Our [EXPLETIVE DELETED] Cities

Well kind of sort of yam, maybe ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Mister gerbutschaf tear down this wall, read my lips. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Blyles. The day we talked to Victor Davis Hanson about cities, culture, the future and all that stuff. So let's

have oursels a podcast. And the numbers have been improving the number of crimes on subways has been declining, and I don't want people to feel anxious again when something like that comes to lighted. To do it is keeply disturbing. Believe me, you'll never get bored with when we never get bored. Hello, mister and missus America and all the ships at see. Let's go to ricochet dot com, shouldn't we where you can find the most stimulating conversations,

civil conversations mostly on the internet. Wonderful place to be. And it's the reason that we are at episode number six hundred and what forty two right now or something like that. We're getting up there. I'm the Ricochet flagship podcast, which this is I'm James Lylenx and the comforting, calm, sane bosom

of the Midwest. Peter Robinson is in California in a in a civilized enclay with barbarism all about I predict, and Rob long as usual, is in Gotham, which is either the epitome of the civilization and fine living or a hellscape in which the tunnels that run to ground are beset by madness and murder of the most dystopian order. Hi, gentlemen, how are you today?

That's probably so well, that's the news this week, of course, is that there was a gentleman who was talking loud on the subway and got choked out, and so everyone is retreating to the usual stances. What do you make of this? Is this a Bernie gets moment which results in I'm not exactly sure what Bernie gets resulted in. Are we going to get more of Curtis Slee wat types to guard the population because the civic authorities seem unlikely to

do so. Is this another opportunistic way of taking somebody's death and making from it a bunch of statements that are applicant. Give me your take, Rob it's your town, it's about town. Um uh, well, I mean I don't think it's going to sound like a Burnie gets moment. Some people are depending on you know, how you're disposed, right, Bernie gets uh, famous famous subway vigilante Bernie gets if you're you know, under the age of ninety, maybe you need to have a refresher. I was on the

subway, he was he was attempt somebody attempted to mug him. Some some some robbers attempted to mug him. He pulled out a Yeah, he pulled out a It turns out it was a screwgar. He pulled out a gun and shot him. And so he instantly became either vilified vigilante in the you know, in the in the style of the time, right, which was sort of a time of Charles Bronson runs, etc. That wow, or he became a folk hero. It's important to know, by the way,

that the crime still like stored in New York City. The high water or low water mark, depending how you look at it, murders in New York City was nineteen ninety UM. So he sort of crystallized what a lot of people thought about New York City, which was said it was you know, this dangerous place where um, where thieves were all over and you put a sign in your car in window back then, I mean really up until the early nineties saying no radio in car because they had to a thing called the

smash grab. People just smashing their car and steal your radio and run. Um. This is different because everyone has written the subway feels has has felt at risk. Not from somebody trying to steal. It's not from some some you know, violent but rational actor rights of thief trying to take your money. I want your money, you have money, give me your watching, your phone and your money. But by some ambulatory psychotic who has been in

and out of some version of prison and psychiatric care. Uh and is now wandering the streets and is capable of any kind of irrational, sudden, irrational violent movement like pushing in front of a train. That's very different. Um. I mean I think at this point muggers would be a welcome relief. They'd be oh my god. But the return of the muggers would be like thank god, people you know regain insanity professionals. Yeah, So this this

is I think a watership moment for a lot it is. Unfortunately, it is not a watership moment for a lot of people who for whom it should be, which is their reflexive attack on the guy who protected people in the subway from a known, unknown, violent criminal with forty two prior arrests, two outstanding lawrence and an outstanding lawren on him. Um. This this,

this, this, this actually is a great big divide. It's not between liberals conservatives, really, it's between um progressive politicians, elected politicians who are busying themselves with you idiotic waste of time. Um, like you know, trans education and prosecuting a former president, and citizens of a city that just think, okay, that's all cherry and cherry and hot fudge sauce on top.

Let's stick to your knitting. Subways are dangerous places, and they and they shouldn't be and and and the fact that they are isn't a failure of the police, right. It isn't like in the sixties and seventies and eighties where you said, well, you know, the NYPD is pretty corrupt or there this or that that. It is not a failure of policing. It's a failure of the of the of the system that is being administered. This guy was arrested forty two times. So it's not but it's not a failure.

If this is exactly what the intended outcome should be, that it would be a failure. That could be, but you know what I mean, I mean, if the propective of a citizen, Yeah, if if if if they the point is to not get these people criminally justice system involved and to remand them to some sort of restorative justice program. That is not a failure at alities. But then he's walking around the streets with forty warrens. It's the exact outcome they desire and believe is good for society or at least

the individual, or at least their sense of justice. Um. Yeah, I would just say the difference here is that this is a No one is saying that this guy is a The point about this guy isn't that he was a bad guy. It's that he was an insanely an insane person who is dangerous and he's wander around the streets. Um, and that seems to be Um that that is actually crossing a lot of partisan lines right now in here

a city, which is sort of a good thing. Thank god they still want to vote any differently, Peter, you have in California, and it's a large place. It's huge. I know I can just make broad, sweeping generalizations. But you also have a problem with the unhoused, as this phrase as a now mentally unwell, with lots of people who are in various throes of psychosis, walking around the streets with their with their pants hanging down

or frozen in place because they've taken crocodial or trank or something. Here's the thing. We have more of this now than before when Rob said that previously it was just your basic thugs who were going car to car and chacking people down or stealing rate. Now we have just crazy, ambulatory people who are

doing mad, crazy things. Do we have an increase in the number of people who are biologically insane because something got unwired in their brain or as I would suspect, this is the result of a class of drugs that is flying the markets and rewiring people's brains and making them nuts. That we have this is not a natural sort of mental illness. This is a assumed mental illness by people who've gone down the route of drugs, facilitated of course by massive

