Well, whiskey coming, take my pain, don's my brain? Oh whiskey, don't you let me go? Whiskey? Won't you help me hide? Oh you don't let me go? Where they slapped it up and live it? Ain't you easy on the Soldier Times guy to give it and let that whiskey flow where you're feeling lowest down and low Well, all right, gang.
I'm not sure whether to call this episode Ricochet Podcast over time or free Whiskey, Happy Hour, after hours or a bonus edition, but our fanatical fans will know that yesterday the three of us occupied the flagship Ricochet Podcast, taking Peter Robinson and Rob Long's place and tormenting poor James Alex, who's really
a very good guy. And by the way, he and I, I will tell you, did not form a fade length against you, because James is a fellow progressive rock enthusiast and like all the same seventies acts that I do. Oh my god, I thought I could hear air Supply playing in the back. Oh that's not air Supply. That's even worse than me called a monarchist man. But there were a couple of issues that we discussed in the course of that very wide ranging and fun time with James that I thought
are worth revisiting and more detailed because we're ideally suited for it. And so if you didn't listen to the Ricochete podcast, don't worry. You don't have to go back and listen to it as a preface for this one. This will stand all on its own. But it's kind of like power Mind back
in the classroom, as Lucretian I have done a few times. So the two issues that I think we should say a little bit more about as one is the question of I think what you'd say, institutional trust, and the second one is the whole problem of human rights, positive rights, natural rights. And you know we've touched on these before. But John, it would give us an opportunity to tease you about your Hobbes video from a few months
ago that we kept threatening to do but never got round to. So, so with that, any inter of you want to say anything more about our star turn on Ricochet yesterday before we get launched, Well it was it was fun to take over. I think they should let us just run their podcast permanently. Well, I'm convinced Peter Robinson is stashed in the Witness Protection program somewhere or something I don't know, is in that jail where they put preppy
criminals. I was gonna say, maybe he's shopping for new ascuts and sweaters. That's that's what John always accuses him of, right right, all right, So it was fun. James is a bit of a I do have to say. I have to tell people that we were texting and chatting back and forth about the fact that James's ability to segue into his sponsors advertisements is legendary. I mean, it's I have no idea how even does that.
He picks up on something somebody else says and twists and turns it and the next thing you know, he's talking about a sponsor that has nothing to do with anything, right, Yeah, So that was that. I was impressed. And you're halfway into the ad before you even know what he's done, right And Well, there used to be the practice that we've all given up, but Rob Long would interrupt him and try and knock him off his game, and I think James finally decided he had enough of that, so we
don't do it to him anymore. But that was always fun, you know, Rob and say well, where are you gonna get some nice sheets? I mean, I don't know, there's nobody really who sells nice sheets. So that's on the way in the bowl and branch and whatnot. All right, well, then let's charge into it. The to my mind, one of the biggest problem today, and Lucretia, you brought it up I think
last week of the week before about things are so bad? Is there any way to get the country back together again after the polarization that everyone is concerned with. So I always point to what is called the trust problem. So here's the top line. If you go back to the late fifties, when the major polling organizations Gallop Paris then and others, they ask people a question that usually went, do you have confidence in the federal government to do the
right thing all the time? Most of the time, or none of the time, or very little of the time, something like that. And it used to be that the people who said they had confidence in the federal government to get things right was about seventy eight percent in the late nineteen fifties.
Today it rarely gets above fifteen percent. And if you chart the time series from the sixties to now, it's an all unbroken slope downward, with the exception of the Reagan years, which you can put a side and leave for later. Now before you go inste you can I just say, is that because of the famous Reagan line, the whatever number of many words, it is scary words and dangerous word, scary words in the English language. Oh,
we're from the government and we're here. I'm here. Well, yeah, all right, I'll just say this, but we come back to this point. James Q. Wilson made the argument some years ago that at the end of the nineteen fifties, when Gallup first started asking that question, the average citizen looks out and sees what they see a American government than one. World War Two set a generation of gis to college, and the GI Bill built the Interstate Highway system. It was a good time for all Americans.
By the way, people say, well accept blacks. True that you still had segregation in the South, but the black white meeting income gap fell by half during the nineteen fifties, so even black Americans were advancing rapidly in the nineteen It was a good time for America, and the government looked like it
had done a pretty good job. From the sixties on. We know what the government's record is, right, Can we just make the point in case anybody us is it, which I doubt they will, which is that government tried to do so much less in those days to begin with, never mind the corruption of it, but government didn't try to do everything. The Interstate Highway was probably the Interstate Highway project was probably something a little bit beyond what
government had often done before. You know, you can think back to seventy five years before that when presidents would veto attempts to do essentially what we're interstate roads, right, that was you know, that was probably a step further than they gone. But it was a massive success. And of course today our government can't even keep those roads up. But anyways, sorry I interrupted, go back. That's all right, I think at one point, well,
it's worth mentioning. I'm glad you did bring it up. It's worth mentioning that there was still in that you know, what really was the heyday of the New Deal era, what New Deal ideology was still writing strong. Eisenhower thought and the leaders in Congress thought, this has to be constitutionally permissible. So remember the Interstate Highway Act. I think that's formal title is something like Highways and National Defense Authorization Act of nineteen fifty five or something like that.
