The Ricochet Podcast - The Renegade Academy

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

Have we hit the "another week, another act of homegrown terror" phase of American history? Spencer Klavan joins Steve and Charles for a roundup of the (relatively) young academic's recent works on subjects ranging from Francis Fukayama's oft-misunderstood thesis to the ascent of figures like Hasan Piker, who hope to microloot our stores of social capital (and Whole Foods, too). The trio also considers the possibilities before the classical education rebellion that's breaking out on campuses. Plus, Cooke and Hayward dive into this week's SCOTUS decision on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and they see an achievement worth celebrating in the United Arab Emirates' decision to leave OPEC.  

Have you ever had a moment where you think, man, someone should really do something about this? Then you realize, maybe that someone is you. Well, with the help of GoFundMe, you can change someone's life. You could start a GoFund me to help a friend pay for school, fund that new community space, or help a local kid finally get to that national competition. I've seen this myself. Last year, a friend of mine launched a GoFund me to help with medical bills after an unexpected surgery. It was incredible how fast the support rolled in.

People want to help. They just need a way to do it. And GoFundMe makes it easy. So do you have a dream, a person, or a cause in your life that could use some support? Don't wait for someone else to bring change. You can be the one who makes a difference. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform, trusted by over 200 million people. Start your GoFundMe today at gofundme.com.

That's gofundme.com. Gofundme.com. I've come straight from the fountain of youth, so I'm ready. I literally have. That's where I was. It shows, Charles. We can tell. We put the Voting Rights Act together because there was an issue because they were keeping people from voting. They were literally shooting people. That problem is gone. It's not gone. Because you're still doing it.

The Supreme Court did the right thing in deciding that we should. should end racial gerrymandering. Chief Justice said it best way to stop discriminating by race is to stop discriminating by race. It's the Rickashay podcast number 787. Steve Hayward sitting in the host chair today with Charles C.W. Cook and our special guest, Spencer Claibon. So let's have ourselves a podcast. That's good.

That's the kind of ruling I like. When did that happen? Well, it's a big role in this morning. Really? Is that right? You tell me about the ruling. Welcome everybody to the Rurkishay podcast. It's Steve Hayward hosting today for the vacationing, I guess, James Lylex with Charles C.W. Cook. And Charles, so, you know, another week, another assassination attempt, ho-hum, right?

Another peace plan from Iran that isn't. But I guess really the biggest news of the week for me, and I know for you, is this Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act. And I have thoughts, but I suspect you have more of them because I haven't had a chance to read the opinion yet. Well, I did read it. I read it the moment that it came out, and I found the majority opinion persuasive, and I found the two paragraph concurrence by Clarence Thomas, joined by Neil Gorsuch, even more persuasive. Thomas did the thing he does every time, and has been doing on this topic for 30 years, where he said, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, now go further. Right.

In effect, the argument here is that the Supreme Court has merely assumed that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act requires majority-minority district. And Alito says it doesn't. And he takes a swing at the court in the 80s and correctly says that the holding opinion until now had been written at a time. when the court just didn't pay that much attention to the text and breathed in all sorts of meanings that simply weren't there. That case was a case called Gingles from, I think, 1982. Anyhow, the logic works a bit like this. If the Voting Rights Act's second section does not require majority-minority districts,

then majority-minority districts, drawn by definition on the basis of race, are unconstitutional. because considering race in government policy is illegal. And Alito proposes that there are now only two exceptions to that rule. One is race riots in a sense. He says that government is allowed to make public policy on the basis of race to separate people if they're rioting on the basis of race because it would be completely absurd to. say we can't stop this prison riot where the white prison population and the black population are

trying to kill each other because that would violate the 14th Amendment. This is a longstanding rule, it seems. And the other exception, he says, is if there is a government policy that is designed to prevent an explicit and current racial discrimination, then you can consider race. But he says, you can't consider race here. And I just think, I think first of, off. This seems to be correct. If you read through the opinion, the law itself has a provision in it in which it says that nothing in this act should be construed to assume that the various racial populations of the United States are entitled to proportional representation along racial lines. So I think that the statutory argument is obvious. I also think this should just be celebrating.

given that the argument is clear. I'm amazed reading all of these complaints as if they did the opposite. Every time it seems the Supreme Court strikes a blow for racial equality, for color blindness, for treating citizens equally under the law, just as it did a few years ago in the affirmative action case,

the media says it's done the opposite. Treats it as if it's reintroducing Jim Crow. So as an American citizen, having been satisfied by a little, to his opinion. I think this is a really great moment in American history that once again, not that he's always great in the court, but we're affirming John Roberts line that the way that you stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. Yes. Well, of course, as I'm sure you know, and many listeners will know, that statement of

Roberts made many years ago now. Yeah. Represented a direct challenge to, was it Justice Brennan or I forget who back in the 70s had written, the only way to get it beyond race and racism is to take account of race, right? It was a convoluted Orwellian logic to it. Now, let me play devil's advocate a little bit, perhaps. And maybe you hinted to this in one of the things you just said, which is remedying clear cases of discriminatory intent. If you'd go back to the 50s and 60s when the Voting Rights Act was written, one of the practices in the South that the authors of the Act had in mind was not just barriers to voting for blacks in the South, but things like cities, I think Jackson, Mississippi was one that had all at-large elections for the city council,

which meant that although you had a substantial black population, it wasn't a majority, and they could never get a black elected to the city council. So they said, no, you have to have districts. Now, I don't think they specified they had to be racially gerrymandered, but that was, I mean, I don't know. It seems to me that that is, while still perhaps problematic, a sensible thing to have gone after at the time, that's very different than, say, House districts, let alone, right? We can't Jerry Amanda Senate districts, right, because the Senate's the whole state. Yeah.

