Well there was that. Again.
You and I are the only people old enough to remember this, but there was that. One of my favorite Andy Griff of scenes. When you know Ronnie Howard at four years old, Loksander says, what do you learn in school?
Day? Hope?
He says, uh, I learned pie are squared? Sheriff Andy says, well that's wrong, Ope, pie are round, cornbread or square. Ask not what your country can do for you, Ask what you can do for your country. Mister Gorbachoff, tear down this wall.
It's the Record Shape podcast with Stephen Eyward and Charles C. W. Cook. I'm James Lollace today, Iran Mondami Minnesota and more So, let's have risols a podcast.
We will draw this city closer together. We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. If our campaign demonstrated that the people of New York yearn for solidarity, then let this government welcome everybody.
It's the Ricochet Podcast, number seven seventy one. Why don't you join it? I said, ricochet dot com. Why don't you just why? I want to be part of the most stimulating conversation and community on the web. That's why. I'm James, Lilyax and I'm joined because I'm falling apart by Stephen Hayward. Stephen, Hello, Hi James, how are you?
Uh?
Fraud question? Maybe Charlie can answer that. Charlie will be along in just a little bit here. How am i? I'm I'm in Minnesota once again, the episode of the stuff about about which we are not happy. Let's go right to it. Everybody has been doing the Zappruder bit on the film back into the left frame by frame analysis, trying to figure out where they stand on this issue. I refer, of course, to the shooting of a woman who was interfering in the protest of a nice apprehension,
and I will ask you what you thought. I have read a lot of nuanced commentary on this, and I say nuanced because it generally aligns with what I think I've read in flammatory common I say inflammatory because I don't agree with it naturally. I have this sensible, moderate, clever position here, and I'm wondering if yours is the same.
I don't think there's a sensible modern position on this. I think we're divided into two camps. I mean, there are some cooler heads in the middle. I thought, Charlie, I can speak for him, since he's not here, wrote a very good, very sober piece weighing all the different aspects of this for a national view one line, and maybe we can get him to reprise some of that when he joins us. I also worry about I mean,
I've seen several different angles. Also, I am a little worried about whether we're going to get some fakes right, you know, the AI stuff these days. That wouldn't surprise me, because I've seen a couple. I thought, huh, that doesn't look quite like the other angle. But you know, we all know, racham on, everything looks different from which corner of the street you're on.
So I.
Think sort of the you know, beyond the particular aspects of this thing that happens in a split second, are some of the wider issues of where does the culpability lie for organizing resistance to federal government law enforcement officers? And I connect this, This is an opening thought. I connect this to the fact that we have been allowing
protests to go unpunished for quite a while. People blocking streets to airports and blocking streets and just the blocking streets part of it because you want to stop climate change, and most of those people have gone unpunished, and so it shouldn't surprise us that we escalate to something awful like this. But I also will say, and I think some listeners will find us harsh or maybe outrageous.
Well, let's go back to James.
You will remember that in the Chicago Convention of nineteen sixty eight, Tom Hayden and all the organizers of that they wanted to provoke police violence on purpose, and you know, they got it right, the so called police riot, as was later called, even though public opinion polls showed that a majority of Americans were on the side of the police, as they were two years later for those poor young National guardsmen who fired on and killed four students at
Kent State in Ohio, public opinion was on the side of the National guardsmen because they thought, you know, these hippies, these bombs, as Nixon called, and remember the fuss about Nixon calling them bombs.
So here we are. And I do think that if we're going.
To talk about okay, you know ice and the police, and you know one are the standards of self defense for the police in a circumstance like this, I think we needed that broad a conversation about the left wants this to happen. I actually believe that is true, and they now have their martyr, and I think we should not let that slide.
