Well whiskey coming, Take pain, money, Oh don't.
From power Line blog dot com and produced by Ricochet dot Com. This is the Three Whiskey Happy Hour with your bartenders Steve Hayward, John You and power Lines International Woman of Mystery Lucretia.
Cat gotta giving.
Let that whiskey bloat when you're being in love, down and low. Welcome everyone to this really really super special edition of They're all special of the Three Whiskey Happy Hour. We're all drinking whiskey even though we're in different time zones across the world yet again. John is in an undisclosed bunker in Washington, d C. Steve is on a float in the middle of some Norwegian fume.
Ord j Ord, and I am.
Trying to rescue my mouse from Nixy, who keeps I have cats playing on the YouTube video on another screen to try to keep her occupied, but it's not working. But you know, she's not leaving my side because she's really worried about those Haitians. So how are you guys today?
I think we should.
Go ahead, John, I was gonna say, to keep the cat occupied, you should just start showing it pictures of Taylor Swift's endorsement of Kamala Harris.
She hates Taylor Swift. She thinks Taylor Swift sounds worse and when she's screaming in the middle of the night in her cat language. So but she has good taste, that's why. So it's been quite a week yet again, and when when the Three Whiskey Happy Hour finally managed to get together, we actually really like each other, we do. It just seems like we can never find a time that works out for everybody. We are coming very late to debate. Punditry Steve said, it's old news. John wanted
to talk about it. I said, I'm splitting the baby because we're not going to talk about the debate. I do believe that one's been beat to death, that poor horse. But it is now five six days after the debate, and we're seeing some weird fallout, weirder than ever. A
people say debates rarely matter. Nineteen sixty the debate with Trump and Biden probably was very significant, but not because of the topics of the debate, shall we say, but simply because it produced an undeniable truth that Biden was senile and that he had been seen now for a while and all the people who told us that he
wasn't we're lying to us. And then, of course they flipped quite quickly, as quickly as what's the name of that country in nineteen eighty four when the when the war changes sides anyway Oceana And so you know, we've seen plenty of memes about Joe Scarborough and everybody else saying that Biden had to go, that debate mattered. Did this debate matter? Well, we were told, kamala ie, we were told Trump did terribly because he took the bait and kind of rambled, Except that, as we all know,
that's kind of what the way Trump is. He takes the bait. He's easily offended by what people say about him, and he rambles. And people have known that since Trump first ran, starting in twenty fifteen, right, I mean, is that anything? Was that news to anybody?
No?
No, I can't. I mean I missed the whole thing. It was three am over here.
But look, I so all I heard about it is not surprised me at all. All these articles you read every day by smart people saying here's what Trump must do to win are completely irrelevant.
He's either gonna do what he wants to do or he's not. He's not going to take our advice. But that leads to point too.
I think John you said in a text chat debates don't matter except when Joe Biden is one of the contestants. But well, I mean there's a few moments that may have been important, like Gerald Ford liberating Poland in nineteen seventy six.
Things that creates some legs.
Reagan's age problem in Debate one in eighty four, which then he squashed in the second debate, Nixon Kennedy. It's kind of a legend. I think that people say, the people listen on radio thought Nixon one, but the people who watchot Kennedy one. I think that's actually probably an urban legend that no one will throw aside. But the empirical social science literature says the debates really do not affect the outcome, and I think you can see it here.
And the problem is who judges these debates. The professional pundit class, political scientists. They raided them the way they were created student papers, and that's not who what. Sixty seven million people watched it, according to ratings, and a lot of people watch it.
They don't score it like we do.
They they look at the people and you know what you hear is and they had some focus groups and they said, you know, Harris didn't really give any answers. You know, Trump was terrible, but Harris didn't impress me. And I know you want to talk about this. I think the whole cats and Dogs in Ohio thing that's got some strange legs, whether it's true or not.
And we can say more about that, but that's all I have to say now to open things up.
Yeah, let's talk about that in just a moment, because I want to hear what John thinks. He's the one who wanted to talk about the debate.
Mostly because I wanted to hear what you guys thought. I mean, I thought that Trump lost. I thought Kamala won, but it's just a matter of tactics, like winning winning
one battle doesn't mean that she won the war. And there are these interesting stories I thought that came out afterwards in liberal places like the New York Times or Reuters that said that when they did focus groups of undecided voters in places like Pennsylvania after the debate, the majority decided to vote for Trump, which I find you know, amazing And the reason why is it goes to what you both have been suggesting. Everyone knows Trump. He's a you know, he's a known quantity. He acted in the
debate the way he always acts, and Paris. It's a missed opportunity for her because she could have come out and said, I believe in this, this is my plan, this is what I think, instead of you know, I think she almost like gave in too much to her own media stories, which was bake Trump, make him look crazy and then he'll lose votes and you won't have to do anything. It was what is the media is telling you to do? But I think for undecided voters
that's the exact rotten thing to do. So she missed a chance to see to give her plan for the economy. And so I've been spending time in Philadelphia these last few days. By the way, she was interesting to see campaign ads again, I find them very interesting. But my local TV news station in Philadelphia had a one on one exclusive interview with Kamala Harris yesterday, her first interview by herself for the media, and they picked the local media market. You know a guy, the interviewer, you know,
he's known in Philadelphia, but he's not known nationally. And he asked her, what's your plan for the economy. You know, people say it's tough now with the Flichy Stone, And she repeated the same story about being raised by her mother, who was a small businesswoman apparently, and never detailed her plan to get inflation down and to get the economy back on track. It's so I think they're engaged. They're maybe solidifying their their farthest base, but they are not.
The Democrats are not reaching out to middle of the road under side of voters at all.
Yeah.
I have one more thought about that's the whole thing, which is here's something that Trump didn't do that I think the Harris people were trying to base him into. Remember the Harris team wanted live mic for the whole debate and not the first whether you might cut off like the CNN debate.
And I think what they were hoping was they could.
Bate Trump into being rude and nasty and saying something really off putting about Harris, you know, call her a you know, a b.
Ch or something. Right, he didn't do any of that. He didn't interrupt her. Adny Olt Ladder.
Now, you know, he got caught up in the egle things and all the rest of that, but he didn't go too far. That would have been a debate moment that would have harmed Trump. I think he could not be in the same way that Joe Biden couldn't be as nasty as we know he can be when he debated Sarah Palin back in two thousand and eight.