And, of course, there are cases such as Reynolds v. Sims, which I think is wrong, for what it's worth, got rid of the Senate's in states, at least in so far as they represented the same sort of body as the United States Senate, where the populations that they represented were unequal. I think that it is, of course, entirely true that throughout Jim Crow, the states in the South that wanted to disenfranchise African Americans often did so while pretending they weren't. In gun control, this comes up time and time again, for example, there's a famous law in Tennessee passed in 1870 in which the state legislature does not. say because it knows, this is prior to 1876, so it's still largely occupied, it knows that it

will pay a price if it does. It does not say blacks can't have guns. What it says is that the only guns that you're allowed to buy are on this list. And the list just so happened to only contain guns that were issued to Confederate soldiers in the Civil War. Now, that's a great example. That's a great example of the sort of law that would need to be struck down because it was facially racially neutral. And so that's the argument that you will hear. I think that it's a fair one on its own terms, but I think that there are a couple of objections to it, one of which makes it into Alito's opinion. The country's changed. And you now have the statistical outcome that that those who wrote the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act wanted,

which is that African-Americans vote at about the same rate as whites. In many areas, they vote. Now, if that were the basis for Alito's opinion, I think it would be insufficient. I don't think it would be the role of the Supreme Court to second-guess Congress. If the argument here were, look, the 15th Amendment allows Congress to make rules in this area, but we think that we're now so enlightened that those rules are unnecessary, so Congress doesn't have the authority. I think that would be outrageous,

because the 15th Amendment explicitly gives to Congress the power to pass legislation in this area. But that's not Alito's or the majority's opinion. The majority says the law doesn't say that. In other words, as a secondary argument, even if you believe that the court should ignore the text and do good things for the country, that justification is weak. I mean, you don't need to get there, though. That's the thing.

You don't need to get there because he's saying, as a textual matter, it just doesn't say that the Congress gets to superintend gerrymandering. It says that you're not allowed to deprive people of their right to vote, and there are criteria for that that are not gerrymandering. But if you're going to take an expansive view of the law and ignore the text, that doesn't make sense either, because we now don't have the same problem that we had in 1965. So I agree with you.

That was a real problem, and I think there are some circumstances in which courts ought to look at that. But I don't think it holds up here textually or otherwise. Well, right. I mean, you mentioned that black turnout has actually been higher than white turnout in a few recent national elections. Maybe that was Obama on the ballot or Kamala Harris. But I think a more telling statistic,

this is a little old, but I can't imagine it's gone backwards. But I remember when the Thurndstroms, Abigail and Stephen Thurnestrom put out their blockbuster book, American Black and White, which is now almost the 30-year-old book. But some of the figures they assembled, including something like this, but something like there were only 100 black elected officials

in the Southern States in 1960. And by the 1995, there were several thousand. So, I mean, that just, the country's changed, you said, and that's one indication of it. And I think the figure I read the other day, and I haven't gone and tried to check, you need Michael Brone or Henry Olson for this, but something like half of the black members of the House representatives today are actually from districts with a white majority or where the black population is a minority, which shows that you don't have to have a, this is part of the racial essentialism of the left that is so destructive. and so it's a blow for that. But at the risk of beating a dead horse, all of this is very important politically, but it's not something the court should consider. That is to say, I saw some people saying,

look at how the Republican parties changed. In 1982, they were happy to expand the Voting Rights Act. And in 2002, the Bush administration, or maybe it was six, 2006, the Bush administration renewed the Voting Rights Act pre-clays. statute and now it wouldn't even get a vote. That's where it matters that the country has changed. But it shouldn't matter here because the constitutional argument is and ought to be very clear. And it runs like this. The 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment ban the use of race in government decisions. That is superior as a principle to all statutes, including at the state level.

So the only way that you could have a constitutional ability to mandate, as Louisiana had been mandated, racial gerrymanders, is if the Congress, acting under the auspices of the 15th Amendment did that, and it didn't. I mean, this is the thing. Right. Like, all of the, all of the hand-waving falls at that point. It just didn't do it. It didn't. You can't get past the 14th and 15th Amendment's ban on the consideration of race unless Congress did it under the 15th Amendment. I just didn't do it. And to me, this is the big fight jurisprudentially between left and right. And it's why on this topic, I am so firmly on the right. I think that you either believe that the law is. an objective thing that can be understood by the common man. And I don't say that disparagingly. That's the whole point of writing the law down is so that non-lawyers, non-commentators, can point

to it in a court, can stand up and say, no, it says here that I'm not expected to do that and you can't do that to me. The only point of having a rule of law is for that. And, you know, if you read the dissent, there's a lot of harrowing history in it that I really do believe we should be cognizant of. But it can't get past that basic fact that the law doesn't say what it had been assumed to have said. And, you know, that's why I'm a conservative, and it's why I'm an originalist, and it's why I'm a textualist on statutory grounds. And it's why I really like the Supreme Court majority we have, because time and time again, that is their load stuff. Is it in the law? No, right. Then it doesn't count. Well, one last question to bring up on this. Having now planted the right flag in the right place on the Voting Rights Act and the application of the

Equal Protection Clause, I think the next step is to revisit the doctrine of disparate impact, which we got from the Griggs case back in the 70s, right? So, you know, in a thumbnail sketches, disparate impact said if there's a, I think the original intent was if there's a statistical disparity between populations and employment, schools or whatever, that would be a tripwire for investigating whether conscious race discrimination has taken place. Of course, it didn't stay there longer than about 30 seconds. And disparate impact, statistical variances became, assumed to be proof that discrimination was taking place, was taking place. And therefore, the legal justification for race conscious remedies, lots of consent decrees with corporations, cities, fire departments, etc.

