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And the ‘D’ Is for ‘Damn Right’ · Q & A, Hosted by Jay Nordlinger

0:01
SPEAKER_01: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Q&A.
0:04
SPEAKER_01: I'm Jay Nordlinger,
0:05
SPEAKER_01: and my guest today is my longtime friend and colleague,
0:08
SPEAKER_01: Kevin Williamson, Kevin D. Williamson, and the D is for damn right.
0:15
SPEAKER_01: He's the national correspondent for The Dispatch.
0:18
SPEAKER_01: His latest book is Big White Ghetto.
0:21
SPEAKER_01: There are many more to come, no doubt.
0:25
SPEAKER_01: Hello, Kevin.
0:26
SPEAKER_01: Wonderful to see you.
0:28
SPEAKER_01: You too, Jay.
0:28
SPEAKER_01: What's new?
0:30
SPEAKER_01: So much.
0:32
SPEAKER_01: And there's so much to write about at all levels,
0:36
SPEAKER_01: on the personal level, national, international, things artistic, things literary.
0:44
SPEAKER_01: I keep a running list of subjects I might turn to.
0:47
SPEAKER_01: I wonder if you have a list either written or mental.
0:54
SPEAKER_00: I have a list of books that I want to write, for sure.
0:57
SPEAKER_00: And I...
1:00
SPEAKER_00: I do a title first.
1:02
SPEAKER_00: Like I have a title for a book in my head and then everything else comes in.
1:08
SPEAKER_00: Someone once described Andrew Lloyd Webber as being a logo first composer.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: Like he comes up with the marketing for a show and then writes it behind.
1:17
SPEAKER_00: I don't think that's probably true.
1:19
SPEAKER_00: And it's maybe not a very generous interpretation of his work.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: Although I get both the envy and the critical sensibility behind it.
1:27
SPEAKER_00: But I'm definitely a title first writer.
1:29
SPEAKER_00: I've got a few titles bumping around.
1:32
SPEAKER_01: Well, it's funny.
1:33
SPEAKER_01: You remind me of Robert Kagan's book, The Jungle Grows Back.
1:37
SPEAKER_01: It's about...
1:38
SPEAKER_01: American World Affairs.
1:40
SPEAKER_01: And I said to him,
1:41
SPEAKER_01: can't remember the subtitle exactly,
1:43
SPEAKER_01: but you almost didn't need to have a book after the title and the subtitle.
1:48
SPEAKER_01: He said, that's exactly right.
1:49
SPEAKER_01: He said,
1:50
SPEAKER_01: because the point of the book was so well encapsulated in the title,
1:54
SPEAKER_01: the jungle grows back.
1:56
SPEAKER_01: It takes constant watching, you know, to keep the jungle at bay.
2:01
SPEAKER_01: And you remind me too,
2:02
SPEAKER_01: a recent guest on this program was our friend Mark Halperin, the novelist.
2:06
SPEAKER_01: That was great.
2:07
SPEAKER_01: Who says that he has the final line of his novel in mind all the way through the final line.
2:14
SPEAKER_01: And I barely have the opening line in mind.
2:18
SPEAKER_00: I wonder if there's another living fiction writer
2:24
SPEAKER_00: who writes just beautiful sentences the way he does.
2:30
SPEAKER_00: I can understand maybe you don't like his books because they're big,
2:33
SPEAKER_00: difficult books,
2:34
SPEAKER_00: some of them,
2:34
SPEAKER_00: and maybe they don't appeal to you,
2:38
SPEAKER_00: but on a sentence-by-sentence basis,
2:40
SPEAKER_00: just what a bunch of beautiful sentences that man makes.
2:44
SPEAKER_01: I said to him in a recent conversation,
2:48
SPEAKER_01: he had said something and I responded, well, you're an intellectual.
2:52
SPEAKER_01: He said, I'm not an intellectual, I'm an artist, he said.
2:56
SPEAKER_01: And he was saying that in a self-mocking way, but he is an artist.
2:59
SPEAKER_01: He's a literary artist.
3:01
SPEAKER_01: You are quite right.
3:04
SPEAKER_00: In an age in which minimalism has had a real good run of it,
3:08
SPEAKER_00: he has just raised the middle finger to minimalism,
3:10
SPEAKER_00: and he is a maximalist in just every direction.
3:14
SPEAKER_00: And it's wonderful stuff to read.
3:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
3:18
SPEAKER_01: You have four boys under the age of
3:21
SPEAKER_00: The oldest is four.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: So I got one four-year-old and three two-year-olds.
3:26
SPEAKER_01: You got a real fraternity going.
3:29
SPEAKER_01: I know.
3:31
SPEAKER_00: One short of a basketball team.
3:34
SPEAKER_01: Marvelous.
3:36
SPEAKER_01: Speaking of things Greek, I was thinking of Greek names for fraternities.
3:42
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
3:44
SPEAKER_01: You're just about the only one who's written about Homer lately.
3:48
SPEAKER_01: No one's doing that.
3:50
SPEAKER_01: And you wrote a wonderful article about Homer and the Odyssey and the poem and the movie.
3:56
SPEAKER_01: I'm looking at my notes here.
3:58
SPEAKER_01: Someone was circulating on social media, such a beautiful video.
4:03
SPEAKER_01: It showed George Steiner speaking.
4:06
SPEAKER_01: And he said something like, I was brought up on Homer from about the age of five by my father.
4:14
SPEAKER_01: Homer was kind of my daily bread.
4:16
SPEAKER_01: I wonder,
4:17
SPEAKER_01: when did Homer enter your life and how big a role have things antique played
4:24
SPEAKER_01: in your life?
4:26
SPEAKER_00: Will, like a lot of people,
4:29
SPEAKER_00: particularly in my generation,
4:31
SPEAKER_00: my first exposure to kind of Greek
4:34
SPEAKER_00: and Roman mythology was Edith Hamilton's famous anthologies.
4:39
SPEAKER_00: Can I
4:40
SPEAKER_01: butt in?
4:40
SPEAKER_01: Can I interrupt you?
4:41
SPEAKER_01: Please, yes.
4:43
SPEAKER_01: First time I met Donald Kagan,
4:45
SPEAKER_01: the great classic scholar at Yale,
4:48
SPEAKER_01: the first thing he said to me almost before we shook hands— You're too nice
4:53
SPEAKER_01: to modern composers, he said.
4:55
SPEAKER_01: And then we talked about this.
4:59
SPEAKER_01: And I said, Professor, I wasn't calling him Don at the time.
5:02
SPEAKER_00: I said, Professor, do you have time for Edith Hamilton?
5:06
SPEAKER_01: She was good, wasn't she?
5:08
SPEAKER_01: He said, yes, quite.
5:09
SPEAKER_01: So anyway, so she might have been popular.
5:15
SPEAKER_01: Doesn't mean that she's not sound.
5:17
SPEAKER_00: No, I don't think so at all.
5:19
SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
5:21
SPEAKER_00: it's such a big Such a big literature that there's there's room in the marketplace
5:28
SPEAKER_00: for a lot of different versions of it,
5:30
SPEAKER_00: as indeed there would have been in that time
5:33
SPEAKER_00: when this stuff was was was not ancient culture, but was just culture.
5:37
SPEAKER_00: After that, I started Latin in seventh grade.
5:41
SPEAKER_00: And so we read a lot of this stuff in Latin and had some,
5:45
SPEAKER_00: you know,
5:47
SPEAKER_00: Some of the Greek stuff assigned to us in,
5:49
SPEAKER_00: you know, just translation and such as well.
5:51
SPEAKER_00: I don't read Greek.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: Probably don't really read Latin anymore.
5:54
SPEAKER_00: Not very well anyway.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: In high school,
5:59
SPEAKER_00: I had a teacher who was very,
6:00
SPEAKER_00: and this will definitely give away my age,
6:03
SPEAKER_00: was very into Joseph Campbell and the hero with a thousand faces stuff and all that,
6:08
SPEAKER_00: which is very much of the sort of, you know, Star Wars kind of generation.
6:13
SPEAKER_00: And so we read a lot of that.
6:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
6:17
SPEAKER_00: I had just a pretty good world literature education in junior high and high school.
6:23
SPEAKER_00: I mean, they made us read the stuff.
6:25
SPEAKER_00: And although the big epics weren't really so much my area of study,
6:30
SPEAKER_00: I had this lovely Latin teacher in middle school, as they call it everywhere else.
6:35
SPEAKER_00: We called it junior high, where I'm from.
6:38
SPEAKER_01: I think we called it intermediate school.
6:40
SPEAKER_01: I can't remember.
6:40
SPEAKER_01: Intermediate school.
6:42
SPEAKER_01: Fancy.
6:43
SPEAKER_01: Well, it's almost like remedial.
6:46
SPEAKER_00: And we got to choose an author to do our own translations of.
6:51
SPEAKER_00: And being the knucklehead that I was, I chose the Roman poet Catullus.
6:57
SPEAKER_00: And so my teacher sort of bites her lip and she says, okay,
7:04
SPEAKER_00: there's going to be a lot of stuff in there that's not
7:06
SPEAKER_00: in your regular vocabulary list.
7:08
SPEAKER_00: And Catullus is just filthy, of course.
7:11
SPEAKER_00: And there's all sorts of stuff in Catullus that is not It's appropriate to 7th,
7:16
SPEAKER_00: 8th, and 9th graders, but she allowed me to do it anyway.
7:19
SPEAKER_00: And there's also some wonderful poetry in Catullus,
7:21
SPEAKER_00: but a lot of it's just like,
7:23
SPEAKER_00: well, stuff we can't even talk about on this podcast, and we make for you blush.
7:27
SPEAKER_01: It's ribbled.
7:29
SPEAKER_00: It is, indeed.
7:31
SPEAKER_00: You know, I've always pronounced that word with a long I on the first syllable.
7:35
SPEAKER_00: It seems like it should be rivaled,
7:37
SPEAKER_00: but I never assume that I'm the right one when we say things differently.
7:40
SPEAKER_00: I also said long-lived instead of long-lived until I knew you.
7:44
SPEAKER_01: English is a screwy and elastic language.
7:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I was kind of a Joyce guy when I was young too,
7:53
SPEAKER_00: so I spent a lot of time with Ulysses and then reading back through that stuff.
7:58
SPEAKER_00: I recently,
7:59
SPEAKER_00: for reasons of complete nerdery,
8:00
SPEAKER_00: I think I've got it on my desk here,
8:02
SPEAKER_00: I actually reread a couple of translations of the Aeneid, which I really enjoy.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: And I've got one that's the interlineated version, so I can kind of do the side-by-side thing.
8:14
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, I've always liked that stuff.
