The Ricochet Podcast - #Us Too

Episode Date: December 15, 2017

This week, Powerline’s (and Berkeley’s!) Steve Hayward sits in and we anoint Roy Moore as a loser, Al Franken as a memory, and discuss with Ricochet alumni Claire Berlinski her fantastic and now famous piece The Warlock Hunt. Also, what exactly is Mueller mulling? And our guys pick their favorite movies of 2017. Music from this week’s episode: Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? Source

We have special news for you. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Are you going to send me or anybody that I know to a camp? We have people that are stupid. Abortion, sodomy and materialism have taken the place of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Stephen Hayward. I'm James Lalix, and today we're going to go to Paris. That's my dog. I'm James Lalix, and today we go to

Paris to talk to Claire Belinsky about the warlock hunt. Let's have ourselves a podcast. It's the Ricochet Podcast, post-net neutrality. So your ISP may be slowing us down just a little bit, maybe not high. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 382. It's brought to you by the fine people at Arrow. Hey, you've got high-speed Internet, right? Of course you do, even post-net neutrality. And if you're tired of paying for the high-speed Internet,

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Um, well, let me just say this on Rob's behalf. A, he'll be back someday, but we'd like there to be a Ricochet when he comes back, right? And that's why we have these little fundraising drives. That's why we give you things like The Daily Shot, a free daily email newsletter. You get the day's news in a way that's easy to digest, and you get the details so you can understand what's going on in the day.

It's free. We know you'll love it. And because you'll love it, you will certainly want to subscribe to Ricochet.com slash TDS, and you'll also want to join Ricochet. It's cheap, and it keeps going the most civil place on the Internet. Yeah, there is some little scrapes now and then. Sure, there's an elbow thrown on occasion, but there's a code of conduct that keeps everybody in line and makes for a happy community that's really unique on the web. And if you've been anywhere else on the web, to YouTube, to comments at Breitbart, you know it's a sewer out there. We're not in the sewer. We're in an alabaster palace somewhere above looking down. Welcome,

Stephen Hayward. Welcome, Peter Robinson. How are you guys on this run-up to Christmas? We're great, James, because we can really rub it in on you people in Minnesota, because out here where Peter and I are inmates in California, it's going to be another 75 degree and sunny day. Another example of the soulless sort of rot that descends into people when the climate ever changes. I'm looking at snow. I'm looking at evergreens. I'm looking at the Courier and Ives view that one is supposed to have at Christmastime. So you should envy me.

Come January, I will weep. But now this is as it should be, right? If you say so, James. Whatever. Tell yourself whatever you need to tell yourself, James. It's all right. I do. I do. I do often. All right. Post Alabama. Break it down. Let's what happened here? Are we looking at a tsunami, a tidal wave, a sinking of Atlantis for the Republican Party come 2018?

Was this a one off? I'll go first because Steve will undoubtedly have more nuance and detail to offer. Here's what I think about what it says about the coming midterms in 2018. There is a high risk. There is high avalanche danger. Judge Roy Moore was a lousy candidate in all kinds of ways, but he still managed. Donald Trump had carried Alabama by, as I recall, 28 points and Judge Roy Moore lost by one point, meaning there was a swing of 29 points against the Republicans in Alabama. That's not an isolation. As I say, Judge Moore was a lousy candidate. just a couple of weeks and lost by what was it six points nine points it was

lost by high single digits was a very good candidate and on that day not only did ed gillespie lose but republicans lost up and down the ballots in the handful all the handful of states where special elections were taking place georgia as well as I recall, two or three other states, not major elections, but Republicans lost everywhere. My own view is that Republicans ought to be very nervous. This is not preordained. Nothing is in politics, of course. 2018 is a long way away. If they get tax reform, if the economy begins, it sustains the pace that it's demonstrated during the last two quarters of over 3%, if we get three quarters of over 3%, that'll be the first time in some years that that has happened. It could be a very good Republican year. But

within the, let's put it this way, within the probability dispersion, a wipeout is now to me, to my mind, a distinct possibility. uh you know i'm i'm not going to be able to disagree with anything you said i think it's going to be a very grim year for republicans for all the conventional reasons and then the special secret sauce of donald trump whom i think a lot of swing voters are going to want to cast their votes against in the midterms uh just as a check on things i'd say this this about Alabama. By my reckoning, this makes the sixth, you know, number six, sixth Senate seat that Republicans have thrown away in the last decade, winnable seats, Senate seats, with bad candidates. And one thing to note about Alabama

is, you mentioned there's a 29-point swing. Moore's raw vote total was half of the raw vote total of trump which means a lot of people just didn't vote for him right they just did not come out and you could have a depressed republican turnout next year we can talk about that a little bit now what a lot of people say and i think this is correct is that well look it's alabama doug jones is there scott brown we'll get the seat back in 2020 when it's up again in a general election. I think that's probably right, except what no one is pointing out right now is, isn't Roy Moore going to run again in 2020? I mean, he's a stubborn and ornery guy. And I mean, of course, he's going to run again. And this is a long story, but the short version is that we don't

have party machines anymore. And gosh, I wish we could get them back so we can clear the field. But I think Alabama Republicans right now ought to think long term about how to keep that guy out and get somebody better to get that seat back in 2020. I should mention in case I didn't that Stephen Hayward, who's joining us this week and get this. Not only is he a contributor at Powerline, a great blog that is located right here in Minnesota, of course, the epicenter of conservative thought, but he's also at Berkeley. Berkeley. Now, let's talk about it. Here's the thing. The rest of the country, people are saying that Roy Moore is now the face of the Republican Party, regardless of whether or not he won, because they sent him money.