Well, the left sanctifies protest because it is holy, it right and good only if it's of a particular kind. And the I hate to say the media because that's a lot and a lot of the organs that we call the media have less influence than they ever did before. But let's just say that general idea on the left of the people who form opinion or repeat it is that basically, the protesters may be irritating, but their hearts
are in the right place. And if their hearts are in the right place because they want to stop climate change, because they want to stop this, because they want to stop immigration enforcement, etc. Well there's a certain automatic sympathy that attends to them. So when they see people who are blocking the highway and it's not them trying to get to the airport to get home for a funeral, they say, yeah, well, you know, sometimes drastic, drastic problems
require drastic solutions, and consciousness is being raised. That's the other thing. We're always told that consciousness is being raised, but most people are sick of it. Most people see the people who are tying up the airports just stop oil gluing themselves to the ground and just wishing somebody would flow it. There is just an increasing patients and lack of patients and fatigue with this, with these people, who,
as you say, suffer no consequences. You can walk into a museum and a hurl a can of paint and a turner, a JMW. Turner, and some people will say, well, what's the difference, But other people will say, you know, yeah, okay, but you know what is a painting when compared to the dire existential crisis that we face with climate chicken jay. So we have since the sixties elevated protest on the left to a sort of holy ritual performed by a sacred cast which can't be criticized because their hearts are
in the right place. Now, what we have going on here is something different in that it is not particularly organic. There are and again here's where you just sound like a nutcase. There are shadowy organizations behind it. Well, no they're not shadowy, they're out in the open. They're organizations whose point it is to get people to the place where these were the approation apprehensions. I see it all
the time on my Twitter feed I go. And apparently more than that, there's a whole group of these trained quote observers end quote, who subscribe to telegram and signal feeds, who get information on where they're supposed to go, and they show up and they yell, and they have their whistles and they film and the rest of it. Now, yes, they ought to be able to show up and film and blow whistles if they wish, but getting up close and interfering and screaming the same tired litanies of you know,
where's the warrant, what is your badge? Why you're doing this doesn't stop anything from happening. They haven't stopped anything from happening. But what they've done is they've raised the temperature on this so that every single act which is their intention, is attended with a great deal of you know, of sound and fury and volume and protesting and the rest of it, giving the impression I think that there is some sort of grassroots people just pouring under their
houses to defend their neighbors. Some are, but it's not that it is. It is an organize. There are organizations that are involved in doing this, and what's their endgame. I don't know because they're because they're not going to stop these things. If anything that we learned is that things are different than they were in twenty twenty, is that now the ICE the next day just simply went back to doing what they were doing the previous day, you know, took a little operational pause and said, no,
we're back at it and we're not stopping. We're not taking a knee, we're not putting on you know, said we're not going to be po faced about this. It happened. There's going to be a process, but we had a job to do and we're going to do it, which is different I think this time than it was in a lot of the you know, the kneeling and the begging and the apologizing that went on in twenty twenty.
You're not seeing institutions, corporate institutions, all of a sudden scrambling to figure out how they can get on the right side of social justice in this case.
Yeah, right, not this time. They're not going to bend the knee this time. Look, you asked what is the end game here? And I mean I can give you approximate answer in a general one that are complementary. I think the general answer is remember the I think it's David Horwitz whoever said the issue is not the issue. She was always the revolution. Now maybe that's a little
bit hyperbolic, but not too much. I think that it's always the impulse, you know, to go on a large scale attack and exploit things like you know, George Floyd six years ago, and now this and so forth. It's also true that the left, especially in Minnesota, especially Governor Waltz, is desperate to change the subject.
From the massive social services fraud that has.
Unfolded there, and which, by the way, we can come back to this perhaps, I think, maybe a big issue in this election cycle and again in twenty twenty eight nationwide, because don't think this is only limited to Minnesota. No, But there's one other thing to say about the sort of protest culture.
You know, Americans.
I think I think I take your point about how Americans say, well, this is annoying. It's especially if you're trying to get somewhere inconvenient have the roadblocked On the other hand, it's possible that a lot of Americans, not the ones in the media, but ordinary Americans, every day Americans can hold two thoughts in their mind at the same time. And one of the things that was true about the Vietnam era is that the Vietnam War was increasingly unpopular, but the anti war movement marching in.
The streets was even more unpopular. And you know, this is something.
That the smarter people on the left, the late Todd Gitlin, for example, figured out late in the game. And so I think that same dynamic can be playing out now. So you know, I say, listeners and everybody else, pay no attention to the braying hounds of the media who are all on the side of the Democratic Party, apparatchicks, desperate to change the subject, desperate to stay on the attack against Trump and anything Trump is doing, and pay
attention to the real facts on the ground. So, you know, for Waltz, this has been hate to be totally cynical in crasts, but this has been a godsend for him this week because it is allowing him to change the subject. And so this is this is how.
It's going to play out over the next I don't know several weeks at least.
I think that's different, and that instead of having government organizations which do audits which are thenkyboged by the people on top, instead of you know, a couple of you know, if you hope, high profile trials as we had here with feed My Future, where the issue just sort of goes away after a while and the general conclusions are
made for it. You have an army of people who have decided to take it upon themselves to go around their communities and figure out exactly what these daycares are doing, what these transportation centers are doing, what these autism centers are doing, what these home healthcare centers are doing, and they're finding an extraordinary amount of front wherever they happen
to look. So you're right, it's an issue in the coming election but also in the election to come, because it underscores this feeling that we started to get during DOGE, that there is such an extraordinary amount of money being shoveled out that does not serve any purpose, accomplish anything except line the pockets of people who figured out how to game the system. And so what was initially set up as a as a an active empathetic government a good thing. We will make sure that the elderly are
transported to their hospital. We will make sure that children actually don't starve. We will make sure that this need will be met. No one really argues anymore that we shouldn't be helping old people get to the hospital. But we found that in almost every single instance, when a program is unable to do these things, it balloons, It mushrooms, it grows, it becomes what was once a balloon that
you could hold in your hand is the Hindenburg. And now we're seeing the whole gas bag just go open flames because people are realizing, my god, my god, the amount of money that I pay that is shoveled out. We saw with Doge how money from the state would go to an NGO, or go to university, which would apportion it to an NGO, which would give one hundred thousand dollars to a Peruvian lama, a farmer who is trying to teaches indigenous people new you know, modern methods
of basket weaving, whatever. And you multiply that times a billion, and you realize that we have been playing for suckers. I was writing out my advanced tax payment to the state. And I was furious because every single dollar that I was I could just see as I was writing the numbers, I felt like every one of them was going to
be wasted. And if it wasn't wasted this year, I could count back year after year after year after year and just see all of those dollars flowing, not to the things that we had agreed that the Social Compact required us to fund, but going to scams that they let go because they didn't want to seem like bad people, because the money flowing was too good, because the whole sweet arrangement made everybody happy in the Union Party state. And yep, you know, I don't pay, I go to jail.
