The Ricochet Podcast - The Dumbest Revolution

Episode Date: November 13, 2015

Because we have to, we spend an inordinate amount of time discussing the recent events at college campuses around the country. Luckily, we have a Yale grad on the show to help us parse all of the cruel injustices taking place in New Haven. Then, the Mad Dog himself, National Review’s Kevin Williamson joins to discuss his new Encounter Broadside The Case Against Trump. Finally, all the way from... Source

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Visit een-ireland.com and take your business global today. Hello, everyone. I need some muscle over here. I'm not going to get... I don't know what's going to happen here. I don't have any information on that. They don't understand what you're talking about.

And that's going to prove to be disastrous. And what it means is that the people don't want socialism. They want more conservatism. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lalix. Two guests today, Kevin D. Williamson from National Review and Mort Kondracki from Japan. Two guests today, Kevin D. Williamson from National Review and

Mort Kondracki from Japan. Let's have ourselves a podcast. There you go again. Welcome everyone to this, the Ricochet Podcast number 282. Contract negotiations were successful. I have returned. I'm happy to be here. The Ricochet podcast is brought to you not only by myself and of course, by the tireless efforts of Robin Peter, but by our valued sponsors. Who are they? They are three in number this week,

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Of course, we'll give you coupon codes for all that later. You can probably guess what they are because this, of course, is brought to you also by Ricochet.com. And Rob, I believe this is the part where you step up to the podium, clear your throat, smile at the audience, and get them to pay you money. Well, you know, I don't think of it as paying me money because, of course, as you know, no one's getting rich off Ricochet.

But here's why we're doing it. We're doing it because if you go on the internets and you look at the way people talk to each other there, it is disgusting and horrible and really kind of loathsome and drags everybody down. I haven't seen a useful exchange on the internet outside of the walled garden of Ricochet in years. Ricochet is the place for people who like thoughtful, witty, interesting, spirited, political and cultural and everything conversation, but with some rules. We don't let you scream at each other. We don't let you use profanity. Our members sometimes say we're too restrictive, but we'd rather be too restricted than not. So if you are interested in that kind of thing, if you're interested in conversation, if you really want to reach out and know what's going on between and among our

contributors and members of the center-right, go to ricochet.com, join. You get 30 days free. Use the coupon code JOIN when you see ricochet.com slash membership. Sign up for the center right. Go to Ricochet.com. Join. You get 30 days free. Use the coupon code JOIN when you see Ricochet.com slash membership. Sign up for the Daily Shot. It's our daily email blast. It's in your email inbox

and tells you all about what happened and what's going to happen and funny ways to win every argument you encounter with a left-wing kook in your life

and I know you have them. It is absolutely risk-free. You will love the community. We are trying to build something here and say something and I'll know you have them. It is absolutely risk-free. You will love the community. We are trying to build something here and say something. And I'll tell you one thing. I don't think you could do this on the left. I'll just say it. I don't think the left is ready, as you can see from college campuses,

for actual free speech because they can't be polite and we can't. So there you go. Well, that's an excellent point that there are no microaggressions suffered in the comment sections. Sometimes there are macro ones, but we get the community, police itself does a really great job. With a few elbows thrown between friends. Peter, of course, you may have read Brother Rob's piece this week about telling people hire all of those screaming lunatics from Mizzou, Yale, Ithaca. They're people with bloodlust and a sense of how to get power, just the kind of people you want in your organization. Would you hire any of these folks that you see or would you be terrified that the leastest syllable you uttered brought you a visit from HR and a rap on the knuckles or worse?

I would certainly not hire any of these people. They've taken seriously what they hear for four years at these institutions, which is that you are the leaders of tomorrow. I want somebody, if I'm going to hire out of one of these, if I'm going to hire a freshly minted undergraduate, I want somebody who's willing to be the follower of tomorrow. The idea that they actually have to spend the first years of their life doing quite hard, often tedious and monotonous work before they really have earned the right to speak up about the enterprise they're working for, let alone before they begin to acquire any – the glimmerings of any knowledge about how to set the world right. By the way, Rob, I think Rob's notion that liberals can't do what we do at Ricochet, which is to say engage in civil and real disagreement, I actually think we have proof of that. And the proof of that is that as one liberal campus after another melts down and the one

really forthright, good, solid statement in favor of free speech, combining it with a statement on the importance of civility, comes from Mitch Daniels, who as president of Purdue, how does it express itself? In a very rapid and powerful statement on behalf of free speech. It ain't the liberal leaders of these institutions who are producing statements on free speech. It just isn't. No, and he was roundly castigated on Twitter by people who said, WTF? Why is he doing this? Why does he feel the need to do this? This is just more Christ-centric, homophobic, right-wing trash telling you that you can't have a space of safety and that you can't be respected, which is twaddle, of course.

But I think as people have pointed out, the whole free speech thing wasn't about getting free speech for everybody. It was about getting free speech for some. And then when that was no longer convenient, it was simply an excuse. It's not even free speech. It's really – it's not getting free speech for everybody. It was about getting free speech for some. And then when that was no longer convenient, it was simply excused. It's not even free speech. It's really, it's not getting speech for some, it's getting silence for others. It's really more about what you're not allowed to say. I mean, that's what's so amazing about these, these, these protests is that they, the students don't even have that internal, even, even Stalin, even Lenin and Mao had some kind of internal way of justifying what they were doing. They at least dressed it up. These kids are saying things like, no more debate.

You shouldn't be allowed to say those things. I mean it was really kind of extraordinary. They don't even bother to dress you to put a little lipstick on the pig as we used to say. They just go right ahead and say it. But let me defend my slightly tongue-in-cheek post at Ricochet. What I simply meant was this. You have to admire the sheer power politics of what happened in Missouri. The football team accurately assessed their financial leverage on the university and got what they wanted. Yes. You have to admire the ability of those basically feckless, lazy kids, right?

