Glenn Beck and Jonathan Rauch dissect the dangers of "new Jacobins" threatening constitutional checks, drawing parallels between modern Minneapolis riots and the French Revolution's mobocracy. They analyze the Clinton trial's lack of defense, Supreme Court tariff arguments under the IEPA, and AI policy failures where states cannot curb federal overreach. Discussing ChatGPT defamation and mass unemployment from Player Piano, they argue for a liberty-enhancing economy and legal torts to prevent a "kept citizenry" before AI achieves sentience or human rights. [Automatically generated summary]
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What destroyed the French Revolution were many of the same types of voices we're hearing today?
These are riots.
They are people who are inebriated by rage.
I think it was a miracle that saved his life, actually.
People today talk like they want to kill each other.
And I said, Congressman, they were actually trying to kill each other.
That's what the Alien Institution Acts were.
Jonathan, thank you so much for coming on.
I am, as you know, a big fan of yours.
And as I said to you before the interview started, what I like about you is I get the same thing from you that I get from the Constitution, and that is you're not always on my side.
And that's how I know somebody's reading the Constitution the right way is it doesn't always cut my way.
And you're an honest broker, and I've always appreciated that over the years.
I want to talk to you.
You bet.
I want to talk about your book, Rage in the Republic.
I mean, the name kind of says it all, and it's right where we are.
Why did you write the book?
Well, you know, the book itself coming out before the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence gives us a chance to take stock of not just where we are, but who we are.
And the first half of the book looks backwards.
It looks at really what were the unique characters and actions that came together to create the most successful democracy in the history of the world.
And to do that, I compare two revolutions.
It's really a tale of two cities, Philadelphia and Paris, both of which were experiencing growing violence.
This is after the revolution in Philadelphia.
But one, Philadelphia, stopped almost on a dime.
The violence ended with the ratification of the United States Constitution, a system that allowed for pressures to be vented within the system instead of on the streets.
Paris, of course, turned into a bloodletting known as the terror.
And so I explored that by looking at a common denominator in the form of Thomas Paine, who was one of two of our great leaders of the early republic that was involved in both revolutions, the other one being Lafayette.
What really comes out of this, as you, I think, really poignantly noted, Glenn, is that we've been here before, that the rage we're seeing, many of the voices we're hearing, we have seen and heard before.
And it is a caution, sort of a cautionary tale of what destroyed the French Revolution were many of the same types of voices we're hearing today.
The second half of the book looks forward and asks, can that unique American republic survive in the 21st century?
And it looks at everything from robotics to AI to global governance, like systems like the EU.
And I believe that we can, but the key here is, yeah.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
Give the key and then we're going to come back.
I want to start at the beginning first, and then we'll get to the second half.
But go ahead.
The key is.
Well, the key is for us to remember who we are in this moment.
And there's a lot of effort to sort of discard the U.S. Constitution and the values that brought us here.
Those values are going to be the very thing that will allow us to survive this century.
So let's go back to Thomas Paine and the difference between the American French Revolution.
It's interesting to me.
He was involved in both of them.
Washington seemed to get it.
I believe Hamilton was the other one that understood this is not the American Revolution.
Jefferson didn't.
Jefferson thought that it was very similar to the American Revolution.
What was it that Washington saw that Thomas Paine did not see?
Well, Paine is, without question, one of the most fascinating historical figures I have ever researched.
He is just extraordinary.
Keep in mind that when he landed in Philadelphia two years before the Declaration of Independence, he had to be carried off the ship.
He was a wreck.
He had failed in everything he had put his hand to, marriages, employment.
He had been fired from every job he held.
And he sort of washed up on these shores.
There was only one person who saw something in that wreckage, and he was Benjamin Franklin.
And Franklin met Thomas Paine when he was penniless and totally out of the running, of anything.
And it was Benjamin Franklin that sent him to this country.
Two years later, he would be called the penman of the revolution.
But where the book criticizes Paine is that he was a believer in pure democratic action, the sort of Rousseau view that the general will produce good things.
The framers didn't believe that.
They believed that the greatest threat to democracies was mobocracy, was what was one framer called democratic despotism.
That's why Madison created a constitution that protected against tyranny of the majority with checks and balances and shared powers.
Paine didn't sign on to all of that.
And when he went to France, he did not argue for those what were called precautionary measures.
And it damn near killed him.
He came within a very short period of being guillotined.
Yeah.
And I think it was a miracle that saved his life, actually.
So tell me the right now, you are looking at a country where you hear all the time, democracy, democracy, democracy.
And that should be cautionary to anybody who hears that.
If you're preaching for a democracy, that is not what we are for a reason.
And people don't believe, they believe majority rules.
They believe that's important.
They want to get rid of the Electoral College and everything else.
Explain the dangers of majority rules.
Yeah, that's exactly right, Glenn.
And there's a chapter in the book called The New Jacobins, and it is a chapter that looks at this growing movement to strip away powers of the Supreme Court, pack the Supreme Court, dump the Constitution.
You have leading legal figures who are saying that the U.S. Constitution has to go on the 250th anniversary of our independence.
This is the most successful and stable democracy in the history of the world.
