Latest / rationally BASED / Episode 42 | Civic Terrorism Is Not Protest

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Episode 42 | Civic Terrorism Is Not Protest · rationally BASED

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome back to Rationally Based, a podcast about law and politics on the edge.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Elon Werman, a law professor at the University of Minnesota Law School.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_04: I'm Josh Kleinfeld, former Chief Counsel of the U.S.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_04: Department of Education, and now Rouse Professor of Law at Scalia Law School.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm Catherine Johnson with Center of the American Experiment.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_02: Catherine, what's on deck?
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, a little bit of a different episode today.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: We're diving into one terrible story out of the New York Times from about a week or so ago.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: The Libs simply cannot fathom having to live next to a public figure that they disagree with.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: And in this case, that's Chief Justice John Roberts.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: His main neighbors are causing him some trouble.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: So first, we coin a new term, civic terrorism, which we want to explain.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: Second, should there be legal consequences for such civic terrorism?
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: We discussed some options.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: And third, we talk about leftist cruelty throughout history.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: You will not want to miss this one.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: Let's dive in.com so we can stay in touch with you.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_02: Also, we've hit some milestones this past week.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_02: Josh, you want to talk about those?
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, we are at 14,200 uh subscribers on YouTube.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_04: Uh that does not include our Spotify and Apple Podcasts uh uh um numbers, but 14,000 on 200 on YouTube after like five months in existence is pretty amazing.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_04: Drives a lot of traffic, even on the audio feeds, and 15,000 would be a big landmark for us.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_04: So I just want to say to our audience, please, please help us get there.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_04: Uh like and subscribe uh on YouTube and on whatever platform you use so that we can grow.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_02: And one way you can do that is by listening to our episodes twice every week.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_02: First, and sometimes, you know, you'll you'll just learn more and you'll absorb more that way.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I tell my students to really learn administrative law, you have to take the class twice.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_02: And then they kind of chuckle nervously.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: But anyway, you can listen to that Apple and then also watch on YouTube.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's kind of fun to watch.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: But also, I'll say we had 10 million views on YouTube, which was uh a milestone as well.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_02: But okay, enough about us.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: Just thank you so much for your support, is what we're trying to say.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: And please keep it up.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: It's so, so important this early stage.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_02: So we really appreciate uh you all, our audience.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, Catherine, Josh, New York Times.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, this was such an interesting story.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: So the New York Times, the failing New York Times, uh, put out a pretty depressing story recently about Chief Justice John Roberts and the island in Maine, where he's spent his summers for the last 20 years.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's like this tiny little secluded island that I don't think there's even cars allowed.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: You have to boat out there and then walk.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and he used to go there to basically get some peace and quiet during the summer months.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but that all really ended, his peace and quiet anyway, uh, after the court overturned Roe v.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: Wade and all hell broke loose.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: So the article details things like a group of lefties calling themselves, I'm not kidding, kayaktivists who have begun regularly protesting uh right outside his home in the water by his property.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: And they even have waterproof signs that say crazy things and they'll like link arms and they're kayaks, and all of these people look exactly like the image you have in your mind right now.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'll just say we're not breaking any stereotypes here.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, a friend recalled a recent outing also in this article where they were just walking along in this small town, and people recognized the chief justice as he walked by a brewery and started chanting that you should be ashamed of yourself.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: One of the people featured in the piece is a local journalist, heavy air quotes, named Becca Shaw Glazer.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: She put out this really awful piece in their local, now defunct paper, I guess, um, where she wrote, quote, should you see Chief Justice John Roberts duck into squidding coffee or the Port Clyde General store this summer, consider letting him know exactly what you think of him and his illegitimate, ultra-conservative court.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yell, boo, whisper, weep audibly, give him the thumbs down or the finger, hand him a note, refuse to serve him.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: The New York Times put a nice picture of her looking very proud of herself in the paper.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: Clearly, she sees nothing wrong with what she's doing.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, again, exactly who you'd expect.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think she has like three different hair colors going on.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, now, this isn't our usual story, obviously, about legal doctrine, but it relates to the law, Chief Justice John Roberts, and uh more importantly, to the leftist extreme tactics we've been talking about on this podcast for a long time.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: I think Josh, you were probably the one among us who was most moved by this piece.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: Why don't you start us off with your thoughts?
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, thank you, Catherine.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_04: I I am really passionate about this issue of leftist harassment and menace and just cruelty, which the media dignifies with the word protest.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_04: And I thought this story, I thought the behavior described in the story was just despicable.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_04: I've never in my life said to another group of people, any group of people, hey, that guy, John Doe, whoever, let's make him miserable.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_04: If you see him, yell at him, give him the finger, refuse to serve him, go to his house, ruin whatever peace he has there, mob up, destroy his happiness.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_04: Like I've literally never done that.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_04: And I bet that most of us have never done that, or at worst did it in like middle school and then learned to regret it as we grew up, right?
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_04: It's like middle school cruelty in the adult world.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_04: But on the left, it's happening a lot and it's getting worse.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_04: So when the court was deciding the Dobbs case, Chuck Schumer stood on the Supreme Court steps and he threatened the justices.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_04: He said, I'm gonna quote him, I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_04: Reap the whirlwind?
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_04: Pay the price?
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_04: Are you kidding me?
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_04: That sounds like some kind of like jihadist threat.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_04: Can you even imagine Senator John Thune threatening Sonia Sotomayor that way, you know, standing outside the Supreme Court and saying, you'll reap the whirlwind, you'll pay the price.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_04: You think the media wouldn't go crazy in that case and say that was a threat to this uh this Supreme Court justice?
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_04: Well, after Schumer said that, this group called Ruth Sentus posted a map of the six conservative justices' addresses, and mobs gathered outside them, chalked the sidewalks.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_04: One guy was caught outside Kavanaugh's house with a gun, zip ties, and burglary tools.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_04: He was caught and he confessed that he was intending to murder the justice.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_04: The group, Ruth Sentus, got criticized after that.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_04: And guess what they did?
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_04: They doubled down.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_04: They uh promised to come back and protest at those houses again the next day, which they did.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_04: Meanwhile, the Biden White House said the protests were peaceful, the judges' homes were not off limits, and I'm gonna quote the press secretary for the White House quote, we encourage that outside of judges' homes, and that's the president's position, right?
