Jeanetic Lottery | The Roundtable Ep. 278 by The American Mind

[Music] Welcome everyone once again to the round table, the editors and publishers podcast at the American mind here at the Claremont Institute. I'm your host Ryan Williams, president of the Claremont Institute and I am joined by a colossus editor straddling both American mind and cler books, Spencer Clayven. uh his day job at CRB as assistant editor, associate editor, whichever one's higher steps. Uh narrow world striding editor I think is the the new title. Yeah. Mike Sabo, managing editor of the American mind and back on his regular every other week or so. Matthew Peterson, editor at Blaze and Claremont Institutes Washington fellow out and about doing great things. So we wanted to start by talking about eugenics and Sydney Sweeney. Oh no. Uh that's that's been the hype from the left. Many of you have probably observed this mama Sydney Sweeney, the new face of American Eagle Jeans. They did an ad for various provocative poses hawking jeans and they wanted to do a play on words with genes that is genetic good genetic material. It's a in a way actually I didn't realize until the internet dredged it up that this is basically just a copy of a Calvin Klein ad from 1980 featuring a 15-year-old Brook Shields who looks 18ish or so in a sort of as Spencer pointed out in the the feed or the group chat before we went on is a is a more articulate ad, a wittier ad and also more alluring but basically making the same point. She gives a little mini lecture on evolution, survival of the fittest, hawking, Calvin Klein jeans, and somewhat provocative. I will say and the jeans are better. Important. The jeans are better. It's true. The Switney, the city sweetie jeans are like Gen Z bag slop. Although I will asterisk the elephant in the room as a father and say her father should not let her do that. 15. It's now a piece of pop culture. Here's a collection of the left's reaction to this ad campaign. Vanity Fair. Sydney Sweeney under fire after controversial American Eagle ad campaign. Boston Globe, how American Eagle Sydney Sweeney good jeans ad went wrong. Euronnews.com explained why is Sydney Sweeny's fashion ad being called Nazi. Slate Sydney Sweeney has caused an uproar. It was always going to come to this. NBC American Eagle sparks backlash for touting Sydney Sweeny's Great Jeans. Newsweek finally Sydney Sweeney fronts ad campaign for jeans sparks debate about eugenics. We can log this in the category of why we can't have nice things. The left's reaction, I guess, long and coming because you all probably remember it was maybe two, three years ago, maybe not that long ago, there was this meme campaign that bubbled up from the internet about, you know, we're so back because advertisements are now celebrating beautiful, voluuptuous blonde women, especially Sydney Sweeney. And American Eagle wanted to to do this play on words between jeans and jeans. And um I mean how much of the country really saw that and thought well that's white supremacist I can't buy those beans. I think it's the editorial staffs of like five publications. So if it's over 500 people I'd be shocked. And then there's the follow on freak out from everyone who makes somewhat of a living or bolsters their reputation online by being outraged by something that should have just been a jeans ad with play on words. I wanted to pair it with this article that Mike Sabbo sent our way. Uh Mike, can you give a little rundown of it? It basically the headline version of it was that modern American women are doing so much work now. Uh with the decline of social life for men, they're now having to take much more emotional care of their boyfriends and husbands. And it's another entry in the tradition now of lamenting the rising nearly infinite work of modern women despite the supposed ascent of feminism. It's sort of whiny in that way. What else should we take away from that? Yeah. So this piece uh why women are weary of the emotional labor of quote maneping. So this was in the New York Times. Um the kind of subhead is as male social circles shrink female partners say they have to meet more social and emotional needs. So I'll just read just just part of this just so like what is mankeeping? What is this new word? The term coined by Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford of course has taken off online. It describes the work women do to meet the social and emotional needs of the men in their lives from supporting their partners through daily challenges and inner turmoil to encouraging them to meet up with their friends. Uh what I have been seeing in my research is how women have been asked or expected to take on more work to be a central if not the central piece of a man's social support system. Dr. Ferrara said taking care to note the dynamic isn't experienced by all couples. So basically what this is is like okay as you know male institutions male only clubs etc. Heather McDonald's talked about this a lot have been destroyed. It's like okay this is what you're going to turn into. The wife is basically going to turn into like a de facto therapist. I mean, men don't have friends more and more and more. I think this piece cites that in just kind of chilling to tail, honestly, where men are just alone. Maybe had five close friends 20, 15 years ago and they haven't kept up with them for whatever reasons, for I I think pretty large um sociological reasons. And so, this is kind of what's happened. And now women are reaping the whirlwind essentially of something that I think you know a lot of feminists were up in arms over. I mean, you look at Augusta Golf Club in Georgia. You look at elsewhere, you know, tearing down the patriarchy. Okay, this is what happens. You know, your husband is now on the couch and you have to listen to him 24/7. So, it's just kind of, you know, chickens kind of coming home to roost at the end of the day. It's like this is this is the end result. This is the tilos of what you've, you know, started up 30, 40 years ago. This is what's going to happen is, you know, your husband is no longer going to be a husband. He's going to be a patient. So, why anybody's totally shocked by this, I'm not quite sure. But, you know, they are in any event and they're they're kind of trying to figure out what to do with the mess that they've created. We will cure cancer before we cure the women who write for the New York Times of main character syndrome. It will be easier for us to eradicate contagious disease from the earth than it will be to convince the people that write these sorts of pieces that not everything is about them. how it should be the case that the obliteration of men's social life is somehow a feminist's problem, a women's problem, is kind of so on the nose that you have to just let it pass because like this is the very same issue that shuts down men's clubs, that attacks men's only