E.T. and His Boundless Orks

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Mister Gerbatcheff, tear down this wall, read my lips. It's the Ricoshe Podcast with Stephen Hayward sitting in for Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lileax. To day, we talked to Patrick Denin about regime change and Annie McCarthy about the indictments. So let stefrasels a podcast. Our country is going to hell and they come after Donald Trump, weaponizing the

Justice Department, weaponizing the FBI. So I just want to tell you I'm an innocent man. I did nothing wrong. Either you were with us or you were with the terrorists. Welcome everybody. It's the Ricoche Podcast, number six hundred and forty five. I'm James Lileax in Minneapolis. Stephen Hayward is sitting in for what's his name again, Peter Robinson. He'll be back next week to remind us who he is. And Rob Long? Are you in

New York? Your zoom feed seems I'm not clear. I expect that there's some sort of a post apocalyptic blade Runner orange myasthma that's going through every corner. Well, there is, but it's only on the ground. I'm in San Francisco, so it's not clear it's foggy. Um it's uh San Francisco where the air is clean, but the needles are dirty. Right, So are you walking around then, since you're an SF Frisco as they hate to be called, just to get you know, dodging around the street. Pooh

and no, you know what I mean. I mean, I think there are. I actually feel like I just took a long walk yesterday, so I shouldn't. I won't even hear two days. But um, I actually feel like it's maybe just coming from New York and then having lived in Los Angeles for such a long time that Las seems much worse to me than San

Francisco. Just anecdotally looking at my window and taking a walk to the Civic center where all the homeless people are, it didn't seem chimps didn't seem nearly as bad as sort of skid row in LA or Los Angeles Street in LA which has been terrible for years. I mean this pre dates covid or for that matter, Venice where I used to live in Venice, or the Ocean

Front Walk. So Stephen, where where are you right now? I'm down in the central coast area of California, whereas I'd like to tell people, I have two hundred mile buffer zones between LA and San Francisco, so I stay away from the craziness. Oh but Rob, are you? I'm curious, Rob, are you by any chance? Probably not? But are you staying in either the Hilton or the Park fifty five? I should say both of those hotels have declared. I think they filed chapter or something. No,

I'm not, but that was a big story. I was reading about it yesterday. It was a big story. What I love is the is the US are the people trying to make it the idea that two big hotels have essentially closed because there's no NUSS convention business and this john Ton is pretty empty. I got to say, um, I mean, anyway, the spate separate issue. But I'm not saying there. But I like the people sort of defending it, defending the city, saying things like, well,

you know, I mean they're just filing chapter. It's really it's a corporate thing, Like well, no, when you close your business, it's not you know, it's not a corporate thing. It's a no business thing. And I would just say that I think, I mean, maybe I'm doing the deep diving right now, but um, I think actually think it's going to be Um, what what what killed San Francisco? And I think what or what it is trying to kill it? I don't think it's dead.

I think there's it's just resting, resting. Um, it's going to be less. I think it's ultimately going to be when you actually add up the human damage and the economic damage, it's going to be either less or equal to the sort of woke nonsense that runs the cities. Um less equal to

the ridiculous behavior of this state under COVID. COVID I think did more damage to certainly to the downtown la at downtown New York or San Francisco then, um, I mean people here have always been woke, but when you add woke on top of woke, you add you know, crazy panic, completely

unscientific but bizarre kind of regulations. And they tore up the benches in the Union Square as a COVID precaution so that people wouldn't sit outside in a beautiful city square like you know, a lot of the stuff is I mean, some of it obviously is the crazy wokeness of San Francisco, which has always been crazy woke. But boy, you put in completely indefensible COVID policy and you just amplify that by one hundred rant over. Yeah, or apply that

in every city that you want. You had the code of policies which emptied out the downtowns, destroy the economic ecosystems, and then you had a concombinant desire to be nice to all the people who are causing the civic disorder. Between the two of them, you have fewer eyes on the street. You have Jane Jacob's ideas about what makes a city safe and a Liverpool turned on

their head. And then you have a waving away of any sort of consequences for people who apparently we're gonna be talking about this with our guest in a little bit, the people who bring the disorder to the streets. And every time, I mean, I'm keen to follow all the arguments and read it.

For example, which has various subreddits devoted to Minneapolis and Saint Paul about the disorder on the public transports in downtown, and it's always the same, It's like, well, you can't do anything about civic order or disorder until

you fix the problems that caused it in the first place. Well, no, that's absolutely not how it works at all, unless you believe, of course, that there are vast number of people who are walking out there who were struck by meth addiction, like by by you know, a thunderbolt, or that a needle flew from the sky and penetrated their neck and caused them to be addicted. And I know it's simplicitic to say that people have choice

over it, but people kind of do. Maybe. So the idea that we have any consequences is, you know, we've failed as a society if we actually require consequences of the people who are causing the disorder. So, yeah, San Francisco, I hope it comes back. I'm not particular particularly hopeful. Yeah, well, I can do a pro and con on Rob's optimism. Let me do the con first, which is things are even worse

than they look. And I'll just one measure is nationwide, I get these figures from Leohni and down at Hoover, nationwide, housing prices are down about three and a half percent. Mostly that's high interest rates and mornage rapes have gone up. In San Francisco. The so the sales price of houses have colned down seventeen percent. He calculates that the loss of property value for homeowners and Francisco is something like two hundred and sixty billion dollars and go one on

that. I think, you know, Milton Friedman used to joke that if you put a socialist in charge of the Middle East, you'd have a shortage of sand And I think it's then underestimated the capacity of progressives direct cities like San Francisco. But that's the converse, right, isn't it. Rob Is that you know right now the exos from San Francisco is greater than any two

year period Detroit ever experienced. But San Francisco's not Detroit. I remember asking, I think it was Arnt Laugher, who's always great with a sensible line, you know, how can California get away with this level of taxation and regulation? I mean, Arkansas couldn't do that. And he said, that's like asking why pretty girls are mean, because they can be so. California has these amenity values that people will pay a high freight charge to be here.