Right, and just a couple more comments about that, and then we can we can move on. But number one, I want to say that Steve and I belonged to a group of mostly squishier Republicans than we are. I guess is the best. There's a few people that are, but one of them very I don't want to embarrass him on this. Quite prominent journalist for Professer wrote an article almost immediately the next morning saying Trump lost badly,
this was a triumpher kamala blah blah blah. And I wrote very early in the day back and said, you know, I am going back to that whole Leslie Stall incident when Reagan was president. Steve, do you remember this when they were trying to insinuate that Reagan when he was up for reelection eighty four would would get rid of Social Security, would eliminate Social Security or at least cut benefits to seniors. And they did this whole big leslie
Stall did this whole big, you know, expose. But what she did was she went to senior citizen centers for footage, and she she went, you know, she did all this footage that made it look like the Reagan administration was just so pro old people. And even though the narrative over the top was you know, anti reg and he hates you know, he's going to make old people die in the streets of hunger and so on. But the photos,
the visuals were all positive. And I don't remember if it was d for somebody else looked at it and said, oh my god, what a great video. And it turned out when they showed the video to people without the sound on, it was one hundred percent pro.
So back to the debate.
Do you remember that, Steve, It was kind of a legend a while.
But I don't know any of that.
But I remember something similar to bears on the point which we have time, I'll tell you, but go ahead.
All I was going to say is a couple of days. My argument was, if you're actually not paying a whole lot of attention, which you know, even I do this sometimes because it's so awful watching those things. You know, I'm doing other stuff. I'm looking at the TV now and then, and Kamala Harris is just making the nastiest faces. She just looks like she's, you know, applying for the role of Crouella Deville, you know, auditioning for the role of Kuelaville in one hundred and one Dalmatians, and she,
you know, they're exaggerated that it's just awful. And so a couple of days after I wrote that, Miranda Devine and The New York Post said the many ugly faces of Kamala Harris, and I think that that probably played
a role. I'm overstating it a bit, however, if you think about Kamala's smug, nasty, refusing to answer any questions, you know, being called out, and then you add to that the it's it's been beat to death as well, the bias of ABC, the bias of the moderators, the bias of the questions that were asked, the bias of them interrupting, the bias of them fact checking Trump usually wrongly, but never fact checking her people Trump has done as well as he has because he has been persecuted on
so many sides by the DOJ, by the media, et cetera. I think that the reason that am Alam ding Dong got no bounce is because it wasn't from the point of view of the political triumph. It wasn't a political triumph. You can't say she won the debate because it wasn't a debate. I mean, geez, wait, if this is what we actually call a debate, how about we just let
them get up there like Lincoln and Douglas did. Give them, give them two and a half hours, no moderator, you get this much, you get this much, you get this much, rejoined her. Next time, we do it the opposite for seven times. How many of them you think he could do Trump could do it. Trump could do it. He could talk for an hour.
I mean, now here's Chryla Guild.
That point is, remember that there are a lot of Americans, a lot of voters who really have paid no attention to Harris.
They're still getting to know who she is. And if they watched it, I think they didn't like what they saw. They're used to.
As you said this, we know Trump's grumpy face and people are used to it, by the way. I think it's one of the things that makes him look commanding to people her They're like, uh, I don't know, but again, but that's.
Importance of image of these things.
And you know, you opened the door to this, lou Creesia by mentioning eighty four quick quick story, Yeah, you were in trouble here. Not an analogy, but a point. You remember the movie The Day After from the Fall of eighty three about it was the World War three. That was an out and out anti Reagan propaganda movie. And you know, I went through all the details of
this and research. They were very worried about it, and it got by the way Super Bowl ratings in terms of viewerships, like a hundred million people watched it in nineteen eighty three, and you know, Reagan got to pre screen it and his team and they thought, all this is this thing is really bad.
It's really devastating. It's got very a huge emotional impact.
But because it was so controversial, ABC practically gave away ads, and when it was broadcast there were ads and you know in me Queen the Gloom and Doom and the end of the world that's Pepperidge Farms remembers and it was always sort of happy American, you know, buy bread and you know, by a Chevrolet truck. And they said, when we watched it broadcast, we thought, well, and that's going to remind people what the real world really still is.
And it totally blunted the impact of it.
So, I mean, this is actually setting up I think about cats and dogs in Ohio. But still I think this is why it's important how these things look more than what is said.
I think that that's true again because the voters were talking about it are not people like us. They're not people who live and breathe politics, and so of the all of the input makes a difference. You and I John probably don't watch a debate and pay too much attention to visuals like the fact that Trump looks serious, he might look grumpy. I heard more than one person comment that talking to someone who watched the debate hadn't made up their mind that when Trump looked angry, it
didn't upset them because they were angry too. They're angry about the price of their groceries. They're angry about the fact that, you know, gas costs more and living costs more, their wages haven't gone up accordingly, there are angry about, you know, migrants moving. We'll move on to that in
just a second. Uh So, when when Trump looks angry while while Hamam and Ding Dong sitting there looking smug and and this whole empathy, I'm the only one who really cares about you that If any politician, even a Republican, says that to me, I'm not voting for him because I'm not interested in them caring about me. I'm interested in them fixing the country. So we're gonna move on to We may as well move on to talk about Haiti Haitian immigrants, because Nixie's asked.
How well I have.
Unfortunately, a terrible joke came to my mind during the debate about that, Can I tell it? Yes? So, being Korean, when I heard they were talking about some immigrant group eating dogs, I was so glad when I heard it was Haitians and not Koreans, being from people who has been accused of eating dogs and having been a Korea we once didn't I starting to sound like job dogs, love them, don't eat them anymore. That's somebody else.
Okay, Well, welcome back, everybody. I want to start off actually with not a not a happy story about the guy whose son was in fact killed by a Haitian immigrant, an eleven year old boy, and the dad this is how the left can be so ooh, I don't even have a right word for it. I mean, this mindset is not something I can wrap my own brain around. The father gets on, gets in public and says, I wish that my son had been killed by a sixty
year old white man. And yeah, because he says that Trump and others are now using his son, making political hay out of his death to bash poor, poor immigrants, poor Haitian and other immigrants, and that's why we should been killed by a sixty year old white man. If you think that through the corruption of the mind of the left is so far gone that I don't know
how we come back from that. Never mind that logically that makes no sense in the sense that, you know, why wasn't his son killed by a six year old white man, because generally speaking, as a matter of a relative to the population, they don't do that sort of thing. They're not barbarians.
