The Ricochet Podcast - Sweet Sowell Music

Episode Date: March 30, 2019

We’re a tad late in publishing this week’s show, but we think it’s worth it: we’ve got Jon Gabriel sitting in for Rob Long, the great Thomas Sowell in the first segment to discuss the reissue of his classic book Discrimination and Disparities as well as the rise of socialism, reparations, and more. Next up, the also great Andrew C. McCarthy, who stops by to discuss his famous recipe for banana... Source

Okay, I do have five minutes here. Okay. All right. Three, two, one. It's important to say I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University. As government expands, liberty contracts. It's funny.

Sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. That's a good thing. First of all, I think you missed his time. Please clap. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and John Gabriel sitting in for Rob Long. I'm James Lilacs. Today we talk to Tom Sowell and Annie McCarthy, neither of whom need any introduction. And this week, as a matter of fact, there was the big one, the big one. Here with Peter Robinson and John Gabriel to describe and discuss the big one, which seems to have left a smoking crater in the left's credibility and the press's credibility, too, I hate to say as a member of the Fifth Estate. Or is it the Fourth Estate?

Or do we promote ourselves to the Fifth Estate? So, guys, Barr says the Mueller report will be released in mid-April. What do we do until then? We forget about it. We forget about it, James. It's been two years. It's been long enough. Adam Schiff, Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told us again and again and again over those past two years that there was more than enough evidence to find the president. Well, I don't know whether he actually said guilty, but I think he did say the evidence rose to the level of an impeachable offense of collusion with the Russians. And now after two years and how many witnesses, 500 witnesses, some huge number of subpoenas, a staff of 59, many millions of dollars spent. Robert Mueller says that neither Trump nor his campaign colluded with the Russians.

Done. So take the next two weeks off until the thing is released in full. That's my advice. John? What I find amusing is just how the press is stroking their chins and very worried that Trump is weaponizing this good news. And he will lash out with vengeance. Well, I think he should be doing nothing but spiking footballs and end zones for the next couple of weeks because darn it, he earned it. You know, it's having to be drug through this when he said from the start, this is fake news. It didn't happen.

They have nothing. It's a witch hunt. Basically, he's been more accurate than our friends at CNN and MSNBC. And I think it really does hurt the Democrats, of course, but also the media. And they have not covered themselves with glory. And I think the Democrats would have been wiser spending two years triggering out how on earth they lost to a fellow named Donald Trump. But instead, they've been doing this Hail Mary pass. Essentially, there are no shortcuts in politics.

You need to convince 51 percent of the electorate to vote with you. Well, yeah, the thing about winning back the Midwest in places that are skeptical of them, you don't do that by having what you described as the intersectional Olympics. I mean, they have to do that, right? Supposedly, they've got to run as far to the left as they can and then run all the way back to the middle. But in going to the left, they've set out a series of statements that can be very easily used against them. Every one of them who was on record as saying the Green New Deal was fantastic, you know, great way to tackle this, has got something that the president can hang around their necks. And as I said in the comments at Ricochet, you know, this is the party that's now going to say, if you want your, if you like your car and your hamburger, you can keep your car and your hamburger. And I don't think a

lot of people are going to buy that from people who have to backpedal. Yeah, there is, I guess the Mueller report I just said, forget about it, probably not forget about it exactly because there is a substantive point to be made. The arguments against Donald Trump on right and left have run sort of like this. On our side, on the conservative side, well, he's no conservative. Well, that argument no longer – you really can't advance that argument now that he's appointed conservative justices – conservative judges and justices to the Supreme Court and the federal bench. He's done things that conservative presidents do, deregulation, tax cuts, and so forth. Item two, oh, he's going to be incompetent.

Well, this White House is a crazy place. There doesn't seem to be any doubt about that. But policy is getting enacted. Again, the economy is moving. Foreign policy is being sorted out. You can't really argue that he's incompetent. And then the argument on the left was, well, he has engaged in illegal or at the very least treacherous activity with the Russians. And now along comes Mueller. And that turns out simply not to have been the case. Arguments against Donald Trump as they now line up 18 months or so before he presents himself to us for reelection on November – in November 2020 are twofold. One is we don't like him. He's low and he's vulgar and a man of bad character.

And that's an argument that will carry weight with some people but it's nothing new and people are going to have to come to their own decisions about that. And then the second argument is, well, we don't like the policies pursuing. And that is the correct kind of argument for a democracy to be having. So we have narrowed it down to I just don't like the guy, which is fair enough, but really not an argument. Or here are the policies I think we should be pursuing. And here are the policies he's pursuing. And that's the right kind of argument to be having. Democracy in this country has just got a little bit cleaner, a little bit better, I think.

I think you're right. But unfortunately, I think the person on the Democratic side who makes those arguments is going to wrap it in nice Betoism that sounds palatable. And as I said, people want tone, people want sort of normalcy, and they want sunniness and the rest of it and they don't underestimate that. But again, a lot of people in the middle are just simply going to be looking at their wallets and the price of gas and figuring out that perhaps they can live with four years of tweeting. We haven't even had that much tweeting lately. So, well, before we get to our guest, and of course you're dying for that to happen as soon as possible, I have to tell you something. You know it's tax season, right? April 15th coming up.

We all hate it. A lot of us are doing our taxes and realizing, Oh yeah, this new tax law reduced many of the deductions that we used to take, but you can still take advantage of one deduction. Congress didn't touch. And that's the charitable deduction. Yeah.

