Well, whiskey coming fame, my pain, moneys, my ry.
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 they slapped it up and David ain't to bes on the should have gotta give me. Well, here it is everybody, the special holiday bonus edition of the Three Whiskey Happy Hour with a special guest today. Who will get to in due course. It's Richard Samuelson.
I'll get to it now because the people on YouTube are watching our lives. You can see you. So Richard, what's that.
I'm the turkey?
Well, I don't know about that. We still think, at least Lucretian. I think that Gordon Wood is the turkey, and you are the arbiter. Being the pre eminent expert on John Adams, what you're going to get to as part of our bicentennial series. But first, yesterday's special episode, there was a lot of trash talk about Thanksgiving and I just want to say, first of all, John, you it looked like you outsourced Thanksgiving to the Metropolitan club. Is that what you did?
Yeah? It was awesome. Awesome, it was awesome. I don't know how people. I had a kind of a U family reunion, which hasn't occurred in about fifteen years on my father's side of the family, and we had people from Hawaii, Los Angeles, Texas, Philadelphia of course. I mean we had people from all over the country. Come, how do people actually cook Thanksgiving dinners for such large numbers of people and then not want to kill each other
by the end of the day. So I figured, let's all go out to So we went to the Metropolitan Club in Washington because the matriarch of the whole clan is now ninety three years old and she lives in Virginia. So I was like, let's all go to the Metropolitan. It turned out that the shooting of the two National Guards people, yeah, happened one block away.
Yeah, so I actually squinted out.
Yeah, I went and looked at the crime scene, and I saw what they were doing. And you know, the whole place is surrounded by media who are shooting hourly updates with that, you know, with the Farragut West metro stop in the background, and it's about thirty eight degrees in Washington today.
Oh well, we'll come to that story here in due course. But I'm not finishing. I'm not finished abusing Lucretia back for mocking my Where is it? There we go, I'm going to share with you a couple of picks for your benefit, and I'll describe it to listeners. There are my pop ups.
We're not Thanksgiving food, but you know what it's about that those are popovers cooked on a backyard gas grill.
And by the way, it was seventy degrees out. I didn't have this thirty eight business, and I didn't know if it would even work, but you can see it works splendidly.
And then what is that like a bread popsicle?
Like? What is It's like? It's like Yorkshire pudding, except it's just like Yorkshire pudding.
And I may hope you have not said any words that sound remotely delicious Yorkshire pudding.
All that must be great? Then, and here is the rotisserie. Oh god, it is not burned as Lucretia said it is. It is smoked, so it's got a great smoky flavor, juicy throughout even the breast meat because it's self based and you have all that lovely juice below it. And I will try and post these pictures and show notes on Ricochet when we finally get round to it. And so so there, and that.
Looks like Facebook too, Steve.
Okay, well I did that already, but it looks like it was a haroshima Jesus. Yeah.
And then but I also got shipped. Finally it arrived today, my new favorite whiskey, Kilcoran from Campbelltown. It is fifty eight percent fifty eight percent alcohol, so what's I almost one hundred and twenty proof. It says they're heavily petd, which means I won't have to share anyone. It's really good. Well, I've discovered this store. I don't know if you ever saw, John, but about a block down from the Washington Hilton where the Federal Society Annual beating is, there's a store in
the corner called Spirits and Spices. Yes, okay, that's what this. This is where I discovered it. They were tasting this and well they have great stuff there, including you know, great custom spices. Okay, I'm glad you know that place because.
It looks nice.
Souh Okay, Lucretia, What are you going to be drinking later?
I'm drinking Famous Grouse, which is a blended scotch. But because it's three o'clock in the after actually it's only one o'clock in the afternoon where I am, I'm drinking it in a little chocolate container. It's a dark chocolate container filled with scotch.
The bottle made the bottle of chocolate, and you eat the bottle.
You eat the bottle, you bite the end off the bottle, drink the scotch and the rest of it. Oh wow, I'm going to do that right now, because it's about the appropriate amount of scotch to be drinking in the middle of the afternoon on a Friday, even if it is sort of a holiday.
So yeah, And Richard, are you are you imbibing in recommended spirit this weekend?
Not?
Just yeah?
Probably have some Highland park I would probably be having.
Oh yeah, okay, that's right, right.
It wasn't Famous Grouse, Margaret Thatcher's prefer a Scotch.
Oh it might be.
All I know is that Steve drinks that swell, that the that the King likes.
Well, okay, Freud, yeah, I think so. Yeah, But he's well, okay, yeah.
That's Scotch should gather no moss.
Okay, I won't count that one against your quota, Richard. That's pretty good. I mean that the other one you get to pass on is sickle sell amnesia. That's an awfully good one, right for people who forget. Yeah, that's a that's a wonderful one. That's a good one. Yeah. Well, well it turns out to be true. All right. So let's turn to a couple of items of news, and then we're going to get to with Richard to talk about John Adams and stuff. So, yeah, John, you just
mentioned you're there where the National Guard shooting is. And I don't know what to say about this yet except the oddist well, probably a lot of exceptions. The fact that this person was living in Bellingham, Washington, and so he had to drive at least five days across the country to commit this shooting. Why drive all that way? There are lots of National Guard people and government officials and probably Ice agents you could have found in Seattle
if you wanted to. So the fact that he wanted to drive all the way to Washington, d C. Suggests some kind of premedita obvious premeditation.
Yeah.
But then the next question is was he a radical jiehattist while he was working in cooperatively with our forces in Afghanistan or was he radicalized over here after he came here in twenty twenty one when we bugged out of Afghanistan? Do you John, do you anybody having opinion on this or another question to raise about it?
Well, I think for the question of first degree murder capital murder, the statute is wonderfully old fashioned. It doesn't say a lot of modern you know, modern language. It actually uses the old fashioned English description of first degree murder, which is murder with malice a forethought, right, That's the way it used to be known in the common law,
and so that but that's cold blooded murder. Was a planned or was it deliberate as opposed to something that's not going to be usually subject to the death penalty, like you're a sudden reaction or you're responding something self defense, something that's caused by the events. So the planning driving five days makes it sound and the going to Washington, it's just a symbolic target, makes it seem like there's not going to be a lot of difficulty claiming first
degree murder. But President Trump, i think yesterday said or even this morning, said he heard that this guy had mental health problems caused by his service in Afghanistan. That's the kind of Yeah, working as a for an Afghan unit that was trained by the CIA to uh, you know, work on you know, sounds like they were an assassination unit.
