Pratt Boy Summer

Hello and welcome once again to the round table, your weekly publishers and editors podcast here at the American Mind. I'm your host, Spencer Clavin, Associate Editor for the Claremont Review of Books and outside candidate for LA Mayor. Why not, right? We're all doing it these days. I am joined this week as always by Managing Editor Mike Sabo and Publisher and President Ryan Williams. So to begin, as I hinted, we're going to be talking about hot Pratt summer. I think Ryan took that joke from one of Pratt's own campaign ads, if I'm not mistaken, but that should give you a quick flavor for this guy if you haven't been following him. I started to notice him swimming into my email inbox. And this is one of these trends that I guess because he has my name, I kind of paid attention in that I noticed it, but I haven't really looked into it until somewhat recently. What a California story, you guys. This fella was on a reality TV show called The Hills, which if like me, you had never seen it, didn't relate to it at all. Just picture the reality. Spencer, you consider yourself cultured. You haven't seen at least one episode of The Hills. There's a gaping, a gaping lacuna in my canonical knowledge. But I will say at least that when I looked up clips of Spencer Pratt on The Hills, I immediately recognized it. It was like a language I'd forgotten that I spoke from birth. All the ladies, they look exactly like Hilary Duff. It's peak millennial hairstyle. They're all wearing exactly the same kind of frilly miniskirt and blouse. And all the dudes have the precursor to the broccoli hairstyle, which was the bleached NSYNC Justin Timberlake curls. Pratt included. He became kind of an antagonist, as I understand it, on this show. This is one of the first signs of his Trumpianism or his Trump-style brand, that he's a reality star and also somebody people previously kind of loved to hate. Also like Trump, although he's very much a populist and is running as a Republican, he's certainly not your typical conservative by any stretch of the kind of policy list imagination. He describes his own constituency as pissed-off Angelenos, and you certainly get that energy from his ads, which have generated a lot of discussion, gone viral online. Some of them with a lot of AI generation, some of them more, I guess, typical. Some of them, I must confess, a little bit cringe, at least from my perspective. He does one where he's Luke Skywalker or Obi-Wan Kenobi and Karen Bass, the current mayor of LA, is Darth Vader talking to the Emperor Palpatine, who of course is none other than Governor Gavin Newsom. And she's maniacally scheming, as long as no one tells the truth, we've got them where we want them. They can't have hope. And Pratt is riding one of those hover motorbikes through a ravaged Los Angeles hellscape. The Hollywood sign is burning. So his big issues are homelessness, drug traffic, the Palisades fire in which I gather his home was destroyed. So he's accusing Bass of having mismanaged that and any number of other things. His performance in the polls is quite impressive. I found this piece in the New York Post about the betting odds of his winning, which are at least, according to one platform, at 25% compared to Bass's 18%. I should say there's another candidate here, which is the socialist, the Los Angeles councilwoman, Nitya Raman, I guess is how you would say that maybe. Anyway, just a remarkable kind of upset candidate race. Whether or not he wins, I'm interested to know your estimation of his chances, whether this is more of an internet phenomenon than a real life phenomenon, but also, and perhaps more importantly, what it portends for the future of conservative candidacy, both locally and at the national level going forward. Is this the long sought after Trumpism post-Trump or merely a stunt campaign of the kind that we typically see from time to time? Can anybody like this win in LA? Have things gotten bad enough that Angelenos might be ready to rally behind this fellow? What do you think? I just love this because it's such a Southern California story. I'm telling exactly, yes. And I'm biased because I grew up there. Pratt is, I think, a year and a half younger than I am. He was born in late summer of 1983. Almost two years younger than I am. It's also of generational interest. Spratt's a kind of exennial-ish type. Of course, he became famous on the show, The Hills. As you say, Spencer, he married on the show, I think season four of The Hills. I will state for the record, I did not watch all of The Hills, but it was such a phenomenon, especially if you lived in Southern California, that you couldn't- You have to understand and see, Lauren was terribly betrayed by Spencer, and her best friend was Heidi, and Heidi wanted her to come to the wedding. But anyway, sorry, I did my research for the show, is all I'm saying. Thank you. I did not know the back history. Yeah, I mean, Pratt and Heidi Montag married in their mid-twenties and are still married. Pratt is also, I mean, he's a California throwback. He looks a lot like old California, and I don't mean just sort of beach white boy, beach-ish white boy, although maybe that's substantially what I mean. So it's an interesting contrast with his two opponents in the mayoral race, Karen Bass, a sort of old school minority candidate, L.A. machine type, with a checkered past, that is to say, a Cuban revolutionary, a young revolutionary past that is, 30 years ago in L.A. would have sunk her first candidacy, let alone her re-election, especially to a pretty charismatic and interesting candidate, although unorthodox candidate like Pratt. So it's the last gasp, or maybe it's the last gasp of an older L.A., although updated for our times, because Pratt is quite young by, well, by any political candidate's standards, I guess not that young for a mayor, but certainly younger than the incumbent mayor, Karen Bass. He's young relative to our kind of geriatric politics also. He seems fresh and vigorous. It's also interesting because, as you said, Spencer, we're at the very beginning of the explosion of A.I. into campaigns, because it makes it so easy for a certain segment of your electorate, especially the under-35 crowd who consume social media a lot, it's so easy to make fun, irreverent content for them. And this is, it seems to me, to be the first election cycle that we're seeing that. And then finally, so it's interesting for all those reasons, he's also pretty good on his feet. I mean, both of his opponents have backed out of the second debate after he manhandled them in the first, made them look either left-wing or just fairly incompetent and not that bright and not fun at