The Ricochet Podcast - The Crusaders

Episode Date: August 7, 2020

Last week, Rob Long and Peter Robinson found themselves in a disagreement about –not kidding– The Crusades. Well, one of the great things about having a very popular podcast is that you can get just about anyone to show up and adjudicate any dispute or question one might have. It’s basically like having Wikipedia on call. But more about that in a moment. Up first... Source

I have a dream this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. No, I haven't taken a test. Why the hell would I take a test? That's like saying you, before you got in this program, you take a test where you're taking cocaine or not. What do you think, huh? I'm the president and you have fake news. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lalix. And today we talked to Michael Tracy about post-right America and Thomas Madden about the Crusades, of course.

So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, and it's number 507. Next week, 508. Tune in. Thanks for joining us. I'm James Lalix here in Minneapolis. Peter Robinson in California. Rob Long in New York, as usual. And gentlemen, happy days are here again. The unemployment rate is only 10 percent. A New Gallup poll this week found that 13 percent of American adults are satisfied with the way things are going in the United States, which of course raises the old question again,

who are these 13 percent of the, and what precisely are they doing? They managed somehow to find the rioters and the looters and pull them and include them in the Gallup's results. The lowest figure in the survey since 2011. Now, think about that. Who wouldn't like to go back to 2011? I can't even tell you what horrible things were going on in 2011 at this point, but I'd love to claw my way back to that.

I'd love to claw my way back to February, back when 45% of the people were looking around and saying, you know, it ain't bad. But now, we are where we are. So, gentlemen, a report on your coasts. How are things, Rob? Well, sort of, it's one of those feelings where you don't know whether you are, those are rapids ahead that you're just going to go, you know, through. It's going to be rocky and you're going to get, it's going to be, or it's a waterfall. You know, you can't tell. You're too low to the horizon. Every small business owner I know and every restaurant owner I know is fatalistic.

They just don't think they're going to be able to last. They don't see how it's going to work. The city itself, you know, people are kind of leaving or mulling over whether they're going to come back. The governor has suddenly discovered economics the past two weeks and realizes that actually he needs rich people to come and move in. The mayor, on the other hand, has not. So we have a mayor who, I mean, he's not even a Marxist, because even a Marxist accepts certain laws of economics. He just thinks that the Marxist just thinks they're going to disappear somehow. de Blasio doesn't even understand them. So he's going to stop people on the way in.

He's going to hand out papers. He's going to essentially make it impossible and unwelcome for people to enter New York City right at the moment when New York City desperately needs people to enter it. Let me ask you this, Rob. Because this is a piquant question that the rest of us in the country looking at New York right now are thinking in the back of our heads. If you want to rob, loot, beat somebody over the head, shoot fireworks into a policeman's face, that's okay. We're not going to stop anything because, hey, you know, justice.

Hey, Floyd. But if you want to enter New York and you refuse to give your information to the gendarmes asking for your papers, that is something that the police are going to be actively interested in. Does anybody in New York look at that particular distinction and say, we've utterly lost our minds and inverted everything that we treasure about society? Well, of course they do. They do all the time. So what the hell are they going to do about it?

Is anybody in New York ever going to say, it's time that I stopped voting this way? Or are they going to find more sensible, more sensible communists? Well, who knows? People tend to vote for lunatics and morons all the time. That's kind of what they do. Who knows? You know, got another year plus of de Blasio anyway. But the irony is, of course, that what most, and this is actually a little bit more worrying, is that what most New Yorkers think, I suspect, is that it doesn't really matter what de Blasio wants the cops to do. They ain't going to do it. The only argument that I've heard for this is the fine argument because the city's broke and the police department's broken. Everybody wants money.

So, you know, they're giving a little bit, they'll be a little bit more strict with the restaurants if you're a little bit past 11 and you're still serving people or people haven't left the restaurant is all outside and it's 1101, they'll cite you. There's that. But I suspect that's only as a revenue measure, which doesn't make it any better. I just don't think that the mayor of the city has an ability anymore, has the credibility or the authority, really, aside from the legal authority, to get the cops to do something they don't want to do. And that's worrying, obviously, maybe not in this particular, but in the general aspect. Peter, California? California, I don't have anything as dramatic as Rob just described to tell you about, but they've cracked down. Cracked down

is the way I'm putting it. They'd say they've tightened up or they've in response to this, that, and the other. So my little haircut saga continues. Yesterday, I called, what, half a dozen barbershops in a row, and nobody was answering the phone. And then I went online, and even in San Mateo County, which I can now come to think of as the good county, it's the one that eased restrictions a little bit. They put the restrictions back in place, so you can't get a haircut. We used to have this, as of last Sunday, there was this quite elaborate procedure where you had to reserve a spot in the church if you wanted to be in the church for Mass. You had to do that online because there was a social distancing, the church filled up quickly, by the way, which is very rare in a Catholic church. The way you do that, of course,

is by making people sit 10 feet apart from each other. And then you could go outdoors and sit as long as you had your mask. And that's all changed now. Nobody's allowed in the church anymore. So, the priest announced as of this coming Sunday, he'll say Mass. It'll be like a little miniature St. Peter's Square where the priest will say Mass at the top of the steps outdoors. In other words, all right. So is a word of explanation, a word of rationale. Again, I've said this, I guess, two or three weeks in a row, but when all of this started, we were going to flatten the curve so that hospital emergency and ICU facilities wouldn't get overwhelmed, and then we'd start to ease up. That happened literally now a couple of months ago.

That's happened. Why are they still making us all live this way? I suppose they have their explanations, but they're not sharing them with the general public. And the second thing that's missing is any resistance. People are supine in the face of all this. Nobody's pushing back. There don't appear to be letters to the editor. And every day, this is, again, we don't have the drama that Bob has in the city of Manhattan, but what we have is the local newspaper, which has an online version, of course. Every day, another couple of local establishments announces it's not going to bother to reopen. So it's not a happy place. I'm with the, what is it, 85% who think the country's on the wrong track.

They're doing it for our own good and our own health, so shut up. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Shut up. Shut up is the answer. Shut up is the answer. I mean, again, how many people do you want to die? And if you point out to the actual mortality figures here and the fact that maybe this isn't a combination of the bubonic plague, Ebola, and the common cold sweeping through the plains. You know, you get looked at very strangely. I've noticed that mask usage downtown Minneapolis just walking on the streets has gone to about 65, 70 percent, which is bizarre because it's outside.

And you meet maybe one person every two blocks, but everybody's masked up in case somebody's coming along and explodes like a seed pod into this miasma of contagion. The other thing is that I was walking the dog around the block the other day, and the people on the other side of the block had a block party, which is what we do around here in the summer. It's beautiful. It's gorgeous. You get together with your neighbors. You have food. You have music. It's something we love to do.

And, of course, this year you can't have food because if somebody jams their fingers up their nose and coats their hands in COVID and then shoves it into the potato salad, everybody's going to die. So you can't have food. So you can't sit because chairs might be close to each other. So what they did was they blocked off the entire intersection with police tape, which was great. It looks like a crime scene instead of a social event. And then they drew circles six feet apart for proper distancing. And as I walked around the corner with a dog, I saw all my neighbors with masks, drinks in their hands, standing in their circles, talking. That was the block party. And Peter's

right. And everybody just sort of accepted it because it's health and it's good and it's all horrible and fatal. So shut up. And there's no end to this. There's no flipping end to it. Yes, that's right. Thank you. That's the point. That's the point. They've lost the ability. I don't know that they ever had the ability, but again, the early rationale made it sound time limited by some reasonable period of time, a month, two weeks at first, then a month, maybe six weeks. Now no one is even suggesting this will ever end until a vaccine comes or death rates drop all the way. Actually, death rates dropping to zero doesn't seem to do it even. Well, I mean, here's the issue, right?

