If he if you could only read it in your progressive liberal voice, Olsen.
Is so smart.
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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 it David, ain't you easy on the should have.
Got a giving Well?
Welcome everybody to this edition of the Three Whiskey Happy Hour. It's going to be a little bit different because we were not able to schedule live for our many followers on substack.
We're going to have to record.
This and post it up for you later on this week. So we are going to leave a side headlines for the moment and try to get into some deeper subjects that our listeners are often asking about.
So first of all, I'd like to welcome.
My co hosts Steve Hayward, Cheers and John You.
Hey, John, do you have any liquor yet? Now?
I'm still moving, so I just have this Taco Deli hibiscus tea.
So John, when we come to visit you next week, we're gonna We're gonna take you on a field trip to that fancy liquor store.
No, no, we want to go to the one that's the size of a Walmart.
That's what I mean, the fancy Ohia, the large flicker store.
That'll be fun. And of course yes you do. I don't know about this.
You being there in that kind of lonely looking place with no out alcohol, having to deal with Texans all day long?
How is that going?
Yeah, I would definitely need more alcohol in order to deal with Texans. They're riding so high right now. They have a sense of they have too much confidence and sense of superiority. But that's because their state seeds we covered so much better than everybody else's.
Yeah, this is true.
So and I'm Lucretia, the international woman of not so very much Mystery anymore. In fact, in fact, you could see that I don't even have the right name on my screen if those of you are watching the video rather than listening to the audio. But we've got a
really exciting show for you. We're all very excited about the things we're going to discuss because they are reaching deep into our areas of expertise and the first one is so far out of out of my area of expertise that I'm going to play the dumb blonde and let Steve and John explain the entire thing to me, because they're going to do something about the constitutional the takings clause and property rights and zoning.
Okay, take it away, guys.
John, you want to go first or me? What do you want to do?
I could just briefly describe it. This is the one hundredth anniversary of a case called Euclid versus Ambler Realty, which upheld the constitutionality of zoning. And I've always thought this decision was wrong. I've never looked at it that closely, except me and Steve were invited to participate in a conference that's going to take place this weekend about the
hundredth anniversary. And so it's a puzzle because the author of the opinion at the Supreme Court upholding zoning was Justice Sutherland, who otherwise was quite a believer in natural rights. It's always seemed to me zoning violens natural right of property. That the government telling you that you can only use your property for some small set of uses is a ticking. It's unconstitutional. It's an invasion of your right as a
property or do whatever the hell you want on your property. Steve, however, has a much more forgiving attitude towards the progressives and the strong hand of government to tell us what we can do with our natural rights.
Steve, as usual, you're trying to promoke us with complete disinformation and misinformation.
Well look, yeah, so what listeners should know is Euclid was a suburb of Cleveland, and Cleveland was growing, but.
It was he was a gym, a mathematician.
Who's well, see, that's that's part of the mystery about this is the Euclid case held it up and people think, you know, Euclidian zoning sounds like something to do with straight lines and corners and triangles, right, and and that's an odd coincidence of the name of this case, right, It's it's totally coincidental with the name of the place.
If it had been you know, Tuscaloosa versus Ambler Realty, we wouldn't think of it the same way because sor Ry, Yeah, Lincoln was a Euclidean zoning sounds right to me, nothing to do.
With it, right, It's a Euclid.
Was this suburb, and and it was you know, it was on a sort of a make It.
Would make a lot more sense if it was called City of Berkeley versus amble.
That's right.
Or there are actually a bunch of famous tickings clauses like the involved Berkeley Tibberer all these towns in California which are left wing hotbeds, which have no problem. Uh you know, it's Stevens support of oppressing all of us in our use of property.
Although brief aside on all that I have, I still haven't found the right place to take the picture of those signs. John When you drive into Berkeley and there's a big sign to the city limit that says Berkeley is a nuclear freeze zone, and I always want to sort of crouch down and get a picture of.
That sign with the Lawrence Livermore Lab on the top of the yell above the campus. Right.
Oh yeah, there's one of the sizes right next to the nuclear Yeah, right next to nuclear weapons lab.
Yeah right. And of course it's federal property, so it can't apply. There was.
By the way, I think I may have mentioned this once, there's a loophole in that famous town ordnance from forty years ago said no development, uh, deployment, you know, basing whatever, of nuclear anything. And I always left out they left out testing. They didn't say we couldn't test nuclear weapons. And Berkeley and I thought when a neutron bomb came along that killed all the people and left the buildings, I thought, well, okay, there's a loophole here we can use.
Okay, so so that the thing.
The buildings aren't that great, Steve, I've seen them.
No, wait a minute, that's that's not quite right.
There are in the oldest part of the campus, not the part Juco the north, the north side.
You have some now where John is that nowhere John is.
That's far end of the campus.
But on the north side of campus, which is a very long beauty have some wonderful Julia Morgan design buildings.
Now it's kind of a hodgepodge.
I mean, I have to the University of Colorado at Boulder did the Florence Italy thing, which is the buildings are a uniform designed.
I think that's very pretty.
It's three times the footprint of the Berkeley campus. Never mind, I'll leave that from underside. So but Euclid was on one of those arterial roads out of Cleveland.
This was where you had national highways in interstates.
Clear that development was going to head out that way, and as clear the main road was going to be commercial. And the city came in and said, we don't want commercial, we want it residential. We don't want commerce here, we don't want industry here. And Amberor Realty had a whole big plot of property they intended to develop for a commercial and maybe industrial purposes. And their estimate was that their the value of their land would go down by seventy five percent I think by this down zoning.
And so that's why they sued.
Now Sutherland and we're probably gonna hear from Hadley about this because he listens to us, but also love Yeah High Hadley High Garrett the he was wrote the majority opinion.
Although there's an interesting backstory to this.
That said, well, really, zoning represents the sort of codification of the common law principle of nuisance, you know, use your and he actually quoted the old Latin phrase use your property, so was not to injure that of another. You don't think that's that's his actual reasoning, John.
