The Ricochet Podcast - The Great Debate

Episode Date: June 28, 2019

A very busy week to cover on this week’s show (even though one of our hosts is already vacation mode — and we apologize in advance for his sometimes spotty audio). We’ve got Jonathan V. Last ( his Democratic Power Rankings are a must read) to parse both of the Dem debates, and the NY Post’s Sohrab Ahmari on the crisis on the border and yes, his criticism of David French and a branch of... Source

They say you can't hurry love, but if you don't get to your post office by March 23rd, you'll miss your chance to save €2.50 on a book of 10 heart-shaped love stamps. Now, just €14. Down from €16.50. Perfect for all kinds of love messages like, We're getting hitched. You're still my favourite. Or,

Growl McCree. If you've a couple of fuckles, buy yours now at your local post office or at onpust.com. Send joy. Show growl. Send love. Onpust. For your world. Decencies apply or at OnPost.com. Send joy. Show grow. Send love. OnPost. For your world.

Deeds and fees apply. See OnPost.com. I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston Telephone Directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University. As government expands, liberty contracts. It's funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people

are lining up for food. That's a good thing. First of all, I think you missed his time. Please clap. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lileks. Today we talked to Jonathan Fee last about the debates and so Rob Amari about lots of stuff. So let's have ourselves a July 4th era podcast.

Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast. It just happens to be number 454. I'm James Lileks here with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. Gentlemen, welcome. Thank you, James. This is the first podcast of true summer, isn't it? Calendrical summer or meteorological summer.

I can't remember exactly which. But yes, I hate the day actually when they say, this is when summer begins because that's the day that's the longest. Yes. Every day after that shortens incrementally. So it's the lead up to that day that is the most hopeful and wonderful. Your breast is expansive. And then after this, you just sort of cast an eye to the horizon and realize, hmm, it's darkening 17 seconds earlier than it did last year. But, yes, it's high summer.

It's high, wonderful, hot summer here, muggy and humid in Minnesota, 100 degrees warmer than it was six months ago. It's wonderful to live in a place with such diversity. Yeah, you know, I was tired of that 10 years ago when people said anything that had to do with the weather. Global warming, man. It's catastrophic. Yeah, it's a jape that's outworn. It's a jape that's outworn. It's welcome. I hear a cawing in the background as though some Poe-like creature has a lit on Bob's shoulder to say never more about Trump's chances. No, no.

I'm just sitting outside here on the lovely island of Nantucket. Sitting outside. Oh, on Nantucket. Of course, of course. Summer is here, so Rob is in the islands. Of course. It's sort of hot inside, and also if you position yourself right, you can be both in the shade and within eyesight of the Wi-Fi thing.

Well, there once was a man from Nantucket who loved his Thai food. So in Washington, Rob's closer than we are, so I'm sure you've got your finger right on the throbbing pulse, Rob. Yes. Border bill, it passes in the House. So now we have this Democrat rift, apparently, I'm being told, by those who say, no, we can't pass anything that funds the wrong people. And we can't fund anything, period, if it means there's going to be beds and toothpaste for the children. And by the way, they need beds and toothpaste.

Where does this put them, the Dems? Well, it puts them exactly in kind of the position they were in at both the debates, where it's not a coherent policy. It's a very useful thing to stir up your base. But you have to have a policy about a refugee crisis on the border. And the problem is, is that for the past two and a half years, Donald Trump has been saying there's a refugee crisis on the border. And the Democrats have been saying, no, there's not. And now there is. And it turns out that Donald Trump was right. And there is a refugee crisis on the border. And we don't have a policy for that, really. We have a policy for what happens when people sneak across the border to work at 7-Eleven. We have that policy, which is for a long time just to let them look the other way.

And we don't have a policy for refugees. We don't even know what what what what what's the absolute definition of refugee in our southern border. And what it looks like is that the Democrats don't have a policy other than Trump's wrong about everything. Right. And they don't have a policy for what happens if Trump's right about something. Well, Peter, would you think that it doesn't matter if Trump's right because he was right for the wrong reasons? He was right because of – I mean, he was saying what he said because of racism and xenophobia and the rest of it. So we can discount what he was saying about it before.

We now have a situation that somehow magically occurred. Sweet, generous, never happened before. And we must act from compassion, which of course one wishes to do. You, you, you want, but the end result of compassion is what the end result is that, you know, Rob's right. We, do we have migrants? Do we have asylum seekers? If there are asylum seekers, must they go through the process? Or is the very fact that somebody shows up in America from a place of diminished circumstances make side and on the Republican side to a large extent as well. But I'll come to that in a moment. We've been through two debates in which a total of 20 some Democrats have said we need to provide humanitarian aid into the illegal, the asylum. I won't even get into that. We need to provide aid. And now the Republican controlled Senate passes $4.6 billion, sends it over to the house and enough Democrats voted for this thing to pass it. It's on Trump's desk. He'll sign it and he'll be able. So it's politics from the Democrats point of view, because Trump is now going to be able to say, I did something for the people at the border and you, most Democrats, a majority of Democrats in the House, attempted to oppose it. Suddenly, this gives Trump the moral high ground on this issue.

Point one of two. The second point I'd make on the reading what's happening with the Democrats is this is the first time of which I'm aware in which Speaker Pelosi has lost control of her caucus. She did not produce a unified position among the Democrats. She permitted a serious rift to develop. I say permitted. Maybe it was beyond her control. She's a very shrewd, tough, intelligent person. It must have been beyond her control. But this is the first time when you could look at it and say, oh, the speaker is not in control of her caucus.

Final point is this. Donald Trump struggled to get something less than $4.6 billion to control the border. Couldn't do it. Republicans in the Senate spend 4.6 billion for aid. When Republicans were in control of both the Senate and the House, they would not send Trump anything like what he wanted for controlling the border. Now they're willing – in other words, this exposes the Republican position. Come on. Of course we want humanitarian aid.

But the underlying issue is that Donald Trump is still promising to control the border and his own party still isn't backing him up. It's a mess. It is. And they're not backing him up for what reason? One, because you have the dreaded chamber of commerce people who want to do an endless supply of cheap labor. Secondly, they are unwilling to get on board with something that they believe will be characterized as coming from a position of racism and xenophobia. Or three, I don't get number three. I really don't. I mean, border control is an important thing.

And no matter how many people tell me the majority are from outstaying their visas. The majority come through, the drugs come through, legal point of entries. All of those are valid points. But it seems to me that you need to do something about, well, places where people swim and die that perhaps make these places impenetrable so that people do not risk life and live. And we get 150,000 people a month flooding into the country with no way to handle them. So I don't know what the number three is. There's a possibility. We'll learn within a week or two, I think.

But there's a possibility that Mitch McConnell, master of the Senate that he is, is playing a deep game here. And first he moved to humanitarian aid. And now that Republicans feel they've demonstrated that they have hearts, now maybe he'll be able to help the president in finding funding to control the border, control the border. I don't know, but it's possible that McConnell has thought all along that Trump was going at it in the wrong order. First show you have a heart, then start asserting control of the border. Maybe. That's speculation on my part. Well, but we first have to understand that there's two different things happening.

