The Ricochet Podcast - Summer

Episode Date: May 28, 2016

We recorded this one yesterday in New York City, and due to travel and other issues, we’re posting it now. We talk Trump, the now official Republican nominee, get the inside scoop on that Facebook meeting from our guest Brent Bozell, and a theory about Joe Biden. Yes, Joe Biden. Finally, what’s Peter Robinson’s favorite Bob Dylan lyric? The answer may surprise you (it surprised us). Happy summer... Source

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Decencies apply. See OnPost.com. Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. North and South American. All the ships at sea, let's go to press. Hello. I think the media is among the most dishonest groups of people I've ever met. That's terrible. One of the things people love about you is you speak your mind and you

don't use a politician's filter. However, that is not without its downsides. What Boehner is angry with is the American people holding him accountable. If I become president, oh, do they have problems? They're going to have such problems. I don't know why that's funny. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lileks, and today we discuss music, art, painting. That's Trump. One, two, three, seven, you got it. And we'll be speaking with Brett Bozell as well.

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But you won't when you get it back into control with SaneBox. And of course brought to you by Ricochet. Coming to you from our New York offices today, where Rob Long, ensconced in some hip millennial trendy shared coexisting workspace. How did you even know? That was a remarkable guess. Well, I'm guessing that you probably don't have office space in Madison Square Garden or 505th Avenue or any one of the other venerable places that you could. I actually, for a week, worked in Madison Square Garden during the 92nd. Madison Square Garden or 505th Avenue or any one of the other venerable places that you could. I actually, for a week, worked in Madison Square Garden

during the 92... Madison Square Garden? The actual... 92 Convention. They were ripping up one of the buildings, and so they rented cheap space to all the media, and I had to work in plantation in Madison Square Garden. It was a ghastly, soul-extracting experience.

But go on about why Ricochet is the opposite of that. Ricochet is the opposite of that. Interestingly, we have a little co-working space here. It is very millennial and highly designed. It is just off Madison Square, which is not Madison Square Garden.

If you are listening to this podcast and you are not a member of Ricochet, and you've been listening and you've been meaning to join Ricochet, and you're saying to yourself, why should I bother to join? I get the podcast for free. Here's why. Because we are entering a complicated and difficult and protracted and I think really kind of personally challenging election year. And no one understands it, but it's woman. On the center right and i you know i i was here i had dinner with an old friend on wednesday night who is a

friend to ricochet he is a ricochet um contributor i won't mention his name but he is you know he feels that this trump thing he's lost friends and um it really hurts him and i feel like that is something that Ricochet is at the very, at his very core DNA, we're supposed to be civil to each other and figure out how we can move forward. Because we can always move forward. This is America. If you

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Please do it today. You get a month free. Really no risk to you. Go to ricochet.com slash member slash join. Join the conversation. Join the community. You will not only not regret it, you'll love it, and you will be striking a blow for good things.

Indeed. Here's a question that I want to ask. Maybe it's one for the member feed. Maybe it's one for the main. Maybe it's one for Peter Robinson. As we go along with this year and people adjust and readjust their political and moral calculuses to make the choices that they make, you know what? At some point, I just, I don't care. I'm not interested. I'm not interested in people's decisions or their personal journeys any more than they're interested in mine. I'm almost at this point just willing to Pontius Pilate my whole, the whole thing and just say, whatever, guys.

Everybody gets a pass for this one. Not that Pontius got a pass, but I'm just saying, I'm just, I just I'm I'm I'm just stepping back and saying, do what you got to do. Peter, Peter, the flaw, the flaw in that argument, James, you said you're no more interested in other people's personal journeys, their decisions, how they're reaching their conclusions than we are in yours. And yet I'm fascinated to hear what you've been thinking this week. Really? Yes, I am. My feeling is that you're a never Trump guy that you – but at the same time that it's largely aesthetic. I know that sounds as though I'm insulting you or making you sound –

Well, according to – You just don't like the feel of the man and that means you're – It's the essence of the pith of the gist but as some some will say that this is just moral vanity and conspicuous preening and your virtue signaling to everybody else asa spades went on a great twitter rant and wrote a fine piece about the the pointlessness of the never trump people on asa spades and you know and this is also a guy who said that he was going to vote for hillary instead of rubio because he hated rubio hated him you know so you know and hold on a second here. Yep.

So when people accuse the position that I'm doing and sneer at it because I happen to have a sneer in my attitude. OK, fine. Great. Got it. But that's why I say I want to step back and put up my hands because it's like, are you going to vote for Trump? I'm not going to vote for Trump.

Why not? Well, I think he's a very bad man, and I think he's profoundly ignorant. Oh, well, your moral preying is just getting enough for the rest. I didn't start this. I didn't put up the tent pole. I didn't string the canvas. I didn't put up the high wire act. You guys put the circus on.

Okay, fine. I don't have to watch. I don't have to applaud for the clown. Now, that's different from saying i'm going to actively attempt to insert a third party candidate or third you know about a third party or start banging the drum for libertarian i'm not doing any of that by there's never trump saying you are a vociferous enemy of the man's election and there's never trump in the fact of saying just saying look leave me out of this because i can't vote for the guy yeah yeah um i have to say so go ahead rob no no no i talked

no no i want to hear so so okay so what you mentioned i know who you had dinner with and i'm sure it's probably right not to mention his name but his losing friends so here's what's i have to say last week on the podcast i said something that I thought wasn't that big a deal, namely that given the specific concrete choices that we now face, Trump on one side, Hillary on the other, I'm going to go for Trump. I'm not happy about it but I'll do it. And that – I elaborated last week but that was all that – I was very modest. I wasn't arguing for Trump in any grand – no, I was just saying this is politics. You take the guy who's not as bad. OK.

