“When no one listens, people tune out and start to do their own thing,” Dr. Helen Smith writes in the introduction to hew new book, Men On Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood and the American Dream – and Why it Matters:

There is a term for bailing out of the mainstream of society that I blogged about in 2008 called “Going John Galt” or “going Galt” for short. Have you ever read Atlas Shrugged? If not, do so. If you have read the book, you know where I am going with this. In Ayn Rand’s book, the basic theme is that John Galt and his allies take actions that include withdrawing their talents and “stopping the motor of the world” while leading the “strikers” (those who refused to be exploited) against the “looters” (the exploiters, backed by the government). One interesting fact about Atlas Shrugged is that the original title was The Strike, but Rand changed it at her husband’s suggestion. The original title of Rand’s book seems fitting for what is happening with today’s twenty-first-century man.

In some sense, men today feel very much like Rand’s characters in Atlas Shrugged, knowing that they can be exploited for their sense of duty, production and just for being male at any time. The state transfers men’s production to women and children through child support, alimony, divorce laws, and government entitlements that are mainly for women, such as WIC (grants to states for women, infants and children) or welfare payments to single mothers. It is not only in family relationships that men are screwed, but also in many areas of modern society. Men are portrayed as the bad guys, ready to rape, pillage, beat or abuse women and children at the drop of a hat. From rape laws that protect women but not the men they may accuse falsely to the lack of due process in sexual harassment cases on college campuses to airlines that will not allow men (possible perverts!) to sit next to a child, our society is at war with men and men know it full well.

In fact, men have known that a backlash against them has been happening for decades, so why is it taking so long for men to fight back? Psychologist Warren Farrell, in his prophetic book The Myth of Male Power, written in 1993, talks about “the men’s movement as an evolutionary shift” and says the movement will be “the most incremental of movements” because it is “hard to confront the feelings we’ve learned to repress and hard to confront the women we’ve learned to protect.” Farrell believes that the greatest challenge of the men’s movement will be “getting men to ask for help for themselves. Men were always able to ask for help on behalf of others—for a congregation, their wives, children, or a cause—but not for themselves.”

If that’s changing, then the contributions that Helen has made, first at her long-running blog and now in Men on Strike, have played a large part in, as the left likes to say about its own pet causes, “increasing awareness.”

During our 27-minute long interview, Helen will discuss:

● Why “Enslavement used to be based on race, [but] now it’s based on gender.”

● Why men dominate the number of suicides reported each year.

● What are some of the ways that college is stacked against men?

● How the increasing popularity of the “man cave” is a bad sign for men.

● How comments posted on her blog at PJM led directly to the new book.

And much more. Click here to listen:

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(27 minutes long; 25MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this interview to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 4.68MB lo-fi edition.)

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Transcript of our interview begins on the following page; for our many previous podcasts, start here and keep scrolling.

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Rich Lowry, the editor of the biweekly print version of National Review magazine, dubs our 16th president “the foremost apostle of opportunity in American history” in our 24-minute long interview to discuss his new book, Lincoln Unbound: How an Ambitious Young Railsplitter Saved the American Dream — and How We Can Do It Again, which is now available from Amazon.com and your local bookseller. As Lowry recently wrote at National Review: 

[Lincoln's] economics of dynamism and change and his gospel of discipline and self-improvement are particularly important to a country that has been stagnating economically and suffering from a social breakdown that is limiting economic mobility. No 19th-century figure can be an exact match for either of our contemporary competing political ideologies, but Lincoln the paladin of individual initiative, the worshiper of the Founding Fathers, and the advocate of self-control is more naturally a fellow traveler with today’s conservatives than with progressives.

In Lincoln Unbound, I make the positive case for Lincoln, but here I want to act as a counsel for the defense. The debate over Lincoln on the Right is so important because it can be seen, in part, as a proxy for the larger argument over whether conservatism should read itself out of the American mainstream or — in this hour of its discontent — dedicate itself to a Lincolnian program of opportunity and uplift consistent with its limited-government principles. A conservatism that rejects Lincoln is a conservatism that wants to confine itself to an irritable irrelevance to 21st-century America and neglect what should be the great project of reviving it as a country of aspiration.

During our interview, Rich will discuss:

● How politicians “Get right with Lincoln,” and why in 2008, it was the left that seemed more comfortable with Lincoln than many on the right.

● What did William F. Buckley think of Lincoln?

● In modern terms, what was Lincoln’s political worldview?

● Lincoln and the Civil War.

● What would Lincoln think about today’s Tea Party and Barack Obama’s myriad scandals?

● And what made Howard Dean attack Lowry personally late last month?

And much more. Click here to listen:

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(24 minutes long; 22MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this interview to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 4.16MB lo-fi edition. And for our earlier podcasts, start here and keep scrolling.)

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Transcript of our interview begins on the following page; for our many previous podcasts, start here and keep scrolling.

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Mary Eberstadt is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC, and a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute. In the 1990s, she was the executive editor of National Interest magazine, and in the mid-1980s, she worked with George P. Shultz and Jeane Kirkpatrick in the Reagan administration.

