Sometimes it's difficult to oppose a government program because it's doing things that are kind
of obviously nice or obviously not harmful, or you'll look like a jerk saying
you think this is a silly idea. I'm going to take the risk of
saying this is a silly idea. The anti hate hotline now the language of
hate on the left. Stop the hate, oppose hate, anti hate.
I remember a long time ago, like I was a kid, I must
have been in high school, and my mom heard about a stop the Hate
rally or something that was happening at I think it was at Fresno City College
or something, and she I think, very uh, perceptively. I've always
been a lot more trust. This is a flaw. This is a John
Girardi character flaw. I'm always too I am trusting of people to a fault,
and this has I think actually hurt me several times in my professional life
where I trust people. I trust people, I trust people and then they
sort of burn me I and and it's I don't think it's like, oh,
this is not me trying to humble brag about what I'm such a wonderful
person. I think it's part of my desire that things not be wrong and
that I not have to fix them. So I keep wanting to trust people
because that gives more equanimity to life. If you're well, he's going to
do the right thing, and rather than doing the difficult work of following up,
I'm sometimes tempted to lazily just sort of trust people anyway. So I've
always been a little bit more trusting, I guess and gullible. And my
mom was like, this is My mom was very skeptical of this Stop the
Hate rally, and I was like, well, I don't think it's evil
or anything. My mom was like, no, this is a this is
an LGBT thing, and I was like, I don't think it is.
And then going forward, you know now today that is actually most of what
stopped the hate means. It's usually something that has to do with LGBT stuff.
Now, in this California context, there's a story in the paper about
an anti hate hotline that the state of California established after twenty twenty. Now,
in twenty twenty, some of you may have remembered this. Early in
twenty twenty, there was this spate of various acts of assault that were being
committed against Asian Americans in California and in New York and it was kind of
noticeable and troubling. So in response to this, California, because California legislators
can and this is I guess the fundamental flaw of the California legislature. The
California legislature is a year long legislative session. It goes pretty much the whole
year goes from January through either the end of August during an election year or
mid September during a non election year. So our state legislators are working are
in Sacramento working on legislation for like nine months. They have way too much
time on their hands, way too much time and ability to screw things up.
Plus they're also term limited, so they're kind of incentivized to pass as
many bills as they can. So instead of addressing the problem of hey,
here are all these anti Asian American acts of violence that are happening. Is
there something we can focus on here, Like, what can we do here
to better address this with the resources we have available? Should? You know,
should law enforcement more closely look at this? Should should we allocate funding
over here? Should how should we address this? You know, are we're
talking with local sheriffs in the counties where this is happening or police officials.
No, the state legislature things we need a new law. Part of the
fact that, you know, beating up Asian people, last I checked,
is not legal in the state of California. I'm not sure that there's a
new law that we need. We seem to have plenty of laws that would
address the problem of beating people up, Asian or otherwise. So we pass
a new law. We pass a new law for an anti hate hotline.
And here's the thing with something like this, like who's gonna say no?
Is someone gonna say no? People who are abused or bully, people who
are victims of racist whatever, we shouldn't help them. We shouldn't have a
hot light. You seem like a jerk if you say that. And so
this gets presented as something that is something to universe acclaim. So here's the
story about it. Mina Fedor, who is Korean American, was in middle
school when she learned of identity based bullying. I mean, it's kind of
when all of us learn about identity based bullying, right Anyway, it was
the beginning of the pandemic, or of you know you have big ears based
bullying or bullying, or you know you wet your pants in third grade based
bullying. It was the beginning of the pandemic in twenty twenty, when reports
of eight anti Asian incidents and rhetoric were on the rise across the nation.
One classmate told her to eat a dog, while she heard comments like go
back to where you came from, fedor learned what it was like to be
treated as a foreigner in her own country and experienced many Asian American face Americans
faced, She said. She recalled seeing anti Asian hate crime from across the
country and in her own community. The twenty twenty one death of Visha Ratanapakti,
an eighty four year old Thai American who was violently shoved to the ground
and died in San Francisco during his morning walk. Kids just miles away from
my home were walking to school with bats to protect themselves. Fendor said.
Elders, including Grandpa Vicha Ratana Pakti, were brutally murdered just for being Asian.
A year ago, the state of California launched California Versus Hate in response
to a growing number of hate incidents. Oh, let me object to this.
