Latest / rationally BASED / Episode 30 | Are All Cultures Created Equal?

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Episode 30 | Are All Cultures Created Equal? · rationally BASED

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to Rationally Based, a podcast about law and politics on the edge.
0:04
SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Elon Werman, a law professor at the University of Minnesota Law School.
0:07
SPEAKER_02: And I'm Catherine Johnson with Center of the American Experiment.
0:10
SPEAKER_00: Catherine, Josh, as you know, is out this week.
0:12
SPEAKER_00: So what's on deck?
0:14
SPEAKER_02: Well, we have a lot to catch up on.
0:16
SPEAKER_02: Mostly, Elon, you have been under fire on X, and so we want to talk about it all.
0:22
SPEAKER_02: First, remember the anti-weaponization fund.
0:24
SPEAKER_02: We talked about it a couple episodes back.
0:26
SPEAKER_02: Well, a liberal judge and some ex-judges have turned that into an opportunity for weaponization.
0:32
SPEAKER_02: We'll explain.
0:33
SPEAKER_02: And then second, is there a major flaw in the Supreme Court's birthright citizenship holding that might justify rehearing?
0:40
SPEAKER_02: Third, do all cultures have the same capacity for self-government?
0:44
SPEAKER_02: The answer seems obvious to most normal people, but Elon almost got canceled for saying it.
0:49
SPEAKER_00: This one will be fun.
0:50
SPEAKER_00: You won't want to miss it, so let's dive in.
1:06
SPEAKER_00: Okay, Catherine, before we start, I just wanted to do a little public service announcement.
1:11
SPEAKER_00: Our podcast comes out on Thursday.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: So if you're listening to this on Thursday, July 23rd, another podcast is also coming out today.
1:20
SPEAKER_00: Jeff Rosen, formerly of the National Constitution Center, and now a uh always been actually professor at George Washington University, has a new podcast where he continues um his interview style as an interlocutor.
1:32
SPEAKER_00: Uh, it's called The Blessings of Liberty.
1:34
SPEAKER_00: It's a great podcast, and it's particularly great because it has me on it today.
1:38
SPEAKER_00: Uh I'm allowed to be a little self-congratulatory.
1:44
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and um, but but more seriously, it's me and one of my frenemies, though we might be in nemesis territory.
1:52
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
1:52
SPEAKER_00: It's hard to tell sometimes.
1:54
SPEAKER_00: Um, Judge Sugarman, uh, uh, who's a professor at Fordham, and he and I have engaged a lot, uh, including on you know Twitter, intellectual combat there.
2:03
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and we both uh wrote amicus briefs in both the birthright case and the removal power case.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: So both in Trump v.
2:11
SPEAKER_00: Barbara and Trumpy Slaughter.
2:12
SPEAKER_00: So Jeff Rosen invited us on for uh a little tete tete.
2:15
SPEAKER_00: And um I really enjoyed it.
2:16
SPEAKER_00: I really enjoyed it.
2:17
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it got it was tense at times, uh, but uh I think ultimately um productive uh and uh engaging.
2:24
SPEAKER_00: And so I hope uh the listeners um tune into Jeff Rosen's uh new podcast, but only after you listen to ours.
2:33
SPEAKER_00: So, okay, Catherine, where should we start today for our podcast here?
2:37
SPEAKER_02: Well, let's start with the settlement fund.
2:40
SPEAKER_02: Um I think the the there was there was a new development, okay?
2:45
SPEAKER_02: So this is the Trump anti-weaponization fund that we talked about, like I said, a couple episodes back.
2:50
SPEAKER_02: Actually, it was a little while ago now.
2:52
SPEAKER_02: But um, an Obama-appointed judge has basically referred Trump's lawyers, including the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, for bar discipline.
3:02
SPEAKER_02: And Elon, you got in trouble online.
3:04
SPEAKER_02: That seems to be a theme of this week's episode, by the way.
3:07
SPEAKER_02: You got in trouble online for having the gall to think that bar discipline was weaponization, which sure it seems to me it is.
3:16
SPEAKER_00: They're they are weaponizing the anti-weaponization fund.
3:19
SPEAKER_00: And I wanted to say a little something about that.
3:21
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, good, go on.
3:23
SPEAKER_02: Well, and as we talked about on episode 20, uh, this started when President Trump sued the IRS over the illegal leak of his tax returns in 2019 and 2020.
3:35
SPEAKER_02: Now, as we also said then, the whole thing is a little awkward because Trump is also the head of the IRS.
3:42
SPEAKER_02: So he basically settled with himself.
3:46
SPEAKER_00: Um, but he did have a legitimate grievance, right?
3:49
SPEAKER_00: I mean, right the the deep state is real.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: He was president when it was released, right?
3:57
SPEAKER_00: So what's he supposed to do?
3:58
SPEAKER_00: What's he supposed to do?
3:59
SPEAKER_02: But but anyway, he's a legitimate grievance, but yes, he didn't get a single penny for himself out of the settlement.
4:05
SPEAKER_02: It was all going to be used to pay out the claims of individuals who had been victims of lawfare and legal process abuse, um, seemed mainly at the hands of the Biden administration.
4:16
SPEAKER_02: And as we also explained, there's already a judgment fund with appropriations, and it can be used to settle cases.
4:22
SPEAKER_02: So it seemed legal on its face, but obviously, you know, there were some concerns about Trump basically being able to settle with himself.
4:31
SPEAKER_02: Now, one important related fact is that a motion to reopen the case in Florida was filed by 35 former federal judges.
4:39
SPEAKER_02: These former judges were represented by none other than Democrat lawfare attack dog, Norm Eisen.
4:46
SPEAKER_02: Norm literally worked in the Obama administration and then was special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, where he played a key role in the impeachment and trial of Donald Trump.
4:58
SPEAKER_00: But I'm sure these 35 federal judges, totally neutral, former federal judges, you know, don't look behind the curtain.
5:03
SPEAKER_00: We are totally neutral apolitical actors.
5:05
SPEAKER_00: But anyway, sorry, go on.
5:07
SPEAKER_02: Elon, you mentioned on the last episode that there was no legal authority for them to move to reopen the case.
5:14
SPEAKER_02: Not to mention like this whole, this is kind of like an on-issue now, right?
5:17
SPEAKER_02: Because the Trump administration has already said that it wasn't going to move forward with the anti-weaponization fund, unfortunately, in my opinion.
5:24
SPEAKER_02: Um, but that didn't stop the federal judge from reopening the case anyway, and sanctioning some of Trump's lawyers and referring Todd Blanche and others for bar discipline.
5:34
SPEAKER_02: Um, so you posted on X wait, Sue and Settle is now bar discipline worthy.
5:41
SPEAKER_02: If so, all the Obama and Biden lawyers are in big trouble.
5:45
SPEAKER_02: Just kidding, of course, these rules only apply to Trump and his lawyers.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: Good tweet, right?
5:51
SPEAKER_00: Good tweet.
5:52
SPEAKER_02: Good tweet.
5:52
SPEAKER_02: But we've got to be another episode.
5:55
SPEAKER_00: Fire, fire, Elon.
5:57
SPEAKER_00: Like, come on, you need to hear me.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: Okay, thank you.
5:59
SPEAKER_02: It was a fire tweet, Elon.
6:01
SPEAKER_02: It really was.
6:02
SPEAKER_02: But commenters were saying, don't you see the obvious difference?
6:05
SPEAKER_02: The obvious difference seems to be that Trump is suing himself.
6:08
SPEAKER_02: People are really set on that.
6:11
SPEAKER_02: Um, why don't you explain your tweet?
6:13
SPEAKER_02: Because we did cover this in the last episode, and uh it's exactly like you said, didn't they do the same thing under Obama and Biden?
6:21
SPEAKER_02: Or is this different?
6:23
SPEAKER_00: So obviously it's a little bit different.
6:26
SPEAKER_00: And the ultimate question, as we'll get into, is like whether that little difference is uh sufficient to justify bar discipline in one case, but not the other.
6:35
SPEAKER_00: That's really this question, right?
6:36
SPEAKER_00: Is the delta big enough to justify, you know, more weaponization in this case?
6:43
SPEAKER_00: Um, now part of the issue here is you have to remember that Trump's lawyers are on both sides.
6:50
SPEAKER_00: So there are the plaintiffs, there, you know, Trump the plaintiff had lawyers, including law professor uh Daniel Epstein, and I believe there was one other lawyer.
6:59
SPEAKER_00: And then there was Trump, the federal government, the president, right, that had lawyers on the other side of the V, right?
7:07
SPEAKER_00: Um uh, you know, so Trump v.
7:08
SPEAKER_00: Trump, so to speak, Trump v the United States.
7:11
SPEAKER_00: Uh and uh those lawyers never made an appearance in the case, right?
7:14
SPEAKER_00: They just settled the case in advance.
7:16
SPEAKER_00: So those lawyers were Woodward and Blanche, right?
7:19
SPEAKER_00: So the acting attorney general and deputy AG, or associate AG, I'm not sure.
7:25
SPEAKER_00: Um Stanley Woodward.
7:26
SPEAKER_00: Um anyway, and so the point I was trying to make on X is if you look at the reasons for which uh Judge Williams in Florida uh said that these lawyers are worthy of bar discipline, right?
7:42
SPEAKER_00: Being referred to the bar.
7:43
SPEAKER_00: There's other direct sanctions on the plaintiff's lawyer, like I think Daniel Epstein can't uh file uh in the Southern District, can't practice in the Southern District for like a year, which is kind of interesting.
7:54
SPEAKER_02: Um but uh when you look at Is that all it takes is one judge that's insane saying you a good question.
8:01
SPEAKER_00: Actually, I don't know.
8:02
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
8:03
SPEAKER_00: Um presumably the judge could prevent him from practicing in front of her.
