Ask not what your country can do for you and what you can do for your country read my lips? Pretty excuse me? And are people are still talking about discount? It's the Ricochet Podcast with Charles C. W. You Cook and Stephen Hayward. I'm James Lylyax. It's July and we're just going to talk amongst arcels. Shallis led zeversos a podcast. Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number seven hundred and
forty eight. Hey, why don't you? Yes, you go to ricochet dot com join up, sign up and be part of the most stimulating conversations in community on the web. I'm James Lenox in Minneapolis downtown in a tall, beautiful skyscraper for the very last time, and I'm joined by Charles C. W. Cook in Florida and Stephen Hayward, who, as we know, is a parapatetic soul and might be ware at the moment. Don't say californ Yeah, well.
I'm at home. I see the ocean. I won't say where though, So.
All right, well, so once again we span the nation. Gentlemen, what is on your minds? Of the more? There's so much. We've got the big beautiful bill of course, which people are still chewing through. And according to my Twitter feeds and the tiktoks that I get, I am under the understanding that the debt are going to be heaped like cordwood on the street corners because of the cuts that
are being made in various programs. I could point out that maybe I've heard before that every time somebody tries to cut something, it's always going to be that people are going to die. I think we discussed last week or the week before, the incalculable fatality right after net neutrality. But is this different? Was this actually a change in programs and going forth there might be some difficulty of aidable bodied people to get what they had got before.
Well, I don't know. I think a unifying thread right now, a whole bunch of issues. Who someone our rundown some not is the exhaustion of the Democrats in the left. I mean, look, you mentioned that neutrality, but we also heard the same thing about the twenty seventeen Trump tax cuts, that people would die from those tax cuts, right and the flash flooding in Texas. They want to blame it on Doge, but there was also they're trying to run
the Katrina playbook. Right, you remember Katrina twenty years ago now, and you know Bush made some mistakes. They didn't present themselves very well, but it wrecked Bush's second term and they thought, oh, well, rerun that playbook. So they keep trying to rerun these old playbooks. But I think they're less and less persuasive. And I'll give you one more
of several I could do. I've noticed a conspicuous silence from Democrats about all the cuts to green energy that were in the One Big, Beautiful Bill, And you would think they would be saying, we're going to die because we're cutting all the green energy because now we're not fighting climate change instead. Apparently, the latest figure I saw that Politico reported five House Democrats have joined in endorsing President Trump's plan to get rid of California's electric car mandate, which,
of course that's spread across the country. And so that shows, as some people have been saying, is that the green mania is in retreat at the moment. And so what have Democrats got, Well, they've got Mondani running in New York. Boy, isn't that.
A great story for it? Indeed, I think California is shutting down some refineries as well, under the belief that perhaps they will be able to power their cars the old Flintstone way, and that's the most ecologically safety Charles, what have you taken away from the followed from the BB.
Well, there's an enormous amount. It's such a big bill. I'm not sure it's beautiful, but it's such a big bill that it's quite hard for serious people to take a unified approach to it. Now that doesn't include those who, of course a demogogueing people were discussing. But there's a lot in that to alike. And then there's arts in
there not to like. For example, if you had told a physical conservative two or three years ago, not only will all of the twenty seventeen tax cuts be renewed, but we'll get full expensing, I would have just jumped for joy. Some of the rest of it less so, but they shouldn't undermine the achievements. The Democrats are in a very weird position here because although they are pretending that everyone's going to die from medicaid, not even cuts
slowed growth. And although they are upset that the Inflation Reduction Act, which had nothing to do with inflation has been partly rescinded. They also agreed that the vast majority of the cuts to taxes in the twenty seventeen should remain. They're glossing over that, but that is a huge hypocrisy something I've observed over the last few years. James's conservatives often don't give themselves enough credit, especially on taxes. We get all of this, or what if you were concerned
were conservatives were conserved? Well, here is a change. When Hillary Clinton ran for president twenty sixteen, she said that nobody who made more than less sorry than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year would see a tax increase. When Kamala Harris ran for president in twenty twenty four, that number was four hundred thousand dollars. Now, if you go back thirty years, no Democrat would have promised that.
The reason I mentioned that is we don't even have to say, well, of course Democrats wanted to keep a lot of the tax cuts. They said they wanted to keep most of the tax cuts. And yet they're again pretending every single statement that they put out that this was a tax cut for billionaires. So that's all this did was cut the taxes of billionaires. So it's very frustrating. It's also a reason why we shouldn't legislate by this
like this. We really should actually have lots of smaller bills and actually debate things and not have physical clefts and so on. But my takeaway from this is there are of course disagreements of America, and there are disagreements over the Inflation Reduction Act, but most of the stuff that is in this bill is actually stuff Democrats wanted
and they got their sole deduction back. So the idea like, oh, this is the worst bill I've ever seen, which I've seen some Democrats say there's the worst bill in American history. It's an astonishing thing to say. The fugitive slave access.