spaces, that derides men for hanging out together and wanting separate spaces, is the exact same pathology that's going to lead people to turn this into like somehow an obligation that poor poor women have to experience. But I this is this all seems like I mean an after effect of nature healing like the culture has moved so utterly past these sorts of complaints and these sorts of critiques. like the moment when it was mainstream and cool and common to turn everything into a social justice issue for one of a number of marginalized so-called marginalized groups is so over. And the the kind of respect and obesence that people used to pay to that idea has evaporated so quickly that now like the people who get paid to write these sorts of pieces just have to desperately clutch at any sort of outrage they can manufacture. And I wonder whether the right isn't like taking the bait a little bit by responding in defense of yes, in fact, Sydney Sweeney is our like white queen and we must like secure a future for our ourselves and our our white children. Like it it seems like the good guys kind of have the upper hand here. Not the good guys that want to secure a future for ourselves and our white children, but the good guys who just don't care about any of this mishika us. And and I I feel like the more conservatives can simply project confidence that nobody in his right mind cares about Sydney Sweeney in in jeans talking about her jeans and in fact everyone finds it charming and and appealing. Uh and these guys are like five marginal weirdos who happen to write for the New York Times. I think that's kind of the right approach to take here. So you're saying just need to mock and move on. Can you read the definition again? Yep. mankeeping. Um, it describes the work women do to meet the social and emotional needs of the men in their lives from supporting their partners through daily challenges and inner turmoil to encouraging them to meet up with their friends. So, that last part, you know, sounds to me like the definition of what you would kind of expect friends to do. Any good person you have a relationship with. The amusing thing to me about this is like I already we already know about emotional labor. We've heard about that for a long time. Never heard anyone talk about the emotional labor of men keeping up with the emotions of women. Uh but the emotional labor of having to deal with men and you know I get that like like I don't like the term but you know there's both sides of the coin. men and women have the complaints. But this is the definition here is kind of troubling to me because it's like helping someone, you know, or like being married. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you have a partner, never mind a partner for life, uh you'd kind of expect them to help you with inner turmoil and stuff and that could be taken to an extreme obviously and that could be a dysfunctional relationship or or not. But like reading it and just hearing it, it's like I'm sorry. This is what human relationships are like. It's called being human. It can go in different directions. And uh you know, why can't we just be normal? Once again, shouting into the void, there's me. And and then with the with the city Sweeney thing is the same thing. It's right something that's normal for advertising. It's actually fairly tame compared to the ads of the past as Ryan points out. And it's actually like uh she's more of an every girl. I mean, even though she's not, I I don't think she's, you know, mid, she has a look about her that's kind of like appealing, I think, uh, makes her a great spokeswoman where she's not like a supermodel, you know, uh, and so, you know, sort of a tame ad, and then we hear, you know, it's Nazism. So, I I think like I think they're losing the plot and they're losing the people. And the best thing about the ad anyway, like this is the thing about maneping. man keeping is kept on online. Like the first time we've all heard of it is from this article uh from some PhD. Uh so I don't I don't buy it catching on. I I get that they're uh you know they're having a temper tantrum about this and the ad, but I I just see this as all like them losing their grip and and people aren't buying it. I and I assume that the the jeans are going to do fantastic, right? is genius marketing and everyone should be making ads like that that just skirt the line a little bit by going back to the 1980s when apparently all of TV was Nazi television. I just can't I keep coming back to the line in the producers where they've gone through this whole process to put on the worst play on Broadway and it's springtime for Hitler and the guy playing Hitler is this flamboyantly gay theater director and the song is called Hyle Myself and the chorus is Hile myself raise your beer every hoty totsy Nazi stand and cheer. It's like this is the level of absurdity is that we've reached is like Sydney Sweeney hot Nazi selling jeans. Yeah. And it's I think paired nicely with Washington Post uh update from yesterday which was half Republicans won young men pointing out that the sort of 18 to 25 group especially among men are the least likely to back Democrats at 34%. You would think that the collected powers that be in the elite political and media space on the left would regard this as somewhat alarming and a trend to be reversed rather than a fire to fan the flames of. Calling a woman who's backing a jeans campaign who's probably erotically attractive to them and uh they would like to be friends with her a Nazi for doing a jeans ad is probably not the way to win them back. I mean, call me crazy. Well, this part of it is really compelling. It's sort of interesting like young men moving right is sort of like CO turning the COVID reaction turning out to have been bad or mass immigration turning out to have not been so popular. It's something that has now become impossible to ignore. But it's also kind of impossible given the position that the American left has staked out. it's kind of impossible for them to reckon seriously with it. And this same thing happened after 2016 when Trump won. There was this mass sort of realization on the part of OpEd writers that kind of middle America had maybe been a bit neglected and we need to go out like anthropologists and and parachute into these strange tribal enclaves called like Appalachia and like the Ozerics. The Ozarics. like you know what what is this? And and you got these weird field reports coming back for about 5 minutes until it became clear that the only explanation that has been allowed for so long of any of these phenomena is straight white men are bad. And so you can look at women having opinions that you don't like or or suffering in ways that you don't like and you can say, "Oh, this is the fault of society if you're a leftist." But you can't look at men doing things wrong or having problems and say anything