The Ricochet Podcast - Toss ‘Em In The Pin

Episode Date: July 29, 2022

It’s a free-for-all on the Ricochet Podcast this week! Rob and Peter are off enjoying the last gasp of Summer, so filling in are the effervescent John Yoo and the mysterious “Lucretia”. Our official guest is Rafael Mangual, the newly minted author of Criminal (In)justice, which compiles his years of studying criminality in the U.S. and the progressive inaction of those charged with fighting it. Source

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That's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center AI ready. Someday is here with Nokia. I basically go to the breakfast buffet station and I assemble an Egg McMuffin on my own. I have a dream this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created in... Negative quarters of GDP growth is not the technical definition of recession. It's not the definition that economists have traditionally relied on. I've

said it before and I'll say it again. Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast. Usually with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. But they're out this week. I'm James Laddix and I'll be speaking with Lucretia and John Yoo and Stephen Hayward. We're talking to Raphael Menguel,

author of Criminal Injustice. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you. Welcome, everybody, to the Ricochet Podcast, number 603. I'm James Lilex in Minneapolis. Peter Robinson is somewhere else. Rob Long is somewhere else. So it's just me and you. No, I'm kidding. We've got, of course, John Yoo, who's joined us, the chief Ricochet legal correspondent and McRib enthusiast, and also joining us, I believe, for the first time, Lucretia. Lucretia, welcome. Good morning, James.

Thank you. It's good to be here. Introduce yourself to the folks so they know who you are. So I am Lucretia. That is my nom de plume. I podcast regularly with Steve Hayward on the Powerline podcast, The Three Whiskey Happy Hour. I'm also an administrator at a university in the West. I'm a dean and a political scientist with some specialty in constitutional law and political philosophy. You keep adding these things. I would have ended with the Hayward podcast because that's the most impressive thing on the entire resume. And of course, John, everybody knows who you are. They ought to. They don't. That's their problem for not listening to the podcast and for your own podcasts

and your own books and the rest of it. So here we are let's uh cast our eye around the world and uh look at what's going on and say hmm are we in a recession joe biden says not on my watch um and it appears that all the uh the dutiful little wikipedia gnomes have been frantically re-editing the definition of recession in order to make it seem different than what it actually is we've all understood it to be two quarters of contraction, and we've had two quarters of contraction. Everybody sort of kind of knows that this is what's going on, right? Everybody feels it. Those rude animal spirits have diminished purchasing power way down, people pulling back. Of course we're in a recession. Would it help Joe Biden to admit it? Would it hurt him to admit it?

It certainly would hurt him, I think, to admit it. And I think that the big problem is what we see is the redefinition of things for political purposes. But actually, it's been more successful than not more much of the time, don't you think? You know, well well we can't we can't say certain things and we have to call other things certain things and and and controlling that language i think has been and having the media as you put it and wikipedia uh support those sorts of things has i think it really does help the biden administration to sort of deny that things are as bad as they are. I think they're making a mistake, actually, because I think the sensible thing is to say, look, we all can see around us the economy's in trouble. I was looking at the statistics when Biden took office and believes inflation was under two percent a year.

The economy was growing quickly- the- effects of the COVID lockdowns are fading into the background. Gas I think was on average below three dollars a gallon throughout the country might have even been around two dollars a gallon- rather than

saying oh it's Putin's fault. Rather than saying oh don't believe your lying eyes there's no recession. You know other dollar you rather than pretending that prices of things like basic groceries are skyrocketing. I think the better thing to do would be to say, look, we had to take these measures during COVID. We knew that they were going to cause serious inflation.

We knew that we were going to enter economic waters that were uncharted. And to say we have to transition out of that and get back to normal. And it's not his, you know, it's not his fault, but his job is to try to steer us in the right direction rather than in the middle of an inflationary period calling for more spending, calling for more shutdown, you know, more restrictions on the use of energy and expiration for gas and oil. I think being honest with the American people would be the smarter political play than just as Lucretia, you should have said the international woman of mystery, as she's known on the Three Whiskey Happy Hour podcast, just pretend trying to redefine the problem away as if everything was hunky dory.

But but, John, honestly, the redefinition of what's going on as not a recession isn't targeted at the people like you who actually pay attention to those statistics. It's targeted at the maybe the person out there who isn't paying as much attention. They're not happy about the price of gas and the price of things. But if it's not a recession, it's not yet time to panic. And all they have to do is manage to keep up this subterfuge until the midterms aren't such an incredible disaster for them. That's the whole purpose of it. You know, you and I may know it's an absolutely a recession, but, you know, does the average person even know what the definition of a recession is and do they care? And so if the Biden administration can, excuse the expression, control the narrative, you can still see the many, many idiots out there on Twitter who say it's not Biden's fault. Of course, it's Biden's fault.

COVID was a long time ago in terms of its very serious uh impacts on on the supply chain and so on i mean i know there's lingering things and so forth but i mean they're not after convincing you and me they're after convincing lots and lots of voters who aren't paying attention that's that's just my belief that's why i think they're doing it that and they're stupid well the old line is a recession is when i with recessions when my neighbor loses his job a depression is when i lose my job um but it's hard not to marvel really i mean lucretia when you're talking about the the perversion of the language they're now calling this new uh build back better bill uh the inflation reduction act so new speak at its best to reduce inflation we're going to spend a half a trillion dollars again as if it won't as if we're not in

the situation now because of the previous spelling and spending into basement of the money and because of course the energy price is having the inflationary effect and they're going to spend 369 billion dollars of it on climate climate um and i'm pretty sure that this is not going to move the needle and cool the sun down so we may have to spend another 300 in other words they're trying to get everything done before the midterms come and they get shellacked uh they also want to increase taxes on corporations minimum of 15 which they say well it'll it'll all pay for itself. No, we're not spending a half a trillion dollars. It's going to pay for itself. We're going to get $740 billion over 10 years out of this tax because, and of course, if that's the case, it'll all be passed on to us. So the

