While the whole in our hearts and lives will never be filled. I hope that in time our family can find healing. I pray that the other victim's family can find some semblance of the same. I'm hopeful that all the wounded are able to make a full recovery and return home to their families. And finally, all the people and especially the children impacted by this horrific event, are able to recover mentally and find strength to live loving, happy and full lives.
Welcome everybody to the Ricashey Podcast, Episode number seven hundred and fifty five. I'm joined by Stephen Haywood in California and Charles W. Cook in Florida, and gentlemen, thank you. So uh, I guess I should start with the news I live. Technically, I'm on fifty first and the Annunciation Church in Minneapolis is on fifty fourth, so I'm close. There's the creek, the creek between us, beautiful rushing water
that goes down to minne Falls. Lovely neighborhood, beautiful neighborhood, beautiful day, and I get to call for my sister in law, who are attacks for my sister in law who lives about a block away from the church that there had been a mass shooting and annunciation, and she goes out and talks to her neighborho had actually seen the demon do it. And within seconds, it seems as if every as I wrote in Ricochet, every siren in the world was heading our way. This this this, this
chorus of whales. That was astonishing, and it was it was. It was a bad day here. And the only thing I can think of, that's that's that's apt Is nine. And I know people drag that into everything, but the same sense of after the event, and the and and just the stunned feeling, that ghastly miasma that descends over
the community, and how the TV is always on. The TV is your friend, It's right there, and it's it's always on all the you know, all the local channels were dumped their Judge Judy and when went to this and you know, we all know now what it was about. We all well, we we do. It seems some of the authorities are still scratching their head and trying to figure out what the motivation was. We may never know.
The strange thing for me was that I was getting on X the identity of this guy about forty five minutes before the authorities announced it. I don't know how that happened. I don't know. Obviously, the ide'd the miscreant right away, and the FBI was on the scene, and the FBI was able to pull the stuff down from YouTube.
Apparently there's a there's there's a protocol for this, there's a there's a red phone that rings, and they know it's the FBI telling him to take something down because his manifesto that he'd put up was gone, but somebody had scraped it and taken screenshots and put the whole thing up and got the guy's identification. And I'm still trying to figure out exactly how that happened. And it just once again shows you how the world has changed.
It used to be you sit by the television and wait for Walter Cronkite to break in and take off his glasses and wipe his eyes and tell you something. But now no, it's blasting out of that little magic glass rectangle in your pocket. And what we know about the guy, of course, is fascinating, not in a good way. It's a look I thought for a lot of people into a part of the dank in cell, moist, miserable, nihilistic cave in online in which so many of these
people dwell and a lot. I mean, if you looked at what he wrote on his gun, his rifle in the magazines, it was a compendium of Internet memes and cliches and references. I hope a lot of people take a look at that and study what it means and figure out exactly what to do about guys like this, because my first instinct is not demand the guns.
Oh. I always try to go by the seventy two hour rule in these things, which is way too you have some information and confirmation of things. This is one case where you can set some of that aside, because, first of all, James, I'm a little curious too that we got photos of the guns and other information came out so quickly. Maybe it was some you know, random people on social media.
Who out No, No, I don't think so. The most likely thing. I think, the most likely explanation is that he set this thing to go to be to go public at a certain time, and one of his mutuals got a notification. Oh and when they got the notification, they scraped it, downloaded it, and then sent it to somebody to give themselves some distance from it. That's the
only thing that I can imagine that makes some sense. Yeah, I'm not going to be conspiratorial about this and say that it was all you know, this is all this is all black rock deep state stuff.
Man.
False.
No, no, Well, but sorry, Jay, if we can't our mind back to the shooting in Nashville, what a year and a half ago, also by a transgender student of great trouble who had a manifesto that was actively suppressed
by the police and the authorities. Parts of it have finally leaked out, and I thought, maybe somebody's leaking it out to get ahead of the suppression effort, which is point number two, which is I'm watching the media turn somersaults to avoid bringing up the chosen identity of the shooter, so they'll say, you know, troubled person, maybe mental illness issues.
NPR kept talking about they shot themselves for this person used to day then pronounced I was watching NBC Nightly News about it the other night, and I thought, how ironic that they won't mention this at all, and yet to have an ongoing segment right now in NBC ninety news called the cost of denial. It's about health insurance and all those problems that are not new to be reported on. But I thought talk about cost of denial.
The media and all of our authorities are going out of their way to deny that any sort of mental illness and mental unbalance of this person could be in any way related to his gender identity issues. Oh no, we can't talk about that. That's a bigotry and hate and everything else.
Charles, Well, I'm sorry that happens so close to you. I'm sorry it happened at all. But it sounds as if it was more horring for you than I am.
The least important element of this story.
No, I know, but still, but still it's worse when things happen close to you.
Well, I don't think it's.
The guns either, And not only do I not think it's the guns, but I think that this is an irrelevant factor because even if you want it to, you can't ban guns. There's hundreds of millions of them. So then the question is what can you do? And I never know the answer. James like, well, can.
You keep a guy from walking into a pond shop passing the background check because he has no criminal record and working out with one of these things. No, well you can't if you simply say you can't do that in Minneapolis. But then of course you can go to Richfield.
Well right, but also you can go to the black market. And this guy, unfortunately, was obsessed with other school shooters.
He was clearly.