Hello.
It's just another reason why a lot of our politics are so silly, because it's nothing of the sort.
I agree that I would like to see smaller bills. It would be nice to see all of these things in individually enumerated, delineated, and then voted up and down so we have a clearer view of who's believing what and what they say and do. I agree. I also don't think there's any way back to that, at least However, we have a bill that somebody voted on as opposed to continuing resolutions to just roll everything over into the blob that just rolls and rolls on. So there's that.
Stephen mentioned the green energy, but it's curious read a tweet the other day that somebody said, after twenty years of green energy, you have better lamps and better appliances and better home stuff and all this stuff. My electricity costs is twice what it was before, which means it
me entirely accurate. But you get that feeling. I outfitted my house with all of the finest and greatest LEDs, I have my Energy Star compliance appliances and the like, and I haven't seen a reduction whatsoever could possibly be because rates go up because of a push to make the grid earth friendly, etc. That's losing it. That's that's that feels like a dead issue now. It just it feels like after the Green New Deal of you know,
the AOC years, there's no enthusiasm for that anymore. And it seems that the Democrats find themselves in a position where all of the things that they all the standards that they held so high are tattered and the flagpoles have have have wilted in the in the hot sun of disapproval and indifference. And yeah, Steven said, what do
they have they got this guy in New York. Is that the future then of the party an appeal to the people who absolutely want their communism and they want it now, fresh and hot.
Well, I mean we've talked about this before a couple of times. At the same time, you have this enthusiasm among some of the progressive thinking class, like you know, Ezra Kline for the abundance agenda, and a few politicians gingerly putting a toe in the water. Even Gavin Newsom for half an hour said yeah, I think I'm for this. Meanwhile, I just picked up the latest New York Review of Books because I read it so you don't have to.
And there's a long review of several books about the whole de growth agenda, and one of them even is called de growth communism. I mean, talk about putting it all out there in playing view without any euphemisms, right, I mean, this is perfect. Right, So you know that old religion dies hard, but I think, yeah, the practical politicians realize that this has been a vote loser for democrats.
But the main point the abundance people. They just say one thing sensible, which is, can't democrats somewhere pick a city and run it well and you know, make the schools work, clean up the streets, produce crime? How about that? And you would think there'd be least there weren't in nineteen nineties a few Democratic mayors like you know, North Quistan, Milwaukee, and a couple others who ran their cities in a sensible way. And so that might be a place to start. But I let me start in New York.
Let me start, let me stop you right there. That's a great idea. It depends, however, on an electorate that is willing to be comfortable with some uncomfortable things. After my recent experience as a I don't want to say a victim of crime because I hate the sound of that. As a non enthusiastic participant in the rearrangement of my
personal property, let's put it that way. I talked to an awful lot of people because I was walking up and down on the boulevards of several blocks trying to find one of the air pods because the carjacker had thrown my aarpods out at three locations, which is just really devious, just evil. So I have to go to each one and get down on my hands and knees and look into the boulevard and the gutter and the
rest of it. And I would explain to people why I was on their lawn looking, And once everybody heard what had happened to me, everybody had their own story. Now they weren't necessarily carjacking, but it was thievery, it was miscreens in the neighborhood, it was bad stuff. Everybody had a story, and everybody was equally convinced that nothing was going to be done to any of the people
who had done these things. And as long as they keep voting in the same people that they do, and I presume that they do because they all want to be thought of as good people and somebody who votes for those you know, nazis, nothing will change. So I mean, it takes a mayor to say that we're going to do the broken windows and squeegee guys things, But it doesn't seem to be that that's from their side. There, No,
I should correct myself. I read the other day that Eric Adams is actually trying to do like real mayor stuff like they used to do to make lives better for his constituencies, which is what mayors is supposed to do. But I mean, what's in it for them necessarily if they are getting rich and their friends are getting rich on the graft and everybody else in their party is doing okay, what's in it for them to go all doge on their own fiefs.
Yeah, good question. By the way, back up a step, James, you were carjacked. I mean yeah, at gunpoint nine point.
I mean he didn't see a gun. Tail didn't happen that it happened too fast. They were in my car before I could notice it.
More than one person.
Yeah, well they traveled in too is they followed me home and then one of them stayed in the car. The other jumps out, and I assume there's a gun because I mean, you have to have some persuasive means to relieve somebody of you know, their of their auto. And the gun was not produced while I was hanging on the side of the car swinging into the car trying to hit the guy. Although it may have been
you know, half a blockdown, you never know. So no, I didn't see one, But Charles helped me out here because a lot of people have said, this is why you always carry And I'm trying to think of a situation in which I could have produced the weapon fast enough while moving a lawnmower, you know, had it strapped. I don't live my life with the idea that I should put on my I should strap on my pistol to go get a lawnmower out of my garage in
the middle of the afternoon. I just don't. But you, but you may have some other ideas on the thought.