8:16
SPEAKER_00: It's never been huge for me.
8:18
SPEAKER_00: It's never been like a primary interest of mine in terms of literature,
8:22
SPEAKER_00: but it's always there in the background.
8:23
SPEAKER_00: It's one of the things you kind of need to know,
8:25
SPEAKER_00: sort of like,
8:27
SPEAKER_00: I don't understand why there are controversies about teaching the Bible
8:30
SPEAKER_00: as literature in schools.
8:31
SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you want to educate people,
8:33
SPEAKER_00: you have to educate them in the actual culture and history that we have,
8:36
SPEAKER_00: which if you don't know the Bible and Shakespeare and the Greek and Roman classics,
8:41
SPEAKER_00: you don't know your culture.
8:43
SPEAKER_01: Hmm.
8:45
SPEAKER_01: I sort of get it.
8:46
SPEAKER_01: I get the controversy.
8:48
SPEAKER_01: I guess my view is that the Bible should be taught elsewhere, in Sunday school and at Temple.
8:53
SPEAKER_01: Anyway, that's a big subject.
8:57
SPEAKER_01: There was a phrase when I was growing up, the Bible is literature.
9:02
SPEAKER_01: I was sort of offended by that.
9:05
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
9:06
SPEAKER_01: More the literature, maybe.
9:09
SPEAKER_00: Although I think that's the appropriate way to probably teach it in a public school.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: I suppose.
9:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
9:15
SPEAKER_01: Well, to take this conversation down,
9:19
SPEAKER_01: as is my tendency,
9:21
SPEAKER_01: didn't I hear you say once something like,
9:26
SPEAKER_01: girls were a lot more interested in my motorcycles than in my Latin?
9:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, something like that.
9:34
SPEAKER_01: To have motorcycles in Latin is maybe a rare-ish combo?
9:39
SPEAKER_00: Oh, I think not so much, probably.
9:41
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
9:42
SPEAKER_00: And frankly, I was probably a better motorcyclist than I was a Latin scholar.
9:45
SPEAKER_00: So I never gotten any wrecks on my motorcycle.
9:47
SPEAKER_00: I did wreck my Latin quite often.
9:51
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the grammar gets a little bit away from you, as you know.
9:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that stuff's always kind of been fun, though.
9:59
SPEAKER_00: I was just thinking in terms of religious stuff as literature.
10:04
SPEAKER_00: For instance, in school, we read the Ramayana.
10:07
SPEAKER_00: And without any controversy surrounding that,
10:10
SPEAKER_00: because of course it's Hindu literature rather than Christian literature,
10:13
SPEAKER_00: so no one got their noses out of joint about it.
10:15
SPEAKER_00: It's just exotic.
10:17
SPEAKER_01: Good point.
10:19
SPEAKER_01: Kevin, can we talk for a bit about an old subject,
10:22
SPEAKER_01: an old subject in the American political and cultural wars and an old,
10:26
SPEAKER_01: old subject in the world?
10:27
SPEAKER_01: And that is, brace yourself for these three words, the common good.
10:33
SPEAKER_01: I was speaking to some students not long ago,
10:36
SPEAKER_01: a table full of students, and one was really quite upset with me.
10:40
SPEAKER_01: I said that these days my blood freezes when I hear someone speak of the common good
10:47
SPEAKER_01: because it can mean, do it my way, not your way.
10:51
SPEAKER_01: Let me be in charge.
10:53
SPEAKER_01: And I think a great question is, well, who decides what the common good is?
10:56
SPEAKER_01: Common good sounds good.
10:58
SPEAKER_01: Who decides?
11:00
SPEAKER_01: Me and my friends?
11:02
SPEAKER_01: You and your friends?
11:03
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it really matters who decides.
11:07
SPEAKER_00: Was it Stalin who said that when I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver?
11:11
SPEAKER_01: Someone did.
11:12
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
11:13
SPEAKER_00: And I happen to have a revolver here in front of me when I hear
11:17
SPEAKER_00: the words common good, because I'm at my desk.
11:20
SPEAKER_00: When I hear the words common good, I definitely want to reach into that drawer.
11:23
SPEAKER_00: And, um, and pull it out.
11:25
SPEAKER_00: It's, you know,
11:25
SPEAKER_00: it's the,
11:26
SPEAKER_00: you know,
11:26
SPEAKER_00: Rousseau general will kind of stuff that it ends up being used as just a kind
11:31
SPEAKER_00: of window dressing for, for will to power stuff.
11:35
SPEAKER_00: Um, the same way,
11:36
SPEAKER_00: you know, we,
11:37
SPEAKER_00: the capital P people are recruited into the service of every political agenda in
11:42
SPEAKER_00: the world.
11:42
SPEAKER_00: Actually,
11:43
SPEAKER_00: I have a column about that today,
11:44
SPEAKER_00: which is we're recording this on Thursday, July 30th.
11:49
SPEAKER_00: And, um, That,
11:51
SPEAKER_00: you know,
11:51
SPEAKER_00: nationalists,
11:52
SPEAKER_00: socialists,
11:52
SPEAKER_00: national socialists,
11:53
SPEAKER_00: communists, whoever, always claim to have the people on their side.
11:58
SPEAKER_00: And they're all right,
11:59
SPEAKER_00: at least some of the time,
12:01
SPEAKER_00: for some period of time,
12:03
SPEAKER_00: because the people will swing back and forth between extremes and different views
12:08
SPEAKER_00: and various kinds of radicalisms.
12:11
SPEAKER_00: Our founding fathers,
12:13
SPEAKER_00: in the language of the 18th century and early 19th century,
12:16
SPEAKER_00: described these as passions and passions.
12:20
SPEAKER_00: It's funny how words change their valence over years.
12:22
SPEAKER_00: Like passion has a pretty, you know, positive connotation in our time.
12:26
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's like romantic or, you know, follow your passion.
12:29
SPEAKER_00: If you told John Adams,
12:30
SPEAKER_00: follow your passion,
12:30
SPEAKER_00: he would have given you a stern lecture,
12:32
SPEAKER_00: a good Puritan that he was on why this is bad for you.
12:35
SPEAKER_01: John Adams said in a very important letter and a very important passage,
12:39
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry, I got screaming sirens out my window.
12:42
SPEAKER_01: Maybe they're blocked by my noise blocker, but it's hard to think of talking.
12:46
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
12:48
SPEAKER_01: The city's so nice, you have to say the name twice.
12:52
SPEAKER_01: John Adams,
12:54
SPEAKER_01: in an important passage,
12:55
SPEAKER_01: I don't cite it much,
12:56
SPEAKER_01: I more paraphrase it,
12:57
SPEAKER_01: because he uses the word gallantry in a very negative way,
13:02
SPEAKER_01: along with lots of other horribles.
13:05
SPEAKER_01: He uses the word gallantry, which means something completely different in our day.
13:09
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
13:11
SPEAKER_00: I've quoted that and mentioned that same usage, in fact.
13:15
SPEAKER_00: And I believe that same letter also has some unfortunate anti-Semitic stuff in it, as I recall.
13:20
SPEAKER_00: Where he's talking about, and who's writing this stuff?
13:24
SPEAKER_00: You know, Freemasons and Jews and Scribblers for Hire and all that stuff that he writes about.
13:29
SPEAKER_00: And just think, he was about the best of them.
13:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
13:33
SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, I think...
13:35
SPEAKER_00: I think about this sometimes.
13:37
SPEAKER_01: What about the guy in the street when the august learned John Adams?
13:42
SPEAKER_01: I often think that about various bad isms.
13:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
13:45
SPEAKER_00: When you think about John Adams' life, my Catholic integral is friends.
13:52
SPEAKER_01: You are a liberal.
13:53
SPEAKER_01: I am a liberal, yeah.
13:55
SPEAKER_00: Liberal-minded.
13:56
SPEAKER_00: These crazy ideas they have about the United States being this sort
14:00
SPEAKER_00: of confessional Catholic kind of culture when our founders weren't sure
14:05
SPEAKER_00: that they should even let these people vote.
14:08
SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
14:08
SPEAKER_00: John Adams was a grown man visiting Philadelphia before he ever saw
14:12
SPEAKER_00: a Catholic church because there weren't any in Boston because it was illegal
14:18
SPEAKER_00: to celebrate mass in public back then in the state of Massachusetts,
14:22
SPEAKER_00: which at that time I think still had the law in the books
14:25
SPEAKER_00: where you could be executed simply for being present in the Commonwealth
14:28
SPEAKER_00: of Massachusetts if you were a Jesuit.
14:32
SPEAKER_01: It was a different, different world.
14:35
SPEAKER_01: All for the common good, mind you.
14:37
SPEAKER_00: Yes, no doubt.
14:38
SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, funny,
14:39
SPEAKER_00: you think about it,
14:41
SPEAKER_00: the first public education law in the United States,
14:44
SPEAKER_00: which is one of my favorite laws,
14:45
SPEAKER_00: it was written in Massachusetts way back in the colonial era.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: It's called the Old Deluder Satan Act.
14:54
SPEAKER_00: And which is a wonderful name for a piece of legislation.
14:57
SPEAKER_00: And it provides for public schools and mandates attendance at said schools
15:02
SPEAKER_00: for reasons that would have been familiar to the Puritans back then,
15:04
SPEAKER_00: which is they thought that literacy would bring students to be able to look
15:07
SPEAKER_00: at scripture and engage with it themselves and make them less susceptible
15:12
SPEAKER_00: to influence by papists.
15:14
SPEAKER_00: And none of these people had ever seen a Catholic or,
15:17
SPEAKER_00: you know,
15:18
SPEAKER_00: at least hadn't seen one in
15:20
SPEAKER_00: a very long time doing anything except maybe being roasted over a spit.
15:24
SPEAKER_00: But they were sure that there was always going to be,
15:26
SPEAKER_00: you know,
15:26
SPEAKER_00: some Catholic,
15:28
SPEAKER_00: some Jesuit stepping out of the shadow somewhere and indoctrinating the children
15:31
SPEAKER_00: of Massachusetts.
15:32
SPEAKER_00: And they thought it was necessary to establish these public schools to keep them
15:36
SPEAKER_00: to keep them out.
15:37
SPEAKER_00: So even some of the worst kinds of bigotry in our country have been sold as defenses
15:42
SPEAKER_00: of the common good.
15:44
SPEAKER_00: You'll know this better than a lot of people because I know you've made a study
15:47
SPEAKER_00: of some of this era,
15:47
SPEAKER_00: but a lot of the segregationist stuff was sold as being good for both races,
15:53
SPEAKER_00: that racial integration would be as bad for African-Americans
15:57
SPEAKER_00: as they thought it would be for white folks.
