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This week, Joe Biden accepts the Democratic nomination and we devote all of the opening segment to the just ended Democratic Convention. Then, this may sound a bit inside baseball (inside Ivy League baseball), but stick with it, because it has implications for cancel culture, affirmative action, and a host of other issues that stem from the way higher education is conducted in the U.S. We’re joined by Ambassador Victor Ashe, who is running for a seat on the Yale Corporation, the tightly controlled and opaque governing body that runs Yale University. The policies they institute have wide ranging implications for schools and for our culture at large. Then, WSJ columnist Gerald Baker joins us to discuss some of the topics he’s been writing about including defunding the police, the protests, and the Presidential election. We’ve got Ricochet member @jennastocker as this week’s LPoW winner for her post Minneapolis Isn’t Lost – Yet — we wonder why? Finally, some thoughts on Steve Bannon and the prospect of life returning to normal.
Music from this week’s show: the last great american dynasty by Taylor Swift
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Good for @jennastocker! And this post of hers already has TEN TIMES as many “likes” as the usual for Gary Robbins.
Doesn’t Yale just have to go away, since it was named for a slave-holder or something?
I didn’t combine those two comments, someone else must have…
@jameslileks :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF5mH_ggZv0
Good show.
Biden is a nice, likable guy? Highly disagree.
He’s still going with the Charlottesville “fine people” hoax. Pretty evil in my book. Not to mention his public record, plagiarism, avid support for baby slaughter etc.
Remember the Clarence Thomas hearings?
I’ll tell you how you build a new Yale. You wipe out the accreditation system. It’s just a scam to create an education monopoly. Higher education is a bad value and it isn’t really about human capital development. I think the ivy league and most of higher education is just a gigantic net minus.
I don’t think describing our world is a triumph of capitalism as Baker says. We beat communism but we really aren’t practicing capitalism as intended by the Founders or what it really means. That’s why you have all of this chaos, socialism and populism. I shell out for a investor site called Real Vision and we haven’t been practicing capitalism since Woodrow Wilson or the fall of the Soviet union or whatever and now it’s all going crazy.
Baker says about the Wall Street Journal editorialzing about Kamala Harris in California, saying “Classic Alinsky-ite Marxist theory that they will use the levers of power…”. This is a proven fact. Listen to those two interviews I posted last week. You have to be out of your mind do to want Trump to lose.
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Regarding the post of the week, I think the issue is they have to stop forcing urban centralization. Between broadband, pandemics, nutty democrat governance that actually creates social problems, all of this is just going to implode on itself. They need to let cities develop naturally. Of course with that AFFH stuff, they are also trying to homogenized the suburbs with the city which is completely nuts. Do you really want to vote against Trump so they can shove all of this crap down our throats?
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re: “racket”
Do you want to know why socialism and populism are taking off?
Government Is How We Steal From Each Other™
Nobody ever argued that Joe Biden couldn’t read.
Why the smug certainty that the RNC will be a weaker show than that mounted by the Dems? Our hosts must suddenly be oblivious to all the show biz production talent that is friendly to Trump. After all, don’t we keep sniggering that he is our reality TV president?
Mr . Baker sounds to me like a lifetime bubble resident , Biden honorable ? A millionaire after a lifetime suckling at the government teat.
Trump controversial – in newsbubblespeak controversial simply means ‘Leftist no like’ as in Boy Scouts , religion, suburbia etc
He wandered then into the disconcerting ‘Trump voters in the mists’ shtick (to paraphrase Goldberg) of discussing Trump voters like some interesting almost human creatures.
I don’t know anything about the Bannon issue but I find it highly suspicious that everyone who has ever had dealings with Trump find themselves under lifetime Federal investigation. These investigations certainly seem like shots across the bow to anyone who may consider opposing the swamp in the future or even supporting someone who may.
Good outro.
The rest of the show was pretty good, too.
Of course he isn’t. But the media will do everything possible to make sure that practically nobody remembers what he is like and that, coupled with Trump’s horrible stuff, may be enough.
This election is going to be decided by people voting against the other candidate. We will see if there are enough of them in the battleground states to swing it for either.
Peter, Rob, and James had lots of good advice for Trump, but does anyone here believe that he’ll take it? Will he make the election about Biden’s far-left policy proposals rather than about about himself?
I hope he will but he is more likely to say that Biden’s wife is ugly.
She does seem pretty ugly, at least on the inside. But I guess we’re not supposed to notice.
If @roblong really believes a lot of potential voters look around at the problems around them or in their life or whatever, and they think, “which of these does Trump make better?” and conclude “none”…. well, they’re pretty dumb. Especially if they don’t realize how much worse those things would get because of President Biden/Harris/whatever.
And I don’t know if @peterrobinson’s comparison of the current election with Humphrey vs Nixon in 1968, is valid. It might work if you believe that today’s voters are as… sober?… as those in 1968. Does anyone believe that?
And if I ever buy a toothbrush with bluetooth, I hope someone will have the decency to put me out of my misery.
Not going to argue this one. Last thing I need is a toothbrush that sends data to Big Brother to nag me.
Not a Big Brother issue for me, it’s just the inanity of it all. Are we living in a world, or at least a country, where people are deciding they can’t get by without bluetooth-enabled toilet paper that sends a signal to Amazon when it’s almost used up? (Although now that I think about it, that might be the kind of thing you could get a government mandate for, since they could say it would eliminate hoarding.)
A while ago, I think it was @roblong who pointed out that with all the home-delivery options for food and everything else, PRC – People’s Republic of California – has apparently willingly been turning itself into a giant assisted-living facility.
(I checked, Rob’s comment was near the end of the “Extreme Affectation” episode of GLoP.)
Nixon was not the kind of guy you wanted to have a beer with. And he did not seem like the guy who wanted to have a beer with you. But he exuded competence.
Which supports the idea that if that election were held today, Humphrey would win. And so Peter’s comparison is not valid. If competence were valued today, Trump should win at least 80/20, especially against someone like JOE BIDEN. But if he does win, it may not be with a majority of the popular vote AGAIN, which is a glaring indictment of today’s voters.
It’s likely that a lot of the Republicans who voted for the two Republican governors on the Libertarian Party ticket in 2016 will return to the Republican fold this time.
Hillary’s much touted 3 million extra votes was more than balanced by the 4.5 million votes on the Libertarian line.
Yes, and as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I don’t see any good reason why anyone who voted for Trump in 2016 wouldn’t do so again this year. Meanwhile, those who didn’t vote at all, or who may have voted third party as you mention or perhaps even voted for Hillary in some cases, because Trump was “risky” or just “an unknown quantity,” really have no good reason for not voting for Trump this time. But I’ve also heard speculation that Trump might “lose” bigger in the popular vote this time, while “winning” bigger in the Electoral College, and that wouldn’t surprise me either. Although it would be a sad indictment, once again, of the quality of voters in this country.
As if voting for most people were about reason.
Are there really a lot of Americans who 1) know who Steve Bannon is, and 2) care what he says and does?
I mean, maybe there are. I’m genuinely asking. But commentators and pundits on both sides always talk about Steve Bannon as if he were a person of real influence. Is he?
Well, supposedly their “reason” before was that he was an “unknown quantity.” That is no longer valid. Some people might still come up with some kind of “but… but… but…” which just means they weren’t serious before.