At Yale, they're lazy. They just don't want to go to class. That's the argument. It's like, well, we got to postpone exams and midterms and I'm too tired and I'm just too stressed out. It's just laziness. But you've got to admire the way that they have served their laziness by – with an almost laser-like precision, identified the soft, cowardly underbelly of their overlords, of the university professors,

administrators and president and have surgically swiped it clean. There is something moving in a way, good and bad, about the fact that these young people have the number of their professors and administrators. They know exactly how useless and cowardly and feckless they are. They have absolutely identified just how pointless it is these days really to be at a university, and they are exploiting it for all it's worth. And I would say, if I was Goldman Sachs,

I'd take the bet. I'd say, I'll bet you I can, with a year's worth of fat paychecks to these kids, co-opt them into my dark side

and get them to use all these evil skills to make a whole lot of money. It's Pygmalion. Yep. Or My Fair Lady. Why can't a leftist be more like a man? You know, it's pigmalion yep or my fair lady why can't a leftist be more like a man

you know it's it's true that they did have a very they showed a very good skill for seeing what needed to be done but you could say that the red guard was very good at learning how to bend a finger back just so far in order to make somebody say what you wanted them to say oh but they didn't they don't have to bend the finger back these kids haven't bent the finger back they simply use the reflexive knee-jerk leftism, the progressive nonsense that their teachers have been spouting at them. That's the beauty of it. And have demanded that they do it. So these kids are simply saying, hey,

you've been preaching at us for years. Now you have to live up to it. And you can see the look of astonishment on the professor's faces. They want to say, oh, you don't understand, I voted for Obama. I drive a Prius. I'm one of the good guys. But no. This is – James, you mentioned the Red Guard and Rob mentioned Lenin and Stalin. Listen, of course, I don't want to suggest that what's happening at Yale is the same thing as that happened in Petrograd in 1917. But on the other hand, on the other hand, what's so astonishing when you read about the Bolshevik revolution, two things to my mind stand out. One is how easy it was.

The Bolsheviks were a very, very small proportion of the revolutionary movement. They were just the ones who were serious. They were the ones who were willing to push the logic of their own position. That's the first thing. It wasn't that hard to do because they had the number of their opposition, which leads to the second thing. The great tragedy, in my judgment, the great tragedy of Russia in the early 20th century, there was a moment when it could actually have made a transition,

was struggling to make a transition to democracy. There was an elected Duma, the czar permitted his own powers to be hemmed in, all of that. And then the liberals would not fight. The liberals would not draw distinctions between themselves and the hard left. They were soft. They were unserious. And the hard left got their number. That pattern is just the same. Well, maybe perhaps it's not the Red Guard. It's not the Russian Revolution. Let's go back to the original source of the French Revolution

because the Russian Revolution were radicals and the liberals overthrowing a soft, corrupt, sclerotic regime. In the case of the French Revolution, you had the... I'm talking about the terror that came after the initial revolution. Everybody set up the university. You can use the post-revolutionary government

as an analogy for the university. And then came the radicals. Then came the Robespierres and the purists and the guillotines and the desire to purge. That's what we're seeing now. We're seeing a leftist institution being consumed by the fires of even more lefty left-to-leftists. Even the kids in Missouri, haven't they sort of fighting amongst themselves in the quad and banished people?

They've already had, they're already having their purges. They're, what's hilarious about this is that because they don't read any history, because they're essentially fools, right? And all they do is read, you know, this PhD lady with the piece about Martha Stewart or her dissertation about Martha Stewart or Fifty Shades of Grey because they don't know anything. They don't even know that they're repeating history because they don't go to history class because history class is patriarchal. I don't want to hear about a bunch of dead white males like Lenin and Stalin and Alexander Nevsky. What could be more pointless than that? So they're actually enacting in their own foolish – the way kids sometimes do in a sandbox will sort of inadvertently ape and model of me thinks it's horrible, but depending on what time of day it is and if I've had a cup of coffee or not or a glass of wine, I could either make it through it and ignore it. What I find so astonishing is – because I know Yale students pretty well, having been one – I know that what kills them, kills them right now is that they are being linked in the news to the university of missouri

that to them is like a status killer they can't like oh no what are we doing i thought that myself in mitch daniel's statement it says how much better i'm paraphrasing but this is a close quotation close paraphrase how much better things are right here at Purdue than they are at places like – he used that phrase, places like Missouri and Yale. It's killing them. It's killing them. They're spending 60 grand too. Seriously though, Rob, if you had spoken on a campus what you said there, eyes would have been glazing, ears would have been shutting until they picked up the word ape. And then they would have regarded that as a coded target message. And if you – I'm serious.

You're right. You're absolutely right. If you were an administrator or a teacher, you would be required to resign. It wouldn't matter at all what the intention was. I mean that's the other thing about this, the 1984 aspect of it is the diminution of language. Because if – it's not in the Orwellian sense that we're going to eliminate any words that have certain meanings so that we eliminate the meanings and the concepts themselves. It's just reducing all language down to little phonemes which themselves are anodyne and cannot be misconstrued or misunderstood. You become terrified of speaking unless you know exactly that your words rolling out are nice little ceramic one-dimensional things that cannot possibly be misunderstood.

But I think the operative word there is nice. What's surprising about the Orwellian 1984 sort of analogy is that Orwell imagined – I think most of us imagined if you imagine Orwellian 1984-style world, this kind of grim place in which there's always war on the television and we're fighting Oceania or Eurasia or whatever it is, and there's this – the country is on a war footing and it's grim and there are rations. And the idea is you have to be patriotic and you have to stand for your – whatever the country is that you're with, your five minutes hate and all that stuff. Instead, it's kind of – what it really is now, it's like it's the republic of nice. It's like you're not nice to me. You don't listen to my pain. I'm hurt. I want to sleep late.

