Speaker 1: We're putting the band back together. It's the Three Whisky
Speaker 1: Happy Hour, the podcast dedicated to single malts and blended
Speaker 1: opinions with your hosts Steve Heyward, John You, and some
Speaker 1: mystery woman named lou Kritia, along with a new floating.
Speaker 2: Cast of regular guests.
Speaker 1: So pour yourself a dram and settle in for another
Speaker 1: episode of one hundred proof Conversation. Well, to paraphrase the
Speaker 1: Blues Brothers, We've got the band back together. It's sixty
Speaker 1: minutes to the end of this podcast. We've got a
Speaker 1: full glass of whiskey in hand, half a pack of cigarettes,
Speaker 1: it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses, just like Anthony Fauci
Speaker 1: in his glam cover shot for in Style magazine back
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty one. More to come on that subject first,
Speaker 1: But first, welcome everybody to the reboot of the Three
Speaker 1: Whisky Happy Hour, which is really just like the old
Speaker 1: Three Whiskey Happy Hour, only more of it. So I'll
Speaker 1: go through a few of our tweaks in a moment.
Speaker 1: My co hosts are already shaking her heads at my frivolity,
Speaker 1: but welcome back, gang.
Speaker 2: How have you enjoyed your hiatus for the month of July.
Speaker 3: Who wants to go first, John, I've been traveling a
Speaker 3: lot and right now I'm in a one hundred and
Speaker 3: five degree weather in Texas because I felt it wrong.
Speaker 3: Did I not share in global warming like everybody else?
Speaker 1: Well, at least you have air conditioning in Austin, unlike Europe.
Speaker 1: You know, our pal Brad Watson has been in Paris. No,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, he's been in Rome where it's been over
Speaker 1: one hundred. I have another friend in Paris where it's
Speaker 1: over one hundred and they have no air conditioning and
Speaker 1: no ice in the hotel. I was in a few
Speaker 1: days ago in Luzerne, Switzerland. They had an ashtray. They
Speaker 1: had ashtrays in my hotel room and out on the balcony,
Speaker 1: but ice, forget it.
Speaker 2: You couldn't get any ice. That's just where Europe busy
Speaker 2: these days.
Speaker 4: I was in.
Speaker 5: I was in London years ago during a heat wave
Speaker 5: in London, and I remember at the being somewhere and
Speaker 5: as seeing far off on the other side of some
Speaker 5: sort of outdoor park parky kind of thing, a big
Speaker 5: sign saying ice cold soda. So you know, I had not.
Speaker 5: I was hot and I'm a little bit less besotted
Speaker 5: with ice in my drinks now than I used to be.
Speaker 6: I really wanted to.
Speaker 5: Drink with ice in it. So I ran over there
Speaker 5: and it was a bunch of cokes sitting on top
Speaker 5: of a block of ice. It was the only ice
Speaker 5: I saw the whole time. Anyway, I've just been. I
Speaker 5: had a lovely time with John in Berkeley. We had
Speaker 5: our friends from South Latin America and had a just
Speaker 5: a wonderful conference on my portion of it was on
Speaker 5: the rule of law in the America's and it was fun.
Speaker 5: We had a good time, great, great guys, great people.
Speaker 5: There's a few women involved too, So wow, it was
Speaker 5: great and it was lovely in Berkeley, wasn't it, John?
Speaker 5: It was even warm for Berkeley.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was like seventy degrees.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Lucretia educated our South American colleagues on the Save Act
Speaker 3: and the many election malfeasanses that occur here, which to
Speaker 3: them must seem like nothing. Gearn that they have had
Speaker 3: such terrible elections. They even make election commissions at independent
Speaker 3: agencies free of all other government control.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was interesting to do here.
Speaker 5: No, no, no, no, I don't believe in anything outside
Speaker 5: of government control. I just believe us in us controlling
Speaker 5: the government. I did have one interesting thing. I don't
Speaker 5: know if I even had a chance to tell you
Speaker 5: about it, John, but the young man who was the
Speaker 5: Japanese consul who came and just sat in on some
Speaker 5: of ours. In my talk, I mentioned, you know, the
Speaker 5: famous James Madison's statement about what's going to make sure
Speaker 5: that we have a republican, honest legislature and it's not
Speaker 5: going to become tyrannical. And he says that it's all
Speaker 5: these things, plus that they will never make a law
Speaker 5: that is imposed upon the people that is not equally
Speaker 5: imposed upon themselves. And you know, then he follows that, well,
Speaker 5: what if the legislature ever decides, if the people ever
Speaker 5: allow the legislature to do that, to pass a law
Speaker 5: which is on the great mass of the people but
Speaker 5: not on the legislators themselves, the people will be will
Speaker 5: be prepared to tolerate anything but liberty, which is exactly
Speaker 5: what Madison says. So you know, then I listed the laws,
Speaker 5: many of the laws, some of which have been overturned
Speaker 5: but or relitigated.
Speaker 4: Shall we say.
Speaker 5: But this Japanese guy was just absolutely fascinated with this idea,
Speaker 5: and so he sat there and I had to so
Speaker 5: he could write out every single law that had ever
Speaker 5: been created by Congress in this way. And I just
Speaker 5: thought it was a very interesting that this Japanese console was.
Speaker 5: Out of all the things that people said, that was
Speaker 5: the thing that fascinated in most. That Congress passes laws
Speaker 5: and exempts itself from.
Speaker 4: The reach of those laws.
Speaker 5: And you know, I agree with Madison on that one,
Speaker 5: but that was it.
Speaker 1: Is there anything you don't agree with Madison on? Maybe
Speaker 1: I should, I don't know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, slavery, slavery, maybe slavery.
Speaker 5: I mean Madison's claims to have been against slavery as well.
Speaker 5: But video owned m ya, I know, yeah, he owned slaves. Yeah, absolutely, Yeah.
Speaker 4: There's more than that.
Speaker 5: I mean, there are some things I definitely come down
Speaker 5: on the side of Hamilton on, but I'm not going
Speaker 5: to give John that satisfaction today.
Speaker 2: Or any day for that matter.
Speaker 3: All Right, Madison's okay, it's Jefferson. If you started bending
Speaker 3: the need of Jefferson, I'd be worried about your sanity.
Speaker 5: There are things, there are things it is to be
Speaker 5: learned from Jefferson, John, But yeah, he was a bit
Speaker 5: of a nut job.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 4: Anyway, you look at it over over a long period.
Speaker 5: Of time, it's a little bit difficult to find consistency
Speaker 5: in Jefferson the same way you might, for instance, find
Speaker 5: it in Lincoln, even though you know, politics and circumstances change.
Speaker 5: There's a consistency to Lincoln that seems markedly absent from Jefferson.
Speaker 5: But he still has much to teach us.
Speaker 3: So yeah, there you go.
Speaker 2: All right.
Speaker 1: So for listeners who of just the audio version or
Speaker 1: the traditional podcast version, you will have heard a new
Speaker 1: bumper music and a new introduction, and I will tell
Speaker 1: you about our British voiceover artists. I'll tell you more
Speaker 1: about him, I think next week, because I'm not sure
Speaker 1: we actually have him yet this week.
Speaker 2: In any case, here's what's new and improved.
Speaker 1: Remember the old There's a little cartoon where someone's holding
Speaker 1: up a box of cereal. This is new and improved,
Speaker 1: and someone's asking what's new and improved about it? And
Speaker 1: he says the new and improved on the labels, what's
Speaker 1: new about it? So not that much has changed, but
Speaker 1: we are going to change up a few things. One
Speaker 1: is we're gonna start having a few cameo appearances by
Speaker 1: some people that we like just for four or five
Speaker 1: minutes most of the time pre taped with me, and
Speaker 1: are going to rotate from some familiar names and a
Speaker 1: few new ones. We'll have Richard Samuelson, for instance, offering
Speaker 1: us either his pun of the week or answering a
Speaker 1: question what would John Adams do about a current question,
Speaker 1: since he's one of the foremost experts on John Adams
Speaker 1: in the country. Today, we're gonna have Alex Prieu, who
Speaker 1: was a guest host a few weeks ago, who knows
Speaker 1: more about classical Greek and the classical Greek literature than
Speaker 1: anybody I know, and he's gonna give us a very
Speaker 1: brief review of the Odyssey movie, which is dividing everybody
Speaker 1: in which I still haven't seen.
Speaker 5: But it didn't stop you from doing a review of it,
Speaker 5: Steve that I loved that.
Speaker 2: No, I didn't. I didn't. I know, I didn't review.
Speaker 1: I just said I can't stand the Emily Wilson translation.
Speaker 1: And by the way, Emily Wilson has dumped on the movie,
Speaker 1: so go figure she's a leftist. It's really strange how
Speaker 1: it's crossing wires. We're gonna have John you don't know
Speaker 1: this yet. We're gonna have from Beyond the Grave some
Speaker 1: short visits from.
Speaker 2: Henry Kissinger now and then.
Speaker 1: So in other words, there's some risk we're gonna become
Speaker 1: the Hollywood Squares of podcasts. Uh. And we're gonna have
Speaker 1: more names of cameos, and due course we also want
Speaker 1: to try and do their a Lattimore. Yes, that's that's
Speaker 1: the course. Yeah, John, you was holding up the Lattimore translation,
Speaker 1: and that's my favorite one. It's also Alex Preu's favorite translation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and uh uh. One of the things we'd like
Speaker 1: to do is try to do what we do on Ricochet,
Speaker 1: which is record every week at a consistent time. That
Speaker 1: makes it easier to announce the people when they can
Speaker 1: tune in when we're gonna do a live show.
Speaker 2: It's not always possible.
Speaker 1: Right now, it's completely impossible because our schedules are ull
Speaker 1: too crazy, and even in Ricochet we don't always keep
Speaker 1: to that. But when only two of us are available,
Speaker 1: we'll steal. That's a quorum, and we may have a
Speaker 1: guest host. We've actually got a guest host intended for
Speaker 1: next week, and I won't say who it is because
Speaker 1: he doesn't know it yet.