I mean, the issue is the people, I mean, I can't help but think of this in terms of show business, right? I mean, we were told this movie was going to open big. Right, yes. And it didn't open big. Right. But it didn't open small either. It's a respectable player in the movie business.

It's doing okay and it's going to last a long time. It's like it's my big fat Greek wedding, right? Makes a lot of money over time. Over time. And it's very, very profitable for a lot of money over time. Over time. And it's very, very profitable for a lot of people over time. But if you were expecting $100 million in the first opening weekend, you're just not going to get it. I think what's happening is that – and this in many ways has been a perfect test for us because it's not terrible enough that we're all on this podcast saying, oh, my God, can you believe it? Society is barely holding together.

We're telling stories of heroes and heroism and the streets are empty. And it's not nothing. If it was nothing, we would be complaining and we'd all be back to work and saying, God, can you believe it? We all just went overboard. It's just somewhere kind of like a C plus, C minus, right? And I think over time what's happening, especially now in the summer, right? It's okay we say in March, well, this is going to last, but it will be done by Easter. And Easter is okay.

Okay. Middle of May, end of May or end of May, the latest. Well, the middle of June now, end of June. No, no, no. June is going to be the mop up month. It's fine. And then July and August will be back to normal and everybody's going to back to school. And now that's not happened.

And they're not giving us a date. They're pushing it and pushing and pushing it and they're forcing us to say something that we don't want to say which is it's not bad enough for this it's bad but it's not bad enough for this and they are forcing us to say that and i think partly so they can point to our point to us and say you you're a terrible person, just as I suspected. You're a horrible, horrible monster. But there are more people every day in the, this is bad, but it's not bad enough for this camp, than there weren't. And I suspect what will happen is, what happens in a lot of these things is people will just

simply begin to ignore it. And maybe that'll be good maybe bad but once you lose the thread the credibility you never get it back that's great and i would love to ignore it in certain ways too but it's you know if you decide i'm ignoring this i'm going out to a restaurant and then the restaurant's closed forever i'm ignoring this you know right all right or the movie theater oh the movie theater chain went out of business. I mean, the fact that there's this odd coincidence between this continuation and the government having more and more power and authority and little tentacular invasions into your life. The fact that this really does suit what the state kind of, sort of, always wanted to do.

Yes, that's right. I'm sure it's pure coincidence. And I'm not being a conspiracy monger about this. I don't think that Minnesota politicians are sitting around stroking their Leningote's saying, finally, finally, this is the moment for the tools. But it doesn't have to be. I mean, they love to do this. They believe government is the wise instrument. So the more it can do and the more it can arrange and the more it can control and the

more it can ban, that's better because they always knew they were the smart people who were able to do this. They got this. Even though they've screwed up every elemental, cosmic, minutiae point of governing this, the city, the safety, the crime, they still think that they're the people who are bestowed the great... Because they are. It's a hazard of the job. Once you have an entrenched bureaucracy, it's hard to convince those people, even if they're really nice people and you like them and they're perfectly pleasant and they could be your friends and your

neighbors and your relatives even. They are. It's just hard to believe if you're in that position that you're not right, that you shouldn't be doing something. The doctors always have that problem. Doctors even study this problem. You go to the doctor and you don't feel well and the doctor looks for a disease. And he almost always finds one. That's what doctors do, right? You know, if every problem, that you go to the doctor and you don't feel well, and the doctor looks for a disease. And he almost always finds one. That's what doctors do, right? You know, every problem,

if all you got is a hammer, every problem's a nail. If all you do all day is regulate, then every problem needs a regulation. It's funny because I've always thought of the Constitution, I mean, I should have John Yoo on this, as a reverse document. The Constitution doesn't tell you what you're allowed to do. It doesn't enumerate the freedoms that you have. The Constitution restricts government. That's what it's supposed to do. You can't do this. You can't do that. That's what the Constitution is supposed to do. And we forget that. And it's natural. It's human. But we forget it all the time. Do this, don't do that. Can't you read the signs? Man, five-man electrical band, one of the most self-righteous hippie pieces of crap songs in the early 70s.

But you know sometimes you want to listen to something like that. You just maybe don't want your internet provider to know that you're the kind of guy who's got a Jones for the five-man electrical band. So maybe that's where you switch into incognito mode. I'm here to tell you people, the incognito mode does not save you from that. It does not hide your activity at all. It doesn't matter what mode you use, as a matter of fact. It doesn't mean how many times you clear your browsing history, think you're safe, think you're kind of private. No, your Internet service provider can still see every single website you've ever visited.

Is your conscience clean? Mine is, but that doesn't mean that you don't want anybody to know. It's your information. So when I'm here at home, I never go online without using Express VPN. It doesn't matter if you get your internet from Verizon or Comcast or my local guys, U.S. Internet, who are great. ISPs in the U.S. can legally sell your information to ad companies. It's just how it is. But ExpressVPN is an app that reroutes your internet connection through their secure servers so your ISP can't see the sites you go to then next. ExpressVPN keeps all of your information secure by encrypting 100% of your data with the most powerful encryption available. Most of the time, you notice you've got ExpressVPN, frankly,

runs seamlessly in the background. It's easy to use. There's no lag. All you have to do is tap one button and you are protected. ExpressVPN is available on all your devices, phones, your computers, even your smart TV, which has a tendency to snoop depending on the brand. So there's really no excuse for not using it. Protect your online activity today with a VPN that's rated number one by CNET and Wired. Here is where you want to go. ExpressVPN.com slash Ricochet. You can get an extra three months free on a one-year package. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S VPN.com slash Ricochet. ExpressVPN.com slash Ricochet to learn more. And our thanks to ExpressVPN for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Now, welcome to the podcast, Michael Tracy, journalist based in New York City. His work is on medium.com slash mtracy, that's T-R-A-C-E-Y. And those of us who've been following him on Twitter over the years, we're happy to see a piece of his blow up beyond what might

have been the usual constraints of his audience. And a lot of people are finding out that he's got a story to tell. It's something that nobody else did. Frankly, somebody drove around the country and looked at what happened after the riots and that somebody was Michael Tracy. Welcome to the show today. Thank you for having me. So we're two months after this and we're supposed to have a big national conversation about this. Instead, somehow this has morphed into something else entirely. And the story of what happened and the devastation that was wrought to not just the big cities, you know, I'm in Minneapolis myself, but smaller places that found themselves touched and scarred. Tell us where you started, where you went, and what you saw.