The people who did this scams? Are they going to go to jail? People writing their checks saying I don't think so I go to jail if I don't pay. But these guys who took the millions of dollars to have a daycare in their basement where no kids ever showed up for three years, are they going to jail? Yeah? Probably not. That would be mean, That would be mean and insensitive.
Right, Well, so I have a field theory for all this which comes in two parts. One is if you go all the way back to the financial crisis of two thousand and eight, after which we committed what a trillion dollars of the whatever it was called then under Obama, and then you get to COVID, where I think we've spent three to four trillion dollars between Trump one and then Biden, and I actually think it was more money than the government knew how to spend.
I mean, now stipulate the spend it. But the point is, and I.
Think the left, which has been, you know, exploiting all these programs for years, you now had the whole thing expand by two orders of magnitude overnight, with little or no controls, little or no oversight. And that's on purpose, by the way. I want to come back to that point, but I say it's a national story. Out here in Californi. The latest estimate is as much as seventy billion dollars in state and federal money may have been misappropriated or fraudulently spent.
And this is not brand new news.
I mean, we knew two three years ago there was an auditor's report that thirty billion dollars of unemployment money out of COVID was perhaps spent fraudulently. We learned at some convicts in prison were collecting some of this money, including what that Peterson kid who murdered his wife twenty five years ago. Whatever it was. Now, why wasn't Waltz concerned about this? Why was he suppressing the whistleblowers who
kept bringing up up that this was going on. I think it's because for a lot of people on the left, and Waltz seems just dumb enough to be one of them easily, is that for them, this is a form of airsats redistribution of wealth. In other words, they don't think it's fraud at all. They think it's it may be inefficient, it may be you know, not universal enough, et cetera. But I think a lot of people on the left think this is just this is good, it's not fraud.
They deserve it. The middle class Americans should be.
Made to pay, like you know, Mondami's household housings are has just said. And so I actually think that really is at the core of this is that the left doesn't think that welfare fraud is actually even possible because it's deserved. And then the last thing I'll say is you know the business about oh so oh racism. Okay, it's racism too, because it's happening among Somali's. Well, so here's a problem. There's a whole bunch of embarrassing social
science data out of Europe. We always admire Europe's great cradle Degrae welfare states. Turns out some social scientists found more than ten years ago that support for the high tax, high benefit welfare states in England is closely correlated with
ethnic homogeneity. It's Swedish Lutherans who all share the same work ethic, right, and that is collapsing in real time in Europe, so much so that in Denmark, just in the last couple of weeks, the socialist primates has said, you know, some of these migrants we've taken in, they need.
To be deported.
And they've cut way back on benefits from making available to their migrants from the Middle East and Africa who aren't working, who don't know the language, aren't learning the language. And so if that's happening in Europe, boy, the Overton window is really moving.
Very much. So. Yes, when when you have an ethnically homogenous country of six million people, you can have a consensus. Now that consensus can be stifling in that you know, people say that there are guardrails in Swedish conversations that keep the dialogue and the national conversation in between, you know, in a certain lane. But those guardrails are breaking down because simply when you don't have a homogeneous society anymore,
you have people who are going to game it. And it's the same in Minnesota, I mean, Minnesota adapted that Scandinavian model. We had Wendell Anderson on the cover of Time magazine and rolling up a walleye the good life in Minnesota because we had made an arrangement. In the arrangement would be everybody's going to pay nine taxes bought. You're going to get good schools, good roads, good government,
up and up. We acquiesced to sort of technic technocratic rule by the met Council which will tell us how we should grow and where the highway should be and how the water should be distributed. And people just generally went along with it because the ideas were sound the practice it seemed to work. But that only works if you have everybody buying into it. It only works if the social compact is shared and you have a high trust society, eventually you can maintain that or when people
from other ways of thinking. And again again we're told that one of the great things about diversity is that it gets other ideas, other ways of looking at the world, other cultures. But it also seems to presume that everybody who comes here is going to have a Scandinavian mindset and slot right into it. No, so yeah, what Minnesota is experiencing is what the Scandinavian countries is experiencing, and
where it ends up we don't know. I mean Sweden other countries are hampered by laws that they've compacts that they've signed about migration, an asylum and the rest of it that keep them from doing things. So it's curious to see exactly what they expect to do about it.
Interrupt real fast, James, I haven't checked on this lately, but Sweden is having an active debate in their parliament about changing their constitution so they can revoke the citizenship they've granted some of their recent migrants. That's how fast things are changing. And the famous Scandinavian social democracies, beloved of our left. By the way, you can here and there if you look at the leftist the media, you can find that they're starting to get unhappy about this.
They're starting to sour on Denmark and Sweden and the whole rest of the scene, which again shows you how the Overton window is changing.
