The Ricochet Podcast - Sydney Sweeny and the Cleavage on the Right

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

The American right has a decision before it. There are a few elements in the coalition that threaten the stability of the whole. The boys of the Ricochet Podcast propose the following: Sweeny in, Fuentes out. After settling on that, Steve, Charles, and James get to Tuesday's rout; Mayor Mamdani and the limits to NYC's invincibility; Trump's bad day at SCOTUS; all Canadian land acknowledgements taken to their illogical conclusion. All this before landing on an oddly reassuring note — that America is still among the sanest places on the planet.

I got so into that story. I forgot what I was talking about. That was great story, though, so who, you know, who can bother? Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall. It's the Rickushe podcast with Charles C.W. Cook and Stephen Hayward. I'm James Lylex, and today we go over the week that was, and what a week it was indeed.

So let's have ourselves a podcast. criticism of the content, which was basically that maybe specifically in this political climate, like, white people shouldn't joke about genetic superiority. Like, that was kind of like the criticism, broadly speaking. And since you are talking about this, I just wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about that specifically. I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear. Welcome, everybody. It's the Rickishay podcast number 7604. I think you might know better if you're sitting there in your cell doing

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I'm James Lalex in Minneapolis, where it is very much in November. it is dank, it is overcast, it is cloudy, it is misty, it's a nice autumn day. The trees are fully inflamed and we're barreling towards Thanksgiving with that feeling of, well, thanksgivingness. Stephen Hayward is not in his accustomed place. If I can tell by his Zoom feed, he appears to be in, I don't know, have you been abducted and you're been somebody's attic or something or what? Well, you might think so.

I'm actually in Washington, D.C., attending the annual national Lawyers Conference of the Federal Society, even though I'm not a lawyer, but I slum it with these lawyers, right? You've got to keep up with them. Where about an hour ago, as you and I are recording, I did hear Senator Ted Cruz launch into a fairly blistering attack on Tucker Carlson and calling out the cowardice of people who won't challenge Tucker Carlson. So for what it's worth, that's what's going on here up in DuPont Circle area of Washington this morning. Interesting. I was seeing a tweet by somebody that I like and follow the other day. on Twitter. They were saying that the whole internecine

squabbles in the right with some people coming down on Tucker and some people coming down on Tucker for platforming Nick Fuentes and some people just coming down on Nick Fuentes in the first place. It makes him feel like a dad who wants to reach around in the car backseat and tell him if you don't stop squabbling. I'm going to turn this guy around and go

right now. I'm thinking, no, no, that's not what it's like. That's not what it's like at all. If this indeed is going to be the new face of the party, if this is going to be something that we have to consider because we're just asking questions because we've just been enthralled for so long to this poisonous element of international hand-rubbing hooked

nose jury uh you know if if if you can't say anything about them you know and uh tells you who your leaders i'm sorry i don't want anything to do with these people and i don't want anything to do with anybody who makes excuses for them they can go to hell somebody who sits there in this interview with tucker carlson and says you know that he's got admiration for Joseph Stalin. I mean, yeah, the other side's got that, too. I think there was a guy on Mondami's election night who was saying, you know, what we need more in this country is more class consciousness. You know, the United States was a country that defeated the USSR. Unfortunately, moron, absolute moron. So, yeah, the other side does have there people who

believe a variety of stupid things about authoritarianism. But this, I did, I, I, I, no, you don't, you don't get to say Stalin was a badass and get to be in this party. go go away or I'm I'm heading for the exit that I don't care what the ramifications are the closest I've ever come to not really appraisal of Stalin but I've occasionally used the joke which I think came from Joe Sobrun a brilliant but somewhat dodgy guy right he commented years ago on the Supreme Court saying just imagine what Stalin could have done if only he'd had the Commerce Clause which I think is funny I think that's pretty good yes yes it is yes It is very much so.

But let's think what Stalin actually did when he had uncontested power in the country where he could just simply do what he wish and send everybody with the gulag. I would like these people, I mean, I would love nothing more than to have this Fuentes character or anybody who's making apologies for the Soviet Union to be strapped down into a chair like Malcolm McDowell in clockwork orange with his eyes held open. there's somebody dropped in, you know, lubricant and be forced to read the entirety of one day in the life of Yvonneisovich, followed by the gulag, you know, the whole thing. You can just sit there for six months and let that scroll across the screen and take it all in.

Joseph Stalin was an admirable character. Ah, but there seems to be some sort of, well, it's Tucker, after all, and, you know, Tucker's gotten a little strange lately. You always was with a UFO thing, but, you know, Tucker was always saying the things that other people wouldn't, and he's got a contrary perspective, and we like, people who aren't, you know, we like the heterodox, think, I don't know what's happened to the guy. I don't.

I mean, a minimum once, we did a panel together, and he's a great guy, smart guy, funny, no indication whatsoever that down the road would be this, boy, you know what, I really do hate the Christian Zionists and those Jews are blowing up Christian churches in Gaza and killing. I would say I didn't have that on my bingo card, but no bingo card ever has. Tucker Carlson goes off the cliff under the letter. eye. So what do you take, what do you make of the, of all this? Is this just, you know, squabbling on the right that doesn't bleed out into the general population or is this one of those things where people say, oh, great. Well, they're complaining that we've called them Nazis and look who

they're bringing in. Look who seems to be a. Okay by the heritage boys. Well, I have lots of thoughts, but I see Charles has entered the chat. So Charles, give us an opening bid here, I think. We know Charles C.W. Cook. We have been talking about Nick and Tucker, as you well might imagine, it's a zesty, zingy topic that brings a lot of things to the fore, and I'm going to let you say hello, and I'll skip the weather and go right to it. What do you think? Well, I think many things. The foundational thing I think is that the notion that in politics you are not allowed to decide with whom you associate is utterly unsustainable. It makes not much sense in a free pluralist society to have rigorous vetting of the

political opinions of, say, your architect or cleaner or plumber. That is a good forum in which to live and let live. But politics is about deciding who you are with and who you're against and what you believe, obviously. So the notion that it's cancel culture for a movement such as ours to say we don't want Nazis in it, it's philosophically ridiculous before you get to the details.

