The Ricochet Podcast - Warriors and Grandmas

Episode Date: May 9, 2020

We know, we know — we’re 6 or 7 hours late with this. We had some technical difficulties during the recording of this show (we broke with tradition and training and left a bit of it in) which forced us to record this show in two sessions today, apologies for that. But that does not mean you, our faithful listeners are getting shortchanged. Far from it — this is one of the longest shows we’ve ever... Source

I'm very happy for General Flynn. He was a great warrior, and he still is a great warrior. Now, in my book, he's an even greater warrior. I'm the president, and you're fake news. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lilex and today we have Annie McCarthy on Flynn, Kim Strassel on Flynn, and Bethany Mandel, grab a killer.

Let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, number 495. I'm James Lilex in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It's a bit chill. Rob Long is in New York, where we assume nothing is happening. Peter Robinson is in California, which has devoted itself to nothing ever happening again, according to Gavin Newsom. And here we are again. Last week we were chomping, chafing, champing.

And now a week later, nothing's changed. You know, thumbs are twiddled. You know, mood the same. Furious. Kettle sitting on the boil. Whistling, shrieking, and nothing seems to have changed. Weird noise. When you smell, you know, when you put something on the stove and you forget about it, and then you smell it and you think, what is that weird smell?

It smells like burning metal and wires. And that's what that is. Yeah. Not quite there yet, but I think we're close. That's what I'm smelling all of the time. Probably a brain tumor. We have, here in California this morning, I thought, what is that sound?

Lawnmowers. Yeah, I heard that too. They've lifted that piece of the restriction as of this very day. And up and down the neighborhood, people are mowing their lawns. And it is the sound of freedom. How deucedly generous of them to let you do that.

Yes. But didn't your governor, Peter, just say, and welcome, by the way, to you guys to this. I'm glad to talk to you again. Didn't the governor of California just say there's no going back to normal until they have a vaccine? Well, you know, he said something like that. But here's the thing. What the governor says, what our strutting, peacock-like governor says, seems to matter less day by day. Here in Palo Alto yesterday, it got a little bit over 80 degrees. And you know what? People were

out strolling. And the proportion wearing masks had dropped from about half to maybe one in five, something like that. And although Stanford University is still shut down, there are a few kids around. And the kids were doing what kids do at this time of year in Palo Alto. They were spreading beach blankets on the ground and they were opening their laptops and reading while slavering themselves with suntan lotion. Why don't they just go to an old folks home and stab people? Yes, exactly. This is the one I love. Up in Modoc County, which is the far northwestern county of the state, which has probably more cougars than people and which has not a single case of COVID, the county of Modoc has said, we are reopening. And governor,

if you don't like it, come here and stop us. So this thing is just starting to break down. And Gavin Newsom is trying to dance and bob and weave so that it looks as though he's still in charge. When people are beginning, at least around the edges here and there, it's uneven. There are still people dressed in masks, giving others the evil eye, but it's beginning to break down. It's just beginning to break down. That is actually the definition of politics, right? It's giving people the impression that you're in charge. I'm glad that he's doing that, because the truth is, what these people are going to discover quite soon is that you're not actually in charge, that you really just really at some point you're going to have to get in front of the parade and say, that's right, everybody.

Get out there on your beach blankets. I order you to go to the beach. They're still in charge of law enforcement. And if they want law enforcement to show up with guns and shut down whatever business you happen to be doing, they have the power to do so. Now, Rob, where you are. I don't think so. I don't think even that. The cops have had about enough of this, too. These guys aren't paid to drag people off kicking and screaming if they're not wearing masks or if kids are playing at somebody else's—I just feel—I've had a couple of conversations.

A cop stopped the other day when we were letting our dog play with a neighbor's dog in a park. And the cop pulled up and he said, look, I saw you look at me as I drove up. I just came down here to tell you, this is fine. It's fine. I'm not going to stop you. It's okay. Well, meanwhile, on the TikTok and on the Instagram and the rest of it, we have the video of New York cops gleefully wading into people who are insufficiently socially distant and getting out the batons. Now, Rob in New York, what I understand is de Blasio has, what, a 97 percent approval rating and Cuomo has 142 percent. The guy who put old people, who put COVID sufferers into old folks' homes and put nurses who were asymptomatic but tested positive to care for them.

We know this is all Trump's fault because he didn't shut down the entire nation on December 27th. But explain the disconnect between the adulation for de Blasio and Cuomo when between the subway and the old folks' homes... No, wait, wait, wait. There's zero adulation for de Blasio.

I don't think de Blasio has experienced this level of hatred across the board in his entire career. I think he's, if anything, absolutely. Which is saying something. Yeah, saying something. Especially for any New York City mayor, not least the second worst New York City mayor in my memory. This guy. Who's first? Who was worst?

Dinkins. Dinkins was worst, but a close second. Dinkins and de Blasio are... De Blasio is aspiring to preside over a city that Dinkins presided over, which is the drug and crime infested. Dinkins

is de Blasio's part two. But anyway, I would say it's like nobody is more loathe and detested than Dinkins. And then sorry, then de Blasio. But part of the problem for these guys and part of the problem with the whole it's the mask issue sort of writ large. If I walk down the street without a mask, I am in full compliance with the rules that I have been given to understand, because I'm maintaining social distance. Now, if I go into a shop, the shop sometimes has a lot of shops here have signs on them saying, please wear a mask, right? I go into the pharmacy,

I go into the UPS store, they want you to wear a mask. I get it. They want you to wear a mask because they're there, they are interacting with people all day. I certainly could understand their caution, and I will absolutely wear a mask for that. But the rule isn't that you're supposed to wear a mask on the outside. And so the people showed last weekend, last week was a beautiful weekend. People photograph of like a bunch of people hanging out at the pier, one of the big piers in the dental lower Manhattan. They sort of redid them years and years ago. They're kind of like their parks. They're beautiful. And if you stand on the end of a pier and you take a photograph of that, of the people cavorting on the grass, and you use a long lens, a telephoto lens, it foreshortens everything. It looks like everybody is on top of everybody else.

Right, right. Not the case. That is not true. But if you want to make a racial argument in New York City, you can by taking that picture and then comparing it to a picture of the cops breaking up some event in the Bronx where people were too close to each other and say, see...

Because in the Bronx, it's going to be African-American and Latino. Almost entirely black. The cops are hassling black people. They're letting white yuppies hang out at the pier. It's just a great amplifier, this virus, because it's bringing out the worst and the best in all of us.

Well, last week, I think I remember telling you that, I think it was Dana Milbank, somebody from the Washington Post, had written a story saying that Georgia is now America's number one death destination. Remember that headline? Georgia vies to be America's number one death. Yes. The Atlantic in the most recent issue has an article titled, Georgia's Experiment in Human Sacrifice.

The state is about to find out how many people need to lose their lives to shore up the economy, that damned economy. Meanwhile, of course, Georgia, the worst. Florida, the economy, a damned economy. Meanwhile, of course, you know, Georgia, the worst, Florida, the worst, right? Because, you know, Florida, man, come on, beaches, idiots, what are you going to say? But yet somehow the picture of people in the beaches and the parks in New York are just, well, those, you know, they got to get out. And we see these charts that say exactly where we got our infection from in Minnesota here. The vast majority of the infection can be traced back to New York.

So it is, again, for the nth week, the rest of the country is full of rubes and idiots for not acting like New York, or not realizing that New York is the epicenter and is the standard by which we must all bear this. Same with California. But in either case, guys, do you think that the general—people are peeved at de Blasio, people are peeved at Newsom—the general effect of this is people are going to say, well, I'm going to vote for smarter, progressive, statist, power-accumulating, revenue-confiscating progressives next time. There's no fundamental shift in their minds as to whether or not their particular preferred political persuasion produced these pieces. And that's a lot of plosives, by the way.

Yeah, I don't know if that's true. I don't know exactly how it's all going to shake out. I mean, I think there's a whole bunch of possible things that could happen that are legit or legitimately predictable sort of the way voter psychology is. One is they'll hate everyone, that everyone's going to represent in your memory this terrible time, including Trump, and just get rid of them all. Just like turn the page. I want a new cast on this show. I'm bored of this show. I don't like it.

