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A
Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn ads go to libsynads.com that's L I B S Y N ads.com today.
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B
At Charmin, we heard you shouldn't talk about going.
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C
To the bathroom in public, so we.
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B
Decided to sing about it.
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C
Light a candle, pour some wine, grab a roll the soft kind for a little me time Charmin Ultra soft smooth hair wavy edges for my rear so let the softness caress your soul Just relax, you're on a roll let her rip. Ultra soft smooth Charmin Ultra soft smooth hair has the same softness you love.
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B
Now with wavy edges that tear better than the leading one Ply brand. Enjoy the go with charming.
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C
Welcome to the Compaq Podcast. Today we'll discuss the events in Minnesota and Donald Trump's changes to the White House. I'm joined by Ashley Frawley. And I'm Matthew Schmitz. So this past weekend, Alex Preddy was shot by federal agents amid protests over ICE raids in Minnesota. Obviously it's the second such event following Renee Good's shooting by another federal agent. And lots has been said at Compact. We've published what I think is really one of the most detailed, subtle and helpful articles on these events that has appeared anywhere. How Pro Immigrant Activism Turned Dangerous by Alicia Nieves. And Alicia is someone who herself worked for nearly two decades with immigrants trying to ensure that their they had the most vigorous possible defense of their rights when they were facing deportation proceedings. She's a lawyer. She helped to set up the rapid response networks that's the term for these activist groups during Donald Trump's first term. And she describes what she sees as a very troubling change in rapid response networks from a focus on offering concrete help to immigrants to an attempt to obstruct federal authorities. And as she writes, obstructing federal authorities is a risky and dangerous proposition. That fact doesn't mean that anything done by the authorities is justifiable, but it means that there are risks inherent in it that need to be attended to. And she sees this as really a kind of falling away from a better mode of activism to a worse and more destructive one. So I've very much enjoyed talking to Alicia about these things. I myself have stayed away from making pronouncements about where the balance of fault lies in these two shootings, in part because we don't have all the evidence available, not seeing all the angles, and also because I think these things tend to turn on kind of fine legal points about what protocols should be followed. That's kind of the legal issue, obviously, in terms of the broader politics. There's been a lot of justifiable horror at the shootings. And clearly Donald Trump is trying to recalibrate. He's reportedly removing Greg Bevino, the kind of commander of customs and border patrol from Minnesota, and he's sending in Tom Hoban, head of ice, much more experienced law enforcement officer, someone who was originally appointed by Barack Obama. And so I think there's at least a certain desire for de escalation on the two sides and maybe some narrow grounds for hope that we'll get that. Or am I being a little too optimistic? Ashley.
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B
I'm afraid that you are being a lot more careful than I would be. And I'm a take is perhaps a lot more conventional. Lefties. I, you know, I. How could you, how could you watch this video and say, we haven't seen all the ankles. Come on. Really? It's, it seems to me, clear as day, you've got these trigger happy, almost certainly very little training bandits who are like, here you go, here's your gun. I bet you've been playing video games your whole life. Now's your shot. And you could just see the M.O. the guy wasn't even paying attention. The moment he sees this guy has a gun, he's like, yay, I'm allowed to kill. Like, you can, like, feel it, like, that's my cue. I'm allowed to kill. Probably wouldn't have occurred to him until a bit later. Oh, you know, Second Amendment. Perhaps that's something I should have thought about. No, no, it was, that was his permission to unload. And then everyone else is like, he's got a gun. He's got a gun. Because somebody said, he's got a gun. So they all just start shooting like, you know, this is, this is that. What is that old documentary that was like big with millennials. Oh, come on. What am I thinking of anyway? Where they he has like a little. An animation halfway through of Americans being terrified of each other and backing into each other and shooting each other. Like, this is. I'm sorry, but that's what it seems like. And it's just really galling to watch what happened. And I. That's my judgment. It just seems to me they very obviously, very little training. They disarmed the guy. He was not a threat. They did not tell each other that they disarmed this guy. The guy pulls a gun, walks away, and then seems a little surprised when he hears gunshots behind him. It was an absolute mess. And they, they executed a man in the streets because they were. They got these fun little toys and they wanted to play with them. I'm sorry, am I wrong? I'm. I'm incensed. And I think even. And I think most Americans, even Republicans, this is a turning point for them too. I mean, I think the real turning point is a long way off, but for a lot of people, this is a turning point. You cannot tell me you watched that video and thought differently than I did.