all, whereas he definitely handled both of them on issues that Angelenos care about. So that's the, finally, the more, the most, maybe not the most interesting, but I think as a model, especially for local office, Pratt has gone to school on how you should run this sort of campaign, which is to say, in our very ideologically divided age, everyone is tempted to tribally signal and sort quickly and aggressively, and Pratt is avoiding that. And I think he should. He's running for, as he said, he also, the way, sorry, I'm so excited, I can't really get a coherent thought. The Pratt fever has overcome, you're just totally submerged in it. It's so refreshing and I didn't expect it. And it's, it's another, another of these reality TV figures who was fairly prominent, especially in Southern California and in national, on national screens. You know, when I was what, I guess I was, well, I was already in college when it really took off after, or out of college when it took off, but I was still spiritually of Southern California. And he, he's running on local bread and butter issues, which you should as a mayor, mayoral candidate. I mean, what, what do national ideological MAGA, intra conservative MAGA fights or MAGA versus liberal fights really have to do with the mayor, mayor's responsibilities in LA, in LA, quality of life stuff, crime, homelessness, affordability, all the rest. So I think he, he may have found the sweet spot as for his chances of winning. It's still Los Angeles. It's still California. It is a thorough, it is thoroughly in the grip of a pretty effective machine politics of the left and of the democratic party. And so I think he would have to have a pretty commanding lead in the polls to be able, I think, to win on election day, but more importantly in California to survive the weeks after that, where the Democrats know how many ballots they need to find and their machine goes about finding them. So it's exciting. It's fun to watch. I think it should, I think it will have some spillover effects that can't help, but be good for Republicans and help be a model for local Republicans running across the country, even in some blue States. And it's, it's helped significantly by the fact that the Democrats, which we've discussed many times, especially on local, you know, quality of life stuff seem determined to be, determined to be unable, completely unable to get, to get out of culture war stuff and, and get out of their own way and providing completely common sense things like public safety and affordability because of their ideological commitments and their, their base and the demands of their ideological base. So it's exciting for lots of reasons. So I, I'm excited too. I mean, certainly about the Pratt campaign, usually when you hear about some kind of social media influencer running, you know, I think about, I think people talking about maybe in, you know, after Trump, I think this was maybe circa 2017. Oh, you know, kid rock and run. And, you know, some of these people where you just kind of roll your eyes at, but, and you actually watch Spencer Pratt's commercials. And I mean, it's kind of amazing, just the energy. I mean, the enthusiasm, the humor, it reminds me actually many ways of like, he kind of went to the Zoran Mondami school of, you know, actually campaigning. I think there's a lot of links to that. We're actually going to be publishing a piece very soon by Brooke Bantgen. Sorry, Brooke, if I, if I said your last name wrong, but yeah, she, she points that out. And I think it's a very, very good piece to say, look, if you're on the right, if you're a Republican, if you're, you know, kind of an anti-establishment candidate, like this is how this is a template. This is how you should be running. So I think that he's done a great job in doing that in the debates, obviously. I mean, he has energy, he has enthusiasm and he's talking about the right things. I think sometimes the wrong lessons have been learned about Trump where, Oh, you're just supposed to talk about everything that Trump is talking about. But the problem is, is that you need to talk about the, the quality of life issues and the issues that are actually affecting your community. Like Spencer Pratt is doing, he's talking about getting the homeless off the streets, getting needles off the streets. And he's rejecting kind of the managed decline in corruption that, you know, the democratic establishment there, I mean, has just overseen for a very, very long time. And then another thing that's, that's important, you know, Mike Cernovich actually, I saw him point this out and some others, you know, talking about the, this is kind of the, the term that's the online term of the retard, right. You know, he's not talking about Israel. He's not talking about Epstein. He's actually talking about, again, like these issues that regular people living in Los Angeles have been seeing on the streets for, you know, 10, 15 years now, and that nothing's being done. And actually, in fact, it's just getting worse. I mean, the garbage, the homeless, the, you know, I'm sure if you've, you were there, you know, if you grew up there and then you compare it to now, I mean, I think on every probably measure things have gotten worse. I'm certainly not a native Californian. I'm a native Ohioan, but you know, every time I've gone out to California, I love the state. It's a shame of what's happened to it, especially in LA and some of the big cities. I mean, it really, really is. So, I mean, to have a guy to stand up, to say, no, you're not insane. You see reality just like I do, you know, to describe this reality. I mean, again, it, it, and there is a connection to what Trump did in 2015 and 2016, where he just simply described what people were talking about, what we, what people were talking about with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, what people were talking about, about the unit party. I mean, he, he voiced it and I feel like that's what Spencer Pratt's doing here. Um, and you know, and one more thing too, just about the corruption in Democrats, uh, the mayor of Arcadia, uh, her name is Eileen Wang. She just pled guilty to acting as an illegal foreign agent of China, resigned. She faces up to 10 years in prison running a fake news site to boost PR, uh, PRC propaganda. So, I mean, these things are real. Um, the corruption is real. The people who are in these offices should absolutely not be there. Um, and you know, we'll, we'll see what happens. I mean, whether he's going to win or not, I'm, I'm probably much more skeptical of that. Um, I mean, the public unions, the SEIU are very, very powerful. Um, they're obviously you have Hollywood, you have