In the introduction to her new book, How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization, Eberstadt does not shy away from asking the big questions about life in the west in the first decades of a new millennium. (Say, how are those things reckoned, anyhow?) She writes:

Why was belief in the Christian God and his churchly doings apparently taken for granted by most Europeans, say, six hundred years ago— whereas today merely alluding to the possibility of the existence of that same God is now guaranteed to provoke uneasy dissent in some sophisticated quarters and savage ridicule in others? How much did the Enlightenment and rationalism and scientifi c thinking have to do with this enormous transformation— this sea change from a civilization that widely fears God, to one that now often jeers him? How much did various historical infl uences fi gure into this reshaping of our shared civilization— factors like technology, the world wars, politics, church scandals, the changing social status of women, and more?

These and other large questions will be considered in the pages ahead— including, at the outset, the radical question raised by some scholars, which is whether Western Christianity has even declined in the first place.

It is the contention of this book that just about everyone working on this great puzzle has come up with some piece of the truth— and yet that one particular piece needed to hold the others together still has gone missing. Urbanization, industrialization, belief and disbelief, technology, shrinking population: yes, yes, and yes to all those factors statistically and otherwise correlated with secularization. Yet, even taking them all into account, the picture remains incomplete, as chapter 2 goes to show. It is as if the modern mind has lined up all the different pieces on the collective table, only to press them together in a way that looks whole from a distance but still leaves something critical out.

As Eberstadt goes on to write, her new book “is an attempt to supply that missing piece.” Its Amazon page adds:

The conventional wisdom is that the West first experienced religious decline, followed by the decline of the family. Eberstadt turns this standard account on its head. Marshalling an impressive array of research, from fascinating historical data on family decline in pre-Revolutionary France to contemporary popular culture both in the United States and Europe, Eberstadt shows that the reverse has also been true: the undermining of the family has further undermined Christianity itself.

During our interview, Eberstadt will discuss:

• What is the relationship between spiritual decline and demographic decline?
• Is religious belief suppressed in secular Europe and Blue State America?
• How the rise of “New Age” spiritualism beginning in the 1960s impacted and interacted with the decline of religion in the west.
• Some background on the book’s publisher, Templeton Press, founded by pioneering mutual fund manager turned philanthropist Sir John Templeton.
• Could today’s ongoing economic and demographic crises help to strengthen the family?

And much more. Click here to listen:

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Transcript of our interview begins on the following page; for our many previous podcasts, start here and keep scrolling.

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There’s been a lot of talk in the Blogosphere on how to “Enjoy the Decline,” spurred on by the popular book with that title by econo-blogger Aaron Clarey on America’s future — or the lack thereof. But what happens next? What happens after the decline?

As Kevin D. Williamson, who writes the “Exchequer” blog at National Review Online and frequently contributes to the dead tree edition of NRO, wrote in the Sunday New York Post, “It’s the end of the world as we know it (and that’s great!)”:

The total fiscal overhang of our federal, state, and local governments — their combined debt and unfunded liabilities — is around $140 trillion, and growing. That is about twice the annual economic output of human civilization, and nearly the value of all the financial assets in the world. It is something close to a mathematical certainty that those debts and obligations will not be made good on at their present value.

The real debate for the next 30 years is not how we go about paying our bills, but how we go about not paying them. What is most likely is a much smaller and more modest government, something closer to what Robert Nozick called the “nightwatchman state.” The reason for that is the fact that we have good substitutes for Social Security and the Department of Education but not for the army or the courts.

This all sounds painful and disruptive, and it surely will be, though exactly how painful and how disruptive will be in part a question of luck and in part a matter of how prudently and intelligently our policymakers proceed while we get from where we are to an economically sane position.

Difficult, yes. But it is also going to be great. There is cause for short-term pessimism, but there also is cause for long-term optimism.

Despite the best efforts of Washington (and Albany, Sacramento, Austin, etc.) the United States is a very, very rich country. Fantastically rich. Absurdly rich. We have a great deal of wealth, extraordinarily productive and creative people and stable institutions.

Our key economic failings are in education, health care and retirements — three sectors dominated by political rather than economic action: the K-12 monopoly model of education, Social Security and other retirement entitlements and a hodge-podge of medical programs which meant that even before the enactment of ObamaCare about half of all health-care spending was government spending, a fact that Republicans foolishly ignored when they protested that we had “the best health-care system in the world.” (Note to Republicans: We have great medicine and medical technology; we have a terrible system of paying for health care, and it was terrible before ObamaCare, too.)

Kevin’s new book, The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome, explores this topic in detail. Kevin and I recently discussed the end of the world in a wide-ranging 20-minute podcast, including such topics as:

● How cataclysmic will the earth-shattering fiscal kaboom be?

● How government red tape fuels both the higher education bubble and retirement shortfalls.

● Kevin updates Leonard Read and Milton Friedman’s classic “I, Pencil” lecture for the Internet era, with an assist from Gordon Gekko’s cell phone.

● Why do those who design, and many of those who purchase the Apple iPhone want highly customizable 21st century technology in their day-to-day lives, and yet want socialized healthcare and retirement schemes that are straight out of the 1930s smokestack era?

● Speaking of Mr. Gekko, how did the GOP lose him to the left in 2008? And what to make of Occupy Wall Street being simultaneously for and against their fellow Democrat, Barack Obama, aka, President Goldman Sachs?

● Why was Mitt Romney so ineffective in communicating Economics 101 to the American voters?

And much more. Click here to listen:

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(22 minutes long; 20MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this segment to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 3.78MB lo-fi edition.)