16:00
SPEAKER_00: So it's a pretty malleable concept.
16:02
SPEAKER_01: Slavery,
16:03
SPEAKER_01: by the way, was also defended as good for both races.
16:07
SPEAKER_01: Right, yeah.
16:07
SPEAKER_01: Not just Jim Crow, yeah.
16:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no doubt, no doubt.
16:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, common good.
16:11
SPEAKER_00: I don't think it actually means anything for the most part.
16:14
SPEAKER_00: I understand what they want to get at,
16:17
SPEAKER_00: which is there are such a thing as communities and we are not completely atomistic,
16:26
SPEAKER_00: deracinated individuals who bounce around in some kind
16:31
SPEAKER_00: of magical Hayekian free market space.
16:34
SPEAKER_01: In a liberal democratic order,
16:36
SPEAKER_01: in an atmosphere of ordered liberty, They can have as many communities as they want.
16:39
SPEAKER_01: They can live in communes.
16:41
SPEAKER_01: They can sit around chanting.
16:44
SPEAKER_01: But they have to let other people live in ways of their choosing.
16:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's one of the old observations that if you had
16:52
SPEAKER_00: a libertarian national government,
16:55
SPEAKER_00: you could set up all the socialist sub-communities you wanted to.
16:59
SPEAKER_00: But if you have a socialist government, you can't set up any libertarian sub-communities.
17:02
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't work that way.
17:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
17:06
SPEAKER_00: What I think they overlook, of course, is that, well, partly it's a straw man argument, right?
17:10
SPEAKER_00: No one argues that the alternative to this stuff is or should be some sort of,
17:14
SPEAKER_00: you Individualism, which is a kind of sophomoric way of looking at the world.
17:20
SPEAKER_00: But the whole thing of having the institutions
17:23
SPEAKER_00: that make well-ordered liberty possible,
17:25
SPEAKER_00: like the rule of law, courts, that kind of stuff, presupposes a community.
17:31
SPEAKER_00: It presupposes a certain kind of community in our case.
17:35
SPEAKER_00: And if you talk to the people who wrote the Declaration of Independence and
17:38
SPEAKER_00: the Articles of the Confederation,
17:40
SPEAKER_00: And the Constitution and all the rest of it,
17:42
SPEAKER_00: you wouldn't have had to explain this stuff to them.
17:44
SPEAKER_00: They would have thought that you were crazy for thinking it needed explanation at all.
17:50
SPEAKER_00: But I think it is mainly just a mask for will to power stuff that,
17:53
SPEAKER_00: you know, we don't we don't get what we want in the marketplace.
17:56
SPEAKER_00: We don't get necessarily what we want from the democratic system.
17:59
SPEAKER_00: So we're going to come up with an idea that empowers us to do what we want in spite
18:03
SPEAKER_00: of our limitations that way, which, again,
18:05
SPEAKER_00: I sort of understand because I'm I'm as free marketed guy as I think you will meet.
18:11
SPEAKER_00: I'm a pretty, pretty, pretty radical libertarian on economic stuff and on other things as well.
18:17
SPEAKER_00: And I don't like what the marketplace produces all the time.
18:21
SPEAKER_00: You know,
18:22
SPEAKER_00: I would if the dispatch had one tenth the traffic of Pornhub,
18:28
SPEAKER_00: I would be we would all be rich over there.
18:31
SPEAKER_00: You know, we would be very, very happy.
18:33
SPEAKER_00: And it's just not the way not the way things work.
18:36
SPEAKER_00: And the market will produce all sorts of things I don't like,
18:39
SPEAKER_00: like casino gambling and online wagering and all the rest of the sort
18:44
SPEAKER_00: of casinofication of American life.
18:46
SPEAKER_00: And nine tenths of what's on television and half of what's at the movies and maybe
18:50
SPEAKER_00: a third of what's at the New York theaters is stuff that I think probably leaves
18:56
SPEAKER_00: the world on balance worse off
18:58
SPEAKER_01: rather than better off.
19:00
SPEAKER_00: But, you know,
19:01
SPEAKER_00: you accept certain tradeoffs in exchange for the sort of system that makes
19:05
SPEAKER_00: the other stuff possible as well.
19:07
SPEAKER_01: Kevin, let's talk police for a minute.
19:11
SPEAKER_00: You and I have been the guest of many fine police departments over the course of my life.
19:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
19:18
SPEAKER_01: And in your own polite way, polite with me.
19:24
SPEAKER_01: I think in the past you've implied that maybe I'm a little bit naive
19:27
SPEAKER_01: about police abuses, and maybe
19:30
SPEAKER_00: I have been.
19:31
SPEAKER_01: Maybe I have been, and I'm reflexively pro-police.
19:36
SPEAKER_01: These ICE incidents are just appalling.
19:43
SPEAKER_01: And I wonder,
19:45
SPEAKER_01: you might think this is a bit of a dodge or ploy,
19:50
SPEAKER_01: but Are these guys, are these agents, are they real police?
19:54
SPEAKER_01: I mean, professional cops?
19:56
SPEAKER_00: No.
19:56
SPEAKER_01: Or some people think they ought not to be lumped in with policemen in general
20:01
SPEAKER_01: who kind of know the rules, public spirited and so on and so forth.
20:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I may be wrong about this and I'm sure people will correct me vociferously if I am.
20:11
SPEAKER_00: But my understanding is that ICE agents are not even law enforcement officers,
20:16
SPEAKER_00: legally speaking,
20:17
SPEAKER_00: although they do certain law enforcement things and they have kind
20:20
SPEAKER_00: of limited arrest powers and things like that.
20:23
SPEAKER_00: ICE has been sort of scraping the bottom of the barrel because people don't want
20:26
SPEAKER_00: to work there because it's not a great job.
20:28
SPEAKER_00: And they're putting people out in the field who haven't really been through proper training.
20:32
SPEAKER_00: And there aren't people who have a lot of experience.
20:34
SPEAKER_00: And then even the ones who are quite good at what they do or have a lot
20:38
SPEAKER_00: of experience at it are in certain places like Minneapolis being asked
20:42
SPEAKER_00: to do things that's not really within their area of expertise.
20:47
SPEAKER_00: You know,
20:47
SPEAKER_00: in Minneapolis,
20:48
SPEAKER_00: you had these ICE agents who were basically trying to deal with urban policing.
20:54
SPEAKER_00: You know, they were dealing with these protesters who were...
20:59
SPEAKER_00: At times breaking the law,
21:00
SPEAKER_00: although often not breaking the law, certainly being rowdy, disruptive protesters.
21:08
SPEAKER_00: Dealing with that sort of thing is not what ICE agents have been trained to do,
21:13
SPEAKER_00: not what Border Patrol agents who they've sent to do to supplement the ranks in some
21:17
SPEAKER_00: of these areas have been trained to do.
21:21
SPEAKER_00: So even if you're a Border Patrol guy who's good at being a Border Patrol guy,
21:25
SPEAKER_00: that doesn't mean you know how to deal with
21:30
SPEAKER_00: A rowdy protest or a low level riot someplace directed toward your agency and its actions.
21:36
SPEAKER_00: And you probably shouldn't be expected to deal with that.
21:38
SPEAKER_01: Kevin, let's talk conservatism and the right,
21:42
SPEAKER_01: you know, our home or sometime home or place we know.
21:50
SPEAKER_01: There's a great debate, was it all a lie?
21:53
SPEAKER_01: This is the title of Stu Stevenson's book,
21:55
SPEAKER_01: It Was All a Lie, How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.
21:59
SPEAKER_01: Were people sincere about freedom,
22:01
SPEAKER_01: democracy, human rights, the American founding, motherhood, apple pie, all of that?
22:06
SPEAKER_01: Or was it just a lie?
22:08
SPEAKER_01: And I'd like to read you a little bit of...
22:11
SPEAKER_01: Jonathan Last in his column the other day.
22:15
SPEAKER_01: We'll talk about it.
22:17
SPEAKER_01: Once upon a time,
22:18
SPEAKER_01: I imagined
22:19
SPEAKER_01: that America's institutions possessed some magical quality like civic antibodies,
22:24
SPEAKER_01: which would cause them to resist Trumpism.
22:28
SPEAKER_01: I thought the Republican Party would rather lose an election than submit to Trump.
22:32
SPEAKER_01: I thought the conservative movement would rather move into the wilderness
22:35
SPEAKER_01: than bend itself to Trump.
22:38
SPEAKER_01: Then a little later,
22:39
SPEAKER_01: The Republican Party as an institution reconciled itself to Trump before
22:44
SPEAKER_01: the 2016 primaries were even complete.
22:48
SPEAKER_01: Most of the conservative movement accommodated itself to Trump after he won
22:51
SPEAKER_01: the presidency the first time.
22:54
SPEAKER_01: The rest of it amazingly threw in with him after his attempted coup.
23:00
SPEAKER_01: I know people, personal friends of mine, who were not pro-Trump.
23:05
SPEAKER_01: Until about 2024, 2023, 2022, 2025.
23:12
SPEAKER_01: Man, I guess I don't have a question.
23:16
SPEAKER_01: Just as Bill would say, say the appropriate things.
23:20
SPEAKER_00: Say the appropriate things.
23:21
SPEAKER_01: Say what you think.
23:24
SPEAKER_00: I think Jonathan Last is a very, very good writer.
23:27
SPEAKER_00: And I always enjoy reading him, although I think we're in maybe slightly different places.
23:35
SPEAKER_00: I think that there is and always has been and always has been understood to be
23:42
SPEAKER_00: a big difference between the conservative movement and the Republican Party.
23:46
SPEAKER_00: The Republican Party institutionally is very weak.
23:49
SPEAKER_01: It can be awfully hard to tell the difference.
23:52
SPEAKER_00: Lately, yes.
23:53
SPEAKER_01: These conservative institutions are like party spokesmen, but keep going.
23:57
SPEAKER_00: Well, you can tell the difference because a lot of important people from
24:01
SPEAKER_00: the conservative movement are not part of the Republican Party anymore.
24:04
SPEAKER_00: You know,
24:05
SPEAKER_00: there's a there's a there's a reason people like Bill Kristol are no longer,
24:10
SPEAKER_00: you know, marching alongside their former fellow partisans in an organization.
24:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, people like that.
24:20
SPEAKER_00: And what a match.
24:23
SPEAKER_00: So, no, I don't think it was always a lie.
24:25
SPEAKER_00: I don't.
24:27
SPEAKER_00: I think that Jean Kirkpatrick really cared about the things she said she cared about.
24:31
SPEAKER_00: And I think Milton Friedman really cared about the things he said he cared about.
24:34
SPEAKER_00: And I think Bill Buckley really cared about the things he said he cared about.