The practical side of this really annoys me because although I am against the toleration of people who say, hate the Jews. I understand that there is a line somewhere at which you say we need a big coalition. We need to accept that people disagree with us. Now I talk about this a lot in that I'm a Reaganite conservative who's for free markets and against tariffs and is classically liberal in most of his presumptions. And I know that between, depending on the time, 30 and 55% of the Republican Party is not. And I think it's fine in most circumstances.

This is why I'm not at the bulwark. I'm not a bill crystallite. I think it's fine for the party to ebb and flow and have those disagreements. We had throughout our history people in the party who were much more Trumpy. We had Senator Taft, who was more Trumpy on foreign policy. We had Pat Buchanan in 1992, challenged George H.W. Bush and so on. What I find annoying, though, James, is that that ecumenicalism that I have just described is, claimed by the people who now say that we have to tolerate Nick Frentes, but not practiced. They shout at me and anyone who disagrees with them in the slightest all the time. They're always trying to kick people out.

So it was funny to watch all these defenses of Tucker Carson. Guys, there's an election this week. I know he didn't have anyone running in it on or endorse them or help them, but guys, there's an election this week. We've got to unite. We can't be wasting our time with this infighting. And the next thing he put up on Twitter was an attack on Lindsay Graham. Now, look, if your view is all against all, fine.

You don't have to defend Lindsay Graham. If you think the Republicans are better off without Lindsay Graham, that's your prerogative. I don't because I think that we need lots of different senators and governors and representatives in different places to cobble together a majority. But you can't have it both ways. You simply cannot say that I have to tolerate Nick Fuentes, but that Tucker Carlson doesn't have to tolerate Lindsey Graham. That is ridiculous. There are bright lines.

Yes, we want a big tent. Yes, we want to be ecumenical. Yes, we want to incorporate contrary views sometimes to illustrate and inform and sharpen our own and to reach a consensus out of all of that. But if somebody believes in a low, if somebody believes in a flat tax, but on the other hand is a strict

adherent and advocate for Carthaginian ball worship and child sacrifice, I'm going to say maybe that's a line that we're not going to cry. That's a bright dividing line. that makes me not want this person in there because, A, they're going to be boring you at the table all the time about how the Carthaginians had it right with child sacrifice, but B, these are things beyond the pale, and there are things that ought to be beyond the pale. Now, Stephen and I were talking earlier about the casual anti-Semitism on the right that's arisen, which is one of those dismaying things that you just, your heart sinks, because the left, as we know, has been masking its own anti-Semitism with the usual indigenous people, revolt, the presser, a press dynamic, the Palestinian question. It gives them a way to say, oh, the Jews, uh, Jews, without actually coming out and saying it, because they've got the word Zionist to

uncover. But on the right, there seems to be a very, well, Stephen, describe what you were in some of the conversations that you were having, which were sort of alarming in their, in their ignorance, more than they are in their malevolence. Yeah, all right. Well, I mean, I think I could just say, I mean, let me, let me reset the scene this way. Fuentes is a shock jock. I mean, I think the model there was Alex Jones, who's shown for 20 years or more now that you can make very good bank by being absolutely outrageous. And so I think Fuentes does that. And now we've elevated him. That's one thing that the whole fracas has done, not just Tucker putting him on, but then the people now rallying around Tucker, who I think is intellectually unstable. I think if you go through his

corpus of writing throughout his career, you can make out that as, you're right, as bright as he is. and he's important because he was a leading figure on Fox News and elsewhere and still has a big audience. Okay. The thing to ask is, why do so many people like Nick Fuentes? And here I was quite shocked in going recently, actually, the University of Mississippi, the week before J.D. Vance went down there and was confronted by the student who said, how can we support Israel?

And I thought he gave a poor answer. But I met several students there really bright, solid conservative. very well read. They know the canon. And several of them said to me, when I asked you, who's going to succeed Charlie Kirk? Because they were still very upset about Kirk's death. And they said, well, you know, we think it might be this Nick Fuentes guy. We kind of like him. And we know he's a little weird. He says some crazy stuff. But, you know, he grabbed their attention. And I found that startling after a couple of, you know, actually three, four days of meeting and doing long seminars with some of these students. And then the young lady says to me, drive me to the airport,

sweet girl, she's driven me to the airport to Memphis before. It's an hour-long trip. She said, yeah, I kind of like this Nick Fuentes guy. And I do wonder, why do we give all this money to Israel? Now, I want to stipulate that I didn't detect any anti-Semitism among these students I met. I don't think they have any of that. But I do think they have been prone to the propaganda, I think a lot of it originates overseas. And there's not been a lot of pushback. So, I mean, I explained a couple of people. Well, actually, most of the aid we give to Israel is military aid. It's for joint development of technology. It's to our benefit. A lot of that money recycles back to our defense manufacturers. And they'll said, oh, I didn't know that. I'd never heard that