8:07
SPEAKER_00: Um, but whether that applies to the other judges in the Southern District is an interesting question.
8:11
SPEAKER_00: I bet the judges would respect each other uh in something like this, though it's pretty political.
8:15
SPEAKER_00: So in this case, I I don't know.
8:16
SPEAKER_00: That's actually a really good question.
8:18
SPEAKER_00: Um, but she also, you know, referred Blanche and Woodward, right?
8:23
SPEAKER_00: Uh the the the Trump government defendant uh lawyers.
8:26
SPEAKER_00: Uh and so what I was trying to convey in my tweet, I thought like reasonably accurately and well, is if you look at what Judge Williams actually actually says are the reasons for which bar discipline is justified, then it literally applies to the Obama and Biden lawyers, especially the Obama lawyers representing the federal government in a bunch of cases where the Obama administration uh engaged in uh sue and settle.
8:53
SPEAKER_00: Now, again, okay, uh you could say during the Obama years, well, somebody else sued, and then years later, Obama settled.
9:01
SPEAKER_00: Fine.
9:02
SPEAKER_00: But the question is when the Obama administration lawyers settled unmeritorious cases in order to favor their Democrat constituencies and interest groups, were they engaged in similar conduct to the conduct that this judge said was sanctionable and bar discipline worthy?
9:21
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so here's one just one point.
9:24
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I get that we're in a different situation because it's Trump v.
9:26
SPEAKER_02: Trump, but in some of the Obama cases, weren't there lawyers on the other side who were like clearly Democrat lawyer partisans working for Democrat nonprofits, and then they were against Obama?
9:39
SPEAKER_02: It's not like it's this huge difference to me.
9:41
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
9:42
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
9:43
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so the only difference is that it's Trump v.
9:48
SPEAKER_00: Trump right away now.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: Whereas back then it was Democrat interest groups v the federal government, and eventually the Democrat interest groups lawyers bundled a bunch of money for Obama, Obama became president, and then Obama's lawyers settled with the Democrat lawyers who bundled for Obama.
10:11
SPEAKER_00: So it became Obama v Obama in a sense, right?
10:16
SPEAKER_00: Um, but it took a while.
10:18
SPEAKER_00: It didn't, it wasn't filed initially.
10:20
SPEAKER_00: Uh, presumably it was filed in the hopes of like friendly government settlements.
10:24
SPEAKER_00: But, you know, so again, let's just go through um what Judge Williams said, and then we'll actually go through these suicidals because we talked about them in the previous episode, um, but I fear it got lost maybe in the bigger uh discussion.
10:36
SPEAKER_00: Certainly the blue sky crowd uh wasn't listening, apparently, to our podcast.
10:41
SPEAKER_00: Um, so here is just one example from Judge Williams' decision.
10:45
SPEAKER_00: Um, lead plaintiffs and defendants, okay, and defendants are public servants, the pinnacle of the executive branch, sworn to uphold the law, faithfully perform the duties of their office, and protect the interests of the American public.
10:59
SPEAKER_00: The issue before the court is whether instead they ignored ethical norms, court rules, and legal authority to manipulate the judicial process.
11:08
SPEAKER_00: The issue is whether they did so to guild their efforts to gain unprecedented access to the public fisc with a patina of legitimacy.
11:16
SPEAKER_00: Okay, all right, remember this and welcome back to this.
11:20
SPEAKER_00: It's not just remember uh the plaintiff's lawyer, right?
11:23
SPEAKER_00: Trump the plaintiff's lawyer.
11:24
SPEAKER_00: It's the question here is Trump defendant lawyers, Trump government lawyers when they settled with them.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: So the question, according to Jones, Judge Williams, is whether they manipulated judicial process to create a patina of legitimacy for settlement.
11:37
SPEAKER_00: Even just repeating it, it's like anyone who knows about this knows Obama did this.
11:41
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
11:42
SPEAKER_00: And were they faithfully performing their duties?
11:46
SPEAKER_00: Remember the government lawyers.
11:48
SPEAKER_00: Um, and so there's other interesting parts of the opinion here.
11:52
SPEAKER_00: Um, so because uh so this is uh another page, because the fact uh was so obvious and so insurmountable, the court finds that this matter was brought for an improper purpose to gain the imprimatur of judicial legitimacy for a settlement that had no viable basis in law or fact.
12:13
SPEAKER_00: Okay, again, to gain imprimatur of judicial legitimacy for a settlement that no, that had no viable basis for law or fact.
12:21
SPEAKER_00: Okay, I I want you to remember that.
12:24
SPEAKER_00: Um, and then finally, um, in another part of the opinion, she explains how in the IRS cases, after the IRS leak, there was a series of other lawsuits involving, because apparently Trump's tax returns were like the Boose Alan Hamilton had like a contracting role with the IRS and they sued the person.
12:45
SPEAKER_00: And wait, there were like a bunch of other lawsuits.
12:47
SPEAKER_00: And so Judge Williams said in every other case, the Biden administration vigorously defended the federal government in these leaked lawsuits.
12:55
SPEAKER_00: Okay, and so here's a quote from Judge Williams.
12:57
SPEAKER_00: In every case naming the government as a defendant, the DOJ engaged in a vigorous defense.
13:03
SPEAKER_00: That is every case until the instant litigation.
13:07
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
13:07
SPEAKER_00: Remember this, listeners.
13:09
SPEAKER_00: Remember this, listeners, because now we were like, I think, Catherine, why don't you set up the two cases which we talked about uh in the suicidal context?
13:18
SPEAKER_00: We talked about several.
13:19
SPEAKER_00: Go back, episode 20, right?
13:21
SPEAKER_00: Uh about the weaponization.
13:23
SPEAKER_00: Episode 20.
13:24
SPEAKER_02: Okay, so go ahead.
13:26
SPEAKER_02: Let's start with.
13:26
SPEAKER_02: Now I have to remember how to pronounce these because I haven't thought about it in a while.
13:29
SPEAKER_02: Cobel v.
13:30
SPEAKER_02: Zal Salazar.
13:31
SPEAKER_02: Uh in the Cobel case, the plaintiffs were Native Americans who had argued that the federal government mismanaged Indian trust accounts and Indian land trusts for a century.
13:42
SPEAKER_02: They had won on the merits, but they were fighting over the damages.
13:46
SPEAKER_02: And so after numerous attempts, excuse me, after numerous proceedings, they eventually got a$450 million judgment.
13:54
SPEAKER_02: Um, every other attempt to increase that amount was rejected by the courts.
13:59
SPEAKER_02: Hardly within a year of coming into office, the Obama administration swept all the prior 13 years of DOJ work under the rug and settled for$3.5 billion, even though the DOJ had consistently won on the damages question.
14:16
SPEAKER_02: And not only that, but part of the settlement was a hundred million in attorney's fees for the plaintiff's lawyers, who were all Democrat activists and donors.
14:27
SPEAKER_00: Um, I think the biggest plaintiff's lawyer was like a big bundler for Obama, too.
14:31
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if he like gave money, but whatever he certainly was able to raise a bunch of money, right, for Obama.
14:35
SPEAKER_00: And so this was very unsavory.
14:37
SPEAKER_00: There were even hearings on Capitol Hill about this.
14:40
SPEAKER_00: But just to emphasize, okay, so yeah, it's true, they went on the merits and they wanted a bunch of money.
14:45
SPEAKER_00: And time and again, the court said, you're not entitled to more than 450 million.
14:49
SPEAKER_00: And instead, they the Obama administration came in and said, 450 million?
14:54
SPEAKER_00: Hey, let's do 3.5 billion.
14:57
SPEAKER_00: That is three billion dollars more than what they were entitled to.
15:03
SPEAKER_00: Three billion dollars.
15:05
SPEAKER_00: How much is the weaponization fund worth?
15:06
SPEAKER_00: Do you remember that they were trying to do?
15:08
SPEAKER_02: No.
15:09
SPEAKER_00: 1.776 billion, right?
15:11
SPEAKER_00: 1776.
15:12
SPEAKER_00: That's how you know it was probably arbitrary and capricious because they picked it up the year of the American Revolution.
15:17
SPEAKER_00: Guys, you could have done it better.
15:19
SPEAKER_00: Like you could have done 7.9.
15:21
SPEAKER_02: That's cool.
15:22
SPEAKER_02: It's just like good marketing.
15:24
SPEAKER_00: Send them off, sent, you know, put them off the scent.
15:27
SPEAKER_00: You know, you should have done 1.788 for the year the Constitution was ratified or something like that.
15:34
SPEAKER_00: You know, some I don't know.
15:36
SPEAKER_00: Um 8.9, the Judiciary Act.
15:38
SPEAKER_00: Like, okay, I don't know.
15:39
SPEAKER_00: Uh anyway, the point is this was double, double the size in terms of money that the plaintiffs were not entitled to.
15:49
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so let's go back, dear listeners, and apply Judge Williams' uh statements uh to the Obama lawyers here.
15:58
SPEAKER_00: Okay, not the plaintiff's lawyers.
16:00
SPEAKER_00: I I confess that, not the plaintiff's lawyers, but the defendant, government defendant, the Obama defendant lawyers.
16:06
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
16:07
SPEAKER_00: Did they manipulate judicial process by obtaining a court-approved settlement to create a patina of legitimacy for a settlement?
16:19
SPEAKER_02: Yes?
16:20
SPEAKER_02: It seems so.
16:21
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is this is what we call a leading question, Catherine.
16:25
SPEAKER_00: Or you chasing you basically leading the witness to an answer.
16:30
SPEAKER_02: Well, it worked.
16:31
SPEAKER_02: It sure seems so.
16:32
SPEAKER_02: I mean, what in the world?
16:34
SPEAKER_02: What legitimate way could you get from um what were they at 450 million to 3.5 billion?
16:41
SPEAKER_00: And they got court approval, right?
16:43
SPEAKER_00: So the here they the in the Trump case, they didn't even get court approval.