And then quite a lot of people on the site and to emails to me got really quite cross about it and used the word principle and the question of character, not Trump's character, my character. OK. Trump's character, my character. Okay. And so what I'm very surprised by, I mean truly surprised by after most of a life in and around the edges of politics is the speed and the depth of feeling with which this has turned into a question of character among our own side. Not Donald Trump's character. But Rob's character, Peter's character. Hey, you leave me out of this. I'm leaving James out of it because he just told us he wanted to be left out of it. But Charles Murray's piece the other day

in which he said it's not good enough to say that Hillary would be worse. I mean, there was real anger and Charles said in his column, friendships are going to be – I have to say this is a shock to me. It's politics. It's a low, dirty, disappointing business. We do the best we can. That's sort of – so the vociferousness, the vehemence is a big surprise to me.

Can I say two things that actually don't – That don't connect in any way but are just sort of two random observations? One of them is that I do agree with you. There is this strange character issue. It got very deep very fast and I think in a very strange way. Right. very strange way um and and i think that for the for the um uh at this dinner we know i sit next somebody and i and i and there's this there's this this moment for me where i'm talking to people who are enthusiastically for trump and oh so there were more people at dinner than there were a couple

well after afterwards yeah got it all right and i what i want what i want what i said what i what i want from at least one of you is an acknowledgment that it's going to be hard. Oh, right. It's actually going to be hard to win the White House this year because we have a candidate who has negatives. Now, I'm not saying he's not going to win or it's a sure thing or any of those things. But I would – I mean what's that old saying? I'd be worrying a lot less if I thought you were worrying a little bit more. And a lot of pro-Trump people like me are like, that's going to be a landslide.

Oh, it's going to be a walk. Oh, she's a terrible campaigner. It's going to be 15 points all the way. Everyone's going to – like when you say that to me, you sound insane. Not because it's specifically about this candidate, although that is part of it, but because that is simply not the way American politics works. And what they always say is, well, I mean everything has changed. But when things change, they don't change 100 percent in your direction, right? When the pro-Trump people say things have changed, they always say, oh, things have changed as if that means that they get their way now.

But it also means when things are changing that they can easily not get their way at all. And so I would feel better if they were a little more nervous. The second thing I noticed. Can you hold before, if I may, because that's too fascinating to me to let it go on to the second, let you proceed. Contrast it if you can with four years ago, there was a little bit of delusion in the Romney camp among lots of people. One of the rightest, smartest political historians in America, Paul Ray, our friend and Ricochet contributor Paul Ray, whom we all adore and revere, was convinced it was going to be a Romney landslide. Right, right. And yet somehow it was different, right? Well, I don't know.

Maybe I just suggest that we're going to vet Obama again, him, which is silly in 2012. So, yeah, there was a little delusional stuff there. I also feel like every now and then people choose and cherry pick the things they like about the candidate to make some sweeping thing. So at dinner, we were talking like, well, you know, the Bush – and there was a general sense around the table, not for me, that the Bushes have been a little bit peevish. Just because he beat Jeb, why aren't they going to the convention? And I had to stop and say, well, it's not that. It's that he accused President George W. Bush being complicit in 9-11. And there was this pause and – OK, yeah, he did that too.

So there's a very – All those things are forgotten. The Daily Statement is forgotten. Ted Cruz's father was there with Oswald to help kill Kennedy. That's a day's thing. Vince Foster was killed by – probably smothered by Hillary Clinton in the White House and then taken out in a rug. That was just for a day. It's all for a day.

It doesn't mean anything. Right. And then the argument – I made an argument to a very, very strong, very smart pro-Trump supporter that it's going to be $300 million sitting on the sidelines in PAC money. You don't think they're going to run – when it gets dirty, they're going to run Fred Trump – Donald Trump's father is a Klansman, was a Klansman. And it's – well, that would be outrageous. Really? Is it any more outrageous than saying Raphael Cruz was complicit in the Kennedy assassination? Exactly what moral standard are you using now? So what's the answer to that?

I'm curious. All I meant was I didn't mean that they were right or wrong. I simply meant that the idea that this is going to be this landslide because 20,000 people show up for a rally is crazy and i would feel better about that whole movement if they were if they were if i felt like they were reasonable political reasonable observers of the american political scene and not resorting every 10 seconds to the idea like oh everything's changed everything's changed that i think you may have put your finger on it and i will shut up or at some point maybe at the end of this podcast we have to get to Rob's point number two. But in the Trump camp, not even the Trump camp.

I don't want to be called in the Trump camp myself. What I'm trying to say is there are people – let's use Ann Coulter as the great symbol of the real Trump enthusiasts, people who really believe in this man and think that he's going to overturn a rotten order and establish some new golden age. Now, Anne is realistic enough to know that no golden age lasts forever. But she thinks this is a really positive, vital, important, and good movement. Then there are people, and if I may, I'll use myself as an exemplar, who say, this guy has all kinds of faults. I find him distasteful, worse than distasteful in one way after another. But for the good of the country, I think I will probably end up pulling the lever for him because Hillary Clinton, everything you say about Donald Trump, almost everything

you say about Donald Trump can be said about Hillary Clinton at a deeper – a liar at a deeper level. OK. In other words, enthusiasts versus those who are reluctant but making a calculation that they believe is in the best interest of the country. And those two groups can barely even understand each other. Can I just say it is Friday. It is Memorial Day day weekend it is 2016 at new york time is 11 20 a.m i will say this people write it down there is no way that peter robinson can vote for anyone or have a political belief in which i will not count him

as my friend and ally and much much much more conservative than I am and ever will be. There is just no way that's going to change. And maybe the other good thing that's happening here is that some of us are starting to stop thinking of this president – of a president as this sort of grand figure. They all go back to where they were. Rutherford B. Hayes, you know? Right.

