All.
This is all about our country right now.
I love the USA, I love my teammates.
It's unbelievable, the US or hockey brotherhood.
It's so strong.
In that shame.
You should be ashamed of yourself, not standing. He should be ashamed of yourself. It's the Ricochet Podcast. I'm James Lilyx. Stephen Hayward is here and we're going to talk to tal Fort Gang about the Democratic Socialists of America. Can't wait, Let's have results a podcast. Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number seven hundred and seventy eight. I'm James Lylyx here in Minneapolis, calm it seems for the moment, and I'm joined by Steven Hayward in California. I presume Charles is
still out and about. We hope to get him back soon. He's not entered the pantheon of hosts who've come and gone. He will be with us again. But it's just us here to do today with our guests to come, which would be fun. And I gotta say USA, right us A. So it was like a replay of the old Olympics, you know, where we beat the hated Ruskies, except now
apparently we've got the hated Canadians. And I heard a term the other day that just absolutely put me on the floor, referring to the Canadians as syrup peans.
I had not heard that one.
That's good, not bad, not bad. I for one, don't like a state of m the t and discord between our I mean, they're right up there, they're closed. You know. I've been living close to Canada all my days. When I was a kid, I used to get in a bus when I want to play a contest at the Fargo Forum Delivery Boys, and would go up to Winnipeg, which was sort of like this mirror image of Minneapolis up there. I love the whole civilization out in the outskirts and the prairies and the planes and the winds
swept world. I've been to Canada on the on the west coast and seen their monumental architecture and marveled at what they did. I like them. But here we are, I guess where they don't like us. We'll show you. We're not going to go to vacation in Florida. We're going to go to Port of Iarta anyway. So the problem, Stephen is you may have known is that some people were moved to jingoistic displays scoundrel like refuge in patriotism.
And if you felt bothered by that, said the said the Hoff post, you're not alone.
Well where do you start? It is a curious Well, it's not curious to me. This is quite obvious and not surprising that the efflorescence of American patriotism over the i think unexpected win of our hockey team over Canada in a really revera performance, right, especially that goalie who you know, only let one shot through. But I'm not surprised that the left is upset about this because well, the latest finding out from the Gallup poll people, which
again does not surprise me. But if you go back to two thousand and one, that's the pole Gallup did two thousand and one to the president, and it's do you have pride in America? And even before nine to eleven, but in the years after that, Republicans Democrats were about two or three points apart, all around ninety to ninety
five percent up with pride in America. Well, guess where Democrats are today, thirty six percent, down from you know, eighty eight percent twenty twenty five years ago, and whereas Republicans haven't moved all. You could balance a glass of water on the pole line of the time series from two thousand and one to now, including when Obama was president. In other words, liberals lost their mind when Trump became president and they haven't gotten it back and they're not
going to get it back. Whereas Republicans who didn't like Obama worth the darn, they did not abandon their pride in the country at all. They didn't make their their patriotism contingent on whether they liked the president. So okay, that's just another description too long, of course, of Trump dearrangement syndrome. But I don't remember yep.
To be fair, do you think that they have if asked that they would have empirical, sighted sourced reasons for not being proud of America anymore? What do you presume would be their responses to that?
Oh, well, the whole bunch of things. I mean, let's leave a side of cliches about fascism, but let's take note of the fact that, and I'll assert this that the patriotism of most liberals, many liberals, has been superficial because and the way they betray this is that think about the countries they always say they admire more and wish we were more alike. Well, the Scandinavian countries of course, but also Canada because they have single payer healthcare and
gun control and they're all nice up there. Supposedly they're not actually nice at all. The way they suppress speech in dissantras we saw the last several years. So there's always been this envy of liberals of someplace Steltz is better than us.
So when are that's also pretty darn white, pretty darn white.
B Right, Well, I mean two or three more things. I mean, I really want to dump on Canada. And let's stipulate that Trump was over the top with about making Canada the fifty first state and all the rest of that. But look, I'll assert this Canada only works, and especially it's healthcare system only works, and that is badly because they're a free rider in the United States.
I mean, just on healthcare. If you're an upper middle class Canadian and you have to endure a year long waiting list for a routine but important procedure, you come to the United States. We're their safety valve and it's only you know, it's a tiny country. The entire population could fit inside California with lots of room to spare. I mean, we're bigger than what twice the size of Canada almost in California. So it's this big, spread out country of just a few cities where most of the
population lives. But then the other finding out recently, and James maybe you saw this is GDP per capita in Canada is now lower than GDP per capita in Alabama, and this is really causing some embarrassment.
Well, the Globe and Mail. The Globe and Mail went and did that story, and apparently Alabama in the national imagination of Canada consists of just a bunch of hicks sitting around with Billy beard cans in a trailer park somewhere, or dispossessed, disenfranchised African Americans toiling and fields. And when they went there they actually discovered something else. I remember
somebody talking there was there was some rocket company. I don't even know if it was ex or somebody else that was saying, you know, we're thinking of opening up some operations in Alabama. And the people on Twitter were just laughing at them. Alabama, like there's rocket scientists in Alabama. Well, yes, quite a few.
