Speaker 1: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask
what you can do for your country.
Speaker 2: Mister gorbitchaw tear down this wall. It's the ricochetfon guest.
I'm James Lillings, General Siegel, your cooks out this week,
but Stephen Hayward is with us to talk to Jason
Willik at the Washington Post about all this deep ortation
stuff and more so, let's advertise a podcast.
Speaker 1: Photos have emerged of Senator Van Holland sipping what appears
to be Margarita's with the Bradio Garcia down in Al Salvador.
Speaker 2: Do you encourage other Democrats to fly down Al Salvador
to meet with this illegal alien who's an acute I
like this guy. See now, this is this is the
kind of a reporter. We're like, there aren't enough of them.
We got to get some more of them. Welcome everybody.
This is the Ricochet Podcast, number seven, one hundred and
thirty seven. As we're getting those numbers that resemble Boeing
aircraft again. I'm James Lylyx and orbed as I'll probably
be called if I'm grabbed out of my house and
thrown onto a plane and dropped off Neill Salvador, Minnesota, Dad,
and I'm joined not by Charles C. W. Cook, who's
off rastling gators in the Everglades this week, but by
Stephen Hayward. Stephen, Welcome, Hi, James Gould, to see you again. Indeed, indeed, well,
it has been a week and it's you know, it's
kind of a nice week where a story that began
the week turns out to be dominating things at the
end of the week as well. But beneath that, and
we'll talk about that with our guest later. Recent news
that had had seems to be under some stress rejecting
the demands that the administration has said. The administration says,
you know what, you've been letting anti Semitism run rampant
on your campus. And unspoken, perhaps, or I don't know,
maybe spoken is the idea that you have promulgated a
variety of anti American ideas in your leftist administration, and
hence we are under no obligation to send you any money,
according to the and so I think it's about two
point two billion in grand send some other stuff in
the contracts, and it's not just money handed to them,
and it's not like one somebody walks over with a
check for two point two billion dollars. From what I understand,
it has to do with funding of certain things and
certain things and this and that, and if we take
that funding away, then the imminent cure for cancer will
be lost, et cetera. But Harvard has said no, no, sorry.
One of the things that seemed to be bulking at,
and people can argue about whether or not it is
the position and the right of an administration to put
demands like this on an institution, is the requirement that
they hire a critical mass of intellectually diverse staff. And
I find this interesting because, I mean, we're seeing manifest
almost every week, if not every day, an explicit act
that conforms with things that the right has been complaining
about for a long time. Right, I mean, the writer
has been saying, you know, you, you parade around your
notions and your examplars ofsity, but actually you are not
diverse at all. You are your diversity consists of immutable
personal racial identifiers. Intellectual diversity is what used to characterize
the institution, and you don't have that, and if you
don't work towards it, we're not going to give you
any money. So, ay, Stephen, tell me what you think
about Harvard's reaction, how you think it's going to play
out and be whether or not you think it is
wise to actually do the thing that people have been
wanting to do for an awful long time, which is reshape,
reform and reset the idea of diversity. Yeah. So I mean,
I guess in reverse order.
Speaker 1: I think, yes, it may not be wise, but it
is now necessary. I mean conservatives and also a lot
of I think smarter liberals have been acknowledging for years
now that universities have become just cesspools of narrow ideological conformity,
but nothing was ever done about it. And two points
I make among many more is we talk about diversity,
but there's no viewpoint diversity, and so commitment to free
speech is really insufficient when there's no one there to
offer a contrariyant opinion to the campus orthodoxy. So it
amounts to nothing to say, oh, we're going to redouble
our efforts for free speech. The second thing is on diversity.
You know, Thomas Sole likes to say, next time you
hear an administrator say we're committed to diversity, ask them
how many Republicans they have in their sociology department, and
you want to talk about, you know, the demand of
the Trump people that they hires more intellectual diversity, something
that listeners and the general public are not aware of.
It's the great move in the last five ten years
at elite university is actually all over the place for
what they call cluster hires. And of course right away
we will joke about what particular now as four utter
word is missing from that. But the cluster hires all
say we want to increase in the interests of diversity,
underrepresented minorities, and it's always in ethnic studies, you know,
feminist studies, maybe history and so forth. And in other words,
cluster hires mean let's hire six or more leftists all
at once and install them. Now, I've always thought that
the idea that you should require demand that universities self
consciously hire some conservatives was a defective idea for a
lot of reasons. But I'm also reminded of Churchill's great
line that democracy is the worst form of government except
for all the others that have ever been tried. And
we now have come to the point where the only
way Harvard and other elite universities are going to reform
is if they're hit in the head repeatedly with a hammer,
because otherwise it's not going to change. And so I'm
all for what Trump's doing, even the unreasonable demands, which
I think were designed intentionally to make Harvard say no, because,
by the way, if Harvard capitulates, no other university in
the country could possibly hold out.
Speaker 2: Well, when you say to people, you know, you talk
about diversity, yet have you hired any Republicans? They will
hear that as somebody going to, you know, a conclave
of a nestists and saying, well, how many Kovorchians have
you hired? Right, it's not as something that they regard
as necessary or even welcome within the field of academia,
because they may perhaps have a rather ancient, crusty, bigoted,
narrow view of what a conservative is. I mean, there
are people, and you see this all the time, unfortunately,
when you're sometimes hearing college protesters vent their spleen that
to be on the right is to have a set
of ideas that is contrary to truth. Not necessarily just
another way of looking at it, but anti science, anti truth,
anti all the wonderful things that we know, and therefore,
why would you include these people in your institution the
idea of both sides ism, It just strikes them as
trafficking with evil, so it's hard for them to make
the leap and say, no, there actually is a conservative
position grounded in a few other ideas, that approaches these
topics that we all are concerned about and finds different solutions.
