The Ricochet Podcast - Teaching Wit, Wisdom, and Love of Country

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

America's 250th birthday is just a few weeks out, and festivities are underway. But, leaving aside disputes about fist fights and daring stunts on the White House South Lawn, a question emerges about what a serious celebration of the American way looks and feels like. To consider this and more, Charles, James, and a visiting Peter Robinson sit down with Matthew Mehan, author and Associate Dean of Hillsdale College's graduate school in Washington, D.C., to discuss The American Book of Fables.The gang thinks through the meaning of our civic inheritance and the endeavor to pass on the baton to the young. Matt's here to remind us that the arduous effort can be joyful and that hopefulness is a trait that marks the serious thinker. Our trio also kvetches (and then some!) over the Iran deal, winces at the newly unveiled Obama Presidential Center, and chortles with bewilderment at the accusation that a Pride-themed baseball cap was "desecrated" by a Bible verse.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ricochet-podcast--5817275/support.

Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. If the Iranians don't change their behavior, their military and their nuclear program is still destroyed. If they do change their behavior, then they are going to have a transformative relationship with the Middle East, and the Middle East will have a transformative relationship with the people of Iran.

that's a win for the American people and for the President of the United States, regardless of which option the Iranians ultimately choose. It's the Rikoshae podcast. I'm James Lalex. Charles C.W. Cook is here as well as founder Peter Robinson, and we're going to talk about the American fable. So yes, let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody. It's the Rikishay podcast number 794. You can join us at Rikersh.com when we're not doing podcasting,

and there we'll be talking about art, literature, politics, movies, everything in the world you can possibly imagine. the place in the internet you've been looking for all your born days. Go there, have a look. One of the founders is with us today. Stephen Hayward is gallivanting off on a cruise or in Antarctica giving a lecture, who knows, but Peter Robinson, one of the people who put ricochet together in the very early days. Well, on its first days is here, and Peter, welcome. Thank you, James. Good to be back. And also Charles C.W. Cook, who is its guardian now in its current iteration, soon to be iteration number five. And Charles is in Florida.

we believe. Hello, Charles. I am. Hello. Well, gentlemen, I think the first thing to discuss before we get to the nice sort of sweet, non-political thing to which we're eventually going to move is the fact that peace in our time with Iran, anybody happy with this deal? I'm not.

I think it's a massive failure of nerve and a producing of the objectives, and I think we really bleep the pooch, says me. Somebody convinced me otherwise. Charles? No, I am not the person to do that for two reasons. First off, I am by no means an expert on

foreign policy and struggle to know what I think myself. And second, I largely agree and think that we went in without a proper plan or a willingness to persuade the public and or Congress and that our exit is the product of that original sin. So I'm not the person to make the, let's say, polyana-ish or optimistic case for Iran? Okay, I'll make the best case that I think can be made for it, although J.D. Vance, if you were listening, would say, no, no, no, we can make a much better case than that. The way it looks to me is as follows. Just what you said, Charlie, Donald Trump went roaring in. Somehow he had convinced himself or others at the table had convinced him that we now had

munitions of such precision that we actually could bring down the regime from the air and would not need to send boots onto the ground. We did a lot of damage to Iran, but we did not crack the regime. And now Donald Trump simply recognizes that he can't sustain this effort. He certainly cannot escalate the effort by putting in human beings on the ground, even onto Karg Island, without the country behind him, and he does not have the country behind him. So, this is a pause. This is the part that's the best case. This is a pause.

Further negotiation will take place. It falls to us. We retain the right to do some terrible damage if the Iranians do not behave. And this is the important bit. The regime, to some extent, unknowable by us, probably much better knowable by the Mossad, but still unknowable to them, the regime to some extent must be weakened. Certainly, the military capacities have been very much weakened. So at a minimum, what we've done here is engage in what the Israelis used to call mowing the lawn. We have set the Iranians back, but we haven't taken them down.

Still, you set them back. Who knows what might happen on the ground? The regime must be, there must be all kinds of power struggles taking place within the regime, that $300 billion that we promise to give them in one way or another to begin rebuilding their economy. They're going to be fighting over that. There may be angles here for dissidents. The best case is that Iran's military capacity has been destroyed for the time being, and that you never know. That's the best case I can make. we mowed the lawn when the problem really was the people being held inside the house at gunpoint by lunatics but we sent a lawn crew i understand the optimistic spin you've just put on it and there are phrases in there

that make me wince as though i had just sucked a lemon after a suffering of ten paper cuts on my lips and that has to do with the money that we're going to give them anybody think at the beginning of this when we're sending in all of these massive waves and this precision and these bombers and the rest of it and submarines that are breaking the backs and setting the ships. Did anybody think that the eventual disposition of this was figuring out how much money we're going to give them? And while you're right, it may cause infighting for them as to who gets it, that's great. The point is to break the spine of the mafia. It's not to have internal division over which one of them gets the biggest chunk of the stuff that falls off the back of the truck.

So, I mean, yes, they have been set back. the military has been severely to dismantled. But now they have the money in the time to build back, which they have done again and again and again and again. And what we finally hoped when this whole thing began was that this was the end of the regime of the Mullahs. We could deal with a secular bunch of, you know, put in our bad guys who at least keep a lid on things

and are not millennial religious fanatics, somebody we can deal with, somebody who actually wants to help the people of Iran, as opposed to export this nonsense. But we didn't do that. We were completely under the impression that this was it. Well, it wasn't it. And if it wasn't it this time, it's never going to be it.