I can't do my work today. It's too – I'm too pained and heartsick over the email that you wrote in response to an email that was written in response to the potential that someone might wear a serape for Halloween. Basically, that's what we're talking about. Take your business international. Enterprise Europe Network is the world's largest network providing free support and advice to SMEs with global ambition. With over 450 partner organizations worldwide, we bring together unparalleled expertise to serve businesses like yours. We can help you discover partners in new markets, advance your digitization and

gain valuable insights into EU funding opportunities. Take advantage of free expert advice and innovation resources. Visit een-ireland.com and take your business global today. That your email, responding to an email, responding to a hypothetical was so distressing to me. That they can't sleep. I can't sleep because you're mean and we don't want mean people. I want to be safe here. It's remarkable. I mean it really is – it's not Orwell.

It's sort of the dinosaur version of Orwell. Yeah, it is Orwell upside down but it's also Orwell in one sense that strikes me as really, really important. In 1984, what was the language? Was it Newspeak? What was it? Newspeak. Yeah, Newspeak. Exactly.

Okay, Newspeak. And there's this chilling passage, which of course when all of us read 1984, we associated with the Soviet Union. But here it is. And it fits what's taking place in American universities right now. And the passage – again, I can only paraphrase it. But Orwell goes into the development of Newspeak. And the point of Newspeak was not simply to control the way people spoke. It was to make certain thoughts unthinkable.

That's what I just said. Without the language to express certain thoughts, you simply could not formulate them, which goes back to James Lilacs, which goes back to when, when was it that we had Angelo Cotevilla on the air a couple of months ago? And Angelo said, if you cannot speak the words, you cannot think the thought that's really what they're doing here.

They're trying to rule out whole, a whole range of thought. It's outrageous. No, it here. They're trying to rule out whole, a whole range of thought. It's outrageous. No, it's double plus on good. You know, and these, these coddled little children, these milk toasts, these fettuccine spine kids. Why in my day, actually in my day, when I got to the university of Minnesota, the newspaper where we worked had just published a sacrilegious humor issue and the legislature was threatening to yank the funding.

This was in the big newspapers, the legislature. The state capitol guys were meeting every day and making speeches about our newspaper. You want to talk about an environment that's not particularly conducive to sitting around and resting on your laurels? That was one of them. And what did we do? We drank. We smoked. We laughed. We played. We put on a newspaper. We what did we do? We drank, we smoked, we laughed, we played,

we put on a newspaper, we went to class, all of the things that collegians do. We didn't curl up into little tiny fetal balls. And it was wonderful. And we didn't get our funding cut, but it was a great story out of which came a whole lot of really good journalists who were growing up and probably came to the place

where there's a little bit more emotional capital than today's helicopter-parented snowflake children do. Well, the thing of it is, those kids who didn't go to class, they probably missed some great instructions. Pity for them. If you, however, ever skipped a class and wondered, I wish I'd learned about that, well, that's why The Great Courses is here for you.

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And what can we say? Kevin D. Williamson is our favorite black National Review writer. Kevin, welcome. I thought you were introducing Mark Stein there for a second. I was going to hang up. That was very nice of you. How are you doing? Good. Doing just great. You're here with Peter and Rob, of course.

And we understand that you have a new book out. Now, we know that National Review is a tool of the establishment and hence is doing everything they can to keep real people from speaking their mind and getting their thoughts across. Tell us what you've written, why, and what you say. Well, it's called The Case Against Trump. And the content is making the case against Trump, who should, under no humanly imaginable circumstances, ever be president of the United States. Can you imagine putting nuclear weapons in this man's hands? Kevin, you and I – just full disclosure, I was at your book dinner last night. I was filled with luminaries of the – or the only luminaries of the sort of right-wing establishment here in New York City. Oh, so there is a right-wing establishment and you are a member.

You admitted, both of you. All right. We're at the Rhino Club meeting. And let me just read a few things from your book. With four bankruptcies on its credit report thus far, Trump's casino empire has been in Chapter 11 more times than any other American business in the past 30 years. Do you think that's disqualifying? No, not in and of itself. You know, a lot of people go through business bankruptcies and things like that. What I think is disqualifying about Trump is what a gigantic liar he is about just everything.

And a fellow who is incapable of dealing – Did you see his speech? We were at dinner, so you might have missed it. Or did you catch up with it? No, I haven't seen it for the most reason. Rambling is one term. About an hour and a half of Stemwinder, we'll call it a Stemwinder, last night, in which he said, how stupid are the people in Iowa? How stupid are the people in America? How high will his poll numbers go now that that clip is being played everywhere? I don't know. I'm not actually particularly good at making election predictions or, you know, polling predictions and things like that. So it may very well be the case that some people will go out and support Trump and vote for Trump, although they shouldn't.

And my thing is more telling them why they why they shouldn't do that. So I can tell you why they shouldn't do it, but I can't tell you what they will or not. So, Kevin, Peter here. Here's my little problem. I'm being provocative, but still. Here's my little problem with you and Jonah and the whole crew at National Review. totally unserious and would fade. And then when he reached a greater height that he would tumble. And then when he reached a greater height still that he would sooner or later, but sometime soon come crashing. And he hasn't. So before you dismiss Donald Trump, don't you have to sort of back up a step or two and explain this appeal, which we now have to say, I mean, we're not talking about geologic time or even a long view of history. But in political time, three months in the lead in all the polls or nearly all the polls is an enduring appeal, right?

So how do you explain what's going on with this guy? Before you talk to the people who ought to turn against him, you have to say somehow or other, I understand what you're feeling. Don't you? Well, yeah, I understand. That doesn't mean I respect it, but I certainly understand what they're feeling. And so the appeal of Trump is two things. By the way, I don't think I ever made predictions about him. You didn't.

But anybody who's been listening to Jonah and Rob and John Podhoretz on their podcast, those guys have been finding themselves more and more perplexed. I think that's fair to say, isn't it, Rob? Well, I start perplexed. All right. Okay. I withdraw the accusation against you, Kevin. Okay. Go ahead. So if you look at the very early polls, when he first gets into the race, you see something really odd, which is that for people who are Trump voters, their number one second choice is Jeb Bush.