Speaker 5: So I hope it's not that transgender person sticking out
Speaker 5: of your bookcase behind you.
Speaker 2: That is not a.
Speaker 4: I can't decide if it's a man or a woman.
Speaker 1: No, it's a it's a that's okay, So what that's
Speaker 1: about listeners? Okay, so that's leftover. That's a leftover prop
Speaker 1: from this morning. So on the Ricochet podcast every week
Speaker 1: at the end, Charles Cook always has some album covers
Speaker 1: behind him, and he was absent this week, and I
Speaker 1: thought somebody's going to take his slot, so I put
Speaker 1: up the album cover Lilas Can Spot Them, and I
Speaker 1: got to put it further back, Lilax can spot them
Speaker 1: and tell you all about them.
Speaker 2: He's like one of those name that tunes kind of guys.
Speaker 2: That behind me is Lowell George.
Speaker 1: And of course, neither one of you know about Lowell
Speaker 1: George because you're both completely.
Speaker 4: Because we're not into transgender musicians.
Speaker 2: He's not it. He was.
Speaker 1: He died forty years ago of alcoholism. But he was
Speaker 1: the guiding force of Little Feet in its glory days
Speaker 1: in the seventies.
Speaker 2: And both of the will.
Speaker 1: Say who, of course, because again, you guys are complete credits.
Speaker 5: But sorry, that's a really interesting an interpretation of cretance
Speaker 5: that we don't listen to obscure rock and roll that
Speaker 5: couldn't make it.
Speaker 1: Little Feet was the precursor to Oh come on the
Speaker 1: Sweet Home Alabama guys blanking on their names. Skinner Yeah no,
Speaker 1: Little Feet was the prototype Southern rock band. So what
Speaker 1: what it means is luc see sorryl because you don't
Speaker 1: know something, you just kept contempt for it. This is
Speaker 1: somebody who don't know about but it was a very
Speaker 1: not an obscure band. They were a very big deal
Speaker 1: in the seventies and litl George. If you ask any
Speaker 1: serious musicians will say, yeah, that guy really had his.
Speaker 2: Blues chops down.
Speaker 1: So there so be contemptions to be one because you
Speaker 1: don't know anything about it.
Speaker 2: But I'm going to call you out on it.
Speaker 5: I know a lot about Leonard skinnerd I love Leonard Skinner.
Speaker 1: I know we'll expand your horizons and start with that
Speaker 1: guy over my shoulder.
Speaker 4: I'm too old to take in new music, Yes this
Speaker 4: I know.
Speaker 5: Also yeah right, yeah, it's just it's it's a failing
Speaker 5: of mine.
Speaker 6: I admit to it.
Speaker 5: But no, I don't do it.
Speaker 1: All right, let us take a quick break, and then
Speaker 1: we're going to come back and talk about grouchy Fauci,
Speaker 1: So don't go away. Well, it's been quite a week
Speaker 1: for Anthony Fauci, and I don't know where to start
Speaker 1: because we go on a long time about it. But
Speaker 1: I think at least three questions in my mind. Maybe
Speaker 1: start with you, John, It's thought that it's obvious that
Speaker 1: he is immune from federal prosecutions, I think for what
Speaker 1: happened during that period.
Speaker 2: Well all right, well that's the next question. What is
Speaker 2: he vulnerable to?
Speaker 3: So you start, Well, what Senator Paul's trying to do
Speaker 3: is set up I think what we call perjury trap.
Speaker 3: So basically, a pardon can only immunize you from things
Speaker 3: you did before the pardon. You can't be pardoned for
Speaker 3: things in the future. So your right, Stephen, that he
Speaker 3: can be a pardon from prosecution for the acts that
Speaker 3: he undertook before Joe Biden parted him in twenty twenty four,
Speaker 3: But if he were to lie about what he did now,
Speaker 3: that he could be prosecuted for. So that's the difference.
Speaker 3: So that's what I think Senator Paul was doing. He
Speaker 3: was going to say, okay, Fauci, you said to the
Speaker 3: American public back then that the most likely explanation was
Speaker 3: some kind of animal to human transmission of the COVID virus.
Speaker 3: But then you told your diary also at the same
Speaker 3: time that you put together a council of people, the experts,
Speaker 3: and eighty percent of them thought it was man made
Speaker 3: and only twenty percent thought it was natural. So who
Speaker 3: were you lying to the diary or the American public
Speaker 3: back then? So if he I mean, he's screwed. I mean, basically,
Speaker 3: he'd have to say I was lying to the public
Speaker 3: back then, and if that's true, then he's immunized. But
Speaker 3: if he were to say, oh, no, I was telling
Speaker 3: the truth, well then he's perjuring himself to somebody. Right
Speaker 3: he's lying to his diary or is lying to the public.
Speaker 3: And if he's lying under oath and saying that before
Speaker 3: the committee, now he can be prosecuted for lying to Congress.
Speaker 3: Right now he can't. Biden couldn't pardon him from lying
Speaker 3: to Congress in the future. So that's why he took
Speaker 3: the fifth. If I were a lawyer, I would have
Speaker 3: told him to take the fifth unless he was prepared
Speaker 3: to say, which he obviously wasn't that I knew a
Speaker 3: but I told the American people be which is what
Speaker 3: it seems he did. But he doesn't want to say
Speaker 3: that in public. So if he's not going to tell
Speaker 3: the truth about that, then yeah, I would have told
Speaker 3: him to take the fifth too.
Speaker 5: So John, I have a question for you. I have
Speaker 5: seen reference to this several times, and I don't know
Speaker 5: the case and I can't remember the name of it,
Speaker 5: but there have been a number of commentators who have
Speaker 5: said that there was a Supreme Court case some years ago.
Speaker 5: I want to say it was like in the eighteen nineties,
Speaker 5: but again I just don't remember that says if you
Speaker 5: are granted immunity, you cannot plead the Fifth Amendment.
Speaker 4: I assumed that you.
Speaker 5: Can, actually, you know, grant immunity. A prosecutor can grant
Speaker 5: immunity and make it conditional that you won't plead the
Speaker 5: Fifth Amendment because you've been granted immunity. But is there
Speaker 5: a more blanket constitutional rule coming down from the Supreme
Speaker 5: Court interpretation that says, if you're granted immunity, you have
Speaker 5: to answer questions that are opposed to you.
Speaker 3: I think people are getting confused about out of who's
Speaker 3: granting immunity and the difference between immunity and a pardon.
Speaker 3: So you may recall, well, Steve's the expert on this,
Speaker 3: remember the around Contra affair.
Speaker 2: I was going to bring that up.
Speaker 3: Yes, Yeah, Congress granted immunity to North and Poindexter to testify.
Speaker 3: That's that's immunity, and that meant anything they said could
Speaker 3: not be used against them. And the end of one
Speaker 3: of the great travesties was that the Independent Council of
Speaker 3: that time tried to prosecute them anyway, and the DC
Speaker 3: circuit throughout the prosecutions properly. So I think that kind
Speaker 3: of immunity that's just different than pardons. That's a totally different,
Speaker 3: totally different thing at work. So, for example, if Congress
Speaker 3: granted Fauci immunity now, then he couldn't claim the fifth
Speaker 3: and he would have to testify right now about all
Speaker 3: this stuff. But Senator Paul's committee did not Grandham immunity.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: See, that was the question I was going to ask John.
Speaker 1: Maybe that was a blunder. Maybe they shou should have
Speaker 1: granted him immunity for his testimony before Congress and then compelled.
Speaker 1: Then he couldn't plead the fifth right, you have to
Speaker 1: answer questions.
Speaker 2: At that point, no one's trying to prosecute him.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think if I remember Iran Contra Wright,
Speaker 1: they actually worked out a deal with the Special Council
Speaker 1: to give North and Pointdexter what they call use immunity.
Speaker 1: Whatever they said at the at the hearing, I would
Speaker 1: not be used by the Special Council. And of course
Speaker 1: that all blew up because it was all cross contaminated, right,
Speaker 1: that couldn't possibly stick.
Speaker 2: But hold on, let me.
Speaker 3: Finish all that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And the thing is, if you're fauci and you're
Speaker 1: as arrogant as he is, he could not resist trying
Speaker 1: to repeat what Oliver North did without going back to
Speaker 1: the whole thing is. You know, that was the pivot
Speaker 1: of those hearings, and North rout of the committee. I mean,
Speaker 1: my favorite moment is when somebody asked him something like,
Speaker 1: and this document that we can't find, what did you
Speaker 1: do with it? North said, I shredded it. You know,
Speaker 1: it was a fantastic moment. I remember what's his name,
Speaker 1: Norman Lear, you know, creator of all in the family,
Speaker 1: said the North testimony for that week was the greatest
Speaker 1: television he'd ever seen, because he's so you know, I
Speaker 1: would have thought that if you really wanted to wreck
Speaker 1: Fauci and blow this thing sky high of how badly
Speaker 1: baby behaved, give him complete immunity for his testimony and
Speaker 1: then compel him to give answers and then you make
Speaker 1: him answer those questions about his diary and all the
Speaker 1: rest of that. I don't think that would have gone
Speaker 1: very well for him, And then there's a sequel of that.
Speaker 3: But yeah, the way to think of it is if
Speaker 3: you care more about the truth than about putting him
Speaker 3: in jail, then you grant immunity. So that's why the
Speaker 3: wrong Contract committee made that decision. And you could say
Speaker 3: Paul's committee thought it's more important to put him in
Speaker 3: jail if for viling the law then getting to the
Speaker 3: bottom of it, or maybe they feel like they already
Speaker 3: know everything because they have his diaries, so why not
Speaker 3: just get him in jail now. But you're right, I
Speaker 3: think Watergate is another example where they gave out a
Speaker 3: lot of immunity because they thought it's more important to
Speaker 3: just get to the truth of what happened. And then
Speaker 3: but you have a trade off to make, which is,
Speaker 3: you get the truth from these people, but you can't
Speaker 3: prosecute him anymore.