Other words, they had to anchor it in a clear constitutional power, whereas when you get ten years later to education. By the way, That's what James Q. Wilson thought was the real turning point when the federal government passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Assistants Act. I think it's called in sixty five. No constitutional justification for that right and that highway system. It's just Act by the way, Elementary and Second Dairy Education Act. Okay ee a
right, yeah, yeah yeah. So I was a young reporter at the Wall Street Journal summer after college, and they wanted me to do a story for Labor Day. So I was trying to figure out what the story story. I did. The finishing of the Interstate Highway System. This is nineteen eighty nine, thirty forty years after the start of the Internet. State Highway sstant. They were still working on it. There were still parts that weren't finished. Yes, And it's funny even while they were finishing it, other
parts were deteriorating that they didn't go back and fix up again. So it's like a never ending, you know, Habit trail, you know for the Gerbil But what was interesting one two things about it. One was yeah, I my recollection is that the main driving force behind the Internet state highway system was President Eisenhower. Yes. And the reason he was is because when he had gone into Germany during World War Two, he saw the German highway system
and admired it because it allowed them to move troops and equipment back. So here's another example of Teutonic influences coming back to America. No speed limit part come with it, I know. Well, of course, as we know for Lucretia, speed limits are strictly optional, so it's meaningless signs anyway, And the one of the thing my editors said, oh, well, we want you to go to some part of the highway system that's in bad shape
and drive along it and talk about it. So I arranged the only time I've done this, I arranged to go in an eighteen wheeler truck those gigantic highway cruisers, to sit in the cab with a driver. And one of the worst rated places was between I think New Orleans and Streeveport, Louisiana. So we drive along and you know when you hit a pole? Ten or what was it? Do you remember? I remember maybe a ten or something.
So we hit a pothole. And when you sit in those cabs and you hit one of those big pothles, you go up like a foot in the air inside the cab. So I was like, so we hit the first one, and I'm like, what happened? What happened? How come I'm not knocked out? And I looked up at the top of the cab and the driver had installed like a six inch thick phone piece at the top of its cab, and you could see the indentations where its head kept hitting
it over and over again from all the bottles in the highway system. Well, first of all, can I send my experience? I just learned two things that I did not know. Uh. First of all, the visual of you writing an eighteen wheel truck is I don't even want to say about that. That's just beyond the imagination. At least he didn't let him drive it, Steve, Oh, I know, I beg I begged the driver. He wouldn't let me. Oh no, those are quite hard to drive.
But then I didn't know that you had been a reporter at the Journal was that. Was that the early years of the Bartley Fellowship or something like that? Or was I was a reporter not an editorial writer. Oh really? When I first met Paul gy go oh, I see it was a job. You had a real job. It was a real job. Jow wow. Yeah, he's ever thought I had a real job when I worked as a journalist. But no, I did when you worked as a journalist.
Okay, but actually that explains a lot about what you two are so felicitous with your writing because of your journalism experience and how you both thinking so quickly just have an idea and turn out an article fifteen minutes later. That always impressed me, even with Steve John from the moment I met him. Everything else I made fun of, but I always told him that he had a tremendous way with words, And yeah, I was always impressed by that. So that explains a lot. It's all about the lead, baby,
That's what I always say. Okay, all right, back back to our topic. One one more bit of news and then we can get us some themes and explanations and remedies. See, because I think John, you're remedy on the FBI, which I'll repeat is necessary but not sufficient. If you go down below the top line level for the government as a whole and so forth, and do individual institutions, what you see there is a wider range. And so the public confidence has always remained pretty high for things like the
military, the police. Actually, after the Michael Brown affair back in twenty fifteen that started Black Lives Matter, public support for the police and defund the police, public support for the police actually went up in the six months after that. That's not true, Yeah, it was really Gallup has the numbers on that. It was not surprising, I think, But after the relentless publicity after the George Floyd a moment, even public support for the police has
been trending down. The point is is that a lot of institutions held up pretty well, including the FBI, and now public's confidence in specific institutions is plumbering across the board. So the military, for the first time in some surveys is below fifty percent. I think there's lots of specific reasons about that. We should go into some of that. Can I just ask you a
question about that. Do you have in front of you any data about the difference between the confidence in the military respect whatever you want to call it. For the military as an institution now and say immediate post Vietnam, I don't. That's sorry, I didn't, But no, I wanted to try and look some of that up. And uh, it takes a while to go back and find what the and I'll bet it was lower for the same reason we'd lost the war, we'd you know, I think also the draft was
unpopular. Of course, by the mid seventies, when the war is finally lost, we'd abandoned the draft. But still, why didn't people want to I mean, I graduated high school in the mid seventies. I didn't want to go into the military because you know, why would you that? You know, the pay is low, the morale is low. What's it gonna do? Uh? And you know, morale's sword under Reagan, as we know, one of the first things Reagan did was raised pay for soldiers,
so that you know more. You know, the mini victory of Grenada didn't hurt either, you know that, right, and and uh it was strength to the point a little bit. But you know when uh, in nineteen eighty one, when our aircraft carrier commanders were saying, what are the rules of engagement when these Libyans keep harassing us with the airplanes and Reagan said, you can shoot back. He says, how far can we chase them?