Well, I live in Jersey City, New Jersey, so I started there, I guess you could say, because when the protests initially erupted, it was sort of stunning how geographically pervasive they were. You could go to a small town in the suburbs or even in a sort of rural area, and chances are there was going to be some kind of protest activity. So I did that for a while in just the vicinity around where I live, New York City, and so forth. But after it became clear, or at least after there were suggestions of the scope of the damage that had occurred as a result of the riot component of the protests, I did not feel any confidence that the true nature of what had transpired would be relayed to me through ordinary media venues. And so I said to myself, I have a car, I have a computer and a phone. It's not that complicated. So I'm just going to take a cross-country trip here and that was basically the direction I took, and I sort of stopped at places along the way in cities that you would not have expected necessarily to have undergone rioting, and you wouldn't have even known that anything happened unless you actively sought out the coverage or you happened to live in the area. Wayne, Indiana, Green Bay, Wisconsin, Olympia, Washington, just to name a few, not high-profile

cities compared to others, but still, per the sort of normal expectations of life in those places, they did undergo fairly severe rioting. And still, even now, it really strikes me that the enormity of these riots has not been conveyed to the public. And unfortunately, if you do make an effort to convey them, it's inevitably going to get twisted as you are some kind of right-wing propagandist or you are trying to delegitimize the, quote-unquote, Black Lives Matter movement, when really my impulse here is more just simply journalistic. A historically significant event of this magnitude ought to be accurately covered and recorded for posterity. But it really hasn't been, so you have to ask yourself why. And there are a number of potential theories that I've toyed around with that don't reflect particularly well on the current sensibilities, let's say, of the major media organs.

Right. Let's take a look at those major media. I work for one. I work for the Star Tribune. And a lot of people, we've done a lot of work on what was burned, what was destroyed, how the neighborhoods are responding. So maybe we're not in the same mix as some other places. But one of the theories that you suggest is that there's a self-censoring by the media, which is sort of ideologically simpatico. Sort of, kind of. No enemies on the left, that idea. So they're disinclined to make too much of that when this wonderful historical moment can lead to a great awakening on a variety of issues. The question is whether or not you think, I'm just asking for your opinion, whether or not you think this is self-censoring in a quiet sense that happens in the brain of the editors and the people, or whether or not you think that

there's actually vocal pressure in these institutions to say, leave that for later, let's concentrate on this now. Because I know where I work, there's no orders coming down saying, you're not going to write about this, you're going to write about that. But what do you think is going on in the major newsrooms? I think it's got to be some combination of the two. Because, for instance, in that first week or two weeks or so after the George Floyd killing and the eruption of the something, there was an atmosphere or a climate in any of these institutions that strongly disincentivized any kind of serious evaluation of the less, let's say, valorous portions of the the protest movement because you know you would have some journalists in their 20s and 30s who sincerely believe apparently that producing reportage or analysis

that they find distasteful amounts to inflicting harm upon them or even in some cases they'll use the word violence um so you know if you're if you don't want to cause any more of a ruckus than had already been existent at that point then i could see why you might not seek out topics that could you know be controversial in that way but in addition um I think there is what you might call a version of self-censorship because it's very clear. I mean, it's not like they try to hide it whatsoever that so many of our so many journalists and people

kind of affiliated with the media one way or another have a deep and personal investment in the sanctity of what they regard as this movement. Now, the movement is very diffuse and multifaceted, so it's hard to even pin down what exactly that means, but at least in terms of their perception, they feel that it's incumbent on them, I think, and it's not as though I have

to really speculate, they're pretty blatant about it, that preserving the sanctity of the movement in the public mind is one of their top journalistic imperatives right now. And that leads to major gaps in coverage. Yeah, and even if you were not motivated by politics or ideology, if you were giving a young reporter, even a middle career reporter, some career advice, it wouldn't be to cover the damage done by the riots. It would be something else. I mean, you would be very popular in newsrooms. So, hey, Michael, thank you. I'm sorry. This is Rob Long in New York City. Thank you for joining us. So I live in the West Village. I was in the epicenter between two pretty hot spots during the riots. And on the corner,

on my corner, very close to me, there was a Verizon store that was smashed and grabbed and completely emptied of everything. And I walked by about a week ago, maybe two weeks ago. It was open. I'd been away for a couple of weeks. So I came back, it was open, the glass was there. And I said to the guy, how's it going? And he said, good, good. You know, I just got to wear a mask. And I said, yeah, but you know, you put everything back. It was great. He goes, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And he said, you know, honestly, I just forgot about that. Like he'd forgotten. It had been memory hold. Now, I don't know whether he forgot because he feels he had to forget or he forgot because he, I don't know, because he just didn't want to remind his customers of that. But I was struck by the fact that there's so much happening,

that if you walk around New York City, and especially in my neighborhood where there was damage and there was a lot of looting, it's as if, yeah, you know what, too much on my plate right now. And I suspect that is also a feeling from the movement, which doesn't want to talk about it either. How much of that is just one more thing that's being compounded onto our current sense of being beleaguered and

overstressed and worried about the world in general? And how much of it is an actual, do you think, whether it's a plot or an agreement or even an unspoken agreement between people who have an agenda, simply not to talk about the price of that agenda. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, I do. And the anecdote from Manhattan is interesting. I was in Manhattan when the curfew had been imposed, if you recall, from early June. Believe me, I remember that. Yeah, and I was, you know, it was eerie. I was driving around.

I actually had been able to get in and the streets were totally barren. I mean, that was already the case sometimes as a result of the pandemic. But it was almost dystopian to be able to drive around in Manhattan with zero cars around and, you know, no people out and about whatsoever. But honestly, that's how Manhattan had been for months. I mean, I took pictures of an empty Times Square more than once. I would just post them on Instagram, and people who weren't from New York City would say wow. So it really I mean honestly the curfew helped but what really stopped the riots

at least in New York City in my opinion was the rain. It rained. And people, even people who want to rob and steal don't want to rob and steal stuff and have it ruined by the rain. No but I was, yeah, I think that's probably accurate although I think when the curfew was imposed there was even less of the vehicular traffic and pedestrian traffic.

But, you know, that's sort of a side point. But I think you're right to sort of postulate this notion that just the constant onslaught and flurry of information that's coming at us this year, especially, but it's also sort of representative of the quote unquote Trump era as well leads to more and more stuff just being constantly memory hold where it almost seems like people have the memory of a, of a gnat where, you know, if you don't get to the bottom of a topic within a few days or a week,

it just gets swept aside and there's some other outrage. Now, to contend with, I think that that dynamic might be a bit more prominent in New York City, where there's just a major hustle and bustle anyway. But in Minneapolis know, in Minneapolis, it strikes me as maybe a little bit more long-lasting in terms of the perceived impacts. Chicago, I mean, one problem here is that how communities in, like, the south side of Chicago or the west side where I visited,

how they perceive the consequences of the writing is not really reflected in the popular narrative. So people who have a relatively comfortable existence in like the West village or something, yeah, they might have a particular kind of attitude, but you know, I spoke to many people who, uh, who couldn't go to the grocery store that they would normally go to anymore who uh had just basic services that they would rely upon in their ordinary life uh totally disrupted um my hair so it's yeah so if they were more prominent in media discourse, then maybe that would have had some kind of overarching effect in terms of how the country at large perceived what happened here. But I think there was a clear political imperative for those people to not take on two outsides of a role, which is ironic because in many cases, probably most, they are themselves minorities. But they have what I've sort of labeled a small-c conservative sort of social attitude

toward this, and they're not on board with the same kind of mantra as you see expressed so fervently by activists and journalists. Michael, Peter Robinson here. I want to repeat what you did. You got in a car, you went places, you took pictures, and you talked to people. In other words, you did what used to be known as reporting. And the piece is on Medium. It's titled Two Months Since the Riots and Still No National Conversation. People should look at it and read it. I have a couple questions. One is simply this. Were you able to tease out in your conversations, maybe it's asking too much,

but were you able to tease out in your conversations the extent to which this would have happened? And by this, I'm referring to what you report on. You have picture after picture after picture, Cosmo Beauty, a Thai restaurant, of establishments where their windows smashed or where they're boarded up, where economic activity has been shut down. How much of it could have happened, would have happened, absent COVID and absent the lockdown that had been in place for weeks before the riots. Were you able to get a feel for that? Well, I got a feel for it in certain respects. So, for example, in Minneapolis, I was able to track down a young man in his early 20s

who became, almost by happenstance a rioter. He didn't have a specific political motive in showing up to the third police precinct building that night when it was besieged and burned. And yet one thing led to another, and he kind of felt, as a lot of young men in their teens and 20s do, that it would be an exciting thing to do. And clearly, if you're under lockdown for months on end, the level of excitement in your life has been severely diminished. So if there's an opportunity that just arises, you're probably going to take advantage of that if you have a certain disposition. And so, yeah, I think there definitely is – that is a component.

