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There’s a lot at stake in this week’s jam-packed podcast. First up we’ve got Byron York (he of the Byron York Show on this very network) to update us on the administration that sees crises everywhere – except for the one at the border. Then the hosts get to chat with Andrew Gutmann, the New York parent who made waves recently for a publicized letter excoriating the fancy Brearly School for prioritizing wokeness and “safety” over education. Plus James gets to exhale as Minneapolis calms down, and Rob and Peter reflect on the late Walter Mondale.
Music from this week’s episode: Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2) by Pink Floyd
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Could Mr. Guttman organize not just a school for NYC, but perhaps simultaneously an online component.
With the online revolution ushered in by COVID, the education revolution could be now.
Teachers could be great teachers from anywhere in the nation (or world).
Students could be anywhere in the nation (or world).
I hope this can catch fire.
Trump love runs deep in some.
By all means, show us where Trump suggested that people drink bleach.
But you can’t, because he didn’t.
And so saying that he did, is a lie.
In others, ignorance runs deeper.
Yes! Two of my nieces attend. It’s very small, with some grades combined. My brothers moved out of Minneapolis to Minnetonka & Edina with their respective families (wife & two school-age daughters each). They both sacrificed quite a bit did the move for a better quality of life. My oldest brother has his daughters still in public ‘school’ which turned out to be a disappointment. My other brother, after planning on Minnetonka public schools (also very good reputation) decided on Agape after the mass school shutdowns. They’ve stayed open throughout. They teach classics and religion. But it is a very big financial sacrifice. The parents work incredibly close with administration, just because the resources are so limited. But it’s a ground-up school, involved parents, and kids in school. It should be a model of what could be.
Thanks. They changed their website a lot. It’s not as strong of a pitch as the one they had before. I’m not sure what is up with that.
I’m recalling more of it now. It basically teaches the kids how to think like the Founding Fathers.
Late to the party as usual, but I think Trump was speculating and used the word “disinfectant”. He did not suggest drinking the stuff, IIRC. I was curious about his speculation because I thought I remembered something similar, and sure enough, decades ago a “disinfectant” was used intravenously. The disinfectant was hydrogen peroxide. I don’t know any more about the subject, and don’t think it matters today.
No big deal to me because I haven’t paid attention to Rob for years, probably since Letters From Al.
There’s a big variety of disinfectants and a lot of housekeepers are trying to find alternatives to bleach products. So most of the public would not have landed there without being led.
The reason I just let it slide is because if Trump had turned at the press conference to Birx or Fauci and asked, “Didn’t people use some disinfectant intravenously in the 1930s?”, lots of Trump-hating fools would still have been saying that he suggested people “drink bleach”. It isn’t worth the effort to understand what motivates them.
Anyway, I got halfway through the podcast and might go back for the second half later on.
So is Blue Yeti bought into a lie or is he invested in conceit and arrogance. If the former, who can I talk to sell out and get money for changing my beliefs. I got bills to pay.
I have no idea why he won’t admit he misunderstood. The last argument we got into over this, he just kept reaching for more convoluted reasons for why bleach is spelled “d-i-s-i-n-f-e-c-t-a-n-t”. All he needed to do was admit he believed the lie and he was wrong. Instead, he chose to promote the lie even after being shown the transcript. Rob is doing the same thing. I expect people in positions of influence or running tricky businesses in politics to be intelligent and informed. For them to keep pushing this is them preferring ego over truth.
It’s been pointed out that they were also discussing that UV disinfectant procedure, which at least for a while was looked at for internal use: shining into the lungs or something, maybe, I don’t remember all the details. But stupid people and the media (but I repeat myself) were also getting “confused” – perhaps deliberately in some cases – about hydroxyCHLOROquine, and how that kinda sounded like chlorine bleach/Clorox, maybe…
We haven’t lost the “Enlightenment”. The Enlightenment is proceeding apace unimpeded. We are simply suffering the logical consequences of the ideas of the “Enlightenment,” foremost of which is the elimination of religion (Christian religion, to be specific) and belief in God.