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, that is not just wrong, that is illegal under existing law.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_04: So a federal statute 18 USC 1507 says, quote, whoever with the intent of interfering with or influencing any judge pickets in or near a residence occupied by such judge shall be fined or imprisoned.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_04: You could argue that the president and the press secretary and that group Ruth sent us were suborning a crime, which is itself a crime.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_04: But US attorney Merrick Garland chose not to enforce the statute.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: Well, he was busy going, he was g busy going after parents at school board meetings.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_04: But go.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, right, exactly.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_04: Let's go after the parents.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_04: So that's just one example.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_04: I could multiply these examples.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_04: In May of this year, there was a fake 911 call saying they heard arguing and gunshots at Amy Coney Barrett's house.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_04: It was fake.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_04: And beyond the courts, you know, Adam Smith, who's a pro-Israel Democrat in Congress, said he was going to vote against cutting off aid to Israel.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_04: And then a staff member of his was beaten in the street.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, Adam Smith's home was vandalized.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_04: A fire was set in his driveway, and there were all night demonstrations outside of his house.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_04: And he voted the other way.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_04: He voted against Israel and released a statement essentially admitting that he was voting that way in order to get the violence to stop because he was intimidated.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_02: So we are by the way, I hadn't heard I hadn't heard about the Adam Smith thing.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_02: And that's really serious.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_04: Like I hadn't heard that either Sorry, sorry, I'm I'm so passionate.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_04: Go ahead, Elon.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, and I was gonna say that I just wanted the audience also understand that you know he was a Democrat, right?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_02: Which you said.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_02: But also Amy Barrett, that's called SWATTER, right?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_02: Like people have died through these false 911 calls that basically send SWAT teams to the residents.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_02: So this is like really serious.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_02: They wish death upon these people, right?
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: If they could get away with it.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, I'm sorry, I know.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_04: From a democratic perspective, we are literally seeing elected representatives changing their vote because of violent intimidation, which, by the way, has long since happened in countries like the Netherlands and the UK and other countries.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_04: It's just coming here too now.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_04: And it's only happening on one side, it's the left.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_04: Don't ever let anyone tell you it's both sides or do both sides ism.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, it's a total double standard.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_04: You know, there are no mobs outside of Kagan's home.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_04: If a right-wing nut job said what this Glazer woman said, that he's gonna hound and encourages other people to hound Katanji Brown Jackson, I guarantee you there will be no fawning picture of him in the New York Times.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_04: You know, if right-wing students on campus took over buildings to like protest the Black Lives Matter movement and it spilled over into individually harassing black students, I guarantee you there would be a ton of expulsions.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_04: It would be nothing like what we've seen with Jewish students.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_04: So it's just critical to see that this is not both sidesism.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_04: This is a left-wing violence problem.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_04: And a lot of people on the right have bemoaned the breakdown of civility with a sort of, you know, what is the country coming to angle?
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_04: And I totally agree with that, but I think that we are falling victim as on the right to just whining, just bemoaning, just saying, what is the country coming to, and just stopping there and being unwilling to go beyond wine politics and actually talk about, you know, what actions to take in response to this, how to think about this problem, like going deeper than just bemoaning the state of things.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_04: So that's what I propose.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_04: To all of that is set up, I want to make three to four points, depending on time, about what's going on here and how we should think about it.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_02: So, Josh, before you jump in there and I want to get Catherine's take here as well.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, on the double standard thing, I only have sort of personal experience, right, as an anecdote uh here, although obviously it's true just empirically what you're describing.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, one is uh I saw I have seen two Supreme Court justices out in the wild.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_02: Uh one was uh Justice Ginsburg, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the other was Justice Elena Kagan.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_02: Both of them were dining out when I was living in DC.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um Justice Um Ginsburg, by the way, dining like royalty, you know, like in a very fancy restaurant, holding court in a big circular table.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_02: Justice Kagan was in jeans and a t-shirt and having like a night out with a friend uh at Pineapple and Pearl was that restaurant.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: And the crazy thing is, in both situations, it took everything in my power not to harass them by asking for their autograph.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, that was how I was going to harass them.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: Not like, oh, I think your jurisprudence is ridiculous.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: Though Kagan, that wouldn't be true.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_02: I actually think she's a wonderful writer and a really good justice.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: She's the best one that there is, you know, um, appointed by democratic president.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_02: And it took everything in my power not to go and like get that a copy of the constitution signed by her.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_02: That was it.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_02: Never even crossed my mind that I would have something to protest.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_02: Now, another example.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the Montessori.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_04: Could I just quickly interject there?
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_04: What kind of a person would you have to be to go over there, give them the finger, and start yelling at them?
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_04: Like you are not the kind of thing.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_04: I can't even imagine.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_04: I can't even imagine it.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and uh there was another example where um, you know, the the Montessori where I was sending uh one of my kids uh in Minneapolis, mayor Jacob Fry sent his daughter there, and I ran into Jacob Fry a couple times, and he's kind of crazy.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, he's a crazy leftist, probably terrible mayor.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, I saw him once, I was like, oh, I wasn't even didn't even cross, I mean, it crossed my mind briefly.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_02: Like, literally, I thought, what would a liberal do if this were a conservative mayor?
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_02: And then I'm like, yeah, I'm not even gonna bother him.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_02: Like, he should get on with his day and his life.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_02: No way.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_02: It would be insane to bother him where his daughter goes to school and is dropped off just because I can.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_02: It would be uncivil.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_02: It would be cruel, it would be inhuman, you know, inhumane, whatever the word is.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_02: And that's literally what liberals do all the time.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_02: So double standard, absolutely true, but enough of my anecdotes.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_02: Catherine, I know you wanted to jump in.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, first of all, you guys are better people than me.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: I have seen our governor Tim Walls once in person at the state fair, and I was physically held back and dragged away by a friend of mine because I was so angry.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: This is not long after COVID, and I was so angry.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: No, this is good.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_03: Tit for tet, right?
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_03: It's tit for tat versus do we disarm?
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_03: But anyway, we'll get to that more.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_03: But we'll get to that.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_03: I have some caveats.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: I was held back, okay?
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I didn't really actually do anything, but I was like fuming out of my hairs.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I and I will say, Is it like an NBA basketball hold me back thing where it's like, why aren't you holding me back right now?
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_04: I don't really want to fight.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: No, I will say it goes to my response a little bit, I think, because I'm just so I'm sick of talking about this, and I'm sick of even frankly having sympathy for people on our side who are going through this because it's been going on for so long.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like I grew up with a family who was involved in politics.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and my dad was getting death threats to our house in 2001.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: He had a secretary that said uh in his law firm that said, I'm so sorry, I'm never picking up your phone again because they won't stop threatening me because liberals were trying to ruin his life, you know, back in 2001.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you're completely right, Josh.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's time that we move on to the next step.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's not just complaining about this, and and we move on to doing something about it.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: And to me, I think maybe that is tit for tat, and we can talk about that.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but another part of this is you have to be prepared if you're going to be a conservative in today's day and age.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think we all just have to come to this realization that you have to be willing to give up most of what you have, especially if what you have is a nice coastal community where you go to cigar club with your friends and everyone has nice mansions on the water.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, my sympathy has run out.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: If you are going to serve on our Supreme Court, you have to be ready to give it up.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I think of your comment too, Josh, where um, you know, we worry about the way people vote afterward.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of people speculated after Amy Coney Barrett testified saying, you know, I had to put on, she had to put on a bulletproof jacket after the Dobbs leak and had to do that in front of her children.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's awful.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: But people have speculated.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: Has she voted any different?
