The Ricochet Podcast - The Return of Robinson

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

Peter's back! After a whole summer away, he, James and Steve have quite a bit to catch up on. What more is there to say? - Opening soundbite this week: FNC’s Peter Doocy spars with KJP at the White House

I hadn't quite realized the itch that the Ricochet podcast scratches for me. I get to test out thoughts on bright guys who are also friends. Anyway, it's been a long time since I could let fly. 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 Stephen Hayward,

myself, James Lilacs, and a very special surprise. Yeah, okay, it's Peter Robinson. So let's have ourselves a podcast. How many more assassination attempts on Donald Trump until the president and the vice president

and you pick a different word to describe Trump other than threat. Peter, I actually completely disagree with the premise of your question, the question that you're asking. It is also incredibly dangerous in the way that you're asking it. Welcome, everybody, to the Rico that you're asking it. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 709. I'm James Lilex in beautiful, sunny, not even autumnal yet, Minnesota. We've got Stephen Hayward with us, and we have a guest.

Let's see if I can get this name. Steve, Steve, no, Peter Robinson. Is that it? Exactly. It's Peter Robinson, who I guess we last saw fall off Reichenbach Falls, and after kicking about Tibet for the last six months or so, has now decided to rejoin us. Peter, welcome. It's good to see you. Thank you. I'd ask, where the hell have you been?

But it's more interesting, what the heck have you been up to? What the heck have I been up to? A fair amount of travel, a certain number of one-offs, but then the main thing, my wife and I just returned from almost three weeks in Europe. Our youngest graduated from college in June. Knowing that that was going to happen, something like eight months ago, we signed up for a cruise. The first real and lengthy vacation that just the two of us have taken together in our entire married lives, which has now lasted more than three decades. But I just thought, after getting five kids up and off to school and then through college, my wife deserved something nice. It would have been even nicer if I hadn't gone, but I thought she needed somebody to carry the luggage.

Where did you go? The cruise began in Venice, then up to Trieste, then down to the port of Croatia called Irk. They actually do seem to spell it, no, Kirk, K-R-K, or who knows it there's not a single vowel in the name of the place then um then around the horn of uh around the horn around the boot of italy we tried to land at rome everybody on the ship looking forward to that including yours truly but there was a very bad wind and apparently if the captain of a cruise, the one thing you really can't risk doing is bumping in to a dock and putting a crease in your big, beautiful ship and causing $3 million worth of damage. So, we didn't.

And apparently, we'd all signed something, fine print, saying that if an act of God prevented our landing. So, we skipped Rome up to Livorno, from Livorno onto buses and three hours tromping around Firenze and then off to Pisa. On it went. Menorca, Mallorca, Malaga, some place in Portugal

the name of which I could never pronounce or spell and therefore cannot remember and then the final stop in Lisbon. So there, that's where we've been. That sounds sounds grand they are now trying to keep people and cruise ships in particular from coming to venice as much as they do yes because uh they're getting overwhelmed they're i think they had something like a five euro fee to get in you know okay yeah i'm gonna pay five euros to get into venice right but i would like to go to venice too again and explore the part.

When I got there, the guy at the hotel circled a large portion of the city and said, do not go here because you will get lost and you will never emerge. Because it's so twisty and labyrinthical that you expect to find a minotaur at the end of it. But just Venice in the time that we had is so extraordinary because every little island has its own church, and they're all extraordinary. These treasures that you find when you open the doors, it's amazing. Majorca is great. Rome is fantastic, and all the rest. But we're glad to have you back.

Stephen, have you gone anywhere since last time? Wait a minute. You were in Iceland last time we were talking, weren't you? Yes, and today or tonight, whereas I am, I am in Amsterdam. Have you gone anywhere since? Wait a minute. You were in Iceland last time we were talking, weren't you? Yes. And today or tonight, whereas I am, I am in Amsterdam. I still have not returned from my sojourn. But unlike Peter, I'm actually able technically to keep up with podcasts. Peter can barely keep up in the U.S., as we know.

That's true. Wait, were you able to do yours? You were able to do it from a ship? Last week, yes, Peter. Believe it or not. We have the technology. We have a totally unreliable internet. We had, I don't know.

Okay. Well, you know, you're a better human being than I am. There's no excuse in the Starlink age for not having absolutely fast-blazing internet on ships. I found that to be the case myself. But I also found myself on occasional cruises saying, gosh darn it, I can't sit here in my little cabin and scroll Twitter. Maybe I should go outside and go on the deck and enjoy it.

It's nice to unplug, but I presume anyway, Peter, that you followed the news and the things that are going on and we have so much to talk about and so many of your takes to take to have. It's been a while, but let's look at the race, because that's the most current event. That's the thing that's actually been roiling along for some time now. From what

you've seen, and I presume that you looked at it before you left and looked at it while you were gone, how does the shape of the race stand to you today, Peter Robinson. Well, the Trump campaign, after, I did not get up at three in the morning, which is when it was local time, to watch the debate, but I got up early enough and sort of went through Twitter and looked at excerpts of the debate, and what came to mind was Mark Twain's comment on the music of Richard Wagner. It's not as bad as it sounds. So what did Trump just, if you were scoring it on debating points,

and it's hard not to as you watch it, if like all three of us, you're a writer and you sense an opportunity, you missed that one and you screwed up that one. And it just looked like this totally hapless performance. But then very quickly, it just sort of settled out in my mind that what comes through is, that's no new information about Donald Trump. Everybody knows he's kind of careening this way and that way, that he gets defensive, that he gets angry.

