The Ricochet Podcast - The Dreamers

Episode Date: September 9, 2017

Whenever immigration rises to the top of the national agenda, we like to call on the best guys we know on the topic, Mickey Kaus and Mark Krikorian. We do a deep dive into the Dreamers, DACA, and The Wall. Also, that deal with Chuck and Nancy, Rob defends Betsy DeVos, and James remembers a dog named Scout. Music from this week’s podcast: Bodhisattva by Steely Dan... Source

We have special news for you. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Are you going to send me or anybody that I know to a camp? We have people that are stupid. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lilacs, and today we have Mark McCorian and Mickey Kaus to talk about defense. Ha, kidding, immigration.

Let's have ourselves a podcast. Bye-bye. Welcome, everybody. This is indeed the Ricochet Podcast, and it's number 368. It's brought to you by the fine folks at Ring. Ring's mission is to make neighborhoods safer. Today, over a million people use the amazing Ring video doorbell to help protect their homes, and you can save up to $150 off a Ring security kit. Go to ring.com slash ricochet. Go to ring.com slash ricochet.

That's ring.com slash ricochet. Did I say it's ring.com slash ricochet? Mm-hmm. And we're brought to you by Bowl & Branch. The right sheets can take your sleep and your style up to the next level. With Bowl & Branch, that upgrade has never been more affordable either. If you go to bowlandbranch.com, that's spelled B-O-L-L and branch.com, and use the promo code RICOSHAY, you'll get $50 off your first set of sheets, plus free shipping in the U.S. And we're brought to you by Away Travel.

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I've been trying. But here he is again to do that thing. Welcome back, James. Welcome to dry land. You are correct, Weir. This podcast is brought to do that thing. Welcome back, James. Welcome to dry land. You are correct, Weir. This podcast is brought to you by Ricochet.com. And what you normally do here is plead in some incredibly ham-fisted fashion that I get my words all bollocked up. Instead of doing that, articulate.

And here is a little snippet from an actual post on Ricochet written by a Ricochet member named Henry Reset. I got his name wrong last week. I said Rickett. Actually, no, I was confused, but it is Reset. You tried it both ways. I tried it both ways. Yeah, that's right. I rhino squished it.

A little bit of this, a little bit of that. This post was not prompted by us in any way. That's the most important thing for you to know. He just wrote it on his own because he wanted to share his thoughts. He says, I've been on social media for more than a decade, written hundreds of pieces of conservative commentary, usually, not always. I've been preaching to the choir, enjoying a receptive audience within my own little bubble chamber, pleasant but not productive.

I've tried blogging. Building a successful blog takes time, focus, and commitment. It also requires a knowledge of search engine optimization, SEO, and other arcane aspects of building a digital presence. Most of us are too busy with our brick-and- brick and mortar lives to compete in the crowded blogosphere. Editors note, thank God conservatives are busy in real life. That is a good thing. When we stopped being busy in real life and started fighting on Twitter, I think things went south.

Anyway, he didn't write that. I'm just adding that because I can't help but add my own little nubbins. Here's him again. Ricochet provides a platform for the conservative voice. They handle the nuts and bolts of managing an internet presence while providing normal conservatives, those of us who spend our days in the real world, with a platform for expressing our ideas to a larger audience. Ricochet is a group blog for the rest of us, a well-known conservative site that can propel thoughtful conservative content from regular people out into the wide world. A conservative blogosphere and conservative news for a few dollars a year, Ricochet makes it easy for us to share our views with thousands, with tens of thousands, millions who are searching for an alternative to mainstream media.

You can read the whole thing as they say. It's on the front page of our site, ricochet.com, right now. And yes, you should join, too. We do need you. We need you pretty bad, so join in. Well, now that we've had an hour of commercials and testimonials, that's the end of the show. Thank you, folks. Glad you could drop by today.

Six and a half minutes, not bad. I missed this, because I've been at sea, and the always question people ask you, what's it like to be on the Queen Mary 2? It's incredible. What's it like to be on a crossing, to go all the way across the Atlantic and not see anything except the endless expanse of sea? Ah, that's a temperamental difference. Some people like that sort of existential bleakness.

I like a little bit more traffic, a little bit more land, a few more ports. But to complain about those things would be the most, would be as churlish as you possibly can get. It would be like complaining about internet on a ship like this, which, by the way, was awful and absolutely dreadful. It was like watching a page load was like watching the pyramids being built by birds that are dropping a grain of sand at a time. It is astonishing. And eventually, everybody in the ship realized that it's pointless and sort of freed themselves from the invisible shackles of having to check the Internet. And it was wonderful. Yeah, right. And we started, we looked up, and we saw each other's faces.

It was like some sort of movie where we were all… Was this real person? Do you do that every now and then? Do you take a digital holiday? People do that, you know. Yeah, it's called a cruise, generally. Okay. Well, no, but it really isn't because you tried i get to see you trying how many days did you last before you gave up um well i sort of uh i don't know three four five i stopped thinking about it you never gave up you you could see new york harbor james was still trying to get Wi-Fi. I guarantee it.

If only, though, to connect with my family in order to send them a text or to send them something or other. I was desperately trying to disconnect my phone to keep this automated message from playing that I didn't want people to do, and it's being referred to my wife. So, in other words, I know that on the bridge of the ship, the captain and the crew are watching Game of Thrones in 4K at 56. And the rest of us are having to deal with AOL dial-up from 1996. Anyway, that's a very small, petty, meaningless complaint. While I was gone, anything happen? Because it seems that the world is pretty much as I left it. Oh, really? We had a little weather, and then there was an earthquake.

It was pretty normal. I wouldn't worry about it. You didn't miss anything, did you? You didn't miss anything. You didn't miss anything. Peter, tell me, there wasn't any sort of seismic shift in the Republican Party where you have a bunch of people saying,

I'm glad that we're negotiating with Democrats. That's what we're here to do. Was there that? It is so bad. The cutting the deal with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi was so bad that even now Republicans in Washington have not found any way to express their their outrage and confusion and disorientation.

Still, we don't have coherent replies to the president from the House and Senate leadership. Absolutely staggering. And yet and yet Rob was right when he said, well, you didn't really miss anything. What he did was cut a deal to raise the debt ceiling. That was going to happen anyway. And to fund Hurricane Harvey repairs, restoration, emergency funding, and so forth. That was going to happen anyway. The vote took place faster than it would have otherwise. And at the moment, it doesn't really matter.