consumers will be paying some. In other words, everything you ought not to do, spend more money in an inflationary period and raise taxes during a recession is everything you ought not to do, spend more money in an inflationary period and raise taxes during a recession is what they seem determined to do. They only have two levers, you know, spend money and raise taxes. So I'm agog at how we get out of this exactly, whether or not we have two years of grinding scraping before we can actually find some sort of relief or you know what the lasting effects on the economy are going to be how long is it going to be before we pull out of what seems to be a uh a very dark black abyss into which we spiral uh but then there's the old the old social issues john i was uh wondering if you

think that the recent supreme Court decisions means that the court is now going to go after contraception and gay marriage. Some people are saying that that's next on the agenda, that's what they want to do. And there are often comments where people say, well, you know, they could because the constitutional reasoning is just as

gossamer thin, but they're not going to. Are they? They would require a case are they looking for one we didn't get a chance to talk about this when we had our emergency podcast when we talked about dobbs the same week it came out everyone is panicking over justice thomas's concurrence to Dobbs, a separate opinion where I think Justice Thomas was not being politic, but he was being honest. And there he said, and I should disclose, I clerked for Justice Thomas, so I naturally like to think that he does the right thing. He said, if there's no right to abortion in the due process clause, as the majority says, then

there's a whole lot of other cases that we should reconsider that have also conjured forth rights that are not in the text of the, come from the same due process clause. And he listed the gay rights decision and the right to privacy decisions. Now, the reasons why I think people are exaggerating the effect for political reasons is because he wasn't saying that those cases should all be overturned. He was just saying we should reexamine where those rights might come from. And in fact, Justice Thomas has long said they actually should be rooted, if anywhere, in the Privileges and Immunities Clause, which has been read to nothingness.

Hobbes is actually the beginning of a slippery slope where this conservative out of control majority oh sorry this out of control conservative majority is going to overrule all these other decisions one other side note i just mentioned sorry was that i just saw a story in the washington post that said people who are upset and depressed about dobbs are actually less likely now to vote in the midlands so it may not actually have the the rallying effect that people on the left hope that Dobbs is going to have. The only salvation of the country is if the people who are the most despairing about it give up completely and,

and, and, and seated back to the people in the middle who is Lucretius may not be paying a great amount of attention, but are muddling through and still believe that the country has a future. That's interesting. Well, that's what I thought. And I'm glad that you informed me about that. Lucretia, you were going to say something. We lost John for a second there. Yeah, I was just going to add to this because John and I have actually discussed it on

several occasions. And that's the fact that I don't know that Thomas made this point very clear exactly in that concurring opinion, but he has made very clear the idea, and John and I have discussed this as well, that conservatives actually need to look at the idea that there are substantive rights that human beings possess prior to government, that conservatives have been very reluctant to acknowledge because they don't want to look like the living constitution jurisprudence of the left for so long. But of course, there are rights that we maintain prior to government and that government exists not to take away, but to protect. And maybe this is an opportunity to re-look at the idea that the rights aren't those

that the Supreme Court decides to give you. That's really the problem, is that, you know, from the, you look at Buck versus Bell, guess what a right the Supreme Court isn't going to give you is the right to be free from compulsory sterilization. And then in Hardwick v. Bowers, they said that the want to have uh the older understanding that rights exist prior to government and our governmental system in its entirety exists to protect those rights it's an alien concept to a lot of people who believe that a right is something that is good and if it's good then you should have it or that i want and that is the job of the government to provide these things which is strength gotten us into all sorts of trouble. Hey, James, can I just say, can I just point out to the listeners how different this podcast is now that we finally got Rob and Peter off it and you've been subject to the hostile takeover of the Power of Blind blog?

We're delving into the deep thoughts of the founders and the Reconstruction Congress. We're not constantly going over cheer scripts yes uh for those of you who are just joining the ricochet podcast for the first time the previous 602 episodes consisted entirely of rob and peter talking about the most trivial non-essential things uh never a serious moment i labored in vain to get in there and get them to talk about the issues of the day but no it was always sitcom televisions and office politics at stanford and how to properly not your sweater about your neck the thing is and again if 602 you podcasts you missed peter robinson does literally talk about knotting his sweaters around his neck in the collegiate fashion every single time and you would think is his is his neck must be chafed then, it's not because they're very fine sweaters. Fine sweaters

because they have a fine thread. Fine thread matters. Like for example, you can think of the finest, softest sweater that you want. Wouldn't you want sheets made out of that? Because that's really what matters. Thread counts, do not talk to me about thread count. No, thread count is a myth. It does not matter how many threads you have. Billions. If they're lousy threads, you need the best threads possible. And that brings us, of course, to Bowling Branch. They use the best 100% cotton threads, organic cotton threads on earth for a superior softness and a better night's sleep. The sheets aren't just buttery, breathable and impossibly soft to start with. It gets softer with every wash. And as I like to say, I'm here to tell you that my sheets are incrementally softer this week than they were last week.

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You will immediately feel the difference right away. From there, the sheets get softer and softer with every... Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia. Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated. The whole data center networking portfolio.

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literally now before the month comes out. It's BowlingBranch-o-l-l-a-n-d branch.com promo code ricochet for 20 off and we thank boland branch for sponsoring this the ricochet podcast james that was an awesome segue i unlike rob who's constantly trying to interfere with your segues and then he's like the he's the russian judge he holds like a six or seven up instead of the 10, to which you are due for such an acrobatically beautiful segue. That was purely, purely beautiful. I'm so impressed. And if our producer could include this in the final podcast, I'd be happy. And now we welcome to the podcast Rafe Manguerelle.

He's the Nick O'Neill Fellow and Head of Research for the Policing and Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to the City Journal, a great magazine. In 2020, he was appointed to serve a four-year term as a member of the New York State Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. His first book, Criminal Injustice, was just released on Tuesday. Hey, welcome. Thanks for joining us, Rafe. Thanks so much for having me. So your book and the introduction starts out with a story that a lot of people might not have heard about. Not the reaction to George Floyd's killing, which happened in Minneapolis, where I am.

