Pumping Iron

At some point I'll disappear for thirty seven seconds to go get it. We'll time you ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Mister Gerbuschoff, tear down this wall. Read my lips. It's the Rickorsche Podcast. I'm James Liviacs with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. That's the first and some time, and we're gonna have a lot of fun talking to Barton Swain from the Wall Street Journals about Joe Biden's iron grip and some other stuff. Lots of it. So Let's Abrise was

a podcast this issue. We'll destroy New York City. We get in ten thousand migrants a month. I said it last year when we had fifteen thousand. I'm telling you now when I went to two thousand, the city we knew with about the loose Welcome everybody to the Ricoche Podcast, number six hundred and fifty seven, and James, I'm like in Minneapolis, I was. I was not here for six fifty six because I was at the State Fair, the great Minnesota get together, swept together when in the daytime it's absolutely

fantastic and the twilight comes and the lightspop on it. It's magical eleven It gets to be about eleven o'clock at night and all the miscreans try to storm the gate and there's gunfire. But that's another day and another story. Happy to be here back with Peter and Rob for the first time in some time. Peter Howard things Howard things in California. This feels like a family reunion. Well, it depends on the family, doesn't it. Are there certain

things we shouldn't talk about? And I was much fonder of the two of you, it turns out, than I would have guessed. Absence. It's called absence or abscess. And Rob, good to hear you two New York. I was just here this morning hearing an angry TikTok rant. And I know, I repeat myself from a New York mother who is not pleased at all that her child has to present in just a huge trench of documentations to get her kid in the school. But all of the migrant children are waved

right in instantaneously. And so you're there in the New York that mayor Adam says is going to be lost or gone, And so of course you have all the people on the right saying well, you know, we reap yourself is what you're voted for. I have no sympathy whatsoever. Go enjoy your dystopian hell. What is it like? Because I've seen the film outside the Rosevelt Hotel where I stayed once. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's closed. Anyway, we should just say yeah, so it was it was.

It was closed owned I believe by a Pakistani hotel group too, So they're getting the nice amount of cash from the from the city. So what is it? What is it like? Do you notice or you just live in a in a migrants, No, I don't most migrants. I notice the

normal, you know, the normal New York City chaos. But I also noticed there's a little bit there's a lot more more addicts on the street, mostly because I love the village, and they can every now and then, like uh once every eight weeks, the neighbors around Washington Square Park complaint screaming and and they clear it cleared out. But that's pretty much where people can score your drugs. So if you're looking to score drugs, James, that's

where you want to go. There. Well, north that the corn Yeah, that was the epicenter in in uh yeah, panic, panic and Needle Parker Panic Needle Park was actually seventy second seal. Yeah, you go up there, it's like, uh so, so that's and then every eight weeks it's it's gonna it'll it'll die down because the parents have just arrived because it's NYU bas basically ny you kind of de facto owns Washington Square Park. They're there, they they were given it for a lot of other concessions, and

so, you know, and then every now and then people complain. The the migrant thing is interesting because I just have to say that I thought the the the little trolling jokes kind of thing that people like Rona Santist did sending you know, migrants up to Martha's vineyard. We're kind of cute, but

basically, what's you know, a lot of energy for nothing. But I think you have to say that the ground swell of rage in New York City and New York State, but between the mayor and the governor and the elected representatives in Congress is precisely because the problem that they got to philosophize and theorize about came home and you know, you have one hundred plus thousand migrants in New York City in a city, woulds going to stretch budgetarily always it's gonna

and you you passed a law promising them all sorts of things you now can't get out of because you just never thought would come right, You never thought be here. It's one thing's Sanctuary City New York City's like okay, fine, Like, how are you can gonna know? Like you're not gonna get all the way up here? Well, wait a minute, and then does the plaque on the statue of Liberty face towards the ocean or towards the city? Because if it faces towards the ocean, I can give them a break

that they haven't seen it. But if it faces towards the city, they ought to have been able to see. And the legal promise that it contains, they know all that. And of course the problem here is not the illegal. The word legal does not apply here. And so you may find that the what I thought to be the silly little you know. I mean, I was in favor of it. I applauded it, but I just

kind of shrugged and let me on and ho hum. That's stuff that, like Rodney Santis did, actually has managed to galvanize a whole portion of the country that just kind of didn't care because it was happening down there in the places where we are gonna go, and you know, and they and they spent past quarters saying crazy things like, well, New York City doesn't have

the resources that Brownsville, Texas has, which is hilarious. Right, So now you're starting to see people like Mayor Adams say we gotta do something. Hey, what's going on? And that is probably good for the country. By the way, I just checked you said correctly. I'm fairly enough. I think that New York City is always stretched for resources, or that the budget is always stretched, but may I note that that is because they choose

to run the city that way. Here is the size of the twenty twenty four budget for New York City. One city population about eight million people, one hundred and seven billion dollars. Here is the budget for the state of Florida, an entire state, what is it twenty five million people now or actually, now that's a little high, and in an event, an entire

state one hundred and sixteen billion dollars. New York City spends so much money, so lavishly that it has a budget that's ninety five percent as big as the budget of the entire state of Florida. This is right, But Peter, beyond the city do you have to you have to understand, I mean, where does that money go. It goes for the fantastically well maintained, clean and efficient subway system that at the envy of the world. It goes

for infrastructure so that the bridge to themselves are never a crumble. It goes for all kinds of every you go to New York City, you see it's worse than that spend you It's worse than that. It's the state that hope runs the subway, pays for it, and it's the state that runs the infrastructure. A lot of that stuff is like for the deputy assistant to the chairman of the subcommittee of the Diversity school Board, controlling authority or whatever.