Donald Trump endorsed him. So when the people say, you know, people look at the right and accuse us of being homophobic and being weird about race and being strange about women's role in the workplace and all that, now all of a sudden we've spent money and endorsed a guy who has all of those ideas which are virtually, literally a caricature of what conservatives truly believe yet they never hang around the left the the the various uh curiosities intellectual and otherwise that you see at berkeley that somehow what what they say is never a definition of the left it's just a strange sort of hothouse, curious side note that has nothing to do with the movement of the Democrats today. Why is that? Well, look, I mean, what's the old line

that if liberals didn't have double standards, they wouldn't have any standards at all? I think it's that simple. Hey, could I ask, Steve, I know you're in California, but you blog on Powerline. James is right there in Minneapolis. What the heck is the latest on Franken? The governor appointed somebody to replace him, but Franken is still in the Senate. And just more generally, I wouldn't want a long discursion on this, but we've got 2018 coming up. Is there any hope that Minnesota will elect a Republican to any office at any level? Steve? Well, I mean, really, I should defer to James, but I mean, I visit now and then. I visit my

two writing partners, John and Scott, there. And look, you know, Trump almost won Minnesota. It was almost as close as it was back in the Reagan elections in the 80s. I always like to point out that Minnesota is the only state in the country that never voted for Ronald Reagan even once, which is a permanent stain on its legacy, I think. But look, Republicans have a slight majority in the state legislature. And, you know, the state is close. It's turning purple, I think. Now, next year may be tough, but you'll have two Senate races.

When Amy Klobuchar is up again for a regular term and then Franken's seat, the remainder of it will be filled. So two Senate races and a governor's race and so i think it's going to turn out that's all in 2018 or that's yes next year yes right wow oh so the that's a trifecta that's the whole thing yeah it's gonna be a super bowl james what what do you think that's gonna be rocking it will be a super bowl and we're having the super bowl by the way i can't wait um i have my credentials to go and i dreamed last night that i tried to walk through the front door of the super bowl without my credentials and a security guard who left our newspaper five years ago stood up and said no just no so i'm already having anxiety dreams about what that's going to be like but when it comes to the uh to the other

races yeah purple is i think where we're going And even though there's been a bumpy ride with President Trump, there's still – the cultural divide that exists between the metro and outstate is still there. Right down to the fact that I call it outstate when the people who live there certainly don't call themselves outstate. They're Minnesota. But the mindset is the city's good and liberal folk doing the right thing and then a largely forgotten swath of people out there who do not share the same cultural values and want things like jobs in mines that the progressives in the cities don't let them have because mines are smelly and nasty. I'm sorry, but go ahead. Go ahead, James. You raised a point I want to ask Steve about, but go ahead. That's it. Ask Steve. Oh, ahead. Go ahead, James. You raised a point I want to ask Steve about, but go ahead. No, that's it.

Ask Steve. Oh, okay. Go ahead. Ask the guy in California about Minnesota. No, no, no. This is a kind of permanent theme, and it's a podcast in itself, so I'm not inviting you, Steve, to spend 45 minutes giving us. But James just talked about upstate versus the cities. I grew up in New York state where it was upstate versus downstate. And here in California, it's the coast, which means the urban heavily settled area, Northern California and Los Angeles

versus the interior. What is it about cities that leads them so predictably to lean to the left? And what is it about the countryside, about rural and small town, the answer to that really could go back to the argument between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, which I won't rehearse now. But remember, Jefferson hated banks and hated cities. And, you know, we thought it would be bad for human character because people who lived in cities would be dependent on their employers and the manufacturers and the bankers. And, I mean, there's more to it than that of course but uh i mean you know another explanation i always liked was uh the late ed banfield the great harvard social scientist who liked to point out why are people uh friendly in small towns and curt and abrupt in new york you know the old stereotypes about walking down the street new york right and by the way the stereotypes are true exactly and the reason is you don't have time in New York. What if you actually stop to answer the question, how are you doing to somebody in New York? You wouldn't get anywhere. I mean, so, I mean, that's a little sort of superficial social thing,

but the friendliness of small towns based on our lower density and the fact that we all know each other, I think changes the politics of them. And, you know, when you get a cultural divide going with the cultural elites in Hollywood and the media and on the coast, sneering at the people who live in rural Alabama or rural Minnesota, people after a while don't like that and they notice it. It's also self-selecting. I mean, the people who want to participate in a collective enterprise flock to the cities, the people who want a looser form of community that gives distance between people, stay where they are, or move to the rural areas. And once the people go to the cities, they want to intensify those values of collectivism and density and the rest of it.