These are not, I mean, national making across the border on the way out. I'm sorry, Rob, you broke up. You broke up a little bit. These are not what's sneaking across the border? Mexican nationals sneaking across the border. The number of those has gone way, way down in the past 10 years. It's really plummeted. These are people from Central and sometimes probably South America, but mostly Central American. They the Syrian refugees. And we need to have a policy for that. And the problem is everyone would prefer to use those people on the border for their own sort of political ends, right? I mean if you're a Democrat, you love – I mean you absolutely love these pictures.

I mean you love them obviously, but they're incredibly useful to you politically. And if you're in favor of border security, they're also useful because it turns out that we do have a crisis on the border. But it's not a crisis the way we've experienced it in the past. It's really part of what we need to sort of accept. I'm sorry, what do we need to accept?

I get the feeling that there's some terribly sophisticated party going on there with songbirds and dogs and the rest of it. And Rob's in his straw boater and his blue and white striped jacket. And he's a bit distracted, shall we say. And it's a terrible loss when we can't quite hear him because, course costa rica one week martha's vineyard the next we go to rob when we want to know what the ordinary joe is thinking right in the hamptons exactly well it okay so we use the word refugee now they're they're refugees from what from dire economic straits from dysfunctional countries from tfns from places that need to get there and we ought to say from violence in some cases. Right, right. So, and there have been proposals made, I believe, by some of the Democratic

candidates that we are obligated to give foreign aids to the triangle below us in order to help them improve their society. We do give foreign aid, though. We do. And where that money's going and what it's going for is always something of a question, isn't it? Do you fear that ideally the best thing to do would not be give money to them and have them skim it off or appoint relatives and the rest, but actually go down there with American forces and build roads and sanitation systems and the rest of it? But that would be sort of smacking of colonialism and imperialism, wouldn't it? It certainly would. it certainly would it certainly would i had in one of my excuse me in one of my last conversations not this will sound as though i knew the man extremely well i didn't but in in one of my last conversations with steve jobs steve steve who was a genius he really was a genius but what he did not know about politics was pretty substantial and he just claimed to the he said well you know

and this was after of course pixar had bought part of i beg your pardon disney had bought part of pixar so steve knew disney very well and he said well you know the way to handle the problem in central america in mexico is just to put disney in charge and i waited for the smile or i waited for the chuckle and there was none. I said, Steve, what, what? And he said, yeah, I mean, really, they would run the place just beautifully. You can't say that kind of thing. And James, now you're saying, well, that's your corporate Steve Jobs to James Lyle.

Put Disney in charge of Honduras. But that's your corporate dystopia future right there, isn't it? Yes, it is, actually. This nation state is supplanted by corporations, and then we get rollerballed. Yes, yes, indeed. Rob is back. Okay, Rob, good. Yeah.

The problem is you have Central American governments, Central American economies that aren't working. And even though Mexico is sort of a basket case socially, a basket case in terms of crime and punishment, the Mexican economy is actually doing all right, right? And that's resulted in fewer Mexicans trying to cross the border, but more Central Americans kind of making their way through Mexico. Mexicans are happy to have them keep going, right? Just keep moving north. And so what you end up is with a crisis a crisis the border that is some something like a refugee crisis and uh you know we we you know trump has been saying this for i don't know a year a year and a half and he's been right and the fact that just because somebody you don't like said

you know some things are true even if donald trump says they're true and this is definitely true and that's big that's one of the biggest problems they have right now. And the Democrats have it because it's like you have to either solve it, in which case you're going to be cooperating with the president you despise, or you have to sort of let it go, which of course has a short string for your political goals, I think. The problem is that nobody talks about numbers. Everybody wants to let in refugees because it's the humane, compassionate thing to do. But if you have 100,000, do you have a 200,000? Do you have 300,000? The number of people who wish to flee dysfunctional societies and come to

America for perfectly good reasons, as an act of love, if you want to, in the Jeb Bush term, for the people who are doing the best for their families is almost unlimited. Period. Because I don't think that there's any segue that I can make here that would be appropriate because I don't think it possibly is to go from talking about privation to the luxurious society in which we live. So period to that conversation. On the other side of the break, we're going to be talking to somebody, an old friend, John V. Last, about the debates and what he took from them. And there is so very much to take. But first, I have to tell you about something. Food. Are you hungry? Maybe. Perhaps you're listening to this on the way home in your car

and your vehicle, and you're thinking about what you're going to get, and you have to make dinner. Maybe you had a tough day at school, perhaps, and you don't really, there's nothing in the fridge. Maybe you're at the office listening to this. Good for you. But the fact of the matter is you're going to have to eat at some point, right? And you want to eat something good, right? Well, treat yourself to the meal you deserve on demand from your favorite restaurant. That's cool. Don't think

about going someplace out and finding parking and the rest of it. No. Restaurants come to you with DoorDash. DoorDash connects you to all of your favorite restaurants in your city. Ordering is easy. Just use the DoorDash app, chooseash connects you to all of your favorite restaurants in your city. Ordering is easy. Just use the DoorDash app, choose what you want to eat, and your dasher will bring it right to you wherever you happen to be.

And not only is that burger place you love on DoorDash already, but there's over 30... I was going to say 31,000. Silly me. 310,000 other amazing restaurants in the app, too. DoorDash connects you with door-to-door delivery in over 3,300 cities in all 50 states across the United States and Canada, might I add.

Order from your local to-go. Choose your favorite chain like Chipotle or Wendy's or Chick-fil-A. The Cheesecake Factory. Don't worry about dinner. Let dinner come to you with DoorDash. I've used this, and I use it because my favorite Indian restaurant is on DoorDash. And rather than having to pretend that I could cook a good Indian meal myself, I call up the app, I find the place, because it's already there, I've already hit it before, and I order what I ordered before, and it arrives. And we eat, and it's magnificent,

and we sweat, and the house smells like curry, and the bread is fresh, and it's great, and I didn't have to lift a finger and move anywhere. So right now our listeners can get $5 off their first order of $15 or more when you download the DoorDash app and use the promo code Ricochet. In the App Store and enter promo code Ricochet. Again, promo code Ricochet for $5 off your first order from DoorDash. Executive editor of the Bulwark, keen observer of democratic politics, co-host of the well-known niche podcast beloved by dozens of the sub beacon available right here in the Ricochet. And you can follow him on Twitter at JV Last. You watch the debates and boy, it was like watching the people jump to the center like they're going after the last collapsible in the Titanic.

I've never seen such moderation on display. What was your takeaway from two nights of this glory? So many takeaways. The first is that the Democratic National Committee doesn't really understand their job. Did you guys pick up on that, too? They think their job is to be nice to everybody? Yes. Their job is, in fact, actually to win a presidential election, but they

just want to be, Tom Perez just wants to be well-liked. So they included all of these people who have literally a zero chance of becoming the Democratic nominee this year. James, you have a better chance of becoming the Democratic nominee this year than, say, Michael Bennett. Should I start an exploratory committee then? becoming the democratic nominee this year than say uh michael bennett you know should i start an exploratory committee then because i'd love to have a committee that just explores it uh is that a euphemism is that what the kids call it these days uh so yeah it was it was uh it's not good um the first the first night was really not good, much more radical. And the Democrats spent Wednesday night just going after each other and barely mentioning the guy with the 43 percent net approval rating.