16:48
SPEAKER_00: They they filed the suit and then settled.
16:50
SPEAKER_00: And so it creates this patina legitimacy, I guess, by invoking the court but not requiring a judicial settlement.
16:56
SPEAKER_00: Here it's almost even worse.
16:58
SPEAKER_00: The judge rubber stamped it.
17:00
SPEAKER_00: The judge said, sure, what's three billion extra dollars from the from the taxpayers?
17:05
SPEAKER_00: So it's crazy.
17:06
SPEAKER_00: Okay, Judge Williams.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: Um, uh, were they faithfully performing their duties?
17:12
SPEAKER_00: The Obama lawyers, were they faithfully performing their duties by giving out three billion dollars that the court said the plaintiffs were not entitled to?
17:22
SPEAKER_00: I would say no it took you a second, Catherine.
17:27
SPEAKER_00: No, catch you.
17:28
SPEAKER_00: No, it's right.
17:29
SPEAKER_00: They were not faithfully uh uh performing their duties.
17:33
SPEAKER_00: Okay, one more for you.
17:34
SPEAKER_00: One more for you.
17:35
SPEAKER_00: Uh let me get the exact quote.
17:36
SPEAKER_00: Hold on, I have it here.
17:38
SPEAKER_00: Okay, in every case naming the government as defendant, the DOJ engaged in a vigorous defense.
17:44
SPEAKER_00: That is every case until the instant litigation.
17:48
SPEAKER_00: That's what she said.
17:49
SPEAKER_00: Well, can you say at every point, DOJ aggressively defended on the damages question and won every time, except in this case, when it was all swept under the rug by Obama.
18:01
SPEAKER_00: What do you think, Catherine?
18:02
SPEAKER_00: Bar discipline for Obama's lawyers?
18:05
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
18:05
SPEAKER_02: Well, it says for 13 years the DOJ was pursuing this case faithfully, as it seems.
18:11
SPEAKER_02: And then all of a sudden, when uh the Obama lawyers took over, boom, the settlement goes up like crazy and things totally changed.
18:18
SPEAKER_02: So yeah.
18:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Clinton, the Clinton and Bush administrations did their jobs.
18:23
SPEAKER_00: I guess the guy didn't bundle enough money for Bill.
18:28
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, okay, there was another case, right?
18:29
SPEAKER_00: It was Garcia Vivil Sachs.
18:31
SPEAKER_00: So why don't you remind our listeners what that one was?
18:33
SPEAKER_02: So here, Hispanic farmers were alleging discrimination by the USDA in the provision of loans.
18:40
SPEAKER_02: They tried to get a class certified for 10 years and they lost all the way.
18:46
SPEAKER_02: The Supreme Court denied review.
18:48
SPEAKER_02: But instead of taking the win, the Obama administration established a fund without court supervision to pay out claims to all of the individuals who would have been in the class that was denied certification.
19:00
SPEAKER_02: And it was a bigger fund than this one.
19:04
SPEAKER_00: This is like on all fours, right?
19:05
SPEAKER_00: I mean, part of the claims uh that they were part of the accusations or you know, against the Trump settlement fund is none of these people actually filed their own claims.
19:15
SPEAKER_00: All of these claims are likely to be time barred, um, all the weaponization claims.
19:20
SPEAKER_00: So it depends on what the exact weaponization claim is, right?
19:23
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't know, like, weren't the Obama administration like arresting people in front of abortion clinics?
19:29
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I don't know, that's probably happened until the last day.
19:31
SPEAKER_02: Isn't that long ago?
19:32
SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
19:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so the Face Act stuff, which we've talked about before uh on the podcast.
19:37
SPEAKER_00: So uh, well, Garcia V.
19:40
SPEAKER_00: Vilsack, a bunch of people who never filed their own claims, uh, never won on the merits uh of any um actual lawsuit, class certification was denied.
19:51
SPEAKER_00: And instead, uh the of taking the win, as you said, the Obama administration just said, hey, let's just create a fund for them anyway, because we're trying to buy Hispanic voters.
20:08
SPEAKER_02: It seems very similar to me, but maybe even worse because they are trying to like win over a constituency and it was in service of that.
20:16
SPEAKER_02: Whereas the Trump uh example, I mean, it's already people who probably were.
20:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they already support Trump.
20:23
SPEAKER_00: They all showed up on January 6th, right?
20:25
SPEAKER_00: You know, most of them.
20:26
SPEAKER_00: Uh so and we look, so the point here, um the point here is um I think my liberal critics have partisan brain rot, right?
20:39
SPEAKER_00: It's like everyone's says, like, oh Elon's always says pro-Trump stuff.
20:43
SPEAKER_00: What are you talking about?
20:44
SPEAKER_00: I'm not like for the weaponization fund, I'm against weaponizing the anti-weaponization fund.
20:52
SPEAKER_00: Right?
20:53
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, and isn't this happening?
20:55
SPEAKER_02: This is happening all over, right?
20:57
SPEAKER_02: This kind of weaponization of the bar complaints and things like that.
21:02
SPEAKER_02: Is this new?
21:03
SPEAKER_02: Because I don't feel like I remember this in the past, but now it seems like lots of conservative or maybe just Trump lawyers are being uh recommended for yeah, bar violations.
21:13
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
21:14
SPEAKER_00: So I assumed it was new, and there's only so much I can share because I had a private conversation with someone off the record.
21:23
SPEAKER_00: Spicy who worked in the Bush administration.
21:26
SPEAKER_00: And apparently there was a bunch of weaponization back then, too.
21:30
SPEAKER_00: Like you could barely be a lawyer for the Bush administration without risking like being referred to the bar.
21:37
SPEAKER_00: Um, some of these reports are actually public.
21:40
SPEAKER_00: Uh uh, but um, you know, like uh so you could probably figure this all out, but so I'll just try to stick to the public stuff.
21:49
SPEAKER_00: Um, but like, oh, hiring interns that are like Republican sympathetic.
21:56
SPEAKER_00: Like, oh, that's unlawful.
21:58
SPEAKER_00: You're discriminating.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: On the basis of political ideas, you know?
22:03
SPEAKER_00: And they got referred for bar discipline.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: You know?
22:07
SPEAKER_00: So it's um some of them, it took years, you know, to fight it.
22:10
SPEAKER_00: Um uh can I tell you a story?
22:14
SPEAKER_02: I haven't I haven't uh Yeah, you have a podcast, so you can really kind of do whatever you want.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: By the way, one thing I love about this podcast is um, and this also gets into like why you should all listen to the Blessings of Liberty podcast today uh with me and Judge Sugarman.
22:28
SPEAKER_00: You know, public intellectual combat is important on like social media, but like you need a hundred thousand followers to make it effective.
22:36
SPEAKER_00: Adrian Vermule's great at it.
22:37
SPEAKER_00: He has like 80,000 followers, and he's just very good at it.
22:40
SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna win in public intellectual combat, you know, with tweets against people who have, you know, my nemeses all have hundreds of thousands of followers or tens of thousands of followers.
22:51
SPEAKER_00: Why do they have so many followers, by the way?
22:52
SPEAKER_00: Because of the nature of the way they tweet, you know, and I try not to tweet like that, right?
22:57
SPEAKER_00: Um, but one of the nice things about having the podcast is like you can actually elaborate in more detail the way like we're doing now on the weaponization stuff.
23:07
SPEAKER_00: But anyway, I went to the DC Circuit Judicial Conference.
23:10
SPEAKER_00: Um was very honored to have been invited um by um Friends of the Pod, Judge Bosberg and uh Judge Srinivasan, the chief judge of the DC Circuit and the chief judge of the district.
23:22
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, and it was about the 14th Amendment.
23:25
SPEAKER_00: But my first night, I sat at the dinner table.
23:28
SPEAKER_00: Uh I came a bit late.
23:30
SPEAKER_00: I just sat at a random table, and it was all the DC bar discipline people were there.
23:35
SPEAKER_00: And they were just kind of like laughing and joking about how, like, oh yeah, you may have heard.
23:39
SPEAKER_00: Like they had no idea who I was.
23:41
SPEAKER_00: And I asked who they were, and like a few of them was one was like the head of the DC bar discipline committee.
23:47
SPEAKER_00: And um someone was like joking, like, you may have heard Trump's lawyers need a lot, you know, like really uh there's a lot of discipline that needs to be happening, or something like that.
23:54
SPEAKER_00: I'm just like, I wasn't gonna engage because you know I'm like polite.
23:59
SPEAKER_02: What was their role?
24:00
SPEAKER_02: So because a judge um refers them for discipline, right?
24:03
SPEAKER_00: And then they go to the they No, that so like the uh US attorney uh for the District of Columbia, uh, or one of Trump's lawyers, uh, remember when he he sent some letter to Georgetown about DEI practices and he said my office won't hire.
24:17
SPEAKER_00: They just sue a sponte on their own initiative.
24:19
SPEAKER_00: The bar disciplinary council basically said uh filed charges against him on in the bar, uh so he had to defend his bar license.
24:26
SPEAKER_00: I don't even know.
24:27
SPEAKER_02: So these like random, random people that aren't really appointed by anyone elected or anything like that?
24:32
SPEAKER_00: Correct correct, because you have to be licensed to practice law somewhere.
24:38
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
24:38
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
24:38
SPEAKER_00: And a lot of these people are licensed in DC.
24:42
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and it will be very painful and uncomfortable if you lose your DC bar license, right?
24:47
SPEAKER_00: And I'm just thinking that like, who appointed you arbiter here to just like decide these politically controversial issues through like the DC Bar Disciplinary Committee or council or whatever.
24:58
SPEAKER_00: And they were like just kind of a little too flippant about it for my taste.
25:01
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, I was polite, didn't say anything, but I was like, okay, right, wrong crowd.
