The Ricochet Podcast - We're Not Finished Yet

Episode Date: April 28, 2023

Mr. President says he needs four more years to break the country, so we at Ricochet thought we'd bring in a few guests that believe we aren't quite done for. First up is the spritely, always sunny, Kevin Williamson to make the case that things aren't quite as bad as many would have us believe. And Andrew Gutmann returns to tell us about his bold campaign in the sunshine state to take a seat in Congress. (Support the effort to take back our future here!)It turns out James was a-way last week. He's still a dude as far as we can tell. The reunited trio chat about his couple weeks in Europa.

I told him I was going to wear a bow tie. It's like a silent solidarity. And then he said, yeah, great. And then he texted me and said, don't, actually don't. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Read my lips.

No new taxes. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lalix, and today we talk to Kevin Williamson about how everything's really better than you think, and Andrew Goodman, who's running for Congress. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Towns that have been forgotten and left behind for dead are coming alive again because of you all and what we're doing. Now we've just got to keep it going. Finish the job. Believe me, you'll never get bored with winning. We never get bored. Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, episode number 639.

Wow, how did we get that far? Well, why don't you join us at ricochet.com and see exactly what the whole enterprise is all about. And you, too, can be part of the most stimulating conversations and community on the web. I'm James Lilacs, back after a two-week hiatus spent elsewhere, which we'll talk about at the end of the show. But nobody cares. I wouldn't. Well, no, actually, I would. Maybe I'll make up a whole bunch of stuff and make it sound really fast. I was abroad, as Rob said last week, and apparently this caused people on Twitter to indicate that i'd had gender affirming uh surgery minnesota being the haven for that that it is

joined by peter robinson and rob long gentlemen biden has announced his re-election and uh you gotta love this uh this statement this uh this new phrase let's finish the job because apparently it's gonna take eight years to fundamentally transform America. What is the job, exactly? I like that phrase because it sounded like, the country's not dead yet, let's finish the job. Let's reach for the pillow. Let's squeeze the IV drip, or whatever it is. Let's finish this. I'm surprised that he lined up that that many i mean you know he's he seems to be doing a pretty good job uh in the democratic party of of getting reluctant

endorsements or maybe even enthusiastic endorsements i guess it helps to have kamala harris as your running mate peter are you saying anything but, are you sensing a Kennedy groundswell here that may derail Biden's efforts to have term number two? Robert Kennedy Jr. is at 19% in New Hampshire, I believe. And there's some doubt now about whether Biden will even contest. It's all kind of a mess. But what's clear is that nobody really wants Biden. But the Democratic Party has convinced itself, well, actually, that's not quite true. Let's finish the job is to the rest of America, as Rob just demonstrated, a preposterous campaign slogan. But they seem to have decided to aim at the left of the Democratic Party because what they think

is, you know what, Biden may simply be sleepwalking through life, but the people are, however it gets done, maybe it's Chuck Schumer, maybe it's AOC in the, however it gets done, the progressive agenda is advancing. And Let's Finish the Job is directed at them. They seem to have decided that this guy, Weekend at Bernie's, El Cid is my favorite comparison. The legend of El Cid, the great Spanish leader who was so great that they propped him up in the saddle after he had died and still followed him into battle against the Moors. That seems to be what's going on here. But for the rest of the country, this is just, nobody wants this. Nobody wants Trump either, as far as I can, but that's not true. There's a kind of corresponding Trump no matter what group on the right that reflects the

progressive left. But for ordinary Americans, and there's still a majority this is just bizarre that's all i've got it's just bizarre it's surreal it's surreal yeah well i mean sort of like i mean the definition of running on fumes right i mean the the way it's supposed to go is that there's a bunch of people in line who could be contenders for the big job. And they're being told by the party elders, hey, hey, hey, you wait your turn. You wait your turn. You wait your turn. And there's a clamoring and then the young lion guts and just either guts the old lion in the primaries um sits there and glowers and hurts the whatever like

this is how it works in both parties i would have a hard time thinking about who are the young lions in the democratic party in the democratic party yes who are the young who are the people in the democratic party you're thinking oh boy in four years my god that's gonna who are those people who are in um you know the equivalent of bill clinton in 1990 who thought you know what this is my time um and you know the clinton campaign in 92 was actually one of the best political campaigns ever it was unbelievably smart and disciplined um and managed to do a thing that was very difficult to do at the time um and i feel like that that's the i say this all the time about democrats like the the solution for democrats is so easy

find yourself some southern moderate democrats make them governor of southern states which you can do even more it's even more possible now than it was before and then those people will run for president and they will win. That's kind of how it works. It used to before the party got moved more to the left. I mean, nowadays there are positions that they would have to take that are absolutely antithetical to the wishes of the modern Democratic Party poobahs. I mean, if you're going to run in the South and you're going to win in the South, you've got to be a little bit or pretend to be conservative on some social issues. That's a lot harder today than it used to be. Now, you have to embrace a panoply of things, which are not just

liberal versions of contentious issues, but redefinitions of the way society is ordered and the way people think about things. So it may work the 92, but not now. I remember in 92 when Gore was put up as the vice president, they called the ticket the double Bubba, if you remember that, making a reference to a kind of gum, as though Al Gore himself had any Bubba-esque characteristics. Those days are gone. I can name two members of the Democratic bench, and they fit exactly the profile that Rob just outlined. Governors of southern states. One is John, I'm not sure I can pronounce, John Bell, B-E-L, John Bell Edwards is the governor of Louisiana. Why does the rest of the Democratic Party ignore this man who wins elections in Louisiana,

can somehow or other satisfy the Democratic establishment, the liberals, and the upstate conservative Democrats, John Bel Edwards is pro-life. So they rule him out. Okay. There's another one. He's too young, but keep an eye on him. Wes Moore. Wesley Moore, 44 years old, now in his, what, third or fourth month as governor of Maryland. African-American, graduate of Oxford, Johns Hopkins, Valley Forge Military Academy. Very impressive guy. But the point I'm trying to make is they are there. The system does, even on the Democratic side, the system does does work maybe a little too slowly for them

this time around but Gavin Newsom would be a better candidate than than than Joe Biden Gavin Newsom would be honest about well maybe honest maybe the wrong word to use but you'd have a real debate there would be a straight forward progressive agenda with somebody who has the energy and smarts to pursue it uh that's what i want i want a clean debate an election that's a real choice i mean one of the problems we're going to find is that the press is going to um be even more enraging as it covers for biden's increasingly disassociated state right so you know he's know, he only has a couple press conferences. I remember when, if a president,

if a Republican president didn't have a press conference once a week, they would talk about why he was hiding. If you go, if you LexisNexis headlines, the president seems to be hiding from press. It's all Republicans who vote. He's only had a press conference in the past month.

