Jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong.
Okay, get out of town.
Get out of town, so you don't represent our values.
You are not New Yorkers.
There are some patriotic millionaires who stepped up. Okay, cut me the checks. I mean, just if you want to be supportive. But maybe the first step should we go down to Palm Beach and see what you can bring back home. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Charles C. W. Cook and myself James Lylax. Today we're going to talk about whatever comes to mind and you are going to love it. So let's have ourselves a podcast.
President Trump has the option, as the commander in chief to compel an adversary to the table, which is precisely what he did, and at the end he chose to say, you know what, I'd rather talk to you at the table than obliterate your capability to export oil and fund your terror regime.
Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number seven hundred and eighty four. I'm James Lylyx in Minneapolis, Cherles C. W. Cook in Florida is with us, and Steven Hayward is dead serious about not being on this podcast today. We look forward to having him back next week. Charles, Hello, how are you?
I'm fine, Thank you. I didn't just relate that.
We're just relating before you before we went live here, that you've been on the Highway and then apparently around Disney World for some strange reason. It's kind of a nightmare this time of the year. How do Floridians actually view the influx of people from all over the country who come to pay exorbitant prices to be beamed at by people in furry costumes and the life I love it? Are they regarded sort of as a pestilent. They're not a pestilence. They're beloved.
Well, it's a big part of the economy, but just as important, if not more important, people who come into the state pay all of our taxes.
Yes, there is that, but there's always that faction that says, oh, yeah, sure they bring in money, they bring an employment, all the rest of it. But you know, they make my life incrementally a little bit more difficult, and so I hate them and I wish we would pass regulations. But then again, that's a state that's generally a blue state, and Florida is not that, so I'm glad you're enjoying it. I'm glad you're enjoying the tax benefits of everybody who
went down there. I myself made many pilgrimage to Walt Disney World during the time when the child was in the Disney life and the age out of that. Thank God, I did not want to be one of those Disney adults that you see infesting social media. More and more
and more, they seem particularly sad breed sad. As the President might say in all caps with several exclamation points, I'm not sure what we can possibly say about Operation Epic Fury, because I have no idea what's going on, and I don't pretend to the only thing that seems to be the case is that we're talking to somebody, but I'm not sure who. I'm not sure whether or not there are any political entities that have any power. I'm not sure whether or not the IRGC is doing
things of their own accord from their various cells. I don't know. I don't know. You might what's going on, Nolan Jurles tell it.
Oh, I don't know either. I do know that if we cut and run now, whether we call a diseased fire or not, then we will have in effect told the Iranians that they can get rid of us anytime they like by closing the straits before moves. And that seems to me to be a big problem and in some sense to undercut one of our rationales, which is that we wish to deprive bad actors in the world
of that sort of power. If you recall a very good in my view, Marko Rubio's speech from I Don't Know ten twelve years ago, he made the point that one of the reasons that we can't allow the Iranians to have a nuclear weapon, aside from the fact that they want to use it against Israel, is that once you get that, then you have a trump card, as it were, And he pointed to North Korea. He might also have pointed to Ukraine, which doesn't have that and
god invaded by Russia. The argument being North Korea can now do pretty much what it wants because anytime we say we would like it if you would change your ways, they say, aha, but we have a nuclear weapon, and we didn't want Iran to be in the same boat. Well it's not quite the same. But if Iran has an economic nuclear weapon and just say, well, we will crash the global economy and cause gas prices to go up.
Then that would be pretty bad. And I really hope that we're not going to leave this with that being the resolution.
Because then I don't see how they can.
Well, I'll tell you how they could, and I agree, I don't think they should. But how they could is a bunch of people in the Republican parties say to the President we would quite like to keep our seats in Kong, and people are annoyed because gas prices are high when we are bombing them, and the stock market goes down when we are bombing them, and Trump, who's quite short term and is thinking, says, okay, then, I mean I don't think that will or should happen, but that's how it could.
Happen, right, Yeah, it could. It could well. At least a whole civilization didn't die.
I found that.