25:05
SPEAKER_00: I felt very much like it was the right crowd.
25:07
SPEAKER_02: You should have gotten there earlier.
25:08
SPEAKER_02: Found some friends.
25:10
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
25:11
SPEAKER_00: Well, anyway, so it was a great event.
25:13
SPEAKER_00: I was very glad uh to have uh participated.
25:16
SPEAKER_00: But anyway, like the point, I guess, is like I'm not saying the Trump administration's fund was a good thing, right?
25:22
SPEAKER_00: I just don't think it was worse.
25:24
SPEAKER_00: I think it was just nakedly collusive, whereas the Obama administration was secretly collusive, right?
25:30
SPEAKER_00: And the Obiden and the Biden settlements were secretly collusive.
25:34
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't change the fact that uh uh, you know, the in terms of what Judge Williams said, the Obama and Biden lawyers basically did the same thing.
25:42
SPEAKER_00: And even if it was just like nakedly, like Trump suing himself, which you you can't say exactly about the you know, Vilsack, the Garcia plaintiffs, you can't say that exactly about the Cobel plaintiffs or whatever.
25:54
SPEAKER_00: Um, though so on the plaintiff side, you can't say it.
25:57
SPEAKER_00: Uh right, whereas here it's immediately Trump v.
26:00
SPEAKER_00: Trump versus there it took 13 years.
26:04
SPEAKER_00: So it's kind of like Obama v.
26:05
SPEAKER_00: Obama, or at least big Obama donor v.
26:08
SPEAKER_00: Uh Obama.
26:08
SPEAKER_00: The question has what that I was trying to raise on X was is the difference uh is the difference sufficiently substantial and significant that it merits bar discipline?
26:19
SPEAKER_00: And the answer is ridiculous.
26:20
SPEAKER_00: Like get out.
26:21
SPEAKER_02: Not according to the judge's own words, right?
26:24
SPEAKER_02: I think also and I agree with you because I think the I I kind of support the weaponization fund in that it's already been done by the left.
26:32
SPEAKER_02: So what we need to fight fire with fire tends to be my opinion.
26:35
SPEAKER_02: Otherwise, we're just going to get trampled.
26:37
SPEAKER_02: I don't think it's necessarily a good thing.
26:39
SPEAKER_02: But the other thing, and we mentioned this in the last episode, but the other thing is that Trump in his last term had tried to get rid of sue and settle.
26:47
SPEAKER_02: And um, both the DOJ and the EPA had issued internal policies forbidding sue and settle.
26:54
SPEAKER_02: So, or like making it much more difficult.
26:56
SPEAKER_02: Well, the Biden administration reversed it immediately.
26:59
SPEAKER_02: So, okay, I mean, we have to play the game at some point.
27:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, are we suckers?
27:03
SPEAKER_00: I think is what we said last time.
27:05
SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, they they literally Trump tried to get rid of it.
27:09
SPEAKER_00: So Obama did it, Trump tried to get rid of it, and then Biden was like, sucker, joke's on you.
27:14
SPEAKER_00: They got rid of it, including Merrick Garland, right?
27:17
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I mean, part of the soon settlement thing was like not to give um not to give money to third party like interest groups because a lot of the money went to them and and Jeff Sessions tried to get rid of it, and Merrick Garland got rid of that.
27:30
SPEAKER_00: It's like, what are we suckers?
27:31
SPEAKER_00: Now, of course, Trump's mistake was not being good at this because he the Republicans hadn't done this before.
27:37
SPEAKER_00: You know, what he should have done is found like one J6er to like sue the government and then settle with that guy.
27:46
SPEAKER_00: You know, I mean, like, how hard could it have been to coordinate that?
27:50
SPEAKER_00: You know, okay, I'm not trying to give anybody ideas.
27:52
SPEAKER_00: I'm against all government weapons and collusive settlements and so on.
27:57
SPEAKER_00: But okay, let's move, let's move on to our second topic.
27:59
SPEAKER_00: That was fun though.
28:00
SPEAKER_02: Okay, the next topic is uh birthright.
28:02
SPEAKER_02: And another place you got in a little bit of trouble, again, theme of the episode.
28:06
SPEAKER_02: Um, you wrote surprised.
28:08
SPEAKER_02: You wrote on our Substack, which everyone should follow.
28:11
SPEAKER_02: It's a great Substack, rationally based.substack.com, about a 10-page essay that a law, uh Yale law student wrote about um a potential flaw in the birthright citizenship decision.
28:23
SPEAKER_02: The student is actually David Hongs.
28:26
SPEAKER_02: He co-hosted a previous episode with us, um, the one where we were at Arizona State.
28:31
SPEAKER_02: Very fun episode eight.
28:32
SPEAKER_02: You can check that out if you'd like.
28:34
SPEAKER_02: But Elon, in the Substack post, you explained that he accepts the court's holding for purposes of his argument, but that it doesn't follow that the Trump executive order was therefore unlawful.
28:46
SPEAKER_02: Can you unpack that?
28:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for the record, this is not why I got in trouble.
28:51
SPEAKER_00: But but it was a birthright-related thing, is why I got in trouble.
28:55
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
28:55
SPEAKER_00: But this is very interesting.
28:57
SPEAKER_00: So let's talk about this and then we could talk about why I got in trouble.
29:00
SPEAKER_00: Again, not that this is all about me, dear elicitors.
29:03
SPEAKER_00: This is about birthright and it's about truth, and that's uh uh what's really at stake here.
29:08
SPEAKER_02: Um getting you in trouble these days.
29:10
SPEAKER_00: Yes, it can, as I discovered on X, unfortunately.
29:13
SPEAKER_00: Um, okay, so remember there were two parts of the majority's holding in Trump v.
29:19
SPEAKER_00: Barber, the birthright case.
29:20
SPEAKER_00: The question here is what does subject to the jurisdiction actually mean?
29:23
SPEAKER_00: And they said if you're born on US soil and you are subject to US law, you are subject to the jurisdiction.
29:30
SPEAKER_00: That's holding number one.
29:32
SPEAKER_00: Holding number two was how do you explain the exemptions for ambassadors, foreign soldiers, and the Indian tribes?
29:40
SPEAKER_00: And they said there was this fiction of extraterritoriality.
29:42
SPEAKER_00: Okay, let me just say one thing about uh the flaws, uh, just since we're talking about it, just remind our listeners of the flaws of the majority here.
29:51
SPEAKER_00: And I talk more about this on the Blessings of Liberty podcast today with Jed when he goes after me for my birthright stuff uh and also my um Trump v.
30:01
SPEAKER_00: slaughter stuff.
30:02
SPEAKER_00: Um, so uh subject to a slaw.
30:08
SPEAKER_00: The problem is the Indian tribes were subject to a slaw.
30:13
SPEAKER_00: Right?
30:14
SPEAKER_00: And so uh the majority doesn't talk about the General Crimes Act of 1817.
30:20
SPEAKER_00: Justice Alito mentioned uh also the Trade and Intercourse Act of 1834.
30:25
SPEAKER_00: Let me read to you the Trade and Intercourse Act of 1834.
30:28
SPEAKER_00: The whole thing, no, I'm just kidding.
30:29
SPEAKER_00: Section 25, okay?
30:32
SPEAKER_00: Just Section 25.
30:34
SPEAKER_00: Quote That so much of the laws of the United States as provides for the punishment of crimes committed within any place within the sole and exclusive jurisdiction of the United States shall be in force in Indian country.
30:49
SPEAKER_00: Okay, the laws, the criminal laws, are in force in Indian country.
30:56
SPEAKER_00: Provided that the same shall not extend to crimes committed by one Indian against another.
31:00
SPEAKER_00: Okay, the persons are property of another.
31:02
SPEAKER_00: But uh, if there's any crime involving an American uh national, uh U.S.
31:07
SPEAKER_00: law applies.
31:08
SPEAKER_00: The Indian tribes were subject to U.S.
31:10
SPEAKER_00: law.
31:10
SPEAKER_00: Of course, they weren't subject to complete US law.
31:14
SPEAKER_00: And that was that's the difference, right?
31:16
SPEAKER_00: Being subject to the complete jurisdiction is what explains, actually explains the Indian tribe exemptions, the ambassador exemptions, foreign soldiers are subject to martial law, the military, you know, law of nations in that sense, not to the municipal law.
31:28
SPEAKER_00: And the argument I made is that when it comes to aliens, you had to be domiciled to be completely subject to the U.S.
31:34
SPEAKER_00: jurisdiction.
31:35
SPEAKER_00: You couldn't conscript foreigner uh temporary visitors, um, you couldn't exercise a general judicial jurisdiction over them.
31:41
SPEAKER_00: I mean, there are many ways in which UX the government exercises obviously more jurisdiction uh over temporary visitors than over Indian tribes, but it's still not a complete jurisdiction.
31:50
SPEAKER_00: Okay, anyway, whatever, put that aside.
31:52
SPEAKER_00: The question here, actually, but don't put that aside generally.
31:55
SPEAKER_00: Like, that's a serious flaw in the court's.
31:58
SPEAKER_02: That is a good point, but moving on.
32:00
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
32:00
SPEAKER_00: Okay, uh the extraterritorial question, by the way, also has a bunch of flaws.
32:06
SPEAKER_00: So let me just briefly remind our readers about those flaws.
32:10
SPEAKER_00: Uh, what do you do with the fact that like almost everybody, almost every single treaty, and almost every single Supreme Court decision described Indian territory as being a US territory, US soil.
32:21
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't extraterritorial fiction.
32:23
SPEAKER_00: The whole point is we hold them in trust.
32:24
SPEAKER_00: Remember Cobel v.
32:25
SPEAKER_00: Salazar?
32:26
SPEAKER_00: We hold the land in how can we hold the land in trust if it's not our territory?
32:29
SPEAKER_00: Like it's so the the the the whole thing doesn't make sense.
