Come straight from the fountain of youth. So I'm ready, I listenally have that's where it was.
It shows, Charles, you can tell we put the Voting Rights Act together because there was an issue because they were cheaping people from voting. They were literally shooting people. That problem is gone. It's not gone because you're still doing it.
The Supreme Court did the right thing in deciding that we should end rachel terry mandering. Chief Justice said, as we said, best weight to stop discriminating by race is to stop discriminating by race.
It's the Ricochet Podcast, number seven hundred and eighty seven, Steve Hayward sitting in the host chair today with Charles C. W. Cook and our special guest Spencer claybn. So let's have ourselves a podcast.
So that's good. That's the kind of ruling.
I like, when did that happen both this morning?
Really?
Is that right?
You tell me about the ruling.
Welcome everybody to the Ricochet Podcast. Steve Hayward hosting today for the vacationing I guess James Lilas with Charles C. W. Cook and Charles So, you know, another week, another assassination attempt. Hohum, Right, another piece plan from Iran that isn't. But I guess really the biggest news of the week for me, and I know for you is this Supreme Court decision on
the Voting Rights Act. And I have thoughts, but I suspect you have more of them, because I haven't had a chance to read the opinion yet.
Well, I did read it. I read it the moment that it came out, and I found the majority opinion persuasive, and I found the two paragraph concurrence by Clarence Thomas joined by Neil Gorsuch even more persuasive. Thomas did the thing he does every time and has been doing on this topic for thirty years, where he said yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, now go further.
Right.
In effect, the argument here is that the Supreme Court has merely assumed that Section two of the Voting Rights Act requires majority minority district and Alita says it doesn't. And he takes a swing at the Court in the eighties and correctly says that the holding opinion until now had been written at a time when the Court didn't pay that much attention to the text and breathed in all sorts of meanings that simply weren't there. That case
was a case called Gingles from I think nineteen eighty two. Anyhow, the logic works a bit like this. If the Voting Rights Acts second section does not require majority minority districts, then majority minority districts drawn by definition on the basis of race are unconstitutional because considering race in government policy is illegal. And Alita proposes that there are now only
two exceptions to that rule. One is race riots. In a sense, he says that government is allowed to make public policy on the basis of race to separate people if they're rioting on the basis of race, because it would be completely absurd to say, we can't stop this prison riot where the white prison population and the black population are trying to kill each other, because that would violate the fourteenth Amendment. This is a long standing rule,
it seems. And the other exception, he says is if there is a government policy that is designed to prevent an explicit and current racial discrimination, then you can consider race. But he says you can't consider race here, and I just think I think, first off, this seems to be
correct if you read through the opinion. The law itself has a provision in which it says that nothing in this Act should be construed to assume that the various racial populations of the United States are entitled to proportional representation along racial lines. So I think that the statutory argument is obvious. I also think this should just be celebrated given that the argument is clear. I'm amazed reading all these complaints that I say, if they did the opposite.
Every time, it seems the Supreme Court strikes a blow for racial equality, for color blindness, for treating citizens equally under the law, just as it did a few years ago in the affirmative Action case. The media says it stunees the opposite and treats it as if it's reintroducing Jim Crow. So, as an American citizen having been satisfied by Aluto's opinion, I think this is a really great
moment in American history. That once again, not that he's always great in the court, but we're John Roberts line that the way that you stopped discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Yes, well, of course, as I'm sure you know and many listeners will know, that statement of Roberts made many years ago. Now, yeah, represented a direct challenge to was it Justice Brennan or Bly I forget who back in the seventies had written the only way to get it beyond race and racism is to take account of race.
Right.
It was a convoluted or welly and logic to it. Now, let me play devil's advocate a little bit perhaps, and maybe you hinted to this in one of the things you just said, which is remedying clear cases of discriminatory intent.
If you'd go back to the fifties and sixties.
When the Voting Rights Act was written, one of the practices in the South that the authors of the Act had in mind was not just barious to voting for blacks in the South, but things like cities. I think Jackson, Mississippi, was one that had all at large elections for the city council, which meant that that although you had a substantial black population, it wasn't a majority, and they could never get a black elected the city council. So they said, no,
you have to have districts. Now, I don't think they specified they had to be racially jerrymandered, but that was I mean, I don't know. It seems to me that that is, while still perhaps problematic, a sensible thing to have gone after at the time. But that's very different than say, house districts let alone.
Right. We can't jerrymander senate districts, right, because the senate's the whole state.
Yeah, And of course there are cases such as Reynolds v. Sims, which I think is wrong, for it's worth got rid of the Senates in states, right, at least in so far as they represented the same sort of body as the United States Senate, where the populations that they represented were unequal. I think that it is of course entirely true that throughout Jim Crow, the states in the South that wanted to disenfranchise African Americans often did so while
pretending they weren't in gun control. This comes up time and time again. For example, there's a famous law in Tennessee passed in eighteen seventy in which the state legislature does not say because it knows this is prior to eighteen seventy six, so it's still largely occupied. It knows that it will pay a price if it does. It
does not say blacks can't have guns. What it says is that the only guns that you're allowed to buy are on this list, and the list just so happened to only contain guns that were issued to Confederate soldiers in the Civil War. Now that's a great example of the sort of law that would need to be struck down because it was facially racially neutral. And so that's the argument that you will hear. I think that it's
a fair one on its own terms. But I think that there are a couple of objections to it, and one of which makes it into Alito's opinion. The country's changed, and you now have the statistical outcome that those who wrote the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Sect wanted, which is that African Americans voted about the same rateless whites in many areas they vote. Now, if that were the basis for Alito's opinion, I think it would be insufficient.