And they're not insane. They're not insane at all. As
a matter of fact, they happen to be based on
about two or three thousand years of accumulated wisdom from
observing various human societies around the globe and knowing human
nature as opposed to you guys who just want to
rewrite it. So yeah, once they get their head around that,
they might find. But you know what I worry about,
of course, is that oftentimes when institutions will hire a conservative,
they will trumpet that fact and say, look, we've got
a conservative here, and again, whenever they say that, it
suggests that liberalism is the norm, is the default position
for any smart, critical person, And therefore, you know, it
just goes without saying there's truth and there's conservatives. But
the other part of this is I don't think that
people would be complaining about intellectual diversity, the lack of it,
so much if indeed they hadn't somehow deduced inferred come
to the conclusion that instead of just general variety sort
of nineteen fifties sixties technocratic liberalism that we all grew
up with around and the you know, the the waters
that were whose temperature was set by Walter Cronkite and
the New York Times editorial board, then instead of that,
it's become this anti American, anti Western civilization gramsy and
nonsense that seeks to upend everything and replace it with
a farrago of nonsense that is that is contrary to
what this country was founded on. I mean, when you
when you have protesters out there in the quadrant, who
are who are saying, you know, we are here to
destroy Western civilization and maybe a one out of ten,
one out of twenty, I don't know. But the idea
that that idea Western sieve has got to go is
something we've heard chanted for an awful long time. So
if you just I mean, if you had your basic
old old line liberals there, people wouldn't be complaining so much.
What it is is they detect the presence of an
of an element, a cohort that is antithetical to what
we regard as the you know, the great American experiment.
So ah, so I again, but you're right. If Harvard goes,
the rest of them would have to go as well.
You know, Princeton has got you know, something like two
percent of their faculty votes republican. You know Yale's it's
three percent. I mean, it's just absurd. And how did
it get to this point? Self selection, bias, reinforcement, and
a culture that just was fat and happy and unchallenged
until now. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know. One of the interesting critiques of this comes
from an unlikely source. It's Cass Sunstein, who I think
is the sort of smartest center left thinker around at
Harvard Law. He wrote an article more than twenty years
ago that in being cast Sunstein. He never published an
article once. He publishes it six times in different forms.
But it was about what he called the dominance of conformity.
And what he said was when you get a bunch
of like minded people together and they're only together inside
their bubble, they become more extreme.
Speaker 2: And he gives lots of examples. Although the real.
Speaker 1: Target of his article, which he kind of admitted to
me indirectly in an email exchange we had was universities.
And so one of the problems that I find is
that the presumption you mentioned that conservatives are simply crazy, wrong, bigoted, ignorant, stupid,
whatever comes about from a reinforced intellectual laziness. And I'll
give you a quick example of what I mean.
Speaker 2: I was last week.
Speaker 1: I went behind enemy lines at the University of Colorado
at Boulder for three days for a conference at Boulder
being the Berkeley of the Rockies. And that's why I
missed the show last week Listeners And anyway, I met
with a bunch of students and somebody asked to go
around with the students in the small group.
Speaker 2: Where do you get your news? It was predictable.
Speaker 1: Oh, I read the New York Times, I listened to NPR,
I watch MSNBC, and I thought, I'm gonna have some
fun with these folks. It says that's why our side
is generally winning elections and winning a lot of things,
and liberals are losing because we also were conservatives.
Speaker 2: Who are you engaged in the world?
Speaker 1: We read the New York Times and listen to NPR,
it's opposition research that makes us bilingual. See, we know
what you're thinking, but you all never read a conservative
publication or a conservative news outlet, so you never actually
hear any serious arguments, and you don't know what we're thinking.
And that gives us a great advantage. And I can
go on from there, but it's a lot of a
lot of uncomfortable shifting around in chairs. When I made
that mischievous point, which happens to have the advantage of
being true.
Speaker 2: Well, here you are the thinking, you know, the Charlie
Kirk of your generation, wading into these places. How did
they respond though, I mean, did anybody raise a hand
and challenge you and say absolutely, you know, we don't
read these things because we believe they are misinformation, because
we believe they are bias. I mean, did they say
anything or just shift their buttocks in a querulous way.
Speaker 1: Well, it was one of those rambling conversations that wasn't
very sequential, so the subject got changed pretty quickly to
I don't know, all kinds of crazy things.
Speaker 2: But it was always fun.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, what's the old line of fighter
pilots about a target rich opportunity. That's why I like
going behind behind the lines at liberal universities, because whichever
way you point, there's something you could attack and throw
people off balance. And I do enjoy that up to
a point. After a while becomes tedious and exhausting.
Speaker 2: Well, the end result of this probably is going to
be these these institutions will not accept the terms and
they will have the funding yanked from them. Harvard, from
what I understand, may have a huge endowment, but it's
not particularly liquid, so who knows what they may have
to do. There's also an administration press to investigate the
intellectual tempera shore, we say, of people who are coming
in from other countries, especially to put the screws to
Chinese visa holders who want to come in and study. Now,
this is something that again a lot of people have said, well,
anybody who comes here is probably CCP connected. You know,
they may be rich enough to come here, their parents
are connected. There are we any under any obligation to
allow this, and you know, perhaps we're not. But again
this is this is being seen as as overly invasive
and of course authoritarian and fascissistic. Whereas you know, I
if I spend a lot of my time fulminating against
every aspect of British culture, society, politics, and the rest
of it. And I walk in with my passport and
I put it down, the thing and the and the
light goes red. I wouldn't particularly be surprised. I mean,
having been given the stink eye by a Russian passport
agent in Saint Petersburg, think branking back forty years to
things that I wrote about Mother Russia, I wouldn't be
particularly surprised. But we but we seem to be in
this position of you know, we walk around with a
kickney side in our back and and encourage everybody to
give us a good boot behind.
