Latest / Political Junkie Podcast / Death Penalty TV

Transcript

Death Penalty TV · Political Junkie Podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_03: Execution by firing squad.
0:02
SPEAKER_03: Army major betrays his country, radical Islamist, kills a bunch of Americans at Fort Hood.
0:06
SPEAKER_03: Of course we're going to do it at Fort Hood.
0:07
SPEAKER_03: We're going to do it on a Thursday,
0:09
SPEAKER_03: we're going to do it at one o'clock,
0:10
SPEAKER_03: which is when he did it,
0:11
SPEAKER_03: and it's going to be soldiers with rifles executing the firing squad.
0:15
SPEAKER_03: We know what it is.
0:16
SPEAKER_03: It was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks.
0:19
SPEAKER_03: And so he's going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be.
0:22
SPEAKER_03: And we'll make sure that people are able to watch it,
0:25
SPEAKER_03: that it's public,
0:26
SPEAKER_03: because people need to understand that there's serious consequences for these types
0:31
SPEAKER_03: of things.
0:32
SPEAKER_03: Has Major Hassan made any final requests,
0:34
SPEAKER_03: reached out to the president, anything like that, to your knowledge?
0:37
SPEAKER_03: Don't care.
0:40
[music]
1:02
SPEAKER_00: We began this episode with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's decision
1:06
SPEAKER_00: to live stream the execution by firing squad of Nidal Hassan,
1:11
SPEAKER_00: the former army psychiatrist who murdered 13 fellow servicemen and women
1:16
SPEAKER_00: at Fort Hood in Texas.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: This is the Death Penalty TV show.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: I'm Claire Potter.
1:22
SPEAKER_02: I'm Neil Young.
1:24
SPEAKER_00: And today we're going to talk about the death penalty.
1:28
SPEAKER_00: Which is a very, very serious topic, so it may not be appropriate for all listeners.
1:36
SPEAKER_00: You may wish to just turn this off after the news summary,
1:40
SPEAKER_00: or you may want to stay and listen to us unpack what has exactly happened in
1:46
SPEAKER_00: the botched execution of Krista Pike and
1:49
SPEAKER_00: the Trump administration thinning around trying to decide whether to live stream
1:55
SPEAKER_00: a barbaric event so that any American can see it.
2:00
SPEAKER_00: Something that Donald Trump has decided not to do.
2:02
SPEAKER_00: So we're going to be talking about that too.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: Neil, how's it going this week?
2:07
SPEAKER_01: I'm doing pretty well hanging in there.
2:08
SPEAKER_01: How about you?
2:10
SPEAKER_00: Pretty good.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's fall in New England.
2:13
SPEAKER_00: Yesterday we drove around and bought apple cider donuts and actual apple cider
2:18
SPEAKER_00: and got grilled cheese sandwiches and everything's like yellow and red
2:22
SPEAKER_00: and beautiful.
2:23
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't happen in California, does it?
2:26
SPEAKER_02: Well, it's 95 degrees today and we're under a heat advisory.
2:30
SPEAKER_02: Although two days ago we were in the 50s.
2:32
SPEAKER_02: So not sure what's going on, but it's hot as blue blazes right now.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: Oh, God.
2:37
SPEAKER_00: Well, you know,
2:37
SPEAKER_00: we're having the temperature go up and down,
2:39
SPEAKER_00: which I think is the climate world that we now live in.
2:43
SPEAKER_00: None of the seasons are ever what they're supposed to be.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: All right, Neil, let's go to the news summary.
2:49
SPEAKER_00: On Monday, Homeland Security...
2:51
SPEAKER_00: Now, Trump has wanted to deport Ilhan Omar for a long time.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: She's been a big target of MAGA hatred, I think has received a lot of death threats.
2:58
SPEAKER_00: What is the issue here, Neal?
3:17
SPEAKER_01: Well, what is the issue in terms of like Trump's grievances with her
3:21
SPEAKER_01: or what are they trying to?
3:22
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think,
3:23
SPEAKER_01: you know,
3:24
SPEAKER_01: she's an enormous critic
3:25
SPEAKER_02: of Trump, although that doesn't really narrow it down.
3:29
SPEAKER_02: But I think, you know, she's a woman of color and a Muslim woman.
3:33
SPEAKER_02: And so I think she, you know, is an easy target for his ire.
3:47
SPEAKER_02: You know,
3:48
SPEAKER_02: that she has are ones that Trump and folks around him really don't like and love
3:53
SPEAKER_02: to go after.
3:54
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
3:56
SPEAKER_00: And she's also Somalian.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: She's from Mogadishu.
3:59
SPEAKER_00: And Trump and the people around him have really targeted Somalians in Minnesota too, right?
4:07
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
4:07
SPEAKER_02: I mean, this is like an,
4:09
SPEAKER_02: if you go onto Twitter,
4:10
SPEAKER_02: this is one of the Overwhelming preoccupations of a really,
4:15
SPEAKER_02: really rabid corner of the MAGA base that has this sort of obsession with Somalians
4:22
SPEAKER_01: in Minnesota.
4:23
SPEAKER_01: I mean, one of the things that they do constantly is post these videos of Mall of America.
4:30
SPEAKER_02: You know,
4:31
SPEAKER_02: when there's,
4:32
SPEAKER_02: I guess,
4:32
SPEAKER_02: a lot of people in traditional garb at the Mall of America and,
4:38
SPEAKER_02: you know, just saying, like, look how far this state has fallen and all the rest.
4:41
SPEAKER_02: So it's an overwhelming preoccupation.
4:44
SPEAKER_02: And she seems to be the sort of embodiment for them in terms of,
4:50
SPEAKER_02: you know, going after this politically.
4:52
SPEAKER_00: Well, an embodiment is a really good word to use here, Neil,
4:56
SPEAKER_00: because Ilhan Omar,
4:58
SPEAKER_00: even when Trump says her name,
5:01
SPEAKER_00: sort of brings a lot of other things to the MAGA mind.
5:04
SPEAKER_00: How much they hate women,
5:06
SPEAKER_00: how much they hate black people,
5:07
SPEAKER_00: how much they hate immigrants,
5:09
SPEAKER_00: that as Trump Said years ago, they are, quote, poisoning the blood of our country.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: I mean, having Somalians in the Mall of America, that was a perfect example of that.
5:21
SPEAKER_00: But there's something else that they think they're going after.
5:23
SPEAKER_00: And this has been a conspiracy theory bombing around the internet for years.
5:29
SPEAKER_00: Ilhan Omar lied about her age to obtain US citizenship over 27 years ago.
5:37
SPEAKER_00: She has been investigated for campaign finance violations,
5:40
SPEAKER_00: which I don't think have turned anything up.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: It's also not clear that she lied about her age or that her father lied
5:46
SPEAKER_00: about her age,
5:47
SPEAKER_00: more importantly,
5:48
SPEAKER_00: because apparently there's a law that when your parent is naturalized,
5:52
SPEAKER_00: The children under the age of 18 also become naturalized at the same time.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: So the idea is that he lied so that she would become naturalized and not go through
6:03
SPEAKER_00: the process and that she was really two years older.
6:06
SPEAKER_00: There's also been this rumor going around,
6:10
SPEAKER_00: which I think is based on nothing, that her first husband was actually her brother.
6:16
SPEAKER_00: What does this add to the picture, Neil?
6:19
SPEAKER_00: Well...
6:20
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think all of this is meant to convey that she's corrupt, that she's a criminal.
6:26
SPEAKER_02: You know,
6:26
SPEAKER_02: I think the stuff with her brother is also supposed to suggest
6:31
SPEAKER_02: that there's something sort of creepy sexually about folks like Ilhan Amar.
6:37
SPEAKER_02: And I think that's, you know, not even really all that thinly veiled.
6:42
SPEAKER_01: Yep.
6:43
SPEAKER_01: When it comes to this stuff,
6:45
SPEAKER_01: you know,
6:45
SPEAKER_01: the stuff around her birth date is interesting because this guy who's,
6:50
SPEAKER_01: I guess,
6:51
SPEAKER_01: sort of a citizen activist in Minnesota is the one who began this accusation,
6:57
SPEAKER_01: I think almost Right.
7:13
SPEAKER_02: Omar has said, and understandably so,
7:15
SPEAKER_02: she can't produce a birth certificate because paper records in her
7:18
SPEAKER_01: war-torn country
7:20
SPEAKER_01: of origin don't exist.
7:23
SPEAKER_01: The one thing that I think is interesting here,
7:24
SPEAKER_01: and I wonder what you think about it,
7:26
SPEAKER_01: is a federal judge has granted I don't know what to think about it,
7:29
SPEAKER_01: to tell you the truth, because we don't know what judge it is.
7:32
SPEAKER_01: We haven't seen the warrant.
7:34
SPEAKER_01: We don't know what they're looking for.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: What we know is that federal agents walked out of her house with all
7:59
SPEAKER_00: of her electronic devices and a lot of banker's boxes,
8:03
SPEAKER_00: which probably had something in them, but might or might not.
8:07
SPEAKER_00: You know, given the Trump administration's penchant for theater.
8:11
SPEAKER_01: Completely.
8:12
SPEAKER_00: You know, it does make me wonder.
8:14
SPEAKER_00: It's also unclear to me which of these things would have been the trigger,
8:21
SPEAKER_00: and my guess is it would have been campaign finance violations,
8:25
SPEAKER_00: because what would there be to find in her house to prove these other rumors?
8:32
SPEAKER_00: I would say another norm has bitten the dust,
8:35
SPEAKER_00: and I think it's just worth it to put up a headstone every time this happens.
8:40
SPEAKER_00: The Department of Justice has long refrained from headline grabbing actions
8:45
SPEAKER_00: the 60 days prior to an election.
8:47
SPEAKER_00: Now, I believe James Comey violated that in the Hillary Clinton emails case.
8:54
SPEAKER_00: Did he not?
8:55
SPEAKER_02: That's right.
8:55
SPEAKER_02: That's right.
8:55
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
8:56
SPEAKER_02: And it was a huge part of Republicans' objection,
8:58
SPEAKER_02: or at least their arguments about it,
9:00
SPEAKER_02: which I think had a sort of weight of validity to them.
9:04
SPEAKER_00: Right.
9:05
SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's no chance that Omar is not going to get re-elected.
9:09
SPEAKER_00: I think what Trump wants is he wants to deport her.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: He has wanted to deport her for years, to denaturalize her citizenship and deport her.
9:17
SPEAKER_00: And that would be symbolic for him and his people at a moment when how
9:24
SPEAKER_00: the immigration and enforcement is going has never been so unpopular.
9:29
SPEAKER_00: It's really unpopular.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: So he needs to point to something for his MAGA people and say, I'm on it.
9:37
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's what this was about.
9:41
SPEAKER_00: I will be surprised if there's anything there,
9:43
SPEAKER_00: because I think if there had been, it would have turned up a long time ago.
9:47
SPEAKER_00: And I think it's a little suspicious for it to have simply a case like that
9:51
SPEAKER_00: to simply come to a head now, don't you?
9:53
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I agree.
9:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
9:55
SPEAKER_00: All right, well, let's get on to something a little more fun.
9:58
SPEAKER_00: Donald Trump has forced Kimberly Guilfoyle out from her position as ambassador to Greece.
10:05
SPEAKER_00: Neil, remind our listeners who Kimberly Guilfoyle is.
10:09
SPEAKER_02: Well, she's a former Fox News.
10:11
SPEAKER_02: Was she an analyst or a, I don't know, she was a personality on there.
10:15
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
10:16
SPEAKER_02: She dated Don
10:18
SPEAKER_01: Trump Jr.
10:20
SPEAKER_01: They were engaged, weren't they, for a bit?
10:22
SPEAKER_01: They were engaged.
10:23
SPEAKER_00: And you know, the great part is,
10:25
SPEAKER_00: and we're going to talk about what has come out about her,
10:28
SPEAKER_00: but when all these things came out,
10:30
SPEAKER_00: Donald Trump's He said,
10:31
SPEAKER_00: as he says normally about everyone who is connected to him who has committed
10:35
SPEAKER_00: a crime, oh, I don't know that person.
10:37
SPEAKER_00: I've never heard of that person.
10:38
SPEAKER_00: And he said, I think she dated my son at one point.
10:42
SPEAKER_00: They owned a house together in Florida, a $9 million house, and they were engaged.
10:47
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
10:48
SPEAKER_00: So continue.
10:49
SPEAKER_02: They were together for years.
10:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for years.
10:53
SPEAKER_00: She changed her whole face for him.
10:55
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
10:55
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that was,
10:56
SPEAKER_01: she was sort of exhibit A on the like Mar-a-Lago, you know, plastic surgery face.
11:01
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
11:01
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
11:02
SPEAKER_01: Story.
11:02
SPEAKER_01: But yeah.
11:03
SPEAKER_01: And then, I mean, so.
11:05
SPEAKER_01: We should talk about what happened.
11:07
SPEAKER_01: The Wall Street Journal wrote this piece last weekend.
11:09
SPEAKER_01: I think we've mentioned this a bit before because the news was coming out a week or so ago.
11:13
SPEAKER_01: But the Wall Street Journal showed that she appears to have pursued financial and
11:19
SPEAKER_01: in one particular case,
11:20
SPEAKER_01: a sexual relationship with all these Greek tycoons,
11:24
SPEAKER_01: which, you know, if you're going to be an ambassador to Greece, you might as well.
11:28
SPEAKER_00: Bring home a tycoon.
11:29
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
11:31
SPEAKER_01: Jackie Kennedy was on to something years ago.
11:33
SPEAKER_01: You betcha.
11:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
11:35
SPEAKER_01: She also appears to have persuaded one of Trump's donors,
11:38
SPEAKER_01: a man named Eric Dieters,
11:40
SPEAKER_01: to pay $100,000 for her American Express bill,
11:43
SPEAKER_01: which I want to know what period of time that covered.
11:46
SPEAKER_01: Was that just her monthly Amex bill?
11:49
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's a great way to money launder, isn't it?
11:52
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you could even just like take a cash advance from your Amex and
11:57
SPEAKER_00: then have somebody pay your Amex.
11:59
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think these people are really, really good at hiding bribes and laundering money.
12:04
SPEAKER_01: Well, but she wasn't too good.
12:06
SPEAKER_01: I mean, she was like basically sending him messages on WhatsApp that were like,
12:10
SPEAKER_01: send me the money now, you know.
12:12
SPEAKER_01: Right.
12:13
SPEAKER_01: So it wasn't that hard of a case for the Wall Street Journal to bust.
12:17
SPEAKER_01: And I think the bigger thing that we can talk about here is Trump dumping her
12:23
SPEAKER_01: because we know Trump has no problem with corruption,
12:25
SPEAKER_01: double dealing, lining one's pockets.
12:28
SPEAKER_01: But what's the issue here?
12:31
SPEAKER_00: Well, I think the issue,
12:32
SPEAKER_00: and of course,
12:33
SPEAKER_00: I listened to the podcast that Michael Wolff does inside Trump's head.
12:40
SPEAKER_00: And what Michael Wolff says is that Trump is fine with corruption,
12:45
SPEAKER_00: but he doesn't like people to grift off of him.
12:48
SPEAKER_00: So if somebody is trying to make money and using him,
12:53
SPEAKER_00: To sort of establish their own connections to haul in the dough.
12:58
SPEAKER_00: He really doesn't like that.
12:59
SPEAKER_00: You know, it makes him feel used and unhappy.
13:02
SPEAKER_02: He has personal boundaries here.
13:04
SPEAKER_00: He does.
13:04
SPEAKER_00: He does.
13:05
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you think the man has no morals, but he does.
13:07
SPEAKER_00: Well, actually, it's not moral at all.
13:09
SPEAKER_00: But the other thing that I thought was both funny and sad
13:15
SPEAKER_00: and horrible is I always thought she was sent to Greece in the first place
13:19
SPEAKER_00: because Don Jr. wanted to marry Bettina Anderson.
13:24
SPEAKER_00: And that the best way of making that happen was to just like send her out of town,
13:28
SPEAKER_00: give her a big reward.
13:30
SPEAKER_00: Ambassador to Greece, which apparently she really liked doing the work.
13:34
SPEAKER_00: And she was going to all these parties and meeting the tycoons and so on.
13:40
SPEAKER_00: And apparently there was one tycoon who really, really liked her.
13:44
SPEAKER_00: Did you read any of those text messages?
13:47
SPEAKER_02: I didn't read the text messages.
13:49
SPEAKER_02: I can only imagine what they were like.
13:51
SPEAKER_02: But I hope they involved lots of, I don't know, innuendos about Sivlaki and all the rest.
13:57
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yes.
13:57
SPEAKER_00: And also that he was just like,
14:00
SPEAKER_00: Which if you're the ambassador to Greece, you're not supposed to do that.
14:04
SPEAKER_00: However,
14:05
SPEAKER_00: one of the things that the Trump administration did to her is that Eric Trump came
14:09
SPEAKER_00: to Greece and there was a big dinner being thrown for him and she was left off
14:14
SPEAKER_00: the guest list.
14:15
SPEAKER_00: And so one of the things she also did,
14:17
SPEAKER_00: which they really didn't like at the White House,
14:19
SPEAKER_00: is she like badgered a lot of people until she was invited to the dinner
14:23
SPEAKER_00: with Eric Trump.
14:24
SPEAKER_00: I mean...
14:25
SPEAKER_00: I think the Trumps are just done with her and she keeps coming back like a bad penny.
14:31
SPEAKER_00: So anyway, she had to quit.
14:34
SPEAKER_00: Well, she was asked for her resignation,
14:36
SPEAKER_00: but really the New York Times was saying she was fired, right?
14:39
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
14:40
SPEAKER_02: And, you know,
14:41
SPEAKER_02: the other thing going around is that she's threatening to write a tell-all memoir
14:45
SPEAKER_02: about the Trumps.
14:47
SPEAKER_02: And I don't know how much that's just in the world of rumor
14:50
SPEAKER_02: and how much that's been like really reported out, but...
14:54
SPEAKER_01: I mean, let's cross our fingers that she's shopping a big tell-all proposal right now,
15:00
SPEAKER_01: which would just be so fitting for all these folks and
15:03
SPEAKER_01: the ways they treat each other and what these relationships are all about.
15:08
SPEAKER_01: Right.
15:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
15:10
SPEAKER_01: I think she was a pretty unruly character all along and a bit of a loose cannon,
15:16
SPEAKER_01: even when she was engaged to Don Jr.
15:20
SPEAKER_01: And I think there was some reporting around Trump being sort of
15:24
SPEAKER_01: a little uncomfortable.
15:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and you know, probably like me.
15:51
SPEAKER_00: Donald Trump was constantly mixing Kimberly Guilfoyle up with Lauren Sanchez Bezos.
15:56
SPEAKER_00: And I can't tell them apart.
15:58
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you put them side by side, cannot tell them apart.
16:01
SPEAKER_00: Everything's the same.
16:02
SPEAKER_00: Okay, let's move on to another woman who...
16:07
SPEAKER_00: Deserves our sympathy, I suppose.
16:10
SPEAKER_00: To paraphrase the immortal words of Richard Nixon,
16:13
SPEAKER_00: we don't have Caroline Levitt to kick around anymore.
16:16
SPEAKER_00: She's gone off to Fox News where we don't know what she's making,
16:20
SPEAKER_00: but everybody's saying it's probably murderous.
16:22
SPEAKER_00: More than the $200,000 a year she made at the White House.
16:25
SPEAKER_00: She was replaced by Katie Zachariah.
16:29
SPEAKER_00: There was a week when there was no press secretary at all.
16:32
SPEAKER_00: Then Katie Zachariah shows up and she turns out not to be better than no press secretary at all.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: Tell our listeners a little bit about Katie Zachariah Neal
16:43
SPEAKER_00: and why actually she's no longer the press secretary.
16:47
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, as of today.
16:48
SPEAKER_02: She didn't even make it five days,
16:50
SPEAKER_02: which we can talk about a little bit more,
16:52
SPEAKER_02: in part because
16:53
SPEAKER_01: of her disastrous first and only press conference,
16:57
SPEAKER_01: which lasted all of 15 minutes.
16:58
SPEAKER_01: And it was crazy how bad it was.
17:02
SPEAKER_01: Even when she was reading an opening statement, it was the most painful thing to watch.
17:09
SPEAKER_02: Let alone like her trying to answer questions, which were pretty much softball questions.
17:13
SPEAKER_02: I mean, nothing even really tough was asked because it didn't last long enough
17:16
SPEAKER_02: for anything substantive to really be
17:19
SPEAKER_01: brought up.
17:19
SPEAKER_01: But anyway, who is she?
17:20
SPEAKER_01: She graduated from Pepperdine Law School.
17:23
SPEAKER_01: One of the controversies of this week was whether or not she had actually passed the bar.
17:27
SPEAKER_01: She was claiming,
17:28
SPEAKER_01: you know,
17:29
SPEAKER_01: For years and years in her public appearances and online that she was a lawyer,
17:33
SPEAKER_01: apparently she never passed the bar when she was asked about this.
17:36
SPEAKER_01: She claimed to have passed it while she was in China working for a Chinese law firm.
17:45
SPEAKER_01: You pass a bar that's in your state and there's no state bar records that show that she has.
17:51
SPEAKER_01: So there's been a lot of sort of, you know, walking that back.
17:55
SPEAKER_01: And there was a really uncomfortable interview last night with Sean Hannity, which,
17:59
SPEAKER_01: you know,
18:00
SPEAKER_01: you would think that would be the most friendly interlocutor,
18:03
SPEAKER_01: but he was even giving her a hard time about this.
18:07
SPEAKER_01: So I think,
18:08
SPEAKER_01: you know,
18:08
SPEAKER_01: the embarrassment of this You know,
18:12
SPEAKER_01: claim about being a lawyer,
18:13
SPEAKER_01: the embarrassing performance at the lectern a couple of days ago.