Right. Well, as somebody said the other day in the protest in New York City, actually there's no such thing as in the legal immigrants, since this has stolen land. Therefore everybody here has the same legal status, which she's a recipe for national dissolution. But speaking of Europe, Charles C. W. Cook has finally joined us. In Charles, we were talking about the shooting in Minnesota, Minneapolish boy, I wish I didn't have that. It's like I got a macro key.
I can just type and you get that, you know, dropped into a piece. You wrote a piece for n R about it, about the video, about the about your thoughts on it. Steven said it was extremely nuanced and wise. I'll be the judge of that welcome, Welcome, and tell me what you were saying in that piece that everybody should go read.
Well.
I said, of course that we should probably sell Minnesota to Canada. Yeah, no, I didn't I was trying to dispense with a lot of the nonsense that has made it difficult to hone in on the question here, the question that would come up at a trial, although I don't think there will be one, which is did the officer have a reasonable suspicion that his life was in danger such that he could open fire? And I noticed that this was getting bogged down in all manner of
other claims. So while I'm not entirely sure what I think, although on balance I think he did have a reasonable suspicion and that he would be acquitted, I thought it was perhaps more useful rather than pil in and write a hundredth piece on my views on that, to point out all the silly things that people were saying that really are re elevant, for example, that this was an
execution or an assassination, which it very obviously wasn't. The shooting was in response to the car moving, whether justified or not. That this could have happened to any of us, that's not true. This wasn't a lightning strike. Again, whether you think it was justified or not, this was the product of this person who seems, per The New York Post to have been protesting Ice having made certain decisions.
The claimed that this was somehow inappropriate because it involved a thirty seven year old woman who had toys in her Honda Pilot. And the Honda Pilot is a car. It weighs four and a half thousand pounds. The car responds the same irrespective of whether it's being driven by a very strong man or by a computer or by a very weak woman. It's like a gun in that respect. The physics doesn't change. So there are always things that people were saying that really have nothing to do with it.
And I think, but let me, let me stop every one second, and if you argue any of those, any of those, they get angry with you for somehow nitpicking and getting away from the central issue, which is the that's what I've I mean, people get in furiated when you say it's also you're blaming her. Also you think it's okay to shoot a thirty seven years It's not
what I'm saying. I'm sorr right that these ancillary issues don't get to the core of it, and the ancillary issues somehow become this mush, the sweet smelling mush that gets painted over, it gets daubed over everything where we're supposed to ignore the particulars anyway.
Yeah, and the other one, of course, is that she deserved or didn't deserve it, which is not a useful question here because this is not a cosmic matter. We're not debating here whether or not those who find themselves in her situation ought to be awarded a death penalty. And I think in this regard this is similar to the Ashley Babbitt shooting, where people get very hung up
on those words deserved. But these are again I don't think it will go to trial, but if it did, these are questions that revolve around details and my NUSI. And another point that I make is they revolve around details in my NUSI as they were experienced in the brief moment by those involved, not as they have been processed by us. Because we have access to information they didn't. We can watch it over and over again. We know
how it ended, we have background information. We can slow it down, we can see it from eight different angles, we can freeze frame the wheels, we can run experiments on ice, and so forth. But that's not what happened here. From the perspective of the officer, or in the case of the Capitol Riots, the police officer who shot Ashley babbittt who didn't know how it ended. And I just think that it's quite annoying that people and I include
conservatives to some extent on this. I think Trump did get way out over his skis when he said that it was a willful, violent and that was another word he used, but running over that's not true. And if you hadn't seen the video, you would have a false impression of what had happened here. But I don't really understand why people are trying to draw these grand narratives out of this when it was an incident involving two particular people in a split second that led people to
have to make decisions. I mean, that's what matters, right.
Yes, they're drawing something out of it because it's useful to do that. And so, you know, when I was talking to people about this, and they were saying, Okay, let's I don't know exactly who they were apprehending. I don't know what he was guilty of, but let's say that he's illegal, he's come into the country three times after deportation, and he's committed sexual violence on minors. What instrument of government would you use to remove that person?
And would it not look identical to what we are doing right now? And there's no answer for that because you can't say, well, judges, well you know you should have just showed up at the airport with a with a boarding pass and gotten on a plane. Well you know, the thing of it is is is that everybody starts the year with great hope and the rest of it, and something usually comes along in the first fortnight that says,
uh right, it's back to the same old bleep. But I don't know about you guys, how your New Year's Eve went. You know, we had celebration here. Of course we had resolutions. Resolutions are usually often towards health and fitness. Go to the gym. I already go to the gym.