In a line of mass shooters and that's how he saw himself. He'd written their names on the magazines. So if you're that determined, the argument that adding friction into the process it's problematic in many ways. It's a constitutional right. If you do that, you also end up preventing people who need guns to defend themselves from getting them and
so on. But the argument in favor of adding friction between a gun purchaser and a gun makes sense in certain circumstances from a purely practical perspective, if, for example, you wish to stop somebody killing himself on a whim, or if somebody is very angry and would have calmed down had he not been able to get a gun, that's the theory at least. But in this case, I mean, you're talking about somebody who wrote a manifesto, and the manifesto is crazy, and I do think we ought to
keep that in mind. It's crazy in so many different ways, some of which touch politics. But the most crazy thing about it is this bizarre, schizophrenic flipping between I want to kill children. I thought that is abhorrent to almost everyone in the world, and hey, Tommy, be nice to mum, make sure that you do your homework.
What what sort.
Of person is concerned about the relationship between their sibling and their mother but also is talking about killing children. This is the part that I think is impossible to interrogate.
I share.
Steve's absolute irritation with the press because the press does not take the view that I usually take left or right, trans or not man or woman, that the people who do this are usually crazy. The press likes to focus in on details. And you can bet your asset if this guy had had a Maga hat, even if every other thing he had said was left wing, if he had one Maga hat in his bedroom, or it would have been caught in the frame or of a red hat for an oil company had been caught in the
frame of the video, they'd have talked about it. But now it's too nuanced, it's too difficult to know. So what they're doing is they're systematically and selectively suppressing what we are allowed to know and talk about.
I find that wildly annoying, even though I'm.
Not somebody who tends to take the view that hey, somebody on the other side did this. Therefore, I think that's usually useless. But the press doesn't, so we get it only in one direction, and I find that furiating.
But they can't because the information is out there and everybody's having the conversation, and there's some conversations that they don't want us to have. They're just not because they you know, I hate that thing den tricks that your dentist doesn't want you to know. What I mean by that is it's an uncomfortable conversation that exposes hypocrisies and flaws in arguments and theories. And it has to do with the guy's transgender identity. One. I don't think I'm
looking at this guy. I don't think he was on anything. To be frank, I don't think he was going through any medicalized transition. I just get that feeling and I had that that was reiterated by a transgender advocate who was in my Twitter feed, who said, you know, this person was just trying on an identity. They put their hair in pigtails, didn't take any drugs, didn't do any surgery, et cetera, et cetera. So not not really a transgender person.
I thought, oh wait, hold, hold on a second, that's not what we've been told before we had been told the whole basis of self ID is that one need not have to go through any of these things. That simply declaring oneselves to be another general is sufficient because they know, because our children know, listen to the children they know, and therefore everything should flip and they should have all the access to the to the other sex that you know that the natural born females or manles have.
So that's part of the Other part is is that if you want red flag laws or people who have manifest signs of mental instability, If you want to say no, that crazy person walking into the gun shop should not get a gun, what do you say about a hulking man in address with pigtails and makeup? Are you allowed to say, I don't believe that that person has the mental stability that we generally require from people to you know,
to possess this, because then all of a sudden. Then you're classifying their way of presenting and identifying themselves as a mental instability, and we can't have that. So, I mean, what the whole everybody has suppressed, not suppressed, but just decline to discuss the nuances that surround the whole transgender, general identity, general ideology thing. They just they just state what is what must be agreed upon and that we must be kind and then we move on from that
point without every being able to discuss. But people want that discussion, and online is exactly where we're having that discussion. Well, other discussions to come, and that will be this we are going to talk to Oh wait a minute, Wait a minute, wait a minute, talk Why talk when you can, you know, do something else like check your bank balance? Have you done that recently? Have you? How about your investments?
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dot com slash ricochet. And we thank beckon yourself for sponsoring this the Ricaget podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast Will Chamberlain, vice President for External Affairs at the Edmund Brooke Foundation. He's also the senior council at the Article three Project and the Internet Accountability Project. Well, welcome, good to be with you. Well, of course I'd like to know about the vice president for Internal Affairs. But more than that, I'd like to know about the Edmund
Brooke Foundation. Tell us about it. It's having its fifth annual National Conservatism Convention conference in DC next week. What should people know about the organization?
Well, so it's found a boy your and Hiszzoni, the author of the Virtue of Nationalism. And really if you want to learn, you know precisely, like what the political beliefs of the organization are. What we're trying to put forward. There's a statement of principles available at the website. I think, you know, it's really a conservatism that's deeply rooted in nationalism. That and I think it orients itself and it finds itself very much at the center of the modern right.
Not necessarily, you know, there's not a uniform view on foreign policy, but it's more oriented towards restraint than previous dominant intellectual strengths and conservatism.
It's also very much.
Focused on you know, the right of peoples to maintain their sovereignty, and that's very focused on immigration. And it is not certainly not you know, the orthodox kind of libertarian view on economics. It you know, we're not, we're very much heterodox, although I mean we're not socialists or anything. But we're perfectly willing to see terrorists used judiciously, and so we find ourselves very much an approval of much of the Trump agenda.
Nationalism is one of those words. It probably gets you red flagged over in Europe. Here in the States, how would you regard nationalism as having the same sort of bad odor that it does in the Well, yeah, I mean the EU is this wonderful transnational project that's going to dissolve borders and have everybody grouped into this this happy union of shared ideas. And you know, America is a country based on an idea, but we're also based very firmly in the fact of our geographical location, the
fact that we are in nation. So where doesn't what do you think nationhood pull nationalism polls these days?
