The Ricochet Podcast - Sycophants and Brutuses

Episode Date: June 19, 2020

Another action packed show: Is the lockdown over or is this just intermission? Hey, did John Bolton write a book? Did the Supreme Court hand down some decisions? Leading off our guest spots this week is Coleman Hughes who has been on our radar for a while. In this moment, we thought it was high time he was on your’s, too. Be sure and read his essay Stories and Data: Reflections on race, riots... Source

It's only the beginning of the flattery. Peter is full of it. Flattery, not full of it. Coming down in 3, 2, 1. I have a dream this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. How would you describe Trump's relationship with Vladimir Putin?

I think Putin thinks he can play him like a fiddle. I'm the president and you're fake news. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lallex, and today we talk to Coleman Hughes about BLM and Abe Greenwald about the Great Unraveling. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you!

Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 552. Boy, what a difference a year makes. President Harris, of course, declared martial law this week because of the autonomous zone riots that have spread out in every single city of America. Truck drivers refusing to bring food into the cities, and bread lines are forming anew. Who could have seen this coming except all of us? No, it's actually Ricochet Podcast, number 501. I'm James Lilacs here in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with Rob Long somewhere on the East Coast, I presume New York, and Peter Robinson somewhere in the green and verdant confines of California.

Welcome, gentlemen. Thank you, James. Not so green. We've already reached the burned-out stage here, so we have the golden hills of California at the moment. But yes. Here in Minneapolis, it is beautifully lush, and our parks are beautiful. Did I mention that we have parks?

Did I mention that we have absolutely gorgeous, stunning system of parks, one of the best in the nation? The Minneapolis Park Board has announced that the homeless people are now free to sleep in the parks. We had a concentration in one particular place, and they said, you know what? Let's just spread the fun around. So now we are to be introduced to the site of tents on the beaches and the parks where this had previously been completely verboten. It's still verboten for most people, but the San Francisco-ization of Minneapolis seems to be accelerating a little bit. It's hard to think what else they could do to make people who are just getting over the defund the police thing

sit up and say, wait a minute, can we? But that's just here in Minneapolis, and who could, you know, what goes on in Minneapolis, how could it possibly affect the rest of the world? So what is it this week, gentlemen? Are things calmed down a little bit? Are we now in the phase where we have a lot of stuff that's happening that isn't spectacular and pyrotechnical, but nevertheless is worrisome for the future of our liberal institutions. Rob, Peter, what's on your mind? I have things calmed down. I'm just a little bit, I'm numb. I'm numb to it. And about, Joe, I think I mentioned this last week, but this week I really put it into effect pretty rigorously.

Twitter for about five minutes a day, ten minutes a day, tops. I don't keep going back to see what the latest is. And no news. The television goes on. It's only a serial binge-watching. Absolutely no television news whatsoever. Why? Because I've gone back to this.

I read the Wall Street Journal in the morning. I'm still old-fashioned enough to trot out to the driveway in my pajamas and bring it back and have a cup of coffee and read it at the kitchen table. And that's about the way I want to get my news these days, in writing, where I can mull it over and it doesn't scream at me and it doesn't have colored, lurid graphics because I just can't take it. I want to know what's happened and then I want to be able to put it out of my mind and get back to my own life and do my own work with my blood pressure reasonably low and my heart rate normal. That's about where I am. On the other end of the spectrum, there's me. I watch Tucker before I go to bed and then stare at the ceiling for three hours. I was going to say, sleep.

Rob, you, how are things in New York? Why do you do that though? Why do you watch, why do you do that? Well, I do from time to time. I think it is necessary a little bit to find out how the argument is being phrased

all over the place. And Tucker is, I mean, he's the highest, highest rate right now, but he's doing network stuff. I mean, he's, he's, he's showing up and, and issuing these 20 minute Jeremiah's that are unlike anything that I've really seen on television. And so, I mean, that's something to discuss. So what I, I ordinarily have a very, Iarily have a very, not ordinarily, I admire Tucker for his intelligence, the delivery, the sheer professionalism as a broadcaster. And ordinarily, I agree with him on 90% of the issues. He falls under my own ban. I'm not watching Tucker because I just have to get on with my life. But I have heard it said a number of times in the last couple of weeks

that Tucker Carlson is putting in one of the great contemporary acts of television journalism that anyone has ever seen. Is that true? I'm not sure I would call it journalism. I mean, it is, as it's being defined now. I mean, there are these... Television journalism, maybe? Yes, but there are these 15-minute flippics,

and they're solidly constructed, and it's a good piece of rhetoric. Now, if you know a little bit about this or a little bit about that, you can say that's an interesting elision. That is actually not entirely what he says that it is. But for the most part, I mean, he's laying forth some markers here that nobody else is. And what's interesting about it is exactly what Rob was talking about before we started the show, getting something from your whatever service you're doing, which informs you that Black Lives Matter and this sort of ritual genuflecting that the corporations are going through, which is almost a bit as if, I mean, Hillsdale this week had to put out a message saying, here's why we haven't said exactly what you want us to say about this.

Because the whole silence is violent, silence is complicit, silence, etc. The way the conversation is being shaped and narrowed is one of the things that I think that Tucker addresses. I never watched it before this. I just, you know, tuned in a couple of weeks ago. So anyway, Rob, New York, has it calmed down? Are people back to loving Bill de Blasio and thinking that he's a fantastic guy? Or are we still right out the Jews you see in the second floor window when Weld shut their playgrounds face? Well, no.