Let's go invent stuff and do stuff and kind of ignore what happens in D.C. I know that's a very hard thing to say, but maybe that's what we ought to do. That would be progress. You're right, Peter. It is sometimes difficult to know what people mean. I mean, when they say how many effing Jews are there in this country anyway,

I don't know what they're getting at. But sometimes if you want to, I mean, seriously, though, I mean, Twitter is a great way to reveal yourself because you've got 140 characters. People can't see your face. There's not a lot of obfuscation involved there.

So when you tweet something, you better stand behind it. Conversation is different. When you're talking to somebody, I'm sure Rob's talking to Ann, you can tell by facial cues, you can tell by the body language, you can tell by the shared experiences

that they have, what meanings are being put across. But what do you do with a stranger? With a stranger, it's different, and that's why better communication is essential, especially this time when you're trying to convince people or tell them what you're doing. Best one ever. Thank you.

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Learn how to become a stronger, active listener. Yeah, like that. Like I didn't do apparently last week with Mickey Cows. I've got to call him and apologize. You get the tools to navigate uncomfortable situations like the one we're all having this year and tips for choosing your words wisely, SOB. So with The Great Courses Plus, you can watch as many different lectures as you want, anytime, anywhere.

Stream it from an internet-connected PC, a TV, or through The Great Courses apps. Now, what are they doing? They're offering you, our listeners, a chance to stream hundreds of courses, including How Conversation Works, a $95 value for free when you go to thegreatcoursesplus.com slash ricochet. Start watching today at thegreatcoursesplus.com slash ricochet. So write down that address and go to it soon. I just was going to broach this topic, which is that years ago, I believe it was the 1992 – the first or second presidential debate. It was a town hall debate, and a guy stood up and said to the three candidates running, Perot, Bush, H.W. Bush, and Clinton, how are you going to lead us morally, something like that. And he kept saying, you are our fathers.

You are our fathers. And everyone kind of nodded and said, oh, of course, yeah, I totally get it. And they all answered straightforwardly how they were going to be our fathers. And I remember, I forget who it was. I think it might have been even the great Bill Bennett said

those were all terrible answers. The only answer to that question is I am not your father. I am the chief executive of the administrative branch of the federal government. You are a sovereign citizen of this republic. You're your own father. You have a father and you are probably a father to a child. That's the – the only fathers in the room are those and I wish someone had said that. I wish we had turned a corner.

Right now we seem to be electing even with Obama, these kinds of – the moral leader, the constitutional monarch in chief, and there seems to be – maybe it's better. Maybe we should reduce that office to its lowest common denominator for a bit. It's not like all presidents were these sort of high-minded individuals. No, but we've gone from the idea of the father to the cool brother. Bill Clinton was the cool guy that

you roomed with maybe in college because he played the saxophone and had shades. Now we've got the drunk uncle. Before that, we had Obama, who was the coolest dude in the room ever,. So now we've got the drunk uncle. Before that, we had Obama, who was the coolest dude in the room ever, period. And now we've got, right, the drunk uncle. So, yeah, I think it all goes back to not the question of you're our father, you're our daddy. Although, of course, calling Trump daddy is very popular among some of the folk on the internet. It's the boxer or breech question.

Boxers or briefs question. It was the way that Bill Clinton made the office cool and got that wonderful boomer style in there with its khaki cargo shorts and its white pasty legs and its big gut and its meretricious musical tastes. Boomers all the way. That was our guy who regarded it as any sort of hang-up about asking the question, boomer, boxes or briefs, as a sign that you weren't with it, man. At that point, somebody should have said, this is a question that demeans you, the person who asked it, and me, the presidential candidate, for having to even consider it. Look at the issues that are before us, and we're discussing exactly underwear styles. Next.

Rob and James also, now that I know you spent a season working at Madison Square Garden, question. To what extent – maybe it's no extent. Maybe this is a foolish question. But to what extent is the revulsion at Trump mixed up with just the discomfort of so much of the rest of the country with the New York street style. I remember when Rudy Giuliani was mayor, I sat in, I did an interview with him. I sat in, in city hall one day as he did his weekly radio show and he got, people would call him, call up and say, Rudy, you're a lousy man. And I remember Rudy, there was one guy, for some reason I can remember the name of this guy. He was calling up and asking Rudy to take a position on something that struck me as totally legitimate, but there was a racial component. So it was taking a position, maybe it was Sharpton. I can't remember what it was. And it was, as best I could tell from the tone of the caller's voice, the caller was reasonable in temperament and demeanor. And the question

struck me as valid. And Rudy Giuliani said, Monroe, Monroe, you should be ashamed of yourself. Monroe, you are a bigoted race. Right like that. Right in his face. I knew that about. Yeah, I knew a little bit in the old days. I knew Ed Koch after he was made. Ed Koch, dinner table conversation.

He'd call somebody an idiot. I mean there's a sense in which that's New York and Donald Trump breathes the air of New – so is that a component or am I just mad? Well, what New Yorkers pride themselves on, what they regard as spunky and undefeatable aspect of their personality. Strikes a lot of people as just boorish rudeness. Go back to Midnight Cowboy and Ratso Rizzo walking across the street and slamming the hood of the car. I am walking here! You've got two instincts. One, you can either say he was right to do so because he was indeed walking there,

or, as a North Dakotan would look at it, well, did he have the light? Did he have the little white sign of the man walking? Because if he didn't have that, he shouldn't have been walking there or as a North Dakotan would look at it. Well, did he have the light? Did he have the little, the, did he have the little white sign of the man walking? Because if he didn't have that, he shouldn't have been walking there. And that, that, that willingness to thrive on, on the, on the bad negative spiky serrated energy of the city is something we like when it's a team, you know, a television character. We like it when it's a monster.

