That Was the Philosophical Week, July 7th - 11th, 2025
Michael Toth on New York's Democrat mayoral candidate; Gregory Copley discusses China's leadership woes; Tal Fortgang on the DEI wars.
Escape from New York (with Michael Toth)
I welcome a research fellow at the Civitas Institute, Michael Toth, also with experience of general counsel of many years for corporations and litigation experience.
But right now, he's here to convince me—I don't need it, but I'm going to pretend—that the state of Texas is the future for the United States of America.
Michael’s piece entitled “Escape from New York” got my attention because I spent 50 years in Manhattan. I'm not there now, but I'm well-informed of the troubles of Manhattan. He’s quite right to point to a movie in the 20th century that won a lot of attention at the time, John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, because we didn't need to imagine that was the future, we thought it was the present.
New York went through bad patches, and then it went through a really good patch from Giuliani through Bloomberg, and then it hit the bumps again. We know that. And they now have a mayoral election that's turning for worse in terms of a future. However, Michael has a Texas I want to celebrate first.
What is it about Texas that makes it so successful? Is there a formula or is it just a lot of good people accidentally came together?
Watch the full conversation above, or listen to an audio version below:
The Fall Guy: Xi Jinping (with Gregory Copley)
I welcome my colleague and mentor Gregory Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, and the author of the new book Noble State, about the success of constitutional monarchy.
We turn to the failure of dictatorship one more time with headline in the Financial Times. The topic here is Xi Jinping, the fall guy, the general secretary ruling over the Chinese Communist Party, ruling over more than a billion people—and not doing well.
The Financial Times puts it this way: “China criticizes manufacturers over price wars as deflation fears mount.” Subhead: “Data this week expected to show a prolonged bout of deflation and factory prices running unchecked.”
What part of deflation did China not expect, given that it's given orders for years to overproduce, to dump your products, to cut your prices, to compete with other state owned enterprises that were subsidizing it? Suddenly they've woken up to the fact that once the deflation cycle starts, you can't stop it.
Xi Jinping didn't do this, but they're blaming him. Is that fair-minded of them?
Watch the full conversation above, or listen to an audio version below:
The DEI Wars (with Tal Fortgang)
I welcome my colleague,
. He's from the Manhattan Institute, but he's writing for Civitas Outlook about DEI.For those of you who have just arrived from another planet, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) has dominated the conversation for several years now. So much so that by going to a result of DEI, I have an opportunity to review how we got here.
The Center for Student Belonging at American University—okay, what does that mean? Tal does the interpreting for us. What is a center for student belonging? My memories of university extend to the fact that I didn't belong anywhere. “Why am I here?” But I went to class anyway.
What is student belonging?
Watch the full conversation above, or listen to an audio version below:
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The opinions expressed on this website and on The John Batchelor Show are those of John Batchelor and guests, and not those of CBS News.
And yet for some, economics isn't the sole determinant of where to live. Considering the likes of Abbott, Paxton, and even the de facto existence of "Sundown" towns, there's so much wrong there, too. Going from NY to TX is trading one form of insanity for another.