I think it would pull pretty strongly. Donald Trump, you know, famously said I am a nationalist and that he didn't think it was a bad word, and all of a sudden he's you know, he's the leader of the Republican Party and the President of the United States. I think it's probably popular.
JD.
Vance actually, I think described what nationalism is nationalism is pretty well at last year's conference where he was a keynote. I mean he said, you know, it's not We're not merely just an idea. We're a common people with a you know, a common history and a common future. And there's there's I mean there obviously people can join that. This isn't a like, this isn't blood and soil. People can join that. That people, but it's more than just an idea.
Well, here's our here's our Brookie and Charles Headley Cook to to ask you the next question. Charles, so what is not a nationalist?
Maybe that's a better way of looking at who do you not want to be like?
On the right or the left? I mean, who do we not want to be like on the left? I mean it's pretty easy to you know, this is people, I mean, the kind of people who national identity is bad that we should you know, submit to a single world government or some sort of globe, some sort of
other type of liberal imperial arrangement. And then further centrists, I think the kind of the tax you know, not tacky, but the sort of simplistic way to put it would be the invade the world, invite the world viewpoint, which is the idea that we ought, you know, that it's perfectly fine for us to be, you know, have a global empire where we're you know, running everything everywhere, but simultaneously have no discrimination about who we admit in because hey,
if you just you know, say, you know, say say the words of the Oath, you can be an American just like everybody else. And I think it's a little it's quite a bit more than that. And then I think on the right, we certainly don't want to be like the you know, I think truly blood and soil, uh and really you know, aggressively bigoted people. I think that's a really simple way, simple way to understand it.
But there, you know, there are there are groups on the right that you know, seem to uh believe that things like jewsers averting the white race, like all sorts of silly nonsense like that, and that's definitely not us and we we really don't have any time for it. I think you know, Or himself is Israeli, and you know the kind of you actually look at the conference leadership, it kind of comes.
From all over the place.
You know, Anna Wellis is Polish and lives in America. I'm I'm American, but of you know, like you know, my dad's a Wasp, my my mom is Jewish. So it's you know, there's a lot of and then there's plenty of you know, Protestants and Catholics. So it's it's a it's a wide it's a wide range of people from different backgrounds, but it's it's a there's a deep Americanism to it, and it's in you know, these are people most of these people, especially on the American side,
are people who've been you know, been here. They aren't just necessarily like recent immigrants.
Mm hmm.
I think some of the people who are very critical of Trump and I have been at times, they miss remember how much nationalism was in the Republican Party historically. They think that there was this time there was no one who's in favor of tariffs and immigration restrictionism, and so it's just not true.
Right.
So obviously you have your figures like Pap Buchanan, who's opposed to boy for a certain portion of conservatism.
But if you go back to Reagan, do you see Reagan.
As a nationalist in some ways or is this project in opposition or tension with the Reaganism.
I think it's a little bit of both. I mean, I think our attitude towards Reagan will be some good, some bad. I think we would probably look back at some of Reagan's amnesty decisions as some of the you know, the worst policy decisions he would have made that really set us back in a number of ways. And it's you know, on the other hand, obviously Reagan bringing back the Republican Party as a brand and a lot of nationalist ideas, and I think much of his foreign policy
approach was something we would broadly agree with. So it's a mix of both. It's also kind of hard to criticize, you know, I when when Reagan was around, when Reagan was president, you know, I was three, So I'm sort of I'm always a little skeptical of presentism. With regard to criticizing Reagan. You have to wonder what was the debate about immigration, Like what were people thinking?
And I don't know.
I mean, it's quite possible that there were more prescient people who were extremely critical of Reagan from the right on his immigration policies. I don't really know, And so I'm willing to give the man himself a bit of grace on that. But I think we would look back at that part of his record and say that that was certainly a mistake and there needs to be a corrective towards it.
Yeah, just one very great thing on that in the late nineteen eighties, National Reviews to run these editorials in a favorite running line when they criticized Reagan was this would never have happened if Ronald Reagan was still alive. Even that was some of.
That yeah, well, can I jump in here on that point.
It's Steve Hayward out in California, Will and I'll just say straight out that I've been fascinated by the National Conservative Project for a while. I attended the first, the very first one, which was the twenty seventeen now or eighteen in.
Washington, eighteen twenty nineteen, I think, yeah, whatever it.
Was, and I wanted to come to several more. There was either I had a scheduled conflict or in one case, I was going to come to a Miami meeting and the airlines didn't cooperate, I couldn't make it, and I can't make it next week, unfortunately, which I'm sorry because I'm delighted to see you're giving your big Beaconsfield Prize to my one of my mentors, Chris Debuth, good friend, and so forth.
At one point about the Reagan business.
Now, of course, by the time the failure of that amnesty of eighty six eighty seven became obvious by the mid nineties, really you know, Reagan had his Alzheimer's. But Mee told me several times, oh yeah, that was a terrible deal. We should never have done it. We believe the Democrats, the Congress would and the bureaucracy would enforce employment verification other things that didn't happen, and said we should not.
So, I mean, they regretted that fairly early on.