Speaker 5: So just I have sorry to beat this point to death.
Speaker 5: But the Supreme Court case is actually Brown versus Walker.
Speaker 5: It was from eighteen ninety six, and it is not
Speaker 5: an immunity case. It is a pardon case. And the
Speaker 5: Supreme Court determined that if you have a pardon, you
Speaker 5: cannot plead the fifth about.
Speaker 3: The pardoned for. Yeah, for the things he can't be
Speaker 3: pardoned yet for longing to Congress during hearings that haven't
Speaker 3: occurred yet.
Speaker 5: But do you think that it's but he shouldn't be
Speaker 5: able to plead the fifth on anything, right? Or is
Speaker 5: that too wide of a reading. If he's being asked
Speaker 5: about activities that took place for which he was granted
Speaker 5: a pardon, which remember was a wholesale pardon. It wasn't
Speaker 5: your pardon for this crime or this crime or this
Speaker 5: crime that you were convicted of. It was anything you
Speaker 5: did prior to this time you've got a pardon for,
Speaker 5: which means any question when they ask him about any
Speaker 5: pet time period prior to the pardon would be subject
Speaker 5: to that pardon, and therefore he could not plead the
Speaker 5: fifth on it.
Speaker 4: Am I just being crazy?
Speaker 3: No? Because you could be. So here's the You could
Speaker 3: be convicted of lying to Congress for things which themselves
Speaker 3: are not criminal. Right, The crime is lying to Congress,
Speaker 3: So whether the thing you are talking about is legal
Speaker 3: or not. Like if you went to Congress they were
Speaker 3: asking him all these funny questions, like what's the color
Speaker 3: of your tie, and suppose it's red and he said
Speaker 3: it was yellow. You could be prosecuted for lying to
Speaker 3: Congress for that, or he doesn't have anything to do
Speaker 3: with the underlying right conduct, whether it's legal or not.
Speaker 3: So I just I have some fair amount of personal
Speaker 3: experience with this. I mean I worked on the Hill
Speaker 3: where I did investigate one of these executive branch scandals
Speaker 3: of voting the clin administration, and we thought about granting immunity.
Speaker 3: And usually it's interesting, Usually people in Congress want to
Speaker 3: grant immunity because they would rather steve is decirement. They'd
Speaker 3: rather have the witness say things in front of the
Speaker 3: American people about the bad things they did. You know,
Speaker 3: having a having any witness take the fifth kills the
Speaker 3: hearing and it can stall the investigation. But it's usually
Speaker 3: the Justice Department, which doesn't want immunity granted. And so
Speaker 3: maybe the case that the Trump Justice Department, which I
Speaker 3: bet would love to prosecute Fauci, was by telling Paul,
Speaker 3: don't grant him immunity. Don't please, don't grant him immunity.
Speaker 3: We want to go after him if he lies to.
Speaker 4: Congress, which so that brings me to you.
Speaker 3: Can't say one big thing about that. They have a
Speaker 3: factual dispute which he definitely should take the fifth on.
Speaker 3: Is he still Fauci is still claiming he had nothing
Speaker 3: to do with the sending of funds to the Wuhan
Speaker 3: Lab to conduct the research which apparently led to this
Speaker 3: kind of you know, you know, infinitely more dangerous virus, right,
Speaker 3: and that's a very important thing to get to the
Speaker 3: bottom of. I could totally see why he would want
Speaker 3: to take the fifth on that and will not want
Speaker 3: to be questioned under oath by Paul about what he
Speaker 3: knew about brit because if you remember, his institution gave
Speaker 3: a grant to this American non scientific nonprofit which turned
Speaker 3: around and gave the money.
Speaker 6: To the Wuhan lad.
Speaker 3: That's silly, that's a terrible, terrible, smoking gun. If Fauci
Speaker 3: knew what that money was going to be used for.
Speaker 1: All right, we'll be back with more on the fabulous
Speaker 1: Fauci after this quick ad break.
Speaker 2: Don't go away.
Speaker 5: I agree with all of that, but I would go
Speaker 5: back to a kind of analysis of both of your
Speaker 5: commentaries and say, the only difficulty with say Rand Paul
Speaker 5: having granted him immunity to get to the truth is
Speaker 5: that A we know that Fauci didn't want to admit
Speaker 5: to the truth. He didn't want to admit that he
Speaker 5: was wrong, and he certainly didn't want to say come up.
Speaker 5: But it doesn't matter their attempt to embarrass Fauci to
Speaker 5: bring out those It's crazy to me that it's called
Speaker 5: a diary. They were federal records. The guy was such
Speaker 5: a narcissistic megalomaniac.
Speaker 4: They used his federal.
Speaker 5: Computer, government owned computer to write his sweet little diary
Speaker 5: and then acts all offended when somebody goes in and
Speaker 5: takes those records. I mean, come on, folks. But every
Speaker 5: stupid Democrat, and I repeat myself, came out.
Speaker 4: Supporting, Oh this is horrible what happened to Fauchi.
Speaker 5: But the New York Times, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, on
Speaker 5: and on and on MSNBC. None of them covered one
Speaker 5: iota of what was in those federal diary records, whatever
Speaker 5: you want to call them, not a single thing.
Speaker 4: And so right now you have.
Speaker 5: I bet you if somebody who could do a really solid,
Speaker 5: honest polling of the American people, they're split somewhere down
Speaker 5: the middle on this. The people who think Fauci is,
Speaker 5: in fact, you know, some sort of mad evil scientist
Speaker 5: who you know, got rich and all those other things,
Speaker 5: and just and then people who think he's still a hero.
Speaker 4: I got a note.
Speaker 5: I can't believe I'm gonna admit this, but I got
Speaker 5: in a little Twitter thing yesterday X thing whatever with
Speaker 5: a guy who claims to be a PhD in virology
Speaker 5: and his damn profile picture he has a mask on.
Speaker 4: He has a mask on.
Speaker 5: And and you know, he's just absolutely offended at all
Speaker 5: of these people, you know, saying Fauci should be prosecuted,
Speaker 5: et cetera. What I told these guys, or what I
Speaker 5: said on X I'll say it here just in case
Speaker 5: somebody missed it, is that I don't want Fauci prosecuted.
Speaker 4: What I want to have happened to him.
Speaker 5: Is I want him put in one of those cages
Speaker 5: or just his head is stuck in the cage full
Speaker 5: of sandflies that will eat him alive, just like he
Speaker 5: did the Beagle Puppies, The Son of a Bitch God
Speaker 5: I hate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he was part of that, right well, all right.
Speaker 4: Still he's dead.
Speaker 3: I think that the thing is, the most damaging things
Speaker 3: come out of it were not the things he took
Speaker 3: the fit for, but the embarrassing love of celebrity. You know,
Speaker 3: thousands of Americans according to his agency or dying a
Speaker 3: day from COVID. And all he's writing about is whether
Speaker 3: he was in People magazine.
Speaker 1: Yeah he did the Uh he boasted doing the full
Speaker 1: Ginsburg remember the Ginsburg Lawyer.
Speaker 2: For the right.
Speaker 1: He did all the Sunday shows and all three or
Speaker 1: four nightly news networks. And and I think I thought
Speaker 1: it commented with us at the time or I forget
Speaker 1: where that just having had a little taste of, you know,
Speaker 1: the doing the six minutes segments on the cable news
Speaker 1: like you do all the time, John, except you you
Speaker 1: get to do them from home.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 1: It used to be when I lived in Washington, you
Speaker 1: had to get in the car they'd always send you
Speaker 1: a car, right, because I want to make sure you're
Speaker 1: going to show up, and it just kills your whole
Speaker 1: afternoon and you're not doing any work. That's when OUCHI
Speaker 1: was doing all that media. I said, Ah, he's not
Speaker 1: really doing any work. He's just now a spokesperson for
Speaker 1: the party line. And I don't know, Lucretia, I think
Speaker 1: the I was talking about. I got to talk to
Speaker 1: Jay Beatachari about all this earlier today, and he was
Speaker 1: agreeing with me that the scientific community has taken a
Speaker 1: lot of big hits from this, and now you may
Speaker 1: be right that you may be right that are off.
Speaker 2: Too many people were fooled by Fauci.
Speaker 1: But I think that the authority of science, which used
Speaker 1: to be in its peak from Sputnik on.
Speaker 2: Right, is now in the toilet.
Speaker 5: I agree, I agree, Steve, but I think both are true.
Speaker 5: If that makes sense, I can't you know. And one
Speaker 5: last thing I want to mention about Fouci, I think
Speaker 5: we talked about it once before on this podcast, is
Speaker 5: that you know he is also the person, not entirely
Speaker 5: but primarily responsible for trying to put out the nonsense
Speaker 5: during the AIDS crisis. Oh that all of us could
Speaker 5: get AIDS and you know, never because he did, you know,
Speaker 5: all the reasons. Didn't want to see homosexuals be discriminated
Speaker 5: against his own. But what a waste of resources to do.
Speaker 4: Something like that.
Speaker 5: And so the guy's been a hack, an ideological political hack,
Speaker 5: and I don't have enough. I'll just be quiet here,
Speaker 5: but bring on the sand flies.
Speaker 1: Well, all right, one equivalent of the sand flies in
Speaker 1: a certain way would be civil suits, right, John, I
Speaker 1: mean the pardon that cannot immunize him or protect him from.
Speaker 2: Any civil suits people might bring. Maybe that's a real part.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I do too. They have three exceptions of pardons.
Speaker 3: You can't parton for impeachment, treason, can only partner for crime,
Speaker 3: and you can't and pardons, so pardons don't cover, like
Speaker 3: you're saying, civil actions. And then you can't partner for
Speaker 3: state law. You know, it's only federal crimes. They only
Speaker 3: party for folk crime. So yeah, I guess you could
Speaker 3: think like Jay and Scott Atlas, some of their friends
Speaker 3: could maybe sue for defamation or vible of some kind,
Speaker 3: but he was a government official, so he would probably
Speaker 3: claim immunity. You know. It would be interesting which you
Speaker 3: could actually do. Uh, and since Governor DeSantis is a
Speaker 3: big friend of Steve Hayward in the Claremoon Institute.
