The Ricochet Podcast - We Deliver

Episode Date: April 2, 2015

This week, we give you the straight pepperoni on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act fight in Indiana and as expected, the podcast mirrors real life (or at least real life on Ricochet). Then, former HP CEO and current 90% decided Presidential candidate Carly Fiorina joins to discuss why she’s the best person to beat Hillary, why she won’t fall into the same CEO trap that Mitt Romney found... Source

Hello, everyone. I'm not going to get I don't know what's going to happen here. I don't have any information on that. They don't understand what you're talking about. And that's going to prove to be disastrous. And what it means is that the people don't want socialism. They want more conservatism. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. Today, presidential candidate Carly Fiorina and Andy Ferguson and those other guys. Let's have ourselves a podcast. There you go again. Yes, welcome to this, the Ricochet Podcast number 255. Hey, are you one of those guys who's bored with shaving and paying too much for it? Then you're one of those guys who hasn't found Harry's, Harry's Shave. It's the smart switch to make, and we'll tell you a little bit more about it later, as well as how you can save even more money off your daily shaving routine.

We're also brought to you by that wonderful apparatus called Ricochet.com. You go there every day, if not 10 or 12 or 14 times a day, frantically hitting refresh to see which of your friends has commented on something you wrote. And one of your friends, of course, imaginary or maybe not, who knows, is founder Rob Long, here to tell us why you should open up your wallet and little cartoon moths fall out and you withdraw some shekels and hand them over. Why would they do that, Rob? Well, I'm not even going to ask anyone to do that.

Look, here's the math. The math is really simple. We have hundreds of thousands of listeners to this podcast and our podcasts, all the other podcasts we offer. It is a huge number and it's very gratifying to have that number. However, a very small portion of those people are members of Ricochet. And so what we're asking you to do, if you're listening to this podcast and you're not a member, just go to ricochet.com, check it out, sign up for the daily shots free, and see if you like it. You can also join.

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And we know. Here's what we know. We know if you get the Daily Shot. We know if you go to Ricochet.com. We know if you sign up, you get two free months. And we know – here's what we know. We know if you get the Daily Shot. We know if you go to Ricochet.com. We know if you sign up for your two free months. At the end of those free months, you will be hooked like a junkie on the high-grade pure China white of Ricochet. How about that? Yeah, without the hepatitis problem you have from using somebody else's login.

Well, I don't know. Yeah, exactly. Depends on how you – using somebody else's login. Well, I don't know. Yeah, exactly. Depends on how you – depends on your keyboard, I guess. But yes. Well, do so and you'll be able to follow – well, you know, it's always fun when something bubbles up in the member feed and then makes it to the main page. And then people can duke it out into endless common threads that go two, three, four, hundred. Who knows? One of those that perennially gets a lot of people exercised on both sides of the issue, of course, has been same-sex marriage.

Now, we're not here to debate that today. But I'm here to tell you that the last week saw something which was quite illustrative. It shows that the left, in their zeal to spread out their peacock feathers and show themselves to be signifying the proper and correct moral position, failed to understand what a law is and fails to understand what the law said and the history of said thing. And in the process, managed to destroy a small pizza place, which frankly was just asking for it with that saucy expression and that come hither cheese. You guys surely followed this story. Peter, you've heard of – I did not follow the pizza part of the story.

Tell us about that. Would you – Well, there was a – I did this on Red Eye last night. There's a pizza place in Indiana that was approached by media. And the media just asked a random question, did not in fact, these people didn't make a pronouncement

or anything, just said, well, would you cater a gay wedding? And the person behind the counter was sort of baffled and said, well, no, we're Christians, so we probably wouldn't do that. And it became – that became a very, very big deal resulting in death threats and all sorts of things to this pizza place, which is now – they've now said they're closing. But now they've also had a Kickstarter campaign for the pizza place. So now they're even raising – they're raising money.

So it is a mess. what's amazing to me is that this is how we argue things now in contemporary america i to win my argument i need to prove that i'm the bigger victim it's a very strange kind of wrestling it's where two people are wrestling not with facts and ideas and principles and and debate but instead by first making the case that I am the victim and I am weaker than you are. Even if I think you're weak, I'm weaker. And that's how I win. It's very, very strange.

Well, there wasn't a lot of weakness on display here. What there was was a lot of people anonymously on Twitter piling onto this place and directing as much vitriol as possible to their Yelp page, which promptly filled up with a thousand one star reviews about what bigots these people were and let's not forget this was not a story that came out about these people saying well you know if it came to well no we're christian we wouldn't do a gay wedding in fact what this was trumpeted as somebody saying we won't serve gay people that's immediately what it became right so it didn't become a question. They never said that they said we would serve anybody of any race,

creed, color, whatever, but we wouldn't cater. Now, this is a distinction that either people are too stupid to grasp or they're willingly doing so because at the heart of it, they view these people as subhuman cretins. John Gruber over Daring Fireball, a great Apple site that periodically dips into moronic social commentary, called them, frankly, bigots.

And that's the left's position. If you hold this traditional idea, which until three to four years ago was that of Hillary Clinton and the president of the United States, you are a retrograde bigot, and there's no other description for you. Therefore, you must be castigated.

And not only did these people kill them on Yelp, but they hacked their – well, somebody hacked their website and threw up all sorts of wonderful bounty of sexual imagery because ha-ha, isn't it fun to rub these prudes' noses in the glee of filth? So – It is – but here, it is murky. You have to give – I mean it is a murky area. So – It is possible to be in favor of this law and be a bigot. It is possible to be in favor of this law and to not be a bigot. It is possible to be a bigot and be against this law. I mean all those things are possible.

Our bizarre – You just described what applies to any law in the United States of America. Why is this one started as a progressive law to defend a guy who smoked peyote in the federal statute and then spread out all over the country in states to defend people who had – not that same basic principle to find that Hobby Lobby could – didn't have to pay for contraception. So it is a very strange – it is a very strange law. Pence signing that law, the people behind him are in many cases associated with, strongly with what you might legitimately believe are anti-gay beliefs. There is a bad faith argument. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. There is.

There just is. Anti-gay beliefs. Yes. Anti-gay beliefs means what? Means that I think that – Means that you subscribe to what has been the consistent teaching of Western civilization for 5,000 years. No, no. That is a disingenuous way to put it. No, I'm asking you a question.

The American Family Association. Hold on. I'm asking you a perfectly legitimate question. You said they hold anti-gay beliefs. I'm asking you to tell us what you mean by anti-gay beliefs. Is opposition to same-sex marriage an anti-gay belief in your judgment? The American Family Association. No, I don't. The American Family Association, which was stood behind Mike Pence when he signed this bill, is against gay teachers and gay adoption, not just gay marriage. A whole host of things that can be described as anti-gay.