Yeah, that's my bet at the moment, by the way. My bet, too, and that deeply embedded in people will be small, petty grievances that won't really play out. Because, look, what happens if in Georgia, for instance, it isn't that bad? I mean, the lesson of COVID-19 is that it's actually not that bad, that every time we prepare ourselves for the worst, we don't get the worst, we get the C-plus version. Not that the C-plus version isn't bad, it's awful, there are people dying in record, in insanely high numbers, but it's not quite what the disaster we were promised. And it all does seem to be reverting to the same basic pace. I mean, just to defend New York for a minute, I mean, the virus came in the New York doorway, but it wasn't like New Yorkers got infected and then just fled to the country.

A lot of those happened in airports, two gigantic international airports in New York. So what we do know about it is that it's not as bad as we think. And the argument, which seems so baffling to me that the left is making and that the Democrats are making, is that somehow it's all about the economy, as if Wall Street and investment banks and the rich 1% aren't doing fine right now. They're doing fine. That's so weird to me. In my judgment, you've got half of it. That's so weird to me. In my judgment, you've got half of it. That's pretty good for me. Well, you're going to agree with what I say.

You're just expressing half of it. I'm coming in to compliment what you're saying. Compliment, C-O-M-P-L-E-M-E-N-T. I think everybody knew. Yeah, exactly. So COVID isn't as bad as we expected. Excuse me. It wasn't as bad as we were told it was going to be. Remember that early model of 2 million deaths?

Nothing like that bad. Furthermore, the only place, as far as I can tell, where the health care system really did begin to get swamped, and even then it only lasted 10 days or so, was New York. Nowhere else in the rest of the country. In Queens and parts of the Bronx in New York, not in Manhattan. There you go. Precisely so. And in Manhattan— Sorry, parts of Brooklyn, not Bronx. In Manhattan, they never even used much of the overflow in the Javits Center. The hospital ship was never used. Okay. That was not as bad as we were told. Here's what's worse than we were told. The pain is real. Restaurants are announcing that they're not going

to be reopening. And that, oh, yes, the elites just won't have a place to go to get their cosmopolitans poured. Well, a lot of people are bartenders. A lot of people are cooks. Banks are going to have trouble collecting. Mortgage payments aren't going to get this is going to get bad. And it's going to take a long time. I go back to this in my own mind, because I think it's being borne out that Kevin Warsh, our friend Kevin Warsh, I did an interview with him at the very beginning of this. And I said, Kevin, how quickly does the economy come back on? And he said, wrong metaphor. This is not going to be like flipping a switch. It's not a light switch. It's a living organism. And it is going to, the economy is going to be badly, badly wounded,

and it will take a long time to heal. Well, there you go. There you go again, Peter. It's all just money with you. I can point out, I can reach into my Twitter feed and I can find some heartbreaking account of somebody who's had close family contact with this and lost somebody. And that trumps absolutely everything you have to say about anybody and their financial situation. I'm sorry. It happened to this person and it could happen to absolutely anybody because to go outside and to spend money is to expose yourself and exposure is death. So again, what you're saying then is that you want a situation where two, let's see, three, four weeks down the road, people mindful of the situation and mindful of what we've gone through enter voluntarily into a series of economic activity. You prefer that with all of its murderous risks to a situation in which people are freed from the shackles of capitalism and given a basic universal income so that they can pursue whatever they want to pursue without having the boot heel of our economic system grinding their face into the curb every single day.

It's finally been exposed. You do the other side alarmingly well. I actually hadn't heard it put quite that powerfully. But you know what? I surrender. I just surrender. Of course I don't surrender. Well, I had a cup of coffee yesterday with Jay Bhattacharya, who I hope will join us next week.

I can't discuss them right now because the report hasn't been released, but he's done another report. And that to one side. And he said what now has his attention—of course, he has family back in India. He was born here, but he has lots of family back in India. He's been back in India many times. announced that it estimates roughly half a million cases of tuberculosis in the third world as a result of the global economic slowdown. And you know what Jay Bhattacharya says? Jay Bhattacharya says those lives matter too. Yeah, but also I find that the choice is so weird. I mean, it's entirely possible.

It's just completely fathomable for us all to figure out a way to go back to work and school and also not kill grandma. I mean, we're going to talk about killing grandma later on the show, specifically with the grandma killer, Bethany. But for now, it seems to me that the idea that it's one or the other is so weird and so strange to me because we know certain things about risk. We know certain things. And I don't see any old people wandering around who desperately need to be saved from themselves. If anything, they seem to be taking this very seriously and their own risks very seriously. People seem to be on the street taking it very seriously, which doesn't necessarily mean they can't go back to work. The biggest danger that I have in killing grandma is when I back my car out of the garage, not when I go downtown to work. And by the way, I've got insurance that covers that.

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senior fellow at National Review Institute and our contributing editor and author of Ball of Collusion, the plot to rig an election and destroy a presidency. Of course, he served as assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and he was on Tucker the other night. And I pointed out to our exchange student, hey, that guy is going to be on our podcast tomorrow. And she now believes that I'm just up in the imperial heights of importance because I got Andy on. And, you know, that's true. So, you know, welcome. All right. Thank you.

Trump says the Flynn case is democratic treason. And it's a disgrace. The Obama administration Justice Department was a disgrace. And they got caught. They got caught. Very dishonest people. But much more than this. It's treason. It's treason.

I'm just going to drop a nickel in here and just say, all right, go. I mean, what possible question could I have? Andy, tell us what you think about all this, because I'm dying to hear it again. Well, I think that it was the right result to drop the Flynn case. I don't think the Flynn case was treason. I think the attorney general reached the right result, although I completely understand where he's coming from. false statements, let's assume for argument's sake they were, that because there was no underlying predicate for the investigation of Flynn, and because to be prosecutable, a false statement has to be material, which means it's got to be probative in connection with something. Since there was no underlying something, the statements couldn't have been material, which, you know, that's fine. Which is correct as far as it goes, right, Andy? Yeah, but I don't, you know, to me, the bottom line here is this case could not have been tried to a jury and with the government proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And I understand why

the attorney general wouldn't want to get into the reasons for that, and you'd much rather rely on a legal reason. But the government's case against Flynn is two FBI agents who have immense credibility issues. Peter Strzok, who was basically blown out of there in disgrace. And what hasn't been given much attention is the other agent is Joe Pientka, who was the case agent on the Trump-Russia investigation responsible for the misrepresentations that were made to the FISA court. And if you couple that with the games that they obviously played with the 302, which is the memorandum of Flynn's statements to them when they did this kind of ambush. Which they substantially rewrote, correct?

Yeah. Which apparently is in violation of all procedure, FBI procedure. Yeah. Okay. So, Peter, I don't see how on earth, as a prosecutor, you take this case into court and think you have a chance to win. I've heard people say today that, well, but Flynn said in court when he pled guilty that he did it. Guilty plea allocutions are not, if the guilty plea is withdrawn, they are not admissible against the defendant. So the government's case rises and falls or falls on those two agents. And I don't see how you win a case like that. Also, Andy, isn't it a matter of public record at this point?

Well, actually, I guess that's the question. Is it speculation or is it a matter of record that Flynn was being threatened that they'd go after his son if he didn't cop a plea? Isn't that public record? Well, yeah, Peter, I think you got to connect the dots a little bit because we don't have an admission by the government that that's true. Here's what we have. All right. We have Flynn and his counsel saying it's true. And now we have a paper trail from emails between Flynn's former counsel, where they acknowledge that there is a commitment by the Justice Department not to prosecute Flynn's son if Flynn pleads guilty. But in a very sneaky

way, they didn't disclose that to the court at the time of the plea, which is a violation of federal law in itself. Wow. Andy, I know this is kind of head-snapping, but I'd like to switch from Flynn to the Rod Rosenstein memo, which has now been released in much fuller version. What do you make of that? Excuse me, I should give us a little background. Rod Rosenstein was Deputy Attorney General. What was the memo? Why was it important? And why is the new release or the wider release significant? The need for the memo is a story in and of itself, because Rosenstein, when he was an emotional wreck the week after Comey was canned by President Trump, that was the week where Rosenstein was saying, well, maybe we get rid of him by the 25th Amendment.

Maybe I go in and covertly record him so we can show everyone how crazy he is and get him out by the 25th Amendment that way. The plan he ultimately settled on while he was reeling, because he was being criticized over his role in Comey's firing, was to appoint Bob Mueller special counsel, Mueller who evidently had applied and been interviewed in connection with possibly replacing Comey as FBI director the day before. So it was of some surprise, evidently, to the White House that Mueller got picked. But when Rod chose Mueller, he didn't articulate the factual basis for a criminal investigation because there wasn't one. And, you know, regrettably for him, it's a requirement of the regulations for appointing special counsels that you do that. So to try to patch that over, he does this what's called the scope memo about 10 weeks later.