Are we really seeing a quote growing number of hate incidents end quote in
California? Really? I mean not that any of it is good. And
by the way, we're saying hate, and I think what we mean is
is discrimination against protected classes within the American Civil Rights Acts, within American and
California Civil Rights Acts. I think that's actually what we mean when we say
hate. No one actually gives a crud if okay, if it was,
because that's effectively what we're saying. When we're saying hate. It's basically violent
or otherwise you know, violent or maybe nonviolent, but still harassing or abusive
conduct motivated by discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation,
ethnic origin. I think that's actually what we mean when we say hate.
And we're just using this as a euphemism or we're using this to mean something
else. So California launched a hot line called California Versus Hate in response to
a quote growing number of hate incidents. The hot line is a first of
its kind in California and is offered in more than two hundred languages. Why
on earth is it offered in two hundred languages? How many? How many
people totally speak some of those languages? Once we're getting to language one fifty.
I mean, if it's in California, I mean, I guess you're
serving immigrant populations, so maybe not everyone speaking English, English, Spanish,
mong for Fresno, I guess we have I guess a number of different Asian
language Asian immigrants, particularly in the Bay Area. Two hundred languages. How
did we fund that? The anonymous program, funded by the state Legislature's Asian,
American and Pacific Islander Equity Agenda and the Jabara Hayer No Hate Act grant,
is also a partnership with California Black Media. Since its launch, Okay,
so since its launch, so we've had this hotline in California for a
year, the program has received more than one thousand reports of hate, the
California Civil Rights Department announced Monday. Within those reports, four out of six
people agreed to receive follow up services like legal aid or counseling. During the
first month, the hate hotline recorded one hundred and eighty reports from across from
across the state. Now that's not a lot, because we're not talking about
a thousand reports of crime. We're talking about a thousand reports of maybe someone
said a derogatory term, like and yeah, like okay, it's bad to
say something derogatory to someone based on their racial background, no question. Is
it a crime though, I mean it might be workplace harassments. If you
say that to someone in your workplace, Certainly that is handled usually not through
any kind of civil not through any kind of criminal process or anything involving the
state. It would be at the level of your HR manager. So if
we're talking about if we're talking about not like hate crimes, actual criminal conduct
motivated by racial or ethnic bias, not assault, not battery, not robbery,
not burglary, not you know, uh whatever. If we're just talking
about anyone says something bad and you can call this hote it says something mean
to you effectively, and you can call this hotline, then a thousand calls
is an astonishingly small number for a state that has forty million people living in
in it. More than a thousand reports of hate. Yeah, there are
forty million people in this state. I'm surprised it isn't forty thousand calls with
hate, Like, you know, how many jerks there are. If you
put forty million people together. What percentage of people you interact with in your
day to day are jerks? You only know maybe two hundred people. Multiply
that until you get forty million. Pe how many jerks are there in the
whole state of California. Yes, of course, You've had one thousand calls
with people saying of people saying hateful things. That's shockingly small. The most
common reason behind a report was discriminatory treatment. Not not a crime, just
discriminatory treatment and broad based. An analysis by the University of California, Berkeley's
Possibility Lab found I think it's possible that this lab doesn't need to keep getting
our taxpayer dollars. Sixteen percent of callers said they were called derogatory names or
slurs. These incidents occurred most within a residential setting, according to twenty nine
percent of respondents. Nine percent happened within a workplace environment or in a public
facility. So a lot of these people are calling a state funded hotline because
someone in their neighborhood called them something rude. Again, not good. I'm
not pro using racial slurs to your neighbors by any stretch. Seems like a
horrible thing to do, not a thing I would ever do, not a
thing I would appreciate if my neighbor did it to me. I guess I
just don't understand why we have a state run hotline for it. When we
return, we'll talk a little bit more about this idea that we need the
whole concept of the hate crime and of specifically hate legislation, as if there's
such a thing as a love crime. I guess that's next. On the
John Girardi Show, we have this story in the be talking about a state
run anti hate hotline. Hate being I guess just the word we use when
what we mean is race based discrimination or discrimination on the basis of some other
kind of category that is protected in California law. And I've been sort of
a little bit mocking this because basically, California open up this hotline. Have
you been a victim of hate? And it's a hotline you can call for
resources and support. And they received a thousand calls over the course of the
first year of the program. Well, of course, there are forty million
people in this state. By rights, there should be forty thousand calls.