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: Pure speculation, you know, no, um, you could probably assume no, but it's something to think about.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like, would that make someone vote differently?
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: And that just has to be part of our vetting process moving forward.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: If you are going to be a leader in this movement, you have to be prepared to put on the bulletproof vest and tell your kids, this is why I'm doing it, it's worth it for this reason.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm willing to put it all on the line for this country because frankly, there's no intermediate conservative view that is acceptable to your friends and your elite circles.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so I agree with you, Josh.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: In short, I think we just need to move on.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm very excited to hear your solutions.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, okay.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_04: I've got three things, well, maybe four, to say, depending on time.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_04: So here's number one.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_04: We need to stop calling this kind of mob aggression protest.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_04: We need words matter.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_04: We need to stop using the left's words.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_04: You know, the word protest carries this warm glow because it carries the cultural memory of the civil rights era.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_04: You know, it's highest expression of democracy, the media says.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_04: Or, you know, I there was a children's book, A Is for Activist, right?
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, I actually think voting is the highest expression of democracy, and protest is a decidedly mixed bag, and activism mostly sucks.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_04: But I will acknowledge that protest was just magnificent when like Martin Luther King Jr.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_04: marched on Washington and said, I have a dream, right?
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_04: That's magnificent.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_04: My dad was in that march, by the way.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_04: But set that aside, right?
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_04: Because we don't need to fight that cultural fight because what we're talking about right now is not protest.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_04: It's not protest, it is civic terrorism.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_04: What is the distinction?
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_04: The line between the two is taking a stand on a public issue in a public place versus trying to make a concrete person's life a living hell and create fear and menace in anyone who might think the same as that person.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_04: Um, you know, marching on Washington to say, I have a dream, that's protest.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_04: What about the KKK burning across on someone's lawn?
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_04: Right?
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_04: That is not protest.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_04: And it's not just because the content is bad, like the message is bad, it's the individuation.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_04: It's the terror to concrete individual people.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_04: So let's go back to that main woman, Glazer, who wrote the article saying, you know, go after Robert.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_04: She said, should you see Chief Justice John Roberts duck into squid ink coffee at the Port Clay General Store, yell, yell at him, weep, give him the thumbs down, give him the finger, hand him a note, refuse to serve him.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_04: What is that closer to?
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_04: That is punishment of a concrete individual human being.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_04: But think about like the campus mob surrounding Jewish students and screaming at them, screaming, you can see it on YouTube, screaming in individual faces.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, that's not protest.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_04: That's menace.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_04: It's menace politics, it's its purpose is to create fear.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_04: So the term I propose that we on the right stop start using, and when we stop using the word protest, which is the left's word, civic terrorism.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_04: That's the term I propose.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_04: It's civic terrorism.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_04: Now I was brainstorming this.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_04: I came up with some others, menace politics.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_04: That works.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_04: Mob aggression, not bad.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_04: Tactical cruelty, uh, it is tactical, as I'll discuss in a in a minute.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, listen, I can come up with terms.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_04: There's 30,000 people or more listening, you decide which to adopt, but I think civic terrorism is the best.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_04: And let me tell you one thing: it is not protest, it is not noble, and it it goes without saying that civic terrorism is not admirable.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_04: So when leftists and when the media, and by the way, I would use the term leftist rather than liberal, because there are a lot of liberals who do not agree with this tactic.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_04: But when leftists call this protest, and when the media echoes them, don't let it go unanswered.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_04: Call it what it is, call it civic terrorism.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_02: So I love this term, civic terrorism.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I just want to luxuriate over it for a second.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_02: And why do I think it is so apt?
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_02: Is because it really highlights and gets to the heart of part of this leftist project, which is to make politics inseparable from ordinary civic life.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_02: And by civic, I mean economic life, family life, civic society.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: That's why civic terrorism is so perfect, because it's motivated.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_02: Their outrage, their installation of fear in other people is motivated by politics, by their political ideology.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_02: And they want it to bleed into civic life.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_02: They want you to be afraid in your, not in your political life or in your political capacity, but in your personal, private, and civic life.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas the right conservatives believe in separate fears.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_02: They're connected, of course, um, but they are separate spheres.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: And in fact, it has long been held by most conservatives.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_02: Milton Friedman stated this most um succinctly and and and poignantly, that you can only have freedom in one sphere if you also have freedom in the other sphere.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: So here's what I mean.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_02: We've talked about this before on the podcast how if uh the government controls the means of production, then you can't be politically free because you better tow the party line.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: Otherwise, your, you know, your very ability to exist and to survive economically and to feed your family will depend on your agreeing with the party line.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_02: So you must separate economic freedom, uh, you must have economic freedom in order to have political freedom, right?
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: It goes beyond, though, the state, though.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_02: And we've talked about this on the podcast before.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_02: Private power.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_02: If private power is so concentrated that you effectively can't be politically free because you're gonna lose your job if you say something totally normal, but that offends the powers that be.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: Or we've talked about the um Aaron Persky, you know, the judge in the Brock Turner case, who not only was recalled for imposing what really seemed like a reasonable sentence, certainly to him, um, in the Stanford sexual assault case, they wouldn't even let him re-emerge as a tennis coach, a high school tennis coach tennis coach.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_02: Again, they want to alter your political views and even your official job duties because they want to make it impossible for you to simply live.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_02: One more example is family.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_02: Like, oh, you're against trans, trans ideology.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_02: We'll take your children from you, right?
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_02: If you don't afford Affirm someone who's slightly gender confused, then we're going to destroy your family.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: So again, historically, this idea that there should be civic separation, family separation, economic separation, these spheres of independence from the state was essential and central to both the way liberals thought and to the way conservatives thought.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_02: But the way leftists think today is that again, there is no separation.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_02: The politics is the be-all, end-all.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_02: Everything must be subordinated to politics.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: The means must justify the end.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_02: We will make you suffer civically, economically, in your family life if you don't agree with us.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_02: And that's why civic terrorism is so perfect, because it blends these two spheres together.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_02: So I love it.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_02: Josh, what was your second point or reactions to what I just said?