I do, right, and you know you have for many years and so yeah, you gotta think sam'sis is going to come back. And then finally you mentioned that it looks not as bad as la. I think what's going on right now, I've picked this up by just my observations around the Bay or because I'm there a lot, either at Berkeley or over in San Francisco is I think the city and the police are quietly trying to get a

handle on the homelessness and cut it back some. They're not eliminating it, and I think they're doing it quietly because if they actually disclosed that they were trying to crack down homelessness, trying at the margins to nibble it and contain it and roll it back, the progressive left would go nuts and make their

lives miserable. So they're doing it quietly. I think you're right. I mean, my larger theory is that for two years we had these crazy crackpot regulations that in which people crack down on things like going to your grandmother's funeral and or going to church, or walking around or sitting outside in a public square, and so all the sort of normal law abiding people just now they're just home. Fine, you don't want me, I'm home. And they're

sort of opening up other places. Right. The one area that was completely unregulated was in social disorder. And that social disorder, which is like, well, okay, well, you know, if you're you're not really going to grab a homeless person and give them a ticket for breaking COVID regulation. I mean, we didn't do that to any of the people who were protesting

in the summer of twenty twenty. So that right there, when you talk about, you know, encouraging social disorder, when you the riots here in twenty twenty were quite extraordinary, and if you watch the live stream, you had an awful lot of people milling around in close contact, work out any maskt whatsoever. And if this had been, of course, the plague that we thought that it was, they would have done something about it. But they didn't. So right, so you have all of these strange, peculiar

messages. But you know, yes, mean girl, pretty girls can be mean, because they can be, but eventually they age and cities, cities, the cities can micro awave the seed corn for a snack for a long time, but they run out of it. And what haunts me about all of this is the idea that we really kind of fixed it before. We had it pretty good. When it came to cities, the renaissance in American cities in the odds and the teens was something to behold. They became destination

places, they became safe place. I remember when I lived in DC. You didn't walk through downtown at night. You didn't. But then in the night, you know, in the late teens, I remember going to a whole bunch of conferences and walking back to my hotel at three o'clock in the morning and feeling absolutely safe. Now could have been because I, you know, drunk, but I think I don't think so. The cities had turned

themselves around in extraordinary ways. Every time every one of these that you look at, you realize that all so much of that progress has been absolutely lost and squandered. And I don't know if it's because they think they can get right back to it again by snapping our fingers, or if they just don't

care. Because the existence of disorder and the people who manifest these certain these social ills proves that the system that we have as ill legitimate needs to be completely dismantled and replaced with the utopian thing that'll fix all of these things. And until then, they're all very handy markers for the fact that capitalism failed and America has failed. In America's a failed project, dissenters, I'd seem crazy or not inter stunned into silence. Change. Yeah, I mean,

I'm an old Reaganite optimist about you know, don't bet against America. That problem is Joe Biden is now saying don't bet against American And if he says that, I'm going to sell short right away the way things are going right. But I do think and this will come up with we get Patanina on a little bit. You know, there are great reserves. I mean,

remember what Reagan's message was is essentially, you're going to fix America. The one difference between say a Reagan or that kind of conservative and a liberal is the liberals say we're going to fix it here in Washington. And remember Reagan's message from day one as president was You're going to fix it the American people. We're gonna help you, We're gonna get out of your way, We're gonna do things to help you, the people of America, fix what's wrong

with the country. I still in my bones believe that is a winning message in a correct strategy. So how to how do the people of San Francisco then pull themselves out of this morass They seem they seem inclined to be voting for the very people who keep the quicksand well moist sand discus they don't. Well, there's a funny thing happening in San Francisco, in the whole Bay area the last few years that I never thought i'd see. This predates COVID,

by the way. There is a organized yimb movement meaning yes in my backyard. And I'm listening to all these liberals who I used to battle about regulation thirty years ago, especially land use regulation, and they say, gosh, you know, our planning process and our building codes and our regulations make it hard to build housing. We've got to do something about this. Now

they're often confused. Still, you know, it's I never thought i'd see such a thing happening, and so I don't I think there is a spot for a progressive in San Francisco to say I'm for all progressive things, but we really need to have simpler regulations so we can build the things we need at a reasonable cost. And there don't seem any of them. But there are activists agitating on this front. And that's also the data is now coming.

Not that they were persuaded by data, but the data. There is data that suggests that, i mean, part of the problem when you should build housing, and we goes, yeah, we should build housing, we should build affordable housing, and should be built by the government. And the truth is that you walk through pretty much any city, but then there's a

there's a I can't really see it. But on the other side of where I am there was a neighborhood called the Fillmore that was incredibly vibrant neighborhood that was filled with people and the houses and it was a majority black and it had some kind of very famous um nightclubs and music venues for one time, and the city decided during the city Beautiful, not city beatiful, but during the sort of urban renewal movement, well we'll just tear all those down and

that, you know, the Embarcadero in San Francisco had this beautiful sort of waterfront. It was, you know, gorgeous, and well, you're just gonna put a freeway there, and they did all this stuff. And these were all people who were acting under the best practices of the time because and it doesn't really matter what your solution is, because their solution was, we

need to plan this, we need central planning. This kind of chaotic neighbors kind of working it out thing doesn't doesn't work anymore in the you know, the modern twentieth century. And so what they did was they sort of tore away all of the little, tiny, little ligaments that hold all people together

and neighborhoods together and cities together. Not that they were safe, not that there was no crime, not even that the cops weren't brutal, especially in San Francisco during the time, lots of issues, but this fundamental thing that makes people live together in a community, whether it's a big one and a dense one or a rural community, they just decided, well, we're smarter than that, and pretty much that's almost that's to me, it's almost always

the problem. It's these things are never done by dumb people. They're always done by very very smart people, because only very smart people can be this stupid. Can offer you a mind blowing footnote to that story, Rob, which is you probably noticed that it was in the early sixties when neighborhoods in San Francisco effectively stopped an interstate from being run through the town stopped at cold And here's the mind blowing part. The ring leader of representing that particular point

of view was a Republican state Assemblyman from San Francisco named Casper Weinberger. Well, now wait a minute, because if you're true, if you're under ninety the podcast, you're Casper Weinberger was in the rate, was a California politician, was in the in the Reagan administration Secretary Defense, Casper Winberger, George Schultz, and Ronald Reagan. Well, working for Ronald Reagan following his lead, managed to do a lot of great stuff, including when the Cold War.

No, Rob's right. The smart people are the ones that you have to walk on. We're look on for because they always have a new theory of urban design. The new urbanists are always absolutely correct about the the the paradigm they should impose on the city, and it never really works. Unfortunately, we can never get rid of the guys who think they're too smart and know precisely what to do. But there are some different tools in the quiver to mix my metaphors. We'll get to that maybe a little bit later.