32:33
SPEAKER_00: Ford soldiers, okay.
32:34
SPEAKER_00: What do you do about the loyal citizens in occupied territory?
32:38
SPEAKER_00: Are they considered not on US soil?
32:40
SPEAKER_00: Well, their children born were actually considered to be birthright citizens.
32:44
SPEAKER_00: So like that's very awkward.
32:46
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, enough about my problems with the majority opinion.
32:50
SPEAKER_00: What David Hongs does in this essay, which is really nice, and we've talked a little bit about it on this podcast, is even if accepting as true the majority's holding, there already is an extraterritoriality fiction for temporary visitors and unlawfully present aliens, at least for some of them.
33:08
SPEAKER_00: So what he's arguing is even if the court's right that the explanation for the exemptions, historical exemptions, is a fiction of extraterritoriality, there is such a fiction.
33:17
SPEAKER_00: It's called the entry fiction.
33:20
SPEAKER_00: And at least it's not entirely clear uh why uh Trump's executive order would be unconstitutional facially, because it should apply to some people who are subject to the entry fiction.
33:30
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so for example, uh, remember uh by the way, just the obvious example, Catherine, is if like you're detained at the border.
33:38
SPEAKER_00: Like you're trying to sneak in, we catch you, and we put you in a detention center at the border.
33:43
SPEAKER_00: Are you in the United States?
33:45
SPEAKER_00: Like, are you entitled to all the benefits that come with being on US territory?
33:49
SPEAKER_00: No, for a long time, no, exactly.
33:51
SPEAKER_00: This is another leading question.
33:53
SPEAKER_00: But I have a favorable witness, you know.
33:56
SPEAKER_02: So No, but also we talked about things like you can't, you're not entitled to a lawyer in that position and things like that, right?
34:02
SPEAKER_00: Well, there are all sorts of uh due process does not apply the same, right, at the border.
34:07
SPEAKER_00: I think we talked a bit about that.
34:09
SPEAKER_00: Um and so yeah, the the the point is like the constitution doesn't fully apply uh when you're uh caught at the border and so on.
34:16
SPEAKER_00: Do you remember the case, uh Kathleen Vitod, I think it was, about the Russian girl uh who was let in um because it was World War I and she couldn't be sent back home.
34:25
SPEAKER_00: And so even though she wasn't allowed in the country, but she couldn't be sent back home, so they paroled her into the country.
34:31
SPEAKER_00: Um and her father was living in the country, her father naturalized, and so the girl, the Russian girl, said, Hey, I'm a citizen now, because the statutes allow the minor children of foreigners to naturalize along with their parents if the minor children were dwelling in the United States.
34:47
SPEAKER_00: And the court said, You're not dwelling in the United States.
34:50
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter if you've been here eight years, right?
34:53
SPEAKER_00: From in point of law, you have never left Ellis Island.
34:56
SPEAKER_00: You have never crossed the threshold, right?
34:59
SPEAKER_00: So this is an fiction of extraterritoriality.
35:04
SPEAKER_00: In other words, yes, maybe.
35:07
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't know.
35:08
SPEAKER_00: Like, I just so we've talked about Kaplan v.
35:11
SPEAKER_00: Todd or Todd v.
35:12
SPEAKER_00: Kaplan, I think it was Kaplan v.
35:13
SPEAKER_00: Todd before.
35:15
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, on our podcast, and we kind of made the point that this suggests that it would be weird to treat temporary visitors and unlawfully present aliens as being subject to the jurisdiction if you could create this entry fiction with respect to them.
35:26
SPEAKER_00: But what David Hongs, this Yale law student, does so brilliantly in the 10 pages is he just accepts the majority's holding and says, even so, how does that make all of the applications of the EO unconstitutional?
35:39
SPEAKER_00: Because some of them will be subject, some of these individuals subject to the EO will be subject to the entry fiction.
35:45
SPEAKER_00: So I don't know, like grounds for rehearing, I I don't know.
35:50
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
35:50
SPEAKER_00: I actually think it's quite plausible grounds for rehearing.
35:52
SPEAKER_00: Um, but how would that work?
35:54
SPEAKER_02: Like, what's the next step for the Trump administration?
35:56
SPEAKER_00: You would file something and you'd need a majority of justices to grant it.
36:00
SPEAKER_00: I don't think rehearing has been granted in six decades.
36:03
SPEAKER_00: So Amy Barrett, Amy Barrett would have to be like, oh, that's a good point.
36:07
SPEAKER_00: No one raised this implication of this holding that we made.
36:11
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I think it therefore warrants rehearing, but I don't, you know, I don't think Justice Barrett's gonna do that.
36:17
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
36:18
SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
36:18
SPEAKER_02: It's a good point, though.
36:19
SPEAKER_02: I mean, it does seem similar, the the case of the Russian girl and what we have now with all of these illegals who are residing in the United States but are not really obviously domiciled here because they're not here legally, right?
36:30
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
36:31
SPEAKER_00: And there's another example with a Chinese national.
36:33
SPEAKER_00: I mean, uh, where in the early 20th century they said you're not in the United States, you know, even though we let you in for some purpose.
36:40
SPEAKER_00: I can't remember the details of that case.
36:42
SPEAKER_00: Um, but yeah, I I don't know.
36:44
SPEAKER_00: I actually think it's pretty good.
36:46
SPEAKER_00: But I like I have I've already drunk the Kool-Aid catches.
36:50
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if I'm the uh the best person for it.
36:53
SPEAKER_00: Okay, why did I get in trouble?
36:54
SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about that.
36:55
SPEAKER_02: Leave a comment on our YouTube video.
36:57
SPEAKER_02: What do you guys think?
36:58
SPEAKER_02: Is that a good argument?
36:59
SPEAKER_02: And read the Substack too, or comment on our Substack because we haven't been seeing as many comments lately, and I love hearing from you guys, and I feel like we're not asking enough questions.
37:06
SPEAKER_02: We need to be telling our audience, we'd love to hear from you.
37:08
SPEAKER_02: I love hearing what you guys think.
37:10
SPEAKER_02: So drop a comment on YouTube.
37:12
SPEAKER_00: I do think you have to be a paid subscriber to comment on usually on Substack, but you should consider a paid subscription.
37:18
SPEAKER_00: We're going to start doing some live shows once we get a critical mass of uh paid uh subscribers.
37:23
SPEAKER_00: And quite we don't pay ourselves anything, it's all to kind of like help promote.
37:26
SPEAKER_00: So we would love that.
37:27
SPEAKER_00: And since we already have your attention, like leave us a rating on Apple.
37:30
SPEAKER_00: The ratings are important.
37:32
SPEAKER_00: Leave us a review uh if you've already left us a rating.
37:35
SPEAKER_00: We only have like a few actual written reviews.
37:37
SPEAKER_00: We would love, love, love uh your um reviews as well.
37:41
SPEAKER_00: But okay, Catherine, why did I get in trouble to set it up for everyone?
37:45
SPEAKER_02: Okay, I've been dying to talk about this topic in particular.
37:48
SPEAKER_02: Um, but you got, I don't know, you found yourself in various arguments on X over the last week.
37:55
SPEAKER_02: And it's funny because I think the reason why kind of contradicts an earlier point you made, which is that podcasts are a good platform to talk about these things um at length, right?
38:06
SPEAKER_00: But what happened is well, they can splice and dice and manipulate what you say on podcasts.
38:12
SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
38:13
SPEAKER_02: Got clipped up a little bit funky, although also I think the clip was just uh misunderstood intentionally.
38:19
SPEAKER_02: So, anyway, what happened is one of your academic nemeses, uh, you know, the list keeps growing, but this is kind of an OG academic nemeses.
38:28
SPEAKER_02: Um, he is at Georgia State University and basically.
38:31
SPEAKER_00: Oh, and you know, you know he's listening to our podcast, by the way.
38:34
SPEAKER_00: I've seen on his Blue Sky feed that he he's quoted from our podcast.
38:39
SPEAKER_02: Uh I hope he's at least getting paid by like Media Matters or something.
38:42
SPEAKER_02: You know, no.
38:43
SPEAKER_00: No, I doubt it.
38:44
SPEAKER_00: Maybe, but like they've got alerts for me.
38:46
SPEAKER_00: They read everything I post, they read everything, like they're waiting for me to say something racist.
38:51
SPEAKER_00: And here, my mistake for engaging him and saying something totally true and normal that apparently crazy liberals interpret as racist.
39:00
SPEAKER_00: Like, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know that.
39:01
SPEAKER_00: But okay, sorry, I'm jumping a little ahead.
39:03
SPEAKER_00: But good, good for you.
39:05
SPEAKER_00: Good for you at Georgia State over there.
39:06
SPEAKER_00: You you really got me.
39:08
SPEAKER_00: Good job.
39:09
SPEAKER_02: Well, he basically lied about what you said in one of these podcast appearances.
39:14
SPEAKER_02: He made it sound as though you were saying um that England didn't want assimilation for the past a thousand years.
39:21
SPEAKER_02: And he laughed at this, saying the Normans literally were invaders ruling England.
39:27
SPEAKER_02: Okay, anyway, you defended yourself by pointing out what you actually said, which is one, it can take a thousand years to develop habits of thought and culture that make liberal democracy and constitutional government possible.
39:41
SPEAKER_02: True.
39:42
SPEAKER_02: Two, you can't import millions of people without assimilation today and expect them to share those important habits.
39:50
SPEAKER_02: True.
39:50
SPEAKER_02: And somehow this is an interpretive.
39:53
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for the ready covet direct.
39:55
SPEAKER_00: Yes, this is obviously all true.
39:56
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
39:57
SPEAKER_02: It's not a direct quote.
39:58
SPEAKER_02: Sorry, I was adding my own my own flavor.
40:00
SPEAKER_02: Uh, and somehow he's interpreted this to say the English wanted assimilation in 1215.