Maybe if that's true, then they're gonna his defense will use that to try to claim that he is mental illness and that he can't and he hasn't and if he really is mentally ill, then you know, he's he can't be found guilty of murder. You have to be held as what used the old fashion phrase used to be criminally insane?
Yeah, can I ask.
A question about that and just get you guys' thoughts on it. So I recognize that the Supreme Court has said that you cannot execute someone who is not mentally capable of understanding the oh, the reason that that their crime was a crime, et cetera, et cetera. I'm of the opinion that that's when you ought.
To execute someone.
And here's what I'm thinking about this is, so the guy that killed that set the woman on fire in Chicago, just a week or so ago, was let out of the mental the mental prison what was it called the mental institution prison? There's a name for it, because he was too dangerous to be there.
Wow, I know that he chat one through.
So what then do you do?
And and if someone has become so so unhuman, inhuman, that's other lacking human qualities due to mental health problems, why then do we owe them the right to stay alive. It's just something that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. You know, a guy who gets off after raping and torturing in a small child because he's got mental of course, you have mental health problems. Only a person with severe mental health problems could do such a horrid thing, And a lot of crime falls, in my opinion,
into that category. Why don't we execute people who are mentally unstable or schizophrenic or whatever? I mean, what's the argument other than what can't it's I don't know what the argument is.
I mean, I suppose the argument would be that sometimes I don't know enough about this. Sometimes people with mental illnesses get over them, either to treatment or who knows what. Right, you know, brain functions are still really mysterious Is.
That an ancient thing though, guys, no.
No, this is this is a Supreme Court do process clause. So it used to be in our country that the death penalty wasn't limited to first degree murder. Right, it's only a recent Supreme Court case seventy thirty years ago. Yeah, that says you, because rape, first degree murder, not just for but rape used to be a capital right act in some states.
But I do things.
Over time in the sixties and fifties and sixties at the Court started to really narrow that death penalty could used. Fronder they doe process clause. I think that was, of course, a lot of that was the reaction to the I think abuse of the death penalty in the segregated South. But maybe, like a lot of things at the Warrant Court did, they went so far in eradicating segregation that they just banned things completely which in some other context might be legitimate.
Richard, my recollection is the seventeenth century, and then more the eighteenth century. I remember the way the law went in English law and the colonies. There were hosts of offenses for which a death penalty included kidnapping and other things. So we actually have scaled it way back from the founding era justly, but.
Compared to well in those days. It's the act itself, not that was qualified as a rape right. It was always a capital crime back then. I do think Lucretia, the argument in favor of your point is actually a theological one that of all people, this will confound you
a little bit of all people. The person who argued that a death penalty was actually merciful was Russell Kirk about thirty years ago in a very interesting article in Modern Age which somehow stuck in my head, and he said, if weirdly believe that people have a soul, and you have somebody who that we described as having mental illness or something, but it obviously has a tortured soul, are we really doing them a favor by keeping them alive in a prison cell for forty years. I don't think
that's a frivolous argument. It may be a hard one to make legally and otherwise, but I think that's a serious argument. I think that's the better one.
But it's not necessarily a problem with that. Steve is not necessarily just a death penalty. I mean, they don't put people accused of serious mental problems in regular prisons either they put them in Why can't I remember them?
I used to have next.
Door to one.
They put them in women's bathrooms.
Yeah that was good.
Okay, that was good.
But I sorry, I didn't mean to get us off on that tangent. But I was actually seriously thinking about it when I saw the news report the other day about how the judge had let that guy out because he was too dangerous for a mental prison, a mental institution prison, I think, prison for the criminally insane.
Yeah, I think. Actually, there are a lot of people in regular prisons that have mental illness. You hear this a lot, and that's become a substitute for the lack of mental institutions like we used to have, I think. And so the ones staunch here is that the one this person was in was not equipped for a violently mentally ill person because he hadn't been convicted in a normal way. If you know how that plays out, it's just shows the dysfunction of the whole darn scene. Right now.
This is what the voters of Illinois won, right or this is Illinois because they're not willing to spend the money to build the right kinds of prisons and build enough, pay for enough police force, and they're going to have a system where judges are build directors are letting out people like this, and then they visit this kind of harm on their population, and then they keep the same officials in business. Will electing people who make these decisions that allow this kind of crime rate to go on.
Well, okay, yeah, I mean I wonder about the premise of your statement, John, I'll bet if you put it to a vote in Illinois the way we can put things to a vote in California. I'm thinking back to the three Strikes initiative thirty years ago, which passed two to one in California, right, And if you put a bond measure to build more prisons, I'll bet it would
pass in California. In Illinois, you know, people vote for complicated reasons, and prison and crime maybe number one, but they don't necessarily associate her to vote or cast a vote on that issue anyway.
But this is a result of one party blue states.
Yeah right, yeah, okay.
This is like this happened in California too, This happening in Illinois, happening in New York where you have high crime rates because of the refusal to engage in tough sentencing.
And Richard to give you the last word on which she keep re electing these people to off.
Yeah, but John would know about this much better than I. But I mean some of the issue is the federal courts have I posed standards of minimal housing, minimal housing standards, want of a better term on prisons, which makes them much more expensive, and then you kept them back and so you're squeezed on the budget side and on the other side of the people that I think overly compassionate people.
Yeah. Right, Well, there's the just one.
Last thing, because there's always I always think about this whenever John says this. It's not that I disagree. He said the same thing. I'll remind you when we would talk about under the Biden administration, Uh, why it's an emergency for states to stop illegal immigrants going through their their states. And John's argument was what people should vote Biden out of office, which of course they did. But there is too many layers of separation. I mean, it's
not even Kevin Bacon style stuff. It's really serious separation between a politician who goes out in front of these people in lies about what they're doing, or or dissembles or gas lights and one party rule and all those other things. I guess I'm saying the same thing that Steve was saying in a different way. There is not a one to one correlation between the crime that people see in their communities and the stupid mayor that they voted in to be mayor of Chicago.
Well, yeah, let's put a let's put aside for some other time the problem of rational ignorance in the complex field of voting choice and so forth, and let's just get out with one more aspect of this. So Trump says he wants to prohibit or pause or whatever immigration from certain high.