So it is not illegitimate for someone to look at that and think, hey, wait a minute, what's going on here? They may be wrong. The idea that these people are just innocently doing this is wrong too. Let me name one additional person who's opposed to gay adoption. His name is Francis. Are all Catholics guilty of anti-gay beliefs? No, because all Catholics do not agree with Francis. You don't agree with Francis. Are you against the death penalty all right then let me simply sharpen up the question is the pope guilty of anti-gay beliefs sure he is all right in a civil society he would be in the united states you are one half step away from bringing the sanctions of the state to bear against catholic teaching half a step away half a

step away no absolutely you are you are able you are allowed to advocate for any political position that political position has consequences in a in a in a in a representative democracy that we have that that that has that has been lost you and you're and you're allowed to agitate against it and you don't see the state going after people who say exactly what the memories pizza counter girl said. You don't see the state eventually declaring that to be hate speech and coming after her. That's just not on the horizon. But again – And a preacher standing up in the pulpit and saying these things, not that I agree with them, but I agree with the right to say them. If he can't

and claim a religious exemption, because a lot of people looked at that and said, oh, I don't like who's behind the person signing that bill. Ergo, are we to conclude then that we've got to criminalize the speech that comes from the pulpit because it is discriminatory, exclusionary, othering, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and constitutes a civil rights violation against a protected class. If you don't see that coming, then you don't see what's happening in England already. No, I don't see that coming. This is not England. It's the United States.

I didn't see that coming when the guy smoked peyote and got in trouble for it. And then we passed a federal law to allow people to smoke peyote as part of their religious belief. Religious beliefs are protected in this country. They are. All right. So let's ask this question then. Brand. What about,

so let's take the case. Where are they not? I'm sorry. I don't understand where they're not. Hang on. I'm about to get there. I'm asking you a few questions. You're the one who's came out with a strong statement about anti-gay beliefs.

Question. So here's the parallel for which many people are pushing. And the parallel is between civil, the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement in this particular regard it became it got adjudicated politically and legally and as a matter of statute that you are not permitted as the owner of let's say a domino's pizza you're not permitted to discriminate against black people right if you refuse to serve black people, you're breaking the law and you can be shut down. Question, is gay marriage, homosexuality, open homosexuality have the same status as black skin?

Is this the next logical step in the civil rights movement as so many people say that it is? So the question is very simple. If you are a florist or a caterer and people say to you, and a gay couple says, we're going to get married, we'd like to have you cater our wedding. And you say, no, because according to my religious beliefs, gay marriage doesn't even exist. The effort to, what you're about to do is engage, is formalize what I view as sinful behavior. And that, by the way, is a position which is not quite as errant as some might try to portray it. Tim Cook, the chairman of Apple, because again, I point out that the leader of one billion Catholics holds just that position. Should it be illegal to refuse to cater to a gay wedding, to cater a gay wedding because of your religious beliefs?

That's really the question here, the underlying question. Do we move in the direction of formalizing gay relationships as the next logical step in the civil rights movement and people who discriminate against gays who choose not to cater gay weddings, let's stick with that case, should be subject to the sanctions of the state in just the same way as people who refuse to rent apartments to black people. Well, that's a very good question, right? Isn't that the issue? Oh, I think it should obviously be the case that if you have, it seems to me that if you have trouble answering that question, you've got trouble.

The answer is obviously – Well, but that is the issue, right? But that is the issue. But that is the issue. A public accommodation cannot be – you cannot discriminate. However, if you do custom work as a florist or a massage therapist or a photographer, you are allowed to discriminate right now. Yeah, and that will end very, very soon because the people will be castigated and driven out of the private sphere, public realm as undesirables. Stone them.

But we've made that accommodation forever. That was a tenet of the civil rights organization. Civil rights movement. Listen, there's not going to be – there's no carve out for anybody on these things. There's one position, and if you don't have it, then the state is going to put its thumb on your common carotid, and that's the end of it because that's what the left wants. A little power, more. A little power, more. Thank you very much. There's going to be no room for dissent.

There's one way to look at it, and shut up if that's not what your way is. And while I don't exactly agree with the people who are opposed, shall we say to homosexuality, I don't have that same moral qualm. I'm saying that if you don't allow people who have that moral qualm, a carve out, we're dead. Well, then how do you,

how do you make it? But, but, but, but on the other hand, let's, let's just hold, let's carve ourselves out a little space here into which we can introduce

our next guest and talk about her, because this is one of the issues that's going to be coming up in presidential campaign. Isn't it just though, Carly Fiorina, we welcome her to the podcast show. She started out as a secretary for a small real estate business, joined AT&T as an entry-level sales position. And 15 years later, she led AT&T's spin out of Lucent and then Lucent's North American operations. In 1999, in the previous century, she was recruited to HP, where she would become the first woman to lead a Fortune 50 business. In her six years as chairman and CEO of Hubert Packard, she would double revenues to $90

billion, more than quadruple its growth to 9% and quadruple the cash flow. Some of that came from me buying the printers and the ink. In 2010, she didn't shy away from challenging Barbara Boxer in the deep blue state of California. She's currently the chairman of the Unlocking Potential Project. We welcome to the podcast, Carly Fiorina. Hello. Hello. How are you? Thank you so much for having me. Well, just glad you're here. Now, we understand that there's a chance you might be running for president in 2016. Yes, there is a chance. In fact, I recently said I thought it was at 90%. And that's true. I have been spending a lot of time talking with a lot of Americans about the issues they think confront our nation. And like them, I believe we are at a pivotal point. We are at a pivotal point where

our leadership is desperately needed in the world. We are at a pivotal point in our ability to get a bloated and corrupt, vast government bureaucracy under control. And we are at a pivotal point in our ability to get a bloated and corrupt, vast government bureaucracy under control. And we're at a pivotal point in terms of being able to restore possibilities for every American and to return to a political process that's characterized by reason and tolerance rather than vitriol and anger. Carly, Peter Robinson here. Question, a couple of questions that just have to be put. You ran against Barbara Boxer.

How come you're not going to run for the Senate this time around now that Barbara Boxer is retiring? Well, first, I don't live in California anymore. I moved back home to Virginia about four years ago where we met and married 30 years ago, to be close, among other things, to our daughter and granddaughters. Secondly, because I think the nation needs leadership now, and leadership comes from the top. Specifically in politics, leadership comes from the Oval Office. And so I think to be in the Oval Office, we need someone who understands the economy, who understands how the world works and the people and the leaders who are in the world today, who understands bureaucracies, as I've mentioned, they need to be brought under control, who understands technology

and the fact that it's a tool that can be used productively. And finally, that understands executive decision-making and leadership, the ability to change the order of things for the better, not just manage within the system, the ability to unlock potential in others, and the expertise and experience to make tough calls in tough times with high stakes for which you're willing to be held accountable. The next question that just has to be asked, that sounds similar to the sale that Mitt Romney attempted to make with the American people. He referred again and again to his principal expertise, which was in business. Nobody denied

that he was a successful figure in business as nobody would deny that you were just an astonishingly successful figure in business. But he still lost and lost big. How would you be different? Well, I think if you look at Romney's race, he lost because of three things, really. One, he failed to unify the party. As you will remember, almost 8 million of our voters stayed home. And it's because they did not believe that he was truly conservative in his principles and his policies. Fair or not, that's what people believe. We can't leave people, our people, on the sidelines. We need all of our team out to vote. And I'm a true conservative who demonstrated my ability to unify the party through a fractious primary in California and who

I believe can do so again today. Secondly, Mitt Romney, if you looked at the exit polling data, by the way, he would have been a fine president and he's a fine man. But while he won on every substantive issue, he lost by 62 points on the question, cares about someone like me. And in order to win, we have to demonstrate through our tone and our actions and who we talk to and how we speak with them that we are empathetic and not judgmental and not angry. And finally, Mitt Romney pulled his punches. He pulled his punches on Benghazi. We need a nominee who is going to fight on Benghazi, on email gate, on what liberals really believe. And Mitt Romney didn't fight when he had a chance.

