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Since our plans to hide away forever at a remote Minnesotan lake house were dashed – on account of James not having one for us – we decided instead to jump on into the mucky swamp that’s swallowed up our institutions. At least we have Eli Lake (who, as you’ll hear, knows everybody) to tour us through the law enforcement agencies who’ve undermined their standing with the public in order to get the guy who they blame for undermining the public’s trust in them…
Also, the hosts chat some about the former rep from Wyoming; a Florida judge who hopes to stop Gov. DeSantis from stopping the woke; Lileks is seeing a resurgence of masking; plus, Rob had lunch with Viktor Orbán!
(And check out Eli’s podcast.)
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Eli Lake does not exactly cover himself with glory.
Anyone who doesn’t notice there was something very fishy about the 2020 election should have his License to Pontificate torn up.
To say the least. But then, this podcast might have no hosts. :-)
Best demographic coverage I’ve ever heard, was in this Best Interview Ever On Any Subject with Mark Steyn:
https://www.adrive.com/public/DS9Nut/NARN%2012-02-06%20NARN%201%20Hour%202%20Mark%20Steyn.mp3
How did Rob describe the election, “fair and square”? Eli has a kind of elitism about himself, which is rather off-putting. The funny thing about podcasts is that people relax and let their guard down. His remark about MTG being a yoga instructor is simply misogynistic. The same with his dismissal of Kari Lake. Hmmm.
After hearing James’ remarks on how people aren’t coming back to the downtown offices, I read this Powerline article by John Hinderaker: Will Our Cities Come Back?
It has charts showing the percentage to which life has returned to the downtown area of various cities. I found the two charts very interesting. (Sadly, Minneapolis lags way, way behind the other mid-sized cities listed.)
Rob is part of the elite too, of course. How many people do you know who hang out in Hungary for a while, and then spend a week in Tunisia…
Top prize for misogyny though, at least “within the Ricochet Universe,” may have to go to Jonah Golberg for referring to Kayleigh McEnany as “MAGA Barbie.”
You like MTG and Kari Lake?
I know nothing about Lake other than the fact that she knows how to read a teleprompter.
As for Greene, she is typical of the House. I think it was Ed Rollins who described it as the true people’s house and very reflective of the general population: some excellent, most middling, some you wouldn’t trust to babysit your house plants.
I give MTG credit for being one of the very few Congresscritters who have raised the alarm about how the January 6 demonstrators’ Constitutional right to a speedy trial has been abrogated. Haven’t sent her any money, though — at least, not yet.
Maybe he resents the fact that she is smarter than he is, at least based on my observations of both.
We may have to wait a while for the next guest who is not anti-Trump. This podcast has approximately two such guests every year, but I’m not sure where we are in the six-month cycle.
P.S.: I sometimes like to use the formulation, “Joe Biden stole the election, fair and square.” Imbued with the conventional wisdom that voter fraud is rarely a significant factor, the Trump campaign was too slow to realize that 2020 was not a normal year.
I think they’ve been developing the cheating machine for some time – as Slow Joe actually admitted on-camera, really – but it wasn’t fully energized for 2016 because they didn’t think they needed it with Hillary. But it was fully activated and supercharged for 2020. And there’s no reason to turn it down now.
Except that, the second time around, the Republicans will be ready for many of the Democrats’ tricks: Democrat judges unconstitutionally changing election rules; Republican poll watchers illegally banned from observing the handling of ballots in Democratic inner-city districts, 100% voter turnout in nursing homes, Antifa mobs intimidating Republican election judges into rubberstamping the election.
One of the biggest mistakes the Republicans made in 2020 was that they assumed that Twitter and Facebook would continue to be biased, but biased in the same way they had been for the previous few years; that is to say, piecemeal. It never occurred to them that they would block the New York Post, America’s oldest newspaper. If they had, they would have started disseminating the Hunter Biden laptop story sooner.
Sorry, gentlemen, Bill Whittle nails it. This is a curve you really don’t want to be behind on.
John suggests it might be crime. I don’t think that’s it. Perception of crime, maybe. Yes, there’s a dense and contentious knot of hoopleheads by the Target and down the street, but I walk around downtown every day and it is, as the kids say, chill.
Everyone got used to being at home, and employers seemed unwilling to disrupt this new paradigm. No one seems particularly concerned about the end game of a depopulated commercial district.
The left doesn’t believe that business is necessary to provide anything, either. Just like they think food somehow just appears magically in grocery stores, etc.
If one’s focus is the 2020 election, this podcast may have some non-conforming utterances, but the interview began with Eli talking about how the latest news is more dopamine jolts for blueanon and their all-consuming Trump fixation, so this wasn’t exactly the Liz Cheney amen-corner songfest, no?
