The Ricochet Podcast - The Fight For Freedom of Speech

Episode Date: October 22, 2021

No, silence isn’t violence; it’s just that here at Ricochet, we’d like to hear what you’ve got to say. As is our wont, we’ve got a few freethinkers to join Rob and James this week – unfortunately Peter is away. First up is Matthew Continetti of The Washington Free Beacon. He’s here to talk about the bewildering politics in a time of competing counter-cultures where both sides think they’re losing. Source

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Innovate. The IT solutions people. Yeah, your mic has to work on this show. I have a dream this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created. Exactly what that means in terms of fundamentally all or whether or not we just end the filibuster straight up. With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long.

Peter Robinson is off. I'm James Lovitz. We talk to Matthew Conanetti of the Washington Free Beacon and Nathan Harden about free speech on campus. Let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! they say on public radio thanks to people like you and also people who aren't like you uh whether you contribute or join or whatever you're welcome to listen and you're welcome to go to ricochet.com and be part of the most stimulating conversation and community on the web give it a shot i'm james lilacs in minneapolis peter robinson is off on parents day for one of his kids um i'm not but i'm wearing the cap of my daughter's school in solidarity. If I had been going to parents, I had been going to parents week. We went once,

which was fine, but you know, after three years, I think the kid is sort of like, Oh great. You're coming for parents week. I will cancel all my exciting plans that I had. So we're fine.

Rob lawn, however, is either in, I don't know if you're in Alaska, Richard Branson's private Island, new Orleans, New York, San Francisco, Venice. So many places. How are you today? I am here in New York City. And how is New York? I'm doing very well. It's beautiful. It's like, this is exactly why New York is so,

has so many, I don't know, fine associations. It's not chilly, but it's brisk, and it's the autumn, and you know, it's great. It's's the autumn and um you know it's great it's great right and you like to hear gershwin playing like in the manhattan movie right that's the orchestrated versions of gershwin tunes but if you do you're probably thinking of the great old romantic skyscrapers of yore i saw a proposal for a building in new york first super tall for a local architectural site it was nightmarish it was it was a it was a fever dream i mean i've said most of the most of the new buildings i see coming out of new york are either incredibly banal the little super tall residential towers or they're

just unnerving there's one that looked like a love crafty and horror all black and oily this one starts out small and the taller it gets the bigger it gets until the top it's it's oh yeah just looking at a small rendering of it makes people unhappy but they want to build that thing just to unnerve and alienate people in perpetuity just because they can yeah i think that's kind of the the since nobody is on the street anymore i think that's the issue issue, right? That used to be that you were on the street. So like, if you were building a building, the first thing you thought about was, well, what's going to happen on the street? And everybody made fun of years and years ago. I remember when I was taking architecture classes in college and Philip Johnson built the AT&T building, which is then called the AT yes um then was the sony building you know it's just a big question mark building on madison avenue and people made fun of it because it had a little chippendale notch in the top and looked like a you know and a big chippendale like a high boy they call a high boy i think um but what they forgot was that what the benefit of that building what made that building so great was that the people on the street it it it created a little environment on the street

uh there were little stores on the street. It wasn't this sort of glass tower rising right from the sidewalk. As you walked past it, you know, at eye height, it felt like it continued Madison Avenue. And it was really pleasant to be a person at the foot of that building, which is not the same, you can say, a lot of these kind of modernist uh or even post-modernist like glass and steel mirror buildings where you don't really i was walking up uh um sixth avenue uh yesterday and the sun was just perfectly positioned so that it was reflecting off of um i think it's like the hbo building or something on um 43rd street and the reflection was so powerful that i really felt like it was under a sun lamp it was stronger than it would be on standing in the sun and i think this is just kind of very odd behavior they're very

repellent like in this giant ray coming off this this cancer causing ray coming off of a company there's a there's a there's a building in London actually, that is known to melt cars because the reflection is so severe. But what you're talking about, the Philip Johnson building and the rest of them, I wouldn't suppose modern mirrored glass skyscrapers are the same thing, right? The mirrored glass is late modernism.

Postmodernism said, we're going to play with all these shapes and do things like Philip Johnson did. And we're, we're going to, we're going to have something. We're going to have a shop on the street. Imagine that.

Because prior to that, your old Mad Men era. No, no, no. We would give you a plaza. Here is a plaza with a piece of meaningless modern art sitting in the middle of it. Like something like an excrescence dropped by some drowsy dinosaur. And then we're going to have some some fountains that will play and then you will walk across this empty plaza into this building and then ascend upwards after you pass through the travertine marbled uh you know lobby no it's i mean one of

those is great but a city full of them is just a is a place full of empty places washington dc avoided that which is odd because it's not you know it's not the most urbanistic town but lately high restrictions if you've been to dina right which has a tendency to compress the app the you know the economic activity you had stuff going on a ground level a lot more and now for example you've got joe mansion saying i'm getting out of this building and maybe going across the street to the others what do you think about what do you think about the possibility of that because we all know that joe mansion is the most evil man in the world who's going to destroy humanity. Yeah, well, I think, too, that one is that Joe Manchin will probably get anything he wants now. I mean, were I Joe Manchin, I'd be making a list of things.

I want ICE delivery. I want Chuck Schumer to deliver me ice every day uh i want somebody i want i want somebody somebody from the like the progressive caucus in the house to come and and collect and return my dry cleaning i mean the guy can get anything he wants um but the second thing i think about joe manchin which is i had a long conversation about him last night with some people who i think actually know him um is that he he's he's not he's only confusing to people if you're insane. If you're not insane, if you're a non-insane person, he makes total sense. He's completely fathomable. He's a West Virginia senator.

In the great tradition of West Virginia senators, we already had one of those, and it was Robert Byrd. And he's not that different than Robert Bybert bird kind of a mildly conservative democrat a partisan at some points a lot less partisan than robert bird what was but uh these are not you don't have to decode him now kristen cinema i think is slightly different but you don't have to decode joe mansion um and i think that was that's a sign that we are in a very weird place politically where where a extremely traditional centrist, moderate, quasi-Southern. West Virginia is not really Southern, but kind of Southern.

Southern Democrat senator is just this baffling figure for people. What on earth could he be? My God, not even read a history book, read a newspaper from 1985. That's who he is. But he's supposed to be, his type is supposed to be gone. I know. They were supposed to have won. By getting rid of Trump, they got rid of all things that are emanations of Trump

and Manchin with his hillbillies and his toothless meth addicts in the haulers and coal, for God's sakes. That's just bygone stuff that shouldn't happen. And I, I even think it's hilarious that cinema is anathema to them now, given that she's probably the only one who's on the vanguard of all these preference shifting ideas, which are supposed to be everybody's new future and the rest of it.

How can she, how can she turn on us? She should know she has fluid sexual preferences. She ought to be able to be in favor of high speed rail. I mean, so weird. It's like, that's how it works that's it i have to just say so yesterday i did um i had a super new york day i went i did uh gutfeld uh in the late in the early evening and then i ran off to uh this book party that a friend of mine was throwing for this for a wonderful book by uh andrea elliott who's a new york Times writer. And she wrote this book called Invisible Child.