But there comes a time to think actually about what comes after all those resolutions about health and fitness, to make sure that the ones you love are covered if something happens, and yeah, I'm talking life insurance, that fun topic, Well it will be because today's sponsor fabric is here to help you. If you've been putting it off. People do,
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com slash ricochet, Meet Fabric dot com slash Ricochet. Policies issued by Western Southern Life Assurance Company. Not available in certain states. Prices subject to underwriting and health questions, and we think meat fabric responsoring this the Ricochet podcast. Well, I get a warm feeling thinking about life insurance, they really do. But some people get a warm feeling when they think about collectivism collsm the warm gentle death in
which we will all bob rugged. Individualism of pulling up your bootstraps is an old notion of a scary thing in some cowboy days. No, we're going to join hands, comrade, and march forth into the alfalfa fields to do our
communal reaping. Well, yeah, this is what Mandami has said, and it's of a piece with the statements they've drug up about his housing advisor, who the other day was seen to be walking away in tears and going into the house in tears because she was asked hard questions about the idiocy, the sort of dorm room bond rip stuff you say about capitalism and kill all the white men and reduce the middle class and the rest of it.
Now she's in a position of power, these comments are coming back to bite her, perhaps, and we get a true view of these sort of theater kids Marxist and what they want, and they're a little bit stunned to find that people think no, this is spinach, and I say, ame with it.
Well, first of all, who's gonna say it, Charlie? You were me? Iron Rand is calling and wants your villains.
I mean, what Whole's inaugural address of Mondamie was right out of the pages of Atlas Shrugg. It's amazing, you know, I've myself never cared that much for Rand until Obama became president, and now in New York City, for certain, there is an interesting thing about that Sea whatever her
last name is. You're right, And one of the questions, by the way, James, is that apparently her mother lives in a one point four million dollar house in Tennessee or somewhere, and so it looks like hypocrisy to you know,
this privilege persons. There's a pattern now that I've observed for several years, which is people like the theater kids, as you put it, like to spout off on social media and elsewhere about social justice or universities like to have crazy programs, and then suddenly, when you expose it to a wider public, the university scrubs the website instantly, and this poor lady breaks down in tears. My observation was I used to think that maybe the characterization of
these folks as snowflakes was a little bit overbroad. Well, guess what turns out she turns out to be a snowflake when she's confronted with more public attention for the things that she said and apparently thinks and can't handle it. So, in an odd way, I'm kind of encouraged about all this, although it's going to be crazy. Mandamie is staffing his administration with pretty crazy people.
You know.
I mentioned earlier James that California may have had as much as thirty billion dollars in misspent unemployment funds during COVID. The person who oversaw that was Julie Sue, who Obama wanted to be Labor Secretary, and Senate would in confirm her. Well, Mandamie has a point I heard of some senior post which just seems.
Perfect, Charles. We are constantly told, of course, that communism, real communism, has never been tried, And I read a quote the other day I can't remember exactly who it was, pointing out that the Soviet Union was staffed start to finish with people who were the best communists you could come up with these were people who went to college to study Marxist Leninism, and a lot of them really
believed it. They weren't just putting a sort of gloss on their own ability to their own desire to get power. So yeah, I think communism has been tried. I think we got a pretty good look at the track record. But we're supposed to be feeling good about collectivism because it's what it's a nursery schools, everybody sitting together in a warm room on the sharing their fruit roll ups. Do these people have absolutely no idea how this stuff plays out in real life. They can't be that stupid.
Wait a minute here, yes, they caain.
They can be that stupid. I'm glad you used the sea word, because that's what this Sea Weaver person is. She's a communist. She's also a racist. Half of her output, maybe moral is racism as much as it's communism. I know academic types will say it can't be racism because her horst involved power. I think that's garbage. I've always
thought there was garbage. She wants white people to suffer, she wants to destroy the white middle classes wealth, and she even said she wished she'd believed in God, because if she believed in God, she would think that white people would burn in the afterlife.
Perhaps that's the warm collectivism she is, and white men would particularly right, that's racism.
I just want to make this very very clear to anyone who's fuzzy on this, that under the fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act, that is racism. There is no such thing as positive or negative discrimination. There's no classes of people who are exempt or bumped up. The Supreme Courts made this abundantly clear, especially recently, that is racism. So she's a racist. But she's also a communist and
her ideas are ridiculous. And although she has labeled as tenant protection or tenant advocacy or what you will, her aim here is to nationalize property in New York City. And if you look at the way that she wishes to go about this, this becomes clear. She says rent control fixes everything. That's her view, stated view. So what you do is you first set rents at such a low level that landlords can't make any money on their properties. So what do they do. They cut back on maintenance
and repairs and improvements. And then you go to those buildings on which you've imposed rent control, and you say, well, the landlord hasn't been doing repairs, maintenance or improvements, so the city has to take the building. She says exactly that on a show with Sam Cedar, from last year, not six years ago, from last year. That is communism. It's absolutely appalling. I don't think it's surprising because I think mum Danni is a communist as well. So the
question is will she prevail? Will she managed to push this through in a country that is not communist and that doesn't tolerate communism legally, but they're going to try. Why did she cry? I saw two theories. One is that she's a cry bully that she doesn't like being questioned. The other I thought was really interesting. Someone said, no, she's upset because the manner of the questioning made her realize that other people aren't enlightened in the way that
she is, and that makes her sad. I don't know why she cried, but I hope she cries more.