Well, look, first of all, this guy's probably well he's probably a partisan democrat and he maybe even you know, maybe he knows somebody who's part of the democratic establishment.
So all right, and he can make news doing it.
But to say it, I couldn't say something like that if you held a gun to my head.
Well, I know, but some people, my kids.
Well but here's what the media didn't do is remember the accident wasn't just this one kid car. It was a school bus the person hit, and there are a lot of kids injured. But what about their parents?
What do they think? Do they agree with Trump about this or not? But they won't ask that question.
In other words, this guy's not the only person who had someone injured by any legal immigrant crashing into the bus. And of course what interesting me about this whole thing is, at first, I you know, a whole cats and box thing. We can I have one thing to say about it. But the shocking thing to me was, wait a minute, twenty thousand Haitian immigrants were sent to a town of sixty five thousand.
People in Ohio.
I mean, it's a staggering number. From anywhere. It could be twenty thousand Germans, it could be twenty thousand Frenchmen. I don't care that's a huge number, an influx of people who are you know, income, don't know the language, et cetera. And you think this is not going to cause difficulties. And that's the astounding thing. And I think this is what so many people are reacting to.
John.
What I don't understand is how the federal government decided to move everybody there. So yeah, seems to me that in order to do that, you'd have to have the cooperation of the city. Right, that's because where would do people stay, where would they go to work? I mean, I assume that it's Youngstown, Ohio, right, Springfield, Ohio. It's not like they got up and just were you know, unwillingly deluged by immigrants. I bet there's some kind of
sanctuary city like San Francisco, and probably agrees. So that just goes to my point that Steve saying that, you know, this is probably the reaction of I mean, a father's totally breathed. Of course, he's sympathized with him, and maybe he wouldn't say or think this, you know, when you know, you know, years from now, but in the midst of it, maybe he's you know, part of as Steve said, the Democratic community to which this is happening, and he wants
to blame someone in a partisan way. He's trying to blame Trump for it, even though you can't.
So I think that's that's the bigger, a more stark picture of the real problem, kind of what you guys have both been saying, And that is the whole thing with eating cats and dogs. We know that Haitians do that. We know that in Haiti that might be the difference between starvation and not start not starving to death.
You know, it might be.
Haiti's just a you can't even call it a third world word that Trump often uses. It's much much worse than that. And anybody from Haiti who was able to contribute anything to that god awful place has pretty much left. The people they're bringing in now are just you know,
they're and they're bringing them in. As you pointed out, John, my understanding, it's hard to tell nowadays, is that that's actually a fairly republican, small Midwestern town, and this was just one of those incredibly cynical move by the Biden administration to force Haitians on this town. You know, remember the city manager supposedly denies that any of that stuff is happening. So my guess is that the city manager at least was complicit in it in the way you argued.
But back to the whole idea that I've never seen the left push back as hard as they have on this whole Haitian thing. And it's not just the left, it's people all the way to the squishy middle of the right saying, oh, this is just not true. This is just not true. In some ways, A, it doesn't matter if it's true or not, because we know that if they're not actually eating cats and dogs, they're capable of it. A And B the things they do in many ways are worse the way they destroy communities.
Right, go ahead, Steve, Well, it's an alien culture.
And by the way, there is a video that Elon Musk posted of a young black lady who is the daughter of a Haitian immigrant, and she.
Says, look, yeah, sixty million view was as of this morning, kind of what I just said.
Well, she said it is true about it, says, I don't know, you know, if it's happening, but it certainly is true of the Haitian culture.
And he said, what you just said.
The Lucretia, which was Look, it's a matter of survival and Haiti for a lot of people. So but he says, you know they do practice voodoo and Haiti. This is not a you know, a joke. And I think what's going on here is I doubt that it's true to any but I don't know.
In Supreme Court lore, there's a Supreme Court case about this called City Huffi Leah. Yes, because remember because they tried to they tried de band Santaria and so the problem was you're not allowed to stop religious practices. So this Remember the city said you basically can't kill animals, but there's an exception for food.
Yeah.
Yeah, And I mean it's like in the Supreme Court reports. I mean it's it's right, it's true that there's animal sacrifice.
And well, first of all, just once again though, notice the medium outpractice. Oh, the city manager says it's not true. Normally, the reporters that there's a story, they go investigate for themselves. There's no curiosity to do that.
But I think it's.
Steve Can I just for one moment go back and say, why was he calling the city manager? Why on earth was that hack of a moderator calling the city manager. Were they plant Were they expecting that?
I mean, anyway, go ahead, Well, if the manager said something else, you wouldn't have heard about it.
Probably. Look, I mean, what is the I have to say? This is say, in an odd way, a triumph.
Of turning postmodern leftism against them. What are the postmodern left to say? There's no truth, There's only what is created by our images and words and you know, cultural depictions. And so the fact that the whole eating cats memes thing has caught on around the country means the left has lost control of the narrative. And that's why they're so angry about and pushing back so hard at it.
And I think that's why it's white has caught on, is because people don't like what's happened, and you know, it's it's like, I don't know, king you.
Can see though it would have been better if you'd never mentioned it though, And one thing I didn't which worried me was that it turns it seems like the story comes from this crazy person who hangs around with Laura.
Yeah, yeah, who's a.
Nine to eleven denier and all this stuff. Yeah, I mean, this is this is the thing I don't like about Trump is you know, you heard some crazy story and somehow immediately gets in the presidential debate. And I bet you know, fifteen twenty years from now, when we look back on debates and you're going on, oh, Kennedy, Nixon remember or Reagan? We remember, you know, nineteen eighty four, Reagan remember about you know that line about not using
his you know, Mondale's youth against him. I bet the only thing we're gonna remember from this debate was that they talked about eating pets.