Yeah, although I do think I would be careful in Minnesota in the situation that you were in, if my life weren't being threatened, which is of course the question, right because you don't want to end up being prosecuted.
No, that's what you worry about. I mean the cerea is basically this, I see him coming towards me, I can produce my pistol. If he then makes a motion to indicate that he's about to pull one out himself, I think at that point I got every right to put a hole in him. But if he takes my car and runs away, I can't shoot him. So yeah, I mean all these little calculations that go through your head. Unfortunate, but yes, I know, go on.
I just wanted to make a comment about de growth communism. So when I was at Oxford, I saw a debate at the Oxford Union. I can't remember the topic of it, but there was this absolutely hilarious moment where the guy on the other side from my friend made some concession, rhetorical concession. My friends did up and he said he said, no, no, in mock helpfulness, he said, no, no, you don't understand. He said, you just said what I am here to
get you to say. You don't say that. You say anything you can to avoid saying what you just said, which loses you the debate. And I spent my time trying to get you to say what you just said, but you came out and said it at the beginning. It was just hilarious and it was just a brilliant rhetorical trick. When someone says I'm for de growth communism, that reminds me of that. No, no, you don't say that.
We we say that, that's our criticism of you being a communist, that it's you don't say that at the outset. Where's the fun in that it's a fit like the Monty Python haggled properly from Life for Brian.
Uh well, they say, they say, because they believe it to, not that it's it sounds good to people. Those are those are absolutely attributes of which they witched trumpet.
So yeah, Steve, well here I've actually got the I've looked up the actual titles. Charlie, it's even better. It's even better than you thought. The title of one of the books is Marx in the Anthrops Scene towards the Idea of de growth Communism. Now, is this book published by Island Press or some little obscure Greenee publishing house. No, it's published by Cambridge University Press. By the way, a mayor one hundred and ten dollars for the hardback. That'll
generate a few communists. It's amazing. You can't make this up.
Well, I mean, if you're inculcated to believe that that capitalism and is the roots of is the most evil system ever combined, ever created on the planet, then yes, of course you would want all manifestations of it to be removed. There was a little video floating around on Twitter a couple of days ago of a University of Minnesota professor who's talking about the need to decolonize and
dismantle America. And they say this as though America is some so of is this object that once removed, nothing but goodness will happen, That the systems that immediately and effortlessly flow into place will empower all, will cause abundance, will make everybody absolutely just jack Dandy happy. When what they're talking about, if it comes about, is a state of nature. And it's remarkable. It's the sort of thing
you know that you only hear. It's so stupid you could only hear it from an academic according to the man.
Yeah, and that's the classic human nature problem. We see this a little bit on the right at the moment. There are some people who believe that the entire modern world is corrupt and that when you really wanted to live with, say the Roman Empire or the Aztecs or something. And most funny about them is that in that Twitter avatars or that general esthetic preferences, they have pictures of statues of Caesar because they think they would have been Caesar,
when actually they wouldn't. And it's the same with these common sides. They all think that if there was some revolution and then we entered into communism, they'd be the artist, right, They wouldn't be the guy who cleaned the latrines. They would get the plumb allocation. They would get to a bunch of paints, and they would get a ceiling to spend their days using them on. And this is of course absolute nonsense, and the ceiling would collapse on them,
hopefully quickly before they knew it. But they don't think that. They think that they would. They would be given all of the best choices.