Not net. I'm sorry. The 43 percent approval rating net. He's like negative 26 or something like that. He's way upside down. And then last night we actually got a look at four people who I think are plausible presidents. And to my mind, the field is actually winnowed already. All this talk about how early it is, I've been thinking for weeks and weeks and weeks now, is simply wrong. It's actually quite late. And we just haven't actually winnowed yet because it's become so cheap to run a campaign. But we really, we are down to four people. And I

would say if the nominee is not Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders, I will be very, very surprised. I would say it is probably like a one in 100 chance it's not one of them. And so, John, why don't you talk about the big five and include Elizabeth Warren? I thought she's been rising in the polls. I'm just interested in what your thinking is here. Yeah, so you look at what Warren did on Wednesday night where she had the stage to herself. She could have done anything, and she barely treaded water. She just sort of hung there. She does not have a great deal of Native political talent.

And I am one of these guys who believes that native political talent is important. Got it. Maybe it isn't. But it's especially important when you are sharing a lane with somebody. And I just find it hard to believe that there is a huge constituency in the Democratic Party who kind of wants to blow everything up the way she wants to, but doesn't want to blow it all up the way Bernie wants to. Do you know what I'm saying? Like at some point you're in for a pound, right?

Right. And the, the, the, the, now the sliver of people who are like, no, we just want to have a progressive reform of the free market.

I think it's actually pretty, I mean, you either are kind of on board with the free market roughly the way it is, uh, or, or you want to blow it all up. This is why I actually don't discount Bernie as the nominee, even though his numbers have softened. Uh, if the democratic party really finds itself in the mood, uh, I mean, his closing pitch last night was vintage Bernie. It's, it's, you know,

why do things not change? It's an indictment of the democratic party. And he had half the democratic party vote for him last time around. Right. right i i am not convinced that he can't win the nomination okay may i ask one more question i know rob wants to get in i want i'd like to ask one more question if i can because it's a follow-up you just made a point bernie sanders had half the democratic party vote for him last time around joe biden has been around for decades, literally decades. He's shaken hands at least twice with virtually every important Democrat in the country. Kamala Harris, Senator from California, she's got money behind her. She represents the biggest state in the union. And then there's Pete Buttigieg. What has he got aside from native political talent, if anything. His age.

I mean, this is Pete Buttigieg, Mayor Pete. I sort of resent the changing of the pronunciation of his name to fit his logo. Have you noticed that? Like it was Pete Buttigieg and then they turned it to Buttigieg. Anyway, he can't win unless the Democrats decide that they want to turn away from the baby boomers. I mean, for him to win, the election has to be a generational change election. And he is now, with Beto gone, the only person in the field for whom that really works. Certainly the only serious person in the field for whom that really works.

And the only, I just, I can't see him winning. He's not going to win on his ideology. There are other people who are selling what he sells better. He is not going to sell on experience or temperament or charm. The other people who do what he does as well are better. But the corner of the market where he is a monopolist is young. And so if this becomes a children's crusade where we just decide we're finished with the boomers, Biden is a boomer. Bernie is a boomer. Bernie is a boomer. Trump is a boomer.

We don't want any more of these people. We want to get rid of the old man. Give us the damn torch, as Representative Eric Swalwell kept asking. Old man, give me your torch. I deserve it. To which Biden responded, I'm still holding on to that torch, which is a really peculiar response to have. Not to say it's burned down to my

elbow at this point, but I still got it. I still have it. You can try this torch for my cold, dead hands. I know Rob wants to jump in here, but we have to play a clip. We have an actuality of the Harris-Biden exchange. Some call it a smackdown. Some said she just whipped Biden. Interesting points were made that aren't being talked about. Let's play the clip and see what Jonathan says. I do not believe you are a racist. And I agree with you when you commit yourself to the importance of finding common ground. But I also believe, and it's personal, and it was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country.

And it was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose busing. And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools. And she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me. Okay, that's all there is, apparently. At least she didn't say it's personal to me. I was waiting for it. So this is personal to me, the way all politicians do it. She was the – I think she was the – well, anyway, people have gone back and said it's not exactly accurate completely, that Berkeley was integrating before she got there, that the whole Berkeley situation is it.

And then Biden had to come back and he had this argument about busing, which was not really an argument about busing at all. Jonathan, what did you think of that exchange? Did Biden get his hide taken off of him, as some people said? Or does her emotional work there and tremulous voice carry the day? What? No, so this was a really big moment because it showed us what Biden's mindset is. To my mind, the two big questions about the Biden candidacy are, does he still have his fastball and is he prepared to fight or does he expect a coronation? I think he answered both of those in the affirmative last night.

He was the same Joe Biden we saw during the 2012 campaign more or less, just with a little more Botox. And he he did not. I really believe from the way she reacted to his counterpunch there that she thought her moral authority was so much that he would simply go into turtle guard and apologize. Instead, he came right back out her and just said, look, you're misrepresenting this whole thing. This was not about that. You were bust because of a vote your city council did. We were against the Department of Education enforcing giant federal laws, and this is preposterous. And so I watch all this. I did a couple cycles ago this experiment

where I started alternating debates with Twitter and without Twitter. And so I would watch a debate with Twitter going on my screen, and then I would do the next debate without one. And what I noticed was that when I watched debates with Twitter, I always wound up agreeing with whatever the consensus take was on twitter and there's all there's always a consensus

take there's a hive mind effect and when i watched it without i would come to like my own conclusions and sometimes those would be at odds with what people on twitter thought sometimes it wouldn't be and so this i was watching this last night sans twitter because i've cut twitter out of my life completely and it is glorious uh and i thought to myself, well, he did really nicely there. This was the only weak moment in in the debate for her. And then I after the debate was over, I looked around and everybody's like, oh, he got destroyed. I thought, I don't think so. And now Sam Stein tweeted, just as we were sitting waiting to go on today. Democracy Corps data shows Biden's favorability with African-American voters went up a net 18 percent after last night's debate.

Yeah, I did not get the feeling that Biden was destroyed and wrecked and the rest of that, because for one thing, he came back with a nice little riposte about how when you were a prosecutor, I was a defender, which is good. But the thing is, he was struggling to make this point about the difference between localities trying to sort out the issue of busing and having it being imposed from afar and above. Which is a good point to make and a necessary point to make because it goes to the heart of all of our arguments about whether or not we should govern ourselves or have a very large federal government tell us what to do. And towards the end, he was getting to that. But that point is lost. Harris came back and said, because the localities didn't act, the federal government had to step in just as it did with the Voting Rights Act. And she mentioned a couple of others, which is essentially just saying, because these two examples here that I'm going to give you are perfect,

perfectly justified reasons for the federal government acting. Ergo, every time the federal government acts. But of course, this isn't actually what it's about. None of these—everything is performative these days. Nobody believes in anything anymore. Oh, I know that. I understand. But his point's lost. He's making a good point, and it's lost today.