And the minute I walked in, they kind of ran up to me and they're like, we really want you to read this book. And she was telling me about the book. And the book is really heartbreaking, interesting. And she sort of embeds herself in a family in New York City, sort of falling apart and coming back together. And I don't know. She did not say this to me but uh it was implied later around that there has been some pushback from progressives about this book um and you know she kind of

implied you know what she just had to tell the truth and say what was going on in real life and so i would say that that while it is uh i understand people when they hear oh this book's written by a new york times writer not interested uh i know what it's going to be yeah this one i think i mean i haven't really finished it yet i just got it last night um this one i think is going to be different and so i i feel like what we need to look at is as certainly people on the center right but mostly on the right are green shoots right? You know, Peter's not here to interrupt us. I think we need to look for signs of hope. And this is one of them.

And I think another one might be Joe Manchin's incredible wish list, his Amazon wish list, which will all come true. And I think for some but for those who love american politics and actually think that even when we think it's broken it's working that's what working is um uh these are this is good times this is autumn the leaves are falling it's beautiful this is we have a vaccine we should be celebrating if no one else will come to this party uh we should come to this party. Well, I am, but I have to ask you about this book.

Are you saying that there's pushback about this book from where? From the left, I think. Again, I'm talking out of turn. I really don't know because I haven't read it, and it was all elliptical. You know the kind of thing people say in parties. But the eagerness at a Manhattan book party, which I was introduced and spoken to and talked to, having just come from Fox News, suggests to me that I hate doing this. But if the progressive left has got a problem with this book, I want to read it. hope for rob he's being invited to more yeah new york is so depopulated that they're actually saying we're gonna have to get some conservatives in here i'll tell you this there

was something i saw on twitter the other day and again i saw this on twitter bear me out it was a a piece i believe for the new yorker discussing how someone had written a novel. Uh-oh. Because if you're going to do that, you have to stay in your lane, right? You can't begin to presume the experiences of others. So she wrote a novel about a woman who had masqueraded as a man, I believe, in the 19th century in order to go to medical school. And I think there are actual examples of this, but she wrote a fictionalized version of it. It immediately got pushback from the noisy.003% in the company who said that it was an objectionable book because the person, the author, had not made the woman explicitly transgender. In other words, it wasn't about that, even though it wasn't about that any more than me going to a Halloween party dressed as Peter Korten from Fritz Lang's M means that I am then a homicidal.

That's a deep cut, my friend. That was a nice deep cut. In fact, using the character's name was pretty amazing. Well, I don't think they ever actually named him Peter Korten, but it was based on Peter Korten. Still, a deeper cut of it yeah i would actually say like so the since we're talking about this wokeness thing that um because i know we haven't i don't think we talked about the chapelle uh dave chapelle special which is probably boring that's what okay okay but i know we couldn't talk about it with peter here because peter wouldn't see it or wouldn't watch it or wouldn't know how to turn netflix on or would be

um i mean it is some there's some salty language james that's good logic wouldn't know how to turn netflix on or would be um i mean it is some there's some salty language james that's good lord you couldn't know how to turn well you know what i mean going the founders away well you know what i mean i'm sure he's got a little bit catty he calls the genius bar when he has to turn netflix on or one of his kids which is sort of the same thing um all the friskies for the little fellow here okay go i mean what wait what podcast is this 500 is 567 is that what it is okay so it's this there there are 566 times that you and i have been here well peter's been mouth i can't i can't hear anything wait you know what i mean so i don't think i'm i don't think i'm out of line here i i would say so the

the thing about the chapelle show and i i said this last night, and I think because it suddenly occurred to me last night, I got a very funny text from a friend of mine who is doing work, has a project at Netflix. He said, you know, Netflix employees, some Netflix employees, some tiny, tiny fraction of them staged a walkout right and he said um uh he couldn't get uh he was had a meeting with one of the executives and he couldn't because she had uh stayed she's been part of the walkout but she works at home so she just walked out of her house i guess to the sidewalk and stood there for a little bit in protest like he's like well why can't you just bring your phone out there like it is we're just going to be talking anyway um but i would say that i i think this is true is that i mean if you haven't seen it look the the controversy

is that he said uh unkind or sharp or dismissive or insulting things about uh trans people and um i i don't know i guess you could say that i think insulting you could definitely say but that's you know it's comedy that's okay um but he told a story kind of a moving story about a friend of his young aspiring comedian i don't think she was young aspiring trans comedian trans female and that yeah she was his friend and they were worked together and i won't give it away as a very sort of tragic ending. That's very moving when he tells it. And I said last night, and I really think this is true.

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has you covered. Visit Innovate today. Innovate, the IT solutions people. He's cheering this, not just even being indifferent to it. He told a powerful story about a specific person, and that is how you actually move people, and that's how you move your movement. It's like you get people to understand that there's a story uh it isn't just um a bunch of black people arguing about demanding civil rights it's rosa parks this woman was they made her sit in the back of the bus that's how you that's how you move people and so it's so ass backwards or bass backwards i guess you should say the idea that this is something

you want to suppress whereas this is actually something you should celebrate. So I find it another sign that the progressive left has gone bananas. They don't even take yes for an answer. And that strikes everybody else as complete bizarre behavior, because if you watch the Chappelle thing,

when he makes fun of somebody, when he makes fun of somebody, when he's saying, I'm looking out for the knuckles and the Adam's apples, yeah, it's an insult. But if you laugh at the joke that he makes fun of somebody, when he makes fun of somebody, when he's saying, I'm looking out for the knuckles and the Adam's apples, yeah, it's an insult. But if you laugh at the joke that he makes about one group, you have to know that your turn at the wheel is coming, and it always will. And that's part of comedy. I mean, you could never, there's a million routines from all the comedians, as opposed to the left doors, that would never be permitted today because they're insufficiently respectful. So Rob's right. I mean, you would think they'd be happy saying, all right, look, we're in the conversation now.

We're being granted humanity by these stories and the rest of us. Oh, the humanity is not his to grant, but maybe people will hear this story and think differently. No, they have to fixate on the one thing which suggests that somebody isn't completely endorsing and clapping and accepting of the whole thing, that there's room to be made for jostling and fiction and the humor that comes from it. When you had the Variety story about the guy who supposedly went and confronted them and swore at them when he was just a genial big walrus of a guy who had his sign destroyed. The Variety piece is so intent on cosseting up to the people that they feel that they absolutely have to get their arms around because otherwise they'll be canceled. The variety was such a piece of dishonesty that they said that the big, big tubby guy was shouting curses when the truth of what that story was.

And the thing that ought to scare everybody and open up their eyes was the nutcase with the tambourine shouting repent repent because the fact that this guy was saying that dave chapelle is funny and has the right to tell stories is harris right and the absolute minority but the more everybody caters suddenly it's the westboro baptist church but it's there that there are the trans right they have all i thought i watched that thing i thought it's kind of funny the guy the poor little guy with a you know big guy he he actually i mean i hate to say this but i for a minute i thought maybe he's trans too because like at a certain point everybody like in most trans events everybody kind of looks trans because they're all you know but the second thing about i say with day chapelle is that like you know he

had a couple of really funny jokes and a couple of really strong positions. Like a very interesting one that I really laughed at was when he made some jokes in the last special and someone came up to him and said, listen, they're after you. And he said, one they or a lot of they, which made me laugh. And then I think a very cutting joke, like Caitlyn Jenner won an award for woman of the year. The first year she was a woman, which was like, yeah, I think it is a little weird. She didn't have to do any of the things that women have to do or put up with any of the things that women have to put up with in order to get the award.