Matter of fact, I'm about 14 blocks south. But it's in 2019 with the murder of Brittany Hill. A lot of people may not know this. Some people may, because the video of this, the horrific, absolutely heartbreaking video of this went around, but nobody really knew the context. Nobody really knew the disposition of the case. Tell us about the case, why you started your book with it, and why you think it's indicative of the problems that we face today. Yeah. So, you know, I've been following crime in the city of Chicago for a long time. I went to law school in Chicago, lived there for three years. My wife is originally from the west side of Chicago, a neighborhood called Humboldt Park, which is still very rough and has been for a really long time. So I've always had kind of a,

you know, sort of special interest in that city and in particular in that issue. So, you know, really, I came across that story the way that a lot of people did, which was when that video went viral. So the Chicago police department actually placed a surveillance camera in this neighborhood called austin which is consistently one of the most dangerous neighborhoods uh in the city of chicago and it captured this daytime shooting it's broad daylight early in the morning sunny summer day and here's this woman britney hill 24 years old unarmed holding her one-year-old daughter and she's talking to a couple of other people one of of them was the baby's father. And here comes this car just kind of slowing to a stop, you know, sort of nondescript sedan. And this little girl actually waves to it,

which is like sort of the first heartbreaking thing about this case. And then within just seconds, the passengers open fire and everyone takes off running off screen. Brittany Hill turns to shield her daughter, is almost immediately wounded, tries to get away and collapses a few feet later with her daughter still clinging to her neck and basically just starts bleeding out in the street. And this little girl is sitting there amid this barrage of gunfire. And in her sort of last act of heroism on this earth, Brittany Hill throws herself over her daughter. Because the shooting was caught on video, police in Chicago were able to make an arrest really quick. They arrested two individuals, a guy named Eric Adams, not to be confused with the mayor of New York City, and a guy named Michael

Washington. Michael Washington, it turned out, had nine prior felony convictions, including one conviction for second-degree murder. And when I read this, I mean, it really just made my blood boil. I mean, I had heard stories of heinous offenses committed by people with open cases before, but it's different when you see it on video. It has a more visceral kind of impact. And, you know, I noticed that people talked about the tragedy, but no one seemed nearly as angry about the fact that the criminal justice system had failed in a really important way that cost a life. And that anger didn't come anywhere close to the anger that you would expect to hear in the wake of a controversial police use of force or, you know, a story of someone like Kalief Browder, who killed himself after spending three years in Rikers Island.

You know, it seemed like there was an underappreciation for the plight of people who were forced to live in some of the most dangerous places in the world that happened to be within the borders of the United States. And I wanted to kind of bring attention to that issue in a loud way. And that was kind of the first time I'd ever really considered writing a book. Before I hand it over to Lucretia and John, I'll just say that some people will look at that case and say, well, well, that's just one example. What we really need to do as a society is decarcerate and decriminalize, in other words, to keep people out of the system that inevitably

will just ruin their lives and turn them into even worse people. And you're making the argument that actually increasing the number of bad actors that we put away and increasing the number of things that get you in trouble helps the people who are the most vulnerable in this society, the people who are right now paying the price for these lofty, airy notions of decriminalization and decreased police efforts? Yeah, well, yes to the first thing, not so much the second thing. You know, I started my career on the criminal justice reform beat, actually, writing about the problem of over-criminalization, about the fact that, you know, the United States has somewhere in the range of 300 to 400,000 criminally enforceable rules and regulations of which nobody could possibly be on notice.

You know, and I don't think that we need to drastically increase the number of things that might bring you into contact with the criminal justice system. I think, you know, what's illegal now, you know, we already do a pretty good job of sort of focusing on the offenses that we should be focusing on. I think for, you know, for as long as we've been keeping data, about 11 to 12 offenses account for about 90% of the prison population for the last 50 years. I don't think that needs to change. What I do think needs to change is this attitude, this idea that we can drastically decarcerate on a massive scale, you know, the scale necessary to bring us up to parity with, say, the Western European democracies

that we're unfavorably compared to so often, which would, of course, require a sort of 80% reduction in our prison population. I mean, that to me would be incredibly disastrous precisely for the communities that you mentioned, which are the communities that reformers say they want to help. And so there's this irony, right? There's this anger about cases involving unarmed Black men shot by police, and that a result of the system's failure to incapacitate people who have shown time and again that they are 1,000% unwilling to play by society's rules. These are people who are manifesting their antisocial dispositions in every possible way, and yet the system seems to refuse to take them at their word that they're not going to behave and that they're going to

continue to present dangers. I know I said I'd shut up, but I just have to say, I agree. We don't need a whole raft of new laws. I think what I was talking about in terms of decriminalization was the way that many police departments have stopped enforcing certain things because they have disparate impact. Here in Minneapolis, they threw the lurking and the spitting and the loitering and the rest of those

laws out because they're having a disparate impact. And as such, the police have no tool to deal with people who are causing problems or are about to cause problems. And likewise, traffic enforcement has dropped. They can't pull anybody over for a vehicle problem anymore because, again, disparate impact. So all the ways in which they used to nip crime in the bud or find a weapon on somebody who was out on parole and shouldn't have a gun, all those tools are gone. And we're told that this is good because it reduces the amount of interaction with the criminal justice system. But it also means that it's more difficult, isn't it, to deal with that tool is gone, and I think we're the poorer for it. Oh, I completely agree.