Speaker 1: So but James, I've had that same stink eye from
a passport guy in Saint Petersburg getting off a cruise ship. Right.
I think it's standard operating procedure. But look, I think
two points on the Chinese business. I think the real
game here is I mean, regardless of how many students
are CCP connected, probably a lot of them, but whether
they're actually spies or not, a lot of wealthy Chinese
want to send their kids to America for degrees and
also to get some money out of the country. It's
it's a long story, but so I think restricting Chinese
students is not only a way of depriving many universities
of revenue because they pay full freight, but also I
think it's to cause trouble for China's rulers, because your
rich elites in China are going to be mad that
relations are so bad they can't send their kids to
American universities. But getting back to the Harvard thing for
a minute, because I think the other target audience of
foreign students are people from the Middle East and elsewhere
who are anti Semitic, anti American. And let's do this
thought experiment. You know, we've heard, oh, we have to
allow free speech and criticism of Israel. Okay, fine, let's
try this as a thought experiment. We know at Princeton
a couple of weeks ago there was a student mob
yelling at Jewish students, go back to Europe because that's
where you're from, That's where you emigrated from. Now, imagine
if you had a group of students at Harvard who
said to blacks go back to Africa. It would be
a five alarm fire for weeks. The university would punish
those students, probably expel them.
Speaker 2: And so there you.
Speaker 1: See the asymmetry of these things. Now to deepen that
thought experiment, would Harvard be justified in saying, say, forty
years ago or so, we're not going to accept any
South African white students who are defenders of apartheid. Their
views are not welcome in our universities. They're poisonous and insidious.
So it seems to me that the Trump administration is
saying exactly, They're taking a consistent line about who should
and shouldn't be admitted to the United States and to
our universities. And I'm all for that too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, basically seems to be we kind of want people
who don't hate us and our foundational principles. We can
work around the details, but basically, we kind of want
you to be like liking us and what we stand
for and what we strive for and the rest of it.
I guess that's an awful lot to ask. Hey, you know,
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Jason Willock, columnist for the Washington Post, where he writes
primarily about law, politics, foreign affairs. Gee, I wonder if
there's any nexus of that. This week, for that he
contributed to the Wall Street Journal and the American Interest.
Welcome Jason, how are you good? Good to be with
you guys. Well, we haven't yet talked about Maryland Dad,
but let's do it now. Administration maybe a clerical error
in March, and so the guy gets sent off to
the bad big House. Two of our active branches of
government are trying to get him back, and the Democrat
Party seems to be taking an awful lot on bringing
Maryland Dad home, where presumably he would be turned a
runner to board it ELSEWHEO, You've been pointing out that
the Democrats are fighting secure his release and they're sending
the wrong message. Shall we say, what should they be
talking about? What should the Democrats be doing if we
all as a nation want to move past this incident?
Speaker 3: Yeah, the moment the Democrats started to make it about
Maryland Dad, and you know, you know, personally, ryanize this
one individual, I sort of had a sinking feeling, and
then lo and behold, the administration releases some more bad
details about him. Fox News reports on a domestic violence
complaint from his wife, and so on. You know, these victims,
when somebody tries to make a victim in the press,
they're never a perfect victim. And that's the wrong way
to think about this dispute. In my mind, the dispute is,
you know, about the law and the fact that the
administration is sort of thumbing its nose at the Supreme
Court on this case. And I think that that should
be the focus, not this individual, because most people, certainly
most Republicans agree than the legal immigrant accused of domestic violence,
suspected of gang membership, there's nothing wrong with deporting that person.
A lot of people think Trump was elected to deport
that person. But you also have to follow the law,
and you have to follow the Supreme Court, and they
are not doing that in a pretty ostentatious way. And
to me, that's the problem, not only constitutionally and but politically,
that's the problem that anyone who wants the administration to,
you know, change course, needs to emphasize.
Speaker 2: I'll give this to Stephen in just a second, Moente,
I want to respond to that one. I think a
lot of people don't care about the the Supreme Court's
decision in this essence is because either a they believe
Stephen Miller when he says that they won it nine
to zero, when in the back of his head, mister
Miller may be talking about the little the difference between
facilitating and effectuating his release. But maybe they probably they
basically don't care because they saw Biden thumb As knows
that the Supreme Court when it came to student loans
and regarded that that's your tit, here's your tat. And
the other thing that I think a lot of people
are thinking is that they are absolutely indifferent to whatever
legal niceties may or may not have been respected because
they believe that the previous administration led in twenty million people,
just a lot of men, didn't care, and X number
of those committed Dan his crimes, small crimes, big crowd whatever.
They don't They don't care. Now we're going to talk
about here why they should. But would you agree that
a lot of the indifference to this comes from the
way the previous administration may have acted and how people
are just indifferent really to the means by which those
consequences are tidied up.
Speaker 3: I think that's right, except I don't think that you're
going to tidy up. You're not going to remove a
huge number of illegal immigrants in this way. I mean
this Salvador in prison. They've sent three hundred people there.
