Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
We open with some thoughts on the just concluded Democratic convention, and then segue into our guest, Avik Roy. His interview with Vox has been discussed extensively on Ricochet, and we give him the full court Ricochet Podcast press. Is the GOP on life support as Avik suggests and can be saved? Or, is everything just fine, and the party should stay the course? We delve into all of that with Roy in a very provocative (but civil!) conversation. Also, some thoughts on auto-promotion and the new version of Ricochet. If you’re reading this and you’re not a member — what are you waiting for? Join NOW. We need you!
Music from this week’s podcast:
You Can’t Always Get What You Want by The Rolling Stones
The brand new opening sequence for the Ricochet Podcast was composed and produced by James Lileks.
Yes, you should absolutely subscribe to this podcast. It helps!
All signs point to EJHill.
Subscribe to The Ricochet Podcast in Apple Podcasts (and leave a 5-star review, please!), or by RSS feed. For all our podcasts in one place, subscribe to the Ricochet Audio Network Superfeed in Apple Podcasts or by RSS feed.
Harry's Shave
Use Code: ricochet
Harry’s produces high-quality razors for 1/2 the price of drugstore brands. Get $5 off your first purchase by using coupon code “RICOCHET” at checkout.
Oh, the comments are a nice manageable number now. But with 1,500 more people? Ack! It will be like reading Yahoo! Stay away people. :)
(This is a joke, please don’t kick me out.)
It’s only 1,500 more people. Not a big deal.
The demise of the Republican party? Well it’s true that whenever the liberal media puts out a narrative, Republicans start using it, like “the demise of the Republican party”. Democrats have already learned from Trump that progressives can speak in patriotic terms, do not have to trash the military or the country, just trash Republicans and Christians and “Zionists”. Brace yourselves folks, the Democrats are going full scale fascist including the necessary military control and nationalism. Please reconsider Trump he isn’t the real fascist thing, they are.
It seems like this podcast is broken. It keeps dying for me at 2:57. @blueyeti ?
If you’re listening on the player on this page, clear your browser’s cache.
I tried downloading it, too. But let’s see how clearing the cache works.
How did you get Peter to pose with that #NeverTrump sign?
Okay, it’s working. I’m past the six minute mark.
Thus I clearly indicated my statement was a joke.
(I now go back to ensure my clarification was not placed in white text.)
I never read the black text, only the white text.
Avik Roy’s analysis seemed to be a little depressing and the Ricochet Podcast gang didn’t seem to be buying it.
Rob, this is meant as a help so don’t take this as me being a smartypants; however, in the past 2 weeks you have stated that you can no longer buy Kodak film. You may wish to choose another example because you may certainly still buy Kodak film, not just from old stock stored up in random camera stores, but from Kodak itself. See the following website: http://www.kodak.com/eknec/PageQuerier.jhtml?pq-path=1143&pq-locale=en_US&_requestid=289
You do seem to be right on the IBM bit though, particularly for new IBM computers.
Still listening, but I’m confused. Roy insists the GOP needs to listen more to non-whites, but flippantly dismisses the concerns of low-income whites as being beneath the pale, lumping them into a big mash of “white identity politics”, which of course are icky and must be purged. What makes non-whites’ concerns more pure than white people’s concerns, other than the internalization of the assumptions of the left?
Thanks for the heads up that the podcast contains another generous helping of Never Trump. I’ll save the bandwith downloading it and the time listening to it. What demographic are you after for new members anyway?
IBM exists and is still very much in the computer game. What they do not make are home units. They sold that business to the Chinese who renamed it Lenovo.
Lenovo
Jamie – Thanks. And fixed. My PC with the built in Chinese spyware says “HP.”
That’s actually NSA spyware installed in China.