Tweet to be that may be the meanest tweet of all, and I thought it was a bit. My daughter sent it to me and said, is this something I should be worried about? And I said, no, you're not gonna know them. I'm not exactly sure what he says what is the civilization that's going to die? Is at the ancient Persian civilization that preceded Islam, is at the quote civilization end quote of the mullas what is it? And if if it is the regime that's going to die,
then why did he say? I didn't want it to happen? But I do love who knows question mark in all caps to be the epitome of strategic ambiguity.
And then finished with God bless the Iranian people.
People right, who were going to end. So yeah, I would I would have worked on that a little bit more. I would have run by a few people. But that's not how it goes. And I don't get particularly upset about it, and it did seem to concentrate minds wonderfully. Well, I have no idea, I have no idea.
It's context dependent. That's sort of rhetoric, right. If you look back to Truman at the end of World War Two, he did threaten the Japanese that we would inflict destruction from the air of the sort that has never been seen.
But that was a bit of a different circumstance. We were gearing up to send seven million people touch a p so I thought that was a bit over the top of the president, but I also didn't worry about it beyond being upset by the rhetoric from an American president because I didn't think he was going to do it, because he, of course wasn't going to do it.
Well. It was quite the weak for maure though. We had a spectacular rescue operation which was conducted by setting up a base in inside of our own practically, and at the same time we hurled a bunch of people to the Moon and they're coming back soon and fingers are crossed. We're going to have a splashdown, which seems
archaic now, doesn't it. We're so used to the Challenger and the Challenger, so used to the crafts just gliding to a stop, these massive bricks that these guys drop that orbit managed to pilot through a particular small, little ending strip that seemed to be the future, and now splash down seems like they're going to get out with buzz cut haircuts and then we're going to change the
channel to I Love to idream a genie. Do you think that this mission has accomplished what it was supposed to accomplish and what was that?
Well? I will very quickly note that it's Friday afternoon and they haven't got back yet. But if they get back, it seems that it absolutely achieved it was supposed to achieve, and what it will have achieved if it is successfully completed is remarkable and no less remarkable for the fact that we have done it before. How long has it been since we last went to the moon? Was it nineteen seventy two?
I think so, Yeah, it's.
Fifty four years, and since then no one else has done it. The United States remains the only nation to have been And next year or the year after, we're going again. Yes, these do and this is great, This is great, James great. You know, there was this period in around I don't know, two thousand and five to twenty twenty maybe where people were quite dismissive of what I think is a miracle, which is the Internet and
the way it's delivered to your hands. And they would say, fine, everyone in the whole world now has the Library of Alexandria and their pocket. But and then they would list things that we could no longer do. And this was a totally fair point. I think it just wasn't fair. As an illustration of our supposed decline. They would say, well, we don't not have concord anymore, so we can't cross the Atlantic in two and a half hours. We used to be able to do that, And well, we can't
go to the Moon anymore. We used to do that, but now we don't and we don't have the Space shuttle anymore. And there's some truth to this. I just think that it was too depressive as an argument. But now we kind of do have the moon again. I mean, if this finishes successfully, we're back in that phase which seemed to be hibernating for fifty years.
I agree there is more. The geist has the aurar of animal spirits about it. Again, the reason we didn't do those things before, and all the things that people said we couldn't do, was not because we locked the lest the most the ability to do them. It's because we lacked the will, or rather we elected people who believed that the will should not be there in the first place. The concord, I mean, they're economic challenges, yeah, cramped and uncomfortable and expensive and the rest of it.