And when the Globe we heard of NASA Huntsville, right, yeah, right, And when when the Globe and Mail went to Alabama, it came back with us with a picture of a place that was self confident that that was actually inhabiting the twenty first century, that had restaurants, that had you know, hospitals and stuff.
People weren't all living in double wides, single minds. And they had to tell people, you know, we are kind of wrong about this, and maybe some national self examination should be going on. Nah no, no, no, no, let's elbows up whatever that means.
Well, so let's throw in Mississippi and the comparisons too. We've known now for several months when the National Educational Assessments came out that Mississippi has been crushing it. I mean, they're they have the biggest improvement in reading scores, including among their minority children African Americans. And I forget now who it was, but there was some liberal might have been a politician or at least one of their leading pundits, said you know, we ought to pay attention to Mississippi.
Well you can imagine a reaction on Blue sky right, and I don't need to tell listeners have what that? How that went? And the other thing is back to Canada.
But again I have to stop you. Why is Mississippi doing better? What did Mississippi do that made all of a sudden their educational metrics.
Improved well, higher standards and accountability right, and a basic curriculum back to phonics to teach Phoenix rhoenics.
I feel like I'm mad. Absolutely well, no, phonics doesn't work. What we have to do is whole word teaching where they look at the whole word and to it and context and no far x. But you know, get hooked on that. And apparently that's the trick. That's the one weird trick you expect to see, like an Internet ad, the one weird trick to make your kids actually read. It's genius anyway, So right, your next point on Canada.
Well, so you know, the the talking point for our country now, at least since Trump came along, as we're heading for a civil war. The country's going to fall apart, We're gonna break up. But meanwhile, those you know, fuzzy warm social democratic Canadians, they look more likely to break up than we are. And there's the paradox there that
I think is explainable. But you know, for years, you know, the the Nre French speaking Quebecois have wanted to secede and what they had a referendum twenty years ago that only narrowly failed. But now Alberta, which is the Texas of Canada, right it's the once the one province that would surely vote Republican if it were in America, They're having a referendum sometime soon about whether they should separate from Canada. So I don't know if it'll pass or not.
I'm not really in touch with Alberton politics beyond what I can read in the papers, which means I don't know anything. But if that passes, I'll bet the people over in Quebec and maybe the Maritimes are going to say, hey, wait a minute, and then let's see what happens after that. It could be interesting because I don't think it's Mark carneg guy you know who want on kind of a flu with a you know, an unintended assist from Trump. I don't think he's all that popular. I think he's
heading for cure Starmer territory. In the fullness of time with Canadians, and so I think they've got a much bigger problem than we do.
I think so too. You have to ask yourself what defines Canada as a nation? What is it? Well, it's this this fusion of I wouldn't say it's a fusion of French and English culture. It's just it's two different territories that got welld it together into one country. And it defines itself by not being American. And in some instances, you know you've got you know, television must contain ten percent Canadian content, or radio stations must have ten percent.
I mean, I get the sense of not wanting to be overwhelmed by the big, bumptious neighbors to the south, especially when you're more well mannered in your own mind, and you're kinder, and you are more civilized and all the rest of that. But is that enough to hold a country together? It is if you hold to the old values, if you see yourself as part of an inheritor of what we always talk about it the Western civilization tradition, If you see yourself in that as a
different offshoot of the themes that made America America. In Mexico, Mexico for that matter, you have a really interesting North American continent with Mexico, Canada, the United States, three different takes on Western CIEV, and two of them quite similar. But if you don't have that, and you have a rootless sort of political philosophy unmoored from any of that, and going towards the usual prog utopianism, then you really
don't have much to hold the country together. You just have an idea of yourself as being well, what it means to be Canadian is to be tolerant and generous and empathetic, and those things usually just end up in graft, failed institutions, open borders, and diluting of your own civilization. So good luck with that. I mean, I don't want to live long enough to see Canada split up. I think that would be really weird. I don't know how
it would work. Berta is its own country, the middle part kind of becomes America, Quebec becomes a separate French en clive, and the maritime province has also become America. I guess it's no longer something that's ridiculous to even consider.
Well, it could be if Trump were And I don't mean this as an insult of Trump, like it will sound. But if Trump were more historically facile to put it that way, he probably revived the old fifty four to forty your fight slogan from this, you know, the middle of the nineteenth century, right right.
I always love that fIF fight. That's a great one, typically new and Tyler too. You know, you grew up knowing these things, thinking I'm I'm old, I'm a rotary phone old. Well, we had a State of the Union speech which dialed it up, but didn't dial it up in the way that people might have thought it was.
Some people said it was more disciplined, that it didn't have the sort of wobbly, meandering middle that Trump does, that it was focused to end, that it had an intention, and that was to create a lot of television ads for the upcoming mid terms. And I assume you listen to every single minute of it. Give us your version of the highlights and perhaps the low lights.