Do we like it when all of a sudden it's transplanted to areas where previously we didn't see that level of uh of emotion and intensity and lying and all the rest of the you know the the thrown elbows of new york yeah we'll see yeah i'm not sure it's the rudeness so much or just the style i mean the although i I think that's – and partly that's his appeal. I mean that is what is cutting through all of the clutter and cut through 16, like a daisy cutter, cut through those other candidates is that he's interesting and he sort of says stuff and every day is interesting with him. Define interesting. Well, interesting to me is –

In the most generic term. I mean I'm not even putting a – I'm not putting a value on it. His Instagram yesterday of him sitting on the jet celebrating his electoral – I mean his delegate count victory. Now he is not just the presumptive nominee he is the nominee you know failing some disaster um and he's sitting there eating a big mac and fries i mean or or what with a diet coke and he never saw he never saw a thin person having a diet coke yeah and he's kind of right about that. Like I read the tweets and he's right about all that stuff. And there he is. And it's like it's hard not to see that and think, you know, that is a powerful sign that there are –

Jim Gaffigan has a great joke about McDonald's. He says he's in a huge – usually it's in a gigantic – he plays these huge crowds. And he says, so I was at McDonald's yesterday. And then he stops and he says to the audience, did you hear that? Did you hear the sound in this audience when I said I ate at McDonald's? That was the sound of 10,000 saying in your head, oh, I didn't know I was better than you. Yes, that's right. And there's something about that. And I don't know I was better than you. Yes, that's right. There's something about that.

There is – and I don't think it's calculated. I don't think that Donald Trump doesn't like that Big Mac or Quarter Pounder. I think he does like it all the time. And there's something about that that if you're – you're just – I mean if you're just sick and tired of this – the gentrification of every part of American society, of the smug – That's not even liberal. That's why you go for a man of the people like Trump. That's like – the billionaire who eats McDonald's seems like – he seems real. I mean I ain't voting for him but he seems real.

Oh, I don't deny that he's real. I mean I don't deny that any of these guys aren't authentic. That's irrelevant to me. I would prefer somebody actually who was utterly artificial in their public statements and positions if I trusted them to do a certain set of policy. I don't care. Any politician by definition is a manufactured construct and Donald Trump is just a different kind that just seems much more authentic. I mean, how many times are we told by the rest of his minions that he's going to change that? Well, that's not really what he means. Well, we're going to soften the Muslim ban. Eh, the wall's going to be, you know, it's going to have a couple of doors. I mean, so that authenticity, that telling it like it is, is already being walked back a little bit because he's a politician. I mean, this is not a criticism.

It's just a fact of the matter, right? So, I mean, Bill Clinton ate Big Macs too, and people loved it for the same reason. Oh, he's one of us. He's one of us. No, he's a scheming, emotionally damaged, vaguely sociopathic figure clawing his way up to get as much money and tail as he possibly can. If that's you, then that's you. But I'm just saying, no, don't misunderstand the plebeian food habits for anything that connects. Yeah, well, but look, it's going to be long four months or five months.

How many months do we have? Was that Mitt Romney's problem? Mitt Romney did not walk out there with a Chick-fil-A and say, I am enjoying very much this manufactured shredded poultry product as I push it into my mouth. Well, the problem is that Mitt Romney would have said that. That's how he would have said it. He would have said it. The thing about Mitt Romney was Mitt Romney had a hard time being authentically Mitt Romney, not because he's not a real person and a charming, engaging guy and lots of fun and has a fantastic sense of humor. Because he wasn't cool.

No, no, no. It's because he put – he felt that when he walked out in front of the cameras, he had to act like somebody else. He had to act like a guy named Mitt Romney rather than just being who he really is. thing about this new media moment where you're right these tweets come right from your cerebral cortex, your reptile brain where people are very much the way they really are and the audience is extremely forgiving of the show they're watching

it's hard not to make a narrative out of this process and they kind of don't mind the fact that in the second act there are some warts, they don't really mind that they're're willing to process that our side sometimes has a hard time with that we you know we think we're going to be screaming benghazi benghazi benghazi all the way to the white house ain't gonna happen or emails emails emails all the way to white house that's not gonna happen either but there is something about the the the population now that wants to look at a show. For instance, on Snapchat.

Snapchat is a gigantic juggernaut. I don't quite 100% understand it probably because I am no longer 20. But if you are 20, you understand it. It raised a billion eight yesterday in a series F round. I think series F means that went through all those other rounds to get there. It has a huge number of monthly active users, daily active users. It's gigantic. And what's the salient part of Snapchat?

It's now beyond sending nudes, self-deleting nudes to your whatever. It's a thing called My Story that you make a little movie of your day i think it's good it expires 24 hours and it's called my story of all these snapchat users out making little stories they call my story i mean they're actually calling it a story and there's something about that that's remarkably remarkably different and new and I don't understand it, but it has ramifications across the spectrum. Well, yeah. In one respect, if they're archivable, I think it's great.

I'm always on my daughter about the fact that she needs to back up her photos that she takes. That she is documenting on a molecular level her life, which I, as a kid, I would get maybe 12 to 16 grainy Instamatic pictures out of the entire summer. She would get those out of a minute with her friends. And because I look back and I have such scant photographic evidence, apparently all I did was have Christmas, go to camp, and then once a year I would be by a lake.