except this is men's fault and have it be acceptable. And so now you get all these pieces. I mean the one that you cite, Mike, is actually I think kind of part of a series in the same way that the New York Times has been doing a series on COVID where they quietly admit that all of the policies they shield for were disastrous, especially for children. They've been doing a series where they quietly admit that all the things they've been saying about men have been hideously destructive for both sexes, but they're all about like why are men being seduced away by this kind of hyper masculineist evil Nazi cult leader Trump? Like what can we do to bring them back? And there there's no room in that space among those people having that conversation. there's no room to sort of seriously and openly entertain the possibility that we like we got something fundamentally wrong about this analysis about the the evils of masculinity about the hatefulness of of Trump and so this is the bind like we talked a while back about Zoran Mandani I think this is the bind that guys like mom Donnie are are there to get them out of is like their only route toward kind of returning to something more like stable and sensical is to to put forward like a a basically a socialist revolution with a a vaguely non-white like but sort of masculine dude at the head of it or something like this. There's there's really like there are very few options very few routes out of this conundrum for them. No. And and remember you're right to recall 2016 they at least tried for a hot second to go out and do the reports and they also hired a bunch of people. I was talking to Chris Bedford at the Blaze about this, another Lincoln fellow from Claremont who's uh in charge of politics editor and DC guy for us and his wife uh similar to our friend and colleague Michael Anton. She was hired for a hot second by, you know, big lib publication and just like they had uh they had Anton write two op-eds and then the second one was on Birthright Citizenship and they just ghosted him. And uh same thing, you know, with with Sarah Bedford, they hired these people on. They were like, "Oh, wait a minute. We actually don't want to hear any of this. Our audience doesn't want to hear any of this." And so now that's not even an option. Like they're not even going to go explore. It's all just these complaints. And so, you know, I kind of feel like, you know, dare I say it, I mean, if a if a woman complains in the woods, does anyone hear maybe the solution is uh you know, we just tune out these women complaining uh as men have done since time immemorial? And uh you know, that's what when I read this stuff, it's like I'm not going to read this whole article. I mean, this is this is absolutely ridiculous. And uh I'm going to tune out and go back into my own man cave of my mind. And I think that's what a lot of these young men are doing. And when you see, you know, my son is uh 15, I'm floored by the opinions of him and his colleagues, his little compadres that they sort of come to on their own. And they're not like, it's not like uh you know, screw the feminists or whatever. It's just kind of naturally organically conclusions they arrive at by looking at the world. And the same with the young women. Uh you know, there's less of them, but my daughter is one of them. I mean, the stuff that comes out of their mouths is just kind of like reacting to the world and environment they grew up in. a lot of times and not even my toutelage such as it is and it's amazing you know the kind of things they say and it's it's fresh and it's interesting because it's natural you know so an example would be have if you guys seen that Kevin Lang he's a comedian he's a he's a black comedian guy on YouTube and he's got this panel of of bros you know they they're just guys on the show and they have a panel and that the theme of the little talk show which is hilarious and has millions of views they do stuff like a bunch of these people get in front of them and they say there's four five different guys and five different numbers. Pick which guy has the number in his bank account right now. And they'll also do things like five guys in a green suit and one of them is white and they have to figure out which one is white or which one is Mexican, you know. And so they say all kinds of like politically incorrect things. Um and it's just, you know, dudes on the show and it's the kind of stuff your son will pick up and just start watching with his friends and thinks it's hilarious. And that's just kind of, you know, I don't know how political that guy is, but it just it's just kind of organically happening. And uh I don't know, I don't want to get too hopefilled too white filled, but I feel like that's the future. Yeah. No, I I I think it's important to kind of point that out where I think so many times and Spencer, you wrote about this last year with your right-wing culture that the left has obviously dominated culture for a long time, for years, for decades, or at the commanding heights, use whatever, you know, idioms you want barred from Marxism, which which I think are actually very true. I I don't just say that just to kind of point that out, but I think that's very true where the right-wing response just itself turns into just a mirror image of the ideology that they're responding to. So, I think that is key to break out of this like almost kind of trad stuff and some of the stuff you see online where it's like, okay, well, if you don't like 1950s housewives, I'm going to show you 10,000 pictures of 1950s housewives and have my vacuum and, you know, be doing this and doing that and it just it's like, no, how about you live real life? You know, how about you live according to nature? How about you actually break out of that altogether? I think that is the absolute key. That's something the right needs to learn very much so with doing things well, living life to the fullest, doing what needs to be done for your family, for your kids, especially just with the kind of stuff that you know they could be immersed in but hopefully are not. If you I think if you parent the right way, you don't have them looking at phones 24/7. So I think all that is kind of points to this which is absolutely key. I mean, you need to get him back to some semblance of reality. And it's just so so important just to come out, you know, a self-governing citizen, but, you know, somebody who can actually, you know, function and has a personality. Yeah. Last week we talked about Co Bear. They canceled the Late Show, not just with Colbear, but Full Stop, and they're canceling a bunch of these late night slots. And the people defending Colbear were protesting, oh, he's the best rated late night show. essentially he's the best rated show in this slot. And they're comparing like within this little hermetically sealed world that used to be the world. That