And that's the memo that we finally saw this week. And what's really amazing about it is that even though it's dated August of 2017, so by then they know that the Steele dossier is complete garbage, and they know that with respect to Papadopoulos, they had run some informants at him and they had intercepted, you know, they recorded those conversations. And he pushed back at them in a pretty believable way, saying, you know, what are you talking about? There's no, you know, that there was any Trump-Russia conspiracy or that these four people that they've so far identified—Flynn, Manafort, Papadopoulos, and Page—w authorization for Mueller to proceed with the investigation. So it's just astonishing to me that they would rely on stuff that by August of 2017, they clearly knew was nonsense. Okay, Andy, here's what we've got. General Flynn,

the sitting national security advisor to the president of the United States, is essentially, I'm a layman, so I'm using the term loosely. I won't expect you to agree with it in strict terms. But he's essentially entrapped. He's lured into saying something that they can claim was untrue, even though it actually wasn't untrue. The guy was set up, item one. Item two, the Mueller investigation investigates a crimeum on, at least in part, on the dossier that they already knew was garbage. And they tied up the life of this nation for two years, knowing that it was all garbage. Okay, I'm talking to Andy McCarthy, whom I know as a tough Irish law and order guy of the old school, who spent 20 years as a prosecutor dealing with the FBI and the Department of Justice.

How do you respond to this? Peter, I think, number one, what I say is I think what you're laying out is true and that it's been confirmed or being confirmed as we're as we're getting these transcripts of witnesses who testified before the House Intelligence Committee. I don't know whether the right interpretation of all this is that there was like—there's the deep state coup interpretation, right? And then there's the other interpretation, which I'm getting more sympathetic to, which is that this was in cahoots with the Kremlin. And yet, when you put under oath the people who were in a position to know whether there was any evidence to support that, it turns out they knew there wasn't. But that didn't stop them from fomenting the impression that was made out there. And I think that's a pretty reprehensible thing to do. On the other hand, I have a lot of admiration, even if I haven't agreed with every step along the way, for what I think Attorney General Barr is trying to do, which is to get the politics

out of prosecution and the prosecutors out of the politics. You know, he's dropped the case on Flynn, but he also wouldn't go forward with a case that I thought was pretty strong against Andrew McCabe, who was found by the Obama-appointed inspector general to have lied multiple times, including under oath, to investigators. And I think the message, which may be inconsistent with the idea that everybody's on the edge of their seats waiting for Durham, but the message here seems to me to be that he wants the Justice Department out of politics. And if that's where he's coming from, I couldn't be more in agreement with that. I don't think you can close your eyes to real crimes. But at the same time, we do have to get out of this system where prosecution, the threat of prosecution,

and particularly in a really sneaky way, prosecution maintained under the cone of counterintelligence, which is a set of powers we really need to protect the country from mass murder attacks and that sort of stuff. That's all got to stop. And if that's where he's coming from, then I couldn't be more in agreement with that. Hey, Andy, it's Rob Long. Thanks for joining us. So in a way, though, Barr has made a political mistake, if you want to term it that, because if this case would have been tossed out of court, or it would have been an easy vindication for Flynn, instead, he's subverted, he's aborted that process and made it now political. So I'm not saying he should have done it,

but I'm saying that he certainly, and certainly he's a smart guy, he knows this was going to be the reaction. But the reaction is going to be political pressure, force the release, essentially, of a criminal because he was going to hurt the president if he was allowed to speak. Whereas as you've laid out pretty clearly, had this gone to trial, it would have cost Flynn a whole lot of money, probably money he doesn't have, and it wouldn't have gone very far or far at all. Is that fair? I mean, there's a payoff, right? Here's the procedural problem. Trade-off, I should say. Rob, the procedural problem with that is Flynn had already pled guilty.

So he was in a posture of asking for his plea to be vacated and asking for the court to throw out the case on outrageous government misconduct. I don't think he had a real chance of the latter. He may have had a chance at the former, but the Justice Department could have made a pretty strong argument that he shouldn't get to withdraw his plea because he not only pled guilty, he was asked a second time by the new judge who was hearing all this saber rattling from Flynn's camp about how he was railroaded. He brings Flynn in and says, do you want your plea back? And Flynn says, no, no, no, I like the deal. No complaints about my plea, no complaints about my lawyers, no complaints about

the FBI. So I think it was pretty uphill. If the Justice Department hadn't supported this, it may have been pretty uphill for Flynn to get his plea back. I think it was 50-50. One of the things I was reading yesterday about this was that Flynn has gotten, in many ways, special treatment because there are a lot of people who have had this exact thing happen to them who haven't had their cases tossed out, who've actually been forced to go to jail sometimes. How widespread is this kind of tactic on the part of the FBI or prosecutors? Is this something that ordinary people need to be worried about? Well, Rob, a couple of things. Number one, I think it is highly unusual what happened here because you shouldn't do a perjury trap. There are certain situations where, let's say,

I have a hardened criminal like a mafia guy where if he's stupid enough to agree to talk to me, either way, I'm fine, right? If he tells me the truth, I get information I didn't have before. If he lies to me, I have some leverage on him. But the idea is I have leverage on him to squeeze him to give me information under circumstances where I know he's a crook and he's holding back stuff. You don't do a perjury trap just to do a perjury trap, to get somebody to lie for no apparent reason. To create a first crime, so to speak.

Yeah. Well, but I mean, I don't think she's listening to this podcast. She might be. But I think Martha Stewart might say is that they were doing a securities fraud case on her and they wanted more information about the stock manipulation. I mean, who knows? But the thing is, you have to consider that also with Flynn in conjunction with the fact that this was a completely unauthorized operation. They didn't alert the Justice Department. What's supposed to happen here is if you want to interview a member of the president's staff, you have to go to the

attorney general who goes to the White House counsel, and everybody has their eyes open. The Justice Department knows what the FBI wants to do and why. The White House can protect any legitimate interest the president has. The subject can be alerted if he needs to get counseled. White House counsel can be there if there's a legitimate reason for that. The FBI bypassed all of that because they knew under the circumstances, without a real predicate for this investigation, if they had asked, they would have been told no. So they not only did a perjury trap, but they violated every rule in the book to get in the room with Flynn. Well, do you think they've learned? Is this a lesson they've learned or are they just chalking this up as the press is to corrupt

Trump administration, got one passed again? No, I don't think so. I think this is a longer conversation maybe for us one day, but having looked at this for a very long time, I think this is a longer conversation maybe for us one day, but having looked at this for a very long time, I think the major abuse that honorable, but because everybody knows that whatever you do in the criminal system, eventually there's going to be a prosecution. There's going to be discovery. The defense lawyers are going to see all the representations you made and all the tactics. And your work's going to get checked. Whereas when they get to operate under the cone of counterintelligence where everything is classified and they think no one is ever going to examine what they did, the temptation to push the envelope and go beyond pushing the envelope is very powerful. And I think what we're seeing here is it may not be appropriate. And this cuts against everything I've said for all the time I was a prosecutor doing these kinds of cases where I outfit operating in counterintelligence under the cone of classification where they basically have all this police power and no one is checking them. I don't know that we can tolerate that. So, Andy, you're talking about no one checking their work.

And it looks as though that extends to the FISA court, which was supposed to be the safeguard in this sort of, well, at least a safeguard in this kind of thing. Doesn't it now seem quite clear that the FISA court judges were not asking even elementary questions, not even perhaps reading the briefs thoroughly? I mean, It's almost incomprehensible to me how thorough the breakdown was. Not just FBI, but the judges themselves don't seem to have been doing their job. Or am I misreading that? No, you're reading it correctly, Peter, but it's a deeper problem. I've always been against the FISA court. This episode shows that it's not that they don't need oversight. They need tons of oversight. But the problem is the FISA court is illusory oversight. National Security Intelligence Collection is not

a judicial function. The court should not be involved in it. It needs vigorous oversight by Congress because the court, as a practical matter, is completely incapable of checking the FBI and checking the Justice Department. They can't do an investigation. You can't make this the equivalent of a criminal case where a defense lawyer is going to attack it. We can't afford to have that interposed in the middle of what 99 percent of the time is very proper intelligence gathering against foreign threats to national security. The abuse here is the using of these powers against Americans in connection with what was really a criminal investigation without an underlying criminal predicate. But I don't think the FISA court is ever going to be an effective check on that. Andy, one more. You're a lawyer, but you're also a deep student of human nature.