Risk countries countries.
Well, okay, he said that. Okay, I'm thinking of his previous formulation of those kinds of countries, which okay. But here's the adjunct, adjunct, the parallel question right now, is this scandal out of Minnesota. I say scandal, I mean Scott Johnson, my old writing partner's been writing about this for years, of the massive fraud of the Somali immigrant community in Minnesota, which is now really exploding into the public view. Seventy eight prosecutions so far, with more to come.
And you know, there's an immigration problem, and it's not just unique to us. You're seeing you know, over in Europe, you're seeing more and more public support behind not only rolling it back. But oh, didn't Trump use the phrase remigration. That's a phrase that's been used by some of the nationalist parties in Europe recently, Like, you know, people have come here, they need to go back home, which I've
been predicting for years was going to start happening. But now the President of the United States is talking about it, and other countries are talking about it. I don't that's an observation, not really a question. Anyone want to grab hold of that for a moment before we move.
On and guarantee one place there's not going to be remigration. As to people wanting to go back to Afghanist.
I shouldn't laugh, of course.
Like what you mean like voluntarily leaving the United States to go back somewhere else, or you mean involuntarily being deported? Well, see Blue, migration doesn't add anything if you're just talking about deporting people.
So, John, the last time I was was at you at Berkeley. My Uber driver from the airport to the hotel in Berkeley was an Afghan who had been relocated after the disaster in Afghanistan, and Uh indicated he might have worked for the CIA. He was a chancelator, and he was quite a charming fellow. We talked the whole
way and it was really quite interesting to me. But I remember thinking that some of his views were a little off, And so I'm just wondering if it's really true that the idea that you can just bring in massive quantities of people who want out of where they come from is isn't necessarily the entire indication that they belong here in America.
I guess no.
Douglas Murray had a great piece of I.
Agree with you. I agree with you, But I also think we can't leave our allies behind. I mean, if this guy really was working for the CIA, I mean, he would have been executed by the Taliban. I mean, I think we have to. I mean if we don't, I think how hard it's going to be for us to have local allies the next time we're in a war.
And to be fair for a moment, remember that was a huge I'm sorry, I mean to talk about. There was a lot of outcry against the Biden administration for not bringing all those people back at the time, do you guys remember that, a lot of outcry about it, well.
Let's get out, let's get out with this, which was just out of historical memory being important. Let us recall that in the nineteen seventies, Senator Joe Biden opposed bringing over to our country South Vietnamese citizens who had worked
for American forces in the CIA in that conflict. And by the way, I'm not aware of any South Vietnamese who did come here either in nineteen seventy four to seventy five or in the second wave in seventy nine and eighty, that any of them became terrorists are violent in this country. So there's that cultural question, which is the course, very delicate. But we've got to figure that out. Okay. The other thing that some listeners have asked us about before we get to Richard Sammons soon on our main
subject is this case out of Texas. It's now like ten days old, involving the district court judge that struck down the Republican Republican proposed redistricting plan for next year's election, which prompted a dissent by judge, where is it here? Jerry Smith? Jerry Smith, And boy, I've never heard that way. He's a district a circuit judge, I guess right, circuit judge. Yeah,
a couple of samples. It's one hundred and four pages, and of course it immediately gets into the weeds of all the different precedents and different tests and the details of district by district. But the part that got into the media was Judge Smith saying, fasten your seatbelt. It's going to be a bumpy knight. And then he's criticizing the district judge who ruled, Judge Jeffrey Vincent Brown, who I understand is a Trump appointee. A judge Smith said
it was pernicious judicial misbehavior. He says, in my thirty seven years on the federal bench, this is the most outrageous conduct by a judge I have ever encountered in a case in which I have been involved. And he says page three, if there was a Nobel Prize for fiction, Judge Brown's opinion would be a prime candidate. Says, this is the most blatant exercise of judicial activism I have ever witnessed. And then this part is really gratuitous, but
I like it. There's the old joke, what's the difference between God and a federal district judge? Answer? God doesn't think he's a federal judge. And he's got a second version of the joke, just to make sure we get the point. So, first of all, I gat it this has been stayed by an upper court. But John, this strikes me as rather unusual. I mean, it's one thing to have a sentence or two that pokes the other
side of an opinion. You know, Justice Scalia was good at that, but this goes on for several pages and he's really angry about it. And this makes me as somewhat rare or you know, out on the spectrum of judicial descents. And I think it points to a larger question. I'm going to hold for now, But what did you make of the whole thing?
This is the harshest descent I've ever read by any judge at any core. But it doesn't have to do with the substance of the case. I mean it's not. I mean, that's not what prompted the over the top
descents that the judges. So this is a special case, right, This is under a voting Rights Act challenge to the Texas redistricting, which we all followed, and the claim by the plaintiffs was that Texas actually redistricted for racial reasons, not the effort to squeeze five more house seats out of Texas, which seems like the obvious and apparent reason,
which was much discussed publicly. So the thing that got Judge Smith, who's an excellent conservative judge, one of the most conservative circuit judges in the country in that court along with Eve Jones, who we've had on the podcast, was that the judges issued their opinion without giving Judge Smith the chance to issue his descent, and so the descent came several days later. That's I mean, that's usually
basically unheard of. Usually, you they come out together because the one of the purposes of the descent is that it's there to force the majority to respond and it helps to narrow the issues down. And for the majority just to issue their opinion without letting the dissent issue at all is I don't think there's any statute against that, but I've never heard of anybody doing that before. I mean, that's so outrageous. So Judge Judge Smith, I think was quite right to be over the top of this heat.
The other thing about these kind of courts is that's a three judge court and they're only done for these Voting Rights Act cases of them are trial judges, and only Judge Smith was the appeals judge. So he's basically saying, you idiot, trial judges have no idea how to act on an appellate court when you have three other judges, two other judges on the panel with you, and you're supposed to be collegial, and you go back and forth, and it helps the decision making process to have a
majority in descent that go back and forth. So I'm not surprised at all that Judge Smith sent up this warning flare with this descent, and Judge Justice Alito intervened and stayed the case, and it will probably, I imagine,
get granted by the Supreme Court. And I think we first because I think Judge Smith's subsequent points were right, that the majority is completely wrong trying to detect signs of racism and the Texas redistricting when it's obvious why Texas did it was to get more Republican seats, and that's okay. The courts are not allowed to review partisan motives and redistricting.