It's about December time, which is when the Republican leadership in the House and the Senate wanted the debt ceiling vote to take place so they could deal with tax reform first and only have to take one vote on the debt ceiling. Now they're going to have to take two. We'll see. We'll see. It may be that they're thinking their calculations were correct and that it would be politically more useful. You could get you could have gotten more done come December. We'll we'll see.

On the other hand, what is clear is the Republicans are in amazing disarray. Just don't know which way to turn, because now even the rest of the country has gotten used to the idea that the president will say one thing on Tuesday and another thing on Thursday. Now Republicans have felt it. Well, right. It's an astonishing thing to see. Rob, don't we now have green lights to say that it's okay to negotiate anything with the Democrats, that that no longer makes one a rhino, a rhino is sellout and part of the swamp? Did that switch completely flip over or was that a one time? It may be.

Look, I think this is a very instructive moment, as they as our progressive friends like to say, is a teachable moment for people who could call themselves Trump conservatives. become president, the presidency and the Oval Office and that big desk and your political calculations become bigger than all of the rhetoric and the nonsense and the shouting and the screaming that you did. So suddenly, well, actually, we will add troops in Afghanistan. And actually, we aren't really going to repeal DACA. He's not going to do that. Actually, we are going to extend the debt ceiling. All those things that we were never going to do, were a sign of rhino squishing them actually when you're in the

president you're like well you know i gotta i'm at 30 here i need to do something i need to get more popular and so uh the idea that anyone in washington including the white house including anyone in the white house including the person who sits in the oval office thinks that december is the right time to kick the can down the road, kick it out of December. That person is a fool. There's no other way to describe that person. You are a fool. There is no evidence in history.

In fact, there is counter evidence in history to suggest that kicking the can down the road on the debt ceiling gets you anything. All it gets you is one more fight about the debt ceiling that you will then cave in on because here's the problem. We have a government that is underfunded and overextended, and that means we're going to have to extend the debt ceiling until we cut entitlements, which we elected a president who campaigned on not cutting entitlements. There's a very sizable, a very powerful political and very nimble political minority in Washington, the Democrats, who have decided they're not going to cut entitlements.

I don't know where you're going to cut entitlements. And then every time Paul Ryan, you know, peeps, puts his little head outside the rock, he gets chopped off. So there is no solution here except endless big entitlements. And the debt ceiling is crazy. And I'm hearing somebody doing some light carpentry. It sounded like woodwork to me as well. Really? Drawing a sword out of a sheath, perhaps.

Well, okay. That's what I was doing. All right. Here's the idea. That's amazing. You got it. We get rid of the debt ceiling then. And Donald Trump is the man who joins with the democrats to get rid of the debt ceiling

how does that play does that still keep does that still burnish his uh his conservative bona fides or is this an act of bracing realism that shows he's the man who can cut through the previous preconceptions and do what needs to be done well i would say the a version of the latter it is bracing realism because it's real if you want to if you want to stop raising the debt and you want to stop having to raise the debt ceiling, you need to cut spending in two areas, defense and or entitlements, period. That's it. There's no other conversation. You can't vent money so that you're going to then cut and then get it. That's how you have to do it.

Or you have to raise taxes. You have to do one of those three things or all those three things, frankly. And it's nice to know that there's at least one person in in what i mean he's a deal maker without any principle that's fine that's probably what you need to do when you're looking at the the realities on the on the on the field me personally i prefer massive entitlement reform and i'd prefer massive medicare reform and i'd prefer uh social security means you know some kind of means testing or sunsetting or privatizing or something like that.

I ain't going to get it, not from this president. That's for sure. You said something I want Peter to respond to. Peter, Rob just said, cut in time, sorry, I still have a cold, which is why I'm being...

I was going to say, I didn't want to go into that. Everybody on the ship got one. Did they bring you warm booyah? You know, I read a thing about the early crossings you would sit on one of those deck chairs wrapped in blankets and they bring you bouillon. Yes.

No. But I stuck to my cabinet and had lemon tea. So Rob just said something interesting. You cut spending by cutting the military or cutting entitlements or raising taxes, which seems to indicate to me that the conversation no longer reaches for that old Reaganite quiver of cutting taxes, generating more tax revenue by that, not raising taxes. So Rob going to that is interesting to me. It may be because he's a rhino squish or because the party doesn't believe that anymore and thinks that's voodoo magic that was long ago repudiated. Well, no, you've got Larry Kudlow, our beloved friend Larry Kudlow, saying, look, saying look let's just get to the tax cut the tax reform because it's going to be substantially a tax cut all that matters right now is growth forget about reforming the entitlement state it's

politically impossible just get that off the table and the argument is that trump has gotten it off the table in part by cutting this deal with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. All that matters is economic growth. If you can get the economy over 3% growth a year, everything else begins to get easier, including, well, you can say that you start to fund the entitlement state a little bit better. I still don't see, anyway, but the argument is if you can get the economy to grow, the only thing you really can do, the only thing that's politically viable is maybe a tax reform, which in turn can help the economy to grow. And then you can have something like what happened during the 1980s if Donald Trump is resolute, large question there. And during the 1980s, what happened was that Ronald Reagan held the line on the growth of the welfare state. It grew very, very slowly, while the economy grew very quickly.

And so you don't get an absolute reduction in the welfare state or spending, but you do get a shrinking of the welfare state relative to the private economy. And if that's about the best that we can do in this country, then at least we ought to go for that. That's the argument. And on the politics of it, I myself find it very persuasive. Entitlement spending is getting to be getting to be it's been for some time now, budget now. You add to that military spending, and that's not going to get cut. Not when we've got more troops in Afghanistan. Not when we've got to challenge China as a rising power. Not when we've got naval ships banging into other ships in the ocean because sailors aren't getting enough training, because the ships are in dry dock too much time. You've got to expand.

Military spending isn't going to get cut. And so this first budget, the first Trump budget, enough training because the ships are in dry dock too much time you've got to expand military spending isn't going to get cut and so this first budget the first trump budget which they actually proposed no nobody expected it to pass but these draconian cuts in discretionary state department is going to get cut by a third agriculture department by a third that's what that wasn't an aggressive move on the federal government. That was simply the mathematical result of entitlement spending crowding out everything else. Everything, right. Everything else. So this is different from during the 1980s where we weren't quite at that dire a stage.

