Well, whiskey, come and take my pain, the money, my.
Way, Oh whiskey, Why think alone when you can drink it all in with Ricochet's Three Whiskey Happy Hour. Join your bartenders, Steve Hayward, John, You and the international woman of mystery, Lucretia.
Where the laps it up?
And David, ain't you easy on the should taps?
Gotta give me and let that whiskey blow?
Well. Welcome everybody to this very special episode of the Three Whiskey Happy Hour. It is a no host episode because there will only be John and me, and we don't have to fight like we do with Steve for the opportunity to say something. When he decides to give us permission. We will just go back and forth drink our whiskeys in peace, without a single historical analogy. Because Steve is off somewhere in the deep Arctic and just can't be bothered to opine upon the important issues of
the day. John has his own theory about why Steve is not here.
Welcome John, I thanks Lucretia, and I just want to say to all the listeners, turn on the recording button now, because you have the chance to make your own final cut. Of what might be the last Lucretia unplugged album where if you remember, if you're people of our generation, there would be the studio album and then the artist would play acoustic guitar in front of a coffeehouse audience and this would be marketed.
Yeah, this would be marketed.
As the unplugged album where things like Steve, like synthesizers are gone, electric guitars are gone, all interference with the true voice are removed.
So now we have no Steve. So now we're finally unplugged.
But Lucretia before we start, Yeah, I know where Steve is. Steve's up in Norway or Iceland or some place. Why do people of Western European extraction like to go on vacation to such desolate places that are used as the backdrop for science fiction movies for Mars and planets where aliens are birthed to come destroy humanity.
Okay, so let me just remind you, my friend, that not being from a Western European extraction and being from Korean extraction, how many times have you visited your ancient ethnic homeland?
So maybe that also it's so cold there, so cold that Steve.
Doesn't have a Viking bone in his body. I, on the other hand, in half Viking.
And wow you are that explains a lot.
Yeah, the good half, I might say. The other half is some weird mixture of those those Brits and the Scots and Cherokee Indian anyway, so I'm proud of my my Viking back owned. But Steve goes there because it's cold and he doesn't like hot weather, because it's miserable here in Arizona. It's going to be one hundred and fourteen tomorrow in too sonwhere I'm gonna be. So that's why Steve goes. I don't know. And he drags his lovely wife along, and I think she can't possibly like
it that cold. I've seen her in the cold before. But anyway, I Steve says he's never actually been cold.
Well didn't I've seen.
I think photos of Steve doing the polar bear thing on New Year's jumping into the water is kind of California in the Pacific.
Ocean fifty degrees Yeah.
Insane, it's sane.
That's that's why he makes such a wonderful podcast co host, because he suffered such brain freeze that he says, ridiculous outrageous things because he's not thinking straight.
Is that it?
Okay? That explains a lot. Either that or he can't actually he can't process what's going on today without some sort of lame extension of some analogy that's never app in the past. Some listeners, by the way, really really
like it. I was yesterday really quickly. I forgot to tell you this, John, I'm at a talk by the commander, the guy who the general who was the commander for four years up until twenty twenty four of Korea in Korea, and also that thereby the commander of the UN forces in Korea, and he had a I guess this is a you know, famous statement from Sun Sun Zou. How do you say, Sun Sue know your enemy and know yourself, and Steve knows neither.
Well, if you knew Steve liked you and I do, you wouldn't want to know there.
He might actually know himself better. But he's way too kind to his enemies or doesn't.
Know who's true. That's true. He is very nice to his enemies, that's true.
Not me, not me. I'd make a good intel, sure I would. All right, let's talk up a little bit about Los Angeles. I am Angelino. I went to high school in Los Angeles and lived there for some time. Some of my family still lives there. So what do you think about the National Guard being sent into Los Angeles. Are a good friend Stephen Bryer, Justice, He's still alive, right, Justice Stephen Bryer.
Justice Bryan.
His brother, the eighty three year old Charles Bryar, issued a decision saying, oh, you don't have kings. We don't have kings in this country anyway. Tell us first about why all the reasons Trump can send troops into Los Angeles, assuming the conditions are met, what the actual rules are. Because you are our favorite lawyer, John.
Well, first, I think we should start with the facts that I think we can all see with our own eyes from the television feeds. You have people trying to attack officers of the federal government who are trying to carry out immigration law. Right They're trying to detain for removal people who are in the country illegally, and they're authorized to do that under federal law. Immigration is not
just a core federal function, it's exclusive federal function. States are not allowed to carry out immigration law.
Courts. I have to stop for a moment and say that one of John's strong suits is consistency. It's absolute consistency. Because when I would argue that the states had every right to practice their own deportetion of illegals and all of those and you know, try to in different ways enforce immigration law, John insisted they could not do so. So go ahead, John, I'm sorry, credit, well.
Just my life.
I don't know if that's the right the best way to do things, but that's what the Supreme Court has said, and so but that just makes really clear that what these officers are doing is.
Carrying out federal law. That's all important.
So you know, we've seen efforts to break into federal buildings, We've seen efforts protests to stop people from getting in and out of buildings, and we've seen right cars set on fire, freeways blocked and so on.
I mean, I just don't think there's any dispute of that.
I mean, people who say this is peaceful or that's restricted to just a few blocks, Well, then why did the mayor of Los Angeles impose a curfew? I mean, and why have hundreds of people been arrested? And why is the LAPD chief not just officers on the ground. The LAPD chriefs chiefs say that the LAPD had been overwhelmed. I organized organized rioters who are trying.
You're not going to get invited to any cocktail parties anymore after that.
Although there may not be any cocktail parties unless this guy's around in LA much longer. So, given that kind of disorder, and we might see all that happen again this Saturday. I don't you know at the at this no King's protests, They're going to be occurring all around the country in hundreds. I looked at the last figures, hundreds of cities and towns around the country already. Some of them are turned violent, like in Austin, Texas, where
I spent a lot of time this last year. Given that kind of disorder, I think the president, any president, has three grounds.
On which they could call out the troops.