And you've got law professors telling people the constitution is our problem.
And what they are really restating is what we heard in the French Revolution, this belief that we just need to strip away those barriers to democratic action.
That historically has proven a disaster time and time again.
The irony that I point out in the book is that when you look at these past systems like the French Revolution, they tend to produce a single tyrant.
So at the end, what they do is they melt down and then the people embrace a tyrant like Napoleon.
And that's the greatest irony.
When people talk about the Athenian democracy, the Athenian democracy collapsed.
And the framers didn't want the Athenian democracy because they saw it as a mobocracy.
That is always the case, isn't it?
I mean, very few revolutions end with the people who started them.
I think we're one of the only ones that ended with the people, because it always ends in a mobocracy.
And then people are screaming out, somebody make this madness stop.
And that's when you get your dictator.
I mean, that's the way it always happens.
It does.
And Paine came to understand that.
You know, I always think I'm a big film noir buff.
And I remember there's a great line in a film noir movie where Fred Murray turns to the femme fatale and says, I love you so much.
I only wish I liked you.
And that's sort of what happens with a lot of people with Paine.
He died without any friends.
He alienated everyone.
He started fights.
But the great genius of Paine is Paine knew what it took to win a revolution.
Madison knew what it took to create a republic.
And in many ways, those two figures shaped our destiny.
Paine understood in the end what Madison was talking about when he was sitting in the Luxembourg prison waiting to be guillotined.
He understood that he advocated a unilateral system, I'm sorry, a unicameral system.
He didn't like two houses.
He wanted the masses to have this enhanced voice.
He came to abandon that.
And he came to understand that you have to control democracies if they are going to flourish.
And ultimately, he was saved literally by a swinging door because he was in with a group of Belgians and he was dying.
He was very sick.
And they convinced the jailer to open the door.
Well, when they opened the door, you couldn't see a mark of four on the door.
That was a mark place that all four of them were to be executed that night.
So he was saved literally by a swinging door.
Otherwise, he would have joined his other friends who were guillotined in the French Revolution.
I love that story.
You know, one of the reasons why he had no friends in the end is because I think he was gravely misunderstood on Age of Reason.
You know, he's trying to make a case to the French that don't believe in God.
In fact, relate to God right directly to the king and government and they're not seeing any of it.
We have a letter, and I'll have to share it with you sometime.
I have a letter in Thomas Paine's own handwriting where he is writing back saying to the founders, What are you doing to me?
I'm trying to make this case.
I'm not talking about, you know, America.
I clearly, I saw the miracles.
I mean, he is misunderstood as this grand atheist, and he's really not.
He doesn't believe in God the way necessarily I believe in God, but he is not an atheist at all.
No, he's not.
And what's also interesting about Pain is that he was the ultimate contrarian, and he was also incredibly principled.
You know, he was so unpopular.
He has the distinction of being tried and convicted in three countries and actually being accused of sedition in three countries.
When he came to the United States, taxi drivers wouldn't even pick him up because he was despised so much.
Benjamin Franklin's daughter, as I talk about in the book, was one of his friends.
And she said, it would have been better if he died after he wrote common sense.
That was one of his friends.
So it's an amazing story about this guy who always had a sense of his North Star, but he also had a sense of when he was wrong.
And that's different from a lot of people.
But Paine was never someone they wanted to embrace.
They liked Thomas Jefferson.
You know, he's tall, handsome, erudite, you know, slave owner.
Paine was against slavery.
They didn't like Paine, who was a hard-drinking guy, penniless, who just started fights in every pub he went into.
By the way, one of the reasons he was penniless is that he insisted that his works, he had the first bestseller.
That's what common sense was.
He was the first world bestseller.
And he insisted that not only should some of that money go to people fighting for the revolution, but that the price should be kept low so everyone could afford it.
And I believe two-thirds of Americans had either read it or had a copy of it by the time, which is crazy.
I mean, there's not two-thirds of anything that has been written, except maybe the Bible in today's America.
That's just, that's an outrageous, especially in a time when you didn't have books.
No, it's so true.
And I drove my kids crazy for years because I did nothing but research Thomas Paine.
But he is so darned interesting.
You know, he was a corset maker like his father and hated it.
But corset making may have saved the American Revolution because he hated it so much, he was going to become a privateer, which is basically a lawful pirate.
It was his father through the secret network of corset makers that found out and found him on the ship and took him off the ship.
That ship went out and was absolutely destroyed by a French privateer.
He would have died on that ship.
But he ultimately joined another ship and actually became effectively a pirate.
And the only reason that's important, as I mentioned in the book, is it gave him something he had never had before, money.
When he finished that voyage, he was able to return and study the Enlightenment and go to university classes.
So in some ways, we were not only saved by corset making and a swinging door, but strangely enough, piracy.
You know, I don't know if we ever would have gotten to the American Revolution without common sense.
And I don't know if we would have won it without the American crisis.
Washington, Robespierre, and Common Sense00:08:47
I mean, in a year period, he played such a critical role in clarifying and saying, look, this common sense, this is what we're fighting for and driving us to the Declaration.