Defense spending was still a larger portion. Defense spending, it was still more evenly balanced with entitlement spending. Now entitlement spending is by far the largest item in the federal budget. So this is a tighter situation. Nevertheless, Larry Kudlow may be right. Frankly, I tend to think that he is

right. You've got to go for economic growth. That's the hope here. Yes, there's no question. And I thought that Rob was going to jump right in there i was with a yes but i was adding no no i i agree look look but the problem is that we as republicans conservatives i should say um we have a mishmash of language and and i mean i love larry but i don't think that uh marginal income tax rates are the problem here. We need tax reform, but tax reform is going to necessarily include for many, many people, probably many people listening to the podcast, a slight tax increase. If you simplify the tax code, you're going to end up on one side or the other, and you're probably going to end up on the higher side rather than the lower side, especially when you have – Mitt Romney is correct that 47% of people don't pay any income tax.

What we're really talking about is corporate tax reform means corporate tax cuts, and that's good. That's something that Obama and Trump agree on, let's be honest. I mean he never got it because he didn't really care about it, but it's still true. But the bitter irony here is that there is no other solution because the president of the United States was elected primarily, not primarily, but certainly in the nomination by promising never to touch entitlements. We have a president who will never touch entitlements. That's a political promise he made. We have the Democrats who don't want to cut entitlements.

Look, here's the thing. Conservatives need to understand we do not need to cut entitlements. We do not need to cut the government. We are not going broke. This government is in great shape because the solution is simple. Raise marginal tax rates to 85 or 90 percent. Socialize the health care business. Do all of that stuff. That's what the Democrats, progressives want. They don't see a problem. They see the solution. The solution is a massive tax state. Only conservatives say, well, what are we going to do? We're going broke. We're not going broke. The government has an ability to tax you at 88 percent, and it will do that, and that's what they are driving it towards.

Anybody who says we don't need to cut entitlements, that's the direction you're driving in. Eventually, taxes will go up, and they're going to go up huge unless we cut entitlements. Right. The progressive idea does not look at your money as your money. It looks at it as money that the government simply hasn't got around to confiscating yet. And so you sit there and you hire attorneys and tax attorneys and people to just scour the ledgers and make sure that you get every dodge that you possibly can to keep them from taking more of your property. But there's something you can't do. I mean, if they drop a box from Amazon on your front desk, what are you going to do there? Are you going to see somebody walk up and take it in the middle of the afternoon? No, you won't do. I mean, if they drop a box from Amazon on your front desk, what are you going to do there? Are you going to see somebody walk up and take it in the middle of the afternoon? No, you won't. What you want to do, though, is discourage that

thing from happening in the first place, and that's where Ring comes into it. Ring is new, I think, new to me anyway, and that was a great segue. It was a fantastic segue. What we had missed. What we had missed, Rob Long. I didn't do any segues. Sorry, James. I don't know if you heard. I know you didn't. I'll tell you what Ring's mission is before I tell you what it is, if you don't know.

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No. I had a friend come over, kind of good on the engineering things, and within 15, 20 minutes, we had that thing all set up so I can look out the window when someone comes and now like a good passive aggressive minnesota lutheran when somebody comes with a clipboard to my door and i see them i can say i'm sorry i'm making dinner and my leg is broken and i can't sign anything and then they go away all through the camera without face-to-face interaction love it well you can do this too 150 off a ring security kit when you go to ring.com slash ricochet that's ring.com slash ricochet that is everybody all together ring.com slash ricochet. That is, everybody, all together, ring.com slash ricochet. And our thanks to Ring for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And now let's talk immigration. I was just in another country, sailed right through, as a matter of fact, presented my papers, off I go.

Not that easy elsewhere, and there are a lot of people who want it to be even easier than that when it comes to the United States. Let's talk to Mark Krikorianorian the nationally recognized expert on immigration issues executive director of the center for immigration studies uh since 1995 by the way and let's also bring in mickey kouse that's right two guys with the initials mk what does it mean probably nothing let's find out gentlemen welcome to the show hey here, Mark. Hey, Mark, were you on the NRCruise? I didn't know. No, I was not. Somebody needs to complain to Jack Fowler. Okay. All right. I guess we'll have this. Thanks for joining us. Then that's all I wanted to know. I got a question. What happened last week, it seemed to me, was the president announced that he was going to repeal daca

which is sort of the you know that the act that allows the children of illegal immigrants or children who were brought over to the united states illegally by their parents to stay um he said he was going to repeal it or he said it was going to be reviewed in six months uh then he got cold feet and then said, it's nothing's going to happen. Don't worry about it. Is that close or what am I missing? Well, that does seem to be what happened. I mean, they discontinued the program.

And then, like you said, within hours, he then tweeted saying that if Congress doesn't do something in six months, which is when people's work permits would start expiring, he will revisit the issue, which I have no idea what that even means, because his attorney general just said it was an illegal program and put it in writing. So I have no idea what that means. I'm not even sure that meant anything. In other words, I think that was the president pretty carefully reasoned, brief but pretty comprehensive and carefully reasoned statement. Did he get it right? Right.

It was, I thought, you know, there was all this talk about how it was a rushed rollout, and I didn't think it was rushed at all. I thought they knew what they were doing, and it was a very carefully prepared statement. One interesting question is, did Trump just see a few demonstrations around the country and freak out and say, oh, this is bad press, I have to reverse course? That seems implausible. That seems too infantile even for him uh i just i think there are two wings of the white house and the second wing the jared kushner wing uh weighed in and uh maybe played on these press fears

and in the other side of trump came out okay so to question to you both if i may and then i know rob and james want to get back in you are a republican in the house or the senate and you are looking at events this past week the president seemed to end the daca program with a six-month fuse and then he took it back and then about 40 within 48 hours he'd made a deal with chuck schumer and nancy pelosi the democratic leadership and now you have all kinds of questions you're asking yourself, but one of the questions is this, what do I do on DACA? He clearly wants Congress to move legislation on this, and I, Republican in the House or Senate, on the one hand, have elements in my party that want DACA ended, and on the

other hand, I have elements in my party and the entire weight of the Catholic Church. If you have Reagan Democrats, so to speak, in your district, the United States Council of Catholic Bishops, Conference of Catholic Bishops condemned this thing roundly, as did lots of other bodies. I've got a lot of people who are against DACA. And now I know that the president of the United States is utterly unreliable in giving Republicans any kind of cover or backup at all. So what do you do, Republican House representative or senator? Mark? Well, I think what you do is you try to hold the president to his own words by saying that legalizing these young people, I mean, they're in their 20s and 30s, they're not children, but legalizing them is something you're willing to work on. like getting E-Verify mandated and getting chain migration ended have to be part of the deal so that when you do amnesty them, it doesn't do more harm than good by attracting more illegal immigration and spurring all of this additional family chain migration. In other words, basically

what Tom Cotton said, that let's fix these people's problem. I mean, we gave them work permits. It was Obama did it. It was illegal. But the facts are on the ground, and you have to deal with this steaming pile of DACA that was handed to you. But the way to fix it, you want to fix it, want to work with the president. Way to fix it is to make sure that you limit the damage from any amnesty by mandating E-Verify and ending chain migration.