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Dr. Thomas Sowell, Hoover Institution fellow economist and by far the most popular guest on Uncommon Knowledge, the show that I host. Tom, welcome and thank you for joining us. You're on with me, Peter Robinson, and with my co-host, John Gabriel, and we are talking about the new edition of your book, Discrimination and Disparities. May I read you a quotation and ask you to explain to us what you have in mind here? The fact that economic and other outcomes often differ greatly among individuals, groups, institutions, and nations poses questions to which many people give very different answers. At one end of the spectrum is the belief that those who have been less fortunate in their outcomes are genetically less capable. Racism. I get that. At the other

end of the spectrum is the belief that those less fortunate are victims of other people who are more fortunate. So we look at America, we see different groups dispersed on the economic outcomes. For that matter, different groups engaged in different professions, different education levels, and so forth, or to engage in victimology. Both of those are wrong. What's the right way of looking at it? Well, first of all, these results are not at all unique to the United States. And the fact that either or both of those causes are possible, intrincible, doesn't mean that there are not innumerable other causes that are out there. And the more you look at empirical evidence, the more reasons you find for it. One example I give in the first chapter of the book is the fact that the firstborn child and the only child normally do far better than children born later on.

And that's true not only in terms of IQ, it's true in terms of careers, incomes, accomplishments in all sorts of areas, whether among astronauts or composers of classical music. In fact, in almost any endeavor that you can think about, the outcomes are very uneven. And sometimes groups that are doing very poorly in activity A are excelling in activity B and so on. But what bothers me the most is people seem to be looking for some one cause that they can turn to and say that's the cause for this particular phenomenon. John? Yes, Dr. Sewell, this is John Gabriel.

And first, let me thank you. My older brother grew up extremely progressive when we were young until his late 20s. And I asked him what changed his mind, and he said, well, I started reading this man named Thomas Sewell. So I thank you for family harmony around Thanksgiving time. And one question that I had is we're hearing more and more about socialism. They're calling it democratic socialism, if that's a better thing. And looking at the track record of socialism, how can anyone in the right mind, even someone who isn't extremely well-read, say that this will work this time? It hasn't been tried correctly, especially looking at the news. We obviously have seen the examples during the Cold War, but especially watching the implosion

of Venezuela, which was once South America's most prosperous country. Why do you think people keep going back to this well, thinking a controlled economy is a wise move? Partly it's because we are now living in a post-empirical era where people, you and I may know that those things have not worked. I suspect that one could go through some of the most elite colleges in this country and never find out that those things never work. So they simply don't have the knowledge. The fact that the knowledge is out there doesn't mean that they know it. And it doesn't even mean that they're taught.

But the thing to do is to check beliefs against knowledge, factual information, empirically. Tom, Peter here. This is a theme. So we're talking about the new edition of your book, Discrimination and Disparities. I want to repeat the title so people go to Amazon and buy it. It's a wonderful, wonderful book. But you just touched on a theme that runs through a great deal of your writing, and that is the importance of historical understanding, the importance of confronting facts, the importance

of education. And I know because you and I have been friends for a long time that reading books was what made Tom's soul Tom's soul. It was what enabled you to overcome – well, not to overcome because there was nothing wrong with the Harlem in which you grew up, but to have this brilliant academic career. It was all involved in taking seriously the life of the mind. What? I just don't even know quite how to formulate the question. But if you look at higher education in the country, kids are smart these days. On every technical endeavor.

Here at Stanford, for example, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, but the sense of history, the sense of underlying principles, the principles that underlie this country, it just feels much weaker. Why is that? What has happened and what can be done about it?

Well, one of the things that has happened and what can be done about it well one of the things that has happened is that people aren't being taught these things back when I was on the lecture circuit years ago and I'd go around colleges around the country one of the things I like to do is go into the bookstore and go where the textbooks were stored and find out out what textbooks they should have. And leading colleges and universities around the country, there was almost never a copy of The Federalist, which is really sort of like the Constitution for Dummies. There was nothing to tell them about the history of this country,

why the Constitution is the way it is is what people were trying to achieve and avoid none of that instead I would find usually more than one course in which the Communist Manifesto was one of the texts and we're talking about a book or rather in the case of the Communist Manifesto, a document about a whole system of government and economics that had already become extinct within one century. But whose words on paper still rang very loudly and well for people who didn't know any of that.

And when you see tests of what people do and don't know, how many Americans don't even know that Franklin D. Roosevelt was president of the United States, that Stalin was, who Stalin was, and so on. This is what happens when educational institutions simply fail to educate because they have other agendas. So the reparations, the idea of reparations for slavery seems to have become a live issue again. You and I have discussed on Uncommon Knowledge a long essay that Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in The Atlantic. David Brooks just had a piece, A Case for Reparations. This was in the last couple of weeks in The New York Times.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is talking about the importance of making reparations payments. What's your general view on the very idea of reparations for slavery? Well, first of all, it's based, again, on a lack of knowledge of history. Slavery is not something unique to the United States or to either blacks or whites. Chances are most of – well, slavery was universal around the world for thousands of years. It's an institution that goes back as far as human history goes back. And I strongly believe that an absolute majority of the people in the world today are descendants of slaves. Right.

But again, people don't study the history of slavery around the world. And there is quite a history. Right where I'm sitting, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, there are five shelves of books on slavery around the world. And so it's not something unique to blacks and whites. There's no large race that I know of that was either exempt from being slaves or exempt from being slave owners. And Tom, the notion that African Americans are uniquely disadvantaged in this country because of the legacy of slavery, that if the statistics still show, as indeed they do, that there is a disparity in education levels and in income levels and even in family cohesiveness between white Americans and black Americans, all of that must be the result.

That must be the legacy of slavery. And how do you respond to that assertion? Again, it's the look, it's the search for one cause that is either the cause or the dominant cause for everything. This goes all the way into natural phenomena like the global warming thing. Yes, there's no question that greenhouse gases can cause the temperatures to rise, but there are other factors that can outweigh that in innumerable ways. But this notion, and I guess this too is part of not teaching people how to think.