I don't think it would be the role of the Supreme Court to second guess Congress if the argument here were Look, the Fifteenth Amendment allows Congress to make rules in this area, but we think that we're now so enlightened that those rules are unnecessary. So Congress doesn't have the authority. I think that would be outrageous because the fifteenth Amendment explicitly give to Congress the power to pass legislation in this area. But that's not Elita's or the
majority's opinion. The majority says the law doesn't say that. In other words, as a secondary argument, even if you believe that the court should ignore the text and do good things for the country, that justification is weak. I mean, you don't need to get there, though that's the thing, right, You don't need to get there because he's saying as a textual matter, it just doesn't say that the Congress
gets to superintend Gerrymanderin. It says that you're not allowed to deprive people of their right to vote, and they are criteria for that that are not Gerrymanderin. But if you're going to take an expansive view of the law and ignore the text, that doesn't make sense either, because we now don't have the same problem that we had
in nineteen sixty five. So I agree with you that was a real problem, and I think there are some circumstances in which courts ought to look at that, but I don't think it holds up here textually or otherwise.
Well, right, I mean you mentioned that black turnout has actually been higher than white turnout in a few recent national elections, and maybe that was a bomb on the ballot or Kamala Harris, but I think a more telling statistic. This is a little old, but I can't imagine it's gone backwards. But I remember when the Thornstroms, Abigail and Stephen Thornstrom, put out their blockbuster book American Black and White,
which is now almost a thirty year old book. But what some of the figures they assembled, including something like this, but something like there were only one hundred black elected officials in the Southern States in nineteen sixty and by the nineteen ninety five there were several thousand. So I mean that just the country's changed, you said, And that's one indication of it. And I think the figure I read the other day, and I haven't gone and tried
to check. You need Michael barn or Henry Olsen for this, but something like half of the black members of the House representatives today are actually from districts with a white majority or where the black population is a minority, which shows that you don't have to have a This is part of the racial essentialism of the left that is so destructive, and so it's a blow for that.
But at the risk of beating a dead horse. All of this is very important politically, but it's not something the court should consider. That is to say, I saw some people saying, look at how the Republican Party has changed. In nineteen eighty two, they were happy to expand the Voting Rights Act. And in two thousand and two the Bush administration, maybe six two thousand and six, the Bush administration renewed the Voting Rights Act preclearance statute. And now
it wouldn't even get a vote. That's where it matters that the country has changed. But it shouldn't matter here because the constitutional argument is and ought to be very clear, and it runs like this. The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fifteenth Amendment ban the use of race in government decisions. That is superior as a principle to all statutes, including
at the state level. So the only way that you could have a constitutional ability to mandate, as Louisiana had been mandated, racial gerrymanders is if the Congress, acting under the auspices of the Fifteenth Amendment, did that, and it didn't. I mean, this is the thing, right, Like all of the hand waving falls at that point. It just didn't do it. It didn't you. You can't get past the fourteenth and fifteenth Amendments ban on the consideration of race
unless Congress did it under the fifteenth Amendment. I just didn't do it. And to me, this is the big fight duris prudentially between left and right, and it's why on this topic I am so firmly on the right. I think that you either believe that the law is an objective thing that can be understood by the common man,
and I don't say that disparagingly. That's the whole point of writing the law down is so that non lawyers, non commentators, can point to it in a court, can stand up and say no, it says here that I'm not expected to do that, and you can't do that. To me, the only point of having a rule of law is for that. And you know, if you read the dissent, there's a lot of harroring history in it that I really do believe we should be cognizant of.
But it can't get past that basic fact that the law doesn't say what it had been assumed to have said. And you know, that's why I'm a conservative, and it's why I'm an originalist, and it's why I'm a text to list on statutute grounds, and it's why I really like this Supreme Court majority we have because time and time again that is their loads start. Is it in the law? No right that it doesn't count?
Well?
One last question to bring up on this. Having now planted the right flag in the right place on the Voting Rights Act and the application of the protection Clause, I think the next step is to revisit the doctrine of disparate impact, which we got from the Griggs case
back in the seventies. Right, so you know, in the thumbnail sketches, disparate impact said if there's a I think the original intent was, if there's a statistical disparity between populations and employment schools or whatever, that would be a trip wire for investigating whether conscious race discrimination has taken place.
Of course, it didn't stay there and longer than about thirty seconds, and disparate impact statistical variances became assumed to be proof that discrimination was taking place was taking place, and therefore the legal justification for race conscious remedies lots of consent decrease with corporation, cities, fire departments, et cetera.
So, and I know, I don't.
I've got to think somebody is working on a case, whether it's our friend Ed Bloom who brought the Harvard case or our friends at the New Civil Liberties Alliance who brought similar cases.
But it seems to me.
That that one ought to be next on the list of things to review and overturn.