Hey, Carly, it's Rob Long in New York. Thanks for coming on. You talked about unifying the party. Right before you got on, Peter Robinson and I, two loyal Republicans, got into a little Donnybrook over what's going on in Indiana now. Loyal Republicans and old friends. Yeah. So in Indiana, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the state version in Indiana, it's been a huge controversy. I took a sort of a measly, weasley, rhino position as I usually do are people, religious people, who probably can worry about what might happen if this law is not enforced.

And Peter took the opposite position. So unify us. How would you speak to Republicans who are nervous about it, Republicans who think that Mike Pence is getting a bad rap? Well, I think it's a great conversation and a great example. So I have consistently supported civil unions, and I think the debate we're really having about gay marriage, set aside that word just for a moment, is about how government bestows benefits. And we believe that government should not discriminate. I certainly believe that it is a time-honored principle in American life. Likewise, the protection of religious liberties is a time-honored tradition in American life. And so this same law, as you know well, the same law at a national level, the same

law in many other states, is used to protect someone of religious conviction against the mandate of a state or federal government. And so it was used by a Muslim prisoner to protect his right to grow a beard. It was used by an American Indian to protect his right to grow his hair and come to school. And people of religious conviction who believe that marriage is a sacrament, that it is not about government, that it is about the gift of life which God bestows through a man and a woman in a sacramental union, that their beliefs are worth protecting. What our laws and our Constitution have always been about is balancing interests. And so, for example, we don't like it when white supremacists gather and spew hateful speech, but we protect their right to do it. And so I think this debate has become all that's awful with politics.

We have people hurling vitriol, people engaging in emotional debate, when at its core, this is about two time-honored principles in our democracy. We protect religious beliefs and religious liberty, and we do not condone discrimination. Ms. Fiorina, James Liling is here in Minneapolis. That's a nuanced, sensible, sophisticated response.

And unfortunately, the left and the enablers in the press are going to portray you or anybody who makes it as an Elmer Gantry type figure spewing brimstone from the pulpit because God was mentioned. Nuances like these are just going to simply be lost. We have, for example, a situation in which Tim Cook, CEO of the most powerful, influential company on earth, stands up and castigates this law. And on the other hand, proudly announces that Saudi Arabia is going to be the home to a new Apple store. Seems to be a bit of the world that would like to start by chopping the heads off of gays and then move quickly on to the rest of the infidels. So let's look at how your administration would approach the Middle East and the growing, for heaven's sakes, metastasizing threat that we face in that part of the world. Well, yes, let's do that. But let me just say, and I have been

public in saying this, I think it is really unfortunate that tech CEOs, starting with Tim Cook, but certainly not ending with him, have jumped into this fray at all. It's disgraceful. They've been pressured into doing so by special interest groups and the hysteria on Twitterverse. And instead of stepping back and contributing to a conversation of tolerance, they have stepped in and contributed to a very emotional debate. It's really a shame. With regard to ISIS, you know, the Obama administration and Secretary Clinton are always presenting the American people with a false choice. A false choice is unless we are willing to go to war again and send thousands of boots on the ground, there's nothing we can do.

And that's utterly false. There are many things we can do, and our allies have asked them to do it. First, we should stop talking to Iran, not continue to extend the deadline so that they can keep spinning their centrifuges while we just keep talking. Secondly, we should provide Jordan's King Abdullah with the bombs and the material that he has asked for. Third, we should arm the Kurds, as they have been pleading with us to do for the last almost two years. We haven't done so. We should share intelligence with the Egyptians. We should share intelligence and provide support to the Saudis. We have a set of allies on the ground who have demonstrated their willingness to take the fight to ISIS. The Arab League, they have a

very important announcement recently that they were prepared to do so, but they need our support to do so. They need our leadership to do so. They need our resolve to do so. And when we stand back and do nothing except to continue to talk to Iran, which strategically has been trying to disrupt this region for 30 years and has succeeded in doing so and all the while sort of fiddling around with ISIS, our allies are concerned that we are retreating from the world and I share their concern. Hey, Carly, it's Rob Long again. If you are successful, just say you're the nominee, you have a certain advantage in that as every Republican nominee has, which is that we pretty much know

who the democratic nominee is going to be uh unless something really interesting happens over there but i'm not sure something is um what would you what would you think the the three things what will you go to what do you think the top three things you're going to use in your you're going to say or your points as you run against Hillary Clinton? What should, what should the independent undecided voter know about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former First Lady Hillary Clinton that they don't know already? Well, first we need to talk about track record and accomplishments. I come from a world where most Americans live, and that's a world where results count. Accomplishments count. A title is just a title.

So we need to talk about what Hillary Clinton has actually accomplished, because it goes to her expertise, her experience, how she would approach problems. We need to talk about candor, because candor is a window into character. And Mrs. Clinton has not been candid about a whole series of things. She hasn't been candid about the whole email issue. In fact, it's pretty clear that she's had a plan all along to shield her communications. She wasn't candid on Benghazi. In fact, she was untruthful about Benghazi. And so we need to talk about that.

She peddled a fiction about it for a month. And finally, we need to talk about really what her policies create. Hillary Clinton will want very much to talk about anything but her policies and her principles. She will want to talk about the war on women. She will want to talk about becoming the first woman president. None of that will she be able to talk to, talk about, if she faces me. None of that. to have a conversation about liberal principles and policies and what they do to people's lives versus our principles and policies, which are better in people's lives.

And that is the debate ultimately we need to have in this nation. Carly, Peter Robinson here with one more question, if I may. I'm struck that even as 40 years ago, Ronald Reagan was moving to the the typical Silicon Valley position, which is often you hear, as you know, around here, you hear in the Valley, well, I'm socially liberal, but fiscally conservative. And of course, you always wait to see any demonstration of fiscal conservatism, and there's not that much. The general tenor around here is pretty liberal. So here you are staking out a position, not just the Silicon Valley position, not just somebody who knows business.

