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Jay talks once more with one of his favorite writers and people — Kevin D. Williamson, whose new book is “Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Woolly Wilds of the ‘Real America.’” Among the topics: poverty, drugs, gambling, porn, and despair. But don’t worry: The conversation is much more pleasurable than it sounds.
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If given a choice between subsistence farming and anything else, most people would choose anything else, can Kevin D. Williamson please explain to me why the Amish are still doing pretty well ?
Kevin. . .is why you don’t assign journalists to cover their own home turf.
Here’s a podcast featuring divisive and obnoxious snobs whose opinions count for nothing.
Like so many of Ricochet’s podcasts.
This book is brought to you by the letters G, F, and Y.
To the Trump administration’s credit, they tried to raise the living standards for everyone. Bringing manufacturing jobs back, encouraging entrepreneurship, the Inner City Initiatives, standing up for faith and community, putting the reins on excessive regulation, and cutting welfare and food stamps unless you could prove you needed it and searched for work. Everyone benefitted.
This is in opposition to free benefits for everyone, including cell phones, and encouraging mass migration from South of the Border by offering these government subsidies. Trump was for border control and law and order, as opposed to open borders where these drugs pour in and changed our culture. He championed the family over the state.
Obama was all for legalizing drugs and dumbing down the population through the educational system, instead of teaching history and math and science to make our kids more competitive. They were all about questioning your gender, are you too white, wealthy, too male – if so you have an issue, marginalizing the population and creating deep divisions and depression.
This is where we find ourselves and it was going to take more than 4 years by a non-politician to break the log jam of dependency and ignorance. Now we are back to the same people running things.
Kevin Williamson is the political equivalent of a Sam Kinison standup routine. And not as effective. (For the uninitiated, Google “Sam Kinison Ethiopia.”)
The Amish are playing the long game. They’ll outlast us all.
Kevin Williamson’s chief problem is his inability to understand that not everyone wants to be Kevin Williamson. Not everyone wants the kind of transient lifestyle that being National Review‘s “roving correspondent” lends itself to. It isn’t a sin to desire a little permanence in life, and it isn’t a sin to express that desire politically.
Are you familiar with the Amish blue glow?
This comment is a certainly a unique way to argue that we are fomenting divisiveness and obnoxiousness. Not sure it’s very convincing, though.
To what audience does a book titled “Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Woolly Wilds of the ‘Real America.’” hold appeal? Certainly not an audience of the people he’s calling “stone-cold stupid and high on rage.”
This garbage doesn’t heal divisions. It widens them.
Has anyone on this thread actually listened to the podcast?
I’m not defending the title of the book or the book (I haven’t read it). And I don’t know who the book is aimed at, either. That said, knowing Kevin and his sense of humor a bit, my guess is that the title is meant to be a self-deprecating joke.
I have! It’s actually a very interesting conversation.
The Amish have a strong religious motivation. People will put up with a lot for their faith.
Interesting. I am in the middle of Crime and Punishment and there are so many parallels to what Kevin is saying in this interview. I am surprised that he described Dallas the way he did. My son has lived there for 2 years and loves it. He lives right downtown and walks to work. I visited him there and found it a lovely city. There are parts that are probably not so nice but that is true of every city. I plan to retire there and get away from northern VA, which would probably surprise Kevin but my husband is an Aggie and I am from Australia. Texas is so much like Australia. Big open spaces just a few minutes from downtown.
I have lived on every continent and travelled widely. The USA is still a wonderful country with much to offer and still offers great opportunity to those who work hard and even to those who don’t work that hard. But if you have the wrong parents … things can go very poorly for many.
America was never about equality, only about equality of opportunity and some will work for those opportunities while some will take the analgesic and live hopelessly.
I’ve started listening to this podcast and Williamson is already irritating me.
He says that the country is “high on rage”, with politics now serving as a sort of substance abuse. He blames both parties equally as “drug dealers” that are “all-in” on rage.
What is the example he goes to?
The recent “sacking” (his word) of the Capitol by angry Trump supporters.
Not the weekly looting, arson and rioting by BLM and Antifa that has been going on all year. There has been nothing like that from the Right, until this past week. This latest event involved some broken glass and shuffled papers in the Capitol Building. No arson, no looting. Yet Williamson reserves the word “sacking” for this, rather than the stuff that looks like actual sacking – you know, emptied stores and burned out hulks that now grace our major cities from coast to coast.