It's interesting how we have communists who aren't actually quoting Marks and Lenen. I mean, they seem they seem to be oddly disconnected from that. They seem to assembled the whole world and inherited the whole world view and way of thinking without really interrogating the actual texts themselves. They've got this set of received wisdom that they got and
where it came from, it doesn't really matter. They just know that it's correct because it makes them feel good and it makes them feel as though they are advocates for the down trodden and are here to bring a wonderful situation of total equality. But when you mentioned the whole racism thing, she gets a pass on that because she is extirpating her own heritage and she's performing, she's doing she's doing the work. Shall we say?
You know what, TAM's I have become increasingly persuaded over the last ten years or so by those who say that for the vast majority of these people, it's flat out envy and a cover for the fact they just want your car. They don't like you, they don't think you should have the things you have, and this gives them a fig leaf that they can news to hide that they wish to violently dispossess you of your things
or worse. I knew at Oxford, a Marxist professor who was absolutely brilliant I mean, of course it was wrong, but he genuinely believed all of this stuff, and he was well versed in it, and he could argue it, and he was lovely. Actually, he was extremely open minded and tolerant. He didn't mark anyone down for disagreeing with him. But he was a Marxist and he thought it. He had built this ideological framework up around himself and studied Marx and that was his worldview. Fine, I just think
so many of these people are just envious. I think a lot of them are mediocrates who look around and are confused why they aren't doing better than they are, and ma'm Downey's come along and they've glombed onto him because they think he's going to deliver that for them. I think that that Marx bit is not, like my professor at Oxford, a real intellectual line of inquiry. But it's just the words they need to utter so they don't sound completely crazy or venal.
Yeah, you know, I'm glad you brought up envy as what Tom Sole has been saying for years, that it's the central organizing principle of the left.
And by the way, Charles I also had two.
Excellent radical Marxist professors, one undergraduate, one graduate. They didn't grade you according to your opinions, and they were terrific to have classes with and argue with.
That's the old school style. So they are out there.
But a lot of them who are, as you put it, you say, mediocre, I think that's a I think an awful lot of academics, especially lefty ones, are mediocre, and deep down inside they know it. They know their kind of frauds where they're intellectually insecure. I've seen this a lot since I marinate in academia. I'm glad you mentioned the envy for this reason. I did publish an article in National Affairs back in the spring called Envy and
Social Justice, and I was asked this question. You know, our social scientists explore all kinds of things in increasingly inventive ways, especially racism. Now it's subco just racism, right. We all say that, you know, we're for the Civil Rights Act, we don't use the N word and.
All the rest of that. But I say, no, you're still really a racist.
Why?
And they'll devise these surveys and so, for example, if you agree with the statement that the best person should get the job that's coded as subconscious racism. So these things become self proving, you know, like a self licking ice cream. And you will look around in vain to find any social scientists trying to do that same kind of analysis of envy. It would not be hard to do, but it's assiduously avoided by social scientists. And I think we can guess why. I don't think there's no secret why.
And so you know, the very best book on envy, that's the copious interdisciplinary study, goes all the way back to nineteen sixty seven. Guy named Helmut Shecheck, a German scholar, wrote a book called Envy of theory of I forget what them, but there's almost I've scoured a scholar literature and can find almost nothing except now and then to exonerate it and say, it's not a series. But if we can study subconscious racism and all kinds of other things, we ought to be able to study envy.
Two. I won't just speak that envy as part of it, but I think it's a way for a lot of midwind banal people to elevate themselves their post religion, so they have they don't have that framework on that they can use guiding them through the world, and so they just say these words which make them seem like a good people and smart people. It also gives them the free soul of a revolutionary, which ever since the nineteen sixties has been the mark of an interesting person, somebody
who doesn't accept the current. You know, well, ever since eighteen forty eight, ever since seventeen eighty nine, we want to go back. So I think that that is a great part of it. Let a shift, because there's a whole, big, wide world out there, and part of it is on fire. I haven't heard anything from Tehran in a day because
they've snipped off the internet. Even though Elon Musk, you know, the guy who made the Nazi salute, that horrible man, that oppressor of freedom and speech, has apparently turned on starling for a lot of people in Iran so that they can get some messages out every night after twelve days, is it now we see snippets of film, more and more people pouring into the streets, more and more flags being taken down, reports that the police have switched over
the show. You know, the Prince makes a stay. It's it's poised more than it seemed to be before, but I swear we've been here half a dozen times and I hate to be the meme of the nothing ever happens guy. But I would hate to think that this ends with the regime still in power, especially since the president Postmaduro, flexing a little bit, said that if they start to fire on the protesters that there will be consequences. Look and learn and listen and all the rest of it.
So I don't know what do you guys think about Iran in the next seventy two hours or so.
Well, although first you know, my late friend Angelo Codevilla had a simple explanation for why the Cold War ended.
He said it ended because.
The Soviet Union lost the will to shoot its own people in large numbers. I like that blunt explanation, and I think that the test right now is is does the running regime have the will still to do that. There's some evidence that the answer is yes. They have called out what the IRGC out of their barracks, the Revolutionary Guard, and there are reports that there's a lot of government violence against the protesters and large numbers of
people are being killed. We really don't know. Information is patchy. Despite startling trying to break through and so forth. And I'd say the last thing is is if the regime does fall, and of course I think we all wish that it will. What an irony that the beginning of the end of the regime started on October seventh, twenty twenty three, because it's all events since then have led to this.