That was all I did for my life. And she has all of this stuff, and I tell her to archive it, to save it it to do so. If Snapchat permits these kids to have this sort of record on a granular level of their day-to-day, the quotidian, banal existence that they can then share with their friends and archive and keep, it's a wonderful thing. The problem is when you see the world precisely not through your own eyes looking at the great panoramic expanse of life before you, but only within the rectangular confines of this glowing rectangle in your hand. And then instead of your neck getting a crick because it's always tilted up looking at the glory of the sky, of the blue and the birds, it's always tilted down looking at the screen

in your hand. If you are ceasing to look at life as something other than a story to be constructed by these means, then interesting villains occurring from the margins, twirling their orange mustaches or threatening this or that becomes just another part of the fictional construct of your life. There's no reality to it. So I think Rob's absolutely right. There's a whole bunch of things changing the landscape out there that we do not understand. But it's odd that both the people who want to blow everything up and the people who want something completely new have chosen somebody who's 70 years old and it seems to have no idea about any of the stuff

that we're talking about from snapchat to oh i don't know let's put it this way you walk into your doctor's office and he's got his feet up in the table and he's having uh he's eating a big mac which is great because i put my feet up in the table and i like a big mac and those are good fries but there's something not professional about it just like you wouldn't want to walk into your financial advisor and the guy's there, you know, scratching himself and looking at a well-thumbed copy of this. They had, you want a certain level of decorum. If we completely abandoned decorum,

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No fees. Go to Betterment.com slash Ricochet. That's Betterment.com slash Ricochet. Betterment. It's investment made better. How we welcome to the podcast Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center. And of course, everyone's been talking this week about Facebook. Supposedly, they're going to be nice with conservatives.

And the day after, they start posting the most innocent little, you know, let's help babies thing as anti-abortion. People are saying their posts are still being censored. Nothing seems to have changed. Should we just let Facebook do what Facebook wants to do? Well, Facebook has already started doing what they said they were going to do. Look, it was off the record, but I can say this much. I'll say what I said. Between two organizations I have, we have 19 million Facebook fans. We probably have more than everybody combined. I've never had a problem with Facebook. I also think that some people who are putting forward some of the problems don't understand how Facebook works. That said, there was too much smoke for

there not to be a fire. But the question is, what kind of fire is it? And I don't think people were understanding and are still understanding exactly what's going on. Number one, the problem with the trending news operation, that even though the Facebook people said it wasn't systemic, it kind of was, but they didn't see what it was. They were relying on ten news outlets, eight of which were liberal, and there was your problem. Now what have they done about that? They said they're not going to do it anymore. They're not going to use any news outlets for their stories. That, to me, should resolve that problem. The second problem is that you have had some examples of some sites that have had some material taken down.

That's not a Facebook corporate policy. What they've got is some problems down there. And they may have a person out of tens of thousands who is doing that, and they've got to find out who that person was and get rid of it. But it's not a Facebook policy. And I think people have to step back and take a deep breath on this. The final point I'm going to make on this is YouTube has caused more problems for conservatives. Google has caused more problems for conservatives. Neither YouTube nor Google are meeting with

conservatives saying we want to resolve the problems. We got to give Facebook a little bit of credit. Let's see what happens. If they're not doing a good job, if it continues, absolutely. We need to speak out on it. But some people I think are just out of line on this where they are just condemning any effort whatsoever by Facebook to try to do anything. Hey, Brent, it's Rob Long in New York City. Good to talk to you again. So I got a question, a little tangential what we're talking about, but still I think part of the larger issue. Are we as conservatives or center-right, are we trying to communicate with each other or are we trying to get in – I mean use the Facebook analogy, get in someone else's news feed? I mean because I have no trouble on my Facebook news feed seeing lots and lots of conservative stuff.

But I also know liberals who have no trouble seeing lots of liberal stuff. They just never see the conservative side. I mean is all of this sort of social media and the tailoring of your news to suit your perspective, is that going to help us? I feel like that's going to hurt us. I think what's going to help us and why Facebook presents us as conservatives with such an extraordinary potential. The beauty of Facebook is in the friends-to-friends perspective of it. And this is what I mean by it. The Obama digital director said it all after the 2012 campaign when he said,

people don't trust politicians. People don't trust the media. Who do people trust? Their friends. The whole dynamic of Facebook is friends-to-friends. You have the average person has 200, 300, of Facebook is friends to friends. The average person has two, three hundred, whatever it is, Facebook friends. Who are they? They're your college buddies. They are your family. They're your neighbors. They're your work colleagues. And if you think about them,

a whole bunch of them don't think the way you think, and yet they're your friends. So what's the impact of that? They will believe and take seriously your and yet they're your friends. So what's the impact of that? They will believe and take seriously your messages because they're your friends. Think about it this way. The average television commercial is believed by 15, 1.5% of the public. If you take that exact same commercial and you share it with your friends, the believability rate goes up to 74%. That's the opportunity that we have, which is to tell our story beyond our immediate circle through Facebook. So it's a huge potential that we have. So I guess what you're saying, Brent, is that in the social media, distributed media world of an editorless universe, right?

There's no New York Times editorial board. There's no CBS News editorial board. There's nobody there to adjudicate the left wing or impose the left wing perspective. It's a win for us, right? It's a win if you're looking at their standard marketplace of ideas where people communicate, the problem that they had was with their trending news, which is a new formula that they used. And by the way, it was a two-layer. I explained how their primary source was ten news outlets, eight of them being liberal. But then they used a secondary source, which was –

So what were the two that weren't uh the wall street journal and i forget which other one maybe a ricochet probably not um that's uh that's interesting like that that i mean did it seem like when you were there that they that they they speak conservative as like a foreign language. They don't quite even understand it. Not only that, but what I found impressive was that Mark Zuckerberg and his team presented that as the problem. We weren't presenting it to them. They were presenting it to us. They were saying, look, we understand.