I mean, de Blasio is still the great unifier. He's the great healer. I said this on the three-martini lunch today. Shop owners and looters agree de Blasio has to go. So in that sense, in many ways, he's a lot like many New York City mayors who get reelected. They are despised. New York is a place where really to become the mayor, you have to have a circle of influential friends who don't really care whether the people like you or they don't like you. It or the 60s in the 60s and the 70s especially the 70s the battle days well actually the 70s the 80s i mean the the high water mark or low water

mark depending how you look at it for murders in new york city was 1990 those people thought back at a different new york of old movies the 40s and 50s and even the early 60s and it was like watching a black and white movie from another time but there are people walking around new york city right now who remember it under under much more peaceful circumstances and it does seem like yesterday it doesn't seem like well like everything else new york city's gone to hell it seems like well new york city's gone to hell uniquely and that to me that when you find younger people looking with as i said the other night in my walk looking at a wall on second avenue which is now has graffiti on it which didn't have graffiti on

it a month ago and they're looking and they're sent they're sensing something bad has happened um well that's a sign that you know they're not going to they're not relegating the the the past into some dim memory they actually remember it which, which is good. So I'm hopeful about that. I'm sort of not hopeful about other things, but that I'm hopeful of. Well, another thing that I'm sure Rob is hopeful for is that John Bolton's book, which came out this week, portrays a picture of the president, which I'm sure many people are saying, this is it. This is going to be the one that actually finishes off Donald Trump. It's so full of stunning revelations that nobody could have seen coming, that it will change the national

conversation in ways we can't even begin to consider. So, Rob, I imagine that you were surprised by a lot of the accusations. I don't think anybody's surprised by the accusations. Really, that's the issue with it. I have not read the book. I don't plan to read the book, mostly because I don't need to read the book. I don't think anybody needs to read the book. I mean, even if you're a Trump supporter, it's not like you don't think these things could have happened. I mean, it's highly unlikely that John Bolton's lying about the phone call with a Chinese premier. That's just unlikely. It's probably true. He probably did shrug and say, yeah, go ahead, build the a conservation camps that is true no no no you have to be careful that wasn't a phone sorry

that one was when he quotes he quotes uh lighthizer and lighthizer has since come out and said in last 48 hours or so i was there that did not happen there there are there are several points where i mean the general portrait yes but there are several points where, I mean, the general portrait, yes, but there are several points where Bolton asserts something, and we now have people who are also present saying, no. It just doesn't seem like it's unlikely, though, is what I mean. It seems perfectly likely. And maybe, yes, well, he wasn't wearing a blue suit that day. That's possible. But it does, I mean, especially kowtowing to the president of China, which Trump does at every twist and turn to the president of China.

So none of this is new. We know that the president of the United States, his character is such that he is a guy who will sell everything and everyone out so that he can win re-election. We know that. Anyone who denies it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly right. Trump gathers around him the very people that he seems to attract and that he seems to recognize. Which will probably start as hideous sycophants and end as treacherous Brutuses.

But that is sort of the culture that he's created. That's who he gets around him. Nobody gets out of the Trump orbit. Not being diminished. Hideous sycophants and the Brutus. That's the band that I believe that Rob is going to be forming. He'll be playing somewhere down the Lower East Side. And the Brutai. Before we get to our guest, though, there's something else that has to pop up. There seems to be the Supreme Court, which is disappointing everybody who expected them to hew to the law. And now

we've got apparently John Roberts' wonderful mind-reading act is going on again, where we're to judge things by not the plain letter of the law, but simply what the intentions gleaned seem to be. Am I reading this right? Or are executive orders now to stand forever? Unless, of course, they don't. Or is this the court sending it back saying no you have to do this the legislative process or will any of it matter in a week i would like to begin by saying hello to john you because if john is telling me the truth he listens to us every saturday as he does lawn work hello john i'm about to get this wrong any law what does he do well that's what he claims that's what he yes i agree trust but verify when

it comes to our friend john but yeah that's what he claims okay yard work for john you is standing there arms akimbo staring at some you know poor sweating creature he's ordering to do his yard work that's what i think prove me wrong where's the lie we have only his word for it. I agree. All right. This is the second case. The first case was the census case in which the chief justice has essentially said, I don't believe your reasoning. You're not coming forward to the administration. You are not coming forward in good faith and telling us the real reasons you want to take this step. And that, as I understand it, because I'm a faithful listener to Law Talk with John Yoo and our beloved friend Richard Epstein, that is a very dangerous

thing to start because now the Supreme Court is putting itself in the position of not simply judging the law, but judging people's motives. That's not really what you meant. That's not really what your true motivation. Well, once you start, okay, so this is another thing that I'm trying to, I know, I'm in this business of talking about what's happening in public, but I'd rather not. I can feel my blood pressure rising. But yes, it was a terrible decision, and the Bostick decision set aside the issue of gay rights for the purposes of argument. Neil Gorsuch, who said up and down over the years and in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings that he was an originalist. He wanted to understand original meaning of the actual text, and you simply cannot claim to be an originalist and state that a law passed in 1965

enshrined an understanding of sexuality and gay rights that didn't exist in any major way more than 10 years ago. You just can't suggest that in 1965, the plain language of the civil rights legislation intended to protect gay rights, because nobody even thought of gay rights. There wasn't a separate category. People had not conceived of it that way. So these are two not only bad decisions, but shockingly bad decisions. It's been a rough week. Rob? Well, I mean, yeah.

That is sort of the story that happens when people go to the Supreme Court. And conservatives tend to, like Lucy with the football, learn that lesson over and over and over again. Finally, we have a conservative majority in the Supreme Court. Finally, we have this. Finally, we have that. These people and these cases that they hear, the cases they choose to hear, are impossible to predict. So we can't even predict which ones they're going to weigh in on. I would just say that it suggests that voting for president because of Supreme Court nominees may be a misplaced emphasis. I don't know if I really believe that,

but it's certainly what it seems like today. Up until early Tuesday morning, I think it was Tuesday morning or Monday morning, Neil Gorsuch was a rock-ribbed conservative. And people would say, yeah, what about Gorsuch? What about Gorsuch? And I'm one of them. I'm one of them.

I'm one of them. Well, there's all those other federal judges that got in there, and at least we can be content that probably no more than 80% of them will turn and disappoint us at some point. Yeah, that's good. I like that. Those are good odds, actually. Indeed. Well, you know what? Speaking on the issue of transgenderism, there's a line that I have coming up in the copy here that I want to explain. This was handed to me, not necessarily something that's a personal testimony. So let me just read the copy here and go. Because basically, we all know it's summer, right? And we know that it's hot. And when it comes to basics, the basics are what you wear under your clothes and you want to be cool. And there's a secret to staying sweat-free this summer. And that is this, Tommy John's.

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did i mention it's tommyjohn.com slash ricochet right see the site for details and our thanks to tommy john for sponsoring this the ricochet podcast and now we welcome to the podcast colman hughes fellow with manhattan institute editor at City Journal, where his writing focuses on race, public policy, and applied ethics. His writing has also been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, yay, Quillette, love it, and The Spectator. He holds a BA in philosophy from Columbia University, which he received last year at the advanced age of 24. So he's a great writer and he's young, and so we're going to all choke back our burning, flaming resentment here and welcome him to the podcast. Welcome, Siri. Glad to be here.