18:18
SPEAKER_01: Apparently,
18:19
SPEAKER_01: Trump had a meeting with her earlier today and said,
18:23
SPEAKER_01: basically raised the question of whether or not she was really up for this and
18:27
SPEAKER_01: whether or not she really wanted to like sort of submit herself to this level
18:31
SPEAKER_01: of scrutiny that broke this morning.
18:33
SPEAKER_01: And then like an hour or two later came the news that she'd been fired.
18:39
SPEAKER_01: This is like half a Scaramucci, right?
18:41
SPEAKER_01: Didn't Scaramucci laugh?
18:42
SPEAKER_00: It's half a Scaramucci.
18:43
SPEAKER_00: Two weeks?
18:44
SPEAKER_00: No, Scaramucci is 11 days.
18:47
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
18:48
SPEAKER_01: Double digit.
18:48
SPEAKER_00: And listeners,
18:49
SPEAKER_00: what we're referring to is Anthony Scaramucci,
18:52
SPEAKER_00: another ill-fated press secretary who became a celebrity after working for Trump
18:58
SPEAKER_00: for 11 days.
18:59
SPEAKER_00: And he actually was a media professional, and I can't remember why he got fired, but he did.
19:04
SPEAKER_00: And so now in political life, 11 days is a unit of time called a Scaramucci.
19:12
SPEAKER_01: Amazing.
19:12
SPEAKER_00: So yes, it's half a Scaramucci.
19:14
SPEAKER_00: I think the other thing our listeners might want
19:17
SPEAKER_00: to understand is why she was calling herself a lawyer and why you wouldn't be
19:22
SPEAKER_00: a lawyer if you had actually gone to law school.
19:25
SPEAKER_00: And I think I came up with a good analogy, Neil.
19:27
SPEAKER_00: See if you like this.
19:28
SPEAKER_00: One can get a PhD in history,
19:31
SPEAKER_00: but if you do not actually have a job,
19:37
SPEAKER_00: As a history professor, you can't call yourself a history professor, right?
19:41
SPEAKER_01: Right.
19:42
SPEAKER_01: You can call yourself a historian, but not a professor, which is what I would do.
19:46
SPEAKER_00: Right.
19:46
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
19:47
SPEAKER_00: And me too, because I'm not a history professor anymore either.
19:49
SPEAKER_02: Well, you're a long-serving former professor.
19:52
SPEAKER_02: Well, I was.
19:53
SPEAKER_02: That's a bit of a mouthful.
19:54
SPEAKER_00: I was.
19:55
SPEAKER_00: But I mean, that's all behind me now.
19:57
SPEAKER_00: But I think that's a distinction because actually when you're a lawyer,
20:01
SPEAKER_00: when you're an attorney, That means you have been admitted to the bar.
20:05
SPEAKER_00: Lots and lots of people go to law school and do lots and lots of things.
20:09
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's why people go to law school.
20:12
SPEAKER_00: It is a kind of education that prepares you for a broad range of careers
20:17
SPEAKER_00: that are not necessarily happening in court or in a boardroom or something like
20:21
SPEAKER_00: that.
20:22
SPEAKER_00: But she never took the bar and she lied about it.
20:25
SPEAKER_00: And I wonder if at the time...
20:28
SPEAKER_00: She believed she was lying because she's one of these people who has kind
20:31
SPEAKER_00: of bounced around the GOP.
20:34
SPEAKER_00: She's worked at Newsmax.
20:35
SPEAKER_00: She's worked at Homeland Security.
20:38
SPEAKER_00: And I kind of wonder if she kind of did think she was a lawyer or that she sort
20:43
SPEAKER_00: of forgotten that she wasn't a lawyer
20:46
SPEAKER_01: or that she didn't really appreciate.
20:47
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I want to say something maybe controversial,
20:50
SPEAKER_01: which is that I don't think that she's a very smart person.
20:53
SPEAKER_01: And I think Based on the evidence I've seen, I feel comfortable saying that.
20:58
SPEAKER_01: And I think in that context,
20:59
SPEAKER_01: it's possible that someone like her who went to law school and then was like working
21:04
SPEAKER_01: and probably was like,
21:05
SPEAKER_01: even in some of these,
21:06
SPEAKER_01: so she did things like she worked in,
21:08
SPEAKER_01: you know, various arms of the She worked at Newsmax.
21:11
SPEAKER_01: She worked at Homeland Security.
21:13
SPEAKER_01: I imagine that some of those jobs entailed some degree of like legal,
21:17
SPEAKER_01: quote unquote, legal analysis as part of the job description.
21:20
SPEAKER_01: And I think there's a way that you can sort of like just sort of forget about
21:25
SPEAKER_01: the technicalities here,
21:26
SPEAKER_01: especially if you don't seem to be all that sort of smart about these things
21:31
SPEAKER_01: and think, yeah, like I went to law school.
21:33
SPEAKER_01: I do like legal advising in a lot of these roles.
21:35
SPEAKER_01: I'm a lawyer.
21:37
SPEAKER_01: I do think There's this other interesting thing happening right now,
21:41
SPEAKER_01: which is this obsession on whether or not Abdul Al-Sayed is a doctor.
21:46
SPEAKER_01: Have you been following this thing too?
21:48
SPEAKER_00: I have.
21:49
SPEAKER_00: And what exactly is it based on?
21:52
SPEAKER_00: I mean, didn't he go to medical school and then go into public health?
21:56
SPEAKER_01: Well, he graduated from medical school.
21:57
SPEAKER_01: He, as far as I understand, never did a medical fellowship, and he's certainly not licensed.
22:03
SPEAKER_01: And so this same debate is happening in different circles,
22:07
SPEAKER_01: and his opponent is constantly saying,
22:11
SPEAKER_01: You know,
22:12
SPEAKER_01: you claim to be a doctor,
22:14
SPEAKER_01: but you're not a doctor because you don't have a medical license and therefore,
22:17
SPEAKER_01: you know,
22:18
SPEAKER_01: this is proof of how you're a liar and the voters in Michigan shouldn't support you.
22:22
SPEAKER_01: And he's saying, I graduated from medical school.
22:24
SPEAKER_01: I'm a doctor.
22:25
SPEAKER_01: I've never claimed to be a licensed practitioner.
22:28
SPEAKER_01: And it feels really similar or even the same to what's happening here.
22:32
SPEAKER_01: And so I do think,
22:33
SPEAKER_01: but yet people are really sort of feeling differently about both cases depending
22:37
SPEAKER_01: on their own sort of political affiliations.
22:41
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if like parsing like this really matters all that much
22:47
SPEAKER_01: and it probably doesn't really count with voters.
22:49
SPEAKER_01: Obviously, voters don't get to weigh in on Katie Zachariah.
22:51
SPEAKER_01: But her dissembling around basic elements of this,
22:56
SPEAKER_01: which is like whether or not she took and passed the bar,
22:59
SPEAKER_01: seem Not good for someone who's supposed to be,
23:03
SPEAKER_01: you know, the press secretary for the White House.
23:06
SPEAKER_01: It does raise a bigger question of why does someone like this get fired in
23:10
SPEAKER_01: the first place or hired in the first place and then quickly fired so quickly?
23:15
SPEAKER_00: Well, I think that's a wonderful question.
23:17
SPEAKER_00: And I just want to add something to the whole doctor thing,
23:20
SPEAKER_00: which is,
23:21
SPEAKER_00: do you remember Republicans going after Jill Biden for calling herself Dr. Biden?
23:27
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
23:27
SPEAKER_00: Right, because she has a PhD and that is a doctorate.
23:32
SPEAKER_00: Like you and I could call ourselves doctor.
23:36
SPEAKER_02: She actually doesn't have a PhD.
23:37
SPEAKER_02: She has an EDD, a doctorate of education, but still regardless, she has a doctoral degree.
23:43
SPEAKER_00: She has a doctoral degree.
23:44
SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
23:46
SPEAKER_00: I've never wanted to refer to myself as doctor,
23:48
SPEAKER_00: although students often called me Dr. Potter.
23:50
SPEAKER_00: And I would say, no, no, no, that was my father.
23:53
SPEAKER_00: But so, yes, I think you're right.
23:55
SPEAKER_00: There is this push from MAGA that everyone's fake.
24:01
SPEAKER_00: You know, all the Democrats are fake, fake, fake.
24:03
SPEAKER_00: And then they come up with this woman.
24:06
SPEAKER_00: And I would say the one piece that I really don't understand that I think The fact
24:11
SPEAKER_00: that she's gone means we will never learn the answer
24:14
SPEAKER_00: to this question is what exactly was she doing in China?
24:17
SPEAKER_00: Because what I read and,
24:20
SPEAKER_00: you know,
24:20
SPEAKER_00: when she said she took the bar exam in China,
24:23
SPEAKER_00: she was actually in China for two years.
24:26
SPEAKER_00: I believe working for a Chinese law firm that was setting up some kind
24:31
SPEAKER_00: of relationship with the United States or something like that.
24:35
SPEAKER_00: But then I saw somebody comment,
24:37
SPEAKER_00: I think it was Judd Legum,
24:38
SPEAKER_00: who broke the story in the first place, by the way, a Substacker, Judd Legum.
24:44
SPEAKER_00: And Legum said, but actually, you can't be hired by a Chinese law firm unless you have...
24:53
SPEAKER_00: Worked for at least two years in the United States on U.S.-China law.
25:00
SPEAKER_00: And you would have had to specialize in international law, none of which she did.
25:05
SPEAKER_00: So what was she doing in China?
25:07
SPEAKER_00: That's what I would like to know.
25:09
SPEAKER_00: Or is that not true?
25:12
SPEAKER_01: No, no, I think that that's right.
25:13
SPEAKER_01: And I think that the other element of this wasn't her husband.
25:17
SPEAKER_01: I believe she was there because her husband was employed.
25:21
SPEAKER_01: In China,
25:22
SPEAKER_01: and there's also been,
25:23
SPEAKER_01: and I don't want to say what he was doing because I'm forgetting
25:26
SPEAKER_01: the actual specifics of it,
25:28
SPEAKER_01: but there were big questions being raised about what he was doing there
25:33
SPEAKER_01: because I think it was maybe tied to some sort of crypto or security firm.
25:40
SPEAKER_01: Again, I don't have the details exactly right,
25:42
SPEAKER_01: but other than just noticing in this barrage of headlines about her this week,
25:47
SPEAKER_01: that there were also real questions about what he was doing and what sort of ways
25:51
SPEAKER_01: that that might implicate them in a series of professional arrangements in China
25:59
SPEAKER_01: that raise questions about just,
26:01
SPEAKER_01: you know,
26:03
SPEAKER_01: Basically,
26:04
SPEAKER_02: what they're involved in,
26:05
SPEAKER_02: and even if they've been involved in some things
26:08
SPEAKER_02: that American national security would see as not something that people connected to
26:14
SPEAKER_02: the White House should be involved in.
26:16
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so now you've brought us back to the how did she get hired in the first place,
26:19
SPEAKER_00: which I think is a really good question because apparently Trump interviewed her.