Right. A lot of it is crap, that is for sure. But the point is that they can't mean you want you can make decisions about how you want to spend your money, and you can spend it luxuriously if you want, and you can waste it if you want on yourselves. Right, So the city can tax everybody and then spend it on some nonsense thing.

And then that's you know, that's not the right way to be, but it's nothing wrong with it when you add to it one hundred thousand plus and growing number of people who've arrived here with nothing and then have a right to all sorts of things that some of the city citizen city residents don't have a right too because you passed a law in a grandstanding you know, well, virtue signaling well a series of of of movements that you thought would never ever

you promises you never ever have to keep, and now you've got to keep them. You know this. I hope people watching this are enjoying it because you you you don't get this kind of You just don't get this kind of symmetry. This is fantastic. It rarely happens in life, at least in my lifetime. That's something so obvious. Happens exactly the way he predicted,

and this is it. And I think it's good for the country because it is time now for people all over the country to realize that border security and border policy is central to the future and that we cannot have You cannot have a welfare state and open borders. You can only have one or the other. You have both, you go broke. And that's what's happened in New

York City, and that's partly what happens in California. Rogers long. When you're really conservative, you're just beautiful at these things are good object lessons. The University of West Virginia, for example, is cutting a whole bunch of programs, but as people have noticed, they're cutting the things that are useful. They're keeping these social sciences and they're keeping the aspirations stay perfectly intact.

So the people who are on the liberal side, who are inclined to support education of this nature, are appalled, and they're the ones who are making the complaints. In New York you have the liberals who are making the complaints about this. And I mean a part of you wants to say, look, you don't get to have these issues. These have been our issues.

We've been talking about them. But on the other hand, if this is what it takes to get the issue to the table, then I'm then fine as long as we can then agree and move forward, and if they want to take credit for it down the road, I don't care. As long

as we have changed. This morning, I was listening to the BBC IS show called hard Talk, in which they had a Swedish politician of the of the liberal leftist stripe who was talking about the need they have organized crime, huge amounts of organized crime, and it's connected to the immigration, and he was talking about how they're going to crack down to that and solve address the problem of integration of the of the integration of these immigrants into Swedish society.

And he was attacked by the host for using the language of the far right Swedish Social Democrats, who themselves have been talking about it into merely to bring these things, to use these terms to this British guy was to validate practically Nazism, whereas in Sweden the left now is having to come around and say, hm, taking you know, maybe we should start to take up these

terms before indeed the really bad guys get to take them. But when it comes to looking at stuff at other you know, other countries of the cultures, it's yeah, you know, you can, you can you can go on and buy streaming service, or you can watch television from other countries, or sometimes if you want to save a little money, and we all want to save a little money. You know, you can figure out a way to watch the shows in other countries themselves, And you think, wait,

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Street journalmate newspaper you might have heard about. He reviews books on a range of topics, and earlier this week he penned an excellent op ed titled Joe Biden's Iron grip on his party. Barton. Welcome Barton. You're on with three three writers. And you may think that we ask you on to talk about politics, discuss your recent columns and so forth. The truth is we have news for you. Between your book reviews and your op eds, you're doing too much work. Yeah, kid, you need to slow down.

You're making the rest of us look bad. I have seven pieces do this week. Thank you, very seven pieces do this week. Seven. I'll talk to Barton about what it's like to be a productive member of society, and the rest of you can stare at your blank page. Okay, listen, you wrote a piece your latest op ed. I think it's your latest, and I haven't looked at today's paper. You wrote a piece about Joe Biden's iron grip on the Democratic Party, in which Rob is going to resist

this a little bit. But it was I thought, just a beautiful piece of angry what aboutism? And Rob is so sick of what aboutism or claims to be. But would you play please make the case for us that you made in that column. Well, I like what about is him? The piece was a it was it was the product of a long standing annoyance that I have had since like twenty seventeen, when I started reading in the New York Times, in the Washington Post, article after article about Donald Trump's grip

on the Republican Party, his iron grip. Conversely, various Republican officeholders fealty to Donald Trump. And I remember reading this and well, I should I should point out that at the time I was working at the at the Weekly Standard, and so so my views were colored by that, And I thought, Gee, it doesn't feel to me like much of an iron grip, and I don't see a lot of fealty at the Weekly Standard. But you

know that that was his own, its own thing. So uh. I remember thinking as I would read these pieces that I'm not a huge fan of Donald Trump, but he is the head of his party. He is the president of the United States, so you would expect, you know, Republicans to to, you know, bend their views somewhat to whatever he wanted to talk about. Granted it was done in many cases in unseemly ways, but that's the nature of politics. So that was in my mind for a long

time. And every time I would read one of these pieces with the word fealty particularly, was like one of those words that you had to learn at that point and then and then suddenly everybody was using it, you know, and then uh fast forwards. It occurred to me recently that like on the Democratic side, there's virtually no criticism. What criticism there is is expressed in the vaguest possible terms. And you know, in a piece I just pointed

out to things, but there are others. One his obvious mental decline, and the other is to pull out from Afghanistan. On the Republican side, if those things had been true of any Republican president, I think I'm right in saying there would be maybe not uproar and demands for resignation, but at least, you know, significant criticism. And I just do not see that on the Democratic side. So that's that's basically that where my annoyance came from.