A may cause B, but C, D, E, and F may cause D, and a thousand other things may cause it. It's not unique to any particular issue. And Dr. Sewell, this is John Gabriel again. You have warned of the dangers of the social justice vision, and I just want to re-quote from you. Confiscating physical wealth for the purpose of redistribution is confiscating something that will be used up over time and cannot be replaced without the human capital that created it. Nor is human capital itself easily created by third-party decision-makers. While it's impossible to hire teachers and buy books, it is not possible to purchase a cultural past which will prepare and orient all people toward the acquisition of skills,

habits, and attitudes that are decisive for human capital. How do you think the social justice vision, which has just dominated our politics more each year, it seems, how has it gotten so much traction, do you think? Well, it's an attractive vision. And if it could be produced, it might be an attractive reality. But there have been so many attempts to produce it without it actually being produced. What it does is produce enormous frustration because the belief is fostered that only the

opposition of people who want to keep other people down is what stops this state of affairs from coming about. There are so many things wrong with the social justice vision that it would take us hours to go through it. But I think one of the things that people don't realize is that that vision is itself one of the impediments to people rising from poverty because it says to them if you're poor somebody else has done this to you maliciously if that's true why in the world should you have to go through a whole life change and devote yourself to hard work, to acquiring knowledge and skills and so forth, when your real problem is that somebody else is holding you down. I mean, social mobility is not an easy thing. And the social justice vision gives you a reason for believing it's not going to be worth it

because you're not going to let you get up anyway. I think of a young man, a couple of cases of young men who said that they wanted to be pilots and that they thought about joining the U.S. Air Force so that they could learn to fly. But then these are young black men, but then they said, but the man is not going to let some black man learn to fly. And this was said decades after there was a whole black squadron of fighter pilots in World War II. And after there were already black men who had been generals in the U.S. Air Force. But they don't know that. And they're taught the opposite, that there's no point and they're trying to learn to fly because the white man is not going to let them fly.

Tom, Peter here once again. So we have, I'm trying to, you make the point that the social vision, social justice vision is a problem in and of itself. OK, I understand that. And then you also make the point, you've touched on it here, but we've discussed it at some length in Uncommon Knowledge shows, that if you look at the actual lived history of African-Americans, a whole century of history from emancipation at the, well, Emancipation Proclamation takes place, but from the Civil War, from emancipation at the – well, Emancipation Proclamation takes place. But from the Civil War, from Emancipation at the Civil War to the civil rights legislation, the Great Society of 1965, you've got a whole century. And what it shows is on one front after another, on one measure after another, African-Americans

are making rapid progress in educational attainment, in income, family cohesion. And then the trouble begins – many kinds of trouble begin with the Great Society in 1965. OK. All of that and yet there's still – there's still these disparities and there's still – I see it among students all the time. We need to do something. The situation still isn't right. We need to do something. The situation still isn't right. We need to do something. Answer that.

What would you say to the kids who say something must be done? I would say, yes, go do it. I mean... Go to the library and study, get a job, work hard, that sort of thing? Well, the very fact that, as I point out in the latest edition of the book, the poverty rate among blacks in general is 22% compared to 11% among whites. But among black married couples, the poverty rate is 7.5. And the poverty rate among black married couples

has never been as high as 20% as 10% rather at any time in the past 20 years so we don't need to guess and grope for some magic way blacks can rise the ones who do this have already risen but of course again if you don't know that, that it's the same as if it never happened.

So what I want to make sure I've got this clearly in mind here, because you're saying something that strikes me as really important and radical. So let's make sure I've got it. I'm a little slow, Tom, as you know. In the United States of America, what African-Americans have to do to rise is what anybody else has to do to rise. You work hard. You stay in school. You get married and stay married.

And you don't have kids until after you get married. Education, hard work, take family life seriously. And that pretty much is all you need to do in this great wealthy country of opportunity. Is that right? Or is that a caricature of your position? No, it's so plain and simple that people are not willing to believe because they want something that's more complicated and provides more of a moral melodrama. Tom, it just worries me because you're telling all of us, oh, sit up. Sit up and do your homework and behave, and everything's going to be fine. And I'm just not sure that's a very palatable political message.

Let me ask you this. It's not nearly as exciting as marching and shouting and doing all those kinds of things. But, you know, one of the few hopeful signs on the horizon are some of the charter school networks. I mean, there are charter schools in Harlem which not only exceed the national average on math tests, but which there's one particular charter school in Harlem where the fifth grade class back in 2013 had the highest scores in math of any fifth grade class anywhere in the entire state of New York.

So it's not like we have to guess what can happen under the right circumstances. It's already happened. And the charter schools, what's different about the Tom, what's different about the charter schools? They're getting the, the, the, the instruction is rigorous. The kids are, are asked to do their homework. They have family support. What is different about the charter schools? What sets them up? What, what permits them to produce these wonderful results? All those common sense things that you just mentioned are in fact common. Now, if you want to spend your time teaching these kids to have resentments about what happened among dead people a century and a half ago, you can do that.

But if you want to teach them math, they're liable to find that the math is much more useful to them if they want to go into almost any profession these days where math is increasingly part of the foundation on which the knowledge is based. And this is John Gabriel again. Dr. Sewell, I have one more question for you. How would you, dominating our news cycle is whatever Donald Trump tweeted on a certain

day, but what is your analysis looking at the past two plus years of how he's done so far, especially economically? Well, things have gotten better by and large. And in fact, again, here's one thing. In fact, I doubt that most young people know that the unemployment rate among blacks and Hispanics is lower than it has been in decades. But people aren't judging by facts anymore. They're judging by rhetoric. If someone comes out there, and in fact, again, reverting to the charter school things, I mean,

there are people out there who are fighting against charter schools because the charter schools make the unions unhappy, make the education establishment unhappy, and so forth. The fact is they are educating black kids to a level that nobody expected them to be educated to before the charter schools came along. It's Peter once again, Discrimination and Disparities. We've been discussing the new edition of your book. Thank you for joining us, and I'll be seeing you on Monday.