24:37
SPEAKER_01: Jean didn't become a Republican until after her government service was over.
24:41
SPEAKER_01: I think she was in her 50s, I think 1985.
24:43
SPEAKER_01: But was Friedman?
24:44
SPEAKER_01: Anyway, I know what you mean.
24:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
24:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
24:47
SPEAKER_01: And they're identified with the right.
24:49
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
24:50
SPEAKER_00: Certainly.
24:51
SPEAKER_00: And well, and I think in a lot of these cases, it's as important that they weren't Republicans.
24:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
24:56
SPEAKER_00: You know,
24:56
SPEAKER_00: people like,
24:59
SPEAKER_00: you know,
24:59
SPEAKER_00: Irving Kristol and people like that who didn't have a super tight relationship with
25:03
SPEAKER_00: the Republican Party and Charles Krauthammer and people of that sort.
25:10
SPEAKER_00: That said,
25:13
SPEAKER_00: we knew that the parties were weak and that weak institutions are easy to corrupt.
25:18
SPEAKER_00: I don't think many of us appreciated just how weak the Republican Party was
25:23
SPEAKER_00: and how craven so many of its senior figures were.
25:28
SPEAKER_00: I, too, was surprised,
25:29
SPEAKER_00: as Jonathan was,
25:30
SPEAKER_00: by how quickly some of these people accommodated themselves to things that they knew
25:34
SPEAKER_00: to be wrong and immoral and in the long term destructive,
25:41
SPEAKER_00: even to their own political aspirations.
25:44
SPEAKER_00: You know,
25:45
SPEAKER_00: whatever Becomes of of of Ted Cruz and his political hopes in the future,
25:52
SPEAKER_00: having done what he did to be a survivor and stay in good graces through
25:57
SPEAKER_00: the Trump years,
25:57
SPEAKER_00: it's going to make him less of a political figure than he would have been otherwise.
26:02
SPEAKER_00: Not not a greater one.
26:03
SPEAKER_00: Now, maybe there was no cost free path forward for him, which why should there be?
26:10
SPEAKER_00: But.
26:12
SPEAKER_00: It has been it has been remarkable and and Despair-inducing to see institutions
26:19
SPEAKER_00: that we had maybe once thought highly of bend themselves either to accommodate,
26:24
SPEAKER_00: whether it's accommodating donors or readers and subscribers,
26:30
SPEAKER_00: or trying just to stay close to political power because you've got career reasons
26:33
SPEAKER_00: for wanting to do that.
26:36
SPEAKER_00: You know,
26:36
SPEAKER_00: the first Trump administration,
26:38
SPEAKER_00: I could kind of just about see a case for people who went to work for
26:42
SPEAKER_00: the administration understanding its character because they thought, well,
26:46
SPEAKER_00: our country still needs good people to be secretary of state or secretary
26:49
SPEAKER_00: of commerce or to be doing this, that or the other.
26:54
SPEAKER_00: I can see why someone like Rex Tillerson tried in the first Trump administration.
26:59
SPEAKER_00: I really can.
27:01
SPEAKER_00: I can see why someone like Larry Kudlow tried in the first Trump administration.
27:08
SPEAKER_00: Because I imagine that they thought they would have more influence and impact
27:12
SPEAKER_00: than they ultimately did,
27:13
SPEAKER_00: that they would do more to shape Trump than Trump would do to shape them.
27:16
SPEAKER_00: They were all wrong about that.
27:18
SPEAKER_00: I have a much harder time understanding, well,
27:23
SPEAKER_00: maybe not understanding,
27:23
SPEAKER_00: but certainly excusing people who are serving the second Trump administration.
27:28
SPEAKER_00: And I, too, know people who are anti-Trump until after the coup attempt.
27:33
SPEAKER_01: I just wrote a piece about so-called elections and dictatorships and elections and democracies.
27:38
SPEAKER_01: And I revisited the phone call from Trump to the Georgia Secretary of State.
27:44
SPEAKER_01: This is what I want.
27:46
SPEAKER_01: Find 11,780 votes.
27:48
SPEAKER_01: That's pretty specific.
27:51
SPEAKER_01: Then he called in the White House on Thanksgiving Day.
27:54
SPEAKER_01: He called this man, Brad Raffensperger, an enemy of the people.
27:59
SPEAKER_01: And this is just, it's dictator talk.
28:02
SPEAKER_01: And the phone call was like a dictator move.
28:06
SPEAKER_01: And the Republican Party said, we want him as our nominee a third time in a row.
28:10
SPEAKER_01: And the American people said, we want him as our president for a second time.
28:15
SPEAKER_01: What can you do?
28:17
SPEAKER_01: A democracy can't be better than the people.
28:19
SPEAKER_00: No, it can't.
28:21
SPEAKER_00: You know,
28:21
SPEAKER_00: all you can do is what we do,
28:24
SPEAKER_00: essentially, I think, which is argue, explain, persuade, document.
28:31
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, keep the evidence in people's faces as much as we can.
28:35
SPEAKER_00: Um, I mean, that's the only real power we have.
28:38
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you live in New York, so not your vote matters.
28:41
SPEAKER_00: And, uh, you know, it's, it's, and neither one of us is ever going to run for office.
28:46
SPEAKER_00: We're, I mean, we're fools, but we're not fools of that scale.
28:49
SPEAKER_00: And, uh, not ever, not ever going to go down that road, I don't think.
28:52
SPEAKER_00: Although I can see you doing it.
28:53
SPEAKER_00: I could see Jay running for office maybe.
28:55
SPEAKER_01: But I do think there's,
28:56
SPEAKER_01: to get back to your more serious point, um,
29:00
SPEAKER_00: You know,
29:01
SPEAKER_00: our crisis in our politics is, I think, fundamentally a spiritual and moral crisis.
29:06
SPEAKER_00: It's not an economic crisis.
29:07
SPEAKER_00: The economy hasn't been great for the last few years, but it ain't the Great Depression.
29:13
SPEAKER_00: We're not being invaded by the Canadians.
29:16
SPEAKER_00: We're not being invaded by anybody else.
29:18
SPEAKER_01: By their wildfire smoke.
29:20
SPEAKER_00: Yes, Canadian wildfire smoke.
29:23
SPEAKER_00: I have duly spoken sternly to my Canadian wife about this.
29:27
SPEAKER_00: She is chastened.
29:29
SPEAKER_00: And we'll not burn the bacon anymore.
29:32
SPEAKER_00: Canadian bacon.
29:33
SPEAKER_00: Yes, Canadian bacon.
29:34
SPEAKER_00: We do not eat Canadian bacon in our house.
29:36
SPEAKER_00: We only eat real bacon.
29:37
SPEAKER_00: But this is a subject we talked about a bit before,
29:42
SPEAKER_00: and I won't go off on my whole mini-lecture on it,
29:45
SPEAKER_00: but I really think that the decline of...
29:50
SPEAKER_00: organized religion,
29:51
SPEAKER_00: both as a cultural force and as a day to day reality in the lives
29:55
SPEAKER_00: of American families and individuals and communities has left this opening
30:03
SPEAKER_00: into
30:03
SPEAKER_00: which politics has been poured and people are looking for a source of Belonging
30:11
SPEAKER_00: and meaning and a place to get their transcendental values.
30:14
SPEAKER_00: And politics is where they're getting it.
30:16
SPEAKER_01: And it's just the worst place to do it, of course.
30:18
SPEAKER_01: They play their politics with a religious fervor.
30:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
30:24
SPEAKER_00: They're like English soccer hooligans,
30:27
SPEAKER_00: except they've become political partisans instead of sports teams partisans.
30:32
SPEAKER_00: And their songs aren't as good.
30:35
SPEAKER_00: But other than that, they're pretty similar.
30:38
SPEAKER_00: And...
30:39
SPEAKER_00: That, I think, is something that just has to be addressed.
30:42
SPEAKER_00: And I don't think that this decline in
30:47
SPEAKER_00: church life is something that's been imposed
30:50
SPEAKER_00: from outside.
30:51
SPEAKER_00: I think it has to do with shortcomings of the American religious institutions themselves.
30:58
SPEAKER_00: I think that the mainline Protestant churches,
31:02
SPEAKER_00: particularly in the post-war era,
31:04
SPEAKER_00: Kind of stopped believing in very much,
31:07
SPEAKER_00: I think in a lot of ways,
31:08
SPEAKER_00: or at least they lost the courage of their convictions in many ways.
31:12
SPEAKER_00: The Catholic Church obviously was institutionally and reputationally damaged by
31:16
SPEAKER_00: the sex scandals and all the rest of it.
31:19
SPEAKER_00: And I think ironically that a lot of the pursuit of so-called relevance
31:27
SPEAKER_00: by religious institutions has made them less relevant.
31:31
SPEAKER_00: If they become just another kind of player in the pop culture Uh, therapeutic sort of world.
31:36
SPEAKER_00: They're not particularly good at it.
31:38
SPEAKER_00: I had a conversation today with a man who's very involved in the, uh, in the Methodist church.
31:42
SPEAKER_00: And of course,
31:43
SPEAKER_00: like other Methodist churches,
31:44
SPEAKER_00: you know, his congregation has a median age of about 72.
31:47
SPEAKER_00: And, um,
31:49
SPEAKER_00: and he had read my, my,
31:51
SPEAKER_00: my account of that, uh,
31:53
SPEAKER_00: that conference I'd been to and how people at these conferences always talk
31:56
SPEAKER_00: about how do we get young people involved?
31:58
SPEAKER_00: And, and he asked me that same question.
31:59
SPEAKER_00: Well, how do we get young people involved, you know, at our church?
32:02
SPEAKER_01: And, um, And what I told him— But classical music and churches are the same.
32:07
SPEAKER_01: It's always, how do we get young people involved?
32:09
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
32:09
SPEAKER_01: What'd you tell them?
32:11
SPEAKER_00: Well, what I told him was that that's the wrong question for him to ask.
32:14
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the question for a church is, how do we proclaim and live out the gospel?
32:19
SPEAKER_00: And if you do that, the other stuff is going to take care of itself.
32:22
SPEAKER_00: The other stuff will become obvious to you.
32:25
SPEAKER_00: Or in whatever providential
32:27
SPEAKER_01: way it won't.
32:27
SPEAKER_01: Reminds me of— Seek ye first the kingdom of God to quote the Sermon on the Mount.
32:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
32:34
SPEAKER_01: All these things shall be added unto you.
32:36
SPEAKER_00: And I think for the congregations that have,
32:39
SPEAKER_00: quote unquote,
32:40
SPEAKER_00: done well,
32:41
SPEAKER_00: you know what I'm talking about from the point of view of someone like this,
32:44
SPEAKER_00: that have people attending and their numbers are up.