Biden doesn't have them. And when he has them, the questions are already prepared and his answers are already prepared. So. Which is an interesting little thing. We've been told this happens all the time. It's been going on for quite some time as if that makes it better. The president photographed with a piece of paper in his hand with the reporter's picture, how to pronounce the name, and what they're going to ask, as if the idea that you could spontaneously ask Joe Biden a question out of the blue about anything

within his purview and he would be able... It's alarming to say the least. And those tend to reinforce the narrative that perhaps the fellow at the top is not at the top of his game uh i'd like to think that we have a guy that could just go out there and answer these things without cheap little notes like this and do so in a way that wasn't just a total word cell that makes you wince as we're kind of used to right right and we have one but unfortunately he's uh his oxygen is being constricted at the moment by that other fellow. So yeah, we're going into an election with octogenarians, with old men born in the 40s, I think, which is not a sign of robust vigor, health, and new spirits in the American Republic of ours. Hey, I interrupt, but we'll be back right after this message uh when it comes to castigating the american republic though there's uh there's there's nobody like our friend kevin williamson

and we're going to have him on now kevin the national correspondent for the dispatch writes the weekly wonderland newsletter he's penned more than a half dozen books most recently big white ghetto and the smallest minority kevin welcome back hey what's up hey you know it's been a long time um you know i was just thinking back the other day you made half of america hate you with the uh statement about uh the death penalty for abortion and you made the other half hate you with the thing about getting you all and get out of your town it's been a while since we've had a really broad polarizing comment from kevin william. It's a shame there's only two halves. Yeah, I know.

You've got to start splitting the halves. All right. So you were talking about Biden and his place in history just a minute ago. I was listening in. And over at the Dispatch, we have a book club we do with our readers, and we just did Bill Bryson's book on 1927. And if I'm remembering my math here, Calvin Coolidge had only been out of office 13 years when Joe Biden was born. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, I think he was born in 1944.

Stars and bars. Oh, my. bars oh my so um we are we are we are closer in history or we're further away in history from 9-11 than he was from the presidency of of warren g harding wow wow that does say what you need to say isn't that in some way i mean i guess the my question is, like, as a conservative, a sort of out-of-it president who's only kind of doing stuff for about five hours a day is an ideal president in many ways, as long as nothing happens, as long as they don't do anything, as long as they have no agenda, as long as they're just going to kind of... We're for gridlock. Speaking of silent cow, just kind of silent cow it out right yeah you know i've got a got a piece in the new york post on sunday that kind of kind of makes that that argument that biden's you know his best thing to do right now would be to follow his instincts and take a nap and sort of you know stay stay out of things because um

you know biden had sort of two um twoitions, right? One, that he was the return to normal guy after Trump and all the Trump craziness. And that didn't really work out because, believe it or not, Trump isn't the prime source of all the craziness in our politics. He's more of a symptom of it than a cause of it. You know, the sort of crazy, angry partisanship and social media driven tribalism and all that stuff was never going to go away. So we don't have a return to kind of quiet and tribalism and all that stuff was never was never going to go away. So we don't have a return to kind of quiet and comedy and all that stuff. The second, you know, possible value proposition from Biden was that if not the president himself, then at least members of his administration would be basically competent and that we could expect, you know, some sort of certainly left of center Democratic, but kind of, you know, reasonably competent, moderate ish, you know, steady

hand on the tiller kind of performance from them. And, you know, with GDP growth at one point, one percent and real wages still lower than they were on the day he was elected president and inflation running where it is, you know, we're going into the season when people are going to be taking summer vacations and what not with, you know, airfares up 10 percent over where they were before the pandemic, hotel rooms up 20 percent, car rental fees up 50 percent, that sort of thing. People are going to, fairly or not, and I think it's silly how much we associate the president with the economy. I know I've written and talked about this a lot, but every time I bring it up, I have to just reinstate it, that it's pure superstition to think that the overall performance of something

as complex as the U.S. economy really depends on the character of the person in the White House. But that's the kind of, you know, game he set up for himself and the way he's invited himself to be judged. And I don't think that he's going to come off particularly well in that judgment, which means that his, you know, his best hope is to get Trump or a Trump-like candidate against him in the general election so that it can be another episode in, you know, hysteria and negative partisanship. But the president can dampen rude animal spirits. The president can set the tone for energy policy. The president can set the tone for energy policy. The president can set the tone for an awful lot of things that do actually affect the way the economy is.

And Biden certainly made some mistakes on that front, particularly on the energy front, which is really, really irritating. I mean, we talk about infrastructure, but the actual infrastructure the country needs to build is things like fuel pipelines. You know, I live in Dallas, which a couple of years ago, you couldn't buy gasoline in Dallas for a while because we had a big flood down in Houston and it knocked out the one pipeline that really connects gasoline supplies from the refineries down there to the rest of the state and throughout the rest of the country. And when you've got that much vulnerability in a place like Texas, you know, when you're within driving distance of where they actually make the gasoline, this suggests that we've got some fragility in the system that needs to be worked out through additional investments.

But gas is yesterday. That's never what they're talking about when they talk about infrastructure. But fossil fuels were yesterday. And Biden, who probably would have scoffed at the idea of getting off of fossil fuels 20, 30 years ago because the overwhelming majority of people thought it was a ridiculous idea, is now, of course, just going to sit back and think of England and let it happen. Because the geist of his party is demanding that we all get off of fossil fuels by 2030. The Pentagon, I believe, had some note that they were going to go to all off of fossil fuels by 2030 the pentagon i believe had some they were going to go to all electric vehicles domestically by 2030 which is according to kevin according to kevin biden is closer to being a fossil fuel himself

than he is to the presidency of warren harding um okay so uh your recent piece which i read i loved um as i love everything you write but this one, I have a question about it. So you essentially are saying Americans are just wrong about the economy, that we are deluding ourselves into thinking that things are bad when things have never been better. Well, I wouldn't say things have never been better, but if you compare the way the United States economy got through COVID and the post-COVID period, even with a lot of bad decision-making out of Washington, some fairly bad policy about continuing emergency spending, especially which has been a bad idea and it's really contributed to inflation and some other disruption. Yeah, we've done pretty well. If you look at things like growth and productivity, it's been solid. There's a sort of myth we have that there was

some great economic decline in the post-war era in the United States, which just really simply isn't the case. If you look at U.S. share of world GDP, it's about a quarter right now, which is where it was back in the 1990s. It's been higher and lower at various times. If you look at our productivity growth, if you look at the long-term trend in things like wages and consumer purchasing power and even inflation, even with the recent troubles with inflation, you know, we've had really pretty solid performance for a long, long time. And that's continued under presidencies and congresses of different parties, sometimes