This was the chance. It's not coming again. Now, to give you a little more of what I really thinking, I was putting the best case on it that I could. Right, right. There are a couple of parts of this. The money, of course, it is, just as you said, James, it is staggering that at the end of all this, the expenditure of $100 billion on our part, that we end up giving them $300 billion more. Two parts of it particularly irk me.

I'll toss them out there to see if they irk you as well. Urk is a weak word here. One is the performance yesterday of the vice president of the United States who said over and over again, well, well, we don't know. We don't know. We'll have to see how they behave. maybe the regime weakened as it is will choose to behave better. That man is 42 years old. The regime is 47 years old.

For 47 years it has been chanting death to the United States and doing all that it could to undermine Israel and kill Jews. They're not going to change their minds. They're just not, and it's foolish. I mean, the magical thinking he engaged in is exactly the kind of which we as conservatives are always being critical for the progressives, the La La Land in which they live. And now the vice president of the United States is living in La La Land. I just found I found his performance yesterday shocking. The other bit of this is that the night he went on the air to announce that

this action had begun, Donald Trump said to the people of Iran, help is on the way. He encouraged them to rise. This is worse than the attacks on Dwight Eisenhower following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Eisenhower did nothing. Eisenhower was attacked for failing to come to the aid of the revolutionaries in Budapest, which for cold calculating reasons, he did not. He didn't, there was no way to, the general, in brief, there was no way to help them without risking a war with the Soviet Union, which we certainly were not prepared to do in

1956, Dwight Eisenhower did not encourage the people who were eventually put down by Soviet tanks. Donald Trump encouraged the people of Iran, and now we're giving the tyrants oppressing those people $300 billion. That is just mind-blowing to me, just mind-blowing. It's demoralizing to the extent to which I don't think it is possible for us to understand. Meanwhile in Moscow, as the note say, Moscow has been hit by a wave of Ukrainian drones, a very dissonment, might I add. Ukrainians are getting really good at turning out an awful lot of these things.

And it is interesting to watch the footage of people watching what appear to be model airplanes, you know, RV-controlled airplanes whizzing across the sky. usually when we think of aerial war you think of the sky's darkening with great bombers and jets and the rest of it these dinky little things just whizzing along here it's handing extraordinary effect

I don't know if you saw the footage of one of the tops of one of the tankers being blown away into the air which wasn't by thrown by the way which was by a wayward defense missile sent by a Russian it really is extraordinary what they're able to do at this point after so many years

and I'm wondering what's next I'm wondering if there's just going to be another year of this until what? I don't know. I don't know. You think you're living in momentous times. And then these two absolutely titanic events, which ought to you think have come to a conclusion, continue to grind and whine and we're on. It is dispiriting. Anyway, I'll throw that out there.

What do you think is happening next before we... Well, this is like the Doolittle raid. Do you remember early 1942 when Jimmy Doolittle first? figured out that if you loaded bombers up with all kinds of gasoline, you could just about reach Tokyo. We could bomb Tokyo, and then the airplanes would have to fly over the sea of Japan and crash land in China. We lost the men. Some actually did crash land and were captured by Chinese, grateful Chinese, who took care of them in the end. But the point was to take the war to Japan after Pearl Harbor, to show the Japanese that their islands were not sacrosanct. It feels to me,

like this is very much what's going on now with the attack on Moscow. He's just, he, Zelensky, the Ukrainians are showing the Russian elite who surround Putin. No, no, no. Your capital city isn't safe. We can strike you anywhere. Now, what I don't understand, and this has been a puzzle to me for at least a year and a half or two years, how the chain of command in Russia works, how it is that Vladimir Putin can still issue commands and young Russian men can be fed into that grinder. Hundreds of thousands have been killed. Now Moscow was under attack. I don't know how that regime continues to function.

I don't know, and I wish I had some faith. I wish the Mossad were in Moscow. I wish I had some faith in our own CIA. I wish I had faith that we had agents on the ground who actually understood where their pressure points were. just how much opposition is beginning to form against Putin, if any at all. But how that country can continue to function when the Ukrainians have shown that they're capable of killing Russians in enormous numbers of striking, of taking out the Russian Black Sea fleet, now of striking a coordinated attack with a number of targets deep inside Russia, striking the capital itself, I do not know. But James, Charlie, I'm happy to hear your answers. How does this continue?

Well, I'll tell you how, and I'll brook no argument about it. No, I'm sorry, most political shows, you know, they'll tell you what to think. The Future of Freedom Podcasts trusts you to think for yourself. And yes, this is an ad, but we want you to know about the future of freedom. Every episode features two guests who share a commitment to liberty and limited government, but here's the trick. They disagree on one major issue. And instead of debating each other, they make their case each one at a time, clearly.

thoughtfully and without the usual political theater and chattering, yelling, and all the rest of it. It's quite a refreshing change in the outrage-driven media that we are all used to. Hear multiple signs of an argument and then make up your own mind. Imagine that. Search for Future of Freedom, wherever you listen to your podcasts. We would love to hear from Charlie when he thinks about the Putin government, and we're going to get to that in a second. But first, we are delighted to talk to Matthew Mia. Author, educator, associate dean, and professor at the Van Andal Graduate School of Government

at Hillsdale College in Washington, D.C., where he teaches courses on rhetoric, politics, and literature. He's also written children's stories about handsome signets and mildly amusing mythical animals. And his latest entry out just in time for the 250th celebration of this country's birth is the American Book of Fables. Matthew, welcome. Thank you for having me.