used to be the culture. It was like what was on TV from 11:30 until 12:30 a.m. or whatever. That was what the culture was for that hour. And Colbear and his handlers and his lovers and fans are kind of still living in that world and refusing to concede that beyond the gates, right, there's this huge barbarian horde of Tik Tockers and Instagram real posters, some of whom are making jokes that are very much of the kind that Matt is describing. They're not cruel. They're not like actually racist, but they're observational. There's there's a guy a Chinese guy I follow on Instagram who just does like imitations of, you know, different Asian families giving their babies names. So he'll do like the Japanese names and do the Chinese names and then you get to the the Chinese parents and they just like throw a metal pot down the stairs and it goes clong clang clang clung, you know, and it's like that's sort of or it'll do like if Adam and Eve were Asian and God says don't eat the apple and they're like okay and then they start eating like the bats in Eden and the angels are like what the hell is going but it's like you are these are funny jokes and and this is the sort of thing that if you live in the world defined by the Colbear people of of of the entertainment industry like you would never even enter your head if you're operating in that space. And so in much the same way, right, like these Sydney Sweeney ads are coming now out of a new fresh source of just sort of natural normal life. It's not right-wing at all. It's not any wing. It's just like this is just kind of surprise surprise like people see a hot girl wearing jeans, they want to buy the jeans, they want to talk about the hot girl wearing the jeans and like this whole New York Times reaction is basically the Colbear equivalent. It's like but but but we created a whole world where this is like outlawed and we would never even you never even think to make a joke about genes and like that's that world is just like has evaporated but there's like five people still acting like we live in. Yeah. Just a brief example from the Kevin Lang show episode I saw with my son. He's watching and so they're trying to figure out which person in the green suit is is Mexican and it goes to the first guy and he's uh kind of tall and manky and he starts talking as if he has a Mexican accent and uh immediately like the three black guys in the pan are like that brother is African. Like you were bad at this. You can't even pretend. Then goes to the Hispanic guy in the panel. He's like I'm not even talking to you. Uh look at him. They just go example. Yeah. Yes. That is exactly the sort of thing that we've been trained to cringe at without ever asking what exactly is hurtful or or bad about it. Right. It's like you say that and everyone's like that's a little ed edgy. It's like why is that even edgy? This is just like the fact that black guys can recogn you know like and and so that like the erasure of that is kind of what's going on. I wanted to just the last thing about the Sydney Sweeney stuff. It's sort of right up our alley in a way. Uh somebody on I forget who on Twitter, you know, decent sized account said um these journalists are clearly just this is the state of journalism, right? It they just looked at a freakout on TikTok uh and they decided to write it up as if it were news. And I my uh commentary on that on on X was that this is incorrect or it's the improper way of thinking about it because we need to understand the role of academia and expert opinion in all of this and it's Tik Tok is actually downstream from all of that even if most of them don't even know it. And so and it segus nicely with Mike's highlighting of this piece about mankeeping. Again, another female academic writing this up. I think we do ourselves no favors by misunderstanding the causal line that goes from one thing to the next and the freak out over Sydney Sweeny's incipient white supremacy because of her participation in American Eagle ad just saying that is so absurd just on the mechanics of it but leave that aside misses the fact that our pop culture now even on Tik Tok is diffusely still being pushed and run the same way a lot of our elite culture, media or otherwise, has been run for so long, which is that ideas that were off on guard in the 60s in academia, and then laughed at when they bubbled up in political correctness in the '9s, and then people took some alarm at them when they spread into the public square up 2020 and the summer of George Floyd. They've been running the show all all along in a way, not running the show, but sort of setting the narrative. So really, we just come back to the sad state of affairs of modern mainstream journalism. It is still a bunch of mostly kids who don't know anything paring the latest fads of academia as they've been diffused through the rest of our cultural media space. Well, the good news is that they're they're they're uh they're really going out of business for real now. I mean, what's her name on MSNBC? Matt, taking a $5 million pay to cuts all over the place. Washington Post. Uh, Kesler, the other Kesler 30 years, like they're all taking buyouts. I mean, that's the only good news, I guess. Yeah. Screeching and hectoring at your audience. Turns out leads to a diminishing audience. And the Co Bear backers are wrong, of course. The highest rated late night show is Red Eye on Fox with Greg Gutfeld. Is that in the same time slot? Is it is 11? Why? I mean, it's late. Maybe it's Maybe it's at midnight, so it's it's not the same. Well, that's the whole trick, right? Is like that in much the same way as they've ideologically defined themselves into this tiny box. They also just like the whole point I mean they do this with acade academic positions too. They'll say like no no serious academic thinker now doubts that that Marx is a powerful theorist. You know I read books all the time that say things like this and you're like yeah because you've defined serious academic thinkers as only those who begin from the premise that Marx is you know so there's no Victor Davis Hansen in this book. There's no, you know, they've just you you're really just describing like what the realm of legitimacy is. And I'm sure they do this with the New York Times bestseller list, right? They they define like what sales count in such a way as to ensure that conservative books don't get on it, which is not just sour grapes about conservative books. It's like this is a thing that they actually do. And and that like official, that gatekeeping is kind of the thing that's breaking down in all of these settings, right? It doesn't. You can you can say like, well, Colbear is the highest rated 12:35 to 10:02 p.m. host with a like mustache or something. And it's like, okay, great. That's that's fine. I'm going to go watch more TikTok, right? That that the highest rated show with what, you know, what's his audience? 