Yeah, amazingly, I did watch the whole thing, and I sir, I'm on record for a long time of hating State of the Union speeches and wishing we'd get rid of them. I mean, the listeners should know that what we're used to our entire adult lifetime is something that was really brought back by Woodrow Wilson. He had a deliberate purpose, which was to, I won't say humiliate Congress, but try to overawe Congress by saying, I'm the boss. The president's
the leader of the country, not the Congress. In Article one, because all presidents but I think maybe Jefferson gave one speech to Congress, but all presidents in the nineteenth century sent letters letters. And by the way, the Article two says the president shall, well, from time to time submit information on the state of the Union. It doesn't say every year. Most of them did the annual message to Congress.
But I wish we'd go back to that. That said, and I did write something about how Reagan he had relatively short state of the Unions. Yeah, in one of the State of the Unions was only thirty eight minutes long, and he delivered them crisply and even with all the applause interruption. And they started getting longer under George H. W. Bush, and then under Clinton they became almost castro esque. And yes, well, my joke about Trump the other night is that if
we measured this on the castro scale. That speech was a half castro.
A half castro. I like that. Well, the part that people are getting upset about is the part about how we have to close the borders, that illegal immigrants are coming here to take the jobs of people. They're straining the medical system, they're straining the schools, and we have to do something about this right now. Oh wait a minute, that was Clinton in ninety six. People were playing back and forth versions of that. It just shows you how
much the landscape has shifted. So yeah, I'm with you shorter. If you have to do it at all, a letter would be nice. Maybe put it on a postcard, and that's I want a federal government. You can drun in a bathtub in a state of the Union. You can put it in a postcard. Yeah, well, but oh sure, go ahead, no go, I mean it had but it too well.
I was gonna say, I you know, normally when I hear these laundry lists, you know working well. By the way, you mentioned Clinton, one of my favorite Clinton moments was the famous State of the Union rre. He said, after the Democrats had gotten humbled in the ninety four election, the era big government is over, and then we had an hour of ninety five new ways the government bigger and do more things for you. But most State of the Unions are the laundry list speeches, and you know,
the occasional nod to a person in the in the gallery. Instead, this was the work of art, a work of showmanship. I've found it riveting, as I say, even though I hate these things. And the way Trump paced out throughout the entire speech, signaling out someone in the audience and giving him award or recognition, that kept your interest because every time the speech was about to flag into a laundry list, he had another spectacle with the person. And you could tell at the beginning this was going to
be different. When the hockey team they weren't sitting there, he announced them, and the doors opened and they came down the steps. I mean as spectacle. And you'd expect this from the guy who was got the top ratings with the Apprentice for so many years. So and you know, he called out all the Democrats' worst behavior. And for Trump, that was a fairly disciplined speech. Oddly enough, right he I mean here and there he had lived and did his usual things. But I thought it was Masterville I
couldn't believe it. Oh one more footnote to that, the Democratic response by Abigail Spamberger. And by the way, Trump going on so long when she was on after eleven
o'clock Eastern times, so nobody watched it. But I've noticed that some of the well two people in particular Rick Pearlstein, a very far left historian, and Corey robbin An even further further left celebrity on the intellectual left, they hated her speech and they both wrote pieces jumping on it, and they thought it was not small enough, it wasn't wimpy,
they didn't yell at Donald Trump enough. And I thought, I think they're on the pulse of the party, which is they want, you know, red meat that's still bleeding, still attached to the cow. I don't know what metaphor you'd use, but they didn't like it, and I thought, Oh, that doesn't occur well for Democrats heading into twenty twenty eight, because they're going to want people just you know, all this pent up anger at Trump for more than ten
years now, they're going to want that. And I think the serious moderate candidates, if there are any, are not going to want to do a lot of that, and it's going to be an interesting problem for them.
Oh yeah, But I still think that immigration moment was the best you could summon all down to that. That's the one thing that no matter where I look, people seem to have taken away, if either to defend it or to to point out exactly what it meant, because it is it's it's not. I mean, you want to talk about authoritarianism and fascism when discussing the tariffs. I mean Trump said that it was a regrettable ruling, sad ruling or whatever he said, but he's going to abide
by it. It's not as if he says how many legions of the Supreme Court had, But it was the it's the job to defend the citizens of the United States before over and not illegal aliens. And if you sit on your hands for that, you've made a very very clear statement as to your priorities and the priorities of your party and movement. There's there's no there's no get well, I agree with what he I think one of somebody the interviewed afterwards, well, you know, I agree
in principle, but it's how we do the defending. It's the way that. It's what's behind it. It's the racism of this. No, no, you can't. You can't parse your way out of that. You can't. Hi, I'm Ben Sass and I'm Chris Steierwald. And this is not dead yet. We're all dying, but some of us have been brought face to face with that reality. However long each of us have to do it though.
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Rick Ricochet, join the conversation.
So we will not go to our guest, tal fort Gang. I hope I got that right. If not, we'll here. Legal policy fellow and advisor to the President at the Manhattan Institute. You can find his writings of the pages of City Journal, National Review, Yay Commentary, Law and Liberty, and The Wall Street Journal. Del Welcome.
Thank you so much for having me. Can I just say that I am a regular listener of the to the Ricochet podcast. It's part of my Friday afternoon pre Sabbath routine. My job is to do the dishes in our house, to make sure that everything is perfectly clean. For the for the beginning of the Sabbath, and the Ricochet podcast is an integral part of that ritual.