26:25
SPEAKER_00: She flew out on a Friday.
26:27
SPEAKER_00: The Friday of Columbus Day weekend or Indigenous Peoples Day weekend, excuse me.
26:32
SPEAKER_00: She flew out.
26:34
SPEAKER_00: He interviewed her.
26:36
SPEAKER_00: He said, I want you back here at work on Monday.
26:40
SPEAKER_00: She flies back to California, packs a couple of suitcases, flies back and starts work on Monday.
26:49
SPEAKER_00: There's no time in there to conduct a security check.
26:54
SPEAKER_00: So one thing I would say is it's clear that
26:57
SPEAKER_00: the White House has simply stopped vetting people for national security who work in
27:03
SPEAKER_00: the West Wing.
27:04
SPEAKER_00: Because I don't see how you could vet somebody in two days over Indigenous Peoples Weekend.
27:11
SPEAKER_00: So there's that, which is worrisome.
27:13
SPEAKER_00: The second thing is, I don't think anybody wants to work for Donald Trump anymore.
27:20
SPEAKER_00: And I think they're really scraping the bottom of the barrel,
27:23
SPEAKER_00: particularly as they approach the midterm.
27:26
SPEAKER_00: People are heading for the exits.
27:28
SPEAKER_00: I think Susie Wiles seems very not present to me.
27:32
SPEAKER_00: And we know she's been ill.
27:33
SPEAKER_00: But what do you think, Neil?
27:36
SPEAKER_00: This does not seem like something Susie Wiles would have signed off on.
27:40
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean,
27:41
SPEAKER_02: I think there's a big assumption that she's just holding out through the midterms.
27:45
SPEAKER_02: And, you know,
27:47
SPEAKER_02: if you are battling health issues,
27:49
SPEAKER_02: can you imagine that this is what your day job is?
27:53
SPEAKER_02: I'm just terrible.
27:53
SPEAKER_02: I think you're right about the types of people that at this point are willing
27:57
SPEAKER_02: to work for this presidency.
27:58
SPEAKER_02: And that's why you get complete,
28:00
SPEAKER_02: you know, Cultists, cultish sycophants like Zachariah is around him.
28:06
SPEAKER_02: But of course, that has a high incompetency level that usually goes along with it.
28:10
SPEAKER_02: And I just think to like broaden this out to the bigger picture of it all,
28:14
SPEAKER_02: this is a president and a presidency and a political movement that made this idea
28:19
SPEAKER_02: of,
28:20
SPEAKER_02: you know,
28:20
SPEAKER_02: meritocracy and attacks on,
28:24
SPEAKER_02: you know,
28:25
SPEAKER_02: women, people of color as being, you know, Inappropriately advanced in this country.
28:32
SPEAKER_02: They were going to sort of return things back to a merit-based system.
28:38
SPEAKER_02: And one person after another in the Trump administration has been just
28:43
SPEAKER_02: a raging incompetent who's been hired not because of their credentials,
28:47
SPEAKER_02: not because of their knowledge and experience or their expertise,
28:51
SPEAKER_02: but because of what they look like.
28:53
SPEAKER_02: And I just feel like that needs to be said here.
28:56
SPEAKER_00: I absolutely think it needs to be said.
29:14
SPEAKER_00: Big curly locks hanging out that you can flip and toss and so on and so forth.
29:19
SPEAKER_00: It's another thing entirely.
29:21
SPEAKER_00: If you're an attorney general or a press secretary, it's not a professional look.
29:28
SPEAKER_00: And that I find really embarrassing as an American.
29:31
SPEAKER_00: And I also want to confess something else,
29:34
SPEAKER_00: which is I really, really, really miss Caroline Levitt.
29:40
SPEAKER_00: You know,
29:40
SPEAKER_00: there was that moment when the question was being asked,
29:44
SPEAKER_00: you know, where did you pass the bar?
29:48
SPEAKER_00: Caroline Levitt would have looked straight at that person and said,
29:52
SPEAKER_00: you are a pathetic excuse for a journalist.
29:55
SPEAKER_00: Next.
29:57
SPEAKER_00: And instead,
29:58
SPEAKER_00: you know,
29:59
SPEAKER_00: Zachariah just said, in China, you know, Caroline Levitt, Knew how to do this.
30:07
SPEAKER_00: And I am developing an ex post facto appreciation for her talents.
30:12
SPEAKER_01: I think a lot of people are saying something similar.
30:14
SPEAKER_02: And of course,
30:15
SPEAKER_02: conservative media is having a heyday with that because they're like,
30:18
SPEAKER_02: oh, now you love Cara, you know, love it.
30:20
SPEAKER_02: But anyway, the point is that this woman was completely not prepared in any way for this role.
30:28
SPEAKER_02: Has been a huge embarrassment to the Trump administration.
30:30
SPEAKER_02: And I think, again,
30:32
SPEAKER_02: that's sort of a connective,
30:33
SPEAKER_01: the connection between her story and the previous one,
30:37
SPEAKER_01: Kimberly Guilfoyle,
30:38
SPEAKER_01: that we talked about,
30:38
SPEAKER_01: that Trump will put up with
30:41
SPEAKER_02: a lot,
30:41
SPEAKER_02: but he won't put up with anything that embarrasses him.
30:43
SPEAKER_02: And I think he particularly won't put up with that when it comes from a woman.
30:48
SPEAKER_00: Right.
30:48
SPEAKER_00: And she also referred to Donald Trump as her husband by mistake.
30:52
SPEAKER_00: Which was hilarious.
30:54
SPEAKER_00: And now there's all kinds of stuff on all the trashy websites about how
30:58
SPEAKER_00: the real reason Zachariah had to resign was Natalie Harp stabbed her in the back.
31:02
SPEAKER_00: It's getting better and better.
31:05
SPEAKER_00: Only the best people.
31:06
SPEAKER_00: Okay, Neil.
31:07
SPEAKER_00: So we're going to turn to our news focus for the day.
31:11
SPEAKER_00: And listeners,
31:12
SPEAKER_00: as I said earlier, talking about the death penalty is not appropriate for everyone.
31:17
SPEAKER_00: So if you need to tune out now, we understand.
31:21
SPEAKER_00: But we think it's really important this week to look
31:24
SPEAKER_00: at these two death penalty cases that have been in the news.
31:28
SPEAKER_00: The United States is one of only 53 nations that still has the death penalty and one
31:34
SPEAKER_00: of only 30 nations.
31:35
SPEAKER_00: So the Trump administration's revival of the death penalty,
31:38
SPEAKER_00: which we're going to talk about a little bit,
31:40
SPEAKER_00: and the Trump administration reviving the
31:53
SPEAKER_00: Death penalty has also then created an atmosphere in which all of
31:58
SPEAKER_00: a sudden people convicted at the state level are being ushered
32:01
SPEAKER_00: into execution chambers too.
32:03
SPEAKER_00: But this puts the United States in the company of nations like Iran and China.
32:08
SPEAKER_00: And although the U.S.
32:10
SPEAKER_00: executes fewer people,
32:11
SPEAKER_00: the United States executes more people than anyone else in the hemisphere.
32:16
SPEAKER_00: And last week's proposed public execution,
32:20
SPEAKER_00: which we're going to be talking about,
32:22
SPEAKER_00: Would have put the United States,
32:23
SPEAKER_00: an even rarer company,
32:25
SPEAKER_00: only Iran and Afghanistan execute people in public,
32:30
SPEAKER_00: which is that ironic or is that ironic, Neil?
32:33
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think irony is dead at this point, but it's certainly interesting company to keep.
32:39
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
32:40
SPEAKER_00: In Iran, they actually use construction equipment to hang people.
32:44
SPEAKER_00: So they like put the noose around your neck and then
32:46
SPEAKER_00: the construction arm just goes up in the air and then they leave you there.
32:51
SPEAKER_00: For like hours or days so that everybody can see you.
32:55
SPEAKER_00: It's like the Handmaid's Tale where they would hang people on the wall.
32:59
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so let's talk about who these people are.
33:02
SPEAKER_00: And I want to give full disclosure at the beginning of this,
33:06
SPEAKER_00: Neil, and you don't have to say the same thing, but I am against the death penalty.
33:11
SPEAKER_00: I've always been against the death penalty.
33:13
SPEAKER_00: I can say why, which is that I actually don't think So let's start with Krista Pike.
33:19
SPEAKER_00: Neil, can you tell our listeners who Krista Pike is?
33:46
SPEAKER_00: Why she was sentenced to death and what happened to her?
33:50
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, she's a woman from Tennessee.
33:52
SPEAKER_02: 30 years ago in March, 1996,
33:54
SPEAKER_02: she was sentenced to death for her part in what was a really violent murder of
33:59
SPEAKER_02: a woman named Colleen Slimmer.
34:02
SPEAKER_02: Krista Pike committed this murder,
34:04
SPEAKER_02: was part of three people who committed this murder when she was the age of 18.
34:10
SPEAKER_02: And Krista Pike herself has just an absolutely horrific upbringing.
34:15
SPEAKER_02: To read about what she endured starting as a toddler in terms of sexual
34:21
SPEAKER_02: and physical abuse inside her family and from neighbors and just really,
34:27
SPEAKER_02: really violent abuse as well is one of
34:30
SPEAKER_02: the most heartbreaking things I've really ever read.
34:33
SPEAKER_02: And she was,
34:33
SPEAKER_02: you know,
34:34
SPEAKER_02: betrayed,
34:35
SPEAKER_02: especially by her mother and so many different ways that led to just the really
34:43
SPEAKER_01: I think she was participating in something called like Job Corps in Tennessee,
34:49
SPEAKER_01: which apparently was just rife with violence and abuse
34:53
SPEAKER_02: inside of it.
34:55
SPEAKER_02: And this is where the crime took place that she was a part of.
35:02
SPEAKER_02: 18 years old.
35:03
SPEAKER_01: None of the history of abuse against her was part of that,
35:08
SPEAKER_01: was introduced to the court, nor any of the mental health challenges
35:13
SPEAKER_02: that she'd had.
35:14
SPEAKER_02: And even some of her boyfriend,
35:16
SPEAKER_02: who was also involved in the crime,
35:18
SPEAKER_02: who was 17 years up at the time,
35:20
SPEAKER_02: he was treated as a minor and he received a different Senate thing.
35:24
SPEAKER_02: So that's the background on her.
35:27
SPEAKER_02: And like I said, she's been on death row for 30 years now.
35:32
SPEAKER_00: Right.
35:32
SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
35:33
SPEAKER_00: the family of Colleen Slemmer,
35:35
SPEAKER_00: who was the woman who was murdered, I think Slemmer and Pike were actually friends.
35:39
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
35:40
SPEAKER_00: And how this went down was some horrendous thing.
35:44
SPEAKER_00: But they tortured her for hours, apparently.
35:48
SPEAKER_00: It was horrible.
35:49
SPEAKER_00: And the Slemmer family deserve all of our prayers and love
35:54
SPEAKER_00: for what they have endured the last decades.
35:57
SPEAKER_00: But here's the problem.