I don't see anybody— Yeah, I think it's one, though, because the real point of all this was, was he going to wilt when Kamala Harris dropped the race card on him? And the answer was no. I mean, I really think that's entirely what this was uh was he gonna wilt when kamala harris dropped the race card on him and the answer was no i mean i really think that this is entirely what this was all about it was so kamala was going to come out and and drop the race card on him and try to really get a moment for herself and it didn't work out yes and it does but jonathan understand my my my tortured breast yearns for somebody who could just make a good argument as opposed to playing and navigating these trolls and currents of emotions. Fool that I am, I actually want a spokesman for an intellectually defensible position to make it as opposed to –

That's my business too. Yeah, I know. But that ain't the world we live in. Rob, out on the coast. Rob sitting in a white Adirondack chair at the moment. Rob, what say you? My only question is the one person who wasn't there was Obama. Obama was a successful two-term president, the last Democrat to win.

Trump's only been president for two and a half years. I mean, there's only so much you can do, even if you're Trump, even if you're – or despite the fact that you're Trump in two and a half years. I mean, it's only so much you can do, even if you're Trump, even if you're or despite the fact that you're Trump in two and a half years. And they all acted like they were so angry about the state of the country. And 80% of what they're angry about is structural and certainly was the case between 2008 and 2016. And the idea that Joe Biden, who was the vice president, served loyally the first African-American president, has to defend his race,

it's just a weird amnesia that the Democrats have. Look, they almost won in 2016. They came really close, 70,000 votes. What they need is just a do-over. Instead, what they're promising is revolution. It seems very strange. Why do you think that Trump was absent in the first debate and fairly absent for a guy who's unpopular, fairly absent last night? Why, Jonathan?

Well, so I guess I disagree with the premise there. I think that Trump was very present last night and certainly in relation to the night before. The question of Obama, though, is really complicated because the game theory on this is that if you are on that stage with Joe Biden and you're a Democrat, you can't really praise Obama too much without helping Biden. And so that's why Biden just hugged Obama all night long. I would fight any Democrat or Republican who doesn't want to build on Obamacare.

He talked about all the successful things he and Obama did together. Biden hammered two themes over and over and over again, and they were Donald Trump is an aberration who must be defeated, and I'm the man to beat him, and Obama. He hugged Obama, and I thought the man to beat him uh and obama right i hugged obama and that worked i

thought i thought it worked well for him yeah it did but what i'm saying is that seems like the path to the white house and all you nearly need to do is to say i agree with that all that stuff and you and essentially claim that biden's too old or he's too tired i mean that seems to me to be that's different from saying we need to tear the system down we need to radically that the people that america is a is a dystopic nightmare which seemed to be what all the other candidates were saying that you don't have to sell people the opposite of somebody you know you can sell ford and the chevrolet in in competing lots next door to each other it just seems like what they're trying to do is trying to sell some kind of vast massive change change to a country that simply hasn't, has never

really wanted that. And I just find that strange. I think that's a strange choice. It doesn't seem to, it doesn't seem like a choice that's going to appeal to vote. I mean, you know, Kamala Harris talks about busing. Does she want to bring busing back? They want to give free health care and free, I guess, probably student loan forgiveness to refugees.

I mean, that's going to play well in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina? I don't think so. And that's my last question for Jonathan. When they all said, yes, I want to give free taxpayer-funded health care to anybody who comes here, however they do so illegally, that's the campaign ad right there, isn't it? They've all raised their hands and said yes, which it is. The Trump campaign ad.

It is the Trump campaign ad, yeah. And the other half of that is turning it from a criminal to a civil penalty for immigrating illegally, right? I mean, these are the two very big things. So Biden walked away from abolishing private insurance last night which was was smart and then i don't know if you saw this kamala harris who has already flipped on abolishing private insurance once and then flipped back last night flipped again today so she was she was for abolishing private insurance then she walked it back and was against it then last night she was for it then today i think today she did one of those apologies like, well, just to clarify, as if somehow we didn't listen carefully.

Just so you guys are clear. Like, oh, I'm sorry. I just thought I heard you say the English words. Yeah. So two questions, two part answer here. The first part is, you know, why are they doing this? And the first part of that is because of Bernie. Right.

I mean, so this guy comes out of nowhere. He's a joke. He is promising socialist revolution and he gets half the democratic vote and what that does is it makes people believe that they have got to go running over towards the left and so he has pulled the whole overton window of the democratic party to the left and for all we know maybe he'll turn out to be right this is why i i am i am very very careful and respectful of Bernie Sanders as a political commodity. After the 2012 election, Republicans believed that the real lesson for them, the

deepest of all lessons was they had to get right on immigration. They could not continue to be xenophobic on immigration. They couldn't be hardline. They had to figure it out. And the party wound up going exactly the opposite way. And then they won the White House. It could be that Democrats think to themselves, we can't go fullernie the lesson is we can't be too radical people don't really want this stuff uh but then it turns out that people do because they're not thinking of it the way we are you know they're thinking oh we're just pushing back against trump or oh he bernie means this stuff seriously not literally or literally not serious. You know what I'm saying? Like, I am not convinced that that's that that's not doable. And as far as the as far as the, you know, the things they started saying about free health care for illegal immigrants and for anybody who shows up at our doorstep, that really does get to the question of what do voters care about anymore?

Do they really care about any of this stuff? Or is it like the polling data on Trump's wall? I don't know about you guys, but I find it the most depressing thing in the world. The guy runs on, his big thing is he's going to build a wall from coast to coast and Mexico is going to pay for it. He doesn't deliver it.

And then his voters all say, yeah, we didn't really expect him to deliver it anyway. Which is what all the poll data says. They say, yeah, first of all, we don't even really deliver it. And then his voters all say, yeah, we didn't really expect him to deliver it anyway. I mean, which is what all the poll get is. They say, yeah, we first of all, we don't even really want it. You know, we'd like to have a wall. That's fine. But but we didn't really care. And Coulter is the only the only Trump voter in all of America who seems to have really believed all this stuff.

That's an entire different. I wonder if it turns out that Democrats are going to be the same way with with this and like illegal immigration. You know, like they they really all of this gets to, I would say, my overarching takeaway. So we can get out of this conversation is that this is what decadence and decline looks like. We are an unserious country. And once you hit that part of the ride, then it's like we're on Space Mountain. We're in the dark. We have no idea where things go next.

We were just talking before about great it would be if Disney ran the Central American companies, as Steve Jobs pronounced. And so now you're ending with a Space Mountain analogy. Perfect. Thank you. Wraps it up with a bow. We're going to slam the Overton window sill down on your fingers now, John. And thank you very much for joining us on the podcast. And we'll see you on Twitter.