2.5 million people. Johnny Carson, I know it's apples and oranges in a way. I mean, so so many fewer channels, but I mean, he regularly got I think 10 to 20 million people a night. I mean, when he signed off, I think 50 million people were watching his show in 1992. So, I mean, this is just a huge shift. These people have become so tiny and yet the only reason why anybody even knows about them is the media megaphone. That's it. I mean, if we just kind of let them, you know, survive on their own, they're not going to. And I think just the evidence of this whole thing, it's just like the the kind of I guess in a way boomer world is just is just breaking apart. And I think it needs to happen. I mean, we're looking at a time where, you know, CNN may not be around in 5 years and and praise God, thanks that that's happening. This is all very much needed and very good and this is just, you know, hopefully the early earliest signs and some signs of of that eventually happening. Yeah, they tie themselves to this narrative. I think Russian collusion is actually still at the basis of this where that's why that flares up again. Uh you can see them just tying them like will they commit suicide or not? The answer is suicide for all of them. Great, do that. And to the gatekeeping point, elsewhere, people were talking about the hundred best podcasts in America. You see this? This list came out. Yeah. Best 100 podcasts in America. And uh just to give you an indication of how BS this was and how it was mocked, they didn't mention Joe Rogan. I mean, it says it all. Just ridiculous. Like no one's going to take it seriously. No. I'm looking at it now. Two dope queens. Unfiltered conversation from WNYC studio. Who has not, you know, who among us has not spent hours binging two dope queens? WNYC. Yeah. Yeah. The audience of normal late night are watching reruns of Gunsmoke or watching on Twitch people play video games. It should warm your heart because you know Johnny Carson was interesting and funny. Let alone the change media landscape. Had interesting guests on. Was a funny guy. But Pomer and all the rest of them have just been lecturing everybody for three years. So, good written. Speaking of the experts crashing on the shoulders of reality, we have GDP numbers out for the latest quarter. GDP grew at a nice healthy 3% defying all of the doom and gloom predictions about Trump's tariff regime which uh sort of piggybacks on the first quarter results which were decent clip, small percentage better than everyone had predicted even the launching of the trade war. Meanwhile, Trump has just struck a pretty good deal, which even I think the Financial Times admitted Trump won basically against the EU and this EU trade deal. And uh now we should say, of course, that the real tariff cliff is still not upon us coming in August. So, we'll see how things shake out when the deadline actually crashes. But, you know, the the Pien Ponant crowd of economists and experts predicted basically a depression by now. And uh we are far exceeding to say the least anything like depression. It's sort of uh I was saying before we we hit record, you know, Trump's like the world historical example of the C student running everyone else's lives, getting the prettiest girlfriend, and just running from win to win in the face of all the nerds, predicting that his life choices were bad and that he would never amount to anything. And uh I think that's a good thing. I mean, I I just this is one of the greatest moments like Monday uh of this week um when this news came out because I was sitting there on on our show at Blaze and just looking at the bullet points they had for me and uh the producers put in, you know, bullet point one, you know, EU is going to spend $700 million buying energy from us. Bullet point two, $650 million in investments or whatever it was. Uh bullet point three, they're going to buy unspecified amount of military equipment. you know, Bolton four and five, like more stuff they're gonna do. And then the last bullet point was in return, the US is going to impose a 15% tariff just like out of thin air, you know, and just just reading it made me think of uh you know, all the real kind of worries that people on the right had and you know, tariffs are bad and and all this kind of thing and just thinking like, damn it, the guy was right. Like he was right all along. He's been saying this for 30, 40 years and he just freaking did it and it just works. And you have to sit there and go, you know, there God loves, you know, fools, drunkards, United States of America and Donald J. Trump and uh, you know, there he is succeeding and I mean, it's just one of those those moments where uh, he just wins and you got to got to hand it to him. I think all the the things that you were just talking about the uh commitments I think just with the European Union and Japan alone that's 1.15 trillion that is astounding and then you look at the other deals kind of in process or completed UK Vietnam Philippines Indonesia um no agreements been reached with China yet so we'll see what happens there but I mean you know and then you look at the GDP growth I mean how does this you know comport to not only what you know people on the left are saying but what I heard saw economist after economist on on the supposed right saying over and over again and it's like okay I mean what is actually happening is the absolute opposite of what you said was going to happen. I mean you know it was going to be from what you said like Lesla Neielson naked gun were nothing to see here and there's all these fireworks and people on fire going off in the background that that's not happening at all. I mean we just had 3% GDP growth. So it it's just amazing once again I mean just how bad the experts are off. Trump is winning at least in reality. I mean, like Ryan said, we'll we'll see when some of this stuff actually hits and what happens. I mean, I think prices on appliances and that are probably going to be going up. We'll probably have some negative consequences, but this was always going to be a trade-off anyway. I mean, this was never promised as, oh, you get everything, the US gets everything, and that's it. There's going to be no negative consequences. Of course, there are. But this just shows again the the tyranny of the experts and just how wrong they are constantly. It's like why would you believe the same guy who's been wrong about everything since 2016, but in this case, oh, he might be right about the tariffs wrong again. I mean, it's just it it it just again it just continues this realignment just in every stage. And it's not only just culturally, politically, you know, on the left or the establishment, but it's it's with us us too. I think that's really important. Like who who are you going to trust? Who are you going to read kind of going forward? Who's who's been actually