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C
I will do that. Yeah. No, I, it's not. I did not reach an opposite judgment to you, but I remain hesitant to pronounce on it. And part of it just stems from the fact that when you watch things in slow motion or afterwards, often they appear more obvious than they did in the moment. It seems clear to me that the agents acted wrongly. But in terms of assigning kind of blame or culpability, that's where I hesitate because I don't know if it was how blameable the misjudgment was. You know, in sports, when you kind of see a bam bam play, you know, was it was the hit targeting, was the catch, was the ball secured as the receiver went to the ground, know, often in slow motion, it seems a little different than it does in real time. And so it's really on. On that level that I just hesitate, hesitate to pronounce and then also I'll just confess. You know, I'm a journalist, and I don't know exactly what the kind of. What, what the training. When I say I'm a journalist, I just mean I'm not an expert in it. So I don't know what, what the training they've received is exactly how they are supposed to act. I mean, these agents, Customs and Border Patrol are probably. These are people who have been moved into Minnesota basically from the US Border. Right? We have very few ICE agents in the country right now, but we have a lot of Border patrol agents. And here's the thing, no one is crossing the border. So since we have very few ICE agents and a lot of border patrol agents who have nothing to do because of Trump's policies, they've moved border patrol agents from the border to the interior. So I don't know, I think that these people may have more sense of training than you would suppose. But I agree with you, Ashley, that no one can look at those videos and be satisfied that the right thing happened. You know, obviously that's the opposite of the case. So I am, I am going to just remain a little more hesitant and mealy mouthed and I just have to kind of, I think, expose myself to your broadsides on this. So I think your horror is absolutely justified in human and moral terms. And my hesitation is more about.
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B
A.
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C
Kind of more maybe pettifogging concern with the legal matters and exactly what kind of culpability should be assigned to the officers in that moment.
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B
Okay. It's absolutely right that as someone not trained and as someone who's not an athlete, that when you are sitting in your armchair and you're watching something go by in slow motion, it seems like I would have reacted differently in that situation. Right. It's easy to say I, you know, that this things were done wrong. Right. Because we're watching it, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, so on. However, these people are supposed to be trained and they're supposed to be trained specifically to use this kind of force, or rather to not use it. As far as I'm aware, there's something called a kill pause that you and I probably wouldn't have, which is that in that split second before you kill somebody, you are supposed to pause like a split second. And it takes a huge amount of training to get that, that pause to be able to do it. But things happen in the field, in real life that you can go through the same scenario a million times, and training does that. Right. So that everything happens automatically. But when you are out in the real world, anything can happen. Things that are unexpected can happen. Children can pop up out of nowhere. You have, you are trained specifically to have a pause, to have a pause before you use lethal force. And it was quite clear that there was not that pause. In fact, it almost seemed like as soon as someone mentioned a gun, it was, yay, now I'm allowed to shoot. And I felt the same thing about Renee Goode when it was like, oh, you know, deadly vehicle. This is my, I'm now able to do this regardless of whether or not this person was actually a threat. It was more like, now I am allowed. I want to do it, but I'm not allowed. Now I am allowed. That's. That is the. That is the. The what? Obviously, I'm speculating wildly here, but that's what it seemed like to me. These people were not in fear of their lives. It's quite clear that this was poor training, very poor training. Particularly when the officer disarmed Preddy, that. That was not, you know, he just. He walks away and nobody sees it. That's just crazy. You know, it seems to me that the training is really poor. And I've been looking into what training they're actually being given, and it seems to me that there's an enormous number of officers that they're trying to get out there very, very relatively quickly. There was an expose by a journalist who got hired very easily. And, you know, Al Jazeera did a kind of, you know, make of that source what you will, but did had a look at some of the training documents and what they could obtain from 2007 to 2010 seemed to be that the main purpose was how to use deadly force without getting in trouble. Essentially, like, yes, okay, the lessons are, you know, deadly force should only be used as a last resort and so on. But. But really it's sort of, here's what you can do in order to escalate without. Without having repercussions. And that was the kind of framing and de escalation was not really a priority. And although that, you know, these training documents are older, it does give some insight into what the mindset seems to be. And what I think the mindset is that I could see from that is that they're not trying to de escalate. Now, put this in context of the excellent piece that you mentioned from Compact How Pro Immigrant Activism Turned Dangerous, which was published, by the way, was it a day before this happened, the second shooting?