with radically different economic priorities. You know, we've got just a really wonderfully, amazingly productive and resilient economy, which contributes to having a productive and resilient economy, which contributes to having a productive and resilient society. And this kind of, you know, bitching and moaning and woe is us and man, wouldn't it be great if it was 1952 and we could all go work in a tire factory again, sort of stuff. It's just nonsense. You know, you can have a 1950 standard of living if you want one right now on what you would make working at 7-Eleven, but nobody wants a 1950 standard of living if you want one right now on what you would make working at 7-11 but um nobody wants a 1950 standard of living uh what they want is this illusion of you know some kind of uh utopian uh post-war manufacturing and industrial golden age that wasn't all that great

for the people who actually lived in it you know uh i remember my my grandfather worked for uh phillips petroleum which was you know at the time considered a pretty good job he lived in it. You know, I remember my grandfather worked for Phillips Petroleum, which was, you know, at the time considered a pretty good job. He lived in Phillips, Texas, which was a Phillips company town. And, you know, he lived in a house that was probably 800 square feet, something like that, you know, air conditioning, that sort of thing. And that was, you know, kind of, that was the steady kind of middle-class manufacturing industrial lifestyle. And to a man who probably lived through the Depression, that was pretty good. That was the steady kind of middle-class manufacturing industrial lifestyle. And to a man who probably lived through the Depression, that was pretty good. That was okay.

Oh, yeah. He was a full-grown adult during the Depression, yeah. And, you know, nobody wants that. You know, these kids coming out of college right now saying, you know, our grandparents' generation, they had it so good. Our great-grandparents, oh, go try it. Yeah, so, Kevin, where does the bitching and moaning, let me frame it a little different way. Here's what you'll hear over and over and over again. One reason that kids are marrying later, one reason that the birth rate is down is that you can't afford to raise a family on a single income anymore. But that is, that has to be in some basic way simply

untrue. Standards of living have continued to rise and have risen dramatically from the late 50s early 60s when I still have childhood memories of my mother having to wash cloth diapers because nobody had invented disposable. I mean clearly at the point you make, we live better now than we did then. Where does the bitching and moaning come from? Yeah. Well, let me preface this by saying this, the forthcoming lecture on why people should get married younger and start families is coming to you from a 50-year-old man with a newborn baby. Yeah, well, we want to get to that. I want to hear, if anything would mellow, Kevin Williamson, and I'm not sure anything would, it would be a newborn.

We want to get to that, Kevin. Yeah, well, we won't talk about that too much, I think. But yeah, it certainly is the case that if you are 27 years old and you're a college graduate and you're making, you know, some reasonable but not outstanding income and you want to get married and have some kids, you're going to have to give some stuff up. You're not going to have the same sort of lifestyle that you would if you were single. Of course, there are some, you know, there are some good trade-offs there too, of course, that I think that people maybe don't appreciate. You guys probably all know Brian Kaplan, who wrote a wonderful book called Selfish Reasons to Have More Children. He's an economist and a kind of pointy-headed libertarian, but a very fun writer.

So I think it's not really... There's a couple of things going on. One is anxiety about status, which is separate from anxiety about actual absolute economic position. And I think a lot of that is driven by social media, the fact that we have so much more immediate access to how other people live, you know, what their lives look like, what sort of vacations they take, what their consumption looks like. And we end up comparing ourselves to people who aren't really our socioeconomic peers. The other is anxiety about change. And I think this is the really important one. You know, if you go back to the kind of Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, and you get the beginnings of what will eventually become capitalism, where people start to have

choice about what kind of jobs they have and where they live and things like that, their standards of living, their, you know, their real income, their real choices, their real liberty economically, personally, and politically all increase radically. And they're all very, very unhappy about it because all of these new opportunities and benefits came with responsibilities and disruptions that they didn't like. And they had to make choices that they didn't have to make before. And not everyone experiences choice as this wonderful thing. Some people experience it as stress and anxiety. And I think that's one of the problems we run into in kind of policymaking is that that whole

culture is dominated by people who are mostly pretty high income, lots of opportunities in life, high performing, highly educated, that kind of stuff. And they don't understand that people see what they see as opportunity, as anxiety. So we've been going through, you know, since the end of the Cold War, something that we call for lack of a better term, globalization. And it also has left everyone economically better off in all sorts of measurable ways. We've got more choices, higher incomes, better consumption. We're better fed, better housed. We get better health care. You've got more choices, higher incomes, better consumption. We're better fed, better housed. We get better health care. You can travel more, all that sort of stuff. But what you don't have is as much stability as we had before that. So, you know, my father, as an adult, had

essentially two jobs. You know, he worked at one of them for 22 years and the other one for 21 years or something like that. And then he retired. By the time I was 40, I had had, I don't know, 16 jobs or something like that. And one for a very short time, as I recall. One for three days. Although I was after 40. Okay. Yeah, I think I've had, you know, 30 home addresses or something like that. And which is great for people've had, you know, 30 home addresses or something like that, which is great for people like me. You know, we kind of thrive on that, but not everyone wants that kind of life. Some people would like, would take the tradeoff of having, you know, less income, less wealth, less flexibility, lower levels of consumption if everything were quieter and more predictable and stable and guaranteed. And that's really the source of a lot of our social tension, I think, is between a kind of upper class of professionals who value choice and opportunity and flexibility versus a class of people who are socioeconomically, maybe just one or two degrees below them, or just simply oriented in a different way,

who have a stronger preference for stability and predictability and those sorts of things. Well, if we are going through a sort of economic transformation like we did in the 16th century, Joe Biden might be the perfect man to lead us there because he remembers it well. But I want to push back on a couple of things that you said there. One, the economy, yeah, in general, stupendous. But of course, it's a big country with a lot of moving parts and a lot of places. I live in one of those cities that was absolutely devastated by the lockdown, a self-inflicted

wound, a gunshot to both feet and the forebrain. And consequently, we have a dead downtown. Everybody got used to staying home and working in their pajamas like San Francisco. You have office occupancy rates that are nowhere. You've got a lot of leases coming up. They're going to have to be renegotiated downward, which drives the property taxes downward. When you add a city like Chicago, which also had the emptying out, a city like San Francisco, like Portland, which is going through several self-inflicted wounds at the same time, we have a real paradigm shift about how American cities are organized. And I don't think that's particularly stupendous. I think it's breaking a model that worked and the economic fallout is immediate. I mean, where I once lived in a thriving ecosystem of small

businesses, it's now dead, gone, 80% of it. And you replicate that across the country and that ain't good. So give me something hopeful to think about that. First of all, let me tell you that it's worse than you think. I lived in New York City for a long time, and New York is great as long as two things work. One is the subways, and the other is the police department. You know, if they've got crime basically under control and the subways work, New York's a great place to live. As soon as those things get screwed up, it's an unlivable place, which is one of the reasons why I moved. But, you know, the cities really are screwed up right now in lots of ways. Every big city in this country has got a lot of serious problems.