Well, but not necessarily so, because I followed the same accounts, or they pop in my stuff too, and they all want to return, and the U in return is always spelled like A like a Latin V. And while they sometimes will say, you know, yes, I realized the class distinctions, being I probably wouldn't be a senator. But on the other hand, there was a simplicity to life. There was
a sturdiness, there was an honorable quality to it. A man knew his place, and uh, well, if you look at some of these studies, peasants worked actually less than people do in America today. I know, I know, you see this all the time, and it's nonsense on its face. But conversely, I think there are things to learn from the past. There are some details motors operendez, motors vivendi that that that bear consideration, and perhaps modernizing, integration and
the rest of it. I like studying the past, but a clear eyed view of it means that you're probably going to die at twenty six of an abscess tooth. So while while yes, having these sorts of cultural solidity and national identification in the so that's that's that's good, and we can learn. But yeah, you're you're going to be in the fields ten hours a day, and you're not going to own the land, and you're going to be strung up for a tree if you shoot a deer that belongs to the to the local laird. So
you're right, Charles. It is ridiculous. It certainly is. But at least it's not as ridiculous as the Tartarians who believe that a giant mud slide wiped away traces of an advanced civilization at the turn of the century, and we've been lied to ever since. Well, that went there, and here I'm kind of glad that it did. I don't mean to interrupt, except of course I did, which means that I'm about to do something important for the health and financial security of Ricochet going forward. Bear with me,
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Epstein file not existing. I think the most interesting piece I read by this was Ace over an Ace of spades, who said, you know, I don't think there was a file. I don't think he kept a file. And he makes the point that rather than being part of some ingenious masade directed black male compromont operation, he was just a guy who called in favors all the time to make himself rich, brought people to the island, got some backgrounds
from some cute girls. Everybody knew what had happened. And when Epstein calls you on the phone and asks for a stock tip, you remember the fact that you were at his island and you want to be buds, and sure you tell them a little of this, a little of that. That seems more enlightened with human nature than some vast, you know, tentacular careful blackmail operation. But then again, I'm just influenced by the last thing that I read. So there's that. What do you guys think?
Well, I think I went on record here a month ago saying I didn't think there was ever a list, or if there had been some kind of list constructed, say by investigators, it was long ago destroyed because you don't want to have a list like that hanging around. But let's remember that there were also rumors a few years ago or claims that there were videotapes they found videotapes of Epstein's island, and you know when that all comes out, well that I haven't heard another word about that,
because I think that didn't exist either. Look, I mean assume the worst speculations that he was running a blackmail operation or some kind of genteel shakedown. You know, he's not going to keep a list. He would have long ago cleaned up and made it all go away. He was a pretty smart guy. Pretty twisted guy, but obviously a pretty smart guy. I still wonder who's the guy was Wexler. Wexner, one of those guys who paid Epstein, has claimed something like one hundred and fifty million dollars
for tax advice. That doesn't seem right. Even the most expensive law firm doesn't charge that much by the hour, So it had to be something else, And you know, I've never heard that explain in a detail. It had to be some kind of partnership of some some crazy equity thing. It can't have been tax advice. So this whole thing has been built on rumors and crazy stuff from the very beginning. I'm afraid.
I never believed in the list either. I also think that the racy theories don't make much sense. So we have a president Donald Trump, who has I think it's fair to say, been victimized by the intelligence services. At least they haven't been nice to him. We have an FBI director, Cash Patel, who dislikes the intelligence services. He dislikes the organization he runs. He thinks it's been a malign force in American history. I agree with him on that.
And we have Dan Bongino, who is very much in touch with the base, especially the sort of people who think that there's a list or that this has been covered up under the Biden administration. And those people are all saying, actually, there is nothing here now. The only reason that I can think of, rationally that they would lie about that, because I think announcing it would be pretty good for them. I think they'd enjoy doing that
is if Donald Trump were in some way implicated. But that's got to be absolute nonsense too, because first off, Joe Biden would have said something. Biden went after him in any way he possibly could. They tried to prosecute him, as did the state of New York, which has an access to Jeffrey Epstein. And even if Biden hadn't done that, for some reason, a person in the federal government would have. There would have been a leak or a whistleblower or
a guy who came forward. Of course there would that person would have had he had the goods made fifty million dollars from a book deal. So you've got the people who already profoundly dislike the intelligence services on the right side of the aisle are saying there's nothing there, And then you have the only reason that they wouldn't want to do that being absolutely ridiculous. The most investigated
man in the world is Donald Trump. Doesn't it make more sense just to say Jeffrey Epstein was clearly an evil man who did evil things, but he didn't write it all down.
It strikes me as utterly reasonable. I'm still trying to get past the fact, and I've never been able to eye bleach this out of my brain, and that Epstein had a big oil painting of Bill Clinton in a blue dress and red heels. Yeah, the audacity of the audacity of that, and the fact that Clinton probably saw
it and yucked and said that's a good one. I mean, everybody would see it when they walked into his place just sort of tells you the type of individual character that we're that we're talking about here.
But yeah, who needs who needs a list when you could have made that painting public Clinton?
So I don't believe that that the the island had that little temple, there had secret elevators that went down to operating rooms where they removed the adrena chrome or whatever that is from the brains of infants. That that that whole common pizza ping punk pizza thing, the madness of that, whatever happened, by the way to Q has has the storm finally blown itself out? Because you don't hear an awful lot of people talking about Q anymore.
And I'm wondering what has replaced it in the space of in the mind space of those people who fervently believed that the revelations were about to drop.
I have no idea I've wondered that too, and I've got no clue what may have replaced it.