It's sort of a symbolic and a deterrent measure. It's
not that, you know, we're going to send millions of
people here. I guess if you really want to make
the point we don't need to respect court orders when
it comes to deporting people's that's fine, I guess. But
you know, it just seems kind of like a teenage
antic because you can easily deport this guy. You know,
you can easily deport he was deportable well to a
country that was not El Salvador, and the courts that
you know, the government could change it, probably through the
administrative legal process, so that he can be deported to
El Salvador.
Speaker 4: It's almost like they just.
Speaker 3: Want to make a symbolic point that we don't have
to respect the court orders on this. But okay, you
know you're making your point, you're not actually that's not
actually going to get you any closer to deporting, However,
many hundreds of thousands or millions of people you want
to deport.
Speaker 2: Jason and Steve Hayward out in California.
Speaker 1: And I want to ask you a slightly whimsical question
before I pick up on the main thread, and that's
from your column yesterday. Where are you opened by quoting
Peter Virek? And I thought, Wow, that's a name that's
like unknown even to a lot of conservatives, right, And
so are you trying to put George Will out of
a job? I mean, the broader question there is not
just via narrowly, but it looks like you know, you're
sort of well read in through the broader spectrum of
conservative thinkers going back, you know, in Bireck's case, sixty years.
Speaker 3: Ago, I wrote an essay about Peter Viereck in twenty
eighteen and National Affairs. So I read all of his
stuff for that, and that was one of one of
my favorite quotes in his Conservatism revisited, and I believe
that if I'm not misremembering, you know that as a
younger writer. Then I got a note from George Will
about that essay and.
Speaker 1: I was over the moon, So okay, so the circle
of causation is complete. By the way, for listeners, the
quote the Jason's referring to is the lead the article.
So from Viereck, he said, the lynching of the guilty
is a subtler, but no less deadly blow to civilization
than the lynching of the innocent. Eminently sensible. I mean,
we could The older variation is the you know, the
quote from the Man for all seasons, what happens when
there's no.
Speaker 2: Law left to protect you?
Speaker 1: Right, so you know, to pick up on where James
was driving us is yeah. The way I put it
is that the Trump people are saying, as a political
more than legal matter, think that, look, we didn't we
haven't been enforcing our immigration laws. Where's been the due
process for the American people of the last several years,
just letting people in willy nilly, and so, you know,
why should we be bound by a certain punptiliousness about
the law now that our country has not been following
for the last twenty thirty years. I think that's a
bad legal argument, but it's a pretty strong political argument,
and the polls seem to bear this out.
Speaker 3: I think I think you're right, But I think if
your goal was to deport people at a faster clip
instead of your goal was to sort of thumb your
nose at the system and really emphasize how bad Biden
was and all the things you should be able to
do because Biden was so bad, you would do something different.
You would have to reform the asylum laws. You would
hire more immigration judges, you know, you would go to
Congress and change the immigration system so you can deport
at a faster clip. And also, I think it's important
to remember it's not like Trump has been stymied this regard.
He has had an extraordinary impact already. He has stopped
you know, the illegal immigration basically in an extraordinary way.
So he has had success in doing it. Now, now
if your question is, well, how many illegal immigrants can
be removed? And you know, I still don't think everybody
wants to remove everybody anybody, you know, but you want
to remove them at a faster clip. Fine, you know,
I think that that's something that you know, the Trump
people like to do stunts sometimes instead of achieved their objectives.
So now they're doing a stunt and in the process,
you know, as sort of a collateral result of this stunt,
they may be diminishing the Supreme Court's place in our
constitutional order, which is a damaging thing in the long term.
After you know, Democrats tried to do the same thing,
and there is a conservative Supreme Court majority, probably the
most conservative in one hundred years. And if the Trump people,
in the course of their stunt, end up sort of
making following Supreme Court rulings optional, that's going to be
bad in the long run.
Speaker 1: Well, so, I mean, I think it's well understood that
Chief Justice Roberts, for his whole twenty plus years on
the Court, has worried about, you say, the public status
of the court. He likes to rule narrowly and cautiously,
as we've seen. And so I thought a couple of things.
Speaker 2: One is, by.
Speaker 1: Choosing to use the word facilitate rather than effectuate, rather
than issuing a rid of mandamus like Marbury sawt way
back in eighteen oh three, they're allowing some wiggle room
because the Court can't enforce a rid of mandamus against
the executive branch. And that does cause a big political
and maybe constitutional crisis as well. And so yeah, they're
flooding the zone they're pushing a lot of stuff up
in the Supreme Court, you know, in other areas, like
you know, Humphrey's executor on presidential control of the executive
branch and so forth, and so I don't know, I
think that's part.
Speaker 2: Of what's behind it. I do.
Speaker 1: I was in a tangle last week with a very
left leaning lawyer who said, you know, we've never seen
a president defly a court like this, except maybe Andrew
Jackson in that famous, maybe apocryphal remark that Marshall's made
his opinion, let him enforce it. And I gently reminded
that Thomas Jefferson, in the Marbury case more than two
hundred years ago, was going to defy the Supreme Court.
It's a Supreme Court issued a riddaman damus ordering that
William Marbury.
Speaker 2: Get his job.
Speaker 1: So this kind of clash with the court is not unprecedented,
and it's been a gray area or a difficult spot
I think, really since eighteen oh three. Right, and so
that's a speech, and I don't know if you want
to grab hold of that and add to it.