No, I don't.
I don't think it's incorrect I think it's oh, yes, okay, I agree with you there. But the point is there are people, including some smart libertarians like the rate late Robert Nelson, who was a pal of mine, who said.
Well, if done right, and there's.
Where you put the asterisk and say the if part is crucial and where we fail, zoning done right would lead to nets social welfare benefit, as our pal Richard Epstein likes to say, who also hates this decision because you know, it would resolve land used conflicts and elevate everybody's property rights collectively, and it would get rid of clogging the courts with endless nuisance suits. That would just be a man. That's where the old common law method
probably wouldn't work. Maybe there's some plausibility to that in the real world.
That has not happened.
And even Hadley I have to say that because I went back and looked and his defense of Sutherland in his book about the Great Book about Sutherland said probably more mischief has been conducted under zoning laws and more corruption ever since then than any other kind of regulation.
So I think even he.
Knows that there's defects with the way zoning has worked in practice.
Okay, so let me be the dumb blonde here knows nothing about this and ask you guys, then I actually do believe that allowing people to do whatever they want with their property can.
Lead to nuisances.
And I would argue that if you have ever been on the border, live on the border as I do, and you cross or you've probably done the same thing in San Diego into Tijuana, you cross the border, and the difference is night and day. Now, some of that, of course, is are things like we have mortgages, you know, whereas in Mexico they tend to build houses, excuse me, build houses and whatnot as they can afford to. So it's a hodgepodge number one. Now they don't have inspectors
and things like that. But zoning laws will prevent you know, things like a porn shop next to an elementary school.
So how would you do that without zoning?
Yes, okay, So this is the coast theorem takes care of all this. That's what I don't understand.
I don't know this. This is a genuine question from don't John.
Here, Go ahead, John, but you're no, no, go ahead, Steve. I want to hear what you have to say first.
Well, so, I mean two things to be said about that.
Really, what you're pointing at is not the lack of zoning, but the lack of prosperity. What you're really observing is poverty. Now, there is some chaos at the margins of America. You mentioned sort of things you see out in the desert in Arizona. But ponder two things. One, it sounds like a small but it's not. How did all the famous medieval towns.
In Europe develop? And some of the downtowns on Old America?
I think of, Oh, John, you'll appreciate Doylestown, Pennsylvania. You've been at Doylestown place, right, and that place was built without zoning?
And why did it happen the way it did? Hold that question.
But the point is is all the places that people want to go to visit as tourists or in America, just like a quaint downtown, were places that developed without any zoning in the nineteenth century. By the way, if you try to build Doylestown today, look it up listeners if you want, You could not build it under modern zoning codes.
How dumb is that?
And then the second point is much more significant, and it's one word, and that word is Houston. Houston is the last major city without a big zoning plan. And I used to talk John. I can't believe I never talked about this, John, I knew Bernie Segant I talked before. Well we haven't, but I've never mentioned that. I knew Bernie Segan pretty well thirty some years ago, right, I mean, he's long passed away, but he was the person who
wrote the really detailed books about Houston. And his first question was, how come Houston doesn't look much different from the other major city.
And I've been to Houston.
A lot because I was fascinated with this more than thirty years ago. And I would drive around. You'd see some odd things. You'd see some things you wouldn't see next to each other in other cities. But they weren't like, you know, the pig rendering plant next.
To a school. You never saw the absurd parade of horribles.
The defenders of zoning put out what they do in Houston is they allow neighborhoods at any scale to have their own local neighborhood governance, which means, you know, covenants and things like that, restrictive covenants. But they don't have a zoning board, they don't have the grand comprehensive plans.
And guess what I think of all the major cities.
Houston is the most affordable housing prices for everybody. It is the easiest place to start a business in the country by all the measures of how long it takes to get permits.
And all that.
And it's where especially minorities love to go right, and Houston is thriving by the way. You know, progressives run Houston. They don't mess with this. They kind of figure out, we can mess with a lot of crazy stuff, don't mess with this. And anyway, I used to talk to Bernie not about the takings aspects, as he wrote a lot about that, but we talked a lot about Houston and saying, I don't why people don't look at Houston
compared to Dallas and everyplace else that zone. That makes clear that the dead weight losses of zoning, and even a lot of progressives agree with this now are massive.
End of random John, Yeah, so I thought about it. One is the coast theorem should take care of this problem. So the coast theorem is one of the most influential principles in law and The idea is that as long as you have strong, clear legal entitlements, people will negotiate around those entitlements for the most efficient result. And Coasts, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics, used between property owners as the example.
He said, you know, if you have meant like the ocean coast.
No nost.
So the idea. So the idea is, you know, like if you're His basic point is, Okay, suppose you have the factory upriver and you pollute, right, you could have the right to pollute. Or suppose you're the downstream property owners and you have the right to stop the pollution. He said, it doesn't really matter who has that right, because whoever wants the thing more will pay the other
side to let them do it. Right, So, if it's really worth more to have the pollution and it's better than that polluter will pay the other people to let them pollute. But if it's actually worth more to the downstream proper owners not to have pollution because of their property values, they'll pay the guy upstream not to pollute. And so his point, which you need to have as clear property rights, it does doesn't matter who gets to
develop or not. They will transact around the property right, and the efficient result will occur either way.
So the most efficient result about my example would be that the porn shop owner who wants to also open a brothel right next to the school, We'll just pay off the school and they can have a brothel and have better quality prostitutes I guess, and better quality school.
Films, or the way the government could pay them not to build next to the school if they really thought it was worth it, and instead of moving.
So, you know, John, this is this is a really wonderful moment that we should savor. It's because I actually think, let me start this again. I actually met Ronald Coase a few times. I mean, he was like ninety at the time, but he.
Was just a wonderful short guy.
He was really delightful, and he actually kind of admitted once that he wrote that famous article for listeners who don't know what, referring to his article is called the Problem with Social Costs When nineteen sixty I think, are sixty.