And when you look at people who are Jeb Bush voters, their number one second choice is Donald Trump. Now, that to me suggests that what is at play is not ideology or issues or anything else. Simple name recognition. People know the name Donald Trump. People know the name Jeb Bush. So that's one thing that's going on. The other thing that's going on for people who are slightly more informed and committed voters. And by the way, if you are the voter who's after saying, yeah, maybe Jeb Bush, maybe Donald Trump, you should just turn in your voting card. You definitely shouldn't vote. I don't care which way you come down on that,

but if it's maybe one, maybe the other of those two guys, you just don't know what you're talking about. So those are the infamous low-information voters. For the voters who are a little less low-information, the thing that's animating Trump, I think, is mainly immigration. And, of course, immigration created

an enormous opportunity for him because neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party has in the last 20 years, 25 years, ever even really attempted to deal seriously with that issue, which is terribly important to a lot of people. And which, you know, Trump in his 40 years in the public eye has never said a word about until that awful murder in San Francisco, which Trump in his 40 years in the public eye has never said a word about until that awful murder in San Francisco, which gave him a chance to stand upon a corpse in grandstand. So he's a fairly bad exemplar of that issue, I think. But it is an issue that needs to be dealt with, and when responsible people don't deal

with it, irresponsible people will. So at a minimum, don't you have to feel, again, I'm making the case as best I can against the case against Trump, but don't you have to feel a little bit of gratitude in some way? Because you yourself just said immigration needs to be addressed. He's the man. Nobody else would be talking about immigration as much or as seriously today as they all seem to be, at least on the Republican side.

If Donald Trump hadn't to continue, you hadn't dragged that corpse right into the middle of the stage and said, look, talk about this. Immigration matters to our people, right? I think you're half right about that. I think you're as right about the as much part, but not the as seriously part, because the conversation hasn't really improved. And Donald Trump, as much as he likes to talk about immigration, doesn't actually seem to understand the issue. He doesn't seem to know very much about it. So we're all talking about the wall and the point-to-point wall on the southern border, which is never going to get built because it's logistically impossible to build a point-to-point wall on that border

because you've got a lot of mountains and bodies of water and rivers and such things. And you're just not building a point-to-point wall. But even if you did, that doesn't solve your illegal immigration problem because most of our illegal immigrants don't come by walking across that border. They come through the airports. And having a system for tracking people who overstay their visas and policing that is actually a much more difficult technological challenge and something that nobody in this race, as far as I know, including Donald Trump, especially Donald Trump, is talking seriously about. Hey, Kevin, I asked you last night if there was a silver lining to any of this. I suggested and was instantly shot down.

You shot me down in public in front of people. Thank you. I suggested that maybe there was a bright side to this, that other Republican candidates now know just how fickle and untrustworthy the evangelical vote is. If evangelicals are voting in large numbers for Donald Trump, they really, to call them evangelical is sort of, you may as well call them people who wear sneakers. It's irrelevant. I mean he is not a values voter by any stretch of the imagination, and if you do think he's a values leader, you're crazy. I mean he isn't.

However, in the chat room, Dick from Brooklyn has a question. It's sort of along the same lines uh about looking for the bright side could the bright side to the correlation between trump and bush voters mean that there's a simply a strong anyone but hillary sentiment among you know the marginally informed voter i mean let's be honest the low information voter does play a part in electing the next president um is there some no allow me to shoot you down again there just real quick the polling question didn't include Hillary it was just among people who are looking at Republicans

so either this Republican or that Republican so the thing about Trump of course is that according to some fairly recent polls in head to head matchups he's basically the only Republican who loses to Hillary. You know, Rubio

in, I mean, polls this far out take them for what they're worth, but, you know, Rubio in the head-to-head polls beats Hillary. Cruz does pretty well. Carson, who should not be President of the United States, does pretty well. Trump's the only one that really doesn't. So, you know, Trump's

energy, his particular adherence, is, it's a smallish movement, I think, but it's a very dedicated one. I mean, the ones who are Trump or nothing are probably, you know, 20% of the people who are in his camp right now. And I don't know what you really do with those people in the long run. They're not conservatives. They're not people who are natural constituents of the Republican Party. They're kind of angry, poorly informed populists. And some of them are, you know, these kind of backward white

nationalists and things like that. I don't think that you're going to ever bring those people into the party of free enterprise and free trade. Yeah. You also make the – my favorite part of the last debate, I think, was when Trump said we should have taken up the oil and distributed it amongst the soldiers, like we're going back to the old Roman army model. I really – I enjoyed that. But you also think something else that some people are questioning, and you believe that Ted Cruz could be president. I was just listening to an interview with Cruz, and as ever, I found myself nodding and agreeing and liking the points that he was making. And then I just imagined him coming out of that sort of eternally beseeching face of his.

And I thought, I've got a problem with this. And I think a lot of people who agree with him find his persona to be oleaginous and off-putting or whatever words they choose to use. You think he could be president. Tell us how. I do. Well, you know, I've thought for a long time that this is basically going to be a Cruz versus Rubio race. Take your business international. Enterprise Europe Network is the world's largest network providing free support and advice to SMEs with global ambition. With over 450 partner organisations worldwide, we bring together unparalleled expertise to serve businesses like yours. valuable insights into EU funding opportunities. Take advantage of free expert advice and innovation resources. Visit een-ireland.com and take your business global today. And, you know, they are the good cop, bad cop, the Republican field.

So Rubio is this very, you know, sort of attractive, uplifting, optimistic guy who gives these speeches that make you just want to, you know, stand up and sing God Bless America. Whereas Cruz is more of a culture warrior. He's sort of dour in his way. He's more of the heavy in that particular casting. And I don't think it's past Republicans to go with the guy who reaches for the black hat instinctively. The guy who wants to be the sort of confrontational figure in the race rather than the sort of uplifting and transcendent one. But, you know, the thing about presidential races is, you know, and I'm a Ted Cruz admirer.