And he said all the way back to the Hangar, and that was known as the Reagan Rules of Engagement. Well, that's good from moral right, So I have a similar problem now, I think, right, we've you know, twenty years of involvement in the Middle East, which has soured everybody on it, and then the walkerie, which you've talked about. We can come back to all that. Steve reminded me when we get to remedies to think about what's really happening in what you just described, and that is that
it was kind of the reason that I brought it up. It's that you actually can turn things around with the right message and the right actions that underlie that message. I guess might be how I put it in other words, you know, I remember you probably remember this too. I'm sure John's too
young. And after the Iraq or during the very beginning of the Iraq War, when they started playing that Tony Orlando song with a tie yellow ribbon, and then I mean that ribbons now show ribbons for everything It wasn't just yellow ribbons for the troops coming home. You know, breast cans are on and
on and on every silly thing under the planet. But that made a huge difference as well, that there was just this push to instead of to be treating soldiers returning from conflict as pariah's and worse, you know, call yellows and all that other nonsense. We saw that with the right kind of message, that you could actually turn those attitudes around. Same thing I think happened after nine to eleven. Yeah, well, let's hold that thought because I
think that that's all right, that's okay, all right. Let me give you, uh, sort of three aspects of the causes here, or the deeper background of it. I mean, we talk a lot about corruption within certain elements of the FBI and partisan champa, and you know, some of that's been really proven the Russia hoax business and so forth. And then we
already mentioned competence. The government is now trying to do things beyond its competence and people are gonna perceive that, right, We're gonna We're gonna eliminate poverty in ten years. Lyndon Johnson's people told us in nineteen sixty six fifty years ago. Now. The other one is ideology is part of it. I think that's one of the reasons. I mean, I saw a headline that says the rebuilding effort in Lahina in Hawaii will be based on principles of equity.
What's that gonna mean. It's gonna be a cultural sensitivity probably right. It goes along with it, right, instead of just letting people rebuild. It's good. I mean, I remembering your comment about some oddities of this fire. There have been two, at least in my lifetime, big fires in Santa Barbara that wiped out hundreds of houses and it was just twenty thirty years ago. Huge bureaucratic hurdles just to rebuild your house on the land had
been on before. And that's gonna happen in Hawaii. It's going to be a mass, great case study worst probably, that's right. I do want to make a real quick mention though, that your weekend pictures, and it wasn't in the comments, it was in your part of the weekend pictures. My conspiracy theory got a little bit of notice from some of your means. I don't remember which one happened, the one about the directed energy for instance. Oh, I don't I don't remember that one, now, you know.
Yeah, anyway, sorry, the other thing is so ideology, competence, corruption, And here's the broader point. And you guys can help me flesh this out a little bit. Maybe if you go back to the late forties, after the war, fifties. Uh, we've always had elites. I mean, you know, sometimes the attack on the leads is a little overdrawn. But I'll say this way, are old elites used to have what
do you want to say? They took the idea of no bless a beach more seriously, Now it's condescension, I mean right, it's Oh you see the reaction to this guy who's done this, Uh what ginger Man. I think you called him the preciate, this guy who's done this Beard right, rich Man north of Richmond, And it's this huge cultural sensation and you're seeing the backlash against it, including even from National Review, which really shocked me.
I mean even well almost his establishment. Well that's a serious point about how you know, William F. Buckley was always an elitist. But I don't think you would utter a condescended to this guy. Quite the opposite, I think even understood exactly and for his magazine now to dump on this guy for not celebrating the greatness of America and the ways you can get ahead is just so tone deaf. But the point is, I don't quite know how to draw this point out precisely, but I think there was in the older
elites. I don't know if it's a more genuine public spiritedness as opposed to a grandistness of elite status or what it is, but I'm gonna let John talk first, but I have the answer. Well, my point is, you know, I'm thinking of people like the Dullest Brothers and even Dean Atchison, who I can criticize the day is long, But there were different kinds of people than the ensconced elites we have today. That's the point I'm trying to develop. Don go no, I agree with you that the elites are
different. I think we have. I think Charles Murray's shown this with this this elite that's built around credentialism and higher education rather than elite's built on achievement or elites you know, based on I know history, you know, although I'm not for aristocracy or anything, but you know, the original question is why are we having this assault on the institutions and what's the best response? Lucius saying, what's the remedy? So I don't think the change in the
elites necessarily is what's causing the loss of confidence in the institutions. I don't blame younger people or thinking there's a problem, because they think about what this generation has lived through. They lived through, you know, very little. When they're very little, they see the nine to eleven tax, where they
think the country has failed in the basic mission of secure national security. And then when they were little, they probably saw their parents suffering from the economic collapse in two thousand and eight two thousand and nine, which I don't know, I don't know what you guys think. Seems to me to to an inflated housing bubble, bubble caused by or economic policies. And then they see all the uncertainty nowadays being wrought by the introduction of new technology into the economy.
So I don't blame them for saying, what does any of this work? These institutions have poorly served us. Maybe the problem is since we have this different elite class, they're not really the best representatives or defenders of institutions. You know, they're you know their defenses. Well, I scored high on the SAT so you know it's a good institution. That's not very compelling a right, So you know, we but just like my conservative instinct is
I can't remember who it was. You guys are into these people more than I. But you know the guy who said, you know, when you come to a fence, uh and just blocked your way, don't think you have to tear it down. Someone probably put it there for a good reason in the first place. Is that like one of your one of your PEPs, one of your peeps. So but I might you know some my instinct is yeah, I mean I wouldn't automatically think we should burn down these institutions.