One the journal from the thirties?
No, no, no, no, it's not that far back. No, it's it's the late fifties. But the reason I know that is because Milton Friedman wrote about this. He went to a little seminar where Coast presented a draft of the article, and Milton Friedman said, I went in completely skeptical, and by the end I was utterly convinced he was right. The thing is the problem with social cost. I'm pretty sure it's nineteen sixty one or thereabouts in the journal I think of Law and Economics, when it was just nineteen.
Sixty Okay, I was wrong as usual. But the post theorem he actually published in the thirties, and then I don't published it twice, But go ahead, I.
Don't think that's right. However, here's two points about it. One is, I believe it is still true. It is still the most cited article in law reviews and economic literature.
In his I think, ever the most psycho article.
It's just humbling, and but the one reason for that is and here's the second point where the fun comes.
I heard him once admit.
That he wrote it in a deliberately he not quite deliberately, but sort of a perverse, obscure way to make people get headaches. I think it'd be fun, John if you and I made Lucretia read it, because our head would explode.
No, I mean, I'm happy in my ignorance. Thank you. I do want to ask you, guys.
It is great. He was a wonderful, great artist.
It's a great idea.
There's other stuff.
That's for me, okay, But I do have a question for you then, because you you alluded.
To some of the other kinds of.
Forces, influences and so on that would keep people from from creating nuisances with their property.
Absent zoning laws.
I want to bring in the only thing I know about zoning, which isn't really zoning, but as homeowners associations, which are those kind of more private agreements. Now, mind you, the piece of property that I wanted to buy because of its amazing location was already owned by or you know, some kind of association, so there was no choice but
to agree to their idiotic anyway. And just so you know, the homeowners association called up mister Lucretia one day and said, you know, you're building a house and we haven't.
Got your plans.
And he said, oh that you know, I'm sure that's something that the builder's supposed to take care of the contractor. And she said, well, we don't have them. And if and the house was just about done. And if we don't have them and you turn them in and we don't like it, you'll have to tear your house down and start over. Like Yeah, but they did tell me that, I that my my dragon for Halloween was out three days too early and they were gonna find me for it.
Okay. So I have.
A huge banner in my garage that says defund the HOA. So I'm, as a conservative, sort of torn between this. I have seen the result of no zoning, right. However, I also don't like all of this.
Yeah, my property.
I get to do what I want to, very basic natural right, right, guys?
Am I right?
Yeah?
Yes, okay, Well we conservatives like to argue about these things, don't we.
Well yeah, most different because the HOA you gave it up in the contract, you signed it.
I did it.
I was forced into it though. Well yeah, okay, what about when they change it them?
I hate them, but yeah, I know you're right, My Karen's right.
I actually think those things could be successfully challenged legally.
But that and.
They have been to some extent, like when they have interfered with First Amendment rights to fly flags and things like that.
We can't put up political science.
Right.
But now, John, so you went to the coast theorem as the remedy, and well, that's interesting, and I think that's basically right. And I can actually play out a coast a little better than you did a coast theorem resolution of Lucretia's brothel and porn shop.
Next to a school. But really, there's the takings issue.
Elementary school, elementary.
Well okay, I mean.
Well these days okay, yeah, no, I remember the old joke of Actually it was Jesse Helms forty years ago he said, you know, really, maybe we ought to encourage sex education in schools because no one will know how to do it. And here we are with a collapsing fertility rate.
I'm I'm interested, no interest. How is it even possible?
Ahead?
Go ahead?
But John, the bigger question is Ambler Realty said they're going to lose three quarters of their value of their land.
Isn't that a taking justice?
Sutherland too easily accepted the proposition of the defenders.
Of EUCLID that that's merely I don't think that's true. Now, I think we have very.
Well functioning landmarkets and can say pretty confidently that you'd lose a lot of value from a different zoning scheme and other regulations. I mean that was true in the Lucas case, for example of nineteen ninety two.
Right anyway, And the point.
Is if you struck, if you overturn euclid or modified it, it wasn't mean you could not have zoning at all. It only means you would have to pay for it, and you'd have to find out some scheme to transfer the gains from the winners to the losers.
And that's part interesting.
Well, No, it doesn't say the government can't restrict land uses through their police powers. It just says if someone loses value, you have to pay them for it. You have to compensate them.
It's taking just compensation, like the Fifth Amendment says. And I am reading right now. I'm a little late for this because I'm supposed to present Friday. But Bernie Segen's last book was all.
About about you know, all the ways, which so by the way, he first started writing about this was the late seventies, before you had Nolan and Lucas and a whole bunch of the other cases that have come since then. And he realized that all of those are chipping away at the basis of euclid and so here we are.
Okay.
Does that mean we're going to not have zoning anymore.
No, it just means well, oh look. Richard Epstein's point in his Takings book was if you had a more robust application of takings clause, it would discipline government at all levels about what they regulate and how they regulate. And by the way, the Lucas case, the one from nineteen ninety two, listeners don't know.
This is a guy who bought a Beats front lot between two other.
Houses zoned for residents, paid a lot for it eight hundred thousand bucks or something. The state coastal nanny said, oh, you know, we need to open space, so you can't build on that now.
So he's suton the taking's clause. And they sat in.
Court, well, you know, you can't build a house, but we have a deprived of all use. He could go camp on it on the weekends. The court said, nice, try, But now here's the point. What happened after South Carolina lost They sold the land to a developer to build a house. When the government was imposed with the cost of their regulation, they said, actually, yeah, no, You're right, it's not worth it if you if you have a rigorous understandings of taking the government will rationalize and calculate
what regulation makes cost benefit sense and what doesn't. If it's free to the government, they're going to regulate out the wazoo.
If it cost them, they won't.
That's a really eternal, invernal optimistic view of government, Steve.
I'm sorry, I don't.
Well, I worked in South Carolina.