Well, let's begin by telling everybody what the book is and what the Genesis for it was. I've been paging through it here and enjoying the, many levels of discourse, starting with little acorns, little kids, and more sophisticated things, and the drawings, the watercolors, extraordinary. It's just the whole thing has a delightful feel to it and reminds me of some of the books that I had when I was young. In as much as, I don't get the feeling when I open it that there's going to be some Chomsky-esque bile floating out about it, that there actually might be some joy and delight in American

culture and Western SIP. So what was your origin for this and tell us, you know, how started. Well, yeah, the book is, the American Book of Fables is this kind of go bigger, go home for 8250. It's 395 page hardback with hundreds of illustrations. I want an NEH grant to go travel to country and do research and bring my illustrator with me. And it's basically designed in a certain sense, twofold. One is a kind of gratitude machine to be thankful for the country again, because there's so much acid bath accounts of our history that focuses, you know, we talk about teaching history, warts, and all. But if you have a photo shoot of just the models warts, it gets a little dark, right? And so you need to sort of emphasize the positive and create a

kind of gratitude for the founding, but also the settlement of the country, its principles. And then the other part that the American Book of Fables is trying to do is re-gift a kind of, or restore the American imagination such that it can do what Ben Franklin always wanted for the Americans, which is that they have both wit and wisdom, they're witty, wise citizens. And that's what the fable tradition is for and why, while there's nursery rhymes for littles, fables for middles, and primary sources and short stories and Socratic dialogues for bakes, the fundamental engine of the whole thing is a fables book, because that's the preferred genre of Republican self-governing peoples to train witty-wise citizenship and virtue.

Matt, Peter Robinson here. The book is beautiful. I mean, sort of staggeringly beautiful as an object. It's about an inch thick. It weighs something. It has heft. It's in brilliant, beautiful color. The illustrations are gorgeous. And I don't quite, I don't get it. Is the, so, okay, so let's go through the table of contents. You tell me a little bit about how, excuse me, that's not an attack. That's a question. Who, I mean, I picture. I picture. this book, you look at this book, and just as it reminded James of his childhood books, it reminded me of exactly the same thing. And I felt an impulse. My first grandchild was born a few months ago. He's not quite old enough yet. But the immediate impulse is family. The immediate impulse is old people need to read this with young people. But I'm still, so here's the organization. Let's just go through the table of contents. You've got the introduction, then you've got 13 parts. And each part, it's organized geographically, part one, mangroves and everglades. Charlie will be very happy to hear that the book starts in his beloved Florida.

I won't read all 13, but we go to the Great Bays in Appalachia, New England and New York, great lakes and rivers, the great plains, and on the Purple Mountain Majesties. So explain this, the organization, there's something tactile about the book. And there's also something rooted, something specific to place about the way the book is written. Have I got that much right? That's right. Each of the 13 regions have nursery rhymes, fables, and stories and primary sources that are keyed to that region. It's history. What makes it special.

It's ecology. It's animals and wildlife. It's national parks. But each of those regions take up a phrase or a paragraph. from the Declaration of Independence. And so all of the fables and stories and rhymes are designed to illuminate and elucidate those principles of our American Republic that are found in the Declaration, but inhabited and lived out in the particular history and place of each part of the country, a kind of weaving

of both the American idea, right, what we are in principle with a kind of praxis and sort of honoring both of those, both the founding and the war for independence, but also. the very difficult settlement of the country. And that's another part of what makes us grateful, because patriotism isn't just about founding fathers. It's also about all of our fellow citizens and all of the labors they've done to give us a happy and peaceful life. All right. So this book is to be read. Correct me as I go along here, it is to be read. I feel as though I'm listening to the pitch. I have the book in front of me, but I feel as I'm a publisher listening to the pitch. The book is to be read in family circles. That's in a way the ideal

readership. It's a family book. A family book. A children's book. It is a family book. And this is the old fable tradition. We didn't use to infantilize books that were illustrated for just children. They were designed to have entry points like a shallow end to the pool, a mid-sized depth of the pool, and a deep end with a diving board. And so I want the whole family to be able to read parts for littles, and then the little's knot off, and we read parts for middles, and then the middles get disengage, and then the adults can continue to read for themselves. Okay. So the purchaser, the customer, is going to be grandma or aunt or grandpa, as I myself have become. It's going to be the older people who are thinking of this book is something that

the kids will cherish all their lives. It's one of those. It's a book that you give to a kid thinking that this book the child will have when he or she himself is 75 or 80 or what. Is that correct? That's the ideal. And it's beautiful enough and heavy enough and beautifully enough produced to really, to carry that thought. I wanted it. I actually negotiated with the publisher to make sure it was the size and feel of the Dahlare's Greek myths and Norse myth books. Because I had those as a child, those hefty, beautiful go hide and get lost in a massive book.

So it's a big, fat book. But I also, I wanted it to be sort of a bright sixth grader, a bright fifth grader, a bright seventh grader can read the whole thing. They can. And they do. By my own children, I've got a fairly gifted, you know, fifth grader who's cranking through all of it. He drifts off on a couple of the letters, you know, between Abigail and John Adams, or, you know,

a letter that he doesn't quite understand from George Washington. But in general, he's tracking the whole story. but I want, you know, the people who are buying it right now are parents and grandparents. That's who's buying it for the family to put on the coffee table and kids can go take it to the night bed stand table and go get lost in it. But the family can read it aloud together as well. Okay, Matt, Charlie's an Englishman. So he was raised on Lady Bird Books, which is something like what you have in mind here. But for Charlie's sake, I'm asking a question that's open-ended and it could take three hours, but I don't.