Well, but here's the funny thing, John. I got up that morning Tuesday morning, the morning of the debate, and you know, it's five o'clock in the morning, and I'm brain dead, and so so I check my email. I go to X and I see all these cat memes with you know, Trump carrying these adorable little kids. I'm like,
what the hell is this? And but you know, then I go to work and I'm busy, and then then all of a sudden, finally I say, I gotta feel so So the story was out there like Tuesday morning, and it was so viral that by Tuesday night, it wasn't Trump bringing this up. It was already like this huge,
big thing that he was just responding to. And that's why I say, even the moderator called up the city manager in Springfield to find because it was it was such a thing that happened so quickly, and all these clever people out there putting together these memes with Trump, you know, rescuing baby ducklings and kittens and puppies. They were awesome, even if it wasn't true. I was just
loving it. So all I'm saying about that is it's not that I disagree with you, John, but it actually was a huge story before Trump said anything, at least in certain weird circles, I suppose, like the ones I run in. I do have to say that I thought my own meme, which was not at all ai or you know, photoshopped, was a picture of Nixy, my kitten
over my my statue of Saint Michael. She was sitting on the piano and the statue of Saint Michael's on the piano, and it says Saint Michael protect her from the wickedness and snares of barbarians welcomed into this country by Harrison Biden. And it got it was it was well received let me just say John, it was well received anyway. So I suppose we beat that subject to death, not not for purposes of animal sacrifice, and I'll take
a look break well again, Welcome back everybody. I do want to talk to John quickly and get Steve's thoughts on it as well. Last week, Steve, John and I had a discussion about the whole Jack Smith case against Trump and John confessed, which, by the way, you got some comments. I got some comments, I got some emails saying I'm glad to see John's finally coming around and
seeing the tews some things out there. But confess to a little bit of embarrassment on the behalf of the at least some of the people at the top of the DOJ for you know, not if nothing else. And I don't want to put words in your mouth John, not recognizing how these things looked. So I want to ask you if a you heard or watched Garland's address and be what you thought of it.
I didn't watch it, but I read it. And so this was a Lucretie is referring to as a eah Garland gave to the Justice Department workforce where he said, I want to make clear that you know, we're a political and that we're not doing anything that's a response to the elections.
And so it did remind me of.
You know'd I've worked for judges and people of the Justice Department, and you should never have to say you're being a political and you should never have to say you're neutral.
You just do it.
And I've always thought when people start complaining by saying they are, it makes me immediately suspicious because you didn't have to say that at all anyway. So, you know, with I don't know, I don't know what the reader said about what I was saying last week, but you know, to extend it a little further, I think one question. I mean, you know, obviously over the last few cycles there have been the leadership at Justice and the FBI that were anti Trump and went too far. You know, obviously,
like the leadership at the FBI. You know, the Inspector General of the Justice Department, you know, a neutral guy who actually doesn't go around saying he's neutral all the time. He's a very guy. Horror whiz, he's quite good. He actually recommended that Comy Go be prosecuted for out of all this. But you know, the whole Steele dossier and the you know, the Cross Crux fire hurricane investigation, and that was just going too far with the Special Council investigations.
I think what they did, I think.
I'm not I'm not saying that the Attorney General actually tried to drive Trump out of the election.
I do think that the.
Das, the elected partisan elected das in New York and Atlanta, are trying to do that. But what they did at the Justice Department is they showed no sensitivity to the political implications of what they were doing, which was to appoint this wild Special Care Council who has gone way too far in the most politically sensitive prosecution, perhaps in the history of the country.
It's not sensitive, didn't you know what Judge Chuck Kinton said. It's not sensitive. She's not even caring about any of those political issues. This is just about the law. John.
I did see.
I did see some highlights on cable TV, which I can actually get on a ship over here, and I thought, and then also John, I read some of the texts.
I thought the speech was utterly tone deaf, and the way it was constructed and delivered, I politically, I thought he looked terrible giving his speech, like you can't really believe this guy the fact that they And I think the other problem is, remember apparently Biden said pretty early on that he thought Frump should be prosecuted, and they waited two full years to start a case, and you know, I just I just think that they had no conception of how problematic was going to be to proceed in
the party way that they did with Jack Smith and all the rest of it that has unfolded since then, and so I think that was a a net negus for them.
Yeah, to me, it's a question of commission, like did they and I don't think that intentionally at the Justice Department again intentionally wanted to affect the election, but they affected election by their negligence by appointing guy like Jack Smith and then not supervising the guy. And he has totally botched this. I mean, there's a reason why he lost. He's been losing at the Supreme Court again and again.
I mean he lost, right, he was a special counselor tried to prosecute the Governor of Virginia and he lost nine to zero at the Supreme Court, lost again on immunity. I mean he he's actually the best thing that's ever happened to presidential power, because every time he gets the Supreme Court, he produces a great decision on behalf of the president.
Well, remember Garland claimed that every single decision made by any of these people was made by him, not not BG, not those people, but of course anybody, any US attorney et cetera, et cetera. Every single decision was cleared through him, Which means you have to say that all the decisions made by Jack Smith were cleared through him, right, I mean.
If problem, this is his problem with the Special Council. It's actually one of the reasons why the district judge in Florida just struck down the Special Council as unconstitutional, because they say, they say both things. They you know, the constitutionally, there is no such thing as a special Council. Everything they do has to be ultimately accountable to the Attorney General and the President and President Biden, right, President Biden. But at the same time and at the same they're saying,
but we've given him full independence and freedom. He can do whatever he wants. Which is why this is, which is why the district judge said this is unconstitutional. Creation of a federal position that doesn't actually exist.
One more point about the gas lighting. I found in that speech and I actually was driving so I heard it was this this the hypocrisy in this that people are threatening uh d o J lawyers and FBI agents, that there's these credible threats out there, and he mentioned
somebody by name, Tommy. But nobody since that's that awful address came out, has even been able to uh substantiate any actual, uh serious threats against any member of the d o J. Sure there are people like me who say all of those people should be executed for treason, but I'm not making a threat. I just think in a just world, that's why when.
Threat though, yeah, but but.
Every now and then then then my then Steve tugs at my heart strings and I take it back, and I didn't mean it, but uh but I think that. So the whole gas lighting business, you know, people discussed and it got plenty of coverage. But this idea that there are that there's credible threats against the dj as opposed to say to what they did to may not like him. Roger Stone, the dad who the preacher who was you know, acquitted by a jury but they showed up, The FBI showed up with a swat team in the
early hours of the morning, at gunpoint. You know, it was just all the horrible things that the FBI and the dj have done to as Garland says, you know, both sides. No, of course, not both sides. Let me remind you again of the idiotic, stupid. There are not enough words for me to describe what I think about this.