I mean, they turned on a dime and they stopped confiscating lots from people on the beach who bought them for legitimate purposes.
So it did work there, So.
Now doesn't work in Berkeley with bike lanes.
Okay, all right, sorry, So you know, I gotta go where I actually know things about this stuff.
Okay, that's that's you know, This is.
Uh, This is uh.
This is rather typical of conservatives who could argue with each other, right, I mean, we argue with each other at time.
We argue with each other all the time, and we hear all the time. We hear a lot, especially online, about conservatives attacking other conservatives. We don't really attack each other. We love each other, but we we we we will
bring in some some fighting now and then. Sometimes it even seems, however, as we've discussed on this podcast many times, that conservatives are fighting each other more than they fight the left right And if that interests you at all, if you find that subject interesting, there is in fact a new podcast on Ricochet called Conservative Crossroads with Henry Olsen, who's a senior fellow at the Ethics and Policy Public Policy Center. His podcast doesn't shy away from these disputes.
It leans into them by putting two conservatives who disagree.
I'd love to do that, by the way.
You disagree about an important issue together to hash it out on the air. Every other week, Conservative Crossroads does what most other programs don't do, which is explore conservatives disagreement without name calling.
That would count comment, no comment.
Conservatives Crossroads is the podcast for conservatives who want to understand what's happening to their movement. And I'm sure many of you are familiar with Henry Olsen. If you're not, I will tell you that I've had the pleasure of meeting him. Lovely man but also has a practically encyclopedic knowledge not just about domestic politics and polls and populism and electoral outcomes and how this county voted in nineteen forty two. You know, he could just off the top
of his head. But he also knows so much about international affairs. I mean he wrote a piece on subject a couple of weeks ago about.
What the Irish and the left and the Irish. You know, he just knows everything.
And when there's ever any kind of election or crisis or something, they often go to Henry because he always know what's really going on. It doesn't matter what country it is, it seems like, and you know, he's a great commentator on conservatism. So if that interests you, I absolutely encourage you to turn on that podcast join him and his guest Henry and his guests at Conservative Crossroads every other Monday as a hash the ideas and principles that will secure and decide the future of the right.
Download Conservative Crossroads from our partner Ricochet or on any platform where you get your podcasts. Conservatism is at a crossroads, which is why all conservatives need Conservative Crossroads.
Today. All I can say is James Lodex better watch out.
Yeah right, Actually I really mean it, because I read everything Henry writes.
I don't always agree with him. But god, he's so damn smart.
Oh, I can tell stories.
Pay you a bonus, and you should pay you a bonus. But if you could only read it in your progressive liberal voice.
Olsen is so smart and you're like that, here's all the podcast with us once.
John I have listenership to his podcast.
Everybody listen to Conservative Crossroads with Henry Olsen.
All right, guys, but let's get back to our podcast now.
Uh, you can listen to Conservative Crossroads all the time as long as you don't let it interfere with three whiskey Happy Hour. So there you have it, all right, our next issue, guys, we've had I've had a lot of.
Questions come to me. I've watched a lot of debate.
About this where people just really don't seem to quite get the whole situation. So we're gonna turn actually to John first and foremost, and then we'll pick apart what John did wrong. But a lot of a lot of
questions around the First Amendment. In all of these protests against ice in Minnesota, ice in other places, they're protesting here in my state of Arizona, and you hear this comment about even from idiot Republicans, which I know that that's sort of redundant most of the time, but that, of course there is a right to protest in the constitution, John, is there a right to protest in the constitution?
Not a right to protest? But Congress is not allowed to pass laws of bridging the right of freedom of speech and assembly. And there's yeah, and assembly, So there's a right to I think, to make known your opposition to government policy. You don't have a right to obstruct federal law enforcement if they're carrying out value federal law. So I don't think there's a right. I think there's
a right to protest. And since you have a right to go on public streets and say that as long as you're obeying the law and say you disagree with the government, that if that's protest, I think you do have a right to protest. It's subject to reasonable time, place, and man restrictions. So you can't don't have a right to protest in a residential neighborhood at one clock in
the morning with bullhorns. But I do think the government can't say we're not allowing anybody to have a public demonstration protesting our policies.
Okay, there's a lot of nuances there though, John, I mean honestly a lot of them. You don't have a right to speak where you don't have a right to
be do you have a right for instance? And I'm not trying to bring up headlines, but one of the things that the protesters in Minneapolis have been doing now for some time is taking their rape whistles of God, can you imagine anything worse than some blue hair, Not that you could see it, because she presumably she'd have on a huge coat of the squishy coats and some sort of hat over her ugly blue hair, but with a stupid rape whistle, screaming and carrying on with this
rape whistle outside of a hotel they think ice agents might be and generally making their lives miserable, not necessarily being violent, okay, not being violent. Or the example of the church, let's maybe turn there for just a moment. What was it called the City's Church? That was the name of it. A sort of non denominational, quasi Baptist church. In the middle of a service, Don Lemon and crew
go in and start screaming at these people. They block the parents from picking up their children from Sunday School whatever.
Do they have a right? I mean, that's why I said what I said at the beginning.
Don Lemon says, this is doing journalism and you have a right to protest, and you know, on and on like the idiot that he is. But do you have a right to protest inside of a church?
John?
No, I think you're quite right. You don't have a right to enterprivate property.
Right.
It's actually it's actually related to what we're just talking about with euclid right. The right to own property means you have the right to exclude people, and in fact that the Supreme Court has actually made clear that if you are a private property owner, you don't you are not. The government cannot force you to turn your property into a public form. And in fact, the right to keep people out of your property to prevent them from speaking is your own speech as a private property owner, because
you may disagree with their message. So no, I don't think you have a right to protest in private property, just like you don't have a right to protest that time places and manage it inappropriate. Now, you know, you think about Martin Luther King, you know his point was I'm going to break the law because it's an unjust law and I'm going to be arrested for it. Right the person Martlink, he's not claiming First Amendment right, he wants to be arrested. The consequence of breaking the law
is how he shows the injustice of the law. It right. So that's the opposite of these people saying I have the right to you know, bust into a church and not be arrested for it, or I have the right to enter a hotel and prevent ice agents from getting their rest at night. That's exactly the opposite of Martin their king's approach.