So not only if so fealty is the word for Trump, but it's a kind of omerta for Biden. They all have to take this their behaving as though there's an oath of silence. They're not allowed to see what's in front of everybody else's eyes. Yeah, yeah, Rob, will now tell you why you're mistaken to engage in words, No, I don't know if I don't know, if you're mistaken. I just think that I mean, if you're you know, as a as a Conservative'm not a Republican, but

I'm a conservative. I like, you know, free trade ish stuff. I didn't really think we needed to renegotiate NAFTA, and if we were going to renegotiate it, we shouldn't renegotiate it with the big labor unions at the table setting the terms. I felt like, we, you know, if we're gonna go into a trade dispute with China, as Trump did, we should you know, stick to our guns and not give up on the first day the important stuff like intellectual property rules. So I, you know,

I can criticize Trump from a conservative point of view. I thought maybe he should have built the wall. He said he was gonna and he didn't, didn't even come close, and he wasn't a serious person. So I was arguing from him because I had, uh, you know, conservatively, if I want a conservative president. It feels to me like the Democrats, at least the liberal Democrats, are getting everything they want from this puppet president.

Right. It's like he's the Emperor pu Yee in Manchuria and the administrations filled with Obama loyalists. They seem to like be unaware or unalarmed by the incredible collapse and polls. It's almost like, I mean, I was at a dinner party last week, a bunch of right wingers and me, Peter,

So you don't say that. And no, the only thing we could think of was we could spend weird fantasies about what happens as they sort of carry this old man through the convention and then replace him and set every after a labor day, which they can do in democratic party rules. I'm solving two problems at once, the Biden problem and then the problem b which is the Kamala Harris problem. But nobody thought that he wasn't gonna Nobody, no point

did we think that he was going to get replaced. Because he seems to be doing everything the liberals want. I mean, it's not fair or not. I mean, I think it is fair. And if we could distinguish, maybe we should distinguish between policy on the one hand and political follies on the other. So, like, you know, Trump did a lot of things that conservatives like. Yeah, and he didn't get criticism from conservatives for doing those things. He did get criticism for being a clown, uh,

you know, saying idiotic things, mainly saying idiotic things. Actually, so on Biden doesn't well I was going to say, he doesn't say idiotic things. He doesn't mean necessarily but when he speaks, yeah, the sort of idiotic things. But there are a lot of sort of political follies on coming from the president, the current president and his administration. And but so even on this is, to your point, rob one, one policy issue that

there's no pushback on with the student loan forgiveness. I rank democrats said, including Nancy Pelosi, said no, the president doesn't have that power. He does it. Okay, he doesn't have that. He does have that power. Silence, No one said anything. It's a mystery to me. And I think I think a lot of people on the right, not necessarily in this sort of political media class, right, but just ordinary folks, they

look at the democratic side and they sort of admire it. They sort of why can't we get behind our guide and just and stop arguing it's I don't know whether to admire it or to be just outraged by it. Yeah, well that's the problem of politics is like, what we want to say to them, Republicans want to say each other is why can't we get behind our unfit candidate the way they've gotten behind their unfit candidates. Are these parties just

dead? Should we just are they just out of gas? It just seems to me like I look at the Republican leaders, the Democratic leaders, and I just think you all should just go home. You should be replaced by younger, more energetic people who are insane. Yeah, I don't know. We talk about parties has always, uh, it sort of leaves me cold. I take this sort of Disraeli view of parties and think that they're all

they are is organized opinion. Opinions are going to organize themselves somehow, and in our country they organize themselves into two big groups, and they can be led by idiots or not. But I don't think the parties are going away or anything like that. The the the age issue is really kind of perplexing, and I don't I don't understand it. People. I've heard different theories.

I don't know. I don't know what's which are true. But it stands to reason that some of them will have to go soon whether we get a better crop. I have no idea. So Barton, could hear shrewd observer that you are This is the this is the way I've begun to think about it, although I resist it because it seems to sort of creepy crawly two grassy Knollie, as Bill Buckley would have said, two sort of conspiratorial.

But the deal that has been made within the Democratic Party, the deal to which I was about to say, Joe Biden is a party, but he's gone. He's not a party to anything anymore. But to deal to which Nancy, the deal to which the sentient Democrats, including old figures such as Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders. But above all, the deal is as follows. We are working a slow I don't want to use the word revolution,

but it is a revolution. It's a kind of constitutional revolution, transformation, transformation in which we are asserting the policy agenda of about the progressive policy of agenda of actually only about fifteen percent of the country. We are formalizing the power of the deep state. And all this is possible because we have reduced the President of the United States to the status of a mere figurehead.