You are in the belly of the beast. This is the most far left liberal spot in America. We are that here. We don't understand you, and we need to understand the conservative perspective to have a neutral marketplace of ideas. So they were very forthcoming on their personal biases in this conversation. Can I just ask you to look at that on the timeline of your life you have been fighting this fight about liberal media bias for i mean too long yeah well i mean you know decades multi-decades right have you ever from a major media outlet or organization or contraption or however you want to put Facebook, whatever category you want to put Facebook, have you ever had a reaction or a conversation like that? That's my point.

You just made my point. What I said to them was this, that they could take the position if they wanted to that conservatives are troglodytes and can go pound sand, and Facebook is the big kid on the block because we've gone into the information age and they are the biggest. And therefore, you know, they just wanted us to tell us to go to hell, and as soon as we leave, they could fumigate the boardroom. And so I said, you know, you can take that attitude, but just remember this, that this is exactly what the networks said in the 1980s, and that was their attitude, and they were the big kids on the block.

But as soon as there was competition, you saw their numbers crumble because conservatives now could go to talk radio, now could go to Fox, now could go to the Internet, and they left them by droves. It was interesting that Zuckerberg immediately said, that is exactly what my concern is here. And so, no, I've not ever heard a liberal outlet say, please sit down and tell us how we can do a better job. So, there will continue to be problems. I know that. And we'll continue to have to focus on that. But I think there is a positive attitude coming. Brent, Peter Robinson here.

I'm following up on Rob's question, the Brent Bozell lifetime line, because it's coincidental with much of my own. So you and I both go back to the 1980s, three phases of conservatives in the press. Phase one, when Brent Bozell begins his career, it's in the 80s. There are a handful of dominant media outlets. You could count them on the thing. Really, three networks that mattered. One newspaper that mattered,

the New York Times and the Washington Post, if you were in Washington. The Wall Street Journal editorial page was only beginning to achieve its influence. The Wall Street Journal had not yet become a newspaper of national importance. Tiny number of outlets. They were all biased against us. Bad. Phase two of three, the internet comes along and we generally, I believe, we tended to rejoice and say, look at this multiplicity of outlets. They'll no longer be able to achieve this chokehold on us. We have Rush Limbaugh.

We have Fox News. We have people. Ricochet and phase three, which is what we're in now, is this creeping sense that a few – it's happening all over again. That what we thought was this glorious multiplicity of outlets in the internet, it turns out all seem in one way or another to run through a few huge companies, Google, which you mentioned has given you trouble, Facebook, which is being open and attempting to fix its problems, but which nevertheless, by its own admission, as you just said, is in the belly of the beast. It's a biased organization. It may recognize that. It may have all the goodwill in the world, but it's still out here.

So we've gone from New York and Washington media outlets to Northern California controlling things. Are we better off or not? Well, you're sending up some warning flares, and they're well-placed. Look with the Internet. There became an immediate opportunity for conservatives to become storytellers, which is what I believe so firmly we need to become.

I don't think, I mean, the Trump phenomena tells you that people don't understand conservatism anymore. I think they do, but they don't. And they don't understand the value proposition of conservatism. That's what you get across through storytelling. And I think Rob would understand this better than I would. Storytelling is so important. Who else understood the importance of storytelling? George Soros. put up over $200 million per year in investigative reporting alone.

Think about that number. It is almost incomprehensible how much money that is in the world of public policy. That's how important they find this. And we're not on the same wavelength, unfortunately, as they are. But then you get into social media. And in social media, this is where you're seeing the potential problem.

The problem that Facebook came up with was what they called their curators. These were people who had been brought into Facebook to make sure that Facebook, the Facebook community, doesn't do bad things. And what are bad things?

Promoting terrorism, promoting suicide, the KKK, whatever it might be, the revolting, the seriously offensive things that you need to take off your site. But what happens then? There's your slippery slope. Well, the next offensive thing might become Frank Gaffney or the Family Research Council because far-left groups do find them to be offensive. And you can see the cherry-picking beginning there.

And so you have to be wary of that. What's the most frightening proposition? That Google and YouTube and Amazon and all these guys, Netflix, they're all coming out of the same community. What if they decided one day, you know, we're going to capture public opinion in this country and we're going to tell, because the far left is going into this fascistic mode throughout society, what if they went into that mode themselves? Boy, that would be a problem, wouldn't it?

It really would. It would. So when we tell these stories, how do we get them to get wider traction? James O'Keefe can tell a story, and it's immediately shot down because it doesn't fit the narrative that the still large mainstream media wants to tell. Katie Couric tells a story in Lies, and it gets out there as a he-said-she-said story. And that's how most people see it. Do we run the problem of...

I mean, the great thing about having all these conservative sources on the Internet is we can go there and people understand the terms and the ideas and the philosophies. But maybe if I'd wanted to marginalize the right back in the 80s, I would have invented talk radio and the Internet because they can just go off there and live in their bubbles and the rest of the nets and the new emerging technologies will take care of everybody else. We have our own stories. How do we get them out? Well, you know, it's what you say and how you say it. And there's a technique as with any medium. And our movement has got to learn how to master the techniques of social media. We have spent millions of dollars in this platform, many millions of dollars,

which is why we have 19 million Facebook fans. But we have an ability to reach about 10 million people every week and another 15 million or so who aren't our people, who are the next generation of people through storytelling. When Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty was knocked out, was suspended from A&E for quoting the Bible, we went public on that. We told that story. We got 11 million people knew about this within about 36 hours. Charlie Daniels, the country western singer, produced this beautiful, beautiful, I don't know if you folks have seen it, this beautiful love story about why he loves America.