Is it the case that the real origin of all of this—and when I say all of this, I mean Flynn, Mueller, two years that the nation lost to this nonsense, the origin was really that a handful of people, really a small number of people, Comey, Brennan, maybe half a dozen others, had somehow misconstrued their constitutional role so that they thought they were in some way saviors or protectors or guardians of the republic. They permitted themselves to believe, or at least to feel—maybe they didn't articulate it, maybe we won't find a memo in which somebody wrote this—but they permitted themselves to conclude that Donald Trump was a mistake and an aberration and a threat to the United States, and somehow or other it was their constitutional duty to thwart him. Was something like that going on, or is that just a wild, crazy Robinson overstatement?

No, no. I not only think that's probably what was going on. Peter, I would rather think that was what was going on than the opposite. I would hate to think that these guys, in a really malignant way, did what they did. I know Comey. I haven't agreed with a thing he's done in 15 years, I guess. But I've known him for a long time. He's a patriot. There's a lot of people who worked in the intelligence community in the Obama administration. I wouldn't agree with them about what time of day it was, but I don't think that they're trying to overthrow the system. I think they got it in their heads that, exactly as you put it, that they were like the guardians of a constitutional order that they had a unique read on and needed to preserve it.

And they got themselves believing that Trump was a threat to that. And when Steele came in with that stupid dossier, I think he was pushing on an open door. Got it. Got it. All right. Well, somebody say it about Andy because I might be in trouble. Well, now he's gone. Totally.

Right. All right. Well, let me just say, I've never heard James make more sense. Andy, thank you for joining us. I think we're going to have to... I do want to do that longer conversation soon, so clear your schedule. Actually, that is a really good...

I want to listen. I'll just let Rob and Andy handle that one. I'd love to hear... I'd love... Yeah, that sounds great. I'd love to have it, so let's stay in touch on that. Let's do it. Let's do it. Thanks so much, Andy. My pleasure. Take care, guys. All right, I'm back now. Bad mic. I'm sorry. I had to go. I think your connection was bad,

obviously, James, but then there's no solving that problem. That problem is an eternal and absolute... There's no vaccine for that. Put it that way. We can wait forever. Well, Rob, wouldn't you agree that it doesn't seem sometimes as if there's just no way to get around Google and the rest of them watching you

and tracking you. Rob... Well, there is no way to do that. No matter what you do on the internets, they will keep an eye on you, and then they'll sell you stuff, and they'll sell your info to nefarious FISA court cheats. Basically, we're all just – we're pawns in a game. We're all in the matrix, and the matrix is controlled by large technology companies, and there's nothing to be done about it.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Pomeranian has the slipper and is running for the next round. Pomeranian? It's enough. The metaphor is enough. You don't have to make me a Pomeranian. Anyway, what Rob's talking about there is if you are indeed worried about privacy, or if that matter, if you just sort of, well, let me put it this way. Have you ever gone to see something and it says, this video is not available in your country? And that's so frustrating. And you figure, well, I live here. There's no way around that. There is a way around that. And it's called ExpressVPN. You all know how VPNs, especially ExpressVPN, protects your privacy and your security online, right? But here's something you might not know. You can use

ExpressVPN to unlock movies and shows that are only available in other countries. It seems that, how do I put this? A lot of us are stuck at home these days for some reason, and we'll get to that. It's only a matter of time before you run out of stuff to watch on Netflix, right? So what you do is you use ExpressVPN to binge, well, let's say Doctor Who on UK Netflix. There's a whole world of shows out there on UK Netflix that are waiting for you. It's simple to do. Just fire up the ExpressVPN app, change your location to the UK, refresh Netflix, and that's it. It's like getting into the transporter and having Scotty just put you over in England like that. See, ExpressVPN hides your IP address and lets

you control where the site thinks you are. Now, you can choose from almost 100 different countries, so just think about the Netflix libraries you can go through. Tonight, I'm going to try Netflix Turkey. Who knows? Do you love anime? Use ExpressVPN to access Japanese Netflix and be spirited away. But it's not just Netflix, though. ExpressVPN works with any streaming service, with Hulu, with BBC iPlayer, YouTube, you name it. There are hundreds of VPNs out there, lots of them. But the reason that I use ExpressVPN is to watch shows because it's ridiculously fast. There's never any buffering or lag, and you can stream in HD no problem, or no problemo if you're going to Spanish Netflix.

ExpressVPN is also compatible with all of your devices, phones, media consoles, smart TVs, and more. So you can watch what you want to watch on a personal device or on the big screen, wherever you happen to be. So if you visit the special link right now at expressvpn.com slash ricochet, you can get an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free. Support the show, watch what you want, and protect yourself with ExpressVPN at expressvpn.com slash ricochet. And our thanks to ExpressVPN and ExpressVPN.com slash Ricochet. And our thanks to ExpressVPN for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. We've had to drop James Lilacs off the podcast for a minute. He's got some cable issues, I mean cable connecting issues, so he's going to join us when he can.

In the meantime, we are very, very pleased to have as our next guest Kim Strassel. Kim is a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board. She's been with us many times before. She writes editorials as well as the weekly Potomac Watch political column, which if you're not reading, you're making a big mistake. Her latest book is Resistance at All Costs, How Trump Haters Are Breaking America. You can find her on Twitter at Kim Strassel, but you can find her right now with us. Kim, welcome. We just talked to Andy McCarthy a little bit about the Flynn results the other day, but there is also outrage from the Trump haters. Are they going to learn their lesson? Well, first of all, so great to be here with you both.

I hope we get a trio back soon. You know, I read an astonishing press release that came out today from Common Cause, which is obviously a left-leaning group. But I was struck by the viciousness of it. It was incredible because some of us looked at what happened with Flynn and felt great joy in our hearts that there was justice out there because it was pretty clear, as even the Department of Justice had admitted, that he was railroaded. But this Common Cause email called first and foremost that Bill Barr be impeached for having taken this action and also called on the judge in the case to dismiss it in such a way that a future Department of Justice could re-prosecute Flynn for lying.

So no one's backing down on that end at all. No one's admitting to anything. And so I guess the answer is no, I don't think anyone's learned a lesson. Depressingly. Yeah, I guess not surprisingly, but depressingly. Well, let me ask you another way. I mean, isn't this part of the problem with American politics is that we, you know, look, I don't know Flynn. I don't know him at all. But I know people who know him and they were so, they always kind of rolled, even people

who are sympathetic to him and sympathetic to his cause, they all kind of rolled their eyes. He was kind of on the make a little bit. He had a lot of clients, and he was a businessman. At the time, he was working with Trump, and he was a businessman while he was advising the Trump campaign, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. That doesn't mean he should go to jail or be prosecuted, but it doesn't make him this unblemished figure. Isn't there some room in America for us to say, look, the guy got railroaded. That doesn't mean he's a Boy Scout. Is that a fair assessment?

Yeah. I mean, look, I don't know Michael Flynn either. I've never met him. I've never spoken to him. And I think what was offensive to me about this was simply the unequal treatment and the tactics that were used against him. And so, you know, I can say that, you know, he could even be a really bad dude. And I would still say that we shouldn't engage in railroading tactics and unequal treatment against people. So absolutely, whatever your view of Michael Flynn, I mean, there are some out there who view him as a hero.

They point to his former service in the military. There are some that look at the business community aspect of this and his dealings with Turkey and go, eh, you know, was he more of a Beltway bandit of the, you know. Look, there's a lot of people in Washington, we all need to just be honest, that, you know, they do a lot of government service. And then they see a way to make some money after their government service. And the number of lobbyists in Washington, there's a reason people say that word with a sneer on their face. Well, okay. So I know Peter wants to jump in. I just have one sort of culture question, because you're a DC insider. You go to your cocktail parties. You know how we always say

that you're going to your Georgetown cocktail parties. Is there ever a moment where somebody from the other side, after maybe the third or fourth glass of wine says, yeah, you know, it was all, it was just, we hate the guy. It's all politics. We hate the guy. Or when they get, when you say, well, what about, you know, the thing that they always hate it when you say, what about Obama? What about Obama? They go, yeah, but we liked Obama. Does anyone ever – is there any – do you think – I guess I'm asking not so much whether they admit it to you, but do you think they ever admit it to themselves at night privately in the dark night of their soul? They're like, yeah, I'm full of it.