Now that's fine for us. And if we get another US the technocrats, the progressives, if we get another four years of this, we will be able to make changes in the country that are effectively permanent or extremely very extremely hard to roll back the Green Agenda, all of that, and that seems to me to be roughly what's going on. Biden is now sinking in the polls. Even Trump is beating Biden. So this grand scheme of theirs that we that if that Biden can win against Trump, maybe not, but he

can't even win against Trump. Maybe, so we'll see whether they get shaken up enough to try to do something about it. But the general idea that they subvert in slow motion the Constitution, Article two of which tells us we need an executive and that the executive power is vested in one human being. We now have a situation in which nobody really knows where the executive power is

vested. The press, the incuriosity of the press on exactly who's running the White House, how decisions get made in this White House where the president is apparently only awake and alert for four or five hours a day in any event, So we got this. It's a kind of slow motion revolution. Taking place, and in the interest of that revolution, they're all willing to clam up. That's the price they're willing to pay. Tell me, I'm mad, You're not mad. Look, in my view, something happened in twenty

sixteen, and that was that the American left hit the jackpot. They didn't know it, and they they didn't feel it was the jackpot, but it was. They got what they wanted, which what I'm I mean by that is as an inheritance I think of even early twentieth century progressivism and certainly sort

of modern revolutionary leftism. They never really believed in the old liberal idea of different points of view coming together forming compromises, i e. The entire the system that our entire republic is based on, with different interests showing themselves in Congress and so forth. They always were technocratic in their outlook, and technocrats see a thing that needs to be done, and they think that they should

be empowered to do it like now. And so when Trump first was nominated and then was elected, that was I think in the American leftist liberal progressives mind, all the excuse they would ever need to completely ignore and dismiss any legitimacy coming from the other side, and I it has grown that they've become more openly dismissive of the right and anything coming from the Republican Party. And

now I just don't think that they care. There's a there's a great line in Casablanca where the Peter Lore character asks the Bogart character do you despise me? And Bogart says, and if I've thought about you, I might, And that's perfect. You know. It's like they can't even be bothered to despise the right, and so I just don't think that they feel obliged in

any way to acknowledge any shortcoming, any any mistakes that Biden makes. And I also think that that is why they sort of secretly want Trump to stay in politics, right. They're divided about it, but they want him to be the nominee. And I think that they even want him to be president again, although they would never admit that. Yeah, I kind of agree with that. I mean, yeah, I think I think I agree with

that. There's also this other thing going on, which is that nobody wants to be the guy who elected Donald Trump on the left, right, So if you run against the incumbent, you're the guy. Right. You know, everybody knows that Ralph Nader elected George W. Bush probably right, So you don't want to be that guy. What you're waiting for, I think is sort of party leadership. If you're if you're I mean, you know the Gavin Newsom is doing a really good job of running for president without running

for president. Right, he's just kind of like announcing his availability and showbiz we would call this person. You know, they are circling the studio in makeup. They are ready right understudy is how's his health today? They are ready to go. If you're a Gretchen Whitmer, you might be feeling the same thing, right, I mean, it's not like, I mean, I don't think the Democrats have a very big bench. That's the legacy of Obama. He's sort of destroyed their bench. But on the other hand,

they don't. It's not like they don't have nobody. They got somebody, but nobody wants to be the guy because you are terrified of this other outcome. Half of you are terrified if you're a Democrat, and the other half think have constructed a house of cards in a sort of a mental landscape, which means it will be a good thing. That's who we want. That's who we want. That's who we want. Don't they have ambition? I mean I was I always thought politicians are just endlessly ambitious, right, they

want what happened? You know? Why are you so scared all of a sudden? Yeah, of course there are dangers, but you guys are the most self serving, narcissistic, ambitious people on earth. Right, But they somehow became they somehow became the bureaucrats they've empowered, haven't they. They said

they like it. They don't really like the getting a car and you go to your office and people like kind of bound scrape and use a separate elevator, and it's kind of nice, and it's like you can't do anything anyway. And so maybe maybe there's something really reassuring about having this ancient ossified bag of bones in the oval office and this like monster dragon on the outside, and it's kind of keeps everything. Everybody in line, right, I mean,

Republicans are in line. And it took how many Republicans have dodged the even Mike Pence, I mean arguably someone that his boss, the President of the United States, he said they should hang and even he won't name him. In a Wall Street Journal editory, he refers to a leading presidential candidate. I mean, the weird, cowardice and unique disease that's I said affected both these parties. That's I guess that's why I'm saying. It's like, how can this last? I mean, no, monetary systems don't last,

political parties don't lat. These things don't last. They almost always refreshed. Are we at a period where they're going to be refreshed or is it more like, well, we'll just be filled with different people, because it doesn't seem like about to be filled with different people. Yeah, there is sort of this pathology in both parties in which the worst, the worst thing on

earth is to be blamed or criticized for anything. So like, I really saw it in a in a sort of gruesome way during the pandemic when I'm we're just following the science, like it's it's those guys over there telling us what. We have no capacity to make any decisions. So look, don't

don't yell at us. We we we don't. We We just believe in science, Okay, And you see that across across the board in all sorts of ways, and and it may be that what what our politics is headed to is just to have this sort of debilitated figurehead off in an attic somewhere that we call the president, and sure you can get mad at him if you want, but we're doing what we want. And when you get mad, you know somebody, somebody's fault, and that that's the that's the dynamic

with the administrative state. You know, we don't actually make decisions. It's all the regulators at the EPA and so on, and there's no accountability. There's not only no accountability, there doesn't seem to be a demand for accountability. If we had a national, nationwide movement that wanted to interrogate every aspect

of the coronavirus handling, maybe we would learn something. Maybe there would be some people who would do the sensible thing and performer ritual disemboweling of themselves, you know, in the old Japanese style, and be shamed and be drummed out. Rob has spoken about one of the things that bothers him about the two thousand and eight financial crisis. There wasn't enough bankers jumping out of windows, paraded around in hairshoots humiliated for what they did, we just went on.