When Garland was asked, why do you prosecute people who are protesting at abortion clinics, but you don't prosecute people who commit van or or worse against pregnancy centers designed, you know, to help pregnant women out of doing something like having an abortion. And do you remember Garland's answer, you guys, do you remember what that idiot said?
I've forgotten now I'm sure you remember.
I do. He said, it's because abortion protesters protest in the day. Oh that's right, yeah, and people who destroy pregnancy centers do it at night.
Yeah. That was amazing, right.
I have one thing that and I think this. I saw two points or broader points to make about this, you know. So first, I'm really disappointed in this kind of leadership. You see from Garland. But I think it's typical of this administration, which is this kind of a fantalization of one of the most powerful agencies in the federal government and in the country. I mean, this is an agency that, unlike other ones, they could take care
of themselves. You know, they've got a national police force, the FBI, they're well armed, they have the power of investigation and prosecution. I mean they're but yet you know, they are the victims and all this that's the thing I find, you know, you know, I can't imagine like some of the great attorney generals or Jaeggar Hoover even having to have a press conference or give a speech claiming to be the victims and woe is me for
being a Justice Department employer. Everybody hates me, And I mean that's that's that's not how you show leadership, is claiming victimhood. But the second point, this Tison, this is one point I thought of the debate was the media and the you know, the established government. They're doing a great job of turning Truck into the outsider. Again, here's
a guy who is essentially running as an incumbent. But if the media goes so hard against them with all these fact check geting and maneuvers and bias in the way they ran the debate. And now you have the government saying, oh, Trump is you know, agitating such that we're the victims here, and they're creating the impression again that Trump is the outsider who wants change and that Harris is the one defending all the establishment institutions, which
is I take it. That's not the way to win an election.
It's it's can I just finished by saying that I'm still not convinced that we wouldn't have been better off with Garland on the Supreme Court. And the reason I say that is because there's obviously some real bitter, pardon me, resentment from Garland for not being on the Supreme Court that has allowed him because I remember, you guys, I remember hearing other people say he was a decent guy.
He wasn't always an absolute partisan hack. But his bitterness, combined with the all of the things John just said about the Biden administration general has turned him into a truly horrible, the most horrible Attorney general ever in the sense that whatever else you can say about his stupid address, and he talked about the norms of the rule of
law and so forth. Nobody has done more, in my opinion, to destroy the notion that the DOJ is actually a non partisan arm of the executive designed to be to execute the law in in a non partisan way. I mean, think, think about back during Watergate, you had the Attorney General resigning rather than carrying out what they considered to be Nixon's partisan request. You can't imagine Garland in a million years resigning over anything that Biden asked him to do. Am I wrong about that? Well?
Remember Nixon?
What was it?
Rickinson resigned refusing to implement a partisan but lawful request. Right, That's the key point. Nixon had every right to do that legally. Look, I've wondered about that about Garland too. I thought, you know, I thought Biden was going to give us I don't know Katangi Brown Jackson is the Attorney General or someone like that.
I thought that was the best case.
But then as things start unfolding, I thought, you know, I wonder does he take a phone call from Mitch McConnell, the guy who kept him off the Supreme Court more than anybody else.
Does he think?
Does he have friendly thoughts about the Republican Senate, Republicans and the party that denied him that seat on the Supreme Court, that he was so emotional about the day he was nominated by President Obama.
And you know, you could see him being bitter, and you know, you know, there's no way to know, and we may never know, but.
I mean, you know, we've even talked about Gorsage and why he should be bitter at least on behalf of his mom and he's not right, you know, it seems not I don't know. I mean, you know, it doesn't matter because it is what it is. The history went the way it went. But I often wonder about whether or not the DJ will actually ever be able to
recover from the damage that Garland has done. Whereas had he been on the Supreme Court, things would have been very different, obviously, and the and you know, we probably never would have seen Roe versus Wade and some of those other great victories come through. So it's really, you know,
it's not a fair thing. But I do think that had he been on the Supreme Court, he would have been a not as bitter, but be one of nine, one of nine, and you know, his opinions, he might have joined with Kitten G when she came on and so on. But I think that the effect of his awful leftism would have been muted or else.
I don't look, I might might hunch Adam john reaction.
I think it's a reaction to January sixth. Actually, I think that sometimes we don't appreciate how you know, they really believe what they're saying. They really do think it was an insurrection. A Democrat, you know, keep in mind, I think Garland at this time January sixth, he's a judge on the DC Circuit, and I worked in that building. It's at third in Constitution, so you could actually see exactly from that building.
To the ride.
He might have been watching it from his office window. He probably saw the crowd go down by the building on its way to the Capitol. I really think they do think it was an insurrection. But the problem is they can go around and say it, but when it came down to it, they didn't have any facts or proof,
and that's the thing that bothered. Like you could see, I could see having an investigation into January sixth, I could se have an investigation to Trump, but when it turns up nothing as it seems to have done so far. That's when you have to have the judgment to say this is over now, and then when the Supreme Court smacks you back pretty bad. You couldn't dropped the whole thing after that now and said the Supreme Court made
us drop it. But to continue going on with these, you know, charges which don't make any that just don't fit the crime, and then politically go around saying he is an insurrectionist edition as present of Biden has been saying, I think that's that's what is undermined the rule of law. But I think it's it's an emotional response in a way. You're right, but it's not. I think it's not to
his failure to be confirmed to the Supreme Court. I think that he and a lot of leaders and the Democratic Party really believe January sixth was an insurrection and they've got to punish Trump for it.
You're such a nice guy, John, I don't believe any of that. I believe that they that they know it wasn't an insurrection, but just let's out pretend to be objective for a moment. There is enough evidence of irregularities. That's all I'm going to say. Enough. Excuse me, evidence of irregularity is manipulating the the fact of COVID to make sure that laws did not need to be applied or executed the way they should have been, you know, going around what the legislators had done, all of those things.