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C
Yeah, a day or two. Something. Yeah, yeah.
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B
Just extraordinarily and astonishingly prescient piece which didn't get a lot of traction at first, and it was just an incredible shame that the warnings in this piece were not heeded. So you put that kind of. That desire.
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C
Traction did pick up, I'll say now, our most read piece of the year.
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B
Yeah. So. But at the time, it was not getting the kind of traction it really, really deserved. I mean, in the first few hours of this going up, which was just not. Not saying that this would have changed the outcome of the situation or something like that, but it was it's just so it nails exactly what happened here. You have, you have these ICE agents who are not prioritizing de escalation and, and the protesters that are prioritizing escalation. This is a, an absolutely debt like it. And you know, everybody's saying like it was, it was an accident, not an accident, it was a horror show just waiting to happen. Yes, of course, in hindsight, but we, but we were saying it right before it happened again.
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C
Yeah. I don't know how, how many of these videos you've watched. I mean, I've mostly been consuming the news through, through Twitter on this. But have you seen the suggestion that Preddy's gun fired as it was, as the man, as the officer who grabbed it was running away? Have you seen that suggestion from some.
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B
Yes.
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C
So I just mentioned that not because I think it materially changes the account of it, but because I think I want to kind of move, I want to move to a somewhat more meta point rather than kind of digging in against Ashley and our disagreements about, or maybe not disagreements, but at least strongly differing responses to the events. It is the case that these events are going to be very polarizing. You're going to get different reactions to them. And the presence of video evidence won't lead to consensus. It will almost just create further grounds for disagreement and contention. And that's why I think my own. I've been happy to give my thoughts on it as best I can, but my own feeling of responsibility as a journalist is not to argue one side or the other in terms of where the balance of blame lies in these discrete shootings. It's instead to step back and ask the question of how can we avoid more of these situations? And that's where I found Alicia's article so helpful. So I really think that's. That's the issue. It's not to. We don't want to have kind of. I mean, we need well trained officers who are able to handle sensitive situations because they're going to be placed in them. But we also want to avoid generating situations in which people can make terrible decisions. So hopeful that we'll see a healthier turn in our pro immigrant activism of the type that Alicia Nieves has described and watch Compact because Alicia will be returning to our pages soon with some further thoughts on all this.