And while that was once a good idea, because it helps to build these magnificent things that we have in America called cities, nowadays, it leads to all kinds of curious ideas about how society should be ordered that really do affect the way people live. All you have to do is to sit in traffic watching the cars just crawl along while an empty bike lane in the winter sits unused for 15, 20 blocks. All you have to do to see neighborhoods trying to look at ways to rezone, to put in denser housing where there's now single family, you see the new urbanist ideas that want to get people out of their houses,

out of their cars, and into various collective means for living, be it the dense unit or the massive mass transit or the rest of it. And so what used to be cities great, rural great, each has their style now we've we're getting more of an idea of this perfect european city which is nonsense there's no way you can pattern an american city after a european model just doesn't it isn't going to work and the american character doesn't fit to it but they like it and we're going to get it but you're right i mean it's it's the the values i grew up in fargo north dakota which had 50 000 people which some people probably regard as you know as as small town

america but it was a big town in north dakota for north dakota that was the it was it was the big city way yeah well there's grant forks and bismarck but there's hickberg's um and you know and and now fargo is is twice the size cosmopolitan, but it's still regarded out there as just a flyover speck. The country is dotted with is just a profusion of these small towns, 100,000, 50,000, 20,000, hanging along the arteries and the capillaries of America. And that is the feeder system for our strength and our character. The big city produces what? It produces libertinism. It's artistic. It produces money and all these things. But the idea that somehow that these flyover values have to be, you're right, mocked at and sneered because they inevitably produce a Roy Moore. Well, they don't. They don't.

And Minnesota, I think there's lots of communities happy to tell you that it's not the Roy Moore, the Bible thumping, get them gays out of here values that they embrace. What they embrace is something else, and it has to do more with economic populism. So we'll see. But, you know, Steve, you mentioned that it would take a 45-minute ride, a read to answer Peter's questions.

What if you don't have that much time? What if you don't? What if you've got like five, ten minutes or so and you've got to find something to read now and all you have is your phone or your pad? Well, that's where you go to Blinkist. And I'm going to stop there because Stephen likes it when I do segues. So I did one just for him. I saw it coming.

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When Claire posts, Claire posts, shall we say, and she's got a book coming too, but one of the reasons we want to have her on is because she wrote an article about our current panic and, to her surprise, was not roasted alive entirely on the Internet for it. Claire Berlinski, she's a former Ricochet doyen and a freelance journalist who lives in Paris. She's crowdfunding a book about European politics, Brave Old World, portions of which we have seen on Ricochet. We're lucky.

She'd be grateful for your support, by the way, so tick out that link when you see her spot on the page. Claire, welcome. Tell us about The warlock hunt. Thank you very much. Um, thank you also for pointing out that people can click on that link to donate money to my campaign.

I have really appreciated that. This has been one of the really strange, really strange things that has ever happened to me in my publishing career. I had no idea that was going to happen. I began as a Facebook post, not even a Facebook post, began as an answer on a friend's Facebook page. He posted something anodyne saying, has this gone too far? And his female friends attacked him en masse. It was like seeing some sort of

ravening animals running down a slope toward an ibex or something. And I just felt they weren't saying totally sane things. I just, the tone of it really unnerved me. There was something in it. It was really, in the language they were using was really – it was kill the kulaks sort of stuff. It was Rwandan radio stuff. It just didn't sound that – it didn't sound right to me.

It didn't sound healthy to me. And I, again, look at these cases more closely. I've written about them on Ricochet before actually. Do you remember the piece I wrote about Jeff Marcy, the astrophysicist? The guy with the shirt. No, I don't think it's his shirt. It wasn't his shirt. No.

This is a guy at Berkeley who is running for the Nobel Prize, loaded up with federal funding, and got caught up in one of these scandals no one knows really knows really what happened or what happened it didn't happen but um without due process without any kind of trial he found himself out of a job and out of billions of dollars of federal funding i mean which is not easily replaced because the research he was doing is irreplaceable. I wrote that in Ricochet a while ago, and that was a basis for what I wrote here. Something is going on now that is very, very strange, and it goes beyond social justice warriors. It goes beyond feminism. It goes beyond – it's a hysteria and a panic that has deep deep roots that i don't really pretend to understand but i can sure see that something's not right

claire peter here yeah welcome back could i just quote one sentence and ask you to expound upon it in this is claire in the warlock hunt in recent weeks, I've acquired new powers. Close quote. Explain. Yeah, I bet every woman in the world has been thinking about this. I've been thinking about all these casual, flirtatious interchanges that I've had with coworkers and supervisors in one context or another. The kind of interchanges that say, hey, we're human. Hey, we can be comfortable.

We can be relaxed about each other. Go up to a bar. You say something you wouldn't say if you hadn't had a couple of drinks. You're on a long assignment together where you spend a lot of time together. You start talking in a more frank language. You start gossiping about other people at the office. You say things that would not look great in a deposition, and this is so human, right? I mean anyone who doesn't recognize what I'm saying has never had a real job, has never earned a living, I think.

I mean if that's not the way you think it goes, then you don't know much about the real workforce. Claire, you've got three men on the line with you. We're all nodding, but we're afraid to agree out loud. Well, this is, okay, this is what's really freaking me out. Every man knows it. Every woman knows it. Now you started with that quote and thought about the powers I now have. The power I now have is this. If I were to be swept up by this hysteria, if I were to look at all these women who are coming forward and suddenly have a change of heart, suddenly reeval so degrading and disgraceful for women that I even that only now do I understand how,

how humiliating it is. If I were to look over my life like that and think about them like that and, and wind myself up thinking, no, that wasn't funny. That was degrading. And some women are doing just that. I could destroy them.