She just had to suddenly declare herself a woman. so she's had this huge career as an athlete and a gold medalist and now she can be woman of the year yeah i mean if i was a feminist or a woman i might be like hey wait a minute wait a minute right especially if you're somebody who you know in middle age has been dealing with raising the kids and the rest of it, the housework, and you're just tired in a way that women seem to be tired and men don't. Speaking of which, well, as we age, the fatigue and the lack of endurance we feel can't always be fixed with more and more caffeine. Oh, you love the jolt, but it doesn't work. So we're introducing a new way to start your day.

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right now, you can get a free 30-day supply with your first purchase of superbeats.com slash ricochet. That's 30-day supply, free with your first purchase. That's superbeats.com slash ricochet. We thank Human N and their Super Beats for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome back to the podcast, Matthew Cononetti, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. And he was the founding editor and editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon, contributing editor at National Review, hurrah, and a columnist for Commentary Magazine. And his writing has appeared in countless, innumerable, infinite numbers of other publications.

Thanks for joining us here, Matt, today. So your latest piece, give us a pre-season of what it's about, and then I can pretend to have read it, and I can ask you piercing questions and make it sound like I have an insight. Well, look, hi guys. I have two pieces out there at the moment.

One's in commentary it's all about the kind of pathetic excuses and lame spin the biden administration is putting out there to um kind of evade the reality of the crises they're facing you know saying that um the border crisis isn't a crisis or that inflation is temporary or that afghanistan was a fantastic success or that the three and a half trillion dollar build back better bill actually cost zero dollars that's one piece i have out there and then today in the free beacon uh freebeacon.com i have my weekly column it shows up in national review over the weekend right i kind of say you know one of the problems in america today is it we used to have one counterculture uh the kind of the the hippie counterculture of the problems in America today is we used to have one counterculture, uh,

the kind of the, the hippie counterculture of the 1960s. And now we have two, we have, we have a left counterculture, the woke counterculture, but we also have the counterculture of the right kind of the, uh,

far, far right. Maga, January six, you know, Hugo Chavez, uh, stole the machines,

um, that type of counterculture. Victor Orban is a model for American democracy. And so this is a unique situation. And the people who actually like mainstream America, or the parts of it they don't like, they think it can be reformed or improved or ameliorated. We need to think seriously about how we face not one, but two countercultures. Well, let me stop you right there. Let's compare the influence of the far right counterculture to the influence of the far left. Can you see anybody at Netflix ever issuing an

apology, anybody at the Ford Foundation or NBC or any one of the institutions issuing an apology to the far right? Because somebody on Twitter came up with a grievous offense as opposed to the far left, which seems to dominate and shape the way we talk now when a small percentage said that they are infuriated. Yeah, well, I mean, there are a variety of institutions in America, and some of them are dominated by the left counterculture. And so what you're discussing about Netflix and such, I mean, it's ridiculous and awful. There are plenty of institutions, mainly political ones, that are dominated by the right counterculture. And so we have this weird situation where both the right and the left think that they're losing. The left thinks that they're losing politically and that democracy is on the verge of collapse.

The right thinks they're losing culturally in that America society is on the verge of collapse. What I'm trying to say is that we need to find some ground or hold on to some ground where neither of those things can happen. And that means that means opposing the worst excesses of both the left and the right. I agree. But what are those right wing institutions? Sorry, Rob, I'm just curious. I mean, I see much more power, cultural power concentrated in the left than i do possibly on the right well the thing about the political institutions that are you know are going through the uh farcical audits of the 2020 results of the state level um think about um uh republican governors intruding on the private sector and local control to fundamental fundamentally conservative concepts to ban um vaccine or mask mandates um think about um Think about the quackery that's spreading on

social media on the right when it comes to how to approach COVID, the idea that somehow COVID is something you want to catch or that it's good to die from COVID. There's an article in The Federalist that said uh i welcome you know if you die from covet that's we have as christians we just have to accept that's the way it is that that was federalist um so i i think you can look at conservative institutions they're not as many of them right uh as our left institutions but of course that's always been the case um and so it's navigating between the two is the challenge of of our time and what happened though i mean you know it used to be i mean i'm not i'm selling an old man here but it used to be like you could you could reliably you could

the the lines were um certainly when i was in college and after the everything about america is bad from the left it's bad the history's bad the present's bad the future's going to be bad because the company corporations are going to take over and watch the oceans rise uh everything's bad uh and then conservatives moderates even were like well i mean oh yeah some things were not great and then but everything's pretty good and like it's uh well the future's really bright and uh you know they people kind of thought oh you know the conservatives is like the rose I mean, yeah, some things were not great, but everything's pretty good, and the future's really bright. And people kind of thought, oh, the conservatives, the Rose, everybody complained. Reagan saw things through Rose-tinted glasses.

No liberal has ever seen anything through Rose-tinted glasses. And I guess my concern is that now, I think looking at things with Rose-tinted glasses is often more accurate than looking at things with your you know your ideological spectacles on and i mean i say this all the time and i'm gonna say it to you because i want to hear you answer and tell me if i'm full of it um why why on the right why aren't we celebrating this vaccine as a triumph of free market american know-how capitalism it you know the let's be honest the vaccine was invented in a lab in China and it was solved and mitigated by American entrepreneurial capitalism in New Jersey, big pharma. And there should be a ticker tape parade

and all the big pharma executives should be going down Broadway and we should be throwing confetti on them like they were the heroes that they are. And the right is sort of like, oh, we don't know what to do. I have a friend of mine who posits this horrible, horrible, very reductive, but interesting suggestion. Chinese virus quashed by American scientific know-how and capitalism. America.

The problem is a lot of Republicans don't like science. And Democrats don't like America. So we'll... You were bringing a tear to my eye with that. That was very inspiring. Why can't we? What's the problem? Aren't we supposed to be the ones who say, you know what?

Leave it to Pete. This is fine. This is is actually no one's suggesting we won't have a virus but man so yeah i think there are a few things that work i mean one is just rank partisanship right i mean if trump was in office he'd be taking credit for the vaccine and uh you'd have the kamala harris's of the world as she kind of telegraphed before the election saying i don't know it's a trump vaccine i don't know if i want to take it. So it is just rank. There is just on one level is just partisanship, but there are some other things happening. One of them is the anti-elitism that has always been an undercurrent on the American right and American conservatism. And to the degree that that conservatism has been

populist. There has been a suspicion of expert authority, often justified, a suspicion of elites, often justified, and that's carried over into the coronavirus. And you know what? Fauci and Walensky have given the right plenty to be skeptical about their guidance has gone back and forth uh you see um cases of hypocrisy regarding masks and somehow that um bleeds over into suspicion of uh the vaccine and the third thing that's happening is changing media environments you know that there is an anti-vax movement that was already pretty prevalent in the united states prior to the coronavirus. But it seems to have taken... That was mostly from the left, I got to say.