Yeah, because what you described is Zebram Candyism. That's Abram Kendy's view that if there is anything in the country that does not fall on perfectly mathematical lines, then it must be the product of racism. And that's absurd. Now, that's not to say, and Alito left room in this decision for extreme examples. That's not to say that there couldn't be a situation in which statistical imbalance is were the product of racism, and that the government would have
a role in trying to remedy that. But the Greeks decision effectively says if there is any evidence for whatsoever, or there's an allegation even, that's how we must proceed. And you'll correct me if I'm wrong, But isn't that why we can't use is it IQ testing or Santa rized testing in the hiring of government officials.
Well a lot of companies too. The testing regime is directly implicated on this. I mean, I do remember a chairman once of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission who said, yes, I've used disparate impact as a again as a trip wire. And then on close investigation we discover some obvious, conscious, deliberate discrimination for which there are remedies under the Civil Rights Act. And that EEOC chairman was a guy named Clarence Thomas.
Yes, that's right there you go. Well, and we've got a problem too now because we're pretending once again that the country is the same as it was in nineteen sixty or eighteen sixty. And this is the great sin of Ibram Kendy and of Chinese coats. In my view, the poll tax was obviously designed to disenfranchise African Americans at a time where there was no money being put into public education for non whites. You can't have that system in a free country. But that's simply not the
case anymore. In fact, quite the opposite is true, So that case should go. It's offensive to the Constitution, it's offensive to the Declaration of Independence. It's offensive to what we teach our children, which is to judge people based on the character, not on their race. And I hope I'm with you. I hope there's a case coming.
Yeah, so Charlie, our guest is here, and so we'll have to draw a veil on the subject until some sequels that will inedibly arise. So we'll be right back. We welcome now to the podcast. Spencer Claven, the editor at large of The American Mind, associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books, and a prolific podcaster and substacker
by on spent, I'm jealous of you, Spencer. How productive you are the author of two recent books and also several current articles, including one just out today Friday while we're taping that we'll talk about. One is How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for five modern crises. Also Light of the Mind, Light of the World, illuminating science through faith. So welcome, Spencer.
How are you? Oh?
Thanks, Steve, it's great. Sue doing well. It's a It's been a big, an eventful week, And all I can say is, don't don't envy me my productivity, it comes at a heavy costs.
Yeah, I think I can understand that too. Uh So let's let's start with something that's uh topical. I mean, you've written these great pieces about the roots of Western civilization, and I want to spend a little time on that. But you have an article out today I just caught up with on this guy, Hassan Piker, who is no Piker when it comes to wokeness if I can make a pun. And I've heard about this guy, and I'm amazed.
We're told that the era of wokeness was over, that peaked in twenty twenty, but from the looks of things, it is not over at all. So tell us a little bit about Piker and why you think he is, you know, the id of the Democratic Party or the left today.
I said at the outset, I would really love to be wrong about this. So if you can, if you can persuade me that I am, I'd appreciate it. Like this seems like a pickle for the Democrats just from where I sit, because I've been following Hassan for a bit. He just had this big moment with the New York Times and Ezra Kleine wrote, I thought, really kind of
gross article excusing him. He's a twitch streamer. If people don't know who he who he is, He's big in certain internet circles, Marxist, kind of clickable, very camera ready, sort of podcast bro, and he's been one of the candidates I think for the left Joe Rogan. That's how Climb framed him. But yeah, he was on the New
York Times podcast. I guess it was with this writer Gia Tolentino, and the two of them were just kind of I mean, it was Champagne socialism on steroids, perhaps literally, since Piker's a big weightlifter, and they were just kind of joking together about micro looting and which is shoplifting basically. Charlie actually has an incredible piece about it at National Review if you want a full rundown of all the
appalling things that were said. And I think for a lot of people not in the twitch very online world, this was first exposure to this guy and what he's like. But it wasn't actually the worst of how he can be. I mean, subsequently people have been seeing that he likes to joke about letting the streets run red with the blood of landlords, and he likes to call for the death of the public figures. He dislikes, you know, genuinely
a bad guy. And what's funny about him is, like you, Steve, do a ton of podcasting, Charlie two, Like we all talk a lot on camera, so sometimes you say things that you don't you kind of regret afterwards. You're ranting a little bits very loose medium. You know, I can say with true confidence that you could search my entire recorded over and not once would you find me accidentally wishing that the streets would run red with the blood of my enemies. So we can kind of, I think,
conclude this guy's the real deal. And what I proposed in that piece is that I don't I think people like Ezra Klin would really like to be rid of this wing of the Democrat Party, or at least for it to take a back seat. I think after Trump's twenty twenty four victory, there was a lot of soul's arching over did we go too far in the woke direction? Was this unpopular? Did we alienate a lot of our
working class voters. Answers to all those questions seem to basically be yes, and that moment has sort of gone the way of the twenty sixteen moment, when the Democrats were so concerned about flying out to the flyover states and talking to your your average voter and figuring out
just what this whole movement's about. Like it has proven really hard, I think for the Democrats to ditch the peak woke for a couple of reasons, one of which is that there's just a lot of energy and momentum and kind of esthetic appeal on the side of peak woke. Much as it might surprise us to learn this, like a lot of the attractive, young, passionate, stupid people of whom there are many, are kind of in this vein
and following Piker. Obviously, he's got a huge, a huge following, and Piker is moving in the same circles as Alexandria, Cassio Cartez, as Rong Mom, Donnie, these very buzzy politicians who have you know, associated themselves with him and I think basically agree with most of what he has to say. On top of that, all the guys that would like to now be more moderate, or many of the Democrats that would like to be more moderate in the wake
of Trump's second victory. Have the problem that when they thought Trump was gone forever, when they thought they had succeeded in banishing him from politics, that I'm talking about, Like you know, in the Biden years, after the fervor of twenty twenty, a lot of these guys went on camera and said things that now in retrospect look deranged. It's not just Kamala Harris, like, you know, let's trans the felons or whatever it was, let's give state sponsored
sex changes to people in prison. It's you know, the demo, it's Pelosian Schumer kneeling and Kent take cloth and you know, pledging their support for the George Floyd rioters.