And when I was working with George Kelling in the last couple years of his life, he had actually introduced me to Commissioner Bill Bratton, who gave the book a wonderful endorsement and has become a good friend over the years. Bratton and I were talking about when he first took over the transit police department in 1990 in New York City. And one of the stories he told me was about this concept he called the Cracker Jack box effect. This idea that, you know, when you were a kid, you bought Cracker Jacks, not so much because you liked the caramel popcorn, but at least as much, you know, for the toy, the treat that you might find at the bottom of the box. This is how he described the uptick in fare evasion enforcement when he took over the

Transit Police Department. By enforcing something as low level and seemingly innocuous as jumping the turnstile, it turned out that one in six individuals arrested for that crime turned out to have open warrants. One in 20 turned out to be carrying weapons illegally. The idea that we can just stop enforcing certain offenses in order to reduce disparities is very incomplete insofar as it ignores that oftentimes the bases for interactions often for low-level crimes can lead to the discovery of more serious offenses, can lead to the discovery of contraband, and eventually the incapacitation of offenders who, by the way, probably shouldn't

be out on the street. There's this sort of idea that we talk about low-level offenders, nonviolent offenders, and violent offenders as if they're static categories that don't change. But the reality is that there's a lot of overlap, right? Yesterday's turnstile jumper could be tomorrow's shooter. Again, it's not to say that all turnstile jumpers are violent criminals, but people who pose a high risk of committing serious criminal violence are generally going to manifest their antisocial disposition in a myriad of ways, right? There's no such thing as somebody who says, I'm just a violent criminal. I only shoot people and kill people. I don't litter. I don't, you know, steal. I don't, you know, that's just not how reality works. And so you see this a lot in

the data, right? In Baltimore, I think it was seven in 10 homicide suspects in 2017 had at least one prior drug arrest. So, you know, maybe it's not such a great idea that we should broadly decriminalize all drugs across the board, because that's an important tool for law enforcement to discover other more serious kinds of crimes and then, you know, incapacitate more serious criminals. Patricia? So, please, thank you. I have a small question and a large question, so I'll start with a small question. In your chapter on stop and frisk, which I found very interesting, you talk about the fact that once stop and frisk was essentially ended because of a variety of different reasons, court cases and then de Blasio coming in, that crime still continued to go down. And you had some interesting data on why that was, but I'm also wondering if there,

and I don't know because I don't know what the stop and frisk, excuse me, let me put it this way. I don't know now a couple of years later what those statistics look like, but isn't it also possible that that kind of active policing that stop

question and frisk entailed created a environment in which uh criminals knowing that that was going to happen uh you know because of that they they were deterred in some way and that that had a kind of lasting effect. And maybe if we were to look at it today, that lasting effect is probably over because now it's pretty clear that even to the dumbest criminal that stop, question, and frisk is over. Absolutely. I mean, the lag effects of policies, even policies that have essentially been undone. That's a real phenomenon. It takes time for criminals to adjust to the new environment, for them to internalize that the risk associated with certain criminal activity has gone down, right? The idea that if we stop

stopping for us tomorrow, that criminals will, you know, just change their behavior the next day is just wrong. But I do think there are a lot of other, you know, sort of problems with latching on to the continued decline in crime that a lot of, you know, sort of left of center and even right of center critics of the Stop and Frist program in New York City, you know, kind of used to continue to disparage the practice. I mean, you know, yes, it's true that crime continued to decline after we saw a massive drop off in the number of reported stops. But, you know, I think there's reason to believe that the sort of trend line of stops, of actual stops, not just reported stops, reported is an important word there, of actual stops

is flatter than it might otherwise seem to the naked eye. Because, you know, one of the critiques of stop and frisk, one of the valid ones, was the NYPD kind of created this incentive for officers to stop individuals who probably shouldn't have been stopped because that was a primary measure of their proactivity on which they were graded and evaluated. Lots of officers that I've interviewed over the years have told me some version of the same story, which is that either they or people they know completely fabricated stop forms, wrote up people they never interacted with, wrote up dead people, made up names, Mickey

Mouse, Donald Duck, or reported as stops interactions that never rose to that level. And this is where we kind of get into, you know, some of the funky legal arguments here. But, you know, the distinction between, say, a right of inquiry interaction, a request for information, and a Terry stop, you know, lawyers argue about that all the time in court. Judges will dissent in decisions, you know, based on questions of whether or not a search took place. So the idea that we should just take at face value evaluations that are given by law enforcement officers, the vast majority of whom don't have any formal legal training, I think is a little silly, especially when they had an incentive to kind of lean in one direction.

Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia. Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated. The whole data center networking portfolio, and they deliver. That's them.

Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center networking portfolio and they deliver that's them hey nokia right on time get your data center ai ready someday is here with nokia and especially when there's a lot of really good evidence that when the incentives were inverted they leaned heavily in the other direction which is to say that there was a lot of underreporting in the immediate aftermath of the sort of policy on stop and frisk being changed in 2013. Thank you. So let me ask my bigger question, because I don't want us to run out of time, and I want to give John a chance to speak to you as well. My bigger question is a little bit like throwing a grenade into the room. You have a, you use this same sort of formulation in quite a few places, but when it comes to de-policing, you say, as long as I can remember, controversial use of force

incidents, both excessive and lawful, have driven enormous amounts of public anger, and you go on to talk about that as if there is not, you even mentioned a little bit earlier when you said that, you know, your opening story doesn't elicit the kind of anger that, you know, what happened to George Floyd did and so on. My only real criticism of the whole book is this kind of almost refusal to acknowledge that that public anger is stoked. That public anger is not just, what do they call it, grassroots anger that's coming out of nowhere. That is part of a very deliberate agenda on the part of the left that takes all of these things, like the stop and frisk data that you were just talking about, like the sort of misrepresenting what racial disparities are, on and on and on. They take all of those things, they turn it into some oversimplified arguments,

they use that to stoke public anger because they have a very serious agenda. You know, you talk about progressive prosecutors, but those progressive prosecutors didn't rise up because of what happened to George Floyd. They rose up because of massive amounts of money being put into the system to get them elected. And so, again, my only, and it's not really a criticism, I can understand why you wouldn't necessarily want to take that whole subject on in a book that's really trying to persuade someone who wants to be, who wants an honest appraisal. But at the same time, do you think that, do you think I'm right about that, I guess, is the best way to put it? I mean, I do think that, never been any crime. I mean, like you say, no murders where I live. it's not it's impossible that people don't know that that's true it it quite frankly didn't take your book with the all of the data to convince those kind of people that what you say is absolutely true and so what is it who who are the real racists here that want to see those communities destroyed i think people have grown uncomfortable with the guilt that has been