So, and I know I don't, I've got to think somebody is working on a case, whether it's our friend Ed Bloom who brought the Harvard case or our friends at the New Civil Liberties Alliance who brought similar cases. But it seems to me that that one ought to be next on the list of things to review and overturn. Yeah, because what you described is Ibrahim Kendiism. That's Ibram Kendi's view that if there is anything in the country that does not fall on perfectly mathematical lines, then it must be the product of racism. And that's absurd. Now, that's not to say, Annalito left room in this decision for extreme examples. That's not to say that there couldn't be a situation in which statistical imbalances were the product of racism and that the government

would have a role in trying to remedy that. But the Griggs decision effectively says, if there is any for it whatsoever, or if there's an allegation even. That's how we must proceed. And you'll correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that why we can't use, is it, IQ testing or standardized testing in the hiring of government officials? Well, a lot of companies, too. The testing, the testing regime is directly implicated on this. I mean, I do remember a chairman once of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission who said, yes, I've used disparate impact. Again, as a tripwire, and then on close investigation, we discover some obvious, conscious, deliberate discrimination for which there are remedies under the Civil Rights Act.

And that EEOC chairman was a guy named Clarence Thomas. Yes, that's right. So there you go. Well, and we've got a problem too now because we're pretending, once again, that the country is the same as it was in 1960 or 1860. And this is the great sin of Ibrun Kendi and of Tiny See. Coates, in my view, the poll tax was obviously designed to disenfranchise African Americans. At a time where there was no money being put into public education for non-white, you can't

have that system in a free country. But that's simply not the case anymore. In fact, quite the opposite is true. So that case should go. It's offensive to the Constitution. It's offensive to the Declaration of Independence. It's offensive to what. we teach our children, which is to judge people based on their character, not on their race. And I hope I'm with you. I hope there's a case coming. Yeah. So Charlie, our guest is here. And so we'll have to draw a veil on the subject until some sequels that will inedibly arise. So we'll be right back. Have you ever had a moment where you think, man, someone should really do something about this?

Then you realize maybe that someone is you. Well, with the help of GoFundMe, you can change someone's life. You could start a GoFund me to help a friend pay for school, fund that new community space, or help a local kid finally get to that national competition. I've seen this myself. Last year, a friend of mine launched a go fund me to help with medical bills after an unexpected surgery. It was incredible how fast the support rolled in. People want to help. They just need a way to do it. And GoFundMe makes it easy. So do you have a dream, a person, or a cause in your life that Could use some support? Don't wait for someone else to bring change.

You can be the one who makes a difference. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform, trusted by over 200 million people. Start your GoFundMe today at gofundme.com. That's gofundme.com. Gofund me.com. We welcome now to the podcast, Spencer Claven, the editor-at-large of the American Mind,

associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books, and a prolific podcaster and sub-stacker. I'm jealous of you, Spencer, how productive you are. The author of two recent books and also several current articles, including one just out today, Friday while we're taping, that we'll talk about. One is How to Save the West, ancient wisdom for five modern crises.

Also, light of the mind, light of the world, illuminating science through faith. So welcome, Spencer. How are you? Oh, thanks, Steve. It's great to see you. doing well. It's a, it's been a big, an eventful week. And I, all I can say is don't, don't envy me my productivity. It comes at a heavy cost. Yeah, I think I can understand that too. So look, let's start with something that's topical. I mean, you've written these great pieces about

the roots of Western civilization and I don't want to spend a little time on that. But you have an article of today I just caught up with on this guy, Hassan Piker, who is no Piker. when it comes to wokeness, if I can make a pun. And I've heard about this guy, and I'm amazed. We're told that the era of wokeness was over, that it peaked in 2020. But from the looks of things, it has not over at all. So tell us a little bit about Piker and why you think he is, you know, the id of the Democratic Party or the left today. I should say at the outset, I would really love to be wrong about this.

So if you can, if you can persuade me that I am, I'd appreciate. it. Like, this seems like a pickle for the Democrats, just from where I sit, because I've been following Hassan for a bit. He just had this big moment with the New York Times. And Ezra Klein wrote a, I thought, really kind of gross article excusing him. He's a Twitch streamer for if people don't know who he is. He's big in certain internet circles, Marxist, kind of clickable, very camera-ready sort of podcast bro. And he's been one of the candidates, I think, for the left's Joe Rogan. That's how Klein framed him.

But yeah, he was on the New York Times podcast, I guess it was, with this writer Gia Tolentino. And the two of them were just kind of, I mean, it was champagne socialism on steroids, It's perhaps literally since Piker's a big weightlifter. And they were just kind of joking together about micro looting, which is shoplifting, basically. Charlie actually has an incredible piece about it at National Review, if you want a full rundown of all the appalling things that were said. And I think for a lot of people not in the Twitch very online world, this was their first exposure to this guy and what he's like. but it wasn't actually the worst of how he can be. I mean, subsequently, people have been seeing that he likes to joke about letting the streets run red with the blood of landlords,

and he likes to call for the death of public figures he dislikes. You know, genuinely a bad guy. And what's funny about him is, like, you, Steve do a ton of podcasting, Charlie, too. Like, we all talk a lot on camera. So sometimes you say things. You don't, you kind of regret afterwards, you're ranting a little bit, it's very loose medium, you know. I can say with true confidence that you could search my entire recorded over and not once would you find me accidentally wishing that the streets would run red with the blood of my enemy.