I don't think they need it anymore. To be frank, well, elsewhere in the news this last week. I mean, it's the fourth of July and normal, but stuff did happen. We had, you know, I have a feed that I have a news feed that was that was. Oh no, I'm sorry. I don't want to talk about Shawn Combs, John Puffy Combs. I want to talk about Sean Duffy shoes.
Apparently there's a new now. I always said that when you take off your shoes at the airport to go through the security line, that there should be a statue of the shoe bomber at the end of the line that you can throw your footwear at, just just to get your anger out of that. That bastard for doing what he did, that made everybody take off their shoes for twenty years. But now apparently we don't. We don't.
Do you know why? And do you think that these guys are going to be less safe now that their shoes will not be examined by X Ray's.
Well, I don't think we ever needed to do it in the first place. Supposedly the new scanners and technology can pick up a doctored shoe. I don't know. I don't think the Europeans. Charlie helped me out on this. I don't think the Europeans ever went in for the shoe removal business.
Well, the British did, but they abolished it last year.
Last Okay, yeah, anyway, I mean I was joking for the last twenty years, and I'd vote for the first presidential candidate who said we could keep our shoes on at the airport. And then, of course I got signed up for pre check several years ago, so I've been able to skip the getting the laptop out and the and taking my shoes off. I did like the last comment. The Babylon Pee had one of their classic headlines saying, you now can keep your shoes on before TSA gropes you.
Well, I was wondering, Steve, how if I don't have to watch other people take their shoes off, I'm going to feel better than the other passengers who don't have TSA pre I'm going to need a new form of separate now, I'm kidding. I never thought this would happen.
I never thought it would happen, not because it ever made any sense that we did this, but because the incentives in a democratic system all line up against repealing bad ideas like this, because if in the tiny chance that somebody was wearing shoes when they blow it blow up a plane, the president or agency that rescinded that
order would be blended. If you look. For example, we haven't touched on it, but at these horrendous floods in Texas, they are quite clearly nothing to do with the fact that Donald Trump is president, the Greg Abbott is governor of Texas. The doge existed, but that is the line. So I always assumed, well, presidents are smart enough to know that, and although this is theater, they don't want to be the guy whose decisional tenure happened to intersect
with a terrorist attack. And I'm so so happy that I'm wrong. It never occurred to me.
No, we did it because the encroachment on freedom only goes one way. We think. Our shower heads will never be more powerful, our dishwashers will never wash like they did before, our toilets will not flush with a robust capacity that they did twenty five years ago. We will never be able to not wear a shit. But you know, I feel like now if I went into a coma and woke up in twenty years and went to the airport, I started taking off my belt and my shoes, people
would be appauled. What are you doing? What are you doing? Just it's TSA, isn't no? You just walk over to the plane here, have a cigarette. I mean they was reverting back to Nay teen sixty seven when I last was overseas in London and in the Roman airports. I'm pleased to note that the scanning detection that they have is remarkable. They make these three D models, these image, these three D models that they can then examine from every angle blow up go into. I should have said
blow up and it's it's remarkable. But I always hate it because I'm always the guy whose bag goes on the dreaded second to shoot because and I'm glad that they are, because I my bag looks dangerous. My bag looks like I am a maniac. I should be in a black hair shirt with bag with bushy hair holding a you know, a boris bad enough bomb in my hand because there's so many wires and batteries and they have you know, they're just paging. Why do you need
so many cords? Well, I'm traveling with my wife and daughter. Each of them has their own dedicated uh accessory battery cord that we that I that I provide for them so they're you can see their color coded here and well, these large batteries are for on the on the train. Smaller ones are for an ex. I mean, you know, explain everything to them. But I'm glad. And it's also this.
They also see your face and they got always all kinds of ways to see your face as you're in line and walking up the minute you walk into the airport, uh, and they know your face and they know who you are. And I would love to know which face of mine they have. I'd love to know where it is. But I walk into a Roman airport and the Roman airport says oh James Loleax Minneapolis, Minnesota, Rivederla. So yeah, that's why we can, that's why we can keep our shoes on.
This would never happen to their return people who would be the ones making that determination.
Right, No, No, it wouldn't. But of course since everybody lived probably about you know, spent their entire life five miles from their birth. They wouldn't have to worry about security checks when they go to some other places you mentioned the floods. The floods they tried to blame on cuts to the NWS, They tried to blame on abbot, they tried to blame on understaffing. In other words, the whole idea that the government, if not funded at current
levels and then more so, results in imminent death. And also what they love about these is the fact that it's weather and having the sort of paganistic fear of Guaya that they do. They believe that this is caused by somebody starting up in suv in nineteen eighty seven and contributing the fatal amount of carbon dioxide that her monoxide or dioxe, whatever, the greenhouse gas that's going to kill us all. But as we were saying before, these
claims are falling on deaf ears. Everybody's been hearing them for twenty years, and the earth is okay. But yet we're still supposed to believe that these ones once in a one hundred year life events are magnifying and increasing and getting more deadly. But none of that is sticking. All this stuff is like putting a post it note on a sweating man just it just isn't working. And the ghouls who would populate social media right away and
gleefully blame this one. The editorial cartoonist of legitimate newspapers blame it on the people who deny climate change or the people who voted for immigration reform, and the rest of it is off putting extreme to the normies, as they say, right.