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B
Can I just add as well that, yeah, I'm not. It's very difficult to say, look, what the protesters were doing was escalating and not sound like you're laying the blame. Right. But I'm I'm just saying that these tactics created this kind of situation and the general kind combined with like, you've got poor training it seems to me, and these, these escalating tactics, both sides escalating and then you get this awful situation. And people who are taking part in these, these protests should know that they're in mortal danger. But also that it's important to kind of contextualize some of this arms race, no pun intended, of immigration enforcement and anti immigration activism, because there is a kind of stalemate that's been going on not just in the usa, but in lots and lots of different countries where essentially states are less and less able to control their borders. Obviously you know that, but I mean, even if you have something on the books, there are all of these NGOs and lawyers and activist groups whose job it is to take on these cases and evade the legal, the laws of the country, the stated desires of whatever the administration might be. And so it's become more and more difficult for a state to put, to set immigration laws and, and enforce them because you have, you know, they'll, in the uk they'll go to the human rights, they'll go to the human rights stuff. And so it, it means that the people wind up staying in the country for a very, very long time in legal limbo or they manage to stay in the country evading the, by, through the letter of the law, evading the spirit of the law or whatever it might be. And so these kinds of crackdowns that are just like, oh, we'll just come in, we'll just pick them up and remove them and evade all of that leads to these awful kinds of situations. And then the protesters themselves also have to escalate because that means that they can't do things through the legal channels that they were using before. So this has been going on for a long time and it's just sort of these competing attempts to control immigration and to allow immigration to proceed are creating an impossible situation because at the end of the day, a country does have to control its borders. You have to be able to respond to the will of the people for who knowing at least who's coming into your country and making choices about who those people will be. Personally, I have other views on immigration and what's going on worldwide in terms of global immigration flows and so on, but it is a fact, fact that I don't like necessarily that you're going to have to put limits on this stuff. And increasingly states are finding that they can't. And this is leading to crackdowns. And I don't know the way out of this. I don't know, because people are. Their global flows are coming. Push and pull factors are still there. Countries need to be able to control their borders. I don't see an end to this, but I don't know. I feel like. I don't know. I feel like people have to be realistic that if they're going to be escalating like this, this is the outcome on both sides. You know, the Trump administration has to recognize, look, if we're going to be doing this, people are going to die. Are they okay with that? Is that a price they're willing to pay? And protesters need to understand the same thing. And I think we need to find a solution out of this that isn't an ever increasing escalation. And also, on the gun going off thing, I would recommend people go and have a look at the New York Times video analysis, frame by frame analysis of the video where the first shot does.
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C
What do they conclude? Do they think that.
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B
No.
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C
Do they think the gun went off?
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B
No. So they show that the first shot coincides with recoil from the officer who turned and shot. So that that was the first sound corresponds to that. So they think that it wasn't an accidental discharge. So go and have a look at that. You may find that they're wrong, but it looks pretty convincing to me.
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C
Yeah, probably more. More useful how they're laying it out than me trying to piece things together from clips on Twitter. And it's the facts matter. So that they have to be. They have to be pieced together and conclusions can be reached. I think there are. There certainly are. You know, I don't want my own hesitation to pronounce to be taken as a kind of general sort of agnosticism. I mean, the facts need to be established, and then if there's legal culpability, you know, that needs to be followed through on, proper charges need to be brought, and very possibly that will prove to be the case.
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B
I highly doubt it, given the past. But the real question is everybody saw this, right? They are all going to come to their own conclusions. Is a lie going to be the end of the Trump loyalty of Trump supporters? For a lot of people, it looks like it is, because I said part of his appeal is his appearance of authenticity. He blatantly lied and he lies all the time, but he blatantly lied about the Second Amendment, that this guy, he brought a gun and he's. And if you're bringing a gun to a protest. And a lot of people were like, whoa, hold on a second. I thought we were allowed to do that. And so there was a contradiction within his own supporters milieu, within their. The things that they themselves hold dear. That's a question I think a lot of people, for them, that was the end point. But I don't think that's the end of Trump loyalty. I think we'll see that down the road when people eventually have to come to terms with the fact that material life gets worse. And that's it. That's. That's my prediction.
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C
Meanwhile, the White House continues to undergo a facelift and spray tan under the direction of Donald Trump, real estate mogul and tastemaker extraordinaire. He has added gilding everywhere, of course.
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B
Of course.