I wish so much that were true because it would really, really gladden me if that were true. But I think the problem. Yeah, I think. But I think you just culturally just put your finger on the problem, which is that people are so dug in that they have managed to turn white into black and black into white. And we have somehow lost our ability to just neutrally analyze situations and, as I said before, apply objective, uniform standards, right? at the various, the two different ways that people are now treating the Tara Reade accusations against Joe Biden and the accusations are made against Justice Kavanaugh. Nobody can suggest that that is a uniform standard. OK, it's just it's not even they're not even in the same ballpark.

And yet if you talk to these people, they will come up with 800 justifications for why not believing Tara Reade now is different from, yes, believing Christine Blasey Ford at the time. And that's really disturbing to me. Cam Peter here. Your column in today's Wall Street Journal. Let me just—one paragraph. Take this section. Excuse me.

You're writing about Rod Rosen's deputy attorney general, his scope memorandum, which is composed in August 2017. The scope that gives, supposedly expresses, details the scope of Mueller's investigation. Quoting you, take the section that allows Mr. Mueller to investigate former Trump campaign members, Carter Page and Paul Manafort for, now you're quoting the document, a crime or crimes by colluding with Russian government officials, close quote. Back to Kim. Every collusion, allegation the FBI had about these two men came directly from the Steele dossier paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. By August 2017, the FBI knew that dossier was bunk. The Deputy Attorney General of the United States writes a scope memorandum for an investigation that will tie up the nation for two years and bases it on known garbage. Somebody should go to jail. Am I wrong about this?

Well, look, the reason I wrote this is that to me, as you looked at the news this week on the Flynn point, but also this scope memo that came out, it's all been slow rolling coming out in pieces here or there. But to me, it all points back and asks the question about what the heck was Mueller doing? You know, he's been kind of a quiet figure in this, but it all comes back to that. And there's a dozen reasons why that scoping memo is very concerning, not just because it was basing so much of Mueller's marching orders on junk, but also here's another one, which I thought was really important on the substance. We now know that the Justice Department earlier this year told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that its last two applications to surveil Carter Page should never have been filed since the government lacked any probable cause.

Those two applications spanned the appointment of Mr. Mueller and the scope memo. So again, I'm asking you, I mean, that's an admission that the government had nothing on Carter Page, even as Rosenstein was telling Mr. Mueller to investigate him down to the ground. So what were we doing appointing this special counsel? And what was he doing for two years? And I think at a certain point, you have to step back and ask if Jim Comey didn't engineer all this as a way to kind of legitimize the mistakes the FBI had already made. Wow. So, okay, I'm going to repeat Rob's question because I'm just so flabbergasted. I just really, I don't know, cognitive, whatever it is,

I just can't get used to this. It's a good word. I'm dealing with somebody who somehow or other, you mean calm and articulate about it. But Rob's question, here's another version of Rob's question. I am just old enough to remember with a certain thrill watching Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman and all the president's men, right? And although I was raised in a Republican family that had been Republican since the party was founded, I had to say, well, you know, it looks as though Richard Nixon did some things that were wrong. And these two reporters, they use some underhand methods, maybe. Now that we know who Deep Throat was, the story begins to fall.

It looks a lot less noble than it did at the time. But there was something basically thrilling about the idea that the press would investigate the highest authorities just because it looked as though they were doing something wrong. Not because they were getting the Cold War wrong or tax, but because they were doing things that were illegal. They were engaging in political techniques that were just plain in violation of the law. And now we have a circumstance in which what took place here makes Nixon's ridiculous cover-up, save, of course, that Nixon was sitting in the Oval Office, but look what was happening all around President Obama, Comey, Brennan, all of them. It makes Nixon's cover-up look preposterously small. And the only person who's really worked up about it is my friend Kim Strassel.

What the heck is going on? Well, I would point out, well, first of all, lucky for us, there's been a number of really amazing reporters who have stayed on all of this. But I would add to what you said. It's not just that the press can do this. The press must of this. But, you know, I would add to what you said. It's not just that the press can do this. The press must do this. You know, and it goes back to the founding of the country. And I think sometimes we are too removed to really remember the importance. Like, why do we have a First Amendment? Of course, because we believe in freedom of speech for average Americans and

for political speech, but also because the founders understood that the only real check on government is an outside fourth estate that is willing to question and question again the actions of elected or appointed officials, because they don't do it to each other, right? I mean, every once in a while you have a huge scandal, and I want to give a shout out here to U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen, who did the review of the Flynn case, and also for Bill Barr for having the courage to have appointed him in the first place to look at it. But that doesn't always happen, right? The institutionalist kind of method is to simply close ranks and to say, we didn't do anything wrong. And that is what you saw happen here, obviously.

The difference, though, was that in contrast to every time in its history, and I can't believe these words are actually coming out of my mouth, the press corps was taking its direction from former law enforcement officials, right? I mean, you had FBI officials who were leaking and driving the narrative via the press corps, who were just sitting there as their willing scribes, instead of questioning anything that came along. And that is why we have the mess. I honestly believe that the number one culprit in everything that has happened in the last three or four years has been a press corps that lost all of its principles. Certainly, and lost its, I mean, I guess the other phrase is lost its chill, right? I mean, part of what we're supposed to think of as

Americans is that, yes, politics and government are important, but they're not that important. It's not like we're going to, the government, the country, the culture is going to live or die or wither or flourish because Trump is president or Obama is president or because Hillary Clinton wins the election. The famous Flight 93 essay from a few years ago, which was in favor of a Trump election, painted a picture of a country on the precipice, on the edge. It was Flight 93 on the morning of 9-11 that we had to plunge the plane into the ground rather than let it continue to fly. And that attitude isn't just for people on the far right or people on the Trump side.

That attitude is pervasive. We know not only in the Fourth Estate, but in the Department of Justice. Where are the cynical grownups that I used to love in politics who would kind of shrug and said, yeah, you know, it's business. And at six o'clock, we realized half of this stuff is just a carnival. I mean, are those people gone? The republic will endure. Yeah, no, I mean, there are too few of them. And you know what I miss, too, as well, just as an addition to what you're saying is when I first arrived in Washington, it was not uncommon to get a call. Look, I'm a conservative writer, but I'd get calls from Democratic congressmen, invite me over to chat. I loved going over to John Dingell's office. The man was a treasure,

you know, and he and also because he was willing to split with his party on some things, you know, his his Detroit district car manufacturing was a big deal. And he, he kind of got into it when they come out with these environmental rules and he was a lion. And so they had to listen to him and, and that kind of debate and that kind of willingness to cross aisles. And, you know, he used to just be blunt. He's like, we probably don't agree on 90%, but on the 10% we agree on, I want you on my side, you know, like this was just a, and, and, and like you said, it was a cynical, grown-up way of going, understanding that, as you said, no one decision was going to make or break the country. No one's in that camp anymore.

And, you know, I think, as you said, you just put your finger on what drove this internally. There was a cabal, and yes, I will use that word because I think it exonerates the other 35,000 FBI employees who do their job well every day. But there was a group of leaders at the top of the FBI who decided that they were going to put themselves between the death of the country and Donald Trump, right? And nobly take this stand. And instead, all they've done is make an enormous hash of it

and made the country's body politic even worse. So it's this weird thing where, I'm no expert on this, but as I understand it in the Chilean constitution, it says that the armed forces are the guardian of the republic. And Pino... James, who's that?

Okay. It is not me. No, no, no, it's not you. Okay, so, James, you've got to mute yourself at this point. Thank you. Your mic is working only too well all of a sudden. Okay, so... No, I was muted.

Really? How bizarre. How do I sound now? It sounds like— You sound as though you're talking from the bottom of a deep, deep pipe. Hold on. Let me continue with it. Okay, so Chilean constitution actually calls the armed forces the guardian of the republic, and Pinochet apparently cited that when he staged his coup. Okay, it feels as though James Comey and Brennan, what, half a dozen people got it into their heads that there was some sort of

unofficial American constitution under which they were the guardians of the republic. And so we get this weird thing where they really believed themselves to be acting on high motives, but in fact, they were in a very straightforward way subverting the constitutional process. Is that right? Oh, and not just subverting the constitutional process, subverting all the rules and regulations. Look, one of the more terrifying things to come out of all of this, and we saw it again with this Flynn filing, is the notion that somebody is, and I'll just use this word, as unhinged as Jim Comey was running the world's most powerful law enforcement agency. I mean, the Flynn filing described yet again his behavior in this, which was utterly irresponsible. He was told by everyone in the senior leadership of the Department of Justice, by the way,

department in which he works, OK, so his bosses, you need to go and brief the White House on this Flynn conversation and give them a heads up about what's going on, the incoming Trump administration. And he said, no, I'm not going to do it. I mean, just complete insubordination. And then Sally Yates, the deputy attorney general, calls him to tell him to give him the order that he's got to. And he refuses to take her call, doesn't answer the call. You are kidding me.