So we can kind of, I think, conclude this guy's the real deal. And what I proposed in that piece is that I don't, I think people like Ezra Klein would really like to be rid of this wing of the Democrat Party, or at least for it to take a back seat. I think after Trump's 2024 victory, there was a lot of soul searching over, did we go too far in the woke direction? Was this unpopular? Did we alienate a lot of our working class voters? Answers to all of those questions seem to basically be yes. And that moment has sort of gone the way of the 2016 moment when the Democrats were so concerned about flying out to the flyover state. and talking to your average voter and figuring out just what this whole movement's about.

Like, it has proven really hard, I think, for the Democrats to ditch peak woke for a couple of reasons. One of which is that there's just a lot of energy and momentum and kind of aesthetic appeal on the side of peak woke, much as it might surprise us to learn this. Like a lot of the attractive, young, passionate, stupid people of whom there are many, like are kind of in this vein and following Piker. Obviously, he's got a huge, a huge following. And Piker is moving in the same circles as Alexandria Ocasio-Cartez, Zoraaimani, these very buzzy politicians who have, you know, associated themselves with him.

And I think basically agree with most of what he has to say. On top of that, all the guys that would like to now be more moderate, or many of the Democrats that would like to be more moderate in the wake of Trump's second victory, have the problem that when they thought Trump was gone forever, when they thought they had succeeded in banishing him from politics, I'm talking about, like, you know, in the Biden years after the fervor of 2020, a lot of these guys went on camera and said things that now, in retrospect, look deranged. It's not just Kamala Harris, like, you know, let's trans the felons or whatever it was.

let's give state-sponsored sex changes to people in prison. It's, you know, the, the, it's Pelosi and Schumer kneeling and Kente cloth and, you know, pledging their support for the George Floyd rioters, you know, so that's kind of on camera. And, and this is the last piece of it, not only is Peak Woke on camera, but a core part of peak woke is that if you walk it back even at all, if you moderate even, slightly, you are a murderer. You're a tantamount to like Hitler, right? And you're alongside all those other Hitlerians that voted for Trump.

So now there's, they're in a bit of a bind that makes it difficult either to like disavow wokeness or to cozy up to people like Piker without giving the game away in their efforts to court more moderate voters or people who are alienated by this. So I suspect that much as like Ezra Klein might wish to kind of reframe toward an abundance agenda or a Democrat populism or whatever, you know, the Hassans of the world are at least not going away. And they might actually be the only viable brand left for the Democrats, which would be bad for everybody. Can I ask you your take on him, Spencer? Do you think he's stupid? I'm not asking that facetiously, because on the one hand, he says truly evil things and seems to have a justification for them.

I think a terrible one. But for example, he said in that interview and it said elsewhere that the CEO of United Health Care who's killed, Brian Thompson, deserved to be killed. He says, from one perspective, but he's really endorsing it. because he was guilty of social murder. And that idea he ascribes to Frederick Engels. So he's got the citations. On the other hand, he says things that no serious socialist would ever say. For example, he says that it would be great if people robbed the Louvre.

Now, that one is stupid, because if you look at the Louvre, what is it? It's a government-run institution that keeps priceless artifacts out of the hands of private billionaires and shows them to the public for free. I mean, so is he just stupid and just saying things for shock value? Or is this an actual intellectual movement that needs countering by serious people? You know, I'm embarrassed to say that point about the Louvre had not actually occurred to me. So maybe I am also like trailing in the way. of Hassan. I mean, yeah, I don't know if you saw Charlie that shot he posted of himself. I think he was on a train reading Lenin. What is to be done? Louis Vuitton, lug in. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, with some ring

that apparently costs upwards of like, you know, $1,500. And there is a eminently mockable quality to him that I think he knows about a little bit. Like, there's a way in which online it pays to be a bit of a bozo. And he's got that going for himself. He definitely leans into the hymbo kind of aesthetic, which would suggest a certain degree of idiocy. Like, before this moment with the New York Times, there was another Times profile of him breathlessly discuss. I mean, I will never write copy as funny as the New York Times article about how hot Hassan Piker is. It's really a work of art if you want to go look it up, especially the captions on the photos. But anyway, I suspect Charlie that he's probably read more than most of his audience, which is a low bar.

But I do think from the twitches, from the streams that I've watched of his, I think he's very fluent. He's very actually eloquent. And when he cites guys like Engels, he's not citing nothing. He's not kind of pulling stuff out of thin air or just riffing. Like all socialists, he hasn't thought his ideas all the way through. If he had, he wouldn't be a socialist. But then I think there's like this extra component of, maybe this is way over intellectualizing it, but there's this this Bodriard theory that online, well, a theory derived from Bodriard that online everything becomes hyper real.

Like it gets so over the top that it becomes detached from the original signifiers. And at that level in that space, like, is it possible, do you think that looting the looves doesn't actually mean looting the loove? Like, it's serving some kind of symbolic role of this is an image of the Western civilization that I despise. And so, you know, at one point he says something, like, let's go full chaos. And I think there's like more of a, like, maybe in a Trumpian. sort of way. It's like take him seriously, but not literally. There's like a kind of poetry, a dark poetry to the way he's talking. That's my guess. Have you ever had a moment where you think, man, someone should really do something about this? Then you realize, maybe that someone is you.