so many things going against him, but even if he doesn't win, I think this just provides a very good template for, um, you know, people who want to run for office and shake things up going forward. Yeah, man. I mean, look like all these other people are also reality TV personalities, even if they weren't functionally on reality TV, like Pratt's not wrong about what a clown Bass is or, or Newsom is. They're all these over the top Gotham villains and the templates that he's using from star Wars and Marvel movies and everything. The funny part is that they actually fit. Like I agree, Mike, that piece by, uh, Brooke is really sharp. And one of the things that made me think about, which I think you guys have been touching on as well is Pratt understands something very key that very few post Trump era politicians have been able to fully grasp. And that is the distinction. I would put it between the letter of Trumpism and the spirit of Trumpism. And what I mean by that is Trump in his most famous political moment as president, both times Trumpism has taken the form of certain political policies and has, for example, been mediated through the Republican party and has made use of a number of genuine concerns that Republicans have also previously pursued the concern for the working man, the common sense on the economy, a certain strain of protectionism, uh, that has been operative in some parts of the conservative movement. Um, but that is what I would describe as the letter of Trumpism. In other words, he's, he's gotten his message across through certain channels in our political system, but that's not what it is to be Donald Trump. Like Trump has had a sensibility going way, way back to his earliest reality TV days. That is actually the spiritual engine of what he's doing. There's this incredible essay, and I can't believe I'm about to associate this with Donald Trump, but there's a wonderful essay by Winston Churchill on, it's called consistency in politics, but it's really about Edmund Burke among other, among other figures. Burke famously switched parties a number of times throughout his career and was often on opposing different sides of one question, you know, at different times and so on and so forth. How is it that the great defender of tradition in France can also be the advocate of the rebels in America? How is it that the qualified kind of mediated, uh, common law tradition guy can also be the grand expositor of universal rights and principles in the case of Warren Hastings and, and the East India Company, right? There are all these contradictions supposedly in Burke's political program. And if you tried to list out the policies he support, you'd be like, none of this makes any sense, doesn't hang together. However, says Churchill, there is an underlying spiritual set of principles that almost is so abstract that it can't quite be set in words, but that are recognizable when you see them. And that spirit is animating Burkeanism, which makes for real consistency in politics. And it may cash out in terms of radical changes in policy from time to time. Now, the uncharitable unkind reading of this essay is that consistency in politics just means whoever Winston Churchill happens to like and whatever that person does or says. But the more generous and true reading, I think, is that Churchill himself was also a good example of somebody who had his eye on a sort of North star, a set of beliefs and sensibilities, and even instincts for ordered liberty, shall we say, and muscular nationalism without being overly hubristic or imperialist or whatever. He read the spirit of the time, but he also had a backbone of his own. And at any given moment, prudence dictated how it was that he was to enact that spirit. Why am I talking about all of this relative to Donald Trump and Spencer Pratt, the Churchill and Burke, respectively, I should say, of our day? Well, it's because in point of fact, the spirit of Trumpism is not the same as the letter of Trumpism. And Trumpism in its various iterations has been accused of being contradictory, sometimes with some validity. But really, Trump is about projecting normalcy and confidence. He's as much an aesthetic and cultural movement as he is anything else. And he's a response, therefore, to what Roger Scruton called the culture despise, which is to this attitude of self-hatred and introspection and constant doubt that tears away at the social fabric in America. And it's that that people respond to. And it's why, even though he's always accused of being a spiteful ideologue, people can actually sense that there's very little hatred in Trumpism. And it's why he's more appealing to certain sectors of the electorate that have otherwise been scared away from Republicans, of talking about now the Latino vote and the black vote and the gay vote and all these people who have kind of flocked to him with this sense that there is a joie de vivre behind the YMCA version of Trumpism. It's fun to stay at the Trump rally that very few imitators of Trump have been able to capture because they are so fixated on the like, yeah, Trumpism is about deporting illegal immigrants. It's about like crazy means. And again, it's not that we shouldn't do all those things. We shouldn't cut, you know, close down the border, all that stuff. That is part of it. But that will express itself at different times and places in different ways. And the fundamental aspect of what Spencer Pratt, I think, gets right is like a sense of goodwill toward the electorate, like a genuine desire to benefit this place that he loves. And that is gotten across in these campaign ads, which I'll just say one more thing about them and then I will shut up. I promise. I said that they're cringe, these Star Wars ads. And by that, I mean that I am a broken brained online addict. And for me, like references to Star Wars and the Rebel Alliance are so overdone and cliche that they go up your spine. And in fact, they're kind of associated with like an old style boomerism. They're much less cutting than let's say, for example, the Ron DeSantis campaign for president, which had all of these super online like, you know, Brett Easton, Ellis references, American Psycho, like what was even going on? Like those were too hip for me to watch. I couldn't understand, but they felt so current. And yet they totally alienated people because that was like the letter of Trumpism. That was like, well, in 2016, Trump was driven forward in part by these radical online memes, whatever. Spencer Pratt is much more the spirit of Trumpism. And it's like, look, people who aren't like doom scrolling 24-7, they love Star Wars. That's why it's a cliche. Like it's a very inspiring