I just feel like a lot of the people on the right, especially the nat con movement, has that, you know, that's their agenda. So so when we talked on the Brookochet podcast, my foot, you know, I just raised the FBI. You know, there's a strong segment of the conservative movement that is now talking about defunding the FBI. There might be good reasons or bad reasons for that, but just getting rid of the FBI and pretending the need to protect our country from terrorists or espionage or from mafia
organized crime groups. It's still going to be there yet to have a solution. So that's why I favored maybe moving the headquarters, decentralizing it, you know, which it does, But getting rid of the FBI that seems like, you know, remedy, you know, the cure that's worse than disease
or remedy that you creates all kinds of unintended consequences that are worse. No, not because part of the reason for that is it hammered Now, John, sorry to hammer you, because I think that that you're gonna agree with my criticism John, when the episode, this is what happens. When you read those seven thousand page tomes about the FBI, you get this insights into him. We didn't have an FBI until Jay Edgar Hoover, and he, you know, because of the kind of person he was, just found all
sorts of ways to expand the jurisdiction of the FBI. At the same time that the federal government started pausing laws making activities illegal that they have no business doing. You know, remember remember the day, back in the day when criminal laws were primarily the subject of state, the police powers of the state. So if you get rid of ninety nine percent of the federal laws on the books, you do only need an FBI for the purposes of worrying about
international terrorism? Do I do? I want? The FBI is shown itself to be completely what's the word untrustworthy when it comes to domestic terrorism. I mean, they're after me, for God's sakes, because I'm a domestic terrorist. I'm proud of it, by the way. I'm proud of the fact that I'm on an FBI watch list, and anyway, I'm kidding, But first of all, are you really on an FBI watch list? It was a joke because I'm a I'm a radical, traditional Catholic by the way,
So we're doing its job right. You should behind the watch should have been I'm not one of those thirty unindicted co conspirators. Well, here's a tip for listeners. If you want to get an FBI file started on you, what you do is you send them a FOI request asking for the contents of your FBI file, and if you don't have one, they'll start one at least on your foyer. And I've heard this, and then you know a year later you're right and say, may I please see my FBI file,
and they'll send in the file of your first letter in first response. So you know, there's a perfect example for John of the idea that I might be willing to keep an FBI if it was reduced to about two percent of its current workforce. The fact that the FBI has time to do things like that, to be spying on private citizens and uh, you know, collecting
dossiers on them, that's I mean, that's ridiculous, the idea. And they've just shown themselves over and over and over again to be so incredibly corrupt,
so biased. And do you remember back when one of those people this is a little bit off the topic, but it was straight my point, when one of those people and was killed by police, I want to say, in Brooklyn maybe I think it was maybe Brooklyn, and because he resisted arrest, but they were arresting him for selling individual cigarettes because you know, the price of cigarettes had gone up so much, and so he would buy
cigarettes and sell them individually because people he was arrested for that, Yeah, I mean so, so then and why is that a crime? Because it was depriving the government that they're huge. I think that guy would buy them at Indian casinos where they're exam from the federal and state taxes and right, well, arbitrazing. So that's a tax problem. But well, but no,
it's a government overreach problem. Government doesn't I mean. And so across the board, the FBI is enforcing laws that it has no business enforcing because they shouldn't be on the books, and no federal I mean. Oh, I promise you if you got rid of the FBI tomorrow, if they completely shut down all completely shut down, every every penny that goes to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, this country would not fall into uh, you know,
attack by domestic or international terrorists. There are other agencies that could pick up the slack on that one, you know, And there's so much overlap between all of the agencies that have law enforcement powers. We just need to look at the whole thing and say, too many damn laws and too much power in the federal government, including in the FBI. Let's just uh, I'll
make him. Well, now here's the here's the thing. If you abolish the FBI or started something new, eventually it would fall in the same patterns of incompetence. But we have some time. Well all right, I mean you know, and I think there's a solution here. There's I Creasius completely right before the FBI, each agency wouldn't you know, have its own enforcement agency, right, so like that's we have leftovers of that, like the
ATF and the DA. You know, they're they're the remember the Yeah, yeah, Elliott Nest doesn't work for the FBI, works for the Treasury Department, Like he's basically customs of fancy customs and tax officer. So you could say, maybe it's good to have multiple agencies when you're worried about liberty because the agencies will compete with each other and fight with each other too. To make so the example that is used sometimes is I think that this way.
Was it better when we had a separate army and Navy and later air Force, or was it better now when you have a centralized d D with all these officers and commands and all that's sit on top of them. Maybe it was better when the services were always competing and fighting. Well, they still are to a great extent, John, just so you know, But the whole when you read these stories about you know, what to do in the
rock or so in Afghanistan. I think this is Colin Powell's fault in a way, right, Like there's this idea there will be a Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs and he shall give you the military advice. And I like the better when I read stories about World War Two and you know there's FDR and you've got like the head of the Navy and the head of the Army arguing about the best way to you know, whether we should go to Pacific or the European theater first, rather than pretending, oh, there's one central you know, expert military advice, which is what you get when you centralize. Yeah, well, now you don't even know. There's no such thing as
military advice anymore. It's all about social policy and social policy within the military. I mean, I am so tired and just have to since we went off on this tangent whining every day coming out of Austin and other people in the top brass about Tuberville's stopping of any appointments going forward and how, oh my god, this is terrible military readiness. Every single actually shouldn't say because
some of them are my friends. And they're really good people. But most of those people who have not been promoted and confirmed for their positions are bureaucrats. And it's going to make no difference one way or the other. But why is this a problem? It's why is this an issue? Why is
Tuberville stopping it? Because because Austin insisted on making it a public social statement that they would pay for women, I guess, or excuse me, birthing persons to go to different states if they were stationed in a state that had outlawed abortion or outlaw making abortion available for their particular circumstances. It has been a policy of the military for decades that if you needed to go somewhere else
for medical treatment. I remember flying from Germany to walter Read for just that purpose, not for an abortion, but for because my husband needed surgery and it couldn't be done in Germany, so we flew in. The government paid for the entire thing. They do that. This whole thing is about Austining making sure it's in your face. Why are we doing that with our military?
Why? Well, this gets back to my point of ideology is taken over our elites and alienating everybody, And okay, without even getting into what are the defects of it and so forth. Back to John's point real quick, though, I think he's onto something here because I remember, you know, my dad, a World War Two Navy flyer. I used to talk to him some about the different requirements the naval Air services versus the Army Air
Corps, and starting an air force did not solve that problem. And this will take us too far afield, but you know, one of the reform attempts, and maybe this is worth the parallel case studies we talk about the FBI and CIA and others. You know, the Goldwater Nickels Bill in the mid nineteen eighties was meant to streamline these inner service rivalries and these fights between the different services. And I'm not sure if that has improved things or not.