Well, with the help of GoFundMe, you can change someone's life. You could start a GoFund me to help a friend pay for school, fund that new community space, or help a local kid finally get to that national competition. I've seen this myself. Last year, a friend of mine, lunch to GoFundMe to help with medical bills after an unexpected surgery, it was incredible how fast the support rolled in. People want to help. They just need a way to do it. And GoFundMe makes it easy. So do you have a dream, a person, or a cause in your life that could use some support? Don't wait for someone else to bring change. You can be the one who makes a difference. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform, trusted by over 200 million people. Start your GoFundMe today,

at gofundme.com. That's gofundme.com. Gofundme.com. Yeah, Spencer, when you said a moment ago, you hadn't thought about his Louve comment or the Louvre angle. I thought, oh, wait a minute. You actually have the answer to that problem in one of your articles I have in front of me. It's your one on the Renegate Academy. Although, Charlie, did you want to follow a further one, Piker? No, no, please go. Okay. Well, then I'll change subjects because it does connect to a couple of your more recent pieces that fascinate me. The Renegate Academy in the latest Claremont Review of

books. And then one you wrote a month ago now, gosh, time flies on the age of America. And I have to say, let's see, how to summarize this for listeners? It's on the American mind and we'll link to it in the show notes. And it's getting a lot of commentary. I know that I was asked to do a comment. I just didn't have time because the usual problem. But you really pushed my buttons in a couple of the right ways. One is it gave me hope. I'm one of those old fogies now who says, you know, all these younger generations. they don't know what's going on. And you give me hope in this piece because you picked up on something I've been talking about for more than a decade,

which is revisiting the famous end of history thesis of Francis Fukuyama, which has been misunderstood and misapplied for a long time. But you picked up on the last page, essentially, where he said, you know, maybe the triumph of liberalism is not going to be what it's cracked up to be. And a lot of people are going to find it dissatisfying. and that in fact liberal individualism was going to be revealed to be, as Leo Strauss famously put it, the joyless quest for joy. And so the question I was going to ask you is, do you think that does explain some of the disaffection we see of the youth of the day, especially some conservative youth, right?

I mean, you know well that a lot of young conservatives are very disaffected from the American founding, from classical liberal tradition. They're contemptuous of it, some of them are, right? That's what the post-liberals are all about. So anyway, congratulations for that and say a little more about that thesis. Thanks. Yeah. Well, first of all, I should inform you that I am officially an aging millennial, which means I'm definitely cringe and not a hip anymore. I wear short socks. So that makes me old. And I actually had the experience of being in my parents gym and thinking, wow, this playlist is great. whatever Spotify they've got going on. It's awesome. I love all of these songs. And then the

DJ came on and said, you're listening to the oldies. And I thought, well, it happened. So, you know, I speak not quite on behalf of the youth. But I do think, yeah, I'm part of this cohort that you are describing that raises some alarm for me and for others, you know, of your bent. Like the thing that everyone forgets about that Fukuyama book is that it's called the end of history and the last man, right? People remember that it's the end of history and they think, yeah, this guy was a fool. He believed we had terminated. First of all, he believed that history was traveling in a direction and second of all, he thought it had a terminus and now it's over. But he wasn't really saying that at all. He was kind of wrestling with Hegel after the enthusiastic optimism

of the Enlightenment had died down. And another essay I cite in that, piece is by John Judas, I guess it is, who talks about Trump as a Hegelian figure. And he says, you know, if you take this theory, this Hegel theory that we kind of go through these big stages of history and there are major players like Napoleon that kind of shunt us into a new era, if you take that theory and you just shear away all of the idea that there might be an upward positive trajectory, then you're left with something actually much more. more turbulent and disturbing. And for Fukuyama, what this meant was that, you know, if it's true that liberalism

solves some problems, which had previously been the major drivers of politics, if it, if it resolves these big questions about, like, what is a just way to decide questions of how we, how we should live, you know, then it removes a lot of. source of conflict and tension that was previously kind of occupied the minds of the great statesmen and thinkers of the West. And there might be people then who would feel a bit listless. Like, what are we going to do now, you know? And these are the last men, or rather these are the post last men. They're sort of those who would regress to like he called them first men, right? So I do think that like we're seeing a lot of that energy

in not just the Pikers of the world, but the Fuentes of the world. I mean, I think like Piker and Fuentes have a lot in common. You could, I probably don't need to draw the parallels for you. And I think that in both cases, like there's a larping element, right? There's this live action role play situation where these guys are like, it goes back to kind of what Charlie and I were talking about. It's like maybe robbing, stealing from the Louvre doesn't actually mean stealing from the Louvre.

Maybe like this whole thing is sort of just a creed occur, which doesn't make it less hauling. But yeah, it does perhaps explain some of the, why the youth have gone so mad. Well, I thought it fit under, you know, you referenced Roger Scruton and your Claremont review article. It goes under his heading of the culture repudiation. which is whatever it is, we're getting to smash it up, right? There's another part of your, one other part of your essay I want to bring up

with a big question. You have a couple of paragraphs about the way you put it is America proceeds from year zero, where even more the year zero country, I think you're hinting than the French Revolution, which openly said that they were, right? But then you also say, in some respects, America is pre-liberal.

And I thought that was an interesting thing because one question I'm asking everybody as we come up to the 250th anniversary to the declaration here in a couple months, is how do you fall out under this debate that's going on between people who say America is a creedal nation, like our friend Richard Samuelson, or that America is a heritage nation.

And right, you have Vice President Vance talking about heritage Americans that were a product of history and not so much of natural right or rationality. Do you, where do you fall in those camps? Are you in one of them or are you a synthesizer as I try to be? Yeah. I definitely, to answer quickly, I'm a synthesizer. I think that to be even to be like pretentious about it, I'm sort of an Aristotelian. I'm a hyalomorphist.