I had missed that. Oh, it's in there. And then when he finally calls her back, he tells her too late, I got two agents headed over to interview Flynn right now. You know, this is a repeat of what he did with the Clinton investigation. Remember where he went around Loretta Lynch, the attorney general, did not tell her about this press conference, didn't say what he was going to say in it, and usurped her authority and made himself the ultimate decider of whether or not Clinton would be prosecuted or not. Totally out of bounds, and out of bounds in this case, too. So, you know, we have rules, we have regulations, as the inspector general in three reports now has said. Comey never followed any of them, even though they're meant to apply

to him, too. And that's a really scary situation. Testing. Can you hear me now? Kim, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. It's, it's, um, this, this never happened. Oh no, we're all, are you kidding? We're all dealing with tech, you know, ultimate disasters all the time. So it's just part of life now. So Kim, I'm going to ask you to tell me how to, how to calm down and calm down and what I should be hoping for as an adult and a good citizen of my nation. And because my impulse is to say, this is outrageous, and James Comey deserves to be put in an orange jumpsuit, along with maybe two or three or four or five other people, and I'd be delighted to name them. And that isn't quite the right way to look at it, I suppose. We're supposed to defer to the Attorney General, Bill Barr, and to these—I can't remember his first name, but to Durer.

Oh, so explain to us what's happening now. What has the Attorney General set in place? What is going to happen next? And what should a mature citizen, as opposed to me, actually be hoping for? Well, first of all, one way to look at this, and his name hasn't been mentioned much, but Durham was central in what came out in the end in Flint. Just remind us John Durham is a U.S. attorney who Bill Barr appointed to look into basically to investigate the investigators, to go back and now look at the origins of this FBI counterintelligence investigation into Trump actors and the Trump campaign. And he's been on the job now for months. We know from a while ago that this did turn into a criminal inquiry. He has the ability to subpoena people and stand up a grand jury. We don't know where it goes. But what we do know is that Jeff Jensen, the man who was separately asked to look at Flynn, this came under the umbrella of Durham. That's how it was described to I see that bill bill bar chose Jensen and made that step in consultation

with Durham. And so while Jensen was running that piece of it, he apparently is still going to be doing some other pieces as well. I'm not entirely quite sure, but it looks as though what's happening here is Durham is there. They're sort of, as they're finding discreet issues, they're having other credible players come and run the reviews on those. Right. So it's issues come up through this. They're kind of being parceled out, as it were. So in a way, this is kind of something that's already come out of the Durham probe.

One thing that was really interesting to me is that the attorney general in a recent interview, I had been expecting that Durham's result would come out soon, that there would be some sort of a deadline given that we're moving into an election period. Right. But the AG, quite to my surprise, said that the Department of Justice is not looking at this election as any bar to continuing this probe because none of the central players, i.e. Trump or Biden, are under investigation and therefore it is not relevant to them, which I thought was really interesting. So I don't know what that means in terms of when we get results.

And in terms of how mature adults should handle this, I would take a leap out of Rob's book. I think you've got to get up every day and press on these issues and care about them and demand that things be done the right way. But at a certain point, just at the very kind of last 10 percent, remember that the republic does not necessarily stand or fall on Comey in a jumpsuit. All right. Thank you very much. Kim, a pleasure. I would note, by the way, that you write the Potomac Watch column in the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal is perhaps the only major newspaper in the country, maybe even in the English-speaking world, to which people subscribe because of the op-eds—not only because of the op-eds, but the op-eds drive that paper. I see subscription, digital subscription of the Wall Street Journal

in the last few years has gone from about 700,000 to over 2.2 million and growing strong. And that is where I'm going to place my hope, because there is still real journalism going on in America. And Kim Strassel and her colleagues at the Journal are practicing it. Kim, oh, actually, I have to, I'm always curious. Are you in Alaska or Washington right now? Well, I am still in Alaska under kind of lockdown rules. The kids are here, and when it looked like everything was going to get shut down, I didn't really want to be kept apart from them for three months. So I hurried on back up here, and we are here. I think it is so cool that one of the sharpest Washington journalists is raising kids in Alaska.

This is wonderful. Kim, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Thanks, guys. And now it's time for the James Lydon. The James Lydon's Member Post of the Week. It's actually getting better. It's actually getting better.

The glass is half full on the Number Post of the Week. I know, I know. But if you're a radio guy, that's a kick in the sphincter with a steel-toed boot every time. But there we have it. People pay good money for that, by the way. I'm sure in New York right now where the dungeons are shut down, they would. You can tell me, Rob, whether or not there's a thriving business in New York of people coming door to door to actually humiliate you in that sort of sexual sadistic fashion. Anyway, Post of the Week has nothing to do with that, although maybe it does.

I hear that light whipping is a thing in England amongst the upper class. Is that right, Rob? You know that. I will. I've heard tell. There are old Yves Le Noir novels. There's always something to that. There is, indeed. Anyway, it's unfair to tar everybody in blighty with that particular brush, but we have a new member, Catch Matt. He's in Kent in

England. And how do we know he's in Kent? Well, he put a little post in the member feed that said, well, it points out a flyer that they got by a well-meaning neighbor that was encouraging everybody to sort of come out and celebrate VE Day but socially distance, cheer from their doorsteps. You know, none of that swooning, kissing in Times Square, none of that. No, no, no, no. So he just discussed his feelings about the matter. What I liked about this post was, first, new member. Love that. Two, from England, that's great. Three, he included the flyer and it had the address at the bottom.

And so I was able to use Google Street View to find out exactly what he's talking about. And this led to a little discussion about his street, why it's called what it is, why the streets are narrow, what the semi-detached look like and why, and so forth. So if you think that Ricochet has just— This is like your crack. I know. It just seems designed as pure lilacs bait. Right.

So I hate to give the post of the week to the ones that I spent a lot of time in and conversed in, but I'm going to do it this time. No, I'm glad. I'm glad. Because the guy is new. I mean, we always love new members. New members are really the backbone of Ricochet, and I know the old members love new members.

And Catch Mad is, of course, from the UK, so there's something a little extra there, too, which I kind of enjoy. And I also like the post where he talks about somebody who admires the British posture during World War II, you know, to refer to the response to COVID-19.

I think I'm reading the cowardly, let alone illogical response to COVID-19. I just, you can only say those words in an English accent. I think so. I think so, exactly. So our hat's off to Catch Matt. We hope to hear a lot from him in the future and someday we'll have a Ricochet meetup in Maidstone, which I believe is the closest metropolis

where we will look at the old Roman forums and the various leavings of history that have accumulated on the island, the Sceptered Isle, lo these hundreds and hundreds of years. And now we welcome Bethany. Bethany Manto, Ricochet editor, co-host of Lady Brains. And if you follow her on Twitter, you know that she's somebody who thinks that trolls with three followers can actually get a rise out of

somebody who gave birth in the backseat of a car. Front seat. Front seat. I leave the backseat for the fifth. Welcome here. You had, this week, you committed a grievous sin. You talked about how you were actually concerned for the people who are losing their jobs in this pandemic. And, of course, I don't believe that for a second. Both you and Seth are just well set up there and doing fine. So this had to be some sort of noblesse oblige with a dark motive. I don't know quite what it is, but what you got piled on for was admitting, frankly, I think without apologies, that you are really interested in killing grandma. It's become

your brand, if I dare say. Yeah, I trended on Twitter for a full day on the number two spot. Yeah, I mean, in the thread- Wait, what was number one? I hate to interrupt, but what was number one? I don't know. You don't know? I wasn't on Twitter that day. All right. It's a day you stay off Twitter. So, yeah, so I wrote aout questions about this, these lockdowns.