Yeah, and then the whole the separate case the Supreme Court has already heard on about the Voting Rights Act may have implications in this, I think, is that correct?
Yeah, that's the Calais case.
Yeah, that might.
That might remove any grounding any claim that even race can be permitted at all, because still there is this so far, there's still legal authority under the Voting Rights Act as it's read by the courts, to redistrict in order to increase the representation of minority members of Congress, which I think is completely a violation of the fourteenth and fifteenth Amendments. But well, I think that's the way the Court will ruled this summer too. By this summer too right.
Well, my political theory meaning ordinary politics theory of not political philosophy, theory of Judge Smith's vituperation on the first few pages was to make sure that became a public spectacle. Out of mean spectacle in the pejorative sense of that word, but the fact that it made news. It may be like front page news, And I think it highlights a broader problem we're seeing right now, which is we're really well, we're just putting a lot of strain on the judiciary
under Trump, as we dine under President Franklin Roosevelt. I may come back to that point later. So this is not unusual in a certain broader historical sense. But we've seen all these district judges trying to nationwide injunctions and so forth and willfully blocked Trump's agenda. And this was not a Trump matter. This was just the state of Texas. But still it seems to me that Judge Smith said, you know, it's time that more of the public be aware that there's a lot of lawfare going on, not
just against Trump. That's my theory of it.
Well, also, he made sure the Supreme Court knew about the case.
Yeah, right, and.
Immediately intervened right to stay this decision.
Right.
It's actually interesting. I'm actually curious what the other everybody else thinks, because it's not clear to me that Trump's gambit to get states to rejigger their maps to increase the number of republic House and it is going to work, because if Texas ends up getting stayed in some way in calif Fifornia as goes ahead, then Trump will have lost. There will be actually more Democratic seats than they were before.
Won't there could be? I mean, you know, who.
Knows, assuming a status quo election, which is a big assumption.
But yeah, and my understanding is the referendum for redistricting in California wasn't quite regular, and the Republicans decided not to challenge it preemptively, and they.
May not have won, but it's interesting.
I think they apparently decided that was too aggressive or something. I'm not sure what how the decision making went. I for a little bit about this.
Yeah, well, I think I have.
Subsequently, the Justice Department actually has and right me, Dillon, your guest on the podcast, has brought suit.
And then there's some California that and some state Republicans have brought a suit too, and I don't know, you know what level the hell will be consolidated or whatever, But yeah, Richard, I think the reason that happened wash First, it would probably been hurt in state court first, and they would have lost because the state courts are tilted. Second, you know, at the beginning of all that, it looked
like the Republicans might defeat the initiative. I actually expected it when it first was announced that it would be defeated, but news of his folks ran a really good campaign, had a ton of money, and they managed to make it about Trump. And the funny thing was just a couple of great polls by you know, our pals at Berkeley, John that you know what's his name does and and a couple other polsters, well Citron and you know his polster guy that never minded Africa Field Pole Field, the
old Field Pole guy, right, who does you know? He used to share an office with him, and he's a really good polster. But they found that on the one hand, huge majority of Californians prefer redistricting by the Nonpartisan Commission. We have that Democrats have gained. But never mind that. But they're going to vote for this initiative because there's a way to signal their displeasure with Trump, and that's
what all the ads are about. And so and then Republicans gave up, I mean, they quit spending money against it because they realized they were losing so badly. Okay, so that was a weird thing.
What else?
What also?
I mean it was a really low turnout election.
Right, Yes, Lucretia were like this. It was mail in only.
Yeah, that's right. Mail in ballants. Right, yeah, yeah, I don't know what the turnout was. But all right, let's move on because uh, Richard has to go here in a little while. So rich as you know Richard, last week we had a spirited debate that pitted Lucretian and I against John about the great Gordon Wood. A lot
to be said about that. But one of the things about Wood's argument, or about his book is there's a famous chapter in it called the Relevance and Irrelevance of John Adams, and I haven't read it in a long time. I tried to dust it off a little bit incuting and also another article of yours i'll bring up in a moment. But so, first of all, I had this
odd recollection. That chapter was kind of an odd man out or an oddball chapter is sort of stuck down towards the end, and it just takes in John Adams at isolation and and I tried to scam it here earlier, but I didn't get very far. And so you are the John Adams expert, and so i'll ask for your take after first you identify yourselves for listeners as to where you were teaching, and you know what you do.
Well, I'm American historian and the founding by training an associate professor of government at Hillsdale College is Washington, DZ Campus.
Right, So that's the short version, and you.
Could have transitioned by point out we're talking about Elvitte, Gary's close friend John Adams.
Oh, oh, good, point right, the originator of gerrymandering or gary mandering. That that argument's going to be one forever. How you're supposed to pronounce it? Anyway, What do you make of that chapter of wich or what should people know about? Well, first of all, John Adams was one of the co authors of the Declaration of Independence, or at least he had some substantial input into it, even if Jefferson was the primary drafter and the person we
always quote about the matter. But so start wherever you want with John Adams. What do we know about him?
Oliy Adams was one of the leading politicians in lawyers and politicians in Massachusetts, and so he was the head of the first if I remember correctly, he was the first person selected for the delegation to both Congresses and was probably the leading guy in the second Congress, but also was pain in the net because he was pushing worth anyone else for independence, and wasn't patient to let other people.
Come along, right, And then he was the.
Principal author of the Massachusetts Constitution of seventy eighty in Massachusetts was the first state to have a special convention and then ratification by the people. So they created that process proposed actually by the people, have conquered roughly lay process in seventeen seventy six.
Can I interrupt you there for just a moment to and refresh my memory. The preamble of that great seventeen eighty constitution has the phrase that goes something like a frequent recurrence to funda mental principles is necessary for good government, to survival of republic, something like that.
That's the declaration of rights, I think, and that's actually in other constitutions as well.
Right, they all believe that was fun.
You have to recur to fundamental principles right in order to sustain the republic amid changing times. And they believe there were principles. As Licoln said, there are such things as truth applical to all men at all times, something that most many modern historians have trouble with because it's by definition antihistorical. To say there are certain things that are simply true about men across the ages.
Well, Adams was often called the first conservative. I think you noticed note that in one of your writings. And what else remind me was he at the Philadelphia Convention for the Constitution seventeen eighty seven.