amounts of them from China and Mexico. That's one take. What do you think I'd go for that? The crime rate in New York is still lower than it is in Detroit and Chicago. We get that tossed at us, even as right out here in San Francisco we keep getting reminded that the rate of violent crime remains low. I'm happy it does, it takes place, but the streets out here are still in San Francisco. Not where I am in Palo Alto, but San Francisco's thirty miles away. You don't have to

walk far to find streets with empty syringes, sidewalks with empty syringes. One of my kids drove up and parked his card to see some buddies, and within three hours the window had been smashed. This happens over and petty crime, dirt, a sense of danger. Now here's what happened earlier this week, Nordstrom announced that it's going to close both of its downtown San Francisco stores. That's going to be over three hundred and fifty thousand square feet of retail

space empty. Here's what Nordstrom said, and it's email to employee quote the dynamics of the downtown San Francisco market have changed dramatically over the past several years. Yeah, have they impacting customer foot traffic to our stores and our ability to operate successfully, which means the ability of employees to get in there and out of the store and feel safe while they're going to the store and from

the store and in the store. So it seems to me that the crime is one thing, and there's a blazing incident that gets everybody's attention, like the one we opened talking about, but this overall level of unease that things are not are spinning out of control, that the city is no longer being run with a primary view to simple safety and cleanliness, both in New York and in San Francisco, and the feeling that these cities are well. New

York is so big and so vibrant. It's just the feeling that there's something dying, something dying. This is all unnerving. There is some good news, or at least here's can I give a silver lining here? Sure, I'm sure is that in New York City. I don't know about the stats for San Francisco, but in New York, but I suspect it might be the same or similar in New York. The crime is not higher than it

was in the sixties, seventies, eighties and early nineties. Um. The murder rates, lower, assault rates, I mean, all the indications are better than they were if you go back far enough, right, which means that there's a whole population of New Yorkers who who have a I mean, and they're young too, they're you know, maybe they've only been here ten years, fifteen years, who have a memory of this city as incredibly livable.

Right in New York City even now has has has a lower crime rate than with a lot of American cities, um, and a lot of world cities, um. But there their standards just were raised under very very good firm law and order management, you know, the one two punch of Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg. So there's standards for what an urban environment should be are

very very high, and they're very upset now. James is right. That may not translate for a whole bunch of reasons into sort of something happening at the ballot, but it in the past it has. And the difference here is that the people who are living in the city in the fifty sixty, seventy, staighties, early nineties felt that there was an absolutely inevitable decline, yes, that there was just no way to stop it. You couldn't stop

it. This is just what happens to these cities. And then it was turned around and suddenly, so oh no, Actually, you know, you can have people sitting out outside of the streets and little tables, and suddenly Brian Park is this beautiful place that has seasonable like events and it's like lovely. It's not a crack. Then it's not. It's not. It's not an open air drug market anymore. But it doesn't have to be the way it was. And I think there are enough young people, I hope that

think, oh, well, this is simple. The way to solve this problem isn't we have to change human nature or change the course of history. We just have to get the successful policies back. And the successful policies, though some will say, included stop and frisk, it included a whole bunch of things that are now off the table because of disparate impact. You have left parties have all made that shift. We're not going to do that anymore.

This is contrary to our foundational beliefs about the way society operates. So I mean, there was an appetite for it back then because people wanted something done. But now there's all of these intellectual guard rails that keep people from saying, from keep people from adopting the things that worked before, it seems, which is what's worrisome on New York. San Francisco is different in a number of ways. But on New York. I thought Kevin Williamson had a

wonderful line when he was with us last week. This is a paraphrase. I can't quote him exactly, but this is a close paraphrase. New York is the greatest place in the world to live as long as the streets are safe and the subway works. It's just not complicated. It's just not complicated out here. Our violent crime rate again, I'm talking about San Francisco. The violent crime rate remains low, but the petty crime rate is way up, and you can feel it, you can sense it. We don't we

don't have a subway out here. Like the subway, their buses, there's the bart system and so forth. People rely on that less. For San Francisco. Again, it's not complicated. The city is so beautiful, so filled with bright young kids, just such a spectacular place that all you have to do is make sure the streets are clean and safe, and they can't

do that. It's just astounding. Well again, Peter, you're talking about victimizing the people who are the victims of capitalists, since we have an unfair system that is shot through with inequity, and houselessness is everywhere and untreated metal illness abounds because Ronald Reagan personally kicked open the doors that the mental asylums and

usshered everybody into the sunlight blinking. Uh, we can't do anything, can't anything that you try to do is going to victimize the victims, which seems to be the take that they have. In Minneapolis, we have not a subway, but we have a light rail system which is becoming well, has become unusable for most people because it's overrun with people who are doing meth and fanty and smoking and weed and the rest of it, and being in their seats. Did you say fenty fenty Yeah? What it is concused of the

lingo. Yeah, So you have people who are who are rightly discouraged from using it because they fear for their personal safety. Um, and that sort of I mean, when we built this thing, this huge, multi billion dollar system. It was supposed to be the jewel of our transit stem, shuttling people from the burbs to the jobs downtown. The whole model is broken

because the jobs aren't downtown anymore. And this elaborate, expensive system has been taken over by people who have no invested interest in maintaining any some sort of social public order. And again we know what, we know what. The solution is. Send in the Metro Transit police who will remove the people, who will make them pay and say no, it is against the rules of our society, as we understand them, for you to do drugs on this

train. But they don't. They're talking about it, but they don't plan going overhead. Sorry about that. From the perils of living here in the urban city that I do. You know, I gotta tell you this though. It is May, right and we're coming up to you know, the first week of May is just glorious in Minnesota because the trees start to bud in the flowering trees and one of the most beautiful things you can imagine.