I've also been in Portland, out this kind of activity. And so, yeah, I mean, it's one variable of many, another being the specter of Trump, who kind of overlays everything in the perception of him as this fascist menace. So it kind of imbues protest activity with this sort of historic significance in the eyes of participants. So they liken themselves, for example, in Portland, they state, and this wasn't in the medium piece that you've referenced, that was written before. But in Portland, I was struck by one speaker saying you know this is our montgomery bus boycott because they're saying they're going to keep it going in total perpetuity and those are the historically elevated terms in which they see themselves and i think trump is a major if if not a pivotal probably

a pivotal reason why they are able to see themselves in those elevated terms so yeah they're they're taking it to the man and the man is the president of the United States. They're engaged in a noble enterprise in their minds, is what you're saying. Yes, I think that is definitely an element here. But in terms of, another point on the pandemic is, and another reason why it's so conspicuous that the damage and the wreckage has not been really adequately covered is because when the riots broke out, it was actually sort of at a key juncture in the timeline of the pandemic. A lot of places were in the midst of opening up or kind of coming to some kind of routine

where they would abide by the new regulations that would allow them to conduct business, such as hair salons and such. And in Minneapolis, there was a woman who I tracked down named Flora Westbrooks, who's cited in the Medium piece and also in a Wall Street Journal column that I wrote, who, you know, she had been locked down for months. And then on June 1st, she was planning to finally reopen her hair salon that she had run for over 30 years and was a well known commodity in the in the community of north minneapolis and you know so she had got the all the sanitation products needed uh she had purchased new materials and so forth and then two or three days before that out of nowhere her entire building is burned down. And so you have the economic decline that was caused by the pandemic and the attendant lockdowns and so forth, exacerbated, in some cases, dramatically by the riots. So for a media which is very much consumed by the pandemic, understandably so, You would think the riot component there, in terms of how

it worsened the economic destitution caused by a pandemic, would draw their interest more than it has, but it really has not. Michael, so here's, if I may, one more question here. So you've got, in the piece that I mentioned, you've got a couple of quotations that are just sort of heartbreaking. You're talking to a black woman in her 40s who runs a bakery in Milwaukee, and she says, I'm quoting your quotation of her, you think you're getting justice, but you're just tearing up your own community. Another man who says, I really don't understand because they're saying black lives matter and all this stuff, but man, you're hurting the black community. Question, did you get any sense that the political system, such as it is, loosely constructed, is responding to views such as that? Even at the very particular local level of black churches, are there preachers who are saying, wait a minute, we're hurting our own people?

Are there city aldermen or anywhere do you see any the political system taking up that view championing those people i see very little indication of that because the sentiments expressed by those two individuals you mentioned and also countless others in many cities, doesn't conform to an easy national political narrative because it's not as though those two people you cited are necessarily going to be natural Trump voters, right? many cases recent immigrants uh from from east africa as as is the case in uh minneapolis minneapolis in particular uh but but maybe just african-american blacks um they are not they're not going to provide talking points to the republicans in favor of their quote-unquote law and order agenda they're they're they're democrats i mean the woman whose salam was burned down in Minneapolis, she voted for Joe Biden in the Democratic primary. And yet they still have viewpoints which very much diverge from the popular depictions within left liberal circles of the nature and meaning and effects of this protest movement. And so because they sort of scramble those ideological dimensions and debates, they

effectively have just been ignored. And so you might have, on a hyper-local level, sometimes Alderman or something could capture those sentiments. But I haven't, I've been sort of focused on the contrast between the local response and the national narrative. And in terms of that, there's an incredibly wide gulf.

Got it. Thanks. They may be Democrats, but they're not the sort of people who were out there burning things down because they wanted to destroy capitalism. They're not activists. Right, and the activists are this odd melange of people who really want to burn the entire system down and replace it with whatever unicorn-infused thing that they want to do. Sorry, one clarification there, because you mentioned that the two people that Peter quoted were from Milwaukee.

And in Milwaukee, there was a lot of – so in the Medium piece, I try to draw a distinction between lowing radicals of some kind, you know, widespread fires, then you have the local sort of non-ideological populations, largely but not exclusively black, who are then opportunistically are able to, you know, you have a bunch of teenagers running into a footlocker taking sneakers. So I think it's important to demarcate those different types of activity that is enabled by riot conditions, because the ones tearing up the community who the black woman who runs the bakery in Milwaukee, for example, was scornful for were people in her neighborhood but but those who actually created the conditions for such activity in the first place tended to be in my experience a a significant percentage of ideological whites who had a explicit

um insurrectionary motive yep you're absolutely correct uh but the fact of the matter is, at the end of the day, when all these things combine to a fire, it's just one color I see in the horizon of my city, and that's red, by some odd coincidence, the color of communism. Michael, thanks for joining us today. It's a great piece, it really is. It's some fine reporting, and I encourage everybody to go and read it.

It's a tour of the United States and the damage that was caused after the insurrections, which you might not see elsewhere, but he went out, he shot it, he talked to people and produced a good piece. So thanks for joining us in the podcast today. Okay, thank you. This is one of those, oh, what shall we say? It's a uniquely American story in so many ways. Oh, Rob's there. Rob's there. Oh yeah, I was trying to figure out how to.

Actually, I don't know how to interrupt this one. I know. Well, the thing was is when I let him go and I started talking, I could see like Ray Walston in My Favorite Martians. You know, the antenna coming back, emerging from the back of Rob's head as he tries to suss out exactly how he's going to squat on this one. We'll just go straight to it, frankly. Because you could say that Rob and I having a cliched exchange about the nature of the Segway interruption could itself be considered the Segway interruption. So we were talking about American stories. That's what we do here in Ricochet, but we're not the only ones. America is unfortunately increasingly divided.

The American Story is a new podcast narrated by Chris Flannery at the Claremont Institute. And it aims to unite listeners with true stories about Americans and the American experiment in freedom. These weekly stories of immigrants, statesmen, poets, soldiers, athletes, inventors, pioneers, and ordinary citizens, all these tales reveal our rich history and shine light on a path forward. Each episode of The American Story reminds us of our shared inheritance of freedom and what we must do to preserve it. So listen to The American Story and rediscover why America is worthy of love. Visit theamericanstorypodcast.org and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or your own preferred podcast platform.