You know.
So that's kind of on camera. And this is the last piece of it. Not only is peak woke on camera, but a core part of peak woke is that if you walk it back even at all, if you moderate even slightly, you are a murderer. You're a tantamount to like Hitler, right, and you're alongside all those other Hilarians
that voted for Trump. So now there's they're in a bit of a bind that makes it difficult either to like disavow wokeness or to cozy up to people like Piker without giving the game away, and their efforts to court more moderate voters or people who are alienated by this.
So I suspect that much as like Ezra Klein might wish to kind of reframed toward an abundance agenda or a Democrat populism or whatever, you know, the Hassans of the world are at least not going away, and they might actually be the only viable brand left for the Democrats, which would be bad for everybody.
Can I ask you your take on him, Spencer, Do you think he's stupid? I'm just asking that facetiously, because on the one hand, he says truly evil things and seems to have a justification for them, I think a terrible one. But for example, he said in that interview and is said elsewhere that the CEO of United Healthcare was killed Brian Thompson deserved to be killed, he says from one perspective, but he's really endorsing it because he was guilty of social murder, and that idea he ascribes
to Frederick Engels, so he's he's got the citations. On the other hand, he says things that no serious socialist would ever say. For example, he says that it would be great if people robbed the Louver. Now that one is stupid, because if you look at the Louver, what is it. It's a government run institution that keeps priceless artifacts out of the hands of private billionaires and shows
them to the public for free. I mean, so is he is he just stupid and just saying things for shock value, or is this an actual intellectual movement that needs countering by serious people.
Hmm.
You know, I'm embarrassed to say that point about the loop had not actually occurred to me. So maybe I am also like trailing in the wake of Hassan. I mean, yeah, I don't know if you saw Charlie that shot he posted of himself. I think it was on a train leading lennon what is to be done?
Luggage?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, with some ring that seemed apparently costs upwards with like, you know, fifteen hundred dollars. And there is an eminently mockable quality to him that I think he knows about a little bit, Like there's a way in which online it pays to be a bit of a bozo, and he's got that going for himself. He definitely leans into the himbo kind of esthetic, which would suggest a certain degree of idiocy. Like before this moment with the New York Times, there was another Times profile
of him, breathlessly discussed. I mean, I will never write copy as funny as the New York Times article about how hot Hassan Piker is. It's really a work of art if you want to go look it up, especially the captions on the photos. But anyway, I suspect Charlie that he's probably read more than most of his audience, which is a low bar. But I do think from the twitches to the streams that I've watched of his
I think he's very fluent. He's very actually, you know, eloquent, And when he cites guys like Engles, he's not citing nothing right. He's not kind of pulling stuff out of thin air or just riffing like all socialists. He hasn't thought his ideas all the way through. If he had, he wouldn't be a socialist. But then I think there's
like this extra component of if. Maybe this is way over intellectualizing it, but there's this this Boudriard theory that online well, a theory derived from Boudriard that online everything becomes hyper real, like it gets so over the top that it becomes detached from the original signifiers. And at that level in that space, like is it possib do you think that looting the louver doesn't actually mean looting
the louver? Like it's serving some kind of symbolic role of this is an image of the Western civilization that I despise. And so you know, at one point he says something like let's go full chaos, and I think there's like more of a like maybe in a Trumpian sort of way. It's like taken seriously but not literally. There's like a kind of poetry, a dark poetry to the way he's talking. That's my guess.
Yes, Spetcer, when you said a moment ago you hadn't thought about his lover comment or the louver angle, I thought, oh, wait a minute, you actually have the answer to that problem in one of your articles out in front of me. It's your one on the Renegade Academy. Although Charlie, did you want to follow further on Piker or no?
No?
Please?
Go okay, Well, then I'll change subjects because it does connect to a couple of your more recent pieces that fascinate me, the Renegade Academy in the latest Claremont Review books, and then one you wrote a month ago, now Gosh, time flies, on the Age of America. And I have to say, let's see how to summarize this for listeners. It's on the American mind, and we'll link to it in the show notes. And it's getting a lot of commentary.
I know that, and I was asked to do a comment and I just didn't have time because the usual problem.
But you.
Really pushed my buttons in a couple of the right ways, ones that gave me hope. I'm one of those old fogies now who says, you know, all these younger generation, they don't know what's going on, And you.