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_02: But feel free to move on.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_02: Point number two.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_04: A lot of these civic terrorist tactics are already illegal or against institutional rules.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_04: So if you hear someone saying, well, there's nothing we can do, you know, don't believe it.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_04: If you hear someone saying, well, it's all First Amendment protected, I mean, it's protest, it's freedom of assembly, it's freedom of speech, that person doesn't know the law.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_04: Don't buy it.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_04: There is relevant law, it exists.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_04: There are institutional rules, they exist.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_04: The problem is not a lack of legal options here.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_04: It's that officials refuse to enforce the options that there are.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_04: And we on the right need to have a policy of enforcement and insist on a policy of enforcement.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_04: So the media assumption is that, you know, it's any protest, it's all protest, and any protest is First Amendment protected.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, as far as they're concerned, you know, in the BLM riots, if you burn down a store, it might be First Amendment protected.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_04: Like the First Amendment is some sort of force field that comes down over everything in the world that involves people making a political point.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_04: That is not how the First Amendment works.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_04: Any lawyer who says that is an idiot.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, the right to protest is not a right to vandalize, to threaten, to do all sorts of things.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_04: Civic terrorism is not First Amendment protected.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_04: So let me give some examples.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_04: I just quoted 18 USC 1507.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_04: It is a crime to protest outside a judge's house with intent to influence his or her carrying out of their job, right?
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: Josh, Josh, does that apply if you're in a kayak?
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: Is there a water exemption?
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, just check it out.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_04: And it's a federal law.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_04: The Coast Guard could sweep them up and should.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_04: No, I'm not kidding.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_04: The Coast Guard should get those people.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_04: In fact, it's not just the crime of 18 USC 1507, it is also conspiracy to commit that crime.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_04: So for the lawyers in the room, conspiracy is entering into an agreement to commit a crime with third parties, and it is a separate crime from the target crime.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_04: If one person was, you know, in that kayak outside Robert's home, protesting with intent to influence his decision, that person could be prosecuted.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_04: If a group of them do it in a coordinated function, that's also conspiracy.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_04: It's a double cry.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and I already told you how Merrick Garland explicitly and publicly declined to enforce 18 USC 1507.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_04: There are also criminal statutes about menace, which is putting someone in reasonable fear of physical harm.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_04: Apply that to the UCLA students who blocked Jews from entering a section of campus.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_04: There are criminal statutes about trespass and kidnapping.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_04: Apply that to the Columbia students who took over a building and took a janitor hostage.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_04: There are criminal harassment and stalking statutes.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_04: What is that?
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_04: Criminal harassment is generally defined as unwanted repeated behavior that causes a reasonable person to feel alarmed, distressed, or in fear for their safety.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_04: There are solicitation statutes soliciting another person to commit a crime.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_04: That woman who wrote the op-ed against Roberts, it was an op-ed.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_04: I think it's protected, but there's an interesting question whether that in itself, in asking people to harass him, constituted solicitation of 18 USC 1507.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_04: I mentioned conspiracy statutes, by the way, there are also civil lawsuits that overlap and go beyond the criminal statutes.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_04: You could sue for harassment.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_04: You don't need a prosecutor, you can do it privately.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_04: You can sue for the relevant kind of conspiracy.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_04: The BLM rioters, that kind of civic terrorism, you could sue for the vandalism and looting, even if you live in a blue state where the mayor or the governor won't enforce the law.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_04: And by the way, if there are any rich people listening to this podcast right now, create a fund for the litigation, right?
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_04: Suing for civic terrorism.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_04: Make it possible for those store owners, for people of ordinary means to pursue civil lawsuits against civic terrorism.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: And subscribe to our Substack while you're at it.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_04: But like university officials can enforce these rules, not just prosecutors.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_04: And folks, if university officials, deans, provost presidents say, well, we can't do anything.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_04: They're students, they're exercising their right to free speech.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_04: Don't believe the hype.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_04: Universities can and do expel students when they want to.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_04: You know, if UCLA students had done to black students what they did to Jews, had said this is a black free zone, expelled, I guarantee it.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_04: I've spent my life in universities, no question, right?
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_04: So it's not a can't.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_04: It's a won't.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_04: It's a choice.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_04: And it's not rocket science why they don't want to punish their own.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_04: So listen, if Elon and I wanted to do a deep dive on the legal options available here, that would be a podcast in itself.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_04: There's a lot.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_04: But my point here is about choice and political courage.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_04: Not creating consequence is a choice.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_04: On the left, it's a choice to support their own rather than the law.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_04: But on the right, it's a choice.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_04: And that's why I have a beef with some of my fellow people on the right.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_04: They do nothing and they even oppose others doing anything because what they really want is to whine and bemoan and not insist on action.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_04: And they say that that's part of the conservative temperament.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_04: They say that's part of prudence.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_04: But we are in a particular moment in this country, a moment where there is a rising tide of left-wing terrorism that is having real effect on the behavior of political officials, like uh that Democratic congressman who voted the other way and essentially admitted it was because of the violence.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_04: At a moment like this, prudence is not passivity, it's action.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_04: And that's that's my point number two.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_04: That's the next thing I want to say.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_02: So, Josh, I have so many questions here.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_02: I don't disagree with you in principle, right?
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_02: But part of the problem is it's kind of like the state bar situation.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_02: The state bars are even in red states are captured by the left and liberal attorneys and leftist attorneys.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's going to be hard to punish people the way they punish us.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_02: But even if that weren't an issue in red states as well, all the government lawyers are in the in DC, subject to the DC bar.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_02: And the DC bar is not going to go after the right.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_02: Look at these universities.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not saying there isn't a top university in a red state.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_02: There obviously are, but the ones where all the protests happened, right, were in New England or in California, UCLA.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_02: And they're, they have, as you said, they're interested, not just the institutions, but the state governments.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_02: They're not going to go after these people because they're their own.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_02: So isn't the problem here not only in other words, you can say that these break the law and/or civil criminal punishments should be appropriate, but it is something else entirely if you're in a blue state where judges are going to give all the wrong instructions, where the prosecutors aren't going to go after them.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_02: And isn't that what we have?
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_02: Like, how do we overcome that problem, right?
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't know.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know that there's a solution.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but that's just one possible roadblock uh to this.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_02: But I think I agree with you that there should be consequences.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_04: Um and Elon, what I would say is don't underestimate the lack of will and courage on the right, because that's a factor here, too.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_04: I do not deny your point.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_04: Obviously, you're right that the deck is stacked in so many instances.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_04: And, you know, you but I'll say a few things about that.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_04: First of all, civil lawsuits can be privately filed, right?