One is just his constitutional authority as president to protect the federal government, the same power that Abraham Lincoln claimed at the beginning of the Civil War. Remember he said that he was protecting at the outside of Civil War, federal arsenals, federal forts. That's why Fort Sumter is the last place under federal government protection because Lincoln said he had the right to protect federal installations and federal personnel.
That is a claim the Supreme Court has recognized in the late nineteenth century.
There are two cases in Ray Nagel in Ray Debs, the Debs.
There's Eugene Debs who's arrested by the federal government for trying to blockade railroads because he was interfering with interstate commerce, trying to lead a strike against all the roads in the country basically, and there the Supreme Court reaffirmed this power. It says in those cases that the president can use force, even military force, to protect the government and protect its personnel and going a little farther and to protect them
and carrying out their functions. So that's the core, and I think that justifies what Trump's done in LA because the other thing is getting lost in the noise is that, I'm sorry, is that Trump's order is rather modest. He's called out the National Guard just to protect federal personnel and facilities's and he authorizes them to do no more.
He did.
He is on record as saying that he actually blames himself for not doing so. Earlier during the twenty twenty riots because they you know, they destroyed an entire federal building. I forget all the details, but it was a courthouse.
Right, a courthouse.
Yeah, they protesters, right, They set up their own little sovereignty focused around the Portland Courthouse and wouldn't allow any police nearby.
Yeah, I mean supposedly he was. He said, I'm not going to let that happen again, which you know, Yeah, this nonsense about kings. I mean, I'm really disappointed that a judge who's been a judge obviously for many many years, if he's eighty three years old, could ever say something that manifestly stupid.
Well was it? He said again?
He just said that we don't that this is a constitutional republic and we don't have kings, and Trump is behaving like a king.
I usually whenever I hear people say that, I usually, Yeah, when you hear people throw around this rhetoric, it's usually a cover for I don't want to think carefully about executive power, which it's just.
Like, which I get, no, But but you and I have even talked about the fact that there's some subtleties about executive power that you don't necessarily want to push too hard. You know, the whole idea, the Lockean idea of prerogative, that maybe the president has to even act against the law if that's what's necessary in an emergency to save the country, right, I mean, that's but we don't spend a lot of time talking about that, nor
should we. But when a president engages in activities that are clearly within his legal and constitutional authority, and just because you don't like it, a judge should know better than to call that, you know, reminiscent of a monarch. Sorry, monarchical behavior and not what we would expect in a democracy. Trademark.
Well, it's also there's a lot of lazy thinking there, because yes, we did rebel against a monarch, but we
didn't rebel against executive power. And you know, people who follow the revolution and the constitution see that the revolution was thought to have gone too far in some ways, and the revolutionary state constitutions were quite weak, the Articles of Confederation were quite weak, and our founders actually purposefully established a vigorous executive to correct the mistakes of going too far.
Many of those mistakes being that the legislature in the case overall, that the legislatures were too powerful in the case of the Articles of Confederation, the whole federal government had no power whatsoever and couldn't do what it needed to do.
And what insight the founders had I think in this really explored in Hamilton's contributions to the Federals Papers, is that there's some things legislatures can't do that large multi member bodies like Congress can't do.
And we're living through.
One of the prime examples is you can't five hundred and thirty five people can't respond quickly to emergencies. They can't respond quickly to threats against.
Public safety, public health. That that's why you have a singular person in charge of.
The energy branch, secrecy dispatch. And there's one more I forget, but yeah, the point is is that that's, as Hamilton puts it, it's the very definition energy in the executive is the very definition of good government. Right.
And so.
Here's the thing. As long as people can look at Trump and say it's Trump's fault, they can hold him accountable. They can know who it is it did what, and well, assuming he won't be running again, but perhaps hold his current vice president, maybe the nominee accountable. That's how the systems supposed to work. You can't do that if you have power dispersed, so you don't know who's responsible. And that's that's Hamilton's whole argument, and we have means to correct him.
Yeah. No, I mean, the thing is that you're quite right. I mean, this is not.
What these officers are doing is carrying out a more vigorous immigration agenda, and that is probably the top thing on the twenty twenty four election agenda. I mean, Trump was very care about what he was going to do, but he made promises about he was do and I was carrying them out.
And the proper means of opposition is not to try to prevent federal officers from doing their legal duty. No one is claiming here that these.
Federal officers are actually, you know, detaining people who are here legally.
They're not detaining citizens.
The normal way is you go to your member of Congress, right, you go to your state governors, you use the national political process, or as you said, Lucretia, you could impeach Trump if you actually thought he was doing something illegal, or.
You go and win the next election.
That's I mean, that's the founder's answers for policy disagree with not defy the authority of the federal government.
I mean, but that's what we're seeing in our cities now.
Well, and remember Lincoln's Lincoln's justification for was it? It might have been for the suspension of habeas corpus. I forget which which law he was accused of breaking, which constitutional revision? He says, Look, you know, four short years, not that much bad can happen. Now, we've seen things move a little faster these days, right, But that was non hold me accountable and get rid of me, if that's what you want to do. He didn't mention impeachment,
but you know that's underlying. It's just it makes the whole No Kings is as much a gas lighting operation to me as the as the Biden is. Biden's as fit as he ever was, you know that.
Or let's cancel four hundred billion dollars in student loans, all right, let's make it ever get nationwide vaccine mandate. I mean, these are you didn't hear these same people, these same judges blocking him or saying there's no Kings. So I'm just gonna you know this, No King's rhetoric just doesn't give the judiciary to say, I'm just say no to anything a president wants to do. You have to look carefully at the as you said, lucretia.
The authority.
See what he what authority president has or not. Oh, just to return to two other things, the two other forms of authority. One is what's called the military people called Title ten authority. Title ten is just where the statutes that regulate the military are located in the US codes.
If you go into yeah, I tell yeah. Title fifty is sort of the military national security powers of that Army and Navy and Marines and air Force.
So Title ten says the president is allowed to call up the national Guard in three circumstances, and the media seems to think there's only two because the first two are circumstance of invasion.
Second is rebellion. Now we can have argument about whether this is.