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Transcript of our interview begins on the following page; for our many previous podcasts, start here and keep scrolling.

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It’s relatively easy for college students to avoid getting into trouble via political correctness, campus speech codes and the stifling of free speech. “Talk to the students you already agree with, join the groups that are ideologically similar to you. Don’t disagree with professors who have strong opinions because they might punish you either in grading or just punish you…if you follow these simple rules, you can really avoid a lot of the trouble that we see at FIRE,” Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, tells me in my interview today.

“But there’s a problem with that,” he’s quick to add. “Talking to the people we already agree with is exactly what’s wrong with our entire society.  And the one institution that could be helping make this problem better is higher education.  But it can’t even come close to working towards that goal if you can get in trouble for having the wrong point of view.”

And these days, as Lukianoff explains during our interview focusing on his new book Unlearning Liberty:  Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, “having the wrong point of view” is determined almost entirely by students and faculty with a hair-trigger sense of aggrievement. Lukianoff explains that each of the following incidents have led students to FIRE:

● Wearing a t-shirt with an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote.

● Being judged by the cover of the books you read. (In this case, the history book, Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan.)

● Having a bible studies meeting in your dorm.

● Campus officials asking “When did you discover your sexual identity?”

And much more. click here to listen:

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(18:35 minutes long; 17MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this segment to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 5.30MB lo-fi edition.)

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Transcript of our interview begins on the following page; for our many previous podcasts, start here and keep scrolling.

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Veteran author and columnist Zev Chafets drops by to discuss his latest book, Roger Ailes:  Off Camera, which, as its title implies, is a biography of the Fox News impresario, and a history of how dramatically the media and political landscape has changed since Ailes cut his teeth producing the venerable Mike Douglas syndicated talk show in the mid-1960s. His chance meeting with Richard Nixon while producing Douglas set in motion a series of career events, including advising the campaigns of multiple Republican presidents.  From the late 1980s through the mid-’90s, Ailes launched CNBC, produced Rush Limbaugh’s syndicated TV series, and created the immediate predecessor to MSNBC. All of which were the prelude to Ailes being tapped by Rupert Murdoch in 1996 to build Fox News and give it an iconoclastic worldview. As Chafets writes in his book:

Murdoch, whose trajectory had taken him from his native Australia to London and then to the United States, already owned a string of broadcast stations, but wanted to go into the cable news business. He had an intuition that a large portion of the public was unhappy with the tone of mainstream TV news and would respond to a more patriotic, socially conservative, and less parochial sort of information. He and Ailes had met only once, briefly, on the Twentieth Century Fox movie lot years before, but they knew each other by reputation. “Roger had great success at CNBC and I heard that he was unhappy there,” Murdoch says. “I asked him to come see me.”

Ailes listened silently as Murdoch laid out his idea. “The question,” Murdoch said, “is whether it can be done.”

Ailes said that it could, but only if it could get on the air within six months, to beat MSNBC (and perhaps also ABC’s new cable venture) to the punch. Ailes would be working from scratch. There were no studios, no equipment, no staff, and no infrastructure. Essentially he would be creating a network from nothing.

“How much will it cost me?” Murdoch asked. “Nine hundred million to a billion,” Ailes responded. “And you could lose it all.”

“Can you do it?” Murdoch asked.

“Yes,” said Ailes. “Then go ahead and do it.”

“I thought, either this man is crazy or he has the biggest set of balls I’ve ever seen,” Murdoch says. Ailes was thinking pretty much the same thing about his new boss.

As John Podhoretz recently noted, after the 2012 election, conservatives spoke frequently about finding some way of changing the media landscape; in the mid-1990s, Ailes did just that. The result was a godsend for conservatives who longed for a TV channel whose tone matched theirs. Concurrently the channel would cause many self-described liberals to jettison their platitudes about free speech, tolerance and diversity, as they descended into apoplexy every time they got near channel #360 on their DirecTV dial.

During our interview, Chafets will explore:

● How did Ailes become an advisor to the presidential campaigns of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush?

● How does Ailes compare to previous Chafets biography subject Rush Limbaugh, whose TV series Ailes produced in the early 1990s?

● How Ailes crafted Fox’s signature slogans “We Report, You Decide” and “Fair and Balanced” to be counterweights to the pretensions of the MSM on the opposite side of the aisle.

● How do Rush and Ailes cope with being such demonized figures by the left? (QED: this 2011 Esquire headline: “Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?”)

● How Ailes’ past careers have allowed to find and recruit new talent, and how crossing Ailes is frequently a quick trip to television Siberia for Fox hosts.

● What does Ailes think of new media impresarios such as the late Andrew Breitbart, and former Fox hosts Matt Drudge and Glenn Beck?

● What will happen to Fox News when the 72-year old Ailes one day departs the organization?

And much more. Click here to listen:

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(22 minutes long; 20MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this segment to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 6.22MB lo-fi edition.)

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Transcript of our interview begins on the following page; for our many previous podcasts, including our interview earlier this month with Monica Crowley of Fox News, start here and keep scrolling.

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We kick off our eleventh year of blogging with an interview with Monica Crowley of Fox News, who drops by today to ask — and answer — the question we’ve all been pondering since November: What the (Bleep) Just Happened…Again?