And then when everybody is, when we're losing and we're running from the British and everybody is saying, well, this was a mistake, he galvanizes at least the troops behind Washington.
Is it true that he wrote that on the head of a drum?
Well, partially it is true.
What's interesting is that his relationship with Washington was really a father-son relationship.
He rode into Philadelphia with Washington.
Washington credited him with saving the revolution.
When Washington was in the winter at Valley Forge and his troops had no morale left, he turned to Thomas Paine and said, write.
And he did.
And it rallied the troops.
Now, that relationship I explore in the book towards the end of the French Revolution discussion, because I think the greatest disappointment for Paine, and he didn't show that a lot because a lot of people attacked him.
But I think the thing that cut him the deepest was he felt that Washington abandoned him, that when he was sitting in the Luxembourg prison, he did not feel that Washington came to his side.
And reading his letters.
When he left, wasn't it?
I mean, Washington said, this is not the American Revolution.
You're wrong.
And he was upset at Washington.
And didn't Washington at the time make it clear, you're on your own, dude.
You're on your own.
Or is that not true?
I think that it wasn't clear to Paine.
Paine dedicated rights to Washington, which Washington didn't like.
So when he sent Washington the books, Washington didn't respond.
But then when he got sent to the Luxembourg prison, there was no real strong intervention by the United States to save his life.
And you could see it was really having this impact on Paine because Washington really was his North Star.
He believed in Washington.
And that was one of the most telling moments for Paine.
That was a very dark period of his life.
The French Revolution had turned into the terror.
They were going to execute him.
Then suddenly Robespierre was executed instead, and he was released.
But I think it was that break with Washington that took its greatest toll on Paine.
So I'm convinced there would be no American Revolution without Thomas Paine.
But I believe there would be no republic without Washington.
Talk to me a little bit about the mob that started to take root after the American Revolution.
Washington was terribly important, as you know, Glenn, that he was this rallying figure.
It was Paine that gave him the words that he needed.
It was Washington that was the symbol.
People didn't rally around Paine.
In fact, common sense was anonymous.
And actually, one of his originally and one of his greatest critics, John Adams, who I think was a bit jealous of Paine's influence, admitted that when his wife wrote him and said, people say you wrote common sense.
And at this time, Paine was not really that well known.
And John Adams said, I could never have written that.
I think I know who wrote it.
It's a guy by the name of Thomas Paine.
And he wrote to a friend and said, I met him.
And this is a quote.
And he had genius in his eyes.
And that's the same thing that Franklin saw.
And I think the same thing that Washington saw.
So Washington and Madison together helped temper this republic and to create the things that limit the passions of democracy, force compromise.
That's what people today resist the most, right?
They want to just pack the Supreme Court with a liberal majority.
They want to reduce the influence of the Senate to try to force compromise.
All of those things were the rallying cries of the French Revolution.
All of those things were what Washington and Madison rejected.
And in some ways, I think Paine was the voice of righteous rage in our revolution, and Madison was the voice of pious reason.
And Washington preferred Madison after the revolution.
As I say in the book, there's nothing more inconvenient than a revolutionary after a revolution.
And that's what Paine found in two countries.
So let's move to today.
Where's the righteous reason today?
Well, that really gets back to where we are.
And you're so right about that.
I mentioned in the book that I was working on the French chapter of this book.
I was sitting in my office at George Washington.
And all of a sudden, I heard guillotine, guillotine, guillotine.
And I had this sort of odd moment.
I felt like I was being pulled into my pages of the French Revolution.
In fact, students outside my window with a guillotine during the pro-Palestinian protest.
They brought a guillotine and they were listing people they wanted to guillotine from the university.
Now, I don't think that they really wanted to see anyone guillotined, but it made me think, you know, is it possible?
You have that moment of doubt.
After all of our history, could we still lose it all?
And the answer is, of course, we can.
I mean, that's what Benjamin Franklin was talking about when he said, it's your republic if you can keep it.
Every generation can lose this gift that we have gotten.
And what worries me is how the establishment have become the new Jacobins.
Remember, the Jacobins of the French Revolution were establishment figures.
They were journalists, lawyers, aristocrats, much like people today.
You've got Erwin Shymerinsky, Dean of Berkeley, saying the Constitution basically has to be trashed.
You've got, he's just one of a number of people who have said the Constitution is now the problem that we have to get rid of.
Those are the familiar voices.
You also have politicians now who will not openly say that.
But I have talked to senators and congressmen that say nobody reads it.
Nobody cares.
Nobody cares.
It's all about policy.
It's not about the Constitution anymore.
So, I mean, while you can say you love the Constitution, your actions show, no, you really don't.
You don't know it.
You don't revere it.
You don't follow it.
So it's almost a step down from somebody openly saying, get rid of it.
No, you're right.
And that is the thing about rage is that it gives you a license to do and say things you wouldn't otherwise do.
It's addictive and it's contagious.
But what people won't admit is that they like it.
When you look at the streets of Minneapolis and other cities, those people like it.
And it spreads.
That's what happens in these revolutions where people are saying, let's get rid of these precautions.
Let's have direct democratic rule.
That's what we're really talking about here.