32:47
SPEAKER_01: It's like magazine people who say that a piece has done well.
32:50
SPEAKER_01: All they mean is it's been popular.
32:51
SPEAKER_01: That could be total crap, but they don't care.
32:54
SPEAKER_00: Right.
32:55
SPEAKER_00: But the ones where there is,
32:57
SPEAKER_00: you know,
32:58
SPEAKER_00: that have these characteristics that these people desire have been the ones
33:01
SPEAKER_00: that either actually stand for something or do a really,
33:03
SPEAKER_00: really good job of impersonating an institution that actually stands for something.
33:08
SPEAKER_00: And it's no accident that you see over the course of many,
33:12
SPEAKER_00: many decades that the kind of most energetic and in that sense,
33:18
SPEAKER_00: healthiest Religious institutions tend to be the ones that are the most demanding
33:24
SPEAKER_00: and conservative and orthodox because people want
33:32
SPEAKER_00: a sense
33:33
SPEAKER_00: that this thing they're engaged in actually means something.
33:36
SPEAKER_00: Because if it's just a social club, why get out of bed early on Sundays for it?
33:39
SPEAKER_00: Social clubs are for Saturday afternoons.
33:41
SPEAKER_00: They're not for Sunday mornings.
33:43
SPEAKER_00: Sunday mornings are for sleeping in unless you've got some other real important thing to do.
33:48
SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
33:49
SPEAKER_00: I grew up to the extent that I grew up in a church in,
33:51
SPEAKER_00: you know, kind of liberal-ish college town Methodist church.
33:56
SPEAKER_00: And my friends all belong to,
33:57
SPEAKER_00: you know,
33:58
SPEAKER_00: kind of very Republican-leaning Baptist churches because those are
34:00
SPEAKER_00: the two flavors you had back then.
34:02
SPEAKER_00: And a few Catholic churches for like,
34:05
SPEAKER_00: you know,
34:05
SPEAKER_00: Texas Tech faculty members with Irish last names and people of Mexican background.
34:11
SPEAKER_00: And that was – those were the religious – and like four Jewish families.
34:14
SPEAKER_00: And hello, Mr. and Mrs. Mann.
34:16
SPEAKER_00: It was nice to have known you back then.
34:18
SPEAKER_00: And the Landsman family, the classic sort of Jewish names was great.
34:22
SPEAKER_00: And I think that,
34:26
SPEAKER_00: you know,
34:26
SPEAKER_00: having grown up in that church, I mean,
34:29
SPEAKER_00: that was my only real experience to organize religious life was,
34:33
SPEAKER_00: you know,
34:33
SPEAKER_00: on the one hand,
34:33
SPEAKER_00: this kind of liberalist Methodist church that didn't seem really on fire
34:38
SPEAKER_00: about anything.
34:40
SPEAKER_00: And then these very kind of angry people.
34:43
SPEAKER_00: Baptist churches that were on fire about a lot of stuff,
34:47
SPEAKER_00: but it didn't really seem to have that much to do with the gospel.
34:50
SPEAKER_00: It had to do with,
34:50
SPEAKER_00: you know,
34:51
SPEAKER_00: political issues and social issues and things like that, which are important.
34:54
SPEAKER_00: I care about that stuff.
34:57
SPEAKER_00: But, you know,
34:58
SPEAKER_00: if what you really,
34:59
SPEAKER_00: really want to talk about in church this week is,
35:02
SPEAKER_00: you know,
35:05
SPEAKER_00: whether drinking beer means you're going to go to hell,
35:08
SPEAKER_00: which is a big thing in the Baptist world,
35:09
SPEAKER_00: at least it was in the 1980s when I was occasionally going to Baptist churches
35:12
SPEAKER_00: with my friends.
35:14
SPEAKER_00: It seems to me like you've maybe taken a turn somewhere.
35:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, a lot to that.
35:46
SPEAKER_01: Kevin, let's.
35:47
SPEAKER_00: I spend a lot of time talking about Moses myself, but that's another.
35:50
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
35:51
SPEAKER_01: Name of one of Kevin's children, I should tell our audience.
35:56
SPEAKER_01: Kevin, you.
35:57
SPEAKER_01: I heard you say for some years,
36:01
SPEAKER_01: if we don't get a handle on the national debt and the federal budget deficit,
36:05
SPEAKER_01: nothing else really matters.
36:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's the ballgame or at least a big part of the ballgame.
36:12
SPEAKER_01: And my thought this morning,
36:14
SPEAKER_01: I was anticipating talking with you,
36:16
SPEAKER_01: was just because no one's talking about it doesn't mean it doesn't matter.
36:23
SPEAKER_01: It might matter more than ever.
36:24
SPEAKER_01: But as far as I know,
36:25
SPEAKER_01: it's an issue completely absent from our politics on the Democratic side and
36:31
SPEAKER_01: the Republican side.
36:32
SPEAKER_01: It's
36:35
SPEAKER_01: a big flaming issue that at the same time, perversely, is a non-issue.
36:41
SPEAKER_01: Do you read it the same way as I do?
36:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I do.
36:47
SPEAKER_01: Your tone of voice suggests that you may not see it that same way.
36:50
SPEAKER_00: No, I do.
36:52
SPEAKER_00: I was just thinking that the ways in
36:56
SPEAKER_00: which this will manifest itself are
37:02
SPEAKER_00: maybe not always obvious to people.
37:05
SPEAKER_00: So my best guess,
37:06
SPEAKER_00: and I don't want to be the prophet about this stuff,
37:09
SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to play Nostradamus here,
37:11
SPEAKER_00: but The most likely thing is that when
37:14
SPEAKER_00: the fiscal pressures get sufficiently difficult to start forcing some reaction
37:21
SPEAKER_00: in Washington,
37:23
SPEAKER_00: the reaction that we're going to probably see is to try to inflate away
37:27
SPEAKER_00: the problems.
37:28
SPEAKER_00: We're going to try to pay off these obligations with created money.
37:33
SPEAKER_00: And so we're not probably going to Tell a whole bunch of Social Security recipients,
37:39
SPEAKER_00: at least at first,
37:40
SPEAKER_00: you're not getting a check this month or we're cutting it by 25% because it's either
37:44
SPEAKER_00: that or stop paying the soldiers.
37:46
SPEAKER_00: And you're the ones who are going to lose.
37:49
SPEAKER_00: And we're probably not going to renege on our national debt, at least not for some time.
37:53
SPEAKER_00: But there will be the temptation to essentially use inflation to do this stuff.
37:58
SPEAKER_00: Now, I can't remember the numbers off the top of my head,
38:00
SPEAKER_00: but we had a pretty good spike in inflation during the COVID and post-COVID era.
38:04
SPEAKER_00: But I think that it ran like on average, like 4.5% or something like that.
38:10
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't Argentina, you know, and people got really mad about that.
38:16
SPEAKER_00: People got really upset.
38:16
SPEAKER_00: I don't blame them.
38:17
SPEAKER_00: You know,
38:18
SPEAKER_00: persistent inflation at a high rate,
38:19
SPEAKER_00: which we still have persistently high inflation,
38:22
SPEAKER_00: at least above our targets, is a real painful tax on people.
38:27
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, people start going to the Kroger in places like where I live.
38:31
SPEAKER_00: And the shopping basket that used to cost them 80 bucks is $150 or $200.
38:36
SPEAKER_00: And they noticed that and they're really upset about it.
38:39
SPEAKER_00: Well,
38:39
SPEAKER_00: when you start trying to inflate away something like our entitlement obligations
38:44
SPEAKER_00: and our debt obligations,
38:46
SPEAKER_00: you're going to be looking at inflation that's much, much higher than that.
38:50
SPEAKER_00: And this is going to cause social strains that make all the rest
38:55
SPEAKER_00: of those political problems that much more difficult.
38:58
SPEAKER_00: And that also increases the incentives for trying
39:01
SPEAKER_00: to do distracting things like have these small ball culture war fights
39:06
SPEAKER_00: over Anthony Fauci's diaries or to try to put Comey in jail or to blow up a bunch
39:14
SPEAKER_00: of boats in the Caribbean under the pretext that they're probably full of cocaine,
39:18
SPEAKER_00: but no one really knows why not just murder everybody on board anyway.
39:21
SPEAKER_00: They're just brown people who speak Spanish.
39:22
SPEAKER_00: Who cares?
39:23
SPEAKER_01: This is flat out murder, isn't it?
39:25
SPEAKER_00: It's just murder.
39:28
SPEAKER_00: I think that we'll be dealing with that for a long time after Trump leaves office.
39:33
SPEAKER_01: Do you think people will care?
39:34
SPEAKER_01: That's interesting, Kevin.
39:36
SPEAKER_00: I think some people will care, yes.
39:38
SPEAKER_00: And I think I will care and I will make a point of reminding people about this for
39:42
SPEAKER_00: as long as Pete Hexteth is in public life, which I suspect will be a long time.
39:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
39:47
SPEAKER_00: Because he seems relatively healthy.
39:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
39:50
SPEAKER_00: And...
39:52
SPEAKER_00: Who knows what his liver looks like, but that's another issue.
39:55
SPEAKER_01: A macho, macho man.
39:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
39:59
SPEAKER_00: That guy.
40:00
SPEAKER_00: I'll go off on a little thing here for a second.
40:03
SPEAKER_01: He's a caricature.
40:05
SPEAKER_01: He's a cartoon.
40:06
SPEAKER_00: It's so weird to be putting these workout videos on the internet when you're
40:11
SPEAKER_00: the secretary of Don't Call It War.
40:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a very strange cat.
40:16
SPEAKER_01: Can you imagine Cap Weinberger?
40:21
SPEAKER_01: He's such a brainy guy.
40:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, it's difficult to imagine.
40:27
SPEAKER_00: Leon Panetta.
40:30
SPEAKER_00: Workout videos.
40:31
SPEAKER_01: Harold Brown, the genius physicist.
40:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, none of those folks probably.
40:36
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, weird characters, I think for sure.
40:40
SPEAKER_00: So that being said,
40:41
SPEAKER_00: I think we will get to the point where the inflation end of the problem is
40:45
SPEAKER_00: the pointy end of the spear before we get to the point about defaulting
40:48
SPEAKER_00: or just like radically cutting government spending.
40:50
SPEAKER_00: But we will get to that other point eventually, too.
40:53
SPEAKER_00: And that is going to be so disruptive in so many ways
40:58
SPEAKER_00: that people haven't really thought through yet.