Could we have continued with SSTs. Well, there's a big controversy here in the United States when we were trying to gear up to build SSTs, and eventually I think that they were outlawed. So that wasn't a case that we didn't have the tech. We had the tech. We didn't go back to the Moon because we couldn't figure a reason to and because we'd lost our enthusiasm and
we'd lost the initiative and the drive. I don't know if you know we couldn't build a base back then because we didn't have the scrubbers and we didn't have the robots and the rest of it. It's entirely possible that whatever we built. I mean, I think sometimes I
had a peace about this NRO. As a matter of fact, on this very day, if we had gone back where I now write a weekly piece on the weekends, thank you, If we had gone back and built a base in the seventies, by the nineties, it would have been outmoded and kind of a joke, and people would have made fun of it, and nobody would be particularly impressed, and there'd be an air leak and six people would die
and they'd say, why are we up there? We'd be reading stories about how the outdated computer system of the movement base is still running on floppy discs the size of a of a record album. I'm kind of glad we didn't. If you've seen the Alternative Future show for All Mankind, that's an interesting view of what had happened. If the Space Race indeed made us build bases to compete with the Russians in the eighties. But we didn't do that because we didn't. I mean, we could have,
but we lacked the initiations. So all these things that people are talking about, well, we can't do this is usually the result of some larger organization frowning, banning, saying no, I mean, we could have built a California bullet train very quickly except for the environmental regulations, except for the union padding and the rest of it. We still could. We still can. We know that we can, but you're right, they.
Don't want to build that. This is the big difference is I saw a tweet and it said Elon Musk managed to send three hundred rockets into orbit for ten billion dollars, and the California bullet Train is one hundred and twenty billion in and hasn't gotten any track. And it's a fair point. But the difference is Elon Musk wants to send rockets into space. That's what the money that he has allocated for it is for. If the
rockets don't go into orbit, then he fails. Whereas I'm looking at tweets from the project, the California High Spiled Rail project, saying this is great because we've created sixteen thousand while paying jobs. Okay, that's not the same thing as building a train though they don't actually want to build the train.
No, the money stops to the unions and the rest of it when they actually finish the train. Now, I love trains, I do. I love wozling around Europe and a train. I like being on trams in European cities. Doesn't mean that I think that has to be replicated here. It's a huge country. I was listening to the podcast the other day and somebody was he was a brit was talking about he said he had to drive across the entire country. Took him forward. He had a four
hour car trip to drive across the entire country. I'm not sure Midlands or South or whatever, but that I mean, that's that's here to far go.
Well, I just did that. That's why I'm ten minutes late. I just did that today.
Yeah, I mean so, yeah, and so it's a big we don't, we don't, we don't, we don't need them. But it seems every day, but once a month on my feed there's a story from somebody in some travel magazine. I took the Empire Builder overnight and had a cabin and here was my experience. And it's always the same, it's always I absolutely had the greatest time. America should
build more trains. We did have a seventeen hour breakdown in the middle of Montana in the winter, but they gave us free peanuts and my room wasn't heated very well. But you know, I I the price you pay. No Americans fill out of love with dreams an awful long time ago. So what are some other things, though, Charles, that we can do? Because I'm you're the one who wrote the great piece on optimism and cheer, there's some other things that we can do that people scoff about.
Well, I actually think we should bring back supersonic travel, partly because it would be very useful to me. Yes, indeed, be how long to fly from Miami to London on a supersonic plan About three hours?
Hmmm?
I don't know if it's cramped, I would take that trade off.
And you're a rangy guy.
Yeah. And then I've seen these plans for planes that go up essentially into the stratosphere and then they can go from London to Sydney in about three hours. I'm sure it's expensive, but that sounds pretty great too.
I would love to get to England faster because there's absolutely no way to avoid hideous jet lag once you get on the other side. And I know, I know first world problems. So we can do that. We should do that, he says, we could. I think we can still build incredibly tall skyscrapers. That is something that we
can still do and managed to do. New York just recently opened a very very tall building for JP Morgan, which I believe is actually one of the most hideous structures to go up by the designed by the hand of modern man in years. It's appalling, but people love it and it's a new, big, huge addition. I don't understand exactly why New York continues to grow and add the office space that they do, even if the previous
government was not exactly business friendly. Mundami is not making all kinds of noises about the worst sort of democratic socialist of America, nonsense equity taxes and the rest. What are your takes on this? He's been pretty explicit about what he's saying and why these taxes are supposed to be done.
Somebody to me, Oh, it's certainly not constitutional at the federal level for different reasons than it may not be at the state level. The federal government is only allowed to do those things the Constitution says it's allowed to do, and there's nowhere in the Constitution that the federal government is empowered to impose a wealth tax. The champions of that tax are conveniently ignoring this and essentially insisting that it has to be done because it has to be done.