35:59
SPEAKER_00: Of course,
36:00
SPEAKER_00: and we'll introduce one of the issues about the death penalty is
36:04
SPEAKER_00: that there have been decades of appeals.
36:07
SPEAKER_00: The Slemmer family was promised justice by this execution.
36:12
SPEAKER_00: Had Pike been executed,
36:14
SPEAKER_00: she would have been the first woman in 200 years in Tennessee to be executed.
36:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
36:20
SPEAKER_00: So part of what we're starting to see under
36:22
SPEAKER_00: the Trump administration is women being executed, which is very, very rare.
36:27
SPEAKER_00: And it was rare back when Ethel Rosenberg was executed back in the 1950s.
36:32
SPEAKER_00: But what we're also seeing is victims' families who are told, this will be your justice.
36:41
SPEAKER_00: And not only do they have to wait for decades and live with the crime,
36:46
SPEAKER_00: whatever it is that they need to resolve,
36:49
SPEAKER_00: Really can't be resolved until the case comes to conclusion.
36:54
SPEAKER_00: So they thought this was going to happen at the end of September.
36:58
SPEAKER_00: And apparently Pike had a medical condition which her attorneys warned
37:03
SPEAKER_00: the state would prevent them from being able to kill her successfully
37:09
SPEAKER_00: with lethal injection.
37:10
SPEAKER_00: Lethal injection actually is a horrible record of killing people.
37:14
SPEAKER_00: It's often very painful.
37:15
SPEAKER_00: It often doesn't work.
37:17
SPEAKER_00: So Pike,
37:18
SPEAKER_00: they sort of poked at her and poked at her to find a working vein,
37:22
SPEAKER_00: which is, again, a common problem.
37:24
SPEAKER_00: She went through two rounds of phenobarbital injections,
37:29
SPEAKER_00: and after a lot of confusion and resistance,
37:32
SPEAKER_00: was finally taken to the hospital when she didn't die.
37:36
SPEAKER_00: She's now up and walking, but she can't use her arms.
37:39
SPEAKER_00: Apparently, when she woke up, she looked at the people around her and said, who are you?
37:44
SPEAKER_00: Like, she didn't know that she wasn't dead.
37:47
SPEAKER_00: But it's now unclear whether she can be legally executed again.
37:51
SPEAKER_00: And what is the problem with Trying to execute her again, Neil?
37:57
SPEAKER_01: Well, principally, double jeopardy.
37:59
SPEAKER_01: I mean, so the second execution raises some pretty big
38:03
SPEAKER_02: legal and ethical issues.
38:05
SPEAKER_02: Double jeopardy and also the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
38:08
SPEAKER_02: And you got to figure that her attorneys are going to really,
38:13
SPEAKER_02: you know,
38:13
SPEAKER_02: take the opportunity to But
38:16
SPEAKER_01: to push that and to sort of pursue a victory here,
38:21
SPEAKER_01: I think there's also just back to the events that happened.
38:24
SPEAKER_01: There's something to me that just seems so perverse about the state's inability
38:29
SPEAKER_01: to carry out this execution and then therefore having to have her transported to
38:34
SPEAKER_01: a hospital where those persons are...
38:38
SPEAKER_01: Committed to restoring her to health.
38:40
SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's just, you can't really wrap your mind around that.
38:44
SPEAKER_02: And I think it really exposes so much that's at like the sort of core ethical heart of this all.
38:51
SPEAKER_02: But what a horrific,
38:52
SPEAKER_02: horrific thing for someone who's
38:55
SPEAKER_01: You know,
38:55
SPEAKER_01: and again, she is someone who has never said that she shouldn't be.
38:58
SPEAKER_01: I mean, she's asked to be to remain,
39:01
SPEAKER_01: you know,
39:01
SPEAKER_01: in a life sentence and says that she is guilty of the crime that she committed
39:04
SPEAKER_01: and says that the abuse and the,
39:07
SPEAKER_01: you know,
39:07
SPEAKER_01: the background that she had was no justification or defense for
39:10
SPEAKER_02: the crime she committed.
39:13
SPEAKER_02: But, you know, has appealed the death penalty verdict for decades now.
39:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
39:20
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, we're going to talk about this a little bit later.
39:23
SPEAKER_00: I used to know a lot of death penalty attorneys.
39:25
SPEAKER_00: They all went to Brooklyn College.
39:26
SPEAKER_00: I played tennis with them and so on.
39:28
SPEAKER_00: And one of the things they always told me was that most people who murder
39:36
SPEAKER_00: in this way are horribly, horribly damaged.
39:39
SPEAKER_00: And that one of the opportunities that incarceration offers is for them
39:44
SPEAKER_00: to literally become human beings in a way that they were unable to To feel connected
39:52
SPEAKER_00: to other people and that prison can actually accomplish that.
39:56
SPEAKER_00: And all these death penalty attorneys I knew believed that and
40:00
SPEAKER_00: that saving people's lives was a way of this society committing itself to humanity.
40:06
SPEAKER_00: So let's talk about the other things.
40:08
SPEAKER_00: Execution here,
40:10
SPEAKER_00: before we get into the broader issues,
40:12
SPEAKER_00: what's the other execution that is on our plate for this week?
40:16
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so in Texas, right,
40:17
SPEAKER_02: Nadell Hassan,
40:19
SPEAKER_02: and he is the person who killed 13 people,
40:21
SPEAKER_02: wounded 32 others in that mass shooting that took place at Fort Hood back in 2009.
40:28
SPEAKER_01: So he's awaiting his execution.
40:30
SPEAKER_01: He would be the first active duty service person to be executed since 1961.
40:36
SPEAKER_01: And of course,
40:37
SPEAKER_01: this He made all the headlines a week ago when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made
40:44
SPEAKER_01: that very public announcement that Hassan's execution was going to happen
40:49
SPEAKER_01: by firing squad, but that it was going to be live streamed.
40:52
SPEAKER_01: Now, Trump has now said that it's not going to happen, correct?
40:56
SPEAKER_00: He has.
40:56
SPEAKER_01: A lot of stuff happened between over the last week in terms
41:01
SPEAKER_02: of the sort
41:01
SPEAKER_02: of public Debate over Hegseth's announcement about this live streaming of
41:07
SPEAKER_02: the execution.
41:08
SPEAKER_00: Right.
41:09
SPEAKER_00: Well, there was a lot of pushback from MAGA world.
41:11
SPEAKER_00: I mean, there were Fox people who were saying, no, no, no, no, no.
41:15
SPEAKER_00: George Will wrote what I thought was a great column in the,
41:18
SPEAKER_00: I believe it was in the Washington Post.
41:20
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
41:21
SPEAKER_00: In which he said it was just barbaric.
41:22
SPEAKER_00: And the words barbaric and barbarism have been used all over the media to describe it.
41:28
SPEAKER_00: J.D.
41:28
SPEAKER_00: Vance being the person he is.
41:31
SPEAKER_00: And it's kind of interesting because J.D.
41:34
SPEAKER_00: Vance is exactly the kind of person who you would expect to find such a thing revolting.
41:40
SPEAKER_00: But he didn't say it was revolting.
41:42
SPEAKER_00: He just said he wouldn't watch it and that he didn't have anything else to say about it.
41:47
SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, Speaker Mike Johnson, aka Speaker Monkey, said he, quote, has concerns.
41:54
SPEAKER_00: So it seems like nobody but media figures were willing to talk back
41:59
SPEAKER_00: to Trump Publicly about this,
42:02
SPEAKER_00: but it seems like in the White House, there was some pushback.
42:07
SPEAKER_00: What was the pushback about?
42:09
SPEAKER_00: And what do you think really got to Trump?
42:11
SPEAKER_02: Well, I don't know if this is what got to Trump,
42:13
SPEAKER_02: but one of the things that a lot of folks were saying was like,
42:16
SPEAKER_02: so Nadal is paralyzed from the waist down and is in a wheelchair.
42:21
SPEAKER_02: A lot of people were saying like that just the visuals of that would be particularly dangerous.
42:28
SPEAKER_02: I mean, and, you know, the folks who were
42:50
SPEAKER_01: Opposed to it,
42:51
SPEAKER_01: conservatives who are opposed to it,
42:52
SPEAKER_01: they weren't just saying, like, this shouldn't happen.
42:54
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they were making really spirited, impassioned arguments about why this was wrong.
43:00
SPEAKER_01: From theological basis,
43:02
SPEAKER_01: from just sort of cultural arguments about this being,
43:06
SPEAKER_01: you know,
43:06
SPEAKER_01: something that,
43:08
SPEAKER_01: again, like, you know, that only places like Iran and Afghanistan do.
43:12
SPEAKER_01: And so that was wrong of the US to be in that sort of company.
43:15
SPEAKER_01: And then also,
43:16
SPEAKER_01: I think a lot of conservatives saying this argument about deterrence is not true.
43:21
SPEAKER_01: And we shouldn't be making arguments that are not factual.
43:29
SPEAKER_01: And so, I don't know.
43:30
SPEAKER_01: I think that there's a good chance that there was sort of a growing argument
43:37
SPEAKER_01: against this that was quite close to the president.
43:40
SPEAKER_01: And I also wonder, too, I mean,
43:42
SPEAKER_01: it seemed to me that Hexeth sort of Said this almost off the cuff and
43:47
SPEAKER_01: that this isn't something that had any approval or that even the White House knew
43:51
SPEAKER_01: about and that they were playing catch up there.
43:53
SPEAKER_01: And again, I think that's not something Trump likes.
43:55
SPEAKER_01: So I think this might have been like overreach on Hegseth.
44:00
SPEAKER_02: And this is a little bit of a slap on the wrist from Trump if it's being
44:04
SPEAKER_02: if it's you know,
44:05
SPEAKER_02: if it's if it's if it's a case that this is not going to happen now.
44:09
SPEAKER_00: Right.
44:10
SPEAKER_00: Well, and I think it's important to say that Hegseth said this on the USS Lincoln,
44:15
SPEAKER_00: which is the ship that has the longest deployment ever and in which people kept,
44:19
SPEAKER_00: you know,
44:20
SPEAKER_00: Trying to hurt themselves because they were so desperate to get off the Lincoln.
44:24
SPEAKER_00: And so the Lincoln finally returned to the West Coast
44:26
SPEAKER_00: and Pete Hegsess flew out there to inspire them.
44:30
SPEAKER_00: And yes, it does seem kind of off the cuff.
44:33
SPEAKER_00: It was in a conversation with a conservative broadcaster who was on the deck with him.
44:39
SPEAKER_00: So there's that piece of it.
44:40
SPEAKER_00: It also seemed to me yet another technique.
44:45
SPEAKER_00: If the White House knew about it, to try and gin up the MAGA base before the election.
44:51
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't think the election is irrelevant here to sort of say,
44:55
SPEAKER_00: we are really tough on crime.
44:57
SPEAKER_00: We really do, you know, go after these terrorists and so on.
45:03
SPEAKER_00: But I think what you said about Nadal being in a wheelchair,
45:06
SPEAKER_00: because of course,
45:07
SPEAKER_00: when he was conducting the shooting, which was horrendous, he killed 13 people.