Our party has the opportunity to come roaring back with an unorthodox candidate like Donald Trump. His appeal and his simple message crosses party lines. The trouble with our movement has been the lack of an effective message and the constant weak refrain of “We’re small government conservatives,” or “constitutional conservatives.” What does that mean to the average voter? What we need to be shouting from the rooftops is the importance of states rights and how the government closest to you is the one that is far more likely to respond to your needs. Why, for example, do we have a Department of Education or Environment in Washington D.C. dictating to the states? We are NOT a one size fits all country that the Democrats want us to be. Policies that are good for NYC are not necessarily appropriate for Kansas City. Only Republicans have that message. Avik Roy is totally wrong about the racism thing. The fact that we want to limit Muslims from Syria, etc. has absolutely nothing to do with race or religion but everything to do with self preservation from terrorists. It just so happens that the terrorists who are threatening the world are Muslims. Are we supposed to ignore common sense for the sake of political correctness? Give me a break.
Wait, Rob wants more Trump types here on the site?
Willing to cut Avik some slack owing to my own reformicon sympathies and Avenue Q position on race. At least he is expanding his argument beyond the cartoon of Beauchamp’s admittedly patchwork piece.
Still the grand historical arc of his analysis seems forced, and largely the result of his guy losing three months ago.
Would like to hear Avik unpack what he means by civil rights? The right of a biological male to throw on a sundress and pair of pumps and follow my daughter into the ladies room? Race based admission, hiring and promotion quotas until the 22nd century? Disparate impact crusades by the Justice Department overseeing every school district in the country? Judicial denunciations of voter ID laws which impose fewer demands than the purchase of a Greyhound ticket?
I’m glad you guys gave Mr. Roy a good beating on several subjects, several times I wanted to say things and either James or Peter said them.
Maybe the response to the ‘people like me’ question is the result of 50 years of being unfairly beaten up over race when we’ve done nothing wrong. In the same vein liberals never have to deal with pundits supposedly on their side accusing them of being racists as Mr. Roy has just done.
We don’t want ‘ what the other group is getting’ , we aren’t looking for anything but to be left alone, but anyone who is getting something out of our taxes should be deserving and have a damn good reason .
Democrats : slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, KKK, poll taxes, poll tests etc etc.
all these are outweighed by one vote by one Senator 50 years ago and for 50 years the country club Republicans have been unable to defend themselves from that slander .
Thus Trump, dammit , at least he fights.
Democrats, and the media which they control, have a way of making innocuous comments from Republican candidates seem “racially charged” even when they mirror things Democrats freely say. I had never heard that particular spin on Ted Cruz’ NY values comment, and he certainly wasn’t saying NY values are bad because big cities have large ethnic communities, but when a darker skinned person (or a liberal white knight) already sees everything through the lens of ethnic politics, it is easy to see how they can straw-man it that way. And the fact that Cruz was referencing something said by Trump is apparently irrelevant.
One that always gets me is suggested in this podcast: the idea that it is somehow wrong to say minorities vote Democrat because they want government aid, which is paid for by mostly white working Americans. The media can portray that as racially charged and insensitive, but how could any honest person who knows anything about American politics deny this? It is so obvious as a generalization, and in every election cycle the Democratic party runs candidates promising more government spending and accusing their Republican opponents of wanting to take things from minorities. But somehow, magically, it is okay for Democrats to say they are going to give things to minorities, but it is not okay for Republicans to say that is the reason so many minority voters support Democrats.
RAYCISSS! Drink!
I really enjoyed the hearing you gave your guest and your full answers, comments, clarifications to his provocative statements. It was intelligent, logical, humorous discourse. After feeling insulted and deliberately misunderstood by speaker after speaker in the Democratic Convention last night, your conversation was heart-warming, frankly.
Thank you for standing up to charges of racism and anti-Semitism leveled at Republicans by Vox/Roy. I also appreciated the answer to the rich/poor issue, echoed so obnoxiously by Millionaire Pelosi, who, taunted those who aren’t smart enough “to act in their own economic interest” but vote Republican because of the “three Gs”. (Original Pelosi?)