I put the music, and it was released on July 4th last year. Well, he gave it to us on July 3rd. We put it out. We know of over 20 million views that it got. So there are ways to tell these stories. Sometimes it ain't easy. And sometimes it's not, you know, it's not exactly Milton Friedman that you're talking about here in social media, but you just have to learn how to tell that story. The other side, the other side is spending fortunes to do it. Well, then let's gin up our fundraising machinery and beat them with the stories. By the way, one point on this. The Obama campaign in 2012 spent $100 million on digital media.

That was the single highest expenditure of the entire campaign. They understood that digital media, that social media, really is transcending television as the medium to change public opinion in this country. And it was telling to me that Obama built such a massive, he had 38 million Facebook fans around the world, but he had built such a massive following that on election day, the message was, now let's all go out and vote. And they were masterful about it. Meanwhile, poor Mitt Romney, do you know what he was doing with his Facebook fans on Election Day? No. Selling baseball caps for $25 a piece.

Well, I'm sure they were high-quality baseball caps. The people who have them today have found them washable and that the band still sticks in the back. Yeah, the sign on them was, make that the band still sticks in the back. Yeah, the sign on them was Make America Great in about four years. Yes. All right, when we come back to how the media is doing and what we can do about it and how to tell our own stories, we'll go to Brent Bizzell. Thank you for joining us today on the podcast, sir. Have a great weekend.

Thanks, Brent. Thank you. Yes, indeed. Well, I ignore Facebook. And it's not because i'm opposed to it and i don't want to put anything out there i just get too much other stuff to do on the internet and it's boring i find it boring and i find it ugly i find everything about facebook to be ugly um and i had to turn off the notifications that would constantly say you have 23 people who want to be your friends and you haven't talked to these people in 17 days and these people would like to

talk to you what do you do about this i just just turned that part off. As a matter of fact, I, well, I couldn't have black-holed it because I didn't have black-hole. Oh, I'd do it today, let me tell you. What's the black-hole? It's a very good question, but first you have to ask this question. How many emails do you have in your inbox right now? 100? 1,000? 20,000? Well, if your email is anything like mine used to be, the answer is too many. And one, frankly, can be too many. Here's the thing, though. Even though I know I wanted to do something about my email, I didn't know how to.

Because you can go through the junk. You can go through this. You can go, oh, I didn't answer this. This needs more time. What am I doing? I'm just going to delete. I know I'd miss something important if I just hit mass delete. And as satisfying as that would be, you never know what's back in there.

There's just too much stuff to go through one at a time. Then, finally, we learned the secret to matching inbox zero, like Rob Long. That's the guy who's got that. And taking back your email sanity. Rob's the same guy. Doesn't he strike you as a well-balanced individual? That's because probably SaneBox has made his life easier. Can't recommend it enough.

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same box.com slash ricochet. Well, from the member feed this week, Quinn, the Eskimo says that Bob Dylan turned 75. And what's your favorite Bob Dylan lyric. And wait, wait, let's not, let's not speeder. Peter, I know you're a big Dylan, Bob Dylan turned 75 and what's your favorite Bob Dylan lyric? And, uh, wait, wait, let's, let's, let's Peter, Peter.

I know you're a big Dylan, Bob Dylan fan. What's your favorite Bob Dylan lyric? I can only name one and I'm not even sure whether this is Bob Dylan or Simon and Garth. Where have all the flowers gone? Is that Dylan? Oh, Peter. Oh, that hurts my head to hear you say that. But that, I only know that because Bill Bennett mentions it in the Book of Virtues.

I don't know. Is that a Dylan lyric? It's the only one I can possibly name. Is that a Virtue song? Long time passing? Yeah. Isn't that Dylan? I think it's.

No, it's one of those sappy singer-songwriter types. Not James Taylor. No, stop. Peter, stop talking now. Trini Lopez. Don't speak anymore. Don't speak anymore. Oh, I love getting to Rob.

And this is totally, this is authentic, baby. I really mean it. Trini Lopez is the only person I can name. Okay. I'll mute myself. James, are you there? Or have you had a stroke?

I'm here and I had a stroke. Here's the thing. When it comes to Bob Dylan, I don't, this is what I'm looking for, like him. And I never have liked him. And I have found him tiresome to listen to and tiresome to analyze. Then why? Because some people think that there's truth there. And it's very easy for me to go

from my Bob Dylan to my Peter Lorre, so I better stop. Because he was part of an iconic time. Because he was part of the restless 60s. And because he was an individual, an iconoclast, who went electric and changed a generation. Because his enigmatic lyrics

cast a light upon the confusing era that flirted over America like the smoke from Kent State, etc. I wish that was a segue. I just find it all tiresome. But I know people who love him and I'm so enjoying it. Yeah. People I know, we know people who love this guy.

It just doesn't work for me. You mean among all three of us, nobody's going to stick up for Bob Dylan? Wait, wait, wait. I mean, sticking up for him is not the same thing as saying it's Trini Lopez. By the way, I just looked it up. Where have all the flowers gone? Was Peter if that helps.

So what's your favorite Bob Dylan lyric? Got to serve somebody. Got to serve somebody. Yeah. Well, that fits your pretty much your Republican mindset, doesn't it? Chains shackles for everybody.