before. I guess that makes some sense, right? But things are bad. And so I think we need to figure out something fast because we are losing a certain segment of younger conservatives over to this at best ambiguous situation. Charles, do you think it might have to be with just young people enjoying somebody who's who's taking on the shibboloths, who's taking on the sacred cows, you know, et per te la bourgeoisie, let's say the shock value of it all, as Steve calls him a shock jock. that that I mean while that's certainly part of being young and loving to splash around in the muck there are other directions from which one can come that don't take this I mean you can be

outrageous about a whole bunch of issues this seems to be one that is a it's a big warning to me when people start to believe in this then it's very easy for them to slip into a casual hatred of the people who you know you know the Jews because frank Yeah. They say we can't criticize them. Well, you know what? What makes them so special? And the next thing you know, the next thing you know, the next thing you know. Well, I'm in two minds on this. I will say before I share my two minds that there is, of course, nothing wrong with anyone, especially in the United States, separate country, criticizing Israel or American foreign policy. And if that were the extent of it, we wouldn't be having this conversation. I'm in two minds as to why this problem has arisen. On the one hand, I do think, and Trump is an expression of this to some extent, that conservatives, because they were successful in many ways, had, and maybe have still, forgotten the argument that led them to their maxims,

by which I mean a lot of conservative argument in favor of Israel, and I am very pro-Israel, does not exist. explain in the way Steve just did why our relationship with Israel is important. It just declares it. They just say we must stand with Israel. And when you do that without the substance, the support atrophies among people who haven't been around for 50 years. On the other hand, while that is a problem in general with conservatism, the people who hate Israel are quite clever, and they are very good at conflating hatred of the Jews, conspiracy theories, the oldest prejudices, with reasonable-sounding contemporary policy disputes.

And most of the problem that we're discussing manifests itself in ways that are simply indefensible. you'll be in a conversation and it won't be why do we give a few billion dollars to Israel it will be the Israelis bombed the USS Liberty or the Israelis have a secret plan to flood the country with the legal immigrants or the Israelis they run the banks or they've bought our politicians or the Jews tricked the white star line into sinking the Titanic so that the federal, you know... Well, that one's not in dispute, Charles. Well, I did hit an iceberg, as someone pointed out to me.

Right. That's the old one, right. So, you know, I do think there's some confusion, and I do think conservatives haven't done as good a job as they could have. At the same time, so much of this stuff is tied to a preference for conspiracy theories that has come back on both sides. to the aisle in such force. And of course, into that

maelstrom, we're going to put the main conspiracy theory in human history, which is the Jews did it. And we should stand up against it, and we shouldn't accept the lie that this is just about Benjamin Netanyahu's leadership. Come on.

If somebody, though, knows nothing about the situation, and I say, yeah, why do we give so much money to them? It indicates to me that they haven't given the slightest look more than a second at the region itself. And what constitutes the governments and the cultures around it. It seems something to me that they would somehow say that this particular little sliver of a country is, it's very curious why we're so attached to them and why we're not equally attached to these, which have cultures that are absolutely contrary and antithetical to all the things that we as good Westerners believe. I don't get that.

I mean, a cursory look at the situation, a glance at the situation will tell you exactly why. perhaps we have thrown in our fortunes with this little New Jersey-sized sliver than the rest of it. I don't know what there is more to go on. Well, can I just add one thought to that, James? I mean, we've been concentrating on interest and geo-strategy. I agree completely with what you just said, but I think we won't add one other dimension. So, you know, one of things Tucker said was, I hate Christian Zionists. I'm not sure exactly what he means by that.

I'm not sure what a Christian Zionist is. I think I might be one rightly understood. But, you know, when that student asked J.D. Vance, by the way, why are we allied with Israel? they have a religion that's different and hostile to ours. And my thought was, Ronald Reagan would have answered that with a single sentence. Reagan would have said, it's called the Judeo-Christian tradition for a reason. And that to me is ultimately the bedrock of why we are allied with Israel. Even at the Middle East were at peace, they would still be one of our best friends in the world,

for that reason alone, full stop. Right, right. Right. And, you know, when you look into Judeo-Christian as a concept, there are difficulties there. They're contrary strains. There are things that you have to entangle. But at the heart of it is like the same thing when we say when we refer to Western civilization. There are basic fundamental precepts that the like pornography, you know, may not be able to

define it, but I know it when I see it. And that's what binds them to us and to, you know, and to Western civilization, which has done its best to try to kill them for the last 2,000 years. Can I give you one more sentence on that? It was from Winston Churchill in the last volume. It was World War II memoirs where he said, all that is best. and Western civilization owes its origin to Jerusalem and Athens. Reason and Revelation, see, and he understood the connection. There's also a point at which it becomes quite

pointless trying to reason with people who've decided they hate Jews, because the arguments are not only made in bad faith, but are unfalsifiable. Jay Nordleger pointed this out to me, that they switch on a dime. So you say, why do you hate the Jews? And they'll say, Well, I hate the Jews because the socialists, the communists. They came into this country with a radical politics, and they destroyed our American system of capitalism and free enterprise, and they created a race war and all the crap they believe, right? And then you say, oh, okay, I don't think that's true.

And then they go, yeah, well, I hate them because they're capitalists, because they came in and they run all the banks, and they got rid of our welfare system, and now they have all the money, and the average working person can't. And then they let immigrants in so they could exploit. And you're like, hang on a minute. Those two things are complete opposites of one another. You're just going with whatever it is at that moment.