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_04: So responding with consequences, with action, with something other than passivity is possible privately with lawsuits.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_04: Um, often, you know, the federal government alternates between right and left.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_04: And often when, you know, local governments in blue states fail to act, the federal government can.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_04: By the way, that's the story of Reconstruction, right?
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_04: True.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_04: Southern states refused to prosecute people who were engaged in persecution.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, and uh uh the federal government had the tools to step into the breach, and sometimes vice versa, right?
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_04: And, you know, when when I was in the Trump administration, one of the things that really astonished me is how often it would be the case that we were trying to do something that was real.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_04: We didn't just bemoan what the universities were doing.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_04: We came after them for anti-Semitism, we came after them for discrimination and admissions, we came after them for uh enforcing intellectual orthodoxies that were inappropriate for institutions receiving taxpayer funding or subject to the First Amendment.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_04: And what happened?
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_04: A phalanx of Federalist Society lawyers and others on the right attacked the administration for doing anything other than just whining and complaining.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_04: They were perfectly comfortable with the whining and complaining that had been going on since Alan Bloom published Closing of the American Mind in 1986 or 87 or whatever it was, when I was just like tiny.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_04: Uh but they wouldn't, and when finally a Republican administration was doing something, who is in the opposition?
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_04: This whole phalanx of so-called conservatives.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm saying we have to get over that if we're gonna deal with this problem.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, fair enough.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_04: What was your third point?
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_03: Because I there's so much good stuff here.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_04: I know.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_04: Point number three, I'm trying to hold myself back because I really do feel strongly about this.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_04: Point number three.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_04: Civic terrorist tactics are working, and they're working for game theory reasons we on the right have to understand.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, so we have to get abstract now and think about the strategic logic of competitive political situations.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_04: So look at that main op-ed calling for the harassment of Chief Justice Roberts from a structural and strategic perspective.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_04: Look at it very abstractly.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_04: If you think of it that way, what Glazer proposed was simply an aggressive action.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_04: Never mind what the content of it was, treated as the X in an algebraic equation.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_04: She proposed an aggressive action.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_04: There were a series of letters to the editor disagreeing with her proposal.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_04: If you look at those letters equally abstractly, all of them amounted to saying, or almost all of them amounted to saying, don't do that.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_04: We shouldn't do that.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_04: They did not say, let's take an equally aggressive action against you.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_04: And what that means strategically is if she wins, as she did, by the way, the Chiaktivist show, she won.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_04: If she wins, she gains political utility.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_04: And if she loses, it costs her nothing.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_04: So just to get clear on, I mean, people who have done game theory know that you put numbers on things to get clear, right?
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_04: So let's put some numbers on this.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_04: If she wins, it's worth, let's say, 10 political utility points.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_04: If she loses, it costs her zero.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_04: So if she cares about her goal, what's her rational response just strategically?
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_04: Well, that's like saying, okay, Elon, Catherine, you can invest in a stock.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_04: If it goes down, you lose nothing.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_04: I'll insure you against loss.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_04: But if it goes up, you're going to make a ton of money.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_04: You get all the gains.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_04: You should always invest, right?
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_04: On the same logic, the left should always aggress.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_04: So think about the kayaktivists.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_04: They might intimidate Roberts.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_04: They might influence him.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_04: They might get him to change.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_04: They'll presumably get at least the emotional satisfaction and the social credit in their evil little community of making him miserable.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_04: There's no cost to them because no one is imposing consequences.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_04: So they should do it, right?
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_04: It's heads I win, tails you lose.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_04: And this strategic structure, I submit, has been repeated a hundred thousand times over decades.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_04: And it is the key reason, I say that advisedly, the key reason why the right has lost almost the entire society.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_04: You know, students on campus say, this professor said something anti-woke, anti-DEI, fire him, take him away from to tenure, take away tenure from him, do, you know, string him up by his ankles, right?
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_04: They're proposing something aggressive.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_04: It might succeed or fail.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_04: If it succeeds, it's huge.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_04: It changes the culture.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_04: It's the equivalent to taking territory in war.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_04: It's a lasting shift in the power structure on campus.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_04: But if they fail, so what?
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_04: They don't get punished.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_04: Nothing ever happens, right?
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_04: It is costless to fail.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_04: In fact, they often gain socially.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_04: Think about the court packing debate we're seeing right now.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_04: Same structure, right?
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_04: The left is saying, let's do something really aggressive.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_04: Let's pack the court, right?
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_04: The right isn't saying, oh, okay, let's let's change the rules of the game for some institution you control.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_04: Let's uh pack the boards of universities, let's pack your state supreme courts, whatever, right?
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_04: They're not saying anything like that.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_04: They're saying don't stop, don't do that, don't pack the court.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_04: Same structure, right?
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_04: At best, at best, the right sometimes insists on institutional consequences.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_04: So, like there's anti-Semitic activity by universities, and maybe they owe a fine, or there's biased admissions, maybe they owe a fine.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_04: But notice, that's almost never adverse consequences for the individual students or professors or administrators who are responsible for the anti-Semitism or the bias.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_04: In fact, it's often the opposite on an individual level.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_04: For those individuals, it's still heads I win, tails you lose.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_04: The institution pays the fine.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_04: They get the social credit and emotional satisfaction and possibility of success that comes from their activism.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_04: So that's a classic kind of principal agent problem or public choice theory problem.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_04: So, anyway, this is analyzed in game theory.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_04: And it's actually analyzed in my criminal law scholarship.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_04: The you aggress, I say stop strategy has been proven empirically in game theory to be a one-way ratchet and a sure loser.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_04: The functional strategy is tit for tat.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_04: Now I hasten to add, tit for tat doesn't mean you do exactly to them what they do to you.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_04: There might be moral reasons for not doing that.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_04: There might be side constraints.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_04: I think there are side constraints, but you do not just say stop.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_04: You do not just try to prevent.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_04: If you want to preserve a shared value or norm, you have to impose penalties for norm breaking.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_04: There have to be consequences and often individual consequences.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_04: And again, we on the right just have to understand this game theory aspect of it because civic terrorism is not just a sort of spontaneous instinct, it's a tactic and it's working.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_04: We know from game theory why it's working.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_04: We know how to stop it.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_04: We've got a deep failure of political will, and we have to fix that.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_01: This is really interesting in light of something we have going on here at my own organization and in Minnesota, which is that people on the right continue to have events that are disrupted by psychos on the left.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, this happened to us at our event uh back in, I think it was March, April, May, somewhere in the spring this year.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it recently just happened to the Republican Party at their event as well.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: These people jump out of the crowd.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: They've actually bought tickets to the event.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: They jump out of the crowd then with big signs that say KKK Republicans or whatever.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, one person got on stage at this Republican event, um, whatever.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_01: And they've actually also done this to people on the left.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: They protested an Amy Clober event not that long ago, and they also protested the USPS um gathering that was in Minnesota because like Trump's ballot thing or something.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: So this is impacting a lot of people.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_01: And we talked about it over the weekend and we're like, well, there has to be a consequence.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_01: There hasn't been a consequence because, you know, we're in Minnesota, Hennepin County, no one's gonna go after them.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um and if you know anything about what Minnesota's uh attorney, U.S.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: attorney right now is dealing with, he's got a lot on his plate.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so I'd love for the federal government to come in and try and do something, but I don't have a lot of hope that's gonna happen because I'm guessing this maybe isn't uh of the highest priority.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_01: So we made the decision we're gonna name these people.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well, as we find out who they are, we're gonna publicly say, here's their name.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_01: They continue to do this over and over.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: And we think that people should know they shouldn't be able to do this anonymously anymore, essentially.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so of course, this week it's been spiraling a little bit.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_01: People have learned where the main girl works.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: People have been calling her employer, things like that.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so we've had this kind of internal debate of like, is that a good thing?