Thanks, guys. Thanks, John. The Overton window. Well, the idea that I am going to once again make some sort of segue into something just seems wrong at this point. James, wait a minute. First, we have John Last saying that the country is in decadence and decline, and now you're refusing to create segues. I can't take this. Well, it's just that an idea like that is upsetting, and there's nothing you can do about it. I mean, what do you do when your soul is stuck in a wearing blender because you believe that the inevitable structural decline of America from within, from its rotten soul, is a process we can do nothing about. But hard to sleep when you've got that idea running through your head. But, you know, if you're struggling to sleep these days, I'd say, you wouldn't be alone. You're not

the first person to toss and turn worrying about things. One in three adults, actually, one in three U.S. adults don't get enough sleep. And if you're not sleeping enough, it can affect your cognitive functions during the day, your learning, your problem solving, your decision making, and of course your mood. And that's why we're happy to tell you about our partnership with Calm. Calm is the number one app for sleep. Now, sleep deficiency, it does serious damage, not just your brain, but your body as well. Those sleepless people, they're more prone to accidents, to weight gain, to depression. With Calm, however, you'll discover a whole library of programs designed to help you get the sleep your brain and body needs, like Soundscapes, over 100 sleep stories narrated

by soothing voices like Jerome Flynn from Game of Thrones and Stephen Fry. So if you want to seize the day, sleep the night with the help of Calm. Right now, Ricochet listeners get 25% off a Calm premium subscription at calm.com slash ricochet. That's c-a-l-m dot com slash ricochet. 40 million people have downloaded Calm. Find out why at calm.com slash ricochet. And our thanks to Calm for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast, Sohrab Amari. He's in the steamy town of New York where he is the op-ed editor at the New York Post, contributing editor at the Catholic Herald. His most recent book is From Fire by Water, My Journey to the Catholic Faith.

Welcome back to the podcast, sir. Let's talk first about the situation at the border. You've written that the Democrats cannot just simply be outraged. They've got to have a plan. What's their plan? I guess at last night's top tier candidates debate, I guess they more or less openly came out for open borders. When I wrote that piece, it was before the debate and all of them had been sort of evasive, they wouldn't come out and say, you know, we believe in absolute open borders, which has all sorts of consequences. But they wouldn't, obviously, they wouldn't support any reasonable, they wouldn't support

any restrictions as being reasonable. I suppose now they're, you know, the major candidates all said they would provide health care to illegal immigrants, that's more or less a declaration of open borders, which I actually think makes situations like that photograph of the Ramirez family, the heartbreaking father and daughter who died together, more likely because it'll make, you know, signal that, you know, you can come. So go ahead and take the dangerous trek, pay the coyotes, risk being raped en route, and potentially dying in the heat or what have you, or drowning. You know, it's a mistake that Angela Merkel made in 2015 when she signaled that Europe's gates were open.

Right, right. So Rob, Peter here. I'm going to pull a little bit of a dirty trick because I'm going to ask you a question which places on you a burden of explaining things. But here's the question. You tweeted, oh, two or three days ago, you tweeted on some story about how radical or liberal the Democrat progressive, radical the Democrats had become. And you tweeted, I can't quote it exactly, but it was something like, we already live under integralism. And I have a feeling that if I was following your argument correctly, the debates during these last two nights will have made you feel that even more strongly. But of course, you have to explain what you mean. Okay, sure. So integralism is an ideology that I don't subscribe to, first of all. But it emerged in the late 19th century, early 20th century among Catholic thinkers,

you know, struggling with the birth of modernity and the displacement of the Catholic Church's position in public life. And it goes something like this, that man's, human beings' spiritual ends are superior to their temporal ends. In other words, what happens to you in the afterlife is more important, if there's an afterlife, to what happens to you in your temporal life. And if that's the case, and you're therefore subject to both temporal powers and spiritual powers, then the temporal powers should be inferior to or subject to the spiritual powers. Therefore, the state has to be subject to the church. That's integralism. Now, what I suggested

was, I was being a bit of a provocateur, but that in some ways we live under a kind of liberal integralism in the sense that it's not as secular or neutral as the regime would have us, as liberals would have us believe, because they are also committed to a vision of what the highest good is, and they sort of impose it on us. And, you know, whether that's, you know, for example, the transgender ideology is a kind of radical Gnosticism that suggests that the, you know, that your inner subjective life trumps everything we know about what makes a man or a woman. It's a kind of theological claim. And so the liberal position… Can I finish this? Oh, sure, of course.

To question transgender ideology, you know, this modern kind of Gnosticism is a form of heresy and it's treated as such. You're excommunicated. I mean, very few, you know, you and I are safe here, but lots of people, if they question it, they risk losing their jobs and so forth. So how is that not living under a kind of religious regime whose dictates are enforced primarily by private actors. It's Google censoring you, it's YouTube demonetizing your account, it's so-and-so deplatforming you, or whoever firing you from your job. Right. So the sort of liberal with a small l position used to be that the founders set up in this country a system that was morally and certainly religiously neutral. That it emphasized procedure.

Everybody had access to the public square. That was the importance of freedom of speech. But it did not choose among various competing religious positions. And for 200 years, it worked. And now we come up with a point where, well, actually, the fundamentally Judeo-Christian outlook was built into the system. The founders were simply able to take it for granted. And now that that is falling away as belief, the traditional belief evaporates, there is

a vacuum that will be filled. And is that your position? Or is that your worry, maybe I should say? No, I think that you summed it up well. I mean, if you, I mean, I'll set aside Thomas Jefferson, who in a way, the more people assess his legacy, the more radical and so he's out of tune with some of the rest of the founding

or most of the rest of the founding generation he looks. But for so many of the founding generation, he looked. But for so many of them and subsequent generations of American statesmen, you're right, it was taken for granted that that procedural kind of liberalism depended on some vision of the good, some substance idea of who the human person is what his origins are what his ends are so that when when fdr was giving his speech of why we're entering world war ii uh he said we were fighting for uh for our country and for freedom and then

he added i'm slightly paraphrasing but he added into the speech that they had written for him and our religion. He hand wrote that and delivered it. Churchill during the war spoke about the fighting for Christian civilization over and over again. That was a phrase that was perfectly natural to Churchill. Or when MLK writes the letter from a Birmingham jail, he's appealing to the procedural promises of the Declaration of Independence, but then also he appeals to St. Thomas and natural law. So I think you're right in the sense that our regime for – and a regime, I don't mean it in a negative sense, but our order for 200 years took for granted a kind of light Protestant integralism. We had a religious establishment in some ways. It just wasn't encoded in law.

But it had a position of superiority, and all of our discourse was centered around it. And my position is that if you remove that, you won't end up with a neutral public square because human beings by nature are religious animals, and therefore some other religion will take over. So I think you summed up my want Rob and James to come in. I know Rob is listening to all this, astounded, because of course he's a good and faithful Episcopalian. But so do you reckon, looking at the two debates last night, that the Democrats have just moved so far to the left? Everybody now is – who was it who was arguing in favor? This unbelievable position, which as far as I can tell is incoherent? Juan Castro, the Texan Castro. Julio Castro, that we have to provide abortion rights for transgender people. Anyway, do you feel relatively confident?

That's so bonkers, right? Yeah, it is. It's nutso. But do you feel – do you say, okay okay it's nuts and the whole country will see that these guys are playing to the tiny tiny fringe of the democratic party that has money and energy but once we get closer to the general it'll all fall away do you feel confident of that look i i i want to believe that i tend to believe that. But 2016, the outcome of 2016, chastened all the confidence I had in my ability to predict things. So I'm not going to say I 100% predicted. But my sense is

that between a roaring economy, you know, no sort of unpopular wars going on for the most part. Industrial jobs coming back, rising wages, including rising working class wages, all of that. And then you put together the radicalism of the Democrats. And I think that Trump will crush these fools. So I guess I did just make a prediction, but we'll see.

So, Hey, so Rob, one last, this is my last question. I don't let James and Rob. How do you resist? So I'm not going to ask about the debate because it's already gotten a lot of play between you and David French.