And you would think that this would create all sorts of political opportunities for, you know, conservative to libertarian, sort of market-oriented reformist candidates. Let me ask you all a trivia question here. So here in Dallas, we've got an election for mayor coming up. Anyone know who the Republican candidate is? In Dallas? Yeah. Gee, does it matter? I dallas had gone to the left well dallas is a very democratic city yeah certainly but the truth is there isn't one oh there isn't one our mayor here eric johnson who's an okay mayor and our elections for mayor are

technically non-partisan but he's saying you're pretty progressive denocrat he is running unopposed. The Republicans, and there is a Republican party of Dallas County that's got all sorts of officers and stuff. They haven't even put up a candidate. So we are the third largest city in Texas and the ninth largest city in the country. Republicans aren't even in the race here. And this is a pattern that you see all over the country where you've got republicans and i just use republicans as a kind of shorthand for people who aren't you know crazy lefties right um simply refuse to uh enter the contest and that is um you know it's a real problem because so i like to use texas as an example republicans are so doomed in the cities that you know in texas which is again

a pretty republican state although not as republican as people sometimes think it is um the biggest city in texas where republicans reliably win any kind of election from you know mayor's races to the majority of the vote in the presidential race is my hometown lubbock not fort worth nope not anymore fort worth currently has a republican mayor uh Tarrant County, I think, went for Biden in 2020. Wow. I don't think Cruz won Tarrant County, or he certainly didn't win the city of Fort Worth. And so Lubbock is what? 240,000 people.

Okay, right. So you've got Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, Austin. El Paso. um houston houston dallas fort worth san antonio austin el paso all run by democrats yeah the state that republicans like me keep fantasizing about moving to because it's so so republicans are great in texas except for the parts of texas where the where the people are and now we've got why am i laughing it's to to avoid, I suppose. Well, Texas has a slightly larger rural population, at least in terms of voter turnout. I think we're a little more urban than the national average, but we still got enough people in kind of exurban and rural areas who turn up for the vote that Republicans still do kind of reasonably well here. But that's not going to last very long. And it's not just, you know, the cities themselves, but now the first rings of suburbs around the cities. So if you look at, say, Harris County, where Houston is to graduate from high school, go to an Ivy League college and work for a Silicon Valley startup, which is something a lot of people want to do. Republicans hate everything you've chosen.

And their whole their whole kind of, you know, public discourse is based on running down the sort of institutions that a lot of people associate with upward mobility and a good kind of life. And one of those institutions is American cities. You know, I will forever be on Ted Cruz's case, not because he was criticizing Donald Trump, which of course is a worthwhile thing to do, but for denouncing him as the embodiment of New York values. Well, you went to Princeton. Your wife works for Goldman Sachs. Come on. You know, you're not some good old boy from Uvalde.

You know, ha-ha, New York City. And this sort of how-do-you-do-anything Republicans do with the cities just has to really stop. First of all, because we need better cities, but also they're simply not going to be a competitive political party if they're entirely dependent on exurban and rural areas. So, Kevin, I just remember, I mean, I guess the first president I was really sort of aware of, like, you know, I was a young teenager. Was Calvin Coolidge calvin coolidge um eisenhower like uh was ronald reagan right and one of the raps we had ronald reagan was that he was so dumb because he was so optimistic right but the attitude from the sort of smart people

then was like this guy's he's a he's an idiot listen to the way he talks that like sunny days are ahead you know it's morning in america that there's a number here i'm saying there's not one problem we face as a nation that someone in this country isn't solving right now somewhere which is completely true and then some somehow in the past sort of five ten years um as the left has been or the left left half of the country and left half of media or whatever you want to call it has become more and more entrenched in the idea that things are really really terrible things are really really awful not just in the economy with the wage with the you

know um with the disparity and wealth gap but also because we're a systemically racist country and there's really no way you could possibly break out of that yoke and the counter argument from the other side has been they're right it is terrible we aren't it's terrible and disastrous for other reasons but we're doomed we don't have a country anymore it's over um and they wonder why nobody likes them they wonder why they're like struggling to like get to to barely 49% for either any candidate. Yeah. Megan McLeod had a pretty good column about that a week or so ago. It was about the debate over, is the guy's name Dylan Mulvaney, the trans person?

Yes. And her argument was that, you know, Dylan Mulvaney seems like someone who's having fun, you know, whereas everyone who is exercised about this, you know, seems sort of miserable and terrible. And, you know, if your if your argument is everything sucks, we're all going to die. We're going to be overrun by dirty foreigners and the country's over and we're losing our Republican, all this stuff. Nobody wants to sign up for that. You know, if you listen to the way Republicans talk, you would think that people in Provo had to get up and, you know, get in snow plows every morning to drive the drag queens out of the way who were chasing their children around. And it's just not really the way the

country actually actually is. And there's a lot to criticize about the United States. I mean, there's a reason I've got the, immigration office bookmarked on my computer. And I'm trying to figure out how to do those forms in German. But there's some real troubles in this country. But I think you're right. Things are almost never as bad as the kind of political entrepreneurs want you to think they are, because it's really easy to sell stuff through fear and loathing and terror and all that.

But also the problems we actually have aren't the problems that people say that we have, I think. It's often the case that when we do point out a problem, though, you know, A, the problem doesn't exist. B, if it does exist, it's a good thing. And C, you're a hater for not going along with the agenda. It's not a matter of how many drag queens they have to get, you know, they have to plow to get to where they have to be. It's the question of is it meet right and proper in society to say, you know what? This family-friendly show here where they're twerking in front of the little two-year-olds and having them stuff the dollar bills. Can we say that's wrong?

We can say that, can't we? We can have an argument about that. We can discuss it without saying that the republic is crumbling because there's a lot of really ugly men in mascara out there moving around but it's not it's not a completely irrelevant issue if you can tie it to a larger you know not top down army agenda but a larger re-evaluation and reconstruction of american sexual morals and gender theory and the rest of it. I mean, it's of a piece of things that we can talk about, and it doesn't distract us from the ability to talk about other things. You know, I wrote an essay a couple years ago that I was pretty proud of called Consider the Moose.