What we have lost is the Reformation. Enlightenment secularism is triumphant.
The first real fruit of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution and the Terror. Subsequent fruits of the Enlightenment have been the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet State, the Mexican Revolution that massacred Cristeros (and provided a brief refuge for Trotsky), Mao’s takeover of China and the Cultural Revolution, and Progressive policies that have effectively destroyed American Constitutional government, and continue to sow chaos across the nation.
Bloody as the Reformation was, it bequeathed us a level of human freedom and prosperity that is unique in human history. It laid the foundation for the American nation. Dierdre McCloskey is correct when she dates the onset of modern freedom and prosperity to October 31, 1517.
Eric Vogelin had it right. All of the “-isms” of Modernity, the Enlightenment, are based on a lie. They all proclaim a “certain untruth.” Christianity, on the other hand, acknowledges an uncertain truth: We are not gods. Man is not the master of his fate, individually or collectively. We are not the source of our own salvation. We will not succeed in building the heavenly city here below by our own devices. We are not the ones we have been waiting for. Christ is the author and means of our salvation. He is the one for whom we wait. To do otherwise is to dwindle and perish in unbelief.
Come O Thou King of Kings! We’ve waited long for Thee, with healing in Thy wings, to set Thy people free.
The Scottish enlightenment liked G-d, capitalism and was wary of taxes, Kings and businessman coordinating with one another. The Enlightenment you are talking about is French. French philosophy is one of the great banes of all humanity.
Especially David French philosophy.
Dude that’s not picking low hanging fruit. That’s picking fruit up off of the ground. French has never justified the burning of Churches of the guillotine. He would just have lectured the priests to be less corrupt as the mob was burning Church property.
A couple in Phoenix ended up 1/2 dead and 1/2 hospitalized thinking it was chloroquine phosphate everyone was talking about. It’s a fish tank cleaner. They had a fish tank.
In my view, it doesn’t really matter about the bleach, imbibed or injected*. Talking off the top your head in a moment of public panic should be the rap. Not knowing, or at least suspecting, that your public health advisors are talking out of their hats (to be polite) and off their policy reservation is the considerably more serious rap. DJT wasn’t alone among world leaders in this unnecessary disaster in being unable to evaluate the situation correctly and to make better tradeoffs.
*note on injecting things. A 90-minute 3% hydrogen peroxide IV drip is currently used in alternative medicine to boost the immune system and as a cancer cure. It was also toyed with in straight medicine before antibiotics. Based on the actual fact that the body produces hydrogen peroxide as part of the immune system response. No evidence to suggest the drip does anything good. And the body is probably much better at getting the dosage right.
The interview with the York wasn’t bad. The interview with the OTHER guy from NY was great.
And only managed it because felons illegally voted for Al Franken.
If there’s some way I can help, I’d like to help. (I’m a philosophy teacher in Hong Kong.)
Folks,
I’m not really interested in debating what is said on the show with people who haven’t listened to the show. If you want me or any of the podcasters to engage with you about what was said on the show, then have the courtesy to actually listen to it yourself. Drive-by commenting based on what someone else is saying about it is weak sauce.
That said, for the record, Rob didn’t say he (or by extension me) that HE believed Trump told people to inject or ingest bleach. He was quoting someone else in order to make a larger point about how Trump and Bill Bryan, Under Secretary for Science and Technology at DHS (who was also at the April 23rd, 2020 press briefing and was the person who raised this topic) may have been correct about bleach. And that a vast swath of people are hypocritical about bleach since many of them (including some people I may be related to by marriage) were using it to disinfect their groceries, their doorknobs, and just about everything else.
But hey; don’t take my word for it (as if you would). Let’s go to the transcript (emphasis mine):
Once more: Rob never said he thought Trump advocated taking bleach internally. He was relating what SOMEONE ELSE SAID. Which is also why Peter and James (and me in editing the show) let it go by unchallenged.
For the record, I don’t believe Trump said it either. I think he could have been more precise with his language that day, but I do not believe he recommended that anyone ingest bleach. Period. Full stop.