He's a smart guy. He's right on most of the issues. But, yeah, I agree with you about his persona. It's not, I look at him and go, like, why can't you be more like Mike Huckabee, who I can't stand. But you see I look at him and go like, why can't you be more like Mike Huckabee, who I can't stand. But you see him on television, you're like, oh, you're kind of like Mike Huckabee. You know, I kind of like Chris Christie, who's terrible on a lot of issues. You'll want to like Cruz if you're a right winger. And he's hard to like. He's just not a naturally sympathetic

person. And he knows this. He actually understands his own shortcomings as a candidate, I think, pretty well. And he would like to be that sort of Reagan-esque, you know, inspiring figure. He just knows that that's just not in his particular set of skills. But, you know, it's always, it's not Cruz versus DeVoy. It's Cruz versus Hillary, or the way I'd like to see this is Cruz versus Bernie Sanders. I think the party should really nominate the person who really expresses what they stand for. And that would

be Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders. And I think Cruz would win that in a landslide. Ted Cruz, Ted Cruz. So, so what's your take on Rubio then, Kevin? There's something inauthentic about Rubio or he's just not far enough to the right for the party? No, my take on Rubio is if I was betting my own money on it, he'll be the nominee in the next president. Right, okay. I think Rubio is, you know, he's run off the reservation on a couple of issues. Immigration, prominent among them, which is going to hurt them among some Republicans. But he is an enormously gifted politician. Now, whether it's sincere or it's not, I don't know.

You know, there's the old joke, you can fake sincerity, you can fake anything. And, you know, I've seen Rubio work rooms of angry right-wingers who are mad at him about immigration and things. And at the end of his talk, they're ready to carry him out on his shoulders. So, you know, and you put a guy like Rubio up against Hillary Clinton, this, you know, decrepit,

you know, she's not Dorian Gray. She's a picture. And, you know, you put Rubio on a stage next to her, you know, thinning hair and all. He looks like, you know, if you're going and you're going to the produce stand at the Whole Foods and you're reaching for a banana, and then you see a banana that looks like a much more attractive, fresher banana, and you reach for that one, she's kind of the old black banana. Wow. Trigger words. Could people imagine William Devane, a younger Williamletting, everybody kind of like stirring the pot a little bit? Primary voters who are traditionally the most conservative and predictable voter subset on earth historically will sort of coalesce between – among two – decide between two candidates.

One that sort of is considerably more conservative and one that is considerably more, quote, electable, unquote, whether that's true or not, but perceived as such, as they have in every primary since I've been alive and I think before that. Is that possible? What's the likelihood of that? Yeah, and I think that you guys are probably cruising Rubio, although if you look at their voting records in the Senate, they're not exactly radically different. Yeah, one of the things I like about the Republican Party, one of the things I like about the conservative movement is that it really is a movement based on ideas. And the people who are mad at Jeb Bush, a pretty good governor, the people who are mad at Rubio aren't mad at him because of who he is or because he shorted them on some deal where they expected to get some juice from the government.

They're mad at him about ideas and issues, and that's the great thing about the Republican Party, and also the maddening thing about the Republican Party is that it's so focused on issues, it's so ideologically rigorous these days that people who stray off just a little bit, who disagree with you about something, you know, get cast

into the outer darkness. You know, we could never, never, possibly ever vote for Jeb Bush because of his views about Common Core, that sort of thing. So yeah, I think that that is a healthy thing through this point in the primary because it really is about ideas at this point. Except for the Trump voters, it's mostly about celebrity. Okay, but not to be a chauvinist here about the center-right or conservatives or whatever you want to call it. But so yesterday at your book party, your book, The Case Against Trump, it's an encounter broadside. So it's the number 46.

Encounter broadside, they used to be podcast advertisers, and I'm still a huge fan of their – of the stuff they're doing on encounter books. It's a small book. It's more like a booklet I'd say, and on the wall there were a bunch of them. They had a bunch of them framed, the most recent encounter broadsides. Two broadsides that were split into two halves. One was open borders, four open borders, and the other was open borders against open borders. I don't remember who wrote the four of one, but the one who wrote against was Mark Ricori. And they had Common Core for and against two smart people, I assume, taking very, very, very controversial issues and the opposite sides of it. Both are conservatives, knowing Encounter Books. Isn't that a sign of – I mean I know I'm going to be a Pollyanna right now, but isn't that a sign of health? I mean they're not doing it on the left. I mean nobody in the Democratic Party or the liberal progressive movement is having thoughtful and nuanced arguments about big issues.

They're just calling each other names, right? I mean what's happening in the pages of Salon or anything else, right? Yeah, the interesting thing is if you look at the ideological debate in the United States right now, the serious ideological debate is entirely on and within the right. The left is really – I mean their last big cause was communism, and that didn't work out very well. And so now it's devolved into, well, I'm gay. Well, I'm black. Well, I'm Latino. Well, I'm gay, black and Latino. And so therefore I trump you. You know, it's fun to watch the education of Jonathan Chase on this stuff. You know, John is this, you know, progressive writer who is engaged in the worst sort of political correctness over the course of his career.

But now that it's been turned against him, where these lefty people are saying, hey, straight white man, we don't have to listen to you even if you're on the same side as we are. And now he's all upset about the exaggeration of identity politics. And, you know, it's starting to catch up with them that you can't, it's difficult in the long run to build a movement that's based on patronage which is really what they are as a party is based on patronage you know everybody gets their piece of the redistribution and as an ideology that's based just on uh demographic characterizations and characteristics there's no particular reason that the teamsters and the transsexuals should be in the same political party.

But they are for the moment. In the long run, I don't think that looks like a stable coalition. So if you're going to put your money – as a student of American history and a student of economics and politics, if you're going to put your – I know we're going to put your money down for the Republican nomination, but if you're going to put your money down about the party most likely to get stronger over the next 15, 20 years, what would you say? Or maybe not party. Party is wrong. The ideology. What ideology do you think is the same? I would guess that both of the parties in the long run move toward me. They move toward free markets, smaller government districts, because in the long run those are things that actually work. And you can ignore reality for a long time, but you can't ignore it forever.

I'm very optimistic, unlike a lot of my conservative friends, about the prospects of the United States and of American culture and the American people. We're not stupid. We don't want to be poor. We don't want to be miserable and vulnerable and all that sort of stuff. We're going to, in the long term, do the right thing.