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C
He has put in far more portraits in the Oval Office, more flags. So it's an embrace of color, the most prominent color being gold. It's an embrace of complexity. It's a rejection of austere kind of neoclassicism. If you look at the West Colonnade, which runs between the actual executive residence, the central White House building, and the West Wing, you know, a place where presidents are so often photographed looking serious as they're discussing grave matters, he has added a wall of presidential portraits and gilded frames with large captions below, offering his truth social post like takes on his predecessors. And most notoriously, one of the portrait for Joe Biden is simply a portrait of an auto pen signature machine. So Trump has done this, and I have to say I think it looks terrible. But I wanted us to discuss it because I felt a duty to offer a defense of it. This may seem like an odd thing to go full Trumpist on, especially given that my own taste runs so counter to what we're seeing. But I figured I had to at least offer the argument. So I don't know. Ashley, before I get into it, how do you feel about the changes Trump has made?
- [26:58]
B
Right, okay. As someone with zilch cultural capital, my dream as a child was to grow up in a house that had pictures on the wall, just because I always thought that was a real cool thing. People painted their walls neat colors and just had stuff because it looked nice. I am, like, the worst person to ask here, but, like, even I can tell with my very poor taste that this is in poor taste. So, I mean, it's got to say something. But, yeah, he's such a. He's such a cliche of the nouveau riche. You know, like, let's put some gold on that. Let's Gild this. Let's gild that. And it just. It does. It does look really, really gaudy. But, you know what? If I didn't know, if I hadn't seen pictures of his apartments and so on that are just covered in silly bling and I simply walked into one of these rooms, I honestly wouldn't know the difference. I'd be like, oh, yeah, that's like one of those stately rooms that you expect to see in the White House. And I assume that's also what the designer thought when she walked in and saw quite austere surroundings and thought, oh, well, we have all these beautiful gilded plates in a cupboard somewhere. They've been in the collection since the 19th century. Let's just put these on the mantel. You know, that seems like a white housey thing to do. And like, I think the clock even in one of these rooms, which, which. Which I'm looking at this, pictures of what he's actually done, and there's like a grandfather clock in the cabinet room in the left corner. And all of these things are, you know, they're from different places in the White House. You know, apparently it was in Marco Rubio's office. So they just sort of removing these things around, it's like, well, we've got all these gaudy things. Let's put them together and give this image of stateliness as seen through Trump's eyes. And, yeah, I suppose it's a bit like they're sort of playing house. And I don't know, a part of me admires it almost where it's like that. The. I hate performative austerity. So just kind of like, although it looks gaudy, I absolutely love that it's a part of me just loves that it's this in your face kind of gaudiness, like, let's stop pretending, let's stop pretending like, this is the highest office. Let's cover it in gold. Why are we hiding these dishes somewhere? Let's just put them on display. I like that it kind of part of. Although I think it looks awful, part of me loves the kind of intruder nature of it. This forcing you to face with sober senses your real conditions.
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C
That's great that you passed the Bourdieu test and found it tasteless, despite your lack of cultural capital, as you said. But when I look at it, I think of the writing of the great German art historian Johann Winckelmann. And Winckelmann was famous for his description of classical art. He was a leading archaeologist and he wrote the preeminent universal note of the Greek masterpieces is a noble simplicity and a silent grandeur. So the idea of noble simplicity and silent grandeur of these beautiful white marble statues and white buildings, this was kind of the aesthetic that Winckelmann celebrated and his ideas. And this kind of archaeological appreciation of classical art was so important and obviously informing neoclassicism, informing the tastes expressed in the White House, which were, of course, tied up with Republican ideals more generally. And Trump, I think, is deviating from the Winckelmann line. Where is the noble simplicity? It's not simple in terms of silent grandeur. I mean, it's not silent, it's shouting. It's sort of shouting it's grandeur or greatness. But I think where Trump may deserve a certain defense, it's not on aesthetic grounds where I think he has really no standing at all, but instead on a kind of historical or vibe based grounds. Because, of course, when classical art was created, it was not done with an aspiration toward noble simplicity or a silent grandeur. I mean, these statues that we see that are so serenely eloquent were painted. Right. They would have looked much more garish at the time. So the age capable of producing these masterpieces was maybe not as tasteful as we want it to be. It was maybe more vulgar than we would like to admit. Admit. And so if America ever were to aspire to the. Ever were to achieve the greatness to which Trump aspires, it might look vulgar, it might look very garish. It might only appear to have a certain simple grandeur in retrospect or after the centuries have kind of effaced all of the. All of the crudeness that was so apparent at the time. So is Trump actually achieving that greatness? No, I don't think so, but maybe. I don't think that by leaning into vulgarity, we'll get the greatness that the Greeks combined with it. But maybe having everything be kind of bone white isn't the be all and end all. And if America ever does achieve greatness, it will be somewhat kind of Technicolor or gilded as it was in a previous age of great national growth and achievement.