That’s also the title of the new edition of her New York Times bestseller, which is out today in paperback, with a new forward focusing on the GOP’s presidential election debacle, and thus, the consequences of four more years of Barack Obama at the helm, along with his disastrous polices both at home and abroad.

During our interview, Monica will discuss:

● How Big Government destroys individual freedom.

● How much success has Obama had in changing the character of Americans?

● Will Obama’s love of big government see a renewed interest in federalism across the land as a counterweight?

● How much tension will there be between the states — many of which have GOP governors — and DC?

● Is Obama naive when it comes to the dangers of the Middle East, or is there a deliberate plan at work?

● How the media has allowed Obama to get away with debacles such as Benghazi and Operation Fast and Furious.

● How conservative was Monica’s first boss, former president Richard Nixon?

● What would Nixon think of Obama?

● When Barack Obama departs the White House, what sort of America will he leave behind?

And much more. Click here to listen:

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(24 minutes long; 22MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this segment to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 4.14MB lo-fi edition. And for our earlier podcasts, start here and keep scrolling.)

If the above Flash audio player is not be compatible with your browser, click on the YouTube player below, or click here to be taken directly to YouTube, for an audio-only YouTube clip. Between one of those versions, you should find a format that plays on your system.

Transcript of our interview begins on the following page.

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L to R: Breitbart, Glenn Reynolds, Driscoll at 2008 GOP convention.

Today is the first anniversary of the death of the ultimate happy warrior, Andrew Breitbart. I met and interviewed Andrew on several occasions from 2005 until his death last year at age 43, which was the very definition of the phrase “untimely passing.” Last year, shortly after he passed away, I dusted off the cassette tape of the first interview I had with Andrew, recorded a couple of weeks after meeting him for the first time at the PJM launch in Manhattan on November of 2005. We discussed his first book, Hollywood Interrupted, for quotes and background material for an article on Tinseltown’s woes that I was writing for Tech Central Station. What follows below is the post I wrote last year, when I originally ran that interview.

* * * * * *

Early on in Chris K. Daley’s new e-book, Becoming Breitbart: The Impact of a New Media Revolutionary, there’s a great quote from Mickey Kaus, on the power that Andrew Breitbart had quickly acquired, very early in his career:

In retrospect hitching his star to Drudge was a brilliant decision. This was hardly a given in 1995. Political blogger Mickey Kaus, someone who understood the power of the Internet, recalled, “I first met Breitbart when he showed up at a panel I was on at UCLA. He told me he was the guy who posted items for Matt Drudge, and I immediately realized he was the most powerful person in the room. Nobody could understand why I was sucking up to the crazed hippie kid in shorts.”

The power of Drudge Report comes from the large audience it has generated. By 2007 it was regularly attracting over three million unique visits. The average visitor spent an incredible one hour and six minutes on the site, an eternity in Internet terms. The average visitor went to the site 20 times a month. The Washington Post, a popular link for Drudge, noted in 2006 that its “largest driver of traffic is Matt Drudge.”

And not coincidentally along the way, as a headline at Andrew’s Big Journalism site gloats, “Newspapers [have become] America’s Fastest Shrinking Industry.”

Flash-forward to the fall of 2004, and Andrew’s behind-the-scenes power was very much in evidence, this time changing the face of television news. As Scott Johnson of Power Line noted at the start of the month:

I learned in the course of [my week-long visit to Israel in 2007 with Breitbart] that it was Andrew who changed my life in 2004, linking to our “Sixty-First Minute” post early that afternoon with the screaming siren on Drudge. He confided that Matt Drudge did not like blogs, but that he (Andrew) was a fan. On September 9, 2004, he was following the action online. Thank you, Andrew. Thanks for everything.

But along the way, Breitbart also took detours into other ventures, such as helping to build the architecture of the Huffington Post, and co-writing, with Mark Ebner, their 2004 book Hollywood Interrupted. As I mention in the podcast below, I met Andrew in person for the first time the week of November 14^th 2005, during the launch week of PJ Media in New York. After we both had returned to California, on November 28, 2005, I interviewed him by telephone for an article I was working on for Tech Central Station, now called Ideas In Action TV.com, about Hollywood’s box office woes, which was published a week later and titled, a la Woody Allen, “Hollywood Ending.”

I loved Hollywood, Interrupted, and I was certainly aware of Andrew’s backstage work at the Drudge Report and the celebrity-oriented Huffington Post. So I definitely wanted to get his take on how the movie industry, a medium that we both loved, had been utterly transformed, and not necessarily for the better, since its golden era of the 1930s through the mid-1960s.

This interview was originally recorded onto a cheap mono tape recorder, originally for the purpose of pulling quotes for my Tech Central Station article. And while I’ve done a considerable amount of restoration work (employing both extensive amounts of Izotope’s RX audio restoration software and the noise gate plug-in built into Cakewalk’s Sonar program), it’s still much cruder sounding than the podcasts and radio shows I’ve produced for PJ Media in the years since. But with Andrew’s passing, I thought it would be worth sharing. So apologies for the sound quality, but I think hearing Andrew riffing on the topic of how the Hollywood of old became, as he would say, Interrupted, is well worth listening to.