Speaker 3: Woman, No, it's like it's like mutual deterrence and mutually
assured destruction. I mean, people try to get out of
it because you're going to hurt both parties. You're going
to hurt the presidency and you're going to hurt the
Court if you do that. So there's maneuvering, right like,
the court, if it thinks the executive is really going
to defy it and have political support to do so,
it might back off. And if the president thinks he's
going to get adverse court ruling, he might over in
a different way. And you know, as a historical nerd
point on the Andrew Jackson thing, people often use that example,
but he was not a party to the Indian removal ruling.
The Supreme Court was ordering Georgia to do something, and
Andrew Jackson just didn't enforce the ruling on Georgia. In
this case, you've got the Trump administration as a party
being told you've got to facilitate the release of this guy,
and they're essentially saying, I mean, no, we don't.
Speaker 4: We don't really need to do anything. So anyway, it
is a.
Speaker 3: Part of the separation of powers, for sure. We haven't
though the brinkmanship, insofar as it's happened, has not led
to a full on rupture, and the Trump people seem
determined to push it pretty close.
Speaker 1: I want to change gears a little bit before I
throw you back to James and ask you a couple
of questions about journalism. So the first one is you're
there at the Washington Post, at the editorial page. I'm
not clear these days. It looks like you're home today
from what I see on the screen. I'm not clear
if people actually go into the building anymore, the old
fashioned way you went to newsrooms. I know James still does.
But so the first question I want to ask, and
maybe you can't say too much about it, which I understand,
is you know, Jeff Bezos, the owner, made this great
announcement six weeks ago or so that he wants the
editorial page to defend free markets and individual liberty, and
it's caused a great deal of fuss. What can you
tell us about where that stands. I haven't heard of
any new editors being hired. I've heard of some resignations.
What can you say about the mood of your colleagues
is this? I'll just stop there and you say what
you want or can say about that.
Speaker 3: I can't say that much except the Post has been
fantastic to me, and they hired me a few years ago,
in twenty twenty two. I think to build up a
little bit their conservative stable of writers. And I'm very
thrilled for where things are going. And you know, keep
an eye out for the for the new opinion editor
being hired. I understand that they're that they're looking.
Speaker 2: I am in a newsroom right now, and I'm alone
on Friday. Often enough, I am alone, and I fear
that there's going to be some calamity in town. I mean,
I look out the window and if I see, you know,
a small plane heading towards the skyscrape, right, I think, oh, man,
I'm going to have to write that I'm the last
person in the world's cancer. Right. No, we do have
a few other people minding the wires and the rest
of it. But do you miss newsrooms as they were
previously constituted, Jason, Because when I entered this business one
hundred and forty six years ago, in the Jurassic period,
they were vital clamors. You know, wonderful places with a
wreath of cigarette smoke and the clatterative typewriters, and you know,
the occasional nip from the office bottle I mean, all
those front page cliches I had them. Do you is
that culture still evident? Were in the Washington Post.
Speaker 3: I think it's coming back. I mean, I think, what
are we twenty twenty five now? I mean the DC
traffic has just dramatically increased in just the last few
months as part of I think, you know, people going
back to the office in a big way, and the
Washington Posts were under a you know, they're sending us
back to the office. I go in often. I mean
I was at the Wall Street Journal in the editorial
page and it was fantastic starting in I guess twenty seventeen,
and then COVID. COVID hit and then you had sort
of this gradual dribble back. And the old norms haven't
been totally restored, but I think maybe they will be
within you know, maybe a decade of COVID, because there's
there's a lot going.
Speaker 4: I agree with you.
Speaker 3: I like to be you know, I talk a lot
to my colleagues, and I think it's that intellectual experience
is really important.
Speaker 2: One more journalism question. It is a more general one.
Speaker 1: There's a story out here today or at least online
at the Wall Street Journal, and it's I won't say
it's taking a victory lap for the journals reporting a
year ago on Biden's infirmities, but it kind of is.
And it's a very brutal story whose subtext is more
people in the media should have known there was a
cover up going on about Biden's condition, and so I
mean that should be as big a scandal as the
cover up itself, because I thought journalism was all about
uncovering cover ups. Do you see is there any second
thoughts going on at the poster anywhere that you're aware
of that? Boy, we really fell down on our duty
in reporting what was really happening right in front of us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that really is extraordinary in retrospect, you know, that
failure because of journalism, you know, on the president. And
that's a piece by Annie Lensky. She's fantastic and she
wrote some pieces in the Journal about it, and I
think her point is, now now books are coming out
about it, about the Biden age and infirmity, because yeah,
that's not like an optional thing for the press. You're
talking about the president. The American people pay for the
press to be here and get exposure and talk to
the people around the president. So that was a terrible
I think blow to the publics, to the public's trust,
you know, up there with Frankly, you know, weapons of
mass destruction or some of the post COVID obfuscations in
terms of just FIBs that were not scrutinized enough. And
I think, you know, will the press, I don't know,
We'll see what We'll see what the Trump, what happens,
what Trump sort of does to the press.
Speaker 4: I mean, he is in he is in no mood.
Speaker 3: To sort of He faced you know, a universally hostile
press in his first term and he seems in no
mood to be you know John Roberts like in terms
of creating a climb down situation on that front. So
I think the press is going to be very hostile
again to to Donald Trump.
Speaker 4: Can they do that?
Speaker 3: You know, they've lost a lot of credibility from some
of their failures before. So will that hostile coverage carry
the same weight as it otherwise could have? Probably not,
But it's still important because you know, when the if
it's Biden or if it's Trump, the American people need
to know about what their president's doing because he's very powerful.