But I think the Supreme Court has already been clear about this, albeit by implication, and would be again. The state question is a little bit more complicated. Certainly, it is a horrible idea in New York, and I think I'm right in saying that, unlike with the billionaire tax that is being proposed federally, which has quickly become the multi millionaire tax. You may have noticed, the one that Ma'm Danny wants is what's seven hundred and fifty thousand
or something. Perhaps that's the estate portion of the tax.
Effectively, I think I think it went from five million to seven hundred and fifty thousand for the estate tax right.
For the state portion, and the equity tax starts pretty low by New York standards, given how much it costs to live there, So I think this would be a real boon to Florida. Once again, the big trend here is toward exit taxes. Internally, we've seen ten states now proposed exit taxes. Now, exit taxes are unconstitutional. You can sort of impose exit and entrance taxes if you don't
do it explicitly. So when I moved from Connecticut to Florida, we got hit on both ends because Connecticut has laws that are neutral but that charge you when you sell a house, and Florida has quite high, for example, mortgage initiation taxes and that sort of thing. So clearly Florida is aware people are moving in, and Connecticut is aware that people are leaving, and so they have taxes that
coincide with those things. What you can't do in America, because of the free movement of people and capital within its borders, is literally do what East Germany did. I'd say you're not allowed to leave, or if you leave the state, we will charge you this or that tax. But that is in effect what ma'm Dini is aiming at. And I really am not trying to be hyperbolic when I say this. I do get the impression with him and some others that if they could build a wall,
they'd do it. If you heard Kathy Hokel complaining about people moving to Florida and being unpatriotic recently, she said this as if it was a problem. She said, well, of course, we live in a country people could just move. I think that's a wonderful thing. I think that's one of the best things about America. It's a free trade, free people's zone. If you don't like one state, you can move to another. And that doesn't just mean in
the way I would approve of. I think there are good places that have different governments than I would like. Massachusetts is a nice place to live, and if that's your worldview, then you probably get on pretty well there, So it's good that you can move there. But I think that the Blue states are starting to freak out about this and actually would like to see it be different, Oh.
Absolutely. The problem is, though, is that every time they do this for the name of equity and the rest of it, they make the golden goods which they fat, which has been fattened up for their convenience, scronnier and less healthy. The result of all these policies is an exodus. Minneapolis is considering a tax on the rich, wealth tax. Minnesota legislatures considering I believe a wealth tax as well.
Minnesota's not a low tax state. Now. Minnesota used to have a great bargain with its people, which is, we're going to tax you a lot. We are, but you're going to get good schools and good roads, good governance, no corruption. It's going to be a fair play, and we're all gonna benefit. And local corporations pitched right in and promised to give five percent of the pre tax profits and the rest of it. And for a while there it all worked, and everybody talked about the Minnesota miracle.
Mary Tyler More was perfectly happy to move here. But consequently what happens, of course, is you get a lot of people to move in for the benefits and don't contribute, and then you have an elected class of people who just continue to take inciphon more money out of the productive call class until you've got Well. I'm not exactly living in a healthscape here. I'm in a Dina, Minnesota,
which is a nice part of town. But on the other hand, there was a shooting right around the corner at the La Fitness there by some miscreants who had moved in. And yeah, people tend to look at places that are safer and cheaper. Why wouldn't they. The exit tax just makes me think that they're going to have state troopers on the freeways heading out and if they see a car with a U haul or too many boxes piled on its roof, they're going to haul you over.
Check your fillings for gold you may be trying to smuggle out, or some jewels that you've sown into your clothing, like the romanops when they were taken off. Here's some more of Mundami's racial equity plan, according to The New York Post and accordeit to Perry, who's cheerfully provided it for me here in the rundown. You're going to increase the number of city teachers who quote receive professional learning in
implicit bias and culturally relevant pedagogy. Now that's interesting because it means we're going to pay more professional lecturers to teach the professional lecturers about implicit bias. Charles, do you think that the school system of New York is riddled with people who themselves are absolutely shot through with implicit bias and that's the reason for the poor test scores?