Kamala Harris is the one who really needed to persuade people that she was worthy of being president. And she did not answer questions. I felt in the end, the sort of the settled residue of that debate was that people know Donald Trump. They know his faults. But for all that, there was a certain authenticity about it. He was who he was. And Kamala Harris spent 90 minutes being fake, inauthentic. I felt skillful in a kind of inside-the-beltway way, deflecting questions, poised, refusing to engage in a kind of cackling, mindless laughter that seems to characterize her so much over the last four years. But for all of that practiced, poised,

seemingly well-spoken exterior, you could not escape the sense that you really had no idea who this person was. That was my... So, as for the state of the race, I guess I'm not terribly surprised that the polls haven't moved much since the debate. It is impossible for me to suppose anything other than that she has peaked. She had a chance. What I was afraid of myself was that during that solid month of media blather, of the attempt to pump her up, of watching her rise on waves of pure froth, that, well, even Lincoln told us you can fool all of the people some of the time. And I was afraid that at the end of that month, coming out of her convention, out of the Democratic convention, they'd break it open. In the week after the convention, we'd see her break into the lead by five points, six points, seven points, high single digits, and then it really would be very difficult for Trump to come back. That just didn't happen. She has not solidified a lead in any of the swing states, any of the seven swing states that we're all watching. It looks as though Trump is doing remarkably well, a point up according to some polls, a point down according to other polls, but totally within the margin of error in

Pennsylvania, which I'm watching is probably, in my mind, the most important state. It just feels to me as though the country senses she's fake and a lefty, enough of the country senses that she's fake and a lefty, that they will not be able to fool all of the people long enough. That's my sense of it. I could be wrong. It could be those of us who spend our lives in politics never become immune from the temptation to make the wish the father of the thought. Of course, I don't want to see her win. But I really do think that the country just isn't, let's put it this way, there's no evidence that the country's been bamboozled by these people today. And I just feel she's

peaked. What do you guys think? That was a long time, because that was a long speech, because it's been a while since we've spoken, but what are you guys thinking? Yeah, we had a lot to catch up on, Peter. Look, I hope you're right, but remember, early voting has already started. Votes are being cast now, and I think the strategy is, see if you can bank enough of those votes before people can change their mind.

Right. You know, I think, I don't know, what I looked this morning is the sort of real clear politics aggregate and others show that Harris is, you know, she's up two, three points nationally, maybe. And it's very discouraging. The other thing you hear, though, that's more important, because, you know, they're going to change day to day and so forth. And there's lots of reasons to criticize modern polling. But what you do see in the data, apparently, is the number of undecided voters is dwindling to a very small number. It may be as low as 5%. And that means what I've suspected, and still kind of think in my bones is going to happen, is that the race will break late for Trump. But there may not be enough people. There may be people who will change their mind. People say

they're not undecided, but they become undecided again and end up moving to Trump. I think that's possible. Because, you know, there's something about this that doesn't feel right. It's not just the, I'll call your observation, she's fake, and so obviously fake and superficial and not up to the job. But, you know, you keep hearing these anecdotes. I don't like to go by anecdotes. I don't like to go by anecdotes. I don't like to go by feels. But you keep hearing these stories of reporters going around Nevada trying to find someone enthusiastic for Harris and not being able to find them. They bus people in for her rallies.

You saw the body language of the journalist. Maybe you didn't see this, but she did an appearance before the same group of black journalists that Trump did. Yes, yes, I did see them. Go ahead, describe it for us. Well, the body language of the three journalists who interviewed her was clearly, what do you say, clearly not impressed and almost dismayed at the end of it when she walked off. And, you know, those are very telling things. And that's why, at the end of the day, I still think, I mean, the problem is, of course, and, you know, we hate to keep grumbling about Trump forever, and we've been doing it for years now.

You know, his campaign is putting out some great ads. You can look them up on YouTube. They're fabulous. And the problem is, Trump can't do it himself. That's right. He screws them up. He can't do it himself. And it's so frustrating that he can't in the debate and other areas.

And, you know, I keep coming back to a simple point. Trump's message is Trump himself. I think that's what that explains. And it may be enough for him to win. I think there's something to the fact that he represents all the things that so many of the outs, to use the ins and outs language that people like Matt Goodwin and Henry Olsen use. And I think that is a majority of the voters. So that's why I still think he's on track to win.

But good grief, it's nail-biting time. It is nail-biting time. Well, the other, I mean, even the three of us who really, really, really don't, well, I don't want to put words in James's mouth, and it's been a long time since we've spoken, but we really, really, really don't want to see Harris win, have trouble becoming terribly enthusiastic about Trump. I mean, so it does need to be restated. We've got two very weak, by historical standards, two remarkably weak candidates. The poll that I'm still sort of stuck on that seemed to say everything was that after the first debate between Trump and Biden, which was so one-sided, such a catastrophe for Biden that it drove him out of the race.

I can't now remember what the poll was, but one poll showed 7% said that Biden won, which would imply that 93% said Trump won, but that isn't what happened at all. Only 44% said Trump won, which meant that left 40 some odd percent, I'm trying to do the math in my head here, but that left 49% as I recall. Yeah, it was 49%. What that seemed to me to indicate was that 49% think Trump is such a jackass that they wouldn't give him credit for winning the debate, even though he obviously did. They just wouldn't do it.

49% undecided. I mean, half of the country just doesn't like the guy. Well, Ed, one more quick thought. He is doing some things this week that are driving me out of my mind, and that's on some issues. He said he wants to cap credit card interest rates at 10 percent, which is economic illiteracy on steroids. He said, oh, let's bring back the state and local tax deduction for blue states, right? And that was one of the best parts of his tax reform bill. And this is clearly pandering for votes in a way that normally Democrats do. At least our side panders usually more cleverly than that, and more seriously and substantively than that. Then what? Let's not

have income taxes not just on tips. I thought that was clever, and there's a case for that, but on overtime. And okay, boy, who's going to take advantage of that? Well, a lot of public employee unions and firefighters and police, and they're going to run up their wages and their pensions based on that. So these are terrible ideas he's suddenly decided that he needs to roll out for some bad reason. Yeah. Yes. They're intended perhaps to get headlines, to say, we're doing something, we have a plan, but it's incremental, it's drip, drip, drip. And what you really want is root and branch stuff where he says, all right, we're going to have a flat tax.