So there's no institutional accountability at a time when we seem to have no faith whatsoever in any of our institutions, they having failed us spectacularly in all the way. So it breeds. It seems sort of a passivity in the electorate, which, as you spoke before about the gift that Donald Trump was in twenty sixteen, is an excellent opportunity for this other, for this great

force to I'm in and flood. But when it comes to nobody having the temerity to go up against the old bag of bones in the attic, is it because now we are sort of post American institution and figuring that if the Democrats find a way to plug Gavin Knewsom in, that's fine. And Newsom thinks that he doesn't have to go through the usual processes, that he can just be plugged in, that that's fine. And so we come up with, you know, what began as a fairly rigorous way to run a country

ends up with a year of four emperors. Not a question so much as a speech. But I'm sure you can probably speech though you can pull something out of it that can be answered to it you may say anything you wish. Barton. Yeah, well it's all very depressing, Thank you very much. That's Parton's way. We can read him in the Wall Street. I'm sorry, Gone, Yeah, this is actually one reason I sort of I have an eccentric fear of AI. I mean eccentric in the sense that it's

not a fear that that is shared by other people. But I think that that AI is the perfect avenue to avoid all accountability forever and completely right, because you know, the algorithm said to do it, and it's not our fault. So God only knows what government folly could be excused by an algorithm. Barton, I have two questions for you. The second one concerns you, but the first one is returning us to Donald Trump in the State of

the country. You said, but did not follow up on, that you thought the Democrats or at least the Progressive secretly want Donald Trump to become president again. That is an idea that had simply not crossed my mind. Could you explain that? Well, you know, people want things without knowing that they want them. Yes, the know it's more fun. For one thing, It's just generally more fun in a lot of ways to be in the

opposition, and it is in power. In your power, you have to defend everything, and you have to make excuses for your mistakes, and you have to, you know, spin everything. And when you are in in opposition, you get to you get no accountability and you get to criticize everything. And look, if there's one thing that unites all progressives and liberals,

it is the need to be outraged. They love it and they always have and I think that at the end of the Obama's second term, the things to be outraged about were really small, you know, we were talking about like transgender bathrooms and stuff like that. Right just just wasn't satisfying. And when Trump got elected, it was like, oh, man, carry us a long way. And I think they had a blast, loved it.

Are you kidding him? It was just the smartest sport of outrage and every day and now with Biden being a complete embarrassment, it's it's just not fun. So yeah, I think that they'd be happy with it. The right is prone to its daily outrageous too, though. I mean, if you hang around Twitter long enough, you see that we have our own version of the thing that we just simply cannot believe now in the case of you know, the Trump years, it was something that Trump said her in all caps

rant, or it was this that or the other thing. It wasn't necessarily always a policy issue. But we have those two and maybe for good reason, because there is a lot going on on a daily basis that we ought to be outraged about and not lose our ability to do so. I think what distinguishes right and left and in this way is that the left cannot concede that anything is good, right, very bad at all times. And and and the right is is fully capable of acknowledging distinguishing between the good and the

bad, which is, you know, the proper way to live. So but yeah, we we do have our our our need for outrage. I guess, although I would caution against uh looking at Twitter for any reason at all. That's very wise. So Barton my second here's my second question. This is a question about Barton Swain. The journalism business model has collapsed. All journalists who want to make a career of it need a constant presence on Twitter. They've got to get a television contract with Fox News. They need

to establish a substack. And you're not doing any of this. There you are seated at home in South Carolina. By the way, they also need to be in Washington. There, you are seated in South Carolina, and you're a newspaperman. You're a newspaperman. Furthermore, you take books so seriously that you wrote one brilliant book, so beautifully written. As a fellow writer, I'm forced to hate you. You wrote one, and you review books, and you take the ideas in those books seriously, and you even comment

on how well they're put together. Art and Swain you are. You are a nineteenth century man. What the hell do you think you're doing? Go on, go on. You're putting your faith in newspapers and the written word. Well, yeah, that's a that's a topic, uh, the written word. I heard this interview with your old friend Peter teal years ago in which he said that if anytime he's interviewing, uh, someone you know, for a for a position or something, he says, tell me of you

that you hold that nobody else holds. You know, that that would be that would be widely panned if if anybody knew you held it. And he said, usually, you know, they come out with things that a lot of people actually believe, you know, racism is a bad or something. If I had to answer that question, it would be that there is a future in newspapers, which is probably actually probably that's the dumbest view ever. But and when I say papers, I mean I mean print papers. And

that is just because when you I'll put it this way. From time to time I tell people that they say what do you do? And I say, I work for the Wall Street Journal And they say, you know, so so you write for them? I say yes, and they say like online and I say no, I mean in the print paper and they say,

oh wow, oh okay. And so what I what I glean from that reaction is that people when people see something in print, they think, well, somebody took the time to edit this into shape and uh, and spend the capital necessary to deliver it somewhere on actual paper, So it must be important. And when you encounter something online and you know that it's only online, it may be excellent, and often it is excellent, but you also know that all somebody had to do is type it into an application and

hit you know, post, and that's it. And so I think that over time there print print papers will come back print magazines and papers. The demand will slowly, slowly re emerge. So I have some I have some very bad news for you, because I get the Wall Street Journal and delivered to my door every day, and if it's something that I'm doing, I guarantee you it's not on its a way to becoming a trend. I'm usually

the guy turning off the lights. Yeah, yeah, so Barton, Tom Wolfe told me the story that he was working at the New York Herald Tribune when John Kennedy was killed and they listened to it in the newsroom on the radio. I think there was a television they watched Cronkite pronounced Kennedy dead, and Tom had this sinking feeling that he was witnessing the death of news papers.