Yes, it was, exactly. But it seems to have kind of reached out and adopted parts of the right in the past year, or since we've had the vaccine, since January. And I think that's a function of um one uh social media uh you know things travel uh virally now um it's hard to combat uh mis mistruths uh and two you know to to make your name these days you don't need a broad audience you need a deep audience and the anti-vax movement uh right and left that's a deep they really care about two three million people on your side is a lot in america right now exactly that and so that i think that's

power all right so um just my politics for a minute but i'm sorry james you want to jump jump well just this when you mentioned the distrust of the elite yeah that's true but not all i mean the elite that we seem to be distrusting are the bureaucratic, technocratic elements that have sort of somehow got to a position of power and authority. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, guys who did, made things, built things, created things. We have no trouble giving a tip of the hat to those elites. It's the ones who seem to have inherited this institutional power over lives that we're supposed to respect. It's a good thing that we're distrustful of the entire managerial technocrat. 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. Looking for reliable IT solutions for your business?

At Innovate, we are the IT solutions people for businesses across Ireland. From network security to cloud productivity, we handle it all. Installing, managing, supporting and reporting on your entire IT and telecoms environment so you can focus on what really matters, growing your business. Whether it's communications or security, Innovate has you covered. Visit Innovate today. Innovate. The IT solutions people. Take your business international. Enterprise Europe Network is the world's largest network providing free support and advice to SMEs with global ambitions.

With over 450 partner organisations 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. Class, isn't it? Out with them. Find us somebody competent. If we've seen anything in the last year, it's that our institutions are not particularly competent and seem to be making stuff as they're going along. I think that's true, but I also think that for some parts of the right, some parts of the Trumpy right, national populist right, whatever you want to call it, that suspicion of elites carries over into the business sector as well and um and the corporate sector as well and everybody i saw some tweet from from that corner of the right-wing universe that's referred to the

woke science corporate regime we live under so you know okay whoa you know right but you know but they're not in congress they're not in congress they're not in government they're not they're not right now in a position to do anything whereas distrust of the corporate elite and a desire to take all of their property and transfer it to government is in congress it is aoc it is the new left it's got far more juice it seems than somebody running on twitter right yeah i don't think that they think that they necessarily have a lot of juice right now when you look when you look at what's happening in congress but um and and you know the the republicans did run the the the white house

just a year ago and there too the suspicion weirdly the suspicion of elites was coming from the actual elite uh in charge um and also they won i mean they won you get the solution of that is to win um so but can i just talk about politics for a minute the winning part um when uh uh when democrats take over all my republican friends but democrats take over the house the senate the one thing they say is don't worry they'll overstep and then we'll get them back right they'll overstep and the one thing they say is don't worry they'll overstep and then we'll get them back right they'll overstep and the one thing my democrat friends always say when probably in state covers they're gonna they're gonna go too far and we'll get the house back in the senate back and i always kind of roll my eyes but so far that is the strategy right the strategy for each party

is to let the other party be itself for a while, for two years, and do nothing or do something or say something, and then take it back. The fundamental given, philosophical given, is that the other side's nuts, and that their opinion is that, yeah, that other side is nuts, and they're both right. It does seem like this is a market failure. Ideologically, politically does the current american politics suggest that milton friedman's wrong that the market doesn't work does the market work the uh the political market is producing um unstable majorities and uh what and it's it's not working for i think americans who are independents or, you know, the fabled suburban moderates that everyone's talking about. For this reason, you know, since 1992, we've been extremely closely divided as a nation.

And those differences are, you know, I mean, they go to not only the ways in which we think, but now where we how we what level of education we've attained and uh and because of the narrow um band within which elections are decided uh you know you you'll get a majority coming in who always again and again mistake their electoral victory for an ideological right i mean but it's such a strange thing at no point in american politics have you ever has that ever occurred it's always been you you now have the right to sit at the table and deal you now have the right to make a sausage that's got slightly more of your stuff in it than the other guy's stuff but you never no one's ever no one ever you don't win in american politics you just get a slightly louder megaphone but you don't win in American politics. You just get a slightly louder megaphone. But you don't win.

The design is that now you have a ticket into the octagon. That's about it. Why is that so hard for people to sort of... Well, it's because I think, you know, the political class do believe in the idea of winning and that you know uh they're gonna um they have the answers to to the the problems facing the country they don't have to compromise we'll get in we'll impose our agenda and this will solve things the the bulk of the country though is not ideological at all. They don't think like that.

And so they just happen to vote, you know, for the candidate for what won the party. That's why we have like the candidate who they think is better. And then all of a sudden they see them do this ideological stuff that they don't like. And they they send them out. I mean, you're younger than me, but for most of my younger up till I, I think, really up until college, I think, there was a Speaker of the House. There was one Speaker of the House. There was that guy, and he was there before Reagan, and I think he was there after Reagan. Maybe not. I can't remember when he died.

But he was there. He was the Speaker of the House. He was another executive in the government it felt like and now i don't know how i mean i can keep trying i tried to make i was on a walk yesterday i was trying to add them all up and like i can't even remember because pelosi was twice or three times but like like back and forth and back and forth and back and forth this is the volatility in american politics seems to be suggesting that the voters are trying to get the attention of their political the voters are trying to have a conversation with you with politicians and the politicians are not doing it because they kind of think if we're if we got two years this is what

this is the argument behind build build back better right let's do it all now let's do it all fast let's get it all done before we're fired right well that's actually the worst possible outcome which is to get to the point where you think well you know screw the voters we're gonna lose anyway so well the democrats have been acting like it i mean i think you i think there is something to the way that biden kind of sees his his position as uh well at most i'm going to have four years really with this congress i'm going to have two so let's try to do whatever we can um that that is bad because you're not responsive to the voters and that just that just creates this cycle that i'm discussing about uh anti-elitism

suspicion of authority often healthy impulses but then but can often also be radicalized uh and and and so you you're in this doom loop um when i think what's important is i just wish that um candidates would listen less to a social media be the interest groups though they're the interest groups are important, no doubt. But they need to listen more to see which is the middle. And the incentive structure is not aligned for that to happen. Okay, speaking of the middle, Virginia. Right now, depending on what side you're on and who wins, it's a bellwether state, right? So if Youngkin wins, Republicans are going to say, it's a bellwether state. This is the indication and if uh terry mccullough wins the democrats i see our agenda still is popular

um for some reason virginia just became important at a certain point but it's important now so it says something right um are the youngkin supporters the republican child the republican candidate are they are they delusional in thinking that he really could easily win? Or not easily, but he could win. Or is it one more of these cases where, you know what, it's Virginia, McAuliffe's got an organization there, he's going to overcome his recent missteps and he'll be the governor. What's your sense of that? Well, he's definitely not overcoming his missteps. and he'll be the governor. What's your sense of that?

Well, he's definitely not overcoming his missteps. McAuliffe does not look like the same Terry McAuliffe who won the gubernatorial race in 2013. No, I think Youngkin has a shot. I think this is a toss-up election. And why does he have a shot? Well, one is his opponent. McAuliffe is a retread. He's not forward-looking. He's backward-looking.