For Charlie's sake, how do you handle Florida in the book? Give us something for littles, something for middles, and something for Charles himself. So for Charles himself. Florida man does make an appearance, Charlie, you certainly happy. But when I take it up, I have, for instance, I have, when in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bans, right? We do hickory-dickory dock, as you'd expect. But then we also do a greatly adapted esop of the python and the marsh rabbits,

which takes place in the Everglades and explains how the Everglades work and the invasive species of the python, which is a kind of stand-in for, forgive me, Charlie, for the tyranny of King George and the Parliament, and how you have to sort of deal with these questions. But then also one about the bat, the beasts and the eagle or retelling, but using local places and local lore. And then I have the story of Billy Bowlegs and Howard, the Christian General and the last Seminole War, and all about sort of this idea of where there's a proper time and a place to change the political nature of things.

And it's actually about Billy Bowlegs realizing that the way of life of the Seminoles in the Everglades doesn't work anymore. And he agrees to leave. Who's Billy Bowlegs? we have listeners, including, and we have a talker who can't remember Billy Bowlegs. Not at all. So he is the last seminal chief, an incredible bushmaster of the Everglades, disappear, Svengali, always impossible to catch. But couldn't control his young Braves who would go and just take pot shots and kill people

outside of the Everglade reservation zones. And so it kept, that's what kept the Seminole Wars going again and again, because warrior cult would go and just shoot up a local store. and then all of the settlers, the Americans would, you know, sort of come in and raise the army again. But Bolegs eventually decides it's time to move west, right? And it's this beautiful story. It's sort of sad. It's somber.

You know, the settlers grew up, but so do the Seminoles. But it's sort of this idea of like, yes, sometimes there is a parting of ways. And it's a sad thing. I think the Americans felt very sad in the Declaration that it was time to break with the English. And so it's this, we got to let go. We got to break up. But this breakup is sad. and let parting be sweet sorrow, and hopefully we can maintain friends and peace, enemies, and war.

And so it's a delicate way of explaining the spirit of the declaration and separating a new people. Let me ask you about the backdrop against which you're writing and publishing this book. Do you see this as remedial in the sense that we have drifted too far from this shared affection for the United States, shared knowledge about the United States? Or do you think that that's something that is reserved to cable news and Hollywood and a bit of academia? But actually most people want to convey this stuff to their kids and this is a useful way to do it. I asked because, you know, this reminds me of some of the books that were hanging around my house when I was a kid, although they were Victorian, but they just assumed everyone loved Britain and this empire. There was never a sense in those books

that it was necessary to fix a dearth of patriotism. So how do you see it? Are you fighting against the tide, or is there still a silent majority out of the out there that's on board? So, yeah, I think the remedial nature of the book is that people think they're patriotic, but because they have constantly, in a certain sense, negotiated away from the real admiration.

And a moderate and gentle person, here's some horrible acid bath Marxist, you know, a grieved account of our history and says like, okay, okay, okay, well, that's wrong, but we'll split the difference and kind of meet halfway. We keep doing that game and eventually you're way away from an actual patriotic, historically accurate assessment of what we did. And so representing actual voices from history, actual sort of moral propositions that people suffered and died for. The real beauty of how we treated the Indians, like, everybody in America thinks it's like we sneezed on quilts, gave it to them, and took their land, right? That's people's kind of basic sense of it. And they're like, yeah,

but they were kind of mean. And so it's okay, I guess. Well, it turns out we made mistakes, but there's actually a really beautiful story of self-sacrifice, of attempts at peace and friendship. And I get to tell some of those stories. And so it is re-I do mean it. It's a restoring of our imagination. Seneca called the imagination a kind of storehouse by which you can make decisions. And I think gratitude for what good people did before you to secure your way of life, right, your principles and your land. That is one of the things that is not, that has been depleted. The Mother Hubbard's cupboard is quite bare in this regard. So I try to re-gift a lot of that through story and primary source. One of your journeys took you,

to the Midwest, I assume, because you went all around the country. So first of all, being in the Midwest, I'd love to know what you said. I don't have the excerpt that I have, does not have any Midwest anecdotes, though. I mean, we got Paul Bunyan. We got lots of Paul Bunyan. And the Pillsbury-Dobo, you know, that I think about it, but that's another story. What did you find from the Midwest? And what did you find, what was the part of the country actually you visited that

that surprised you the most? Because we're all coming across these Europeans and not to put you into that basket, but we're all coming across these Europeans who were visiting America for the first time in the World Cup and having their eyes wide open and the scales fall off on their own particular road to Damascus, Indiana. So we're getting a view of the country through their eyes, but what did you find that honestly surprised you?

Because, I mean, I've been living and traveling in this country for a long time, and I still find things that surprise me. So first, the Midwest. What did you think? And what were the stories? So I am by birth, a Midwestern boy. I was born literally on the banks of the Mississippi

and the DePere River and then spent my childhood, came pole fishing on the Missouri. So I had a Huck-Fing childhood. So I spent a lot of time. And the line from the Declaration for the Midwest, it's the chapter on the Great Lakes and Great Rivers, is just one word, right,

the inalienable right to life. Because that is the breadbasket, but it's also the great waters, the life, the fertility, that sort of vicunded place. And so I actually wind up singing the Midwest as this sort of Lazarus Pit, of life, but also of simplicity and Republican virtue. And so I do a lot there, not with,