But Reagan was always something of an immigration dove, going back to his experience as California governor when you had, you know, a guest worker program for agriculture, and okay, that probably worked decently anyway, but it's true, Charles Race
is a good point. One of the things that people forget, including a lot of pro Reagan nostalgist who I am at least half the day, is during the eighties there were a lot of conservatives, and I was among him, who were very frustrated with Reagan over arms control, Soviet Union. Immigration was not as big, but there were some people and certain fiscal matters which now look very differently in retrospect.
But I'm going to that. I wrote a large book about all that. A couple of things about.
Well, let me do one big one is you may reference a moment ago to jd Vance last year saying I forget how we put it or how you summarized it, but I understand what he's on about, which is well, there's always been this debate about whether America is a credle nation deca had our identity really for the declaration of independence, or whether we're a historical nation. And I remember Margaret Thatcher saying once that Europe is a product of history, America is a product of philosophy, hilted toward
the creedle part. And as you may know, we've been having these rather bitter debates about some aspect of that question for decades among conservatives. I'm scratching my head thinking, why can't it be both? Why can't someone produce an intellectual synthesis that blends them together, which I actually think is the right answer to things. And maybe you guys will be the ones who come up with that in the fullness of time.
I mean, I think I think Joram's book is I mean, he's really I think he does a good job of integrating the you know, the creedle part to an extent. I mean it is you know, he talks about kind of the nation as the sort of middle ground between the tribe and the empire, right is, you know, and it's sort of tribes unifying. He roots it in kind of the experience of these biblical Israel and the Bible, you know, and I think that there's something to the
idea of kind of the expanding circle of loyalties. Vans also talked about this when he had that whole discussion about order of Morris, the idea that you know, it's like the people closest to your family you most loyalty too. Then it expands and the degree of loyalty care reduces as you expand outward in the concentric circle.
You know.
I think it's all it's a difficult way thing to balance because you have these obviously truths, right, the idea that we have immigrants that come in and they really duly truly become American. But on the other hand, simply saying the words clearly is insufficient.
And when you go.
Simply embrace the idea entirely that you're just a credal nation, you end up admitting a bunch of people who have no meaningful loyalty to the country. Like I could I usually name specific names people, you know, it blows my mindlets around. I'm Nadi Mamdani is running for office in New York. The guy was it wasn't even a citizen until five years ago.
I think that.
You know, a guy named Oron McIntyre had a great epithet for this. It's a paperwork, American, like, you've signed the words, you said the oath, But do you actually agree with any of the founding principles? Does your politics resemble anything that like twenty years ago, Americans would have thought, Ah, yes, that's that's something we can recognize as an American viewpoint.
And I look at Zora Mundani and I think, no, not really.
Yeah, well, you know, I'm reminded of the story that maybe true told about the Battle of Bulge in World War Two, when apparently there was a unit of Germans dressed in American or British uniforms who could speak English, and what was the question you asked them to determine if they were authentically not German? And the question wasn't what's the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence? It was
something like who won the World Series last year? Something only an American would know, Right, So I said, I don't know if that story is true. He gets often told let me switch to another sort of issue that's almost say troublesome to me. I'm fascinated by it. But and you're going to have another debate about it at this conference. I see from the agenda, and that's industrial policy. And here see, I wasn't three years old when Reagan
was president. I was voted for the third time in nineteen eighty four when Nash Review and conservatives like me all said Walter Mondale's out of his mind calling for industrial policy and saying America needs to have destiny over making its microchips and computer screens and all the rest.
Oh, domestic content.
Legislation for cars and machine tools was a big, a big and it was this was socialism, this was central planning, we all said. And now suddenly I'm hearing it from some national conservatives. I don't categorically say like we did in eighty four that this is socialism or central planning, but I'm not entirely persuaded.
By ore and casts.
And again I haven't made the meetings, but I haven't seen a lot of progress and really refining this. How do you make it something that we're confident will work? And how do you avoid all the pitfalls of red seeking and special interests and and simply dead weight mistakes?
Yeah, I mean it's there's a I think part of part of the answer to that is you have to be intelligent about how you do it. And part of the answer to that is you have to embrace some amount of that as the cost of having industrial policy and therefore trying to achieve the positive ends that you're trying to achieve. You know that there's going to be some amount of rent seeking with regard to all this.
I think it's interesting to you know, I've talked with a number of kind of people, intellectual influencers my age in the conservative movement. You know, the people who grew up went you know, went to high school when Bush was president, for example, and you know, we all we
all had this experience. Many of us went to you know, like Conservative Fellowship type things or or you know, put things put on by the Coke Foundation, and we're taught all the free trade stuff, and and and then I remember having this discussion somebody were like, you know, so when somebody actually started making arguments about why that wasn't true, I realized, like I didn't really listened to the accounter arguments.
I literally had just heard the arguments, the free trade arguments, and I hadn't heard any of the other arguments, and I think, you know, Rubio had an interesting speech or he was gonna he was just being interviewed at one point where he said during his presidential campaign, you know, he was parent, he was saying the free trade line, and then he visited the rust belt and said to himself, you know, there's a there's a real downside here, and and we have look back at NAPA and say that this,
whatever this was, it certainly was not helpful, not good for these voters. And these voters are our people, the people who vote, you know, people who we want to vote Republican. So you know, I think I think there's
two obvious angles that industrial policy makes sense on. First is, obviously there's a huge national security angle, which is that there's a you know, having supply chains of important things controlled by China is very risky to our national security, and so reshoring a huge slew of manufacturing just needs to happen. Pharmaceuticals, important, uh, strategically important military assets, rare with.