And my beginning argument is that we all spend a lot of time worrying about shark attacks, but you're a lot more likely to be killed by a moose than by a shark. You know, moose are really aggressive and there's a lot more of them and there are a lot more interactions with them, but they're just not terrifying that way. And we tend to fixate on problems that have some sort of exotic or dramatic character. So if you want to talk about, you know, trouble in American, you know, sexual and family mores, yeah, you've got a lot to talk about. But it starts with the divorce rate between 1965 and 1995 being whatever it was, some insane number, and the number of children being born out of wedlock and the rest of this and the normalization of all that. And I remember the debate about gay marriage and people saying, well, this is just it for marriage. Well, I mean, the traditional version of marriage had been dead for a generation by that

point and the real mystery was why gay people wanted to take up such a devased and devalued institution in the first place um so while yeah the kind of you know drag queen uh story hour sort of stuff is um certainly not uh at the top of the uh list of places i'd like to take my own kids or um that i think is good for children i don't think that actually is where the um the real problem in our society is i think this is a a small dramatic thing that it's easy to get excited about um but the real problem is that 90 of the people who are excited about it have kids who have three different children by three different fathers, and I've never even thought about getting married. I agree. If I had to choose which one that I would fix, which one that I could wave a magic wand,

it would be the destruction of the American family and all the rest of it. But at the same time, having said that and having that my prior top priority for fixing American society, when we had a little debate, when we had a signing of a bill here at the Minnesota State Capitol that would protect transgender people, which is usually in the floor of the Capitol, and it's usually roped off. You don't walk on it because of reverence. And he's got ridiculous heels and some purple outfit, and he's thrashing around and gyrating to the applause of everybody else. And thankfully, he didn't do what he did on his Instagram page, which is to cover himself with blood and hail Satan. But I'm looking at hail Satan covered with blood guy in his fishnet and his stilettos, dancing on the symbol of the state in this wonderful classical temple of democracy and thinking, I would prefer this not to have happened. I wish we hadn't gotten to the point where this sort of Weimar ridiculousness is not celebrated as stunning and brave, but that, you know, what our Scandinavian forebears might've thought of course is something you can only imagine.

But okay. If that's dead topic here, I don't want to rehash it, but I want to push back on something you said earlier, because the people in the comments will. Globalization helps us all. I agree. We all benefited for it. We got a lot of cheap stuff. We got less, we got a lot of, I mean, I got a television set. I probably paid 68 bucks for that is better than the movie screens that I grew up with as a kid. But I was on Amazon the other day trying to find an espresso machine. And there's about 178 espresso machines that I could get in this price point, all from companies that don't exist.

Just some fake brand name full of consonants and vowels that they stuck on the front of the thing. And we're not better off for that. I don't want to be like Bernie Sanders saying, why do you need 178 espresso machines? I'd be content with choice from 81. But you look at that, and you look at also the fact that we seem to be particularly vulnerable during the pandemic to things that China made, and we didn't. And we ask ourselves, at the end of the day, did we really benefit? We did, but so much so that let's do it again? Or isn't there a way that we can kind of make cheap

espresso machines here in America and drugs and the rest of it too? I mean, shouldn't we onshore some of this stuff back? No, you should go to Williams-Sonoma and buy yourself a proper espresso machine made in Italy like a civilized person would. Right. Well, that's my plan. What brand would you suggest? I have a Mr. Coffee myself. Oh, man of the people. Sure. I'm not a man of the people. I don't like the people very much, but I prefer to drink coffee. But also, I've got the Hipster Coffee shop down the street from me because I do live in America, and I can get my vegan kolaches or whatever it is they're selling down there. Kevin, I'm going to insist on this, but you being you, you can find some way just to flip the question off if you want to.

You are 50 years old, you just said this, and you have a newborn. 11 months, yeah. What's that? 11 months, yeah. 11 months. First of all, congratulations. Thank you. But you have no idea how shocked many of us were when we heard,

wait, Kevin is really getting married? Yeah. And you didn't give us enough time to adjust to that idea before Kevin is going to be a father? Okay. So, one of the many appealing, you're a kind of a Mencken in that your grouchiness is actually appealing. I want to know, give us the top three list. How fatherhood has changed you, changed your thinking, changed your demeanor? What has it done for you or changed you, changed your thinking, changed your demeanor? What has it done for you or to you, Kevin? You know, I think my grouchiness is exaggerated.

No, I don't think so. I don't think so. I always hear from people who think that I'm a really angry writer. I don't think I'm a particularly angry writer. I compared you with Mencken. Won't you take that? No, I don't think I'm a particularly angry writer. I compared you with Mencken. Won't you take that? No, I don't like Mencken. I think Mencken was a genuine misanthrope

in a way that I'm not. No, you're not. That's true. Also that it was a shtick with him. Toward the end of his career, it was a shtick. He was a wonderfully gifted writer in a lot of ways, don't get me wrong. But I think Mark Twain is more cynical than I was. Williamson compares himself to Mark Twain.

Not exactly what I'm talking about here. So, no, you know, being father, it's, well, okay, it's actually, it has made me an angrier writer in some ways, or an angrier person, I think, in some ways. Because it makes me a lot more attuned to the fact that there are a lot of children out there who are relatively low priorities for their parents um as i certainly was um you know i'll i'll write about this you know one of these days but um yeah i think actually having uh i'll do a little jonah goldberg here i think that um having a dog makes you more i think attuned to how people treat animals in the world. And I think having a kid does the same thing on a much deeper and more profound scale for thinking about how people are treated. I want to preserve this clip and then send it to your child on his 18th birthday. When you were 11 months old son your

father compared you to a dog well we have a very nice name pancake and your father by the way was born during the nixon administration he was yeah just right before the big re-election um but you put your elderliness in context for him well you know on the subject of political swings i think about that a lot because you think 1968 just a few years before i was born seemed like the most left-wing time in american history and then in 72 nixon wins 49 states so um you know the idea that we are at some kind of lost cause uh level of of political um insanity i think is uh is is is not defensible. So yeah, certainly, you know, having kids just makes you softer in a lot of ways. It makes you just aware of their kind of,

you know, vulnerability and dependence and all of that. Certainly makes you grateful for things like healthcare, you know. So again, we live in Dallas, as I mentioned, and Dallas is a great place for medical care and that sort of thing. We had a little thing during the pregnancy where we thought there might be a problem that turned out not to be a problem, but they're like, well, we can give you, you know, a fetal MRI and we can do it two hours from now and it's going to cost 400 bucks or something like that. It's just amazing the stuff that you can do and um yeah so you certainly learn to be grateful for those sorts of things i wouldn't buy an espresso machine from amazon because a lot of their manufactured uh things like that tend to be terrible but man it's a good place

to buy baby formula and baby food and all that kind of stuff and have it just delivered to your home by the ton so um yeah we always we always jokingly say peace be upon him when the name Jeff Bezos is mentioned because it makes life so much easier for kind of, you know, bulk purchases and that sort of thing. Right, right. Well, we look forward to you giving the world an account of the books that you have to read to your child

and how you will agree or disagree with a little engine that could if you give a mouse a cookie all the rest of these things are fraught with lessons of for life oh man you wouldn't believe how many books i bought for this you know kid already right bust out for uh for for toddlers all right kevin you're at the beginning of a wonderful wonderful journey and and you're going to have a great deal of fun. It's going to be over too soon. So, you know, we'll talk to you

when your kid moves away to college, which for you, I guarantee, will seem like 90 minutes. Well, yeah, but I'm going to be 72 years old. You won't have any idea.