kind of image that does express something about a city under capture, under siege. And he has all these different people of different races, like getting involved in the Rebel Alliance. As you point out, Ryan, he's really not like riding a bunch of hobby horses that Angelenos probably don't care about. And as you say, why on earth would he? So yeah, it's a very skillful and I think effective way of doing Trumpism without Trump. I have no idea if he'll win. I sure hope. I mean, it'd be kind of awesome if he did. Yeah, I've gone on for a long time. Is there anything else you're going to talk about on this before I move us on, any of the Spencer Pratt things to say? Well, I'm not quite sure what the relationship is. I think it's one of his friends who's doing the fully AI videos. And then I would just point people, if you haven't seen it, the official campaign ad from a few days ago, it was one of the more powerful ones I've seen in a long time. It's just a wide pan shot down a normal LA street. And for those that know LA neighborhoods well, it's clearly a kind of middle class, working class street. I mean, nothing really is in LA, lots of parts of LA because it's still going to be a bunch of $800,000 houses, but it's not Bel Air or up in the Hollywood Hills. It's sort of a normal, somewhat down in the flats, normal LA suburb where a lot of normal people would live. And it's nice. There's cypress trees. It just has the classic look of a Los Angeles suburb. That's not too fancy. And at first you're wondering, what is this? And it's just going down the street with probably a, I don't think it's AI. It looks real to me. It probably, it is real, a drone camera. So it's about two car heights above the road, just going down the street. And you come to a T in the road at the end and you're not quite sure what you're looking at until you get closer to it. And it's a homeless encampment. I mean, really just one guy with his tent and a bunch of junk around it at the end of the street. And the message is, Los Angeles deserves neighborhoods that aren't like this. And it's set to a, again, it's not generationally, it can't be boomer bait. It's millennial bait set to the 1990, a cover of the 1994 Soundgarden song, Black Hole Sun. So I think that there's this mix. There's this interesting AV mix going on of flanking ads that are kind of online and sort of fun. I mean, my favorite detail from the latest Star Wars ad, which opens with an Emperor Palpatine, who's to get Gavin Newsom talking to people about what to do with California and how to basically keep immiserating its people. And at one point he's talking to a Kamala Harris figure and she's just standing there not talking, but he's talking to her and she's holding a bottle of vodka. So it's, this is, it's just fun. And then you have the more serious, more serious, as some people have called it, some of the reporting has called it melancholy, but I can't understand how you could conclude anything about the state of modern Los Angeles without being a bit melancholy. And his message is, I want to get us out of this melancholy. And so I could see, this ad seemed to me would resonate quite well with, I'll be, I will be 45 in December, as I said, a couple of years older than Spencer, would resonate quite well with a lot of my friends that I went to high school with who are not that political. They're all living in San Diego because it's where I went to high school. But if their counterparts were up in LA, I think this ad would make complete sense to them and his candidacy would be pretty compelling. So if he wants to win, I hope that he recognizes that he needs all this sort of charisma and good on your feet campaign rhetoric and good ads. He does a bunch, you know, he's done a series of videos just talking to his phone when he's hiking up in the hills about his opponents and their defects and what LA needs. All great. But this, this, this will be won or lost, I think on his side with the old school and fairly expensive work of a get out the vote effort and then a ballot chasing effort for the week or two following the election. And that just takes pretty good organization, money, and people. And that's where he's completely outgunned, at least for now, and will be outgunned, but he can make it, maybe make up some of the difference by the LA Democratic machine, which will bring to bear all of the constituencies of the Democratic Party of California and Los Angeles to vanquish Spencer Pratt, the public sector employee unions, the teachers unions, which really the same thing, and organized labor, et cetera. One last thing to mention, I forget which group paid for it, but they ran a hit ad against Pratt and they said, Spencer Pratt is not right for LA. They didn't quite put it this way, but they basically said he wants to get rid of homelessness. He wants to curb the power of the public sector employee unions. And again, they didn't put it this way, but he wants to go after the organized interests of the elite Democratic Party in Los Angeles and California, the benefactors of which make much more than most of you normal voting Angelenos. And it seemed to me to be an awesome endorsement for Spencer Pratt rather than a real hit piece. Yeah. That's a really important point. Both the real life ad, which Pratt has retweeted and taken ownership of the AI once, but they're not his official ad, which I should have talked about opening and you just described Abley Ryan. And actually that one appeals to me, not so much on a generational level, but as a person who left Los Angeles. I mean, it gets at exactly what happened to the city over the 2010s. And I'm sure it's only gotten worse. I mean, I know it's only gotten worse. So that part is really important. And you have to weigh it against the alternatives, which are so flat footed and his opponents are utterly out of touch. So relative to the, to the possibilities and even relative to kind of the going fair among conservatives, I'd say it's, it's much hipper and sharper and more fun as you, as you indicate. Also side note, Black Hole Sun, great song. I mean, generationally, not generationally, whatever. Thank you. Can you back me up on this? No, no, it's a great song. And I actually wanted to add kind of one more thing is I've been thinking about this. I mean, part of, I think the thing that the right should learn is look, what is going to be probably called cringe in your group chat that may be actually very politically useful and effective. And I think the right means 100 coast. I just, sorry. I just like everything you're about to say is so important. Go ahead. So I think the right needs to understand that because I think one of the