The Ricochet Podcast - The Joy is Gone

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

Who needs guests when the news overflows? Not us! Our intrepid trio of James Lileks, Charles C.W. Cooke and Steve Hayward opine on Joy Reid's exit at MSNBC, Jake Tapper discovering Joe Biden's decline, gay horses and free speech in the UK (Not a joke!) and Gene Hackman exits the stage (Rest easy, Marine!)

Don't forget, yeah, I was going to say, Ryan, don't forget to record. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Charles C.W. Cook and Stephen A. Wood. I'm David Wileks. Today we're going to talk about, oh, everything. So let's have ourselves a podcast. My show had value and that, I'm sorry, that what I was doing had value, had value. And

in the end, I'm sorry, I try not to cry on TV. And I said, this is kind of like being on TV, so I apologize. Those are the things that I was taught were of God. And so I'm not sorry. I'm just proud of my show. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 730. I'm James Lilacs in an overcast, gray, moody, contemplative Minneapolis. And I'm joined by Charles C.W. Cook in sunny-splashed Florida, and Stephen Hayward, who may be in Riga or Rio or wherever. Where do you happen to be today, Steve? I am sitting right now in John Yoo's office at Berkeley Law School.

I'm actually here teaching a short seminar over the weekend with him and Richard Epstein, which means I won't get to say anything, but that's okay. Don't forget to smear all the knobs with McDonald's McRib barbecue sauce. Gentlemen, today we are facing a world that is, well, it looks a lot like the one we had last Friday, but there have been several media quakes. And, of course, we all know how much we love to talk about the media and castigated for its sins.

Imagined or real, where do we begin? Well, there's the Washington Post. Jeff Bezos announced this week that he's going to refocus the editorial page. Instead of doing the thing where you got some syndicated columnists, all who are going to say things that you know exactly what they are going to say, he said, you know what? You can get that from the internet. We're going to do something different. We're going to say things that you know exactly what they are going to say. He said, you know what? You can get that from the Internet. We're going to do something different. We're going to crusade.

And Bezos, in, of course, this era of incipient fascism, is concentrating on two things which ought to really scare the culottes off anybody, and that's free markets and personal liberty. And I know, pearls clutched elsewhere, all over the newsroom. The editorial page editor, the opinion page editor resigned after having been given such an unfortunate edict, marching orders. But it's really interesting that this is the sort of thing that's now regarded as dog whistles for this night of horror, terror, and authoritarianism that is enveloping us. Personal liberties and economic freedom. What do you think about this, guys? And how do you put this in the context of the actual, A, Washington Post itself,

which used to be so tremendously important, and B, newspapers, media organizations in general? Well, all right, I guess I'll start. I keep trying to go on a diet, but I'm getting fat with all the extra popcorn I'm having to pop up right now for all these wonderful stories. I mean, two opening thoughts, and then I'll be interested in what Charles thinks of this. Amongst the rending of garments going on, I haven't seen... And gnashing of teeth. And gnashing of teeth, right.

And gnashing of teeth. Right. I haven't seen anybody make the point or the observation that Bezos chose to make the announcement to the public on Twitter rather than through a press release of the... Whatever. And, of course, that has to annoy everybody, because Twitter is now the node of fascism. Second, and here's where I'll be

interested, Charles, what you think. I thought the wording of one part of the message was curious or interesting. It's when he said, we want to change the focus to free markets and individual liberty. I asked our very talented editor, David Shipley, to lead the effort. And then Bezos said this. I think I've got this committed to memory. He said, and I told him if the answer wasn't hell yes, then the answer in fact was no. And so David has chosen to leave. But I thought that was an interesting way of putting it. It sounds kind of like an ultimatum maybe Bezos didn't think so but I thought that uh post facto really kind of put Shipley in a box that uh I think that's a little

maybe he intended to be a little twist of the knife to the editorial staff of the paper I'm not sure but I I that jumped out at me Charles I don't know if some if it jumped out at you or maybe something else caught your eye well you know what's funny about that was he says in this missive as you note that he had told him that if his answer wasn't hell yes then it was in effect no and then he says shipley went away to think about it right which is such a great juxtaposition is your answer hell yes i need to think about it it's also funny because when I was offered the chance to be the editor of NRO in 2015, I was at breakfast with Rich and my first words were literally hell yes. So I think that Bezos is into something good here, which is the understanding that I'll go away and think about it.

It's probably not what you need when you want enthusiasm from your editor what i find most interesting about this is the response which seems to me to be of a piece with a general progressive conception of the people who own or use services as being there to pay progressives to advance their agenda and then shut up. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. You might not like that, but he does. It's not too long ago that we were being told that the ownership of various social media outlets was protected by the First Amendment, which it is, that the federal government had no business interfering, which it didn't. And that if you wanted to change those institutions, you had to build your own, build your own Twitter, build your own Facebook. Well, build your own Washington

Post. It's owned by Jeff Bezos. He gets to do what he likes with it. And it is ridiculous to suggest that he has no say or should have no say over its direction. I used the analogy, we were talking about this yesterday, of the Virginia public school system. Bezos reminded me of Terry McAuliffe when he said, you don't get to determine what your kids are taught. You don't get to have a say over the curriculum. That's the preserve of experts who know better than you do. Okay, so what is the point of the parents then?

