Twitter. Thanks for joining us on Twitter.

Sorry. No, don't join us on Twitter. It's a cesspool. It's a nightmare stay away from it thanks we'll talk to you later again thanks we said hello we'll do um i have uh downstairs speaking of some sort of feral needs to connect my dog is um wanting to go through the window and i believe kill a squirrel which are still in abundance here i tell you it's what's the latest on the squirrels in the roof?

They're still there. They're still about, and I paid the money, and I'm asking them to come back and take a look and all the rest of it. And they have to put out the right proper treat for the squirrels. You just can't throw anything out there. Apparently, they're very little picky creatures. But life is like that. Ourselves, we find little treats that we like. I've got a little divot of ice cream that I like to have in the evening or so. All these things that make your life a little bit better. You could just go with the basics, but no, why not upgrade the things that make life worth living? Here's an idea where it comes to something you might not think about because you go to bed and you fall asleep and you don't think about the sheets because you're sleeping. But how about if you could fall asleep

easier and more comfortably because you loved your sheets? Few things matter more in life than a good night's rest, and that's why we recommend that our listeners, which would be you, sleep on bowl and branch sheets. Bowl and branch signature sheets feel so soft and light. You will forget you're not actually sleeping on a cloud, yes, and they're sustainably made for uncompromising quality from field to factory. What does that mean? Well, it means 100% organic cotton, ethical production, and thoughtful attention to every detail. Move to a higher standard for your life.

Bold and Branch focuses on quality over quantity. No inflated thread counts here. Nine billion threads, because more doesn't always mean better. Signature hemmed sheets from Bold and Branch are a bestseller for a reason. They're buttery soft, lightweight, organic cotton in a classic sateen weave for sheets that just get softer over time. They get better and better and better because they work with family-owned mills all over the world to expertly weave every set of Bolden Branch sheets while they have the highest level of craftsmanship. It's quality you can feel the moment you open the box. And by the way, opening the box is fun. The experience starts with just opening that box and taking it apart. So comfort,

sustainability, and quality that lasts all at a fair price. So I have been using them, I think, since we started this years ago. And honestly, they do get better the more you wash them, the more you use them. It's not one of those things that just wears out until it's as thin as a tissue. These things are holding up and they're still absolutely the best sheets I ever had. You can experience the best sheets you've ever felt at BowlingBranch.com. Get 15% off your first set of sheets when you use promo code RICOCHET at the checkout. That's Bowling Branch, B-O-L-L-A-N-D-B-R-A-N-C-H.com.

Promo code RICOCHET. We thank Bow C H.com promo code. Ricochet. We thank baller branch for sponsoring this, the ricochet podcast. Well, Peter, you were about to run off, but you're still here. The,

my wife was able to, while we were on the air, if we're on the air, whatever it's called these days, while we were recording, my wife was able to push back the appointment. So I'm happy. Good.

You're here. You know, Rob, Rob is in New york of course i was uh we have a relative who was told by his company that he had to move and he was choosing between he had to choose between san francisco and new york oh new york hands down well that's what i thought and the reason was was that he had come from there originally and they knew it well but they regarded its descent into cesspool status of the last few years to be just takes it completely off the tape wait wait new york san francisco new york oh yeah no no no new york is incrementally a little bit better even though much better watching from a distance wonder exactly how so and i have to ask much much

better has it filled back up are people when you look at those at the magnificent skyline of manhattan are you seeing buildings that are filled with people are they still just empty cenotaphs or the for the well they're not empty cenotaphs but they're they're they're filling up people are you know restaurants are opening 50 capacity inside although i have to say um this is new york and sometimes you can tell what's really happening by what's not being enforced i walked by a restaurant restaurant i really enjoy last night uh and it was full outside every table taken and i peeked inside it looked like every table taken it looks there will be some enterprising restaurateurs that are going to make up for lost time because they're going to be

booking double um they're only supposed to be half filled inside. Some of the bigger, more high-profile restaurants, I think, are obeying that or pushing it a little bit. I suspect the police have other things on their mind. This sounds like Florida-style madness. Well, look, I mean, there's something incredibly attractive about Florida-style madness, which, by the way, I'll be enjoying next week. I'll be in Florida next week. But I suspect, I think it's coming back.