I think that there's body and soul. Everything is form and matter, right? Everything is a compound of sort of the spirit and the body. And I think of the creed of America as its form and the people and the history and all the material circumstances as its matter that is shaped by the creed. So I think that's kind of what I'm trying to drive at in that piece and what I'm trying to work out as the 250th approaches. That quote you mentioned actually I picked up at a conference that Charlie organized about fusionism. And it's Frank Meyer who talks about kind of America as he gives this potted history of the West. and then America is basically this little spacecraft that gets ejected at the very end of the old world,

carrying like a time capsule, everything that's good about it. And there's a speech by John Quincy Adams that I cite there too, which is also kind of tells this story that like the best of what the West could be was struggling to be born, but was too encumbered by old prejudices on the continent to really take, take root and find its full form, and it was only in America that, like, the West reached its final boss form. And to do that, it had to cut off the, it had to jettison the spaceship, whatever the right, the spaceship metaphor is, right? And I think that there's, that's like true and not true. You know, you, again, you could, you could draw a parallel here between the creedal nation versus

the heritage nation, right? The creedal nation is a fresh creation. It's genuinely an advance in American, or rather in Western intellectual history. The heritage nation is not. It's meaningfully steeped in English common law and the folkways of the sort of four major branches that are described in Alpine C and all that stuff, you know. So I think it's, I'm definitely both and, but there's a squishiness to that that I think doesn't always satisfy. Oh, no. You know, friends of ours, we know well are dug in on some of these. questions. But let me shift gears a bit, and then I want to let Charlie get in the word edgewise again,

and go to your article, The Renegate Academy, which, of course, is actually a long, extensive review of the new two-volume book out by James Hankins and Alan Gelzo on the golden thread, the history of the Western tradition. And I've read a couple little bits of it. And I mean, it was an unusual pairing. They're from two different fields of history, but they're the right people will do what I think for a bunch of reasons. But along the way, there's one particular thing I want to pick up on. Although I'll just mention in passing, I was thrilled when you mentioned Whitaker Chambers and that famous letter to Buckley where he says, you know, we're going to rot from within

and so forth. I have tried to, tried, I have assigned Whitaker Chambers to students a few times. And I find that they just don't get it. I have to explain it to great length. And even then they kind of shrugged her shoulders because for today's students, but what, the Berlin Wall came down, what, so 35 years ago, no, 37 years ago, it might as well be the Crusades of the Middle Ages now, right? And it's just too remote. And, you know, I will freely confess to being a baby boomer for whom the Cold War was the dominant matrix of how we had to

think through everything, right? It wasn't just enough to refute Marx. We had to really understand the radical mind. Okay. Anyway, you then get off talking about, well, both Gilso and Hankins have left the Ivy League for the Hamilton School at the University of Florida. You know, Charlie and I are involved with one of these similar efforts at UT Austin. And you ask a very important question toward the end, which is these sort of civic schools that are being established at public universities in red states and a few private universities are trying this too. And you ask a very important question. I'll just quote it. The next question is whether the Renegade Academy will succeed. Were the renegades now? That's the point for listeners to be clear.

Are these renegade efforts going to succeed? And I've visited a lot of them. I'm in one. You've been around, a lot of them. Walk us through how you see that playing out. Sure. So funnily enough, this is a little visual joke that about five people will get on the front page of the CRB, which is where this article lives.

There's a piece that we have reused with the art that goes with the piece is also associated with a different piece. And it's a guy, it's a guy to tweet jacket bulldozing a kind of Corinthian column, I think, or an Ionic, you know, Greek column. And originally that was attached to a piece about radical leftists destroying kind of the Western Academy. And now it's been attached to this piece about kind of, as you say, us becoming the renegades. The conservative professors are sort of in exile. because the takeover has been so complete, the march to the institutions has been so complete.

And now you get these guys like Hankins, like Delzo, like you, and I'm sort of trailing along, you know, as well, among kind of teachers, professors at scrappier institutions, like UATX, where I teach, where we're really trying to kind of revive the liberal arts in the deep sense. of those pursuits that are fitting for free people, right, that train the soul for freedom. And to do so unblushingly and to really kind of endorse the old ways, if you will. And I think there are kind of two possible ways I could see this going.

I mean, there's technically three because it could just fail utterly, and that would be terrible. And I hope that doesn't happen. But there's two ways it could succeed, right? one would be that the Renegate Academy itself is so successful that it takes on all the prestige, which once attached to, say, the ivies, which I think have lost a lot of their luster after the Claudian Gay scandal and the many other sort of debacles, basically since I left Yale, it's all been downhill. Right after the year after I left, they had this Halloween costume flare up, and the IVs have started to lose public trust.

So one possibility is this is just the replacement. This is kind of the new Ives. But the other one is that the sort of renegade venture is successful enough and attracts enough attention and enough talent and bleeds off enough really top tier students that would otherwise go to Ivy's. That the IVs themselves have to kind of take notice and reform in order to compete. You're seeing a little bit of that happening. At Yale, they just conducted this big internal after the piece came out. They conducted this sort of internal review and concluded that they were too biased and they needed more ideological diversity. We'll see where that goes.