But a specific aspect of David's position is that Trump is just in and of himself unacceptable. He's just too vulgar. He tells too many lies. It just is wrong for the presidency. The never Trump position. You are a man who you've just written a memoir about coming to a deep religious faith. The moral component, I saw it in 2016 ahead of the general election that, you know, given what he said and his sort of me, I mean, I look at experience and on the one hand, it's the fact that I think as a policy matter, he's governed pretty well. In fact, I think as a policy matter, he's governed better than his two predecessors. And then I look at the radicalism of the other side, and it's just so much easier. And I don't know if it's only me because I care about these kind of social and cultural issues. But if you have a party that's militantly committed to the idea that transgender people deserve abortion rights, radical abortion rights, and Trump on the other side, I will pick Trump.

So it's not that hard. So, Rob, James Lalix here. We want to get to this David French thing because it's a little bit of an internecine quarrel, but it has greater ramifications for the conservative movement. And first things, you wrote a piece, and correct me if I mischaracterize what you're saying in any way, attacking David French's idea of some sort of pluralistic world in which Hollywood and the radicals and the people who put out the drag queen library sessions have their space and we have our space over here, he says. He asks them, if we allow you yours,

why don't you allow ourselves to have that space as well? And if I understand the argument against Frenchism, it's saying that the people like David will be constantly, continuously run over and steamrolled by the people who refuse to grant them that because they believe them as people inimicable to the needs of the modern age. There was another piece in First Things, and I can't link you with it, but it was the same argument made in a tone that is the very thing that David was talking about, about the problems on the right. It attacked David. It mischaracterized position after position that he made. It tarred all of NR with this broad, nasty dripping brush. And it provoked or at least reinforced something that David had written about how cruelty and the glee that comes from getting scalps and counting coup is something that Trump has, if not interjected, has allowed to flourish.

And that the people who seem to defend him the most and want that war are the people who seem to be delighting in a kind of rhetorical and personal cruelty. I know that's a lot there that I just said. Maybe that's just a statement instead of a question. But wither Frenchism, let's just put it that way. I have to kind of, on an empirical point, kind of question that. I don't think it's a first things piece you're talking about. I don't know what piece you're talking about. Oh, I'm sorry. It was a human event. Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. I believe it's a first things piece you're talking about. I don't know what piece you're talking about. Oh, I'm sorry.

It was a human events. Oh my gosh. I'm so sorry. I believe it was human event. I believe it was. I mean, I speak for, for neither publication. I do most of my kind of long form thinking in first things, but I don't think it was the kind of thing first thing was only published.

So I guess I don't want to have to defend, you know, an article that may be sympathetic to my point of view, but which I have, I honestly haven't read. And so I don't want to be defensive. I understand that. So let me just, let me just boil it down to this then. Civility, David puts great stock in it. Is this one of these things that we're just going to have to shrug off, call it overrated, in order to get down to brass tacks? So that's a much better question. I think it's very important for people to read the last paragraph of my Frenchism essay more carefully than lots of folks have in it I say that civility is a second-order good and that's true in the sense that civility

assumes the existence of a shared moral consent and then you use civility to enforce that consensus if there is no shared consensus, and you, for example, in my case, as a father of a young son, I find the idea of Jag Queen Reading Hour to be abhorrent, and all sorts of other things that are radically new and that the left is now pushing forward with seemingly no limiting principle. In other words, you know, if you go on, I mean, you can go and find these things, but even if you don't go out and find these things, they seek you out, you know, where it's like there's an LGBT website called Vem I recently ran across, and it's owned by Condé Nast, so it's not some fringe thing.

It's owned by Condé Nast, and it recently ran an article saying that kink and sadomasochism and dominatrixes and so forth should be a part of the Pride events. generation LGBT person who had, um, you know, uh, the closest figure in his life was one of his mothers or their mothers, because they don't identify as a gender, their mothers, uh, you know, permanent submissives in the, in the, in the S and M relationship. This person deeply identified with their mother's submissive, okay? It was a total bizarre world, right? What that suggests for most Americans is that there's no shared consensus with that, with whatever that is. And so to insist on civility and politeness on its own terms without the existence of a shared moral consensus well of course it doesn't work because for me to to practice civility in a sense would be to say well i don't judge that right that's just uh yeah i i i'm not allowed to make normative claims about

that of course i'm allowed to make normative claims about it, and I will, and it'll be treated by uncivilized the other side. I don't know if that makes sense, but... No, it does. I subscribe to the James T. Kirk theory that when somebody asks you, who are you to judge, I say, who do I have to be? But the example that you made is interesting, because when you look at these pride festivals, if you'd gone back 20, 30 years, there wasn't any argument about introducing kink or allowing kink for that, for heaven's sakes. They had the reputation of being a bunch of guys and buttless chaps being led around by chains by other leather daddies. And when you look at them now, you find organizations that are bourgeois as can be, they're bourgeois as get out. And you can almost say that the civilizing messages of

society have co-opted the gay rights movement so that the pride is now this anodyne thing that's family friendly. I mean, that would seem to be something of a cultural accomplishment and shows how we move towards a mean middle when we're not screaming at each other. But that's a whole other podcast. We run over time. And gosh, it's been great to have you. And we'll continue to read what you do, follow you on Twitter. And thanks for joining us again. Okay, thank you.

So, Rob, thanks a lot. Okay, bye now. Thank you. Bye. Yeah. You didn't sound convinced, James. No. Oh, I'm convinced.

You are. Yeah. Okay. I am. All right. Well, then. aggressiveness on particularly on the social issues for example in certain places i i don't know the curriculum in california in detail because we sent our kids to catholic schools but i've heard about it here i know for sure it's taking place in some places at least there is now it's now a regular part of the curriculum or there's a push to make it a regular part of the curriculum to teach children, very young children, about alternative – well, so Rob mentioned it. I think it's in New York. They're having drag queens go into – Yeah, the Sacramento.

The drag queen reading – where is that? That's Sacramento? Sacramento. Okay. It doesn't matter where it is. That's an example of something that's being worked into the public school system and that relies on people who find that at a minimum puzzling and pretty likely to be outrageous or strange or bizarre who really don't want their children exposed to that it relies on them to be polite and say oh oh well of course every to each his own and if you if you if you if you if you make too much of sheer politeness and civility as a value in itself, you start losing. There comes moments when you have to fight back.

Of course. That I think is what he's saying. Absolutely so. If you have somebody going in and putting in a book in first grade that says there's no such thing as genders and men can have babies and women can have babies. If you subscribe to that idea and you want to get it into the first grade and you are successful in doing so, a parent has still a right to say,

I disagree with this. This is not science. A parent has a right to stand up to that. If the parent goes to the school board, to the meeting, and screams and shouts and calls them all perverts and sickos and the rest of it, not a single mind has changed. If somebody intelligently, calmly, confidently makes the argument and lets other people know that it is possible to say these things in public without having your head handed to you, then the movement grows. If you get up and you scream, you feel good, you own them. Again, coups counted.