I heard yesterday. I shouldn't be able doing just that. I could destroy them. I could destroy them. And I shouldn't be able to do that. I heard yesterday about a professor who was going to lose everything, probably, job, academic respect, because somebody had come forward long after the event and there was no touching, there was no grabbing, there was no sad wanking,

there was no cornering somebody in an elevator. Did you say that on Ricochet podcast? I did. I just did. I did. Ixnay. Ixnay, no. I'm going to faint. Take to the couch, Claire. What he had said, he had complimented the woman's voice because

apparently it was distinctive or low or it had a Suzanne Plachette quality. He found licorice or whatever, and she felt uncomfortable about it. So we've gone from the Weinsteins of the world who are monsters, as Selma Hayek just reported to us, to the whole panoply of men with their sad, unwanted behavior that involve actual assault. But now we've tipped into something that if simply a woman feels uncomfortable in retrospect. If she says, I feel demeaned, I felt humiliated, I froze, I was terrified, I went home and shook, I had no idea what to do. Any of these common phrases tacked at the end of some interchange that is either sexual or maybe sexual or something that didn't go – maybe it was funny at the time or maybe it wasn't quite so funny at the time.

That's enough to ruin someone's life now. But doesn't the end effect of that make women seem not like strong creatures who are standing up and saying me too but incredibly fragile people? This is why I'm going absolutely – well, if you're allowed to say wank, I'm going to say batshit. I'm going to absolutely batshit because I cannot see what good women are doing for themselves because they are going, the obvious

implication of this, anyone with their head screwed on straight is going to see that any man with a reasonable instinct for self-preservation is not going to want women around the office place. And although he's not going to be able to see that any man with a reasonable instinct for self-preservation is not going to want women around the office place. And although he's not going to have that, he's going to make

sure that he is never in a position alone with a woman, is never going to have the kind of informal relationships with women that are essential to their professional advancement. You know, networking. What is networking about? Networking is about going out to lunch one-on-one. You don't go out to lunch one-on-one with a woman you're afraid is going to drop a dime on you. And if anybody doubts this, all you have to do is ask yourself, how many men are there in the wake of my publishing this article i've received hundreds of letters

hundreds and they i can't tell you who they're from for obvious reasons but if you read them together you'd weep you really would something is so wrong here we have men whose careers i mean obviously i'm not taking them all at face value probably some of them are telling the truth and some are embellishing this the truth and some are remembering it the way they want to. But they're too similar in language for me not to believe that basically what's going on is roughly what they're telling me. No accusers to confront. They don't even know what they're being accused of. who surreptitiously go around behind their backs asking everyone in a leading way, did such and such do something that made you uncomfortable,

with the presumption being that you would be telling them something they wanted to hear. If you said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, he did make me uncomfortable. Maybe when he chewed that popcorn with his mouth open. But something going on that should not be happening in a free society resulting in the destruction of their lives, but not just this destruction, but this form of aggressive voyeuristic humiliation where every single detail of their sexual life is publicized in the New York Times. Things that no one has a right to know about them. Even if you're going to write an article about sexual harassment, do you need to know the details about, I'm not going to say who it is, people who read the article will know who it is, about so-and-so having sex on his desk with his assistant? I mean, that's not anyone's business.

It's just not anyone's business. It's a grotesque national voyeurism that we're all they're all entrapped in. I think about the details of my sex life or my sexual foibles being broadcast, primetime news over everything, along with the accusation that

I was something below a creep, something below a moral, but some kind of monster. I think I'd want to die. And I have a feeling some of these men will commit suicide because that is the kind of event that if you're not in great emotional health to begin with, that can precipitate an act of tremendous self-destruction. You know, Stephen Hayward is quite quiet here. Stephen, is there a reason? Yeah.

So first of all, I've been bolded to say what would otherwise risk my career by saying I've long had this mad fanboy crush on Claire Berlinski, even though we've never met. So you can't say that now without, right? And what fun is this for women? Tell me why this is an advance for women. Don't you think we enjoy hearing that? Don't you think we like that? Yeah, I think that's right.

Right. Am I happier because I didn't know that my work and my persona were admired? No, of course not. What a dull, dreary world we'd be living in if no one complimented anyone else and no one – we are going towards that that world though, where people are afraid even to sort of cutely flirt. Yeah, quick comment. About five years back when I was an inmate at the University of Colorado, I got into a heap of trouble one day on Colorado Public Radio when I said, you know, both my mother and my mother-in-law, when they were in the workforce back in the 1940s,

when we didn't have sexual harassment laws, we didn't have hostile workplace statutes, we didn't have sexual harassment laws we didn't have hostile workplace statutes we didn't have human resources departments and you know the lawyers they work for they both work for lawyers would pinch them on the bottom or grab their knee and both my mother-in-law and mother said what we found was if you just slap them once real hard the problem was solved and so i said this on the radio and all hell broke loose i mean there was a faculty senate wanted to drum me out of the university for recommending assault. So that's where we are. The question I want to ask is –

It's a national insanity. I mean it's just complete hysteria. Yeah, well, that's what the question I want to ask is how are we going to get out of all this? I mean you compare this to the Salem witch trial mania and some other things. And other people have compared it to McCarthyism where, again, it's a complicated matter. We had real communists, but McCarthy was reckless, and people are being reckless now. Yeah, McCarthy didn't happen to have access to the Venona tapes, the Venona revelation that would have proved him right.

He happened to just be a nut who happened to get it right. But how that ended, as people know, is really two things. Eisenhower sort of undermined him subtly. And then you had that climactic moment when Joseph Welch said, have you no shame on the Senate floor. And then he was censured. And, you know, he sort of self-destructed and went away. And I'm wondering if you have any idea how this is going to end? Or is there going to be more people like you? I can say this. There is a known trajectory of a moral panic, right? I mean, this is not a new phenomenon. It's very studied by sociologists.