And he's approaching this race with a sense of entitlement. Like, you know, of course you have to elect me governor so I can run for president in 2024. Right? Voters don't like that. Another reason is the the education issue that seemed clearly right that did that turn the it's huge yes i think the comment that mccullough made in the september 28th debate where he said offhandedly i don't think parents should have a role in what teachers teach that you know what i that that may have been his campaign room watch this debate he said he's been like oh man oh i mean it's a bit it's a bit elitist yeah and he shrugged it off at first but then you know he's

now unleashed this new 60 second spot uh where he's talking direct to the camera and he's saying i want you to hear it from me because glenn yunkin took my words out of context you can't take the words out of context it's a video record you it's on tape uh so so i think education uh is is helping youngkin uh the third thing represents something else right doesn't it doesn't isn't it emblematic of something it represents the kind of the the degree of uh alienation of kind of the democratic uh woke elite from like as i've been saying ordinary people who think that you know students go to learn the basics and not uh that they should feel shame uh depending on the color of their skin or that uh they should be re-educated into the niceties of transgenderism so yeah that it does stand in for

something and finally i'd say the third thing is voters are tired um that um that they people you know they in virginia especially biden won virginia by about 10 points they they moved on moss to uh defeat trump and now they're being asked again to go up against to to this guy glenn yunkin who is not trump who seems you know friendly uh is running a positive campaign and it's not it's not scary so it's hard it's hard for them to be motivated and the last time republicans won statewide in virginia was bob mcdonnell in 2009 it was the same thing there was was a huge drop off among Democrats and in northern Virginia between the Obama election and the O'Donnell election. And I think something might happen this year, too. Well, we'll see where that middle resides.

I mean, you said we have to appeal to the middle. You're absolutely right. But what defines the middle keeps shifting and it keeps moving ever and ever leftwards. I had a conversation with a mayoral candidate here in Minneapolisneapolis where public safety is big big thing on the ballot we're trying to figure out whether or not to completely reconfigure our police force and crime is through the roof the carjackers the murders it's awful he was telling me that his plans to increase public safety which involved more police and involved more support of the police but he prefaced everything by reassuring me that he voted for Elizabeth Warren.

At which point I wanted to do the old Bugs Bunny thing. You know, he don't know me very well, do he? Because he thought that because I worked for the newspaper, obviously, I was going to come marching out singing the Bernie and the Elizabeth Warren songs. That isn't the case. He had to reassure the moderate Minnesotans that he's a confiscatory status leftist i mean so that's where right the middle has moved over here i mean i was just gonna i just gonna say like we we know we we mentioned a passing washington free beacon you guys are incredible stuff really great like expose i don't mean i just want to remind everybody

that uh uh for your daily jolt of you know i don't know red meat is not the right word what what like it's a it's a fun interesting exciting writing reporting from a different perspective but uh uh what's coming up do you want to just uh ending you're really excited you know i uh i i think uh the writer aaron sabarium is a young writer he's been doing he's been covering basically the woke beat for free beacon and he really broke this story this incredible story out of yale law school about a student getting a discipline for um for literally a party invitation he sent out. And it's gotten a lot of coverage. The Atlantic just wrote a follow-up.

The Yale Law School has kind of been twisted into pretzels because of the free beacon reporting. So I'm excited about that story. And I think there'll be more to come like that. We also had another good scoop by a writer named Chuck Ross that basically showed that the Biden administration, the white house knew about that ridiculous letter that merrick garland uh sent out saying that the justice department would uh you know investigate all all the security risks uh to um to the local school boards and school officials um and uh that just shows that

there's some political coordination going on. Seemingly, you know, the independent just the supposedly independent Justice Department and the Biden all those security risks, including those awful parents who found out what the school. You know, the assault. Yes. Yeah. Or the assault in Loudoun County. That's incredible. NPR NPR did a story on this, on the rising threat of violence at school board meetings. And they talked about how the Proud Boys were lending assistance to parents. And it made it sound as if there's this network of Proud Boys out there who's just, you know, like a spider web made of iron. You know, I don't really see the Proud Boys as the kind of guys sitting down and saying, how can we establish a nationwide system for disseminating information about correct educational policies? No. What it is is a few of them show up because they don't like the mask and the vaccines, and they rant and they rape.

But NPR sort of made it sound as if the Proud Boys. January 6th. You know, are cadre-like, like the old Communist Party and their discipline and order have linked together. Isn't it just a case? Again, but wait a minute, Rob. I mean, this goes with Biden saying that the greatest threat the nation has is domestic white terrorism, right? That's the biggest terrorist threat that we face, which is preposterous but again it makes it wants to elevate the the january 6th crowd into this existential threat which seems a bit so i let me you have another

minute i'm gonna i'm gonna i guess 50 000 foot project yourself into 10 15 years from now um how transformative in all of its ways cultural cultural ways, the way we think about, I mean, one of the things that's happening in school boards is that parents are home and they're watching, they're actually listening to school. They're listening to all that stuff. How transformative do you think COVID,

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Innovate, the it solutions people gonna be is it is it at the world war ii level because i think it's at the world war ii level of cultural and national change what do you think yeah i wrote something for politico at the outset of the pandemic where i said it's a paradigm shift and we're going to be living with the consequences of COVID for a long time to come. And, you know, six months later or so, I was thinking, oh, maybe I was wrong. But, you know, as we go into the second and third year of the pandemic and people are still wearing masks and the CDC is still exercising authority saying, well, even if you're're vaccinated you have to wear masks and um the the not only the politics of it but also the effects on the global economy right to the degree that the supply chain uh shortages are causing are contributing to rather the inflation um the political fallout

with our relationship with china now i i've always thought it it accelerated a lot of things that were happening and um and we as long as we don't come to the point where we finally accept the fact that it's not going away and that if you're vaccinated you're going to survive the disease so you should get vaccinated so hence let's get back to life as as we lived it before. Until we reach that point, the virus is just going to wreak havoc on our society, our politics, and our economy. Ah, but there were people who don't want to get back to the way it was before.

It was either wasteful, it was consumerist, it was capitalistic, it was on stolen land. And we had all the people who had to go to the office who now are saying, I like to stay at home. That's going to happen. And it's the rise of the introvert and the laptop class. Matt, I've got to thank you for wearing a tie to this, because usually we don't see people who actually dress like an adult. For you guys, I had to.

So we appreciate it. Matt Contenetti, you can catch him all over the place. Check the links at Ricochet.com. Washington Free Beacon. And thanks for joining us. We'll talk to you down the road. One of the things, of course, that people miss about the pandemic is going to stand in line at the post office, right? No, I don't think so. If you're putting in a lot of time at your small business, you do not want to spend a lot of time at the post office.

The lines are long, and you could be doing other stuff. You've always got other stuff to do if you've got a small business, right? There's nothing more valuable than your time. So why would you waste it on a trip to the post office when you don't have to, when there is stamps.com? Stamps.com makes it easy to mail and ship right from your computer. Since 1998, early days of the internet, they've been on this thing for a long time, haven't they? Stamps.com has been an indispensable tool for nearly 1 million businesses. Stamps.com brings the services of the U.S. Postal Service

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trial plus free postage and a digital scale. What a deal. And there's no long-term commitments or contracts either. It's great. Go to stamps.com. Click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in Ricochet to get four-week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. We thank stamps.com for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Stamps.com, promo code Ricochet. And now we welcome to the podcast Nathan Hardin, education editor for Real Clear Politics. He's a musician, he's a writer, and a commentator on politics and culture. And the author of 2012's Sex and God at Yale, Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad. Follow him on Twitter if you would like, at Nathan Hardin.

Hey, welcome to the podcast. Good to be here. So, start with your book came out and, you know, look back at 2012, aside from all the worrying about the Mayan and or the Aztec predictions at the end of the world, it kind of looks like a hell of a lot of days right now. What were you seeing on campus back then that made you sound the alarm and has it gotten worse? Spoiler, but it's gotten worse. Yes, in a word. So, you know, it's very interesting. Yes, in a word. So, you know, it's very interesting.