Will the Democrats go for that? I don't think so, but that's, you know, that's basically the deal. Go for this or not. What's the president going to do? Say, no, I'm against E-Verify and ending chain migration after making a big deal of it? I mean, you kind of try to put him in a box in a sense, I think. So can I ask a political question, Mark? And then I got one for you, Mickey. Just go back a week, 10 days. Are we now closer to a repeal of DACA or farther away from it since the president announced that he was going to repeal DACA?

Well, you know, DACA is repealed. I mean, there's no DACA is going to be gone because remember, they're taking no new applications for eight months. They've been taking new applications. But also, if you expire in the next six months, you have to get your application in the next one month. So after October 5th, there is no more daca now the president could create a new daca i guess i mean but that's the only way it could happen so yeah i think daca is definitely going away so is this a step forward you know a two steps forward one step back situation or is it a one step forward one step back situation yeah i don't know that's i haven't thought about it in that terms um It's that he got rid of

it as a step forward, but he's muddied what he did. He should have done this in January, stopped new applications and said, we're going to give it till the end of the year. I'm going to open in 11 months. You know what I mean? And then we're going to revisit it and then we're going to stop it. Gives Congress plenty more time. It had to happen. So in a sense, he couldn't have not done this. In a sense, we've got to deal with what he did now and try to sort of make the best of it. Hey, Mickey.

Yes. Does this make you a little bit more nervous about your beloved wall, the wall that you're convinced he's going to build? Well, I'm for the wall, but I'm adhering to the restrictionist party line here, which is if you had a choice between the wall on the one hand, or especially like 60 symbolic miles of the wall, and getting E-Verify and curbing chain migration, the latter two are much more important. So I would put emphasis on getting those. He seems to tend on the wall.

That's the problem. He's a very unreliable ally here. I think we – you can't count on – people still talk as if he's going to come to their rescue. He's not. The only way to stop the Chuck Schumer DREAM Act, which is much broader than DACA, is going to be after Schumer's lawyers get through writing it, is for Congress to block it. We have to rely on Numbers USA and their angry voters blocking it in Congress. So let me ask you something. Who right now in American politics is the most powerful voice

in the immigration debate? I'd say Tom Cotton, probably. I mean, it depends what you mean by powerful. I mean, most likely has the most political leverage, has the most political momentum, most likely to get most political leverage, has the most political momentum, most likely to get most of what he wants.

Chuck Schumer. Yeah. The minority leader of the Senate. Well, he's the President of the United States, frankly, for all intents and purposes. Okay. Wow. That's great. So, all right, I got one more question, and then I'm going to turn it back to these guys.

On a scale of zero to Mickey Kaus, Mark Krikorian, dream immigration legislation situation status quo. So let's say that's 10. No, not zero to 10. So 10 is Krikorian- Kaus immigration policy nirvana. And zero is gang of five, a comprehensive immigration reform, the kinds of things that Mickey could barely type in Kaus Files. His excellent blog, Kaus Files, without even dripping with contempt. That's zero. What's going to happen here? Are we going to get something closer to you guys or something closer to that when it's all over?

Or something worse? I would guess that it all comes down to a crunch in the six months and it gets put off again. That would be my guess. I think Trump is perfectly capable of restarting the program yeah i understand he's made it more difficult but it's it's possible uh yeah yeah i don't know i mean i'm leaning toward mickey until until trump's tweet that night after he ended daca i was more optimistic but at at this point, what interest, what incentive do the

Democrats have to come and negotiate? I mean, they've been pushing this DREAM Act for, what is it, 15 years? And it's always been a marketing gimmick. It was never about getting those young people green cards. It was about using them as poster children for getting everybody else who's illegal green cards. So, yeah, I think it's entirely possible he may end up putting it off after six months, not because he's going to make a new DACA, but he's going to, you know, sort of, their work permits will expire, but he'll have some kind of prosecutorial discretion, phony baloney like Obama did, to say that you're not going to go after them.

So let me spin one more scenario to you, and then I'll turn it over to Peter. It's the end of the Trump administration at some point, the next four years, next eight years, whatever it is. He is the president that is the political leader most associated with immigration reform he is the president who campaigned on a wall he is the president who galvanized at least his voters his a large block of people to vote for him primarily because he was tough on or at least he was very tough on immigration um what is the likelihood that after all this noise and talk and shouting and screaming we end up with, an immigration reform weaker and less effective than we could have gotten with those horrible rhino gang of five, whatever, senators all those years ago? Can I say, I think that the troubling development there in terms of his big achievement is he's cut the number of illegal crossings at the border.

If that achievement is still in place, he has at least some argument to make that immigration control is stronger. The problem is if he appoints Representative McCaul instead of DHS, even that is in jeopardy. Yeah, I mean, I would say the odds I think it's definitely going to be better. There's no question it's going to be better than what we would have gotten with the Gang of Eight or under Bush, the McCain-Kennedy thing. Remember, that was 10 years

ago. It's the same basic idea. Comprehensive immigration reform, whatever they call it. Right, exactly. No, it's definitely going to be less bad than that because, remember, the whole point of those comprehensive immigration reform things was to amnesty everybody, the enforcement stuff was not real, and a double immigration, legal concern in the longer term is something Rehan has written about and some other people that he taints the issue because it becomes Trumpish when it wasn't Trumpish before. And that's a real problem, but it's a risk I've been willing to take and just want to keep some daylight between restrictionism and him. And because he's not really all that restrictionist in a lot of ways uh you know he wants to use all these guest worker visas uh when the only one time

has anyone ever asked him an economist reporter asked him do you want to reduce legal immigration uh this was before this raise act was introduced and he said, no, we just want everybody to come legally. So we can, I think, my goal is to try to maintain daylight between restrictionism and him where it's appropriate. And there's a lot of places, a lot of opportunities for that. Lost in all this are the general issues about immigration that we seem to discuss in the off years. When I was on the ship, it seemed that everything about immigration now boiled down to whether or not we were being cruel, to use the approved democratic talking point, to children. The entire immigration issue was now being cruel to children.