40:08
SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
40:08
SPEAKER_02: So you unleash this whole kind of firestorm and you were called bigoted and racist, of course, because that is what the left loves to do.
40:18
SPEAKER_02: Um, but I do feel like it bothered you a little bit, maybe.
40:21
SPEAKER_02: So why don't you talk about it and uh get into your thoughts a little bit?
40:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, okay.
40:27
SPEAKER_00: So, first of all, this Georgia State professor who I know is listening, well played.
40:32
SPEAKER_00: Well played.
40:33
SPEAKER_00: Like you deserve like a little like credit, right?
40:36
SPEAKER_00: Um basically lie to his audience about what I said.
40:40
SPEAKER_00: And then when I corrected, like, no, I didn't say that England wanted assimilation for a thousand years.
40:45
SPEAKER_00: Like, I know that there was lots of invasions and mixings of culture, you know, and and so on.
40:51
SPEAKER_00: I didn't say that.
40:52
SPEAKER_00: Here's what I actually said, and then he said, Oh, so what you actually said is racist, right?
40:58
SPEAKER_00: So, like, well played.
40:59
SPEAKER_00: Like, well played.
41:00
SPEAKER_00: Having said that, like, I don't think it was racist.
41:04
SPEAKER_00: And um, I do care, I guess.
41:06
SPEAKER_00: Like, I've I've not been called racist before, I've not been called bigoted before.
41:10
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
41:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, does that surprise is that something that just happens a lot?
41:15
SPEAKER_02: I think that just that tends to just happen to people on the right quite frequently, but also I would say it used to happen to me in college.
41:22
SPEAKER_02: I think I went to college kind of in the height of like everything is racist, like 2015, 2019, where I couldn't say anything in class without it having like um white supremacist undertones or things like that, you know.
41:34
SPEAKER_02: But I thought we were kind of past this personally, and we were on to a more serious discourse about these issues like culture and and assimilation, but apparently not in some sections of the left.
41:45
SPEAKER_00: Apparently not.
41:45
SPEAKER_00: So in class, were you like, I really think it's important that we be polite to one another.
41:50
SPEAKER_00: White supremacy.
41:52
SPEAKER_02: White supremacy literally, I was taught, I was taught the oppression structure very seriously.
41:57
SPEAKER_02: Like, you know, you can't be speaking as much if you're a white man.
42:01
SPEAKER_02: I mean, what come on?
42:02
SPEAKER_02: We're still over that.
42:03
SPEAKER_02: If you're still stuck on that, get out of here.
42:06
SPEAKER_00: Dark times.
42:07
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
42:07
SPEAKER_00: Wait, that's also racist.
42:09
SPEAKER_00: Okay, I've got to be careful.
42:11
SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry.
42:13
unknown: Thank you.
42:14
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
42:15
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, so um I, you know, so I guess there are two things.
42:18
SPEAKER_00: One is the merits of the claim that I'm making, right?
42:21
SPEAKER_00: Which is like it can take a thousand years for cultures to develop liberal democracy, which it did, like liberal democracy is the exception in human history, right?
42:30
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and then there's a separate question of how long uh it would take people from different cultures to assimilate into that culture, which is a separate question on the merit.
42:43
SPEAKER_00: And people seem to like be totally incapable of reading, right?
42:47
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and then I use the word importation, which they didn't, some people didn't like, though um apparently it has sort of like racist overtones or undertones, uh, tones, uh, which I'm going to defend, I guess, a little bit my use of that word.
43:01
SPEAKER_00: Um, but uh yeah, I just want to start with like, first of all, disappointed that people, I don't know, like who should know better have are totally incapable of like reading what I actually wrote, right?
43:12
SPEAKER_00: So, like someone from the Cato Institute, like our favorite.
43:16
SPEAKER_00: Uh I actually thought my tweet was pretty good in response to him.
43:20
SPEAKER_00: It was a more aggressive than I normally get.
43:22
SPEAKER_02: It was Would you like me to read it?
43:24
SPEAKER_02: We I put it in the notes here.
43:25
SPEAKER_02: So, okay, first of all, this is the Cato Institute guy.
43:29
SPEAKER_02: He tweets shocker that the guy leading the academic effort to deport US-born Americans thinks that it'll be thousands of years before immigrants' descendants can develop habits of thought and culture that make liberal democracy possible and calls immigrants imported people.
43:45
SPEAKER_02: Okay, also worth noting, the Cato Institute and this guy in particular just advocates for open borders.
43:50
SPEAKER_02: Like that is that that's what he wants.
43:52
SPEAKER_02: And he thinks somehow he's morally superior, as if if we had open borders, there would be anything morally good about that.
44:00
SPEAKER_02: Outcome, but okay.
44:01
SPEAKER_02: You quote tweeted and said, shocking that someone affiliated with Cato misreads a post.
44:06
SPEAKER_02: Everyone can read for themselves to serve a narrative.
44:08
SPEAKER_02: I don't come even close to saying this in the underlying tweet, and I'm embarrassed for your once great institution.
44:15
SPEAKER_00: Pretty good, right?
44:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thank you.
44:18
SPEAKER_00: So we have you on the show.
44:19
SPEAKER_00: Um you are so affirming.
44:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, like I didn't say it'll take immigrants thousands of years to develop the culture.
44:27
SPEAKER_00: The quest it takes thousands of years for culture, a culture to develop this.
44:33
SPEAKER_00: And there's a separate question of how many foreigners from foreign cultures without that culture, right, to integrate and assimilate into the culture.
44:44
SPEAKER_00: That may not take a thousand years, that could take a generation, but it requires on the quantity of immigration, whether it comes with certain conditions, right?
44:51
SPEAKER_00: And so it's just like he's totally incapable of reading.
44:53
SPEAKER_00: And kind of interestingly, there was also an AEI person whom I'm not going to name, American Enterprise Institute, but I'm not going to name the person, uh, who also quote tweeted it.
45:02
SPEAKER_00: And again, he's for open borders.
45:04
SPEAKER_00: And it's like he said the same thing.
45:05
SPEAKER_00: Like, Worman thinks it'll take 900 years to for him and other immigrants, you know, because my parents were immigrants, to develop habits of culture.
45:13
SPEAKER_00: Like, I didn't say that.
45:14
SPEAKER_00: I literally did say that.
45:15
SPEAKER_02: And I was thinking your parents?
45:18
SPEAKER_00: No, he knows.
45:19
SPEAKER_00: I mean, he he knows.
45:20
SPEAKER_00: Like it's not hard to find.
45:22
SPEAKER_00: Like my dad's obituary, you know, explains you know, it's not hard to find, right?
45:26
SPEAKER_00: That I'm a second generation, first generation.
45:29
SPEAKER_00: I was born to immigrant parents, right?
45:31
SPEAKER_00: Um, and uh this is like, but it's like that's not what I said.
45:34
SPEAKER_00: And so I was thinking of saying, what is it with like open borders think tankers that makes them incapable of basic reading comprehension?
45:41
SPEAKER_00: And like, do you play this fast and loose with the data too?
45:44
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, oh, I'm not gonna go into that.
45:46
SPEAKER_00: But here I just went into it on the podcast.
45:48
SPEAKER_00: So I guess I went into it anyway.
45:50
SPEAKER_02: Well, and it seems like they're ignoring your actual point, which is that, you know, we don't necessarily know.
45:55
SPEAKER_02: I mean, the the how long it takes someone to assimilate is based on a lot of factors.
45:59
SPEAKER_02: But clearly, when we have a huge amount of immigration like we did under Joe Biden, it's going to be harder for people to assimilate.
46:06
SPEAKER_02: But there are other factors, like, yeah, how comparable your culture is with American culture.
46:11
SPEAKER_02: It's going to take you longer to assimilate or maybe harder in general.
46:14
SPEAKER_02: And they just seem to be ignoring that point and obviously misreading what you wrote, to ignore having that more important and possibly difficult conversation.
46:24
SPEAKER_00: I agree.
46:26
SPEAKER_00: And another thing that, you know, prevents them from having that conversation is they focus on the word importation, which that I used.
46:33
SPEAKER_00: And so can I just say like one quick?
46:35
SPEAKER_00: I mean, so two defenses of this.
46:37
SPEAKER_00: Defense number one is it's actually quite a convenient word when you think about it.
46:40
SPEAKER_00: Like, um, now look, I wrote the tweet fast, so I'm not gonna pretend like I had a well thought out like why did I say importation?
46:47
SPEAKER_00: But I was thinking like, what are the like alternative words that one could use?
46:52
SPEAKER_00: Like you could say invite, but that's not entirely accurate because some of them are uninvited.
46:56
SPEAKER_00: You could say let in, but some aren't let in.
46:59
SPEAKER_00: They're they they sneak in, you know, and so like there are lots of variants of invited, let in, snuck in, like, okay, well, one word to explain the idea is the like importation of foreign ideas and foreign cultures and foreign peoples.
47:14
SPEAKER_00: Now it turns out, and this is sort of my second defense, that that's actually how they spoke, right?
47:19
SPEAKER_00: Um, for a long time, probably until the last decade or two about this question.
47:24
SPEAKER_00: So it's like no longer politically correct, but I don't care like what's politically correct or not correct, right?
47:29
SPEAKER_00: So we have two examples.
47:31
SPEAKER_00: So Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin both explained, you know, uh used the term importation of foreigners, and also had some like serious questions um about it.
47:40
SPEAKER_00: So I think we put it uh in the notes.
47:42
SPEAKER_00: So in uh the notes uh on the state of Virginia, what query was this?
47:47
SPEAKER_00: I think it was query eight, maybe.
47:50
SPEAKER_00: Um he says, I don't know, like you're this is gonna probably sound right to you, Catherine.
47:56
SPEAKER_00: He says the present desire of America is to produce rapid population growth by as great importations of foreigners as possible.