right about some of this stuff? You know, at CRB we have this quarterly schedule. This is Tam's sister publication and we always talk about like it can be extremely frustrating to watch these dramas unfolding in national politics and try to pinpoint exactly when the issue is going to land and how do we intervene and when or whatever. But one thing we always say is like the the positive advantage of that is you get to kind of watch and see which things stick and which things land and which things just turn out to be an effect of whatever moment you're in in the news cycle. And Americans in general I think are very bad and I count myself among these Americans who are very bad at realizing when a new cycle is just a news cycle. like you get immersed in this cloud of rhetoric that makes every event seem like the most important or all-defining thing and it becomes like David after dentist that old video of the kid that's been drugged up at the dentist and he looks around and goes is this going to be forever? Like we tend to assume that the state of the media or the state of the narrative is going to be forever the way it is right now. And this tariff thing has really taken that shape because Trump is doing a Trump thing. He's doing this freewheeling wild negotiation with a north star in mind. He wants trade protectionism for the US. He believes it's going to help the economy. He has like a theory, a sort of general theory of the case that may or may not pan out. Every little moment, every micro gesture in that negotiation has been treated as if it were going to be like the future of the US economy. And that's where you get these predictions about like well like soon, you know, stocks will plummet or prices will skyrocket or or whatever. And like none of these things materialize. We seem to be kind of gradually working our way toward a readjustment of the global trade balance. I think there will be pluses and minuses to that. We probably will see prices rise in some areas, but we might also see like industry take off in others. But it's just really remarkable to me to watch the like breathless passion with which every stage in this process has been turned into like an epochdefining moment where Trump seems to be treating it rather differently. He seems to be kind of moving stage by stage through a negotiation and right now it it kind of things kind of look good for him. You'll we'll see like where goes next, but this is this is a good uh a good moment for him. Yeah. And in a healthy academic environment, we should keep an eye on it. For economists and a very dying, if not nearly extinct breed of political economists, they would, you would think they'd reexamine their priors and then start doing work on what what Neo Hamiltonian economics means in the 21st century. that is to say a sort of tariff regime that's focused on supply chains national sort of independence especially and take for one example rare earth metals which has scrambled some of the Chinese negotiations I don't think we've addressed it on this podcast but you talking to friends in the administration you know part of the climb down on China or the sort of cooling of rhetoric had a lot to do with basically they could they can basically turn off the world's supply of magnets because of rare earth minerals and We we have plenty of them in the United States. We're just not mining them. They're all on the ground, especially in the Mountain West and elsewhere. And um you would think that it would be a top priority for the leading experts, especially in national security, to have been beating this drum forever. There have been a small segment of them that have been, but this is just, I think, part of Trump's calculation on all of this along with, you kind of alluded to it, Spencer, compensating for any price shock effects from tariffs with really freeing up American energy or the continued pursuit of American energy independence and even surplus. It's a it'll be a thing to watch. But I I guess I wouldn't hold our breath about u the state of academia being able to now explain this to us and how they were wrong and why they were wrong and how that's interesting going forward, especially as it would pertain in very critical ways to national policy going forward. That would be a healthy academic environment. Alas, we don't have it yet. We just have pockets of it at places like Claremont, Hillsdale, Matt's Alma Mo, Thomas Aquinus College. Although I wouldn't call TAC or even Hillsdale a a great production factory of elite academic opinion, they're doing the much more important work of just educating the generation of elites that will replace the Ivy League degrees. We hope as those degrees increasingly become more and more either laughable, ideologically tendentious or colonized by AI and increasing numbers of students who aren't able to think or write. Actually, one thought from the female the mankeeping section. I mean, we're simple creatures. I think the mankeeping could be outsourced to an LLM if they get a little bit better. So, there's relief on the horizon, ladies. Don't worry. With that, we should uh get to some cultural recommendations. I So, I've been uh I have like a two-parter in a way, which dubtales with some of our discussion of men's spaces. So, I don't know if it's really a cultural recommendation. I'll just say I for the first time I got the chance to attend the Bohemian Grove for two nights for the Midsummer encampment and I won't say much about it because it's, you know, they pride their privacy and we should respect that. But I will just say anyone out there listening, no matter your politics, if you ever get invited, go. It's all the way out on the West Coast. If you're far away, you got to fly to a small airport in Soma and rent a car or whatever. But how would I describe this to the outside world? There's all the caricatures on the right that it's some satanic pagan ritual and uh you know bad demonic things are happening there, but it's really just a lost island for boys, but for men, men who are interested in politics, culture, music, so there's 115 camps at the place. There's, you know, a thousand people there at any given time, give or take change, sometimes less, sometimes more. And uh you just wander around and go to talks. Uh enjoy some evening theater and the somewhat body ba u d y style of all men theater. You know, women in drag and everyone's having uproariously hilarious time. And then at the end of the night, you go to sort of late later night stuff, which is basically a bunch of concerts happening. small bands playing all over the place and more talks and you're just hanging out with your friends and enjoying beverages while you walk around at least in the central part of the camp in an old growth redwood forest. So, it's a it's it's a cultural institution that could never be recreated because it's all male membership. Uh women