Moment in Iran. So I'm hopeful but very worried that it's going to be very, very bad.
I don't know.
I have watched over and over again as we have got our hopes up that the Iranian people will overthrow this horrible regime, and I've stopped believing it.
Now.
That doesn't mean I'm right, but I've stopped believing it because it's never happened. The first time in was it twenty eleven, two thousand and nine, I assumed that it was going to happen because twenty years earlier the Berlin Wall had fallen, and as a younger man, I assume this is just what happened. I thought maybe there was some sweep of history that guaranteed that tyrants would fall, And now I'm just not sure. And I wonder if
this has lost momentum as well. Now I'm told by people who know an enormous amount about this, far more than I do, that one of the big differences in this case is the economy. That the economy is so bad, right, and so this is going to sound odd. I don't mean that in other contexts it would be an ideological revolution. It would be abstract in some sense. Of course, there are very real material problems with the regime. But perhaps that changes it. Perhaps that prevents people from going back
to their lives as it were. But I don't know. I'm getting nervous again that this is going to fizzle out and that I will never see this regime fo I share your feelings.
On the other hand, we have a Venezuelan followed, which is fascinating to me because in one stroke we well we like I like, like I was repelling down from the helicopter. The United States dealt a severe blow to China, to Russia, and to Iran. Basically the don Roe doctrine, as he's calling it, is saying, no, this is our backyard,
and you're not going to look about here. The days of the Biden administration and the bombed administration, just saying I'm sorry, we don't like, what you're doing, Can we give you some more money? Those days are over, We're they're done. And so now China finds itself in the back foot there and Russia, having faced one humiliation after the other, right down a little tanker that we diverted and boarded. Love to know what was in that, probably
never will. Seems to have given America all of a sudden, a pop and a swinger. Along with the Iran decapitation of the nuclear program. That is I think one of those sort of turnarounds comparable to what we had in the eighties, when all of a sudden, America no longer believed that the military was this seventies falling apart, rusty thing, but actually was a competent force and a force for good. And it seems like it happened a lot faster than it did in the eighties. Is this So is America
back baby? When it comes to the armed forces and there? In other words, if we're not retreating hastily with people firing at us and putting and dropping bombs and people falling out of the wheelwells the cargo plane as they
drop off, we can actually accomplish something. If we don't exactly prioritize a transgender surgery for somebody so that they can be on the front, then we actually are account If we don't make the whole thing seem to be a woke enterprise, you're actually in a corn fed fred from I was signing up and saying, yeah, hell yeah, all fight.
Well, the operational execution was just so stunningly.
Successful and awe inspiring, and that always has what Churchill used to call a moral effect on the way people look at these things. And in particular, one thing that I think is quite significant. People have been saying, who no defense matters? Is we neutralize their Chinese supplied and Russian supplied air defense capabilities quite easily, quite swiftly, And so suddenly that makes China and Russia have to doubt how could their stuff is if they actually come toe to toe with us?
Okay, So there's that. The other thing I like.
About it is, you know, what of Trump's great skills is he keeps everybody always off balance. And so you know, we weren't even done with the news cycle about snatching Maduro before he was talking about Greenland and saying some crazy things, or hegsas saying some crazy things about, no, we don't rule out military force. It too, you acquire Greenland, which really is kind of reckless and insane, completely insane. But on the other hand, you can see how the
world's reacting. But in the middle of all this, you know, we kind of missed this because of all these big things happening in Minnesota and elsewhere. About midweek, the Trump administration announced that the United States was withdrawing or ending its membership and participation in fifty five different international agencies, most of them in the UN, one of them being the Inner Governmental.
Panel on Climate Change. That's the head of the whole climate change circus.
Now, to be sure, if you had a democratic president in three years, they'll bring us all back into all those things. But still that does not without cost. I mean, that's you know, all the things Trump is undoing they'll want to redo are going to be hard to do. And maybe the cherry on top was also in the middle of the week, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, you know, the Ministry of the Media, of government run media, having been deprived of federal funds, decided to close down completely.
That's a win.
And you know, again bringing that back they can probably do it, but it will require some political capital, and we'll see they're not going to undo everything Trump does.
Which why do you.
Hate big Bird? Why do you hate big Bird?
Bird makes money? Is you know I've been pointing out for years.
Right, My next door neighbor who passed away was the head writer for Sesame Street and then The Muppet Show.
So and he did very well at all that.