Because right now we should just get to our guest. We'd love to get to our guests. Who would be Patrick Demon professor of political science at Notre Dame, where he concentrates on the history of political thought, liberalism, conservatism, and constitutionalism, and twenty eighteen he wrote Why Liberalism Failed, and earlier this week he published his latest book, Regime Change Towards a Post Liberal Future. Patrick, thanks for joining us in the podcast today. Thanks well,

I you know, I hate to sum up erroneously or thesis. And we have two failures. We have the failure of kin of the economic liberalism. We have the failure of social liberalism. What we need is to sweep away the order which is strangling us now and create a new regime. But before we get to that, there's a word that keeps popping up in your work that I read the piece and Impact, and the word is unbounded us that the central preski pardon compact, Compact magazine, Compact, I'm sorry, Compact

Impact, right right, It's like, what are you? Yeah, commentary and descent emerging in form um. Unbounded was this word that appeared again and again and and I liked it. It has a sense of It reminded me of David glertn Are talking about the culture of obligation of the nineteen thirties. How were there were these boundaries and structures put into place that we're that we're

done away with. Um, tell me a little bit more about why you like that word, and what sort of boundedness you think society would profit from having. Well, I guess, I mean, I was been trying to think of of an appropriate or fitting word to capture I think what you were just saying, which is the what I see as the sort of extreme forms of you could say unbounded liberty that I think has come to define aspects of what we think of as the contemporary right or the contemporary left. And what

would be the correct term? And I thought about both borderlessness or limitlessness, could could in some ways describe them, But I thought of boundedness in part because it's it seems to both suggest the need for boundaries, of course, the need to draw boundaries around either places or people or behaviors that applied, it's seemed to me, could be thought of to apply to kind of both of the forms of liberalism that I see as the dominant strands on both the

contemporary right and left, and that I think represent the kind of somebody's the furthest reaches of the development of this liberal border that we are now either enjoying or suffering under, depending on your perspective. Right, So, I mean, societally used to be like those invisible senses that my neighbors want for their dog sense, and the limits of what you where you would go and there would actually be a little jock in the collar if you walk through it.

But I believe that Stephen Hayward has has some questions and I'm going to defer to Stephen. Well, Hi, Pad, it's it's great to see you again. It's been a long time. I did. I did promise listeners though, Pat, that we're both have a backwind and political theory. But we will not get off in an esoteric discussion of how to understand walk correctly. You and I can do that separately, and I'd actually like to do that with you. But but I do think we ought to be clear.

I mean, we introduced one key point point of about unbounded liberalism, and I want to bore in on that. But I think we've got to there's clearway definitions for people. I think that's really are sort of three parts of what we mean by the liberal tradition. The first part is uncontroversial, I

think, and you're understanding. The second part gets more interesting, and a third part is where all the action is so so part one, when we say you and I say liberalism, we don't primarily mean the Democratic party platform of higher taxes and spending and regulation and all the rest of that. I mean lots of reasons to criticize that, but that's not you know, the contemporary way people understand liberal That's not really what you mean. I think that's

you agree with that. Yeah. Well. Part two then is the institutional and constitutional aspects, and that has four parts plus an idea, and we've got to put in brackets and it's going to sound like a Supreme Court syllabus. They're two key asterisks here, but the four or five parts are. One is equality under the law, no special privileges, thready cast of people, a second representative government. The third is a market economy or often we

say a free market economy. Oh, that's kind of redundant. And then fourth is the idea of robust individual rights. And that's where one of the ass risk comes in. Then the bracketed idea is the idea of progress, and you talk about that a lot in your book. So I mean, I think you're in fact, I know you're not saying we're going to throw out that whole tradition. We're not throwing out constitutionalism, representative government, even

individual rights. You're after something bigger. Is that so far, so good? Patrick, I haven't. I think that's a correct Yeah, the institutional constitutional aspects, yes, right. And so this last part, I instead of saying unbounded, I say the idea. I think you use this phrase alternately yourself, the idea of unlimited individual autonomy. It's the John Stuart Mill idea that liberalism means we all get to pursue our own self chosen purposes.

But the problem is is that it does not fill the whole in our soul when we're detached from communities and families and religion so forth. Or you know, I know you're familiar with the line from Leo Strauss that the end result of Lockey and liberalism would be the joyless quest for joy. And so now

we live at a time and here's the problem. What bounds anything? Well, nature does right and so just because you say a man doesn't become a woman by saying that I'm a woman, right, Just like you remember Lincoln's famous line, if you call a tailor leg, how many legs does a dog have? And the answer was for because calling a tailor leg doesn't make it a leg. Well, today we have the Biden administration refusing to use

the word woman in official policy documents, and this is crazy. Right, So this is some of the stuff that you're after, And so let me stop there. That was a long opening speech, but say a little more about because I hear I'm in very strong agreement with you. While I may have some reservations about other aspects of your argument, but I'm very strongly agreement with you about that core point of individual moral autonomy is become a moral disaster

for Western civilization. Yeah, yeah, well, so that was really the Obviously, this is a continuation of the argument that I made in my last book, Why Liberalism Failed. The liberalism fails because it succeeds. That's the

short summary of that of the argument of that book. It's not that we don't have enough liberalism or that the cures of liberalism is more liberalism to play on John Dewey's old phrase about democracy, but in fact by becoming fully itself and some ways by overcoming in part what Toville, of course, I've described as in some ways the kind of inherited boundaries, right that that America had inherited from its book, from the old world, and also from practice as

it was able to develop. It was able in some ways to constrain the tendencies of liberal democracy what he calls democracy, But I think what he means is fundamentally liberal democracy to kind of spin out of control and really move in a direction in which the individual was detached, unattached, came believing in their unbounded perfectibility, limitlessness, the restlessness of the human soul. And so once you know, in somebodys Tokeville writes this book and says, don't do this,

don't go down this path. Try to retain those elements that you've inherited or that you've kind of developed that limit this temptation of developing this bounded understanding of individual autonomy. And my book, that book, and I guess this current book is kind of an effort to say, well, what happens when Tokeville's warnings you know when we've we've neglected them, or we simply said,

well, too bad for that, and what do we do then? And I think, look, I mean, this has been a project that we've all been engaged in, you know, for forty or fifty years, those of us who call ourselves conservatives, we've all been concerned about this. And I suppose maybe what makes me something of a heterodox thinker is that I think that in some senses, both sides of the liberal tradition have gotten the answer wrong. And by by by liberal tradition, I mean both the classical liberal

as well as progressive liberal aspects of this tradition. So yes, I think we bring out points one and three, and maybe that the sticking points. It's this point two. Yeah, yeah, well you have I just we could go on a long time on this, and I don't want to. But you have a very provocative phrase where you say we should use Machiavellian means to Aristotelian ends. Now two points on that one is I totally understand what you mean and agree with it. I'm on team Nick of the people who

say we've get them all wrong because we only read the Prince. But it does remind me a little bit. And here's where the trouble starts. Of Herbert Crowley's famous phrase and progressive error. You remember he said we're going to

use Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends. Were you self consciously paralleling that with that phrase, Pat or yeah, sure, sure, I mean I teach Crowley regularly, and I was using it in part because I think it's it's such a it's a powerful way to phrase or two things that in the American tradition

we've understood to the opposite. Right, in the American tradition, you were either on team Jefferson for a long time, you're on Jeam Jefferson, or you were on team Hamilton at least until relatively and so but and you know this, Steve, in the those for those who study political philosophy, we do kind of divide ourselves, you know, with their different camps. But one of the big divisions is are you on team Aristotle or are you on

team mafia Velli? Are you a modern or are you on ancient? And I thought it was you know, it was worth sort of trying to make a play on Crowley, but also to Um suggests that maybe these two could be um and somebody's brought a little more closely together. Well, in that case, I'll just call you crowlier than thou and leave it there a moment. I think you are bounded, Steve. Yeah, well one more, one more quick set of questions, and then Rob has a couple for you.