Yeah, yeah, I think people are suffering from apocalypse fatigue at this point. And this is li isn't brand new.
I mean I filed away. I think way back around two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight, when an unexpected person it was Nick Christoff, the liberal minded columnists of New York Times wrote an article saying, gosh, I wonder for being too apocalyptic with this environmental business, because my perception is environmental alarms are now like car alarms, something blaring in the background that we're starting to tune
out and ignore. Well, I think now we actually have the op polling data in on this is it's now the fact that you actually had the Democratic analyst David Shore a year ago telling Democrats from his very careful survey work shut up about electric cars. My findings say that talking about electric cars loses votes for Democrats, and lo and beholders starting to not talking about electric cars as much, so it's become a stone cold loser for them and it's about darn time.
Well the Charles. Before you get to that, I want to note, I don't know what it's like in Florida. It's probably soupy there, right, And Stephen, if you're in California, we know the California is clement and beautiful, but July is hot. I'm here to tell you in Minnesota that it has been absolutely well, extraordinarily hot, drenching rains and the rest of it, which is fine. It's good it's summer. But you can't escape it, can you. That's scorching summer sun.
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most the deadest thing you can imagine. Right, So there's not a lot left. So I'm gonna ask you, guys, what is something that you have been watching that you don't think that enough people are paying attention to? But as consequential nevertheless, Well, James.
I was expecting you to bring up the new Superman movie, which, uh, well I almost did. Well, well, now I'll make you because it sounds like it's going to be a bomb at the box office. We'll see about that. But you know they've changed it from truth justice in the American way to truth justice and the human way.
Uh huh?
And what the director is? A James Gun or somebody Gun says, well, you know Superman was an immigrant. It's an immigrant story and like wait a minut, no, he was well from another planet, right, he was raised in America. To try and politicize this movie in even such a hamheaded way, seems like a real blunder. And so I noticed this morning that this White House that should never have blundered this way, this White House, not the White House,
should have blundered, but Hollywood shouldn't have blundered. They put out an AI drawing Trump in a Superman suit. I stand for truth, Justice and the American Way. It's an epic troll on all this. And so I'm gonna watch. I'm gonna watch the box office and see what the word of mouth is on the movie. It's getting mixed reviews so far.
I'm curious. James Gunn was loved by some for the quirky, quippy tone that he brought to Guardians of the Galaxy. And I love the first Guardian. It had a great charm to it. Walking through listening to you know, hooga Shaka at the beginning, he thought, oh, this is new. But unfortunately quippiness is one of those things that infected all the Marvel movies, which gave made them a sort of weightless. People don't say these things after they've just
saved the world. And then of course it was swamped by also darkness and complexity in the rest of it, and Marvel movies became almost unwatchable. They seemed like homework, and I fell away from them. I've never been a Superman guy, because what's the interest there. He's Superman, He's vulnerable, he can't you know, Oh yeah, Krypton brings him down.
I thought as a kid that the Superman books were stupid, because in every other one of them it was what if Superman actually had a peg leg and it would be one of those stories, or Lois Lane and Lana Lang would be catfighting in the right. Well, that actually was a pretty good episode, but there's nothing about him
interested in me. The only thing, however, that you maybe can take away from the sixty Superman's was that they did do PSAs and which Superman would tell a bunch of kids not to be prejudice that everybody's an American here. We're all born in America, roll citizens. Your national origin doesn't count. And you could say that was him being woke back then, but no, that was the usual good citizenship stuff that they used to do all the time.
What Gun has done with the statements that he's made, is indicated that he doesn't realize the nature of the complaints about illegal immigration. Nobody's talking is it is not anti American to be against anti illegal immigration. We love our immigrants, right, Charles, You should do. We do, and we would be less without them. But there's a process,
there's legality, there's a number of people. There's the question of dumping fifteen thousand people into a community of fifty thousand without thinking that the culture was going to go under stresses and the rest of it. It's this complex argument, and if you want to reduce it down to your stupid comic book terms, then you're an idiot. And I'll presume you're an idiot, and I'll watch the movie with that in mind. That said, everything I've read about it
makes this thing sound weightless and jokey and quippy. And let's redo it and rethink it. And while there's room for that, and a competent director and a they could do it. I trust Kyle Smith when he says, right, I don't think that. I don't think they did it.
