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This week, in an unparalleled act of commitment, we persisted and Naomi Wolf is our guest this week. It’s a fascinating, surprising, and yes, hopeful conversation and we’re very grateful she agreed to join us. But see what you think. Then, the delightful Deb Saunders –on hiatus from covering the White House– joins us to talk about how the current White House is covered vs. the last one and the differences between covering the two. Also fascinating if less surprising. Also, Rob Long shares his name with someone more famous than him (for the the time being), James updates us on his SQUIRREL! issues, and Peter is wants more productivity in his life. We’ll try and get to that soon.
Music from this week’s show: Will The Wolf Survive? by Los Lobos
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I would LOVE to have a Lileks Oil Co. t-shirt.
Doesn’t Ricochet sell “swag” yet?
If Naomi Wolf doesn’t insist on always being addressed as “Doctor,” then I’d rather she were First Lady.
We were quite active at itva couple of years ago. But sales were, shall we say, lackluster.
I failed to get out of bed at the ungodly hour of 9Am PST. So I am so happy to find out this was recorded.
If Lileks Oil Co t-shirts were available, I’d buy a couple. Does that help?
About halfway through; N Wolfe has departed.
Mr Lileks, regarding your last comment regarding Amazon not having the power to make you do anything, and that power belonging solely to the State; I’ve made that comment dozens and dozens of times over the past 20 years.
But, but, but … isn’t it different now when the power of the state has made shopping so unpleasant, or where stores and parts of stores were made unavailable? The power of the State has forced people to abandon shopping and forced us to use Amazon, or similar platforms. Taken away movie theatres and forced us onto streaming services. Taken away education and forced young people onto zoom.
For months, the question I’ve been asking is: who benefits? And Naomi Wolfe gave a pretty good answer. And none of those people/entities she listed are to be trusted. Add to it poorly educated and traumatized young people and it’s good-bye, America.
I was kinda shocked about how lighthearted all the Rico hosts sounded.
Naomi Wolf’s memory of the “AIDS Pandemic” doesn’t match mine. “We” handled that as free adults? I remember basically all the media shouting that EVERYONE had to use condoms, ALWAYS, even married couples who wanted children, because – they claimed – EVERYONE was at EQUAL RISK. It was nonsense then, same as it’s nonsense now.
I was in San Francisco at the time. And frankly surrounded by AIDS patients.
There was no forced quarantining. They was no forced condom wearing. There was certainly no tracing, though I do believe people with AIDS were asked to contact their partners. I specifically remember an AIDS patient, on an IV, not being treated very well by an airline when he boarded a plane. And it made national news. No comparison to how toddlers sans masks have been treated in the last year.
The propaganda was as you described. But there was no abuse of power of the state.
And yes, my memory is that we handled it as free adults … free adults who were being fed a bunch of bad information.
“Democracy is the best idea the world ever had, and America is the best idea Democracy ever had.” — Naomi Wolf
Naomi Wolf?? Naomi Wolf is now talking like a reasonable, old school, left-wing-but-still-patriotic, Gregory Peck-style Democrat??
Strange times…
In that sense, you have a point. Although it seems far more likely that government mandates then, would have made more of a difference than now. The media propaganda was maybe just as big then, if not bigger, except since homosexuals were even then a protected class at least among the media, they were telling heterosexual married couples to use condoms because of The Risk, but orders to shut down the bath-houses were opposed as violations of civil rights, etc. They didn’t seem to have the same insistence that gays use condoms, because – an early version of their bias against finding islamic terrorists – that behavior was seen as some kind of “cultural thing” which could not be interfered with.
Cancellation pending…
I remember whether or not to close down bathhouses was a huge controversy. Compare that to 2020, where every bar and restaurant and gym was closed down by fiat, no discussion.
Regardless, honest information, shared generously, is always the best policy. Which is something I’ve seen very little of in my life.
It’s already started. She spoke this week on Tucker about being banned from Twitter.
What’s wrong with being a dogmatic anti-Marxist again? Isn’t that like being an anti-flat Earther?
Concerning the closing comments on this episode about having people drop by:
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I get your point, but the state forcing us to do things by forbidding certain things, “temporarily,” is different than the state forcing you do things explicitly. Small distinction, but there it is.
The question is whether you believe this is intentional collusion, or ad hoc improvisation the gummint and tech like because it happens to empower both. I think it’s the latter. It may not matter if the end result is a solid partnership between the two that dominates all aspects of civil society with minimal need for collusion and consultation, but I think this is something we stumbled into.