I was delighted to see. I mean, you're a theorist, and often theorist to stick with theory. You at the end of the book have several suggestions, including a couple of radical ones that I have made in speeches, I haven't written them down. And then I want to suggest one to you that you haven't had but fits with your theme. YEA for the paper back right, Well, universal service. I think if you want to actually

have the classes, A mixed the idea of universal service. And by the way, you pretty much say what I say, which is including at least six weeks of training and how you shoot a gun like Israel does. Right. Pro family policy, I go one step further than you, and I floated the idea that I do have several specific examples, but one I have is how about we exempt two parent families to have more than three children from all income taxes? And then watch people's heads explode. I have a lot

to say about meritocracy. I'll skip over that for a minute. But then you talk about how we need to reinvigorate our public Christian culture, and I have one specific idea for you. Almost nobody and no Red states had to wit to propose this, but I think forty eight of the fifty state constitutions have an acknowledgement of God or the Almighty as the source of our rights.

So you live in Indiana, Indiana's constitution begins, we the people of the State of Indiana, grateful to Almighty God for the free exercise of the right to choose our own form of government, do or day this constitution. My

proposal is school prayer. Of course, while Reagan's the last president to talk about how we really shouldn't have got rid of school prayer, how about we just passed laws saying that the school children in our public schools shall recite the preamble of the state Constitution every morning at the beginning of the school day. And watch leftist heads explode, and dare the federal course to say the state

constitution is unconstitutional? Constitutional? Yeah, yeah, that's excellent, that's excellency. I've long actually I've taught many classes in which I do point out not only do many state constitutions have a positive acknowledgement of God, some state constitutions, including the state of Massachusetts, have beginning their preamble by saying, by

enjoining a positive duty to recognize and worship God. So imagine the heads exploding in Boston and the areas of New England when they suddenly discovered that their own constitutions have these have these pastors. Of course, my fear would be that places like Massachusetts, which would quickly introduce constitutional amendments of racing and scrubbing those passages. It's it's the would be the version of tearing down the statue. So one has to be one has to be careful what one wishes for.

Well, yes, I'm a million sorry, No, I think at the very least you could have you could pass this in red states where for example, in Indiana, where this would be where this would naturally lead to the recognition a public acknowledgement of a creator. But you know, I would actually like to see, you know, push the envelope even further. I would like to see, let's test some of these older cases. Let's test some of these cases about prayer in school. Let's see where the Supreme Court is

now on these questions. Obviously, we have a different court than we did in the nineteen sixties and seventies. And I think, sadly, you know, it's interesting you mentioned Ronald rig and it seems to me that the Republican Party or Conservatives in America have kind of they've they've abandoned certain stances and the belief those are lost causes or those are effectively lost causes. So now we'll move from prayer in school and we'll just defend religious liberty. We'll take a

much more defensive stance. And I actually think this might be a moment for really for people to begin to think about a much more you know, a stance which actually tries to regain some ground um and maybe if it doesn't work, to begin to say, well, maybe we need to think about jurisprudence that would allow these cases to win. Well, I've got a bunch more questions and some objections, path, but I want to foot a rob promantic who wants to get them on the fire. Expect, I expect you'll have

objections. Yeah, Yeah, he's you know, that's his that's his sticked objections. Thanks for joining us. I'm good to see you again. I think I think I saw you last in the summer or last summer in um in Hungary of all places. Um right, right? Uh so, I have you talk about lost causes some of these issues, you know, and lost causes and the social conservatives who are advocating for them in the eighties and baking Er kind of gave up. Um it was stipulated. They're at least

presently lost causes right there. They have lost till now, Um who lost them? I mean, there's there's a kind of a I've going to reveal my theory that this sort of a kind of a vanity on the part of the right to say that we lost them because these evil, faceless bureaucrats infiltrated um state governments, local governments and federal government where you know, they really didn't declare their their biases, and they've undermined traditional sort of American Americanism left

and right. That and and what I mean is, whenever you lose something, you always ask yourself one question, did I lose it? Or was it stolen? And you always want it to be stolen by bureaucrats or something, because it means there's not your it's not your fault who lost this stuff? Did? Was it just the inattentiveness by the right or was it a kind of a larger American cultural decline brought upon by wealth and good news? Maybe? So who's gonna so when your book is really called regime change?

Like what regime do we need to change? The regime in the state houses or the city halls, or the Congress, or the regime culturally that we have sort of slipped into. I mean, who's the book for? Well, I don't you know, you never know who the who a book is

for. But the book, the book, I hope, is for people who are you know, like me, and I assume like you, fairly unhappy about the situation we find ourselves in right now, thinking that the nation, maybe the broader Western worlds, and it is in a state of what appears to be terminal decline, in which efforts to fight back again. This always seemed to be kind of you know, at the same at the same

time, there's still fighting spirit. You're always you're always fighting, you know, you're always fallen back to the to the further defensive point, and it almost feels like we're at the you know, we're at the keep right now, and and how much further can you retreat? Right when? Uh? When when we can't define a man and a woman? When we can't uh uh you know, when when when to be a Christian is now in this country? Is is a reviled uh you know, um form of identity?