You know, people do this with Americans too, right? It's Americans, the problem with them is they worship the body. They worship. There's hairbrushing and they're just obsessed with bodybuilding. The other problem with Americans, if you need it to be, is that they're all fat and obese. They don't care about themselves. It's just like once you've decided you hate someone,

you can find a reason for it. And that's why ultimately you just have to stand up and say, you know what? There will always be people who hate the Jews, but they're not going to be in our movement because that's just not what we do here. Yep. As far as being superficial and body conscious, Sydney Sweeney was in the news this week. Thank goodness. She did an interview and I saw a little snippet of it where this woman was trying to get her to say,

okay, you can kind of say you're sorry now because, you know, the whole jeans thing and the white supremacy and it's just a bad time to be talking about jeans. you know this is your opportunity to to apologize get around that and her response was basically no the response was when I have something to say about things I'll say it I did a gene ad I wear jeans all the time refusing to take the bait and showing exactly how it's done everything this woman does somehow somehow seems to be this culture war clash um which is quite remarkable, really. And it's coming from people who probably 20, 30 years ago,

30, 40 years ago, would have defended the, the Brooks Shields ads because it was chic and it was transgressive and all the rest of it. But this is a bad ad because Nick Fuentes has probably, you know, been holding up picture of her in the jeans to the wall with one hand for three weeks now. Oh, no. Did you see any?

Did you, what? What? He just was trying to find some tape. some pins. I don't know if you guys saw the interview or whether or not you think this is... I don't think Nick Fuentes likes women. Yeah. No, I don't, yeah, I think you're, I think you're right. That's that's also they keep saying on the left that this was a beloved ad among a white supremacists and I've seen literally no evidence of this whatsoever. It's all in their heads. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I don't know who these people are. Well, it has been a week,

um, apparently of stunning victories for the left, the Democrats and the rest of it. I generally am not all that interested in most election postmortems because they're local, but some of them are indicative. It's interesting that in Virginia, of course, you know, the racist population, the white supremacist population in Virginia rejected the opportunity to be led by a strong, smart black woman. You had a fellow who won the AG race by five, six points, who had previously announced his desire to shoot his opponents in the head, and your little dog, too, and your children, which may, given his electoral success, have a bunch of people trying to invent a time machine so they too

can go back and fabricate tweets about themselves fantasizing about the death of their opponents. But the New York mayor election was the one that probably got most people's attention because it seemed the stupidest. It seemed the most unforced era. It seemed the most willing descent into the worst form of politics and economics than you could possibly imagine for the city. And it was facilitated by, well, probably by very rich people who wanted to do the right thing and thought that this shiny new socialist was the best hope for New Yorker just liked the idea

of just putting a thumb in the eye of America by electing him. And, of course, by all the young women that I saw on Twitter, X and TikTok, who were proudly declaring that they just voted for him because he was going to bring back, well, New York is, they've only been able to imagine it, free buses, grocery stores run by the state, and something else, I don't know. so guys what do you think it portends for new york in the short and the long term or is this just going to be another one of those guys de blasio style who comes in wasting an awful lot of money in the city in america nevertheless manages to survive because it's a colossus on its own right too big to fail perhaps which we know it isn't well it's too big to fail in the sense that it won't collapse it's too big to fail in the sense that it is unlikely wall street's going to move to dallas it's too big to fail in that it turns turns over its population almost completely every 50 years. It is still the center of the world.

It's not too big to fail in that, and I know you're not suggesting this, the political leadership doesn't matter. I moved to the United States in 2011, and I moved to New York. And my parents were nervous about it because they'd been to New York in the 80s. And they thought it would be, like that. It would be dangerous. And in fact, in 2011, when I lived in New York, it was safer than London. And if you were in Manhattan, as I was, it was much preferable to being in London, not because London has more crime everywhere, but because in London the crime happens in all

parts of the city, including the nice bits, whereas in New York, that isn't true or wasn't in 2011. If you were in Manhattan in 2011, you were pretty much guaranteed to be spared the crime. And I used to tell people back in England who would ask me about it because their conception of New York was 1970s, 1980s New York as well, that I could probably walk around the streets with cash in one hand in an iPhone in the other at one o'clock in the morning drunk and no one would touch me. And that's not true now. New York is not dead. But New York is not 2011. in New York anymore. That Giuliani Bloomberg legacy has been squandered. Bill de Blasio did not take New York back to 1978, but he certainly took it back to the mid-90s before it got really, really good.

And that's a disgrace. It's an absolute disgrace to have gone through what New York did, to have made the difficult changes, to know how to do it. Obviously, conservatives know this story. Steve said they know the canon these conservatives he's been talking to. Well, part of the canon is James Q. Wilson. Part of the canon is Rudy Trilly High and policing, broken windows, and all of this. This is not a secret. So I am worried for New York in that respect.