You know how many jerks there are in a state of forty million people.
It seems like if you only got a thousand calls to this hotline, like
they also said they can field calls in two hundred different languages. They almost
have more languages they can field calls in than they have calls. How do
they do that? Do they just took you up to a translator service or
something? Anyway, regardless, it's led me. Now these people are calling
this hotline, and usually it seems like many of these calls are just people
who in their neighborhood were called something rude by someone walking by or by someone
that they interacted with in a public setting. A few people mentioned that they
were called this in their workplace, which that's more of an issue for HR
to handle at your work rather than calling a state run hotline. And it's
it also just sort of seems like, yeah, yes, we recommended legal
or counseling service, legal services AID or counseling services for some people, but
like that that's the other part of this that makes me sort of think,
Okay, how many calls for how many of these calls did you have anything
useful as the State of California to offer, like counseling services because you were
called a mean thing? I mean, I get again, this is the
problem with these kinds of programs. There's nothing wrong with seeking out counseling services
if you've been the victim of lots of horrific racially based abuse. I guess
I mean that, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I'm not
gonna rant and rave at you if if you decide to do that. I
guess I'm just not understanding why the state is offering it when we have such
a small number of people calling about it, and when it's like they someone
could find this on their own without a state run hotline. If anything,
I think you could find it easier without the state run hotline. You just
I don't know, google counseling services or something. And it leads me to
sort of ask this, this sort of thing, the whole idea behind hate
crimes, and I feel like I kind of go back and forth on it
whether it's a useful concept at all. So the idea behind a hate crime
is, here's a crime, but if you commit this crime motivated by and
we as a prosecutor, can present enough evidence to show beyond a reasonable doubt
that this was your motive. If you commit this crime and it's beyond a
reasonable doubt that you committed this crime with the motive of antipathy towards someone because
of their race or because of their and then you insert whatever protected category is
in this case protected under California law, whether it's sexual orientation and gender identity,
sex, ethnic origin, race, blah blah blah. If we can
prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you committed this crime based on antipathy against that
thing, then we'll add basically a heavier sentence. It's a sentencing enhancement if
you do this thing out of some racially motivated thing. And I guess it
makes me ask the question, well, if you rob a liquor store versus
if you rob a liquor store because a black guy owns the store and you
don't like black people. At the end of the day, you've robbed a
liquor store, should we care that much what your motive for so doing was.
I mean, it's not like robbing the liquor store in the first place.
It was a kindly deed of love, you know, assault and battery
versus assault and battery because I don't like the fact that you're Asian? Was
the assault in battery without racial animus like a nicer form of assault and battery
was that a love crime as opposed to a hate crime. The ultimate example
of this was when Al Gore criticized George W. Bush for I guess not
passing certain kinds of hate crime legislation in Texas and brought up the example of
an African American who was lynched in Texas, and Al Gore was talking,
Oh, it's so terrible, George W. Bush, how you didn't do
this? And then George W. This was during one of the presidential debates.
George W. Pointed out that the men who had committed that act of
lynching all received the death penalty. So Bush basically was asking what possible extra
punishment could I have given these guys like they We literally gave them the death
penalty. There's not anything more we can do to them. Now, Maybe
if you see that racially motivated attacks are happening, and you think a greater
sentencing provision would deter that specific conduct, maybe there's some way in which it's
justified. I don't know, but I guess looking at something like a state
run hotline for people who and reasonably, by the way, it's reasonable to
have your feelings very much hurt when someone says calls you an ethnic slurt.
That's a totally reasonable thing to have your feelings hurt over. I guess I'm
just not sure what's the point of a state run hotline for you to deal
with the fact that someone was rude to you, Like the kind of what
help can the state offer you at this point? You can't You know,
your neighbor says something rude to you and makes a derogatory racial comment, Well
you're not. You can't arrest him. No one's gonna arrest What do you
even want. You can't arrest the guy. We'll give you state recommended counseling
services. Well, I can find that with Google. I just find the
whole thing. It's one of these things where you sound like a jerk if
you question its utility, And I'm sure that is what I sound like right
now, but I still think it's kind of silly like this. This is
something that makes a politician be able to pat him or herself on the back
like they're doing something and it's not really doing anything. When we return the
weird story about Justice Alito's wife flying the American flag, upside down. That's
next on the John Girardi Show. This story comes out very suspiciously, very
suspiciously timed, I should say, and the timing of this is important.