If to use the current parliance, that feels pretty much like we're at the keep. And well, well, let let me ask you this as a practical question of um years and years and years, the uh, the pro life movement has said has been, as their strategy has been, we need to change the makeup of the Supreme Court. We have conservative justices to overturn

row rows overturned. And it turns out that the pro life political operation hasn't been that successful anywhere, even in places where you think it would be. So was the problem, I don't know, it's not probably either or was the problem Supreme Court? It was the problem that the movement itself had failed at persuading the voters. Yeah, So I think this gets us to the broader question that you asked, which is sort of how did these causes get

lost? And obviously I'm far from being able to have a comprehensive answer to this question that I think none of us is able to adequately answer in its complexity. But one thing I would say is so in the first instance, I think we can all look at the unstinting, unrelenting efforts by progressives to change and transform the fundamental institutions of the United States and frankly the globe,

and using the power of the United States to advance its vision. It's very positive vision, not you know, in the eighties, I remember I was a part of Steve I think I got to know you around that time, you know, Alan Bloom and closing the American mind. And the problem on

the left was relativism. The progressives were simply relativists. And now, in retrospect, that seems like a kind of charming argument, because all along this wasn't The problem wasn't relativism, It wasn't the lack of a belief in anything. It was a very strong and firm belief about what the vision of the

world should be like. And it's it's increasingly it seems to be the one that we encounter in the world, you know, they a world in which, again it's now crime thing to say that there's biological difference between a man and a woman. So I think I would I think we'd be in strong agreement that the left plays a really powerful and profound role in this transformation, and maybe we might differ a little bit in terms of the role of the

right. And I think you know, what you suggested in your question, was it inattentiveness on the part of the right, And I think it was more a problem in the way in which the right kind of constituted itself as a response to the left, going back to the nineteen eighties, even earlier than that, when it began to articulate itself as a form of opposition to this incipient movement that we've seen come into full flower today, and it was

to say that the problem lie in the kind of exercise of political power. The exercise of political power, state power was the problem. So these bureaucrats, these and trench figures in government, the use of political power was the problem. And if we could in some ways create a world in which that no longer applied, which there was an absence of political power, we would

see the kind of flourishing of a good society emerge. So it's a kind of in the background life theories of spontaneous order, that in the absence of any kind of public authority, the goodness, the kind of inherent goodness of human beings would emerge, and those of Steve Knows as better than anyone.

But you know, Robald Reagan had some some qualities of this. He would often say his favorite political philosopher wasn't Edmund Burke, it was Thomas Payne, and Thomas paineo famously argues that, you know, the government only exists to restrain the evils of human beings. But as an Aristotelian, myself, as an Aristintilian, I also understand, or at least I believe that government also

exists. We could say, the public order exists to cultivate the potential virtues of human beings that, left to our own devices, were not naturally good. We have the capacity for good, but we need those capacities to be developed. So I think that that you have on the one side, the left willing to use more or less unbridled exercise of political power to pursue its ends, and the right saying what we really need is just to have the

disassembling of the political order of government use of government power. And so there was always asymmetric kind of an asymmetric kind of warfare that was going on that I think. I think these are the people who might be interested in reading my book, or the people who are saying, well, how do we

how do we actually begin to fight back? And do we actually we need to rethink what we thought in the nineteen eighties, going back even to the sixteen seventies and development of conservatism, that what seemed to be the answer then may not be the correct answer, certain from the standpoint today. And that's where I think there is a really, of course, it's a it's a pretty sometimes let's say, unpleasant, sometimes civil, sometimes productive debate taking place

within the right today over these questions. I just jump in with one last item, just the placeholder. Really, I love this argument. I will say that I'm not quite ready to give up on liberalism or progress, but let's delay that to another day. But it does promptly nostalgic memory. I had forgotten until I was catching up with all this, that I lost a bet to you about fifteen years ago I don't know if you remember this. I do. I still up you paid me with Yeah, they'll see.

That's just it is that you were I was actually right, accept in a larger sense of your point is better. The bet listeners was Pat had written some sympathetic comments about the peak oil theory, very popular back around two thousand and five, and I said, Pat, that's all wrong. I'll bet you that three years from now oil prices will be back down to seventy five dollars a barrel. Pat Gamley took the bet. It was a rerun,

by the way, the famous Julian Simon Paul early bet. And three years came along right, and uh and by the way, you know all the people the Goldman sacks and oil was heading to two hundred dollars a barrel. I me, there's lots of people experts on your side. And three years rolling around and oil prices were still high. And so yeah, are the terms of our bet. You can tell where academic nerds was there? The two parts, Pat, It was a two books from Liberty five book catalog

and I think dinner, which I don't think I ever paid off. So that office, I'll told you to that Steve. Yeah, you should. But and of course it wears oil today about seventy dollars a barrel, so adjusted for inflation, I was totally right, But that's a different art. Your your argument was beyond that, which was never mind oil and resources. It's uh material progress is not filling the whole in our soul. That's the

large argument you're making. That's the one I'm most enthusiastic about, even if, as I say, my cavit is I don't think we should entirely give up on liberalism and progress just yet. Right. Well, so, well now it's it's you know, it's there was just an article that appeared in Politico yesterday about my my majestic powers of influencing all things in American politics today. I was I was reading and wandering, who is this? Who is this wizard of our right here? Who who's who's operating? You know?

If only but um, but it did it did Actually, you know, the reporter admirably uh you know, went went into my uh went into some of my older publications and revived, um revisited and talked a little bit about

some of those arguments that I was making. I you know, it brings me back to something that you had said earlier, and this was really I think the thing about peak oil that really most interested in me was within the liberal order, did liberalism have the capacity in somebody's to recognize natural limits? So you said earlier, what what can bind or limit the autonomy the desired autonomy of the individual, and you suggested that those limits would be nature.

And I think, on the one hand, the right has always been very attentive to the ways in which nature, of course is a limit, especially when we think about the human being, what we are as human beings. I mean, we both cut our teeth in political philosophy. And what attracted me to political philosophy, I'm sure what attracted you. It's it's really just

an endless discussion about what is human nature? And once we have the answer to that question, then we give begin to think about what is the appropriate political form that follows from that definition of human nature. But so on the one hand, conservatives conservatives have always been very keen critics of the way in which the left has been has argued for the transcendence of natural limits, and in particular the transcendence of natural limits in what it is a human beings.