In your podcast, you categorized the non-HRC voters as Pro-Trump, Never-Trump and a persuadable third group.
I’m not racist, anti-Semitic or homophobic; I have two degrees, am divorced with one child still at home; I think a social safety net is important, but will work very hard to avoid getting trapped in it; see Obamacare for the fraud and tax-hike it is, sick of being lied to and (for a fourth category) Never-Clinton.
What I don’t understand is why #3 should be wrapped up with #1 and #2, and be thought of as somehow equally wrong and unworthy of respect. The first 2 are not political policy suggestions, they are just wrong statements.
I agree completely. Also, since when is “Muslim” a race, so that opposing Muslim immigration equals racism? I expect this level of sloppy rhetoric from the Left, but it’s galling to get it from so-called conservatives. It reminds me of Bush accusing everyone who objected to his nomination of Harriet Myers of being sexist.
I found several remarks by Mr. Roy to be grating, and after a fair amount of reflection I really don’t think it’s just because he’s telling me something I don’t want to hear. I think it’s because he is basing a lot of his arguments on some fundamentally flawed premises.
Just one example: Roy claims that the Republican party is worse than the Democratic party at listening to how all sorts of different groups of Americans talk and think because it is more demographically homogeneous. Implicit in this argument is the notion that there are political viewpoints which are intrinsically white or intrinsically Asian or what have you – that the interests of one minority or another are either at odds with those of traditional Republican voters or at least dramatically different; that there are views that you just can’t get unless you talk to enough people of color, because they have a monopoly on a certain outlook.
That assumption raises my hackles for a number of reasons. It’s true that I think a black person is better equipped than a white person to, say, speak about personal experience with racially-tinged police encounters, but survey after survey shows that attitudes on things like foreign policy, fiscal issues, and even social matters are about as diverse and evenly distributed among every minority as they are among white respondents. Minority votes break heavily towards Democrats in large part because the Democrats have succeeded in creating a narrative that Republicans want the worst for minorities and are motivated by deep-seated hostile racism. No amount of supplication on our part, no amount of desperate virtue signalling to prove that we are not racist will win these votes back, because there will always be one offhanded remark that can be construed as indicative of some evil ulterior motive.
Mr. Roy advocates for a retreat to the wilderness to do penance for our multitudinous racial sins, to self-flagellate until minority voters trust us. I say that telling them we aren’t racist simply won’t work so long as Democrats have an electoral incentive to insist, “No, no, they totally are – look, this state legislator said that he wants to ‘help people’ and you know that’s just a dog whistle”. We have to demonstrate that we have a better product – that our economic policies, which supposedly are constructed to keep white fat cats rich, open more doors to black Americans than anything on offer from the Left, and that our ideas about education give kids of all races an equal chance to succeed.
In short, the proof is in the pudding; until minority voters have a chance to compare how well they are doing under a Republican administration and under a Democrat one, and get a really stark look at how George Bush helped people like them more than Barack Obama ever did, all we’re doing is ad campaigns for Democrats about our own awfulness.
I really hate it that we have accepted the left’s framing in using apartheid terminology to discuss cultural differences. No one in America is as invisible as the 10% of Black Americans that have assimilated into the bourgeois middle class value system, while hipsters and “urban” people are certified groovy guys.
I agree with Mr. Roy that the Dixiecrats did migrate in masse to the Republican party, but the cultural changes of the sixties were not only on racial lines. I’d argue that a substantial motivation in the South was the Warren Court’s treatment of issues like school prayer or redefining what constitutes a family for public services.
If the parties are to be rebuilt after Trump, maybe a party that actively reaches out to Asians and Indians as people that produce more than they consume, rather than disproportionately consumers of transfers, should be considered. The party of Santorum, Fiorina and Christie should remember that in living memory Italians were not considered white either.
man, I would enjoy this podcast if someone could make Robinson stifle……….You have a guest who has some good things to say but one of the host won’t keep his mouth shut.