And the larger cultural issues of what happens to a culture when you allow a lot of immigration to change things was completely off the table. And I'm thinking of this because in London, the entire service industry now seems to be Polish, which is interesting. At our hotel, for example, we showed up just absolutely jet lagged and were dead asleep. And ding dong at four o'clock, there's a bell and I opened the door and there's a young Polish woman teaching a younger Polish man the proper way to give somebody the newspaper at four o'clock in the afternoon of course i'm bleary and dead and sent them away and wish that i'd spoken polish uh but i went right back to

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And our thanks to our friends at Bolan branch for sponsoring this, the ricochet podcast back to Mickey and Mark. Um, we were talking with the larger issues of, the effects of immigration, which seemed to be off the table because we're sunk in a Washington morass in the swamp up to our, up, up to our chins.

All of the demonization of the,ization of the DACA repeal, the carefully calibrated use of the word cruel by everybody who appeared on television, is this going to work, or do most people look at that, shrug their shoulders, and say, I'm sorry these people weren't here legally in the first place, not really concerned about the cruelty aspect of it, but I guess, where do we go from here then?

Well, I mean, I think the reason Obama decided to go with DACA is because they're the most sympathetic group of illegal immigrants. I mean, they're a special case, a unique subgroup, people who not just came as kids, but also grew up here. I mean, that's the main point, is that they've been socialized as Americans. I mean, a four-year-old who comes here and his parents get arrested when he's five, he goes back with them because he hasn't grown up here yet. Whereas somebody who spent, you know, 15, 20 years from childhood, you know, there's a pretty strong case for an act of mercy, for a humanitarian act. They don't deserve it. It's the entitlement that's the problem. Politically speaking, that, I think, is what hurts them, is this sense that they deserve it, that you have to give me

my green card and, you know, F you. So, you know, they're blocking bridges and all the rest of it. That stuff is great, is all I got to say, because I wish they'd blocking bridges and all the rest of it. That stuff is great. That's all I got to say, because I wish they'd block bridges in D.C. at rush hour. That would be fantastic. The possible upside here is there's a reason why for years pro-immigration, pro-amnesty activists didn't want the Dreamers to get a special deal because they wanted to use them as the poster children for the big gang of eight, 11 million to however many million amnesty of everybody. So it's possible that they were right. And once the Dreamers are taken care of, whatever deal we get or don't get, that in fact some of the wind will go out of the sails

of the larger pro-amnesty movement. Okay, so last couple of questions from me. One is as follows. So let's just, to be very explicit on this, if over the next six, seven, eight months there is a deal that permits those 800,000 kids whose parents brought them here illegally but who grew up here. Excuse me, not kids.

Many of them are in their 20s and 30s now. If there's a deal that 800,000 of those get to stay here but the wall goes up, the RAISE Act gets enacted, you guys would be perfectly happy with that, correct? Yeah, I would. I mean the wall for me is not a super high priority, quite honestly, because we've got a lot of wall already on the border. Okay, so E-Verify. E-Verify and the RAISE Act. If we got that, I'd give them all green cards tomorrow and shine their shoes in the mix.

Absolutely. Okay, and what you just said, DACA compromise, let them them stay, E-Verify, and the RAISE Act is plausible. That's within the realm of political possibility, don't you think? Both of you? Yeah. That combination of outcomes? Go ahead, Mickey. I don't think you're going to get the whole RAISE Act.

I don't think you're going to get the switch to the emerit point system that just it takes too long to work out it's too big a deal for everybody uh and i don't think you're going to curtail as much chain migration as the race act does but you could do part of it and that would still be a big victory okay that's what i'm saying seems it seems to me as though, although conservatives are conservatives, I don't even know what to, it seems as though people were upset by Trump's muddying the waters on DACA. Actually, the situation isn't all that bad. The conversation about the gain of a comprehensive immigration reform is just dead and gone. Now the conversation is, do we get to E-Verify? How much of the RAISE Act do we get? So that actually is substantial progress from your point of view, I think, right?

I think it's clearly progress, but politically speaking, what interest, what incentive does Chuck Schumer have to make that kind of deal since his pal Donald Trump has just told him if he holds out for six months, he'll take care of it himself. That's my fear. Here's my last question to the two of you. This is a subjective question and I don't know how to... Is this the really last question? No, it really is the last question. It really, really is the last question. On a scale of, oh, I don't know, 1 to 10. 1 to 10, it doesn't trouble me at all. 10, it's causing me a moral crisis. I'm going to slump and I'm just

going to sit around all weekend drinking beer and wishing for another life scale of one to ten well that's every week for me anyway i don't know how shaken are you by donald trump this last week between ending daca and tweeting that maybe doesn't really mean it and then the deal with chuck schumer and nancy pelosi how shaken are you it seems to me that the one thing everybody, including the two of you, thought was clear about Donald Trump was, who knows what he's actually going to do on trade or this or that or the other, but immigration, that was clear. How shaken are you? Mickey?

I'm a little shaken, but we knew this was coming, and also we always knew that he had a soft spot for the Dreamers. So the combination is sort of troubling. It's troubling more with respect to his abilities as a leader as opposed to his actual views. Yeah, I mean, I kind of agree. I mean, maybe a two or three honestly you know because all during the campaign even i mean he you know talked tough on the wall mexico is going to pay for it which is total nonsense i don't even know how he made that up um thank god people are forgetting he said that i think but um i think he just thought that sounded tough but there was no he's never been all that

much of a restrictionist quite honestly so like mic says, it's more that he doesn't, it casts doubt on his ability to not just lead, but make deals. I mean, I'm starting to think he hired a ghostwriter for that Art of the Deal book. You know what I mean? The sequel is going to have to be

the Art of the Choke, because that's what we've been seeing over this past week. Well, you know, he did actually hire a ghostwriter. It was Tony Horowitz who I think has written a bunch of articles about how weird that experience was. Sorry, I do have one last question. But hold on, Rob, before you do that. On this subject, that said, is it permissible for those of us who thought this is what he was in the first place to say so, or should we just shut up?