It's been almost 10 years now since Sex and God of Yale came out. And, you know, it was a pre-Me Too era. sort of wild porn stars on campus things that were going on uh then uh which seems so out of place at this elite institution would probably not pass muster um today today on the other hand uh the kind of censorship overall the sense that uh you know we're walking on constant eggshells with every different identity uh group and what we can and can't say um you know the ability of a guy for instance like dave chapelle to to visit a place like yale is probably much more limited than what it was uh so yes in that sense uh i think the climate on on campus we all sense, has gotten much more precarious when it comes to viewpoint diversity and free speech. Right. In 2012, compared to today, it's like going to a weekend at Nero's Villa.

Now, it seems like the anti-sex league from 1984 has taken over, where supposedly everything's sex positive and everybody's all great with this new kaleidoscopic set of options but nobody should do anything about it because there might be harm there might be lack of consent there might be misgenerated all the rest of it i i can't think of a generation that considers itself to be so in tune truly with the dionysian nature of life and yet does absolutely nothing about it except scurry back to the little cubbyholes and perform some onanistic acts. That's a picture right there. So Nathan, you're the education editor

for Real Clear Politics. And you guys just have a new kind of survey. Yeah, it's really cool. We did this in partnership with the people at fire the foundation for individual individual rights and education um great uh first amendment group and it's the largest uh survey on the topic of free speech that's ever been conducted over 37 37,000 students across 159 colleges. And really, this is data-driven. We've obviously heard all the anecdotes about speakers being canceled or shouted down, but we wanted to put some hard data behind this. So these rankings that we came up with, this is sort of the First Amendment version of the U.S. News

and World Report rankings, you can actually see where you're more likely to be permitted to speak your mind or where you're more likely to encounter diverse points of view on campus. And it's all, by and large, coming from the students themselves. So we asked them things like, how open are you to having a controversial liberal or conservative speaker on campus? We took that as a data point. How comfortable do you feel disagreeing with your professor? All that into a numerical score that we use that we hope students and parents will go to and actually use as a piece of information when they're ranked by university so you you ranked by colleges but also some disturbing like poll number you know responses for me anyway um 80 say they self-censor 80 i mean i yeah at least some of the time and i guess i would say is like what i've always heard from college kids is that, oh, you know, you see the pictures of the crazy kids.

That's always a small percentage. The rest of us are just going to class. But this poll suggests, the 80% suggests that the rest of them are just going to class and keeping their head down and not raising their hand and simply censoring themselves. Yeah. I think it's important, too, to look at this as a problem that goes beyond our colleges. These students are coming in with a very fearful mindset. It starts in social media. And this is what people like Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt have written about.

This sort of growing fragility of mind uh of the younger generation um where words are now considered harmful words are violence okay yeah they and yet ironically two-thirds say that it is acceptable to shout down and one in four almost one in four say it is acceptable to use actual physical violence to stop unwanted when i read that at first i was like shocked oh my god but then i thought well wait a minute i mean that's not that different from the way it was in 1968 surely what's the difference i thought i asked myself between 1968 and today you said this i i don't think it's the same number yeah you're very close to the same number of undergraduates who think they should be break stuff and sit in and throw Molotov cocktails and riot.

The difference is that in 2021, the faculty and the administration agrees with them. Is there anybody at, I don't know, our alma mater, Yale, say, standing up for the institution of Yale? It seems like everybody at Yale, even the people getting a salary from Yale are ready to tear it down. Well, there's, there's Nicholas Christakis, right. Who famously was the victim of one of these mobs a few years ago. I think there's a growing sense, among you know the sort of old guard liberals at elite institutions that that we're in trouble and you see more of them uh standing up

but a lot of them you know a lot of them frankly are afraid of losing their jobs you know the idea that a tenured professor uh can get fired when we just saw this guy at the university of michigan who's lost his uh who's not teaching anymore because he showed othello right right uh in in class so i don't think not that he showed othello not the james earl jones version he showed the lawrence olivia in right right um you know there's just a growing sense of fear that hey and and jonathan height said this to me a couple years ago i no longer have as interesting of classes i no longer bring up the challenging questions that i might have five or ten years ago because you know i i just can't trust that that's not going to lead to, you know, one of these bias reporting committees and another controversy.

It's not worth it. The students are there to educate the professors now. The students are the red guards who are there to imprint upon their better, their, you know, the old guard that you cannot say this. I mean, the idea somehow, I don't know when you guys went to Yale, I was going to the University of Minnesota in in the 80s the idea so we're about the same age i'm going to walk yes okay then i'm going to walk around campus like this raw flayed nerve in fear of being you know finding a fence somewhere is what it seems to be i mean the the decline of intellectual activity intellectual curiosity cripples all these institutions now you talk about how there's this inertia in the bureaucracy because they don't want to get their lose their job they don't want to you know sacrifice the tenor and the rest of it but they basically kind

of agree with these people they just regard they just think they're a little too far how does this come back does it come back well some people are saying right these institutions are lost other people think no you know i tend to be more of the kind that you can't give up this ground uh without a fight um you have to uh try to resist uh the the spirit of the age which is to um you know to explain to students why free speech is important and i think there's evidence in our rankings, actually, that when the administration stands up and makes free speech a priority, explains to students why having constructive and civil disagreement is important,

it makes a huge impact on how these schools rank. Places like the University of Chicago, who's famous for its Chicago statement on free speech, they send a clear message so that even conservatives who go there, and it's a very liberal institution overall, even conservatives who go there say that they feel relatively comfortable expressing themselves. But if the administration takes a passive attitude, they don't stand up for this. They don't explain to students why it's protected, why it's important. It's not going to be a good picture for this. They don't explain to students why it's protected, why it's important.

It's not going to be a good picture for them. So we think that these rankings also serve as an indicator for those leaders on campus, both professors and administrators, that if you have work to do, here's the evidence of that. Well, I was going to say that part of the problem the problem of course is i mean look it's terrible you can't show um lawrence olivier zethello all that stuff i guess i'm more worried on the chilling effect on science and research right because that ultimately is the you know we'll we'll all be fine if we don't see lawrence olivier zethello that's live you know it's not great it's you know but um well what happens when that you know we're in the middle of a pandemic and there are there's the right way to think about it the wrong way to think about it there's the right way to look at the research on um virus transmission and the wrong

way um and um if you're somehow you're unlucky in science and you have scientific evidence and research and a intellect that says points you to the wrong way officially the culturally wrong way how much trouble you in if you're a tenured professor at a big university and you are saying things about covid that are undeniably true but nobody wants to hear i mean that to me i'm a little bit worried about that than i am about othello yeah there's a there's a client uh climate scientist who was just cancelled at MIT. He was going to give a guest lecture there only because of his views on affirmative action and college admissions. It had nothing to do whatsoever with his views on science or climate change.