And our thanks to The American Story Podcast for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast Professor Thomas Madden, Professor of History and Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at St. Louis University. Dr. Madden's latest book is Istanbul, City of Majesty at the Crossroads of the World, recently published by Viking Penguin. Welcome to the podcast. We were just talking about the Crusades in Istanbul last week, and here you pop up with this book to tell us why we're right or what we're wrong. I'm going to hand this right off to Rob Long because Rob is a crusades expert. He is, he is marinated in this stuff. Now, whether or not he's Terry Jones perspective or another one, I'm going to let him go. Rob, uh hate the Crusades. You've got 15 seconds.

Tell us why. No, the Crusades are a huge subject, and they did some good stuff. The people on Crusades did good stuff. Oh, they did do some good stuff. Now you're already making concessions. There were some fine people. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. So I guess if I'm going to start, I'll start this way.

What is it? Peter and I agree, Peter Robinson and I, we will both agree, are peculiar and not representative of the world as a whole. But we found ourselves talking about the Crusades of all things last week. What is it about the Crusades, this weird moment of history medieval history pre-renaissance history that seems so relevant and easy to trip over in 2020 um well thanks for uh having me first of all and i gotta say um i'm a big fan both fan of both of you who are arguing about this, so I want you both to be right. You'll have some disagreement on that here. As far as why, it is true.

Almost everyone, if they know nothing about the Middle Ages, they'll at least have some idea in their mind about the Crusades. It's not generally a very accurate idea, but they do have some idea in their mind about the Crusades. It's not generally a very accurate idea, but they do have some idea. I think it's one of those events in Western history that's just kind of indelibly marked on the image of the West. I also think that they became much more interesting to people after 9-11. Before then, I was really the only working professional historian in America who was working on the Crusades before 9-11. And since then, there are a whole generation of scholars that have come of age who study it now. So it's much more popular than it once was. Can we just talk about the politics just one minute? And I think one of the things we discussed last week,

which was sort of a snapshot idea, which is that visitors to Spain, to Toledo, to Alhambra, even to Southern France, will say, look at the wonderful Moorish influence. And visitors to maybe the Holy Land or places in what we call the Middle East will say, look at the examples of colonialism.

And the idea is somehow that one was this natural, there's a natural movement of the Muslim civilization from east to west. It naturally moved from Mecca to Toledo. And there was some unnatural movement of influence and even military ambition that moved from, say, London to what is now Syria. Is that close? Is that, as a historian, is that close? Is that real?

Does that bother you? Do we need to hear all of the full context of the Crusades? Or are you just happy enough that people aren't saying it was a smash-and-grab pirate trip by a bunch of guys who just wanted to get rich? Yeah, I agree with you completely. It's kind of a natural thing to hear about the expansion of Islam from the 7th century onwards as just kind of an expansion and

not as a conquest, when it was in fact a conquest of three quarters of the Christian world. So it was a pretty extensive military operation over many centuries. And it's also true that when we tend to think, I'll say most people think of the Crusades as colonialism, but historians do not view it that way at all. In fact, professional historians have long ejected the concept of colonialism with the Crusades. They're really a devotional activity. That's main purpose was to secure the holy sites.

So, and then the crux of our disagreement was, to what extent, you know, on a scale of 1 to 10, you like how intellectual I'm being with you? Do not! I beg you, I beg you, I beg you, don't put it at 5, Tom.

Whatever you put on. 1 to 10, how distorted, and I'll grant you, certainly if it was colonialism or some kind of mercantilism, it was a majestic failure. But what a taking as a given that it was primarily, as you say, a devotional activity, to what extent were those devotional motivations distracted or thwarted on the way from Northern Europe or Rome or Avignon to Jerusalem with stops in Greece and Sicily and in Cyprus for some smash and grabs.

I mean, do you think we overplay the smash and grabs, or do you think that on balance it was sort of typical human activity? Yeah, it's typical human activity, but you have to remember in the medieval context, there was no contradiction between looting or capturing things from enemies along the way and doing what was considered to be an act of charity of capturing these lands and returning them to the people who had had them taken from them. So in the medieval mind that was not a contradiction at all in fact if anything those were things which god was giving to you on the way to help you it was it was showing a favor yeah well i guess i was speaking more about um you know christian against christian you know the attacks of christians on a devotional mission

to the fourth crusade that's what the fourth crusade right i gotta warn you that was that was my first book was on the fourth crusade so i can talk a long time about it yeah the fourth crusade um it is an attack on christians um that was not the purpose of the crusade i mean it's a time explain explain what the what makes the fourth crusade distinctive well it's distinctive because it never attacked any muslims at all it went to the greatest christian city in the world and then destroyed it constantinople yeah so it's a it's a rough uh and it's still um there are a lot of people who are still upset a lot of greeks are still upset about it today um even though most people in the west have pretty much forgotten it

but yeah that was a crusade that was not aimed at Constantinople, but it became hopelessly mired in Byzantine politics along the way and ultimately ended up attacking the city. And in fact, the leaders of the Fourth Crusade, that was not their intention to go there at all. They had planned to go to Egypt, but one thing led led to another and that's what ended up happening Tom, it's Peter Robinson here now and I'm the man who resists this is what got us into trouble last week was that Rob kept using I shouldn't say kept using

but he did use one or two times the term smash and grab so first of all let's lay down just very quickly here we're talking about through crusades in the holy land first crusade begins at the very beginning of the 12th century we get eight crusades which end in the second half of the 13th century in the middle of all this the crusades do establish what the kingdom of jerusalem the county Odessa, there are two or three actual political entities that they found,

and that lasts, so there's actual control of the Holy Land that the Crusades achieved that lasts for about a century. Have I got that right? Almost two centuries, yeah, from 1099 to 1291. Oh, okay, so two centuries. And then finally, there's two centuries, so there are moments where it's a little bit like Spain, that the Christians get along with some of the surrounding Muslims, but there's constant tension.

And in the end, the Crusaders lose a decisive battle, Manzikert, and it's Saladin who defeats them, correct? That's a decisive moment? No, I mean, they're finally defeated. Well, the decisive moment isn't man's occurred it's a battle of hatin and that's the horns of hatin sorry sorry yeah okay i'm going all right and the last thing i want to establish is that although your latest book is on istanbul you have written what i take as the best one volume introduction and it is called the concise history of the crusades thomas madden the concise history of the crusades thomas madden

the concise history of the crusades beautifully written absolutely fascinating okay to what extent was it was it younger sons i'm going back on the old what i take to be a kind of old cliche it's the aristocracy if you're an oldest son and you inherit, so you stay on the estate, but the youngest sons are restless and the crusades are loot gathering missions and opportunity for young males overburdened with testosterone to wreak havoc. And there's really nothing useful about them at all. it's just a movement of mobs seeking loot what's the what's the latest scholarship on on that general picture yeah that's like the old 19th century kind of enlightenment uh caricature of the crusades

yeah the the it was not the younger sons who were leading the Crusades. The Crusades were massively expensive, and you paid for them yourselves. That meant that the people who went on the Crusade were, in fact, the eldest sons. They were the people who controlled the estates. Some of the others might have come along with their brothers, but the people paying the bills were the ones with the money. So it was very wealthy and powerful men who took the cross and went off. And they did so for very medieval reasons. They cared deeply about the state of their souls. And that was what led them to want to make this arduous trek for thousands of miles.