Oh, James wants to come in and say, I told you so. No, no, no. The people who were saying this from the very beginning are waved off as like, well, yes, yes, you were never Trump. You wanted Hillary. No, I didn't. So, yes, what matters is that the people who previously didn't believe this are now coming to that opinion. And so those of us who got there first are still out here beyond the wall, beyond the perimeter, irrelevant to the discussion. That's not a question.

It's just an angry statement. Yeah, but I mean, like I said, none of this particularly surprises me. I mean, this is what he was always like. It's just that, you know, he wasn't Hillary Clinton. I mean, that's just what it boils down to. Yeah, I think you should shut up. I get a lot of this on the web. And as if people who supported Trump were under illusions that he was going to be a master negotiator and going to emerge as this, you know, just absolutely terrific advocate of the restrictionist point of view.

I don't think anybody really had those illusions. We hope for that. And those hopes have pretty much been dashed. But we support we supported him anyway. All right. Before we go, I mean, I know what you got. And I did have one last one question seven questions ago. I still have – this is one.

If the argument that I made before, that Ryan has made, the sort of the argument that Donald Trump can toxify an issue and make it less likely to get what you want and you take a step back, that's sort of our position or has been my position. But the counterposition, let me ask you this. If you got, as Peter outlined, some version of RAISE Act, which I think – let's be honest. That's simply as if we are importing the Canadian immigration policy into the United States, which would be a smart thing, and re-up DACA for those kinds of optical and humanitarian and PR reasons, etc. You got tougher – you could even verify sort of tougher rules in place for the next wave. I mean we've had a net outflows now, but we're basically building sandbags, legal sandbags for the next flood. So the next time the US economy takes off and starts to grow at a fast clip, there might be that giant sucking sound reverse of laborers sneaking in the country.

Okay. Could you make a case, in this case, a pro-Trump case, that all that noise and all of that controversy was necessary to get us to push the window farther towards immigration restriction in order to get what in fact is a reasonable compromise, whereas before we would start at the reasonable compromise position and then just start giving away things and end up farther behind. Can you make that argument politically? Is that an argument that you're willing to make? Yeah, I say I think so.

I mean, I think I mean, I'm hoping that's what we're going to end up with. Yeah, because the compromise position where we get get the systems in place for enforcement, we reduce the illegal population just through attrition over a period of time. And then we legalize some substantial portion of those who were left. I've been trying to make this case for years. And you're right that the only way we're going to get there, I think, is by pushing hard in the other direction so that the middle is where we end up, rather than, like you said, starting at the middle and then just going to the left. I agree that if we get that outcome, then you will be able to make that argument, but I think we're a long way from that outcome.

I judge where we are from the annoying tweets I get from my friend John Alter. The latest ones was Mickey the moral case is clear you have no compassion and I said well Tom Cotton has compassion he gives dreamers green cards but he also wants the raise act and he verify

what's wrong with that and John said well he showed no compassion so I reject that which I think it means that the Democrats the Democratic talking points are we don't need to cut a deal now. We're in the driver's seat. So we're a long way from them needing to cut a deal. Yeah. And in a sense, the I think politically moving in that direction will the only way we're going to get there is if trump gets re-elected not because of trump but because it will be sort of you know um maybe the left will finally get the you know get the idea that they've got to revisit some of their precepts because they have become radicalized

on immigration over even just over the past 10 years. Probably so, but you have to think. Give us the House and we'll get something. Okay, we got the House. Give us the House and the Senate and we'll get something. All right, we got the House and the Senate. Give us the presidency and we'll get something. Okay, we've got all three of those, but we really need to reelect Trump in order to show that the message has been accepted by the majority of the people.

And we need 60 votes in the Senate. Right. Okay, we need Vice President Pence then to win presidency in two election cycles out to show that it continued between the Trump... Well, okay, well, a sense of disappointment sometimes does seem to attend having a conservative viewpoint.

Gentlemen, thank you so much. We'll talk to you later because I think this issue may actually come to play in the months and the elections to come. It might. Thank you. I'm going to go and shave and hire somebody now. I don't know if you guys can help me with that. Thanks. Thank you. Bye-bye. One of the things that I was supposed to ask and did not because I am still recovering from uh being out in the bounding main was the bannon question and i i have to tell you one of the joys of not being up on every single thing

i had to rely on various news sources while i was out there the bbc which was uninteresting they just did not play news as much as they did 17 minute pieces about uh you know uh contact lens makers in nigeria um and then you go to ITV and Sky TV and the rest of it, CNBC, God forbid. And then I would find myself going to Fox. I haven't watched Fox in a long time. Fox and Friends, the five friends of Fox, et cetera. Bong, breaking news all the time. Everything in a constant state of turmoil.

I missed the Bannon question. Apparently he said something about Catholics, that the Catholics want to bring in, which maybe goes with some other questions somebody asked about, if you're a Catholic, does that mean that you believe this, this, and this? This curious religious test that seems to be creeping back into the public dialogue. Is that basically what the Bannon question is, gentlemen? The Bannon question is whether he was right to criticize the catholic church in the way that he did by the way he is catholic and he said the catholic church needs immigrants to fill the pews and that was as the as the spokesman for the united states council of catholic bishops immediately replied preposterous on the other hand you have cardinal dolan of new york

calling the ending of the daca program uh un-american and you have have archbishop gomez of los angeles saying that it represented a challenge to every conscience in the nation and where i fellow catholic of steve bannins think that he's correct is the idea that the bishops have any idea about the, that any bishop in the country, not even one could begin to carry on a conversation at the level of knowledge of the issues that we just had with Mickey Kaus and Mark Gregorian. They just don't know what they're talking about when it comes to immigration and this reflexive open border stuff is, in my opinion, an abuse of their teaching authority. I'm with Bannon to the extent that that's what he was saying. But I think that's the Bannon question that people have been talking about.

And Rob, I understand that you're hanging on every word that Steve Bannon says because you're endlessly fascinated by the man yeah i just i find it all that sort of inside baseball stuff is sort of silly especially when you when you talk about the uh the trump administration because the the insides of it are total mess it's all scrambled eggs in that white house the more interesting issue is really what kelly's trying the battle is what kelly's trying to do in that white house is what sort of make it run like um an efficient operation rather than a you, just this kind of weird free-for-all. The strange thing about – the Bannon case was sort of like – was that – and Bannon rhetoric always sounds to me like just the flipped version of what I heard from liberals and progressives, which was always, oh, yeah, follow the money. You know, it's all about Halliburton, the big oil.