Speaker 4: Uh, Lloyd is going after it.
Speaker 3: You got the minute you guys met with him, his
Speaker 3: poll numbers, what like that. I don't know what you guys,
Speaker 3: maybe you met secretly with Trump a few weeks ago too,
Speaker 3: But a stay could conduct an investigation actually, and the
Speaker 3: pardon would not apply at all too well.
Speaker 5: But I mean, you know, again, pinning him on certain
Speaker 5: things is very very difficult.
Speaker 4: One of the things.
Speaker 5: I think that there's got to be some uh, some
Speaker 5: kind of again, I think they'd be federal some crimes
Speaker 5: involved in him getting his minions to go and uh
Speaker 5: put in nominations for him for these big prizes from
Speaker 5: the organizations that he was awarding billions to and they
Speaker 5: were giving him back millions of dollars in prize money
Speaker 5: for being so wonderful, being mister science. There has to
Speaker 5: be something just really, I mean, I guess that that
Speaker 5: just You're probably right, that's a reputational thing. You just
Speaker 5: need to shout it from the rooftops. But none of
Speaker 5: the major media organizations are doing that so well.
Speaker 1: But you know, I mean, the reason I say civil
Speaker 1: suits or state action are both is remember what the
Speaker 1: left figured out after Watergate.
Speaker 2: The process is the punishment.
Speaker 1: And you know it cost him a lot of money, dude,
Speaker 1: to fend off all these suits, even if they can't
Speaker 1: actually succeed at the end of the day.
Speaker 2: I do have a last question.
Speaker 1: So we're talking about, you know, immunization for Congress and
Speaker 1: all the rest of that. What about having as I
Speaker 1: don't know, presidential commission or Congress could set it up
Speaker 1: or both. But a Truth and Reconciliation commission do a
Speaker 1: major review of the whole COVID fiasco. And there Fauci again,
Speaker 1: and the all the other people, Deborah Brooks and all
Speaker 1: the other folks of all of this. They cannot dodge
Speaker 1: answering questions before a commission I have in mind. Actually,
Speaker 1: Jay Baticharia liked the idea. He said, my model for that,
Speaker 1: he says, I before that, my model was the commission
Speaker 1: and the Challenger space shuttle disaster in nineteen eighty six, Right,
Speaker 1: was very serious and sober thing.
Speaker 2: Right, it's a good idea.
Speaker 3: Only problem is that you can't force them to testify
Speaker 3: before presidential commission. In fact, I was only biparttersan commission
Speaker 3: to study the COVID nineteen thing in twenty twenty four
Speaker 3: that was chaired by John Ratcliffe, who later became is
Speaker 3: now the head of the CIA, And there's actually a
Speaker 3: lot out in the public record to piece together what happened,
Speaker 3: and it seemed pretty clear that it was escaped from
Speaker 3: the Wuhan lab. And the only question is, you know,
Speaker 3: was it intentional or not intentional? And then who ought
Speaker 3: to pay for it? But the problem with the presidential
Speaker 3: commission is that the president can order people to testify.
Speaker 3: So there's a Silverman rob commission which was about w
Speaker 3: D in a Rock, so all rumsfeled, everybody testified, but
Speaker 3: Fauci he's out of government. So the reason why Congress
Speaker 3: can do it is they have the power to subpoena
Speaker 3: and they can force you to appear. But in essential
Speaker 3: commission can't.
Speaker 5: All I want to say is I don't know you
Speaker 5: guys are the experts on this having been involved in it.
Speaker 5: I just ever watched it on TV. But what I
Speaker 5: will say, and I mean this sincerely, never mind the sandflies.
Speaker 5: It's still my preferred method. But I do think that
Speaker 5: the harm that was caused by COVID, starting with the deaths,
Speaker 5: starting with the unnecessary deaths because we didn't protect the
Speaker 5: people who are the most vulnerable from this, the unnecessary lockdowns,
Speaker 5: the destruction of just billions and billions of dollars of wealth,
Speaker 5: and the destruction that it did to an entire generation
Speaker 5: of school children. Kid My kid graduated on on video
Speaker 5: online from college, right, you know. And so I do
Speaker 5: think that even if you can't get Fauci again.
Speaker 4: Just sand flies the rest of them too. I don't care.
Speaker 4: But we need a reckoning.
Speaker 5: We need to make sure that we understand how this happened.
Speaker 4: And you know, we.
Speaker 5: Haven't even mentioned the role of social media and the
Speaker 5: media in general in covering up and you know, being
Speaker 5: complicit in making sure that any truth about the matter
Speaker 5: never got out.
Speaker 4: I think I've mentioned before.
Speaker 5: I'm gonna mention it one more time because it just
Speaker 5: came up again that the woman who is the PhD
Speaker 5: head of the nursing program at my university, in a
Speaker 5: discussion about whether or not there should be censorship of
Speaker 5: the Internet sub discussion on a larger issue, said absolutely absolutely,
Speaker 5: we need to make sure that we censor the Internet
Speaker 5: and stop allowing people to just post whatever they want,
Speaker 5: because there are people on the Internet who are actually
Speaker 5: advocating the use of horse medicine for COVID.
Speaker 4: She was a freaking nursing head in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 5: She had to have known that I've met in was
Speaker 5: one of the safest anti virals on the planet, had
Speaker 5: been used for decades. And she's so stupid and so
Speaker 5: bought into the whole nonsense that we got to.
Speaker 4: Stop people from thinking, make it take horse medicine.
Speaker 5: You know, I mean, I just I couldn't say anything
Speaker 5: because it was one of those big meetings.
Speaker 4: I just got off. I couldn't stand it.
Speaker 5: But that was over and over and over again. You know,
Speaker 5: Joe Rogan nearly got platformed entirely. Remember, I could go on,
Speaker 5: we forget some of these things. So I think, even
Speaker 5: though the Presidential Commission probably wouldn't produce anything near what
Speaker 5: most people want to see happen to those responsible for
Speaker 5: this need we need to. We need to study it,
Speaker 5: we need to get it out there, We need to.
Speaker 3: I think what you're saying is that you would be
Speaker 3: in favor of granting Fauci immunity before Congress because it
Speaker 3: produces this effect which people haven't remarked. And I think
Speaker 3: which is once you get that, you want to tell
Speaker 3: the truth and more you want to talk about as
Speaker 3: many things as possible, because the more you talk about,
Speaker 3: the more you can't be prosecuted. So if you really
Speaker 3: want to find out all these things, really, the best
Speaker 3: way this is from my congressional aid, you know, background
Speaker 3: talking immunity is the best thing. It agrees to great hearings.
Speaker 3: You'll have everything out there because he has an incentive
Speaker 3: to over testify in fact, so you'll get all the
Speaker 3: truth you want if you start handing out, but you
Speaker 3: won't be able to prosecute. But beholding him responsible doesn't
Speaker 3: mean putting him behind bars. I think he's getting his
Speaker 3: come up as just in the public humiliation of from
Speaker 3: these diary entries, which is show him to be a
Speaker 3: you know, publicity hound and not a real scientist.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, all right, let's go to a break and
Speaker 1: then we will come back and talk some constitutional matters,
Speaker 1: which is really supposed to be our bread and butter.
Speaker 2: So don't go away, all right.
Speaker 1: So here's kind of a quiz listeners, do you know
Speaker 1: what the Republican Guarantee clause of the Constitution is it
Speaker 1: refers to Article four, Section four, which is very short,
Speaker 1: and it says, the United States shall guarantee to every
Speaker 1: state in this Union a republican form of government, and
Speaker 1: shall protect each of them against invasion and on application
Speaker 1: of the legislature or of the executive when the legislature
Speaker 1: cannot be convened, against domestic violence.
Speaker 2: Now, this is one of those clauses of the.
Speaker 1: Constitution which the Supreme Court long ago said, and we
Speaker 1: can go into.
Speaker 2: That in a little detail, or none at all.
Speaker 1: Is non justiciabal, which means it's not something that the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court can ultimately pass on, similar to the Ninth Amendment,
Speaker 1: which I think we've I mean that has shown up
Speaker 1: now and then, but there's no clear body of doctrine.
Speaker 1: And that's controversial, right while Robert Bork famously said the
Speaker 1: Ninth Amendment was.
Speaker 2: An ink blot, and so I kind of resist this. John.
Speaker 2: There's several ways to play this.
Speaker 1: But the reason this comes up is that Glenn Reynolds
Speaker 1: of Instapundit and University of Tennessee, who always likes to
Speaker 1: stir the pot, had a substack post here recently where
Speaker 1: he says, hey, maybe President Trump either the left is
Speaker 1: always saying Trump's going to cancel elections or you know,
Speaker 1: stay in office or have a coup, And he said no, no,
Speaker 1: Trump could invoke the Republican guarantee clause. I'll just give
Speaker 1: you one paragraph from Glenn's peace. It's better than me
Speaker 1: summarizing it. So if President Trump announces that we have
Speaker 1: uncovered massive electoral fraud, as he most certainly will, and
Speaker 1: that he is dispatching huge numbers of federal election watchers
Speaker 1: to oversee voting and counting in areas where fraud has occurred,
Speaker 1: he would be acting directly under a power that the
Speaker 1: Constitution had vested in him. For they to have a
Speaker 1: republican form of government, it must have meaningful elections, and
Speaker 1: elections that are rigged are not meaningful. Stopping them from
Speaker 1: being rigged would be protecting a Republican form of government. Okay,
Speaker 1: there's more two of the argument than that, But he
Speaker 1: thinks that there's a constitutional power, at least implied for
Speaker 1: President Trump to invoke it to justify some federal supervision
Speaker 1: of state elections, even though other clauses say states are
Speaker 1: in charge of that. So John, maybe give us your
Speaker 1: take on what you think that the Republican Guarantee clause
Speaker 1: means will go from there.