Give me hope. And this piece because you picked.
Up on something I've been talking about for more than a decade, which is revisiting the famous end of history thesis of Francis Fukuyama, which has been misunderstood and misapplied for a long time. But you picked up on the last page essentially where he said, you know, maybe the triumph of liberalism is not going to be what it's
cracked up to. Be and a lot of people are going to find it dissatisfying, and that, in fact, liberal individualism was going to be revealed to be, as Leo Strauss famously put it, the joyless quest for joy.
And so the question I was going to ask you was, do you.
Think that does explain some of the disaffection we see of the youth of the day, especially some conservative youth, right. I mean, you know, you know well that a lot of young conservatives are very disaffected from the American founding, from classical liberal tradition. They're contemptuous that some of them are right. That's what the post liberals are all about. So anyway, congratulations for that, and say a little more about that thesis.
Thanks.
Yeah.
Well, first of all, I should inform you that I am officially an aging millennial, which means I'm definitely cringe and not anymore. I wear short socks, so that makes me old. And I actually had the experience of being in my parents' gym and thinking, Wow, this playlist is great. Whatever Spotify they've got going on, it's awesome. I love all of these songs. And then the DJ came on and said, you're listening to the oldies. And I thought, well, no,
it happened. So you know, I speak not quite on behalf of the youth, but I do think, yeah, I'm part of this cohort that you are describing that raises some alarm for me and for others, you know, of your bent. Like the thing that everyone forgets about that Fukuyama book is that it's called the End of History and the Last Man. Right. People remember that it's the end of history, and they think, yeah, this guy was
a fool. He believed we had terminated. First of all, he believed that history was traveling in a direction, and second of all, he thought it had a terminus and now it's over. But he wasn't really saying that at all. He was kind of wrestling with Hagel after the enthusiastic optimism of the Enlightenment had died down. And another essay
I cite in that piece is by John Judas. I guess it is who talks about Trump as a Hegelian figure, and he says, you know, if you take this theory, this Hegel theory, that we kind of go through these big stages of history and there are major players like Napoleon that kind of shunt us into a new era. If you take that theory and you just sheer away all of the idea that there might be an upward positive trajectory, then you're left with something actually much more
turbulent and disturbing. And for Fukuyama, what this meant was that, you know, if it's true that liberalism solves some problems which had previously been the major drivers of politics, if it resolves these these big questions about like what is a just way to decide, questions of how we how we should live, you know, then it removes a lot of sorts of conflict and tension that was previously kind of occupied the minds of the great statesmen and thinkers
of the West. And there might be people then who would feel a bit listless, like what are we going to do now?
You know?
And these are the last men, or rather these are the post last men. They're sort of those who would regress to like he called them first men, right. So I do think that like we're seeing a lot of that energy in not just the Pikers of the world, but the Fuenteses of the world. I mean, I think
like Piker and Fuantes have a lot in common. You could I probably don't need to draw the parallels for you, and I think that in both cases, like there's a LARPing element, right, there's this live action role play situation where these guys are like, it goes back to kind of what Charlie and I were talking about. It's like, maybe maybe robbing stealing from the louver doesn't actually mean
stealing from the loop. Maybe like this whole thing is sort of a just a cree occur, which doesn't make it less paulling, but yeah, does perhaps explain some of the why the youth have gone so mad?
Well, I thought it fit under you know, you referenced Roger Scrutin and your Claremont Review article. It goes under his heading of the culture repudiation, which is whatever it is, we're he'll smash it up.
Right.
There's another part of your one other part of your essay I want to bring up with a big question. You have a couple of paragraphs about the way you put it as America proceeds from years zero or even more of the year zero country. I think you're hinting than the French Revolution, which openly said that they were right.
But then you also say in some respects America is pre liberal and I thought that was an interesting thing because one question I'm asking everybody as we come up to the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration here in a couple of months, is how do you fall out under this debate that's going on between people who say America is a creedle nation, like our friend
Richard Sandelson, or that America is a heritage nation. And right you have John Vice President Vans talking about heritage Americans, that we're a product of history and not so much of natural rite or rationality. Do you where do you fall in those camps? Are you in one of them? Or are you a synthesizer as I try.
To be, Yeah, I definitely to answer quickly, I'm a synthesizer. I think that to be even to be like pretentious about it. I'm sort of an Aristotelian. I'm a hylomorphist. I think that there's body and soul. Everything is form and matter, right, everything's a compound of sort of the spirit and the body. And I think of the creed of America as its form, and the people and the history and all the material circumstances as it's matter that
is shaped by the creed. So I think that's kind of what I'm trying to drive out in that piece and what I'm trying to work out as the two fiftieth approaches. That quote you mentioned, actually I picked up at a conference that Charlie organized about Fusionism, and it's Frank Meyer who talks about kind of America as he gives this potted history of the West, and then America is basically this little spacecraft that gets ejected at the very end of the old world, carrying like a time
capsule everything that's good about it. And there's a speech by John Quincy Adams that I cite there too, which is also kind of tells this story that like the best of what the West could be was struggling to be born, but was too encumbered by old prejudices on the continent to really take route and find its full form. And it was only in America that like the West, reached its final boss form. And to do that it had to cut off the jettison the space ship. Whatever
the right spaceship metaphor is right. And I think that that's like true and not true. You know, again, you could draw a parallel here between the Creedle Nation versus the Heritage Nation. Right, the Creedle Nation is a fresh creation. It's genuinely an advance in American or rather in Western intellectual history. The Heritage Nation is not. It's meaningfully steeped in English common law and the folk ways of the sort of four major branches that are described in Algean Sea and all that stuff.