Is it just to write the checks and provide the children and then go away? Jeff Bezos isn't going to lose $100 million a year forever on this newspaper. He's going to at some point want to have some say over it. It's just unbelievable entitlement. So I found that the most interesting thing is that the people who work there have still not worked out that, yeah, you can criticize the way newspapers are run, but it is his newspaper. Yeah, I think I'll add a thought, James, that I think beyond the sense of entitlement that you see amongst people on the left in so many places and in so many ways, there's a deeper through line. And I guess partly my background academically is in political philosophy, so I run to mama moments like this but I've long thought that the real problem at the end of the day is the progressive philosophy that manifests itself and that favor cliche of Obama and others the side of history right I mean if you think that your if your fundamental premise usually unreflective and not really grounded the way say Hegel did is that you're on the side of

history you represent the vanguard of all that is good and true and beautiful you don't have to think very hard. It makes your life easy. And when somebody comes along, whether it's Donald Trump or Ronald Reagan or Giorgio Meloni in Italy or Jeff Bezos buying the paper, and they say, we think something different, they can't cope. I mean, it really does get to the core of their almost theological being. I'll put it that way. Maybe listeners will think that's too recondite and abstract, but I can trace that out at some length, and someday maybe I should write a book on this. I don't know. Well, a theological basis that is not theological

at all and has replaced actual theology. The moral arc of history, which of course bends very slow, as we know, and is destined to end up where the progressives want it to be, began with the Enlightenment and the dethronement of various ideas which they believe had held mankind back. And so over the centuries, we have seen the continual refinement of the human being and his institutions until more and more liberty are granted to more and more people, the franchise is extended, ideas become more broad-minded, et cetera, et cetera. And we can argue about the Enlightenment, but I tend to think that generally, yes, the idea that societies become more broad-minded, etc., etc. And we can argue about the Enlightenment, but I tend to think that generally, yes, the idea that societies become more free, that people are granted the franchise, that there is equality, these are all good things,

and these are advancements in human civilization. However, that does not necessarily mean that the end result of this is supposed to be technocratic rule by transhumanists who believe that they've come up with a completely new paradigm that dumps everything we've known before in favor of a brave, bold new world. And over the last 20 years, I've seen myself how the Democratic Party has shifted to the left and embraced ideas with a wholehearted passion that would have horrified people, well, like myself, and did horrify people like myself until we end up where we are today. We have some very curious people with some very curious ideas who also have the state, I hate to say the deep state, but this governmental NGO technocrat rule blob,

which is supposed to do the good work and is supposed to tug that arc of history where it ought to be. And that's one of the things that you're finding at the Washington Post with people screaming as they are. When I worked in Washington, D.C., in a news bureau, of course, the gold standard was always to go work at the Washington Post because that would be perfect. They had money galore. You'd have a job forever. I mean, the Post was it. And the Post was it in the sense that it was a great company town paper. It was thick. It was well written. It was interesting. But it was a company town paper. It told you what you needed to know about living in Trantor. Everybody I knew in the Bureau was married to somebody else who was in the blob. My wife worked for justice, somebody who was a beat reporter out of Alabama or something,

you know, might be dating somebody from the chlorine Institute. I mean, we were all as soon as we got there fitted neatly into these slots where we would do the reporting and they would do the lobbying and this other group would do all the money spending and the rest of it. And it all went on for so long and everybody thought that we were all doing such good things until today. You open Twitter and you find there's a controversy because, my God, the end of the USAID money has meant that the only transgender medicine clinic in India has closed down. Now, when you pair that with Hegseth's decision to not kick everybody transgender out of the military, you have a real shift in the way people are thinking. Or, tell me this, do you think we have a assertion, a reassertion of way the most people actually think. And that this silent group is

finally saying, no, we're not going to do this. We are not going to pay for this. We don't actually should not have people who have these gender issues in the military. And it's stunning to the people who believe that the moral arc of history was supposed to deposit them at the place where, you know, a transgender president was probably two or three elections off. That wasn't a question at all. That was just a statement. Well, I mean, it does look like they're doubling down on a lot of this, right? You had is it who's the governor of Wisconsin? I'm forgetting his name already, but he is putting in a state law to change mothers to pregnant people.

Inseminated persons. Inseminated persons. Thank you, Charles. That was so ridiculous. You can't believe it. And, you know, the polls on this show, this is not a 70-30 issue. It's an 80-20 issue, you know, trans men and women sports and things like that. And, but they want to go down guns blazing with this. It is,

it is amazing. Yeah. Inseminated persons is such a dehumanizing term. And the, I, I, I mean, it's, it's, it's stunning. It really is. So yes, the other media quake that we had this week, you know, it's coming, don't you joy reed the readout got canceled as part of a an ongoing what uh let's charitably call right sizing at msnbc uh rachel maddow lost a bunch of people on her staff 30 people on her staff what are these one person for each million dollars she makes each year i No, I think she makes $25 million now.

I think she got a haircut. No, it went from $35 to $30. Oh, I see. Okay, so $1 million for each. And I'm not exactly sure what these people do. These are not people in the booth. These are not people pointing the camera. These are not people who are loading up the teleprompter.

30? What does she need 30 people to do exactly? And why not take some of that $30 million and toss it Joy's way to help her get on her feet? Madoff came out and said that this was part of a very disturbing trend at her employer because they have also fired other people who qualify under the diversity banner. And I tend to think that it probably is, and I know this may seem preposterous, but it's entirely possible that those people were not making enough money for the company to justify the continuance of their show. But if you believe that networks exist to,

you know, as a public service, that they're supposed, that they are obligated to do, to put on these shows, and that profit is just one of those bygone notions to which we should not subscribe i suppose yes you would be appalled at this restriction again of a free speech so can i just quickly say james that i incorrectly corrected your correction of my interruption it is 25 million i was thank you this is typical of my interruption. It is 25 million. I was 30. Thank you. This is typical of my inability to do math. So I'm wrong. James is right.