Do you find that's a, Mr. Robby, do you find that's a, um, I mean, when Peter Dice talked about this last week, he, he, that was the argument. I mean, I'm characterizing and he's on the line,

but that was the argument that he made and, and, and, and made, um, and really an emphasized, which was, was not really a counter argument toument to something I was saying,

because I take it that the motivations were what they were. But do you find that hard now in the business of history to sort out the motivations? It seems to me that, I mean, you can tell me if I'm wrong, that we now have sort of this Marxist analysis of everything that's so deep and so almost into the DNA now of every historical or scientific or mathematical inquiry even, that it's hard to remind people that there was a time in the year 1100 or 1200 where people did things because they cared about the state of their souls whether you agree with whether they did or not it wasn't because they were hoping to

compound uh you know their savings and and create capitalistic enterprise i mean is that are you are you swimming are you swimming upstream now to try to make this argument well i think i think it's swimming upstream in um just a modern modern culture we tend to view in our world we want to know what's in it for the person who's doing something and if it's hard there must be something really in it for them in it in this world not in the next world um it's in it for them in this world and that's why it's hard for us to get into that that's why but among historians among professional historians of the crusades that that's what that's what we try to get past and to try to get into a medieval world in which

the next world is always there this is a world in which you can be dead by dinnertime, and there's no rhyme or reason as to who dies and why not. So you think about where you're going to be all the time. It's a world of death, where death is everywhere. And it's something that we, in our world, where we expect death to come almost always in a very rational manner, with lots of warning ahead of time. That's not the way the medieval world was. It's not the way any pre-modern world was. Hey, Tom, Peter here again. Just another couple of things I'd like to establish, if I'm right, if it's correct.

So, it's important to understand, I think, that the Crusades are not an attack, but a counterattack. Is that fair? Yeah, that's absolutely right. Every one of the Eastern Crusades was a response to a Muslim aggression. All right. And then I guess two more questions. I'm going way back. I guess it was a decade ago when we recorded an episode of Uncommon Knowledge together, but you said something then. I guess it was a decade ago when we recorded an episode of Uncommon Knowledge together. But you said something then, I think this was actually before, well, in any event, you said something then that has stayed with me, which is that to us, the Crusades is something that's over and done. It's an episode in history, off in the distance. In the Muslim world, it's still alive.

It's something that's real to them. Could you explain that for a moment? Yeah, I mean, well, it's still alive. It's something that's real to them. Could you explain that for a moment? Yeah, I mean, well, it is today. In the Muslim world today, they think about the Crusades a lot. In fact, in the Arab street, say in Egypt, it's common to refer to an American or a European as a Crusader. It's a memory that they remember very strongly. However, I should say, it's a memory that is purely the result of politics in the 20th century.

Muslims in the Muslim world in the 18th century had no recollection of the Crusades at all because they were really just too small for them to notice in the large swath of Islamic history that goes all the way from India to Spain. It was massive empires. Yeah, Bin Laden referred to the tragedy of Andalusia. Yeah, exactly. As though, dude, it's Spain. You don't get Spain.

And Islamists still say that today. They consider any land that is ever consecrated to Islam can never not be that. But we've seen that recently with the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Right, right, right. The whole basis of that is if this was ever a mosque, it legally can never cease to be a mosque. And it's the same thing with land. So, Tom, one more question from me, and then I know Rob is going to want to get back in. I guess here's what I would suggest as one way of looking at it. It is the first time Western Europe gets a sense of itself as a kind of entity of,

not just Western Europe, but much of what we would today consider middle or central Europe. You get a kind of civilizational sense of Christendom able to organize itself and take action. Christendom, a totally incorrect, unacceptable term anymore, but you get a civilizational awakening. You then get two centuries of political entities controlled by the West or by Christians in the Holy Land, which greatly facilitates the expansion of knowledge. All kinds of important documents come to the West during that period, including Arab knowledge comes to the West during that period. And you also get this tremendous example of people willing to do something extremely difficult and dangerous

to lay down their lives in many cases for a high and noble cause. That's one way of looking at it. President Obama and President Clinton, possibly others, I can't remember whether George W. Bush said anything that made me cringe about the Crusades. So the question, I guess, is, are the Crusades anything for which a president of the United States ought formally, in speeches, as did Obama and Clinton, to apologize? No, not at all. And in fact, I wrote op-eds after both of those, pointing this out. The Crusades were a response to aggression. They were a defense of the Christian world. And Christendom did mean something then. Remember, this is a world in which there is no nationalism. The concept that binds the people of Europe together is their faith,

their shared membership in the church. And that's what men fight for. They fight for those things which are common to them and which they feel part of and feel that it's larger than themselves. And that's what led them to want to take the cross and to go off they were fighting for christians far away who they didn't know but they knew that they were christians and that they were being attacked purely because they were christians and therefore they were their clan it was as though if our americans were attacked overseas we wouldn't say well they're overseas it's their their problem um We would see that as an attack on us. I'm trying to get to the 2020 of it all. I think one of the reasons why it was so interesting

in post 9-11 was because we were suddenly seeing the idea of the clash of civilizations becoming a three-dimensional reality. And so we suddenly had to think of it not as a theory that a Harvard professor wrote, but an actual three-dimensional war with real three-dimensional

casualties. What about now? It seems now that we're maybe we're just distracted by other things that that clash of civilizations has morphed into an internal civil war um that we are now um i mean you know i'll reveal my priors that i i personally feel is the best possible outcome not not it's not a good outcome but it's the best possible outcome. It's not a good outcome, but it's the best possible outcome of our adventures in the Middle East.

To what extent does the clash still exist for the Islamic world? To what extent is it simply a political brick bat that people like Erdogan use when they feel like they need to gin up the enthusiasm and take over the Hagia Sophia again? To what extent is it dormant

and going to explode? I guess the larger question is, to what extent is that region going to become more secular as our region became more secular. It is no coincidence that the Crusades faded as the world, the European world, became more secular and more political and less faith-driven.

Is that fair? That's a lot of things, so you can tell me where I'm wrong. I do think that um well one i do think part of right now it's rather dormant um islamist ideas and organizations haven't gone away they've been dealt a pretty heavy blow um with the caliphate being destroyed but remember it wasn't that long ago that there was a caliphate. So I think that it still exists. I think over the long term, yeah, secularism and particularly also American culture, which is just ubiquitous worldwide, I think that will slowly erode these Islamist ideas. But there are still a lot of people who view the current state of the world as being fundamentally

wrong and unholy because God wants, from an Islamist point of view, and there's still many, many of them, God wants the whole world to live under Islamic law, and he will eventually give that to them. So that's not gone away, and it won't go away, I don't think, I don't think for centuries. But for right now, it's not on the front burner, and so we can spend more time being divided amongst ourselves. In fact, I'm writing a book right now, It's a history of the fall of republics. And I'm, in fact, talking precisely about this dynamic of essentially when republics become so wealthy and there are no more existential threats, they immediately begin dividing up and attacking each other. I don't know. It sounds familiar.

Speaking of 2020. Yeah, it's very similar. The Romans did exactly the same thing. After they had defeated all of their external enemies, then they immediately went after each other. Right, right. Tom, so I'm just trying to think of some way of how close I can get you to saying, Peter, you were right and Rob, you were wrong. I wasn't there for it.

So I just, everything you guys are saying today is absolutely right. Well, Rob is being very gingerly in the way he's putting his questions. Tom, thanks so much. It's my pleasure. James? Yes. Did you just let him go? Yeah.