And I know a lot of the lore about you know, McNamara thought we need to make one kind of fighter plane. I think we're still doing this, and things like the F thirty five one kind of fighter plane that all the services can use. It sort of one size fits all, and that's a mistake. I think you're right. I think we get a better
as a result from competitions. Another exam here's another example. It helps it makes your points to you that I think, lucresh WILLI is after nine to eleven, we thought there was an intelligence failure, and so what do we do. We create one guy, one guy, gigantic DHS. Yeah, and we're you know, combined twenty different agencies the Director of National Intelligence,
right, and we did it with the intelligence community. Not clear. It's a good idea, wastes a lot of money, creates lots of more government unions and security. Actually, what they talk about again, watch what they talk about. What the major pronouncements coming out of the DNI is, uh, diversity and how do we get more inclusive about our intelligence community so that we have a grant. I have a grant to increase the diversity of the intelligence community. Oh my god, oh yeah, yeah. Now see this,
Now this has helped me crystallize my money. I'm gonna take it. John. Come on, let's do a study. I'll do a study for you at how many intelligence the racial diversity of intelligence agents that show up at McDonald's. All right, let's at McDonald's now, John, this uh, now, this helps crystallize the point that I was struggling with at the end of my opening bid, which was the dullest brothers Dean Ashton. They ever
would have called in for this nonsense. They may have been, in the actions case, a liberal and a new dealer and all the rest of that, but they wouldn't have They wouldn't have surrendered to this kind of trendy, idiot logical fashions. They would have actually kept their eye on what's central and what's important. One last thing I'll say, by the way, about that, and then I think we should move on to topic number two. I didn't give my my go ahead. Well, that's well, all right.
I've said this long time ago. But one of the very fine senior FBI agents I used to know, he's now long retired. He actually was one of the invest principal FBI investigators who arrested all rich Ames, the CIA trader back in the early nineties. You Oh, he told me great stories about that. After he'd retired from the FBI, he was offered the head of I don't know if it's counterintelligence, but the top intelligence one of the top
intelligence jobs in the new Department of Homeland Security. And he said, I wouldn't go near that with a ten foot poll because he knew it was going to be a bureaucratic mess. You know, the FBI was bad enough. And he used to show me his picture of being sworn in as a young agent by Jagger Hoover himself, which was kind of cool. Right, all right, Lucretia, what's point of appealing to your guy's classical philosophies? So is this actually when you make your point about Atchison? And so, by
the way, I had this great little tidbit about Atchison. Yes he was a liberal, but I was reading this book about the Berlin Wall crisis and Atchison's advice. They brought Actison into the Kenny administration because they didn't know what they were doing, and Atchison said, let's just take six divisions, drive it down the Audubon, and if the East Germans tried to stop us, let's drop a few tactical nukes on them. So those were those were that
was liberal for Bossy in the good old days. And of course JFK's like, get this guy out of here. Yeah, but this is this is remind you of Plutarch and Polybius and this idea of you know, republics are young, and they are tough, and they you know, they do great things and then they become rich and luxurious, And is what we were talking about a sign that we're just too wealthy, that our elites have the luxury to worry about what the workforce should look like because they are fat and happy
and they're not worried about the security of the country anymore. Isn't it sounds like the end of the Roman Republic. I thought that's what Lucretia's viewalist Now mine's deeper even than that, And it's really very simple. I do believe that I'm gonna say this oversimplified to make it not such a long discussion, Steve, that our current elites are complete nihilists, and because they believe in nothing, they certainly cannot believe in any kind of patriotism or recognize why Americans
exception America is exceptional, or any of those other things. So where they are is having to grasp onto any kind of solid foundation. Right now. The solid foundation is climate change, it's d ei, and it's you know, world global dominance. That you know that they're none of those things actually make any sense when you push down into any one of them, right I mean, we don't have to go into that because we've discussed it a million
times. But that's that's the current reigning orthodoxy or dare I say religion. The problem is that when you you adopt this sort of man made religion, just like with what we saw with with communism in the Soviet Union. Uh, in order to make sure that you you know, you can fully, that you can embrace this explanation for the world fully and give your life meaning. It's not enough just to believe it yourself. You have to force it
on everybody else. And I do think that that's part of the problem with our elites. Why is it that every time the left moves from being you know, totally obsessed by feminism and what we have to do there to the next thing. You know, let's throw the feminists under the bus and let's embrace transsexualism and transgenderism. And we don't care even if you're a feminist.
Uh Now, we can sacrifice you because we've moved on and this is our reigning orthodoxy and if we all don't join it, we have no meaning in life. And if we don't force it on everybody else, we can't be sure that it's reality, right, I mean, does that explanation make sense as opposed to someone. You know, I have no idea of Dean Adjison or Eisenhower. Any of those people were religious, but they certainly were grounded in some sort of basic idea that there's a difference between good and evil.
Yeah, well they are nothing, I'll say the dullest brothers. They were the three of them, h and you know, one the Secretary of State, Oneman's head of the CIA, and the third was a prominent Jesuit's right. They were very much believers in old fashioned religion. And I mean know that bring back the Dallas Brothers. Maybe that's gonna be my theme, John, I don't know, But does what I say makes sense? Why why they can't leave us alone? You know, Steve's favorite thing is the Left
doesn't care what what you do as long as it's mandatory. But as long as they get to make it mandatory is what the phrase really should be. It's you know, they want it doesn't matter what they make you do.