41:02
SPEAKER_00: Hayek and the Austrian economists have this concept of malinvestment,
41:07
SPEAKER_00: where you've got the government that's creating all sorts
41:09
SPEAKER_00: of economic incentives based on policy that is in the end not sustainable.
41:15
SPEAKER_00: And then when it becomes clear that this stuff is sustainable and
41:18
SPEAKER_00: that something's going to change,
41:19
SPEAKER_00: whether it's spending or interest rates or something else,
41:21
SPEAKER_00: and these things that look like good investments are not bad investments,
41:24
SPEAKER_00: you go through this painful period where that capital has to be reallocated,
41:27
SPEAKER_00: which is essentially what a recession is by their understanding.
41:32
SPEAKER_00: And so we've got a lot of people who have certain expectations
41:34
SPEAKER_00: about what their standard of living and disposable income is going to look like
41:37
SPEAKER_00: in retirement because of Social Security.
41:40
SPEAKER_00: It's not going to be there.
41:42
SPEAKER_00: And they have certain expectations of what their health care is going to look like
41:45
SPEAKER_00: and what it's going to cost them because of Medicare.
41:46
SPEAKER_00: They're simply not going to be there.
41:48
SPEAKER_00: And businesses have been started and apartment buildings in Florida have been built
41:55
SPEAKER_00: and clinics have been launched.
41:58
SPEAKER_00: And hospital systems have been organized in ways that reflect these assumptions
42:02
SPEAKER_00: that are going to turn out to be bad assumptions.
42:06
SPEAKER_00: And all of that stuff is going to get disrupted in various kinds of unpleasant ways.
42:11
SPEAKER_00: And the social and political ramifications of that,
42:14
SPEAKER_00: I think are really hard to predict, but they ain't going to be pretty.
42:17
SPEAKER_00: And
42:20
SPEAKER_00: so I do worry about that a lot in terms of not only what the economy is going
42:25
SPEAKER_00: to look like,
42:25
SPEAKER_00: I think the economy is We'll recover from this stuff because we have a big,
42:31
SPEAKER_00: inventive,
42:33
SPEAKER_00: entrepreneur-driven economy that can absorb a lot of stuff and a lot of troubles.
42:40
SPEAKER_00: Amazon's not going to stop being a valuable service because
42:42
SPEAKER_00: the federal government is badly financed and because there are various problems
42:46
SPEAKER_00: that go along with that,
42:46
SPEAKER_00: although people have less money to spend there than they thought they were going to.
42:50
SPEAKER_00: Americans aren't going to stop inventing things and improving things and doing
42:54
SPEAKER_00: that sort of stuff.
42:56
SPEAKER_00: But...
42:57
SPEAKER_00: If you have a politics that becomes many,
43:01
SPEAKER_00: many orders of magnitude more resentment driven and sour and violent even
43:07
SPEAKER_00: than it is now, the economy can't save you from that.
43:13
SPEAKER_00: Entrepreneurship and startups and venture capital and all
43:16
SPEAKER_00: of this great stuff we have can't save you from that.
43:19
SPEAKER_00: And that's really what I worry about are the kind of social breakdown aspects
43:23
SPEAKER_00: of these problems that are very difficult to forecast.
43:27
SPEAKER_00: And once those bonds are broken,
43:29
SPEAKER_00: to take us back to Ulysses and Christopher Nolan's movie of the Odyssey,
43:36
SPEAKER_00: once those bonds are broken, it's really hard to restore those things.
43:39
SPEAKER_00: Have you seen the movie yet, by the way?
43:41
SPEAKER_01: No.
43:42
SPEAKER_00: I know you're not much of a moviegoer.
43:44
SPEAKER_01: I enjoy going to the movies, but I don't go much, which is...
43:50
SPEAKER_01: Strange, but I go to concerts and operas and things, but I would like to see the movie.
43:55
SPEAKER_01: But not having seen the movie does not stop me from commenting on it.
44:02
SPEAKER_00: My theory of the movie is that it really is very much meant to be commentary on current events.
44:06
SPEAKER_00: And although not in a clumsy or obvious sort of way,
44:11
SPEAKER_00: and everyone else will have heard this by now, but you haven't seen it.
44:13
SPEAKER_00: And there's...
44:15
SPEAKER_00: There's a bit at the end where he talks about how the songs of
44:18
SPEAKER_00: the Trojan War are songs that will only be sung.
44:22
SPEAKER_00: And his wife asks him why.
44:23
SPEAKER_00: And he says, because songs will be all they have to remember those of us who could write.
44:29
SPEAKER_00: Because he realizes that he set in motion a chain of events that has disrupted
44:32
SPEAKER_00: the norms of his civilization.
44:34
SPEAKER_00: It's not going to be able to survive without them.
44:36
SPEAKER_01: Kevin, I have a few more for you.
44:40
SPEAKER_01: Here in New York, Mayor Mamdani This is a line of mine, and I wonder what you think of it.
44:46
SPEAKER_01: I said this during the campaign, the mayoral campaign.
44:50
SPEAKER_01: What Republicans have long said about Joe Biden,
44:55
SPEAKER_01: Nancy Pelosi,
44:56
SPEAKER_01: Hillary Clinton,
44:57
SPEAKER_01: Kamala Harris,
44:58
SPEAKER_01: Chuck Schumer,
44:59
SPEAKER_01: all of them, what Republicans have said about them is actually true of Mamdani.
45:05
SPEAKER_01: But they've spent their rhetorical fire on He's out of central casting, this guy Mamdani.
45:12
SPEAKER_01: He's a grad school Marxist.
45:16
SPEAKER_01: He's a good guy who never grew up.
45:17
SPEAKER_01: He just believes all that stuff that the pot smokers in the dorm rooms said.
45:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I wonder how much of this is that New York is not a well-governed
45:28
SPEAKER_00: or well-administered place, to be sure.
45:32
SPEAKER_00: But it's not as badly governed or as badly administered as a lot of other American cities are.
45:38
SPEAKER_00: Um, Detroit at its worst.
45:40
SPEAKER_01: There's a deal of ruin in it.
45:43
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
45:43
SPEAKER_01: Someone's phrase.
45:44
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
45:45
SPEAKER_01: Adam Smith.
45:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
45:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
45:46
SPEAKER_00: And, um, so I wonder if Mamdani isn't in some ways a, um,
45:56
SPEAKER_00: A reflection of official New York's ability to more or less keep
46:00
SPEAKER_00: the machinery going, irrespective of who is in the mayor's office.
46:05
SPEAKER_01: We think it's on autopilot.
46:06
SPEAKER_01: We think it's on cruise control.
46:07
SPEAKER_01: And you might ding it around the edges, but you can't really wreck it.
46:11
SPEAKER_01: I hope that's true.
46:12
SPEAKER_00: I think there's probably something to be said for that and that it may actually be the case.
46:19
SPEAKER_00: And I think at the national level,
46:21
SPEAKER_00: that's been one of the reasons why Trump hasn't been more destructive
46:24
SPEAKER_00: than he has been.
46:25
SPEAKER_00: Is because a lot of the machinery can kind of just keep going
46:29
SPEAKER_00: and he doesn't understand it well enough to be as disruptive as he would like to be.
46:32
SPEAKER_00: You know,
46:34
SPEAKER_00: saboteur has to understand how the mechanism works before he can be a good saboteur,
46:39
SPEAKER_00: I think.
46:42
SPEAKER_00: So we've been having these conversations over the dispatch a lot about this kind
46:45
SPEAKER_00: of spike in socialism as a brand anyway.
46:50
SPEAKER_00: And to some extent, socialism as a real idea.
46:54
SPEAKER_00: I think in the DSA world of people who are running for office,
46:58
SPEAKER_00: like Mondami,
46:59
SPEAKER_00: you've got people who are true-believing socialists,
47:02
SPEAKER_00: and then the people who are voting for them aren't necessarily ideologically
47:05
SPEAKER_00: or doctrinaire socialists,
47:07
SPEAKER_00: but they're people who want a more confrontational, less compromising system.
47:14
SPEAKER_00: Less accommodating kind of democratic politics.
47:16
SPEAKER_00: They're the left's Tea Party.
47:19
SPEAKER_00: Essentially they want more of a fight and less of a conversation and they're in
47:23
SPEAKER_00: the mood for some radicalism in the waning days,
47:27
SPEAKER_00: what we hope here are the waning days of the Trump era.
47:31
SPEAKER_00: So I don't think that socialism per se is necessarily much of a living threat
47:42
SPEAKER_00: to American institutions and American governance.
47:45
SPEAKER_00: But I think that the people who call themselves socialists really are.
47:49
SPEAKER_00: But what they believe in isn't socialism.
47:51
SPEAKER_00: They believe in mob rule and kind of a mass crass majoritarianism in which
47:58
SPEAKER_00: the intervening liberal institutions are either stripped away or disempowered
48:04
SPEAKER_00: in various kinds of ways.
48:05
SPEAKER_00: If you look at the DSA's agenda, a lot of it's not socialism.
48:08
SPEAKER_00: A lot of it's majoritarianism.
48:10
SPEAKER_00: They want to get rid of the Senate.
48:11
SPEAKER_00: I think, Kevin.
48:33
SPEAKER_01: There was so much written about Springfield,
48:35
SPEAKER_01: Ohio and the Haitians there, the alleged pet eaters, so much written.
48:40
SPEAKER_01: And your piece,
48:41
SPEAKER_01: your reporting piece after your visit was one of the most penetrating,
48:45
SPEAKER_01: one of the most moving of all those pieces.
48:48
SPEAKER_01: And...
48:50
SPEAKER_01: The Haitians are back in the news, those in Springfield, Ohio.
48:54
SPEAKER_01: And I read something from Noah Smith.
48:58
SPEAKER_01: And this is what I read on social media.
49:02
SPEAKER_01: I will never forget the Haitians eating cats lie.
49:06
SPEAKER_01: I will never let it go.
49:08
SPEAKER_01: It was so deliberate and monstrous and unprovoked and cruel.
49:13
SPEAKER_01: And no one has ever apologized for it.
49:17
SPEAKER_01: I wonder if you share some of that sentiment.
49:20
SPEAKER_00: I do.
49:21
SPEAKER_00: I think JD Vance is a son of a bitch and he ought to be ashamed of himself.
49:29
SPEAKER_00: JD, of course,
49:30
SPEAKER_00: has been,
49:31
SPEAKER_00: you know,
49:31
SPEAKER_00: not only not apologized for it,
49:32
SPEAKER_00: but gone out and justified it and said, well,
49:34
SPEAKER_00: if I had to,
49:35
SPEAKER_00: I forget how he put it exactly,
49:36
SPEAKER_00: we had to create narratives or something in order to get people to pay attention.