So when we're talking about Black Lives Matter, you've written much about this. I want to just ask this. There's Black Lives Matter, the organization. There's Black Lives Matter, the concept. There's Black Lives Matter, the signs, the sentiment that people say. Is it peculiar that at this moment in human history, when we're so focused on something, that we really, the very thing itself, the BLM, is slippery. It's a slogan, it's a movement, it's an organization, but maybe it really isn't. What do we talk about when we say Black Lives Matter? Yeah, you're completely right that there are a bunch of different Black Lives Matters. There's just the slogan itself, which on its face is a true statement.

You know, no one could disagree with the idea that Black Lives Matter. There are the set of policy proposals advanced by the leadership to the extent that there even is a leadership, which is another curious thing about the movement, sort of lack of leadership. And most of those policy proposals, a few of them are reasonable, but many of them are just totally beyond the pale. Then there's the rank and file Black Lives Matter protester who was at one of the protests in major cities. And that person, the median protester, I think,

is just out there because they saw a video of something horrible, a horrible incident of police brutality. And they may not be aware of the wider policy proposals at all. And it is definitely worth distinguishing all of those different things because the leadership is much more radical, especially the national spokespeople are much more radical than the typical protester. Coleman, Peter Robinson here. And we chatted a little bit before we came on the air. I do want to repeat for everybody who's hearing you for the first time that you should also read Coleman. Coleman is an unusually gifted writer. In your recent piece in the Manhattan Institute, I can't remember whether

it was the City Journal or the Manhattan Institute website, but you said, my view of BLM is mixed. On the one hand, you said something. On the other hand, you said something else. Can you just recap that for us, your mixed view? Sure. On the one hand, I think they're right about a few very important things. For example, that police departments are rife with corruption, so much so that we don't even think of it as corruption when a cop lies to protect his own. That is the norm. Police lack the accountability that we should want them to have. Short of shooting someone in the back, it's actually very difficult to get disciplined as a police officer.

There is racism and there's racial bias, particular, you know, and, you know, the black community bears the brunt of police attention. And we can talk about why that is. Racism is not the only cause, but just as a baseline fact, it is true that black people are more likely and black men in particular to attract police attention, to be roughed up. Right. By the way, I want to point out that in your piece in the City Journal, you support each of these assertions with studies, facts, stories. You don't simply assert them, but go ahead. Yeah, sure. And then, you know, the other hand is that Black Lives Matter's central claim,

which is that we have a problem in this country with racist cops killing black people. That is not true. So on the one hand, there are a suite of reforms that make sense that we're talking about probably in part because of Black Lives Matter. And I think some good will come out of this. On the other hand, they've created and spread this false narrative that racist cops are shooting unarmed black people. And because so many people believe that narrative, you know, people, you know, took to the streets and businesses have been destroyed and looted that otherwise might still be in good shape. Right, right. Coleman, this is, I'm going to ask a large question, too large for you to answer in

full in a, well, who knows? You may be able to pull it off. But there are, Black Lives Matters, the narrative there is we need major reform, defund the police. As we said in answering the top James's question, there are all kinds of reforms, but they tend in one direction, which is less money to police, more money to various forms of assistance, government assistance for African Americans. And then on the other hand, you've got a view, not stated very often right now, but in the past, this is Tom Sowell, this is Shelby Steele, that it's the, it's, that what, and Jason Riley has argued this in a couple of pieces in the Wall Street Journal recently, that the greatest danger to African American lives is not too little policing, but crime, the disproportionate amount of crime in the neighborhoods where they live. And so you need more policing. And then Tom Sowell argues, Tom Sowell, who is a great man, he may not be right about every point, but his argument,

based on years of research and years of lived experience, is that the welfare state, I'm putting this crudely, but you know the argument, that the welfare state has undermined the African-American experience, in particular, undermined the African-American family. So, we have two solutions that it is impossible to split down the middle. They trend in opposing directions. How do we get some good out of this moment? Yeah, well, we can only get some good out of this moment if we are honest about what the trade-offs are. And you are right to bring up the problem of violent crime in black communities. Most liberals and progressives dismiss this out of hand as a quote-unquote right-wing talking point, but it simply is a fact that the number one cause of death for black men in their 20s and even early 30s is murder. And that is over 90% of those murders are gonna be committed by other black men in their

community. And it's not the number one cause of death for members of any other race in this country. And it's not only the primary cost of the toll that it's taking on lives, it's also the fact that it's difficult to attract investment in these communities. Property values remain low so that homeowners don't experience the benefits of wealth growth and all of these knock-on consequences. And it is also a fact that higher police presence and better police presence, which means less policing of petty drug crime and more solving homicides, that is what lowers the crime rate. That is the main thing that lowers the crime rate.

It's not to say that social programs aren't also important, but many people have been talking about the Camden, New Jersey example, where they got rid of the city police and replaced it by twice as many county police that had on their account a kind of different culture and a different union contract, but also doubled the number and homicides went down. Right. So if we're, you know, the focus right now on defunding the police seems more about hurting them or the symbology of hurting them rather than actually helping communities which very much need police. Hey, Coleman, it's Rob Long in New York. Thank you for joining us. So I'm just trying to

project myself a year from now. As you point out, in 2018, NYPD killed five people, right? In 1971, it was 93 people. Use of force has gone down, at least in New York City, where I guess where you and I both live. Force has gone down. Crime has gone down. In general, it's been sort of an era of a reborn city. At that point, if that is the case, to what do you attribute the massive anger and demonstrations and the willingness and the ease with which people believe things are not getting better but getting worse and not getting worse but getting a lot worse? Is that because we, just as a culture, just no longer understand scale or because we just are addicted to drama? What's the cultural prognosis, do you think? I would say the main cause is social media and smartphones. I don't think it's a coincidence

that the modern crisis in race relations started in roughly 2012 or 2013. That was the moment Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman and he got acquitted and BLM began. And that's also the moment that everyone and their mother was on Facebook and had a smartphone. And what that does is, you know, if the number of unarmed Americans or incidents of police brutality decreases by 95 or even 99%, but the remaining 1% are caught on film, then the public perception will be driven by that 1%. But that number is never going to be zero, right? I think we can agree that just in terms of just the way the world works and life works, we're never going to get to zero. There will always be something that you can capture on film. So this, yeah, this comes down to your sort of view of the world.