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: That maybe now the consequence she faces is that she's gonna get fired from her job.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_01: That seems like it could be possible based on what we're seeing online.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_01: What do you guys think about that?
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_01: Is that an appropriate tit for tech consequence?
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna be named if you're doing these actions, or should we, you know, as an organization who is impacted, just keep our mouths shut and say, whatever.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's just, you know, part of the game.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_02: Can I make two points here?
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_02: One in reaction to what Josh says and one in reaction to what you said, and they're related.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_02: So I want our audience to be clear on what Josh is proposing.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_02: And this goes back to the anti-weaponization fund discussion that we got some heat for on this podcast, even though we stand by everything we said.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_02: There are two forms here of tit for tat.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_02: One form would be oh, the right should just assume civic terrorism for itself, it should protest Ginsburg or Jacob Fry or whatever or um Wall's, you know, if Catherine almost terrorized him, I guess.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_02: You really would have been scary, Catherine.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so that's one option.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_02: And we're not actually proposing that because we think it's evil and immoral and cruel.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_02: We are not.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_04: I just want to I just want to echo that, Elon, explicitly.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_04: Like, I I think there are limits, there are side constraints, they are moral side constraints.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_04: I do not propose tit for tat, meaning you do to like eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, you do to them everything they do to you, because sometimes you can't for moral reasons.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_02: But to be clear, what you are saying is for those who engage in that on the left, for those individuals, there should be consequences.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not tit for tat, it's just you you tit and we will tat you.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_02: That, you know, I don't know.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_02: We needed you as sort of expression for it, but you understand, right?
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's the same anti-weaponization.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_04: How about we say lawful consequences for wrongful action is but what about social?
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what about social consequences?
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: What about your job?
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's the thing where I think things get a little bit hairy that you know, we would never call for this person to be fired, but other people are.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_02: I that would be true.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: Good.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_02: I think social consequences are included in this, if by which we mean, you know, uh, you know, you are doing something that terrorizes someone because of their political views in their civic life.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_02: Therefore, we should punish you by getting you fired from your job.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's different than saying we should adopt cancel culture writ large.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_02: Saying we should cancel people engaged in canceling is, I think, in the spirit of what Josh has been saying.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, maybe it makes you a bit more uncomfortable because, again, it bleeds into that civic private sphere, whereas you just want legal consequences of some kind, uh, for to the extent it's illegal for the civic terrorism.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I don't want to lack the courage of my convictions.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_04: And it just is the case that a lot of the time this stuff will happen totally extra legally.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_04: Like, like imagine there's a school setting.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_04: I think about my daughters in this respect all the time, right?
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_04: Like, they're not highly political people.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_04: I actually kind of hope they don't become highly political people, right?
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_04: And if there are people who will deprive them of their social standing and social opportunities in, you know, in high school or eventually in college or whatever, um, they will be intimidated out of speaking and possibly they will be intimidated out of their views themselves, right?
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_04: So that kind of purely social intimidation, which is not illegal and not legally actionable, um, can be very, very effective.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_04: And if we want it to stop as a society, there has to be a sort of tit-for-tat relationship.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_04: There has to be social consequences imposed the other way.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_04: I am so uncomfortable imposing them myself or doing them in the individual case.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_04: It's just not who I want.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_04: At the same time, we have to.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_04: I yeah.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but think about this: like, if you store like I in my I work for a conservative organization, if I stormed the stage at like the DFL convention and I grabbed the mic, my ass would be fired from this job immediately.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_01: No questions asked.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's insane behavior.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, what we've seen is everyone on the left embracing it.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think that the difference there, maybe we can find a happy medium.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_02: Let me give you another example because I maybe, Josh, you are lacking a little bit the courage of your conviction.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_02: So let me shore up your let me shore up your courage.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_02: Let me let me shore up your courage.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_02: What are some examples where people were saying you You should be canceled on the right.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_02: We're saying that of people on the left recently.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_02: And people were like, oh, you're just adopting cancel culture.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_02: But actually, no, it was adopting consequences for their cancel culture.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_02: People who celebrated the murder of Charlie Kirk.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_02: Why is that different?
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_02: Why is that different?
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_02: Because by celebrating the murder, you literally want people to die for their political views, which is the pinnacle of the civic terrorism we're talking about.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_02: And if you adhere to that view, you are engaged in that same civic terrorism.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_02: And we should not, we should not tolerate civic terrorism.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_02: And we should be able to cancel people who wish violence upon other people because of their political views.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think it's a stretch for also the people who believe in the mass slaughter of Jews, you know, um, who, again, for political ideological reasons, believe personal consequences should be visited upon private individuals, including Israeli citizens and innocent civilians and Jews on college campuses.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_02: And like we sh there should be consequences for believing those kinds of things, right?
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_02: Again, it's not tit for tat.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_02: We're not saying, let's go murder whatever that guy's making.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_04: We're not endorsing killing anyone.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_04: No, or no, but let alone doing it.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_02: So I I think the cancel culture on the right has been different because it is targeting the people who are celebrating this kind of civic terrorism or doing the civic terrorism that is uh the such a big part of the problem, right?
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the only other point, Josh, I was gonna say before letting you move on to your other point, by the way, is the but feel free to respond to anything I've already said.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_02: It goes back to this double standard thing.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's Catherine's point about there are no consequences because you know these are prosecutors, you know, uh in Hennepin County.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_02: They're not gonna bring charges against the people that stormed a center of the American experiment.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_02: Again, can you imagine me yelling at Jacob Fry or Catherine getting on a stage and grabbing a microphone, right?