49:40
SPEAKER_00: That's just a way of saying that I lied and got away with it and the lie had
49:43
SPEAKER_00: the effect that I wanted it to.
49:46
SPEAKER_00: You know,
49:47
SPEAKER_00: in writing about the people in Springfield,
49:48
SPEAKER_00: but also writing about the, um,
49:52
SPEAKER_00: Immigrants,
49:52
SPEAKER_00: including the illegal immigrants in Los Angeles and around there,
49:55
SPEAKER_00: which I spent some time doing.
49:59
SPEAKER_00: The common theme that really emerged was these people who are
50:06
SPEAKER_00: the actual working class jobs that people talk about,
50:09
SPEAKER_00: who are actually out there doing very difficult kinds of work.
50:13
SPEAKER_00: They're not sitting around writing.
50:15
SPEAKER_00: They're opinions like we do or working in academic offices or think tanks or things like that.
50:21
SPEAKER_00: They're cleaning restaurants and hotels and they are doing really very different kinds of work.
50:26
SPEAKER_00: Some of them are illegal immigrants and I'm anti-illegal immigration.
50:28
SPEAKER_01: Taking care of the elderly and sick.
50:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, doing all that stuff.
50:32
SPEAKER_00: And the thing that really emerged for me from these folks talking
50:35
SPEAKER_00: to them is what they want is a normal life.
50:38
SPEAKER_00: As one of them put it to me, just a normal life.
50:40
SPEAKER_00: We want things to be normal for us,
50:43
SPEAKER_00: which means that we want to be able to get up and go to work and take
50:47
SPEAKER_00: the bus like we're used to and not be afraid about getting snatched up
50:50
SPEAKER_00: by some masked gunman on the bus and have our jobs and be with our families and try
50:57
SPEAKER_00: to save some money and build a better lives for our kids and grandkids,
51:00
SPEAKER_00: that old-fashioned stuff.
51:02
SPEAKER_00: Now, the fact that...
51:06
SPEAKER_00: A lot of illegal immigrants are here with the best of intentions does not mean
51:09
SPEAKER_00: that we should accept that.
51:13
SPEAKER_00: I'm pro enforcement when it comes to immigration and
51:20
SPEAKER_00: including pro enforcement
51:21
SPEAKER_00: against people who are going to be sympathetic in many cases.
51:25
SPEAKER_00: That's part of having the rule of laws that you enforce your laws
51:29
SPEAKER_00: and you don't do it just when it feels good and when the people seem nasty
51:34
SPEAKER_00: in some way.
51:36
SPEAKER_00: That being said,
51:38
SPEAKER_00: this sort of thing is having effect on all sorts of people
51:40
SPEAKER_00: who are not illegal immigrants as well.
51:43
SPEAKER_00: People who are legal immigrants in those communities,
51:45
SPEAKER_00: people who are part of families that have some legal and some illegal immigrants
51:50
SPEAKER_00: in them,
51:51
SPEAKER_00: or people who aren't immigrants at all who have families
51:53
SPEAKER_00: that have illegal immigrants in them as well.
51:55
SPEAKER_00: And the sort of viciousness and scapegoating and cruelty that we've seen at work
52:01
SPEAKER_00: in this stuff and using these people as a kind of
52:06
SPEAKER_00: Corporate Spanish-speaking Emmanuel Goldstein to be the recipient of all hate
52:15
SPEAKER_00: and
52:15
SPEAKER_00: the blame for all that's wrong in the country has been really despicable
52:18
SPEAKER_00: and detestable.
52:21
SPEAKER_00: Obviously,
52:22
SPEAKER_00: there are enormous problems associated with our current levels
52:25
SPEAKER_00: of illegal immigration.
52:26
SPEAKER_00: Some of those problems are economic.
52:27
SPEAKER_00: Some of those problems have to do with crime.
52:29
SPEAKER_00: Some of them have to do with the problems and challenges of That being said,
52:34
SPEAKER_00: most of what ails our country does not have very much to
52:58
SPEAKER_00: With the fact that there are a lot of Americans who get their grass cut by a guy
53:01
SPEAKER_00: who is not legally president in the United States.
53:05
SPEAKER_00: It's an issue.
53:06
SPEAKER_00: It's a real issue.
53:07
SPEAKER_00: And it's not a small issue.
53:09
SPEAKER_00: Is it as big an issue as the fact that we have a president who tried to overthrow
53:13
SPEAKER_00: the government the last time he lost an election?
53:15
SPEAKER_00: The corruption.
53:16
SPEAKER_01: The scale of the corruption.
53:19
SPEAKER_01: It's just shocking.
53:20
SPEAKER_01: And the public seems so accepting of it.
53:22
SPEAKER_01: So blasé.
53:23
SPEAKER_01: You can't get them interested.
53:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
53:28
SPEAKER_01: Let's end with this.
53:28
SPEAKER_01: I've been writing lately about language and American accents and code switching.
53:36
SPEAKER_00: I enjoyed your piece on Michigan accents very much.
53:39
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
53:39
SPEAKER_01: This is a woman named Haley Stevens,
53:41
SPEAKER_01: a congresswoman who's running for the Senate in my home state.
53:46
SPEAKER_01: Kevin, do you have one voice as far as you know?
53:51
SPEAKER_01: Do you have different modes, different registers?
53:56
SPEAKER_01: I mean, are you a Lubbock guy if you're ever back in Lubbock,
54:01
SPEAKER_01: or do you have sort of a standard Williamsonian way of speaking?
54:05
SPEAKER_00: No, there's definitely this code shifting, as they say in linguistics for me.
54:14
SPEAKER_00: So...
54:16
SPEAKER_00: I do not have nearly as strong an accent as my older brother had or as my father had.
54:25
SPEAKER_00: Now, my older brother had a real like sort of West Texas Panhandle accent.
54:30
SPEAKER_00: My father's accent was more North Texas because he grew up around there and came to
54:35
SPEAKER_00: the Panhandle when he was in high school
54:37
SPEAKER_00: when your accent's already pretty well developed.
54:40
SPEAKER_00: I never made any conscious effort to shed my accent,
54:44
SPEAKER_00: but I think I spent just a lot of time watching Firing Line when I was a kid
54:49
SPEAKER_00: and too much public television and stuff like that.
54:54
SPEAKER_00: So my accent is not as strong as it was in earlier generations of my family.
54:59
SPEAKER_00: It comes out at times.
55:00
SPEAKER_00: I have more of an accent sometimes if I'm tired.
55:04
SPEAKER_00: I have more of an accent if I've been drinking.
55:08
SPEAKER_01: How about if you're angry?
55:11
SPEAKER_00: No, anger goes to the bellowing theater voice.
55:16
SPEAKER_00: So this is the make my children cry voice that I use.
55:19
SPEAKER_00: So when my register goes down to about two octaves and my volume goes way up
55:23
SPEAKER_00: and I make the wall shake, I'm good at that.
55:27
SPEAKER_00: Certain kinds of music, if I sing, my accent comes out a lot more.
55:31
SPEAKER_00: So like old country songs I sing with,
55:33
SPEAKER_00: and I don't do it like a put on, it comes naturally that way.
55:37
SPEAKER_00: There's a thing Texas politicians do Where I think that once you take a guy who's
55:43
SPEAKER_00: a Texas politician and you put him on the national stage,
55:46
SPEAKER_00: that they lean into this BS howdy duty cowboy thing.
55:52
SPEAKER_00: I love George W. Bush.
55:54
SPEAKER_00: Everyone knows I love George W. Bush.
55:56
SPEAKER_00: I'm a great admirer of George W. Bush.
55:57
SPEAKER_00: I think he was a decent man and a pretty good president in a lot of ways.
56:02
SPEAKER_00: And I don't really know him, but what I do know of him personally, I like.
56:07
SPEAKER_00: I have no idea where that accent alleges to come from because nobody in Midland
56:12
SPEAKER_00: or Houston talks like that.
56:14
SPEAKER_00: I was writing about this.
56:18
SPEAKER_01: His father had a strange hybrid accent.
56:21
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
56:22
SPEAKER_01: Father born in Massachusetts, grew up in Connecticut largely.
56:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
56:28
SPEAKER_01: Was in the war,
56:29
SPEAKER_01: World War II,
56:31
SPEAKER_01: started his career in business and politics in Texas,
56:34
SPEAKER_01: summered in Maine, worked in California for a while.
56:37
SPEAKER_01: George W.
56:39
SPEAKER_01: grows up in Midland and Houston,
56:43
SPEAKER_01: but then goes to Andover, Yale and Harvard, back to Texas.
56:48
SPEAKER_01: Mother always, Barbara always remains kind of a New Englander.
56:51
SPEAKER_01: Jeb speaks differently, made his life in Florida.
56:58
SPEAKER_01: Since I'm on this,
56:59
SPEAKER_01: I was somewhat defensive,
57:00
SPEAKER_01: this may interest people, of Hillary Clinton and her so-called black accent.
57:08
SPEAKER_01: You'll remember she was in a church,
57:10
SPEAKER_01: First Baptist Church in Selma in 2007 during the 2008 presidential cycle.
57:16
SPEAKER_01: And it was an anniversary of Bloody Sunday, I think the 42nd anniversary.
57:21
SPEAKER_01: And she gave a speech with some,
57:22
SPEAKER_01: here's that word again, passion in it, in basically her normal or accustomed voice.
57:31
SPEAKER_01: But then she came to her peroration and she quoted an old gospel song popularized
57:37
SPEAKER_01: by James Cleveland, I Ain't No Ways Tired.
57:40
SPEAKER_01: And she lapsed into the vernacular.
57:43
SPEAKER_01: And this was a hoot all over the country.
57:44
SPEAKER_01: She was derided.
57:46
SPEAKER_01: Hillary sounded like a mammy.
57:48
SPEAKER_01: She was ingratiating.
57:49
SPEAKER_01: She was insulting.
57:51
SPEAKER_01: She's a white girl from the Chicago suburbs.
57:54
SPEAKER_01: So plenty of derision.
57:57
SPEAKER_01: And Hillary answered something like this.
57:59
SPEAKER_01: I could relate to it.
58:00
SPEAKER_01: She said, okay, you got me.
58:04
SPEAKER_01: I was born in Chicago.
58:05
SPEAKER_01: I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago.
58:07
SPEAKER_01: I went to New England for college and then law school.
58:12
SPEAKER_01: I was in Arkansas for 20 years.
58:15
SPEAKER_01: I was the first lady of that state.
58:18
SPEAKER_01: I was in a thousand black churches.
58:22
SPEAKER_01: Sue me.
58:23
SPEAKER_01: Then we went to Washington.
58:24
SPEAKER_01: I was first lady of the country.