The irony, as I point out in my book, is that the Rage of the Republic really shows over and over again that today's revolutionaries become tomorrow's reactionaries.
All of the so-called mountain, as they were called in the French Revolution, Robespierre, Marat, all of them, they were all guillotined.
They were all killed in the end.
And so it's why I quote at the beginning of the book, one of the few Frenchmen to survive from the revolution.
And he observed that revolutions like Saturn devour their children.
And Paine himself made reference to that expression.
And it has proven itself over and over again that revolution unleashes not just the best, but the worst of us.
Revolution Devours Its Children00:05:53
And if you don't have a system that can take those pressures, it consumes you with the rest of the world around you.
Now, that's going to be very important because the book goes into what we're looking at in the 21st century, which is unprecedented.
With AI and robotics, we are looking at massive unemployment numbers.
Even the most conservative estimates are looking at a huge population of citizens that may have to be subsidized by the government.
And the book, there's a lot of research on that.
But this is different about Raging of the Republic as I look at what does that mean about being a citizen?
What does that mean if a large part of our population is supported entirely by the government?
How does that change a relationship to the government?
How do we make this republic work if we are essentially a kept citizenry?
And I explore that and suggest ways that we can avoid it.
But the only way we will survive this is if we return to the principles that created us, including what I call a liberty-enhancing economy, which is capitalism.
People forget that Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith came out the same year as the Declaration of Independence.
And it did not go over well back in Great Britain.
Its success was in the United States.
The framers immediately saw capitalism as the key economic theory to coexist with their political theory.
They realized that unless people are economically free, they can never be politically free.
But they also, I think, had read the first book on moral sentiments.
And that is the part that we completely leave out of the conversation.
If you don't have moral sentiments, the invisible hand of the market will give you everything you want and it will strangle you to death.
And, you know, we think, we thought, because I don't think we've had capitalism, real, true capitalism for a very long time.
But what we are in now, I don't even know what to call it now.
But, you know, we have so what people have a problem with with capitalism, I think, is the fact that there is no, there's no understanding of moral sentiments, our responsibility.
And that doesn't mean just capitalism.
That means also freedom.
As you said, it's a republic if you can keep it.
That requires you to have moral sentiments.
No, you're so right.
This is why I love talking with you.
You're the best read person I know in the media.
And you're absolutely right that people forget that Adams, that Adam Smith was really offering a theory of political economic rules, not just economic rules.
It was an economic model.
He tied it directly into his view of society.
He did believe in morals.
And in that sense, he broke from some people in what's called the Scottish Enlightenment, who sort of downplayed the role of faith and morals in their theories.
Adam Smith did not.
He believed wholehearted in those decisions.
And people often misportray him, as you noted, because they say, oh, well, you know, it's not for the love of the butcher, which is why the system works.
It is self-interest.
But Adam Smith still believed that individuals still needed to make virtuous decisions.
Yes.
Yeah.
I mean, real capitalism, I think, is the greatest charity of all time.
You get to do what you believe.
You pay the price for it if it fails.
You get the winnings if you keep it.
And if you're a good capitalist, you realize the only thing you have to do to win is figure out how to make people's lives better.
You know, give them what they want.
Yeah, give them what they want.
And in an immoral society, then you get into all kinds of problems.
But in a moral society, you get into a, I mean, it works really, really well.
So let me go through a couple of things.
We are looking at so many things where we don't agree on truth, on morals, on anything, on right and wrong.
And if you don't agree with one side, you're evil.
And that works on both sides.
You're either evil on one side or you're a Nazi, according to the other side.
How do we, you know, the secret of America is unum, e pluribus unum.
The one thing we agreed on was the Declaration and the Bill of Rights, that you have these rights and responsibilities, and that's what makes us free and prosperous.
If we don't have that, what do we have?
And how do we get back to that?
Well, I do think that's what we need to be talking about.
You know, I have, I just gave a speech in Prague where I may have irritated my audience and said that I have less faith that the EU will survive this century.
The key here is how can we preserve a republic with the pressures that are coming?
And the book lays out a couple of critical components of that that basically mean that we have to reaffirm and magnify some of the original values that created the American Republic.
Preserving the Republic Against Global Governance00:02:23
That includes keeping government as local as possible, avoiding these global governance systems like EU.
It means trying to maintain what I call a liberty-enhancing economy.
And we do that by trying to not subsidize just half or more of the population, but to try to make wise decisions about what areas are likely to be homocentric and what are going to be robocentric, as I talk about in the book.
And the book actually refers to certain jobs as what I call Gynan jobs, which are, it's actually named after the bartender on the Star Trek Enterprise.
I used to always, as a kid, marvel the fact that Gainan, the bartender, was standing in front of a replicator that could make the perfect Romulus Sunrise cocktail, and yet she made it.
And so I call these Guynan jobs that for some reason, they wanted Gynan to do it.
Now, there are lots of jobs like that, where people still prefer humans, but there are other jobs which will be wiped out by robotics.
And we need to look at that.
But what I'm afraid of is that the usual response in government is, let's just subsidize dying industries and, you know, and penalize industries going on.
That's right.
And it's never going to work.