Yeah. Cause it's the latter debt Dylan, like doesn't it? It's changed shackles for everybody. It's because it's the latter Dylan, like after the 60s nonsense. Well, I think there was the Christian Dylan that made a lot of people uncomfortable. I think they just kind of waited for him to get out of that phase. Finally, if Dylan had gone fundamentalist Christian, it was like learning that Prince was

actually a Jehovah Witness. He just didn't quite connect with people. Show business trivia. Dylan is part owner of a boxing gym, yes, in the basement of a coffee shop, a coffee house thing in Santa Monica, the 18th Street Coffee House. Downstairs is a private boxing gym,

and there's like a little hallel. I think it's a Jewish education center also attached to the building somewhere. And is there anything there with the memorabilia of Reuben Hurricane Carter who could have been the heavyweight champion of the world? A song played interminably at the bar that I live in. In the coffee shop, there are pictures of him and then the basement itself is sort of private. You can't go in there unless you remember that, Jim. But I used to see Dylan there.

I would see Jacob Dylan getting coffee and I would see his son Jacob and I'd see Gary Shandling there all the time. That's interesting. Could you just hold on? This is not even beginning to compute. Bob Dylan in my mind is – you can call him a great musician even though I – so I'll grant that. But isn't he rather a small, a slight person? What, a boxer? I don't understand. This doesn't even compute.

He doesn't box there. He's just training. All right. So that's part of your member feed. You can go argue about that if you like there, if you please. Let's end with this, however. We've got this Peter Thiel v. Gawker thing.

And for some people, this is like the Iran war. They wish they both could lose. And some people are saying, yes, good. Finally, Gawker is being slapped down. Other people are worried that Thiel is using his money to exact some sort of revenge personally on a news organization. Because revenge exacting, well, that's the news organization's job, don't you know? Yeah, right, right.

Anybody worried about this? I am not only not worried about it, I actively support Peter. I think he did the right thing. I think he was absolutely entitled to do that. We live in a country where if you are a news organization or I don't know what organization

and you publish stuff like that, then you are liable. And the idea that your protection from punishment is that the people that you victimize don't have the resources to take you to court is no idea of justice. And all that happened here was that the guy with an actual – with actual standing to sue Gawker has a friend who has the resources um and that is what we call justice i love i subscribe to every word of that i'm with rob on every word of it was a really great tweet yesterday and i forget who did it said something like um evil Evil Corporation publishes revenge porn against a national hero.

Gay vigilante strikes a blow for justice. And progressives and liberals side with the corporation. That's exactly what happened. And there's no reason that we shouldn't be cheering. And I do. It's a wonderful thing. Before we go, can I just say one thing? Last night, I was the guest

of along with Blue Yeti, of a prominent New York philanthropist. We sat at a big table for the USS Intrepid Museum, a fundraiser for the museum. Incredibly interesting night. Intrepid is fantastic. If you're going to be in new york city you should go see it um speaker vice president joe biden

um people around the table and in the whispers are all saying the same thing which is if hillary keeps trailing trump or emails keep going up they'll find a way to dump her and replace her with Biden. And if they do, you know, he's an impressive guy. He's an impressive speaker. So I don't know. Prediction, Peter, you think it's going to happen? I think my prediction runs as follows. If Hillary is trailing Trump by Trump, Trump passed her.

What was it? Two or three days ago in the real clear politics amalgamation of polls, he passed her, what was it, two or three days ago in the Real Clear Politics amalgamation of polls. He passed her by two-tenths of one percent, but still he passed her. And as best I can tell, this is causing panic among the Hillary camp. If she's down by five points or more this time next month, they'll find a way to dump her. They will find a way to dump her, I think. Afore mentioned 1992 convention we were talking about Rob, the Intrepid

I was sitting at the Marriott writing a piece and Dave Barry comes over and says listen I got us into this fundraiser tonight on the Intrepid it's a $20,000 $30,000 hype the fabulous Thunderbirds are playing let's go, so we go so we take a cab over to the Intrepid and there's nobody dancing

there's just all of these old guys and their young daughters and the fabulous Thunderbirds and about 100 people and nobody's dancing. It's a lot of fun. We drank and we drank and we drank and we drank. And at the end of the night, I just remember that one of the young members of the party found himself behind some gun emplacement and was just sort of like pretending that he was

bombing Times Square from this ship as he was hammered out of his head. Boom! Which said a lot about that 1992, you know? We got to blow it all up. And they did. And now here we are again. Thanks, everybody, for listening to the podcast.

Don't go because we have to tell you something you don't know, and that's this. The great courses, SaneBox, and Betterment.com. Hot. You knew that, right? And you also know that Ricochet is your coupon code in all of those places. You can get lots of stuff for your life to make it better and easier and cheaper there. Lots of great Ricochet swag in our store as well. Enjoy Ricochet 2.0 now before it becomes overhauled again,

and there will be gnashing and wailing and rending of garments, but you'll be all delighted when all the dust settles. Have a good Memorial Day weekend. Peter, Rob, it's been a pleasure, and we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet2. We know. Happy Memorial Day. Oh, and happy Memorial Day. Yes, yes.

The start of summer, really, isn't it? ¶¶ Summer time And the living is easy Fish are jumping And the cotton is high Oh, your daddy's rich And your ma is good-looking So hush Little baby

Don't You cry One of these mornings You're gonna rise I'm singing Yes, you spread your wings And you take to the sky But till that morning

There's nothing can harm you Yes, we're getting back Standing by Summertime And the living is easy Fish are jumping is easy fish are jumping and the cotton is high

for your daddy's rich and your ma is good looking. So hush, little baby, baby, don't you cry. Oh, don't you cry. Oh, don't you cry. Oh, don't you cry. Oh, don't you cry. Oh, don't you cry. Oh, don't you cry.

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