You know that's for the profits. And that seems to be the argument there that somehow that the Catholic Church needs a bigger market so that they want to have a bigger market, a bigger addressable market, which may be partially – No, no, no. Pay attention to the bishops. They're doing their best they possibly can to empty the churches in my opinion. Well, that's true yes but you you could make i guess you could make some kind of weird creepy marxist argument about that and say well you know in an economic imperative yes of course they want it on the other hand the fastest growing denomination among latins and latin americans central americans is pentecostal faith pentecostal church if you

drive through la uh there are churches opening you know weekly maybe even daily iglesia says something something's on pentecost that uh these are pentecostal evangelical um churches that are about as far from roman catholicism as they are from reformed judaism um and that's the growing side so it's not really to fill the new fancy cathedral in LA. If anything, illegal immigration fills those storefront churches across the South, definitely across the South, across Texas, definitely across Texas and in California. I think that's the part then when

if you have a large Hispanic contingent going to evangelical churches and believing in unthinkable wrong think, that's when they become white Hispanics, I think. That's when they... They cease to become interesting. Look's it's hard to get here it's hard to get to this country i mean especially if you have a lot of luggage well that's interesting rob welcome back james it's my welcome back gift to you

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Ricochet podcast. Well, gentlemen, what else was there in the news this week? I, can I just rant for a minute? Go. Good news and bad news.

Here's the good news. Betsy DeVos is our secretary of education, and I am a big Betsy DeVos fan. I think she is fearless and smart, and if anything – I mean I guess I'm as Mickey Kaus is. Mickey Kaus is an immigration. I am too. Education reform, and we have an articulate, smart education reformer in that, frankly, in a federal directorate that shouldn't exist. But nonetheless her. Here I'm going to give you a little piece of good news. You can go to This American Life, an NPR show. This American Life, I forget what it's called.

They do a profile of Betsy DeVos. And I know you think, okay, I'm tense already and my shoulders are hunched and my fists are clenched and i i heard it with that same attitude but is a fair and decent portrait of a very fair and decent person who has personal generosity and a personal character that is uh really kind of moving um she is uh deeply invested in making education better but she's not going to be fooled she when she says i want to make education better for kids, not for systems, that drives the liberals crazy. But it is, in fact, exactly right. What she said this week, she made a big speech about changing the – people talk about Title IX in higher education. It wasn't really about Title IX. It was really about changing the

sexual assault and the regulations that the Obama administration put on schools and making them more normal, more fair, more frankly, more like an actual judicial inquiry. Not even regulations though. I mean didn't this come from the dear friends, dear colleagues letter that you simply suggested strongly? Oh, yeah. That's right. That's right. It was strong-armed. It was definitely an armed twist. But yes no it was strong-armed i mean it was it was definitely

an arm twist but yes it was right it was it was it was softly put her argument is impeccable every single case that she mentioned in that speech was true and verified and simply the tip of the iceberg she balanced what she talked about but you know we've all heard the stories of the kid who's accused of rape and then didn't do it and then is kicked out of school but she also reminded that there are stories of young women who were raped and then because of the system uh their assault their assaulter their rapist went free um perfectly balanced perfectly reasonable perfectly normal decent argument she was making and she was vilified for it vilified for it in a way that can only be described as misogynist by the by the progressives uh and she was vilified for it vilified for it in a way that can only be described as misogynist by the by the progressives uh and she deserves so much better this issue deserves so much better

it was just it was really really revealing how low the left the anti-devas left will sink sink into nonsense, into lies, into misogynist language just because they don't – I don't think it has anything to do – this is my big rant. It has nothing to do with sexual assault or sexual assault on campus. This is entirely driven by a public school reform agenda that – or public education reform agenda that Betsy DeVos is spearheading. This is entirely driven – all of the Andy DeVos stuff is entirely driven by an ossified, I think, criminal and utterly, utterly bankrupt public school monopoly union, teachers union, and the entire monopoly around it. Any weapon to hand, they will try to destroy this and and i and i will march in a pro-trump rally i will wear a maga hat if she gets what

she wants if she gets she's actually able to reform public education in this country that i actually make that because this is the future what she could do she could actually her policies actually will affect the next 50 60 70 100 years of american of young americans in schools and um that's my and my rant you're right but when you said that it was misogynist the way the left attacked her she's not a real woman like jean kirkpatrick she exactly i forgot any any claimant to being so by taking incorrect positions and i well i agree with you that the people who are opposed in a raid against her are those who I forgot. You have to get any claimant to being so by taking incorrect positions. And while I agree with you that the people who are opposed and arrayed against her are those who are defending an ossified, outmoded system, there's something else there.

There's a free-floating cultural permission to hate her because of all sorts of things. BuzzFeed, that stalwart bastion of journalism, had a piece the other day about betsy devos's ugly house it's so ugly and they ran 25 tweets from people describing how ugly it was and in the comments is that we're dripping with hatred for her for two reasons one because she wants to destroy education and make sure that poor kids are not educated because you know she's you know why not you wake up one morning you say i got all the money I need. What can I do? Oh, let's make poor people's lives miserable. And two, because she is denying rape culture.

Those two things are completely – there's no other explanation for what she's doing to these people. And there's a third one, which I think is even more toxic, which is they refer – that's why I think you should listen to this American Life profile of her because it is so fair. It is really scrupulously fair and honest and well-reported, and you really will know a lot about her when you hear it. The first spear of the attack is, you know, she belongs to a church. She's very religious. And the eye – you can hear the eyebrows go up it's a religious thing because of course she can't possibly be trusted to have have have

the the the well-being and the education of children um as a priority if she believes in christian doctrine it's really it's extraordinary, the attacks on her. And I think it still comes, and I hate to sound like Bannon and being sort of a Marxist progressive attitude here, but I think it still comes from an ossified system, a powerful system, the public school system and all of its attendant associations, including powerful unions and a powerful lobbying group and an enormous amount of money given into campaigns to finance campaigns statewide. It's all about protecting that power. It has nothing to do with whether kids learn algebra or basic grammar.

It has nothing to do with that. Rob, did you go to private school or public school? I went to private school. Okay. Because I went to public school and both of us have used the word ossified. I just find that interesting. It's one of my favorite words. It is.