And I think that the city is, you know, look, you never want to bet against New York City. It's just that's a losing bet. The leafy Elysian fields of academe, Peter, are things feeling like that. Not even close. Not even close. No, no. We've been told our offices will remain closed for at least another number of weeks. The vaccinations, we see people lined up outside a gymnasium, which is where Stanford seems to be administering these vaccines. But every time I get my name on a list, I get an email a couple

days later saying, your vaccination has been, I'll die of natural causes before I get the vaccine at this rate. But no, not even close. This doesn't feel even remotely normal. Can I offer just another, just to talk a little bit about current events as well as this, is that there is a problem if you are an advocate of a certain political, I don't know, agenda. It doesn't really matter which one. When your priors, when your demand for a crisis, when your insistence that there is a crisis is sort of countermanded by everybody's eyes and ears. Example happening today uh uh people are complaining you know there's a big argument today about georgia's voter rules about um h1 voter suppressing people keep talking about voter

suppression now if you're just been paying attention for the past 15 years that the story of the past 15 years has been an explosion in people voting voter turnout in this country is extremely high it's higher than anyone thought it would ever be i mean we have what do you have 150 million people i mean what was 65 million people voted in november for the loser that's pretty good that's like at 70 voted for the winner that's a lot of people voting we we do not have a problem in this country with voter suppression we simply do not i mean the numbers just tell a different story whatever we're doing whatever we did in 2000 whatever the voting rules were in 2000 or 2016 we should continue to do them we don't need to change that we just keep doing what you're doing

you're doing great and i think that happened that is happening now with people and covid that they're starting to sort of as they come out of the you know they haven't heard the all clear buzz but they now know that no american official no elected or bureaucratic american official will ever say okay it's safe now they just won't ever say that and so people left to their own devices are going to decide when it's safe which is kind of how it's supposed to work. And the evidence of their eyes and ears, despite the fact that many, many 500,000 people died of this disease, it was very, very serious. But despite that, they do know that if you're under 40 or 45, you have a greater chance of dying in a motorcycle accident than you do of covid that we don't even the number of people who are infected with covid and the number of cases of covid is a huge difference there maybe

3x 4x um and everyone can do that basic math and everyone is doing that basic math and so we're once again entering this sphere where the people have one kind of collective wisdom that is evidenced by their eyes and ears as they did in all the big crises before. They do with homelessness. There's no American who really is observant, who thinks the homeless problem in the United States is because of housing. Like, it's not housing. These people are not, they're not houseable right now. They are drug and alcohol dependent, or they are mentally ill.

That is the problem. And no one wants. So so I guess what I'm saying is there's a there's a there's a there's a real wisdom and understanding among the people. And then there's this sort of upper layer of bureaucratic and official and approved wisdom. And those two things have never my experience have never been more divergent on almost every level than they are today and right below the bureaucratic level is a level of media enablers who want to continue certain narratives for many variety of reasons but they're really invested in this stuff they get really head up and excited when there's a new variant um we can't do we can't go back to normal because we can't we can't ever

go back to doing what we used to do because of variants. But Rob's right. I mean, most people, Texas reopened, and we were told that in two weeks it was going to be a mass graveyard. It hasn't happened. And what's frustrating about this in the debate is that, you know, you end up debating masks versus mask mandates, right? You can have your own opinion about whether masks work, but that's a different matter from a mask mandate, right? You can have your own opinion about whether masks work, but that's a different matter from a mask mandate, right? You can have your opinion about herd immunity. You can have your opinion about vaccine. There are so many competing little things getting at this. We had

Alex Berenson on this podcast, right? Talking about masks. We were talking about the sensibility of lockdowns. Now he's gone daft. He's absolutely daft when it comes to the vaccines, if you ask me. He was on Clubhouse the other day saying, interesting, when somebody pointed out that the vaccine is really there to get your DNA information. Yeah, right. All right, fine, great. But at the end of it, it seems to me that we saw nearly every single institution that we'd expected to behave reasonably competently fail to meet the challenge.