Evasion or rebellion, but circumstance three is obviously involved.
Here.
Number three is the president finds that he is unable to carry out federal law. And you see it on the streets of LA You're seeing it in the streets of other cities. You have people trying to stop officers of the federal government from carrying out legal, legitimate immigration law that itself, I think is sufficient grounds for President Trump to call out the National Guard. Just a side note,
and we'll talk about Judge Brier's opinion. He claims that those orders essentially have to be confirmed by the governor of the state. I think that's a complete misreading of the statute. The statute says the orders go through the governor,
but the governor has no veto. In fact, the Supreme Court decided this, and we'll talk about this later too, but there's actually a Supreme Court case which which Briar did not mention, that talks exactly about this issue about whether a governor can veto what's done with the National Guard.
I'm astounded that he missed this case. I mean, he was at the Supreme Court and it was unanimous.
Well, because think about it, logically, if it gets to the point where the president has to nationalize the National Guard for some reason, because for instance, other Republican governors are prepared to or have already called up their National Guard in their states to help about with these protests. If you have a situation, say with these protests, or say you're talking about back during the de segregation orders,
it was not. It did not go through the governor because the governor would have stopped the National Guard.
The governor was an opposition.
Yes, yes, and I don't see that showing up in Briar's case either.
No, he doesn't really mention the most prominent example of the uses of these powers, which was right the most recent obvies was there desegregation and to protect civil rights protesters.
But I think the way you put it, the media is ignoring this because it doesn't fit. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm gonna say it's a narrative. They want to make this narrative not about they're doing anything they can to make it not about removing criminal aliens. Now it's a difficult thing. Let me stop there for a second. A criminal alien, an illegal alien is by definition of criminal
but law. Yes, to Trump's credit and you know, Homan's credit and so on, they really are going in most cases that I understand, first after the worst of the criminals, and you know that, so as long as that keeps happening, Trump wins on that issue. And then when you have rioters out there engage in violence and waving Mexican flags, the best other argument they have besides Trump is a dictator or a king? Is that this is stolen land? You know, yeah, California, that Los Angeles where I live
in California. It was the Mexicans were tricked into allowing the United States to buy their territory. And so there wasn't a trick.
There was a war and we took it.
There was a war, but then there wasn't.
Yeah, and there was a treaty, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. I mean it's it's like it just the United States took it farre and square.
But no, they didn't because because nobody can do that because it's the ancestral land of these people, just like you can't Berkeley can give all the land acknowledgments at once, but that land still belongs to somebody. I don't know who it is. Do you guys have are you on Indian land?
Yeah?
I actually refuse to give these land acknowledgements with something called the Aloney tribe, I believe.
Okay, ours is the ta Honah Autumn. But I mean, so those are the lame kind of arguments that democrats have. And then you know they were trying to make a whole big deal about your stupid, dumb senator Alex Padilla.
Who oh yeah, what do you think about that, Lucretia.
As a former senate aide, I did feel some you know, I felt some unhappiness at seeing a senator manhandled.
Now there's some.
Senator as well. I would have liked to have seen treated that way. But as a body as a whole, do you think that they went too far in restraining Senator Padilla and uh arrest doesn't.
Yeah, I don't. And it's not just because they didn't really know who he was until you know, he didn't have security badge on, you know, all those other things. Okay, then he told them and they still handcapped, handcuffed him. But being a senator, I'm too much of a small d democrat on these things. I don't give a damn. If you're a senator, I don't give a damn. If you're any supposed vaunted thing, you get treated just like anybody else would. It comes into a press conference and
acts like a jerk. I mean, I don't think a senator, being a senator entitles you to act like a jerk. And actually, you know, uh threatened.
This was a stunt. I mean, it was an obvious stunt.
Yeah, maybe they didn't know that he wasn't.
No, not just that makes it worse, That makes it worse for him that he wasn't there really seriously to conduct oversight or investigate the facts.
He was just well, yeah, and this isn't the first such stunt that Democrats have done. And you know, but what that does, of course, it is it draws attention away from the fact that people are very happy with Trump getting rid of of murderers and child molesters and drug traffickers and all those other things who have no
right to be here. That's you know, everything that Trump has done in the immigration space has been ninety percent of what he promised to do, which is amazing for a politician, right, I mean, no politician ever does everything they say they're going to do. But Trump shut down the border. Trump's removed people that shouldn't be here. And they can't stand that because it's so popular. So I think they're doing anything they can to change a story
to something else. The Badia thing that no kings, you know, so why would they talk about the actual authorities of the president. Those are those are my thoughts. I think it's the biggest gas lighting operation in history because they stand to lose forever.
I mean, let me add one more thing, because I think it also addresses your first question, which which was what's Trump's authority? Because I think if the courts actually do intervene and block Trump from using troops in this modest role right where he does transmit orders through the governor and President Trump hasn't invoked his constitutional authority, which I think he has, then he's only going to have to escalate to the third basis of power, which is
the Insurrection Act and the Insurrection Act. And the reason I'm say is a broader power is the Insurrection Act allows the troops to go out onto streets and make arrests to execute the law, not just protect the government, not just protect federal officers and support them who are doing their jobs, but actually to do the job themselves. You know where marines will actually arrest people for federal trial.
This is an enormous power, and we generally don't want our military to have to do it in our country, unlike places like Urep, for example, where.
You see heavily armed troops on city streets quite often or in train stations.
And the Insurrection Act has also, just like the Title ten, authority, three different independent reasons you could call out the troops. They don't involve anyone else's, you know, getting permission from someone else.
Now one of them does.