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former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. You know, that's the one that's on all the T-shirts nowadays. And a contributing editor to National Review, senior fellow at the National Review Institute. Andy, welcome back. We've got a clip to play for you. Roll it, Yeti. You might think it's okay that he took that meeting. You might think it's okay that Paul Manafort, the campaign chair, someone with great experience in running campaigns, also took that meeting. You might think it's okay that the president's son-in-law also took that meeting. You might think it's okay that they concealed it from the public.

You might think it's okay that their only disappointment after that meeting was that the dirt they received on Hillary Clinton wasn't better. It's almost like a Jeff Foxworthy bit, isn't it? If you think it's OK, you might be a Putin stooge. Andy, is it OK? Well, it's legally it's OK. I think politically and to my mind, it's not OK in a you know, in the sense of somebody who thinks that we shouldn't encourage foreign interference in the elections and candidates shouldn't be dealing with repulsive regimes to get dirt on their opponents. You know, I don't think that's OK, but there's a big difference between is it OK and is it illegal? And here's my bottom line take.

I'm going to actually, in my column over the weekend at National Review, take one more stab at trying to clarify collusion. Although after two plus years, I don't see how it's going to make much difference. But what a prosecutor cares about and what registers in the criminal law is conspiracy to violate a law. And I think anybody who engages in that in a serious way, especially with a regime like Russia, that's something that ought to be dealt with very harshly. If we're going to get down to non-criminal concerted activity, it's perfectly fine by me if we condemn all of it. But then I think that we have to recognize that that's not a Trump problem. You know, it is a Trump problem in this particular this particular instance that you that you've

just Adam Schiff is just describing there. But, you know, it's a much bigger problem than Trump. And, you know, my my only view of that is that I'm happy to look at it. I just think we should look at everybody's activity along those lines. Well, that's what, oh, I'm sorry. No, no, go ahead, James. That's what's interesting about this. I mean, if, if Melania had Trump, Trump had gone to Russia, had a private meeting with Putin and his DACA, and then taken half a million dollars to give a speech to some people. And then a business deal was, uh, greased down the road that gave a strategic mineral interest to Russia. You would think that that would be a matter of greater import than what the, you know,

Trump, Donald Trump jr. Having that stupid meeting at the tower with the, with the Russian agent would be, but nobody seems to care about that. And frankly, a lot of people in the left just don't even seem to know about it. Yeah.

You know, I, James, I don't have a lot of sympathy for Trump in terms of his dealings with a lot of these Russians who have very concerning connections. And I think, you know, it was he who decided to bring Manafort and Gates into the campaign. You know, most most people might have taken five minutes to Google the guy. You know, he didn't do that. Or if he did, he didn't care, which is probably worse in some ways. But this is a broader problem. And I just think Trump is, to me me like the guy who is left without a chair when the music stops.

You know, for for for 30 years, we go on with enemy in the in the formal legal sense, but certainlyanchist ambitions and the like, what you would get told is the 1980s gold and they want their foreign policy back and you're an old, crazy, cold warrior. Yeah, but to Trump's, okay, so Peter here, Andy. Yeah. It's a question of, I mean, I'm thinking twice here because I find myself somewhat disagreeing with my friend, Andy McCarthy. And first of all, that's arresting in and of itself. When have I ever disagreed with you before? And then the second place is also slightly scary because you're a pretty good at polemicist. So I have to be careful here. You don't thrash me. But look, here's – first of all, all of this Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort, well-established, they're sleazy.

It's been established that they're sleazy for months and months and months. It seems clear that Donald Trump at this stage wishes he'd never met either one of them. Does it speak well of Trump that he hired them? No, it doesn't. But on the other hand, that's two years old. And Donald Trump may have played footsie with Putin in some ignorant way early and during the campaign, but good Lord, he has not been pro-Russia or pro-Putin

in any substantive way at all. We had, what was it, just last summer, as I recall, it was the biggest NATO exercise in Poland, right on the Russian border, coordinated and led by American troops. I'm just saying the Mueller report, the big news here is not that Donald Trump surrounded himself with sleazy characters. That's old and it's not illegal. And it's not that Donald Trump was foolish in his dealings with Putin many months ago. Again, it's old and it's not illegal. And it's not that Donald Trump was foolish in his dealings with Putin many months ago. Again, it's old and it's not illegal.

The big news here is that after two years, during which incidentally Adam Schiff, now the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said over and over and over again that there was evidence of collusion. Mueller has said no. There is no evidence of illegal collusion or I don't know the phrasing from the report. We have yet to see the report yet. But there was no collusion. Isn't that the big news? Aren't we still allowed to revel in this, even though Karl Rove wrote a piece in The Wall Street Journal the other day saying move on from Mueller, Mr. President? I think Trump gets 10 days to gloat. What do you think, Andy?