I told Steve I wasn't gonna do it, but I'm gonna do it after all in this context, So there's an article there's all over Twitter this morning, John, is a story about how the Biden administration is in the process of putting in place a new mask mandate and lockdowns for the latest variant of COVID, and that they're starting with the TSAU pilots, stewardesses, et cetera will have to We'll be required again because they can do that, you know,
for federal regulations. They can tell stewardesses and airline pilots that they have to wear masks, and that two months from now the lockdown, the COVID lockdowns will be complete again. I don't know, I don't have I told Steve you guys still still haven't sent me my designer tinfoil hat. So I'm just gonna I told Steve, I gotta put this out there on this podcast because if I'm wrong and two months from now, none of this has happened,
thank goodness. If I'm right, I'm gonna go see I told you so, and you can say, see you guys can look at me and say, now, you, Lucretia, you're a nut job. Be quiet. Oh look, I figured Steve's got the science math kid who's just went off to college. It's I was hoping he's gonna design the damn thing. I've been waiting. We come on, Steve. Oh, I'll get him on that right away. Speaking of classical virtue that you brought up a mom gonna go, John. That's topic number two left over from yesterday. We
got off. I don't remember how this happened, but we got off on the whole problem of human What's that John brought it up? Yeah, and is interesting discussion. Actually, yeah, it was. But I think we should carry on with it because there's a lot more to be said with it, and we're the right people to do it. Plus it gives us a chance to tease John about his Hobbes video from a few months ago, which we never got around to. We talked about human rights, and of course
my joke is, we're not even sure what humans are anymore. There are no more women's rights, since there are no more women, as we know. But the confusion is the way of what it is that human rights are essentially any good thing that people assert that they want, a right to housing,
a right to health care, right, all kinds of things. Now, as it happens, quite separately from all this, the other day I came across a book I hadn't heard of before called Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law, and it's just out from Actually it's been on a while, but I just found out about it by a guy named Cody Cooper, who apparently was a student of Tom Pangel And certain listeners in the know will know what
that's code for. And he's arguing that Hobbs act had more in common with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas than is generally thought that actually his views are entirely harmonious with the classics, and this is a renegade view in modern times. And so this has led to people to say, ah, here it comes.
We're gonna get Hobbistottle to go on the shelf next to Locastottle. That you may know, there's this big project to harmonize lack in Aristotle, that Tom West is one of the key figures about behind and now we're gonna get Hobbistottle.
So I don't know. I mean, this is a good way of getting back into explaining the distinction between classical natural law, classical natural right and modern natural law and natural right and how it ultimately degrades into well, I was gonna I was gonna pause here, and he's hanging on the edge of my seat. Right, do you want to weigh in with any more clarifications lucretia, But I can find it's the problem. This is just Strauss.
I don't know why you can't just turn to Strauss and have this Christians very simply, and that is that the ancient world and the classical classical philosophy understood, or let me put it differently, operated within a horizon where there was not a monotheistic universal God. And so each community, each ah polis what everyone call, had their own gods who made the laws, and so on.
With the advent of Christianity and the Romans carrying a Christianity all over the world, you have a universal regime and a universal god, Christianities, the universal God. Politics becomes very difficult, very difficult, indeed, and because who do you owe to whom do you owe your allegiance in the In the classical world, you owed your allegiance to the gods of the city, which was at the same time obeying the laws with piety. If you are in
the modern world, obeying the laws is not necessarily piety. It could be if you if you live under a regime with good laws. But this whole religious problem created. For Machiavelli, for instance, he saw that as the major problem of the modern world was how do you how do you return powerful government to its rightful place in human politics in a world dominated by Christianity. And so what you find it works for Locke, it doesn't work for Hobbes.
Sorry, is that you can in fact find natural right in Hobbes that is fully consistent with Aristotle, fully consistent with Aristotle in the sense that that Locke is operating in a world transformed by Christianity. You cannot return, as you once did to the classical Greek polis, where you could question the gods of the city, question the laws of the city, because as you all, it's that's done. I mean, you played a walked us out of the cave. Socrates walked us out of the cave, and now you know,
so it's a different situation altogether. The real question is how do we what what gods of the city can we use in order to give our laws, our fundamental regime principles, the same kind of authority that the gods of the city once were able to do. And that's of course social contract theory and the fundamental notion of equality, which builds, of course, on the Christian idea of all human beings equal, being equal before God, and so
you can. Locke doesn't work if you stick him in third century BC Greek cities, but third century BC cities don't work if you put them in seventeenth eighteenth century England or twenty first for America. Wow, it's It's not a Marxist view, not at all. It's an understanding of of the the the experiences under which you operate, the environment, the culture, the all of that. I don't even know what the right word for it all is. But you cannot go back to the days where we just have the gods of
the city. Maybe you could even say that that's somewhat what the left is trying to do. They're going to replace the Christian God and the notion of right and wrong revelation with their own gods, which are you know, climate change and diversity and so on. Uh. We're always looking for authority, We're always looking for something beyond ourselves that we can believe in, that that that can remind us that maybe we're not non existent human beings staring into the
void. I don't even know anyway, sorry, I'll be quiet now. Well that was a tour to force John. Do you want to comment or ask a question about that? Yeah? Yeah, so I how do you respond then, to the idea that the state of nature and the social compact are really the creation of Hobbes? And Hobbes uh, you know, isn't so accommodating to Christianity as Locke is. Just you know, so, you
know, you guys are teasing me. I did you know, I am a I do like the work of Hobbes, and I do like people who write it, you know, trying to revive interest in him, and I did. I don't know why, but Prague, are you asking me to do these videos about Hobbes? And so I actually went back and reread Hobbs for the first time in a while, probably since I sat down in Harvard Mansfield's intro to Political Theory and read it carefully in the you know, the