Metals, you name it.
And then the second thing is, yeah, we need to we can't be cavalier about the jobs of working at the working class Americans who vote Republican. We just can't be cavalier about that. Those people demoralize means, and it's it's self defeating to not want to make sure those people are doing well. And the reason it's self defeating is because if they're demoralized, they don't vote.
In the socialists takeover.
So, you know, I think that that has to be There has to be a real politic element from the right about you know, whatever whatever inefficiencies result, there has to be a real politic element about if if if our voters are not doing well, even if then then we're going to be in trouble and the end results is going to be bad for everybody.
One more then I'll turn will turn you back to the tender or untender mercies of James and Charles, and it be the other hot button or divisive question, which is foreign policy. And I see you are going to have a whole panel on the United States in the Middle Eastern War, and you know, Israel and Gaza and what I from the looks of the lineup, that's going
to be a barn burner. And so we now have, as I think, a subset of the net cons the restrainers, who I mean Dan McCarthy's a friend of mine and I, you know, I have a lot of agreement with a lot of what they have to say. But this looks like one of the naughtiest problems than that cons because I think the disagreements there are serious and deep and hard to harmonize.
I think that's right. I mean, it's it's it's our biggest challenge. It's it's really the only panel I think where there's explicitly it's almost explicitly set up to have a really distinct clash of viewpoints.
Uh.
That's not necessarily the case on a lot of other panels where the participants in our movement are basically aligned. You know, there isn't there isn't some open borders immigration advocate debating somebody else on immigration, for example. But on the Iran strikes, you know, there were definitely are competing factions that would I would think of as both within the NAT content, you know, the American conservative restrainer types, and then more kind of actually you know, hardcore realists.
I would say, I don't even think of it as neo conservatism. I think it is a straightforward, very pragmatic realism. That's you know, says, I mean that, you know, I personally find myself on the realist side. I think that the basic you know, I joke about trusting the plan, right, you know, borrowing all that from qan on. But I think, uh, there's something I could actually develop that into an entire theory of foreign policy approach, which is defference.
Right.
I elect a guy who I think of as having sharing my general perspective, and then when he makes decisions, I assume he's making them for the in the right way because he has I have enough evidence of him viewing the world the way that I do that I assume that his decisions are rooted in the intelligence and makes sense. And I think those people who did that with regard to Trump and Iran, even if they were not inclined towards intervention, found themselves vindicated because, of course
the war. You know, the strikes were very effective and the war wrapped up in forty eight hours.
You know, we to get back to industrial policy versus a second now that you're not making interesting points there, But here's the deal. We always say nowadays, well, you know, we warned you you wouldn't like the rules when they were applied to you. It's something we tell the left because they change things. They say law fair is great, and now you know se on the other foot. The she's going to be on the other foot at some point.
And if we start to become accustomed to and normalize a great deal more government and intervention in corporate policies, the left is going to take that right up. They're not going to do it for a nationalism reason. They're not going to do it because of nation that. They're going to do it seemly because they want the control in order to make the industries do what they want them to do, or to use it as a pretext for nationalizing them without actually having to do it or
go through that. Is there a point where you would be concerned about the government's intertwining with business? Ten percent of Intel's okay, but fifty five you ain't. What's your comfort level on the amount of intervention that the the industry?
There is obviously a level at which I would be uncomfortable. We're I don't think we're there really particularly close to there is the answer to that specific question in terms
of the argument about kind of precedent setting. I have a general perspective on this sort of argument, which is that it is not it is not a productive use of time to worry about the precedents who are setting for Democrats when you constantly complain about them doing unprecedented things all the time, when they have power, they do unprecedented things all the time, Which means that the consequence of the presidency said you really should think about, is
this this uniquely a precedent they would not exploit but for our having opened the door. And I don't think that's true at all with a guard to economic policy. I mean, you know, we do we criticize Biden for being one of the most absurdly you know, corporatist presidents. Yeah, I don't think that was that was not a product of Trump suddenly bringing up industrial policy again. That was a product of Biden wanting to shovel something like two billion out the door at the end of his presidencied
all sorts of his political allies. So I think that that's that's This is a very very strong view that I have, at least for the regard to president. I always find the arguments about, oh, well, the Democrats might
exploit this president. I mean, think about all the judicial wars the Democrats have always been the first to defect on every issue of consequence with regard to the judiciary, you know, deciding to revive the legislative filibuster for judicial nominees and then revoke it themselves, Like this is how Democrats operate. Jerrymandering another great example, right, the Democrats have
been aggressively jerry mandering. So you name it, you find a place where the Democrats have always been the first movers. And I think that's that's rooted in the kind of basic democratic vibe in their politics, which is we are morally righteous, so we don't care about the rules.
Ultimately, they're just there to be exploited.
Uh So, I think the Republican approach and response to that should be, well, tit for tat. It's one you know, obviously we're going to do tit for tat. We're not just going to submit and uh too, just the willingness to say we're not going to sit here and worry about the president. We're just going to say is this the right thing to do for us? Like does this help our voters? Does this help our does this help
our politics? If so, then we should do it. And you know, and worry about, like what the Democrats are going to do when they do it, realizing that it's not it's not a consequence of our actions.
And in this case, well.