He and Jefferson are both in Europe, both of are You're okay?
Right?
Adams was our first minister to Great Britain and Jefferson was in in Paris.
Right, So thought experiment if Adams, sorry, if Adams and or Jefferson had been in Philadelphia in seventeen eighty seven, do you think they would have had a major influence on things?
It may not come out so well.
These strong personalities may may have prevented some of the compromises that were necessary.
All right, Well, one of Wood's arguments about Adams is he had this aristocratic view of a mixed republic where things like the Senate and the Presidency were supposed to reflect you know, sort of aristocratic formal class elements that you saw in Britain. Right, Whereas I think our federalists, if I can use that term, thought more of the sovereignty based on the people and really believed in the
idea of equality. Is that, I know it's very crude, but is that I'm on the right track, or help us out.
That's what's so complicated, because in Creation the American Republic, Adams might be the guy who quotes for anyone else, and that might be where the chapter comes from because he doesn't quite get Adams he actually literally is as far as does not mention the ratification of the Massachusetts Constitution by the people in seventy eighty. He mentioned seventy eight they rejected constitution because it was not created by
a separate convention, but he doesn't mention they ratified. Therefore, popular ratification and the application of that that the people are ultimately in charge can be associated with the Federal Constitution as a repudiation of something that came before it. I don't think that's an accurate account of atoms.
I mean, he goes, he supports declaration.
His ideas are there, and it's the same sentence in which are first our rights from our creator and including the right to governed by consent to the government, and we change our governments when we don't like it.
That's all one.
Thought, right, and Adams is very much on board with that. The question then is about inequality. There is going to be an elite. Every society has some people with more authority, more power than others. How do you reconcile that with republican government. That's the challenge. Wood wants to portray Adams as an old having mora old fashioned idea of aristocracy in general, which is kind of how John Taylor Caroline character. I don't think correctly. Adams simply say it's empirical fact.
They are going to be people with power for reasons you wouldn't choose, such as having a famous father, or being tall or good looking. These factors get people ahead. It's just the way the world is.
Okay. I was typing a note here to Lucretia, but I'll ask, because I couldn't finish. Was it Adams or Jefferson? I think was Jefferson in their exchange of letters who talked about the natural aristoi? Was that they both do?
They both they disagree about their meaning. They use the word they mean different, something different by it.
Jefferson wants to call the You know, the natural aristocracy is the wise and good. It's from nature by birth. You actually read them closely. It's kind of problematic.
He says.
Fortunately people don't read as they ought to, like we read our russ. Otherwise you'd have a genetic arista. And Jefferson says that in that letter Atams is describing from the perspective of empirical science, there will be this group by nature, in the vulgar sense of nature, There's going to be a group that rises for reasons good and bad, that will have an overage of power and the challenges to help them use their talentes can be genuine ability to do things and also just their ability to get
ahead to serve the public. And that's why you know checks and balances are actually not in the federal spapers that phrase.
It's very much all over atoms work on the constitution.
Right, So in order to say a should I put this in order to preserve the political impact of the idea of human equality, you have to deny the inequalities that are manifest in nature and that actually make representative government possible. If that makes sense, I mean, who is it this as if if the major head and fit mankind, it's Jefferson, it says, with these natural aerostoys who could
actually help govern the people. The difference is what you don't want then as a hereditary aristocracy, because it's not clear that those important characteristics are always genetically transferred number one, and then you have no longer consent being the reason why these people are ruling over us. And Jefferson makes it, I think, really clear that the whole purpose of education
is twofold. It's to make sure that you pull the natural Errstoy out of the general population, where he seems to intimate they come in the poor as well as the rich. You know, that kind of thing, but also to educate the people well enough to recognize the characteristics of those people who are by nature not destined to rule, but better fit to rule if they're chosen to do so.
Is that remember is the creator would be a bundling artist if he had not created a sort of people who will be fitted to rule society. And Jefferson thinks you can train the people sufficiently well so they will recognize that on a regular basis.
Adams is more skeptical.
They'll have their heads turned as often as not by the wrong sort of thing, and therefore the checks and balances become more important.
It's just extent something through that.
What's interesting if you think about how in Madison my riad of Madison is not the common whether I think it's correct, I think the extent is fear is primary for Madison. Remember checks and balances the term, but that's an auxiliary precaution. And what's primaries a reliance on the people. But he says the reliance of people doesn't work in a small republic. It works in a larger republic because then you're more likely to have the proper characters and
they're more likely to be recognized. There's some truth to that, but up to a point, and then it can you can be very conspicuous for the wrong things, as as we know from from from history over and over again.
Is it unfair though, to say that that You can't blame Madison or Jefferson for having that view in so far, and you have to look at John Adams as being somewhat correct, because we have in fact failed generation after generation to give them the kind of civic education. Sorry, you hate to use that term because they know you
hate it, Steve and everything. It implies, no, because you say, I don't want to get into the whole debate about civics, education, I mean genuinely education to teach citizens to be good citizens. And part of that, of course, is to recognize demagoguery and those who will flatter them and so forth. And we've done a excuse the expression, a piss poor job of educating generation after generation of Americans to recognize what is in their best interest in terms of being self governed.
But I don't think it had to be that way. I mean, you can look at what's happening in public education now and over the last say forty years, and it's just, I mean, it's spine chillingly evil what they do to children in schools now, and it's certainly not teaching them to love their country and to be on the lookout for tyrants what Jefferson wanted out of public education, if you'll recall basically.
Yeah, we have to accept there is a category tyrant, and you can recognize it across time and know what it is. And there is a bias in modern education to deny there are such categories that, oh, that's just a prejudice, and then you back ended in and say, oh, well, we kind of recognize that anyway, But we're uncomfortable with starting with this is something that exists across time in many governments, and it has certain characteristics, and therefore we
correctize it. This is not the way the modern story and has been trained since we created the modern history fashion of the nineteenth century. That's our biases against thinking there are such things.
Yeah, but it's a kind of funny contrast because on the one hand, they would deny that these well trained elites would do anything but use their power for the public good. At the same time, they also treat these elites as if they are in fact deserving of that power over the rest of us, poor slobs who are incapable of really ruling ourselves. And so they do believe in tyrants. They just believe that there's nothing wrong with the tyrants as long as they're the right kind of times.