45:11
SPEAKER_00: He wounded 32 others.
45:12
SPEAKER_00: Again, To the families out there,
45:16
SPEAKER_00: if any of our listeners know the families,
45:18
SPEAKER_00: you have our love,
45:19
SPEAKER_00: you have our prayers, that this should happen to anyone was horrifying.
45:23
SPEAKER_00: But Hassan was shot by someone on the base, which is why he's in the wheelchair.
45:29
SPEAKER_00: But the idea that you would actually shoot someone in a wheelchair...
45:35
SPEAKER_00: I think did not seem heroic to Trump.
45:37
SPEAKER_00: He had imagined something else,
45:39
SPEAKER_00: you know,
45:39
SPEAKER_00: someone being tied to a post,
45:42
SPEAKER_00: blindfolded and given a last cigarette and it would all be very cinematic.
45:47
SPEAKER_00: It's really not cinematic.
45:48
SPEAKER_00: You know,
45:48
SPEAKER_00: remember that poor man who was on a ship that was hijacked and he was in
45:52
SPEAKER_00: a wheelchair and the hijackers threw him off in the wheelchair.
45:55
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was like everybody was horrified by that.
45:59
SPEAKER_00: But I think the other thing is that there is some thought that this is also tied to
46:06
SPEAKER_00: the failure of the Pike execution, that Trump was...
46:11
SPEAKER_00: Really embarrassed that that execution didn't work.
46:14
SPEAKER_00: And he wanted to show that the federal government could do it.
46:17
SPEAKER_00: But then I want to add another thing because I was listening
46:20
SPEAKER_00: to Kara Swisher's podcast with Hillary Clinton.
46:23
SPEAKER_00: And one of the things Clinton talked about was that when
46:27
SPEAKER_00: the Obama administration got Osama bin Laden,
46:31
SPEAKER_00: They had extensive conversations about what to do with the body and to make sure
46:36
SPEAKER_00: that images of him being shot were not distributed
46:39
SPEAKER_00: because such things are radicalizing.
46:42
SPEAKER_00: And Nadal himself has been saying, you know, go do it.
46:46
SPEAKER_00: This would be great, you know.
46:48
SPEAKER_00: And that it does, in fact, become a recruitment tool, right?
46:52
SPEAKER_01: Of course, right.
46:53
SPEAKER_01: Can you imagine how that video footage of that gets used in different places
46:58
SPEAKER_01: for radicalizing efforts against the U.S.?
47:05
SPEAKER_01: So I don't think that the Trump administration is thinking through that.
47:08
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they should be, but that's certainly a relevant context to this.
47:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
47:13
SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
47:14
SPEAKER_00: something that nobody has written about,
47:16
SPEAKER_00: I'm just curious what you think about this,
47:18
SPEAKER_00: is that I don't know how that video would have been kept away from children
47:23
SPEAKER_00: and teenagers.
47:25
SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, a lot of folks online, again, were saying this shouldn't happen.
47:29
SPEAKER_01: Like, this is not something that, like, school children should be watching.
47:33
SPEAKER_00: Right.
47:34
SPEAKER_00: Well, and I wonder if people like Bezos and Zuckerberg went to Trump and said,
47:40
SPEAKER_00: you know, This will be horrible.
47:43
SPEAKER_00: I mean, can you imagine Facebook if this video were just proliferating?
47:48
SPEAKER_00: And we know it happens.
47:50
SPEAKER_00: On YouTube, you know, we've had various shooters who had cameras strapped to their heads.
47:56
SPEAKER_00: And every time the video comes down, somebody else puts it back up.
48:00
SPEAKER_00: So this would have been a nightmare for the tech companies.
48:04
SPEAKER_00: But it's just one of those things that it's just horrifying to me
48:08
SPEAKER_00: that it was ever raised in the first place.
48:11
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so Neil,
48:13
SPEAKER_00: we know that Donald Trump has overseen more federal executions
48:16
SPEAKER_00: than any other president.
48:17
SPEAKER_00: Quick quiz.
48:19
SPEAKER_00: Who's next in line?
48:20
SPEAKER_02: Bill Clinton.
48:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there you go.
48:24
SPEAKER_00: There you go.
48:24
SPEAKER_00: Bill Clinton.
48:25
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, 98 people were put to death in what was before the previous peak year, which was 1999.
48:31
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
48:31
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
48:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
48:35
SPEAKER_00: so that's something that we recall about the Clinton administration is that law
48:39
SPEAKER_00: and order was sort of the spine of that administration.
48:43
SPEAKER_00: Only 27 states in the United States still have the death penalty.
48:48
SPEAKER_00: 23 have abolished it, but most states do not use the death penalty.
48:52
SPEAKER_00: Like California still has the death penalty on the books,
48:55
SPEAKER_00: but I don't think they've executed anybody in decades, right?
48:59
SPEAKER_02: That's right.
48:59
SPEAKER_02: And I think,
49:00
SPEAKER_02: you know,
49:00
SPEAKER_02: even some of the states that have it,
49:02
SPEAKER_02: like California, Oregon, Ohio,
49:05
SPEAKER_02: and Pennsylvania,
49:06
SPEAKER_02: so it's still technically legal there,
49:08
SPEAKER_02: but they are paused on executions by executive action.
49:12
SPEAKER_02: So, and even when,
49:14
SPEAKER_02: like you were saying,
49:15
SPEAKER_02: in many of the states that still,
49:17
SPEAKER_02: it is legally,
49:18
SPEAKER_02: it's still legal, they use it sparingly or haven't done so in a very long time.
49:24
SPEAKER_00: Right.
49:24
SPEAKER_00: But nevertheless,
49:25
SPEAKER_00: I was actually surprised at how This was,
49:29
SPEAKER_00: and I guess it isn't few, but it seemed few.
49:32
SPEAKER_00: 1,685 people have been executed in the United States since the founding, which,
49:38
SPEAKER_00: again,
49:39
SPEAKER_00: for over 250 years,
49:41
SPEAKER_00: less than 2,000 people, that would be an average of fewer than 10 a year.
49:46
SPEAKER_00: That does not include over 6,500 lynchings between 1865 and 1950,
49:54
SPEAKER_00: or the American servicemen who were put to death between 1940 and 1961.
49:58
SPEAKER_00: I think that's like 160 more people.
50:01
SPEAKER_00: So if you expand your idea of execution in the American mind,
50:06
SPEAKER_00: you really have to take in the military,
50:09
SPEAKER_00: extra legal executions, and so on and so forth.
50:13
SPEAKER_00: But the last two public executions in the United States were in the 1930s,
50:19
SPEAKER_00: after which politicians kind of agreed that this was a degrading spectacle.
50:24
SPEAKER_00: And it's interesting that this is actually the same decade in which movies become
50:30
SPEAKER_00: the sort of primary method of visual entertainment.
50:34
SPEAKER_00: Who were these people, Neil?
50:37
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the first one was a man named Rainey Bethea,
50:40
SPEAKER_02: who in 1936,
50:40
SPEAKER_02: he was an African-American handyman and he was accused of rape and murder.
50:45
SPEAKER_02: He was hanged in Owensburg, Kentucky.
50:47
SPEAKER_02: A crowd of 20,000 people came out to watch this.
50:51
SPEAKER_02: You can see pictures and it's just stunning to see an enormous crowd gathered for this hanging.
50:59
SPEAKER_02: And, you know, this has been...
51:02
SPEAKER_02: Characterized as illegal lynching.
51:03
SPEAKER_02: The writer and filmmaker Sonia Lee has characterized it as such.
51:08
SPEAKER_02: And actually in that case,
51:09
SPEAKER_02: there's sort of an interesting
51:10
SPEAKER_01: detail that prosecutors dropped the murder charge
51:14
SPEAKER_01: because the Kentucky state law mandated public hanging as a punishment for rape.
51:19
SPEAKER_01: So that was done in order
51:21
SPEAKER_02: to do that.
51:21
SPEAKER_02: And so then the other cases in 1937,
51:24
SPEAKER_02: Roscoe Jackson,
51:25
SPEAKER_02: who was a white man,
51:26
SPEAKER_02: Was publicly hanged in Galena,
51:29
SPEAKER_02: Missouri for the robbery and murder of a traveling salesman named Pearl Bozarth.
51:35
SPEAKER_00: I loved it that the guy was named Pearl,
51:37
SPEAKER_00: but it was also one of those stories that if you look it up on Wikipedia,
51:41
SPEAKER_00: which I did.
51:42
SPEAKER_00: I did too.
51:42
SPEAKER_00: And then that led me to another newspaper article.
51:46
SPEAKER_00: Pearl Bozarth was like this.
51:49
SPEAKER_00: Hair tonic salesman guy who was like driving around the Midwest and Upper South.
51:55
SPEAKER_00: And he just picked up Roscoe Jackson as a hitchhiker.
51:59
SPEAKER_00: And Jackson robbed him and killed him and stole his car.
52:03
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's sort of one of those classic scenarios.
52:05
SPEAKER_00: But he's the last person to be publicly hanged.
52:10
SPEAKER_00: But they continue to...
52:12
SPEAKER_00: Why, Neal?
52:25
SPEAKER_01: So that was a 5-4 decision.
52:27
SPEAKER_01: And well, actually, that was the case that reinstated it, right?
52:30
SPEAKER_01: So in 1972, the Supreme Court suspended the death penalty.
52:35
SPEAKER_01: I mean, there was lots of concerns about cruel and unusual punishment.
52:39
SPEAKER_02: Also, it's being wrongly used that,
52:42
SPEAKER_02: you know,
52:42
SPEAKER_02: innocent folks were innocent people were being killed via the death penalty.
52:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's that.
52:49
SPEAKER_02: Capriciously, right?
52:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
52:51
SPEAKER_00: And also,
52:52
SPEAKER_00: I think there was a lot of evidence that if you were black,
52:56
SPEAKER_00: you were exponentially more likely to be sentenced to death.
53:01
SPEAKER_00: And then there were increasing concerns, as there are today, that innocent people are convicted.
53:08
SPEAKER_00: I mean, to sort of go back to the Rainey Bethea case,
53:11
SPEAKER_00: it's not at all clear that he committed the crime that they said he committed.
53:16
SPEAKER_00: He was taken to a police station.
53:18
SPEAKER_00: He was beaten until he confessed.
53:20
SPEAKER_00: He then withdrew his confession.
53:22
SPEAKER_00: He then was beaten again and he confessed again.
53:26
SPEAKER_00: So there are a variety of ways that confessions are extracted.
53:31
SPEAKER_00: And it's not just the 1930s.
53:34
SPEAKER_00: It happened to the Central Park Five.
53:36
SPEAKER_00: People are coerced into confessing or they are convicted wrongly.
53:41
SPEAKER_00: And once you've killed them, you've killed them.
53:44
SPEAKER_00: So what the death penalty does is make it impossible for people Who continue
53:50
SPEAKER_00: to assert their innocence to prove their innocence if you've killed them.
53:55
SPEAKER_00: So that's another one of the big contemporary arguments against it.