I, not with, like, Paul Bunyan. I feel like those stories are well told, and that's not the fish I'm after. I actually am trying to fish the sort of witty-wise moral technology, not the sort of entertaining yarn that has you sort of gently regard, but the kind of moral puzzles and almost factual knowledge of what a free people are doing. And I found the thing that, things that were most interesting was the fur trade up the Missouri and all of those stories that I get to retell and fictionalize historical memoirs and these dialogues, but also just the incredible animal life and the settlement of the interior. I tell stories about Boone and even tragic stories about Battle of Blue Licks, the last battle of the revolution, which after Yorktown when they didn't really

need to fight, and Boone lost one of his children because he was a little too rash and didn't regard his own life, which is part of the right to life is actually being cautious and prudent, right, and not risking your life in a crazy way. And that's a kind of ESOP's fable, I tell. But a lot of love of the river and the Riverbolt culture and a kind of regard for the French connection, sort of the influx of the Louisiana purchase. That's what I did there. And then what most surprised me were two places. Charles would be happy to know, the Everglades blew my mind. Just blew my mind. A two mile an hour freshwater lake, the width of Florida, slowly flowing down into this incredible and unconquerable land of mangroves

and shallows blew my mind. It is one of the most beautiful things. And I got to sing that part of the land in a number of stories that I just loved to do. And I took flatboat rides and saw the alligators and got chased by saltwater crocodiles that I didn't know that existed before I went down there to the Everglades in August, which was a terrible and blessed mistake. The Rangers told me not to go. Whoa, whoa. You went to the Everglades in August? I did. Literally at the gate, they said, what are you doing here? Are you trying to vacation? I was like, no, I'm here for research. Like, oh, research that go right in. Matt, to me, what's so striking about the Everglades is the number of creatures in the

Everglades that are trying to kill you. Yes. I was actually chased by a saltwater crocodile at the Flaminko marina. I was out there with a headlamp at night because they told me the biggest ones were there at night. And one of them got up on land and started knocking around some air tanks or something from the marina. And that didn't color your view of Florida just a little. Oh, I loved it. It was like, I'm like, this is still, no wonder Florida man is so adventurous. It's like you are Charlie's kind of guy. You are Charlie's kind of guy. And the other place that blew my mind was I'd never been in my life to my great shame and I knew I couldn't write this book without going to Yellowstone. and Glacier National Park.

And I end the book in Glacier. Yellowstone is its own thing. I think everybody knows that. It's in the visual imagination of America in some way or another through television and photos. Glacier National is it's the most, what's the line from Hamlet? A wonder wounding place. It just blew my heart away.

It is so like I'm like this is where the book ends. We are going to end the day newman, the big grand finale with the last story of humanity, who's the lead character that sort of travels throughout the lower 48, Hugh ends up having a heroic moment dealing with a grizzly bear named Red Goat. The Red Goats are coming. The Red Goats are coming. But I did it at the Going to the Sun Road, which is a kind of image of American optimism and hope that needs to be recaptured. And Charlie, do your original question about remediation,

that is, to my mind, the thing that has to be recaptured. You tell a young person to be a happy warrior, like a good conservative, then people will spit in your face and call you a zombie Reaganite. Yeah, right. There's this sort of like hatred of optimism as somehow irrational and jejun. And it's actually the most reasonable thing about Americans is that we are optimistic. And I try to basically make a kind of apologia for why the entire cosmos and our historical experience in the moral law all tell you that this is the way to be. And that's the final story at the going to the sun road, sort of reorienting yourself to the hope of a rising sun.

Wow. It's always been the mark of a simple person to be optimistic, right? The clever person, the smart person who apprehends the nature of the world is pessimistic and witty and sits in a cafe. It's bottle air and has absinthe. But, I mean, we're always working against that sort of adolescent needs to be goth and dark and the rest of it. And most people grow out of it and then just go on to a life of, you know, maybe the suburbs, raising kids and the rest of it. stuff. But there still is seemingly a

disinclination of people to be proudly optimistic in a way because as you said, it's scorned. It's looked down upon as a mark of a jeune and a half-baked intellect. But it's there. Let's take a look at our 250th anniversary celebration coming up.

Do you find in that the sort of basic optimism and rebirth and rekindling of the spirit that we need? Because if people are pointing at 8, you know, the 1770 to 1976 are gilding I think their memories a bit it was it was it was a bit crass it was a bit 60 or 70s it was a bit Wauca Chica it was you know what was that word it was a bit Wachachaca chica like a dis there was a disco undercurrent to the whole thing it was a bit

but but still it was there and it absolutely saturated the culture you couldn't escape from bicentennialism and now at 250 we we don't seem to have the same desire to to have the same sort of omnipresent spirit and congratulations and the rest of it. So that was a rambling paragraph with no real clue, discernible question in it. I'll just ask you then, 250. How are we doing a 250? How do you think the celebrations reflect America as we know it today? I don't think it's as superficially positive or universal.

I think it is, I mean, you get this, I'm sure you feel this, that sometimes an American flag on your front porch is a political statement these days. And that's not where I live. No, that's right. But it's like depending on what state you're in, right? I live in a purple area and it's very much that way, right, in northern Virginia. But the redder is the state. And so there's a kind of sectarian political divide about whether or not you're getting into the

semi-Quincentennial or not, which is regrettable. I do think we need to wait until the local blue states actually celebrate because they're going to do fireworks. They're going to have concerts. They're going to do things. There will be land acknowledgements and annoying PC things that kind of sandbagged in sadness. But I'm curious to see how it all plays out. I do think that beneath the superficial sort of that partisan, slightly deflated version of things,

what I see is actually in education is a robust and slow burn desire to actually rebuild civics and rebuild a kind of informed and reflective patriotism. Do you see that among, but do you see that amongst the consumers of the educational product? Because I sense that too, but if you don't get it from the producers of the educational product, how many teachers and the teachers union are demanding that we go back to hardcore civics and create a nation of people