pushed on them as a result of a hyper focus on the disproportionate share of the costs associated with robust enforcement programs borne by these communities. And there's truth to that. It is true that when police officers make mistakes, they're more likely to make mistakes in the communities in which they're spending the most time. And if they're spending the most time in low-income minority communities because that's where the crime is, then that's who's going to bear the brunt of those book, there is another side to that ledger that, you know, we have to pay attention to, which is that so too are the benefits associated with crime declines disproportionately concentrated in low-income minority neighborhoods. And for whatever reason, I think lots of people who fancy themselves, you know, sort of morally good and conscientious members of society have not yet been able to find a way to square those two circles. And they continue to sort of be almost entirely driven by the arguments about the unequal distribution of the costs. And, you know,

I think that has a lot to do with the fact that there are just so many degrees of removal between them and the sort of carnage and the reality of serious criminal violence you know they've never smelled what a puddle of blood is like on a hot piece of concrete you can smell the metal in the air you know it's um they've never been that close to serious violence. They've never walked past people who they genuinely fear would take their property or their life if they refused. visceral reality of violent victimization in the hopes that it opens up people's hearts to exactly what individuals who live in these low-income minority communities that are plagued with crime go through. Can I just say, before I turn it to John, that's a very generous explanation. Actually, my question follows right on Lucretius. But before that, I wanted to read a message because I contacted one of your former employers. I said,

yeah, this guy Rafe, I love this guy, but you got to give me some dirt on him to confront him at his ricochet podcast appearance. So your former boss said, unfortunately, he's a nice guy, but he is one of the few people I know who might be able to go one-on-one with you in a terrible food eating contest. Dude used to sit in meetings and down an entire giant size bag of sour gummy worms and have fast food for lunch every day of course he is still in athletic shape which is why he must be destroyed i think i know exactly who that is i can't stand this because i want to come next time you're on we're going big mac to big mac because Mac because I can beat you on this. I'm determined. But let me ask my effort to destroy you as asked by your former boss, Troy.

Let's let him out. It's identity out. But it actually builds on Lucretia's question, which is a lot of these facts, you provide a lot of data in your book. But I think it backs up what people see with their own eyes in these communities. I mean, I actually, in Berkeley, there was a person murdered on my block. And so people see the rising crime all around us. The statistics, I think, just back it up. And yet, the people in the cities are voting for these progressive prosecutors. My hometown of Philadelphia had the chance to

kick Larry Kramer out of office, one of the very worst progressive prosecutors. He's reelected, right? We're, you know, San Francisco just- With only 17% of the vote? With only 17% of the vote showing up in the primary. Everyone knew the data about how bad things are in Philadelphia, yet he's reelected, right? Chesa Boudin is recalled in San Francisco, but I bet he's going to be replaced by someone who's only marginally less crazy than him. Your book makes a big point about federalism, I think.

It makes a big point how communities are all different, and policing strategies work in some places, may not work in others. And so I have the sort of more pessimistic view, Lucretius, is people in the cities have had this data, have the choice, and yet they still think it's better to suffer higher crime rates in order to promote whatever agenda they have in mind. And as conservatives, we gave them the data. They still made that choice. Maybe we have to respect that choice, unfortunately. I think, yeah, no, I think you're onto something, but I do think that that phenomenon that you describe is largely a function of the hyper-geographic concentration of crime, right? There's a sort of rule of crime concentration that was developed by a criminologist named David

Weisberg, and I run through it in the book, but it's an experiment that's been replicated in cities across the world. And in any given modern city, what you'll find is about three to four percent of street segments will see about 50 percent of all violent crime. And so while crime is rising in a lot of places and in a lot of neighborhoods, including the nice ones, it's still not even close to what it is in the truly concentrated pockets of violent crime. In New York City, some of the worst neighborhoods may have homicide rates of, say, 10 per 100,000, which is about double the national average. But take West Garfield Park, Chicago, and you've got a homicide rate of 131 per 100,000, which puts it on par with some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the world. And so there is still a degree of insulation, I think, for a lot of sort of upper middle class progressive urbanites who are sort of driving the electoral success of movements like the progressive prosecutor movement. And they don't really have to bear at least the brunt of the costs associated

with these bad policies. Now, one of the interesting things about the recall in San Francisco was that unlike San Francisco doesn't have a huge violent crime problem, which is to say that, you know, homicides are not a huge problem in San Francisco compared to other cities or even compared to Oakland across the bay. What's different in San Francisco, what I think really explains why voters there threw Chesa Boudin out on his rear end, is that even the well-to-do, wealthy, politically active residents of that city had to bear the costs associated with the massive uptick in disorder that they were seeing on their front lawns, literally. I mean, you had 10 encampments across the street from, you know, five, six million dollar homes. People, you know, were

having their Maseratis broken into in their driveways, you know, stepping on human excrement while you're just walking to and from the office, you know, being accosted by people with needles hanging out of their arms. I mean, you know, so that kind of disorder, I think, really got people fed up because they had to deal with it in a way that they maybe hadn't before. Rafe, I'm inviting, I am giving you a, anytime you want to come to Berkeley, ticket to come give a speech on your book. I can't wait to have you here. I can't, we haven't had a good protest in a few years. I can't wait to bring you. I'm going to speak at Claremont McKenna in November, so let's make it work. I'd take him up on that offer. We would love to live stream the protests

here on Ricochet. But until then, until your next book, we have to thank you for showing up in the podcast. The book is Criminal Injustice. It's out, it's fresh, it's bound to be controversial, and read it and learn so you can better deal with the arguments that you'll no doubt will be hearing from people about why everything is just fine and nothing should change, even though everyone knows that's not the case. Rafe, thanks for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me. John, though, I have to ask, when you do bring him by, are you going to engage in some sort of disgusting eating competition whereby you do consume an entire bag of sour gummy worms or something like that and then throw back at him?