54:00
SPEAKER_00: In 1976, the court reinstated execution.
54:04
SPEAKER_00: So there's only four years in which a Supreme Court mandated moratorium is in effect.
54:11
SPEAKER_00: And Georgia came back to them and said, well, how could we do this right?
54:17
SPEAKER_00: And so the Supreme Court Said you have to come up with statutes
54:21
SPEAKER_00: that mean you're applying it evenly.
54:24
SPEAKER_00: So that's an important thing to remember about the Supreme Court.
54:26
SPEAKER_00: They didn't say, you know, we're actually ruling on the death penalty.
54:31
SPEAKER_00: They're saying you are applying it unequally and you're applying it cruelly.
54:35
SPEAKER_00: So in 1977,
54:37
SPEAKER_00: Gary Gilmore,
54:38
SPEAKER_00: I think, becomes the first person to be executed by firing squad in Utah.
54:44
SPEAKER_00: And he's the subject, of course, of Norman Mailer's Executioner's Song.
54:49
SPEAKER_00: Did you ever read that, Neil?
54:50
SPEAKER_02: I didn't,
54:51
SPEAKER_02: but when I went down a rabbit hole reading about Gary Gilmore,
54:55
SPEAKER_02: I saw that and have always meant to read that book.
54:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I read it in college, my senior year.
55:01
SPEAKER_00: I remember buying it at the Yale Co-op and basically not going to class until I finished it.
55:07
SPEAKER_00: It was like eight or 900 pages.
55:09
SPEAKER_00: It's a riveting book.
55:10
SPEAKER_00: And Gary Gilmore, again,
55:12
SPEAKER_00: very good example of somebody who was just brutalized as a child and a young man
55:19
SPEAKER_00: and came out of that,
55:21
SPEAKER_00: you know,
55:21
SPEAKER_00: probably brain damaged, certainly amoral, and went on a kind of killing spree.
55:26
SPEAKER_00: So by the time he was Captured and tried and convicted.
55:30
SPEAKER_00: One of the things that Gilmore did is he refused to defend himself.
55:34
SPEAKER_00: He refused to appeal.
55:36
SPEAKER_00: And people were filing appeals on his behalf because they didn't want
55:40
SPEAKER_00: the death penalty to come back.
55:42
SPEAKER_00: And Gilmore kept saying, you know, I don't care.
55:45
SPEAKER_00: I want them to kill me.
55:45
SPEAKER_00: And he chose the firing squad.
55:48
SPEAKER_00: He wanted to be killed by firing squad.
55:50
SPEAKER_02: Although the alternative was to be hanged and he was worried that I was not going
55:54
SPEAKER_02: to be and I would probably choose.
55:55
SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's what a choice to make.
55:57
SPEAKER_02: But yeah, apparently his last words were, let's do this or let's do it.
56:01
SPEAKER_02: And he was quite annoyed with the ACLU and also this group of pastors and rabbis
56:08
SPEAKER_02: in Salt Lake City who were mounting all these legal cases trying
56:12
SPEAKER_02: to get his death sentence overturned.
56:16
SPEAKER_00: Right.
56:16
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know,
56:17
SPEAKER_00: the 1970s are such an interesting period where the Supreme Court is intervening
56:23
SPEAKER_00: in key issues like abortion and the death penalty and so on.
56:26
SPEAKER_00: And everybody thinks if they can just build on that, it's going to be okay.
56:31
SPEAKER_00: And abortion didn't work out in the end.
56:34
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it did work out in some ways, but it's illegal in half the country now.
56:38
SPEAKER_00: And certainly when the death penalty comes back It really seems to depend on
56:43
SPEAKER_00: a political atmosphere that does or does not support it.
56:47
SPEAKER_00: You know,
56:48
SPEAKER_00: the Trump administration,
56:49
SPEAKER_00: like a number of people who believe in the criminal justice system we have,
56:56
SPEAKER_00: says it's an effective deterrent to crime.
56:58
SPEAKER_00: Is that true, Neil?
56:59
SPEAKER_02: It's not true at all.
57:01
SPEAKER_02: The Amnesty International has argued it's a myth.
57:05
SPEAKER_02: Others have,
57:07
SPEAKER_02: you know,
57:07
SPEAKER_02: pointed out that death penalty,
57:10
SPEAKER_02: there's no evidence that shows it makes communities safer.
57:13
SPEAKER_02: You know,
57:13
SPEAKER_02: it's just like one of those arguments that's like,
57:15
SPEAKER_02: and it was getting brought up a lot in the past week with both the Pike and
57:21
SPEAKER_02: the Nadal Hassan case of all these folks being like,
57:24
SPEAKER_02: we have to have this because this is a deterrent to crime.
57:27
SPEAKER_02: And like,
57:30
SPEAKER_02: why is crime not being deterred, therefore?
57:32
SPEAKER_02: Right.
57:33
SPEAKER_00: Right, exactly.
57:34
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, does it stop a brain-damaged, drug-addled teenager from flipping out?
57:40
SPEAKER_00: No, it really doesn't.
57:41
SPEAKER_00: And that's partly why normally we don't execute teenagers,
57:46
SPEAKER_00: because they are not actually young enough to have any consciousness,
57:51
SPEAKER_00: any kind of moral consciousness.
57:52
SPEAKER_00: But I also think,
57:54
SPEAKER_00: you know,
57:55
SPEAKER_00: having this right before the election may have made
57:59
SPEAKER_00: the Trump administration feel strong,
58:01
SPEAKER_00: but It sort of revived a series of rifts in the conservative movement
58:07
SPEAKER_00: that are getting riftier as we move toward November 4th.
58:12
SPEAKER_00: The Cato Institute opposes the death penalty in part because of the danger
58:16
SPEAKER_00: of executing innocent people.
58:18
SPEAKER_00: A lot of other libertarians oppose the death penalty because it's so expensive.
58:24
SPEAKER_00: How much does it cost to execute somebody as opposed to keeping them in prison for life, Neil?
58:31
SPEAKER_02: A lot more.
58:32
SPEAKER_02: One million to three million more to sentence a person to death than
58:35
SPEAKER_02: to sentence them to life because,
58:37
SPEAKER_02: of course,
58:37
SPEAKER_02: so much time is spent on the appeals and so much costs are racked up around that.
58:42
SPEAKER_02: So lots of folks have made that argument that this is just a real waste of resources.
58:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
58:48
SPEAKER_00: And then there's also an argument that I would sort of place myself in
58:52
SPEAKER_00: that has been highly developed by Christian thinkers and theologians
58:57
SPEAKER_00: that retribution is not restorative.
59:01
SPEAKER_00: And that when somebody is committed to life in prison,
59:06
SPEAKER_00: first of all, that is a pro-life position.
59:09
SPEAKER_00: If you are pro-life, you should believe in the preservation of life, even bad lives.
59:16
SPEAKER_00: But Christians believe that those bad lives can be redeemed and that the kind
59:21
SPEAKER_00: of clemency that might exist or the sympathy would permit conversion and repentance.
59:28
SPEAKER_00: That, you know, if you execute somebody, they go to hell.
59:31
SPEAKER_00: If you keep them alive and allow them the opportunity to repent,
59:36
SPEAKER_00: you've saved a soul and that person can be admitted to heaven despite their sins.
59:42
SPEAKER_00: What do we think about that, Neal?
59:44
SPEAKER_02: Well, I found this really interesting to watch carry out online this week as someone
59:50
SPEAKER_02: who follows,
59:51
SPEAKER_02: you know,
59:51
SPEAKER_02: religious conservatives really closely and,
59:53
SPEAKER_02: you know, from a scholarly standpoint mostly.
59:57
SPEAKER_02: But this was
59:58
SPEAKER_01: a really,
59:59
SPEAKER_01: really rich debate online this week between within conservative Christianity about,
1:00:06
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:00:06
SPEAKER_01: folks arguing,
1:00:08
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:00:09
SPEAKER_01: In general,
1:00:09
SPEAKER_01: in support of the death penalty,
1:00:11
SPEAKER_01: and in the particular case,
1:00:13
SPEAKER_01: like advocating for the live execution to happen,
1:00:18
SPEAKER_01: being public and being live streamed,
1:00:20
SPEAKER_01: and lots of Christian conservatives arguing against especially the live streaming
1:00:25
SPEAKER_01: of it, but even many of them arguing against the death penalty itself.
1:00:30
SPEAKER_01: And so I think,
1:00:31
SPEAKER_01: you know, it was interesting because all of them were making theological arguments.
1:00:36
SPEAKER_01: They were picking sort of different theological supports and sort of framing them
1:00:41
SPEAKER_01: in different ways.
1:00:42
SPEAKER_02: And I always find that fascinating.
1:00:45
SPEAKER_02: Something I like to explore a lot as a historian is the sort of rich room
1:00:50
SPEAKER_02: for interpretation within a particular theological tradition that insists on sort of
1:00:57
SPEAKER_02: A literal reading of the Bible and a very particular understanding
1:01:01
SPEAKER_01: of what Christianity means.
1:01:03
SPEAKER_01: An example like this shows that there's so much variation even
1:01:07
SPEAKER_01: within conservative evangelicalism about lots of big issues.
1:01:11
SPEAKER_01: But I think those who are arguing That sort of consistent life ethic that tends
1:01:17
SPEAKER_01: to be more a Catholic position, right?
1:01:37
SPEAKER_02: Because of that difference around that very question, which I wrote about in my first book.
1:01:42
SPEAKER_01: But a lot of evangelicals do have that position and certainly argue
1:01:46
SPEAKER_01: that there's been a lot of ink spilled over
1:01:48
SPEAKER_02: articles that say,
1:01:50
SPEAKER_02: I'm an evangelical and that's why I oppose the death penalty.
1:01:53
SPEAKER_02: You can Google that and read, you know, a couple dozen.
1:01:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:01:58
SPEAKER_00: Well, and there's one piece of it that this is overly simplistic, but...
1:02:02
SPEAKER_00: Do you believe that God is vengeful or do you believe that God is loving and forgiving?
1:02:08
SPEAKER_00: And that is a split in Christianity.
1:02:11
SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
1:02:12
SPEAKER_00: So, all right.
1:02:13
SPEAKER_00: On that note, Neil,
1:02:15
SPEAKER_00: again, sympathies to the friends and family of all who have been harmed by murder.
1:02:22
SPEAKER_00: And maybe we'll take this up again in the future when we see what is going to happen
1:02:27
SPEAKER_00: to Krista Pike.
1:02:29
SPEAKER_00: So, Neil, what do you want to go viral this week?
1:02:32
SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm going to stay in the realm of American religion because I want
1:02:36
SPEAKER_01: to share this really terrific piece that came out yesterday in the New York Times
1:02:39
SPEAKER_01: from Ruth Graham, who is their absolutely incredible religion reporter.
1:02:43
SPEAKER_01: The title of the article is, A Mega Church Pastor is Running for Senate.
1:02:47
SPEAKER_01: Will Democrats Vote for Him?
1:02:50
SPEAKER_01: This is about Adam Hamilton, who is running for the Democrat running for Senate in Kansas.