So this is in May of twenty twenty four that this story comes out,
but this was an event that allegedly happened. In January of twenty twenty one.
This story comes out, and I think it was a New York Times
story about sam Aledo, and specifically this has to do with some bizarre incident,
as Justice Alito talked with some reporters about it, an incident involving sam
Alito's wife. So the Alitos live in suburban northern Virginia, in kind of
a suburb area of Washington, d C. And d C has so many
affluent professional people who are in some way, shape or form employed by or
contractors for the federal government, and federal workers are these overwhelmingly left wing people.
D C is an astonishingly left wing city. It's like ninety percent to
ten percent Democrat, and even among Republicans, even Republicans in DC are incredibly
anti Trump. So the Alitos apparently have some very left wing neighbors who realize
that they are neighbors to the Alitos who were putting up some putting up signs
or flags in their yards that were incredibly aggressive and incredibly directly rude towards the
Alitos, including a specific sign right this neighbor of the Alitos, like right
across the street from them, with the F word on it, like F
the Alitos or f F whatever, something to that effect. And this was
very distressed to missus Alito. Apparently they now this was all ramped up and
heightened and extremely volatile, apparently in the timeframe immediately after January sixth, which
for DC area liberals they think of as again not to say January sixth was
a good thing. It was a bad thing. It it was a stupid
thing. It was a dumb right, et cetera, et cetera, et
cetera. Okay, you got to do all of our stupid you know,
go through this ritual action of declaring that January sixth was a bad thing.
But for people who live in d C, the sort of liberal DC it's,
they think of January sixth as like the absolute worst thing that has ever
happened in the history of this country. And basically there was some thought because
because Alito is who he is, that this is what you wanted. This
is you know, blah blah blah. So these neighbors of the Alitos put
up these derogatory like signs in their yards with like cursing and things like that,
and it's very obviously pointed out the Alitos. The Alitos have go for
a walk. This is about a week or two after January sixth, get
into this this sort of shit. I guess they have a very unpleasant interaction
with a neighbor as they're going for a walk, and apparently for some time
frame, in front of the Alito house they have a flagpole, they flew
the American flag upside down. And the way this was reported was that this
was a come that as a sign, this was a sort of Maga themed
symbol of that the country's in peril because the election has been stolen, and
so what it means is aha see justice Alito believes in stop the steal.
Justice Alito believed that the twenty twenty election, the most secure election in history,
was stolen and therefore that he should have to recuse himself from all future
cases involving blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Now Justice Alito clarified that
his wife did that he didn't have anything to do with that, but it's
led me to sort of ask more questions. And Alito said, basically,
his wife was very upset. She was upset with this angry interaction she had
with these neighbors and mad and then that's why she did that. Now,
there's a lot about this article that is raising questions. First of all,
why is this coming out three years after the fact. I think it's coming
out three years after the fact because we're about to have a series of Supreme
Court decisions. This We're about to have a bunch of Supreme Court decisions basically,
all right, if the twenty twenty four, if twenty twenty four is
going to be anything like twenty twenty, it's going to require the Supreme Court
to have to step in on a couple of election disputes. In twenty twenty.
The Court had to step in and basically, like at one point they
had to tell Pennsylvania, hey, you cannot change your laws just by your
state Supreme Court issuing a fiat like the day but like a week before the
election just out of COVID concerns that that's not appropriate. There are probably going
to be a number of election cases that the Supreme Court is going to have
to decide on over the course of the summer into the fall. We're also
coming up to the end of the Supreme Court term, which is in June,
and usually it's at the end of the term that the Court issues a
lot of its decisions in some of the big cases that they've able to have,
they've been able to have full briefing on over the courts of the year,
and I think this story is being released out of basically there's been this
ongoing campaign the last three or four years to try to paint the Conservative justices
on the Court as being unacceptably ethically or otherwise compromised, and that they have
inappropriately refused to basically recuse themselves from certain kinds of cases. So because Clarence
Thomas's wife, Ginny, is involved with a lot of Republican politics stuff,
therefore Justice Thomas needs to recuse himself from any cases involving Donald Trump. Well,
that's not how recusal rules work. The ethical rules involving when a judge
should or should not recuse him or herself. They it's you know, there's
there there are rules and guidelines and things like that for when and in what
circumstances judges should do that. But basically, the fact that your wife does
something does not necessarily mean that you need to recuse yourself. Now, if
your family has say, you know, a major business connection or major business
investments or something with say a company who is a party to a lawsuit in
front of you, then yeah, you should probably recuse yourself. If your
wife is an executive with Budweiser and Budweiser's a party to the case in front
of you, yes you should probably recuse yourself. But basically, the fact
that your wife is an is an enthusiastic Trump supporter and a case that somehow
involves Donald Trump lands in front of Clarence Thomas does not mean Thomas needs to
recuse himself. But there's this whole campaign going of, like justice Thomas was
friends with this billionaire who gave him free flights on his on his private jet.