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the promo code ricochet at Bowlin Branch dot com. That's Bolon Branch ol An d Branch dot com promo code Ricochet exclusion supply to see the site for details. And we thank Bowland Branch for sponsoring this the Ricochet Podcast. Now we welcome back to the podcast Victor Hanson, Martin and Ilia Anderson, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. It's written more than a dozen books on a variety

of fascinating subjects, and most recently The Dying Citizen. You can find his pieces latest pieces along with his podcast, The Victor Davis Hanson Show at Victor Hanson dot com. Welcome back, Victor, good to talk to you. Thank you for having me. You know we're going to get to the book

and the matter of immigration a second Saint Quadamio being upon us. But we were just talking before about the possible death of American cities, the double whammys of crime, people feeling unease, and the emptying out of the office, infrastructure and the rest of it. We've seen this before, We've come back from it before. But are we a unique inflection point in the life of American cities that may actually not be retrievable. There wasn't the work from home

option when urban corps were dying before? And now why go downtown? Yeah? I think I think we're it's a little different because of what you said. I had just been in San Francisco, and I was shocked, but thirty to forty percent. It looks like these beautiful buildings that were built during the Renaissance between two thousand and twenty fifteen are empty, and when you go down Market Street, it looks like a medieval city. But the other thing

is this isn't This isn't the Democratic Party anymore that's running those cities. This is a Jacobin party. They have ideological agendas that are not compatible with the old Democratic Party. They don't really believe that crime is an individual act.

They believe that it reflects critical legal theory, critical racial theory that if you go in and you smash and grab and Walgreens in San Francisco and you take out allergy medicine or something, that's only against the law because wealthy white elites don't steal allergy medicine, so therefore they make laws against it. So all

the laws of that are being broken are subject to debate. And you'd see these people, so that means and then the people who live there, they're kind of like when you talk to them and you see them interview, they're sort of like HD Wells Eloy. They don't they're just kind of I don't know, impotent. They just think, wow, I voted for all this and then the old days it was great and maybe it'll come back. But I'm I'm afraid now these other people that I can't condemn for various reasons,

have taken my life away and I'll just sort of take it. So there's no I mean, once in a while they get angry and they we call a school board member, or they tell you that, oh we've lost Lotle High School. It's now a mess. Or but London Breeds not doing this, so they recall Budden. But they don't. They're not they're being shepherd off to oblivion and they don't seem to want to or they're not able to chair. It's different. I think it's much different. So Victor, could

I ask on that point. Is it that the tech, the long long tech boom that we've had here in northern California. This applies to the rest of the country as well, as you'll see in a moment, but it's especially vivid here if I'm right about it, and I'm not sure i am. But the rich are now so rich that they can simply insulate themselves. It's a little inconvenient to have to navigate dirty streets in San Francisco. But you know, the streets aren't that dirty up on Pacific Heights. The streets

aren't that bad up on knob Hill. So this dispersion of income, the rich have really become spectacularly rich, and they just don't care. They're able

to insulate themselves. Is that one reason why there simply doesn't seemed to be I mean just we were talking about this a couple of weeks ago in New York, and the old days, Rob and I are old enough to remember that town would drift a little bit too far to the left, and then you'd have Then there would be the sort of big boys, the big guys in Wall Street would get together and say, okay, this is far enough.

There will be some community organization, or they'll back at can't. And the wealthy people it wasn't they alone who saved New York or they but they backed Rudy Giuliani. They would there was a limit how bad things could get because there were adults, and they tended to be people of wealth who would

enforce the limit. And in San Francisco it's as though this the rich, I don't know in their minds they've simply walked away, or they've said, the top of this city, the hilltops, Pacific Heights are still pretty good. That's where we all live. We're fine, I think so. I wrote an article and the current New Criterion about Silicon Valley, San Francisco and Stanford, and one of the th was that these people are never subject to

the consequences of their own ideology. There's not nine trillion dollars or market capitalization Silicon Valley. So we've never seen history of civilization that concentration of wealth. It's not just you know, Mark Zuckerberg or the Google people. It's low level management that have five, ten, fifteen, twenty million dollars and they are thousands, two millionaires, thousands of them, and they go they drive

around. I talked to people now and they'd drive in, knock on people's door and said, I'd like to buy this house for five million dollars. And so that's a law of it. And you can see how that permeates. California used to be run by Los Angeles money and remember sammuority the LA time, the Chandler family. It's run now with a Bay Area which wasn't the dominant force, but after Silicon Valley came in. You can see what's

happened. If you look at kill of what charges, what they've done to PG and E. It's the highest electrical alm in the country, but it's predicated on people living there that you don't have one hundred and ten degree august like we do down here where all the Mexican American people are that are poor in Walmart, trying to keep cool. And when you look at charter schools, they oppose charter schools, they oppose teachers unions, but they find a

way with prep schools to get around that. So they always and that raises a really interesting question whether it's sort of a medieval penance or what it is. But they feel so bad about all these problems that they voice their morality and cosmic terms, but when you actually look at their lives, they're completely selfish and they don't integrate with people that don't look like themselves necessarily, but they hector everybody, and you can really see it on the Stanford campus,

but you can see it in San Francisco. To the other thing is if you add to that mix, you don't if I was walking around San Francisco two weeks ago, I just noticed that when you look at recesses of schools, there's no kids out there. There's no families living in San Francisco. The schools are dying. So you don't have a lot of upper middle class people who saying, who say, I can't let my child get on the

bus or they're crazy in my school. What you do is you have a lot of wealthy people and they put their kids, you know, down on the peninsula or somewhere in prep school. So there's no families except for the Asian community. And they're they're starting to change a little bit. Even they you know, they're more bewildered than angry. I talked to some people and they say, you know, we sent our kids a low high school. It's the best in California. It's one of the worst victory for our listeners.