Can I just say that in the wonderful city of Philadelphia, I just had Italian ice sour gummy worm flavor. So you just can't get that anywhere else in the country. And then I ate it when a soft pretzel with mustard simultaneously. I mean, there was heaven. I would not be surprised to find that at the state fair, because every year they come up with some new taste combination that we're supposed to just go nuts over this year.

It's apple pie, a limoed hamburgers and stuff like that. So I don't doubt that whatever atrocity you find on the streets of philadelphia you could find here in minnesota what matters though john is you just describe the heavenly experience of eating those things uh were you standing on a street with a cup in one hand and a pretzel in the other yes i was i was standing on a street so the the big chain is called rita's italian water ice has 40 flavors. And also they serve something called custard ice, which is really just soft. And that's why John is centered.

And that is why he is the beaming beacon of health that you know he is if you ever see him. I mean, other people have different things. They have some people, it's workout. Some people, it's yoga. Some people, it's meditation. All of these things that you do to make your life better, to jumpstart your day, clear your headspace, give you some energy. Well, so let me tell you about liquid IV. Maybe that can go in some of the dishes that John has mentioned. He can report back to us now to enhance the stem. Why are we talking about liquid IV?

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Now, we got this to test, and immediately I gave it to my wife. Why? Because she plays tennis outdoors. Why? Because once she actually went to the emergency room with heat exhaustion, it was not fun. It was bad. She's been trying this and that, maybe a bottle of this. Well, some people recommend. She loves this stuff. Absolutely so. And here's the great

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liquidiv.com and use the promo code ricochet at your checkout that's 25 off anything when you shop better hydration that's 25 off anything promo code ricochet at liquidiv.com. And we thank Liquid IV for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, Lucretia, John, if you've listened to the Ricochet podcast... Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data

center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia. Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated. The whole data center networking portfolio. And they deliver. That's them.

Hey, Nokia. Right on time. Get your data center AI ready. Someday is here with Nokia. Before you know it, this is usually the spot where Rob will tell you all the things that are coming up. But frankly, something else is going to happen. Bursting through the brick wall like the Kool-Aid man, it's Stephen Hayward. That's awesome.

Oh, yeah. Okay, what is this? I mean, we have you on. One of the other guys is off. But, you know, you're becoming a squatter here, hard to evict. Yeah, I know. Sorry about that, James, except I actually need your help because I'm about to lose my job to these two usurpers you've got.

By the way, I'm in a bar right now in the Isle of Skye in Scotland, and I don't know how much background noise you can hear, but since I'm in the UK, I think I'm going to adopt the feeling of my daughter. Who's that? Hi, Winston. That's my daughter. My frame of mind is King Henry VIII since I'm in the UK. So the sense of sound is uncertain, like his wife.

I don't want to keep you long. But by the way, John, I am going to disappoint you. I have been checking all of the outlets of the most prominent scottish restaurant in the world mcdonald's i can't find a mcrib anywhere what and by the way they're no i they don't have them here wait wait do they have something called mc haggis it tastes so good oh i'm not sure why you want to be like henry the henry the eighth at this point with gout in one leg and some sort of eternal eternal uh separating uh thing on the other but uh we'll grant you that so why are you in scotland and how is the how's the pub life well the pub life

carries on as usual so that's the lynchpin of england of course uh i will connect to what rake was talking about the subject of crime uh i think um you know the list of things the american left does not know about social policy in britain is very long and one of the things they don't know is that almost every european nation has a higher ratio of police to population than the united states but something that is conspicuous to me here in england for the first time in over a decade is i'm used to seeing the london bobbies everywhere you know what they're funny uniforms they're i hardly see them anywhere and i don't know if i don't think their number's gone down i think they have changed their practices

i don't know much about it but i thought that's funny i don't see a lot of them ambling around the street like they used to so i don't know what that's about yeah the homelessness when i was in england in the spring you're right i saw not a single one unless you got the guys in front of buckingham palace who as we all know have you know uzis those big top furry hats but anyway go on right oh so i uh i was at in london what two weeks ago and i had the two days 104 degree heat which for california is you know that's sort of every summer we get that average and you know those guys in the thick coats and the big furry hats they were all out there uh manninger stations as usual i thought that's the england of the old days you know nowadays um you know we say oh my

god it's the end of the world it's's the climate crisis. These are countries that colonized the tropics with heavy coats and hats on 100 years ago. And now we're told that we can't handle it. The heat wave was only two days in London, which, you know, that's hardly a respectable heat wave at all for a native Californian. Given all the strikes, though, you're going to be there for another two months because you can't fly out of europe right now right although you can buy everything you can buy everything with the powerful american dollar 30 off i'm so jealous yeah yeah that's right it's it's a good time to travel in europe right now absolutely yeah except the only thing he's buying is whiskey so well this is my uh for viewers this is my second pint of the i've been hiking all day

today i had a vigorous uh um vigorous day so now i'm rewarding myself with a couple of pints before i move on to the whiskey course well continuing the fine pundit tradition of uh or rating in great detail with confidence about a country that you've been in for three days what is something else something i do it all the time what is something else that we should know about the scepter dial that may not have hit the press over here? Well, I am following day by day the press coverage of the race to replace Boris Johnson. And when I got to London about two and a half weeks ago now, is when there were still five candidates, and I watched some of the TV debates. And I have to say, they're pretty dispiriting.

There have been some great newspaper headlines about how the shadow of Margaret Thatcher looms over this race. And the candidates, like Republicans have done, try to be the most Reaganite. A lot of the candidates are trying to claim the mantle of Thatcher, but they're all pretty unconvincing.