You're saying I can unite the party. I can appeal to Reagan Democrats. I'm tough and I'm really conservative. Why are you conservative? What has led you to that position? You know, I think the core of conservative philosophy, which I was taught as a child, and which I learned over time, worked better in all aspects of life. The core of conservative philosophy is a fundamental conviction that no one of us is any better than any other one of us. Every one of us has God-given gifts. Every one of

us is equal in the eyes of God. Every life has potential. And the highest calling of leadership is to unlock potential in others. And so I'm a conservative because I believe it. I'm a conservative because I know our values and our principles work better in people's lives. I am a Ronald Reagan conservative, which means I think all three legs of the conservative stool matter for our nation and in our lives. Thank you. And I'm going to ask you what some smart aleck kid is going to ask you when you go on the Daily Show or Tonight Show or any one of these places. They're going to look at your record at HP and they're going to ask why ink is so expensive.

And you'd better have a response. Well, I'll tell you what people don't understand is in that little ink cartridge that seems so easy, there are literally 100 patents in that ink cartridge that allow the ink to make all those beautiful colors and allow it to be manufactured as inexpensively as it is. And that might be a jumping off point to stun your interlocutor even more to talk about how we need patent reform in this country and how we're stifling innovation with legalistic hoops and traps that people have to run through. Yeah, exactly.

Turn it against them and tell them exactly why America is great because, frankly, we have 100 patents and a little tiny thing that makes it possible for people to print out great pictures at home on their machines, be they HP or otherwise. Listen, thank you so much for coming by today. We had a great time talking to you and we hope to talk to you more as the campaign season

unfurls. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for having me and have a wonderful Easter holiday. Thanks, you too. Bye-bye. Alright, bye-bye. The printer thing I mentioned because I was just in Arizona with family and my brother-in-law was telling me

that his printer, which is HP, is a smart machine. When it knows that it's running out of ink, it automatically orders more, which to me is just like having a crack dealer sitting in the corner, you know, who just notes that you're getting a little less, you're getting a little twitchy and instantly drops in an order.

Amazon did something similar this week where they came up with a little device, the Dash, which you can place anywhere you need. And when you run out of something, you just press the button and automatically it orders what the logo is on the device itself. Imagine that. If you use Tide and you're running low on Tide, you just hit the little tiny Tide button on the thing that you've got stuck up in the wall of your laundry room and more Tide appears. Oh, is that what that thing is for? Oh, you don't have it yet?

No, I saw it on the cover. I saw it on the homepage of Amazon. I was ordering some mundane thing like new fountain pen or ballpoint pen refills. But I thought, what is – and I didn't take the time knowing, of course, at some level that James Lyle was sooner or later explaining it to me. I'm just fascinated by the fact that Peter Robb, if you want – the mundanity of modern life comes down to a highly intelligent man using his – using the vast computational network to order ballpoint pen replacements. Wait a minute. I do that. I do that.

It's incredibly – it's one of the most joyful things you can do because you need a specific product. You do not want to go into a shop. Yes, yes. You know exactly what you need. You have the pen there. You order it. It arrives basically at your desk. Ordering little refills like that is what the

internet's for. Thank you, Rob. We agree on this, Peter. I take joy. I'm just wondering if out of the glee of the season and the happiness of Easter that suffuses the country in its pastel glow, whether or not

Rob realized how much he was assisting me in ramping up that segue to Harry's. Did you know what you were doing there, Rob? Of course I did. It's Easter. Okay. Thank you. All right.

Good. Okay. It's Maundy Thursday. This is the equivalent of my washing your feet. Finding a segue-based generosity from Rob like that is like finding a foil-wrapped chocolate egg under the pillow the kind with a little gooey caramel inside. Well,

anyway, yes, of course, Harry's. As you can hit the button on the dash and get you tied, as you can have your printer automatically order your ink, as you can go online and re-up with your ballpoint pen replacements, so can Harry's help you make your face very, very happy.

And of course, you all know about Harry's. And if you don't, well, listen, okay, here's a couple of guys who decided to disrupt, to use that big popular internet word, the industry of shaving, which frankly could stand some disrupting. And what they did was they bought a factory in Germany that made excellent blades. Excellent, they made the best blades. 98-year-old factory. Bought it so they make sure that they got them

coming all the time, and what they did then is put together this package online where Harry's brings you great razors, great handles. Don't underestimate the aesthetic pleasure of scraping your face every morning with something that looks good. And it comes right to your door. And it's

so much less expensive than the stuff that you've been paying for. Why would you go to the store and pay $30, $40 for ridiculously overpriced blades when you're going to have Harry's come right to your door? No, what you do is you use the coupon code RICOSHET, and you get $5 off your first order. And your first order is $10. It's $15, so that brings it down to $10. That brings it down to a month's worth of shaving at the low, low price.

RICOSHET is your coupon code. And you're going to want to go to harys.com to begin what will be for you a revolution in shaving. And you'll never go back to the way it was before. Do you hate shaving? Is it boring? Do you look at your mug with just ennui when you start your morning ablutions? No more. Harry's is the answer.

Speaking of the answer, what's the question? The question is, this Jeb Bush guy, is he what we think he is? Is he not what we think he is? How close do you have to be to figure out the guy? I don't know. What do I know? Let's talk to somebody who's actually been hanging around with him for a while. That would be our next guest, Andy Ferguson.

Of course, Andy's a senior editor at the Weekly Standard. His most recent book, Crazy You dad's crash course on getting his kid into college was published in 2010 by simon adjuster and i assume that we're going to have a sequel soon about getting his kid into graduate school it being four years since the book was out we welcome back to the podcast andy ferguson and that's what i'd be saying if andy was here at the moment but apparently he's a couple of minutes away so let's fill up the time with the chatter and palaver carly thoughts guys well i was i liked her i liked her a lot what do you think peter I'd be saying if Andy was here at the moment, but apparently he's a couple of minutes away. So let's fill up the time with Chatterin Palaver. Carly, thoughts, guys?

Well, I liked her. I liked her a lot. What do you think, Peter? Oh, I like her a lot as well. She is – I have to say I felt slightly foolish. She's around here in Northern California enough that I had no idea she had changed her residency to Virginia. But she's well-spoken and in that quite calm way. She said things that were really very tough. She is – this is my memory of the last – of her Senate campaign against Barbara Boxer.

She didn't have the money. It was going to be a democratic year. California is a democratic state, blah, blah, blah. But it was quite a good campaign and what is clear is that she is willing to fight. She is a fighter. Yeah, and she's – I mean she – I think it was a tough year for her in California. First of all, she was running for the Senate and Meg Whitman was running for the governorship. And I think those are two very different ways to win in California.