Speaker 3: You know who makes this exact same argument, my debate partner,
Speaker 3: John Eastman, your formal roommate. He didn't justify what.
Speaker 2: Yes guarantee clause.
Speaker 3: I thought, yes, us we argue about the twenty twenty election,
Speaker 3: and ultimately he will invoke the Republican guarantee clause for
Speaker 3: the exact same argument. And I will say to you
Speaker 3: what I say to him, which is the Republican guarantee
Speaker 3: clause is the refuge of scoundrels. When you have no
Speaker 3: other textual arguments, no other provision, retreat to this amorphous,
Speaker 3: undefined clause which you can pour any hope in any argument.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 3: So, first, and this doesn't go to the merits of
Speaker 3: what the clause means. But you're right, the Supreme Court
Speaker 3: has said we can't divine legal standards from this to
Speaker 3: the extent that we could enforce it in cases. There's
Speaker 3: a case called Luther versus Board, and I think is
Speaker 3: the first case just right. And there was actually a
Speaker 3: rebellion in Rhode Island, if I believe in two different
Speaker 3: governments went to the court essentially and said we're the
Speaker 3: real government and So the other more interesting case, I
Speaker 3: think we're recent case not that much more recent, but
Speaker 3: was the practice of initiatives. Right, California famously has the
Speaker 3: initiative process, and these initiatives were This is a case
Speaker 3: called Oregon versus Pacific Telephone tograph and right, the telephone
Speaker 3: company went to the Supreme Court said, that's not republican.
Speaker 3: That's aric democracy. That's like god a very die. Definition
Speaker 3: of republican government means you act through these, you know,
Speaker 3: filtering institutions. And the Court didn't say no. The Court
Speaker 3: just said, we can't tell. Part of it is also
Speaker 3: that notice the clause says the United States shall guarantee.
Speaker 3: So people sometimes forget this when they when they read
Speaker 3: these Supreme Court cases. The Supreme Court doesn't say that
Speaker 3: the clause is a nullody. They just say the courts
Speaker 3: can't enforce it, and they say, look, it's up to
Speaker 3: the other branches to decide. For example, they pretty much
Speaker 3: think they have suggested I think in the past that
Speaker 3: Congress could enforce the Republican guarantee clause because it says
Speaker 3: the United States shall guarantee, rather than in the way
Speaker 3: the individual rights clauses are written. So in terms of
Speaker 3: what the clause means. So I, you know, I do
Speaker 3: tease you and John and other Clarmont friends about, you know,
Speaker 3: retreating to this, but I will say, your roots, the
Speaker 3: roots of your arguments go back to the abolitionist period,
Speaker 3: because before the Civil War, the abolitionists were trying to
Speaker 3: construct arguments about why slavery was unconstitutional. And one of
Speaker 3: the things they said is very similargument they would say,
Speaker 3: they said, slavery violates the Republican Guarantee clause. The problem
Speaker 3: with that argument is that there's provisions in the Constitution
Speaker 3: before the Civil War that clearly seem to allow slavery.
Speaker 3: And that's the problem with this argument too. I'll just
Speaker 3: wrap up with this is if this were true, if
Speaker 3: this reading or your Republican Guarantee clause is true, it
Speaker 3: would sort of wipe out the Elections Clause. There's already
Speaker 3: a much more specific clause in the Constitution that talks
Speaker 3: about all how you hold elections. The election claw says
Speaker 3: states run elections subject to override by Congress. So it
Speaker 3: seems to me if there is problems in the election system,
Speaker 3: that clause says Congress has to pass a federal rule
Speaker 3: otherwise it's still up to the states. If you take
Speaker 3: this vaguer provision out there and you override it, this
Speaker 3: specific provision, then you're opening up the Constitution to be
Speaker 3: overrid and left and right by the Republican guarantee clause
Speaker 3: on all things.
Speaker 5: Is it not possible to read those two as complementary,
Speaker 5: as opposed to being opposed to each other. And the
Speaker 5: reason I say that, I'm looking at Madison's discussion of Sorry, John,
Speaker 5: look at Madison's discussion of what the guarantee clause means,
Speaker 5: and you know, he says in there they obviously we
Speaker 5: don't want them to have aristocratic or monarchical innovations, and
Speaker 5: mistake King.
Speaker 4: King's right, can't have democracy.
Speaker 5: But he says, the more intimate the nature of such
Speaker 5: a union may be the greater interest have the members
Speaker 5: in the political institutions of each other, and the greater
Speaker 5: right to insist that the forms of government which the
Speaker 5: Compact was entered into should be substantially maintained. Okay, I'm
Speaker 5: not sure that I probably use this argument to I'd
Speaker 5: pass a Save Act under Congress's power to do so
Speaker 5: the way you just described it. But but if you
Speaker 5: are actually in a position where you see that elections
Speaker 5: have become in ande of themselves, so.
Speaker 4: Suspect that the.
Speaker 5: People are now no longer have any There was an
Speaker 5: Axios Stupid poll that was out today and it said,
Speaker 5: you know something, some ridiculously high percentage of the people
Speaker 5: think that our politicians will cheat rather than accept the
Speaker 5: results of the election. One of the things they didn't
Speaker 5: ask was are you worried about illegals voting? But that's
Speaker 5: a different subject altogether. My point is this, would it
Speaker 5: be possible, looking at the situation where we are now
Speaker 5: so suspect about the integrity of our elections, that we
Speaker 5: have actually under mind a republican government from that point
Speaker 5: of view, from the way Madison describes it. So I
Speaker 5: have just one little anecdote here. I have not had
Speaker 5: a chance to run this down and make sure it's
Speaker 5: absolutely correct, but I'm going to I'm going to read
Speaker 5: it to you guys.
Speaker 4: Anyway.
Speaker 5: From eighteen sixty to nineteen ninety six, the state of
Speaker 5: Oregon in the presidential election voted seventy seven percent Republican.
Speaker 5: Since two thousand, only Democrats have won the presidential electoral
Speaker 5: college vote in Oregon. What changed November third. Nineteen ninety eight,
Speaker 5: Oregon approved ballot Measure sixty, requiring vote by mail for
Speaker 5: all general elections. What a coincidence, right?
Speaker 4: Okay, that's it voted.
Speaker 3: By mail, viol the Republican Guarantee clause.
Speaker 4: Saying that it does.
Speaker 5: What I am saying is that it is right for fraud,
Speaker 5: and we've seen evidence of that today. They just announced
Speaker 5: that there was where the heck was it somebody two
Speaker 5: hundred ballots?
Speaker 3: Say?
Speaker 5: Somebody found in an Amazon drop off center that never
Speaker 5: got to where they were supposed to go. You know,
Speaker 5: it's just constant. All of these are smaller numbers. You
Speaker 5: know the situation in New Jersey where you know, hundreds
Speaker 5: of thousands of illegal aliens were accidentally I don't think
Speaker 5: it's that many accidentally signed up to vote.
Speaker 4: Registered to vote.
Speaker 5: Over and over and over again, we're seeing this and
Speaker 5: at some point then if my vote, you know, the
Speaker 5: Supreme Court wrongly in my opinion, but said one person,
Speaker 5: one vote, my vote is completely undermined the value of
Speaker 5: it by someone who votes illegally in our illegally in
Speaker 5: our elections.
Speaker 4: Voter, what do they call it? Harvesting?
Speaker 3: But then think about okay, so we don't have to. Like,
Speaker 3: So these elections, the more recent ones, they may be close,
Speaker 3: they may not be close. The number of ballots that
Speaker 3: may be illegal maybe small, maybe like, but we actually
Speaker 3: have in the historical record elections where we know that
Speaker 3: the vote tallying and bouts were completely illegal, and presidents
Speaker 3: never in vote the Republican Guarantee, because that's like every
Speaker 3: election in the South nineteen sixty between eighteen sixty six
Speaker 3: and the nineteen sixty five Voting Rights Act, right, millions
Speaker 3: of black voters were disenfranchised. Everybody knew it, agreed, and
Speaker 3: even then, no president would say, I have the right
Speaker 3: under the Republican Guarantee clause to intervene and throw all
Speaker 3: those out and redo the elections. And I would say,
Speaker 3: even Ulysses s. Grant, Right. So the election that comes
Speaker 3: to mind when you're talking about this, which is a
Speaker 3: real one, not like to me, the twenty twenty four elections,
Speaker 3: in the eighteen seventy six election, right, we know that
Speaker 3: the electoral votes from certain states were basically fraudulent because
Speaker 3: of the suppression of the black vote. And even Ulysses S. Grant, right,
Speaker 3: the great winner of the Civil War, the great pro
Speaker 3: Civil Rights President, he did not think the Republican Guarantee
Speaker 3: Clause all of a sudden authorized the president.
Speaker 4: The election of nineteen sixties and throw.
Speaker 3: These all out. But my boys, there's no president has
Speaker 3: ever read this clause. No one's ever read this clause.
Speaker 3: Is this reservoir of.
Speaker 5: But that doesn't mean it's not possible.
Speaker 3: Let me let me ask just that no one's ever
Speaker 3: thought it meant that. Let me anyone at the time
Speaker 3: of the founding.
Speaker 1: Let me try a hypothetical question on you, John, like
Speaker 1: we do in law school classrooms, and you want to
Speaker 1: be careful because it might be a trick question.
Speaker 3: Suppose it's coming from you, Steve, You're just doing a
Speaker 3: double trick upon yourself.
Speaker 1: With you you laughing now, to quote that great line
Speaker 1: from Bucko Bonds, I laugh while you can, monkey boy, you're.
Speaker 2: Gonna get okay. I suppose so.
Speaker 1: By the way, Lucretia mentioned or made brief reference to
Speaker 1: the fact that the states have tried to use the
Speaker 1: Republican Guarantee clause, I was following a case out of
Speaker 1: Colorado that went for a decade, bouncing up and down
Speaker 1: between circuit and federal court, and it was an attempt
Speaker 1: to overturn the initiative that had the taxpayer Bill of Rights.
Speaker 2: The liberals brought this.