That was an alarm. I've seen several well-known liberal writers actually saying, you know, this is a new kind of cancellation. 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. And this actually had nothing to do with- A new kind of, the bad kind of cancellation. This is the bad kind, yes. They're suddenly realizing wow you know they're coming for us too now and and i do think one of the things we may see as that uh you know the various intersectional uh you know uh confederate nations of within progressivism may begin to turn on one another can i just be cynical for a minute just for a second a huge part of

college for a long time has been freedom from parents partying i mean that's what frats are but keg stands right that's been a big part of college been part of the culture of college part of the popular culture understanding of college the other part has been simple careerism you i mean and i don't mean that in a bad way it's a good way you go to college and you learn a thing and then you get and then your parents who didn't do to college wouldn't go to college they don't know the thing then you get to be the lawyer you get to be the scientist at the doctor the lawyer whatever it is right right and then a certain amount of it has been simple prestige credentialing right oh i went to yale right uh so i met people

who now you know are my friends who are powerful right and maybe number four number five was you know i read chaucer i my my brain expanded i'm maybe four or five i'm not criticizing i'm saying that's the way it was so if i'm a parent now and i'm reading about and i read you even your list which it does have some bright spots in it um Why go? Why spend the money? If I had a hundred grand for my kid, can he just like, I don't know, take a lot of class at community college and learn something serious and then travel and then,

and then keep 50 grand to move to a city and get yourself started. I mean, like, why wouldn't you like, what's the, I don't mean what's the idealistic argument for college. What's the practical argument for college in 2021? Well, I think there's a growing suspicion among many people that the cost isn't worth it, partly because they see that it's driven, it's drifting more and more away from that ideal.

Right. That you pointed out um you know and there's there's now a growing sense that there are other pathways you know just this is sort of a triggering thing to say but you can learn to code right uh we just got knocked out twitter sorry that um and right you don't you you know famously uh you can you can become a tech titan uh by dropping out of these elite colleges if you want to follow the zuckerberg gates model so um i think that the the sense of uh it being a safe path to sort of prestige is still very powerful especially these elite institutions.

You know, I certainly participated in that in my own way. So I don't think that it's going away, but I think if you're spending $200,000 for maybe, you know, a kind of mid-tier institution, and you can look at all these other very plausible pathways. If I had a kid who was great with computers and coding, I think I would just tell him, you know, you don't need this. And you raise a great point, too, just about, speaking of technical issues, the science angle. You know, another big issue that I've seen coming up that these political correct, uh, limits on research are, are dangerous is in the area of gender, because we're not allowed to talk about biological sex

differences anymore. This goes to a lot of, of issues in medical research, um, and, and scientific research. So we are getting to that place where, you know, um sort of liberal uh stranglehold on science which is that has kind of been their religion for the last 30 years it's now suspect as well and there's a there's a new right uh religion that superseded that and it comes down to identity politics and yet would you ever go to a doctor who thought that sex differences don't exist? Why would you go to that doctor? I mean, I don't think even the people holding signs at the Netflix trans rally, they'd still rather go to a doctor who understands how the human body works.

You may not believe it. Your doctor may not believe it, but you will be required to say these things in public. Right, Nathan? Isn't that where we're going? I mean, when you mentioned the science, it's not just gender, it's also climate, it's also math, it's also, I mean, if you have institutions that actually entertain for a second somebody who was talking about destroying Western paradigms of mathematics because they regard whatever, because it was a participant in colonialism

and has to be deplatformed or deemphasized. If these institutions go along with this, they deserve everything that they get when it comes to reducing their authority and the authority of those like them. I mean, so maybe it's if it's you know, I hate to say the colleges are lost, but I think it'll take another generation before finally the accreditation means nothing the assumption of call of the assumption of intellectual competence means nothing and people start to use other criteria um and i say that as somebody you know who just wandered around the university of minnesota for seven years and didn't really do it i was on the six-year plan personally we um yeah i have to run but there's so much in the subject. I'm sure we'll have you back again.

So right. Yeah, it's a great study. But put a link to it in the, in the notes here, but also a real clear politics. The education section, real products in general is fantastic, but your section, especially right now is kind of front and center, right? Yeah. Thank you so much, guys. This was great talking to you. Nathan Harden, it's been a pleasure.

You know, here's the deal. You know, when he said learn to code, which is hate speech, it'll get you knocked off Twitter or something. And you think, is there any way around this? Well, there kind of sort of is, but there isn't. What am I talking about?

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express vpn for sponsoring this the ricochet podcast you know uh rob back to college i love how people who are in the process of sort of disparaging the the yale thing uh kind of have to mention that yeah i mean i disparage it anyway by the way i did go to yale I'm a Yale-y. The University of Minnesota, the best... They say it like, I went to Yale. Have you heard of it? Well, that's if they're one of those people who is cursed

by the modern... That awkward inflection thing but also it's more like you know I don't want to say like definitively because that sounds rude like I went to Yale like like I'm making a point I went to Yale like I'm so incredibly

weirdly modest that I don't even know if you know ring a bell you should not say that you should not say that it You should not say that. It is the curse of a generation that does not want to sound as if it believes anything. They're going to have to end it with that. In that sense? I went to Yale.

When I started to note that years ago from guys, I would back off and say, well, wait a minute. Within their context, within their culture, it's a normal way of speaking. But I still have to wonder whether or not it's born of this hesitance to sound as if you're sure. Because that somehow wipes away all the other possibilities of what other people have. You can't be diverse and certain. Anyway, the University of Minnesota where I went has this great metaphor for modern education. It has a mall, a classical mall designed by Cass Gilbert. It's beautiful. Northrop Auditorium with its Roman... Everything's Roman.

It's got the tall columns. Everything's red brick. Well, there were two spots at the end of the mall that they didn't build in the 20s and they filled them in later. One in the 50s still looks like it belongs there. Except the columns are now plastered, they're recessed, but they're fluted and they're still

columns in a sense. It's just a 50s reimagining of the classical ideal. Across from it is Kolthoff Hall, which is this 70s monstrosity. Nobody could have designed anything good in the 70s except for the IDS building, but this one actually takes the portico,

the columns, detaches it from the building, renders it into this stylistic object.'s almost post-modern commentary but at the same time it's still connected to the architectural vernacular of the rest of the mall so even the 70s piece and its rejection of classicism manages to find some connective tissue to the past and what i love about that the thing that i'm not done the thing that they added to the mall at the end when they finally said we got some space let's put something in here was a klingon embassy of busted up plates

inside an aluminum jiffy pop bag by frank gary and it looks it's it's it's a it's a museum that looks like it could be from any planet any culture and it's like It's a Frank Gehry building. It doesn't belong. It doesn't belong. And it was willfully, gleefully put there, I think, because it was such an affront and a statement to the studied, settled classicism of everything there, which is what they are. They want all the prestige that comes from inhabiting that institution, and they want to shatter it at the same time,

make it their own, and pretend that what they've inherited is so anyway no not at all i was just saying that i love about the roman stuff is that um it you know meanwhile the actual ancient rome was sort of governed by crazy lunatic emperors and a variety of like but it represents something right it's supposed to represent um you know classical inquiry and all the best things about it like it there was a time when you if you said i guess the theory is that you you you're not we're not saying ancient rome we're saying the ideals of what those ideals are worth striving for even though we fall short and i feel like a lot of the ideals yeah a lot of times not the not the crazy a lot of times we forget like it's okay to

have an ideal and say okay i'm gonna fall short of it i'm gonna try to it and try to attain it and even if i don't it still doesn't make the ideal bad like i mean i guess what i'm saying is it's okay to have a statue of thomas jefferson in the um new york city uh hall and to take it down because thomas jefferson in your view fell short of his own standards and your standards seems to miss the point of a statue of a person he's supposed to remind you not that um that slavery is a essential institution but remind you that um well i mean free inquiry um you know the the best of us the best of what you can be and i would say the same thing about the roman roman columns they don't remind us to be more like ancient romans they remind us to be more like our idea of ancient

romans which is sort of robo and the idea that the ancient the ideal that the ancient romans had of themselves i mean even at the time where we say oh if only we had those great republic virtues as And the idea that the ancient Romans had of themselves. I mean, even at the time where we say, oh, if only we had those great republic virtues as they did. They were saying to themselves, oh, if only we had those great republic virtues. Those columns weren't Roman, they were Greek. I mean, so it's syncretic, yes. It's idealized, yes. But it's something to believe in. Here in Minnesota, we're having a debate, or maybe we aren't, now that I think about it, about what to do with the Columbus statue.