And this of course brings us back to old kind of Strausian themes of historicism, that the human beings has no nature. We are really just creatures who are defined by historical sort of circumstances. And the circumstance above all that defines us is the idea of progress. That they're called progressives for subercise, because progress isn't just you know, just a change, like you know, a using a ballpoint pen instead of a feather. Progress is this sort of existential

ontological condition of what it is to be a human being. There is no human nature. There's only a changeable, transformative, constantly altering, an ultimate perfecting, a kind of perfectable creature that is a human being. At the same time, though, the right, it seems to me, has similar tendencies as well, at least as it's been constituted in the United States, which is the belief of a kind of endless economic progress, a limitless economic

progress. And what was really interesting to I guess what interested me about these ideas of peak oil, which I think is still in some sense it is true, right we're going to run out of maybe not, I shouldn't say run out of it. Become the easy, easy energy in the form of

oil gets more difficult. That's kind of what interested to me. And the extent to which, and again these are just questions in my mind, the extent to which what we understand to be the success of liberalism has been tied to a kind of perhaps temporary bounty, a bountious energy form that allowed us the belief in this kind of autonomy, in this kind of this condition of

completed, thorough going autonomy. So, in other words, the question that really interested me out of that period was is there a quality on the right that actually begins to collapse itself with some of the assumptions on the left as well, which is that the economic and material form of our life is as a limitless and subject to progress as the belief in human transformation. And it

seems to me just put a finer point in this. So I know you want to talk about other things, but this is of course really important that what used to seem to be a distinctive approach to progress on the left and a distinctive approach to progress on the right has now really collapsed, because what we are actually seeing now isn't just a kind of theory of transformation of human nature as a kind of philosophical and historical process that takes place through political agency,

but rather now the scientific technological perfection of human beings through interventions in biotechnology and nanotechnology and artificial intelligence and so forth. What is the conservative answer going to be to this when we have such a strong kind of less It's basically saying, if science progresses, then it must be a good thing. If the material conditions of our life progress, it must be a good thing.

And I think, I think, I think we're at a really critical moment, a kind of key Lynchin moment where conservatives need to really it seems to me I think pretty hard about where we are in terms of those questions. Well, if conservatives believe in smaller government, as we do, then nanotechnology is very exciting because absolutely enable us to get small, really small, down

to the micron level and perhaps injected into people. All right, Well, if you want to know more about this, of course, go to Impact Compact. I'm sorry, and find the apiece which lays out the basic ideas of regime change towards a postliberal future and why a mixed constitutional future in which we have a virtuous elite and a virtuous, populous movement walking hand by hand into a better place where yes, there are boundaries. You read that,

pick up the book, and we thank you Patrick for joining us. Patrick Dennen, the Notre Dame University Political Science Department, doctor latter. Thanks Patrick, thank you. Okay, and now we go from the esoteric and the imperion to the specific and the political. We have Andy McCarthy here to tell

us. Well, you know, Andy has, of course senior Fello up the National Review Institute, contributing editor there as well as well as Fox News, served as the assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Welcome back, Andy, Trump indicted seven counts. So what does this mean? And surely it means, if there's going to be a fair application of the laws, that Hunter Biden is going to be indicted sometime soon. Ryan,

well, at least Joe Biden he's indicted. It's interesting because they these guys are so political. Virtually every line of what they do is politicized.

So this is a little inside basebally, but they've charged Trump under a provision of the Espionage Act that requires proof that he willfully retained classified documents and it seems to me that if you combine the rationale under which they dumped the case against former Vice President Pence last week and what they're saying about Biden, what they want you to believe is those guys they're not really an Espionajact problem because

they're victims of sloppy staff work and inadvertent behavior, and they cooperated with the investigation and all that. Whereas Trump, he's willful, that's why he has to be prosecuted. But if you look at the Espionage Act, and I think Donald Trump is going to make sure we all look at the Espionajact, the subsection of the there's a second subsection of the Act. He's a Trumps and charge into Subsection D, which is the part that deals with the willful

behavior. But there's this subsection F that you know, Biden's not going to want to talk about that deals with people who exhibit gross negligence in the mishandling of classified information. And while the Biden Justice Department and the Democrat media complex will say, oh, well, but we don't go after people who just make mistakes. We go after people with willful behavior, the fact is that

Congress made both of them equally ten year felony camps. And you know, they'll say, well, but Hillary Clinton wasn't prosecuted, which is the same thing of course Trump is saying. And the problem with that argument is it's a travesty that Hillary Clinton wasn't prosecuted. And there's no good basis in my mind to go after Trump on this and not go after Biden. So I just think this is a gratuitous just for as a political matter rather than a

lead one. I think they're gonna be very sorry they went down this route. Hey, Andy, it's Rob Long, thanks for joining us. So I'm you say they're gonna be sorry they went down this route because because it's going to be revealed to be completely political, or because they're gonna lose, or both. I think because the selection of Trump to be prosecuted on this is political. And there was a way Rob to indict this case without doing

that. You could have just indicted it as grand jury obstruction. In other words, they could they could have just made this case. You know. Luck we asked him for our stuff back, he wouldn't give it back, so we gave him a grand jury subpoena and he duped his lawyers into telling us under oathed that he had given everything back when they gave these thirty eight documents on June third, And of course that was a full statement. We

you know, two months later they find one hundred more documents. So instead of you could have taken the ESPNA jack completely out of it, just made it a plane ol obstructing the grand jury case and look the country in the eye and say, you know, look, he says, this is a selective prosecution. But no one in America can lie to a grand jury and get away with it. And that's the kind of thing I think people could have wrapped their brains around. Why didn't they do that, because I think

they want to make a well a couple of reasons. First of all, they want to run against Trump, right, so it doesn't really the more unfair this seems to be, the more Jim's up Trump's space. And this has the paradoxical effect of there's like a surge effect and a tail effect. Right. The surge effect is in the four corners of the primary contest to

win the GOP nomination. It helps Trump because his base is catalyzed and none of the other candidates can get any traction because they have to talk about Trump all the time. But the all effect of this is if you combine this with like Bragg's case and the EG Carol case, and in August you got the Atlantic case, and then in October's one of those is a fundraising opportunity

for Trump. Yeah, I wouldn't go to sleep on October is the Letitia James Broad case, the civil case, which is going to be you know, years of the Trump organization and they're accused of this massive like you know, insurance, tax fraud, you know, every fraud under the sun. And then you know, now you have this, then you have Bragg's trial coming up, and the other thing that's going to happen here at a certain point, I don't think Trump is going to get charged with a June with

a January sixth crime. But remember Smith is a special counsel, which means he gets to write a report. So at some moment in time when it's propitious for them, he's going to Trump a comprehensive report on what Trump did in connection with the with January sex. So they have this whole thing skelped out in a way that it's very likely he could win the nomination and then they're going to frig and kill him as it gets close to is it just? I mean, he'll also do a number on himself. He's good at

that. I mean, now, okay, what are they all talking to each other? Or this is just kind of the hive mind at work. Um. I mean, you what you've sketched out as is a system, right. I mean, to bring this case in Miami because they want to bring it, I guess because they want it. They want it, they don't want to suffer through a venue change. They want to just make it,

make it simple. Um. I mean, I'm just trying to understand, like, is there anybody there in that entire operation saying, well, listen, you know this is a little bit we're pushing this because Biden did it, and Pence did it and Hillary Clinton famously did it. Seems like everybody's taken stuff home and there's nobody there. There's no dissenting voice, or is there? Or are we going to hear more about that later? I think, first of all, it's it's it's a hive mind. But you