It's a weird state. I think she probably didn't run the toughest campaign she could have for a whole lot of reasons like running in California is harder. But she's – I like that she's smart and I like that she seems like she's been in the world for a while. And I kind of, I kind of liked the idea that, that she ran a tough campaign in a tough state where she really wasn't going to win and still ran it and ran it hard. Cause I think, I think you learn a lot when you run for office and lose for, for a big state in a big state like California, you learn what it takes and just how hard it is to get people to, to,

to join the, join the bandwagon. And so I, I sort of admire that and I admire that she's back in the fray. Same here. I would agree with that. I was just momentarily disconcerted by a noise in the credenza here.

And my printer, for some reason, I do not understand, turned itself on. Yeah. And we're the most expensive ink. Yeah, that's right. It's not an HP either. It's a brother. But perhaps there's some sort of solidarity between these machines where they're aching for the rise of their mistress to interconnect.

And this is how Skynet happens. Eventually you get a printer. Your printer has become self-aware. Has become self-aware. True. I hope that printers become self-aware because then they will understand exactly how much we hate them. I have seen James' office and it is not one wit less complicated than the cockpit of a 747. I don't know how you get any work done at all, James. There are things pinging and lights

flashing and printers spitting. I don't want people to have the idea that it's a massive cables and some just big junky thing here. I designed my office with the thought that John Walker would walk in and say, that is an admirable layout. That is an efficient layout. When John Walker had a post the other day in E.J. Hill's point about shellac and backing up old medium, John had this wonderful disquisition on tape drives. And oh, it just gladdened my heart when he talked about how when he went someplace else, he took a hard drive of basic stuff with him just in case the asteroid struck. And I'd just come back. I was in Arizona at the time smiling because I was between off-site backups.

So, yes, when I took a trip, I had a hard drive that had every family photo and movie on it just in case. Well, we could talk about my endless backups, right? Or we could bring in Andy Ferguson as we talked about before. And Andy is finally deigned to join us, and we thank him so much. Andy, hello there. We were talking about Jeb Bush, sort of, and you did several weeks on the road with the guy, six days on the road. And you're coming home to tell us what you think about Jeb. Okay, I just want to back up a minute.

You literally back up. You carry around a hard drive with pictures of your family? When I go on vacation, when I go on vacation, I have a... How much do you like them? A lot. I like my family, but jeez. I don't consult them. It's just there in case I come home and the house is nothing but sticks and smoldering lath and plaster. I've got

a backup of everything that we were before the tragedy struck. Well, you're a better father. I am. I know that without question. Yes, anyway. So yes, all right. Let's go forward from my own anal retentive backup strategies and talk about, we're talking about Jeb and we're also talking about the RFRA and the fact that Jeb seems to have massaged and qualified somewhat his position on, on, on RFRA. Is that of a piece with a man or are we misunderstanding the subtleties of

the mind that eventually will be catapulted to the presidency? Well, I can't, I can't quite speak to what his massaging of his position was. I guess he spoke to a bunch of people in Palo Alto, where massages are very big, I understand. So he may have backed off, although I tend to doubt it. the people who are around him that I was talking to said that it often happens when you're sitting around and you're trying to say, okay, should Jeb say this, or how did he approach this?

But there was none of that palaver this time. Bush just said, no, no, no, no, we back pants, we back pants. And there was no discussion about it. And so it sounds to be like one of those positions that he actually holds pretty strongly. As I wrote in the article, though, he's not above tweaking the language to soften the hard edges of what other people would see

to be his really quite extraordinary right-wingery. Andy, Peter here. How can it be? In some ways, this is the question that informs your whole marvelous piece. The only reason I'm not saying what brilliant prose is that I'm just tired of saying it every single time you publish something. I'm getting pretty damn sick of it too, Peter. All right.

For the record, Andy, it's Rob here. I don't think you're that good. Before you came on, he was just – you're welcome. So how can it be – Speak the truth to power. How can it be that a man who was governor of Florida for eight years in a state that had no income tax in the first place, cut taxes every single year, reformed education with not vouchers but charter schools. How can it be that this went to battle over Terri Schiavo trying to ensure that she received

food and water, which a socially conservative position as it was defined at the time, I think it would still be defined that way. How can it be that this unquestioned conservative governor has now got people in the Republican party thinking of him as a squish? Well, it boils down to the two things, which is, uh, it is support for the common core educational standards and,

um, and, uh, leniency for illegal immigrants. And I don't know, it strikes me, one of the reasons I wrote the piece, I'm not a big Bush advocate or anything like that. I have no idea if I would vote for him in the primary or not. But it did seem to me kind of odd that he was being sold so short, not just by the national press, who insists on calling him a moderate or part of the moderate wing, but my fellow right-wingers, who seem to have narrowed the definition of conservatism down to whether you hate the Common Core and whether you want to kick out all the

illegal immigrants it actually used to be a much broader range of issues on the right and when you take them off one by one and you look at what bush did against sometimes enormous opposition like the shavo thing i mean he was getting uh he was getting hit literally from everywhere around the world, um, for what he was doing with Chavo. And he did, he did not, he never backed down. Um, so it just seems to me odd that after this guy is amassed this kind of record, um, conservatism, our conservatives can't kind of see that he truly is an extremely conservative guy, not just in his ideology but in his practice. But Andy, hasn't he made it kind of – I mean isn't he sort of suffering by his own hand here? He sort of started by describing himself as the person who can speak to the whole of America.

He really – he started by saying he didn't want to run a traditional primary campaign. He was going to run sort of a general move to the center campaign even in the primaries. He's kind of gone out of his way to make sure that that impression is the impression he's giving, don't you think? Or am I being unfair to him? No, no, no. No, I agree. And I think that's self-conscious on his part. One of the reasons I spent so much time in the piece about the difference between his first run for governor in 1994, which he narrowly lost, and when he ran again in 98, which he won in almost a landslide,

is that there was a transformation in him as a political person, as a political personage. And whether it's pure opportunism or really a matter of just sophistication on his part, but he completely altered the way he presented his conservatism to the people of Florida. And as one guy said to me, one of his old campaign managers said, you know, he learned that if you're, if you believe 10 things and you're in a room with a group of people who only believe five of them, just talk about those five things. Forget the other five. You can talk about the other five another time. And so you read his speeches then, and you see that what's going on underneath is extremely conservative stuff. I mean, you know, really emptying out entire office buildings of the state government and vouchers for everybody, pushing vouchers into areas where it had never gone before, like in home care for the elderly and so on,

that there's still this very gentle rhetoric on the top. And he talks about love. And he talks about brotherhood and stuff like that that actually makes my skin crawl. But it got him elected, and it got him elected easily enough that he was able to pursue this conservative agenda that I was describing earlier. And I suspect something like that is going on. This is just the way he talks as a candidate. But if you really drill down into what he's saying and the way he's governed, it's pretty obvious which side of the street he's on.