With the exception of the woman, Kemi Badanok, who I thought was the best in the field, but she got voted out in the third or fourth round. She's the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. She was, I forget what, she was the minister of culture or some, or minister of equality. It was a terribly dubious title, but she's supremely anti-woke. So here is this black woman, African descent, with that lovely british accent standing in the house of commons the last couple of years attacking the wokery in the most fulsome way and driving the left out of

her mind and she's also said more directly than any of the others that she would back away from the crazy environmental policies of boris johnson the others are all equivocated about it so i thought she's the best candidate in the field because she would anger both the cultural left and the environmental left how can you get any better than that and unfortunately the members of the house decided not to elevate her can we just get her like with uh like i used to think with thatcher can we just give her american citizenship and get her over here and run things john i wrote that about her a year ago on Powerline, because I'd seen some video of her in the House of Commons. I thought she was so spectacular.

We've got to get her to America and let her run. So when you mention the climate crisis, which I'm sure is gripping the minds of every single Briton and Scotsman and Irishman, the energy situation over there, the price of petrol, as they call it, which they take by the liter, I understand. And they drive so charmingly on the road. And they put the aluminum bat in the boot. Are they having the same inflationary troubles that we are? And are people feeling the pinch? Are people worried about an upcoming winter in which energy is going to be quite dear, as they would say?

Oh, yeah. There's serious forecasts that a lot of middle class Britons are going to have to choose between paying their energy bills, which are expected to skyrocket, partly from the market, partly from stupid new taxes Boris Johnson agreed to impose. And they may back off on that. Now, one of the clever things is I know Lucretia talked earlier about how the Biden people always redefine things. You know, they sell the petrol, as you say, James, in liters. So I pull up to the pump. I have a rental car. I blew a tire yesterday hitting a rock on these terrible Scottish roads. Anyway, you pull up to the pump and it says, you know, a dollar eighty nine or sorry, a pound eighty nine a liter.

And you think, oh, it's cheap because you don't run through your head how much that comes out a gallon. It's like nine dollars a gallon or something like that. So it's pretty grim. Although the whole place is so tiny, there's nowhere to drive. I mean, you just walk. I mean, the whole, what is it, just the size of New Jersey over there, basically? I mean. I don't know if it is or not, John.

All I know is I drive for an hour and a half, and I've gone 20 miles. Well, John, Stephen, I envy you envy you i do i love it over there troubles aside and i'd hop over across the pond in a second um but alas i'm here in minnesota wait a minute not alas i love it uh but from all of us to all of you there uh our regards to the pub and we'll see you back when peter is gone and rob is gone and john is gone and lucretia is gone and then then we'll have you around again yeah and if i still have a job i John is gone and Lucretia is gone and then we'll have you around again. Yeah, and if I still have a job, I mean, John and Lucretia are so popular

with listeners without me, I think I'm going to lose my job. Interesting job, isn't it, that pays absolutely no money. All right, we'll talk to you later. Oh, regard. We'll talk to you later. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye, Steve. And again, if you're not watching the live stream, in true

Henry VIII fashion, he was waving a large turkey leg at us as he said goodbye. Before we go, here's a couple of things. I got a Milwaukee meetup. You know, it's a weekend affair. It's probably too late to tell you, but here's the thing. There are Ricochet meetups going on all the time. And so if you join Ricochet.com,

and again, if you you missed 602 podcasts, this is your first one wondering what it is. It is a place where people, yeah, they got to pay money. You got to pay money to make a comment. But that, as Rob Long used to say,

it makes you have skin in the game. It means that everybody has a vested interest in a civil community. It's not a free-for-all madhouse like you find in these other places. Really, we've been keeping things civil for a decade plus. And, you know, it gets lively. It's not a free-for-all madhouse that you can find in these other places. Really, we've been keeping things civil for a decade plus, and, you know, it gets lively.

It's fun. But it's not like Twitter. It's not like Facebook. It's a place where you can find a like-minded community, and you'll wonder why you never went there before. There's also going to be a meetup in Texas because Ricochet will be a media partner with the Texas Tribune Festival. It's taking place September 22nd to 24th in downtown Austin. You've got plenty of time to plan for that. We'll have an announcement soon on some of your favorite

Ricochet stars who will be attending. Well, that'll be fun. But before we go, we always like to look at something out there that we haven't talked about before. John and Carisha, there's talk if the Republicans win back everything of investigating Fauci.

Good idea. Would that have as much impact moving the needle as the January 6th seems to have accomplished? John, all I'd say is I think that what they really need to do is clean house at the Department of Justice. Congress shouldn't investigate Fauci. The Department of Justice should investigate Fauci. If they had an honest and ethical Department of Justice, I think that they'd probably find plenty to put him in jail for.

For what, though? What do you suspect they would find? I actually think that not so much about the COVID stuff. I think that that was a breach of public trust for sure. But I think that there's some actual malfeasance going on between the gain of function research and some other things. The personal and crony, what would you say, the benefit, the financial benefit that they all incurred from the vaccine itself. I think there's stuff there that at the very least could send Fauci, get him a little bit nervous about his role in all of that. I think it's a waste of time to do congressional hearings on it. It's just sort of red meat for a certain portion of the population that keeps them from doing the really important things that need to be done. And I despise Fauci. It's not that. It's just I'm so worried that when the Republicans take over both houses of Congress, let's hope that it's just going to be it's going to be such disappointment because they won't do what

needs to be done about so many things. Well, there's certainly no precedent for that in recent history. See, after listening to Rafe, Lucretia wants to throw everybody in jail. But I think it's important to have some kind of postmortem on what happened during the COVID lockdowns, even if it's not about throwing Dr. Fauci in jail. This is where Lucrezia and I usually differ. I wouldn't go as far as going after him personally, but I think you can tell there were serious mistakes made in our response to the COVID pandemic, that we incurred huge, you know, trillions in dollars in economic costs and delayed medical care, people thrown out of work, increases in crime. And for what? What was the real benefit in the end that we got that wasn't actually delivered by the warp speed?