Peter, before we wrap up here. That means either Rob's family overpaid or you got a deal. I think both are true. Argonaut Dakota has finest education in the planet. Peter, you're on the other side of the country from Irma right now, yet I'm sure that your heart goes out,

your concerns and the rest of it to people who are there. My question is, do you see this as the harbinger of an unending series of ecological catastrophes because the sea has warmed by a quarter of a degree or whatever it is? My brother-in-law and his family live in Coral Gables, which is a near-end suburb of Miami and their evacuation. First, my brother-in-law, Berto, booked a room in Tampa, I think, when Irma was supposed to make landfall on the Atlantic side. Now, it looks as though Irma is going to make landfall on the Gulf side and he's kept driving. He's booked a room in Birmingham, Alabama to ride out this storm. Do I think it's a harbinger of more climate catastrophes? Look, I'm not going to pronounce on this storm. Do I think it's a harbinger of more climate catastrophes?

As best I can – look, I'm not going to pronounce on this because I'm reading up on it and trying to work – as best I can tell, neither Hurricane Harvey nor Hurricane Irma indicate any sort of increasing strength of hurricane not all the whole climate change thing as best i can tell and i'm i'm sort of reserving my views on this as best i can tell they don't mean anything like that each of um harvey was caused at least in part by an el nino year which warmed water in among other places the gulf where harvey picked up moisture so i've been reading up on this and i i mean we know the the earth is a little bit warmer than it was a century ago and maybe that has something to do with more air capable of holding more moisture the short answer is i don't know but it doesn't look the idea that elizabeth colbert if i'm pronouncing her name correctly is in any way correct or compelling in her lead piece in the current new yorker in which hurricane harvard republicans just have a death wish that effectively

she's arguing that they want to turn the planet over to for purposes of drowning and incinerate is ridiculous that's all i know for sure the liberals are ridiculous yet again well it's the strong it's the strongest storm ever recorded and we know that the hunter gatherer who roamed across Florida 10,000 years ago had very exact measurements of what the wind was like

you're right, the idea that we all want to just drown and incinerate the planet is handy for them because it makes them very good people and it makes all of their opponents very very bad people which seems to be something that categorizes and characterizes modern discussion what can we agree on well i'll tell you what we can agree on we can agree that i should and will post a a deeply felt thank you to everyone on ricochet who responded to the post that i wrote about my dog and the reason that i have not done so so far is because anybody who's lost a pet

and had the circumstances perhaps that I did knows that you are absolutely fine and going along your day until something just hits you in the sternum with the force of a sledgehammer and you are useless with moisture and sudden sadness. And it's just like that. And so I got on a ship sort of thinking that this would be a good seven-day decompression and a chance to leave some of it behind. And it did work. I was not looking. Every time I opened Twitter, and there would be 25, 35, 45 messages from wonderful, wonderful people,

it would just floods all over again. Of course, of course. And so, yes. So is this the greatest tragedy in the history of the world? No. Are there people out there right now whose lives are horrible and make our family grief look preposterous and small by comparison? Of course, of course, of course. But this is what we lived through for a month, and it was unreal.

And it was the strangest experience i've ever had most people just post a sign at the grocery store you know lost dog nail it to the post somewhere and hope he comes home we had three weeks of running around town following leads 65 huge posters all over town which generated every single time somebody saw a lost dog they called me i was up and out and running in the dark with flashlights in the park. It was the strangest, most surreal, unbelievable month. And we thought it was for something, and it wasn't. And the catastrophic collapse at the end of it was just, to this day, it's hard to talk about without feeling it well up.

So I will go to Ricochet. I will post in the member feed something to thank everybody because all of the things that people wrote were extraordinary so that's that and that should remind you that there's more to life than politics and there's more to ricochet than politics there is a community there and there's a community of people who know each other and we do and argue and disagree and throw elbows and poke each other in the sternum from time to time but in the end we have things in common and a common humanity and throw elbows and poke each other in the sternum from time to time. But in the end, we have things in common, a common humanity and a desire for a better country and society

that is represented every damned day on that site. So go there and join up. And if you do, you will also not be let off the hook for going to our other wonderful sponsors. James, go ahead. Yeah. No, I just want to go, go, go, go. Sorry. Thereling Branch, and Away Travel. I'm trying to get some commercial stuff here, Peter.

As usual. I don't want to start weeping. You can support them and support us, and you will get great things yourself to make your life easier. Peter, you're want to say this before we end the show, that Rob's earlier personal endorsement of Bowling Branch reassured me enormously. Because Rob said, as he said several times now, that they get softer with each washing. And I've been a little worried that Rob and his studio apartment in Manhattan might be reverting to bachelor days. And, of course, the first thing that goes is the bedding. You stop making the bed, that goes is the bedding.

You stop making the bed, let alone laundering your sheets. And it suddenly occurred to me, if Rob's bowl and branch sheets are getting softer, I can stop worrying about him. He's not reverting to Yale bachelorhood. It's a little bit. The other thing when you think about it, when you say you made your bed, now lie in it. It doesn't make any sense.

If you've made your bed, you can't lie in it. You can't lie in it. You can lie on it. You've unmade your bed. If you've unmade your bed, now lie in it. Clichés. Clichés. Can I interrupt a cliché one more time just to say, and I know exactly how you feel right now, James, in this conversation.

You and I both have had the experience of we both have been lucky to have dogs love us and to love a dog. And we always say about the animals, we say, oh, you know, they love us unconditionally. That's why they're so great. But the truth is that we are the ones who love them unconditionally, and that's what makes it so special, that they let us know how that feels. And so the heartbreak is really – I'm with you in spirit. If I was there, I would sort of pour you a nice drink. And there's nothing – it's a very specific kind of pain, and my heart breaks for you. And I just – that's all I want to say.

And I'm trying to stay out of this conversation because I feel it too deeply. Crusoe, the magnificent big white poodle, is 13 years and a couple of months old and sinking fast. We have a family dog who's not long for this world. So all three of us, we'll all pour a drink together the next time we're with each other. The shortest short story I can imagine in the last few days is he knew a dog and a dog knew him. That is the saddest story at one point that you'll ever hear, but it's also the happiest. Thank you, everybody, for reading. We'll see you in the comments at Ricochet 3.0.

Guys, next week. Next week, fellas. Next week. We'll be right back. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. Ricochet! Join the conversation.