Yes, can I bring up a really funny thing I saw and I the other day the Minnesota National Guard were ordered to provide the protesters with donuts and coffee, and but I follow act. I follow a bunch of really great veterans with a lot of great experience and you know, subsequent careers in law and so on. And one of them came out and said, you know, sort
of hm related to the Mark Kelly incident. If I was ordered to give those lousy communists hot coffee and donuts, I would disobey that law and gladly go to Fort Leavenworth as a consequence when I was court martiall.
Which is kind of what you're saying here, John.
Right, I mean, in a funny sort of way, if you're going to protest and break the law that's not protected by necessarily protected by a First Amendment, either the freedom of speech or the freedom.
Peaceably to assemble.
That was the distinction I wanted to make, actually, which is there is a difference between protests with rape whistles and getting in the way and getting in the face of and peaceably assembling.
Right, you know, what they're doing is obstruction of federal law enforcement. It's a criminal.
Would you agree, Steve Well?
I completely agree, Except my head is spinning because on a now, of course, you're the host today, Lucretia, and you're trying to be reasonable and sober and serious, and that doesn't fit your nature. And no, I'm sitting here thinking, of course, there's a I think.
The line is pretty bright.
I don't think it's hard to draw a right line of what's protest and what is unacceptable illegal behavior. But what we know about what's going on in Minnesota, and question one, not the rhetorical question, why is it only happening in Minnesota. Well, because there's been an organized effort to make it happen there. More and more details are coming out that this is financed organized. Oh, our pal Richard Samuelson was watching this on TV. He said, wait
a minute, recognize that guy. He's been protesting in front of the Heritage Foundation. You have professional protesters. Okay, one thing if you want to, Yeah, that's it. But there you know, the the the you know, docsing the agents and getting their license plates and where they're staying.
In hotels and and and.
Uh so you know this is ah okay, somebody said, and I embrace it, holy which is this is normally your department in the Creatia.
This is the parrot military wing of the Democratic Party.
And I don't want to get off into the guy was shot last week, because that's still a big jumble of a.
Mess and we don't know all the facts yet exactly right.
I don't want to get into all that.
But the point is is that this is not simply let's go, oh my little county here in Santa Sobisco's let's move out of Minnesota for a minute. So I'm driving down to Pepperdine on Sunday and I drive by the county jail, which is actually not downtown, it's actually out of town in little ways. But there's three hundred people with their signs, and why are they there, Well, they want to have their signs. Who will see it? Will people driving by? Not that many people on a
Sunday morning. Now today the sheriff, by the way, this is kind of a not quite a right wing county, but you have a conservative DA and a conservative sheriff. But under California state law, they have to appear once a year before they're county Board of supervisors to say, how are we complying with some stupid state law the Democrats have passed in Sacramento. And I think as we're recording here at seven forty five pm Pacific time tonight, the hearing is still going on before the County Board
of Supervisors. There's no actual business. It's just, you know, let's make the sheriff sweat. Because the sheriff here is very good. He's a very solid guy, unlike the rest of California. And there was a huge protest in front of downtown the county courthouse I saw in the evening news. So now I bet it's not hard to turn out people in a college town like Sandel's obispo. But this is happening a lot of places, and it's organized. I'll just slightly change subjects for a second, not quite entirely.
But you may have caught the news today that it was the daughter of one of the high ranking mallahs in Iran turned out to have a teaching job at Emory University. Well, our pals in the conservative media world publicized this starting.
Ten days ago or so.
So I'm happy to report to listeners that person was fired for Emory today. But I learned it there were protests in front of Emory University or on the campus.
By you know, some group of conservatives. I don't know who organized it. I'd like to see more of that.
I'd like to see counter protests in front of these ice people. I'd like to see protesters showing up at Columbia or wherever that has some crazy lunatic professor who's related to Irani and Mala's And so this is all very good.
I except that, you know what, that's just not what conservatives do a they have jobs, you know, you know exactly, So the problem with that, it's always going to be that way, and then when you do have situations like you know, during the Black Lives Matters protests and Kyle Rittenhouse that that ends up blowing up at them, and then people are very wary of that.
People are wary. Go ahead, go ahead.
Well I agree with all that, except let's roll the tape back fifteen years and we had the tea party protests.
Now very peaceful.
Oh no, oh no, the behavior again.
You know, they would clean up after themselves, whereas the lefts always lose their trash everywhere. But not just that, but the fact but they that did happen, It got organized quickly, and that of fell apart.
And it's a long.
Story, but the point is it's not you know, we actually have some examples of where our team can turn out. How do I'm actually deep in discussions with people about can that be replicated, can be revived, what can make it work?
And I just picked that little.
Data point of some people showing up with protest signs at Emory about an awful Iranian despot unemployed on there and then they.
Fired the person. I mean Emory. It is Georgia, true, but.
Still I think that that it's Emory.
Yeah, but there may be some opportunities here.
I do want to ask John, so, I think this has been interesting and it is against a little bit of a bigger question, not just as it applies to the Don Lemon fiasco. So, the Biden administration for many years used the Face Act to prosecute people who were praying inside of, or write next to, or on the sidewalks of abortion clinics. They weren't violent, they weren't intimidating, but they were there praying.
And you know, the.
Famous examples of it are where the not only did the Biden administration and Diet prosecute these people, but you know they did the full swat thing at five o'clock in the morning, you know, hauling the dad out in front of his eleven kids and that kind of thing. And then they attached to that the KKK Act charges the enforcement It is the Enforcement Act of eighteen seventy one is its real name, right, and which is depriving a person of their civil rights. We discussed that in
a previous podcast. Now, of course, Harmeiat Dylan is wanting to use the Face Act against the like the protests that happened that Don Lemon was a part of just out of curiosity. Do you see in a general sense, not either side of it, but in a general sense, that either the Face Act or the KKK Act is in fact a violation of those rights that you just articulated that protected by the First Amendment right freedom of speech and right to peaceably assemble.