No, I think these people are maniacs. And although the consequences of it are slightly different, and although it is less frowned upon, and it's lack of a direct connection to the bad parts of our nation's history, I think at route this sort of thinking is no different than was routine in the clan. I think that if you spend your time obsessing over the immutable characteristics of your fellow citizens, then you're a bad person and about American, and you're going to lead us down a dark path.
And I see this as being not so much an overcorrection but an inversion of that ugly habit. I really do find it revolting. I saw in the Washington Post. I've been on vacation, but I saw in the Washington Post there was a piece slamming the Supreme Court, and just the piece was that this ultra conservative Trump appointed Supreme Court is for the first time in years, refusing to uphold civil rights. And I thought, that's very interesting. That sounds bad.
So I read the headline. Was the headline literally was the meme women and minorities in this word?
Yeah, And so I read dan and the first and really only substantial claim that civil rights in America have been undermined was a reference to the Supreme Court finally refusing to sanction affirmative action, which is quite literally color blindness.
Right.
You can argue if you want with the reasoning in that case, I was probably more of the view that the Civil Rights Act was being violated than that the Fourteenth Amendment necessarily was, although there are good arguments against that, one made by Clarence Thomas. But irrespective, it is absolutely preposterous to suggest that government stopping discriminating on the basis
of race is the civil rights violation. And yet, and yet, there's a certain class of people, and our fortune, there are far too many of them in our media and academia and government who think that the way that you achieve the values that are inherent to the Declaration of Independence is to bring people into a room to be lectured by those who cannot see human beings but for their skin color, or sexual orientation or what you will. And I think it's tragedy.
Well, I mean, yes, we'd like to be color blind, but there's a disparate impact to that. I mean that flipped at some point, gone into the character was what they wanted, and that flipped in order to make the numbers better and to achieve better results now and all the rest of it's an inversion, of course, as we've said, of what the original objections were. But you're right, color blindness is a violation of civil rights because because you know,
as Mendeimi says, because of systemic racism. Now, the idea that there is systemic racism endemic in New York institutional educational structures at this point is preposterous. It's it's it's a conspiracy theory. As somebody pointed out, there are all these systems, interlocking and such that do these things as opposed, and it's it's never no bad outcome is ever the fault of the people who are experiencing and manifesting the outcome.
It's all these institutions operating in seamless meshing behavior. So when you talk about culturally relevant things as he did. That's one of those phrases that makes you think back to the sixties when everybody was protesting about what they were being taught in school because it wasn't relevant. Man, it wasn't relevant to be It wasn't I can't feel that. So what they're saying, and what they've been saying all along, is that we can't teach the American story. We can't
teach the American experience the exceptionalism moment. What we have to do is to find a way to pluck out some narrow little things and give those to people, because they are incapable of understanding anything beyond themselves in whatever particular clan that may happen to be part of, which is which is grossly insulting. But the only history they're going to teach them is sixteen nineteen. They're not going to teach them anything else, because how culturally relevant is that?
Culturally relevant is the expansion to the West and the rise of the railroads and industrialization and the rise of communications and the rest of it. To somebody in New York in twenty twenty six, I mean, please come on, get out.
Of here and that he's an immigrant James, Yeah, because that means that he came to the United States and that's what he picked up, and that's a failure. I'm afraid that is a failure of the system, speaking of systems to inculcate and I use that word quite openly, newcomers with the foundational values of the United States. If we have immigrants who are obsessed with that, that's a failure.
It is a problem. But I don't think it was. It was stuffed into him, like he's a goose being fattened up for the FOI gras. I think I think that that's what he naturally gravitated towards. And in this country, there's a big in a New York there's a lot of juice that account that you can get by going to that side, because that's the side with virtue, and that's the side where everybody's gonna praise you. So for him to plug into that as classic grifter mode really is.