Here comes Elon Musk, who's going to be in charge of the new Proxmire division of eliminating government waste. Those two things would be interesting. Those two things would be interesting to debate about. Because having broad, having these little sort of, you know, penny ante here and there, this thing, you know, it's a good idea, but what about this? That's a good idea, but how about... The whole problem with the tax code is that you can endlessly tinker it for political advantages,

when what we need to do is to have something that's streamlined, fair, comprehensible to all, and gets the job done, which is to generate revenue, not to institute a social program or a social purpose for things we like and don't like. And bringing on Musk, I think, you know, which he talked about as a joke, would be great because you would love to see somebody go into the Aegean stables with, you know, a golden shovel, two coats, and start to work. But we've sort of given up on that. What we do know, though, undecided and people on the right and whatnot, is that while we're not exactly sure what Trump would do, we're pretty certain what he wouldn't. And I think that's a lot. Yes, yes, yes. Exactly.

People who don't like him and don't believe that he has the temperament or the intellectual capacity. I mean, he's not an idiot and he's not completely irrational, but he's Trump. He is what he is. We know what he is. We don't think that he's going to pack the court. We don't think that he's going to put in Supreme Court and other judges who are going to tilt the playing field leftward. We don't

think that he's going to increase taxes on everybody. We don't think that he's going to all of a sudden say, oh, we have to kowtow to the international community and we have to sign all these Paris Accords, and we have to be very concerned about global warming. So it's that. It's like when he gets in... That's beautifully put, actually. Well, thank you. It's a sigh of relief. We don't have to worry about these things. Now we have to worry about these things, but they're probably not as fundamentally opposed to the American experiment as these things are.

Are we going to get more ships out of Trump? We'd probably get more ships out of Trump. Are we going to get, you know, so there you go. That's why people are utterly indifferent to the nonsense that he says, and they don't care if J.D. Vance told a whopper about cats and dogs, because it doesn't matter. What they know is, is that a Trump-Vance administration would, at least as a baseline, be more concerned about illegal immigration. And even the legal sort that brings in people under temporary protected status.

Whereas we are pretty much safe to assume that a leftist progressive administration would be inclined to say, you know what? You know, if you catch some guy and he's illegal and he's done a crime, you don't have to turn him over to ICE because you're a sanctuary city because it's the moral thing to do. It's stark difference when it comes to immigration, tax, and the rest of it. So there you go. But we were talking about this last week, Peter, Stephen and Charlie and I, about how this cats and dogs thing is actually just sort of, you know, the accuracy of it doesn't matter. What it did was it memed an idea that is still sort of cohering in the American mind about what is going on in various places and how and what the effect of that is going to be.

So let's shift gears a little bit, move over to that and say, all right, supposedly immigration bolted up the charts to be a major concern in this election. Not so much global warming, imagine that, but immigration. So do you think we're going to have a rational, reasonable, fact-based discussion on this? Or is the right going to say some stupid things and the left going to retreat to the, well, you're a bunch of careless, callous, non-empathetic people who hate foreigners which is you know what they always do and what frankly tends to work yeah uh both i mean the right will say stupid things but it's exactly what i mean you've actually put it so beautifully i almost feel as though there's

really nothing much to say it's not that any of us has fallen in love with trump i think i don't james you're a little younger than steven steven and i actually did love ronald reagan and in fact if you go way way back younger god sakes i'm too i'm this is my second year of medicaid eligibility okay um in the the the uh the judson welliver society the club for former presidential speechwriters there were two tables of writers who always understood each other i felt and had a certain degree of friendship even though their politics were quite opposite and one table was the john kennedy speechwriters ted sorensen arthur schlesinger dick goodwin ted sorensen and i became pretty good friends even though he was really liberal.

And the Reagan writers, and that was because for those two writers, they loved their president. They just loved their president. This is not what's happening with Donald Trump and me and Steve and I think you, James. But you just summed it up so beautifully that we don't know. He's going to yak about he'll be better on taxes than they. Who will the right say stupid things about that Haitians are eating cats or. Yeah, but they'll still be much better. Vance and Trump will still be much better on the border than the other side.

By the way, could I let me try itot out one thing because this kept coming back to me again and again on this cruise. And I thought for me, the one event that really, really still makes me furious and that in one way or another sums up this race, when you elect a president, you're also electing between 3,000 and 4,000 political appointees whom a president nominates, the Senate approves, and they run the federal government. So you're getting a big group of people. And I just thought to myself, the residue of all these years we've been through of Trump and Russia and this and that, the 51 intelligence officials who signed that letter saying that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation two weeks before a presidential election, any violation of norms that even approaches that, even approaches it. And here's why.

We need intelligence services. And in a democracy, intelligence, distinct, unique from every other bit of the government, relies upon our trust. We don't even know what the CIA's budget is. The CIA budget is top secret. We need those guys, those agencies. But the only way they can operate is if they have, broadly speaking, the trust of the American people. And 51 senior intelligence officials, including Leon Panetta, who had been Bill Clinton's chief of staff, who had been CIA director, lied to us. They lied to us. Those people have to be punished. They must be kept out of government.

Excuse me, I'm not saying orange jumpsuits, although if I were attorney general, I would certainly review the case and see if there were any grounds for action against them. But when I say those people need to be punished, what I mean is that group, people who feel so entitled, who feel so certain that the government of the United States belongs to them, that they're willing to lie to the people to protect their own positions, their own deep state, they really must be defeated. To me, it just comes down to that one incident. Is that some strange quirk? Have I latched on to the wrong thing? No. All right.