And then I'm worried for it in a second and related respect, which is how many people are going to move out? I don't worry about that as a Floridian. The people who move here tend to be more conservative. We now have one and a half million Republican registration advantage because people have moved in from the Northeastern elsewhere. That doesn't hurt me here. But it hurts New York because you need to have a critical mass of people who are persuadable that they don't have to live like this,

which is what you got with Giuliani and then Bloomberg. But if they've all moved, even if it's just to New Jersey or Southern Connecticut, how does the city fix itself? Chicago hasn't had a Republican mayor since 1934. It cannot fix it. itself because everyone's left. So that's the bit that worries me is that Mamdani will make it worse. He'll squander what's left of that legacy and then no one will stick around to fix it,

so it will spiral. Well, they'll stick around perhaps, but only 49% of the year. If you can move to Florida, seriously, really, if you can move to Florida and have that as your primary residence, but also have a Pietateran billionaire's row or in Park Slope for that matter, then you're able to come back and avail yourself of all the things you love. about Manhattan the stores time square you are my wife goodbye city life and the you know the shops and the restaurants and then go back to florida and pay no taxes and live a much more comfortable life so they're not going to go they're just going to exacerbate this thing that supposedly they're so

mortified by which is the class distinctions they're going to make it's not going to get cheaper rent control will only make it more expensive it mean that nobody will build anything we just lost here in st paul the city across the river got rid of their mayor who had been part of the whole rent control apparatus and it's been disastrous for the city everybody saw it immediately all the building permits dropped to one you know from you know from a thousand to one and that'll happen new york um i mean nobody will notice exactly the additional economic boat anchors being draped around the next of the companies because nobody notices the person they don't hire nobody notices the skyscraper that doesn't get built actually all of the i mean there's just less of things that

you don't notice because they don't happen because of what was done in minnesota Well, I'm sorry. Well, what they will notice in New York is when the buses, the free buses become rolling homeless shelters and they will know who to blame because he was so associated with it. Whether he can make that actually happen as he might actually. People say, oh, there's the MTA or whatever it's called, have the real authority, but he can he can pressure the MTA or appoint new members and so forth. But look, the bright side sort of is this. Mondami is now the leading progressive celebrity in the country. And he has responsibility.

I mean, unlike Elizabeth Warren and AOC and Bernie Sanders, what do they do? They give speeches. Mondami actually has to perform. A lot of his wreckage will happen somewhat slowly, but at a certain point, you mentioned Chicago, I think, Charles. Mayor Brandon Johnson, I think his approval rating is in a single digits. I think 9% last I saw it. And, you know, Mondami, you could easily see three, four years from now, Mondami plumbing those

depths even with New Yorkers. Now, is there somebody, even a sensible Democrat, has come along? Maybe not, but you know, out in San Francisco, I can tell you, since I live out there and visit the city from time to time, it's getting better in a hurry. It's coming back fast. Why? They elected a Democrat who's not an idiot law. He's actually from what Lurie's his name. Dan Lurie. He's from the Gap family or something like that, or Levi Strauss maybe, one of the big apparel companies that goes back to the gold rush. He's not interested in making rhetorical fights with Trump. He says, I just want to fix the city. And he's moving fast to do that. So, you know, I mean, this will sound kind of. unoffensible, but it wouldn't surprise me if five years from now, we're talking about the first term of the comeback under Mayor Bill Ackman. Ah, that would be interesting. I think he wants to be president, but he may have to settle for Chicago mayor. Well, the left, you know, the progressive left, a big part of it is that worse is better.

I mean, that's always kind of an idea for the left, because the worst things are, that means that you just haven't, you just haven't done enough. If the bus has turned into rolling homeless shelters and everybody's being assaulted by wide-eyed men who are waving around box cutters, well, the solution for that, obviously, is to abolish capitalism because it's what's produced this inequity, et cetera. But people don't go for that. People don't buy that. People hear enough stories about somebody being garotted on their subway platform. And the last thing they think of, you know what we really do need to upend this order completely and start fresh from years. No, what they want is for guys in uniforms, burly people, to come along and take them and put them away. into bins. And that, I hope, as Stephen was saying, that six years from now, that's what will be hearing. But it's a lesson that has to be learned over and over and over again. And you just don't know why the aggregate effect of this kind of rule doesn't sink into New Yorkers. It's just, is it because there's just a lot of ruin in a society? And as I, you know, as I said,

before, the city's not going to fall apart. But there's a lot of ruin in society. And there's a lot of things that have to happen in New York before people start to demand more. Well, one of the Republicans the other day said that we're getting to the point of the shutdown where planes are going to start falling out of the sky. Maybe that will put people to the negotiation table. I thought it was a new twist on wishing your opponent's dead. And again, it's one of those worse as better things. Haven't had any planes fall out of the sky yet.

Planes are being canceled because the FAA shortfalls. But 38 days in, as of this podcast, record. breaking shutdown. I guess we have to say something about it. Senate's supposed to vote again. I think for the 147th time on a House passed CR. Clean CR, I think, not filthy, as the others are. What do you think this goes? Do you think the Democrats will eventually cave and say, okay, okay, clean CR will hammer out the stuff later or not? Yeah, so I think if I'm keeping up with the news today, and I'm never sure if I am, I think it's already failed in the Senate today. Okay. And I think, you know, I did predict last week that Democrats wanted to wait for the election and that they had a big result.

It was going to stiffen their spines to hold out for more. So I think they're now, I'll say it greedy. I think they think that they're going to get Republicans to fold. And so I think they're not at all bothered by airline cutbacks and so forth. So now this is going to go on a while longer yet. Yeah. Charles, you'll be with me on this. One of the things is they're saying that they're waiting for them to fold. One of the things that's the hardest to fold. and everybody knows this is a fitted sheet. Now, a regular sheet has got corners on it and you can fold it nicely, but a fitted sheet has got that elastic under it, and it's impossible to fold the things to put them away. But you've got cozy earth sheets, you're never going to want to put them away. You're going to want to have them on your bed all year round.