tendencies for the online is to lose all context, to lose everything. And it actually becomes just an abstraction. And so we lose connection to real people, to, you know, to generations. I mean, so much of it is just what zoomers think. And it's like, well, there's more to the world than just zoomers. So I think that that's what Pratt's doing. Yeah. You may not like the star Wars stuff. Yes. Kathleen Kennedy drove star Wars into the ground. Unfortunately, that is all true. And you know, Disney too, and Bob Iger, but, but the problem is, is guess what? There are tons of people who still love the first three. There's tons of people who, who, you know, want, want to go right on the rides, want to go to Disney, want to do these things. And they're a part of the electorate. And so I think that that's again, it's just not means and, you know, online stuff constantly. I mean, it's yes. Do it like he's doing. You have to use online. You have to use the tech. You have to understand these things, but then you have to actually connect it to real people as they actually are. So I think that that is just, that that's a key to that. The righteous needs to learn going forward. Say a lot of, for the people in the back, like scream it from the bleachers, man, that is so important. And I, by myself falling into this trap all the time, like you go outside and somebody asks, Hey, what's going on today? And you realize it takes like 30 minutes just to explain the backstory of what you're concerned about. And you think, Hmm, that's probably not the best electoral strategy. Anyway. Great. This, this was a fun conversation as befits this fun campaign and we'll keep an eye on it. And I encourage our listeners to write in with their impressions of Brad, if they, if they have any, uh, when's the election we know coming up, uh, I suppose I should know June 2nd, I think is the, yeah, is the, um, where, you know, and then the first two, um, people primary, yeah, jungle primary. And then, and then obviously November is the general. Okay, cool. So it is, it's, uh, I predict that he will survive the jungle primary. I think that that seems to be clear. Um, and then it'll be on game on for the general, my one last cultural thing, uh, Spencer it's, it's nice. It is Socratic to me, but, uh, it's just more LA bait for well, Southern California bait for our fans who know, know it well, but Amelia and I find ourselves watching just sort of by happenstance now, uh, the police procedural, the post wire police procedural from 2009 called Southland, which is about LA cops, LA street cops, uh, and detectives. And one of the star young officer of that is Ben McKenzie, uh, not a reality TV show star, but an actor who before that start in the another classic show Southern California and, uh, you know, in the, uh, in the OC, he's the bad boy kid from the Inland empire, which is, uh, you know, he, uh, he grew up in Chino, which is actually not that far from Claremont. So it all comes together here at the Claremont Institute, uh, with, with the tradition of Claremont. And so, uh, it's fun to see even I mean, the decline of LA has been set, set in this context for a long time, but the one last, but the last story I want to tell about this, because it's actually real and practical is, uh, uh, former, uh, Claremont Institute, president Brian Kennedy and Angelino himself, whose father was a homicide detective in LA. Brian grew up in LA. And he told me Bernie Carrick is walking through LA and Brian happened to be there. I forget the reasons. And they're going past Skid Row and, uh, it's broad daylight and they see some homeless guys in Skid Row. I should remind everyone Skid Row, the largest concentration of homeless people in the country, probably about 60 or 65,000 in Los Angeles, this sort of six block four to six block area of, of downtown LA, where when you drive over the bridge near it, you literally can smell urine through your closed car windows as you get closer to Skid Row. And it was broad daylight and the former NYC police commissioner, and then who came out to LA and work as well, walking through the city, they see two homeless people with a shopping cart, with a somewhat freshly severed horse head in the shopping cart. They were going to cook it, I guess, you know, protein is protein, I suppose. And, and Bernie's conclusion was, I have never seen anything like LA. And he's the guy who came from many decades of experience in New York. Uh, that's the setting for Southland and it hasn't improved much since. Add the Palisades fire to it and the complete breakdown of local governance. And you have the environment in which maybe Spencer Pratt can be a fresh, fresh change for LA. We'll see. Maybe they were going to stuff it into the sleeping bag of one of their enemies in the great gang wars. That's what you do with severed heads. That's right. That's right. You better not cross Benny from under the overpass or things get very ugly. Don't even call me Godfather. You don't even, you don't even kiss my trash fire. Okay. Uh, well this has clearly gone on long enough. Let's talk about, um, let's talk about the war. There's still a war happening. Um, I don't know if you guys know that, but we're still doing, we're still doing war in Iran. Um, and it's worth, I think, occasionally just revisiting. I have no, um, opinions about this. This is not true. I have some opinions. I, I genuinely don't know what to think exactly. We, we're going to start this segment off or I'm going to kick us off by summarizing this piece by Wolfgang Munchau in UnHerd, whose name alone commands respect. It's called boots on the ground is Trump's best option. It's what the logic of war dictates. So this is not a piece arguing that Trump should, or we should want Trump to put American soldiers in Iran to be clear. It's that he may have no choice. You may have no better choice under the circumstances at this juncture. And the line that kept coming to my mind as I read this piece is from Thucydides, uh, Peloponnesian war, where the Athenians are in this terrible position of basically having accidentally conquered the Mediterranean and now having to deal with all these rebellions and uprisings and great power struggle. And, uh, Pericles, their foremost statesman says to them, it may have been wrong to acquire your empire, but it would be too dangerous to let it go. And so Wolfgang's, or I should say Mr. Munchau's point in this piece is basically that the time's arrow only flies one direction and that your options at 90 days into a war are not the same as your options before you've launched the war. So he writes that essentially, you know, Trump hardly wants to risk Iran blowing up a US aircraft