And I doubt you. And you will have mellowed so much. Kevin Williamson for The Dispatch. Thanks for joining us today. My pleasure. Thanks a lot.

Congratulations on that baby. Thank you. I wonder if he's getting a lot of sleep. Because they do tend to keep you up. I just remember when my daughter was born. There was those moments where I would just be so exhausted seeing my wife do everything that I just had to take a nap. But luckily, actually not luckily, in those days, it was hard for me to fall asleep because I was sleeping on sheets that were like iron. Not that they wore like iron, but that they felt like it or that they were scratchy or

that they just came apart at the seams because they were cheap. Nowadays, of course, you know, if I had another kid again and I had to nap a little bit more than I do, I would be content to know that Molden Branch would take me where I needed to go. And also, I got to tell you this, it's getting to be a little bit warmer here where you might be. Not here, 45 flipping degrees and rainy and drizzly. I want to actually go back to bed into my nice, cozy Bowling Branch sheets. It's getting hot where you are. You're thinking, hmm, are these sheets going to cause me peril when it's hot and I go to

sleep? No, no, no, no, no, no. Bowling Branch, they're the bedding experts and they make the highest quality sheets with incredible craftsmanship. Each sheet set is slow made for an unmatched softness with 100% traceable organic cotton. They get softer with every wash. The signature hemmed sheets from Bowling Branch are bestseller for a good reason. Bowling Branch uses the highest quality 100% organic cotton threads on earth. And each sheet set is slow made, as I said, for a superior softness and a better night's sleep.

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And again, I have to report, it's now been three weeks since I've told you that my sheets are softer than they were the last time because I've been away. But they were washed, and they are incrementally even softer than they were before. Keep in mind, Bowling Branch gives you a 30-night risk-free guarantee, which I swear they do because they know that nobody having slept one night and then will ever take them back. They got free shipping and free returns on all U.S. orders. Sleep better at night with Bowling Branch sheets, and sleep better in the afternoon, too, if you take a nap. Get 15% off your first order when you use the promo code RICOCHET at BowlingBranch.com. That's Bowling Branch, B-O-L-L-A-N-D, branch.com, promo code ricochet. Exclusions apply. See site for details. And we thank Boland Branch for

sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. Now we welcome back Andrew Gutman. He became known as the Brearley dad after trying to get the parents of his daughter's school to stand up for their children's education. He's stuck with the fight against indoctrination in schools, and he's running for Congress. How about that? He's not all talk, but somebody who's actually going to get into the lion's den and do what needs to be done. Andrew, welcome back.

Thank you for having me. I've got to say, first of all, I love my Nespresso machine. I do not like Amazon. It's a company that should not exist. We can talk about that or not. And I think I disagree with everything that Kevin said. But of course, I am now the politician that he is complaining about. I like the Nespresso machine too. I do. All the color-coded capsules are something of a confusion to me because I don't care as long as it's not the green one, because I know the green

one's going to be espresso or it's going to be decaf, except when it's not. All right. You're running against Lois Frankel in Florida, District 22. Tell us about your opponent and what do you hope to do to win? Well, first, I have to get through the primary. So it's a long road. We've got not to log us as a primary. November is the election. Lois has been there. She's a sixth term congresswoman who has been there forever. She is not well liked by the people who like me. They want to get her out. They've never had what I'm told is a viable candidate in this district as a Republican. And there's a lot of excitement that I can be that viable candidate. But, you know, I feel I'm running for the same

reason I wrote the letter two years ago that we've talked about on the show a bunch of times. And I talk about all the time on Take Back Our Schools on Ricochet, which is I had a duty two years ago to write that letter to parents, never expected it to go viral. And I feel the same sort of duty now that this is the next step of the parents movement. People like me, we call ourselves accidental activists and we have to step up, because I don't think, kind of what your last guest was talking about, I don't think most people, and including most of our elected officials, fundamentally understand what is going on in our school systems and what is at stake in this culture war. And so I hope to bring that to

Congress. So, Andrew, I've got the 22nd congressional district up on my screen right now. We start just north of Boca Raton. We go all the way up to West Palm. That takes in Lake Worth, Boynton Beach, Delray Beach. Does it take in Palm Beach itself? I'm not clear about that. Andrew Barrett Yes, it takes in Palm Beach Island, which has now become the fundraising capital of the Republican fundraising capital of the world. Andrew Barrett Okay. So, you've got this little, long, narrow strip of sand, Palm Beach, where there's some rich Republicans.

But the rest of... Rich Democrats, too. Well, the rest of that district is... First of all, everybody's pretty rich who lives there. We've got 100% urban, it says. That doesn't sound like Republican country, really. We've got 40% minorities. Again, not a Republican district. And then we've got the

Cook Partisan Voting Index, D plus 7. Andrew... That's actually better than I thought. I've seen D plus 10 the last time I checked, but maybe that's after I announced. Okay. I mean, I just want... you try to reform the New York City schools. This is one impossible task. You move to Florida, you look around and say, let's do something else impossible here. What are you doing? We have to try. We have to fight. Look, DeSantis won the county, which was the first time in three or four decades that a Republican had won the county. He came very, very close to winning in

this district. I think it was two or three points that he lost by. This is possible. And with more and more people like myself coming from New York and coming from other blue states, coming down here, voting Republican, it's also 30 percent independence. And I think that I can reach those independents in a way that previous candidates had no shot at reaching. I'm Jewish. It's one of the most Jewish districts in the country. We've never had, in recent memory, a Jewish Republican candidate. We think this is doable. My political consultants think this is doable. We're going to fight like hell to make this happen. I mean, it's not easy. One more. I know Rob wants to get in. Can I just ask?