who know what the founding ideas are? Again, it does shake out in terms of blue state, red state, I'm afraid to say, for the most part, except that the homeschooling that's exploding in blue states, their educational products, right? We're talking about 250% year over years since COVID. Like it's roaring out. And their products, they're actually doing serious civics and serious U.S. history,

serious government, serious folklore, serious training for citizenship. And then on the red state side of me, Florida, I've got a book coming out in August. We have all lived in, Mark Bauerline and I and some others. I put out basically each of us wrote a chapter explaining the 10 points of the Phoenix Declaration, which is how to basically revivify the public school system. And it's an instruction manual for school leaders to design curriculum and work on their policies and their schools, which was adopted by the entire Florida State Board in toto. And so like some red states are doing the sort of major terraforming of these things.

So I think the semi-quincennial has been a great occasion to set in place and in motion a kind of revivification. of patriotism rightly understood, that is one of those magnanimous projects is going to take 150 years because you're going to have to raise the next generation who could be the knowledgeable teachers to make the really deeper forms that then will make the right kind of teachers and citizens that then you have a perpetual motion machine. But that takes hundreds of years sometimes. You have to have that vision. Matt, you teach at an institution known as.

Hillsdale College. Hillsdale College. Okay, so Hillsdale College. There's a huge amount of self-selection, of course, for the students who enroll at Hillsdale. But Hillsdale has all kinds of outreaches to the rest of the country. And I'm going to suppose that Hillsdale is an institute. You teach in Washington, don't you at the Capitol Hill, or at least for now you do. That's from the associate dean, but I also sit on the K-12 advisory board.

So, just give us a moment. Give us a couple paragraphs on the Hillsdale Project, to promote a curriculum for K-12 schools. It's not just a college. You've got outreach to the whole country, haven't you? That's one of my Bailey Wicks is the civic ed for K-12 on the side. And how does that work? My first profession was a school teacher before. This is my, being an academic is my second, my second love. School districts can go to you to Hillsdale and say, could we, what do you lease the curriculum, or you buy books? So we run our charter school initiatives, been private schools, and we have hundreds of schools, 30 that are hours that we sort of help guide.

We don't own them, but we guide them and help run their boards and hire everyone and give them a curriculum. Then we have hundreds of schools that use our curriculum, which we design for free and give to them and do some new teacher training and teacher continuing ed. Then we have, for instance, we helped build this. We built ourselves. I mean, I helped, but a bunch of us did the 1776 curriculum a few years ago, which is now free and down. unloadable K through 12. And it's, it's a U.S. history and government and civics, but also the American heart, which is kind of was a part of it close to my heart, this idea of you can't just give them the principles. You have to give them beautiful images. You have to give them an imaginative world

to love because that's how you wind up loving principles as you love people who embodied them, right? That's how you teach principles well. That's why patriotism is about founding fathers and what they taught, not just about what they taught, because that's not lovable enough, right? You have to, there has to be a huggy bear effective side to this, which is why ripping on founders is so bad. But the 1776 curriculum is now being adopted by whole states. And, you know, not in part, or not in whole everywhere, but in part. And then homeschoolers are using it. So it's, it's a major reach. It's, it's had an enormous effect and it's going to only get bigger. God bless Hillsdale. All right. So you teach it, Hillsdale. You also.

wrote this book, here's something I've wondered, if you have college teaching students about America and parents, maybe with the aid of books, teaching kids about America, which one wins? Because I hear people say, you know, I raise my kids to love America, I raise them conservative, if not necessarily in a propagandistic way. And then they went off and within two years at college, they were leftists and had purple hair. On the other hand, as a conservative, I really like the idea that we pass down ideas to our children

and that our children are the product of their non-official upbringing. So how do you deal with that? What's your view as somebody has a foot in both camps? So it really depends on the devil's in the details, right? If sort of like, I raised my kid, right? Like, did you know, there is that, which, you know, you can't do that personally to someone, right? But you have to ask that question sometimes. Like, you know, did you really know what they were being taught in high school?

Or did you have a filter on the internet or, you know, how much were they on TikTok, right? And getting the Chinese algorithm. So, you know, there's all kinds of those issues of like softened ground. But I do think those stories are getting less frequent as the sort of when you get past the initial raising kids with the internet. And now you've got kids who are now parents who had the internet and are much more wise to the sort of secret life of your child online. And so I think the transfer, the ability to raise your child in the way you think is best is we're actually able to hand on the trick. we're not dropping the baton as often as you get more digital natives parenting children. So that's changing how many times we get surprised by the sort of blue-haired disaster in college.

But I still think that you need, we underestimate what real educative culture, and I am an absolute biased product of the liberal arts private colleges that actually have core curriculum. That's what I was educated in and that's where I teach. I think that is actually how you create. create leaders and how you actually give the full package to someone. And, you know, that's what the IVs were originally, these small, intense sort of places that did this. And maybe they will be one day again, but they're not now.

So I do think you have to mind those. But I do think it's particularly the parents win when the student is less intelligent, right? Meaning, like, college doesn't hit a kid who's there to just kind of get through college. And the sociology professor is like yada, yada, yada. And they're just kind of more barstool conservative or they do what their parents do. It's when you have a really bright and intelligent child who reads to the bottom of Foucault and really drinks deeply of whatever Nietzsche they got and reads the manifesto twice to talk to their professor. Those kids are much more at risk of a bad curriculum and a bad environment. And that's why there's all these civic centers that have cropped up, like the Hamilton Center and others.

and I think there's all these. Matt, Matt, you, there are two propositions that seem to follow from what you just said. And I'd like you to, I'd like you to take on both because you can't possibly really be saying this. Proposition one, Charlie's brilliant children are doomed. They're too bright. They will turn against the country. Proposition two, to be a patriot, you have to be stupid. You can't possibly, you can't possibly even be implying that.