There are people who really think that it is possible to fully eliminate all, to zero out all human evil or even human incompetence. I think it's possible to make progress. I think we can get to a place where we will almost never and perhaps never see a video like George Floyd, but we simply won't get to a place where zero unarmed Americans are killed by the cops. That is a totally unrealistic picture of policing. Right. I just have one more, and I'm't know, I'm going to phrase it awkwardly because I don't really know what I'm asking, and if it makes no sense to you, feel free to tell me to shut up and buzz off. We went very quickly from George Floyd to cops to Black Lives Matter and to the sort of larger conversation about racism in America,

whether America's racist or not racist, whether it's systemically racist, all these, the word racism. And I would just posit that I don't, I think there's a difference between racist and anti-black. And I'm more willing to believe that it's more is that it's more useful to talk about the latter than the former because it's more specific or is that just am i making a meaningless distinction well i one thing i definitely agree with there is racism in many people's minds is synonymous with anti-black racism but it's's always worth, you know, noting that it's a concept that ought to at least encompass racial, race-based hatred against any group. And, you know, for example, it's unclear, you know, I don't know if this was what you're

driving at necessarily, but it's unclear, you know, where the place of Jews are in the modern anti-racist movement. Because when people speak of anti-racism, you know they're not really talking about anti-Semitism. And one gets the sense that they don't quite care about it as much based on how much attention they give it. Right. And they're not talking about anti-Korean actions. It seems to me hard to argue that you could argue in a sort of larger umbrella term that the police are racist, but it really feels like they're not anti-Chinese. They're not anti-South Asian. It seems the more specific we are, the more likely we are to get to actual solutions rather than, you know, performative. Well, part of the solution, Mr. Hughes, as I'm sure you know, is that we've shifted from discussing racism to the imperative of anti-racism. This is one of those phrases that bubbles up, and I believe Ibram X. Kendi's got a book about it.

This is his thing. I heard a very long interview with him where he talks about the need to think in terms of anti-racism, where every single one of your buzzword terms, isn't it now, that it's meant to indicate, if you say anti-racist, it's like saying black bodies instead of black people. It indicates that you've drunk very deeply from Dianese Coates. So there's a philosophy behind here that seems to transcend the politics of what we're talking about today and has very specific things in mind that it wishes to do in reforming society. And you mentioned social media. That's true. I mean, that's the tinder into which these matches are dropped. But doesn't it seem that now, as opposed to 68, there's a bedrock change in the opposition,

that it's not so much the perfecting of the flawed American experiment, but the replacing of it with a new paradigm that eliminates human nature and goes back to year zero. Yeah, I think what we're witnessing with the anti-racist movement is the transformation of a, and John McWhorter has written a lot about this of a politics into a religion and it's uh you know making anti-racism you know the center of your political identity there's nothing the historian barbara fields said which was you know anti-racism shouldn't be a movement it should be a starting point which is to say you know, anti-racism shouldn't be a movement. It should be a starting point, which is to say, you know, everyone is against racism. Everyone sane and of goodwill is against

racism. But to make it your lodestar, it just, what it does is it incentivizes you to always find racism because your existence is now dependent on the existence of racism. There are whole organizations whose existence and funding is predicated on the existence of white supremacy. And there are more such organizations now probably than there have ever been because of the cultural moment we're in. So we have to be worried about the inertia that this is going to have. Last question then. You're 24, recently had some experience with the college campus. We were told 15, 20 years ago that when you're listening to these people,

these crazy people on campus are going to have all this time on their hands and they're fighting a fence everywhere. Wait until they get into the real world. Well, now it turns out that once they were in the real world, they started to shape it along the strange and peculiar lines that they had in college. What were your experiences when you were in college? Because we tend to think that these people dominate and control and define the college atmosphere as opposed to being a minor group of very noisy people who say peculiar things.

So the thing is that both of those things you just said were true. They were a minor group of people measured by number, but they absolutely dominated and controlled the culture. There's absolutely no doubt about it. It was rare to find any kind of public forum where you could talk with any kind of nuance, even have a center-left type perspective on an identity issue. And I think you're right, very few people are saying now, like they were saying in 2014 and 2015, that we don't have to worry about what's happening on college campuses. Many of the skeptics then

have been convinced now that what happens at college today happens in the culture tomorrow. Well, thank you for joining us today. Next time we'll have you on, we'll talk about your other specialty, applied ethics. I'd like to know if it's topical, if there's a cream that we can use to apply ethics. Unapply them. How do you get the residue of my ethics off? Before you leave, Coleman, when Rob asked you his question, he said, if you think I'm mistaken,

you can tell me to buzz off. That is permission he has never given to anybody else. That's like receiving a Nobel Prize right there. You guys aren't smart. And you didn't take. I'm honored. And you didn't take him up on it.

All right, you have one buzz-off Rob card free. You can cash it in the next time. Thanks for joining us on the podcast today, sir. Of course, anytime. Coleman, a real pleasure. Thank you. Yeah, well, Peter, do you feel you have the freedom to tell Rob to buzz off? No, no, no, no. Well, I mean, I suppose I have the freedom to do it.

Do I have the feeling that it would have any effect? None, whatever. But the general point, Rob is so effervescent, even when he's mistaken. I like to think of myself as minty fresh. Man, that was horrible. Who can resist this man? It's just absolutely horrible. I mean, that was like dropping a cement block into a little tiny bowl of pudding and hoping it makes a little nice splash.

Okay, let me put it another way. I like to think that I have sonic vibrations with 30-second pulses. That's kind of how I see myself. This is why they... I'm sorry, were you having a segue? I'm sorry, I didn't know that. No, this is why I don't let you do this, or why they shouldn't, and why it should be taken from your hands in all other podcasts. Did you not see where I was going with the word buzz? Did you not think that perhaps I was going to draw a filament between that and the sound that the quip makes, and that that's where I was going?

I don't know. I can't read your mind. What am I, like, Kreskin here? I'm just... My job is to interrupt these segues, and I think I've done a pretty good one this morning. Yes, I think so, in the sense that kneecapping somebody is a nice bit of orthopedic therapy. Anyway, when I was talking about buzzing, I was talking about that little sound. And Rob's right. Minty fresh is what you want your mouth to be.