Yeah, discussing Adams long it was I remember what exactly was. I did a liberty fund and afterwards me and the other recent PhDs Adam Smith camp and talking to a hardcore rational libertarian, I use the phrase, well, Adams sinks people are irrational in predictable ways, and that phrase has since become very well because of cast unsteamate your tailor's work.
But Adams use it more broadly. Who has included the set of people who are rational in predictable ways social scientists, bureaucrats, right, And that's precisely they want exemptance wit checks and balances. Don't trust anybody to be judging their own case. And all people will be tempted enough of the time. Maybe not the first year, but you're five to six seven, it gets worse to push things more and more. That's
the problem with the modern administrative state. The checks and balances, at least in adams view, are an exercise in moderating souls. They keep you from going to excess because somebody's in your way, and that might be necessary over time for most of the people.
Most of the time.
Well let's do this, yeah, please, yep, or we leave.
So two questions. So first, Richard, are you saying that you disagree with Wood's view of Adams where he thinks of this separation of powers as a checks and balances system that's determined by social class. So that's what Wood says. He says, you know, I think he uses atoms in my view to show how different the new Constitution was, because Adams's defense was that American constitution. State constitutions are so good because they kind of replicate a checks and
bounces where different classes of society check each other. And that's not the Constitution's method, right, The constitution method is functional and there's no social c So are you saying that you think Wood's wrong in the way he read Adams, and then that Adams's view is closer to we might think of as the American view of separation of powers.
Well, there are two things.
One of the separation of powers the three branches legislate, executive, judicial, and Adam is very much on board with that.
Right that was that was the message constitution.
He defends it regularly across The defense does come up that often because it was more or less settled by the time he wrote the defense, but he meant it's mentioned in passing, and he defends it every now and then. It's just not the focus. The question is what's the
second house for. There was a lot of push for a second house, for a single house, because we don't have an aristocracy, you don't need to have a second house, and Adams saying that doesn't work out that way, because what's going to happen in a single house is you'll have a small cabal that runs it most of the time, and it'll actually be less good for having legislation that is for.
The common good.
So Adams thinks the category of person when you have we don't call the Senate the upper house and the Constitution, So why is it those the upper house. There is a natural tendency to see a hierarchy, and there's a tendency of people when they become talking to about.
Students this way who work in Washington.
Yes, people get full of themselves when they become senators of or it happens off I mean as kygre been too.
But you see a difference in personality in the in.
The two chambers, and Adams is anticipating that and thought that would serve the public good.
That's kind of what he means by having in lead.
It's and in some of the many cases will be people who are either themselves or married into a distinguished family. And it's still that still happens often enough in the Senate as well. I think what exaggerates to reach which Adams thinks this is simply a mixed regime. One other point, though, it's very interesting if you look in June.
Fifth and sixth.
Dickinson says, yes, you're one house from the people when you're working toward the connected compromise.
But you know we second house. You know, well, we don't have lords, we want that, but.
We have states. So he's defend what becomes the connecting compromise is saying the states can serve as proxies for Oldhams and Baronites. That is, they represent the regions and then the legislature selects someone who represent them. That's the day that Madison writes, Jefferson is in Paris about John Adams's awful influence in the Convention's.
Right about a second question.
We can just killed Richard's point quickly with the famous story attributed to various speakers of the House, most recently the Nuke Gingrich who said, oh, our enemy is the Democrats, and Gingridge said, no, no, our enemy is not the Democrats. Our enemy is the Senate. Right, okay, yeah, well our tip O'Neil said it. See it's been attributed to multiple does sound like, but it does sound like the logic
Richard is describing about the house. We will have a different influence on the call of the of a single house. So anyway, John, question two.
So my last question because you guys have you guys have both Philip bustered and old Senate tradition and Menzli you and Linda with your Philip bustering questions with Richard, But there's actually something as a historian, because this is something we got into last episode two, was do you think that there are these eternal truths that you can
draw out from? He says to discussions that they aren't all talking about the same thing across history, because I think we're talking about woods speech at AEI, and I was trying to say that, you know, would My sense of him was a Wood was very critical of the idea that right, that we can interpret what they're saying back then as if it has to do with today's arguments about natural rights and natural law. And a lot
of historians accuse people of being what they were. They call him presentists, right, or they have a lot of different variety of wards to accuse people who try to who make the mistake of thinking they're vocabulary their thoughts from even this recent as seventeen eighty nine really are the same things we're writing and talking about now, and
we talk about natural rights and natural law. And that's how I tried to make sense of Wood's speech because would right, he's he is saying in his speech that America should be a credle nation, you know, a nation built around the Declaration and its principles. Didn't really say that in his book, right, I mean, I think it's fair to say that was not the argument in his book. And argument is book is that there's this weird conspiracy theory ish way that the Americans thought about why they
had to break away from me. And it's very much you know, as follows right along with our balance arguments too. But that's that seems to me very typically how historian talks about things, like it's so weird and context dependent and they're not really talking about the same things we are, and we have to put ourselves in their minds and
understand why they thought so strangely. But Richard, sometimes when you write, I think you actually do believe that there is this kind of eternal argument that they're talking about the same things we are.
Well, there are a couple of things, and one is, you know, it's interesting what classically would say and historian can't say what the American regime is he can say what Americans have attended to think it has been.
There's no essence in woods spistemology, there's no essence of a nation. All you have is you know.
And he might even say that's just the summary of what we've been. But he's this that I like, it is not a historical opinion. I read the op ed the piece in the journal. I didn't attend the speech on the full transcripts available, but that's very interesting that maybe he's changed his mind on that though.
It's the other thing just on when that chapter.
Ends, that Wood was pointed to some truth about Americans we were uncomfortable with, meaning that I think you're saying that there's a communition. But from Adam's perspective, as I read it, you know, Adams is saying this chap the chapter is strange.
It's unnecessary from a.
Literary perspective, because the book closes with that chapter afterwards about what they'd achieved, and before that you set up the final chapter what the Constitution did. I think he knows he's missed something, and I think what is missed is Adams has a point of view that he can't quite get his head around because how does an historian who believes everything is contingent give a good account of somebody who does not believe that?
And not only that, As.
I read Adams, he's defending that point of view against the new philosophical point of view, which is twenty two human nature being radically fluid. So I think Adams thinks there are classically that would not have been a problem to historians going back to the citizens. It's the modern historians who think it's all contextual and there's no up underlying baseline.