Once doing the wrong thing becomes less attractive and easy. You know, right now doing the wrong thing is cheap. You know, it's pretty easy to borrow money and throw it around and redistribute and all that sort of stuff. But in the long run, that's not really a very good business model. And I suspect that as those financial pressures build on us in the long term, that we move in the right direction on a lot of issues. I think 25 years from now, the United states will be so prosperous and so happy and so free that they're going to look back on us the way we look back on the 1950s in terms of their

material standards of living and say how did people ever get along living like that so for a guy who dresses in black all the time you're pretty you're pretty from your lips to trump's ear yeah i mean the great thing about you know one of the great things about my job is that i travel around the country a lot and uh you know you meet a lot of people who are not in that sort of new york dc los angeles cultural bubble and you know americans are really smart as it turns out they're really good at things and they do all sorts of interesting productive things they. They're idiots as voters. It's really weird. They're terrible buffoons as voters, but in their own lives, their own businesses, in their own communities, their own families, they're a pretty sharp bunch

of people. But if they continue to vote for things which down the road cripple the economy, if they continue to vote for people who lard more and more regulations and drape more boat anchors around the neck of the, uh, if they continue to vote for people who pile up debt that we can't pay, um, how does that all play out then down the road? Yeah, I don't think you can cripple this economy. I really don't. It's had a, uh, it's had a close spot for the last several years, uh, largely related to the financial crisis and some regime uncertainty. But if you look at the things that Americans are actually out there doing, you know, Silicon Valley and Austin and California, which, despite all of its madness, is still an absolute petri dish of innovation and new ideas, things that are going on all over the country. In the long term, I just don't think you can keep that down.

You know, you can try to regulate it, but people ignore regulations as they get around, and it just becomes a cost to do a business, and people adjust to it. I mean, what you've got is,

you know, a kind of permanent parasite class, right? You know, the regulators, the people in D.C., the people who consume

your taxes. And an economy as productive and innovative as ours, as it turns out, can actually carry a lot of that for a long time. So we hate them, and we should hate them, and we should try to get rid of them,

and we should try to minimize their influence on our economy and our lives. But I don't think that even the worst of what a Hillary Clinton, even the worst of what a Bernie Sanders thinks about in the imaginary universe where they could get it done is enough to keep down what Americans do. I just don't think it is. I think we're unstoppable. Hold on one second, Peter. You're short of nuclear weapons. Speaking as someone whose family business consists of petrochemicals and other things that release nasty carbon, I guarantee you that what they want would be the end of what our family does.

But, you know, we could find – perhaps we could then find something else selling solar panels. Peter, you had a question? I do. Kevin, back to the case against Trump. Dan Henninger had a piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday I think in which he said essentially, look, we've all been saying for three months now that Trump was going to collapse. He hasn't. I, Dan Henninger – this is needless to say.

Dan put it better than this. But I, Dan Henninger, and I suspect a lot of my colleagues in the press at this point can no longer quite see how he might collapse. We can't see – he can't say anything stupid to drive down his poll numbers. Every time he does, the poll numbers go up. There's no mechanism visible by which he will collapse. Therefore, I am beginning to be persuaded that we may actually end up with a brokered convention. I don't really care so much about the brokered convention. Everybody always says that. It's very hard to imagine that it'll actually happen. But still, Dan's point, how will Trump go away? After three months of this, what can he possibly do to observe support dropping below 30 or 25 percent?

What's the mechanism? Do you see it? Yeah, the mechanism is he loses Iowa. You know, Trump is not going to stay in a race where he's not winning. Even if he comes second? Yeah, I don't think he would stay in. I think it's not winning. Even if he comes second? Yeah, I don't think he would stay in. I think it's very difficult. And if he doesn't win

one of the early primaries at some point and win it fairly convincingly, it's hard to imagine him staying in. I don't think his ego could stand second, third place very long. So the mechanism is that Donald picks up his marbles and goes home. Well, the mechanism is that he you know, he loses in Iowa.

He looks like he's going to lose in Iowa. And someone like Ted Cruz comes out with a stronger and more robust, incredible immigration platform. And Trump says, OK, see, here's what happened. You know, I came into the race. I changed the conversation. Now the Republican Party has finally got religion on the subject of immigration. Now I can go back and do my – whatever deal I have coming up next. I can build some horrible gold-plated casino in some backwards cesspool part of the world and I feel fantastic I'm sorry the end of the segment is near and it was awesome I think that would be a better paraphrase of your book

and of course don't miss Mad Dogs and Englishmen podcast he is the mad dog and don't miss also the new Encounter Broadside the case against Trump follow him on Twitter at KevinNR to be amused and enlightened thank you for joining us on the podcast can Can't wait to have you back on. Thanks, guys.

Good talking to you. Thanks, Kevin. Take care. And, of course, if you subscribe to The Daily Shot, I'm sure The Daily Shot, Ricochet, which provides for free all kinds of interesting links and news in the day. You'll get a link now and then to what Kevin does. And you'll want to save that link, and you'll want to curate it. You won't want to put it in your junk folder because it's important. But you know, sometimes your folder just gets all cluttered up with all kinds of crap. My junk folder right now is about 12,000 email messages from banks in Venezuela that want

me to exchange pesos for Zloty's. I have no idea. I don't care. I don't worry about it anymore because I have SaneBox. You know the kind of conversations you have with email. Sometimes you're sharing ideas and thoughts with a friend or a colleague and you write back and go back and forth. And pretty soon, however, what became 10 emails or 100 and 1,000 and you've got no time whatsoever to take care of the good stuff, to pay attention to the emails you need to because all of your conversations have just been overflowing and there's the junk and there's the rest of it. No, you give out. Who needs it? You don't. If that sounds like your inbox cluttered, this might be your cure.

It's SaneBox. It does the sifting for you. Right. It diverts the trivial stuff into a separate folder, so all that's left are the emails that matter. It's got a feature like the black hole. Drag an email into the black hole, you never hear from them again. You can snooze your non-urgent emails and you'll save countless hours and increase your email productivity, they say, by 25%.