We should talk Lowell High School. Correct me on this, but Lowell High School it used to be competitive to be admitted, right, and they did away with public school. It's a public school. It's like bed Stye in Manhattan, for example, or Boston Latin School actly. And then they did away with the entrance exams, or in one way or another they eliminated or very much dumbed down the standards and totally change the character of the school.

Correct, Yeah, they did, but they didn't remember what they didn't do. They didn't fire the faculty or at least immediately change the curriculum. So when you admit somebody on the watery, that is considered by the advocates of that new policy as synonymous with graduation. So the teachers then have to graduate those people are that they exhibit a systematic plan or evidence of illiberality.

It's like Stanford University. The class of two twenty six that's coming in, according to the Stanford website, is twenty two percent white, and the SAT was optional. They will not reveal the mean score of the people who chose to take the SAT to enhance their application, but they did to the press that's somewhere between sixty and seventy percent of those who chose to take the SAT, and we're among the one percent in the nation that got a perfect score.

They reach SECT at sixty to seventy percent of those applicants, and they were proud of that. And so what does that do to the faculty at stand for. If you can't, you either have to do one of three things. You have to change the curriculum. So if you're teaching history of Western humanities Homer to Dante, you have maybe half the number of authors that you did. Or you can inflate the grades, or you can do what one professor said to me, I'm not going to die on the altar of

standards. You can keep your standards and then you exhibit a systematic prejudice that will be evident to a diversity equity inclusion czar. There's eighty of them on campus. I mek. So it's happening all everywhere. And I did a Hoover fundraiser to a bunch of Silicon Valley guys and a guy came up and he said, you're so pass And I said, what, because we've for the last three years we give our own tests. Don't you think that we're

going to do that someday? We already do it. We give our own private test on coding, and even for people in HR and PR, we want to have a test if they're not going to do it at Stanford. And he said, by the way, I would rather any day hire a Georgia tech code or electrical engineer than the Stanford. So I think it's happening. People are reacting to this. So I hey, Victor robed New York joining it. So when so when standards fall, right, they don't just

fall in a day or overnight. They fall slowly, and nobody kind of notices, right the old frog doesn't know it's being boiled. Um. But just to interrupt myself, if I'm listening and I'm not from California Stanford and I am needing one of them those things, and you say that people are going to be more interested in hiring somebody from Georgia Tech or somewhere else, I think that's great. That's actually the market working, right, I do. I think it's great. So if the market works here, do you

think the market's going to work? Um? Do you think it can work the way it worked in nineteen the nineteen nineties, when um, the most dangerous city in America, New York City, did a law and order mayor and within a short order became of the safest cities in America. Um? Do you think that's and and and an attractive and attracting attracting forces to young people around the country? Around the world to come to the city because it's New York City and it's not a cesspool. Um, do you think the

market will do you think it's a market correction that could happen here? Yeah, I think there's all these natural symphysical forces are already. They always react. The biggest one that we've seen five hundred thousand Californians in the last ten months left. They just left. And another example is we in this community that I live near is about nine Hispanic and we're one of the drop off points for the open border policy in the six and a half million illegal entrance.

But that is creating a huge backlash by people who will tell you their mom can't get into the dialysis clinic, their kid is roughed up at school because he doesn't speak Spanish. And these are Mexican American people voicing these complaints. So there's always is going to be a reaction to the reaction. I

don't know. But the problem is eventually it works out. But it's kind of like Hemingway instead of going broke, you know it, right, we're graduating then it was suddenly suddenly Now, I think the COVID lockdowns, the George Floyd aftermath, the rioting, the Trump, the whole Trump controversy, all of that, and then the change in the Democratic Party. All of that was a perfect storm, and we this is the most this is the most crisis I've never seen this country, even the sixties, at this crisis

level. Well, that's interesting. I'll get to that in a second. But when you mentioned the five hundred thousand people in California who move out to worry, is that this diaspora seeds these are now red places with people of blue And yeah, I think that depends on where they go. You know, if you're a conservative in California, you tend to go to Texas or Tennessee or Florida or Wyoming. If you're liberal, you tend to go to

Colorado or Nevada or Oregon or Washington. Washington, another place that you left. That's the that's the word when you said that, where you've never seen the country in a stead of chrisis. Let's let's go back to the battle days of public conspicuous political assassination and in a horrible divisions in the country over an unpopular war sixty seven through seventy three, Inflation, oil shocks, just the general feeling of it. I don't feel that there is a sense of

America in permanent, irreversible decline. I mean, we got problems, but the sense was all pervasive in the early seventies. We can't make anything. What we do make breaks, We're dead for innovation, We're militarily useless. It was all across the board, the sense of American decline and crisis in the late sixties early seventies, as compared to today. That's my pushback to

the classical scholar who knows more than I do. Yeah, but if you look at the Stanford Electrical Engineering Department in those days, or you look at the Harvard English Department, or you look at the people who were in the State Department, there was a professionalism still, and there was a miraclecratic system.

I went to UC Santacru's right when that period you're talking about, and I remember my father brought me from the farm and he dumped me there and he said, hey, Victor, I just walked out of the door out of your co ed dorm and there's a guy and a woman fornicating in the shower. And I said, oh wow, this is going to be interesting. And then he said, look at that door, and there was drugs listed in the cow College Morrison House, you know, marijuana, psilocybin with

a price tag. So it was wild. But then when I went in to take a class in classics, it was almost Renaissance type. It was. There was you had to turn your paper in time, you had to know Greek grammar, and it was this is at uc Santa Cruz. And that's not true today. And I know that it was more chaotic, and some of it is. You know, we still was the Reagan Revolution that

stopped the continuous sixties. There was a hiatus for twelve years between Reagan and Bush and then the younger Bush. That eight years there were roadblocks, not saying that they were perfect, but they were impediments. But Barack Obama was not a traditional Democrat yet he looks that way now, but he wasn't. He was considered a more radical Democrat. And now to the extent Joe Biden

is in control of things, the people who are running this agenda. I guess what I'm saying is in the sixties people marched on the dean's office today at Stanford to take the example, I know, but the revolutions coming from the Dean's office. They marched on the Pentagon. The revolution is coming top down from the channel, Mark Millie, I mean, you're short. This hadn't happened during Vietnam. The volunteer Army had all the people we needed.