Speaker 2: Let me be a lone voice of craziness out here
in the middle of the continent, and just say, then,
I think that saudom Mussein shipped massive quantities of his
WMDs across the border to Syria, and we did find
in a lot of stuff, and we did a very
poor job of publicizing it. I will say that until
the day I die, and people can laugh and point
and hoot all they liked.
Speaker 3: But well, I was in fourth grade, so I didn't
follow as that closely.
Speaker 2: Teach bag right the mago Judge Bozburg, who is the
bugaboo now of a lot of people. We've got a
article two in an article three cage fight, constitutional crisis looming.
I hear this every single day, that there's a constitutional
crisis coming threatened, you know, open contempt investigations against the
administration alleged a willful disregard of the March fifteenth. I
think it was a temporary restraining order. You've had a
chance to read what he did and and how this
is forming and shaping, and maybe you could cut through
the bs and tell us exactly what is going on
with Bosberg here. I have read it, and you know,
you realize, of course that reading it disqualifies you from
telling us about exactly.
Speaker 3: I Look, he's really pissed off because the administration had
this idea, we're gonna proclaim the Alien Enemies Act, and
we're going to immediately, you know, we're gonna proclaim it
late Friday night or maybe early Saturday morning, and then
that same day we're going to load these people on
planes under the Alien Enemies Act and put them in
this prison in El Salvador. The lawyers for these plaintiffs,
for some of the people the Venezuelan's got into it,
filed a lawsuit. The government knew it was coming, but
you know, hustled them onto the planes anyway. And you know,
it actually removed from the planes some of the specific
plaintiffs in the case because it knew that they were
blocked from being deported. But then the judge said, you know,
he enjoyed the use of it that same day.
Speaker 4: This is all happening in.
Speaker 3: A few hours on a Saturday, right, But he then orders,
you can't remove anyone pursue it to the Alien Enemies Act.
But the government has had people on planes already. They're
out of US airspace, so they have them keep going
and they you know, despite being under an order to
not remove anybody, they hand them over to the Salvadorans
a few hours later, and so he's saying, you violated
the order because I said you couldn't remove anybody. They said, wow,
they were already out of US airspace. He's saying, well,
removing them is really changing custody. You're in custody of them,
and you're giving them custody of another country. Also, I said,
you might have to turn the planes around or not
disembark people from the planes. So it's a you know, frankly,
I mean contempt in the ordinary sense, the government is
treating the courts contemptuously in this case. They're like, who
the heck do you think you are interfering with this?
You know, we're sending them off, and you know, by
the way you're biased. We should have a new judge
on this case. And you know, we don't need to
bring back this guy Garcia. That's technically a separate case.
But still, so, you know, contempt in the colloquial sense.
I do think the government is treating the courts contemptuously.
You know, whether Boseburg should be doing this is a
different question, because, of course, the Supreme Court five to
four basically agreed with his substantive ruling, which is, you
can't send somebody with the Alien Enemies Act out of
the country without any opportunity for due process. But the
jurisdiction should really be in a different district court, so
the government can say, what's this guy doing who's been
stripped of jurisdiction trying to prosecute us for contempt? And so,
you know, is it wise for Boseburg to try to
push this contempt thing forward? I think, you know, maybe
not if you're trying to de escalate. On the other hand,
I'm simple authetic because they were thumbing their nose at
a federal court and they just didn't really care what
he was saying.
Speaker 1: Well, okay, so all that's very cogent. On the other hand,
I get back to what I know bothers a lot
of people I know on the left, which is the
ruling of the Supreme Court last year about the immunity
of presidential acts in connection with official duties. And of course,
a lot of the problem there is what's an official
duty and so forth, and so we again we get
into one of those lacunae in the constitution, where when
a judge finds someone in contempt of court, they then
need who to enforce it and actually arrest somebody and
put them in the jail cell. When you're found in contempt, well,
that's something that you rely on the executive branch, whether
it's the state level or at the federal level. In
other words, Judge Bozburg can say, I find you Donald
Trump or your officers in contempt of court, and now
I want federal marshals to go pick you up.
Speaker 2: Well that's not going to work. I mean, we just
know that's not going to happen. And Trump could pardon.
Speaker 3: Trump could pardon somebody under restigation for contempt of court exactly.
Speaker 2: So yeah, go ahead, sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 3: I mean, look, fundamentally, I at first saw this administration
and it's lawsuits and executive actions, and I said, okay,
they want to take an aggressive posture toward the courts politically,
and they want to uh provoke the Supreme Court to
come in and side with them against the federal these
lower federal court judges usually appointed by Democrats. My calculus
started to change after that Oval Office meeting with Bukela,
where it's where it's like huh. Maybe they're not really
interested in just getting stuff in front of the conservative
leaning Supreme Court and sort of doing politics, and they're
really just interested in, you know, going as far as
they can possibly go. So my old calculus would be,
you know, judges have to lower the temperature, and I
still think that they should do that where possible, But
it may be that, you know, your thanks you get
from lowering the temperature, as the Supreme Court tried to do,
and the facilitate versus effectuate is even you know, more contempt.
So that's sort of the question here. I think you're
absolutely right. I mean, you're getting to the constitutional no
man's land. I mean, the president can pardon somebody for contempt.