original carefully. And I think of him as thinking he is making a break with the ancients, and you know, making a break with Arson Plato with this idea of the state and nature and social unpacked and you know, his his account, I think very strange treatment and discussion of the Church and Christianity. It seemed like he was being very weasily, actually much more forthright about it. You could still be burned at the stake for heresy and those you
have to be very careful what you right. Yeah, I mean, I know this is what how Strassman's approach it. Right. You guys say there's something you say to the general public that won't get you in trouble, and then you hide the real message inside that. And so when I was trying to think of it that way, it seems to me Hobbs was quite dubious about Christianity and its role, even though I didn't want to say it out right. That seems quite contrary to what you just describe. Don't be harmonious
with the past. Well, first of all, let's let me go to your first question, and that's the difference between Hobbs and Locke and why why it is? When I think the way you put it was, if you see the modern the answer to the modern problem as a social contract that you know that we understand from that construct of the state of nature, why then do I not see Hobbs in the same light as say Locke and beyond. Here's the difference, and I'll just do talk about the difference between Hobbes and
Locke. It is a fundamentally different view of human nature. And so Hobbs believed that there was no such thing as virtue, as goodness, as morality at the only thing that he thought in human beings was a trait that was reliable in any way was just that sort of you could almost call it the who's the guy the apple from the tree? Newton right as right as it's almost for Hobbes, it's it's a sort of uh, non moral non out there, and it's just like it's this very basic almost like an object in
motion wants to remain in motion. Okay, that's it's no more than that. It's not even an emotion. It's mechanical. It's mechanical, and that becomes the most reliable thing about human nature, and upon which you can build a much more solid political regime than you can on these you know, all this flighty notion of Christianity and blah blah blah blah blah. The difference between Hobbes and Locke is that Locke actually he talks about it. He says,
the help me Steve. The actual quote is the rightness of the law of nature is written on the heart of man. Yeah, no, the law, Now that that's not it. It's not the law of name. The idea of right and wrong is, according to Locke, part of our nature that we recognize the difference between right and wrong that we you know, and everything that flows from that. The problem is it's not reliable. Do I think that Hobbs and and Locke disagreed about that? Maybe maybe not. But
for Locke, you don't have to reduce human beings to that mechanical. I'm the only thing that motivates me is the fear of violent death. You can, in fact recognize that human beings have a moral compass, even if it's faulty, and that's where you build your political regime from. And that's what takes us back to Aristotle. Ah, look, can I can I during at this point? Yeah? I mean I sometimes say that on the surface and getting started, you could say that Locke is Hobbs with a happy face.
I mean, he's more optimistic about the potentiality of human sociality. But here's the thing. I mean, Yeah, we think of Hobbs as the founder of through modern political thought and contract theory. You know that's correct, but I'm not sure how far you've gotten your reading of Strauss. John you said you were struggling through natural right and history. Strauss repeats the conventional of
you that Hobbs founds modern natural modern political science. But then he says this, it was Machiavelli, that greater Columbus, who had discovered the continent on which Hobbs could erect Hiss structure. In other words, Hobbs going straight from Cockavelli. Now you mentioned the sometimes a perverse, overdone methodology of esoteric reading that Strauss sans do what it looks to be. I think it is the central paragraph of that whole book, and maybe you shouldn't put too much weight
on it. But this one sentence that I think explains the problem very well, which Lucretia brought up a minute ago, which is different conceptions of what we mean by nature, Nature as a standard and grounding of justice or nature is just a totality of phenomenon in modern life, and we reduce it to simply self preservation as the bedrock of things. So here's the sentence that I think is very useful from Strauss again, page one sixty one, the central
page of the book. It is important that the difference between the Aristotelian view of natural right and machiavellianism be clearly understood. Machiavelli denies natural right because he takes his bearings by the extreme situations in which the demands of justice are reduced to the requirements of necessity, and not by the normal situations in which the
demands of justice in the strict sense are the highest law. Lot mark can be said about all that, But the point is is that Machiavelli starts the break and Hobbs continues it. But now, as I say, there's this book, comes along the letter thinkers saying, well, you know, actually Hobbs, like Locke comes Now there's more room for harmonization than you think. Yeah, okay, can I just express the difference. This is why I'm so surprised you guys disagree with me about Hawes, because I actually I'm a
little more maybe I'm excessively optimistic about Hobbes. So Hobbs, you know, for you know, somewhat for the law. We think about why do people cooperate? That's the main issue, and how do people cooperate? And so with Hobbes, as you said, necessity forces you people to cooperate, and you describe Block as almost suggesting human beings by nature are sociable, so they
will cooperate because they want to, not because necessity forces them too. So two things about that is one, I actually like Hobbes description because it doesn't make you overly ambitious and setting up a society, you know, Hobbs. The other part I thought about how's it was not appreciated as much or hasn't
been appreciated much as you know. He gives a kind of description of relatively minimal state that I think Lucretia would like, where where basically hopefully the state maintains basic law and order and then people are just left to you know, enjoy their lives, spend their time from Yeah, I mean, there's one of these big issues is what are you supposed to do in a Hobbes in society after law and order is established? And he really doesn't have anything to
say about it. He's just not He doesn't really say, oh, and then people should do A B and C and D with their free time. Where's the thing that worries me? About Locke is if you want to build a society that's based on people want to cooperate in these sort of almost Christian traits about their nature, then I worry the state might get too involved with what we do with our free time. Try to make from Locke. This is what Locke says, that exactly in response to what you just said.