See I told you that. I told you tal would be a great guest and now suitable listening forgetting ready for Shabat or whatever.
That's just that's fantastic. Well, and as a fellow National Review guy, we're all good friends here, so let's just have an RGOSL congratulations and agree in agree with each other in an amiable fashion. No, thanks so much for listening. We appreciate it. And people should say, well, what's this guy written recently? And the piece is radicals are at the door, as you got the piece you have in the latest National Review, and we talk about the Democrat
socialists of America. They're cuddly and cute, right, I mean, you got that charming guy in New York. That's a very human face for socialism. I want more of that kind of cuddly socialism. We got a nice smile, he cares about people. Ah, the DSA that we have here in the Twin Cities and Minneapolis where I live are not a happy, cuddly bunch of people. And they're insane.
But I'll let you tell me about these radicals who are not just at the door, got one foot in it in some places, and in other places are sitting by the fire, you know, lighting up a pipe and looking at what trinkets they might take from your mantlebies.
Yeah, I haven't tried to cuddle with any DSA members recently or ever, but I do think that most Americans are under the impression that the DSSAY is little more than the leftmost faction of the Democratic Party, which might make them extreme or radical in their ideology, but within the bounds, perhaps pushing the bounds of regular, acceptable, if
radical politics. But when you look at what the DSA actually says and does, what its institutional messages are, what its leadership says regularly, and in fact the kinds of things that you say if you want to be promoted within the ranks of the DSSA, it's actually it's not a left wing flank of the Democratic Party itself. It is aiming to take over the Democratic Party in a hostile fashion and replace it with a truly revolutionary anti
American group. And I don't say those words lightly, and I know that sounds like some kind of neo McCarthyist scare tactic, but they're quite open about it. They're quite open and saying we support America's enemies against it. We think that America is a terrible and bad thing, and we're here to take to take over the Democratic Party as our vehicle to execute upon that revolution. It's not normal politics.
I expect almost that one of them will come out some day and say what we have is a shining path for America's future. So can we draw a direct line between weathermen radicals of the sixties and the seventies and whatnot who eventually sort of cleaned up their act, sort of put on a nice disguise and strolled in
the long march through the institutions. Is there a direct line back to the sixties radicals ideologically or do they do they have different ideological well springs or does it not matter because at the end of the day, they're all, we got to get rid of the America with three k's and replace it with the people's wisdom and power.
Well, the Weathermen, as as you know, were weird. They had weird ideas about about politics, about sex, about all kinds of things.
Okay, but not those weirdos. How about the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Well, look, the DSA is weird too, perhaps in its own way, And I would say that the biggest difference between the weather underground, which never really went away. Some of its leadership obviously suffered legal consequences very briefly and then went on to the stay wished academic careers, but the animating ideology of the DSA kind of just retreated to campus for a few decades. The DSA takes on part of that. Obviously. They seem to be okay with
revolutionary violence if directed against disfavored classes of people. So you have members of the DSA quite openly celebrating the murder of two Israeli embassy employees last year. Right, there's a pretty regular utterance in DSA circles is free Elias Rodriguez. That's the name of the guy who just murdered two young people in cold blood because they worked at the Israeli embassy. And within the DSA, it's a perfectly normal thing to say, like, well, that's a direct action against
the illegitimate Zionist enterprise. Like who's who's to say that that kind of violence is unjust? That kind of thinking, I think can fairly be traced to an intellectual tradition that might be a little bit too generous generous, but an ideological tradition that the weathermen belong to. With that said, the current dssay also has quite a bit of open Marxist, Leninist,
and often Maoist language. I'm not familiar with the weathermen being particularly inspired by now perhaps I'm wrong about that, but that is a major influence among DSA rising stars. The other is Islamism, is that the DSA has very apparently strong Islamist ties. They seem to be really concerned with what's going to happen with Iran, particularly if the United States exercises its hegemony over the Western Hemisphere and cuts off the flow of oil between Iran, Venezuela and Cuba.
That really raises hackles in DSA circles. And occasionally they'll just send people over to Iran to hobnob with the with the Mullahs there and explore the ways in which their interests are aligned in fighting the Great Satan.
That's I I will throw this to Steve in a second, I promise, and then I'll shut up. But I just have to say, do they not understand that the Islamists stray and that they are that they are aligning themselves with is profoundly illiberal in all of the ways that they hate. If they don't like America because it's patriarchal, it's racist, it's homophobic, it's transphobic, it's it's it's it
wants to impose a religious theocracy. And yet they turn around and make common cause simply because they have the oppressor oppressed matrix going on in their head. Can they not think one step beyond that and say, we are getting in bed with the people who will kill as at the earliest popular possible opportunity.