So well. Yes, as the joke goes, my agent was sitting in the backseat of a car with with Sherry Lewis, and as a matter of fact, he shook her hand and said her hand was remarkably soft. You said your hand would be soft if it'd been up a lamb's rear for the last twenty years too, sort of work back when people knew who Sherry Lewis was. If you know who Sherry Lewis was, and you're eager to be
amongst people who do, that's what Ricchet meetups are for. Yes, this is not one of those websites it just has a bunch of guys blathering at you. No, this is part of a larger community that includes guys blathering at you. Ricochet people get together and they meet. So if you are a member of Ricochet dot com. You may be wondering, hey, what's up in February having a group meet up in Detroit, Michigan, And we're having a group meet up in Cape Canaveral. I still love the way he went back to Cape
Canaveral in Florida, of course in February. And if you would like to meet people from Ricochet, all you have to do is just sort of post your idea for a meetup and they'll come to you now invited. Mind you, they're not going to just show up at your house and knock with pot dish. You got to put something together, but they will. Ricochet meetups happen all over the country, over the world. To learn more, you can go to
ricochet Join up. Yeah, it costs a little, it does, it's hardly anything, and it's cheap, and it gives you access to the member feed with the real communities form. Go to the meet up page at ricochet dot com slash events, and there you will find out where next people will meet. Well, gentlemen, before we go, hate to ask, but did you have any New Year's resolutions? No? You know.
The funny the irony is I actually have been working out a little bit this week, even though I didn't make that cliche resolution that people always do.
I love the Babylon Babylon b had a story. Planet Fitness offers two week gym membership for eye Charles.
No, I'm not a big New Year's resolution person.
Well, but Charles, you should be.
I mean, if I were you, I would be resolving to enjoy the fact that your beloved Jaguars have performed.
So I have really paid attention out here in the West Coast. And what a great season they've had.
Yeah, Trevor Lawrence is surging and looks to me like you're gonna probably enjoy a nice deep playoff running.
Ah, please, please, please, nervous Steave, I'm going on Sunday. They're playing the Bills, a great team, great quarterback. I'm just so nervous they're going to crash out in the first round. But yeah, I mean, we ended thirteen and four. Last year. We were four and thirteen, and I thought we'd improve. I thought we had the right coach. I've always believed in Lawrence, but I didn't think we'd go thirteen and four. We were one bad PI call away
from being the one seed. So it was a remarkable season. But I just hope it doesn't end because I'm really into it.
It will, as somebody who's been there five times will. You'll live and you will feel like a fool for having hoped. I know it'll come to the end of the fourth quarter and you will look back and you will say, why did I even why? But the ride is wonderful, the game will yes. The nerves that you feel on that it's great. It's why we do it. It's why we play.
I am now James, the our scanning even existentials and you.
Was really But you see, I do deserve this because at various points I have teased James about the vikings, of course, and so I deserve I'm going to take my lumps here.
Yeah. I wish you all the best and I hope you and your team are happy. I have to end with this, Charles, we are on video at the moment. Can you I knew this right away? This is a deep I wish it wasn't deep, but it is pop culture reference. Can you tell by looking at Stephen who plays drums.
His shirt is it? Is it a Genesis shirt? Phil Collins?
Very very good, But what's the album Don't Move, so he doesn't see any more of the words.
It's a trick or treat.
Yeah, it's trick of the tail. Yeah, yeah, that's what you don't know what you're wearing.
Post Phil first, post Peter Gabriel album.
Where we were pretty impressed and actually it's a good album. It's got some wonderful songs on it. And uh, I remember when it came out and I was a young lad listening to that, and uh was was was gratified that Jenny Jenny came out.
I think it came out in seventy six chains. So this is yeah, fiftieth anniversary, which you know, we're oh, that.
Would be Oh, I know I wasn't born then.
Oh, I know this is right. Okay, all right, well, I'm gonna go downstairs and have some have some metrocal and you know, take out my put my teeth and soak them in poly No, you didn't soak them in polydent. Polydent was what you used to put them on. I think it was Martha Ray with her big flashing choppers who was the person for that. It wasn't Jane Russell
who did the soaking solution. It was one of those glamorur gals from the forties who popped up and you know the Greatest Generations commercials in the sixties telling them where to put their their upper plates. Yes, well, okay, times wing a chariot all that. But Ricochet is still young, still new, still heading forth with great vigor and the
bigot your enthusiasm into the new year. You can join us there and you will find a good place to read and to write, because if you're a member, you can write in the post this week it, which is great. We would like to thank you for going to fabric because that's where you're going to get life insurance and as a parent with small kids or somebody later in life who's just looking for it, go there, give it
a start and support them for supporting us. Everybody works out, everybody pays, everybody benefits, and you know, five star reviews at Apple podcasts are always one of those things we're asking you to do. I've been doing it for about six hundred and seventy four podcasts. Now one of these days you're actually going to do it. The weight of responsibility and guilt will task you to do it. Your reviews allow new listeners to discover the podcast that keeps
the show going, that keeps Ricochet going, etcetera, etcetera. And by the way, if you're new to this, we're not the only podcast in the Ricochet. We've got a whole audio feed with all kinds of people, including the Diner, which returns this Saturday. Once I get down to it and decide exactly what I'm going to say. Am I kidding? I never know what I want to say. It's been great. Thank you Steven, Thank you, Charles. Regards to all, and
we'll see everybody in the cup. I gotta ask, what version are we on now, Charles Ricochet four.
Point four point fourteen point fourteen point fourteen point fourteen.
Still for three?
Still pretty big update?
Yeah, well big update to come. And won't it be fun when we flip the switch and everything goes dark and scrambles and server blows up. But no, that won't happen until it doesn't though, We'll see everybody in the comments, said Ricochet four point oh bye bye