You know.
So I think it's I'm definitely both, and but there's a quistionness to that that I think doesn't always satisfy.
Oh no, you know, friends of ours, what we know well or dug in on some of these questions.
But let me shift heres a bit.
And then I want to let Charlie get in the word edgewise again and go to your article The Renegade Academy, which of course is actually a long extensive review of the new two volume book out by James Hankins and aligelzo on the Golden Thread, the History of the Western Tradition. And yeah, I've read a couple of little bits of it, and I mean it was an unusual pairing. You know, they're from two different fields of history, but they're the right people to do what I think for a bunch
of reasons. But along the way, it's one particular thing I want to pick up on, although I'll just mention in passing, I was thrilled when you mentioned Whittaker Chambers and that famous letter to Buckley where he says, you know we're going to rot from.
Within and so forth. I have tried to tried.
I have assigned Whittaker Chambers to students a few times, and I find that they just don't get it. I have to explain it a great length, and even then they kind of shrugged their shoulders because for today's students, but what the Berlin Wall came down on thirty five years ago, No, thirty seven years ago, it might as well be the crusades of the Middle Ages now, right,
And it's just too remote. And you know, I will freely confess to being a baby boomer for whom the Cold War was the dominant matrix of how we had to think through everything. Right, wasn't just enough to refute Marx, We had to really understand the radical mind. Okay, Anyway, you then get off talking about Well, both Gilzo and Hankins have left the Ivy League for the Hamilton School at the University of Florida. You know, Charlie and I are involved with one of these similar efforts at UT Austin.
And you ask a very important question towards the end, which is these sort of civic schools that are being established at public universities in Red states and a few private universities are trying this too, And you asked a very important question. I'll just quote it. The next question is whether the Renegade Academy will succeed? Were the renegades? Now that's the point for listeners to be clear, is that are these renegade efforts going to succeed?
And you know, I've visited a lot of them.
I'm in one, You've been around a lot of them. Walk us through how you see that playing out?
Sure? So.
Funnily enough, this is a little visual joke that about five people will get on the front page of the CRB, which is where this article lives. There's a piece that we have reused with the art that goes with the piece is also associated with a different piece, and it's
a guy. It's a guy to tweet jacket bulldozing a kind of Corinthian column, I think, or an ionic Greek column and originally that was attached to a piece about radical leftists destroying kind of the Western Academy, and now it's been attached to this piece about kind of, as
you say, us becoming the renegades. The conservative professors are sort of in exile because the takeover has been so complete, the march of the institutions has been so complete, and now you get these guys like Hankins, like Deelzo, like you, and I'm sort of trailing along, you know, in the as well among kind of teachers professors at scrappier institutions like UATX where I teach, where we're really trying to kind of revive the liberal arts in the deep sense
of those pursuits that are fitting for free people, right, that train this soul for freedom, and to do so and blushingly and to really kind of endorse the old ways, if you will. And I think there are kind of two possible ways I could see this going. I mean, there's technically free because it could just fail utterly, and that would be that would be terrible, and I hope that doesn't happen. But there's two ways that could succeed, right.
One would be that the renegade Academy itself is so successful that it takes on all the prestige which once attached to say the IVS, which I think have lost a lot of their luster after the Claudine gay scandal and the many other sort of you know debacles. Basically since I left Yale, it's all been downhill. You know, right after the year after I left, they had this Halloween costume flare up, and you know, the obvious have
started to lose public trust. So one possibility is this is just the replacement, This is kind of the new IVS. But the other one is that the sort of renegade venture is successful enough and attracts enough attention and enough talent and bleeds off enough really top tier students that would otherwise go to IVS that the IVS themselves have to kind of take notice and reform in order to compete. You're seeing a little bit of that happening at Yale.
They just conducted this big internal after the piece came out, they conducted this sort of internal review and concluded that they were too biased and they needed more ideological diversity. We'll see where that goes. You know, the students that come to UATX and I'm sure you've experienced this too. Are superb. I mean, they're genuinely they could be anywhere. So it's not like this really is a going concern.
And I think I'm a little bit more hopeful about this second option, that this kind of forces some reform across the board in the academy because the market is free.