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_02: Similarly, can you imagine a prosecutor, a serious prosecutor in a red city or in a red state not going after a Republican who terrorizes and vandalizes and burns down a home or burns down some public building and some public protest?
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_02: Of course not.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_02: They would be in prison the next day.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_02: You can, and they will do that left and right.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_02: But when you think about these blue jurisdictions, like justice is not blind for them.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's all about political power.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's all us versus them.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's identity politics, Josh.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_02: As much as you said, the truth is justice is not blind and impartial in blue jurisdictions because they will not go after people impartially and neutrally.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_02: They will go after the right more than the left.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_02: And that's part of the problem.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_04: And tacking back to my last point, it's a game theory problem.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_04: Because if you have that structure repeat over and over again, the double standard problem, right?
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_04: When you have that repeat over and over again across multiple domains throughout our very complex society, eventually you just lose.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_04: You have to lose.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_04: There's no other way.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, can I just say one more?
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I have one more.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_02: I just want to say one more thing about this, and which we'll dot dovetail into point number four.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_02: I want our audience to know that what's her name?
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_02: I've got to look at my notes now.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_02: Hold on.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_02: Becca Schawglazer, the person who, the chai activist, we have her address.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_02: We found her physical address, we found her email address, and you know what we could do right now?
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_02: We could do this, these consequences.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe I am now don't have the conviction, you know, courage of my conviction.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_02: But the point is, we're not gonna do that.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_02: We're not gonna do that.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_02: But we should we want you to know that we can.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_04: And just so you know, folks, her name was in the New York Times.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_04: It's not like we went and found it.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_04: She was Jane Doe before that.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_04: No, her name and her picture were in the New York Times story about this whole thing, so this is just public information.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_02: But like, even I'm not ready to do that, to impose those consequences and to sick everyone on it, even though, again, yeah, even though it's what we're sort of talking about, right?
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so it just shows you that we are the conservative sensibility is just kinder and less cruel.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_02: And that is my way of segueing to what I think Josh wanted to talk about next, was cruelty.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_02: At least that's what he planned to talk about.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_04: Point number four.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_04: And here I'm gonna put my teacher hat back on and my philosopher hat back on.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_04: I want to talk for the moment about the nature of political cruelty, the nature of cruelty.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_04: The media presents civic terrorism, which they dignify with this term protest, which it is not, as the highest expression of democracy.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_04: And they present all of this aggressive activity as activism, which also is supposed to be admirable, right?
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_04: But it's not, it's not protest, it's not activism, it's not admirable.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_04: What it is is cruelty.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_04: So what is cruelty?
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_04: I'm a philosopher.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_04: I want to propose a definition.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_04: Cruelty is acting with the immediate aim of causing pain to something with a face.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_04: Cruelty is acting with the immediate aim of causing pain to something with a face.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_04: Why a face?
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_04: Because cruelty is not abstract, it's concrete, it's about the relationship between I and thou, you know, self and other.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_04: It's second personal.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_04: It's it's about you and me.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_04: And the symbol of that is a face.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, why immediate pain, excuse me, immediate aim of causing pain?
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_04: Because cruelty is not about causes.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_04: It doesn't matter what you're fighting for.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_04: It's not, you know, cruelty is not redeemed by a just cause.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_04: It's not about your ultimate motive.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_04: In fact, I think motive doesn't matter.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_04: Behavior doesn't cease to be cruel because it's in the service of someone's beliefs about justice or about good cause or any cause.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_04: Whatever your ultimate motive, your immediate aim is to cause pain to another person or animal bearing a face.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_04: Why?
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_04: Well, first because ends don't justify the means.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_04: We've known that since time immemorial.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_04: Because people are fallible and their beliefs about justice are fallible.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_04: So really, none of us, none of us, us included, ever really know, with like God's knowledge, that our cause is just.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_04: All we know is that we're hurting someone for the sake of something we believe is just.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_04: And if you accept human fallibility, you don't do that.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_04: And in the end, we can't control whether we achieve justice, only whether we treat the people around us with decency.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_04: And finally, this is an important definition because of a psychological phenomenon.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_04: If people believe they can be cruel in the service of a greater cause, it releases something just demonic in human beings.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_04: It unlocks the human, I was gonna say capacity, but it's more like tendency.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_04: It's like proneness to cruelty, right?
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_04: There's something that is alluring about cruelty.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_04: I think it's just some of these classic kind of us them tribal instincts that are built into the human psyche.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_04: And when you say you can be cruel, you can hurt people in the name of a greater cause, it just releases all that venom.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_04: And leftist cruelty is especially seductive because it's clothed in compassion.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_04: It presents itself as compassion.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_04: So they're taught to think, I can't be cruel.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_04: I'm fighting for compassion.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_04: I'm the compassionate one.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_04: It's them, those people who are the cruel ones, they're the ones who lack compassion.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_04: Let's go ruin their lives, right?
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_04: So you can be really a moral monster in the service of compassion if you let yourself play this game.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_04: So a moment ago, I proposed consequences for wrongdoing, tit for tat.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_04: And here's the nuance there is that has to be counterbalanced by guarding against the risk of cruelty in ourselves.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_04: It's gotta be tit for tat with side constraints, or we start, you know, acting with the immediate aim of inflicting pain on something with the face.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_04: So I want to tell two anecdotes about this, and then we can just talk a little bit, but I really want to get these two anecdotes out.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_04: One of my students told me about something that happened to him when he was 18.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_04: He had arrived in college.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_04: He was a he was first generation, first in his family to go to college.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_04: He was 18.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_04: He was from a farming family, modest family of modest means.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_04: Beginning of his freshman year, he was in a class, I think it was economics, discussing why women and men often go into different career fields, right?
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_04: Why like women choose nursing and teaching and stuff.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_04: And he raised his hand and he suggested that the reason might be natural or genetic differences between men and women, that women are just naturally more nurturing.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_04: And okay, so first of all, that's true.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_04: It's just true.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_02: No one should be punished for telling the truth.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_02: But still, do you remember who and do you remember who did say it and who did get punished for saying it?
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_02: Much Larry Summers.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_02: Larry Summers, the president of Harvard, Secretary of the Treasury under Barack Obama, got fired from Harvard for raising the possibility.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_02: He didn't even assert it, raising the possibility in an off-the-record speech.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_02: That is the cruelty that we are talking about.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_02: And it's insane cruelty in service of an insane untruth.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_04: Cruelty in service of lies.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_04: So it won't surprise anyone who knows how modern campuses work that the other students took offense to his comment.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_04: But that's not the point of the story.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_04: The point of the story is what came next.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_04: The students organized over social media to track his movements around campus.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_04: And wherever he was, they would ping each other with his location and go and organize a flash mob to mock him or denounce him.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_04: So someone would ping the group and say, he's at the coffee shop, he's at the bookstore, and then a group would organize and scream at him until he went off.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_04: And this went on for months.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_04: It went on for a semester, right?