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B
Yeah, maybe it'll take itself seriously in its gilded nature, because I feel like a part of this is that it's kind of a joke. Do you know what I mean? He's not.
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C
These are the auto pen.
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B
The auto pen, like the auto pen in place of Biden's photo, like the Presidential Walk of Fame. And it's so over the top, like Nobody is serious with that. I mean, I feel like Trump is kind of serious in his attempts to, like, guild everything, but it's a country that's not taking itself seriously, I think. And maybe one day we'll have gaudiness that we can embody fully instead of it looking like someone, you know, put lipstick on a pig.
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C
When you see photos of Trump or other American officials meeting with foreign heads of states, Emmanuel Macron has some very gaudy digs that I think look dignified. So the French have that legacy and have pulled it off. But when you go to a Latin American republic, they have a very elaborate palace, you think, yeah, I'm not sure that looks quite as nice as the simpler, more austere digs of our own executive. So maybe Trump is adding some of that kind of Araviste, Western hemispheric gaudiness to the White House that. That I don't like when I. When I see it elsewhere in the Americas.
- [34:55]
B
I don't know. Maybe I'm just being. Maybe I have. Maybe I've got just enough cultural capital to know that I should be snooty about this. Maybe that's what it is. Because I was just thinking, like, I don't know, France is pretty gaudy if you think about it, like, going to those palaces. The thing is that it was like, it's real, I guess, you know, and, like, everything after that is like, you don't get it, you don't know why. And so you just kind of, you know, you like shinoiserie and this sort of thing where it's like, I don't know why, but they do this. It looks kind of cool and it just comes off where, like, everything's empty and the purpose is gone. Or like, when men try to, like, dress in suits and they don't understand why a suit looks a particular way and it looks off and you can't figure out why. And it's because they don't know why they're dressing that way. The rules are gone and so they mismatch things. Maybe it's something like that. I don't know. Maybe it's. I sense an emptiness to it.
- [35:45]
C
Yeah. I think the French knew how to do it. And if you go into, whatever, the Alicia palace, the Chinoise right there, those are the vases that were actually in the court of the Sun King or whatever, and everything was created for this or that grand monarch. So it all holds together a little bit better than our job being. Attempts to imitate it.
- [36:13]
B
Yeah, I don't know. I'M just thinking out loud, but I, yeah, I, maybe, maybe it is all, all just horrible and you just have to know when to be snooty and when not to. And apparently when it comes to Trump, we just gotta be snooty.
- [36:27]
C
Yeah, the, it, it looks bad, but I think I will, I will, I will take art that looks bad for if it, if it goes along with a kind of more a genuine national exuberance. And I think if there's an objection to the, to the Trump administration, it's just that we aren't, it's not, it's not delivering on its promise of American greatness. Not, not that it lacks perfect taste because, you know, perfect taste can, can go along very well with decline.
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B
Yes, good point. Yeah. So let's have gaudiness that has some real material exuberance behind it. Gaudiness for everyone. Everyone gets gilded portraits in their houses. Why not?
- [37:18]
C
And if you want to crush Winckelmann, you know, buy one of those Trump four more years hats. It is an unconstitutional proposal, but it's the way to go if you want to defeat the dead hand of classicism. And with that. Thank you, Ashley. Thanks to our producer Stephen Adubato. Thank you listeners. For for more, go to compactmag.com subscribe read Alyssa Nevis's article how Pro Immigrant Activism Turned Dangerous.
- [38:11]
A
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