know, we're not talking about a complicated issue here. I mean, it's pretty simple the way this Tea's up right, So I think everybody kind of knows what's expected of him. I got I must have been asked ten times today. Do you think that Smith is coordinating with Garland? I mean, Rob you're talking about, like, are these other prosecutions in different or prosecutors

in different jurisdictions colluding. I don't think Smith is talking to Garland. That doesn't mean Garland's not running the show, or that Biden's not running the show. It's that Smith was brought in because he knows what's expected of him. He knew what he was here to do. They don't have to have a conversation about that. And I think if you're an activist Democrat, which covers the Justice Department, and then all these politically elected prosecutors who are state prosecutors

around the country. Let's remember, the state prosecutors, unlike the federal prosecutors, are elected. They seek office promising their constituents that they're going to use their power against Trump, and it really doesn't matter that much how the cases come out. They're supposed to use their power and get Strump, which they're doing. So I don't think. I don't think it's one of these things where it's so complicated that we all have to get together to figure out what

each one does next. I think there's a trajectory of this that's pretty simple. They want him to win the nomination and then they think, you know, Biden can beat him in the general and it's teeing up that way. Probably can Steve Heyward out in California. I was glad you mentioned, but I think you should say more about the Hillary Clinton case from what seven eight

years ago? Now? Yep. And you know what I recall from that, and this is getting off strictly legality and the constitutional issues involved in this Trump and its documents is we remember now that James Comey, as head of the FBI, laid out the case of how she violated the law, but then said, we're not recommending a prosecution because it's our ethical duty not to bring a prosecution that could not be won in court. In other words,

what he was saying was, no DC jury will convict Hillary Clinton. What does it tell us that now they're not applying that same standard of judgment to Trump. I mean, it seems to me it's problematic on its face, but below the surface, it's increasing reasons for people to be deeply cynical about the fairness of our law enforcement oparatus in the country. Yeah, I think it's worse than that sty because I don't think Komey believed the word he was

saying. Yeah. First one of the reasons for example, you know, we just talked about the difference in the sp and a jack between the willfulness thing and what it is a gross negligence provision. I thought the gross negligence thing was like the shiny object. I thought it was a diversionary tactic. To my mind, having done this for a while, Hillary clinton case was

the easiest wilfulness case in the history of cases. She intentionally systematically created a communication system that was non secure and outside the government channels, even though she was a Secretary of State who had to enforce against her subordinates the government provision

that you're supposed to do government work on government facilities. She did it under circumstances where eighty percent of her job was national security and foreign relations work that's foreign classified as far as the government was concerned, So she had to know it was inevitable that highly classified information was going to transit through and be stored on her Homebrew system. So she did that wilfully, that was not accidental

behavior. And then when they caught her on it, and there was a congressional subpoena issued to her in connection with Benghazi, she intentionally not only deleted, but had destroyed thirty three thousand emails, which Komy ended up having to concede had some classified information in it and some State Department business, and it probably quite a lot. And where they didn't go public. You know, what Komey excised out of his statement that he gave publicly was that the FBI

was convinced that her system had been hacked by foreign intelligence services. She had even talked to Obama over the system from Russia. So that's like, there's no reason on God's green earth that that that case wasn't brought. I think any reasonable prosecutor. I know a lot of people have accused me of being an unreasonable prosecutor, but I think any reasonable prosecutor would have been delighted to take that case to trial. But they were never going to prosecute her.

In April of twenty sixteen, while the investigation was still ongoing in an early stage, Obama came out publicly and said he didn't want her to be charged, and Coomey ended up not charging her, and three months later, when he explained why she shouldn't be charged, he virtually echoed what Obama had said in April. So the fix was in on this from the beginning. And I hope that Trump is talking about this case every single day, because not

only I don't know if it'll read down to his benefit or not. Selective prosecutions one of these things where it's a good argument for why prosecutorial discretion should not be exercised to charge. But once you do charge, it's not much of a defensive trial. It's kind of a nullification defense. But you know the judge is going to tell the jury at trial the only person on trial here is Donald Trump, and the question is has he'd been proven guilty on

the charges against him. It's not a legal defense for him that somebody who did similar things wasn't prosecuted, But I think politically it's going to be a very powerful argument. Today, Hillary Clinton reminded people that you can buy baseball caps that say but her emails if you go to this address. She tweeted that out in order to just let everybody know that she completely got away with it. Absolutely, it's so much in your face and it's it's so we

don't care what you crazy people think. I'm surprised she's not having an event at Comet Pizza to anything. And we gotta go Andy. You know, one of these days we're gonna stop going to you because there's no news about this stuff and the country's on an even keel and a good, good trajectory forward. But I don't think that's going to happen. So stay close to your phone, and we always appreciate what we're able to call you fast and get you on all right, Let's have a great weekend. Talct you later.

Bye bye. Speaking a great weekends. One of the things people doing the weekends, of course, he is gathered around the barbecue. They have themselves a bigger They have a burger and the rest of it, and they meet and greet. They're near and deer, but sometimes meeting and greeting those who are completing other strangers can be fun too. Strangers in the sands. They maybe you didn't meet them in the real world, but you know them

from online. And that's what we love about the Ricochet get togethers and here's Rob Long to tell you about one that might be in all about it. Yeah, you're absolutely right. They're not strangers. They're fellow members, club members of the Ricochet Club. So we do that. We love the online stuff, obviously, that's part of our identity. We like podcasts. We love it when we mix it up in the podcast as well in the pages

of Ricochet. On the other hand, it's always nice to get together, so we have meetups, and there are some meetups coming up in Winston Stalem, there's a meetup in mid July. The annual German Fest meetup in Milwaukee's happening the last weekend in July, Labor Day weekend meet up in Cookville, Tennessee. There's some tentative meetup scheduled for Columbus, Ohio in late June. That's late this month. And there is a meet up in Portland, Oregon,

happening in mid July. The dates specific dates coming soon. And Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky in August also has some moving around it. How do you find out about all the stuff? You go to ricochet dot com. You join Ricochet and you say I'll be there and if one of these things or none of these things work for you, for timing wise or geography wise. You just say, hey, how about a meet up closer to you at a date you can do it, and believe me, Ricochet members

will show up. And that is really the most fun part about being a member of Ricochet. It certainly is before we go anything on your mind, before we wrap it up here and we have a few more trying to keep these podcasts, you know, close to an hour or something like that, because we know that people sit down, they get riveted, they lose track of what they're doing. They're stopped knitting, they stopped fixing, they stopped driving, they pull over to hear something, and you know, then they