Anything. Okay. So, here, I used to feel, and this is the question, I used to feel that I could name, that I personally knew every conservative Jew in America. Norman Podhoretz, his son John, and that gets you to about 80% of them right, I mean, that's a small community, isn't it? You say that being Jewish will help you, but isn't it overwhelming? Even in Florida, isn't the Jewish community overwhelmingly democratic? Yes, yes. But they are, one of the differences with the Jewish community in Florida versus New York is they're pro-Israel here, so that helps. They are not pro-Israel in New York, so you have

that, and certainly I can speak to that. You know, my family has been involved in a lot of work in Israel. I think there is a realization on these culture war and education issues. These these grandparents and you have a lot of retirees, obviously, in this district and West Palm. These grandparents are seeing what is happening in their grandkids schools. They don't like it. So we think there are some of them that are that are reachable and that we can talk to. You know, if I win the independence, it's 30 percent that we can talk to. If I win the independents, it's 30% independents. I win the independents and I win the Republicans, we win. We don't need a single Democrat. That's the way the math works.

But I think we can reach people that previous Republican candidates had absolutely no shot at reaching. Great. Hey, Andrew, it's Rob Long in New York. Thank you for joining us. I have an answer in my head to this question, but I wonder if it's the Long in New York. Thank you for joining us. I have an answer in my head to this question, but I wonder if it's the same one. Whose campaign, clearly, Republican campaign do you think is the close model?

You kind of model yourself after. I have no idea. I don't model myself after anybody. When you run for office, you want to look for a path, right? And you can see where other people have maybe, there are a lot of issues, right? They've crystallized a few issues that really seem to resonate with people. Is there anyone that you think, okay, well, that proves that somebody with my message can win in what is in fact currently held as a blue district? Look, I think there are a number of outsider, you know, political outsiders that have been successful that you can look to. I think I'm somewhat I don't want to overstate my uniqueness, but I think I'm reasonably unique in trying to do this. You know, a complete political outsider. You know, I was not a Republican. I wasn't independent.

I sort of considered myself an independent my whole life i'm a libertarian but um i don't have what's your answer i don't have an answer um glenn yunkin yeah i thought he was more republican establishment that embraced his parents movement and i know a lot of people that were in that parents movement in virginia that really helped him and yeah but i mean he he for for the purple voters in virginia he crystallized something that they had been feeling which was that the schools that they're paying for yeah and education in general is off the rails and they're that is an issue i think i mean i don't know your district so i't know. But I feel like that's an issue that you, I put it this way. I have a lot of friends who are liberals and Democrats. And they will say things like, I'm a really liberal Democrat.

I am a progressive liberal Democrat. But, and then they will list one or two or three or four or five or ten things sometimes in which they differ on that current orthodoxy. And I'm like, well, I got some bad news for you. At the best you you're you're at the best you're a moderate you're probably a conservative right no no no i'm a liberal liberal um so i know a lot of people in new york yeah top three the top three the top three issues are always education it's all this is the one two or three depending on how old they are and how old their kids are yeah yeah no i i think we reach you know one of the things that

has been very frustrating to me since my letter happened and since the sort of parents movement started was that this became such a partisan issue. And that's the world we live in. We live in this polarized world. But this issue of education should not be a partisan issue them, are not happy with the direction of these schools. They're not happy with the anti-meritocracy, and they're not happy with what I would call, some people criticize it, the woke ideology, the gender and trans stuff, especially as motivating people. And so the question is, how do you reach those people? But if you can reach them, this absolutely crosses over the aisle. And I think, you know, that's the opportunity. So I think the education issue absolutely can motivate people in the center and in the center left well people who are listening to this podcast and not seeing it on our little live zoom thing here don't know it but andrew is is is in front of a book case with lots of books which we assume him being a republican conservative you will promptly ban and then burn at the conclusion of our little conversation here. So good luck. You can't see the bottom right section is all my critical race theory books that I've read. It's like a whole section of that because I had to understand the ideology that I'm talking about.

But no, we're not banning books. We're not banning. But look, I really call myself a classical liberal rather than a conservative. I mean, I prefer that. I always have called that. I don't think there's that much of a distinction these days between classical liberalism and conservatism and we need both those people we need to explain it we need to explain that exactly what classical classical liberalism means and reclaim the word andrew will talk to you again as the campaign goes on and thanks

for joining us here good luck and thank you very much for having me andrewgutman.com is the website andrewgutman.com yeah with that. AndrewGutman.com, yeah. We'll put that in the show notes for sure. And good luck out there in the shoe leather knock-on doors. That's the most important thing. I will. Hold on. Here's how impressed I am. I want everybody to know that Gutman has

one T and one N. No, two N's. Two N's? Oh my goodness. Okay, so this is really important. AndrewGutman.com. It's been wrong all over the internet, but we own all my goodness. Okay, so this is really important. Andrew, it's been wrong all over the internet, but we own all the different domain names, so if you get it wrong, you're going to be wrecked. I know you got it wrong, but can I give you one more

model? Yes, please. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Okay. She unseated an establishment Cortez. She unseated an establishment Democrat who'd been there a long time. No one thought she could do it. She marched around. She knocked on doors.

I mean, you've got to give her credit. She took that seat. She's a brilliant politician. Rumored now running for Senate in 2024. No reason you can't steal the playbook of people who've been successful, even if you disagree with them. Agreed. I guess this means when you win, we'll be seeing you in proper.

See you later. I got my tax the rich jacket. There you go. You're all set. All right. Thanks, guys. Bye-bye. Thanks, Andrew.

You're crazy, but we love you for it. Well, gentlemen, on the way out here a few minutes a week ago i was in the dumpiest airport i've ever been in in my life a place called luton oh sure luton in england north of north of london it's not bad it's just dumpy and it was cold i mean it's like they didn't turn the heat on and uh i caught an easy jet which is one of the ugliest airlines i've ever been on it's got this orange logo and this squashed cooper black typeface and you've got to pay for everything including oxygen and water and the rest of it but on the other hand it delivered me safely to barcelona which is where i was i was in england and then i was in barcelona i've never been to

barcelona i highly yeah would advise anybody who has the anybody to attempt to make a trip to that city because if you are interested in urbanism and how places can look, it's just a revelation. As much as I love American cities and as much as I love car culture and all the rest of it, and I have no beef with the suburbs whatsoever, there is part of me that just sings at this density and these stores and the shops and the trees and the universal height of the buildings in its course. I mean, it was just a life of the thing. I don't know, nobody cares, I took a vacation.

What I want to say is this. I find, and I found the same thing in England as well, that the idea that the ugly American that they hate is coming over there uh they still like us maybe it's just me but i don't think so they are still fascinated with america and they said they're i met a young man who was the tapas restaurant waiter and he he he wanted to know about America. He wanted to go. He wanted to go to Chicago. And he wanted, what was my favorite state? You know, and I didn't ask that question before, actually.