And Rob's right. Sonic guidance pulses are not something that you find in every single object in your house unless you've got a quip. And then it's the only thing, and it's the best thing because it's a quip. It's almost tautological. Now, 75% of us, that's 75% of us use old, worn-out brushes that, you know, they're ineffective. They're useless. And even more people forget to floss daily. Well, good health starts with good habits. And quip makes it easy by delivering all the oral care essentials you need to brush and floss better. The Quip electric toothbrush has timed sonic vibrations, as Rob will tell you, with 30-second pulses to guide a dentist-recommended two-minute routine. It buzzes, and then it buzzes to tell you to switch your quadrants.

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Spelled G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash ricochet. Quip, the good habits company. And our thanks to Quip for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast Abe Greenwald, senior editor of Commentary Magazine and one of the stars of the Commentary Podcast, which I might add is available here on the Ricochet Audio Network. Abe, you wrote a great piece for Commentary, We Must Stop the Great Unraveling. So basically, what is it and how do we stop it? You got 30 seconds. Well, the Great Unraveling, I would say, has its roots in decades of sort of radical liberal social activism. But it all came crashing into the culture at light speed in the weeks following the killing of George Floyd. We saw, as I say in the piece, a rolling crime wave in city after city, leaving cities completely destroyed.

We saw a campaign online and in media to silence anyone who didn't agree with the narrative that America is irredeemably racist. White people need to sort of take moral instructions from their fellow citizens to learn how to address the privileges that they don't even recognize in themselves and their deepest prejudices. And it is an effort really on the part of social justice activists to destroy the country as we know it, to tell a story about the country as we know it that is false. That is to say that America was founded on slavery and not on human freedom, and that the slavery is the sort of prime social mover up to this day in American society. And the effort of the Great Unraveling is to destroy all that, to replace America with a sort of leftist propagandistic country of eternal but ultimately never satisfiable repentance and guilt and chaos.

Perhaps one of the ways we can do this is start reclaiming the language, or in the words you use, their social justice is always one that makes the hackles in my neck stick out. Because it's one of those terms that we bandy about now as if we all know what it means and it's a good thing. And I've always said to somebody, okay, you're accused of those terms that we bandy about now as if we all know what it means and it's a good thing. And I've always said to somebody, okay, you're accused of a crime. There are two juries here. Behind this door is one marked justice and behind the other door is social justice. What do you want?

I have a theory that if you put the word social before anything, it makes that thing much worse. Social justice. Social underwear. Yeah, sure. much worse. Social justice, social media, social democracy, social science, and on and on. Yeah, no, social justice is a very poor excuse for real justice, which I believe in, and which all Americans should believe in, and which is sufficient to redress inequalities that do exist. Hey, Abe, it's Rob Long. It's interesting. I don't think I've ever heard you speak that long on the podcast.

You have a nice voice. Yeah, no, listen. The editorial's great. It's the second best thing in that magazine. I have a question. An example. Sorry, go ahead. Well, speaking of, Rob, we are two months out from the next closing of the issue,

so I figure if I start bothering you to file now, I'll only be a week late. Yeah, yeah. That's true. That's true. Thank you for reminding me. It's two months. I forgot you guys take the summer off. A rejection of cancel culture and all that it entails. Okay, so two days ago

in the Washington Post, there was an incredibly riveting story about... It's almost hard to explain, a Halloween party at the Washington Post. Tom Tolles, the cartoonist for Washington Post, he had a Halloween party in 2018. A woman arrived at the party in 2018 in blackface. She was parodying Megyn Kelly, who had 2018 in blackface. She was parodying Megan

Kelly, who had had a blackface scandal right around then. And this is 2018, so this is 18 months ago. Two young people were there. They saw it. They confronted this woman. This woman left in tears. Then, for some reason, so

did the two young people. They left in tears. Thing happened at a party. And then 18 months later, the Washington Post decides for some reason to do a piece about it, an actual article about a Halloween party that happened a year and a half ago. The result is the woman who tearfully apologized and realized she'd made a mistake. And apparently, according to her, has been in therapy to work out her guilt and shame. She was summarily fired when the piece came out. And the New Washington Post editors were saying, yeah, we thought about not running it, but then we realized that maybe people need to be made an example of. And there have been two responses to this Washington Post piece.

One of them has been a total outrage that this was produced. And the other has been a vague kind of sick disquiet on the part of everyone. Are we entering – is this the beginning of something that's going to get worse? Or is this the end of something that's going to get worse, or is this the end of something that's been bad? Or is this just one more salvo and a continuing war in which we dig into other people's past to try to get them fired? Well, I mean, I think it's all going to get worse before it gets better, if it gets better. The reason I wrote the piece and commentary is because it simply has to get better. And what the Washington Post story shows is something that is typical of so many of these cases,

which is that what is demanded is endless apology, but in return, there is absolutely no forgiveness. So it is, you are supposed to apologize for no, it is not a reciprocal situation. You apologize and then you shrivel and go away. Right, which is, I think, literally Stalinism, right? First, you must confess before you're shot. Exactly. The confession won't save you, but we want it anyway. That's right.

Yeah. And as I say in the piece, once you begin going down that road, as the Washington Post story shows, it's over. When you give an inch, they smell blood, the mob smells blood, and you're done. The only way to survive these episodes is not to try to please the mob. Peter here, Peter Robinson. One of the reasons your editorial struck me as so beautiful, so forceful, so clarion, is that it's so singular. Every major institution in business and academia, I'm overstating it slightly, but only slightly, is simply proven more than supine, craven.

So, as you survey the scene, are there any political figures, any academic figures? Has anyone stood up and said in the public square, other than you and the editors of Commentary, what you say in this editorial? We reject the public policing of opinion in all its forms. We draw clear lines between speech and violence. We affirm speech. We reject violence. Who's got it right? Anybody? I've been very impressed, although this had to do less with the racial issue, which is really what's convulsing the country now,

than with the gender and trans issue. It's all part of the same identity madness. I've been very impressed with J.K. Rowling, who... Tell us the story. Tell us what's good for people who aren't familiar with that, who haven't been following it moment by moment on Twitter. Fill us in. Well, you know, she's the enormously successful gazillionaire author of Harry Potter, and she has said on more than one occasion that women are biologically women, and that without being punitive towards trans women, that sex is hardwired, and let's not go crazy and start calling anyone who claims to be a woman, a woman.