And boy, there's a great video on Twitter that you can pass around that shows how they're oppressing people, but nothing changes. It is possible to be forceful and to be civil. The idea somehow that we have to revel in being jackasses is just something I don't understand. And I particularly don't understand it coming from a perspective that would encourage people to come to the religious beliefs that these people share with their own hearts, come to it with their own hearts of gladness and love as opposed to being browbeaten by somebody who's pointing at them and saying you're going to go to hell. I mean you want to do it. There's a very uncivil way to convert people to religion, and that's with a sword and some nasty – Yeah, it doesn't work. It's not an either-or thing. It really isn't.

And making David French the enemy of the future of the Republic to me just seems absolutely absurd. I mean, where did that come? Where did where did that idea come from? I know. I don't know. But I do want to stress that that's not in. So, Rob, you know, I just want to I just want to stick up for our guest here. That's right.

But no, it was not. But I'm saying that's the whole part of it. He's obviously he's a civil man. And obviously, Rob, about to say something means that he didn't get that. I was trying to get to an ad here. Oh, go right ahead. Sorry. I didn't either.

Hold that thought. Put that hand in the put that thought in the hand. It's not holding a gin and tonic at the moment. When I was saying, where did that thing come from? Because you don't always know where everything comes from. But sometimes, well, for example, we had in our family, our family dead end at a certain point, as far as we were concerned, we knew that the genealogical lines went back there. And then after that, terra incognita, here'd be dragons. Well, you might wonder where your family comes from, too. And you can now discover more about

them and learn your family story by combining the ancestry DNA test with billions, billions of historical family records. Ancestry DNA gives you so much more than just the places you're from. Ancestry connects you to the places in the world where your story started using precise geographical detail and clear-cut historical insights. You can even trace your ancestors' journey over time by following how and why your family moved from place to place and what they did. And to amplify your results, well, you can start a free trial on Ancestry and build a tree so that your ancestors become more than just a name. Because Ancestry has combined DNA results with

over 100 million family trees and billions of records to give you more insight into your genealogy and your origins. Only Ancestry can tell a story like this. The unique features that give you more complete pictures about a person, not just where they went and why, but the events that shaped them, how they made a living, what they were really good at, where they went to school, stuff like that you never knew before. Now you can. Ancestry's unique features and record collections give a more complete picture of people from your past. Well, it's easy to get started, really. All you have to do is, well, take the test, okay? You get to take the test, you have to join, and's easy to get started, really. All you have to do is, well, take the test. You get to take the test.

You have to join and then start to put the family together. It's not like writing a novel. It's like putting together a novel that's already out there waiting to be collected. Ancestry.com slash Ricochet today for 20% off your Ancestry DNA kit. That's Ancestry.com slash Ricochet. 20% off your Ancestry DNA kit. That's Ancestry.com slash Ricochet. 20% off your Ancestry DNA kit. That's Ancestry.com slash Ricochet. And our thanks to Ancestry.com

for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Rob, are you going to say something? Of course you will. Yes, I can't remember though. So just keep talking and I will... Alright, I'm going to bring up another subject and then you could derail it completely when you come up with your thought. So you're at the beach for the 4th, I take it.

Peter, you're in California, so obviously you're going to enjoy the 4th and all of its great American manifestations. What are you guys doing? Every year, downtown in Nantucket, in the town, they have a water fight. They get the antique fire engines out and the city stages a giant Main Street water fight. All the kids on the island come in the center and fire water cannons at each other. Everybody gets wet and all the grown-ups

hide in the little side streets. It's all over in about 25-30 minutes and then everybody goes to the beach. It's a perfect 4th of July. It's almost too perfect. There's pie-eating contests before and stuff like that. It's really great. I recommend

it. Anybody who's in the area, you should come. It's incredibly fun. Peter, at Stanford, are they having some sort of equal Dionysian ritual? I have a daughter who's a rising senior in high school. There was a family trip planned to Wyoming.

And it turns out that she has a tennis tournament and you can't let go of tennis during the summer between your junior and senior year of high school. It turns out if you're a serious tennis player. So I just found out the other day that I will be remaining home with my beloved daughter. And what that means is I don't know quite what we're going to be doing. I'll have to figure that out. But I do know that the rest of the family will be off in Wyoming having a glorious time. Good for you both. That sounds fantastic. I have sort of lost my traditional role as provider of the pyrotechnics on the 4th of July. Friends used to come over and bring their kids,

and I would make everybody ooh and ah with the stuff that I would fire off. And now I just don't have that anymore. I don't, and it's sort of sad, and I wish I could get it back. But I don't know. You're super strong. How did this happen? I don't know, but there was just – it's like losing your libido overnight or something like that. All of a sudden, from childhood, I've loved fireworks because my dad had a firework stand for a couple of years.

He had a firework stand at the family gas station, which in retrospect seems like a really peculiar thing to do. And I can imagine that my mom, even though we lived on the other side of the town, would all day just wait to hear this distant thump, followed by the shaking of the china and then the sirens and then maybe a phone call. But it didn't happen. What did happen was that he didn't sell We Got the Fire off. And since it was North Dakota in the wild, wild west era, that meant real fireworks. So we would go to the farm and some of these rockets had to be launched by pounding a pipe into the ground. You couldn't just stick them in a bottle.

Wow, that's real. This is great. Real stuff. So you arc in the sky and explode and the rest of it. My cousins and I would have duels with bottle rockets where you put them in bottles and then point them at each other and fire them. Fantastic fun. So that set the bar. Since Dad had a fireworks stand also, I had access to like a, Dad, can you bring home a couple of bricks of Black Cats?

And he would, and I would get all of the gunpowder out. So I had raw gunpowder in abundance. And then I would tape a green army man to the lid of a Gerber's baby food can lid and blow that thing into the stratosphere, ping it off the Sputnik. So that was my childhood. Then I moved to places which clamped down on them, and it was nothing but fountains and boring stuff. And then, of course, the kids come along, and all the kids, and I got to coordinate these things, and I got to stage my own fireworks show.

They were underwhelming, but the kids were of an age where they loved it. And then all those kids are gone now, and I really don't want to go somewhere and drive somewhere and sit and look at the fires and then wonder how long it's going to take to get back home because the traffic's going to be awful. So it's a good thing that somebody in our neighborhood has the biggest selection of impressive fireworks that I've ever seen and usually gives us a show on the fourth. But the cookouts, the fireworks, the rest of those things, eventually they come to an end, alas. But we're also talking before the podcast because you know we chatter on for 20 minutes beforehand about uh cars peter robinson is in the market and we

understand that you're going to get a maserati is that it a turbocharged manual this is this is this is you just wrote you just went through the car market yourself james rob has very strong opinions and we were exchanging texts about this over the last couple of days i am in the i You just went through the car market yourself, James. Rob has very strong opinions. And we were exchanging texts about this over the last couple of days. I so hate the process that I tend to hold onto cars a long time, which means I never get into practice. So it's now been 10 years since I bought a car. The good news, no matter what we buy, we'll seem dazzling with this electric gizmo, that electric gizmo, and so forth. That's really true.

Yeah, it's really true. But of course it is the case, because the market always, always works, that we fall in love with a particular car, and in this case, it is the Kia Telluride. It is the new SUV-ish car from Kia. Brand new this year, and the price is totally reasonable, and all the reviews say this is a great car, and for the price, it's a spectacular car.