Speaker 1: And it got tossed out, but it took ten years
Speaker 1: to the appeals court to keep sending it back to
Speaker 1: the district court saying no, try again, and they repleted
Speaker 1: all that stuff. The funny thing was is that I
Speaker 1: knew people on both sides of the case who both
Speaker 1: at one point approached me about being an expert witnessed.
Speaker 1: I said, look, I don't know anything about this stuff
Speaker 1: that I just was curious about it. They didn't have
Speaker 1: anybody who even thought about it.
Speaker 3: See, that's why you would never make it as a lawyer,
Speaker 3: because no lawyer would ever say such a thing. I'll
Speaker 3: take that price and first, and then you'll learn about it.
Speaker 2: Second, here's my hypothetical for you.
Speaker 1: Suppose the voters of California or the legislature doesn't matter,
Speaker 1: but they pass a constitutional amendment that made Arnold Schwarzenegger
Speaker 1: the Emperor of California for life. Would that be beyond
Speaker 1: the reach of the federal courts to say no, you
Speaker 1: can't do that, or is that is the remedy only courts?
Speaker 3: The federal courts say they can't touch it, so it will.
Speaker 2: Let me follow this along here for a moment.
Speaker 3: They say, it's up to the other branches.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, so but you just conceded John that there
Speaker 1: are parts of the Constitution that are beyond the reach
Speaker 1: of you lawyers.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, a lot of.
Speaker 2: What I now.
Speaker 4: I mean, remember apportion was once beyond.
Speaker 3: Think about what this would do. Think about your power,
Speaker 3: Lucretian and Steve. If it were in the hands of
Speaker 3: President AOC or the president hands of President Warren, they
Speaker 3: would say, I'm going to reject the votes of states
Speaker 3: that require voter I D because the evidence shows that
Speaker 3: voter I D suppresses my suppresses my not right minority.
Speaker 3: Turn out for.
Speaker 4: Elections shows that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they say, there's no evidence that any of these
Speaker 3: fake votes you're talking about to change the outcome of
Speaker 3: any election. Everybody, Lucia smacked.
Speaker 4: No, No, I didn't. My camera just decided it doesn't
Speaker 4: like me anymore. It just moved. I didn't do anything.
Speaker 4: I know, I didn't. It's way up here. Click, it
Speaker 4: doesn't like me. It just turned away.
Speaker 1: How funny, listeners, if you want to see this on YouTube,
Speaker 1: it's pretty funny.
Speaker 4: The camera nobody around and all right, okay, sorry.
Speaker 1: Let us just let's draw this second to an end
Speaker 1: while Lucretia tries to regain control.
Speaker 2: It's got hal nine thousand.
Speaker 4: On you, Lucretia, I can't do this is a visit.
Speaker 3: Why don't you just stop it with your hand?
Speaker 5: I can't, It's all it's supposedly this fancy, this fancy
Speaker 5: thing that that that follows.
Speaker 4: Me around and I haven't moved. Okay, I don't know.
Speaker 1: So many directions. All right, so we will either of
Speaker 1: clause for another day. But it's a nullody in certain ways,
Speaker 1: maybe not others. But let's go to a break and
Speaker 1: then we'll come back with a couple of new things
Speaker 1: for the rebooted three Whiskey Happy Hour.
Speaker 2: Don't go away, all right, listeners.
Speaker 1: Now we are going to have the first of two
Speaker 1: new features that we're going to try and have every
Speaker 1: week on the show. And the first one's going to
Speaker 1: be a cameo from Alex Preu are adjunct classical scholar,
Speaker 1: And so without further ado, here's Alex pri Youu. So,
Speaker 1: Alex pre you, you have forgotten more about the classical
Speaker 1: world than I will ever know or have ever known.
Speaker 1: And the reaction of the Odyssey movie seems to me
Speaker 1: quite astonishing in this respect. It's become a huge phenomenon
Speaker 1: opinion that's divided, not necessarily in predictable ideological lines. Right,
Speaker 1: some conservatives like it, some don't, some liberals or leftists
Speaker 1: like it, and many don't.
Speaker 2: And so I thought.
Speaker 1: To myself, I need to go to the person whose
Speaker 1: views I would trust the most. I would describe you
Speaker 1: an audience as the genus is Skellius and Robergium, I
Speaker 1: Bertian of the Athens Advertiser newspaper. So is it two
Speaker 1: thumbs up or two thumbs down? And give me your
Speaker 1: two or three best shots about it.
Speaker 6: I'm tempted. I'm tempted. It's we're going into ancient to
Speaker 6: say I wouldn't I wouldn't even send my dulos to this,
Speaker 6: to this movie. But I'm a thumb up and the
Speaker 6: thumb down kind of guy, and the thumb up I
Speaker 6: should begin positive. I did a podcast and I've had
Speaker 6: a few tweets about this. Well, it was kind of
Speaker 6: hard on it, and I want to just offer a
Speaker 6: positive thing given this opportunity, which is that visually it's
Speaker 6: it's in many ways quite sunny. It's not you know,
Speaker 6: it's not representative of the Greeks. Actually is not like
Speaker 6: period correct in it. But like seeing the Cyclops, watching
Speaker 6: Circe turn the men into pigs, the way that it's
Speaker 6: it's rendulous. Even seeing the Liftians coming through, even when
Speaker 6: you're losing the story it is it's cool. I mean,
Speaker 6: it's just cool to see it rot in great effect
Speaker 6: on the screen and see how he's presented the Cyclops
Speaker 6: in this deformed way. The way he did his face
Speaker 6: is it's not one eye like a circle in the head,
Speaker 6: but it's kind of the face is distorted up and
Speaker 6: it's one eye and then a distorted nose and and
Speaker 6: and just parts of that. To see that rendered well,
Speaker 6: is it's worth seeing for that. I saw it twice
Speaker 6: just to make sure because you're going to criticize something,
Speaker 6: I think you should give it, you know, make sure
Speaker 6: you get your details right. But and then also you know,
Speaker 6: sometimes when you make a movie out of a massive
Speaker 6: epig like this, you take things out. You can't do
Speaker 6: the whole thing. And when you take things out, you
Speaker 6: create holes and you have to patch it up together.
Speaker 6: And I think Nolan found some interesting ways to get
Speaker 6: around sort of long stretches of the odyssey, that would
Speaker 6: be tough, and so I give him a thumbs up
Speaker 6: for those kind of moves. The thumbs down is as
Speaker 6: regards the content. I think he completely changes the story,
Speaker 6: and I think he does this deliberately, and and he
Speaker 6: in a way, I think he looks down on the
Speaker 6: Greeks from a standpoint of contemporary moral self satisfaction and
Speaker 6: unearned I should say, if you look down on somebody
Speaker 6: because you've outthought them, and you know, for me to
Speaker 6: say Nolan has done this, but that's fine, fair enough.
Speaker 6: But if you if you're just kind of content with
Speaker 6: your world and you look down on them, that's I
Speaker 6: think a problem. And this comes out in a number
Speaker 6: of details which we could get into if you want to.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I mean Nolan's certainly, you know, he doesn't
Speaker 1: like to use CGI, so he likes to do real effects.
Speaker 1: And He's certainly, as we've seen from all his movies,
Speaker 1: really does like the what you say, the vivid canvas.
Speaker 1: So that shouldn't surprise us that the production of it
Speaker 1: is really staggering.
Speaker 2: Do I detect on what you just said that?
Speaker 6: I mean, is it?
Speaker 1: Are we doing too much of the cliche to say
Speaker 1: he has a historicist point of view about it, that
Speaker 1: you know, we have a better perspective than they did, and.
Speaker 6: Historicist would be to make it too theoretical. I think.
Speaker 6: I think it's just a bias for contemporary views, right,
Speaker 6: And there is a kind of historicism to the film
Speaker 6: actually when you really look at it, which is, you know,
Speaker 6: there's all this stuff where Odyssey says, I'm going into
Speaker 6: the Unknown West, and I think it's alluding forward to
Speaker 6: later Western history. Some people have mistaken a lot of
Speaker 6: the Christian imagery to apply that Nolan is pushing a
Speaker 6: Christian view. No, that's part of the Unknown West's future.
Speaker 6: The ultimate sort of standpoints going toward is the contemporary moment,
Speaker 6: and the theological is therefore downplayed. Right, it's much more humanistic,
Speaker 6: it's much more tolerant. Is the view that it's very
Speaker 6: much worrying about the oppressed minority groups. Groups oppressed by
Speaker 6: namely a kind of imperial capitalism is seems to be
Speaker 6: what Agamemnon represents. And from this perspective, the Greeks look
Speaker 6: like a very backwards kind of people, and Agamemnon is
Speaker 6: a represent when he comes through Troy. It's an orange
Speaker 6: background with his black armor, and it looks like Greek pottery.
Speaker 6: This is the truth of Greek art therefore also of Homer,
Speaker 6: I think, is what he's saying. But his Odysseus has
Speaker 6: been modern modernized, right. His Odysseus is kinder, he's less coolly,
Speaker 6: doesn't feel good about being a Greek. And at one
Speaker 6: point when he comes to his first island after leaving Troy,
Speaker 6: he encounters a foreigner and he has to have a translator.
Speaker 6: The person speaking there is speaking Greek. So it's his
Speaker 6: way of saying, my Odysseus is not Greek, right, And
Speaker 6: the way in which he's not Greek is he is gentler.
Speaker 6: And so another detail just to I've talked to others before.
Speaker 6: But when he sees ury Clay and Urclay identifies him,
Speaker 6: he puts his hand on his on her chin, and
Speaker 6: in the original Odyssey, as you will know, right, he
Speaker 6: throttles her and grabs her by the neck and strangles
Speaker 6: her to keep her quiet. It's a very very drawing moment.
Speaker 6: So when I saw that on the screen, when he
Speaker 6: brought his hand or chin, I got tense in my
Speaker 6: cel was always going to do it, And that's Nolan,
Speaker 6: I think, deliberately saying no, I'm not going to go there.