Excuse me. And she was, of course, pilloried, and she has not backed down. She has not given an inch to the mob. And I think she's going to do great because of it. She could afford to. She's, I mean, the people apparently at her publishing house have threatened to down tools, as one story put it, using the British term for striking, if they had to work with this wretched, hateful, venomous turf again. But she's got all the money in the world and she can tell everybody to, you know, here's a

bag of sand and a hammer. The people who find themselves not with their millions of dollars just shut up because the social pressures and the obloquy that follows on them is just too much to bear. That's right. And you see, you know, something that strikes me about this that Peter was just getting at is the cravenness of the corporate campaigns to get on board with the identitarian madness. I know people who, I was hearing a story from someone yesterday, who works not in media, not in policy. She works in pharmaceuticals.

And in a Zoom meeting at a large company, in a Zoom meeting with her team, her boss was assigning their workers reading lists and TED Talks that they had to go and read and listen to to re-educate themselves, having nothing to do with the actual work that they do. Talk about Stalinism. Well, there was also a piece the other day about the perils of microaggressions in Zoom meetings. If you have in the background, you have pictures of your family and it's a man and a wife, you're committing a microaggression by suggesting that the heteronormative paradigm is the only one that matters. I mean, everybody becomes so paralyzed and so fraught with all of the problems they read in the white privilege book that every single social encounter becomes this stilted stork dance where people are just, you know, hesitant to give

offense. At least that's what people fear. I don't find it in my world yet, but I'm in journalism where people are a little bit more pre-swinging, shall we say. So far. So far. Yeah, and I think, you know, and being on the conservative side of journalism, I think we are, we benefit enormously because the cancel rules mostly or almost entirely apply to those who sort of buy into their logic. And conservatives, in that sense, are kind of left to their own rules. And liberals and progressives are canceling liberals. They can complain about us, but luckily we work for outlets that don't play by their rules, so it doesn't matter. Peter here, New York. Mayor de Blasio, I've lived in California for a long, long time, so I've lost any feel I had. It was never a detailed feel for New York in the first place. But I look at Mayor de Blasio. Here he is, I think it was two weeks ago,

he put up that tweet saying, here is my message to Jewish groups and all groups, Jewish groups and all groups. I'm going to start, as of now, the NYPD, I'm instructing the NYPD to take action against anybody meeting in large groups. And then 10 days later, he's putting pictures of himself marching in massive protests. He's now had, in the face of all the evidence that it's better for people to be outdoors than indoors, that little kids are unlikely to be affected by any of the COVID stuff. He's welding shut. He's having the city workers weld shut playgrounds across the city. So here he is, hostile. I don't know whether you would watch, you watch this in detail, but boy, does that make it, when he singles out Jews, what is going on?

He's welding. But then I think to myself, wait a minute, the opposition is so shattered in New York. There's no functioning Republican. I guess what I'm asking is, where do people who read commentary and believe what you believe, I say who read commentary, of course, that's a small subset of what I hope is still a kind of commonsensical view in New York, where do they put their political feet? How does the opposition find its grounding? Yeah, well, you know, the buzz in New York among my fellow conservatives, and you can spot a fellow conservative in New York. By the way, it's a surprise every time in New York City when you discover someone else is a conservative. You can spot them because they don't, whatever the conversation is, if you're talking about the weather, they don't say something like, well, if we have nice weather anymore after Trump.

You know, they don't, they're the only people who don't bring every conversation back to Trump. But the talk of leaving the city is huge um not only because because not only because de blasio is it has been a disaster across the board um but um because uh of what's going on which is very much related to all this talk of defunding the police and um the nypd last week announced that they're getting rid of their plainclothes anti-crime units. The murder rate is more than double this year what it was last year for over the last month. So I think there very well could be a sort of mass exodus of conservatives. I don't know. I mean, what's going on with de Blasio, by the way, in terms of the Jewish community stuff is, I think, two things. First is de Blasio is a very hard left, far leftist guy. Religion

generally doesn't particularly tickle him. And secondly, he is signaling, this is another identitarian sort of conflict historically between Orthodox Jews and blacks in Brooklyn. I see. And de Blasio is signaling that he is on the side of – don't worry uh black people out there in brooklyn i'm i'm your enemy is my enemy as well i see i mean that this is this is my get you know this is my interpretation right right but he's back to crown heights in some way with him precisely yeah he's been on

team sharpton you know yeah okay so one more question for me sure and i'm asking you to cheer me up and so and so and if this means that you have to do a little violence to what you really believe please go ahead and do so because i just can't this is the wrong way to start a weekend so here's my argument no it's not an argument. It's a hope. I'm hoping that you raise it to take this form, this particularly virulent form. But it's no surprise in some way that the country's gone a little crazy. And as the lockdown ends and people get back to work and those shops, one reason you could argue that those shops were looted, that people felt free to loot the shops and smash them, that they'd been sitting there vacant for two months or two and a half months in the first place. Those shops will begin to fill up with people and customers. Life will return to normal. Abe, have I got that right? I think I may be able to cheer you up ever so slightly on this point.

Oh, you're a great man. Great man. I agree with you entirely. Not only was it just a matter of being cooped up by the lockdown, I think the nature of the pandemic and the lockdown on top of it really removed every sort of truth that people had in their lives for an extended period of time. It isolated them they

didn't know if it was safe to talk to their family they didn't know if they had a job they they they the days of the weeks became meaningless yes the very hours of the days became with so in other words they were sort of broken down psychologically deprogrammed and then made into sort of perfect cult recruits. And then the murder of George Floyd comes along, and it is their only North Star. It is the only real thing in the world to them, and they took to it with a kind of religiosity. So I absolutely think that is the case, and that will not last. Additionally, there is reason to hope in the fact that a lot of liberals seem to be quite freaked out about what is going on in private. In their Zoom calls, they cannot talk about it because, as I sort of get into in the piece, all dissent is punished.