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_04: So, first of all, that is against any university's rules.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_04: It is against the law.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_04: Set that aside.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_04: It is almost unbelievably cruel, right?
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, this is just a kid who said something in I sometimes I think, you know, what is wrong with Gen Z?
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_04: I hear people, they're so intimidated by the youth.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_04: And it's not just by dint of numbers, like, oh, we're gonna get voted down.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_04: It's something more.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_04: It's like, well, the youth have to be enlightened and we have to like get in line with them.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_04: We have to adjust our views.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_04: No.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_04: World War II was the greatest generation.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_04: Generation Z is the cruelest generation.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_04: And we don't for a moment have to accommodate their cruelty.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_04: We need to correct them as older people.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, I'm gonna tell one more anecdote and then stop my monologue.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_04: I want to talk, this is actually more like history than anecdote.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_04: I want to talk for the moment about the communist terror movement in the years just before Lenin's communist revolution in Russia.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_04: So these are the years immediately before 1917, 18, 19.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_04: There's like 1908 to 1910.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_04: So the story is told by Gary Sol Morsen in his article entitled Suicide of the Liberals.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_04: I recommend it to all of you.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_04: It's a jaw-dropping, amazing article that you'll you won't forget.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_04: He records how in two years, two years in Russia in that pre-revolutionary time, there were 20,000 acts of terror.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm going to quote from the article.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_04: Quote: Anyone wearing a uniform was a candidate for a bullet to the head or sulfuric acid to the face.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_04: Bombs were tossed at random into railroad carriages, restaurants, and theaters.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_04: Far from regretting the death and maiming of innocent bystanders, terrorists boasted of killing as many as possible, either because the victims were likely bourgeois or because any murder helped bring down the old order.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_04: Sound familiar?
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_04: Instead of the pendulum swinging back, a metaphor of inevitability that excuses people from taking a stand, by the way, parenthesis, totally agree with that.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_04: Pendulum is stupid.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_04: Don't ever say pendulum.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_04: Don't ever tolerate people saying pendulum.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_04: It is an excuse.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_04: He says, instead of the pendulum swinging back, the killing grew and grew both in numbers and in cruelty.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_04: The need to inflict pain was transformed from an abnormal and irrational compulsion experienced only by unbalanced personalities into a formally verbalized obligation for all committed revolutionaries.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_04: Women torturers were especially admired.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_04: End of quote.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, so when you hear yourself, when you hear the left rather praising activism or protest, ask yourself and ask them: is this a case in this particular case?
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_04: Is what's being characterized as morally admirable really just kindness and compassion?
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_04: Or is it, whatever the ultimate motive, because set that aside, because who cares if your ultimate motive is justice?
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_04: Is it acting with the immediate aim of causing pain to something with a face?
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_04: Because I've said it on this podcast before, leftist compassion always has a knife in it.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_04: You know, they soften their heart to one group, they harden it to another, they soften it to Palestinians, harden it to Jews, soften it to blacks, harden it to Asians, soften it to, you know, um uh criminal offenders, harden it to police and victims, right?
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_04: It's always that.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_04: And civic terrorism is tactical cruelty in the name of that kind of vision.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_04: So, you know, on the right, we say we believe in civility.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_04: Civility isn't just politeness, it's an anti-cruelty stance.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_04: And what we are up against here is how demonic and effective political cruelty is when it's on one side and unanswered.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_04: And now I'm done.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_04: Now that was my monologue.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_02: Well, listen, on the left, they've been doing this for a long time, it sounds like.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, think about slavery, you know, the period that I'm familiar with and abolitionism, like the lynching and murder of Elijah Lovejoy, the abolitionist printer in Illinois, right?
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the caning of Charles Sumner by Preston Brooks, right?
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_02: A congressman.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_02: That's a horrible story.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like, why in service of an evil political ideology?
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_02: And they got what they wanted, though, right?
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_02: How long did the union persist and the Civil War was put off?
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_02: Because of the South's threats of violence, threats of secession, actual personal violent consequences to individuals who adopted the abolitionist cause.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_02: And so it really seems to me that this is a theme across leftist history, not liberal history, but leftist history, that they really try to collapse this distinction between politics and civil society through these acts of civic terrorism.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_02: And what the left is doing today in front of Chief Justice Roberts' house and so on is not as bad as that, but it is of a piece, including the murder of Charlie Kirk.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's of a piece with all of that.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_02: You do one of those things, it's a difference in degree, not a difference in kind.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_02: Protesting in front of Roberts' house is a difference in degree to the murder of Charlie Kirk.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_02: I I have not thought through that sentence, but I believe it to be true as I sit here and say it today.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_02: But those are my final thoughts.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_02: We are probably out of time.
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_02: Catherine, any final reflections, thoughts, or just bring us home?
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_01: And as also, I think, more widespread than ever.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_01: So you have like, you know, incredible tragedies like the Charlie Kirk thing, but ask any single conservative, you know, have you lost family members over your political beliefs?
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_01: 90% of them will say yes.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not just the matter of degree, it's the amount of how widespread it is, where we're all incurring some sort of um, you know, downside to publicly stating our beliefs.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_01: And one day I'll tell you about how I got my start caring about politics in college in a very similar situation.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_01: And no one suffered any consequences.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think it's better at that college on this day than it was when I went there, you know, woke during woke one, maybe, um, you know, almost like a decade ago.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_01: Are there consequences?
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_01: Can we practically impose consequences?
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_01: I hope so, but I'm a little bit of a doomer on this one and think maybe uh we just need to separate and be done.
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_04: Well, Catherine, Josh, last word.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I'll just add, um I just want to clarify, you know, the goal is not a world where people are behaving aggressively to one another in political contexts, you know, where, you know, they did it to us, we do it to them, and now everybody's miserable.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_04: Like that's not the goal.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_04: The insight is that if you, it's like criminal law, if you don't exact consequences for wrongdoing, the wrongdoing won't stop.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_04: And so what we need is, and this is also like the theory of criminal punishment, what we need is morally constrained consequences regularly imposed by people with the courage to do so so that we can bring a stop to having a society that is going in this direction.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Josh, Catherine, I think this was a really important episode, maybe one of our most important.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_02: So if you agreed, hit that like and subscribe button, share this episode with everybody, follow us on Substack, and we will see you next time.