So, yes, it has an end and usually ends with some kind of more concrete resolution about what Cohn called the boundary crisis. I thought his insight was very relevant here. We are having a boundary crisis because right now no one really knows what the boundaries are for sexual behavior in the workplace or out of the workplace. We've just been through a total upheaval in the form of the sexual revolution, in the form of the mass entry of women into the workplace, in the form of the transformation of our economy, the one that is much more favorable to women. You know what? Go back and explain who Cohn is and what the boundary argument is. You're presuming knowledge of that that I think many listeners won't have. What I brought up in the last part of the article, if you made it all the way through, and brought up because my editor

Adam Garfinkel said it really needs this, and he was right, was he said, okay, but why this panic? Why now? And I started thinking about it, and I started thinking about a book by Stanley Cohn, who he wrote about the mods and the rockers in Britain, called Moral Panics and Folk Devils.

And he did is the classic criminological and sociological study of the cycle of a moral panic and one of which a folk devil is identified by the media. And it's significant. It's it's it's something that signifies a real problem. There's something really there. There's something that bothers people. I mean, it begins with Weinstein, and yeah, that bothers people for a damn good reason, right? But suddenly the folk devil is exaggerated hysterically to the point where no one can have a rational conversation about the subject anymore. And then you get what he calls the moral entrepreneurs who compete with each other to show their own respectability by decrying the folk devil have we seen this element so far we have yes right um and uh the the the problem becomes exacerbated rather than remediated because people can't talk rationally about it anymore

because i mean everyone so far in this on this call is that I can't say this except to you. That's not a joke. People can't talk rationally about this anymore. They can't ask each other, so what are the boundaries here? They just can't. And sooner or later, after a lot of witch hunting is done, a lot of men's lives are destroyed, and they really are destroyed. This is a deep um it's a deep injustice it's a it's a terrible thing that i'm getting letters from men who are using a vocabulary that no man in a free free society should be so fluent with and i you know maybe some of them aren't innocent but i have a suspicion

quite a few of them are you mentioned you you mentioned the mods and the rockers that was a later version of what happened in america when we had a panic over juvenile delinquency i mean it had a dome at a station in two different socials you know two different styles greasers different kinds of music but in america in the 50s we feared the jd we feared the guy with the switchblade and the and the greased up hair and the rest of it the difference was in that moral panic was eventually the culture the counterculture the intellectuals began to side with the juvenile delinquency because they saw in his nihilism an essential fact about modern life. And so they began by using these archetypes that went against

the current bourgeois society to devolve and deconstruct and eliminate all the usual rules by which people behaved. And that has led us to where we are now. So the ultimate result of the sexual revolution, which was supposedly going to be the empowerment of everybody, turns out to have been the empowerment of creeps and a slew of conflicts for women, which we're still working out. And the end result where everyone is walking around now on eggshells. You said, I don't know how people, you know, how do people be? I know how to behave in the office. I mean, it's not that hard to be a reasonable gentleman.

It just – it isn't. But I pity young women and young men coming up and not knowing whether or not they need – I pity young women and young men. I especially pity shy young men coming up in this environment, shy men who are already totally bollocked up by what it is that women want, who are now thinking, and on top of it, if I get my attempt to approach her wrong, I'm going to wind up in HR.

I'm going to lose my job. This is a terrible environment for them, and it's not helping our overall national morale. I'm sure it's related to the epidemic of suicide and deaths of despair, as they call them. This is not healthy.

It really isn't. But to put it on a more healthy footing, I think we're going to have to begin to look at this in a much more rational way. We're going to have to say there are aspects of the way the world as it used to be that we clearly miss. And we need to bring back replacement structures even if we don't want all of that world we need to set really clear

guidelines about workplace behavior certainly they may be totally new guidelines we can't punish men for not to not knowing those guidelines in 1979 however however. I mean, we really cannot. That is absolutely immoral. But what I think has come up, what is clear, is that many women are furious about the way they've been treated in the workplace. Many men are baffled. And so we need absolutely foolproof guidelines for behavior in the workplace, even if they're ridiculous, even if they're like the campus rape codes

where you have to ask me, please put my finger on your arm before touching you, to keep women and men safe. And I think we also have to think about this in deeper terms, though, in deeper psychological terms, how it is that we are so angry at each other, women, men and men and women, women are acting out an anger that seems so disproportionate. Where's that from? Who's that really meant for?

Can't be these poor schmucks. And what is the answer? What is your answer? Have you got a provisional answer? Are you? Hey, this is something that the world, I mean, Freud asked, what is the answer what is your answer have you got a provisional answer are you this is some world-haming you know for it as what is what would we want but i am so struck by the anger i have a lot of ideas going through my head i don't know what whether they make sense yet i i think about you know the divorce epidemic of the 1970s and think about how many women were left without a father figure. Claire, may I try a provisional answer on you?

Sure. The sexual revolution turned out to be a really bad deal for women. Yeah, except not all of it was. Okay. I mean, I think the idea that women should be in control of how many children they want to have and whether they want to have a career that they can do, whether they should have as many opportunities in the workplace as a man is – those are great ideas. The fact that I had tutorials one-on-one with Dons at Balliol was fantastic. And when you talk about rolling that sexual revolution, you talk about rolling that back, too. You do?