But they are privately absolutely freaked out by what is going on. They don't want to be given reading lists and made to be reeducated by their bosses and by their neighbors and by their friends on social media. So there is going to be some sort of backlash among liberals. I don't know when and I don't know how. And things will definitely get brighter as the lockdown is lifted. Well, here in Minneapolis, there's a lot of that, too. I know what you mean about people being locked up and losing everything. The people who are rampaging through the stores and stealing everything

possible, I think if you quiz them afterwards, they'd say, well, man, it's the ennui. It frankly is. It's the accumulated ennui that led me to have no confidence in my civilization anymore. These were the feral elements that were unleashed by this. And the conversation that we're having here in Minneapolis seems to be, we're not really going to talk about the destruction because that's a diversion from the true issue that we have to address. And it seems to me that

you've got to talk about both because unless there's a public feeling restoration of safety, this could happen again. There's still boards up all over Minneapolis as if people think anything could set it off again. And it makes for an uncomfortable and drab place to live. Hey, Abe, go on. Oh, I was going to say, well, I have to say the degree of denial in Minneapolis when the riots first started happening, was quite astounding. And it kind of sort of set the palette for how people reacted to the riots as they took off in various cities. Everyone was saying, including the governor and local law enforcement at first, that the rioters had been bussed in. Eighty percent of them were from out of state.

They're not connected. In no way are they connected to what's actually going on. been bussed in. 80% of them were from out of state. They're not connected. They have in no way are they are they connected to what's actually going on. And white supremacist white supremacist is another thing that the that our mayor said. Right. Yeah, it was it was astounding. And then some degree of that sort of stuck in in city after city and news networks would forever explain how the riots, the protests are mostly peaceful and the riots are a small group of possibly white supremacists and, you know, agents trying to stir up trouble. So, yeah, there's been no actual reckoning anywhere on the left about what really went on. In fact, to some extent, we act as if we didn't just witness this massive, destructive, and quite deadly, by the way,

convulsion in American cities. The whole discussion of Tom Cotton's suggestion, for example, of using military to quell things took place in a kind of cultural atmosphere where none of that happened where there were there weren't actually deadly and violent and life-destroying riots night after night and city after city if you work for a major newspaper and you wrote a story about how buildings actually matter as well not as much as lives of course but they're important signifiers of the culture and history of a place you get fired fired. Abe, thanks a lot for coming by. And remind Rob that he's got a piece coming. And might I add also, Rob and I write for National Review. Yeah, but Rob and I write for National Review and we're sort of similar. And maybe that'd be great for commentary too, because I know that people say,

well, I like that Lilacs, but that Rob Long guy, he's the really funny one. So if you want to make Rob look even better, you know, call me up and I'll write for you. Hey, Peter here. I'm not going to pitch you for a column. You may send me an email thanking me later. All right. Well, your contribution to our magazine would be more than welcome. And that would be $29.95 a month.

Thanks, Abe. I didn't say we'd pay. That's what he'd pay you. Abe, thank you. Take care. Thanks so much. Bye-bye. Yes, well, if you've got money just sitting around there, Peter, subscribe.

It wouldn't kill you. Subscribe. I do subscribe. I wouldn't kill you. Subscribe. I do subscribe. I've subscribed for years. Good. Because I know that some people, you know, in perilous economic times, look around for a way to save money. Especially now. Well, there is.

I've got to ask you. Well, when was the last time? How much? Well, yes and no, Bob. You can't shop efficiently. This is impossible. Are you muttering around in your silk robe watering your plants or misting them right now, I'd no, Rob. You can't shop efficiently. This is impossible. Are you muttering around in your silk robe watering your plants or misting them right now, I'd like to know.

I'm misting myself. Okay. Well, Rob's right. It is tough. And when was the last time you looked at how much you're spending every month on car insurance or homeowner's insurance, for that matter? Now is the time to check out Gabby. Gabby. And see about getting a lower rate for the exact same coverage you already have. Now, Gabby takes the pain out of the shopping for insurance by giving you apples-to-apples comparison of your current coverage with 40 of the top insurance providers like Progressive, Nationwide, Travelers.

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Take two minutes right now if you want. See how much you can save on your car and your homeowner's insurance. Go to Gabby.com slash Ricochet. That's G-A-B-I dot com slash Ricochet. Gabby.com slash Ricochet. And our thanks to Gabby Insurance for sponsoring this, the Ricochet. That's G-A-B-I dot com slash Ricochet. Gabby dot com slash Ricochet. And our thanks to Gabby Insurance for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, we've got some amazing stuff about the life of Peter Robinson coming up in just a second. But as we know, he says, slowing down, making it obvious. It's officially a bit. It's now a bit. Yeah, it's a thing. James Lydon's Member Post of the Week.

It's officially a bit. It's now a bit. Yeah. It's a thing. Lydon's Post of the Week, sort of obligatory, I guess. Lots of great stuff in there, but I had to pull this one out because it was not contentious, but it was R.I.P. Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben. And I mention this because, of course, that's something we probably should talk about before we end the podcast. Quote is with it.

Weeping wrote this, by the way. Congrats, Weeping. It is with great sadness that we come together today to mourn the deaths of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben. Born in 1889, Aunt Jemima spent her life providing delicious breakfast for everyone she came into contact with. And since his birth in the late 1940s, Uncle Ben did the same for lunch and dinner. And then We weeping notes, on a more serious note, how in the world is removing well-known African-American icons and logos from the public sphere supposed to make anything more equal for the African-American community?

Doesn't just removing them from that field seem more unbalanced? That there's absolutely, you know, aside from the fellow in the cream of wheat package, if he's still there, that's it. And it's an interesting argument. And the thing of it is, is that I understand why they did this. And I understand what is offensive about these archetypes, even though their stories have been amplified and changed over the years. I mean, I seem to remember Uncle Ben back in 2007 was named the chairman of the board of the Uncle Ben Rice Company. And they ran ads of him saying, this is my joint.