Since when is the Republican Party “all in” on rage? You can debate it with respect to Trump if you like. But Mitch McConnell? Kevin McCarthy? Kristi Noem? On the other hand, every major Democrat from Nancy Pelosi to Chuck Schumer to Andrew Cuomo to “The Squad” has done their best all year to fan the flames of leftist outrage.
Then he poisons the well by saying that his position is sure to irritate Trump supporters, who are all “high on rage” don’t you know. So you can discount any objection they might make.
If the rest of the podcast is done in similar bad faith, I’ll probably end up high on rage myself.
Equal people are not free, and free people are not equal.
I am curious about who is going to buy this book and who is the target audience. The Left won’t read it and the right isn’t interested in anything National Review offers.
I have everything Williamson wrote but I don’t see the need to continue to listen to him or buying his books. Loyalty is a transaction one must give to receive.
p.s. I am also curious when he is going to release “Big Black Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, criminal and High on Rage in the dystopian hellscape of the ‘Urban America.’
Maybe he can get by on book advances, for a while. But if his stuff doesn’t eventually/actually sell, those will stop.
Well, maybe NR pays him enough to get by. At least until NR goes under due to lack of donor support.
Wouldn’t it be just hilarious and stuff, if Kevin D. Williamson ends up working on a farm to support himself?
He’d finally be contributing to society.
Wow! That’s really the book title! I thought that was a joke.
There’s a local radio show that usually has Kevin on to promote his books. I really doubt she will have him call in for that one.
What happened to Kevin? Did he already flee to Switzerland?
That last time Kevin tried to cross the Atlantic. The Atlantic got italicized and rejected him.
No, I guess I’m too “stone-cold stupid” and possibly “dead broke” and “high on rage”.
Perhaps everyone should be “high on rage” once in awhile, but I think it has been the Left and type of people rioting in Portland who have been “high on rage” recently.
Huh. I still remember all the lectures Kevin gave on how poor white people were bigots for wanting to start trade wars with nonwhite countries but not white ones–until Trump went after Germany for unfair trade practices.
I wonder if Kevin still uses the line “blaming their problems on brown people from across the border.” That was a phrase he seemed to like quite a bit on MD&E. Sometimes I felt bad for Charlie for having to sit there and listen to Kevin’s interminable rants (Charlie was always the reason to listen to that podcast).
The rest of the podcast isn’t as bad as I feared. Actually, it is largely boring. Williamson states a lot of commonplace views as though he is the first to discover them. For instance:
There are benefits and drawbacks to both drug legalization and drug prohibition. Well, duh. Jay Nordlinger, for some reason, congratulates Williamson for allegedly being a lonely voice proclaiming this.
Another is: Casino gambling doesn’t really bring many economic benefits to anyplace but Las Vegas. I think even NPR figured this out years ago.
The problem with Williamson’s brand of economic libertarianism is that it eventually dissolves all barriers between an individual and the state.
Criticizing the existing political order in the US is easy. Devising a better, and more replacement, is the hard part. The alternative to the democrat party is not a party that better recognizes the limits of state power, it is race hustlers and socialists. The alternative to Trump is not Kevin D. Williamson, it is John Kasich.
Hmm… Maybe Kevin is one of those second-rate intellects who is impressive to third-rate intellects?
Or perhaps a third-rate who is impressive to fourth-rate?
Now who is being a snob.
As Rush says, or at least used to say, “It’s not bragging if you can do it.”
Local governments love the money though.
There are probably places besides Las Vegas outside of the Unites States like Macau, etc.
They might love the money, until they have to turn around and spend it all, and perhaps more, supporting the gambling situation and increased crime etc. Vegas apparently comes out ahead still, but other places like Atlantic City don’t seem to.
Also, Kevin seems to think that having legal prostitution available just a 45-minute drive from Vegas is adequate, and the only reason there is still illegal prostitution within Vegas is because they’re underage, or HIV-positive, etc. But what if someone just doesn’t want to travel 45 minutes each way, especially if that costs maybe $200 or more for taxi or limousine? That’s an hour and a half they can’t be in the casinos! And maybe $200 or more they can’t gamble!
If someone had to drive 45 minutes each way to buy cigarettes or beer or liquor, would he claim that bootleg cigarettes or beer or liquor should obviously disappear?