Those are necessarily tied to co-ed dorms on every campus? What's that? Well, I don't know about co-ed dorms, but they are precisely tied to that. The argument against admitting women to bailioles, this is just a bad idea to have men and women unsupervised in a room alone together. That's just inappropriate. Claire, it's Steve Hayward again. In a little bit of time we have left, I wonder if I could briefly ask you about two other things. Sure. One is, you know, I don't keep as close a track of what's going on in France as I should.

And when I do, I'm not sure I get the whole picture. But, I mean, the country has essentially been almost under martial law i understand no is that too strong okay no no the country's been appropriately policed given the level of the terrorist threat well okay well what's what's uh i guess i'll put the question broadly this way what's the state of emergency okay that's the current state of sort of anti-semitism in france um you to – I don't know. I'm not sure what. I saw some screaming headline in front of Drudge and traced it back to Breitbart. Don't trust those things because this is really weird. Every couple of years there's an anti-Semitism in France hysteria that happens in the United States.

I don't know why. It's an interesting phenomenon. I should crack it. Every couple of years, it starts... You see these screaming headlines in the US that the Jews are fleeing France, and it's... And I looked at the statistics, and no, they're not. The incidence of anti-Semitic... The incidence of anti-Semitic incidents, as the

government defines them, and it defines them quite precisely, has actually decreased by 20% last year. So if they're fleeing, they're not fleeing because of that. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. And the government does keep very close track. I mean, they will define something like the writing of a swastika on a metro wall. It's an anti-Semitic crime. And it's gone down, both casual and more serious anti-Semitic crimes.

So if Jews are fleeing, that have now become more Muslim and moving them to neighborhoods that are known for their higher socioeconomic status. Right. And one other quick question is, can you give us a hot take on Macron? Is he actually kind of more interesting than we might have thought? I mean, I thought he was just another Davos man, but I see signals that maybe he is better than that. That's the question we're all asking. Is he another Davos man or is he more interesting?

And it depends what he can pull off. So far, I think what's been remarkable is that he did manage to come out of nowhere, destroy both of France's established political parties, place himself in the center and say, well, now I'm going to change French labor and do it now that doesn't happen that often right right um so i i'm inclined to i'm inclined to be pretty impressed by him but he's got a lot got some big problems to work with and a lot of big figures to work with too he's going to have to work with merkle and he's going to have to work with the rest of the eu and he's going to have to work with Putin and he's going to have to work with Trump. And somehow his vision of France, if his vision of France is at the end of this, the vision he has in mind now, I will be very impressed because that's a very challenging project. But so far I've been impressed.

All right, everybody, you can go to any magazine site in the country and read about people in America talking about Europe. Or you can go to Ricochet, look at Claire's posts and find out what an American in Europe is writing about Europe and support her book, too, because we want to see that. Based on the excerpts that we've seen, it's going to be spectacular and as engaging and interesting as everything else that Claire has done. Thanks for joining us today. It was my pleasure. Don't be a stranger for so long. I am not a stranger. And pity me, your host, because after this long discussion of all the difficulties that

people have in this sexually charged world, I have to do a mattress commercial. Oh, lucky you. That may be the greatest segue ever. Hope you're doing a really sexy tone of voice? Could you, Jim? Send me a text. I'll do it for you. All right. Thanks, Claire. I'll be your mattress.

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It's the usual bounteous week of news. Good Lord. A lot of people were hammering national review uh the last couple of days for an editorial saying it's time to investigate the investigators a lot of despair among some people on the right saying that national review has now given in to the worst forms of trumpism by saying there might be something a little suspect on mueller's team uh what say you guys yeah i i would like to hear what steve has to say about this i watched uh got done with my desk work last night and spent a few moments watching fox and there was uh newt gingrich saying

that don't don't fire mueller but the fbi and possibly the department of justice both need to be investigated themselves and i'd like to hear hear what Steve has to say about that. Well, we said before that on the city question, we can go back to Jefferson. On this one, you can go all the way back to Plato, who said, who is going to watch the watchers, right? And our fellow Ricochet podcaster, Andrew Klavan, has been making jokes about this for weeks now. We did an investigation of the investigation and investigators for the investigation. Right. He's very good good very funny about all that uh but look uh you know these uh

these texts that came out from well that agent straws or however you pronounce the name is a really problematic uh and uh who is he set it up yeah sorry that's right he was the agent who worked on the hillary investigation and who I think most substantially persuaded James Comey to change his wording from gross negligence, which meant a crime, to extremely careless about her handling of her private server, right, back in July a year ago. But he had, apparently he had a mistress, another FBI agent, to whom he had 10,000 text messages. I mean, were they doing any work at all?

I mean, this is ridiculous. And some of them are pretty salacious. One of them talked about how, I'll paraphrase here, I don't remember the exact word and I don't have it in front of me, but it was, we can't allow Trump to become president. I don't think there's any chance he'll win. But just in case, we better have some kind of plan B in place. I'm not sure he used plan B, but it was languished to that effect. And you sort of wonder what that means did that mean the the steel dossier or you know leaks and you know helping to gin up this russia collusion story and the broader problem is this uh you know

the phrase that's become very popular in the last six eight months is the deep state and right i've been a little uh i've had mixed feelings about this because the the more technical term that our friends like richard epstein and you know friends at uber know is the administrative state which talks about the constitutional problems we have with runaway administrative government and the deep state has become the shorthand more popular version of that but it's not quite the same thing. This FBI problem really is, I think, an example of what is meant by the deep state in that you have agencies and people in agencies who think they have a permanent interest immune from politics, immune from the will of the voters, and believe that