One of them is you have if the governor asks for assistance, then you can. Then the president can call out the troops. And that was what happened to ninety two the last time we had this in La, the Rodney King Riots. After the Rodney King Riots, Governor Wilson called out, called to the call President Bush, and President Bush sent troops, and I think wisely so to restore
order after the Rodney King verdict. The second round, which I don't think is evident here but maybe it is, is if there's an insurrection basically that prevents the enforcement of the law. I'm not sure this is an insurrection. I didn't think January sixth was an insurrection either, But if January six is an insurrection, then this is definitely an insurrection because I think here you have much broader violence over a longer period of time, much more I
think you've seen. I think you have much more risk of loss of light, and you have I think you're really directly taking on the authority of the federal government here. But whether that's evident or not, it doesn't really matter, because the third option under the Insurrection Act is I think already met, and I think Trump is actually showing i'll use your favorite word, prudence. He's showing prudence and
not invoking it yet. But if he continues to get judicial interference, he can very well invoke the third ground under the Insurrection Act, which is, and this is lovely early nineteenth century language, when illegal combinations, right, illegal combinations impede federal law. And that's clearly what's going on here on the ground in Los Angeles. You do have people trying to stop in cases successfully stopping federal law enforcement.
They are successfully right. Unfortunately, they're successfully i think, preventing the federal government operating in places it's legal to operate. And this is not again, this is not some think Trump concocted President George Washington invoked the Insurrection Act and put down the Whisky Rebellion of seventeen ninety four. Although I have great sympathy for the Whiskey rebels who are from my home state of Pennsylvania, and I think should
have every right to make booze free of federal taxation. Nevertheless, President I remember George Washington. He personally led the militia, you know, the eighteenth century version of the National Guard, personally led them. He rode in a horse at the front of the troops to put down the rebellion you know, or insurrection.
And didn't take much.
Yeah, it didn't take every Actually, when people heard Washington was coming, they dispersed and gave up. Actually, interestingly, and this actually goes to this Eric Adams parton issue. Washington, for the good of public stability and to make peace, pardoned all the ringleaders and dropped the prosecutions, not because they weren't guilty.
But because he thought it was best to put this behind us.
Yeah, anyway, so I think I think the natural response, I think is that President Trump could go higher and escalate the use of his powers and response to this kind of resistance he's getting from state officers like Newsome.
But I agree with you, I don't think he will unless things get really really out of hand. The other thing that the media is, I don't want to say covering up, but making sure doesn't make it into the
stories they're putting out there. The situation in Los Angeles, actually, if you believe, sorry doctor Phil, If you believe doctor Phil, I do know that the situation in Peoria, which is a suburb of Phoenix, that a protest that escalated out of control, was actually a situation where HSI was going in on some very serious drug trafficking activity and they
were executing warrants on drug traffickers. But somebody put out to somewhere I guess on social media that it was an ice raid, and so that thing all got completely out of hand. But the story in La is, if you believe it, who knows what to believe these days, that is actually originally the original ICE raid was conducted on a warehouse that was being drug running for the cartels. And the cartels are the ones who got their friends
on social media. They're friends on the left to gin up this big protest that is now of course spread everywhere. So just another crazy thing about how much the left doesn't care about what happens to this country and would rather take the side of cartels than they would love abiding American citizens. There's my editorial comment, John, But.
You know, for the purposes, this is one crazy thing.
Judge Bryer said in his opinion is that he said President Trump is doesn't satisfy the requirement for being unable to execute federal law, unable to get to send agents, for example, to make those arrests and break up the cartel's use of this warehouse.
Not because someone has blocked federal agents.
He said, because they've may been able to make some arrests, they've been able to make some detentions, and what you have to see is zero cases of success.
So it's quite incredible. He basically says, well, it looks like the.
Federal government has been able to detain to to say, two hundred illegal aliens. Therefore he is able to execute the law. That makes absolutely what if you know, what if the DHS was actually trying in these operations to detain twenty thousand illegal and they were only able to get two hundred. Coring to Judge Pryor, that means you can't trigger any of these authorities because federal law is still being executed at some minimal level.
And in a much deeper point to that, John, that you've made many many times over and excellent articles, is that it's not the judge's place to decide what is necessary to execute federal law. It is the president's sole discretion about is what is and is not a legitimate exercise in any given case of federal law. Now again, I suppose that you could argue that this has gone
too far and then you impeach the president. But you or you could on behalf of some actual innocent person who was arrested, prosecuted, and jailed as a result of all of this. You could go backwards and you know, find out was this not a was that person's conviction not consistent with the proper application of executive power? You could do it that way. A judge can't make those decisions, Am I wrong?
Yeah? No, So if Judge Brier's opinion is upheld, I think it will be the first and only time a federal court has essentially overruled a president's decision that the protective function was justified, or that Title ten could be triggered, or that the Insurrection Act could be triggered. And there's a case I wrote about from you and Steve love these old cases because they're close to the time of the founding, and you guys think the founders have this
insight into politics that many of US have lost. There's a case called Martin versus Mott, which is from the War of eighteen twelve, and there was a guy called up to defend the country in the militia, and he basically said, there was no invasion going on when I got called up. The British had shown up yet, and so there was no legitimate evasion, so I didn't have to The call of the militia was illegal. And justice story, you know, one of the greatest justices in American history,
just history. He said, it's not for the courts to second guess. You know, it's up to the president under the laws to decide. And how can how could courts figure out whether the evasion or rebellion or obstruction of federal law is enough? You know, the federal courts aren't there to, you know, examine all the cases in the country simultaneously at a point in time.
We're under great stress of time and resources. Just I don't know how Judge Bryor thinks Martin Versus Mott doesn't apply to this case.
I'm trying to find quickly. The great statement you made in the piece you wrote with Robert Delahunty recently about it's not the place of the JA. It's not the place of any branch of government to decide the powers of other branches.
Well that's yeah.
That also that each branch, the branches expected to fight over their own powers and right And what was your what I'm.
I was looking for because they can't remember what your Oh here it is, I've got it that I'm quoting the great John yu on Robert Delte in interpreting the Constitution. The branches cannot force each other to adopt their favored, favored reading of the law. They must respect each branch's freedom to carry out its unique functions. Just as the president cannot order the courts how to decide cases the Supreme con the Supreme Court cannot force a president to
veto or sign a bill. Two examples not the only examples, obviously, And I think the problem is that whole argument gets lost in the the larger emotion of all of these cases because it's Trump. Because it's Trump.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with you.
You know, we may uh you know we're going to you know, this will be posted by Saturday, but because of this uh nationwide whatever.