Okay. Let me let the record show that I knew that I was correct in how much that Rachel made up. There's a famous one-sentence critique of liberalism from many decades ago that said the problem with liberalism is it will end up being the joyless quest for joy. I immediately thought of that line, you know, the joyless quest for the very joyless joy read, right? I think the obvious answer here is that she needs to join The View. That would really complete the ensemble, I think, if she joined The View. Who knows, that might not be such a joke. It may well happen. Yeah. Does anybody watch that show? I mean, does anybody who exactly watches that show? Because it really is as pleasant as an hour of the characters from Macbeth around the cauldron.

It just yeah, I think it I think it does big ratings. I haven't checked for a long time, but I think it does big ratings and actually makes money for ABC. But James, we're not far away. I mean, you know, the next step is going to be renewed calls from the left to have state-funded media. They've already been calling for that for, you know, local newspapers and things like that. And I'd say we already have NPR. What do we need more state-funded media for? James, you need to reflect on your gendered language and do the work and do better.

I mean, comparing the ladies of The View to witches. Uh-oh. That's a trope, James. That's very hurtful. When it comes to doing the work, doing better, reading a book, reading the room, if you would like to play the tape back, Charles, you will notice that I did not refer to witches.

I referred to characters from Macbeth. Around the cauldron, you said. Around the cauldron. Could be anybody. Could be a deleted scene from Macbeth. It could be Orson Welles' brilliant version of it in which he casts three warlocks. So don't give me that, Mr. Jones.

Can I tell you what annoys me about Joy Reid? The Joy Reid firing has been met predictably with accusations of racism, including from Rachel Maddow. Also with the presumption that this is some sort of political move. Maybe it shifts MSNBC to the right or what you will. Joy Reid was not on that spectrum. She was crazy.

This is not a left versus right thing. This is not whether we're going to have networks that are friendlier or more hostile toward the Republican Party or Trump or conservatism or have different views on Bernie Sanders or Josh Shapiro or you will. Joy Reid is a lunatic. There is something wrong with her. There was something wrong with her on her show. There was something wrong with her on the Instagram and TikTok videos that she made from her house. She does not have a firm grasp on reality.

She does not know what America is like. She doesn't know why things are happening. She is ensconced in the extended Rachel Maddow universe. And it has to have grated eventually on the executives that run the network who are running out of money. Again, this is not about what color her skin is or what her political outlook was. There is plenty of room in this country for people who profoundly disagree with me and us and your median ricochet user. There are tens of millions of those people.

But Joy Reid is out of her mind. I've been on TV before with Joy Reid. I know this personally. That's why she eventually got fired because she was a total liability it's bad enough not being able to describe politics in the country you live in when your job is to describe politics in the country you live in when the president is a democrat but when everything that you had said about that person and everything that you had anticipated happening in the election turns out to be wrong because you are a lunatic.

Then you are no longer useful on a politics show. I just think this is the most obvious explanation of why she was canned. And I know people aren't going to write this in The New York Times, but maybe they should. Maybe that would actually be good for the left for once instead of constructing a bigger suicide machine. If they said, you know what? That guy's crazy. We just don't want to hang out with him anymore. I don't think they may be constructing a bigger suicide machine, but it's certainly getting more streamlined.

It's no Rube Goldberg enterprise anymore where there's lots of moving parts and the result is indistinct. There is a very streamlined procedure now when it comes to defending Joy Reid, when it comes to inseminated person, when it comes to this, that, and the other, to committing political and party suicide by continuing to push things that people don't like. I'm Greg Karambas. Join Jim Garrity of National Review and me each weekday for the Three Martini

Lunch podcast. We'll give you the good, bad, and crazy news of the day and lots of laughs too. Find us right here on the Ricochet Audio Network at ricochet.com or wherever you get your podcasts. One more thing in the media before we go, and that is Jake Tapper has written a book about the cabal of people who conspired to keep Joe Biden's infirmities from the American public. It's almost his if I did it.

It's very strange. And I do not know. I don't know if he really expected that he was going to get the reaction that he did. It is remarkable to me that he would sign on for a project like this, not realizing that everything that he had said before about Joe, oh, it's a stutter. Oh, it's this, you know, he's, he's, he's actually in the back room with Spock playing 3d chess, uh, that, that people were going to say, wait a minute, Jake is on this book. Well, I have a theory about this. It's only a hunch. Uh, you know, his coauthor for the

book as Alex Thompson from Axios. And he did write a few pieces, I think before the election, doing some of the earliest reporting that, in fact, there are problems in the Biden White House that he can't do his job. And he was one of the few who ventured into that territory. I have a hunch that he's the bulk of the reporting in this book, but the publisher probably wanted a big name because who's, you know, most people don't know Alexlex thompson but they know jake tapper and i'd that's one possibility i think but the other one is this book in the flood in the north no doubt coming

are all certain to absolve the media from any blame in all this right i mean uh... you know the who covered up well you know i thought the media's job was exposing cover-ups that's the credo number one ever since watergate right so uh... i i you will wait to see what they say about the night even done exposing cover-ups. That's the credo number one ever since Watergate, right? So we'll wait and see what they say. I'll bet they're not even done writing the book. What, it's a May 20 publication date. And I think they're trying to preempt the field and be first out. And so as Trump likes to say, we'll just have to see what happens, but I'm not expecting very much self-reflection. Charles? I will defend Alex Thompson to the hilt because he wrote over and over again about Joe Biden's problems and we shouted out for it.