No, not a bit. In fact, what you really have picked on is a microcosm, a very important, maybe the most important microcosm of the macrocosm of the administrative state. I mean, here's the point, is to restate the problem is government has become an interest unto itself. Correct. You don't think government's supposed to, you know, be neutral among various competing interests in American society. No, they become their own distinct interest, and then you combine that with the intelligence and defense functions, and it becomes very sinister, right? Not just censorship, but, right, okay. So that's part of what this election is about, is that question, is whether the people really are a self-governing people. Related to that, and this gets back to the cats and dogs business, is what's the identity of this country?

So, you know, immigration is just one aspect of it, but look, the left wants to say, if we complain about immigration, we're racists. The whole identitarianism business. This is another election, and there have been some in the past. I remember Harvey Mansfield used to say the Reagan Democrat elections of the 80s were about opportunity versus entitlement. And that's still true of our economic philosophies, but now it's about identity. Are we going to govern the country by dividing people into groups and putting them in a hierarchy of their oppression and oppressor status and adjust them through government mechanisms accordingly? Or are we going to be a country that believes that we are equal individuals with the same equal rights? And I wish Trump were,

Trump gets this, and he is the champion for, I think, the correct view. He doesn't know how to talk about it. So it's up to us. Well, so you mentioned a moment or two or James mentioned it a moment or two ago about this, this notion that the immigrants are eating cats and dogs in Springfield. Well, maybe they are and maybe they aren't. Maybe somebody has munched on a cat and maybe not. But here's what we know. Pursuing that story, I read various numbers, but they were all enormous. Springfield, it's Springfield, Illinois, isn't it? Yes. Ohio. Ohio, excuse me. Of course, it's Springfield. That's not Springfield, Illinois. Sorry, Springfield, Ohio. And it's a town of some tens of thousands. 60.

60,000 people, into which 20,000 immigrants, many illegal, has been imposed, on which, and you just say, wait a minute, one quarter of the population or one-fifth of the population or one fifth of the population came from no came came to this country illegally in the last five six seven eight years who voted for that nobody it's not nobody they're they have temporary protected status and god bless every single one of them obviously we have nothing against any individual human being but this is meant to be a democracy. The people of Springfield didn't vote for that. The people of Ohio didn't vote for that. The people of the United States haven't voted for it. Every time, the people have been asked, what about the borders? They've said, okay, let's have legal immigration and let's not have illegal immigration they've so when you get to this question of identity that's obviously part of it but the other question that you what am i doing i'm just saying yes steve yes steve yes jameson yes a long time since i could say this to your face but will we be able to govern ourselves do we get stuff we vote for and not get stuff we didn't vote for we'll see

how the next election goes in Springfield. I mean, they're going to have an opportunity, I presume, to get a city council that's more amenable to the complaints of people who've been showing up and having their mic shut off because they're a little too unhappy about what's going on in their town. We will see. But, I mean, the difficulty here is, I mean, when you say that these people have temporary protected status because they had an earthquake a couple of years ago, there's a humanitarian element to that is something that's hard to untangle, and it's difficult for something to vote that out. The problem here is not that there are Haitian people in Ohio. That's not the problem. The problem is that you have an inorganic imposition on a town in a way that changes the culture of the people who live there. Correct. I was reading about a town in Pennsylvania, I think somewhere, that is now becoming increasingly Dominican. And the reason it's becoming increasingly Dominican is because a lot of

people who are of Dominican ancestry or recent immigrants, legal, from Dominican Republic, DR, have moved there because it's a good place. They move there and chain migration and telling their friends. And over time, over time, the city becomes more and more Dominican in culture. That is the American way. That's how it always happens. We were talking about that last week. That's how Chinatown becomes something else. That's how this neighborhood that was primarily Jewish becomes this. It's where a Procrustean bed and things alter. What has really come to the fore in the whole Haitian thing is the way in which there seems to be this disregard for the ability of people to maintain the culture of their town without having it drastically changed against their will by a series of economic and government forces over which they have absolutely no control or say. And that's a legitimate argument to have, because if we are to atone as the West for colonialism of the 19th century, then explain to me exactly why we have to then acquiesce to what seems to be a sort of colonialism on a small scale in places in the Midwest that weren't there. Now,

in some cases, it's just because they can't find the workers. There is a city in Iowa, my guy I was talking to the other day, that used to be something like 10% Hispanic, and now it's 40% Hispanic. And the reason is they need the workers. And I get that. I mean, I understand that. The pork plant that's owned by Springfield, which is owned by China, needs to bring in people from another country to work in Iowa. And it's unfortunate that that's where we are, but that's part of this thick, sticky matrix that we have. And it is thick and sticky and almost impossible to untangle. When Stephen mentioned identitarianism, and Peter, you were talking about it as well, are we a self-governing nation? Do we all have

the same set of rights and the rest of it? Or are we to be governed as a series of little competing identities in a matrix, in an intersectionality pyramid? That's the problem. Because we've gotten so far away from the fundamental concept of this, because the argument has been shaped in the last 10, 20 years that America is an illegitimate organization because of our past, right? The original sin of slavery, the 1619 project, and all the rest of it means that we have no past to which we can point and be proud. What matters is what the guy said that so many, I think 12 years ago, that we are about to fundamentally transform the United States of America. Now, when Barack Obama said that, I think he was just using high-flown rhetoric. I think he was just choosing great grand words,

but they meant something. And he was right, because that is the project, to fundamentally transform our fundamental idea ourselves, to delegitimize it so that we can create this much better, much more egalitarian, much more diverse and equal and inclusive place in the future. That's the problem. I mean, the choices couldn't be more stark, but yet we have two candidates who are completely incapable of manifesting verbally what their sides actually stand for. It gets my blood boiling, actually. And sometimes it's good. You don't want boiling blood because that makes you hot. But if your blood is coursing well and your body is working well, what you have is an effective metabolic system that makes you hot. But if your blood is coursing well and your body is working well, what you have is an effective metabolic system that keeps you on your toes. Now, I,

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This thing works. I love it. And we thank Lumen for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. Peter, I understand also that you went on a keto sort of diet, and then you went on a cruise where the buffet table groans with the desserts. There's a chocolate buffet at the end of the day. How did you do? Three pounds.