I don't I don't I don't think we disagree. I'm trying to answer the questions as they come up. The first question was, is this OK? I think it's sure that's that's complicated. And secondly, Peter, with due respect and you know how much I respect you, even as you just concluded your remarks, you went from collusion to illegal collusion, back to collusion and to illegal collusion. This is the line. I do have to be straightened out on these things. You're right. I mean, it's not the problem here is unfairly accused for two years, I don't know if I'd be that fastidious while I was out there saying there was absolutely positively no collusion. But, you know, you have the Trump people saying that what Mueller's report says, and I do agree,

by the way, that Mueller's report is something to be celebrated, not only for Trump, but for the country. of the conclusions, what Mueller says is that there was no conspiracy or coordination in either the hacking scheme of Russia or the social media propaganda scheme. Mueller didn't undertake to address other forms of non-criminal concerted activity, and he didn't, at least so far as we've seen, address much in the way, or at least that Barr has outlined, address Trump associations with Russians and the activities that they engaged in. And I think just for my own, now, I'm not a political guy, I'm a legal guy. So take this for what it's worth. But as a as a legal strategist, I always wanted to draw the sting of the bad news before the jury heard it from the other side. Right. And I think it's a real mistake to frame this report as if it said absolutely positively no collusion, because I sense that when Bill Barr gives us the 400 pages of it, what we're going to see is what is evidence that they looked at that they ultimately decided was

insufficient for criminal charges, but still involves at times some disturbing connections with with Russian people. I see. I see. So you think there is news still to come and that the that the Trump the Trump camp will take no comfort from it when that when as much of the report as Barr feels he can release is made public? Well, I don't know that it's news because I think we know most of it. But but I do think that, look, you know, I heard that I've had my disagreements over time with Trey Gowdy, but I heard him, I think it was yesterday or the day before in an interview, say that the old Justice Department line that what prosecutors should do is indict people if there's a case and shut up if there isn't one. And I don't I really don't think, you know, in a perfect world,

we would not be getting Mueller's report. We would have we'd have at most Barr's outline of it. And I'm you know, there's no there's no reason to fight this because politically it can't be fought. We're going to get some version of the report. But, you know, be prepared for that to be abused. I see. I see. And what they're going to do is they're going to mine facts out of it, just like Schiff is doing now. They're going to mine facts out of it and turn it into and they're going to say quite rightly, by the way, that Congress doesn't have to find a crime to impeach someone or to be concerned. They just need to find concerted activity that they think is disturbing. And I think what they're going to end up saying is that Mueller's found it to a fairly well. But I think that's been priced in already. I mean, I think the people who want this, who want him impeached and frog marched out and all the rest of it are nothing would dissuade them. And if they try to make that case to the general public, the people are going to look

around and say, well, wait a minute. we thought the report was out and there was nothing to it, et cetera. What are you guys going on about? Um, but they may be so desperate and convinced that the Republic will fall or they will be in trouble that that's what they do. You're, you're quite right. I just, I, um, I, I, I think this, there's a bow has been tied around it, not by the people who are obsessive about it, but by the people who follow headlines glancingly. And I don't think it's going to work for the Democrats if they try to say it. Yeah, I think that's fair. I think that we're at the point where few people are going to be convincible anymore that there's anything groundbreaking here.

And everybody is kind of where they're at you know that they're uh i think most people will accept muller's conclusion that there's no crime that there's no conspiratorial collusion and let's face it that's that's important because that's a more that's a more serious and disturbing you know if you're talking espionionage, it's a much more disturbing species of collusion than just like the Trump Tower deal. Andy, let me ask you one other big question here. I know John Gabriel is on the line and it's only fair to let him get in. I can feel his elbow in my ribs right now. So Andy, if I had to, this is me personally, if I had to choose the one other

person I've been reading as carefully as I've been reading you on this, it would be Kim Strassel. She's gone into the details. She's followed the story. She's broken news on this again and again and again. And I don't want to put words in her mouth, but her position now is roughly, I believe it's fair to say, OK, the Mueller report is out. Trump and his people are not guilty of any criminal collusion, criminal conspiracy, if I'm using the correct term, with the Russians. Now, let us put that aside and get to the real conspiracy, to the really alarming aspect of all of this. And that is the activity of James Comey and Andrew McCabe and others in the FBI, John Brennan and James Clapper, in the FBI and the intelligence community, the unmasking of various figures from intelligence reports, the Comey's intervening in the presidential campaign and this whole notion they intended one way or another, based on a phony dossier to take down a duly and constitutionally elected president of the United States. That's what we need to investigate next.

Is that your position roughly as well. Yeah, I couldn't agree more with Kim. And I'm actually so grateful for the work that she's done, because that part of it is a very hard part of it for me. I'm just speaking personally. These guys were your friends, right? Jim Comey is a guy I know for 30 years. I don't know all of them, but I know a number of people who are jammed up here and and they deserve to be jammed up here. But I've always been willing. You know, I think I went along for a long time being wrong about the dossier because I insisted to people that there's no way the FBI would ever give the FISA court an uncorroborated partisan research screen from one campaign to use against another campaign that the FBI wouldn't put up with that kind of. I want to interrupt you right there to bring draw that out. You are a tough guy, former prosecutor. You know the people involved and you, Andy McCarthy, are shocked by

what took place. Is that correct? I am. Yes. All right. And not only shocked, but but kind of indignant because it hits close to home during the 90s when we were having the big fight over the wall. I was one of the people who was affected by it because I had investigations where it would have been very important for the intelligence side of the FBI and Justice Department's house to be able to talk to the law enforcement side so we could get, as they said back in the day, a complete mosaic of the threat, right? And the wall regulations prevented that from happening. You explain just for a moment what you mean by the wall. You're not talking about the Berlin Wall or the Wall of the Southern Border.