And then when Joe Biden was thrown aside, he was the only mainstream journalist that I could find. Maybe Annie Linsky was another who would ask questions of Harris if you read Thompson every day he would say I reached out to the Harris campaign to ask why she changed her mind about creating a new breed of ponies using the bones of children and he would say she's just not answering these questions and then he would write down what she had thought before and then he would write down what she said she thought now. And he would know that it was mighty strange that there'd been no explanation for the shift. So I think he deserves to write this book. I don't think anyone else does. And I suspect what's happened here is that the advance on a book like this, if Jake Tapper name is attached. It's five times the size.

And the chance of it becoming a bestseller and the contents being read by hundreds of thousands of people is much higher because Jake Tapper has a really solid platform. And that Alex Thompson thought, okay, I will take that deal. And I can't entirely blame him for it. No. The phenomenon in general of the media now reporting on the thing that it did is infuriating and it reminds me of nothing more than the 2017 tax cuts that donald trump and the republican congress passed which were lied about

assiduously day in out, including and especially by the New York Times. And then in 2019, the New York Times had the temerity to run a piece, the title of which was, face it, you probably got a tax cut. The first paragraph of that piece said, there's widespread misapprehension about what the tax cuts did. Most people don't know what they did. Many people think that their taxes went up. Yes, because you told them that for two years. Well, why do you think the media has to write books now about the cover up of Joe Biden's senility is because it spent four years covering it up. And here's the thing. They say, well, we didn't know. And I'm sure some of that's's true the white house did engage in some shenanigans i'm sure there is some extent to which they didn't know everything but here's the problem i was one of the people who repeatedly said joe biden's too old a position

that was shared by 80 of the american public and we were called names so even if you don't know everything about it even if some bits are off the record or you don't want to go out there a problem they didn't have during russiagate but they don't want to go out there, a problem they didn't have during Russiagate, but they don't want to go out there on a limb. They shouted at us. They said that we were being mean to a man with a stutter, that we were falling for cheap fakes, that we were partisan.

Go to hell, guys. You can't now write books on this, but I will exclude Alex Thompson for my criticism because he actually was, right from the beginning, pretty good. You know, James, this is what happens when we give Charlie a week off. He comes back with the full fire and brimstone, and I like it. Oh, I love it too.

Plenty of vinegar. And he's right. That's just it. And, you know, the thing is that they won't be called out on this because to call them out would be to call themselves out, so we won't have that. But thank heavens that we have alternative medias. And when they said that, when you say, Charlie, that they were shouting at us, I mean, shout all you like it. They don't have the

megaphone and the reach that they used to, and they can't set the debate and the tone that they used to. I have, you know, adjusted my news consumption habits over the past couple of years to the extent where, you know, I get it from X. And people just wince when you say that because, oh, that's what you mean, you're trapped in your own little bubble, your own little non-contiguous information stream. No, no, no. I subscribe to a wide variety of voices that bring a wide variety of things on. And I have the fulminating of the left side of the fulminating of the right. But there's a lot of good sourced stuff in there that either goes to a primary source, which is trustworthy, or itself is an interesting source that did not exist six months ago. Key example of this is data Republican,

small r. Do you know the account to which I refer? Yes. Okay. Here's this woman. She is apparently a computer nerd, brilliant, very good at, she's a, she's a kernel engineer. She's very good at getting rooting down into the, you know, the, the, the heart of systems and finding relationships and finding patterns and how things work. And she's applied her skills to, to doge things to USAID and has produced these fascinating flow charts of where the money goes. I think we talked about this a couple of weeks ago where before we never knew exactly, we would just hear that $20 million had been granted for climate change abatement in low income communities. We think, well, that's great. Unless if you think though, it's a scam. But that's of course not what happened. 20 million would go to this institution,

which would take 10 million and give it to this one, which would shave off two, and then eight would go to this place and et cetera, et cetera. And somebody's coming into the room to talk to me. Hi, sorry. Doesn't matter. Sorry. Just had an interruption. And so she's come and she's applied for work at Doge. And apparently she's going to get it. She's going to get a security clearance and bring these incredible skills to that. So I have learned more from her stuff, which is fairly transparent and easy to understand, but complex than I have from any single ever mainstream media newspaper saying, well, let's take a look at the funding of the government and break it down and see how it goes. It just wasn't in their interest or their appetite to do so before. But now we've got people

who have very large appetites for it and very great interest in skills and we're learning we're learning things that we should have known years ago yeah i mean with it once upon a time uh well actually we're back in the 90s and the 80s i used to try and get after certain data sets in the federal government and that meant going to a government agency library and getting bound volumes that were available to the public and pouring through lots of tables. And then if I found a meaningful data set, entering it by hand on an Excel spreadsheet. Well now, a lot of data sets are available in downloadable form, not spending, I mean,

because the ledgers are huge. But likewise, if you did budget work, you had to go through ledgers on paper, and that meant thousands of pages. And now you can use artificial intelligence and other screens to get at it. This isn't the only effort. There's been this great organization out of Chicago for several years called Open the Books, and they do something like this. They produce some very good reports.