We're short sixteen thousand people in the army. And I have a kind of a joke when I used to when I talked this year, I'd on military affairs to audiences, I'd say, Okay, anybody's kids going to go to the military. They all said no. And then I got the same refrain, Oh, my father fought in Vietnam, my husband fought in the First Golf War. I'm not sent in my son. And then when you when you look at the data, white males died at about double their demographics in

Afghanistan and Iraq. I don't know if that's good or bad, but of the casualties in frontline combat white males. But if you go out and target that group and you say that you're going to root out white rage, as Millie did or Austin did, Chief of Neville, and you don't present data that there is an epidemic of white rage, then you alienate those people. Same thing with the transgender and they're not joining there. It's a mass.

If you look at all the data that routbreak is irresponsible for the shortfall, I hadn't seen that before. I think that's really going to that's going to affect it's going to affect the efficacy of the military very quickly. I think the Navy entering into a marketing partnership with bud Light, as they've announced, I think that altered everything around it. Yeah, so I think it's a little bit, a little bit, it's not as dramatic. You're absolutely right.

There's not the explosions and the weatherman at least yet. But the difference was when you had the Watts riots or you had the Rodney Kings riots, then you had the police. There was a sense George W. I'll give you an example. Colin Powell called up George W. Bush during the the Rodney king as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and said, if you need five thousand troops, mister President, you have them. And Bush sent five thousand

troops right into Self Central. When this happened, and Trump suggested you did that, everybody thought he was a dictator and they said, you can't do that. And so we had one hundred and twenty days, three billion dollars, two to three billion dollars, thirty five killed arson looty, they damnaged. They tried to torch the federal courthouse and police precinct, the Saint John's and there was it was almost as Kamala Harris said, it's not going to

stop. It shouldn't stop, It's going to go on all the election. And the head of the sixteen nineteen projects said, you know, looting is not that that's new. That right, the authorities or the establishment was a deer in the headlights. Reactually the mayor of Portland or Seattle. I've never seen that before. Yeah, but you said something I thought was really fascinating.

I just want to go back to it for a minute. That the revolutionaries or the progressives or the sort of I don't know what the disturbers are coming from the top. You know, in olden times, right, you know, the traditional family dinner, the young person at the dinner table says something outrageous designed to give the older person a heart attack at a stroke right there, right, That seemed to be how the jungle of the family dinner

table worked. The young line is trying to give the old line a stroke. Now every parent I know, my age and older is constantly outraging their children by saying something sort of anodyne and maybe baffled and not using the right whatever pronoun or the right word. And it really is the opposite the sort of the radicals are now teaching. The radicals are now governing. They're now I mean, the New York City where I live is not a machine state in any meaningful way. What it is. It's a it's a it's a

policy state. It's a may fifth form. Yeah, we saw that at Stamford Law School that the person we forget that really ended that lecture by Judge Duncan wasn't the students they were protesting. It was the dean of inclusion, Equity Inclusion who hijacked the event and had a pre written in expectation that she would do that and then condemned him for speaking out and that was the end

of it. And then she's now on leave. But it's it's from the top faculty administration down the pentagon hierarchy of generals who are going to revolve out to corporate boards, right, and I know the corporations are left wing, and they prep their attitude and their profile downward. And you talk to lieutenant colonels and they all say, I'm never going to be I'm never going to

be promoted on how many shells hit the target. Just not. But before we, uh, we get too gloomy, Victor, because I know, to make sure this Friday afternoon, come on, yeah, I don't want to be so name one or two things that you think, you know, what are the indications that you might you might be looking for that things are turning around. I actually found. I mean, maybe I'm grasping here desperately

at whatever floating piece of detritus I can. Um. I think it's interesting that the big brands that were um, you know, unimpeachable, you know, a Stanford diploma, a Yale Law School diploma. You know, there are other brands like that, maybe for some people that might even include something like Disney, and those are now being shaken and those brands now no longer have the lust they had. And part of us is, I mean, part of this is sort of true. Conservatives were just a little nervous with

any kind of change. We talk a big game about economic disruption and all that stuff, but when it really happens, to get a little nervous, Right, But isn't that good, isn't it? I mean, I feel that way about the American party system. The American party systems is putting up

probably may likely put up two very damage, very unpopular politicians. It just seems like these parties, the institutions we've been clinging to for thirty forty years, both the big brands and maybe even the big political brands, are out of gas, and maybe we're looking at something new happening. Yeah, I had I have talked to an editor in New York and she said, gone, or the days you want to hire a Yale English An editor. So yeah, I think that the other thing, that's just I want to pile

in on that. Yeah, I just want to pile in on that very point. I had lunch not long ago with somebody who had a very impressive twenty year career in the Financial District of New York. And this guy had been to an IVY League school and was a very good athlete. And in those days, twenty years ago, if you were a good athlete from an IVY you could write your ticket on Wall Street. Rob and I were rejected by Wall Street, which shows that there were still some standards in those days.