You're talking about? I'm talking about internal regulations that you mean by the wall.igence route to conduct your investigation. Not only because it was a question of your honor, would you actually do that, but also because I thought it was practically a stupid suggestion because you have to go through the counterintelligence chain of command, which is a much different set of approvals and a whole bunch of other eyes on what you're doing. So I took the position that, you know, number one, I wouldn't do something like that. And number two, I'd have to be an idiot to try to do something like that. What I didn't factor in, Peter, and I think this is the untold story. When we look back at the history of this, this is going to end up being the most important fact. What I didn't factor in back in the 90s when we were arguing about this is what if headquarters decides to do the investigation itself? Right. Because the idea here is you want these

investigations to be done in the field office where where the crime or the counterintelligence threat is. Right. And headquarters is supposed to be there to be the adult supervision to make sure that the people who are investigating the cases who always want to push the envelope. I know it myself. I always wanted to push the envelope in my own cases. I mean, you have to really police yourself because you get involved in these cases and you're sure that your bad guys are the worst bad guys in history. And you need your chain of command and headquarters to be there saying, we don't do that kind of stuff. You know, we don't we don't take a uncorroborated screed and bring it to the FISA court. We corroborate stuff. We verify it before we go. And what happened here is they did the investigation themselves. And when they decided to push the envelope politically, I think there was nobody there to tell them no.

Right. Right. And Andy, this is John Gabriel. Just another quick question here as we wrap up. How is Bill Barr doing? We're hearing complaints. He came out with a summary to it took him too long. Then when he released it on Sunday, it took him. He was way too fast with it. How do you think he's doing so far just from an outside observation? Well, I like Barr, so we have to factor that in. But I think he's doing a fabulous job. I think it's remarkable that he got this report on at five o'clock on Friday. And by about four o'clock on Sunday, we had Mueller's conclusions. I thought it was silly for people to suggest that, you know, we need to get yesterday's argument was the report appears to be somewhere between three and four hundred pages and because bar's letter is only four pages that's somehow suggestive that the letter is not

representative of the report in the meantime you know we all know that you can easily summarize something that's 350 pages say in a lot lot less than a four-page letter. But all Barr did was spell out, here are what this guy's major conclusions are, that is to say Mueller. And what he says is that you're going to get the whole report we now heard today probably by April 15th, if not before. We could get it as early as next week. And the thought that someone as savvy and scrupulous as Barr would misrepresent a report that he knows everybody is going to see and be able to compare to his letter is one of the, you know, it's one of the dumber things I've heard recently. But I think he's doing a great job. One of the dumber things you've heard recently. You got to stop watching Rachel Maddow.

That's all I can say. Andy, it's ever a pleasure. We'll talk to you soon. And we hope that the next time we talk it's about matters that do not affect the nation and Russia and interminable debate about this. You know, sometimes we just call you up

and talk about baseball or music or something. But anyway. Hey, Mets are 1-0. I'm happy to talk about that. Andy, you know what you are? You are a cross between Antonin Scalia and Joe Friday. And there is just nobody else

who's got that down. Thank you. Thanks for joining us and thanks for all your work. You're the one guy I can turn to to make it so I can understand this stuff. Thanks. Talk to you later. Thank you. Thanks, guys.

And we're happy to have him here at Ricochet. We didn't have the time to ask him what he thought about the fact that USA Today apparently has decided that National Review is not a credible source because it's right wing. The Federalist is not a credible source. Somebody wrote a piece about recent events for them and cited both the Federalist and NR, and specifically Andy. And the editor of the editorial page of USA Today decided that that just wasn't going to do. I mean, who is this fellow anyway? Which speaks a bit to the bubble in which they're in, I would think, and the fact that if they don't regard Andy as a credible source,

given his background and his steel-trap mind, as you just heard, and his skeptical character, gee, what else is USA Today keeping from us? If that's the sort of thing that bothers you, then you should pony up and give money to Ricochet. And I say that because Ricochet is a place where we don't do that kind of stuff. We look at sources from all over the place, and we have a robust conservative conversation that ranges from the center-right to the very right,, the occasional voice from the left chiming in as well. Subscriptions are cheap. You can give them to a friend, and by that, what you do is you ensure that it keeps going so there's always a place to talk.

It's not just the main page that's fun. It's the member page where people start their own posts, and the community that's grown up there is far more interesting and friendly than anything you're going to find on Facebook or Twitter or elsewhere. Rob, who isn't here, likes to take people that he knows, watch and listen and read. And he names them and he drags them around and publicly shames them to pay. I don't know if that's worked yet. So instead of using shame, I'll be a good North Dakota and just sort of nudge you gently and say, isn't it time? Really? Really? Isn't it time that you joined? Right. And you guys would agree, right? I would agree. Although I think the shaming has worked once. My friend Tommaso, whom I shamed two weeks ago, sent me a text saying that it almost caused a traffic accident

because he heard me humiliate him on the air as he was driving to work. But he claims that he has signed up. Actually, I'll confirm that with the Yeti. I'll do that. But I believe it has worked once. I'm all into shaming, James. All right, good. I don't have your Minnesota nice scruples. Let's put it that way. Well, between the two of us, then we'll run the gamut of strong arm and soft techniques. That's good. And people will say, well, where am I going to get the money for Ricochet? I mean, come on. It's not a lot, but I'm kind of skint right now. I haven't invested.

I don't even know how to invest. And here's where Rob would intercede and say, gee, James, if only there was an easy way to invest. And I would pretend that I wasn't irritated by that and go on to say there is, and it's called Robinhood. Robinhood is an investing app that lets you buy and sell stocks, ETFs, options, and cryptos, all commission-free. While other brokerages can charge up to $10 for every trade, Robinhood doesn't charge any commission fees. You can trade stocks and keep all of your profits.