But he also said he wants a public school curriculum that reflects the diversity of families and communities. Okay, we just don't with that, And he's demanding anti racism training for city government staff to help workers quote combat racial discrimination in the workplace, which again, apparently New York is just a healthscape after I mean, granted, he's the first person on the left to govern New York in what
a hundred years? How under these previous under adams, under these previous administrations, was that was racism allowed to fester to the point where he's got to bring in some to read them Ibraham Candy books. Every time I use here to see the phrase anti racism, I know that somebody's drunk all that flavor rate, because that doesn't just mean, oh, I'm against racism. It's a whole set of behaviors and thoughts and things that you have to do to combat
racism and every single manifestation. And Candy is not a deep thinker. Kendy is not particularly the guy your go to guy for heavyweight analysis or heavyweight to intellectual liftings. But you know, I thought his free ride was over, but apparently he's got a new book out and people are paying attention to him again for that. Finally, he's requiring the Department of Housing, Preservation and Development to quote insure racial equity is considered in evaluating one hundred percent
of new proposals for construction one hundred percent. Now, what that usually means is using small firms that are cutouts for other people to say that we've got ten twenty thirty percent minority contractors on this one. Actually it's kind of a shell game where they got a guy up front and they got other guys in the back. So
that's more I mean, that's just more money. All the stuff that he talks about, none of it is going to achieve anything except the enrichment of the class that comes in and tells you how to think and how to behave and what not to do. None of this solves changes anything. Have you ever been through implicit bias training journals?
I have not, and in fact I have made it a point of principle to refuse to work anywhere where they would put me through that or with any organization that would require it. Now, obviously this has not been a problem my National Review, which.
Is institutionally a bit of racist, though it is yet.
Oh exactly no, but its institutionally against this. But it has crossed my mind that if I lost my job or what you will, and I went in a different direction and I was told to do this what would I do? And I think I would just have to say I'm sorry, I'm not doing that. But of course maybe I wouldn't. Maybe I would see my children's starving mouths and say I better sit through it. Yeah, but I feel you see, this is why I think that DeSantis was right in Florida when he signed the bill
that effectively outlaws this. And I think that those with whom I usually agree, who said ah butt the first Amendment were wrong. I'll tell you why, because I am fortunate, I have a nice life, and I work somewhere that's never going to ask me to do this. And I am not typical in that respect because most people, increasing this is the case, work for large companies. More people
now than ever work for large companies. The number of people who work for small businesses has declined and declined and decline, and large companies are much more likely than other companies to put their staff through this sort of nonsense, and that makes those who work within those large companies somewhat powerless. If you're a middle manager at Unilever, you don't have a huge amount of say as to whether
you have to sit through this. Now, as a general rule, I am a First Amendment absolutist, and I think that those companies should be able to do whatever they want. And that means that if they want to be conservative or progressive, or Christian or not Christian, find their private institutions. But we do have civil rights laws in this country.
And if you suppose this goes back to our earlier conversation, if you said to someone, look, middle manager at Unilever, you need to sit through a presentation as part of your job that tells you why black people are inferior, it would be abundantly obvious to everyone, given our civil rights precedence, that that was illegal. You wouldn't say, ah, by what about the First Amendment? You'd say, well, in this case, the civil rights laws control and unless we
change that, then that will continue to be the case. Well, I do not see any difference between that hypothetical and what was going on, especially during and after COVID and some of George Floyd, where people were being asked to sit through presentations that effectively said white people are racist, the United States of America is racist, and you, white middle manager at Unilever are the problem. And Dessantis said, we're just not doing that. If we're going to have
civil rights laws. They're going to be applied in both directions. They're not going to be employed. And he got student students sutent and I'm not quite sure what the status of the laws. And a lot of people I really respect, to a big free speech guys like me, said well, he can't do that. Well, why can't he do that? Why is it the case that only in wonder because if you read the Civil Rights Act, it doesn't say in one direction. It doesn't say white, Black, Asian, Mexican,
or whatever. It just says discrimination on the basis of race. It just says hostile work environment. It just has these terms. So I was very strongly in favor of that because I think it was supposed to protect everyone, which is what it did. And it also prevents what you're talking about, which is this circular grift where the people who are obsessed with this high the people who are obsessed with this, and they transfer my money, usually between themselves, and then pat each other on the bag.