Speaker 6: He'll win her over with gentleness, which is what happens.
Speaker 6: She's quiet out of a kind of fondness. My Odysseus
Speaker 6: doesn't do that anymore, and that I think is a
Speaker 6: Nolan's saying, I actually think the Greeks are really backwards
Speaker 6: and primitive and overly violent, and we're out of that.
Speaker 6: And the Odysseus I like, or the part of Odysseus
Speaker 6: I like, is the part that wants to go home
Speaker 6: and wants to restore peace. But he does it in
Speaker 6: a backwards way. I'm going to make him do it
Speaker 6: in a much more forward thinking, progressive way. Right. Well,
Speaker 6: that to me was a big thumbs down. That's missing
Speaker 6: the whole point of the work.
Speaker 2: Let's do this as an exit question.
Speaker 1: If you want, now you you actually translate ancient Greek
Speaker 1: complete texts.
Speaker 2: I don't. I barely know a word of it.
Speaker 1: Am I right in disliking the Emily Wilson translation as
Speaker 1: much as I do.
Speaker 2: I've only read a translation I like Latimore and to
Speaker 2: others that are around a while a lot better.
Speaker 6: I've not read it. I've seen some criticisms, read some criticisms.
Speaker 6: I really like Latimore. I was asked to cheat Fagels
Speaker 6: last year, and I really found myself correcting it way
Speaker 6: too much. But Latimore is very faithful to the degree
Speaker 6: that I at least require in the classroom, and I
Speaker 6: feel very confident reading him in English. And then when
Speaker 6: a passage really jumps out at me or I think
Speaker 6: it's interesting, I'll work through the Greek. And they are
Speaker 6: little things. Obviously no translator gets all the subtlety, but
Speaker 6: for the most part, you're in good hands with Latimore.
Speaker 6: So I don't want to criticize Wilson. That was funny.
Speaker 6: She was also critical of the film, but from the
Speaker 6: left right. People the right didn't like it. People on
Speaker 6: the left didn't like it, and it ends up being
Speaker 6: a kind of mediocre contempt version of contemporary morality. Though
Speaker 6: I think it was more leftist. So one guy reacted
Speaker 6: to my criticism and said, oh, this isn't woke, this
Speaker 6: is neoliberal, And I said, I think. I think the
Speaker 6: accusation of neoliberalism from the left is just a way
Speaker 6: of saying true wokeism has never been tried. Right, It's
Speaker 6: it's like pointing to the Soviet Union and saying, oh,
Speaker 6: the Soviet Union, that's not real communists, And it's just
Speaker 6: the same sort of thing. It's like, No, it's got
Speaker 6: woke elements. The pure victims of the film are an
Speaker 6: African actress and a transactor and or actress, depending on
Speaker 6: how you come down on it, and they're they're viewed
Speaker 6: as pure victims. That's a conscious effort to make the
Speaker 6: victims look a certain way and be a kind of woke,
Speaker 6: woke version, to say nothing of the casting playing into
Speaker 6: Oscar woke Oscar rules. So yeah, I think it's it's work,
Speaker 6: but you know, for the woke crowd, it's never woke enough,
Speaker 6: of course. Not.
Speaker 2: Hey, Alex, thanks for this.
Speaker 1: We'll have it back again soon with some other classical moment,
Speaker 1: and certainly when your book comes out next year, we'll
Speaker 1: want to have you back.
Speaker 6: Yeah, of course, yeah, thanks for having me. Steven cheers.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you, Alex.
Speaker 1: And now the next feature we're going to try and
Speaker 1: corporate is a listener question, and some episodes we may
Speaker 1: do more than one. But we've got a very good
Speaker 1: question from a longtime listener and reader named Ed Anderson
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles, adds an old pal, and he wrote
Speaker 1: this to me the following. There's another thing that rankles me.
Speaker 1: Why do so many people on the right buy into
Speaker 1: the left's abuse of language? In other words, labeling leftists
Speaker 1: socialist communist policies as progressive progress is something good?
Speaker 2: Is it not?
Speaker 1: So you pose the left's plans, you must be against
Speaker 1: progress or regressive.
Speaker 2: I noticed that even you, he means me, use that word.
Speaker 1: Is this just a surrender like blue states and red states,
Speaker 1: or as even anti communist Pat Buchanan used to say,
Speaker 1: calling it the Soviet Republic when there was nothing republican
Speaker 1: about the administrative states of dictatorship. It seems that the
Speaker 1: left is winning everywhere, and so I think that's actually
Speaker 1: a worthy challenge, is problem of language, and I've got lots.
Speaker 2: Of thoughts on it.
Speaker 1: But I'm going to start first by asking Lucretia, who
Speaker 1: looks like she has her camera under control.
Speaker 4: I have a thing of.
Speaker 5: Fountain pen cartridges holding it in the same place. Anyway,
Speaker 5: it is a good question. I'm going to start with
Speaker 5: this specific question, and then I think we move on
Speaker 5: to the broader question about language and how the left
Speaker 5: has co opted our language across the board. I don't
Speaker 5: find progressive to be in and of itself a complimentary
Speaker 5: term or a salutary term. I you know, maybe that's
Speaker 5: because I'm a conservative, right, But I mean the idea
Speaker 5: behind progressivism, the progress to which they aspire, is, of course,
Speaker 5: the idea that human beings are infinitely maliable and can
Speaker 5: be made too anything into anything. Society can be made
Speaker 5: into anything that will satisfy the tyrannical impulses of the left,
Speaker 5: and that's what they.
Speaker 4: Mean by progress.
Speaker 5: And you know, so we're progressing because we went from say,
Speaker 5: feminist being allowed to work in the.
Speaker 4: Workplace, to.
Speaker 5: Transgender men pretending to be women going into little girls'
Speaker 5: locker rooms, and that somehow progress right, and in the
Speaker 5: eyes of the left it is I don't have a
Speaker 5: problem with that word. I will give Steve a shout out.
Speaker 5: I told him this yesterday met In twenty sixteen, Steve
Speaker 5: wrote for The Weekly Standard. It was probably the most
Speaker 5: pro Trump piece that The Weekly Standard actually ever published
Speaker 5: prior to the twenty sixteen election. If they'd have kept
Speaker 5: doing that, they might still be in business. But anyway,
Speaker 5: and one of the things Steve made very clear, I've
Speaker 5: never forgotten this. I mean I read a million articles,
Speaker 5: but I've never forgotten this. And it's not just because
Speaker 5: Steve wrote it. Is that, in fact, what your comment
Speaker 5: or said, this is true. The left owns our language
Speaker 5: and they force us all of the time into speaking
Speaker 5: in the language that they use.
Speaker 4: I just did it. Transgender.
Speaker 5: What a stupid term. Gender refers to language. It doesn't
Speaker 5: refer to sex. You could call it a transsex, but
Speaker 5: of course they don't want to do that, because even
Speaker 5: the most deluded leftists recognize that sex probably is something
Speaker 5: relatively immutable xx x y, et cetera. But we always
Speaker 5: talk in terms of leftist goals and leftist language. And
Speaker 5: back to Steve's point that he made, he said the
Speaker 5: thing about Trump that was different more so than any
Speaker 5: anything else, more that that differentiated him from other conservatives
Speaker 5: like Ted Cruz, who commented that, yes, we use the
Speaker 5: left's language. We don't know how not to speak the
Speaker 5: language of the left. And it's been a long time
Speaker 5: Steve since I read it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's awards in your mouth.
Speaker 2: It is actually worse than that.
Speaker 1: The quote I used was after the twenty twelve election,
Speaker 1: when Republicans during this autopsy we've been too mean to immigrants,
Speaker 1: and Cruse said at a Nash Review meeting, he said
Speaker 1: a conservative social policy ideas have to be filtered through
Speaker 1: and get the approval of a Raulsian filter.
Speaker 2: I was just appalled.
Speaker 1: I mean to ad think he knows better than that,
Speaker 1: but he actually but that show is a concession to
Speaker 1: by the way, I think Ralsanism was disappearing. Believe that
Speaker 1: for another day, because that is really boring.
Speaker 2: But I was Ama said that before.
Speaker 4: I turned it over to John.
Speaker 5: I just want to add one little thing about this,
Speaker 5: and that is that not only has the left co
Speaker 5: opted the language, but they have co opted that's not
Speaker 5: the right word. They have managed to soften the meaning
Speaker 5: of words that people that are intelligent actually understand. John,
Speaker 5: You mean we understand our listeners understand exactly what we
Speaker 5: mean when we talk.
Speaker 4: About socialism, when we talk.
Speaker 5: About communism, when we talk about fascism, when we talk
Speaker 5: about not But the left has successfully convinced an entire
Speaker 5: generation of young people, probably several generations now that socialism
Speaker 5: is a good thing. They don't understand the single thing
Speaker 5: about the economic side of it, or the political side
Speaker 5: of it, or the tyrannical side of it. But that
Speaker 5: pull that came out just a couple days ago that
Speaker 5: said three quarters of Democrats would vote for a socialist
Speaker 5: candidate for office, and forty eight percent of college graduates
Speaker 5: would vote for a socialist for office. And that's just
Speaker 5: downright scary. And again that's where they've taken socialism and
Speaker 5: turned it into something kind of cute and cozy, like
Speaker 5: a little stuffed Kiwi doll or something, you know. And
Speaker 5: of course socialism has been the source of so much
Speaker 5: human suffering everywhere it's been tried, but.
Speaker 4: It hasn't been real socialism. I'm sorry, John, Well, do
Speaker 4: you want to weigh in, John?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't mind calling political parties, but they want
Speaker 3: to be called so uh you know, like the Democratic Party,
Speaker 3: you know, for many many decades was not very democratic,
Speaker 3: especially when they were Democrats defending you know, slavery, defending segregation.