My redline would be the government taking over reply Sat Company and forcing them to make Tupper Aware. I mean, I missed up Aware. It's a great product, but I think the market is spoken.
To man Donnie deciding to set up state run grocery stories. I think that's all we never do. That we talk about talk about the silliest idea in the world. You know, the guy's like seeing grocery as a high margin industry or something they're going to buy and bulk.
Yeah, amazing new idea, Charles, you had one more before I do.
What do you think is going to happen when Trump's no longer in charge? So you've got three and a half years and then he leaves office. Now, just for the sake of argument, for an intellectual exercise, I'm sure media matters will love this. Assume that he leaves office and dies peacefully the same day, so he's not a king maker, but he's just gone. What do you think happens on the right, Because Trump's obviously extremely powerful, he
has the ability to move voters. He moves people who are devoted to him, but he also moves Median Republicans from one position to another seamlessly, and that makes it quite difficult to tell where the Republican Party is. Where do you think it is? What do you think is going to happen? Is it going to be a grand fight? Will there be one candidate who's the old school Republican and another who's the heir to Trump? What is being an heir to Trump? Like? Are you confident? Do you
think it's a complete open fight? Are we going to go when Trump's not in charge of everything?
I think I think it's as about, you know, giving an imagine an open seat in the role of leader of the Republican Party and president's nominees open. It's going to be about as determined a race as we've ever had. It's going to be Vance. I think that it's really straightforward. Vance has not just he's not just the sitting vice president, a remarkably articulate speaker, very strong popularity ratings, and the sort of competitors to Vance, I mean, the most obvious
one is Rubio. But I think it's just going to be as simple as a Vance Rubio ticket in twenty eight. I think that's really that. If it were anything but that, I would be quite surprised. On the Republican side, I don't think there's I think that this strategy of like the old school Republican has been tried and it you know, NICKI Haley managed to clear out everybody else in the lane of the sort of anti Trump or Trump's skeptical Republicans,
and her prize was nothing. Her prize was thirty percent of the Republican primary vote, and that seventy percent was going to be all Trump's. I think Vance, even in the absence if Trump just disappears and doesn't endorse his sitting vice president somehow, I think Vance represents that wing of the party. I think that's the future of the party. And in a sense, we're in a strong position as
a result. We're kind of we're kind of set in terms of we have not just the leader of the party, but also kind of the heir apparents waiting in line and the Democrats as and so there's much more message uniformity and less infighting. I think you're seeing a lot of craziness in the Democratic side as a result of somebody trying to stand out, get a little more influence in cachet and as a result saying more and more radical things that kind.
Of drag them further and further away from the median voter.
Yeah. Newsom is doing a wonderful job with this. The other day in the air he said that Donald Trump is just not going to have the election at twenty twenty eight. He's going to figure out a way to cancel the elections. And you expected Newsome to say after that, and that's why I'm running right, Okay, all right, fine? Great? So will the conference is going to be live streamed? Will people be able to find it online? What's the what's the website if they do?
All right, so National conservatism dot org is the website. I don't believe there will be an active live stream, but there will be plenty of clips and videos coming out. You'll see them on x you'll see them on YouTube elsewhere. But we just don't we don't do an immediate live stream that you can just live watch it. The way to watch it live is to attend, which is in Washington, d C. On September second to fourth, that's next week
starting next Tuesday. There are tickets. It's an awesome conference. I mean I've been going every year well before I actually became joined the organization running the conference. It's been them the best conference on the right from the word go in terms of really yeah, well, you know, extremely intellectually dynamic.
Washington, DC. All that violence and carjacking. Oh wait, not anymore. I know somebody. If somebody asked me in Minneapolis whether or not I would be, well, how would you feel about the National Guard in your corner? And I thought I would love It would have been great if they've been there when I was Guyja karjacked in my driveway, and I love to see it when they drop by in twenty twenty after the city went up and play. So yes, I can see an instance in which they
are useful. Will Chamberlain, thank you very much and good luck with the conference, and we'll have you on again to talk about the Article three project and what that means for the future of American politics. Good to see you, Thanks for dropping back.
Can I just add before you go, Will, but some we haven't met in person, which is regret because I want to shook hands with Wilt Chamberlain.
My hand.
No, and I want to shake hands with Will Chamberlain just to keep my w Chamberlain's.
In all in one place.
Wonderful.
Thanks wells for having me, guys, Bye bye. Of course there's Richard Chamberlain, Dick. We don't want to share. So Ricochet is many things, and it's you know, it's such as politics. If you ever go there, and if you're a member and you go to the member of you know that we discuss all matter of things, religion and arts. We have wonderful threads on television and not just the oh I remember that show, but I mean really insightsive things from people who know their business. It's great fun.
But there's also sports, and you're thinking, oh man sports, Yeah, yeah, because it's a big part of America football. It is. And I'm here with a man with a vastly inferior team to my own Vikings Charles, why don't you tell us about the fantasy football that's going on right now at Ricochet.