I think they have a site, OpenTheBooks.com or something. And they've done a lot of work on mostly the state and local level around the country, but some federal about wasteful spending and stuff. But now we're the next generation or maybe even a third generation of this where you can use AI tools and find the things you really are looking for. And, yeah, the media is just lazy about all this. Oh, that one – it's a parallel to that. I remember the Reagan years, James, I think you do too, when every time there was a budget cut, which usually wasn't a cut at all. It was a reduction in the rate of growth. Exactly. But the media would find somebody who was hurt by a change in eligibility and, oh, they give a big sob story.

CBS, you might remember, I think in 82 or 83, did a week-long series, primetime, called People Like Us. And it was an hour a night of people being hurt by Reagan policies. And Reagan, who was very disciplined about ignoring the media, was so angry, he called up Dan Rather and yelled at him about it, how biased it was and so forth. Okay. They're trying to rerun that now, of course, with the federal workers losing their jobs, who are saving babies in Zimbabwe or wherever.

And I don't know. I don't think it's getting quite the traction. Oh, and finally, maybe you, Charlie, or somebody say this a while ago. Did the media ever interview a single person who lost their job when Biden shut down the Keystone Pipeline on day one? I think we know the answer. We don't. You never get an interview with a person who wasn't hired because of a regulation, who never got the job in the first place because the company had contracted 3% because an onerous regulation came down. You never hear about those people. But when you do hear about the people who are being hired, sometimes you hear about the stories that, oh, the nightmares that business owners have when it comes to hiring. I mean, if you're a business owner, you probably sometimes have felt totally lost when it comes to HR and hiring.

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and are truly affordable at bamboohr.com slash free demo. That's bamboohr.com slash free demo. And we thank Bamboo HR for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. I'd like to move to England now. Well, actually I wouldn't. Actually I would. I would. I mean, if move to England now. Well, actually, I wouldn't. Actually, I would. I would. I mean, if I had my druthers, I would pack everything up and I would buy a house in Suffolk

by the sea, and I would live there very happily in a wonderful little community that I know. But England as a whole, and perhaps in its urban centers, is having difficulties of which we find news here. We either find news of the way that immigration patterns have resulted in changes to English culture that may not sit well with the locals. We also find that there is a bizarre desire to emulate the most banal portions of 1984 and knock on people's doors for things that they've said. Well, Trump is going to meet with British Prime Minister Keir.

And they're going to I think they already have met. Yeah. And I believe that Starmer objected to J.D. Vance saying what he said about UK free speech, at which point he was roundly excoriated on X and Twitter by people who are saying you're putting grandmas in jail for Facebook posts, for heck's sake. Charles, looking back on your former country, we of course know that you're a proud American citizen by choice and by effort. How do you regard, are we over-exaggerating

exactly the extent to which free speech, supposedly a cherished British value, is being trampled upon? Or is it really that bad? No, I think it's really that bad. It's not as bad in England as it is in Scotland. Scotland, which has certain devoluted powers, devolved powers, I suppose you would say, has gone truly crazy with laws that are effectively modern, sat's progressive versions of the old blasphemy laws, just only applied to the people they hate. But Britain, having no constitution to stop this, has failed to stop it and you've got a bunch of laws on the books that are designed

to stop people talking about subjects that the government doesn't want to talk about under the guise of protecting people from hatred and discrimination. And in America, those laws would be struck down under the First Amendment in about seven seconds. The most egregious example recently has been the arrest and prosecution in some cases of people who are praying silently outside of abortion clinics. Now, this topic gets slightly complicated because when you look into some of these cases, including ones in America, you find that some of the people who were supposed to be praying or standing were actually blocking the entrance. And of course, blocking an entrance is not speech. But in the English case, they've actually been arrested and prosecuted for praying.

In fact, one woman who was arrested literally said while she was standing there, I don't wish to stop anyone or coerce anyone. I'm just here to pray for you and talk to you if needed, because I know sometimes people are coerced into abortions. And that was too far. When I was at Oxford, there was a kid in my year who was famously and very amusingly arrested because he called it police officers horse gay this is a real story this is a real story that you can look up and you'll find instant google

results for the case he told the police officer by the way mate your horse is gay like that he had a few drinks he was being facetious and he was arrested under speech laws that prohibit not because it was a police officer, not because he was belligerent, but the content of the speech. Now, I think I'm right in saying that case was dropped. But for years, we had all of these absurd examples. There was a guy, a singer on a pier at one of the English seaside resorts who sang the song Kung Fu Fighting in front of a Chinese person, not because the Chinese person was there,

but because he was a singer at a beach resort. And he sang the song and he was arrested. We are equal opportunity prosecutors when it comes to religion. We prosecute Muslims for criticizing atheists and Christians for criticizing Muslims and atheists for criticizing both. There was a guy who was arrested

because he leafleted Liverpool Airport. The leaflet said there is no God. I mean, it's very, very silly. And yeah, it is a problem. It's not just the media getting over his skis. Well, in America, I think... Hold on, Stephen. In America, I think under the new anti-misinformation idea,

you could actually bring somebody up on charges if they had said in social media that everybody was kung fu fighting because it's demonstrably not true.

I'm looking out my window right now. You may have a portion or a fraction of the audience engaged in kung fu fighting, but to say that everyone is kung fu fighting

is misinformation. You've seen that T-shirt where it says surely not everybody is kung fu fighting. Oh to say that everyone is kung fu fighting is misinformation. Yeah, there's a great T-shirt. You've seen that T-shirt where it says, surely not everybody is kung fu fighting. Oh, no, I haven't. See, I had the same joke in my head. Look, it's worse. I mean, I say it's worse than that. They're getting more brazen about preemptive censorship.