I know it's helped me a lot. So you can try it yourself for the free two weeks of SaneBox. Don't need a credit card. Visit SaneBox.com Ricochet to start your trial. After that, after two weeks, you get $25 off a membership, which is the deepest discount you will find anywhere in the known galaxy. Again, it's S-A-N-E-B-O-X slash Ricochet. I would now like to welcome to the podcast, on the other side of the world, literally,

but somebody who knows this part of the world, particularly the goings-on inside the Beltway with a lot of precision and history and skill. We welcome back to the podcast, Morton Kondracki. Mort, Peter Robinson here. Can you hear us? Yeah, not very well, actually. Oh. But I guess well enough.

Well enough to proceed? Talk some more. All right, I'm talking some more. Mort, you're in Tokyo, we know. Thank you for joining us at what is certainly an ungodly hour in Tokyo. It's actually, I'm actually some more. Mort, you're in Tokyo, we know. Thank you for joining us at what is certainly an ungodly hour in Tokyo. It's actually – I'm actually in Kyoto. In Kyoto. All right.

Jack Kemp, the bleeding heart conservative who changed America. You and Fred Barnes have just published this book. Let's just start with the title, A Bleeding Heart Conservative. Describe what you mean by that subtitle. Kemp believed that with Thomas Jefferson that all men were created equal and that everybody – I mean he basically believed in the promise of the Declaration of Independence that it applied not only to Americans, but to everybody in the world. And he thought his other great hero was Abraham Lincoln, whose idea was that everyone, regardless of station of birth, had the right to rise and that everybody could rise to fulfill their God-given talents and their energy, whatever that entitled them to.

So he cared about people and he cared about their success and he was in favor of civil rights. It was said of him because he was a football player that he'd showered with more African Americans than most Republicans had ever met. Right. And he tried to mount a conservative war on poverty during the George H.W. Bush administration, which was not successful because basically Bush didn't care very much about domestic policy and he was thwarted by Bush's budget director. But nonetheless, he wanted to do that. And it was sort of understood that he had this position and, you know, cared about the poor and stuff like that. So he sort of got famous for it. But it was genuine, totally genuine. So the second part of that subtitle, The Bleeding Heart Conservative, Who Changed America?

We're talking after all about two prominent journalists, Mark Kondracki and Fred Barnes, who devoted a couple of years of their lives to writing about a man whose highest elective office – he was secretary of housing and urban development under George H.W. Bush, as you mentioned. The highest elective office he ever achieved was a member of Congress and there are 435 of those at any given time. Why is this man, Jack Kemp, important enough for you to write about and to say that he changed America? Well, the first sentence of the book is that Jack Kemp was the most important politician of the 20th century who was not president, certainly the most influential Republican. And we say that because he was the original and most active sponsor, evangelist in fact, of supply-side economics. And supply-side economics, of course, is the idea that lowering marginal tax rates on individuals will incentivize work, savings, investment, and production and productivity, and will make the whole country more prosperous. So this was an idea that was revolutionary in its time.

He didn't get it through Congress himself, but he convinced Ronald Reagan to put it into effect. Ronald Reagan did put it into effect. And from 1983 through 2000, the country's economy boomed. It boomed in comparison with the dismal 70s, which we can discuss if you want, but it boomed in objective terms. And the fruits of that were that we could afford a defense budget that Reagan put into effect that eventually toppled the Soviet Union. The morale of the country surged. It went from 13% of the population that thought the country was on the right track in 1976 to 69% in 1986. And the whole world believed, on the basis of America's example,

at least for a time, that democratic capitalism was the quote-unquote end of history. So all of those – he didn't do it by himself for sure. Ronald Reagan was the actor who did it. But nonetheless, he used Kemp's instruments to do it. Kemp was also a principal originator of the tax reform of 1986, which lowered the marginal rate even further and stimulated the economy even more. Mort, in his review of your book, Jack Kemp, the Bleeding Heart Conservative Who Changed America, in the New York Times this past Sunday, Tim Noah referred to the Kemp-Roth legislation, which you've just been describing, the 1982 legislation that lowered marginal tax rates as, and I'm using the word that Noah used in the New

York Times review, a, quote, disaster. To which Mark Kondracki replies, how? And I think it's – except among conservatives who believe in supply-side economics, it's the conventional wisdom of the country that somehow even though Reagan was enormously popular and at the time everybody believed that he was doing great things economically, that somehow his economic policy was a failure. Now, so the only evidence for – the only detriment that Reagan can be said to have instituted or the only negative is that he did blow the deficit sky high. I forget the exact numbers, but nonetheless, he did blow the sky high. But it was not because, as Noah says, revenues collapsed. Government revenue stayed roughly at the same level of GDP, even though Reagan cut the top tax rate from 70% of income to 28% of income by 1986. Revenues did not fall as a percentage of GDP. What caused the deficit was a lot of defense spending, and you can look at that as an investment in the victory of the Cold War and interest on the national debt, which had to be paid back in non-inflated dollars because simultaneous with the success of the supply-side tax cuts, Paul Volcker crushed inflation out of the economy and produced a recession. If the Kemp Roth tax

cuts had gone into effect earlier, we probably would have gotten out of that recession faster. But as I said in this lengthy rebuttal, the average yearly GDP growth from the end of World War II to the 70s was like 3.7% a year. During the 1970s, it was 1.6% a year. After the Volcker recession ended in 1983, we were averaging 4, 5, 6, and some quarters 7% growth. And except for temporary little glitches, it went on all the way through the Clinton administration

because Clinton cut capital gains taxes. He raised the individual income tax top rate, but he cut capital gains taxes, which was a supply-side maneuver. So, you know, it worked. And, you know, liberals and Keynesians, followers of John Maynard Keynes, want to say it didn't work. You know, they basically want to portray Ronald Reagan as some kind of dolt. And working on this book, you know, I've read practically everything. I've read every Reagan authored book, his autobiography, his diaries,

lots of biographies about him. It just is so false. I mean Reagan was some kind of a genius even though some of it was instinctual as opposed to intellectual. The results are just all in the numbers. You go through the numbers, and it's clear that Reaganomics was a success. Hey, Mort, it's Rob Long in New York. The last time I saw you, just to go back, travel by memory lane, it was years ago and you were in Los Angeles. I was the writer for Cheers and John McLaughlin had just done our big 200th episode groupies. So I have to apologize for being a fanboy 25 years ago, whatever that was.