It's no King's Day, but this day of rage.
You know, President Trump may have to make some of these difficult decisions because you could see things really deteriorating in Los Angeles and maybe other cities where law enforcement does get overwhelmed as we've seen in law as the LA Police l a p D Chief said, And President Trump's gonna have to make the decision whether to deploy troops in some of the cities tours just to restore basic public safety, you know, basic law and order.
And I think that maybe remember I think.
Democrats by you know, exaggerating and saying oh he went, I mean there. You know, Governor Newsom has actually said that he thinks President Trump was doing this on purpose in order to take over blue cities and become an autocrat.
And it wouldn't have happened without Trump doing it. That's caused it.
Yeah, the Trump has caused the chaos when you know, you look at the timeline of events and you know, this thing started to go south in LA before the deployment of the troops.
But to make arguments like that, you know, makes it.
Harder for our troops to restore order and encourages people to continue to try to disrupt the functions of the government.
Okay, so let me channel Steve here for a minute. Oh but we don't want listeners to think we've completely forgotten. Steve would say that if that happens, what's going what is likely to occur is that Republican governors and republican states, Republican governors. We've seen examples of them. I think it's Florida where the sheriff has said, you want to protest here, Fine, you'd break any laws, you harm you, you threaten to harmony officer, we will kill you dead in a graveyard's dead,
you know, on and on. So what will happen is that it will kind of be twenty twenty on steriles rights where where those protests will again harm leftist cities, leftist states, you know, blue states. I guess we should call it, and it will only make it more and more clear to people that the left is not responsible enough to govern.
Is that it's just like a federalism argument, and then people will leave those cities and move to right states that do a better job of public safety.
More people in California for Arizona and Texas.
Yeah, well Arizona's not necessarily but we won't go there. Yeah, No, Hobbs has said she's not going to allow them to come in and do these raids anymore. And in my really, yeah, it's it's awful. But you know what, when it comes down to it, every person in the United States who's here legally, resident or citizen has the right to live in safety. And Trump says that over and over. They don't want that to be the message that's going out. This is oh, poor Maryland fathers who you know, got
z into El Salvador. And you know, it's all an emotional argument, which is funny because we still know that a vast majority of people think all illegal immigrants should be deported. I do know that this whole activity is causing for massive self deportation.
Lucretia, do you think that Trump is winning that. I did see that poll that just came out saying that a very large majority of Americans think all illegal aliens should be all of them should be deported. Yeah, I was really surprised. And then I think I saw a poll that said that numbers even higher amongst immigrants, you know, legal immigrants in the United States are naturalized citizens agree with that statement even a higher rate than right in the native foreign Americans.
That was truly stopped.
Those are the people, you know. I live next to the border, so many many of those people are my friends, naturalized citizens, and the absolutely because the way I saw
somebody explain it. You know, if you stand in line for something really important, not that you and I would ever stand in line but anymore, but if you stand in line for something really important, and the person in front of you, you've been there for a while, invites fifty of their closest friends and put them in front of you in line, You're gonna be a little upset
about it. I know that that's cheesy and a little bit trite, but it kind of gets to the point that if I was an immigrant who came here and did things the right way, I'm not going to be so happy about knowing that. You know that these people can just come here and and they can get jobs, and they can get welfare, and they can get Medicare and all those other things. And so it makes perfect sense.
If we're a small percentage of immigrants who came here illegally, I don't think it would be an issue at all. But when you're talking, some estimates think there could be forty million illegal immigrants in the United States now because we just have no way of counting them anymore. That's my thought.
Well, see, but then this is the thing that I don't understand from a political perspective. I can totally see why Trump is doing what he's doing, right. He made promise during the election. He's keeping his promise. He I think, wants to have federal law enforced throughout the country. He's not going to say, well, I just won't enforce federal law in Los Angeles. Why are democrats you just made fun of them, right? Why are Democrats out there defending
people like Garcia? Why are they out there saying these these protests are mostly peaceful?
Why are they out there? Right?
Some I've seen, incredibly, I've seen California, some elected California officials saying there should.
Be more protests.
Well, what is Why do the Democrats think that rather than saying we will cooperate, we welcome you know, federal assistants or devote their own police forces to put down these riots.
I think you have to look at it at a really big from a really big picture point of view, and that is that this is now of a piece with the whole leftist project, the globalist project, the no borders project, and if you actually allow for Trump to deport all of these people that you know, the left wanted to pretend that you that they couldn't The Biden administration wanted to pretend that they couldn't close the borders because of course they didn't want to close the borders.
And you have a larger and larger low income, poverty, almost income population that depends upon the government for their subsistence. That's power base. And I think that they've just gone so far down that road they can't turn around.
So if Trump, the election results of twenty twenty four haven't shown them that this is at you've seen.
Any evidence that Democrats are willing to change their their They're doubling down on everything. They're doubling down. I mean, there's a few there's a few people RUI to Shara and others who are Democrats, smart Democrats who are trying to argue that this is crazy, but they're not. You know who are we listening to Jasmine Crockett who tells us that we can't get rid of illegal aliens because who's going to pick our cotton?
You know?
So anyway, so tell me a little bit what your thoughts are because you have the most foreign policies.
No, I mean anybody I happen to be.
No, I mean you're the political Oh I didn't want to accuse you of being a political scientist.
Sorry, now they're a philosopher. But you know, just being in California, I've I.
Think the state is terribly run and it's being terribly led right now, and I think people like Gavin Newsom are sacrificing the safety of people in Los Angeles to his presidential ambitions.
Well, but and he's making a big gamble. Yeah, he's making a big gamble because if Trump ends up failing in all of this because the protests gets so out of hand and he oversteps a thousand different ways it could go, then Gavin Newsom maybe has a chance. But and you know, these people live in a bubble. He has no idea that the average person out there is not in favor of even of the you know, the
big things you see on social media all the time. Oh, this this man has been here, he's started a business, and he's got seven children and they've all gone through the schools, and you know he's an illegal immigrant by pays his tax Well, you know, what did he do for all those years? Why didn't he get his citizenship? Why didn't you apply for a green card? People are losing their patients with it, but they don't see that. I think their ideology just doesn't allow them to.