and families are welcome a few times a year, but not at the Midsummer Encampment. And uh it's in one of the most beautiful settings in the world. So, anyway, it's my my pitch. if you get invited, don't believe the weird conspiracy theories about it. It's much more harmless and it's just a good time. Then the other thing I was a we've been in Maine and uh Cape Cod, a mix of professional and family stuff for a week or so and I picked up an old Steinbeck book that I had never seen before called The Moon is Down, which is a short book you could read in an afternoon. Uh it's published in 1941 and it's Steinbeck's envisioning of if the fascists had conquered North America and it's centered in a small town, small coastal town. You're not quite sure where. I think it's got to be on the east coast where a mine is very important. And it's sort of the contrast between the psychology and approach to tyrannical rule by the occupiers and then the uh slow realization of the ability of the local towns people with a little bit of outside help to revolt. Nazi is never mentioned. It's sort of just alluded to reading in 41. You of course know what it's all about. And uh it's a nice little study. It's a bit propagandistic and a bit stareyed. It's a nice little piece of cultural literature that's worth reading and it will throw you back a little bit into uh the sort of midwar era in World War II. Anyway, I recommend it. Go check it out. Won't take you long to read. It's beautifully written and has some penetrating psychological analysis about the differences between tyrannies and republics. So, I talked about this last week on the podcast. Um, I started the first episode of the two-part docue series on Billy Joel on HBO Max. So, my wife and I are now kind of in the middle of of the second part and it's it's really fascinating. You'll see home movies, especially like when he was married to Christy Brinkley and just it it's fascinating. I mean, it was marred in one point. He repeated the, you know, the the Trump like 2017 Charlottesville lie that the media and Biden and etc have tried to do. But outside of that, I mean that that that was definitely the one bad thing about this. I mean, it's it's fantastic. Goes through all his albums, his ups, his downs, a manager who absolutely stole I mean I think upwards of almost $90 million, which is insane. He trusted this guy so much. it was the brother of his uh ex-wife and just didn't want to face what was actually going on. Then did an audit and realized, "Oh, this guy's like stealing all this money from me. I should have way more." And this was, you know, in the mid80s. I mean, basically, you know, close to not not probably the height of his peak. That was probably in the, you know, maybe after um Stranger 52nd Street, maybe in the in the 70s. But, I mean, at a place where he should have had much, I mean, much much more money than what he had. I'm to the part now where River Dreams just came out. It's 1993 and he talks about why, you know, he's never actually done a full length album since then. So, it's really fascinating. Would definitely say, you know, if you're a fan of Billy Joel, if you're a fan of dad rock, um like Spencer says is is my musical taste. If you're a fan of yacht rock, anything like that, uh go for it. And speaking of yacht rock, so I think I mentioned this also last week, the Toto concert is finally here on Sunday. to see them. Christopher Cross, Men at Work. So, I am very much looking forward to that. I just want to make clear that Dad Rock is not a pjorative. In fact, if anything, it's a term of praise, but you're really not bucking the reputation by citing your Toto attendance right after Gold Panda. Uh, both great terrific uh artists by the way, just just to be clear. Um, I guess I have two because one of them is so sort of trifling as not even to count as a cultural recommendation. I have a cocktail that I'd like to recommend to our listeners because basically all over the country, certainly here in Nashville, the heat has become simply offensive. It at this point I feel that this is like an affront to human dignity and we ought to speak to somebody about it. But failing that, if we're going to have to suffer through this heat wave, you really want like a good cold cocktail. I love a martini, but you get a little tired eventually of martinis. There's only so many different ways you can make them. So, allow me to recommend another gin cocktail called the Too soon. Have you guys ever anyone ever had a Too soon on the podcast? No. Okay. Uh, two big slices of orange in the bottom of the tumbler that you're going to use to mix the cocktail. You can muddle them, which is easy enough. Just kind of crush them up a little bit. But the really fancy way is to take one of those giant ice cubes and toss it in there and let the ice cube just basically open up the orange slices as you shake it. Gin, like some sort of nice dry gin. H. And then the truly secret ingredient uh is chinar, which is an artichoke flavored uh like a bitter kind of lure. And I think it's like one to one with like a little simple syrup, but you can look this up online and mix that all up together. extraordinarily refreshing. And if you're tired of your martinis and your ginonics and your apperall spritzes, but you still want a refreshing cocktail, make it too soon. But my real like actual I don't just drink alcohol. I also watch things and think about things. Recommendation is uh the the adaptation of the Sandman, Neil Gaiman's Sandman on Netflix, which does have a slight political tinge to it because Gaiman was the subject of like a late me too. There was a sort of hangover controversy surrounding Gaiman's practices, which did sound abhorrent. I didn't really look into them too closely because at that point I was so disgusted by the whole phenomenon and I was disgusted by the particularly what the the gaming thing seems to have been is that he was this like self-proclaimed ally many of whom of course turned out to be terribly mistreating young young women all the while they proclaimed their feminist monafides and Gaiman is I should warn our listeners insufferably sort of woke pre-woke like he just throws he's he's known for throwing in gratuitous LGBT characters, etc. But he's also undeniably a kind of offbeat, Macob, zany imagination, and his graphic novels are are classics. This is one of his most famous pieces of property. And what's good about the Netflix adaptation is simply that it goes all out. Like, it really just throws the melodrama at the wall. It's fully camped, fully overdone, and they canceled it, I suspect, because of the sort of me too stuff surrounding gaming, but also I think because it's it's kind of unsophisticated, like it's it feels very lowbrow because it's so over the top. Um, but it's it's absolutely crushing on the Netflix numbers. So, it's kind of an interesting thing that like