Here was a major event that had taken place, and it was broadcast rather than And then as he walked home to his apartment, there were lines around the block at every news stand for the evening edition newspapers, right, because it wasn't real until people had read it in print. Still valid, Still valid, Marton, Yeah, yeah, I think that's still valid, all right. Maybe not for the immediacy, you know, the web takes

care of the immediacy. But if you if you really want to know something, everybody knows that you have to Not everybody admits, but everybody knows you have to read it on a physical thing. It may be a mental take. Just with me, but I cannot remember anything I've read online more than six months ago. Nothing, It's all just a blur. I can remember things that I read in Commentary magazine in nineteen ninety six and be able more or less to find it on the page. I mean, it's not a

memory. But you know, you oftentimes you remember things that well from long ago, and yeah, you consulted. Maybe it's not exactly you know, the way you remember it, but you do remember it. No clue what I read last year online. So there's hope. There's hope, depends as there is. I agree. Walter Kern American Writers has started his own little newspaper with somebody else who's name escapes me, and it comes out periodically, and it's an attempt to revive the newspaper as it used to be a community

sort of conversation. It's not online that paper, No, it's not. No, it is printed. It's like the way things used to be we're going to cut down a tree, We're gonna pulp it, We're gonna ship it here, we're gonna spell it full of ink, and then it's going to run through this enormous machine. It's going to be mechanically folded, put it into trucks, dropped off its street corners, and urchins will deliver it to your door, which is still kind of how we do it here at

the newspaper where I am. But we all know where print is going. We all have seen where the line is going, and it's writing a demographic down into the graveyard, and we have to figure out how to get new people and eyeballs to use those wretched terms to the website, where everything, as you point out correctly is digital and weightless, it doesn't have the same

thing, the same heft. So the question is whether or not we can keep the shells of the institutions alive long enough to repopulate them with people who realize that there is something there, and also to do it in a way that seems counterintuitive. The Wall Street Journal is a great newspaper. It's broad is it has depth, that has intelligence and trust its audience, and it's got a lot of stuff in it. I go to the UK and I see the Telegraph and I just marvel at this huge saddle blanket that I can

unfurl. It's got all kinds of stories and the serendipity of going to here to there and find something on the jump and the rest of it is an experience that cannot be reproduced on the web or you're just simply a flea on a hot plate. So a last question, then, do you think that that the newspaper industry as we know today has to shutters and die and then something comes out of the ashes, or can we slow the decline and repopulate

it. That's that's my last that's my last sermon masquerading as a question. I don't know is the answer, but okay, yeah I don't either, really don't. But I think that So I've always wondered if there's if there's a way to if one business model, and I don't maybe this has been tried, is to charge. This would work only at a local level, I think, but that but that's that's where that's where newspapers that they're going to be revived would need to be revived, and that's the local papers.

So people know what this school board is doing or whatever is. There is one business model to arge for the online sub but to get the paper for free. So maybe delivery would be a problem. But on any newstand, the actual paper would be free. But if you want to see it, you know, if you like the instantaneousness and all of the rest of it, you want it on your phone, your desktop, You're gonna have to pay and pay a lot. So these outlets are going to have to experiment

with different, different business models. But I think that just the demand for news hasn't gone down. I have a little wrinkle on that to suggest I personally would be willing to pay not to have the New York Times delivered. Just a thought for you there, Bertie, or we switched our model to a dog wasteed disposal envelope system and then give the newspaper for free. Well, I stopped my New York Times print subscription only because the art section.

You know, I have kids in the house. Come on, I don't want born lying around. Well, I still get it because I love doing the Crossroad puzzle on paper. And that's that. So so I I well, well, a question before before we go, because I know we gotta, we gotta let you go. And I keep asking the same question, but it seems to me like there's a market opportunity. Right, Well, you look at the where where is there? Where is there no one in

politics everyone has has basically the same thing. This is great, big center, right, This is great, big kind of shrugging center there. You know, the pro life pro choice movement is pretty much abortion is pretty much a great example of that that. Americans are kind of clustered in a very very very big, fat center, and they are looking for a party to

speak to that and need a party seems to be doing that right. Half the Republicans are saying things like life begins the conception, they don't like that, and the Democrats are saying you should be able to have an abortion the you know, second year of birth of life. Right. Essentially, isn't that emblematic of politics in general? I mean, isn't somebody gonna gonna jump on this? Does does it seem like? I mean, I don't, I guess I'm just I'm looking at economically, there's a market, there are

buyers out there. Yeah, yeah, I mean with with the with the example of abortion, there's this difference. Uh that people don't want to talk about abortion. That's true. Most people are in the middle. But they also don't like to talk about it. They don't like to debate it, they don't want to argue about it, and so and so that that that leaves that leaves a hole in the middle for people who do want to argue

about it to get in to take all the action. But I mean, I think on economic issues, the market is there, and you know, it's a it's a it's a matter of reforming the institutions, particularly Congress, to to actually make these debates real and simply use their offices as juve all evince as platforms for a national audience. So we just need to to figure out a way to make our institutions, particularly Congress, functioning the way they