But I do remember that time really well. And I remember introducing Jack Kemp at a National Review Institute dinner. This is 1993, maybe 1994. And he spoke eloquently and very movingly and convincingly about race in America and that the future was bright. And now it's 2015.

And it doesn't seem that way. It seems like it got worse. How did it get worse? Well, you know, I have to say that one of the great mysteries of this whole project is why George W. Bush's economics failed. Bush cut taxes both in a kind of a haphazard way by instituting tax credits. That was his first go-round. But his second, his 1993, sorry, 2003 tax cuts were capital gains tax cuts, and it didn't work. He did not produce the kind of economic growth that Reagan produced. What's more, George W. Bush never vetoed an appropriation while

Republicans were in control of Congress. And they spent like wastrels. Tom DeLay in the lead, he was the majority leader at the time, they used the federal treasury the way you'd expect liberal Democrats to do it, with abandon. And so the deficits ran up. Then, of course, we had the tech bubble that broke in 2000. That hit the economy badly. We had 9-11, which hit the economy badly. We had the Bush, basically, economic, what I regard as an economic failure. And then along comes the bust of 2008, which was catastrophic. And, you know, we've been sort of trying to crawl our way back ever since. And, you know, if you're a conservative, you blame it all on Barack Obama. But I got to say that the Congress of the United States

in Republican hands has not helped the economy. It has, Kemp would be furious at the way that the Congress has behaved. It has based its policies back to the old basis of austerity of cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, and cut especially programs for the needy, cut food stamps, cut AFDC. Cut Medicaid. privileged and the generation that's benefited the most from diversity and a sense of diversity and inclusiveness and openness. And I mean, these are kids protesting who were born in the 90s. And it doesn't seem to have had any effect. They seem even more racially aggrieved, even more attuned to what they call structural racism than ever before. What would Jack Kemp say to these kids?

What would he, if Jack Kemp was at Yale or Jack Kemp was in Missouri, what would he say? Well, you know, he, when the Los Angeles riots happened, the Rodney King riots, 1992, the Bush administration said that this was all due to the Great Society, that the Great Society had basically failed black America and that it hadn't worked and people were as poor as ever. Kemp said, this is a cry of protest. Racism still exists in the country. We got to do something about it. Now, what he would say about the plain excesses of political correctness, I don't know. He was inclined to think that racism still existed in the society, that we still hadn't solved the eternal curse of the consequences of slavery. He was in favor of affirmative action. He'd rather do economic development than preferences, but nonetheless, he was not against preferences.

I think when it comes to policing, he would have been in favor of police reform so that, I don't know about body cams and all that, but he definitely would have been in favor of police reform so that – I don't know about body cams and all that, but he definitely would have been in favor of community policing so that cops knew against black people, and I think Ferguson was entirely defensible. But we've had – let's face it. We've had lots of cases where innocent blacks have been tased and thrown to the ground and killed and stuff like that. And it's a movement now to stomp on it. And it has its excesses, but it has its legitimacy too. Now, on college campuses, I got to say, it's ridiculous most of the time. There is racism on college campuses.

There is, you know, there are slurs thrown at them and told the kids uh you know i mean look that the the idea that you're that you're not allowed to to to to all this whole business of having safe rooms and and banning and banning certain Halloween customs and being chewed out for objecting to that. That he would have regarded as crazy because it's plainly crazy. Well, figuring out what somebody would have said about current events can be difficult and almost as difficult as getting back to bed after someone woke you up at 2.50. So we wish you luck and we don't know which way way you're going to go coffee and just start the day or head back to slumber,

but whatever you choose, we thank you for being on the podcast. We can't wait to have you back to talk as the election unfolds. Mort, congratulations. Thank you. Mort. Thanks so much.

Okay. Bye-bye. I mean, I go to bed late. So if I was to wake up at 250, I would not have even gone into REM sleep yet, but I know what it's like to get awoken before it is your time. And you have to make that decision.

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Gentlemen, we just have a few minutes here before we go. I'd like to say it's great to be back after my perambulations around the office to do things. We invite people to go and talk in some of the posts here. Rob not only told people to hire these young miscreants. He also told people not to leave a tip. So he's getting pretty bossy is what I'm saying here. Yeah. I'm thinking all about the popular issues, exploiting them.

Well, we'd like to thank Morton Kondracki. We'd like to thank Kevin D. Williamson. And we'd like to thank you, the Ricochet listeners, for listening to this and for joining because that's the place where you can find the smartest, most civil conversation of center-right issues on the entire interweb today. Peter, Rob, it's been a pleasure, and we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 2.0. Next week, fellas. Next week. I was helping on the straw by a thousand concentrations While you were living like a saint

And all the time the very one you trusted was Watching out somebody else's face. Now you've got yourself a brand new occupation. Every fleeting thought is a blur. And beautiful people stampede to the doorway Of the funniest fucking world They're here to help you Satisfy your desires There's a bright future

For all your professional lives Now you know how to be done Are you ready to take your place In a mind of new See all my mistakes Don't you know how to be done Like a boomed and filmed up oven Had it one of those

Reversed and quick They emptied out All of the asylums They emptied out all of the asylums They emptied out all the jails The new prince was the name of a dance grace By Jesus crossing the cool mix Followed up by torture and little fever Where their contraption are barbed wire

Between the fear and the fever That's all the rejection they require They'll be howling by midnight They'll be chewing by dawn Scallops shrunk down to the size of your brain Oh, say, little child Don't you know how to be good? Ricochet!

Join the conversation. Don't you know how to be good? I could go then turn up there Outro Music