That's settled. So courts can't really enforce contempt against the
executive branch if the president doesn't want them to. So
it's really becomes a political question. What does the public
think of these contempt findings and what does the public
think if the president pardons somebody and so on? And
I'm not sure Boseberg, you know, and is going to
help the political case against Trump. I think that's pretty
easy for the administration to spin as here's an Obama
pointed judge appointing a prosecutor to go after our people.
Speaker 4: So I think, you know, the.
Speaker 3: Courts have to be very judicious and you know about
what kind of political terrain they want to defend.
Speaker 4: Not sure if this is the wisest.
Speaker 3: Thing, even though, as I said, quite sympathetic here because
I'm frankly quite angry at the way that the administ
I don't think there's a basis for the Alien Enemies Act.
I think that's you know, protextual. I don't think Venezuela
is at war with the United States. I don't think
that the gang. Normally, the Alien Enemies Act is against
like citizens of Germany, not members of a gang. I
think the whole thing is legally flawed and flimsy and protextual.
And I think that the way that they implemented it
to circumvent judicial review is outrageous.
Speaker 2: Let's change itself before we let you go in one
more question, because you also know, no, I mean, really,
we can talk about it. It's fascinating, but we eventually
come down to that. Jason's right, and that's a completely
defensible set of positions. But as far as how it's
going to change the calculus, of it. The people who
hate Trump will still think that he's being likely to stop,
and the people will love Trump will be indifferent to
it because and I you know, that's unfortunate, because one
of the things that distinguishes us is a rule of law,
and a rule of good law, and a rule of
law intended to produce moral outcome as opposed to you know,
like the Soviet Union and Russia with the lodges simply
exists to grind people between the gears. Anyway, foreign policy
is something you also write about briefly before you go,
tell us give us some good news and foreign policy
and some and some and some less good news so
we can balance things out here.
Speaker 3: And really quickly, I just say something more on the law,
which is, you know, Donald Trump that everyone in DC,
in the press, prosecutors wanted him prosecuted and convicted for
January sixth, by the election to hurt his election. Odds
it was going to happen, except the Supreme Court intervened
to the surprise of many, and prevented it from happening.
So just be quite an irony if the administration turns
around in malls the Supreme Court. You know this early
in a term that it might not might not have
but for that that immunity decision foreign policy, good news.
Speaker 2: Something comes trippingly to the tongue. I see, you're, you're,
you're weighing so many good stories. Which one do we
give me?
Speaker 3: Okay, I'll start with bad news, which is, you know,
I was actually kind of hopeful that Trump's Ukraine gambit
of sort of as one of his advisors call it,
hitting Zelensky with a two by four, you know, forcing
the Ukrainians to come to the table, that that would
start to yield to some kind of productive peace process
does not seem.
Speaker 4: To be happening at all.
Speaker 3: I was, you know, open to it happening because we
had such an attitude that you can't have any negotiation
between Russia and Ukraine. And maybe that attitude was right,
you know, but we'll see. But I'm I might have
thought that the Trump people could have gotten some progress
on that front.
Speaker 4: They really just have not.
Speaker 2: Because of what, because of Russian you know, disinclination to
talk or Russian desire to spin it out as long
as possible while they continue to grind away and you know,
lose ten thousand soldiers for every square kilometer. I mean,
Russia knows and Ukraine has to know that the eastern
part is not going to be relinquished. And that's I mean,
that's the sad, gut wrenching reality where we are today.
I would love to see Ukraine whole, but I mean,
is that a reality that has to be acknowledged by
Ukraine and the United States before they go forward.
Speaker 3: And I mean, but that's the thing. Trump seems willing
to more or less acknowledge it, but the Russians seemed
to be wanting to push, push for more, and you know,
maybe maybe their terms are still what they were when
they were threatening the invasion, which is, you know, a
total reconfiguration of US and NATO troop presence in Eastern Europe. Yeah,
I mean, it seems to me we more or less
know what the endgame is going to look like. But
as always with these things, the details of the peacekeeping force,
the time horizon, what's officially recognized, what's informal.
Speaker 4: Whatever it is.
Speaker 3: It's hard, it's hard to say, but Witcoff and you know,
Ribio and Trump, and they don't have much to show
for it. In the first one hundred days or ninety
something days. Of his of his office. So I think
that's bad news because I I was open to to
there being a at least temporary agreement that was within reach.
I think good news is you know, Israel is There
was just that news story leak about how the you know,
Trump decided against going along with an Israeli strike on
a round. But I think nonetheless, Israel has basically, you know,
in the last couple of years and the last year,
really uh turned the tide in this war and really
beaten the you know, weakend Iran degraded, has bela There's
an article in the journal about how Hamas is running
out of an ability to pay fighters. So I think Israel,
you know, is going to have emerged victorious in its
October seventh war.
Speaker 2: It's it's looking like somewhere else in the world that
there has to be something that's going to just pop
up in two three months or so, and everybody is
going to be scrambling for their maps and their lobes
to figure out where that is and why it matters.
And then we'll have you back on and you can
tell us about about it. Jason Willoking at the Washington Post,
Thanks for joining us today. Fascinating conversation, lots of stuff
that our readers are going to love and listeners are
going to to pick a bone with or to applaud.
And it's that's that's why we got you here.
Speaker 3: You know, the the Washington Post comments the AI summary,
They now do an AI summary of the comments, and
it's like, well, it's like readers express strong disagreement with
the columns author Jason Willock.
Speaker 2: So I wel, congratulations, good for you, right there you go,
All right, Jason, regards to DC and and all that,
and thank you for being on the show today.
Speaker 4: Thanks great to be here.