So earlier this week, what's her name? Elizabeth van der Lederhosen, I call her, the president of the European Commission. She gave a speech to bring open about what they want to do. And what she said was, you know, the problem of misinformation and disinformation is so serious that I'm not sure she used the word prior restraint, but the phrase she did use was, it is easier to pre-bunk something than to debunk it after the fact. So that's just sugarcoating for we're going to stop people from dissenting and making criticisms and saying everyone's Kung Fu fighting and all the rest. Pre bunking. I know. I like that. Right.

I mean, these people have never seen minority report, I guess, pre-crime and yet is very, or that's a model right that's the joke 1984 was not supposed to be the owner's manual for doing this right and minority report and all those other Philip K Dickie and things great wonderful one quick other thing that is gross about the English system

so I just looked up the story that I told you about this guy at Oxford who caught so he was drinking after his final exams. And he said to this police officer, do you realize your horse is gay? And he's arrested for making homophobic remarks. He spent a night in the cells before the charges were dropped. But the reason he spent the night in the cells was that he had been given the chance to pay an $80, 80 pound fine without due process. They introduced that under Blair,

that a police officer could say, instead of going through the system, I will march you to an ATM right now and you can just hand me $80. So you've got two things there that will be unconstitutional in the United States. One is arresting people for speech. And the other is punishment One is arresting people for speech, and the other is punishment that is determined by police officers completely outside of the system of due process.

That is Cancun, Mexico police action right there. But what I find fascinating about that, really, when you think about it, is the bias that they're showing in arresting the man for saying that the horse is gay. What if the man himself was gay and intended that to be a compliment? Oh, right. Maybe the horse was gay. Just the way it stepped. He found it extremely attractive, and he was paying it a compliment.

But for them to automatically assume that that was a slur shows the mindset of the policeman himself, and I'm surprised that he wasn't brought up on charges no huh all right well sturm apparently is going to um embark on a crash defense build-up i don't know if you guys saw that which i find interesting because british defense has perhaps not been as robust as it was at its imperial peak, which I think we all get that. But their ability to project power is minimal. So great that they're doing that.

On the other hand, you read that an ongoing investigation of the art in Westminster has decided that they have to take down a portrait of Lord Nelson. And I find that extraordinary. I regard the way the British seem to be denying their own history, the glories of for human frailties and failings or, you know, egregious misdeeds or whatever, to just wipe it all out and hang new portraits and say that this is who we are. It's remarkable. I mean, it's a matter of time before Nelson comes off the column. That's all I'm saying. Do you think so?

What did he do wrong? What did he do wrong? Do you know, Charles? What's the beef with Nelson? I think it was his indifference to the slavery issue. Yeah, he... Oh. Right.

So this sprung up about eight years ago, and I wrote about it. There was a call to take him off the column in London. And my point then, I don't know what you think of this framework, was that even if you are tremendously bothered by the fact that he was a man of his age, he's not on the column because of that. Here in Jacksonville, during the summer of 2020, when everything went crazy, we had a protest outside the courthouse.

It was one of the few summer of 2020 protests that I thought had a point. There was a statue of Alexander Stevens, the vice president of the Confederacy, a man who is literally famous for believing that slavery was, quote, the cornerstone of the United States and that the Declaration of Independence was full of lies. And some of the speakers there said, this is not a good thing to have outside of a courthouse. What message does that send? And I thought, you know what? That's a good point. But Nelson is not Stevens.

Nobody, nobody looks at that and says, oh, that's Nelson, the incidental slavery supporter. They think that was Nelson, the great patriot who gave his life for the country and won the Battle of Trafalgar, defeated Napoleon's navy many times. That's why he's on there. So to drill down on all of these things that really weren't very important, if they're even true about him, seems to me to be silly. I can understand taking down some statues. I can. I mean, you mentioned Confederate vice president and other people who rose up against the United States, secessionists, traitors, doing what estonia what the what the what the they did in the balkans i remember taking a tour in uh where was i somewhere in the balkans estonia and uh the tour guide had explained that they'd rounded up all of the marxist statues and they put them in a special garden which they called the you know the garden of soviet monsters and you could go

there and you could see all you could see the Lenin in his various portraits, either Lenin, you know, gripping his jacket, the side of his jacket or Lenin with his hand out like this, which they call the Lenin hailing the taxi model. And, you know, some bristly face of Karl Marx and then some local luminaries and forgettable people who would assist with Soviet rule. They put him in a place where you could go and see him and laugh at him or jeer at him or study or whatever but not to destroy them because to destroy them would be to destroy the history that they represented you can't you ought not to do that so i find it so hilarious when people are saying that we're renaming mountains now and gulfs this is the entire renaming project in order to create a more serene sense of i mean when you start taking down the guys like nelson then Teddy Roosevelt comes down. Then Ben Franklin goes down.

Then Thomas Jefferson is dethroned from his place in Washington, D.C. And it's madness. And I think we stopped that. I think the fever has broken and we're no longer doing that. And I think people are kind of happy about doing that. Let's switch gears again because I want to talk about Justice Roberts coming, just waking up in the middle of the night and saying, no, no. Somebody want to explain that for everybody? Well, I can try it. What I guess some lower court judge had said that, no, Trump,

you can't halt foreign aid that's been scheduled by previous decisions of the State Department or whoever, USAID. You have to send it out by midnight last night or something. And that's what Roberts stops. He says, no, they can stop the funding. And I think it may be pending a more complete review by an appellate court. I'm not quite sure. But this is part of the larger scene where the Supreme Court fairly soon is going to have to confront issues we haven't had in front of us for 50 years, really since the Nixon era of presidential control over spending. And then second, presidential control. This is getting more ink over the federal workforce. And we're going to revisit a Supreme Court case from what, almost 90 years ago now, that said a president couldn't remove somebody. That's the Humphreys executor's case. Long thought by just about everybody across the political spectrum in law schools, like where I am today, to have been wrongly decided.