You're just going to burn money.
The key is to be smart about this.
And we need to lead the world in that.
You know, Kondrakiev is one of my favorite economists from history, you know, Stalin's economist.
And he came up with a Kondrakiev wave.
And he actually did research when Stalin said, you know, which is better, capitalism or communism.
And he's like, let me think that through.
The answer to Stalin is whatever you say.
He was killed after he came up with his wave.
But his whole thing was capitalism will, it's seasonal and it will burn itself out.
It will go into winter where communism and socialism and all this try to take the trees and force them into growth when they have to have sleep and you have to burn out the dead stuff.
And we are headed towards a deep, deep winter and those things have to die.
The Double-Edged Sword of AI00:03:54
You know, as you point out in the book, you're talking about such displacement of people.
You know, I have been, Jonathan, I've been talking about this for 30 years.
I've been warning about AI.
I'm a big fan of AI.
Also, a big proponent of saying warning because it is, it's like everything.
It is a double-edged sword.
It will cut our throat or it will cut the forest down in front of us so we can expand.
But I don't, you know, you get to this place to where if we're not careful, we will have a very few people making all of the money, controlling absolutely everything.
And then we're kind of just sheep that have to be fed by the machine and by the elites.
How do we avoid that?
You know, I talk about that in the book because I ask a question in the book that was asked by a Frenchman who went by the name of Farmer John.
And he was a Frenchman who came to our shores and wrote a book that was itself a rage success in Europe.
And it described what was happening in the United States.
People were fascinated by these Americans.
We were viewed as a type of new species.
And he asked this poignant question.
He said, what then is this American?
It was an honest question because we were the hottest thing of the time.
We were the first Enlightenment revolution.
And we have to ask ourselves again, what then is this American?
Who are we?
And the fact is that people came to this country.
We don't have a legacy of land or shared culture.
We have a legacy of ideas.
That's what makes us unique.
People came here because they could reinvent themselves the way Thomas Payne did.
He came here as a human wreck, as a lifetime failure, and he reinvented himself.
And he said at the time when he landed that there was, quote, something special here.
There is still something special here.
It is who we are.
And we need to make sure that people have this ability to go through self-exploration, to become the people they want to be.
And as bad as jobs are, you know, one of my grandfathers was a coal miner who got black lung in the mines.
And my other grandfather was a cooper, made barrels.
They didn't like their jobs.
Certainly my coal mining grandfather didn't like getting black lung.
But if you asked him who he was, he'd say, I'm a coal miner.
We've always been defined by what we did, by how we were productive.
And we can't go into this century with a huge percentage of our population of unproductive people who have no identity because the only identity they will have then is the government that's supporting them.
So how do they find identity?
I mean, I see, because I think there's like there's two, I am a big proponent of AI and I warn at the same time.
But I use it.
I see it as a tool to allow me to do things that I have in here.
I just don't have the staff of 400 to be able to keep up with what's in here.
You know what I mean?
It can do so much.
And I have a staff check everything, check everything, check everything because I know what it is.
But it's a tool and a great tool.
But there's also a part of the population that is like, it'll do my job for me.
And when you get to that, well, then you're going to be a slave to the technology or to the government or whatever.
Filibuster, Insurrection, and Two Systems00:15:50
I mean, there are people that just want to punch in, punch out, and just live their life.
Yeah, that's what I refer to in the Raging Republic as a kept citizenry.
We can't have that.
And we also cannot create an economy that's fake, right?
You can't have an arts and craft citizenry that just has a bunch of people doing effectively arts and crafts, right?
None of that is going to give them a sense of worth.
So it means that we have to focus on those industries that we still want human beings to be part of and then can be productive.
They are there.
I believe in capitalism.
I believe that there will be those industries.
As you suggest, Glenn, there's going to be a burn off, but then people will shift.
We have to facilitate that by not artificially subsidizing some industries.
We have to allow people to find ways to advance themselves.
What we need to avoid is that if you have a small percentage of productive citizens, they're going to increasingly live separately and they're going to demand more power over how money is spent.
And you're going to have a calcified class structure that has never existed in this country.
And that's what we have to avoid.
But I think we can, but we won't if we follow the way of the new Jacobins, these leaders and this mob that is calling for us to trash the very thing that we will need to survive this century.
There comes a point where everybody, everybody starts to feel sore, you know, where your body is offering unhelpful feedback.
Usually at inconvenient times, you stand up and something like all of a sudden you're like, hey, that's not good.
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Let me go through a couple of, um, a couple of things.
Um, how do we, how do we get to a place to where.
Well, first, give me your thoughts on Minnesota and what is happening there.
Is that insurrection?
Is that a protest?
What's happening there?
Well, I don't like the term insurrection.
People use that at January 6th.
I said it wasn't an insurrection that day afterwards.
I don't know.
Can you define what an insurrection is?
An insurrection is truly trying to overthrow the government itself.
I think these are riots.
They are people who are inebriated by rage.
It's also caused by these politicians who are so similar to what I describe in the book in France.
They are so much like these figures that enabled the mob in France and then ultimately were themselves guillotined and devoured essentially by the revolution.