But if you were an athlete in orisman or is okay, he said, that is just over. They don't try that standards still matter in the financial world. You have to be smart, you have to be hard working, and an IVY degree, even among athletes is no longer considered a guarantee of that. They're looking at a certain sense. We Rob said this earlier. It's good in a way that now Goldman and JP Morgan are looking to Ohio State. And absolutely I think that the standard the old world is collapsing.

That's the point. Yeah, I think so. And I think here forty five percent of the state of California is identifies as Mexican American, and they are integrating and simulating in airing, and they are gradually I think it will take another ten years. They're gradually becoming to the point as the Italians

in the nineteenth century. So if your name now is Juliani or Cuomo, you can't adjudicate their political leanings, I think, and now pretty soon Lopez and it's already starting to happen, and the Democratic Party all has this elite Hispanic in the legislature that have powered but right below them guys that are thirty forty fifty sixty with families. Every single thing they're pushing, from open borders to transgenderism, to these new attitudes toward crime, they don't like it.

And I think they're gonna They're starting to vote. Here where I am, all of our our board of supervisors, local assembly, state, we have Hispanic candidates and about a third of them are conservative Republicans. Mike Gonzales's are conson congressional right, you know, fifteen feet away, and then David Valadeo is right or were here. So it's starting to change. And that's I think that's and you just named. I don't know those two. I don't

follow their them as closely as you do. But my impression is you just named in Gonzales and Valadeo's bay. You just named two smart, tough, hard working guys. They are, and Valadeo is the only person there was only two that voted to impeach Tron. He called me about it. I said, you should have pled that you had COVID that day. But but he but he uh, he survived, And I just gave a campaign. He just called me and I introduced him in a campaign rally. He's Portuguese,

but he speaks Spanish better. Every time he runs. These guys bring out these elite, third generation left wing Hispanics to defeat him, and they don't speak Spanish. He speaks at point And Mike Gonzalez is a wonderful candidate. And so I think there's there's that's hopeful as well. And then there's always the fallback that when things get so bad people come out of the woodwork. That you one other thing, because I was asked to this fight you

guys. That is when you look at Matt Talibee Tybee, and you look at Schallenberger, and you look at oh, Barry Weiss and Bill Maher, you start to get the impression that and some of that, these people feel they've created a Frankenstein and the monster now is devouring them, and they understand that that can't go on. It's not going to be the guys who run the grifting organizations at mass mail and do noisy things on campus and the rest of it. It's going to be the people that the ones that you just

mentioned. I don't agree on every single issue. I don't agree with Glenn Greenwald on a whole raft of things, but there's an intersection about government restriction of information. As Tiabe is also talking about that, it's a new core, it's a it's a new issue around which people have disparate intellectual beliefs can coalesce. And I think it's a good one because the objective of that is the maximization of freedom of speech and the rest of it, which are things

that we've got to take back. And if it's a bipartisan thing that does it, and I got to, you know, be in the same bed with people who have completely different ideas economically, I'm going to do that for a while in order to restore some some key points you said and get back to what you said before before you let you go, because we have to that a lot of these generals will go through the revolving door and end up on corporate boards that are that have left wing agendas. That's true, maybe

though some of those people on those boards do. But do you think that maybe it's a lot of the people in the elite circles don't necessarily subscribe to these luxury beliefs with any degree of conviction. They're very easily detached from them. But they do because A it's a convenient and necessary means of signaling where you are in the virtual scale, and B perhaps they have an exaggerated idea

of how popular these ideas amongst the general population are. And it's not just the mega knuckle draggers, anilind snakes and speaking in tongues down in Georgia. No, there is a broad based distaste for a wide variety of these things because they go against a biology and be essential American ideas about our identification. They are. I'd say it's sort of how many people join were for the Bolsheviks in nineteen seventeen, or the National Socialists in nineteen thirty three, or

the Maoist It doesn't I think you're right. Seventy or eighty percent do it

out of necessity or perceived advantage or just you know, anyway slow. But it doesn't really matter if they do it, because most of these revolutionary movements start with a very hardcore the squad, the Elizabeth Warrens of Bernie sand or the Obash and if they can faith through the institutions of which they control, corporate boardroom Hollywood, Professional Sports, Kate through twelve, Academia, Silicon Valley, Traditional on social media and they can convey like they did with a bud

light for a while. Then they can they can win, but they don't have You're absolutely right, they don't have people who sincerely agree with them. They just feel. My wife teachers at Clovis Community College. She's in a history runs a little history department there, and it's all it's all woke. But the number of people that she knows who believes it is very, very Just remember the Bolsheviks were the Menshevi exactly, and the Mensheviks were the Bolsheviks.

Victor, thanks so much, Victor Hansen dot com, new book, all that stuff. We'll talk to you again, always fascinating. We didn't get to the things we want to talk about, because heck, it's just fun to talk to you about all kinds of Victor. Will see you this coming week. Yes, yes, and you're going to Washington. Oh you're coming down. You're going to Selma Victor Tesla. Yes, well he may well. We may have to meet him with a bag of batteries halfway there,

but charged on the farm. That's great. Do you have a Tesla charger. You have some I have some explaining to too. My wife is a big fan of Elon Musk, so she went out and got starlink and then she demanded that she drive to work at Tesla so that I put twenty chargers. Scotty can charge up. Huh. All right, she's deep and long and dogecoin keep her keep her off that particular all right, thanks much.

I think about a survey that says something like eight percent of American people want an EV and Ford loses a huge amount of money and every one of the vehicles that they have, and it's one of those perfect instances where nobody really wants this on mask. We want the gas car, but everything is miniating against us having one because our bidders believe that we shouldn't. It's like the gas stove, the gas of it and all the rest of it um

And that's where you just wonder Rob's use the boiling frog thing. But you know, it's just not a lot of evidence to me that. I always feel like Winston Smith with Julia standing at the window, you know, looking at the pearls and saying, that will be you know that that will be what takes us away from Big Brother. The rest of the pearls are the future. The pearls are the hope, and that never arrives. There's just the knock on the door in the arrested room, one on one anywhere.