Speaker 2: I hate those AI summaries. I get them all the time.
I get them from Google loun and I don't trust
any Google responses that I get because instead of giving
me a link to go where I want to go,
it gives me the AI summary, which then has a
little paper clip at the bottom of it that I
can click if I want to. And if I click
on that, then something on the right side bar shows up,
and it's the Wick pay thing that I want to
go to. And maybe I don't want to go to
Wikipedia at all because it's a story about a contemporary
character and we all know those are shot through with
all sorts of poisonous politics. Possibly I just want to
learn about a guy who's an architect in the seventeenth century.
But no, I got to go to this other I
hate Google search right now. I just do. But here's
the thing. If you want wait a minute, Jason, you're
still here. I'm doing a commercial.
Speaker 4: No, I'm listening.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're gonna be like Rob Long. Rob Long at
this point my shoulder his way into the conversation and
completely destroy the segue that I was attempting to build.
But I'm more than happy from somebody who's from an
august publication is the Washington Post to to come in
and do so. Anyway, I have to get back to
my commercial to keep the lights on. So thank you, Jason,
Thank you guys so much.
Speaker 4: I'm a big fan, so good to talk to you.
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Speaker 1: Well, I was wondering how when you began that segue
you were going to get to because it's all about
searches and the Internet at AI and how are.
Speaker 2: You going to get But that was okay?
Speaker 1: Can I just say two quick observations on a couple
of things. Jason said that I didn't want to protract
the conversation argue because I'm not really arguing, but you
mix the point that you know we're not at war
with Venezuela, and so how does the Alien Enemies Act apply?
And I think that's true, although remember that we have
had a formal declaration of war for any hostilities now
since World War Two. We have, as the Obama people
put it, with our Libya bombing kinetic activity, right, we
use these euphemisms. I do think it is correct, though,
to understand that Venezuela, if they're not at war with us,
they're at least hostile to us. And you know, one
piece of information many listeners may not know is there
have been direct flights with a refueling stop between Tehran
and Caracas for fifteen years now. And I don't think
that's about coordinating their oil strategies, for opek, I think
it's about a lot more mischievous things than that. So
and I think, by the way, determining whether a country
is hostile to us in actable ways is an executive determination.
That's just my opinion. And you know, Jason's views on
this are certainly credible. Then the second one is, and
here again I get back to my historian role in life.
It's true that Trump is taking a big risk if
he attacks the Supreme Court and defies the Quarter or
otherwise causes a controversy or crisis over that. On the
other hand, let's keep it mind that you go back
to FDR and everyone knows about his court packing scheme,
and that's all you read about in the history books.
Thought to be a great failure. But people really ought
to go back and read his speeches and his fireside
addresses that he gave in nineteen thirty seven. His attacks,
direct attacks on the Supreme Court were borderline violent. I mean,
he was trying to delegitimize the Supreme Court and force
them to bend to his will, which they did. So
you know, again, I don't think what we're seeing is
anywhere close to the assault on the Court that Roosevelt conducted.
And you know, I wish more people were aware of
those kinds of things.
Speaker 2: What you're saying, Stephen, is that actually there are nuances here,
and I agree with you. I mean, I just want
to I want to reiterate that when I make the
point that I mean I'm a great believer in the
rule of law and applied to all. Not find me
the man and I'll show you the crime, but find
me the crime and show you the man. I hate
law fare. But at the same time two things. One,
I'm not saying that I agree with this, because I
think it is a dangerous down which to go. But
a lot of the indifference that people have to this
comes from the lawlessness of the previous administration. And even
though that may itself have been fortified by code or
programs or the rest of it, everybody knows that it
was open season come across. And the Americans who themselves
would say, yes, I believe in bringing people into this
country to replenish us, to bring new acid, you know,
to do jobs here, to provide certain I mean, yes,
we believe in immigration. We just want the legality and
the process and the vetting and the idea that there
wasn't any of that. That people got in They got
a little date, show up in court in twenty twenty
six and released in the middle of nowhere. When you
combine that with the occasional high profile crime, it combines
to form an era of an absolute indifference to what
may be less than legal means to solve the problem.
And I'm not saying I like it. I don't like it,
but I understand why a lot of people this is
their sole intellectual contact with the arguments. Just shrug and
say they didn't care then and I don't care now.
So let's like Jason was saying, let us be careful
to cross teas and dot I is because we don't
want to lose our eventual fallback and are to the
position of the galley because it's a good thing. But
again again, I you know, I brought up the Soviet
Union in Russia. People keep observers keep pointing out that
Russia is an extremely legal nation and will do things
and you know, they follow codes and procedures just down
to the atomic level. It's not because they're interested in
doing what's right, because they're interested in doing what the
system requires them to do. Just because something is legal
doesn't mean it's right anyway. Second point, and it had
to do with the what were you what was what
was the last point that you were making there? I
can't remember well.
Speaker 1: That that FDR's assaulted on the court was way beyond
anything that any of the Trump people have.
Speaker 2: Said so far, at least, right. Yeah, I go back
and I look at the newspapers of the thirties and
it's quite remarkable the the the zestiness of the dialogue.
We sink back and forth. Yeah, oh it's you know, Yes,
history helps, it really does. There's there are many many
antecedents for what we are seeing today in the twentieth
century of American culture. And sometimes it's amusing to find
those echoes. And sometimes it's heartening too to see that
we have faced this before and we've gotten through it,
and we've remained a country that is still the last
best hope for mankind. Well, you know us and I
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at Ricochet four point oho. Bye bye,