There are several observations that Andrew makes here that have withstood the test of time. Early on, there’s a grimly hilarious remark by Andrew concerning his ailing grandmother, who emitted a piercing primal scream of terror, whenever anyone attempted to change the TV channel from her beloved CBS, the only channel she apparently ever watched, in sharp contrast to today’s world of hundreds of cable and satellite channels and millions of Websites and blogs. At about 17 minutes into the interview, he mentions the punitive liberalism and growing nihilism of Hollywood’s product, the latter of which being a topic I discussed extensively with Thomas Hibbs last month, the author of the definitive look at Hollywood nihilism, Shows About Nothing. And two minutes later, Andrew makes a great observation on the popularity of today’s show-biz-oriented reality TV shows as a sort of payback by the American people for today’s drug-addled screw-up stars abandoning the glamour they maintained during Hollywood’s earlier era. Near the end of the interview, you can sort of hear the Big Hollywood Website starting to coalesce in Andrew’s mind; a topic he and I would discuss a few years later on PJM’s Sirius-XM radio show in 2009.

A transcript of this interview, which I originally typed up in 2005 as raw material for my Tech Central Station article, and thus paraphrases some of Andrew’s more stream of consciousness remarks, follows on the next page.

Click below to listen to the podcast:

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I’ve long enjoyed Jonathan Last’s articles at the Weekly Standard, whether it’s an iconoclastic look at who the real good guys were Star Wars, or a prophetic look at the similarities between England’s anti-war left in the 1930s, and America’s own self-described intellectuals today. For What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster, his first book, he decided to take on the topic of America’s coming demographic collapse, which could see the US facing the same birth-dearth that is crippling Japan and magnify our hemorrhaging entitlement problems until we’re the super-sized equivalent of Greece.

But in era in which the San Francisco Chronicle can quote the “founder of Washington state’s Progressive Kid, which has a Web site with suggestions on how to raise kids with good values,” when she says with a straight face that “There is nothing more bacchanalian than a kid’s birthday party,” (Really? Nothing more bacchanalian…in San Francisco…?), as Jonathan acknowledges in our interview, “I think that’s just sort of important to acknowledge, that people aren’t crazy.  They’re not entirely irrational if they, you know, back away from having kids.” Along with a fair amount of tough love from Jonathan towards those who choose to become parents.

During our interview, we’ll explore:

● How Jonathan initially became interested in demographics.

● What he thinks about Mark Steyn’s America Alone, which famously argued, “It’s the demography, stupid!”

● What are the demographics of the Muslim world?

● What do professional demographers think about Paul Ehrlich, the author of the infamous 1968 book, The Population Bomb, which causes so many on the left to be terrified of overpopulation to this day?

● What caused previous American demographic slumps?

● How will America’s demographic decline exacerbate its ongoing fiscal hemorrhaging and education bubbles?

And much more. Click here to listen:

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(17:30 long; 16MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this segment to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 3MB lo-fi edition. And for our earlier podcasts, start here and keep scrolling.)

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Transcript of our interview begins on the following page.

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Columnist and author Amity Shlaes stops by for a half-hour interview to discuss Coolidge, her new sequel — or perhaps prequel is the better word — to The Forgotten Man, her best-selling look at the 1930s. The latter book shed new light on the Depression, by exploring its “Forgotten Men” — the entrepreneurs and employees whose lives were up-ended by the destructive “Progressive” policies of first Herbert Hoover, and then FDR.

Coolidge places the Roaring ‘20s into context by focusing on the man who helped make them possible, by getting out of the way. Silent Cal was the only president who ever said, “Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.” And along the way, as Amity mentions in our interview, “He was in office more than one presidential term.  And when he left that office, the federal budget was lower than when he came in.  Real, nominal — with vanilla sprinkles on top.  Wow, how’d he do that?”

How indeed? During our wide-ranging interview, Shlaes discusses such topics as:

● Recovering a sense of traditional America after Woodrow Wilson’s oppressive administration and collectivism during WWI.
● The real version of Coolidge’s “the business of America is business” quote.
● The surprising modernity of the 1920s and Coolidge himself.
● The tragic and untimely death of Coolidge’s son, and how it impacted Coolidge himself.
● Coolidge’s fear of where the unending expansion of government could lead.
● Who best fits the model of Coolidge today.

And much more. Click here to listen:

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(30 minutes long; 27.4MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this segment to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 5.14MB lo-fi edition. And for our earlier podcasts, start here and keep scrolling.)

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Transcript of our interview begins on the following page. Incidentally, I first interviewed Amity for an early segment of PJM Political, which ran on Sirius-XM satellite radio from 2007 through the end of 2010, not too long after The Forgotten Man was released. Fortunately, that episode is still online; Shlaes’ interview begins at about the 25:50 mark.

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A journalist who cooked the books and avoided reporting on an international tragedy that was occurring in a far-off land and won a Pulitzer for his paper in the process — what possible relevance could that have to the twenty-first century? Well, let’s just say that he Walter Duranty really kept the news to himself, to coin a phrase.

Roger L. Simon, the co-founder and CEO of PJ Media and a veteran screenwriter and director, and his wife Sheryl Longin, a screenwriter herself, stop by to discuss their latest joint effort: The Party Line, the published script to their new play, with an introduction focusing on Walter Duranty by PJM’s own Ronald Radosh. Their play contrasts the lives of Duranty, the New York Times’ man in Moscow in the 1930s, when the Soviet Union was thought by many intellectuals to be “the future” of mankind, to Pim Fortuyn, who confronted a different kind of religious fervor in Holland — before being assassinated in 2002.