I have not read this, but Joel Pollak is a lawyer and I think he’s done stuff with South African elections. That is where he’s from. He said the last election violated all kinds of United Nations standards.
Regarding Hungary’s preferred way of organizing it’s society, look up “diversity and trust” research by Robert Putnam. Believe me, we are living it here in Minnesota. We have this one group that just cannot stay out of the news. It’s a joke. Look at France.
You just can’t shove this down everybody’s throats with central planning, that’s all.
The 2020 elections also violated State Dept. standards for other countries.
I don’t know how to find it, but there is an interview of Johnny Rotten where he makes it clear he’s not on the left.
I agree with James
I am in the IT industry and have been working from home for the last 15 years – got used to not having to spend 30-45 minutes to travel/traffic each way – don’t think I would ever want to go back to an office
It was said about the British Parliament, and I don’t recall the exact person this attributed to, but someone who was kicked upstairs from the House of Commons to the House of Lords was asked what it was like, and he responded “It’s like going from the Animals to the Vegetables”.
It’s having a huge effect in recruiting for our IT department. A lot of prospects don’t want to come to the office much, if at all, and they certainly don’t want to have to relocate.
Victor Davis Hanson gets it.
Thank you Peter for standing up for the historical Anglo-legal principal of the right to cross examination by an antagonistic questioner. How can anyone familiar with our system of arriving at truth in governmental matters casually toss this aside. I think Richard Epstein was genuinely shocked by Adam White casually dismissing the principal of antagonistic cross examination in their podcast. And Adam White is supposed to have a rigorous legal mind. The January 6 committee may have done its greatest harm by tempting people to approve of kangaroo courts for their pet projects.
The televised January 6 proceedings should have been aired with a disclaimer. “ This proceeding violates exceedingly important Anglo-legal norms regarding attempts to arrive at the truth in important National issues. As such, it should not be relied on for any important decisions”.
What I like about MTG is that she is a successful business owner. I like that she is irate that members of Congress don’t read bills, don’t attend hearings, and don’t have serious debates on trillion dollar spending bills. Kari Lake wants to be the Ron DeSantis of the West. We need more freedom fighters at the state level. MTG and KL both have limited experience, but I’ll take that over professional grifters any day and twice on Sunday.
I remember hearing Eli Lake saying that Garland was justified in raiding MAL, because it was good for personal life–peer pressure in his Lefty friend-group. That is an appalling idea! We cannot have a DOJ be the personal Stasi of anybody. Four intelligent people in the conversation and nobody said a peep. We should have a heard a “record scratch” and a few WTFs.
Here’s Eli Lake speaking for himself:
“I’m mostly on Liz Cheney’s side …”
“I agree with her about the election …”
“The stuff from elements of MAGA-world about Liz Cheney, the obsession, it’s so over the top …”
The other panelists did not express disagreement with Lake’s observations. Too polite, no doubt!
Then why air them at all?
So, on the whole “staying home in our pajamas” … try substituting “coding fixes to websites that you use every day and doing that at all hours of the day.” Or “gathering the real news rather than farting around the office writing moping columns.”
I’m a former journalist and they always said the best reporters were never in the office, because the news doesn’t happen in the newsroom. It happens out there [gesturing to the street.] I know journalism has changed a lot since I did it, but I would have hoped the basics of getting out of the office and talking to people would remain. Clearly not.
Secondly, when me and my team fix websites that our customers rely on, the customers don’t know, don’t care and can’t tell where we are working. The customers just want the thing to work. And — funny thing that apparently gets forgotten — sometimes that maintenance has to happen off-hours. Like, from 2 a.m. until 6 a.m. … or starting at 6 p.m. and going until … whenever. (Same with covering news, fwiw.)
So maybe when I see the people demanding we return to the office sitting beside me when we do that work, maybe I’ll listen. But, golly-gee, they never seem to be around then.
I’m sorry that the downtowns are fading and every time I drive by Chicago I think “what’s going to happen to all these empty buildings.” But if you think I’m going to give two hours of my life every working day to ride on a train and do the same job in a cubicle that I could do at home, in the hopes that my presence somehow rights the sinking ship that is Chicago, that’s just silly.
Finally, setting aside all my decades of working in jobs that don’t have offices and shifting to the present, if we look at the team I work with now, we have metrics — actual work done — that shows we are more productive working from home than we were in the office. And we have subjective surveys that say we’re happier. Plus we’re able to recruit top-notch talent from across the U.S. because we won’t make them move.
I could go on but — again, focusing on the present — the “back to office” crowd speaks gauzy notions of “culture” and “camaraderie” [as well as darker motives of “command” and “control”] … but I have proof, actual metrics, that working from home works.