1:02:57
SPEAKER_01: Kansas, we should say,
1:02:58
SPEAKER_01: just yesterday,
1:02:59
SPEAKER_01: pollsters moved Kansas from the leans Republican category into a toss-up.
1:03:05
SPEAKER_01: So this is a really,
1:03:06
SPEAKER_01: really close race in a state that I think a lot of people just assume is deeply red,
1:03:10
SPEAKER_01: but that's not the case at all.
1:03:12
SPEAKER_01: Adam Hamilton is a fascinating...
1:03:15
SPEAKER_01: A person,
1:03:16
SPEAKER_01: he is a Methodist pastor in Kansas,
1:03:20
SPEAKER_01: and not only that,
1:03:21
SPEAKER_01: he presides over the largest congregation in the state of Kansas,
1:03:26
SPEAKER_01: a congregation that between its home campus and its one And
1:03:30
SPEAKER_01: the thing that's really fascinating to me is that there's a lot of people
1:03:32
SPEAKER_01: who are living in the world.
1:03:44
SPEAKER_01: That's fascinating to me about it.
1:03:46
SPEAKER_01: Usually the biggest church in any given state is an evangelical church.
1:03:50
SPEAKER_01: And this is in the Methodist church.
1:03:53
SPEAKER_01: And it's sort of straddled both the mainline Protestant tradition and a sort
1:03:59
SPEAKER_01: of evangelical tradition.
1:04:01
SPEAKER_01: And that's not something we see a lot,
1:04:03
SPEAKER_01: although I think that sort of explains,
1:04:06
SPEAKER_01: again, why it's gotten to be so big in this state.
1:04:09
SPEAKER_01: Hamilton is a fascinating person.
1:04:11
SPEAKER_01: He started this church back in the 90s with like,
1:04:13
SPEAKER_01: I think there were 10 people who were meeting in like a rented room and then grew it
1:04:18
SPEAKER_01: into this enormous, enormous mega church.
1:04:21
SPEAKER_01: He himself was a registered Republican for a long time and considered running as
1:04:26
SPEAKER_01: an independent, but is running as a Democrat.
1:04:29
SPEAKER_01: And he also has a really fascinating journey theologically.
1:04:32
SPEAKER_01: He's someone who,
1:04:33
SPEAKER_01: and I think the most interesting thing here is His evolution on the question
1:04:37
SPEAKER_01: of same-sex marriage,
1:04:39
SPEAKER_01: he was someone who had opposed it,
1:04:40
SPEAKER_01: but sort of wrestled with it personally and came to affirm same-sex marriage
1:04:44
SPEAKER_01: and was part of the group within the United Methodist Church that pushed for
1:04:50
SPEAKER_01: that denomination,
1:04:51
SPEAKER_01: adopting a pro-same-sex marriage position within the last decade or so,
1:04:56
SPEAKER_01: something that caused him to lose a lot of Members at his church,
1:05:00
SPEAKER_01: but obviously not so many that they still have, you know, 24,000.
1:05:04
SPEAKER_01: So a fascinating sort of biography and a really interesting background and sort of
1:05:09
SPEAKER_01: in a lot of ways,
1:05:09
SPEAKER_01: I think the ideal person to be running as a Democrat in a place like Kansas.
1:05:13
SPEAKER_01: So we'll continue to watch this race,
1:05:15
SPEAKER_01: obviously,
1:05:16
SPEAKER_01: but it's a really
1:05:18
SPEAKER_02: worthwhile piece to read from Ruth Graham
1:05:20
SPEAKER_02: in yesterday's New York Times.
1:05:23
SPEAKER_00: You know, I saw that piece and I sort of skipped over it and now I'm going to go back to it.
1:05:28
SPEAKER_00: It's so exciting.
1:05:29
SPEAKER_00: And I have to tell you one of the things I find very exciting about
1:05:32
SPEAKER_00: the Democratic Party right now.
1:05:33
SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
1:05:34
SPEAKER_00: there's some of my friends and our colleagues who are ripping their hair out
1:05:38
SPEAKER_00: because they are saying, you know, the Democratic Party has to decide what it is.
1:05:42
SPEAKER_00: And what I'm seeing is this sort of quilt of diverse candidates all over the country
1:05:48
SPEAKER_00: who Who are really local in their interests,
1:05:53
SPEAKER_00: in their import, in the people that are supporting them.
1:05:56
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you can't run an Elizabeth Warren in Kansas.
1:06:01
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's part of why people are getting so excited on the Democratic side
1:06:08
SPEAKER_00: about this election.
1:06:09
SPEAKER_00: Cook Political Report moved 11 races toward the Democrats today.
1:06:14
SPEAKER_00: You know, so that Republican became lean Republican.
1:06:17
SPEAKER_00: That's in South Carolina.
1:06:19
SPEAKER_00: Darlene Graham is losing some traction.
1:06:22
SPEAKER_00: They went from lean Republican to toss up.
1:06:24
SPEAKER_00: They went from lean Democrat to Democrat.
1:06:26
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's wild.
1:06:27
SPEAKER_00: It is just wild out there.
1:06:30
SPEAKER_00: I want to talk about politics too.
1:06:33
SPEAKER_00: I want everyone to read Sarah Longwell's How to Eat an Elephant One Vote at a Time,
1:06:40
SPEAKER_00: which just came out from St. Martin's Press.
1:06:42
SPEAKER_00: Sarah Longwell is one of the founders of The Bulwark.
1:06:46
SPEAKER_00: She worked in Republican political consulting for years.
1:06:50
SPEAKER_00: She was a board member of the Log Cabin Club,
1:06:53
SPEAKER_00: and she actually resigned in 2016 when the Log Cabin Club decided
1:06:58
SPEAKER_00: to endorse Donald Trump.
1:06:59
SPEAKER_00: And actually, they don't seem to be many women in the law club anymore.
1:07:03
SPEAKER_00: She's an out lesbian, has been for years.
1:07:06
SPEAKER_00: And she's broken with the GOP and was one of a small group of never Trumpers
1:07:12
SPEAKER_00: who came out of that political consulting world and journalism world.
1:07:17
SPEAKER_00: Bill Kristol was another.
1:07:19
SPEAKER_00: Tim Miller is another.
1:07:20
SPEAKER_00: Jonathan Van Last is another.
1:07:23
SPEAKER_00: And they put together The Bulwark as this on-magazine of Trump resistance.
1:07:29
SPEAKER_00: But what Sarah really does for a living is she runs focus groups,
1:07:34
SPEAKER_00: which means she has spent the last 10 years running around the country talking
1:07:41
SPEAKER_00: And so the book is,
1:07:46
SPEAKER_00: in many ways,
1:07:46
SPEAKER_00: it isn't one of those,
1:07:48
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:07:48
SPEAKER_00: I once was lost and now I'm found kind of thing,
1:07:51
SPEAKER_00: because Sarah is still,
1:07:54
SPEAKER_00: as she would say,
1:07:55
SPEAKER_00: socially liberal and fiscally conservative,
1:07:59
SPEAKER_00: which we recognize from what the Republican Party used to be.
1:08:02
SPEAKER_00: We used to call them Rockefeller Republicans.
1:08:05
SPEAKER_00: But she also is persuasive about how the dynamic of MAGA works.
1:08:11
SPEAKER_00: So she would point to some of these races and say,
1:08:15
SPEAKER_00: you know,
1:08:15
SPEAKER_00: when Donald Trump calls Annie Andrews,
1:08:19
SPEAKER_00: Tranny Andrews,
1:08:22
SPEAKER_00: it's not that he's defaming her as transgender,
1:08:26
SPEAKER_00: it's that he's reminding the crowd that That they're supposed
1:08:29
SPEAKER_00: to hate transgender people and Annie Andrews loves transgender people.
1:08:34
SPEAKER_00: So that what Trump has become adept at,
1:08:37
SPEAKER_00: has perhaps always been adept at,
1:08:39
SPEAKER_00: is creating these soundbites that bring together a variety of issues
1:08:45
SPEAKER_00: that frighten people.
1:08:46
SPEAKER_00: And then offering himself up as the solution.
1:08:49
SPEAKER_00: And part of what she talks about in this book,
1:08:52
SPEAKER_00: which I loved,
1:08:53
SPEAKER_00: was how to talk to your friends and relatives about what's happening
1:08:58
SPEAKER_00: in this country.
1:08:59
SPEAKER_00: How not to drive them into a corner.
1:09:02
SPEAKER_00: How not to like break up with your relatives at Thanksgiving because they voted
1:09:07
SPEAKER_00: for Donald Trump.
1:09:08
SPEAKER_00: And what would it mean to actually meet people where they live
1:09:12
SPEAKER_00: and what people like me and you might have to give up?
1:09:18
SPEAKER_00: To bring people on board to save democracy.
1:09:21
SPEAKER_00: And I won't go into it at length because we're a little short on time today,
1:09:25
SPEAKER_00: but it's a wonderful book.
1:09:27
SPEAKER_00: It's a great read.
1:09:28
SPEAKER_00: Sarah is very entertaining and she's really sort of become one of
1:09:33
SPEAKER_00: the leading figures of the anti-Trump resistance because of her capacity to listen
1:09:38
SPEAKER_00: to people.
1:09:40
SPEAKER_00: And I admire her enormously.
1:09:42
SPEAKER_00: She is crazy young.
1:09:44
SPEAKER_00: But as she says, you know, all of us online feel like we're friends with each other.
1:09:49
SPEAKER_00: Well, I felt like Sarah Longwell was my friend for a really long time.
1:09:53
SPEAKER_00: So everybody, how to eat an elephant one voter at a time.
1:09:57
SPEAKER_00: There's a link as there is to the Adam Hamilton piece that Neil was talking about
1:10:02
SPEAKER_00: by Ruth Graham.
1:10:03
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's it for this week, Neil.
1:10:06
SPEAKER_01: All right.
1:10:06
SPEAKER_01: See you next week.
1:10:08
SPEAKER_00: See you next week as we get closer to
1:10:10
[music]
1:10:25
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for hanging out with us.
1:10:26
SPEAKER_00: Share this podcast with a friend who loves history, politics, and smart conversation.
1:10:31
SPEAKER_00: You can follow Neil and me at Threads, Blue Sky, X, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.
1:10:37
SPEAKER_00: Go to the Political Junkie Substack at clairepotter.substack.com for show notes,
1:10:43
SPEAKER_00: more episodes,
1:10:43
SPEAKER_00: to leave a comment or question,
1:10:45
SPEAKER_00: to subscribe for free, or to support our work for as little as $5 a month.
1:10:50
SPEAKER_00: Our podcast is supported by the New School for Social Research and by paying subscribers.
1:11:05
SPEAKER_00: Political Junkie is written, recorded, edited, and produced by me, Claire Potter.
1:11:10
SPEAKER_00: Today's theme is The Weight,
1:11:12
SPEAKER_00: written by Robbie Robertson and sung by the Staples Singers,
1:11:15
SPEAKER_00: copyrighted music, licensed from Lichty.
1:11:18
SPEAKER_00: That's all for now.
1:11:19
[music]