Give you one. I think I can get away with this.
On this podcast, Adams is reading I can't remember who it's, you know, a classic account about biblical stuff when the critics late seventeenth century about pages and pages of how they all debate did Adam and Eve get together in the garden? And he's saying, Adams, this is crazy. He writes to his margin, had Eve bubby's b u b b I ees exclamation point exclamation. He's a guy, this is a cross, This is across the ages, right.
What do you think he did?
Your point is that's how guys are right, and that's a truth. And you're met with women men around power, these things have patterns and you can see them happening, and you can't.
Rather you can't. There's certain things are never going to work when you try to make a government.
Do that, because we humans simply ain't gonna ain't going to cooperate with what your vision is. So I think there's that underlying element that the modern historian has trouble with because we know in the backside that yeah, okay, some things don't quite work out.
But before the modern age, historians.
More comfortable, and maybe it often pushed too far with saying that you know, something they kind of had it was not unreasonable to anticipate, Okay, this is why this is gonna work. This is why that's gonna work, not gonna work, based on the constants in what human beings are like.
Well, that was really good, Richard. That was actually was trying to get out of you my opening question that I kind of mangled here here. I think you're honto something about Wood didn't know what to do with Adams. Here's two quick quotes from Wood. First, one, Adams deserves to be regarded as a major founder, so he clearly
respects adams profound grasp of constitutionalism. But then Two sentences later, he says, for all his intense involvement in constitutionalism, and for all his insight into his own and America's character, Adams never really comprehended what was happening to the fundamentals of American political thought in the years after seventeen seventy six. Another words, he's saying, Adams didn't figure out the civic
republican tradition the way I did. That's one, maybe not an uncharitable way of reading it, but I've just thought that was odd. Well.
Another way of saying this is Adams didn't think the fundamentals of political thought can change.
Yeah, yeah, they're not fundamental.
Then right, all right, let's get out with this because it's Lucretia Bate. It's your article from ten years ago called John Adams versus Edmund Burke, which I just think is really fun in one particular part. And this is debate John Hugh just as much. You have a long passage about what Adams thought about prudence, and I'll skip over it until your concluding sentence about all that, where you say of Adams views prudence divorced from the other
virtues would become a moral pragmatism. In other words, you'd become John Yu.
Yeah, what's wrong with that?
I'm skipped over a lot now. Was just a gratuit to slap at you, John, that's are you.
Saying, John isn't courageous.
I don't wrong with AMORL pragmatism is because you guys don't mean anything when you say prudence. At least it's AMORL pragmatism to start. Well, all right, I still don't get what it is.
I know that's the whole point to bring.
With you guys think it is. This is kind of mushy. Do the best thing possible the circumstances.
I'm not even going to entertain that. I do want to. I told Richard that my only regret about the boring talk about Wood last week when Steve, when you guys both came back with well, he's the most consequential intellectual historian out there, blah blah blah. I said, that's why history is a dying field. And what I wanted to say, but you got you jumped in immediately, Steve and came
back with something. And so what I did get to say was if there were more historians like Richard it wouldn't be a dying field.
Dump on him. Balon and Wood made ideological history cool again. I mean this is you guys should like you, guys.
I love you guys.
Always attack your allies, you always kfe your allies and respect your enemies. I don't understand you people.
Well, that's the very very kind kind of you, Lucretia.
But I I think of what is cultural story and who writes about thoughts?
I don't think he really writes about ideas fair enough.
Not the way you guys do. But he's an intellectual history I mean considerable by the way.
He hasn't done any He did a collection of essays.
I don't think James cebrity those are not books in intellectual history.
His dissertation and his first.
Book is the only one that's in that that would be in that field.
I think of James mc pearson is something of a cultural historian too. I liked I like reading his history. I like the the culture and all the economics and all those other things. I don't want to get ideas from him. I don't see I don't see agendas or ideas or things like that in there. That's okay. It's when they get it wrong. That's the problem.
Ah, like like like Gary Will's book on the Gettysburg Address exactly.
But you guys, the thing that Balin and Wood I think that they did. And it's just a it's hard, I think, to put ourselves back in what history history of the Founding was like back then was they think ideas motivate why people act? Right, that's like, that's like seems like crazy back then, right, they thought it was all Marxist, you know, materialism, and this is I think this is what launched. I think, even though we debate and just maybe very disagreed with what they their conclusions,
but the folks they think ideas motivated people. That's what you guys believe the idea. I don't think you have about what the ideas are.
I think Baialance, chapter conspiracy, suggusted. The idea is basically shaped in ways they couldn't possibly understand.
I don't think that's.
Saying the ideas moved them, and they were moved by essentially on the forces of the background.
And I'm pushing it too much.
Bailon is more moderate than would when you get down to this and you start looking at the theory, especially as theoretical writings.
Yeah right, I mean, oh, sorry, Richard, I mean well, you know you and I were together at that conference on John Patrick Diggins with last year at City College in New York, and Diggens, who is a liberal, kind
of a proto se of artist Lessenger. He went after Balin and Wood really hard, and his critique was not that their accounts of the ideas were incorrect or inaccurate, but that their premise is that they're idiot, that it's the ideologies were a result of sub rational forces that at the bottom of the day, they weren't really based on rational idea formation, rational philosophy. And they're not explicit about that because they're not well enough trained to get
at that fundamental problem. But sorry, Richard, will give you the last word here.
They're not What do you mean when they're not well enough? These guys are amateurs. What are you talking about? Did you just say would and bail And are inadequately trained to write about ideas? And like, was it only Straussians can write about history because they're adequately Come on, you don't believe that.
I didn't. I didn't say the last part, but the first part. The answer is yes, but Richard will give me the last word implication. Well, okay, not really, because they're competing schools with Straussians like Quentin Skinner in those network way off, way off the beam. Richard, Well, do this one.
I think, as I've been saying, the I think the difference between once we the history created the creation.
Of history PhD.
Which is the model of the history on the sciences, and hence this cumulative knowledge, and you try to the old modern story idea of his historiography, not having read other people, but that you have a cumulative field building a better idea.
It fundamentally pushes you.
Towards towards culture. The second thing is Tokevils chapter on histories of Democratic ages. In aristocratic ages, we exaggerate the importance of individuals. In democratic ages, we basically make its large cultural forces who were uncomfortable with the notion that some people are more significant historically than others.