Yeah, it seems absurd, And I think the key in trying to to mention the challenge, the problem, the threat that DSA represents is to try to take their way of viewing the world seriously, which is not just to say that they're like absurd or idiots, But what is
it that they could possibly be thinking. Is it that their hatred of America is just their number one animating principle and whatever follows from that, whatever Molotov Ribbentrop pacts have to be signed to affect that outcome, they'll take it. Maybe it's that maybe they have these beliefs that you and I and reasonable people will recognize as as Kakammy, that if Iran is simply liberated from the shackles of Western colonial influence, that they'll become progressive para coons. I mean,
it's like, it's laughable. I'm literally laughing talking about it. But I think we have to try to get inside their heads and seriously about what's going on.
Boy, I really don't want to be inside their heads. I don't know what you mean, but look, I mean, I think there's two parts to it. One is, I think that the left doesn't take religion seriously when they're not hostile to it, right, So I think they don't believe that the Islamists really do believe the Quran and
all the rest of that. That's one possibility. The other one is to take off something James said is I sometimes half joke but only half that every one of these revolutionary cycles that we see are just replays of the Spanish Civil War from the thirties, in which the perceptive people like Orwell and Arthur Kessler and a whole bunch of people you can think of who went to Spain wanting to fight on the side of revolution and discovered, oh, we're going to be the first people to communists kill
if they actually get power. Right, this has been seen over and over again, and they never seem to learn that lesson, and they don't realize that they will be the first people the Islamists, the Islamists will kill if they actually got power here or anywhere else. So there's an iavitae there, but I think you could your finger on it. The enemy, my enemy is my friend. Their hatred for America is qualifications number one through ten, and that's why the ally with them. And it's pretty perverse,
but I did well. Back to your article, though, my one sentence summary is that essentially the case you make is that what we used to think of was a wing of the Democratic Party is rapidly becoming It's or so right, it's it's no longer going to be a wing. It's going to be the mainstream of the party. And that's on purpose. I think back to the Students for Democratic Society, the poort hereon statement. You know, their first idea was let's take over the universities and make that
our power base. And you know that pretty much succeeded in that, and so the next step would be the Democratic Party.
What you know what, because that's where the chicks were anyway.
Okay, oh, I have so many friends you know a little older than me from the sixties and said the only reason they went to Andy warr rallies was to meet girls. Yeah, okay, those people are all conservatives now. But here's the point tal is in a question, Sorry I'm rambling too long. Is the party is seems to be rolling over pretty fast without putting up much resistance. Say more about that.
I mean, the Democratic Party appears to be ideologically defenseless against the DSA. Right, there are really two possibilities here that we're seeing play out as mainstream figures like President Obama, Governor Kathy Hochel in New York, various others have just rolled over and conceded all the dsay's premises and welcomed them almost as liberators, which is kind of a funny,
a funny phrase to appropriate for this instance. But they'll say things that really just ease the blow of the DSA taking over, like, well, you know, they're just they're just four more community control of our means of production. Right, we will frame them as more moderate than they really are, because frankly, we can't fight. They're going to steamroll us. And the reason for that is either that they see
that that's where the political wins are blowing. The Democrats have simply lost younger voters and ideologues, and anyone who's going to be left of center is going to go full DSA, and there just aren't any more kaffe Hocals out there. That's one possibility. The other is that ideologically they really see very little difference between their own position and the position of the DSA. Perhaps rhetorically and strategically they make different choices, but ultimately they're really two wings
of the same Torso. I don't know if that physiological metaphor holds, but we'll strain it right now.
I'm so old that I can remember sort of the leading figures I think within the DSA back in the sixties, or at least they were adjacent, and that was Michael Harrington, the famous author of The Other America that was so influential with the beginning of the War on Poverty, and then a little later ALERD. Lowenstein in New York, who was very far left but friends with William F. Buckley.
You know those were different times, right, Both of them managed to get themselves elected to Congress, but they were both I think you'd say serious people with a you know, an intellectual quotion. And I look now at the DSA and I don't see people of their stature. I see what I see here. You know, crazy people like Naomi Kleine,
and they all seem to be named Naomi. You're half of them to right, So I don't know who are the Do you see any sort of significant intellectual leadership on the DSA or is it all just crazy people.
Within the DSA. I don't see serious intellectual anything, leadership, promulgation of ideas. Nothing is serious. They have tons of publications. I mean, it is a treasure trove to just sift through the National DSSAYS archives, the many many chapters, many of which have their own zines. You gotta love a good revolutionary zone, and there's so it's a it's an absolute gold mine in there. All of it is total pseudo academic babble. And no, there are no individuals within
the organization who are are setting the pace ideologically. There are external publications that will try to run cover for DSA in its its kind of ideological program. Some of those, I'd say the most prominent of those are actually sham news sites like like drop site news Right, which is a partially George Soros funded operation that seems to have suspiciously close ties to Hamas and Hesbalat manages to get exclusive interviews with their leadership all the time, which is
kind of interesting. But they will they will put out what appear to be news articles that really push the boundaries of analysis towards a framing that is very friendly to basically everything that that DSA stands for, extremely hostile towards the United States oddly obsessed with revolutionary violence. The redemptive Phenanian uh Colonized defeats Colonizer with a healthy dose of Cuban and Venezuelan sympathy is thrown in there for quick measure.