It's like James was saying earlier. It's like that meme, the midwit bell curve of like smooth brain patriot, like midwit, like cynic and then really intelligent patriot, optimistic patriot, right? Like it actually takes, you have to go all the way. But I do think it's a warning for parents of very intelligent children that they're actually, they're more likely to think of sending their kid to self-serving place like Hillsdale or University of Dallas or, you know, Grove City, like places that actually have a full complement of like you can plumb the depths of the tradition here with truth and not with

ideological. Because it could presumably work the other way around, right? You could have parents who are progressives, who are lazy and brought their kids up to be progressives. And then the kid goes somewhere. And instead of reading Foucault, then they read all manner of great books. And they read them eight times. And they come out of conservative.

Yeah. It does happen that way sometimes. But I do think that the gloss of the, the, the, the, the gloss of the, professor has a lot to do with how you come out in the end, which is why the numbers tend to wildly skew in the percentages to the number of conservative versus liberal professors in your given institution. Right. Then they come out and they have a degree that isn't applicable to anything, doesn't pay any

money that does. And when they finally end them up in New York, living in Williamsburg, six to a room, they're consumed by envy and poverty, believe capitalism has failed and elect Mandami. Repeat in every single big city that you want, which means that the only one. hope are the hinterlands like the places where you can still dip the line in the Missouri and the rest of it. No, I'm not that cynical, but if you would like an antidote to the cynicism that you find on both sides of the aisle these days, the American Book of Fables is from you by Matthew Mian. And believe me, it's something that you want to put on the coffee table as well and

let the kids find it. Because unlike some of those books with baffling walls of texts and no pictures whatsoever, it has a very appealing layout, delightful illustrations, and it's something you can dip in and dip out of. And like I say, your hope is that the kid will take it and find a private place, a corner, and enter another world, the world of the American fables. Matthew, thanks so much for joining us, and we'll talk to you in the next book's out. Thank you very much. Matt, thank you.

That book is an achievement. Yes, that it is. All right, gentlemen, before we leave a couple of things to do, we should shake our heads and or deplore the UFC Freedom 250 party or celebrated as a piece of raw American authenticity or find something in the middle where we both wince and grin. Charlie, you want to wince and grin or you want to grins and win? This is Charlie's department.

Well, I have complicated thoughts. I'm not upset about it. I'm not clutching my pearls. I also think that it is not, as many have suggested, outside of the American tradition. This is a Teddy Roosevelt spectacle. This is an Andrew Jackson spectacle. This is a...

not alien. I want a small presidency. I like Calvin Coolidge. I dislike the imperial presidency per se. It has nothing to do with Trump. It's just as true under Trump as it was under Obama. And so this is not the sort of thing that thrills me, but the freak out over it is preposterous. This is, in my estimation, a non-story. The extent of my reaction to it was, that's not for me. Unlike say Heather Cox Richardson, who told her many, many subscribers that it was the same instinct that led to this, that led to the lynching of African Americans under Jim Crow. Nope, nope. This is a classic Trump move in that Trump cannot get the sort of celebrities that

attended Obama's presidential library opening. But he can get a whole bunch of entertainers and athletes that the average person actually loves. I don't say that disparagingly at all. I am much more in line with the tastes of the average person than I am with the sort of people who showed up at Obama's presidential library opening. It's just for me, I'm into the NFL. or baseball rather than UFC. But UFC is very popular. It is. And there's nothing intrinsically wrong with this.

Thoughts in the matter. Similar to what Charles just said in my National Review online column this weekend, which I encourage everybody to sign up for and get, with a little bit more. We were always told that Kennedy would invite public assaults to the White House. Couldn't we go back to those days? And yes, I would like to go back to those days, but it doesn't mean that I don't believe you can't have the guys

grappling in the front lawn in a way that wouldn't make TR say bully. America is both, and that's one of the reasons that I love the country. Charlie mentioned the Obama presidential senator. Peter, I'm sure that you were wrapped watching all of the presidents show up with the wives and spouses and the rest of it and take a look at the marvel of the architectural beauty, the unbelievable lightness and grace of that building. What do you think? Well, it's a pedestrian thought, but it's what comes to mind. The building, you just take a look at, well, you're the Midwestern. I mean, Chicago, Chicago contains architectural multitudes, but, oh, my Lord, that thing is at once pretentious and ugly, pretentious and crude, pretentious and obvious.

And it is a perfect summation of the Obama presidency. So there's that. They got that part right. The sheer pretentiousness of it. It. They had a land acknowledgement while making well, while dedicating it. A land acknowledgement.

It's a perfect opportunity to actually give it all back at the time, at the spot, right? Deed the whole damned thing back, but they wouldn't. It is sufficient merely to acknowledge. We have a situation here in Minneapolis, which I no longer live, of course. But there was a dog park down by the Mississippi, and it was known for being leash-free. Dogs could just gamble all about and fight and play and do all sorts of things. is wonderful, but Native American activists, or a couple of them, decided that this was wrong and disrespectful.

One of them got up before the park board and said that the dogs take the prayer energy for themselves and diverted from the people for whom it is originally meant, to which other Native American people would say, that's absolute nonsense, never heard anything of the sort. We love dogs. What are you talking about? But the park board, eager to engage in some performative show of their respect for indigenous ways, has voted now to ban the least. leash-lishness of the dogs, and every dog must be leashed.