And so fun to watch all this. The court's going to have to do a lot of extra work right now. And I think they don't like that, but they don't have a choice. They're going to have to do it charlie some say that this is just uh the supreme court making it known that these injunctions by the judges these nationwide bans of people is uh it's just not gonna fly anymore i'm not sure that the court is quite ready to set a system-wide rule on injunctions because that is quite complicated. I find them annoying in some cases, but I have read some pretty good defenses of why they're necessary. It has to be looked at on a case-by-case basis. I think that the reason that the court in this case, and I think many

others to come, is refusing to acquiesce is that the reasoning underneath most of the interventions that we've seen is really poor you know before he shifted on it david french used to call it trump law there was this different system for trump than anyone else All of a sudden in 2017, the plenary power over immigration, for example, that had been assumed in American law since the start of the 20th century was shaved back. Not because there'd been any alterations to the facts or any supreme court cases that had amended the precedents but because donald trump was doing it and you know i think we're seeing that and then there is a shift i think coming back toward article two as it's actually written and away from the New Deal era invention of so-called independent agencies. There's a case Humphreys executor that I think Steve would be able to explain better than I

that could well be overturned. And every time you see one of these judges jump in to try to prevent the president from doing something that, at least in the original constitution, is very clearly under his power. You are raising the likelihood that it will be litigated on the merits and that the Supreme Court will shift back to the pre-New Deal, i.e. correct understanding of presidential power within his own department. So I do think that the decision you're discussing is important, but I think it's less to do with the wisdom or necessity of nationwide injunctions per se,

and more to do with other... You know, you just revealed your own biases there and you know charlie with that pre-new deal and hence correct i mean why don't you just bundle some sticks together and make it obvious well i just think that i think the way in which the administrative state was used in much of the New Deal was flatly unconstitutional. Now, there's lots of people who would argue with me, lots of smart caprice in the changing of the meaning of american law but it doesn't restore the authority to the white house that ought to be restored and so we've ended up in a weird place james which is the president usurps an awful lot of power that belongs to congress and congress doesn't do much about it.

That's a problem. At the same time, and people struggle with this, if you believe both of these things. At the same time, Congress has imposed all sorts of rules on the executive branch that don't pass constitutional muster, like that it has to preside over and execute agencies whose staff it can't fire. It's just nowhere in there. And you get the best modern example of this, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, not only set outside of the president's remit, but Congress said it's outside of its own remit now,

so it's funded by the Federal Reserve, so you can't even use legislative power to amend it. I think these are New Deal inventions that ought to be struck from American law. I agree. And by the way, by saying bundle of sticks, I meant the old Roman symbol of authority. I did not mean a British locution that you would be arrested for if you called a horse that. We've had a lot of horse here, even back to charlie's note about uh kamala harris's plan to use the bones of children to create a new breed of pony which brings us back to the lippins on her horse which brings us of course to the dialogue written by quentin tarantino

for the great gene hackman i believe in crimson tide uh i think and you the story is peculiar when we heard the when everybody heard that gene hackman had died, you said, oh, well, he was very old. Sad, but not unexpected. And then the story takes odd twists when you learn more about it. I have nothing to say about that except to wait for what we're eventually told. But it does make one recall his various roles in the movies. Everybody seems to be topping off with, he was great as Lex Luthor. And I thought, no, I don't think so. various roles in the movies, everybody seems to be topping off with, he was great as Lex Luthor.

And I thought, no, I don't think so. That's like my least favorite Gene Hackman performance. And I've got a lot of favorite Gene Hackman performances. One of my favorites, actually, of his is Bonnie and Clyde, where you don't even see him. You just hear him crying out in mad fever-struck nonsense from a distance. I liked him in Young Frankenstein as a comic turn. Loved the way he wore a hat in French Connection. But what I loved

the most about people talking about Hackman was the realization that this is one of those guys that came out of the 70s. Actually, we had them in the 40s. Every era has them. Guys that shouldn't be movie stars because they're not classically handsome. They don't seem to have... have, just look at them, you wouldn't. But have that something.

And Ackman had that. And it's odd for an actor of his intensity that I seem to remember him having, I always remember him with an easy grin. I liked the guy. And I just wondered if you had any other thoughts. Charles, I know you're still working your way through the classic American movies, so you may not be the go-to man in this. Yes, I haven't seen that one.

Although I would note that Gene Hackman was a Jacksonville Jaguars fan, which was to his credit. All you need to know. NBC and Fox. And I don't recognize the media today. President Trump broke them. Join my show every Thursday and into the weekend as we take the media to task and call out phony and feckless politicians and dive into stocks and investing and explore internal affairs like health and well-being and have a glorious day. Um, what five things did you do this week? Have a glorious day. What five things did you do this week?

Go on, tell me. I finished three articles that I was past deadline on. So each one of those counts as one thing. So there's up to three right there. I've been teaching a class here for yesterday and now the next two days. What else did I do? I took the trash out before I left town. I don't think that qualifies.