We've been over a million times. But I think January sixth persecutions are all about and calling Trump an insurrectionists is that they never want to see anybody question a
democratic victory again. And if that's why they're prosecuting all of these people, that's why they keep calling Trump and insurrectionists, even though there's all the evidence in the world that not only was Trump not an insurrectionist, but that there may have been at least malfeasance on the part of people like Nancy Pelosi and the Justice Department with regard
to January six Leave that aside too. But if they can't convince people that you should not question our electoral system, the integrity of our elections, our democracy trademark is threatened, then people might actually demand fair and free elections going forward. And that's that I honestly believe that.
But go ahead, can I offer this maybe as a last word, It's true, I mean, you know, we talked to people who talked to people in Washington in the federal government said they were shocked that there could be such a riot in Washington, d C.
At the capitol. If John, if those folks really.
Think, oh my god, democracies and perils, an insurrection and we can't even we don't know if we can trust our own security services.
That was one of the subtraining things you heard among Washington DC officials.
My response is, you know, maybe you guys needed spurs around the country and be in Minneapolis during a riot, and Seattle when it's overrun, and Chaz Zone and actually see what's happening around the rest of the country, and then maybe they would have a different view of these things.
I was at the twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen inauguration of Trump and walked around the entire perimeter and there was way more damage done then to Washington, d C. There were way more people out violently protesting, not more people, I guess you would say, heading to the capitol. But those same people watch in the summer of twenty twenty and the George Floyd riots, them burned down churches and
you know, and they weren't scared to death. Then that's why I'm very very suspicious of this idea that they really thought it was a dangerous insurrection, and that even though aoj Aoc was killed thirteen times that day, at least right that it really wasn't the danger that they that they were claiming it to be. It's you said this a long time ago, Steve. Those same bureaucrats in
Washington couldn't believe that people didn't like them. They couldn't believe that that there were actually Americans out there that were against the swamp and the power that they have in DC. Anyway, I don't want to beat that one to death, but we were sort of in agreement that that Garland has all the wrong motives, were just not necessarily agreeing about what those motives are. So let's move on to our next story. I want to hear a little bit from John about his experience at the American
Political Science Association. It's really funny because Steve and I are actually technically both political science professors, and I have a degree. I have two degrees in political science. Actually, you couldn't get me to the APSA if it was the last place on earth. I'll be honest with you,
but John, he's a brave soul. Not only did he go to APSA not being a political scientist, but he went with the Claremont crowd, and in fact, he held a lovely party for the Claremont crowd who had been disinvited. Shall we say, well, John tell the story.
No, this is great.
And it was curious to me, since I'm not a political science to go to one of your conventions, which struck me much more like a trade show than an
academic conference. It was at the Philadelphia Convention Center, and you walk around and they are all these rooms, dozens and dozens of rooms with people holding presentations where it's like the panelists seemed to outnumber the members in the audience with lots of powerpoints, and then an enormous like trade show hall with like all kinds of people hawking things like books and stationary and it was like it really was more like a trade show convention than an
academic conference. So that was one second. Yeah, So I had not known that the Claremont Institute had been kicked out of the APSA and that this was their first return, I guess in five years, and it seemed to me that Claremont people were back and forth. You know that there's a lot of people at the panels. The panels panels are really interesting. I mean they're about topics that
I think topic listeners would be interested in. Yeah, Like my panel was on the Supreme Court term, and we have really interesting discussion about administer what do all these administrative law cases mean. I spoke about the Trump immunity cases and presidential power. Now, my panel was at eight am on Saturday, so we didn't have panelists out numbering the audiences in my panel, but it could have been close.
I think that the Claremont people are punishing me for my Heertrodox views, my positivest views, and sticking me in the worst slots. But the best part was that the I arranged for the Clermont is too to have a reception and then a dinner at the Union League, which is one of the great institutions in the hometown of Philadelphia,
founded in eighteen sixty two to support the Union. It's still very much caught up with the honoring of Abraham lincol We actually had the reception in the Abraham Lincoln Room, which is a beautiful sculpture of Abraham Lincoln and has the Gettysburg address imprinted into the walls. It has Civil War historical memorabilia in the room. So it was a
great event. But I did I was very conscious of what you guys have told me about political science now that a lot of it has become swept up by economics, by empirical measurement of this and that, and fantasy, statistical manipulations, and the kind of things that I would have thought would have been important, like political theory. Constitutional theory is barely there if you look at the titles of the panels, And that's why I think the Claremont Intitute is the
most interesting, you know mostly now. Then I read I forged you the story because it got forwarded to me that there were these people were very unhappy to see the Claremont Institute there because they showed you with John Eastman. Yes, but John Easton wasn't around, so that they said, I wish John you wasn't there instead.
Well, they're back to picking on you. I mean, can I share the story John that.
We I remember you and I were together on the Claremont APSA panel in San Francisco.
What was that twenty sixteen. It was twenty sixteen, I think, yeah, and maybe twenty seventeen.
Anyway, the funny thing is there have been rumors there would be protests, and so the panel had what four presenters and on the administrative state I think, and you were last. And so I thought that was a genius having you go last, because the protester to assemble to yell at you. I had to listen to the rest
of us and learn something. And then remember, the protesters got up and they tried to disrupt your talk in the hotel, and APSA was very good about rousting and and kicking them out so we can proceed with that.
You know, that was very good of them to do that. But I'll say this, Johnny met you trade show. So here's the thing.
Obviously, you don't go to a lot of sort of conventional academic discipline annual meetings. I don't either go to APSA, but I've talked to the so you always have a big haul of the book publishers academic mostly, but some trade they're trying to persuade professors to give away free books to you to consider for course adoption.
They're often trying to sign up authors, usually the editors of the presses.
Are there and you wander through, what are you working on? You have something we might be interested in, and a lot of deals get cut. But if you talk to the people the book publishers who go to all they go to the Modern Language Association, they go to American Historical Association, they go to the American Sociological Association.
And they all say the same thing.
The political science meeting is always the most interesting of all the disciplines.
Why is that worse?
The other ones are worse, Yes, much much worse.
And the reason is this gets back to the Claremont angle on it. The reason is political science still has some methodological diversity, which leads to a little bit of ideological diversity, which is absolutely it's much.