I've said this before, but it's a good thing. Nobody remembers what I say. I have gone through this kind of training, and three things stuck out in my mind. One. First, they were asking us all to identify ourselves. What we identified as? I said, and I said, un North to Cotin, because that's the culture in which I was brought up, for which I got my ethics, ethos, the rest of it. And so they smiled indulgently and also chucked me up to Oh, you're going to be one of those, aren't you.
The second thing we had to do was play with lego, and they just gave us a bunch of lego and asked us to build something. So of course you're on your guard right away. What I'm good? How am I going to be? Jut? What? So? I designed? I built a little house. I did, and then when I looked at it at the end, I said, oh my god. I grouped all of the colors together. There was a red wall and a blue wall and a yellow wall because to me, that seems to be more aesthetically appealing thing.
And there's a chimney. I've built a segregated crematorium. And I was terrified They're going to look at that and say, this guy's built a segregic gated crematorium. But they never explained what that was about. Anyway. Finally they showed us pictures,
and we're supposed to have reactions to these images. And they showed us a guy with facial hair can think of me like a biker and leathers, and he's holding in his hands, he's holding a dowel of sorts like a truncheon, and so it was a little circular picture around him, and we're supposed to ask what we thought about him, and you know, generally people said, well, he looks like he looks mean and dangerous. I would avoid him.
Well then they pulled out on the image and it turns out that this biker, the trothal that he was holding was actually the handle of a pram. He was pushing a baby cart. And we're supposed to think, oh, aren't we silly for having made the assumptions that we did. And I'm thinking, who walks around in the world with, you know, look through the life through a toilet paper tube where they can't see the entire thing. Of course, I'm not going to be scared of a man in
leathers who's pushing a baby cart. But this was meant to show us how we make assumptions that don't turn on to be true. You can't assume. Remember when you make an assumption, you make an ass out of you annumption. And it was miserable and nobody learned anything, and everyone just sat through and endured it because the company made us do it, and then they could check a box
and move along. I almost got sent to sensitivity training towards the end of my tenure at the Star Tribune because I committed a gross racial insult that I had to grovel, I had to go through. I had to go through a struggle session in slack I did. I don't think I've spoken about this. I had used a phrase I said, in many cafes, small town bars in Minnesota, you'll see a sign that says Tipping is not a city in China. And those signs used to be everywhere.
As a matter of fact, they still are. When I did a Google search for it, the phrase came up and ABC story, but it was regarded as racial insensitivity and making fun of the act. It was making fun of the accent of Asian people. And what's more, it was Asian American Journalist Month or something like that, and that compounded my sin. And there was something else in the piece that was not to the liking I mean I generally sort of kind of made fun of everybody,
and I didn't really think that I couldn't anyway. So the piece got yanked from the paper, scrub from the internet. The print version was still out there. The paper apologized for the insensitivity in its correction space, and people were writing I was following this on local creddits and other stuff. People were saying, I have no idea what they're talking about. I read that thing. I have no idea what he said.
That was so bad. It was a mystery ahead scratched of all, probably the beginning of my downfall there, So jams.
What was the piece replaced with? Was it replaced with an editorial explaining why it's important for social justice to give Asian people out of colleges, which is the literal position of IDs who were torturing you.
I know, I know, I know, I know, I know it was absurd.
I can't say Tipping is not a city in China can systematically discriminate against stations in college admissions. That's the that's the social justice rule.
Right, So that I guarantee you that the walk that I got a little bit with people at the Washington Post and the New York Times did were anybody any gray head there, any veteran journalist with experience found himself dealing with these these maoist red guards and just I mean, I got a mild version of what some guys do. But we're told this is crested. We're told that in twenty twenty six, woke is over, it's in retreat. We're
told that me too is spent. We're told that the that the trans mania has subsided has peaked and subsided. Do you think these things are true? I think they are, But that doesn't mean they're gone. Ah.
I think they are in one sense or not. In another. I think they are in that the public, which never had much time for them, has even less time for them now. I think that one of the manifestations of that was the victory of the Trump campaign in twenty twenty four, and that we are likely to get some Democratic victories in the midterms and probably in the twenty
twenty eight presidential election. And when we do, many of the people who don't care that the positions that they espouse are on popular will once again have control of the leaders of power, and they will push this stuff irrespective of public opinion. So I think that it has peaked in its popular form. We probably won't see as
much of it from private companies. But I would be surprised if we get a democratic president twenty eight come mid twenty nine, if we're not looking at the Department of Justice starting all that stuff up again.