But you know, I'm actually, in a perverse sense routing for the Vikings, or at least the Vikings offense, because I am a Justin Jefferson fan, and my seven year old is playing fantasy football this year. It's his first journey has Justin Jefferson, so on his behalf or have good Vikings too well. The Ricochet Fantasy Football Extravaganza has returned. Last one was twenty twenty four, and this one's shockingly is twenty twenty five. You have a few hours still
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Yes, well join heartbreak those two attributes of a Vikings fan that we know quite well. Yeah. Go to rocchet check it out and also notice the subtle little changes. There have been many subtle little changes, including the time face, the headline, time face, and the rest of which all part of what Charles does behind the scenes, tinkering and adjusting and getting out his code Scalpel and doing his work. More to come on Ricochet, of course, but what's there already,
it's pretty darn great. I had a conversation, of course, in the Sight about flag burning executive order. So there are two, there are two ideas, and this one. People are saying, well, this is absolutely ridiculous. Some of this is a matter of free speech. And then there were those who said, actually, know this is this is a clever little trap by Trump because he's not really changing anything at all, and he's just making people go out and burn flags to look silly. And an American I
didn't think it was something we particularly needed. But where do you guys stand on it?
Well, yeah, if you actually read the executive order, it's fairly narrow and tries to conform with the existing Supreme Court President and say and connected to incitement for violence or rioting, which may be a reach, I mean that may not stand up legally. I do remember Ronald Reagan when he was governor again around nineteen seventy. How do we get the kids, how do we get the left to stop burning the flag, Well, why don't we subject
him to our antie air pollution regulations. And that'd be one thing that Trump could propose to the EPA that the liberals would oppose. They're all up in arms about Trump and his EPA changes. But I think the real trapier James is not that the left is going to go out by the way. I think I've seen some things online and some leftist groups are calling for some flag burning beings this weekend, so that part is working.
But I mean two thoughts. One is, you know, I believe and Charles may disagree with me about this, we'll see. I still think those flag burning cases were wrongly decided low those many years ago, and I'm not sure the current court would not rule differently. Remember those were five to four cases. And the reason for this is it's
a long story. And so I'll just say in one sentence, I've always thought our First Amendment jurisprudence went off the rails when it said free expression was the same as free speech, and that applies to not just flag burning, but you know, naked dancing and things of that kind of pornography and all the rest of that has gone along for such a long time. However, it seems to me that the right remedy, and here I bet Charles will agree with me, is Republicans should propose a constitutional
amendment to ban flag burning. And then let's see how many Democrats want to vote in favor of permitting flagburning to continue by opposing the amendment. That would be fun too.
All right, I'm going to be this quiesh.
It's my role today.
I'm aware that I'm on the wrong side of the public on this question. I do think a lot of people who think those cases were rightly decided. I'm one of those people need to understand that their position is unpopular. I don't see any acknowledgement of this in the press, and I think that has informed some of the coverage of Trump because they don't understand it.
This is a wage issue.
But first off, I think those cases were right. I agree with you, Stev actually about the expression question. I
do think this is a tough one as well. When the First Amendment was written, of course, it only applied to the federal government, so you have to go through an enormous amount of law to get to the application of the First Amendment to the states, and of course, in the original Constitution there is no enumerated power that would allow the federal government to prosecute flag burning at all,
so it wouldn't have come up. So it's quite difficult to discern what the original public meaning was in this area. But I think given that enormous numbers of Americans during the Alien Tedition Acts burned John Jay and effigy, there was a tradition of burning even effigies of people to protest government policy, even on war, which was where the government was strictest in the colonial and post colonial eras,
so I think the case was just about right. More than that, though, this is why I say I'm a squish. I loath people have burned the American flag, and I would never do it myself. Very proud immigrant, but I do think that passing laws that empower the national government to prosecute people for burning flags is ultimately a sign of under confidence, and an unnecessary one given the way in which Americans revere the flag and do so organically without legal mandate. We know who the people we hate are.
They're the people you just mentioned respond to Trump's order by going out and burning flags. Those people suck. I quite like the fact that they have this way of segregating themselves from the rest of us by doing stupid things, and I think to try to use the force of law to stop them doing it, to me is a sign of civilizational under confidence. It's just unnecessary. I don't think, as some people have said, that we would lose something as a society people couldn't burn flags. I don't think
that it is valuable speech. It's also not debate. It's not a marketplace of ideas question. But I am ultimately of the view that America and it's lag can stand without government force, and it would be fine if there was an amendment that's the right way to do it. It will be fine. Off the Court overturned that. It's not a core case, but it's just not something that I
particularly worry about on the amendments. The order itself that Trump wrote, it's very odd because on the one hand, it seems to completely acknowledge all of the Supreme Court cases. On the other hand, it is potentially a problem because he implies in it that he's going to start using whether one burned a flag as the gateway to look into other crimes, and that might have under current jurisprudence that might have some issues.
Right.
You can't, for example, say well, we can't prosecute you for your political opinions, but we can see what crimes you're committing while expressing them. If you only look into those people, then you fall a foul of the law. So if that is how it's enforced, maybe problematic, But I actually think it and do anything. I think Trump wants to be seen to be doing this rather than actually violating the constitutional mandate.