In other words, what is a new lemon test?
Oh, you could see Steve was like waiting for the last ten minutes to say this, but you I know, he's finally I exploded out of the breasshak.
Cake that one. Uh. You know, I don't think the application and the faith of the Face Act by the Bide admonistration the way you described is constitutional as long as they were you know that people who were praying or protesting were doing it on public property right there. You're allowed to exercise your First Amendment rights on the sidewalk, sidewalk.
On the street.
Yeah, but you enter the property of the abortion clinics. And I don't think any of these protests did. And if they did, they you know, the part of why they want to protest is to get arrested, to show the unjustness of the law. The other thing about the Biden administration, what they're doing is they were I think obviously doing it to punish only protests of a certain viewpoint, right, So yeah, I don't think they were using it to
prosecute pro life protest I'm sorry, pro choice protesters. And so if that's the case, then they would have had a good argument that they were the government was still violating the free speech clause. This is very interesting. This is a very fine opinion by Justice Scalia about can the government, even in an area where the government can regulate speech heavily, chew can choose amongst the viewpoints of whose speech is restricted. So this is a case called
riv versus Saint Paul. All these problems have to do with Minneapolis and Sat Paul.
You know, there used to be nice people there too, Justice.
Scleia said, is suppose there's an area of an area where the government is allowed to take action to restrict speech. For example, suppose you know, we allow, for example, the government sometimes to restrict conduct that is speech related, but the conduct is so important they allow the speech to be the conduct to be restricted. But suppose they only
did it for for example, Republican people. Only Republicans were prosecuted in this area, but not Democrats, and Scalia said, even in areas where the government is allowed to regulate, is allowed to control, it can't use its power to favor one viewpoint over another. And that sounds like what the Biden administration was doing. Well, remember so it's still unconstitutional.
Remember what when Merrick Garland was hauled before Congress to try to explain why they targeted, you know, Catholic churches, why they targeted parents at PTA meetings and that sort of thing, and why and the figure I threw out there at the time was accurate.
I don't know if it still is.
Ninety seven percent of the prosecutions under the Face Act were against pro life protesters. If you recall Merrick Garland's answer to the latter question was, well, you know protesters, pro life protesters do their protesting in the daytime where they can be seen. And people who bomb because there was one hundred such incidents during the Biden administration that went absolutely unprosecuted.
Is that the right word?
Anyway, They didn't prosecute bombings of pregnancy crisis centers, they didn't prosecute bombings of churches that had active pro life initiatives that sort of thing, and His answer was that the first happens in the daytime pro life protesters protesting the day and so we can see them on cameras, etc. And these other things happen at night under cover of darkness, and they're a lot harder to prove, and that's why the FBI hasn't prosecuted them.
I got to confess. You may remember, I'm sure the preacher is going to remind me of this, so I'm going to beat her to the punch. Is I was a defender of Meryrick Garland as a moderate, and you did, over the four year period of his term in office persuade and persuade me that he was a terrible attorney general.
Yeah, but that he did that, I didn't do it, John, I mean, we all had a kind of much more optimistic view of him going on into being Attorney General.
We really did.
We expected, based upon his decision making and so forth as ap pellet judge, that he would be Yeah, that he would be a much not just moderate, but rational.
I mean, that's the dumbest.
Thing I've ever heard in the idea that somebody could say that and not expect to be laughed off. You know, the stage is just crazy to me. So I don't blame you for that. You just you have loyalties that that I don't have. That caused you to have to stay with it a little bit longer. But you did, You did come around, Steve.
You, on the other hand, I don't know. Oh, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.
Okay, before we completely thank you for that job. That was what I was hoping to hear, just that kind of analysis. And I've gotten people asking me about it.
Just wants us to submit and then we're good. That's really what this is.
Yeah, no, I didn't.
So this is here's your chance, Steve. I hope that John can think of things to make fun of you here.
So twenty years ago, oh, al Gore.
Al Gore did a documentary, right, I guess it's a documentary called An Inconvenient Truth, and then he followed it on some years later with an Inconvenient Truth something something. But in the first one, twenty years ago, he made a bunch of predictions that he said, we're going to happen as a result of global warming. We now call it, of course, climate change, because global warming doesn't explain enough of the things that they find wrong with what human
beings are doing to the planet. An inconvenient sequel truth to power.
That was the name of it. Sorry, I just remembered. Yeah. Whatever.
Anyway, So I have a list, and I'm not going to go through all of them. But twenty years ago, twenty years ago, al Gore made these predictions that we would that the entire Arctic Sea would be ice free in the summers.
Has that happened, Steve?
Yeah, well I think by twenty fifteen or something, or twenty twenty, I mean some years behind us now.
And of course no, everything he said was wrong.
No more snow and kill him in Jarrows. So all these people went and climbed to kill him in jars so they could see the snow before it was gone. Is the snow gone?
No?
No? By the glaciers in Glacier. I went to Glacier National Park, Yeah no, and had to listen, you know, the docent on the boat had to tell me that, yeah, these glaciers are receding because of climate change.
And all I'm gonna tell you is, damn, let.
Me do it this way instead of going through those things, because I think most of our listeners.
Going to I just want a couple of them.
Yeah, I know.
But so, by the way, you know what ten days from now or to whatever, it's two weeks from now, we're going to be together in Austin. And I won't say the name now, I'll tell you guys later, but we have one of the chief climatistas is on one of the panels, not one of the ones that we organized.
John.
I was sort of taken by surprise that they'd added this third panel, and I, oh that guy. Oh, I have paper on that guy, as they used to say in sort of mafia language.