There's no segue there because I wouldn't want to actually go to a product after having said something so depressing. So I will thank you say to Rob that we got meetups coming where people can get together and either be joyful and optimistic and hopeful or a music. People are joyful and optimistic and hopeful in person. I think actually people and people all over are much more happy and joyful and easy to get along within person than they are online. Ricochet members are

easy to get along with online and they're even better in person. So if you have been looking to meet your fellow members, please do. Randy's got another meetup for Winston Salem in mid July. Matt Foster's asking for RSBPS for the annual German Fest meetup in Milwaukee. That's the last weekend in July. There's more stuff going on, so you go to ricochet com for the beet up. I think it's gonna meet up tab or something. If these meetups

are are inconveniently scheduled or located for you. There is a simple solution, joint Ricochet. Put up a post, Hey, how about a meet up here or there? And name a date someone people will show because that's what Ricoche members do. They show up. And we had a great, great meetup last month in New Orleans. I look forward to the next one that I can make. But but that's the fun of Bricochet. It's a membership,

it's a club, and we want you to join. And remember, if you're absolutely completely clinically paranoid and you don't want to join any sort of site that you think is post back to you and your opinions will get back to you, you can always use a pseudon m We have I'm Lilacs everywhere I go because it keeps me honest and what I say, I don't say things I don't mean or would regret saying later. But if you're one of those people, you know, just come to the site. By VPN means

what's that you ask, Well, let me tell you. Oh nice, that's right VPNs. But you say which one should I use? Well, I'm here to tell you. You could possibly go on your computer and ask chat GPT which one day want? Can everyone talk about GPT? And artificial intelligence is going to change the world. You know, Microsoft and Google they're

all investing really heavily in AI for search. But guess what, they're also the same big TEP companies that determine your search results, and only now they get to cut out a whole new layer from the information by that you see. So why should these companies link off to third party websites and the search results when they can let their robot generate the perfect answer to your question?

I'm not sure about that. Every time that I ask chat, GPT, this or any of the other AM models, I'm always mindful of the guardrails that are put in place and how they reflect the biases of the people write the programs. Well, listen, you can get around this. You can use express VPN to add a layer of protection between you and big tech see express vpn app. It hides your unique IP address on all your devices.

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know, let's discuss whether let me put it into the way. One of the things that's fascinating about this whole Brook book burning, book banning in school conversation, as you say, well, actually, what they're trying to do is keep from middle school's graphic novels that have rather explicit representations of sex.

Maybe we don't need that. And now Utah is being banned in porn hub because of Utah's age verification rules, and it's like, okay, we're not going to ban all this stuff all over the coun tree and make sure that every picture of a woman has her clothes down to her ankles. We're just saying, maybe make it harder for fourteen year old kids to see the most

grotesque, debasing stuff out there. Shouldn't that be? I mean, the right is really bad at making the argument about what we're trying to do, because either you have a complicit media that just extrapolates from this that you just want to batter and here a bunch of prudes and the rest of it. No, I mean, we're just trying to carve out a period of childhood that maybe has some innocence passed them. My little pony, you're a six

year old stage, well, I have my little pony. Adults are into that, you know what I mean, Guys, Well, I mean part of the part if you're part of the deliciously attractive of one of the great attributes of being young is if you're interested brainwashing people and getting them that's incredibly great. Like it's too rich and and they're too vulnerable, right, if you're if you want to sell people on something, you want to sell them

on smoking, you sell them on sugary cereal or something. It's better to get them when they're young, right before their brand taste have been locked in.

So you can see why companies like that, and you can see why larger economic interests like that, right, and you can see why progressives like that, because if I get them in they're in third grade, second grade, third grade, and fourth grade, then I may have them for the rest of their life and doesn't really matter what conversations have at dinner table, because I have them for eight hours. You only have them for two. And then there's an argument of a bedtime, right, that's kind of how

that's sort of the power struggle. But in general, we've had this sort of kind of las a fair attitude about what children. I mean, I remember when I was a kid, I never heard the F word ever ever, And I can hear it on the street. I mean it'd be like I would have been, Oh my god, I would have been I was shocking. Now you don't walk down the street. You hear everything. If people drive by, you can hear their music, and you can hear the N word. I mean I hear it. You're ten times a day walking

around New York City. Um, it's just naturally, just a natural course. I mean, I mean Twitter, for all of its you know, whatever benefits it has, a munch for, it has any but just to say it hasn't is a pornography delivery device. That's what it does. No one pays attention to that. It isn't for me. There's nothing about But that's because you're not interested in. But if you are interested in, if you're a child and you're interested in, go to Twitter. You can see

anything you want. You can see d you want to in two minutes. You have to be thirteen years old officially to join Twitter, but of course people join it younger and the thirteen years old is pretty young. Um. So we have we we've sort of let all this stuff fly, and at least now we're noticing that's happening in schools and instead of like where it should be happening, which is furtively and you know whatever. But but it's in

general a good thing. They were paying attention to what our children learning and what people are trying to teach them. But that that is only I think because we have as a culture, we have kind of um outsourced over the past twenty thirty years, outsourced a lot of stuff that we used to take care of at home and separate from government. Um. And we just was naturally took it separately from government, um. And we just sort of like

kind of outsourced it to you know, the quote unquote experts. Right, So, what do I know really about this or that I'm just the parent. The people at school, they've gone out, they have degrees in this, they know. I think we're I think we're watching American parents taking that back and I think that's that's a good thing. I'm going to agree with everything you just said, except that we let it all fly. We didn't exactly let it all fly. There were laws that were that in retrospect make

even more sense than they seem to at the time. But beginning in the late nineteen fifties there was there was one concerted attack after another on censorship laws, and we end up with a regime in which there's simply no censorship at all. The notion of local standards that was the Supreme Court eliminated said censorship can be imposed, um can be imposed that reflects local standards. And it turned out to be that as a matter of practice that was impossible to uphold.