Well, let me read the tweet in entirety. Yeah, please. You can call me a grandma killer. I'm not sacrificing my home, food on the table, all of our docs and dentists, every form of pleasure, museums, zoos, restaurants, all my kids' teachers, in order to make other people comfortable. If you want to stay locked down, do. I'm not. Yeah. Then you also said, doesn't mean I won't be responsible, but I am just, I am done. I'm done. I'm done. I don't really understand what we're waiting for. And I say that in the thread too. What is the purpose of this? The original thing that we sold on and that we bought into was 15 days to slow the spread, on board with 15 days. And now the governor

of Illinois is saying they can't hold church services or any religious service until there's a vaccine. That's unconstitutional, and that's not what we bought into as a society and as a country. And I'm really disturbed. So, Bethany, I mean, you know, you're clearly a grandma killer. You say it. Two things you say in the—and we should say, by the way, if you're listening to the Ricochet podcast and you have not heard Bethany before, she is our Ricochet editor, and she's the co-host of Lady Brains, another podcast. And you're not going to fire me, right? No, of course not.

Are you kidding me? A lot of emails told you to. So you own me. Are you kidding me? I'm trying to monetize you, my friend. I don't want to fire you. I want to make flags with your face. So Bethany is also the host of Ladybrains, a great podcast.

I recommend if you are listening to this, as soon as this podcast is done, go and listen to Ladybrains. It's really great. And it's considerably more raucous, and I would say dangerous, than the flagship podcast with the stodgy old lilacs and Robinson along, but okay. So you also add this one thing to your, to your tweet storm, which I thought was great. You said, I feel lied to about the terms of this lockdown and I regret ever trusting that it would be done responsibly. How much, how many people do you think hear those words and think to themselves, I totally agree? And how many of those people do you think hear those words and say, I totally agree, even though I am a liberal Democrat?

I don't know. I mean, so what's interesting is even though I theoretically got canceled, the replies to the tweet are about 15,000. That's the grammar killer. But the first tweet in that thread had more than double the likes. So I was not ratioed. I was not remotely ratioed. A lot of people agree with me, and I've heard, from every, I mean, I got a text message from a very, very liberal friend who saw she's not on Twitter and she saw screenshots and she's like, so what do you think exactly? And I, I texted her basically like, this is what I said in the thread.

And she was like, yeah, yeah, I'm not on board with this. And she says like, you know, all of the people in her, in her upper middle-class circles are telling her, like, don't leave your house and just get Instacart indefinitely. And she said, justifiably, so I'm paying someone in the lower class to get sick for me. That's what I'm doing. I'm paying someone to expose themselves. That is exactly what has happened in New York City. In the greater New York area, there is an absolute class line designed for people getting sick and people not getting sick. Now, you have received strange new respect, I have to say, from places like the New York Times.

Yeah, I was surprised by that. I'll bet. Michelle Goldberg. Go ahead. Sorry. Well, before we get to that, though, you got to add zoo killer to this. And that leads to Rob's question about Michelle Goldberg and how the zoo animals are actually now coming back to you to voice their opinions. Well, that was in The Washington Post.

The Washington Post published a column in The Voice of the Zoo Animals saying, don't kill grandma for our sake. And that that I think really set me over the edge, like, whatever, cancel me. But the Washington Post mocking my concern about the zoo, I'm not concerned about the zoo animals. I'm not concerned about going to the zoo necessarily. I haven't been in many months. What I am concerned about are the concessions workers and the parking lot attendants and the people who work in the education programs who are all getting laid off right now and getting furloughed and not collecting their paychecks and who don't know if they will ever collect their paychecks again. And in response to my concern about the zoo as an entity, the local paper decided to mock

that. And in so doing, they insulted everyone freaking out that draws a paycheck from the National Zoo. And that, to me, is just beyond. And again, rewinding back to Michelle Goldberg, who actually wrote a very coherent response to my thread. Yeah, it's possible. So I want to read, She talks about your thread. She's on Wednesday. The villain was a conservative editor named Bethany Mandel. I mean, how about the conservative editor named Bethany Mandel?

She didn't even say ricochet anywhere. I mean, I can't sell off this. Anyway, she tweeted what I'm guessing was a moment of extremist, quote, you could call me a grandmother killer. I'm not sacrificing my home, food on the table, all of our docs and dentists, every form of pleasure, museums, zoos, restaurants, all my kids, teachers, in order to make other people comfortable. If you want to stay locked down, do. I'm not. And then she goes on to say, naturally, people did indeed call her a grandma killer. But for a while, the phrase was a top trending topic on Twitter, but despite her callous language, I couldn't help feeling a stab of sympathy for Mandel's anger and exasperation.

Hey, if you're a lockdownist and you have lost Bethany, you've lost the New York Times and Michelle Goldberg, are you at the forefront of a wave? So it's funny. I'm not even saying everything has to go back to normal, and I don't want to wear a mask anywhere, although I find them suffocating. But the point is we have to have an end date, and we have to have a plan. And she says it in her column. You know, the only thing that we—I'm trying to find the part in her column where she says it actually really well. They've squandered the time necessary that was bought by the sacrifices of the citizenry,

and there's no national plan for reopening. The lockdowns thus seem to have no clear endpoint. In a functional country, the federal government would be assuring people that they've given up everything. Everything they've given up has been necessary and not in vain. But that's not been the case. Everyone's been following the rules, but we have not been told when we can have a social gathering again and what form that looks like. And there's no way that it can be a

national statement, though. I mean, you cannot say from Washington, D.C., this is when Bismarck, North Dakota will be able to have outdoor singing at a bar. But I mean, it's stunning to me that the people who are piling on about this and especially sneering at the zoo part don't realize that there's a guy across from the zoo entrance in Woodley Park in D.C. whose entirely livelihood consists of selling ice cream treats. They think that this guy went home and that somebody like Data on Star Trek flipped the switch in his back and he's just been lying down inert for the last two months. No. All the places around there are getting hammered. I mean, it is – Josh Marshall, I think, said, had some of the stupidest responses to what you were saying. And he was accusing you of having the—of this coming from a class perspective, no, you can't go outside because theoretically grandma's going to die.

And again, if people are going outside, walking into the phrase that Rob likes, covidian miasma of other people's exhalations, and promptly going home, finding grandma and coughing her in her face, that's probably bad. But how about if you go outside and then you don't go see grandma at the nursing house? Yeah. I'm staying away from people. So, Bethany, what are you going to tell grandma? What will you tell grandma, you know, instead of killing her, what would you tell her? What advice would you give to grandma so that you don't have to kill her? I mean, we are staying away from people who are at risk.

You as a family. staying, we're, we are staying away from people who are at risk. The, the, yes, all of the information indicates that you are exposed by long-term exposure, by living with someone, by sitting next to someone in an office, um, by being on an airplane or on a subway with them. That's, that's how you get exposed. It's just, I mean, it's a virus. It's like any other virus. It doesn't have a magical quality that it can jump across 17 feet when you're in, when you're in the park, when it, at any point during any flu season, when you, like, for example, last year I ran into someone in CVS and she was coughing and we were chatting. She's like, y'all, my kids just tested positive for the flu. And I was like, oh, and I backed up two feet and I didn't get the flu because it's not this, it's not a supercharged thing that, that has like a laser that can hit you.

You take reasonable precautions. I got home and I washed my hands and during particularly bad flu seasons that, I mean, that's what we do. We get in the car and we use hand sanitizer. We get home and we change our clothes, and that's it. You have to live your life. But moving forward with this virus, we'll do the same thing that we always do during a really bad flu season. We'll keep our distance from people and wash our hands. So I know we don't keep talking, but my question is, do you think

this moment here is revealing not just different people's different understandings of how viruses are transferred and what society needs to do and what it doesn't need to do and our responsibilities to each other, but it does seem like our basic premises are different. That if your premise is that no matter how generous the government is with future money, it'll never replace work, the value of work. It'll never replace your, a natural citizen's need to have a job. That no matter what your check is from the government in terms of getting you through this period, it'll never be enough. And what you want is an economy that's growing so you can have a job and you can get a better job next year and you can make more money the year before and you can

provide for your family. There are people who believe that that is a fundamental bedrock truth, that the government will never be able to replace those things. And there are people who believe fundamentally that that is not true, that the government can replace those things. And if you believe the government can replace those things, then your response to all of your concerns is we should just be giving people more money. Right. Meanwhile, tax revenue in every single state is down or will be down 15, 20 percent because no one's making any money. What sort of broke me Wednesday, was that Wednesday? I don't even know what day it was. It was Wednesday, according to the New York Times, when you were a great villain. Yeah. So what happened Wednesday was I heard that one of my

favorite small businesses was closing. And I talked to another friend who owned a very similar small business who is in tears because she doesn't know what to do. She got the small business loan, but she doesn't know if she could keep, she should keep her business open or even take out a loan at this point because she's not getting, she's not being given any guidance about when she can reopen, how can she reopen. And she's, she's ripping her hair out. I like, there's a million things that it's like, we need answers. And I, I'm exasperated by the lack of a timeline. And the timeline doesn't have to be the same in every state, and it should not be

the same in every state. But the end date cannot be a vaccine, but the states have to start giving very clear, open, and benchmark days days because this life that we're all living is not sustainable. Right. When I was downtown today, and I actually did venture downtown, I noticed that there are now big signs in the Skyway system telling people how to wash their hands, how to cough into their elbows, all this basic stuff that Bethany's known all of her life so that she doesn't get sick and her kids. But it tells me that there's this sort of waiting to about to open, that all the stuff is there because people are expecting it to crack open soon. But we expected it to crack open two weeks ago. Today, our governor just kind of waved it away about his March, May 18th deadline and said, you know, we're still in the thick of it, even though the outbreaks that we have are in a pork-producing place and an old folks' home, which is kind of where it's happening.