carrier, but again, we should not be considering what he wants, but what choices he has in front of him. It is a logical fallacy to think that it that because it was wrong for the war to have started, the right course of action is to reverse it. Um, then a little bit further down, he raises the possibility that domestic politics might be part of this as well, because Trump doesn't want to back out of this war without looking like he's had a major victory. So he can't just settle for a subpar, less than satisfactory deal or ceasefire as well. Um, on the flip side of this, I raised this as kind of like one far side of how, what might be going on here. I don't really think it's quite right, but I will say why down the line. First, let me just also throw into the mix this tweet that Ryan sent by pointing out that, and digging into their oil reserves, meaning that the, uh, that our adversaries and also the EU with, he says, it's asinine energy policy might just flat out collapse. The United States is now the only going provider of, uh, energy and, and we are the dominant oil producer. Now we are the dominant food expert exporter. Your tanks are empty. Your fields are barren. Welcome to the era of hard power wielded effectively. So rhetorically a very effective tweet, but just on the other side of this, not necessarily the plan trusting side, but just the, maybe the war's not going as bad as you think sort of side. Um, there are knock-on effects to this conflict that might be rejiggering the balance of power slightly in our favor relative to some of our Eastern adversaries in particular, China, and I guess also Russia to an extent. Um, what is your guys, we haven't talked about the war in a little bit. Last time we talked, we were sort of saying, you know, it's a, it's a major gamble, but it could pay off really well. We need to define what victory looks like. Um, how do you feel now about the progress? Do we, do we still too early to say, or do you have strong opinions? Not feeling warm and fuzzy, Spencer. You don't say. Yeah. It was in the context of the Virginia Supreme Court overturning Virginia, the Virginia democratic gerrymander. But some, some people were collecting the unhinged reactions, um, from the online left to all this. And one of them was revealing, which was like, look, guys, we just have to admit it. Uh, even though he's a, they didn't quite put it this way, even though he's a world historical doofus and he somehow has the gods with him. Trump always just, it always works. Eventually we just have to resign ourselves that we've been rolled by this buffoon. Uh, I put it in that, in the context of the Iran war, because I do not see many signs that there is some imminent ability of Trump to pull a rabbit out of this Iran hat. There've been plenty of problems with this war, uh, the Straits of Hormuz debacle, um, the CIA. And look, you have to take these things with grains of salt, uh, because the CIA is notorious for counter signaling presidents that is displeased with that is the rank and file of the CIA. The CIA reports, you know, Iran is pretty durable. It can last even with the blockade or whatever, um, solution Trump has for Straits of Hormuz for many more months, eight months. Uh, if that's, if that's the case, I think Trump's in real trouble because a quick solution to this that doesn't involve boots on the ground seems elusive. And I think if he really pulls that trigger, if I can mix those metaphors, uh, and inserts troops into Iran, it will be seen. And I hear this, I hear this weekly now when I'm out and about, we were just out in LA for an event. I was talking with some, some old friends who are, uh, uh, you know, well, the wife of one of them is just a normal observer of us politics. She's not in our world and the policy world, but she reads pretty closely. And there's a Trump fan. And she just said, you know, what is this? Why did we do this? This seems like a total betrayal and all of this plan, trusting rhetoric around it now that, Oh, the plan all along was to degrade, degrade the capability. This has always been about China and China's really suffering for this. Even though I sent that tweet to you, if I can counter signal that she says it's patently obvious to those of us observing it, that it's ex post facto bull that's just spinning it. So all of that said, um, and as I said, weeks and weeks ago, there was plenty of reason for Trump completely aside from the Israelis lobbying him to do this thing. Uh, we've been at open or subterranean war with Iran or Iran has been at war with us for many decades. Uh, it's, it's certainly a regime populated by elites and a ruling class that is mendacious, nasty, evil, and cruel. And, uh, uh, it's gratifying in a way to see a lot of them taken out after years of torturing and killing their own people and, uh, killing Americans as well. And previous adventures we'd had on their doorstep in Iraq, especially, and promoting terror across the region, uh, and even a little farther flung than that all true. But, uh, I think this seems it's hard to render any judgment other than the fact that this war was a fairly ill conceived and has not been beautifully executed and the unintended consequences, which seem to have grown out of a bit of a miss, a mistaken view of the Iranian regime's durability in the face of a conflict like this, which it seems they've been preparing for for some time. All of that was an underestimation. All of that said, um, you know, Trump, I've told people, you know, Trump's, uh, OODA loop, this is a, uh, a famous air force strategist term, uh, OODA standing for observe, orient, decide, and then act. Trump's OODA loop in a way that no president really in the post-war era has been is about a week long, as far as I can tell. So he's quickly changing course and adapting. And so that may provide some avenues out of this that we haven't considered or that official Washington, even official CIA, Washington, or intelligence community, Washington has not foreseen Trump's ability to mix things up and open new pathways for himself, uh, is pretty impressive at times. So we'll see. Uh, but I, I it's, um, the, the midterms are five months away. This war is not very popular, uh, despite the MAGA bases loyalty to Trump, even on this. Uh, I don't, I don't know how deep that, that loyalty goes on the Iran question, but they're with him for now. Uh, but the real, you know, that, that doesn't win you a midterm, your MAGA base will not win you a midterm or help you keep the house in the midterms. So fuel prices still high and inflation still humming along in large degree because of energy prices because of this war in three or four months going into the