It did feel a little like that moment in Annie Hall where Woody Allen is standing in line and he hears somebody talking about Marshall McLuhan this and Marshall McLuhan that. And he turns and says, you don't know anything. I happen to teach Marshall McLuhan. And he goes, well, I have Marshall McLuhan right here. He pulls him from off screen. Actual Marshall McLuhan. And that's kind of what this felt like. But Peter, I can't honestly say who in this story is Woody Allen and who is

the guy behind him. I suspect it's well, I'll be I suspect I'm more of the annoying guy in line. You're more of what he is. But it's not 100%. You know nothing of my work. How you came to teach a class on anything is beyond me.

Boy, if life were only like this. Tom Madden is the nation's leading scholar of the Crusades and a good sport. Thanks so much for asking me to come. Not at all. Thank you. Well, a lot of things, of course, were shaken by the fall of Byzantium. The foundations of the city itself were riven and shattered as a new order arose. Hey, and speaking of foundations, the Bradley Foundation. You know, we're talking about tumultuous times in the past, but all times seem tumultuous when you live through them.

I tend to think that they're going to look back on this. And I hope that what they're going to take away from 2020 more than anything else is the rise of the independent private space programs that eventually put people on Mars. And a lot of the stuff that we wallow and thrash around about today will be lost in greater significance. I think Paul Harvey had something about that, today's news of lasting significance. But maybe not. We know that these are trying times, and making sense of current events during these extraordinary times can be trying intellectually, physically, too. Conceived in Liberty, the Bradley Speaker Series, it's a new video series that offers meaningful perspectives through engaging 15-minute interviews. 15 minutes, you learn a lot. Visit bradleyfdn.org slash liberty to watch the most recent episode featuring renowned scholar Robert P. George.

He's the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton. George is a 2005 winner of the Bradley Prize and a member of the Bradley Foundation Board of Directors. In this episode, he makes the case against judging historical figures by present standards. Oh, that's timely. Don't you want to hear that? And he makes the case for telling the truth about America's history, protecting the integrity of the institutions of civil society, and being more understanding of those who have perspectives that may differ from our own. So that's Bradley with an L-E-Y at the end, fdn.org slash liberty to watch the video. New episodes posted weekly.

So come back often, subscribe to the YouTube channel, and be notified whenever a new one is posted. Our thanks to the Bradley Foundation for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. Out of that, and coming back. And three, two, one. Well, then, it is time for the Lilacs Post of the Week. The James Lilacs Member Post of the Week. It's going to be called Q-Tight right there. It's going to be.

By the time Yeti gets done editing this thing, it's going to be so tight, you won't be able to put a piece of onion skin between what I said and the sounder. That's great. That's great. It comes from Boss Mongo, the name that I love, right there. I just see the guy out of Blazing Saddles right there, and it's called Fauci's Farcical Face Mask Follies. Full disclosure, I'm a mask skeptic, a mask denier. I am not, though, a mask skeptic a mask denier i am not though a mask refuser if a business establishment puts up a sign that says mask required or better please wear a mask i'll do it without too much grousing because because that's me i'm a giver i carry and as required wear a mask for the same reason i carry a leash when i walk my german shepherd dog i don't need

the accoutrement in either case, but if I can prevent anyone from feeling ill at ease with my actions, I will. Did I mention I'm a giver? Yeah. Okay. Driving on. Where he then goes from there, which may sound like, oh, here's another one of those guys who doesn't want to wear masks.

Come on, science, science, doctors, medicine. He goes on to list his bona fides when it comes to the medical profession and his experience with these things. And his experience is substantial, shall we say. And it's fun to read, especially in the way he writes it. And then he gets to a moment on a plane where, well, let's say an overly hair-gelled influencer decides to document the masklessness that is all about him. The whole thing is just a perfect time capsule of 2020. And as a story, it has the sound of sitting at a bar

and the guy's telling you this tale. And you're caught up in the story and you're caught up in the telling. It's a perfect example of why Ricochet is great. Because Boss Mongo is a member. He's a highly paid writer out there that we got and we ensconced on a comfortable chair and gave him the word processor and said, we're going to step back now. You just work your magic. No, he's a guy who came up with this on his own for the rest of us at Ricochet. And it's an absolute delight to read. If you disagree with it, you can tell him so to his face, too.

He's unmasked to face. But you've got to be a member to do so. So, gentlemen, before we end here, I guess I should ask you, well, Rob, you're going to love this. Disney has decided that they're going to put Mulan, which everyone was waiting to see in the theaters, I guess, they're going to put it on Disney+. So you have to pay for Disney+, in order to pay $30 to watch Mulan. Is this the future? Any of you guys champing at the bit to watch your next big favorite blockbuster at home for 30 simoleons? That's Rob's territory.

Well, I mean, it's a smart move for them because it's a title that people want to see. They want to get people to sign up for Disney+. They're kind of scooping up. Disney Plus has been a smashing success. Everyone's going to have to try all these different things. But remember, people in show business, all of them, not one of them has any particular experience in pricing. You know, the art of pricing is very complicated. There are people in Cincinnati, Procter & Campbell, who do it for a living.

It's very hard to do. It's a very complicated thing. People in show business don't understand selling a thing for the price of the thing. We don't do that. You watch a TV show, and price of the thing. We don't do that. You watch a TV show and we sell the ads. You go see a movie and it's rented by the movie theater company that sells you $5 milk duds and that's how kind of it. Everyone's always selling something else. The radio business began from people selling something else, selling insurance or selling the Chicago station,

the world's largest store, WLS. These are Sears. They always start with some other way to make money. Amazon does the same thing. So it's going to be – it could fail, but it could succeed depending on what price the consumer is willing to pay for a specific piece of entertainment. And that number is now a mystery. But we're about to find out. And if anyone's going to discover it, it's going to be Disney. There's also a social, emotional, historical, cultural cost to this.

When I see a movie at home, and I love to see movies at home. I have my comfortable chair. I've got my headphones. I've got my big screen, and I can pause it whenever I want when I want to get some popcorn that I'm not going to pay $6.99 for. I love watching things at home. But by the same token, there are some movies that my daughter and I always made a point of seeing in the theater because it's a completely different and necessary experience. It's immersion. It shuts out the world. The doors close,

the lights go down. And you see it at a scale that you simply can't manufacture or reproduce at home. And when you leave the theater, there's a feeling of having crossed between worlds, the one that you were in and now the sort of pedestrian one that you're reentering. And it always seems a little careworn when you get back to it and you have to acclimate yourself back to your reality, which is maybe sad about your reality,

but tells you also something about the wonders that you just experienced and the emotions that you felt and the way you were stirred and taken out of your own life and the rest of it. None of that happens in your own theater. And the idea that, you know, if we come up with superior alternatives for home, great. But one of the things that terrifies me is the idea that we are going to lose the movie theaters, that they're just simply going to be, I mean, to this day, you can go through a small town and you can find out,

you can look, you can see what used to be the theater in the 20s and the 30s. Yes, that's right. That's right. And from that little nugget, from that pristine madeleine, you can reconstruct an entire Saturday night of the town coming to life and the neon signs popping out at dusk and the people coming to the farm. But that's been gone for years. It's been gone for years except for the places that it never left or has come back. You'd be surprised how many of these small towns actually have that. And one of the things that's going to come, they say, from our societal reorganizing following the pandemic is that as

more people say, I don't want to go back to the office, I like it the way it is, that a lot of people are going to move to small towns that have been more abundant for years and bring money and bodies and actually sort of revive the dead small town experience. I was just talking to a guy who studies cabin culture towns in Minnesota all over the place, and that's what it is. You've got people from the cities going up there, bringing their money, and bringing these places back to life. So the perverse concept, you know, the 20th century, the last half of the 20th century

has decimated, has destroyed the American small town Main Street, and we thought it was gone forever. It's entirely possible that it comes back. And while I lament the loss of the IMAX experience, what if the end result of this is the small theater with a small screen and 100 seats and the high school girl selling you the tickets and making the popcorn? What if that comes back a little strong? That would be not bad. That'd be okay. I mean, I think people in their sort of two basic rules in show business, right? One is if you actually put something on that people want to see, they'll go see it.