But freedom of men, this is from Locke's second Treatise. But freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to everyone of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it. A liberty to follow my own will in all things where the rule prescribes not and not to be the subject to be subject to the inconsistent, uncertain,
unknown, arbitrary will of another man. That's referring directly to Hobbs as freedom of nature is to be under no other restraint but the law of nature. In other words, Locke says, in the state of nature, you are subject to the law of nature. The problem with that is the law of nature written, he says, on the Hearts of Men is often interrupted, shall we say, by the passions. Rationally speaking, it's very easy to know how we ought to behave with respect to one another. But the passions
get in the way. So that is why man forms a social contract sets up that government. But the whole point of the government, and this is another difference between the classics and the moderns. For law, it's very clear you are free to do whatever it is that the government does not proscribe. Remember the classics were very clear. A good government is a government that creates laws, prescriptive laws that help you become the best person you can be.
I guess, yeah, that's the last sentence. That last sentence is what worries me. I was with you all the way until yes, that the state, and I think I could see that in Lock. Oh, I think I just read you the part where yes, that's why I'm worried. But sorry, go ahead, all right, I'll go ahead. Look, I don't look. You have to work some You have to really help out Lock to make him an avatar of limited government. Remember his one one one
of his most ringing phrases is tyranny is merely monarchy misliked. In other words, there's no objective ground for saying something that tyranny. He's following, I met Hobbs. Sorry, I said, yeah, I met Hobbs. Thank you. I'm sorry I do that a lot. Yeah, says tyranny is merely monarchy, mislike he is following Machiavelli there and being in some ways more explicit than usually very explicit Machiavelli. Uh oh boy, where do we go
with this? We're listeners. By the way, We thought this would be like a half hour episode, and here we are coming up to an hour, and so I think I need to play the tyrant the Hobbesy and tyrant and brought us to an end. But we've got quite a lot out there. You guys, have any last thoughts here before we mercifully release our listeners from I have one little one, and maybe we picked this up next time
Steve. But I was going to give Steve a hard time yesterday in the Ricochet podcast John because he brought up the unshe the positive Yeah, the Universal Declaration of Rights and how they established positive rights, and because of the format, I never got the opportunity to say, why would you bring that up? Before you brought up FDR's Economic Bill of Rights that he gave in the
State of the Union address. And that's where I think at least in the United States, to have a much more powerful reorientation from the rights that belong to humans to citizens, to be free from government interference, to be treated equally, civil rights, being treated equally before the law, and those things that don't require anything anybody at the governmental level. To be reorganizing society and
gaining more and more power doing so. That starts with Roosevelt. And that was the only point I wanted to make, not that you were wrong, Steve, but I was actually surprised you picked that instead of Roosevelt's introduction of those ideas. Well. The only reason I did it was it's a good illustration of the confusion between what we would call the old fashioned natural rights of individuals and positive rights of claims on the government. So you have Roosevelt,
well, but he doesn't. Yes, I mean you can trace the four freedom speech directly back to the Commonwealth Club speech, which we've talked about at
great length, And that was on purpose. You're right, but I think it's very accessible to notice that you have traditional things that sound like our Bill of Rights in the UN Declaration. And then but also it's so much fun to point out a right to pay vacation does a fundamental international human it's so ludicrous on its face that I and again it's simple to approach, that's all.
Yeah, Okay. All I'm gonna say is you know that look at the rights he talked about, the right to a good education, the right of every family to a decent home, right, the right of every businessman to trade an an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition. You know, the right of farmers to raise and sell products at you know, a fear return. None of those things are rights. Yeah, they're they're you know,
they're good policy in many cases good policies. But when you tell I think that this was even a point John made and James yesterday, when you start calling them rights, you have really messed up the vocabulary in a way where you mess up people thinking about them, and you change the dynamic. All right, do you have a Do you have a I don't suppose, since we did this hastily, John, you have a Camelism of the week. But I'm sure Lucretia has got some babylon Bees for us. Yeah. I
don't have any any commulisms. Well, I mean, I I've forgotten our old communism for you John always always drink your whiskey. Wait wait, wait, now I've forgotten it. We are drinking the whiskey that we've been drinking. Well, actually she did say, I've got one one sentence. It was, you know, one of the objects of our policy has been to bring down energy prices. And it's like what she wanted again. Yeah, currently, of course not it is time to drink the whiskey we've been drinking,
and that time is every day. That's what's from a long time ago. But so you know, again, it's so hard to pick, but one of my favorites was desk caused by Hurricane Hillary to be labeled suicides. That one's pretty good, huh. And then you guys will appreciate this one. California achieves world first crime rate of zero after legalizing all crime. Yeah, that's I know, I know. Sometimes it's not even funny, and I'll actually I had to laugh about this, and it probably doesn't even work
in the midst of this whole podcast, but I laughed at it. It's got it. This really old guy, Why do all these lazy kids live with their parents? Says Grandpa, who once bought a five thousand square foot house for two potatoes. All right, I'm done. Oh hey, this week we've got the first Republican debate coming in. Right, we have a lot to talk about on the next show. Yeah, I'm gonna have to drink a lot just to be able to watch that. Let's have a drinking
game. Yeah. Oh I always do that. Yeah, all right, start start our start, our exit launch John, always drink your whiskey. Meat. Let's go Brandon and Steve. God save the queen man right next week, everybody, I try to trust the country man, then a town man. You can judge, fise eyes, take a love if your can you sign no star survivor trace side. I try to trust the man who
works with these hands. He loves that you wants. You know, we un understands don't need any ship when you hide your love feel the downy. I'm so along with my fear without the thing that I keep, and every single d that I've walked to whe me back came again. I've got to find the priest and magician singing all the chants, and they never heard, and they're all calling down my name, even academics searching printed words, and my father to the left of me Ricochet joined the conversation