48:04
SPEAKER_00: But is this founded in good policy?
48:05
SPEAKER_00: The advantage proposed is the multiplication of numbers, but are there no inconveniences to be thrown into the scale against the advantage expected from a multiplication of numbers by the importation of foreigners?
48:15
SPEAKER_00: So, first, of course, note the use of the word importation of foreigners.
48:19
SPEAKER_00: And then he says, if we do import a bunch of foreigners back at his time, right, they're going to come from monarchical governments, from monarchical regimes.
48:27
SPEAKER_00: And he said, they will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth, or if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing as is usual from one extreme to the another.
48:39
SPEAKER_00: It would be a miracle were these immigrants to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty, their principles with their language, they will transmit to their children in proportion to their numbers, they will share with us the legislation, they will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it heterogeneous, incoherent, and a distracted mass.
48:58
SPEAKER_02: This is spot on, but also so interesting to me because I think this the idea that I had was, you know, around this time of the founding, they were like, bring everyone, bring them all in.
49:09
SPEAKER_02: We're a nation of immigrants, bring whoever.
49:11
SPEAKER_02: And it seems like maybe that wasn't.
49:13
SPEAKER_02: They were actually much more intentional about the culture that they were creating in America, or at least having this open discussion about it that now apparently we're too afraid to have after we've spent these hundreds of years trying to develop and preserve that culture.
49:27
SPEAKER_00: There's a great book by David Hackett Fisher called Albion's Seed, which explains sort of these four major waves of immigration to the colonies.
49:38
SPEAKER_00: And they weren't even Germans and Norwegians.
49:42
SPEAKER_00: It was it's called Albion's Seed.
49:45
SPEAKER_00: Why Albion?
49:46
SPEAKER_00: Perfidious Albion, where does that come from?
49:48
SPEAKER_00: The poem?
49:49
SPEAKER_00: Albion is Britain, England.
49:51
SPEAKER_00: It comes from the British Isles, these four waves of immigration, right?
49:54
SPEAKER_00: And so you say nation of immigrants is because, yeah, because the Protestants hated the Catholics and the Scots hated the Irish and the Irish hated the English and the, you know, but they were all sort of from the United Kingdom type, Great Britain type.
50:08
SPEAKER_00: Uh so anyway, uh you know, we were a nation of immigrants in that sense.
50:15
SPEAKER_00: And then once you establish this liberal democratic culture, you can bring in and allow in, dare I say, import people from other cultures in sufficient numbers, you know, certain quantities, so that they can assimilate into those habits of thought.
50:30
SPEAKER_00: And okay, as we know from our last episode, Catherine, Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, so maybe we have to ignore everything he said.
50:37
SPEAKER_00: But Ben Franklin said it too, right?
50:39
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you know, Thomas Jefferson had his faults, but uh Benjamin Franklin in a 1755 essay wrote the importance.
50:45
SPEAKER_00: By the way, Ben Franklin, founder of the first abolition society in the world.
50:50
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so you cannot accuse him of the same thing that you accused Thomas Jefferson of.
50:54
SPEAKER_00: Okay, but what did what did he say in his 1755 essay?
50:56
SPEAKER_02: He said the importation of foreigners into a country that has as many inhabitants as the present employments and provisions for substance will bear, will be in the end, no increase of people unless the newcomers have more industry and frugality than the natives.
51:12
SPEAKER_02: And then they will provide more substance and increase in the country, but they will gradually eat the natives out.
51:19
SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's pretty that's pretty harsh.
51:22
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
51:24
SPEAKER_00: The next the next passage is good, though.
51:25
SPEAKER_00: Good.
51:26
SPEAKER_02: Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our anglifying them?
51:35
SPEAKER_02: And will never adopt our language or customs any more than they can acquire our complexion.
51:40
SPEAKER_00: Now the complexion thing is interesting, which is like Germans, like, is it is it different, that different complexion?
51:46
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
51:46
SPEAKER_00: I don't quite understand it.
51:48
SPEAKER_00: But like, note the point.
51:49
SPEAKER_00: I mean, one, of course, is the use of importation, but note the the the merits point, the substantive point is he's not saying no immigration.
51:56
SPEAKER_00: He's saying you can't have aliens come in in so numerous numbers that we will then just become like them.
52:04
SPEAKER_00: Which I mean, it's obviously true, right?
52:06
SPEAKER_00: We have a country of 300 million Americans.
52:08
SPEAKER_00: If tomorrow you bought brought in imported 500 million uh from some different culture, why would they assimilate to us as opposed to bringing their cultural habits to simply the new land and the new territory, right?
52:21
SPEAKER_00: And so uh again, the question is how many foreigners can we admit into the country?
52:27
SPEAKER_00: There's gonna be like an optimum amount and there are gonna be optimum conditions, right?
52:32
SPEAKER_00: Uh, in order to promote this liberal democratic uh values, constitutional um culture.
52:38
SPEAKER_00: And it's just it just doesn't have to do with race as such, which maybe I guess goes to the broader philosophical conversation of like, are all cultures the same?
52:47
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
52:47
SPEAKER_02: Right.
52:48
SPEAKER_02: I think so.
52:48
SPEAKER_02: Well, and and it's an obvious question in part because we all see it.
52:52
SPEAKER_02: We see the ways that we've let in too many immigrants under, you know, a lot of it, Joe Biden or or Obama too.
52:59
SPEAKER_02: Like here in Minnesota, we have a large Somali population.
53:02
SPEAKER_02: And it's they've had a really hard time assimilating because there's been so they're so numerous that they can create their own enclaves.
53:08
SPEAKER_02: And now this idea of multiculturism, multiculturalism, which everyone on the left thinks is is good, is not playing out because we have complete schools for their culture and then complete schools for the existing culture.
53:21
SPEAKER_02: And so it's not this blending that the left says that they want, which I think would be ideal.
53:26
SPEAKER_02: But maybe if it would have happened slower over more time, would have allowed more, you know, space for assimilation, maybe this could have happened a lot better.
53:34
SPEAKER_02: But they don't want to have that conversation about what's the sweet spot.
53:37
SPEAKER_02: They don't seem to care.
53:39
SPEAKER_00: And I remember like in the elections, there were some stories about how the Somali community itself divided along tribal lines and like voted along tribal lines.
53:47
SPEAKER_00: And so, like, obviously, like you need some degree of assimilation to make liberal democracy work, right?
53:53
SPEAKER_00: It cannot be that you just vote along tribalistic lines.
53:56
SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, why not just have tribalistic government, right?
53:59
SPEAKER_00: Why not just have bloodlines and you know, uh, so it just it just can't work.
54:04
SPEAKER_02: Things like ballot harvesting, um, they find they they they find to be normal in their community and with their culture.
54:09
SPEAKER_02: They think it's okay that someone fills out the ballot for them.
54:12
SPEAKER_02: And now we have these election fraud issues, and and it's a big issue.
54:15
SPEAKER_02: But like I think there's a sweet spot there of somewhere where we can allow assimilation, but it's not what we're doing right now with mass importation.
54:23
SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, go ahead.
54:26
SPEAKER_02: I was just gonna say we can move on to your next point, which is a good one.
54:29
SPEAKER_02: Are all cultures the same?
54:31
SPEAKER_02: Are they all created equal?
54:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, defend basically the merits.
54:34
SPEAKER_00: The first question, right?
54:36
SPEAKER_02: Well, another should I go on to the other law professor that went after you?
54:39
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
54:41
SPEAKER_00: One of my new nemeses.
54:43
SPEAKER_00: So I'm up to five, I think, by the way.
54:45
SPEAKER_02: Brand new added to the list.
54:46
SPEAKER_02: Um, he wrote a whole substack post about you, and he did he called you bigoted.
54:51
SPEAKER_02: And it's actually quite amusing because as I was reading this, it was quite long.
54:56
SPEAKER_02: As I was reading this, I was like, okay, I think everything Elon says is pretty much true.
55:01
SPEAKER_02: Uh, I think he actually said your he presented your point, I think pretty fairly.
55:06
SPEAKER_02: Um let's read two paragraphs for him from his substack.
55:10
SPEAKER_02: He says, the bigoted move comes next.
55:13
SPEAKER_02: Those dispositions are assigned to a particular civilization.
55:17
SPEAKER_02: Constitutional democracy becomes the product not of institutions operating in the present, but of a people developing across centuries.
55:25
SPEAKER_02: The law is the surface.
55:27
SPEAKER_02: Beneath it lies culture.
55:29
SPEAKER_02: Beneath culture lies history, and only some people have lived the right history.
55:33
SPEAKER_02: The result is a division between populations that possess constitutional habits and populations that do not.
55:39
SPEAKER_02: Some people arrive carrying an accumulated inheritance of liberty.
55:42
SPEAKER_02: Others arrive carrying the consequences of autocracy, hierarchy, religious difference, poverty, or political disorder.
55:48
SPEAKER_02: They may learn the constitutional rules, they may recite the creed, but they do not necessarily possess the deeper habits that make the rules work.
55:57
SPEAKER_00: By the way, what's the over that's basically true?
55:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, basically everything except the first sentence about it being bigoted is true.
56:03
SPEAKER_00: Um by the way, what's the over-under on this having been written by AI?
56:07
SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's got a couple AI elements, I will say.
56:11
SPEAKER_00: It just feels very AI-y, but um yeah, look, I just so then I caught- I saw I retweeted this, and then I said, like, again, I'll all I'm saying is not all cultures have the same contemporary capacity for constitutional self-government, and then I got called racist again.
56:27
SPEAKER_00: Um, and so or I did wasn't okay.
56:30
SPEAKER_00: To be fair to them, my ideas are racist, is what they say, which is okay, really, really subtle move.
56:34
SPEAKER_00: Good job, uh, distinguishing the person from uh the ideas.