And then the second one is that if you put something on that people want to see and they can see it with other people in a nice atmosphere, they'll do it. So theater going has declined, but IMAX is still a pretty spectacular experience. It does pretty well. If you give people an experience that they want where they're not standing in lines too much, they're not waiting for $5 popcorn, all sorts of things you have to be sensitive to. Some people do like going to the theater. They do like it. They just don't want to, they're just not, if the theater is at the, is a concrete box

at the end of an empty mall, you know, what's, where's the fun of that? Right, right. James, I love the point, the question, I guess, about whether COVID is going to revive small towns or move people out to the suburbs or make the country in some way, I don't, some people will cheer when I say this and some people will cringe, but make the country look more like Texas, which is essentially a suburban culture. Texas is a state that's dominated by the Republican Party, even though five of the six biggest cities in Texas are run by Democratic machines. How can that be? Well, it can be because the downtowns, the urban areas in Texas don't bear the same cultural or

political weight that they do other places. I don't know, what will the early signs of that be? I guess one question, well, I guess we already have a couple of early signs that Rob mentioned in the opening segment where the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, is now all but begging rich people, frankly, to move back to the city. He knows what's going on. That may be an early sign of something that somehow or other, but who knows? This is all for years to come, I suppose. I would look at mid-sized cities, right, as the bellwether here. What are the smaller American cities?

Say Cincinnati or Cleveland or smaller? I would say Chattanooga, Tennessee. Fargo. Chattanooga has the fastest, best internet in the country. You know that because it's on billboards everywhere. It's one of the things they sell. And it's got a vibrant

downtown being rebuilt. It's filled with young hipster people starting new distilleries and doing all sorts of things. Chattanooga, I would keep your eye on it. What happens if Chattanooga catches fire? What happens if you move to Chattanooga

and you can buy a big house for not much money and you can you can zoom with your co-workers wherever they are and your kids can go to school and you can go have a fancy dinner and there's some hipster neighbors down that street they're making their own bourbon and that's sort of cool what what happens when what happens when those cities become legitimately cool well what happens is you give people a choice. And they may choose my neighbors here in New York City may choose to leave. Bad for New York City, good for the country.

How big is Chattanooga? I don't know, but it's like a mid, it's like a, you know, a couple hundred thousand, isn't it? Second tier in size. So is Minneapolis. And Minneapolis has been going great guns lately. The downtown is bristling with cranes. There's all kinds of apartment buildings going up. A lot of the people moving in, we aren't losing people anymore. It's a beautiful, clement place. But then, overnight, the reputation is in smoking ruins. It's not entirely the case. But I, so, I mean, yes, we ought to be one of those places that's, that, that benefits from that. But even here in the Twin Cities, the empty, the office towers, 50 stories are, are occupied by 5% of the people that they used to be. And it, once that switch.

Say that again, repeat that statistic. The tower where I work, I was told is now at 5% occupancy. Wow. It's right. It's rented. It's like 85% rented, but there's nobody there. And I go to work in that tower, and there's nobody there. I hate to say this because after 9-11, we all said, well, irony is dead, and the cities are over, and everything's changed. And as it turned out, it didn't. And I'm thinking that it's possible that two or three years down the road, we're going to be like they were in 1920, 22, after the pandemic that they had. That we're going to be on to jazz and bootleg gin and Charleston and a whole bunch of other things.

Who knows? We'll see. We know how that unfortunate era ended. We can but hope. So there you have it for the graphic of this week. If anybody wants it is all three of us in flapper dresses with feathers in our hair, bobbed hair, cloth hats, and long strings of necklaces as we shimmy to the Charleston waiting for the 20s to actually become the fun place that we thought they were going to be. Another fun place, of course, is Apple Podcasts.

That's right. That's where you can go and give us five-star reviews, which helped me help find the show and help more people find ricochet we're brought to you by the bradley foundation the american story and express vpn support them for supporting us and you get great information great learning and a great way to get around the internet now as you always know there's one little thing we have to do before we go and that's briefly rob and peter what are you? Tell everybody what you're watching on streaming services so they can judge you harshly by your entertainment choices. Peter?

I'll go first to give the two of you the chance to laugh at me. The house is empty. Everybody's, my wife and daughter have gone off. So I'm here all by myself. And what am I watching? Kenneth Clark's Civilization, filmed 51 years ago. It's a gorgeous piece of work.

It really is. It really is, but the only time I can watch it is when the house is empty, because the eye-rolling that doesn't take place, the snoring sounds that don't take place when people wander into the room and see Dad watching that. Kenneth Clark, Civilization. Baby,

if you've never seen it, you've missed something. Just a lot of smash and grabs. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Smash and grabs. Exactly. And Rob? I am finishing, finally, which is a lovely series, but I was finishing the Ken Burns documentary series

on country music. And the later ones are really good. They're really good. He's a completely annoying and irritating character, but, man, it's great. And it reminded me that there's a couple of his other ones I haven't seen, but I think before that I'm going to re-watch The Civil War, which was sort of the beginning of all of it for him,

and still remains to this day an incredible experience to watch the Civil War documentary. You don't find that the country music one is just a little slow, that you wouldn't increase the speed? Oh, I like it. It is slow. It is slow, yeah, but that's kind of what I want. Got it.

What a bunch of highbrows. I've been binging on Get Smart. No, actually, I watch a Netflix Belgian show, because I've watched two Belgian series this year. You don't think of Belgium as being a powerhouse of television production, but the first one was this preposterous sci-fi apocalyptic thing. And this one is called The Twelfth or The Twelve. It's about a jury. And it's spoken mostly in Flemish, and after a while, it becomes hypnotic. I would turn on the show waiting for somebody to say, Undebrecht, Winde Vogel. And it's just great. But it's also a view of the European justice system,

and you see the differences where the judge is asking questions of people. It's basically about the jurors and the case. Ten episodes, a lot of character development set in that sort of gray, colorless, EU modern world where human emotions and people themselves seem slightly detached and adrift from the institutions and the structures that they've created. I mean, in that sense, it's fascinating,

and it's a good story. The Twelve, or De Twelf, or whatever. Did she kill brecht devine devogel you'll have to find out thank you everybody for listening rob peter it's been a pleasure and we'll see everybody in the comments at ricochet 4.0 next week and next week in the meantime let the record show that rob's definition of the moment chattanooga will become cool is when the hipster down the street is making his own bourbon. I think that's a direct quotation from Ralph.

It is. And that is how you'll know. That's the first step. It didn't make me blind. We left Constantinople in 1099 To restore the one true cross Was in this heart of mine To bring it to Jerusalem And then sail home to old sin

We took that holy ride ourselves to we took that holy ride ourselves to everyone got famous Everyone got rich Everyone went off the rails And ended in the ditch

We had to take that long, hard road To see where it would go Yeah, we took that holy ride On ourselves to go We took that holy ride On ourselves to go home. Ricochet. Join the conversation. Oh, my God.