despite the cancellation and despite the uh problems and despite the fact that it's really not a perfect show, um it's just so entertaining and it's got all these weird like kind of ancient mythologies jumbled up together and set in in the modern world. So, if you want a graphic novel adaptation that is not simply the rehash of like the same five superheroes you've seen and that doesn't suck, Sandman, which is just coming to its conclusion now on Netflix. This is amazing. I love this part of the show. Um, first, I mean, I can't wait to see Ryan's inbox after he The Claremont Institute defends Bohemian Grove. Um, I know you'll get some choice emails. I'll tease everyone by saying I spotted one other CLA monster while I was there older than I was. Oh. Oh. And then uh you know say with the Billy's old dad rock. I am I am guilty as charged. Uh I came a certain age and it's like I never accusation. I know. I know. I'm proud of it. I mean I listen to honesty really loud and sing it really loud and I love those songs. Those songs are great for kids too. It's like goodbye to Hollywood. I mean, you know, I play that while we're driving around Hollywood with the kids. It's great for that stuff. And as to drinks, I will say that uh I'm just dependent upon the stable ranch water, you know, which I just like fell in love with when I came to Texas because I did not know that men could make such things as simple as pouring tequila and uh you know, some chica in a glass. You're like, what? So, I'm still not over it. I'm not over the ranch water uh in the summers here and we drink it like water. I wanted to point out something just on the Sydney Sweeney thing. You're going to have to forgive me because I only have a few cultural recommendations. Bridget Fetesy uh tweeted this article out and there's a line in it about Sweeney. Even Even her figure, this is a quote, "Even her figure has become a cultural standin for the idea pushed by conservative commentators that Americans should be free to love boobs." I think my ancestors died for that. Right. This the Claremont Institute is a, you know, devoted to the study of the founding and the the writings of of the founders. I I can guarantee that that's somewhere in the Federalist Papers. Oh, yeah. We don't know who exactly wrote it, which of them, but it's in there somewhere. Take my word for it. Uh, so recently I rewatched the Sakario movies um with my son, my oldest son. uh he found them dark because he's still bright and idealistic and uh full of good cheer and and morals. I found them amazing that they were ever made. I know a lot of our audience probably already seen them, but I mean the fact that these they were preient as hell about everything and just said all the things you would want and you look at it right now, it's like a fever dream of the right to make those movies which is why they've become memeable and all that. Um, so the fact that Taylor Sheridan made those movies and a number of other incredible movies before he started making every TV show known to man is notable and this both sucarios are worth uh watching again uh if you're into such things because it is uh astounding all the themes in there. And of course the central theme of of the first Sakario is that um even though she's a good upstanding person, the FBI agent is in over her head in a land of wolves and that America is in the same place when it comes to the border. I mean, absolutely astounding. Of course, the cinematography in the first one from Dennis is amazing. Um, and then as far as the the reading front goes, I'm I'm just going to suggest in general reading poetry, again, anyone out there who's not reading a lot, which is like a lot of us because we're on the screens, just picking up uh anything uh any any kind of poem and reading it to yourself uh before bed is a good idea, or in the morning. It's you know, it's going to be short and you have something to reflect on. sort of like maybe the anecdote to Tik Tok of the brain. And so you know ba basic suggestion I know or also I encourage people baby steps take some uh kind of nature writing if you don't have any uh we could recommend some of that later on but but we need just just take something where you feel good about resting in you know a paragraph or a sonnet and I feel like that's a that's a good anecdote for the uh for the modern mishaps that we're all falling into with the screens and a good uh I'm sure Spencer will endorse this and maybe has some other recommendations. But if you want a good uh primer on great English verse, go to the Oxford book of English verse slightly older edition. I would recommend uh you can get them at used bookstores and on the internet pretty easily. Oh man, you guys you you guys are doing me dirty by introducing this topic at the end of the show to spend the rest segment. But yes, absolutely, Ryan. Also, the Norton anthology is pretty good. also the making of a poem which is about like basic verse forms and in pretty non-technical language but just so that you can get a foothold in like what's a villain what's a sonnet how do these things work is really helpful just for your basic enjoyment and then also memorize things like it exactly as you say Matt you don't have to read a lot in fact you should read a little and dwell in it and if you memorize it'll start to occupy your brain in a way that like really clears out a lot of the other gunk that the internet is constantly sleing into our minds. Good. It was a nice pastiche of recommendations. I love it. But we've come to the end of our our episodes and thank you all again for listening to the round table. If you want to learn more about our work, go to www.claremont.org. If you want to support our work, just put a slashdonate in there. Uh we don't sell much at the Claremont Institute besides a few magazines. So we're dependent on all of your support. We thank you very much. Go to americanm.org for the latest from the American mind to check out the center for the American way of life's work. Uh I just reviewed this morning with our interimm director Analysis Rogers. Our executive director Arthur Milik is over at the state department on on leave working working for the government. So analysis uh shouldered the task of center for the American way of life output. We've got a number of provocations coming out on all sorts of spicy topics like women in the military and things like that. So keep an eye out for those at dc.claremont.org and then of course go to the Claremont books at claremontbooks.com. Please rate the show, spread the word to your friends and family. We'll again tease that this will be a vidcast I think within the month. So uh that should be fun and an adjustment for us. But uh new vistas await popularity and reach of the roundt podcast. So thank you all for listening and we will talk to you next week. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music]