But I don't see it with a trans issue. I think everybody's backed off that one and realizes that there's no gain in it anymore, and that it is no longer the vanguard of human thinking and transformation, so to speak, and that the lawsuits will start coming.
Yeah, that's a good point, that one. The lawsuits is a big part of this. That's how things change in America.
Yeah, well, you know, and good for us. Good for us, I'm you know, speaking of the future. Let us conclude with this. I think you've made a bombshell announcement the other day in Rickshet that five point oh is en route. Now those of us who have been with us thing since they plugged it in, and I've been here since the original day. I remember when Robin Peter came to my house as a matter of fact, at one point for a party, and I said, why didn't I write
for you? And they said, yeah, why don't you write for us? And then the next thing, I know, I am doing this for years. So I was there at one point. Oh, I've been there for the various iterations of the logo and the typeface and the style and the rest of it. But it's been static for some time and out comes five point Oh. I'm a big fan of occasionally shaking everything up and redesigning. Charles, what have you done? What have you done to our beloved Ricochet.
Well, it will be a big shake up because this will be the first time in Ricochet's history that Ricochet is an app, by which I mean to say not that it will run immediately on your mobile or though there'll be a mobile version in a browser, but that it is not going to be built on something else. My understanding is that Ricochet has historically been a top a CMS and other infrastructure. Currently it's word Press. It's
no secret, and it won't be. This is going to be like Twitter or Facebook or anything else, its own thing. It will be built from the ground up as a bespoke, custom, self contained piece of software. I have taken that decision despite the fact that it is something of a jump after a lot of thought. As some people will know, my business partner passed away six weeks ago, and I reviewed everything, and I came to the view that Ricochet is not best suited to being crammed into someone else's
software or working within its confines. So there'll be two stages. Stage one is the launch of Ricochet with all of its legacy data, everything up until the point at which it is Ricochet five will be there. And then the second step will be pretty aggressively adding new features to the new system.
Well, you're gonna have to go to big Share to find out what those are. And the release date is when is it this weekends at next not this week?
Oh okay, it will be no later than September thirtieth of this year.
Ah okay. Good. So we're not going to tease you with things that might not appear. We're not going to wet your app Well, we will wet your appetite. But I tell you what, right now, Ricochet four point zh it's still a great place to be. I love it. I'm there several times a day. We should also add that I understand the trials of building something on top
of something else, using somebody else's platform. I my site has had code so simple for so long that when some people look at it, they just they it's like they feel young again. It's like twenty years never happened. I have tables, I have image maps, I have spacer gifts. I mean, it's this thing. It is just is ancient.
Anyway.
I may change it up at some point too. But you, the listener, can go to Ricochet, as you probably already do. But if you don't go to the member feed, you're probably always wondering what is behind the curtain. And the answer is everything from lots of amusing memes, to discussion of the unanities of Canadian politicians, to things to arguing about the war, to arguing about literature, sports and the rest of it.
Movies.
There's nothing really that isn't discussed open the member feed at Ricochet. So I advise you to part with a few shekels, tenari lira whatever, you please go there, join and you'll find that four point zero is pretty good, and then you'll be amazed when you see what five point zero is. I got to go because I got to have a guy come over here and put a table together or a desk together. I could do it myself, but I am tired of assembling furniture. I nearly wept
with the last Ikia thing that I put together. It took me days. I had to actually find a guy who just silently put it together, holding out his hands and showing the parts, pointing to what to do. It was brilliant. I actually was so grateful that guy. I sat through all of the ads and didn't skip them, so we got However, little revenue came about from that anyway. Charles, glad you're back from your trip your home. Have a great weekend. Have a great weekend everybody else. I hope
Stephen will be with us as well next week. I'm Jamie Lelex here in a dynam Minnesota cake eater now that I am, and we'll see you all at Ricochet four point whatever. Bye bye