And so it was a specific sort of legal cultural political decision to dismantle elite decision. People didn't vote against it, and there was an elite decision case by case, part of the liberal legal movement of the nineteen sixties that's simply eliminated. And now we have Utah. Of all places, I say, of all places, it's the only place that's trying to reassert some minimal

standards. And I don't know whether it's being laughed at across the country, but things have now become so inverted that a pornography company, how do we know it's a pornography company because it's called poor Knobs the state of Utah, supposing that everybody in the rest of the country will will look at Utah on chortle. Oh, they can't get poorn there anymore. What a punishment. Okay, I agree with you, it's all, it's all mad. But

but it's I mean, this business about never hearing the F word. I can remember my parents were shocked, shocked for a week when the issue of Time magazine arrived in the mailbox that reproduced segments from the Watergate tapes, and they were shocked by that phrase that burn over and over again expletive deleted. They could not believe that the president of the United States used what, by today's standards, would only be salty language in the oval office. That and

and that was the world in which we grew up. It's impossible to convey that to kids these days, that it used to mention before the local standards was there. Yes, local standards turned out to be ken, shabby and a rain coat down at the train station, you know, pleasuring him. So they and the elites would would not be would not condemn him, because once you do that, once you do once you suppressed the most grotesque form

of degrading pornography available. Well, you know, it's just the same as saying a D. H. Lawrence book must be abandoned, unable to unable to see anything between the continuum. But the F word thing is fascinating, and it goes to Rob and we should ask him about this because of the

writer's drake, even though I know he has to go. I was arguing with my daughter about the liberalization and the normalization of the F word the other day because I'd walk past a television show she my wife were watching and it was F bomb F this, And I am not a language proude. I prefer that people curse ornately in an intelligent fashion, with some intelligence. But

just the fact that this word is now so it's lazy. Dropping it into the show and having a character use it to make them real and legitimate is lazy that if you took it out, it wouldn't matter. So we started arguing about this, and she said, well, Succession is a great show and people are using the F bomb all the time. I saw it was

true, but if you removed it, you would never notice. You would never notice if nobody in Succession use that because the rest of the stuff that they're saying is so written, so well crafted, that it depends on the language, It depends on the car. You wouldn't notice it now, and

then are you sure? On the other end of the spectrum is deadwood, in which I think about every third word might be the F word, but it's wrapped in this this this hallucinogenic Shakespearean language that is so beautiful and marvelous to listen to that it becomes music and poetry. So it's all context. And if everybody can do it like David Milch, then I don't worry about it. But it's the people who keep dumping this tabasco into the water supply

and thinking that they're adding saffron. That just that drives me crazy. Um, And now we have a writer strike. But now I believe also that Rob has to do a strike of his own and leave am I correct? Well close? I mean, I you know, at some point there will be some humiliating photographs of me picketing in front of a thirty rock or so

what will you have a little thing to write themselves? Everybody has to write their own little funny thing, and that's I don't tell I would say, thank you for the money, So what I'll probably say, so please excuse this. Um, yeah, it's one way or the other. I mean, I think that there's probably a time when people put them put the exploitive deleted in a script to appear, you know, to make it seem more

rough and tumble. But I think now it apps accurately reflects the way people talk, unfortunately, and so now it's like it doesn't seem like it's a doesn't seem like it would be more of an affectation to not put it, because just people use it constantly. Um. And I just remember in my lifetime, which like it has been going on far too long, but in my my lifetime, that was just being like ime on, come on, lord. I mean, I don't think we even I think when I was

in college, I don't think I can't imagine. I mean, I'm sure I've definitely used it. I have terrible language, but I mean just trying to think of in the official areas, you know, we had an indoor voice and an outdoor voice, and we had a you know, a proper

set of you know words and an improper set of words. And there's one great moment in Bonfire the Vanities when after Sherman McCoy is arrested and released, he's a minor celebrity in his society and he's at a fancy dinner party and he discovers, my god, everybody wants to talk to me because they I'm a huge, huge celebrity, and uh, and he kind of starts making up stuff, saying to sound a little tougher, and he uses the F word, and it's as I think it's a parent it's tom wolves about a

page of description. I mean, he's going to use it. He's thinking about, he knows he's going to use it, and it's the idea being that in a salon in New York City in nineteen eighty seven, so it's not that long. The use of that word would have been shocking. And he says it because he says, this is and this is what I said. I think I can't remember pervase it and this is I said this to the guy to the guard. I looked at him and I said, get

me out of this. At his voice drops and he says the F word very like gutterly and low, and he acknowledges by dropping his voice that he's embarrassed to have to use that language among the ladies out of this place, and they all are shocked, titilated and shocked it up. Absolutely, it's a great social moment for him. But he just the idea that back then that word would have been shocking and the use of it would have been socially kind of cool, and you had to couch it in all sorts of attitudes

and now be able to just screaming on the street. Great f and point Rob, we'd like to we'd like to remind you that Rob's point and Peter's and victors have all been brought to you by the wonderful organizations known as a Bollen Branch and Express VPN. Support them for supporting us, and you will get great products. Everything will be better everything. And join Ricochet to day. Why don't you Shore? We always need the members. I always love

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do it. Your reviews allow other listeners to discover us, and that keeps Ricochet going and that's what we all want, isn't it? You do, Peter rob It's been fun and we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet four point er next week, boys next week. Next week. Giles Ricochet joined the conversation