Yeah, so right, I mean I think, well, the competition, right, We're all for competition, and just this school choice for K twelve this is a variation of that and higher intellectual choice in higher education, and yeah, I think it's going to attract the students who used to want to go to liberal arts colleges to actually learn the liberal arts from people who liked the teaching, who had broad
gauge minds. And so here I have a heterodox proposition that doesn't contradict anything you said, but I've thought so. My data point is my wife was at Stanford in the eighties and was there when Jesse Jackson went, and you mentioned it in your article and said, hey, hey, ho hoo, Western sieve has got to go. And what she said, and I've heard of from a lot of students back in the late seventies early eighties that the
Western sieve required courses weren't very good. And I think the reason for that is some of the reasons that you know about is the specialization of the academy, the rewarding of niche radical things, and so you didn't I think the professors, many of them, were no good at him, and they boarded students to death, and a lot of students just shrugged their shoulders, said why are we required to take it from? And often these courses would be taught by graduate students and not by professors, or the
senior professors didn't want to teach it. You know, it's a rare person like John Taylor at Stanford who likes to teach econ one oh one to a thousand students there, Right, it was very rare to find those kind of Hankins was like that at Harvard. He would teach survey type courses of the old School, and those people that dwindled and as you pointed out, were not hired. And so now I think all these schools look to me like they're creating that older culture.
By the way, I look a lot of observation on Yale. I mean I looked through it.
I know a couple of people who are on that committee, like Beverly Gage. She's not a conservative, but she's not a leftist. She's not a liberal. She's doing a biography
of Ronald Reagan for Simon and Schuster. That's very rare for academic historians now, right, David Bromwich, who's a liberal but is always written intelligently about Edmund Burke, for example, Yale was really kind of the outlier among the ivs, whereas Harvard, as Hankins put out, that he's the last of the old school types, right.
Yeah, And so that's my hope for them too.
But I'm also worried that, as you may know, there's intense hostility to these centers, you know at Ohio State and the University of Toledo and at Florida and even at U T Austin, but you know, the politics and Texas, there's so much wind at they're back to. I think our friends there are going to succeed in a big way. But that's a thing that worries me.
That's really interesting. You know. It speaks to something I touch on on the piece, which is that a lot of these surveys that got deleted in the convulsions of the sixties and the eighties were already concessions. They were the last ditch effort to save this what was previously simply the remedial curriculum. And yeah, it's like Harvey Mansfield is the last guy standing or was the last guy standing who taught intro courses at a high and enthusiastic,
exciting level. And you're making me think, you know, for me at least, intercourses are the most fun to teach and have fun.
Yeah, I think so too, right, But that's where people like you and me really differ from leftist faculty who want to do their narrow stuff.
A quick story then that Charlie wants to jump in. I was.
I forget now when it was or what the occasion was, but I was on zoom at some deliberation about whether a university should hire conservatives explicitly, and you know, I was one of those at the University of Colorado, and one of the persons speaking was PIPA. Norris, who's very eminent in the government department at Harvard, And so I asked, Harvey Mansfield is retiring soon, is the department going to
try and hire somebody like him. And there's a long pause, and she said maybe, and I said I'll take that as a no until I hear different, and then we moved on. So, Charlie, how do we.
Make it clear to the public that the institutional cachet on which the useless types that were implicitly condemning rely has gone.
Now.
I'm a big opponent of credentialism. I think that it is not only hollow per se, but that it leads to a societal instinct that doesn't suit America. For example, I think it is completely absurd that we instinctively believe that somebody who went to college is better in some
manner than somebody who become a plumber. And I don't think you can run a proper society if you believe that the left great trick is to take over these institutions, then to be mediocre or worse, but then to point to the institution and say, well, yes, But I'm at Yale.
And I was talking to someone the other day who is a centrist, but it is very critical of conservatives, and he said, you know, your problem is that the public still thinks that what's in the New York Times is true and still thinks that if it comes out of Harvard then it's correct, and still thinks that Hollywood is cool and you are never going to get over that. And I don't know if that's true or not, but I do think we haven't made as much progress there
as we need to. How do we do that? Because I love all of the institutions you just mentioned, and I work with them, but I still notice that if at the I'm about to use a cliche, but if at the cocktail party someone says, well, yes, my son just got into Dartmouth, everyone goes ooh.
Oh, yeah, it's very hard to get.
Yeah, that's what I mean. That's what I mean. It's even it's funny. You go to these conservative events and the first forty five minutes is spent condemning all these institutions, and then someone says, well, my son just got into Dartmouth, and everyone goes, congratulations.
I'm once on a podcast which shall not be named, where I had you know, sometimes you wait in the wings and the is doing a routine somewhere else about something else, and so help me. The host was talking all about the terrible rot at the Ivy leagues and the institutions and the way that they've been captured, how grotesque it is. And then she said, and my next
guest is Spencer Claven She went to Yale. This is emblematic of I mean, this is the skin suit problem, right, yes, is like the right people worthless people take institutions of worth, hallow them out, and then use the kind of appearance of worth like like zombies where he's gets I mean, I don't have a good answer to this question because brands are so powerful. It really does still sit even
with me. You know, when somebody has a fancy name on their resume, I have to stop myself from thinking like, oh, this is a smart guy I needed. You know. The only thing that I can point to is I suspect we haven't yet really spent enough time or realized how much depends on our being exceptionally good at whatever it is we're trying to do in you know, as a parallel institution. And I say this because like there's a phenomenon in the arts, let's say, where cancel culture is
a thing. We all know this. It's clear that there are conservatives who've gotten blacklisted for no other reason than that they wouldn't take the COVID vaccine or they but said something that was perfect and in jectable. And also, at the same time, there are a lot of mediocre conservative artists who find it extraordinarily convenient to account for
their actual failures by way of reference to cancelation. And that's not so much of a problem except that it ends us up in a situation where when somebody tells you I've got a world class novel that Presses won't publish, your immediate reaction is to think, oh no, like an head for the door, you know, because it's always going to be some guy, and so like, we have to be sending our best right. And one of the things that's heartening in academia, as I was just alluding to,
is like we've only really just begun. I said this in the piece about Hankins and Gelzo. It's like these guys are actually the real deal. You know. They're not particularly political actually until they became politicized by their opponents. And the thing about the Golden Thread, which I have next to me and I would hold up except that I would slip a disc because it's like two thousand pages. The thing about the Golden Thread is that it really does deliver on its promise at a very high level.