I think that's one of our problems.
And but there are you know, someone like Alan Wellso is terrific on Lincoln and other things. There are historians out there I think that who are doing do very good work. There is a whole contrary tradition. I can give you a history of that, but I don't think we have time for it. No one wants to listen to it. The history of history can be rather boring.
But I do think that one of the keys the Founding is there is a debate in the Founding about these ideas, and somebody's in the space between Adams and Jefferson about the depth of human nature, how much can be changed? And ERNs Kasher, the great German philosopher, story
and who happened? I think overstood over over saw Leos Forrausi's dissertation, not as menture in the full sense, but he writes in his Philosophy Enlightenment that the odyssey becomes a political problem in the In the Enlightenment, the.
Problem of evil is no longer. How did God create such a world?
It's okay if we believe in progress through reason, how do we account for the bloody pages of history? Something must be wrong. The Atoms view is there's something. We have the angel on one shoulder, the devil on the other, to use amendment, to use the one metaphor, and that's not changing, and that puts a radical limit on progress, which makes the modern very uncomfortable.
Because which is why I'm sorry. You said you could have the last word, but can I have the addendum, which is that that is why that the radical progressive project is all about making sure that that is entirely destroyed, that that even the notion that there's an angel and a devil must go way, because both of them place
limitations upon what is possible. And so if you want to deny human nature, you we are so far down that progressive road that we now deny human nature by saying that it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman, that that's your choice, you choose your identity. We don't even call it sex anymore. We call it a stupid language term gender instead of sex. It's not you don't have a gender, that's if you're a here or a she. Right, But okay, or we you know, we can be furries. We don't have to be human
beings anymore. We can be animals and we can have weird sex as weird animals and there's nothing wrong with that.
Or we can be I'm learning so much right now that I never knew before.
There is there, well, there there are two things, and.
One is right to borrow from Madison in the modern sexuality the l B, G, T, Q, W X, Y, Z, et cetera. We have extended the queery right. The other thing to mone of a serious point, that is, there was a fine line that separates idealism from misanthropy. That is, if what you want is it compative that human beings are like, you actually don't like human beings, and that might explain some of the violence of bloodshed we've seen by leftist regimes over the years.
Last week there was the final report out of HHS about whether or not gender affirming God what a horrible phrase. Gender affirming surgeries and treatments for children is actually a salutary thing. And HHS pulled together some real experts, did a number of very solid evidence based scientific studies, released the draft, and lo and behold, all of the American Psychiatric Association, the American Pediatric Assosia, I don't remember all of them. All of them came out and denounced it.
So the AHHS came back and said, okay, find your go ahead and you know, pick this apart. Tell us what's wrong with our methodology, tell us what's wrong with our research studies?
Et cetera, et cetera.
They could not do it, they would not do it, and the ones who did come back had absolutely lame, non scientific complaints about things. So on the eighteenth of November, the Trump Administration's Health and Human Services published a study with the detractors included that, as a matter of fact, it's not a good thing for children who might have other mental health issues to get surgery that cuts off their vital parts so that they can pretend to be
a different sex. What happens all of those people, what did you call it? Misanthropy? There's a fine line between.
My ideal misanthropy, and it's.
Because so much of that is part of the progressive project. If we can't remake humans in the imagery, and these are children who are victims of these god awful, evil, vile adults who want to use them as experiments to advance the progressive project that destroys human nature. That's my there's the explanation of the modern world.
Well if I if I, Well, the problem is, as you said, if you give the surgery to a kid, they can't really experience pleasure. In other words, their entire rest of their life is an anti climax, Richard deserve that were.
He to turn this all into some kind of gender history discussion, We're.
Going to let you go, Richard, although we're going to get to advertise to listeners that you finally found a way to apply the mark gnalia of John Adams to Sidney Sweeney. Because it's a rule this podcast we got to mention Sidney Sweeney as often as we can. It's because, you.
Know, anyway, think that someday, I think Steve said this that if they ever have to make a movie about me, that Sidney Sweeney will play me.
That's my dream.
All right, Richard, we'renna let you go. We'll have me here. Okay, you can just log off when you want, Richard. And yeah, so we never did lucrease you get to the question of his John Adams versus Edmund Burke. But we can go back to that because we'll we've got a lot to go between now in July four of next year. And by the way, Richard's point about a fine line between idealism and misanthropy, I think it was Arthur Kessler who said the problem with the left is something like
the revolutionary left is they love humanity. It's individual human beings they don't like and you see that in real life right oftentimes.
Although I'm not even sure I buy that anymore. St I think it was probably true for a while. But what kind of what kind of evil Frankenstein monster wants to do that kind of surgery on children and celebrates it. I mean, it's just sorry.
Well I have a field theory for that, but we are out of time, and so I have we.
I don't have a lot because we just had a podcast a few days ago, and even the people at Babylon Bee have been staying home and hanging out with their family.
But I do have a.
Few, and I'll make it quick. Chicago, you'll like this one. Chicago kicks off holiday season by unveiling festive, red and green crime scene tape. Okay, Chicago judge hoping twenty third time is the charm for rehabilitating violent criminal. Oh Trump reminds Americans to give thanks for him this holiday.
To get it a second.
Okay, we talked about last time about the turkeys that Trump said weren't truly pardoned because of the auto pen when Biden was president. He pardoned by Biden administration four Times commits violent turkey murder. And then finally, just because we're entering the Christmas season, mal Santa prepares for seasonal gig by cutting off ankle monitor.
All right, get us out of here, John, we got ready.
Always drink your whiskey, meat, buy more books. And Steve, what's the latest AI brainwashing you have for us?
You know?
I can't find it, so we're run overtime anyway. I had one, but I can't. I can't find it on my computer. It's just my desk is chaos. So we'll just have to go that one this week. But that's probably Steve.
You didn't record yourself live for five minutes this time?
No, I didn't. All right, well, we'll be back again next week with you know, a regular episode. So drinking well, of course.
John Adams, I know him.
That can't be.
That's that little guy who spoke to me all those years ago.
What was it eighty five?
That poor man agent to eat him a live? Shoes are right, Empires fall next to Washington.
They all look small.
All alone.
Watch them run.
They will tear each other into peace.
Sis, Jesus Christ is going to be fun.
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