midterms. And it will be a, it will be a bed that Trump love made and it won't be good for him or his party. Four and a half bucks a gallon down the road for me, almost almost two X what it usually is. Yeah. That's my, my, my lifestyle inflection point. Now that I live in Texas is when gas climbs above $4 a gallon in Texas, then you really, you're shocked. Then you perk, you perk up. Exactly. That's right. Yeah. I think I filled up the other day. It was like four 77. Uh, that still, I mean, it's, it's, it's hard. And, you know, I want to preface this by saying, look, I don't think you should ever count Trump out. He just has this ability, like what you were saying, Spencer to just pull, you know, like diamond wearing rabbits out of a hat. I mean, it's, it's amazing. It's astounding. I've never seen anything like that in politics, even just studying the history and political history and past presidencies. It's astounding. But with this, I I'm yeah. I mean, I I'm fairly pessimistic about this whole thing. Like you pointed out, Ryan, the midterms are close. Um, you know, uh, inflation, I think I've seen it now reported just today. It's, you know, risen to 3.8%, obviously gas prices. Um, you know, the Pentagon, I think just came out this morning and said the cost of the war has risen to $29 billion. Um, you know, Trump is talking about, he's floating about moving to suspend the federal gasoline tax. I don't think that's probably going to make that huge of a difference. I wouldn't think. But yeah, I mean, there are a lot of signs that things obviously aren't going well. Um, you know, you wonder if we didn't enter into this war, you know, basically what are the benefits that we even look to get out of? I mean, even at best case scenario, almost now it looks like, okay, well, the straights for moves can be wide open again. Well, just as they were before the war, like, like, you know, where exactly was Iran's nuclear program. I mean, that's obviously a question that's hotly debated. So you wonder, you know, even if we do get out and get out with a favorable, um, you know, deal for the United States, I mean, what, how exactly is that helped us long-term? Um, so those are some issues. And then you just have some other news too, you know, about the war. So some interesting news actually of the UAE, the United Arab Emirates, they've actually helped, I guess, secretly, uh, carry out military strikes, which is interesting. So that's actually, you know, a little bit of a positive. Um, but then kind of then CBS has reported that, I guess, uh, Pakistan. So they're kind of like the diplomatic conduit between Toronto and Washington. Uh, they've reportedly quietly allowed Iranian military aircraft to park in its country, protect, uh, potentially shielding them from us airstrikes. So you're kind of getting, you know, some positives and then some negatives too, but you know, again, with all reporting, uh, obviously with, with the mainstream media, you, you, there's grains of salt, but still, I mean, just the way this is going, I know that Trump himself, um, I think just talked about, you know, kind of the latest round of, um, you know, negotiations. I, it didn't sound like that it's going well. Um, actually he actually just said, I think it was maybe earlier today or yesterday where the current temporary cease fires on massive life support with a 1% chance of survival. Uh, he called Iran's latest counter-proposal garbage. Um, so, and then he's talking about, actually, I think this just happened recently too, where he was talking about, well, what about, you know, the supposed Iranian, you know, people who want it, we're going to go out in the streets once this happened right away and really take over and do a, you know, a full kind of regime change in its fullest sense. What, what happened to that? And Trump himself said, you know, look, the Iranian people want to go out in the streets, but they have no weapons. They have no guns. We thought the Kurds were going to give them weapons, but the Kurds disappointed us. The Kurds take, take, take. I'm very disappointed in the Kurds. Um, and you know, and that I think should be read too, I think is probably a swipe at the CIA. I have a feeling that some operations that they've conducted didn't exactly go to plan. So, you know, you have some of that going on too, but I, you know, I, I don't see how this can end well, especially for the midterms again, with a preface that with Trump, you can never count them out. But the way this is going, I, I, it, it doesn't portend a good future for, uh, you know, the president's party in the midterms for sure. I'm very disappointed in the Kurds is something I last heard at a wine and cheese tasting. I went to now, um, I knew you were going there. Oh, terrible. You saw it in my face, like, but you know, 30 seconds ago when I was still just listening to my dog, review of the new poutine place in Nashville, right? Yeah, exactly. That's what I put on. That's what I put on Yelp after having bad fun too. Uh, boy. Uh, and I'd like to formally issue an apology, um, for nothing. I regret nothing. Uh, okay. So I too, um, not so much failing to trust the plan is worrying. There isn't one. I think the biggest desideratum from the beginning has been a clear picture of what victory is. That's what we said kind of when it started, that has gotten murkier, not clearer. And so there does not appear to my limited civilian vision to be an off-ramp here, which is why I understand what, uh, Mr. Munchau, excuse me, has to say that Trump might want to force victory, essentially force a dramatic positive outcome by mobilizing massive amounts of troops. And I do not think he's going to do that. I don't think he's going to do that first because it's cost domestically would be vastly greater than taco-ing, which is the thing that Munchau says he doesn't want to do because he would lose face with his voters. That may be the case. Um, but surely if it's true, it's far more true about a deployment of troops. If you actually put the military into Iran and, or rather, if you put soldiers into Iran, you've really badly alienated the most devoted MAGA followers. And they're the only ones you have to worry about because I don't think anybody else would be all that upset about a kind of quiet withdrawal. Like if we took our hat and went home here, which I'm not advocating, I think Trump may know may have other third ways here that might be better. But I think worst case scenario, we have to kind of just settle for a sort of situation status quo, IMT, like the way things used to be. Um, I don't think he's going to pay the cost for that, that he would for, uh, you know, deployment of troops and, and