of their own will, they can take it upon themselves to rule that a duly elected president is illegitimate and should be driven from office. And that is a big problem. And I'll end with this. I've never gone to these deep dish conspiracies, but you know, there's always been thought that one part of the Watergate story 40 years ago was the intelligence community and the FBI saying we're in on it to get rid of Nixon. And I think there's something to all that, That doesn't exonerate Nick. He was professionally aggrieved. He felt he should have been named director of the FBI after Hoover left. And out of his own personal bitterness, he brought down Richard Nixon. Now, that is not to defend Richard Nixon, but that the high-ranking agent at the FBI was involved in bringing down the president, we now know to be true. We also know this, that there is a legitimate question about whether the Trump dossier, which we now know is unsubstantiated and was paid for very substantially by the Democratic, by the Hillary, I guess it was the Democratic National Committee, in any event by some official organ of the Democratic Party, the question is whether that Trump dossier was used as the basis for a request from a warrant, for a warrant from the FISA court to eavesdrop on Americans, including members of the Trump campaign. That is to say the FBI used phony information to manipulate a court into permitting it to eavesdrop on the opponents of the Democratic Party. And we now know people that high ranking a candidate, a candidacy that high ranking FBI officials disdained themselves.

Or as Andy McCarthy says, might be more possible that the first run with a Fusion GPS dossier got them nowhere. So what they brought to them later was information that they had substantiated based on the leads that they saw from the document. of the American people through the House Select Committee on Intelligence has requested information about this, subpoenaed documents, and the FBI and the Justice Department have stonewalled that committee again and again and again for a period now of months. Article 1 of the Constitution establishes Congress, not the FBI. And so what we have shaping up right now is a direct defiance of the constitutional order by the FBI. That is an outrage, and it's serious in my humble opinion. Yeah, no, I think the whole thing stinks. And I mean – and I think it's going to damage the FBI very badly. I think what's going to happen is we're going to find out there was something of a cabal inside the FBI that was pro-Hillary and somehow insinuated themselves into the center of this.

And I think it's going to damage a lot of people at the FBI. I'll say this. I met Mueller once about 10 years ago in the company of a very prominent Reaganite conservative. So I don't know quite what his own personal political leanings are, but my first blush was I was kind of hopeful about the guy, only because he knows good friends of mine. And I'll mention that one of my privileges in life was knowing a very senior FBI man. He was on the team that arrested Aldrich Ames way back when. And I've never met a finer human being than this particular guy. And by the way,

he and his wife were also an agent. We're very conservative politically. So, you know, this is a problem. It's, you know, it's not, who knows what the FBI is like on across the broad spectrum, but there's a serious problem with what went wrong here. If you're assembling in a team, though, don't you have a lot of people to choose from? And if you choose somebody who themselves has had a partisan moment before, you know, about or was involved in the, you know, deposing Hillary, it seems like maybe you could go outside of that little group. Unless, of course, you're trying to keep the old cabal together because everybody's on the same page and you know where it's going. What I find, I mean, we'll find out eventually, I hope. Let all the poisons in the mud hatch out, as I, Claudia, said. But what I find odd is the absolute lack of interest on this,

on people in the press. Because, I mean, I know that they're invested in Trump is going to go down because of the Russia thing. But it's entirely possible to have two ideas in your head proceeding on the same in the same direction uh like train tracks but yet this thing which smacks of everything that the left loves when it's talking about conspiratorial government and the you know you know in the uh the evil cabals that bring down the good guys this is huge if it's true this is immense but it doesn't play. It doesn't fire five synapses when I talk to people.

They just shrug and it doesn't matter. For some reason in their heads, every time you bring up the deposition of Hillary and the downgrading of her server, they get sort of a little smile on their face and say, but her emails, because they factored her emails into complete and utter irrelevance. That was never anything that meant anything. And likely, they feel the same way about this, that at best, it was justified.

At worst, eh, it happens. So, I mean, it's extraordinary to me. But they're consumed with Russia. Absolutely. So they put all of it's extraordinary to me. But they're consumed with Russia. Absolutely. So they put all of their eggs in that basket. And their eggs, as a matter of fact, if they put them in an away travel suitcase, would probably survive the entire journey intact no matter how much the plane was bumped around. I saw that coming. I didn't.

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And that one, I can get weeks of travel in that. So $20 off a suitcase, visit awaytravel.com slash ricochet20. Use the promo code ricochet20 during the checkout. Once more, that's awaytravel.com slash ricochet20. Promo code 20 for checkout for $20 off any suitcase. And we thank Away Travel for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. Well, before we go, ladies and gentlemen, I'm sure the nation is still grappling with the fact that Omarosa is out of the White House.