Only three pounds up. Not bad. I consider that a great victory. Well, it's just a great victory. I used to walk around the whole ship, you know, several times, which helped. But then also, in European cities, you tend to walk a lot. Correct. And you eat the food, which everybody says.

You know, the last trip I went to, while you were gone, I went to Scotland. Went to Glasgow and Edinburgh with my wife and ate copious amounts of Scottish food, which, shall we say, is not particularly green or vegetable-oriented. And, of course, the beer and the ale and the wine. And at the end of it, I hadn't gained a single pound. And people say, that's because of the seed oils. We've got seed oils over here. Our food is poisoned and the end of it, I hadn't gained a single pound. And people say, that's because of the seed oils. We've got seed oils over here. Our food is poisoned and the rest of it. And while I don't necessarily believe that, because it is possible to eat healthy here in the United States,

I was in the store the other day and I saw an entire end cap devoted to cotton candy in plastic containers. One of them was a hot tamale cinnamon-flavored cotton candy. And I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, I wonder exactly where you have to be in your life where you say, you know, I really want to sit here and just put spun powdered gossamer sugar with an air sat cinnamon flavor into my gob while I watch television. Not a sign of a healthy society, I don't think. But, well, you know, we lead people to their own devices. We lead them to make their own decisions. Or do we? If you're in California now, and you see a parody ad, and you laugh at it, and you think that's a pretty good parody ad,

you might be violating the new prescriptions of Gavin Newsom, who wants to crack down on these things. Have you heard of this? And what think you of it? Stephen, you probably heard of this, too. Well, it's ridiculous, of course. It'll fail any First Amendment test. I do wonder, though, I mean, again, you take a wider angle view of the whole things, and you hear, you know, Tim Walz and other people saying, I guess Hillary again, you know, we have to have censorship. We just can't allow irresponsible speech on social media and all the rest of that. And I can see, you guys may remember back in the 70s when, I forget who it was, it was Russell Means, one of the American Indian movement activists, was wanted in, I think, South Dakota for committing a crime, but was in California.

And Governor Jerry Brown refused to extradite him on an extradition request. I don't remember how that all turned out, but I remember it was a huge controversy. And so Governor Abbott in Texas has said of the current business, memers, you're safe in Texas. And of course, the next step will be, if California or the federal government really does try to go after somebody under some censorship regime before the Supreme Court can reach it, will we start to see governors? And this could happen perhaps in other domains.

Simply, this is an aspect of the coming civil war that you keep hearing about. I think we're going to start seeing governors refusing to cooperate with other states and with the federal government. We've already got hints of this on the immigration story out of Texas, but I think it now will broaden. So good luck to Governor Newsom trying to enforce this completely unconstitutional idea. But, you know, the Constitution, what's the Constitution among liberals? Well, that brings me to a question for Peter here. Stephen mentioned waltz saying there is no First Amendment protection for hate speech or for misinformation,

which is a terrifying thing to hear from somebody who's going to be heartbeat away, because there absolutely is. And that's absolutely wrong. So answer that building on what Stephen said and then tell me what you think of our big dead energy beloved hockey coach Waltz. What do I think of Tim Waltz? You'd have to tell me James, you live in that blessed state. The guy strikes me as really hard left.

I mean, just amazingly hard left. And this notion, there's no protection against spreading fake information, and he just ignores the First Amendment. But this is part and parcel of, it's not even a casual attitude about the Constitution. It's not even ignorance. It's not that at all. It's real hostility toward the Constitution that is appearing again and again and again, and now in mainstream outlets, including mainstream. To say mainstream, that is not a term of approbation, but the New York Times now has run a number of articles that are essentially attacks on the constitution of the united states and it's great peter they they say trump is a threat to the constitution oh and by the way the constitution

stinks and should be thrown out i love yes exactly right exactly it's not it's not the hatred of the constitution of the first amendment per. It's just extreme irritation that it gets in the way of the good thing being done. It's not like they burn with hatred and want to go to the National Archives and torch the thing. It's just an almost adolescent

frustration at having Dad, in the form of the Founders, put down these rules that you have to live by. Because if it wasn't for this outdated, outmoded thing written by a bunch of old white slaveholding guys, we could do the good thing about guns. We could do the good thing about stamping out people who say mean things. Now, there's no second-order effect here. You're thinking.

You never hear anybody say, and the people who will determine what is misinformation and hate speech will always be correct, and that will be a bipartisan agreement. No, of course. Everybody knows that that simply depends on who is making the judgment, who is making the decision. slam Tim Walz for misinformation, for talking about book bans in such a way that makes it sound as if people are marching into libraries, Barnes & Noble for that matter, and getting Charlotte's Web off the shelf and going to a torch-lit fire at the end of the night where they burn them in great bonfires and sing the Horse Vessel song, when actually the whole book banning thing is very specifically about explicit books about sexuality that people do not believe should be in middle schools or high schools. That's a legitimate argument.

That's a legitimate discussion to have. But if you're going to tell anybody that we're not going to do it because, no, you're book burners, you know, that strikes me as misinformation. Except that it's not. It's political speech. It's what people do all the time. People shade. People do all of these things in order to get their point across. I mean, the state of Minnesota has this free lunch program. Every kid who goes to school gets free lunch. And the objections to that are not, no,

no, that poor child with a single mom who had a bad dinner last night of bread and macaroni, we don't want that child to be fed in school. That's not the argument. The argument is people like me, who are perfectly capable of putting together a meal for my child and putting a lunch in her box, should not let the school do it. It's not their business. It's not their place. And we don't need it. But if you object to this whole school lunch thing, because Walt says we stand for feeding kids in schools. They don't. Again, that's misinformation. That's a mischaracterization of what the other side believes. So when he says these things, nobody ever talks to Tim Walters and says, well, exactly describe what you mean. Describe what the enforcement mechanisms should be.