During their interview, Roger and Sheryl discuss:

● Why they chose the format of a play to tell this story.

● Who these two men were.

● Which came first? The Party Line or The Duranty Prize?

● The third historic figure in their play, the infamous Aleister Crowley, whom Duranty knew, astonishingly enough.

●  The “Penthouse Bolsheviks” of the 1920s and ’30s; the forerunners to today’s limousine liberals and Radical Chic.

● How they structured retelling the historic events they depict to create drama.

● What conservatives who feel impotent in the face of a hostile pop culture should be doing in 2012.

And much more. Click here to listen

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(17:49 minutes long; 16.3 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this show to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 5MB lo-fi edition.)

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Ed and Rob Long, November 17th, 2012.

Our final interviews from the 2012 National Review Post-Election Cruise feature a troika of pop culture-oriented conservatives. Rob Long writes an often hilarious column for “dead tree” edition of National Review, in addition to producing TV’s Sullivan & Son for WTBS (in past years, Rob was a producer on a comedy you may have heard of called Cheers). James Lileks writes the “Athwart” column for each issue of NR, in addition to writing at his own Lileks.com Website, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and, from time to time, PJM as well. Along with Peter Robinson, they host the flagship Ricochet.com podcast. Roman Genn has illustrated many a National Review cover. With his deep foghorn Boris Badenov voice, he’s also the master of the deadpan one-liner on the comedy nights on the NR cruises.

Topics discussed include:

● How can conservatives recapture pop culture?

● John Yoo for mayor of Oakland!

● Rob and TV’s Sullivan & Son.

● Lileks’ new novel, Graveyard Special and its flashback to college life in 1980, during the culture’s transition from Carter to Reagan.

● How the BBC blew the lid off the secret history of German nudism.

● How Roman crafts his National Review covers.

And much more!

Click here to listen:

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(24:36 minutes long; 22.5 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this week’s show to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 7MB lo-fi edition.)

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● For our interview with Jim Geraghty from the 2012 NR Cruise click here.
● For our interview with Victor Davis Hanson from the 2012 NR Cruise click here.

And for many more podcasts, start here and keep scrolling.

(Thumbnail on PJM homepage based on a modified Shutterstock.com image.)

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Another interview taken from the 2012 National Review Cruise, as Victor Davis Hanson dropped by on Saturday to discuss the election, the culture, and the dissipated state of California. During this wide-ranging 13-minute interview, recorded poolside in the “Monte Carlo” cabana of the MS Nieuw Amsterdam as she sailed back to Fort Lauderdale, FL, VDH discussed:

● How both sides of the aisle are trapped in their own media cocoons.

● Are conservatives “Going Galt” by tuning out the pop culture?

● How the left is living on the fumes of California’s great wealth, which they inherited, and then squandered.

● What causes a culture to lose faith in its future?

● How the news media became America’s equivalent of 1984′s Ministry of Truth.

Click here to listen:

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(12:40 minutes long; 11.5 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this week’s show to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 4MB lo-fi edition.)

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On Saturday, the last day of the National Review Cruise this past week, Jim Geraghty of NRO’s Campaign Spot blog, dropped by for an in-depth discussion of the 2012 presidential election. During this wide-ranging 18-minute interview, recorded poolside in the “Monte Carlo” cabana of the MS Nieuw Amsterdam as she sailed back to Fort Lauderdale, FL, Jim discussed:

● Did Mitt Romney outperform the Republican brand in 2012?
● Are Republicans in danger of being branded the Mean Party to their detriment?
● How much did Romney’s 47 Percent remark hurt his chances?
● How the election came down to less than 450,000 votes.
● What is the relationship between culture and politics?
● Where does the Tea Party go next?
● And much more.

Click here to listen:

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(19 minutes long; 17 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this week’s show to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 5.36 MB lo-fi edition.)

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Just in time for the potential chaos on Tuesday, I talk with Hans von Spakovsky, the co-author (along with NRO’s John Fund) of Who’s Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk. As you may know from his frequent contributions to PJM, Hans is a Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a former commissioner on the Federal Election Commission.

During our interview, we discussed:

● Did a 2008 article that appeared on a Website owned by the Washington Post really claim that “Believing in vote fraud may be dangerous to a democracy’s health”?
● On the flip-side, is discouraging voter fraud actually an attempt to suppress minority voters?
● We need to produce ID when we drive a car, purchase liquor, get on an airplane, and go to the hospital. Why don’t we need it to vote?
● Whatever happened to that 2008 case of the New Black Panthers brandishing billy clubs in front of a Philadelphia polling place on election day?
● The late Andrew Breitbart instructed readers that thanks to flip-cams and the Internet, they were now the media. Does that same Army of Davids spirit also allow individuals to be better poll watchers, as well?
● How did voting fraud impact the Minnesota race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken in 2008, and how did the election of a former Saturday Night Live writer to the Senate have ramifications for the entire nation?
● How quickly — or how slowly — could we know the winner this Tuesday?

And more.

Click here to listen:

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(12 minutes long; 11 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this week’s show to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 3.33 MB lo-fi edition.)