We're certainly seeing that.
I don't think we're at an insurrection here.
What should worry us is what these people are saying.
That is what it is that they want.
You know, they want instant power.
They want democratic change without those Madisonian precautions.
They want to just get rid of the Supreme Court or stack it, get rid of the Constitution.
One of my colleagues has argued that we have to rewrite the First Amendment because it's, quote, aggressively individualistic.
These are not fringe voices.
Yeah.
But these are not fringe voices anymore.
I mean, these are different figures and they're telling the public, you know what your problem is?
It's this constitution.
It's this republic.
Then it could become an insurrection.
And what we're seeing in the terms of the sort of unrequited rage will spread.
That's the reason I'm so concerned with what we're hearing from Democratic leaders.
They want to ride this rage wave to the elections this year, the midterm elections.
They don't realize that history has shown people just like them who are ultimately declared reactionaries by the mob that they are leading.
But for them, the only thing that's important is the midterm elections.
I tell you, Jonathan, I've been saying this for a long time.
I said this when they first put Michael Moore in the presidential box, maybe in 2004.
And I said, you can't put a revolutionary, you can't put a guy who doesn't fit into that constitutional box and believe in that and make friends because it's not him.
It's the people who are left of him and left of them and left of them that now have access.
And these people will come in.
They believe something.
And they will come in and they'll eat you in the end.
They will eat you in the end.
You think you can control them, but they're actually revolutionaries that actually believe in something.
And when you say we're not in an insurrection, I think that the average person in Minneapolis does not consider what they are wanting or thinking about as an insurrection.
But you are looking at people who, you know, these Turtle Island people who are saying, you know, America was a mistake, never should be, blah, blah, blah, who are actively working to overthrow the government.
Then you have crooked politicians who either think they can control this and use this to their advantage, or I think in some cases to cover their own crimes on something entirely different.
That's just a bad stew.
It is.
And there's nothing more pathetic than watching people like Schumer and Walsh, you know, mouthing these revolutionary and reckless rhetoric lines.
It's pathetic because this is only going to come out one way.
I mean, this mob is not going to embrace those individuals as their leaders.
They are the temporary convenience that they need.
But what they are unleashing could be uncontrollable.
Now, having said that, we have a system that is still working.
We have been stress tested before.
What worries me are these figures like Shimmerinsky and others who want to change the system itself?
Because as long as we keep the constitutional system, I have no question about our survival and that we are going to flourish.
It's only if they take that system down.
And that unfortunately is what a lot of these law professors and others are arguing for.
So I agree with you.
However, there is a step in between this, and that is to so pervert it.
I mean, how does the president prosecute people for crimes in states where the prosecutors or the attorney general or the even federal judges will not stand with the Constitution and the rule of law of the United States?
And I'm not saying that there's a lot of them, but there seems to be a lot more than I thought there was.
No, there is.
I think the New York legal system was an example of that.
You know, I covered the Trump trial and I was in the courtroom and he was tried and convicted.
And when I came out, there were people dancing in the street.
It was complete ecstasy.
It was true rage that was being unleashed and the joy of it.
And the legal system failed.
Eventually, it corrected it.
Eventually, appellate courts did the right thing.
I'm hoping they continue to do the right thing.
But this is a problem.
You know, you have jurors and judges who can ignore the law.
But we've had that throughout our history and we have survived.
Fortunately, we have a multi-layered system.
It doesn't always happen as fast as we want.
Has it been this bad?
Well, yeah.
I mean, if you look back at like the Jefferson Adams period, you know, the, I once was in a, in a hearing and a member said, you know, Professor, don't tell us about the forming of the Republic.
People today talk like they want to kill each other.
And I said, Congressman, they were actually trying to kill each other.
That's what the Alien Institution Acts were.
You know, they wanted to kill each other.
So don't pretend that your problems are unique.
There's this dangerous conceit from people on the left that we've never faced these problems.
Of course we have.
And you're the same voices that we've heard throughout our history.
The key that we have to keep our focus on is as long as we preserve this system, we can outlast these people as we have in other ages of rage.
That's why they are so insistent on trying to change the system.
I had a debate with one Harvard professor who admitted that they want to change the Supreme Court because they can't make radical changes to the constitutional system if the Supreme Court is still around.
He said that openly.
So this is a concerted knowing effort to try to get rid of the Supreme Court and then to push through these radical agendas to change our system.
And the scary thing is, is I think they'll do it.
I think they'll actually do it if they're given the chance.
So let me ask you this about changing the system.
They're talking about the zombie filibuster, getting rid of the zombie filibuster.
And getting rid of anything related to the filibuster scares the heck out of me.
But from what I understand, the zombie filibuster puts it back closer to the way it's supposed to be, where you actually have to stand up and make your case.
I mean, if my understanding, filibuster was to slow everything in government in our Constitution is just meant to slow the process down so you don't do anything hasty and you give people time to think.
And that's what the filibuster was supposed to do.
But now you just filibuster and then it's over and it needs a 60 vote to bring it to the floor.
Getting rid of the zombie filibuster, good idea or bad idea?
Well, I'm not too sure.