I want to pick and choose. I agree with Steven that the shift from speech to expression did open up a Pandora's box that said, I'm not willing to close it because there are things of expressions that our speech. And I sided mostly with Charles on this one too. I mean to spend all the time and energy on a constitutional amendment. I think those should be rare and necessary, and I've got a few others i'd like to see
cuta before that one. But a person burning a flag tells you everything about them at that point in time. I don't want the government to tell me that I cannot burn any emblem of authority, idea, creed, etc. Whatever. If I want to be that jerk. Then then I'm going to be that jerk, and it's not their role to tell me that I can't. And he asked everybody saying, yeah, you can burn in the backyard if you want. I
get that. I get that, And yes, it is incitement, and if maybe perhaps an executive order that says that if anybody is incited by the sight of a burning flag and therefore stamps the fire out and in the process does the same to the person holding it. I mean, sorry, he was just in the way as I was stamping out the fire. It's it's it's not a it's not a big burning issue. Sorry, I didn't mean to say that. What is. However, probably this was strike some people as
proof of my madness, seedlectivity and efeat sensibilities. But I was, you know, strugging my shoulders at the burning of the flag. But I got really excited about the executive order that mandated the Federal Classical style of buildings. This is something that trun tried to do in the first administration, and
I and Biden overturned it. And the thing is, you know, having a conversation just the other night about this about how architecture sort of broke the social compact with people after the war, and we developed these these increasingly inhuman scale buildings and styles. It's better now. It's not as bad as it was in the seventies when it was really, really bad. Somebody had a beautiful Twitter throw it the other day where they said, you know, this is my
one strange architec actual preference. I will die on this hill, and that is brutalism with lots of vegetation. And he had a point that when you actually drape these things in jungles, there's a certain certain power and beauty to it. But I prefer that they weren't there at all. The best example would seem to me to be the thumb that is Obama's library, which looms over this neighborhood like some soul sucking machine that's been dropped out by the
necromancers in orbit. It's a ghastly thing. And I this probably would not have been affected by that. But yeah, when they're putting something small in a little town, a little post office, one of those embassies of the empire, and that reaches into the small corner, don't just put up a ball, you know, dull brick international style whatever, boy, give it some grace, even if the columns aren't true, even if they're just pilasters, and it looks like some
you know, in nineteen thirty stripped down government. F you know, a modern style that's better than something that's just been snipped and disconnected from human history. So that's I'm okay with that. There really am you, guys, James.
You know what I find really weird. I remember Trump doing this in his first term. I did a whole podcast with a guy who is obsessed with his topic.
Justin Schuber. How is that the guy?
Yeah?
I think he was on the Ricorchet podcast too, Is he probably?
Yeah?
I hope so ye.
And I'm still baffled by the contention that I hear from progressives that classical architecture is fascist but brutalist architecture is democratic because classical architecture comes from Greece, and the early Republic in the United States based its capital on it for a reason, and brutalist architecture has mostly been the preserve of the worst regimes in history, and building for the masses, not building for the masses, is sometimes necessary.
I don't think it's inherently fascistic or anything. But it's not individualistic to put up concrete blocks. So how can they say that that is the complete opposite of the truth. Where do they get that idea?
Well, Charlie, you put your finger on a key point that really does not get much public recognition. I was also stunned at the reaction of you might say, modernist architects to Trump's first term directives to build in the federal style.
And they like to.
And by the way, Jane, it's not just the seventies architecture, but some recent big federal courthouses.
Which have huge projects are just awful.
Yes, And I mean I do think that, you know, the architecture not just people prefer efficiency or you know, they're trying to unleash their interflank brank wade right or something. I think that as part of the cultural rot we see in the humanities and social sciences and so many other places. I never perceived that. But justin Schubacht, maybe we should have him back again. He's in the middle of all this with the Trump administry. He really opened my eyes to the fact that this is not just
a matter of architectural taste. It's actually a deeper, more significant aspect of our culture war right.
What they're doing is they're severing the public sphere from any relationship to something that went before you know, you could. The point was made that if you looked at the cities of England after the war, you would think that they'd been bombed, but no, they've been leveled by actual by the council to build something that was anti human.
The deliberate desire to take people and sever the relationship between the forms of the past is seen as a way of bringing about this better world, because the old world was what do we get from the old world? We got World War One, we got destruction, we got devastation. They associated with Western culture, which is white, which is all of these things that have brought such unending misery
to the world. So if you are one of those people who has, you know, a marble statue in your Twitter profile, well, first of all, you're probably a guy in India somewhere who's doing a bot farm. But if you're one of those people who wants to return to certain sets of values, they see this as all right wing coded dog whistle hh eight eight Here comes, you know, here comes the most horrible form of nationalism, violence and ethnic supremacy. You can imagine when no, we just it's beautiful.
It's beautiful and it's of our and we respond to it in ways that go deep. So, yeah, what are we doing this show today? Nationalism and old and classical architecture ideas that used to be mainstream in the old days, but now apparently patrias is way out there. So I'm pretty sure we're gonna get taken down it by YouTube and Twitter before the day is out. But if you found yourself listening to this, we thank you for that. If you found yourself thinking, hey, bank on yourself, I
had to check that out. Do so support us by becoming part of the best part of the You know you can be you. You can be the best part of Ricochet if you just go there and sign up. Take a minute to give us a five star review on Apple Podcasts if you would, and then send me proof of it in the form of a screenshot, and I will give you. I got a coffee canyon for pennies here that I have to take to the store and pull down and poured down the coin stars apout. But
if you do that, you get all the pennies. I'm kidding this opera is not legally binding. I should shut up before I get us in more trouble. Charles been a pleasure, Stephen as always, and hey everybody, we'll see you in the comments. At Rik Aschet, what is it now? What is the version?
I think it's four point fourteen point.
Two, four point fourteen point two and actually right four point fourteen point two b by the time this is up. Thank you everybody, See you next week. Bye bye,