Now, it's getting cozy, to use their own word, on this earth here in this part of the country, is the temperatures go and the leaves fall and the winter beckons. And what, of course, you want to do is make a refugee, out of your own home from the stresses outside or inside and just crawl into bed sometimes and enjoy a nice, warm, soft place. Hey, when the holidays get busy and they get a little overwhelming, think about it. What's the gift you would like to give your loved ones most? I'll bet you think I'm going to say sheets.

And I am, but I'm going to say a specific kind. For me, it's the gift of, I don't know, slowing down and feeling cozy and making home your sanctuary to write out those bitter winter months to come. And that's exactly what cozy earth. provides. Charles, I know you're in a place with a seasonal variation of temperatures is about seven degrees or so. You never have the winters that we do. Snow does not lash at your windows. Gales do not put the temperature down to the 20s, but nevertheless, you are experienced as a man who's used these sheets both in hot weather for their wicking ability, and I guess in what you

would call cold to keep you warm. And I know it's only because your wife likes them. Well, not only, but she is in charge. Yes, of course. But I have used the in both circumstances and that's the impressive thing because most of the time I want to stay cool I don't want to crawl into a warm bed I want to crawl into a cool bed and these sheets are pretty great at that but it does occasionally get cold we did last year James go below freezing really up to 31 one night but that is still cold even if it's 33 34 outside that's still cold. So I do love these sheets. My wife chose them. She's in charge off the sheets, but I still sleep in them. And I'm impressed. Well, he's been doing so for over 100 nights.

If you would like to, if you would like to do that yourself, because of the earth, they stand by their quality. And to show that, their blankets come with a 100-night sleep trial and a 10-year warranty, sick of sheets that just aren't getting shredded after two or three, 10-year, a decade. Look, try them out. You don't love them, return them, hassle-free. But trust me, you won't want to. Now, Black Friday, a big November term, it's come early to Cozy Earth. Right now, you can use the code ricochet. You can stack that code on top of their site-wide sale,

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at the Cozy Earth promo here. Wrap the ones you love in luxury with Cozy Earth. And we thank Cozy Earth for sponsoring this, the R ricochet podcast. Let's see what up is going on here in the world. Oh, Scotus stuff. Scotus. There are tariffs. Now, we are told by Chris Matthews, of course, that Donald Trump is acting like a king. He wants to be a king. So I assume that if the whole tariff thing goes against him, there will be at least six bloody severed heads on pikes outside of the White House, or maybe on the gate. Let me outside the Oval Office with its new sign.

What do you make of the tariff arguments so far, and what do you think is the fallout going to be, depending on which way it goes? Charles, Tariff fan, and Scotus fan that you are. No, I'm just pausing a second to wind myself up, James, because this is

my area. What do I think of it? I think that the way in which the Trump administration has used IEPA is preposterous and an obvious threat to our constitutional order, and I thought that that was obvious from the oral arguments at the court earlier in the week. The foundational question here is of delegation. I'm fairly radical on this. I don't think the court will touch this, but the tariff power is put into Article 1.

Section 8, along with the power of taxes and duties, and they are separately enumerated. The idea that Congress can hand one away, can give the President carte blanche, can create a tariff-enabling act, of you will, is preposterous, and I think it would be seen as such if we were talking about income taxes. Imagine if tomorrow the president could just say, the tax rate for those in bracket X is now Y. It would be chaos, but it would also be a big problem. Now, the Supreme Court has ruled, and I'm not wild about this decision, but it is precedent in 1928 that to delegate Tower of Powers to the President,

there has to be a comprehensible principle. I forget what the exact phrase is from that decision. it cannot say the president can do what he wants there is a line somewhere but clearly this is well short of it and even if it weren't in theory it is in practice because the statute doesn't mention tariffs this is the thing people don't talk about this statute does not anywhere mention tariffs and that's why the solicitor general sour who's a very smart Matt, don't get me wrong, was left having to argue that lots of different words meant tariffs.

But that's not how we run our system. That's not how textualism works. It's not how original public meaning works. If it were, we would have a big problem. And Sauer had to concede this because he said at some point that under his theory, a future Democratic president could start imposing all sorts of taxes in the wake of a president declaring a climate emergency.

But if this is allowed to stand, then what we have done is turned Aipa into an act that wipes out all the others. Because we have said that the president, if he deems there to be an emergency, in other words, if he deems it necessary, not if there are any circumstances delineated by Congress, like a blockade or a war, but if he deems it necessary, he can impose tariffs. Now, the proximate cause of these tariffs is that Trump doesn't like trade deficits. We can argue about trade deficits, but trade deficits have been with us for 50 years. There were trade deficits when this law was passed. So if this stands, we have told the President of the United States that he has complete, unfettered plenary power over trade, which would be a bit odd even for Trump,

given that in 2019 Trump negotiated a trade deal that he said was the greatest in American history. So why bother? Why bother going through that process? Why bother getting Congress on site, and it passed with bipartisan support? If a president can at any point just say, but I don't like this anymore, Canada has put out a commercial I don't like, the tariffs have changed. It's a huge problem for our system. So even if you don't take the maximalist non-delegation

position that I do, I think the New Deal was a disaster for separation of powers in this regard, just the specifics of this statute ought to be wiped away by the court, and they should use the major questions doctrine to do it, and bonus, they should get Elena Kagan and anyone else they can to go along with it and endorse that doctrine so that next time when it's about climate change or something conservatives like, then they can point to her and say, wait a minute, aren't you on board now? Right, right. What a literal mind, what a literal-minded textualist kind of way to look.