I'd forgotten that she was in. I didn't really know who she was. But once again, and I don't care about that, although she says she's going to tell some things because that's the third act of her particular career. But she said it said that she was removed by force, dragged out. And then came the reports from the Secret Service saying, no, that didn't happen. So who are we to believe here is this another example of that term that i've absolutely come to loathe fake news james there's there's only one thing worse on a podcast than saying i don't know but i'm about to say that thing that is worse i don't care oh there you go okay oh i don't care

either but i do have this observation i mean i've been observing for a while how many firsts Trump is delivering in our political scene. First person ever elected for whom the presidency was his first public service. The first president to have his scandal the very first year in office. Usually presidents wait until their second term to have a scandal or some kind of political difficulty. So Trump may be flipping a script and getting that out of the way early, because I think this Russia thing is fizzling. And then third, the tell-all books usually don't appear until year five or six of a two-term presidency, right? You think of Don Regan and David Stockman back in 1987, 86. Or you think of Robert Rice who Locked in the Cabinet late in

the Clinton years. And so Omarosa is going to be first out with a Trump book, probably by Father's Day is my prediction, if not sooner. And so there we go. As I say, everything is being speeded up under Trump. And as I say, he may flip the script, but I still think, despite all the things he does that drives me crazy, he may end up being a very successful and handily re-elected president. Well, we'll pin you to that. On the way out, last question.

Wait, wait, wait. Is there any way we can just make sure that that bit gets edited out of any versions that are listened to in Berkeley? Probably a good idea, right. We don't tailor these for different markets, Peter. We can't say that. Then people will think that the ricochet that they're listening to

is not the ricochet that other people do. No, this is one undiluted stream of ricochet truth. Before we go, last question, as Peter Robinson is wonted to say. On a cultural note, best movie you saw in 2017. Very easy for me, but I have the I have the feeling that Peter maybe saw one and that's the one he's going to name. Well, I last week I sort of raved about murder on the Orient Express, and that's still in my mind. We've also seen since then, The Man Who Invented Christmas, which is a stinker from the first moment to the last, overwrought, overacted, and boring in spite of it all. Aside from Murder on the Orient Express, which I think provided the most sheer, simple pleasure of any movie we saw

in 2017, I think I would name Dunkirk. As long as immediately after seeing the movie, you read the column that Victor Davis Hanson wrote about Dunkirk, placing it in historical context and filling in the bits that the movie leaves out. But it is a remarkable piece of filmmaking. It is gripping from the first moment to the last. And if you place it in context by reading victor you'll be okay now peter i take it you haven't seen darkest hour yet no no i haven't seen it yet no yeah okay so that's my movie of the year uh and that's interesting because a lot including your fellow uh powerline blogger scott johnson just panned it i noticed yes well and so did kyle smith i'll just say this to tease everyone here because otherwise it would take too long.

I had to hold back from yelling at the screen while I was watching it, saying, that's wrong, that's wrong, no, this is wrong. And walking out of the theater thoroughly annoyed, but by the next morning, literally after tossing and turning all night thinking about it, I changed my mind. And I'm going to explain that at great length in an article. I think it's a great movie. Well, the minute you post that article, you better send us the link because now we and all our listeners are going to want to read it. Yeah. I'll give you my choice, but first I want to tell you that this podcast has been brought to you by Arrow, Casper, and Away Travel. Well, I mean, really, you say that, people go away.

They say, ah, it's over, I'm done. No, you're right, you're right, you're right. We also want to tell you to go to iTunes and leave a review. That would be nice, especially if you like it, because your reviews allow new listeners to find the show, and that keeps it going. And, of course, we advise you and beg you. No, we don't beg. That's demeaning.

We strongly advise that you do the wise thing and spend $2.50 a month, which is nothing, to join the podcast listener tier. And you can comment and read stuff, too. It'll be a great introduction to Ricochet. And then you'll pay the huge $5 freight. Oh, that'll bust the bank. My favorite movie, and I didn't see many. I see

most of them later on DVDs, but the theater experience that I enjoyed the most this year was last week with Coco, which is the Pixar film that I went to see with my daughter. And it is funny. It's wildly inventive. It's it's the Pixar sets a standard for these things that somehow you you forget until you look at the ones that proceeded in the trailers. There was a movie animated about garden gnomes, one of whom jumps in a mud puddle, and there is a series of flatulence.

There was a trailer for Ferdinand the Bull, who's trying to escape very quietly, but unfortunately, he too is plagued by flatulence. There was a movie about ducks, and ducks were in a truck, and a pig backed up in the bill, and the pig had an expression because the duck's bill was in his butt. That's most animated movies. And then on a whole different level of sophistication and intelligence and wit and heart is Pixar. And everybody, the reviewers, have said the strange thing. Well, not among Pixar's best. It certainly is a great. I'm sorry.

You can make a very good argument that it isn't the best. And it's very difficult to look at everything that this movie does and say that it's number two for anything. It's a wonderful film. My daughter and I have gone to all of the Pixar movies since she was a little kid. It's been an annual tradition. And this is the last time that she's going to be at home because next year she'll be gone. And we sat there. Oh, James, you're going through it now.

We watched the story about remembering and about family and sat there until the credits were done. And the Luxo lamp bounced across the street and knocked the Pixar logo down and then turned to us and the light bulb went off. And then we left the theater. That's how we always did it. So even with that, even if I didn't have that experience, I'd put that one high up there.

But for the two of us to have that last moment and for her to finally be crying at the end of a Pixar movie, I looked at her and said, uh-huh. Welcome to adulthood kid. Thank you everybody for listening. It's been a pleasure.

Steven, we'll talk to you later. Peter, we'll see you next week. And thanks to everybody for listening to Ricochet podcast at Ricochet 3.0. Tonight you're mine completely You give your love so sweetly Tonight the light of love is in your eyes Will you still love me tomorrow Is this a lasting treasure Or just a moment of pleasure Can I believe the magic of your sight?

Will you still love me tomorrow? Yeah. Tonight with words unspoken You say that I'm Ricochet! Join the conversation.