Andy, you wrote a cover story. Actually, you're pretty good so far. You have quite a good record at tanking presidential campaigns, as I recall. You wrote a cover story on Mitch Daniels, didn't run for president. You wrote a cover story on Haley Barber, didn't end up running for president. I have the feeling that at this moment, as he reads the cover story he wrote about him, Jeb Bush is reconsidering the whole darn thing. How would you compare him, though, with Mitch Daniels? That's the name that came to mind as you described this governing in a conservative fashion, but not talking that way. Yeah, I actually think he's more conservative than Daniels. I'm not a mind reader or anything, but my hunch is that Daniels has a very wide libertarian streak, and that's where the small government stuff intrinsically tied in with a view of kind of civil society in which people are allowed to practice virtue and develop their character and become the kind of people who are good at governing themselves.

And it's a much more deeply developed idea, I think, than something that Daniels would have. But again, you know, both of them were tremendously effective. And I mean, I wish Daniels had run, but there's still a lesson there for people that you really can govern conservatively. You really can push against big government and higher taxes. You really can deregulate state bureaucracies. And it works. Conservatism actually works. Who would have thought it? These guys have proved it. And that really, to me, is a very profound lesson to take away from what Bush did and from what Daniels did. One more contrast or comparison.

Jeb Bush with Mitt Romney. My own reading of Mitt Romney was that the truth of the matter was not all that well disguised at any point, was that the man was a moderate. He called himself that when he was governor of Massachusetts. In that famous debate with Ted Kennedy. He said, I don't want to take us back to the days of Reagan's America. And then, of course, when he got to running for president, he called himself, the phrase was severe conservative, quite whatever that means. Is Jeb Bush just doing the opposite? Is there a kind of mirror image campaign going on here?

I think they always misheard him. I think he said insincere conservative, and everybody needed some new lip readers. Well, actually, you and I have talked about this before. I think I may have even cribbed the idea from you, Peter, that Bush may be doing a reverse Bush. You know, we have always said, and I think rightly, that Bushes talk right and govern in the middle or govern sometimes even to the left. That was certainly true of his father. It was true of George W. Bush,

who was really sort of a big government conservative, which means not really a conservative. And they sounded like conservatives because it was politically advantageous to them. It looks to me like Bush is kind of, he's going around the country talking to every rich guy that he can find, trying to squeeze as much money out of them as he can.

All these guys like to think of themselves as moderate, and they're all pro-choice, and they're pro-day marriage, and all that stuff. And he doesn't see any reason to antagonize them at the moment. And he's happy to collect their money. And he may sound like this moderate all the way through November, until next November. But I suspect that what would

happen when he was in the White House is that he would prove to be a much more conservative guy than either his father or his brother. And you suspect that. I mean, at the moment, his campaign, in my mind, rests entirely on vote for me, and says i'm really conservative so you suspect that he's really conservative based on what his record as governor which was unambiguously conservative and or you're having spent time with him spent a couple months now talking to him and to his people to prepare oh no no no no no no it's not i i would never ask anybody to take my word for it it's purely about the record. Got it.

I didn't spend that much time with them. They, you know, and even if I did, you never, these guys never let you see something unless they want you to see it. So, you know, I wouldn't ask anybody to take my word for it. I can't vouch for his conservatism except to point to his record, which is really impressive all the way up and all the way down. We've got to figure out where he is on the dog issue, though, because as we

know, the last campaign foundered entirely on Mitt Romney's placement of a dog in a box on top of his car. And now we understand, according to the New York Times, that Scott Walker is actually allergic to dogs. Can a man who's allergic to dogs occupy the White House? Andy Ferguson. Would you want him to? That's a good question. Can you trust him? Even if he's allergic to them, does he like them?

I think you can be allergic to dogs, but if you don't like them, that's disqualifying. Well, what else? I don't know, Andy. There is a presidential candidate, a presumed presidential candidate on the Republican side who I admire. I think he's a perfect – I'm interested to see what he has to say. The senator from Florida, Marco Rubio, has a dog. He is a dog lover. Unfortunately, the dog is – Did he just say he's a dog lover? No. He is a dog lover and he owns a dog. He has a dog lover. Unfortunately, the dog is a dog lover.

No, he is a dog lover and he owns a dog. He has a record. Yeah. But unfortunately, unfortunately, his record when he's a severe dog lover. When you drill down in the dog loving the dog he owns is a shih tzu. Now, no, that's that's not a dog. That's a floor mop. That's an ambulatory floor mop.

What dog do you own? What dog do you own, Andrew Ferguson? I own an extremely manly Bichon. Oh, okay. But I, okay, I just, and I don't mean this, I'm not Okay. But I, okay. I just, and I, and I don't mean this.

I'm not trying to be insulting, Andy. I don't want you in the White House with that dog. I don't want a president of the United States with a little yappy dog. What's he going to do? Carry it around in one of those little carriers? Yeah, exactly. In a bag? I don't even know what's his name.

Something like Mr. Skeffington. Oh, that's, oh, that's. I don't even know what's the name. Something like Mr. Skeffington. I'll admit, when I take my dog out for a walk and there's a lot of house construction going on around where I live, and you've got these big, manly guys beating down walls and tearing up bricks and chewing mortarboard with their teeth and stuff. And I walk by with my little Bichon, and I feel like one of the DeBoer sisters. Like I'm about to go on The Tonight Show and show Johnny my cute little puppy. But I think what that shows

is a kind of self-confidence in my own master. I think what it shows is that you are unfit for higher office. That's what I, well, one of the other things that I had that I so revere in Andrew Ferguson is that he, like me, as a matter of fact,

has the courage to end all his references to popular culture in approximately 1955. The Gabor sisters, the Gabor sisters. We're going to have to die.sa just died like a year ago. I don't know where – I think Zsa Zsa is still alive. Zsa Zsa is still alive.

She's still with us. She is a desiccated parentheses of a person hooked up to a variety of machines that go ping, but I believe that she's still with us. It's Ava. Dudes, we are killing our demographic. Can we please can we upgrade this slightly? Then it would be this. Putin,

you know, likes to be posed with his dog, which is probably a German shepherd with the entrails of his political enemies still hanging from its jaw. Let's look at which of these candidates has the proper attitude to stand up to Vlad, who is making all kinds of nuclear threats

and saber-rattlings about the Baltics now, just for fun. Well, you know, I don't know about Bush on the dog question. I did get one thing out of him that kind of alarmed me, which is that he drives a Fusion. Why is that surprising?

Isn't that kind of like half of a Prius or something? I think it's, yeah, a Prius with worse mileage. No, it's a standard model. You can get the electrical version, but it's a standard model, modest Ford automobile. The message there is mod model, modest Ford automobile. The message there is modesty, not greenness. I think he has the kind that's like half Prius and half normal.

That's an establishment. It's an establishment car is what it is. On a scale of one to a shih tzu, it's really still only a three. But is it not possible that the country might be yearning for a guy with a little bit of a pickup in him? That that's, oh, is that your take? Lamar Alexander.