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Evan Sayet caused quite a splash in 2007 with his speech at the Heritage Foundation, in which he told his audience that prior to 9/11, he was a television comedy writer, until hearing his fellow liberals admit that they thought America had it coming. The cognitive dissonance in these arguments caused Sayet to reevaluate his politics, and he became a self-declared “9/13 Republican:”

Since then, he has been refining his positions, and has a book in the works, scheduled to be completed early next year. But if you’d like read over half of it, as a sort of detailed work in progress, it’s currently available on Evan’s Website in e-book and dead tree format. Titled The Kindergarden of Eden: How the Modern Liberal Thinks, it fits comfortably in the niche mined by Jonah Goldberg in Liberal Fascism and The Tyranny of Cliches. Or as Dwight Schultz blurbs on the cover of Evan’s new book, “With this book, that spot between Allan Bloom and Thomas Sowell has now been filled.”

During our interview, Evan discusses:

• The laws of modern liberalism and their corollaries, how he arrived at them.
• Evan’s epiphany occurred after hearing liberals say that America had it coming to her on September 11^th. Does he think Barack Obama believes we had it coming on 9/11, as Rev. Wright said in no uncertain terms?
• Evan’s book features a quote from the late far left historian Howard Zinn: “Objectivity is impossible, and it is also undesirable. That is, if it were possible it would be undesirable.” What did Zinn mean by this weapons-grade sophistry?
• Exploring the back story of “progressivism” from Rousseau to Nietzsche.
• Why does the Hollywood left — many of whom are actors and comedians who need words put into their mouths by writers like yourself — believe they know what’s best for the rest of America?
• What is the future of modern leftism, no matter what happens in November?

Click here to listen:

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(20 minutes long; 18MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this week’s show to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 6 MB lo-fi edition.)

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Jonah Goldberg brought H.G. Wells’ meme of “Liberal Fascism” out of the memory hole of the 1930s and into the 21st century, and as he noted, environmentalism has long been a key component of that ideology. Veteran journalist Elizabeth Nickson, who was the European Bureau chief of Life magazine, in addition to contributing to Time, the Guardian, Vogue, Harper’s and numerous other MSM magazines, which typically have at least one boilerplate “green”-themed issue a year, found that out the hard way, hence the title of her new book, Eco-Fascists: How Radical Conservationists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage:

An investigative reporter documents the destructive impact of the environmental movement in North America and beyond.

When journalist Elizabeth Nickson sought to subdivide her twenty-eight acres on Salt Spring Island in the Pacific Northwest, she was confronted by the full force and power of the radical conservationists who had taken over the local zoning council. She soon discovered that she was not free to do what she wanted with her land, and that in the view of these arrogant stewards it wasn’t really hers at all. Nickson’s long, frustrating, and eyeopening encounter with these zealots started her on a journey to investigate and expose the hugely destructive impact of the environmental movement on ordinary people and communities across North America—and the world.

What she discovered is shocking. Forty million Americans have been driven from their land, and rural culture is being systematically crushed, even as wildlife, forests, and rangelands are dying. In Eco-Fascists, Nickson explores how environmental radicals have taken over government agencies at the local, state, and federal levels. The result? A wholesale sequestration of forest, range, and water—more than 40 percent of North America—impoverishing us all, especially the most vulnerable. This confiscation of America’s natural heritage is a major factor contributing to our current economic decline; until it is acknowledged and addressed, our economy will not recover.

Nickson traces the tens of billions of dollars environmental nonprofits marshal every year to promote the notion that our essential natural systems are collapsing, and finds, in a brutal example of self-fulfilling prophesy, that their corrupted science is desertifying the heartland. She visits once-thriving communities that are turning to ghost towns because environmental legislation has forced mines, ranches, and mills to close and has forbidden critical forest, range, park, and wilderness maintenance.

Eco-Fascists exposes the major fallacies of the environmental movement—from wildlife protection to zoning to forest-fire management—and introduces us to the individuals who are fighting back. Fast-paced, highly accessible, and sure to be controversial, this is a work that will change the national conversation about environmental protection and its impact.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• How does eco-fascism prey on the citizens in the hinterlands of western states such as California, Washington, and Oregon?
• What is eco-fascism’s impact on the logging industry?
• What is the relationship between eco-fascism and Obama’s crony corporatism?
• Will California’s cap and trade program finish off state’s already moribund economy?
• For those of us who haven’t drunk the green Kool-Aid, is there any hope for the future?

Click here to listen:

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(18 minutes long; 16.3MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this week’s show to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 3 MB lo-fi edition.)

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L to R: Breitbart, Glenn Reynolds, Driscoll at 2008 GOP convention.

In the early days of PJ Media — back when we were still had our pajamas, but before we founded PJTV — Andrew Marcus was our first in-house video maker, and gave me plenty of valuable advice when I first began to ever-so-tentatively dip my toes into the video pool back in 2007.

These days though, Andrew is directing on the big screen — his new documentary, Hating Breitbart, debuts later this month — and as Andrew explains during the interview, the keyword is later; its release has been delayed by the MPAA, who wish to slap an R-rating on the documentary, as The Hollywood Reporter recently mentioned:

The release of a documentary about deceased new-media provocateur Andrew Breitbart that was to open Friday has been delayed one week because of a rift between the filmmakers and the MPAA, which has rated the film R due to obscene language.