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Hey, that was pretty good. It's so unattractive though, The whole Cuban Venezuelan mojo is so unattractive to people in this country. I mean, when you when you dress it up in a nice suit and a big grin, you say we're gonna have free busses for everybody, a lot
of people. Yeah, okay, whatever. But when you start that hardcore revolutionary talk, there is something in the American spirit that just instinctively turns away from it, except for the one or two or three percent who just absolutely love it because they get to see the right people killed, and they get to be in charge of all the things, and they are going to be so well set up after the revolution, when actually they're probably either going to
be in a pit or digging the pit. But that's why I don't really worry that it gets a lot of traction because of the core. The more they get back to that sixties style Harry chay Bovara stuff, the more people are repulsed by it at an atomic automatic level. But I have to ask, then, is there right now they're having the moment and everybody's you have all the zines, you have all the websites, and everybody's getting together and figuring out what it means to be a DSA. But
as we all know, there are inevitably splitters. What do you see could be one of those dividing lines that actually tends to take the movement. That fractures the movement, it loses some of its momentum power.
Well, there's still a little bit of an old guard left. They've basically lost their positions of power on the the NPC, the national I think National Political Committee is the name of the uh, the central.
Body and the NPC. They're the non playable characters.
That's great is that it also just has like such a great Soviet ring to it, right, like it just now obviously like we're talking about a party, so so to some extent that uh, that is inevitable. Most of them have been have been replaced by open Marxist Leninists or Maoists or you know, people who like to leave lots of blood emojis in there in their posts on social media, just to to tell you what they're all about.
Uh, And that.
Spooks some of the old guard. But ultimately I don't think that that's where DSA shows serias fault lines. The serious fault lines are going to be. I mean, this is like Alcove one, Alcove two, Alcove three, right, or you know the Popular People's Front of Judea versus the Judaean People's Popular Front, right, It's it's like, oh, do
we do we take now as our guiding light? Do we take Lenin as are guiding And obviously the more granular you get and the more high you get on your own recent political success, the more you think that it's urgent to hash out these infinitesimally small ideological differences.
That's kind of the great hope of conservatives and free market capitalists is that the communists will just tear themselves to death because it's it's almost in their nature as constant purity seekers, constant like true ideologues, people who are are really rigidly tethered to their their ideological foundations that eventually the differences between them will come to a four And obviously putting differences aside is the key to coalitional and party politics.
So that's the hope.
It's not obvious where that rift is going to emerge, though, you know, I'm.
Having flashbacks tell to I mean, I read about these things. I'm not old enough for this, but not just Mao versus Lenin versus Trotsky, but here in this country is you may know, back in the thirties it was the fights between the Shackedman Knights and the Lovestone Nights, right then Mother Joe all these crazy things, and Emma Goldman
crazy stuff. But I do think, you know, James mentioned the affinity people on the left had for so long for these four and utopias, and that brings me back to the famous book now, gosh, more than forty years old, but so am I by Paul Hollander and political Pilgrims. Right. And the point is, if you go back decades ago, a century ago, there were all the fellow Travelers we call them. They loved the Soviet Union until it became indefensible.
They love Cuba until you know, that came hard to defend. Two, they were Maoists for a while, until that became indefensible. And then he pointed out, you know, serious people saying Albania, that's our country that we're going to hold up as
the socialist utopia. And North Korea for a while. You know, at Peter your Collier and David Horowitz, who I knew very well back in their days in the left in the late sixties early seventies, they would sing these songs in praise of as it was a kim Il song whoever the guy was ran the North Korea for all those decades and so there. And the point is is today it's hard to point to a foreign left wing utopia they can point to, and I think in a way that most people haven't take account of that partly
fuels their anger and rage. I mean, they always had the anger and rage and were violent and all the rest of that, but they at least said they had someplace to point to is their model, And now there isn't one, is there? I can't It was in Venezuela. I mean they tried for like a couple months what's his name, Sean Pan and even Bernie Sanders, but that evaporated pretty fast. So they don't have a utopia anymore. So what are you going to do when you lose your God?
There is a strong well. I should say first of all that the North Korean dream has not completely died. The d Essays International Committee has sponsored multiple events aiming to rehabilitate North Korea's image in the West and trying to blame obviously blame every any suffering there of which there is shockingly little. But whatever suffering there is is the United States fault. And really, if the United States were just less imperialist, less supportive of South Korean capitalism
than the North Koreans would be living in paradise. With that said, China is the closest thing they have to a model. Now it's a totally invented version of of what China and the Chinese Communist Party have wrought. They'll say things like, oh, it's a true ecological society. It's the future of the world's worst polluter, right is. But if you just if you swallow CCP propaganda whole, which is essentially the policy of the DSA, we do not
believe anything that comes out of the United States. We believe everything that comes out of China, and they are living glorious future. I mean, this is like it's it's it's so dumb. It's really hard to believe.