What happens then to somebody who says something you perceive to be misinformation, but actually is just an opinion about the truth. Would you tell me that exactly? Could you? No. And the thing, you know, to expand more on what Peter and Stephen have been saying, we wouldn't, if there was an organization set up to empirically, coldly Vulcan-like, take a look at these things and figure out whether or not they're information or hate speech, nobody would trust it. And the reason that we don't is that every single institution we have had in the last four or five years has absolutely beclowned itself and destroyed its legitimacy with glee. And Peter, when you mentioned the guys who, the 51 intelligence

agents, it used to be that conservatives would look at the FBI and we think Ephraim Zimbalist Jr. or Quinn Martin Production, these guys are professionals, they're out for us, even when you get to the 90s and it's paranoia, at least we got Scully and Mulder on our side. But now, between the medical establishment and between, you know, the science apparatus, the intelligence apparatus, all of these things, I mean, we'd given away the media a long time ago. We just, you know, that one's gone, okay? We'll just, we'll find our own sources. But to find the sort of the places that we trusted to have a down the arrow, down the middle concern for the best of America, when you topple onto, I mean, there's no real institution that

we can look at right now. I mean, who do you, what, the FAA? The FTC? What? Somebody give me a government institution that actually seems to be not compromised by ideology and its own fiefdom management. Maybe the post office. There's a story that won't get any attention but but should i think or at least if i were an editor i'd want to be very close attention to it over the next couple of days

yesterday i think it was yesterday or was it really early this morning i'm still at the stage where i'm jet lagged and waking up at the wrong times and checking my x file feed at the wrong times my twitter feed anyway rondaSantis has said that the state of Florida is going to conduct its own investigation into this second assassination attempt on former President Trump. And that announcement took place, what, a week ago, something like that. As of yesterday, Governor DeSantis announced, said this during a press conference, said so publicly, that the FBI is refusing to cooperate with his own investigators, with the state of Florida. That is serious. That is serious. Either Governor DeSantis and the state of Florida has a legitimate legal,

has legal standing to investigate this case. as far as i can tell they certainly do someone took a someone was likely to take a pot shot at a former president on a golf course located in the state of florida and if they do have legal standing then the fbi should be cooperating this this is that's big that's big when the when the fbi and of course what's going on, I shouldn't say this is what's going on because I don't want to put words into Sandus' mouth, but we don't trust the FBI. It's just what you guys were just saying. We don't trust the FBI. I think there may be some sort of longstanding historical disinterest for the requirements and the questions of the local authorities. And it probably goes the other way where the locals are bad when the FBI does get involved. So it could be that. It could be, I mean. But this is not a routine matter.

No, no. A second attempt on the life of a former president is not a routine matter it's not an episode from ephraim's ephraim's symbolist is not in charge anyway that strikes me as a big story oh so but talking about this antipathy toward the constitution brings us to something that makes me jittery and that is the united states senate if If Harris wins and the Democrats take the House, which seems to me at least 50-50, if she takes the presidency, the rule of thumb, the longtime rule of thumb in politics would be that they'd, especially when it's already so close, you'd expect them to take the House as well, which means our last holdout would be the United States Senate. I was hoping we have, the Republicans are defending, what, a couple of seats,

and the Democrats are defending half a dozen or so. And yet it looks right now as though the only seat that Republicans can count on picking up will be Joe Manchin's seat in West Virginia, which will go to Governor Jim Justice, and apparently that one won't even be close. But that only gets Republicans to 50 seats. And if the other seats are retained by the Democrats and Tim Walz, as Vice President of the United States becomes President of the Senate, they have the Senate. And we have a party which is pledged to wholesale reform, restructuring of the Supreme Court. And if they have the White House and the Senate,

they won't be able to help themselves. They'll have to do it. Their constituencies will demand them to do it, and they will. I mean, were that... So, have you been paying attention to the Senate? Yeah, let me cheer you up a little bit, Peter. Thank you, thank you, thank you. So, first of all, there's one other Senate seat that looks pretty promising for Republicans, and that's Montana. Several polls show Tester losing badly, too. I forget who the Republican challenger is now. I've forgotten his name. But he's won a good campaign, and Tester looks like he's toast. You know, our friend Henry Olson, who really goes straight by the numbers, said,

if Republicans have a good night, they could end up with 55 Senate seats or more. And it will depend on how Trump does. Does that include McCormick in Pennsylvania? Could he pull it out? I think he's down four now, right? Possibly. Possibly. That's a possible reach.

But there's two or three others. But then the other thing is, we've now seen this for two presidential election cycles, is that it's not that we've gone back to split-ticket voting, but that we've seen Republicans run ahead of Trump because of the usual story about Trump. And you saw it in 2020. 2020 was a really strange election because Biden took office while losing House seats. Democrats lost 14 House seats. That's never happened. And not for more than 100 years has that happened, or maybe longer. opinion runs towards if you go through the all the all the issue um the only issue where democrats have an advantage with public is on abortion uh but all the other issues republicans have big advantages and if you have decent campaigns for the house the republicans have i think a better than even chance of maintaining control oh you do not yeah i do um and then finally you know if the worst if your nightmare scenario comes true, Democrats can only pack the court and

do the other things they want to do if they get rid of the filibuster, which I'm not sure all 50 Democrats are down for that. You know, you heard that, I think there's some are going to say, you know, that's just a bad idea for the long term. Look how it worked out for us getting rid of the filibuster for judicial appointments, right? That blew up in their face really fast. And so, I mean, it could happen. I mean, you should absolutely be worried about that. But I think that there's lots of reasons to put that down on your list of norms, Peter. By the way, what do we think about Ohio? Sherrod Brown, who's running for, what, a third term? Sherrod Brown, a quite liberal senator from Ohio, which has been trending more and more Republican. But as far as I can tell, he's...