Right, I'll tell you later about all that. So there's two three funny things about all that.
One is I actually got to meet Al Gore once in person before his movie was for the movie I know, Lucky meet. By the way, actually, I think listeners will enjoy this in person in a small group of people. He's remarkably lifelike. I mean, that's the old joke, right, how stiff he was?
No, he was funny.
He was self effacing. Although except there are two things that were curious. One was, this is two thousand.
He kissed Steve. He sounds like he did a number on Steve.
No, no, no, no, I got him pretty good.
Here.
The one thing that I didn't ask this, but somebody this is like two thousand and six. I'm gonna say, maybe order two thousand and seven. Before two thousand and six, he somebody mentioned Hillary Clinton and he suddenly stiffened up. I try to suppress it, but that was going to be his rival, right he hated. Okay, that was funny. And the other one was I asked a question and I said, so, you know, Vice President Gore, you have said it's a terrible error to think that human beings
can't damage the planet. Rush Limball used to say that, by the way, nor it's too big, we can't possibly damage it, and I thought, and I actually try to persuade Rush once one time. I talked to him that, yeah, the environmental wackos are wackos, but you know, you just take seriously what humans can do. And he's like, that's too hard to do and talk anyway. I take your point about that we can damage the planet if we're
heedless about it. On the other hand, I think you and your friends think that there's no risk to human liberty.
From your endless interventions. Through regulation. What say.
By the way, you know his book Earth and the Balance, it mentions liberty once to say we have too much of it, I wrote along five thousand.
To be honest, right, if it's an X, I'm a moment.
I know you're going go ahead.
Yeah, yeah, And you know it's not my point, but I have to play devil's advocate. If climate change, climate change, the climate.
Changes, folks, oh my god.
Anyway, if climate change is truly an existential threat to all life on this planet as we know it, then of course liberty doesn't matter because in the list of natural rights, life comes before liberty.
Yeah.
Well, his answer was his answer. He was totally befuddled by the question. His answer was, this is a group of conservatives, he a weay to meet with. I should give that little little extra detail about this and uh and he said, well, I would think you conservatives will be much more concerned about threats to liberty from the Patriot Act.
That was his answer back, Oh yeah.
I mean this is two thousand and six unbelievable, right, this is just and right over his head.
Right, So anyway, there's that. And the other thing to say is what I had a second point about all that. Oh yeah, oh you this is fun.
I mean, this is a little bit of a fun war story and boasting. But as you know, Lucretian, this is how you, I think, caught sight of me on the radar after years.
I was gonna mention.
Okay, so I did my own little conzo film call.
An Inconvenient Lie.
No, it was inconvenient truth or convenient fiction. And so I don't know if you ever seen it, John, you can find it on YouTube, I think, and we filmed it that the hair.
You made a movie you made.
And I saw it when I hadn't seen Steve in twenty years.
Right wait, wait, so you made a movie and you were in it, and you guys had not talked for twenty years, and this is how you were brought back together.
Kind of yep, oh, this is this is box off.
I mean, Steve being in a movie is like guaranteed to be rating's death.
It's before you go on.
I know that the thing that's so popular on TikTok, which is the you know, the the chick who's in her car and she's she's got some kind of stand for her phone and she's videoing herself having a meltdown. Now, Steve wasn't having a meltdown, but a good portion. As I recall it, Steve, is you driving in the back of the car or the camera on you?
Yes, you know it's like the TikTok video.
It sounds like the worst movie ever video of a car talking about.
No, I just remember that laughing about it.
Sorry, No, I.
Actually hired a producer to this, you know, a tiny fraction of what Gore spent on his movie, of course, but our friends with pr I put it together.
But what happened was is, uh so I did this thing.
And if you ever saw Al Gore's movie, and you know, if you didn't, don't bother. But there's one scene where he gets on this big fork lift and goes up on this giant like iMac screen to show you this line of where Co two goes and temperature and it's all wrong. And what I did is I had somebody pull out a ladder and I said, I'm going to climb a ladder.
It was so anyway, it was a very comic moment.
Very dangerous by the way.
No, well, actually I got to give that movie once on a cruise ship. But the cruise line would not have a ladder because you're out on the ocean, right.
Okay, never believe that side.
But here's the punchline to all this is our friends at pri I did something very clever. They rented a theater in downtown San Francisco, announced it like a premiere of a movie, packed the place out, and the New York Times sent their cultural reporter, and the culture reporter Jesse McKinley was his name.
He wasn't, you know, a political reporiler. But he posted a big feature in The Times that ran on a Saturday morning and it says something like finally a.
Foe for Gore.
And that headline was changed within five hours, by the way, But it was all about really funny stuff. Because I said, so you know it is, I'll find a story. I can still find it somewhere and post it. I said, you know, mister Hayward, who is saw we say big boned.
You should assumed them for I means times committed Lucas look asm against you.
Actually wait, wait, wait, I have to honestly tell you, Steve, what happened was is I saw that somehow I came across that. I think probably whatever I saw your name. So I tried to look you up in the early days of Wikipedia, and what it said was this is true, and this is how I ultimately found him, because it said I think you were at Heritage or somewhere. Ay, you are at a and that's how I found you.
But it said Steve Hayward had looked at himself in this movie and decided enough is enough and went on a diet.
That's true.
Yeah that was, but that was in Wikipedia.
Yeah, I know.
But you know who the Wikipedia entry, John, You'll love this. It was Ted Frank did my Wikipedia entry.
Really I love That's a great.
Guy, the amateur. So this whole operation just compounds itself.
Okay, so before we it is spinning, I'm gonna bring it back to one important point so that they that our listeners don't think we've completely gone off the rails. And that is one of one of al Gore's big predictions after Katrina it was proven to be true, was that there would be all of these extreme weather events caused by climate.
By climate change, and see it works, and you know people, you know, millions of people were going to die as a result of these extreme weather events caused by climate change.
What's the truth of the matter, Steve.