I don't know.
So the crusia, I think we've already gone beyond the time we specified. So let's can we turn to political theory and political philosophy and leave for the next episode discussing Israel's attacks on Iran's still going on. Yeah, we still don't even have all the facts and what's going to happen.
So I'd vote all in.
Favor of turning to Jaffa and Strauss and then taking up Tel Aviv and Tehran in the next episode. Who knows Steve might come back from those places too, although I hear they're very warm there, maybe even radioactive in some places, and so Steve won't go visit there for his vacation.
Not until winter.
I'll go there in the winter.
Well, let me set it up, John, explain to me, explain, I just what is the Why Why do you and Steve get upset when I say you're political theorists rather than political philosophers.
What's the difference.
Let me start by saying how some of this started, which was me getting upset whenever you or Steve would throw something at me like game theory or realism or something like that in the international relations field, which is not my field, by the way, And I claim no expertise because I found all of that to be unbelievably boring and irrelevant. So I just went off in a
different direction. But I'll come back to that. Here's the problem with being a political theorist, which as opposed to say, a studier of political thought or a studier of political philosophy. I would never in a million years claim to be a political philosopher, or I have no such vaunted abilities. But I do study political philosophy, and I study politics.
And what I find, in the most mundane sense problematic about political theories is that they attempt to put into politics a all encompassing, very handy, very neatly tied up in a package way of looking at things that I think I mentioned to you last time, I considered both too inclusive and too exclusive, because you begin to look
at everything through the lens of that theory. Use Marxism, for an example, you yourself have said many many times on this podcast, you just have to look at that as a Marxist way of things, you know, or that's the Marxist perspective, because everything gets seen through those lenses, and it doesn't allow you to look at what the actual human condition is, the actual human experience in this place, in this time, and so you make a lot of mistakes,
especially I think in international relations. But whenever we've seen Marxism or socialism or all these other isms that are political theories about how governments and societies should be organized progressivism, we've seen that they mistake their understanding of human nature. They end up becoming very dictatorial or authoritarian. They have to force people to do what people would not want
to do. When you change the focus from how you perfect the human character to how you create institutions that will get people to do what they want to do, that's the problem. A political philosopher studies human things, human nature and looks for what is good and in this particular situation what we call natural right, what is good in the here and now. But you take your bearings from what is good simply speaking.
So can I say just.
So thank you for clearly explaining this. You know, it took Steve to be absent to get a clear explanation. Like I said, Lucretia unplugged. So because Steve would be like a Moog synthesizer, if anybody remembers what.
Those were, he would start anyway.
So is this a difference between you know what we in law and other social scientists call. Oh, well, you guys don't like it when we call you social scientists either, or at least Steve doesn't like it.
Between descriptive and normative in that.
When you say you study politics and you study political theory, but that's because you want to understand you know, man and political you know, political decisions and conduct, that sounds to me like you're trying to be descriptive. You're trying to understand why did a cause b, why did person?
Why did Lincoln do this?
And that's descriptive and our philosopher is just normative in the sense that they don't really care that much about what's descriptively true.
They just think I have a moral view, it's just my values.
I just want to I think like Marx, I think proletariats should overthrow everybody and just run the world. Not because that's descriptive. In fact, he's been descriptively utterly wrong. That's not happened in any country.
But that's just what he wants. That's a value he has. And you're interested in facts, as it were, you're interested in the way the world really is fair.
There's there's the rub. Actually I don't I'm not going to call it unfair.
But yeah, I'm not trying to be unfair. I'm just trying to understand you.
No, no, you'll understand what I mean by that. The biggest problem with social science, of which political science, of course is a a sub subscience, subdiscipline, is this idea that you can actually distinguish between facts and values, or that you should And what you end up with with social science, if you'll forgive me for just making it oversimplified, is you end up with social scientists who can study
human phenomena, political phenomena, economic phenomena, international phenomena, and so forth, but they have no guide, no bearings to discover, to determine if a it's even worth studying those things, or what context they should be placed. So, for instance, when you and I have had our discussions about prudence. You want to say that it's just simply a cost benefit analysis. It is a cost benefit analysis, But the question is what's your final tilos? What is informing you about what's
a cost and what's a benefit. It can't just simply in politics at least be economic. So is democracy a good thing? The modern political scientists will provide you with all of these different means for advancing democracy, but they can't tell you why democracy is a good thing. And
so that's the first problem. The modern political theorists accept the webers the fact value distinction, and then there their activities become kind of mundane and irrelevant and trivial because, you know, like the old fashioned, silly metaphor of how many angels can dance on the head of a pen? How do we make a determination about what's even worth being studied? Why is Lincoln? You know, Lincoln and Winston Churchill both have you know, I guess the most books
written about them of any human beings. Why who cares about Lincoln? Who cares about Winston Churchill? Lincoln was a goofy guy who's only president for you know, eight years. He was one one session of Congress and he was voted out. You know, from a purely empirical point of view that there's nothing very interesting about Lincoln. He was assassinated. You know, why is Lincoln? Why does he capture the imagination?
Those kinds of questions social scientists just kind of pretend don't exist, and so go ahead, no, I'm done, Go ahead.
No. So so are you saying that what you and Steve and other Straussians do, which is different from what other self styled you know, self styled social scientists do, is that you start out before you start investigating things, making arguments with a certain you called it, or if you don't call it value vapor called values or just or the normative. There's certain things you think are right and wrong before you start, before you start. That's valuating politics.
Yeah, different, So you can follow up. I would say it like this, that the most important thing that you can study is what those telos are. That's the most important thing. And then but you can't you never know the final thing. The tendency of modern science is to say that when it comes to you know, human things, we we can we can't have absolute certainty, so we
can't know anything. And a political philosophy, at least ancient up until recently would say, well, we can't know everything, but the quest for knowing the good is the most important thing and it should inform everything we do.
You So, yeah, so this is so? I yes, I understand that. So then why is how do you know that?
So?