Go ahead. Yeah, I don't know. He's a good politician. I haven't seen polls there, but I've got to think that he's vulnerable, too. Yes. Speaking of vulnerability, let's shift our sights to the other side of the world, where Israel pulled off one of the most audacious bits of espionage, statecraft, warfare that the world has seen in some time. Straight out of a Black Mirror episode, as somebody once said,

when a single little signal detonated a whole bunch of pagers in the groinal area. And then, you know, capped it off the next day by going after the other devices that people were using. I was thinking about this last night as I just looked at the stuff on my table, my headphones, which have a battery on them, the remote control for my television, my iPhone, and the rest of it, what it would be like to live in suspicion of every single device that you have. What do you guys think was the reason for this? Some are saying that because there hasn't been a large scale, other there's been some strikes. But some people saw this as the precursor to a major attack on Hezbollah, wiping them out, etc. Some say that the fact that they did it and it wasn't accompanied by

tanks rolling in may have meant that the effort was compromised and they had to just use it or lose it. A couple of days later, two, three days in, what do you think about this? Because now the world is looking back at Israel again and tut-tutting and tisking. I haven't had a chance to think this through in great detail or even to talk about it. I've just got back from Lisbon, of all places.

But here's my visceral, well, this isn't exactly all visceral. There's a little bit of brain involved. Couldn't happen to a nicer group of guys here here yeah and i just it was astonishing that israel has now struck twice inside iran we'll come back to Lebanon in a moment. But Iran sends that shower of missiles over Israel and the Iron Dome takes down. I think one of them actually touched the ground, but it landed where no one was hurt. And Israel responds. I don't understand the details of the strike, but they respond in a way. They take out a military installation inside Iran in a way

that suggests that the Israelis know exactly what's taking place inside Iran, that their intelligence was superb. Item one of two. Item two of two, they assassinate a man inside the secure sort of guest barracks for visiting bad guys in Tehran itself. This is breathtaking. Who's going to volunteer to succeed that guy? All these Iranians are looking at each other and say, wait, wait, wait, wait, how they can do that? What else could they do? And now we come to this unbelievably brilliant in the following sense.

Think of all the things they had to do. The Israeli intelligence had to intercept these devices, develop an explosive charge that was small and undetectable. I believe they made them. They actually manufactured the devices? They set up a shell company. So not only did they... I mean, intercepting would be brilliant, but to set up a shell company

means that they're actually paying you for the things that they're going to blow up. It's just even better. Honestly, what this reminds me of, back during the 80s, what Gorbachev wanted Reagan to do, excuse me, I don't mean to compare Gorbachev to Hezbollah, except in one very narrow sense, and you'll understand the sense once I spin this out.

But Gorbachev realized that the United States had a couple of things that the Soviet Union could never match. One was the sheer strength of our economy, and the other was our technical expertise. And Gorbachev wanted Reagan to put those inside the box and just compete the way we had been competing, which was on nuclear forces and conventional forces on which they could match us. And the whole point of the Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars, was for Reagan to say, no, this is a new game. Now we play by our rules. Will Star Wars work?

Won't it work? Who knows? But once the United States of America begins spending some tens of billions of dollars on research, money you can't match because your economy is so backwards, and you can't match the actual, who knows what we might do? So it was bringing to bear a new set of pressures that the other side couldn't possibly match. All right. So Hezbollah says, ha, ha, ha, ha, we have Tehran behind us, we have 100,000 rockets, and the only way you're

going to be able to deal with us is by some massive tank operation in which you move into southern Lebanon, hugely expensive, killing civilians, the world is already... And the Israelis say, oh yeah? You know what we're going to do? We're going to give you a little taste of Israeli brain power. And it just brings to bear on Hezbollah something... Does anybody really suppose Hezbollah has an intelligence operation that could begin to pull off anything like this? Hezbollah is saying, you meet us with brute force. And the Israelis say, no, actually, we won't. We have a better idea. We'll kill bad

guys, but we're going to do it in a way that you couldn't even begin to imagine, let alone match. We're going to use intelligence. And people are still complaining. The Israelis could develop a space laser that vaporized a criminal, a terrorist. And if he was at the grocery store and dropped a glass container of milk and there was nothing left of him, but there were shards of glass on the grocery store floor, people would complain about that. A child could step on that glass and hurt himself. I mean, it is the most precise thing you can possibly imagine. And yes, it's collateral. There's a little bit of collateral. But compared

to what, yes, they could have done compared to what a dumb bomb does, even a smart bomb does, and the rest of it, it was quite, quite the feat. But you mentioned Russia. I don't know what the Soviet capabilities were truly like. I mean, they were enormous. We know that. They were big. They were drunk. But I think as the historian said, drunk they beat Napoleon, drunk they beat Hitler, drunk they could beat NATO. Who knows?

Now the Russian army, as it's known, for a while there was the second best army in Ukraine, and now it's turning out to be the second best army in Russia. The advances made by the Ukrainians in drone warfare have really pushed the envelope for what war of the future is going to be. I mean, hitting that big dump that they did a little while ago with a drone swarm, I think it was a swarm, like a hundred or something, maybe some bigger ones, causing just extraordinary explosions, which are probably cooking off to this day, makes me wonder and makes me fear, actually, whether or not our own military establishment is taking notice of this and acting fast about it. Because it seems as if the nature of warfare has changed quite quickly. And we are not a nimble institution. I mean, Ukrainians are having to be nimble and pivot and invent all the other flight because they have to because it's an existential threat

that's marching down from above I just wonder whether or not somebody is putting together a proposal for a meeting for a white paper for stakeholders for a future strategy for an arm division that might investigate and interrogate the possibility of the future of drones. I mean, I just hate to think. Well, on the other hand, maybe we'll just do paperclip part two and bring the Ukes over here and have them tell us what to do. It's moments like this when I miss Andy Marshall. Do you know that name, Peter? Do you remember who he was?