And my hope is, like I actually think that we haven't really been doing that to the level that we that we could be, and my hope is that as we continue to do so, we'll get a little bit more cloud, or will force the institutions with cloud to high respect.
Right, nothing succeeds like competition, and Spencer, you are a golden thread of your own.
I'll just put it that way, and thank.
You for joining us at spending a half hour with us here in the Ricochet podcast.
Don't rely on me if you need directions as.
Okay, okay, thanks Spencer, We'll see you soon.
This is a delight.
Thanks well, Charlie.
Let's get out this week, but checking in briefly with the Iran war, and look, we've got this now a stalemate with the blockades and the Gulf. We have rising gas prices that are increasing the political problem that you had predicted all along, and I think you're right about that. I do think there's one notable thing this week. I think it's quite significant, and it was the United Arab
Emirates exiting their membership in Opek. And I think this is the end of a longer saga that really does a lot to Trump, but also the oil industry going back twenty years, we would I'm old enough to remember the gas lines of nineteen seventy nine and the price shops. So yeah, gas is expensive now, and that's politically potent, but we don't have gas lines, we don't have shortages. Oil is priced on the world market, which is why
our costs are going up. But we actually, now because we are energy dominant, don't have to face the strategic danger that we did in the seventies, whereas our Europe, Asia, China, they're in a world of hurt right now. But then I think that all this combinance with the United Arab Emirates saying we're done with OPEK, and I think that means that whole game is over, and so we'll have
to see how it goes. It could still end very badly for us, but it might end well for shaking up the whole kaleidoscope of the geopolitical energy map that has dominated our thinking for fifty years.
Yeah, and this is a sustained public policy win for conservatives who are talt never win anything. We do right, Well, we do This is a remarkable achievement over the last thirty years to turn the United State it's energy independent. Now that there's a political problem for Trump and one, as you say, I predicted, people don't like the fact that gas is four plus dollars, nor should they. But there's a picture, Steve. You can't see it on my shelf of my family in California in nineteen ninety eight
in Anaheim. Of course, we were going to Disneyland, and in the background there is not on purpose, but there is a big gas sign and it says one ninety eight, and that is adjusted for inflation, more than gas is on average in the United States now, right when it's supposedly intolerably high. And that's because we made certain decisions.
The only public policy failure that we've made in the last five years was that the Biden administration, when it thought that it was going to become even more unpopular, emptied the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for no reason, and we didn't refill it. And it's partly Democrat's fault, it's partly Republican's fault. But that should have been refilled when gas was it a low, because right now would be a
good time to start using it. Keep the And I say that not because I think that Trump should do what Biden did, which is rescue his own political fortunes, but because it would take away from the Iranians a chess piece if they couldn't say, ah, wow, we'll close the straight up hor mooz and we'll put pressure on you domestically because we had the strategic petroleum reserve and we could keep prices down, not as much as they've gone up. That would be great. But other than that,
we should be so proud of what we did. Yeah.
So, I because I'm mean spirited, I wish our team, so to speak, would be reminding people that when Sarah Palin twenty years ago said drill, baby, drill, all you guys laughed at her and mocked at her. Who's laughing now? Remember this is what you know, John Carra. But we can't drill our way out. There's just not enough oil in the United States are anywhere for us to be energy independent. That's why we have to run our cars on solar panels of you know, banana peels and other ridiculous things.
Well, look a look at how successful it's been in your state. The probably democratic front runner. Is what Tom Steyer, who's an environmentalist, Yes, right, it's a Pacera. Now I can't keep up with Itera is.
Actually at the head of the polls right now, but which is amazing with Styer spending one hundred million dollars blanketing the airways with NonStop ass.
Yeah, so I can't get past this. Steve so Styre is an environmentalist and the message that he keeps putting out is cats prices are too high. Right, Just think about how much you have to win this issue politically to get the vironmentalists to complain that gas prices are too high. Yeah, the high gas prices. They thought that this was how you saved the planet, but now apparently they should be three dollars in perpetuity.
That's right. Yeah.
Well I did once get quoted in the Economist magazine no more than twenty years ago saying that Americans think that dollar gallon gasoline is somewhere in the Bill of Rights.
Yes, there's something to that, I think.
All right, Charnie, this has been fun. We miss James this week. Look forward to having it back next week. But the Ricochet Podcast is brought to you by Ricochet Dot com. Please support us by joining the best place for civil center right conversation. It's very cheap, it's very fun, and please take a minute to leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify or wherever you like to source your podcast material. It helps us keep the show growing, so we will see you in the comments.
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