It's not happening. So right. So we're going to have two more weeks of this. And as Bethany said, the little businesses, the little people, they're dying. But as Rob said, there's a whole bunch of people out there who, if I can use the old tired buzzwords, want to clout pivot in the system and say, well, let's just, let's decouple work,

not just from healthcare, but let's decouple work from living. And wouldn't it be better if people did, as I said earlier in the podcast, people didn't have to grind through the day with this fiction that work is somehow enabling, but they can just get them. Because if you believe that monetary theory, that control of your own currency means you can just invent endless amounts of it, and it will never inflate, then this is a golden opportunity. At the same time, it's a golden opportunity for judges to rule by, for judges in Texas to come up with laws, not even laws, and just write things and it's an edict. So we not only have the economic problem, we not only have the epidemiological problem,

we have the problem of society all of a sudden splintering along these different lines about, yes, I want the state to order me and tell me and make me safe. And us nutcases here are saying, wait a minute, there are laws and procedures. So Bethany, exit question is this. Looking at the political aspect of it, do you think that come November, people are going to say, no, I kind of like that whole rule a lot thing that we were pretending to have back then. Let's do that. Or are people more likely to vote for the people who say, I will do anything to keep you safe? I mean, I don't think that they're going to vote for anyone to keep them safe because you don't need someone else to keep you safe. If you do not feel safe, you know how to keep yourself safe. What people are going to vote for is I had the best of my business that I've ever had

in early March, and now I've had to lay off or deferlo 80% of my staff, and I don't know when I can reopen again. We are at job loss numbers that are at the same as the Great Depression. We are experiencing a Great Depression, and it is self-inflicted. And this will not continue. The parking lots in Montgomery County, Maryland, in super liberal, super suburban, super wealthy, unaffected Maryland, tell me this will not abide. The parking lots in Home Depot are packed. Lowe's is packed. People are not staying home. They are not going to deal with this anymore. I have a neighbor who's a public school teacher, and he's like, I can't

not go back to work in January. Are they going to fire me? I have four kids in my Zoom classes. They would not be wrong to fire me because I'm not doing any teaching. He's freaking out. He has the most job security of anyone in America, and he is freaking out. This is not going to continue. And the irony, of course, is that the young people who I see kind of sauntering around town, feeling like they're completely bulletproof from this, they're the ones that are going to have to pay the bills. Yes. When it comes time for them to be earners, I mean, how many kids do you have at home? Four.

Yeah. So those four, a couple of them are too little to understand FICA. A couple of them, yeah. Yeah. But eventually they're going to understand FICA and they're going to see their pay stub and they're going to know that was when that mommy was trying her best. To kill grandma. To kill grandma so that they didn't have to have this tax bill. Yeah.

Grandma killer, qu'est-ce que c'est? It's practically a talking heads lyric. Thanks for joining us here today on the show, Bethany. We'll talk to you later. Good luck. Good luck. Good luck. Bethany, thanks.

Thanks, guys. You know, the great part about that is I don't have to say, stay home. Be safe. Safe. Hope you're healthy. I give every email I start and finish and read as always. Hope you're staying healthy. I get those too.

Yeah. You know, okay. All right. Fine. Great. We got to get out of here in a second, but I'm going to ask Rob what he's watching on television at the moment. And just hold on a little bit of business here beforehand.

Got to tell you, this podcast was brought to you by TheZebra.com, Quip, and ExpressVPN. Support them, support us, you get great products, everybody's happy. And also, of course, could I chew up the next 27 seconds telling you to go to Apple Podcasts and give us a five-star review? I could. Could I tell you that this helps the show get noticed by more people and that leads to more members and the future of Ricochet looks even brighter after that? I could, but I won't. And also, I want to tell you a little bit about Quip. And I know you're going to listen because you really want to hear what Rob is going to say about what he's streaming. Yeti, stop the tape.

I'm going to do the Quip after Rob's gone so he doesn't have to listen to this. Oh, great. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, well, I just, you know, you got stuff to do. And I'm coming back to you. Three, two, one. Peter's not with us. Of course, he had some stuff to do. And I'm coming back to you. Three, two, one. Peter's not with us. Of course, he had some place to go. Lord knows what nice little quaint masterpiece theater thing about some murders in a small English village he's listening to.

But, Rob, what are you watching? What are you streaming that people might enjoy? Well, I did finish Breaking – not Breaking Bad. I can't believe I keep doing that. I did finish Better Call Saul. So I'm kind of, as they say, on the beach. But my problem is that I have the Criterion channel, and I can't not watch a Criterion channel offering really above and beyond anything. Although I have been told, and I don't know if this is true or not, I have been told that on Netflix there's a piece of trash that is incredibly addictive.

It's probably what I'm going to say I'm watching. What do you think it is? It's called Outer Banks. Oh, no. No? And basically, it's a sunken treasure show. Young people. It's like a young adult novel.

A bunch of young people, hugely attractive young people, run around trying to get $400 million in gold. And it's pure trash, but it's almost summer. And it's the closest to a summer novel you can probably get. Okay. All right. Naked, glistening people in search of precious metals. That works for 2020. I'm watching something called Into the Night, which is ridiculous. The premise of the show is that there's about seven people on an airplane, and they're having to outrun the daybreak because the sun has gone gamma and kills everything in its path. So they have to hop from Brussels to Iceland to America to Alaska. And, of course, they're all carefully chosen characters.

Every single archetype you could possibly want is there. And what makes it work is two things. The pace is just harrowing. And it really draws you in and just stirs the nerves, they used to say. And it's a lot of fun because of that. It's very well done. But basically what I love about it is what the Wikipedia entry says, which is the first Belgian apocalyptic sci-fi series. And I have to applaud that.

And so when somebody comes up with the next Belgian sci-fi apocalyptic series, I can say, well, I was there from the start. And I'm not sure this is as good as the original. But it's Belgian. Yeah. Not as good as my favorite Belgians. Yeah. How many Belgian end of the world things set in a plane can you find? Well, who knows?

Everybody sit down in front of your typewriter and come up with your own version of it. I know it's all the people from Outer Banks on a plane going to see a drug lawyer or something like that. Be creative. Hey, it's been fun. Thanks to Peter, who's gone. Bye, Peter. And Rob, good luck in New York. Stay safe. Stay home.

Thank you, everybody. We'll see you all in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week. Next week, fellas. Grandma's hands Clapped in church on Sunday morning Grandma's hands Played a tambourine so well Grandma's hands

Used to issue out a warning She'd say Billy, don't you run so fast Might fall on a piece of glass. Might be snakes there in that dress. Grandma's hand. Grandma's hand. Sue, the local unwed mother.

Grandma's hand. Used to ache sometimes and swell Grandma's hand Used to lift her face and tell her she'd say Baby, grandma understands That you really love that man Put yourself in Jesus' hands Grandma's hand

Grandma's hand. Grandma's hand used to hand me a piece of candy. Grandma's hand picked me up each time I fell. Grandma's hand, boy, they really came in a handy, she'd say. Matty, don't you whip that boy. What you want to spank him for? He didn't drop no apple core, but I don't have grandma anymore. If I get to heaven, I'll look for grandma's hand. Ricochet.

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