That's the worst. It's it's really stupid. So we can hope then that actually this whole movement sunders and sputters because they're dumb enough to say, you know, North Korea is really getting a bad shake. I mean, North Korea is sort of a humorous meme, you know, an ex people that have fun with it. The actual horrors of
the regime, I think everybody realizes. And when you see the sneaked out video of these clockwork societies, it look like some nightmare out a wrinkle in time of the regimentation, and it's it's it's abhorred. Everything they point to is ap porrant. Everything that they point to and want manifests the sins they find in America times ten. So they're
dumb at the bottom angle of it. And if they were smarter, they would realize that they could just get away with an awful lot of things by wrapping it up in more of an American tradition and being the guys who come wrapped in the flag to tell us how we can be even better if we take these
ideas on. But what you're describing as a group of kids who just never got out of college and want to stay there in the dorm movement with the chap poster behind them and do bowing hits and talk about it what it'll be great when the man is dead, When dad is dead, I'm sorry, not dad. I'll just say yeah, yeah.
There's a lot of that too, for sure. I would say they're dumb in a smart way, which is everything is framed in an unfalsifiable fashion. Were it not for America's dominance, were it not for capitalism, all these things would occur. Now nobody knows that world, right, it's a totally counter factual universe in which the North Koreans are
free from American influence. But as long as you can frame your support for those hostile foreign nations as were it not for the United States as it is, they would be everything that we hoped we would have utopia here on earth. Then you can say the craziest things and just say, oh, well, all the bad things that you've heard about the CCP, all the times you've been told to distrust them, that's just American propaganda. It's all a conspiracy theory about American dominance.
So tell let me shift gears back to when inside our on borders and give you what I think we'll end up being an exit question, and it is is mom dommy the key to the near and intermediate term for this whole story. I mean, your article points out how the democratic establishment rolled over so quickly for him, he appears to be serious. He's not just a dorm room bs er. I mean, he's really trying to do this in New York City. And look, I mean, I'm sure he's going to fail, but it looks to me
like he's the in person. He's clearly the new Bernie Sanders, and he's going to be a national, international celebrity. And so is Bondamie the key to this whole story right now?
Well, he's certainly the model to the DSA takeover, right he presents a particular archetype of the DSA candidate, who's who's a true believer. He's got a history of that kind of street activism that's the highest vocation for aspiring DSA members. And then he ran a snappy campaign in a in a winnable place and gained a lot of power. Now, how he governs in the long run is to be seen, and whether that form of governing serves as a model
for other jurisdictions is to be seen twice over. But I do think that that is the key to understanding the political st ategy. How does the DSA run candidates, What are they encouraged to do when they govern at a particular level, what perhaps they are encouraged to keep in the in the quiver for when the DSA has a little bit more sway power a little bit more
of a of a coalition of its own. That is a really interesting and open question that clouds any semblance of moderation that we might see from from Montani, Like if he is truly a true believer, then then perhaps anything he's done that appears to be moderate is really strategic. That's not a crazy thing to think.
It's a new economic plan, right yeah, mber Leno's new economic plan in nineteen twenty one.
Right yeah, Well, I don't remember that. I'm a little.
Okay.
Nothing we've done is working, so let's try this and not call it capitalism. Dall has been a pleasure, and everyone should go to National Review and read this peaceable and get the comments here at bricochet dot com. And if you hit a paywall, well you know that's pony up. National Reviews got to keep the lights on. Two. I've been to their office. They're not palatial. They're nice, but there's no golden fountain. So Tell needs to get paid,
as do we all. And I'm sorry, I'm so sorry Tell that you know when you do your cleaning up this week, you're gonna have to listen to yourself. I'm afraid. And I know that I fast forward through that whenever I do so, grit it, Barrett and listen to yourself and be proud because it's been fun. We've enjoyed having you. We went forward to the mix that of man you want.
Thank you so much, guys, I'll look through the archives for this afternoon.
There you go. Okay, bye bye.
I'm Greg Corumbas. Join Jim Garrity of National Review and me each weekday for the Three Martini Lunch Podcast. We'll give you the good, bat and crazy news of the day and lots of laughs too. Find us right here on the Ricochet Audio Network at ricochet dot com or wherever you get your podcasts.
Well, before we go, a couple of things. Somebody mentioned Albania. I hadn't thought about Albania in a long time, and I thought, who is the guy who? And Verhosa right, and I thought, I remember that guy's name. You know that he was the Albanian because Albania was always one of those weird things out there. You never it wasn't one of your marquee comed states in the Eastern Bloc, you know. And the fact that they fastened on it is there is the future. Ah yeah, next, next, up Liberia.
So yeah, I don't wish that. I do wish sort of having you know, the cultural amusement we got out of having just a parade of gray suited door idiot functionaries in charge of countries that we could always sort
of make fun of. But it reminds me that whenever Mission Impossible or shows of that ILK of that time would go to a comic country, or for that matter, one in Central America, they would always they'd never they'd never name any of them, like they were scared of somehow losing the future Albanian distribution rights if they said, you're going to Albania, Peter with your staff and we you know, yeah, so yeah, we are not done because
we have to talk about a couple of things. One Gavin Newsom, I think everybody's sort of expecting is going to be, you know, a real contender for the Damson twenty the next presidential election, made a remarkable speech the other day where he was talking to an audience largely composed, if not entirely, of African Americans with an African American injured low future and said, look, I'm like you guys crap as at scores and I can't read.