It was so essential to have Strong Thurman with Bacon in his pockets trying to talk for days on end.
Certainly made for good theater, made for a great movie with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
I think the key here, what I talk about in the Rachel of the Republic, is that we have to look at preserving these minority protections in our constitutional system.
Everything from the filibuster to the Electoral College, ways of guaranteeing that we have, for example, a federalism system where states have real power to go their own way.
All of those are bulwarks against a tyranny of the majority.
And it's why many of these people on the left want to eliminate that.
You have law professors that said, even without, I talk about this in the book, you've a couple of Yale and Harvard law professors that have argued that they could change the Senate without a constitutional amendment so that you can give more representation to more populous states.
I have no idea how they think that comports with the Constitution, but it won't matter if you can pack the Supreme Court successfully.
Those things become less important as to whether you can make the case as opposed to make the court.
Yeah, Alan Dershowitz told me if they pack the Supreme Court, that's the end.
That's the end.
Let me just ask you a couple of quick questions here.
I have been, I held my tongue on Pam Bondi for a year.
And I've seen her do some, what I think are stupid things.
And I've also seen nothing, seemingly, none of the big guys go to jail.
Nobody seems to be paying a price.
And that's one of the things that has to be fixed or clarified.
If you don't have a case to put somebody in jail, then explain it and move on.
There are some people who just want people to go to jail.
I don't.
I want people tried.
I want it fair.
And if they're guilty, put them in jail.
And it doesn't matter if they're at the lowest ladder or the highest ladder.
But right now, America is starting to think that there are two systems of justice.
And it was this idea that maybe it's if you, if you're on the left, you get away with it.
And you're on the right, you get hammered.
I don't think so.
I think it might be power.
And Pam has not been putting cases together.
Or I'm going to be really fair.
This is my question.
What am I missing?
You know, I worry that maybe, because I just started coming out and saying, you know, you're either crap or get off the pot.
You know, what is happening?
Give us some updates here.
And I'm not a prosecutor.
I don't know anything about all of this.
And I'm afraid that I'm missing something that would slow this process down to almost a snail's pace.
But I also believe we're running out of time.
If you don't start prosecuting people that did do things that were wrong, nobody's ever going to pay a price.
And then we have just this out-of-control government just going on both sides.
Well, it is a legitimate concern.
I've been critical of some aspects of Attorney General Bondi, and I've been complimentary of others.
Although I look, that's certainly been the case of every attorney general in my lifetime, every president of my lifetime.
But a good test of that is going to be the Clinton impeachment, sorry, Clinton contempt sanction.
You know, the Clintons did an extraordinary thing by telling the House Oversight Committee to pound sand.
They had a legitimate subpoena, lawfully issued, but on a bipartisan vote, and they just said, we don't feel like it.
It is the most open and clear case of contempt I have seen in my lifetime.
Now, I think the Clintons are counting on the fact that they might be able to play this out until after the Trump administration.
If there's a Democratic president, they'll scuttle this effort.
But what if they don't?
You know, it does take a long time to put cases together.
What if the next president's name is Vance?
The fact is, I don't see any cognizable defense here.
One of the things I've been writing about is this is the first time where there's not even a suggestion of a defense.
It's just basically we're the Clintons and we don't feel like showing up.
AI Rights and Tariff Authority00:07:57
So this would be the world's fastest trial.
Now, this goes to your point, Glenn, that they may be counting on the fact that they would be tried in Washington, D.C.
And it's pretty hard to imagine a jury pool in Washington without at least one person who wouldn't convict the Clintons if they had a video of them committing heinous crimes.
But they can't count on that.
And this is going to be a real test to our system.
Democrats voted to hold them in contempt.
That's another difference here.
So you now only have a bipartisan vote for the subpoenas.
You have a bipartisan vote to hold them in contempt.
And the Department of Justice needs to move with the speed of the Biden administration.
They went to zero to 60 on Bannon and other figures.
We'll see if they can do it here.
How is SCOTUS going to rule on tariffs?
And if they rule against the president, what does that mean?
Well, you know, I've always said the odds are against the president on IEPA.
But I have to tell you, after the oral argument, I said, you know, it's not as clear as people suggest.
The justices did, I would say, a majority have serious questions about the president's interpretation.
But if you look closely, they had different reasons.
And so how that cycles out in the final vote is something we'll have to see.
But if they do, wait, wait, wait, wait, because if they you don't you wouldn't say I have a reason different than yours, but I'm going to vote the same way as you.
Or what does that mean?
Well, because some we've seen justices who disagree with an interpretation of the majority, but still wrote a concurrence with the majority.
And they can choose whether it's a concurrence or a dissent.
So is it possible you could have a divided court, maybe a plurality that preserves the tariffs?
Yeah, they could fracture on the rationale.
And you could have some that say that they will concur with upholding the tariffs.
All of that is possible.
But if the administration loses, there are a myriad of other tariff provisions that they can rely on.
So the tariffs are not going to immediately go away.
Also, even if the court rules against the administration, it could make any relief prospective so that they don't have to return the money.
So there's a lot of elements here that we don't, we really don't know.
And that's why we're all waiting to see that opinion get handed down.