Marx might not disagree with you in a way I think you would, but no, I mean I disagree with how you set up the problem. But then the question is, how do you decide that it's natural rights? That is the tilos you're gonna you know, there's going to be the prism through which you view your lens?
Would you view everything you know?
Marx could say no, I think it's you know, mode of production that should be the starting tilos.
And then I understand everything that way. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Why is how do you decide one versus the other? Then? Is there right?
So if I'm talking to my students, this will upset you. But if I'm talking to my students about the argument of Madison in Federalist Number ten, I do so by contrasting it with Marx's argument. And I know, Marx, you know the Madison predated Marx. But you know, according to Marx, this whole concept of private property is a construct that is not part of human nature. Acquisitiveness is not part of human nature, and it is, you know, it is
somehow unhuman for what's dehumanizing? That's what I'm looking for, for us to have a society built based upon that. I won't go into all the you know ways Madison says different things, but I will often ask my students, have you ever seen a couple of three year olds with a brand new toy? Have they been? So?
We've seen it, We've seen We've seen Steve show off as computer equipment all the time.
Yeah, or or fight me for a piece of cake.
Judging by your relative sizes, it seems you let Steve win every time.
Oh but is that is that truly? Is that natural equivalitive inquisitiveness? Let me take it a little bit less trivial. The fact that you know you, You and I are married and we care. I don't care what you say about it. We care more about our wives, our husbands, our children, our families, our own moms and dads. We care more about those things. Why is that just conditioned by society? Remember a major, major tenant of at least
Soviet Marxism was to destroy the family. Because totally agree with you, right so so so the reason I use those examples, though john is one or the other is the accurate, uh fact finding description of of of genuine human nature.
So this is the thing I didn't understand before. So your views of uh, you know, the normative. To me, the normative question is not just because you're you're like Marxian. I just think this is better for everybody. It has to be rooted in something you've observed about the way human beings are.
That's true.
So you're saying the reason why property has to be part of a natural right is because human beings are wired a certain way to acquire and if you don't recognize it, then you have terrible things that happen to people.
So nobody means like it's like it's interesting to.
Me because it's it's kind of like a you're making normative claims or claims about virtue or what's good, but it's within the context of things that you have observed about human beings that have to be true or unchanging. Yes, And whereas you might say therefore, so I see, so now you're saying that the reason we're able to pick natural rights as our framework rather than Marx is it because it's not. It's not that Marx isn't allowed to
make his claims. It's just that they're wrong. Like he's just mistaken about human beings and the way they the way they operate, and so therefore his But if he had been right, you know, if he had actually if there had been all these proletarian revolutions right after the publication of his book and all the industrialized countries, we might have to change what we think.
Yeah, he is totally wrong. Yeah, it was something we have to observe about the way people are.
It's interesting, kind of a mixture of you know, normative and descriptive in a way.
Yeah. One might argue too, that the success of the United States, especially up until the progressives took over and offered an entirely different view of human nature, the perfectibility of human nature, and all those other things we've talked about before, that the success of the United States, the prosperity, the freedom, all of those things that were unrivaled in the history of the world happened for a reason. It
wasn't just luck. It was because of the belief in the understanding about human nature and it's inquisitiveness and what you know, Lucke and Madison Bill talk about protecting the faculties for acquiring property and giving people of freedom to criticize their government at the same time that you have certain principles of that government that that that that have
been sort of embedded in. There's all sorts of reasons why I think the United States was successful, but its understanding of human nature was in many ways the best that that could happen in the modern world. And that's why, you know, I don't think it was accident.
No, no, so so, but now I kind of understand why the Jaffa school, of which I include you and Steve and a lot of our friends, find such importance in the Founders and Lincoln and the Civil War, whereas I think what I know of is East Coastraucians think.
This is not important. So you think this is important.
Because it shows that they got something right about human nature, Like they properly identified something that's true about human nature, and then they designed uh a philosophical system or a governing system that took of you know, properly responded to it.
I was gonna say take advantage, but that's not the right word. It's properly allowed, you know, responded to it.
I remember, as we've talked about the I think we talked about when Steve was last not here, the Federals papers and the Founders had.
A pretty dim view of human nature.
Right, humans left to their own devices, were you know, like Hobbsian's they were pretty you know, they were they were you know, they right?
You know, Madison says.
That we wouldn't need government if men were angels, right, men are not angels. They are, which is the progressive view, the Brissoian views there angels and have to be freed from society and government. But it's more that, in your view, the better society, better government is one that properly restrains and channels human nature then allows it to flourish when it's when it does well without government.
But when it does badly without government, then you need government.
And but that's why you think the American experience is really important, whereas East Coast Straussians don't think it is.
Or if you know, I always study.
Well, I hate to put words in their mouths, but there you kind of hinted at it as well. And that's that they think that the foundations of the American constitutional system, the founding are so low and so base.
Yeah, about virtue.
It's not about virtue stopping people from hurting each other, right, And you know.
They have their their like you say, almost a hobbsy and that that they follow Lack who followed Hobbes. We won't go and we could have a lovely five hour conversation about that. We won't borrow listeners today, maybe someday. But their their argument is with the fact that, yes, this is not the best regime. They do not agree with Lincoln that this is the last best hope of mankind.
And they definitely don't agree that someone like Trump could ever be any kind of prudential statesman, as low and as crass and all those other things that we know he can be. And so that's why you have the East Coast Straussians not interested in any way, shape or form in promoting the Trump rustation.
Question free, who do the East what regime to the East Coast Straussians think is the best one? Then it's not the American our political system Athens.
The one that's not around anymore.
You mean the one that disappeared effectively in the I think that that what ends up the tree BC after Alexander the Great put them under his heel, and that Athens, the one that lost the Peloponnesian War.
Athens. Really, I don't know.
You have two options. One is the option of the philosopher who becomes uninterested in politics altogether. And that's.
Yes of our friends say the best thing to do is to just live in a regime that supports philosophers so they can live have the life of leisure to think about virtue.
Right, which is a little bit of what I mean when I say Athens. But the other one is, you know, think about someone like a William Crystal, who was so you know, I mean, he's he's a much smarter guy than you would ever know from his stupid postings.