Speaker 3: Still will call them the Democratic Party. Doesn't really bother
Speaker 3: me to call progressives progressives, in part because I think
Speaker 3: the reputation of the progressives is uh, you know, coming
Speaker 3: into question right. The original progressives who today's are just
Speaker 3: a you know, somewhat pale limitation. Uh you know, we're
Speaker 3: uh you know, great fans of eugenics and segregation and
Speaker 3: this idea that they could manage all society without regard
Speaker 3: to anybody's rights. They were kind of, uh, I don't know,
Speaker 3: you guys, I don't know what you think. They were
Speaker 3: kind of sort of Marxists. They're definitely Hegelians, right, because
Speaker 3: they thought history was always moving in a in direction
Speaker 3: towards progress, and they see Marxists to me too, right,
Speaker 3: And Marx was a Hegelian also, So I don't have
Speaker 3: any problem calling progressives by that. I do take Linda's point.
Speaker 3: There's that great essay by George Orwell right about political
Speaker 3: I just pulled it up, the use of the politicization
Speaker 3: of language. But I think Lucretia's example of transgenderism is
Speaker 3: a good one because to me, it's a good example
Speaker 3: because it shows that when the political left stretches language
Speaker 3: so far that it conflicts with people's common sense, that
Speaker 3: the people rejected right. So they could call transgender whatever
Speaker 3: they want, but it's an eighty twenty issue in favor
Speaker 3: of conservatives, because no matter what the language is, it's
Speaker 3: just so at conflict with everybody's right, common sense wisdom
Speaker 3: that it shows that their efforts, the use of the
Speaker 3: language actually makes the case worse and it becomes obvious
Speaker 3: to everybody.
Speaker 1: Yeah, can I work backwards and start Actually in two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven, for a moment, Hillary Clinton, everyone thought
Speaker 1: she was going to be the nominee. Right, she made
Speaker 1: a statement one day, I'm not a liberal, I'm a progressive,
Speaker 1: And I thought, isn't that interesting? We're circling all the
Speaker 1: way back to a century ago. Why that was important
Speaker 1: is during the eighties, to do a little history here,
Speaker 1: Conservatives Republicans were so successful in demonizing the word liberal
Speaker 1: the Democrats ran away from it, right, Docucus, This isn't
Speaker 1: about ideology, it's about competence.
Speaker 2: And you know, we didn't want to be called a liberal.
Speaker 1: And that was the biggest Republican attack attack, he ads,
Speaker 1: was you're a liberal person.
Speaker 2: So that was a great short run political success.
Speaker 1: Why did we get progressive in the first place one
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty years ago, party, It's because liberal meant
Speaker 1: the opposite of.
Speaker 2: What it means now.
Speaker 1: And you know, Wilson starts the hijacking of liberal and
Speaker 1: FDR completes it, turning it on head. Right. It used
Speaker 1: to mean, you know, freedom, limited government and so forth.
Speaker 1: I do remember you still, by the way, it does
Speaker 1: still have that meaning a lot of places overseas, So
Speaker 1: the Free Market Limited Government Party in New Zealand and Australia,
Speaker 1: but also Eastern Europe are the liberal parties. But in
Speaker 1: Eastern Europe they have you know, Slavic names, so we
Speaker 1: don't recognize it as such. But I remember having a
Speaker 1: bunch of Eastern European students twenty years ago now in
Speaker 1: Georgetown when I was teaching here as an adjunct, and
Speaker 1: these Eastern European students, we'd go through current events and stuff,
Speaker 1: and they'd say, Hillary Clinton, John Carey, they're not liberals,
Speaker 1: they're socialists. So there's what's happened is the progressive became
Speaker 1: a way out of the liberalism label, and now it's
Speaker 1: kind of caught on. And you know, it would be
Speaker 1: nice that there's been a lot of debate over the years,
Speaker 1: especially among libertarians, but others like Gosh, because the way
Speaker 1: we could reclaim liberalism from the left and you know,
Speaker 1: from the Democrats, and I think it's a lost cause.
Speaker 2: It's just too deeply embedded.
Speaker 1: The Cato instance, twenty years ago, try to promote the
Speaker 1: term market liberalism, and that flopped. And then Brink Lindsay
Speaker 1: tried to double down with what he called liberal tarianism,
Speaker 1: and that flopped even harder. I mean, stupid idea is
Speaker 1: liberal tarianism. You get a whole book about it. It sounds
Speaker 1: like sour kraut ice cream. It's just ridiculous.
Speaker 2: I do think, though, Lucretia, that you know, the.
Speaker 1: Founders you can find again Madison, certainly Hamilton. They were
Speaker 1: for progress and I think used the word but then
Speaker 1: the ordinary common sense meaning right, life just gets better
Speaker 1: for people and it has.
Speaker 5: I mean, let's let's be honest, right, Let's let's talk
Speaker 5: about what progress, good progress really means. Let's talk about
Speaker 5: the fact that in in half an hour Lucretia can
Speaker 5: go out and cook a meal for six people in
Speaker 5: about fifteen minutes because of all of the amenities of
Speaker 5: modern society, you know, whereas.
Speaker 4: H grill But you know, but no, no, that was
Speaker 4: a dumb example.
Speaker 5: I you know, four loads of laundry done today, the
Speaker 5: kinds of things that have made life so air conditioning, John,
Speaker 5: air conditioning is progress, yeah, right, I mean it's one
Speaker 5: hundred here today and very humid, unlike it usually is so. Yes,
Speaker 5: there is such a thing as progress. What I meant
Speaker 5: was that their idea of progress, of course, isn't progress
Speaker 5: for the human condition. It's progress for what humans become
Speaker 5: and what society can become.
Speaker 1: Yeah, by the way, I will I mean having beaten
Speaker 1: up on Cato. First, I loved ed Crane, who passed
Speaker 1: away recently. Second, their best project today is actually their
Speaker 1: program called human progress dot org, which quantifies all that
Speaker 1: those things can.
Speaker 4: I tell you my liberal poem.
Speaker 1: Just let me add one thing about such devices. I
Speaker 1: just learned this the other day, and I think it's
Speaker 1: kind of fun. Did you know when the microwave was
Speaker 1: first invented, it was called the cavity magnetron.
Speaker 2: I'm not making this up.
Speaker 5: I'm calling it that from now on, when it's in
Speaker 5: a drawer. It's so cool, cavity magnetron. I get write
Speaker 5: that down because I'll forget Steve.
Speaker 3: Steve would never use in my grave. He just takes
Speaker 3: like some kind of gas, turns it on and uses
Speaker 3: a flamethrower to shoot over his.
Speaker 5: Me so cool, I want to flame throw. No, here's
Speaker 5: my poem. I'm liberal to a degree. I think everyone
Speaker 5: should be free.
Speaker 4: But if you.
Speaker 5: Think that I would let Burry Goldwater move next door.
Speaker 4: To me or marry my daughter. You're crazy?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 5: Is that you never heard that old poems? It's from
Speaker 5: forty five fifty years ago.
Speaker 1: I thought it's It reminds me an inverse of the
Speaker 1: great phil Oaks to and love Me. I'm a liberal,
Speaker 1: which I'll skip over for now because we are running short,
Speaker 1: running around.
Speaker 2: Let me do it. Let me do just a quick
Speaker 2: ad break here.
Speaker 1: Then we'll do some Babylon b's and we'll give you
Speaker 1: a couple of stabs at are new ending, and we'll.
Speaker 2: Be out for the newly rebooted three Whiskey Happy hours.
Speaker 6: Don't go old.
Speaker 4: Democrats.
Speaker 5: Use Fauci's Diary of Attacking Science. Okay, this one's for you, guys.
Speaker 5: Mitch McConnell honors late friend Lindsey Graham with forty seven
Speaker 5: day moment of Silence.
Speaker 2: Yeah that's got bad.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I know it's bad.
Speaker 5: Okay, Fauci asks, I gotta have a few Fauci ones.
Speaker 5: Fauci asked China to engineer new virus that just kills
Speaker 5: Ran Paul.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I saw that one.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I know that. So Mandel MEI so I can't
Speaker 5: say the guy's name. Let me do this one, man.
Speaker 5: It's a picture of Fauci man who took nations constitutional rights,
Speaker 5: claims protection by constitutional right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you get it.
Speaker 5: Okay, one last one. I'm trying to pick the best one. Okay,
Speaker 5: this one's good because I don't know if you guys
Speaker 5: are up on this.
Speaker 4: It just came out.
Speaker 5: But the gram Platinum replacement Troy uh Troy Jackson. Troy Jackson,
Speaker 5: it turns out is married and has a couple of
Speaker 5: kids with his cousin.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so to avoid.
Speaker 5: Yess a picture of them both.
Speaker 4: Yes, to avoid criticisms. I know. The thing was when
Speaker 4: I first when I first.
Speaker 3: Saw it the United States.
Speaker 5: The caption on it was just give us back the
Speaker 5: damn Nazi. But but this is this is my last
Speaker 5: Bablon bute. To avoid criticism for hooking up with his cousin,
Speaker 5: Troy Jackson converts to Islam.
Speaker 2: Thinks are bad.
Speaker 4: Okay, I'm don.
Speaker 2: All right, listeners.
Speaker 1: The the reboot of the still a work in progress.
Speaker 2: Here.
Speaker 1: We're going to have a new ending. We are going
Speaker 1: to have a guest host next week. I think John
Speaker 1: you said you've texted him. It's going to be Philmon
Speaker 1: Notre Dame, who's got neuter Dame con who's got an
Speaker 1: interesting new article out on post liberalism that we'll work
Speaker 1: over with him. And we're also looking and I think
Speaker 1: couple have a listener poll about a new sort of
Speaker 1: exit motto. We might go back to don't forget to
Speaker 1: milk the soft power dividend. I kind of like, we'll
Speaker 1: just have to see what happens. I think that's Trump's
Speaker 1: most memorable line. It's very usable, right, And I'm working
Speaker 1: on a swag store, So if you want three Whiskey
Speaker 1: Happy Hour, coffee mugs, hats, t shirts, swag bags, maybe
Speaker 1: even you know, water bottle, I'm gonna try and get
Speaker 1: that set up sometime soon.
Speaker 2: It's just a matter of executing. And with that, I
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