Well, you know what I mean, though? I mean, there's a certain sort, I mean, the Fusion is one of those cars that's going to appeal to the people in the right cities and the right little upper crust of a certain urban demographic. But that almost sounds like he's positioning himself carefully to be judged by the kind of car he drives, again, to appeal to people who wouldn't vote for him anyway. Yeah. Well, that's true. I think – I hate to say it, but I don't think we're any longer a pickup country. And so I think the day of the pickup driving candidate has probably passed. I hope we're not yet a fusion driving candidate kind of country, but that remains to be seen.

Well, as long as we're not a shih tzu country, I'm happy. I do believe that all these little markers are important. The one thing about the fusion is that at least it's a Ford, right? So the gentry liberal class that would be impressed by this would probably be horrified by the Fordness of it. So at least that says something for him, I guess. I don't know. If you look at where all the jobs in the country are being made, it's pickup country. It's Texas. It's North Dakota.

Yeah. Good. Nice rejoinder, James. I'm thinking Texas isn't quite pickup country anymore either, but that's another discussion. Well, son, you just go out in the panhandle and you tell those folks they're not pickup

country and that they ought to be driving some little thing that goes down the highway. Just watch the way they squint and size you up and adjust their hat ever so kindly and tell you to move along, stranger. Tell you and your Bichon Fries to move along. That's what they'll do.

I don't need it. You know, the bed of a pickup is way too big for my dog. My dog would just be like rolling around back there. You need to hire like two giant labs just to bookend your dog in between. You just need the glove compartment for your dog, Andy. Andy, who's next? Who's next on the Ferguson hit list? Who's going to get a profile next?

I don't know. I wrote about Cruz, and we got a couple of good people at the Standard who know a lot about Walker, so I'm not going to do that. I don't know. There's some obvious ones. But, you know, after you... One thing I've noticed is, now that I'm old enough to remember the Gabor sisters,

it's very hard to get to these people, even at this stage of the campaign which used to be considered at this point in the cycle was very early on right now I went to an event in Iowa in AG summit which is this like totally artificial event that some ethanol billionaire put on to get all the Republican candidates to come and kiss his ring and more than half of them did. But there were probably, I'm thinking maybe 400 to 500 people in attendance, ordinary, normal people. And there were 300 reporters. Wow.

And row after row after row of people with their laptops and two cell phones. And what, what, what, what publications, even the, who's paying these people? I've just spent the last decade hearing that American journalism is in collapse. I don't understand. No, we were wrong. We were wrong. It turned out that we, we really, it's just our jobs. We were wrong and we should have wanted to be wrong because what's happened is you go on these

things, BuzzFeed has four people in Iowa. Huffington Post has half a dozen people from New Hampshire to Arkansas. These websites have enough money or they think that they've got a lot, that they're just blanketing the political world with sometimes very talented people. But you sit there and there's 300 people watching the exact same thing, which, by the way, is being broadcast on C-SPAN. Right. And none of the candidates are talking to them. They don't get any kind of press availability, as they call it.

And so you just stand there and you think, something's gone. This is market failure of some kind. Something has gone wrong here to have 300 people at the beginning of the year before the presidential election year standing there watching something they could be watching on c-stand and and yet we had the feel somehow we know don't we maybe maybe maybe i'm wrong about them but somehow we know that there's no teddy white in the crowd right that we'll never get another book as

detailed and rich in character and full of inside information as the making of the president series that he wrote back in the sixties and early seventies, right? Or not? Well, I don't think so because it's all being dispensed in spoonfuls, you know, as it happens. Um, and, uh, things are pretty exhaustively covered. I mean, now, you know, if you look at, at Huffington post or, um, uh, you know, if you look at Huffington Post or, you know, BuzzFeed Politics or something, they're not just covering the candidates, they're covering the families of the consultants that work for the candidate, you know? If it turns out one of the consultants sends his kids to some kind of school, That can become a big story in Buzzfeed. You know,

it's just the salami is being sliced so thin, um, that I don't understand any way you kind of put it back together and write a big sweeping narrative of the whole thing the way white did. Well, well, the other part of it is that no matter how much Buzzfeed puts into it and a, I'm sure those people are seasoned campaign, uh've seen many a presidential election, no matter how

much BuzzFeed puts into it, it's going to be swamped by a factor of 100 for the number of clicks they get for 17 times this corgi won the internet with its ears. That's just... Absolutely. Absolutely. That's BuzzFeed. No, that's what I meant by a lost leader. You know, I think BuzzFeed looks at it as kind of a prestige thing or something that they can have as many political stories every day as the New York Times does.

Actually, they have more every day from what I can tell. They know that nobody wants to read them. But it's sort of part of what they think they need if they're going to be grown-up people sitting at the grown-up table. They were all English majors after all. They have to have a modicum of self-respect somehow. Hey, last question for me anyway. You're in Washington. Can you figure out what Bezos thinks he's doing with the Washington Post? No.

No, I really don't. I'm not even sure if he's aware of what's going on completely. The paper, in some respects, is much better than it's been in years. In other respects, it's appalling, partly because you do clearly the turnover in journalism is such that they're not English majors. They're sort of women's studies majors and Native American studies majors. And, you know, they've read a couple of Shakespeare plays, but it was only as illustrations of imperialism and colonialism. And so they're really as badly educated as any profession I've seen and probably much worse than it was a generation ago.

But there's still talented people there, and he's clearly throwing a ton of money in it because he's hiring people. So who am I to say anything bad about a guy who wants to hire a journalist? You and the Pope, who am I to judge anything bad about a guy who wants to hire a journalist? You and the Pope. Who am I to judge? All right. Exactly. Well, Andy, we thank you for being on today. And if you do take your Bichon for a ride in a pickup truck, remember,

dogs sometimes look cool in the back of a pickup truck with a bandana around, but don't be putting a Hermes scarf around the neck of it, because that may play in the beltway. On the other hand, why stop there? Does that go for me, too? Can I not wear a Hermes scarf? Well, the Gabor's were more Chanel, so I would go with that. Leave it on, Andy. It's style. It's good. Thank you.

Andrew Ferguson, senior editor, Weekly Standard. Go read him and laugh and learn. One of the best writers we got today. Thank you for being with us on the podcast. Happy Easter. Thank you, guys. Thanks, Steve. Bye-bye.

You know, and a very funny, funny writer. We had this week some interesting humor news. And some people have said that, oh, come on now. Let's not on the right get our undies all bundled and play the outrage game when it comes to, oh, Leah Dunham doing a stupid piece in The New Yorker with, is this my Jewish boyfriend or is this a dog? Oh, that edgy girl with her piercings and her tat. But the other interesting story I thought this week was the elevation to the Daily Show of Trevor Noah. And I mean so here's the deal. This guy is known by nobody except for people who watched his – except for comedy – keen comedy aficionados.

And he had some tweets. People prowled through years and years and years of his tweet feed and came up with a couple of basic ideas. One was anti-Semitism, jokes at the expense of Jews. What? Almost hit a Jewish guy with my Volkswagen. Irony. And then there were jokes about fat chicks because he's a thin guy, so he can mock and point fun at fat chicks. And then occasionally Jewish fat chicks.