I mean, think about Aristotle's I would go a little well, it's not you're wrong. I'm not saying you're wrong. It's one step further. Aristotle says that political science politics actually is the architectonic science, meaning political science actually looks at important questions. Now, that's part of the problem with modern political sciences. They don't take important questions as seriously as
they used to. At least some elements of it. You know, the whole empirical stuff usually has the dumbest questions that they're asking, but not always.
But see, the thing is Lucretia. You don't. I mean you've never been, I think you said, or not for I've been.
I've been half a dozen times, but I wouldn't go back.
Okay, Well, I mean, I'm sure it has changed a lot. It's gotten people. And two people in the audist.
Always Steve, you're breaking up. You're breaking up. Well, you get some that's it, right, when you get some coverage, you're still right enough.
I think Steve just two.
Yeah, sorry, folks, Steve just hit an iceberg. So hopefully the Titanic's will say and he'll he'll get on a life.
I think I heard that girl that gurgling sound with Steve going down in the lifeboat because he did not make space for men. He did not make space for women and children.
Let me just say that back. Let me say quick, well, you're is that next year's aps A. This is the title of it read Imagining Politics, Power and Peoplehood in Crisis Times? Can you imagine anything that more nauseating? Anyway? And one last thing about that, I just want to say the new executive director of the aps A, Kimberly Neely. She is, of course a woman of color. There's a
big surprise. And her entire academic background is you'll never guess what di She has no actual substance, but she's been a great mover and shaker in advancing people of persons of color and inclusion and belonging. And so I mean that's the APSA. The fact that they even let Clermont in. I'm gonna say it's probably not a bad thing. It's probably a good thing, but it's not really going to change the character of it very much. You want to give it a try.
Talk about talk about being late to the party. I mean, the zeitgeist has moved on. It's a rare time. I use that stupid German term.
But good grief, good grief indeed.
Okay, our last topic. Steve published a piece that is some what of a continuum of the things John and I were discussing last week, and we'd be discussing for a while on common good originalism. Do you want to tell us quickly, Steve, what that piece argues so we can share you down.
I will try. Yeah, I see I will try.
But first of all, I want to reassured room of listeners that the word prudence does not appear once and then won't appear here. Second, you'll be relieved, John that the Clean Air Act has not discussed or referenced od all in the article, although that's.
What you're really talking about. I'm sure no.
Well, I had run across this unusual empirical study.
I think I had lots of flaws, but it had an interesting conclusion based on this weird methodology that gosh, you know, these original Supreme.
Court we have now seems to be relying a lot more on.
The old treatises that would have appealed to the American founders two hundred and thirty some years ago, you know, Blackstones, Redward Cook, Matthew Hale, Bracton from what the twelfth century I think it was, and they left some people out
they might have talked about. But and he, you know, gives the receipts, especially Alito writing the majority opinion in the Dobbs case, where the question turned on what was the status of abortion in the common law at the time of the founding before that and also the time the Fourteenth Amendment was written, and you know, Elito made a very strong case that blackmen had gotten that completely wrong, had a just terrible history in the Road decision, which
I think is all true. And you know, if you put together the numbers and they went back sixty seventy years, what you saw was is those old treatises and they were still kind of around in the forties and fifties. They disappeared, guess when during the war in court era when you had you know, legal realism or the living constitution, And now they've come back.
And I thought, isn't this interesting?
And of course I worked at It's a short article and I'll link it to the show notes, but I worked it into the point being that this is a portal back to the natural law tradition, because.
I believe firmly that the common law is the.
Application practical application of natural law philosophy, and that the Court's not really going to settle out what their originalism really means, I think, until they move closer in that direction and acknowledge it more directly and openly. And that's just an opening bid to cause fights.
So well, I don't I think you could read that evidence one of two ways. So I'm not surprised that you're seeing more citation and reliance on the common law because the Court has turned towards originalism. It's not a surprise that you see this happen along start along with the edition of Scullia and Thomas the Supreme Court, and it's only going to grow as more originalist justices on the Court. I'm not sure I would read it as a victory lap for natural law, because you could use
it one of two ways. And you know, for those of you who want to come visit, you know, Steve Lucretia and I are going to be teaching a court so Berkeley next month about constitutional interpretation and we debate this very subject. So it could be that you have people who grew with Steve and Lucretia or Hadley Arciz or you know, we could go on a lot of the people at Claremont School who think the Court ought to be borrowing or incorporating natural law and natural rights
into its interpretation the Constitution. Or it could show that what the Court is doing, and I think this is what it's been doing so far, is that when they try to recapture the original understanding of the constitutional provision, for example, what did life, liberty, and property mean to the people who ratified the fourteenth Amendment in eighteen sixty eight. They look at the common law treatises and the common law to see what regular lawyers thought those words meant
at that time. So it's not a incorporation of the natural law natural rights. It's an effort to figure out what does the original understand. So the treatises are important, but so would be course case decisions, so would be books, law books, law dictionaries, all kinds of materials, and those are the most important distillations of the meaning of regular
legal words, which are then used in the Constitution. So I think you could we'd have to see whether I'm right or you're right in terms of why the justices are doing it. But I can still see it being part of a positivist enterprise interpreting the text of the world, rather than your non positive approach.
Think. I think the problem I have, Steve, is with the the basic definition that somehow the common law is our access to the natural law, because I actually see common law in the hoddest understanding of it as a positivist thing and meaning that think about how common law developed in great Britain, and maybe that's why I'm being too narrow minded about this, but it is in fact the result of judges determining that A B or C is a good thing in these circumstances. That becomes a
precedent for things in the future. I guess the best way to say it is, how does common law actually help justices overturn precedent? I don't get the argument that common laws are access to natural law, and maybe this is not the time or place to discuss it, but that was my That's the argument I've had with you every single time we've talked about the common law originalism.
We even had a nice podcast about it a long time ago before John joined us, and I said, I don't see common law jurisprudence as the answer to I think it's a simpler thing. It's I wouldn't look at story and say he's common law.
Sorry, Lucretia. I agree with Lucretia on this point that the common law sometimes can be judges trying to honor the natural law and put it into decisions, but often it isn't. It is. So to just give an example we talked about in class last year, the common law used to say, don't break your word.
In a contract.