The movie, called Hating Breitbart, is largely about the subject’s battles against the mainstream media over the way it allegedly unfairly maligns the Tea Party movement. Clips of Anderson Cooper, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, Bill Maher, Janeane Garofalo and others who call conservatives “teabaggers,” “racists” and other disparaging terms are used throughout the film.

The movie originally contained several uses of the F-word, which was routinely hurled at Breitbart when he’d show up at liberal gatherings. Breitbart also uses the word a few times in the film.

Under current MPAA guidelines, if a film uses “one of the harsher sexually derived words” — such as the F-word — more than a certain number of times, it receives an R rating. But the MPAA sometimes has made inconsistent rulings over language.

The MPAA gave Hating Breitbart an R rating last week, much to the dismay of director Andrew Marcus and distributors Rocky Mountain Pictures, who were hoping for a PG-13 rating. Marcus then cut out the offending word nine times but left in some that he deemed important to the integrity of the film. The MPAA still rated the film R.

We’ll also discuss:

• How Marcus sold Breitbart on the idea of a documentary by appealing to his love of ’80s rock.

• How the conservative Breitbart ironically became Saul Alinsky’s most brilliant disciple.

• The transformation of Breitbart from backroom boffin at the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post to master showman, culminating in the legendary moment when he took the stage at the press conference for Anthony Weiner’s press conference — aka The Best. Press Conference. Ever.

• The future of the conservative documentary, and Marcus’ thoughts on Dinesh D’Souza’s hit documentary, Obama: 2016.

• What Breitbart would think of the MSM’s all-racism-all-the-time approach to the presidential election.

• And where to find out more information about, and showtimes for Hating Breitbart.

Click here to listen:

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(23 minutes long; 21MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this week’s show to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 7 MB lo-fi edition.

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For my earlier podcasts, start here and keep scrolling — and don’t miss my first interview with Breitbart himself, originally recorded in late November of 2005 discussing his then-new book Hollywood Interrupted, click here.

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Last year, as the month of August began, I received a copy of Mark Steyn’s After America from his publicist on Wednesday, the Dow Jones dropped 512 points on Thursday, and S&P shorted America’s credit rating on Friday.

Mark’s crack PR team earned their keep once again this year, staging riots across the Middle East, a feckless “Quantitative Easing” program by the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and a First Amendment-trampling POTUS, all in the past week, as a sort of extended infomercial to promote the paperback edition of the book, which is now out today.

Mark spoke with me late last week to discuss the new edition of the book, and the breaking events in the news it foreshadowed.

Click here to listen:

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(24 minutes long; 22MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this week’s show to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 4 MB lo-fi edition. And for our earlier podcasts, start here and keep scrolling.)

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Transcript of interview begins on the following page.

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In 1957, William DeVane, dean of Yale, made a casual statement that no one noticed at the time. But in retrospect it’s remarkable.

Our national leaders for the most part are men of integrity, idealism, and skill; our literary and artistic people command an international respect such as they never had before; our scientists and engineers, especially the latter, are the wonder and envy of other nations; our teachers in our colleges and universities are learned and devoted.

In 1957, Americans were pleased with America and proud of it. They had problems and knew it, but were undismayed.

Less than twenty years later, that proud confidence was gone, crumbled like mud-bricks into flyblown clouds of dust. “No one knows which way to turn and which way to go,” wrote the great essayist (and lifelong optimist, patriot, liberal) E. B. White in 1975. “Patriotism is unfashionable,” he wrote in 1976, “having picked up the taint of chauvinism, jingoism, and demagoguery. A man is not expected to love his country, lest he make an ass of himself.” The nation got over its low spirits, but Americans no longer speak about their country the way DeVane did back in 1957.

– From the opening of Chapter One of David Gelernter’s new book,  America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered In the Obamacrats).  Today, if an American academic expresses any pride at all in America, he does so by modifying his statement with some variation of “yes but.” Or as an academic-turned-president said shortly after taking office:

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.

But what caused such a dramatic transformation? That’s the subject of the new book by Gelernter, who is also the professor of computer science at Yale University. During our 25-minute interview, David discusses:

• We all know of the isolationist right in America on the eve of World War II.  Why aren’t we as familiar with the numerous prominent liberal intellectuals who also opposed America’s entry into that war?
• The symbiotic relationship between the liberal intellectuals who dreamed up America’s role in the Vietnam War, and the liberal intellectuals who opposed it. And how opposition to Vietnam essentially predates the war itself, not the other way around.
• The role of what Gelernter dubs “self-hating WASPs,” and the changing role of Jewish intellectuals in the academy over the 20th century.
• How Barack Obama is “the perfect superhero of America-Lite.”
• How a video featuring David earned him 549 “likes” — and over five thousand dislikes from YouTube’ viewers.
• How the higher-education bubble (to coin a phrase) could be the opening for conservatives and other members of the non-Left to take back higher culture.

And much more. Click here to listen:

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(25 minutes long; 23 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 4.3 MB lo-fi edition.)

Since in the past, a few people have complained of difficulties with the Flash player above and/or downloading the audio, use the video player below, or click here to be taken to YouTube, for an audio-only YouTube clip. Between one of those versions, you should find a format that plays on your system.

For the rest of our podcasts, click here and just keep scrolling. The transcript of my interview with Gelernter begins on the next page.

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