Your guess?
You know, I would always guess that because IEPA is silent, that they lose it.
I thought that Solicitor General Sauer did one of the best jobs I've seen in front of the Supreme Court.
And man, he made some great arguments.
And his main argument is: look, IIPA is based on a prior statute with the same language.
And you said under that statute, a president has tariff authorities.
I thought that was a real haymaker of a point.
And we'll have to see if the justices, when they drill down on this, go, well, yeah, that is a bit of a problem, isn't it?
So you were talking about AI, and you talk about it in the book.
And you also talk about local, local, local.
Make sure everything is as local as possible.
Our AI policy now is that states really don't have much to say about anything because they don't want to slow down the process.
I think this is extraordinarily dangerous.
I mean, I don't care what it is.
The people have a right to say, no, I don't want to do it that way.
And, you know, in every state.
How do you feel and will it stand if that's what we actually end up with?
That, no, the federal government has control of this and they're going to make all of the rules and no state has anything to say about it.
You know, I talk about this in Rage in the Republic and saying that I don't think we're going to get this cat to walk backwards.
AI is now integrated so thoroughly in various industries.
I do not think that any given state is going to be able to seriously curtail it or even a government can curtail it.
I don't think the EU could curtail it if they wanted to, which they don't.
So AI is here and it's going to continue to grow.
What we can do is to reinforce its protections.
For example, I talk about in the book how AI has been accused, for example, of inducing suicides or enabling suicides with teens.
And these are shocking cases where AI is advising teens how to hide marks of prior suicidal attempts.
The argument of these companies is, well, look, it's not like we did it.
That's AI.
Look, you replaced employees with AI.
That's why these teenagers are talking to AI is because there used to be a human there.
If you do that, I think you should treat the AI like an employee and you are liable for it.
In my view, they can sue under TORD, which I teach.
Those are the types of precautions that we can have.
The same thing is with defamation.
In Raging Republic, I talk about the fact that ChatGPT defamed me in a bizarre situation that the Washington Post and New York Times got involved in because ChatGPT said that I had sexually assaulted students on a trip to Alaska while teaching at Georgetown.
Now, every aspect of that was hallucinated.
I've never taught at Georgetown.
We don't take students on field trips.
I've never taken a student on a field trip.
I've never been accused of sexual harassment or assault.
And I think that the Washington Post was a bit disappointed when they found out it was untrue.
But then they, you know, but they then sort of begrudgingly said, we're sort of interested because this is the only pure hallucination we've ever encountered because we can't find any basis for hallucination.
There's not even an article that would cause hallucination.
Now, the fact is I regret now that I didn't sue.
I've never sued for defamation, but I almost regret now that I didn't because the solution of ChatGPT was to ghost me.
So if you go on and ask ChadBT about Jonathan Charlie for years, and I think it still is still the case, but it might have loosened up a little recently.
But for years, I didn't exist.
They just basically ghosted me.
And I write in the book, this sort of captures the inherent dangers of AI in these companies, that if you raise defamation, they then eliminate your existence so that you disappear.
And there's no right to be recognized so they can get away with it.
That is a heck of a lot of power.
And it's largely unchecked.
And we do have to look at things like that.
How far are we away from somebody, you know, because people are already marrying their, you know, their avatar, their, you know, chat GPT avatar.
And you can see people, it's coming, where they will say, this is my husband.
This is my spouse.
This is my best friend.
You don't have a right to terminate him in the, you know, the next upgrade.
You don't have a right, et cetera.
And as ChatGPT and AI becomes ASI or AGI, you're going to reach a moment where it's going to claim or people will claim that it should have rights, should have human rights.
The Player Piano Problem00:02:26
Yeah, I don't think...
Go ahead.
Yeah, not in the short term.
I don't think in the short term we're going to see that.
The question that you're raising is a good one is the degree to which AI and robotics are combined and you have greater sense of interaction.
It can give the illusion of sentience.
And sentience has always been the key issue as to whether you have rights.
The reason that human beings are treated differently from other animals is because of sentience, the awareness of who you are, consciousness.
And so this is sort of the West World type of theory that eventually they could break through to sentience.
We're a long way from that.
I think that what we have to focus on immediately is what AI is going to do to us as opposed to what we're going to do to AI and prepare ourselves for the elimination of whole job categories.
There's not going to be taxi drivers.
There's not going to be bus drivers.
There's not going to be many radiologists.
All of that is going to go the way of the buggy whip, right?
And when I talk about AI and Rage and the Republic, I mentioned the wonderful first work of Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, called Player Piano.
And he describes the scene of this carpenter looking at this vast factory of lathe.
And each lathe is reproducing or exactly replicating his actions.
And he was told what an honor it would be that he would be immortalized.
But of course, he and the rest of his colleagues were then fired.
And they just watched these machines do what they did.
The player piano problem is a serious one, that we become player pianos.
That robots and AI mimic what we do, and then we are not necessary.
And so we have to have that debate.
We got to talk about it.
But what Rage and the Republic suggests is that we have to talk about it, not just in terms of the economic impact.
We have to start to talk about it on its democratic impact of how that's going to change our relationship with the government.