It's as if Charles doesn't think the Constitution is living and or breathing. Stephen. Yeah, so I'm with Charles. I would love to see a big revival of the non-delegation doctrine. Unlikely not to happen. And for listeners unacquainted with any of the fine points of this, the one sentence analogy would be that the non-delegation doctrine is to our jurisprudence, what changing Istanbul back to Constantinople would be, which is something I'm for, by the way.

Me too. For another day. Yeah. So, you know, I listen to some of the argument. And, you know, walking around the federal society here, I've been to the collection of the greatest conservative legal minds and a lot of talk about it yesterday. And most people think it was a bad day for Trump in court, a rough day for solicitor General Sauer, as Charles says. But a few really shrewd observers say, not quite sure it's a slam dunk.

There was enough play in the joints and the way the questions went. And some of the legal questions presented about the statute and other related matters. My best hunch on this is it might be like a 5-4 ruling even. I'm not sure. And it might be very narrowly tailored to saying that Trump's use of what's the IE, whatever that statute is you mentioned, Charles. That his use of it exceeds the textual boundaries of that statute that would still leave some tariffs and place on other avenues, but they're harder. And Trump can't just make it up as he goes along. I have a, that's my hunch about how it's going to come out. But I don't think it's entirely clear right now, because that argument, unlike some of the ones we've had in the last year involving

Trump of the court, where it was clear, Trump won some of those nine zero, right? This one's likely not to be nine zero. Well, we've been told again by the people of the view in the other talk shows that Trump has packed the Supreme Court and made it into his vassal and bends them to his will, which is, you know, no. So if he loses, it'll be interesting if any of them say, hmm, you know, I have to readjust my preconceptions. He might not actually be a king since he hasn't killed the court or overridden it. And he might not actually have them in his pocket after all since they've just scotched one of his primary concerns. Hmm, I think I'll have to be more moderate about these things in the future. No, I don't think that's going to happen at all.

last point guys before we go one of the things that's great about the anglosphere is that we have two examples of countries that show us what not to do and when it comes to civil liberties and speech england is one of them i i still worry about these things well when it comes to a lot of things england is a worrisome example but canada which has had the luxury to go as walk as it wants for a long time now and has been giving you these land and acknowledgments that take seven minutes of every single speech, going back to who was on this land fishing 250 years ago, et cetera, now finds itself in British Columbia in a very unusual situation. You have people who have homes who now don't really own them because the government has

figured out that they actually belong to the indigenous people that were on that island years ago and who, you know, contemporary sources describe as a nasty bunch of people too. Slavery, enslavement, killing other tribes, taking all the other stuff. know, not to single out indigenous people, but just to say they behaved like human beings. They behave like human beings have done absolutely everywhere in competition for recess, or just because it's fun, or just because this is what tribal societies do, et cetera. So now there's all this question about whether or not Canada is just going to be a, you know, a viable economic entity going forward because all of a sudden the precedent's been set,

the claims are being made, and really ought not the settlers give it all back, colonialists, though they were, imperialists though they were, just spoilers of a natural paradise though they were. I mean, if the whole Western colonial enterprise was an absolute disaster and those beautiful buildings that we see in the western part of the country that

symbolize parliamentary democracy and participation and rights for all, regardless of blood and soil, why not unwind that and see what we can, you know, do next? Well, so first of all, there's a parallel story that I thought you were going to bring up, I think, out of Vancouver,

where there's a plot of land in the urban core that was actually, you know, native Canadian land, whatever they call it, first nations, they call them up there. And what's happened here in the last two or three years and it's finishing right now is they have complete sovereignty over this land, the way we extended sovereignty, which has given us all the Indian casinos in America. and because they have complete sovereignty, they are exempt from normal planning and zoning rules of Vancouver. So what are they done? They're building some big high rises, very high density, not the required amount of parking, not the required amount of street lane widening.

No bike lanes, probably. I don't know about that. Oh my gosh. Oh, my gosh. Right. Yeah, road diets. We can talk about that separately, James. But and, but the point is this has upset the neighbors. Surprise, surprise. Right. So either way, either, you know, give all your land back. or let them ignore the admittedly flawed regulations that Canada probably has too many up, right? You say the indigenous people should be subject to the Western colonial notions of zoning, of street widening. I mean, it goes without saying, of course, that they're going to put in bike lanes, the inheritor to the noble horse. I mean, if you live in harmony with the earth, of course you're going to have bike lines. No, it's probably they're going to think, no, there's some money to be made from there because we're

sensible, practical people, and we're going to do it. I did not have actual anarchic libertarian on my, well, of course, my bingo card is completely unintelligible with all the words that are not on it. In there. So, Charles, what say you about this matter? And do you think it's actually sort of comeuppance for the people who've been mouthing these platitudes for a long time without thinking that there would ever be any consequences? Well, I do think that. I think this is actually one of the best criticisms of the people who go on about Native Americans and who do land acknowledgments is that they never say, and that's why we at the Microsoft Corporation are giving the land back.

But I think more important is that this, if taken to its logical conclusion, and certainly if it were picked up in the courts by rogue judges, would essentially do. destroy the rule of law. We just talked about tariffs and my argument was that Aipa, if construed in this way as a disaster, because it supersedes all other law relating to, well, if you read it, anything, well, so does this. If you don't have confidence when you buy a house or you buy an office or even you buy a tiny plot of land to garden in or put a shed up on that it could not be taken away from you arbitrarily, then you lose the foundation of Western civilization, at least legally. And you say that like it's a bad thing.