So in other words, whatever bad mojo the dogs brought, I guess you can just solve it by clapping something around their neck. And now people can no longer take the dogs down there, and the dogs can no longer run and splash in the Mississippi and have fun. It's extraordinary. And what I find interesting about this is the great reverence paid to religious beliefs, as long as they are not those of the general West, right? Correct, correct, correct.

That's correct. I mean, you have people in Reddit who are saying, no, you have to understand that according to their cosmology, this is, you know, human being sprang directly out of the soul here, soil here. And you can say, well, that's fine. You're welcome to believe that. I'm not going to, I'm not going to do anything about your ability to believe that or criticize it. I'll just simply leave it alone. But I don't have to believe that myself. I don't.

And I don't. And as such, I'm not in the opinion that we should all. alter society to conform to that religious belief. And you saw this also in the baseball teams, which are having trouble with the pride. The rainbow and the jersey and the hats and the rest of it. Charles, do you have any thoughts? Or Peter, do you have any thoughts on this before we head out? Because I think this is one of those things where people just say, look, I don't care what you do.

I really don't. But I'm not going to wear that. I'm just not. Yeah. Right. Well, I think it's the wear that part that is the problem here. When you change the uniform and you demand that your players wear the uniform, then you are, in effect, demanding your players endorse what's on the uniform,

which of course it's not a problem in most circumstances. No one says, well, I'm thrilled to play for the New England Patriots, but I can't possibly wear the uniform. But you can say that if they put something on it that is unrelated, either to the team or to truly universal symbols, like, say, the American flag. And this is the transgression here. And they wouldn't let them opt out and not wear the uniform, wear the normal uniform, which we're doing fine.

And they wouldn't let them write things on the uniform either. And so you get these great tweets, one of which was from a man who was about to be a representative in California, Peter. You're welcome. In your area, no less, Scott Weiner, who I think used the phrase desecrated. They had desecrated the pride symbol. unbelievable. With Bible verses.

So the Bible verses were doing the desecration of the pride symbol. That's just delicious. And a tweet that I saw from somebody saying, you know, all of these weak men afraid to put on some colors. They're just colors. I think you have to be willfully ignorant to believe it. You have to be incredibly stupid and deceptive to believe that. It's just two bent lines that intersect with each other inside a circle.

in a crooked fashion. That's right. God, you hate shapes now, you WICO. Shapeophobia. Shapeophobia is next. If you would like to unburden yourself, folks, of your shapeophobia, be sure to stop by a ricochet. Why?

Because it's got a great public face, and it's got all the wonderful podcast, but it's got a member fee, too. And yeah, you've got to pay a little bit of this coin to get into it, but it's worth it because the code of conduct and the feeling that there is skin in the game, as co-founder Rob Long once said, means that it's an interesting, safe, sane civil place.

Well, not always safe. No, you'll be challenged, but you'll be amongst friends and people know how to behave. So we ask you every week to do that. We ask you every week also to go to Apple Podcast, give us that good review. More people discover the podcast.

More people discover Ricochet. We're here for longer and longer. In matter of fact, we'll be here for so long that years from now we'll be talking about Ricochet 7.5. But now we're on Ricochet, about to be, RICOchet 5. and a brief message now from Charles, who was keenly interested and pouring over every error report

to make sure that the launch of RICOchet 5 is as seamless and easy as possible. How was it so far? I'm very excited about it. I mean, we have a fully built website for version 5 works. We have, oh, this might be some news, actually. This is breaking news. RICOchet 5 will launch with apps for iPhone and Android. Yeah.

Really? Yeah. So if you like RICOCHA on your computer, you're going to like it even more natively on your device's full functionality on Android and iOS. Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. Can't wait. So you can, I advise everybody to go to RICOCHAY now so you can, you know,

acquaint yourself with number four and then when number five comes out, you can call those people who play. You'll enjoy number five so much more if you've looked at number four. Or you'll be one of those people who complains, because, you know, you like the old way. I've been sitting here on the cusp of updating to the next Mac OS. And I have my laptop. They didn't have a choice.

Came with it. But my computer here, which runs all of the old apps that I need for my own creaky website, believe or not, which I despair actually what's going to happen to it sometimes. If I finally hit that point where Adobe says, nah, we're not going to support a dreamweaver anymore. You're on your own. And then I don't know what I'll do. Well, what I know I will do now is say goodbye. It's been great. Peter, great talk to you, Charles.

Likewise, next week, Charles, I want you to have different album art in the back there. We're tired of Pink Floyd and your kid's Spider-Man drawing. So I'll tell him. Let's step this up. Tell them we love the drawings, but it's time. I will. I want a stuffed saltwater crocodile in your background, Charlie. Yeah.

Is that true? There are crocodiles in Florida as well as all those kids? Oh. that's the everything is trying to kill you in Florida California is California is also full of things that will kill you no well liberals

no bears scorpions and snakes well the black bears here no they'll come up and shake your hand and ask very politely for a 20th I'm pretty sure there was a famous English actor who may have been in a merchant ivory movie who was eaten by a bear wasn't he went off

walking in the mountains no couldn't have been eaten no How many podcasts have we done that you gentlemen should have known that I had ended the show right there? No, I'm assuming this will be cut. I'm assuming all this will be cut, Jim. Charge extra for this content.

All right, gentlemen. Peter Gray. All right, boys. And talk to you next week. Bye bye. Take care. Bye-bye.