A very smart guy. He's a very smart guy.
But he's very emotional about this and he he I don't know if his feelings were hurt by Trump or what it is. But I don't know what his alternative is. But he has supported the worst of left wing politics in the United States because he hates Trump so much.
I don't know what the answer is, but I know that the reason the Claremont folks, I won't say roundly of race Trump, but they began to understand that some of the defail the of the United States that have become so profound could only be fixed by somebody willing to be entirely different than the than even say a Ted Cruz or a or a Ron DeSantis. It needed somebody who would challenge everything that had been built up since at least since the New Deal, because.
Those are things so like the East Coastraussians. Uh, you know, the you know, the two groups.
The first group shouldn't care about Trump one way or the other, right, because they want to have a life of leash, of intel, of leisure that would support the ability to have a class of people. Yeah, I guess kind of like Plato right this story, except they're not kings, they're just philosophers.
But they live on a live in a society that generates.
A surplus that allows you to have a class of people just to sit around and think all the time about a good life. But but they shouldn't care whether Trump's in charge of not as long as he just right does a good job of providing the material resources and stability.
To allow philosophers to do what they want.
But there's a lot of Straussians who are quite hard, quite offended by Trump, right They don't They see me as a kind of a coarsening of politics, you know, that kind of you know. But I don't understand why I'm putting to your question, like I don't understand why they would care about the regime as long as it supports there's a.
Little hypocrisy at work there. John and I say it as with this, we probably should take it up again in another time, or Steve will kill us. He won't publish this. In order to have the kind of society that offers philosophers the leisure to sit around and think about politics, or think about political philosophy or whatever it might be, you have to have a material abundance, and you do have to have a society that sort of
leaves you alone. How many people do you suppose in Iran right now or have the leisure to sit around and think about political philosophy? And I mean, so it takes a good regime even to have enough leisure and enough freedom to be a philosopher. You can't just be a lousy regime and that's.
It certainly doesn't have to be a democracy, because isn't that also true? The East Coast Strauscians are quite ambivalent about democracy.
Where the Jaffa School, you know, you you know, you guys.
Like the Founding, So you like the Founding, you're a democracy the Founding, you know, the balanced regime that they created.
Yes, it was not a democracy, right, it's not a democracy. No, I don't care how many times the left tells us that we do not have a democracy.
Yeah, we agree. We don't live in a democracy. Then we don't want to live in a pure democracy.
What happens or even something close to a pure democracy. I mean we could from a purely logistical point of view with tchnology today, every single human being in the United States could vote on every single issue, right, I mean we could have a pure democracy that we could do it, sure, but who would be the ones put You know, you can just imagine what a nightmare that would be.
We don't have to imagine.
You just look at Europe in the last hundred years they've tried to become warm up pure democracy. It leads to, you know, rapid changes to fetish politics that produce socialist governments.
That that and even that is countries within the framework of a parliamentary system, which in itself is not a pure democracy. But anyway, do I'm gonna quickly.
I think we have to end and go to the Babylon B headlines.
Unfortunately, so one thing, two real quick things I want to throw out there for comment, because then the Babylon will work in the Babylon B. This week is June nineteenth, or how the Ebonics version of it, June teenth. I propose that since this is the one hundred I didn't do this right, one hundred and fortieth anniversary, and my mouth is probably bad. Coming up in December sixth was
the ratification of the thirteenth Amendment. Why we celebrate a stupid holiday like June nineteenth, which all it did was pass along to what was at Galveston, Texas. Wherever it was in Texas. They finally figured out that Lincoln had made the Emancipation Proclamation, so some more slaves in the South were free. The Emancipation Proclamation didn't free all the slaves. The Thirteenth Amendment did. We need to change, We need to have a movement to get rid of Juneteenth and
replace it with Emancipation Day on December sixth. That's my first thing, and my second thing is Happy Birthday to the Army. Are you going to watch the military parade?
I was going to watch a lot on TV, but we might be seeing the army out in force of many cities having their own parade around the country.
Unfortunately, where's my.
Where's my tinfoil hat? I read today that they might cancel the parade because of thunderstorms.
Yeah, apparently it's supposed to rain on the parade as it were.
Yeah, since when does the military care of it anyway?
Yeah, not supposed to stop the military.
Trump disappointed army parade won't have a giant snoopy balloon. You'll like this one. Unclear of crowd of fifty thousand illegals is an ice protest or Dodgers game.
Oh no, oh that's terrible.
Illegal immigrants forced to do the rioting Americans. American citizens refused to do. All right, we've gone way long. You want to take us out, John?
Yeah, Let me finish the podcast by doing Steve's job, which is I put in three whiskey Happy Hour into the AI machine and accident to write a poem, and I think this is this case with AI. They just repeat themselves, because I think Steve repeated these very lines. It said, first, let's toast to the host a trio so grand. With each tram they pour, they explore and expand, from politics to law. They delve ever deep with the rich flavor of knowledge. Their spirits do keep. That's pretty good.
I mean they know how better AI than Steve.
Well, yeah, mine is free. I don't pay for it like Steve does. I have no subscription.
This is actually quite impressive that it knows where podcasts about politics.
I have to tell it quickly. Mister Lucretia was trying to uh to demonstrate to friends of ours how great Groc was, and he asked questions from Groc about three whiskey happy hour without giving them any information, and they don't. AI Rock doesn't like me.
You are the.
Measured I wish we didn't record it, which was disappointing, but it was definitely the AI was pro John you and thought I was brassy and sassy.
It said that, well, that's that sounds better than being a moderate reasonable one. I'd rather be brassy and say well, but I wouldn't mind being brassy?
Okay, are you are you sure?
Are you sure that it didn't call you brassy and Steve sassy? That would actually make a loup.
No, they didn't talk about Steve very much at all. It was almost like it was like today, you and me. But I'll ask it again.
I was great to see you, Lucretia, and I'm sorry Steve's going to start coming back so soon. I hope he enjoys his herring and stays a little longer.
Have a good week, everybody, you too.
Later Ricochet join the conversation.
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