And in England, what I was talking to some people who are incredibly civilized, and, you know, they've been places, but they've never been to America. And we've sort of conjured up this trip that they would take to take, and I was describing where they should go, and part of it is the whole Florida. Why would I go to Florida? Because you learn something, and I realized you learn something about America no matter where you go. Get a car, hit the highway, go to the diners, stay in the cheap motels. And they were enthralled with the idea of America, and they still believed in it. And for all of its strange craziness and the politicians they don't like and the things they don't understand and the guns, they're always mad about the guns, we still hold a special place in the hearts of a lot of people around the world. And that is a really stupid, obvious thing to say,

except that we forget it sometimes and think that we're just constantly being poor-mouthed by our intellectual betters. So that's the only thing that I took away from the trip, aside from how much I love England, that I wish to share. Anything else, gentlemen, while I was away? I assume that you carried on. We talked about you behind your back, of course. Okay, I'll have to go back and listen to that one. What did you say? Wait a minute. You can't really say how much i loved england and then leave us with luton what luton where where else did you visit yeah well um i well i went to london and then picked up my daughter and went to walberswick which is this small town coastal town in suffolk where i go once a year

where i have friends where we do some business stuff. And I was also speaking at an arts festival, so that was fun. Really? A little talk on the... You're speaking at an arts festival? Oh, really? Yes. Well, they called up and asked if I would like to do something. Yes.

And I said, yes, absolutely. And then they said, what would you like to do? And I scrambled, and since I've been listening to Herbert Marshall do a very bad radio show in the 50s, I said, the British actors in American radio who defined the idea of i said uh the uh the the british actors in american radio who defined the idea of england for the american audience in the post-war period great brilliant come and do it so then i had to come up with something to prove my point and i was going to be speaking at the at the king theater now mind you this arts festival is scattered all about hailsworth and uh and the rest of the small little suffolk town so it's it's all over the place it's

one of those things where they get a room here they they get a room here at the old maltery, malting factory, and pack you in here. So I was impressed to hear that I would be speaking at the King Theater, expecting as I did some sort of, you know, Edwardian place or Victorian with three tiers of balconies and some, you know, musty, you know, backstage areas. And the King Theater. Well, I get to the King Theater, and it turns out that it's a room in the D.L. King Auto Dealership.

It's where they had their little conferences, and they got people together for sales talks or presentations or whatever. I met a dealer in an auto dealership in Halesworth. But it was a nice seating seating a lot of people could pack in and they did pack in it's standing room only and it was just absolutely marvelous and then we did work on our continuing effort to bring the writings in the television shows of pagan lunch back to life i stay with her daughter and her musician husband and that was great it's the garden of england it's a small town it's the growling sea at the edge of town, just constantly pawing at the island and taking

a few inches away every millennium or whatever, running down the beach with a dog, going to the pub for an astonishing quiz night, sitting next to a guy who lives around the corner who was in the last Star Wars, who was the solo star wars movie he got he got stabbed i didn't want to bring it up and his father was uh in the original uh house of cards in england ian richardson was his father oh you're kidding wow oh ian richardson was a great actor a great right right a serious actor even though we only know him and so is miles and so you know and miles is an incredibly plummy voice and he's just the very picture of a British actor. Speaks like it.

And then you find yourself, and my favorite, we're sitting around with Jan Etherton, who has been, she writes a sitcom for BBC Radio with Joanna Lumley and Roger Allum.

He's a comic actor? He's doing comedy work? He's absolutely, he's wonderful. Lumley and Roger Alam. He's a comic actor? He's doing comedy work? He's absolutely, he's wonderful in this series. And talk turns to musical theater, as it does sometimes, because Dennis had written several privates on Parade. A whole bunch of them, Dennis'

composer and the rest of it. And I mentioned this theory that I'd heard, been told, was that my fair lady is actually sort of a double meaning, because it's how Eliza Doolittle would pronounce my fair, Mayfair, my fair, Mayfair lady, my fair lady. And I mentioned that, and Dennis says, bollocks. And I said, well, that's what I heard. Astrid picks up her phone and says, I know who to call. And she calls the woman who was the seventh wife of the man who wrote the lyrics for my fair lady and she texts we were having a conversation

here it turns out that my fair lady may be a a play in the words it's my fair lady and the woman decks bags almost immediately absolute bollocks so if anybody brings that up to me i can say well i was at a dinner party you know we we asked it yes his seventh wife about it and she was quite quite quite clear didn't have so i mean i go to this place all these people are brilliant and they're all intelligent smart and conversation is sparkling and it's just it's i i mean i it's the greatest it's my it's my second home and i love it so much and i have such fun when i was there. Now, Barcelona, we stayed with the exchange students, with our old exchange students and her parents.

And so we got a granular molecular level tour of 11 miles a day walking through downtown Barcelona, through winding through the old medieval areas, going to the Roman ruins. And of course you got to see the Gaudi Church, which is ugly. It's fascinating. I think it's an insectoid alien nightmare, but it's fascinating. And so you spend a lot of time.

So just could be. There's nothing I love more in life than to walk around a city with my daughter and just soak it all in the typefaces of the buildings, the architecture, the history, the manifestation of the way it is at this minute, the way it manifests what was 500 years ago. That is my great joy and delight in life. And I got to do it again. And so I can die happy. I was sad that I missed the podcast, but you know what? I think Barcelona a little bit better. And now I have to go. We'd like to thank you all for listening. Bolan Branch brought you this podcast. And, you know, get yourselves, if you haven't, just do it. Get the sheets.

You will sleep better for the rest of your life. And, of course, Rob, would you like to tell them that there's a five-star review waiting to be written on Apple Podcasts? There is. You can take a minute to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. And the benefit of that is that the algorithm kicks in and more people can find the podcast so please do that for us and and speaking of people of course ricochet people meet in person in the real world in meat space as we used to call it horrible term go to ricochet.com and you can check the side panel that'll tell you where and if or when there's a meetup near you or you can

meet your fellow ricochetti gentlemen pleasure to be back. Great to talk to you. And we'll see you in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week. Next week, fellas. Next week, boys. Hello, I'm Dennis Neal, and here's what's bugging me. The media are burying some of the biggest scandals of our lifetime, and I'm here to call them out on it and make fun of them for it. The Twitter files and government censorship. The Biden documents. The Hunter laptop.

The lies of the FBI in the Russiagate hoax. China spy balloons and toxic chemical burn-offs. Join me to hear things no other journalist will dare tell you. All that and more on What's Bugging Me, available for download and streaming every Thursday right here on the Ricochet Audio Network and wherever you get your podcasts. Ricochet. Join the conversation.