Let me give you one little footnote to it, James, that will amuse you. The New York Times has a story out today. The headline is Superman's other secret weakness journalism ethics. Subhead writing the Daily Planet about his heroic alter ego raises thorny issues for Clark Kent. Lois Lane has her conflicts too. Now, I mean, I haven't read Peace. I'm not going to. I've got to think that maybe this is a lame of tempet satire. But I'll bet not.
I'll bet this is somebody that really thinks that there's something wrong with this depiction of Clark Kent.
I hear me, hope there is way do they learn about a guy named Peter Parker who would set up his camera to take pictures of this spider man fellow. There's another questionable set of ethics for you. I just
like the idea. I mean, I'm keen to see if this movie takes place in an actual newsroom, because if it's supposed to be a newsroom of twenty twenty four and there's more than five people in the office, I'd be surprised if it's one of those places full of clattering keys and people shouting copyboy and wreaths of cigar smoke. You know, that's nineteen forty seven Daily Planet. That isn't that isn't here. And even though we have a globe in our lobby that looks like something you would have
in a classic newspaper. The whole idea of the paper as it was in the Daily Bugle is gone. Charles. Were you a comic book reader growing up? Did you have any favorites of your own?
I wasn't and I'm still not, and mostly I'm disinterested in comic book movies, although I thought the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy was spectacular, and I liked the Iron Man movie with Robert Danney Jr.
The first one I did.
Yeah, I think the quippiness, oh and you mentioned got into the guy because that was good to the quippiness does bother me. Though. I saw someone on Twitter the other day showing the scene in Jurassic Park where the two paleontologists first see the dinosaur, and they said, you know that movie had been made now by someone other than Spielberg, they would have made a quip to show how cool they were, rather than been overalled. And I
thought that that was a fair point. My problem with the Superman movie, aside from things the director have said which have irritated me too, for all the reasons you outlined, it's just that I just don't think it looks very good and okay, I'm obviously not the target audience because I'm not a big superhero movie so stipulated, but I really actually wanted to be excited to go and see this because I have two boys, right seven and nine, and I thought, well, when I was ten, I loved
the Superman series with Terry Hatcher and Dean Kane, and I thought, well, they would probably love to go to the movie theater, which they love going to the movie theater, and to see the Superman movie. And I've watched the trailer, and I tried so hard with the first couple of trailers that I sought to get excited about going to see it, and I just don't think it looks right now. Maybe it's amazing, but everyone who has seen whose opinion
I respect, says it's not so. Between that and the trailers that didn't excite me at all and the director being annoying, I think I'm going to skip it right.
The whole business about going from truth justice in the American way to the Human way fails on two levels. One, the human way is actually not that good. It is not something that we if I had a choice to be. Here's a society full of humans and here's a society
full of Americans. I'm going to go with the one that's got the concepts of law and order in individuality and personal responsibility as opposed to the ones that are that are basically blood maddened, you know, resource expropriating feral humans. I mean, the human way, unmediated by law and by tradition and culture is bad. And America is a law, tradition and culture. So he's stupid in that way again to think that there is something human that is on
a plane above evil of Americanism. But also Superman has done this before. I think you were in one. He renounced his citizenship and became a United Nations ambassador or something like that. I mean, they love to do this, and they love to point out exactly that. You know, he's got roots as an immigrant. He's a reflection of the Jewish immigrant experience and all that stuff. And hey, you know, Clark Kent didn't have his papers when he
landed in Smallville. And these are all tedious, small, little, anal retentive details that forget the basics of the story that he landed here a blank slate and his and by being raised by two loving people in the middle of the Midwest. He grew up to embody these characteristics, and that says something about the culture that we'd like to think. And even if we don't think it's true all the time, it's something that we should strive to
incorporate into our national mythology. No harm in that. But basically, we're talking about a guy who you know, bullets bounced off his chest and he's got laser beams out of his eyes. So let's not take all that too seriously. Yeah,
we will see. I'm disappointed. But again here and here's the other thing, though, when are we going to get past this idea that well, what I'm going to do, and it's very brave, it's very edgy, is I'm going to subvert the audience's expectations about this long standing cultural institution. How long have we been doing this?
You know what? What movie didn't do it? Top gun Maverick? Right to start with some exposition about how planes actually suck?
Right, you know what sucks?
Planes? Planes suck and pilots pilots suck too, And who cares whether America wins all the nameless enemy? Iran uh? And do that?
No?
And for this f one movie that people seem to like as well, does not seem to subvert the expectations that cars that go very fast are cool.