that he is paying for gas prices because that's, to me, the part of this that is most immediately affecting the Normans. To return to our distinction between the MAGA base who are very devoted to kind of no new wars and felt rather betrayed by this war to begin with, that distinction between them and everybody else upon whom Trump's success and the Republican success actually depends. I mean, it's by adding all of the non-online, non-true believer people into the MAGA crowd that Trump was able to win. And it's going to be those people, if anyone who come up to vote in these midterm elections, you know, it's not, midterms are not known for being really drawing and attracting your very online commentator crowd. Like you have to kind of win over just bread and butter people. And I think those people, and I would include myself in this dimension of it, like, you know, we look at the gas prices and we say like, what are, as you pointed out, Ryan, as your friend indicated, like, what are we getting out of this at this juncture? Maybe when the dust settles, we'll see that we're better off than we were before. I don't know, like, you know, how that would be exactly. But right now, from where we stand, it looks like the dice have not, it's not exactly that they've shaken out badly, like negatively, but they've kind of come out as a wash at the moment. And I would, if I'm Trump, I would have to imagine that I'm thinking, let's wrap this up quickly one way or another. And I don't think by like flattening the country, much as he might like to talk about that, might find it expedient to talk about that. I don't think that's in the cards. Yeah. Also, he would be helped considerably by a more traditional White House comms plan for this. That is to say, you know, he talks about it a decent amount, whether it's issuing threats to Iran or kind of describing how we're winning or whatever on social media, on, you know, truth posts that then pop up on X and elsewhere. But Trump has really not made the case to the American people directly in any sustained fashion about what we're doing and why exactly. You know, a weekly update would probably go a long way. It might help a bit with a portion of his base that is wondering, what are we doing? You know, and Trump has not really systematically nor, I mean, the closest would be Rubio, his most effective surrogate on this issue, talking about it, and maybe Vance a little bit as well. But, you know, some more sustained plan from the chief would be helpful. I also want to explain to our listeners and viewers, just one quick thing, Spencer, and I'm going to make fun of you for doing violence to the English language, but also explaining to them what you meant. You said tacoing would be an option. Now, Spencer has converted the noun taco into a verb, to taco, and then pushed it into Gerund territory, that is tacoing. And for those that aren't that online, that just, it's, the left has, over the last 18 months or so, has said taco. Trump always chickens out. So that's a stand-in for kind of maybe declaring victory, but going home, which is not really victory. So that would be Trump tacoing. Just to be perfectly clear. So taco, tacas, tacat, tacamus, tacatus, tacant. No, it's getting worse. No, no. Tacare, infinitive, tacendus, tacendo. Stop, stop it, stop it. Would be, so sorry. Mike, save me, save me. I'm not going to save you. You dug this. That's true. I did. I wrote this script for myself. Yeah. Trump always chickens out is which really is a silly, I think the whole conceit is kind of a bad framing that, because he doesn't always chicken out. He has been known from time to time to walk, to make big brash statements and then walk them back. But most of the things that he's accused of chickening out on, it wasn't the, it was either the right decision or he didn't actually make the commitment that he's being accused of having been made and then chickening out on. This one would, I think, be, there would be a lot of talk about that. If Trump signed an accord that didn't put us in a very good position, or if he kind of just let the war fizzle out or something, he would be accused and there would be justification for, you know, kind of doing a Napoleon in Russia kind of thing. Like I've, I've got a great idea. Wait, it's not such a great idea. Like back up, back up, back up. But it very much, I think, remains, remains to be seen. We just thought we should check back in on it and take a look now that we've, the war's been going on for a bit. I said on the Close Read podcast that this war's kind of started to feel a bit like four weeks to flatten the crescent. And it does seem as if, you know, that COVID dynamic is somewhat lingering in the back of all of our minds and causing a little bit of post-traumatic stress disorder as we wonder, like, is that what we're in for now again? I doubt that that's true, especially with the midterms coming up. I do think we'll see something akin to a resolution, whether it's one that makes us and our friends happy or not. We'll just have to wait and see. And with that, we are out of time. So thank you very much, all of you, for listening to The Roundtable. If you want to know more about the work that we do at Claremont, you can visit our website at AmericanMind.org where you will find the aforementioned essay on Spencer Pratt. You can also visit our sister publication, Claremont Review of Books at ClaremontReviewOfBooks.com. And there you will hear the, if you go to the podcast page, you can hear the episode where I talked with Charles Kessler about the war, among other things. So that might be of interest to you as well. We also have our paid subscription service at ClaremontInstitute.substack.com. And in this week's paid-only, members-only episode, Ryan and I are going to be reviewing the online drama over Christopher Nolan's Odyssey and discussing how much of it is warranted, whether this movie is really going to suck. And we can say that for sure already, and all the different choices that have been announced and rumored and brooded about. So if you want to know our true, unvarnished opinions on that subject, you have only to go to ClaremontInstitute.substack.com and become a paid subscriber. And you can donate more generally to support the Claremont Institute at Claremont.org slash donate. You can also check out our DC-based Center for the American Way of Life at dc.claremont.org. And I believe that's just about everything we have to offer you. And isn't that enough, people? Come on. We'll see you next time. Thanks to our production and engineering one-man crew, the Brother G, Ryan Gannon, and thanks to you all for listening. We will talk to you next week.