Columbus statue was pulled down during last year's excessive enthusiasm. It was supposed to be put back up, but it isn't, but nobody knows what to do with it. And that whole iconoclastic, literally, toppling of monuments makes me think back to what Matt was talking about at the beginning of the show. It is not the right-wing counterculture that is doing this. These are not equal elements. The culture that is the most disruptive of the society that we know is not the right-wing culture. I think it's fringy. I think it's obsessed with little details, but it hasn't coalesced into something that took down the statues and burned the streets, burned the buildings, spattered the fields, attacked the White House, for God's sakes. We've forgotten about that attack from Lafayette Park. So I think he's wrong. I think he's wrong

in sort of placing these in equal status as though they are equal threats. We do have two countercultures right now, but I think if you want to talk about a right counterculture that would be the one that actually seeks some sort of return to tradition that isn't based in all the stuff that people talk about when they talk about the far right right i mean do you see this the the argument i have had with people on the right and people on the left as always well they're worse and yeah sure i think i think they are worse because they are everywhere. The right wing is not everywhere. I'm not really part of that, but they're not everywhere.

But that doesn't mean it isn't something to be – I'm certainly concerned about – from the people who generally share my world political view like i'm more concerned that those people i i find i have i differ with them on one big issue that is really important to them and i don't know why it's important and so there are a whole lot of people who i think like me there's probably a whole lot of people who don't like me who probably a whole lot of people who no longer listen to this podcast there are a lot of people who quit ricochet because we differed on one crucial aspect and that to me is like it's too bad um what what worries me more is that i feel like the that there's a huge portion of the right that is beginning to act like a huge portion of the left and i already lived through that i went to college

and i went to you know i've been in the culture and i don't i don't really want i don't really want to not have a home and i I sometimes feel like I don't. So I understand. I understand your point. But it's different when it's the people that you – a political science professor at Harvard or Yale cannot disappoint me. An activist with purple hair and a picket sign cannot disappoint me. I already expect to be disappointed i didn't i didn't i was hoping that the people that i could you know see a bunch of people on my side who were still rational and i'm

i sometimes i'm wondering about that but that's just that's my journey and that's not anybody else's right and you know what uh there are people who differ from you who are not rational there are people who look at you and believe that exactly that's very true some of this can be impaired some of this can be empirically proven to be accurate. A lot of this, Matthew Continetti, some of the things that he believes are not rational. In other words, yeah, yeah, it's just I'm a big tent kind of guy. It's the only way we're going to win. What I can't stand is the idea that if you differ on this issue, you must be cast out,

that we absolutely have to concentrate it down to the purest of the pure and anybody who says that is just here's i guess here's what i mean i mean like uh this is not what i mean i want to say two things before we go uh one sort of thing i'll say in a minute and then the other thing i'll say right now um when uh last night late last night i got this new alert uh there was a death on a on a set a movie set alec bald. Alec Baldwin had a prop gun. And as happens every now and then, not that often, it was missed

in some way. It's murky what actually happened. But we know when someone died and someone got really seriously injured because he pulled the trigger of a prop gun. And my instant urge there was just to have an opinion about it and i do have an opinion about it which may make me sound like a jerk but it may not um and one of my and i saw and i've been like okay what what's the protocol here do you get to say your opinion no shut up that's the protocol shut up just

just don't don't don't say anything i think that's the protocol it's just wait i mean i'm you know there'll be a time when i can share my opinion i don't need to share it now about um the problem with gun safety on movie sets being that nobody on movie movie set is anything but guns. That was my opinion. But we can wait on just about all of this stuff. Put yourself back in the mindset of somebody 30, 35 years ago upon reading something in the newspaper. Okay, and they have an opinion about it like you did. They have an instant opinion about

what they just read, but they had, in order to express it, they had to go find a piece of paper. They had to find a of paper they had to find a pen they had to find a pen that worked well it didn't work because they ran out of people so they had to so they had right so they had to go down to the ben franklin and get some ink and then they come back and they sit down then they had to write it and put it in the envelope if they had one and then they had to find a stamp and they had to go somewhere and mail it where it would be ignored and probably not put in the news. Right.

Now, of course, whatever idiocy springs to your tongue and your mind, it can be instantaneously disseminated. And that's one of the reasons everything is poisonous because of it. I too had a variety of thoughts about hearing this about Alec Baldwin, but as with most things, you just sort of, yeah,

I mean, just you get calluses in the sides of your tongue. My view has nothing to do with Alec Baldwin as a person. sides of your tongue my view has nothing to do with this person i don't have it has nothing to do with him it has just to do with movie sets and who's on them and the props but anyway but i do have one opinion i'm happy to share i'm not happy to share i'm not unhappy to share it um but i just just learned it uh that uh the great great comic actor very very funny talented guy peter Scolari, who you might remember. He starred in a TV sitcom called Bosom Buddies, which was not a success, but launched both his career, but also the career of Tom Hanks.

And was funny in a lot of ways. And I remember watching it and feeling like, I was watching it as a kid, thinking, this seems so sophisticated and hilarious. You could not do that show now um then he was on the new heart show the second um bob newhart show for i think it was like seven years maybe uh very very funny and he's been a sort of journeyman actor ever since incredibly talented guy um and i worked with him once we did a reunion show with new heart and judd hirsch and he came and he was so great and so funny uh and a person. And he died. He's 60, 66. I don't know. I don't know. I think it was cancer. But that's sad.

It's sad. He was, he, but he, he was a, I can say this. I don't need to think about it. I don't need 24 hours. He was a great, great actor, really, really talented guy. And I'm, I'm really sorry that, that, really talented guy. And I'm really sorry that he died. And that is how you do it. That is how you express sentiments. I'm learning.

Now, you'd make it anything but a heartfelt salute to somebody in their passing. We now heartfeltly salute everybody who's been listening to the show because we too are passing into the ether, although we will be back next week.

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hold that over your head we actually and we really do need if you're listening and you've been putting it off please don't put it off um especially as we enter uh the fourth quarter of uh 2021 we actually really do need um we really do need need you to join. Come join and disagree with us or agree. In either case, you'll be part of the most fascinating community in the web that you've been looking for ever since they plugged this thing in. I'm James Lalix. Rod Long. Thanks.

And we'll see everybody in the comments. We're the show for going up next week. Next week. 1989, that number. Another summer summer Sound of the funky drummer Music hitting your heart cause I know you got soul Listen if you're missing y'all Swinging while I'm singing Giving what you're getting Knowing what I'm knowing While the black band's sweating In the rhythm I'm rolling

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