You know, the students that come to UATX, and I'm sure you've experienced this too, are superb. I mean, they're genuinely, they could be anywhere. So it's not like this really is a going concern. And I think I'm a little bit more hopeful about this second option that this kind of forces some reform across the board in the academy because the market is free. Yeah, so right. I mean, I think, well, competition, right? We're all for competition. And just as school choice for K-12, this is a variation of that in higher intellectual choice in higher education. And yeah, I think it's going to track the students who used to want to go to liberal arts colleges to actually learn liberal arts from people who like to teach it to have broad gauge minds. And so here I have a heterodox proposition that doesn't contradict anything you said. But I thought, so just my data point is my, my, my data point is my, wife was at Stanford in the 80s and was there when Jesse Jackson went and you mentioned it in your article and said, hey, hey, ho ho, Western Siv has got to go. And what she said, and I've heard to some of a lot of students back in the late 70s, early 80s, that the Western SIV required courses

weren't very good. And I think the reason for that is some of the reasons that you know about, is the specialization of the academy, the rewarding of niche radical things. And so you didn't, I think the professors, many of them were no good at him. And they board students. to death. And a lot of students just shrugged your shoulders and said, why are we required to take it from? And often these courses would be taught by graduate students and not by professors or the senior professors didn't want to teach it. You know, it's a rare person like John Taylor at Stanford who likes to teach Econ 101 to a thousand students there, right? It's very rare to find those kind of Hankins was like that at Harvard. He would teach sort of survey type courses of the old school.

And those people dwindled and as you pointed out, were not hired. And so now I think all these schools look to me like they're creating that older culture. By the way, an observation on Yale. I mean, I look through, I know a couple of people who are on that committee, like Beverly Gage. She's not a conservative, but she's not a leftist. She's not a liberal. She's doing a biography of Ronald Reagan for Simon & Schuster.

That's very rare for academic historians now, right? David Bromwich, who's a liberal, but is always written intelligently about Edmund Burke, for example. Yale was really kind of the outlier among the ivies, whereas Harvard, as Hankins put it, that he's the last of the old school types, right? Yeah. And so that's my hope for them, too. But I'm also worried that, as you may know,

there's intense hostility to these centers, you know, at Ohio State and University of Toledo and at Florida. And even at UT Austin, but, you know, the politics in Texas, there's so much wind that they're back to that. I think our friends there are going to succeed in a big way. But that's a thing that worries me. That's really interesting. It speaks to something I touched on on the piece, which is that a lot of these surveys that got deleted in the convulsions of the 60s and the 80s were already concessions. They were the last ditch effort to save this, what was previously simply the remedial curriculum. And yeah, it's like Harvey Mansfield is the last guy standing or was the last guy standing who taught intro courses at a high and enthusiastic, exciting. level. And you're making me think, you know, for me at least, intro courses are the most

fun to teach. And they're fun for. Oh, yeah. I think so too. Right. But that's where people like you and me really differ from leftist faculty who want to do their narrow stuff. A quick story. Then Charlie wants to jump in. Yeah. I was, I forget now when it was or what the occasion was, but I was on Zoom and some deliberation about whether a university should hire conservatives explicitly. And, you know, I was of those at University of Colorado. And one of the person speaking was Pippa Norris, who's very eminent in the government department at Harvard. And so I asked, Harvey Mansfield is retiring soon? Is the department going to try and hire somebody like him? And there's a long pause and she said, maybe. And I said, I'll take that as a no until I hear different. And then we moved on. So,

Charlie? How do we make it clear to the public that this the institutional cachet on which the useless types that we're implicitly condemning rely has gone. Now, I'm a big opponent of credentialism. I think that it is not only hollow per se, but that it leads to a societal instinct that doesn't suit America. For example, I think it is completely absurd that we instinctively believe that somebody who went to college is better in some manner than somebody who became a plumber. I think you can run a proper society if you believe that. The left's great trick is to take over these institutions, then to be mediocre or worse, but then to point to the institution and say,

oh, well, yes, but I'm at Yale. And I was talking to someone the other day who is a centrist, but is very critical of conservatives. And he said, you know, your problem is that the public still thinks that what's in the New York Times is true and still thinks that if it comes out of Harvard, then it's correct, and still thinks that Hollywood is cool. And you are never going to get over that. And I don't know if that's true or not, but I do think we haven't made as much progress there as we need to. How do we do that? Because I love all of the institutions you just mentioned, and I work with them.

but I still notice that if at the I'm about to use a cliche but if at the cocktail party someone says well yes my son just got into Dartmouth everyone goes ooh oh yeah it's very hard to get past it yeah that's what I mean that's what I mean it's even we it's funny you go to these conservative events

and the first 45 minutes is spent condemning all these institutions and then someone says well my son just got into Dartmouth and everyone goes congratulations I was once on a podcast which shall not be named where I had, you know, sometimes you wait in the wings and the host is doing a routine somewhere else about something else. And so help me. The host was talking all about the terrible rot at the Ivy League and the institutions and the way that they've been captured and how grotesque it is. And then she said, and my next guest is Spencer Claven. He went to Yale.

This is emblematic of, I mean, this is the skin suit problem, right? Yes, yes. Right. They, people, worthless people, take institutions of worth, call them out and then use the kind of appearance of worth like zombies wearing skin suit. I mean, I don't have a good answer to this question because brands are so powerful. Right.