Go ahead. Remind us about Andy Marshall. I forget the name of his unit, but he ran this little, essentially an in-house think tank inside the Defense Department for decades. People used to call him Yoda. And I never met him, but he's a legendary figure in defense planning and strategic circles. And he was the guy the teams he would assemble would be looking at things like drones and the next generation or two generations out of warfare and why we had to be on. He was a very influential voice in our defense establishment for a long time. Nicky died seven, eight years ago now.

I don't know that he and his team have ever been replaced. He's the kind of person who had a genius about him. It matched the same way maybe with Hyman Rickover in our nuclear Navy 60 years ago now. By the way. That's irreplaceable, one of a kind, right? By the way. By the way. No, no, go ahead.

Go ahead. Finish your thought. I'm essentially done. You get the point. I'm done, Peter. Go ahead. You're excited. I'm excited Peter's back.

No, by the way, I just, oh my gosh, there's so much, we're this close, we're this close to all kinds of wonderfully good things happening but it isn't going to be the case if if kamala harris wins anyway uh so uh this is the kind of thought that only occurs to my little mind i'm sure it's occurred to both of you already but it only occurs to my little mind when i'm on a ship and the thought is this that here and there even the climate people even the environmentalists saying, you know what would really solve the problem here? Nuclear power. Unfortunately, nuclear plants are too big and too expensive and too dangerous.

And then Robinson says to himself, as he cruises around the mediterranean on a ship wait a minute the first nuclear power submarine in the united states navy was commissioned in 1955 i did some research on this as far as i can tell the united states navy has never experienced never experienced a nuclear failure or incident of any all kinds of other things have gone wrong there has never ever been a problem with a nuclear plant on a nuclear ship or submarine in the united states navy since 1955 that technology belongs to the american people we paid for it we know how to build small reactors we know how to use them in total safety Go ahead. So go go Steven. This is your you you must be way ahead of me in thinking these thoughts

You're the environmental expert Well two quick things one is the Navy's nuclear program has always been exempt from regulation by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission But But second Peter you missed the news uh out just in the last uh 36 48 hours that they're making plans to reopen drum roll three mile island who's making plans who how what how did this come about the utilities in pennsylvania i guess are thinking about reopening three mile island which wouldn't that be delicious jane fonda will heal over an embolism when this happens, which

much deserves. Yeah, and if that's the case, they lower her into the ground like a lead rod into a power plant. So, boy, can I just I'm sorry, James, and I just want to finish out one thought, again, to test it and see if you guys agree.

I'm thinking, so for six or seven months now, I've been saying, I got onto this interviewing somebody, and then I just thought to myself, it's a tremendously powerful point. I'm going to ask everybody I interview. And the point is this, that in the old days, it was generally understood to be the case that the armed forces of the United States were supposed to be disposed such that we could handle two major conflicts in two theaters at once. And that became more and more of a stretch. And then Jim Mattis became Secretary of Defense, and he said, let's get real here. And so now it's our official position that we can really only handle one major theater at once with the hope of containing problems in one other theater.

And yet, what do we see? We see that we're in trouble in the north of the Baltic and Russia, the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean and the Pacific and Taiwan. Okay, so that's three theaters. This is a big problem. And now I'm saying to myself, and no guest has really had any good answer to that. They say, yeah, actually, that's a serious problem. The Israelis are now doing things that increase the deterrent effect of the Western world as a whole. The Ukrainians are now causing Vladimir Putin and certainly the Chinese to have second thoughts. We're just sitting back, and in some marvelous way, technology originated here, but in some marvelous way, the technology is so powerful, the desire for human liberty is so powerful, that even these relatively dinky states such as Israel and Ukraine are making

it look hopeful for the West. Coherent thought? That's a great point. Yeah. That's a great point. All right. I like that. Yes. I mean, because the idea that these large, insurmountable organizations could just roll over, Ukraine has been proven wrong for about three years or so.

I want to go back and end, actually, because I got to get out of here. What? What? I'm just warming up, James. Peter, I've been away too long. Peter is back, baby. Come back next week, and we'll be glad to have you. When you were saying that nuclear is there as an option, absolutely so.

The problem with nuclear is that it strikes a lot of people as scary because it's technology. It's technology, and that's bad in an era of degrowth where we shouldn't be using washing machines and gas ovens anyways you know it's technology the thing about wind and solar is it's absolutely natural there's nothing technological about it it streams from the sun it blows around the world so the big mistake that they made with the nuclear industry i can understand in the 50s and 60s but what they should do to rebrand now is not talk about nuclear industry, but talk about it in terms of magic rocks. We have found magic rocks. And when you put them here and you sort of do this thing with water, because water is natural, water is holy, you get power.

And if you just keep pitching it that we put the magic rocks near the water and we'll get power, that'll seem more, you know, more, more animistic, more pagan, more, more earth and cosmos centered. Whereas technology is icky. Yeah, he said. Bare point. Broadly characterizing the other side with glee and disregard. I guess what I committed there was misinformation. Come at me, man. Gavin Newsom, Tim Waltz.

I'm sitting right here in Minneapolis in a skyscraper waiting for you, looking out the window, checking the drones. was misinformation. Come at me, man. Gavin Newsom, Tim Waltz, I'm sitting right here in Minneapolis in a skyscraper, waiting for you, looking out the window, checking the drones. Come on. Come at me. Next week, we hope to have Peter Robinson again. I don't know if Brother Rob will be with us, but all I know is that you should come for Ricochet Podcast number 710. I'll be here.

Peter, it's a delight to see you back. It's great. Glad you got to have fun in Europe. And, hey, here we are. Good to be home. We'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week. Next week, boys.

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