And then perhaps there were two tweets that summed it all up for me. One, the man, and two, the reaction to him. The tweet that summed up the man was saying that when he is in an airplane going over middle America, the turbulence to him is the ignorance rising up from the middle of the country, which tells you all you need to know about the guy. He is there to instruct you yahoos how to think

and what to laugh about, and the show will continue to signal, just as Jon Stewart did, with that piercing, damning look and that tapping pencil. Oh, it'll tell you what you're supposed to make fun of. Comedy Central should be so lucky. I mean, if this guy merely continues the Daily Show franchise, then at least it won't be a failure the what i got for those tweets was that the guy's not funny um and that's we're i mean that's much more dangerous

john stewart for all you know whatever you think of him you know he can make a joke you can write a joke he was a stand-up comedian was a popular one he was a successful one he understood you know he said funny things um i'm uh if i were if I were the head of Comedy Central at this point, I'd be looking at those tweets and not thinking about the sort of cultural ramifications of them but just the material. God, he's going to need a lot better material. It's a big job. Here's the one that summed it all up for me and not the man but the but the left and the the progressive left and their embrace of him he was saying that the reason historically that men got down on one knee to propose was that if she said no you'd be in a great position for an uppercut now you you can look at that joke

from a clearly uh you know rob you write you write comedy you can you can look at that for its setup its delivery the way it unexpectedly plays off in the setup. I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a terrible joke. But at the point of it – It's not funny. No. If I made that joke, I would lose my newspaper column, right? And if I joked in public hardy-har about punching women because they'd rejected me –

Well, yeah. You'd be out. You'd be out. I mean the double standard is amazing but what i think it's gonna eat i mean i look i'm not projecting myself into the future and you can't ever do that but what after all of this right after all this outrage from all of his tweets that are horrible and and then comedy central stand by him and he's gonna take the job so just project yourself a year or so from today or a year or so from when he sits in the big chair.

You know that there is going to be someone with the political and cultural profile of James Lilacs. Not James Lilacs. He's too witty, frankly. But there will be some guy on our side, roughly on our side, some poor campaign staffer or somebody who will have tweets that are not even probably as bad as give your your uh the girlfriend an uppercut and it will be a six-act play and trevor noah will be leading right the parade of outrage but you just know that will happen and no nobody on nobody on that side is going to say hey maybe we should all simmer down a little bit. But I mean that doesn't make it right. We should all simmer down a little bit about all this stuff and just concentrate on how incredibly unfunny they were.

That's kind of my feeling. But I'm not tired of being outraged. That's not what I'm coming to this. What I'm weary and borderline mad about is the fact that the extraordinary hypocrisy here of giving a pass to this guy for what appears to be a body of work that's anti-woman fat shaming anti-semitic those things will never those are little post-it notes put on a on a on an oily pan right there they're never going to stick and it's it's seen as preposterous to even assume those things because he's of the left god yeah yeah no you're right you're right i mean that's

true also but we shouldn't stand for it we every time we talk about the guy in public we should say the anti-semitic woman hating trevor noah i mean just never. Here's the reason. And now I'm putting my brain back together. I'm sorry. There was something in the corner last week. Jane Nordlinger was talking about a concert in New York where the guy was introducing a piece that he

said had been inspired in part by hearing the travails of women in the Middle East. And then he added, of course, here in America we have Rush Limbaugh, at which point the audience erupted into a two minute of hate, right? Great applause, because, you know, ISIS, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Rush Limbaugh, they're all of a piece. Now, Rush Limbaugh is saying this because he said this about Rush, and he can say that about Rush, because A, the audience doesn't listen to him. B, the audience knows he's a conservative, and therefore he hates women. And C, that Sandra Flu fluke thing. Okay. Now here's somebody who says something far,

far worse, far worse. Rush Limbaugh has never advocated in a joke, punching a woman in the jaw because she sexually refused him. Right? So why is it they get to do that? Why is it that they get to do that? That's the infuriating part.

Yeah, it's infuriating part. Yeah, it's infuriating. But they do. I mean I hear you and I agree with you and I'm mad about the thing that hasn't even happened yet that I know is going to happen. So I can't possibly criticize you for being really mad about the stuff that has happened. But there's something exhausting for me just personally and i'm not even advocating it as as a as a way to live your life or way to feel about politics but there is something exhausting um about these skirmishes for me like i just wanted it to be i wanted to be over by i

guess what here's in my fantasy world the people on our side say, you know what? We're going to give Trevor Noah a pass. I want everybody to notice that we're giving him a pass because we're not going to play the game that you play. And then later hope that something happens that then we can point to him and say what an incredible hypocrite he is. But I'm not sure that's going to be satisfying either. I don't know the answer. Now, all you've done, James, is depress me. Never give them a pass. Never give them

a pass. Hold them to their own standards every single time, and don't let the conversation be deflected away from that. That's just the thing. That's the whole Alinsky strategy, isn't it? Make them abide by their own rules. Hmm.

Yeah. I don't know how you do that, though. I mean, it's one thing to say just keep tweeting it. I just don't... The people who watch, the people who work on and schedule and produce and watch The Daily Show

are not vulnerable to our criticisms at all for anything. They live on Planet Daily Show. We live on Planet Ricochet or whatever. We live on Planet something else. And they just – they don't care. It doesn't matter.

And it isn't like – it isn't going to be Alinsky because Alinsky wrote basically in 1903 practically. That's how long ago it was in media years where you do something. We all read the same paper and watch the same TV, and we don't. And they live on another planet, and on their planet, they get to do anything they want and rewrite the rules. And it's horrible, but they do. And you're absolutely right. And if it was a question of us living on different planets,

ours being on the other side of the sun, that'd be great. But we're all on the same planet and the rules that they write eventually become the rules that define us, which is why the public sphere is being continually prescribed and diminished by these joyless, humorless scolds

who are determined to extirpate, as I said before, any single possible private sphere. Everything must be subject. There is no private sphere anymore. Everything is public. And if you believe the right things on a certain checklist,

the majority of them, you get a pass. The rest of us can sign to the fiery depths of hell. And we can sign you to the fiery depths of Ricochet where I'm sure already the conversation is 500 messages deep on what we were talking about at the beginning of the show. And I hope it gets her onto Carly Fiorina because she's lots of fun and somebody to watch and listen to.

Hey, thank you to our guests. Thanks to Andy Ferguson. Thanks to Harry's. Harry's.com where you should go and enter that coupon code RICOSHET to get $5 off your first order. You'll never go back to the old blades again. Trust me on this one. Once you drag a Harry's across your face, the word drag won't even come to mind. A smooth glide.

That's what you'll get. Thanks, Peter. Thanks, Rob. Thank you for joining us, everyone, and we'll see you in the comments at Ricochet 2.0. Next week, fellas. Next week. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Thank you. ¶¶ Ricochet. Join the conversation. Thank you.