It really does still sit even with me, you know, when somebody has a fancy name on their resume, I have to stop myself from thinking, like, oh, this is a smart guy. You know, the only thing that I can point to is, I suspect we haven't yet really spent enough time or realized how much depends on our being exceptionally good at whatever it is we're trying to do in, you know,

as a parallel institution. And I say this because, like, there's a phenomenon in the arts, let's say, where cancel culture is a thing. We all know this. It's clear that there are conservatives who've gotten blacklisted for no other reason than that they wouldn't take the COVID vaccine or they said something. It's perfectly unobjectionable. And also, at the same time, there are a lot of mediocre conservative artists who find it extraordinarily convenient to account for their actual failures by way of reference to cancellation. And that's not so much of a problem except that it ends us up in a situation where when somebody tells you, I've got a world-class novel

that the presses won't publish. Your immediate reactions to think, oh no, like in head for the door, you know, because it's always going to be some guy. And so, like, we have to be sending our best, right? And one of the things that's heartening in academia, as I was just alluding to, is like, we've only really just begun. I said this in the piece about Hankins and Galzo. It's like, these guys are actually the real deal, you know? They're not particularly political, actually, until they became politicized by their opponents. And the thing about the golden thread, which I have next to me and I would hold up except that I would slip a disc because it's like a thousand pages.

The thing about the golden thread is that it really does deliver on its promise at a very high level. And my hope is, like, I actually think that we haven't really been doing that to the level that we could be. And my hope is that as we continue to do so, we'll get a little bit more clout or we'll force the institutions with cloud to hire us back. Right. Nothing succeeds like competition. And Spencer, you are a golden thread of your own. I'll just put it that way. And thank you for joining us and spinning a half hour with us here on the Rickettship podcast.

But don't rely on me if you need directions as the golden thread. Okay. Thanks, Spencer. We'll see you soon. This is a delight. Thanks. Well, Charlie, let's get out this week with checking in briefly with the Iran War. And look, we've got this now a stalemate with the blockades in the Gulf. We have rising gas prices that are increasing the political problem that you had predicted all along. And I think you're right about that. I do think there's one notable thing this week.

I think it's quite significant. And it was the United Arab Emirates exiting their membership in OPEC. And I think this is the end of a longer saga that really does owe a lot to Trump, but also the oil industry going back 20 years. We would, I'm old enough to remember the gas lines of 1979 and the price shops. So yeah, gas is expensive now and that's politically potent, but we don't have gas lines. We don't have shortages. Oil is priced on the world market, which is why our costs are going up.

but we actually now, because we are energy dominant, don't have to face the strategic danger that we did in the 70s. Whereas our, you know, Europe, Asia, China, they're in a world of hurt right now. But then I think that all this combines with the United Arab Emirates saying we're done with OPEC, and I think that means that whole game is over. And so we'll have to see how it goes.

It could still end very badly for us, but it might end well for shaking up the whole kaleidoscope of the geopolitical energy map that has dominated our thinking for 50 years. Yeah, and this is a sustained public policy win for conservatives who are told never win anything. We do. Right. Well, we do. This is a remarkable achievement over the last 30 years to turn the United States energy independent.

Now, there's a political problem for Trump, and one, as you say, I predicted, people don't like the fact that gas is four plus dollars, nor should they. but there's a picture, Steve, you can't see it on my shelf of my family in California in 1998, in Anaheim. Of course, we were going to Disneyland. And in the background, there is not on purpose, but there is a big gas sign, and it says 198. And that is adjusted for inflation. more than gas is on average in the United States now. Right.

When it's supposedly intolerably high. And that's because we made certain decisions. The only public policy failure that we've made in the last five years was that the Biden administration, when it thought that it was going to become even more unpopular, emptied the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for no reason. And we didn't refill it. And it's partly Democrats' fault, it's partly Republicans' fault.

But that should have been refilled when gas was at a low, because right now would be a good time to start using it. Keep the... And I say that not because I think that Trump should do what Biden did, which is rescue his own political fortunes, but because it would take away from the Iranians a chess piece. If they couldn't say, aha, well, we'll close the Strait of Hormuz and we'll put pressure on you domestically, because we had the strategic petroleum reserve and we could keep prices down, not as much as they've gone up.

That would be great. But other than that, we should be so proud of what we did. We took that away. Yeah, so I, because I'm mean-spirited, I wish our team, so to speak, would be reminding people that when Sarah Palin 20 years ago said, drill baby drill,

all you guys laughed at her and mocked at her. Who's laughing now? Remember all this is what, you know, John Kerry? We can't drill our way out. There's just not enough oil in the United States or anywhere for us to be energy independent. That's why we have to run our cars on solar panels or, you know, banana peels and other ridiculous things. Well, look at how successful it's been.

In your state, the probably democratic frontrunner is, what, Tom Steyer, who's an environmentalist? Yes, right. Or is a Bekera now. I can't keep up with it. Bekara is actually at the head of the polls right now, which is amazing. with Steyer spending $100 million dollars blanketing the airways with non-stop ads.

Yeah, so I can't get past this, Steve. So Steyer is an environmentalist. And the message that he keeps putting out is gas prices are too high. Right. Just think about how much you have to win this issue politically to get the environmentalist to complain that gas prices are too high. Yeah.

They loved high gas prices. They thought that this was how you saved the problem. planet, but now apparently they should be $3 in perpetuity. That's right. Yeah, well, I did once get quoted in The Economist magazine, oh, more than 20 years ago, saying that Americans think that dollar gallon gasoline is somewhere in the Bill of Rights. Yeah. There's something to that, I think. All right, Charley, this has been fun. We miss James this week. Look forward to having it back next week. But the RICOchet podcast is brought to you by rickashet.com.

Please support us by joining the best place for Civil Central. to write conversation. It's very cheap. It's very fun. And please take a minute to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify or wherever you like to source your podcast material. It helps us keep the show growing. So we will see you in the comments, everyone, at Ricochet 5.X. Five point X, I'm going to say, Charles. Five soon. Five soon. Five soon. It's four. It's four, four and then an ever increasing number. Okay. Well, next week, everybody. Bye-bye.