I mean, the incredible development of the vaccines. And I think it's important for us to have an accounting for that. And as Lucretia says, the other thing we saw, and I think we need more investigation, is the way big science works. That Dr. Fauci and people in other agencies were interested in suppressing dissident scientific voices like those of Scott Atlas, like those of Dr. J, who you've had on the podcast many times friend yeah and so i think it's important for the american people uh to know that so that the next time there's a pandemic we actually respond better than we did this time can i just ask if either of you do either of you think a congressional set of congressional hearings could ever accomplish that no that's my

i mean they they may but um it would be the usual back and forth and people would pick for their side and that would be it um i mean you could go to the local gift store in my neighborhood and you could buy a mug that said wwfd what would fauci do and there would be votive candles of him like there would be for ruth badrick of ginsburg and you know it just is the the adelaide the idolation of the man uh because he presented the voice of science and the people who like to think of themselves as smart rational people who believe science trust science as though scientism itself is a is a isn't a belief system have too much of their own self-identity bound up in sort of being right in doing what they did. So nobody wants to go back and look at that again,

really. So there's really nothing much to come from it. Now, as a former staffer, what I would do, I think you have a great hearing. You just have, what you can do in a hearing, what you can't do through media and stuff is have people directly confront each other. So I would just have a panel one table dr fauci scott atlas and dr j and just let them go at it for two hours it'd be great i'd love it yeah but you're you're right all of these little fantasy scenarios that we come up with would never happen because they would uh you know they people might get the wrong idea now don't get me wrong i i'm not one of those people who doesn't trust science you know in and discarded completely is a ridiculous idea that's how we find things out but we got locked

very early into a set of ideas from which you could not deviate and that was the frustrating thing to a lot of us we would say for example that um well take the lab leak idea right does everybody pretty much now kind of think that it was cooked up in a lab and it got out through sloppy procedures? Do you think that's what most people have come around to thinking? I know the science magazine, science, not magazine, the journals, the academic journal just released a study claiming that, yeah, just claiming that actually the outbreak of the virus was in fact due to these wet markets.

But then it was very odd. It said, but it was like simultaneous, multiple mutations and releases, which made me see that really raised doubts in my mind that it was such a coincidence that multiple identical viruses would come out at the same wet market and then cause this enormous pandemic. But that's what James. Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. And as you can hear, I'm making some big changes in here because AI is making some bigger ones everywhere. So I took a little trip to Nokia. Super fast routers, optical interconnect, fully automated.

The whole data center networking portfolio. And they deliver. That's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center AI ready. Someday is here with Nokia. To be critical, but the way you phrased it, I trust science. We're not supposed to trust science.

We're not supposed to have faith in science, right? I think that that and i'm really not being critical but the idea that if you questioned anything you didn't believe in science as if it were a religion as if you were questioning the trinity or something that i think has probably been the most destructive aspect of both the climate change nonsense and the COVID nonsense is that all of a sudden it's, it's become an article of faith rather than inquiry and, you know,

scientific method and all of those other things and, and well-designed research studies and things like that. And, and the media's complicity in falsely reporting or uh that's not you know what i'm trying to say oh i do and and i agree i i mean yes that's what irritated me too is when you you if you had a just a different scientific approach to this and i'm not a scientist but there are there were ideas floated there were smart legitimate people who had disparate conflicting narratives and you're're right. If you

went with this batch of scientists and you didn't trust the science because they were easy to dismiss, you know, we'll be playing this. You see, this is why the hearings wouldn't go. We're going to be playing this over for years and years and years and retreating back to the same arguments and the rest of it. When we all know that if they'd been straight with us from the start, a lot of our trust in the institutions might still be there. And maybe it's good that they weren't, because we've come to reevaluate every single one of the institutions that failed spectacularly and broke up in a brittle fashion when they were confronted with something actually to do. But, you know, that's a good point. Can I just make that it's not the Republicans against science.

It's science and the bureaucracy are different things. And I think you could legitimately and importantly attack the bureaucracy, which perverted science, to seize power over every daily acts of our lives. Who thought that Americans would ever allow government to have that much power? That's what I think would be a useful looking back as a way to prepare for the future. We all knew that standing outside a hardware store at a distance of six feet, wearing masks, unable to go into the store and presenting the guy with a little bolt and saying, can I have six of these, whereupon he would go back into the dim recess. We all knew this was not we all had to participate in this consensual lie that did more to dissolve societal bonds, I think, than anything else that has happened to this country in the last century or so. Or maybe not.

Well, enough of my blathering. And we could hear more of John Lucretia's blathering. Maybe they'll get a podcast, too. Oh, they do. Right. Lucretia, where can you be heard? The Three Whiskey Happy Hour on both Ricochet powerline and apple podcasts i believe sorry sorry and john you i i'm like i'm the itinerant troubadour i just go from podcast to podcast like a magpie invited

invading the nest guest host for a week and then. Well, better a magpie than a parasite who enters through one aperture and comes out the other. John promised that he was going to take Steve's job away a long time ago. And I think Steve, like everything else, has forgotten that. Well, we'll see what happens in the future. Will it be Rob next week? Will it be Peter? Will it be Lucretia? Will it be Steve?

Will it be John? Will it be me? You'll have to tune in and find out for Ricochet podcast number 604. And this one, by the way, 603 was brought to you by Bull & Branch and Liquid IV. Support them for supporting us. And of course, join Ricochet today. Go to a meeting, enter, find the member-only side of Ricochet and join a community you've been looking for all your life. And take a minute or two or five minutes, however long it takes to give us that five-star review on an Apple podcast. I think I've said that 575 times now.

I'll probably say it for 576. Thanks for listening, folks. We'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Ricochet. Join the conversation. Hey, move those routers there. Oh, hey, it's me, your data center. Join the conversation. the whole data center networking portfolio, and they deliver. That's them. Hey, Nokia, right on time. Get your data center AI ready.

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