were intended. That'll be great. Let's reform our institutions and make them work. I think we can probably get that done by the end of the month, and we redouble our efforts. Great prescriptions and great ideas you can find them at the Wall Street Journal. Under Barton's Ways is a byline also that the author of the speech, writer of brief education on Politics and the latest

pieces Joe Biden's iron grip on his party. As you can tell by this wide ranging conversations, He's adept in a variety of arena and we thank him for coming and we look forward to having you on again. Gentlemen, Thank you, Thanks Marton. All right, take care man the next time. Perhaps if you're going to quote Peter Lorrie, I think you have to do it in a Peter Lorrie voice. Yes, I think you do a nice,

nice Peter. It's right the lie, you know, I always thought the line was you just I know you despise me, Rick, but it's not. It's a what did I think? Well, in any case, Laurie was great. I love Peter Laurie in that movie. And I was just thinking about Casablanca the other day, what an American treasure it is, and how the fact that it was just a wrote studio product that just became inhabited by the best people who could possibly do any of those roles, and

how they never managed to do it again. And they kept trying, didn't they. I mean, Robbie would know better than I. But they when something works, they turn around and say, well, let's do that again. As we seeded diminishing effects with the Marvel world. But we don't see that is with you know, when a conservative movie hits, the studios don't say, hey, what was a little lightning in a bottle that they captured there? Let's see if we can do some of that before we go.

Then a brief account of how our things in the entertainment industry right now. You are keeping your eye in the strike in the summer box. I'm on strike. Has anybody learned anything or does anybody know anything? Or is it still know? No, nobody does anything learned anything. I mean, I

think the it's coming down to two big issues. And you know, it depends on you know, it depends on it depends on how how the market reacts to the continued shutdown, depends on what happens when everybody realizes that if you backdate from summer twenty twenty four, you figure that your movies have to be either in production or finished in post production right now, and they're not.

So, you know, the long term, the tail effect of a strike is continues and lingers, and you know you're seeing I think a lot of sort of what they call M and a activity. Well, I think less M and a and more breaking up is going to be happening, and that's going to be great. The future of show business is going to be not six big companies, but twenty seven thousand little companies, because that's what

show business the most efficient. And I think we're also seeing things like the as you mentioned, you mentioned a movie that did very well this summer. I think it's maybe the third biggest movie is called Sound of Freedom, and it was I happen to know a lot about a movie because a good friend of mine wrote it. I'm writing a piece about up for commentary and I'm

doing Martini shot about it next week next week. Probably the guy who wrote it is a believing Catholic, a practicing Roman Catholic, as is the dog. I don't, I don't. I don't know whether Jim Caviezels are Roman Catholic specifically, but you know, okay, I know he's devout. I don't know if he's the archives. There's a little little weirdly okay. Uh. And so they made a movie, and they're gonna make about two hundrellion

dollars domestically this year, which is a lot. Uh. And the distributor Angels' notice that James is or that Rob is a little uncertain about the religion, but he knows exactly how much money. Yeah, well, I know he's Catholic, but I mean I do know people I know some Catholics in that know him that that are not Roman Catholic. They differ. So there's that and uh and but the movie itself is just a really really great thriller, and it's a true story, and the guy it's based on, who's

a real person, is also a believing Catholic. There really is nothing particularly faith based about the Sound of Freedom. The next movie they're making, or this Maide is coming out of March, is called The Cabrini and the trailer looks spectacular about Mother Cabrini, who was very sort of first American Saint. I think, Peter, why am I doing this Roman Catholic stuff, Peter,

you should be jumping in so there. But my friend who wrote it, Rod Barr, who's a wonderful, wonderful writer, said he's not sure that these big companies could even release some movie like that and afford it. It's just too risky and small. So we're a movie that did really well in the movie theater, by the way, two hundred million dollars, which

is pretty good in movie theater. When the conventional wisdom was no only big movies with marvels, whatever could be in the movie in the movie theaters, there'd be no way for them to release it to the larger public because it had to start in a certain place, kind of following the old Tyler Perry model, which as you start small with a small audience, you and you grow the audience, and a big company like Disney simply just can't wrap your

head around it, which creates a huge opportunity for people to make real movies that are good and can go in the movie theater and make hundreds and hundreds of months. And there's space for that now because companies like Disney have just poisoned their brand. Manesque before we go. I mean, I had I grew up with a great fellow feeling for for you know, Uncle Walt in the house every Sunday night, and then I kind of sort of fell away

when I grew up. But then I had a child, and all of a sudden, I'm rediscovering this great backstory of the catalog of American wonderfulness and learning about that, and enjoying going to Disney World and marveling at the efficient machine, the money extraction machine that this is, while still finding myself in a dark room somewhere in a little off of Main Street spaghetti place, watching watching Flowers and Trees, one of their earlier color numbers, and just you

know, just enjoying the whole Disney thing. And now it's just weird to me, not just the whole place, it's just it's just got a whiff about it that I just don't like, and I don't think a lot about it. But if that's if that's hit me, who was a you know, a Disney fan, not a supern You know, I'm not going to go there in the mouse hears and propose to my wife in front of the Magic Kingdom. But I love the place and everything about it, And now

I'm just I don't care if they sunder and fall into the ocean. Well, I mean that may be true, all that could be true. I'm just making a business argument, which is that these big companies have big channels and they can only do big things in a big way, and they really rearrange themselves for that. I mean, I mean, we're using I'm using disease an example, but you could say the same thing about so and you can say the same thing about comcasts. You say the same thing about Warner

Brother's Discovery. They're just too big and they think that's going to that adds, gives them efficiencies, but I think it really doesn't. In a way, it opens up the market to a lot of movie makers, like the people who made Sound Freedom and Gabrini, to do like incredible movies. Looks not a Freedom is just a really good thriller you can want. You can go in and eat your popcorn and watch a hero do something heroic and saves children, and then you know, you cheer and you walk out, and

that that's a business argument. And you may be right about the other argument, but it's not. It isn't as if there's some very exact, exact parallel here in Silicon Valley sequoia of venture capital became too big. If you're managing billions and billions of dollars, you can only do really big deals, and those are not where the returns are. The returns are these little upstart companies that you want to get them in. They're same same kind of thing.