And it turns out that in all of Northern California, and we took a test drive, and in all of Northern California, at this moment, there are nine cars available. Nine! And what this means is that every single dealer is selling them at $5,000 above MSRP. And so, and you know what? I'm just, I have a little branch, one branch of the family got here in 1630 and they were Puritans. And they still, speaking of ancestry.com, they live in my genes and there is no way

I'm paying five grand over the sticker okay that's me at the moment i understand believe it is surprising when you start when you look to buy a car how hard sometimes it is that you have to work to buy one Yes! It is freaking exhausting. It's exhausting. Oh, you agree! You make me feel so much better. When did you... Tell your story, Rob. I'm trying to buy this

when I try to buy my Subaru. I love my Subaru Outback. I'm a huge fan of my Subaru Outback. But I knew exactly what I wanted. But just navigating it, even a simple website like the Subaru website. I recognize that you may not be exactly the most convenient Subaru dealership to me. And maybe you'll have to do some stuff behind the scenes. I don't really care.

But I want that car. I don't want a car like it. I don't want a car that you – I mean, I just – And you want a number. Just give me one stinking number. Why am I working so hard for this thing? I just don't – I never quite understood.

When I bought my last car, and I've told this story before about the experience that I had with millennial dealerships. God bless the generation, but the guys who are selling these cars might as well be moving refrigerators or vacuum cleaners or the rest. But they had no passion for the machinery at all. Except for the old style guys there. When you got an old line guy at the dealership, then he had the glad handing and the, you know, he had the ghosts of all the polyester clad guys with loud wide ties were behind him.

And those are the ones that I actually want to deal with because, did I say this before? Last time, I think I did. So I won't repeat it. But I do know this, the idea of making it hard. I was, I'd been sitting there

after I'd agreed to buy this thing for an hour or so. And one of the guys came by and said, we got people were coming and then we'll get you out of here You know what? Like this is an MRI in favor to you Well like this but but he's absolutely right because it takes two bloody hours You know, I understand if they have to detail it and shine it up. That's fine. That's great I'll come back whatever but the paperwork

I have to sign all these things saying that I agree to this and I don't want this package. And I have, there's a camera mounted in the office that records the fact that they had to tell me all of these things they had to tell me. But all I want to do is go and just count out some bills and put them on the table and get a key return. But it's never that easy. I will add, since it's been a decade since I was last in the market, and again, I just buy these cars, I tend to pay cash, and I hold them because that's how you, that's how you, that's how, that's, that's the way I was raised, frankly. There's no great thinking or analysis involved. You run it until you can't, until it becomes unsafe to run. Okay.

So I thought, wow, it's been a decade. The internet will have changed everything. And you know what? I spent a couple of days on the internet and I thought to myself, it has changed everything. You can get pricing information, reviews. And so, and you know what? The dealers are still the ones with the cars and they have found all kinds of ways to fight back. You click a button and says, get, get your e-price right now. And then, but of, you have to fill in your phone number and your email address. And then you get an email or you get an reply. You get infinite phone calls. And the email I got replied, this happened just this morning.

I was trying another brand. The email, this is typical. The email was, do you intend to pay cash or finance the car? I need to know to give you the most accurate information on the price. No, you don't. That is a bald-faced lie. And, of course, one way or the other, we've now spent a day and a half going from one dealer to another. Here I am complaining and whinging and whining about the free market.

These cars are dazzling by comparison. And in real dollar terms, it looks to me as though we're going to pay about the same as we paid 10 years ago for our Toyota Highlander. I mean, it'll be a higher nominal number, but if you apply the adjustment for inflation and the cars are all better, even the ones that are ranked fifth and sixth in a category by U.S. News, they're all better than what we bought 10 years ago. So why am I whinging and wanting? Because it's just miserable. I'll leave off with this. The rear view camera system on my car, I have learned at twilight, interprets the lights behind you in a strange way and makes them flicker and flash. This may be just the technology. It may be the screen. It may have been a trick of the

atmosphere at that point. But the lights behind you appear to be flashing. It's very odd. And the reason that I found this out was after I bought this car and I decided I got to wind this thing up. So I took it on the freeway and there's this wonderful curve. It's a 90 degree curve. It's just great. It's banked. And I wound it up as hard and fast and high as i could and took that turn

and i'm pulling some g's i mean this i don't want to face it but it's really holding the road nicely and i'm thinking i love this car it's not a sports car it's not my old turbocharged eclipse but this is a fast zippy little car i look in my rear mirror, and every single light behind me is flashing like a police car light. Oh, no. And I was convinced that in my little moment here of late middle-aged glee when I'm saying, I'm going to do it, I'm going to wind her up to 80, and I'm going to take her on the curve, that a flanks of the entire highway patrol, like in a Smokey and the Bandit movie, was on my tail. But it was just simply a trick of the system.

So now here I am complaining about my rear view camera system. Yes, exactly. When 10 years ago I didn't even. And as we said before, to be able to walk, plug in your phone, and then say out loud what song you want to hear that I have. And it plays. And that's Apple CarPlay, is that right? Yeah, I just walk in and I ask for the certain song, and it plays. And that's Apple CarPlay, is that right? Yeah, I just walk in and I say,

I ask for the certain song and it plays and there you go. So it's fantastic. Also, we just passed a law here. Wait, before we get to Peter, that is not going to work for you. I just want to make that clear. Don't expect that to happen. That's not going to happen

to you. You're not going to get that. Fair enough, brother Rob. Fair enough. Siri, play Brahms' Academic Overture. Okay. Boring piece. All right, we're done. We're done? We're done. Happy 4th, guys.

Well, happy 4th to Calm.com, to DoorDash.com, and to Ancestry.com. Happy 4th and beyond to them, because they support us.com, and to Ancestry.com. Happy 4th and beyond to them because they support us. And if you go to them and get their wonderful products, that will be supporting us as well. We're off next week, so have a happy and safe 4th. And since we're off next week, you've got two whole weeks to go to iTunes and give us a review. You've got two weeks to say, we didn't get a member pitch from Rob.

That must mean he's so sorely disappointed in all of us that I feel bad. I will join Ricochet. I will join Ricochet. I will. I will. I will. You will. Now. Thank you. Rob, Peter, have a great Fourth. Everybody else have a great Fourth as well, and we'll see you all in the comments at Ricochet 4.0.

Happy Fourth. Two weeks from now, boys. The house I live in A plot of earth, a street The grocer and the butcher And the people that I meet The children in the playground The faces that I see All races, all religions, that's America to me. The Place I Work In

The place I work in The worker at my side The little town or city Where my people lived and died The howdy and the handshake the air of feeling free the right to speak

my mind out that's America to me The things I see about me The big things and the small The little corner newsstand And the house a mile tall The wedding and the churchyard The laughter and the tears

The dream that's been growing for a hundred fifty years The town I live in The street, the house, the room The pavement of the city Are a garden all in bloom The church, the school, the clubhouse The million lights I see But especially the people

That's America to me me. Ricochet. Join the conversation. So, Mr. President, if you're listening, I want you to hear me, please. You have harnessed fear for political purposes, and only love can cast that out. So I, sir, I have a feeling you know what you're doing. I'm going to harness love for political purposes. I will meet you on that field, and, sir, love will win.