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so you never miss the right moment to invest. Now, Robinhood is giving listeners of the Ricochet podcast a free stock, a free stock like Apple, Ford, or Sprint to help you build your portfolio. Sign up at ricochet.robinhood.com. And our thanks to Robinhood for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Legal boilerplate right here. Right, Yeti? Isn't there a legal boilerplate?

Oh, there isn't. Oh, that's for LendingTree. I'm sure you'll have to cut that out. Or leave it in so people can dig the behind-the-scenes stuff. Well, all right, closing segment. Three, two, one. Well, gentlemen, I don't know if this will be current. By the time people hear this and however many hours it takes to get it up um britain may have voted

for a 56th time to not accept the brexit deal what what what now what do you think is going to do either of you think there's a chance that there might actually be a second referendum? Just curious. And if there was, what do you think people would say? Wow. I have no idea. And I don't say that because I haven't been following it. I say that because I have been following it. And just two hours ago, talked to a very well-informed Englishman who told me he had no idea. Anything is possible at this point, including Theresa May standing up and saying, I thought I had a very good deal for leaving the European Union in a negotiated way. You rejected it. You rejected – you and this house rejected it three times. You then voted on eight different alternative measures and voted against every single one of them. What is the law now on the books is that we will withdraw

from the European Union on April 12th. I am now given a choice between withdrawing with no deal, which will be disruptive, and obeying the law. As the prime minister of Great Britain, I will obey the law. It strikes me as perfectly plausible that sick to death of it all, there will be a consensus, not consensus, but at least a willingness to just crash out on April 12th and be done with it, at least achieve that kind of certainty and stability that getting it done would provide. But I don't know. John?

I agree completely that it should just be, you know, rip the bandaid off essentially because this has gone on just to comic levels almost, uh, time and time again, they voted, they can't agree on a thing. And, uh, right after it's, um, right after it's passed, uh, she should just walk away and, uh, head into a nice retirement, maybe on the continent. If she likes it so much, I heard Brussels is very nice this time of year. There was a piece on national public radio, uh,place, I believe, where they went to a town. They went to the High Street, as they call it, not Main Street, the High Street, and asked people what they thought. It was the home of Brexiteers, people who wanted to leave.

And they were still unhappy because what they saw was what a lot of people talk about when they talk about the Rust Belt or used to or still do. The towns that are hollowed out, the shops that are gone, the industries that have left, and the foreigners that are coming in. And this is the part where everybody sort of on the left gets a little, rubs their hands together with the glee because, oh, they're going to be nasty, nasty Islamophobes. Turns out they were unhappy about the polls. They were unhappy that there's so many Polish.

And I've said this before. I mean, the immigration portion is so large a part of it. And it's not because people don't hate other people other than Britons. They just felt, I believe, that they'd lost control of the ability of their country to mine the borders. And that seemed to be a very critical thing for national self-identification. But we'll see. It's going to crash here. Right. So last thing we do, as usual, it's another edition of, hey, what are you watching? John, what are you? I know you've no time, really.

Yes, no time at all. Actually, yeah, I'm not much of a TV viewer. I did just go see the movie Us, Jordan Peele's follow-up. Oh, tell us. Do tell, do tell. Well, Get Out was absolutely fantastic. Everybody, all the praise it got was utterly warranted. Jordan Peele is a master, and I was a big fan of his comedy sketch show as well, and I was really surprised how brilliant he was as a director.

This isn't as good to say the least. It's spotty. The story doesn't make sense. It's like you get out of the theater, walk around for three minutes, and you go, wait a um the story doesn't make sense it's like you get out of the theater walk around for three minutes and you go wait a minute that didn't make sense but it's very artfully done so it's certainly not a bad movie the acting is absolutely astounding uh lupita niango i believe her name is and uh elizabeth moss uh both terrific acting, very stylish, very nice, but it's no get out. Kind of a sophomore slump kind of movie, but I'll still be there opening weekend for anything he comes out with in the future.

Peter, what am I watching? My wife and I are just so addicted to British mysteries that we're now watching season eight of Vera. And let me tell you, the basic formula for Vera mysteries hasn't changed in all eight seasons. And yet there we go on Sunday evening. Click. And we're watching all 90 minutes of the latest mayhem in Newcastle-on-Tyne with this plucky lady cop, Vera, totally absorbed. That just shows a lack of – what it shows is a lack of recommendations. So, James, tell us what we should be watching instead.

Well, that's hilarious because I have the same shortcoming. Oh, really? Oh, it's so much better. Well, there are so many British series out there that have gone for 47 seasons about some beloved inspector in a seaside place who solves all the crimes and has a few affectations. Oh, he smokes a carved Meerschaum pipe and he loves Baroque music. You have a couple of ticks like that and then you have these tightly constructed murders. And after about seven or eight seasons or so, you think, you know, there's about 75 people killed in this small town. I start to – it's a bit bizarre.

One of them that I never bothered to watch was Inspector Morris because it just didn't seem to set itself apart in any way. And I feared that if I watched it, it would be like the sort of thing that grandpas have in VHS box collections on their shelves, you know, a 6448 resolution, sort of gauzy and the rest of it, and, you know, low production values, etc. So I was intrigued when I saw a widescreen, high def version of Inspector Morse as a young man called Endeavor. There are four seasons of it, each of which is four shows, each of which is 90 minutes. And I know nothing about Inspector Morse. And I'm sure that people who know the backstory entirely are saying, oh, that's where that comes from. Oh, that guy turns into that guy.

I don't care. They are tightly constructed, interesting, smart murder mysteries. And they all take place around Oxford. So they've got a bit of plummy charm to them as well. I find those delightful and I watch once a week. I have a question about those, specifically about those. The man, the actor who plays Sergeant Friday, who is young Morse's boss. It's wonderful. I can't figure it out because he underplays every scene and cannot take your eyes off him.