If you're big. If you're managing huge amounts of money, then the executives can very easily convince themselves they need big bets, and that means things that aren't as risk they need to deploy anyway. You get the pictures same here. Yes, that's true. You I mean you need size because you need financial resources to do some things. Although I still don't understand why digital movies cost so much. I mean, it's not like you have to build

the sets physically. But if there were three things you would ask me twenty years ago that I absolutely would love for the rest of my entire life, besides the Disney catalog, it would be Star Wars because I grew up with it and I will love it even though they did stupid things with it. It would be Marveled because I grew up with the cartoons and my god, I love that Iron Man and the fourth thing was so great. And it would be Pixar because it was the genius home of storytelling, the likes of

which we hadn't seen in our entire lives. And what now happens. I look at Disney Plus on my bill, which is Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars, and I went eh, and I canceled it. I did too, just a couple of months ago. It was exactly because they happening. They had leached out every element of goodwill and interest that I had through a combination of ideological, emotional storytelling decisions that had nothing to do with the size. And my point to that is this the golden era of Hollywood's There wasn't

any such but in the studio system they had size. But they also had a certain way of looking at the audience and the culture and their role in it that enabled them to turn stuff out. It wasn't all Casablanca, but the stuff below it was watchable, and part of it I almost sound like Peter and Robinson there. It was watchable, and you would go to the theater and sit there for the newsreel and the cartoon and the short feature and the programmer and the big thing, and that was your night. And that

was big. And they owned the theaters and they owned the actors, and Bigness worked because of the culture and the attitudes of the people who were running the show. Says me, what do I know, Well, I mean, I think that's I think it's partially true. They didn't own the theaters in the thirties, they were bought busted, and they couldn't block book and

they owned the actors. But that was like the actors like that because they got these giant fact contracts and they had to do certain certain movies, but they put the two things that were different. One is they made tons of movies. They made tons of pictures, like the Paramount released fifty pictures a year and then not including b movies. And they were terrible, terrible investments. So nobody in a Wall Street thought of investing in these crazy companies.

They were run by people, and there was cash flow business and individuals got very, very rich, but shareholders there weren't any. They didn't They didn't really start getting interested in show business until the sixties. And every single acquisition, major acquisition of a company, of a large company, of a studio,

and it in tears. There isn't one that hasn't yet. So the reality is that show business were The argument you're making that they were big was like, but they were small, and they had a bunch of little little contraptions within it, and decisions were not they were not vertically integrated, and they made so many movies that there was no top down supervision of the movies.

There's no marketing department that read a script before they made it. It was all kind of It was show business the way it's supposed to be, and it totally worked. And I think what's broken about it now is that you have a bunch of people who think that if only I was in charge of everything, then I wouldn't make any mistakes. And that is just not

efficient way to run a movie studio or a TV studio. It's just isn't like you gotta like make some room for some mistakes, which means vertical integration

is a disaster. And it used to be a law that financial interests and occasion rules that Nixon put into place in the early seventies because he wanted to punish the TV networks, so he said that you can't own any TV shows and then there was deregulation, which I'm in favor of the de regulation of it, but that doesn't mean that just because you're not regulated from doing something,

you should do it. And everyone thought, oh, you know what, So so you have this bizarre moment where because of low interest rates, Netflix could go to Ball Street and raise billions of dollars in debt, make a lot of TV shows and movies and put them on their servers, and no one is watching them. The number one show on Netflix this summer is a USA TV rerun series called Suits, Suits, and every said, well,

that's because Megan Markle's in it. Well was you know? She was in Suits four years ago, and two years ago and one year ago she was not. People didn't just discover this summer that she was in Suits. They're watching Suits because Suits is a pretty good show. It's light, it's fun, it's interesting. You can watch an hour of it if you were if you're a yearholder of Netflix, and the number one show on that network is an almost ten year old rerun. I mean, what is that telling

you? It's telling me that we should end this before I get on a big, long story about how actually I found myself spending most of my time on YouTube. The serendiity angle of which and the fastness and the turnover and the connectivity of it once google notes which you like is terrifying, and the

quantity of commercials is absolutely off putting. But on the other hand, Wow, the things that you find and the things that you hear here so ladies and gentlemen listening to this podcast if you haven't already, cancel that stupid streaming subscription and spend the money on Ricochet, where you will find a community that is welcoming and interesting and fascinating. The member feed, which you don't have access to unless you remember, is you know, really where a lot of

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appears from the grave and they ask it wonderful, very wonderful. Too bad they didn't have Peter Laurie for that role. Sending wonderful ric We'll see everybody in the comments, said Ricochet. Four for now, point out next week, guys, next week to tell us Ricochet join the conversation.