56:38
SPEAKER_00: But like, honestly, it's like we should take a deep dive when Josh is back uh uh onto this uh question of culture.
56:44
SPEAKER_00: Because when did the left become so obtuse and ignorant?
56:47
SPEAKER_00: It is obviously true.
56:48
SPEAKER_00: I was actually just reading a book about this, and it was in the height of wokeness where you it where it became racist to distinguish cultures.
56:56
SPEAKER_00: Okay, I don't I missed that.
56:58
SPEAKER_00: I must have missed that uh because I always thought it was racist to distinguish on the basis of race, and uh but culture like is a bit different, right?
57:07
SPEAKER_00: Or I that wasn't exactly a good even definition of racism because there are distinctions um among races, um, biological differences, uh which we can go into um just like there's just distinctions between men and women.
57:19
SPEAKER_00: The question is whether those are relevant to anything, and the answer is probably not, but culture obviously matters, and it's not necessarily connected with race, right?
57:28
SPEAKER_00: So Tocqueville made this point in Democracy in America about mores, right?
57:32
SPEAKER_00: If if culture didn't matter, okay, then let me ask you this.
57:36
SPEAKER_00: And oh, I'm gonna get in trouble for this one, Catherine.
57:38
SPEAKER_00: Are you ready?
57:39
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
57:39
SPEAKER_00: Steal yourself.
57:41
SPEAKER_00: If culture didn't matter, why is it that despite one and a half millennia, okay, 1,500 years of development, there's not a single dependable dependably democratic Islamic country anywhere in the world.
57:56
SPEAKER_00: They conquered nearly a third of the world, maybe more.
57:59
SPEAKER_00: So geography, climate isn't the answer.
58:01
SPEAKER_00: Uh it has nothing to do with race because they there's multiple ethnicities given the breadth and range of the Islamic conquest.
58:08
SPEAKER_00: There's an old joke about Islamic democracy.
58:10
SPEAKER_00: I think I learned it from Bernard Lewis, the late historian uh of Islam.
58:14
SPEAKER_00: Uh, the joke is one man, one vote, once.
58:20
SPEAKER_00: So it's like, you know, that's literally what you saw in Gaza in 2007.
58:24
SPEAKER_00: Like, oh, let's have elections.
58:26
SPEAKER_00: And Hamas quote unquote won, which is easy to do when you kill all the moderates before the election.
58:31
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
58:32
SPEAKER_00: And then there were no elections ever again.
58:34
unknown: Okay.
58:35
SPEAKER_02: I mean, we did everything we could do to help as the US, you know, but no, I mean, it couldn't be done.
58:40
SPEAKER_00: Correct.
58:41
SPEAKER_00: For a long time, by the way, and again, just to emphasize this has nothing to do with race.
58:45
SPEAKER_00: It was widely accepted.
58:46
SPEAKER_00: And it's still probably true that Protestantism was more conducive to liberal democracy for obvious reasons.
58:53
SPEAKER_00: Protestantism encouraged people to read and think for themselves.
58:57
SPEAKER_00: It democratized congregations, it democratized religious worship.
59:00
SPEAKER_00: Catholicism was really obsessed with ritual and hierarchy and authority, right?
59:07
SPEAKER_00: And so until the Second Vatican Council in like the 60s, many Catholic countries were not dependably democratic.
59:14
SPEAKER_00: And then you had this third wave of democratization, largely because of the liberalization of the Catholic Church.
59:20
SPEAKER_00: Now, some might say, well, economics matters.
59:23
SPEAKER_00: Okay, well, what, you know, uh so actually, a very intelligent law professor from the University of Chicago, Brian Leiter, said, isn't it just about economics if they reach a certain state of economic growth and so on?
59:33
SPEAKER_00: Like, okay, what conduces to economic growth in free markets?
59:37
SPEAKER_00: Culture, maybe?
59:38
SPEAKER_00: Does culture have something to do with it?
59:40
SPEAKER_00: Remember like Max Weber and the Protestant work ethic?
59:42
SPEAKER_00: Now, obviously these things interrelate with one another, but to say culture doesn't matter and to say that any assertions to the contrary are necessarily bigoted and racist is just utterly, utterly anti-intellectual.
59:52
SPEAKER_00: And quite frankly, the people making these claims, I think, should be embarrassed that to be law professors, right?
59:58
SPEAKER_00: This these aren't academic ideas.
1:00:00
SPEAKER_00: They're anti-academic ideas that they are advancing.
1:00:04
SPEAKER_00: And that's really sort of the last point I wanted to make, I guess, in defense of all the, you know, against all the attacks I've been getting.
1:00:10
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I think it's pretty obvious that if you want to say that all cultures are inherently equal, you can't also say that you're a feminist, for example.
1:00:18
SPEAKER_02: You can't also say that you care about equality and women's rights if a culture that does not support those things is actively abusing and um oppressing women is equal to one that does not.
1:00:31
SPEAKER_02: I feel like that's pretty obvious.
1:00:33
SPEAKER_02: And that's okay.
1:00:34
SPEAKER_00: That's a great point.
1:00:35
SPEAKER_00: That's a great point.
1:00:36
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, so so if it's okay, by the way, all right, answer me this, okay, my critics.
1:00:44
SPEAKER_00: Okay, seriously, come on the show.
1:00:46
SPEAKER_00: We'll have you on the show, maybe.
1:00:48
SPEAKER_00: Maybe not.
1:00:49
SPEAKER_00: No promises.
1:00:50
SPEAKER_00: If if it's not okay to criticize other cultures, if if all cultures are created equal, then why can't you say that about America circa 1800?
1:00:58
SPEAKER_00: That's a culture.
1:01:00
SPEAKER_00: But everyone constantly says America was evil and terrible.
1:01:03
SPEAKER_00: Well, you're just you're just doing cultural racism.
1:01:06
SPEAKER_00: Why are you being racist against American culture in circa 1800 or circa 1860?
1:01:11
SPEAKER_00: Because the a country's own past is a different culture.
1:01:14
SPEAKER_00: And so if you can't criticize contemporary culture for differences, why can you criticize a past culture, including your own culture, for differences?
1:01:22
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't make sense.
1:01:23
SPEAKER_00: And indeed, to connect culture to self-government, what is the like what is more obvious than the culture of slavery and slavocracy being incompatible with democratic self-government?
1:01:36
SPEAKER_00: Why is it that anti-slavery abolitionist thought exploded onto the world stage in the mid-18th century?
1:01:43
SPEAKER_00: It's because, in part, Adam Smith, but also like Montesquieu.
1:01:48
SPEAKER_00: Montesquieu, in his Spirit of the Laws, which is all about how culture affects laws and laws affect culture, okay, explained that slavery was promoted despotism.
1:02:01
SPEAKER_00: Why?
1:02:01
SPEAKER_00: Because it created habits in the master.
1:02:04
SPEAKER_00: The master, the slave owner, would become himself despotic toward the people around him and his enslaved property.
1:02:12
SPEAKER_00: And if you develop despotic habits through the culture and institution of slavery, you're going to translate that into principles of government, which is you can do that in the South.
1:02:22
SPEAKER_00: They were basically an oligarchic, anti-democratic society.
1:02:25
SPEAKER_00: And so do they disagree with that?
1:02:27
SPEAKER_00: Do my critics disagree with that?
1:02:29
SPEAKER_00: Do they think a slave culture is created equal?
1:02:33
SPEAKER_00: Question one.
1:02:33
SPEAKER_00: And do they think a slave culture, a slaveocracy, a culture with slavery, has no effect on the principles of self-government, that slave owners are equally capable of creating a democratic uh society, a constitutional self-governing society of liberal democracy?
1:02:50
SPEAKER_00: I highly doubt it.
1:02:52
SPEAKER_00: I highly doubt it.
1:02:53
SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's that's very interesting.
1:02:54
SPEAKER_02: And I think it goes back to your point about assimilation that, you know, maybe some cultures are going to be harder to assimilate into ours than others.
1:03:02
SPEAKER_02: I think that's pretty obvious depending on what your culture looks like.
1:03:05
SPEAKER_02: But I also want to pull out one other thing from what he said in this substack because I thought it was revealing.
1:03:11
SPEAKER_02: Um he makes this point about American nativism, which is, I guess, bad, he says.
1:03:15
SPEAKER_02: Um he says American nativism is about preserving the authority of established members to decide what the newest arrivals have not earned membership.
1:03:25
SPEAKER_02: I what I take from this, which I thought was interesting, is that he sees no virtue in preserving America's unique and incredible qualities, like freedom and equality and things that the left used to pretend to care about.
1:03:39
SPEAKER_02: He now defines as just what the established members want to preserve the authority of.
1:03:46
SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's not it at all.
1:03:47
SPEAKER_02: What this conversation about is about preserving the things that make America great.
1:03:51
SPEAKER_02: And those things are things like freedom and equality.
1:03:55
SPEAKER_02: So to abandon that and to make his argument, I think kind of gives away the plot that he seems to not care about preserving those things whatsoever.
1:04:03
SPEAKER_02: And for me, it's hard to um rationalize with those people.
1:04:07
SPEAKER_02: I think we have very different outlooks on our country.
1:04:10
SPEAKER_02: I think preserving those ideals is one of my, it defines my political view, it defines my beliefs.
1:04:16
SPEAKER_02: I think that that is the most important thing we have to do here as Americans is define the things that make us great and have made us the best, most successful society in the world that has allowed for human flourishing.
1:04:27
SPEAKER_02: And I think clearly he does not agree with that.
1:04:31
SPEAKER_00: Catherine, as always, a rational and based point to take us home.
1:04:35
SPEAKER_00: So that's all we have time for today.
1:04:38
SPEAKER_00: We think Josh will be back with us uh next week.
1:04:40
SPEAKER_00: So please stay tuned and thanks for listening.
1:04:42
SPEAKER_00: And hit that like and subscribe button.