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