“I get your point, but the state forcing us to do things by forbidding certain things, “temporarily,” is different than the state forcing you do things explicitly. Small distinction, but there it is.”
“temporarily”. We’ll have to take a gander at that word a few years from now. It’s amazing how little it takes to change things permanently. Enforce a one-child policy for a couple of generations by rule of brutal law. Stop enforcing it and guess what? Turns out people are just fine with one child.
How much market share has been permanently shifted ?
“The question is whether you believe this is intentional collusion, or ad hoc improvisation the gummint and tech like because it happens to empower both. I think it’s the latter. It may not matter if the end result is a solid partnership between the two that dominates all aspects of civil society with minimal need for collusion and consultation, but I think this is something we stumbled into.”
Not my question at all. Makes no never mind to me whether this was collusion (doubtful) from the get go, or if there are a lot of people whose interests align.
The results are disastrous regardless.
I don’t know. We’ll see. I know that the overclass chatterers want us to avoid restaurants and mask up and live in timorous distancing, but every relaxation of the “temporary” restrictions results in more people doing the things they used to do. The grocery store parking lots are packed; a statistically insignificant number of people abandoned in-person shopping for Amazon. Target lots are jammed. Home Depot lots have been packed for months. I tried to make local restaurant reservations tonight; jammed up and jelly tight.
The economic impact of lockdowns and fear, where I live, has been brutal to the downtown economy. That didn’t shift anywhere. It was just murdered.
I didn’t say whether or not it was your question. But the plandemic / scandemic people are inclined to believe a conspiratorial agenda, and I think that’s a cutl-de-sac. The results have been bad, but we’ve a better chance of regaining normalcy if this was, as I suspect, a colossal cock-up.
This is just dead-on.
I don’t feel like explaining it right now, but this is also empowered by structural issues that are going to end the hard way. Really stupid policy that should’ve ended over 20 years ago.
Aaron Rupar is a menace.
https://reason.com/2021/03/19/aaron-robert-long-spa-killer-atlanta-jay-baker-cop-bad-day/
Mainstream media quoting Rupar’s deceiving edit.
Think of how much Vox has changed. They couldn’t hold the line on what they originally proposed to be. Now it’s just propaganda.
Now the Commies are going after substack.
Speaking of “Constitution over party”, I don’t know how to look this up, but the discussion of the filibuster rule on the Hugh Hewitt Hillsdale Hour is must listen. The guy just had a cascade of reasons for that rule. All of it was supported by reasoning in the Federalist papers and all of that. It’s not some gentleman’s agreement they whipped up at one point.
When she talks about the left splitting off from traditional liberal values, this is my view. Government adds no value beyond actual public goods and stopping illegitimate force. I mean zip. When people vote the other way there is no limiting principle. There is no limiting principle that contains these guys to traditional liberalism and it obviously doesn’t stay there. Even if these people are sincere they can’t stop the momentum. Then the whole system breaks down to, you are stupid if you don’t use the government to steal from your fellow citizen. Public goods only. If you start a a government actuarial system, it has to be 110% find it all of the time. The central bank does nothing except back up the financial system in a punitive way.
Those guys just want a better world with more and more government force and there is no limiting principle.
If you want to learn some thing, have somebody from the Mises Institute analyze this discussion.
She keeps talking about capitalism. We don’t practice capitalism, especially given the structure of the Fed and the financial system. This is why I think you are better off with populist policies until we get a collapse of the bond market.
http://financialrepressionauthority.com/2017/07/26/the-roundtable-insight-george-bragues-on-how-the-financial-markets-are-influenced-by-politics/
This is queued up at the end, let’s start at the beginning. Everybody is showing this to remind you of Biden.
I’ve posted this before, but if you are going to understand the system you need to listen to this. This guy lays out every single problem that our system has right now. It has a nice summary, so definitely look at it.
https://investresolve.com/podcasts/mike-green-the-fourth-turning-and-reimagining-the-american-dream/
He leans towards statist solutions, but the whole thing is very reasonable. 10x better than listening to any Democrat
Start at 2:27:00
By the time I listened to the episode this morning this information was out and I had to shake my head at Rob quoting the “bad day” line. So much manipulation by the media.
I hadn’t been paying much attention to Atlanta and didn’t know the suspect’s name was Robert Long.
Mr. Lileks has a more charitable view of our “betters”, I mean the state, than I do.