I'm not you know, I'm not trying to impress you. I'm just trying to impress upon you. I'm like you, I'm no better than you. You know, I'm a nine to sixty SAT guy, and you know, and I'm not trying to offend anyone, well, you know, trying to act all there if you got nine forty, but literally a nine to sixty SAT guy, I cannot You've never seen me read a speech because I cannot read a speech.
I'm I'm still goggling over that particular speech and why anybody would think that was a wise thing to do, and why there hasn't been the blowback that you would think. There's been amusement and shrugging. Oh, I mean, I mean nobody. Maybe you're seeing something out there that I'm not. But I mean Newsom doesn't have that. Oh that's just Gavin talking off the talking off the cuff. He's kind of
a babbler, he's weird in that way. That's not his persona yet, So was this a calculated move and if so, what the hell were they thinking?
Well, okay, I can explain it all to you, but first I do have to say I don't think he's gonna end up being a top contender for the nomination. I think he's going to have a glass jaw the way Kambella did in twenty twenty. And you might not even make it to the first primary. But first of all, can I just set the scene for listeners? And I hate to do this to you, James, but I'm sitting here in my shorts in the morning, out here where
it's going to top out at eighty degrees today. Yesterday I was watching a pot of whales swim by my window in the middle of the day and the ocean out in front of my house. And yet people are leaving California. How is this possible?
Right?
Only you know all the other Sun Belt states are gaining population. We're losing it by a lot. Well, that's the legacy of Newsom. But when I heard that comment, my mind ran back to something you might remember too, or at least it was close enough to your sentient youth. It's when George Romney, the governor of Michigan in late nineteen sixty seven, even with Richard Nixon in the polls for the Republican nomination the following year, made the offhand
comment to Detroit TV station. Oh yeah, I went over to Vietnam and I just got the most thorough brainwashing. You can imagine his campaign collapsed instantly because I mean, of course, there were some great jokes. You know, Jean McCarthy, the air from your state, who really did have a great wit, said Romney didn't need a brainwashing, a light rents would have been just fought. Yes, great stuff. And you know he never recovered from that because you know,
it just made you look like a moron. So why is Newsome so far not gotten that kind of blowback? Well, so here's an interesting thing. You know, I've never been for the psychological theory we call projection, except maybe I think it's true. And so one reason liberals are always accusing the rest of us of being racist is because,
guess what, that's what they actually are. So a few years ago, actually twenty eighteen, so what eight years ago now, an African American professor at Yale and a woman social scientist at Princeton did a study that was a very thorough content analysis of speeches by Republican and Democratic politicians. And you know, they code all this stuff and you can contest the methodology, but come back to that in a minute. What it found was democratic politicians routinely talk
down to minorities. The way they characterized it was they profess a certain incompetence. In other words, they described in the study exactly what Newsome did the other day. And you know, they want to say, and I'm guessing these professors have liberal sympathies, probably if they're social scientists at Yale and Princeton, they're saying, oh, you know, these people are trying to be ealitarian and non racist, but they're betraying subtle racism in thinking the capabilities of minorities are
lower than everyone else. You remember the famous statement Biden made about poor kids are just as smart as white kids.
Right, yes, right, So I.
Mean I actually think that's what's going on here, and I think that's now deeply embedded on the left. They are paternalistic. They really do privately believe that minorities are not as capable without their help as everyone else. They don't believe. That's one reason they don't believe in treating people as individuals and equally in the sense of it.
So I think that's what's going on. But I do think that between that problem, which I think all of them share really, but I think between that gaff and just generally a nuisance record, I think he's going to get clobbered, maybe by another liberal. I mean, if JB. Pritzker runs, he's gonna say, Illinois may stink, but we don't stick as bad as California.
So yeah, run on Illinois. That's that's an interesting, interesting thing.
Yeah, well, I need to just add, by the way, about that study. You know, I see all these look I read a lot of these things, and I always say, I wonder how it turn out with a different methodology. No one, to my mind, has either replicated a study or done a study refuting it. I can point to a whole lot of social science studies that give a very anti liberal conclusion, and other social scientists avoid taking it up because I think they fear that they would ratify it if they did it.
I think you're right. Well, let's sort of predicate predicates underline the opposition to voter id that these groups are too stupid and too incapable to actually go and get vote voter idea. And there's a there's a second part of that too, which is, well, how exactly do they get the documents to get these voterer Id's, well, they get them from the government. As you're saying that the government makes it very hard to get them. Because the government isn't very good at this, why don't you get
better at at them? I know, well, you know, I think the main thing going for Newshim is his presidential hair. I think people look at that and say, we haven't seen presidential hair like that since Martin Sheen, and that's gonna get them a certain distance. But yeah, I would love to know that. You're right, Britzer doesn't have a particular amount of charisma for me. I can't see them putting up another white guy to go up against Vance, who would have a lot more bryo energy and sideways
knowing looks at the camera during debates. We'll see, we'll see long ways away. And I have no intention of thinking about it. In a beautiful day like today, it's sunny, and it's always sunny at Ricochet, he said, with a
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