And that's what's going to come out of this. That's what's going to come out. I hope. The point at which the narrative finally gets rewritten where we realize that the lockdown in its severity and duration was a mistake, was a horrible economy-killing, city-murdering mistake. It's difficult for me to conceive of anybody actually having the stones to admit it and to go forth and to put that out and stand behind it. Well, aside from Doc J, from our own J. Bhattacharya, but yeah. James, to go back to your friend who's trying to decide between San Francisco and New York, may I tell a brief,

true story of San Francisco? This did not happen to me, but it happened, but I heard it from the person to whom it happened. He was walking down the street in San Francisco, heard a commotion on the other side of the street, looked up, a window opened in an apartment, clothes got tossed out, computer got tossed out. And then the woman who was doing the tossing heaved out a man, presumably her boyfriend. And by this point, a number of people had gathered around my friend to watch this, these items, including a human being come out the window on the other side of the street. And the woman standing next to my friend said, you know, there are a lot of weirdos in this city. And he turned to look at her and she had a

cat on her head and that is san francisco the san francisco in my mind is the one of vertigo oh yes that's right right different i know i know but that that that's that's but that's still in the back of my head but can i just can i can can I just add one more thing to this, which has sort of occurred to me, that one of the weird other disconnects we see is like when we talk about all the heads of big tech, those big social media behemoths were called and the one which people spend more daily time is TikTok. They were not there. Again, it's solving a problem we don't have by writing regulations that regulate behavior that is not a problem, that we are becoming exercised over crises that are not crises and distracting ourselves from what's really, really happening. All right. One last question. I'm going to ask this to you and you're going to give me the answer.

Yes or no. One word because we have to end. But first, I have to tell everybody this podcast was brought to you by Bowling Branch, by Smart Asset and Stamps.com. Support them for supporting us. And you can listen to the best of Ricochet. Many, many excerpts from our many, many podcasts hosted by some short guy from Minnesota, born in North Dakota. It'll be this weekend on the Radio America Network. You can check your

local listings, as we like to say, and take a minute, of course, to give us a five-star. Oh, not four, not six, not possible. Five would be about right on Apple Podcasts. And if you want other people to listen to this show and to join get them hooked ricochet.com slash radio get you three free months all right question guys peter rob yes or no answer does this statement make any sense to you cinnamon toast crunch shrimp guy got milk shake no yes i just had a conversation about it i knew i knew this exactly where it would split and we'll leave it there because i will say this generate 9 000 comments i will say this only that i was just speaking to a reporter about an hour ago a very

fine reporting to anthony fisher for business insider and he uttered this sentence he said you know i was the one that milkshake ducked zoom cat oh and that was one other person on the phone was like i don't know what any of those words mean that is completely baffling but i knew what it meant i said well good job and that was that so there you go it matt it i was trying to explain this to my wife the other day and it matters because this is the language of the Utes. This is the language of the Internet culture. This is how memes contain little concepts that the olds don't get. And the person who gets this lingo right is going to have tremendous political power once they start to apply it to the very online Internet generation.

Just watch for it. But, Peter, believe me, that statement, you need to find out what that means. It's meaningful. The scales will fall from your eyes and you will see that there's a whole different link. Or maybe he can do what my wife does and just wave it off and says, it's very silly and it's very stupid and it's a complete waste of time. I hope we haven't been that. But thank you, everybody, for listening to this, the Ricochet Podcast, and we'll see everybody in the comments

at Ricochet4.com next week, guys. Next week, boys. Next week, fellas. shoes. They're shiny, shining so I head for the bar. We had a bottle of tequila and I knew if I got cigarettes. I got a cousin and she got a friend who thought that I knew a man who put him at his apartment.

I knocked on the door. He wouldn't come out until he got paid. Now don't tell anybody what I wanna do If they find out, you know that they'll never let me through Cause it's no fun being an illegal alien No, it's no no fun being an alien

Down at the office at the fill of the phones A pink one, a red one, the colors you choose Up to the counter, you see what they think They say it doesn't count, man, it ain't written in I don't trust anybody, at least not around here Cause it's no fun being an illegal alien I tell you it's no fun being an illegal alien No, no, no, no, it's no fun being an illegal alien I mean it when I tell you that it's no fun being an illegal alien.

I mean it when I tell you that it's no fun being an illegal alien. An illegal alien. Ricochet. Join the conversation. Thank you.