Well. I wrote about the F one movie in my blog the other day because I ran across a piece that said, we need to talk about female representation in F one. Oh, And I thought, no, no, no, no, no. We don't know. If anybody says we need to talk about this, you look at your watch and you say, I gotta I got a red canal, I gotta go to We don't need to because, first of all, you know, it's not going to be a talk, it's going to
be a lecture. But the problem is is that the F one audience is getting more and more female, and there wasn't enough representation in the movie. So that's a problem. But you know, movies that are straight ahead and appeal to that old style American movie going, people adore them. People respond to them with huge waves of gratitude. And I have to tell you, as good as I know that they are, I have a real problem with Mission Impossible movies because of something they did in the very
first one. They may spoiler alert for a movie it's been off for twenty years. They made Jim Phelps into a trader. And I remember sitting there and thinking, I mean, I hate to say childhood ruined and the rest of it, but I grew up admiring the hell out of Jim Phelps, and to do this to that character, just just for a twist, Oh, he was evil all along. Look at that Captain America's actually hydra. I hate this stuff. It's the most boring, predictable trope you can get these days.
Yeah, yeah, I think I recall reading that it was a greg and I think maybe Peter Graves was still alive and hated the movie and walked out of it and wouldn't have anything to do with it. And I quite agree with you about I.
Think for that reason. I think for that reason, and if Martin landa who had been alive, and Barbara Bain, that's right, Martin Lando and Barbara Bin I think. And then of course Spock joined the show a little bit later, right, yes, right, I just I absolutely loved that show very much.
But now the other thing, James that I think here I want to prompt Charlie that happened this week is I thought we were all done with the Supreme Court for the summer right, Oh, you know, the term ended. Instead, we have all this new commotion happening, including the Supreme Court say no, we really meant it about district courts
doing universal injunctions. And there was the amazing spectacle I never would have predicted of Sonya Sotomayor hectoring Katanji Brown Jackson to say, you don't really know what the law is, do you? And over to you, Charlie, because you wrote wonderfully about this.
Well, it was you don't really know what the law is, do you? But also I think the broader message was you don't really know what your job, yes is do you? I wrote about this because we love the rule of three in journalism. If you have three examples of something, your golden ah, that's the column. And we have three examples now. The first was I'm going in reverse water.
Katandi Brown Jackson herself in an ABC interview, saying that she loves being on the Supreme Court because it gives her the opportunity to share in her opinions what she thinks about the issues. She also said she likes to share her feelings, and she said that she likes to talk about how the country should work and this bothered me because judges are not supposed to talk about how the country should work. Citizens are supposed to talk about
how the country should work. Congress yes and state legislatures. I was supposed to talk about how the country should work within his limited realm. The president's supposed to talk about how the country should work. But judges are not. Judges are supposed to talk about how the country does work and what the law is, not what it should be, and there's certainly not supposed to share their feelings. And it struck me that I'm not the only one who
thinks this. Clearly, Sonya sort of my all thinks this, of all people to be chastised by, imagine being chastised for not being good enough at your job by Sonya's sort of my own who told Justice Jackson a few days ago that sure, she also agrees that the president must follow the law, but that they hadn't actually got to that case yet, and the questions that were raised in Jackson's descent hadn't actually been raised by the side of the dispute, and that she should jump the gun.
And before that we had Amy Cony Barrett, who was careful and judicious as a writer and as a justice New King Jackson frankly for her descent, pointing out that it was not connected to the Constitution or any statute, or any doctrine or any canon of construction, and that it was odd to hear a Supreme Court justice complaining about legal ease, which is an actual talent that Jackson used.
And it was odd to hear a Supreme Court justice complaining that both the majority opinion and the principal descent were obsessed with that complicated and boring legal question, which is again the nature of the job. And I just thought, and I wrote this in the piece you refer to. I just thought that having listened to Jackson talk about her role, she'd be much better. Are off starting a substag.
Yeah, I think you're right, because we're about another term away from her releasing a descent that consists of the dog in a fiery room saying this is fine, alas, alas, and a lack. Hey, listen, folks, it's a short week this week for us, because, frankly, you got other things to do, and we thank you for listening to us.
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expanse of January July January July still stretches ahead. I've got another hour and a half in the building where I've worked for these many years, and just a couple of hours left in a in a job I've been at for twenty seven years, and I'm retiring today. Well, not retiring. That implies that I'm sort of hanging it up,
and I'm not. As a matter of fact. You can find me at lilax dot com and James Lilacott substack dot com, as you can find Charles C. W. Cook at the National Review and Stephen where can people pick up the latest thing that you've written?
I have a substack these days I call political Questions. But if you do Steve Hayward at substack, it pops up.
There you go. So there's your reading for the weekend. Folks. Don't forget to hop on that cozy earth sail and we'll see you at Ricochet, and we'll see you in the comments at Ricochet for point zero. Bye bye, guys,