This goes to what I meant by posting the Babylon Bee article: you read in this comment thread about someone making a statement on the show–that again several of the commenters admitted that haven’t actually heard themselves — and automatically assumed the worst and went into convulsions about it. So there’s someone out there (many people, actually) who think Trump said this. So what? We have vaccines now. We’re on our way out of this horrible moment in time. We should celebrate that and the fact that the Trump administration is 100% responsible for ramping up a program that resulted in 3 different very effective vaccines. That’s a major, major accomplishment. An offhand remark at a press briefing a year ago or on a podcast yesterday is inconsequential.
In this show, we spent 20+ minutes interviewing Andrew Gutmann, a genuinely brave person who is putting everything on the line to affect change and fight for freedom of speech and diversity of thought in our schools. It’s a vitally important fight and it is to be commended and encouraged, which is why we made a big effort to get him to come on this show. I can’t believe this needs to be said but here goes: What Andrew is doing is MUCH more important than the throwaway anecdote you’re arguing about –which again– doesn’t matter now because we have an ACTUAL vaccine.
Keep your eye on the ball, folks.
P.S. This is my last comment on this topic. Because it’s not the point of this show. If I had an inkling that this silliness was what people would take away from this show, I would have cut it out.
For the record, I did try to listen to the podcast like I used to every Saturday but had to turn it off when Byron York started in about Biden’s erroneous positive polling numbers, and how Biden has, “…given those who were tired of Trump a sense of relief…” and how Biden has, “done a skillful job of portraying himself…”
I like Byron York, really I do, but you have to have swallowed the beltway media kool aid from a fire hose to believe those things about the most disrespected, pathetic excuse for a public figure on earth, a man who can’t even move the enthusiasm meter on his own YouTube channel.
I turned it off because the commentary just didn’t gel with reality.
Good point. I think the term “The Enlightenment” has morphed into a general-purpose term for gauzy optimistic rationalism unimpeded by hoary old non-empirical belief systems. The freedom to express humanist ideas. Like many terms, it has been detached from history.
https://ricochet.com/930020/meet-thomas-reid/#
Not exactly correct. Adam Smith termed any religious argument casuistry and torched his mentor, Francis Hutchison, for his transcendent arguments. Hume famously eschewed any human capacity beyond the 5 senses. And was the quintessential skeptic. What came to be called The Science of Man, the title of the Rockefeller project to discover the building blocks of human heredity for Eugenics purposes, principally at Cal Tech, with Lin’s Pauling as the principle beneficiary of Rockefeller Foundation funds, was based explicitly on the secular philosophy of Hume and still guides the Eugenics that underpins organ and tissue harvesting from abortions for research.
I would argue that John Knox (Reformation) had more to do with the Scottish culture than did Hume, but now Hume prevails and has been extend to his ultimate conclusion
You certainly have gave this more thought than me.
Only two details I can address.
First, don’t leave out Thomas Reid.
Second, Hume is only a skeptic in one weak sense of the term.
Same here , but I just listened to two in a row , I’ve listened to very few since November , it seems even the guests are incapable of uttering his name without some kind of side kick at him. I fear Ricochet going the way of National Review and being so far above the Trumpian rabble that it loses its audience .
Here are thoughts from a retired academic, albeit outside of the United States, regarding education…Most contemporary Americans in my admittedly limited experience place little value on (supposedly) conventional knowledge, whatever pieties they may express to the contrary. I once spent two years in a reputable American university, the students of preppie background, in which almost no one could come close to telling me when World War II took place—and, most significantly, they didn’t care: they thought I was posing a trivia question. And that was a well over a third of century ago. I belong to the generation that still learned Latin and Greek. I had students who angrily dismissed the term “adverb” as esoteric linguistic jargon…When those who wind up with well-paying jobs have waved the American equivalent of Mao’s Little Red Book and majored in sexuality and gender studies at Yale, how does one convince one’s children that they should go to a new, independent school where they will learn about Thomas Aquinas, especially if they have a poster of “Dr.” Jill Biden on the wall?