If you know made a contract, keep your promise, and it was a very moral principle. Today, in a lot of jurisdictions the common law says it is okay to break your word and break the contract if you can find a more efficient use of your property and resources. Because the law and economics movement has so influenced common law judges that they have now adopted, you know, an efficiency approach to contract law, and they totally rejected the
earlier moral approach to contracts. But that's the common law. It doesn't you know, inevitably, you know, it's in the hands of these judges who are given the authority under their state institutions to make policy.
Well, three quick things, John, If that approach can get us to overturn rent control, I'll be all for it.
Look the two quick right, Yes, I win, I win.
No.
Look, John, the description you gave of the common law a couple of minutes ago. I kept thinking, I am listening to Sir Edward Cook's description of the common law given in the seventeenth century. He described it exactly the way you do. I actually thought you were quoting him from memory. But you know, common law is not just one thing. It's you know, decisions, things in the statute books, precedents, cases, It's this big soup.
Right.
Look, here's the distinction that I think clarifies it.
And if you ask somebody today, some educated person, what's the common law, they'll often say it's judge made law, you know, deciding controversies that don't have a statute to refer to. And the real common law tradition I thought of itself, and you can find us in the older literature and treatises.
It's not judge made law. It's judge discovered law. That's the phrase of use of it, judge discovered.
Well, how do they discover it? Well, you have to do like Blackstone. That's why I was like assigning a couple of those Blackstone chapters. He was a firm natural law man. But when it came to you know, how do we consider all the different kinds of homicide circumstances that come to us. We have to use our reason, anchored ultimately in some principles to make the distinctions about it.
And okay, I'll stop there, but I think.
To be continued continued, we could discuss this forever, and I confess to some confusion about it again because I understand it differently than you do, Steve So.
But I always like to show people. I think you have a John Pluck that's short history, concise history of the common law. That's twelve hundred pages.
It's like nothing in that title is true, including the punctuation. As someone said, oh.
My god, and the book is twelve hundred pages, a very small print, and that that's the concise history.
Good grief.
So I want to end this. There's so much more we could talk about, but I want to end this to just talk about an email that I received and responded to. I copied Steve on it, but I should have copied you, John So. Steve and I are both graduates of Clermont Graduate University. I'm actually from back in the days when they were just a college. That's how
long ago it was. But they sent an email saying that, you know, basically, what's happened is they've spent themselves in deeply into debt and they're going to have to do all these things to try to get out of debt because they've just poorly handled their finances and it's a you know, explaining to that all this great stuff is going to happen and they're going to be they'll be back. I don't know if you got the email, Steve, but you got my response. My response was, I went to
their website, found their DEI page. I think to the DEI page and said, I suggest that Clermont Graduate University could save millions by eliminating these useless and devisive offices and by terminating the employment of anyone associated with this grift. But guess what I didn't get a response.
This is how how how could any you know, major college or university be claiming financial difficulties when there was extraordinary demand for their products, Like they could double the size of their classes and still fill every seat. So if there's any mismanagement going on, right, it's there. It's if there's any deficit, it's because of their own internal mismanagement, failing to run their institutions.
For me.
Yeah, and I hate to don't give them any money.
Part of it. Don't give them, Oh god, I wouldn't give them a penny. But you know, most most universities, most colleges have so many never mind just DEI nonsense, vice provosts and this and that every college has those, but they have so many administrators and staff now, and if you look at it, it's the same in Cage twelve. But if you look at any data about education in general, the number of administrators and staffs is chipbled and quadrupled
and sextupoled and whatever else you want to say. Wow, the number of students has actually gone down. And so that's why they can't they can't pay the bills because they have too many people that are absolutely useless towards the mission. But anyway, that's my I mention.
One little news item today that showed up on Twitter. Kamala Harris has said she wants to eliminate a lot of college to create requirements for many federal jobs.
I thought that's interesting.
I mean, look, higher education is considered an adjunct of the Democratic Party and a propaganda organ for spreading liberal ideology.
Here's the first step of they're recognizing that maybe it's not working for them, that they don't need it.
I don't know what, but I think that I think it's because I sorry, I think it's because of the Formative Action decision.
Yeah, it could be exactly, and right, I think I think this is just about Pennsylvany.
This is just about Pennsylvania. I think Trump's made a lot of that way and I think that I don't remember if this was this administer the Trump's campaign, but didn't. This is something that Trump people have wanted to do. Also, they've wanted to write downgrade college requirements for a lot of employment. And so right, this is did you see that Trump also said he didn't want to have taxes on overtime pay? Now I don't know, so I'm sure that Harris is going to do that too. Next.
I think they are.
I mean, they're really I mean, this is these are the condeagues are going to play really well in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Michigan.
All right, I think since we're way over time, even with our breaks for commercials. Again, folks, let me just tell you that don't beat up on Steve about this. It's not his fault. We don't control what happens with the ads, and so we've given some breaks to try to control it so at least they don't come in the middle of a of a sentence by one of the three of us. So I'm going to move on to Babylon Beast really quickly. Do O J warns if Trump is elected, he will do to them all the
stuff they're doing to him. That's not even funny. Yeah, I know it's not funny, though. Democrats concerned California wildfires may burn up their stock of pre filled Kamala Kamala Harris ballots. Sorry, John, why would they need to in California anyway? White House? It doesn't. White House responds to Haitian immigrant crisis by air dropping crates of cats into Springfield, Ohio.
That's funny.
A fetus should not be treated like a human, says woman with cat named Dave that wears a sweater. Just a few quick debate ones. Kamala accused of using performance enhancing moderators. Kamala proposes second debate, moderated by Michael Moore and Joy Behar. That's really all I have today, and I think it's time for you guys to close this thing out.
Yeah, all we have now is just drink your whiskey.
Meat.
We're still waiting on Steve to pick our new sign off.
Well, I'm an improvise from Campbelli's interview yesterday and just urge all the listeners be proud of your lawns.
That's what she started with.
Didn't hear that, neighborhood?
What's your plan for inflation? Well, you know, I grew up in a neighborhood where everybody was proud of their lawns and of your lawns. So everybody, and we'll be back next week when I'll be back on filand for church.
Which is good because you were just garbled against you, but we're gonna leave that in there so everybody can enjoy you and in the joy you're experiencing on the Okay, okay, okay, goodbye, everybody, have a one.
H don't.
Don't do you know where? Don't inside.
The Ricochet joined the conversation.