He's a brilliant actor. How does he do it? I think he just sort of he imagines how Michael Caine would act five seconds after the anesthetic had been delivered. That's the only thing I can say. So – and I will say also this. I took about five or six nights to get through the event, the latest Avengers movie to bring me back up to speed on that one, and that's a bit of a chore. I love them, but Lord knows they're just getting so Wagnerian in the constant soundtrack. And I find, I, you know,

I know you're a superhero, but if somebody throws you against a brick wall at 70 miles an hour, I think you ought to just have a headache or something, but everybody's perfectly fine with a ma'am. Well, and I have more recommendations for my wife. Who's a loyal listener to this podcast and, uh,

loves all the BBC detector shows, uh, cheery offerings like Wallander and Broadchurch. Now she'll have a few more to get to. Yeah, real day brighteners like that. But here is what I found to be an absolute way, perfect way to cap off the evening, and you'll roll your eyes on this because it's so on brand,

but Amazon has just made some deal with a company that owns billions of old vintage game shows, most of which are meretricious and unwatchable. But they have What's My Line from the 50s. Oh, right. And John Carson Daly is the most erudite game show host ever. He's absolutely charming.

And the level, I mean, even though if you broke it down and looked at the transcript, it's not brilliant. But the level of sort of civility and air and and and suggested erudition with the with bennett surf being on the panel winking away it's charming and everyone's dressed up and the women are gorgeous and it's just this marvelous little piece of civilization from 1955 and if you follow it by going directly to match game 75 which is nothing but single entendres and drunks you think the 60s really did sweep the leg from under this culture. It really, really did.

And what I remember about those early – because I've watched a few of those What's Mine lines on YouTube or there are excerpts of them on YouTube. or the host of the show who's in his bow tie and very cheerful, but also the manners, the manners that he, that seemed to be demanded or expected in that era. It's not Bennett, your question. It's Mr. Surf, your question. Everybody is Mr. or Miss or Mrs. It's just astonishing. And you want for the first three or four minutes, it seems rather odd and old. And then you sort of, it seems normal.

It seems it's, it's just the most amazing thing. There was a different – you know what it reminded me of? It reminded me of the episode of I Love Lucy where they actually shot it in New York. I can't quite – I think Lucy gets her head stuck in an urn or something of that nature. She and Ethel have to go on the subway and there's a moment when Lucy says to Ethel, oh, Ethel, I can't leave just yet. I have to put on my gloves. And in those – there was a time in New York City when you didn't leave your apartment building even to go on the subway until a lady put on her gloves. Lore.

Now, what – does that make us just – we put on our jeans and go to the grocery store and not have to put on a tie or the rest of these things, that we admire them in absentia. We mourn the loss, but we wouldn't want them imposed upon us again. On the other hand, it would be nice if we were to expect of our public speakers somebody who has the discursive ability of Mr. Daly to take a question. Somebody says, you know, you'll have Fred Allen say, is this a service that you render? And Daly will say, it may possibly be a service if one considers the excesses to which one might in a public situation, notwithstanding that. You've got to come up with a huge constructed reason for that.

I'll leave you with one more thing. There were all of these panel shows of the 50s and early 60s that nowadays look quite quaint. And there's one that I had to find last night. And that is to tell the truth where you have three people who are pretending to be – two people are pretending to be somebody and one person who is that actual person. And it's quite interesting because they don't – I mean they just are – they have to lie convincingly, but the one person who's truthful tells the truth. And the guy that they had on was a man named Chester Locke, who was a radio star for about 22 years for a show called Lum and Abner. And this was just only four or five years after it had gone off the air. They'd made eight movies. I think they'd made. It was wildly popular, and he was completely forgotten.

He was absolutely forgotten. He could show up there, and nobody on the panel knew who he was after a 25-year career in radio. That's how big a split there was in the culture, I think, between radio and the era of television. It was like the sort of amnesia that it wiped the country with, like sound did to film. It's fascinating.

Here's where E.JJ starts to go in the credits and tell me I'm full of BS and we'll argue there. We will argue there. We can argue about all of these things. We'll still be main friends of the day because at the end of the day because it is Ricochet. And it's brought to you by Donors Trust, Quip, and Robinhood. Support them for supporting us. And of course, as we always

beg you on bended knee, Jolson-like, go to iTunes. It wouldn't kill you to leave a review, would it? No, it wouldn't kill you. And your reviews help other people find us, which helps keep the show going. And, of course, what helps keep it going most is money. Thank you. Peter, John, glad I could make it.

It's been a joy, and we'll see everybody in the credits and the comments at Ricochet 3.0. Next week, boys. See you, gents. Dancing with the music Oh yeah We are here on the floor, y'all. I'm going to a goal. Dancing with the music. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Spotlight on Lou Ross, y'all. I don't need the ball, y'all.

Taking love to hurting things, y'all. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Spotlight on Sammy Dave, y'all. don't you feel so great, y'all Singing hold on, I'm coming Oh yeah, oh yeah Spotlight on Tuesday night That's wicked, wicked, wicked

Singing first thing Saturday Oh yeah, oh yeah Spotlight on all this ready now Thank you. Get it on the spot. Spotlight on Jane Brown, y'all. Hit a jing of them all, y'all. Hit a jing of them all, y'all. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Do you like the music?

That's sweet so. Just call me this way, yeah Oh yeah, oh yeah I got to get the feelin' I got to get the feelin' Do you like good music? That's sweet so do you Help me get the feelin' I want to get the feelin' Music. That sweet soul of yours. Help me get the feeling.

I won't forget the feeling. Oh, it's ready, got the feeling. And I'll be not the same. Ricochet. Join the conversation.