No. Oh, no. This is not your wife asking you what five things you did, because if it was your wife asking you, you would have just had one there with the trash thing. And those other four were just kind of waved away as things that you do, I guess, somewhere for some reason. That would be interesting. If spouses begin doing what five things have you do, I guess, somewhere for some reason. That would be interesting if spouses begin doing what five

things have you done this week? Charles, are you as appalled by this as one TikToker put it, something that is like North Korea? She said she was a woman with extremely luxurious hair.

Yeah, she was extremely pretty. I could forgive her hyperbole. I am not appalled by it. I'm not sure this was particularly well thought through, given that people within the administration, who I assume are not to be designated squishes by the president, Kash Patel, for example, immediately said, could you just be careful because we do intelligent stuff around here but there's nothing inherently wrong with asking that question it's certainly the sort

of question you would hear a lot in silicon valley steve jobs was famous for asking people what they did and then if unsatisfied firing them i i don't think that it is like north korea i do think although i've been defensive of a lot of doge that it was less useful as an exercise than much of what they've done. Yeah, well, I just remembered I want to do this last thing here because it's – oh, yes, Stephen, go ahead. Well, I mean, I've got to go back and – I have to – right, I have to go back and find a story. About 10, 12 years back, there was this story that got a lot of publicity about a guy at the EPA who had retired, except he stayed on the payroll. They'd had a retirement ceremony, and then somebody noticed, hey, he's still on the payroll, but he's not showing up for work. What's he doing? They called him up and says, oh, I've been seconded to the CIA for a special project, which turned out to be a lie. He was working at it. He was some

socialist wacko. He was working on a plan to reorganize the whole American economy on behalf of the EPA, on his own remit to save the planet. And he went to jail. But my wonder is, it took a couple of years for someone to notice they're paying this guy a big salary who doesn't ever show up. There's got to be more people like that, maybe not tens of thousands. But I think they're not wrong to say, let's see people out there even paying attention. Now, when your payroll systems are actually operating on those old IBM mainframes that have the tapes spinning and whirring back and forth and spitting out

punch cards, possibly, you know, possibly there may be one or two feather betters out there. The last thing that I wanted to do, that means that the previous item, which was the last is now the penultimate. We used to do this with Robin Peter and it's been a while,

just very briefly. what are you watching? And I don't mean, you know, the world girls. I mean on the television. Right, yeah. I watch very little television. I did just watch this show. I think it's on Amazon Prime, a police procedural called On Call. It's a half-hour police procedural.

It's sort of, you might say, dragnet updated. Well, not quite dragnet, but it's, you know, about a couple of officers on the beat in Long Beach of all unlikely, not maybe not unlikely places, but it's very well made. And that's about the only thing I've seen lately, because otherwise I don't have any time, unfortunately. Is it a reality show? Is it descriptive? No, it's a scripted drama um uh

oh dick wolf you know the law right guy he's he's one of the producers of it of course so a half an hour scripted crime show i like that because it's not a commitment charles i am watching season one of slow horses now everyone who yeah for anyone enjoying it i hope it's fantastic i think it's terrific i was gonna say for anyone who listens to me on various things and recalls faintly having heard me say about a year and a half ago that i was watching season one of slow horses that is in fact correct i am a slow horse in this regard we watched three episodes then we got very busy with many things including football season and then we dropped off it not because we didn't love it but because we wanted to pay it attention and so now we're back

and we're finishing off season one with the attention that it deserves and it is terrific i want to give a shout not a shout out i hate that a a a a stamp of endorsement for a show on Hulu called Paradise. Nobody is watching, apparently. Well, the people who are watching, some people aren't, but it's one of those you go to the Reddit subreddit for it, and it's got like 20, 30 comments. It doesn't seem to have broken through.

It's one of the most incredible things I've seen in a great long time. It's a Secret Service agent for a president, and it's funny how we sort of cycle our tropes of presidents and what we expect them to be. The Morgan Freeman era of presidents is over. We appear to be back to the William Devane era of presidents now. I can't tell you anything about it because the first episode ends with a startling twist. And then it's off to the races. Extraordinarily good storytelling.

Remarkably well done, and it has a penultimate episode, the seventh episode, which simply is one of the most thrilling pieces of television I've ever seen. I have never sat on the edge of my chair immobile for an hour like I did. It's really good. Paradise on Hulu. Five things, folks, you need to do this week. A, you need to go to BambooHR.com, free demo, and take a look at what they can do for you. Two a you need to go to a bamboohr.com free demo and take a look at what they can do for you two you need to go to any one of the platforms that offers podcast suggestions and reviews and give us those five stars or however many stars they allow you to do because that's great because if you do it on apple that means that more people see us more

people go to ricochet and that's your third thing If you haven't signed up for Ricochet yet, you need to do that. I mean, I've been telling you this for 700 plus episodes now, but it is the same civil center right place you've been looking for on the internet all of your days. You wonder why you didn't sign up before. Oh, you can read it for free, but it takes a couple of coins to get to the member feed and that's where the communities start and really grow. And you can post, too. And like other places on the internet,

if you don't cough up those couple of coins, you can't post, so it keeps the bar for conversation high. That's why we love it. The fourth thing you need to do is to tell other people about Ricochet, and the fifth thing you need to do right now is to say, that was a great show.

I'm going to just think about how much fun I had and make sure that I'm there next week. That said, Charles, thank you. Stephen, thank you. Listeners, thank you. Bamboo HR, thank you. And we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Goodbye.

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