I'm the boss here. But even doing that was a recognition that the archetypes originated in servile concepts. And the very titles aunt and uncle themselves are terms of condescension and derision used to keep from having to say Mr. and Mrs. So I kind of get that. It's an interesting conversation to have, but it doesn't bother me as much as some of the other cultural erasures do. I would have named them something different that had more respectful names rather than nuking them, because that shows

that we do learn and change, and we don't just have to send everything in the past down the memory hole, which is what we seem determined to do to get back to year zero. Gentlemen, agree, disagree, not paying attention, misting your flowers? Why? No, I'm misting myself. You know, it's a brand. The brand did the smart move. That was a very smart move. It's a brand that offends a lot of people and a lot of customers, and it would have been a problem. So change the brand. That's not a big deal. It's a business. So they made the right decision right decision and you're right it is rooted in a certain kind of winky kind of hey hey isn't this funny uh kind of attitude that um i mean i put it this way i was shocked to discover that aunt jemima still was aunt jemima looked like i mean that goes back to that goes back to the 70s when it was sort of a female

version of Uncle Tom. I mean, that word Jemima had had these negative connotations for so long. I see. I didn't realize that. From my deep experience in black culture in the 70s and 80s, I mean, that's what I've gleaned. I love this

post simply because I didn't know that aunt jemima and uncle ben were real people there's some history there i suppose if i were in the business you can't you can't offend i mean rob has a point if you're running the business if you're a shareholder but i found it a fascinating post i did not know that they were had been real people at all in the first place well yes and no and that's kind of murky too i mean the aunt jemima brand well the jemima i mean the jemima aunt jemima was an old minstrel term and they've they've they sort of they found i'm getting an education they found this woman and plugged her into it at the 1893 uh exposition colombian exposition i understand and she's very famous and beloved, and that led to other things.

But it wasn't as if an African-American woman invented syrup or pancakes and then started a business and it flourished. And likewise with Uncle Ben, that's a little bit murky too. I think there was an African-American Texas rice farmer who supplied some stuff to the military, but his name wasn't Ben. And they, I mean, just. Yeah, you can't get away from the fact that at the bottom of it, there are servants. And while it's illustrative to see how those connotations have changed, and there is a lesson there, but like Rob says, it's a brand. There is an old movie.

I don't remember what it's called. Wasn't there an old movie? Gone with the Wind. No, not that one. Where it comes up with a kind of an alternate history for how Aunt Jemima became Aunt Jemima. A pancake mix. It was a woman and her maid had invented the pancake mix. And so she and the

maid kind of like went into business together i have a faint memory of it i shouldn't even be talking i should be looking it up but there's something in the culture in the 30s there was a movie about that not that it wasn't a movie really about race at all it was a that was just an incidental moment in the movie but um it just sort of implied these two women had a business together and um and one of them was sort of the sort of a kind of a caricature of aunt jemima well the the the large sassy domestic was a staple of the times i mean if you did it's the only time you saw black women in white movies was when they were domestic and all the radio you know the radio shows had them and

it was a cliche and aunt jemima may have been beloved in the ads but if you go back and look at the ads in the 40s she's speaking in what people assume to be that sort of comic minstrelsy patois of uh with its curious verbs and all the rest of it and it's just i mean it's your eyes bleed looking at it today and that's the history of the stuff so maybe we got a lesson in that history and reminded people of those things but i I just, again, what bugs me, here's what annoys me. The idea that these old offensive images, and they are offensive, cannot be shown anymore is the peculiar thing here. It's like, this stuff is proof of the racism in American culture in the past. You say, right, so here's an example of it. Well, you can't show that. Why not? Well, it's

offensive. People will take offense at it, but how are we to know unless we're all well-versed in what these images were? It's like they simultaneously believe that we should all assume these things without any proof. And I think you learn a lot studying exactly how African-Americans were portrayed in the culture, in the pop, in the radio, and in the advertising in the 40s and the 50s, 30s and 40s. You have to look at it. I mean, it's important to look at it and not just do so in order to horrify people. It's like anything else. Well, we have something amazing for you, just absolutely astonishing. But before I give it to you, I've got to tell you this.

This podcast, as you know, was brought to you by Quip, by Gabby Insurance, and by Tommy John. If you support them, you support us, and you get great underwear, great insurance quotes, and your teeth are sparkly, minty, fresh. What else could we do for you? Well, we could, I don't know, pay you to go to Apple iTunes

and give us, Apple Music Podcast, give us a good review. Nah, can't do that. That's probably payola. But we'd like you to, out of the goodness of your heart, justice,

social justice, demands that you give us a five-star review, and that helps us, I don't know, surface the show, get more paying subscribers. All that great stuff. Well, here's something quite amazing. Roll tape. Chris.

Professional speech writer. Nope. Everybody else. Amy. Presidential speech writer. Nope. Everybody else. Amy. Presidential speech writer. Yeah, that's it. That's our Peter Robinson puzzle. Hey, you got both those up.

You have $3,000. Did you hear that? Wheel of Fortune, Pat Sajak, Soto Voce, Peter Robinson. I made the track. I made the track. I made the track. I am pretty sure, but I don't know for certain because I haven't mentioned this to Pat. But there was, Rob does the New York Times crossword puzzle.

This is a year and a half ago. That was a replay of a show that aired some time ago. And Sajak was the answer to one of the clues. So I dropped, I sent Pat an email and I said, Pat, you're in the New York Times crossword puzzle today. And Pat wrote back and said, in effect, something like, Peter, Peter, Peter, this is the 27th time that I have appeared in the crossword puzzle of a major American newspaper. And I think that he mentioned me on the show just as a sort of little solace to me. I'm not the kind of person who will ever appear in a crossword puzzle, so Pat put me on Wheel of Fortune for a nanosecond. Well, it'll be great when he does it 26 more times and somebody tells you about it.

You can say, John, John, this is the 27th time I've been mentioned on the Wheel of Fortune. By the way, I want to thank member Captain Spalding for pointing out that audio clip to us. Well, also, let's be honest. If you construct crossword puzzles, Sajak is a great... It really helps. It can really help you.

Because you can't use Sojak. Where would you use Sojak, for example? Does anybody know Notary Sojak? Does that phrase strike a bell? Ring a bell? Doesn't. Well, that's something we'll leave then for people to tell us about in the comments.

Is that from True Grit? No. Notary Sojak. What is the origin of that nonsense phrase? We'll know that people listen to the podcast all the way to the end if they actually answer the question. I should start doing that every single week. No prize for the person who can tell us where Notary Sojak, Pat Sajak's other crossword puzzle entry comes from. Thank Peter, Rob. It's been a pleasure as ever. We thank our sponsors and you, the listeners, so keep this show going. This is number 501, and we'll see

everybody in the comments at Ricochet for Boyd4. Next week, boys. Thanks for calling. No difference what group I'm in I am everyday people There is a blue one Can't accept a green one For living on the back one Trying to be a skinny one Different strokes for different folks So born and so born It's cool to be me We got to live together. And no better.

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