I do. When you buy a plot of land, then you are ascribing to Western notions of commodification of space. You're taking things away from the general public. And the very idea that the rule of law is something that protects us. When we all know that the rule of law is there to protect the rich. It is a fiction that exists to extract resources from the lower classes and then coat itself with righteousness because it has the law on its side. Charles, you're not paying attention is what I'm saying. You say rule of law like it's a good thing. You say end of Western Siv like it's a bat. Of course, I am being very specious in an obvious and tiresome fashion. But really, the people who are behind this, the people who are not necessarily behind it

like Jews, but I mean, the ideological wind and energy of the university and the leftist culture, that's behind it. In their dream, I mean, they'll tell you that, you know, in their dream world of everything they'd been reconstituted, we would not have private property, we would all be communal, we'd have the dictatorship of the proletariat and all the rest of that. And since, you know, that's not going to happen imminently, we have to do this, this, and this and this. But scratch them deep, and you will find somebody who, of course, would say, yes, this entire capitalist system is rotten, Marx is right and it's time that we, you know, it'd be great if we could do something about it. Well, here's an example of them being able to do something about it.

We quite rightly complain a lot. We complain about regulation and we complain about the New Deal and the Commerce Clause and delegation and taxes and pretty much everything that happens in California. But, you know, we really are still exceptional. and those other countries that are like us are dwindling in number. I have some friends who invest in things. That's their job. They go around looking for things to invest in.

And they just tell horror stories about India and Greece and Croatia. That even if you're in a nice area that is nominally stable, and is growing economically, it's quite difficult to do deals because the rules are liable to change on the fly. Now, in Greece, that's often the result of corruption. In India, it's the result of a lack of a well-established canon of law that can be applied to markets

in the way that you would get in London or Holland or New York. And in Croatia, it's a combination of things, partly political corruption, partly dysfunction, and lack of practice, frankly. But the complaints are fascinating to listen to because what you get is people who will spend all day telling you that America's in trouble and that they're so worried about this and the Democrats that, and I agree, they will say, well, of course, I'm going to do all my investing that I can here. We still have the gold standard. We still have expectations that are fulfilled. And let me just digress for a second. One of the most moving things I ever heard in my entire life actually was at a debate I took part in at the National Constitution Center around the time of the 1619 project. And it was me and it was someone who really liked the 1619 project

and there was a lefty professor who was in the middle and I was outnumbered for a lot of this debate but halfway through this lefty professor I won't name he said to the 1619 project type figure you know after the civil war the first thing that many freed slaves did in the southern states was open savings accounts and he said think about that you've been saying

he said to the 69 project type, you've been saying that the whole thing was a fiction, but all those American ideas was a fiction. He said, but the freed slaves didn't think so. The only way you ever would consent to opening a savings account is if you believe that the institution you're saving in is stable, that it will be there next week, next month, next year,

that the government, which has until that point been fine with you being a slave is going to honor the money that you've put in the bank and he said just think about that that's an incredible thing and I think about this a lot because if that was true for freed slaves who had a pretty rough for another hundred years it's certainly true for me but we take it for granted so I've actually forgotten where I started this but I think we still have it pretty good and it's important to hold on to that because we're still the

the most stable, most welcoming place for investment and land. Yeah, that's where I was. And if you are one of these people who think what we should do is just rush in and willy-nilly start settling 100-year-old scores and handing people's houses over to the downtrodden, then you're a fool.

If you believe those retro ideas like Charles does, if you believe those ancient, archaic, creaky notions of what makes this country great, you might want to go to the ocean and you can join Ricochet members at sea, December 13th, the 20th, Holland American Airlines are going to be cruising through the Eastern Caribbean. I've done this a dozen times and it's great. It's great fun. Great ships, great people. And you say, I don't like cruise ships. Okay,

fine then. Take a look at your calendar for next February 6th to the 8th because they're going to be meeting up Ricochet style at the Florida Space Coast, Cape Canaveral, celebrating decades of shoving huge piece of carbon spewing machinery into the sky. penetrates it in a very phallocratic way and then disseminates a whole bunch of little satellites or even worse goes to other planets and dump stuff on them. I tell you the imperialism, the colonialism, the extractive practices never end with us. That's because we like them. Stephen, it's been great fun. Charles, likewise, we advise everybody to go to rickashet.com

and sign up. It's cheap. Yeah, you can go to the front page and read stuff and hear some podcast, but the member feed is where the communities develop and where the stuff happens behind the sea. Just trust me, once you go there, you'll make it a, a stop for four, five times a day. We thank, of course, Cozy Earth for sponsoring this. If you go in there now, as I said, you can stack our coupon code on top of theirs and get up to 40% off sheets with a 10-year guarantee. I need to say no more.

And, of course, if you go to Apple Podcasts to give us a review, we'd like those five stars. I say this, I think this is the 737th time because I took a while to get out of the podcast. And I'll be happy to say it for the 800th time, whenever that may be. Charles, I guess I'm going to have to quiz you again. When people go to R ricochet, what version are they seeing today? I think it's still 4.14.14.2. There is an update coming soon, at which point that number will change. So if you're obsessively refreshing the page to look at it, then you'll have a fun week. Always working behind the scenes.

Stephen, Charles, thank everybody for listening and we'll see you at the comments section at Ricochet 4. Point. You know, all that stuff. Bye-bye. time.