Well, I haven't mastered it, but I think landfalling hurricanes can in the US continue to decline over like a sixty year period, right, Not just.
That, but fatalities from extreme weather events have declined precipitously.
Well, that's a resilience thing. But that's I mean, that's significant. But it's technology all the.
Measures of you know, drought and all the rest of that.
I mean, the great thing about climate change is it can apply to anything.
Here's a little, tiny.
Little footnote. That's funny if you go back twenties plus years ago, when Robert F. Kennedy Junior was really crazy and it was a climate change fanatic, he attacked climate change as a phrase.
He said, it's global warming.
Climate change is the deceptive language of the anti environmentalists until everybody embraced it because they had to because it wasn't working.
Okay, Yeah, And by the way, I wish can I just say, sitting in Austin, Texas, where one inch of ice has brought the state to a complete halt for three days, I welcome global warming.
I want it to be warmer. I don't want there to be any ice caps. What's wrong with having free passage up north? If it's warmer, things grow more, There's going to be more food. More people die of being cold than being hot, and I wish out we're right and it was getting too hot.
Actually shows you how far sighted Trump is wanting to acquire Greenland now before the Iceman place is glorious.
So stop for a second, and this is this is not funny. I read earlier today that twenty people in New York City died, presumably of exposure. The implication is that the homeless people dying of exposure. Okay, but that I mean, they've had extreme storms, cold weather storms and that sort of thing. The reason that those people died. They don't want to come out and say it against Mindami Swami Wami, but he's stopped policies that tried to force homeless.
People to go into shelter. Yeah, and.
Again wait, not enough information to make any sort of blanket statement here. But my point is is that resiliency isn't the whole story.
Sure well, I mean this will sound callous on the surface. The fact that it's only twenty is actually remarkable. More people die of cold weather every year all around the world than hot weather, and those numbers would have been much larger, you know, fifty sixty, seventy eighty years ago, I mean, you know, order magnitude larger.
So especially yeah, shutting down gas natural gas pipelines because there's just not enough to go around in a major event like that, it could have been much much worse.
I get I get it.
Okay, anyway, I'm I'm going to go with the fact that there have not been as many hurricanes or extreme weather events.
Go ahead, go ahead, this is your well.
If you want to sort of end with the Gore business, if you want to know what a it has been, he has been so.
First of all, the whole Davos thing a week ago, more than a week ago.
Now, it's amazing how little climate change was talked about, even by the people. They left all the major people left in out of their speeches. Second, Al Gore was there. I don't know why, probably because there's nothing better to do. But he had some little meeting of you know, let's gather and talk about climate and I think only like twenty people showed up.
I mean, it is so over for those guys. They have a lot of mole mentment, bad policies, but it is over for these people.
So yeah, that's that's been a pretty constant theme for even by people on the left. Our friends who write for Liberal Patriot, which includes Henry Olsen. Yeah well now right, yeah, no, I actually I read them every day. I want sometimes I get so angry, not with Henry but with some of the others with the obligatory and gratuitous Trump bashing that has to happen before they say, look, Democrat, you're being a bunch of idiots and you're never going to win election again.
Do they want to keep those guys reading?
So I think that's okay, I know, but that doesn't mean I can't point it out all right time for babyl MB's guys too cold to start civil war?
Right now? National agrees.
This won't make sense to us, because it didn't make sense to us when there was a reference to it last week. But I'll say it anyway. Nations starting to wonder if people who spend life singing to toddlers on YouTube might not be all there mentally.
I guess you have to be there.
I don't know what this refers to, but because I don't follow it, tragedy as entire studio audience drowns in flood of Jimmy Kimmel's tears.
Oh know what that means.
Yeah, he cried on his late night show about the guy was shot in Minnesota. Man again, it's supposed to go off air too, and then he came back.
Yeah, it's horrible.
So this one's for you, John J. Sixers wishing they had thought of branding themselves legal observers us posts Minneapolis on Craigslist fifty dollars our best offer. Finally, w NBA or w NBA players vowed to continue missing layups until Ice withdraws from Minnesota. Oh boy, sorry, all right, you guys, your turn.
Shrinky Whisky, Neat, buy more books and Steve, what has AI given your given you today?
Yeah?
I kind of failed today.
I asked chat GBT several times to give us a debate between Hamilton, so I thought we might talk about Hamilton, and we didn't. Between Hamilton and you, you John U debating about executive power.
And I tried several in.
We would have no differences.
Well that's the thing, and I think that's what up right.
It's so I'll just give you a couple of lines and it's written kind of in you know, the cadence of either Wrap or the Hamilton musical.
What's that's it?
Or thing about?
Yeah?
So Hamilton step aside unitary executive fanfit king.
That's you. See you read the constitution like it's doing your bidding.
Okay, I'll skip a bunch and then here's you you John u icy, smug, bold talk from a man who loves centralized control. You'd rationalize the weather if it fit your role. Agencies run wild, Congress hides and defers than court's rubber stamp. What's courts rubber stamp rules?
Nobody voted for. That's all stupid. I'll try something better for next year.
It's John. Wait, so that we don't end up with stupid.
I have a I have one last battle. Frustrated dun Lemon wonders what a guy has to do to get sent to men's prison.
Bad, bad, bad.
Yeah, we'll be we'll try next week. We're on the road again next week to who knows.
We're together, So maybe we have a breakfast episode.
That would be fun.
But we want to we do want to go back to substack because I it's it's a mixed fact.
There's something's about we'll.
Figure it out.
Just because Steve freezes with funny faces all the way through, it actually makes.
It a lot of fun to watch.
Exactly, Thanks everybody, bye.
To my train of thought.
Recent in section got switched down the menus infection, and.
Now he spread the infection.
That you bad down your woad.
Whoa you know, blow with leg. Yeah, every morning at the cracking down, the jumping in the water, roll around the house.
It's really fine. The only water wall going on. Ricochet joined the conversation