Okay, and I mean it must be nice. Yeah, I mean
that that's nice. I wish I got free flights on a private jet.
That relationship is not ipso facto inappropriate for Justice Thomas, Oh, John Roberts's
wife is a super highly paid attorney who's getting a bunch of big contracts.
Is just purely because she's John Roberts's wife. Yeah, John Roberts's wife is
also a very accomplished attorney. She makes a ton of money, No kidding,
Like the basically what is happening is the media is trying to get story
after story after story to attack the character of conservative justices. It's always conservative
justices, by the way. No liberal justice has ever done anything questionable,
by the way. There was all kinds of stuff about, you know,
if we want to talk about appropriateness or inappropriateness of recusal, it was very
questionable that Elena Kagan, for example, did not recuse herself from the big
twenty twelve Obamacare decision, for example, which was one of the most significant
decisions the Court issued over the course of the twenty tens, because she had
been Obama's Solicitor General involved in defending it immediately prior to joining the Supreme Court.
That was highly questionable. Ruth Bader Ginsberg was getting all kinds of you
know, perks and international travel and stuff like that just as much as as
Clarence Thomas was, if not more. But what's happening. The Left wants
to paint a picture through unfair hit job after unfair hit job after unfair hit
job, that the justices on the conservative justice on the Supreme Court are so
ethically compromised, so engage in so much inappropriate conduct that it therefore justifies Joe
Biden in presidential term two with a more compliant Senate, more compliant house.
Let's say Democrats win everything this election, it justifies them packing the Supreme Court.
That's what we're setting up. When we returned, we'll talk a little
bit more about the Alito story, and it's particularly the idea that an upside
down American flag was a stop the Steel thing. Next on the John Girardi
Show, this big story came out, Oh the Alito family, Justice Alito
and his wife, they flew an upside down American flag outside of their house
after January sixth, a symbol showing that they thought the election was stolen,
a well known maga stop the Seals steel sign. Now, I wasn't super
big into stop the steal all that. I thought it was a very I
thought a lot of those efforts were didn't have a lot to them whatever,
you know. Basically, I was like, if you can give me enough
evidence that shows we can win in court to overturn this thing, then I
am interested. If you cannot do that, then get out. I don't
care. Stop whining. Either show enough evidence that we can actually win something
in court, or stop whining and anyway. Regardless, I have literally not
until this story from The New York Times came out three years after the fact,
I have not once heard the notion that an upside down American flag was
a symbol for stop the steal, or some kind of maga symbol or something
having to do with the twenty twenty election having been stolen. I've never once
and by the way, I've seen some real right wing jobbery, I've been
to super right wing events. I've I have friends who are super trumpy people,
some of my dearest people that I love very, very dearly. I've
never once in the last four years heard of, or seen or ever had
any inkling that an upside down American flag was a reference to stop the steal
somehow, you know what it reminds me of. There was several years ago
there was like an Army Navy football game, and one of the West Point
cadets was holding like an okay symbol with his hand when the camera was on
him, and then everyone in the media freaked out that this was a white
supremacist symbol and it wasn't. It was like some game, but like teenagers
play, I don't know, some stupid teenager thing. It feels kind of
like that, like the media is so confidently asserting that an upside down American
flag was a stop the Seal Maga symbol. And again, what this is
really about is trying to throw as much spaghetti against the wall, cast as
many aspersions as we can against all the concerns vative justices in order to delegitimize
whatever rulings they issue over the course of the twenty twenty four election cycle and
justify packing the Supreme Court. That'll do it for John Girardi Show. See
you next time on Power Talk