complain to us, I was immobilized by ninety minutes of brilliance? Can you keep it down to sixty five or sixty six or sixty seven like that? But is there a story this week, guys, something that popped up that made you think, here's a sign of societal disclosure, or, as Paul Harvey might say, the you know, the news of something that was pointed at hopeful, today's news of most lasting significance. I don't know why I

thought of Paul Harvey there. I was just I guess because I came across some Paul Harvey stuff the other day in which he was taking it wasn't Amoy necessarily, because he's got this great record, which is essentially thirty minutes of what is fine about America culminating in a praise of Amoy and the rest of it. He was just such an interesting broadcaster to me that I lament the

loss of him. And we don't have to rust Limbaugh anymore? Do we have Do we have anybody who commands that sort of national Because Paul Harvey came on at noon, right and everybody stopped and listening to what Paul he was doing. Rush came on at eleven where I was. And now in the podcast world, it's just all diffuse. There's no sort of there's there's no sense of those stentorian voices had come on at a particular time to mark the phases of the day. Is there that's gone forever, isn't it? Yeah?

It probably is, James, But I mean, look, I mean, I'm old enough to remember when seventy five million Americans watched the evening news, when the country was half the size of this today, and now that number is down under thirty million. I think, who watched the evening news, the network news, right, but I am surprised, what's on your mind? I saw a story this week that immediately thought, this has to

be cat nips for James. And that's the flurry of UFO stories. Yeah, but I'm deeply skeptical of them, because, well, what I wait for is a detail. They say, we have things, all right, names from specific things. Do we have an engine? Do we have a composite material we don't understand? Do we have control services? Do we have a limb from an alien being in the biology lab? None of that has been suggested. This all secondhand. I've heard this well placed sources. I

don't know. I count me as skeptical until somebody shows up with a fragment from Alpha Centauri or something. No, I'm all about Fox Molder's poster here. I want to believe too, but it's a tree. But again, show me something. I mean the amount of UFO footage or I'm sorry, up footage that right now. It was pretty incredible, and some of it's getting actually better. I mean I carry it on in my pocket, a four K phone that is capable of an enormous detail and the rest of it,

and so do a novel a lot of other people. So until we start getting a welter of really convincing footage and not just something that's darting a round of the sky, I want something that's artifact for you when you subjected to analysis, I want I want the gray alien striding towards me with his bighead and his black liquid eyes and his swinging hands and the rest of it. That's what I want. In the absence of that, then I'm sorry,

I'm not I'm not going to believe any of it. I remembered in the late nineties when we were going through this whole stuff, we had a big UFO crace where people were being abducted. They were all over the place. We had an alien, there was an autopsy. There was that, and there was photographs of it and the rest of it, and it was every single piece of evidence that was trotted. I was completely inconclusive and unconvincing.

If you wanted to be a skeptical myy, the only way to think about this stuff is to proceed from a certain set of assumptions about the likelihood of life in the universe, throw away everything you know about science, like, well, I can't get here because the universe is too big and you can't go faster than like yeah, okay, well you know, maybe they figure that out and then get down to the third thing about how they've been

hanging around for an awful long time and nobody found them because they never crashed because cameras weren't bad. Okay, well, now cameras are better. Now the government is admitting we don't know what these is. All right, that's still all a big gashes mix out there. Show me something, put it out on display, have the journalists from all over the country come and take pictures of it that then we can talk until we get to that point. Shut up. I'm sorry, Yeah, I mean you think it's sort of

this. I mean, you'd think the people who faked the moon land and could fake a UFO, and but so far that you know, we're not even getting that. That's so much contempt they have for us. Well, I mean, I know we got a run. But one of the things I find interesting about this is that forever, forever, I mean I can't remember a time, maybe every single movie, the premise has always been when we find the UFOs or the UAPs, what are they are? Um,

we can't telp the people. The people can't know because they'll freak out because nobody can handle this. This is just two bananas. And the truth is that if they announced tomorrow oh yeah, yeah, we've been visited by aliens, people be like, Oh that's really interesting. I'm gonna trust about that. And you know, uh, how do they feel about the Trump indictment? You know, it was really kind of I have I have an idea that when when, when this happens, it's just going to be this thing

like oh yeah, you know, oh, well here's the alien. He's going to be on um, you know, he's going to be on a Twitter spaces. Okay, here's what you do is you do what they've been doing. If you say we have to prepare the public, how do we

prepare the public? Well, we give them the idea these things exist, and then we have a whole bunch of science fiction movies, and then we have a whole bunch of different things to train them to look for this so that they assume that maybe actually this is the saucers and the Dutton and the rest of it. We we spend thirty four years si opping the people. Sometimes we'll give him a really big, huge alien spacecraft that's friendly and pretty

and pastel and glowing, like Steven Spielberg did. And then we'll give them the Independence Day thing that scares the bleep out of them. And it's you know, since it's neither of those two, they won't be too upset when we drib drab out that there are some tic teks flying around and we don't

know. I mean at this point, yes, it's a great fan there's a great fan theory about the Spielberg movies they booked in is there's close Encounters, right, and then there's Et and then he did the other one the day the Earth's Are Still or whatever that one was that remember he did, didn't he do what he didn't? That was not a Spielberg every he did.

He did the remake of War of the World. The World that's right, So like you know that the aliens come and visit it and then one of them is then captured by children and tortured in a closet, and then Et goes home and they prepare the invasion force, which is War of the World's Those ets in there. That's that's a bit much. We actually saw the creature at the end in the Great original, The War of the World's movie. All we saw with a little three fingered thing that just kind of

limped its way out the hole and died. Now we actually saw the Aliens the Martians in the spe Steven Spielberg, and they were not et They were a nasty bunch of m evers and no, I'm sorry. So anyway, if you wanted to train the people, they were eats orcs works. Oh yeah, I got to stop there. I got to stop there because we have a we have a title for the podcast, we've got a graphic.

There's nothing we cannot improve upon it. Peter Robinson, we helpe. We'll be back next week, or maybe we don't because we love having Steve Hayward around. Steve had been great to end. Take care and good to have you and thank you for everything you've done. Rob We hope you get back to New York soon. But remember where you're in ninety five so that you don't expire as the Canadian will active war frankly continues to belong at the United

States. I will see everybody in you know, I usually say we'll see you and Ricochet four point zero, but, as our new leader has been reminding us, coming soon is five point excited Going to be fantastic. They're probably broken for the first two days, so hurry up, get your comments in and join if you will, at ricochet dot com. See you there next week, guys, Thanks you Ricochet. Join the Conversation