58:27
SPEAKER_01: I was a U.S. senator from New York.
58:28
SPEAKER_01: I was secretary of state.
58:30
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
58:31
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
58:32
SPEAKER_01: I haven't been in the same village my whole life churning butter.
58:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
58:36
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
58:37
SPEAKER_01: You got me.
58:38
SPEAKER_01: And I thought, yeah.
58:41
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
58:42
SPEAKER_01: But so George W., he's
58:47
SPEAKER_01: That's his own way.
58:48
SPEAKER_01: I don't think anyone else talks like that.
58:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
58:50
SPEAKER_00: And like, you know, Rick Perry is another example of this.
58:55
SPEAKER_00: Like I interviewed him a few times before he ran for president.
58:59
SPEAKER_00: And in private, he sounds like.
59:04
SPEAKER_00: A hundred other like sophisticated, worldly Dallas and Houston businessmen that I know.
59:11
SPEAKER_00: And he's really quite funny.
59:14
SPEAKER_00: And but.
59:15
SPEAKER_00: But sort of subtle.
59:16
SPEAKER_00: And I mean,
59:18
SPEAKER_00: he's not,
59:18
SPEAKER_00: you know, he's not some, you know, think tank egghead or something like that.
59:22
SPEAKER_00: He's a smart, sophisticated guy.
59:23
SPEAKER_00: He knows a lot about the world.
59:24
SPEAKER_00: He's been around.
59:25
SPEAKER_00: And then you put him out on the campaign trail running for president before he's,
59:30
SPEAKER_00: I guess he's a seller of psychedelic drugs now or something, which is America.
59:36
SPEAKER_01: He's Elmer Gantry and Theodore Bilbo.
59:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
59:40
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, and he's just...
59:43
SPEAKER_00: You know, he leans into that sort of thing.
59:45
SPEAKER_00: But then there are people who don't do that.
59:47
SPEAKER_00: And I think it's either because they're more secure in themselves or
59:51
SPEAKER_00: because they weren't, you know, really seeking elected office.
59:55
SPEAKER_00: So they don't feel the need to do that.
59:57
SPEAKER_00: Like, I don't I don't really know James Baker, but I've spent a bit of time with him.
1:00:02
SPEAKER_00: And James Baker always sounds like James Baker,
1:00:05
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:00:06
SPEAKER_00: and and he doesn't he's got a Texas accent, but he doesn't sound like, you know,
1:00:13
SPEAKER_00: Um, some guy who's putting one on,
1:00:15
SPEAKER_00: uh, Phil Graham, of course, who has a Georgia accent, not a Texas accent.
1:00:20
SPEAKER_00: Um, but he's got this wonderful foghorn leghorn accent and he sounds like that all the time.
1:00:24
SPEAKER_00: At least,
1:00:25
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:00:26
SPEAKER_00: I remember running into him in an airport one time and, um,
1:00:29
SPEAKER_00: he was not a young man at that point,
1:00:30
SPEAKER_00: but he's carrying his own luggage and stuff and doing his own thing and stopped
1:00:34
SPEAKER_00: to chat for a while.
1:00:35
SPEAKER_00: And, um, just this wonderful, enormous, uh, accent.
1:00:39
SPEAKER_00: And, um, Which,
1:00:40
SPEAKER_00: you know what,
1:00:41
SPEAKER_00: I'd sit through a State of the Union address,
1:00:42
SPEAKER_00: which I will not voluntarily do normally.
1:00:45
SPEAKER_00: I'll listen to Phil Graham talk if he were president.
1:00:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think people do kind of lean into it.
1:00:51
SPEAKER_01: I had a choice between Tip O'Neill and y'all, and I chose y'all.
1:00:55
SPEAKER_01: Kevin, you've lived in a lot of different places in America and abroad in India.
1:01:02
SPEAKER_01: Are you a Texan wherever you go?
1:01:04
SPEAKER_01: Because I've lived in New York for almost 30 years.
1:01:07
SPEAKER_01: I would never call myself a New Yorker.
1:01:09
SPEAKER_01: I regard that as pretentious.
1:01:10
SPEAKER_01: I'm a transplant.
1:01:11
SPEAKER_01: I'm an adoptee.
1:01:15
SPEAKER_01: People say, where are you from?
1:01:17
SPEAKER_01: If I'm out and about somewhere.
1:01:19
SPEAKER_01: And I always say I'm from Michigan.
1:01:20
SPEAKER_01: I've lived for a long time in New York.
1:01:24
SPEAKER_00: How long have you lived in Michigan?
1:01:25
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
1:01:27
SPEAKER_01: Are you a Texan wherever you go?
1:01:28
SPEAKER_01: Or is that not part of your...
1:01:31
SPEAKER_01: I was going to say identity, self-awareness.
1:01:35
SPEAKER_00: You know Mitt Romney's things about how the trees were the right height?
1:01:39
SPEAKER_01: I quoted that just the other way.
1:01:40
SPEAKER_01: I knew everyone ooted at him.
1:01:42
SPEAKER_01: I knew just what he meant.
1:01:44
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:01:45
SPEAKER_00: So something about West Texas for me, there's no trees, of course, not very many.
1:01:50
SPEAKER_00: There's so much wind, right?
1:01:52
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the wind is just right.
1:01:53
SPEAKER_00: And the tumbleweeds are the right height, I guess.
1:01:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I do feel a permanent sense of connection to that place.
1:02:02
SPEAKER_00: And both to Lubbock where I grew up, but also to that region sort of more broadly.
1:02:09
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, for me,
1:02:11
SPEAKER_00: everything from about,
1:02:15
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:02:15
SPEAKER_00: Wichita Falls through about the Rocky Mountains,
1:02:22
SPEAKER_00: I guess, is what I think the world looks like.
1:02:26
SPEAKER_00: You know, or what I think America looks like.
1:02:28
SPEAKER_00: Now, it's not what America looks like.
1:02:29
SPEAKER_00: It's a very big country with all sorts of landscapes and some
1:02:32
SPEAKER_00: of them really quite beautiful, much more beautiful than that.
1:02:36
SPEAKER_00: You know,
1:02:36
SPEAKER_00: let's I mean,
1:02:37
SPEAKER_00: Utah has some lovely,
1:02:38
SPEAKER_00: lovely places and the California coast is one of the most beautiful places in
1:02:42
SPEAKER_00: the world.
1:02:44
SPEAKER_00: But for me, driving across West Texas, you're always driving somewhere in West Texas.
1:02:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:02:50
SPEAKER_00: It's just kind of, that just feels right in some way.
1:02:55
SPEAKER_00: People ask me about like Tex-Mex food sometimes.
1:02:57
SPEAKER_00: And I do miss the tacos from home.
1:03:01
SPEAKER_00: But the thing is like, they've got a way of doing Mexican food in Arizona.
1:03:06
SPEAKER_00: They've got a way of doing it in California.
1:03:08
SPEAKER_00: And they've got a way of doing it in Nevada.
1:03:10
SPEAKER_00: And the Texas, New Mexico thing is a real thing.
1:03:14
SPEAKER_00: And I don't think that any of those are Inferior.
1:03:18
SPEAKER_00: Although I,
1:03:18
SPEAKER_00: I will make a case against the San Diego burrito,
1:03:23
SPEAKER_00: but, um, it's just what you grew up with is a certain kind of thing.
1:03:28
SPEAKER_00: And, um, and that's just what I, what I grew up with.
1:03:31
SPEAKER_00: Like, if you asked me, like,
1:03:32
SPEAKER_00: if you gave me like a blind taste test,
1:03:34
SPEAKER_00: I'd probably tell you that I like Kansas city barbecue better than Texas barbecue.
1:03:37
SPEAKER_00: Now I'm never going to get to move back there,
1:03:39
SPEAKER_00: but it's just not what you, not what you grew up with.
1:03:43
SPEAKER_00: And, uh,
1:03:43
SPEAKER_00: so those landscapes and the wind and the, um,
1:03:47
SPEAKER_00: You know,
1:03:47
SPEAKER_00: particular quality of the light in the West,
1:03:49
SPEAKER_00: which has to do with elevation and dryness and other sorts of things.
1:03:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's a certain left a stamp on me.
1:03:59
SPEAKER_01: You've given me a memory.
1:04:03
SPEAKER_01: So I grew up in the upper Midwest and you'd read in the Bible about the wilderness
1:04:09
SPEAKER_01: and the waste howling wilderness.
1:04:11
SPEAKER_01: And I thought little house in the big woods, you know, my wilderness is forest and so on.
1:04:18
SPEAKER_00: And I go to
1:04:18
SPEAKER_01: Israel for the first time and
1:04:23
SPEAKER_01: so many of the biblical images came to life for me.
1:04:28
SPEAKER_01: They mean desert by wilderness and King James, they mean desert.
1:04:33
SPEAKER_01: No wonder they make so much of shade,
1:04:36
SPEAKER_01: you know, a shelter from the blast and the waste howling wilderness.
1:04:41
SPEAKER_01: I heard that wind in the desert one night or day, I can't remember.
1:04:46
SPEAKER_01: And that phrase from the Old Testament came to me, the waste howling wilderness.
1:04:52
SPEAKER_01: In Michigan, that's not the wilderness.
1:04:56
SPEAKER_00: No, no, different, whole different kind of wilderness.
1:04:58
SPEAKER_00: You know,
1:04:58
SPEAKER_00: Jonah Goldberg just came back from a trip to the Grand Canyon and he was writing
1:05:01
SPEAKER_00: about it.
1:05:02
SPEAKER_00: And this thing he'd never really experienced before,
1:05:05
SPEAKER_00: which is wind blowing about 30 miles an hour in your face and it's hot.
1:05:10
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's not a cool breeze.
1:05:11
SPEAKER_00: It's like a 90, a 90 degree like hair dryer kind of breeze.
1:05:16
SPEAKER_00: And that's spring through about Thanksgiving.
1:05:22
SPEAKER_00: And that's all good and fine.
1:05:25
SPEAKER_01: Kevin, you provide your readers
1:05:31
SPEAKER_01: edification, laughs, and I would say comfort, comfort.
1:05:37
SPEAKER_01: You make one feel less alone.
1:05:39
SPEAKER_01: And thank you so much.
1:05:41
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
1:05:42
SPEAKER_00: Man, if people are turning to me for comfort, God helps.
1:05:45
SPEAKER_00: But thank you for saying that.
1:05:48
SPEAKER_00: And of course, I feel the same way about you.
1:05:50
SPEAKER_00: It's good to have you for a friend.
1:05:53
SPEAKER_01: Ditto, ditto.
1:05:55
SPEAKER_01: Thank you one and all.
1:05:56
SPEAKER_01: Till next time.